Set in Perpetua

By NEVILLE BRAYBROOKE

IN the art of cut-lettering and in the designing and carving of inscriptions, Eric Gill was completely the master. Two type-faces, Felicity and Perpetua, still keep his memory green. But at the distance of just over a quarter of a century since his death, his talents in other spheres seem more open to question. Sometimes the name of William Morris is invoked and—though perhaps there are parallels between the Kelmscott com- munity of the last century and the Ditchling one of this—Gill had nothing like the same range as a creative artist and man of many parts. None of his books, even at their most utopian, can really measure up to Morris's News from Nowhere.

Another more fruitful comparison is some- times made with D. H. Lawrence: and certainly Lawrence, who had once described Gill as a 'fat-hipped soft fellow,' came later to agree with a number of his arguments put forth in Art Nonsense and other polemical writings. Gill in turn admired and illustrated Lady Chatterley's Lover, thought that all seminarians should read it, and named one of his nude statues after Mellors, the hero of the novel. The ultimate difference between the two men lies in the nature of their achievement, an achievement Which high- points quite dramatically the contrast between dream and reality.

Lawrence was a genius and a dreamer. Gill was a dreamer and craftsman. Lawrence poured his genius into his novels, literally sweating at the brow, while his dreams of community-living and blood-brotherhood were made a reality by Middleton Murry and other disciples. Likewise, many of Gill's dreams were made a reality by his disciples, though the sweat that went into his activities on the scaffolding, even into his finest bas-reliefs, such as that which stands before the Palace of the League of Nations, never resulted in works of the same order of intensity as the writings of Lawrence. His Stations of the Cross at Westminster Cathedral are live and right, but (as David Jones once said) they are not profound works of sculpture.

Too often Gill allowed himself to be dis- tracted. That is made manifestly clear in his letters and Autobiography; in the memoirs of his friends; and in Robert Speaight's new Life of him.* A shout from the kitchen, the arrival of an unexpected guest—and he would find him- self torn between the duties of courtesy and the pressures of his art. This seems to be the difference between the craftsman and the creative artist. Lawrence could be called away when decorating a box—and then return to finish it. But it was another matter when he was working on a novel.

Gill was first and foremost a crafts- man and a 'maker,' and although a creative artist must always be a 'maker' first, it is not an absolute of 'making' that the first stage shall necessarily lead to the creative, second stage. The second stage, moreover, requires a complete

* THE LIFE OF ERIC Gm,. (Methuen. 63s.)

concentration, demanding not less than every- thing. A mistake often made in community groups by the disciples who gather is to assume that because a craftsman is a perfectionist he automatically achieves the second stage. The truth is that comparatively few reach even the first stage.

But as a compensation 'it [was] Eric's good fortune throughout his life to meet the right person at the right moment.' This was particu- larly the case with Ananda K. Coomeraswamy, a Hindu from Madras who had made a study of Indian art and whose books introduced Gill to the sacred civilisation of the East. Their friend- Ship ripened into a long one, and in one of the last essays that Gill wrote on 'Art in Relation to the Incarnation,' he put this saying from Coomeraswamy at the top: 'Art is not an aesthetic but a rhetorical activity.' In the essay itself, he quoted again: 'The artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist.'

For Gill, it was one of the tragedies of the world in which he lived that not every man recognised what Coomeraswamy said. This, how- ever, was a tragedy long before the twentieth century—as witness the serfdom of the Middle Ages, or the forced labour by which the pyramids were built. Yet as far as history was concerned, Gill was always something of an innocent. Further, it was this precise innocence which made him appear such an individualist, despite the fact that this was the last thing he wanted to be taken for.

Nor could he ever understand—cutting the individualistic figure that he did—why nearly everyone else around him appeared to act and think so differently. The answer was that, without knowing it, he was a typical eccentric in the long line of English eccentrics. A great many of his eccentricities were noted by the gossip- columnists at the time, and Mr Speaight, true to the English tradition of biography, provides a generous quota. I knew about the biretta and smock, but had not heard before about the crimson silk petticoat-bodice that he wore without breeches when working on the sculptures outside Broadcasting House. However, some of the eccentricities sound excessive.

Mr Speaight tells us that Gill believed in the segregation of the sexes at church; he thought it 'indecent that husband and wife should kneel together.' At Capel-y-ffin, in the Welsh moun- tains, to which he and his family retired from 1924 to 192$, the house had its own private chapel. Rather incongruously, on each side of the chapel, were black cards printed in sans serif capitals that read: MEN and WOMEN. Yet 'Re- ligion [was] as important in Eric's life as sex or "making"; indeed, more important because it . . . inspire[d] the practice and the preaching of both.' Mr Speaight makes this comment early, and follows it consistently for just on 300 pages. Nor can anybody read much of Gill's writing without being aware of it. In his Autobiography, he records how as a boy he was taught modesty

and the concealment of that 'organ of drainage' which could also be transformed so easily into 'a pillar of fire.'

But in his drawings and woodcuts and sculp- tures. he never went in for any kind of con- cealment. Rather it was the reverse—though with this irony: there crept into his work a certain coyness, however much he might rail against boudoir standards or against art-school con- ventions, that said some poses were 'nice,' and others not. For instance, in the preface to his

Drawings from Life, he comments: . . the skeleton and the "bag of tricks- which we call the vital organs and the muscular apparatus are enclosed in the skin, and that skin is a sort of intimate inner garment or underclothes.' How significant is that description 'bag of tricks'!

This self-consciousness—often expressed by a mixture of modesty and daring—was apparent also in Lawrence's life. Catherine Carswell recalls how when she was once staying with the Law- rences, he reprimanded her for coming down to collect a book in her nightdress. Mr Speaight recalls how although there was nothing that Gill liked better than 'to see women in the nude, he would insist that in public they should be dressed in black from head to foot.'

Catholics who thought Gill outspoken on sex in the 'thirties might do well to think again. Here is his view of birth control: 'simply masturbation a deux, and when, by means of contraceptive contrivances, a man and woman seek the same gratifications, they make them- selves homosexual and earn the same con- demnation.' Much of Gill's pamphleteering now shows how the progressives of yesterday can become the conservatives of tomorrow. For in- stance, in Unemployment, a pamphlet of 1933, his argument that as machinery is perfected, so unemployment will decrease, has proved false. Its plea for the abolition of machinery defeats, too, some of his earlier writings, in which it is not the commerce brought about by machinery that he deplores, but the setting-up of commerce as an end in itself. In accepting Gill, a certain contradictoriness has to be swallowed.

In October 1929 the SPECTATOR published a review of one of Gill's books, Art Nonsense, by Joseph Thorp. Thorp had always been an admirer, but he had to admit that if the book had not been so well printed in Perpetua, he would have hurled it across the room: its dogmatic assertions exasperated him—although the same book, in the review pages of the Book Collector's Quarterly, found favour with D. H. Lawrence. The Life of Eric Gill is also set in Perpetua, but, unlike my predecessor, so en- gagingly has every aspect of Gill's character been presented and interpreted, that not once have I been tempted to follow suit. Here is the authoritative study, delivered with wit, panache and affection. Mr Speaight has used his talents as an actor to get right inside Gill's skin, while at the same time exhibiting a critic's proper degree of detachment.

None of the soft sog that has marred the memoirs of other disciples and friends has crept in, and there are many illuminating touches: 'A man does not read Conrad's Victory aloud to his wife, unless they have more than bed and board in common.' Or, who would not like to have witnessed the scene on the Downs on that February morning in 1913 when Leonard and Virginia Woolf were staling with the Gills, and when Eric and Mary, after they had made their first communion; spent the day walking with their guests? 'Faith and agnosticism—each in its purest form—can rarely have mixed so easily.'