The Art of Eric Gill
Stuart, Henry Longan
THE ART OF ERIC GILL By HENRY LONGAN STUART WHENEVER an event of prime human significance has transpired, stirring nations to their depths, and making a violent break with continuity, its...
...But you cannot talk to him for five minutes without falling under his spell...
...Goya's Horrors of War, the catastrophic public mind—the way of "looking at things" that portends changes...
...But they turn their eyes to the Catholic Church as the one social entity not reared by human hands or committed to human compromises...
...S. C. Nott, a friend of the artist, who has made the popularizing of the new movement in America his work for two years, has assembled a large collection of the products of Saint Dominic's Press...
...The reference, it is true, was characteristic and significant...
...In front, the common stretches away to the foot of the Sussex Downs where Roman earthworks can still be seen, with other mounds even older than the Romans...
...They are frankly "little Englanders" but with a passion of patriotism for all things English that are not too big to be loved...
...THE ART OF ERIC GILL By HENRY LONGAN STUART WHENEVER an event of prime human significance has transpired, stirring nations to their depths, and making a violent break with continuity, its repercussion (to use a word now pretty well naturalized in English) is to be observed, not only in literature, but in painting and the plastic arts as well...
...More than two years ago—in May, 1923, to be exact—a memorial to students of Leeds University, dead in the war, was to be erected...
...Your riches are putrid...
...Weep and howl for the miseries that have come upon you...
...Many artists of many schools have sought to convey this impression of sudden glory in their own way—by a ray of light piercing the thatched roof of the stable, by an aureole that hovers over the sacred straw...
...The other name for Christmas is Revelation...
...The peace of the eternal hills floats across the common...
...The pamphlet (it is not much more) is ostensibly a "dissertation" on the Song of Songs and a defense of its legitimate place in liturgy against those who would reduce it to a mere eastern love-song, full of provocative imagery...
...The period of decay which the renaissance ushered in...
...But, in his hands, and by methods which the school of Chesterton uses very skilfully, it becomes an attack on commercialized sacred art, and a plea for a return to forms of which faith untainted by profit was the motive...
...The printing press is in a large airy building, and the first thing that impresses one is the quietness, no clanging nor banging of machinery...
...At the Chaucer Head, 32 West 47th Street, Mr...
...The Church is not the enemy of freedom...
...Society is sick and faint, and the only thing that can rouse it from its swoon is the smell of new-turned earth, the scent of byre and sheep-fold...
...The dog with the torch in its mouth is, of course, the age-old symbol of the Dominican Order...
...They cannot lie...
...But they are at least honest fanatics...
...Industrialism, for them, is of the devil—the modern big city a "den of dragons...
...These men see little but evil in the modern economic structure in their own country...
...And in nothing is this inertia and ignorance more evident than in the encouragement given to the irreligious and merely sentimental art of a commercial civilization...
...And the hither side of Revelation is always eclipse...
...He has all the childlikeness of a true artist, the childlikeness which looks at everyone and everything without a single preconceived idea marring the contact...
...Society, according to them, has been bled white by poverty and the only cure is a redistribution, to be brought about by a return to mediaeval conceptions of property...
...is now past repair...
...On the base was a text from Saint James (in Latin) — "Woe to you rich men...
...We are in a sinking ship and every man must save himself...
...Eternity's veil is withdrawn and against its overpowering light, no detail subsists...
...Naturalism has always and everywhere been the sign of religious decay...
...They cultivate their own land, make their own wine and beer and bread, and in their own workshops carve woodblocks, cast type, and print books, produce pictures and sculpture, with a complete disregard for all so-called labor-saving devices and complicated mechanisms, to the use of which even the most individual of artists elsewhere have so generally succumbed...
...Gill's own views on what Father Vincent McNabb in a preface terms "the asceticism of art," are to be found in a strange little book, Songs without Clothes, written five years ago and "printed and published at Saint Dominic's Press, Ditchling, Sussex, on the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lady a.d...
...Chesterton and Belloc are their publicists and Father Vincent McNabb, former prior of the Dominican monastery of Haverstock Hill, in London, their theological supporter...
...Naturalistic painting, sculpture and music are always found concurrently with the decay of dogmatic religion...
...Just before writing this article, I had the curiosity to examine the files of one of the Last Judgment of Delacroix, Gericault's terrible Raft of the Medusa, even Blake's enigmatic cartoons, keep the turmoil of revolution for years after revolution has become history...
...Eric Gill is a member of the Third Order of the Dominicans, together with Douglas Pepler, and others of a group of laymen who have set up Saint Dominic's Press, and live a community life that is a startling contrast to the existing social order in England...
...Christ wept over Jerusalem," Gill has said...
...The torch symbolizes the light of reason...
...The richness of the designs, the seemliness of type and hand-made paper are a revelation of what can be achieved by a few men who make a resolute return to old craftsmanship and hand-work, translating not only the methods but the ideals of what they conceive to be the way of economic salvation into their daily work, and proclaiming their belief that today, as six centuries ago, "by hammer and hand, all arts do stand...
...On this they are quite convinced and are not to be shaken by the most plausible of arguments...
...The history of art since the sixteenth century has been a faithful reflection of the progress of the world from one infidelity to another, and today we find ourselves at the nadir...
...The result, I believe, was generally hailed by the critics who reflect enlightened judgment as artistically satisfactory...
...Sophistications, even pious ones, lay down their arms before the stark accessories of the Divine birth —the manger, the ox and ass, the shepherds, the Wise Men and their camels, the star...
...The memorial," he told enquirers, "is a memorial to a war that has just begun—the war between stupidity and injustice...
...Society is atrophied and the only thing that can restore flexibility is the play of muscles upon men who handle tools instead of levers...
...He has a charm of manner that is irresistible, a keenness of humor and a merry twinkling eye...
...In an account of the visit to the colony at Ditchling which first aroused his enthusiasm for Gill's work, Mr...
...We want today's salvation by truth...
...Ox and ass, the beasts of the field, the Mother chosen among mankind, even the Child who has assumed our mortal nature show only as the shadows that heaven makes of all earthly things here below...
...It is rather surprising how little is known in this country of the group of craftsmen, artists and writers who are using their art to attack the industrial armature in England...
...P. Q. R." banner floating overhead (very much, historically considered, as if December 23, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 177 modern soldiers were shown carrying their regimental flags to a riot call) the distant view of Jerusalem, the theatrical gestures of hatred or mourning, and of replacing them by one or two figures, symbolizing malignancy, violence or sorrow, and reduced to the barest essentials of anatomy, struck many as revolutionary...
...But at the present time these facts are hidden from the majority of the people by reason of the inertia and ignorance of Catholics both lay and cleric...
...Nott has this to say— "The printers, sculptors, artists, wood-engravers who constitute the personnel of the colony, have their workshops in low wooden buildings...
...But one can fancy that an inherent symbolism was present in the artist's mind as he limned his picture...
...Art works by indirection...
...And the money-changers wore, not the hood or mitre of Jerusalem that might have tempered the challenge, but the silk hat of stock exchanges and board meetings...
...The ship that brought us is on the rocks and nothing is to be saved but the toolchest and the compass...
...In the series of Eric Gill's Christmas pictures with which The Commonweal decorates its Christmas number, the artist's frugality of execution finds perhaps the theme which suits its peculiar genius best...
...The views on social righteousness which received so dramatic a presentation in the Leeds memorial were no new things with Eric Gill, and they are shared by many thoughtful and hard-working writers and publicists in England...
...Eric Gill is one of the most interesting personalities I have ever met...
...One of those happy accidents that I76 THE COMMONWEAL December 23, 1925 providence knows how to arrange, put the commission for a war memorial in Gill's hands...
...Luckily New York has an opportunity at hand to make Gill's acquaintance in all his picturesque phases of chap-book, social pamphlet, manual of devotion and decorative compositions...
...For one blinding moment in the world's story, and one only, heaven visited earth...
...You will notice, however, that one further step away from the "naturalism" which is Gill's bete noire and which perhaps finds its extremest expression in Rembrandt, has been taken and that the great scene in the stable is presented in silhouette, the shadow-show at which children clap their hands...
...Questioned—not to say attacked—-upon the subject, Gill's reply was rather an elucidation than a defense...
...The writer was in London at the time Gill's now famous series of the Stations of the Cross were installed in Westminster Cathedral and can well remember the storm of criticism aroused by them among traditionalists...
...Gill, in fact, belongs to a group which might be called the extreme left of the Catholic economists...
...Imperialism—the vision that stirred Kipling to rhapsody, is a mirage that is dissolving...
...It is hard to study these pictures, wonderful in their quality of simple faith and child-like rapture, without a desire to know more of their author and of his work...
...The richness that a composition can have, left dependent for its effect on the sheer rightness of the "containing" line is seized at a glance...
...Today the stations are recognized as the most characteristic and befitting ornaments of Bentley's great masterpiece of Christian architecture, the ones most thoroughly in key with his conception when he planned it as a monument to all time of the Church's second spring in England...
...A method all the more effective for its simplicity has been chosen by Gill...
...But he chose to live and work in the country...
...These men, it may be said, are fanatics...
...The idea of eliminating the things to which the devout had been accustomed—the mob of priests and soldiers, the "S...
...But aesthetic considerations took second place in the storm that some of the details aroused...
...The things that men have made are the best evidence...
...Not all of them are Catholics...
...In a frieze at the base, the daring artist had drawn a Christ, scourge in hand, before whom ran a hound with a torch in its mouth, driving the money-changers from the temple...
...She is its only real support, and also she is the only opponent of the unjust rich...
...All the presses are worked by quiet-voiced people in smocks...
...He is rather strange looking, perhaps, with his long beard, untidy hair, much-worn overcoat and old grey trousers...
...mcmxxi...
...Set apart from the workshops is the tiny chapel, simple and beautiful...
...The Dominicans are the scientists of religion...
...Consequently its attacks upon what its authors conceive to be social evils escape not only the attention of the historian but the attention of those who might conceivably be interested in observing the shifts in the big dailies in New York, the one perhaps which most completely and satisfactorily covers the activities of the whole world, and could find, amid its exhaustive files, but one reference to Eric Gill...
Vol. 3 • December 1925 • No. 7
