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.
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