Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  But his health was worse. He was constantly suffering severe internal pain which the doctors failed to diagnose. He went to a new doctor. “He wanted me to have had jaundice very much but I couldn’t oblige him. He’s given me a new treatment with all manner of strange and potent drugs which makes me very giddy. In fact I’ve been rather bad of late.” He even contemplated taking a week’s rest, “sitting out if it’s fine enough and lying down after every meal”. But rest was impossible; the pains increased and so in despair “I’ve had recourse to a much advertised quack remedy.... I hardly like to say it but I can’t help thinking it’s doing me good.”

  Public affairs seemed worse than ever. “Oh the unfathomable beastliness of our newspapers!” Once there seemed a chance of peace: but ‘these beastly intriguing politicians will really bring the whole thing to a smash”. His father, whose views on the war he found unexpectedly sympathetic, began to tail. He ‘can hardly speak loud enough to be heard and can’t move a muscle”. But the Fry constitution is indomitable. There was no immediate danger. Friends were his great consolation. That summer he made a new one — André Gide. He brought Mm down to Guildford. “He’s a real event in my life at a time when events are very rare. I feel almost as tho’ I’d always known him. That I haven’t is evident from the fact that I never suspected him of being a musician, but when I showed him my virginals he sat down and played all the old Italian things I have as no one ever played them before and exactly as I have always dreamt that they should be played. He’s almost too ridiculously my counterpart in taste and feeling. It’s like finding a twin. I exaggerate of course. We should differ on a hundred things and he’s much more gifted than I am but still it’s a strange likeness in the point of view. — But we mostly talk poetry and I’ve got from him immense quantities of books to read which will keep me going for ages”. Heine, Tchekov, Lord Dunsany, Colette, Havelock Ellis, Romain Rolland, Schreiner (Sea Parasitism), Tristan Bernard; Durkheim; Schlumberger; Pierre Weber; Paul Fort; Levy Bruhl — those are some of the names jotted down in a note-book; in addition to the usual learned works by French and German Art Experts. He was reading too Harris’s Life of Oscar Wilde— “an amazing book and frightfully tragic. Also confirms all my beliefs of the impossibility of art in England. I don’t think any other civilisation is so recalcitrant to art. However you’ll say I’m back in my obsession. But I wish you would read it and see what happened then and would happen again if ever the British public could get its teeth into an artist.”

  So the summer of 1918 wore on; peace seemed further away than ever; he took stock of his resources against the winter. He had saved one cwt. of coal from last year. He had replaced the slavey with her trays by a married couple— “The Shepherd and the Shepherdess” he called them. They were a delightful pair. But travel was becoming impossible. There were no porters and no taxis. A page is filled with a sketch of himself heavily burdened leading a procession of small boys carrying the family luggage from the station to Durbins. The Omega flourished, then flagged. It would not die, and it would not live. He could scarcely face another year of that struggle, he felt. “I really think the Omega will have to shut up. It’s too discouraging now. I’m having to pay all the time and I can’t keep it up.” Then in October, while he was paying a visit to Failand, his father died. “It was infinitely quicker and better than I had feared”, he wrote. It was the end of a long relationship. They had had much in common, and many differences. His father and mother had shared his failures but they had not shared his success. He had not realised perhaps how much his own unhappiness had saddened his father’s life. And now it was over. There were many reasons that autumn, both public and private, to make him write more despondently than ever before. He said how he had failed to achieve “the kind of intimate companionship that my domestic nature longs for”; how “I’ve missed marriage which was what I wanted, and there’s no means of getting a substitute”; how “after all these years of pain spent to try to save something from the wreck” all seemed wasted.

  And then at last, as the autumn wore on, the cloud lifted. “Isn’t Prince Max’s speech splendid?” he exclaimed. It was almost impossible to believe that peace was at hand. At last the Armistice was signed. “Isn’t the relief immense?” he wrote. “But how much there is to do now.... I feel it’s the beginning not the end.”

  II

  The war years then, as these scattered and incongruous fragments show, broke into many of the lives that Roger Fry lived simultaneously. It was no longer possible to believe that the world generally was becoming more civilised. The war had killed, or was about to kill, his own private venture, the Omega. It had destroyed the hope of an annual exhibition in which English painters were to muster their forces at the Grafton Galleries. And private happiness, though this lay beyond the reach of any war, had once again eluded him. He had no centre of private security in which to shelter from the public catastrophe. But civilisation, art, personal relationships, though they might be damaged, were not to be destroyed by any war, unless indeed one gave up one’s belief in them. And that was impossible. He fought his old battles on their behalf, as the letters show, with many different weapons. They were humble and practical battles for the most part — with business firms, with public men, with private customers. He cooked; he washed up; he made pots; designed rugs and tables; showed visitors round the Omega; found work for Conscientious Objectors; fought on their behalf with politicians; did what he could to pay his artists their thirty shillings a week; and in one way or another he tried his best to make the Omega, though chairs were lacking, a centre in which some kind of civilised society might find a lodging.

  But he fought the bad dream most effectively with his brain. “My intellectual life”, he wrote at the end of the war, “is perhaps keener than ever.” Throughout the war he went on writing articles, writing letters to the papers on behalf of this cause or that, and lecturing all over the country. Very little mention is made in his letters of his criticism. “I’ve been doing an article for the Burlington.... I had just time to scribble a few notes for my lecture in the train.. — that activity is dismissed casually enough, as if it could be taken for granted. But there is one paper — Art and Life — read to the Fabians during the war, which helps to explain how it was that he survived the war, and not with his intellect merely. He there makes “a violently foreshortened survey of the history of art”, and concludes that “the usual assumption of a direct and decisive connection between art and life is by no means correct”. Art and life are two rhythms, he says — the word “rhythm” was henceforth to occur frequently in his writing— “and in the main the two rhythms are distinct, and as often as not play against each other.... What this survey suggests to me is that if we consider this special spiritual activity of art we find it no doubt open at times to influences from life, but in the main self-contained.... I admit of course that it is always conditioned more or less by economic changes, but these are rather conditions of its existence at all than directive influences. I also admit that under certain conditions the rhythms of life and of art may coincide with great effect on both; but in the main the two rhythms are distinct, and as often as not play against each other.”

  This suggests, what the letters also confirm, that there were two rhythms in his own life. There was the hurried and distracted life; but there was also the still life. With callers coming, the telephone ringing, and fashionable ladies asking advice about their bedspreads, he went back to the studio at Fitzroy Street to contemplate Giotto, to look at a picture by Buffalmacco, and to remark “That’s the next step I’m aiming at”. If he survived the war, it was perhaps that he kept the two rhythms in being simultaneously. But, it is tempting to ask, were they distinct? It seems as if the aesthetic theory were brought to bear upon the problems of private life. Detachment, as he insisted over and over again, is the supreme necessity for the artist. Was it not equally necessary if the private life were to continue? That rhythm could only grow and expand if it were detached
from the deformation which is possession.

  To live fully, to live gaily, to live without falling into the great sin of Accidia which is punished by fog, darkness and mud, could only be done by asking nothing for oneself. It was difficult to put that teaching into practice. Yet in his private life he had during those difficult years forced himself to learn that lesson. “It was a kind of death to me”, he wrote of that long struggle, “and it is a pale and disembodied ghost that’s survived....” But it was no pale and disembodied ghost who opened the door if one knocked at it in December 1918 as Desmond MacCarthy had knocked at it in August 1914. He was huddled in an overcoat over the stove, writing. He was worn; he looked older; his cheeks were more cavernous; his face more lined than before. But he was as eager as ever to talk “about all sorts of things”, and the room was if possible still more untidy. Mrs Filmer had obeyed the command on the placard “Do not touch”. Mrs Filmer had not touched. Rows of dusty medicine bottles stood on the mantelpiece; frying pans were mixed with palettes; some plates held salad, others scrapings of congealed paint. The floor was strewn with papers. There were the pots he was making, there were samples of stuffs and designs for the Omega. But on the table, protected by its placard, was the still life — those symbols of detachment, those tokens of a spiritual reality immune from destruction, the immortal apples, the eternal eggs. He was delighted to stop work and to begin talking. But directly the friend was gone, the article would be finished, and directly the light dawned upon that very untidy room he would be at work upon his picture. Whatever the theory, whatever the connection between the rhythms of life and of art, there could be no doubt about the sensation — he had survived the war.

  CHAPTER X. VISION AND DESIGN

  I

  It was the beginning not the end, he wrote to his mother when the Armistice was signed. But in order that there might be a beginning, there had also to be an end. And it was difficult to make that end. The Omega too had survived the war, but in a badly crippled condition. A fresh spurt of business came, of course, with the peace; but then three of the staff went down with influenza; the auditors complained of unbusinesslike book-keeping, and Roger Fry had to pay certain debts out of his own pocket. At last, when it came to selling two chairs for four pounds “after being abject for a whole afternoon”, the struggle seemed no longer worth the effort. By March 1919 he determined to make an end of it; and in June of that year he presided over a sale of goods at the Omega workshops.

  Rather bitterly Roger Fry watched the public buying linens and pots at half price which they had refused to buy at the full price. They might so easily have turned failure into success. Even now, could he have found the right manager, or carried on himself for a little longer, the business might have struck roots and flourished. It was on the brink of success when he dropped it. “Nobody knows”, one of the press gossips remarked, “why he is giving up the Omega place.... Everyone wants a Roger Fry house... perhaps he can’t live with his own wallpapers.... Lady Fry, his mother, dislikes his frantic colour schemes, and the family in general will be tempted to say T told you so’ when he puts up the shutters. But I admire him”, the gossip concluded, “for all that. He looks good — he looks like one of the early Italian saints he writes about.”

  Unwittingly the gossip had put his finger upon one of the sore places that this failure had left behind it. Many people would be tempted to say “I told you so when he put up the shutters. It was not the first time that Roger Fry had failed, and this failure, unlike the others, left unpleasant consequences behind it. He had lost the money that his friends had invested, as well as his own. Also “drenched by Post-Impressionism and immersed in his Omega business”, Roger Fry, as Sir Charles Holmes records, “now seemed by general consent to be out of the running” for directorships and appointments. Once more he was without a settled source of income. And when he came to survey his work later he was by no means sure that he had done anything to make the railway restaurant less eczematous, though there was a notable change, superficially, in the shop windows. The English, it seemed to him, always attack an original idea; then debase it; and when they have rendered it harmless, proceed to swallow it whole. “Twenty years ago”, he wrote in The Listener, “I organised the Omega workshops with a view to creating just that kind of art applied to the needs of everyday life which Mr Barton so eloquently recommends. Twenty years ago the little group of artists which ran that workshop were experimenting with cubist designs and were endeavouring by the austere simplicity of their designs for furniture, and the geometrical quality of their patterns, to give expression to that new feeling for orderliness, clarity and adaptation to use which Mr Barton extols. Unfortunately we were too far ahead of our times, and people who now buy degraded and meaningless imitations of what we did twenty years ago feel that they are on the crest of the wave of a new movement.” Snobbism was ineradicable. The failure of the Omega and incidents connected with it no doubt did something to confirm him in his conviction that art “in this vile country” is hopeless.

  He wrote bitterly and with reason. But perhaps he was too pessimistic. Perhaps Mr Thornton was right when he said that though “the value of the venture at the Omega workshops is not yet fully appreciated, yet much that is vital in present-day designs derives from this source”. Perhaps without the Omega to lead the way drawing-room suites and dining-room suites would have been still more degraded and meaningless than they now are; the riot of patterns in tea-shops and restaurants would have pullulated still more profusely. But whatever disillusionment the Omega brought him, it had not shaken his belief in the movement, or in the young English artists and their capacities. He could reflect that he had given them work when they were most in need of work; and he had carried out experiments that interested him greatly. If he had made enemies— “but you must admit”, he wrote, “that I’ve chosen my enemies well” — he had made new friends and given the old still more reason to say with the journalist “I admire him for all that”. Who but Roger Fry could have undertaken such a task single-handed, or have carried it within an inch of success, or have remained after all his difficulties and disillusionments not only undaunted but full of fresh projects for the future?

  So the Omega workshops closed down. The shades of the Post-Impressionists have gone to join the other shades; no trace of them is now to be seen in Fitzroy Square. The giant ladies have been dismounted from the doorway and the rooms have other occupants. But some of the things he made still remain — a painted table; a witty chair; a dinner service; a bowl or two of that turquoise blue that the man from the British Museum so much admired. And if by chance one of those broad deep plates is broken, or an accident befalls a blue dish, all the shops in London may be searched in vain for its fellow.

  II

  The relief when the Omega was wound up. and he was quit of that incessant strain and struggle, was very great He was free, and the first use he made of his freedom was to take a holiday. First he went with his daughter to the English lakes, but the English lakes were not to his liking. “There’s very little temptation to paint here. It’s all so deucedly scenic’, he wrote. Nor was he moved by the poetic associations of the country. The cottages of the Lake poets left him cold, but at least he was vouchsafed a vision of William Wordsworth. I have very little doubt that I have seen William Wordsworth. I found him in the form of a very old sheep lying under a tree. I sat down close to him and did a drawing. He never moved but looked over my shoulder and coughed occasionally.”

  With this tribute to his native land he crossed the Channel. He felt, he said, like an exile returning to his own country. At first he was disappointed; he found France “to all intents and purposes back in the middle ages”. The bureaucrats were all-powerful; soon they would be unable to keep the railways running; there was a tobacco famine; and he was reduced to a starvation diet of six cigarettes a day. But Paris was still the centre of civilisation. If there were strikes and bureaucrats and politicians there were also artists. He met Derain and Vild
rac. Talk about pictures began again. “He [Derain] complains that every technique is so terribly easy. He seems to want to find some material that will resist his facility. He talked a great deal of getting rid of the quality of painting. I think I know what he means. He wants the vision to be communicated directly so that one is quite unconscious of the medium through which it is given.” He bought a picture by Derain. He visited Picasso; and was amazed by his work. “It’s astonishing stuff. Rather what I hoped might be coming. Vast pink nudes in boxes. Almost monochrome pinkish red flesh and pure grey fonds which enclose it.

  They’re larger than life and vast in all directions and tremendously modelled on academic lines almost. They’re most impressive almost overwhelming things. I said ‘Mais vous commencez une nouvelle école, l’école des invendables’, for one can’t conceive who on earth could ever find a place for these monsters. He was very much pleased, and it is rather splendid of him... he goes and does things which disconcert everyone.... He’s always chucking Ms reputations. It’s curious how near all his late work is in its aims to things Fr. Bartolommeo and Raphael worked out.”