Set Down in Malice: A Book of Reminiscences

by Gerald Cumberland

I always think of Norman and Edwin Morrow as typical artists. Norman, who died almost in harness a short time ago, was absolutely disdainful of success, or perhaps it would be truer to say that he was disdainful of the means by which success is usually won. I imagine him looking upon certain successful men and their work and saying to himself: “Only the distinguished nowadays are unknown.” But he would say this with his tongue in his cheek, laughing at himself, and knowing that the dictum is only half true. He liked admiration—what artist does not?—but people who liked things of his that he himself did not approve of made him “tired.”

Of course, those people who worship success—or, at all events, admire it—are very difficult to bring to the belief that many artists are almost indifferent to it. “Artists may pretend to care nothing for success, especially those who have failed to achieve it,” they say, “but surely it is a case of sour grapes?” No man except a fool, it is true, is wholly indifferent to money, but the type of artist of whom I am now writing is tremendously casual about it. If money comes his way, as it has in John’s case, well and good; if not, it can very well be done without. The artist [173] ]lives almost entirely for the moment, for the moment is the only thing of which he is certain. Yesterday has gone and has melted into yesterday’s Seven Thousand Years; to-morrow is not yet here and may never arrive; therefore, carpe diem.

Norman Morrow had the kind of subtlety and refinement that one finds in the work of Henry James. I very rarely came away from his studio without feeling that I had given myself “away,” that he had seen through all my insincerities, that he was aware of the precise motives of my acts even when I was not aware of them myself. But, being a swift analyst of his own emotions and a constant diver after the real motive in himself, he was tolerant of others and very slow to condemn.

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It is incorrect to assume, as many people do, that there is in Chelsea anything of the atmosphere of Henri Murger’s Bohemia. Nowadays, in London artistic and literary circles, only the idle and incompetent starve. Murger’s young artists, moreover, are absurdly self-conscious and flabby and childish. Chelsea men and women are keen-witted, level-headed, and experienced people of the world.

. . . . . . . .

All the faddists, of course, go to live at Letchworth, but there are in Chelsea a few groups of young “intellectuals” who are good enough to supply comic relief in the “between” days when one is bored. One Saturday evening, having been to the Chelsea Palace of Varieties and feeling restless and disinclined for bed, I remembered that I had a standing invitation to go to a certain studio where, I was told, I should be welcomed whenever I cared to go. I went and discovered a handful of young men sitting round the fire and directing the affairs of the Empire.

The little group of intellectuals (all from Cambridge—or was it Oxford?) hailed me and fell to talking about politics, socialism, Fabianism, Sidney Webbism, and so [174] ]forth. All very bright and clever, and all very promising, but the wonderful conceit of it all! Some of them were men with brilliant university honours, but they had not even the wisdom, the sense of proportion, of children. They idolised Bernard Shaw and spoke of H. G. Wells in terms of contempt. They really thought that the destinies of our Empire were directed by the universities, and their priggish little minds were eager to “control” the poor, to direct their work, even to fix the size of their families....

I sat silent, wondering if these men represented the best—or even the average—that our universities produced in immediately pre-war days. I looked at their long, white fingers, their longish hair, their long noses, and I listened to their drawl which was not quite a drawl, and I thought that their conversation was, what Keats would have called it, “a little noiseless noise.” They had brains, of course; they were smartish and “clever.” But what are brains without experience and what is cleverness without judgment? These men, I felt, would never gain experience, for they saw in life only what they wished to see, denying the rest. Life to them was a vast disorder which Oxford and Cambridge, as represented by them, was about to put right. I imagine Mrs Sidney Webb and Mr Beatrice Webb (as The New Age once so happily called them) walking over from Grosvenor Road to Chelsea and smiling blandly, and with huge satisfaction, at their ridiculous disciples.

I have described these people because, though they do not represent Chelsea, they are to be met with there in considerable numbers. They have flats and studios full of knick-knacks, flats in which you will find art curtains, studios in which there is ascetic severity and where one has triscuits for breakfast.