Whatever the nature of the gift that can bring before us the green of an apple, the glow of a desk, or the complicated oppositions and harmonies of abstract lines, an increasing number of people came under his spell. His fame as a critic was growing. It is difficult to check that growth; it was not marked, as is usually the case, by honours and appointments. But proofs multiplied of the extraordinary position that he had come to hold among the younger generation of artists and critics. “In so far as taste can be changed by one man,” Sir Kenneth Clark wrote after his death, “it was changed by Roger Fry.” The only other writer with whom he could be compared was Ruskin. “At the time of his death”, Mr Howard Hannay writes, “Roger Fry’s position in the art world was unique, and the only parallel to it is that of Ruskin at the height of his reputation.... The scholars listened to his views on contemporary art because he knew more than they did about ancient art, and artists paid attention to his historical surveys because they illuminated contemporary painting.”
It was thus as a great critic, with something of a prophet’s power to excite and stimulate, that he appeared to those who were best fitted to judge among the younger generation. But Roger Fry had no reason to fear the fate he so often deplored — that he would be canonised during his lifetime. There was something about him, or his views, that still made it very difficult for those in authority to accept him. Of this he had curious proof when in 1927 the Slade Professorship, this time at Oxford, was again vacant, and the electors again rejected him. It gave him, he admitted, “a slight shock of surprise”. He regretted the opportunity it would have given him to formulate some of his theories, and, though the “grand Victorian vice of saving”, which he had not inherited, had given him an independence, a settled income would have been welcome. But he was more amused and interested than distressed. Could it be possible that he was still capable of inspiring fear in the minds of the elderly? “The Oxford electors”, he wrote, “are afraid, Bridges says, of my unreasonableness — as though the real crime weren’t that I’m so scandalously reasonable. But it’s rather pleasant to feel that one’s such a lurid figure... if they only knew what mildness, what caution, what prudent conservatism, what elderly wisdom there was behind this hob-goblin mask of mine how very shamefaced they’d be. But let’s keep the mask on just for the fun of frightening them.” Or was it that the authorities had a keen nose for formulas and had scented out the lack of one in his case? Whatever the reason, he was rejected, and the chief pang it caused him was that once more he had to confess his failure to his mother. The inferiority complex bred by his Victorian upbringing was not, he noted, quite dead yet; witness the fact that when he was past sixty he dreamt of a lion; and when he woke and analysed his dream he identified the lion with Sir Edward Fry and the British public. That showed how terribly he had been suppressed by both, and he was pleased when Dr Martin confirmed him by tracing his visceral neuralgia to the effects of a puritan upbringing— “I always think we ought to show some bad effects of that early training and sure enough here it is”. But though traces of Highgate and Sunninghill returned in dreams, Victorianism was evaporating. Time had changed his relation with his mother. “It’s not to be believed how much she’s changed”, he wrote. He could discuss anything with her, and he delighted in her wit. “It shows what a portentous pressure my father exercised over her”, he remarked. The old restraint had gone and it was “a real pleasure” to talk to her, even though he had to confess once more that the Oxford electors had again rejected him.
VII
But if Oxford rejected him, London accepted him. He found in these years to his amazement that he could fill the Queen’s Hall when he lectured upon art. The winter exhibitions at Burlington House gave him the opportunity. He lectured on Flemish art, on French art, on Italian art; and the hall was filled. The audience, as one of them records, “was enthusiastic and rapt”. It was an astonishing feat. There was the Queen’s Hall, full those winter evenings of greenish mist, echoing with the sneezings and coughings of the afflicted flock. And to entertain them there was nothing but a gentleman in evening dress with a long stick in his hand in front of a cadaverous sheet. How could contact be established? How could the world of spiritual reality emerge in those uncongenial surroundings? At first by “personality” — the attraction, as Mr Hannay says, “of the whole man”. “He had only to point to a passage in a picture... and to murmur the word ‘plasticity’ and a magical atmosphere was created.” The voice in which he murmured was conciliatory, urbane, humorous. It conveyed what was not so perceptible in his writing — the tolerance, the wide experience, that lay behind the hobgoblin mask of the man who had the reputation of being either a crack-brained theorist or the irresponsible champion of impossible beliefs. But as he went on it was clear that the beliefs were still there. Many listeners might have inferred that the lecturer, who looked like a “fasting friar with a rope round his waist” in spite of his evening dress, was inviting them to the practice of a new kind of religion. He was praising a new kind of saint — the artist who leads his laborious life “indifferent to the world’s praise or blame”; who must be poor in spirit, humble, and doggedly true to his own convictions. And the penalty for backsliding was pronounced — if he lies “he is cut off from the chief source of his inspiration”. No Fry among all the generations of Frys could have spoken with greater fervour of the claims of the spirit, or invoked doom with more severity. But then, “Slide, please”, he said. And there was the picture — Rembrandt, Chardin, Poussin, Cézanne — in black and white upon the screen. And the lecturer pointed. His long wand, trembling like the antenna of some miraculously sensitive insect, settled upon some “rhythmical phrase”, some sequence; some diagonal. And then he went on to make the audience see— “the gem-like notes; the aquamarines; and topazes that lie in the hollow of his satin gowns; bleaching the lights to evanescent pallors”. Somehow the black-and-white slide on the screen became radiant through the mist, and took on the grain and texture of the actual canvas.
All that he had done again and again in his books. But here there was a difference. As the next slide slid over the sheet there was a pause. He gazed afresh at the picture. And then in a flash he found the word he wanted; he added on the spur of the moment what he had just seen as if for the first time. That, perhaps, was the secret of his hold over his audience. They could see the sensation strike and form; he could lay bare the very moment of perception. So with pauses and spurts the world of spiritual reality emerged in slide after slide — in Poussin, in Chardin, in Rembrandt, in Cézanne — in its uplands and its lowlands, all connected, all somehow made whole and entire, upon the great screen in the Queen’s Hall. And finally the lecturer, after looking long through his spectacles, came to a pause. He was pointing to a late work by Cezanne, and he was baffled. He shook his head; his stick rested on the floor. It went, he said, far beyond any analysis of which he was capable. And so instead of saying, “Next slide”, he bowed, and the audience emptied itself into Langham Place.
For two hours they had been looking at pictures. But they had seen one of which the lecturer himself was unconscious — the outline of the man against the screen, an ascetic figure in evening dress who paused and pondered, and then raised his stick and pointed. That was a picture that would remain in memory together with the rest, a rough sketch that would serve many of the audience in years to come as the portrait of a great critic, a man of profound sensibility but of exacting honesty, who, when reason could penetrate no further, broke off; but was convinced, and convinced others, that what he saw was there.
VIII
The success of the lectures surprised him. Perhaps he had misjudged the British public. Perhaps in its queer way the public had more feeling for art than he allowed. At any rate there was the fact— “under certain conditions the English public becomes interested in ‘highbrow’ stuff.... Roger Fry had the power of making other people feel the importance of art.... In spite of a complete absence of purple passages or playing to the gallery
he was able to keep his audience at a high pitch of interest and curiosity.” People, drawn from all classes and callings, would fill the Queen’s Hall when he lectured. And not only would they fill the Queen’s Hall — they threatened to fill Bernard Street into the bargain. “I am as usual”, he wrote after one of these lectures, “swamped by telephone calls and people at me all the time. Miss — wishes to know if she may come and look at my Matisse.
Mr — wants advice upon a lot of old masters.... A. wants to borrow my Vlaminck. B. came to consult me about his son’s education as an art student.” And there were the letters — the innumerable letters. One from a schoolgirl ran: “Dear Mr Fry... Our art mistress from school took a party to the Persian art Exhibition and we were attracted in many pictures, to people with their first fingers held to their lips. Also in some designs animals are seen biting each other. If these mean anything, or are symbolical in any way, I should be very grateful if you could tell me. Another thing is, does our common cat originate from Persia?”
He was delighted to answer schoolgirls’ questions. He was delighted to give advice. He would show “hordes of school marms from the U.S.A. armed with note-books seeking information”, round his rooms; and then “a very intelligent young man from Manchester” who was interested in Chinese pottery; and then go on to a committee meeting at Burlington House to arrange the Italian Exhibition; and from that to a committee meeting of the Burlington Magazine; and when he got home in the evening, there was somebody waiting to “ask my advice about getting up a show of Russian ikons”. That was an ordinary day’s work; and it was no wonder that at the end of a season of such days he would exclaim “London’s impossible!”
It was an exclamation that burst forth irrepressibly every year about February or March. It was necessary to escape from London and its attractions and distractions if he was to have any peace at all. And it was equally necessary if he was to continue lecturing. He must fill his cistern from the main source; he must see pictures again, And so he was off — to Berlin, to Tunis, to Sicily, to Rome, to Holland, to Spain and again and again to France. The old pictures must be seen once more; they must be seen afresh. “I spent the afternoon in the Louvre. I tried to forget all my ideas and theories and to look at everything as though I’d never seen it before.... It’s only so that one can make discoveries.... Each work must be a new and a nameless experience.”
His method was the same in his sixties as it had been in his thirties. He went to the gallery as soon as it was opened; for six hours he worked steadily round, looking at each picture in turn, and making rough notes in pencil. When lunch-time came he was always taken by surprise; and always, as in the old days, he compared his impressions with his companion’s, and scribbled his theories down in letters to friends at home. “I’m getting my aesthetic feelings absolutely exhausted with the amount I’ve looked at. I doubt if I’ve ever had such hard work in my life — one’s absolutely driven to it by the wealth of these museums”, he wrote to Vanessa Bell from Berlin in 1928. A long list of pictures seen and noted follows. There was Menzel; there was Liebermann; there was Trubner. There were ‘magnificent Cézannes’; there were Manets. There was Egyptian art; there was the art of Central Asia. Berlin had ten galleries filled with paintings and sculptures and miniatures, whereas the British Museum had only a few cases. Stimulated by all these sights, theories began to form themselves; perhaps too rapidly — perhaps they might have to be scrapped. “In fact I don’t know what I’m getting at at all. All sorts of vague hints at new aesthetics seem to be simmering in my brain....”
It was thus, in front of the pictures themselves, that the material for the lectures was collected. It was from these new and nameless experiences that vague hints at new aesthetics came into being. Then the vagueness had to be expelled; the simmer had to be spun into a tough thread of argument that held the whole together. And after the lecture had been given the drudgery of re-writing the spoken word would begin. The obstinate, the elusive, word had to be found, had to be coined, had to be “curled round” the sensation. And so at last the books came out one after another — the books on French art, and Flemish art and British art; the books on separate painters; the books on whole periods of art; the essays upon Persian art and Chinese art and Russian art; the pamphlets upon Architecture; upon Art and Psychology — all those books and essays and articles upon which his claim to be called the greatest critic of his time depends.
IX
But if, in order to write and lecture, it was necessary to see pictures “as if for the first time”, it was almost equally necessary to see friends. Ideas must be sketched on other people’s minds. Theories must be discussed, preferably with someone, like Charles Mauron, who could demolish them. But even if the friend was incapable of demolishing them, they must be shared. “He was so sociable that he could never enjoy anything without at once feeling the need to share it with those around him”, as M. Mauron says. It was the desire to share, to have two pairs of eyes to see with, and somebody at hand, or at least within reach of the pen, to argue with that made him scribble those letters which it is impossible to quote in full, for they have neither beginning, middle nor end, and are often illustrated with a sketch of a landscape, or with the profile of a sausage-maker’s wife at Royat, or with a few notes to indicate what he was “getting at” in his own picture. But if the letters cannot be quoted in full, here is a complete post-card: “In the train going to Edinburgh. I wonder whether you could send me to Edinburgh I. my béret which is very nice for travelling. 2. Slides of Picasso’s sculptures, those queer birds. They’re in the Vitality series upstairs I think and still all together and on the bureau. 3. A negro head [sketch] the very blank one with no features. It’s in the negro lecture which I left on the old French chest of drawers in my sitting-room. The carriage is scarcely warmed. Damn the English.”
“Damn the English” — the words ceased to apply to the English — was not England the only country where free speech was allowed? But they may serve as a hint that he was not one of those characters who have, as we are told by their biographers, an instinctive love of their kind: His kind often amazed him and shocked him. His eyes, shining beneath the bushy black eyebrows, would fix themselves suddenly, and, looking as formidable as his father the Judge, he would pronounce judgment. “You are bolstering people up in their natural beastliness”, his words to Sir Charles Holmes who had given him, innocently, a book on fishing recall some awkward moments in his company. But if not gregarious he was sociable— “incurably sociable” he called himself. His friends meant so much to him that he would give up the delights of wandering from village to village, from gallery to gallery, in order to be with them. Spring after spring he would exclaim, “I feel very much inclined never to come back to England, just to wander on into Spain and Morocco...”, but the sentence would end, “if you wretches will live in London, then to London I must be dragged back”.
A list of those friends would be a long one. It would include many famous names — the names of painters, writers, men of science, art experts, politicians. But it would include many names that are quite unknown — people met in trains, people met in inns, mad poets and melancholy undergraduates. Often he had forgotten their names; names mattered less and less to him. He went out into society sometimes, but he came back disillusioned. “Your old friend”, he wrote (to Virginia Woolf), “went to that charming Princess... and came back with another illusion gone — he now knows that all aristocrats are virtuous but incredibly boring and refuses to suffer them any more... the said Princess having been his last desperate throw of the net on that barren shore.” After the war his old dream of a society in which people of all kinds met together in congenial surroundings, and talked about everything under the sun, had to be given up. People were too poor, their time was too occupied, and the English moreover had little gift for discussing general ideas in public. Perhaps the best substitute for this society was at Pontigny. He went several times to the sessions there and enjoyed them gre
atly. Of one he wrote:
To Helen Anrep, 7th September 1925
Pontigny broke up to-day.... Saturday was the day when at last Mauron and I had our innings and brought things down from the abstract. I elaborated a good deal on my empiricism, said with what envious admiration I’d watched all those marvellous evolutions “dans l’empyrée de la pensée” but that as an Englishman I couldn’t throw off my “empiricisme”, that however much I wanted to advance “je n’étais capable de quitter le sol que d’un pied a la fois”, and so on which amused them a good deal. Then Mauron read an essay on literary beauty which was by far the most creative and masterly contribution (except perhaps Groethuysen’s Augustine) of the whole “décade”. It was beautifully written, transparently clear, and perfectly developed and full of the most original ideas.... The enthusiasm was so great when he’d finished that everyone applauded wh. they never do in the entretiens. So the scientific spirit really had the last word and a great triumph over the abstractionists and metaphysicians. We two brought the thing out into daylight out of the mist of dialectic ingenuity. The brilliance of these men is simply amazing. Fernandez and Fayard do plays in extemporised Alexandrines or sing songs which they make up from bouts rhythmés given them. One night they had conférenciers who had to lecture for 2 minutes on subjects chosen out of a hat — the subjects are always preposterous. I gave them “the Ichthyosaurus as a precursor of Charlie du Bos”.... Then they did a Music Hall entertainment with acrobats who pretended to do incredible feats and of course did nothing, but the best was Martin Chauffier, a little solemn Breton with a face like a sucking nonconformist minister who had two specialities — Chateaubriand (on whom he read a very good paper) and Charlie Chaplin whom he did to perfection — the feet especially.... Also I liked Fabre-Luce, an exquisitely precise and formal young man — immensely rich, who has written the most brilliant and unpatriotic account of contemporary history.... He told me I looked like Erasmus. Je ne demande pas mieux.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 445
