why did they call it café royal? it has nothing of the opulent white and gold quality which naturally would go with such a name, nothing expensive or elaborate. here and there, in the only room i know, namely, the café itself, is an escutcheon impressed with the letter n. it makes one think of napoleon, and the name café royal clashes still more. but, after all, that matters very little, for who cares what the café royal was? or under whose auspices it was founded. i suppose that for antiquity it treads upon the heels of verrey’s; it has a flavour of 1870 rather than 1860; what matters much more is that the café royal always savours of the day, that it concentrates within itself more of the feeling of the day, as exemplified by current art, than any other spot in this country. thus, when calling this chapter café royal, i do not mean to devote it to an anecdotic study of the famous tavern, but rather to those things which it represents and contains, to some slight impression of the arts as they develop, flourish, and wilt in this city. the café itself should never have been called royal, for an eternal opposition exists between the pomp of such a name and the rebellious young arts; in no essential do they oppose the royal suggestion, but they are remote therefrom, live in a world where the values are different, not related to class or fortune, artificial, perhaps, but created in virtue of a private political economy. thus, the café royal should have been called something dashing and picturesque, such as ‘café des mille colonnes,’ or ‘café de la pomme vermeille.’ how well it would have looked, sparsely decorated with rubicund apples painted by cézanne! as it is, the café royal is a very large room in regent street. its ceiling, a mass of gold scrollings that embrace frescoes darkened by smoke and time into the colour of old masters, is sustained by many columns with a golden base and a green stem. round that stem intertwine golden leaves from which hang golden grapes. the effect of the café is one of rather excessive122 gilding: the walls are crowded with gilt figures and baskets of flowers that leave space only for many mirrors; as if the wall had been hidden away at the behest of some obscure modesty. yet the effect is pleasant, for this gold is old and tarnished. it has nothing blatant, and the whole effect is one of comfortable decency, as if this excessive room had been built by a parvenu, but had been lived in so long by his successors as to lose the parvenu spirit. the furnishing, plain tables with marble tops, long seats with red plush backs, also resolve themselves into good-humoured comfort, while, at the end, a prince of bars with something like ten score bottles, each one filled with something individual, produces an impression of eclectic welcome.
the café royal may have been built to astound, but nowadays it is just the comfortable background of people who like to drink a little, to pay moderately, and to talk enormously. the conversations at the café royal are not, probably, such as would make a good book of memoirs, but its mixed public has, at one time or another, numbered everybody who did something (whatever that may mean), so that many good things and many spiteful ones are spoken every day under its golden roof. before the war, the violent young men and the much more violent young women seemed to meet there every night, with an almost sacramental air, to discuss, that is to scarify, reputations. that was good, for renan was right when he said that if a young man, aged twenty, had not always ready a mouthful of insults for his predecessors, he would pronounce no judgments fit to be heard when he attained the age of forty.
the café royal
this does not mean that the café royal is a literary café, or an artistic café. the literary, dramatic, and pictorial elements are certainly stronger there than in any other london resort, but at any time you may see there the strangest assembly: foreigners, a great many; smart people who are seeing life; and very dull, ordinary, fat men who stop on their way from business or shop to have a drink before dinner. at dinner time the room is not itself, for half of it sees its marble tables covered with cloths, which means that eating proceeds, and eating does not, so well as123 drinking, favour turbulent debate. it is just before dinner, and especially after dinner, that the café royal enters upon its true function: to provide a pleasant, cheap place, fairly noisy, fairly smoky, and fairly comfortable, where the young arts may meet and joust. during the war it did not quite do this, for many of the young men had joined the army, and it was strange suddenly to recognise over a tunic, in a well-kept, well-brushed head, the outlines of somebody whom once one knew with endless locks, whiskers, or a beard. even in khaki they did what they could. military discipline did not completely dominate those rebellious beings; their moustaches were either a little more luxuriant or very much more hogged than usual. the café royal platoon was still faintly noticeable.
some, however, were not in khaki, for theirs was not a very fit generation, and even now many a table throws back a memory to 1914. in those days the frequent visitor to the café royal soon knew many people by sight, and if he was of that world, or had somebody to guide him, he soon could pick out those who were celebrated and those who were notorious; with time, he even came to recognise those who were extremely well known. i do not know if, nowadays, one often sees at the café royal, mr jacob epstein, but once it was difficult to detach one’s eyes from the sleepy strength of his heavy profile. one wanted to look into those eyes with the thick lids, in which strangely mingled so much detachment and so much kinetic energy. he was seldom alone; there was always a little epstein group about his table. indeed, it is a characteristic of the café royal that few people sit alone. they form groups. one i remember well. it always contained a tall young man with very long, thin features, and hair grown low about the cheek; he had a fancy for clothes faintly 1860 in feeling, notably, for stocks. there was an extremely beautiful girl, thin, dark, and languid as some warm italian greyhound. there was a young man who wore a velvet coat, whose fair hair fell in long wisps upon his collar, a strange young man, with a peculiar grayish skin and an air of nervous excitement. round these moved other figures less definite, but all of them124 young: square men in knickerbockers, with short pipes stuck precisely in the middle of their faces; girls, outrageously florid or eloquently simple, round whose long necks hung the flowered yokes of chelsea, on whose hands clustered many rings of turquoise and aquamarine, or whose hands were virgin of all decoration save that of black finger-nails. the smart people used to watch them steadily and feel that, at last, they were really seeing life.
sometimes they saw people whose names could serve as conversation at the morrow’s lunch party. sometimes they caught sight of mr c. r. w. nevinson, and could describe his square figure, his rather blunt, pleasant face with the bright, live, brown eyes. it does one good to look at mr nevinson, though, nowadays, something oppressed has crept into his expression; there is, in those rather thick features, a sense of life and desire. with him sometimes goes his wife, slight, white and rose, and bending a little under the heavy sunshine of her hair.
until recently the café royal also often contained mr augustus john, and one could sit for a long time, wondering what it was gave his features that air of tautness. there is always about mr john a feeling that he is imprisoned within himself.... equally with mr epstein he had his court, young men in a state of extreme reverence, and other men who preached to him in attitudes of hostility tinged with nervousness, which is the ordinary approach to the successful painter of those who are less successful. i think that, now and then, mr arthur symons used to draw them away, so as to procure for mr john a greater peace. it was as if he were trying to create about him an atmosphere of hush. at the café royal this is not easily done. notably, it was difficult to create hush among the reverential young men, for i suspect that they all wanted to know what mr john thought of their work, that is meant to tell him what he ought to think. the young women were more easily managed, and it is interesting to note that they tended to approximate in appearance to the john type. nearly all were what the vulgar call plain, in some cases because they were perfectly beautiful: that which is perfectly beautiful is severe and separate; it does not arouse desire, it125 arouses respect, and this most of humanity cannot forgive. those strange young women, apparently long-legged and long-armed, in their simply-cut high frocks that hung straight from shoulder to ankle, young women with hair plainly banded, rather long noses, strong chins, thick, dark mouths, like open fruits. they seemed to come straight out of some sketch in donegal.
there were many others, too. now and then one caught sight of mr wyndham lewis who, nowadays, is plump, but in those was tall and white and rather slim, often silent and generally weary; it was an education in negligence to watch the depressed droop of the cigarette stump which generally hung from his underlip. there were others, too, a woman with small, humorous eyes and a pleasant coppery complexion, who wore turbans of purple silk and gold, who never thought or spoke an evil thing of any creature alive. one saw mr gertler, very young and seductive, perhaps a little conscious of it; mr gilbert cannan, oozing defiance from every sharp angle and confining his conversation to this process. the other young writers came now and then: mr swinnerton before he grew his beard, mr hugh walpole, who always seemed slightly out of place in so ill-regulated a spot. people less definable float through my mind: a young girl who had been told that she looked like a russian, and thenceforth appeared attired in a red sarafan; a young man with black locks massed upon his eyebrows, locks he often tossed back to show the running water of his pale eyes. there was a young woman who believed in asceticism; as she looked rather like a brick, i was told that her beliefs had never been put to a rude test. there was another young woman, too, who seriously informed any marble table that she believed in reincarnation, and that within her breathed the soul of shelley. nearly everybody painted, some wrote verse, a few ventured on prose; the talk was of art and of sinners against art. swiftly they passed from studio scandal to the declarations, manifestoes, proclamations which made the arts sound foolish in 1914, but actually were evidences of their vigour. indeed, the modern forms of art tend to shock the philistine: i am not with him; i like my paint wet.
126 the old arts are unkind to the young arts. struck by a certain wilful outrageousness which often overlays talent and in the beginning always heralds it, the old arts make as much fun of the new arts, as the old arts made of the older when they were young. some of my readers may remember mr epstein’s rather theoretical venus, at whose feet reposed a wheel. it was an abstract piece of sculpture, but, however abstract, i think it was a little harsh of mrs aria to describe it as a sick penguin sitting on a broken bicycle. the truth is that the modern forms of art are not as wilful or as intentionally shocking as their adepts choose to make out. it may be true that most schools, from the impressionists onwards, have formed round one man who had something original to say in an original way, and that most of the pupils, having nothing original to say, found it necessary to say it in a violently original way. that is true to a certain extent; truer, perhaps, is it to say that ‘genius creates the taste with which it is enjoyed.’ thus, i think it quite as likely that people like manet created the taste for impressionism, just as wagner created a taste for music in reaction against, let us say, rossini. nature, after all, is only a thing which one conceives, and not a thing which really exists; it varies with the eye that beholds it, and if a man sincerely and violently feels that trees are pink, then to him they are pink, and if he has art enough to translate his temperament into those pink trees, then the people who can understand him will learn to see trees like him, that is, pink. we need not stress this, because it is an extreme case, but i submit that the modern forms of art, during the last dozen years, have all of them tended to express nature on the lines of certain conventions, and that instead of taking up an attitude of contempt, it was easy to understand these conventions, therefore, to understand the artist, therefore, to collect from the canvas the impression he painted there. here, i will be told by the philistine: ‘why should i see that a face looks like a cube?’ well, nobody wants to force him to see a face as a cube if he doesn’t want to, but one is entitled to point out to him that he has already accepted many conventions. he is quite willing to look at gainsborough’s ‘blue boy,’ and to see it127 as a human figure, though it has only surface and not volume. he is quite willing to look at venus of milo and to accept it as a reproduction of a beautiful woman, though it has no colour. he is quite willing to go to a play the action of which extends over five years, and to see this action condensed into two and a half hours. the public has to accept the arts conventionally because the arts do not reproduce nature, they interpret it.
private view
the a.a.a.
it may, therefore, be suggested that our young post-impressionists, futurists, and cubists were badly treated by the public, for the public never tried to understand the new conventions on which they worked. with all the power of my sincerity, and in the name of such honesty as may be in me, i assure my readers that if they will take the trouble to master the conventions the work can be interpreted. i possess an excellent non-representational picture, by mr wadsworth, inspired by the roofs of a yorkshire village; it is entirely composed of black and white planes. when, lately, this was shown to a friend, she asked why she should be told to admire a set of decayed dominoes. but the picture is not made up of decayed dominoes; it is a highly simplified impression of walls and roofs, and when you have sympathetically sought for what we may call the key plane, the picture becomes absolutely obvious.
but what if it were not obvious? many of the modern men, such as mr wadsworth, mr mcknight kauffer, mr wyndham lewis, do not aspire to represent anything at all. what they want to do is to sketch or paint an interesting pattern. mr ezra pound has put the attitude clearly in his book, gaudier brzeska, where he says, more or less: ‘when you hear a sonata played, you do not say, “oh, what an eloquent reproduction of the waves upon the shore!” or, “this is where the sheep begin to baa.” what you do is to ask yourself whether this combination of sounds is pleasant or moving. that is the freedom we wish to find in painting or sculpture. we are not interested in painting the mayor of leeds in such a way as to make it clear that he is a mayor, possibly of leeds, but we are interested in setting together128 lines and coloured surfaces, irrespective of any meaning, and to be judged on that, according to whether these lines and colours produce a pleasant sensation.’
this position appears to me above attack. the technical improvements in painting, which began in the seventeenth century, producing rembrandt, raphael, velasquez, and, in due course, sir edward poynter, seem to have set a heavy yoke upon the painter’s neck, for the painter grew enthralled by technique, became more and more inclined to represent a baby so life-like that everybody expected it to howl; he grew liable to lose sight of the one thing that matters, namely, that to represent a baby is nothing, and to represent the artist through the baby, everything. (if i am wrong, consider a picture by mr clausen and a photograph by mr park; mr clausen knows how to paint, but mr park will far more exactly reproduce the sitter, do it quicker, and much more cheaply.) the thesis of the modern artist, of which i am trying to give an impression, therefore involves that while we bow to the undeniable greatness of men such as rembrandt, botticelli, leonardo, we wonder whether a greater emancipation from their technique might not have allowed them to soar higher into the abstract region where none save an artist can breathe. the plea is that in a more abstract field they might have been still greater.
undeniably, the modern forms of art have emancipated themselves too much from technical restrictions. it is dangerous to have too much technique; it is dangerous to have too little, and i could not say who suavely broods in the golden mean. still, when we consider what a dead and damnable thing technique alone can be, when we consider the annual mortuary at burlington house, when we stand awhile before a work of mr frank dicksee, and stare incredulously at sir luke fildes’s ‘the doctor,’ or attempt to solve the hon. john collier’s psycho-pictorial mysteries, we are indeed assured that though technique may exclude a man both from heaven and from hell, it shall, for certain, land him in purgatory.
i remember very well the first ‘advanced’ pictures i ever129 saw. they were twelve impressions of a bridge over a brook by claude monet. that must have been nearly twenty years ago, and i thought them very beautiful. it is strange that nowadays they seem so tame. but it does not matter to me that i thought them beautiful then, just as when i first saw a matisse i thought it interesting, that my first gauguin, with its queer brown figures stirred me; it matters to me that when the futurists came to town, mr marinetti did not strike me as a marionette, and that later all the others, cubists, boulists, imagists, vorticists, were taken by me as honest men. you may call me a fool; you may even think worse of me and say that i was so anxious to be in the movement that i liked every movement; i prefer to say that i was always ready to try to understand a new pictorial convention. when i cease to be able to do that, when i cease to see in painting that mr wadsworth is deeply interesting, in literature, that mr james joyce is strikingly individual, when i am philistine enough to hang a painter because i won’t hang his picture, then, indeed, shall i be middle-aged and take to meals.
the years between 1908 or so and 1914 were some of the most important english art has passed through. in those six or seven years, for the first time, london saw the post-impressionists, not only matisse, but also cézanne and picasso; she saw the futurists, the singular pictures of views from a moving train which, faulty as they were, were well worth painting, because from a moving train one does see things, therefore material for art. she saw severini’s ‘pan-pan dance,’ where colour and surface dance rather than men and women; she saw the coming of mr epstein, first in the statues outside the british medical association, which were said to be indecent and became famous; she also saw reproductions of mr epstein’s oscar wilde monument, which went to paris and was said to be indecent and became kilted. the cubists came in the train of mr metzinger. the non-representational movement extended, radiating round mr wyndham lewis, impressing many men and women, among whom, in those days, was found true ability. it was a breathless and beautiful period, where everybody was under130 thirty and many were under twenty, when people painted not for art’s sake, but consciously for the expression of self. when that self was feeble, the painting was feeble. but it was not always so. many ridiculous things were done; many ridiculous things were said in the café royal and out of it, but, as miss may sinclair puts it very well, these young men had not come to destroy the pictorial glories of the past; they had come to destroy their imitators. conscious of their period, they wanted to express it.
some have suggested that the modern forms of painting were merely outbreaks of youth, that these movements had severed the continuity which should exist between one period and another. now the modern young man is generally arrogant, and if you talked to him of continuity would say, perhaps: ‘i don’t want any ancestors; i am an ancestor.’ but he would be wrong. from monet to matisse, from matisse to the early nevinson, from the early nevinson to the modern wyndham lewis, the link is close. no doubt a pen better versed than mine could link monet with giotto. i cannot; for i find it difficult to think back further than fifty years.
the good intent
chelsea
there have been reactions. one of the most notable is that of mr nevinson, who is to-day the most popular of the young men, the one who has been most completely recognised by a broad public. certainly he has become more recognisable, though i am not of those who think that his work has thereby lost. a man may be great and esoteric, or he may be great and lucid. it all depends on the way in which the dice fall. the several exhibitions of mr nevinson’s work, during the war, have shown him more and more gaining independence. he began by adopting one of the cubist conventions; he is still able to do so when he wishes, but he is also able to use other conventions, even the most stereotyped, when his subject seems to demand it. he paints pattern, or subject, or idea, but an interesting sidelight on his attitude is hatred of all cliques. in the preface of his last exhibition, he bitterly assails the people who seek ‘pure form through nothing but still life, endless green apples, saucepans,131 and oranges, picasized and cezanned with a ponderous and self-conscious sub-consciousness.’ he hates what he calls the child-like antics and the gambolling of the elect of bloomsbury. he may not be quite fair, but when i remember the various cliques to which i had occasional access, the rhythm clique, for whom nobody existed except anne estelle rice, j. d. fergusson, jessie dismorr, and george banks ... until the review changed its name, when most of these people ceased to exist and nobody but mr albert rutherston was granted physical likelihood, when i reflect how mr nevinson used to cluster with many others in a cosy cube, only to be driven out at last at the point of a cone, when i reflect upon the sombre mystery that surrounds the adepts of mr roger fry (a mystery recently grown less sombre with success), i am assured that cliques are the necessary breeding-ground of talent because they fortify its members against the cackling philistine. but they are also the thing which keeps talent small and parochial once they have helped it to grow. the clique is the nursery, and the test of a man is whether he knows when he is grown up. the art clique is like journalism, which can lead you anywhere provided you forsake it.
most of the cliques have their being in chelsea, though fitzroy square and the garden city occasionally put forward claims, and bedford park asserts itself. i suspect that the movement is nowadays away from chelsea. king’s road grows every day more mercantile; nothing in it recalls the arts except a slight excess of shops which sell artists’ materials. one does meet the chelsea girl, no longer in a jibbah, but more likely in an eloquent sweater, with her hair cut short and her feet brogued, but then the chelsea style has crept into many circles. you can go into the chenil gallery, where you will always find works by mr augustus john and mr gill; you can even go and have lunch at the good intent, but somehow chelsea will not seem to you very chelsea-ish. indeed, there are rows and rows of studios near glebe place, church street, redcliffe square, in all sorts of odd back-yards and shanties, but the whole thing does not hold132 together. at the good intent, for instance, you will find a small, quiet restaurant, decorated with old furniture, pictures that may have been advanced once upon a time, a jolly old pug, very fat and wheezing, its portraits on the wall, grossly flattered, with a mauve ribbon round its neck; you will see at the tables mainly women who live at local diggings, rather tired and lonely looking, as women grow when they live in diggings and toast muffins on the gas stove.
no, chelsea is nowadays too successful to be a locality for artists. cheyne walk has become too famous and too rich, for artists cannot live together, unless it is in a sort of alsatia where you must pay your footing in such coin as the keeper thinks fit. nowadays, the arts tend to scatter. they can be found in chalk farm, even in paddington, some say in bayswater, though this is not likely. they tend to live more privately than they do in paris, where half the day seems to be spent at the lilas. (oh, how i hate the lilas! the last time i went there, there was an enormous crowd; a hairy russian philosopher stood on my right foot while he read bad french translations from the sanskrit; meanwhile, two young people stood on my left foot and made love.) in london the arts meet at their communal places, in certain restaurants which they discover and then forsake, at the coq d’or, at little dancing clubs. if only the philistine hated them more, they might cling closer.
still, the arts are not, in london, as absent and ignored as the foreigner likes to think. it is true, as mr nevinson says, that owing chiefly to our press, to our loathsome, tradition-loving public schools and our antiquity-stinking universities, the average englishman is not merely suspicious of the new in all intellectual and artistic experiment, but he is mentally trained to be so unsportsmanlike as to try to kill every new endeavour in embryo. it is true, but it does not matter. the arts are vigorous, and in the end, those who came to kill stay to buy. that will be seen as time goes on.
is it, i wonder, a symptom of the english attitude to the arts, that the chapter which concerns them should, in the words of133 mr henry james, drag far in the dusty rear of this book? perhaps, though london of to-day is so vivid and so eloquent, so full of sharp colour and true line that, when i consider her music, i am inclined to think that she would not have attained her crisp and harmonious form if some creative instinct within her humorous, pessimistic, and languid people had not presided over her birth, and favoured her composite life.
the end
