Collected Essays (36 page)

It is hard to uncover the source of Henley’s rage against Wilde. Perhaps Wilde’s very generosity – a quality in which Henley was deficient – called it out, in the same way that the money Henley regularly received from Stevenson, even after their friendship had ceased, made it all the more necessary for him to assert, however viciously, his independence. Perhaps it was simply the jealousy of a bad writer for his superior who had replied with such impervious wit and good humour to his critics in the
National Observer.
Wilde was not vulnerable to journalistic attack, and Henley seems to have felt a shabby delight at the thought that at least he was vulnerable to the law. And so again we have the sight of Henley exposing himself far more drastically than he exposed his victim in those ugly letters in which he kept Whibley in Paris posted on the news of the two trials.

Oscar at Bay was on the whole a pleasing sight . . . Holloway and Bow Street have taken his hair out of curl in more senses than one. And I am pretty sure that he is having a dam bad time . . .

As for Hosker, the news is that he lives with his brother, and is all day steeping, steeping himself in liquor, and moaning for Boasy! I am summoned to play the juryman next Monday (
Je m’en fiche pas mal
), and it isn’t impossible that I should have at least the occasion of sitting upon him. For, they say, he has lost all nerve, all pose, all everything; and is just now so much the Ordinary Drunkard that he has not even the energy to kill himself.

The depressing nature of the hero is emphasized by a certain drabness in his biographer. This is never at its best a well-written book, and Mr Connell show little power of discrimination in his choice of material. The letters to Whibley are, for the most part, incredibly tedious – repeated complaints of overdue articles, news of his own books, bluff out-dated slang. Here is one typical paragraph to stand for hundreds: ‘The book seems to be thriving no end. Nutt had ordered all the edition from the binder: and therewith the remainder of Ed. Sec. of
A.B. of V.
So the oofbird may presently begin to flutter.’

1949

ERIC GILL

R
OMAN CATHOLICISM
in this country has been a great breeder of eccentrics – one cannot picture a man like Charles Waterton belonging to any other faith, and most of us treasure the memory of some strong individuality who combined a strict private integrity with a carefully arranged disregard of conformity to national ways of thought and behaviour. Eric Gill, with his beard and his biretta, his enormous outspokenness, his amorous gusto, trailing his family across the breadth of England with his chickens, cats, dogs, goats, ducks, and geese, belonged only distantly to this untraditional tradition; he was an intruder – a disturbing intruder among the eccentrics. He had not behind him the baroque internationalism of a great Catholic school, or the little primnesses of a convent childhood, to separate him from his fellow-countrymen along well-prepared lines, with the help of scraps of bizarre worldliness or the tag-end of peasant beliefs picked up in saints’ lives.

Gill’s father was a curate in the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion in Brighton, who later conformed to the Anglican Church and became a different sort of curate in Chichester, doomed to bring up eleven children on £150 a year. ‘He was from a “highbrow”. intellectual, agnostic point of view, a complete nonentity; but he loved the Lord His God with all his sentimental mind and all his sentimental soul.’ What Gill gained from his parents was a sense of vocation; money was never the standard by which values were gauged. ‘They never complained about poverty as though it was an injustice. And they never put the pursuit of riches before us as an occupation worthy of good people.’ There were tradesmen in the family, and missionaries in the South Seas. There was even in a sense art, for Gill’s mother had been a singer in an opera company and his father read Kingsley and Carlyle and Tennyson’s poems, and called his son after Dean Farrar’s hero. It was all kindling-wood waiting for a fire – the grim Brighton railway viaduct with the huddled mean houses of Preston Park inserted between the railway lines, the small boy drawing engines and the father writing sermons, and the advertising sign of a machine-made bread against the sky, and a Mrs Hart whispering dreadfully, There was a black-beetle in it’ – and yet a sense of infinite possibility. ‘My favourite author at that time was G. A. Henty, and the only prize I ever got at school was
Through the Sikh War.
I remember walking home in the moonlight with my father and mother after the prize-giving and school concert in a daze of exaltation and pride.’ The kindling-wood is always there if only a flame be found. In Gill’s case Catholicism supplied the flame.

What followed in one sense is anti-climax, the progress of an artist not of the first rank – the railway engines giving place to architectural plans and those to letter-cutting and monumental masonry: the artist impressing himself on the face of London in W. H. Smith signs, in self-conscious Stations of the Cross. Is it for this – and the little albums of dimly daring nudes – that the father painfully taught the love of God? As an artist Gill gained nothing from his faith, but the flame had been lit none the less; and perhaps it was the inability to express his vision that drove him into eccentricity – to the community life at Ditchling, from which again he fled when it became advertised by his Dominican friends – the disciplined Catholic private life advertised like the machine-made bread. His beard and his biretta were the expressions of fury against his environment. He hated commercial civilization, and everything he did was touched by it – a new kind of repository art grew up under his influence; above all, he hated his fellow-Catholics because he felt that they had betrayed their Catholicism, and of them he hated the priesthood most. It seemed to him that they had compromised too easily with capitalism, like that Bishop of San Luis Potosi, who hid the Papal Encyclical,
De Rerum Novarum
, in the cellars of the Palace because he believed it would encourage Communism.

The clergy seem to regard it as their job to support a social order which as far as possible forces us to commit all the sins they denounce . . .. A man can be a very good Catholic in a factory, our parish priest used to be fond of saying. And he was very annoyed and called us bolshevists when we retorted: yes, but it requires heroic virtue and you have no right to demand heroic virtue from anyone, and certainly not from men and women in thousands and millions.

And again he wrote: ‘Persons whom you would have thought could hardly exist, Catholic bank clerks and stockbrokers for instance, are the choice flower of our great Catholic schools.’

There, of course, he went wrong; Waterton is a much more likely product of Stonyhurst than a bank clerk, but he was right on the main issue – that in this country Catholicism which should produce revolutionaries produces only eccentrics (eccentricity thrives on an unequal social system), and that Conservatism and Catholicism should be as impossible bedfellows as Catholicism and National Socialism. Out of his gritty childhood and his discovered faith a rebel should have been born; he wrote like a.rebel with a magnificent disregard for grammar, but something went wrong. Perhaps he made too much money, perhaps he was half-tamed by his Dominican friends; whatever the reason his rebellion never amounted to much – an article in a quarterly suppressed by the episcopate, addresses to a working men’s college, fervent little articles on sex. That overpowering tradition of eccentricity simply absorbed him until even his most outrageous anti-clerical utterances caused only a knowing smile on the face of the faithful. The beard and the biretta won – he was an eccentric too.

1941

HERBERT READ

S
OME
years ago Mr Read published an account of his childhood under the title
The innocent Eye.
It must have come as a surprise to many of his readers that the critic of
Art Now
was brought up on a Yorkshire farm: a whole world of the imagination seems to separate the vale, the orchard, the foldgarth, the mill, and the stockyard – the fine simple stony architecture of his childhood – from what was to come, which one is tempted unfairly to picture as a long empty glossy gallery with one abstraction by Mr Ben Nicholson on the farther wall, perhaps two Ideas and a Navel in clay by Mr Hans Arp on a pedestal on the parquet, and a Calder decoration of wires with little balls attached dangling from the ceiling.

The basin at times was very wide, especially in the clearness of a summer’s day; but as dusk fell it would suddenly contract, the misty hills would draw near, and with night they had clasped us close: the centre of the world had become a candle shining from the kitchen window. Inside, in the sitting-room where we spent most of our life, a lamp was lit, with a ground glass shade like a full yellow moon. There we were bathed before the fire, said our prayers kneeling on the hearthrug, and then disappeared up the steep stairs lighted by a candle to bed.

Now Mr Read has written a sequel to
The Innocent Eye.
*3
taking the account of his own life on out of the Yorkshire vale: a grim Spartan orphan’s school with a strong religious tone and the young Read absorbed in Rider Haggard; a clerkship in a Leeds Savings Bank at £20 a year, and the slightly older Read becoming a Tory and reading Disraeli and Burke; then Leeds University and loss of faith, religious and political, and so the war, and after it the literary career – and the settled literary personality, the agnostic, the anarchist, and the romantic, bearing rather heavily the load of new knowledge and new art, the theories of Freud blurring the clear innocent eye. The first book was one of the finest evocations of childhood in our language: the second – finely written as it often is – records a rather dusty pilgrimage towards a dubious and uninteresting conclusion: ‘This book will attempt to show how I have come to believe that the highest manifestation of the immanent will of the universe is the work of art’ – sight giving place to thought: to abstractions which have not been abstracted but found ready-made – and in an odd way it doesn’t quite ring true. There’s an absence of humility, and no one can adequately write of his own life without humility. When Mr Read, writing of his youth, remarks that ‘in a few years there was scarcely any poem of any worth in my own language which I had not read;’ when he writes of religion in a few dogmatic sentences as the phantasy of an afterlife conceived in the fear of death, we have travelled a long way with him too far – from the objective light of childhood and the first ‘kill’. ‘I do not remember the blood, nor the joking huntsmen; only the plumed breath of the horses, the jingle of their harness, the beads of dew and the white gossamer on the tangled hedge beside us.’

We have travelled too far, but we should never have known without
The Innocent Eye
quite how far we had travelled. That is the astounding thing – Mr Read was able to go back, back from the intellectual atmosphere personified in Freud, Bergson, Croce, Dewey, Vivante, Scheller. . . . And if we examine his work there have always been phases when he has returned: the creative spirit has been more than usually separated in his case from the critical mind. (He admits himself in one essay that submitting to the creative impulse he has written poetry which owes nothing to his critical theories.) The critic, one feels, has sometimes been at pains to adopt the latest psychological theories before they have proved their validity – rather as certain Anglican churchmen leap for confirmation of their faith on the newest statement of an astronomer. But the creative spirit has remained tied to innocence. ‘The only real experiences in life’, writes Mr Read, ‘being those lived with a virgin sensibility – so that we only hear a tone once, only see a colour once, see, hear, touch, taste, and smell everything but once, the first time.’ One of the differences between writers is this stock of innocence: the virgin sensibility in some cases lasts into middle age: in Mr Read’s case, we feel, as in so many of his generation, it died of the shock of war and personal loss. When the Armistice came: ‘There were misty fields around us, and perhaps a pealing bell to celebrate our victory. But my heart was numb and my mind dismayed; I turned to the fields and walked away from all human contacts.’ In future there was to be no future: as a critic he was to be sometimes pantingly contemporary, and when he was most an artist he was to be farthest removed from his time.

‘When most an artist’: we are not permanently interested in any other aspect of Mr Read’s work. Anarchism means more to him than it will ever mean to his readers (in spite of that vigorous and sometimes deeply moving book,
Poetry and Anarchism
) – sometimes we suspect that it means little more to him than an attempt to show his Marxist critics that he too is a political animal, to give a kind of practical everyday expression to the ‘sense of glory’ which has served him ever since youth in place of a religious faith; and I cannot share his belief that criticism with the help of Freud will become a science, and a critical opinion have the universality of a scientific law. As an artist he will be assessed, it seems to me, by
The Innocent Eye
, by his only novel,
The Green Child
, by a few poems – notably
The End of a War
, by his study of Wordsworth, informed as it is by so personal a passion that it is lifted out of the category of criticism (‘we both spring from the same yeoman stock of the Yorkshire dales, and I think I have a certain “emphatic” understanding of his personality which gives a sense of betrayal to anything I write about him’), and some scattered essays in which, too, the note of ‘betrayal’ is evident – the essays on Froissart, Malory, and Vauvenargues in particular.

It is that author with whom we wish to dwell – however much lip service we may pay to books like
Art and Society, Art Now, Art and Industry
and the rest – the author who describes himself: ‘In spite of my intellectual pretensions, I am by birth and tradition a peasant.’ Even his political thought at its most appealing comes back to that sense of soil, is tethered to the Yorkshire farm – ‘real politics are local politics’. The result of separating Mr Read’s creative from his critical work has an odd effect – there is colour, warmth, glow, the passion which surrounds the ‘sense of glory’, and we seem far removed from the rather dry critic with his eyes fixed on the distinctions between the ego and the id. The mill where the hero of
The Green Child
rescues Siloën from the sullen bullying passion of Kneeshaw is his uncle’s mill – just as the stream which had reversed its course is ‘the mysterious water’ which dived underground and re-emerged in his uncle’s field. And it may not be too imaginative to trace the dreadful sight that met Olivero’s eyes through the mill window as Kneeshaw tried to force the Green Child to drink the blood of a newly-killed lamb to that occasion in the foldgarth when the child crushed his finger in the machine for crushing oil-cake. ‘I fainted with the pain, and the horror of that dim milk-white panic is as ineffaceable as the scar which my flesh still bears.’