Читать книгу Stanley Spencer (Text Only) - Ken Pople - Страница 12
ОглавлениеStudy me then you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next Spring,
For I am every dead thing
In whom Love wrought new Alchemy.
John Donne: Poems1
ONCE POSSESSED of an overpowering idea, Stanley would all his life tenaciously worry its development through a succession of paintings. The desperate desire to resolve the paradox of duality became spiritual in Apple Gatherers. In The Nativity, also painted in 1912, the longing became religious.
If from the title we expect a conventional interpretation, we shall be surprised. Stanley is a will-o’-the-wisp who leads us unsuspectingly into what we think is familiar territory only, Puck-like, magically to change our surroundings, so that we stand bewildered, disturbed, abandoned, even resentful, according to our preconceptions.
What is it in his painting which so suddenly changes terrain we thought we knew? It is his composition, the transformation of content into visual presentation, which disorientates us, so that only slowly and perhaps incredulously do we begin to find our bearings. Many, in Stanley’s day, never found them, and simply relished the surprise. The message, to his chagrin, was all too often dismissed or devalued.
In his Nativity, the three Wise Men have come to visit. They are presented thus in a preliminary drawing. But now two of the Magi have become, surprisingly, the males of two pairs of lovers who meet as the emotional focus of the composition. The third remains a kneeling worshipper. The lovers are absorbed in each other and are oblivious to the presence of the Holy Family. This is not unexpected in view of the fact that Stanley intended the Holy Family to be not a tangible presence in Mill Lane, but visual imagery to convey his awed sense of sanctified discovery. Joseph, the figure on the right of the painting, is portrayed not in the manner of most traditional Nativities as the remarried widower of legend, an old man past sexual capability, but as a virile and romantic young man in a blue Botticelli robe, ‘doing something to a chestnut tree’.*
Despite this, the tree is in blossom, not fruit. The imagery is of the new life of spring; hardly relevant to a traditional Christmas scene. Precisely what Joseph is doing to the chestnut tree is left to conjecture, but his young thoughts are perhaps linked imaginatively to the erect chestnut candles with which it is girdled. Contrary to orthodox religious interpretations, it is suggested that he has every reason to be suffering sexual frustration. Mary, although a mother and his wife, is still a virgin. God has chosen her over Joseph’s head to become the link with the coming of creativity, a prodigious role in which he, Joseph – Stanley – has as yet no part.
Joseph is thus separated from Mary, who stands full in the centre of the painting, large, sombre-robed, almost masculine in appearance. Amy Hatch, another ‘cousin’ of Stanley’s, posed for her. She must, like Dorothy Wooster, have been a sturdy girl. ‘Monumental’ is Stanley’s own adjective for her in the painting, meaning that like a monument in a public place she is unnoticed by those who pass preoccupied. A miracle has been bestowed on her. Its physical form lies in the crib at her feet, added according to Stanley as ‘an afterthought’. For of course her concern in Stanley’s presentation is not so much with the child as with the wider meaning of creation, that which lies beyond the fence, the world where flesh-and-blood lovers meet in mutual delight. A separation – that of unfulfilment – exists between Mary and her spouse, and there is a division – the fence, the barrier of inaccessibility – between them as spiritual manifestations and the real world. Florence wrote:
neither is it strange that the grandchildren of a builder who was also a fine musician should have been consciously or subconsciously interested in the structural significance of walls and fugues. Cowls, walls and railings have from the first, I think, provided the fugue subjects of many of their works; the cowls, walls and railings which absently focussed our attention as children and about which as children our first thoughts and impressions played.5
Like Mary in the painting, Stanley is gazing in wonder and longing at those who are about to enter a comprehension of the renewal of creation as experienced on earth. Indeed, the pairs of lovers may be drawn from Stanley’s feelings when Will or Harold or Florence married; the emotional amputation of departing siblings is a common enough experience in families. Rapt in the adoration of their beloveds, the Wise Men who came to see the birth of God have in that miracle become themselves part of the perennial birth of God, and advance to affirm the universal sacrament of life. Beyond them, in the background field, sheaves of corn seem stooked at harvest. Beyond again are the trees of Cliveden Woods, some of which seem to be turning into autumn brown. Perspective has become a series of compositional waves. Each wave is a season. A fourth dimension has been added to the canvas. Time itself has been compressed.
The secret of the painting stands revealed. It is a hymn to fecundity, to the compulsion and universality of the sexual instinct in its broadest concept, to that miraculousness of the process of creation which humanity has always seen as holy. Mary and Joseph are not simplistically the figures of accepted recognition, nor are the pairs of lovers those of poetic romance. The whole must be God. Mary and Joseph are primal figures dressed in Christian symbolism whose profoundest meanings go back beyond their own time, past the known gods of old, back to our earliest awareness of the sources of our existence and our survival.
The figures in Stanley’s paintings are symbols of our primeval consciousness, of the thrust of male fertility and of the protectiveness of female parturition; the duality of fecundity. In his struggle to understand, Stanley is returning to a literal beginning, to the implications of his earlier reading, for example, of The Golden Bough, to the ‘embryonic fish’ of his contemporary Wyndham Lewis, to the understanding which was to obsess another young genius of his generation, D. H. Lawrence, however differently expressed. In the painting, Stanley tells us, Mary and Joseph are ‘related in some sacramental ordinance’. It is as yet beyond his comprehension. Stanley is still physically Joseph, virginal, restricted in experience to ‘doing something to a chestnut tree’. Yet in some spiritual sense, glimpsed if unrealized, he is also Mary, the mother who is fulfilled in that ultimate act of creation, the birth of God. Stanley’s inability to resolve the dichotomy troubles him. He is as yet a child in comprehension, relegated to a crib (an ‘afterthought’) at the feet of the majesty of creation. ‘The painting’, wrote Stanley, ‘celebrates my marriage to the Cookham wildflowers.’6
There were some who glimpsed his meaning, but few who might have felt the power of what he was trying to say, and fewer still who would have sympathized. To the devout of the day he was toying dangerously with the pagan sources of Christianity. Yet to him the apparent unchangingness of Cookham was becoming revealed as the everlasting rhythm of the mystery of death and rebirth, of the miracle of the emergence of exquisite form from meaningless chaos, of the marvel of that gift given him to fashion into art – into ‘compositions’ – the random chess or domino or draughts pieces which the world of the senses emptied into his brain. The same forces which compelled Cookham into the renewal of spring were those which moved his hands into creativity and his spirit into ecstasy. He and Cookham were united by that force, ‘married’, so that creation – birth – emerged from disorder – death – in each.
Spanning the two was the seed. In front of the kneeling Wise Man in The Nativity a plant grows, its pattern boldly shadowing him to draw our attention to it. It is apparently a sunflower, that traditional symbol which will appear in future paintings of Stanley’s as the promise of seedburst to come. As Stanley wandered enraptured among the wildflowers of the Cookham water-meadows, blossoming then in uncontrolled profusion, he was overcome not only by an aesthetic beauty he would glorify in later landscapes and still-lifes, but by an awe of their greater role as silent witnesses to the compulsion of fecundity. Like a woman adorned for her lover, each flower flaunted its beauty as sexual invitation, honouring its instinctive purpose as the provider of the seed for future life. The seed was in Stanley himself too, as it was in all animate things, in the men, women, girls, babies, trees, flowers, corn, lambs or beehives of his early compositions. As an animate thing it had been nurtured into existence through what scientifically might be called a ‘conducive environment’, but which to Stanley was the protection, the security, the peace, the ‘cosiness’ of its ‘home’. Thereby it had been brought to its power of fertilization, the token of an ultimate fulfilment dedicated beyond any urge of immediate satisfaction to the compulsion of rebirth, the cosmic coming-together of male and female elements, the drive of creation. That above all was inevitable and holy, and each of us is a priest in worship. It is surely no coincidence that most of Stanley’s early paintings are set in spring or summer, and show meetings, conjoinings or emergences. The exhortations of John Ruskin have Stanley as firmly in their grip as earlier they had held Proust and Tolstoy.*
Stanley’s painting won the Summer Picture Figure Composition Prize of £25 which was shared with a fellow-student. It still hangs today in University College, London.
