CHAPTER VII

TWO LESSER LITERARY LADIES OF LONDON: STELLA BENSON AND VIRGINIA WOOLF

Miss Stella Benson and Mrs. Virginia Woolf are young women who have come to the fore very rapidly. The former, who lived in this country for two years after the war, published in 1915, when she was barely out of her teens, a novel called “I Pose” which revealed an unusual personality with an uncommon outlook on life, and an enviable capacity to describe what she saw, felt, and fabricated. Until the appearance of her last novel it might be said that she created types which symbolised her ideas and attitudes and gave expression to them through conveniently devised situations, rather than attempting to paint models from life and placing them in a realistic environment.

“I Pose” is a story of allegorical cast lightened with flashes of whimsical sprightliness. A pensive Gardener who likes to pose as “original,” a Suffragette who disguises romance under a mask of militancy, a practical girl, Courtesy, and a number of others take an ocean voyage and have many adventures, at the end of which the Suffragette and the Gardener find themselves in love, just as any other young people who had been dancing and playing tennis, instead of posing as individuals with convictions.

For the setting of her two succeeding books, “This is the End,” and “Living Alone,” Miss Benson created a world of her own, and in a foreword to the latter book she says:

“This is not a real book. It does not deal with real people, nor should it be read by real people. But there are in the world so many real books already written for the benefit of real people, and there are still so many to be written, that I cannot believe that a little alien book such as this, written for the magically-inclined minority, can be considered too assertive a trespasser.”

Her world is not the traditional fairyland of the nursery, nor are the supernatural endowments of some of the characters the classic equipment of witches and fairies, although her _dramatis personæ_ include both who function under the law of Magic. Rather is her dramatic machinery in these books a vehicle in the form of a sort of delicate symbolism for getting over a very sane attitude toward certain social foibles and trends of today. Incidentally it gives her opportunity of expressing this attitude in frequent witticisms and epigrammatic sayings for which she has a gift. In “Living Alone” social service and organised charity are the targets for her irony. She says,

“Perception goes out of committees. The more committees you belong to, the less of ordinary life you will understand. When your daily round becomes nothing more than a round of committees you might as well be dead ... organizing work consists of sitting in 'busses bound for remote quarters of London, and ringing the bells of people who are almost always found to be away for a fortnight.”

So after Sarah Brown, whose work consists of

“sitting every morning in a small office, collecting evidence from charitable spies about the Naughty Poor, and, after wrapping the evidence in mysterious ciphers, writing it down very beautifully upon little cards, so that the next spy might have the benefit of all his forerunners' experience,”

eats the magic sandwiches which the witch has given her for her lunch, the scales fall from her eyes. “I am sentimental,” she says to herself.

[Illustration: STELLA BENSON]

“It is sentimental to feel personal affection for a Case, or to give a child of the Naughty Poor a penny without full enquiry, or to say 'a-goo' to a grey pensive baby eating dirt on the pavement ... or in fact to confuse in any way the ideas of charity and love.”

She resigns her “job” and her place on the committees and goes to live in the House of Living Alone.

In other words, Miss Benson gives the artist in her what is called “rope.” She doesn't ask herself, “Will people think I am mad, or infantile?” She doesn't care what “people think.” And that is an encouraging sign. Women writers will come to their estates more quickly and securely the more wholeheartedly they abandon themselves to portraying instincts as they experience them, behaviour as they observe it, motives and conduct as they sense and encounter them, accomplishments and aspirations as they idealise them, the ideals being founded, like the chances of race horses, on past performances.

In her last novel, “The Poor Man,” Miss Benson's art shows tremendous development. This story is characterisation in the finest sense. Edward, the poor man, as a psychological study, is living, vivid, almost tragically real in the reactions which betray his inherent defects--a poor devil who never gets a chance. Miss Benson preaches no sermon, points no moral, makes no plea. She gives us a slice of life--and gives it relentlessly, but justly. It is the Old Testament justice which visits the iniquity of the father upon the third and fourth generations, and leaves the reader with the congenial task of finishing the sentence by supplying the mercy without which this old world could hardly totter under the weight of this Commandment. The story, however, makes no reference either to eugenics or to religion. The application is for the reader to supply--if he is so inclined. The author is not concerned with “science,” but with art. She does not bore us with a history of Edward's heredity or of his early life. She introduces him to us sitting in Rhoda Romero's room in San Francisco--an unwelcome guest--without throwing light upon his previous existence, except that he had been “shell-shocked” and had experienced three air raids in London.

From his introduction we know Edward as we know an acquaintance, not as we know ourselves. His tragedy is his feeble mentality and still feebler temperament, and the heart of the tragedy is the contrast between his intentions and his acts. Edward always means well. He is not vicious; not lazy. But he is stupid. He wants to be decent; wants to be liked; even wants to work. He is weak, sickly, drinks too much, and there is nothing he knows how to do well. It is as a victim, rather than as an aggressive wrong-doer, that we see him secretly currying favour with school-boys he is supposed to be teaching, and ignoring their insults, selling what belongs to others, and at last robbing a boy of thirteen who has been left alone by his father in a hotel in Pekin, whence Edward has gone in headlong and blind pursuit of Emily, with whom he has become infatuated without even knowing her name. But such is the art of his delineator that one finds oneself almost pitying him when his infatuation climaxes in the declaration from Emily: “Can't you leave me alone? I can't bear you. I couldn't bear to touch you--you poor sickly thing.” It is on this note that the drama ends.

If one were obliged to confine himself to backing one entry in the Fiction Sweepstakes now being run in England (entries limited to women above ten and under forty), he would do well to consider carefully the Stella Benson entry. Many would back Sheila Kaye-Smith, but the expert and seasoned bettor would be likely to find so many characteristics of the plough-horse that he would not waste his money.

Had Rose Macaulay not succumbed to smartness and become enslaved by epigram, her chances would have been excellent. As it is, she attempts to carry too much weight. The committee, the literary critics, have done what they could to lighten it, but “Mystery at Geneva” is her answer.

E. M. Delafield, Clemence Dane, and even G. B. Stern would be selected by many, no doubt. But judged from their record, not on form, they cannot be picked as winners.

The entry that is most likely to get place, if it doesn't win, is the youngest daughter of the late Sir Leslie Stephen, Mrs. Virginia Woolf.

“Mark on the Wall,” her most important story, deals with the flood of thought, conscious and unconscious, when so-called abstraction is facilitated by intent gazing. The hypnotist anæsthetises the consciousness by having the subject gaze at some bright object, she by gazing at a snail. The illusion facilitates thought of the place and of the lives that have been lived there. The richness of the thought stream thus induced gives full play for her facility of expression and capacity for pen pictures.

There is in Mrs. Woolf a note of mysticism, of spirituality which reveals itself in a conscious or unconscious prayer for the elusive truth. This note of itself sets her apart from the realistic woman writers of today. Although often vividly realistic in her form, there is in her work an essence which escapes the bounds of realism. This is most strongly acknowledged in “Monday or Tuesday,” a volume of short stories and sketches. The book takes its name from a little sketch of three hundred and fifty words, for which the only accurate label is “prose poem.” It is a direct illustration of the author's meaning when she makes her hero say, in “The Voyage Out”:

“You ought to write music.... Music goes straight for things. It says all there is to say at once. In writing it seems to me there's so much scratching on the match-box.”

For prose writing “Monday or Tuesday” is a triumph in the elimination of “scratching on the match-box.” One recognises in it the longing, more or less vaguely felt by all people, but inexpressible by most of them who are not poets, musicians, or artists in form or colour, for some supreme good which she calls truth. The New Psychology would attribute it to the unconscious and call it an ugly name. But Mrs. Woolf does not name it; she merely gives voice to the aspiration welling up from somewhere in people's deeper selves and hovering hauntingly, just out of range but near enough to colour the quality of their thoughts, even when they are occupied with the most trivial and commonplace business of life. They can never elude it, any more than they can long elude the “Hound of Heaven,” but unlike the latter it is not a relentless pursuer, but a lovely, tantalising wraith--always present but never attainable or definable.

In “An Unwritten Novel,” in the same collection, Mrs. Woolf again reveals a power of discernment, as well as the irony which is a part of her large human sympathy, in the conclusion of the story, which opens with:

“Such an expression of unhappiness was enough by itself to make one's eyes slide over the paper's edge to the poor woman's face--insignificant without that look, almost a symbol of human destiny with it.”

During a railway journey the writer makes up a novel to fit the face of the old woman opposite her--a story of an old maid whom life had cheated, thwarted, and denied all expression of sex, and left her embittered, resentful, envious, and starved.

“They would say she kept her sorrow, suppressed her secret--her sex, they'd say--the scientific people. But what flummery to saddle her with sex!”

When she reaches her destination the old woman is met by her son--and the “story” remains unwritten.

In “A Society,” Mrs. Woolf shies a few brick-bats--and well-aimed ones--at modern feminism. Her gesture is, however, more one of the irresistible impulse of the humourist to enjoy herself than any intention to do serious violence.

The members of the Society, who are a number of young girls bent upon self-education and believing that the object of life is to produce good people and good books, find themselves as a result of their investigations forced to acknowledge that if they hadn't learned to read they might still have been bearing children in ignorance, and that was the happiest life after all. By their learning they have sacrificed both their happiness and their ability to produce good people, and they are confronted, moreover, with the awful thought that if men continue to acquire knowledge they will lose their ability to produce good books.

“Unless we provide them with some innocent occupation we shall get neither good people nor good books; we shall perish beneath the fruits of their unbridled activity; and not a human being will survive to know that there once was Shakespeare.”

The Society disbands with the conclusion that when a little girl has learned how to read “there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in--and that is in herself.”

“Kew Gardens” is as vivid a picture as if it had been painted in colour, of the public gardens on a hot summer day, with their procession of varied humanity, old, young, and in the flush of life, each flashing for a moment with all of its own intense personality, like a figure in a cinema, before the reader, and then passing into the shadow as vague as the breath of the flowers, the buzzing of the dragon-fly, or the memories which for a moment the garden had invoked.

The two novels, “The Voyage Out,” published in 1915, and “Night and Day,” in 1919, are love stories in which, through the efforts of the lovers to find and express themselves, the author reveals her own ideas of life. Her machinery is largely that of dialogue between the lovers, and her chief actors are normal young men and women, wholesome in their outlook, as well as frank in their expression of their problems, which revolve largely around matrimony. The result is that while the novels are introspective in a way, as well as daring in their analysis of the author's psychology, they are free from the morbidness of many of the introspective books of today. “The Voyage Out” is the expression of healthy, normal youth reverently but straightforwardly seeking in marriage the deeper values that underlie its superficialities and justify the quality of its idealism.

In no more striking and creditable way have the women of Britain demonstrated the legitimacy of “Rights” than by their fiction of the past few years.