Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  But these experiments in unconsciousness were interrupted in December 1923 by a call upon faculties of a very different kind. From Nancy he went to Paris to give expert evidence in the case of a disputed Leonardo. For five hours he was examined and cross-examined. A certain Mr Hyacinthe Ringrose was facetious and searching. “You found that the public thought more of your writings than of your paintings?” “Yes.” “Did you ever get any prize in Paris?” “No, I never had that insult.” “Did you ever read John Ruskin?” “It is a very long time since I read him, but I should say he talked a great deal of nonsense.” “Have you changed your opinion sometimes?” “Yes.” “And you are still liable to change your opinion?”

  “I hope so.” After a good deal more of such bickering, Mr Ringrose drew from him “a sort of personal confession”. “When I was a young man I thought the Italian masters had got hold of what I considered the right technique.... At that time I really believed that there was a right way of painting and a wrong way of painting. I honestly confess that I have changed my mind. Now I no longer think that there is a right way or a wrong way of painting, but every possible way. Every artist has to create his own method of expression in his medium, and there is no one way, right or wrong. But every way is right when it is expressive throughout of the idea in the artist’s mind.” And he went on to deliver a very lucid and technical disquisition upon mediums; upon washes and pastes; upon the use of the thumb; upon what is meant by rhythm and what is meant by movement; and gave Mr Ringrose and the experts who crowded to hear the case a learned and brilliant lecture upon art in general and the style of Leonardo in particular. After which he returned to more séances on the camp-stool at Nancy, and could be heard muttering “Ça passe, Ça passe” as he sat abstracted and unconscious in the corner of the railway carriage which took him later that year through Spain.

  III

  There is another aspect of the body which has to be referred to, and if possible in his own tone of voice. That, in talking of love and its “many ways”, was always perfectly simple, open and even matter-of-fact. Hence, a curious reversal of ordinary standards like that which had baffled his son in his school days. It was far more immoral to suppress the body than to give it its natural place. Its natural place had been distorted out of all proportion by the bourgeois conventions of the time. For the evasions and hypocrisies of his youth he had nothing but contempt. But if anyone imported the body into places where the body is out of place — if a painter, for example, used his art to rouse sexual feelings — he was disgusted and had only one word for that distortion— “pornography”. This honesty, like so many of his reversals of the accepted conventions, resulted in a new sense of reality. He made no attempt to hide passing affairs; they had their pleasure, perhaps their necessity, certainly their amusement; but the love that was not passing, that was transformed into a relation where mind and body mixed indistinguishably, gained in seriousness because of that honesty, and no one felt the importance of such relationships more than he did.

  There was an experience about this time that affected him deeply, and of which he wrote an account. In order to introduce his own comments an outline can be given, such as remains in memory after reading a document meant only for himself and one or two friends. Among the patients at Nancy was a French woman who was neither young nor beautiful, but witty and sympathetic, and between them sprang up one of those friendships which are natural under the circumstances. The rest followed. He had reason to believe that for both of them the relationship in spite of its difficulties — she was ill, they were often separated — was of extraordinary value, when, for no reason that could be discovered, in a sudden access of insanity his friend put an end to her life. Far from having caused this tragedy, he had given her, as her family assured him, the greatest happiness she had ever known. But the shock was terrible, and in the days that followed he wrote an account of this “tragic story” in French, from which some passages may be taken:

  Il se livre en moi un combat interminable entre deux principes contradictoires. Par l’amour et seulement par l’amour nous touchons ou croyons toucher à une réalité solide, à un monde peuplé de vraies substances, des âmes, des substances, indestructibles, éternelles, définitives. Dans tout le reste de notre vie règne une rélativité complète. Là il n’y a que des relations changeantes perpétuellement, et jamais répétées. Tout effort à concilier ces deux expériences semble vain. Les deux mondes n’ont pas une perspective commune. Dans la femme le principe de la vie éternelle de l’amour prime généralement sur l’autre. Souvent elle appartient complètement à l’amour. Je crois que... placée comme je suis maintenant et en pleine possession de son entendement se tuerait — moi non. L’autre principe, celui de la vie relative ne se laisse pas jamais abattre complètement chez nous. Sur celui-là j’ai petit à petit formé une philosophie capable de me supporter, capable de rendre viable la vie. Est-ce qu’on connaît le cas d’une seule femme qui fut vraiment sage? Tandis qu’il y a eu des hommes sages. Et la sagesse consiste dans la complète rénonciation de tout en nous qui réclame la justice. Il faut que l’on se résigne à ne pas croire même dans sa propre personnalité. L’ensemble de notre caractère est tout aussi bien le résultat pour ainsi dire fortuit de l’hérédité et du milieu que tout autre chose.... Il faut écarter toute idée de mérite et de blâme. Il faut traquer la vanité jusque dans ses recoins les plus intimes, l’écraser complètement et alors la vie peut se poursuivre tranquillement. Il me semble que Lao Tzu (si c’est bien lui) est le seul philosophe qui a su annoncer cette vérité profonde. Toute vanité implique une déformation de la réalité extérieure. La vie n’est qu’une longue apprentissage dans l’art de se ficher complètement de son égo. Et la folie n’est autre chose que d’être complètement emprisonné. La sagesse n’est autre chose que la suppression de toute déformation, l’acceptation complète de ce qui n’est pas nous. C’est le triomphe de l’adaptation au milieu. Ce n’est pas le bonheur mais quel Démon nous a soufflé dès notre maissance l’idée funeste que nous avons droit au bonheur?

  Finally— “Je vais me guérir je le sais...je ne vais pas donner à la nature en plus ce spectacle ridicule de l’homme en révolte. Il y a plus de fierté dans l’acceptance, dans l’humilité complète. Je vais goûter la saveur d’être vieux, de ne plus être aimé, de n’avoir plus d’espoir ni d’ambition.... Il faut que la sagesse nous enseigne encore comment nous soumettre à ses conseils. C’est la dernière et la plus dure passe de la philosophie.”

  IV

  He went later that summer to stay with the Maurons at St Rémy. It was the only life that he then found tolerable. He lodged in a little Mas, did his own housework, and found the peasants “the most civilised, sceptical, humorous good natured people imaginable — such people can only happen where Christianity hasn’t really taken hold — they descend direct from the Pagan world and have its wisdom”. The communism that had flowered from this ancient civilisation was congenial to him. If any one wanted a salad, he noted, he took it from the next garden, and the neighbours did the same in their turn. Soon he was out in the market at four in the morning, and won the respect of the market women by guessing correctly the price they would get for their haricots. It was very hot, and there was the landscape to look at — the infinitely complex chiselling of the limestone hills and the intricacy of the squares made by the almond and the olive groves. He forced himself to work. The light falling through the vine leaves of the half-darkened room where Charles Mauron, whose eyesight was threatened, was forced to sit interested him and he began to paint his portrait. They discussed aesthetics, played chess, and began together a translation of E. M. Forster’s Passage to India. “It’s only by piling new sensations on to one’s memories that one can learn to start life again”, he wrote to Mrs MacColl. He might have added, “It is only by helping other people to overcome their troubles that one can forget one’s own”, for such, as the letters abundantly prove, was one of his main preoccupations. But for the time, “th
e intensification of life” had gone; the bad dreams were to the fore.

  If he could be happy, he could be very unhappy.

  Often the visitor to Dalmeny Avenue would find him harassed and in pain. He had given up repeating the magic formula “Ça passe, Ça passe”. Dr Coué’s magic had failed. And the old obsessions returned — art was impossible in England; nobody bought his pictures; perhaps he would be forced to give up painting. London society became more and more boring: yet people pestered him with invitations; and his restlessness increased. His energy without a centre to absorb it was formidable. There was his voice on the telephone. He was just back from one of his innumerable expeditions. He had met “a delightful creature” (Spanish, French, Portuguese or from the purlieus of Manchester) who had a real gift (for poetry, painting, or nothing in particular) but was, of course — with officials what they were and the British public what it was that might be taken for granted — starving, or what was worse, living in hopelessly uncongenial surroundings. Something must be done. A lecture must be given; a hall hired; circulars sent out; the rich forced to subscribe. Something must be done — the voice was imperious; and it was heard not without dread by those whose spirit was weak or whose time was occupied. The only consolation lay in art. There were the young English painters. “Matthew Smith has made tremendous strides this winter....” There were pictures, “I have bought a little Matisse for which I longed ever since I saw it years ago in the Elder Gallery”. And there was always the theory: “I’m getting an idea of what is the great thing in design, namely to have the greatest possible amount of interplay between the volumes and the spaces both at their three dimensionalist. Do you understand? It means that both volumes and spaces function to the utmost against one another as it were... if you look at a Raphael and then at, say, a Titian, perhaps you’ll see what I mean....”

  At last, happily, he found what he had lacked for so many years — a centre, the intimacy between two people that grows with the years. That possibility presented itself in 1926. “Je suis incapable de me marier par suite de notre loi inique”, he wrote to his friends the Maurons. The law then must be disregarded. With a simplicity that makes it unnecessary either to emphasise the fact or to conceal it, he disregarded the law. He lived with Helen Anrep from 1926 to the end of his life— “il n’y a que la formule qui manque”. The reality— “jamais de ma vie ai’je recontré une sympathie aussi parfaite que nous avons” — was of such immeasurable importance that the formula could be brushed aside without hesitation. If from time to time he traced signs of outraged morality on the part of educational and other bodies, he was compelled to admit that things had improved even in England since Sir William Richmond had boycotted him from decent society, and it rejoiced him to find how successfully the young were routing the “fantastic puritanism” of the Victorians in their private lives. Certainly he was no less often asked to lecture; hostesses continued to pester him with invitations; and he was forced as time went on to admit, though it went strangely against the grain, that there were quite a number of people even in England who bought his pictures.

  V

  The main external change, then, of this marriage without a formula was another change of house. He took a house opposite the tube station with a side view of the terra-cotta prominence of the Russell Hotel, in Bernard Street. “Vous voyez”, he wrote to Madame Mauron, “que le bon dieu se charge de m’éviter toute monotonie dans la vie.” And once more the pictures, the pots, the negro carvings, the Omega chairs and tables were rearranged. “It’s great fun”, he wrote, “getting things to fit and seeing the new values they take.” Happiness, “this immense bien être, this extraordinary comfort and ease”, as he described it, gave everything a new value. Born, it seemed, to enjoy life instinctively, he had been forced to enjoy it courageously, philosophically, in the teeth of circumstances. Now that effort could be relaxed, and the things to be enjoyed seemed endless. “I seem”, he wrote in a letter at this time, “to get more and more pleasure out of all the small things.” He almost ceased to analyse them. That is why perhaps he enjoyed them so fully, and why in recording them he came closest to being the artist that he always longed to be. Here are some of them. “Just to walk about Paris and come to an old door or a Louis XV balcony”, to “flâner in the Tuileries gardens and watch the fat lady who keeps one of the kiosques... sitting out with her family round a great pot of stew... wishing the men who sweep up the leaves ‘Bon appétit’ with such an air of simple greedy good sense and humour”; to have one’s hair cut and “notice the relations between the manicures and the clients”; to buy toys for his grandchildren in the Printemps; to light a fire and watch “how the flames take hold of a great log and lick round it and eat their way into hollows and make lovely golden caverns”; to eat “two slices of ham shimmering in a pale reddish brown sauce of indecipherable subtlety and complexity” — these were among the small things that made every day richer and fuller. There were also the “odd contacts with people”. “Why should I provoke the confidence of the elderly clergy?... But he was rather an old dear with an odd capricious passion for pictures.... He said, ‘I’m getting very anxious about these Cubists and Futurists, and I mean to preach about it one day’. So I had to offer to show him my Cubists.” Then there was the great lady, the patroness of art, who, confronted with a blue Picasso, emitted “one of the great sayings of the century— ‘Well, if you call them Chinese, I think they’re beautiful, but if you call them French, I think they’re quite stupid’ “. And the perennial and eternal earnest American lady, “who teaches art, God help us, to 300 American girls and is seeking desperately for the last word. She’s totally incapable of seeing anything, but she’s longing just to hear that blessed last word”, which word Roger Fry refused to supply. There was the pleasure of being taught to play billiards by a decorated French professor; and the pleasure of playing roulette on a system of his own by which he earned one franc after playing for twelve hours, and then, on the boat coming back to England, the amusement of hearing the French sailors squabbling: “ ‘Oh toi, à moins tu es plus moche que moi!’ He saw I was amused and turned to me and said, ‘N’est-ce-pas, Monsieur, il est plus moche que moi?’ I said, ‘Ce sont deux types de beauté. Dieu me garde de juger entre eux’, and all the quarrel ended in laughter.” And, of course, there were the perpetual inexhaustible pleasures of landscape, seascape and townscape, and the simple pleasure of feeling “the extraordinary sensation of pure sunlight”.

  So he noted down rapidly and casually the small things that made up the common texture of daily life. Small they were; but the enjoyment of such pleasures played a great part in making his last years fuller and richer than any that had gone before; and had their share too in the increasing richness and humour of his writing.

  VI

  It was with many groans that he hitched his “very external and analytic” mind after these summer saunterings to the task of writing. “Yes, I know I ought to write, but you know it does need such a different focus of attention from painting — there is really a kind of opposition in the two attitudes.” He teemed with ideas, but to sit down and write them out meant “such intense labour and pain.... How little natural aptitude I have, and how rarely I like the turn my phrases are apt to take. How sick in fact I get with my own style.... I was rather shocked at the horrible repetition of words like ‘plastic’, but what is one to do if one has to make clear one’s exposition? One has to have the exact word as much as a man of science has to use the correct term for which no substitute is possible.” Such were some of the groans with which he set to work under friendly pressure to prepare his next book, “Transformations” (1926), for the press. “By the word ‘Transformations’ I wish to suggest all those various transmutations which forms undergo in becoming parts of esthetic constructions”, he explained. The old articles and lectures had as usual been much “remoulded and manipulated”, and it may be that the reader will discover traces of the intense labour and pain that the writing cause
d him. Phrases repeat themselves; words, hideous words like “pastose”, “constatation” have to be coined and forced into service to express exactly that sensation for which there is no correct term. He never hesitated to spoil the shape of a sentence by tagging on a “namely” or a “that is to say” if he thought that by so doing he could lessen obscurity and press the argument a little further. Nor did he attempt to seduce the reader with perorations or fine writing. But again what other writer upon art, what other maker of aesthetic theories, has his power to make the chase exciting and the discovery real? And again, the ordinary reader asks, how is it done? Some Questions in Esthetics — it is not an attractive title. Questions about aesthetics are apt to fine themselves into thin air. The problem of what is meant by representation in art is remote and obscure. But as the process of pushing the theory further proceeds, the argument is not only so subtle and so serpentine that it is fascinating to follow its windings, but it grazes so many solid objects in its passage that it acquires solidity; the theory becomes something that we can see and touch. The picture is always miraculously at hand to illustrate by the attitude of a sportsman or the shadow on a wall, or the caricature of the old Duchess d’Uzès, the exact point that has been reached; and from that point it is possible to press still further. Then the views from this uphill path are so new. The pattern on the carpet is seen from the other side. Much is disputable; much doubtful. Fiction is given the capacity to deal with “psychological volumes”. Poetry is declared incapable of sensual appeal. New values are suggested and new vistas revealed. And at last, as if cleaned and burnished and set before us on the easel in a clearer and richer light than ever before, there is the picture itself: Rembrandt’s “Schoolboy at his Lessons” lies before us. But Roger Fry’s descriptions can never be detached from their context. His astonishing power of evoking, say the painting of the wood of the boy’s desk, is not a purely descriptive faculty. It depends upon the friction of argument and analysis that has gone before. But if for this reason he does not provide purple passages, the glow is deeper seated; it is ingrained in the very stuff of his prose. And then, of course, there is the humour — the refreshing and perpetual play of mind — turned now upon Sir Claude Phillips and then upon the old obsessions — the Philistine, the snob, and the treatment of the artist by the State — all of which leads us on, until upon the last page we have reached the present moment, and the living artist, and ask again what comes next?