The Common Reader Volume 2 by Virginia Woolf

Author:Virginia Woolf [Woolf, Virginia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Writing, Classics
ISBN: 9781448181933
Goodreads: 24948734
Publisher: Vintage Digital
Published: 1932-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

IV

DOROTHY WORDSWORTH

Two highly incongruous travellers, Mary Wollstonecraft and Dorothy Wordsworth, followed close upon each other’s footsteps. Mary was in Altona on the Elbe in 1795 with her baby; three years later Dorothy came there with her brother and Coleridge. Both kept a record of their travels; both saw the same places, but the eyes with which they saw them were very different. Whatever Mary saw served to start her mind upon some theory, upon the effect of government, upon the state of the people, upon the mystery of her own soul. The beat of the oars on the waves made her ask, ‘Life, what are you? Where goes this breath? This I so much alive? In what element will it mix, giving and receiving fresh energy?’1 And sometimes she forgot to look at the sunset and looked instead at the Baron Wolzogen. Dorothy, on the other hand, noted what was before her accurately, literally, and with prosaic precision. ‘The walk very pleasing between Hamburgh and Altona. A large piece of ground planted with trees, and intersected by gravel walks … The ground on the opposite side of the Elbe appears marshy.’2 Dorothy never railed against ‘the cloven hoof of despotism’.3 Dorothy never asked ‘men’s questions’ about exports and imports; Dorothy never confused her own soul with the sky. This ‘I so much alive’ was ruthlessly subordinated to the trees and the grass. For if she let ‘I’ and its rights and its wrongs and its passions and its suffering get beteeen her and the object, she would be calling the moon ‘the Queen of the Night’4; she would be talking of dawn’s ‘orient beams’5; she would be soaring into reveries and rhapsodies and forgetting to find the exact phrase for the ripple of moonlight upon the lake. It was like ‘herrings in the water’6 – she could not have said that if she had been thinking about herself. So while Mary dashed her head against wall after wall, and cried out, ‘Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable – and life is more than a dream’,7 Dorothy went on methodically at Alfoxden noting the approach of spring. ‘The sloe in blossom, the hawthorn green, the larches in the park changed from black to green, in two or three days.’8 And next day, 14th April 1798, ‘the evening very stormy, so we staid indoors. Mary Wollstonecraft’s life, &c., came.’9 And the day after they walked in the squire’s grounds and noticed that ‘Nature was very successfully striving to make beautiful what art had deformed – ruins, hermitages, &c., &c.’.10 There is no reference to Mary Wollstonecraft; it seems as if her life and all its storms had been swept away in one of those compendious et ceteras, and yet the next sentence reads like an unconscious comment. ‘Happily we cannot shape the huge hills, or carve out the valleys according to our fancy.’11 No, we cannot re-form, we must not rebel; we can only accept and try to understand the message of Nature.

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