But when he first set up house in Beaufort Street, perhaps Harris was more important to him than the New English Art Club. Harris certainly plays a far larger part in his letters than Mr Gladstone or the Home Rule Bill. Harris was the maid-of-all-work supplied by Lady Fry. Harris was a woman of sensibility. When left alone Harris took rather more drink than was good for her; when remonstrated with, Harris’s feelings were hurt, and when her feelings were hurt, Harris was incapable of cooking dinner. This was a serious matter, because Roger Fry was naturally hospitable. Now that he had a studio of his own, and not merely a room with a gas fire at the top of his parents’ house, friends came crowding to see him.^ The old Cambridge friends came of course; Lowes Dickinson read aloud the play there that he had written in the untidy attic in Paris. But the old Cambridge circle was being considerably enlarged. Mr Bernard Shaw came, and talked delightfully, but refused to eat a delicious risotto cooked by Roger himself because “he detected a flavour of animal gravy in it”. Family friends came — among them Mrs Crackanthorpe, who looked at his pictures and said: “I ought to write up large on my walls ‘Do not take pains’ “ — a criticism with which he agreed; and then she carried off some of those too laboured canvases to show to Mr Ouless, R.A. And the argument, the everlasting argument, now that it was no longer necessary to plot the destruction of society in secret, raged fiercely in the studio at Beaufort Street. “When late one night Daniel [Sir A. M. Daniel] left”, Mr R. C. Trevelyan writes, “Roger accompanied him the whole way down King’s Road to Sloane Square Underground Station, and as the discussion was not yet finished, we all three walked the whole way back to Beaufort Street, and then back to Sloane Square again.” The subject of the argument has disappeared. It may have been, according to the evidence of the letters, “on the methods of the old masters and whether they can be combined with truth to nature to which modern people have become accustomed”; or it may have been about the Old Masters and the failure of the Impressionists to absorb their meaning — a subject, according to Alfred Thornton, upon which Roger Fry at this time used to carry on vigorous arguments with Henry Tonks. Or again it was likely with R. C. Trevelyan as a house-mate that the argument turned upon poetry. Through Robert Bridges, who had married a cousin, Roger had read some of Gerard Hopkins’s poems in manuscript, and was at once convinced and must convince Bob Trevelyan that here was a great poet, a far greater poet than Tennyson. “I’ve got some manuscript poems by Gerald Hopkins which would make you tear your hair. Look at this: T caught this morning, morning’s minion king’ “, etc. From Tennyson to Gerard Hopkins — that may serve as a landmark or as a mind mark, too.
Whatever the subject of those arguments, there is plenty of evidence that Roger Fry was, as R. C. Trevelyan writes, “a tireless and obstinate disputant” — on one side of the garden wall. But the garden wall had another side, and so too, it seems, had Roger Fry. On the other side of the garden wall lived Ricketts and Shannon, and the great mulberry tree, whose branches overhung the wall, brought about meetings. “Once every year,” Mr Trevelyan writes, “when the mulberries were ripe, Ricketts sent us a courteous invitation to come to tea and eat our share of the mulberry vintage. The ceremony, though outwardly friendly enough, was apt to be rather formal and constrained because Roger and Ricketts did not really like each other. Roger was still very much of a Quaker in temperament and tone of mind, though quite emancipated from Quaker puritanism, and he was inclined to be irritated by the somewhat irresponsible dogmatism of Ricketts’s talk.” But that irritation was concealed, it appears, and the “tireless and obstinate disputant” of the studio was silenced. He seemed to Sir William Rothenstein, who met him on the Ricketts and Shannon side of the wall, to be “very much what he was when he first came to Paris — shy, rather afraid of life, painting in the manner of the early English water colour painters”. And the discrepancy is interesting — it shows that there were two Roger Frys; one who had been trained at Cambridge to reason and was quite able to hold his own in argument with McTaggart and Lowes Dickinson, and another who was still inclined to be shocked by what he called “rampant and flamboyant Bohemianism.. who was very diffident in the presence of painters, and who felt vaguely that if he could paint he would paint differently from the artists of his own generation.
There was a further characteristic that struck many people at that time and later. “He sat at Ricketts’s feet”, said Sir William Rothenstein. Mr Edgar Jepson, the novelist, uses the same words. “He sat at Selwyn Image’s feet”— “a pleasant gushing young fellow,” he called him, “and rather an ass. I never dreamt that he would grow up the Father of British Painting”- Sitting at other people’s feet was certainly a characteristic. Roger Fry had a great capacity all his life for laying himself open, trustfully, optimistically, completely to any new idea, new person, or new experience that came his way. But with it was combined another characteristic — when he had sat long enough at those feet to see where they led, he would get up and go off, sometimes in the opposite direction. This rare combination — the capacity to accept impressions implicitly and then submit them to the test of reason — made him the most stimulating of critics. But it was a gift that puzzled, and sometimes distressed his friends and colleagues. It led, as Alfred Thornton noticed, “to a certain restlessness and tendency to secede from societies to which he belonged and to found others, each to be abandoned in its turn”. Roger Fry did not regret it; he was often to maintain that it is only by changing one’s mind that one can avoid the prime danger of becoming either a fossil or a figurehead.
He seems, then, in those years at Beaufort Street to have sampled many groups but to have attached himself to none. He was always being driven by the range of his own interests and the activity of his mind to explore beyond the walls of the studio. The art of painting and its connection with the other arts was a subject that had already interested him when he was a student at Julian’s. He went to a great many concerts, and he read a great deal of poetry. There would burst into the studio, to take one instance, “a man who has lived in Italy for eight years translating Dante into Spenserian verse” which he proceeded to shout by the canto. “But the really extraordinary thing is that it is quite good... a few little tips which I had second hand from Bridges” threw him into a wild state of excitement “and made him perspire all over his bald head.” Then there was science. Science had been supplanted by painting; but it was dormant, not dead. Science was still the great bond between him and his father. He still discussed scientific problems with him, and would still gather some rare flower for Sir Edward to dissect on his cycling jaunts into the country. He continued to be interested in Psychical Research. Mrs Piper and her revelations were then exciting a good deal of discussion. He spent a week-end with Shadworth Hodgson and summed up the result of their arguments in a letter to his parents. “There does seem”, he wrote to his mother, “some reason to think that there are spirits and that they exist in luminiferous aether. They all find it a much pleasanter place than this, but apparently they are still rather confused as to their whereabouts.... It is much the most rational and collected account I have heard.” Then again medicine and its problems fascinated him. A new drug might always contain some magic property. His own colds and influenzas lent themselves to interesting theories and experiments. “Little tips” that he had discovered were always being handed on to his family. His charwoman had cured her husband of indigestion by putting isinglass in his tea — might it not be worth while for Lady Fry to try the same cure upon Sir Edward?... Undoubtedly, sitting at other people’s feet, whether they were the feet of art experts or of psychical researchers or of old charwomen with a hoard of nostrums under their black bonnets, was a characteristic, endearing to some, in its innocency; irritating to others, the sign of something fantastic, flighty, gushing, in his character. At any rate, it meant that his days were packed full of different things. In Beaufort Street, as at Cambridge, the old complaint recurs; life is too full of different possibilities and interests. “
I sometimes think”, he wrote, “that I shall have to get a disguise and give out that I’ve gone abroad so as not to hurt people’s feelings by not spending all one’s time rushing about.”
All these different, sometimes conflicting, interests and activities may have interfered with that absorption in art, that isolation and concentration which, as he was often to remark, the great artists, like Cézanne, have found essential. To the critic, however, a richer, or a more varied diet, may be helpful. And circumstances were forcing him to become a critic. He was finding his allowance insufficient, and to write notes upon current art for the various weeklies was the obvious way of adding to it. There are frequent references to articles in the letters from Beaufort Street. Indeed, according to Sir William Rothenstein, he was already “an admirable writer”. His writing never satisfied him; there was nothing plastic about it; pen and ink, were meagre tools compared with brush and paint. But his mind was stored with ideas and arguments, and editors were ready to accept notes and half columns, reviews of books and reviews of picture shows, if not more serious contributions. Pages torn from the Athenaeum and the Pilot began to accumulate and to be thrown into table drawers. In October 1893 there is reference to a more ambitious article upon Impressionism intended for the Fortnightly. He tried to explain that “painting is not mere representation of natural objects”. But the Fortnightly refused it, and he turned to another method of making a living, and one that was more congenial to him.
“Berry wants to try me as an Extension lecturer upon art”, he wrote in 1894. He had already some experience as a lecturer — he had lectured to the boys in his study at Clifton with a block of ice in front of him; and he had lectured staying down at Yattendon with his cousins, the Bridges, when there was an explosion and the electric machine went wrong. But this was his first attempt at lecturing upon art, and though Berry said that his manner “was not assured enough”, it was a success. He went on to give a course at Cambridge on Leonardo da Vinci. Then Eastbourne applied for a course upon Italian art. Brighton followed suit. Very soon he was saying, “It is curious how my lecturing has caught on”. He was even complaining that though his lectures cost him very little trouble compared with his painting, they were much more successful. Lecturing was at any rate preferable to writing, and more congenial to him. The audience stimulated him, and the picture on the screen in front of him helped him to overcome the difficulty of finding words; he improvised. He had, too, natural gifts — a beautiful speaking voice, and the power, whatever its origin, to transmit emotion while transmitting facts. But he had to develop a technique, and the practical difficulties were at first very great. It was essential that his lectures should be illustrated, and it was difficult in those days to come by illustrations. He had to send to Italy for photographs and to have them made into slides. Then there were long journeys to remote places — often he went without dinner, was nearly frozen in his third-class railway carriage by the time he reached Dunfermline or Aberystwyth, and then found that no arrangements had been made and he had to set to work to rig up a screen, a light and a reading-desk himself. But he liked his audiences, and even if they wrote him papers too full of “gush about the fair city of Florence and the slopes of the Apennines”, he found them eager to learn. He was always discovering, to his great delight, someone in some out-of-the-way place who “is really keen about art”. He enjoyed, too, looking out of the train window, for a new landscape was almost as important to him as a new friend. Nor was he yet as positive as he later became that Suffolk is the only county in England worth looking at.
As a lecturer he was undoubtedly successful; but he was not successful as a painter, and his painting mattered far more to him than his lecturing. As a painter he complained that he did not seem “to fit in anywhere”. He was painting in the manner of the early English water-colour painters when his contemporaries were painting in the manner of the Impressionists. When he succeeded in getting a picture hung — a portrait of Mrs Widdrington — it seemed to him “old-fashioned.... I fear it is not very original or up to date — more like a reminiscence of Gainsborough than anything.” A fellow artist told him that he was “much too Old Masterish — it seems quaint for me to be an old fogey, but I see that it is a possible danger”. Critics to whom he showed his work took different views of it. “Steer has been round and I think likes my work more than before, but it is difficult to find out quite what he thinks. Powles has also been round....” And Powles of course said the very opposite of Steer. For reasons which he gave later in his “Retrospect” {Vision and Design), he found himself “out of touch with his generation as a painter”. And it followed that he found it very difficult to show his pictures, let alone to sell them. “I have had a great disappointment over the N.E.A.C.”, he wrote (November 1893), “which chucked all but Mrs Schiller and skied that. I am very sore about it, as I honestly think it is not a fair judgment and am backed up in that view by Bate and others....” Again, “I sent two things to the New Gallery with the usual result”. Success, he wrote to his mother, “seems to take a long time coming, but that chiefly troubles me in so far as it concerns you”. He did not like taking an allowance from his father, who had many claims upon him, and yet, though friends were very kind in commissioning portraits — the Pearsall Smiths, the Palgraves and the Bridges all gave him commissions, and he added to his income by taking a pupil, a Frenchman who improved his vocabulary — he was finding it very difficult to make both ends meet-
But he was right in saying that he felt his failure chiefly because it affected his parents. He had no doubt that he had found out “what to do”; he never regretted Cambridge or a scientific career. Particularly he was free to travel — indeed, his growing success as a lecturer made that great pleasure a necessity. He went to Antwerp and to Lille in order to see Rubens. There was another visit to Italy, partly in order to hunt up photographs for his lantern slides, partly in order to see pictures for a book on Bellini that was taking shape. “Daniel is talking so incessantly about the various ascriptions of pictures we have been to see that I am unable to concentrate”, he wrote (to Basil Williams, 20th October 1894).
We work here at the galleries all day long and read Morelli all the evening, and I am really getting a grip on Italian art such as I have never had before and I hope my lectures will be the better for it though I don’t see how in the least to convey what I have learnt in words. On the whole I am coming to the conclusion that the general level of painting in the 15th century was not very high. There was a batch of great men at the beginning, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca and Pisanello, and then no one first rate till Leonardo da Vinci. Also that on the whole the Florentines were a prosaic and rigidly scientific lot. I am trying very hard to see why Raphael is so great but he still leaves me cold and untouched.
And so to Prato and Pistoia and Parma and the works of Correggio. “... I am immensely excited by him. He seems to me almost the greatest painter of all the Italians. I know that I have felt that at random times of two or three others so you won’t think much of it”, he wrote home to his mother. Then it was necessary to go to Paris, to see the Salon and the work at the Louvre, “which seems to me finer every time I see it and to have more of importance especially in Italian art than our National Gallery”. He was beginning to know France itself, not merely Paris and the Louvre, but the villages, the rivers and the inns — France as it is known to the cyclist with a map in his pocket and an easel strapped to the back of his machine. There were expeditions at Easter and in the summer to little French villages — Sassetot-le-Mauconduit, Giverny, La Roche Guyon; visits to the English colony at Vetheuil, where he met Conder and admired the beautiful Miss Kinsellas; and there D. S. MacColl was staying too, and noted Roger Fry as “a modest youth worried because his painting would never look ‘artistic’ “ He missed seeing Monet, but he saw the poplars on the Ept with Alfred Thornton, who records “but despite the glamour of it all Fry was continually in doubt” — about the Impressionists, it seems; and once Jane Ha
rrison was of the party, and they cycled together, and he delighted in her “ribald spirit” and her “really Apostolic mind” whilst her enthusiasm for “collecting idiotisms” helped him to a greater fluency in his own speech. Indeed, he fell in love not only with France but with the French language, and teased his friends by sprinkling both talks and letters unnecessarily with French words.
Back in Chelsea he filled up whatever crannies of time were left over after his articles were written, his lectures prepared and his pictures laboriously finished, with another activity. It came naturally to him to use his hands — they were broad, supple and sensitive. While he talked he was always doing something with his fingers. Now his friends gave him work. McTaggart asked him to design furniture for his rooms at Cambridge. Another friend, Bertie Crackanthorpe, the writer, asked him to decorate his house. Thus began his long connection with “little men in back streets”, house painters and carpenters, with whom he began to grapple with practical problems — cost; material; design and construction. And then when he had surmounted these problems and the house was finished, Bertie Crackanthorpe must go and ruin the design — white walls and a black dado — by hanging up photographs. How to reconcile the carpenter and the client was a problem that was to become familiar to him later. Meanwhile his father’s words about being a jack-of all-trades and master of none recurred to him, or, as he put it, “I sometimes feel tempted when I am in a cowardly mood to think that I’ve cut off a bigger chunk of life than I can chew.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 427
