THE ESSAYS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF Volume Two: 1912-1918. Edited by Andrew McNeillie. 381 pp. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $22.95.
''One short choppy wave after another'' was the phrase Virginia Woolf used to characterize the regularity and brevity of her reviews in The Times Literary Supplement; but even in the turbid waters of journalism, there are occasions when the wind is at her back, her thought unfurls itself, and she sails calmly toward the open sea. Hers are not the reviews of a critic, in other words, but of a writer: in the six years covered by this second volume of her collected reviews and essays, Woolf completed her first novel, ''The Voyage Out,'' and was working on ''Night and Day.'' She had just entered her 30's but was not yet well known and, as other writers have discovered, one of the nervous ailments that precede success is the need to review as much and as often as possible. The years of her worst mental trouble during this period were not productive (there were long episodes of illness in 1913 and in 1915) but in 1917, for example, she wrote some 35 separate pieces.
The editor of The Times Literary Supplement at first seems to have given her books about women, and especially about women novelists - not unnaturally in the circumstances but, as Virginia Woolf soon demonstrated, a good writer can discuss practically anything with perfect self-assurance. The first review in ''The Essays of Virginia Woolf'' concerns the biography of a philanthropist, while the last discusses ''The Method of Henry James''; in between there are reviews of guidebooks, anthologies, memoirs and even children's books.
The earlier reviews are solid, not to say professional: it is clear that Woolf did her homework and, for example, she took care to know about all previous biographies of Jane Austen (then mercifully a finite number) before embarking on the review of the newest one. But even in the most workmanlike of pieces one senses the novelist looking deeply into the pages of these books in order to catch some glimpse of herself in them, some reflection of her own art in the art of those she praises. Even the subjects that one would think might be uncongenial to her - Thoreau and the English travel writer Richard Hakluyt, for example - give her the opportunity of airing her own preoccupations in public or, as she put it, of slipping in ''some ancient crank of mine.''
In the later reviews the oddity of the ''cranks'' is gone and, in her commentaries on writers as disparate as Swinburne and Conrad, she is systematically expounding the artistic principles that inspire her own work. Of course there is no formal announcement of her interests - the letters and journals go much further toward providing that - but even in these necessarily brief contributions her predilections become clear. Though she rarely mocks or satirizes the work of the generation immediately preceding her own (one of the easiest things in the world to do), she is implicitly hostile to the 19th century, at least in its more solid mid-Victorian aspects. She inclines to the belief, as she puts it in one of her reviews, that ''there is a form to be found in literature for the life of the present day,'' and this is a form that she discovers in modern prose rather than in poetry or drama. In these reviews also - specifically in those of the great Russian novelists, who emerge here as her single most potent source of inspiration - she charts her preoccupation with the knots and loops in mental imagery and a style that, partly as a result of her own work, has since become better known as ''stream of consciousness.'' In that sense the novelist and the reviewer cannot be separated.
Neither can these reviews be separated from the cultural life of their time and, although it would be absurd to suggest that English writing has collapsed in the last 75 years, it is perhaps true that Virginia Woolf's graceful but elaborate prose would not now be welcome on the desks of many literary editors. Certainly it would be difficult for any contemporary reviewer to deploy her range of allusions - a fact painfully emphasized by the number of footnotes that Andrew McNeillie, the editor of this volume as well as the previous one, feels obliged to append to each review. Woolf's little shafts of lightning now come trailing clouds of detail.
Continue reading the main storyBut no doubt one ought to take one's cue from Virginia Woolf: she was a kind reviewer, at least in the sense that she looked for the best in everything rather than laboring over the worst. This was partly because she was herself notoriously fearful about reviews of her own work, and so she perhaps practiced a form of sympathetic magic - she praised others in the hope, rather than the expectation, that she in turn would be praised. In fact, she was often so careful not to give offense that she kept her real opinions to herself - she informs us in a letter that she thought Edward Marsh's memoir of Rupert Brooke ''one of the most repulsive biographies I've ever read,'' but she allowed only the mildest of reproofs to percolate through into print.
As a result, she lacked the acerbity of T. S. Eliot and the grandiloquence of Pound, both of whom took to reviewing with metaphorically slavering jaws. And, unlike these two famous contemporaries, she made no attempt to assemble a literary theory out of disparate critical remarks. Her judgments tend to be couched in the form of striking individual perceptions, and yet by these means she often gets to the heart of the matter - she explains how ''Jane Eyre'' is so powerful that ''if we are disturbed while we are reading, the disturbance seems to take place in the novel and not in the room.''
In addition, Virginia Woolf possessed a sense of humor, however desperately won, and this volume is filled with what can only be described as a comic spirit - an individuality all the more remarkable when one remembers that these reviews were printed anonymously and were to a certain extent forced to comply with what was then the standard authoritative mode of The Times Literary Supplement. And so this book emphasizes the lesson Virginia Woolf herself suggests in a review - ''To be able to write such criticism is so rare a gift that one is inclined to doubt whether it is ever done save by the poets themselves.'' Or by novelists. There are some beautiful essays here (notably those on James and Dostoyevsky) and many memorable ones; but each of them has that steady glow of purposefulness and attention that issues from a writer who not only loves literature but also knows herself to be, on occasions, capable of writing it.
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