To look at, he might have been a clerk, but of the better sort; for he wore brown boots; his hands were educated; so, too, his profile - his angular, big-nosed, intelligent, sensitive profile; but not his lips altogether, for they were loose; and his eyes (as eyes tend to be), eyes merely; hazel, large; so that he was, on the whole, a border case, neither one thing nor the other; might end with a house at Purley and a motor car, or continue renting apartments in back streets all his life; one of those half-educated, self-educated men whose education is all learnt from books borrowed at public libraries, read in the evening after the day’s work, on the advice of well-known authors consulted by letter…

Here he opened Shakespeare once more. That boy’s business of the intoxication of language - Anthony and Cleopatra - had shrivelled utterly. How Shakespeare loathed humanity - the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly! This was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of words. The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. Dante the same. Aeschylus (translated) the same.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

That is very much a neurotic’s view of the matter: whether Woolf’s, or Smith’s, or Woolf-ventriloquising-Smith’s is not decidable. Septimus Smith, with the “fantastic Christian name” with which his parents have “thought to distinguish” him, has been in the War and is now subject to “sudden thunder-claps of fear”, the panic of feeling that “he could not feel”. His former infatuation with Anthony and Cleopatra, closely bonded to an infatuation with a “Miss Isabel Pole, lecturing in the Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare” who once asked him if he was not “like Keats”, is a “boy’s business of…intoxication”. In passing from the sensuous surface of the letter, “the beauty of words”, to the “message” signified therein, does he project or discover his own “loathing, hatred, despair” in Dante and Aeschylus?

I would like to highlight this as a moment in the construction of a type - racialised, drawing on the tropes of physiognomy, and also strongly feminised, hystericised. Leonard Bast, in Forster’s Howards End, is the pre-war prototype of Septimus Smith. Richard Hoggart’s “sensitive” scholarship boys, who feel the shocks of social changes sooner than most, are among the inheritors of his type; although Woolf and Forster were concerned with the self-improvers of a rising petit-bourgeoisie rather than the working class boy “elevated” by grammar school selection.

The common theme is one of seduction: Smith by Miss Pole, Bast by Miss Schlegel. The poet Geoffrey Hill, speaking about his own grammar school education, described the system as one in which a boy who shows a “lively aptitude” for a subject is schooled for the future “professional exploitation” of that aptitude: no harm if it’s only an aptitude, but “gifts tend to be seduced the same way”. Only an innocent can be seduced, or someone playing at innocence in order to play at being seduced. The intoxication of language masks the “sordidity” of its meaning, the cold moral ruin to which one awakes the morning after.

It is in the context of a narrative of seduction, which frames class mobility as the corruption of an innate virtue, that the distinction between the exoteric beauty of high culture and its esoteric message of “loathing, hatred, despair” arises. The “rightful” owners of culture were never innocent to begin with, and their relationship to culture is seldom eroticised, still less hystericised, in this way. Enthusiasm is deprecated: one should be beyond such dangerous transports of delight. At the same time, the self-improvers’ “half-educated” accumulation of “half-digested” cultural fragments - their heedless eclecticism - is bound to lead to digestive difficulties. Only a grasp of the totality, which belongs to a whole mode of life to which these interlopers are irremediably foreign, will enable each sonnet, each Beethoven sonata, to be properly placed; which is to say, neutralized.