So they went on seeing pictures in Berlin, Dresden, Amsterdam, Madrid, and at last, with the usual regrets at returning to the land of the Philistines, came home. England among its many drawbacks of convention and climate always meant work — the work of writing and of lecturing, which had to take precedence of painting. He had to make money, and he had to take whatever work offered itself. It came from many quarters and it took him during these years (1900-1906) in many different directions. Now he was lecturing in Glasgow; now painting a Band of Hope banner in Guildford; now helping to build a friend’s house and overseeing workmen; now he was “just back from a wild journey to the Highlands, whither I went to report on two portraits in the house of a Highland laird.... Next week I must go to Paris, Brussels and Ghent.” The words show that his reputation as an expert was growing. He had no great respect for expertise; often enough he said sarcastic things of those who can only like a picture or trust themselves to buy it if assured by an expert that it is “genuine”. But it was fortunate for his purse that such people existed and some of the tasks they set him gave scope for his ingenuity and skill with his hands. “I’ve restored various old masters with a power of imitating various styles which is I suppose a proof that I haven’t one of my own — but it’s vastly intriguing work and brings in some of the increasingly necessary money.” It was exciting to clean a picture that its owner thought worthless and to find “a very good Florentine Madonna and Child underneath”. His visits to Paris and Italy were often on matters of business — flying visits that sometimes led to exciting incidents — one for example that reads something like a sketch for a story by Henry James. At Vienna there was an impoverished nobleman who, forced to part with his family collection, sent for Roger Fry to verify some of the ascriptions. Together they went round the gallery of reputed masterpieces. At each Roger Fry’s heart sank — it was a fake. Each time he had to declare that the Van Dyck or the Raphael or whatever it was called was worthless. And each time the Count remained unmoved. Finally Roger Fry saw unmistakable signs of a well-known forger’s hand and named him. The Count started with surprise. It was true — the man in question had been a friend of the family. The Count himself had always had his doubts. In fact he had always thought the collection a very poor one. And he was so delighted that his taste was confirmed and so impressed by the insight of the expert that, in spite of the fact that the verdict robbed him of a fortune, he was in the best of spirits and so won Roger Fry’s heart “by the perfect simplicity and candour of all his transactions with me... that I gave him a very good dinner and we parted excellent friends”.
Then again there was an experience of the very opposite kind — the discovery in a Venetian palace of two large pictures which the experts rated very low and Roger Fry was positive were in fact by Jacopo Bellini. They were for sale at a ridiculous price if he was right. But suppose he was wrong? He risked it, and wired home for the money. Very generously Sir Edward advanced it; the pictures were bought, packed and sent to London. There “Sidney Colvin fully endorsed all my views about them and considers them as the unique survivals of the great works that Jacopo Bellini did for the Venice Scuolo. But he thinks that the present authorities of the National Gallery will not seriously look at them and he says no one of the Trustees will understand their historical value.” Eventually a sale, though not to the National Gallery, justified his boldness, and his reputation was increased.
What with flying visits to the Continent, what with painting and writing at home his hands were full enough; but he could never resist embarking upon any enterprise that seemed promising. Perhaps the Quaker blood in him was responsible for the ardour with which he threw himself into such crusades. The cause was different but the zeal was the same. And perhaps from some old Eliot or Fry who in bygone days had made a fortune by chocolate-making or shipping he had inherited not only a strong interest in practical affairs but considerable though untrained business ability. Demands were frequently made upon it. There was the Burlington Magazine — in the autumn of 1903 it was in extremis. It had been run on insufficient capital “and with absolutely no business method”. It could not be left to perish; it must be revived and given wider scope. “I believe the only thing to save it is this...” he wrote to Charles Holmes. There followed not only an urgent appeal to Mr Holmes to take the editorship, but the most strenuous efforts on Roger Fry’s part to secure the capital. “On this errand we tramped about London together”, Mr (afterwards Sir Charles) Holmes wrote. “Fry... was simply magnificent. No rebuff could shake his determination to carry the matter through....” Friends were appealed to; millionaires approached. Somehow the money was found; somehow the magazine was started afresh.
The quiet painter’s life was always being interrupted by demands from the other world, the practical and active world where trains start punctually and business men are waiting to keep appointments. Nevertheless, he managed during those years to publish two books — the Bellini (1899) and his edition of The Discourses of Reynolds (1905). A first book is apt to lay a load upon a writer’s vivacity, and this first book seems, to the ordinary reader at least, less vigorous and less characteristic than the articles that were dashed off simultaneously. It is a little elaborate and literary, as if he were still in thrall to the literary associations of pictures, and had not found his own way to his own words. It was successful however — on the strength of it he was made art critic of the Pilot But in the Reynolds he speaks with his own voice. His voice had only to provide an introduction and notes, but it is clear that he found in Sir Joshua not only a great critic — he gave, he said, “the truest account of the function of an art critic that has ever been framed” — but a critic after his own heart. Sir Joshua too was a painter as well as a critic. He too had to fight against “the demands made upon art by the untrained appetites of the public”. He too believed passionately in the importance of art; he too was disinterested and praised the work of contemporaries. In writing of him, Roger Fry praised the qualities he most admired and most wished himself to possess. Indeed, in the last year of his life he wrote, “Looking back on my own work, my highest ambition would be to be able to claim that I have striven to carry on his [Reynolds’s] work in his spirit by bringing it into line with the artistic situation of our own day”. Both books, like many of Roger Fry’s books, increased his reputation, but when the first edition was sold out, there was not enough demand to cause them to be reprinted.
But he was a cool and dispassionate parent of books. He cared very little what was said of them compared with what was said of his painting. And another and more absorbing form of paternity came to him during those years. The doctors no longer forbade the natural wish that both Helen and Roger felt for children; and their first child, a son, Julian, was born in March 1901. It was a very anxious time, but everything went well. “He looks very jolly curled up asleep in Helen’s arms”, he wrote when the baby was born, and though momentarily crippled — he had been thrown riding “with that hippomaniac Goldie” — he was sitting with his wife, sketch-book in hand, preparing to make “innumerable bambini drawings”. Another child, a daughter, Pamela, was born in 1902. For a time it seemed that the centre was safe again, that a happy life with wife and children was assured. “I can never tell you”, he wrote to his mother, “what enchantment and happiness Helen has brought me.” As for the children, “they are really a pure joy to us”, he wrote; and the letters become full of childish stories. Their games, their gifts, their doings — all this fills pages in the letters to Failand. He was an enthusiastic but perhaps a puzzling father. He was determined that his children should not suffer what he had suffered. There was to be no moral censure from their parents; no lack of simple humanity in their upbringing; no floggings when Julian went to school. He was not alarming as his own father had been; but his sympathies sometimes seemed perverse — he could not understand how any boy could like school; he was delighted by any sign of rebellion. And perhaps to reverse the ordinary standards is in its way as alarmi
ng as to accept them. Fortunately, however, the nursery came before school, and in the nursery there were toys — he made a water-wheel from a piece of tin and a hollow parsley stalk; he made a sailing boat— “the first that ever really sailed”; and these, his son writes, “have always been bright stars in my memory and have had associations of joy above all others”. And his daughter of course was given paints and brushes as soon as she could use them, and her childish scribbles were kept by her father, for they suggested “what an astonishing natural gift for art” children have before teaching has ruined them. Then, as they grew older, there were expeditions— “bicycling from Oxford through the Windrush valley to Fairford, walking from Guildford to Canterbury... rowing down the Thames from Oxford to Maidenhead, with anecdotes of Goldie and of Wedd thrown in.... The rare occasions when Roger was able to be with us, or better still to go out with us were very exciting”, his son wrote of those childish days. But inevitably those occasions were rare. There was very little time to spare, however carefully he contrived “to fit things in”. With two children in the nursery it was difficult to travel with his wife in the old way. A cycling tour in France had to take the place of the old rambling journeys through France to Italy and back again to France. The expenses of family life— “I am suffering from suppressed doctors’ bills which are coming out like the measles”, he complained — meant that he was hard pressed to make both ends meet. But for a time happiness returned, the domestic happiness that he had always wanted. There were, he told Lowes Dickinson, two kinds of happiness, one of “tantalising ecstasy”, the other of “comfortable reciprocity”. It was this last that he preferred: “... there’s something infinitely satisfying in the mere mass of affection two people accumulate between them in a number of years of quite close intimacy — but then boredom must never have to be suppressed — with us I feel that it has never begun to occur, but then I’m a lucky one in this at all events and I think I’d rather be fortunate so than have all the other sorts of success”.
That letter was written from London — they had moved to Hampstead (22 Willow Road) in 1903. But the happiness described there was not to last. “It seems”, he wrote to his mother, “as if one never could get free from constant anxiety, as though peace and security always eluded us.” During those years at Hampstead Helen Fry’s health was constantly threatened, and with the children to consider a new load of responsibility fell upon him. Whatever plan the doctors could suggest, he followed out with a devotion that amazed them. He carried on his own work under difficulties that need no description, always hoping that his wife’s health would be restored, always undaunted when once more that hope was shattered. At one time he was tempted to leave England for good, but he had his living to make, and for that London was essential. “The break is too difficult”, he wrote when a scheme for settling in Italy had to be abandoned. “And I must grind on in the old mill.”
III
It was becoming more than ever necessary to find some employment less precarious than journalism upon which he could depend for an income. “I hope that some post like a Slade professorship may fall to my share ultimately”, he wrote in 1902. And in 1904 the Slade Professorship at Cambridge was vacant. He collected the necessary testimonials, and was very sanguine, he told his father, about his chances of success. Many people in the art world, according to those old testimonials, thought that he was “peculiarly fitted for the post”. He appeared to George Prothero, for instance, “to possess an ensemble of qualifications for the duties of a professor of Fine Art which it would be difficult to surpass”. He was, the various witnesses testify, frank and independent; original yet learned; he had a mental and physical energy which were rare; he was an expert and experienced lecturer; and the tendency to over-severity which, in the opinion of Walter Armstrong, was a “debatable point” in his criticism, became a virtue in a professor. In short, there seemed to be considerable agreement among experts that “no critic and historian of Art in England is better fitted for the post than you are”. But he failed, and it was a bitter disappointment. “It is a very serious blow to my hopes”, he wrote to his father (June 1904), “and I find but little consolation in the indignation that the appointment has aroused in Cambridge. I gather that the King expressed a wish for Waldstein’s election, and that Poynter showed a very determined antagonism to me.” The articles in the Athenaeum, he might have reflected, had done nothing to ingratiate him with the President of the Royal Academy. And he minded the failure also because of its effects upon his parents. He had disappointed them again. “I feel”, he wrote to his mother, “that my want of worldly success has caused you more and more anxiety, and that you have felt that it must be my fault. So no doubt in a sense it is, that is that if I were a different kind of person with different ideals, I might have succeeded more conspicuously....” It seemed, he said, “an endless uphill fight” and he needed all the encouragement and sympathy that she could give him. Since he had failed at Cambridge, it was necessary to look elsewhere.
Among the collectors who had employed him to buy for them was the most famous and the wealthiest of them all — Pierpont Morgan. He had not only a great collection of his own, but he was one of the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum at New York. He had already sent Roger Fry to Liverpool to report upon a picture for the New York Gallery, and Roger Fry had already recorded his first impressions of the millionaire. They were mixed. He described him as “the most repulsively ugly man”, “with a great strawberry nose” who behaved “like a crowned head”; but there was no doubt that he was “a very remarkable and powerful man”. Suddenly, while he was still suffering from the disappointment about the Slade, and considering another possibility — that he should become the head of the British School at Rome — the Metropolitan Museum cabled to ask him to sail at once to New York. It was Christmas, and he had to take the next boat, but he decided to go. “I can’t tell you what it is precisely that the Americans want of me,” he wrote to Lady Fry, “but there is no doubt that certain very influential people there are getting disgusted at the way they are being cheated by the London dealers and I think they have pitched on me as a person who might give advice on pictures over here — The chief persons behind all this are the Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of New York which has more funds at its disposal than any other gallery in the world, so that I hardly think I could hesitate about going, much though I dislike rushing off just now.”
This first visit to America was short and crowded with conflicting impressions. He found himself at once much more of a celebrity in New York than in London. Cultivated Americans, he found, had read his Athenaeum articles and had been impressed by them. He was fêted in the most imposing way. The scale of the eating and drinking and speech-making amazed him. He was present at a great banquet of which the toast list remains, illustrated in pencil with portrait heads of some of his fellow guests. He stayed with Pierpont Morgan and was astonished by the luxury of millionaires. He travelled in the great man’s private car tacked on to the end of a private express. It was snowing, and a log fire was lit in the car, which was “fitted up like a private house in the grandest style”. It appeared that they wanted him to become Director of the Metropolitan Museum under Sir Purdon Clarke. The decision was difficult. “There is no doubt”, he wrote to his mother, “that with the immense wealth here and the growing enthusiasm for pictures I should have a very big position, or at least the possibility of making one. I needn’t say that I am tempted to accept. It seems so much better to have a free field for one’s activities and real scope for one’s knowledge than to be for ever browbeaten and snubbed as I am at home. But it’s very difficult to think of making one’s home over here for some years and of course it would mean that.” It would also mean that he was much in contact with Pierpont Morgan, who was “all powerful” at the Museum. And Pierpont Morgan, seen at close quarters, was not altogether prepossessing. “I don’t think he wants anything but flattery”, he wrote home. “He is quite indifferent as to the real
value of things. All he wants experts for is to give him a sense of his own wonderful sagacity. I shall never be able to dance to that tune, so that it is more than doubtful if after all America will come to anything. I must be quite independent in my judgements and behaviour and if Morgan is too great for that we had better part company.... The man is so swollen with pride and a sense of his own power that it never occurs to him that other people have any rights.” The difficulty of submitting to Morgan and the difficulty of transporting his family to America decided him finally to refuse. He told Morgan “quite politely” and Morgan was “very furious”. If proof is needed of the curious power that Roger Fry possessed of charming millionaires even while he enraged them, it is to be found in the fact that he persuaded Morgan in spite of his fury to subscribe a thousand pounds to die Burlington Magazine. He also arranged that though he would not accept the post in New York he would act as buyer to the Museum in Europe. It was a compromise that allowed him to live in England, and there was always the chance that some appointment in England would be given him.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 431
