To the Lighthouse
by . New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1927. 12mo. viii+302 pp. $2.50.
To the Lighthouse will naturally, being the work of Mrs. Woolf, bitterly exasperate readers who desire that a novel should ‘get somewhere,’and proportionately please those who enjoy looking at temperaments skillfully and wittily portrayed in their attractions and recoils, their unsatisfied wanderings and their moments of insight. Mrs. Woolf’s style is as seriously marred as in her earlier work by constructions incredibly slipshod; yet it conveys the sense of beauty with a power that cannot be analyzed.
The scene of the action and ’action’ must of course be interpreted in the most liberal sense — is laid in the Hebrides. The Lighthouse, which can be seen from the home of the Ramsay family, may seem at first merely a peg on which the psychological subtleties and the wit of the novel are hung; later it is perceived to be something more — a symbol, if one likes, or merely one of those occasional inanimate things that lay so potent a touch on the spirit. Take it as one will, it dominates the book pictorially as the personality of Mrs. Ramsay dominates it spiritually— for Mrs. Ramsay, living and dead, is the heart of all the varied moods and emotions so sharply drawn.
With the exception of Jacob’s Room (and Jacob, after all, was a very young man), Mrs. Woolf’s novels suggest that she thinks rather better of women than of men. Prodigiously modern as she is in manner, she likes to draw a type of woman by no means hackneyed in current fiction — the woman of temperament who nevertheless is essentially steadfast, reticent, and self-controlled. Such a woman is Mrs. Ramsay. She lacks the gay, spirited charm of Clarissa Dalloway, and her physical beauty, though much insisted upon, somehow is not made particularly real; but she is a remarkable study in perceptiveness and sympathy, and moreover her effect upon the reader is in proportion to her effect upon the persons in the novel.
From this curiously constructed book — curiously even for Mrs. Woolf — two things stand out preeminent: the originality and beauty of the section called ‘Time Passes,’and the admirable skill with which moods, and shadowswift changes of mood, are depicted. In ’Time Passes’ the author has caught and held the intangible, and clothed it in rhythmical beauty. In the empty house, left untenanted for years after Mrs. Ramsay’s death, nothing stirs but light and darkness and faint sound, and the soft nose of the clammy sea-air, rubbing, snuffling, iterating and reiterating their questions — “ Will you fade? Will you perish?"'
As for illustrations of the masterly depicting of mood, choice can be made at random. Perhaps two of the best are Lily Briscoe’s frozen inability to proffer to the widowed Mr. Ramsay the sympathy which he so imperiously though tacitly demands, with her subsequent gush of pity, called out, too late, by his infantile pleasure in her praise of his boots; and the discord, the constraint, and the rebellion in the hearts of Mr. Ramsay’s adolescent children when the long-dreamed-of, long-delayed expedition to the Lighthouse is made at last.
ETHEL WALLACE HAWKINS