A London Mosaic

by Walter Lionel George

THE CAFÉ ROYAL

This does not mean that the Café Royal is a literary café, or an artistic café. The literary, dramatic, and pictorial elements are certainly stronger there than in any other London resort, but at any time you may see there the strangest assembly: foreigners, a great many; smart people who are seeing life; and very dull, ordinary, fat men who stop on their way from business or shop to have a drink before dinner. At dinner time the room is not itself, for half of it sees its marble tables covered with cloths, which means that eating proceeds, and eating does not, so well as drinking, favour turbulent debate. It is just before dinner, and especially after dinner, that the Café Royal enters upon its true function: to provide a pleasant, cheap place, fairly noisy, fairly smoky, and fairly comfortable, where the young arts may meet and joust. During the war it did not quite do this, for many of the young men had joined the army, and it was strange suddenly to recognise over a tunic, in a well-kept, well-brushed head, the outlines of somebody whom once one knew with endless locks, whiskers, or a beard. Even in khaki they did what they could. Military discipline did not completely dominate those rebellious beings; their moustaches were either a little more luxuriant or very much more hogged than usual. The Café Royal platoon was still faintly noticeable.

Some, however, were not in khaki, for theirs was not a very fit generation, and even now many a table throws back a memory to 1914. In those days the frequent visitor to the Café Royal soon knew many people by sight, and if he was of that world, or had somebody to guide him, he soon could pick out those who were celebrated and those who were notorious; with time, he even came to recognise those who were extremely well known. I do not know if, nowadays, one often sees at the Café Royal, Mr Jacob Epstein, but once it was difficult to detach one’s eyes from the sleepy strength of his heavy profile. One wanted to look into those eyes with the thick lids, in which strangely mingled so much detachment and so much kinetic energy. He was seldom alone; there was always a little Epstein group about his table. Indeed, it is a characteristic of the Café Royal that few people sit alone. They form groups. One I remember well. It always contained a tall young man with very long, thin features, and hair grown low about the cheek; he had a fancy for clothes faintly 1860 in feeling, notably, for stocks. There was an extremely beautiful girl, thin, dark, and languid as some warm Italian greyhound. There was a young man who wore a velvet coat, whose fair hair fell in long wisps upon his collar, a strange young man, with a peculiar grayish skin and an air of nervous excitement. Round these moved other figures less definite, but all of them young: square men in knickerbockers, with short pipes stuck precisely in the middle of their faces; girls, outrageously florid or eloquently simple, round whose long necks hung the flowered yokes of Chelsea, on whose hands clustered many rings of turquoise and aquamarine, or whose hands were virgin of all decoration save that of black finger-nails. The smart people used to watch them steadily and feel that, at last, they were really seeing life.

Sometimes they saw people whose names could serve as conversation at the morrow’s lunch party. Sometimes they caught sight of Mr C. R. W. Nevinson, and could describe his square figure, his rather blunt, pleasant face with the bright, live, brown eyes. It does one good to look at Mr Nevinson, though, nowadays, something oppressed has crept into his expression; there is, in those rather thick features, a sense of life and desire. With him sometimes goes his wife, slight, white and rose, and bending a little under the heavy sunshine of her hair.

Until recently the Café Royal also often contained Mr Augustus John, and one could sit for a long time, wondering what it was gave his features that air of tautness. There is always about Mr John a feeling that he is imprisoned within himself.... Equally with Mr Epstein he had his court, young men in a state of extreme reverence, and other men who preached to him in attitudes of hostility tinged with nervousness, which is the ordinary approach to the successful painter of those who are less successful. I think that, now and then, Mr Arthur Symons used to draw them away, so as to procure for Mr John a greater peace. It was as if he were trying to create about him an atmosphere of hush. At the Café Royal this is not easily done. Notably, it was difficult to create hush among the reverential young men, for I suspect that they all wanted to know what Mr John thought of their work, that is meant to tell him what he ought to think. The young women were more easily managed, and it is interesting to note that they tended to approximate in appearance to the John type. Nearly all were what the vulgar call plain, in some cases because they were perfectly beautiful: that which is perfectly beautiful is severe and separate; it does not arouse desire, it arouses respect, and this most of humanity cannot forgive. Those strange young women, apparently long-legged and long-armed, in their simply-cut high frocks that hung straight from shoulder to ankle, young women with hair plainly banded, rather long noses, strong chins, thick, dark mouths, like open fruits. They seemed to come straight out of some sketch in Donegal.

There were many others, too. Now and then one caught sight of Mr Wyndham Lewis who, nowadays, is plump, but in those was tall and white and rather slim, often silent and generally weary; it was an education in negligence to watch the depressed droop of the cigarette stump which generally hung from his underlip. There were others, too, a woman with small, humorous eyes and a pleasant coppery complexion, who wore turbans of purple silk and gold, who never thought or spoke an evil thing of any creature alive. One saw Mr Gertler, very young and seductive, perhaps a little conscious of it; Mr Gilbert Cannan, oozing defiance from every sharp angle and confining his conversation to this process. The other young writers came now and then: Mr Swinnerton before he grew his beard, Mr Hugh Walpole, who always seemed slightly out of place in so ill-regulated a spot. People less definable float through my mind: a young girl who had been told that she looked like a Russian, and thenceforth appeared attired in a red sarafan; a young man with black locks massed upon his eyebrows, locks he often tossed back to show the running water of his pale eyes. There was a young woman who believed in asceticism; as she looked rather like a brick, I was told that her beliefs had never been put to a rude test. There was another young woman, too, who seriously informed any marble table that she believed in reincarnation, and that within her breathed the soul of Shelley. Nearly everybody painted, some wrote verse, a few ventured on prose; the talk was of art and of sinners against art. Swiftly they passed from studio scandal to the declarations, manifestoes, proclamations which made the arts sound foolish in 1914, but actually were evidences of their vigour. Indeed, the modern forms of art tend to shock the Philistine: I am not with him; I like my paint wet.

The old arts are unkind to the young arts. Struck by a certain wilful outrageousness which often overlays talent and in the beginning always heralds it, the old arts make as much fun of the new arts, as the old arts made of the older when they were young. Some of my readers may remember Mr Epstein’s rather theoretical Venus, at whose feet reposed a wheel. It was an abstract piece of sculpture, but, however abstract, I think it was a little harsh of Mrs Aria to describe it as a sick penguin sitting on a broken bicycle. The truth is that the modern forms of art are not as wilful or as intentionally shocking as their adepts choose to make out. It may be true that most schools, from the impressionists onwards, have formed round one man who had something original to say in an original way, and that most of the pupils, having nothing original to say, found it necessary to say it in a violently original way. That is true to a certain extent; truer, perhaps, is it to say that ‘genius creates the taste with which it is enjoyed.’ Thus, I think it quite as likely that people like Manet created the taste for impressionism, just as Wagner created a taste for music in reaction against, let us say, Rossini. Nature, after all, is only a thing which one conceives, and not a thing which really exists; it varies with the eye that beholds it, and if a man sincerely and violently feels that trees are pink, then to him they are pink, and if he has art enough to translate his temperament into those pink trees, then the people who can understand him will learn to see trees like him, that is, pink. We need not stress this, because it is an extreme case, but I submit that the modern forms of art, during the last dozen years, have all of them tended to express nature on the lines of certain conventions, and that instead of taking up an attitude of contempt, it was easy to understand these conventions, therefore, to understand the artist, therefore, to collect from the canvas the impression he painted there. Here, I will be told by the Philistine: ‘Why should I see that a face looks like a cube?’ Well, nobody wants to force him to see a face as a cube if he doesn’t want to, but one is entitled to point out to him that he has already accepted many conventions. He is quite willing to look at Gainsborough’s ‘Blue Boy,’ and to see it as a human figure, though it has only surface and not volume. He is quite willing to look at Venus of Milo and to accept it as a reproduction of a beautiful woman, though it has no colour. He is quite willing to go to a play the action of which extends over five years, and to see this action condensed into two and a half hours. The public has to accept the arts conventionally because the arts do not reproduce nature, they interpret it.

PRIVATE VIEW
THE A.A.A.

It may, therefore, be suggested that our young post-impressionists, futurists, and cubists were badly treated by the public, for the public never tried to understand the new conventions on which they worked. With all the power of my sincerity, and in the name of such honesty as may be in me, I assure my readers that if they will take the trouble to master the conventions the work can be interpreted. I possess an excellent non-representational picture, by Mr Wadsworth, inspired by the roofs of a Yorkshire village; it is entirely composed of black and white planes. When, lately, this was shown to a friend, she asked why she should be told to admire a set of decayed dominoes. But the picture is not made up of decayed dominoes; it is a highly simplified impression of walls and roofs, and when you have sympathetically sought for what we may call the key plane, the picture becomes absolutely obvious.