Out of Victorianism:
SCHOLES, ROBERT
Out of Victorianism Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880 to 1904. By Leonard Woolf. Harcourt Brace. 224 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Robert Scholes Instructor in English, University of...
...One of the important virtues of Leonard Woolf's book is that it bridges that gulf...
...Reviewed by Robert Scholes Instructor in English, University of Virginia...
...also at or around Cambridge at this time were Desmond MacCarthy, Clive Bell and E. M. Forster—all closely connected...
...The comparison is instructive...
...There is a good reason for this remoteness...
...The parallel is interesting...
...As Sowing traces Woolf's career only through 1904, he is not obliged in this volume to chronicle the demise of those bright hopes with which the young Victorians faced the future in the first decade of the new century...
...The battle, which was against what for short one may call Victorianism, had not yet been won, and what was so exciting was our feeling that we ourselves were part of the revolution, that victory or defeat depended to some small extent upon what we did, said, or wrote...
...These two beauties, like great works of art, are and were representative of the society, the culture, which formed them...
...But in Sowing the principal members of the group are introduced, and the milieu which produced them is presented with considerable charm and insight...
...It was only in the heart of stolid, stable England that intellectual rebellion was really cherished and allowed to flourish...
...We were not, as we are today, fighting with our backs to the wall against a resurgence of barbarism and barbarians...
...At Cambridge Woolf was a member of a group called the Apostles, to which Tennyson and Hallam had belonged in their generation...
...In the same year Joyce, a rebellious intellectual, left Ireland with a girl he had not yet married and the manuscript of an unfinished autobiographical novel...
...This incredible combination of intellects was to become the center of the intellectual life of England in the next decades, acquiring the name "Bloomsbury" from the section of London where most of them lived, and was augmented by the Stephens sisters, who married Bell and Woolf, and a young American of poetical tendencies called Tom Eliot...
...Contributor, "Yale Review," "Arizona Quarterly" In leafing through a cluster of photographs in this first volume of Leonard Woolf's autobiography, I was startled to come upon two pictures of extraordinary beauty—the Stephens sisters as they were in 1902...
...This intellectual world will be presented in a later volume of Woolf's autobiography...
...So it must have been...
...The effect of the pictures is apparently quite like the effect of the two girls in real life, for Leonard Woolf describes his first impression of them in this way: "I first saw them one summer afternoon in white dresses and large hats, with parasols in their hands...
...One of the dominant impressions of Sowing is how receptive late-Victorian England was, despite a vigorous tradition of anti-intellectual Philistinism, to intellectual rebels...
...He is concerned, rather, to give us a sense of that late-Victorian milieu, and to introduce to us the young men and women who were to play such important parts in the intellectual life of the early 20th century...
...Our state of mind was the exact opposite...
...There was no shadow of past defeat...
...Woolf is very much aware of the difference between life now and life then, and he is able to discuss this without indulging in either sentimentality or bitterness: "We found ourselves living in the springtime of a conscious revolt against the social, political, religious, moral, intellectual, and artistic institutions, beliefs, and standards of our fathers and grandfathers...
...In the description of his first sight of the two Stephens girls, Leonard Woolf compares their impression on him to works not of natural beauty, but of art...
...There was no place for him...
...they have grown up under the shadow of defeat in the past and the menace of defeat in the future...
...we were in the van of the builders of a new society which should be free, rational, civilized, pursuing truth and beauty...
...But the visions of that day have given way to the nightmares of our own...
...Curiously enough, the more well known of the two girls, who married Leonard Woolf and became a major novelist, is almost a symbol of the modern...
...the omens were all favorable...
...But Woolf was able to return some years later, an accepted member in an accepted group of intellectual rebels, while Joyce—except for brief and awkward visits—found he actually could not go home again...
...With her contemporaries—E. M. Forster, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence—Virginia Woolf represents the great gulf in literature and life which separates us from the Victorians...
...In 1904 Woolf, a rebellious intellectual, left England with a fox terrier and 90 volumes of Voltaire...
...After the 1914 war, and still more after Hitler's war, the young who are not conservatives, fascists, or communists are almost necessarily defeatist...
...Their beauty literally took one's breath away, for suddenly seeing them one stopped astonished and everything including one's breathing for one second also stopped, as it does when in a picture gallery you suddenly come face to face with a great Rembrandt or Velasquez...
...It is natural, inevitable that they should suffer from the sterility of being angry young men...
...The pictures of these two young ladies were made in our own century, when Virginia was perhaps just 20 and her sister Vanessa slightly older, but they seem as remote from our time as the faces one sees in the portraits of nameless beauties of the ante-bellum South...
...We were not a part of a negative movement of destruction, against the past...
...Bloomsbury is not the subject of Sowing...
...It was all tremendously exhilarating...
...Among the Apostles at Cambridge in Woolf's time were J. E. McTaggert, A. N. Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes...
...We were out to construct something new...
...Sowing ends with Woolf's preparation for departure to Ceylon, just as James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ends with Stephen Dedalus preparing to leave Ireland for Europe—as Joyce himself had done in 1902 and again in 1904...
Vol. 44 • January 1961 • No. 2
