After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Auden wrote that:

  In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, ie it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighbourhood (but not too well-to-do – or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing-room carpet.27

  It is noticeable that the idyllic Eden is often the English village or the English countryside, even when the author is far from England. John Dickson Carr was American but set his mysteries, most of them, in England. ‘Michael Innes’ (the pseudonym of J. I. M. Stewart) began his nostalgic evocations of an England of very old-fashioned Oxford colleges and country houses miles from the nearest remote railway halt while he was a lecturer in Australia. England, even for those who lived there, but perhaps even more acutely for those who did not, came to stand for something recognizable, if difficult without absurd sentimentality to define.

  Exile intensified, for writers, a sense of ‘Englishness’. One discerns this in the perfectly crafted short stories and novels of Somerset Maugham, whose characters never feel more English than when they are on liners crossing from Tahiti to San Francisco, or pursuing their expatriate lines of business in Rangoon, Singapore or Molucca. One feels it too in the four magnificent Wessex novels of John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) – Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1933), Maiden Castle (1936), and perhaps the greatest, Weymouth Sands (1934). These incomparable explorations of the hidden human psyche, of relations between the sexes, of the mysterious and occult quality of the landscape and archaeological history of England itself, have things in common with Hardy and with Lawrence but are much more ambitious achievements. They are the only novels in English to rival the great Russians, especially Dostoyevsky – one of Powys’s great heroes. They were all composed in America where the need to earn his living forced him into the unstoppable and exhausting routines of the itinerant lecturer. Bard, show-off, mystic genius that this craggily built Celt was, these lectures were triumphant. His Autobiography, also a masterpiece, reveals the extent to which he is embedded in the Victorian traditions of a clerical family. Through the interstices of his family tree, he was related to the great mainstream of intellectual and literary life – from the eighteenth-century poet William Cowper to the Macaulays. His parsonage upbringing and boarding-school education were those of so many of the best minds of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Strangely enough, the books which he wrote after he had come home lack the deeply felt and extraordinary quality of the novels he wrote in the period 1929–36. The reader opening one of these stories for the first time might suppose he was entering a purely idiosyncratic version of England. When the addiction grows, however, you realize that with his finely attuned intuitive antennae, Powys understood better than many political and religious analysts what was happening to his native country during his exile. He is infinitely old-fashioned, and yet more shockingly modern, not least in his portrayal of sexual feeling, than his younger contemporaries. Like many of the greatest English artists in any medium, Powys is hard to define against the backdrop of modernism which shapes the American or European scenes.

  Modernism in poetry, painting, theology, had been attempted in Britain but with no notable native-born exponents. The poetry of Eliot knew many English imitators, but that is what they were. An English Joyce was unimaginable. After the war, Britain retreated into itself. Stanley Spencer’s return to his childhood village of Cookham was emblematic, as the life-choices of great artists often are. So, in a very different way, was Ivy Compton-Burnett’s decision to set all her novels in a period before the First World War. British Elegy, and most specifically English Elegy, is the overriding note of serious art and literature for the next twenty years. So much had been lost and destroyed in the war that it is as though the creative intelligences in Britain wanted to recover Eden, not to chart new lands. The most successful productions in music, painting and literature in the period all have a kindred völkisch feeling for a lost England, to be heralded in the strains of Britten’s folk songs, in Betjeman’s evocations of a Victorian world, in John Piper’s switch from very weak imitations of continental Cubism and abstract collage to a quite distinctive representational style elegizing such apparently threatened phenomena as Welsh chapels or country houses. Whence came the threat? From industrial pollution, from the expansion of towns, from foreign enemies? No doubt some of these thoughts explain the appeal of English elegy. But is there not here a simple metaphysical perception, on the part of the elegists and of their admirers, that Britain had reached, if not the very end, a penultimate chapter?

  Stanley Spencer’s extraordinary confidence as a painter, his absolute at-homeness with the medium of oil paint, is as obvious as a poster. He was born the son of a piano teacher, the grandson of a builder, in the Thames Valley village of Cookham, a place he would mythologize, immortalize in rather the way that Samuel Palmer made Shoreham in Kent seem a gateway to the beyond. He went to the Slade School of Art. A photograph of Slade students on a summer outing in 1912 shows us David Bomberg, Dora Carrington, Edward Wadsworth and C. R. W. Nevinson. Gwen Raverat well might have been there – she too was a contemporary at the Slade. And there is the diminutive figure of Spencer, whom they nicknamed ‘Cookham’. The condescension in the soubriquet hovered round Spencer for most of his life, when he must have been regarded as a primitive, an eccentric, a boy from a suburban village on the edge of Maidenhead, doing spiritually in his art what he did actually, for reasons of poverty, as a student: returning each night to Cookham and his ‘Pa’.

  In subject-matter, the paintings of Spencer follow the grand traditions of European art – stylishly executed landscapes of a highly traditional kind and, his hallmark, religious pictures, in which, for example, the villagers of Cookham experience a General Resurrection upon the Last Day. His experiences serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the First World War were poured into the haunting murals in the Sandham Memorial Chapel. There are scenes of life – soldiers frying rashers of bacon in a billycan in the Camp at Karasuli – and scenes of death and resurrection. There is sometimes grandeur in his perception of humanity, and sometimes low ribaldry, as in his low-life pictures, chiefly executed during the 1930s, between overweight women and randy, bewildered little men like himself.

  Many English viewers of these grotesque paintings – the funny little man in trousers staring imploringly, but alarmedly, at the bulbous women bulging from their flowery frocks – will be transported into the world of Donald McGill’s comic postcards. If Disraeli was – as he so inconsequentially once informed Queen Victoria – the blank leaf between the Old Testament and the New, then perhaps Stanley Spencer was the missing leaf between the art of the High Renaissance and the saucy postcard. As in the world of his contemporary John Cowper Powys, spirituality and ribaldry and self-conscious Englishness can be disconcerting until you get your eye in, learn how to overlook some of the tomfoolery. You feel ‘important’ themes are being given a lightness they can’t bear – the exact opposite of the sort of thing going on in Europe at the time, where French or German writers and artists might take themselves more seriously.

  Spencer’s art was a continual stripping, self-revealing, self-lacerating. And it might be as well to mention, before exploring its overtly religious dimension, the autobiographical counterpoises to the Donald McGill–Maillol roly-poly joke-pictures. In 1950 Sir Alfred Munnings came across some of Spencer’s ‘couple’ pictures and initiated a prosecution of the artist for obscenity. One always dislikes reading accounts of artists persecuting one another by means of the law – think of A. A. Milne acting the Pharisee over P. G. Wodehouse during the Second World War. As it
happens, the whirligig of time brings its revenges. The scenes which Munnings depicted – harmless equestrian canvases, race meetings and the hunt – would probably be much more shocking to many people today than Stanley Spencer’s searingly honest nudes – particularly the self-portraits with Patricia Preece.

  Patricia Preece was Stanley Spencer’s reason for returning to his childhood village in the early Thirties. Spencer divorced his wife Hilda, and made over his property to Patricia Preece, whom he married at the Maidenhead registrar’s office on 29 May 1937. Patricia Preece went on loving, and wishing to live with, her lover Dorothy Hepworth, one of those pre-Second World War lesbians who look exactly like a man. Spencer wanted to have his ex-wife as a lover, not an idea which pleased either woman very much.

  The Thirties were a time of sexual revolution, just as much as the 1960s – in some ways much more so.

  See the advertisements of the period for new suburban housing, or drive out of any big British conurbation until you reach the mile upon mile of 1930s housing, the semi-detacheds, all aping larger houses, the stockbroker Tudorbethan of Edwardian Surrey and Middlesex and Altrincham and Edgbaston; all nagging the mortgage-slaves to aspire to something higher. An Englishman’s home is his dungeon. These houses were supposed in every way to be better than the tenements and terraces of the Georgian and Victorian cities. Each had a scrap of garden behind its privet hedge. Many had a garage. Once inside them, though, and you find that the rooms are poky, just as small in many cases as those in a rotting Georgian rented terrace, but, unlike the town house, miles from anywhere or anything which could be described as interesting. What hopes these miserable little dwellings represent, what spiritual and emotional constriction they must have offered in reality, as hubby went off to the nearest station each morning from just such a dormitory village as Cookham, and the wife, half liberated and half slave, stayed behind wondering how many of the newly invented domestic appliances they could afford to purchase, and how long the man would hold on to his job in the Slump. No wonder, when war came, that so many of these suburban prisoners felt a sense of release.

  Stanley Spencer, ‘Cookham’, used to the coming and going of the trains to Maidenhead and Slough and Reading, knew the soul of lower-middle-class, imprisoned British humanity during the years of the Slump and the preparation for war. His own life was deeply bizarre, but he made of it a parable of his times. His nude canvases of himself and Patricia Preece give off an overpowering atmosphere of sexual frustration. One of the most successful shows her lying on some crumpled sheets wearing the sort of black lacy ‘lingerie’ men are supposed to like to buy for their womenfolk. (She looks as if she ought to have a bubble coming out of her mouth saying to the figure leering at her from behind the easel: ‘You silly bugger!’) Spencer wrote her a poem at this time:

  I will buy my God a chemise

  To wear over her

  I embrace her with suspenders

  And worship her with drawers

  My adoration dresses her

  Covering her with loveclothes.

  Spencer always, whether he is depicting sexual or religious themes, retained a very strong element of absurdity. The canvas now hanging in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge is a truly ghastly scene of crestfallen Spencer, naked from the front, gazing at Patricia as she leans with her hands behind her head and her legs splayed. It must be one of the most ridiculous, as well as the saddest, pictures of human non-meeting, non-love, incomprehension and depression. (When Spencer left his wife and child and married Patricia Preece, it was an unconsummated union.) The uncooked joint of mutton in the foreground with its perkily phallic leg-bone is in sad contrast with the drooping Spencer.

  Companions to these terrible pictures are the self-portrait of Spencer alone, in tears, in a bedsit in Belsize Park, and the painting done two or three years earlier of his estranged wife Hilda, looking away from him with tight lips, his contemptuous daughter and her alarming death-like dolls, held like a father’s broken promise in the arms of her summer frock. So all this lies behind and alongside the Stanley Spencer we all know and love: the potboiling evocations of the sunny Thames valley, and the overtly religious stuff – Christ carrying his cross down Cookham High Street, and the General Resurrection happening in Cookham Churchyard.

  In all this there was a turning of the British back upon the rest of the world, a pulling up of the shutters. The troops had come back from the war. The politicians and the businessmen had conned everyone into thinking life would be different. It wasn’t a land fit for heroes. It was still as unfair and as class-riven and as silly as before, simply less rich, and less certain of itself. The way that English art turns its back on the Continental traditions is emblematic. Piper stops being a pseudo-Braque and becomes a minor but distinctive figurative artist in his own right. A definitive article, explaining his position, is Piper’s ‘England’s Early Sculptures’, published in Architectural Review in 1936. He was struck by such wonders as the carvings of the Last Supper on the twelfth-century font at North Grimstone in Yorkshire. His work as an abstract artist had drawn him to ‘an instinctive search for the everyday symbols of geometry’. A medieval Wiltshire wit in Peter Langtoft’s Chronicle of 1307 is obliged, when studying the antiquities in Rome, to admit that he has never seen Stonehenge. He is kicked out of doors and told to go home and see the beauties of his own culture. Everyone, says Langtoft, should be treated thus ‘who scrap for barley cornes of vanity on foreigne dung hills’.28 Whether painting lighthouses or harbours, Welsh Nonconformist chapels or aristocratic houses (see his magnificent series of paintings of Renishaw), Piper appears to have been released by Langtoft’s injunction into a series of powerful elegiac visions. It is as if he has seen a Britain which is about to destroy itself, and is determined to capture it in a series of rapid, haunted, almost tear-stained visions. When George VI saw Piper’s series of Windsor Castle, he expressed commiseration with the artist for having struck such bad weather. It would be crazy to think of Piper as a great artist in the league of Picasso or Titian, but sometimes minor artists see a clear truth. His great friend John Betjeman, similarly, was never in the league of his old schoolmaster Eliot, but Betjeman’s hymn-like verses about the strapping thighs of girls in tennis clubs, or the rattling tram-ride of his boyhood back to Parliament Hill Fields through poverty-stricken North London, have similar power to Piper’s sad washes and sketches. Like Noël Coward’s songs, they stay in the head for ever, indelibly recording

  Dear old, bloody old England

  Of telegraph poles and tin,

  Seemingly so indifferent

  And with so little soul to win.29

  * Both, of course, half-American.

  * Austen Chamberlain died in 1937.

  22

  Two Thousand Whispered Voices

  Today in the twenty-first century, the robust vernacular religious traditions of Anglicanism (the Church of Tranter Dewey from Under the Greenwood Tree) have been all but forgotten in these days of church being only for the devout. The Victorian High Churchmen, the so-called Tractarians, started the rot, of course – one sees that now. But as the novels of Hardy, George Eliot and E. F. Benson show, church as a place where communities gathered – partly for worship, partly for music, ribaldry, and gossip, partly for nebulous reasons which did not need to be defined – went on for a very long time, even after the box pews were removed, and the bewigged parish clerk reading the responses to the curate in the three-decker pulpit gave way to Kempe glass and ‘piety’. Stanley Spencer in all likelihood is seen by modern secular gallery-goers as some kind of religious nutter. In fact, his canvases are the last flowering of normal English religion. On the surface you have the bright world that he painted so incomparably well – brick and flint-knapped houses, lush green countryside, a blacksmith’s yard, boats and goldfish in a tank on the edge of the Thames, a goose-run where cherry blossom flowers in 1949. He is able to show how England retained its stubborn wish to be idyllic long into the post-Second World War
years. Yet beneath this surface, and in these houses, men and women are looking for their God-in-suspenders, and there’s more vigour in the Sunday joint than in their sex lives. It’s a sad, silly world that Spencer depicts, and in this context the religion seems both part of the silliness, and a moving way of coming to terms with it.

  If the Victorian sages – Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Marx, George Eliot – had returned to England after the First World War, they would have been astounded to discover that religion survived – that indeed Christianity, and the Church of England in particular, flourished as never before. This was not simply a matter of folk religion, nor of the Establishment wishing to decorate its power-base with religious trappings. In 1931 the Archbishop of York, William Temple, conducted a mission to the University of Oxford. It made an extraordinary impression. The vicar of the university church believed that it ‘stopped the rot in the Christian life of post-war Oxford. There are large numbers of men and women rendering influential Christian service all over the world today who owe all that is best in them to that week. It was, indeed, a decisive moment in the history of that generation, and the influence still endures and spreads. It was when the tide began to come in …’ The metaphor alludes to Matthew Arnold’s great Victorian poem about the Sea of Faith ebbing away.

  William Temple (1881–1944) was the son of the Victorian Archbishop of Canterbury Frederick Temple. His mother, Beatrice Lascelles, was a granddaughter of both the 2nd Earl of Harewood and the 6th Earl of Carlisle. He is a good example of how vigorously the hereditary principle continued to replenish the stock of British public life. A brilliant scholar of Balliol, and by training and temperament a philosopher, Temple delayed his ordination because of doubts about the Virgin Birth and the Bodily Resurrection of Christ – though not about God. One of the only ‘dead’ public performances of this corpulent, eloquent, attractive man was when asked to address the Student Christian Movement on ‘Why I believe in God’. When asked by the warden of the Student Movement House in Bloomsbury why he had been off form he replied: ‘You see, I have never known what it is to doubt the existence of God, and I felt I had no right to be speaking to that audience of young people.’1