Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  36. Until the beginning of the eighties, according to Miss Haldane, the sister of R. B. Haldane, no lady could work. ‘I should, of course, have liked to study for a profession, but that was an impossible idea unless one were in the sad position of “having to work for one’s bread” and that would have been a terrible state of affairs. Even a brother wrote of the melancholy fact after he had been to see Mrs Langtry act. “She was a lady and acted like a lady, but what a sad thing it was that she should have to do so!’” (From One Century to Another, by Elizabeth Haldane, p-4.) Harriet Martineau earlier in the century was delighted when her family lost its money, for thus she lost her ‘gentility’ and was allowed to work.

  37. Life of Sophia Jex-Blake, by Margaret Todd, p, 70.

  38. For an account of Mr Leigh Smith, see The Life of Emily Davies, by Barbara Stephen. Barbara Leigh Smith became Madame Bodichon.

  39. How nominal that opening was is shown by the following account of the actual conditions under which women worked in the R.A. Schools about 1900. ‘Why the female of the species should never be given the same advantages as the male it is difficult to understand. At the R.A. Schools we women had to compete against men for all the prizes and medals that were given each year, and we were only allowed half the amount of tuition and less than half their opportunities for study . . . No nude model was allowed to be posed in the women’s painting room at the R.A. Schools . . . The male students not only worked from nude models, both male and female, during the day, but they were given an evening class as well, at which they could make studies from the figure, the visiting R.A. instructing.’ This seemed to the women students ‘very unfair indeed’; Miss Collyer had the courage and the social standing necessary to beard first Mr Franklin Dicksee, who argued that since girls marry, money spent on their teaching is money wasted; next Lord Leighton; and at length the thin edge of the wedge, that is the undraped figure, was allowed. But ‘the advantages of the night class we never did succeed in obtaining . . .” The women students therefore clubbed together and hired a photographer’s studio in Baker Street. ‘The money that we, as the committee, had to find, reduced our meals to near starvation diet.’ (Life of an Artist, by Margaret Collyer, p-81, 82.) The same rule was in force at the Nottingham Art School in the twentieth century. ‘Women were not allowed to draw from the nude. If the men worked from the living figure I had to go into the Antique Room . . . the hatred of those plaster figures stays with me till this day. I never got any benefit out of their study.’ (Oil Paint and Grease Paint, by Dame Laura Knight, .) But the profession of art is not the only profession that is thus nominally open. The profession of medicine is ‘open’, but ‘. . . nearly all the Schools attached to London Hospitals are barred to women students, whose training in London is mainly carried on at the London School of Medicine.’ (Memorandum on the Position of English Women in Relation to that of English Men, by Philippa Strachey, 1935, .) ‘Some of the girl “medicals” at Cambridge University have formed themselves into a group to ventilate the grievance.’ (Evening News, 25 March 1937.) In 1922 women students were admitted to the Royal Veterinary College, Camden Town. “. . . since then the profession has attracted so many women that the number has recently been restricted to 50.’ (Daily Telegraph, 1 October 1937.)

  40 and 41. The Life of Mary Kingsley, by Stephen Gwyn, p, 26. In a fragment of a letter Mary Kingsley writes: ‘I am useful occasionally, but that is all — very useful a few months ago when on calling on a friend she asked me to go up to her bedroom and see her new hat — a suggestion that staggered me, I knowing her opinion of mine in such matters.’ ‘The letter,’ says Mr Gwyn, ‘did not complete this adventure of an unauthorised fiancé, but I am sure she got him off the roof and enjoyed the experience riotously.’

  42. According to Antigone there are two kinds of law, the written and the unwritten, and Mrs Drummond maintains that it may sometimes be necessary to improve the written law by breaking it. But the many and varied activities of the educated man’s daughter in the nineteenth century were clearly not simply or even mainly directed towards breaking the laws. They were, on the contrary, endeavours of an experimental kind to discover what are the unwritten laws; that is the private laws that should regulate certain instincts, passions, mental and physical desires. That such laws exist and are observed by civilized people, is fairly generally allowed; but it is beginning to be agreed that they were not laid down by ‘God’, who is now very generally held to be a conception, of patriarchial origin, valid only for certain races, at certain stages and times; nor by nature, who is now known to vary greatly in her commands and to be largely under control; but have to be discovered afresh by successive generations, largely by their own efforts of reason and imagination. Since, however, reason and imagination are to some extent the product of our bodies, and there are two kinds of body, male and female, and since these two bodies have been proved within the past few years to differ fundamentally, it is clear that the laws that they perceive and respect must be differently interpreted. Thus Professor Julian Huxley says: ‘. . . from the moment of fertilization onwards, man and woman differ in every cell of their body in regard to the number of their chromosomes — those bodies which, for all the world’s unfamiliarity, have been shown by the last decade’s work to be the bearers of heredity, the determiners of our characters and qualities.’ In spite of the fact, therefore, that ‘the superstructure of intellectual and practical life is potentially the same in both sexes,’ and that ‘The recent Board of Education Report of the Committee on the Differentiation of the Curriculum for Boys and Girls in Secondary Schools (London, 1923), has established that the intellectual differences between the sexes are very much slighter than popular belief allows,’ (Essays in Popular Science, by Julian Huxley, p-3), it is clear that the sexes now differ and will always differ. If it were possible not only for each sex to ascertain what laws hold good in its own case, and to respect each other’s laws; but also to share the results of those discoveries, it might be possible for each sex to develop fully and improve in quality without surrendering its special characteristics. The old conception that one sex must ‘dominate’ another would then become not only obsolete, but so odious that if it were necessary for practical purposes that a dominant power should decide certain matters, the repulsive task of coercion and dominion would be relegated to an inferior and secret society, much as the flogging and execution of criminals is now carried out by masked beings in profound obscurity. But this is to anticipate.

  43. From The Times obituary notice of H. W. Greene, fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, familiarly called ‘Grugger’, 6 February 1933.

  44. ‘In 1747 the quarterly court (of the Middlesex Hospital) decided to set apart some of the beds for lying-in cases under rules which precluded any woman from acting as midwife. The exclusion of women has remained the traditional attitude. In 1861 Miss Garrett, afterwards Dr Garrett Anderson, obtained permission to attend classes . . . and was permitted to visit the wards with the resident officers, but the students protested and the medical officers gave way. The Board declined an offer from her to endow a scholarship for women students.’ (The Times, 17 May 1935.)

  45. ‘There is, in the modern world, a great body of well-attested knowledge . . . but as soon as any strong passion intervenes to warp the expert’s judgment he becomes unreliable, whatever scientific equipment he may possess.’ (The Scientific Outlook, by Bertrand Russell, .)

  46. One of the record-breakers, however, gave a reason for record-breaking which must compel respect: ‘Then, too, there was my belief that now and then women should do for themselves what men have already done — and occasionally what men have not done — thereby establishing themselves as persons, and perhaps encouraging other women towards greater independence of thought and action . . . When they fail, their failure must be a challenge to others.’ (The Last Flight, by Amelia Earhart, p, 65.)

  47. ‘In point of fact this process [childbirth] actually disables women only for a very small fraction
in most of their lives — even a woman who has six children is only necessarily laid up for twelve months out of her whole lifetime.’ (Careers and Openings for Women, by Ray Strachey, p-8.) At present, however, she is necessarily occupied for much longer. The bold suggestion has been made that the occupation is not exclusively maternal, but could be shared by both parents to the common good.

  48. The nature of manhood and the nature of womanhood are frequently defined both by Italian and German dictators. Both repeatedly insist that it is the nature of man and indeed the essence of manhood to fight. Hitler, for example, draws a distinction between ‘a nation of pacifists and a nation of men’. Both repeatedly insist that it is the nature of womanhood to heal the wounds of the fighter. Nevertheless a very strong movement is on foot towards emancipating man from the old ‘natural and eternal law’ that man is essentially a fighter; witness the growth of pacifism among the male sex today. Compare further Lord Knebworth’s statement ‘that if permanent peace were ever achieved, and armies and navies ceased to exist, there would be no outlet for the manly qualities which fighting developed,’ with the following statement by another young man of the same social caste a few months ago: ‘. . . it is not true to say that every boy at heart longs for war. It is only other people who teach it us by giving us swords and guns, soldiers and uniforms to play with.’ (Conquest of the Past, by Prince Hubertus Loewenstein, .) It is possible that the Fascist States by revealing to the younger generation at least the need for emancipation from the old conception of virility are doing for the male sex what the Crimean and the European wars did for their sisters. Professor Huxley, however, warns us that ‘any considerable alteration of the hereditary constitution is an affair of millennia, not of decades.’ On the other hand, as science also assures us that our life on earth is ‘an affair of millennia, not of decades’, some alteration in the hereditary constitution may be worth attempting.

  49. Coleridge however expresses the views and aims of the outsiders with some accuracy in the following passage: ‘Man must be free or to what purpose was he made a Spirit of Reason, and not a Machine of Instinct? Man must obey; or wherefore has he a conscience? The powers, which create this difficulty, contain its solution likewise; for their service is perfect freedom. And whatever law or system of law compels any other service, disennobles our nature, leagues itself with the animal against the godlike, kills in us the very principle of joyous well-doing, and fights against humanity . . . If therefore society is to be under a rightful constitution of government, and one that can impose on rational Beings a true and moral obligation to obey it, it must be framed on such principles that every individual follows his own Reason, while he obeys the laws of the constitution, and performs the will of the State while he follows the dictates of his own Reason. This is expressly asserted by Rousseau, who states the problem of a perfect constitution of government in the following words: Trouver une forme d’Association — par laquelle chacun s’unisant à tous, n’obeisse pourtant qu’à lui même, et reste aussi libre qu’auparavant, i.e. To find a form of society according to which each one uniting with the whole shall yet obey himself only and remain as free as before.’ (The Friend, by S. T. Coleridge, vol. I, p, 334, 335, 1818 edition.) To which may be added a quotation from Walt Whitman:

  ‘Of Equality — as if it harm’d me, giving others the same chances and rights as myself — as if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same.’

  And finally the words of a half-forgotten novelist, George Sand, are worth considering:

  ‘Toutes les existences sont solidaires les unes des autres, et tout être humain qui présenterait la sienne isolément, sans la rattacher à celle de ses semblables, n’offrirait qu’une énigme à débrouiller . . . Cette individualité n’a par elle seule ni signification ni importance aucune. Elle ne prend un sens quelconque qu’en devenant une parcelle de la vie générale, en se fondant avec l’individualité de chacun de mes semblables, et c’est par là qu’elle devient de l’histoire.’ (Histoire de ma Vie, by George Sand, p-41.)

  THE END

  THE DEATH OF THE MOTH AND OTHER ESSAYS

  CONTENTS

  The Death of the Moth

  Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car

  Three Pictures

  The First Picture

  The Second Picture

  The Third Picture

  Old Mrs. Grey

  Street Haunting: A London Adventure

  Jones and Wilkinson

  Twelfth Night At the Old Vic

  Madame de Sévigné

  The Humane Art

  Two Antiquaries: Walpole and Cole

  The Rev William Cole. A Letter

  The Historian and “The Gibbon”

  Reflections at Sheffield Place

  The Man at the Gate

  Sara Coleridge

  Not One of Us

  Henry James: 1. Within the Rim

  Henry James: 2. The Old Order

  Henry James: 3. The Letters of Henry James

  George Moore

  The Novels of E. M. Forster

  Middlebrow

  The Art of Biography

  Craftsmanship

  A Letter to a Young Poet

  Why?

  Professions for Women

  Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid

  The first edition

  Editorial Note

  It is ten years since Virginia Woolf published her last volume of collected essays, The Common Reader: Second Series. At the time of her death she was already engaged in getting together essays for a further volume, which she proposed to publish in the autumn of 1941 or the spring Of 1942. She also intended to publish a new book of short stories, including in it some or all of Monday or Tuesday, which has been long out of print.

  She left behind her a considerable number of essays, sketches, and short stories, some unpublished and some previously published in newspapers; there are, indeed, enough to fill three or four volumes. For this book I have made a selection from these. Some of them are now published for the first time; others have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The New Statesman & Nation, The Yale Review, The New York Herald Tribune, The Atlantic Monthly, The Listener, The New Republic, and Lysistrata.

  If she had lived, there is no doubt that she would have made large alterations and revisions in nearly all these essays before allowing them to appear in volume form. Knowing this, one naturally hesitates to publish them as they were left. I have decided to do so, first because they seem to me worth republishing, and second because at any rate those which have already appeared in journals have in fact been written and revised with immense care. I do not think that Virginia Woolf ever contributed any article to any paper which she did not write and rewrite several times. The following facts will, perhaps, show how seriously she took the art of writing even for the newspaper. Shortly before her death she wrote an article reviewing a book. The author of the book subsequently wrote to the editor saying that the article was so good that he would greatly like to have the typescript of it if the editor would give it to him. The editor forwarded the letter to me, saying that he had not got the typescript and suggesting that if I could find it, I might send it to the author. I found among my wife’s papers the original draft of the article in her handwriting and no fewer than eight or nine complete revisions of it which she had herself typed out.

  Nearly all the longer critical essays included in this volume have been subjected by her to this kind of revision before they were originally published. This is, however, not true of the others, particularly of the first four essays. These were written by her, as usual, in handwriting and were then typed out in rather a rough state. I have printed them as they stand, except that I have punctuated them and corrected obvious verbal mistakes. I have not hesitated to do this, since I always revised the mss. of her books and articles in this way before they were published.

  Leonard Woolf.

  The Death of the Moth

 
Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths; they do not excite that pleasant sense of dark autumn nights and ivy-blossom which the commonest yellow-underwing asleep in the shadow of the curtain never fails to rouse in us. They are hybrid creatures, neither gay like butterflies nor sombre like their own species. Nevertheless the present specimen, with his narrow hay-coloured wings, fringed with a tassel of the same colour, seemed to be content with life. It was a pleasant morning, mid-September, mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than that of the summer months. The plough was already scoring the field opposite the window, and where the share had been, the earth was pressed flat and gleamed with moisture. Such vigour came rolling in from the fields and the down beyond that it was difficult to keep the eyes strictly turned upon the book. The rooks too were keeping one of their annual festivities; soaring round the tree tops until it looked as if a vast net with thousands of black knots in it had been cast up into the air; which, after a few moments sank slowly down upon the trees until every twig seemed to have a knot at the end of it. Then, suddenly, the net would be thrown into the air again in a wider circle this time, with the utmost clamour and vociferation, as though to be thrown into the air and settle slowly down upon the tree tops were a tremendously exciting experience.

  The same energy which inspired the rooks, the ploughmen, the horses, and even, it seemed, the lean bare-backed downs, sent the moth fluttering from side to side of his square of the window-pane. One could not help watching him. One was, indeed, conscious of a queer feeling of pity for him. The possibilities of pleasure seemed that morning so enormous and so various that to have only a moth’s part in life, and a day moth’s at that, appeared a hard fate, and his zest in enjoying his meagre opportunities to the full, pathetic. He flew vigorously to one corner of his compartment, and, after waiting there a second, flew across to the other. What remained for him but to fly to a third corner and then to a fourth? That was all he could do, in spite of the size of the downs, the width of the sky, the far-off smoke of houses, and the romantic voice, now and then, of a steamer out at sea. What he could do he did. Watching him, it seemed as if a fibre, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body. As often as he crossed the pane, I could fancy that a thread of vital light became visible. He was little or nothing but life.