Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  She was certainly one of the most charming and intelligent women I have ever known — I will not say intellectual, because she was a little impatient of purely intellectual discussions and ways of thinking — even in Roger.... Helen had none of Roger’s love of finding reasons for liking and disliking things.... In a picture gallery, she knew at once what she liked and went straight for it; and then Roger would try to make her look at other pictures... to like works of art in the way in which he himself liked them, and he would become quite sad when he failed.... She seemed to me to be very much devoted to Roger, and when she laughed at and teased him, as she sometimes did, it was never in a way that could hurt him....

  As for her appearance, she may not have been really very beautiful; but she gave me the impression of being so. It is often so hard to distinguish charm and intelligence from beauty. Her movements were always graceful and unhurried and her way of talking too. She had a beautiful and expressive voice, and a quiet, humorous, often rather satirical smile. I think it was Roger who first put it into my mind that she was like the Spring in Botticelli’s Primavera.

  The old friendships it may be guessed were improved not spoilt now that they were shared with Roger’s wife.

  But happy as they were and hard as they worked, feeling sometimes, as Roger Fry said, overcome by the sight of so many masterpieces— “Italy makes one lose one’s nerve — a malarious infection of humility creeps over one’s soul” — a shadow little by little fell over them.

  The illness which the doctor in London had diagnosed proved unimportant. But another anxiety, so vague at first that no reason could be found for it, took its place. Certain fears, whether reasonable or fantastic it was impossible to say, kept recurring. They moved from place to place in the attempt to escape from them. Roger Fry, it can only be said, did all that he could to help his wife; his patience and sympathy were indefatigable, his resourcefulness beyond belief. But her obsessions increased. And finally, when they came back to England in the spring, the blow fell. Madness declared itself. “I was a fool to be happy yesterday”, he wrote to R. C. Trevelyan who was with him. “Last night she was worse. Nothing was omitted to make it horrible. We take her to-day to an asylum.”

  The agony that lay behind those words cannot be described but it cannot be exaggerated. To write of Roger Fry as he was before his wife’s illness is to write of someone who differed fundamentally from the man whom his friends knew later. He was never again to know perfect freedom from anxiety; the “beauty of life as a whole” was shattered, and the centre upon which he depended was shaken. The first shock was followed by the torture of prolonged illness. Death, which then seemed to him the most terrible possibility, was averted. But there were harassing alternations of hope and despair. Sometimes he was able to see her, again he was forbidden. Worst of all, the doctors could give him no certainty as to the future — the illness might be permanent, or again it might pass as suddenly as it had come. He spent those terrible days sometimes with friends — the Trevelyans, the Pearsall Smiths, the Sickerts all did what they could for him — sometimes alone. It was best, he found, to live as far as he could in the country, and he found, as he was often to find in the future, that the only way of facing the ruin of private happiness was to work.

  CHAPTER V. WORK

  I

  Work was very necessary, if only to earn the money that was more than ever needed; and happily work was forthcoming. The Athenaeum made him at about this date their chief art critic; and the Athenaeum in those days devoted a generous space to art. They allowed their critic a column or two every week in which to express himself; and the public in those peaceful days, with time on its hands and a desire to cultivate itself, was willing apparently not only to be instructed about current pictures, but on technical matters — the use of tempera, for example, or the merits of Raphaelli’s new colour sticks. They would suffer long disquisitions in very small print about Old Masters — whether a certain picture was from the brush of Bellini, or by one of his pupils. It was an opportunity of great value to Roger Fry, not only financially, but because it gave him a chance to clear his mind and to deliver himself of views that had been forming during these years of travel and intensive picture-seeing. He took advantage of it with extraordinary energy and independence. The mass of old newspaper cuttings is evidence of that, and if in time to come anyone should wish to trace Roger Fry’s long and adventurous career as an art critic to its source, it is here in these columns of faded print. Even to the common seer, to coin a counterpart to Dr Johnson’s Common Reader, to whom the names of Pesellino and Matteo da Siena mean nothing whatever, to whom English painting round about 1900 is an obscure tract of country and its figures shadowy enough, these old articles seem curiously alive, alert and on the spot.

  Further, they are very amusing. This is the more remarkable, because writing was often drudgery, and drudgery is apt to leave its trace on the printed page. Nor was Roger Fry a born writer. Compared with Symonds or Pater he was an amateur, doing his best with a medium for which he had no instinctive affection. For that very reason perhaps he was saved some of their temptations. He was not led away to write prose poems, or to make the picture a text for a dissertation upon life. He wrote of pictures as if they were pictures, and nothing else. But this itself led to a difficulty. “When the critic holds the results of his reaction to a work of art clearly in view he has next to translate it into words.” And there were no words. Often in those early articles he makes shift with terms that belong to the literary critic, or to the musical critic. He often calls in Shakespeare to help him out with a quotation, or Blake. Sometimes he gives up his attempt to express his reaction; what he feels can only be expressed by music. It was to take him many years and much drudgery before he forged for himself a language that wound itself into the heart of the sensation. And yet in spite of these difficulties, perhaps because of them, it is plain even to the common seer, even in these old articles, that here is someone writing with a pressure of meaning behind him. He has a definite idea of the critic’s function. That is soon apparent:

  Mr Ricketts [he wrote in an early article] has tried to use the painful and laborious excavations of the Kunstforschern for the only purpose which in the end justified them, namely the more profound understanding of great imaginative creations. This has to be done over and over again for each generation. Pater did it to some extent for the last. Each successive performance of this work of appreciation and interpretation is based upon fuller knowledge and approaches nearer to completeness and finality.

  That was the fundamental idea that lay behind these scattered notices, and it gives them their sequence, their seriousness. Though the notices may, and often must, deal with the fugitive — Mr Walker’s Twilight over Farringford Woods, or Mr Patterson’s Pink Roses, — each picture seems to fall into its place, so that we feel we are taking part in a planned and continued voyage of discovery. He makes his statement positively, as if he had a weight of knowledge behind him, nor is he afraid of speaking out — there is no trimming or evasion. The voyage, too, is made on broad lines — now we reach back to the early Italians, circle round the French and Dutch, and reach the particular piccure laden with ideas gathered in other places. And the excitement is great. However rapid many of the judgments, however far they lead into unfamiliar regions, the theme we are made to feel is of surpassing interest, the art of painting is of the greatest importance. A few quotations may serve to justify these claims, and, what is more important, will give some idea of the lie of the land and of those bygone figures as they presented themselves to Roger Fry when he went the round of the galleries as critic to the Athenaeum about the year 1900.

  In the first place, of course, the Royal Academy looms up — the Academy was an important feature of the landscape. Roger Fry was by no means opposed to Academies. They had a useful part to play. An Academy, he said, might be “an effective organ of scholarly and academic opinion”. It might preserve “a tradition of sound craftsmanship, a thing
no more inherently impossible than a tradition of good plumbing and of carpentering”. And Academicians in the past had done this — the tradition still lingered among the older men. For the work of Etty and Sant he had a great respect. And for the work of one living Academician at least he expressed again and again the highest admiration. Watts’s portraits of Joachim, Garibaldi and the Countess Somers he said “take rank with the finest achievements of English art for all times”. They were enough to show that “... we are not altogether out of sight and out of touch with that great and genuinely academic tradition of British art....” But the question recurs again and again— “What does the Academy stand for? What tradition does it uphold? What does it inculcate on its students?” And the reply also recurs— “The Academy becomes every year a more and more colossal joke played with inimitable gravity on a public which is too much the creature of habit to show that it is no longer taken in”. He criticised the works of Academicians in some detail and with considerable frankness. There was the President himself, Sir Edward Poynter. “The president’s career”, Roger Fry remarked, “shows how industry, and decided specific talent, and strict attention to business, combined with a certain fortunate commonness of feeling, may lead to success; how gradually sentimentality may take the place of imagination, and with what benefits the change is attended.” As for Mr Goodall, R.A., “one rejoices that his geniality has never been warped by the anxieties of thought or his complacency disturbed by the ambition for imaginative creation”. The Hon. John Collier “is really outstripping the camera in his relentless exposition of the obvious and the insignificant”. Yet these were the men who were officially at the head of British Art, and in control of the endowments given by the State for its encouragement. It was, he said, as if a theatre endowed by the State for the production of classical drama “pocketed its annual grant and proceeded to have thousand-night runs of Charlefs Aunt”. In short, when he contemplated the Royal Academy he was “often tempted to think that as a nation we are incapable of the imaginative life; and therefore fit for nothing but a harsh and ungenerous puritanism”. The present condition of art in England is chaotic.

  Certain unacademic groups were, however, opposed to this “vast formless resistent mass of commercial Philistinism”. Among them the most prominent was the New English Art Club. The exhibitions held there were, as he remarks again and again, the only exhibitions of serious interest in London. There alone the critic had scope for serious criticism. Again and again he singled out the works of Steer, Gonder, Sickert, Shannon and Rothenstein for careful examination and praise. The praise was often warm; but it was also critical, for reasons which he gives at some length in an article upon the Exhibition held in 1902:

  If we admit what is usually postulated of this society, that the more serious and strenuous of the younger artists send their work to its gallery, and that here, if anywhere, we should look for some encouraging signs of regeneration in English painting, the present exhibition can hardly induce, an optimistic mood. The very sincerity of these painters, the absence from their work of the more glaring displays of vulgarity and sentimentality which distinguish the larger shows, bring into more striking relief the poverty of their emotional and intellectual condition. In saying this we do not mean any depreciation of the individual artists. It is but their misfortune to have come at a “dead point” in the revolution of our culture. But such a point seems to have been reached. We are at a period which is fiercely opposed to such a one as that of the early Pre-Raphaelites, when fruitful and inspiring ideas were epidemic, when the imaginations of even mediocre minds were stimulated to attempt, and in some measure to achieve, things beyond the scope of their natural gifts. Now we have a good display of talent — in the case of one or two men, of remarkable gifts — and no sign of their finding a suitable investment for them. If one were to judge by this exhibition alone one would say that these artists seem paralysed by the fear of failure, that they lack the ambition to attempt those difficult and dangerous feats by which alone they could increase their resources and exercise their powers by straining them to the utmost. Such a landscape for instance as Mr Steer’s Valley of the Severn (No. 120) shows what really great things he might produce if only the conditions of contemporary thought favoured a more adventurous spirit — A lesser artist might be content with having accomplished so much, but with Mr Steer we feel a sense of disappointment that, having got so far, he does not push to their utmost limits the possibilities of his idea.... If only Mr Steer were to practise those powers of invention which in past times have been accounted among the most important parts of an artist’s training he would be able to express with far greater intensity his finely poetical feeling for landscape and atmospheric effects. Doubtless it is vain to protest, for it is one of the curious anomalies of the time that it is, as a rule, the more capable artists who despise most the study of invention, who are most influenced by a sophistical theory of aesthetics, which denies them the full use of the pictorial convention. The arbitrary rule that they have formulated is that they may leave out anything they like in a given scene, but that they must not introduce forms which do not happen to be there, however much these might increase the harmony or intensify the idea.

  These were some of the theories that he carried at the back of his mind. But the theory had always to be applied to the particular instance and that was not so easy. The most famous of the artists who then exhibited at the New English Art Club was J. S. Sargent. He was being hailed both by the critics and by the public as the greatest painter of his time. Roger Fry disagreed. He condemned him instantly and unhesitatingly. “Mr Sargent”, he wrote in 1900, “is simply a précis writer of appearances.” Of his portrait of Lady Elcho, Mrs Adeane and Mrs Tennant he wrote, “Since Sir T. Lawrence’s time no one has been able thus to seize the exact cachet of fashionable life, or to render it in paint with a smartness and piquancy which so exactly corresponds to the social atmosphere itself.... He appears to harbour no imaginations that he could not easily avow at the afternoon tea-table he so brilliantly depicts.” The portrait of Sir Ian Hamilton made him exclaim, “I cannot see the man for his likeness”. And when he stood before Sargent’s portrait of the Duke of Portland he recorded his sensations in the following order: “First the collie dog which the Duke caresses has one lock of very white hair; secondly the Duke’s boots are so polished that they glitter; thirdly the Duke’s collar is very large and very stiffly starched; fourthly the Duke was when he stood for his portrait sunburnt. After that we might come to the Duke himself.” But by the time he came to the Duke himself is so “deadened by the fizz and crackle of Mr Sargent’s brush work that [he] can see nothing”. Whatever other judges might say, Sargent was to him nothing but a brilliant journalist whose work had no artistic value and would have no more permanent interest than the work of an expert photographer. Whether right or wrong, Roger Fry gave his opinion fearlessly, for what it was worth.

  But, happily, contemporary art round about 1900 was not exclusively British art. In 1906 the International Society held an Exhibition at the New Gallery. And there, it seems for the first time, Roger Fry caught a glimpse of Cézanne. As usual, he felt his way along the walls conscientiously, noting first the sculpture. There was Rodin; there were two important works by M. Bartholomé; there was an excellent statuette by Mr Wells, and Mr Stirling Lee’s portrait head was admirable as a treatment of marble, “though a little wanting in the sense of style”. And then at last he came to the Bertheim collection in the North Room. There was a still life by Cézanne. In view of what he was to write later about that great master, this first glimpse may be given in full:

  Here, indeed, certain aspects of the Impressionist School are seen as never before in London. There were, it is true, a few of M. Cézanne’s works at the Durand Ruel exhibition in the Grafton Gallery, but nothing which gave so definite an idea of his peculiar genius as the Nature Morte (199) and the Paysage (5205) in this gallery. From the Nature Morte one gathers that Cézanne goes back to M
anet, developing one side of his art to the furthest limits. Manet himself had more than a little of the primitive about him, and in his early work, so far from diluting local colour by exaggerating its accidents, he tended to state it with a frankness and force that remind one of the elder Breughel. His Tête de Femme (188) in this gallery is an example of such a method, and Cézanne’s Nature Morte pushes it further. The white of the napkin and the delicious grey of the pewter have as much the quality of positive and intense local colour as the vivid green of the earthenware; and the whole is treated with insistence on the decorative value of these oppositions. Light and shade are subordinated entirely to this aim. Where the pattern requires it, the shadows of white are painted black, with total indifference to those laws of appearance which the scientific theory of the Impressionistic School has pronounced to be essential. In the “Paysage” we find the same decorative intention; but with this goes a quite extraordinary feeling for light. The sky and the reflections in the pool are rendered as never before in landscape art, with an absolute illusion of the planes of illumination. The sky recedes miraculously behind the hill-side, answered by the inverted concavity of lighted air in the pool. And this is effected without any chiaroscuro — merely by a perfect instinct for the expressive quality of tone values. We confess to having been hitherto sceptical about Cézanne’s genius, but these two pieces reveal a power which is entirely distinct and personal, and though the artist’s appeal is limited, and touches none of the finer issues of the imaginative life, it is none the less complete.