V. H. F. Country Life. May 21, 1927, p.816.
To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf. (Hogarth Press, 7s. 6d.)
MRS. WOOLF’S own journey has been like one to a lighthouse. In
her first novels, up to the time of “Jacob’s Room,” many of us saw
nothing but a rudderless bark on a plunging sea. The bark had left the
shore, it seemed to us, unprovisioned except for a number of sky rockets,
and was bound for some modern port of nothingness. But in “Mrs.
Dalloway” suddenly a tall object stood up in the featureless waters, and
we perceived that it was a lighthouse: a thing once seen by Mrs. Woolf
from the shore, and thereafter determinedly sought. And now, in this
new novel, she is there, and out of a darkness of majesty and magic
shines, steadily pure, the light. There is no more a sense of purposelessness
or loss of direction; Mrs. Woolf is at the haven where she
would be, and the voyage has amply justified itself. This, in her own
words, is the haven: “Phrases came. Visions came. Beautiful
pictures. Beautiful phrases. But what she wished to get hold of was
that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made
anything. Get that and start afresh.” She has started afresh, and
she has got that. The book moves surely and with beauty among the
deepest, most delicate motions of the human heart and spirit. There
is no longer any obscurity, any lack of sequence. (But there is a printer’s
addition of a full stop at the top of page 200 that mars one of the most
effective sentences in the book, a sentence into which death crashes
with all the desultoriness and shock of life itself.) The early admirers
of Mrs. Woolf’s work were right, and this notice is a public confession
of previous error. V. H. F.