Indeed, as the years at Cambridge went on, art was more and more frequently interrupting science. In November 1887 there was an important exhibition of pictures at Manchester. Roger Fry left Cambridge at 3.45 in the morning; reached the gallery at noon; looked at pictures till eight in the evening; got back to Cambridge at 4.15 the next morning; slept for an hour on a friend’s sofa and then went to a scientific lecture at nine.
It certainly was a somewhat fatiguing affair [he wrote], as of course one could not get much accommodation at the price, but the pictures were a sight worth all the trouble. I do not remember seeing so interesting a collection (bar the Nat. Gallery). I had got a catalogue beforehand and selected those pictures which I wanted to see so that I did not waste any time. I was as much delighted with some of Walker’s things as almost anybodys, and Madox Brown another artist one rarely sees anything of was well represented. There are some lovely Prouts but some of Sir David Roberts’ small architectural drawings delighted me as much as anything in the way of unfinished sketches. One or two of Uncle Alfred’s [Waterhouse] were noticeable, the Pœstum (I think it is) and the doorway of Chartres. As you despise Burne Jones and Rossetti and I have a somewhat similar feeling for Edwin Long I fear it will not be much use my “enthusing” about the pictures I liked best. I was surprised to find how good some of Millais’ earlier work is, making me still more deplore things like the “Dying Ornithologist” and the “North West Passage”. I was very much delighted with Sir Frederick Leighton’s “Daphnephoria”. I do not know whether you ever saw it, an enormous picture of a Theban chorus of victory. Holman Hunt was very poorly represented, but A. W. Hunt’s water colours were very magnificent and there were several that I had not seen before.
And there this first crude essay in art criticism stops, for, though it is only half-past eight, he is dropping asleep and must go to bed immediately.
The excursion to Manchester was made with friends, but they were not Apostles, a sign that when Roger Fry wished to gratify certain growing curiosities he had to seek company — and he had a great liking for company — outside the circle of that very select and famous society. But he had a gift for finding his way across country to the people he needed. At Clifton “an intuition” had made him discover in McTaggart the one friend who made school life tolerable. So at Cambridge where the conditions were reversed — there were almost too many friends, too many interests, too many things to be done and enjoyed — he discovered the one man who could give him what he still lacked. The letters begin to refer to “Middleton”. “I am getting to know more of Middleton which is very nice”, he wrote in October 1886. “I go to him once or twice a week for a sort of informal lecture on art — he shows me photographs &c. It is exceedingly good of him.... He tells me about the development of Italian painting, illustrating it by photos.”
John Henry Middleton had been elected to the Slade Professorship of Art at Cambridge in 1886. A romantic and rather mysterious career lay behind him. In youth the shock caused by the sudden death of a close friend at Oxford “had confined him to his room for five or six years”. Afterwards he travelled widely and adventurously in Greece, America and Africa. In order to study the philosophy of Plato as taught in Fez he had disguised himself as a pilgrim, had entered the Great Mosque “which no unbeliever had previously succeeded in doing”, and had been presented to the Sultan as one of the faithful. He had arrived in Cambridge with a tale of erudite works upon Greek and Roman archaeology to his credit; but he held very unconventional views as to the duties of a Slade professor. Dressed in “a thick dressing gown and skull cap looking like some Oriental magician”, he was willing to talk informally about art to any undergraduate who chose to visit him. Mr E. F. Benson, who thus describes him, was one of the undergraduates who went to his rooms: “... he gave me no formal lectures,” Mr Benson writes, “but encouraged me to bring my books to his room, and spend the morning there... now he would pull an intaglio ring off his finger... or take half a dozen Greek coins out of his waistcoat pocket and bid me decipher the thick decorative letters and tell me where they came from”. As for the Tripos that his pupil was expected to take, he never mentioned it. Roger Fry too found his way to the Slade professor. He too found him enthralling and stimulating as he wandered about the room talking unconventionally in his skull cap and dressing-gown. That room was full of “the most wonderful things... some very lovely Persian tiles which he got at Ispahan and Damascus, some beautiful early Flemish and Italian paintings and several original Rembrandt etchings, some of them very fine — He is very delightful to talk to, though I fear”, he added, “you [Lady Fry] would think him dangerously socialistic.” Professor Middleton seems to have returned Roger Fry’s liking. He guessed that though he was working for a science degree his real bent was not for science but for art. He encouraged him in that bent. One vacation he asked him to go with him to Bologna. But Roger Fry’s parents were opposed to the visit. Their ostensible reason was that they doubted whether North Italy in the summer was “extremely healthy”, as Professor Middleton asserted. But they may well have doubted whether a jaunt to Bologna to look at pictures with a Slade professor of socialistic tendencies was the best preparation for “the awful Tripos” that was impending. They were afraid that Roger was scattering his energies. How far, they may well have asked, was he fulfilling the wish that Sir Edward had expressed when he first went to Cambridge, “I wish you as you know to have a thorough education and not to be ignorant either of letters or science. At the same time I want you so far to specialise as not to turn out a jack of all trades and master of none”?
There were signs that Roger Fry was finding it increasingly difficult to specialise. Every week he was discussing “things in general” with the Apostles. And when one of the brethren, Lowes Dickinson, came to Failand he made no better impression than McTaggart had done: “... he was unobtrusive and untidy and forgot to bring his white tie. ‘Have you any further luggage coming, Sir?’ enquired the footman.” His mind was being unmade rather than made up. All his friends were, as he called it, “unconventional”. He was staying with Edward Carpenter who, though once F. D. Maurice’s curate, was certainly “very unconventional” now. He also stayed with the Schillers at Gersau— “the most unconventional family in all its arrangements I ever saw”. He stayed at Kirkby Lonsdale with the Llewelyn Davies’s. They too were unconventional; and there he met Lady Carlisle, an unconventional countess who preached temperance and socialism. He attended meetings of the Psychical Research Society and visited haunted houses in a vain pursuit of ghosts. Also he was helping to start a new paper, The Cambridge Fortnightly, for which he designed the cover— “a tremendous sun of culture rising behind King’s College Chapel”. He was painting in oils, and twice a week he was discussing art with a Slade professor who wore a dressing-gown and cherished dangerously socialistic views. At a lunch party, too, there was another meeting with Mr Bernard Shaw. The effect of that meeting is described in a letter written to Mr Shaw forty years later:
I remember that you dazzled me not only with such wit as we had never heard but with your stupendous experience of the coulisses of the social scene at which we were beginning to peer timidly and with some anxiety. All my friends were already convinced that social service of some kind was the only end worth pursuing in life. I alone cherished as a guilty secret a profound scepticism about all political activity and even about progress itself and had begun to think of art as somehow my only possible job. I like to recall my feelings when that afternoon you explained incidentally that you had “gone into” the subject of art and there was nothing in it. It was all hocus pocus. I was far too deeply impressed by you to formulate any denial even in my own mind. I just shelved it for the time being.
In the midst of all these occupations, exposed to all these different views, it is scarcely surprising that Roger Fry himself admitted to some perplexity.
“It is perhaps no use retrospecting,” he wrote home in December 1888, “but I can’t help thinking
that in 22 years one should be able to get through rather more than I have done. In fact I think one wants two lifetimes, one to find out what to do, and another to do it. As it is one acts always half in the dark and then for consistency’s sake sticks to what one has done and so ruins one’s power of impartial judgment.” The family creed which had been so forcibly impressed upon him since childhood was no longer sufficient. “Life”, he wrote, “does not any longer seem a simple problem to me.... I no longer feel that I must hedge myself from the evil of the world — that there are whole tracts of thought and action into which I must not go. I have said I will realise everything. Nothing shall seem to me so horrible but that I will try to understand why it exists.” Just as his father had shaken himself free from Quaker peculiarities, so Roger in his turn was ridding himself of other restrictions. But his was a far more buoyant and self-confident temperament than his father’s. Life at a great University, for which his father had longed in vain, had shown him a bewildering range of possibilities. Some of them were invisible to his friends. They, as he says, were convinced that social service of some kind was the only end worth pursuing. Of that he had come to be sceptical. Not only was he hiding from his friends as a guilty secret his doubts about political activity — he was hiding from his family another secret; that art, not science, was to be his job.
These doubts and secrets, the variety of his interests and occupations worried him. He wanted help and he wanted sympathy. In a letter to his mother he tried to break down the reserve which, as the years at Cambridge went on, had grown between them. “When those petty daily commonplaces of which our lives seem so much made up weigh upon me with the feeling of a dreary interminable life of getting up and dressing and eating and talking and going to bed and all without any object in the end, it is sometimes delightful to realise that such things are all shams and that at any moment the surface may dissolve and the reality appear, whatever that reality may be.... I do not know whether I am wise in writing a letter so full of my own convictions which I can hardly expect to be understood, but perhaps it is sometimes worth while to show one’s real self and not hide behind the make-belief ideas which for the most part are all we show, and your letter somehow encouraged me to make a confession.” Whatever else his new friends had taught him, they had taught him to distinguish between the sham and the reality, “whatever that reality may be”. He was becoming more and more conscious of the horror of hiding behind “make-belief ideas”. But it was very difficult to speak openly to his parents. He could only assure them that “the differences of opinion which I fear do and must arise between us owing to our different points of view in no wise affect our love for one another”. As the time at Cambridge drew to an end, he was concealing more, and they were becoming increasingly uneasy.
The immediate question was a practical one. A friend’s letter summed it up. “What”, he asked, “are you going to be?” The “awful Tripos” provided what, to his parents at least, seemed a decisive answer. Almost casually in the postscript to a letter he told his mother that “the examiners have honoured me by giving me a first; this is the more kind on their part as I neither expected nor deserved one. It was telegraphed to me at Norwich this morning by Dickinson.” The path was now open in all probability to a Fellowship, and thus to the career that his father had wished for himself and had planned for his son, — the career of a distinguished man of science. But Roger hesitated. Did he any longer want that career? Had he not come to feel that painting was his “only possible job”? that art was his only possible pursuit? When his father pressed him to decide, he answered, “Please do not think me weak because I find it hard to make up my mind about matters of great importance to me, but it really is because I realise what infinite possibilities there are [more] than because I am apathetic or indifferent”. He was going, he said, to consult Professor Middleton “on the subject of art as a profession”. The result of the interview is given in a letter to Sir Edward:
Roger Fry to Sir Edward Fry
Cambridge,
My dear Father, — Feb 21, 1888
Middleton has been very kindly advising me about my prospects in life, and I will try and give you as clear an account as I can of what he thinks. I explained to him (thinking it an extremely important factor) how unpleasing an idea it was to you that I should take up art — he says he quite understands the feeling that to fail in art is much more complete a failure and leaves one a more useless encumbrance on the world than to fail in almost anything else — e.g. to be a 4th rate doctor in the colonies.... He advised me if I thought I felt strongly enough to ask you to let me try for about two years and by the end of that time he says that he thinks I shall be able to tell what my own capacities are and whether it will be worth my while going on.... In case I do do that, he says the best course would be for me to do at least the first year’s drudgery at the cast and to do that up here at the Museum of Casts — spending some time on dissecting at the Laboratory. He kindly says that he would superintend my work and give me all the assistance he could and that I could get no better opportunities in London or Paris until I have had a year at casts.
He says that the idea of the possibility of landscape painting without figures is quite untenable — you must correct your drawing and colour on the figure as you see there more immediately where you go wrong. I then told him the objection you had to the nude — which he said was very natural tho’ so far as his experience went it did not lead to bad results and was not so harmful as an ordinary theatre — he says however that there is no reason at all why one should draw from the female figure — on the contrary men have much better figures as a rule in England and are more useful to practise drawing on....
I think I do feel strongly enough the desire for this, to ask you to let me try it. That is to say, if I do not do so I fear I may have an unpleasant feeling afterwards that I might have done something worth overcoming all obstacles to do if I had only had perseverance. I know what a great thing it is that I ask of you considering your views on the subject and what a disappointment it must be when you had hoped I should do something more congenial to your tastes. Still I do ask it because I think taking everything into consideration it is what I sincerely think I ought to do.
Your very loving son
Roger Fry
The result was a compromise and a strange one. For a few terms more he stayed on at Cambridge, dissecting in the Laboratory and painting the male nude under the direction of the Slade professor. Twice he sat for a Fellowship. But the first time his dissertation was purely scientific, and he took so little trouble with it that he failed. And the second time he tried to combine science and art — his dissertation was “On the Laws of Phenomenology and their Application to Greek Painting”. That too was a compromise. It seemed, Mr Farnell reported, “to have been put together in haste”, and again he failed.
The two failures mattered very little to him personally. “After all”, he wrote to his father, “I have got more from Cambridge than a scientific education.” For him that was true — he had got more from Cambridge than he could possibly explain. His mind had opened there; his eyes had opened there. It was at Cambridge that he had become aware of the “infinite possibilities” that life held. Now had become eternal as he sat talking to his friends in a Cambridge room while the moon rose and the nightingales sang. What Cambridge had given him could not be affected by any failure to win a fellowship. But to his father the failure was a bitter disappointment. It was not only that he had thrown away the career that seemed to Sir Edward the most desirable of all careers, a career too in which he had shown brilliant promise. But he had thrown it away in order to become a painter. To Sir Edward pictures were little better than coloured photographs. And that the son, upon whom all his hopes centred — for his elder son was an invalid and his daughters, it is recorded, “had no claim to a career” — should have rejected a science for a pursuit that is trifling in itself and exposes those who follow it to grave moral risks, was a source of prof
ound and lasting grief to him. If Roger Fry had no regrets for himself he felt his father’s disappointment and his father’s disapproval not only then but for many years to come.
CHAPTER III. LONDON: ITALY: PARIS
I
The little Queen Anne houses at Highgate, in whose gardens Roger Fry had felt his first great passion and his first great disillusion, had been given up in 1887 for a house in Bayswater. Sir Edward liked the house, because it was near Kensington Gardens and had a fine view down the Broad Walk. To Roger Fry when he came to live there, for the combination of art and science at Cambridge soon broke down, it was “peculiarly flamboyant and pretentious”, and the years he spent there were, he said, “very uncomfortable”. That was inevitable, for they were years of compromise on both sides. His parents still believed, or hoped, that he might give up his wish to be an artist and return to science. He still hoped that they might come to share his views and sympathise with them. They agreed, after consulting Briton Rivière and Herbert Marshall, that he should study painting under Francis Bate at Hammersmith, but they expected him to live at home. A room with a gas fire was allotted him at Palace Houses; all day he worked at Applegarth Studios with Francis Bate, and he came back to family life in the evening.
The compromise proved very difficult. He expressed his feelings openly in letters to Lowes Dickinson. “Oh Goldie... Incomparable Crock... My dear...” the letters begin, and they go on in a rapid unformed hand to talk of the books he is reading, the expeditions he is making, how Francis Bate is teaching him “more how to analyse your impressions than how to move your pencil — and this seems to be the right end to begin”; how he is painting from the nude and how the lady students very sensibly “kick up a row” and insist upon painting from the nude in the same room at the same time; how he shows his pictures first to Briton Rivière and then to Herbert Marshall and how each gives different advice. But the letters are also full of complaints. He has to apologise for making them “a sort of drain for my superabundant spleen”. Again and again he complains that the snow is falling at Failand; and the fog is brooding over what he calls “the Bayswater bog”, and that both Failand and Bayswater reek with what he calls “a Nomian atmosphere”. “This Nomian atmosphere”, he wrote [March 1888], “is positively suffocating.... When every member of a family has a moral sense that makes them as rigid as iron and as tenacious as steel and when they have got through this same moral sense a feeling of the superlative necessity of doing everything in common because of the family tie, you may imagine that the friction is not slight.” He went on to give an example of this friction at work. “When a few minutes ago I made in pure innocence the statement that I believed Elsie Venner was founded on a psychological fact, I was immediately challenged for my evidence, which was only of a very imperfect kind. This I at once admitted. ‘Then you should not spread inaccurate and dangerous views’ For quietness’ sake I admitted the enormity of my crime. It is but a poor recompense to admit your folly, and I cannot but regret that you should speak in that light way of it.’ Silence on my part. Now do you see why I am an Antinomian?” Yet he could have been happy at home; he was highly domestic; he was very fond of his sisters. In the same letter he goes on, “All this is more or less made up for by my younger sisters who are blessedly corrupt — poor things they too will soon be ground down into presentable and eligible young ladies — all acquiescence and smirk and giggle. Damn — damn” — that forecast at least was not fulfilled.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 424