ROGER FRY: A Biography. Virginia Woolf

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      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