Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  Certainly there was no doubt that he had found out, and was daily finding out, what to do, but there is evidence that he was also finding out that he needed someone to do things with. His “fearful sensitiveness” to family friction is enough to show how much depended upon family sympathy. And now that the friction was lessened, the dependence showed itself. The general term “my people” is broken up significantly into the names of separate sisters. He was very anxious that they should share his freedom. With his sister Margery, in particular, he had a special sympathy. “I hear that Margery is coming to town at last.... If you really give up Rome, mightn’t she and Agnes come and live here for the summer and study with Bate and me? They should have a room to themselves so that they need not see my visitors and friends, and I think it would be a great thing for both of them”, he wrote to his father. The words hint at his conviction that his sisters must find family life and its “Nomian atmosphere” as suffocating as he did himself, but they also suggest, what was equally true, that he was, as he claimed, “highly domestic”. To have a centre, to share a home, was a deep instinct. Perhaps it was an instinct of self-preservation. He needed someone to concentrate upon, to share things with, to curb his restlessness.

  There were, needless to say, young women who were not sisters. One— “the heroine of a Meredith novel” he described her, “aristocratic, high-spirited” — had refused him. Another had treated him “cat and mouseically”. He was very susceptible— “There are so many ways of love, aren’t there?” he wrote once. Indeed his words to his mother about Correggio, when he felt him to be the greatest of all the Italians— “I have felt that at random times of two or three others so you won’t think much of it” — were true in the emotional sphere also. Many young women found themselves invested, in Roger Fry’s eyes, not only with transcendent beauty, but, what surprised them perhaps more, with an infallible flair for the virtues of old Italian masters. And among these fleeting attachments to young and lovely faces there was a more serious relationship with a lady who was neither young nor beautiful, but old enough to be his mother. She it was who undertook to educate him in the art of love, much as Symonds had educated him in the art of painting. Endowed, he said, “with enough fire to stock all the devils in Hell”, she stormed at his stupidity, laughed at his timidity and ended by falling in love with him herself. He profited by the lesson and was profoundly grateful to his teacher. Had she not taught him what was far more important than the art of dissecting the livers of drunken men or of discriminating between a genuine Botticelli and a sham? So he thought at least, and to the end of life pupil and mistress remained the best of friends. Thus instructed he lost his Cambridge callowness and learnt to distinguish between “the many ways of love”. And there was one relationship in the years at Beaufort Street which from the first differed from any other. One day, to use his own words, “the fated inevitable thing” happened. “I fell completely in love in one afternoon’s talk”, he wrote. “And it was so inevitable that I thought she must see it too, but she didn’t for nearly a year.”

  “She” was Helen Coombe. She was a year or two older than he, an art student, living by herself, and exhibiting too at the New English Art Club. “A delightful artist”, Sir Charles Holmes called her, and Roger Fry always maintained that she had a far more instinctive and original gift as a painter than he had. She, too, had broken away from her family and its traditions. The impression she made on him was strange, complex, unforgettable. She had “wit and a strange touch of genius... and there was beauty too, and a certain terror on my part at the mysterious ungetatableness of her... but the terror, though very definite... added a fearful delight”. She was the only person, he felt, with whom he could spend his life in complete sympathy. But when, after a year’s hesitation, she felt as he did, and agreed to marry him, there were obstacles. His parents, when asked their consent, objected, naturally enough. It was not the marriage that they wished for. She belonged neither to the Quaker world, nor to the conventional world. She was an artist, and for artists they felt a mixture of distrust and fear. Then there was her health — a rumour had reached them that there were reasons for anxiety. Roger Fry denied it. Then there was the old Victorian respect for family — that he dismissed with a laugh. “There is an Admiral somewhere in the offing”, he assured them. But there could be no answer to their final objection — that she was penniless. And this was a serious matter, which led to much discussion and roused much of the old bitterness, as one quotation is enough to show. “Don’t think”, he wrote, “I don’t feel sufficiently the humiliation of having to appeal to father’s generosity — I know that I am at his mercy and that if he chooses to cut off my allowance the whole thing must be broken off. We are neither of us very young or very rash. We both know enough of the world to see the dangers and disadvantages of marriage. We were both averse to the idea of it, I because of the possible interference with my work, she because of her dread of losing her independence; and yet we are both driven to it as the only solution.”

  Marriage was “the only solution”. Neither of them, it is worth noting for the light it throws upon the conventions of the time, contemplated any other; and at last the objections were withdrawn. When the engagement was announced he wrote to Lowes Dickinson: “I know that it is momentous and irretrievable, and that it must make you and Mrs Widdrington apprehensive, as it would me if I hadn’t that sort of fundamental instinct about the thing which defies analysis. Of course I have to admit logically that I can’t prove anything....” But he added, “I am afraid I am ridiculously happy”. Proof of that, even if it was not logical proof, is given in many letters, too private, too outspoken, too sure that every word will be understood and their exaggeration discounted to be quoted. They are full of high spirits, full of laughter. There is an account of a visit to Cambridge — he was hanging a show of modern pictures; he laughs at himself “wheeling canvases in handcarts through the astonished slums”; he pokes fun at the Cambridge attitude to art— “everyone here thinks it a queer sort of joke, this art business, and that a sensible chap must excuse himself for caring about it at all by a sort of shy laugh like a schoolgirl over an indecent book”; and he describes with fantastic exaggeration the rigours of family life at Failand on a Sunday morning. At last he has someone to laugh with him and, what, is equally important, to laugh at him. And then the laughter dies away, and he tries to put into writing “what I said to you yesterday when we walked up from Bourton in the twilight when the whole world was an accomplice in our transfiguration and the trees claimed a new familiarity and even the stars nodded mysteriously between the driving clouds.... Oh, Fm trying to say the unsayable.” And what Roger Fry could not say that evening, in the twilight among the trees must be left unsaid by another.

  They were married on 3rd December 1896. “The wedding was not so bad as it might have been”, he told Lowes Dickinson. “And there was no sentiment or humbug about it. Everything most matter-of-fact and jolly in spite of some horribly well-dressed and gossiping Bath ladies.... You needn’t be afraid that I don’t want you. Can’t you see the truth of your own quotation, that ‘to divide is not to take away’?”

  II

  The honeymoon was spent, needless to say, abroad, and it was a time for both of them of “perfect happiness”.

  Happiness is a difficult emotion to convey in letters written from a hotel bedroom with bags to be packed or unpacked, with clothes and paint-boxes littering the floor, and often “not a scrap of paper left to write upon”. Yet it was conveyed, and there it still is — a sense that everything had fallen into place and all the odds and ends of existence had come together to make a whole, a centre of peace and satisfaction. The honeymoon was prolonged. They loitered slowly through France, and then went on to Tunis and Bizerta, where they stayed with the Vice-Consul, Terence Bourke, “a jolly Irishman, a brother of Lord Mayo”, owing to whom Roger Fry, much to his delight, “heard and saw more of Eastern life than one could ordinarily through years of travel”. A
very long letter to Lowes Dickinson gives a very full description of what they heard and saw. One incident is perhaps worth preserving. There was a service of the Isa Weir, a sect of the Mahommedans. Would they like to see it? They said yes, and were driven in a rickety mule carriage down to the village. It was a wonderful pale-green moonlight night. The village with its whitewashed domes and its mud walls looked very mysterious. Strange figures wrapped in white burnouses glided about. Then the service began. A holy man “something like Edward Carpenter to look at”, began beating a tambourine, lifting it above his head and bringing it down again in a kind of ecstasy. Others joined in; for over two hours there was scarcely any stop in the howlings and the jumpings; then the dancers were seized with a wild passion, crushed glass in their teeth, scraped their bare scalps with prickly pear leaves, and one man plunged a sword into his belly. There was scarcely any blood, Roger Fry noticed. “The only explanation I can find of it is that it is some form of auto-suggestion brought about by the music.... But I suppose the East has always explored the subconscious self as thoroughly as we have explored the ordinary consciousness.” That led him to ponder the difference between the Eastern conception of life and the Western— “What is so extraordinary about these people is that they have no idea of movement. All the functions of life are regulated and provided for — their religion prevents them from bothering about a future life and so they actually live and enjoy instead of preparing to enjoy as we do.... No one”, he reflected, “is disappointed by not getting what he hasn’t got because the idea of struggling and competition hardly exists — everything is accepted as it is. They constater the fact that they are poor or ill or wicked and there’s an end on’t.” Again, as at Venice with Symonds and Horatio Brown, the atmosphere was sympathetic. It was a great delight to find “a people who can’t be vulgar or really bad-mannered and who have complete social equality — in fact a sheik talks on terms of absolute equality with the man who serves his coffee at a few pence a day”. Half a page is given up to a sketch of the sheik, and that leads to a description of a picture he is painting — a great classical picture of the harbour at Carthage. And at Carthage while he was painting his picture “Helen found a corner of a capital sticking out of the earth and I grubbed it out with a bit of potsherd and my nails. It was high up on a bank of earth and took ages and nearly blinded both of us but we were as excited as children digging in the sand and finally got it out when it nearly crushed us under its weight. It was a very ordinary Roman Ionic capital and of course we could do nothing but leave it lying there, but we felt we had made a great discovery.”

  The honeymoon was full of such discoveries. On they went to Florence, to Naples and to Sicily. There is no need to follow their progress in detail or to quote the rapid notes of all they saw in full. The letters written, as usual, post haste, on any sheet that came handy, on any surface that happened to be flat, are crowded with descriptions, with travellers’ stories, all run together in one unbroken flow of high spirits. Nothing went wrong — not even a meeting with Sir Edward and Lady Fry in Sicily, when there was a ridiculous scene with an eccentric English woman who kept great dogs at large in her villa; and the dogs set upon the party and Sir Edward “took up an attitude something between Horatius Coccles and the Vicar of Wakefield ready to die in defence of his family”; and “my mother carried on a sort of afternoon tea-party conversation in the intervals of the dogs’ remonstrances and Mrs C. said shortly that it was a pity the dogs were so nervous, poor things — she meant to get a really fierce one soon. My mother horrified: Then I suppose you’ll keep him chained up?’ Mrs G. indifferently: ‘Oh no. We shall keep him about the garden.’ “ Whatever happened, savage dogs, trains missed, a handbag left on a café table turned out to be a source of merriment and fun. They read Bouvard et Pèchucet together and laughed prodigiously; also the Inferno; they drank a bottle of wine to celebrate the arrival of Goldie’s letter, and Helen vowed that she would dive into the sea next day and was made to keep her vow. There were innumerable pictures to be seen again with two pairs of eyes; there were pictures to be painted and museums to be visited. “My museum appetite”, Roger wrote without exaggeration, “is a robust one.” Work and pleasure went happily hand in hand. In blazing heat they visited Faenza and found it deserted; the courtyards “all grown over with vine and honeysuckle”; and noted the “beautiful simple-minded people... with unconscious gestures like animals” as well as the Donatellos. In blazing heat they reached Venice at last. Symonds was dead now, but Horatio Brown was still there and with him the old talks in the café were resumed. Apparently, they discussed Symonds and his books; but Roger Fry was no longer the ignorant art student sitting at his master’s feet. “I find Symonds”, he told Lowes Dickinson, “too much of an amateur in art. I like his history better, but then I’m only an amateur in history.” Venice continued the train of thought begun in Bizerta about life and the way to live it. “It makes me see more clearly than ever that somehow beauty of life as a whole (not the beauty of incidents and individuals but the beauty of harmonious relations between people and their surroundings) has somehow got reformed and ballotted and steam-intellected out of the world.” Why should they submit to the unnatural conditions forced upon them in England? Why not live in Venice, the perfect life in perfect surroundings? “Now that we are here of course we know that Venice is the one and only place in the world that a mortal man can possibly think of living in.” The weather grew hotter and hotter, but they delighted in the heat. They would get up at five in the morning, hire a sulky little boy, and row out across the lagoons in a sandolo. All day they loitered about, sketching, looking at. pictures, talking with Horatio Brown in the evening and bathing, until the heat at last grew too much even for them. The flesh melted off their bones and they fled across the Alps to the comparative coolness of France. There they lingered week after week, and at last, in the autumn of 1897, came home.

  The letters to Lowes Dickinson and to R. C. Trevelyan, are by no means models of composition. Commas drop out, dashes insert themselves, sentences rush headlong without beginning or end. And sometimes— “you see what it is to be married — you can’t keep a sheet of note paper and its the last we’ve got to yourself” — Helen added a page in the middle. But even Lowes Dickinson, who had most reason to feel anxious about his friend’s marriage, could scarcely have doubted, as he read the many pages that reached him from abroad, that Roger Fry had found the wife who suited him, or that, whatever else life might bring, the months of the honeymoon were the happiest he had ever known.

  III

  The honeymoon over, the time had come to settle down. A house had to be found; furniture extracted from the warehouse, and the problem of making money enough to secure their independence to be solved. They were both of course to paint; Helen Fry had already some success as a decorator — Roger greatly admired a harpsichord that she was decorating for Arnold Dolmetsch; he was to paint, to lecture, to write articles, and if possible to come to grips with his book on Bellini. They were entering into negotiations with landlords, and proposing to R. C. Trevelyan that he should share rooms with them, when some slight illness, diagnosed by Roger Fry as rheumatism, made Helen Fry consult a doctor. He discovered symptoms of lung trouble and ordered them abroad at once.

  Apart from the anxiety, the change was upsetting. The house had to be postponed, and engagements given up. Still, another visit to Italy was no great hardship, and Roger Fry was learning to carry on his work under all kinds of makeshift conditions. There were always pictures to see, and so long as he could improvise some sort of desk in his inn bedroom, he could fill yet another notebook with still more careful criticism. If it was fine, they could paint together, and in the evenings there was always a book to read — a learned German kunstforscher, a French novel, Dante, Baudelaire, — they read everything together; and their friends kept them supplied with plays and poems in manuscript. So the travels began again. Once more they went to Italy. There were one or two unpleasant incidents. R
oger Fry was robbed of his pocket-book, containing what to them was the very important sum of ten pounds. On the anniversary of their wedding day they were almost suffocated by a faulty stove in the bedroom. But there were many pleasures. They made new friends from chance encounters, and old friends came out and stayed with them. Marriage, as Roger Fry had told Lowes Dickinson a day or two after his wedding, was not to mean an égoïsme à deux. And the theory was put into practice. Lowes Dickinson stayed with them in Rome. And once more they plunged into arguments about art, and Roger Fry was again afraid that he had talked “too much rot about technique”... Indeed I was sorry all the time”, he wrote when Lowes Dickinson had gone back to Cambridge, “that I was so immersed in pictures and so much in a technical way that I got no time to get into your atmosphere. I know you aren’t complaining and you know I’m not apologising for what was in the circs, inevitable, for a place like Rome so bowls me over with its complexity and the insistence of its purely sensuous presentations that I can’t get away from it. I can’t think in the metaphysical sense, not that you want me to talk metaphysics exactly. But I mean that I can’t get free enough from the immediate to generalise. It’s always been a little of an effort to me. You and Jack [McTaggart] have always lugged me panting though willing up your particular Parnassus and — well, perhaps I’ve got a little bit out of it.” But though they diverged, Lowes Dickinson to climb the heights of the metaphysical Parnassus, Roger Fry to explore the other, the more sensuous and immediate, that was the inevitable result of growing older. It was not the result of marriage. Helen Fry did not interfere with her husband’s friendships. She was, Lowes Dickinson said, the wittiest woman he had ever known, and, what was perhaps of more importance, it seemed to him that she understood her husband and gave him both the check and the stimulus that he needed. To that, too, R. C. Trevelyan, who stayed with them also, bears witness. And since his words throw light from an outside angle upon a relationship that was of intense importance to Roger Fry, they may be given.