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
SOME 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.’
‘Milk-white panic’: like the Green Child himself Mr Read has a horror of violence – a horror which preceded the war and did not follow it. The conflict always present in his work is between the fear and the glory – between the ‘milk-white panic’ and the vision which was felt by ‘the solitary little alien in the streets of Leeds’, the uncontrollable ambition which ‘threw into the cloudy future an infinite ray in which there could always be seen, like a silver knight on a white steed, this unreal figure which was myself, riding to quixotic combats, attaining a blinding and indefinable glory’. If art is the resolution of a combat, here surely is the source of Mr Read’s finest work. Very far back – farther than the author can take us – the conflict originated: it was already established when the machine closed, when the small boy felt the excitement of King Solomon’s Mines and Montezuma’s Daughter. Both sides of the conflict are personified and expressed in his poem The End of a War, in which the sense of glory is put first into the mouth of a dying German officer and then into the dialogue between the soul and body of the girl whom the Germans had raped and murdered – the glory of surrender to nationality and to faith, and last the revulsion in the mouth of an English officer waking on the morning of peace and addressing his dead enemy – the revulsion of an ordinary man crushed by the machine who has no sense of glory in martial action or in positive faith, caught up in violence and patiently carrying out of the conflict only the empirical knowledge that he has at least survived.
The bells of hell ring ting-a-ling-a-ling
for you but not for me – for you
whose gentian eyes stared from the cold
impassive alp of death. You betrayed us
at the last hour of the last day
playing the game to the end,
your smile the only comment
on the well-done deed. What mind
have you carried over the confines?
Your fair face was noble of its kind,
some visionary purpose cut the lines
clearly on that countenance.
But you are defeated: once again
the meek inherit the kingdom of God.
No might can win against this wandering
wavering grace of humble men.
You die, in all your power and pride:
I live, in my meekness justified.
Because we have detected a conflict between the sense of glory and the fear of violence it mustn’t be thought that we have mistaken the meaning Mr Read has attached to glory: glory, he has written many times, is not merely martial glory, or ambition.
Glory is the radiance in which virtues flourish. The love of glory is the sanction of great deeds; all greatness and magnanimity proceed not from calculation but from an instinctive desire for the quality of glory. Glory is distinguished from fortune, because fortune exacts care; you must connive with your fellows and compromise yourself in a thousand ways to make sure of its fickle favours. Glory is gained directly, if one has the genius to deserve it: glory is sudden.
In that sense glory is always surrender – the English officer also experienced glory in the completeness of his surrender to the machine: the ‘wavering grace’ too is glory. But just as the meaning of glory extends far beyond great deeds, so the fear of violence extends to the same borders. Surrender of any kind seems a betrayal: the milk-white panic is felt at the idea of any self-revelation. The intellect strives to be impersonal, and the conflict becomes as extensive as life – life as the artist describes it today, ‘empty of grace, of faith, of fervour, and magnanimity’.
Glory in that sense cannot be attained by the artist, for glory is the cessation of conflict: it is private like death. The mystic, the soldier, even the politician can attain glory – the artist can only express his distant sense of it. In his novel, The Green Child, Mr Read conveyed as he had never done before, even in The End of a War, that private sense of glory. We see it working inwards from political glory – from the ideal state which Olivero found in South America back to the source of inspiration, the home of the ‘innocent eye’, back through fantasy to the dream of complete glory – the absolute surrender. Alone in his crystalline grotto, somewhere below the earth’s surface, to which the Green Child led him, sinking through the water at the mill-stream’s source, Olivero awaits death and petrifaction – the sense of sin which came between Wordsworth and his glory has been smoothed out, passion, the fear of death, all the motives of conflict have been eliminated as they had been from the dying German. Desire is limited to the desire of the final surrender, of becoming first rock, then crystal, of reaching permanency – ambition could hardly go farther.
When the hated breath at last left the human body, that body was carried to special caves, and then laid out in troughs filled with petrous water that dripped from roof and walls. There it remained until the body turned white and hard, until the eyes were glazed under the vitreous lids, and the hair of the head became like crisp snail-shells, the beard like a few jagged icicles . . .
It is the same sense of glory that impelled Christian writers to picture the City of God – both are fantasies, both are only expressions, of a sense unattained by the author, both, therefore, are escapes: the solution of conflict can come no other way. The difference, of course, is that the Christian artist believes that his fantasy is somewhere attainable: the agnostic knows that no Green Child will ever really show him the way to absolute glory.
The difference – though for the living suffering man it represents all the difference between hell and purgatory – is not to us important. Christian faith might have borne poorer fruits than this sense of unattainable glory lodged in the child’s brain on a Yorkshire farm forty years ago. Mr Read’s creative production has been small, but I doubt whether any novel, poem, or work of criticism, is more likely to survive the present anarchy than The Green Child, The End of a War, and Wordsworth. The critic who has hailed so many new fashions in painting and literature has himself supplied the standards of permanence by which these fashions will be condemned.
1941
THE CONSERVATIVE
ALL along the wide stony high street o
f Chipping Campden one is aware of stopped clocks. Time has been strenuously and persistently defied – almost successfully. Even the public telephone box – after a short struggle with the Post Office has been allowed to wear the protective colouring of Cotswold stone. At one time a lady did rebel, painting her seventeenth-century door scarlet, but the slow pressure of well-directed public opinion won in the end. Everything here is preserved – even the smells. So remarkable an attempt to halt the passage of time is of more than local interest: its success can be judged in the late F. L. Griggs’s drawings now published, together with an introduction by Mr Russell Alexander.*4 As drawings they are not of wide interest, but to anyone who knows Campden they will recall very vividly the geography of this strange experiment in escape – with its stone continuity of building from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, as if the mind of man here had always taken as his main motto: ‘Conserve.’
No one conserved more passionately than the late F. L. Griggs: he built his own house of solid stone with little medieval rooms, no telephone and no electric light. New bungalows and workmen’s cottages were pushed under his leadership beyond the imaginary walls of what was in effect a dream town – they littered the road to the station and the road to Broadway, which was always to Campden an example of a town that had not sufficiently conserved. Griggs was a Roman Catholic, and so were most of the inhabitants of Campden. He believed in guilds and the love of craftsmanship: he had a mind’s eye picture – which he sometimes engraved – of what an English town had been like before the Reformation, and to this he wanted Campden to conform.
Collected Essays Page 28