Dalmeny Avenue, Jem. 23rd, 24
... I am delighted to have your criticisms of my book, though whether I fully grasp them or can meet them is more doubtful. First of all my attempts at aesthetic (and they are confessedly only attempts and suggestions) are much more empirical and less philosophical than your criticisms. I very early became convinced that our emotions before works of art were of many kinds and that we failed as a rule to distinguish the nature of the mixture and I set to work by introspection to discover what the different elements of these compound emotions might be and to try to get at the most constant unchanging and therefore I suppose fundamental emotion. I found that this “constant” had to do always with the contemplation of form (of course colour is in this sense part of artistic form). It also seemed to me that the emotions resulting from the contemplation of form were more universal (less particularised and coloured by the individual history), more profound and more significant spiritually than any of the emotions which had to do with life (the immense effect of music is noteworthy in this respect though of course music may be merely a physiological stimulus). I therefore assume that the contemplation of form is a peculiarly important spiritual exercise (your “spiritual mirth”). My analyses of form-lines, sequences, rhythms, &c. are merely aids for the uninitiated to attain to the contemplation of form — they do not explain.
But agreeing that aesthetic apprehension is a pre-eminently spiritual function does not imply for me any connection with morals. In the first place the contemplation of Truth is likewise a spiritual function but is I judge entirely û-moral. Indeed I should be inclined to deny to morals (proper) any spiritual quality — they are rather the mechanism of civil life — the rules by which life in groups can be rendered tolerable and are therefore only concerned directly with behaviours. I shall admit that the feelings we have to our kind are of a spiritual nature (love being a function of spiritual health and hate of spiritual disease) and that those feelings may issue in good or bad behaviour. But in so far as they do not issue but remain “states of mind” they are spiritually good or bad but not morally. But in any case it must, I think, be admitted that there are spiritual functions that are not moral.
As to sex. It like the endocrine glands may be a predisposing cause, a stimulus (like Mozart’s smell of rotten apples), but surely is no part of the aesthetic apprehension. I find that in proportion as a work of art is great it is forced to discard all appeal to sex. Only bad art can be successfully pornographic. It may have been the point de départ, it is no longer visible when the work of art has arrived. Of course those people who are insensitive to the artist’s real intention may go off on even the slightest hint of a more accessible appeal. As for instance a man reading a great poem which he did not understand might occupy his mind with the double entendre of words it contained. I can imagine that to some people Velasquez’s Venus might excite sexual feeling; to any one who understands the picture such an idea is utterly impossible, it is too remote from the artist’s meaning to be even suggested. As regards painting I think you are quite wrong in thinking that the preoccupation with the female nude is a result of sexual feeling. It is simply that the plasticity of the female figure is peculiarly adapted to pictorial design; much more so. on account of its greater simplicity, than the male — though of course the plasticity of the human figure in general is peculiarly stimulating to the pictorial sense — perhaps not more so than that of a tiger but it is the most stimulating of easily accessible natural phenomena.
There — if I’ve answered you at cross purposes it is because of the great brevity of your exposition. One day we must talk it over at length.
IV
The letter to the Poet Laureate is enough perhaps to show that the argument, always growing in vigour and variety, had survived the war. And no doubt the keenness of his intellectual life, which, he said, had increased during the war, helped him to bridge the difficult transition from war to peace. But that keenness made him also acutely aware of the difficulties that lay ahead. “My God”, he exclaimed, “what a world the reaction is going to bring — a return to the Middle Ages without the naïveté and the beauty of the Middle Ages.” He noted signs of that reaction in the early ‘twenties with apprehension and horror. “The question for Europe is no longer to struggle for power, but simply to safeguard what is left of civilisation by helping each other as much as possible. If Germany succumbs there will be no hope for Europe, and to continue to prevent it from re-establishing itself is so mad that one can’t understand it.” Again, “Of all the religions that have afflicted man (and they are the most terrible afflictions) Nationalism seems to me the most monstrous and the most cruel”. He was neither blind nor deaf to what was happening in the world of politics, even if he had to coin a name— “I’m an individualistic anarchist” was his attempt in 1925 — to sum up his own political position. All his sympathies of course were with Lowes Dickinson in his fight to establish a League of Nations. Through Lowes Dickinson’s persuasion he attended one of the many conferences of intellectuals that were then being held in Paris. But conferences seemed to him to result in outbursts of moral indignation; and moral indignation was a mere “gaspillage de l’esprit”. His own fight lay elsewhere; and a long series of letters to Charles and Marie Mauron, written during the early ‘twenties, shows how clearly Roger Fry realised the necessity of fighting if, as he said, “it” — civilisation in one word — was to begin again.
“The herd” is the phrase that dominates the letters at this time — the herd with “its immense suggestibility more than ever at the mercy of unscrupulous politicians”. The herd has taken the place of the adversary; the herd is the adversary, swollen immensely in size and increased in brute power. The herd on the one side, the individual on the other — hatred of one, belief in the other — that is the rhythm, to use his favourite word, that vibrates beneath the surface. A vast mass of emotional unreason seemed to him to be threatening not only England — that was to be expected; but France also. France, he lamented, had lost that “objectivity which has been the glory of its great thinkers”. And this emotionalism, this irrationality could only be fought by science. We must try to understand our instincts, to analyse our emotions. That was a doctrine that he preached and practised. He extended his reading. He read Wilfred Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd with immense interest. He pressed it upon all his friends. He read the Behaviourists; he read the psychologists. “Il nous faut surtout de la psychologie vraie. Il nous faut comprendre cet animal entêté, violent, idéaliste qui se laisse mener par les mots creux.” He poured out the theories that all this reading suggested in argument and in letters. Two quotations from letters to the Maurons will be enough to show the drift of the ideas that swarmed in his brain.
March 2nd 1920
Le bon Duhamel hurle dans La Nouvelle Remm contre la science — il prêche un soulèvement moraL la bonté, &c. Je trouve cela très dangereux et au fond réactionnaire. L’homme ne peut s’élever moralement par la bonne volonté pas plus qu’il ne s’élève dans l’art par sa propre force. Rien ne change en l’homme que les mœurs... et la science seulement peut changer les mœurs on nous montrant les moyens d’arriver à tel ou tel but...
And again in the same year:
— Je crains au dessus de tout l’impatience de l’homme — qui cherche des raccourcis qui l’amènent dans les culs-de-sac. La seule route qui ne l’a jamais égaré c’est la science et la science demande les plus grandes vertus pour l’homme... une humilité à toute épreuve et une complète désintérressement — c’est pour cela que c’est toujours mal vu par le commun des hommes qui ne l’acceptent que pour ses côtés utiles ou plutôt (voir la guerre) néfastes. Pour moi je crois que l’intelligence humaine n’a jamais rien construit de si beau, de si impressionant que la théorie de la matière depuis la découverte du radium. Je la comprends à peine mais juste assez pour en voir l’immensité et l’audace.
But though the scientific method seemed to him more and more the only metho
d that could reduce the human tumult to order, there was always art. In painting, in music, in literature lay the enduring reality. And though in the ‘twenties he noted with dismay the return to mysticism in religion, and the return to nationalism in politics, by one of those paradoxes that were for ever upsetting the theorist he was forced by the evidence of his own eyes to believe that, far from perishing, art was more vigorous than ever.
(In these passages and those that follow Roger Fry’s French has been allowed to stand as he wrote it.)
Moi qui détestait L’art moderne dans ma jeunesse, qui m’absorbait entièrement dans les vieux maîtres Italiens — je vois maintenant une véritable Renaissance — nous vivons dans une époque extraordinaire pour l’art. Je suis sûr que je ne me trompe pas... à Paris j’ai trouvé un artiste jusqu’alors presqu’ inconnu pour moi, Rouault, qui est sûrement un des grands génies de tous les temps. Je ne peu comparer ses dessins qu’à l’art Tang des Chinois dont il nous reste seulement quelques spécimens. Non, je n’ai pas de patience avec les gens qui décrient notre époque — nous avons developpé aussi cette* immense système de faux art — l’art officiel et pompier — l’art véritable devient toujours de plus en plus une chose esotérique et cachée comme un secte hérétique — ou plus encore comme la science au moyen âge.
So he wrote with all the old enthusiasm to Madame Mauron.
The question that he had asked Lowes Dickinson before the war, whether the new ferment, the new movement, was lasting or would it “fizzle out like the Pre-Raphaelites”, was answered. There were, it seemed to him, more “honest artists” in England than ever, in spite of the emotional turbulence that the reaction was stirring on the surface. On the other hand, the adversary was stronger than ever. In England, he wrote in 1920, “the artist is almost without resources”. So while theories multiplied, and with the help of science and with the help of psychology he tried to fortify the individual against the herd, he had also to help the individual in his private fight — to pay his rent, to sell his pictures. “I seem”, he said, “for some reason to be the only person available.” In his double capacity as artist and man of business he was indispensable. So the letter which has been dealing with the evils of mysticism, and the evils of nationalism, with behaviourism and psychology, breaks off in the middle of a quotation from Alain, from Bertrand Russell, from Flaubert, to exclaim, “I have a million calls upon me....” He is due at a hanging committee. He is trying to organise a new group. A and B and C are all pestering him with letters. A is the Secretary of a provincial art gallery. “He wants me to go down and lecture. And as they seem really keen...” B is a young artist who wants to start a picture gallery with a lending library of pictures attached. It is an admirable idea; but money is needed. Every artist seems to think that Roger Fry can extract money from stones. Then there is C. He has real talent but “is in a frightful muddle about his private affairs”. He has, the letter laments, three children already, and another is on the way. “Oh dear, why are these delightful people so unpractical? he breaks off with a groan.
Each of these letters of the alphabet — and that alphabet had twenty-six letters at least — was an individual — a man or a woman who was trying to put up a fight for the spiritual life against the dominion of the herd. Therefore each had a claim upon him. For “What a rarity the individual is!... More and more I understand nothing of humanity in the mass and au fond I only believe in the value of some individuals.... I know that I have no right to detach myself so completely from the fate of my kind, but I have never been able to believe in political values!’ More and more he interested himself in the individual. The individual might be an old tramp who had stolen a watch and was found by Roger Fry sitting on a bench in the Temple Gardens. Roger Fry sat down beside him. “Oh la conversation exquise que j’ai eue l’autre jour avec un vieux mendiant criminel! Il faut que je raconte ça.” The old tramp told him how he had stolen the watch, and how he had gone to prison, and the account ends with the exclamation, “Mais comme ces gens sont sympathiques et moralement supérieurs aux bourgeois!” These were the people who must be helped if civilisation were to continue. And so, though “the jealousies and suspicions of artists make it almost impossible to help them”, he was off, as the abrupt ending of many letters testifies, to sit on committees, to hang pictures, to organise exhibitions, to beg money and to persuade the rich to buy.
He was also off to lecture. For by lecturing not only did he make a living and support his family, but he did something to encourage the individual to enjoy the rarest of his gifts, the disinterested life, the life of the spirit— “I use spiritual”, he wrote with his usual care to make his meaning plain, “to mean all those human faculties and activities which are over and above our mere existence as living organisms”. Instead therefore of nursing his bronchitis over the fire, he would pack his bag in the chill of January and February and be off to Dunfermline, to Birmingham, to Oxford, to lecture upon art. And that his audience was grateful is proved by some simple and anonymous lines in the local newspaper :
Beauty awoke: you heard her stripling call;
Enthroned her where some vulgar upstart sat.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all
We know on earth.... You helped us to know that.
V
Then of course there was always his own painting. The studio at Dalmeny Avenue, a very pleasant room looking out over the garden and under Margery Fry’s supervision comparatively tidy, was full of his pictures — too full unfortunately. Nobody bought them, he complained. He held a show of his work in 1920, and it was a complete failure. Only five sketches were sold and he was bitterly disappointed. “I will never show again”, he wrote to Madame Mauron. “I will go on painting, and when the canvases are dry, I will roll them up.” This failure he explained partly by the crass indifference of the British public to art, and partly by the fact that the emotionalism left over from the war was rushing both public and painters “pall-mall into romanticism under the guidance of the surrealists”. Even in France, the country of civilisation, the pseudo-artist, the arriviste, was for the moment rampant. A letter to Helen Anrep (1925) gives an amusing account of a dinner-party in Paris where he met one of the apostles of the new mysticism and, rather maliciously, drew him out. “Mon dieu, the arrivism, the mercantilism, of the art world here! It has fallen very low and it seems to me all the young are given over to the determination to arrive and attract attention.... After dinner I got alone with — and pumped him about the ideas of les jeunes. I was shamelessly open-minded and sympathetic and out it all came. ‘We spent our youth at the war — that has made us more serious than the old — we can only accept hie at all on condition of finding God. To find God we must reduce all to a desert and then we may see him.... I accept life.... I can make money by dealing and I get drunk only because I know the emptiness of all except God. We seek to dislocate everything, to stir up trouble everywhere for trouble’s sake and because it leads to the desert where God is &c. &c....’ — the new mysticism, you see it all....”
The new mysticism which despised science and also Flaubert (“Flaubert,” said the young man, “je ne lui prête plus d’attention que je donne à ma concierge”) was highly antipathetic to Roger Fry. While surrealism and romanticism swept the surface, he felt more and more “left alone on the deserted island of orthodox classicism”. The meaning of that phrase so far as his own work as a painter was concerned is given in a letter to Vanessa Bell; and since it represents a considered opinion of his painting it may be quoted:
I am coming to have quite a good conceit of myself. At least I think I get more power every year and that’s all one need worry about. I don’t suppose you’ll ever like my things very much, but I think you’ll respect them more and more because there’s a lot of queer stuff hidden away in them as a result of all my long wanderings and peelings and gropings in the world of art and I think they’re things that will only come out gradually. I shall never make anything that will give you
or anyone else the gasp of delighted surprise at a revelation but I think I shall tempt people to a quiet contemplative kind of pleasure — the pleasure of recognising that one has spotted just this or that quality which has a meaning tho’ mostly one passes it by.
That is not an extravagantly high estimate; whether it is a just one or not the art critic of the future must decide. But that it underestimates the place that painting played in his life is obvious. That is shown again and again by the eager, the pathetic, delight with which he recorded any praise of his work. If the English despised him, the French at least, who did not suffer to the same extent from the “snobbery of genius”, took him seriously. Even when nobody praised his work, and he was oppressed by the conviction that art after the war must be esoteric and hidden like science in the middle ages— “we can have no public art, only private ones, like writing and painting, and even painting is almost too public”, he wrote (to Virginia Woolf), he still went on painting. Even if he had to hire a room to house his canvases, and the canvases themselves must be rolled up, he painted. And that his writing profited by his painting can scarcely be doubted whatever the value of those canvases as works of art. It was with his brush that he broke through the crust that so often separates the critic from the creator. It was because the painter’s problems were his own that he understood them so profoundly, followed them so adventurously, and is first and foremost a painter’s critic not a connoisseur’s.
VI
The studio at Dalmeny Avenue, then, in the early ‘twenties was both an ivory tower where he contemplated reality, and an arsenal where he forged the only weapons that are effective in the fight against the enemy. More than ever it was necessary to oppose the emotionalism and chaos of the herd by reason and order. If the political man, as he told Lowes Dickinson, is a monster, then the artist must be more than ever independent, free, individual.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 442
