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Roger Fry
IN the circle to which Roger Fry belonged there were many bril- liant people, and more than one of them would have been capable of writing his life. But Mrs. Woolf, as Fry himself seems to have realised in a prescient moment, was his only perfect biographer, and this book is in every respect what he would have wished it to be : honest, sympathetic, understanding and—prevailing against the bias of a long and intimate friendship—objective in its design and workmanship. Some of Mrs. Woolf's readers, accustomed to the very personal quality of her imaginative writing, will perhaps be surprised at the cool and level stretch of this narrative ; and if they have found her critical essays sometimes too oblique and coy, they will be pleased with a new firmness and directness. The material of a scholar's life is bound to be refractory: no action, no open glory, no plaudits. To make for continuity, for " inscape," for the necessary tension, the biographer must pick up the golden thread of the spirit, and follow it through the mind's dark corri- dors. That is exactly where Mrs. Woolf excels: her intuitive perception of values—human values, aesthetic values, moral—and her interest in what is called the drama of life enable her to con- vert the debris of memories, anecdotes, letters and records into the organic shape of a work of art. The limitations are those of an inside point of view. Mrs. Woolf belongs to the same set or coterie to which Roger Fry him- self belonged. The public has given it a local habitation in Bloomsbury, but it was nourished at Cambridge and in reality it had an altogether wider ambience : it was (and is) a fairly common attitude to life. It was (the past tense is now inevitable) a cul- tured attitude; but its exponents would probably prefer the word "civilised." It was an elite—of birth no less than of education; its leading members were the sons and daughters of eminent Victorians, and they had passed through one or other of our public schools. Cambridge gave them a scientific and inquiring temper. Historians, economists and philosophers belonged to this elite no less than writers and painters, and for that reason it could never be loosely identified with Bohemianism. But no less certainly it could never be identified with a true sense of reality. It turned with a shudder from the threatening advance of what it would call "the herd." Though it despised the moral pretensions and social prestige of the parent generation and hated the prevalent commercialism, it did not attempt to reconcile its own traditions of good taste and refinement with the necessary economic founda- tions of a new order of society. This was very obvious in Roger Fry's case: faced with the machine, mass-production and universal education, he could only retreat into the private world of his own sensibility. He did, more and more as time went on, attempt to find a universal philosophical justification for this private world, and he had at his command an ingenious mind and a patient ex- perience of his subject. But all this effort did not bring him into any very vital sympathetic relationship to his own age.
This came out very clearly in his only public venture—the Omega Workshops. This experiment was very nearly a success— a success, that is to say, with the small and snobbish public that can afford to buy individualistic art in a machine age. That it could not be more than this was evident in its early days to four of the most original artists whose services Fry had enlisted; they revolted with perhaps unnecessary violence, but one passage in their manifesto expressed a truth which is still not obvious to anyone within the charmed circle: The Idol is still Prettiness, with its mid-Victorian languish of the neck, and its skin of " greenery-yallery," despite the Post-What-Not fashionableness of its draperies. This family party of strayed and dissenting Aesthetes, however, were compelled to call in as much modern talent as they could find, to do the rough and masculine work without which they knew their efforts would not rise above the level of a pleasant tea-party, or command more attention.
This brings us to the real problem of Roger Fry's life—a certain ambiguity which was due to his championship of Post-Impres- sionism. His sincerity has more than once been questioned, but usually by forthright reactionaries like Dr. MacColl, who could not understand why a man who knew so much about art could support such an abrupt break with tradition. Fry was quite capable of looking after himself in that quarter, but he was hurt and bewildered when the young men whom he had patronised turned against him. It would be absurd to suggest that Fry did not really appreciate artists like Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso ; he had an inborn aesthetic sensibility which could not play him false. But he had been converted rather late in life—he was over forty when he first began to appreciate the significance of Cezanne- and much as his mind might react to the art of Matisse and Picasso, he was never able to follow them in his own painting. He might try to penetrate the secret of Cezanne, not only by analys- ing him as he did in his most brilliant essay in art criticism, but also by trying to repeat the old wizard's performance on canvas; but it would never have occurred to him to jump forward, in front, not only of Cezanne, but even of Matisse and Picasso, Painters with much less talent have ventured more : but Fry's deepest instinct was not adventurous--his point of view being that "art as created by the artist is in violent revolt against the instinctive life, since it is an expression of the reflective and fully conscious life," a point of view which is the antithesis of that ex- pressed by Matisse and Picasso and the artists who have come after them.
The explanation of this ambiguity probably lies in the tradi- tions against which Roger Fry vainly revolted. The " snailliorn sensibility" which manifested itself while he was still an under- graduate studying science was something that could not be denied: it made him give lip a scientific career; it made him disappoint his eminent Quaker parents; it landed him in all sorts of financial and social difficulties; it gave him immense- joy and stimulated him to endless intellectual research; but it could not prevail against the Inheritance—against the prettiness and the protective- ness of the Ivory Tower, against the benevolence of the Liberal outlook, against the intellect's pretensions to the final word.
HERBERT READ.
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