Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  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.

  III

  From Sunninghill and its shrivelled pine trees and dirty heather he went in 1881 to Clifton. The Head Master of Clifton, Canon Wilson, was a very different man from Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley. “One sees him standing there”, an old Cliftonian wrote, “at the plain deal desk where Percival had taught before him, a tall gaunt figure with sweeping beard and shaggy eyebrows, like some Old Testament prophet....” And the inner difference was no less marked than the outer. He was a man of the highest academic distinction, a Senior Wrangler and a Fellow of St John’s, Cambridge. Far from following Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley’s habit of “getting rid of any master of intelligence”, the men he had for colleagues at Clifton were “men of unusual ability and individuality” — men like Wollaston and Irwin, Norman Moor and W. W. Asquith. Clifton itself was “a new type of public School”. In seventeen years it had realised in no small degree John Percival’s vision of a public school which “should be a nursery or seed-plot for high-minded men, devoted to the highest service of the country, a new Christian chivalry of patriotic service”. And Percival’s ideal — an ideal “not only of simplicity, seriousness, modesty and industry but of a devotion to public service”, was also the ideal to which Canon Wilson was now devoting his immense ability and enthusiasm. Clifton, then, was a very different place from Sunninghill. There were no more floggings. The bullies, Harrison and Ferguson, with their red bulbous noses and small red-rimmed eyes, were replaced by quiet and conscientious boys, whose only fault, according to the evidence of the letters home, was that they were too anxious to uphold the public school convention of “good form”. No pet snakes were allowed in Roger’s new study. His messes — he tried unsuccessfully to make omelettes in a machine of his own invention — were objected to by the boy who shared this apartment. “One can hardly do anything for fear of making it less gorgeous ‘to anyone coming in’, as Wotherspon is always saying”, Roger complained. The community of six hundred boys was a highly organised society compared with the rather childish company at Sunninghill. Perhaps the newness of Clifton made it a little self-conscious in its virtues; it had to assert the new standards and to live up to them rather aggressively. The machine was efficient, and Roger Fry seems to have been completely ground down by the machinery. Dutifully and rather perfunctorily he recorded how “a fellow of the name of Reed had won the Short Penpole which came off on Thursday in one of those freezing east winds”; how “Clifton College has won the Ashburton Shield at Wimbledon.... The Eight came back last night... were accompanied by the Gloucestershire Engineer volunteers of which we form a company.... The Captain of the Eight presented the shield to Wilson who made a speech to which Colonel Plank, the Colonel of the Regiment, replied.... The Eight were then chaired to their houses.” There were the usual games and examinations: “Oh that there were no such things as exams. I am sure that they are ruinous to education of the highest kind!” he exclaims, and the usual epidemics of which he had more than his fair share. Missionaries appealed for funds; and “a Mr Johnson obtained £70 for a steamer on Lake Nyanza by an earnest though incoherent and rambling address”. Occasionally a
lecturer caught his attention. “A Mr Upcott lectured on Greek Art and I noticed a curious thing in the photos of the frieze of the Parthenon, namely a rider riding apparently with his back to the horse’s head.” Miss Jane Harrison also lectured upon Greek art and he enjoyed her lecture very much. As for his school work, though his classics and his English were only fair, he did well enough to be among the first twenty fellows in the House in 1882, and found “being in the Fifth very much nicer than being a fag”.

  But his main interest lay in science; and his main pleasure was in the Laboratory. That he “enjoyed immensely”. There he was allowed to carry out experiments of his own. His letters home were largely filled with accounts of these experiments in which his parents were deeply interested— “one was to find out how fast bodies fall by experiment; and another the specific gravity of candle grease.... I got a block of ice from the fishmongers with which I illustrated regelation by cutting it in half with a wire.” He also painted modestly, economically. With penny moist paints and twopenny Chinese white and penny brushes he decorated “two sweet little terra-cotta plates” with pictures of flowers. Flowers picked on half-holidays on the downs and scrupulously given their long Latin names fill a large part — a larger part than games — in the weekly chronicle. At Portishead, where his father in his boyhood had gone botanising, he found “Lithespermum purpureo caeruleum. I must tell you all about it, as it is almost the only important thing that has happened this week.” Often “there is no news since I last wrote” and the letter home has a blank page. Once, it is true, there was a sensation: a boy called Browne who had been “sent up for certain betting transactions” took “a large knife out of his sleeve and stabbed the H.M........He appears to have aimed at his heart but hit him in the right shoulder only escaping an artery by an inch or two...” — a crime which was partly attributed to the works of Miss Braddon “in which he took a sort of horrid delight”.

  But that sensation apart, the terms seem to have dragged along, heavily, respectably, monotonously. The weeks, the days, even the seconds separating him from the holidays are minutely counted and struck off. Whether the fault lay with Roger himself or with the public school system, it is strange how little the presence of men so remarkable as Wollaston and Irwin and Norman Moor and the Head Master himself penetrated his shell; how helplessly he endured a routine which was breeding in him nevertheless a “sullen revolt” against “the whole Public school system... and all those Imperialistic and patriotic emotions which it enshrined”. The hygienic hideousness of the new limestone buildings depressed him still further.

  The shell was broken at last not by a master but by a boy. One day in 1882 his study mate, “an exceedingly prim and conventional schoolboy, the very personification of good form”, tried to express his amazement at a portentous apparition which had been seen in the Lower Fourth. “Words failed him to describe its strangeness — the shock head of hair, the long twisted lank frame, the untidy clothes, and above all a peculiarly crooked gait which made it appear that McTaggart was engaged in polishing the limestone walls of Clifton College as he sidled along their surface.” This description of the small boy who was afterwards to be the famous philosopher John Ellis McTaggart was received with “howls of laughter”. Roger listened, but he did not join in the laughter. “I was already conscious of so deep a revolt against all schoolboy standards that my heart warmed to the idea of any creatures who thus blatantly outraged them. Here, I thought, in one so marked out as a pariah, was a possible friend for me. I deliberately sought him out.... My intuition was more than justified; that ungainly body contained a spirit which became the one great consolation of my remaining years at school, and no Sunday evening walk for all that time was ever shared by anyone but him.”

  This, the first of many such “intuitions”, was among the most fruitful. McTaggart’s friendship was by far the most important event of Roger’s life at Clifton. The influence lasted long after Clifton was over. But the nature of that influence was not plain then, and indeed it was of a peculiar kind. The discussions on those Sunday walks always centred, Roger said, “round Canon Wilson’s Sunday afternoon sermon”. But the centre itself was scrupulously respected. For “by the exercise of an extraordinary intellectual dexterity McTaggart never allowed me to suspect that he was already an atheist and a convinced materialist”. The astonishingly precocious boy, who had “absorbed and accepted the whole of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy” before he came to Clifton, must have perceived that his Quaker friend was by no means ripe for such revelations. The same disposition which made him argue that “being for a time an inmate of a Christian school he owed it a debt of loyalty which forbade any criticism of its tenets” led him also to respect his friend’s traditions and conventions. Whatever Roger’s latent revolt may have been, it was still deeply hidden.

  He was outwardly pious and even priggish. He accepted the religious and political opinions of his family unthinkingly. He still asked his mother to pray for him, prayed devoutly himself, and “knows that God will help me”. He exclaimed: “Is it not a pity about Bradlaugh being returned again by those wretched Northampton shoemakers?” and thinks “the explosion at Westminster” inexcusable in England “where the people have so large a share in the country’s government”. He still went as a matter of course with his family to Meeting on Sunday. Such opinions and pieties were not directly combated on those Sunday walks. Nevertheless, the discussions were speculative; the talk ranged over “every conceivable subject, from Rossetti’s painting, the existence of which he revealed to me, to the superiority of a Republic over a Kingdom”. Clearly, though McTaggart carefully avoided certain subjects, and was “delicately scrupulous never to let me feel my own inferiority”, he was stimulating Roger Fry as none of the Clifton masters stimulated him. He was making him think for himself and suggesting the possibility of asking innumerable questions about things hitherto unquestionable.

  Roger’s parents were soon aware of this. There was something in that ungainly boy that roused their suspicions. He looked, a sister remembers, “with his ill-fixed head and his inordinate length of body, like a greatly elongated tadpole”. His views were equally distasteful. “I am very sorry you were disappointed in McTaggart,” Roger wrote to his mother after the visit, “though I do not feel so sure that you would be if you could see him alone as I do. He is whatever his views and manners may be one of the most thoughtful and conscientious boys I know, and one who struggles to have a good influence.” Two or three years later, when they were both at Cambridge, Roger was still trying to lay his parents’ suspicions; and the words are worth taking out of their place, not for what they reveal of McTaggart but for what they reveal of Roger Fry. Lady Fry had again expressed anxiety about McTaggart’s influence. Roger answered: “I suppose you have forgotten that I once told you of McTaggart’s freethinking propensities as I thought I ought to, although I know he does not like them talked about nor is he anxious to talk on those subjects which relate to it. Indeed at Clifton I know he felt himself under a sort of obligation not to talk to fellows upon these subjects. I am very sorry if my friendship should be a cause of anxiety to you, as I feel he is a fellow of really fine character in many ways, and I know Wilson thought so too. I have often wished and prayed that he might be convinced of what we believe to be the truth, but I do not think that his want of Christianity ought to debar me from a friendship from which I believe that I have derived much good — though of course that friendship can never be of the very highest kind. I confess I do not feel that there is any danger to my own Christianity from this companionship, as I hope my Christianity is not so weak a structure as [not] to stand the proximity of doubt.”

  That letter was written from rooms which he shared with McTaggart at Cambridge in 1885. It serves to show that in spite of Sunday walks in which they speculated about everything under the sun, Roger must have been, as he admits, “portentously solemn and serious” at Clifton with no notion “of any but the most literal directness of approa
ch” — a weedy boy, with a retreating chin and spectacles hiding the bright large eyes, who behaved decently, hid his latent antagonism under a deep surface of conformity, and attracted no particular attention from the masters who taught him. Nobody seems to have guessed that he had any particular gifts or tastes of his own. Canon Wilson, it is true, had “no special gift or appreciation of poetry, nor indeed of any of the arts”. But Canon Wilson had at once recognised McTaggart’s genius. He knew that McTaggart and “a friend” discussed his sermons on their Sunday walks. But though he valued McTaggart’s opinion, and treated him as an equal rather than as a pupil, Roger Fry was only McTaggart’s friend. He seems to have made no impression upon the Head Master or upon any of the masters. His bent, if he had a bent, seemed to both purely scientific. It was taken for granted that he was to study science at the University; the only question was which University it was to be. Mr Jupp was in favour of Oxford. But for some reason the thought of Oxford roused Roger to express himself more outspokenly than was common with him then. “How long will it take for me to convince him [Mr Jupp] that I intend to go to Cambridge and that scholarships are not the only aims of one’s life, or at all events of mine, though my getting one may be part of his aims and I expect it is”, he wrote. Wilson himself was not only in favour of Cambridge but in favour of King’s. “He says I shall not be swamped as I might be at Trinity, and that the set is he believes extremely nice.”

  So Cambridge it was to be, and in December 1884 he went up to try for a scholarship at King’s. He found himself lodged in a queer little garret looking across at King’s over the way. At once, in spite of the impending examination, his spirits rose and he began to enjoy himself enormously. The door opened and in came a gyp with an invitation from Mr Nixon to breakfast with him. “So I went rather in fear and trembling to his rooms.” But Mr Nixon was not in the least formidable. He was a “very jovial and queer little man” who had only one hand, squinted and wore very extraordinary spectacles. And he was very kind and amusing and explained that he was a friend of Smith’s. Then Roger went to his examination and feared that he had done very badly— “they set the life history of the Chara instead of the moss and unfortunately I could not do it”. However, Mr Nixon asked him to come and have tea after Chapel, and other friends turned up, “so you will perceive that I am doing pretty well considering how few people I know”. In spite of his foreboding he was successful. On 22nd December 1884 Lady Fry at Failand received a telegram which she put with the other letters from school.