PARTISAN REVIEW
lished, mostly on literary topics. There are several exquisite portraits in
miniature, notably those of Ellen Terry and Roger Fry; some more of
Mrs. Woolf's magical evocations of the literary and artistic past, such
as "Sterne's Ghost" and
"B.
R. Haydon"; and some of her most im–
portant critical pronouncements, including "The Leaning Tower," "The
Artist in Politics," "Congreve's Comedies," and "The Art of Fiction."
As usual, the value of her
aperyu
is enhanced by her constant interest
in craftsmanship, language, and style, and by her inexhaustible curiosity
and affection for human traits both normal and eccentric. Of all the
four writers under review-perhaps,
in~eed,
of all writers on literature–
Virginia Woolf is the least "critical" in the day-of-judgment meaning
of the word. She writes plastically, molding little busts and cameos of
people, times and places; her every word is a revelation of her indi–
vidual sensibility, and one might suspect that she has no regard for
general principles at all, so little does she parade them and so modestly
does she qualify the range and validity of her wider judgments. When
speaking of Russian or American literature, for instance, she is careful
to stress the fact that she is a foreigner, an Englishwoman, a lover of
gardens, quiet, and Jane Austen. But this does not prevent her from
seeing that Miss Austen may be likened to the Greek tragedians, "though
with a thousand differences of degree: she, too, in her modest, everyday
prose, chose the dangerous art where one slip means death." She is one
of the few imaginative writers who can apply their own artistic methods
to criticism without ever violating its first canon: to bring the reader
closer to the book, the particular, than he could have come unaided-to
"make it new,') as Pound tried to do, and so often ended by making it
Pound. She can instill a deeper awareness of the nature of writing by
analyzing a page of Flaubert, as she does in "Re-reading Novels" in this
new volume, than you could get from an entire treatise, even a good one,
on truth and value in art, or contemporary significance in fiction. No
writer about books surpasses her in imm(jdiacy, in the ability to convey
"knowledge of'' as distinguished from "knowledge about."
But this is old stuff for Virginia Woolf's admirers, and just stuff
for her detractors.
If
one is "searching for criteria without wishing to
go to the trouble of acquiring taste," as Gide accused certain people
of doing, then certainly the familiar literary essay, as practiced by
Hazlitt, Strachey, Woolf, is the last place to look. Such writers assume
that their readers are already equipped with aesthetic palates; and, in
cases where this assumption is correct, they will guide you, not just
benignly but beneficently, toward what Virginia Woolf calls "that
absence of self-consciousness, that ease and fellowship and sense of com-
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