But sometimes the internet is really cool.
I recently re-read, after about fifty years, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The first of the book’s three parts ends with a dinner party set piece in which Woolf weaves layers of narrative, dialogue and consciousness into an exquisite, engaging tapestry. Among the things that the characters refer to are a few contemporary issues – the adverse effect on local fisherman of a new government policy (the novel is set in the summer retreat on the Isle of Skye of an academic family, the Ramseys), the poor quality of English dairy products resulting from the system of milk distribution, a disdain for Scott’s novels which had become fashionable. It is not necessary to know the particulars of these, since it is the characters’ reactions to those particulars, not the particulars themselves, which engage the reader. However, knowing something about them enriches a reader’s understanding and pleasure.
Back in 1965, when I first read the book, I had a vague idea of what England was like just before World War One, which is when Part I takes place. I didn’t research the subjects discussed at the dinner party. If I had wanted to, I would have had to spend hours, even days, at a library. Now, of course, all I have to do is google.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I’m not sure. It’s a good thing, not only because it swiftly, easily enriches the reader’s experience of To the Lighthouse, but also because it enlarges his fund of general knowledge. It’s a bad thing because the ease with which anything can be researched tends to democratize knowledge. Knowledge and information have become synonymous. Thanks to the boundless ease of internet research, knowing that the North Atlantic Fisheries Arbitration of 1910 supported the right of a country to regulate fishing in its territorial waters (thus allowing the United States to limit Skye fishermen’s access to traditional fishing grounds), is now no more weighty, has no more significance, than knowing what movie won Best Picture in 1943 or which Medoc has the least tannin.
In her wonderful dinner party scene, Woolf present the reader with a private reality along with the public facts which her fictional characters ponder and discuss. She steps around to the other side of the mirror (the mirror being the one that is strolling down the highway in Stendhal’s metaphor for the novel.)
Towards the end of the dinner, Mr. Ramsey, who has a habit of suddenly spouting lines of verse, declaims,
Come out and climb the garden-path,
Luriana Lurilee,
The China rose is all abloom
And buzzing with the yellow bee
Mrs. Ramsey responds with,
And all the lives to be,
Are full of trees and changing leaves,
then,
I wonder if it seems to you
Luriana, Lurilee
Another character, a somewhat pompous poet, then stands and recites,
To see the kings go riding by
Over lawn and daisy lea,
With their palm leaves and cedar sheaves,
Luriana, Lurilee,
After the dinner party, while silently knitting, Mrs. Ramsey recalls again some of the poem’s verses.

In 1965, if I had wanted to find out who was the author of those lines in To the Lighthouse, it would have been a painstaking task. I would have had to go to a library and search its card catalogue for anthologies of Victorian poetry (Dewey Decimal section 821.8). From those, I’d have chosen the ones I thought most likely to contain the poem and examined them one by one. If any had an index of first lines, those would have been quickly and easily disposed of. If not, I would have had to browse tables of contents, looking for likely candidates and, when that came to naught, thumb through each book page by page. I might or might not have found it, depending on how persistent and patient I was and, most importantly, on whether or not the library I was in contained a slim collection, from 1946, of poems and fragments of poems – most of them from the 18th century or earlier – Another World than This, edited by Vida Sackville West and Harold Nicholson. This book includes the full poem’s first publication – and still its only publication in print – and its first attribution.
Come out and climb the garden-path,
Luriana Lurilee,
The China rose is all abloom
And buzzing with the yellow bee
We’ll swing you on the cedar-bough,
Luriana Lurilee.
I wonder if it seems to you
Luriana Lurilee
That all the lives we ever lived
And all the lives to be,
Are full of trees and waving leaves,
Luriana Lurilee.
How long it seems since you and I,
Luriana Lurilee.
Roamed in the forest where our kind
Had just begun to be,
And laughed & chattered in the flowers,
Luriana Lurilee.
How long since you and I went out,
Luriana Lurilee
To see the kings go riding by
Over lawn and daisylea,
With their palm-sheaves and cedar-leaves
Luriana Lurilee.
Swing, swing on the cedar bough!
Luriana Lurilee
Till you sleep in a bramble-heap
Or under the gloomy churchyard-tree,
And then fly back to swing on a bough,
Luriana Lurilee.
Its author was Charles Isaac Elton (1839-1900), a lawyer, antiquary and Member of Parliament, who wrote one best-selling book, The Great Book Collectors. His other publications dealt with law and the history of law. A notebook containing Elton’s poetry was destroyed at the death of his wife, at her request, by her cousin, Philippa Strachey, Lytton’s sister. Considering the strange, slightly awkward beauty of Elton’s only surviving poem, I wonder whether it was a shame or a blessing that his other poems were burned; that is: were the lost poems similar pre-Raphaelite gems or, among other amateurish jumbles of images and moods, was Luriana Lurilee a one-off success, and the masterly second stanza just a fluke?
The poem and the identity of its author would have been familiar to friends of the Woolfs, who quoted from it often. While the attractions of the poem are obvious, and its unpublished obscurity made it a sort of Woolf family treasure, the Woolfs, who must have been aware of the destruction of the rest of Elton’s poetry, also may have kept the poem alive as a sort of protest against Philippa Strachey’s conflagration and as a tribute to Elton as a poet.
Andre’s Blog is an adjunct to Patremoir Press, in Vancouver, B. C., which offers one book, Fathers: A Literary Anthology, edited by Gérard. Here is Patremoir’s blurb for the book:
Fathers: A Literary Anthology is a literary treasure trove. Wise and wonderfully varied essays and poems by five Nobel laureates and by writers such as Margaret Atwood, Alan Bennet, Angela Carter, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka also make Fathers a powerful self-help manual for all children trying to understand and improve their relationships with their fathers. As well, the inspired musings in this collection will help all fathers—fathers young and fathers old—better appreciate the complexities of their role and the rich rewards it offers.
Considering the intense intelligence that Gérard brings to his blog, I thought it sad that he felt that his book must be marketed for its utility, not its quality.
This André Gérard has been a private tutor in Vancouver for twenty-five years. Here he explains the genesis of his Father anthology:
The book came out of my experience as a tutor. Many of my students were so-called “astronaut” kids, Asian students whose father was on the other side of the planet. The parents were making huge personal sacrifices for the sake of their children, yet often the child struggled emotionally. Some children felt confused, others hurt, others angry, yet others depressed. Initially, I started to collect these essays to give the students a chance to gain perspective and also, if they chose, to give them a chance to talk about their fathers.
The student response was so strong that I began to think about compiling an anthology.
So – I was wrong about Gérard’s slanting his sales blurb to appeal to crass utilitarianism. A benevolent utilitarianism was the impulse behind the book.
I ended my internet adventure there – an arbitrary cut-off because all sorts of new avenues of exploration opened themselves up, as is always the case with internet research.
Speaking of utilitarianism, my final thought: In a city full of Asian immigrants (Vancouver, always attractive to immigrants from China, had a huge influx from Hong Kong after the British agreement to return the colony to China), private tutoring can be a viable profession, instead of just something one does while waiting for a better job in academia.