PARTISAN REVIEW
personalities, and nothing of many other personalities
in
this life. An
"omission is not to have attempted to describe the very sincere, admirable
and complex personality of E. M. Forster. Again, I have said almost
nothing of the drawing room, scented with hundreds of oranges into
which cloves had been stuck, placed in bowls, of Lady Ottoline Morrell
or of the personality of the hostess herself, an old lady at this time,
dressed still as an eighteenth-century shepherdess receiving celebrities
like the Huxleys, Bertrand Russell, W.
B.
Yeats, at her famous "Thursday
afternoons." But I must avoid describing all this, at the risk of annoying
those I have not mentioned even more than those I have. The point to
make is that all this existed, just as a point is that Virginia Woolf could
be extremely amusing.
If
I were to go on, I would be tempted to describe the occasion
when W.
B.
Yeats sat on a sofa in Lady Ottoline's drawing room, ex–
plaining to Virginia Woolf the story, the philosophy and the connection
with ideas of relativity in modem science, and with spiritualist research,
of her novel
The Waves-a
book which, he wound up an hour's discourse
by saying, he one day intended to read. But the final point
to
make is
that all this has passed away, passed away, and that even while I was
observing it as the latest comer on its stage, it was crumbling under my
eyes. I lived in it while thinking that already it belonged to the past.
192
