Last Essays
The Death of the Moth. By Virginia Woolf. (Hogarth Press. 9s.)
THESE essays are mainly about literary subjects and what one though of The Common Reader one will, on the whole, think of th If anything, they are written more genuinely from the standpoin of the (of course, infinitely idealised) common reader. Virgin Woolf knew, which most professional critics do not, that writer have " a mood of the great general mind which they interpret, indeed, almost discover, so that we come to read them rather fo that than for any story or character or scene of separate excellence' that the " suggestiveness of words " will often make a bad boo into a very lovable human being, and a good book into a man wh we can hardly tolerate in the room ; and she discusses with gr point and warmth the endless interactions of lovable and hate people and their good and bad books. In the process, she write very perceptive straight criticism ; the essays on Georg Moore and E. M. Forster in this volume could hardly be belie But somehow, though the essays are individually acute and human the total effect stifles. It is like Orlando and the gypsies ; one over-conscious of the 30o bedrooms of English literature and social connexions. The best essays are about minor figures ; th great figures are not brought alive, but trivialised for, after a poin one just does not care who their friends and relations were. course, it affected their work, but there the work is, and either on reads it or one does not.
There are two reasons for this. She is trying to do what s could not and did not try to do in her novels—be circumstan Her novel characters are what they feel, not what they are ; an however minutely analysed, feelings are always general, and nev particular. Here she tries to build people out of their local an particular relationships to circumstances, and the attempt dulls edge of her perception of their intrinsic qualities as people an writers. Also, as she herself says in one of these essays, the tru of biography and the truth of fiction do not mix.
But this book is called The Death of the Moth, and I wish the was more about the moth in it. For in this essay and the on called Everting Over Sussex she makes explicit, and analyses th general statement which underlies all her work. She says of th moth flying round the one window-pane: " That was all he coat do, in spite of the size of the downs, the width of the sky, the f off smoke of houses, and the romantic voice, now and then, of •
steamer out at sea "; and, particularising: " And then, when all seems blown to its fullest and tamest, with beauty, and beauty, and beauty, a pin pricks ; it collapses. But what is the pin? So far as I could tell, the pin had something to do with one's own im- potency. I cannot hold this—I cannot express this—I am overcome by it, I am mastered. Somewhere in that region one's discontent lay ; and it was allied with the idea that one's nature demands mastery over all that it receives ; and mastery here meant the power to convey what one saw now over Sussex, so that another person could share it."
Her real theme is always this horribly painful impotence of man facing the power of beauty, and the belief that only by recognising explicitly, and being able to communicate the facts of beauty and impotence can either be made bearable. She is obsessed with the desire to communicate. Writing of the Elizabethans, she talks of " the enormous burden of the unexpressed " ; reporting Mon- taigne's view, which was, I am sure, her own, she says : " Communi- cation is health ; communication is truth ; communication is happi- ness." But her problem is not the novelist's problem ; how to communicate with another individual by getting into his separate mind, but the poet's problem : how to give awareness form, and thereby make it communicable to those who, with him; can get out of their separate minds into a world built only of the universals of form and feeling.
She need not have worried ; for not only can she convey with extraordinary intensity a particular act of sensual perception ; she is also one of the very rare prose writers whose general statements immediately and intensely recreate in the mind of the reader the feeling stated. If she says, as in To the Lighthouse, that " the walls of the partition had become so thin that practically it (emotion) was all one stream," then for the moment it is so, not only in the book, but in the life of the reader. The fascination of these last short essays lies in seeing her pose problems as if she had not in some sense solved them ; and one wishes passionately that there were more of this and more of the statements, which are poems, of " the fine mistlike substance of countless lives." But possibly she was too much a prose writer for these to be poems detached from their context, and, anyway, one would presumably have missed other admirable things, wit, feminism and plain nonsense.
CAROL STEWART.
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