PAINTER AND WRITER

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21418, 9 March 1935, Page 17

PAINTER AND WRITER

Walter Sickert: A Conversation. By Virginia Woolf. The Hogarth Press (1/G net.) The form, '"a conversation." of Mrs Woolf's tribute to Mr Sickert allows her an informality and an intimacy by which both she and her reader yam. The conversation is not a quick and brilliant exchange: it has an unhurried, brooding quality—a long evening, one imagines, and j comfortable chairs after a good din- j ner, warmth, many pauses, friendship, sincerity. If is a brief discus-! sion of the inter-relation of the arts,: but particularly of the arts of painting and of writing; and while the arguments are suggestive rather! than conclusive, it'is obvious that, at any rate in her present mood. Mrs Woolf is sorrowfully impressed by the comparative clumsiness and inexprcssiveness of words. "Words are an impure medium,'' says one of her talkers; "better far to have been born into the silent kingdom of paint." She claims for Mr Sickert thai; he is one of the greatest of English biographers, poets, novelists: in each capacity he achieves, ''cloaked in the divine gilt of silence," a completeness, a liawlessne.ss, a depth beyond the compass of any biographer, any novelist, of any but the very greatest poet. It is an old question, of course, how far this is a straining of terms, and how far one is justified in it. Mrs Wool I.' is continually catching herself up—words, she feels, will not do her work. "We have reached the edge where painting breaks oil' and lakes her way into the silent land." . . . "We only catch a glimpse now and Ihen of what lives there: we try to describe it and we cannot; and then it vanishes, and having seen it and lost it, exhaustion and depression overcome us." These, the talkers, are ordinarily sensitive and artistic people; but even the more particularly gifted reach that "silent land," and to express themselves "can only open and shut their fingers." "making passes with their hands."

It is an interesting statement of the case; but not, of course, a complete one; for each of the arts has its own limitations and each is at times triumphant over the others. Painting and music speak more directly, and do not suffer under the curse of tongues. But allowing for this special disability of words (which is no part of Mrs Woolfs discussion), could you, for example. Defter, for power and economy, in either painting or music, Shakespeare's "When. I love thee not, chaos is come again"? Have Keats's "magic casements" ever been surpassed? Or Milton's "glassy. cooi, translucent wave"? Or Wordsworth's sounding cataract that haunted him •"like a passion"? The poets are easier to quote; but the prose writers do it too upon occasion. There is Drvden on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. "Here is God's plenty"; or Izaak Walton on his "little nimble musicians of the air''—needless to multiply, though it could be done for Mrs Woolf's comfort and her readers'. But she knows it; and it is proof of her own power with the medium of which in this little book she seems to despair, that her few words about certain of Mr Sickert's pictures give what proves to be a quite astonishingly clear and accurate idea of them even to one not before familiar with his work.