Pickford's van swung down the street. The omnibuses were locked together at Mudie's corner. Engines throbbed, and carters jamming the brakes down, pulled their horses up sharp. A harsh and unhappy voice cried something unintelligible. And then suddenly all the leaves seemed to raise themselves up. 'Jacob, Jacob,' cried Bonamy standing by the window. The leaves sank down again."
By the end of the book we know Jacob as one knows one's brother, but we never identify ourselves with him.
To do this Mrs Woolf employs a particular method which she has employed before, but never so completely to the exclusion of other methods. Just as in Conrad's The Heart of Darkness we hear everything as a story from the lips of Marlow, so here we learn everything as a fragment of memory passing through Virginia Woolf's mind. One thing calls up another, and we skip on to something very different, yet queerly linked with what went before. The story is tangled and inconsequent as are our digressions into the past. To use Mr Strachey's metaphor she drops a little bucket now here, now there, and fishes up—What is it? Ah, the sheep's jaw so treasured at eight years old, the door slamming all night in the passage.
Things so recalled have a peculiar beauty, an added value, yes, and an odd reality, which the things we are passing have not got as we flash by in the 16-40 automobile of life. Every moment in life we are carried beyond the possibility of turning our heads to take a second look, and we are haunted by whatever it is—an old woman stooping to gather a dry stick, a child by the red currant bushes, the sun sweeping down between the clouds so that the valley is barred and chequered with light, like waking, years ago in the night nursery with the sun pouring in through the Venetian blinds.
That is the impression Mrs Woolf gives, that the illusion got by art. Our own memories are pale trodden-away things like the pattern of the linoleum in the parlour, her words fresh like childhood, or first love, and real—as poetry i1s. And we actually have to remind ourselves that Mrs Woolf is not drawing upon her memories, but her imagination, and that somehow she gilds everything she writes with the beauty of something remembered.
If she were not so individual she would almost certainly be a
