Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  But the studio was not the only room in the house; there was the dining-room, looking out over the garden, where his favourite irises nodded over the fountain presided over by the Chinese statue. On the dinner table, decorated by Duncan Grant, were the plates he had made with his own hands, and round it were the chairs that he had designed himself. Almost any guest invited to dine with him about 1920 would find him, manuscript in hand; seeking the right words with which to fill in a gap in his translation of Mallarmé.

  .. One of his greatest pleasures”, Charles Mauron wrote in his introduction to their joint translation, “was in poetry, and especially the poetry of Mallarmé. He made no secret of the difficulties he met with: who does not meet them? But he of all men, he who was ever on the trail of some new splendour — felt himself attracted by the mysterious miroitement en dessous which, imprisoned in the poet’s most cryptic verses, at once exasperates and delights the mind.... Assured, then, of an authentic pleasure, Roger Fry’s first impulse was to share it....” Thus the guest before sitting down to dinner would be asked to share the dangerous delight of helping to translate Mallarmé into English:

  Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d’aile ivre Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre Le transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas lui!

  — how was that to be rendered? But if it was impossible to find the exact sense, let alone the exact sound, Mallarmé, intoned in Roger Fry’s deep and resonant voice, filled the dining-room with magnificent reverberations. Mallarmé stood with Cézanne among his patron saints. Mallarmé, of course, led to argument. The arts of painting and writing lay close together, and Roger Fry was always making raids across the boundaries. He was careful to explain that he knew nothing whatever about the writers’ problems, but that did not prevent him from discussing the other art. He enjoyed his irresponsibility. It left him free to indulge his speculative genius unfettered. Perhaps he was not altogether displeased to find flaws in the art of writing. In England, at least, literature had assumed such airs of superiority; it had done so much to turn the artist into a mere illustrator. So he would be perverse and he would be disparaging. How far, he would ask, could literature be considered an art? Writers lacked conscience; they lacked objectivity, they did not treat words as painters treat paint. “Gerald Brenan is almost the only writer who has the same sort of ideas about writing as we have about painting. I mean he believes that everything must come out of the matière of his prose and not out of the ideas and emotions he describes.” Most English novels — he read very few — were on a par with Frith’s “Derby Day”. Writers were moralists; they were propagandists and “propaganda... shuts off the contemplative penetration of life before it has found the finer shades of significance. It simplifies too much.” Defoe’s simplicity delighted him; Henry James’s complexity satisfied him. But in between, what a waste, what a confusion, what a jumble of mixed motives and impure desires!

  As a critic of literature, then, he was not what is called a safe guide. He looked at the carpet from the wrong side; but he made it for that very reason display unexpected patterns. And many of his theories held good for both arts. Design, rhythm, texture — there they were again — in Flaubert as in Cézanne. And he would hold up a book to the light as if it were a picture and show where in his view — it was a painter’s of course — it fell short. He greatly admired E. M. Forster’s Passage to India. “I think it’s a marvellous texture — really beautiful writing. But Oh lord I wish he weren’t a mystic, or that he would keep his mysticism out of his books.... I’m certain that the only meanings that are worth anything in a work of art are those that the artist himself knows nothing about. The moment he tries to explain his ideas and his emotions he misses the great thing.” Then “poetisation”, making things out more interesting than they really are, that imposition of the writer’s personality for which there is no exact critical term, was another sin that he discovered in the work of another friend. So his light fell upon new books and upon old, upon the great and the small. It fell spasmodically; it fell erratically. “I’m sure I’m right about Gerard Hopkins” — he had been equally sure that he was right about Marguerite Audoux. Proust at first reading was a source of endless joy to him. Then he revised Ins views. “He comes out rather too pernickety and silly.... I get impatient with him.... Fancy a mind that could work for three years upon Ruskin!” So to Balzac... “what a queer creature after Proust. However, he does make a kind of texture, in fact a very solid one, out of the purely external conditions of life. He never gets inside anything or anybody but he does make the panorama move along. Also I’ve fallen back on a twopenny edition of the Fleurs du Mal — what a queer book to be distributed among ‘the people’. But what a genius — only how tiresome romanticism is even when you have great genius. It becomes a duty to have such violent experiences that they tend to be faked, faute de mieux. But when he talks about cats, owls and simple things he has such tremendous style.”

  A theory impends, but it can be left pendant. To analyse, to explain, to theorise had for him an irresistible fascination. And yet he was almost envious of those who felt no such desire to investigate their sensations. It was so much better to create than to criticise, and perhaps, in order to create, unconsciousness was necessary. “Theories are dangerous for an artist. It is much better to know nothing about them.” It was thus that many arguments would end, and he would apologise for having ventured so many sweeping, perhaps ill-founded, criticisms of an art “about which I know nothing”. And the next letter would contain, not criticism, but an experiment of his own in prose poetry. It was not very successful; his interest in technique had perhaps allowed the sensation to grow cold. The nervous tremor which distinguishes the hand-made pot from the machine-made was lacking. Yet whatever the failure of his practice, and however distracting his theory, even in his rashest raids across the boundaries he conveyed his own sense of the immeasurable importance of art. Here one had pressed a little further — here one had been baffled. But in either case there was no conclusion, only the perpetual need for fresh effort. The thing itself went on whatever happened to the artist — in books, in pictures, in buildings and pots and chairs and tables. And the less the artist gave himself the airs of genius, the humbler he was; the more detached and disinterested, the more chance he had of becoming what Roger Fry sometimes called “a swell” — a member, though it might be a very humble member, of that confraternity to whom “Cézanne and Flaubert have become in a sort the patron saints”.

  VII

  The patron saints, in spite, perhaps because, of all the heresies of the ‘twenties — its mercantilism, its mysticism, its arrivisme — remained more firmly fixed than ever in their shrines. And the old enemies were still there, the snobbery of the British public, the stupidity of the Royal Academy, the timidity of officials. Nevertheless, a change in taste was gradually coming to pass: perhaps he had done something to bring it to pass himself. He noted in 1921 the amazing fact that the National Gallery had bought a Gauguin. “Ten years ago”, he wrote, “I was turned out of polite society for having a show of him.... Now they accept Gauguin but hate their contemporaries none the less.” It was his duty, and he practised it to buy his contemporaries. “It will be a long while before the modern pictures” — bought by selling one of his old masters to the National Gallery— “will be let into that exclusive society. Perhaps Pamela will live to see them there.” He was still sceptical about any genuine love of art among the English, and indignant at the travesties palmed off by the pseudo-artist whose “only faith is the faith in advertisement and getting on”. But though he could still be indignant, more often than in the past his indignation was tempered by other reflections. Officials became hidebound and reactionary as a matter of course. On the other hand, there were artists like Mark Gertler, like Matthew Smith, like McKnight Kauffer, like Duncan Grant, whose gifts differed but whose aims he respected immensely. There was a group of young English painters, he thought
, who were more promising and more serious than English painters had ever been in the past. And everywhere he met private people — Sir Michael Sadler, Mr Hindley Smith, Marian Richardson, to choose some names at random — who were carrying on the fight of the individual against the herd. There was much in all this to encourage him. And for the rest, the scientists had shown him that human nature is very little responsible for its behaviour. “I am very indulgent to myself,” he wrote, “and therefore I must be indulgent to others.” Over and over again in his letters at this time he urged upon his friends the necessity of “sagesse” and tried to acquire that virtue himself. “To see things in their true perspective, to cease to have any parti pris for oneself, what freedom!” As for his own reputation, about which he used to care, he had ceased to consider it, except as an impediment to freedom that one must endeavour to destroy from time to time. “He’s always chucking reputations”, he wrote with admiration of Picasso. Freedom was the word that summed up what he most desired, and perhaps, after infinite gropings and wanderings, he was on the road to it.

  The stock phrases thus never seem to have time to settle — he would not sit for his portrait as artist, or as critic; as politician or as prophet. But he did, to quote his own words about Balzac, “make a kind of texture... out of the purely external conditions of life”. In the spring he was off to Italy, or Spain, or France. In the winter, with the usual groans, he was dragged back to London. There he lectured and wrote; dined out and went to parties. At one of them Lady Astor took him for the devil “and I did my best to live up to it”. At another, given to Augustine Birrell on his eightieth birthday, he rejoiced in the sight of Francis Birrell “sublime in his unconsciousness of its being ‘an occasion3... in an old brown suit, a well-crumpled shirt, and a string of red stuff for tie...” and delighted in the wit of “old Augustine who was superb... he kept us in roars of laughter by simply saying what he felt in opposition to what people are expected to feel and finally almost forgot about the company and his speech while he mused over the engravings in the Shakespeare which we gave him”. Crannies of time were filled up with Mallarmé; with chess; with the Burlington Magazine^ and, since he was “very hard up”, with doing odd jobs of expertise.

  But this external framework was never allowed to cramp the other life, the personal life, which, according to his belief, must go on changing if it is to live. Detachment seems as good a word as another to define the change which these later years were bringing to pass. It was felt casually, incidentally, as such things are felt in ways that cannot be put into words. It is expressed in a letter written in 1920 to Lowes Dickinson. The old project of sharing a house together, perhaps in Pisa, perhaps in Provence, had once more come under consideration.

  Seriously it’s a splendid idea for one’s later years — years which I mean to be fuller and richer than any before. I suppose it’s a wild idea that, but I have a strange sense of liberation and ease as old age comes on. The envies and anxieties of appetite and ambition are gone or less — one’s egotism is there but it’s changed — it’s less sharp though perhaps it’s more petty.

  ... It’s true I still like to be in touch with the younger artists... but I get more and more inclined for quiet and sunshine and just to see tranquil and generous sights like the walls of Italian buildings... and now I know what I want to work out I could manage a great deal of comparative isolation. And then we should I think keep one another going — even our disagreements would prevent us going to sleep intellectually.

  But detachment did not mean withdrawal. His later years, as he told Lowes Dickinson, were to be richer and fuller, not emptier and paler than the others. And as he approached his sixtieth year his claim that the perpetual” revision of aesthetic experiences kept one alive aesthetically seemed to be justified in the emotional life also. New experiences succeeded the old, and brought new orientations. No crust must be allowed to form, even if the purely external conditions of life must have a certain solid texture. But while every sensation was to be savoured, and none rejected off-hand, a balance seemed to have been arrived at — a balance between the emotions and the intellect, between Vision and Design.

  CHAPTER XI. TRANSFORMATIONS

  I

  Transformations was the title that Roger Fry chose for a book of essays, and it seems a fitting title for the last ten years of his life, the years that were to be richer and fuller than any that had gone before. Indeed, so full were they of change and experiment that only a rapid and fragmentary sketch of those transformations and their results can be attempted. “The great difference I find between myself and these people”, he wrote from Pontigny in 1925, “is that I have curiosity and they haven’t. I want to have new experiences. I want to go out into this tremendous unknown universe outside one.

  The one drag upon this insatiable curiosity was, as might have been expected, the body. The long strain of the Omega, the hours spent potting in the cold factory at Poole, the odd meals he cooked for himself with the smell of paint hanging over the frying-pan, had told upon him. He suffered from violent attacks of a mysterious internal pain. But this also excited his curiosity. It might be indigestion; on the other hand it might be cancer. All theories must be given a trial, none must be dismissed offhand. And so with indefatigable optimism, rather as a scientist on the track of a new discovery than as a patient seeking relief from pain, he went from doctor to doctor, tried cure after cure— “One has to see lots of doctors and draw one’s own conclusions”. When the orthodox failed he had recourse to the quacks. Drops of blood were submitted to a man with a black box and a pointer. Next a gentleman with an instrument that “worked as a kind of wireless receiver of telepathic vibrations” was consulted. Whatever the verdict — and it varied — he considered it with complete open-mindedness. “It’s altogether too queer”, he wrote when reporting one of these experiments, “and I want to find out more about it.”

  This temper of mind, “this ridiculous and occasionally nefast gullibility” as Clive Bell put it, “was the exaggeration of an open-mindedness that made Roger not only one of the most delightful of companions, but one of the most remarkable men of his age. Had a serious student seriously advanced an opinion (say that Giotto or that Cézanne was no good) which called in question his (Roger’s) judgment and jeopardised his whole aesthetic, Roger would have listened attentively and sympathetically. And that, not out of urbanity, but because he was genuinely anxious to get at the truth....” Naturally, legends arose. What limits were there to what Roger Fry would believe if given the chance? It was tempting to give him the chance Might there not be, it was suggested, a scientific method for testing the value of works of art? The suggestion was acted upon. Next week he was found, according to gossip, “swinging a weight attached to a bit of string above a canvas by Cézanne or himself and attempting to measure by eye the extent of the oscillation”. Then his son, yachting in Southampton Water, reported some vagary in the tides, or perhaps in his own watch. To his father, however, a more sinister explanation seemed possible, indeed probable. He had been reading the astronomers. “He inferred that we were in the ambit of a “dark star’ which in all probability would shortly collide with the planet and annihilate it.” And so convincing was the picture that he drew of this catastrophe that doom seemed to hang over the omnibus that took his guests down the Holloway Road. As for the cures that he discovered and pressed on his friends, the patent medicines, the pills, the ointments, even the saffron-coloured vests — legend had it that he had pressed one such garment upon a lady threatened with tuberculosis with instructions that she must wear it “if possible on a promontory above the sea, looking east at sunrise” — they were legion. Perhaps one anecdote which is told and vouched for by Clive Bell may sum up this aspect of Roger Fry’s open-mindedness. A party was travelling in Italy: at Bologna one of them was struck down with illness. Roger Fry “arrived direct from Paris and found the little Italian doctor in the sick-room. Now in Paris, just outside the Gare de Lyon, Roger’s eye had been
taken by a gay, multi-coloured tube containing a secret remedy. He had opened it in the train, administered a dose to himself — to precisely what end I am not sure — and studied the printed matter that surrounded it. This had satisfied him that he had in his waistcoat pocket nothing less than the veritable panacea. So, when the Italian doctor had finished his examination, written out a prescription, and arranged for a consultation with the professor of the faculty, Roger stepped forward, and a little uneasily I do think, said that he had brought with him something from Paris that might be worth trying.

  “ ‘What does it cure?’

  “ ‘Tutto’, said Roger without flinching.

  “È troppo’, said the little doctor.”

  II

  It was not surprising, then, to find that in 1923 when other cures failed he prepared to submit himself to Dr Coué. But it was interesting. For he had a natural antipathy to that “damned thing” the unconscious; and the “huge Quaker obstinacy and independence of our race” revolted against submitting to it. On the other hand, a new experiment appealed to his curiosity, and there was also the human interest of the strange gathering that collected round the queer little man in the big shed at Nancy. Coué, he said, looked like a grocer’s assistant, and yet was so simple, so gay, so sincere that soon all the dismal invalids were laughing and believing in him as in “a kind of secular Jesus Christ. People of all nationalities and classes had come together. They told their stories in public. Miracles happened daily. A cripple walked; a deaf and dumb English lady suddenly recovered the use of faculties. At first it seemed impossible for Roger Fry to be anything but a detached and sympathetic spectator. “It’s terribly difficult for people with so external and analytical a mind as I have to submit”, he wrote. For six hours daily he sat on a camp-stool repeating “Ça passe” and tried to realise that his scepticism was “merely instinctive and irrational”. At last the charm began to work. His pain left him, and he went on to develop a theory of the unconscious, and that theory was, of course, brought to bear upon art. The séances at Nancy had their share in developing his growing interest in the art of uncivilised races. “The development of the unconscious in art”, he was to write in his last Slade lectures, “may bring about a purer and more expressive visual art and one that is complementary to the intellectual and spiritual art of the West.” And with Coué in his mind he went on to the Colonial Exhibition at Marseilles and exclaimed, on ‘ seeing the negroes, “What we’ve lost by forgetting how to be animals!”