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- Herausgeber: e-artnow
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
This carefully crafted ebook: "Roger Fry: a biography by Virginia Woolf" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Virginia Woolf's only true biography, written to commemorate a devoted friend and one of the most renowned art critics of this century, who helped to bring the Postimpressionist movement from France to England and America. Roger Eliot Fry (14 December 1866 – 9 September 1934) was an English artist and art critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism. Adeline Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer, and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
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Roger Fry: a biography by Virginia Woolf
ROGER FRY: a biography
Roger Fry about 1928
Foreword.
London, April, 1940
Dear Virginia,
Years ago, after one of those discussions upon the methods of the arts which illuminated his long and happy friendship with you, Roger suggested, half seriously, that you should put into practice your theories of the biographer’s craft in a portrait of himself. When the time came for his life to be written some of us who were very close to him, thinking it would have been his wish as well as ours, asked you to undertake it.
I have now begged to have this page to tell you of our gratitude to you for having accepted, and for having brought to completion a piece of work neither light nor easy. As the book is to have no formal preface may I here join with yours our thanks to all those who have allowed the use of letters and pictures in their possession.
MARGERY FRY
Chapter I
Childhood: School
I
“I lived the first six years of my life in the small eighteenth-century house at No. 6 The Grove, Highgate. This garden is still for me the imagined background for almost any garden scene that I read of in books”—thus Roger Fry began a fragment of autobiography. We may pause for a moment on the threshold of that small house at Highgate to ask what we can learn about him before he became conscious both of the serpent which bent down “from the fork of a peculiarly withered and soot begrimed old apple tree”, and of the ‘large red oriental poppies which by some blessed chance” grew in his “private and particular garden”.
He was born on 14th December 1866, the second son of Edward Fry and of Mariabella, the daughter of Thomas Hodgkin. Both were Quakers. Behind Roger on his father’s side were eight recorded generations of Frys, beginning with that Zephaniah, the first to become a Quaker, in whose house in Wiltshire George Fox held “a very blessed meeting, and quiet, though the officers had purposed to break it up, and were on their way in order thereunto. But before they got to it, word was brought them, that there was a house just broken up by thieves, and they were required to go back again with speed … That was in 1663, and from that time onwards the Frys held the Quaker faith and observed certain marked peculiarities both of opinion and of dress, for which, in the early days, they endured considerable persecution. The first of them, Zephaniah, was in prison for three months for refusing to take the oath of allegiance. As time went on the persecution weakened; they had nothing worse to suffer than the “sneers and coldness of their own class”; but whatever they suffered they abode by their convictions consistently. The injunction “Swear not at all” meant that no oaths could be taken, and therefore many professions were shut to them. Some of the Frys added additional scruples of their own. Even the profession of medicine was distasteful to Joseph, the grandson of Zephaniah, because “he could not feel easy to accept payment for the water contained in the medicines he dispensed”. Such scruples—“miserable questions of dress and address”, as Edward Fry came to call them—tormented the weaker spirits and laid them open to ridicule. They vacillated between the two worlds. A coat-of-arms was first engraved and then scratched out; fine linen was ordered and then cut up; one John Eliot fretted himself into the conviction that he ought to outrage eighteenth-century convention by growing a beard. The arts as well as the professions were outside the pale. Not only was the theatre forbidden, but music and dancing; and though “drawing and water-colour painting were tolerated or encouraged”, the encouragement was tepid, for, with some notable exceptions, even in the nineteenth century almost the only picture to be found in a Quaker household was an engraving of Perm’s Treaty with the Indians—that detestable picture, as Roger Fry called it later.
Undoubtedly the Quaker society, as one of its members writes, was “very narrow in outlook and bounded in interests; very bourgeois as to its members”. But the canalising of so much energy within such narrow limits bore remarkable fruit. The story of Joseph Fry is typical of the story of many of the Frys, Since, owing to his scruples, the medical profession was shut to him, “he took to business occupations, and established, or took part in establishing, five considerable businesses which probably proved far more remunerative than the profession which he had renounced for conscience sake”. Hence there came about a curious anomaly; the most unworldly of people were yet abundantly blessed with the world’s goods. The tradesman who lived over his shop in Bristol or in Bartholomew Close was at the same time a country gentleman owning many acres in Cornwall or in Wiltshire. But he was a country gentleman of a peculiar kind. He was a squire who refused to pay tithes; who refused to hunt or to shoot; who dressed differently from his neighbours, and, if he married, married a Quaker like himself. Thus the Frys and the Eliots, the Howards and the Hodgkins not only lived differently and spoke differently and dressed differently from other people, but these differences were enforced by innumerable inter-marriages. Any Quaker who married “outside the society” was disowned. For generation after generation therefore the sons of one Quaker family married the daughters of another. Mariabella Hodgkin, Roger Fry’s mother, came of precisely the same physical and spiritual stock as her husband Edward Fry. She was descended from the Eliots who, like the Frys, had been Quakers since the seventeenth century. They too had eschewed public life and had accumulated considerable wealth, first as merchants at Falmouth “exporting pilchards and tin to Venice”, and later in London, where they owned a large family mansion in Bartholomew Close. The Eliots married with the Howards, who were tinplate manufacturers and Quakers also. And it was through the marriage of Luke Howard, the son of Robert, the tinplate manufacturer of Old Street, with Mariabella Eliot that the only two names among all the names in the ample family chronicle in which their descendant Roger Fry showed any interest came into the family. His great-grandfather, Luke Howard (1772–1864), was a man of “brilliant but rather erratic genius” who, like so many of the Friends, being denied other outlet, turned his attention to science. He was the author of an essay “proposing a classification and nomenclature of the clouds” which attracted the attention of Goethe, who not only wrote a poem on the subject but entered into communication with the author. Mariabella Hodgkin could remember her grandfather. He seemed, she writes, “always to be thinking of something very far away…. He … would stand for a long time at the window gazing at the sky with his dreamy placid look”, and, like some of his descendants, he was “deft in the use of tools” and taught his grandchildren in his own workshop how to handle air pumps and electrical machines. Roger Fry left his copy of the family history uncut, but he admitted that he wished he knew more of this ingenious ancestor whose gift for setting other people’s minds to work by speculations which were not “entirely confirmed by subsequent observation” suggests some affinity of temperament as well as of blood. The other name that took Roger Fry’s fancy, though for different reasons, was his mother’s—Mariabella. It was first given in the seventeenth century to the daughter of a Blake who married a Farnborough, whose daughter married a Briggins, whose daughter married an Eliot. It was a name with a certain mystery attached to it, for it was “evidently Italian or Spanish in its origin”, and Roger Fry, who took no interest whatever in the Eliots and their possible connection with the Eliots of Port St Germans, or in the Westons and their possible but improbable descent from Lord Weston, Earl of Portland, liked to think that his ancestress, the first Mariabella, owed her name to some connection with the South. He hoped that the quiet and respectable blood of his innumerable Quaker forefathers was dashed with some more fiery strain. But it was only a hope. No scandal in the Eliot family had been recorded for more than two hundred years. His mother, Mariabella Hodgkin, the seventh to bear that name, was a pure-bred Quaker like the rest; and it was in the Friends’ Meeting House at Lewes on a cloudless spring day in April 1859 that Edward Fry married her and brought her back to the small house in Highgate.
That house[◉1], Edward Fry wrote, “looked over Miss Burdett-Coutts garden of Holly Lodge beyond to the roofs of London … a little garden, with a copper beech in one corner, sloped down from the house to the trees of our great neighbour, and was very dear to us in those early days. It was a little plot
Not wholly in the busy world nor quite
Beyond it.
And murmurs from the great city below us often stole up the hill and reminded us of how near we were to the great heart of things.” It was in that house that his nine children were born; and it was in that garden that his son Roger felt his first passion and suffered his first great disillusion.
This garden [Roger Fry wrote] is still for me the imagined background for almost any garden scene that I read of in books. The serpent still bends down to Eve from the fork of a peculiarly withered and soot begrimed old apple tree which stuck out of the lawn. And various other scenes of seduction seem to me to have taken place within its modest suburban precincts. But it was also the scene of two great emotional experiences, my first passion and my first great disillusion. My first passion was for a bushy plant of large red oriental poppies which by some blessed chance was actually within the limits of the square yard of bed which had been allotted to me as my private and particular garden. The plants I bought and glued into the ground with mud, made with a watering pot and garden mould—the seeds which I sowed never came up to my expectations, generally in fact refused to grow at all but the poppies were always better than my wildest dreams. Their red was always redder than any thing I could imagine when I looked away from them. I had a general passion for red which when I also developed a romantic attachment for locomotives led me to believe that I had once seen a “pure red engine”. Anyhow the poppy plant was the object of a much more sincere worship than I was at all able to give to “gentle Jesus” and I almost think of a greater affection than I felt for anyone except my father. I remember on one occasion the plant was full of fat green flower buds with little pieces of crumpled scarlet silk showing through the cracks between the sepals. A few were already in flower. I conceived that nothing in the world could be more exciting than to see the flower suddenly burst its green case and unfold its immense cup of red. I supposed this happened suddenly and that it only required patience to be able to watch the event. One morning I stood watching a promising bud for what seemed hours but nothing happened and I got tired, so I ran indoors very hurriedly for fear of getting back too late and got a stool on which I proceeded to keep watch for what seemed an eternity and was I daresay half an hour. I was discovered ultimately by an elder sister and duly laughed at by her and when the story was known by all the grown-ups, for all passions even for reel poppies leave one open to ridicule.
The other event was more tragic. It was in fact the horrible discovery that justice is not supreme, that innocence is no protection. It was again a summer morning and I was leaning against my mother’s knee as she sat on a low wicker chair and instructed me in the rudiments of botany. In order to illustrate some point she told me to fetch her one of the buds of my adored poppy plant or at least that was what I understood her to say. I had already been drilled to implicit obedience and though it seemed to me an almost sacrilegious act I accomplished it. Apparently …
There the fragment stops. But the sequel is known—he picked the poppy and was gravely reproved by his mother for doing so. The disillusionment was great. For if he was credulous and passionate, he was also “drilled to implicit obedience”; and the person who had first exacted his obedience and then punished him for it was his mother. The shock of that confused experience was still tingling fifty years later. It was akin to many of the same kind that were to follow; but the fact that his “first great disillusionment” was connected with his mother perhaps explains the sharpness and the permanence of the impression. Lady Fry exercised upon that very impressionable and sensitive, yet also very logical and independent, boy an influence that lasted long after she had ceased to teach him botany. As her photographs show, she was a woman of great personal impressiveness; handsome of feature, firm of lip, vigorous of body. Tradition has it that she was a high-spirited girl, fond of gaiety, and capable of attracting admiration in spite of the Quaker sobriety of life and of the Quaker dress which was still the common wear of the Hodgkins in her youth. Late in life—she lived to be ninety-seven—she made out a list of “Things that were not—: Things that were: when I was a little child”. It is an instructive list. Among the things that were not, she counted lucifer matches; hot-water bottles; night-lights; Christmas trees; hoardings with posters; Japanese anemones; spring mattresses; and gas for teeth extraction. Among the things that were, she counted flint and steel; rushlights; prunes and senna; clogs and pattens; beadles and chariots; tippets and sleeves (in one); snuff-boxes and Chartists. She drew no conclusion, and it is left for us to infer that there were more denials than delights, more austerities than luxuries in the life of the little Quaker girl. An anecdote that she tells of her childhood bears out this impression. “On this occasion [an illness at the age of four] a kind Uncle brought me a box of lovely tea-things (I have them still) and brought them up to me as I sat in my crib. Though no doubt longing to have them, I resolutely and firmly shut my eyes, and in spite of cajolements and commands, refused to open them. My Uncle departed, the tea-things were no doubt taken away and I was left under the ban of displeasure. This was one of those secret inhibitions which are part of childhood, and arise probably from vehement shyness.” And there were other inhibitions that were peculiar to a Quaker childhood. To the end of her life she remembered how her father had ordered the tight sleeves that were fashionable to be cut from her dress and large sleeves that were out of fashion to be inserted, and how, as she walked along the road, the street boys had jeered “Quack! Quack!” at her. Very shy and sensitive, the effect of such an upbringing was permanent. Always she seemed to live between two worlds, and to belong to neither. Thus it was no wonder that when her second son was a child, her eyes remained firmly yet uneasily shut to many of the sights that were to him objects “of a much more sincere worship than I was at all able to give to ‘gentle Jesus’ “—red poppies, red engines, and green flower-buds with little pieces of scarlet silk showing through the cracks between the sepals. And yet he respected her; and was “drilled to implicit obedience”.
The garden in which he received this first lesson in the rudiments of botany was surrounded by other gardens. Below it stretched Ken Wood, then belonging to Lord Mansfield; and Ken Wood merged in the heights of Hampstead. Highgate itself was a village; and though, as Sir Edward Fry said, the murmur of London stole up the hill, access to the great city was difficult. Only “an occasional omnibus” connected the two. The “villagers” were still isolated and exalted. They still considered themselves a race apart When Roger was a child, the old hair-dresser who had cut Coleridge’s hair was still cutting hair and recalling the poet’s loquacity—“He did talk!” he would say, but was unable to say what the poet had talked about. Local societies naturally formed themselves. There was a chess society and a society for literary and scientific discussion. A reading society met “once in three weeks to read aloud selections from standard works … Tea is handed round at 7, and sandwiches and fruit at 10 … and if any unfortunate lady, through ignorance or want of thought, put jellies or cream on her supper table she was sure to get a gentle rebuke for her lawlessness.” Sometimes the society met at the Frys”; and the leading spirit—Charles Tomlinson, F.R.S.—an indefatigable and erudite gentleman whose published works range from The Study of Common Salt to translations from Dante and Goethe with volumes upon Chess, Pneumatics and Acoustics, and Winter in the Arctic Regions thrown in—would drop in of a Sunday evening and listen to Sir Edward reading aloud Paradise Lost or George Fox’s Journals or one of Dean Stanley’s books to the children. The reading over, Mr Tomlinson would talk delightfully, if incomprehensibly, to the children. And then he would invite them to tea with him. He would show them all the marvels of his “den”. The small room, as befitted the multiplicity of its owner’s interests, was crowded with fascinating objects. There was an electrical machine; musical glasses; and Chladni’s clamp—an invention by which sand, when a violin was played, formed itself into beautiful patterns. Roger’s lifelong delight in scientific experiments must have been stimulated. But science was part of the home atmosphere; art was “kept in its place”; that is the Academy would be dutifully visited; and a landscape, if it faithfully recorded the scene of a summer holiday, would be dutifully bought. Thus it was through Charles Tomlinson perhaps that he first became aware of those aesthetic problems that were later to become so familiar. As the author of a Cyclopaedia of Useful Arts Mr Tomlinson had access to certain factories, and he would take the little Frys with him on visits to Price’s Candle Factory, Powell’s Glass-making Works, and a diamond-cutting factory in Clerkenwell. “And these factory visits”, wrote Roger’s sister Agnes, “raised questions of a fresh sort; what made good art and bad art, what ornament was justified, and whether diamonds were not better used for machinery than for necklaces. He was very strongly of opinion that they were—a brooch, he told us, might be useful, but lockets were an abomination to him.” Roger’s opinion, as to what made good and bad art, was unfortunately not recorded. It was again thanks to Mr Tomlinson, who was on good terms with the head gardener, that they went every spring for a walk in Lord Mansfield’s strictly private woods—that “earthly Paradise which we could see all the year from our own garden, which we passed almost daily in our walks, and which for one delightful morning in May-time seemed to belong to us”. So Agnes Fry described Ken Wood; and Ken Wood, as appears from another fragment of autobiography, had its place in Roger’s memory too. But his memory was not of walking in spring woods; it was of winter skating.
One day in January 1929, he says, he was dozing when
suddenly I had a vivid picture of my father skating. It must have been somewhere in the 70’s about ‘74 I should guess and the place was one of the ponds in Lord Mansfield’s Park at Kenwood which is now public property but was then very private. Only when the ponds bore, the privileged families of Highgate of which we were one were allowed in by ticket. It was a beautiful place with beechwoods standing a little back from the pond’s edge and that winter all beflowered with long needles of hoar frost which glittered rosy in the low winter sunshine. And there was my father with a pair of skates which was old-fashioned even for that date. Low wooden skates with a long blade which curled up in an elegant horn in front, skates exactly like those one sees in Dutch pictures. We half despised them because they were old-fashioned, half revered them as belonging to my father. He was passionately fond of skating—it was indeed the only thing approaching to a sport that he cared for. He was passionately fond of it though he skated rather badly at least it was an odd style or absence of style, the way he scuttered along with legs and arms and long black coat tails flying out at all angles and the inevitable top hat to crown it all. He loved skating indeed so much that though he was a Q,.C. in big practice he sometimes managed an afternoon off in the middle of the week so terrified was he of the frost giving before Saturday. It was the only interruption he ever allowed in the routine of his work. So there we were, my mien and I and Porty my elder brother six years my senior and a great swell to us, in various stages of scrambling along on skates in already gaining confidence. My father after two or three turn of the pond would return to us and help us very cheerfully giving a hand and a turn across the pond to those that were sufficiently advanced, for he was a I way» in high spirit when there was skating and even more kind than usual, anyhow more lively more talkative and less alarming. More and more alarming he was destined to become as we grew older and became separate individuals and more unwilling to fit in to the rigid scheme of Victorian domesticity. But on those days he was all laughter and high spirits and there seemed no danger of suddenly finding oneself guilty of moral obliquity which at other times seemed suddenly to be one’s situation without knowing exactly why or how it occurred, for the moral code was terribly complicated and one didn’t always foresee where it would catch you tripping over some apparently indifferent and innocent word or deed. And when it did my father’s voice was of such an awful gravity that one shrunk at once to helpless self-condemnation and overpowering shame.
There was one dark or doubtful spot in the picture—the skates. We were a large family and those who like myself came in the middle had generally to make what they could of discarded skates of the elders. These were made of blades of doubtful steel set in wood with a small screw which went into the heel of one’s boot. These screws had always lost most of their thread and used suddenly to come loose from one’s feet in the middle of an exciting race or when one was just beginning to cut an eight. The worst of these imperfect skates was that in the last resort they delivered you into the hands of the wretched men who hired chairs and fitted on skates. Our relations with these men were strained and painful.
First of all we were brought up to the absolute conviction that all men not in regular employment and receipt of a fairly high salary were morally reprehensible, that in fact the world was so arranged that wealth and virtue almost exactly corresponded, though every now and then we were allowed to despise some parvenu whose mushroom fortune had grown so quickly as to throw a dubious light on the theory itself. Such indeed was the owner of the upstart Kenwood Castle which thrust its gimcrack Gothic brickwork belvidere up into the midst of our own private view from our garden and who seemed actually to want to rival the splendours of Kenwood House which Lord Mansfield filled with his hereditary and long established dignity and actually allowed us to skate on his ponds.
This theory, then, of money being a coefficient of virtue made the pond loafers with their big red noses and big red neckerchiefs who stamped about blowing into their ugly hands altogether foreign beings infinitely remote from us like some other species, almost like the criminal species of man of which we heard now and again.
It is impossible to exaggerate the want of simple humanity in which we were brought up or to explain how that was closely associated with the duty of philanthropy. To pay these poor men who after all were trying to do a piece of work—to pay them a decent tip was truckling to immorality because a casual being immoral you were helping immorality. My elder brother was quite particularly stern about this and many a painful scene from which we retreated under a well-directed volley of abuse resulted from our heroic attempts to live up to his principles.
There again the fragment ends. Obviously the man, looking back at his past has added something to the impression received by a child of seven, and, since it was written for friends who took a humorous rather than a reverential view of eminent Victorians, no doubt it owed a little to the temper of the audience. Yet it is clear that the child had received an impression that was very vivid, and at the same time puzzling. He had felt the contrast between the father who “scuttered along” with his coat-tails flying “all laughter and high spirits” and the stem man who could in a moment, in a voice of awful gravity, reduce him to a sense of overpowering shame for some moral obliquity of which, without knowing exactly why or how, he had been guilty.
Sir Edward Fry, Roger Fry’s father
Lady Fry, Roger Fry’s mother
Indeed, judging from Sir Edward’s own account of himself in his own autobiography, these early impressions were well founded. There were good reasons why he should inspire his son with a mixture of devotion, fear and bewilderment. He was a man of deep feelings and of many conflicts … I often thought that in no human being had the two contending elements of our nature “—the baser and the better—ever existed in stronger antithesis, or ever fought more fiercely for the victory,” he wrote: … doubts and difficulties about God and the other world: aspirations often vague and purposeless, that were perforce unsatisfied: fears for the future—of things both spiritual and bodily: the mystery of the world: a sense that ordinary life was full of triviality: a repulsion from the character and habits of many people: regrets for things said and done amiss, and especially for the outbursts of a temper that was always somewhat masterful—all these and manifold other things often gave me sad and painful thoughts”—it was thus that he described his character as a young man. Among the desires that were “perforce unsatisfied” was the desire for the life of a scientist. His natural bent was strongly scientific. As a boy at Bristol he spent his pocket-money on the bodies of dead animals at the Zoological Gardens which he dissected at home. His first published work was on the Osteology of the Active Gibbon; his second, On the Relation of the Edentata to the Reptiles. Bones and rocks, plants and mosses were far more congenial to him than the work of a clerk in a sugar-broker’s office. The life of a professor of science at one of the great universities would have suited him to perfection. But as a Quaker both Oxford and Cambridge were “practically shut” to him; and he chose the law, for which he entertained “no predilection”, because it gave him “a justification for asking for College”. The college—University College, London—was not Oxford or Cambridge, but it was better than no college at all. It was natural thus, that, though born and bred a Quaker and remaining a Quaker all his life, he was yet highly critical of the sect. He was one of the first to protest against Quaker “peculiarities” and in his old age he wrote that “miserable questions about dress and address and the disputes about orthodoxy produced a chasm in my feelings between myself and systematic Quakerism which I have never got over”. By temperament he was shy and despondent, and “had very little interest in the common run of humanity”. But he had a vigorous and critical intellect; was contemptuous of “anything morbid, sentimental or effusive”; merciless to inaccuracy; and so retentive of facts that in extreme old age—he scarcely knew a day’s illness till his last years and lived to be over ninety—he could supply precise information “whether as to the exact limits of the English Channel, the geographical distribution of animals, or the spelling of a word”. Such gifts, though the law was not the profession of his choice, naturally brought him to eminence. After a dreary time of waiting, “seeing the current of briefs flow in the Square below me”, longing “for more society and love”, longing too for the country and sometimes catching a whiff of hay and seeing above Lincoln’s Inn the distant hills of Hampstead, briefs came his way, and his practice steadily increased. But the life of a successful lawyer never satisfied him. Directly he became a Judge he told his clerk that he would retire when he was entitled to a pension; and much to the surprise and regret of his colleagues he kept his word. In the prime of life, but too late to become a serious scientist, he retired to the country to enjoy that “union of simplicity of life with the benefits of cultivation” that had always been his ideal. But like his ancestors he was a country gentleman with a difference. He never smoked; bowls and halma were the only games he tolerated; and he had no skill with his hands. He read aloud to his children, cultivated his garden, and served his country at the Hague and on the Bench. His shelves were well stocked, and the busts of great men ornamented the library; but for works of art he had no feeling whatsoever. His only recorded judgment of a picture was unfavourable because “the beautiful lady [in the portrait] … had borne a character not without reproach”. Mosses, on the other hand—the Hypnum, and the Tortulas and the Bryums—gave him a satisfaction that human beings failed to give. And if, as he said of himself, he lacked confidence in his own powers and had “a certain rather despairing way of looking at the future”, there was no lack of decision in the rulings he laid down either upon, the Bench or in his own house. The “scheme of Victorian domesticity” devised by him was rigid. The moral code might be “terribly complicated” to a small boy, but it was extremely definite. Even though he inspired his children, and his daughters in particular, with profound devotion, they “always realised that there were bounds not to be overpassed”. Perhaps, could they have ignored those bounds, he would have welcomed it. Perhaps he regretted as much as his son did the “alarmingness” which, as they grew older and the son developed his own individuality, drove them further and further apart. Sir Edward at any rate was deeply conscious of his loneliness. He had had much happiness, he wrote in his old age, and many friends. “But in spite of all this, there is a sense of solitude—aloofness from my fellows, which has clung to me through life, and which in looking back has, I feel, coloured my intercourse with my fellow men as a whole. How few of those with whom I have associated have really understood me! One may think of me as a lawyer, another as a botanist, and another as this or that, and how few feel one’s real self. … I was born alone; I must die alone; and in spite of all the sweet ties of home and love (for the abundance of which I thank God) I must in some sense live alone.”
Naturally a child of seven could not enter into these solitudes; but he could, as Roger’s memory of the winter’s day on the pond at Ken Wood shows, feel the contrast between the father who, when he gave way for once to his passion for skating, was all laughter and high spirits; and the father whose large bright eyes suddenly clouded; and whose voice became one of awful severity as he accused him of sins which he could not understand. Moreover, there was another contrast which even as a child perturbed him. Whatever his father’s moral convictions might be, they lived a highly comfortable life in the small house at Highgate. There were perpetual compromises with the world of respectability and convention. A carriage and pair took his father to Lincoln’s Inn. The rights of property were respected; class distinctions were upheld; and the pond loafers, with their red neckerchiefs, blowing into their ugly hands, were not to be pitied but blamed. There was, he felt, “a want of simple humanity” in their upbringing. He revered his parents, his father especially; but they frightened him; and there was much in their way of life that puzzled him.
Such impressions, however, though sharp enough to last a lifetime, and deep enough to cause much conflict, were of course momentary and exceptional. For the most part, there was nothing to perplex or to frighten. “ The black hen is still sitting. Mr Carpenter’s little girl came this morning to take the white kitten away. On Saturday Forty examined Mab and Kizzy and myself in Tables, Geography and Latin and he set Mab and Kizzy some sums while he examined me in French”—that is an average sample of daily life at Highgate in the ‘seventies. The garden with its hot-houses and its gardener played a great part in Roger’s day. He had his own garden, and a lily grew there which he drew in pencil for his grandfather in Lewes. He had his sisters to play with; and he ruled over them despotically and refused to let them borrow his toys. There was a wide connection of uncles, aunts and cousins, remembering birthdays and sending presents, often, for they were a highly scientific family, of a mineral or of a vegetable nature. He went up to bed not with a toy, but with a crystal that his grandmother gave him. “In return for the Epipactis,” his cousin R.M. Fry writes, “would you like a specimen of the Oxalis corniculata?” And the boy of nine was always careful to use the proper scientific names in reply. His elder brother Portsmouth, already at school at Clifton, instructed him in other matters. “On the envelope is a picture of the hawkheaded God, I forget his name, and in his left hand he has the ‘crux ansana’ or symbol of generation, that is of life. He isn’t exactly what you might call a handsome God but perhaps he was very powerful and that is much more glorious. … I enclose another skeleton of a speech against the notion that the Greeks did the world more good than the Romans…. Grandpapa … again remarked on the thickness of my hand and said it was a good hand for work; his are so thin and shrivelled.”[◉2]
Nor did his father when he was on Circuit forget to write to him. It is true that he moralised: “I am glad to hear that you are good. You feel happy when you are good and unhappy when you are naughty”, but that did not prevent him from sending Roger the picture of a lion; and he picked a gentian and sent it him, and wished when he saw a squirrel in the Welsh woods that Roger at Highgate could have been with him and could have seen it too.
Roger Fry about 1872
Roger Fry about 1889
II
But a change in the garden at Highgate was at hand, and it was connected, as it happened, with a great family occasion—his father’s appointment to the Bench. Roger Fry has described it himself:
I must have been between 10 and 11 years old when our schoolroom lessons were suddenly interrupted by a message from my mother that we were all to go downstairs to her. We ran down to the dining room filled with rather apprehensive curiosity. For lessons to be interrupted it must be grave, it might—it probably would be, a criminal case—so peculiar were the intricacies of the moral code—one might quite well have committed an act of whose enormity one was still unconscious. My mother was seated gravely with an inscrutable air—no it was not criminal—it was solemn but we were not in disgrace—how quickly and surely we had learned to read the hieroglyphics on a face on which so much depended! Solemn it was but not evidently altogether unpleasing. Then we were told that our father had been made a Judge. It was a great honour, we must feel proud of him—but he would not be so well off as he had been—we must be prepared to sacrifice many comforts and luxuries that we had hitherto enjoyed willingly and gladly since the sacrifice would be due to his high station. Also he would be knighted—he would be Sir Edward Fry—that was a great honour but we must not be vain about it—though we gathered we might indulge some secret satisfaction in the far higher but more esoteric title of Mr Justice. We had nothing particularly to say to all this, but we knew how to murmur in a generally admiring and submissive way which was all that the occasion required. We went away encouraging one another to bear with Spartan fortitude those deprivations with which we were menaced. As my father must have been making something around £10,000 a year and as we lived in a smallish suburban house of I guess £50 a year rental—as moreover entertainment was confined to rare formal dinners each of which wiped out the hospitality scores of months and as my father had no vices and no expensive tastes I have no doubt that even the miserable salary of £5,000 a year to which he would be reduced more than covered our expenses—and thank goodness it did for I should scarcely be here if my father had not indulged in that grand Victorian vice of saving.
However we never noticed any serious change in our way of life. The Sunday sirloin continued to appear; Sunday tea still had its tea cakes and really it would have been difficult to point to any luxuries that could be suppressed in our week day menus. However when the summer came we found something which we were called on to sacrifice. My father as junior member of the Bench had to be Vacation Judge. So our yearly visit to the seaside was impossible as he could not get to and fro every day or at least it was thought impossible. My parents rented a house near Leith Hill belonging to two old Miss Wedgwoods. From here my father could drive to Abinger Station and get to his Chambers in time for the day’s work, coming back in the late afternoon. The house was furnished with a good deal more taste than our own and I suppose in a dim as yet unconscious way I was sensitive to such things for the memory of it remains as a peculiarly happy interlude in my life. And besides that the garden was large and led directly into a wooded valley which belonged to the house and of which we had the free run. So that our sacrifice to our father’s honour cost us nothing and I believe we enjoyed those holidays much more than the usual holidays in some distressing seaside lodging house. My father had begun to be interested in me. I was old enough for him to talk to without too much condescension and we often went for long walks over Leith Hill and the neighbourhood. It was in 1877 and the Russo-Turkish War was in full blast, and I remember my father telling me that not only did he hope the Russians would win but he believed firmly that they would because God would not allow a Christian country to be defeated by a Mahommedan one. It was many years before the full enormity of such a statement from a man of my father’s wide knowledge of history and science dawned on me. At the time it appeared perfectly natural and made me an ardent Russophil without having the slightest knowledge of the rights and wrongs of the quarrel. A month or two later when I found myself at Sunninghill preparatory school this conviction, which I was always ready to defend with rapidly improvised arguments, earned me a good deal of unpopularity for, for some reason, all right-minded people were on the other side. I fancy that the real issue for all even for my father was between Dizzy and Gladstone.
Fortunately during our delightful summer at Leith Hill I had no notion of the fate that was in store for me. So that when one day a clergyman Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley came to lunch I did not even wonder why this new acquaintance had turned up, although visitors were for the most part very scarce. After lunch he expressed a wish to see a particular view in the neighbourhood and I was told to show him the way. I suppose that he tried to draw me out during the walk, but I took very little notice of him or of anything he said believing in my incredible innocence of the world that he was just some stray acquaintance to whom my people wished to be polite. He left soon after and then I was called to a private interview with my parents and suddenly the bolt fell—would I like to go to a school with Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley? He was starting a new school at Ascot in a fine country house built by my uncle Alfred Waterhouse—this point was much dwelt upon as being likely to make me feel more at home than in a house built by an unrelated and unknown architect whereas I, who had so often staid at my uncle’s own country house, would be rejoiced to find the same sacred pitch pine boarding everywhere the same gothic windows with stained glass in the W.C. Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley was very fond of boys and there were no punishments. I had no desire whatever to go to school but I answered in the manner that was expected of me that it would be very nice to go to school with the strange clergyman.
And so sure enough in September I went, armed with a silver watch which my father gave me, and a black leather bible which my mother gave me, with many solemn warnings against sin and the assurance that the Bible would always guide me through the difficulties of life.
Now therefore Lady Fry began to receive the first of many schoolboy letters which she kept neatly tied up in little bundles. Many of them are stained with the juice of wild flowers, and still contain withered buds that Roger picked on his walks and sent home to his botanical parents. From the record of paper-chases and school concerts (at one Roger sang “The Tar’s Farewell”), of cricket and football matches, of sermons and visits from missionaries—“We are going to keep a nigger at Bishop Steer’s School. It will cost I believe £60 per ann…. He seems to be getting on well in most things but his character is only fair”—it would seem that he was tolerably happy at school, and was allowed not merely to have his own garden, but to keep pets—among them two active and adventurous snakes. As far as work went he was successful. He was almost at once at the top of the school. And yet there were certain sentences in the letters that might have made his parents uneasy. Bullying there was of course. A certain Harrison and a certain Ferguson “bully me as much as they can, sometimes by teasing, and sometimes by hitting me about … but their favourite dodge is to try and keep me under water and upset me when we bathe”. But he got on well with the boys for the most part, and liked the games and the work. The disquieting phrases concern the masters. Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley had assured the Frys that there were to be no punishments. Yet “there were two fellows flogged yesterday and there is going to be one flogged tomorrow. He was only playing with another boy at dinner.” Again, “the moon-faced boy” had been flogged because he threw some water on to the wall. Again, “Last night Ferguson went to Kynnersley’s room I don’t know what for, but he was found out and I had to dress and go to the Head’s room … Ferguson was so troublesome that Mr Holmes had to hold him down.” As head of the school Roger had to be present at the floggings. He disliked it very much. “I intend to get leave not to bring the boys up to be whipped, as I don’t like it” he told his mother; but the Head said that “it was the business of the captain of the school, but he hoped not to whip anyone”. In spite of these very plain hints that Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley was not keeping his promise, his parents made no effective protest, and the letters continue their chronicle of treats and paper-chases and measles and chilblains and long walks botanising over Cobham Common as if on the whole life at Sunninghill House was quite a tolerable experience. Years later, however, Roger filled out in greater detail the expurgated version of school life that he had given his parents. It begins with a portrait of Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley himself:
Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley had aristocratic connections, his double name was made even more impressive by an elaborate coat of arms with two crests, one the Sneyd the other the Kynnersley, which appeared in all sorts of places about the house and was stamped in gold on the bindings of the prizes. He was a tall thin loose-limbed man with an aquiline nose and angular features. He was something of a dandy. The white tie and the black cloth were all that marked him as a clergyman—he eschewed the clerical collar and coat. But his great pride and glory was a pair of floating red Dundreary whiskers which waved on each side of his flaccid cheeks like bat’s wings. How much satisfaction they afforded him was evident from the way in which during lessons he constantly fondled them distractedly. He was as high church as was consistent with being very much the gentleman, almost a man of the world. But he spoke of respect for his cloth with unction and felt deeply the superiority which his priesthood conferred on him. He was decidedly vain. His intellectual attainments consisted almost entirely in having as an undergraduate at Cambridge belonged to a Dickens society which cultivated an extreme admiration for the great man, and tested each other’s proficiency in the novels by examination papers, from which he would frequently quote to us. He read Dickens aloud to the whole school every evening before bed-time but I do not remember that we ever got beyond Pickwick and Oliver Twist Dickens and Keble’s Christian Year were I think the only books that he brought to my notice during the years I was under him. I doubt if he read anything else, certainly he read nothing which prevented him from being a bigoted and ignorant high church Tory.
He was however genuinely fond of boys and enjoyed their company. He was always organising expeditions—during a cold winter he took the upper form boys for long afternoons skating on the Basingstoke canal—in summer we went to Eton and always we were treated very lavishly with high teas and strawberries and cream. The school was I think a very expensive one but everything was done in good style and the food a good deal better than what I was accustomed to at home.
As the boys came mostly from rather aristocratic homes they were much easier to get on with than those which I met later at a Public school. They had not to the same extent the idea of good form were much more natural and ready to accept things. Altogether my time at Sunninghill House might have been more than tolerable if it had not been for one thing which poisoned my whole life there.
When my parents told me there were to be no punishments it was quite true that the masters never set lines or kept boys in, but as Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley explained to us with solemn gusto the first morning that we were all gathered together before him he reserved to himself the right to a good sound flogging with the birch rod. How my parents who were extremely scrupulous about verbal inaccuracy reconciled it to their consciences to omit this fact I never made out, but I cannot doubt that they knew or else they would have expressed more surprise than they did when later on I revealed the horrid fact to them.
Anyhow the birch rod was a serious matter to me, not that I dreaded it particularly for myself because I was of such a disgustingly law-abiding disposition that I was never likely to incur it. But as I was from the first and all through either first or second in the school I was bound ex officio to assist at the executions and hold down the culprit. The ritual was very precise and solemn—every Monday morning the whole school assembled in Hall and every boy’s report was read aloud.
After reading a bad report from a form master Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley would stop and after a moment’s awful silence say “Harrison minor you will come up to my study afterwards”. And so afterwards the culprits were led up by the two top boys. In the middle of the room was a large box draped in black cloth and in austere tones the culprit was told to take down his trousers and kneel before the block over which I and the other head boy held him down. The swishing was given with the master’s full strength and it took only two or three strokes for drops of blood to form everywhere and it continued for 15 or 20 strokes when the wretched boy’s bottom was a mass of blood. Generally of course the boys endured it with fortitude but sometimes there were scenes of screaming, howling and struggling which made me almost sick with disgust. Nor did the horrors even stop there. There was a wild red-haired Irish boy, himself rather a cruel brute, who whether deliberately or as a result of the pain or whether he had diarrhoea, let fly. The irate clergyman instead of stopping at once simply went on with increased fury until the whole ceiling and walls of his study were spattered with filth. I suppose he was afterwards somewhat ashamed of this for he did not call in the servants to clean up but spent hours doing it himself with the assistance of a boy who was his special favourite.
I think this fact alone shows that he had an intense sadistic pleasure in these floggings and that these feelings were even excited by the wretched victim’s performance or else he would certainly have put it off till a more suitable occasion.
Monday morning thus was always a dreadful time for us. It nearly always resulted in one or two executions but sometimes no sufficient excuse could be found in the reports. Sunday in spite of its leisure and amusements was spoilt for me by the anticipation of next morning’s session and I lay awake often praying feverishly, and nearly always futilely, that no one would get a swishing. But one was never sure not to be called on to assist. One night just as I was going to sleep the Head, as we called Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley, called me to come to his study. We slept in cubicles, sometimes three or four were arranged in a single large bedroom and the Head had overheard one boy say to another “What a bother, I forgot to pump-ship: I must get out of bed”. This indecent talk merited of course a ferocious flogging and my night’s rest was spoilt by the agitation it had put me into. I won’t deny that my reaction to all this was morbid. I do not know what complications and repressions lay behind it but their connection with sex was suddenly revealed to me one day when I went back to my room after assisting at an execution … all ideas of sex had been deeply repressed in me in my unremembered past. I have the proof of that from the fact that I read through the whole of the Bible in the years of my preparatory school without the faintest enlightenment on the subject being borne in upon me even by the smuttiest parts of the Old Testament. Why, you will wonder, did I accomplish this peculiar feat? My mother had so firmly impressed on me the supreme virtue of the act of reading the Bible and of its incomparable prophylactic power that in the inevitable troubles and anxieties of school life I inevitably relied on its help. I managed by waking early to put in one or two chapters every morning before the dressing bell rang. It was a piece of pure fetishism, the longer the amount read the better the chances for the day. Under these circumstances I did not exercise my intelligence or imagination much upon what I read and indeed I had known nearly all of its histories from our Sunday Bible lessons long ago, but still I was not a stupid boy nor wanting in curiosity about some things and I find it hard to explain my total immunity from any understanding of sex.
But whatever the cause, my horror of these executions was certainly morbid and it has given me all my life a morbid horror of all violence between men so that I can scarcely endure any simulation of it on the stage….
You will no doubt long ago have come to the conclusion that Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley was at least an unconscious Sodomite but on looking back I feel fairly convinced that he was not and that his undoubted fondness for boys was due to his own arrested development. He was certainly very vain and his very meagre intellectual culture left him I suspect always with a feeling of slight humiliation among grown-up people. I attribute to that the care with which he got rid of any master of intelligence and supplied his place with imbeciles. It was natural therefore that he felt happiest among boys where he could more than hold his own and whose sense of humour was of his own elementary brand.
Such is his own account of what went on behind the façade of the letters from school. The effect, he thought, lasted all his life. Yet he seems to have borne Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley no ill-will. “I am very sorry for it,” he wrote a few years later when his old schoolmaster died, “as although he never inspired me with much respect he was, I think, kindhearted on the whole.” And Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley must have felt a certain affection for his old pupil; for when he died he left Roger Fry “a nice little copy of some of Arnold’s sermons” in his will.
