Virginia Woolf's Richest Novel
In "The Years" Her Art Reaches Its Fullest Development to Date
Mrs. Woolf's novel, her first since "The Waves" of 1931, is rich and lovely with the poetry of life. It might be called a chronicle novel, since it begins in 1880 and ends in the present day, or a "family" novel, since it narrates the fortunes of the large and representative Pargiter family. But it eludes both classifications. Though the founder of the present family, old Colonel Pargiter, who lost two fingers in the Indian Mutiny--is, in habit and class, a bit of a Forsyte, there is nothing of the careful solidity of Galsworthy's saga, with its verifiable genealogy, interludes and corroborative detail.
Rather this is a long-drawn-out lyricism in the form of a novel, with flying buttresses to sustain its airy and often absent-minded inspirations. There is the minimum of substructure. But there is everywhere, on one lovely page after another, a kind of writing which reveals a kind of feeling that is more illuminating than a dozen well-made and documented novels. Mrs. Woolf has made, or unmade, her novel in the form of a poem or a piece of music.
And so not built at all
and therefore built forever,
and it is this subtle and oblique composition, though we may perhaps exaggerate its durability, that gives whatever she writes its distinction.
She has not continued from "The Waves," which was the furthest the novel could go in the way of freedom, or even license, of reverie and the stream of consciousness. Instead she has turned back to earlier forms of her own. "The Years" resembles somewhat the general motive of "To the Lighthouse" in its marking of time as the chief protagonist of recorded life. But sometimes there is the traditional form of narration that she mastered so easily in the early "The Voyage Out." There is also the discontinuity of "Jacob's Room." There is also the unity and singleness of "Mrs. Dalloway," with the years of five decades toiling instead of the chiming of a day's hours. In short, Mrs. Woolf has written her longest novel, her richest and most beautiful novel, out of many years in the practice of writing.
The Pargiter family she writes of might very well be, in its extensions and influence, a summary of her own family or any upper middle-class family, though it is a relief to record that she never descends to personal justifications. The Colonel has seen service in India. Retired, well-to-do, with an invalid wife in the foreground and a mistress in the background, he gives way to his family. Children in the Eighteen Eighties, they begin to form their lives. Martin goes into the army, Morris to the bar, Edward to Oxford and a distinguished scholar's life. Delia marries and becomes a brilliant hostess. Milly marries into the squirarchy and a routine of horses and children. The militant Rose will take to smashing windows to demonstrate the right of women to vote and Eleanor will stay home to look after her father the Colonel. How very representative it is, and how very natural--almost like one of nature's laws--that this English family should spread itself imperturbably throughout the professions and the counties, with a fling at India and Africa, and still remain completely itself, unmistakably Pargiter.
So far as the book is a chronicle of family life, we must note that it has a perfect beginning and a perfect end, and almost no middle. The development of character, the process of growing up, the movie-life of fiction, so to speak, has never been easy to Mrs. Woolf; or perhaps she distrusts its genuineness. The childhoods in the house in Abercorn Terrace, opening at tea-time with Milly taking her invalid mother's place at the tea-kettle which works so badly, and the family coming in from here and there: Martin from school, Eleanor from being kind to the poor, the Colonel from his club and his mistress, Morris from his law office; and the dinner that follows and is interrupted with the death of the long-ailing mother--this opening is so brilliantly composed that one looks back with dismay to the opening of another novel of about the same year and time of afternoon, Galsworthy's "The Man of Property," so full of upholstery and exposition. Mr. Galsworthy himself wrote of "picking" and "embalming" his characters. But Mrs. Woolf's persons are alive with the excitement of life. No one, I believe, has quite her immediacy of effect, her recklessness of sensation, tempered by breeding and intelligence, turned into pure expressibility.
The ending is in the same key, which means that though her characters have become older and have suffered the Boer War and the war of 1914, the suffragette movement and the Irish trouble, and some have been killed and others have lost their money, they are still young at heart. The grand party that ends the book, like a grosse fuga, is still gay and lively with memories, dreams and aspirations. Some nostalgia there is, certainly, and melancholy for the passing years; but there is still the perpetual bubbling of sensation, like old wine into a new glass, perhaps a cheaper glass-- but still something to contain the poetry and effervescence. Mrs. Dalloway's party, which took so many pleasant pains of composition, is merely a precious and somewhat malicious prelude to this family largess of personalities and histories.
Between the beginning and end there is a sort of stasis, possibly more true to life than the dynamics of other novelists; but still part of a criticism of Mrs. Woolf's method. The characters were young; now they are old; and both Mrs. Woolf can render to perfection. In the meantime, events happen, and they are arbitrarily selected. Eleanor at a committee meeting, Rose in prison because of Votes for Women, Eleanor at dinner with her cousins during an air raid; these are pictures, vividly painted but without a frame, unless one's own experience supplies one. It is here that one recalls Galsworthy again, who charted the course of each character. Mrs. Woolf lets them wander at will, forgetting and remembering, as one does really in life, moving slowly or standing still and musing while new inventions and policies clamor for attention. Her people live in the past, in the family, in all the roles of Victorian decorum; and yet with a sense of fun and intelligence and common sense and uncommon sensibility; and, above all, with the eccentricity of personality, so that no category quite contains them: they are as likely to burst into poetry as politics, or to qualify the army with a quotation from Horace. There is no cataloguing them, and no way of regimenting them into the customary form of fiction.
It is this, really, that gives Mrs. Woolf's novels their utmost delight, a quality of pleasure in living, a lovely sense of people thinking and feeling and brooding by themselves, with vague memories and sharp present sensations, with bits of song and odd poetry; and still their contact with life, in 1880 or 1930, is quite definitely realized. The Years neither retreat into history nor knock at the future. They are there as something done, and something still existing, as Martin picking up his cousin Sally from St. Paul's and carrying her off to lunch at a City chop house, and then to a famous walk to the Serpentine; or Eleanor, the best prototype of Mrs. Woolf's Betty Flanders, Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsay, picking out absent-mindedly her sisters and cousins, her nieces and nephews, taking her pleasure from them as human beings of bright and various discrepancies and compensations; or Peggy wondering if they are all they are said to be; or Nicholas, who, at the end of the party, makes no peroration, because, as he says, there had been no speech--so there they are, without peroration, or propaganda, or even perspective, exactly and minutely as they lived, a family through fifty-odd years from 1880 to 1930, delighting, in spite of their years and the wars and their attendant worries, in being alive and feeling the new warmth of fresh family life around it.
Lovely as "The Waves" was, "The Years" goes far behind and beyond it, giving its characters a local habitation and a name, and expressing Mrs. Woolf's purpose in the novel more richly than it has ever been done before.
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