Moments of Being by Virginia Woolf

Author:Virginia Woolf
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2018-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

Mecklenburgh Square again on a hot summer day, July 1940. Invasion still impends. My bookfn57 is out; and jaded and distracted I return to this free page.

The sociable father then I never knew. Father as a writer I can get of course in his books; the father who is related to the man’s Leslie Stephen, I suppose. The Leslie whom so many writers and scholars admired, though many thought him cold and sneering; just as many thought him formidable and wild and inapproachable. He is to be found here and there in memoirs. He never spoke a word when Stevenson and Gosse lunched with him, and sat silent with his long cold hands and his fan shaped beard flowing over his breast. When I read his books I get a critical grasp on him; I always read Hours in a Library by way of filling out my ideas, say of Coleridge, if I’m reading Coleridge; and always find something to fill out; to correct; to stiffen my fluid vision. I find not a subtle mind; not an imaginative mind; not a suggestive mind. But a strong mind; a healthy out of door, moor striding mind; an impatient, limited mind; a conventional mind entirely accepting his own standard of what is honest, what is moral, without a shadow of doubt accepting this is a good man; that is a good woman; I get a sense of Leslie Stephen, the muscular agnostic; cheery, hearty; always cracking up sense and manliness; and crying down sentiment and vagueness, yet putting in a dab of sentiment in the right place – “I will say no more . . . exquisite sensibility . . . thoroughly masculine . . . feminine delicacy . . .”. That shows a very simply constructed view of the world; and the world was, I suppose, more simple then. It was a black and white world compared with ours; obvious things to be destroyed – headed humbug, obvious things to be preserved – headed domestic virtues. I admire (laughingly) that Leslie Stephen; and sometimes lately have envied him. Yet he is not a writer for whom I have a natural taste. Yet just as a dog takes a bite of grass, I take a bite of him medicinally, and there often steals in, not a filial, but a reader’s affection for him; for his courage, his simplicity, for his strength and nonchalance, and neglect of appearances.

Through his books I can get at the writer father still; but when Nessa and I inherited the rule of the house, I knew nothing of the social father, and the writer father was much more exacting and pressing than he is now that I find him only in books; and it was the tyrant father – the exacting, the violent, the histrionic, the demonstrative, the self-centred, the self pitying, the deaf, the appealing, the alternately loved and hated father – that dominated me then. It was like being shut up in the same cage with a wild beast.

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