Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  But still Venice remained. And Venice happily provided a respite, for he had been walking too far and seeing too much and was feeling mentally surfeited and physically knocked up. In Venice he came to a halt. In Venice there were cafés, or “little pubs” as he called them, where after the day’s sightseeing he could sit, and sample strange dishes, and drink good wine. Such was always his natural method of taking his ease when the sun had sunk and he could see no more pictures. And at Venice in May 1891 he was supremely fortunate. For there he fell in with John Addington Symonds, whose books, though he came to dislike the style, had, so Roger Fry always said, the root of the matter in them, and whose talk, he added, was infinitely better than his books. With Symonds was Horatio Brown, “the authority upon early Venetian painting”, “a solid unselfish pessimistic sort of man who says very surprising things when he does speak”. Both Symonds and Brown were “awfully good” to him. They asked him to dine with them almost every night “at a little tiny pub where they are habitués and know all the Venetians who frequent it”. The atmosphere was completely congenial. The pub was kept by a magnificent Venetian who looked as if he “might have stepped out of some great Vandyke portrait”. Roger christened him “Il Senatore” and sketched his portrait while they talked and drank. And while they talked, Roger marvelled at the ease with which Symonds and Horatio Brown mixed with “the people” — perhaps he was thinking of the pond loafers at Highgate and their big red hands — and reflected, “Somehow I think it would be easier to be friends with ‘the people’ here than in England. Class distinctions are not really deeply implanted, and there is always a substructure of latent culture; civilisation has had so long to sink in and has penetrated the people so that they have all sorts of fine and delicate perceptions even when they can’t read or write.”

  With Symonds and Brown he could talk to his heart’s content, and sometimes indeed rather to his mind’s bewilderment.

  Last night we stayed up till the small hours discussing the preposterous paradox started by Symonds in real good faith, namely that Botticelli was either a fool with a knack of drawing who didn’t understand the least what he was about or else a puritan satirist who tried to bring the sensuosity of the Renaissance into contempt by his pot-bellied Venuses, &c. &c. I tried to convince him but in vain; he is wrong and ought to own it — the worst of it was that defending Botticelli is not at all what I am naturally keen on now but such a theory demanded criticism which alas, I was not very well able to give. Symonds ended by saying “Of course we are all very thankful to Botticelli for having inspired those pages of Walter Pater”, and then he added with what I think was hardly good taste in one who is so obviously a rival, “That is the worst thing I’ve yet said about Botticelli”.

  Symonds perhaps saw in the young Cambridge art student someone who could still be very easily shocked and was worth shocking and so educating; for he continued the process at his own flat.

  There one evening [Roger continued, to Basil Williams] we had the most extraordinary company I ever met. In the first place one Cope Whitehouse, an American who thinks he has discovered Lake Moeris and is going to fill it with water from the Nile. He was the most perfect type of schemer I ever met (Harry Richmond’s father would give you some idea of him).... I never want to see a cleverer humbug and bogus company builder. With the next visitor the scene shifted from G. Meredith to Oscar Wilde for it [was] no one less than Lord Ronald Gower who one recognised at once as the original of Lord Henry in Dorian Gray. A middle-aged man with a splendidly finely featured aristocratic face not yet quite brutalised by debauchery, the most perfect manner, easy and affable, perhaps a little too indifferent. He talked very well about Greek sculpture and Giorgione and so on, but the conversation finally became weird and remarkable without ever being other than perfectly proper in its expression. The details of it I would rather tell you than write.

  It was now Roger Fry’s turn to be shocked; there was still a great deal of the Quaker in him that was liable to shock from the “surprising” things that were openly discussed. There was no “cast iron morality”, nothing Nomian in the atmosphere that surrounded Symonds and Horatio Brown at Venice.

  Symonds [he wrote admiringly] is the most pornographic person I ever saw but not in the least nasty... he has become most confidential to me over certain passages in his life. He is a curious creature — very dogmatic and overbearing in discussion, but with nice humane broad views of life.

  But though he was still a little shocked — Quaker scruples still had an awkward way of asserting themselves — he felt nevertheless “absolutely at home here in Venice”. As he sauntered along the Zattere at night after these conversations, “it had just the feeling of King’s Backs to me without its associations” he remarked. Lowes Dickinson and Wedd and McTaggart unfortunately were missing; nevertheless, he found that he could talk perfectly openly with Symonds and Brown— “who is most Apostolic” — and not only about morals and philosophy, but about Veronese and Tintoretto and Tiepolo, whose pictures he had been seeing that morning. There was no fear that Symonds or Brown would complain, as his Cambridge friends complained, that he was “talking rot about technique”. Technique was not rot to them; pictures were the most important things to them in the world. And then there added itself to the group at the little pub another figure who was to recur in other pubs and other places so frequently that no record of Roger Fry’s life would be complete without mention of him — the traveller met by chance, the marvellous discovery. This time he was a nameless Swede— “a man of wonderful culture, who knows all English, French, and much Spanish and Italian literature and understands Italian art in a way I have hardly ever known anyone else do, but his special subject is Dutch literature in the 17th century... he gives one the notion of belonging to a bigger race than ours with a bigger future opening before it.... If he were a pedant, I wouldn’t mind, but he is a man of the world with all his learning... and he is younger than I am.” They made great friends; they roamed the streets at night talking endlessly. All his life Roger Fry was meeting such people; and sometimes he struck up lasting friendships with them, and sometimes, as on this occasion, they remain nameless, and vanish into the May night.

  To make the spring complete only one thing was wanting and that too came to pass. An English girl and her mother were staying at Venice. The girl was “fascinating”; the mother “very remarkable”. Roger Fry fell deeply in love. To fall in love for the first time and in Venice in the spring must have been the most exciting of all those exciting new experiences. But his feelings must be guessed, for though he was on terms of perfect intimacy with Lowes Dickinson, falling in love was a topic that he did not find it easy to discuss with him. “Seriously I love you and understand you more than ever... and yet it’s no use to blink the fact that it isn’t the only kind of love I’m capable of although it may be better than any other; nor also that our love means something different to me to what it does to you — but I think you understand.”

  Thus it was that the Italian tour with its immense variety of exciting experiences — artistic, intellectual, emotional — came to an end.

  III

  The process of digestion had now to begin. It was difficult; he had swallowed so much. He had seen enough in those few months to make him sure that compromise was impossible — his life’s work was to lie not in laboratories, but among pictures. He had only taken a rapid glance at Raphael, Michael Angelo and the rest, but he guessed that the mass behind them was prodigious, and that it would need a lifetime to take its measure. But there was also the other desire — the desire to paint himself. There was the shepherd boy standing against a background of bright red trees with blue mountains behind him. The critic, to whom it came so naturally to form “wild theories” and to analyse impressions, was always being urged by the artist to stop taking notes and to get out his canvas and paint. Yet although he had found that he could hold his own in argument with Symonds and Horatio Brown, he was very doubtful whether he could paint
a picture that was fit to hang on a friend’s wall, let alone among the works of real painters in a gallery. It was a doubt that troubled him and that was to go on troubling him. Further the love affair, that had begun so happily at Venice, came to an unhappy end in the winter that followed.

  Naturally the few months that he spent in London with his family on his return were gloomy. “I am very sick about things in general just now and cannot manage to work properly”, he wrote. After Italy, Bayswater was less tolerable than ever. The Quaker atmosphere, he said, made him “into a strange jelly-like mass with about as much consciousness as a chloroformed amoeba”. And after Italy the atmosphere of Applegarth Studios, Hammersmith, with Francis Bate to instruct and Briton Revière to advise was a little elementary. The solution seemed to be a second foreign tour, this time to France, to continue his education at the headquarters of art, the Académie Julian at Paris. He went there in 1892.

  IV

  According to Sir William Rothenstein, who had gone there a year or two before, Paris and Julian’s studio— “that congeries of studios that was called the Académie Julian” — was enough to send young art students “accustomed to the orderliness of the Slade, and the aloofness of the students, wild with excitement”. “Those first days in Paris”, he writes, “seemed like Paradise after a London purgatory.” Over the studio door was written the saying of Ingres, “Le dessein est la probité de l’art”; within, the rooms were crowded with students from all parts of the world. “Our easels were closely wedged together, the atmosphere was stifling, the noise at times deafening.” So Sir William begins his description of that exciting time, and he goes on to give a fascinating account of the friends he made; how they worked and discussed each other’s work; how they dined at the Rat Mort and the Moulin Rouge; how the band struck up and La Goulue danced, and Rayon d’Or and Nini Pattes en Fair and Grille d’Ëgout displayed their charms; how Gonder drew them; how one met and talked on equal terms with Lautrec and Anquetin and Edouard Dujardin.

  All this and much more than all this, as a dozen memoirs testify, was going on when Roger Fry went to Paris. But he seems to have missed it. He was sharing rooms with Lowes Dickinson, and Lowes Dickinson, when he was taken to the Moulin Rouge, “or one of the dancing places”, records that he was bored; and when “a very ugly old prostitute came up to me once, in some eating-place, and began fondling me”, he “fairly ran away” — to continue writing his drama upon Mirabeau in the untidy attic which he shared with his friend. Roger Fry himself found Julian’s “very mild after all the tremendous accounts I heard”. Perhaps after Venice and Symonds and Horatio Brown, studio life with its song-singing and its merciless chaff and its frequent practical jokes, “some of them very cruel”, seemed to him rather primitive. Whether because of his upbringing, or because of some innate Puritanism of his own, he never liked what he called “rampant Bohemianism”. So, leaving Lowes Dickinson to write his play in their attic, he wandered about Paris by himself, gathering impressions of a mixed and miscellaneous kind. “What delights me in Paris”, he wrote to Basil Williams (February 1892), “more than anything else is the sort of way in which the national sentiment has got itself expressed in the magnificent public buildings.... It is an organised vertebrate city, not an amoeba or fungus like London.... Then the pictures. Well the Luxembourg is a great disappointment — I scarcely can think it typical — there is so little that is really big — little that is quite bad it is true, but a dull academic mediocrity pervades the place. Whistler’s mother is quite among the first three, if not first of all, as I rather incline to think. Bastien-Lepage is a disappointment to me, nice and genuine observation of peasant life, but I don’t like to have undigested facts thrown at my head in that way.”

  He sampled the opera too. “I have never got at Wagner before — it seems quaint to get ones first real thrill of Wagner in Paris, but so it was” — and the theatre. He dined out with Madame Darmesteter, and went to a state ball, “chez Carnot”, at the Élysée. “Imagine me in the most gorgeous condition I could assume with a new opera hat wandering round the rooms at the Élysée — not knowing a soul and unknown.... It wasn’t anything very extraordinary in any way except for the number of decorations under which fat little Frenchmen who looked as though they’d made their money in candles or soap staggered about. The women were nearly all rather ugly but the dresses were good.” He was amused by the various samples of French life that came his way, but not excited, or much impressed. It is true that he made friends with “a young English artist, a friend of Oscar Wilde’s, and one of the most conceited little shits — there’s no other word for it — you can imagine but very clever and great fun”, and through him heard talk of the symboliste poets; but the symboliste poets “seem to be a set of egregious asses in some ways and only to keep alive through vast orgies of mutual admiration and reciprocal incense-swinging’ ‘. He went to the Chat Noir, “a café run by a sort of circle of artists where they give the most splendid shows” — but those shows seem only to have suggested aesthetic theories about an “ideal union of the three arts of drawing, music and poetry” upon which he meditated in solitude.

  Altogether the months in Paris, though they had a wide circumference, seem to have lacked a centre. He was inquisitive and he was interested, but he found nothing in particular to fasten upon. He missed, to his lifelong regret, seeing any picture by Cézanne. And Paris and French painting, considering what both were to mean to him later, made very little impression upon him at first sight. It may have been that the first sight struck at him from an odd angle. Modern painting had to strike through a Quaker upbringing, through a scientific education; through Cambridge and Cambridge talk of morals and philosophy, and finally through an intensive study of the old Italian Masters before it reached him. And there was a further impediment; as a painter he was not in the least precocious. Had he shown at Julian’s a strong original bent as a painter, he would have been a member of that little artists’ republic which, whatever the age or the state of society, is always actively in being. His contemporaries would have praised or abused his work. His elders would have taken notice of him. He would have come to know both painters and writers at first hand, not only through the reports of others. As it was, he rambled about Paris for himself and nobody took any particular interest in him or in his work. Sir William Rothenstein sums up, no doubt, the impression that he made upon his fellow students at Julian’s when he says that Roger Fry “was not much of a figure draughtsman”, and though “clearly very intelligent”, he seemed “somewhat shy and uneasy” as if he had moved “chiefly in scientific and philosophical circles”. And to Roger Fry that famous studio seemed “very mild”.

  Yet France was to mean more to Roger Fry than any other country. It was to mean something different. Italy, as the skipping summary of the letters is enough to show, was a lovely land of brilliant light and clear outlines; it was a place where one worked hard all day seeing Old Masters; where one settled down at night in some little pub to sample strange dishes and to argue with other English travellers about art. But it was not a place with a living art and a living civilization that one could share with the Italians themselves. France was to be that country. He was to spend his happiest days there, he was to find his greatest inspiration as a critic there. But he seems in 1892 to have had no premonition what France was to mean to him, and for perhaps the last time in his life he exclaimed on leaving Paris, “It’ll be ripping to see London and its inhabitants again”.

  CHAPTER IV. CHELSEA : MARRIAGE

  I

  London was Chelsea. He took a house in Beaufort Street which he shared with his friend R. C. Trevelyan. There was a studio in the back garden, and a great mulberry tree hung its branches over the garden wall. The house is still there, and Beaufort Street, whatever may have happened to the world since 1892, is practically unchanged. The years have given it neither dignity nor romance. The houses remain monotonously respectable and identical. But the river still runs at the end of the s
treet, and Roger Fry, to whom London was a fungus, an amoeba, liked the river and the barges passing, and the silhouettes of factory chimneys and the yellow lights opening in the evening. But though Beaufort Street remains unchanged and the river still runs, it is difficult to recapture the; Chelsea in 1892. The peace was so profound. Politically, the most stirring question was the fate of the Home Rule Bill; in the world of poetry, it was the year of Tennyson’s death; Sir Frederick Leighton was President of the Royal Academy; Millais was exhibiting “The Little Speedwells Darling Blue” at the Academy; some of Oscar Wilde’s plays were being produced; and Roger Fry and his friends were immensely impressed by Ibsen. These are scattered landmarks that may recall as far as such things can the outlines of the world as it appeared to him. And it appeared to him of course from a certain angle, a sheltered angle, a favoured angle. Through his family, through his father, he had many connections with the active and eminent in the professional world; he had a tradition, a background, behind him.

  For many reasons it seemed perfectly possible to settle down in Chelsea and to plan long years of work ahead. But another result of that profound peace was also obvious — it seemed necessary to revolt against it, to break it up. It was the stability of the world that impressed him; its security, its prosperity, its self-satisfaction. When he stayed at Failand, his father’s country house near Bristol, he fumed with irritation. He could see no chance of any change in family life in his time. In the world of art the Royal Academy was his bugbear. It stood for everything that was dull, established and respectable. The New Gallery, the Grosvenor Gallery, the New English Art Club were all in opposition; he joined the opposition as a matter of course. When he set up on his own as a painter, he sent his first pictures to the New English Art Club. It was the centre, as he wrote later, “of the serious artistic life of the day”. He had reasons of his own for criticising the New English Art Club and its aims; he thought, as he says in a letter at that time, that if he could ever paint a picture it would be “a better picture” than the pictures shown there— “My study of the Italian drawings has influenced my work in the direction of demanding more complete design in a picture”. But he had no doubt that the artists who showed at the New English Art Club were the only artists worth considering in England. He took Lowes Dickinson to task for doubting it. “I wish you wouldn’t say such things about the N.E.A.C.”, he protested. “No doubt some of them are extravagant. Steer I’m sure isn’t. He’s much too genuine....” So he sent his first pictures to the New English Art Club and was greatly disappointed when they were rejected.