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Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf (1941)

She was given to increasing the bounds of the moment by flights into past or future; or sidelong down corridors and alley.
(Old Mrs Swithin, describing Woolf’s own technique, page 8)

She gave him an arch roguish twinkle, as if to say—but the end of that sentence was cut short.
(One of many instances of interruption and incompletion which characterise the novel at every level, p.182)

‘Bless my soul, what a dither!’
(An unknown member of the audience as it disperses at the end of the pageant which forms the centrepiece of the narrative, p.180)

Virginia Woolf killed herself before her last novel, Between the Acts, was published. She drowned herself in the River Ouse on 28 March 1941 and the novel was published on 17 July 1941.

According to her biographer, after the long, gruelling process of writing and rewriting her previous work, the long novel The Years, which covers 55 years in the lives of the extended Pargiter family, the writing of Between The Acts flowed much more easily. It stems from one simple concept: all the events are set on just one day in the summer of 1939 (p.48), on the day of the annual village pageant at Pointz Hall, at the heart of a remote and idyllic rural community in the south of England.

As usual, the narrative describes not only of events, but the thoughts and memories of half a dozen of the central characters. And the pageant itself reviews and celebrates English history just at the moment when the nation was poised on the brink of another world war, which would rewrite or even obliterate much of that history.

Shadows

Born in 1882, Woolf was approaching 50 when she wrote Between The Acts. She had been a prolific author, but had also lived a life plagued with mental illness and periodic collapses into complete madness. So the idea of a rural village pageant sounds as idyllic as can be, but the book is darkened by multiple shadows, details and themes.

So, for example, Isabella (Isa) dawdling in the library of the big house at the centre of the novel, picks up a copy of The Times and starts idly reading it. What could be more privileged and tony? Except that she finds herself reading the account of what seems to be an assault or rape case, of some British soldiers accused of luring a women into their barracks, throwing her on a bed and tearing off some of her clothing, at which point she started to slap the soldier…

This upsetting image recurs to Isa throughout the book, only a few times but enough to add a very dark thread to the fabric. Also regarding Isa, she is very obviously unhappily married to Giles, son of the village’s posh landowner, and her day is punctuated by thoughts of not just unhappiness, but active hatred for him. She tries to counter these by repeating the mantra that he is ‘the father to my children’ but it doesn’t really help.

As I say, dark shadows…

Threads and themes

So there’s this ancient house, Pointz Hall, sitting in a dip in remote and unspoilt English countryside. In it live old Mr Oliver who’s accompanied everywhere by his big Afghan hound, and his widowed sister, Mrs Swithin, who he calls Sindy though her given name was Lucy. They’re both in their 70s.

Old Oliver doesn’t understand how his sister, like him in so many ways, can believe in God, wears a big crucifix, is always off to church. a) Woolf herself, in either her novels or essays, gives no indication of understanding religion: this is another massive gap in her sense of human nature and experience, along with her timidity about sex and her inability to grasp most aspects of masculinity. b) But Oliver’s incomprehension doesn’t affect the deep affection of brother and sister. c) Which reminds me of the deep affection between the 70-something brother and sister, Eleanor and Edward, in The Years, one of the many ways that themes from the previous book spill over into this one.

Lucy / Mrs Swithin is the classic Woolfian absent-minded and dreamy older woman cf Eleanor in The Years.

Was it that she had no body? Up in the clouds, like an air ball, her mind touched ground now and then with a shock of surprise.

With Bart and Lucy lives Bart’s son, Giles Oliver, who is a stockbroker in London, and his wife, Isabella, generally called Isa. Isa is identified from the start as another typically dreamy Woolf woman, not interested in details, drifting off when people talk, preferring her dream world of disconnected thoughts and perceptions. Isa writes poetry but does so in a book disguised as an accounts book so as to hide it from her husband.

Isa is not a slip of a thing. When she takes Dodge to see the greenhouses, the narrative tells us she is ‘broad’ and ‘fairly filled the path’ (p.101).

At one point there’s a really pure expression of the dream aesthetic underlying Woolf’s entire approach, the non-human stasis and timelessness she aspires to.

Empty, empty, empty; silent, silent, silent. The room was a shell, singing of what was before time was; a vase stood in the heart of the house, alabaster, smooth, cold, holding the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence. (p.33)

If only life, or art, could have that perfection. but things keep changing, moving on, everything is in flux, and so no record of it can be perfect.

The young people of the village – Jim, Iris, David, Jessica – are busy decorating the old stone barn where the pageant will be held. A stage has been erected at one end. They call Mrs Swithin ‘Old Flimsy’.

Enter Mrs Manresa and William Dodge

Uninvited, two people show up at the house, Mrs Manresa, 45, and her friend, William Dodge. Through Isa’s eyes we learn that Mrs Manresa is a well-known local eccentric, married to a well-off City financier, with homes in London and down here, well known for playing jazz, roaming round in unusual clothes, insisting on teaching the village girls basket weaving.

Isa affectionately mocks Mrs Manresa as ‘the wild child of nature’ but she represents enjoyment of life, what Woolf mockingly refers to as the importance of ‘the jolly human heart’. She stirs some sugar into her coffee and:

She looked before she drank. Looking was part of drinking. Why waste sensation, she seemed to ask, why waste a single drop that can be pressed out of this ripe, this melting, this adorable world? (p.51)

It is identical to the sentiment expressed several times in Mrs Dalloway, about the sheer delight in living, in being live and sensitive to everything around you, no matter how small.

The stories that never are

It was in Orlando that I realised something distinctive about Woolf: given that her characters hardly ever do anything except drift from house to house, stroll through the streets, catch buses or cabs, and attend luncheons and dinner parties – for action, for interest, to liven up conversations, they often refer to ‘stories’, are described as telling ‘stories’, remind each other of the old ‘story’ about so-and-so.

But here’s my point: we never get to hear these stories. The promised stories are never told.

This was most flagrant in Orlando where we are repeatedly told about the months Orlando spent with buccaneers and whores in the East End and the stories they told! How the knackered old playwright Nicholas Green told him story after story about his contemporaries Shakespeare and Marlowe! About his time with the Turkish gypsies who told many a fine yarn round their campfires! And here’s the point: we never hear one of these stories.

In her big long novel, The Years, characters threaten to tell each other ‘stories’ about the old days, but never do.

Partly this has a modernist feel, a deliberate strategy of indirection, reminiscent of The Waste Land or The Cantos, which are made of unfinished fragments. But it’s also, I think, because Woolf couldn’t actually tell a story; she was one of those people who doesn’t remember stories, isn’t really interested in stories; her thing is moments of being, her characters noticing luminous details, dreams. Each of her novels features a leading woman protagonist who is the first to admit how forgetful they are: Mrs Dalloway, Mrs Ramsay, Eleanor Pargiter and here’s inattentive old Mrs Swithin.

‘A bishop; a traveller;—I’ve forgotten even their names. I ignore. I forget.’ (p.64)

The never-told stories are closely connected to another phenomenon, which is something to do with incompletion. Characters start to say something that may be a story, but are interrupted, shouted down, talked over, or someone laughs and the character listening doesn’t hear the crucial part. Woolf’s narratives revel in incompletion and frustration. The classic instance is at the end of The Years when Nicholas attempts to cap the big party which forms the final section of the book with a speech, but he is interrupted once, tries again and is interrupted again, tries a third time but other people walk by, talk over him, suggest someone else makes a speech, and so it never happens.

That sense of an action, generally a narrative, of someone trying to tell a story or a speech but not being completed, left hanging, frustrated, is a fundamental aspect of Woolf’s fictions, and the same happens here in Between The Acts. Here is a typical Woolf anecdote, Mrs Manresa rattling on to the Oliver family:

On she went to offer them a sample of her life; a few gobbets of gossip; mere trash; but she gave it for what it was worth; how last Tuesday she had been sitting next so and so; and she added, very casually a Christian name; then a nickname; and he’d said—for, as a mere nobody they didn’t mind what they said to her—and ‘in strict confidence, I needn’t tell you,’ she told them. And they all pricked their ears. And then, with a gesture of her hands as if tossing overboard that odious crackling-under-the-pot London life—so—she exclaimed ‘There!…And what’s the first thing I do when I come down here?’ They had only come last night, driving through June lanes… (p.38)

What happened to the ‘story’? We are not told it. I think Mrs Manresa actually does tell it and Woolf simply doesn’t report it, though it’s not very clear. What is certainly clear is that Woolf doesn’t share it. She never does. In all these novels we never get to hear any ancillary or subsidiary stories.

Here’s another typical moment. Old Bart is telling the unexpected lunch guests, Mrs Manresa and William, about the paintings hanging in the dining room.

Dodge [said] ‘I like that picture.’
‘And you’re right,’ said Bartholomew. ‘A man—I forget his name—a man connected with some Institute, a man who goes about giving advice, gratis, to descendants like ourselves, degenerate descendants, said…said…’ He paused. They all looked at the lady. But she looked over their heads, looking at nothing. She led them down green glades into the heart of silence.
‘Said it was by Sir Joshua?’ Mrs. Manresa broke the silence abruptly.
‘No, no,’ William Dodge said hastily, but under his breath. (p.45)

And that’s it. Things move on to Mrs Manresa counting out the stones from the cherries in her tart. In other words the story, or anecdote, about the expert who assessed the Oliver paintings, is never completed.

Later, in the interval of the pageant, Mrs Manresa is tempted to tell an off-colour story, but, of course, doesn’t.

Mrs. Manresa laughed. She remembered. An anecdote was on the tip of her tongue, about a public lavatory built to celebrate the same occasion, and how the Mayor… Could she tell it? No.

No, we never get to hear this as we never get to hear hundreds of other ‘stories’ referred to but never told. Woolf conversations are full of these interruptions and incompletions, it’s her trademark move. Thus at the very end of this book, the vicar starts to make a speech but is interrupted in mid-word by a flight of airplanes overhead.

‘But there is still a deficit’ (he consulted his paper) ‘of one hundred and seventy-five pounds odd. So that each of us who has enjoyed this pageant has still an opp…’ The word was cut in two. A zoom severed it. Twelve aeroplanes in perfect formation like a flight of wild duck came overhead. That was the music. The audience gaped; the audience gazed. Then zoom became drone. The planes had passed. ‘…portunity,’ Mr. Streatfield continued, ‘to make a contribution.’

We, like the author, want things to form a unity, to be whole. But life is never whole, life is really a litany of interruptions and distractions.

‘One thing follows another’

Giles Oliver, Isa’s husband, arrives by train from London. He is nettled that they have unexpected guests i.e. Mrs Manresa has imposed on them. Giles bolts his lunch (the fish) to catch up with the others, then they take their coffee on the terrace with a view.

If his wife is a Woolfian dreamer, Giles represents a type of the Angry Man. He is angry that Mrs Manresa is breaking the family mood he came down to enjoy. This spills over into his acute awareness that war is coming and his seething frustration that all these old fogies just sit around in their deckchairs admiring the view as if nothing’s up. He instantly forms a bad opinion of Dodge and, as the coffee conversation wears on, decides he is a ****, a word he cannot say. Presumably he means gay.

The narrative meanders on. On the face of it Old Bart commences an inconsequential conversation asking why the British are so indifferent to their painters but so much more devoted to their writers (because the writers are better is the short answer). But while these middle-class types noodle on their inconsequential conversation, other things go on. The narrative ponders the subtle affiliation between cross Giles and self-professed wild child Mrs Manresa.

A thread united them—visible, invisible, like those threads, now seen, now not, that unite trembling grass blades in autumn before the sun rises. She had met him once only, at a cricket match. And then had been spun between them an early morning thread before the twigs and leaves of real friendship emerge.

Woolf isn’t interested in ‘stories’ and her novels have next to no plot because this is what interests her: the invisible threads that link people, places, memories…

Miss La Trobe

Only now, a quarter into the text, are we introduced to a figure who’s going to dominate it, Miss La Trobe, the impresario who stages the village pageant every year.

Outwardly she was swarthy, sturdy and thick set; strode about the fields in a smock frock; sometimes with a cigarette in her mouth; often with a whip in her hand; and used rather strong language…

This commanding figure has decided that the country house’s terrace would be the ideal place to perform the play. Now the lunch party (the Olivers, Giles and Isa, Mrs M etc) hear voices coming from the dip beyond the lily pond because it is here that Miss La Trobe is organising her troops for the day ahead. (Her nickname among the village actors is ‘Bossy’.)

Mr Streatfield the vicar arrives, with his ‘handsome, grizzled head’.

Rhymes

Isa is a poet so we see her continually versifying and looking for rhymes. It’s her shtick, her identifier.

‘Where we know not, where we go not, neither know nor care,’ she hummed. ‘Flying, rushing through the ambient, incandescent, summer silent…’ The rhyme was ‘air’. She put down her brush. She took up the telephone.

But somewhere, this cloud, this crust, this doubt, this dust—She waited for a rhyme, it failed her…

Here she is, taking Dodge to see the greenhouses:

‘Fly then, follow,’ she hummed, ‘the dappled herds in the cedar grove, who, sporting, play, the red with the roe, the stag with the doe. Fly, away. I grieving stay. Alone I linger, I pluck the bitter herb by the ruined wall, the churchyard wall, and press its sour, its sweet, its sour, long grey leaf, so, twixt thumb and finger…’

This fondness for rhymes is occasionally present not just in Isa but in the narrator themselves. In the first third of the book it occasionally spills over into the narrative text but once the pageant gets going, it becomes far more present (see below).

A tour of the house

There’s an odd jump cut from Miss La Trobe fussing with props to the narrative suddenly showing us Mrs Swithin showing young Mr Dodge round their house. For some reason this tour by the 70-year-old lady becomes freighted with an almost symbolical weight:

‘The nursery,’ said Mrs. Swithin. Words raised themselves and became symbolical. ‘The cradle of our race,’ she seemed to say. (p.66)

And for his part Dodge feels a sudden urge to confess his life story, to tell her he was bullied at school and that, yes, he is a **** (the word which Giles thinks can’t be mentioned, presumably poof or some such slur meaning gay) and so describes himself as a ‘half-man’.

The sound of cars in the drive reminds them that guests are arriving to watch the pageant. It is half past three on a June day in 1939.

Rows of chairs, deck chairs, gilt chairs, hired cane chairs, and indigenous garden seats had been drawn up on the terrace.

Into these the guests start fumbling and sitting. And then, without any preparation from the narrator, a child steps onstage and starts reciting, meaning the pageant has started.

The pageant 1. Elizabethan age

The pageant is surprisingly incoherent and confusing. Woolf deliberately makes it so. Thus a child comes onto the terrace/stage and starts declaiming but half the audience can’t hear. A chorus of villages comes on and sings but the audience can’t hear the words etc. It’s a continuation of the non-stories and interrupted speech theme. Nothing can get finished or completely understood. In a way, it’s like a nightmare where you’re running full pelt but not moving.

Anyway it appears to be a pageant overview of English history, starting with Chaucer and people in medieval garb miming the Canterbury pilgrims. Then a local figure, Mrs Clark, who runs the local shops (‘licensed to sell tobacco’) comes on impressively made up as Queen Elizabeth.

First play with the play

She recites some (bad) verse describing herself but is interrupted and mocked by the village idiot, Albert, skipping around, mocking her and the audience. Elizabeth introduces a play within a play. This appears to be a pastiche of an Elizabethan play with lost relatives and far-fetched coincidences but the real point is that, characteristically, it is badly explained and we don’t see it all acted out.

She bawled. They bawled. All together they bawled, and so loud that it was difficult to make out what they were saying.

First interval: tea in the barn

The play with a play is interrupted and incomplete when the Interval arrives, much to the chagrin of Miss La Trobe, yet another example of incompletion. Here is Isa’s confused response:

There was such a medley of things going on, what with the beldame’s deafness, the bawling of the youths, and the confusion of the plot that she could make nothing of it. Did the plot matter?… Don’t bother about the plot: the plot’s nothing.

You can’t help reading that as Woolf’s instructions about her own novels: ‘the plot’s nothing’.

But the other thing about the pageants is the way format of poetry, rhyme and repetition infects the narrative. At the interval all the characters and the narrator have picked up the habit of rhyming, repeating short phrases, poetic diction, as if it’s catching. Here’s how the narrative describes the audience returning to their seats. See how it’s become… what exactly? Impressionistic? Certainly with fanciful rhymes.

Feet crunched the gravel. Voices chattered. The inner voice, the other voice was saying: How can we deny that this brave music, wafted from the bushes, is expressive of some inner harmony? “When we wake” (some were thinking) “the day breaks us with its hard mallet blows.” “The office” (some were thinking) “compels disparity. Scattered, shattered, hither thither summoned by the bell. ‘Ping-ping-ping’ that’s the phone. ‘Forward!’ ‘Serving!’—that’s the shop.” So we answer to the infernal, agelong and eternal order issued from on high. And obey. “Working, serving, pushing, striving, earning wages—to be spent—here? Oh dear no. Now? No, by and by. When ears are deaf and the heart is dry.” (p.107)

At the interval everyone crowds into the ancient barn where tea and cakes are being served. Woolf takes the time to emphasise that both are disgusting, the tea tasting like ‘rust boiled in water’. There’s a great press of people all talking at the same time, overhearing each other’s fragments of speech, never finishing their sentences, a festival of inconsequentiality.

Symbolical voices they seemed to her, half hearing…. feeling invisible threads connecting the bodiless voices.

Woolf likes this kind of thing, mocking but also enjoying the hubbub and sustained inconsequentiality of banal conversation, an atmosphere of ‘scraps and fragments’ (a phrase she repeats six times). She staged the same sort of thing in Mrs Dalloway’s party which forms the climax to the novel of the same name, in the Ramsay family dinner in To The Lighthouse and in Delia’s party which forms the climax of The Years.

Thus Mrs Swithin rambles on to Mrs Manresa about the swallows which nest in the barn every year, someone comments on the King and Queen’s upcoming trip to India, someone else points out it’s actually Canada they’re going to, random voices interrupt asking for a splash more milk or another slice of cake. Isa and Dodge find themselves in a corner and jokingly quote bits of the play to each other. Dodge is an alienated outsider, the role played by North at Delia’s party. He is just thinking he’s made a bit of connection with poetry-quoting Isa when here whole expression changes and her little boy George comes running over to her, while Dodge catches sight of her husband, Giles, by the door, virile and still angry about everything.

New faces at the pageant

Albert, the village idiot
old Cobbet of Cobbs Corner, who worked out East for a while
Lady Haslip, of Haslip Manor
Mrs Parker
Mrs Neale who runs the village post office
Mrs Moore the keeper’s wife
Mr Pinsent with his bad leg
Mabel Hopkins
Major and Mrs Mayhew
Mrs Lynn-Jones who shares a house with Etty Springett, both being widows
Mr Page the village reporter, who is used to point out many of the above

On being gay

On a whim, Isa offers to show Dodge the greenhouses and off they wander. He knows she’s realised he’s gay.

‘And you—married?’ she asked. From her tone he knew she guessed, as women always guessed, everything. They knew at once they had nothing to fear, nothing to hope. At first they resented—serving as statues in a greenhouse. Then they liked it. For then they could say—as she did—whatever came into their heads…. ‘I’m William,’ he said, taking the furry leaf and pressing it between thumb and finger. ‘I’m Isa,’ she answered. Then they talked as if they had known each other all their lives; which was odd, she said, as they always did, considering she’d known him perhaps one hour. (p.102),

The pageant part 2. Restoration comedy

The audience drifts back to the seating in front of the terrace-stage, with much fragmented and inconsequential chatter, many of them repeating an irritatingly catchy line from the first half:

‘O sister swallow, O sister swallow,
How can thy heart be full of the spring?’

Out onto the stage steps Mabel Hodges, one of the family nannies, in costume with make-up and starts to recite more poetry about Reason but, in the classic style, the audience doesn’t catch many of her words. Behind her a troupe of villages pass to and fro among the trees chanting something which also cannot be heard, for ‘the wind blew their words away’, which itself becomes a catchphrase, repeated three times, even though Miss la Trobe furiously yells at them to chat the words louder.

Then the wind rose, and in the rustle of the leaves even the great words became inaudible; and the audience sat staring at the villagers, whose mouths opened, but no sound came.

Second play within a play: a restoration comedy

If the play within a play in the first half was from the Elizabethan era, this one is from the age of reason, and so is a Restoration comedy. It is a very bad pastiche. The point of Restoration comedy is the rapier wit, the cut and thrust of dialogue. Woolf is useless at this, as she showed in Orlando. The characters keep drifting off into Woolfian reverie, dreaming, free association. Also Restoration comedy is funny. Woolf is rarely funny.

It’s actually quite long this pastiche play, consisting of four scenes, between which we see some members of the audience clapping, shouting ‘hear hear’, commenting on the action, or Mrs Elmhurst reading out the plot summary in the programme to her deaf husband.

It’s a pastiche of a Restoration comedy in which Lady Harraden, the aunt of a pretty young virgin, Flavinda, conspires with an old gent, Sir Spaniel Lilyliver, for him to marry the virgin so that she will inherit a fortune which the old couple can divide between them, when all the time young Flavinda is, of course, in love with handsome young Valentine.

Cast of the Restoration comedy

Lady Asphodilla Harraden, played by Mrs Otter from the End House
Deb, her maid: ?
Sir Spaniel Lilyliver: ?
Flavinda, played by Millie Loder, shop assistant at Messrs. Hunt and Dicksons, drapery emporium
Valentine: ?

In the characteristic Woolfian way which I’ve been emphasising, one of the four scenes is missing, was never written, and the programme gives a short prose summary of it (it’s the key scene in the plot). As I’m said quite a few times, Woolf is all about incompletion and absence.

Second interval

Mrs Swithin breaks convention by going into the bushes where Miss La Trobe is supervising the actors getting dress, to congratulate her, for activating invisible strings, for waking the sense of history in her. Miss La Trobe hastily dresses Mrs Rogers and Hammond in Victorian clothes.

The pageant part 3. Victorian age

Mr Budge the publican steps on stage in the costume of a Victorian policeman directing the traffic. In his speech Woolf mocks the Victorian age, its racist assumption of white superiority, the white man’s burden to rule the world etc. Then:

There was a pause. The voices of the pilgrims singing, as they wound in and out between the trees, could be heard; but the words were inaudible. The audience sat waiting.

Inaudibility. Fragments. Incompletion.

Third play within the play

The Picnic Party. About 1860. Scene: A Lake.

Quite a few actors in Victorian dress perform the creation of a large picnic party. There’s a young couple, Edgar and Eleanor, who very earnestly discuss getting married and going out to Africa to convert the heathen. There’s a chorus of young men and a chorus of young women. It’s as big as an opera! Ladies sing a song. Mr Hardcastle leads Victorian prayers.

The picnic party pack up and leave, as Budge-as-constable returns and stands on his dais, painting a picture of the hard-working Victorian bourgeois returning to the bosom of his family, while the gramophone, offstage, plays Home Sweet Home.

Third interval

Mrs Swithin, Mrs Manresa, William, Isa and Giles witter on.

The pageant part 4. The present day

The program tells the audience that the last part of the pageant represents ‘the present day’. Obviously the use of that phrase, ‘the present day’, recalls the end of her previous novel, The Waves, the long final section of which was titled ‘Present Day’. It brings out the way the structure of all her mature novels reuse a handful of the same themes, settings or ideas.

Tick tick

I haven’t mentioned yet that during the interludes and a bit during the performances, the audience can hear the sound of the gramophone turning but not playing anything and that this sound is a ‘tick tick tick’. Obviously this is the sound of time, and the more the phrase is repeated, the more ominous and oppressive it becomes…

Only the tick of the gramophone needle was heard. The tick, tick, tick seemed to hold them together, tranced… Tick, tick, tick the machine continued…

Tick, tick, tick, the machine continued. Time was passing. The audience was wandering, dispersing. Only the tick tick of the gramophone held them together…

Tick, tick, tick, went the machine in the bushes… Tick tick tick the machine reiterated.

What is time? Why are we trapped in time? How is it that we vividly remember events from our childhood but can’t remember what we did this morning? Can we ever recapture lost time? Time is a trap.

They were all caught and caged; prisoners; watching a spectacle. Nothing happened. The tick of the machine was maddening. (p.158)

The audience becomes restive, grumbling among themselves. Cut away to Miss La Trobe and it is a deliberate strategy: nothing happens for ten minutes so the audience can experience the present moment.

After ten minutes of this, something happens. The cast come onstage holding a variety of mirrors, large and small and silver surfaces, moving around to reflect an image of the audience back at themselves, but in shimmering fragments. Hmm. Could Virginia be saying something about art? Or the novelist’s art?

Then a scene is quickly concocted, a backdrop showing a ruined wall, and some workers in front rebuilding it. It symbolises our civilisation (ruined by the Great War?) and the endless labour needed to maintain it.

Suddenly an unseen voice sets off on a long surreal and bracing accusation of the audience declaimed through a megaphone, which reminded me of W.H. Auden’s many minatory verses from the 1930s.

Let’s break the rhythm and forget the rhyme. And calmly consider ourselves. Ourselves. Some bony. Some fat. Liars most of us. Thieves too. The poor are as bad as the rich are. Perhaps worse. Don’t hide among rags. Or let our cloth protect us. Or for the matter of that book learning; or skilful practice on pianos; or laying on of paint. Or presume there’s innocency in childhood.

Then the vicar, the Reverend G. W. Streatfield, appears and delivers a speech. Characteristically, his first words are inaudible. Life, Woolf insists, is a thing of fragments and incompletion.

He says he is speaking simply as a member of the audience, as puzzled as everyone else, but he thinks one of the pageant’s meanings was that we are all one, that one person plays many parts, that there is a spirit which pervades all things. His speech is interrupted mid-word by the roaring of a flight of airplanes flying overhead, the machine, the modern world intruding into this idyll. Interruptions and fragments.

Moving on, the Reverend congratulates everyone because the pageant has raised thirty-six pounds ten shillings and eightpence towards the fund for installing electric light in the church. But a hundred and seventy-five pounds is still required so he asks everyone to give to the collection tins which come round.

Lastly he goes to offer a vote of thanks to the impresario of the afternoon’s entertainment but Miss La Trobe is nowhere to be seen. This is very like the climax of Delia’s party in The Waves, which Nicholas repeatedly tries to make a speech to provide a climax to the evening but is repeatedly interrupted and shouted down and eventually gives up. Fragments and frustration.

Similitudes

And it’s not the only repetition or echo of earlier works. Some of the characters are so similar to ones in this novel’s predecessor, The Years, as to be virtually identical.

Old Lucy Swithin, in her good-natured vagueness, is very like good-natured, vague Eleanor Pargiter.

Isa’s sharp observations remind me of critical young North. But her habit of misquoting long streams of poetry, or making up long streams of verse in more or less every situation she finds herself in, reminded me very much of the eccentric Sara or Sally, who does exactly the same in The Years.

In the event his puzzlement is ended when someone puts the National Anthem on the gramophone and everyone stands and sings along. Then that’s it. The actors are still onstage chatting to each other and the audience, a bit puzzled, start to disperse. The gramophone plays a song, first heard earlier, with the refrain ‘Dispersed are we’, and the audience disperse with four pages of what Woolf enjoys, scraps and fragments of random conversation.

Coda

The audience packs up, gets into their cars, and leaves, leaving the family as in the first quarter: old Bart, Lucy / Mrs Swithin, Mrs Manresa and William, Giles and Isa.

Lucy asks whether they oughtn’t to go and thank Miss La Trobe. Bart gruffly says she doesn’t need thanks, she’ll go to the pub with the actors and stumps off with his dog. Thank God the bloody thing’s over for another year. Lucy stays to watch the fish in the big pool and reflect on God and the unity of all things.

William Dodge casts a shadow on the fish pool as he finds Lucy and thanks her and shakes her hand.

Isa listens to the bells in the nearby church, the one the pageant has raised money to illuminate. When they stop she knows the service is starting. So presumably it’s a Sunday. She notices William Dodge making for the car park and hastening thither, discovers her husband talking up close to Mrs Manresa. She has entranced him. But at that moment (gay) William arrives, Mrs Manresa flirtatiously tells him to jump in and the car roars off.

Miss La Trobe

She avoided everyone, refused to go forward to take the vicar’s thanks, waited until everyone left, and then packed up the gramophone and records. She is an emblem of the artist, of Woolf herself and the creative agony. if only she had had more time, more money, more resources, she might have said the thing she wanted to but instead… hurry, imperfection, incompletion. She is haunted by her failure.

For what it’s worth we learn that she shares her bed with an actress and is shunned by the village women.

She was an outcast. Nature had somehow set her apart from her kind.

So I think that pretty much confirms she is a lesbian, as William Dodge is gay. Interesting that Woolf made these queer identities not exactly prominent but just notable, in her last novel.

She goes to the local pub where the talk stops when she enters because they’d been talking about her, using her nickname ‘Bossy’. She doesn’t care and doesn’t hear, orders a drink and the whole world fades out as the nurses a vision, two figures onstage by a rock at midnight, and the shape of her next project starts to come to her. She is moving onto the next work. Which we imagine is how Woolf felt as each new project began to take shape in her (troubled) mind.

The Oliver family

Everyone has gone leaving the Oliver family to have dinner (prepared, served and cleared away by the unknown servants). Bartholomew, Lucy, Giles and Isa. They discuss the play and its meaning without any great ideas, for example Bartholomew simply thinks it was too ambitious. Isa regards her husband, dressed in formal evening wear and reflects that she loves and hates him. The second post of the day is handed into the drawing room by the butler Candish. The reader is a little awed at how flat and boring their lives are.

Darkness falls deeper and deeper. The flowers close up. The windows are closed. Lucy draws her shawl tighter as she resumes reading H.G. Wells’s Outline of History (a book which also crops up in D.H. Lawrence’s novella, St Mawr).

The end

The ending may be the best thing about it. All day long there had been barely suppressed tension between Giles and Isa. Old Bart and Lucy go to bed leaving them alone and they both know a fight is coming, but after the fight what we nowadays call ‘make-up sex’. The last three paragraphs are really powerful.

The old people had gone up to bed. Giles crumpled the newspaper and turned out the light. Left alone together for the first time that day, they were silent. Alone, enmity was bared; also love. Before they slept, they must fight; after they had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born. But first they must fight, as the dog fox fights with the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in the fields of night.

Isa let her sewing drop. The great hooded chairs had become enormous. And Giles too. And Isa too against the window. The window was all sky without colour. The house had lost its shelter. It was night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among rocks.

Then the curtain rose. They spoke.

‘As the dog fox fights with the vixen’ sounds like D.H. Lawrence, and for the only time in the seven Woolf novels I’ve read, you get a real sense of the human depths, not polite and glossed over with dreams and memories and vivid impressions, but hard and dark and brutal. Wow.

Last thought

On the subject of thematic repetitions and echoes (or the very limited plot elements that Woolf chose to work with), Mrs Dalloway follows the lives of half a dozen characters during one day in London, whereas Between The Acts follows the lives of half a dozen characters during one day in the heart of the countryside. Town and country.

Make of this what you will but my interpretation is that High Modernism was an urban phenomenon which describes the fragmentation of experience and mentality in the modern (1920s) city: The Waste Land, Ulysses, Berlin Alexanderplatz, these are all intensely urban works.

But 20 years later, at the end of the 1930s, the modernist wave had retreated and there was a revival of interest in life in the country: T.S. Eliot transitioned from the intense alienation of The Waste Land (1922) to the powerfully rural descriptions of Burnt Norton (1936), and Virginia Woolf transitioned from the intensely London setting of Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the intensely rural setting of Between The Acts (1941) i.e. these two great modernists travelled in the same direction.

But it was also part of a broader cultural shift. In art the movement is called Neo-romanticism which turned against the city and revived interest in depicting an idealised, stylised (sometimes nightmarish) English countryside. In her own understated way, I think Woolf’s novel was part of that general cultural shift as the bitter end of the 1930s turned into the catastrophe of the 1940s.

Cast

Posh people

Mr Rupert Haines, the old gentleman farmer, his face ravaged by time and work

Mrs Haines, the wife of the gentleman farmer

Isabella, generally called Isa, the wife of their son – she is a dreamer, a quoter of poetry, haunting the library wondering which book to read

Mr Bartholomew Oliver, of the Indian Service, retired, who owns Pointz Hall, ‘A very tall old man, with gleaming eyes, wrinkled cheeks, and a head with no hair on it.’ Referred to by servants as The Master, or when no-one’s around, ‘Bartie’.

Mr Giles Oliver, a stockbroker, Old Bartholomew’s son, Isa’s husband. They met salmon fishing in Scotland.

Mrs Giles Oliver, daughter of Sir Richard ?, wife of old Oliver’s son, herself the mother of toddler George.

Old Mrs Cindy Swithin, sister of old Mr Oliver, Cindy is a nickname for Lucy. She married a squire, now dead, and two children, one in Canada, the other, married, in Birmingham. The staff call her ‘old mother Swithin’. The young people of the village call her ‘Old Flimsy’.

Sunny the cat, nickname of Sung-Yen.

Mrs Manresa, married to Ralph Manresa, a Jew who works in City finance.

Miss La Trobe, organiser of the pageant.

Servants and suppliers

Bates the dentist (up in London)

Mitchell the fishmonger and Mitchell’s boy who delivers orders on a motorbike.

Candish, the butler, fond of ‘gambling and drinking’.

Mrs Sands the Olivers’ cook, known to friends as Trixie, ‘the thin, acid woman, red-haired, sharp and clean, who never dashed off masterpieces, it was true; but then never dropped hairpins in the soup’ as her predecessor, Jessie Pook, had done.

Jane the kitchenmaid

Unnamed ‘girls’, maids and kitchen staff e.g. ‘the scullery maid’, dismissed as silly and superstitious, believers in ghosts etc.

Gardeners.

Billy, Mrs. Sands’s nephew, apprenticed to the butcher.

Bond the cowman

The future shadowed their present, like the sun coming through the many-veined transparent vine leaf; a criss-cross of lines making no pattern.

Credit

‘Between the Acts’ by Virginia Woolf was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1941. Page references are to the 1992 Oxford World Classics paperback edition, although the text is easily available online.

Related reviews

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1940s reviews

2 Comments

by Simon on April 11, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Novel

Tagged 1939, 1941, Afghan hound, Albert, art, Bartie, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Between The Acts, Billy, Candish, Canterbury Tales, Chaucer, Cobbs Corner, David, Deb, DH Lawrence's novella, Eleanor Pargiter, Elizabethan Age, England, English history, English literature, Etty Springett, fiction, Flavinda, free association, gay, George Oliver, Giles, Giles Oliver, Great War, Haslip Manor, HG Wells, homosexuality, Iris, Isa, Isabella, Isabella Oliver, Jessica, Jessie Pook, Jim, Lady Asphodilla Harraden, Lady Harraden, Lady Haslip, lesbian, lesbianism, Literature, Lucy, Mabel Hopkins, madness, Major Mayhew, mental illness, Messrs. Hunt and Dicksons, Millie Loder, Miss La Trobe, Mitchell, Mitchell's boy, Mr Budge, Mr Hardcastle, Mr Oliver, Mr Page, Mr Pinsent, Mr Streatfield, Mrs Dalloway, Mrs Lynn-Jones, Mrs Manresa, Mrs Mayhew, Mrs Moore, Mrs Neale, Mrs Otter, Mrs Parker, Mrs Ramsay, Mrs Rogers, Mrs Sands, Mrs Swithin, National Anthem, Neo-Romanticism, novel, Old Bart, old Cobbet, Old Flimsy, Orlando, Outline of History, poetry, Pointz Hall, Queen Elizabeth I, queer, Ralph Manresa, Restoration comedy, River Ouse, Rupert Haines, Sindy, Sir Spaniel Lilyliver, St Mawr, Sung-Yen, Sunny, the Cantos, the End House, the Hogarth Press, the Reverend GW Streatfield, The Times, The Waste Land, The Years, Valentine, Victorian age, village pageant, Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, William Dodge, World War Two

Posted by Simon on April 11, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/04/11/between-the-acts-virginia-woolf/

Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael @ the Royal Academy

This is a tidy little exhibition bringing together works by the three giants of the High Renaissance, Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael. First I’ll explain the layout and contents of the exhibition, then explain why I didn’t like it very much.

The exhibition is hosted in the Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries, round the back of the Royal Academy (RA) building, on the first floor – the same space which until recently was hosting the surprisingly enjoyable exhibition of Ukrainian Modernism (which I much preferred).

Exhibition premise

The basic idea is that at the turn of the 16th century, the three titans of the Italian Renaissance – Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael – briefly crossed paths, competing for the attention of the most powerful patrons in Republican Florence.

To be more precise, on 25 January 1504 Florence’s most prominent artists gathered to advise on an appropriate location for Michelangelo’s nearly finished statue of David. Among them was Leonardo da Vinci (1452 to 1519) and Michelangelo di Buonarroti himself (1475 to 1564). Both had only recently returned to their native city of Florence. A little later that year there is some evidence that their younger contemporary, Raphael da Urbino (1483 to 1520) turned up in the city.

So by picking this date, the curators are able to cobble together a display of 40 or so paintings, pictures, sketches and drawings, books and notebooks made around the same time, in order to compare the work of the three Renaissance Big Cheeses at more or less the same moment in time (give or take a few years).

Room 1. The Taddei Tondo

The exhibition opens with Michelangelo’s only marble sculpture in the UK, his celebrated ‘Taddei Tondo’ from 1504 to 1505, which is owned by the RA. A tondo is a round painting or relief. By the end of the fifteenth century they had become extremely popular and were a common feature of many Florentine palazzos.

The ‘Taddei Tondo’ is one of the most important examples of its type. Michelangelo worked on around the time he was finished the David i.e. 1504 to 1505 and it is accompanied here by some of its related preparatory drawings. It was, characteristically, left unfinished, with the smooth bodies emerging from rough-hewn, pockmarked marble.

The Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John (The ‘Taddei Tondo’) by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1504 to 1505) Royal Academy of Arts. Photo by Prudence Cuming Associates

The Raphael connection comes in when the curators claim that the relief made a big impact on Raphael, as can be seen in his Bridgewater Madonna (1507 to 1508) and the Esterházy Madonna (around 1508; see below), both of which are displayed nearby. The room also contains a tondo painting by Piero di Cosimo, The Virgin and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist, completed a few years before Michelangelo’s, by 1500.

Room 2. The Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John the Baptist

The central gallery is devoted to Leonardo’s ‘Burlington House Cartoon’, made around 1506 to 1508. This is a silly name for one of the most sublime images in Western art, which is more accurately titled ‘The Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John the Baptist’. It is deservedly given a room to itself, darkened and with a bench in front so you can sit and gaze in awe.

The Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John the Baptist (‘The Burlington House Cartoon’) by Leonardo da Vinci (1506 to 1508) The National Gallery, London

The only slight drawback to this setup is that you have been able to see the exact same picture any time for the last 60 years hanging at the National Gallery, half a mile down the road where it will doubtless be returned when this show closes in February next year.

All exhibitions have, to some extent, to justify themselves, to propose a particular theme, idea or interpretation. For this exhibition the curators claim to be putting forward an entirely new interpretation of this world-famous image, thus:

The purpose of the cartoon has puzzled scholars for generations. We propose here, for the first time, that Leonardo made it around 1506 to 1508 as a proposal for an altarpiece for the newly built Sala del Gran Consiglio in the Palazzo della Signoria, originally commissioned from Filippino Lippi (1457 to 1504). The altarpiece’s commission had not been reassigned following Filippino’s death in 1504. Having been summoned to Milan in 1506, Leonardo may have presented the ‘Burlington House Cartoon’ to the wondering gaze of the curious public upon his return to Florence in 1507. He eventually settled in Milan more permanently in 1508, after which the Signoria turned to Fra Bartolommeo (1472 to 1517). The latter began work on the panel but, following the return from exile of the Medici, formerly the most powerful family in Florence, never finished it; by 1513, he had completed only the monochrome underpainting.

Obviously none of us ordinary gallery goers has a clue whether is true or not but it’s symptomatic of the detailed academic minutiae which every scrap of Renaissance art is usually accompanied and stifled by.

Room 3. Battle murals

The two older Titans, Michelangelo and Leonardo, are most directly compared in the third and final room. In 1503 the Republican government of Florence had commissioned Leonardo to paint a monumental mural, ‘The Battle of Anghiari’ (fought between Florence and Milan in 1440), in the city’s newly constructed council hall, the Palazzo della Signoria (nowadays known as the Old Palace or Palazzo Vecchio).

In late August or early September 1504, around the time Michelangelo’s ‘David’ was being installed on the ringhiera in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, the Florentine authorities also asked Michelangelo to paint a battle scene, not just in the same building, but in the same room as the Leonardo one (the Salone dei Cinquecento), on the opposite wall. Michelangelo was to paint The Battle of Cascina (fought in July 1364 between troops of Florence and Pisa). Key fact: neither of the murals was ever finished.

An the end wall of this, the biggest of the three rooms, the curators have created a life-size outline of a central composition of the Michelangelo work, namely a group of soldiers who’d been swimming and bathing in a nearby river when the enemy forces attacked, and are now seen scrambling out of the river and donning their armour in a panic. Nearby there’s a painting by Bastiano da Sangallo which shows what Michaelangelo’s composition was aiming towards. Here’s the Sangallo:

The Battle of Cascina (‘The Bathers’) by Bastiano da Sangallo, after Michelangelo Buonarroti (1542) By kind permission of the Earl of Leicester and the Trustees of Holkham Estate

And here’s the curators’ wall-sized outline of it:

Diagram of The Battle of Cascina (‘The Bathers’) by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1504 to 1506) after the copy by Bastiano da Sangallo, reproduced to the wall-sized scale of the original cartoon (photo by the author)

Alas there doesn’t seem to be the same documentation for the Leonardo composition. If there had been, then a moment’s reflection suggests the curators missed a trick by not recreating the intended effect of the Salone dei Cinquecento and having white-lined schematic drawings of each of the compositions on facing walls, as the Florentine authorities intended.

What the room very much does have is more preparatory sketches and drawings by both masters, for their respective murals.

In fact this is very much the point or content of the exhibition: there may well be six or seven paintings (2 by Raphael, 1 by Piero di Cosimo, 1 by Bastiano da Sangallo), the massive marble Tondo and the huge Leonardo cartoon – but numerically, the majority of the exhibits are sketches and drawings. I counted 36 in total, 16 by Michelangelo, 11 by Leonardo and 9 by Raphael.

To put it another way, given that the Tondo is owned and displayed by the RA fairly often, given that the Leonardo cartoon is usually on display at the National Gallery anyway, then the really distinctive thing about this exhibition is the sketches and drawings many of which, was are told, were loaned by His Majesty The King from the Royal Collection.

They are all good, some of them are breath-taking, and yet… and yet… Well, I’ll explain below. Here’s an example from each of the tre formaggi:

Drawings

Raphael

According to the curators:

Raphael had come to Florence to learn. His copy of Michelangelo’s ‘David’ is remarkable not only for its unusual perspective – showing the sculpture from behind – but also its high degree of finish. To achieve a greater sense of natural proportion, Raphael slightly adjusted the size of David’s hands and feet, making them ever so slightly smaller than in Michelangelo’s sculpture.

‘David’ by Raphael, after Michelangelo Buonarroti (1505 to 1508) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Michelangelo

‘Male Nude’ by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1505 to 1506) Teylers Museum, Haarlem

Leonardo

According to the curators:

Leonardo made several drawings to develop the motif of the rearing horse of the captain of the Florentine forces, Piergiampaolo Orsini, seen on the right of the central scene of the ‘Battle of Anghiari’. While the horse’s pose echoes that of the horse seen on the left, Leonardo continued to experiment with the position of the horse’s head and legs.

‘A Rearing Horse’ by Leonardo da Vinci (1503 to 1505) © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024 / Royal Collection Trust

Why I don’t like the Italian Renaissance

1. Bleak and arid The backgrounds of classic Italian renaissance paintings are more often than not rocky and arid, stony, hot and bleak (see ‘The Battle of Cascina’ or Raphael’s ‘Virgin and Child’, below). All this contrasts with the tenderness and charm of medieval or Northern Renaissance art which abounds with flowers, bushes, trees, wheatfields and verdure of all kinds. Late medieval and northern art is softer, gentler and contains sweet and charming natural elements. To put it simply, there is grass in northern landscapes, there are daisies and recognisable flowers, bunny rabbits and deer.

2. Nature The Italian Renaissance saw a great flowering of interest in the human mind and body. Fair enough, but this focus on people tended to come at the expense of their natural backgrounds and landscape. In Italian Renaissance art the background is often a very standardised backdrop to the human figures, which is where the interest lies. By contrast, in the Northern Renaissance Man is integrated into the natural world. Medieval and Northern Renaissance art teems with details and decoration, overflows with life, which humans are a part of. For some reason Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow pops into my mind, where the dogs and the birds and the leafless bush in the foreground are just as important as the people. Italian Renaissance art radiates a sterile perfection.

3. Human Northern Renaissance art depicts people in all their human ugliness. Italian Renaissance art tends to deal in idealised human forms and faces. I know that Michelangelo and Leonardo did whole sketchbooks of gargoyles and grotesques (and some vivid human faces are on display here) but when it came to their finished paintings or sculptures they tended to depict ideals. The soldiers in ‘The Battle of Cascina’ (‘The Bathers’) aren’t individuals with individual quirkinesses, but depictions of types of emotion – fear, panic etc. Mary and Anne in Leonard’s huge cartoon have a seraphic, other-worldly beauty which is awe-inspiring and transcendental but not really human. The Virgin in the Raphael below is as empty and vapid as a portrait could possibly be. Compare and contrast, I don’t know, A Man and A Woman by the Early Netherlandish painter Robert Campin. The Campin is head and shoulders (pun intended) the more interesting work to look at.

4. Lols Which is why there is no humour in Italian Renaissance art. Everything is too perfect. Compare the humanity and humour in Breughel or Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling or Jan van Eyck.

5. Religiose Obviously medieval and northern Renaissance art is just as religious and as Catholic as Italian Renaissance art, but it manages to lend that belief a humanity. I find Italian Renaissance art too slick and perfect. You can see in it the beginning of hundreds of years and tens of thousands of religiose, sentimental Italian paintings, all fluttering angels and tearful saints.

6. Bambini and putti Nowhere is this more obvious than in the depictions of the pudgy baby Jesus. This exhibition includes a good example of the kind of thing I dislike, by that master of the vapid and empty, Raphael. The background is characteristically sterile. OK there are rows of trees but no flowers or signs of wildlife. It looks like a golf course with some purely decorative ruins thrown in for decorative effect. Mary’s face is a perfectly expressionless blank. And the baby Jesus is just one of the thousands and thousands of podgy infants which would, over the following centuries, come to infest so many Italian religious paintings and make them so intolerable.

‘The Virgin and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist’ (‘The Esterhazy Madonna’) by Raphael (1508) Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

7. Snobbery For centuries a show-off knowledge of Renaissance art has been associated with upper-middle class pretentiousness. I’ve just read ‘A Room With A View’ by E.M. Forster which skewers the desperate snobbishness of a group of ghastly English tourists in Florence, competing like ferrets in a sack to demonstrate the fineness of their responses to Italian art, to name drop obscure Tuscan chapels which contain little-known but oh so influential masterpieces by Piero dell Something. Back to this exhibition, there is a strong vibe of one-up-manship and connoisseurship. It reminds me of wine tasting. You are just expected to know that this or that vineyard and this or that vintage are the right one, the approved one, the only one a gentleman would consider. I felt oppressed by the social pressure to rejoice in these Masterpieces of the Great Ones, whether or not I actually like them. Looking round it felt like the Sunday Times Rich List of exhibitions.

8. Reputations This is partly because it’s almost impossible to approach these works innocently. The reputations of Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael overshadow them. You know these guys are really Big Players and so feel intimidated into having The Correct Response to Great Art, and feel a failure if you don’t have some life-changing experience. But it’s precisely this weight of expectation which prevents you from being taken by surprise, gripped and thrilled in the way the best art can.

9. Academic This isn’t helped by the very art history and scholarly tone of the commentary on the works. This comes over at points as pretty pedantic, dwelling on minute and academic aspects of the characters’ poses or the history of the tondo which feels like it’s missing the whole point of a work of art. Take the wall label about the Bridgewater Madonna. It tells us that:

Raphael copied the motif of the twisting Christ Child from Michelangelo’s ‘Taddei Tondo’
and used it as a model for his ‘Bridgewater Madonna’. While slightly changing the poses of both the Virgin and Child, creating a cautious tenderness between them as they are now looking at each other, he preserved the sense of movement so crucial to Michelangelo’s composition.

This is the purest form of academic art criticism, concerned with the minutiae of specific poses. I suppose this is enlightening for those who really care about minute differences between all these treatments of basically the same subject, but doesn’t really help you understand or enjoy the picture as a work of art.

I kept comparing this arid display with the astonishing Van Gogh exhibition currently on at the National Gallery down the road. You may or may not read the curator labels at the Van Gogh, but the paintings themselves grip you by the throat with the extraordinary exuberance of their artistry and technique, in a way which nothing here does.

Two conclusions

1. On its own terms, I didn’t find the show persuasive. The curators’ stated aim is to show us how Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael influenced each other. But somehow the two main displays – of the tondo and the battle murals – completely failed to do that. Was the influence on Raphael just to change the position of the Virgin’s arms? And I didn’t at all understand how the sketches by Michelangelo and Leonardo, despite being placed next to each other, demonstrated an actual influence, in either direction. They just looked like really good drawings done by two guys in two different styles.

Maybe it works better in the catalogue. The basic thesis of the show is very bookish and in a catalogue the curators can refer to numerous other works which they couldn’t get hold of for the physical exhibition.

To repeat myself, if the curators had selected a room with two big walls, and drawn life-sized diagrams of the two battle murals planned by Michelangelo and Leonardo on them, and then done a detailed comparison between them at all points – the different ways each artist chose their subject, set about the composition, depicted human faces and bodies and horses etc – I think I would have found that fascinating.

But, as I’ve mentioned, the Leonardo battle scene was conspicuous by its absence and I found all we did have – half a dozen Leonardo sketches for a composition I couldn’t see, mixed in with Michelangelo sketches for a composition which I could see – dissatisfying and even a bit confusing.

2. I dare say all the art on show here is, from an art scholarly point of view, top-of-the-range, Mayfair prices, Rich List masterpieces, but only the Leonardo cartoon and a handful of the drawings really cut through to me as works of art. Otherwise, objects like the paintings which are only included because Raphael had very subtly altered the angle of the arm of the Virgin compared to the Michelangelo original, or a tiny notebook in which Leonardo appears to have drawn a miniature copy of Michelangelo’s bathers, or a random tondo painting included simply to illuminate the influence of Michelangelo’s tondo sculpture – I can see how these would enthrall the scholars and, maybe, the really knowledgeable visitor – but I’m afraid it all left me cold.

Related reviews

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2 Comments

by Simon on November 23, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Art, drawing, Exhibition, Painting

Posted by Simon on November 23, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/11/23/michelangelo-leonardo-raphael-the-royal-academy/

Freud on religion

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motivation of human behaviour and thought, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian, bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

‘God is at bottom nothing but a projection of the father.’

The influence of Darwin

In his later writings, in the 1870s, Charles Darwin hinted at the implications of his theory of evolution by natural selection for human psychology. In the 1890s Sigmund Freud, like many other scientists and psychologists of his generation, picked up on these hints by developing a theory of human nature which aimed to be entirely materialistic, secular and biological.

But in Freud’s writings this project became closely linked to his lifelong, systematic and remorseless attack on religion, specifically Roman Catholic Christianity – leading to a lifelong obsession with rewriting Christianity’s history, concepts and present-day appeal in purely secular, materialist, psychological terms.

Freud takes Darwin’s insights into the natural world (i.e. that all life evolved from less organised to more organised forms via countless trillions of variations, with no divine intervention or plan) and applies them to the life of the mind. He aimed to show that the mind, as much a part of the natural world as our legs or eyes, also evolved by a process of natural selection, by trial and error, from below, rather than being divinely created from above.

Freud’s theory of the mind

Building on this foundation Freud went on to claim, and try to prove, that the mind is a complex overlay of different strategies, instincts and forces which are frequently in conflict with each other. It is the conflicts between different instincts in the mind which account for much of our unhappiness, our sense of being at odds with ourselves or with the world.

Freud divides the mind into different compartments or functions which engage in the struggle for survival among themselves: predominantly this is a battle between the unconscious, instinctive part of the mind, the ‘id’, and the rational, strategic, forward-looking ‘ego’.

Freud developed a technique, the so-called talking cure, whereby patients were helped to express these unconscious conflicts in order to become fully conscious of them and so cope with them better. The technique and the theory together came to be called psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis has been used differently in the hands of different practitioners, but with Freud it went hand-in-hand with Darwin’s idea that religion, ethics and so on are to be dealt with naturalistically, as products of the developing human species, rather than as supernatural gifts from God.

The roots of Freud’s anti-religion

Freud’s lifelong animus against religious belief was:

partly a product of the antisemitism he encountered from childhood onwards in the Austrian capital, Vienna
partly due to the fierce anti-clericalism of the German, rationalist, materialist tradition which he imbibed at school and while studying science at university

Both these sources were further confirmed by the hypocritical and hysterical attacks made on him by churchmen of all denominations as he published the results of his new discoveries of the mind throughout the early 1900s. As with Darwin, the stupidity and ignorance of the Christian attacks on him confirmed Freud in his low opinion of Christian authorities and ‘thinkers’.

Freud’s critique of religion

Freud critiques religion in a number of ways, approaching the issue from various angles, which this blog post will describe in the following order:

by providing an alternative, purely secular psychological account of religious experience
by demonstrating that religious feeling is at bottom wish-fulfilment, to which we are all susceptible
by drawing an analogy between religious rituals and neurotic obsessions
by analysing specific religious phenomena in secular terms
by rewriting religious history (of Judaism in particular) in purely psychological terms
by showing how harmful religious belief is in modern life, both to the individual and to society as a whole

1. The psychoanalysis of religious experience

Religion, Freud claims, is the fulfilment of mankind’s oldest, deepest wishes, namely:

to have a coherent explanation of why we’re here
to have our path through the world watched over by a benevolent Providence
to have clear-cut guidelines as to how to behave and the promise of reward if we behave well
to live forever
to be loved unconditionally

Religion answers all of these wishes by creating an all-powerful God:

who made the world
who watches over and protects all of us so that not even the falling of a sparrow goes unnoticed
who created us free to choose, and planted a knowledge of morality in us and a little watchdog in our brains – our ‘conscience’
who will reward us for obeying its promptings with eternal life

But for Freud individual religious belief is an illusion because none of the above is true. Very obviously all the qualities attributed to ‘God’ are based on the child’s view of their all-powerful father, or are designed to address the anxieties and uncertainties we all face as adults.

As for society as a whole, society-wide religious belief is a type of mass delusion and, at its most extreme, actually takes the form of mass delusions, from the group weddings of the Moonies to the religious hysteria of entire nations e.g. the Iranians in the aftermath of their revolution, or periodic outbreaks of ‘end-of-the-world’ hysterias.

You don’t have to delve far back into European history to uncover evidence of mass, society-wide outbreaks of madness, many of them centred around hysterical religious fervour, not least the 130 years of social turmoil and civil war which came to be called the Wars of Religion (roughly 1520 to 1648).

In addition to the, as it were, ‘rational’ or sympathetic wishes listed above (the wish to be looked after, protected, comforted etc), religion offers a range of other satisfactions:

by teaching you to turn away from relying on the outside world and concentrate on ‘spiritual affairs’, religion helps in the avoidance of the pain inevitably caused by the outside world; for example, the inevitable ageing and death of ourselves and those we love
religion helps you sublimate your basic instincts into socially acceptable routes; for example, a powerful sexual drive can become sublimated into a love of all humanity, or into exhausting works of ‘charity’; aggression can be practiced as long as it’s against acceptable objects, like ‘heretics’, ‘the infidel’, Jews etc
religion helps you feel part of a gang, of a large organisation which you can devote yourself to, and so helps you to forget your personal difficulties, or submerge them into working for a higher cause
religion offers the pleasure of feeling superior to outsiders – ‘I’m saved. You’re damned’ – which has been such a feature in Christian theology

2. Religion as wish-fulfilment

When we turn our attention to the psychical origin of religious ideas we see that they are not the precipitates of experience or the end-results of thinking; they are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes. The infant’s terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood arouses the need for the protection provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life makes it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one.

Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fears of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfilment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilisation; and the prolongation of a earthly life in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulfilments shall take place… It is an enormous relief to the individual psyche if the conflicts of its childhood arising from the father complex – conflicts which it has never wholly overcome – are removed from it and brought to a solution which is universally accepted.

When I say these things are illusions I must define the meaning of the word. An illusion is not the same as an error; nor is it necessarily an error. Aristotle’s belief that vermin arose out of dung was an error. On the other hand it was an illusion of Christopher Columbus’s that he had discovered a new sea route to the Indies. The part played by Columbus’s wish in the illusion is obvious. He wanted to discover a new route to the Indies. And so on the slightest evidence he thought he had.

Thus what is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. Illusions need not necessarily be false – that is to say, unrealisable, or in contradiction with reality. For example, a middle class girl may have the illusion that a prince will come and marry her. This is possible and a few such cases have occurred. But that the Messiah will come and institute a golden age is much less likely, that is, it includes a larger proportion of pure wish-fulfilment… And so we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation.

(The Future of an Illusion, section 6, Pelican Freud volume 12: pages 212 to 213)

Thus, at the heart of religious belief – or religious illusion – there is a real truth, the truth of our infantile, helpless dependence on our parents and our experience of the unconditional love they showed us. And religious belief arises from a long-suppressed wish to return to such a state of unconditional belovedness.

Submission to an organised religious creed, with its offers of punishment as well as reward, amounts to a compromise between a) the Pleasure Principle’s bottomless need for love and b) the Reality Principle, the rational ego’s knowledge that endless love is difficult if not impossible to attain in this hazardous world. Between optimism and pessimism.

This explains why religious ‘conversion’ is commonly experienced as a breakthrough into a realm of radical happiness, happiness such as we thought we could never have again because it is the re-experiencing of childhood simplicities.

Freud’s theory says that the sense of ‘victory over death’ described by converts is a purely internal, psychological victory of the love-wanting, wishful part of our mind over the mature, realistic, pessimistic part. It is thus a ‘real’ experience, just that it has no reference to events outside our minds.

Christians’ mistake is the elementary one of thinking that this breakthrough inside their own heads is reflective of an objective reality; is fed by, or part of, a great cosmic struggle between good and evil. It is the same mistake made by drug-users, drunks and psychotics of projecting their inner experience onto the universe.

Thus, on Freud’s theory, the success and endurance of religion is its ability to fit the individual’s powerful libidinal wishes into an acceptable, nay, an eminently respectable social structure, the form and hierarchies of the church. In the church the most personal and private, semi-conscious, infantile fantasy-wishes are united with eminently grown-up, sophisticated, objective realities. Are approved.

Where else outside the Church could ordinary, boring, middle-aged men dress up in purple skirts, be adored and worshipped by pretty young boys, move solemnly through an atmosphere rich in incense and gold, and play-act that they have infinite power of judgement, of the forgiveness of sins?

Where else could their rather mediocre opinions and ideas about life be listened to, soaked up and debated with fervour by a large, devout congregation? The power of that experience must be intoxicating. And, since all enjoyment is suspect in Christianity, the very thrill of power and control itself might make the subject think he is being tempted by to the Devil’s sin of Pride. Which explains, in Freud’s view, why so many Christians go around and around in a self-confirming cycle of hyper-self-awareness, doubt, spiritual agonies, religious breakthrough etc etc, all the time convincing themselves that they are not boring, insignificant cyphers who will grow old, grow ill and die – but are at the centre of a great cosmic battle between good and evil.

How boring non-believers’ mundane lives seem in comparison. How lost and unfocused they seem.

3. Religious rituals as forms of neurotic obsession

Freud was the first to draw attention to the similarity in psychological structure between the religious believer’s performance of religious rituals and the array of bizarre obsessions displayed by some mental patients:

It is easy to see where the resemblance lies between neurotic ceremonials and the sacred acts of religious ritual; in the qualms of conscience brought on by their neglect, in their complete isolation from all other actions, and in the conscientiousness with which they are carried out in every detail.

(Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices, 1907)

On the face of it, though, obsessive compulsions – like not walking in cracks in the pavement in case the Devil snatches at your feet, or closing all the doors in a house in a certain fixed order – are meaningless, whereas religious ritual is charged with the highest meaning.

No. This has been psychoanalysis’s greatest achievement: revealing that even the silliest behaviour, the kind of deviant behaviour that in previous ages resulted in witches being burned and lunatics locked up in Bedlam or dismissed as ‘hysterics’, is in fact supercharged with meaning for the subject.

This meaning may be either historical (the compulsive repeating of a real trauma) or symbolical (i.e. a disguised defence mechanism against a perceived threat, where the threat – for example, of a long-dead father’s punishment – no longer exists in the outside world, but is still a terrifying reality in the patient’s mind).

A good deal of Freud’s work consisted in listing compulsive behaviours which seem weird in isolation and showing their origin and root in real unhappiness experienced in a patient’s life. And Freud’s distinctive contribution was to show that often this unhappiness was caused by the repression of an instinctual need.

At the bottom of every obsessional neurosis is the repression of an instinctual impulse which was present in the subject’s constitution and which was allowed to find expression for a while during his childhood but later succumbed to repression. In the course of the repression of this instinct a special conscientiousness is created which is directed against the instinct’s aims; but this psychical reaction-formation feels insecure and constantly threatened by the instinct which is lurking in the unconscious.

Analysis of obsessive actions shows us that the sufferer from compulsions and prohibitions behaves as if he were dominated by a sense of guilt. This sense of guilt has its source in certain early mental events but is constantly being revived by renewed temptation…. This sense of guilt of obsessional neurotics finds its counterpart in the protestations of pious people that they are miserable sinners and the pious observations (such as prayers, etc) with which pious people preface every daily act.

As the mental protection slips, crumbles, the subject – threatened with a return of the repressed and forbidden instinctual wish, and warned of the return by symptoms of anxiety or hysteria – erects ever more frantic mental barriers against its inadmissible return into consciousness, actions which will ward off the unacceptable truth by, as it were, magic.

The same psychic mechanism thus underlies superstitious belief (not walking under ladders), obsessive behaviour (washing of hands, not walking on cracks in the pavement), the games of children with arbitrary but crucial rules (hopscotch), the propitiatory behaviour of primitive peoples towards their gods (for fear that omission of one aspect invalidates the entire ritual and thus will call down the anger of the gods), and the propitiatory behaviour of Christians towards their God (saying three Hail Marys, crossing yourself as you pass in front of the altar in a Church etc).

The formation of a religion, too, seems to be based on the suppression, the renunciation, of certain instinctual impulses. These impulses, however, are not, as in the neuroses, exclusively components of the sexual instinct; they are self-seeking, socially harmful instincts, though, even so, they are usually not without a sexual component.

A sense of guilt following upon continual temptation and an expectant anxiety in the form of fear of divine punishment have, after all, been familiar to us in the field of religion longer than in that of neurosis.

For some reason the suppression of instinct proves to be an inadequate and interminable process in religious life also. Indeed, complete backslidings into sin are more common among pious people than among neurotics and these give rise to a new form of religious activity, namely acts of penance, which have their counterpart in obsessional neurosis.

4. Aspects of organised religion explained in psychoanalytical terms

Communion

A reversion to the primitive oral phase of childhood when we try to control the environment, to assimilate the outside world, by eating it: watch any two-year-old.

Conscience

‘Conscience’ is the superego, the absorption into your psyche of the instructions and demands of your parents from your earliest years, a function of the mind then expanded by later teachers and other authority figures. It hurts to disobey them but we do, and guilt is the result. Guilt is no proof of Man’s uniquely moral nature, as some Christians argue. It is the purely mechanical result of transgressing our early training. Think of dogs who disobey their masters, and then look sheepish.

Conversion

Being ‘born again’ is the result of returning, after a detour, to the sense of being loved by, and of loving, the God-like figures of our parents as they appeared to us in our childhood. Most ‘born-again’ Christians are in fact returning to the religion of their childhood which they had rejected at some stage. Two examples I know of are W.H. Auden and C.S. Lewis who were both brought up in Anglican households, underwent student and early manhood years of light-hearted atheism, and then returned to the religion of their boyhoods with an overwhelming sense of relief and illumination, which went on to underpin all their writings from the moment of their (re)conversions until they died.

God

God is a projection onto the universe of the demanding, caring, loving, all-powerful father as we experienced him in our earliest infancy, in the first couple of years of life.

The devil

The devil is an equal and opposite projection of the father in his bad, punishing aspect. In the Old Testament the two are mixed together in the figure of Yahweh, the demanding, violent jealous god. The achievement of Christianity was to extract and focus on the figure of the God of Love implicit in the Old Testament. Unfortunately, this psychological or theological development also had the effect of bringing into greater clarity the image of the anti-God, the figure of pure malice and evil, the Devil. This explains why there is little mention of the devil in the Old Testament but why he comes to play such a central role in the New Testament.

Immortality

Immortality is everyone’s deepest wish, for death does not exist in the unconscious mind. It is a creation of the conscious mind which we can never quite fully believe. Everyone else might die, but not me.

Morality

Morality is a system of approved behaviour worked out by society, instilled in a child by its parents, and reinforced by later authority figures. Some Christians use the alleged existence of a moral sense in human beings as proof that there is a moral God. But:

the so-called moral sense boils down to a person’s accumulated training in how to behave and not behave
it is, to put it mildly, extremely variable, in content and effectiveness, across individuals, societies, and cultures
it is entirely absent in some people, so God demonstrably did not implant the moral sense in some people – why not?

Guilt

Guilt is an internal psychological response to the act of disobedience to the rules and regulations which have been so strongly inculcated by your parents and other authority figures. It is a purely psychological reaction, a form of fear that punishment will be inflicted if we do something wrong. Inflicted by whom? By our parents, even if they’re dead, because their image and prolonged training live on in our minds, whether they are alive or dead, present or absent. It is the legacy of our earliest, deepest training, which is almost impossible to shake off.

Spiritual feelings

Spiritual feelings are reawakenings of the earliest narcissistic phase of childhood when the child hadn’t yet differentiated between its feelings and the reality of the outside world. These feelings, just like the earliest infantile feeling of fear or abandonment, can be revived in later life. This is the explanation of all forms of religious feelings of the sublime or ‘oneness with the universe’.

Original sin

Original sin combines two emotions:

1. The deeply held feeling all of us have of having been in some way expelled from a paradise of love and physical bliss. Freud says this was the experience of babyhood at the mother’s breast, the immensely powerful, pre-linguistic, pre-conscious experience of inhabiting a wonderland of union and fulfilment.

2. Along with obscure feelings of punishment at the hands of our parents.

Each of these can be experienced individually. What’s interesting is that some individuals, and even entire cultures, fail to combine the two into ‘original sin’ as Christians wish them to.

The two main sources of ‘original sin’ can be explained as the inevitable result of the natural processes of human growth and development, with no supernatural overtones whatever.

Prayer

Prayer is a relic of ‘magic’, a reversion to the child’s primitive belief in ‘the omnipotence of its thoughts’, the childish conviction that the universe revolves around us and can be altered by our wishes and commands. It can’t.

We are taught to pray to ‘our Father’ to make things right, look after us and our loved ones. What could be more transparent?

Superstition

Superstition amounts to relics of animism and primitive (i.e. childish-neurotic) beliefs which have been discarded by religion under the modernising influence of the rational Enlightenment (for example, burning witches, epileptics are possessed by devils, evil omens and unlucky days).

But these primitive psychological formations, anxieties and fears, still threaten to grip the ignorant, the simple, or the extremely repressed. or any of us when we’re in a stressful situation.

5. A psychoanalytical history of Judaism and Christianity

Central to Freud’s theory is the Oedipus Complex. Each of us is born into the world with the problem of how to grow beyond the boundaries of our parents’ care into autonomous individuals. To put it another way, how to overthrow the sometimes terrifying authority of our Father and build on the love and nurturing of our Mother.

In our unconscious minds, swarming with uncontrollable feelings, we act out countless inchoate scenarios of revenge and possession. How effectively we repress these earliest fantasies determines our later character.

Freud (who was, of course, himself Jewish, although a non-believing, atheist Jew) thought that Judaism is the religion of the Oedipus Complex par excellence.

He believed the Jews stood out in the ancient world due to their more advanced ethical code but that this was intimately connected with their greater fear and reverence of a demanding Father-God.

Freud thought that the Jews’ especial devoutness stemmed from an actual historical event when they actually played out an Oedipal scenario. He thought that the Israelites actually rose up and killed their obstinate leader, Moses, who tried to impose his version of monotheism onto the Jews’ primitive worship of the thunder god Yahweh – and were forever afterward guilty about this murder.

Slowly, over the following centuries, the primitive belief in Yahweh was spiritualised by the higher ethical and intellectual content of Moses’ monotheism. A belief grew among the spiritual elite that the Israelites were the chosen people because Moses, the prophet of the One God, had quite literally chosen them.

The Old Testament records a succession of prophets rising up to recall this stubborn, backsliding people (the Israelites) back to the high spiritual requirements of Moses’ idol-less, afterlife-less faith.

Sometime around the fifth century BC priests compiled the various stories handed down by tradition into a coherent and chronological account of:

the creation of the world
the era of the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob etc)
the era of the Kings (Solomon, David)
the era of the Prophets (Ezekial, Isaiah, Jeremiah)

Central to the entire religion are the ‘covenants’ or promises made between the Chosen People and God. Because the Israelites are constantly falling away from God’s detailed and demanding law, they are in continual need of forgiveness.

This process – adoption of pure monotheism and the sorting out of their holy writings – was substantially complete, and the Jewish religion formalised, by about the fifth century BC.

The Jews’ survival was due, paradoxically, to the fact that they were repeatedly conquered and hauled off into bondage, first to Egypt, then Babylon and finally, after the failed wars with Rome, in 70 and 135 AD, expelled from Palestine altogether.

These experiences left the Jews no land or capital or buildings, nothing but a written tradition requiring the highest ethical standards, which both produced a tremendous ethnic cohesion, confidence and success, but also triggered suspicion and resentment of them wherever they went.

Saul of Tarsus was a deeply religious Jew, a Pharisee, steeped in the Orthodox tradition. When he heard about the crucifixion of an obscure wandering preacher in Judea he set about persecuting his blasphemous followers.

But then Paul had a literally blinding insight which changed his life and the course of history. For a thousand years Judaism has been a guilty Father-religion, the purest form of the social memory of the struggle all human beings undergo to wriggle free of their parents’ domination.

Judaism was saturated in the sense of letting the Father down. According to Jewish scripture and tradition, again and again and again the Chosen People fell away from the laws and purity demanded by their God and Father, which resulted in a permanent sense of guilt and unworthiness.

It was Saint Paul who realised that the death of this man who called himself the Son of God had the potential to bring a millennium of crushing guilt to an end. From now on Christians could openly acknowledge the importance of Original Sin, an idea only vaguely formed in official Judaism, because they have been relieved of it. The execution of the Son relieves us of the guilty memory of being the Father-hating children we all were in childhood. In the ultimate sacrifice of the crucified Son, all true believers are freed from their primal guilt and so experience the wonderful psychological liberation of being ‘born again’, of starting a new, guilt-free, sin-free life.

In the decades after Jesus’ execution it quickly became clear that Christianity and Judaism were incompatible. The Jews doubled down on their religion of guilt while the Mediterranean world of the Roman Empire swiftly fell for the new religion of liberation, especially as it proved capable – unlike the racially and geographically restricted religion of the Jews – of claiming to be universal, of welcoming everyone, rich or poor, man or women, free or slave, of any ethnicity.

Christianity also had the advantage of being flexible. In its early inchoate form it had the ability to assimilate a lot of the fringe beliefs which were floating around the Mediterranean during the Roman Empire. For example, Christianity easily assimilated:

doctrines based on the oriental Mother goddess
the idea of a family of Gods (Father, Son and Holy Spirit, plus the Holy Mother)
the idea of a terrifyingly powerful Evil Spirit who came to be called Satan, derived, ultimately from Zoroastrianism
a sky full of angels
a complicated system of punishment and reward in a place called ‘hell’, only vaguely hinted at in Jewish scripture but worked out by Christians in terrifying detail

In this sense (in Freud’s view), although a step forward psychologically (insofar as it presents a solution to the perennial Oedipus problem), Christianity actually operates at a much lower intellectual level than the rigid monotheism of the Jews. It leads to much more florid and bizarre behaviour (as history, indeed, records: monks, stylites, self-castrators, martyrs, miracles).

The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. It is still more humiliating to discover how large a number of people living today, who cannot but see that this religion is not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions.

Christianity triumphed because of its ability to combine Jewish high ethical standards with pagan superstition, thus providing a comprehensive home for most people’s deepest fantasies and wishes – of salvation, of punishment, of eternal life.

The notion of an all-powerful all-seeing God who nonetheless allowed His Creation to be wrecked by evil, pain and suffering is a logical nonsense but who cares? It is a bold and imaginative attempt to explain and justify, in mythological terms, the fundamental psychological need of human beings to reconcile the childish experience of our all-powerful, all-seeing parents with the traumas of adult life – and then to project this fantastical narrative onto the (in reality, blank and uncaring) universe.

We need to be helped. We want to be protected. We want to be loved. If something’s gone wrong it must be our fault. ‘I’m sorry, Daddy, say you forgive me.’

So we try to reconcile this deep need for there to be an all-powerful, all-seeing father guiding the universe, with the evidence before our noses that the world is harsh and arbitrary, amoral and terrifyingly indifferent to our little lives.

The doctrine of Original Sin is a mythological way of reconciling these opposite desires. The fact that it makes no sense to those outside the cult is a matter of indifference to those inside the cult; for them it is vital because the deeper ‘Original Sin’ has plunged us into the depths of misery and guilt, then the more intense the feeling of liberation, of being ‘born again’ through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus, becomes. The longer the foreplay, the more intense the feeling of release.

So, in Freud’s view, the psychological mechanism at the heart of Christianity is extremely effective in channelling and resolving very real psychological feelings which we all experience, but it comes at a price: the price being that you accept a good deal of weird, often deeply irrational, beliefs, superstitions and legends.

But even this problem has long ago been worked through and resolved by Christianity’s many, very brilliant, apologists: ‘God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform,’ as the 18th century poet William Cowper wrote i.e. don’t think about any of this too hard or the illogicality and irrationality will undermine your faith. Just accept it.

Jesus himself said: ‘You must become as a little child to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’ (St Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 18, verse 3). Exactly. Just as Freud said, almost all of our problems, our anxieties, our achievements, our characters, stem from our earliest childhood experiences. One difference between Freud and Christianity is that the latter calls us to relinquish adult intelligence, and adopt a sentimentalised, simplified version of childhood, all submission and innocence. Whereas Freud knew what anyone who can remember their childhood knows, that those years are far from being paradise but often full of dread and anxiety, awash with uncontrollable emotions, and sometimes the scene of terrible experiences which we spend the rest of our lives trying to come to grips with.

6. Religion’s harmful effects

Christianity imposes impossible ethical requirements on people, which result in failure and a crippling sense of guilt (for example, the impossible requirement to ‘love your enemy as yourself’). Imposing these impossible commandments on young children warps their personalities and leads to neurotic illness in later life.

Christianity’s forbidding of open-ended debate, and limiting the spirit of scientific enquiry, damages the prospects of creating a better society.

Christianity suppresses perfectly natural sexuality in a way calculated to produce the maximum number of neurotics and perverts. By restricting sexual activity to heterosexual, adult, married, genital-focused copulation, exclusively for the purposes of procreation, Christian teaching drives people into illness or the arms of prostitutes, makes them choose between madness or immorality; or, more simply, makes them disobedient to their teachers and moral leaders and so habituates them to a life of lies and hypocrisy.

Relying on religion to underpin morality is dangerous because, since religious belief is visibly crumbling away (Freud wrote in the 1920s), so will the foundations of our social morality. Quite obviously, morality needs to be put on a firm, secure, secular basis in order to survive the coming social changes.

Conclusion

In his more optimistic moments Freud thought that organised religion would wither away in a new world shaped by reason and technology – but this turned out to be misplaced optimism.

Indeed, the whole tenor of his work undermines and disproves his own hope. The whole point of his work was to establish the existence of the vast, unconscious, irrational aspects of the mind – primitive, inexpressible urges whose attempts to enter the conscious mind can only be controlled at the expense of a variety of compulsions and obsessions, personal rituals and beliefs.

Precisely the penetrating nature of his critique of religion as an appeasement of so many of our deeply irrational instincts should have alerted Freud to the fact that religious belief will continue as long as human nature continues to be what it is, because – although irrational in form and content – religion does, often very effectively, alleviate many of the anxieties and fears which all human beings will always be prey to.

Therefore, it was childish of Freud to imagine that organised religion and religious belief would die out. They will quite clearly be around as long as there are anxious irrational humans i.e. forever. And in times of stress and uncertainty they will revive and flourish and there is nothing the hyper-rational psychoanalyst can do about it.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. All the works cited here were translated into English as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, published throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s. My quotes are taken from the versions included in the relevant volumes of the Pelican Freud Library, published in the 1980s.

Freud and religion reading list

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907)
Totem and Taboo (1913)
On Transience (1915)
A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis (1923)
The Future of An Illusion (1927)
Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930)
Group Psychology (1930)
Question of a Weltanschauung (1933)
Moses and Monotheism (1939)
Freud, A Life For Our Times by Peter Gay (1988)

More Freud reviews

More Freud reviews

A Closer Look: Colour by David Bomford and Ashok Roy (2009)

This is another superbly informative, crisply written and lavishly illustrated little book in The National Gallery’s A Closer Look series. To quote the blurb:

‘A Closer Look: Colour explores how painters apply colour, describes different types of pigments, and outlines optical theories and artists’ treatises. The authors explain the effect on colour of the artist’s chosen medium, such as oil, water or egg tempera, and the dramatic impact of new pigments.’

It ranges far and wide across the National Gallery’s vast collection of 2,300 art works, selecting 80 paintings which illustrate key aspects of colour, medium and design. The quality of the colour reproductions is really stunning – it’s worth having the book almost for these alone and for the brief but penetrating insights into a colour-related aspect of each one.

They include works by Seurat, Holbein the Younger, Corot, Duccio, David, Chardin, Ghirlandaio, Monet and Van Dyck in the first ten pages alone!

Aspects of colour

Colour quite obviously has been used by painters to depict the coloured world we see around us. But it has other functions, too. Maybe the two most obvious but easily overlooked are: to represent depth and create the optical illusion of three dimensions on a two dimensional surface; and to reinforce this by indicating sources of light.

Depth A common indication of depth is recreating the common observation that objects at a distance fade into a blue-ish haze. This is often seen in Renaissance paintings depicting increasingly hazy backdrops behind the various virgins and main figures. This is known as aerial perspective.

Light Sources of light need to be carefully calculated in a realistic painting. The book shows how the effect of light sources is achieved by showing glimmers of white paint on metallic objects or even on duller surfaces like wood. There is a particularly wondrous example in Lady Elizabeth Thimbelby and her Sister by Anthony Van Dyck. The authors give a close-up to show how the colour of the yellow dress worn by the main subject is reflected on the bare skin of of the little angel, and even in the catchlight in his right eye, an indication of the depth of thought which goes into his compositions.

Detail of Lady Elizabeth Thimbelby and her Sister by Anthony van Dyck (1637)

Shadows turn out to be an entire subject in themselves. For centuries painters improved their depiction of shadows, at first using grey colours for the shadows of buildings, but quickly realising that the most shadowed things around us are fabrics. Dresses, cloaks all the paraphernalia of costume from the Middle Ages to the turn of the 20th century, involved reams of material which folded in infinite ways, all of them a challenge to the painters’ skill. At the very least, painting a fabric requires not one but three colours: the core colour of the fabric itself, the fabric in shadow, the fabric in highlight, reflecting the light source.

The human eye is not a mechanical reproducer of the world around us. It has physiological quirks and limitations. The book evidences the way that, dazzled by orange sunsets, the human eye might well see evening shadows as violet. Quirks and oddities like this were known to various painters of the past but it was the Impressionists who, as a group, set out to try and capture not what the rational mind knew to be the colour, but the colours as actually perceived by the imperfect eye and misleadable mind.

Emotion In the later 19th century artists across Europe made the discovery that intensity of colour can be used to reflect intensity of emotion. Probably the most popular painter to do this was van Gogh whose intense colours were intended to convey his own personal anguish. This approach went on to become the central technique of the German Expressionist painters (although they aren’t represented in the book, along with all 20th century art, because the National Gallery’s cut-off point is 1900).

Symbolism In earlier centuries, more than its realistic function, colour had an important role in a painting’s symbolism i.e. certain colours are understood to have certain meanings or to be associated with certain people or qualities. The most obvious period is the Renaissance, when the Virgin Mary’s cloak was blue, Mary Magdalene’s cloak was red, St Peter’s cloak was yellow and blue, and so on. From early on this allowed or encouraged Renaissance painters to create compositions designed not only to show a (religious) subject, but to create harmonious visual ‘rhythms’ and ‘assonances’ based on these traditionally understood colour associations.

Pigments and Media

This is dealt with quite thoroughly in another book in the series, Techniques of Painting. There we learn that paint has two components, the binding medium and the pigment. Over the centuries different pigments have been used, mixed into different binding mediums, including egg, egg yolks, oil, painting directly into wet plaster (fresco) and so on.

Painting is done onto supports – onto walls, plaster, or onto boards, metal, canvas or other fabrics. All of these need preparing by stretching (canvas) or smoothing (wood), then applying a ground – or background layer of paint – to soak into the support. Painters of the 14th and 15th centuries used a white ground. In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, artists experimented with varying the tone of the ground, which significantly alters the colour of the works painted onto them.

Hardening Binding mediums dry out in two ways: watercolours and synthetic resin paints by simple evaporation. Drying oils such as linseed, walnut or poppy oil harden by chemical reaction with the oxygen in the air. Egg tempera, used extensively in the 14th and 15th century, dries by a combination of both.

This may sound fairly academic but it profoundly affects the whole style and look of a painting. Because tempera dries so quickly (especially in hot, dry Italy) shapes and textures are best built up by short hatched strokes.

This is a detail from the Wilton Diptych (1397) where you can see the way the skin of the Virgin and child and angels has been created by multiple short paint strokes of egg tempera.

Whereas, because oils are slow drying, they allow the artist to merge them into smooth, flowing, continuous transitions of colour. Oil paints = more flowing.

In this detail from Belshazzar’s Feast by Rembrandt, you can see how the gold chain has been rendered with a really thick layer of gold paint. Laying on very thick layers of oil paint is called impasto.

In general, oil paint looks darker and richer than paint made using water-based media such as egg tempera, glue or fresco, which appear lighter and brighter.

Age and decay Painting was, then, a highly technical undertaking, requiring the painter to have an excellent knowledge of a wide range of materials and chemical substances. Different media dry and set in different ways. Different pigments hold their colour – or fade – over time. And this fading can reveal the ground painted underneath.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the specific examples it gives of how some pigments have faded or disappeared – sometimes quite drastically – in Old Master paintings.

In Duccio’s The Virgin and Child with Saints Dominic and Aurea, the face and hands of the figures show clearly how the lighter pigments painted in tempera have faded or flaked off allowing the green underpaint to come through. The Virgin was not meant to look green!

Bladders to tubes Pigments had to be ground by hand and mixed in with binders in studios for the medieval and Renaissance period. There are numerous prints showing a Renaissance artist’s studio for what it was, the small-scale manufactory of a craftsman employing a number of assistants and making money by taking on a number of students.

In the 18th century ready-mixed pigments could be transported inside pigs’ bladders. The early 19th century developed the use of glass or metal syringes. But it was in 1841 that an American, John Rand, developed the collapsible metal tube. This marked a breakthrough in the portability of oil paints, allowing artists to paint out of doors for the first time. A generation later a new school arose – the Impressionists – who did just this. Jean Renoir quotes his father, the painter Pierre-Auguste, as saying:

Without paints in tubes there would have been no Cézanne, no Monet, no Sisley or Pissarro, nothing of what the journalists were later to call Impressionism.

Biographies of colours

Primo Levi wrote a classic collection of short stories based on The Periodic Table of chemical elements. It crossed my mind, reading this book, that something similar could be attempted with the numerous pigments which artists have used down the ages.

This book gives a potted history of the half a dozen key colours. It explains how they were originally produced, how different sources became available over the centuries, and how the 19th century saw an explosion in the chemical industry which led to the development of modern, industrially-manufactured colours.

Blue

Prime source of blue was the ultramarine colour extracted from the mineral lapis lazuli, which was mined in one location in Afghanistan and traded to the Mediterranean.
A cheaper alternative was azurite, which was mined in Europe but had to be ground coarsely to keep its colour, and is also prone to fade into green, e.g. the sky in Christ taking Leave of his Mother by Albrecht Altdorfer (1520). Many artists painted a basic wash of azurite and then used the much more expensive ultramarine to create more intense highlights.
Indigo is a dye extracted from plants. At high intensity it is an inky black-blue, but at a lesser intensity also risks fading.
A cheaper alternative was smalt, manufactured by adding cobalt oxide to molten glass, cooling and grinding it to powder. It holds its colour badly and fades to grey.
In the early 1700s German manufacturers stumbled across the intense synthetic pigment which became known as Prussian blue (the book gives examples by Gainsborough and Canaletto).
Around 1803 cobalt blue was invented.
In 1828 an artificial version of ultramarine was created in France

Thus the painters of the 19th century had a much wider range of ‘blues’ to choose from than all their predecessors.

The book does the same for the other major colours, naming and explaining the origin of their main types or sources:

Green

Terre verte was used as an underpaint for flesh tones in early Italian paintings
malachite
verdigris, a copper-based pigment was prone to fade to brown and explains why so many Italian landscapes have the same orangey-brown appearance
emerald green (a pigment developed in the 19th century containing copper and arsenic)
viridian (a chromium oxide)

Red

Vermilion, obtained by pulverising cinnabar, liable to fade to brown as has happened with the coat of Gainsborough’s Dr Ralph Schomberg (1770), which should be bright red.

Yellow

Lead-tin yellow in the Renaissance
from the 17th century lead-based yellow containing antimony known as Naples yellow
from the 1820s new tints of yellow became available based on compounds of chromium of which chrome yellow is the most famous
cadmium yellow

White

Lead white was used from the earliest times. It forms as a crust on metallic lead exposed to acetic acid from sour wine – highly poisonous
only in the twentieth century was it replaced by non-toxic whites based on zinc and later, titanium. Unlike all the pigments named so far, lead white keeps its colour extremely well, hence the bright white ruffs and dresses in paintings even when a lot of the brighter colour has gone.

Black

A large range of black pigments was always available, most based on carbon as found in charcoal, soot and so on. Carbon is very stable and so blacks have tended to remain black.

Summary of colours

Over the past 500 years there has been a large amount of evolution and change in the source of the pigments artists use.
Colour in art is a surprisingly technical subject, which quite quickly requires a serious knowledge of inorganic chemistry and, from the 19th century, is linked to the development of industrial processes.
Sic transit gloria mundi or, more precisely, Sic transit gloria artis. The net effect of seeing so many beautiful paintings in which the original colour has faded – sometimes completely – can’t help but make you sad. We live among the wrecks or decay of thousands of once-gloriously coloured artworks. Given the super-duper state of digital technology I wonder if anywhere there exists a project to restore all these faded glories to how they should look!

Disegno versus colore

Vasari, author of The Lives of the Great Artists (155) posed the question, ‘Which was more important, design or colour?’ As a devotee of Michelangelo, the godfather of design, he was on the side of disegno and relates a conversation with Michelangelo about some paintings by Titian (1488-1576) they had seen where Michelangelo praises Titian’s use of colour but laments his poor composition.

The art history stereotype has it that Renaissance Florence was the home of design, while Venice (where Titian lived and worked) put the emphasis on gorgeous colours. This was because Venice was a European centre for the production of dyes and pigments for a wide range of manufacturing purposes, not least glass and textiles.

In late-17th-century France the argument was fought out in the French Academy between Rubénistes (for colour) and Poussinistes (for drawing). Personally, I am more moved by drawing than colour, and a little more so after reading this book and realising just how catastrophically colour can fade and disappear – but, still, there’s no reason not to love both.

Optical theories

Isaac Newton published his Optics in 1704, announcing the discovery that when white light is projected through a prism it breaks down into primary colours, which can then be turned back into white light. Among its far-ranging investigations, the book contained the first schematic arrangement of colours and their ‘opposites’. It wasn’t until well into the 19th century, however, that colour charts began to proliferate (partly because they were required by expanding industrial manufacture, and the evermore competitive design and coloration of products).

And these colour charts bore out Newton’s insight that complementary colours – colours opposite each other on the circle – accentuate and bring each other out.

Colour Circle by Michel Eugène Chevreul (1839)

Colour circles like this systematised knowledge which had been scattered among various artists and critics over the ages. It can be shown that Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) made systematic use of contrast effects, pairing colour opposites like orange-blue, red-green or yellow-violet, to create stronger visual effects.

On a simplistic level it was the availability of a) new, intense colours, in portable tin tubes, along with b) exciting new theories of colour, which explains the Impressionist movement.

The Impressionists were most interested in trying to capture the changing quality of light, but the corollary of this was a fascination with shadow. Apparently, impressionist painters so regularly (and controversially) paired bright yellow sunlight with the peculiar tinge of violet which is opposite it on the colour charts, that they were accused by contemporary critics of violettomani.

Some examples

The book lists the pigments used to create Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne. The intense blue sky is made from ultramarine lapis lazuli, as is Ariadne’s drapery and the flowers at the lower right. The blue-green sea is painted with the cheaper azurite. Vermilion gives Ariadne’s sash its red colour. The Bacchante’s orange drapery was painted with a rare arsenic-containing mineral known as realgar.

Titian was aware of the power of colour contrasts long before the 19th century colour wheels, something he demonstrates by placing Ariadne’s red and blue drapery above the primrose yellow cloth by the knocked-over urn at her feet (painted using lead-tin yellow). The green of the tree leaves and the grassy background are created from malachite over-painted with green resinous glazes. An intense red ‘lake’ is used to give Bacchus’s red cloak its depth.

These coloured ‘lakes’ were an important element in Renaissance painting but I had to supplement the book’s information with other sources.

Lake paints Wikipedia article

From this I take it that ‘lakes’ were translucent i.e. you could see the colour beneath, and so were used as glazes, meaning you would lay down a wash of one colour and then paint over potentially numerous ‘lakes’ to add highlights, depths or whatever. This build-up of ‘lake’ glazes allowed the layering of multiple variations of colour and so the intensely sensual depiction of the folds on fabrics, the light and shade of curtains and clothes which is so characteristic of Old Master painting.

The book then applies this detailed analysis of colour pigments to a sequence of other Old Masterpieces by Rubens, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Tiepollo, Canaletto, Monet and Seurat.

Conclusion

A Closer Look: Colour makes you appreciate the immense amount of knowledge, science, craft and technique which went into painting each and every one of the National Gallery’s 2,300 artworks (and the depth of scholarship which modern art historians require to analyse and unravel the technical background to each and every painting).

It’s a revelation to read, but also pure joy to be prompted to look, and look again, in closer and closer detail, at so many wonderful paintings.

Reviews of National Gallery exhibitions

Lake Keitele: A Vision of Finland (December 2017)
Drawn in Colour: Degas from the Burrell (December 2017)
Monochrome (December 2017)
Michelangelo and Sebastiano (March 2017)
Australia’s Impressionists (January 2017)
Beyond Caravaggio (December 2016)
Painters’ Paintings: From Freud to Van Dyck (August 2016)
Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art (February 2016)
Every room in the National Gallery (December 2015)
Goya: The Portraits (November 2015)
Inventing Impressionism (May 2015)
Making Colour (September 2014)
Veronese (May 2014)
Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900 (January 2014)

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by Simon on December 10, 2017 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Books, European History

Posted by Simon on December 10, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/12/10/a-closer-look-colour-by-david-bomford-ashok-roy/

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged David

Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf (1941)

Shadows

Threads and themes

Enter Mrs Manresa and William Dodge

The stories that never are

‘One thing follows another’

Miss La Trobe

Rhymes

A tour of the house

The pageant 1. Elizabethan age

First play with the play

First interval: tea in the barn

New faces at the pageant

On being gay

The pageant part 2. Restoration comedy

Second play within a play: a restoration comedy

Cast of the Restoration comedy

Second interval

The pageant part 3. Victorian age

Third play within the play

Third interval

The pageant part 4. The present day

Tick tick

Similitudes

Coda

Miss La Trobe

The Oliver family

The end

Last thought

Cast

Posh people

Servants and suppliers

Credit

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Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael @ the Royal Academy

Exhibition premise

Room 1. The Taddei Tondo

Room 2. The Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John the Baptist

Room 3. Battle murals

Drawings

Raphael

Michelangelo

Leonardo

Why I don’t like the Italian Renaissance

Two conclusions

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Freud on religion

The influence of Darwin

Freud’s theory of the mind

The roots of Freud’s anti-religion

Freud’s critique of religion

1. The psychoanalysis of religious experience

2. Religion as wish-fulfilment

3. Religious rituals as forms of neurotic obsession

4. Aspects of organised religion explained in psychoanalytical terms

Communion

Conscience

Conversion

God

The devil

Immortality

Morality

Guilt

Spiritual feelings

Original sin

Prayer

Superstition

5. A psychoanalytical history of Judaism and Christianity

6. Religion’s harmful effects

Conclusion

Credit

Freud and religion reading list

More Freud reviews

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