Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  Fortunately the younger generation, his own children and the children of his friends, was growing up and proved of great help in carrying on the business of living. “They are entirely lacking in reverence”, he noted. They had greatly improved upon his own generation. When they were small he would teach them the rudiments of chemistry, making a beautiful blue-green solution of copper sulphate, or brewing coal gas in a clay pipe plugged with plasticine on the drawing-room fire. He would appear at a children’s party glittering in chains and frying-pans bought at Woolworth’s, a fancy dress which brought out, as fancy dress so often does, a spiritual likeness, in his case indisputably, to Don Quixote. Later he would arrive at their rooms in Cambridge and, remembering his own attitude to his elders, exclaim in delight, “They talk about their own interests and their pleasure in life without troubling to recognise our presence”. But there he was wrong. They were well aware of his presence — of his humours, of his eccentricities; of his “immense seriousness”, and of his equally immense powers of enjoyment. He would plunge at once into his own interests and his own problems. He would make them help to translate Mallarmé, he would argue for hours on end with “terrific Quaker scrupulosity and intellectual honesty”; and he would play chess, and through playing chess bring them to understand his views on aesthetics. “He was extraordinarily good at gaining one’s confidence,” one of those undergraduates, Julian Bell, wrote, “principally because he always took one’s ideas seriously enough to discuss them, and contradicted them if he disagreed.... He made one share his pleasure in thinking.... He had a power of analysing poetry, of showing what was happening, that was extraordinarily useful.... I’ve never known anyone so good at making one share his enjoyments.... He always seemed ready to enjoy whatever was going on, food, drink, people, love affairs. I was never once bored in his company. He never grew old and cursed.”

  And Roger Fry returned the compliment. For Julian Bell himself he had a deep affection— “the most magnificent human being I have known since Jem Stephen”, he called him. Fresh from talk with him and his friends, he went on to reflect how much more at his ease he felt with the young than with his own generation. They made him realise “how curiously far I have travelled from the standpoint of my own generation.... Not that I didn’t enjoy seeing [an old friend] very much, but it just showed me how much I’d joined the younger generation.”

  XI

  Beside Julian Bell’s description of Roger Fry arguing with undergraduates at Cambridge in 1932 may be set another of Roger Fry filling up gaps in his knowledge that same spring in Greece. A great book, great in range at least, perpetually pushed aside to make room for lectures, for reviews and broadcasts, lay at the back of his mind; and since Greece was one of the gaps in his knowledge he went there in 1932. The conclusions he came to are to be found in the last Slade lectures. Of the journey itself scattered memories, little pictures that seem to complete the old, remain: Venice, for instance, cold in the spring evening, and Roger Fry waving his hand at the palaces and saying, “That old fraud Ruskin has chapters about all that. He was too virtuous — that’s a great pity. Everything had to be squared — even those finicky palaces must be morally good, which they’re not — oh no, merely slices of coloured stone.” And then the voyage down the Dalmatian coast, sliding past pink grey mountains with blue shadows; and then the first sight of the Acropolis, purple that evening in a storm of rain, and his shock of surprise — his “Awfully swell — awfully swell”, and his delight at the French sailors, so “educated and avertis” compared with the Germans; and then the Museum. The Museum was a disappointment. “They don’t compose. That’s a starfish shape. Look at the thinness of the lines, and there’s no background.” And so, one sunny afternoon, to a Byzantine church where an old man was reading the newspaper at three o’clock in the afternoon and the peasant women were lazily picking great yellow flowers. He had out his little conversation book and began to talk to them, and then, gazing up at the white vindictive Christ in mosaic on the ceiling of the church, exclaimed: “Better than I’d any notion of”, and instantly set up his easel and began to paint. And so to Sunium, where, squatted on the turf, he dug up minute blue irises with his pocket-knife. Did he think Greek irises would grow in Suffolk? “Well, one can only try and see.” And so to Delphi and the argument with the chauffeur. “We must see that monastery.” The chauffeur protested; the monastery was twenty miles out of the way. “Never mind. We’ll get up at dawn.” “But the road’s impassable.” “Never mind. We’ll take the risks.” “But the last car fell over the precipice.” Reason convinced, at last he yielded. And so across the Peloponnese, the road winding along precipices, the road pitted with pot-holes, scarred with ruts, the passengers flung from side to side, bounced up and down. But always pitching or bouncing, back from the front seat where Roger Fry sat beside his sister came scraps of talk — about prison reform; about politics; about flowers; about Max Eastman’s book; about birds; about people. “The Frys”, according to a letter, “begin talking at dawn; and talk all day without stopping until...” — until the writer of that letter was forced to revise certain theories about Roger Fry himself.

  One of the most persistent of those theories was “I’ve always hated families and patriarchalism of all kinds.... I have so little family feeling, so little feeling that it’s by the family that one goes on into the future.” That was the theory, and it was illustrated by so many anecdotes of the horrors of family life, and of his own attempts to escape that horror, that it was natural to suppose that he had never enjoyed a joke or shared a secret with any one of his own flesh and blood. That theory broke down with his sister. But then, he might have argued, she was not his sister; she was an individual. So the car pitched and bounced; fragments of talk and laughter were thrown back; until at a turn of the road where cypresses or poplars made a pattern and the accent was right for painting, two hands rose simultaneously, the car was halted, and brother and sister sat silent, painting. But Greece, bare of trees, angular and over-dramatic, lacked something necessary. He admired, he analysed, but he did not fall in love. That was a tribute that he reserved for France.

  For years he had dreamt of a home in the South. It was to be “a rather grand place... where one could have big spaces and nice stones and jolly materials of all kinds”. This recurring dream had had to adapt itself to his purse— “we may have a motor car, but we shall never be rich enough to do all that”» His dreams, however, had a way of coming true, — if indeed his motor car can be called a dream. It was a second-hand Citroën; it could go very fast; it stopped very suddenly. It landed him in the middle of a mustard field; it broke down on a hot Italian road and he lay on his back in the dust “tinkering the innards”. But with its help he discovered the beauty of Suffolk— “It’s no wonder that the only English painting or at least landscape comes from these parts. One finds everything arranging itself, the way the trees grow, the way they belong to the soil, the way they fill the spaces of the valley, and then the splendid cloud effects.” The car did something to increase his growing respect for his native land. It could be made to hold luggage, easels, paint-boxes, earthenware pots and furniture. Not without reason the bourgeoisie of Roy at were amazed when he drew up at the hotel in this battered veteran, covered with dust, having negotiated thirty hairpin bends in the Massif Central successfully, clasping in his arms a large Provençal kitchen implement — le diable — which he was taking home to acclimatise in Suffolk. Above all the Citroen took him again and again to St Rémy. There, in 1931, he had bought a little Mas, overlooking the famous ruins, which he shared with Charles and Marie Mauron. He loved that corner of Provence with a passion that seemed to spring from some ancestral memory. He did his best to believe that there was southern blood in his veins. There was the name Mariabella and his mother’s southern darkness to prove it. Even if the family annals were against him, and he was wholly English and purely Quaker, “both Margery and I always feel”, he wrote, “that we were born there”. It was not o
nly the landscape that he loved; it was the pagan, classless society, where salads were held in common, where every peasant was an individual, and the old man who trimmed his olive trees was a more civilised human being than the citizens of Paris, Berlin or London. The Mas was always at the back of his mind, a centre of sanity and civilisation, when the telephone rang at Bernard Street, the loud-speaker brayed next door, and the Tube opened and shut its doors upon herds of undifferentiated cockneys. He was going to end his days there, he said, when all the young had turned Bolsheviks and talked nothing but politics. “Mais trêve à la sale politique — parlons Mas” — so one political argument ended.

  The Mas, of course, had to be furnished. A great stone was hauled through the window to serve as hearth; chairs and tables were bought at the local market; stone pillars and jars were found in the neighbourhood; and he made himself a bed from four sections of plane trees “just sawn across”. As for the cooking, he announced triumphantly, “I’ve made a bœuf en daube which is a dream and will last us about five days so all I need do is to boil peas or something”, and he could read or write while he watched the pot. “We certainly have fallen on happy places”, he exclaimed. All night he slept on his raised couch with the door open,— “that door which opens straight out into nothing”, and listened to the nightingales singing and the frogs croaking, “but they always break the rhythm before it gets quite fixed”. Then he woke, and there was “the perfect view, the view that’s so full of infinitely chiselled detail and lucky conjunctions” to look at. All day he sat under the pine trees painting, his legs bound in copies of the Éclaireur de Nice and his head swathed in veils to protect him from the mosquitoes. The hoopoes, as he painted, described wonderful loops in the air with their white heraldic wings and said “Hou — hou — hou” very quickly, answering each other. The voices of his grandchildren reached him, chattering among the olives; now and then they interrupted him with fantastic stories of their dolls’ adventures. At last he went indoors, to gossip with the neighbours, to play chess, and to continue the argument about aesthetics with Charles Mauron.

  XII

  Here a sentence from a letter may be quoted, for the light it throws upon the method by which the final conclusion of some of those many transformations was reached. “Charles Mauron is so terribly good at analysis that it sometimes seems impossible to make any positive construction that will resist his acids.... I suppose you feel like that with me, that I will go on analysing when you want to take a certain whole and look without pulling it apart. Only as I never feel clear in my mind without having analysed as far as possible, I have to applaud his destruction even of my cherished ideas.” The book of all Roger Fry’s books which seems to the common reader at least, to prove the value of destroying theories by acids, because the positive construction left is so very solid, is the Cézanne (1927). A masterpiece, Sir Kenneth Clark “called it, and the word seems the only one to fit this profound, rich, and completely satisfying essay. It was written with great care, twice over, first in French and then in English. Here at least the theory is consumed, and the critic has become a creator. It suggests that if Roger Fry received the impulse to create from the work of art rather than from the thing itself, it was because a work of art posed an intellectual problem and thus gratified that intense intellectual curiosity, the desire “to pull apart and to analyse”, which, when he came directly into contact with the thing itself, was either too active, or too separate, to let him submit, as perhaps an artist must submit, completely and unconsciously to the experience itself. At any rate, the Cézanne, whether we call it criticism or creation, seems to justify the endless work of revision and analysis that lay behind it. Much more, of course, has gone to it than purely aesthetic curiosity. Sympathy and experience have enabled the critic to place the timid little man with only a sentence or two of biography in his setting of time and circumstance. We see him sheltering within his shell of bourgeois respectability at Aix, and then, step by step, he emerges and becomes “the great protagonist of individual prowess against the herd”. It is a “thrilling drama” with its counterpart in other dramas where the hero is assailed by temptations and confronted by apparently impassable obstacles. The story, the double story, is unfolded with masterly ease and the most scrupulous care. Never was the development of a character or of a picture from the bare canvas to the infinite complexity of the finished work more closely followed or more subtly described. Every element is distinguished and shown to have its necessary part in the final composition. But though the analysis is minute, it is not a dissection. Rather it is the bringing together from chaos and disorder of the parts that are necessary to the whole. When at last the apple, the kitchen table, and the bread-knife have come together, it is felt to be a victory for the human spirit over matter. The milk-jug and the ginger-jar are transformed. These common objects are invested with the majesty of mountains and the melody of music. But in all this protracted and difficult business of revelation and reconstruction the critic’s own identity has been consumed. Never does he draw attention by irrelevance or display to his own share in the work of reconstruction. The two gifts, the gift of analysis, the gift of sensibility, that so often conflict, here enhance each other — each contributes, neither dominates. “The concordance which we find in Cézanne between an intelligence rigorous, abstract and exacting to a degree, and a sensibility of extreme delicacy and quickness of response is here seen in masterly action.” The words are true of Roger Fry himself. The flower has kept its colour and the microscope its clarity. And yet, though it seems as if nothing could be added, as if the art of painting had been explored to its limit, the essay ends: “But it must always be kept in mind that such analysis halts before the ultimate concrete reality of a work of art and perhaps in proportion to the greatness of the work must leave untouched a greater part of its objective”.

  XIII

  Like most books that appear seamless and complete, the Cézanne cost its author much drudgery and despair. “O Lord, how bored I am with it”, he exclaimed; “... it seems to me poor formless stuff and I should like to begin it all over again.” There was even more than the usual struggle with words, and their vagueness. And at moments there were doubts — could Cézanne be as great as Roger Fry believed? Was he not deluded? He went and looked at the pictures again “as if for the first time”. His conviction became stronger than ever. “How much the greatest of all he is! He has that gravity and ponderation of the ‘greatest things... this is the colossal thing.” He had not changed his mind, in spite of the fact that all the authorities were now of his way of thinking. The authorities he noted, not without amusement, had purchased a picture by Cézanne for the National Gallery.

  But if the Cézanne stands out among Roger Fry’s books like Mont Sainte-Victoire, solid in structure and bathed in light, from it, as from that mountain, other tracts of country became visible. He had it at the back of his mind that one day he must find time and energy to set about a great book — a book about the National Gallery; a book that was to cover the whole history of art from the earliest ages to the present time. He hesitated. One reason for hesitation was that “I feel so infinitely less confident about anything I have to say than I used to be. It’s dreadful how diffident getting a little deeper into things makes one — one sees too much to say anything.” So he painted, wrote articles, gave lectures, or went once more to Italy to look again at the old pictures.

  It seemed as if some drop were needed to precipitate all that he had seen and thought into written words. At last, however, in 1933, the opportunity was given him: he was offered the Slade Professorship at Cambridge. It was a post that he had often wished for; it had often been denied him. But now at first he refused it. It had come when he did not need such recognition, and when those who would have valued it were dead. Cambridge too had lost its chief attraction for him. Lowes Dickinson had died in 1932; and there was nobody to take his place. “I knew you’d know that nothing else in my life is quite the same as that”, he wr
ote to Vanessa Bell. “He had been all through my youth my greatest and most intimate friend.... I owe such an immense amount to his influence and his extraordinary sympathy. I begin to see what a tremendously big place he had in shaping all that counts in our world, bigger I think than I’d ever quite realised.... He seemed to have got finer, wittier, more charming with age.” No one could take his place, and Cambridge without Lowes Dickinson did not altogether escape his criticism. The lack of any sense of beauty among the under graduates was painfully proved (as he pointed out in his first lecture) by the “barbarous ugliness” of their rooms; and “Mon dieu”, he exclaimed to Marie Mauron, “quelle vie que celle des universitaires, des hommes charmants et intelligents, mais si bornés et fixés dans les ornières de cette vie provinciale, et d’une conservatisme réflexe qui vraiment me choque”. But the offer of the Slade was made in very flattering terms, and after some hesitation he accepted. “I think it’s a good thing on the whole”, he wrote; “I shall be compelled to work out some of my ideas more fully.” Soon he was “head over ears in Chinese art, and hardly know how to get through in time — there’s so much for me to learn....” He was going to “apply his theories of esthetics to the visual art of die whole world, in roughly chronological sequence, from Egypt to the present day”. He was going at last to crystallise the mass of ideas that had been accumulating in his mind ever since, as a young man he had gone to Rome and filled note-book after notebook in front of the pictures themselves. It was “the sort of intellectual adventure which he loved”, as Sir Kenneth Clark wrote in his introduction to those last lectures; and vast as it was, he threw himself into it with ardour. But he was sixty-seven, and it was late in life to start upon such an enterprise. He was beginning, he sometimes complained, to feel old... “you begin to feel your whole body creaking, that’s what it is.... Don’t tell people this — I’d rather they didn’t know it.” It was difficult to know it; the more work he had on hand the greater his energy became. It was difficult even to know that he was working, for he carried on so many other activities simultaneously. A specimen day is described in a letter written at that time by Give Bell: