by Nigel Jones
We can do something far better. Also we must realise that in a thousand ways new conditions and vast possibilities are round us and ahead. The circumstances of modern life offer new temptations and new dangers to the artist. Enormous potential art publics grow slowly before our eyes. And both they and the artist are increasingly helpless before the blind amoral profit-hunger of the commercial. We must not be unprepared for the effects these dark multitudes will have on the Arts …
Although Brooke would have been astonished at the acidic extent to which commercial values would have eaten into artistic ones by the century’s end, he had unerringly put his finger on a trend that was gathering pace even as he spoke and warned. The admass culture of our day was but a gleam in the collective capitalist eye, but Brooke had spotted it. He cautioned against the innate tendency to idolize the past as a golden age – had not the eighteenth century, regarded as the pinnacle of the great age of letters, let Thomas Chatterton starve amidst its very plenty? The truth was, said Brooke, that there had never been a good time to be an artist or writer – they were perennial outsiders, and a danger to the good order of society.
Even patronage, held up as an ideal system that had produced the great works of Renaissance Italy and Elizabethan England had never worked well for long, said Brooke, drawing on his recent reading: ‘most of the best writers lost all their shame (which doesn’t much matter) and half their vitality (which does) in cadging and touting’. Patronage forced artists to be creeps and toadies, and the constant struggle for sheer economic survival soaked up creative energy: ‘It is impossible to know how much more Milton and Marvell would have given us if they had had enough money to live on. If anything at all, the loss is enormous.’
But Brooke was determined to see a silver lining in the clouds – the products of mass education, he pointed out, were a potential reservoir for good; they need not be seen simply as the lowing, vulgar herd: ‘The numbers of a potential literary public increase enormously year by year … this multitude of opening minds, may bring perplexity and apparent confusion of standards; but also (I say it soberly) the chance of a vast, unimaginable, unceasing addition to the glory of the literature of England.’
It was the duty of him and his audience, Brooke insisted, to pass on their privileges to the many: ‘It is the future – their future fineness – we work for. It is only natural that the taste of the lower classes should be at present infinitely worse than ours. The amazing thing is that it is probably rather better.’ Mentioning in passing a group of East End writers he had met in London, Brooke added: ‘There is more hope in them … than in the old-world passion and mellifluous despair of any gentleman’s or lady’s poetry.’ The freshest fruits of art and poetry must be looked for in the living, Brooke claimed, even a modern public abreast with Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Tolstoy and Ibsen were already falling behind the times: ‘They are dead, my friends, all dead,’ he said, adding ominously: ‘Beware of the dead.’ No art, however great, is immortal: ‘If you write a poem on Tuesday it begins to die on Wednesday. Some take longer dying than others. That is all.’
Brooke went on to outline a positive proposal for a future socialist government that might be in existence, he hazarded, by the year 2050, and suggested that a panel of 30 or so members be set up to endow 30 creative artists with an allowance of £250 a year each. On a lower level: ‘If the numerous universities of Great Britain could be given money to endow creative artistic work, it would be excellent.’ Or, Brooke suggested, great and rich municipal authorities such as Manchester could endow their local artists and writers and thus be associated with the glory of ‘the next great painter or dramatist’.
Brooke’s words are an extraordinarily precise prophecy, almost a prescient vision, of what did in fact come about – not in the twenty-first century, but a whole century earlier under a Labour government in which one of the leading figures holding the state’s purse-strings as Chancellor would be his friend and fellow-Fabian Hugh Dalton. And the first Chairman of the Arts Council – the body, as he envisaged, set up to endow needy artists and writers – would be none other than Maynard Keynes. Brooke’s words to his small audience that cold December night in Cambridge sparked more fires than he could possibly have known. He concluded:
To give vitality to the Arts it is necessary to direct a large proportion of our interest to contemporary art … it is our duty to be interested in contemporary art for the artist’s sake, first that he may live, second that he may turn out better stuff. We shall – rather we will – find that the old unchanging ground for the artist stands fast, the emotions of the individual human heart. Imagination will only grow profounder, passions and terrors will come in stranger shapes. Tragedy and Comedy will not leave the world while two things stay in it, the last two that Civilization will cure us of, Death and Fools. In new shapes Hamlet and Othello and Macbeth will move among us, as they do today.
Brooke’s address was not only a vision for the future, but a farewell to an important part of his past. He was leaving the Fabians in good shape – under his presidency, as he proudly boasted in a circular to freshmen, the Society had grown from ‘a few individuals with a lust for martyrdom’ into the university’s biggest political association, with 105 full members who had signed the Basis and 142 associates. It now had an office in Trinity Street and a full-time paid librarian. On the other hand the campaign to reform the Poor Law on the lines laid down by the Webbs, to which Brooke had devoted so much time and energy, was clearly running out of steam, and much of the national impetus for social reform was now going into the fight to carry Lloyd George’s reform budget through the reluctant Lords. Freed of his formal Fabian responsibilities – although he was never to formally quit the organization, he now lapsed from active membership – Brooke resolved to devote himself for the immediate future to private goals: winning his Fellowship by completing his thesis on Webster; finishing his first collection of poems; and studying German with a view to making an extended trip to the country in the New Year.
The end of the year saw another change in Brooke’s domestic circumstances. He had clearly outstayed his welcome at the Orchard, where the Stevensons continued to voice their disapproval of his streams of visitors and his stubborn attachment to his bohemian ways. Fortunately, a new chance arose to move home without leaving his beloved Grantchester, to which he was increasingly devoted: Brooke prevailed on the owners of the Old Vicarage, next door to the Orchard, Mr and Mrs Neeve, to let him take over half the house as a permanent tenant. The Neeves needed the steady income that a tenant would bring to educate their teenage son and supplement their other chief source of cash – selling honeycombs from Mr Neeve’s beehives to the Orchard tearoom at sixpence a comb. By Christmas Brooke was installed in his new – and final – home.
Reluctantly, he returned to Rugby to spend the first Christmas without his father in the company of the Ranee. But he soon became embroiled in the general-election battle. For the first time Labour were putting up a candidate in the constituency, and, in keeping with his Fabian principles, Brooke threw himself heart and soul into the fray on behalf of the socialists. He was given the task of organizing transport to the polls in the 90 far-flung villages of the constituency, but found himself facing an uphill battle since the Tories had commandeered all but 12 of the available cars in the area. He let out his frustrations in a letter to Ka Cox:
Man after man we had to give up. Couldn’t get them to the poll … the next day came pathetic letters, reproachful. ‘We was waiting in the rain for three hours for that motor.’ They can’t afford railway fares … It is not true that anger against injustice and wickedness and tyrannies is a good state of mind, ‘noble’. Oh, perhaps it is with some, if they’re fine. But I guess with most, as with me, it’s a dirty mean choky emotion. I hate the upper classes.
The result of the election was a virtual stalemate: the Tories succeeded in chipping away the Liberal majority, so the Asquith government depended on the support of Irish MPs – who exacted t
he promise of Home Rule as the price of their backing. The country now faced the prospect of more crises brewing.
Brooke, almost unconsciously, had been growing ever more dependent on the emotional support of Ka as his relations with Noel continued to run into brick walls. He had been hoping to persuade Noel to accompany him for a quiet holiday over the Christmas period for an ‘H to H’, as Ka called the heart-to-heart talks popular in their circle. His hopes were high as the ever-watchful Margery would be holidaying in the Swiss Alps with Daphne, and the distracting Bryn was in distant Jamaica. Noel, he presumed, would be at a loose end. He enlisted the aid of Ka as a prospective chaperone: ‘You’ll have to arrange about Noel,’ he told her, ‘unless you think she’d be a nuisance, and the conversation too much above her head. You’d be responsible (to Margery!) that that very delicate young flower keeps her pale innocence, and her simple trust in God unshaken by the world-worn scepticism of Jacques and me. You appear (which is the point) equal to that responsibility.’
At the beginning of December Noel had written expressing her eagerness to come to Lulworth, which Brooke, Jacques and Ka had settled on as their holiday destination, but she was leaving the final decision to her elder sister – ‘Margery knows best’ – who was acting as Noel’s guardian in their parents’ absence in Jamaica. Infuriated by Noel’s passivity, Brooke replied, attempting to stiffen her resolve against Margery’s interference:
I’m trying rather confusedly to urge you to make a protest against idiocy & wickedness. Don’t show a Christian spirit. Thunder! Even if you’re not used to thundering. You, you, can thunder. Is my advice impudent? No. Nothing’s impudent, between us, now. And don’t think it’s all my hysterical selfishness. I’m right to begin with. Superbly right. And if you don’t believe me, – everyone agrees, except cowards. Ka agrees, obviously. And she’s fine, and wise. And think of Bryn! She’s sensible. Margery must be made as sensible. You mustn’t humour her. So make a push for it. And let me know what happens. Noel, I must see you. I love you.
In spite of the hysterical, hectoring tone, one can sympathize with Brooke’s frustration, and his gathering rage against Margery’s irrational attempts to control her youngest sister’s life. Ironically, her ‘idiocy and wickedness’, along with her delusion that most men she met – including Brooke – were in love with her, were the early symptoms of a mental illness that would eventually be diagnosed as dementia praecox and lead to her lifelong confinement in psychiatric hospitals. By an even more bitter irony, it would fall to Noel, by then a qualified doctor, to sign the papers that certified Margery’s insanity.
For the time being, Brooke remained fixated on Noel; but her continued elusiveness was starting to play on his own delicate mental balance. Writing from Rugby in mid-December he told her: ‘I’m going to stop, and learn my German lesson … I seem feverish and horrible. Oh, I’m fretful and grimy and bad. But sometimes, I do assure you, I’m better than that. Though I’m hungering often for you, and though I’m of little faith, and full of jealousies and fears, sometimes I step back a bit and look at the world and me and you; and realise the glory.’ Sexual deprivation, and the strain of the election, were playing their part in sapping Brooke’s always limited mental and emotional reserves:
Last week … I was working so hard at elections, all day & half the night, without moving, on occasional coffee and bread and butter. But that, or working, or writing, or meeting old friends in the streets, – it’s all so vague and dreamy, compared with realities. For you’re reality, and there I live – you coming up the Old Vicarage Garden, or in a field, or in camp, and the light on you, and the way you move, your mouth and hair and face and body, and the feel of your hands …
Desperately, feeling that Noel was starting to slip imperceptibly from his grasp, and their New Forest engagement was crumbling into dust and ashes, Brooke strove to bind her with the only weapon he had – words:
It may be that I’m wrong, or hurting, writing so. For you’ve been mad, and I a fool, since. And what you are now, and are feeling, perhaps I don’t know. For I can’t see you; and how can I tell, how can I tell? But it won’t be. I’ll not have it. If we could meet, once, it would all be right … Noel, Noel, Noel, I’ll not let you go. I’ll hold you by the shoulders tight, tight, tight. I can almost feel you. You shall not change. Except to grow more glorious; for you’ll burn more amazingly, and I’ll do finer things, the finest in the world, for you. But oh! I must see you! Your lover Rupert.
But it was not to be. Noel replied to this torrent of aching eloquence with a dampener: her father had commanded her to go to Switzerland with her sisters and instead of resisting: ‘I, as usual am damnably placid & indifferent, & wanting to do about three incompatible things at the same time.’ This disappointment seems to have been a catalyst for Brooke, bringing to a head his simmering exasperation with Noel. She, he thought, had brought playing hard to get to an art form. Her hesitation and damnable placidity could no longer be blamed on her parents or sister – by her own admission they were part and parcel of her own sluggish emotions. Brooke, for his part, could not continue with his own feelings strained as taut as a high wire. He had to subside – or explode. He chose to confide in Ka.
‘What hurts,’ he told her, ‘is thinking her [Noel] wicked. I do, you see. Not very judicially, but I do. And what’s to be done if you think a person you know so well is wicked?’ The answer was staring him in the face. He squeezed in a Christmas trip to London and a hurried meeting with Ka. They visited a bookshop together, and when Ka asked him to choose a book as a Christmas gift from her, Brooke, beset with his own troubles, waved his arm irritably at a crowded shelf. Hurt by his indifferent gesture, Ka gently let it be known that if her present was a matter of indifference to him, it was very important to her. Brooke was mortified by guilt at his own insensitivity. The scales fell from his distracted eyes, as slowly it dawned on him that Ka, this quiet, lumpy woman who had already become a peripheral part of his life long ago, might, in fact, be more than ‘the cushion’ he liked to compare her to.
On his return to Rugby he wrote to try to explain his confused feelings: ‘I’m red and sick with anger at myself for my devilry and degradation and stupidity. I hate myself because I wickedly and unnecessarily hurt you several times … I hurt you, I hurt you, Ka, for a bit, unforgivably and filthily and infamously; and I can’t bear it; I was wild to do anything everything in the world to undo the hurt, or blot it out …’
After Christmas four old friends gathered at Cove Cottage and Churchfield House in Lulworth, the familiar one-street hamlet of terraced cottages, nestling between the sea and the whale-backed Purbeck hills of Dorset: Brooke, Jacques Raverat and Justin Brooke, and with them, revelling in the chance to love and mother three very needy males, the comforting, creamy presence of Ka. Caught in that empty, timeless cocoon between Christmas and the New Year, the four passed their time in relaxed fashion: walking the downs and the seashore by day; reading Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound to one another in the evenings. But between the friends, emotional undercurrents flashed like electrical discharges: Jacques, in the emotionally heightened state that is a feature of the early stages of multiple sclerosis, seemingly forgot his interest in Gwen Darwin and once again asked Ka to marry him. She replied with a metaphoric pat on his head: ‘You’re too much of a baby.’
Brooke, brooding over Noel and the injustices he had suffered at the collective hands of the Oliviers, went off alone on long, silent walks, and finished a long letter to Bryn that he had begun at Rugby: despite his courtly, almost automatic compliments – ‘I always think of you for an hour three times a week’ – his bitterness ate through the brittle words; speaking of Noel he asked: ‘Don’t you think there’s a chance of her turning out less pointless than the rest of you?’ The letter gives a vivid picture of Brooke’s less than festive Christmas at Rugby:
For Christmas Aunt Fanny came and stayed with us. She is a short wicked horrible middle-aged woman who believes in God. To keep her qui
et I trooped off to Church on Christmas Day – a queer way of celebrating it. I hadn’t been for years. Bryn dear, it was funny. I’d got over the bitter feeling I used to have when I was made to go. So I could enjoy it. All the old Christmas hymns turned up and fairly wrung my stomach with sentimentality. Most of the time, however, I was irresistibly driven to make up parodies on them – of a nature too obscene for me to write even to you, emancipated and unshockable!
He continues with a hint of his changing but still confused sexual interests, and his usual swipe at his old tormentors:
Also there was the lovely psalm about the King’s Daughter, who was ‘all glorious within; her clothing is of wrought gold’ etc. All the bald Rugby schoolmasters around … sang it with fervour. I could see them calling up the picture of the King’s daughter, very lovely & golden, riding out in the procession, in the sunlight. They all lusted for her – oh! just very slightly. Romance flitted in and out of the holly decorations; & their eyes looked far away. Beside each was his dumpy little middle-aged wife, quite placid; and the children. So it all faded again. Life is very wonderful; and all things are entirely for the best; and if; in twenty years or so, I meet you & find you a little dumpy middle-aged wife, I may kill you, just for sentimentality’s sake, rather wonderingly.
As for church, I wasn’t really very happy. A chinless man preached the sort of sermon a tapioca pudding might preach. However, there was a girls’ school out to the left of me … and I stared at them for a long while, and longed for a dozen or so of them; and there was a beautiful choir-boy. Occasionally it seems a little tame. For I’d never bring myself to the point of just dashing into the girls’ school and lugging the loveliest away. Yet that’s just the only dignified thing to do, I suppose? But I just trotted home in my bowler hat & neat little stiff collar, without so much as winking at anyone on the way out of Church. (Aunt Fanny stayed to eat God.)
