Virginia woolf biography of roger fry artisan

Roger Fry Roger Fry, painting en plein airStudland Woolf's "Biographies" Roger Fry. But it was also obvious that he himself was overwhelmed by the multiplicity of new friends, new ideas, new sights. If he could have stopped as he ran about Cambridge "I have no black gloves and I do not wear a hat", he told his mother to single out which of the three came first, perhaps he would have chosen the third the sights.

It seemed as if his eyes always on the watch for beauty but hitherto often distracted by alien objects had opened fully at Cambridge to the astonishing loveli- ness of the visible world. After the shrivelled pine trees of Ascot and the limestone buildings of Clifton, the beauty of Cambridge was a perpetual surprise. The letters are full of exclamations and descriptions "I have hardly seen anything more lovely than the view from King's Bridge looking down the river when the sunset glow.

He rowed up the river in a whiff with Lowes Dickinson to watch the sunset effects "and Dickin- son ran into a bank of reed and was upset". He noticed the light on the flat fields and the willows changing colour and the river with the grey colleges behind it. He listened, too, sitting with Lowes Dickinson in Fellows Buildings, to the nightingales singing to one another all the evening.

He borrowed a tricycle and began to explore the Fens. Blank pages of letters are often filled with drawings of arches arid the windows of churches discovered in the little Cambridge villages, Gradually, his interest in the college boat faded away, and Sir Edward's fear that Roger would have to cox the University boat proved unfounded. Soon the faces and the voices of his friends become more distinct to him.

He refers to papers that he read himself or heard others read. After Dickinson's paper on Browning's Christmas- Eve and Easter-Day, "the discussion", he says, "turned on whether an universal desire for immortality was any proof of its truth 5 '. But he was reticent in what he reported of these arguments to his parents. They kept an anxious eye upon his morals, his virginia woolf biography of roger fry artisan and his behaviour.

Some of his new literary tastes were not to their liking. He had to apologise for having left a copy of Rossetti's poems at home. His sisters had read it. I did not read it nearly all through and did not come across any that were bad. Maurice's curates once and has a great admiration for him". Yet Edward Carpenter's visit to Cambridge created a great impression.

He discussed the universe with the under. Later, with Lowes Dickinson he went to stay with Carpenter at Millthorpe. The manner of life here is very curious and quite unlike anything I ever saw before, but I have not seen enough yet to form any opinion He became interested in Ashbee's social guild, had a "Toynbeeast" to stay with him; and felt vaguely that a new era was dawning and that England was on the road to ruin.

The riots in London November made him "hope that it won't come to much because then one would have to make up one's mind what position to take up, which of all things is the most objectionable to me". And when Lady Fry expressed some uneasiness that his mind was not "made up", he replied: "I am sorry you were troubled because I said that I had not made up my mind about social questions.

But then one has to consider such an enormous number of facts and it is so hard to get at them truly, and even given the facts it is so difficult to get into a sufficiently unbiassed frame of mind that I really think I may be excused if I say that I should like to wait a great deal longer before I commit myself practically to any one theory of the State.

I hope", he concluded, "that mere differences of opinion which are after all only very. It became, as the terms went on, increasingly difficult to describe his life at Cambridge to his parents. In replying to his parents, stress had to be laid upon scientific work "I am getting very swell at cutting sections with razors. I enclose with this a specimen of the true oxlip Primula elatior Jacq.

But it was not the work in lecture-rooms or in laboratories that was most important to him. It was his talk with his friends. Lowes Dickinson, the young Fellow of King's, had quickly become the most important of those friends. All one hot moonlit night they sat and talked "while a great dome of pale light travelled round from West to East and the cuckoo and the nightingale sang", and for a few hours "we cared only for the now which is the same thing as being eternal".

His new friends were forcing him to take stock of the vague religious and political beliefs which he had brought with him from home and from Clifton. All questions were discussed, not only Canon Wilson's Sunday sermon; nor was there any need to circle round the centre. His creed, he noted afterwards, had dropped from him without any shock or pain so far as he was concerned.

His new friends were as respectful of the scientific spirit and as scornful of the sentimental or the effusive as Sir Edward himself. But they submitted not merely mosses and plants to their scrutiny but politics, religion, philosophy. So one may Infer from a description given by Mr E. Benson of a certain evening party in Oscar Browning's rooms.

The host him- self pedalled away at the obeophone; "Bobby and Dicky and Tommy" strummed out a Schumann quintet; the President of the Union played noughts-and-crosses with a cricket blue, and in the midst of the racket Mr Benson observed "a couple of members of the secret and thought- ful society known as 'The Apostles' with white careworn faces, nibbling biscuits and probably discussing the ethical limits of Determinism".

The names are not given, but it is possible that one of those thoughtful young men was Roger Fry himself. For in May he confided to his mother: "I have just been elected to a secret society not dynamitic though it sounds bad commonly known as The Apostles it is a society for the discussion of things in general. It was started by Tennyson and Hallam I think aboutand has always considered itself very select.

It consists of about six members. McTaggart and Dickinson belong. It is rather a priding thing, though I do not virginia woolf biography of roger fry artisan whether I shall like it much. It is an extremely secret society, so you must not virginia woolf biography of roger fry artisan it much. But he refused, because he thought it "not worth the very big subscription".

He had no doubts about joining the other society, even if he doubted whether he would enjoy it. Soon the only doubt that remained was whether he was worthy of the honour. Since I last wrote [he continued a few days later] I have been partially initiated into the society I mentioned before, Le. I have seen the records which are very interesting containing as they do the names of all the members which includes nearly everyone of distinction who was at Cambridge during the last 50 years.

Tennyson I think I told you is still a member and. Thomson the late Master of Trinity, Baron Pollock, Lord Derby, Sir James Stephen, Clerk-Maxwell, Henry and Arthur Sidgwick and Hort are all or have been members, so that I feel much awed by thus becoming a member of so distinguished and secret a society it has a wonderful secret ritual the full details of which I do not yet know but which is highly impressive.

The most awful thing is that on June 22nd there is a grand dinner at Richmond at which Gerald Balfour is President and I woe is me as being the newest member am Vice- President and I have to make a speech. I suppose that theoretically it is very wrong of me to tell you all this but you must tell no one but father. I am afraid you will think all this rather absurd but I am rather delighted to have been elected though I know I am far below the average of members and was really chosen because they did not happen to know of anyone else so suitable.

And now to turn to the awful Tripos. It was undoubtedly "a priding thing" to be elected a member of that very select, very famous and very secret society. No election to any other society ever meant so much to him. And "the most awful thing" the speech at Richmond was a success. They laughed at Ms jokes; Gerald Balfour paid him a compliment on his speech; and after dinner with eight others he rowed down the river to Putney, which was reached about two in the morning.

So, it would seem, the Apostles were not quite so white and careworn as they looked to outsiders. The meetings led to friendships and the friendships led to boating parties. Lowes Dickinson has described one of them:. We four [he wrote], that is McTaggart, Wedd, Fry and myself, used at this time to row down the Thames from Lech- lade to Oxford at the close of the summer term and those few days were a wonderful blend of fun and sentiment.

He could not row, of course, but we made him do so. He read aloud or quoted Dickens, whom he knew almost by heart. The long stretches choked with rushes and reeds above Oxford; Abingdon, where we could pass the night and lie in the hay by the river; the wonderful wooded reach between Pangbourne and Maple Durham; the Hill at Streetley which we climbed at sunset; the locks with their roaring water; teas in riverside gardens; a moonlight night at Shipley; the splendid prospect of Windsor and ices in the famous tuck shop; it all lingers still in my mind after forty years, and the ghost of McTaggart rises up inspiring and en- chanting it all, witty, absurd, sentimental, adorable.

It was a society of this kind then the society of equals, enjoying each other's foibles, criticising each other's characters, and questioning everything with complete freedom, that became the centre of Roger Fry's life at Cambridge. The centre of that centre was the weekly meeting when they read papers and, as Roger told his mother, "discussed things in general The records are private; yet it is permissible, judging from the names of the members and their future fame, to suppose that the subject of Roger Fry's first paper, "Shall we Obey?

There is no evidence, apart from McTaggart' s early reference to Rossetti and from one visit in his company to the Royal Academy, that the young men who read so many books and discussed so many problems ever looked at pictures or debated the theory of aesthetics. Politics and philosophy were their chief interests. Art was for them the art of literature; and litera- ture was half prophecy.

Shelley and Walt Whitman were to be read for their message rather than for their music. Perhaps then, when Mr Benson talks of the pallor of the Apostles, he hints at something eyeless, abstract and austere In their doctrines. Often In later life Roger Fry was to deplore the extra- ordinary indifference of the English to the visual arts, and their determination to harness all art to moral problems.

Among the undergraduates of his day, even the most thoughtful, the most speculative, this indifference seems to have been universal. His own interest in abstract argu- ment was so keen that the deficiency scarcely made itself felt then. But as his letters show, even while they argued his eye was always active. He noticed the changing lights on the willows, the purple of the thunderstorm on the grey stone of the colleges, the sunset lights on the flat fields.

Many half-sheets are filled with careful archi- tectural drawings. He was sketching a great deal. At Cambridge indeed he began to paint in oils his first picture was it seems a portrait of Lowes Dickinson. And pictures themselves were becoming more and more important. He bicycled over to Melbourne, where Miss Fordham showed him her "really very wonderful collec- tion.

He began to add lectures upon art to his lectures upon science; he went to meetings of the Fine Arts Society in Sidney Colvin's rooms, and records how a scientific experiment that he was making was interrupted by "a huge discussion on the nature of art with an old King's man who is up". Indeed, as the years at Cambridge went on, art was more and more frequently interrupting science.

In Novem- ber there was an important exhibition of pictures at Manchester. Roger Fry left Cambridge at 3. It certainly was a somewhat fatiguing affair [he wrote], as of course one could not get much accommodation at the price, but the pictures were a sight worth all the trouble. I do not remember seeing so interesting a collection bar the Nat. I had got a catalogue beforehand and selected those pictures which I wanted to see so that I did not waste any time.

I was as much delighted with some of Walker's things as almost anybodys, and Madox Brown another artist one rarely sees anything of was well represented. There are some lovely Prouts but some of Sir David Roberts' small architectural drawings delighted me as much as anything in the way of un- finished sketches. As you despise Burne Jones and Rossetti and I have a somewhat similar feeling for Edwin Long I fear it will not be much use my "enthusing" about the pictures I liked best.

I was surprised to find how good some of Millais' earlier work is, making me still more deplore things like the "Dying Ornithologist" and the "North West Passage". I was very much delighted with Sir Frederick Leighton's "Daphnephoria". I do not know whether you ever saw it, an enormous picture of a Theban chorus of victory. Holman Hunt was very poorly represented, but A.

Hunt's water colours were very magnifi- cent and there were several that I had not seen before. And there this first crude essay in art criticism stops, for, though it is only half-past eight, he is dropping asleep and must go to bed immediately. The excursion to Manchester was made with friends, but they were not Apostles, a sign that when Roger Fry wished to gratify certain growing curiosities he had to seek company and he had a great liking for company out- side the circle of that very select and famous society.

But he had a gift for finding his way across country to the people he needed. So at Cambridge where the conditions were reversed there were almost too many friends, too many interests, too many things to be done and enjoyed he discovered the one man who could give him what he still lacked. The letters begin to refer to "Middleton". It is exceedingly good of him.

He tells me about the development of Italian painting, illustrating it by photos. A romantic and rather mysterious career lay behind him. In youth the shock caused by the sudden death of a close friend at Oxford "had confined him to his room for five or six years". Afterwards he travelled widely and adventurously in Greece, America and Africa.

In order to study the philosophy of Plato as taught in Fez he had disguised him- self as a pilgrim, had entered the Great Mosque "which no unbeliever had previously succeeded in doing", and had been presented to the Sultan as one of the faithful. He had arrived in Cambridge with a tale of erudite works upon Greek and Roman archaeology to his credit; but he held very unconventional views as to the duties of a Slade professor.

Dressed in "a thick dressing gown and skull cap looking like some Oriental magician", he was willing to talk informally about art to any undergraduate who chose to visit him. Benson, who thus describes him, was one of the undergraduates who went to his rooms: " As for the. Tripos that his pupil was expected to take, he never mentioned it.

Roger Fry too found Ms way to the Slade professor. He too found him enthralling and stimulating as he wandered about the room talking unconventionally in his skull cap and dressing-gown. That room was full of "the most wonderful things. He guessed that though he was working for a science degree his real bent was not for science but for art.

He encouraged him in that bent. One vacation he asked him to go with him to Bologna. But Roger Fry's parents were opposed to the visit. Their ostensible reason was that they doubted whether North Italy in the suminerwas "extremely healthy", as Professor Middleton asserted. But they may well have doubted whether a jaunt to Bologna to look at pictures with a Slade professor of socialistic tendencies was the best preparation for "the awful Tripos" that was impending.

They were afraid that Roger was scattering his energies. How far, they may well have asked, was he fulfilling the wish that Sir Edward had expressed when he first went to Cambridge, "I wish you as you know to have a thorough education and not to be ignorant either of letters or science. At the same time I want you so far to specialise as not to turn out a jack of all trades and master of none"?

There were signs that Roger Fry was finding it increas- ingly difficult to specialise. Every week he was discussing "things in general" with the Apostles. And when one of the brethren, Lowes Dickinson, came to Failand he made no better impression than McTaggart had done: ". All Ms friends were, as lie called it, "uncon- ventional". He was staying with Edward Carpenter who, though once P.

Maurice's curate, was certainly "very unconventional" now. He also stayed with the Schillers at Gersau e c the most unconventional family in all its arrange- ments I ever saw". He stayed at Kirkby Lonsdale with the Llewelyn Davies's. They too were unconventional; and there he met Lady Carlisle, an unconventional countess who preached temperance and socialism.

He attended meetings of the Psychical Research Society and visited haunted houses in a vain pursuit of ghosts. Also he was helping to start a new paper. The Cambridge Fortnightly, for which he designed the cover a a tremendous sun of culture rising behind King's College Chapel". He was painting in oils, and twice a week he was discussing art with a Slade pro- fessor who wore a dressing-gown and cherished danger- ously socialistic views.

At a lunch party, too, there was another meeting with Mr Bernard Shaw. The effect of that meeting is described in a letter written to Mr Shaw forty years later:. I remember that you dazzled me not only with such wit as we had never heard but with your stupendous experience of the coulisses of the social scene at which we were beginning to peer timidly and with some anxiety.

All my friends were al- ready convinced that social service of some kind was the only end worth pursuing in life. I alone cherished as a guilty secret a profound scepticism about all political activity and even about progress itself and had begun to think of art as somehow my only possible job. I like to recall my feelings when that afternoon you explained incidentally that you had "gone into" the subject of art and there was nothing in it.

It was all hocus pocus. I was far too deeply impressed by you to formulate any denial even in ray own mind. I just shelved it for the time being. In the midst of all these occupations, exposed to all these different views, it is scarcely surprising that Roger Fry himself admitted to some perplexity. In fact I think one wants two lifetimes, one to find out what to do, and another to do it.

As it is one acts always half in the dark and then for consistency's sake sticks to what one has done and so ruins one's power of impartial judgment. I no longer feel that I must hedge myself from the evil of the world that there are whole tracts of thought and action into which I must not go. I have said I will realise everything. Nothing shall seem to me so horrible but that I will try to understand why it exists.

But his was a far more buoyant and self-confident temperament than his father's. Life at a great University, for which his father had longed in vain, had shown him a bewildering range of possi- bilities.

Virginia woolf biography of roger fry artisan

Some of them were invisible to his friends. They, as he says, were convinced that social service of some kind was the only end worth pursuing. Of that he had come to be sceptical. Not only was he hiding from his friends as a guilty secret his doubts about political activity he was hiding from his family another secret; that art, not science, was to be his job.

These doubts and secrets, the variety of his interests and occupations worried him. He wanted help and he wanted sympathy. In a letter to his mother he tried to break down the reserve which, as the years at Cambridge went on, had grown between them. I do not know whether I am wise in writing a letter so full of my own convictions which I can hardly expect to be understood, but perhaps it is sometimes worth while to show one's real self and not hide behind the make-belief ideas which for the most part are all we show, and your letter somehow encouraged me to make a confession.

He was becoming more and more conscious of the horror of hiding behind "make-belief ideas". But it was very difficult to speak openly to his parents. He could only assure them that "the differences of opinion which I fear do and must arise between us owing to our different points of view in no wise affect our love for one another". As the time at Cambridge drew to an end, he was concealing more, and they were becoming increasingly uneasy.

The immediate question was a practical one, A friend's letter summed it up. Almost casually in the postscript to a letter he told his mother that "the examiners have honoured me by giving me a firstj this is the more kind on their part as I neither expected nor deserved one. It was telegraphed to me at Norwich this morning by Dickinson.

But Roger hesitated. Did he any longer want that career? Had he not come to feel that painting was his "only possible job"? When his father pressed him to decide, he answered, "Please do not think me weak because I find it hard to make up my mind about matters of great import. He was going, he said, to consult Professor Middleton "on the subject of art as a profession".

The result of the interview is given in a letter to Sir Edward:. Middleton has been very kindly advising me about my prospects in life, and I will try and give you as clear an account as I can of what he thinks. I explained to him thinking it an extremely important factor how unpleasing an idea it was to you that I should take up art he says he quite understands the feeling that to fail in art is much more complete a failure and leaves one a more useless encumbrance on the world than to fail in almost anything else e.

He advised me if I thought I felt strongly enough to ask you to let me try for about two years and by the end of that time he says that he thinks I shall be able to tell what my own capacities are and whether it will be worth my while going on. He kindly says that he would superintend my work and give me all the assistance he could and that I could get no better opportunities in London or Paris until I have had a virginia woolf biography of roger fry artisan at casts.

He says that the idea of the possibility of landscape painting without figures is quite untenable you must correct your drawing and colour on the figure as you see there more im- mediately where you go wrong. I think I do feel strongly enough the desire for this, to ask you to let me try it. That is to say, if I do not do so I fear I may have an unpleasant feeling afterwards that I might have done something worth overcoming all obstacles to do if I had only had perseverance.

I know what a great thing it is that I ask of you considering your views on the subject and what a disappointment it must be when you had hoped I should do something more congenial to your tastes. Still I do ask it be- cause I think taking everything into consideration it is what I sincerely think I ought to do. The result was a compromise and a strange one.

For a few terms more he stayed on at Cambridge, dissecting In the Laboratory and painting the male nude under the direction of the Slade professor. Twice he sat for a Fellow- ship. But the first time his dissertation was purely scientific, and he took so little trouble with it that he failed. And the second time he tried to combine science and art his dis- sertation was "On the Laws of Phenomenology and their Application to Greek Painting".

That too was a com- promise. It seemed, Mr Farnell reported, "to have been put together in haste", and again he failed. The two failures mattered very little to him personally. His mind had opened there; his eyes had opened there. It was at Cambridge that he had become aware of the "infinite possibilities" that life held. Now had become eternal as he sat talking to his friends in a Cambridge room while the moon rose and the nightin- gales sang.

What Cambridge had given him could not be affected by any failure to win a fellowship. But to his father the failure was a bitter disappointment. It was not only that he had thrown away the career that seemed to Sir Edward the most desirable of all careers, a career too. Woolf approaches this rather dry intellectual problem as a study of personality:.

The new movement was suggesting fresh developments of the old aesthetic problems. For this reason, that those who are sensible to form find that the kind of emotions derived from the contemplation of it, while they may not be as intense as the emotions of ordinary life, or even as the echoes of those emotions aroused in romantic [6] art, yet are of so peculiar and precious a quality that they are willing to undertake great pains and make great efforts for the enjoyment of them, so that a small number of people do continue to maintain from generation to generation and from age to age the extraordinary value of these quite vague, undifferentiated, universal emotions.

But Woolf has no patience for a sentence with five wandering dependent clauses and no subject, nor one that serves to make a perfectly comprehensible idea unapproachable. Instead, she prints a description of formalism with clarity and humor that she found in a letter Fry wrote to a friend:. I want to find out what the function of content is, and am developing a theory which you will hate very much, viz.

Though he made his living and his reputation as a art lecturer and critic, Fry considered painting his primary vocation. He was older than the other members of this group, and always held in high regard by them. Despite getting a first in science, he switched to the study of Art and travelled to Italy and France on a sort of autodidactic Grand Tour to bring himself into contact with the masters.

There is little attempt at analysis of her material. And we have to put up with her reticence on personal matters to a a degree which is almost infuriating. Ever after Cambridge, his problem was how to earn a living from art, and even when he got married to fellow art-lover Helen Coombe, he was still living off an income from his father.