Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  Home life was difficult, and London life was dull and conventional after Cambridge. The family circle was legal and scientific, not artistic. When he dined out, he met a gentleman, a certain General, the type of many he was to meet in later years, who said, “What I demand in a picture is that it shall represent something to me which I can recognise at once, and if it doesn’t do that I maintain it is a bad picture”. Even with Lowes Dickinson he could not discuss painting. “But all this is technical rot to you”, he broke off, after trying to explain Bate’s methods as a teacher. When his Cambridge friends braved the rigours of family supper and went upstairs afterwards to sit in the room with a gas fire, they “plotted the destruction of society... unknown to the rest of the family”. Their interests remained the old interests — Shelley, Walt Whitman, and social reform. They were all convinced that “social service of some kind was the only end worth pursuing”. And in obedience to this creed Roger Fry tried also to make art the servant of society. He went to Toynbee Hall and gave lessons in drawing; but they were not successful. “I can’t possibly tell them to look for hidden meanings in things... at least my tongue would visibly fill my cheek if I did.” There was something in that compromise too that was disagreeable to him. He sampled the pleasures of London. He took train to Aldgate with a friend and tried to find adventures in the slums of Whitechapel and the Minories, “but we found nothing, much to my great relief for I didn’t much like the idea of a row”. The theatre was sampled too. One night he went to see Mrs Langtry act in Antony and Cleopatra. “Mrs Langtry really is very grand, quite worth going to see and acts really tolerably well, but anything more hopelessly absurd than the rest of the show it is hard to conceive. If you can imagine a number of respectable cheesemongers who have retired to Bedlam ranting and strutting about not invariably accompanied by the prescribed number of H’s, you will have some idea of the ridiculousness of the whole thing.” And one day on the top of an omnibus he again met Mr Bernard Shaw. More illusions fell from him. Bernard Shaw “took occasion to explain to me what a colossal farce British Justice was. Up to then my respect for my father had led me to take his word for it that anything so pure as British justice had never been known on earth. Again I shelved it....”

  But he could not go on shelving it perpetually. The friction with his parents was increasing. They could not help “expressing disgust at my determination to go on drawing”; and he could not help asserting his determination to be an artist and nothing else. At last there was what he called “a general bust-up and explanation of my views with my people.... I think on the whole it is a very good thing. It removes the veil of reserve almost amounting to hypocrisy which I had long kept up so as not to hurt their feelings. You can understand knowing me as you do, how difficult I feel it to steer clear of priggish self-assertion on the one hand and dishonest compliance on the other, especially as I cannot quite make my usual motto of Don’t care a damn apply to the opinion that my people have of me.”

  Obviously, he cared a great deal what his “people” thought of him. He was “fearfully sensitive to slight innuendoes”. He had a profound admiration for his father. He had moreover little confidence in his own gift as a painter, and no reason to think that he could make his living as an artist. For many years to come he would be dependent upon his father, and Sir Edward would have the right to look for results and to criticise failures. But he could not go on vacillating between self-assertion and dishonest compliance. That was the compromise that family life forced upon him; and he was determined to end it. “I may be a bloody fool”, he wrote, “but am at least as obstinate as a pig”. So the compromise between the bed sitting room and the studio which had been “frightfully uphill work for both parties” broke down; and in the spring of 1891 he left home and went for his first visit to Italy.

  II

  He had crossed the Channel before — there had been childish holidays in Switzerland and undergraduate visits to the Schillers at Gersau. But this was his first visit to Italy, and he went with a friend of his own age, Pip Hughes, the son of Thomas Hughes. The change from Bayswater and Hammersmith, the change even from Cambridge, was immense. It was a change from fog and damp to clear colours and sharp outlines. It was a change from plaster casts in museums and photographs in friend’s rooms to statues and buildings and the pictures themselves. It was a change from compromise and obedience to independence and certainty.

  “Rome at last” — such are the first words of his first letter to Lowes Dickinson, dated 15th February 1891. A thick packet of letters, to Lowes Dickinson, to Basil Williams, to his family, is still in existence. They are traveller’s letters; full of details about lost luggage and quarrels with railway officials, with long and laboured descriptions of pictures, buildings and landscapes. He was always a casual and a careless letter-writer; a letter-writer who did not, like the born letter-writer, change his tone according to his correspondents. But for all that, the letters still convey the hum and pressure, the excitement and the rapture of those first weeks in Italy. Perhaps some notion of what they meant to him can best be given by making a skipping summary of their packed pages.

  Oh I wish I could send you some of the sunlight of this divine city of splashing fountains and sunburnt domes.... Yes, Italy is much better than I ever thought but it smells much worse.... We have a divine sort of balcony or rather roof top where our host grows vines and oranges... but the wife proceeded to have a kid the morning we came in... he therefore kicked up the devil of a fuss... and demanded the whole rent to be paid in advance... I’m getting frightfully learned in Italian dishes... we have found a wonderfully cheap Trattoria where we can dine splendidly for about 2 francs.... The Colosseum is a big ugly ruin very like a large building contractors yard.... Sometimes I dislike being so many hundreds of years old as one is in Rome and wish the whole bloody place might be burnt down.... But it is Eternal and I don’t think anything can touch it.... Whatever I have said against Rome... I won’t say anything against Italy... the country is perfectly lovely.... We took a two days’ walk. We went to Nemi [a pen-and-ink sketch of Nemi is inserted]. I doubt if you will understand this. If you don’t, half shut your eyes, and if you don’t then, shut them quite.... Every now and then we came on beds of purple crocus bursting up through last years dead leaves.... We sat and drank wine and watched the sun go down like a red hot ball into the blue sea of the Campagna.

  In the evenings the two young men argued :

  We continue to discuss socialism and individualism, and of course Pip has plenty of texts for his sermons in the treatment we experience at the hands of officials.... I’m furious about the officialism and bureaucracy of this damned government. It seriously interferes with what good I might get from Rome not to be able to make a note of a thing without rushing round after a permesso.... I want to get some idea of the development of early Christian art but can’t without getting a separate permesso.... I am often speechless with indignation.

  But however he might abuse the Roman officials, the Roman people enchanted him:

  I’ve just been walking on our loggia under a vine trellis through which the stars shine while in the street below... some men are playing intoxicating and voluptuous dance music which makes even me dance to it.... I think there is a great deal of spontaneous music in the Italians....

  Then he began to go to the play:

  Last night I went to hear Antony and Cleopatra.... Cleopatra is done by the great Duse.... She is called the Italian Sarah Bernhardt; she is really magnificent... she emphasised the witch or gipsy character rather than the grand queen and yet kept it full of dignity... it was incomparably finer than Mrs Langtry and the hair-dresser business.

  But the greater part of every day was spent in seeing pictures. While Pip, who had no great liking for sightseeing, sat in the loggia smoking toothpicks, “having a dislike for Government tobacco”, Roger Fry, armed with a note-book, worked steadily, seriously and enthusiastically round the galleries.

  My dear Goldie [he bur
st out], I’ve made a great discovery. Raphael is a great painter... one of the greatest. I never used to believe it, and I think I was right not to when I had only seen his English works — the fact is he is a fresco painter and not an oil painter.... I think the Venetians are the only Italians who knew what oil meant. Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love... is simply splendid... and so is Veronese’s Rape of Europa — But Raphael’s Galatea I Isn’t it divine? He seems to me in some way to have effected in some way the synthesis of Christianity and Paganism.... The Pantheon is the one really grand Roman building... I can’t in the least explain the effect it produces — it is like the awe and reverence one feels in a great Gothic “fane” and yet it hasn’t any mystery.....I’ve been to-day to see the Baths of Caracalla — they’re no better than a railway station.... I’ve been to the Vatican sculpture and had the divinest antidote to Rome in Greek sculpture. I’ve noticed that the Greeks always have a wonderful treatment of the surface of the marble which leaves it almost soft to the touch instead of the polish the Romans sometimes put on.... I’ve got very keen on Etruscan things.... I think they will throw some light on Greek paintings because what is so interesting is the extraordinary way in which they accepted Greek art. But there is also much that is original in their art and I think I can trace all that I formerly thought the Romans had added to Greek art (namely something grotesque and picturesque) to an Etruscan origin — so much so that I think what the Italians of the Renaissance selected for their model was rather what was Etruscan in Roman art than anything else. I daresay this is rather wild or else has been said before but at present I’m rather mad on them....

  So he spent the days indefatigably looking at pictures. And then he began to dine out.

  I’ve begun [the letters go on] to get into Roman society... last night we had a most delicious dinner through a friend of Pip’s people, Miss Cartwright. She asked Signor Costa, the great Italian Pre-Raphaelite, to take us all to a restaurant and give us a real Roman dinner.... We had frogs dressed in various ways and other strange and delightful Roman dishes. He brought his wife and daughter.... After dinner we walked about Rome. I fell quite in love with the daughter.... Also I have met Elihu Vedder a nice burly beefy sort of American with a stupendous opinion of himself.... I’ve also seen Mrs Stillman who is Rossetti and Burne-Jones personified.... I think a few years ago I would have thought her almost divine. Now I should like a little more blood.

  And then he fell in with William Sharp, who excited him with stories of the Campagna — one part South of Rome is absolutely wild — herds of wild buffaloes and wild horses without a soul living in it and yet once full of huge Etruscan cities....

  Finally the two young men made friends with a Contessa who showered invitations and introductions upon them, and altogether Roman society became so exciting that he was glad, he said, that he had not discovered its charms sooner, or he would have done even less work than he had done.

  Yet he had worked hard enough, and not only at seeing pictures. He had been painting pictures too. He went out sketching by himself.

  I’m doing a lovely thing near the Villa Madonna... a row of bare trees bright red in the afternoon sun and behind the Apennines and the blue sky and in front a pool and sheep and a shepherd.... The frogs in the pool drive me wild with their incessant invitations to the female.... But there is a deaf little green lizard with whom I always have a talk as he sits by my paint box and lets me brush his back which he afterwards licks. The other inhabitant is a most wonderful shepherd boy who is half savage.... He is ugly and dressed entirely in raw sheep skins but what is interesting is that he always stands like the shepherds in Greek vases in the most beautiful attitudes.

  What with seeing pictures, painting them, making new friends and dining with them, the weeks in Rome were packed to the brim. He had seen “all the important pictures and statues at least twice” as well as “a great many churches”. He had painted “six largish pictures, and many little drawings and copies”. And now, leaving Pip Hughes in Rome, for though they got on very well Pip was indolent— “he suffers from almost perpetual melancholy relieved by occasional flashes of moody exhilaration” was Roger’s way of describing what was probably a natural disinclination for several hours of picture-seeing daily — he was off to Sicily alone.

  Sicily begins with a quotation, “And torrents of green rush down from the snows to be quenched in the purple seas”. It goes on with “Sicily is divine — to be there is to live in a perpetual idyll”. Syracuse, Palermo, Girgenti, each with a note of exclamation, for each is the loveliest place he had ever seen, follow. Temples and churches are visited, ruins and mosaics are described. Good Friday comes with its procession. Onlookers light their cigarettes at the holy candles. The dead body of Christ is carried past. And then a friend, Seaman, is met, who rushes him through the sights “a good deal faster than I liked, but perhaps it was as well to get a general view”. Anyhow, this is only a first taste of the wonderful land; next time Goldie must come too. And the next letter from Cambridge is to be addressed to the Villino Landau at Florence.

  So, taking Amalfi and Sorrento and Paestum on the way, walking much of the road on foot, and falling in with two delightful American architects who played the flute and discussed art endlessly, he reached Florence, and that incredibly cheap pension where one could live not merely in comfort but in luxury for six francs a day and enjoy many of the humours of a Jane Austen novel into the bargain. “Florence”, he exclaimed, after a first walk by night to a hill-top from which the lights of the city showed bright among the olives and the cypress trees, “is splendid — in some ways the jolliest things I’ve had yet.” And then work began — the usual round of all the galleries. There are references to Andrea del Sarto; to Masaccio; to the Lorenzo Library, and to the chapel of the Medici which “make me quite certain that Michelangelo was much the greatest architect that has lived since Greek times. It is a perfectly new effect, produced by the most subtle arrangement in proportion and expresses an idea at least as complete and’ intelligible as a sonata of Beethoven’s which indeed it much resembles.... Botticelli’s Primavera is as splendid as I had expected and renews all the delight I had when I first saw your photograph and which I feared I should never again get out of Pre-Raphaelite painting...” Then by great good luck he met Daniel (Sir A. M. Daniel) and they “grind all day at pictures.... Daniel with his terrific energy and intellectual beefishness is making me do it much more scientifically than I should otherwise.... The pictures are extraordinary.... Ashbee is out here and has joined us. He occasionally gives us parts of a Wagner opera on the Piazza Signoria.... If only Cambridge could be transplanted to Florence I believe you [G. L. Dickinson] would produce a great work. Wedd would become an epic poet, and McTaggart would go up to heaven in a fiery metaphysic.” So with music and argument and endless visits to the galleries, the days rushed by.

  Then all of a sudden the gossip of the old maids in the pension became intolerable; the heat made him ill; he bought a great Panama straw hat and started off alone for a walking tour in Tuscany. The sun blazed; the country was parched and wild. Sometimes he walked eighteen miles a day through “the most absolute wilderness I ever saw... everywhere mile after mile hill behind hill one desperate wilderness of yellow sandy clay.... I assure you I nearly gave up and lay down and prayed sometimes.” But at last “I got through to a lovely little village called Sinalunga where I found a magnificent Sodoma....” On he walked. He stayed with peasants in a farmhouse and had “a delightful feeling of being perfectly at home with them”. Adventures befell him. He was taken for a brigand in his great straw hat; for some mysterious reason a man picked a quarrel with him; a suspicious landlady refused to believe that there could be such a name as Fry — it was too short she asserted; he had to find an official and to produce his passport, and even so he had to pay his night’s lodging in advance. Still, in spite of all rubs and hardships, “I can’t give you any idea of the gracious gentleness of manner of these Tuscan peasants, nor of
the Madonna-like beauty of the women”. And so, either on foot or by train, he visited Volterra and Prato and San Gimignano and Pistoia and Lucca; and made sketches and picked flowers and took notes and looked at so many pictures, frescoes, baptisteries and statues that at last he has to ask pardon both for describing so much and for leaving so much undescribed. At last, too, he exclaimed: “I am beginning to feel like a boa-constrictor after a very big bull or whatever it is that he constricts” and felt “half inclined to come home at once and begin the process of digestion”.