Roger Fry

ROGER FRY was not a great writer (though he wrote a first-rate book on Cézanne), and he was not a great painter, but he was a great personality. It is not too much to say that he changed the taste of his time by his essays, altered the current of English painting by his championship of the Post-Impressionists, and extended immeasurably the love of art by his lectures. To transfer personality to the printed page is the hardest of literary tasks, but Roger Fry lives in this book. It is not possible to transmit the peculiarly enkindling quality of his actual presence, but the story of how his rebellious and lovable and vital spirit expressed itself in his life and in his work — in his hatred of æsthetic snobbery and the ‘academic mind,’ in his encouragement of young and unrecognized talent, in the changes in his own ideas and practice, and above all in his friendships and personal relationships — can be read here in Virginia Woolf’s own limpid and beautiful writing. There is no reader of the book who will not agree with E. M. Forster’s epitaph on his friend: ‘Roger Fry’s death is a definite loss to civilization.’