Impudence and Iconoclasm: The Early Granta and an Unknown Roger Fry Essay

68 IMPUDENCE AND ICONOCLASM: THE EARLY GRANTA AND AN UNKNOWN ROGER FRY ESSAY By Panthea Reid Broughton Louisiana State University Few undergraduate magazines achieve either notoriety or renown, much less longevity. Granta, founded at Cambridge University in 1889, achieved all three.1 Granta's early notoriety rested upon its impudent attacks upon individuals, especially authority figures. Its renown followed from the calibre of its contributors.2 Its longevity probably emerged from its relations with Punch. In Frederick A. Rice's terms, Granta became "a nursery" or "stepping stone" towards writing for Punch? whose editors must have had a vested interest in keeping Granta alive. Roger Fry's name has not, to my knowledge, been associated with Granta or with its brand of undergraduate impudence. But, as we shall see, an essay by Fry formed part of a Granta coup against Oscar Browning, FeUow of King's. In that essay, while Fry adopted Granta's impudent tone, he anticipated his mature iconoclasm. Fry left King's College, Cambridge, in 1888, some months before Granta's founding. The Annual Report of King's College in 1934, the year of Fry's death, stated that his "academic career was a complete success in that he gained a double first in Science and was given to understand that a post could easily be found for him in the School of Botany."4 But Fry turned his back on the School of Botany, on prudence, and on propriety. He determined to become a painter. It was twenty-two years before he became famous (and infamous) for introducing modem art to England in his 1910 "Post-Impressionist" exhibit. Forty-five years passed before Cambridge University honored Fry by appointing him Slade Professor of Art. In 1888 when Fry went down from Cambridge, his friend Nathaniel Wedd became what Fry's parents had expected him to be—a Fellow of King's. Wedd devoted his lifetime's energies to his college. As the Annual Report of the College put it in 1940, the year of his death, "Wedd's genius was for teaching. His knowledge was profound and his range wide, and the published work of many scholars owed much to his advice and help. He himself, except for a notable edition of Euripides' Orestes, published little."5 While Fry went on to publish countless books, to become the foremost English art critic since Ruskin, and to be the subject of the only biography Virginia Woolf wrote, Wedd remained at Cambridge, an inspiring teacher and valued friend, but a man little known to the rest of the world. Wedd is "known to history only in the context of E. M. Forster, as the teacher of Classics who encouraged him to write, of whom Forster was to say, 'To him, more than anyone else, I owe such enlightenment as has befallen 69 Broughton: Roger Fry Essay me'___"6 For the more than 3000 students at Cambridge,7 late nineteenth century university life, even for fellows, was elitist, high-spirited, and sheltered. Wedd's absorption in that life (as well as a lengthy illness) contracted his horizons; Fry's departure from it expanded his. In Michaelmas (fall) term of 1888, university life at Cambridge was considerably enlivened by the unannounced publication of a shockingly irreverent magazine. It was priced at 3d (a quarter of a shilling—between one pence and two cents) and was called The Gadfly: The Cambridge Mirror of Morals, Men and Manners. The front page of the eight-page large quarto had two columns. The first, entitled "What We Intend," described the paper as a "new organ for religious and social improvement." The second column, entitled "O-CR B~ng At Home," made a mockery of the first's supposedly noble intentions. To anyone who knew Cambridge at the time, these initials clearly referred to Oscar Browning, the flamboyant King's Fellow know as "O.B." Virginia Woolf in her biography of Fry describes Browning, with some irony and considerable discretion, as "the great figure" and "the great man."8 Frances Spalding is more direct: "Having been sacked from Eton without explanation, Browning had been installed at King's. ... He was lazy, witty, corpulent, effeminate...