The Opinions of Eric Gill
Collins, Nelson
42 THE COMMONWEAL May 15, 1929 THE OPINIONS OF ERIC GILL By NELSON COLLINS WHEN, some years ago, the second Christmas number of The Commonweal appeared, there were striking small...
...The great war memorial in New College, Oxford, is his triumph that way...
...He has had intimate connection with several great modern presses, Count Kessler's, the Saint Dominic's Press at Ditchling, the Golden Cockerel Press, and it is the Shakespeare's Head Press that is issuing his Chaucer...
...Mr...
...Joyce...
...And lately he has turned author...
...and in religion his declarations, particularly in Love and Art, of purely Catholic meanings will surely cause discussion, possibly excitement, some pause, certainly entertainment, among theologians open to the idea that an active artist may possibly have reliable slants into the very centre of Catholic religious inspiration, quite in the same way as theologians have assumed credentials, time out of mind, for entering the arcana of the arts...
...Even the hymn of Mary, the Magnificat, is but a faint reflection of her own acceptance of the Divine Will...
...Where I am writing at the moment—in Portland, Oregon—both Jurgen and Ulysses are in the public library, even though police taboo has only lately been withdrawn from the one and still formally exists for the other...
...They are conjoint and coordinating...
...The aesthetic ideas he elaborates are novel rather in the way he distributes his emphasis than in the groundwork of his conception...
...It is one of a hundred such current statements...
...Probably many English Catholics know him only as the designer of the Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral...
...Mere review of Mr...
...But woe more deep if indeed they have no meaning, if they also know neither God nor gods...
...Such conditions do not exist in England today...
...The figure of man is therefore seldom absent from his designs, and his interest in the animal world and in what is known usually as nature, calls forth in him less desire to represent them...
...The three books he has written and his present sum of accomplishment in the graphic arts seem to me extraordinarily interesting, and I do not find that American Catholics talk much about him as a Catholic exponent of the arts of the day or as an exponent of Catholicism in the arts of the day...
...He definitely believes religion, love, art to be inseparable...
...Walker's comment on "a Gothic gargoyle, etc...
...But it would be a sheer pose of aesthetic immaculacy to overlook a certain surreptitiousness that has already attached to some of Mr...
...It is beside the point to allude to Plato and The Symposium when quoting Eric Gill...
...From the Canticle of Canticles to Saint Bernard and Saint John of the Cross, from Saint Teresa of Avila to Saint Therese of Lisieux, the theme of love has never been without vivid and unveiled expression...
...Which last invites the comment that surely Mr...
...There can be no more direct access to the informing spirit of this looming graphic artist than by his own considered arguments and assertions, given when he is forty-five years old...
...It is the second most Catholic thing about him...
...Gill's combined aesthetic and Catholic standpoints—or standpoint, one really should say, the two are so fused—is more to the present point than any criticism of them, exaltative or depreciatory...
...Gill and his work, and that solitary reference a mere statement of fact about him...
...In all cases, however unconsciously and with whatever accompaniment of philosophical error and uncouth theology, God has been worshiped as the Lover, the Fount of love, Love itself...
...Gill's preoccupation with human beings rather than with external nature, and his preoccupation with them as male and female, thus aestheticized and Catholicized, is again expressed by him briefly in his very special argument of a point of view as artist: Only where the non-photographic, the conventional, the symbolic, the hieratic, is regarded as being the proper nature of artistic work and all else is regarded as indecency, tour de force or triviality, only there can you have the representation of marriage either holily or tolerably executed...
...In 1927 he wrote two books, Christianity and Art, and Art and Love...
...but then to this artist religion is the origin of art and it is doubtful if he could believe in any art that was not in some way governed, guided and generically descended May 15, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 43 from a religious belief...
...42 THE COMMONWEAL May 15, 1929 THE OPINIONS OF ERIC GILL By NELSON COLLINS WHEN, some years ago, the second Christmas number of The Commonweal appeared, there were striking small illustrations by Mr...
...Gill's graphic work has been done to illustrate books, the Troilus and Cressida, the Procreant Hymn, The Canticle of Canticles, and now the great new edition of The Canterbury Tales, to come out year after year for eight years, commencing with the autumn of 1928, one volume each year— the greatest thing of its kind since William Morris, certainly since Aubrey Beardsley...
...Gill makes utmost freedom in material the very centre of his emphasis upon the adjective in Catholic aesthetic...
...Eric Gill scattered all through it...
...We wish to deal with those particular works of art in which love is the theme, the subject-matter, the material form as well as the immaterial form and raison d'etre...
...None the less the Crucifix and the Madonna transcend all such symbolic things...
...He then in a notable passage—all this is from his book, Art and Love—builds up the isolated Christian character of his aesthetic doctrine: It is easily seen, then, that as non-Christian peoples everywhere have naturally set up sexual symbols of Divine Love, not knowing Christ, so Christians, as naturally and often as thoughtlessly and with as little misgiving, have set up everywhere the Crucifix and the Madonna...
...It is interesting "in these days" to see so insistent a personality so communal...
...It is then logical that it must be the human figure which is to him the chief expression of his art...
...Although he seems so individual in his Catholicism and in his practice of his craft, and although he seems to accept intuitive, impressionistic, individualized modes of experience, yet he turns in total rejection from uniquely individualized experience, in nothing being more Catholic...
...Though Eric Gill has grown steadily since then in varied pictorial achievement, in significance and clarity of purpose and in fame in England, there still seems to be little technical or general or specifically Catholic concern with him over here...
...Brooks said recently: Our ancestral faith in the individual and in what he is able to accomplish as the measure of all things has despoiled us of that instinctive human reverence for those reservoirs of collective experience, religion, science, art, philosophy, the self-subordinating service of which is almost the measure of the highest happiness...
...R. A. Walker, in the Print Collector's Quarterly for April, 1928, says in his article on Mr...
...For all works of art have love for their reason of being but not all have love for their bodily theme...
...There is for Eric Gill the one supreme Being, God, Who is love, and art is only love made manifest by a craftsman...
...It accounts also in part for the marvelous acumen and grace with which he can cut out the female figure from a small piece of wood...
...The relation to religion, the emergence from religion, for all art is done with a modern artist's independence...
...He elaborates a religious-aesthetic doctrine headed in the other direction from the aesthetic-religious doctrine of William Morris, away from the "Religion of Beauty" group that F. W. H. Myers commemorated in an essay with that title...
...He is a "Southern English Catholic," a tertiary of the Order of Saint Dominic, the substance of his books first appeared in the magazine Blackfriars, and "from 1901 he began to make a name for himself, a name which is now supreme in England, as an inscription cutter...
...Cabell and Mr...
...Therefore the love song and the love picture which takes human love as the symbol of Divine Love are everywhere recurrent and such love, so taken, is still rightly the theme of themes for poets and picture-makers...
...Woe to them if the nakedness with which they clothe their meaning be anything but sentimental...
...That is Platonic enough in direct take-over, yet love Christianized, Catholicized, is so the essence of Eric Gill's aesthetic that its undifferentiated resemblance to the pagan philosophy is almost meaningless compared with the Catholic distinction that he makes: No one should be satisfied with the definition of art that it is simply skill, or that it is skill in the imitation of nature, or that it is the expression of emotion, or even that it is the expression of the workmen's sense of beauty, though art may include all these things...
...A Gothic gargoyle, a Hindu corbel or a Buddhist capital were neither religious nor irreligious ; they formed a material part of a large spiritual conception, and that is exactly how much of Gill's work should be regarded by the intelligent connoisseur...
...At all events many of his woodcuts, published and unpublished, show a freedom which to some is refreshing, to others, maybe, shocking...
...Gill's work, even though not—certainly not—to his fame...
...Meantime, one buys his etchings, his woodcuts, contemplates his works in granite, prays before his images, seeks out the books he illustrates, expensive as they all are, finds the little books he even writes, with no "imprimatur" upon them but with all the circumstances otherwise of Catholic publication...
...have already departed from India...
...Gill himself departs so readily from the confines of the arts to attack pretty nearly all current civilization, and many errancies of Catholic procedure, that neither he nor we need anticipate only stripped artistic estimate of him and all his works...
...Gill also, opening with a complaint that he could find only one reference in all the journalistic files of the United States to Mr...
...His Catholic and personal declarations against the aesthetic tendencies of the times remind a reader often enough of Mr...
...Gill's etchings and woodcuts in toto...
...Such is the soil in which forlorn painters and poets must plant their seedlings...
...Again let us not be misunderstood...
...Erotic esotericism or esoteric eroticism...
...Yet I cannot believe the art room of the public library of Portland, or any other broad-minded library, will soon be willing to offer Mr...
...The divine background has disappeared and the modern world fondly imagines that it has removed the veil with which a more superstitious generation shrouded reality, whereas, actually, it has simply blinded itself to the reality of which material life is the veil...
...Such is the state of dispiritedness in which we now find ourselves...
...We are not seeking, as do many students of religion, to reduce Christian imagery to the level of non-Christian idolatries...
...And in these days appreciation is necessarily rare even among the faithful, for the whole modern world, enamored of materialism and individualism, has divorced itself from Catholic faith and morals and has, therefore lost the habit of mind necessary for the understanding and appreciation of an art essentially both spiritual and sensible and also anonymous, and in its love of anecdotal sentimentality sees no beauty in the epic and intellectual art of the Church...
...So it is easily an open bet whether his recognitions will come first on purely aesthetic grounds...
...To him they are a trio who cannot be divided...
...Gill would never agree to Mr...
...To the present-day point of view, that is the third and least of the grounds for paying close attention to Eric Gill...
...Reasonable hope might anticipate straight, undistracted, aesthetic acceptance for all his work from the outset...
...It is now, one hopes, easy to see that it is logical for the artist to give himself complete latitude in content once the premises are accepted...
...Henry Longan Stuart had an article on Mr...
...Even the Song of Solomon in all its glory is but a pale ghost before the divine Lily of Calvary...
...The Canticle of Canticles is but a symbolic poem...
...Aside from his very emphatic, perhaps over-emphatic, declarations of Catholicism, his literary and aesthetic and philosophical and religious declarations are significant whether you emphasize Gill the theorist as inheritor or innovator...
...Only 200 copies of each were published, and they are already items in the sought-forand-hard-to-find list...
...In 1928—belatedly, one may be led to think, considering the other two—he did a book called Prudence and Art...
...we are not trying to discover in Christian imagery a hidden idolatry...
...The image is mightier than the symbol...
...This figure which is really symbolic, is the maker of man...
...Gill: The art of Eric Gill, then, is a religious art...
...Van Wyck Brooks's current comments...
...being "neither religious nor irreligious," because Mr...
...His sense of beauty is not an alternative, a sense of escape from dogmatic religion, but an immersion in it...
...the Christ of Calvary is a historic fact...
...For this literary slant upon him not only are there the three little positive books, but much of Mr...
...These are the Christian love tokens...
...It is the factory of God for the making of His own image...
...There is (of course) a whole world of difference...
...Mr...
...It is in fact the great competitor and the sworn enemy of the word factory and all that it signifies...
...Eric Gill Catholicizes it: Only those who are themselves Catholics can, as a rule, appreciate the contribution made by the Catholic Church to the art of the world, and even they only 44 THE COMMONWEAL May 15, 1929 partially...
...that Christianity has not obliterated that truth but given it divine sanction...
...On the contrary, our concern is to show that nonChristian religions, inasmuch as they proclaim that love is the central fact of the universe, proclaim truth...
...so assertive a person merging himself to the enrichment and not the impoverishment of his personality...
...The relationship is obvious, and yet the influence is not so great as the open relationship might seem to establish...
...It is harder to anticipate undistracted initial Catholic acceptance of all his theories...
...It is another open bet whether scandalized comment—if scandalized comment there be—will start from a Catholic source, as, "How could I expect this within the Church itself ?" or from a non-Catholic source, even an anti-Catholic source, as, "So this, so this, is what comes to us out of the Church itself...
...His greatest eminence is in the graphic arts—carving, etching, wood-cutting, monumental stones, granite letterings, copper-plate work, loving and cunning work in the blocks...
...I wonder sometimes if, when the general interest comes—as it has to come—it will come by way of scandalized excitement, as did the interest in Mr...
...I have a feeling that he himself would find congruous conclusion to this random account of him in such a paragraph of his own as this: . . . While the sentimental is everywhere applauded, the sensual is a source of panic...
...Stuart himself, so it seems to me, in that enterprising account stressed Eric Gill's social attitudes, certain William-Morris-like condemnations and communal craft livings, a hatred of stockbrokers, a repudiation of machines...
Vol. 10 • May 1929 • No. 2
