AN ARTIST IN SEARCH OF INTEGRITY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 122, 24 October 1941, Page 10

AN ARTIST IN SEARCH OF INTEGRITY

The Autobiography of Erie Gill

Written for "The Listener" by Professor

F.

SINCLAIRE

AM grateful to the Editor for [ having put me in the way of reading Eric Gill’s Autobiography. But I was far from being grateful when he sent me the book with the twofold suggestion that I should read it, first "for my own delight," and secondly for the purpose of "writing something about it" for The Listener. In a general way I do not greatly care for that kind of criticism which consists in relating one’s adventures among masterpieces. At least I am not the man to do it. But here I think I can best bring out some of the qualities of Eric Gill’s book by adopting a frankly egotistical attitude, and speaking of my initial prejudices and how they were overcome. In the first place, like one of my betters, I hate to read a new book-

more especially on éomeone else’s recommendation. Like Voltaire’s Englishman, who insists on finding his own way to heaven, I must make my own discoveries among books-and hasten to force them on other people. And then, to read a book for delight, and all the time to be thinking what one is going to say about it! That is not my idea of delight. Surgit amari aliquid. If, as Wordsworth tells us, there is a pleasure in poetic ins- which only poets know, there is also a pain in poetic and other literary pleasures which only teachers (and reviewers) know. But this is not a review. % BS %

HEN again, the name of Eric Gill suggested to me in my ignorance a little world of arts and crafts in which I was not interested. So when the book arrived, I reverted automatically to a. technique which has more than once before served me very well in providing excuses for not reading. The method is simple: one approaches a new book as a natural enemy, and turns over the pages on the look-out for some occasion of stumbling, some small pebble of offence-a cant phrase, a cliché, a gross error of fact, a piece of

fable or insincere writing-anything will do! Now in this book of Gill’s, it happened that the very first page I lighted on seemed to give the excuse I wanted. "Integrality "--yes, the word stared me in the face. People who talk that lingo, I said to myself, are not for me. My second dip was, I thought, even more lucky. " Defence mechanism"; that phase would have finished me, if my eye had not involuntarily taken in the context. The sentence ran: "This is what the psycho-boys call a defence mechanism." That sentence converted me, and my defence mechanism broke down badly. Yes, it had been a lucky dip, but not in the sense I had expected. The psychoboys! There spoke a man and a brother. Only a good writer hits upon the mot juste in that way. Only a good man could have invented that delicious phrase to shy at our modern fashionable idols and throw out of gear this defence mechanism of tall opaque words. So I turned to page 1 no longer recalcitrant, but expectant. * * * ] was not disappointed. This writer is not-as that dreadful word " integrality " had led me to think-another of the corpses. He is all alive and kicking, and his kicks are directed with hearty gusto and deadly accuracy against some of the most kickable things in our contemporary world-captains of industry, pillars of society, psycho-boys, business men, "art" (that is "art divorced from meaning, divorced from prophecy, divorced from ritual, divorced from daily

life, divorced from the common work of men"). Read this, and your immediate response will tell you whether Eric Gill is your man or not. " There is nothing which so certainly obscures the face of God as the desire for money, . . . The root of all evil! Did I make up that phrase? No, it is the word of God to man.... And yet we'in our world regard it as the very flower of virtue. ... We give honour to the rich as to the saints of God.... Hence it is that we must go down into the dust disgraced and infamous, with no monument but the filthiness of our cheap idols. . , . What is truly monstrous and disruptive and corruptiné to

our life is that such persons should be our rulers-that they should have usurped the seats of kings, that this hideous teaching should have replaced the Gospel. That is what is unendurable; that is what is unforgivable; that is what God will neither endure nor forgive."

"[ HERE you have art undivorced ‘" from prophesy! Socialist soap-box-rant, you may say, or at best a belated echo of Morris and Ruskin. No, not rant; not an echo, and not (alas), belated, Eric Gill was a humble man, who was not afraid or ashamed to acknowledge his spiritual debts to both predecessors and contemporaries; but the voice you hear in his book is noone’s but his own. His book is, as he rightly describes it, a book of adventures; but they all took place in his own head, which is just where a man’s most exciting adventures ought to happen. Gill’s world was the world of art, politics, and religion. But to put it so, though the statement is baldly true, is in more than one way misleading. For instance, though he was known to the world as a craftsman, Gill would have put (Continued on next page)

ERIC GILL (Continued from previous page) religion first. He would say, and does say in effect, that unless you put religion first, you get nowhere with your art and your politics: until you have answered the first question -" What is the chief end of man?"-~your art and your politics flounder for want of direction. But then the phrase "art, religion, and politics " is even more fundamentally misleading when one is ‘talking about Gill. These anaemic abstractions and generalisations may serve as counters among the rest of us. Gill, one may say, poured into them his own life-blood. Nor, again, were politics and art and religion three worlds of discourse, separate or separable, competing for his attention and allegiance. This, I take it, is the central and most stimulating thing about Gill, that in an age of specialists, in which one man says "T am an artist, and politics are not my

affair," and another man says "I am a socialist and art and religion are not my affairs, I want to make this world a better place, and chance the next," and another says "I am a teacher of religion, and religion is above politics "-in the midst of these one-eyed specialists Gill appears as a full man, or man with all his wits about him, and those wits brought to bear harmoniously on the whole of life. Yes, he is an "integralist." He has got things into focus and related them in his life and work, into a single and beautiful whole. This integrity, or wholeness, or saneness, or whatever we like to call it, did not come to Eric Gill as a gift or a birthright. He paid for it in the coin of his adventurous spirit, and he reached it as the goal of his adventures. He has written a true and manly book, but above all and best of all, a book of encouragement for spiritual adventurers who are in search of their own lost integrity. (Eric Gill died almost immediately after the completion of his autobiography).