Common Reader: Second Series

THE COMMON READER

SECOND SERIES

by

VIRGINIA WOOLF

1935

        ". . . I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be generally decided all claim to poetical honours."

--DR. JOHNSON, Life of Gray

    Most of the following papers have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Life and Letters, The Nation, Vogue, The New York Herald, The Yale Review, and Figaro. For permission to reprint two of them I have to thank the Oxford University Press and Mr. Jonathan Cape. Some are now published for the first time.

CONTENTS

THE STRANGE ELIZABETHANS

DONNE AFTER THREE CENTURIES

"THE COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE'S ARCADIA"

"ROBINSON CRUSOE"

DOROTHY OSBORNE'S "LETTERS"

SWIFT'S "JOURNAL TO STELLA"

THE "SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY"

LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS TO HIS SON

TWO PARSONS--

   I. JAMES WOODFORDE

   II. JOHN SKINNER

DR. BURNEY'S EVENING PARTY

JACK MYTTON

DE QUINCEY'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

FOUR FIGURES--

   I. COWPER AND LADY AUSTEN

   II. BEAU BRUMMELL

   III. MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

   IV. DOROTHY WORDSWORTH

WILLIAM HAZLITT

GERALDINE AND JANE

"AURORA LEIGH"

THE NIECE OF AN EARL

GEORGE GISSING

THE NOVELS OF GEORGE MEREDITH

"I AM CHRISTINA ROSSETTI"

THE NOVELS OF THOMAS HARDY

HOW SHOULD ONE READ A BOOK?

THE STRANGE ELIZABETHANS

There are few greater delights than to go back three or four hundred years and become in fancy at least an Elizabethan. That such fancies are only fancies, that this "becoming an Elizabethan", this reading sixteenth-century writing as currently and certainly as we read our own is an illusion, is no doubt true. Very likely the Elizabethans would find our pronunciation of their language unintelligible; our fancy picture of what it pleases us to call Elizabethan life would rouse their ribald merriment. Still, the instinct that drives us to them is so strong and the freshness and vigour that blow through their pages are so sweet that we willingly run the risk of being laughed at, of being ridiculous.

And if we ask why we go further astray in this particular region of English literature than in any other, the answer is no doubt that Elizabethan prose, for all its beauty and bounty, was a very imperfect medium. It was almost incapable of fulfilling one of the offices of prose which is to make people talk, simply and naturally, about ordinary things. In an age of utilitarian prose like our own, we know exactly how people spend the hours between breakfast and bed, how they behave when they are neither one thing nor the other, neither angry nor loving, neither happy nor miserable. Poetry ignores these slighter shades; the social student can pick up hardly any facts about daily life from Shakespeare's plays; and if prose refuses to enlighten us, then one avenue of approach to the men and women of another age is blocked. Elizabethan prose, still scarcely separated off from the body of its poetry, could speak magnificently, of course, about the great themes--how life is short, and death certain; how spring is lovely, and winter horrid--perhaps, indeed, the lavish and towering periods that it raises above these simple platitudes are due to the fact that it has not cheapened itself upon trifles. But the price it pays for this soaring splendour is to be found in its awkwardness when it comes to earth--when Lady Sidney, for example, finding herself cold at nights, has to solicit the Lord Chamberlain for a better bedroom at Court. Then any housemaid of her own age could put her case more simply and with greater force. Thus, if we go to the Elizabethan prose-writers to solidify the splendid world of Elizabethan poetry as we should go now to our biographers, novelists, and journalists to solidify the world of Pope, of Tennyson, of Conrad, we are perpetually baffled and driven from our quest. What, we ask, was the life of an ordinary man or woman in the time of Shakespeare? Even the familiar letters of the time give us little help. Sir Henry Wotton is pompous and ornate and keeps us stiffly at arm's length. Their histories resound with drums and trumpets. Their broadsheets reverberate with meditations upon death and reflections upon the immortality of the soul. Our best chance of finding them off their guard and so becoming at ease with them is to seek one of those unambitious men who haunt the outskirts of famous gatherings, listening, observing, sometimes taking a note in a book.