Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  One is reminded of a passage in his letters in which he describes how on his honeymoon he had dug up the head of a column in the sand at Carthage, with a bit of potsherd and his nails. There for a moment Cézanne is seen still half covered in the sand. But half covered he still was and the critic had other matters to attend to. His duties were not simply confined to going round the galleries. The artist and the public had somehow to be brought together. It was one of the critic’s duties to see that the artist was fairly treated by his paymaster. And the artist, as Roger Fry was discovering, “is intensely individualistic, and in proportion as he is an artist, he finds it difficult to combine with his kind for any ulterior purpose”. It fell to the critic to mediate between the two parties, and Roger Fry took the practical side of his profession very seriously. He was in the first place a fearless and outspoken critic of institutions. He attacked the trustees of the Chantrey Bequest; he went at length into the question of the administration of the National Gallery. He pointed out that it is ruled by a body of trustees “gentlemen of very various and in some cases of quite empirical tastes...” so that the chances are that “any work in which the characteristics of its own period are strongly accentuated, any good work in short, will arouse their vehement opposition”. A body of trustees will be bound to compromise. “Compromise which is the deadly enemy of so absolute and definitely willed an activity as art will rule all the nation’s acquisitions.” He was of opinion that there should be one trustee with absolute powers. And he was fertile and perhaps optimistic in suggesting methods by which money could be raised for the endowment of art. He suggested that “A tax of one per cent, should be levied on all sales of works of art, the tax to be levied by means of stamps, without which the receipt will not be valid”, a scheme, he said, “so perfectly feasible, so simple and so likely to prove efficient that one can hardly doubt that it will be put into practice” — this was in January 1906.

  Into these by-paths of the critic’s duty he poured a great deal of energy. But his main duty, so far as the Athenaeum was concerned, was to keep his eye upon current pictures, and to point out which tendencies were fruitful and which barren. One more quotation will show how keenly he scrutinised the present, and how eagerly he kept his eye upon the future.

  “We doubt”, he wrote (19th November 1904), “if the New English Art Club has ever had an exhibition to be compared with this in importance... Mr Sargent, Mr Steer, Mr Rothenstein, Mr John, Mr Orpen, to mention only the best known artists, are all seen here at their best.” But he goes on to say that though they are at their best, they belong to a group “whose traditions and methods are already being succeeded by a new set of ideas. They are no longer le dernier cri — that is given by a group of whom Mr John is the most remarkable member.”

  The contrast between the two groups has been gradually becoming apparent, and in the present show it is now clearly perceptible, for the younger men are coining into the inheritance of this power. The difference may be explained by their approach to the thing seen. The older men are all more or less impressionists, that is to say, they approach nature in order to analyse it into the component parts not of the thing seen but of the appearance.... But the younger men, really going back to an earlier tradition, carry the analysis further, penetrating through values to their causes in actual form and structure. This they record, and then adding the particular and accidental conditions of light and shade, and finally colour, regain at last the general appearance. The older group, the impressionists, are painters from first to last, and only draughtsmen and chiaroscurists by accident; the younger men base all their art upon draughtsmanship, and acquire the art of painting as an afterthought.... We have no doubt that the younger men in the group have got hold of the better method, a method which allows of inexhaustible possibilities of expression and of a deeper appeal to the emotions, and moreover that though it may take them far longer to learn how to paint, they will ultimately be able to paint much better, owing to their methodical and deliberate attack. This year for the first time Mr John gives promise of becoming a painter... at last he has seen where the logic of his views as a draughtsman should lead him — Following out these stages he has arrived already at a control of his medium which astonishes one by comparison with the work of a year or two back.... One must go back to Alfred Stevens or Etty or the youthful Watts to find its like.... People will no doubt complain of his love of low life; just as they complain of Rubens’s fat blondes; but in the one case as in the other they will have to bow to the mastery of power.... In modern life a thousand accidents may intervene to defraud an artist’s talents of fruition, but if only fate and his temperament are not adverse, we hardly dare confess how high are the hopes of Mr John’s future which his paintings have led us to form....

  So the stream of comment and criticism runs on. It had to deal with much that was trivial and much that has proved ephemeral. A great many pictures of Farringford in the Twilight, a great many bowls of pink roses were painted forty years ago. Many of the theories here sketched were worked out more fully in later years. Many of the groups have changed their positions, and some of the figures have changed their proportions. But whether his judgment was right or wrong, it was an individual and independent judgment. It went beneath the surface and related the particular example to some general idea. Praise and blame are both outspoken, yet they are always directed towards the art, and not towards the artist. But the quality which draws the reader past the ephemeral and the accidental is one that is scarcely to be conveyed by quotation. It is his power of making pictures real and art important. Perorations about the function of art would have been out of place in the Athenaeum even if the critic himself had had a taste that way. But his belief conveys itself, as such deep-seated convictions do, without the help of set phrases, in his indignation, in his satire, in his underlying seriousness. Now and again it comes to the surface. When Watts died, for example, he seized the opportunity to do him honour because “he looked upon art as a necessary and culminating function of civilised life — as indeed the great refining and disinterested activity, without which modern civilisation would become a luxurious barbarity”. Watts at least had always stood out against the view that “art is only an amusement and luxury for the idle and preferably the uneducated rich, that the artist is after all, in Stevenson’s phrase, a fille de joie”. Whatever his own deficiencies as a painter, this entitled him to an eternal place of honour among the great, “mob of commercial philistines” who had reduced Victorian art in Roger Fry’s opinion to a level of incredible baseness.

  There is plenty of evidence then in these old articles that Roger Fry was qualifying himself to do that work of differentiation and interpretation which, he said, has to be done over and over again for each generation in order to bring about “a more profound understanding of great imaginative creations”. They also show that he possessed the power of making the outsider, whose eyes are the least active of his senses, aware of something real and exciting on squares of coloured canvas. Further there is evidence that he was becoming capable of what he called “the painful and laborious excavations of the kunstforscker”. He could state that a Fra Bartolommeo was really from the hand of Brescianino; or that “Lady Wantage’s Adam and Eve is not we think by Bronzino, as stated, but by some Parmese artist, probably Mazzoloa Bedoli working under the influence of Parmegiano”. But such feats of expertise were always to be subordinated to the critic’s proper task and in themselves they were worthless. The critic, Roger Fry insists over and over again, must trust his sensibility, not his learning; he must lay himself open to all kinds of impressions and experiences; to science, to music, to poetry, and must never be afraid to revise a view which experience has altered. The muddle in which these old newspaper cuttings lie is perhaps symbolical — they are mixed up with passports, with hotel bills, with sketches and poems and innumerable notes taken in front of the picture itself. But there was another reason why it was impossible for Roger Fry to be content with the triumphs
of a specialist. It is contained not in an article but in a letter. “I’m grinding away at my writing”, he told R. C. Trevelyan in 1898, “but it’s difficult to make the jump from Helen who seems all-important to the date of Bissoli’s death for which I don’t care just now a tuppenny damn.”

  II

  Gradually Helen Fry recovered. By the beginning of 1899 he was able to bring her back to a small house that he had taken near Dorking, The relief was enormous. Happiness returned with a bound. “It is really so wonderful to be with Helen again and at last in a home of our own that I can hardly believe it is real”, he wrote to his mother. Their plans for the future, the rooms in Beraers Street, the artist’s life where each was to work independently had to be abandoned. Great care was necessary; often he had to be doctor and nurse; and there was always anxiety in the background. Still, “The month down here”, he wrote to R. C. Trevelyan, the friend who had helped him through the worst, “has been as happy as any we have either of us spent”. And the letter goes on to say that Helen was laughing at him as he wrote it— “laughing at my pretensions as a lecturer”.

  The cultivated classes were beginning to take him very seriously, perhaps too seriously, as a lecturer. He was lecturing not only in the provinces but at Leighton House and the Albert Hall; at Cambridge he delivered a course of lectures on Venetian painting a syllabus of which remains. But a home of his own meant as usual visits from friends — Logan Pearsall Smith, the Berensons, Desmond MacCarthy — those are some of the names that recur in the old letters. They came; they dined; they talked. Faint echoes can still be overheard; Stephen Phillips’s new play, Paolo and Francesca, was discussed — was it a masterpiece or a fake? Roger Fry had no doubt. “It was exactly”, he declared, “what the English like, there’s no harm in it, and no real poetry to shock and disturb them, and the consequence is that the critics are all tumbling over each other in their hurry to say that Sophocles and Dante aren’t in it.” He was reviewing books. A pile of books “as high as the tower of Babel and as intelligible I expect” stood on his table. Among them, however, was Letters to John Chinaman, by Lowes Dickinson. He was enthusiastic:.. really”, he wrote to the author, “I am amazed at the beauty of it. It seems to me the only eloquent prose I’ve seen for ages or that so far as I know anyone but you can produce, and the added chapters are the best of all. In some ways I think it’s the biggest thing you’ve done yet — at all events you’ve let yourself go in bigger and freer flights. The last few years and all their disillusionment have made me think that eloquence and even rhetoric is not done with yet. The reasonable people can’t afford to let their view be shown merely on its reasonable merits but must speak in the emotional language that the unreasonable understand. But what a people the Americans are,” the letter goes on, for there was another book on his table, “I’m just reviewing a book on the great epochs of Art history by one Hopkins of Yale — the most amazing farrago of loose titbits of information all muddled up in his stupid colourless brain and tumbled out anyhow.... But for all this and for many other ills there is consolation in Max Beerbohm’s show of caricatures. They are perfectly amazing. There is a series of John Bull... but it’s no use describing them — they are really superb and a delightful revenge for much Pan-Anglo-Saxondom.”

  The usual plans and projects sprang up. A colony was to be founded, either in Italy or in Surrey, where life could be lived as a whole without interference from Pan-Anglo-Saxondom. That great project broke down, but there were lesser enterprises to be carried out; a book to be written by R. G. Trevelyan and illustrated by Roger Fry; the craft of printing must be investigated, and printers instructed how to print wood blocks; new magazines — the Burlington, the Independent — were being founded and were, as usual, to be better than any that had appeared before. “Bertie’s article (A Free Man’s Worship) I think very fine indeed, but I don’t quite think resignation is a logical result of the attitude. I think indignation however fatuous would be more justified. Anyhow his attitude is too exalted for me. I cling to a cowardly ‘hope’.”

  His friends the writers were doing brilliant work. With his own work, now that he was able to settle down to it, he was by no means satisfied. “I loathe art criticism more and more”, to take one phrase from many to the same effect, “and long to create.” But the doubt remained, could he create? Painting gave him the keenest pleasure; but when the pictures were shown the critics were depressing. From time to time he held exhibitions — with Neville Lytton at the Alpine Club; alone at the Carfax and at other galleries. All the critics, he complained, said the same thing; what the critic of the Westminster Gazette said may therefore be taken as an average sample. “Too strong a critical faculty and too wide an acquaintance with precedent are apt to act as a danger upon spontaneity. Sometimes we may suspect Mr Fry of thinking too much of his models and trusting too little to his instinct” — that was the usual verdict. His reputation as a critic stood in the way of his reputation as a painter. It gave him a label which the public read before it looked at his work. And perhaps there was a grain of truth in it. “Fry’s pictures looked too much pondered”, Alfred Thornton wrote, “and I suggested once that he let himself go and allow his sub-conscious mind some freedom. His reply was that if he did ‘the damned thing would only produce a pastiche’.” How far must the artist surrender to the damned thing? And did Roger Fry with his puritan upbringing and his Cambridge training repress the damned thing too severely? The psychologist may note that he had “given up day-dreaming when he was a boy of sixteen”. Again, when he found that a mood of “egotistic exaltation” forced itself upon him when he was listening to music, he gave up going to concerts. Perhaps the subconscious mind resented this incessant inspection and took its revenge. Or perhaps, as he claimed towards the end of his life, the art which is produced consciously and intellectually has its own quality, and it is a lasting one. At any rate, he painted indefatigably, pictures that were out of touch with his generation, with a queer mixture of obstinate belief in his own gift and of extreme diffidence. The critics were tepid; and he had no commercial success whatever. The usual fate of exhibitions held about 1900 is summed up in the account he gave of one of them: “My show has been a rather modified success. Rather poor notices in the press.” Sixteen pictures had been sold, and he had made one hundred and six pounds. Criticism and odd jobs of expertise were forced upon him against his will.

  But criticism with all its drawbacks meant seeing pictures, and seeing pictures meant foreign travel. Directly his wife was well enough they were off abroad. “I assure you”, he wrote to his father, who had doubted the necessity of these journeys, “I don’t waste my time.... It’s solid hard work all the time.” There he certainly spoke the truth. When he was in his sixties, he would spend six hours a day every day for two months going round the Berlin galleries— “and I am a quick worker”. Picture-seeing when he was in his thirties, “filling up gaps” in his knowledge in the galleries of Berlin and Dresden, in Amsterdam and Madrid, must have been still more formidable. By way of proof, he was enraged when the Berlin galleries shut “at the absurd hour of three” in order that the officials might have “mittagsessen or something”. If the public galleries were shut there were always private collections to be seen. Note-book after note-book was filled. Seeing pictures was the foundation of his work. “You see”, he wrote to his father, “whatever success I have had has been the result of my Italian studies, not only in lecturing and writing, but in painting. It is there that I find the real source of all my ideas and there I must go often to get them. Even from a purely worldly point of view it would be very foolish to rest on my oars as it were and not keep constantly in touch with the latest ideas and constantly refreshed by new investigations of the Italian painters.” So they went, not only to Italy, but to Germany, to Spain and to Holland.

  To the end of his life he would never write a book or deliver a lecture without seeing the pictures themselves, whether a fresh sight confirmed his opinions or upset them. And to h
is friends at home those journeys meant that each letter contained a shower of comments upon the pictures seen. He compared this year’s sight with last year’s sight; was amazed by this, disappointed by that; revised an old judgment, struck the track of a new one, improvised a theory and pressed it to the limits. To quote these comments in full would fill many volumes, and to select from them so as to show his snailhorn sensibility trembling this way and that would require the skill of a trained hand. But one extract may be made, not for its critical interest but because it shows Roger Fry sitting in a café and doing what he always did when he had seen a picture — discussing it with somebody else and comparing notes. “Helen”, he wrote, “won’t come round to Correggio and she don’t like the Sistine Madonna....” The words bring back to those who went picture-seeing with Roger Fry in later years the pause with which he would receive an opinion contrary to his own. And then, after the first shock, and the surprise, his eyes would light up — there might be something in it. The remark would be taken, and explored, given the benefit of every possible doubt, and returned to its author, perhaps exploded, but certainly illuminated. To have another pair of eyes to see with, another brain to argue with, was a very necessary process in making up his mind. And his wife’s instinct, he always maintained, rightly or wrongly, was much better than his own knowledge. “Women”, he wrote in an article at this time, “seldom learn.... But if they have good taste, they rarely sophisticate it... they have an instinct, a certainty and rapidity of judgment which not even the most gifted men can emulate.” This opinion, he goes on to say, is based “not on chivalrous grounds but from experience”. There can be no doubt that it was his wife who gave him that experience, or that whatever views she might hold upon Correggio and the Sistine Madonna would be carefully considered by her husband. But the letter continues: “In spite of all Helen’s attempts to undermine my beliefs I’m almost annoyed to find that I really do always like the great artists. It would be cheering to say with conviction that Raphael was not so good as Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, but I can’t.” That too was always behind his delight in the expression of direct sensation — something stable, and serious, a standard to which all speculations must be referred.