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CHAPTER SEVEN

The Centurion’s Servant

Here we part with the year 1913 which has had many joys for me and few sorrows. What has 1914 got locked up in its bosom for me and mine? We shall see in time.

Sydney Spencer, 31 December 1913¹

TUESDAY 4 AUGUST 1914 was Florence’s birthday. She had come to Cookham to enjoy a celebration party at Fernlea. During the afternoon, Herbert Henry Asquith, long-serving Prime Minister in the Liberal Government, announced in the House of Commons the delivery of an ultimatum to Germany demanding the withdrawal of her troops from Belgium, to whose neutrality Britain was committed. Florence had cause to remember that day:

On the afternoon of August 4th – my birthday – 1914 I was pacing the Causeway at Cookham with my brother Percy, gravely discussing with him the family scene, when he said: ‘Of course, I shall have to go.’ ‘Not you!’ I cried sharply. ‘A family of seven sons’, he replied, ‘could not stand aside, and if I went, perhaps the younger sons will not have to go.’ I listened dumb-stricken …²

The ultimatum expired at midnight. There was, as expected, no response. On Wednesday the 5th, the recruiting offices opened.

Joining the forces was voluntary. The older married brothers, pianist Will and violinist Harold, seemed unlikely to be affected, except that Will now found himself trapped in England, his wife Johanna in Germany. In the patriotic fervour which swept the nation, Sydney in Oxford dismayed his parents by joining the Officers’ Training Corps as a cadet. The rolling-stone brother Horace was trying to get home from West Africa, having suffered a shipwreck from which he escaped with his life only because he was a strong swimmer. Percy stuck to his resolve and joined the Warwickshire Regiment.

Henry Lamb put his medical training to use by becoming a volunteer dresser in a private military hospital in France. Darsie Japp, an excellent horseman, was proposed for a commission in the Royal Artillery; field guns were still pulled by teams of horses. Rupert Brooke joined Churchill’s recently formed Naval Division – a forerunner of today’s Marine Commandos – as a platoon commander. Gaudier-Brzeska went back to France to join his infantry regiment. Jacques Raverat too crossed over to France and was both chagrined and alarmed to be rejected for military service as medically unfit.

Stanley, like most young men then, had no idea of the meaning of warfare and was attracted to the notion of joining the Royal Berkshires as an infantryman. But it is unlikely that he would have been accepted, on account of his slight stature; he was 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighed 6 stone 12 pounds. In those early days of the war, recruiting followed peacetime standards and the minimum requirements for infantrymen precluded Stanley. However, he and Gilbert compromised by joining the Maidenhead branch of the Civic Guard, an unauthorized but encouraged pre-recruitment training organization, the activities of which consisted mostly of marching and drill. Such team activity required a suppression of self to corporate perfection which appealed to the metaphysical in Stanley, and with the rest of the Cookham contingent he would return at night exhausted but exhilarated. He and Gilbert also joined the Bray brigade of the St John’s Ambulance Corps. Provided they could acquire the First Aid Certificate, they would be eligible to join the Royal Army Medical Corps as medical orderlies in the Home Hospital Service, the only basis on which Pa and Ma would consider letting them go.

But if such was their outward behaviour, internally the shock reverberated. It was not so much the danger of going to war which troubled Stanley, for he was seldom concerned for his physical circumstance. Rather it was the spiritual dilemma which disturbed him; the question whether he should offer up his painting, his creative destiny, to the unheeding Behemoth of military service which had no need for it. If he joined up, would he, in his words, ‘commit a sin against the Holy Ghost’?

It is possible to deduce several hints in Stanley’s work during 1914 of the seriousness to him of his perplexity. In The Betrayal, painted in that year, Stanley used St Mark’s account of the arrest of Christ in which a young man who ‘lay hold on Christ’ – Stanley shows him holding Christ’s hand – is so startled by the violence of the proceedings that he tears himself from Christ’s clasp, loses his robe in his haste, and flees from the scene naked. Stanley set the main figures in the back garden of Fernlea against a black wall and makes the young man pale in tone, so that he glows white. So intensely did Stanley feel about the painting that he sent the Raverats an annotated sketch. Even after the painting was finished, he continued to be preoccupied with the theme and made a subsequent pencil-and-wash study in which the wall is rendered lighter in tone. Against it he inserted another of his pronounced shadows; it is that of the young man fleeing, and emphasizes his being torn from the handhold of Christ. That the subject reflects Stanley’s disturbed feelings about the war is apparent from the unusual way he has in the study shown Peter drawing his sword to strike off the ear of the High Priest’s bailiff. The scabbard has been rotated until it points upwards. He later told a confidante that he based the image on the army drill for unsheathing a bayonet; this was to rotate the scabbard in its belt-holder or ‘frog’ and withdraw the bayonet downwards, a drill he must have learned from his Civic Guard training and incorporated into the study.

Stanley is surely indicating that he sees himself, like the young companion of Christ in the Bible version, as forced to flee naked from the handholder of his creativity. He is in shock, being compelled to betray his destiny. In a letter to Gwen Raverat he desperately asks her: ‘What ought Gilbert and I to do in this war? My conscience is giving me no peace … advice from you would greatly relieve me, even if you said I ought to go to the Front. … I have been so disturbed that I have not been able to concentrate.’³ Sydney, at home for the Christmas vacation of 1914, records in his diary the unusual fact that ‘Stan made a bad bed companion last night, he kept rolling over and pulling the bedclothes with him.’⁴

In the same vein, Stanley writes to Henry Lamb: ‘When you see how Gil’s painting is getting on, you will say to yourself “Oh! He must not go to the war!”’⁵ Gilbert’s painting was The Crucifixion. In stark, angular composition it shows the Cross in process of being raised from the horizontal to the vertical. But the figure outstretched on it is Pa, and those hauling him up are five round-faced, dark-haired young men uncannily like the Spencer boys; from which we may suspect that Gilbert is telling of his sympathy for the old man, whose headstrong sons, so anxious to go to war, are emotionally crucifying him. Is then Stanley’s The Centurion’s Servant a comparable allegory, the visual equivalent of a personal nightmare or sleepwalk? Arguably so. Not only is this the first occasion on which Stanley places himself recognizably as the subject of a visionary painting, but even more decisively he stands back to watch himself in his experience by placing himself as the centre onlooker of the kneeling figures, the one who seems to show no emotion but curiosity or contemplation.

Stanley had begun to think about the biblical story (Luke 7, Matthew 8) in 1913, conceiving it as a double picture, one section showing the messenger running to Christ, the other Christ’s miracle in healing from a distance the centurion’s servant or batman. As with all his paintings to date, he envisaged exterior settings. But ‘this seemed beyond me, although in trying to imagine what the scene would be like, I began to find my mind in very outdoor places. I vaguely remember willows and sunlight in certain parts of Cookham.’⁶ The imagery, however, would not materialize and ‘in that baffled state my mind wandered into some shade, and in doing so I wondered what the scene would be at the house where the servant actually lay, seven miles away. Here I seemed to find better foothold.’ The imagery began to take shape. It would be Stanley’s first use of an interior, a considerable step in that paced progression which characterized his development. The interior would be a sickroom, a bedroom. So somewhere in his experience he had to cast around for a bedroom which by its association of feeling would recreate for him the sense of the miraculous to which the painting was dedicated.

Why, one might ask, did Stanley not select any bedroom, or indeed invent one? Not merely in Stanley’s failure to do so but in his actual inability to do so, we glimpse one essence of his genius. Truth demanded not just a bedroom but the only bedroom possible for the revelation: ‘I don’t think it struck me then as it does now that the room I selected as being the bedroom in which the servant was to suddenly revive was our own servant’s bedroom. I mean [that it was purely coincidence] that they were both servants and both in bedrooms.’ Stanley’s memory had settled on the servant’s attic bedroom at Fernlea not because it classified itself as the bedroom of a servant; still less because the servant was a female. He is more than anxious to disabuse the reader of any connection between the mystery of the event and the possibility that the servants were mysterious to him as female, or that the room was mysterious to him, as some rooms were later to become to him, because he was not allowed to enter them. On the contrary, ‘there was never any ban on one going into the attic and I remember that up until shortly after I began to go to the Slade I usually used to sit by the gable window and talk to the servant dressing, and quite innocent [even at] about 19 or 20 years of age’ – ‘quite innocent’ because the maids were usually local girls taking an occupation before hopefully getting married. The reason why Stanley picked the servant’s attic bedroom was because:

The attic had a dark recess in which was the big bed, and the china knobs could be seen now and then when the door was open, and when [one day] I passed the door I was impressed to hear her talking to some invisible person, [whom I imagined to be] a sort of angel. This [in fact] was the servant next door. She was talking through the wall, as our own attic and the one next door had only a wall between them. This I did not know till later. When she came down in her afternoon frock from this room I almost expected her face to shine as Moses’ did when he came down from the mountains.

Stanley is transferring to the painting that sense of awe he felt on the day he heard the servant talking to her angel, to recreate the holy sense of awe which must have overcome the centurion and his servant on that day two thousand years ago when they knew the joy of salvation from death. He transfers the manner of its arriving to recreate through the medium of art his own joy at finding himself the recipient of a miracle too. He is himself the subject of the painting, as he describes:

The running attitude of the figure on the bed was arrived at through a consideration which did not materialize. I had originally thought of depicting the meeting of Christ and the centurion [as an exterior]. Then, when I was feeling there was too much out-of-doors element in the idea, I considered also including the scene in the servant’s bedroom showing his miraculous recovery. I thought I would like to have two pictures in one frame, with a frame between them as division. In the meeting picture, the centurion was to repeat something of the position of the servant lying on the bed which can, I think, be seen to be similar in position to a person walking, only it is lying down. As I lay on my bed one evening in our front bedroom, I realized that I was in such a comfortable position that I would love to take that ‘just-me-happy-on-the-front-room-bed’ and plant it, with all its fact elements retained, into the other picture. I tried this many times, but it did not come as I wanted and finally I painted the bedroom idea alone. I at this time liked to gaze round the Church when praying and feel the atmosphere I was praying in. In the picture I have remembered my own praying positions in the people praying round the bed, because I knew the state of mind I wanted in the picture was to be peaceful, as mine was in Church, even though the miracle had occurred.

How compressed are Stanley’s descriptions of his great paintings! The figure on the bed is ‘a person walking only it is lying down’. Visually it is the messenger running to meet Christ of the aborted exterior panel; but spiritually it is the distress of Stanley’s dilemma transferred en bloc into the bedroom scene. Yet, conversely, the ‘state of mind’ he wanted to express in the painting was to be ‘peaceful’, so that ‘the miracle had occurred’; so ‘peace’ is invoked from the terror through his recollected feelings of lying comfortably in bed ‘in our front bedroom’, but even more from the sensations which overcame him when he gazed around during prayer in Cookham church to catch the ‘atmosphere’.

Later he adds: ‘The people praying round the bed may have something to do with the fact that in our village, if anyone was very ill, the custom was to pray round the bed, and I thought of all the moments of peace when at such moments the scene might occur …’ – ⁷ and there was in Spencer-family recollection an episode in which one of the older boys developed pneumonia. Watched over anxiously by the womenfolk, the stage in the illness was at last reached when young Sydney was sent to run to Pa at Hedsor to tell him that ‘the crisis has come’; a message which reached Pa’s ears as ‘Christ has come.’

The Centurion’s Servant, like The Betrayal, marks a crisis of its own in Stanley’s development. Before it, all his painting had been done in the unfettered joy of creative metaphysical-spiritual discovery. Then, suddenly, the impending war introduced a brutality in existence until then unsuspected. Its darkness broke his arcadia, left him in shock. He had to find a way back to comfort and assurance, and in this endeavour he recognized The Centurion’s Servant as a watershed in his art. Never again would he be able to recreate exactly the feelings of ‘innocence’ which pervaded his earlier paintings, a loss he would ever lament. But in the destruction of that innocence the marvel to him was that he was given the means to find reconciliation. We may venture what they were.

In all his visionary pictures, no matter what the titled subject, Stanley is ultimately depicting a cluster of associated experiences, or ‘memory-feelings’ as he called them. They are chosen so that the feeling he draws from them matches the current feeling he is trying to express in his painting. This happened for him joyously in his earlier paintings when metaphysical revelation could be visualized from his happy feelings about moments and places in Fernlea and Cookham. But now that he is in shock the match cannot be made directly, for he has no store of shocked memory-feelings. Should he paint reflexively and let his anger show? Such was the response of many painters, especially of the artists of the coming war.

But Stanley’s genius is such that he has an added layer to his personality which lifts him above the merely reflexive. Since his distress is greater than can be shown in even the most hurtful experience he can recall, he relates their feeling to a more powerful source, one which will convey the intensity of the required terror: in this present painting, the Bible and one of its happenings. The story he selects describes terror. But its significance is such that in doing so it is able to reveal the possibility of release from terror. The centurion is terrified; Christ in healing his servant releases him from his terror. For the centurion a redemption has occurred. If Stanley is to find a corresponding release from present terror he too must go back in memory-feelings to a remembered redemption of his own and link its feeling to the power of the biblical event. In composing his picture he will show a moment of personal terror in one part, and then reveal its redemption in another. In this respect an event which happened powerfully in the Bible has already happened for him, even if less emphatically, in Cookham. ‘If I had not had that subject, I could not have drawn any of that picture,’ he was to say of one religious painting.⁸

What he is doing in The Centurion’s Servant is that which he will struggle to do for the rest of his life when baffled by the painful. As he grows older he will accumulate memory-feelings sufficiently vivid to match and redeem some bewilderments. But there will also be occasions when his distress will be so agonized that only a return to biblical example will suffice to indicate its intensity. There will even be instances when he is unable to find any forceful match at all between his feelings and the redemption of memory. Then he will be left frustrated, unable to compose his picture, or else forced to use memory-feelings which are ‘incompetent’ and which in his opinion dilute his intention. But when he can find a match, as in this instance, the ways he finds for expressing it will be a continual surprise and wonder.

The process by which Stanley arrives at his notions is subtle, perhaps subconscious, perhaps instinctive, but invariably logical in metaphysical terms, and always precise. To convey it, he first states the fact of what is taking place. This he depicts so transparently – and in later work with such honest directness – that we should not be tempted into thinking that he intends self-revelation from a desire for self-indulgence. The emotion inherent in the content, even when related to the event he so strikingly depicts, is not used as direct imagery; such use would be sentimentality. Although the imagery of the picture is personal, it is there to transcend the personal. It may be of interest and indeed of help to know that clues to the imagery can lie somewhere in his writings. But detection does not necessarily establish the true notion of the painting; the clues are merely signposts. Once Stanley has found his imagery in the personal, then the associative emotion determines the visual pattern or arrangement in the depiction; the composition. In redemptive work, provided that the imagery to hand was what Stanley called ‘man enough to do the job’ – there could be no compromise with the ‘Holy Ghost’ – there will be great, even vital, significance in the painting: a redemption, an emotional movement from one state of awareness to a higher. It is this triumphant discovery which The Centurion’s Servant records.

In this sense it seems cogent to argue that there was in Stanley’s make-up a quality which makes him a dramatic painter. His visionary paintings capture an instant of tension between a before situation and an after situation, like a strip of movie film stopped in the projector. Each painting is that crucial freeze-frame which exactly pinpoints the moment when we become aware that a change is about to happen – The Nativity – or is happening – Apple Gatherers – or has happened – The Centurion’s Servant. The freeze-frame is not a random moment. It is the consequence of decision, more particularly of commitment. Its effect is a catharsis, a purging, the moment in drama when the confusion of reality is suddenly dissolved into spiritual comprehension. At that moment, the preceding is clarified and linked to the now inevitable. The past cannot be undone, but it can be apprehended in some awesome synthesis of meaning. A god has come.

Redemption to Stanley was the miraculous means by which he got himself, through his pictures, to where all was ‘holy, personal and at peace’; in other words, to his feelings for ‘home’. His pictures are not illustrations of redemptions. They are in themselves a reaching to redemption. It is irrelevant that the past in The Centurion’s Servant may be a recollection of some serious Spencer family illness or that Stanley has portrayed the future as an expression of ‘cosiness’ in bed, its valance echoing those of Edwardian prams. Neither the title, nor its allusions, nor its associations are to be taken at face value, and to do so is to limit, even destroy, their meaning. Particularly with this picture Stanley felt that critics might decide its presentation derived from an unpatriotic reluctance to go to the war. The thought of such possibility could never be allowed to interfere with the form of the work. If the content came to him vividly, then it must be valid, demanding expression without dissemblance. Only so could a path be cleared through confusion to meaning. The best precaution he could presently take against misinterpretation was to conceal the painting, even though the clarity he found in its execution convinced him of the truth of his feelings:

My bed picture is an example of how a picture ought to be painted. Everything in that picture, colour particularly, was perfectly clear, and the way to get the colour decided in my mind before I put brush to canvas. The result was that it was done in no time, it was done like clockwork. … What pleases me is that I have learned the reason why the picture should be done so as to let me see the idea without having to plough through incompetent [irrelevant] detail that has no fundamental bearing on the idea.⁹*

Stanley’s excitement at his achievement is obvious. Some outside force is acting on him, easing his mental suffering into that state of peace through which he can joyfully offer tribute. His picture ‘lets him see’ his idea in uncluttered clarity. The joy it gave him sprang not from the fact that the picture indicated a solution to the perplexity from which it originated; the imperative of physical reality continued to assail. Rather his joy sprang from a discovery that the making of the picture discharged his emotional distress. It was a redemption. In it, reason became the servant of imagination, imagination of feeling, feeling of revelation, revelation of comprehension, and comprehension the miraculous gift from some exterior power. The process was religious. When in later years an art critic interpreted it as the reaction of children caught in an air-raid, Stanley’s contempt was vitriolic*

For the time being, however, nothing was done with the painting. Stanley stored it in his room at Fernlea while he settled to other work. One such was among the first of what must be called his ‘landscapes’: the painting of Cookham, 1914.