Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  Once more I tried to get to my petit déjeuner but once more I was stopped, but this time by an elderly lady very refined with the timid dignity of an old Italian provincial aristocrat. She and her sister lived in a Casteilo some ten miles away in the hills and had a wonderful service of Majolica. Wouldn’t it be possible for il Morgan to visit them? Well, there was some possibility. I would do what I could and let her know. No need for that. She and her sister never left the ground. Any time would do. That made the chances all the more favourable and I could almost promise a visit. After petit déjeuner I went on to Morgan’s suite of rooms. He was up and ready to start while Mrs Douglas was putting the final touches to her stately and enamelled appearance. The courier entered. He was il Cavalière Luigi Poretta, a lank hungry Italian cadger, a servile and insinuating bully who had lived on his wits and somehow managed to get a title. He was ignorant, incapable and intriguing and the title was the only quality to recommend him for the post of courier to Pierpont Morgan. He announced in tones of greasy servility that the Fiat motor was waiting. The party descended and passed through the hall, eyed with awestruck admiration by the expectant Italian counts, the Levantine Jews and all the other human flotsam that was drawn into the whirlpool of Morgan’s wealth. They indeed but most of all the Italians looked at Morgan with something like worship. His wealth affected them not merely as something from which they might hope for doles but as something glorious and romantic in itself. Their passion was so great as to be almost disinterested. The mere thought that one man had so much wealth seemed to them ennobling and uplifting and incredibly more romantic than royalty itself. I forgot one other member of the party, little shrivelled white haired old Miss Burns, Mrs Douglas’ chaperone. She was entirely unnoticeable and the only evidence of her presence was that at proper intervals and whenever it seemed appropriate she uttered little shrill mouse-like squeaks of admiration at pictures, scenery, or Mr Morgan’s remarks.

  It was a beautiful day and we were spinning along the road to Assisi. For a wonder Mr Morgan was in a good humour, he didn’t know how bored he was going to be with the frescoes at Assisi where moreover there was nothing one could buy. He was so pleased with himself that he joked about one of his gloves having a rent in it. “Can’t afford to buy another pair haw haw.” Faint screams of delight from Miss Burns and a slight relaxation of the grimly well preserved features of the maîtresse en titre. There was even something like conversation which Morgan pulled round to Raphael a sign of good humour because it allowed him to make the inevitable remark “What fools those National Gallery people were to let me lend ’em my Raphael — made their Ansidei thing look pretty queer”. (The said Raphael was a much repainted altarpiece which had been left for fifty years in the S.K. Museum because no one would buy it and no one wanted to look at it.)

  The motor spun along driven by a horribly skilful but reckless Italian chauffeur who had his ideas of how an ultra-royal and Morganatic car should be driven, namely to cause as much terror to the inhabitants as possible. Oxen dragging loads of hay plunged wildly into ditches and up the opposite bank, fowls, dogs and children rushed screaming away and everyone realised that Morgan was a real millionaire. So we spun along until a particularly deep canniveau gave the car such a jerk that Morgan was projected violently up to the ceiling and his hat crushed down over his eyes. (He wore a kind of truncated top-hat.) Then there was an apoplectic splutter of rage, the Cavaliere was called from the front seat, the driver warned, and the car driven less impressively. Assisi was a failure. Mr Morgan was displeased with the condition of the frescoes, Miss Burns let off a few screams but stopped when she saw it wasn’t approved. Mrs Douglas would like to have improved her mind by pumping me on the history of the church and Giotto but we were hurried away since neither Morgan nor the Cavaliere were enjoying themselves.

  On the way back I persuaded Morgan to go round by the old ladies’ Castello and see the Majolica service. It was a lovely place up in the hills and Morgan was always pleased by the idea of buying family heirlooms from the family itself, the object seemed to convey with it some of the distinction of impoverished nobility. He was none the less rude to the poor trembling old ladies but he agreed to buy the service. I think he imagined that he gave more when he bought from the family than when he bought from the dealer. But this was not so. It is true he bargained less but then no private person except Clive Bell ever had the gumption to stick on to the proper price a quarter as much as the Jew and Levantine dealer did. I forget what the ladies got but I fear whatever it was the Cavaliere got 6/7 of it. That was what he considered the proper perquisite for having arrived in the same motor car as Morgan.

  Such was our triumphal progress through Italy. At Siena the whole of the wooden floor of the Cathedral was taken up that il Morgan might see the mosaics. The Queen of Italy had visited Siena a little before and had asked in vain for this. I must say the Cavaliere was ingenious. He got all the smaller galleries and libraries which are ordinarily open to the public shut up and then opened to Morgan as a special favour. At San Gimignano though we visited the town without warning we were instantly recognised and the royal book was brought out by the Mayor to be signed by the more than Royal millionaire. At Ancona we drove to the harbour through the square while everyone was listening to the military band. In a second the band was deserted and the whole population followed our carriage to the harbour where we embarked on Morgan’s yacht. As the launch put out a salute was fired and answered from the yacht. We lay off the town all night and till late in the evening the choral society of Ancona serenaded us in boats. They shocked Morgan very much by asking for money and they were rudely refused. It was not so much that he minded parting with money as that the request was a blow to the cherished illusion that everything was done out of pure admiration for his personality, just for his beaux yeux. I always wondered that his mistresses in New York got such substantial subsidies as they did. To man it is impossible but to Jews Armenians and women...

  There the fragment ends. Morgan returned to New York “with a million dollars worth of the lovely spoils of his voyage”, writes his biographer. “Wood carvings, historic ceilings, treasures from the trappings of ancient palaces... lay in yet unopened cases at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” And Roger Fry, having done his duty by the millionaire, returned home to his wife and children.

  But he came back to anxiety, not to rest; he could no longer share these humours with his wife. During his absences Helen Fry was frequently ill, and the doctors were beginning to hint that her recovery was impossible. Once more he was faced with all the problems that her illness brought with it. He fought them with splendid courage; he won spaces of great happiness; but the menace was always there, increasing the strain of his work, taking away any pleasure that he might have had in his success. When about this time some show of his pictures was unexpectedly successful he wrote, “it comes at a time when I have lost my ambition in that direction and indeed in all directions”. With his sister’s help he made provisional arrangements for his wife and children, and went back to the problems that awaited him in America. They were familiar enough, and the words of one of the trustees, Mr Johnson of Philadelphia, may be taken as a sufficient description of them. “The trouble is”, he wrote, “that everybody is under the coercion of Mr M’s dominating will. No one does, or dares, resist it.... The one-man power in public institutions is a good one; but where it is exercised as in the case of the M[useum], it is worse than Turkish rule.... I do think”, he continued, “it would be wiser for you, until some arrangement by way of complete substitution opens, to run upon the modified engagement although at a very considerable cost of just irritation.” Whatever “the modified engagement” may have been, Roger Fry did his best to comply with it. He was feeling “grumpy and dissatisfied”, he said, but “I must not throw up in mere disgust a position that does give us some much needed money”, to renounce a post which with all its drawbacks was still “the greatest opportunity I have ever had”, was a step to be
deferred as long as possible. The break was only put off; given the President’s temper and his own inability to dance to that tune it was inevitable. On 14th February 1910 he wrote to his father: “The blow I expected has fallen. Morgan could not forgive me for trying to get that picture for the Museum, and Ghoate has proved a broken reed.... It is useless to make any fuss about it. I could get no satisfaction from these people and they have behaved vilely.” “A vile deed,” he called his dismissal in a letter to Sir Charles Holmes, “villainously done with every kind of hypocritical slaver.” It is immaterial whether, as Sir Charles says, he “received his conge” or took it. The breach was final and for the moment he could not help regretting the National Gallery. Yet, as Sir Charles pointed out, the conditions in England were as unsatisfactory as in America. In America, he says — and his words throw some light upon Roger Fry’s difficulties at the Museum— “Fry... was... meeting with serious difficulties from Trustees as anxious to retain good pictures for themselves as ours apparently were to see them sold, of course for the highest obtainable price, to other countries.” The policy that then ruled the National Gallery— “the strangling of National Gallery initiative” — would have been as distasteful to Roger Fry in one way as the tyranny of Pierpont Morgan in another. Many years later, when he realised the difficulties under which Sir Charles Holmes laboured under the English trustees, he exclaimed: “How glad I am that the Americans prevented me from having that post which once seemed to me the height of my ambition!” But that was in 1927. In 1910 he was left without any post whatsoever.

  The end of his work in America coincided with a far more terrible conclusion. When, three years before, Sir George Savage had told him that in his opinion Helen Fry’s illness was hopeless, he had refused to believe him. He had gone from doctor to doctor; he had tried every method that held out the least chance of success. It is a splendid record of courage, patience and devotion. In the hope that his wife could still live with him he had built a house from his own design near Guildford. In 1910 the house was ready, and he brought her there. But the illness increased, and in that year he was forced, for the children’s sake, to give up the battle. It had lasted, with intervals of rare happiness, since 1898. “You have certainly fought hard to help your wife, and shown a devotion I have never seen equalled”, Dr Head wrote to him in November 1910. “Unfortunately the disease has beaten us.”

  What that defeat meant to one so sanguine, and so dependent upon private happiness, is only to be guessed at, and only from his own words. To his mother he wrote:

  It is terrible to have to write happiness out of one’s life after I had had it so intensely and for such a short time.... I suppose we learn more from suffering than from happiness. But it’s a strange world where we are made to want it so much and have so little chance of getting it.

  He also wrote:

  ... with all the terrible trouble that these years have brought... I do feel a kind of pious gratitude for it all.

  And to Lowes Dickinson:

  I think I could get used to the dullness and greyness of life without love if it weren’t for the constant sense of her suffering. This thing seems to be as diabolically contrived to give prolonged torture as anything could be. If she could only die!...

  When Helen had first fallen ill, the thought of death had been intolerable. The years that followed had made death desirable. But he wrote:

  I do believe almost mystically in tout comprendre est tout pardonner. The understanding is generally too impossibly difficult, but when one does understand it’s always a pitiful rather than a hateful sight one stumbles on.

  His emotions were broken and contradictory. He did not attempt to take up any attitude. He had to find his way, to piece things together, as best he could. “I’ve given up even regretting the callus that had to form to ~ let me go through with things. Now and then it gives, and I could cry for the utter pity and wastefulness of things, but life is too urgent”, he told Lowes Dickinson. He had no creed. The old phrases meant nothing to him. He dreaded most, he said, “shutting myself up in the imprisonment of egotism.” The understanding of life, like the understanding of art, must be attempted by following its lead according to Ms own discovery of the pattern. He laid himself open to all experience with a certain recklessness, because so many of the things that men care for, as he said later, were now meaningless. The centre which would have given them meaning was gone. From this experience sprang both Ms profound tolerance and also his intolerance — his instant response to whatever he found genuine, Ms resentment of what seemed to Mm false. So much perhaps may be read into his fragmentary and broken words without risking the scorn with which he blew away stock phrases. At the back of all that he accepted and rejected after his wife left Mm lay the fact of that experience — he had suffered and was to go on suffering, something that was, he said, “far worse than death”.

  Helen Fry died in the Retreat at York in 1937. After her death the cause of her illness was found to be an incurable thickening of the bone of the skull.

  CHAPTER VII. THE POST-IMPRESSIONISTS

  I

  To a stranger meeting Mm then for the first time (1910) he looked much older than his age. He was only forty-four, but he gave the impression of a man with a great weight of experience behind him. He looked worn and seasoned, ascetic yet tough. And there was his reputation, of course, to confuse a first impression — his reputation as a lecturer and as an art critic. He did not live up to Ms reputation, if one expected a man who lectured upon the Old Masters at Leighton House to be pale, academic, aesthetic-looking. On the contrary, he was brown and animated. Nor was he altogether a man of the world, or a painter — there was nothing Bohemian about Mm. It was difficult at first sight to find his pigeon-hole. And another impression floated over the first glimpse of Roger Fry in the flesh — a glimpse caught a year or two before on a lawn at Cambridge. The trees were in leaf, and through the green light by the side of the summer river came two figures, both tall, both for some reason memorable and distinguished. Who were they? “Roger Fry and his wife.” And they disappeared.

  He talked that spring day in a room looking out over the trees of a London square, in a deep voice like a harmonious growl,— “his and Forbes Robertson’s were the only voices one could listen, to for their own sakes” says Bernard Shaw — and he laughed spontaneously, thoroughly, with the whole of Mm. It was easy to make him laugh. Yet he was grave— “alarming”, to use his own word of his father. He too could be formidable. Behind his glasses, beneath bushy black eyebrows, he had very luminous eyes with a curious power of observation in them as if, while he talked, he looked, and considered what he saw. Half-consciously he would stretch out a hand and begin to alter the flowers in a vase, or pick up a bit of china, turn it round and put it down again. That look, that momentary detachment, was so instinctive that it made no break in what he was saying, yet it gave a sense of something held in reserve — things played over the surface and were referred to some hidden centre. There was something stable underneath his mobility. Mobile he was. He was just off — was it to Paris or to Poland? He had to catch a train. He seemed used to catching trains whether to Poland or to Paris. It was only for a week or so, and then he would be back. Out came a little engagement book. The pages were turned rapidly. He murmured in his deep voice through a long list of engagements, and at last chose a day and noted it. But the particular Sunday he chose for a first visit to Durbins was somehow muddled. There was no cab; there was no Roger Fry. The name Durbins conveyed nothing to any porter. And much to his contrition — but the blame must be laid on the “cussed nature of human affairs” — he inflicted upon his would-be guests the horrors, about which no one could be more eloquent than he, of Sunday lunch at an English inn.

  It was to Poland, not to Paris, that he was starting that spring evening in 1910. A letter to his mother fixes the date — 24th April 1910. “I am very busy”, he wrote, “just now. I have to go to Poland to buy for Mr Frick a very important picture. The
whole business came upon me very suddenly, and I have, I hope, transacted the affair satisfactorily. The owner is a rather stupid country gentleman who insists on selling the picture in his chateau, that’s why I have to go and get it, as I must see it before buying. The picture costs ^£60,000 so it is an important affair.... It’s tiresome and rather hateful work but I couldn’t refuse to do it.... At all events I ought to get handsomely paid for it, and indeed it comes at a critical time for I am just at the end of my resources and have been feeling very anxious of late as to how I can possibly meet expenses.”

  He had plenty of work on hand that spring — a ceiling to paint for Sir Andrew Noble, the Mantegnas to restore at Hampton Court; but it was spasmodic and miscellaneous, and he hoped again, though he was no longer sanguine, for some appointment that might canalise his energies and provide the income that was more than ever necessary. Once more the Slade professorship, this time at Oxford, was vacant. And again men of reputation in the art world asserted his fitness for the post. “I, for my part,” wrote Salomon Reinach, Conservateur des Musées Nationaux, “would consider Mr Roger Fry as capable of exerting the most beneficent influence on young students; they would learn from him to use their eyes not only for reading, but for seeing works of art; he would teach them to appreciate quality which makes the difference between handiwork and art” — but the electors thought differently; the post went elsewhere, and Roger Fry’s energies were made no use of, officially, to teach the young to use their eyes.