III

THE ENGLAND IN which H.D. arrived in 1911 had changed from the England that greeted Pound in 1908, not greatly, but significantly. Edward VII’s death in May 1910, hastened, many thought, by political anxieties, was not precisely the end of an era, as is indicated by the very fact that ‘Edwardian’ is often used to denote the whole period from 1901 to 1914. Yet the Britain George V reigned over was already altering, and Virginia Woolf, for one, thought 1910 marked the end of the Victorian period and the beginning of a different world. The years from 1910 to 1914 were increasingly unsettled, and the disturbances in the country that even Pound had found hard to ignore by the end of his first visit would cause growing tension and anxiety. If the devastation ahead was still unimaginable, in retrospect the fragility of the social and political order is clear. The political battle, under way when Pound left the previous spring, between the Liberal Government in the House of Commons and the Conservative majority in the House of Lords, or, as the Liberals preferred to put it, between the People and the Peers, had finally been resolved in August 1911 with the passing of the Parliament Act. Now the House of Lords could no longer veto, but only delay, House of Commons legislation. But the resolution of social conflict that the Liberals hoped would follow in the wake of their victory, now they had the freedom to implement more generous and progressive measures, would continue to elude them.

Lloyd George’s People’s Budget had been passed in April 1910, while Pound basked in Sirmione. Whilst its aims – to raise more money from the rich to fund the beginnings of a welfare state, with pensions, health insurance and unemployment benefit – were laudable, progress was slow and workers’ discontent grew. Poverty was widespread in Britain. A survey by Seebohm Rowntree indicated that over 30 per cent of the urban population lived in poverty. Real wages were falling. The deference the workers had by and large felt in the nineteenth century towards those who thought themselves their ‘betters’ was fading. As G.K. Chesterton wittily pointed out in 1905, upper-class privilege was not the result of merit: ‘it rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor’.⁵³ The poor were – through a combination of the effects of universal education, working men’s institutes and the growth of socialism – no longer inclined to be so kind to the rich. Flint’s Nietzschean rage against an exploitative society was in the spirit of the time. The great dock strike that Pound just missed on his return was one of many portents of labour unrest. There was, as George Dangerfield commented in his famous study of the decline of Liberal England, less of what one might call organised anarchism or theoretical syndicalism in Britain than on the continent, but the trade unions were very ready to take direct action; they in practice behaved in the best anarcho-syndicalist fashion. ‘Between 1910 and 1914,’ he notes, ‘and against the wishes of their leaders, [the workers] plunged into a series of furious strikes which, but for the declaration of War, would have culminated in September 1914, in a General Strike of extraordinary violence. The exact prescription for a syndicalist revolution.’⁵⁴

Then there was the suffrage movement, which reached a militant phase in late 1910. If the male workers were losing their deference, so were women. Not all those supporting votes for women agreed with militancy, but to the country at large it looked as if womanhood would never be the same again. The suffragettes stormed Parliament; they chained themselves to railings; they broke innumerable panes of glass; they committed arson; they poured dye into pillar-boxes; they burnt the suffragette message in acid on golf courses; Emily Davison eventually, in 1913, flung herself under the King’s horse at the Derby. The authorities took a far from gallant, and indeed ever more brutal attitude to the women; the police moved against them aggressively; most infamously, in prison, the suffragettes who went on hunger strike were violently force-fed. But they did not give up, even when the Cat and Mouse legislation was passed, by which women being force-fed would be let out when their health was failing, to be re-arrested a fortnight later and taken back for another session, so that the maximum cruelty was exerted without producing an undesirable martyr. If the New Woman had appeared a dangerous and unnatural creature, the suffragette was her apotheosis. Virginia Woolf’s remark about human nature changing in December 1910 has not generally been thought of in connection with the workers and the women suffragettes, but to contemporaries it would have made sense. Indeed, the example Woolf gives is of a worker and a woman, the cook:

The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing-room, now to borrow the Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat. Do you ask for more solemn instances of the power of the human race to change?⁵⁵

The old hierarchies were breaking down; only slowly, perhaps, and the liberal yet upper middle-class Woolf was possibly ambivalent about it, but change was on the way.

The other fraught area for the government was Ireland. Many, including Yeats, thought that the passing of the Parliament Act meant that Home Rule, to which the Liberals were sympathetic, was assured. They reckoned without the Ulster Unionists, who were not to allow any such devolution to go ahead. But in any case that hope of democratic concession came too late. In 1910 the Irish Republican Brotherhood was reborn. Paramilitary organisations began to form in Ulster and the West. By 1914, all the elements that shaped Ireland’s bloody twentieth-century history were in place, and the slow and painful dissolution of British Imperial rule in that island would begin.

It was in this unsettled Britain that H.D. arrived. Of course, on the surface much seemed as usual. The drawing-rooms to which Pound had been invited were as hospitable and well provided as ever, as she would gratefully discover. For the very rich, whom H.D. was rarely to meet at this stage, it was even a time of increasing opulence. Douglas Goldring asserts in Odd Man Out that it was in the ten years before the war that money began to be accepted as a passport into Society and ‘the aristocracy of birth was beginning to wilt under repeated shocks’.⁵⁶ He may not be right about the newness of this trend, for the English aristocracy was always pragmatic about accepting trade-money into its ranks, but perhaps the process was accelerating. It was undeniably a good period for the wealthy, and his memories of the champagne that flowed at Society balls hosted by new money were undoubtedly correct.

Pound himself gives no hint of registering any particular change in atmosphere when he first arrived back. If he made comparisons, indeed, it is much more likely that he would have been struck by how different on a personal level this arrival was from that in 1908. Then he was almost penniless, unknown and friendless. Now if not rich he was a great deal more comfortably off; his name appeared everywhere; he had published seven books and had many friends. During his first couple of months back, Pound spent most of his time with the conservative well-to-do, protected from social unrest. None of Pound’s more political or radical friends were around. The Shakespears themselves had firm views about social hierarchy. Apart from occasional wry comments on ‘the woman question’, one of the only political events that Dorothy mentioned in her letters to Pound before their marriage was the revolution in China: she was shocked that they would now be ruled by a president rather than an emperor. The admiration for Chinese art that Laurence Binyon had encouraged in her remained strong, but for her China was an ancient aristocratic civilisation, and should not be sullied by attempts at modern democracy. Yet in many parts of the world beyond Europe old orders were crumbling. The Ottoman Empire had collapsed in 1908, there had been a revolution in Mexico in 1910, and revolutions would also take place in Persia and Morocco. Eric Hobsbawm has argued that the destabilisation of these societies was in many ways due to the impact of Western expansion and trade development on the non-European world.⁵⁷ In turn, the competition between the Western powers for new spheres of influence in the wake of these revolutions was one of the precipitating causes of the First World War. A time bomb was ticking.

H.D., coming to London without her family, seeing it all in a haze of excitement and with a sense of escape, noticed the mood of rebellion from the beginning. She was taken to a suffragette meeting soon after her arrival; ‘most thrilling,’ she told her mother. H.D., impatient as she was with the rules laid down for women in bourgeois Philadelphia, savoured the suffragettes’ defiance; perhaps it gave her hope for her new life in Europe. Women’s fashions were changing strikingly at this time, in line with the new lives young women were seeking. Voluminous skirts and corsets were beginning to disappear. Dresses became slim and flowing, and hems were just beginning to rise. The Paris designer Paul Poiret was widely credited with bringing in the new look in 1908, with his high-waisted, slim-fitting Empire gowns, but his designs were part of a general trend. Isadora Duncan had created a fashion for fluid Grecian lines, and the couturier Mario Fortuny brought out Greek-inspired fashions. H.D., who had hated the many layers of stiff material required for respectable attire earlier in the century – particularly unsuitable for hot humid summers like those of Philadelphia – loved the new and infinitely more comfortable styles. After her earlier irritation with conventional dress, she now began to enjoy clothes, and later observers commented on how gracefully and elegantly she dressed. The fashion had changed not just in design but in women’s figures. Statuesque Edwardian battleship bosoms were out. To be tall and slender like H.D. was suddenly absolutely right. As Vogue’s Paris correspondent in May 1908 had commented, ‘The fashionable figure is growing straighter and straighter, less bust, less hips, more waist, and a wonderfully long, slender suppleness about the limbs … The long skirt … reveals plainly every line and curve of the leg from hip to ankle. The petticoat is obsolete, pre-historic. How slim, how graceful, how elegant women look! The leg has suddenly become fashionable.’ The colours women wore were changing too, becoming brighter and more varied, though H.D., at any rate in the version of herself in Asphodel, continued for some time to wear the silvery greys and pastels that she had been used to in Philadelphia, and was rebuked by George Lowndes for being ‘too nun-ish’.⁵⁸ Yet those she felt happier in. In her clothes as in life more generally, she was finding a style that suited her.

The sphere of rebellion with which H.D. and Pound would of course be most associated was that of the arts, though it would be the best part of a year before either of them would align themselves with the modernist revolution that was entering British cultural life. The impact of continental art movements had belatedly registered in London during Pound’s absence. The famous threshold moment is traditionally ascribed to Roger Fry’s 1910 exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’, which coincided with the Welsh coal-miners’ strike and the first wave of suffragette violence, and was seen by the conservative press as an equally dangerous and perturbing outbreak of disorder, ‘a wide-spread plot’, as an alarmed Robert Ross put it, ‘to destroy the whole fabric of European painting’.⁵⁹ ‘Like anarchism in politics,’ The Times complained indignantly, ‘it is the rejection of all that civilization has done.’⁶⁰ Manet was already well known, the respectable bait to lure the public in to see the works of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and others, including a few Picassos, though none of his recent Cubist paintings. As Pound’s friend Laurence Binyon put it in his largely unsympathetic review in the Saturday Review:

By an admirably discreet arrangement, reminding one of a Turkish bath, the shock of the revelation is only administered by degrees. In the first room you need scarcely be uneasy; Manet reigns there, and Manet is already a classic; in the second room the temperature is more exciting, you are in the face of Gauguin and Van Gogh; and only when sufficiently acclimatised need you venture yet further into the wild realms of Matisse and his compeers.⁶¹

Although the show was greeted, as Roger Fry predicted, with ‘a huge campaign of outraged British philistinism’, it was commercially a great success.⁶² As in the 1999 ‘Sensation’ show at the Royal Academy, people swarmed in to be excitingly shocked. Paul O’Keeffe has pointed out that the four painters central to the exhibition, Manet, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cézanne, were all dead, though apart from Manet little was known of their works by the public at large, or even by many in the art world. Cézanne, for example, had been exhibited very occasionally in England, but no one – apart from Roger Fry – had thought much about him; his death in 1906 had passed virtually unnoticed by the British press.⁶³ To many of the exhibition’s first visitors, for whom the detailed realism of Sargent’s society paintings or of Alma-Tadema’s Grecian nudes represented the best of modern art, the paintings appeared crude, careless failures that ignored rules of perspective. Probably not untypical of the older generation was Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, quoted by Virginia Woolf in her biography of Roger Fry, in which she recalls with some glee this moment of cultural upheaval. Blunt wrote in his diary: ‘The exhibition is either an extremely bad joke or a swindle. I am inclined to think the latter … these are not works of art at all, unless throwing a handful of mud against a wall may be called one. They are works of idleness and impotent stupidity, a pornographic show.’⁶⁴

The Times was right to link the paintings with the current political unrest, for the changes in art were a sign of a new desire to rethink the accepted order of things, but the outrage provoked by the pictures was perhaps in part a symptom of the fears of the conservative bourgeoisie of other insurrections. The Labour-supporting Daily Herald had an equally political reading of the paintings, though from the opposite angle, writing: ‘The Post-Impressionists are in the company of the Great Rebels of the World. In politics the only movements worth considering are Women Suffrage and Socialism. They are both Post-Impressionist in their desire to scrap old decaying forms and to find for themselves a new working ideal.’⁶⁵ As Frances Spalding points out, in these paintings, ‘Nothing now was allowed to come between the artist’s sensibility and his mode of expression: liberties could therefore be taken which before had been only allowable in a sketch. At a time when formality in dress and behaviour sustained a man’s or woman’s position in life, the informality of these paintings looked shockingly subversive, their lack of finish impolite. In their expressive vigour, they hit an English audience like a rude unwelcome shock.’⁶⁶ Blunt is, politically speaking, an interesting case in point; he was a fierce anti-imperialist who had been put in prison for his support for the Irish, but he was a Tory none the less, a believer in aristocratic values, with a fierce hatred of modernity and a horror of the decay of established traditions that to him these paintings symbolised. Significantly, his visit to the Grafton Galleries was one of the few non-political – or not obviously political – entries in his published diaries.

The papers divided largely on party lines: all the Tory papers hated the exhibition and most of the Liberal ones were more tolerant. The left-wing New Age gave it a cautious welcome in more than one review, one being by none other than Arnold Bennett under his pseudonym ‘Jacob Tonson’, though, as the letter pages testified, many of its readers were outraged. Pound’s old acquaintance from the Tour Eiffel, Edward Storer, sent a letter arguing, in line with his earlier comments on convention in Mirrors of Illusion, that these artists – he particularly admired Matisse – had naturally moved on from the now overworked Impressionist conventions to their own set of ‘rules and canons’, which in fact drew on very old precepts.⁶⁷ Fry, looking back in 1920, felt the reason the ‘cultured public’ turned against him was that they regarded traditional high art as ‘one of their social assets … it was felt that one could only appreciate Amico di Sandro when one had acquired a certain considerable mass of erudition and given a great deal of time and attention, but to admire a Matisse required only a certain sensibility. One could feel fairly sure one’s maid could not rival one in the former case, but might by a mere haphazard gift of Providence surpass one in the second.’ The condemnation of these painters, he argues, came out of ‘social rather than aesthetic prejudice’.⁶⁸ The vehemence of many of the attacks on the exhibition reflected the violence with which the more obviously political rebels were being repressed: Winston Churchill sent the troops in to break the miners’ strike, and the police were growing ever more aggressive towards the suffragettes.

‘Post-Impressionist’ was a name that had been seized on by Fry as a catch-all for these very different painters, and is a term he is generally credited with inventing; although in fact it had been used a couple of times before, it was he who gave it general currency. As he tried to explain to a confused British audience, what these artists had in common was a move away from the mimetic representational art that had dominated Western painting since the Renaissance. ‘They are,’ he said, ‘in revolt against the photographic vision of the nineteenth century, and even against the tempered realism of the last four hundred years … Like the Anarchists with whom they are compared, they are not destructive and negative, but intensely constructive.’⁶⁹ In spite of its many detractors, ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ was to be an exhibition that dramatically and rapidly changed the course of much British art. Vanessa Bell, for example, already training herself as a painter, found it a revelation. ‘It is impossible,’ she said later, ‘that any other single exhibition can ever have had so much effect as did that on the rising generation … here was a sudden pointing to a possible path, a sudden liberation and encouragement to feel for oneself which were absolutely overwhelming … It was as if one might say things one had always felt instead of trying to say things other people had told one to feel.’⁷⁰ She was one of many for whom the new art forms or new ideas or new mores appeared to offer ‘sudden liberation’ from Victorian hypocrisy and oppression.

Although the 1910 exhibition seemed to London like an overnight revolution in the world of art, the changes it charted had emerged over half a century. Fry himself was well aware of this progression, pointing out that in their desire to undo post-Renaissance realism, the Post-Impressionists were ‘true Pre-Raphaelites’, but though he pointed to the long roots of this art, his language played with images of violence and revolt, as in his reference to the Anarchists, quite as readily as his detractors. The sense of revolution in the arts initiated by this exhibition would remain in the air for the next decade. The frequently xenophobic British press was quick to note that this artistic revolt had a continental source, and other signs of this continental menace were appearing in London. Even before the arrival of Fry’s exhibition, the theatrical Futurist poet and painter Marinetti had visited, but though at that stage he caused a stir, he was regarded as too obviously foreign to be a threat to British culture. In any case, there had so far been no exhibition of Futurist painting, though Douglas Goldring had published one of Marinetti’s Futurist manifestos in his magazine the Tramp, in which Flint and Lewis were also appearing. Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet came in 1911, but whilst Edward Marsh astutely described it as a ‘Post-Impressionist picture put in motion’, it came in for much less attack, and indeed was greatly admired. On the other hand, when the New Age in November 1911 published a black and white reproduction of a Picasso Cubist painting, the storms of the previous winter blew up once more. Picasso was defended by the New Age art critic, Huntly Carter, and by Middleton Murry, who caused near apoplexy by talking warmly of Picasso’s Platonism. The letters flooded in to protest, the most vehement coming from Ebenezer Wake Cook, a Royal Academy painter in his late sixties, who warned darkly that ‘While there are any deeper depths of degradation, inanity, or of sheer lunacy to be gone through the Continental anarchists will drag the dishevelled Goddess of Art through them.’⁷¹

Pound must have heard about the 1910 exhibition in the States, if only through Floyd Dell’s reference to it, but although Dorothy, who rarely missed any significant cultural event, would almost certainly have been one of the visitors to the Grafton Galleries, and the aftershocks of the ‘Art-Quake’, as Desmond MacCarthy dubbed it, still rumbled away in the press on his return, such events were not yet of interest to him. If Pound had read the Wake Cook letter, it would scarcely, one imagines, have occurred to him that in a couple of years, through his association with the Vorticists, he would be hailed as the next dreadful step downwards. The future Pound would rejoice in provoking such diatribes, but for now he paid little attention to this modern movement, even though his ‘Δρια’ poem, in its bare simplicity and elemental power, has a quality that evokes the chthonic weight and strength of Cézanne’s Mont Saint-Victoire paintings. Pound’s imagism, when it emerged the next year, was to have much in common with this rigorous simplification, as well as with the move beyond conventional representation. But for now mysticism remained more significant to him than the artistic avant-garde. He wrote to Margaret in early October about his meeting with the Persian ’Abdu’l-Bahà, creator of the Baha’i religion, who had come to London to preach world love and unity, a worthy if perhaps over-optimistic platform, urging her to hear him in Paris, as ‘Its more important than Cézanne’.⁷² Yet even his interest in the ‘Bahi’, as he called him, was perhaps an indication that he would soon, like so many of these painters, turn to non-Western sources as models for his art. In late August, the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, whose work had been published in translation by Elkin Mathews, sent him two books of his poetry and asked Pound to send him some of his. Pound was very struck by the poems, and wrote to Dorothy, prophetically in light of the later impact of Far Eastern poetry on him, ‘His matter is poetic & his stuff not like everything else, he is doubtless sent to save my artistic future.’⁷³ He wrote back to Noguchi, saying that ‘if east and west are ever to understand each other that understanding must come slowly and come first through the art’.⁷⁴