Up and on the motive before breakfast; after breakfast just slips over to Tilton to see Sam Courtauld, and arrange about lectures, and telephone to Hindley Smith; painting in Vanessa’s studio till lunch; at lunch moans and groans about not being allowed to eat anything; has Lottie put on to cook special invalid dishes but meanwhile makes a hearty meal off roast beef and plum-tart; hurries over to Seaford to inspect Hindley Smith’s collection; back in time for an early tea so that he can drag Vanessa and Duncan to Wilmington to paint landscape; after dinner just runs through a few of Mallarmé’s poems, which he is translating word for word into what he is pleased to consider blank verse; bedtime— “Oh just time for a game of chess, Julian”. I look out of window at half-past one and see the old object, lying like a tomb, in bed on the terrace, reading by the light of a candle. He had to start early this morning in order to lunch with Lady Colefax. But, while I am dressing, I hear him shouting to Julian through the ground-floor window— “I think before I go we’ve just time to run through U Après-Midi d’un faune It was in the midst of such distractions, playing chess with one hand, correcting Mallarmé with another, that the inaugural lecture was written. Whether it was a day’s work or a day’s pleasure — and it was difficult to say where work ended and pleasure began — it was a full day at any rate. If in his company, as Sir Kenneth Clark has said, “one felt sometimes that the proper answer to Tolstoy’s ‘What is art?’ was the counter question ‘What isn’t?’ “ so in his company the proper answer to the question “What is life?” seemed to be “What isn’t?” Everything was drawn in, assimilated, investigated. The body might creak, but the mind seemed to work with more sweep, with less friction than ever. It reached out and laid hold of every trifle — a new stitch, a zip-fastener, a shadow on the ceiling. Each must be investigated, each must be examined, as if by rescuing such trifles from mystery he could grasp life tighter and make it yield one more drop of rational and civilised enjoyment. And here fittingly, since he was no lover of vague statements, may follow his own definition “of what I mean by life... I mean the general and instinctive reaction to their surroundings of those men of any period whose lives rise to complete self-consciousness, their view of the universe as a whole and their conception of their relation to their kind”. Could he but live five years longer, he wrote in 1933, “life will have done all for me that I can expect”.
XIV
Only one subject seemed to escape his insatiable curiosity; and that was himself. Analysis seemed to stop short there. Perhaps human nature, until we have more knowledge of psychology, is inexplicable; we are only beginning, he would insist, to know anything about this very queer animal man. He was delighted, of course, to hazard theories — about the effect of a puritan upbringing, about the origin of the inferiority complex which he observed cropping up in him from time to time. And if pressed, though very little interested in the past compared with the present, he would try to set down what he could remember. “The first thing”, one such fragment of autobiography begins, “is the play of light on the leaves of the elm trees outside the nursery window at Highgate....” He could remember many sights, and here and there an amusing incident or character — his father skating, for example, or Pierpont Morgan, with his strawberry nose and his little red eyes, buying pictures in Italy. But the central figure remained vague. “... I don’t pretend to know much on the subject. It so rarely interests me”, he wrote when asked to explain himself. “You say I’m wild and want to know if I’m impulsive”, he went on (to Helen Anrep). “Why I should have thought, but of course I don’t know, that I was impulsive (which I don’t like and suspect you don’t) but not wild. No, surely not wild — infinitely sane, cautious, reasonable — what makes me look wild is that I don’t happen to accept any of the world’s idées reçues and values but have my own and stick to them.... But I should have said impulsive, i.e. moved rather jerkily and suddenly by what appeals to me, and I think it implies something wasteful and incoherent in me which I also lament and would like you to forgive — oh, and cure, perhaps.”
This lack of interest in the central figure — that central figure which was so increasingly interested in everything outside itself — had its charm. It made him unconscious, a perfect butt for the irreverent laughter, in which he delighted, of the young; unaware too of the astonishment that his appearance, clasping le diable in his arms, created among the respectable residents in middle-class hotels. But it had its drawbacks, for if he ignored himself, he sometimes ignored other people also. Thus it would be quite possible to collect from different sources a number of unflattering portraits of Roger Fry. They would be contradictory, of course. To some people he seemed insincere — he changed his opinions so quickly. His enthusiasm made the first sight so exciting; then his critical sense came into play and made the second sight so disappointing. The swan of yesterday would become the goose of to-day — a transformation naturally, and often volubly, resented by the bird itself. To others he seemed on the contrary only too ruthless, too dictatorial — a Hitler, a Mussolini, a Stalin. Absorbed in some idea, set upon some cause, he ignored feelings, he overrode objections. Everybody he assumed must share his views and have the same ardour in carrying them out. Fickle and impulsive, obstinate and overbearing — the unflattering portraits would be drawn on those lines.
And he was the first to realise that there was some truth in them. He was impulsive, he knew; he was obstinate; he was, he feared, egotistical. “I suddenly see”, he wrote, “the curious twisted egotism that there is somewhere in me that used to come out when I was little in my indignation against ‘the twinges3, as I used to call Isabel and Agnes, for wanting to play with my things.” Also he was “cross, fussy, stingy, pernickety and other things”. Perhaps psycho-analysis might help; or perhaps human nature in general and his own in particular was too irrational, too instinctive, either to be analysed or to be cured. And he would go on to deplore the natural imperviousness of the human mind to reason; to gird at the extraordinary morality with which human beings torture themselves, and to speculate whether in time to come they may not accept the simple gospel “that all decency and good come from peoples gradually determining to enjoy themselves a little, especially to enjoy their intellectual curiosity and their love of art”. In such speculations about the race in general, Roger Fry lost sight of himself in particular. Certainly he would have refused to sit for the portrait of a finished, complete or in any way perfect human being. He detested fixed attitudes; he suspected poses; he was quick to point out the fatal effect of reverence. And yet whether he liked it or not he would have had to sit for the portrait of a man who was greatly loved by his friends. Truth seems to compel the admission that he created the warmest feeling of affection and admiration in the minds of those who knew him. It was Roger Fry, to sum up many phrases from many letters, who set me on my feet again, and gave me a fresh start in life. It was he who was the most actively, the most imaginatively helpful of all my friends. And they go on to speak of his considerateness, of his humanity, and of his profound humility. So though he made some enemies and shed some acquaintances, he bound his friends to him all the more for the queer strains of impulsiveness and ruthlessness that lay on the surface of that very deep understanding.
But there was the other life — the artist’s. He felt no need to apologise for his conduct there. A work of art was a work of art, and nothing else: personal considerations counted for nothing there. He was a difficult man, it is easy to believe, on committees. He gave his opinion uncompromisingly; he gave it wittily and pungently, or sometimes he gave it sufficiently with one deep groan. He had no respect for authority. “If you said to him, ‘This must be right, all the experts say so, Hitler says so, Marx says so, Christ says so, The Times says so’, he would reply in effect, ‘Well, I wonder. Let’s see.’... You would come away realising that an opinion may be influentially backed and yet be tripe.” Naturally, artists and art critics being what they are, he was bitterly attacked. He was accused of caring only for t
he Old Masters or only for the latest fashions. He was always changing his mind and he was obstinately prejudiced in favour of his friends’ work. In spite of fadings that should have made his opinion worthless, it had weight — for some reason or other Roger Fry had influence, more influence, it was agreed, than any critic since Ruskin at the height of his fame.
How, without any post to back it he came to have such influence, is a question for the painters themselves to decide. The effect of it is shown in their works, and whether it is good or bad, no one, it is safe to say, will hold that it was negligible. To the outsider at any rate, the secret of his influence seemed based, in one word, upon his disinterestedness. He was among the priests, to use his own definition, not among the prophets, or the purveyors. By ignoring personalities and politics, success and failure, he seemed to penetrate beyond any other critic into the picture itself. To this the outsider could also add from direct observation another characteristic — he did not indulge in flattery. Friends he had — he cannot be acquitted of liking some people better than others. But a mutual admiration society, if such things exist — and according to some observers they do — would have expelled Roger Fry at the first meeting. He was as honest with his friends’ work as with his enemies’. He would look long and searchingly, and if he liked what he saw, he would praise generously, dispassionately. But if he did not like what he saw, he was silent; or his one word of condemnation was enough. But his detachment, his disinterestedness was shown most impressively by his own attitude to his own work. His painting was beyond comparison more important to him than his criticism. He never lost hope that he had “a little sensation”, as he called it, or that he had at last been able to express it. He would set his own canvas on the easel and await the verdict. It was often adverse; those whose praise he would have valued most highly were often unable to give it. How keenly he minded that silence is shown again and again in his letters. But it made no difference. His own picture would be set with its face to the wall, and he would turn to the work of those who had, been unable to praise his own. He would consider it with perfect single-mindedness, and if he liked it, he praised it, not because it was a friend’s work, but because he admired it. “One thing I can say for myself”, he wrote. “There are no pangs of jealousy or envy when I see someone else doing good work. It gives me pure delight.” There perhaps lay die secret of his influence as a critic.
But his influence as a human being — his own words, “We know too little of the rhythms of man’s spiritual life”, remind us of the perils of trying to guess the secret that lay behind that. He did not believe with all his knowledge that he could guess the secret of a work of art. And human beings are not works of art. They are not consciously creating a book that can be read, or a picture that can be hung upon the wall. The critic of Roger Fry as a man has a far harder task than any that was set him by the pictures of Cézanne. Yet his character was strongly marked; each transformation left something positive behind it. He stood for something rare in the general life of his time— “Roger Fry’s death is a definite loss to civilisation”, wrote E. M. Forster. “There is no one now living — no one, that is to say, of his calibre — who stands exactly where he stood.” He changed the taste of his time by his writing, altered the current of English painting by his championship of the Post-Impressionists, and increased immeasurably the love of art by his lectures. He left too upon the minds of those who knew him a very rich, complex and definite impression.
If for a moment we attempt his own task and assume that he was an artist who began his work in 1866 and continued it with immense energy and inventiveness for sixty-eight years, we can perhaps single out a few of the qualities that gave it shape. There are certain phrases that recur, that seem to stress the pattern of the whole. His own words “It gives me pure delight” might serve for a beginning. They bring to mind the little boy who sat in his own private and particular garden at Highgate, watching for the bud to burst into flower— “I conceived that nothing could be more exciting than to see the flower suddenly burst its green case and unfold its immense cup of red”. What was true of the child in the garden was true of the man all through his life. There was always some bud about to burst into flower; there was always some flower that gave him pure delight. But the critic who attempts to analyse the composition of his own work of art will have to note that his flower did not burst suddenly and completely into its immense cup of red. There were many obstacles. We recall the pond in winter; the “lack of simple humanity” in his upbringing that long cramped and fettered him.
Sunningdale and its floggings followed; from them he learnt a hatred of brutality that lasted all through his life. From Clifton and “its crass bourgeois respectability” sprang his intolerance of the Philistine, of the conventional.
. Cambridge, of course, meant liberation. Only there again nature thwarted him. She gave him the capacity for pure delight, but a mind quick to doubt, to reason, to analyse, to dissect — perhaps to destroy pure delight. It was only after much waste of time and temper that he set to work with all his faculties upon the picture. The critic therefore has to record no steady and uninterrupted progress, but rather a series of sallies and excursions in different directions. Sensation beckons one way; training and reason another. The Quaker, the scientist, the artist, each in turn took a hand in the composition. And then happiness, a medium that would have solved many difficulties, was snatched from him. He had no centre. He had to make his picture in the harshest conditions, out of the sternest elements. The danger that threatened him was the danger of “imprisonment in egotism”. But “life was too urgent”. It was only “by piling new sensations on to one’s memories that one can learn to start life afresh”. He threw himself into other activities, and in their pursuit found once more that “all passions even for red poppies leave one open to ridicule”. He found, too, that to feel passion is to expose oneself not only to ridicule but to anguish. There was no lack of “that spiritual torment, that anxious effort which in the lives of the greatest artists forces them always to wrestle with new problems”. Here the phrase of the Chinese philosopher makes itself heard: “L’homme natural résiste à la nature des choses, celui qui connait le Lao coule par les interstices”. One must master detachment. But detachment did not mean withdrawal. “I want to have new experiences. I want to go out into this tremendous unknown universe outside one.” It was thus, the critic will note, by experiments, by revisions and perpetual reorientations that he avoided with astonishing success the fate that attends so many artists, both in paint and in life — repetition. Like the frogs at St Rémy, he broke the rhythm before it got quite fixed. As the artist grows older, therefore, the critic becomes aware of an increasing richness and boldness in the design. New rhythms and new themes appear. The artist becomes less conscious and so has access to a greater range of emotion. He draws into his theme common things, the milk-pot, the apple and the onion, and invests them with a peculiar quality of reality. So we can single out some of the processes that went to the making of that picture. 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 greatest of the work it must leave untouched a greater part of its objective”.
With such words of warning the critic of Roger Fry may well drop the stick to the ground and give up pointing. But though the lecturer, when he came to a certain late work by Cezanne, made his bow and said, “It goes beyond any analysis of which I am capable”, he went next day to the gallery and tried to see the picture again as if for the first time— “it’s only so one makes discoveries”. Sometimes, though not by conscious effort, people also are seen as if for the first time. One such occasion — it was the last, as it happened — comes to memory. It was a summer evening, late in July 1934, and a friend had brought a picture upon which he wanted Roger Fry’s opinion — was it by Degas, or a copy only? The canvas was stood on a chair in front of him, in the same room, looking out on to the same trees w
here so many pictures had been stood in front of him — pictures by Watts, and pictures by Picasso, school children’s drawings and canvases with the paint still wet on them. Again his eyes fixed themselves with their very steady and penetrating gaze upon the canvas. Again they seemed to carry on a life of their own as they explored the world of reality. And again as if it helped him in his voyage of discovery he turned and laughed and talked and argued about other things. The two worlds were close together. He could pass from one to the other without impediment. He responded to the whole vibration — the still life and the laughter, the murmur of the traffic in the distance and the voices close at hand. His presence seemed to increase the sensation of everything in the room. But at the centre of that vibration was a gravity and a stillness, as in his face too there was that which made him look so often “like a saint in one of his Old Masters”. But he was a saint who laughed; a saint who enjoyed life to the uttermost. “Whereas piety or holiness make goodness stink in the nostrils”, he once wrote, “saintliness is the imaginative power to make goodness seem desirable.” He made goodness seem desirable, as he sat laughing with his friends and looking at the picture. But how describe the pure delight “of watching a flower unfold its immense cup of red”? Those who knew him best will attempt no summing up of that sensation. They can only say that Roger Fry had a peculiar quality of reality that made him a person of infinite importance in their lives, and add his own words, “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.”
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 448
