The New Age. Sept. 8, 1927, p.227.
To the Lighthouse. By Virginia Woolf. (Hogarth Press.
7s. 6d.)
Mrs. Woolf takes such a long time to reach her blooming
lighthouse—she herself has to divide the pilgrimage into the
Getting There and the Being There—that we soon lost
patience with her carefully-drawn Golders-Greenish wanderers
on the shore. It gives such a handle to the there-
you-are-then type of literary tradesman to have to confess
that conscientious and high-minded authors like these latter-
day Hogarths of ours never seem to get anywhere, but take
up all the time talking about it. There is, after all, such
a thing as the Reader’s Magna Charta, one of the clauses
in which is that something ought to happen at some time in
a book, or we ought to get our money back. With all due
respect, it must be said that it is lucky there are not more
publishers with a mission and the cacoethes scribendi.
They can be—mind you, they’re not, as a rule, heaven
forbid!—just as bad in their way as the rot-gut merchants
of Paternostralia, who hope to recoup, in some blind lucky
swipe, all the money they lose every year on the grisly
rubbish they try to sell by fishing in the broad stream of
pornography. But how terrible that the contemplation of
such a decent and efficient person as Mrs. Woolf should lead
us to any such reflection!