Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  But it was late; his mind was made up; and once more he was off.

  XV

  He went to St Rémy. He worked with Charles Mauron, translated Mallarmé and painted among the olive trees. “The sun shines perpetually”, he wrote home, “and if only the flies didn’t bite it would be an earthly paradise.” Once more there was Royat, once more there were the usual groans at the romantic landscape, at the bourgeois respectability— “like a perpetual Victorian sabbath” — of the hotel. Then with Helen Anrep he drove through France seeing “an incredible number of Romanesque churches some of astonishing beauty”. One last letter to Vanessa Bell thanked her for a last visit— “I don’t think I ever enjoyed it more” — and for a long friendship which had grown “more and more important with the years”. He was going to settle in for a winter of hard work, he told her; he was absorbed in his Slade lectures. He was full of plans for the future and of hope.

  He reached home in the first week of September. On the evening of his return he was working in the room at Bernard Street, got up to fetch something, slipped and fell. Once before he had fallen and had written, “It’s odd that for some time before this I’d this feeling of impending menace and my first thought after the fall was — That’s it. I’m killed. But I almost instantly recovered and began to constater the facts.” This time the fall was very serious, the thigh was broken. For a few days he lay in great pain, but his vitality was great, and he seemed to be recovering. Then suddenly his heart failed and on the afternoon of 8th September he died in the Royal Free Hospital, to which he had been taken.

  On 13th September, a day as it happened of extraordinary beauty, his body was cremated. When his friend McTaggart was cremated he wrote, “This slow silent movement through doors into the unknown is... a perfect symbol of the inevitable mechanism of things and of the futility of our protests against its irresistible force”. There was no service as Roger Fry’s body passed through the same door, but music was played, Bach’s Chorale, a Choral prelude, and Frescobaldi’s Fugue in G minor. And upon a paper that was given to his friends were printed some lines from Cornus, a passage from Transformations, and finally the words of Spinoza which, when his friend was cremated, he had said were the right words:

  A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.

  APPENDIX

  The following technical appreciation of Roger Fry’s development as a painter has been contributed by an artist:

  Roger Fry developed very late as an artist, partly because of the home influences described in this book, but also because of his own great sensibility to the work of others and perhaps some want of self-confidence. Hence he was even more influenced than are most young artists by those whom he admired. A certain natural austerity of taste and intellectual clear sightedness led him to reject the theories, and in consequence, the practice, of the more plain-sailing and purely painter-like among his contemporaries or immediate predecessors in England. Instead he accepted first, Whistler, with his deliberate and conscious attempt to design within a given space; and Gonder, who suggested something of eighteenth-century artificiality and could create a world at one remove as it were from reality and Impressionism’s disturbing problems. As he saw it, Impressionism, which at this time he seems to have judged mainly from Monet, led to a cul-de-sac, and this prevented him on his first visit to Paris from seeing very much of the work still being produced by Renoir, Cézanne and Monet, or from focusing attention on what he must have seen, such as the Caillebotte collection, then at the Luxembourg.

  He was interested always in the old masters, between whom and the living there was never in his mind any dividing line, and his first visit to Italy must have made a very deep and permanent impression on him, not only as a critic but as a painter. This interest led him naturally to great consideration of technique and actual surface quality of paint. Probably at that time this seemed to him of much greater importance than it did later, though the discovery of a new “old masters’ medium” excited him greatly years afterwards. His paintings in gouache on silk and his oil paintings at that time all show this preoccupation. Poussin’s rich and complicated art fascinated him then as always, and the exhibition with Neville Lytton, when he was beginning to exist as a mature artist, showed this clearly.

  The need to make money which led him to journalism and lecturing, to the editorship of the Burlington Magazine and the Metropolitan Museum at New York, inevitably put great difficulties in the way of painting, and by the year 1910, when he had finally returned from America, he was doing comparatively little serious work as a painter. Perhaps when he bought the La Famille Charpentier and Le Viol of Degas, both of which he admired enormously, for New York, he was beginning to see the significance and greatness of his French contemporaries. At any rate, about the year 1908 or 1909 he must have become aware of some other force stirring in contemporary art, something which made much greater appeal to his own instincts and satisfied his intellect as well as his sensibilities. This force, to which he later gave the name of Post-Impressionism, gave him — and many others — freedom to become himself. At first he was inclined to abandon subtleties, to use flat masses of colour and line, to reduce all as far as possible to fundamental and essential elements. Of all the exciting new possibilities that presented themselves the most obvious at first were probably those suggested by Gauguin and Van Gogh. His one-man show in 1910 or 1912 consisted almost entirely of new work, and in general tone, colour and quality could hardly have been more unlike the exhibition of five or six years earlier.

  This liberation, which was almost a new birth as a painter, did not, however, prevent him from finding presently that he had jumped too rapidly to conclusions. The simplified statements, in spite of their new vigour, became too empty to satisfy his trained sensibility. But now, instead of the passionate interest in quality of paint and surface he became more and more intrigued by the problem of expressing something of the richness and complexity of nature transformed by vision and design. Cézanne, who more perhaps than any other artist since Rembrandt had conveyed something of this richness through his own sensibility, became the dominant influence. He realised too at last the greatness of the late Renoir and he possessed and studied the works of artists as different as Picasso, Derain, Segonzac and Vlaminck. After the dreary war years he was able more and more to explore his own sensations in the country he loved most, and gradually his own personal vision and attitude asserted themselves. His deep and wide sympathies with the art of so many ages and countries, his intense excitement about anything which seemed to him good, from the work of a living three-year-old child to that of some master dead centuries ago, seemed to leave him free at last to follow his own instincts as an artist. Some very profound and personal sympathy with the Dutch and with certain French artists — Chardin and Corot especially — helped him also to a more complete understanding of his own gifts and aims. In his latest work he was more sure of himself than he had ever been and saw more clearly the general direction he meant to follow.

  ON BEING ILL

  On Being Ill first appeared in the ‘The Criterion’, a literary magazine created by T. S. Eliot, in January 1926, before being published by Hogarth Press. Periodically throughout her life, Woolf suffered from illness, mentally and physically, and was incredibly aware of the connection and intertwined nature of the mind and body. Woolf experienced terrible headaches and fevers, which were often shortly followed by a deep and prolonged period of depression, in turn resulting in awful physical side effects and complete exhaustion. The treatment she received from her doctors and other medical practitioners was far more harmful and distressing to her than helpful, and included some incredibly painful physical procedures. An interest in the physical and the body is a focus of the author’s essay, as she ponders why illness, unlike love, jealousy and battles, has not become a feature of literature.

  In the essay, Woolf contends that illness has just as a profound and personal impac
t on a person and is just as significant an experience as love, but that literature always concentrates on the mind and not the body. Although this is no longer an issue, as there has been keen interest in literature that chronicles illness over the past fifty years, but it was a topic rarely addressed by writers outside of the medical profession in the 1920’s. The author suggests that in some sense illness is a rebellion against the productive Capitalist order. Unwell people not only waste time, become self-consumed and disengaged, but most importantly they do not work and therefore do not aid capital. While Woolf acknowledges the pain and suffering that illness causes, she does not view it as a wholly negative or useless state. The experience of illness allows the imagination to flourish; it provides the time to let the mind roam free and ‘when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed’ offer something unique and valuable to the sufferer.

  The first edition

  Vanessa Bell’s design for the cover

  ON BEING ILL

  Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his ‘Rinse the mouth — rinse the mouth’ with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us — when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia; lyrics to toothache. But no; with a few exceptions — De Quincey attempted something of the sort in The Opium Eater; there must be a volume or two about disease scattered through the pages of Proust — literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane — smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes. But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record. People write always of the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how the mind has civilised the universe. They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher’s turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery. Those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected. Nor is the reason far to seek. To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth. Short of these, this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism. The public would say that a novel devoted to influenza lacked plot; they would complain that there was no love in it — wrongly however, for illness often takes on the disguise of love, and plays the same odd tricks. It invests certain faces with divinity, sets us to wait, hour after hour, with pricked ears for the creaking of a stair, and wreathes the faces of the absent (plain enough in health, Heaven knows) with a new significance, while the mind concocts a thousand legends and romances about them for which it has neither time nor taste in health. Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out. Probably it will be something laughable. For who of English birth can take liberties with the language? To us it is a sacred thing and therefore doomed to die, unless the Americans, whose genius is so much happier in the making of new words than in the disposition of the old, will come to our help and set the springs aflow. Yet it is not only a new language that we need, more primitive, more sensual, more obscene, but a new hierarchy of the passions; love must be deposed in favour of a temperature of 104; jealousy give place to the pangs of sciatica; sleeplessness play the part of villain, and the hero become a white liquid with a sweet taste — that mighty Prince with the moths’ eyes and the feathered feet, one of whose names is Chloral.

  But to return to the invalid. ‘I am in bed with influenza’ — but what does that convey of the great experience; how the world has changed its shape; the tools of business grown remote; the sounds of festival become romantic like a merry-go-round heard across far fields; and friends have changed, some putting on a strange beauty, others deformed to the squatness of toads, while the whole landscape of life lies remote and fair, like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea, and he is now exalted on a peak and needs no help from man or God, and now grovels supine on the floor glad of a kick from a housemaid — the experience cannot be imparted and, as is always the way with these dumb things, his own suffering serves but to wake memories in his friends’ minds of their influenzas, their aches and pains which went unwept last February, and now cry aloud, desperately, clamorously, for the divine relief of sympathy.

  But sympathy we cannot have. Wisest Fate says no. If her children, weighted as they already are with sorrow, were to take on them that burden too, adding in imagination other pains to their own, buildings would cease to rise; roads would peter out into grassy tracks; there would be an end of music and of painting; one great sigh alone would rise to Heaven, and the only attitudes for men and women would be those of horror and despair. As it is, there is always some little distraction — an organ grinder at the corner of the hospital, a shop with book or trinket to decoy one past the prison or the workhouse, some absurdity of cat or dog to prevent one from turning the old beggar’s hieroglyphic of misery into volumes of sordid suffering; and thus the vast effort of sympathy which those barracks of pain and discipline, those dried symbols of sorrow, ask us to exert on their behalf, is uneasily shuffled off for another time. Sympathy nowadays is dispensed chiefly by the laggards and failures, women for the most part (in whom the obsolete exists so strangely side by side with anarchy and newness), who, having dropped out of the race, have time to spend upon fantastic and unprofitable excursions; C.L. for example, who, sitting by the stale sickroom fire, builds up, with touches at once sober and imaginative, the nursery fender, the loaf, the lamp, barrel organs in the street, and all the simple old wives’ tales of pinafores and escapades; A.R., the rash, the magnanimous, who, if you fancied a giant tortoise to solace you or a theorbo to cheer you, would ransack the markets of London and procure them somehow, wrapped in paper, before the end of the d
ay; the frivolous K.T., who, dressed in silks and feathers, powdered and painted (which takes time too) as if for a banquet of Kings and Queens, spends her whole brightness in the gloom of the sickroom, and makes the medicine bottles ring and the flames shoot up with her gossip and her mimicry. But such follies have had their day; civilisation points to a different goal; and then what place will there be for the tortoise and the theorbo?