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Craftmanship

by virginia woolf

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renitutu18
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10 views

Craftmanship

by virginia woolf

Uploaded by

renitutu18
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Transcript of Woolf’s broadcast, ‘On Craftsmanship’

Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations —


naturally. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in
the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief
difficulties in writing them today — that they are so stored with meanings,
with memories, that they have contracted so many famous marriages. The
splendid word ‘incarnadine’, for example — who can use it without
remembering also ‘multitudinous seas’? In the old days, of course, when
English was a new language, writers could invent new words and use them.
Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words — they spring to the lips
whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation — but we cannot use
them because the language is old. You cannot use a brand new word in an old
language because of the very obvious yet mysterious fact that a word is not a
single and separate entity, but part of other words. It is not a word indeed unt il
it is part of a sentence. Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a
great writer knows that the word ‘incarnadine’ belongs to ‘multitudinous
seas’. To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of the
sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to invent a new
language; and that, though no doubt we shall come to it, is not at the moment
our business. Our business is to see what we can do with the English language
as it is. How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive,
so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question.
And the person who could answer that question would deserve whatever
crown of glory the world has to offer. Think what it would mean if you could
teach, if you could learn, the art of writing. Why, every book, every
newspaper would tell the truth, would create beauty. But there is, it would
appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance to the teaching of words.
For though at this moment at least a hundred professors are lecturing upon the
literature of the past, at least a thousand critics are reviewing the literature of
the present, and hundreds upon hundreds of young men and women are
passing examinations in English literature with the utmost credit, still — do
we write better, do we read better than we read and wrote four hundred years
ago when we were unlectured, uncriticised, untaught? Is our Georgian
literature a patch on the Elizabethan? Where then are we to lay the blame? Not
on our professors; not on our reviewers; not on our writers; but on words. It is
words that are to blame. They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most
unteachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and
place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in
dictionaries; they live in the mind. If you want proof of this, consider how
often in moments of emotion when we most need words we find none. Yet
there is the dictionary; there at our disposal are some half-a-million words all
in alphabetical order. But can we use them? No, because words do not live in
dictionaries, they live in the mind. Look again at the dictionary. There beyond
a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra; poems more
lovely than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside which Pride and
Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only
a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But
we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind.
And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human
beings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and mating
together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention
than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French
words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy.
Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better
it will be for that lady’s reputation. For she has gone a-roving, a-roving fair
maid.

Thus to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than
useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling are all the constraint we
can put on them. All we can say about them, as we peer at them over the edge
of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which they live —
the mind — all we can say about them is that they seem to like people to think
and to feel before they use them, but to think and to feel not about them, but
about something different. They are highly sensitive, easily made self-
conscious. They do not like to have their purity or their impurity discussed. If
you start a Society for Pure English, they will show their resentment by
starting another for impure English — hence the unnatural violence of much
modern speech; it is a protest against the puritans. They are highly democratic,
too; they believe that one word is as good as another; uneducated words are as
good as educated words, uncultivated words as cultivated words, there are no
ranks or titles in their society. Nor do they like being lifted out on the point of
a pen and examined separately. They hang together, in sentences, in
paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. They hate being useful; they
hate making money; they hate being lectured about in public. In short, they
hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one
attitude, for it is their nature to change.

Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity — their need of change. It is


because the truth they try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being
themselves many-sided, flashing this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing
to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one
generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this
complexity that they survive. Perhaps then one reason why we have no great
poet, novelist or critic writing to-day is that we refuse words their liberty. We
pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which
makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.
And when words are pinned down they fold their wings and die. Finally, and
most emphatically, words, like ourselves, in order to live at their ease, need
privacy. Undoubtedly they like us to think, and they like us to feel, before we
use them; but they also like us to pause; to become unconscious. Our
unconsciousness is their privacy; our darkness is their light. . . . That pause
was made, that veil of darkness was dropped, to tempt words to come together
in one of those swift marriages which are perfect images and create
everlasting beauty. But no — nothing of that sort is going to happen to-night.
The little wretches are out of temper; disobliging; disobedient; dumb. What is
it that they are muttering? ‘Time’s up! Silence!’'

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