Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  But that was not the end of his day’s work. When the galleries were shut to the public he would open them again to bring people together — people from many different worlds, ladies of fashion, painters, poets, musicians, business men. The new movement was not to be restricted to the art of painting only. Some of the young French poets were invited to read aloud from their work. He lectured both upon poetry and upon painting himself. He arranged concerts. The fashionable and the aesthetic rubbed shoulders at those parties. Post-Impressionism had become, he noted, all the rage. Whether that meant that people really enjoyed Cézanne or merely thought that it was the right thing to say so, he was doubtful. His enthusiasm was always corrected by a douche of caustic common sense. His exquisite urbanity concealed a certain scepticism. Lady So-and-so was charming; she was’ ecstatic; but did she really cherish a disinterested delight in Cezanne himself”, or was he merely a new fashion to be worn this summer and thrown away the next? He often dwelt in the articles he wrote then upon snobbism and its symptoms— “the tendency to believe in the value of right opinion — to think that by knowing whom one ought to admire... one achieves aesthetic salvation’. But his own faith was more deeply grounded than ever, and whatever his share in the movement had been, there could be no doubt when the second Post-impressionist exhibition shut on the last day of 1912. that the two exhibitions had made an immense impression both upon the artist and upon the public.

  CHAPTER VIII. THE OMEGA

  I

  Many of the things that Roger Fry had thought impossible in 1892 seemed to him possible in 1913. The stability which he had found so oppressive as a young man was breaking up. The Post-Impressionist Exhibition was only one sign of the change that was coming over the world. What did that change amount to? He threw out a theory, characteristically, in a note to Goldie Dickinson (1913). What was happening in England, he said, was much what had happened in Rome in the sixth century. They were “in a hopeless muddle” then, he said: “the old stupid Roman attitude (dully materialistic and fatuous like that of modern popular art) still persisting, and yet this new ferment working.... And the new thing in the sixth century”, he went on, “wasn’t a religious thing... it was just a new excitement — about what? That’s where the difficulty is — to see what it was, which crystallised art into the spirituality of the Middle Ages and S. Francis. Anyhow its life and Roman art was dead. We’re so like that now somehow — all the people in this new movement are alive and whatever they do has life and that’s new. How long will it last — will it fizzle out like the pre-Raphaelites or have we got hold of something permanent?”

  The change was in himself too. The shy and studio with his faculty youth, with his faculty for sitting at other people’s feet and absorbing other people’s ideas, had become “dictatorial and ruthless”, the leader of rebels, the father of modern British painting. Perhaps it was growth, not change, a natural development that sprang from his conviction that one must lay oneself open to new ideas, and to new passions even if they expose one to ridicule. Certainly the new ferment worked in him. He was gay. hopeful and immensely active. The new movement was suggesting fresh developments of the old aesthetic problems. As he explained in a letter to G. L. Dickinson (1913):

  I’m continuing my aesthetic theories and I have been attacking poetry to understand painting. I want to find out what the function of content is. and am developing a theory which you will hate very much, viz. that it is merely directive of form and that all the essential aesthetic quality has to do with pure form. It’s horribly difficult to analyse out of all the complex feelings just this one peculiar feeling, but I think that in proportion as poetry becomes more intense the content is entirely remade by the form and has no separate value at all. You see the sense of poetry is analogous to the things represented in painting. I admit that there is also a queer hybrid art of sense and illustration, but it can only arouse particular and definitely conditioned emotions, whereas the emotions of music and pure painting and poetry when it approaches purity are really free abstract and universal. Do you see at all and do you hate it? The odd thing is that apparently it is dangerous for the artist to know about this.

  He worked out these theories at dinners, at debates, even at week-ends. “A. J. Balfour and Lord Morley are both here,” he wrote to his mother from Lord Curzon’s country house in December 1912, “so we have some delightful discussions. As I hoped, Balfour tumbled at once to my ideas about Post-Impressionism, tho’ he has not liked the pictures hitherto... but he sees how logical the theory is. Lord C. denounces it as pure humbug. So we have heated but very agreeable arguments. Balfour is charming as I always suspected he would be. Lord M. is getting old. He is old for his age, and I should think never had anything of Balfour’s intellectual agility.” Lord Morley, it is to be inferred, did not “tumble to” his ideas about Post-Impressionism. But a surprising number of people passed that test, as it was put to them by Roger Fry. He was ready to exempt a great many individuals from the common curse of Philistinism which brooded over the British Isles. He made many converts and friends. There was nothing he liked better than those heated but very agreeable arguments. At last, he felt, after the hypocrisy of the Victorian age, of which he had many anecdotes drawn from his own past, a time was at hand when a real society was possible. It was to be a society of people of moderate means, a society based upon the old Cambridge ideal of truth and free speaking, but alive, as Cambridge had never been, to the importance of the arts. It was possible in France; why not in England? No art could flourish without such a background. The young English artist tended to become illiterate, narrow-minded and self-centred with disastrous effects upon his work, failing any society where, among the amenities of civilisation, ideas were discussed in common and he was accepted as an equal. He was always hoping that he had discovered some such centre. Naturally, he was often disillusioned. The hostess whose passion for Cézanne had seemed to him absolutely disinterested was suddenly discovered to be a mere lion-hunter; the old Quaker in him would be roused, and henceforth she would be relegated to the lowest depths of the human hierarchy. But hope always revived — the very next night he sat next somebody who could talk, who could provide an atmosphere. And the centre of civilisation would be removed once more to her dwelling.

  But if he was convinced in 1913 that there was a new excitement — something was happening — he was never blind to facts. There was always the Adversary. The Adversary, a compound of schoolboy bully, Pierpont Morgan, the pseudo-artist and the British public, had been too long and too solidly established in the centre of his mindscape to let him indulge in dreams of an easy Utopia. If you wanted a better world, you had to fight for it. And he fought — he waged endless newspaper battles for the Post-Impressionists; or indeed for any other cause that needed a champion. In 1912 to take one instance. Regent Street was being pulled down. The Times leader expressed a hope that the new buildings would ‘ sacrifice to art”’. Roger Fry at once protested.

  The writer adjures us to make sacrifices for art, as though that were not the very root of all our aesthetic disasters. We all sacrifice to art, from the lodging-house keeper who fills her house with incredible ornaments to the millionaire who buys Old Masters that he does not like. It is the art that comes from such motives which is so deadening to all artistic impulse and effort. Nowhere is this dreary aesthetic “snobbism” more devastating than in architecture. We make buildings for our need, and then, sacrificing our pockets to art, cover them with a mass of purely nonsensical forms which we hope may turn them into fine architecture.... Let Messrs Swan and Edgar and the rest be as vigorous in their demands for plate glass as ever they like, and then let a really good engineer solve them their problem.... Thus we may get something really satisfactory instead of another piece of polite archaeological humbug. Fortunately there is already one building in London which reveals what may be done by honest methods — I mean the Kodak building in Kingsway.... This admirable shop puts all its neighbours to shame by sheer reasonable
ness and good sense, for it has what they lack — essential dignity of style.

  Again, there was an exhibition at Burlington House of the works of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. The Royal Academicians had been denouncing Cézanne. This then was the kind of art they admired. Roger Fry was indignant. He devoted an article in the Nation to the exhibition. He began by saying that “Sir Lawrence’s products are typical of the purely commercial ideals of the age in which he grew up”. He went on to say that “he had undoubtedly conveyed the information that the people of that interesting and remote period” (the Roman Empire) had “their furniture, clothes, even their splendid marble villas made of highly scented soap”, and added that while no one grudged “so honest and capable a commercialist his fortune”, artists must protest “against the remissness and indifference of the governing classes who instead of enforcing the Adulterated Foods Act... stamp it all over with the Government stamp, indicating that it is guaranteed to be the best dairy-made butter”. “How long”, he concluded, “will it take to disinfect the Order of Merit of Tadema’s scented soap?” This was the signal for an astonishing outburst. Perhaps, since times have changed and Alma-Tadema’s marble is no longer as solid as it seemed, a few phrases are worth resurrecting. Sir Philip Burne-Jones began the attack. “Fortunately at this date”, he wrote, “the work of Alma-Tadema needs no sort of defence. It rests in the security of a practically unanimous European reputation.” But since Mr Fry had attacked it, and expressed no contrition when called to order, lovers of art must protest. But what reason for surprise was there? Mr Walter James demanded. It was the “third consecutive year in which Mr Fry has performed a war dance over the recently interred remains of a Royal Academician”. (The other corpses were apparently those of Mr E. A. Abbey, R.A., and Mr John M. Swan, R.A.) But of course, they were all agreed, the man who could champion the works of the Post - Impressionists was capable of anything. Yet even he must realise that “his malignant sneers at a great artist only just dead did no good but great harm” to his advertisement of Post-Impressionism. That Post-Impressionism “as at present known will have any real effect upon true art I think nobody believes”, was the opinion of Mr Richard H. Herford. And Sir William Richmond summed up: “Mr Fry’s position as a student of art, of connoisseurship and criticism is not strong enough to stand up against many more such suicidal egoisms”; and he “must not be surprised if he is boycotted by decent society”. To all of which Roger Fry could only reply that there were two standards of art and that they differed, and suggest that “the State should either endow both, or, better still, allow complete free trade in art. and refuse all subventions and all honours to artists’ — a conclusion that was naturally unpalatable to Royal Academicians. And then the “ Roger Fry rabble’ as Professor Tonks called them, among them Lytton Strachey and Give Bell, joined in. and the battle raged merrily.

  The venom and the vigour of those old feuds proved that the Post-Impressionist movement had some sting in it. Roger Fry was delighted. He would quote Sir “William’s boycott with great appreciation. “The poor things lose their heads altogether”, was his private comment in a letter. But the vigour of the movement was being proved much more seriously and effectively by the young artists themselves. They were absorbing the new ideas; they were besieging Roger Fry for advice and criticism; they were asking him to organise exhibitions. He was convinced that the young English artists were extraordinarily gifted. If they were given the opportunity, they could use it. But that was the problem. How in England, with an Academy that was enraged by Cézanne and delighted by Alma-Tadema, could they hope to make a living? It was always possible, perhaps useful, to go on denouncing the indifference of the governing classes in the columns of the Nation, to prove over and over again that the State only rewarded “the honest and capable commercialist”. Every week almost he could find some fresh instance “of the complete indifference of contemporary officials to spiritual things”. But something practical had to be done, even if his experiment at the Borough Polytechnic had shown him the difficulty.

  Many ideas occurred to him. Some are expressed in the article “Art and Socialism” from which quotation has already been made. He shows there how the artist has nothing to hope from the plutocrat; nothing to hope from the aristocrat; and nothing to hope “from the gentlemen who administer... the public funds”. Frankly, he says, “one scarcely knows if things would be worse if Bumble or the Royal Academy were to become the patrons of art”. So he conceives that in the great State, the State of the future, things might be so arranged that “all our pictures would be made by amateurs”. The painter would earn his living “by some craft in which his artistic powers would be constantly occupied, though at a lower tension and in a humbler way”. “There are”, he goes on, “innumerable crafts, even besides those that are definitely artistic, which, if pursued for short hours... would leave a man free to pursue other callings in his leisure.” And with his love of the concrete, in order to put some of these ideas to the test of fact, he wrote certain paragraphs of this article in a railway station restaurant. He described what he actually saw in front of him. It was, as he said, “a painful catalogue”. The window was half filled with stained glass; the stained glass was covered by a lace curtain; the lace curtain was covered with patterns; the walls were covered with lincrusta walton; the tables were covered with ornate cotton cloths — in short, every object that his eye rested upon was covered with an “eczematous eruption”. And “not one of these things has been made because the makers enjoyed the making; not one has been bought because its contemplation would give any one pleasure”. Display was the end and explanation of it all. And horrible toil was involved in that display. The article ends with a vision of what might be possible in the future: “Ultimately, of course, when art had been purified of its present unreality by a prolonged contact with the crafts, society would gain a new confidence in its collective artistic judgment, and might even boldly assume the responsibility which at present it knows that it is unable to face. It might choose its poets and painters and philosophers and deep investigators, and make of such men and women a new kind of kings.”

  Ultimately that may be the case; but in 1910 it was a vision in the far future. In 1913, art depended upon “quite small and humble people... people with a few hundreds a year”, upon people like himself. It was they who must transform the vision into fact. It was their business to destroy the railway restaurant and all that it symbolised and put something else in its place. A plan was sketched in talk. A company was to be formed; a workshop was to be started. The young artists were to make chairs and tables, carpets and pots that people liked to look at; that they liked to make. Thus they were to earn a living; thus they would be free to paint pictures, as poets wrote poetry, for pleasure not for money. Thus they would assert the freedom of art “from all trammels and tyrannies”. And the great danger which had seduced so many fine talents — the danger of becoming a “pseudo-artist”, the prostitute “who professed to sell beauty as the prostitute professed to sell love”, would be removed. He knew by this time the drudgery and the difficulty of putting such schemes into execution. He had first-hand knowledge both of artists and of business men and of the abuse that is the reward of one who tries to bring them together. But— “all the people in this new movement are alive and whatever they do has life”. There were the young artists and they looked upon him as their leader. The moment had come, he believed; that was proved by a show of Post-Impressionist pictures at Leicester. People flocked to look at the pictures. “I can’t understand the enthusiasm”, he wrote. “I went and lectured there. The gallery packed, crowds standing all the time and an extraordinary interest. It’s really very odd and sometimes frightens me.” The artists and the public seemed to be coming together. All that was wanted to make the union fruitful was a connecting link. As it happened a legacy had been left him; for the first time he had a little capital of his own to play with. He decided to make the venture himself, to float a company, and to star
t a workshop. Once more he went about explaining, expounding, persuading. “I’ve got £1500 and am going ahead”, he wrote to G. L. Dickinson. “Already an architect has given me an order and to-day a big firm of cotton printers has written to ask if I can supply designs and so far I haven’t published a word so it looks as though I had hit on the psychological moment.... God knows”, he added, “why I work so hard. I don’t. It’s a stupid plan but I suppose I dimly think the thing’s worth doing tho’ I couldn’t prove it to my own satisfaction.” In July 1913 the Omega workshops in Fitzroy Square were opened.

  II

  The Square remains, one of the few Bloomsbury squares that are still untouched and dignified, with its classical pillars, its frieze and the great urn in the middle, though the roar of the Tottenham Court Road sounds not far away. The house in which Roger Fry set up his workshop is there to-day — a house with a past of its own, a Georgian past, a Victorian past. A lady remembered it in her childhood; the Pre-Raphaelites, she said, had congregated there, and either Rossetti’s legs had appeared through the ceiling or the floor had given way and the dinner-table had crashed through into the cesspool beneath — which, she could not remember. It had a past, anyhow. But now the Georgian and the Victorian ghosts were routed. Two Post-Impressionist Titans were mounted over the doorway; and inside everything was bustle and confusion. There were bright chintzes designed by the young artists; there were painted tables and painted chairs; and there was Roger Fry himself escorting now Lady So-and-so, now a business man from Birmingham, round the rooms and doing his best to persuade them to buy. But before that stage was reached a great deal of business had to be transacted. The work was very heavy and it fell mainly upon him. “I have to think out all between the design and the finished product and how to sell it — also how to pay the artists, and it’s almost more than I can manage”, he wrote to G. L. Dickinson. Another letter gives further details: