Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  Then of course he spent long days in the Louvre. “I spend most of my time over the Poussins in the Louvre and am trying to hammer out some notions very vague at present about the different kinds of fullness and emptiness of picture space. Poussin fascinates me more than ever. His composition seems to me more full of new and unanalysable discoveries than anyone. I want to find what principle there is that governs the relations of a convex volume to the space it occupies or fills pictorially. Do you understand? I don’t yet, but I’ve got the glimmer of something which I can’t grasp....” (To Vanessa Bell.)

  From Paris he went south to Avignon, and the further south he went, the happier he became. His eyes absorbed colours and forms as if they had been starved all these years in England. cc... It’s too exciting to see this Southern colouring again”, he wrote to Vanessa Bell. “Every bit of old wall, every tiled roof seems as though it were exactly right, and only needed to be painted.” Although it was October, there were masses of wild flowers in the fields, “the most lovely daisies, our kind, only huge with bright pink flowers and heaps of candytuft”. He painted all day long. Up at seven, he was out by eight; and there in the open air he painted, until the mistral blew his canvas down and he had to seek refuge in an “incredibly dirty inn” kept by Spaniards. He found them surly at first; then as usual he made friends with them. Helped by the village carpenter he devised a special easel, warranted to resist the mistral; and when even this capsized, he took up his lodging in the kitchen. That kitchen may serve as the setting for innumerable scenes in Roger Fry’s pilgrimage. It was the common sitting-room of the place. He had only to sit there, sketch-book in hand, and someone turned up who fell into the very pose he wanted for a big composition he was working at. At night they turned on “an awfully loud mechanical piano called euphemistically the viola”, which ground out three tunes incessantly; the young men and women danced the farandole very beautifully, and he sat entranced, talking, drinking, sketching. Compare this with the Tottenham Court Road on a Saturday night!... but he was too busy and too happy to dwell upon his old obsessions, the Philistines, the British public and Bird’s Custard Island. He bicycled on to Les Baux.

  There an adventure befell him. Les Baux itself was “too theatrical to be much good for painting”, and he was about to move on. But by chance he fell into talk at a restaurant with a very beautiful young man and woman. The man was an artist, who had run off with the beautiful lady and they were hiding at Les Baux until some formalities, “divorce of his wife or what not”, could be completed. They persuaded him to stay, and with them he went to an entertainment at which “a Breton cabotin” declaimed patriotic poetry. Roger Fry was outraged; and the village schoolmistress, whose name he discovered was Marie Mauron, observing his indignation, insisted that the peasants should sing some of their Provençal songs. The peasants sang; and Roger Fry was enthusiastic. In letter after letter to his friends in London he described those perfect autumn days at Les Baux. “I can’t give you any idea of how delightful these people are”, he wrote. “First of all there’s no idea of any class distinction — the peasants behave to one exactly as equals, and then they all seem to be artists in a way — i.e. they all know these poems which are quite modern and sing them beautifully.” He made friends with the singers, and through them he met the poets themselves. The greatest poet of all was “an old peasant who lived in one room of a tiny cottage. He was just preparing his supper which was stewed apples and we helped him to light the fire and cook the apples and all the time he talked about poetry and intoned his favourite poems. He is the great authority on the Provençal language. He has translated Homer into Provençal and is now doing Dante.... He was immensely distinguished and had the most charming manners and was quite conscious of being a great artist—” There follows a description of the wedding of the beautiful young man and the beautiful young woman, and how at the feast afterwards he made friends with another poet— “a most amusing character, no one knows his real name, but he is called le sauvage’ because of his peculiar habits. He lives quite alone and has a passion for all kinds of wild animals and plants, but above all for spiders which he collects and keeps in his room which is entirely tapissé with spiders webs. He has written a charming poem in French to his spiders.... The odd thing is that he is also very well read in French literature and criticised things with perfect taste. He never wears a hat because one day the mistral blew his hat away and he swore it should never happen again. I’m afraid all this”, the letter ends, “sounds very dull, because I can’t give you the curious delight of finding that one can spend an evening with these peasants with much greater ease and happiness than let us say with... [a well-known literary man]. The fact is they really are our sort of people with our ideas of what’s worth while and our absence of all notions of arrivisme.”

  He had the same sense of ease and well-being that had come to him years ago in Venice with Symonds and Horatio Brown and the gondoliers. He found again, even more completely with the Omega and the Tottenham Court Road to point the contrast, the atmosphere that suited him — the atmosphere in which people developed their own idiosyncrasies whether for spiders or for poetry, where differences of birth and education had ceased to exist, and the “great artist” living in one room and stewing his apples merged naturally in his surroundings— “for they all seem to be artists in their way”. And again, as if things repeat themselves, there was the unknown traveller met by chance This time she was Marie Mauron, and the chance meeting was to lead to two of the most valued friendships of his life. With the Maurons he was to share a mas at St Remy, and with Charles Mauron he was to carry on the most fruitful of his aesthetic arguments. The meeting at Les Baux ranked high among Roger Fry’s adventures.

  From Les Baux he moved on to Martigues, cycling with his easel strapped to the carrier. He preferred travelling alone, he confessed, for then he could give his whole mind to the landscape. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the landscape in his life. He analysed it in all its vagaries and its moods, its asperities and its charms, as if it were a human being. The atmosphere of the country affected him almost as much as the human atmosphere, to which he was, as he said, “horribly sensitive”. “Aren’t atmospheres”, he wrote, “the reallest things there are?” Les Baux he found too theatrical; Martigues had certain merits but was too like Venice; and so he moved on to Aix, “the holy place” he called it, the home of Cézanne. To his critical eye it was too dramatic. “The illumination is so tremendously definite here that a small change of angle alters the tones a great deal. It hasn’t the sharp sculpture of the country round Avignon.” After Les Baux and the life there with the peasant poets the bourgeois atmosphere — he was lodging in a respectable hotel — was unendurable. He could no longer tolerate the conventions of his own class. He looked round and discovered a carriers’ inn, where though it was noisy, for the carts on the cobbles woke him at dawn, the company was entirely to his liking. He made friends with the local antiquity dealer, and persuaded him to put some of his pictures in the shop window. “At once there was a buzz of excitement. It reminded me of Vasari — one old connoisseur bringing another and then the artists coming and asking ‘Où sont les tableaux du peintre Anglais?’ “ Compare that with the dull supercilious indifference of the English! “There is more interest in art here than in the whole of London!” he exclaimed.

  Cézanne even persuaded him to go sight-seeing. He made a pilgrimage in the holy place to the holy shrine. He went over the great man’s house, penetrated to the attics and persuaded the gardener to let him wander over the garden. But the gardener had never even heard of Cézanne, and when Roger Fry tried to get the shopkeepers of Aix to talk about him, they could only remember an old man who was rather cracked. Roger Fry was a little downcast. “It all seemed to me very queer and uncanny that Cézanne came and went and left no trace in the little bourgeois life of the place.” He gave up the pursuit of associations and turned to his own canvas. Colours and shapes after the frozen war yea
rs when he had no one to talk to about art, and everyone talked politics, became absorbing. He slipped back — he was writing to Vanessa Bell — into the fascination of painters’ shop. “I consume more terra verte than anything.... I use hardly even a touch of cadmium or rose madder.” The words murmur on as they murmured on hour after hour in the studio. And the problems of his own work came once more to the fore. “Why is it that I, who am a good critic, am so helpless in front of my own work? — is everyone? I alternate between fits of thinking — now this time I’ve done something, and sheer disgust.” Perhaps he was letting himself become “too terribly subordinated to the thing seen.... I don’t think I’m au dessus de mon sujet as Poussin said one should be — and I think he was right... but I think all the same that a period of subjection to the thing seen fills one with a lot of new possibilities of forms and colours which one may use later more freely. But perhaps I’m only persuading myself because I do get so excited by what I see everyday... Once more his favourite word was “excited”. Mont Sainte-Victoire inspired it again and again. It dominated Mm; it absorbed Mm. He sat in the valley with his legs wrapped in a copy of the local newspaper painting the mountain. He tried to describe it— “the most beautiful mountain I have ever seen — all white with blue shadows and pink rocks... and green tufts of dwarf oak and then the river-bed filled with all kinds of pale brown red orange and grey bushes”. Words as usual refused to do his bidding. A pen-and-ink sketch follows. But nothing he could say in a letter could give any idea of the beauty of the place, or of the harmony and satisfaction of the life there. Vanessa Bell must come there. She must transplant her family. He found a house. He counted the rooms; he planned alterations; he described the garden, the olive trees and the river. No doubt there was some school in the neighbourhood where children could be far better taught than in England. Was it not madness to live there?

  But at last in the autumn he came back to Dalmeny Avenue.

  III

  The end of the Omega had brought about another change. The house at Guildford was too large now, and with his sister Margery’s help he discovered another in London. It was “in die wilds of Camden Town with a fine view of Holloway Jail”; and there in 1919 they set up house together. House-moving was an arduous occupation in the early days of peace; the price of linoleum, he groaned, was exorbitant; firm after firm refused to move his furniture; but at last two meat vans hired at Smithfield arrived at Durbins, and under his supervision porters who reeked of blood but were charming characters nevertheless removed the Chinese statues, the Italian cabinets, the negro masks and all the pots and plates that had made the big rooms at Durbins glow with so many different colours in so many different styles, in safety to Holloway.

  The house in Camden Town (7 Dalmeny Avenue) was, he lamented, “in a horribly good condition”. The previous owner had decorated it with only too Victorian a thoroughness. Fortunately, he had learnt how to obliterate classical ladies heads in his lodgings at Poole; the Victorian wallpaper was dabbed out with a stencil; and there in the garden — for there was a “beautifully designed garden which stretches away for ever” — by the side of a fountain presided over by a Chinese deity under the austere gaze of the tower of Holloway Jail he sat writing an article for the Athenaeum. It was on Victorian furniture. “I think it’s the best I’ve ever done,” he wrote, “though written with great toil and labour.”

  A mass of such articles had accumulated. They were torn out and tossed away without any respect for order or subject. For twenty years he had been lecturing and writing upon art, but save for the Bellini and the edition of Reynolds’s Discourses he had published no book. It was owing to his sister’s “gentle but persistent pressure” that he now began the work of collecting a volume from these old and repulsive deposits. “My notion”, he wrote, “of making a book is dumping old articles into a basket and shaking them up.” With his sister to supply pressure, and the “devoted and patient labour” of Mr R. R. Tadock to help in the task, the book that he called Vision and Design was finally collected. It was made up of old articles — a difficult and unattractive form. The articles treat of many subjects — of architecture, of society, of the Ottoman and the Whatnot. And inevitably the book suffers from the chops and changes and repetitions that are unavoidable when many short pieces are strung together. But why is it that the book attracts the common seer — the ordinary non-visual human being to whom pictures are far more inaccessible than books or music? Its appeal to the expert is plain enough. There is the masterly essay upon aesthetics to absorb Mm. And for the practising painter there are the essays upon Cézanne and the French Post-Impressionists and Claude. But why is it that Roger Fry’s criticism has for the common seer something of the enthralment of a novel, something of the excitement of a detective story while it is strictly about the art of painting and nothing else?

  To this old problem it is only possible to hazard one such reader’s answer, as it forms in turning the pages once more. It is perhaps, in the first place, that Roger Fry makes painting different from the other arts. It is not literature; it is not biography; it is not music. It is the art of painting that he is writing about. And he does not make the approaches easy. It is an art of supreme difficulty. “Good painting”, he quotes Michael Angelo’s saying, “is a music and a melody which intellect only can appreciate and that with great difficulty.” So curiosity is stimulated. And then sensation is roused. For he assumes that we all have sensations; all that is necessary is to let ourselves trust to them. How, without any of Ruskin’s or Pater’s skill in words he rouses sensation; how he brings colour on to the page, and not only colour but forms and their relations; how without anecdote or prose poetry he wakes the eye to qualities that it has never seen before, are problems for the literary critic to solve at leisure. Undoubtedly he wakes the eye; and then begins what is in its way as exciting as the analysis by a master novelist of the human passions — the analysis of our sensations. It is as if a great magnifying-glass were laid over the picture. He elucidates, he defines. And as the colours emerge and the structure, learning begins easily and unconsciously to release its stores. He recalls other pictures — one in Rome, another in Pekin; he is reminded of a negro mask, or bethinks him of a Matisse or a Picasso seen the other day in Paris. So the tradition, the submerged but underlying connection, is revealed. And then from the collision of many converging ideas a theory forms. It may be helpful. For if we allow sensations to accumulate unchecked they lose their sharpness; to test them by reason strengthens and enriches. But fascinating as theories are— “I have an itch for explaining my own sensations” — they too must be controlled or they will form a crust which blocks the way for further experience. Theories must always be brought into touch with facts. The collision may prove fatal to these delicate and intricate constructions. It does not matter. The risk must be run. Running risks indeed is not the least part of the excitement of reading Roger Fry. At any moment he will have to confess, when faced with the discoveries of his eye, that he has been wrong, and so must change his mind. More sensations are examined, not ours — ours are long ago exhausted; but his. His well up, refreshed it may be by the theory which he has made but thrown aside. He seems to have an inexhaustible capacity for sensation; until at last, whether we see the picture itself, or only what he sees, there is nothing for it but to drop the book and take the next omnibus to the National Gallery, there to gratify the desire for seeing that has been so miraculously stimulated.

  But besides the power to stimulate, he has also another gift which does not always accompany it, — the power to suggest. Even when the chase is at its hottest sayings like “There is great danger in a strong personal rhythm... unless [the artist] constantly strains it by the effort to make it take in new and refractory material it becomes stereotyped”, or a remark— “You cannot imitate the final results of mastery without going through the preliminaries” — break off heavy with meaning. They go behind the picture; they bring into being a rich background which we explore
half-consciously while we read. That is why, when we read him, we never feel shut off alone in a studio; morality and conduct, even if they are called by other names, are present; eating and drinking and love-making hum and murmur on the other side of the page.

  And pervading al is the character of the critic himself, with its strange mixture of scrupulous sincerity and fervent belief. He will reason to the last moment, and when that limit is reached he will admit honestly: “I feel unable at present to get beyond this vague adumbration”- But if reason must stop short, beyond reason lies reality — if nothing will make him doff his reason, nothing will make him lose his faith. The aesthetic emotion seems to him of supreme importance. But why? — he cannot say. “One can only say that those who experience it feel it to have a peculiar quality of ‘reality’, which makes it a matter of infinite importance in their lives. Any attempt I might make to explain this would probably land me in the depths of mysticism. On the edge of that gulf I stop.” But if he stops it is in the attitude of one who looks forward. We are always left with the sense of something to come.

  This attempt to explain the fascination of Roger Fry’s criticism may serve to show that others besides the practising painter felt his spell. He started so many hares that all kinds of people joined in the chase. Among them one of the most distinguished was the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges. Unfortunately, the Poet Laureate’s letter has been lost; but its drift can be gathered from Roger Fry’s reply: