Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  If we want an example of the difference between writing and non-writing we have only to compare a page of Queen Marie with a page of Queen Victoria. The old Queen was, of course, an author. She was forced by the exigencies of her profession to fill an immense number of pages, and some of these have been printed and bound between covers. But between the old Queen and the English language lay an abyss which no depth of passion and no strength of character could cross. Her works make very painful reading on that account. She has to express herself in words; but words will not come to her call. When she feels strongly and tries to say so, it is like hearing an old savage beating with a wooden spoon on a drum. “... this last refusal of Servia... almost forces us to SEE that there is no false play.” Rhythm is broken; the few poverty-stricken words are bruised and battered; now hooked together with hyphens, now desperately distended with italics and capital letters — it is all no good. In the same way her descriptions of celebrated people slip through the fingers like water. “I waited a moment in the Drawing-room to speak to Irving and Ellen Terry. He is very gentleman-like, and she, very pleasing and handsome.” This primitive little machine is all that she has with which to register some of the most extraordinary experiences that ever fell to a woman’s lot. But probably she owed much of her prestige to her inability to express herself. The majority of her subjects, knowing her through her writing, came to feel that only a woman immune from the usual frailties and passions of human nature could write as Queen Victoria wrote. It added to her royalty.

  But now by some freak of fate, which Queen Victoria would have been the first to deplore, her granddaughter, the eldest child of the late Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh, has been born with a pen in her hand. Words do her bidding. Her own account of it is illuminating. “Even as a child,” she says, “I possessed a vivid imagination and I liked telling stories to my sisters.... Then one of my children said to me: ‘Mama, you ought to write all this down, it is a pity to allow so many beautiful pictures to fade away.’... I knew nothing whatever about writing, about style or composition, or about the ‘rules of the game,’ but I did know how to conjure up beauty, also at times, emotion. I also had a vast store of words.” It is true; she knows nothing about the “rules of the game”; words descend and bury whole cities under them; sights that should have been seen once and for all are distracted and dissipated; she ruins her effects and muffs her chances; but still because she feels abundandy, because she rides after her emotion fearlessly and takes her fences without caring for falls, she conjures up beauty and conveys emotion. Nor is it merely that by a happy fluke she is able to hit off a moment’s impression, a vivid detail; she has the rarer power of sweeping these figures along in a torrent of language; lives grow and change beneath our eyes; scenes form themselves; details arrange themselves; all the actors come alive. Her most remarkable achievement in this way is her portrait of “Aunty” — that Queen Elizabeth of Roumania who called herself Carmen Sylva. As it happened, Queen Victoria also tried her hand at a portrait of this lady. “The dear charming Queen,” she writes, “came to luncheon.... She spoke with resignation and courage of her many trials and difficulties.... I gave her a Celtic brooch and Balmoral shawl, also some books.... The Queen read to us one of her plays, an ancient Greek story, very tragic. She read it to us most wonderfully and beautifully, and had quite an inspired look as she did so.... Many could, of course, not understand, as she read it in German, but all were interested.”

  In Queen Marie’s hands this “dear charming Queen” develops out of all recognition. She becomes a complex contradictory human being, wearing floating veils and a motoring cap, at once “splendid and absurd.” We see her posing in bed under a top fight; dramatising herself melodramatically; luxuriating in the flattery of sycophants; declaiming poetry through a megaphone to ships at sea; waving a napkin to grazing cows whom she mistakes for loyal subjects — deluded and fantastic, but at the same time generous and sincere. So the picture shapes itself, until all the different elements are shown in action. Two scenes stand out with genuine vitality — one where the romantic impulsive old lady seeks to enchant an ancient flame — the late Duke of Edinburgh — by dragging him to a hill-top where hidden minstrels spring out from behind rocks and bawl native melodies into his disgusted ears; the other where Queen Elizabeth of Roumania and Queen Emma of Holland sit at their needlework while the Italian secretary reads aloud. He chose Maeterlinck, and as he declaimed the famous passage where the queen bee soars higher and higher in her nuptial ecstasy till at last the male insect, ravaged by passion, drops dismembered to the ground, Carmen Sylva raised her beautiful white hands in rapture. But Queen Emma gave one look at the reader and went on hemming her duster.

  Vivid as it all is, nobody is going to claim that Queen Marie ranks with Saint Simon or with Proust. Yet it would be equally absurd to deny that by virtue of her pen she has won her freedom. She is no longer a royal queen in a cage. She ranges the world, free like any other human being to laugh, to scold, to say what she likes, to be what she is. And if she has escaped, so too, thanks to her, have we. Royalty is no longer quite royal. Uncle Bertie, Onkel, Aunty, Nando, and the rest, are not mere effigies bowing and smiling, opening bazaars, expressing exalted sentiments, and remembering faces always with the same sweet smile. They are violent and eccentric; charming and ill-tempered; some have bloodshot eyes; others handle flowers with a peculiar tenderness. In short, they are very like ourselves. They live as we do. And the effect is surprising. A month or two ago, the late Duke of Edinburgh was as dead as the dodo. Now, thanks to his daughter, we know that he liked beer; that he liked to sip it while he read his paper; that he hated music; that he loathed Roumanian melodies; and that he sat on a rock in a rage.

  But what will be the consequences if this familiarity between them and us increases? Can we go on bowing and curtseying to people who are just like ourselves? Are we not already a little ashamed of the pushing and the staring now that we know from these two stout volumes that one at least of the animals can talk? We begin to wish that the Zoo should be abolished; that the royal animals should be given the run of some wider pasturage — a royal Whipsnade. And another question suggests itself. When a gift for writing lodges in a family, it often persists and improves; and if Queen Marie’s descendants improve upon her gift as much as she has improved upon Queen Victoria’s is it not quite possible that a real poet will be King of England in a hundred years’ time? And suppose that among the autumn books of 2034 is Prometheus Unbound, by George the Sixth, or Wuthering Heights, by Elizabeth the Second, what will be the effect upon their loyal subjects? Will the British Empire survive? Will Buckingham Palace look as solid then as it does now? Words are dangerous things, let us remember. A republic might be brought into being by a poem.

  ROGER FRY: A BIOGRAPHY

  Roger Fry: A Biography was first published in 1940 by Hogarth Press and featured artwork by Vanessa Bell. Roger Fry was a British artist and art critic, who became a close friend to Woolf and her inner circle including working closely with Clive Bell and having a romantic relationship with Vanessa Bell, in spite of Fry already being married. Fry was born in 1860s and became very influential in the art world through his promotion of modern art in Britain. He was an advocate for some of the developments being pioneered in the late nineteenth century by French painters and artists, which he coined ‘Post-Impressionist’. Fry highlighted the formal properties of painting and was at the forefront of altering British tastes in art. Early in his career Fry was interested in the Italian ‘Old Masters’, but in 1906 he came across the works of Paul Cézanne and this instigated his change of direction as an art critic towards a fascination for French art.

  Woolf was given the responsibility of producing the biography by Fry’s widow and she produced an incredibly respectful work, approaching the art scholar’s personal and professional failures with the kindness one would expect from a close friend. A significant section of the text consists of Fry’s letters, which reveal some of the do
ubts he had about his art and writings. Woolf offers little editorial comment during large sections of the work and her voice only asserts itself when she begins to chronicle Fry’s life within the Bloomsbury Group. Although it is far from Woolf’s most interesting non-fiction book, Roger Fry: A Biography reveals yet another facet of her talent and ability.

  Roger Fry (1866-1934) was an English artist, critic and member of the Bloomsbury Group.

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  CHAPTER I. CHILDHOOD: SCHOOL

  CHAPTER II. CAMBRIDGE

  CHAPTER III. LONDON: ITALY: PARIS

  CHAPTER IV. CHELSEA : MARRIAGE

  CHAPTER V. WORK

  CHAPTER VI. AMERICA

  CHAPTER VII. THE POST-IMPRESSIONISTS

  CHAPTER VIII. THE OMEGA

  CHAPTER IX. THE WAR YEARS

  CHAPTER X. VISION AND DESIGN

  CHAPTER XI. TRANSFORMATIONS

  APPENDIX

  A portrait of Woolf by Roger Fry, 1917

  FOREWORD

  London, April, 1940

  Dear Virginia,

  Years ago, after one of those discussions upon the methods of the arts which illuminated his long and happy friendship with you, Roger suggested, half seriously, that you should put into practice your theories of the biographer’s craft in a portrait of himself. When the time came for his life to be written some of us who were very close to him, thinking it would have been his wish as well as ours, asked you to undertake it.

  I have now begged to have this page to tell you of our gratitude to you for having accepted, and for having brought to completion a piece of work neither light nor easy. As the book is to have no formal preface may I here join with yours our thanks to all those who have allowed the use of letters and pictures in their possession.

  MARGERY FRY

  CHAPTER I. CHILDHOOD: SCHOOL

  I

  “I lived the first six years of my life in the small eighteenth-century house at No. 6, The Grove, Highgate. This garden is still for me the imagined background for almost any garden scene that I read of in books” — thus Roger Fry began a fragment of autobiography. We may pause for a moment on the threshold of that small house at Highgate to ask what we can learn about him before he became conscious both of the serpent which bent down “from the fork of a peculiarly withered and soot begrimed old apple tree”, and of the ‘large red oriental poppies which by some blessed chance” grew in his “private and particular garden”.

  He was born on 14th December 1866, the second son of Edward Fry and of Mariabella, the daughter of Thomas Hodgkin. Both were Quakers. Behind Roger on his father’s side were eight recorded generations of Frys, beginning with that Zephaniah, the first to become a Quaker, in whose house in Wiltshire George Fox held “a very blessed meeting, and quiet, though the officers had purposed to break it up, and were on their way in order thereunto. But before they got to it, word was brought them, that there was a house just broken up by thieves, and they were required to go back again with speed... That was in 1663, and from that time onwards the Frys held the Quaker faith and observed certain marked peculiarities both of opinion and of dress, for which, in the early days, they endured considerable persecution. The first of them, Zephaniah, was in prison for three months for refusing to take the oath of allegiance. As time went on the persecution weakened; they had nothing worse to suffer than the “sneers and coldness of their own class”; but whatever they suffered they abode by their convictions consistently. The injunction “Swear not at all” meant that no oaths could be taken, and therefore many professions were shut to them. Some of the Frys added additional scruples of their own. Even the profession of medicine was distasteful to Joseph, the grandson of Zephaniah, because “he could not feel easy to accept payment for the water contained in the medicines he dispensed”. Such scruples— “miserable questions of dress and address”, as Edward Fry came to call them — tormented the weaker spirits and laid them open to ridicule. They vacillated between the two worlds. A coat-of-arms was first engraved and then scratched out; fine linen was ordered and then cut up; one John Eliot fretted himself into the conviction that he ought to outrage eighteenth-century convention by growing a beard. The arts as well as the professions were outside the pale. Not only was the theatre forbidden, but music and dancing; and though “drawing and water-colour painting were tolerated or encouraged”, the encouragement was tepid, for, with some notable exceptions, even in the nineteenth century almost the only picture to be found in a Quaker household was an engraving of Perm’s Treaty with the Indians — that detestable picture, as Roger Fry called it later.

  Undoubtedly the Quaker society, as one of its members writes, was “very narrow in outlook and bounded in interests; very bourgeois as to its members”. But the canalising of so much energy within such narrow limits bore remarkable fruit. The story of Joseph Fry is typical of the story of many of the Frys. Since, owing to his scruples, the medical profession was shut to him, “he took to business occupations, and established, or took part in establishing, five considerable businesses which probably proved far more remunerative than the profession which he had renounced for conscience sake”. Hence there came about a curious anomaly; the most unworldly of people were yet abundantly blessed with the world’s goods. The tradesman who lived over his shop in Bristol or in Bartholomew Close was at the same time a country gentleman owning many acres in Cornwall or in Wiltshire. But he was a country gentleman of a peculiar kind. He was a squire who refused to pay tithes; who refused to hunt or to shoot; who dressed differently from his neighbours, and, if he married, married a Quaker like himself. Thus the Frys and the Eliots, the Howards and the Hodgkins not only lived differently and spoke differently and dressed differently from other people, but these differences were enforced by innumerable inter-marriages. Any Quaker who married “outside the society” was disowned. For generation after generation therefore the sons of one Quaker family married the daughters of another. Mariabella Hodgkin, Roger Fry’s mother, came of precisely the same physical and spiritual stock as her husband Edward Fry. She was descended from the Eliots who, like the Frys, had been Quakers since the seventeenth century. They too had eschewed public life and had accumulated considerable wealth, first as merchants at Falmouth “exporting pilchards and tin to Venice”, and later in London, where they owned a large family mansion in Bartholomew Close. The Eliots married with the Howards, who were tinplate manufacturers and Quakers also. And it was through the marriage of Luke Howard, the son of Robert, the tinplate manufacturer of Old Street, with Mariabella Eliot that the only two names among all the names in the ample family chronicle in which their descendant Roger Fry showed any interest came into the family. His great-grandfather, Luke Howard (1772-1864), was a man of “brilliant but rather erratic genius” who, like so many of the Friends, being denied other outlet, turned his attention to science. He was the author of an essay “proposing a classification and nomenclature of the clouds” which attracted the attention of Goethe, who not only wrote a poem on the subject but entered into communication with the author. Mariabella Hodgkin could remember her grandfather. He seemed, she writes, “always to be thinking of something very far away.... He... would stand for a long time at the window gazing at the sky with his dreamy placid look”, and, like some of his descendants, he was “deft in the use of tools” and taught his grandchildren in his own workshop how to handle air pumps and electrical machines. Roger Fry left his copy of the family history uncut, but he admitted that he wished he knew more of this ingenious ancestor whose gift for setting other people’s minds to work by speculations which were not “entirely confirmed by subsequent observation” suggests some affinity of temperament as well as of blood. The other name that took Roger Fry’s fancy, though for different reasons, was his mother’s — Mariabella. It was first given in the seventeenth century to the daughter of a Blake who married a Farnborough, whose daughter married a Briggins, whose daughter married an Eliot. It was a name with a certain mystery att
ached to it, for it was “evidently Italian or Spanish in its origin”, and Roger Fry, who took no interest whatever in the Eliots and their possible connection with the Eliots of Port St Germans, or in the Westons and their possible but improbable descent from Lord Weston, Earl of Portland, liked to think that his ancestress, the first Mariabella, owed her name to some connection with the South. He hoped that the quiet and respectable blood of his innumerable Quaker forefathers was dashed with some more fiery strain. But it was only a hope. No scandal in the Eliot family had been recorded for more than two hundred years. His mother, Mariabella Hodgkin, the seventh to bear that name, was a pure-bred Quaker like the rest; and it was in the Friends’ Meeting House at Lewes on a cloudless spring day in April 1859 that Edward Fry married her and brought her back to the small house in Highgate That house, Edward Fry wrote, “looked over Miss Burdett-Coutts garden of Holly Lodge beyond to the roofs of London... a little garden, with a copper beech in one corner, sloped down from the house to the trees of our great neighbour, and was very dear to us in those early days. It was a little plot