A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Вирджиния Вулф

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СКАЧАТЬ she wrote poetry, and one has only to open her poetry to find her bursting out in indignation against the position of women:

      How we are fallen! fallen by mistaken rules,

      And Education’s more than Nature’s fools;

      Debarred from all improvements of the mind,

      And to be dull, expected and designed;

      And if someone would soar above the rest,

      With warmer fancy, and ambition pressed,

      So strong the opposing faction still appears,

      The hopes to thrive can ne’er outweigh the fears.

      Clearly her mind has by no means ‘consumed all impediments and become incandescent.’ On the contrary, it is harassed and distracted with hates and grievances. The human race is split up for her into two parties. Men are the ‘opposing faction’; men are hated and feared, because they have the power to bar her way to what she wants to do–which is to write.

      Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,

      Such a presumptuous creature is esteemed,

      The fault can by no virtue be redeemed.

      They tell us we mistake our sex and way;

      Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play,

      Are the accomplishments we should desire;

      To write, or read, or think, or to enquire,

      Would cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time,

      And interrupt the conquests of our prime.

      Whilst the dull manage of a servile house

      Is held by some our utmost art and use.

      Indeed she has to encourage herself to write by supposing that what she writes will never be published; to soothe herself with the sad chant:

      To some few friends, and to thy sorrows sing,

      For groves of laurel thou wert never meant;

      Be dark enough thy shades, and be thou there content.

      Yet it is clear that could she have freed her mind from hate and fear and not heaped it with bitterness and resentment, the fire was hot within her. Now and again words issue of pure poetry:

      Nor will in fading silks compose,

      Faintly the inimitable rose.

      –they are rightly praised by Mr Murry, and Pope, it is thought, remembered and appropriated those others:

      Now the jonquille o’ercomes the feeble brain;

      We faint beneath the aromatic pain.

      It was a thousand pities that the woman who could write like that, whose mind was tuned to nature and reflection, should have been forced to anger and bitterness. But how could she have helped herself? I asked, imagining the sneers and the laughter, the adulation of the toadies, the scepticism of the professional poet. She must have shut herself up in a room in the country to write, and been torn asunder by bitterness and scruples perhaps, though her husband was of the kindest, and their married life perfection. She ‘must have’, I say, because when one comes to seek out the facts about Lady Winchilsea, one finds, as usual, that almost nothing is known about her. She suffered terribly from melancholy, which we can explain at least to some extent when we find her telling us how in the grip of it she would imagine:

      My lines decried, and my employment thought

      An useless folly or presumptuous fault:

      The employment, which was thus censured, was, as far as one can see, the harmless one of rambling about the fields and dreaming:

      My hand delights to trace unusual things,

      And deviates from the known and common way,

      Nor will in fading silks compose,

      Faintly the inimitable rose.

      Naturally, if that was her habit and that was her delight, she could only expect to be laughed at; and, accordingly, Pope or Gay is said to have satirized her ‘as a bluestocking with an itch for scribbling.’ Also it is thought that she offended Gay by laughing at him. She said that his Trivia showed that ‘he was more proper to walk before a chair than to ride in one.’ But this is all ‘dubious gossip’ and, says Mr Murry, ‘uninteresting’. But there I do not agree with him, for I should have liked to have had more even of dubious gossip so that I might have found out or made up some image of this melancholy lady, who loved wandering in the fields and thinking about unusual things and scorned, so rashly, so unwisely, ‘the dull manage of a servile house.’ But she became diffuse, Mr Murry says. Her gift is all grown about with weeds and bound with briars. It had no chance of showing itself for the fine distinguished gift it was. And so, putting, her back on the shelf, I turned to the other great lady, the Duchess whom Lamb loved, hare-brained, fantastical Margaret of Newcastle, her elder, but her contemporary. They were very different, but alike in this that both were noble and both childless, and both were married to the best of husbands. In both burnt the same passion for poetry and both are disfigured and deformed by the same causes. Open the Duchess and one finds the same outburst of rage. ‘Women live like Bats or Owls, labour like Beasts, and die like Worms …’ Margaret too might have been a poet; in our day all that activity would have turned a wheel of some sort. As it was, what could bind, tame or civilize for human use that wild, generous, untutored intelligence? It poured itself out, higgledy-piggledy, in torrents of rhyme and prose, poetry and philosophy which stand congealed in quartos and folios that nobody ever reads. She should have had a microscope put in her hand. She should have been taught to look at the stars and reason scientifically. Her wits were turned with solitude and freedom. No one checked her. No one taught her. The professors fawned on her. At Court they jeered at her. Sir Egerton Brydges complained of her coarseness–‘as flowing from a female of high rank brought up in the Courts.’ She shut herself up at Welbeck alone.

      What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind! as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death. What a waste that the woman who wrote ‘the best bred women are those whose minds are civilest’ should have frittered her time away scribbling nonsense and plunging ever deeper into obscurity and folly till the people crowded round her coach when she issued out. Evidently the crazy Duchess became a bogey to frighten clever girls with. Here, I remembered, putting away the Duchess and opening Dorothy Osborne’s letters, is Dorothy writing to Temple about the Duchess’s new book. ‘Sure the poore woman is a little distracted, shee could never bee soe rediculous else as to venture at writeing book’s and in verse too, if I should not sleep this fortnight I should not come to that.’

      And so, since no woman of sense and modesty could write books, Dorothy, who was sensitive and melancholy, the very opposite of the Duchess in temper, wrote nothing. Letters did not count. A woman might write letters while she was sitting by her father’s sickbed. She could write them by the fire whilst the men talked without disturbing them. The strange thing is, I thought, turning over the pages of Dorothy’s letters, what a gift that untaught and solitary girl had for the framing of a sentence, for the fashioning of a scene. Listen to her СКАЧАТЬ