profession you looked at, there was a Warburton or
an Alardyce, a Millington or a Hilbery somewhere in authority
and prominence.
It may be said, indeed, that English society being what
it is, no very great merit is required, once you bear a
well-known name, to put you into a position where it is
easier on the whole to be eminent than obscure. And if
this is true of the sons, even the daughters, even in the
nineteenth century, are apt to become people of importance—
philanthropists and educationalists if they are
spinsters, and the wives of distinguished men if they marry.
It is true that there were several lamentable exceptions
to this rule in the Alardyce group, which seems to indicate
that the cadets of such houses go more rapidly to
the bad than the children of ordinary fathers and mothers,
as if it were somehow a relief to them. But, on the
whole, in these first years of the twentieth century, the
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Alardyces and their relations were keeping their heads well
above water. One finds them at the tops of professions,
with letters after their names; they sit in luxurious public
offices, with private secretaries attached to them; they
write solid books in dark covers, issued by the presses of
the two great universities, and when one of them dies the
chances are that another of them writes his biography.
Now the source of this nobility was, of course, the poet,
and his immediate descendants, therefore, were invested
with greater luster than the collateral branches. Mrs.
Hilbery, in virtue of her position as the only child of the
poet, was spiritually the head of the family, and Katharine,
her daughter, had some superior rank among all the cousins
and connections, the more so because she was an only
child. The Alardyces had married and intermarried, and
their offspring were generally profuse, and had a way of
meeting regularly in each other’s houses for meals and
family celebrations which had acquired a semi-sacred
character, and were as regularly observed as days of feasting
and fasting in the Church.
In times gone by, Mrs. Hilbery had known all the poets,
all the novelists, all the beautiful women and distinguished
men of her time. These being now either dead or secluded
in their infirm glory, she made her house a meet-
ing-place for her own relations, to whom she would lament
the passing of the great days of the nineteenth
century, when every department of letters and art was
represented in England by two or three illustrious names.
Where are their successors? she would ask, and the absence
of any poet or painter or novelist of the true caliber
at the present day was a text upon which she liked to
ruminate, in a sunset mood of benignant reminiscence,
which it would have been hard to disturb had there been
need. But she was far from visiting their inferiority upon
the younger generation. She welcomed them very heartily
to her house, told them her stories, gave them sovereigns
and ices and good advice, and weaved round them
romances which had generally no likeness to the truth.
The quality of her birth oozed into Katharine’s consciousness
from a dozen different sources as soon as she
was able to perceive anything. Above her nursery fireplace
hung a photograph of her grandfather’s tomb in
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Virginia Woolf
Poets’ Corner, and she was told in one of those moments
of grown-up confidence which are so tremendously impressive
to the child’s mind, that he was buried there
because he was a “good and great man.” Later, on an
anniversary, she was taken by her mother through the
fog in a hansom cab, and given a large bunch of bright,
sweet-scented flowers to lay upon his tomb. The candles
in the church, the singing and the booming of the organ,
were all, she thought, in his honor. Again and again she
was brought down into the drawing-room to receive the
blessing of some awful distinguished old man, who sat,
even to her childish eye, somewhat apart, all gathered
together and clutching a stick, unlike an ordinary visitor
in her father’s own arm-chair, and her father himself was
there, unlike himself, too, a little excited and very polite.
These formidable old creatures used to take her in
their arms, look very keenly in her eyes, and then to
bless her, and tell her that she must mind and be a good
girl, or detect a look in her face something like Richard’s
as a small boy. That drew down upon her her mother’s
fervent embrace, and she was sent back to the nursery
very proud, and with a mysterious sense of an important
and unexplained state of things, which time, by degrees,
unveiled to her.
There were always visitors—uncles and aunts and cousins
“from India,” to be reverenced for their relationship
alone, and others of the solitary and formidable class,
whom she was enjoined by her parents to “remember all
your life.” By these means, and from hearing constant
talk of great men and their works, her earliest conceptions
of the world included an august circle of beings to
whom she gave the names of Shakespeare, Milton,
Wordsworth, Shelley, and so on, who were, for some reason,
much more nearly akin to the Hilberys than to other
people. They made a kind of boundary to her vision of
life, and played a considerable part in determining her
scale of good and bad in her own small affairs. Her descent
from one of these gods was no surprise to her, but
matter for satisfaction, until, as the years wore on, the
privileges of her lot were taken for granted, and certain
drawbacks made themselves very manifest. Perhaps it is
a little depressing to inherit not lands but an example of
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intellectual and spiritual virtue; perhaps the conclusiveness
of a great ancestor is a little discouraging to those
who run the risk of comparison with him. It seems as if,
having flowered so splendidly, nothing now remained
possible but a steady growth of good, green stalk and
leaf. For these reasons, and for others, Katharine had her
moments of despondency. The glorious past, in which men
and women grew to unexampled size, intruded too much
upon the present, and dwarfed it too consistently, to be
altogether encouraging to one forced to make her experiment
in living when the great age was dead.
She was drawn to dwell upon these matters more than
was natural, in the first place owing to her mother’s absorption
in them, and in the second because a great part
of her time was spent in imagination with the dead, since
she was helping her mother to produce a life of the great
poet. When Katharine was seventeen or eighteen—that
is to say, some ten years ago—her mother had enthusiastically
announced that now, with a daughter to help
her, the biography would soon be published. Notices to
this effect found their way into the literary papers, and
for some time Katharine worked with a sense of great
pride and achievement.
Lately, however, it had seemed to her that they were
making no way at all, and this was the more tantalizing
because no one with the ghost of a literary temperament
could doubt but that they had materials for one of the
greatest biographies that has ever been written. Shelves
and boxes bulged with the precious stuff. The most private
lives of the most interesting people lay furled in
yellow bundles of close-written manuscript. In addition
to this Mrs. Hilbery had in her own head as bright a vision
of that time as now remained to the living, and
could give those flashes and thrills to the old words which
gave them almost the substance of flesh. She had no
difficulty in writing, and covered a page every morning
as instinctively as a thrush sings, but nevertheless, with
all this to urge and inspire, and the most devout intention
to accomplish the work, the book still remained unwritten.
Papers accumulated without much furthering their
task, and in dull moments Katharine had her doubts
whether they would ever produce anything at all fit to
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Virginia Woolf
lay before the public. Where did the difficulty lie? Not in
their materials, alas! nor in their ambitions, but in something
more profound, in her own inaptitude, and above
all, in her mother’s temperament. Katharine would calculate
that she had never known her write for more than
ten minutes at a time. Ideas came to her chiefly when
she was in motion. She liked to perambulate the room
with a duster in her hand, with which she stopped to
polish the backs of already lustrous books, musing and
romancing as she did so. Suddenly the right phrase or the
penetrating point of view would suggest itself, and she
would drop her duster and write ecstatically for a few
breathless moments; and then the mood would pass away,
and the duster would be sought for, and the old books
polished again. These spells of inspiration never burnt
steadily, but flickered over the gigantic mass of the subject
as capriciously as a will-o’-the-wisp, lighting now on
this point, now on that. It was as much as Katharine
could do to keep the pages of her mother’s manuscript in
order, but to sort them so that the sixteenth year of Richard
Alardyce’s life succeeded the fifteenth was beyond
her skill. And yet they were so brilliant, these paragraphs,
so nobly phrased, so lightning-like in their illumination,
that the dead seemed to crowd the very room. Read continuously,
they produced a sort of vertigo, and set her
asking herself in despair what on earth she was to do
with them? Her mother refused, also, to face the radical
questions of what to leave in and what to leave out. She
could not decide how far the public was to be told the
truth about the poet’s separation from his wife. She drafted
passages to suit either case, and then liked each so well
that she could not decide upon the rejection of either.
But the book must be written. It was a duty that they
owed the world, and to Katharine, at least, it meant more
than that, for if they could not between them get this
one book accomplished they had no right to their privileged
position. Their increment became yearly more and
more unearned. Besides, it must be established indisputably
that her grandfather was a very great man.
By the time she was twenty-seven, these thoughts had
become very familiar to her. They trod their way through
her mind as she sat opposite her mother of a morning at
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a table heaped with bundles of old letters and well supplied
with pencils, scissors, bottles of gum, india-rubber
bands, large envelopes, and other appliances for the manufacture
of books. Shortly before Ralph Denham’s visit,
Katharine had resolved to try the effect of strict rules
upon her mother’s habits of literary composition. They
were to be seated at their tables every morning at ten
o’clock, with a clean-swept morning of empty, secluded
hours before them. They were to keep their eyes fast upon
the paper, and nothing was to tempt them to speech,
save at the stroke of the hour when ten minutes for relaxation
were to be allowed them. If these rules were
observed for a year, she made out on a sheet of paper
that the completion of the book was certain, and she laid
her scheme before her mother with a feeling that much
of the task was already accomplished. Mrs. Hilbery examined
the sheet of paper very carefully. Then she clapped
her hands and exclaimed enthusiastically:
“Well done, Katharine! What a wonderful head for business
you’ve got! Now I shall keep this before me, and
every day I shall make a little mark in my pocketbook,
and on the last day of all—let me think, what shall we do
to celebrate the last day of all? If it weren’t the winter
we could take a jaunt to Italy. They say Switzerland’s
very lovely in the snow, except for the cold. But, as you
say, the great thing is to finish the book. Now let me
see—”
When they inspected her manuscripts, which Katharine
had put in order, they found a state of things well calculated
to dash their spirits, if they had not just resolved
on reform. They found, to begin with, a great variety of
very imposing paragraphs with which the biography was
to open; many of these, it is true, were unfinished, and
resembled triumphal arches standing upon one leg, but,
as Mrs. Hilbery observed, they could be patched up in ten
minutes, if she gave her mind to it. Next, there was an
account of the ancient home of the Alardyces, or rather,
of spring in Suffolk, which was very beautifully written,
although not essential to the story. However, Katharine
had put together a string of names and dates, so that the
poet was capably brought into the world, and his ninth
year was reached without further mishap. After that, Mrs.
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Hilbery wished, for sentimental reasons, to introduce the
recollections of a very fluent old lady, who had been
brought up in the same village, but these Katharine decided
must go. It might be advisable to introduce here a
sketch of contemporary poetry contributed by Mr. Hilbery,
and thus terse and learned and altogether out of keeping
with the rest, but Mrs. Hilbery was of opinion that it was
too bare, and made one feel altogether like a good little
girl in a lecture-room, which was not at all in keeping
with her father. It was put on one side. Now came the
period of his early manhood, when various affairs of the
heart must either be concealed or revealed; here again
Mrs. Hilbery was of two minds, and a thick packet of
manuscript was shelved for further consideration.
Several years were now altogether omitted, because Mrs.
Hilbery had found something distasteful to her in that
period, and had preferred to dwell upon her own recollections
as a child. After this, it seemed to Katharine
