Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  And then, his duties in the sick-room done, there was just time for a drive. He was enthusiastic about the landscape. There was a magnificence about the Turkish hills that gave him immense satisfaction. They were not romantic. The light was real light, not pea-soup dissolved in vapour. One could see the structure of the hills. Then he stopped the driver. Where could he buy pots like those the women used tor water? And handkerchiefs like those they wore on their heads? Talking partly French, partly Turkish which he had picked up from a conversation book, he persuaded the driver to take him to the native quarter. Soon he was standing with his hat on the back of his head gesticulating, laughing, the centre of a group of excited peasants. Pots were bought and coloured handkerchiefs, and he pointed out how the bold crude pattern was based on some half-forgotten tradition — Russian, or Greek, or Chinese? Whatever it was it proved that the tradition was alive and that the peasants of Broussa put the educated English to shame.

  Soon therefore his room at the hotel was littered with stuffs and pots and silks, mixed with chessmen, medicine bottles and paint-boxes. Thanks largely to his skill, the invalid recovered. And though the Orient Express was crowded, and a truculent Colonel, whom Roger Fry sized up correctly at first sight, refused to give up his corner seat — had he not said that he would? — he contrived somehow to convey an invalid who could not stand and a freight of fragile china successfully across Europe. He himself was attacked by sciatica, but as the train rattled through the uplands of Serbia he stretched his leg upon an improvised leg-rest, took a book from his pocket and read it aloud.

  The book that he was reading was by Frances Cornford. He liked it very much. “I think this shows”, he wrote to his mother, “that she is a genuine, though no doubt not a great poet. She has felt things for herself, and managed to say them. It is strange that this should be so rare, because when it’s done, it seems so simple, as though anyone could do it.” The Post-Impressionist movement, as the casual words show, was by no means confined to painting. He read books by the light of it too. It put him on the track of new ideas everywhere. Like a water-diviner, he seemed to have tapped some hidden spring sunk beneath the incrustations that had blocked it. The twig turned vigorously and unexpectedly in streets, in galleries, and also in front of the bookcase. There it was — this reality, the thing that the artist had managed to say, now in Frances Cornford, now in Wordsworth, now in Marie Clare, a novel by Marguerite Audoux in which, if memory serves, the writer has contrived to express the emotions of a peasant at the sight of a wolf without using a single adjective. But it was not where it was expected to be. He laid sacrilegious hands upon the classics. He found glaring examples in Shakespeare, in Shelley, of the writer’s vice of distorting reality, of importing impure associations, of contaminating the stream with adjectives and metaphors. Literature was suffering from a plethora of old clothes. Cézanne and Picasso had shown the way; writers should fling representation to the winds and follow suit. But he never found time to work out his theory of the influence of Post-Impressionism upon literature, and his attempts to found a broadsheet, profusely illustrated, to be sold for one penny at all the bookstalls, in which the two arts should work out the new theories side by side, failed — the money difficulty floored even him. And he went on to turn his attention to another undertaking that came more naturally within his scope.

  This was to find work, not as painters but as decorators, for the young English artists who had been drawn together by the Post-Impressionist Exhibition. It was bad for young artists to be forced to depend upon private patrons who, as the exhibition had convinced him, looked upon art “chiefly as a symbol of social distinction”. He wanted to see the walls of railway stations and restaurants covered with pictures of ordinary life that ordinary people could enjoy. As soon as he was back in England therefore he persuaded the authorities of the Borough Polytechnic to let him decorate the walls of the students’ dining-room. He got the artists to design cartoons; he got the Committee to accept their designs; and in the autumn of 1911 the students of the Borough Polytechnic were given pictures, not of saints or of madonnas, but of the pleasures of London to look at as they ate their meals. Duncan Grant, Frederic Etchells, Bernard Adeney, Albert Rutherston, Max Gill and Roger Fry himself made designs representing Swimmers and Footballers, Punch and Judy, Paddlers in the Serpentine, Animals at the Zoo, and other familiar London scenes. The pictures have, it is said, now been destroyed; but Roger Fry threw a great deal of energy into the work of organisation that as usual fell chiefly upon him, and he was delighted with the results. “My work at the Borough Polytechnic”, he wrote that autumn, “has been a great success. They had a great debate upon it the other night which I was asked to open. It was a very amusing occasion, with much freedom of speech, but on the whole they seemed to be converted to my view.”

  No record of the speech remains, but “the view” he expressed may be gathered from the essay called “Art and Socialism” which he wrote in 1912. In that essay, published later in Vision and Design, which begins with the words “I am not a socialist”, he investigated the position of the artist in the modern State, and tried to discover how the ideal State might make the best use of his powers. Only one phrase need be taken from that reasoned and subtle argument— “the greatest art has always been communal, the expression — in highly individualised ways no doubt — of common aspirations and ideals”. Attitudes had always to be revised, the fixed pose was always suspect, but though he would not call himself either a socialist or a democrat, he had views about the relation of art to society, and the pictures on the walls of the Polytechnic were an attempt to put those views into practice. One has to “accept modern conditions and to make the best of them”. He accepted those conditions down in Southward and if the public did not come forward, as he hoped, with commissions on a larger scale, it was an experiment that interested him greatly. If he was disillusioned about the love of art among the cultivated, he was sanguine about the love of art among the untaught. Indeed, it was more likely to be found, he had come to think, in Southwark than in Grafton Street.

  Meanwhile, there were his own pictures. Underneath all these theories, fertilising them, there was his own “petite sensation”. That somehow had been freed from impediments. He was hard at work all that winter painting. Pictures accumulated. They “threaten to choke my room entirely”, he wrote. There they were, among the peasant pots and the Broussa handkerchiefs, those new pictures; upon one a cheque with five pounds still legible upon it was pasted; upon another the figure of Christ stood upon his head. The painters, without caring a rap for their reputations as men of learning and culture, were trying to penetrate beneath appearance to reality. And Roger Fry was carrying on any number of supplementary adventures. He was maintaining that a hat suitable for a negress under a tropical sun was fit headgear for Lady Ottoline Morrell in Bond Street; he had discovered a new cure for sciatica, and he was arguing some abstruse point about representation and the aesthetic emotion while all the time the picture grew rapidly beneath his brush.

  He was going to hold a one-man show of his pictures in January. He wrote of it with the usual doubts: “I fear it may be rather a rash speculation. But I hope that it may cover expenses and distribute a few of my works which at present threaten to choke my room entirely. Perhaps it would be simpler to give them away without more ado...But he attached great importance to that exhibition, for he was convinced that he was painting better than he had ever painted before. The pictures were shown at the Alpine Club in January 1912. They roused a good deal of attention. He was laughed at of course. The Post-Impressionist label had succeeded the Old English Water Colour label. It was astonishing, the old press cuttings said, to find that the cultivated and erudite Mr Fry had thrown overboard all his learning and all his science. But he was obviously sincere, and though the frames were of deal, and he had painted them himself, and though a pot of tulips if stood upon a table must have toppled over, the pictures were worth looking at. The press was kindly enough. B
ut as the following letter shows, he was hurt when a critic for whom he had a great respect, Mr D. S. MacColl, expressed doubts about his “conversion”.

  To D. S. MacColl

  Dunbins,

  Feb. 3rd, 1912

  Of course I don’t like your article, partly no doubt because one doesn’t like to be called a pasticheur. There’s enough ground of truth for it to be very plausible and to be the most unpleasant thing I could have said of me, but as far as I can judge of my work impartially — and I try for my own sake to do so — I don’t think it’s true. I’ve always been searching for a style to express my petite sensation in. One of my earliest oil paintings was essentially Post-Impressionist but was so derided at the time — I never showed it publicly — that I gave in to what I thought were wiser counsels and my next rebellion against the dreary naturalism of our youth lay in the direction of archaism. I know that was no good, knew it at the time, but saw no other outlet for what I wanted which was a much more deliberate and closer unity of texture than any of my contemporaries tried for.

  Now as to my sudden conversion. I don’t think it’s a point of any importance but you don’t state the facts correctly. So long ago as March 1908 I wrote a long letter to the Burlington Mag. to protest against Holmes’s contemptuous tone with regard to Cézanne and Gauguin and what I said there seems to me, on re-reading it, to show that my first reaction to Cézanne and Gauguin was exactly what it still is.

  The step from critical and intellectual assent to practise obviously takes some time but I think those — and there were one or two critics — who saw more of Matisse than of Guido Reni in my ceiling were right. In fact I thought the Guido Reni idea was a mere joke of Ross’s and could not be taken seriously at all. Still, that work had been commissioned and designed more than a year before I began to paint it and obviously I couldn’t with fairness change the whole thing to something quite other than I had covenanted to do.

  All this may seem very trivial personality only I like to put it on record.

  If indeed I have had a petite sensation which struggled now and then towards expression, why on earth didn’t you ever give it a helping hand by showing where and when it showed itself and pushing one in that direction? I should have been very grateful in old days.

  Now, whether rightly or wrongly, I feel that I have got a way out of it and have an altogether new sense of confidence and determination which I shall stick to as long as it will last.

  There is an asperity — a personal tone — in the letter that shows that what was said of his painting affected him differently from anything that was said of his writing. “You can create”, he once wrote to Lowes Dickinson, “and can influence others and impose your own creations on them and that is surely the greatest position to be got out of life.” After “long years of toil and uncertainty” he felt that he too was able to create and any doubt of that new capacity hurt him acutely. Under certain circumstances, as the letter shows, he might have become an artist with a grievance. But the circumstances were not favourable. For he had to leave his own problems as an artist, and to deal with the practical problems that faced him in Grafton Street.

  V

  The second Post-Impressionist Exhibition was opened on 5th October 1912. “The scope of the present Exhibition”, to quote the introduction to the catalogue, “differs somewhat from that of two years ago. Then the main object was to show the work of the ‘Old Masters’ of the new movement, to which the somewhat negative label of Post-Impressionism was attached for the sake of convenience. Now the idea has been to show it in its contemporary development not only in France, its native place, but in England where it is of very recent growth, and in Russia where it has liberated and revived the old native tradition.” This time, though English artists of established reputation had refused to co-operate, works by young English artists — Spencer, Grant, Gill, Etchells and Miss Etchells, Vanessa Bell, Adeney, Wyndham Lewis, and Gore — were included. And once more in his introduction to his own section — the French — Roger Fry did his best to anticipate objections and to explain the idea that lay behind the movement. “It was not surprising”, he wrote, “that a public which had come to admire above everything in a picture the skill with which an artist produced illusion should have resented an art in which such skill was completely subordinated to the direct expression of feeling. Accusations of clumsiness and incapacity were freely made, even against so singularly accomplished an artist as Cézanne. Such darts, however, fall wide of the mark, since it is not the object of these artists to exhibit their skill or proclaim their knowledge, but only to attempt to express by pictorial and plastic form certain spiritual experiences; and in conveying these ostentation of skill is likely to be even more fatal than downright incapacity.... Now these artists”, he went on, “do not seek to give what can, after all, be but a pale reflex of actual appearance, but to arouse the conviction of a new and definite reality. They do not seek to imitate form, but to create form, not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life. By that I mean that they wish to make images which by the clearness of their logical structure, and by their closely-knit unity of texture, shall appeal to our disinterested and contemplative imagination with something of the same vividness as the things of actual life appeal to our practical activities. In fact they aim not at illusion but at reality.”

  Once more the public exposed themselves to the shock of reality, and once more they were considerably enraged. This time perhaps the shock was less considerable — the novelty had worn off; certainly Roger Fry himself had lost some of his illusions. But the business side of the enterprise was enough to engross his energies. The first exhibition had not done quite so well, financially, as had been expected. Therefore it was of the greatest importance, if as he hoped the exhibition was to be held annually, that the present show should succeed. Much depended upon his own aptitude for business. And he was not a trained business man. He sometimes thought, he said, that he had “a great business instinct somewhat smothered in great superficial incompetence”. “In fact”, writes Leonard Woolf, who took Desmond MacCarthy’s place as secretary, “he was a very curious mixture. In many ways he conducted business in an extremely unbusinesslike way, and this occasionally led to disastrous results. For instance, he would make agreements with people without recording them in writing. Although extraordinarily good and ingenious about the details of business, he was inclined to be carried away by his enthusiasm for a scheme and brush aside as unimportant all the details upon which success or failure depended.” Hence there were many scenes, in the basement beneath the gallery where business was transacted, that were both “hectic and comic”. Many of the Russian pictures failed to arrive upon the opening day. The rates of commission had been left unspecified and Roger Fry was naturally held responsible when they were found to be higher than the artists had anticipated. And when accused by artists and business men of mismanaging their different interests, he was not conciliatory. “He was completely disinterested”, Leonard Woolf writes, “in the large sense of the word, i.e. his ultimate motives were not his own interests, but some idea. But in planning and carrying out the actual steps and business necessary for attaining his disinterested object, he would be both dictatorial and ruthless.” Plain business men who were not used to skipping details in order to follow ideas were puzzled; and they protested. But the plain business men were not only puzzled; they were often coerced. In order to achieve his end, Roger Fry brought to play upon them three different qualities, not usually exercised in business dealings. “First”, his secretary writes, “there was the immense charm which everyone felt as soon as they began to talk to him. Then there was his incredible persuasiveness. In a personal business interview these two assets were usually sufficient. But if they were not, there then appeared a third line of defence which often, I think, surprised people. Roger had an extraordinarily strong will and immense persistence. If he had made up his mind on a practical business question, he nearly always got his way and in the pursu
it of his object he would display what can only be called ruthlessness. Intellectually, he was the most open-minded person I have ever met, but he was not open-minded in practical affairs. That is why people who ‘got across’ him in business often genuinely misunderstood his motives.”

  But difficulties with business men in the basement were not the only difficulties that he had to solve. All sorts of people were daily passing in front of the pictures in the galleries above. They were being exposed to the shock of reality and were registering many unexpected emotions. Directly Roger Fry showed his face in the gallery they would seize upon him; they would demand explanations; they would express their delight or their disgust. And then, his secretary observed, “His handling of people was masterly — it did not matter who they were”. Often they were very angry — then he would “skilfully and courteously manage to squash them”. Often, on the other hand, they would show unexpected intelligence. Then he would take them round the gallery and “deliver an extraordinarily interesting lecture”. And among the daily press of unknown people there would appear now and then an old friend — Arnold Bennett for instance, or Henry James. Them he would take down to the basement where, among the packing cases and the brown paper, tea would be provided. Seated on a little hard chair, Henry James would express “in convoluted sentences the disturbed hesitations which Matisse and Picasso aroused in him, and Roger Fry, exquisitely, with something of the old-world courtesy which James carried about with him”, would do his best to convey to the great novelist what he meant by saying that Cézanne and Flaubert were, in a manner of speaking, after the same thing.