Books of the Day
Rebels and Eccentrics
Autobiography. By Eric Gill. (Jonathan Cape. tzs. 6d.)
ROMAN 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. 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 worldli- ness or the tag-end of peasant beliefs picked up in saints' lives.
Gill's father was a curate in the Countess of Huntingdon's Con- nexion 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 L15o a year. " He was from a ' high- brow,' 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 there were 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. Henry, 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 per- haps 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 civilisation, 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 in- stance, 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 (eccen- tricity thrives on an unequal social system), and that Conserva- tism 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 some- thing 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 utterance caused only a knowing smile on the face of the faithful. The beard and the biretta won—he
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