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
