Virginia Woolf as a Literary Critic

' VIRGINIA -WOOLF AS A LITERARY CRITIC .DESMOND PACEY ' ' She was a born crztzc, and a critic whose judgments were inbonJ, unhesitating . She is always referring her impressions to a standard-hence the inCisiveness, the deptlz and the comedy that make those spontaneous statements so illuminating. There is nothing naive about_her. She is by no means a simple spectator. Maxims fall from her pen. She sums up; she judges. But it is done effortlessly. She has inherited the standard and accepts' it without effort : She is heir to a tradition, which stands guardian and gives propor~ion.1 T HUS Virginia Woolf writes of Madame de Sevigne, and in so doing utters a judgment'which is at least as true of herself as of her subject.· For Mrs. Woolf was herself a born critic,.an impressionist who nevertheless had clear and.consistent standards of judgment, a literary experimenter to whom tradition was a real and living force. , Vrom her father, Leslie Stephen, she inherited and acquired an eager interest in literature, and especially in that of the eighteenth -century. From first to last she moved among people to whom the high importance of literature and the arts was self-evident, and to whom criticism was a staple-of conversation and one of the assumed necessities of daily life. It was almost inevitable, then, that she should seek to refine her impressions, form judgments, and, when she had subjected them to rigorous review and revision, publish them. The product was the two series, of The Common·Reader (1925 and 1932), the critical essays in The Death of the Aloth (1942) and The Moment and Other Essays (1947), and the pamphlets l'vfr. Bennett and M1·s. Brown (1924) and Letter to a Young Poet (1932). , Her critical approach is modest and unassuming. Her essays read like conversation ·which has been purged of redundancy, triviality, and flatulence , but which has retained all its informality, warmth, and verve. Though sometimes maxims fall from her pen, though she does not hesitate to sum up and judge, she does so casually and easily. She never essays the role of pontiff, nor speaks with academic condescension. She is professedly "the commpn reader,'' apologizing semi-seriously for her ignorance: · But before·I begin, I must own up to those defects, both real and acquired, which, as you will find, distort and invalidate all that I have to say about poetry. The lack of a sound university training has always made it impossible for me·to distinguish between an iambic and a dactyl, and if this were not enough to condemn one for ever, the practice of prose has-bred in me, as in most prose writers, a foolish jealousy,· a righteous indignationanyhow , an emotion which the critic should be without.2 She is impatient of rules-and of schools. "It would appear, then,'' she_ , writes in an essay on Christina Rossetti, <