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Cambridge

The years at Cambridge—years that were to be so important to him that in after-life, he said, he dated everything from them—began cheerfully but prosaically. Nixon asked him to dinner; but the lodging-house keeper was a stingy brute who provided no slop pails. Also when asked to provide antimacassars to hide his “hideous green chairs”, he refused, and demanded “twelve tallow candles apiece for his maid to use on dark mornings”. George Prothero, the tutor, was appealed to; and these domestic matters arranged, Roger Fry at once began, with an ardour that seems miraculous after the perfunctory records of Clifton routine, to talk, to walk, to dine out and to row. “Every afternoon I am tubbed, i.e. instructed in the art of rowing”, he told Sir Edward, and he showed such promise that Sir Edward took alarm, and hoped that he would not be called upon to cox the University boat. I have met both senior classic and senior wrangler several times at coffee”, Roger went on. “But I have met so many men lately that I cannot possibly describe them all.”

Thus he was writing when his first term was only a week or two old. There is no reason to doubt his statement that “my life at present is anything but dull, but rather on the contrary over-full”. He dined out, he said, almost every night, and found Cambridge dinner parties “where one plays games afterwards” very different from London parties and much more to his taste. He met the Cambridge characters. The great figure of O.B., “as Oscar Browning is commonly called”, loomed up instantly, and he had the usual stories of the great man to repeat—how he had “invited ‘the dear Prince’ to dine and provided wine at a guinea a bottle but ‘the dear Prince’ never came”. He met the Darwins, the Marshalls, the Creightons—“Mrs Creighton very formidable but Creighton delightful”—and Edmund Gosse. He was elected a member of the Apennines, a literary society which met to discuss “the poets of Kings and the origins of Tennyson’s Dora”, and he read them a paper on Jane Austen. In short he had slipped at once into the full swim of Cambridge life and confessed that he had never enjoyed himself “away from home so much”. “It is really so delightful to find so many nice friends and after school it is such a wonderful change. One is so free from the tyranny of one set who exacted homage from all others.”

The ugly rooms with the unpleasant landlord were shared with McTaggart, and to that original friend others rapidly attached themselves. The names recur—Schiller, Wedd, Dickinson, Headlam, Ashbee, Mallet, Dal Young. He walks with them, boats with them, dines with them, and presumably argues late into the night with them. But at first they are names without faces—an absence of comment that was no doubt partly due to the coldness with which McTaggart had been received at Failand. 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 loveliness 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 is still bright”. He rowed up the river in a whiff with Lowes Dickinson to watch the sunset effects “and Dickinson 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 and 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. There was one on William Blake; another on George Eliot; another on Lowell’s Biglow Papers. 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”. But he was reticent in what he reported of these arguments to his parents. They kept an anxious eye upon his morals, his health and his behaviour. “I shall of course observe your wishes entirely about smoking and such things”, he had to promise. 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 am sorry,” he apologised, “also that it is bad in parts. I did not read it nearly all through and did not come across any that were bad.” It follows that Westcott’s beautiful sermon receives more attention than Dickinson’s speculations; and that when Edward Carpenter made his appearance in Cambridge he is described as “one of F.D. 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 undergraduates, made them read Walt Whitman, and turned Roger Fry’s thoughts to democracy and the future of England. Later, with Lowes Dickinson he went to stay with Carpenter at Millthorpe. “I had rather expected”, he wrote home, “that he might be a somewhat rampant and sensational Bohemian. But I am agreeably disappointed, for he seems a most delightful man and absolutely free from all affectation. 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 is quite one of the best men I have ever met, although he has given up so much for an ideal.” Under this influence the political opinions that he had brought from home became more and more unsettled. 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. “Society seems to be sitting on the safety valve”, he told Lady Fry; and when she expressed concern for the German Crown Prince’s illness, said caustically: “I should be equally sorry for John Jones in similar circumstances, and doubtless far more sorry for most of the patients in the Cambridge hospital did I know the details”. The riots in London (November 1887) 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 indirect indications of moral character and that is what concerns us most) need not alter our feelings at all.”

It became, as the terms went on, increasingly difficult to describe his life at Cambridge to his parents. Letters from London told him how they had been dining, as Sir Edward wrote, with the Master of the Rolls to meet Sir Andrew Clark and Lord Bowen—“Bowen”, Sir Edward said, “asked Clark: ‘Is it true as I have heard that genius is a kind of fungus?’—a remark which is I believe a little in advance of any discovery yet”; and on the next night they were entertaining the Literary Society at Highgate to read and discuss More’s Utopia and Bacon’s Atlantis. 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.) which may interest you”—upon the lectures of Vines and his work with Michael Foster. He was working hard; he was showing brilliant promise as a scientist.

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. This intense interest in abstract questions drew upon them a certain amount of banter from outsiders. So one may infer from a description given by Mr E.F. Benson of a certain evening party in Oscar Browning’s rooms. The host himself 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 thoughtful 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 1887 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 about 1820, and 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 know whether I shall like it much. It is an extremely secret society, so you must not mention it much.” Not long before he had been elected, without being asked, to the Pitt Club, “which is supposed to be a very swell thing, and for which there is keen competition”. 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, i.e. 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 there are references to the society in “In Memoriam” which none but the duly initiated can understand. 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 his 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. Certainly they ate something more succulent than biscuits; nor were their discussions confined to the “ethical limits of Determinism”. 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 Lechlade to Oxford at the close of the summer term and those few days were a wonderful blend of fun and sentiment. McTaggart bubbled over all the time. He could not row, of course, but we made him do so. “Time, Bow”, said the cox and McTaggart replied, “Space”. 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 enchanting 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?” was typical of the general run; and to infer that “things in general” excluded some things in particular. It is difficult to suppose that Baron Pollock, Lord Derby, Sir James Stephen, Clerk-Maxwell and the Sidgwicks ever discussed the music of Bach and Beethoven or the painting of Titian and Velasquez. 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 literature 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 extraordinary 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 argument 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 architectural 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 collection. She has five Turners, 2 Prouts, many old Cromes, Copley Fieldings, D. Cox’s &c.” When he stayed with Edward Carpenter he visited the Ruskin Museum at Walkley and noticed not only the minerals, though they are duly described, but also “copies of Carpaccio and Lippo and Botticelli, also a very fine Verrocchio”. 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 November 1887 there was an important exhibition of pictures at Manchester. Roger Fry left Cambridge at 3.45 in the morning; reached the gallery at noon; looked at pictures till eight in the evening; got back to Cambridge at 4.15 the next morning; slept for an hour on a friend’s sofa and then went to a scientific lecture at nine.

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. Gallery). 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 unfinished sketches. One or two of Uncle Alfred’s [Waterhouse] were noticeable, the Pœstum (I think it is) and the doorway of Chartres. 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.W. Hunt’s water colours were very magnificent 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—outside 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. At Clifton “an intuition” had made him discover in McTaggart the one friend who made school life tolerable. 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”. “I am getting to know more of Middleton which is very nice”, he wrote in October 1886. “I go to him once or twice a week for a sort of informal lecture on art—he shows me photographs &c. It is exceedingly good of him. … He tells me about the development of Italian painting, illustrating it by photos.”

John Henry Middleton had been elected to the Slade Professorship of Art at Cambridge in 1886. 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 himself 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. Mr E.F. Benson, who thus describes him, was one of the undergraduates who went to his rooms: “ … he gave me no formal lectures,” Mr Benson writes, “but encouraged me to bring my books to his room, and spend the morning there … now he would pull an intaglio ring off his finger … or take half a dozen Greek coins out of his waistcoat pocket and bid me decipher the thick decorative letters and tell me where they came from”. As for the Tripos that his pupil was expected to take, he never mentioned it. Roger Fry too found his 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 … some very lovely Persian tiles which he got at Ispahan and Damascus, some beautiful early Flemish and Italian paintings and several original Rembrandt etchings, some of them very fine—He is very delightful to talk to, though I fear”, he added, “you [Lady Fry] would think him dangerously socialistic.” Professor Middleton seems to have returned Roger Fry’s liking. 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 summer was “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 increasingly 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: “… he was unobtrusive and untidy and forgot to bring his white tie. ‘Have you any further luggage coming, Sir?’ enquired the footman.” His mind was being unmade rather than made up. All his friends were, as he called it, “unconventional”. He was staying with Edward Carpenter who, though once F.D. Maurice’s curate, was certainly “very unconventional” now. He also stayed with the Schillers at Gersau—“the most unconventional family in all its arrangements 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 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 professor who wore a dressing-gown and cherished dangerously 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 already 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 my 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.

“It is perhaps no use retrospecting,” he wrote home in December 1888, “but I can’t help thinking that in 22 years one should be able to get through rather more than I have done. 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.” The family creed which had been so forcibly impressed upon him since childhood was no longer sufficient. “Life”, he wrote, “does not any longer seem a simple problem to me…. 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.” Just as his father had shaken himself free from Quaker peculiarities, so Roger in his turn was ridding himself of other restrictions. 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 possibilities. 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. “When those petty daily commonplaces of which our lives seem so much made up weigh upon me with the feeling of a dreary interminable life of getting up and dressing and eating and talking and going to bed and all without any object in the end, it is sometimes delightful to realise that such things are all shams and that at any moment the surface may dissolve and the reality appear, whatever that reality may be…. 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.” Whatever else his new friends had taught him, they had taught him to distinguish between the sham and the reality, “whatever that reality may be”. 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. “What”, he asked, “are you going to be?” The “awful Tripos” provided what, to his parents at least, seemed a decisive answer. Almost casually in the postscript to a letter he told his mother that “the examiners have honoured me by giving me a first; 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.” The path was now open in all probability to a Fellowship, and thus to the career that his father had wished for himself and had planned for his son,—the career of a distinguished man of science. But Roger hesitated. Did he any longer want that career? Had he not come to feel that painting was his “only possible job”? that art was his only possible pursuit? 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 importance to me, but it really is because I realise what infinite possibilities there are [more] than because I am apathetic or indifferent”. 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:

Roger Fry to Sir Edward Fry

Cambridge, Feb 21, 1888

My dear Father,

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.g. to be a 4th rate doctor in the colonies…. 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. … In case I do do that, he says the best course would be for me to do at least the first year’s drudgery at the cast and to do that up here at the Museum of Casts—spending some time on dissecting at the Laboratory. 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 year 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 immediately where you go wrong. I then told him the objection you had to the nude—which he said was very natural tho’ so far as his experience went it did not lead to bad results and was not so harmful as an ordinary theatre—he says however that there is no reason at all why one should draw from the female figure—on the contrary men have much better figures as a rule in England and are more useful to practise drawing on….

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 because I think taking everything into consideration it is what I sincerely think I ought to do.

Your very loving son

Roger Fry

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 Fellowship. 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 dissertation was “On the Laws of Phenomenology and their Application to Greek Painting”. That too was a compromise. 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. “After all”, he wrote to his father, “I have got more from Cambridge than a scientific education.” For him that was true—he had got more from Cambridge than he could possibly explain. 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 nightingales 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 in which he had shown brilliant promise. But he had thrown it away in order to become a painter. To Sir Edward pictures were little better than coloured photographs. And that the son, upon whom all his hopes centred—for his elder son was an invalid and his daughters, it is recorded, “had no claim to a career”—should have rejected a science for a pursuit that is trifling in itself and exposes those who follow it to grave moral risks, was a source of profound and lasting grief to him. If Roger Fry had no regrets for himself he felt his father’s disappointment and his father’s disapproval not only then but for many years to come.