“Your father is a great man.” But in no other way could we have learnt, in the short time we had, so much of her true nature, obscured by none of those graceful figments which interpose themselves generally in the gulf which lies between a middle-aged woman and her children. It might have been better, as it certainly would have tired her less, had she allowed that some of those duties could be discharged for her. But she was impetuous, and also a little imperious; so conscious of her own burning will that she could scarcely believe that there was not something quicker and more effective in her action than in another’s. Thus when your grandfather was ill she would never suffer a nurse to be with him, nor could she believe that a governess would teach us as well as she did. And apart from economy, which always weighed with her, she had come to attach a desperate importance to the saving of time, as though she saw heap themselves all round her, duties and desires, and time to embrace them slipped from her and left her with grasping fingers. She had constantly in mind that comprehensive view of the final proportions of things which I have noticed; for her words were never trivial; but as her strength lessened her respites were fewer; she sank, like an exhausted swimmer, deeper and deeper in the water, and could only at moments descry some restful shore on the horizon to be gained in old age when all this toil was over. But when we exclaim at the extravagant waste of such a life we are inclined no doubt to lose that view of the surrounding parts, the husband and child and home which if you see them as a whole surrounding her, completing her, robs the single life of its arrow-like speed, and its tragic departure. What is noticeable about her, as I am come to think, is not the waste and the futile gallantry, but the niceness, born of sure judgement, with which her effort matched her aim. There was scarcely any superfluity; and it is for this reason that, past as those years are, her mark on them is ineffaceable, as though branded by the naked steel, the sharp, the pure. Living voices in many parts of the world still speak of her as of someone who is actually a fact in life. Whether she came merry, wrathful or in impulsive sympathy, it does not matter; they speak of her as of a thing that happened, recalling, as though all round her grew significant, how she stood and turned and how the bird sang loudly, or a great cloud passed across the sky. Where has she gone? What she said has never ceased. She died when she was forty-eight, and your mother was a child of fifteen.fn14 If what I have said of her has any meaning you will believe that her death was the greatest disaster that could happen; it was as though on some brilliant day of spring the racing clouds of a sudden stood still, grew dark, and massed themselves; the wind flagged, and all creatures on the earth moaned or wandered seeking aimlessly. But what figures or variety of figures will do justice to the shapes which since then she has taken in countless lives? The dead, so people say, are forgotten, or they should rather say, that life has for the most part little significance to any of us. But now and again on more occasions than I can number, in bed at night, or in the street, or as I come into the room, there she is; beautiful, emphatic, with her familiar phrase and her laugh; closer than any of the living are, lighting our random lives as with a burning torch, infinitely noble and delightful to her children.
fn1 ‘Your mother’ is Julian Bell’s mother, Vanessa. ‘The three little creatures’ whom she cares for are her younger brothers and sister – Thoby, Virginia and Adrian Stephen.
fn2 ‘The others’ are George, Stella and Gerald Duckworth.
fn3 Julian’s grandparents were Julia and Leslie Stephen.
fn4 St Ives, Cornwall, where the Stephen family spent summer holidays from 1882 to 1894.
fn5 John (Jack) Waller Hills. See here.
fn6 John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing (London, 1857).
fn7 Madge Symonds, a daughter of J. A. Symonds, married Virginia’s cousin, William Wyamar Vaughan. Madge was the object of Virginia’s first passion, the intensity of which is echoed in Mrs Dalloway’s memories of Sally Seton. (See QB, I, pp. 60–1, and Lee, Virginia Woolf, 1996, pp. 162–3)
fn8 The ‘four others’ were Julia’s three children by her first husband, Herbert Duckworth, and Laura, the daughter of Leslie Stephen and his first wife, Minny.
fn9 The ts (here) is torn at mid-page. After ‘amusement’, instead of a full stop, there is a semi-colon and four deleted words. There is no doubt that the next page is meant to follow directly.
fn10 The ‘Mausoleum Book’, begun by Leslie Stephen in 1895 after the death of Julia. The last entry, dictated to Virginia, was made in 1903. It was published as Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book, ed. Alan Bell, Clarendon Press, 1977.
fn11 Mrs Carlyle reminds me oddly of her, with her ‘coterie’ speech (VW).
fn12 The English Utilitarians, published in 1900; shorter works were to follow.
fn13 Aunt Mary Fisher. See here.
fn14 Julia died at the age of forty-nine on 5 May 1895. Vanessa became sixteen on 30 May.
Chapter Two
HER DEATH, ON the 5th of May, 1895, began a period of Oriental gloom, for surely there was something in the darkened rooms, the groans, the passionate lamentations that passed the normal limits of sorrow, and hung about the genuine tragedy with folds of Eastern drapery.
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