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 for such revelations. The same disposition which made him argue that “being for a time an inmate of a Christian school he owed it a debt of loyalty which forbade any criticism of its tenets” led him also to respect his friend’s traditions and conventions. Whatever Roger’s latent revolt may have been, it was still deeply hidden.
He was outwardly pious and even priggish. He accepted the religious and political opinions of his family unthinkingly. He still asked his mother to pray for him, prayed devoutly himself, and “knows that God will help me”. He exclaimed: “Is it not a pity about Bradlaugh being returned again by those wretched Northampton shoemakers?” and thinks “the explosion at Westminster” inexcusable in England “where the people have so large a share in the country’s government”. He still went as a matter of course with his family to Meeting on Sunday. Such opinions and pieties were not directly combated on those Sunday walks. Nevertheless, the discussions were speculative; the talk ranged over “every conceivable subject, from Rossetti’s painting, the existence of which he revealed to me, to the superiority of a Republic over a Kingdom”. Clearly, though McTaggart carefully avoided certain subjects, and was “delicately scrupulous never to let me feel my own inferiority”, he was stimulating Roger Fry as none of the Clifton masters stimulated him. He was making him think for himself and suggesting the possibility of asking innumerable questions about things hitherto unquestionable.
Roger’s parents were soon aware of this. There was something in that ungainly boy that roused their suspicions. He looked, a sister remembers, “with his ill-fixed head and his inordinate length of body, like a greatly elongated tadpole”. His views were equally distasteful. “I am very sorry you were disappointed in McTaggart,” Roger wrote to his mother after the visit, “though I do not feel so sure that you would be if you could see him alone as I do. He is whatever his views and manners may be one of the most thoughtful and conscientious boys I know, and one who struggles to have a good influence.” Two or three years later, when they were both at Cambridge, Roger was still trying to lay his parents’ suspicions; and the words are worth taking out of their place, not for what they reveal of McTaggart but for what they reveal of Roger Fry. Lady Fry had again expressed anxiety about McTaggart’s influence. Roger answered: “I suppose you have forgotten that I once told you of McTaggart’s freethinking propensities as I thought I ought to, although I know he does not like them talked about nor is he anxious to talk on those subjects which relate to it. Indeed at Clifton I know he felt himself under a sort of obligation not to talk to fellows upon these subjects. I am very sorry if my friendship should be a cause of anxiety to you, as I feel he is a fellow of really fine character in many ways, and I know Wilson thought so too. I have often wished and prayed that he might be convinced of what we believe to be the truth, but I do not think that his want of Christianity ought to debar me from a friendship from which I believe that I have derived much good—though of course that friendship can never be of the very highest kind. I confess I do not feel that there is any danger to my own Christianity from this companionship, as I hope my Christianity is not so weak a structure as [not] to stand the proximity of doubt.”
That letter was written from rooms which he shared with McTaggart at Cambridge in 1885. It serves to show that in spite of Sunday walks in which they speculated about everything under the sun, Roger must have been, as he admits, “portentously solemn and serious” at Clifton with no notion “of any but the most literal directness of approach”—a weedy boy, with a retreating chin and spectacles hiding the bright large eyes, who behaved decently, hid his latent antagonism under a deep surface of conformity, and attracted no particular attention from the masters who taught him. Nobody seems to have guessed that he had any particular gifts or tastes of his own. Canon Wilson, it is true, had “no special gift or appreciation of poetry, nor indeed of any of the arts”. But Canon Wilson had at once recognised McTaggart’s genius. He knew that McTaggart and “a friend” discussed his sermons on their Sunday walks. But though he valued McTaggart’s opinion, and treated him as an equal rather than as a pupil, Roger Fry was only McTaggart’s friend. He seems to have made no impression upon the Head Master or upon any of the masters. His bent, if he had a bent, seemed to both purely scientific. It was taken for granted that he was to study science at the University; the only question was which University it was to be. Mr Jupp was in favour of Oxford. But for some reason the thought of Oxford roused Roger to express himself more outspokenly than was common with him then. “How long will it take for me to convince him [Mr Jupp] that I intend to go to Cambridge and that scholarships are not the only aims of one’s life, or at all events of mine, though my getting one may be part of his aims and I expect it is”, he wrote. Wilson himself was not only in favour of Cambridge but in favour of King’s. “He says I shall not be swamped as I might be at Trinity, and that the set is he believes extremely nice.”
So Cambridge it was to be, and in December 1884 he went up to try for a scholarship at King’s. He found himself lodged in a queer little garret looking across at King’s over the way. At once, in spite of the impending examination, his spirits rose and he began to enjoy himself enormously. The door opened and in came a gyp with an invitation from Mr Nixon to breakfast with him. “So I went rather in fear and trembling to his rooms.” But Mr Nixon was not in the least formidable. He was a “very jovial and queer little man” who had only one hand, squinted and wore very extraordinary spectacles. And he was very kind and amusing and explained that he was a friend of Smith’s. Then Roger went to his examination and feared that he had done very badly—“they set the life history of the Chara instead of the moss and unfortunately I could not do it”. However, Mr Nixon asked him to come and have tea after Chapel, and other friends turned up, “so you will perceive that I am doing pretty well considering how few people I know”. In spite of his foreboding he was successful. On 22nd December 1884 Lady Fry at Failand received a telegram which she put with the other letters from school.
It simply said in telegraphist’s English: “I have got the exhibition for two years they have only given this one for science”. But it was an immensely important document. For it meant an end—an end to Sunninghill and its shrivelled pines and dirty heather and Monday morning floggings, and an end to Clifton and its good form, its Christian patriotism, and its servility to established institutions. From his private school he had learnt a horror of all violence, and from his public school a lifelong antagonism to all public schools and their ideals. He seldom spoke of those years, but when he did he spoke of them as the dullest, and, save for one friendship, as the most completely wasted of his life.
Chapter II
Cambridge
