The Tree of Heaven Part 39

Above this primitive, savage base of features that responded incessantly to any childish provocation, the intelligence of Monier-Owen watched in his calm and beautiful forehead and in his eyes.

He said, "It expresses movement, because it presents objects directly as cutting across many planes. To do this you have to break up objects into the lines and ma.s.ses that compose them, and project those lines and ma.s.ses into s.p.a.ce on any curve, at any angle, according to the planes you mean them to cross, otherwise the movements you mean them to express. The more planes intersected the more movement you get. By decomposing figures you compose movements. By decomposing groups of figures you compose groups of movement. Nothing but a cinema can represent objects as intact and as at the same time moving; and even the cinema only does this by a series of decompositions so minute as to escape the eye.

"You want to draw a battle-piece or the traffic at Hyde Park Corner. It can't be done unless you break up your objects as Mitch.e.l.l breaks them up. You want to carve figures in the round, wrestling or dancing. It can't be done unless you dislocate their lines and ma.s.ses as I dislocate them, so as to throw them all at once into those planes that the intact body could only have traversed one after another in a given time.

"By taking time into account as well as s.p.a.ce we produce rhythm.

"I know what you're going to say, Stephen. The Dancing Faun and the Frieze of the Parthenon express movements. But they do nothing of the sort. They express movements arrested at a certain point. They are supposed to represent nature, but they do not even do that, because arrested motion is a contradiction in terms, and because the point of arrest is an artificial and arbitrary thing.

"Your medium limits you. You have to choose between the intact body which is stationary and the broken and projected bodies which are in movement. That is why we destroy or suppress symmetry in the figure and in design. Because symmetry is perfect balance which is immobility. If I wanted to present perfect rest I should do it by an absolute symmetry."

"And there's more in it than that," said Austen Mitch.e.l.l. "We're out against the d.a.m.nable affectations of naturalism and humanism. If I draw a perfect likeness of a fat, pink woman I've got a fat, pink woman and nothing else but a fat pink woman. And a fat, pink woman is a work of Nature, not a work of art. And I'm lying. I'm presenting as a reality what is only an appearance. The better the likeness the bigger the lie.

But movement and rhythm are realities, not appearances. When I present rhythm and movement I've done something. I've made reality appear."

He went on to unfold a scheme for restoring vigour to the exhausted language by destroying its articulations. These he declared to be purely arbitrary, therefore fatal to the development of a spontaneous and individual style. By breaking up the rigid ties of syntax, you do more than create new forms of prose moving in perfect freedom, you deliver the creative spirit itself from the abominable contact with dead ideas.

a.s.sociation, fixed and eternalized by the structure of the language, is the tyranny that keeps down the live idea.

"We've got to restore the innocence of memory, as Gauguin restored the innocence of the eye."

Michael noticed that the talk was not always sustained at this constructive level. And to-night, towards twelve o'clock, it dropped and broke in a welter of vituperation. It was, first, a frenzied a.s.sault on the Old Masters, a storming of immortal strongholds, a tearing and scattering of the wing feathers of archangels; then, from this high adventure it sank to a perfunctory skirmishing among living eminences over forty, judged, by reason of their age, to be too contemptible for an attack in force. It rallied again to a bombing and blasting of minute inept.i.tudes, the slaughter of "swine like ---- and ---- and ---- and ---- and ----"; and ended in a furious pursuit of a volatile young poet, Edward Rivers, who had escaped by sheer levity from the tug of the Vortex, and was setting up a small swirl of his own.

Michael was with the revolutionaries heart and soul; he believed in Morton Ellis and Austen Mitch.e.l.l and Monier-Owen even more than he believed in Lawrence Stephen, and almost as much as he believed in Jules Reveillaud. They stood for all the realities and all the ideas and all the accomplishments to which he himself was devoted. He had no sort of qualms about the wholesale slaughter of the inefficient.

But to-night, as he listened to these voices, he felt again his old horror of the collective soul. The voices spoke with a terrible unanimity. The vortex--_the_ Vortex--was like the little vortex of school. The young men, Ellis and Mitch.e.l.l and Monier-Owen belonged to a herd like the school-herd, hunting together, crying together, saying the same thing. Their very revolt against the Old Masters was a collective and not an individual revolt. Their chase was hottest when their quarry was one of the pack who had broken through and got away. They hated the fugitive, solitary private soul.

And yet it was only as private souls that Ellis and Mitch.e.l.l and Monier-Owen counted. Each by himself did good things; each, if he had the courage to break loose and go by himself, might do a great thing some day. Even George Wadham might do something if he could get away from Ellis and the rest. Edward Rivers had had courage.

Michael thought: "It's Rivers now. It'll be my turn next" But he had a great longing to break loose and get away.

He thought: "I don't know where they're all going to end. They think they're beginning something tremendous; but I can't see what's to come of it. And I don't see how they can go on like that for ever. I can't see what's coming. Yet something must come. _They_ can't be the end."

He thought: "Their movement is only a small swirl in an immense Vortex.

It may suck them all down. But it will clear the air. They will have helped to clear it."

He thought of himself going on, free from the whirl of the Vortex, and of his work as enduring; standing clear and hard in the clean air.

PART III

VICTORY

XVIII

It was July, nineteen-fourteen, a month remarkable in the British Isles because of the fine weather and the disturbances in the political atmosphere due to the fine weather.

Every other evening in that July Anthony Harrison reminded his family that fine weather is favourable to open-air politics, and that the mere off-chance of sunstroke is enough to bring out the striker. And when Michael asked him contentiously what the weather had to do with Home Rule, he answered that it had everything to do with it by increasing parliamentary blood-pressure.

"Wait," he said, "till we get a good thunderstorm You'll see how long the strike'll last, and what Sir Edward Carson has to say to Mr.

Redmond then."

Anthony kept his head. He had seen strikes before, and he knew that Home Rule had never been a part of practical politics and never would be.

And Michael and Dorothea laughed at him. They had their own views about the Home Rule question and the Labor question, and they could have told Anthony what the answers were going to be; only they said it wasn't any good talking to Father; when he got an idea into his dear old head it stuck there.

Now, on Mother, if you talked to her long enough, you could make some impression; you could get ideas into her head and you could get them out.

Frances, no longer preoccupied with the care of young children, had time for the affairs of the nation. She was a more intelligent woman than the Mrs. Anthony Harrison who, nineteen years ago, informed herself of the affairs of the nation from a rapid skimming of the _Times_. In the last four years the affairs of the nation had thrust themselves violently upon her attention. She had even realized the Woman's Suffrage movement as a vivid and vital affair, since Dorothy had taken part in the fighting and had gone to prison.

Frances, sitting out this July under her tree of Heaven with the _Times_, had a sense of things about to happen if other things didn't happen to prevent them. At any rate she had no longer any reason to complain that nothing happened.

It was the Home Rule crisis now. The fact that England and Ireland were on the edge of civil war was brought home to her, not so much by the head-lines in the papers as by the publication of her son Michael's insurgent poem, "Ireland," in the Green Review.

For Michael had not grown out of his queer idea. He was hardly thirteen when he had said that civil war between England and Ireland would be glorious if the Irish won, and he was saying it still. His poem was the green flag that he flew in the face of his family and of his country.

Neither Frances nor Anthony would have been likely to forget the imminence of civil war (only that they didn't really believe in it), when from morning till night Michael talked and wrote of nothing else.

In this Michael was not carried away by collective feeling; his dream of Ireland's freedom was a secret and solitary dream. n.o.body he knew shared it but Lawrence Stephen. The pa.s.sion he brought to it made him hot and restless and intense. Frances expressed her opinion of the Irish crisis when she said, "I wish that Carson man would mind his own business. This excitement is very bad for Michael."

And she thanked Heaven that Ireland was not England, and that none of them lived there. If there was civil war in Ireland for a week or two, Anthony and the boys would be out of it.

Frances was also alive to the war between Capital and Labour. There was, indeed, something very intimate and personal to Frances in this particular affair of the nation; for Anthony's business was being disagreeably affected by the strike in the building trade.

So much so that Anthony had dismissed his chauffeur and given up his idea of turning the stable loft into a billiard-room. He had even thought of trying to let the shooting-box and the cottage on the Yorkshire moors which he had bought, unforeseeingly, in the spring of last year; but Michael and Nicholas had persuaded him that this extreme measure was unnecessary.

And Frances, even with the strike hanging over her, was happy. For the children, at their first sight of possible adversity, were showing what was in them. Their behaviour made her more arrogant than ever. Michael and Dorothea had given up their allowances and declared their complete ability to support themselves. (They earned about fifty pounds a year each on an average.) She had expected this from Dorothy, but not from Michael. Nicholas was doing the chauffeur's work in his absence; and John showed eagerness to offer up his last year at Oxford; he pressed it on his father as his contribution to the family economies.

Veronica brought her minute dividends (paid to her every quarter through Ferdinand Cameron's solicitors), and laid them at Frances's and Anthony's feet. ("As if," Anthony said, "I could have taken her poor little money!") Veronica thought she could go out as a music teacher.

There were moments when Frances positively enjoyed the strike. Her mind refused to grasp the danger of the situation. She suspected Anthony of exaggerating his losses in order to draw out Dorothy and Michael and Nicholas and John, and wallow in their moral beauty. He, too, was arrogant. He was convinced that, though there might be girls like Dorothea, there were no boys like his three Sons. As for the strike in the building trade, strikes, as Anthony insisted, had happened before, and none of them had threatened for very long either Frances's peace of mind or Anthony's prosperity.

The present strike was not interfering in the least with Mrs. Anthony Harrison's Day, the last of the season. It fell this year, on the twenty-fifth of July.

Long afterwards she remembered it by what happened at the end of it.

Frances's Day--the fourth Sat.u.r.day in the month--was one of those slight changes that are profoundly significant. It stood for regeneration and a change of heart. It marked the close of an epoch. Frances's life of exclusive motherhood had ended; she had become, or was at any rate trying to become, a social creature. Her Day had bored her terribly at first, when it didn't frighten her; she was only just beginning to get used to it; and still, at times, she had the air of not taking it seriously. It had been forced on her. Dorothea had decided that she must have a Day, like other people.

She had had it since Michael's first volume of Poems had come out in the spring of the year before, when the young men who met every Friday evening in Lawrence Stephen's study began to meet at Michael's father's house.

Anthony liked to think that his house was the centre of all this palpitating, radiant life; of young men doing all sorts of wonderful, energetic, important, interesting things. They stirred the air about him and kept it clean; he liked the sound of their feet and of their voices, and of their laughter. And when the house was quiet and Anthony had Frances to himself he liked that, too.

But Frances thought: "If only they wouldn't come quite so often--if only I could have my children sometimes to myself!"

It was the last rebellion of her flesh that had borne and suckled them.