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 Jesuat” 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.
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 scient
ist. 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.”
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 420
