Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/107



IRGINIA WOOLF seems to me the most interesting of the younger writers now living as well as the best of them, but her work is so individual that another writer can learn little from it, and I very much doubt if she will have a direct influence on her contemporaries. In that respect she may be compared with Matisse among the painters. In each case the art is perfect, but the gifts are personal and defy imitation. Mrs Woolf's writing is characterized by remarkable beauty of phrasing, and the merit of her work lies in the fact that the beauty of each line runs into the next one and forms part of the whole work.

"Long past sunset an old blind woman sat on a campstool with her back to the stone wall of the Union of London and Smith's Bank, clasping a brown mongrel tight in her arms and singing out loud, not for coppers, no, from the depths of her gay wild heart—her sinful tanned heart, for the child who fetches her is the fruit of sin, and should have been in bed, curtained, asleep, instead of hearing in the lamplight her mother's wild song, where she sits against the Bank, singing not for coppers, with the dog against her breast."

In Jacob's Room the task that Virginia Woolf has set herself is "to create Jacob's environment, to approach him on this side and on that, so that the surroundings evoke Jacob about whom she does not tell us very much directly.

"Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain, the flowers in the jars shift. One fibre in the wicker armchair creaks though no one sits there. Bonamy crossed to the window.