THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY. Virginia Woolf
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one? Whatever they may say, silks have been ruined by the war. But what are you looking behind the curtain for? Ann: There is no gentleman present? Judith: None, unless you count the oil portrait of Uncle John. Ann: Oh, then, we can talk about the Greeks! There is not a single memoir in the whole of Greek literature. There! You can’t contradict me; and so we go on to wonder how the ladies of the race spent the morning when it was wet and the hours between tea and dinner when it was dark. Judith: The mornings never are wet in Athens. Then they don’t drink tea. They drink a red sweet stuff out of glasses, and eat lumps of Turkish delight with it. Ann: Ah, that explains! A dry, hot climate, no twilight, wine, and blue sky. In England the atmosphere is naturally aqueous, and as if there weren’t enough outside, we drench ourselves with tea and coffee at least four times a day. It’s atmosphere that makes English literature unlike any other—clouds, sunsets, fogs, exhalations, miasmas. And I believe that the element of water is supplied chiefly by the memoir writers. Look what great swollen books they are! (She lifts five volumes in her hands, one after another.) Dropsical. Still, there are times—I suppose it’s the lack of wine in my blood—when the mere thought of a classic is repulsive. Judith: I agree with you. The classics—oh dear, what was I going to say?—something very wise, I know. But I can’t embroider a parrot and talk about Milton in the same breath. Ann: Whereas you could embroider a parrot and talk about Lady Georgiana Peel? Judith: Precisely. Do tell me about Lady Georgiana Peel and the rest. Those are the books I love. Ann: I do more than love them; I reverence them as the parents and begetters of our race. And if I knew Mr. Lytton Strachey, I’d tell him what I think of him for behaving disrespectfully of the great English art of biography. My dear Judith, I had a vision last night of a widow with a taper setting fire to a basketful of memoirs—half a million words—two volumes—stout—blue—with a crest—genealogical trees—family portraits—all complete. ‘Art be damned!’ I cried, and woke in a frenzy. Judith: Well, I fancy she heard you. But let’s begin on Lady Georgiana Peel. Ann: Lady Georgiana Peel was born in the year 1836, and was the daughter of Lord John Russell. The Russells are said to be descended from Thor, the God of Thunder; their more direct ancestor being one Henri de Rozel, who, in the eleventh century—Judith: We’ll take their word for it. Ann: Very well. But don’t forget it. The Russells are cold in temperament, contradictious by nature. Ahem! Lord and Lady John were resting under an oak tree in Richmond Park when Lord John remarked how pleasant it would be to live in that white house behind the palings for the rest of their lives. No sooner said than the owner falls ill and dies. The Queen, with that unfailing insight, etc., sends for Lord John, etc., and offers him the lodge for life, etc., etc., etc. I mean they lived happily ever after, though as time went by, a factory chimney somewhat spoilt the view. Judith: And Lady Georgiana? Ann: Well, there’s not much about Lady Georgiana. She saw the Queen having her hair brushed, and she went to stay at Woburn. And what d’you think they did there? They threw mutton chops out of the window ‘for whoever cared to pick them up’. And each guest had a piece of paper by his plate ‘in which to wrap up an eatable for the people waiting outside’. Judith: Mutton chops! people waiting outside! Ann: Ah, now the charm begins to work. A snowy Christmas—imagine a fair-haired little girl at the window—early in the forties the scene is—frost on the ground—a mutton chop descending. Don’t you see all the arms going up and the poor wretches trampling the flower-beds in their struggles? But, ‘I think’, she says, ‘the custom died out.’ And then she married, and her husband’s riding was the pride of the county; and when he won a race he gave something to the village church. But I don’t know that there’s much more to be said. Judith: Please go on. The charm is working; I’m not asleep; I’m in the drawing-room at Woburn in the forties. Ann: Lady Georgiana being, as I told you, descended from the God of Thunder, is not one to take liberties with life. The scene is a little empty. There’s Charles Dickens wearing a pink shirt front embroidered with white; the Russell mausoleum in the background; sailors with icicles hanging from their whiskers; the Grosvenor boys shooting snipe in Belgrave Square; Lord John handing the Queen down to dinner—and so forth. Let’s consult Mr. Bridges. He may help us to fill it in. ‘Our mothers were modelled as closely as might be on the example of the Great Queen. … If they were not always either beautiful or wise they gained love and respect everywhere without being either…. But, whatever happens, women will still be women and men men.’ Shall I go on skipping? Judith: I seem to gather that the wallpapers were dark and the sideboards substantial. Ann: Yes, but we’ve too much furniture already. Life is what we want. (She turns over the pages of several volumes without saying anything.) Judith: Oh, Ann; it’s fearfully dull at Woburn in the forties. Moreover, my parrot is turning into a sacred fowl. I shall be presenting him to the village church next. Is no one coming to call? Ann: Wait a moment. I fancy I see Miss Dempster approaching. Judith: Quick; let me look at her picture. A devout, confidential lady—Bedchamber woman to Queen Victoria, I should guess. I can fancy her murmuring: ‘Poor, poor Princess’; or, ‘Dearest Lady Charlotte has had a sad loss in the death of her favourite gillie’, as she extracts from the Royal Head a sleek tortoiseshell pin and lays it reverently in the golden tray. By the way, can you imagine Queen Victoria’s hair? I can’t. Ann: Lady Georgiana says it was ‘long and fair’. Be that as it may, Miss Dempster had nothing to do with her hair-pins—save that, I think it likely her daydreams took that direction. She was a penniless lass with a long pedigree; Scotch, of course, moving in the best society—‘one of the Shropshire Corbets who (through the Leycesters) is a cousin of Dean Stanley’—that’s her way of describing people; and for my part I find it very descriptive. But wait—here’s a scene that promises well. Imagine the terrace of the Blythswoods’ villa at Cannes. An eclipse of the moon is taking place; the Emperor Dom Pedro of Portugal has his eye fixed to the telescope; it is chilly, and a copper-coloured haze suffuses the sky. Meanwhile, Miss Dempster and the Prince of Hohenzollern walk up and down talking. What d’ye think they talk about? … ‘we agreed that it had never occurred to us before that somewhere our Earth’s shadow must be ever falling…. Speaking of the dark and shadowed days of human life I quoted Mrs. Browning’s lines: “Think, the passing of a trail, To the nature most undone, Like the shadow on the dial, Proves the presence of the sun.’“ You don’t want to hear about the death of the Duke of Albany and his appearance in his coffin or the Emperor of Germany and his cancer? Judith: For Heaven’s sake, no! Ann: Well, then, we must shut up Miss Dempster. But isn’t it queer how Lady Georgiana and the rest have made us feel like naughty, dirty, mischievous children? I don’t altogether enjoy the feeling, and yet there is something august in their unyielding authority. They have fronts of brass; not a doubt or a desire disturbs them outwardly; and so they proceed over a world which for us is alternately a desert or a flowering wilderness stuck about with burning bushes and mocking macaws, as if it were Piccadilly or the Cromwell Road at three o’clock in the afternoon. I detect passions and pieties and convictions all dumb and deep sunk which serve them for a kind of spiritual petrol. What, my dear Judith, have we got in its place? Judith: If, like me, you’d been sitting in the drawing-room at Woburn for the past fifty years, you would be feeling a little stiff. Did they never amuse themselves? Was death their only amusement, and rank their sole romance? Ann:
There were horses. I see your eyes turned with longing to Dorothea Conyers and John Porter. Now you can get up and come to the stables. Now, I assure you, things are going to hum a little. In both these books we get what I own was somewhat disguised in the others—a passion for life. I confess that I like John Porter’s view of life better than Dorothea Conyers’, though, from the lips of a novelist, there is charm in her reflection: ‘Unfortunately, I shall never be a popular short-story writer: I do something just wrong’; one feels inclined to tell her to shorten her stirrups or have her fetlocks fired and see whether that wouldn’t do the trick. But this cherry-cheeked elderly gentleman, this quintessence of all good coachmen and trusty servants, this lean old trainer with his shrewd little eyes, and the horseshoe tiepin and the look of integrity and service honestly performed, of devotion given and returned—I can’t help feeling that he is the pick of the bunch. I like his assumption that the whole world exists for racing, or, as he is careful to put it, for ‘the amelioration of the thoroughbred’. I like the warmth with which he praises his horses for holding their own on the course and begetting fine