Having enjoyed, through the five novels, all the rich variety of 
impressions which illustrate the main themes, the humour that is 
never studied or artificial, the brilliant subsidiary sketches of human 
character (such as Mrs. Hilbery in Night and Day, Miss Kilman 
and Peter Walsh in Mrs. Dalloway), the swift and suggestive mixture 
of detail and reflection, the sharp physical imagery of the passages 
where to the observing mind there comes what the Germans would 
call a Steigerung, the sudden loomings up of ordinary people or things, 
like Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay playing ball with their children, as 
symbols of tremendous import and stature, the sensitiveness of
feminine observation abnormally acute, the skillfully used anger and 
pathos, one sees all the better how the passage quoted at the beginning 
of this article sums up the whole. It is not astonishing, therefore, 
that the society observed in Mrs. Woolf’s novels is more or less 
the same throughout—that of the cultivated intellectual, or governing, 
class, with its wide connections up and down, its chance contacts, 
its conversational trend towards Plato, Shakespeare, poetry or 
politics, its standards of success and failure and its typical joys and 
disasters—because the visions, in the last resort, are all the author’s 
and relate, one is certain, to the visions that in the course of years 
have impressed themselves on her mortal eyes and brain. It is not 
that she puts herself into all the characters—though she puts herself 
into many, and deals freely with her own intimacies in certain others
—but that, even when she is ostensibly portraying another mind, 
say that of Mr. Ramsay ruminating on his failure, of Peter Walsh 
stalking a pretty girl, of greedy spiteful Miss Kilman, or of Septimus 
Smith engulfed in his hallucinations, it is her mind observing the 
other mind of which we are conscious.

Mrs. Woolf’s art, in other words, is intensely personal in its 
stamp, especially now that she has abandoned the solidly constructive 
method of narration for her uniquely reflective impressionism. 
This is simply a statement, not a critical judgment, but it leads to 
the question whether she will ever succeed in embodying her personal 
vision so as, even faintly, to correspond to her intentions, which 
are those of a serious artist whose work, vivid, exciting, sympathetic, 
rightly excites a profound admiration.

‘Making of the moment something permanent’—this is the 
work of the poet, the painter, the musician, not of the dramatist 
nor, as I believe with Mr. Wyndham Lewis, essentially of the