494
PARTISAN REVIEW
They heard a sad story; they were genuinely moved by it; they
wrote it down straightforwardly, asking no questions and
without a trace of self-conciousness; and this is what we cannot
do, and this is what we find most strange in them.
Then she was able to see not only what the Victorians thought
they were doing but that it was done in good faith and sincerity,
and yet, in spirit, how discontinuous with her generation-this
took her beyond simple reactive irony.
It
permitted a further
perception of the imaginative dissonance all modernist writers felt
with Victorian art and with
the Victorian passion for getting Nature perfectly accurately, for
her own sake, into poetry. And when, with much observation,
much matching of words and similies, the right description is
found, down it goes, and the emotions of the poem pass round
it as if it were an island in mid-stream and leave it unmoved.
So much is being said here, and so effectively, that the
whole passage could be glossed at length. What makes it worth
reading now, more than seventy years later, is precisely the
unmistakable individual voice, and the sound of distinctions
which do not only reflect the spirit of the age. Strachey would be
much harder to read now, for example. Other Woolf essays on
the Victorians exhibit a similar sense of aesthetic difference and
distance, arising from her vivid contradictory responses. Woolf was
not always anxious to reconcile contradictions, but gleaned
something from the disparity-such as that between a great nov–
elist and a great writer, or between the vocabulary of a poet and
the inspiration of a poet, between honesty of imagery and the
honesty of the poetry expressing it; she had doubts about form
conceived as a precious stone shaped to fit exactly into a ring, or
about writing beautifully in English,;she wondered why some
writers could do it so well, how bad literature possesses "the qual–
ity of unfettered imagination," how some poetry is made almost
entirely out of emotions received from books, in language
learned from books. Observations and distinctions like these are
still of absorbing interest, and the reader looks forward to reading
again in collected form the essays in the four volumes still to
