To The Lighthouse: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition

Copyright 1927 by Harcourt, Inc.

Copyright renewed 1955 by Leonard Woolf

Foreword copyright ©1981 by Eudora Welty

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ISBN 978-0-15-190736-6

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Foreword

As it happened, I came to discover To the Lighthouse for myself. If it seems unbelievable today, this was possible to do in 1930 in Mississippi, when I was young, reading at my own will and as pleasure led me. I might have missed it if it hadn’t been for the strong signal in the title. Blessed with luck and innocence, I fell upon the novel that once and forever opened the door of imaginative fiction for me, and read it cold, in all its wonder and magnitude.

Personal discovery is the direct and, I suspect, the appropriate route to To the Lighthouse. Yet discovery, in the reading of a great original work, does not depend on its initial newness to us. No matter how often we begin it again, it seems to expand and expand again ahead of us. Reading To the Lighthouse now, I am still unwarned, still unprepared in the face of it, and my awe and my delight remain forever cloudless.

The setting of To the Lighthouse is generally supposed to be much like the place at St. Ives in Cornwall where the Stephen family spent the summers during Virginia Woolf’s childhood; and the portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are said to derive from Leslie and Julia Stephen, the author’s parents. However great a part recollection played in informing the novel, what connects To the Lighthouse to autobiography seems meteorological in nature. Not slow recollection so much as a bolt of lightning runs between them; we enter a world that is lit by its flash and play and under its heavenly signs is transformed.

The physical surround, so continuously before us in its changes, its weathers, its procession of day and night, so seducing in its beauty, is not here as itself. What Virginia Woolf has us see is the world as apparent to them—to Mrs. Ramsay, to Lily Briscoe, to James, Andrew, and the rest of the characters.

From its beginning, the novel never departs from the subjective. The youngest child, James, is on page one cutting out a catalogue picture of a refrigerator which he sees fringed with joy. The interior of its characters’ lives is where we experience everything. And in the subjective—contrary to what so many authors find there—lies its clarity. There is nowhere in this radiant novel a shadow of detachment. Such is Virginia Woolf’s genius. The business of living goes on—stockings are knit, the Boeuf en Daube is cooked and served—and she is a genius with the homely, piercingly precise detail too. But if there is a pull and lure and threat from the outside world, other threats, other lures, are greater: those that search the characters more fatally, from within.

Here, with this houseful of family and summer guests, on these few miles of shore and sea, with Lighthouse, life has been intensified, not constricted, not lessened in range but given its expansion. Inside, in this novel’s multiple, time-affected view, is ever more boundless and more mysterious than Outside. And for the author, who is throughout this novel writing in her deepest element, there is more to risk, and farther to go.

The hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the perpetually changing sea beneath the unpredictable sky, standing at its tricky, illusory distance away, signals on eternally.

To some of the children it remains as a father’s promise of destination, a promise that a tyrant of a father can break, or can withhold until it’s too late to make amends. To Mrs. Ramsay it is indeed her husband’s promise to her children and is as well, in plain fact, the home of the little boy with the tuberculous hip and the keeper, who regularly needs to be sent coffee, tobacco, warm stockings, and something to read.

We see that the novel, too, from the start is full of signals, many of them signals of danger; these take the form of questions in the characters’ minds. Not only, Will the children ever get to the Lighthouse? but What has life in store? How far is Mr. Ramsay (his gift being to stand alone in his intensity of mind facing the dark of human ignorance) able to think his way from abstract A to abstract B and then forward? Will Lily Briscoe succeed in putting her susceptibility, her apprehension, her adoration of the Ramsays, into color and shape on paper? What is reality?

Part One is thronging with possibilities. All is speculation directed toward the future. It is centered upon destinations, promises to the private self, to others; it smiles toward the beckoning of love. That what is in store might prove to be unbearable is news broken, in To the Lighthouse, by Time itself.

Persisting through the novel and playing a part in transforming it is a rhythm that moves as waves of the sea move, and the rise and fall of the heavenly bodies that pass over the sleeping house. Rhythm is visible in the silent strokes of light from the Lighthouse, and sounds in the pounding of the waves and the racing feet of children through the rooms. It is administered in the blows of chance or fate; and to an extraordinary degree the novel seems to partake of its own substance, to be itself a part of this world, for there is a felt rhythm, too, underlying the novel’s structure and forming a pattern of waking and sleeping, presence and absence, living and living no longer, between clamorous memory and lapses of mind, between the rushing in of love and the loosening of the hand in sleep. In the Time Passes interlude, the novel works its way forward and backward and around, freely, within its own realm of time imagined, and can inundate the void, too, when people are no longer there.

Lily, who has been in love with the whole Ramsay family, thinks near the end, standing at her easel, Love had a thousand shapes. Love indeed pervades the whole novel. If reality is what looms, love is what pervades—so much so that it is quite rarely present in the specific; it is both everywhere and nowhere at a given time. This is of course because of Mrs. Ramsay. The love between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay is the centerpiece, yet we see them alone together only once. The beautiful Mrs. Ramsay, in contrast to the others, had resolved everything into simplicity, bringing them all together, saying, ‘Life stand still here.’ The unforgettable dinner-party scene, as the day, and with it Part One, reaches its culmination, has the very texture of human happiness. With its lighted candles, the bowl of fruit, the wonderful Boeuf en Daube, the last-minute arrival of Minta and Paul, who come to the table, as hoped for, engaged—here is Mrs. Ramsay’s triumph.

It could not last, she knew, but at that moment her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of the people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling.

The windows of the dining room give back to her a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily. And as the ladies rise and leave the table and go out through the door, in that moment the present—and with it the poetry of the scene—becomes the past; as the twilight goes and night falls beyond the bare panes of the dining-room windows, what is really out there is time. And in the brief thirty-page interlude that follows, time gets in.

The novel written altogether until now from inside a number of human minds is at this point divested of any of them, of the human point of view. Time is at work: the verbs of sentences—nosing, swaying, fumbling, stroking (the Lighthouse beam), blundering—no longer stand for human action. We watch—outsiders now—as time moves, with slowness immeasurable or with the slide of elision, or with the speed of light, and the identities of the characters prevail only within parentheses. The tide swims over them, bearing here and there in its waves the power of sudden or random disintegration—the extinction of Andrew in a burst of wartime shellfire, the loss of Prue in childbirth, the death, on some night or other, of Mrs. Ramsay.

But Mr. Ramsay’s expedition through abstract thought toward reality will never be given up, and never will it reach its destination. (Try thinking of a kitchen table when you’re not there, so Andrew once describes this to Lily.) Lily herself, painting on the lawn, finds her own way "from concept to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage. . . . But this is what I see" (italics mine).

Set down here in the surround of the sea, on the spinning earth, caught up in the mysteries and the threat of time, the characters in their separate ways are absorbed in the wresting of order and sequence out of chaos, of shape out of what shifts and changes or vanishes before their eyes. The act of thinking, the act of using a brush dipped in greens and blues to set down what I see on a square of paper, the giving of human love, of making the moment something permanent, are all responses made at great risk (risk is the novel’s repeated word) to the same question, What does it all mean?

Beautiful and bright . . . and feathery and evanescent on the surface . . . but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron . . . a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses. These are Lily Briscoe’s private words to herself for her painting as she would have it be at last; by no coincidence they come as close as we could ask to a description of the novel. Radiant as it is in its beauty, there could never be a mistake about it: here is a novel to the last degree severe and uncompromising. I think that beyond being about the very nature of reality, it is itself a vision of reality.

To the Lighthouse is at once ethereal and firm, as perhaps only a vision can be. A presiding presence with streaming hair and muscles stretched, the novel’s conception has the strength of a Blake angel. It is an exertion, a vaunting, a triumph of wonder, of imaginative speculation and defiance; it is that bolt of lightning Virginia Woolf began with, an instantaneous burst of coherence over chaos and the dark. She has shown us the shape of the human spirit.

EUDORA WELTY

The Window

I

YES, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow, said Mrs. Ramsay. But you’ll have to be up with the lark, she added.

To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled, the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night’s darkness and a day’s sail, within touch. Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy. The wheelbarrow, the lawnmower, the sound of poplar trees, leaves whitening before rain, rooks cawing, brooms knocking, dresses rustling—all these were so coloured and distinguished in his mind that he had already his private code, his secret language, though he appeared the image of stark and uncompromising severity, with his high forehead and his fierce blue eyes, impeccably candid and pure, frowning slightly at the sight of human frailty, so that his mother, watching him guide his scissors neatly round the refrigerator, imagined him all red and ermine on the Bench or directing a stem and momentous enterprise in some crisis of public affairs.

But, said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, it won’t be fine.

Had there been an axe handy, or a poker, any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children’s breasts by his mere presence; standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgement. What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all of his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness (here Mr. Ramsay would straighten his back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon), one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure.

But it may be fine—I expect it will be fine, said Mrs. Ramsay, making some little twist of the reddish-brown stocking she was knitting, impatiently. If she finished it tonight, if they did go to the Lighthouse after all, it was to be given to the Lighthouse keeper for his little boy, who was threatened with a tuberculous hip; together with a pile of old magazines, and some tobacco, indeed, whatever she could find lying about, not really wanted, but only littering the room, to give those poor fellows, who must be bored to death sitting all day with nothing to do but polish the lamp and trim the wick and rake about on their scrap of garden, something to amuse them. For how would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn? she would ask; and to have no letters or newspapers, and to see nobody; if you were married, not to see your wife, not to know how your children were,—if they were ill, if they had fallen down and broken their legs or arms; to see the same dreary waves breaking week after week, and then a dreadful storm coming, and the windows covered with spray, and birds dashed against the lamp, and the whole place rocking, and not be able to put your nose out of doors for fear of being swept into the sea? How would you like that? she asked, addressing herself particularly to her daughters. So she added, rather differently, one must take them whatever comforts one can.

It’s due west, said the atheist Tansley, holding his bony fingers spread so that the wind blew through them, for he was sharing Mr. Ramsay’s evening walk up and down, up and down the terrace. That is to say, the wind blew from the worst possible direction for landing at the Lighthouse. Yes, he did say disagreeable things, Mrs. Ramsay admitted; it was odious of him to rub this in, and make James still more disappointed; but at the same time, she would not let them laugh at him. The atheist, they called him; the little atheist. Rose mocked him; Prue mocked him; Andrew, Jasper, Roger mocked him; even old Badger without a tooth in his head had bit him, for being (as Nancy put it) the hundred and tenth young man to chase them all the way up to the Hebrides when it was ever so much nicer to be alone.

Nonsense, said Mrs. Ramsay, with great severity. Apart from the habit of exaggeration which they had from her, and from the implication (which was true) that she asked too many people to stay, and had to lodge some in the town, she could not bear incivility to her guests, to young men in particular, who were poor as church mice, exceptionally able, her husband said, his great admirers, and come there for a holiday. Indeed, she had the whole of the other sex under her protection; for reasons she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance; finally for an attitude towards herself which no woman could fail to feel or to find agreeable, something trustful, childlike, reverential; which an old woman could take from a young man without loss of dignity, and woe betide the girl—pray Heaven it was none of her daughtersl—who did not feel the worth of it, and all that it implied, to the marrow of her bones!

She turned with severity upon Nancy. He had not chased them, she said. He had been asked.

They must find a way out of it all. There might be some simpler way, some less laborious way, she sighed. When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey, her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have managed things better—her husband; money; his books. But for her own part she would never for a single second regret her decision, evade difficulties, or slur over duties. She was now formidable to behold, and it was only in silence, looking up from their plates, after she had spoken so severely about Charles Tansley, that her daughters, Prue, Nancy, Rose—could sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other; for there was in all their minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry, of the Bank of England and the Indian Empire, of ringed fingers and lace, though to them all there was something in this of the essence of beauty, which called out the manliness in their girlish hearts, and made them, as they sat at table beneath their mother’s eyes, honour her strange severity, her extreme courtesy, like a Queen’s raising from the mud to wash a beggar’s dirty foot, when she thus admonished them so very severely about that wretched atheist who had chased them—or, speaking accurately, been invited to stay with them—in the Isles of Skye.

There’ll be no landing at the Lighthouse tomorrow, said Charles Tansley, clapping his hands together as he stood at the window with her husband. Surely, he had said enough. She wished they would both leave her and James alone and go on talking. She looked at him. He was such a miserable specimen, the children said, all humps and hollows. He couldn’t play cricket; he poked; he shuffled. He was a sarcastic brute, Andrew said. They knew what he liked best—to be for ever walking up and down, up and down, with Mr. Ramsay, and saying who had won this, who had won that, who was a first-rate man at Latin verses, who was brilliant but I think fundamentally unsound, who was undoubtedly the ablest fellow in Balliol, who had buried his light temporarily at Bristol or Bedford, but was bound to be heard of later when his Prolegomena, of which Mr. Tansley had the first pages in proof with him if Mr. Ramsay would like to see them, to some branch of mathematics or philosophy saw the light of day. That was what they talked about.

She could not help laughing herself sometimes. She said, the other day, something about waves mountains high. Yes, said Charles Tansley, it was a little rough. Aren’t you drenched to the skin? she had said. Damp, not wet through, said Mr. Tansley, pinching his sleeve, feeling his socks.

But it was not that they minded, the children said. It was not his face; it was not his manners. It was him-his point of view. When they talked about something interesting, people, music, history, anything, even said it was a fine evening so why not sit out of doors, then what they complained of about Charles Tansley was that until