God will speak unto me, in that voice and in that way, which I am most delighted with and hearken most to. If I be covetous, God will tell me that heaven is a pearl, a treasure. If cheerful and affected with mirth, that heaven is all joy. If sociable and conversable, that it is a communion of saints.
John Donne: Sermon CXX, preached at St Paul’s.1
IT IS NOW 1911. Two Stanleys are emerging. The Stanley in the tangible world is exploring. His schooling, his reading, his discussions, particularly with his sisters as teachers and with his brother Sydney, begin to reveal that world to him at the physical level. The embryonic world-space of childhood Fernlea extends to the wider geography of Cookham village. The magic for Stanley of the one pervades the other. The cowls of the malthouses behind Fernlea rotate in the wind like the eyes of God. The blacksmith’s anvil rings like the cries of the damned in Dante’s Inferno. Known possessions of villagers, once treasured, appear miraculously as discards on the village rubbish heap. Builders mysteriously carry ladders to unseen destinations. Swans are caught, carpet-bagged for their annual marking, and trundled astonishingly down the High Street in wheelbarrows. Summer steam-launches disgorge hordes of excursionists on to the riverside lawns of the Ferry Hotel, beings as remote to Stanley as those who come for the annual regatta, effete young sprigs in boaters and blazers who lose their punt poles in the river, or fiercely athletic men who swim and row, both with elegant women in tow, whose new, less corseted Paris fashions startle: ‘In Cookham the idle rich have been having some sort of competition for the best bosoms and busts. Ladies patrol the streets boneless utterly. There is one thing, they keep the dogs from barking.’2
His family-feeling, the reciprocity of home, is tentatively projected outwards to the places and people of Cookham. The places become inwardly, privately, his. But many of the people are too individualistic to be absorbed. Sometimes he achieves response from them, often not. He views them occasionally with passion, frequently only in amusement or sardonically. If they are to be absorbed, they must die for him in their material form and be reborn as emanations from the place-meanings Cookham holds for him.
Places in Cookham mean specific spots – meadows, riverbanks, trackways, copses – in which he finds, or suddenly found, an ecstasy of sensation. He does not know why they bring such ecstasy, he only knows the sensation to be joyous and to spark creativity.
We swim and look at the bank over the rushes. I swim right in the pathway of sunlight. I go home to breakfast thinking as I go of the beautiful wholeness of the day. During the morning I am visited, and walk about being in that visitation. Now everything seems more definite and to put on a new meaning and freshness. In the afternoon I set my work out and begin my picture. I leave off at dusk, fully delighted with the spiritual labour I have done.3
Always the drawing came first. When he begins at last to paint – Two Girls and a Beehive (1910) is thought to be his first – he sometimes makes a preliminary wash to test the compositional effect. Then he often measures a pencil grid across the drawing with draughtsman’s exactitude. He covers the canvas with the equivalent grid scaled up and sketches the outlines of the drawing in their co-ordinated positions on the canvas. Working usually from one side or corner, he almost blocks in the paint to create solidity of form. In early paintings the paint is applied thickly, but later, in the heat of passion, sometimes so thinly that the underlying outline shows through or is reinforced. Oil was his favoured medium. He was virtually self-taught in its use, and later claimed that at the Slade he was given only three or so days’ painting tuition, working on a single model: ‘three days out of four years!’
After Will’s breakdown Ma won the right to promote her values rather than Pa’s in the upbringing of the youngest sons. She liked them to accompany her to Sunday worship in the village Methodist chapel. As the boys grew older, the fundamentalist nature of the chapel worship failed to provide the richer fare they needed. Stanley, on the road to discovering his ‘metaphysicals’, as Gilbert called them, pleads for help from Gwen:
You must understand that I have had a thorough grounding in Wesleyan Methodism. I have listened to a thousand sermons and would like something to counterbalance this. I would like to read about St Francis and St Thomas Aquinas. I have come out of the Chapel sometimes shaking with emotion. Gil and I used to get so excited that we could not face the prayer-meeting. By the time I had reached the prayer-meeting pitch I felt I was ready to break down. The end of the prayer-meeting was ghastly always, a man would say in a whisper: ‘Is there any poor wandering soul here tonight who has not heard the call of Jesus? He is passing by, passing by …’ A long pause. Of course, I used to feel that I had done wrong in not going up to the stand to acknowledge my conversion, as you are supposed to do. … About this there was a wretched clammy atmosphere, and it used to get well hold of you, and it has not gone yet.4
Among the books Gwen lent him was a selection of John Donne’s Sermons. Stanley could not grasp all their meaning, but was excited by a glimpse of spiritual nourishment which seemed to him to exceed the doctrinal exhortation which had been his gruel till then. The earthly joy his Cookham-feelings gave him must, he thought, be equations of the eternal joy which is the Christian celebration of heaven. Those places in Cookham which are associated with such joy must therefore be ‘holy’.
Widbrook Common is, Florence tells us, the heaven which John Donne approaches in Stanley’s next major painting, John Donne Arriving in Heaven. Reading John Donne, Stanley seemed ‘to get an impression of a side view of Heaven as I imagined it to be, and from that thought [fell] to imagining how people behaved there. … As I was thinking like this I seemed to see four people praying in different directions.’5 In the painting, heaven becomes an infinity in which the saints are placed in a compositional balance which reflects exactness of feeling.* The Common was a favourite picnic spot of the Spencers and well worth the walk there, even on a hot day, as Florence recounts:
Sutton Road [the main road towards Maidenhead from the ‘east end’ of the village] was an alleyed shadeless desert which must be traversed if one would win through to Widbrook Common, loveliest of commons, and when in the course of time … at Cliveden the old Duke of Westminster was succeeded by a gentleman named Waldorf Astor, the pilgrimage to Widbrook on hot summer days became well-nigh intolerable … for he stretched a glaring brick wall, of immense height it seemed to us, surmounted by broken glass, along Sutton Road, blotting out the view of Cliveden Woods which had until then helped our journey along. Mr Astor, familiarly known to us as Mr Walled-off Astor, was afraid, we were told, that his son would be kidnapped … perfectly preposterous in the familiar Cookham of our hearts.7
The wall must still be ‘traversed’ if one wishes to reach Widbrook