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PA L G R AV E C R I T I C A L S T U D I E S O F A N T I S E M I T I S M A N D R AC I S M
IDEAS OF ‘RACE’
IN THE HISTORY
OF THE HUMANITIES
Edited by
Amos Morris-Reich
and Dirk Rupnow
Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and
Racism
Series Editor
David Feldman
Birkbeck College - University of London
London, United Kingdom
Aims of the Series
Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism considers antisemi-
tism from the ancient world to the present day. The series explores topical
and theoretical questions and brings historical and multidisciplinary per-
spectives to bear on contemporary concerns and phenomena.
Grounded in history, the series also reaches across disciplinary bound-
aries to promote a contextualised and comparative understanding of
antisemitism. A contextualised understanding will seek to uncover the
content, meanings, functions and dynamics of antisemitism as it occurred
in the past and recurs in the present. A comparative approach will consider
antisemitism over time and place. Importantly, it will also explore the con-
nections between antisemitism and other exclusionary visions of society.
The series will explore the relationship between antisemitism and other
racisms as well as between antisemitism and forms of discrimination and
prejudice articulated in terms of gender and sexuality.
v
Contents
Introduction 1
Amos Morris-Reich and Dirk Rupnow
vii
viii Contents
Afterword 317
Sander L. Gilman
Index 323
Notes on Contributors
ix
x Notes on Contributors
Red: A Red Sox Fan’s Diary of the 2004 Season (New Academia, 2005). He
is currently working on books on bus boycotts in the United States and
South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s and on the 1981 South African
national rugby team’s tour to the United States.
Nigel Eltringham is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the
University of Sussex. He is the author of Accounting for Horror: Post-
Genocide Debates in Rwanda (Pluto, 2004); editor of Framing Africa:
Portrayals of a Continent in Contemporary Mainstream Cinema (Berghahn,
2013); and co-editor of Remembering Genocide (Routledge, 2014). He is
currently working on a monograph on the International Criminal Tribunal
for Rwanda.
Sander L. Gilman is a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and
Sciences as well as Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. A cultural
and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over ninety books. His
Illness and Image: Case Studies in the Medical Humanities appeared with
Transaction Publishers in 2015; his most recent edited volume, Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam: Collaboration and Conflict in the Age of Diaspora
was published with the Hong Kong University Press in 2014.
Christopher Hutton is chair professor in the School of English at the
University of Hong Kong. His research concerns the history of linguistics,
in particular the relationship between linguistics and race theory, linguis-
tics and colonialism, and linguistics and fascism. More recently he has
been working on the politics of language and interpretation in the context
of the law. His publications include Linguistics and the Third Reich
(Routledge, 1999); Race and the Third Reich (Polity, 2005); Word
Meaning and Legal Interpretation (Macmillan, 2014), and Signs, Meaning
and Experience (with Adrian Pablé, De Gruyter, 2015).
Suzanne Marchand is LSU Systems Professor of European Intellectual
History at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. She is the author of
Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany,
1750–1970 (Princeton University Press, 1996) and German Orientalism
in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge
University Press, 2009) as well as many articles on the history of the
humanities in Germany and Austria.
Amos Morris-Reich is a professor in the Department of Jewish History
and Thought and director of the Bucerius Institute for the Research of
Notes on Contributors xi
xiii
Introduction
In the decades following World War II and the Holocaust—years that wit-
nessed European decolonization and the African American civil rights move-
ment—the concept of race slowly but surely lost its legitimacy as a cultural,
political and scientific category. Nevertheless, for much of the nineteenth and
the first half of the twentieth centuries, concepts of race enjoyed widespread
currency, playing an integral role in numerous fields of knowledge, in some
cases even serving as an essential basis. This volume is concerned with the
hitherto neglected role of the humanities in the histories of the idea of race.
For reasons that we shall turn to shortly, contemporary scholarship has
by now firmly associated notions of race with late nineteenth-century biol-
ogy and physical anthropology rather than with the humanities. Thus the
scholarly imagination of today populates the racial studies of the past with
anthropologists dressed in white doctors’ coats and measuring the skulls
of dark-skinned and half-naked native subjects, but not with distinguished
historians, book in hand and ruminating in their armchairs. And yet recent
scholarship has documented notions of “race” within a wide range of fields
A. Morris-Reich (*)
Department of Jewish History, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
D. Rupnow
Institute for Contemporary History, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
of impressions and ideas (J. S. Mill). But whichever position was adopted,
the point is that the different moral sciences—and these included, at vari-
ous times, history, law, logic, ethics, psychology, political economy and
political science—were not simply defined as such by virtue of this posi-
tion, but they were also supposedly grounded in the correct account of
the human mind.11 This was still the situation at the turn of the twentieth
century. It was only in 1903, for example, that an Economics Faculty was
created at Cambridge University—hitherto economics had been taught
as but one of several moral sciences. In general, the disappearance of the
category “moral science” was the result not of intellectual development
but rather of the processes of academic specialization that witnessed, over
the course of about half a century, the establishment of separate facul-
ties and, consequently, independent identities for the various one-time
moral sciences. It was only in the wake of such fragmentation and subse-
quent intellectual amnesia that the term “humanities” could enter into the
vocabulary of the universities as a new catch-all label.
Even in the German context it would be quite wrong to regard
Geisteswissenschaften as a timeless category. In the German universities sig-
nificant innovation occurred as early as the years after 1825, when the new
and reformed universities restructured teaching and research along disci-
plinary lines. The new academics were increasingly specialists who wrote
primarily for their peers and taught mainly to create a new generation of
scholars in their subject.12 Many new disciplines like philosophy, history
and philology now came into existence as distinct social entities. The con-
ception of these various fields as all belonging to the Geisteswissenschaften,
however, had to wait until the introduction of that term, which occurred
as part of the intense methodological and ideological controversy that
took place in the third part of the nineteenth century. The term was intro-
duced by Wilhelm Dilthey, according to some accounts, as the German
translation of the term “moral sciences” that Dilthey found in the sixth
book of J. S. Mill’s System of Logic (1843).13 Literally, Geisteswissenschaften
means “sciences of the spirit,” and the term encompasses that which is
authentically human and, as such, is in fact wider than the English-language
term “humanities,” at least if the latter are understood as predominantly
historical-philological disciplines. At the heart of Dilthey’s thinking was
a distinction between Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften;
between, that is, the sciences of the natural world and the sciences of
man. While the latter engaged with law-like causal relations, the former,
he insisted, must focus on understanding human beings by way of the
INTRODUCTION 7
idea for the conference itself was fired by the experience of both editors,
who had independently come to the conclusion that crucial aspects of
the history of race and racism had far more to do with an intrinsic his-
tory of the humanities than with that of the natural sciences or the politi-
cal sphere. We then started to look around and realized that there was a
growing body of literature that corroborated this intuition with regard
to specific aspects of the humanities, but no combined discussion across
the various contexts. Such a joint discussion, ranging from the eighteenth
through the twenty-first centuries and involving different national con-
texts and different linguistic and disciplinary skills, could only be pursued
through a collective endeavor, and the conference was intended to serve
as a first step in that endeavor.
We then issued a call for papers for the conference and received a large
number of applications. Many of these focused on critical perspectives
on the history of ideas of race in the humanities. Our interest, however,
lay not in critical and, to an extent, external perspectives on race in the
humanities, but rather in authors who were either committed in one way
or another to concepts of race or else viewed race as necessary for the
treatment of their subjects in certain respects. The conference, which was
much wider in scope than the current volume, was the first time these
aspects of the history of the humanities were discussed jointly.
The conference brought together some of the most distinguished
authors in their respective fields across the humanities, discussing different
continents, intellectual traditions, historical periods and political, social
and linguistic subjects and contexts. Only following the conference pre-
sentations and discussions did we begin to understand the sheer size of the
subject that the conference had opened up. And it was only after the con-
ference was over, in a long and arduous process facilitated by discussion,
reflection and review, that the ideas of the editors about the shape of the
volume and the required form of this introductory chapter crystallized.
What became increasingly apparent to us was that in opening up a
vast subject that had been greatly neglected by scholarship, we faced the
choice of either reifying a partial segment of its history, most likely the
more clearly racist end of the spectrum (about which both editors had
independently published extensively),15 or, on the other hand, opening
and historically deconstructing some of the different and shifting histori-
cal entanglements and underpinnings of ideas of race in the history of the
humanities. Each of these strategies, however, would come at a price: the
former would give the appearance of a clearer and more consistent role for
INTRODUCTION 11
ideas of race in the history of the humanities, but it would also entail his-
torical partiality and even misrepresentation; the latter, meanwhile, would
express a wider segment of the historical continuum, but the chapters col-
lected in the volume would seem more disparate.
It gradually became clear to us as historians that the latter strat-
egy was stronger and historically more productive. We then wrote this
Introduction, which seeks to reflect this strategy. Our insistence on de-
reifying the history of ideas of race in the history of the humanities, on
emphasizing the entanglements between race and the humanities in par-
ticular contexts, on pointing out different modalities of relationship and
even on calling attention to the inability to fully fix and stabilize the mean-
ing of “race” and the boundaries of the “humanities” across history and
national context reflects this strategic choice. The contributions collected
here are thus not randomly chosen but express our growing conviction
that the first step, in this current state of research, should not be to artifi-
cially contract the field but, on the contrary, and even at the risk of having
the selection viewed as insufficiently historically defined, to move towards
demarcating an as-yet-uncharted field.
From all this it should be clear that the essays collected in this volume
do not attempt to exhaust the subject. Rather, they offer carefully selected
chapters that methodically study varying manifestations of ideas of race in
the history of the humanities. These chapters demonstrate race as a string
of notions in texts, images and music, in various branches of the humani-
ties ranging from linguistics to folklore, art history and musicology, in
their local contexts as well as in wider contexts that are arguably shared.
Despite the fact that both editors of this volume study, in one way or
another, National Socialism in its wider context and have a background in
German history, Nazism is purposely almost completely absent from the
volume. This decision was made because the editors feel that the subject
of race in the Nazi context has been thoroughly studied, as has the his-
tory of the humanities in Nazi Germany.16 The Nazi context is an obvious
and necessary one in the study of race because of the extremity of the
case, but because the aim of this volume is to kick-start a more systematic
and wide-ranging historicization of notions of race in the humanities in a
non-teleological and non-deterministic way, it seemed appropriate to cast
the net in less-charted waters and to seek out appearances of race in other
contexts. Having said this, it must immediately be conceded that Nazi
Germany remains as subtext in much of the discussion, and one of the
constant questions that undergirds many of the chapters pertains to the
12 A. MORRIS-REICH AND D. RUPNOW
extent in Europe as well, there is a widely shared belief that race is pri-
marily a category of physically observable superficial difference (“race is
skin deep”). This tendency is probably connected to the critical turn that
anthropology has taken towards race in its own disciplinary history, but
it is not helpful in the reconstruction and understanding of the history of
race in the humanities. One of the major accomplishments of the chapters
that follow is that they serve as a corrective to an entrenched focus upon
physical difference and point to the frequent (but by no means exclusive)
conceptualization of race as a deep structure that organizes human his-
tory and culture. This contrast, it may be noted, is not unrelated to that
between the visible and the invisible, where in some contexts race is essen-
tially about the visible and about visible differences, whereas in others it
is equally essentially about non-observable, almost hidden and in a sense
stronger or more threatening differences.
Our second argument is that it is necessary to draw distinctions between
several interrelated but independent genealogies of race as a concept (or
set of dynamic concepts). Thus one genealogical line of development
runs from Count de Gobineau—whose primary form of argumentation
as found in his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races was historical—
through to the Rassesystem of the twentieth century. In this line, racial
purity is the highest attribute, aesthetic as well as biological. Another
line begins with Charles Darwin and leads, by way of Francis Galton, to
modern eugenics. In this second genealogy, it is variability that plays the
crucial role: Darwin conceptualized species as by definition dynamic and
historical rather than stable, and as therefore lacking a fixed border; and
race therefore came to be conceptualized as, in principle, also lacking a
permanent and fixed border.
Finally, our third argument is that the discovery of the idea of race is
a specifically modern phenomenon, which cannot be separated from the
sense of the crisis of modernity which accompanied the belief in the period
as an era unlike anything that had preceded it, a veritable sui generis. In
this sense, ideas of race are inseparable from what could be termed a form
of reactionary logic as a response to modernity. That is, a structural rela-
tionship can be discerned between the belief in the natural division of the
human species into races and the belief that modern conditions increas-
ingly undermine and erode that boundary. Many writers on race were
responding to what they felt to be the disintegration of traditional forms
of social, community, family and natural life in the wake of serious, imme-
diate processes with irreversible implications. Race was thus established as
14 A. MORRIS-REICH AND D. RUPNOW
The very idea of notions of race in the humanities confronts the histo-
rian with several interpretative hurdles that arise from the massive changes
in assumptions about race that have occurred between the early modern
period and the early twenty-first century. From early in the second half of
the twentieth century onwards, historians have increasingly worked with
the epistemic assumption that races are not simple biological entities but
are rather, in one way or another, constructs, inevitably involving social
and political (that is, non-biological) considerations. Simultaneously,
commitment to notions of race has become a commitment to racism.
Consequently, historians tend to approach branches of knowledge com-
mitted to race from an external point of view, treating them as ideologi-
cal constructs—a tendency that complicates the study of these bodies of
knowledge by way of the normal tools of intellectual history. The specific
problem that we face here, however, is not so much with the moral or
ethical judgments themselves, but with what such judgments do to our
capacity to write this chapter in the history of the humanities.
16 A. MORRIS-REICH AND D. RUPNOW
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc, 1925
Biography
FLUSH
ROGER FRY
Criticism, etc.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
HBMC
New York
Twenty-third printing
This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men
and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and
endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing. Think, for
example, of the woman she admired most, Lady Bexborough,
opening the bazaar.
There were Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities; there were Soapy Sponge
and Mrs. Asquith’s Memoirs and Big Game Shooting in Nigeria, all
spread open. Ever so many books there were; but none that seemed
exactly right to take to Evelyn Whitbread in her nursing home.
Nothing that would serve to amuse her and make that indescribably
dried-up little woman look, as Clarissa came in, just for a moment
cordial; before they settled down for the usual interminable talk of
women’s ailments. How much she wanted it—that people should
look pleased as she came in, Clarissa thought and turned and
walked back towards Bond Street, annoyed, because it was silly to
have other reasons for doing things. Much rather would she have
been one of those people like Richard who did things for themselves,
whereas, she thought, waiting to cross, half the time she did things
not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that;
perfect idiocy she knew (and now the policeman held up his hand)
for no one was ever for a second taken in. Oh if she could have had
her life over again! she thought, stepping on to the pavement, could
have looked even differently!
She would have been, in the first place, dark like Lady Bexborough,
with a skin of crumpled leather and beautiful eyes. She would have
been, like Lady Bexborough, slow and stately; rather large;
interested in politics like a man; with a country house; very dignified,
very sincere. Instead of which she had a narrow pea-stick figure; a
ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird’s. That she held herself well
was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well,
considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore
(she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its
capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all. She had the oddest
sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no
more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this
astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up
Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more;
this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.
Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the
season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of
tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty
years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.
“That is all,” she said, looking at the fishmonger’s. “That is all,” she
repeated, pausing for a moment at the window of a glove shop
where, before the War, you could buy almost perfect gloves. And her
old Uncle William used to say a lady is known by her shoes and her
gloves. He had turned on his bed one morning in the middle of the
War. He had said, “I have had enough.” Gloves and shoes; she had
a passion for gloves; but her own daughter, her Elizabeth, cared not
a straw for either of them.
Not a straw, she thought, going on up Bond Street to a shop where
they kept flowers for her when she gave a party. Elizabeth really
cared for her dog most of all. The whole house this morning smelt of
tar. Still, better poor Grizzle than Miss Kilman; better distemper and
tar and all the rest of it than sitting mewed in a stuffy bedroom with a
prayer book! Better anything, she was inclined to say. But it might be
only a phase, as Richard said, such as all girls go through. It might
be falling in love. But why with Miss Kilman? who had been badly
treated of course; one must make allowances for that, and Richard
said she was very able, had a really historical mind. Anyhow they
were inseparable, and Elizabeth, her own daughter, went to
Communion; and how she dressed, how she treated people who
came to lunch she did not care a bit, it being her experience that the
religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes); dulled their
feelings, for Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russians, starved
herself for the Austrians, but in private inflicted positive torture, so
insensitive was she, dressed in a green mackintosh coat. Year in
year out she wore that coat; she perspired; she was never in the
room five minutes without making you feel her superiority, your
inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were; how she lived in a
slum without a cushion or a bed or a rug or whatever it might be, all
her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it, her dismissal from
school during the War—poor embittered unfortunate creature! For it
was not her one hated but the idea of her, which undoubtedly had
gathered in to itself a great deal that was not Miss Kilman; had
become one of those spectres with which one battles in the night;
one of those spectres who stand astride us and suck up half our life-
blood, dominators and tyrants; for no doubt with another throw of the
dice, had the black been uppermost and not the white, she would
have loved Miss Kilman! But not in this world. No.
It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal
monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the
depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content
quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring,
this hatred, which, especially since her illness, had power to make
her feel scraped, hurt in her spine; gave her physical pain, and made
all pleasure in beauty, in friendship, in being well, in being loved and
making her home delightful rock, quiver, and bend as if indeed there
were a monster grubbing at the roots, as if the whole panoply of
content were nothing but self love! this hatred!
Nonsense, nonsense! she cried to herself, pushing through the
swing doors of Mulberry’s the florists.
She advanced, light, tall, very upright, to be greeted at once by
button-faced Miss Pym, whose hands were always bright red, as if
they had been stood in cold water with the flowers.
There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilac; and
carnations, masses of carnations. There were roses; there were
irises. Ah yes—so she breathed in the earthy garden sweet smell as
she stood talking to Miss Pym who owed her help, and thought her
kind, for kind she had been years ago; very kind, but she looked
older, this year, turning her head from side to side among the irises
and roses and nodding tufts of lilac with her eyes half closed,
snuffing in, after the street uproar, the delicious scent, the exquisite
coolness. And then, opening her eyes, how fresh like frilled linen
clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays the roses looked; and dark
and prim the red carnations, holding their heads up; and all the
sweet peas spreading in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale
—as if it were the evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to pick
sweet peas and roses after the superb summer’s day, with its almost
blue-black sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its arum lilies was
over; and it was the moment between six and seven when every
flower—roses, carnations, irises, lilac—glows; white, violet, red,
deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in
the misty beds; and how she loved the grey-white moths spinning in
and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses!
And as she began to go with Miss Pym from jar to jar, choosing,
nonsense, nonsense, she said to herself, more and more gently, as if
this beauty, this scent, this colour, and Miss Pym liking her, trusting
her, were a wave which she let flow over her and surmount that
hatred, that monster, surmount it all; and it lifted her up and up when
—oh! a pistol shot in the street outside!
“Dear, those motor cars,” said Miss Pym, going to the window to
look, and coming back and smiling apologetically with her hands full
of sweet peas, as if those motor cars, those tyres of motor cars,
were all her fault.
The violent explosion which made Mrs. Dalloway jump and Miss
Pym go to the window and apologise came from a motor car which
had drawn to the side of the pavement precisely opposite Mulberry’s
shop window. Passers-by who, of course, stopped and stared, had
just time to see a face of the very greatest importance against the
dove-grey upholstery, before a male hand drew the blind and there
was nothing to be seen except a square of dove grey.
Yet rumours were at once in circulation from the middle of Bond
Street to Oxford Street on one side, to Atkinson’s scent shop on the
other, passing invisibly, inaudibly, like a cloud, swift, veil-like upon
hills, falling indeed with something of a cloud’s sudden sobriety and
stillness upon faces which a second before had been utterly
disorderly. But now mystery had brushed them with her wing; they
had heard the voice of authority; the spirit of religion was abroad with
her eyes bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide. But nobody knew
whose face had been seen. Was it the Prince of Wales’s, the
Queen’s, the Prime Minister’s? Whose face was it? Nobody knew.
Edgar J. Watkiss, with his roll of lead piping round his arm, said
audibly, humorously of course: “The Proime Minister’s kyar.”
Septimus Warren Smith, who found himself unable to pass, heard
him.
Septimus Warren Smith, aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed,
wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat, with hazel eyes which
had that look of apprehension in them which makes complete
strangers apprehensive too. The world has raised its whip; where will
it descend?
Everything had come to a standstill. The throb of the motor engines
sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming through an entire body.
The sun became extraordinarily hot because the motor car had
stopped outside Mulberry’s shop window; old ladies on the tops of
omnibuses spread their black parasols; here a green, here a red
parasol opened with a little pop. Mrs. Dalloway, coming to the
window with her arms full of sweet peas, looked out with her little
pink face pursed in enquiry. Every one looked at the motor car.
Septimus looked. Boys on bicycles sprang off. Traffic accumulated.
And there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a
curious pattern like a tree, Septimus thought, and this gradual
drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if
some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst
into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and quivered and
threatened to burst into flames. It is I who am blocking the way, he
thought. Was he not being looked at and pointed at; was he not
weighted there, rooted to the pavement, for a purpose? But for what
purpose?
“Let us go on, Septimus,” said his wife, a little woman, with large
eyes in a sallow pointed face; an Italian girl.
But Lucrezia herself could not help looking at the motor car and the
tree pattern on the blinds. Was it the Queen in there—the Queen
going shopping?
The chauffeur, who had been opening something, turning something,
shutting something, got on to the box.
“Come on,” said Lucrezia.
But her husband, for they had been married four, five years now,
jumped, started, and said, “All right!” angrily, as if she had interrupted
him.
People must notice; people must see. People, she thought, looking
at the crowd staring at the motor car; the English people, with their
children and their horses and their clothes, which she admired in a
way; but they were “people” now, because Septimus had said, “I will
kill myself”; an awful thing to say. Suppose they had heard him? She
looked at the crowd. Help, help! she wanted to cry out to butchers’
boys and women. Help! Only last autumn she and Septimus had
stood on the Embankment wrapped in the same cloak and, Septimus
reading a paper instead of talking, she had snatched it from him and
laughed in the old man’s face who saw them! But failure one
conceals. She must take him away into some park.
“Now we will cross,” she said.
She had a right to his arm, though it was without feeling. He would
give her, who was so simple, so impulsive, only twenty-four, without
friends in England, who had left Italy for his sake, a piece of bone.
The motor car with its blinds drawn and an air of inscrutable reserve
proceeded towards Piccadilly, still gazed at, still ruffling the faces on
both sides of the street with the same dark breath of veneration
whether for Queen, Prince, or Prime Minister nobody knew. The face
itself had been seen only once by three people for a few seconds.
Even the sex was now in dispute. But there could be no doubt that
greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down
Bond Street, removed only by a hand’s-breadth from ordinary people
who might now, for the first and last time, be within speaking
distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the
state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of
time, when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying
along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a
few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of
innumerable decayed teeth. The face in the motor car will then be
known.
It is probably the Queen, thought Mrs. Dalloway, coming out of
Mulberry’s with her flowers; the Queen. And for a second she wore a
look of extreme dignity standing by the flower shop in the sunlight
while the car passed at a foot’s pace, with its blinds drawn. The
Queen going to some hospital; the Queen opening some bazaar,
thought Clarissa.
The crush was terrific for the time of day. Lords, Ascot, Hurlingham,
what was it? she wondered, for the street was blocked. The British
middle classes sitting sideways on the tops of omnibuses with
parcels and umbrellas, yes, even furs on a day like this, were, she
thought, more ridiculous, more unlike anything there has ever been
than one could conceive; and the Queen herself held up; the Queen
herself unable to pass. Clarissa was suspended on one side of
Brook Street; Sir John Buckhurst, the old Judge on the other, with
the car between them (Sir John had laid down the law for years and
liked a well-dressed woman) when the chauffeur, leaning ever so
slightly, said or showed something to the policeman, who saluted
and raised his arm and jerked his head and moved the omnibus to
the side and the car passed through. Slowly and very silently it took
its way.
Clarissa guessed; Clarissa knew of course; she had seen something
white, magical, circular, in the footman’s hand, a disc inscribed with a
name,—the Queen’s, the Prince of Wales’s, the Prime Minister’s?—
which, by force of its own lustre, burnt its way through (Clarissa saw
the car diminishing, disappearing), to blaze among candelabras,
glittering stars, breasts stiff with oak leaves, Hugh Whitbread and all
his colleagues, the gentlemen of England, that night in Buckingham
Palace. And Clarissa, too, gave a party. She stiffened a little; so she
would stand at the top of her stairs.
The car had gone, but it had left a slight ripple which flowed through
glove shops and hat shops and tailors’ shops on both sides of Bond
Street. For thirty seconds all heads were inclined the same way—to
the window. Choosing a pair of gloves—should they be to the elbow
or above it, lemon or pale grey?—ladies stopped; when the sentence
was finished something had happened. Something so trifling in
single instances that no mathematical instrument, though capable of
transmitting shocks in China, could register the vibration; yet in its
fulness rather formidable and in its common appeal emotional; for in
all the hat shops and tailors’ shops strangers looked at each other
and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire. In a public house in a
back street a Colonial insulted the House of Windsor which led to
words, broken beer glasses, and a general shindy, which echoed
strangely across the way in the ears of girls buying white underlinen
threaded with pure white ribbon for their weddings. For the surface
agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed something very
profound.
Gliding across Piccadilly, the car turned down St. James’s Street. Tall
men, men of robust physique, well-dressed men with their tail-coats
and their white slips and their hair raked back who, for reasons
difficult to discriminate, were standing in the bow window of Brooks’s
with their hands behind the tails of their coats, looking out, perceived
instinctively that greatness was passing, and the pale light of the
immortal presence fell upon them as it had fallen upon Clarissa
Dalloway. At once they stood even straighter, and removed their