Conrad Aiken, “The Novel as Work of Art.” The Dial, July 1927, pp.41-44.
THE NOVEL AS WORK OF ART
BY CONRAD AIKEN
AMONG contemporary writers of fiction, Mrs Woolf is a curious
and anomalous figure. In some respects, she is as “modern,”
as radical, as Mr Joyce or Miss Richardson or M Jules Romains;
she is a highly self-conscious examiner of consciousness, a bold
and original experimenter with the technique of novel-writing; but
she is also, and just as strikingly, in other respects “old-fashioned.”
This anomaly does not defy analysis. The aroma of “old-
fashionedness” that rises from these highly original and modern
novels—from the pages of Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, and now
again from those of To the Lighthouse—is a quality of attitude;
a quality, to use a word which is itself nowadays old-
fashioned, but none the less fragrant, of spirit. For in this regard,
Mrs Woolf is no more modern than Jane Austen: she breathes the
same air of gentility, of sequestration, of tradition; of life and
people and things all brought, by the slow polish of centuries of
tradition and use, to a pervasive refinement in which discrimination,
on every conceivable plane, has become as instinctive and easy
as the beat of a wing. Her people are “gentle” people; her houses
are the houses of gentlefolk; and the consciousness that informs
both is a consciousness of well-being and culture, of the richness
and lustre and dignity of tradition; a disciplined consciousness, in
which emotions and feelings find their appropriate attitudes as
easily and naturally—as habitually, one is tempted to say—as a
skilled writer finds words.
It is this tightly circumscribed choice of scene—to use “scene” in
a social sense—that gives to Mrs Woolf’s novels, despite her
modernity of technique and insight, their odd and delicious air of
parochialism, as of some small village-world, as bright and vivid
and perfect in its tininess as a miniature: a small complete world
which time has somehow missed. Going into these houses, one
NOTE: To the Lighthouse. By Virginia Woolf. 12mo. 310 pages.
Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2.50.
