Orlando: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

“The biographer is now faced with a difficulty which is better perhaps to confess than to gloss over,” the narrator writes. Until now, Orlando’s life has been pieced together by documents— “both private and historical”—and they have enabled the narrator to do their job, “which is to plod, without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth.” Much of Orlando’s story, however, is “dark, mysterious, and undocumented.” Thus, it also cannot be easily explained. The “simple duty” of the biographer, the narrator declares, “is to state the facts as far as they are known, and so let the reader make of them what he may.”

Following the winter of the Great Frost and Orlando’s relationship with Sasha, he is “exiled from Court,” so he goes to his country house and lives “in complete solitude.” In June, on the morning of Saturday the 18th, Orlando fails to wake at his usual time (7:45 a.m. “precisely”). For an entire week, despite excessive noise and a mustard plaster, Orlando sleeps without food or “any sign of life.” On the seventh day, he wakes at precisely 7:45 a.m., gets dressed, and sends for his horse, as if he has “woken from a single night’s slumber.”  

“Some change,” the narrator writes, has “taken place in the chambers of [Orlando’s] brain.” He has “an imperfect recollection of his past life,” and he is “puzzled” by the events of the last six months. However, whenever Russia, ships, or princesses are mentioned, Orlando falls “into a gloom.” Orlando visits several doctors and is prescribed “rest and exercise,” “starvation and nourishment,” “society and solitude,” and “the usual sedatives and irritants.” The medical consensus is that Orlando “had been asleep for a week.”

“But if sleep it was,” the narrator asks, “of what nature, we can scarcely refrain from asking, are such sleeps as these?” The narrator questions if they are “remedial measures,” in which painful memories that are “likely to cripple life forever” are scrubbed from the mind: “Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest rend us asunder?” The narrator reasons that perhaps people must take death “in small doses daily” in order to keep on living. Perhaps Orlando had “died for a week, and then come to life,” but if that is the case, “of what nature is death and of what nature is life?” Orlando thinks of these questions and waits “well over half an hour for an answer.”

Orlando’s life begins to reflect one of “extreme solitude.” No one is sure just how he spends his time, but he has retained a full staff of servants on his estate, and they go about cleaning empty rooms and worrying about Orlando. He disappears for hours on end, and Mrs. Grimsditch, the housekeeper, fears constantly that something terrible has become of him. Mr. Dupper, the chaplain, tries to calm her fears, but even he is worried. All of Orlando’s servants hold “him in high respect,” even the “Blackamoor,” who was given the name Grace Robinson to make a “Christian woman of her.”

Orlando takes on “a strange delight in thoughts of death and decay.” He often goes down into the crypt of the estate, where 10 generations of “his ancestors lay, coffin piled upon coffin.” He holds the bones of his family in his hands. “Nothing remains of all these Princes,” he says, “except one digit.” He picks up a single hand. “Whose had was it?” he wonders. “The right or the left? The hand of a man or woman, of age or youth?” Putting down the bones, Orlando thinks of Thomas Browne, a writer and Doctor of Norwich, whose books greatly interest Orlando.

To Orlando, life is “not worth living anymore.” Sasha is gone, and he will never see her again. He sobs for hours, and Mrs. Grimsditch worries in his absence that he has been “foully murdered.” When he is through crying, Orlando opens one of Sir Thomas Browne’s books and begins to read. The reader has probably guessed, the narrator says, that Orlando is “strangely compounded by many humours—of melancholy, of indolence, of passion, [and] of love of solitude.” In short, “[Orlando is] a nobleman afflicted with a love of literature,” and the “fatal nature of this disease is to substitute a phantom for reality.” 

“For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system,” the narrator claims, “it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.” In this sickly state, the narrator says, is where Orlando is. He would give his entire fortune to write a single book and “become famous,” but “all the gold in Peru” cannot buy him “a well-turned line.” As such, Orlando “falls into consumption and sickness, blows his brains out, turns his face to the wall.”

This “disease,” of course, does not break Orlando “as it has broken many of his peers,” the narrator writes, “but he is deeply smitten with it.” In fact, by the time Orlando turns just 25, he has already written “some forty-seven plays, histories, romances, poems; some in prose, some in verse; some in French, some in Italian; all romantic, and all long.” Unfortunately, Orlando knows that “to write, much more to publish,” is “for a nobleman an inexpiable disgrace.” Still, he removes a thin writing book with the title “The Oak Tree” from his cabinet, opens it, and with quill in hand, Orlando “pauses.”

This pause is “of extreme significance,” the narrator writes, and “it behooves us to ask why [Orlando] paused.” Nature plays “many queer tricks upon us,” the narrator says, “making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often the most incongruous.” Nature has “further complicated” things, not only “by providing a perfect ragbag of odds and ends within us,” but by “lightly stitching” the “whole assortment” together with “a single thread.” The “seamstress,” the narrator explains, is “Memory,” and she is a “capricious one at that.”

“Memory runs her need in and out, up and down, hither and thither,” the narrator asserts, and “the most ordinary movement in the world,” such as sitting down to write, “may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting.” So as Orlando dips his quill, he begins to think again of Sasha—“why had she left him?” and “was she dead?”—and then his thoughts turn to “the face of that rather fat, shabby man” whom Orlando saw at the servants’ table so many years before. Orlando knows that the man was not a nobleman. “A poet, I dare say,” Orlando mutters.

“It is these pauses that are our undoing,” the narrator writes. Orlando pauses again for a moment and begins to write with “Ambition.” He will be “the first poet of his race and bring immortal lustre upon his name.” He thinks of the family ancestors in the crypt and what might remain of them: “A skull; a finger.” Orlando turns the pages of Sir Thomas Browne’s book, and, suddenly, the answer comes to him. Orlando’s ancestors and “their deeds” are nothing more than “dust and ashes,” but Orlando “and his words” are “immortal.”

“Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail,” the narrator says. Orlando writes, and it seems “good”; however, he reads the same and discovers it is “vile.” He “corrects” and “tears up” papers and is sometimes “in ecstasy,” other times “in despair.” He “cries,” “laughs,” “vacillates between this style and that,” and cannot decide if he is “the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.” In such a whirlwind, Orlando decides to “break [his] solitude,” and writes to a friend who is himself acquainted with many writers. Orlando is now convinced that he belongs “to the sacred race rather than to the noble.” He is “by birth a writer, rather than an aristocrat.”

In the letter to his friend, Orlando asks to meet Mr. Nicholas Greene, “a very famous writer” and an acquaintance of his friend. Orlando tells his friend that if Nick Greene will consent to meet him, he will send a coach and team of horses to fetch him. To Orlando’s complete surprise, Nick Greene agrees, and on April the 21st, he reaches Orlando’s estate. When the famous writer arrives, Orlando is “slightly disappointed.” Green is “not above average height” and is “lean” and somewhat “stooped.” Despite being a poet, he is more apt to “scold than to flatter,” more suited “to quarrel than to coo,” and more likely “to hate than to love.” Orlando is “taken aback” by this realization, but they go to dinner anyway. 

At dinner, Orlando and Nick Greene engage in small talk. Nick tells Orlando of his last name, and how some spell it with an “e,” and others do not. Orlando tells Nick about his grandmother who milked cows, and then he finally asks Nick about poetry. Nick’s eyes “flash fire” as he begins to tell Orlando all about “the nature of poetry.” Compared to prose, it is “harder to sell,” and it takes much longer to write. Nick’s nerves have suffered on account of poetry, he tells Orlando, giving an account of his entire health history, including “the palsy, the gout, the ague, the dropsy, and three sorts of fever in succession.” He has also suffered “an enlarged heart, a great spleen, and a distressed liver.” But the worst, Nick claims, is his spine; it “burns like fire,” and his brain often feels “like lead.”

Greene tells Orlando that he has sold only 500 copies of his own poem. “But that of course is largely due to the conspiracy against me,” Nick says. “All I can say,” Nick concludes as he pounds the table, “is that the art of poetry is dead in England.” Orlando is shocked. How can this be? Their time is one of great writers—of “Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Browne, [and] Donne”—how can poetry be dead? These poets are Orlando’s heroes. Surely, Nick must be mistaken. 

Nick laughs “sardonically.” Sure, he claims, some of Shakespeare’s plays are “well enough,” but most of his scenes are taken from Marlowe. And Marlowe? What can really be said of a man who didn’t live to see 30? “As for Browne,” Nick says to Orlando, “he was for writing poetry and prose and people soon got tired of such conceits as that.” John Donne is “a mountebank” who wraps up “his lack of meaning in hard words.” Ben Jonson, however, is a friend of Nick’s, and he never speaks “ill of his friends.” The “great age of literature” was the Greeks, Nicks says, and the Elizabethans are “inferior in every respect.”

The ancient Greek writers, Nick says, “cherished a divine ambition” that he likes to call “La Gloire” (only he pronounces it “Glawr,” so Orlando has no clue what he is talking about). Elizabethan poets don’t have “Glawr,” Nick claims, and they only write for money. Shakespeare is “the chief offender,” he says. Nick can remember a time when he ran into Kit Marlowe and Shakespeare at a bar. Kit was quite drunk and was speaking very loudly. “Stap my vitals, Bill,” Kit said to Shakespeare, “there’s a great wave coming and you’re on the top of it.” Kit, of course, was “killed two nights later in a drunken brawl” and never saw how his prediction played out. “Poor foolish fellow,” Nick says, “to go and say a thing like that. A great age, forsooth—the Elizabethan a great age!”

“So, my dear Lord,” Nick says to Orlando, we must “cherish the past and honour those writers—there are still a few of ‘em—who take antiquity for their model and write, not for pay but for Glawr.” Nick claims that if he had “a pension of three hundred pounds a year,” he would “live for Glawr alone.” He would do nothing by read Cicero and imitate his style. “That’s what I call fine writing,” Greene says. “That’s what I call Glawr. But it’s necessary to have a pension to do it.”

All of this pleases Orlando to no end. He has “a power of mimicry” that can “bring the dead to life,” and he can say the most wonderful things about books, “provided they were written three hundred years ago.” Time passes and Greene stays on as Orlando’s houseguest. Orlando has for him a “strange mixture of liking and contempt,” but he readily admits that Nick is good company. Nick tells fabulous stories, and even the servants, “who despise him,” enjoy listening to him. However, Nick isn’t having such a good time and can’t wait to get out. If he can’t “somehow make his escape,” he feels as if he will “be smothered alive” and will never write again.

Nick Greene soon tells Orlando that he must be on his way, and while Orlando is disappointed to see him go, he is also somewhat relived. As Nick departs, Orlando gives him one of his original plays, the Death of Hercules, to read and give his opinion. Nick seems hesitant and begins to mumble something about Glawr, until Orlando offers to pay him a quarterly pension. Nick agrees and returns home.  

Back home, Nick finds himself in the perfect “atmosphere for writing,” and he quickly pens “a very spirited satire” of a young Lord which is an obvious “roast” of Orlando. He even adds a few scenes of Orlando’s play, the Death of Hercules, which Greene claims is “wordy and bombastic in the extreme.” Word soon reaches Orlando of Greene’s pamphlet (which is selling like hotcakes), and Orlando sends one of his servants to Norway to get him two of the best elk hounds that money can buy. “For,” Orlando says. “I have done with men.” The servant returns with two prime dogs, one male and one female, and Orlando immediately takes them to his room. “For,” he says again, “I have done with men.” Despite this, Orlando continues to pay Nick Greene’s quarterly pension.

Soon after Greene’s visit, at the age of 30, Orlando takes to burning each of his “fifty-seven poetical works, only retaining “The Oak Tree,” which is “his boyish dream and very short.” He now puts his trust in only two things: “dogs and nature.” Calling to his elkhounds, Orlando decides to take a walk in the park. He would consider himself happy if he never again had to talk to another poet or Princess, and so it is in this solitude that Orlando spends the next days, weeks, months, and even years. Sometimes, the narrator writes, “things remain much as they are for two or three hundred years or so, except for a little dust and a few cobwebs which one old woman can sweep up in half an hour.”

One might conclude, the narrator says, that it is easiest to say only that “‘Time passed’ (here the exact amount could be indicated in brackets) and nothing whatever happened.” Still, while Time “makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality,” it “has no such simple effect upon the mind of man.” According to the narrator, the “extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation.” Orlando’s time now, having lived 30 years, seems to him “inordinately long,” but in the “doing” is “inordinately short.”

Orlando spends much of the following months and years thinking about “love,” “friendship,” and “truth.” He eats his breakfast “a man of thirty,” and comes “home to dinner a man of fifty-five at least.” At times, a week can add “a century to his age, others no more than three seconds,” as, the narrator claims, the “task of estimating the length of human life (of the animals we presume not to speak) is beyond our capacity.” One’s thoughts, which are doubtless made up of both “brevity and diuturnity,” seem “of prodigious length” but go by “like a flash.” Alone in these “deserts of vast eternity,” Orlando lives and thinks. 

One June day, Orlando’s Memory flashes before his mind the image of Nick Greene. “I’ll be blasted,” Orlando cries, “if I ever write another word, or try to write another word to please Nick Green or the Muse. Bad, good or indifferent, I’ll write, from this day forward, to please myself.” Around this time, another thought strikes Orlando “like a bullet” and ambition drops “like a plummet.” He looks to his vast and sprawling house. He will add to the estate. But it already extends over nine acres, so he decides instead to furnish it—all of it.

Orlando buys blankets and curtains, and then chairs and tables. He finds the perfect glasses and the best lace and cloth. He spends millions—about half his fortune—and when every room is done, he moves on to the garden. He plants flowers and shrubs, and even has birds and two bears imported, whose “surliness,” Orlando is sure, hides their “trusty hearts.” He soon discovers, however, that the finest beds mean nothing without people to sleep in them, so he invites all the local nobility and gentry to stay with him. Orlando’s 365 bedrooms are soon full, and his guests pass each other on one of 52 staircases.

Orlando is sure to avoid writers and foreign women, and he often works on his poem, “The Oak Tree.” By now, the poem has been scratched out and rewritten so many times, it is difficult to remember how it started. Orlando’s writing style has changed “amazingly.” He has “chastened” his “floridity” and “curbed” his “abundance.” One day, while again working on his poem, the image of a strange woman passes his window. She appears again later that week, and then the next day, and Orlando decides to follow her.

The woman, the Archduchess Harriet Griselda of Finster-Aarhorn and Scandop-Boom, stands over six feet tall, and she returns to visit Orlando many times. Suddenly, Orlando begins to feel the “beating of Love’s wings,” but then “a thousand memories” rush back and—“horror!” Love has “two faces,” Orlando says, one is “white,” and one is “black.” His feelings for the Archduchess are black, and he knows immediately that is “Lust the vulture, not Love, the Bird of Paradise” that is beating its wings. He immediately sends the Archduchess away, but he continues to see her around town. Orlando concludes that his home is now “uninhabitable,” and he asks King Charles to send him to Constantinople as an Ambassador.