Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  But painters lose their power directly they attempt to speak. They must say what they have to say by shading greens into blues, posing block upon block. They must weave their spells like mackerel behind the glass at the aquarium, mutely, mysteriously. Once let them raise the glass and begin to speak, and the spell is broken. A storytelling picture is as pathetic and ludicrous as a trick played by a dog, and we applaud it only because we know that it is as hard for a painter to tell a story with his brush as it is for a sheep-dog to balance a biscuit on its nose. Dr. Johnson at the Mitre is much better told by Boswell; in paint, Keats’s nightingale is dumb; with half a sheet of note-paper we can tell all the stories of all the pictures in the world.

  Nevertheless, they admit, moving round the gallery, even when they do not tempt us to the heroic efforts which have produced so many abortive monsters, pictures are very pleasant things. There is a great deal to be learned from them. That picture of a wet marsh on a blowing day shows us much more clearly than we could see for ourselves the greens and silvers, the sliding streams, the gusty willows shivering in the wind, and sets us trying to find phrases for them, suggests even a figure lying there among the bulrushes, or coming out of the farmyard gate in top-boots and mackintosh. That still-life, they proceed, pointing to a jar of red-hot pokers, is to us what a beefsteak is to an invalid — an orgy of blood and nourishment, so starved we are on our diet of thin black print. We nesde into its colour, feed and fill ourselves with yellow and red and gold till we drop off, nourished and content. Our sense of colour seems miraculously sharpened. We carry those roses and red-hot pokers about with us for days, working them over again in words. From a portrait, too, we get almost always something worth having — somebody’s room, nose, or hands, some little effect of character or circumstance, some knick-knack to put in our pockets and take away. But again, the portrait painter must not attempt to speak; he must not say “This is maternity; that intellect,” the utmost he must do is to tap on the wall of the room, or the glass of the aquarium; he must come very close, but something must always separate us from him.

  There are artists, indeed, who are born tappers; no sooner do we see a picture of a dancer tying up her shoe by Degas than we exclaim “How witty!” exactly as if we had read a speech by Congreve. Degas detaches a scene and comments upon it exactly as a great comic writer detaches and comments, but silently, without for a moment infringing the reticences of paint. We laugh, but not with the muscles that laugh in reading. Mile. Lessore has the same rare and curious power. How witty her circus horses are, or her groups standing with field-glasses gazing, or her fiddlers in the pit of the orchestra! How she quickens our sense of the point and gaiety of life by tapping on the other side of the wall! Matisse taps, Derain taps, Mr. Grant taps; Picasso, Sickert, Mrs. Bell, on the other hand, are all mute as mackerel But the writers have said enough. Their consciences are uneasy. No one knows better than they do, they murmur, that this is not the way to look at pictures; that they are irresponsible dragon-flies, mere insects, children wantonly destroying works of art by pulling petal from petal. In short, they had better be off, for here, oaring his way through the waters, mooning, abstract, contemplative, comes a painter, and stuffing their pilferings into their pockets, out they bolt, lest they should be caught at their mischief and made to suffer the most extreme of penalties, the most exquisite of tortures — to be made to look at pictures with a painter.

  Harriette Wilson

  ACROSS the broad continent of a woman’s life falls the shadow of a sword. On one side all is correct, definite, orderly; the paths are strait, the trees regular, the sun shaded; escorted by gentlemen, protected by policemen, wedded and buried by clergymen, she has only to walk demurely from cradle to grave and no one will touch a hair of her head. But on the other side all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular course. The paths wind between bogs and precipices. The trees roar and rock and fall in ruin. There, too, what strange company is to be met — in what bewildering variety! Stone-masons hobnob with Dukes of the blood royal — Mr. Blore treads on the heels of His Grace the Duke of Argyll. Byron rambles through, the Duke of Wellington marches in with all his orders on him. For in that strange land gentlemen are immune; any being of the male sex can cross from sun to shade with perfect safety. In that strange land money is poured out lavishly; bank-notes drop on to breakfast plates; pearl rings are found beneath pillows; champagne flows in fountains; but over it all broods the fever of a nightmare and the transiency of a dream. The brilliant fade; the great mysteriously disappear; the diamonds turn to cinders, and the Queens are left sitting on three-legged stools shivering in the cold. That great Princess, Harriette Wilson, with her box at the Opera and the Peerage at her feet, found herself before she was fifty reduced to solitude, to poverty, to life in foreign parts, to marriage with a Colonel, to scribbling for cash whatever she could remember or invent of her past.

  Nevertheless it would be a grave mistake to think that Harriette repented her ways or would have chosen another career had she had the chance. She was a girl of fifteen when she stepped across the sword and became, for reasons which she will not specify, the mistress of the Earl of Craven. A few facts leak out later. She was educated at a convent and shocked the nuns. Her parents had fifteen children; their home was “truly uncomfortable”; her father was a Swiss with a passion for mathematics, always on the point of solving a problem, and furious if interrupted; while the unhappiness of her parents’ married life had decided Harriette before she was ten “to live free as air from any restraint but that of my own conscience.” So she stepped across. And at once, the instant her foot touched those shifting sands, everything wobbled; her character, her principles, the world itself — all suffered a sea change. For ever after (it is one of the curiosities of her memoirs — one of the obstacles to any certain knowledge of her character) she is outside the pale of ordinary values and must protest till she is black in the face, and run up a whole fabric of lies into the bargain, before she can make good her claim to a share in the emotions of human kind. Could an abandoned woman love a sister, could a mere prostitute grieve genuinely for a mother’s death? Mr. Thomas Seccombe, in the Dictionary of National Biography, had his doubts. Harriette Wilson, he said, described her sister’s death “with an appearance of feeling,” whereas to Mr.

  Seccombe Lord Hertford’s kindness in soothing the same creature’s last hours was indisputably genuine.

  Outcast as she was, her position had another and an incongruous result. She was impelled, though nothing was further from her liking than serious thought, to speculate a little curiously about the law of society, to consult, with odd results, the verdict of “my own conscience.” For example, the marriage-law — was that as impeccably moral as people made out? “I cannot for the life of me divest myself of the idea that if all were alike honourable and true, as I wish to be, it would be unnecessary to bind men and women together by law, since two persons who may have chosen each other from affection, possessing heart and honour, could not part, and where there is neither the one nor the other, even marriage does not bind. My idea may be wicked or erroneous,” she adds hastily, for what could be more absurd than that Harriette Wilson should set herself up as a judge of morality — Harry, as the gentlemen called her, whose only rule of conduct was “One wants a little variety in life,” who left one man because he bored her, and another because he drew pictures of cocoa-trees on vellum paper, and seduced poor young Lord Worcester, and went off to Melton Mowbray with Mr. Meyler, and, in short, was the mistress of any man who had money and rank and a person that took her fancy? No, Harriette was not moral, nor refined, nor, it appears, very beautiful, but merely a bustling bouncing vivacious creature with good eyes and dark hair and “the manners of a wild schoolboy,” said Sir Walter Scott, who had dined in her presence. But it cannot be doubted — otherwise her triumph is inexplicable — that gifts she had, gifts of dash and go and enthusiasm, which still stir among the dead leaves of her memoirs and impart even to their rambli
ng verbosity and archness and vulgarity some thrill of that old impetuosity, some flash of those fine dark eyes, some fling of those wild schoolboy manners which, when furbished up in plumes and red plush and diamonds, held our ancestors enthralled.

  She was, of course, always falling in love. She saw a stranger riding with a Newfoundland dog in Knightsbridge and lost her heart to his “pale expressive beauty” at once. She venerated his door-knocker even, and when Lord Ponsonby — for Lord Ponsonby it was — deserted her, she flung herself sobbing on a doorstep in Half Moon Street and was carried, raving and almost dying, back to bed. Large and voluptuous herself, she loved for the most part little men with small hands and feet, and, like Mr. Meyler, skins of remarkable transparency, “churchyard skins,” foreboding perhaps an early death; “yet it would be hard to die, in the bloom of youth and beauty, beloved by everybody, and with thirty thousand a year.” She loved, too, the Apollo Belvedere, and sat entranced at the Louvre, exclaiming in ecstasy at the “quivering lips — the throat!”, till it seemed as if she must share the fate of another lady who sat by the Apollo, “whom she could not warm, till she went raving mad, and in that state died.” But it is not her loves that distinguish her; her passions tend to become perfunctory; her young men with fine skins and large fortunes innumerable; her rhapsodies and recriminations monotonous. It is when off duty, released from the necessity of painting the usual picture in the usual way, that she becomes capable of drawing one of those pictures which only seem to await some final stroke to become a page in Vanity Fair or a sketch by Hogarth. All the materials of comedy seem heaped in disorder before us as she, the most notorious woman in London, retires to Charmouth to await the return of her lover, Lord Worcester, from the Spanish wars, trots to church on the arm of the curate’s aged father, or peeps from her window at the rustic beauties of Lyme Regis tripping down to the sixpenny Assembly Rooms with “turbans or artificial flowers twined around their wigs” to dance at five in the evening on the shores of the innocent sea. So a famous prima donna, hidden behind a curtain in strict incognito, might listen to country girls singing a rustic ballad with contempt and amusement, and a dash of envy too, for how simply the good people accepted her. Harriette could not help reflecting how kindly they sympathised with her anxiety about her husband at the wars, and sat up with her to watch for the light of the postwoman’s lanthorn as she came late at night over the hill from Lyme Regis with letters from Mr. Wilson in Spain! All she could do to show her gratitude was to pay twice what they asked her, to shower clothes upon ragged children, to mend a poor country-woman’s roof, and then, tired of the role of Lady Bountiful, she was off to join Lord Worcester in Spain.

  Now, for a moment, before the old story is resumed, sketched with a stump of rapid charcoal, springs into existence, to fade for ever after, the figure of Miss Martha Edmonds, her landlady’s sister. “I am old enough,” exclaimed the gallant old maid, “and thank God I am no beauty.... I have never yet been ten miles from my native place, and I want to see the world.” She declared her intention of escorting Mrs. Wilson to Falmouth; she had her ancient habit made up for the purpose. Off they started, the old maid and the famous courtesan, to starve and freeze in an upper room of a crowded Falmouth inn, the winds being adverse, until in some mysterious way Mrs. Wilson got into touch first with the Consul and then with the Captain, who were so hospitable, so generous, so kind, that Aunt Martha bought a red rose for her cap, drank champagne, took a hand at cards, and was taught to waltz by Mr. Brown. Their gaieties were cut short, however; a letter demanded Mrs. Wilson’s instant presence in London, and Aunt Martha, deposited in Charmouth, could only regret that she had not seen something of life a little sooner, and declare that there “was a boldness and grandeur about the views in Cornwall which far exceeded anything she had seen in Devonshire.”

  Involved once more with Meylers, Lornes, Lambtons, Berkeleys, Leicesters, gossiping as usual in her box at the Opera about this lady and that gentleman, letting young noblemen pull her hair, tapping late at night at Lord Hertford’s little private gate in Park Lane, Harriette’s life wound in and out among the bogs and precipices of the shadowy underworld which lies on the far side of the sword. Occasionally the jingling and junketing was interrupted by a military figure; the great Duke himself, very like a ratcatcher in his red ribbon, marched in; asked questions; left money; said he remembered her; had dreamed of her in Spain. “I dreamed you came out on my staff,” he said. Or there was Lord Byron sitting entirely alone, dressed in brown flowing robes at a masquerade, “bright, severe, beautiful,” demanding “in a tone of wild and thrilling despondency ‘Who shall console us for acute bodily anguish?’ “Or again the spangled curtain goes up and we see those famous entertainers the sisters Wilson sitting at home at their ease, sparring and squabbling and joking about their lovers; Amy, who adored black puddings; good-natured Fanny, who doted upon donkey-riding; foolish Sophie, who was made a Peeress by Lord Berwick and dropped her sisters; Moll Raffles, Julia, niece to Lord Carysfort and daughter to a maid of honour with the finest legs in Europe — there they sit gossiping profanely and larding their chatter with quotations from Shakespeare and Sterne. Some died prematurely; some married and turned virtuous; some became villains, sorceresses, serpents, and had best be forgotten; while as for Harriette herself, she was scandalously treated by the Beauforts, had to retire to France with her Colonel, would continue to tell the truth about her fine friends so long as they treated her as they did, and grew, we cannot doubt, into a fat good-humoured disreputable old woman who never doubted the goodness of God or denied that the world had treated her well, or regretted, even when the darkness of obscurity and poverty blotted her entirely from view, that she had lived her life on the shady side of the sword.

  Genius

  “GENIUS,” cried Haydon, darting at his canvas after some momentary rebuff, “Genius is sent into the world not to obey laws, but to give them!” But he need not have said it. Genius is written large all over his memoirs. It is genius of a peculiar kind, of course. It is not the Shakespearean but the Victorian genius, not the conscious but the unconscious, not the true, but — let us pause, however, and read Haydon’s diaries with attention (they are now reprinted, with a brilliant introduction by Mr. Huxley) before we decide what kind of genius his was. That it was violent in its symptoms and remorseless in its severity, no one can doubt. Of all those men and women who have been stricken with genius (and the number in the British Isles must be great) none suffered more, or was more terribly its victim than the inspired boy with weak eyes who should have been a bookseller in his father’s shop in Plymouth, but heard himself summoned to go to London, to be a great painter, to honour his country, and to “rescue the Art from that stigma of incapacity which was impressed on it.”

  He came to London. He made friends with Wilkie. He lived and painted in one room, and there, night after night, Wilkie, Du Fresne, Dr. Millingen, McClaggan, Allan (“the celebrated painter”) and Callender all met and drank his good tea out of his large cups, and argued about art and politics and divinity and medicine and how Marie Antoinette’s head was cut off (Du Fresne said he had been present and had flung his red cap into the air), while Liz of Rathbone Place, who loved their talk but was otherwise cold, sided with one, attacked another, and was found studying Reid on the Human Mind “with an expression of profound bewilderment.”

  “Happy period!”, Haydon burst out, “no servants — no responsibilities — reputation on the bud — ambition beginning, friends untried,” and so things might have gone on had it not been for the demon which possessed him — the devil which made him, even in those early days, indite letters, which Liz applauded, against the might of the Royal Academy, and vow to bring about their humiliation and the triumph of High Art by vast pictures of Dentatus and Macbeth and Solomon, which took months to paint, filled his living-room with the reek of oil, required that he should dissect the forequarters of an ass, bring Guardsmen on their horses into his studio, and run into debt, for, a
s he soon found out, “the expenses of a work of High Art in England are dreadful.”

  But there was another consequence of his prepossession. High Art being of necessity large art into the bargain, only the great nobles could afford it, and in consequence the simple life with Liz and cups of good tea was abandoned for the life, or at least the dinner tables, of the Mulgraves and the Beaumonts and any other lord or lady who could be hypnotised into the belief that it was their wish to have a vast picture of Achilles in the drawing-room, and to their credit to have a man of genius talking very loud at their board. Haydon, rapt in his burning enthusiasm for the Heroic and for the Elgin Marbles and for himself, took it

  all seriously. He entertained fashion all day long. Instead of painting, “I walked about my room, looked into the glass, anticipated what the foreign ambassadors would say,” overheard whispers at parties, “he himself has an antique head,” and seriously believed, when the beauties put up their eyeglasses and lisped their admiration, that his fortune was made, and that “all the sovereigns of Europe would hail with delight an English youth who could paint an heroic picture.” But he was disillusioned. The great, he found, care not for art, but for what people say about pictures. “Dear Lord Mulgrave” lost his faith in Dentatus when he heard it criticised. Sir George Beaumont shillied and shallied and said at last that Macbeth was too big and Lady Beaumont had no room for it, and, “in fact, Sir George was tired and wanted another extraordinary young man, for Wilkie was an old story, and I was a nuisance.”

  “And so, artists,” he concluded, summing up all that he had borne from his patrons, but letting us infer how boldly he had corrected them and how terribly he had bored them, “and so, artists, be humble and discreet!”