ROGER FRY: A Biography. Virginia Woolf

Years ago, after one of those discussions upon the methods of the arts which illuminated his long and happy friendship with you, Roger suggested, half seriously, that you should put into practice your theories of the biographer’s craft in a portrait of himself. When the time came for his life to be written some of us who were very close to him, thinking it would have been his wish as well as ours, asked you to undertake it.

I have now begged to have this page to tell you of our gratitude to you for having accepted, and for having brought to completion a piece of work neither light nor easy. As the book is to have no formal preface may I here join with yours our thanks to all those who have allowed the use of letters and pictures in their possession.

MARGERY FRY

Chapter I

Table of Contents

III

Childhood: School

I

“I lived the first six years of my life in the small eighteenth-century house at No. 6 The Grove, Highgate. This garden is still for me the imagined background for almost any garden scene that I read of in books”—thus Roger Fry began a fragment of autobiography. We may pause for a moment on the threshold of that small house at Highgate to ask what we can learn about him before he became conscious both of the serpent which bent down “from the fork of a peculiarly withered and soot begrimed old apple tree”, and of the ‘large red oriental poppies which by some blessed chance” grew in his “private and particular garden”.

He was born on 14th December 1866, the second son of Edward Fry and of Mariabella, the daughter of Thomas Hodgkin. Both were Quakers. Behind Roger on his father’s side were eight recorded generations of Frys, beginning with that Zephaniah, the first to become a Quaker, in whose house in Wiltshire George Fox held “a very blessed meeting, and quiet, though the officers had purposed to break it up, and were on their way in order thereunto. But before they got to it, word was brought them, that there was a house just broken up by thieves, and they were required to go back again with speed … That was in 1663, and from that time onwards the Frys held the Quaker faith and observed certain marked peculiarities both of opinion and of dress, for which, in the early days, they endured considerable persecution. The first of them, Zephaniah, was in prison for three months for refusing to take the oath of allegiance. As time went on the persecution weakened; they had nothing worse to suffer than the “sneers and coldness of their own class”; but whatever they suffered they abode by their convictions consistently. The injunction “Swear not at all” meant that no oaths could be taken, and therefore many professions were shut to them. Some of the Frys added additional scruples of their own. Even the profession of medicine was distasteful to Joseph, the grandson of Zephaniah, because “he could not feel easy to accept payment for the water contained in the medicines he dispensed”. Such scruples—“miserable questions of dress and address”, as Edward Fry came to call them—tormented the weaker spirits and laid them open to ridicule. They vacillated between the two worlds. A coat-of-arms was first engraved and then scratched out; fine linen was ordered and then cut up; one John Eliot fretted himself into the conviction that he ought to outrage eighteenth-century convention by growing a beard. The arts as well as the professions were outside the pale. Not only was the theatre forbidden, but music and dancing; and though “drawing and water-colour painting were tolerated or encouraged”, the encouragement was tepid, for, with some notable exceptions, even in the nineteenth century almost the only picture to be found in a Quaker household was an engraving of Perm’s Treaty with the Indians—that detestable picture, as Roger Fry called it later.

Undoubtedly the Quaker society, as one of its members writes, was “very narrow in outlook and bounded in interests; very bourgeois as to its members”. But the canalising of so much energy within such narrow limits bore remarkable fruit. The story of Joseph Fry is typical of the story of many of the Frys, Since, owing to his scruples, the medical profession was shut to him, “he took to business occupations, and established, or took part in establishing, five considerable businesses which probably proved far more remunerative than the profession which he had renounced for conscience sake”. Hence there came about a curious anomaly; the most unworldly of people were yet abundantly blessed with the world’s goods. The tradesman who lived over his shop in Bristol or in Bartholomew Close was at the same time a country gentleman owning many acres in Cornwall or in Wiltshire. But he was a country gentleman of a peculiar kind. He was a squire who refused to pay tithes; who refused to hunt or to shoot; who dressed differently from his neighbours, and, if he married, married a Quaker like himself. Thus the Frys and the Eliots, the Howards and the Hodgkins not only lived differently and spoke differently and dressed differently from

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