ROGER FRY: A Biography. Virginia Woolf
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