Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  But in London he was less ambitious. The attraction of London to him was that it was easy to get together little parties where old friends met new ones even if their names had slipped his memory. For if names mattered less and less, people mattered more and more. How much they mattered, how from one end of his life to the other he lived in his friendships, how in letter after letter he broke into praise of his friends — all that is not to be conveyed by lists of names. If certain friends — Lowes Dickinson, Desmond MacCarthy, Vanessa Bell, Philippa Strachey, the Maurons, his sister Margery stand out, they are surrounded by so many others from so many different worlds, talking so many different languages, that to choose from among them or to say what it was that he got from each of them is impossible. But to be with them was one of his chief pleasures. “Do you realise what delightful little parties we shall be able to have?” he wrote when he moved to Bernard Street; and one of those little parties may stand as the type of many.

  His guests found him writing. He had forgotten the time; he was trying to finish a lecture. But he was delighted to stop writing and to begin to talk. The room was as untidy as ever. Ink-bottles and coffee-cups, proof sheets and paint-brushes were piled on the tables and strewn on the floor. And there were the pictures — some framed, others stood against the wall. There was the Derain picture of a spectral dog in the snow; the blue Matisse picture of ships in harbour. And there were the negro masks and the Chinese statues, and all the plates — the rare Persian china and the cheap peasant pottery that he had picked up for a farthing at a fair. Always there was something new to look at — a new picture, or a little panel of wood perhaps with a dim face upon it — very possibly it was the portrait of Dante, painted by Giotto and carried in Dante’s funeral procession. The room was crowded, and for all Roger Fry’s acute sensibility, he was curiously indifferent to physical comfort. The chairs had passed their prime; the lifts in the Tube station opposite clanged incessantly; a flare of light came in from the arc-lamp in the street outside; and what he called “the hymnology of Bernard Street” brayed from a loud-speaker next door. But it did not matter. “The dinner”, he wrote of one of those little parties, “was a great success. The wild ducks were a trifle tough, but our friends are not really critical. And after dinner”, the letter goes on, “we settled in to a good old Cambridge Apostolic discussion about existence, whether good was absolute or not. Charles [Mauron] and I representing modern science managed to make it clear that Oliver [Strachey] and Leonard [Woolf] were mystics. They could not accept the complete relativity of everything to human nature and the impossibility of talking at all about things in themselves. It’s curious how difficult it is to root out that mediaeval habit of thinking of ‘substances’ of things existing apart from all relations, and yet really they have no possible meanings.... Poor Oliver was horribly shocked to think he was in that galère.... It was a delightful talk. Philosophy was varied by some free criticisms of — to begin with. He was left a good deal damaged, but with some sympathy for him as a character — when Oliver said, ‘But the really wicked man is—’

  And then the hunt was up and a fine run across country.”

  That might serve for the skeleton of many such talks, and to give the skeleton flesh and blood — so far as flesh and blood can be given without voices, without laughter, without Roger Fry himself, looking now like Erasmus, now like a fasting friar — some extracts can be taken from the letters he wrote when, after the party was over, he sat on, “thinking’ aloud”, as he called it, over what had been said, and what there had been no time to say as the hunt galloped across philosophy, religion, science, and art, to its happy end in pure gossip. Mysticism may serve as a start.

  I wish I hadn’t got so hot about mysticism [he writes]. But I must go on because I’ve found a perfect description of mysticism — it’s the attempt to get rid of mystery. To the primitive mind there is no mystery — his mysticism is so complete and is capable of such indefinite extension that he can always explain every phenomenon. Science can only begin when you accept mystery and then seek to clear it up. But the effect of science is none the less always to increase mystery for with every new avenue that’s cleared up you get a fresh vista into the world beyond. To have science one has both to accept mystery and to dislike it enough to try to clear it up which is so complicated a balance that there is no wonder it’s rare, and that nearly everyone is even now at heart a primitive. We still have the method of science but we are losing for the time its faith.

  So to religion:

  As to religion — I can’t help thinking that you don’t see quite enough the difficulty. If religions made no claim but what art does — of being a possible interpretation without any notion of objective validity all would be well — that’s what the artist does — but religions all pretend to do what science tries to do — namely discover the one universally valid construction and hence comes all the trouble and hence it is that religions have always obstructed the effort towards more universal validity.... I think what I feel is that for the most part religions are so deeply dyed with wish-fulfilment that more than anything else they have stood in the way of the disinterested study (science) and vision (art) of the universe. I don’t doubt they’ve had to be, because men couldn’t straight away get the disinterested attitude, but I think they ought to go, and that one can’t by re-interpreting the word God or any other such methods make them friends of man’s real happiness.... I don’t think this is altogether the memory of my escape from a creed which really was a very gradual and painless process on the whole. I mean I had no sudden shock, no despair at losing my faith.

  So to civilisation:

  I’m gradually getting hold of a new idea about the real meaning of civilisation, or what it ought to mean. It’s apropos of the question of the existence of individuals. It seems to me that nearly the whole Anglo-Saxon race especially of course in America have lost the power to be individuals. They have become social insects like bees and ants. They just are lost to humanity, and the great question for the future is whether that will spread or will be repulsed by the people who still exist, mostly the people round the Mediterranean. We must hope for the complete collapse of Anglo-Saxondom. The Arabs and Turks are still pure. I want to write something round this when it gets clear. It’s the question of whether people are allowed a clear space round them or whether society impinges on that and squeezes them all into hexagons like a honeycomb.

  Then to literature:

  Why doesn’t one always re-read the classics? There they are offering the most authentic, the most accessible delights, and why bother about second-rate and third-rate stuff because it’s new?... Yes, you’re quite right about the Chartreuse de Parme. I thought all the tiresome part was the beginning, but it’s later on the repetition of the stabbéy affrays &c. get boring. I think there’s a real reason why novelists should be very sparing in violent action — it increases the element of mere chance wh. one knows the author can turn either way he likes — whereas if you remain within the ordinary course of civilised life the situation whatever it is develops with some appearance at least of logical inevitability — of course chance is always at work but its effects are minimised and one’s sense of inevitable sequences is heightened.... I’m reading Flaubert’s letters right through. What an exquisite character and how intimately one loves him! I get furious when I think of the up-to-date young men of to-day who despise them and say he wasn’t a born writer. Why, some of his letters written when he was only 18 have the most gorgeous things and written with a gush and abandonment that only a born writer could have achieved.

  He had thought of a new classification for writers — into Priests, Prophets and Purveyors. Of course Flaubert actually called himself a priest of literature — it means those who regard it as a sacred calling. I’m a Priest if I’m anything. Of course there are mixed specimens. Thus Shaw is mainly prophet but tinged with Purveying. Wells is mainly purveying but with a flavour of Prophecy. Shakespeare of the early poems and sonnets was
a priest but became an almost pure Purveyor, so did Dickens. No, it’s a very good classification and the more you think of it the better you’ll like it....

  He had been reading Rilke:

  On the whole I don’t think much of Rilke. He exaggerates too much. He’s too anxious to create an effect. Things are really much more interesting than he makes them by forcing all the overtones of feeling. But I know that he’s the other side of a big dividing line between our ways of taking things. You like the overtones to sound more than the main note. I want a construction made out of solid blocks first and then let the overtones modify it.... It’s something like that isn’t it?

  And so to Henry James — he had been reading Confidence :

  It hasn’t the richness of texture of his late writing, but it has such a very elegant psychological pattern — you say you can almost touch Max’s wit, well, I feel I can almost draw James’s psychological pattern. I think I feel that aspect of things excessively — it gives me such special pleasure like the counterpoint of Poussin’s designs — I wonder if there’s any truth in the ordinary idea about me that I am purely “intellectual” in art — that it’s a sort of excited recognition of the aptness of formal relations like a mathematician’s recognition of the validity of an equation? There is something of that no doubt but then I also like some things that have very little of that quality....

  But anyhow there’s a man [Henry James] who has a standard. He never wanders from the idea — it’s all dense and close-packed. I do like conscientious art — oh you’ll say that I’m a beastly moralist — but there it is — I can’t help it....

  Also he had been reading The Road to Xanadu, by Livingstone Lowes, and had found it amazingly ingenious.... It will be very useful if I ever do my Vision in Literature, because he’s really analysed the sources of almost all Coleridge’s imagery, and it’s clear that he’s the one really visual poet of that lot. I read some Shelley to compare and it’s deplorably lacking in any sharp or decisive sensation. Even Keats was far less visual than Coleridge. He was almost an impressionist, for I find in one note how he amused himself by looking out of the window at a view towards a twilight and seeing it together with the reflection of his fire in the glass — so he evidently played with his eyes. The Ancient Mariner is astonishing in the colour of the images.

  And so naturally to painting:

  He [Simon Bussy] began about volumes, so I showed him two portraits in my Flemish art. He said that I’d chosen them on purpose and that I might have shown an Italian flat and a Fleming in relief — and that it had no importance which way it was — that I was an illuminé who imagined such things and then got excited about them. I said it wasn’t a peculiarity of mine, that it was a commonplace of criticism. Then he snorted out Giotto — wasn’t he a great artist by my own showing, and wasn’t he perfectly flat? I brought out a photo of the Deposition.... Mon dieu, what a genius! I got wildly excited by just doing that.... At first he swore it was flat — then I showed him a Duccio which was all linear and involved one figure in another and at last he was staggered....

  Those are some sentences that may serve to bring back the speaking voice. But the voice would often stop. For there was music — music that so often came to his help as a critic of painting. “Plastic phrase” was coined on the analogy of musical phrase — ^’the big men having long-sustained phrases and the lesser only managing to hold out say for a face or one fold of drapery at a time”. And Gainsborough, “never makes a statement in prose... it is transmuted as though music were going on somewhere”. He had replaced his virginals by a gramophone, chose his records carefully and as he listened, commented.

  It is scandalous the musicians don’t do more for us. We ought to have perpetual concerts going regularly through all the old music so that at least we should know what it’s like.... I was terribly moved by Monteverdi’s Orfeo. I see that to be deeply moved I must be at a certain passing distance from the actual emotional situation — hence all the trouble with the Dostoievskis and the others.... I suppose Gluck isn’t a very great musician, but Lord what a gift of melody, and how right in feeling he is! It’s a fascinating idea — that eighteenth-century notion of the Greek. They just give it a sort of sweetness and tenderness which is all untrue, but which doesn’t spoil the bigness of the contours. How I like works of art which don’t break the line — that’s partly because I ain’t musical enough — because I see that in painting some of my greatest loves are people who do break the line — the Rembrandts, and after all Cézanne himself....

  He had been to the opera, The Valkyrie:

  ... Well, first I thought I shall never sit this out because almost at once they rose to the last pitch of emotion without any apparent reason.... But gradually by not attending to the idiotic story more than just to see what he wanted to express — Lord, what an expressionist he is and what dreary Board School psychology — and then refusing to be the least interested in the emotion I managed to get a great deal of pleasure out of the interweaving of the motives and the extraordinary beauty of the orchestral colour.... Bizet’s Carmen.... I hadn’t seen [it] since I was an art student in Paris and had still left some vague Quaker scruples about the Opera.... It really is a most satisfactory work — so admirably planned to get everything within the operatic plane, so much drama that is rightly expressed in opera and will be no good on the stage. It exactly illustrates my theory of the mixture of the arts. For it’s almost perfect — the music never so important that you want to think of it as music and yet always adequate to the situation....

  Finally, after discussing mysticism, religion, science and painting, and listening perhaps to “that remarkable artist Mrs Woodhouse” playing Bach on the gramophone— “Bach”, he said, “almost persuades me to be a Christian” — time must be found, before the party broke up and the Tube station shut, for “free criticism of...” — that is to say for gossip pure and simple. As a gossip he was imperfect. He said Smith when he meant Jones; and for all his indignation against Smiths in general, he was curiously tolerant of any Smith or Jones in particular. Nevertheless, the talk aloud continues. “We spent the evening laughing at stories, largely invented, about you. But you wouldn’t have minded.” That last remark was true, so far at least as he was concerned. He relished his friend’s foibles; he liked to hear them travestied and caricatured, to add some fantastic theory or inaccurate anecdote of his own. But though he laughed easily, and valued laughter more and more— “I’m sure the ‘Vale of Tears’ and ‘fiery ordeal’ view of life comes from people who have never learnt to enjoy and take an envious pleasure in preventing joy whenever they can” — still, the “only kind of fun I care about is fun made with flickering seriousness”. So, though he laughed at his friends, he never diminished them, and the most usual end to that fine run across country was praise — delight in Desmond MacCarthy’s wit— “I quite agree that he has the most imaginative view about life of almost any of us and he has the most humane humour” — praise of his old Cambridge friend Charles Sanger:

  Charlie Sanger came.... He really is astonishing. He’s seeing through the press the greatest book on the law of wills that has ever been written, 2000 pages. That’s the sort of thing he does when we aren’t looking — then he casually remarked that he had nearly finished a book on mathematics for physicists which contains all the mathematical machinery for doing these things about atoms and all the rest of it which hardly anyone but a few specialists dream of understanding. Then he discoursed beautifully about Orlando, then about theories of infection, then about Gibbon, and on everything he has more interesting knowledge than anyone else. I know you think I have a well-furnished mind — compared with his it’s a workman’s cottage to be let unfurnished. I seriously think he’s the most remarkable intelligence (I don’t say the most original) that I’ve ever met, and to think that he’s utterly unknown to the public and probably always will be!

  And so, standing at the door in his slippers with praise of an Apostle on his lips, the “g
ood old Cambridge Apostolic discussion” came to an end.

  X

  In the ‘thirties some of the talkers began to drop out. Charlie Sanger died; MacTaggart died. It was he who on the downs above Clifton had first roused the portentously serious and solemn little boy to question everything — Canon Wilson’s Sunday sermon; kingdoms; republics; Rossetti’s pictures; “everything under the sun”. Ironically enough they had reached very different conclusions. Roger Fry after fifty years had come to distrust all institutions, “but institutions, as such, and in the end quite apart from what they stood for, moved [McTaggart] to almost religious veneration”. They evaded dangerous topics, and, when they met, talked chiefly of the past. But when McTaggart died (1935) Roger Fry went to his funeral and wrote to Helen Anrep: “... partly because in a way I had loved him very deeply — no, not that for we were au fond too different in temperament and his was the warmer, less critical affection — but because he had been one of the most constantly familiar beings in my life and one with whom I always found myself happily at ease, I was very much moved”. They played Beethoven’s Hymn of Creation, Bach’s Pastorale, and a Chorale of Bach, and then— “was read this from Spinpza, The free man thinks less of death than of anything else and all his wisdom is the contemplation of life’ or very nearly that. So for once the right thing was said. And while the Bach Chorale was being played the coffin moved by hidden mechanism through the doors into? — How odd that this up to date, hygienic, scientific machine-made and machine-worked disposal of the body is ten times more impressive, more really symbolic than that age-long consecrated business of earth-to-earth — with the ugliness of the big hole — so unsuggestive of the infinities which surround us — Whereas this with its slow silent movement through doors into the unknown is really dramatic and a perfect symbol of the inevitable mechanism of things and the futility of our protests against its irresistible force.... My faith in life is utterly unreasonable and groundless,” he concluded, “it rests on nothing I can see, it seeks for no sanction; it is the faith by which the animals live and move, perhaps the atoms themselves. So I must hurry on with this business of living which lasts as long as life lasts” (to Helen Anrep, 21st January 1935).