I’ve hardly known which way to turn since I’ve been back for the number of things to do and people to see. Most of all I’ve had to work at the Omega workshops which is now fully started. It needs a tremendous lot of work to organise it properly. The artists are delightful people but ever so unpractical. When I think of how practical the French artists are I almost wish these weren’t the delightful vague impossible Englishmen that they are. But I think I can manage them and it’s very exciting. Our stuffs are being printed and the French firm that’s doing them is full of enthusiasm and are altering all their processes to get rid of the mechanical and return to older simpler methods. Already a big American firm wants to buy some with the right to use them as wallpapers which I don’t mean to let them have. The main difficulty is the fact that everyone is going to copy and exploit our ideas and it’ll need great business skill to prevent it. Altogether the situation is exciting and rather alarming. I’ve got to make it pay or goodness knows what’ll become of me, let alone the group of artists who are already dependent on it. God knows how they lived before they got their 30/- a week from my workshop.
It was as he said “very exciting”. The public was eager to buy; and the artists were eager to work. He was surprised by the excellence of their work. “The artists have a tremendous lot of invention and a new feeling for colour and proportion that astonish me”, he told Lowes Dickinson. “My fearful problem is to harness the forces I’ve got and to get the best out of them practically and it’s the deuce to do.” The truth of that last statement was soon to be proved. The Omega had been opened in July; in October four artists, three of whom were employed by the Omega, issued a circular addressed to possible patrons which began:
1 Brecknock Studios, Brecknock Road, N.
Dear Sir,
Understanding that you are interested in the Omega Workshops, we beg to lay before you the following discreditable facts.
They detailed them. The first charge was that “The Direction of the Omega Workshops secured the decoration of the Post-Impressionist room at the Ideal Home Exhibition by a shabby trick, and at the expense of one of their members — Mr Wyndham Lewis, and an outside artist — Mr Spencer Gore”. The second charge was that the Direction of the Omega had suppressed “information in order to prevent a member from exhibiting in a Show of Pictures not organised by the Direction of the Omega”. But the circular did not confine itself to these alleged facts; it went on to express opinions of a highly damaging nature about the Omega Workshops and their Director. One passage ran as follows:
As to its tendencies in Art, they alone would be sufficient to make it very difficult for any vigorous art-instinct to long remain under that roof. The Idol is still Prettiness, with its mid-Victorian languish of the neck, and its skin of “greenery-yallery”, despite the Post-What-Not fashionableness of its draperies. This family party of strayed and dissenting Aesthetes, however, were compelled to call in as much modern talent as they could find, to do the rough and masculine work without which they knew their efforts would not rise above the level of a pleasant tea-party, or command more attention.
The reiterated assurances of generosity of dealing and care for art, cleverly used to stimulate outside interest, have then, we think, been conspicuously absent from the interior working of the Omega Workshops. This enterprise seemed to promise, in the opportunities afforded it by support from the most intellectual quarters, emancipation from the middleman-shark. But a new form of fish in the troubled waters of Art has been revealed in the meantime, the Pecksniff-shark, a timid but voracious journalistic monster, unscrupulous, smooth-tongued and, owing chiefly to its weakness, mischievous.
No longer willing to form part of this unfortunate institution, we the undersigned have given up our work there:
Frederick Etchells Wyndham Lewis C. J. Hamilton — E. Wadsworth This document was sent to Roger Fry, who was abroad. He was not, apparently, greatly surprised; once more he remained “strangely calm”, as the following letter shows:
Many thanks for your letter [he wrote to Duncan Grant] and all the bother that you have gone through in fighting my battles. I think you’ve got to the bottom of the question.... I quite agree with you about Etchells. I always thought he would act on rather romantic impulses. The only thing is that I personally find it a little hard to think that he could turn them so completely against me after having been so very friendly and without ever listening to me. But I really want to help him and I quite expect that when he’s seen the thing in a more reasonable way we shall be able to.
I’ve not heard a word about the Ideal Home. Has it been a success and has there been any decent press on it? This place is magnificent and we work quite hard. I don’t know whether to any purpose. I’m afraid all I’ve done so far is to “take views” of the various objects of interest. I try to turn my back on the mediaeval castle and the distant town of Avignon, but the beastly things will get into my composition somehow or another.
However I have come definitely to the conclusion that the painting of pictures is too difficult a job for human beings. It’s evident from the history of art that you sink such an amount of talent and taste and thought and feeling in producing something completely tiresome wherefore I rejoice in the Omega because it is not beyond the wit of man to make a decent plate or a decent stuff.
Doucet sends you his amities. He’s just gone to bed very tired after a game of billiards.
Yours ever,
Roger Fry
The circular, however, had been sent to the press; and some of his friends urged Roger Fry to bring an action for libel. The Omega might be damaged, they pointed out, if such charges were left unanswered. But Roger Fry refused to take any steps. No legal verdict, as he observed, would clear his character or vindicate the Omega. Publishing correspondence would only advertise the gentlemen, who, he sometimes suspected, rather enjoyed advertisement. He was quite content to abide by the verdict of time — le seule classificateur impeccable, as The Times critic had observed in another connection. But the young artists themselves anticipated the verdict of time. They gave him then and there the most practical and emphatic proofs of their confidence. They were quite ready to go on working for him; and, what was perhaps more remarkable, he was quite ready to go on working for them. The storm in a tea-cup blew over; though he noted bubbles from time to time— “The Lewis group have got hold of the New Age critic and he’s written an amusing thing wh. I send you — please send it back.... The Lewis group do nothing even now [March 1914] but abuse me. Brezska who sees them says he’s never seen such a display of vindictive jealousy among artists” (to Duncan Grant).
But he had much more important matters to attend to than storms in tea-cups. The “fearful problem” presented by the Omega was very real. It showed signs of immediately becoming a great success. Orders were coming in. The public was amused and interested. The papers devoted a great deal of space to the new venture. Interviewers were sent to Fitzroy Square, and one of them has recorded his impressions of the Omega in those early days. Mr Fry, he says, took him round and he asked Mr Fry to explain his intentions. “It is time”, said Mr Fry, “that the spirit of fun was introduced into furniture and into fabrics. We have suffered too long from the dull and the stupidly serious.” He took up a wool work cushion. “What do you think that represents?” said Mr Fry. “A landscape?” the interviewer hazarded. Mr Fry laughed. “It is a cat lying on a cabbage playing with a butterfly”, he said. “It was a mid-Victorian idea,” he explained, “but it was not treated in a mid-Victorian manner. The coloured designs are as full of colour and rhythm as the others were full of dullness and stiffness. The interviewer looked and at last saw the butterfly though he tailed to see the cat. Then Mr Fry showed him a chair. He said it was ca conversational chair”, a witty chair; he could imagine Mr Max Beerbohm sitting on it. Its legs were bright-blue and yellow. and brilliant bands of intense blue and green were worked round a black seat. Certainly it was much more amusing than an ordinary chair. Then there w
as a design for a wall decoration; a landscape with a purple sky. bright moon and blue mountains. “If people get tired of one landscape”, said Mr Fry, “they can easily have another. It can be done in a very short time.” Then he brought out a screen upon which there was a picture of a circus. The interviewer was puzzled by the long waists, bulging necks and short legs of the figures. “But how much wit there is in those figures”, said Mr Fry. “Art is significant deformity.” The interviewer was interested. Upstairs they went to the great white work-room, where one artist was at work upon a ceiling, another was painting what appeared to be “a very large raccoon with very flexible joints” for the walls of a nursery. Then down again to the showroom where the journalist was made to look at chintzes, cushions, lamp-shades, garden tables and also “a radiantly coloured dress of gossamery silk” designed by a French artist. Mr Fry was tackling the subject of women’s dress. Upon this one the artist had designed “a mass of large foliage and a pastoral scene, and maidens dancing under the moon, while a philosopher and a peasant stood by”. It was very beautiful, the interviewer agreed, but would English women ever have the courage to wear it? “Oh,” said Mr Fry, “people have to be educated....” So at last the interviewer took himself off, prophesying that posterity would hold the Omega in honour because “it had brought beauty and careful workmanship into the common things of life” and in high good temper for whatever else might be said, the Omega, or Mr Fry, had “certainly stimulated one’s intellect and one’s curiosity”.
Another visitor was Arnold Bennett. “I went up to the Omega workshops by appointment to see Roger Fry. Arrived as arranged at 2.30. I was told he was out. Then that he was at his studio, down Fitzroy Street. I went there and rang. He opened the door. ‘Come and have lunch’, he said. ‘I’ve had lunch; it’s 2.30’, I said. ‘How strange!’ he said. ‘I thought it was only 1.15.’ Then as he went upstairs he cried out to a girl above: ‘Blank (her Christian name), it’s 2.30’ as a great item of news. Fry expounded his theories. He said there was no original industrial art in England till he started, i.e. untraditional. He said lots of goodish things and was very persuasive and reasonable. Then he took me to the show-rooms in Fitzroy Square, and I bought a few little things.... I began to get more and more pleased with the stuff, and then I left with two parcels.”
Roger Fry had to say a great many goodish things and to be very persuasive and reasonable before people left with parcels under their arms. But the show-room side of the business was a very minor branch of his work at the Omega. He had also to deal with business men. As Arnold Bennett also records, he met with very serious opposition in that quarter. English firms, he said, “roared with laughter at his suggestion that they should do business together”. When he produced his designs they would not take them. “One firm quoted an impossible price when he asked them to make rugs to his design at his own risk.” But though they roared with laughter, the business men were, as he had foretold, quick to see how the designs could be copied and made agreeable to the public taste. Emasculated versions of the original Omega ideas appeared in the furniture shops and were more acceptable to the ordinary person than the original. Further, the original besides being original had to be practical. Chairs had to stand upon their legs; dyes must not fade, stuffs must not shrink. Sometimes there were failures. Cracks appeared. Legs came off. Varnish ran. He had to placate angry customers and to find new methods.
He had to hunt out carpenters and upholsterers — little men in back streets who could be trusted to carry out designs and to make serviceable objects. He had to keep an eye upon estimates and accounts. Altogether there were “almost endless small worries about details”. And then when the days work was over, “I have to be bagman”, he told G. L. Dickinson. “I go out into smart society and advertise my schemes.... You can guess if I’m busy.”
Lowes Dickinson, it may be presumed, had no need to guess. And sometimes the endless small worries that fell to Roger Fry’s lot made him doubt if he “could stick it out”. But again the excitement was great. Not only was the thing itself worth doing, but it opened a new world that appealed to his insatiable curiosity. He visited factories; he interviewed the makers of stuffs and carpets and wallpapers and furniture; he tried to understand the problems which confront manufacturers. And when he had found out how things are made there was the excitement of trying to make them himself. It seemed a natural division of labour — while his brain spun theories his hands busied themselves with solid objects. He went down to Poole and took lessons in potting. Soon a row of handmade pots stood on the studio floor. “It is fearfully exciting... when the stuff begins to come up between your fingers”, he wrote.
As his readers may remember, he had a habit, when he had found the word he wanted, of working that word, perhaps too hard. This spring the word was “exciting”. Everything was “exciting”. He went for a holiday to Italy. He revised his views upon Piero della Francesca. “Incomparably beyond all the men of the High Renaissance”, he commented. “He’s an almost pure artist with scarcely any dramatic content, or indeed anything that can be taken out of its own form.” He discovered new country to the north of Rome that was “very exciting”. Even England that summer — Bird’s Custard Island as he called it — though there were “gloomy inky black shadows round the trees and no clear-cut shapes or bright colours” — how could any artist possibly work there? — was “very exciting”. Above all the Omega was flourishing. Orders were pouring in. Brezska had sold several drawings. Lady (Ian) Hamilton had given a commission for stained-glass windows and a mosaic floor. The French and the German manufacturers were placing orders. He was able to pay his young artists their thirty shillings a week.
But the excitement was not confined to the Omega. Smart society yielded some very good friends to the bagman. There were parties; there were plays; there were operas and exhibitions. London was full of new enterprises. He went to see the Russian dancers, and they, of course suggested all kind of fresh possibilities, and new combinations of music, dancing and decoration. He went to the Opera with Arthur Balfour. It was Ariadne, by Strauss, and he was enthusiastic. “I do think seriously he’s incomparably better than Wagner, more of a pure musician.... It’s still not the music I want, but I think it clears the way for it.” The way seemed cleared in many directions at the moment. He had fallen very much in love — that was the most exciting thing of all. With complete openness, for the Quakers had taught him to be as honest about love as, indirectly, they had shown him the evils of suppressing it, he shared his excitement about that too. The most incongruous places — the Tottenham Court Road, for instance, on a rainy night — were lit up as he talked of this new hope in his life and of all that it meant to him.
So that exciting summer wore on. The garden at Guildford was ablaze with flowers as he sat writing to Lowes Dickinson— “It’s a mass of blue anchusas and red poppies and yellow and pink water lilies and Julian and Pamela are playing about with an old donkey they’ve hired”. He was reading Goldie’s articles in the Manchester Guardian. “My dear, they’re splendid. You know you do write better than anyone. It’s always alive and humorous and unexpected and so beautifully passive to reality. They’ve given me enormous pleasure.” All sorts of people were coming down — Princess Lichnowsky. Lady Ottoline Morrell G. JL. Dickinson, a Chinese poet, a French poet, business men. young artists. He was working harder than he had ever worked before, and with more hope. Many of the things that he had worked for seemed to be coming within reach. Civilisation, a desire for the things of the spirit, seemed to be taking hold not merely of a small group, but to be breaking through among the poor, among the rich. As for himself though he knew that he often seemed “self-sufficient and headstrong. though he was conscious of a great indifference to most of the things men work for , though “success seems such a tiny thing compared with what I have lost”, he was happier than he had been since his wife’s illness. “We are at last”, he summed it up, “becoming a little civilised.” And then of course the
war came.
CHAPTER IX. THE WAR YEARS
I
That a break must be made in every life when August 1914 is reached seems inevitable. But the fracture differs, according to what is broken, and Roger Fry was a man who lived many lives, the active, the contemplative, the public and the private. The war affected them all — it was, he said, “like living in a bad dream”. And the first shock was terrible. He had come to believe that a more civilised period in human life was beginning; now that hope seemed ended. “I hoped never to live to see this mad destruction of all that really counts in life. We were just beginning to be a little civilised and now it’s all to begin over again.... Oh if only France would keep out and leave Slavs and Teutons to their infernal race hatreds! But we are all entrapped in the net of a heartless bureaucracy” — such are two exclamations in August 1914.
But there were reasons why the shock affected him differently from some of his friends. He was not surprised, once the first shock was over, as G. L. Dickinson was surprised. “I suppose the difference is that I’ve known since Helen that the world was made for the worst conceivable horrors and Goldie somehow has thought it will stop somewhere”, he wrote to Vanessa Bell. “The war seems to knock the bottom out of his universe in a quite peculiar way. I was really glad when a knock came at the door at 10 o’clock and a thirsty and supperless Desmond [MacCarthy] appeared. So we were able to talk of all sorts of things... And there was another difference between him and some of his friends. He had not to change his work; he had only to work the harder. The problem of the Omega — how to pay his artists their thirty shillings a week — was more of a problem than ever. The same letter goes on to say therefore that he is “plugging away at his tables”. And again he had not to reconsider his beliefs or to reconstruct his life. He had been waging his own war against the adversary for many years now, and his life, as he said, had been full of bad dreams. The adversary was now more formidable; the bad dreams were not fitful but continuous. Thus the war was not so much a break as an intensification of many old struggles.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 438
