Bergson in Britain: Philosophy and Modernist Painting, c. 1890-1914 (Refractions) [1 ed.] 147449238X, 9781474492386

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Bergson in Britain

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Refractions Series editor: Kamini Vellodi, University of Edinburgh At the borders of art history and philosophy Editorial Board Andrew Benjamin, Kingston University Adi Efal, University of Lille 3 Jae Emerling, University of North Carolina Vlad Ionescu, University of Hasselt Sjoerd Van Tuinen, Erasmus University Sugata Ray, UC Berkeley Aron Vinegar, University of Oslo Hanneke Grootenboer, Radboud University Poised at the threshold of art history and philosophy, Refractions offers a space for intellectually adventurous work that engages the theorisation of art and image as a persistent provocation for our times. The series captures the character of inquiry as refractive, forging resonances and oblique intersections between diverse zones of thought, while fostering breakaway strands of thinking. Books available Mieke Bal, Image-Thinking: Artmaking as Cultural Analysis Bart Verschaffel, What Artistry Can Do: Essays on Art and Beauty Ian Verstegen, The New Vienna School of Art History: Fulfilling the Promise of Analytic Holism Kamini Vellodi and Aron Vinegar (eds), Grey on Grey: At the Threshold of Philosophy and Art Joaquin Lorda, Gombrich: A Theory of Art, translated by Tim Nicholson Charlotte de Mille, Bergson in Britain: Philosophy and Modernist Painting, c. 1890–1914 Books forthcoming Maryse Ouellet and Amanda Boetzkes (eds), Art’s Realism in the Post-Truth Era Aline Guillermet, Gerhard Richter and the Technological Condition of Painting Adi Efal-Lautenschläger, Ravaisson’s Method: Edification as Therapy Visit the series website at www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series-refractions

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Bergson in Britain Philosophy and Modernist Painting, c. 1890–1914 Charlotte de Mille

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Charlotte de Mille, 2023 Grateful acknowledgement is made to the sources listed in the List of Illustrations for permission to reproduce material previously published elsewhere. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Cover design: emilybentonbookdesigner.co.uk Typeset in Constantia by Biblichor Ltd, Scotland, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 9238 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 9240 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 9241 6 (epub) The right of Charlotte de Mille to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Supported by a Publications Grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Image Grant from AAH.

Published with the support of the University of Edinburgh Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund.

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Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction: The ‘Age of Bergson’ 1. Bergson in Britain? ‘I am not an “Intuitionist” ’ The Independent Review: Considering the World from a   Moral Point of View The Reality of Time The UK Lectures

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The Society of Psychical Research T. E. Hulme’s Original Sin Karin Costelloe’s ‘Interpenetration’

33 40 50

2. Metaphysics of Non-Representation: Bloomsbury’s Bergson 57 ‘Our tactile imagination’ 57 Bergson’s Intuition 58 Fry’s Essay in Aesthetics 61 Intuition in Post-Impressionism 64 ‘Art is philosophy’: Matthew Stewart Prichard 66 73 Art Writing Philosophy 76 Bathing with the Byzantines 82 Embodying Experience: Grant’s Scroll 86 Temporality in Painting and the Cinematic Challenge Plurality in Painting and Multiple Memory 93 96 Re-Membering the Thing Conclusion100 3. New Spirits: Moina MacGregor ‘Psychical phosphorescence’  Psychic Vertigo ‘A wild phantasmagoric dance’ ‘A bizarre assemblage of images’? Re-tracing Steps

103 104 114 123 133 143

4. R hythmist (E-)Utopias: Fergusson’s Bergson and the Evolution of Creation Bergsonian Origins

145 147

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Durational Portraiture 148 Intuitive (E-)utopias 154 ‘Primordial’ Perception and Neo-Barbarism 159 Rhythmist élan vital in Fergusson’s Rhythm (1911): A New Deity? 162 168 Immanence against Symbolism From Rhythm to Crystallisation 172 Conclusions174 5. Blasted Devolution: Wyndham Lewis and Henri Bergson 176 Devolution and Mediocrity 177 Autocracy192 Transgression200 207 Imaging the All-embracing Conclusion222 Conclusion

224

Epilogue – ‘a momentary displacement of our equilibrium’230 Recapitulating Art History 232 235 Bergson and History Immanence and Art History 239 244 Animating Art History Towards a Holobiont History of Art 249 Notes Bibliography Index

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253 336 377

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Figures 2.1 Duncan Grant, Head of Eve, 1913 © Tate London 2022; estate of Duncan Grant. All rights reserved, DACS 2022 2.2 Duncan Grant, Bathing, 1911. Photo © Tate London 2022 2.3 Duncan Grant, Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound, 1914 © Tate London 2022; estate of Duncan Grant. All rights reserved, DACS 2022 2.4 Henri Bergson, memory cone, from ‘On the Survival of Images’, Matter and Memory, 1896 2.5 Vanessa Bell, Studland Beach, 1912 © Estate of Vanessa Bell. All rights reserved, DACS 2022 viii

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3.1 W. B. Yeats, copy of the Golden Dawn Minutum Mundum © National Library of Ireland 3.2 W. B. Yeats, tattva card, Akasa (Spirit egg), no date (c. 1890s) © National Library of Ireland 3.3 MacGregor Mathers as Rameses, c. 1897 3.4 Mina as Isis, c. 1897 © The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo 3.5 Beatrice Offor, Destiny, 1894 © Bruce Castle Museum (Haringey Archive and Museum Service) 3.6 Beatrice Offor, The Love Potion, n.d.? 1890s © Bruce Castle Museum (Haringey Archive and Museum Service) 3.7 Mina Mathers, Book of the Sacred Magic of Abremalin the Mage, 1897 4.1 J. D. Fergusson, The Persian Scarf, 1909. The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, Scotland © Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images 4.2 J. D. Fergusson, Les Eus, 1910. The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, Scotland © Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images 4.3 J. D. Fergusson, Rhythm, 1911 © The Fergusson Gallery, Perth and Kinross Council, Scotland; University of Stirling J. D. Fergusson Memorial Collection 4.4 Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Head, 1911, reproduced from Rhythm 5.1 Wyndham Lewis, Figure Holding a Flower, 1912, private collection. On long-term loan to The Courtauld, London. Photo © The Courtauld © The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust/Bridgeman Images 5.2 Wyndham Lewis, A Masque of Timon, 1913, private collection. On longterm loan to The Courtauld, London. Photo © The Courtauld © The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust/Bridgeman Images 5.3 Wyndham Lewis, Timon of Athens, Act III. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK © Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust. All rights reserved 2022/ Bridgeman Images ix

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5.4 Wyndham Lewis, The Crowd, 1915. Photo © Tate, London © Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust. All rights reserved 2022/Bridgeman Images 5.5 Wyndham Lewis, Study for Kermesse, 1912. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund and Gift of Neil F. and Ivan E. Phillips in memory of their mother, Mrs Rosalie Phillips © Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust. All rights reserved 2022/Bridgeman Images

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Acknowledgements My curiosity in Bergson and art history was sparked over ten years ago in a seminar room at the University of St Andrews. Since then, many people have helped and stimulated this research. Early on, Christina Lodder and Tom Normand at St Andrews, then Chris Green and Paul Crossley at The Courtauld Institute of Art – their guidance and inspiration encouraged me to think this research was not only possible but desirable. Mark Antliff, Grace Brokington, Howard Caygill, Dennis Denisoff, Suzanne Hobson, Michelle Huang, Craig Lundy, Iris van der Tuin and Sjored van Tuinen have shaped my thinking, both in conversation and in print. Henry Mead has been a loyal and attentive reader and Maria Mileeva xi

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the best of collegiate supports. Encouragement, critique and belief in my research from Daniel Grimley, Simon Shaw-Miller, Emma Sutton and Sarah Wilson spurred it on possibly more than they knew at moments of doubt. The exceptional group of students I had the privilege to teach in Gavin Parkinson’s ‘Modernism after Postmodernism’ MA at The Courtauld in 2011, as well as Gavin himself, raised the bar for thinking philosophy and art history. Lydia Goehr and John O’Maoilearca are extraordinarily generous, collaborative and intuitive conversationalists. I am profoundly grateful for their conviction and creativity which have enriched this book; it would be a fraction without them. There are of course many personal debts. To the chefs, musicians and sailors who kept me grounded; to Glen Ogilvie, who facilitated a winter of ‘running wild in the woods’. Even though I did not dye myself in woad or live on hips and haws, being able to take to heart Bertrand Russell’s satirical recommendation for intuitionists was critical to the creative process of manifesting these ideas in print. And to my parents, Angela for her insatiable hunger for learning and insightful conversation, and Peter for encouraging me to question everything and his delight in carrying every argument to a logical and precise conclusion, an excellent example for critical thinking. This book is for them. I was immensely fortunate to be the recipient of a Mid-Career Fellowship from the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art in London which enabled me to take a sabbatical from teaching. The generosity of Felix Appelbe allowed me to extend this time. The Association of Art Historians and the Paul Mellon Centre have subsidised the reproduction of images. Karin Kyburz at The Courtauld Institute of Art has been a wealth of advice in negotiating the image files. Small sections of the text have appeared in altered shape in articles, and I thank the publishers for permission to reprint. xii

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For archival expertise I thank: The Archivist of King’s College, Cambridge, staff at the Library and Reading Rooms at Tate Gallery London, Carly Randall at the Horniman Museum, Deborah Hedgecock at Bruce Castle Museum, Susan Snell at the Library and Museum of Freemasonry, London, Geraldine Beskin at the Atlantis Bookshop, Rona Morrison of Special Collections at the library of the University of Edinburgh, the staff of Archival Collections at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Jennifer Kinnear at the Fergusson Gallery in Perth, Yves Gaonac’h and Paul Cougnard at the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris, Kirstin Parker at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, the staff at the Rare and Manuscript Division of the library at the University of Cornell, and Molly Schwartzburg at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. I have benefited enormously from the critical acumen and patience of Kamini Vellodi and Carol Macdonald at Edinburgh University Press. Without them, it would be a far lesser work. Any remaining oversights, gaps or glitches are entirely my own.

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Introduction: The ‘Age of Bergson’ When Roger Fry, writing in 1909 with a thorough knowledge of Bergson, described the application of paint as a ‘gesture of the artist’s feeling’, he turned aesthetics towards the body, physical sensation and emotional affect as the modes of experience addressed by the arts.1 In large part he was responding to the scientific discovery of the individuality and subjectivity of human sight. Following this discovery, art could no longer be perceived as holding universal ‘truth’, but was itself heterogeneous, subjective and embodied.2 As Fry steeped himself in the metaphorical, at times synaesthetic 1

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multi-sensory writing of artists Maurice Denis and Paul Cézanne, Bergson’s investigations of consciousness, memory, intuition and perception functioned as the ground for a radical shift in the understanding of painting. Bergson’s challenge to perceive the world differently – in pure, intuitive duration – captivated artists and art writers on both sides of the channel as it complimented their move to process-led practices attuned to perception, sensation and subjectivity. Bergson in Britain: Philosophy and Modernist Painting, c. 1890–1914 explores the historical context of Bergson’s early writing and charts his rise to fame in the UK. It analyses the interpretations of Bergson by disparate avant-garde figures and factions including Bloomsbury, the Golden Dawn, the Rhythmists, and Vorticism. It traces the paths leading to their discoveries of Bergson’s thought through his lectures and texts, secondary commentary and hearsay. It sets out the challenging reception with which Bergson’s work was met by representatives of analytic philosophy in the UK in a period when analytic and continental approaches started to diverge and become a field of dispute. Whilst the first UK references to Bergson were made by academic philosophers, British artists needed no such scholarly mediation, and unlike their academic colleagues, departed to hear Bergson lecture personally at the earliest opportunity. This direct experience of Bergson’s thought at the moment of its first public articulations gave these artists a unique and unexpected role as early transposers of this new philosophy to artistic practice. For the first time, my book unearths archival evidence that demonstrates the deep engagement of British artists with Bergson’s work, and their significant role in his wider reception in the UK. As a series, Refractions redresses ‘the putative absence of the philosophical in art historical thinking and the a-historicity in philosophical thinking of art’.3 Just as Bergson’s work transformed philosophical thinking on the 2

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Continent, so is archival research the surest way to change thinking in this area of academic art history. Bergson in Britain: Philosophy and Modernist Painting, c. 1890–1914 uses this factual base to build unexpected readings of significant individuals and works of art produced before the First World War. The book uncovers the multiple ways in which Bergson’s thought was channelled and exploited by artists, philosophers and critics across the channel with individual and conflicting motives. In private papers and early publications, J. E. McTaggart, Bertrand Russell and G. F. Stout engage with durée (durational time). For Scot John Duncan Fergusson and his colleagues at the Fauvist magazine Rhythm, Bergson’s arguments in Creative Evolution stimulated a ‘vitalist ontology of colour’.4 Bergson’s notorious concept of élan vital was cast as a regeneration of spiritual values, finding its way into the subjects of Fergusson’s paintings Rhythm (1911) and Les Eus (1910). Wyndham Lewis, inventor of Vorticism, slams Bergson in his 1914 ‘Manifesto’ in Blast I. Yet Lewis’ copious marginalia in his personal editions of Bergson reveal an attentive reader who turned Bergson’s thought inside out in the formation of his artistic vision. Lewis subverted both Bergson’s experiential time of duration, and his theory of open evolution to present its counter, backward effects of psychological and evolutionary degradation, denying movement or even three dimensionality in much of his work. In contrast to these distortions, Roger Fry arguably offered a much more direct transposition of Bergson’s analysis of perception as physical sensation from Matter and Memory (1896) in his work on aesthetics, particularly ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’ (1909). For Fry, intuitive multi-sensory experience opened the route for justifying abstraction, which, for a time, he encouraged in the works of his artist-collaborators, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Bergson never published a stand-alone treatise on art or aesthetics, as he had planned.5 The absence of such a text is perhaps one reason why his 3

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thought, until relatively recently, has attracted less attention from the discipline of art history than philosophy. In order to grasp his work on art and aesthetics, it is necessary to piece statements together from across his books and essays. Given the lack of a single go-to work, the close engagement by artists with a living philosopher was even more remarkable. But Bergson’s lectures both at the Collège de France and elsewhere were not straightforward renditions of texts already published but rather comprised familiar concepts from earlier published work with the arc of their current development. Lectures had the atmosphere of spontaneous creativity, participants witnessing Bergson’s active, living process of thought, as the subjects of perception, representation, intuitive vision, time and memory were freely interwoven.6 Bergson’s thought was a challenge and an impetus to creative thinking and making, in contrast to the process of validification employed by the art historian keen to ‘fix’ the archaeology or analytical interpretation of an artwork already complete. Adopting this provocative Bergsonian spirit, Bergson in Britain builds upon factual evidence to offer new readings of paintings, collage and contemporary art criticism. Bergson gives substantial weight to images, virtual and actual, in relation to durational consciousness, recollection, perception, intuition and bodily sensation. As John Ó Maoilearca and I have written elsewhere, Bergson’s philosophy of immanence ‘enacts poetic forms of perception through reforming our sense of duration, affectivity, the body, memory, and intuition’ to unroll a ‘new practice of art-philosophy and philosophy-art where nothing represents anything else, but everything gestures towards, or allows the many kinds of singular immanence to ‘speak for themselves’ (without that old adage only licensing mute genius)’.7 By adopting this philosophy of immanence as a method of critical interpretation, this book opens out the potentialities of the ‘possible and the real’ inherent to Bergson: 4

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If we consider the world of life, and still more that of consciousness, we find there is more and not less in the possibility of each of the successive states than their reality. For the possible is only real with an act of mind which throws its image back into the past, once it has been enacted. But that is what our intellectual habits prevent us from seeing.8 What might be unlocked when we attend to the possible rather than being geared for action? Can an experiential embodied duration in the act of looking alter our perception? How do we write these encounters of being, rather than writing externally about an object, context, biography? This book oscillates between historical foundations and experiments in immanent practice which adopt a disinterested, expanded perception of change in itself. As Lisa Tickner has quipped, historical facts are a ‘necessary but insuf­ ficient condition’ of art historical practice, but equally important is her contention that the ‘historian’s task is to comprehend the work in the circumstances of its original production’.9 Too often in recent writing around art, Bergson has been conflated or ‘read through’ his most famous interlocutor Gilles Deleuze, to the detriment of the full sense of what he meant for his own generation. The process of ‘extracting’ Bergson from a complex cultural matrix has led to an interest in misinterpretations as much as accurate exegesis. Tracing the path of philosophy to its dispersal in cultural history is never an easy task. Ideas are refracted, split into a kaleidoscope of competing interests, intents, nuances and identities, pertinent to the time and context of their assimilation. Synthesised and distorted to the limits of recognition, what value can there be in recovering the diffuse, the inarticulate, and the 5

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ignorant? One answer comes from the Bergsonist T. E. Hulme: ‘while the influence of a philosopher must necessarily be very limited, he yet has a kind of spurious influence of a very widespread character’.10 Hulme invites us to consider the popularisation of academic philosophy through creative arts as a serious endeavour, misinterpretation notwithstanding. Misinterpretation is not always born of ignorance, however, and Bergson was often misinterpreted or manipulated to suit discrete modernist agendas. So whilst Bergson in Britain indicates a degree of cohesion seldom admitted amongst the various avant-garde factions, it explores the contrasting ways in which Bergsonism was harnessed. In 2000, Tickner diagnosed the state of historical studies of twentieth-century British art as ‘riven by the tension between two opposing narratives’, the formalist interpretations of, for example, Richard Cork, and the ‘eccentric’ parochial.11 The result has been two poles which fail to take stock of the matrix of influences inherent in culture generally and art practice in particular. Since the mid-1990s, exclusion and insularity have largely been replaced by many excellent penetrating studies, instigated by Tickner, Anna Gruetzner Robins and David Peters Corbett. The pioneering shift in methodological approaches could perhaps be dated to the conference in 1997 at the University of York, ‘Re-thinking Englishness’, from which the papers of Corbett and Perry’s English Art 1860–1914 were drawn. Their call for a re-evaluation of a specifically English context for modernity has been followed with zeal by writers such as Ysanne Holt, Jane Beckett and Kenneth McConkey, and substantiated by another volume from York, Geographies of Englishness (2002).12 Corbett and Perry argued that the ‘French-influenced and teleo­ logically modernist’ reading of early twentieth-century British art must be rethought to take account of marginalised histories. Today, at a time when a disunited UK has made its most significant political decision of a generation, 6

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re-engagement with wider influences from the European Continent and beyond is timely.13 The scholarly censorship of what was regarded as regressive Francophilia in studies of British modernist art a decade or two ago is over. In its place, astute critiques such as the edited volume of essays on literary subjects, Cross Channel Modernisms (2020), trace the cross-cultural mesh that was the reality of cross-channel exchange at the start of the twentieth century.14 Bergson in Britain returns to British avant-garde reactions to the tense and uncertain political climate immediately before the First World War. It demonstrates the close associations the avant-garde forged with Bergson’s thought as distinctively French, apart from the British and Germanic traditions, and assimilated as it was alongside the art of Cézanne, Gauguin, the Fauves and Cubists. Meanwhile Bergson’s critics lambasted him for everything from his philosophy to his Polish Jewish-Irish inheritance which made his French citizenship somehow ‘false’, and by extension his philosophy false as well. Countering such xenophobia, Bergson in Britain recovers one case which highlights both the tensions of cross-cultural assimilation in the sometimes insular community of the UK, yet which nevertheless came to recognise the potential and excitement in that cross-cultural digestion.15 Bergson was welcomed initially by Francophile artists who wished to use his thought as a counter to nationalist insularity, even though Bergson’s extensive visits and lectures emphasised instead his regard for the British philosophical tradition.16 A number of scholars have addressed the topic of Bergson’s impact in Britain: David Ayers, SueEllen Campbell and Paul Edwards in relation to Wyndham Lewis; Mark Antliff’s pioneering study, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (1992) largely concerning art in France, but including the Rhythm group; and Mary Ann Gillies’ literary critique Henri Bergson and British Modernism (1996). In addition, there have been 7

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scattered references by Simon Watney in relation to Bloomsbury, and by Duncan Macmillan in relation to Rhythm. Beyond the specifically British context, Burwick and Douglass’ insightful The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, and intellectual histories by R. C. Grogin and Thomas Hanna situate Bergson in French cultural production. Over the past twenty years in anglophone philosophy, there has been a resurgence of interest in Bergson spearheaded by Pete Gunter, Keith Ansell-Pearson, Leonard Lawlor and John Ó Maoilearca. Of these, only the interpretative anthology The New Bergson has intentionally taken a ‘bipart­ isan approach that places Bergson’s work where it should be: between the concerns of the so-called ‘continental’ and ‘analytic’ (or ‘Anglo-American’) schools of philosophy’ – a history I trace in Chapter 1.17 Although Bergson studies have included work in relation to such disparate fields as biology, physics and film studies, to take a brief array of topics from The New Bergson, there has been little effort to relate him to the art of his day in book-length studies since Antliff ’s Inventing Bergson or Alliez’s L’Oeil-Cerveau: nouvelles histoires de la peinture moderne (2007), although Geinoz’s Relations au travail is a notable exception (2014).18 Ardoin, Gontarski and Mattison’s Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism (2013) and Ó Maoilearca and de Mille’s Bergson and the Art of Immanence (2013) began to redress this oversight, as have articles by Antliff, Geurlac (2007), Luisetti (2008) and Wünsche (2017).19 Todd Cronan’s Matisse, Bergson and the Philosophical Temper of Modernism (2014) is the only subsequent book-length study, but in prioritising intentionality and meaning in contemporary art criticism it leaves Bergsonian interpretation to a secondary role in the narrative.20 Bergson appears in inspired essays by Yve-Alain Bois, but is never his first focus.21 Meanwhile, Sjoerd van Tuinen (2018), Adrian Parr (2003), Milz (2016) and Souleymane Bachir Diagne (2011, 2019) have proposed Bergsonian interpretations of art of 8

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other periods and cultures.22 In terms of art historical methodology, there is an early precedent for a Bergsonian approach in Henri Focillon’s 1934 The Life of Forms in Art, as well as more recent explorations by Frédéric Worms (2003) and Marie-Claire Bienaimé (2019).23 Bergson in Britain is situated between these predecessors from philosophy and art history, in the words of the series editor of Refractions, to ‘recalibrate the perception of both philosophy and art history to refresh the horizon of studies of art’.24 Chapter 1 brings to light the extensive contemporary criticism of Bergson in the UK: 157 articles on his work in original or translation between 1890– 1914. Its starting point gleaned from the emphases of these texts is the provocative question: why was Bergson’s work so unpalatable to the majority of British academic philosophy? The chapter demonstrates that despite the bombastic and pugnacious reviews, Bergson posed questions – particularly the concepts of durational time and intuition – that far from being dismissed were thoroughly investigated, and at times integrated into the early work of J. E. McTaggart and Bertrand Russell.25 Along with Goldsworthy Lowes Dicken­son, other members of the Cambridge Society of Apostles, and writers for The Independent Review, these men formed Fry’s friendship circle and had a significant impact on his thinking. Beyond this tight and critical network, Bergson’s reception was complicated by his UK lectures, which consolidated champions for his work in H. Wildon Carr, Vorticist T. E. Hulme, and Russell’s niece, Karin Costelloe. This contrasting image to the incredulity and dislike that circulated in the wider press may explain why Bergson himself felt he achieved as great, if not greater, respect in Britain than he did in his native country.26 Chapter 2 explores the responses of Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury group to Bergson as resting on a sensory and experiential interpretation of Matter and Memory. Underpinned by a detailed examination of Fry’s ‘An Essay in 9

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Aesthetics’ (1909) and his art criticism for the First and Second Post-­ Impressionist Exhibitions which he curated (1910 and 1912), the chapter questions the received interpretation of Bloomsbury’s formalism as based in rationality, intellect and logic to open it instead to Bergsonian themes of perception, memory and subjectivity. Advising his reader to concentrate on the ‘sensation’ found in ‘obscure depths of consciousness’, Bergson sug­ gests that the ‘complete image is there, but evanescent, a phantom that dis­appears’.27 With this in mind, the chapter offers an immanentist interpretation of key paintings by Bloomsbury artists – Vanessa Bell’s Studland Beach (1912) and Duncan Grant’s Bathing (1911) and Abstract Kinetic Scroll with Sound (1914). Following an unbroken stream of images, these interpretations will resist attempts to ‘explain’ works by bringing standard art historical tools of historical context, politics or anthropology to bear, but rather will seek to draw attention to the processes of making and looking in intuitive experience. The import of cross-channel writing on the arts underpins Chapter 3. Investigating the spiritualist interpretation of Bergson by British thinkers such as Evelyn Underhill, the chapter brings Bergson’s mysterious sister, Mina, back into the domain of art history. Mina’s years at the Slade School of Art (1880–4) mark her as a generation apart from the young and rebellious modernist student Wyndham Lewis (1898–1902). Instead, her circle of pioneering women included fellow student and painter Beatrice Offor and actor Florence Farr. Marrying the founder of the Order of the Golden Dawn, Mina’s art took a performative turn into spirit-generating practices as High Priestess of the Order. The chapter considers the proximity of her spiritism to Bergsonian intuition through records of her transformative Rites of Isis, performed in Paris the year after the publication of Matter and Memory. By tracing readers of Bergson also associated with the Golden Dawn and British 10

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Spiritualist societies, the chapter points to such convergences as instrumental to the reception of Bergson’s most esoteric book. The Rhythmist group was the first of the British avant-gardes to publish a ‘little magazine’ to propagate their manifesto and ideals, Rhythm (Summer 1911–13). Known at the time as a ‘brilliant young Bergsonian’, its editor John Middleton Murry seized on Bergson’s intuitive perception to argue for visionary art which presented a ‘differen[t . . .] rhythm of duration’.28 Unlike their English counterparts at this date, Murry and his Scots collaborator John Duncan Fergusson were fully resident in Paris, absorbing the neo-symbolism of the journals Les Tendances Nouvelles and Les Bandeaux d’Or with whom they shared contributors. Translating the élan vital into a utopian spiritism, the approach of the Rhythm group has far greater proximity to the use of Bergson by French artists such as the Puteaux Cubists.29 Chapter 4 examines this unique reaction amongst the British avant-garde. The final chapter turns to Lewis’ Vorticism. By 1914, Bergson’s broad appeal had fired Lewis into an obsessive and multi-faceted revolt against anything that could be interpreted in a Bergsonian context: for Lewis, Bergson was suddenly popularist, plebian and not suitable for the unique position he claimed for the artist. Seizing upon strategies of opposition and concealment, Lewis exposed the living death of the mechanical self and evolutionary stagnation contra duration and organic adaptation. That Lewis combined a profound understanding of Time and Free Will, Laughter and Creative Evolution into his short stories and associated drawings collected as The Wild Body (1903–27), his play Enemy of the Stars (c. 1913–14) and Vorticist painting The Crowd (1915), is evident from his copious marginalia in his copies of Bergson’s texts. Negotiating authenticity and individuality amongst mass interest, Lewis formulated a tense and remarkable engagement with Bergson. 11

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Despite the distinctions in emphasis and understanding of Bergson between these artists, critics and writers, Bergson in Britain goes beyond the disparateness with which these conflicting avant-garde groups are usually discussed in art history, to consider a major point of convergence in their shared reaction to and interest in Bergson’s work. Their responses help to focus the ground-breaking debates of 1911–14 in European painting: questions concerning the nature of perception at the advent of cinema, the possibility and extent of temporality in painting, and the role of perspective in directing viewers’ attention. They demonstrate that British art was not merely following the outward appearances of work by the French avant-garde but was itself deeply engaged in the aesthetic thinking that inspired artists both sides of the Channel. In a final provocation, the Epilogue considers methods of philosophical immanence for art history. It seeks comparisons to Bergson’s thinking in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German pro­ genitors of modern art history, Aby Warburg and Alois Riegl, and their current interlocutor, Georges Didi-Huberman in Confronting Images (2005) and The Surviving Image (2002). Marking the recent return to subjective histories activated by attention to the temporal unfolding of the art object led by T. J. Clark’s meditation The Sight of Death (2006) and W. J. T. Mitchell’s provocative What do Pictures Want? (2005), I consider these texts as practices that correspond to Bergson’s immanence. Bergson’s ontology of immanence entails the condition whereby our experiential faculties of perception (consciousness of self, other and durational time in addition to sight, sound and touch) are expanded, enabling us to grasp our being in the world as multiple: multiple pasts, presents and futures that co-exist ‘in the presence of images’.30 What can Bergson’s thought bring to the debate on methodol­ ogical shifts within art historical writing? Could there be a new, consciously Bergsonian art history? 12

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1. Bergson in Britain? I believe that Bell, Fry, Bergson, Croce, Baensch, Collingwood, Cassirer and I [. . .] are, really, engaged in one philosophical project.1 American philosopher Susanne Langer is more famous for writing on Bergson’s ‘failure’ than for aligning herself to him. She is unique in listing Bell, Fry and Bergson together. Why this has remained an uncommon grouping is the subject of this chapter. Writing in a British journal of philosophy and theology in winter 1909, the secretary of the elite Aristotelian Society claimed that ‘the influence of Bergson is a distinct feature of a new interest in philosophy of which there is abundant evidence in every country’.2 H. Wildon Carr 13

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could have named countless articles challenging Bergsonian thought in the UK but few that acknowledged him seriously in the shaping of new ideas. His comment was astute, but misplaced so far as obvious connections in the UK were concerned. Iris van der Tuin has taken the model from Donna Haraway and Karen Barad of reading ‘diffractively’ to unpick Langer’s own Bergsonism. ‘Diffractive’ thinking attunes to how and why divisions (whether disciplinary, self/other or any other division) come to exist, and it acknow­ ledges the interference or intrusion of difference without hierarchy in order to build new, unexpected interpretations based out of old foundations.3 Following this method, van der Tuin’s project demonstrates synchronicity in thinking between Bergson and Langer despite Langer’s outward indifference and rejection of Bergson’s thought. The method is productive for freeing interpretation from the coat tails of archival fact. This chapter will marry archival evidence with a diffractive method: demonstrating Bergson’s presence in the UK whilst offering more diffractive readings of McTaggart’s time and Russell’s uncharacteristic essay, ‘Mysticism’. For Lytton Strachey, the publication of G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica in October 1903 heralded the ‘beginning of the Age of Reason’.4 If the statement was meant to secure the hegemony of Moore and Russell at the forefront of Anglo-American analytical philosophy, then it would seem that Bergson’s experiential thought would be reviled by UK audiences. That this was not entirely the case was due to deep contradictions in British intellectualism at the turn of the last century. Writing of Bloomsbury’s theoretical position, S. P. Rosenbaum claimed that the group sought to ‘combine’ two different value systems: the rational, consisting of ‘truth, analysis, pluralism, toler­ ation, criticism, individualism, egalitarianism and secularism’, with the ‘visionary’ – the ‘equally profound faith in intuition, imagination, synthesis, ideality, love, art, beauty, mysticism, and reverence’.5 However we may wish 14

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to rearrange the components of these lists, Rosenbaum is astute to emphasise the interwoven nature of two supposedly discrete modes of thought. This chapter does not concern solely the close friendships of the Bloomsbury group but argues that Rosenbaum’s division of the rational and the visionary may be taken as typical of British academia more widely.6 Nonetheless, due to the foundation of Bloomsbury at the University of Cambridge, it is inevit­ able that many figures associated more loosely with the group form a considerable part of my groundwork here. That Bergson’s philosophy was a phenomenon in Paris is well understood, but its reception in Britain is a matter of far greater contention. Contextualising Bergson in a British intellectual milieu, this chapter lays the foundation for the detailed exegeses of particular artist case studies to follow. This chapter traces the complex network of associations and friendships that worked both for and against the assimilation of Bergson’s thought in this hostile environment. It commences with Cambridge c. 1900 and the journalism of The Independent Review, which arguably marked both the forming of the Bloomsbury group, and the reorientation of the tight network of Apostles away from their exclusively Cambridge setting to embrace academic thought of broader origin. Next, I consider Bergson’s various lectures in Britain (Universities of Oxford, Birmingham and London 1911, Cambridge Society for Psychical Research, 1913, Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh 1914–15), and responses to them drawn from contemporary reviews in the wider press.7 The chapter closes by focusing on two contrasting cases that typify the ambivalent attitude of British academia towards Bergson: T. E. Hulme and Karin Costelloe. I start with the simple question: why was it that Bergson’s work was so unpalatable to the majority of British academia? From a brief glance at Bergson’s biography the reasons are far from apparent. Bergson’s mother was Anglo-Irish in origin and his parents brought up his younger siblings in 15

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London, where his mother chose to retire in the 1920s. Although Bergson lived in Paris during his childhood, he was bilingual. Spencer and Mill were early philosophical influences, as they were to all in British academic institutions at the end of the nineteenth century. According to an early French disseminator of Bergson, Floris Delattre, Bergson himself felt he achieved as great, if not greater, respect in Britain than he did in his native country.8 Bergson’s first doctorate was in mathematics, a discipline that demanded rational intellectual rigour, and notably an academic path that he shared with Bertrand Russell and A. N. Whitehead. Claiming dislike founded on either national or intellectual difference is clearly shaky. Yet Russell was to become one of Bergson’s most vociferous critics. For him, Bergson was an anti-intellectual mystic who advocated an irrationalism that was wholly impractical for daily life. Apparently dispensing with the logical premises of a moral code that secured good governance, his philosophy signalled the disintegration of civilisation: that is the hierarchical, institutional and privil­ eged order refined to a self-sufficient mechanism in the Victorian era.9 Notwithstanding Russell’s radical and philanthropic educational programme in later life, as one who had benefited from the old order he had much to lose. His stature as a leading figure in British academia effectively suppressed any attempt to nurture Bergsonian thought in the universities. ‘I am not an “Intuitionist” ’10 Following Henry Sidgewick, Moore was aware that he had used the term ‘moral intuition’ to describe intrinsic goodness in itself.11 This, he contended, was in contrast to ‘intuitionists’ who found a sense of moral right or duty could not be defined by the results of ensuing actions. The indefinable, unprovable nature of Moore’s Good carried into his definition of Organic 16

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Unity: that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.12 A clear example is a living biological organism which displays properties resulting from a relation between individual parts, properties that cannot be reduced to any one individual component: a thinking brain, for instance. The ‘value’ of this property cannot be quantified by adding up the mechanisms that give rise to it. In a paper intended for the Apostles, John Maynard Keynes elaborated on the consequences of Organic Unity. It allowed consideration of every ‘circumstance as modifying the sum of goodness, even if the original source of this goodness, must be [. . .] the states of mind of conscious beings’. Tellingly, he continued, Moore was inclined [. . .] doubtfully, to extend the principle of Organic Unity to time. He held, for instance, that there is value in the continuity of personal identity, and that, if at successive moments of time we are replaced by new persons identically like us, this discontinuity is to be regretted.13 A year later, in his Huxley Lecture to the University of Birmingham, Bergson would claim that a ‘consciousness that died and was reborn at every instant [. . .] would be no longer consciousness’.14 So was Moore a vitalist, who adhered to a Bergsonian duration? This was Keynes’ reading: as he wrote to Lytton Strachey following a paper on epistemology given by Moore, ‘the whole thing depends on intuiting the Universe in a particular way [. . .] It is not a question of argument; all depends upon a particular twist of the mind.’15 Reading Moore diffractively, we could argue that he is a Bergsonian intuitionist: for intuitive thought ‘knows that the mind draws from itself more than it has’ in entering into a sympathy with the object considered. Intuition 17

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is movement and change – not perhaps so far from the relational metaphor of Moore’s Organic Unity. Philosophy in Edwardian Cambridge may have been engaged in ethics – what was necessary, and therefore ‘right’, for daily life – but this did not preclude considerations of other ways of living. As Fry was to vote at an early Apostle gathering, the artist was a chartered maniac ‘by reason’.16 An artist should hold a mirror up to society, to pose questions at the extremes of possibility.17 As Moore’s Good clarifies, at the heart of academic rationalism was an attraction to a more mystical world view. A. J. Balfour contended in relation to Bergson specifically, ‘however obscure to reflective thought such mystic utterances may seem, many will read them with a secret sympathy’.18 This alternative state of mind, which is embodied and not narrated, surfaces and resurfaces across disparate contexts, including the unlikely figures Russell and McTaggart themselves. Elucidating the tension between a tendency towards a spiritually founded world view and the love of rational argument prevalent at Cambridge is an uncharacteristic essay by McTaggart, ‘Mysticism’. Analysing certain mystical experiences in which he felt that he had reached the ‘culmination of all things’, McTaggart allotted two definitions to his titular term: ‘firstly, a mystic unity, and secondly a mystic intuition of that unity’.19 Crucially the paper examined the viability of disregarding pragmatism focused on everyday action and instead following the mystical vision. McTaggart’s conclusion is fascinating: ‘I can see no reason why a man should not act in this way [. . .] In the ordinary affairs of life, action on such a principle would be approved.’20 The argument is contorted, however, so that this endorsement of intuition is far from flattering – McTaggart’s emphasis on ‘ordinary affairs’ implies that mysticism cannot provide a substitute method for academic study, or a path to Moore’s elusive Good.

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The Independent Review: Considering the World from a Moral Point of View Practical scepticism regarding the value of a mystical world view for daily life dominated the tone of The Independent Review: a stoic personal denial for moral good. With an editorial council consisting of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Nathaniel Wedd, G. M. Trevelyan, Charles Masterman and Francis Hirst, the review was founded as a post-university enterprise that retained solid allegiance to Cambridge through the continuation there of three of its editors.21 Its circulation was intended to extend beyond an insular academic community, and the first issue contained an introductory statement with a revolutionary flavour: the review would ‘prepare public opinion for the changes which [. . .] are desirable and necessary, if this country is to maintain its high place in the society of civilised nations’.22 In its reforming zeal, expressing a dissatisfaction with contemporary civilisation, the paragraph anticipates the manifestos of a host of magazines that appeared less than a decade later.23 The Independent Review is characterised by its considered stance towards contemporary thought. Whilst it adhered broadly to a liberal Fabianism preferred by its editors, it was a more mature offering than the wilful and spontaneous avant-garde publications that followed in its wake, not least Rhythm and Blast. The journalism of The Independent Review was consistent in its commitment to moralism, suspicion of aestheticism, rejection of logic and ambivalence towards mysticism. As Desmond MacCarthy, Fry’s later collaborator in the Post-Impressionist exhibitions, complained in a review of A. R. Orage’s book on Nietzsche, Nietzsche ‘regarded the world from the aesthetic rather than the moral point of view’. With a wry stab at the decadence of Aestheticism MacCarthy continued that ‘this explained some of his current influence’.24 19

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With similar reticence, Russell was both enamoured of mental freedom yet willing to forgo it in daily life: ‘in action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free [. . .] let us descend, in action, into the world of fact, with that vision always before us’.25 The statement is close to Time and Free Will: Russell acknowledges the dualist perception of Bergson’s practical and ‘pure’ duration, apparently agreeing that the more intense experience belongs to the latter. Alfred Sidgwick understood F. C. S. Schiller’s Humanism to have a similar role, dependent on the method of Pragmatism but seeing a ‘larger whole’, the more mystical attitude appreciated by Russell.26 For Sidgwick, Humanism rejected the ‘excessive ‘intellectualism’’ of the previous generation’s Hegelian Absolutism, and the ‘too uncritical acceptance of certain assumptions made by formal logic’27 – a criticism that could also be levelled at McTaggart, Moore and Russell. Paradoxically, even though the philosophy of Moore and Russell was geared towards the moral good of civilisation, its pursuit of logic and denial of perceived experience arguably amounted to a denial of the life it was intended to protect. Sidgwick contended that Humanism ‘recognises, more than intellectualism can, the value of a point of view which is different from our own individual one; and no piece of insight is condemned by it merely on the ground that it came without effort or special study’.28 The conflicted attitude of attraction and repulsion towards a mystical, visionary or intuitive point of view is most clearly wrought in Dickinson’s journalism. Retaliating against the claustrophobia and industry of the modern city, Dickinson’s first article for the Review offers a metaphor for intuitive experience. He describes a glade near London where one might find in the ‘amplitude of time and space, [nature’s] suggestion of a life more large, more serene, more significant than our own. Here, for a moment, we may be released from the dizzy wheel of action’.29 20

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His subsequent article, ‘Religion and Revelation’, asks what one should make of these experiences. He longs for a way of attaining truth about real existences which is different in kind from the method of science, or of philosophy; which depends not upon direct perception, internal or external, clarified by analysis, tested by comparison, and supplemented by inference, but upon some peculiar and unique intuition.30 But just as Russell denies himself the vision of freedom in daily life, Dickinson finds this aspiration impossible; revelation cannot render truth. Regardless of his hard drawn conclusion, he remained attracted to Schiller’s Humanism. In ‘The Newest Philosophy’, a review of George Santayana in relation to William James, John Dewey, Schiller, and with passing reference to Nietzsche, Dickinson found a new tendency in philosophy, very intimately connected with a tendency in life, a tendency which calls itself pragmatism, Humanism, and, for aught I know, by other names [. . .] It insists upon the tentative and experimental character, not merely of human life, but of the universe as a whole. It hates the ‘Absolute’; it hates ‘Eternity’; it hates all the conceptions about which, for the most part, philosophy hitherto has turned [. . .] It believes in time, in change, in progress, in 21

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attainable ends. It believes also, so it would appear, in free will. Whether, and in what forms, it will be able really to establish any of these beliefs, is matter for the future. But the attempt is in itself a matter of considerable interest.31 Time, change, progress and free will: the defining features of Time and Free Will. Yet Dickinson’s sympathy with Humanism, and appreciation for James’ Pragmatism did not extend to Bergson. Writing under the pseudonym ‘Don’ in The Manchester Guardian, Dickinson characterised his age as one of action and anarchy. Bergson’s work was implicated as a ‘philosophy of violence’ which ‘relegates intelligence to a secondary place and appeals to a blind purpose-less life-force [. . .] the negation of society’.32 The Sorelian nature of this description begs the question as to whether Dickinson had actually read Bergson first-hand, or had merely taken Sorel’s manipulated form as representative of Bergson’s thought: he lists ‘anarchists, Syndicalists, Futurists, Militants, blood and thunder patriots’ along with Suffragettes as representative of the anti-intellectualism he deplores.33 The article is an impassioned intellectual call to arms, peculiar given Dickinson’s pacifism. It is striking in its provision of an alternative form of avant-gardism, where intellectuals are described as ‘the vanguard of the light’.34 Dickinson establishes a ‘contest’ between modernist approaches, formulated in terms of ‘violence and reason, self-abandonment and self-control’.35 It was clear which path Dickinson and his philosophical colleagues favoured, and it was correspondingly the inattention to daily life that Lytton Strachey objected to in the mysticism of William Blake: ‘what shall it profit a man [. . .] if he gain his own soul, and lose the whole world?’36 Yet as Fry and E. M. Forster realised, artists were exempt from the imposition of a rational 22

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path to moral value. Their role was to endorse or contradict the findings of rationalism by other means. Representing visionary tendencies prevented the stultification or constriction of mental life. Moore himself, in the final chapter of Principia Ethica entitled ‘The Ideal’, contended that ‘aesthetic enjoyments require for their goodness, not merely perception of the object, but also an appropriate emotion’.37 Moore does not define his ‘aesthetic emotion’ other than that it contributes to the intrinsic good. Moore claims ‘aesthetic enjoyments include all the greatest, and by far the greatest, goods we can imagine’.38 Does this suggest aesthetic appreciation is at the heart of Principia Ethica? If so, it would give art a powerful role in articulating social, moral good. The Reality of Time In Forster’s early story, ‘The Road to Colonnus’, published in The Independent Review, Mr Lucas’ moment of expansive insight articulates Moore’s ideal ‘realm of ends’, through Jamesian intuition:39 So he lay motionless, conscious only of the stream below his feet, and that all things were a stream, in which he was moving. He was aroused at last by a shock – the shock of an arrival perhaps, for when he opened his eyes, something unimagined, indefinable, had passed over all things, and made them intelligible, and good. 40 Despite Moore’s doubtful ‘continuity of personal identity’ already referred to by Keynes, Forster’s transposition of the literal stream to a metaphysical one marks the start amongst the Cambridge set of the popularisation of 23

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William James’ famous metaphor developed in his Principles of Psychology (1891). James used the stream to describe ‘consciousness that does not appear to be dropped into bits [. . .] Let us call it a stream of thought, of consciousness, of subjective life’. 41 It was this subjectivity that injected humanism into what, despite the claims of Moore, McTaggart or Russell, was academically remote philosophy whose practical benefits were limited by the distance between logic and life. The paradoxical situation was that whilst these philosophers demurred against the ‘incompetence’ of intuition for daily life; the artists understood their visual popularisation of complex thought to be a means by which to redress an imbalance: to counter intellectual remoteness with what Fry called a ‘purely empirical and practical philosophy’ of living. 42 With a dose of exaggeration, Fry claimed in a late paper read to the Apostles in 1920, ‘Do We Exist?’ that ‘in the bottom of my heart, I didn’t believe a word’ of the Apostolic metaphysics of his youth. 43 Whatever the truth in this, Fry’s Apostle papers clarify that unlike his contemporaries, he never did object to the intuitive method. In one of the earliest manuscripts, ‘Shall we Temporize?’, an undated paper read to the Apostles between 1887–9, Fry defended the concept of time based on subjective experience. He reasoned that if we are immersed in the stream of time, [we] must be connected . . . imperceptibly with the inter­ minable immovable land on either side in order to become conscious of that very flow, then surely through us . . . time becomes an eternal reality – the duration of any sensation or emotion affects us, alters us unalterably.44 24

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The sentence echoes Bergson’s definition of duration in Time and Free Will as a ‘succession of qualitative changes, which melt and permeate one another’. 45 It is a curious statement, as tantalising as it is frustrating. With no definite date for Fry’s work, all that can be ascertained is that he should have been favourably predisposed towards Bergson. The paper is also instructive in the stance taken towards time itself – adamantly against that developed by his long-standing schoolfriend and housemate at Cambridge, McTaggart. McTaggart’s fame-making paper on ‘The Unreality of Time’ (1908) is significant for its appraisal of the reception of process philosophy in Britain. Time was a charged issue in British philosophy, one with which every academic philosopher had to contend. It is therefore even more significant that we should find Russell, in ‘Mysticism and Logic’ (1914) declaring the unreality of time ‘fallacious’, preferring to picture ‘things entering into a stream of time’.46 Likewise, it is important that Fry, thirty years after his first Apostle paper, should choose to reiterate his thesis that the ‘truly philosophic course [is] to live in the moment’, by maintaining that we should ‘abandon the idea of permanence and stability’ in order to attain a ‘vitalistic’ experience.47 In ‘The Unreality of Time’ McTaggart admitted ‘time involves change’, naming ‘the contents of a position in time’ as ‘events’. 48 So far so Bergsonian. ‘A-Time’ denotes a passage from past – present – future, but McTaggart claims it is contradictory for our individual experiences of these moments will not be identical and they cannot be universally agreed upon; ‘B-Time’ refers to the sequential relation of events which is unchanging, and therefore not in time. McTaggart’s argument explored subjective experience and acknowledged psychological duration. The essential difference with Bergson is that for McTaggart individual duration is misleading – he termed it ‘my specious present’.49 The ‘‘specious present’ varies in length according to circumstances, and may be different for two people at the same period [. . .] But we are 25

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considering attempts to take time as real, as something that belongs to the reality itself, and not only to our beliefs about it’.50 Through this subjectivity McTaggart discredited the notion of an a priori objective time. McTaggart’s conclusion has been used to place him contra Bergson, however, arguably the disagreement centres on what may be considered appropriate material for philosophy and its method. Clifford Williams has countered McTaggart with the view that by ‘applying Bergsonian intuition’ McTaggart’s distinction between A-Time and B-Time is ‘indistinguishable’: Williams like Bergson prioritises experience over any concept of external reality.51 In their exploration of psychological duration Time and Free Will and ‘The Unreality of Time’ are remarkably similar. Both picture the self in a state of flux, in which what is perceived as ‘present’ varies with the selective attention of the individual. The concepts of ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ are false constructions, since experience demonstrates their interpenetration and contingency. Compare McTaggart: ‘The self [. . .] is pictured as moving with the point of presentness along the stream of events from past to future’, with Bergson describing the ‘undivided progress of [. . .] our conscious states’.52 For Bergson objective time does not exist anymore than it does for McTaggart: ‘Time, conceived under the form of a homogenous medium, is some spurious concept.’53 Yet whereas Bergson permits experiential, psychological data in the construction of philosophy, McTaggart does not. It would therefore be interesting to consider McTaggart’s reaction to Bergson were he to have categorised his book as psychology rather than philosophy. Bergson’s notoriety greatly increased in 1907 with the publication of Creative Evolution. In the following year, seven reviews of his work appeared in respected British philosophical journals. Whilst neither Bergson nor any other example of process philosophy is referenced in McTaggart’s article, no practising philosopher could have missed the implication of its content. It may be read as a 26

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precise answer to Bergson’s duration, formulated to appear part of a more generalised response to the new empirical philosophy that was deemed too overtly subjective. McTaggart’s article defends the position of British Metaphysics. From this perspective, Russell’s ‘Mysticism and Logic’ is curious as it argued for the combination, the ‘marriage’, of the mystical and scientific, of which he gives Heraclitus as an example that tends towards the mystical, and Plato as the philosopher who ‘produced a divorce between philosophy and science’.54 Russell posits four general tendencies of mystics: belief in intuition, belief in unity, the unreality of time, and the disbelief in good and bad, applauding in mysticism ‘an element of wisdom [. . .] which does not seem to be attainable in any other manner’.55 Commending mysticism as ‘an attitude to life’ he condemns it as philosophy: ‘those who see [. . .] a recommendation of intuition ought to return to running wild in the woods, dyeing themselves with woad, and living on hips and haws’.56 Russell advocates the ‘harmonising mediation of reason’ against Bergson’s ‘fallible [. . .] irresistibly deceptive’ intuition.57 In its place Russell seeks data from the senses, and an ‘impersonal disinterestedness’ of vision.58 These methods are no different from Bergson’s own claims for intuition, the disagreement revolves around whether intuition can be disinterested and detached as Bergson claimed.59 Defining the mystic outlook as one characterised by a ‘feeling of unreality in common objects, the loss of contact with daily things’, Russell conceded ‘that there is something unique and new at every moment is certainly true’, and that ‘this cannot be fully expressed by means of intellectual concepts’.60 He admitted that ‘instinct, intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which subsequent reason confirms or confutes; but the confirmation, where it is possible, consists, in the last analysis, of agreement with other beliefs no less instinctive’.61 Russell’s agenda in this article is multifaceted. In 27

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laying claim for a scientific philosophy against an introspective one he necessarily considered three areas that distinguish Bergson’s thought. And in spite of taking every opportunity to load Bergson’s name with shortcomings the language of his argument suggested a different view. Russell accepted the twofold nature of perception, the ‘physiological subjectivity’ of sense data and the physical actuality of the external object. But he admonished both the vitalists and ‘Hegelian evolutionists’ (it is not clear in which category Bergson is put – if not both), for being ‘exclusively practical’.62 In contrast, his own scientific philosophy ‘comes nearer to objectivity [. . .] and gives us, therefore, the closest contact [. . .] with the outer world that it is possible to achieve’.63 Russell was scarcely kinder to McTaggart’s thesis, denouncing the unreality of time as ‘fallacious’. In its place, he offered a more Bergsonian ‘truer image of the world [. . .] obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time’.64 Again he advocated Bergsonian ideas and yet condemned Bergson himself. Russell’s problem came when the stream of time was applied to philosophies of evolution from Spencer to Nietzche, pragmatism and Bergson: the Heraclitan flux of life is too self-interested and particular to have scientific value. ‘Evolutionism [. . .] fails to be a truly scientific philosophy in its slavery to time, its ethical preoccupations, and its predominant interest in our mundane concerns.’65 Russell’s vision for philosophy was against his Apostle friends as much as Bergson: against the ethical considerations of Moore’s ‘Good’, McTaggart’s unreality of time, and Bergson’s intuition. The elusive disinterestedness of vision is equally prized by Bergson, merely sought by different means; the stream of time is real, but its implications are interpreted differently. Russell, the man of scientific philosophy, admitted mystical tendencies in his desire to construct a universal and more-than-human vision of reality, but was too bound to the British metaphysical tradition to accept 28

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that this reality may be found other than in objective logic. For Bergson this reality is in our perception, our lived experience, which is in time: as he concluded in his Oxford lecture ‘The Perception of Change’ ‘In ea vivimus et movemur et sumus’.66 The UK Lectures What is the aim of art if not to show us, in nature and in the mind, outside us and within us, things which did not explicitly strike our senses and our consciousness?67 Philosophy in Edwardian Britain was a battle ground of gifted thinkers with a talent for communication beyond academia. This situation was exacerbated and enormously complicated by the arrival of Bergson in person. The texts of the lectures Bergson delivered in the UK mostly repeated the main arguments of his published books, and as such were simplified explications of a theory alien to a British audience. Of these, only ‘The Perception of Change’ (1911), given on the occasion of Bergson’s honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford, has continued to be read as a significant text in its own right. Bergson’s intention in the two lectures on ‘The Perception of Change’ was to redefine the parameters of philosophy as a discipline that was fundamentally based in perception. A large proportion of his first instalment was concerned with method. Demonstrating the disadvantages of traditional, what he called ‘conceptual’ philosophy that sought to combine, select or abstract, Bergson argued that by substituting this with an approach that ‘plunged in’, one gained an ‘intuition’ of change which he believed was basic 29

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to philosophy in general.68 But Bergson had a wider agenda in his reformulation of philosophy. Many of his audience would certainly know how Bergson lambasted ‘metaphysical dogmatism’ and ‘metaphysical scepticism’ in Creative Evolution.69 The divide between British and Continental thought was clear on both sides, yet Bergson hoped that in perceptual philosophy, he offered ‘unity of a doctrine capable of reconciling all thinkers’.70 Given how McTaggart and Russell dismissed data from perception as individual and subjective this was inevitably provocative. Bergson did not come as conciliator, however. ‘The Perception of Change’ overhauled the flaws of the ‘conceptual’ method of British Metaphysics through arguments from Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory. Implicitly Bergson declared it was not so much the sensationalised content of his latest work, Creative Evolution that was significant, so much as the means by which he obtained his conclusions. His work was a new form of philosophy, a method of infinite possibility. Central to Bergson’s argument is the example of the artist who can ‘make us see what we do not naturally perceive’.71 Bergson prioritised painting as an art form wherein we can see the transformation of the subject under the artist’s brush. These ‘revealing agent[s]’ demonstrate that the ‘extension of the faculties of perceiving is possible’ contra the arguments of metaphysicians who regard sense perception as a weak, personalised view of an external reality.72 Artists – defined as ‘painters, or sculptors, musicians or poets’ – employ a vision detached from practical concerns which enables the invisible to show. The point is similar to that implied by Moore’s discovery of the ‘greatest goods’ in ‘aesthetic appreciation’.73 Crucially for Bergson, this ‘conversion of the attention would be philosophy itself ’.74 Disinterestedness ‘dilates our perception’, but directed in a philosophical vision of ‘universal becoming’ opens to depth rather than the ‘surface’ rendered by art.75 This philosophy is not only ‘more accessible to the majority of men’ than conceptual 30

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frameworks, but more accessible than art. Philosophy is the truly democrat­ ising subject for modern understanding. Through durational consciousness of change as itself we intuit life. ‘The Perception of Change’ is Bergson’s clearest identification of philosophy with art or philosophy-art as a visionary, immanentist method. In contrast to the complexities of the text delivered to an Oxford audience which Bergson considered ‘in the vanguard of the philosophical movement’ towards both rationalism and pragmatism, in ‘Life and Consciousness’ Bergson sought to relate his work more clearly to the British tradition.76 This was probably not due to any sense he may have had regarding the knowledge and ability of his audience who remained academic, but rather due to the memory of the lecture’s founder, T. H. Huxley. Nonetheless the frame in which familiar ideas were rendered is interesting. First, Bergson contended that the vital impulse should be regarded as an impulse ‘towards a higher and higher efficiency, something which ever seeks to transcend itself, to extract from itself more than there is – in a word, to create’.77 To put this in Moore’s terms, the sum is more than its parts. Whatever Moore may have thought of the connection between his Organic Unity and what Bergson clearly stressed was a ‘spiritual force’, Bergson used the British context as a theme throughout his text. This point of view led him to one of the clearest expositions of the artistic, intuitive method: The thought that is only a thought, the work of art which is only in the conceptual state, the poem which is only a dream, costs yet no effort: what requires effort is the material realisation of the poem in words, of the artistic conception in a statue or a picture. This effort is painful; 31

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and yet [. . .] perhaps more precious than the work it results in, because thanks to it, we have drawn from ourselves not only all that was there, but more than was there: we have raised ourselves above ourselves.78 Good resides in the transcendental affect upon consciousness of the creative process. Whilst for Bergson the emphasis is means and not ends, the ‘end’ of this sequence of events is not the production of the material object but far more oblique. Here the creative process has a positive direction that is commonly lost in other texts, where the artist’s vision cannot be related to transcendence but rather to clarity. The concept of transcendence does not rest easily with Bergson, so it is a striking concession in this lecture.79 Bergson’s conclusion betrays his particular agenda. In expressing his concurrence with Sir Oliver Lodge’s argument in Life and Matter, Bergson states that ‘Intuition and Intellect do not oppose each other.’80 The lecture was both defence and explanation, a self-conscious and diplomatic exercise. Bergson’s lecture had a number of repercussions that were played out in the British press. Alongside the published text appeared a response to Bergson’s philosophy by the former Prime Minister A. J. Balfour. Prior to his political success, Balfour had a career in philosophy, publishing On Philosophical Doubt (1879). He was therefore a natural choice for the editors of the Hibbert Journal beyond his celebrity status.81 As Hulme commented with frustration, ‘there must have been quite a considerable number of people who for several years have known that Bergson was an important person, but it was necessary for Mr Balfour to write an article, for him to become famous’.82 In spite of the instant popularity it brought, Balfour’s article is of value not simply for the favourable impression he gives of this ‘brilliant experiment in 32

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philosophic construction’, but because his measured critical analysis is indisputable.83 Situating both his own work and the entrance of Bergsonian thought in the history of British academia, Balfour’s article is certainly unusual. Remarking on the incompatibility of Bergson’s thought with his progenitors Mill and Spencer, Balfour cites Bergson within the long-held view of patriarchal rejection on which history and cultural practice were said to proceed. In this context, Bergson shares much with the undergraduate generation that became Bloomsbury. Yet Balfour also contextualises Bergson in relation to the interim development of what he called the ‘great idealist revival’ in Britain that occurred in the 1880s. Noting the reappropriation of Continental thought, Balfour presented Bergson as, to an extent, nothing unusual, certainly nothing against which one should defend oneself at all costs. Indeed, ‘now in 1911’, he writes, ‘the bulk of philosophers belong to the neo-Kantian or neo-Hegelian school’.84 So, it is implied, why not a third Bergsonian one? The Society of Psychical Research Through Balfour and Oliver Lodge Bergson’s presence in Cambridge can be mapped. Of similar age, both took a keen interest in Sidgwick’s Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Lodge was heavily involved, and it is likely that Balfour’s distance in the early decades of the twentieth century had more to do with his political profile than choice: his brother Gerald continued his connections to the Society, and his sister had married Sidgwick. The Society is an interesting and under-studied context for Bergson to appear in. Too often charged today with a profile of the ridiculous: séances, ether and women with a preponderance for jet, this could not have been further from the reality. Nor is it immediately apparent why a philosopher whose work was regarded 33

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by the majority of contemporary British appraisals as having a distinctly religious turn should be welcomed into a gathering of agnostics. None of these stereotypes hold. The Society was acutely conscious of potential criticism and based in profound scepticism. Avant-garde in its reaction against the requirement that university professors must hold Christian views, it presented a modern forum for discussion that took the scientific revolution of Darwin and Huxley seriously, and one that was not without severe personal sacrifice. Sidgwick had been forced to resign his professorship of philosophy at Cambridge on his loss of faith. The act gave the Society an aura of sincerity; the Society gave Sidgwick a continued role of influence outside the institution; and Sidgwick conducted enquiry with the highest intellectual rigour. Appearing in its true light as providing the most probing opportunity for the study of the new discipline of psychology, it is not at all surprising that the SPR’s presidents should have included William James and Bergson. Bergson’s presidential address to the Society was delivered in Cambridge at the end of May 1913.85 Given the interests of the gathering, his text largely concerned arguments for survival through memory first articulated in 1896 in Matter and Memory. In keeping with the Society’s anxieties, Bergson gave a lengthy consideration of methodology. Raising the problem of precise and scientific study for a discipline conducted through and in relation to mental states, he argued predictably enough for a synthesis of the methods of reason and psychology. From the delivery of this dense and rigorous text, four significant points emerged: first, outside the university, Cambridge welcomed Bergson; second, it was the complex arguments of Matter and Memory that held their attention; third, the esteem in which many members of the Society were held, and by extension, the positive light in which this presented Bergson; lastly, the varied audience the Society drew, including Wildon Carr, Schiller, and artists G. F. Watts and Franck Dicksee.86 34

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The SPR may have been the first occasion on which Bergson was invited to Cambridge, but it was another alternative forum that has claim to the first discussion of his work: the Cambridge Heretics. Established by the respected, if feared, classicist Jane Harrison, the Heretics were founded to ‘promote discussion on problems of Religion, Philosophy, and Art’.87 Like the SPR, membership of the Heretics supposed the negation of allegiance to any conformist religion. Also like the psychical researchers, the expression or reorientation of a tendency to spiritualism remained, identified through the numerous papers that took for their topics the conformist religion that had been rejected.88 The Heretics also reflected another tension of their age – gender. Since members could only be drawn from Newnham and Girton, the Heretics retained a long list of eminent male Honorary Members, including Sir Francis Darwin, Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes and psychiatrist Dr W. H. Rivers, alongside familiar figures of Cambridge academic life: Forster’s musicologist friend E. J. Dent; L. T. Hobhouse; Keynes; Walter Lamb; McTaggart; psychologist C. S. Myers; Russell; Russell’s supervisor G. F. Stout; and G. M. Trevelayan. It was to this audience that Russell first presented his article on Bergson published in The Monist, and in altered form, much later in A History of Western Philosophy.89 Harrison’s lecture ‘Unanimism’ (1912) is less polemical and more revealing as regards Bergson than Russell’s notorious article. Having laid out the historical facts pertaining to the foundation of Unanimism in the publication of Jules Romains’ La Vie Unanimiste by the press of the Abbaye de Créteil in 1908, Harrison rapidly moves to consider the doctrine in relation to Bergson.90 Harrison’s distinction between those she sees as the three Unanimists – Romains, René Arcos and Charles Vildrac – exposes a surprisingly full knowledge of contemporary French poetry. With lucidity, she argued for two approaches to Unanimism, in which Arcos’ version closely approximates to 35

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Bergson’s thought.91 As Harrison rightly identified, Arcos builds on Bergsonian imagery from Creative Evolution to the extent that ‘without some knowledge of Professor Bergson’s philosophy most of M Arcos’ poem (Ce qui nait) would be hard to follow’.92 More curious and more pertinent are the comparisons Harrison drew with British literature. Arcos’ poem finds its analogy in H. G. Well’s Marriage, from which Harrison quotes: ‘This is as much as I see in time and space as I know of it, something struggling to exist.’93 To see Wells in a Bergsonian light was uncommon and creative. Harrison’s other point of comparison was more readily acceptable – George Bernard Shaw. Moreover, Shaw is a figure through whom we can travel from the alternative Bergsonism of Cambridge to the furore of the social event of the previous year (1911), Bergson’s series of four lectures in London. Harrison, in her lecture to the Heretics, recalled Shaw’s own offering of the previous spring, ‘The Future of Religion’, in which he argued that it ‘was our business not to worship but to make – God’.94 She sensationally referred to the scandal which he unleashed but her words do not describe the ‘horror’ at his ‘vile and blasphemous ravings’ in which the press revelled.95 Shaw only partially deserved this reaction. He said little that was outside Bergson’s own claims; his radicalism was as he put it in a preface to Back to Methuselah, in preaching ‘the religion of Creative Evolution which [. . .] has been taking shape in the chaos of unbelief of the past fifty years and is now ready for adoption as the New Faith of the world’.96 It is hardly surprising that in Britain, Bergson exercised so much of the religious press, nor, given the messianic Shaw whose figure stood ‘electrical in its suggestion of vital energy’, that Bergson should be so feared.97 Shaw had a gift for polemic. His lecture for the Heretics is a fine example of this, where he pronounced the élan vital as the creed: ‘I believe that the universe is being driven by a force that we might call the life-force. I see it as performing the miracle of creation.’98 Portraying 36

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Bergson’s philosophy as resting on belief and vision did it a great dis-service. But Shaw ignored the effect, instead mutating it yet again in a letter to Labour parliamentarian Charles Trevelyan. This time tangling politics, religion and science, he enquired, ‘why not a creative-evolutionist party?’99 Shaw had a more interesting point to make in this letter, one that has greater bearing on the events of October 1911. Comparing the third act of his 1903 play Man and Superman to Bergson’s Creative Evolution, Shaw reconfirmed his sympathy with Bergson’s philosophy. Although ‘totally independent of one another [. . .] one is a dramatisation of the other’.100 Shaw was asked to preside over the honorary dinner held by the Aristotelian Society for Bergson at the culmination of his lecture tour. This occasion has been vitriolically recorded by Russell: ‘everybody congratulated themselves and each other on their possession of freedom and on their escape from the barren scientific dogmas of the sixties’, he wrote, characterising this self-gratification in less than complementary terms: ‘They seemed to me like naughty children when they think (mistakenly) that the governess is away – boasting of their power over matter when matter might kill them at any moment.’101 Russell inferred that adherence to this freedom was as dogmatic as the previous system that had been overturned. The Aristotelian Society had in fact always been well disposed towards Bergson, and through its secretary Wilden Carr it had prepared the academic audience for Bergson’s appearance.102 Carr’s first paper on Bergson was read to and then published by the Society in 1908–9. Characterised by its thoroughness, Carr’s work provided a penetrating synopsis of Bergson’s Creative Evolution as well as his own thoughtful questions. Carr’s analysis was directed towards Bergson’s method, which in this first paper, he found problematic. He was baffled by the apparently self-contradictory nature of the text since it did not conform to the accepted logical structure on which theories or 37

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systems were judged. Uneasy with intuition – a term he used only once – he wondered how Bergson intended to escape the limitations of the intellect that he so eloquently expressed. Further, Carr wondered about the interchange­ ability of time and space, the prospect of simultaneity, and the reactionary basis of thought that sought to overturn the dominant position of positivist science. The article included a letter from Bergson in reply to these questions, allowing the reader to shadow Carr’s intellectual process. A year later, with knowledge of Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory rectifying his difficulties, Carr provided a pithy version of his text for the Hibbert Journal. The synopsis of this text benefited from its skeletal structure, and whereas comparison with Hume was the reference of his previous paper, his focus was the needs of contemporary philosophy. Still concerned with method, Carr’s new confidence is manifest in his realisation of the ‘method of intuition’, anticipating Bergson’s own estimation of his work delivered in Oxford a year later.103 Carr’s response was ahead of its time; however, it cannot be regarded as particularly well known even if Russell’s analysis that he had no impact at all should be treated with caution.104 So what of the effect of the London lectures themselves? The best précis we have of them is from a series of anonymous articles in The Times.105 It is clear that just as he had in ‘Life and Consciousness’, Bergson cleverly spun his argument to suit his audience. Mollifying academia with statements of the utmost respect for the difference between the British analytic tradition and his own he sought to strengthen the points of their convergence. To this extent, his mission was diplomatic. On the other hand, Bergson’s title, if not always the detail of his subject, pandered to a more popularist audience. ‘On the Soul’ was a captivating topic and his analogy of the soul to melody provided precisely the sort of titivating table talk that his audience of social hostesses could latch on to. Yet if they were 38

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lured by such moments, Bergson also provided a detailed exegesis of his entire thought to date, sparing no complexities but rather concentrating on the arguments of Matter and Memory. Commencing with the significance of perception, movement and change in his work, Bergson pushed through duration, intuition, the pathological relation between mind and brain, and the metaphysical relation between mind and matter. His radical diagnosis of the place of man in Creative Evolution arises as the logical outcome of these arguments, and with this, the series ended to ‘loud cheers’.106 The reports in The Times marked the great interest taken in the event and the profile of the attendees. Outside his official role, as a disseminator of Bergson, Hulme, under his pseudonym Thomas Gratton, wrote an engaging article deploring this popular success. Soured by the discovery that although tickets were almost unobtainable for students, ‘nine out of ten’ members of the audience were women, he was repulsed by their ‘heads lifted up in the kind of “Eager Heart” attitude’.107 Another indication of Bergson’s sudden popularity came in the extraordinary image in a letter to the editor of The New Age in which the author described ‘walking sharply along Piccadilly last night discussing Bergson’.108 More subtly the repercussions were felt in Cambridge, marked by the change that overcame Sydney Waterlow, friend of Clive Bell, relation of Katharine Mansfield. Waterlow hoped to be a philosopher but worked as a diplomat. In January 1910 he wrote to Bell claiming ‘I’ve decided to drop the idea of an article [. . .] about Bergson and get on with real philosophy as quickly as I can.’109 Whether or not this decision was influenced by Bell, by October 1911 Waterlow must have felt that he had missed the boat. What would have been relatively daring in 1910 could at best have appeared fashionable a year later. Nonetheless, Waterlow did eventually produce a review of Bergson’s work in translation, albeit an uneasy one. Charmed in spite of himself, Waterlow harangued Bergson for a lack of logic which 39

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produced a ‘vague and fantastic’ position. Perhaps in order to emphasise the disparity of his own method, Waterlow adopted a particularly analytic framework that rests awkwardly with the subject.110 In fact Waterlow was overly cautious, for Bergson’s lecture texts have a clear and logical structure. The marriage of content and form was a point remarked on also in his French lectures, where the history of the Collège de France demanded that he kept ‘strictly in the field of reason’.111 Few in Britain without direct experience of the French academies would have realised this, and, unhelpfully, those who did for the most part saw no need to disillusion the populace from an image that served the insularity and security of British academia so nicely. Yet this air of foreignness, both in thought and nationality, surrounded Bergson with a fascination which multiplied his impact when he did finally arrive. The British were swept up, ‘intoxicated by the electric personality’, as one attendee enthused.112 For this reason, charting Bergson’s actual reception is a hard task. He erupts from nowhere, sensationalised, sanctified, ridiculed, but amongst this hyper-activity were a few who had been quietly, solidly assimilating his work. The remainder of this chapter concerns two of these figures. T. E. Hulme’s Original Sin  ulme was a remarkable exponent of Bergson in Britain. One of the best read H of his contemporaries, he set himself the colossal task of assimilating all the British criticism on Bergson’s work. By 1911 he claimed this amounted to over 200 books and articles, groundwork he used in preparation of the biblio­ graphy for F. L. Pogson’s translation of Time and Free Will.113 Hulme benefited not only from private conversation with Bergson but he had a perniciously critical mind which he delighted in exercising against the British academic 40

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establishment. On being sent down from Cambridge in 1904 Hulme travelled extensively, first to Canada then in 1907 to Brussels. It is unclear when he first became aware of Bergson. Wallace Martin suggested 1909; however, Hulme recalled reading Matter and Memory in c. 1905–6, prior to the publication of Creative Evolution.114 Karen Csengeri’s careful dating and editing of Hulme’s extant manuscripts traces the progression of his thought. Csengeri regards Hulme’s interest in Bergson as an ‘important step’ and not the ‘centrepiece’.115 Having completed around twenty articles Hulme ceased to write publicly on Bergson in 1912. From this evidence Csengeri suggests that by 1914 Bergson held little place in Hulme’s developing system.116 Arguing that Hulme’s early discipleship to Bergson has been grossly misconceived by the incomplete publication of Hulme’s essays, Csengeri places Bergson in the broader context of Hulme’s interests. A more lengthy account of Hulme’s responses to Bergson still raises questions that may be better understood in relation not simply to Hulme’s individual concerns but rather in relation to the British context of his writing. Hulme’s critical writing comprises lecture texts and journalism. The journalism comprises three more interrelated enterprises: the ‘Notes on Bergson’, the series entitled ‘Searchers after Reality’, and articles concerning lectures and events, all written largely for The New Age, a weekly with an enquiring and educated readership, but not a specialist one. Given his readership, Hulme’s ‘Notes on Bergson’ offered little in the way of extended or penetrating exegesis, which he reserved for his lectures. By Autumn 1911 Bergson was receiving copious attention in the press, and so Hulme’s approach was, as he said, crabwise, sidling from one amusing digression to another without getting to the point. Published sporadically across the autumn and winter, a lively exchange was maintained in the correspondence pages. By February 41

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1912 with still no answer, one exasperated reader wrote demanding ‘Is he dead?’117 Bergson’s profile was masterfully kept in focus with minimum effort. For all that, Hulme referenced aspects of Bergson that other reviewers largely ignored, particularly in his earlier series ‘Searchers After Reality’ which commenced in 1909. The series included Hulme’s first article on Bergson, published not under the series title which appeared the following month, but simply as ‘The New Philosophy’. Congratulating William James for his assimilation of Bergson, Hulme outlined the ‘extreme originality’ of Bergson’s method which approached reality by intuition not logic. Prophet­ ically expecting that ‘now we shall hear nothing but Bergson’, Hulme fulfilled his claim by writing the subsequent series largely in relation to Bergson’s position.118 And so the first of his articles under the ‘Searchers’ title on E. Belfort Bax rapidly becomes a comparison of Bax and Bergson, where again Hulme stressed Bergson’s ‘new method [. . .] of intuition’.119 From the start Hulme capitalised on the feature of Bergson’s work that Bergson himself most prized. Hulme’s criticism is unusual for its consistent urge to place Bergson in the frame of British academic thought. Beyond its obvious use for his readers, the project allowed him licence to chastise the institutions he remained ever outside. According to Hulme their flaws were many. He regarded their adherence to German Idealism to be outdated, concerned with questions that had been resolved or reformulated in France so as to make the British enterprise nigh on worthless. In relation to attempts to review Bergson, Hulme found three faults. First, the reviews suffered from repetition of a philosophical language without explanation, creating a ‘hypnotic’ veil that prevented critical penetration. As such, they had to be regarded as external reproductions of Bergson’s thought without grasping its import. Second, the majority of his contemporaries approached Bergson second-hand through a few book-length 42

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studies that conformed to the laboured convention of intellectual method and were ‘entirely misleading’. Worse, they adopted a ‘patronising tone’, that was rendered absurd by the third fault of these critics – inaccuracy. In ‘Bax on Bergson’, Hulme showed Bax to be deluded in believing to have reached Bergson’s conclusions prior to Bergson himself; for Hulme the resemblance was superficial. Similarly inaccurate but a far more common error was Lord Haldane’s pronouncement that ‘the whole of Bergson could be found in Hegel’.120 If these were not problems enough for the integration of Bergson in the universities, his work faced another barrier to serious study in these institut­ ions – its popularity. Bergson had discussed the problem with Hulme at the Bologna conference in April 1911. Writing in the Westminster Gazette, Hulme reported he asked Bergson about the tremendous réclame he had had in this country, and he seemed extremely amused, but at the same time rather regretted it. For this fictitious notoriety among people to whom what he says cannot possibly convey anything tends [. . .] to bring about a certain reaction among the philosophers themselves.121 This was apparent in the responses of the British press, amplified by Bergson’s London lectures. Academics and pupils were blinded by the popular hysteria. With uncanny premonition Hulme wrote in August that ‘the very persistence of the mob is apt to obliterate in the mind of the student of philosophy the extraordinary import’ of the lecture.122 Hulme himself fell victim in ‘Bergson Lecturing’, where he described the impending crisis of 43

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his own ‘reversal’ in thought following his experience of the London audience.123 Despite this Hulme was an astute critic who realised the very real gap between what a popular audience might take from a philosophy and what that philosophy itself entailed. ‘While the real importance of Bergson lies in pure philosophy, lies in his method’, he wrote, ‘yet the conclusion to which the application of his method leads him, that of the dualism of soul and body, is precisely the conclusion which most people seek’.124 Further, he emphasised that in Bergson’s lecturing strategies, ‘he seems to have felt the kind of audience he was going to get, and to have modified the character of his discourse considerably’.125 Having anticipated the ‘propagandists’ and salons, Bergson merely gave them what they came for, the external watchwords Hulme described and not a characteristic exposition.126 If this was a means for Hulme to distinguish his own long-standing and privileged knowledge of Bergson from the mass it was certainly portrayed that way. Contrasting this inauthentic experience of Bergson Hulme recalled the mesmerising quality of Bergson lecturing at Bologna, giving the impression that ‘he is describing something actual, something seen, and to that extent detached and above the words he is using’.127 Hulme undoubtedly remained in thrall. Hulme’s apparent disavowal of Bergson cannot simply be read as a consequence of sudden popularity. Csengeri’s proposition that he found it increasingly difficult to marry Bergson with the politics of Pierre Lassere and Action Française is fruitful. Yet Hulme was also aware that in French politics Bergson was manipulated to suit discrete agendas every bit as much as he was misrepresented in Britain; after all, Hulme translated Sorel’s Reflections on Violence. It is equally likely that he simply felt his work to be complete. It was no longer exciting to elucidate a way of thinking that was commonplace. Hulme’s was a sophisticated and subtle approach that did not need to rely on 44

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its originating texts. It is too straightforward to read Hulme as someone who could step neatly from one system of thought to another, as the texts of his lectures demonstrate. Of Hulme’s longer texts, two are worthy of consideration in the context of the dissemination of Bergson: ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ and ‘The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds’. It seems likely that the first of these was delivered in 1913; the second began as a series of four lectures delivered between 23 November and 14 December 1911.128 Both were collected and organised by Herbert Read for the posthumous publication of Hulme’s works as Speculations (1936). The texts have two distinct agendas. What both share is a determination not to fall into a Bergsonian terminology as other critics were prone to. ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ is the more creative, containing the germ of what Csengeri sees as Hulme’s rejection of Bergson. But to deal chronologically I shall survey ‘The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds’ first. Hulme’s rejection of Bergsonian language is immediately apparent in Read’s title for this text. Whilst it is unclear what Hulme’s own title may have been, Read’s choice was appropriate and in no way distorts Hulme’s thought for the text opens with a discussion of ‘intensive manifolds’ – a rephrasing of the qualitative multiplicity of Bergson’s intuition. Although this is drawn out in the first few pages, Hulme does not simply present intuition in its popular vagueness but uses his alternative term to give intuition ‘accurately and exactly’ with the precision of meaning of Bergson’s usage.129 Key to this is his adoption of the word ‘interpenetration’ to account for the continual process activated in intuitive duration. Apt as it is, it is an interesting and significant choice, for ‘interpenetration’ was in turn adopted by Karen Costelloe in a lecture on Bergson the following year. The reasons for Hulme’s attention to language are twofold; first, to convince the sceptics for whom the intellectual mechanist point of view held sway; second, to launch the entirety of Bergson’s 45

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thought from this basic shift in perspective. Consequently, the remainder of his lecture provides a clear synopsis of Bergson through Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution. The lucidity and logic of Hulme’s text relies on a method of organisation contrary to Bergson’s own intuitive one. Instead he adopts G. E. Moore’s distinction between ends and means. It is no surprise then to find in ‘A Notebook’ that Hulme believed the ‘only philosophical movement of any importance in Britain is that which is derived from the writings of Mr G. E. Moore’.130 Given his open admiration of Bergson’s method, this presentation is peculiar, suggesting either a concession towards his intended audience, or perhaps the beginning of a step away from Bergson. First Hulme extracts the crux of Bergson’s achievement, that he had solved the determinist nightmare by demonstrating it to be a product of a failure of mind and not a constituent of the nature of reality.131 Second, he looks to the means through which this had been accomplished: the thinking of intensive manifolds. Third, he looks for the outcome of this radical shift in thought, the ‘new theory of the nature of reality which the use of these new tools produces’.132 He then concludes by describing this reality in accordance with ‘Bergson’s conception of change and time’. Bergson’s method is not simply a subjective one, he states, for the scientific evidence of evolution bears out the hypothesis of vital impulse.133 It is only if we see Creative Evolution as the culmination of thought begun in Bergson’s first book that we are able to read his system with satisfaction. The use of Moore leads to one final point on this text. Written at a time when it is still accepted that Hulme held Bergson in high regard, it is particularly prescient that he seems to have had no difficulty in admiring Moore simultaneously. Could we even suggest Hulme is reading Moore diffractively (i.e. finding synchronicity despite Moore’s outward rejection of Bergson’s thought)? Nonetheless, the article has an aura of the final word from a pupil 46

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whose long thinking has matured to the end of its capacity on that course. After all, it provided what was lacking in British accounts of Bergson. Hulme had answered his own challenge voiced in The New Age articles and nothing more was required. Yet the idea that this is the final word on Bergson’s philosophy is belied by concerns that dogged Hulme into 1915. Csengeri quotes from an article that she reads as exemplifying Hulme’s utter rejection of Bergson’s standpoint. ‘The momentum of its escape from mechanism carries it on to the attempt to restate the whole of religion in terms of vitalism. This is ridiculous. Biology is not theology, nor can God be defined in terms of “life” or “progress”.’134 Hulme’s problem was always the mechanistic nightmare, but whilst such claims were often made for Bergson, these were as inaccurate as the many failings Hulme exhumed from British criticism. He had too thorough an understanding of Bergson to believe that this error lay with Bergson himself. It was rather one of those unwanted products of Bergsonism and is manipulated by Hulme to forward his own interpretative doctrine of Original Sin. This part of Hulme’s thought will be read in relation to Lewis in Chapter 5, so suffice it here to suggest a motive for Hulme’s apparently Janus-faced move. Bergson’s claims were consistently considered and balanced. It would not do for Hulme’s readers to find the embryo or inspiration for his doctrine in his old master. For even in spite of holding a demonstrably positive attitude, this did not prevent Bergson from many statements to the contrary: ‘along the whole course of the evolution of life, liberty is dogged by auto­ matism, and in the long run is stifled by it’.135 In short, such blatant opposition should be treated with more caution.136 In the interim, Hulme provided a synthetic rendition of Bergson’s thought and its relation to art. Bergson never spelt out an aesthetic theory, but rather than gather together the many moments of analogy that litter his texts, Hulme instead wrote a thorough application of his philosophy as a whole to 47

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aesthetic problems. This time, the ‘extraordinary importance’ of Bergson’s account of reality lies in its truth for art. The corresponding art theory then is not simply metaphorical, but ‘actual’.137 Moreover, Bergson’s preference for an interpenetrated reality over the selective one for which most are programmed necessarily suggested a privileged role for the artists and critics who are more able to ‘pierce’ the ‘veil’ of everyday existence.138 The artist’s creation is unpredictable, inspired and sympathetic; Bergson’s significance was in ‘disentangling’ the mental process involved in creation and stating it with great clarity.139 Not wishing to re-state Bergson, Hulme instead provided an answer to Bergson’s Oxford Lecture ‘The Perception of Change’. Subtly appropriating the conclusions while shifting the examples, this is largely a personal enterprise which only becomes apparent with ‘Perception of Change’ and ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’ to hand. Both texts concur that whilst it is in the artist’s nature to be separate from a life programmed towards action, it is nonetheless through this lack of participation that the artist is able to see more of life. To this extent, art is ‘revelatory’.140 It is because of our latent connection to what the artist portrays clearly that art has value. Bergson’s example is Turner and Corot; in answer, Hulme’s example is one who has been regarded as the inspiration for both – Constable.141 Crucial to this relation of texts also, is Hulme’s paraphrase of the disinterested state of mind necessary to the artist. Where Bergson writes of the artist’s ability to ‘look at a thing [. . .] for itself ’, Hulme writes that the artist ‘sees things as they are in themselves’.142 Both Bergson and Hulme deal not simply with the import of philosophy for art but also art for philosophy. As early as Time and Free Will, Bergson had sought inspiration from the artist’s disinterested vision. Hulme’s verbatim quote comes from Creative Evolution, that we should ‘conceive of an inquiry turned in the same direction as art which would take life in general as its 48

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object’.143 Bergson’s lecture puts it in new terms, that philosophy should attempt the ‘conversion of the attention’ to render ‘a completer perception of reality by means of a certain displacement’.144 Art and philosophy are interrelated. Bergson’s method explains artistic creation; art provides the model for philosophical enquiry. The thrust of Hulme’s article differs from Bergson’s purpose. Instead of returning to the metaphysics of change, Hulme moves from creation to the reception of works of art. The use of Bergson’s theory is acceptable for charting the correspondence of art to ‘other activities’, but it is not a model for art criticism.145 And here, his interlocutor is not Bergson but the aesthetics of Fry and Bell. In the course of his essay Hulme attempts to unravel what is meant by the ‘aesthetic emotion’.146 In so doing, he lays bare a source that Fry and Bell left implicit, and allies aesthetic emotion to a very Bergsonian concept. Aesthetic emotion is ‘life-communicating’, a term used by Berenson in Florentine Painters (1903). Hulme does not seek to prove or disprove any connection between Berenson and Bergson. What Hulme does achieve is the destabilising of the omnipotent position of the theories of Fry and Bell.147 Hulme’s article shows his fascination in aesthetics. This may sound a facile point, but it fits ill with Csengeri’s contention that Hulme’s real enthusiasm for art came only following his immersion in the study of Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy (1908). Hulme heard Worringer lecture in 1913 in Berlin and Csengeri uses this fact to mark a shift in Hulme’s thought.148 Certainly, his articulation of aesthetic problems matured greatly, but his zeal for contemporary art cannot be regarded as sudden. Epstein in his eulogising forward to Speculations recalled Hulme’s purchases of work by Gaudier-Brzeska as well as himself at a time when he could ill afford it.149 And Bergson himself distinguished Hulme as one who would produce ‘interesting and important works of philosophy in general, and more particularly, perhaps, 49

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in the philosophy of art’.150 In a review of the London Group from March 1914 Hulme noted the tendency towards a ‘re-emergence of a sensibility akin to that behind geometrical arts of the past’, art that resembled that of ‘Archaic, Byzantine and African’ peoples.151 Nowhere in this article does he contrast this new geometry with empathetic forms as in Worringer’s thesis. He had read Worringer’s essay by this date, and had already reformed it in his own categorisation of the ‘geometric’ and ‘vital’ in ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’. This paper was given to G. S. Mead’s Quest Society on 22 January 1914, and it was here that Hulme developed an aesthetic quite apart from Bergson.152 The concept of a return to Byzantine art was widely prevalent in British criticism at this date, and therefore I would nonetheless be wary of reading Hulme’s interpretation of it in the light of solely one source.153 I do not wish to disregard Hulme’s claim to a ‘change in philosophy’ at this date, merely to suggest that to shake off the vestiges of influence without resorting to opposition was a harder task than he imagined.154 Whatever the final verdict it cannot be contended that, in Hulme, Bergson gained one of his most stimulating disseminators. Karin Costelloe’s ‘Interpenetration’ Hulme initially had the more intimate knowledge of Bergson than any of his British contemporaries, but this was not to last. If he at least partially thought his way out of Bergson as a consequence of Bergson’s increasing popularity, the Bergson phenomenon had the opposite effect on Karin Costelloe. Costelloe’s upbringing and education made Bergson not only a difficult but a rebellious choice of study – she was Bertrand Russell’s niece through his first marriage. It was Russell who coached her for her Cambridge exams, and he recorded what in effect he regarded as the sad waste of a good brain on a bad 50

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subject.155 The University of Cambridge was not an institution in which Bergson was readily admired and, in this light, Costelloe chose to fly in the face of two great supports to her career. As it was, Russell remained surprisingly encouraging even after the distancing of their families. This distancing threw Karin from one echelon of the intelligentsia to another. As Russell’s marriage dissolved, Karin’s mother married Bernard Berenson. Meanwhile, Karin’s own marriage was to Adrian Stephen, younger brother of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf.156 Karin’s pursuit of Bergson then holds particular interest in the dissemination of his work to this largely hostile group. It was with a great sense of duty that Karin’s Bloomsbury acquaintances appeared in support of her academic endeavours to hear her first paper on Bergson delivered to the Aristotelian Society in 1913. Despite being family it seems she was never admitted into the close circle of friends that was to become Bloomsbury. As Virginia Woolf later recorded of another Aristotelian event, Costelloe induced such ‘physical repulsion’ in Leonard that he could ‘hardly endure to look at her’.157 Lytton Strachey was equally cruel about her paper, ‘What Bergson means by Interpenetration’. We get little sense of the paper’s content from Strachey’s account for he found the ‘boredom was infinite’. He describes Costelloe seated next to Russell, with a ‘mouth forty foot long and lascivious in proportion’, reading hurriedly through the text of which everyone had a copy. Followed closely only by ‘antique faded spinsters’, the event only became interesting in the ensuing discussion. Following Russell’s ‘pungent criticisms’, came a ‘terrific’ rejoinder from Moore which Strachey extolled as the ‘simplicity of genius’, obviously in contrast to Costelloe’s laboured lecture.158 At the time of the lecture’s reading Costelloe, unlike Hulme, had not yet met Bergson. From her paper’s title and approach, it is clear that she was conversant with Hulme’s criticism: not only does she adopt his term 51

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‘interpenetration’ but, like him, she staves off using ‘intuition’ till near the paper’s close. If Hulme had already written his own answer to his challenge, here was another. Yet unlike Hulme, Costelloe did not give a complete rendition of Bergson’s work, focusing only on the consideration of duration in Time and Free Will. Characterising Bergson’s work as a series of oppositions – interpenetration/discreteness; mind/matter; and the intellect and its alternative – led her to a novel definition of duration. It is a ‘synthesising principle’ she writes, without an ‘objective sum or synthetic whole of any kind: there is simply a multiplicity of otherness’.159 The definition points to what Costelloe ignores: nowhere, neither in this paper or her later book-length study, The Misuse of Mind (1922), does she approach the élan vital. If this is a fundamental failing it may be understood in relation to the academic milieu in which Costelloe was situated. She opened her paper on duration with the request that we should ‘put aside all idea of time’.160 It seems she had in mind two possible progenitors: the significant place held by McTaggart’s paper ‘The Unreality of Time’; and the legacy of Cambridge academic James Ward’s work on psychology and philosophy. As Ward’s interlocutors have shown, during the 1890s the ‘problem of psychology as a separate science, and its relation to philosophy, was becoming acute in England’.161 Ward’s work sought an uneasy union of two separate disciplines, leaping continually from one to the other. In Essays in Philosophy Ward argued that ‘it is this unity of self-consciousness that makes the difference of what etymology identifies, the atoms of the mechanical world and the individuals of the world of morals’.162 This was not only a transformation of subjective psychological experience to philosophical categories, but the means by which those categories could be found. The proximity of such a combination of disciplines to Bergson’s own task in Time and Free Will was not missed by contemporary critics.163 It is instructive to regard Costelloe’s own method in this light. 52

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In her remarkable essay ‘Complexity and Synthesis’ Costelloe attempted a diffractive reading of Russell through Bergson, seizing on Russell’s complex position with regard to perception. Notwithstanding Costelloe’s personal agenda in achieving a rapprochement between these two opposing systems, it is informative to consider her point of view. At a fundamental level Costelloe read Russell and Bergson as two sides of the same coin. For her, both were in agreement that the nature of data is twofold: either ‘complex’, denoting logical change, or ‘synthetic’, denoting irrational continuity.164 Their disagreement concerned the question of ‘whether all data must [. . .] be composed of logical terms and relations’.165 Since neither allowed that ‘some data are logical and some are not’, Russell favours the analytic ‘complex’ method for accruing data, and Bergson the intuitive ‘synthetic’ method. ‘According to Mr Russell’, Costelloe wrote, ‘our fullest knowledge comes from the complex data of attention; according to M. Bergson, from the original synthetic data’.166 Whilst outlining major differences, most particularly the question of the desirability of selective attention, Costelloe also found moments of convergence. The issue remained irresolvable yet was transformed into a problem of methodological priority and not one that was so distinct as to preclude all discussion. And so we find Russell in Knowledge of the External World admitting that ‘as a matter of immediate experience, the sensible flux is devoid of division [. . .] The effect produced [. . .] will be precisely that of “inter­pen­ etrat­ion,” of transition.’167 Made more Bergsonian in the light of Costelloe’s repeated use of the term ‘interpenetration’ for Bergson’s theory of ‘duration’, this is hardly the analytical categorisation expected from the philosopher of the logical atomism of Principia Mathematica. Likewise we find Bergson in Creative Evolution claiming that ‘the philosopher is obliged to give up his intuition once he has received the impulse from it, and to trust himself to continue the movement’.168 53

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Hence it is that Bergson’s letter to Costelloe, which she incorporated as a prefatory note to her book does not absolutely endorse her position. Calling the book a ‘personal and original interpretation of an ensemble of my views’, Bergson, in line with Costelloe herself, emphasised that it was an interpretation that the author had reached independently of his writing. He described how she had ‘developed them in her own manner, in the direction that she chose’.169 The Misuse of Mind continued themes from her original article, concerned with Bergson’s description of reality. Costelloe drew extensively from Time and Free Will and ‘The Perception of Change’, reformulating Bergson’s spatial view as a solely ‘logical’ one; and distinguishing (in a laboured way) the difference between ‘actual facts’ and ‘real things’ – the former being the product of analysis, the latter the product of direct vision attained by interpenetration.170 It is unlikely that The Misuse of Mind should ever have been written had it not been for the repercussions of Costelloe’s original article. For in spite of Russell’s deep involvement with Bergson’s British excursion, it was only after Berenson had sent Bergson a copy of Costelloe’s text that she acquired him as a correspondent. Bergson was clearly appreciative of her attempt, and his encouragement produced a charmingly artless letter from Costelloe in reply: ‘I do hope you really meant what you said when you praised it [her paper], and also when you asked me to come and see you.’171 The second of these points was fulfilled the succeeding autumn, but the first is less clear to ascertain for the letter goes on to reference what must have been a fairly substantial criticism: ‘The definitions I attempted apply, as I see now, to completed change, and what has been created, not to the process of changing and the act of creations.’172 This is tantamount to an admission that she had entirely missed the point. Just as Bergson was to dissociate the particulars of his own thought from Costelloe’s book, so it appears she failed to elucidate the import of his work. 54

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It is possible to read Costelloe’s fault here as being largely a product of conflicting allegiances, torn between Russell, anti-Bergson in spite of Costelloe’s stimulating attempt at proving otherwise, and Berenson.173 Berenson was remarkably pro-Bergson. His first reference, dated 1907, marked a salient awareness of the Bergson–Russell disjunction: ‘If Bergson is right (and if I understand him) Bertie has been on the wrong track for some time.’174 Berenson’s second is far more probing in the light of the influence his own criticism had on members of Bloomsbury. ‘I met Bergson’, he wrote, he told me at once that my books were not only the best but the unique attempt at a philosophy of painting, that he thought them very hard to understand but found them very illuminating and revealing. All the time I was having the curious sensation of being with a mind exactly like mine, and not superior [. . .] and yet he has written books I cannot grasp or fathom and is the first thinker who has expressed an appreciation of me.175 Clearly ingratiated by Bergson’s flattering appreciation the comment provides an unusual context in which to reconsider some of Berenson’s own writing. A brief glance offers some fascinating correspondences. Beyond the characteristically late nineteenth-century formulation of a ‘tactile consciousness’ in the appreciation of art, Berenson, in Italian Painters elicits a penetrating observation regarding the artists’ method. ‘Leav[ing] himself out of the account’, Berenson claims, the artist will distil the ‘original phenomenon to its essential significant facts and forms’.176 The artist has a particularised manner of perception that enables unmediated assimilation of the object 55

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under view. To this extent, there is a point of comparison to Bergson’s own discussion. Costelloe, Russell and Berenson present a convenient hinge from this broad British context to a more considered analysis of Bloomsbury. As Hayden Maginnis has argued, it is comments from Berenson on aesthetics like the one quoted above that bear interesting resonance with the subsequent work of Fry and Bell. Adding to this an appreciation of Bergson only goes to deepen the enigmatic nature of their attitudes. In her complicated matrix of colleagues, associates, friends and family, Costelloe can be taken to epitomise the tensions of the reception of Bergson in Britain. Leaving this context behind now, the next chapter turns from generality to the first case study – Bloomsbury.

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2. Metaphysics of Non-Representation: Bloomsbury’s Bergson And we see through the surface to the depths. In those moments, I find one of my greatest salutations, not that I am thinking in the past, but that I am living I think most fully in the present.1 ‘Our tactile imagination’ Berenson’s aesthetic prioritisation of a ‘tactile consciousness’ and ‘essential significant facts and forms’ in his early criticism are critical to understanding the art writing of Roger Fry. Fry painted a Renaisssance-esque Desco da Parto for Berenson’s marriage to fellow art historian Mary Costelloe, and 57

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published her articles in The Burlington.2 Berenson bought Matisse’s Copper Beeches (1900–2) in 1910, in time to lend it to Fry’s first exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’.3 In his 1897 The Italian Painters, Berenson wrote of ‘the greatest painters [who] stimulate our sense of touch, our tactile imagination’. 4 Berenson mentored Fry before accusing him of plagiarism for the way he carried these critical observations into a new theory of modern art.5 Berenson’s personal contact with Bergson is an additional layer to the topic of this chapter – Fry’s, and Bloomsbury’s, Bergson. Bergson’s Intuition Bergson’s achievement was to transform intuition from a psychological state of fleeting insight into a new method for philosophy. Building on nineteenth-century scientific discoveries he constructed a complex theory of intuition and ‘pure’ perception which radically redefined memory, representation and the limits of human knowledge.6 Intuitive vision is not governed by the selective powers of the intellect, but rather an expansive ‘sympathy’ with the thing considered, where ‘one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible’.7 This hyper-subjective convergence with the object – an intense empathy – is metaphysical, conforming to Bergson’s redefinition of metaphysics as ‘experience itself ’ in his 1903 An Introduction to Metaphysics.8 For Bergson, ‘true empiricism is the true metaphysics’; metaphysics connotes a more intense reality, and one that is basic to creation. In Bergson’s process philosophy all is transformative, relational, multiple. Perception is understood as ‘to translate or to picture the states of our (moving) nervous system’.9 Intuitive perception is embodied, but non-self-serving, disinterested. Identifying this intensely 58

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empathic vision as the crux of intuitive perception, I trace the convergence in sentiment between the philosophy, aesthetics and writing of Bergson and Fry’s circle to renegotiate a role for an experiential, sensation based method of art history which in its lack of self-interest nevertheless retains those prizes of disinterest and objectivity. According to Gilles Deleuze, representation in Bergson’s thought is ‘divided into two directions that differ in kind, into two pure presences that do not allow themselves to be represented: that of perception which puts us at once into matter and that of memory which puts us at once into the mind’.10 Bergson described pure or virtual perception in Matter and Memory as ‘the lowest degree of mind – mind without memory – [it] is really part of matter’.11 Whilst every perception is stored in memory, there is a disjunction between image and experience: ‘to picture is not to remember’.12 As Bergson put it, an image may be without being perceived; it may be present without being represented; and the distance between these two terms, presence and representation, seems just to measure the interval between matter itself and our conscious perception of matter.13 It is in this gap that ‘pure’ perception functions, and, utilising this mode of consciousness, that modernist art flourished. As the selective nature of everyday pragmatic perception is arrested we are ‘actually placed outside ourselves; we touch the reality of the object in an immediate intuition’.14 Without the continuity of our personal durations, the flashes of intuition in this ‘pure’ perception appear dissociative, spatial ‘presences’, where the processual 59

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temporality of consciousness is indefinitely halted. But, although our consciousness may be expanded by this exterior perspective, still we only gain a contracted image. Bergson writes that representation is there, but always virtual [. . .] To obtain this conversion from the virtual to the actual, it would be necessary to [. . .] obscure some of its aspects [. . .] so that the remainder, instead of being encased in its surroundings as a thing, should detach itself from them as a picture.15 Representation is selective, decontextualising its object. A picture is the result when a ‘thing should detach itself ’ from its environment.16 This would suggest that in Bergson’s aesthetic, painting can only serve to draw our attention to the limitations of human perception. A painting cannot give more than the reduction of its parts. How then, is it so commonly acknow­ ledged that art operates in culture to reflect upon and shape experience, to reconnect us with our environment, and to open up a fuller image of life? Rather than regarding the static painting as a detachment from duration and as an actualisation of thought, we should regard it as a re-affirmation of immanent possibility. I suggest Fry’s aesthetic is a desire to ‘picture’ the ‘thing’ – thereby in Bergson’s terms harnessing pure perception to represent the un-representable. In this Fry adheres to the characterisation of the artist given by Bergson in his 1911 lecture ‘The Perception of Change’: artists ‘look at a thing [. . .] for itself and not for themselves [. . . They] perceive in order to perceive – for nothing.’ 17

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Fry’s Essay in Aesthetics The whole secret of art is to care for the thing, not for oneself.18 We can imagine that Roger Fry’s background in the Natural Sciences would have predisposed him to the biological and physiological premises of Bergson’s intuition laid out in Matter and Memory. Although this has been contested ground, there is extensive evidence of Fry’s thorough knowledge of Bergson’s work. Christopher Green rightly characterises Fry as an ‘objective empiricist’, who ‘set himself the impossible task of observing objectively his own subjective experiences’.19 Much of this insurmountable dilemma is resolved in the intuitive perception of Bergson’s 1903 An Introduction to Metaphysics. Fry hoped to rescue for art a new objectivity. ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’ is Fry’s mature statement on aesthetic perception and value. Fry propounds a ‘double life’ comprising the ‘actual’ and the ‘imaginative’, analogous to the ‘actual’ and ‘virtual’ perceptions outlined in Matter and Memory. Just as Bergson requested the reader of An Introduction to Metaphysics to ‘reverse the direction’ of thought to attain intuitive consciousness, so too does Fry judge that one should ‘rather justify actual life by its relation to the imaginative’.20 The structural similarity is carried by Fry’s language, calling for a ‘disinterested intensity of contemplation’, ‘heightened power of perception’ and ‘sympathy’ with the object under consideration.21 Through intuition, both artist and viewer gain an unmediated experience, a direct cognition of the thing under consideration. Leaving aside pragmatic consequences, Bergson classified the immediate moment of intuitive insight as ‘knowledge of the mind of what there is essential to matter’, followed by 61

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expansion of this initial vision in a reflective process to gain ‘knowledge of the mind by the mind’.22 It is a like process that Fry’s artist undergoes at the end of the ‘Essay’: the ‘artist passes from pure sensations to emotions aroused by [. . . those] sensations’.23 The artist of Fry’s ‘Essay’ ‘uses natural forms, which in themselves are calculated to move our emotions, and he presents these in such a manner that the forms themselves generate in us emotional states, based upon the fundamental necessities of our physical and physiological nature’.24 Aesthetic experience is programmed biologically, bodily and correspondingly Fry’s ‘Essay’ begins with the ‘imaginative [. . .] perceptive and emotional aspects [. . . of] a different kind of emotion’.25 Sounding very like the final chapter of Creative Evolution, Fry regarded the work of art ‘as perception of a process of motion and balance’ of formal elements that manifest the ‘vital rhythm’ of the art work, ‘through which the artist’s subconscious feelings reveal themselves to us’.26 Far from abstract lines or shapes, Fry’s ‘formalism’ is first and foremost pitched in terms of movement and gesture, the process of divining the form(s) of the artwork in the act of its creation and re-creation in the sensations of the beholder.27 Fry’s ‘Essay’ is perhaps best known for his designation of ‘emotional elements of design’, often regarded as dubious by art historians for their psychological rather than empirical foundation.28 These are ‘primary physical needs’, Fry writes. The first element, ‘rhythm of line’, is proposed as a ‘record of a gesture [. . .] modified by the artist’s feeling’; mass, second of the elements, is described as the ‘power of resisting movement, and communicating its own movement to other bodies’.29 The movement of painting corresponds to a movement in perception that is embodied. Fry’s comments return his aesthetic to the biological and neurological premises upon which Bergson’s work is founded. Here Fry is the phenomenologist, the hinge for his thesis directly 62

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counter to Kantian aesthetics, for all the talk of disinterested contemplation. Correspondingly then for Fry, Bergson’s method of intuition is also primarily phenomenological. Intuition allows the viewer to regard an object immanently: literally from within the object considered. In this way it gives rise to bodily sensations in the viewer, which are immanent to the viewer’s physio­ logy. It is helpful here to recall the designation of ‘image’ in Matter and Memory, as both the thing and its representation, what we could uneasily call an experienced phenomenology.30 Fry’s understanding of art as the exposure of an ‘equivalent’ life that did not serve any utilitarian end (creating ‘for nothing’) effectively exempted him from many of the demands of his Cambridge colleagues. Russell’s position, both philosophically and socially, is especially relevant given Fry’s academic milieu, and a probing study of Bloomsbury epistemology by Anne Banfield. Sculpting a particularly British context for Fry’s aesthetic, Banfield noted the logic that underpinned his dualistic theory of ‘vision’ and ‘design’. Banfield compared this to Russell’s dual theory of knowledge: that of direct acquaintance through scientific evidence or analysis, and the indirect knowledge attained by description, or what can be inferred from those scientific facts.31 Banfield stressed that ‘because knowledge is not equivalent to perception’ for Russell, ‘the disappearance of the observer does not [. . .] entail a denial of the possibility of knowledge’.32 This was certainly convenient for Fry’s desire for objectivity. In spite of his attempt to demolish mysticism, Russell nevertheless left creativity in this realm: ‘Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical realms it is insight that first arrives at what is new.’33 Whilst his own philosophy could not allow sole dependence on such modes of thought, art, by its very nature non-utilitarian, could. If Fry needed licence from Russell to pursue an alternative course, this was it. This is not to say that Fry disagreed with Russell’s 63

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thought for daily life, but as Russell freely admitted, he was not the person to follow for aesthetic guidance. ‘In my heart’, he wrote to Berenson, ‘the whole business of Art is external to me – I believe it with my intellect, but in feeling I am a good British Philistine’.34 Russell’s is a philosophy of, to coin Sickert’s term, ‘gross material facts’, material facts that bear some resemblance to Bergson’s life infested ‘empirical metaphysics’. And here is the tension in Fry’s advocacy of Post-Impressionism. Not originally against Sickert’s advice himself, Post-Impressionism was for Fry both hyper-realist and, in its difference from the mundane, equivalent. Intuition in Post-Impressionism In her biography of Roger Fry (1940), Woolf praised his propagation of Post-­ Impressionism for transposing the predilection of the British for the ‘associations of things’ into ‘things in themselves’.35 Bloomsbury had embraced the autonomous status of Post-Impressionist works of art, but peeling away the ‘cocoon of unreality’ required a radically new method, not founded on rational analysis nor Sickert’s ‘gross material facts’, but in a fluid psychology of intuition and empathy.36 Fry did not arrive at his aesthetic treatise overnight, and much of the groundwork for the ‘Essay’ is found in his posthumously published essay ‘The Philosophy of Impressionism’ (1893). During the writing of his fellowship dissertation, ‘Some Problems of Phenomenology and its Application to Greek Art’ (1891), Fry had been travelling to France, for his painterly descriptions of the ‘atmospheric luminosity of the whole’ relate as much to contemporary work in Paris as the Greek painting of his title.37 Referencing William James’ Principles of Psychology of 1891 together with modern ‘process [. . .] metaphysics’, ‘The Philosophy of Impressionism’ provides the considered observation that ‘Some Problems of Phenomenology’ lacked. Impressionism 64

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is characterised in durational terms as the ‘momentary group of sensations in the perceptual flux, existing in necessary relations to its surroundings and an inseparable part of them’.38 The visionary freedom of this new mode of seeing was inspirational. The practically orientated man ‘does not know how little he sees of things’ Fry writes, ‘– how fluctuating, evanescent and fantastic are the actual visual impressions of objects, how they melt and glide into each other’.39 Comparatively to Bergson’s Time and Free Will, he negates science as actively ‘prevent[ing] the mind from making the step from sensations to things’.40 In his perceptual consciousness of attunement, things ‘only exist when they are perceived’.41 Whether or not Fry had come across Time and Free Will by 1894, it is clear he was reading voraciously and aware of the tendencies of contemporary continental thought. A notebook listing publications dating from 1903 to 1909 includes both Time and Free Will and An Introduction to Metaphysics in their French editions.42 Fry redefined art and its language of debate. In noting the ‘clearness’ and ‘logical structure’, of Matisse, Fry twisted our understanding of logic contra Russell’s associationism, replacing it as formal ‘rightness’. Similarly, Fry adopted and transformed ‘synthesis’, the term soon to be used by Costelloe in her 1913 analysis of Russellian-Bergsonian perception. Desmond MacCarthy’s introduction to Manet and the Post-Impressionists (written from Fry’s notes) introduced the ‘Synthetists’ whose new painting transitions from the ‘complexity of the appearance of things to the geometrical simplicity which design demands’.43 Matisse’s desire to recapture ‘lost expressiveness and life’ instigated the definition of ‘synthesis in design; that is to say, he [Matisse] is prepared to subordinate consciously his power of representing the parts of his picture as plausibly as possible, to the expressiveness of his whole design’.44 Two years later in his ‘Apologia’, Fry described Matisse’s method as ‘fusing to form a new synthesis’.45 This art is not constructed from selective vision but 65

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created by the ‘inverse of analysis, by which we widen [. . .] the field of our acquaintance’. 46 It is both ‘ample and simple’, to borrow from Fry. Post-­ Impressionism became a lesson in perception. The artist hoped to ‘arouse the conviction of a new and definite reality’, not intending to ‘imitate form, but to create form; not to imitate life but to find an equivalent for life [. . .] In fact, they aim not at illusion but at reality.’47 Post-Impressionism went far beyond Fry’s proposition for a ‘reconsideration of the purpose and aim of art’, radical enough as this was for the British public in 1910.48 This was not merely a redefinition of art, but a re-prioritisation of life, a shift in what was understood as real. Fry’s case was a cogent one: that ‘art depends on cutting off the practical responses to sensations of ordinary life’; that the artist ‘might, if he chose, take a mystical attitude’; and that ‘we should rather justify actual life by its relation to the imaginative, justify nature by its likeness to art’.49 In contrast to Russell, Fry advocated the intuitive life as an authentic and rich experience, conducted in freedom. Against the ‘perpetual economising of selection’, Fry described a situation in which we are able to see ‘everything equally’.50 By implication democratic, it would replace the hypocrisies and obliqueness of Edwardian associationism with a wiser civilisation. ‘Art is philosophy’: Matthew Stewart Prichard Fry’s vision for Post-Impressionism coincided with his intimacy with the British aesthetician Matthew Stewart Prichard. Arguably under his influence, three themes characterising British Post-Impressionism 1909–12 emerge: the concern with movement and gesture; the reinterpretation of Byzantine mosaics; and the interest in religious revival. It is possible that Fry and Prichard had first met many years earlier at Edward Perry Warren’s house in Lewes. 66

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As early as 1889 Warren and the ‘Georgian brotherhood’ were notorious enough to have excited the interest of Fry’s old school friend and room-mate at Cambridge, McTaggart.51 In 1892, five years after they came down from New College Oxford, Warren invited Prichard to become secretary for his collecting enterprise, and accordingly Prichard moved to Sussex. David Sox’s biography of the Lewis brotherhood includes Fry in the list of house guests, and this is plausible.52 During the 1900s both Prichard and Fry were working as expatriate curators of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan in New York respectively. Their first recorded meeting was at Isabella Gardner’s Fenway Court in 1905, Prichard subsequently writing to Mrs Gardner that Fry was ‘the most inspiring critic I have ever met’.53 By 1906 the ‘charming’ Fry was recommending the ‘best’ Parisian painters to Prichard. On a visit in November, Prichard showed Fry a manifesto document for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, although ‘the ideas are ahead of the world even in which he lives’.54 Prichard next recorded visiting the Academia in Venice with Fry, Claude Philips and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson in September 1907, followed by a gap of nearly two years in which Prichard pursued a detailed study of Italian art. Their acquaintanceship was warmly renewed during Fry’s visit to Paris in May 1909. Having ‘met twice or three times’ in a week, Fry ‘promised’ to return and invited Prichard for a week-long visit to his home in order to ‘discuss things’.55 With pride Prichard recorded that Fry had discussed his work with a mutual friend, writing ‘he thought me the only person situated without attachment to institutions who can therefore obligingly sacrifice himself by speaking the truth’.56 During these months in Paris Prichard assimilated Bergson, sufficiently so to be described by Fry as ‘the great Bergsoniste’.57 At the end of February 1909 he first refers to studying ‘the modern attitude in France towards 67

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Metaphysics’,58 and with the same companion he read ‘a great book on consciousness’ as a prelude to a discussion of Matter and Memory.59 No doubt it was these new discoveries that formed the discussion Prichard and Fry found so satisfying, since it is clear from his letters that Prichard was consumed by combining his aesthetics with Bergson’s thought. If as seems likely Prichard used Fry as a sounding board for these new theories, then Fry’s encouragement may be read as a reflection of his own opinion of Bergson, an interpretation endorsed by Prichard’s hopes for Fry’s collaboration later in the year. He informed Mrs Gardner of a planned visit to England to enlist ‘friends and those who may be willing to help me in my particular directions of thought. Fry, if not too preoccupied, would, I think, be one of the trumpets for the artistic side of the world’s new movement.’60 Prichard continued, ‘[William] Rothenstein, the painter was in Paris not long since and is inclined to enrol.’61 By 1911, Rothenstein ‘was entertained [. . .] by the ideas, and Fry, too, who is prepared in a large measure to accept the conclusions we have reached in Paris’.62 If there is a note of disappointment in his inability to find an ‘opening for practice’, then this was outweighed by the conversion of two important figures of British art. Prichard’s letters and notebooks from c. 1909–10 provide a fascinating insight into contemporary interpretation of Bergson’s philosophy. ‘Art is a matter of pure perception’,63 he wrote, defining representation negatively as the reduction to intellectual terms of that which is experienced through the medium of feeling: it is the attempt to express conceptually what comes to us intuitively: the quantitative equivalent of quality (which does not exist and is undiscoverable) the durée in terms of space.64 68

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Prichard connected Bergson’s (negatively) selective representation to Fry’s work, quoting Fry: ‘ “aesthetic sentiment” is a false term applied to the intellectual interest we take in art objectively as a thing in space’.65 Prichard followed his physiological perception: ‘we don’t feel colours but tensions, vibrations and rhythms, just as we don’t hear notes but movements’.66 So, in Prichard’s conception, psychologically, Art is akin to hypnosis, I mean the artist hypnotises us by his power of awakening in us the mysterious rhythm which is at the basis of all his expression [. . .] Beauty, psychologically, is not, I think more than complete attention, attention which takes us out of ourselves, as we say, and negates the desire for action, – the prolongation of a given state of consciousness, to speak more technically. Emotion is a symptom of freedom, the untrammelled expression of one’s real self.67 The statement amalgamates Bergson: in Creative Evolution the artist intuits the ‘intention of life, the simple movement that runs through the lines, that binds them together and gives them significance’; in Time and Free Will beauty ‘put[s] to sleep the active or rather resistant parts of our personality [. . .] to bring us to a perfect state of responsiveness’; and ‘freedom is self-expression’.68 Prichard’s letters capture the intense anticipation and excitement surrounding Bergson in Paris. The first reference to lectures given by the ‘big gun of all’ came at the start of December 1909.69 Little did Prichard know that he would wait until the following autumn to hear them. In the interim the 69

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hearsay mounted. ‘They tell me that Bergson, the philosopher who has put me in the path of thinking more clearly has written or is writing on art among other things’, Prichard gossiped, noting blithely, ‘he went to Italy to solve the question’.70 Meanwhile, Prichard’s work had received some notoriety. At the start of May the French colleague with whom he had read Matter and Memory met an unidentified man who promised to take their studies to Bergson himself.71 This man who was considering the question of launching a book on the subject of art was immensely impressed and said he intended at once to lay the question before Bergson himself whom he knows intimately. He said that he thought that Bergson might like to see us and hear more and give some directions. We don’t expect summons from the emperor of our thought who is engaged on a book to define his position about morals and must be very busy, but it is pleasant to think that our simple efforts will be laid before our master.72 Bizarrely, exactly when Prichard was formally introduced has gone unrecorded, but he was to come into close contact with Bergson and his family.73 Finally at the end of 1910 we get his appraisal of Bergson’s course at the Collège de France:74 At the apex are the two courses given by Bergson at the Collège de France. He did not 70

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speak last year and this is the 1st time that I have heard him. He speaks once a week on each of 2 subjects, La Personalité, that is, What are we? And on the philosophy of Spinoza. Three quarters of an hour before the lecture begins the hall is full and the doors are held by those inside to prevent the catastrophe which would be entailed were more of the public admitted; many must take their seats two hours before he begins: I find I can find a seat near a distant window where breathing is difficult but possible if I arrive an hour early. He speaks clearly, fluently and impersonally without self-assurance but in a manner which convinces you at once that you are at last face to face with reality.75 He is in a way unaware of his audience and paused in the middle of his opening address to say to himself, c’est curieux, ça, très curieux. He is vivacious but aims at no oratorical display, remains strictly in the field of reason though by nature he must of course have leanings toward mysticism. He is followed breathlessly by the most critical of audiences, and you have the feeling that you are preparing in that room in company with a great teacher the future of the world. His tradition and the tradition of the place allows of no flights; he is obliged to show very quietly the weakness of 71

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the intellectualist position, that is, the basis of action of our Western world from the time of Aristotle until today. His position is that we can obtain a wider knowledge by our feeling than by our reason, that intellectual knowledge and science serve only for action, and that they only deal with that which is lifeless or is treated as if it were without life. To understand life itself we must refer to the data of our feelings and trust our intuitions. He puts reason, science, the concept on a lower plane, and feeling, art and the intuition on the higher plane;76 they are the instruments of life, the spirit, while geometry, logic, matter, space, reason come into existence with the intelligence which is only derived from the feeling for the purposes of action [. . .] His method is to show the errors of previous thinkers of which his books have abundantly persuaded us. What I want is the direction for the future, though that is not hard to imagine. He said that it had been remembered that such a philosophy as his approaches art. He accepted the criticism, but said he would rather say that art (meaning artistic expression) is philosophy. ‘Art is philosophy’ – Prichard’s description resonates with today’s inter­ locutors, particularly John Ó Maoilearca whose writing on Bergson and 72

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Laruelle’s art-philosophy or philosophy-art acts to ‘change us and our ways of seeing, but not by showing us anything directly’.77 Bergsonian philosophy-art licences suggestion, the glimpse caught in intuition, abstraction. Art Writing Philosophy Fry’s Post-Impressionism sought to change our view of the world. In Clive Bell’s introduction to the ‘English Group’, Post-Impressionism was a ‘spiritual revolution which proclaims art a religion’.78 Against the secularised culture of modernity and its daily banalities, Fry concurred: Post-Impressionism ‘express[es] by pictorial and plastic form certain spiritual experiences’.79 In Grant’s Head of Eve (1913) (Figure 2.1), he had a work that fulfilled the criteria for a new idol of worship, nominally Eve, but manifestly a symbol of a new culture of Art. In a similar vein, Watney has read Grant’s concept for his destroyed work, Adam and Eve, 1913, to be the ‘originating parents of a new Edenic world of Post-Impressionist art in England’.80 This art was a mediator, not to be revered for its own sake. It was indeed not art, but life: an authentic life in juxtaposition to the mundane that usurped the ‘real’ meaning of that term.81 To this extent, Fry’s art criticism was not really concerned with art at all, instead, art was the means, the voice by which he could reach a larger audience to instigate philosophical discussion. In his personal activity, Fry had always been keen to separate his own painting from his criticism. Art writing became the preferred genre for the continuation of topics of debate that stemmed from his Apostle days, as a member of that elite group which included so many of the soon to be eminent philosophers of his generation. Fry’s realisation of the potential of art writing as a suitable medium for a new philosophy chimes with Prichard. Under the tutelage of Bergson, Prichard came to regard art as a ‘voice’ for, or equivalent to, philosophy in action. 73

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Figure 2.1  Duncan Grant, Head of Eve, 1913 ©Tate London 2022; estate of Duncan Grant. All rights reserved, DACS 2022

The organisation of philosophy in action is what we call Religion. The aim of our study then is in the direction of Religion, as the culminating point of effort, or rather as the disinterested vigil and pilot of Life and Art, – of life, in fore-seeing its direction and promulgating its values, – of Art, for Art’s ends. It was for religions that the arts were developed and only through religion can they be re-established.82

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As early as 1899, Fry had discovered what was to become a lifelong concern: ‘What makes ART so dangerous, I think, is that it has got separated from religion and life; by religion it could hang on to life, without it, it can’t, and so one has to make it a religion by itself, to the great detriment of both or rather all three.’83 Compare Prichard: It can only be by the appearance of a new religion drawn in sustenance from a new spring that Life and Art can be helped out of the maze in which the world has lost itself at present [. . .] It is my belief that at the present moment there is a vast movement of life toward a new religion, and modern philosophers have a new religion as their aim [. . .] My aim is resolutely creative and always has been.84 Of Quaker origin, and like the majority of his Cambridge milieu doubting if not agnostic, Fry could have found Prichard’s religious zeal dubious. But Prichard was clear as to the distinction of Bergson’s work and the Catholic revival he witnessed. ‘There is a general waking up here in favour of religion’, Prichard recorded of his time in Paris, and, as religion is synonymous for a Frenchman with Catholicism, in favour of Catholicism, although its dogmas are more and more widely discounted; a curious result, is it not of Bergson’s work, for his position can never be reconciled with Christian creeds . . . Very few people seem 75

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to think that there is the possibility of a new religion, though Bergson is well aware of the [. . .] deep tendency toward one and the necessity of its creation.85 It would be many years before Bergson published The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). Meanwhile, art-philosophy changed perception, and by attending to life, found its purpose – a metaphorical point for belief. Fry’s Post-Impressionism was the visual expression of this purpose, the spirituality of its description synchronous with Prichard’s Bergson. Bathing with the Byzantines See with the Byzantines and the Post-Impressionists as the soul sees [. . .] with the vision of feeling.86 Simultaneous to his study of Bergson, Prichard turned to the art of Byzantium.87 The recognition of the spiritual quality of Byzantine art became a pretext and a liberating inspiration. In the place of secular civilisation, Prichard found in Byzantine art the inspiration for his attempt to rejuvenate a sense of spiritual presence in his own time. The compact synthesis of religious life expressed through art in Byzantium offered a model even for Bell.88 Consequently British Post-Impressionism had a temporary stylistic trans­ formation, led by Duncan Grant’s Bathing (1911), part of a commission for seven murals for the new Borough Polytechnic at Elephant and Castle on the theme of the amusements of London.89 Fry used the commission to exercise his new Byzantine enthusiasm, requesting his artists to use a ‘technique of 76

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graduating colour tones to a dark contour to increase the rhythm of design – as in Byzantine mosaics’.90 The shift makes sense in the context of Prichard’s study in Ravenna in September–October 1907 (a site Fry had previously dismissed).91 Fry had coincided with Prichard in Venice that September. The following Spring he introduced Cézanne and Gauguin to the readers of The Burlington as ‘proto-Byzantines’.92 Picking up the theme, Grant wrote ‘mosaicing is the only thing to be done’.93 As J. B. Bullen has identified, the term ‘Byzantine’ was relatively new. Only in the 1890s did it cease to connote any style neither Gothic nor classical.94 Prichard added a new dimension that sealed the manner in which Fry came to view periodisation: ‘Byzantine art is a misnomer for it takes its name from a place and belongs to a period, or rather to a point of view.’95 Style is symbolic of wider cultural ideas – a point of view – which could resurface. Already finding a ‘reawakening of the same spirit in French painters to day’, Prichard pointed particularly to Matisse, whom he considered a ‘Byzantine’ painter.96 For his part, Fry considered Matisse to be ‘Assyrian’, noting the ‘perfect equilibrium of motion’ in La Danse.97 Both Prichard and Fry emphasised the rhythmical and symbolic character of Matisse’s canvas. As Christopher Green has argued, ‘both temporally – across history – and spatially – across geographical boundaries – Fry’s rhetoric was much more of cultural conjunction’.98 Whilst Grant’s Bathing (Figure 2.2) lacks the translucency of mosaic, in both style and tone his source is unmistakable. Both Shone and Reed emphasise Grant’s visit to the twelfth-century Sicilian mosaics at Monreale and Palermo immediately before he painted Bathing in spring 1911.99 Unlike the naturalism of the sixth-century mosaics at Ravenna, those at Monreale are distinguished by hieratic abstraction whereby contorted quasi three-­ dimensional figures are set against two-dimensional backgrounds. In the 77

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light of Prichard’s account of Ravenna’s ‘grotesque [. . .] 5th Avenue attitude in the 5th century A.D’, it was clearly crucial for the Borough commission to take their inspiration only from certain examples.100 Grant’s dynamic and rhythmical handling of the lake follows the depictions of water at Monreale, the coracle shaped boat in St Peter Submerged referenced through tilting the Serpentine rowing boat. As Shone argues, the physiognomy of Grant’s bather, particularly the chest and ribs, bears striking resemblance to Adam and Eve at Monreale.101 The resemblance is also found in the central figure of Matisse’s final version of La Danse, 1910, where the definition of her stomach echoes the twelfth-century figures. Both Matisse and Grant play with the dark russet outline of mosaic. Matisse particularly adopts a mahogany tone for La Danse II as opposed to the muted brown of La Danse I. Grant, in keeping with Matisse’s earlier example, uses a more earthy brown tinged with blue, blue used for Eve’s torso at Monreale. Grant instils a double quotation, simultaneously contemporary and historical, fulfilling Fry’s vision for a new manner of depiction in Britain.102 Grant’s multiple quotation de-contextualises his image. The bather’s lack of facial features renders him an anonymous symbol, a generic type both everyman in the Serpentine and the sensory ideal to which we should aspire. Just as Matisse’s dancers engrossed in their activity exude an infectious uplifting freedom and vitality so too can Grant’s bather instigate, in Christopher Reed’s words, a ‘self-conscious return to sensual, primal pleasures’.103 Bathing should be seen in the context of late Victorian radicalism, which saw athleticism both as an indication of the well-being of the British ‘race’, and, according to Reed, as ‘a way beyond the restrictive morality of the bourg­eoisie’.104 The southern Mediterranean symbolised liberation, ‘an antidote to what ailed Britain aesthetically, socially, and sexually’.105 By regaining immed­iacy unfettered by social convention man could come full circle in the 78

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Figure 2.2  Duncan Grant, Bathing, 1911. Photo © Tate London 2022 9781474492386 Bergson in Britain (248b) final pass updated.indd 79

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knowledge of his condition. For Prichard, this return to self-knowledge was the wider implication of Byzantine regeneration. Ingrained in Bathing’s structure is both a critique of the present and a utopian aspiration; a social diagnosis with a personal layer of significance for Grant as homosexual at a time this was illegal. On one level Bathing presents the restrictive and dissonant existence of modern man. The high horizon and rhythmic linearity of the waves confound the strong contrasting diagonals that would otherwise lead the eye into spatial recession. By flattening the surface, the Serpentine is metaphorically a site of restriction, apart from the life to which the city people populating it are adapted. The contorted flailing figure struggling through the waves is out of place, the action directed towards the boat, a refuge from hostile surroundings. Man-made but tilted by the weight of man, this boat warns against modern over-civilisation. But if this is a negative judgement of contemporary society, then it is countered by the evocation of a Byzantine ideal. That this ideal was based in feeling was noticed by The Times. Bathing conveyed the ‘extraordinary keen sense of pleasure’ in the ‘act of swimming’.106 Highlighting action and process, the reviewer is in tune with Fry’s art writing, advocating art’s ‘power of expression’.107 As Denis said of Cézanne, art could offer a ‘transposition [. . .] of sensation received’, enabling the authenticity of emotional and physical experience to be gained by a viewer before the work.108 Bathing distils much of this complex lived experience. Curiously, Bergson used the example of swimming to explain the flash of insight in intuition, the realisation of something already given: ‘If we had never seen a man swim, we might say that swimming is an impossible thing, inasmuch as, to learn to swim, we must begin by holding ourselves up in the water and, consequently, already know how to swim.’109 In the same way, this art makes visible what we already know or sense, but 80

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could not necessarily articulate without the work to guide us: it shows us the invisible. Bathing sought to suggest the invisible not only of thought or feeling, but of movement. Watney recalled Grant saying he intended the mural to be understood as the ‘development of [. . .] one figure in continuous movement’.110 Possibly harder to follow through the figures in the water, this could certainly be true of the two on the diving platform, where the arms of the figure on the far right meld into the muscular mass of the back of the diving man immediately in front. Bathing asked the viewer to recreate this process of movement imaginatively. Grant demonstrated his interest in portraying a serial present, alerting the viewer to a temporal experience of visuality, but here all is already given, the viewer’s present also a fixat­ ion of the past moment of the painting’s creation.111 He overcame this with Abstract Kinetic Scroll (Figure 2.3), where the event is played out in real time. Amongst a complex synthesis of allusions, it is possible to draw out a coherent and developing agenda from Grant’s work. Bathing synthesised histories and ideologies to contextualise present and future in relation to an idealised past culture that was more immediate in response to its images, yet religiously speaking, more esoteric. Simultaneously, the painting, and the commission as a whole reached manifesto proportions in eschewing new creative force, and a new manner of expression that through empathy would catapult Britain into a programme of social regeneration. Head of Eve and Adam and Eve gave a metaphor for a changed perception, Bathing gave the physical sensation of that perception, and Abstract Kinetic Scroll gave the method.

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Embodying Experience: Grant’s Scroll Grant questioned what the material of an artwork might reveal through the first known attempt at mechanised painting, Abstract Kinetic Collage with Sound, 1914, often known as Abstract Kinetic Scroll (Figure 2.3). As it was conceived, the Scroll addressed central questions concerning the nature of perception at the advent of early cinema, the possibility and extent of temporality in painting, and the role of perspective in directing the viewers’ attention. These three concerns formed the ground-breaking debates of 1911–14 in European painting, foremost in the critical framework of Fry and Bergson. Grant’s Scroll is provocative for the way it masters and animates these themes, rehearsing the Bergsonian challenge to cinema whilst offering support to Deleuze’s criticism of it. Thinking of the Scroll in this way forced me to reassess art historical methodology, to work creatively with its components to visualise the effects Grant wanted to achieve. In writing the Scroll back to its intended being, the text below traces my process, offering the pitfalls into which it was so easy to fall along with their benefits. It

Figure 2.3  Duncan Grant, Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound, 1914 ©Tate London 2022; estate of Duncan Grant. All rights reserved, DACS 2022 82

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assesses the methodological scope of virtual and multiple: appropriate enough for a work that until the last three years of the artist’s life, remained an incomplete ideal. ~ Grant himself was self-deprecating. When in 1919 André Derain complemented his work, his response in a letter to Vanessa Bell was elusive. ‘With my gifts I ought to attack “des grandes problèmes” ’ he recorded, concluding lamely ‘but I don’t really understand what he means’.112 Despite being a great friend and confidant of Fry and the Bells, Grant kept himself consciously apart from published and publishable theoretical discussion. No review seems to have elicited a response, defensive or otherwise, and it was exceedingly rare for him to write at all – when he eventually did, it was an introduction of his past tutor Simon Bussy’s work.113 Despite this, anecdote shows a degree of knowledge of Bergson was unavoidable. Through an introduction from Bussy, Grant studied at Jacques-Émile Blanche’s La Palette from January 1906 to autumn 1907.114 A fashionable portraitist, Blanche was hardly avant-garde,

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although he painted Bergson’s portrait in 1908.115 Throughout Grant’s time at La Palette the majority of his links were to the insular British artistic community, including William Forrestier, Constance Lloyd, Helen and Boris Anrep, Henry Lamb, and Dorelia John. Outside the confines of art school his acquaintances ranged more widely. His unpublished memoir mentions morning coffee with Wyndham Lewis at Le Café de Dome,116 and he was friendly with Rodin’s muse Gwen John who was integrated in French art circles. In 1909, Bussy introduced Grant to Matisse, signalling the start of his assimilation into the Parisian avant-garde. In 1913, he was again in Paris working for Jacques Copeau to produce set designs for a production of Twelfth Night. According to Frances Spalding, Grant met Karin Costelloe on this visit, whilst she was completing her thesis on Bergson. Costelloe invited him to a ‘tea party that included Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Charles Vildrac, Mme Bergson and her two daughters. Karin [. . .] warned Duncan in advance that one of Bergson’s daughters was deaf.’117 A social gathering may not be an auspicious environment for sustained intellectual debate. But whatever Grant may or may not have assimilated from this exposure, he could not remain oblivious to the pervading furore that Bergson’s work instigated amongst the avant-garde, and he was certainly ready to develop his work according to Fry’s aesthetic. In the final chapter of Creative Evolution Bergson distinguishes between the picture (like a jigsaw) that ‘is already created’, which ‘requires only a work of recomposing and rearranging’ and the work of art which brings to light ‘that unforeseeable nothing’ at its heart.118 Perception is a ‘perpetual oscil­ lation’ between repeated movements and ‘elementary changes’ which are grasped as entirely new.119 These movements and changes are the site of creativity and élan in the work, animated as the viewer’s perception traces these paths in the act of looking. Rather than regarding the static painting as a 84

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detachment from duration and as an actualisation of thought, we should regard it as a reaffirmation of immanent possibility. Grant’s mastery in Abstract Kinetic Scroll was to test these assumptions by animating the canvas. The Scroll is not a static, enframed – or encased – picture vulnerable to passers-by, but a dancing, moving stream of images that unfolds for those viewers sufficiently intrigued to study it. The aperture through which he intended it to be viewed might be regarded as another framing device, yet, crucially, it places the viewer where the artist wants him or her to be, at the mercy of the Scroll, not vice versa. By this small device, Grant instigated a radical shift in gallery experience, challenging his viewers to reflect upon the nature of looking at a work of art, and from where in the gallery one looks at it. The Scroll’s materiality is an immediate intervention against our dulled, overly categorical and representative perception, where, contrary to expectation, representation is not what is offered on the Scroll’s surface, but is rather our perception itself, orchestrated by the process of looking.120 The effect is to place us ‘at once into matter’, to awaken an attentive and fully participatory perception able to recognise pure presence. The Scroll functions as both thing and picture, demanding multi-perceptual assimilation to engage with the intangible limits of representation and identification. Conforming in its movement to Fry’s use of rhythm and mass, Scroll defines itself and its process of production through its mechanism. The artist’s ‘gesture’ is perpetuated, literally brought to the surface and recreated by the rise and fall of the passing rectangles. Quite obviously, it ‘communicates its movement’ to the viewer, whose own path through the gallery would be arrested for the duration of the Scroll’s sequence. Our own perceptual process is emphasised by the shifting object which demands that we follow that object’s duration with close attention. This is clearly not 85

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the realm of pragmatic life, but rather the ‘equivalent’ that Fry characterised as the Post-Impressionist grail. Watney has argued that in ‘exploring a purely pictorial territory of formal transformations’, Grant explored ‘movement within the pictorial space’.121 The work is ‘less a painting which moves, than an analysis of movement itself ’.122 Conservatively, Watney conceded that whilst ‘unwise to attempt to place Grant’s work from this period in relation to any single intellectual influence’, Grant’s interests in the Scroll ‘undoubtedly stand within the large framework of contemporary Bergsonian thought’.123 Richard Shone’s description of the Scroll moving testified to the sensory and perceptual effect that the work had as it was originally conceived: it gave the ‘impression of extraordinary harmony, of clear, subtle colour, with the restless calligraphy of contrasting, sometimes sharply, sometimes discreetly flowing, with each section of unerringly placed rectangles as they rise and fall in progression’.124 By creating a moving work, Grant found an easy way to convey the instability of flux and potentiality through actual change. Temporality in Painting and the Cinematic Challenge In certain Chinese paintings the length is so great that we only look at it in successive segments. As we unroll it at one end and roll it up at the other we traverse wide stretches of a country, tracing perhaps, all the vicissitudes of a river from its source to the sea, and yet, when this is well done, we have received a very keen impression of pictorial unity. 86

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Such a successive unity is of course familiar to us in literature and music, and it plays its part in the graphic arts. It depends upon the forms being presented to us in such a sequence that each successive element is felt to have a fundamental and harmonious relation to that which preceded it. I suggest that in looking at drawings our sense of pictorial unity is largely of this nature; we feel, if the drawing be a good one, that each modulation of the line as our eye passes along it gives order and variety to our sensations.125 It is clear from a letter from Vanessa Bell that Grant not only considered the Scroll to be inspired by the Far East, but that his central concern was to channel his viewer’s perception. This description marries well with Fry’s characterisation of Chinese scrolls in ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’ as being ‘perceptual’ not ‘emotional’. As Grant worked on the Scroll, Vanessa described ‘a long painting which is meant to be rolled up in the manner of those Chinese paintings and seen by degrees’, continuing, ‘it is entirely abstract’.126 It should not be surprising that the Scroll should sit in this context for it was topical in pre-war London. Fry’s great friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson had travelled extensively in China and wrote a book that parodied Western preconceptions of China through masquerading as a series of Letters from John Chinaman (1901). This was followed in 1911 by the influential publication The Flight of the Dragon: An Essay on the Theories and Practices of Art in China and Japan, Based on Original Sources, by the Keeper of Oriental Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, poet Laurence Binyon.127 The example 87

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of Chinese painting, and scrolls in particular, offered a particular means through which to address temporality in painting, unsettling the spatial preconceptions of Western viewers. It is no accident that Grant adopted the example, however the Scroll is no straightforward appropriation, mechanised as it is, as a material form of cinema. According to Deleuze, the cinematic properties of Chinese painting fascinated early filmmakers, including Sergei Eisenstein. Consequently, we may perceive Deleuze’s own writing on the painting of China and Japan is coloured with description similar to his discussion of film: Chinese and Japanese painting invoke two fundamental principles: on the one hand the primordial void and the breath of life which permeates all things in One, unites them in a whole, and transforms them according to the movement of a great circle or an organic spiral; on the other hand the median void and the skeleton, the articulation, the joints, the wrinkle or broken stroke which moves from one being to another by taking them at the summit of their presence, following a line of the universe. In the one case it is the union which counts, diastole and systole, but in the other it is rather the separation into autonomous events, all of which are decisive. In the one case the presence of things is in their ‘appearing’, but in the other presence itself lies in a ‘disappearing’. . . All the art of execution is in fragmentary notations and 88

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interruptions, although the aim is to achieve a total result.128 Grant’s Scroll enacts this appearing and disappearing, following the lines that both Fry and Deleuze emphasise as key to temporal art. But do we regard Grant’s Scroll as a whole, or as an animation of fragments? Grant subtly varied his technique. The collage introduced for the rectangles of the opening seven sections gives way first to a mixture of collage and paint, then for the last four sections paint alone, presumably effecting a recession or visual weakening towards the work’s close. The visual rhythm slows, allowing the viewer to wind down from acute attention to reflection. Or rather, we imagine it would, were the Scroll’s animation to be realised. The work remains latent and full of potential rather than one anyone can visit and experience, because even when on display, it is shown stretched out as a strip, static and pinned behind glass as a painting. I first shifted my analysis of the Scroll as a result of searching for a way to convey its radicalism in a lecture theatre. I needed to ‘perform’ the work as near as it was intended to be. However, the imperfect cut that I produced for this experiment merely highlighted the difficulties of recreating Grant’s vision. In seventeen sections, the Scroll’s ground alternates between rich marbling and stark calligraphic brush marks where the paint has not been washed to leach into the marble effect. Using a muted palette of six colours (smoke blue, sage green, forest green, russet, ochre, black), Grant has both collaged and painted rectangles to produce layered contrasts, which in movement, leap back and forth upon the plane in rhythmic pulsation.129 The scroll was to be wound on two spools, moving from right to left (after Chinese scrolls, and the direction of the cuts I made), and was to be viewed through an 11 by 14 inch aperture. In the Tate Gallery’s 1974 film realisation, the scroll 89

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took 4 minutes 18 seconds to unwind, the length of a performance of the slow movement of J. S. Bach’s First Brandenburg Concerto (BWV 1046) which Grant had chosen for the piece. Unfortunately the Tate film is currently unavailable, but in any event, and bizarrely (given their close attention to timing), the film is silent – so it is itself an incomplete realisation of Grant’s idea. The series of stills that I took were therefore the closest we could get to Grant’s work. But playing this sort of game has enormous pitfalls. For a start, I ‘contracted’ and ‘dilated’ the work, which as Bergson reminds us, is ‘to modify both the psychical evolution that fills it and the invention which is its goal’.130 Second, I chose to cut each slide to the leading edge of each new shape – justifiable perhaps for better marking the Scroll’s dynamism – but ignoring its seventeen sections. Third, I showed, as my accompanying illustration does, the scroll entire with its ragged bare canvas borders. Our vision is not restricted to the dimensions of Grant’s aperture; indeed, recreating the individual, private looking the aperture implies was impossible in a communal lecture theatre. Lastly, without becoming an expert in Photoshop or QuickTime, I could not replace the moving of the scroll by a series of slides. There was no continuity there, but a sequence of fragments. In short, the slides I made rehearsed the difficulties of the cinematographic method vigorously discussed by Bergson at the end of Creative Evolution. Throwing ‘instantaneous views on the screen [. . .] reconstitutes the mobility [. . .] with immobility set beside immobility’.131 According to his understanding of the working of human knowledge, ‘instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things’, the slides required that we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing 90

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reality [. . .] Our activity goes from an arrangement to a rearrangement, each time no doubt giving the kaleidoscope a new shake, but not interesting itself in the shake, and seeing only the new picture.132 The effect is that the ‘movement slips through the interval, because every attempt to reconstitute change out of states implies the absurd proposition, that movement is made of immobilities’.133 Returning to Deleuze, the slides exhibited his criticism of Hume’s empiricism as ‘a world of exteriority, a world in which thought itself exists in a fundamental relationship with the Outside, a world in which terms are veritable atoms and relations veritable external passages; a world in which the conjunction “and” dethrones the interiority of the verb “is”; a harlequin world of multicoloured patterns and non-totalizable fragments’.134 This may be labouring the point, but it is worthwhile given Fry’s (and Grant’s) knowledge of Bergson. Grant’s work is not blindly cinematographic. So what might we learn from my poor reconstruction? Viewed as a series of stills rather than sliding seamlessly one to the next, the movement of the Scroll through my slides appeared vertical not horizontal, effected in space not time. By choosing to cut to each new shape, the size of the slides was uneven, causing them to contract and expand; they breathed as a lung, reflecting the systolic/diastolic working of heartbeat.135 The cuts could not correspond to the even proport­ ions of a film strip and Grant’s medium ensures that we do not view these ‘photogrammes’ as negatives vitalised by light but consider the materiality (physical solidity) of paint and canvas. By unfolding the materiality of his surface, Grant forces our attention on it and it alone. He puts his method, tools, proposition on full view, concealing nothing, but giving little away. 91

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To this extent, the scroll gives expression to many of Deleuze’s contentions about painting. I could describe it as an ‘overflight’ or ‘line of flight’ that functions in the interval between possibility and actualisation. On an artistic plane of composition, the scroll renders a ‘block of sensations, a compound of percepts and affects’ where the absence of form marks ‘becoming-other’.136 Deleuze and Guattari divide the technical and material qualities of the artwork from its aesthetic affect. Yet, as they concede and Ronald Bogue has clarified, the distinction is false, for both are integrated in the expressivity of matter. This seems to be just Grant’s concern. Moreover, the movement of the scroll actualises – emphasises – the rhythm of painting, designs repeat, returning as musical leitmotif through a score. Rhythm (as movement) gives an in-between of two planes,137 and in Grant’s work, an in-between of two media. What would the scroll express, put to music? Splitting our perception simultaneously into visual and aural fields, the affect is perhaps, to adopt another metaphor from A Thousand Plateaus, of ‘milieu, each defined by a component, slid[ing] in relation to one another, over one another’.138 The refrain orders, contains and escapes. Grant seems to be contracting and extending time: is it such a leap from the so-called seventeen sections of the scroll to the eighteen frames per second of the cinema of his day? Is it accidental that the Adagio of Bach’s First Brandenberg Concerto could just fit within the time of one side of an early gramophone recording if carefully wound (3 minutes 40)? The work implies that one second is simultaneously one and multiple, that 3 minutes 40 can be over in a flash. Grant demands that we inhabit his work, following, to return to the thought of his day, Bergson’s demand in that final chapter of Creative Evolution: In order to advance with the moving reality, you must replace yourself within it. Install yourself 92

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within change, and you will grasp at once both change itself and the successive states in which it might at any instant be immobilized [. . .] A perpetuity of mobility is possible only if it is backed by an eternity of immutability, which it unwinds in a chain without beginning or end.139 My imperfect jigsaw of images regarded from without cannot create the inter­ nalised movement either of Grant’s aspiration for this radical work or the premises of immanence. As art historians we are ever translating a visual art into a written one. This transposition of one art to another – akin to Grant’s adaptation of Bach’s concerto – leaves open possibility, a multiplicity of potential interpretations any one of which might be condensed onto the page.140 Plurality in Painting and Multiple Memory Plurality is potentiality – resolution withheld – and following Bergson’s virtual, the opening out of a perceptual field beyond the infringements of self, an intuitive perception of ‘presence’ that draws nearer to matter than representation can.141 Plurality is expansion of thought, prior to intellectual selection for action. It is our unfamiliarity with this thinking that led Bergson to describe the path to intuition as necessitating a ‘reversal of the usual work of the intellect’, in other words, to think constructively from things to concepts.142 This has led Bergson scholar F. C. T. Moore to characterise the philosophy as ‘thinking backwards’, in its rebuttal of analysis.143 Matter and Memory inverted the prioritisation of mind over matter to effect an experiential metaphysics. Here, Bergson posited a tripartite theory of memory to account for the various ways in which sensory data were accumulated, stored 93

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and utilised. At the most basic is bodily habit memory, reliant upon cerebral mechanism.144 More complex is ‘learnt recollection’, the first form of ‘memory-­ image’.145 Summoned to inform and aid practical action, such recollections can never recur in their original state, but are continually distorted by additional experience. Lastly, pure unmediated virtual memory, a plurality of potential ‘memory-images’, that runs through all habit and recollected memory. Unhindered by necessity, it forms an unmediated index of every moment.146 Whilst every perception is stored in memory, there is a disjunction between image and experience: ‘to picture is not to remember’.147 As Bergson’s famous memory-cone distils (Figure 2.4), each return to past

Figure 2.4  Henri Bergson, memory cone, from ‘On the Survival of Images’, Matter and Memory, 1896 94

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Figure 2.5  Vanessa Bell, Studland Beach, 1912 © Estate of Vanessa Bell. All rights reserved, DACS 2022

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memories brings the particular inflection of the present. Memories layer, and as Virginia Woolf wrote ‘the accent falls differently from the old’.148 Vanessa Bell’s Studland Beach (1912, Figure 2.5) addresses this recurrence of memory. First taking rooms at Studland in Dorset in 1909, Vanessa returned in late August–September for the next three years, possibly also in 1912. Visited by Virginia Woolf, the Frys and the Stracheys, these beach holidays with small children evoked those of the Stephen/Duckworth family at St Ives until the premature death of their mother Julia. Studland Beach recalls cyclic life, freedom from daily responsibilities, and a strong connection to a specific place. The painting is simultaneously strikingly daring in its Post-Impressionist manner and peculiarly English in its associative subjectivity. During the painting process, Vanessa wrote to Fry with the wish to ‘enlarge upon my theories of composition in front of your paintings. They were very vague and confused when I did talk to you. Will you give me your lectures to read? I think they might be good for me and would also perhaps save me from telling you things you know already.’149 Along with the ‘Essay in Aesthetics’ these possibly included a short unpublished series in which Fry attempted to categorise works of art into his eponymous titles Epicurean, Dramatic, Lyric and Comedic.150 In Tickner’s biographical reading of Studland Beach, the seaside is a social escape, grounded in the history of seaside leisure in late nineteenth-century Europe. In the following text, written in an attempt at immanent art history, I counter it is not only social, but psychological.151 Re-Membering the Thing Vapour. Nothing was clear.152 Darkened images come forward into the full light,153 slipping obliquely sideways, hewn into the surface. 96

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‘Colour changes completely when one brings it out of the sun. One can’t get any composition’.154 ‘No, the marks are made, and you survey the thing like you would a sort of graph (diagramme). And you see within this graph the possibilities of all types of fact being planted’.155 For Deleuze, Francis Bacon instigates ‘matters of fact’, new relationships between figures which are neither idea nor object based: the intermediary ‘image’ of Matter and Memory.156 If the matter of fact is akin to the image, then it is the membrane between imagination, vision, belief and testimony – fact.157 Between, un-resolved, the matter is not yet decided, not moulded but potential gathering towards creation. Bacon’s graph visualises this process, hauling to the surface what most eyes ignore. This is why Deleuze writes that the ‘painter is already in the canvas’, that there is already ‘an entire order of equal and unequal probabilities on the canvas. And it is when the unequal probability becomes almost a certitude that I can begin to paint.’158 This is the ‘painting-before-painting’, both ‘invisible’ and ‘intense’ but the trace of which remains to be released by attention to ‘diagrammatic’ qualities: the ‘irrational, involuntary [. . .] nonillustrative, nonnarrative’ traits which signal the ‘emergence of another world’.159 Diagrammatic painting is a ‘properly pictorial experience’ that ‘unlock(s) dimensions of sensation’.160 In kaleidoscopic shift, a vast sweep of beach instigates the destabilisation of monumentality. Disfluent striated brushstrokes, symbolic forms which signal neither individuality of place, nor immediacy, nor sentiment. Studland Beach speaks of memory, cyclic life, freedom from daily responsibilities, and above all, a strong connection to a specific place that was visited and 97

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revisited for a number of years in the second decade of the twentieth century. Advising his reader to concentrate on the ‘sensation’ found in ‘obscure depths of consciousness’, Bergson suggests that the ‘complete image is there, but evanescent, a phantom that disappears’.161 Hence what intuition articulates is as indefinite as it is reassuring: the ‘real curve at the root of experience, stretching out into the darkness’.162 The curve of Studland Bay is a phantom held. While the scene will not quite slip from the canvas, it grasps a moment lost. In this sense, its generalisation is the conscious outcome of a plurality of specific memories, where disparate times are melded, condensed in a signification in which the past of St Ives is rewritten in Studland’s present.163 ‘Pervasively melancholic’, this beach is psychological escape.164 Triggering mental vortex in Bell, it is St Ives flooding to the surface to be transposed intensely into Studland’s canvas. Marjorie Strachey, an adult Virginia, fold into Duckworths, Mrs Stephen perhaps before the tent, standing as Piero della Francesca’s Madonna della Misericordia before her canopy: icon for aporia lifted, prescient guide for remaking the childhood of the Stephen-­ Bell-Fry children at her feet, unaware of unresolved yearning, of lingering ache.165 Not directly representative of either place or time, Bell achieves a Proustian quest for ‘things lost in one lifetime’,166 traced in ‘significant forms’, significant moments of being at rest amongst and counter to the humdrum everyday. In Lisa Tickner’s words, the ‘sensual physicality of the beach is subsumed into [. . .] a paradoxical refusal of what is seen’.167 Blinded by inner sight, here is a psychology of non-representation, where the ambiguity of this visual field is a private and introspective one. Raw memories of past times are reinstated with a veil of nostalgia it would be both impossible and impertinent to attempt to raise. But it is precisely this sense of the withheld together with the intuitive beneath-appearances language of Post-Impressionism 98

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which at once seals this work as a private narrative that is publicly the thing itself. Bell combines what Woolf so clearly cast as Fry’s understanding of the British aesthetic.168 Studland Beach is re-membering: connoting variously bodily sensation; the construction of physical space from its parts; dismemberment: both contextual, and physically and mentally fractural. In aesthetic terms, the disconnection from a particular event serves also to disengage thought from the need for practical action. Following this dismemberment of context there is a dismemberment of the object as it is ordinarily perceived. It may be grasped on its own terms, not with our action upon it in view. Richard Wollheim had a method of ‘seeing-in’ where one might simultaneously grasp the dominant characteristics of the thing itself whilst retaining the capacity to relate it to other known items.169 His terminology melds with Deleuzian-­ Bergsonian immanence, where diagrammatic painting ‘shows and thinks the between [. . .] moves between icon and symbol’.170 Diagrams are in-between, negating painting, operating in the interval driven amongst certitudes: the waiting, non-events of Between the Acts. Activity in Studland Beach is thrust to the periphery, riven to extremities of canvas: decentred limpet figures cling to the bottom-left, their place sustained by the edge, emphasising the floating struggle against the deflation of space amid the group opposite. Intuition is a ‘fringe’ reaching for the extremity of thought. At the perimeter, it encases imaginative depth barely held contained within it. Here intention leaks through the top-left corner, where two sets of diagonal lines sweep in un-meeting, the lower unsustained parallel trod to ground; the upper-most unresolved by its break mid-tent, melting object-sand-canvas turbulently eddying to the spoilt centre, grains of sand congealed and muddied by a hint of sea-sky blue beneath its transparency, awaiting a tide to sweep forward in renewal: to return to the pristine white of St Ives. 99

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Considering Studland Beach as line, Bell finds a ‘looseness and lightness’ of technique akin to Woolf’s own. Figures float, globular molecules of passing humanity, spectres that intervene but do not interrupt the driving diagonal across history. The canvas is both a narrative of every event – outside time; and no event – the impossibility of the scene as the imagined condensation of times, people and places. Negation is constructed by the frame, a quadrant thrown seemingly carelessly across memory, place, character to render another equivalent for life, held only for as long as the outline remains lying across its ill-chosen subject but ever ready to slip out of thought. Casting her canvas obliquely, Bell is constantly surprised, arresting both her attention and our own. Conclusion Vanessa’s plurality of virtual strands of development is mirrored in her sister’s short story ‘An Unwritten Novel’. The story is a novel confounded, as its author is duped into false narration, through which the novel literally un-writes itself when real life intervenes. Woolf’s concern here was not merely with a plurality of potential events, but with the question of representation. Mary Ann Gillies in her survey study of Bergson’s influence on contemporary British fiction, Henri Bergson and British Modernism, has highlighted Woolf ’s concern with representation as something that she shared with Bergson. Woolf ’s ‘particular preoccupation was with the issues of representation and the ways of dealing with the split between subject – the vital living aspects of the self or the artwork – and object – the static representation of the same things’. Woolf ’s intent was to ‘close the gap between subject and object’.171 Towards the end of Matter and Memory Bergson complained of the ‘impossibility of constituting either a psychology of memory or a metaphysic of 100

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matter’.172 Broadly speaking, his project was an attempt to establish both. His words draw attention to the deep-seated problem regarding subject and object in all forms of representation. For Louis Marin, as for Deleuze, W. J. T. Mitchell and Barbara Bolt among others, representation is firstly a process that entails creative becoming, a degree of performance on the part of both viewer and viewed.173 At the heart of this chapter has been the problem of subjectivity for the ‘authentication’ or ‘valorisation’ of a work of art. It questioned the extent of the objective world, and our knowledge of it. Woolf ’s writing, like Fry’s new art, is less about representation than its lack or evasion. In his ‘Introduction’ to the Oxford edition of The Mark on the Wall and other Short Fiction, David Bradshaw cites a contemporary review of Woolf ’s two short sketches ‘Monday or Tuesday’. These are ‘examples of the “unrepresentational” art which is creeping across from painting’, continuing in an unacknowledged rehearsal of vitalist, possibly Bergsonian themes, ‘suggest[ing . . .] life-full things’.174 In condemning the vagaries and limitations of the English weather, Vanessa mirrored Fry’s dissatisfaction, prompted in part by their shared visit to Turkey in April 1911. Woolf in her biography recalled that for Fry, the English light was ‘full of vapour. Nothing was clear. There was no structure in the hills, no meaning in the lines of landscape; all was smug, pretty and small.’175 England was hardly suitable material for Post-Impressionism. Against this geographical and metaphorical landscape, this chapter has demonstrated Bergson’s themes of perception, empiricism, memory and subjectivity to be dominant concerns of Bloomsbury. Before the works of Post-Impressionism, the viewer is challenged to recreate contexts and emotions which are not narratively described, forcing an interchange of viewer and viewed that is not an act of reading alone. Whilst my writing on Studland Beach found analogy with Deleuze’s perspective (that ‘this mixture 101

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is our experience itself, our representation’),176 the chapter demonstrates how Bloomsbury found these themes in Deleuze’s progenitor, Bergson. Post-­ Impressionist paintings give us a fuller image of our surroundings, reconnecting us with our environment. Painting becomes a reaffirmation of immanent possibility, of multiple referents beyond surface appearance. Memory, perception and intuition are at root similar consciousnesses for Bergson: dissociative, latent, uncontrollable and unarticulated traces prior to cognition, never un-conscious, always operating in the realm of possibility. As Clive Bell acknowledged, these fleeting intuitive moments can give an impression of lasting consequence: We come across some scene or object, a tree a field, a wall, a landscape, and suddenly, we find ourselves in that world to which great art transports us. The scene or object before us is charged with an extraordinary significance, we, ourselves, are filled with an unreasonable delight [. . .] For a moment the world has become a work of art: we see it as form: and behind form we catch a glimpse of reality.177

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3. New Spirits: Moina MacGregor Imagination (eidolon) means the faculty of building an Image. The imagination of the artist must lie in the power, which he possesses more or less in proportion to his sincerity, and his intuition, of perceiving forces in the Macrocosm, and allying or attuning himself thereto, his talents naturally and his artificial training permitting him to formulate images which shall express those forces.1 Concentrate your mind on the sensation, and you will feel that the complete image is there, but evanescent, a phantom that disappears.2 103

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Bergson’s study into the ‘obscure depths of consciousness’, Matter and Memory, has long been recognised as the book in which he comes closest to the contemporary culture of spiritualist investigation at the close of nineteenth century. These more challenging aspects of the text have reinvigorated colour when set beside the life and work of his remarkable sister Mina, later Moina Mathers, for a time his close neighbour in Paris. Mina’s London upbringing, study at the Slade from 1880–6, and centrality to British occultism, brings her brother into a very different domain of British life a generation earlier than the artist groups of my other chapters. In contrast to the reception studies of these chapters, here we catch glimpses of Bergson’s life and early work as seen through the eyes of Mina’s circle, seeking points of convergence in their thinking. The chapter draws comparison from contemporary psychological fiction and occult experimentation on both sides of the channel to consider the centrality of the ‘image’ in both Bergsonian disinterested perception and occultist investigation. ‘Psychical phosphorescence’3 That self-discovery, super-sensuous perception, psychology and psychiatry captured the imagination of the late nineteenth century is well documented. The major advances of Freud, Bergson and others constituted a leap that changed philosophy and created an entirely new medical research methodology and treatment – psychoanalysis. The spiritualist or occult sympathies of these fathers of academic, scientific disciplines is however less public precisely because of these affinities, and the potential damage their authors foresaw to their professional reputations and the reputation of psychology as a whole. It is for this reason we have Freud describing the occult as ‘the black tide of mud’, yet writing in a letter refusing co-editorship of an occult journal, 104

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‘If I had my life over again I should devote myself to psychical research rather than to psychoanalysis.’4 In concentrating on subjects of memory, intuition, collective consciousness and dream, Bergson clearly identified against mechanistic and positivist thought. For a brief period in the 1890s, he studied under Charcot at the Salpêtrière hospital, the home of psychological research in hypnotism and suggestion, and he remained a regular at Charcot’s (in-)famous Tuesday evenings. Bergson was a member of the 13 Club, meeting on the thirteenth of each month to discuss psychic subjects, and it is known he attended other experiments in hypnosis during this time.5 During the Mathers’ time in Paris, we know they held soirées where one could ‘find people attending them of nearly every shade of opinion and of profession; Isis worshipers, Alchemists, Protestants, Catholics, scientists, doctors, lawyers, painters, and men and women of letters, besides persons of rank’.6 It would be strange for Mina’s brother not to have attended at least occasionally, and Yeats recalled seeing him on one such occasion. Mina’s red-chalk portrait of their mother remains in the Bergson archive at the Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet. It is, however, the only trace of her there: Bergson’s instruction to destroy certain documents on his death plus Mina’s magic name ‘leave no trace’ or ‘I never retrace my steps’ continues to floor researchers seeking concrete connections in this area. Instead, Mina, with the celticised name ‘Moina’, appears through the Golden Dawn Flying Rolls and Minute Books, which she kept in her role as High Priestess of the Order and wife of its founder, Samuel MacGregor Mathers. Through comparison of statements on intuition, self-transformation and visions in these doc­uments and Bergson’s writing it is possible to reconstruct a greater congruity between the siblings’ work, possibly even a cross-pollination of ideas between them. 105

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John Ó Maoilearca has pioneered work on these philosophical similarities. Both subscribe to a philosophical spiritualism/mystical spiritualism, a pluralist approach, some form of hyperaesthesia, access to the absolute, and the importance of the past. Both are against reductive materialism, but offer a virtual/astral, immanentist vision.7 We should remember that Bergson in ‘The Soul and the Body’ (1912) described consciousness as ‘a kind of phosphorescence; it is like the luminous trail of the match we strike on the wall in the dark [. . .] a self-illumination, [it] begets strange optical illusions’.8 The work and aspiration of the Golden Dawn was self-transformation through insight. Yet more than the merely optical illusion, a Golden Dawn ‘vision’ could be multi-sensory. In ‘Skrying and Projection’, Mina described that ‘there are distinctly in these experiences, things heard, things felt, as well as things seen, which would prove that the qualities that we are here using are really the sublimated senses’.9 Whereas Bergson in Matter and Memory distinguished between affection (feeling) which is internal, and perception, which could be outside the body, or without feeling, Mina here suggested willed, virtual affection.10 For Bergson, whereas the image could survive bodily annihilation, feeling could not.11 The challenge of the limits of whole body sensation and virtual perception as modes of comprehension fascinated both siblings. Both experimented in thought and action to this end, and both used the example of artistic creation as a metaphor for psychic processes. As Guy de Maupaussant’s character in The Horla cried, ‘If only we had other organs that could work other miracles for us, how many things we could then discover.’12 I would like then to return us to the context of Paris c. 1886, in particular to The Horla, a short story by Maupassant widely read immediately it was published (1886).13 The story relates the experiences of a young man who finds himself possessed by an indescribable being which leads him to a cataclysmic 106

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end (no spoilers). In the course of this discovery, he attends a party where a hypnotist experiments on his sister: She was under the power of a strange will which had entered into her, like another soul, a parasitic and ruling soul. Is the world coming to an end?14 Crucially the narrator compares his own possession by the supernatural to the ‘scientific’ experiment conducted in the comfortable drawing-room. Maupassant’s fascination – and fear – of such events is all too clear, but the story is perhaps also one of the earliest analyses of the relation of the sub- or un-conscious and our perceiving senses in fiction: Everything that surrounds us, everything that we see without looking at it, everything that we touch without knowing it, everything that we handle without feeling it, everything that we meet without clearly distinguishing it, has a rapid, surprising, and inexplicable effect upon us and upon our organs, and through them on our ideas and on our being itself. How profound that mystery of the Invisible is! We cannot fathom it with our miserable senses: our eyes are unable to perceive what is either too small or too great, too near to or too far from us; we can see neither the inhabitants of a star nor of a drop of water; our ears deceive us, for they transmit to us the vibrations of the air in sonorous notes.15 107

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Maupassant’s understanding of the complexities and frustrations of sensory perception chimes with a scientific analysis in a report published by Bergson and Robinet, curiously also in 1886, their joint paper ‘De la simulation inconsciente dans l’état d›hypnotisme’.16 Here they describe how the hypnotised subject was able to ‘read’ text from a book reflected in the cornea of the hypno­tiser’s eye. From this discovery, Bergson elaborated his theory of hyp­eraesthesia, which found manifestations in all his subsequent major texts. In a lecture given at the École Normale Supérieure in 1898, Bergson turned his attention to the role of the body more largely, not only the eye but the neurological pathways that translate sensed perception: If we analyse in effect, the idea we have of our self, we find organic sensations emanate from the interior of a visceral body [. . .] because thought is interior word, we cannot represent to ourselves the muscular images we awake with their concomitant sensations. To summarise, in these sensations is the perception of our body. One can therefore say that at the base of our personality there is the representation of our body firstly exterior, but secondly interior, because the affective and general sensations are themselves organic.17 Questioning the extent of bodily versus out-of-body perception became a common theme amongst the occult, particularly the members of the Golden Dawn. The descriptions of astral travel for example, acknowledged that whatever the extraordinary other-worldly visions that are summoned, the ‘travel’ 108

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is an interior one, with events unfolding in an attuned mind alone. Flying Roll XI, ‘Clairvoyance’ described the process of transfer from ‘optic’ vision to interiorised ‘perception’, following the optical analysis of Bergson and Robinet: take the Symbol for Clairvoyance then, with the utmost concentration, gaze at it, comprehend it, formulate its meaning and relations. When the mind is steady upon it: close the eyes and continue the meditation, and let the conception still remain before you . . . as clearly as [it] appeared in material form to the outward seeing. Transfer the Vital effort from the optic nerve to the mental perception, or thought seeing as distinct from seeing with the eye; let one form of apprehension glide on with the other – produce the reality of the dream vision, by positive will in the waking state.18 Mina concurred in her Flying Roll XXXVI on ‘Skrying and Projection’, where she directed the initiate to ‘employ Intuition and Reason, firstly by permitting each thought-picture to impress itself on the brain in the manner comprehended generally by the word “inspiration”, followed by the reason applying its knowledge of correspondences’.19 How far was it between the macabre scenes of gothic fiction and the philosophical or psychological exploration of the role of mind, body and subconscious? In the case of Maupassant, his personal experience of mental ill health in his family (his mother, brother, and ultimately himself through contracting syphilis) led to a detailed knowledge of the advances 109

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in science which repeatedly find their way into his fiction. 20 In The Horla he referenced the medical school at Nancy which, under Dr Ambrose Liébeault, was at the forefront of research into hypnotism and its use in psychiatry.21 According to R. C. Grogin the late 1880s–1890s in France were characterised by a disenchantment with enlightenment science, parti­ cularly as discoveries in physics (atoms, sound waves) challenged mechanistic sureties. Grogin sites Bergson as one of the ‘spirit philosophers’ along with Émile Boutroux and Félix Ravaisson, who inspired – and arguably were inspired by – the emerging internationalist and inter­ disciplinary arts of Symbolism. As the Symbolist novelist, poet and critic Anatole France put it: Our contemporary literature oscillates between a brutal naturalism and an exalted mysticism. We have lost faith, and still wish to believe. We are overwhelmed by the depressing majesty of physical laws. We seek after mystery. We summon all the magic of the East; we throw ourselves whole-heartedly into psychical research, the last refuge of the marvellous.22 Bergson’s investigations prioritised experience over the ‘marvellous’ however, his sources included less orthodox subjects. For example he turned to a ‘contemporary English [sic] novelist’ Robert Louis Stevenson for his principal case study in his lecture on Dreams, given before the Institut psychologique, 26 March 1901, and published in the Revue scientifique of 8 June 1901.23 It is worth quoting him at length for it establishes his understanding of memory and psychic perception. 110

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In a very curious essay entitled ‘A Chapter on Dreams,’ this author [. . .] explains to us how the most original of his stories have been composed or at least sketched in dreams. But read the chapter carefully. You will see that at a certain time in his life Stevenson had come to be in an habitual psychical state where it was very hard for him to say whether he was sleeping or waking. That appears to me to be the truth. When the mind creates, I would say when it is capable of giving the effort of organization and synthesis which is necessary to triumph over a certain difficulty, to solve a problem, to produce a living work of the imagination, we are not really asleep, or at least that part of ourselves which labors is not the same as that which sleeps. We cannot say, then, that it is a dream. In sleep, properly speaking, in sleep which absorbs our whole personality, it is memories and only memories which weave the web of our dreams. But often we do not recognize them. They may be very old memories, forgotten during waking hours, drawn from the most obscure depths of our past; they may be, often are, memories of objects that we have perceived distractedly, almost unconsciously, while awake. Or they may be fragments of broken memories which have 111

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been picked up here and there and mingled by chance, composing an incoherent and unrecogniz­ able whole. Before these bizarre assemblages of images which present no plausible significance, our intelligence (which is far from surrendering the reasoning faculty during sleep, as has been asserted) seeks an explanation, tries to fill the lacunæ.24 Bergson’s relation of dream to memory is not unexpected given his 1896 Matter and Memory. He continued however in this lecture to outline his vision for future research into dreams, directly referencing the agnostic, scientific and profoundly sceptical Society for Psychical Research, and speaking of ‘telepathy’, not so far removed from his sister’s explorations on what she termed the ‘astral plane’. Visions accessed through a willed dreaming were regarded as enormously significant to the Golden Dawn. Florence Farr’s ‘consciously guided dream’ for example imagined entering a hyperstate of awareness whereby the insights of the dream world could be accessed and recalled to consciousness. Golden Dawn members related episodes of collective dreaming, whereby multiple consciousnesses could permeate one another to create shared experience. Moreover, they believed that this activity opened access to a universal ‘Great Memory’, which is echoed in Bergson’s ‘impersonal perception, which is at the very root of our knowledge of things’.25 The resonance in Bergson’s Matter and Memory rings out towards the end of the book, where he calls for philosophy to take on the ‘last enterprise’ remaining to it: ‘to seek experience at its source’ by ‘unmasking’ the relative nature of normal human perception which is geared towards daily events. Once we have 112

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placed ourselves at what we have called the turn of experience, when we have profited by the faint light which, illuminating the passage from the immediate to the useful, marks the dawn of our human experience, there still remains [. . .] the curve [of universal perception/intuition] stretching out into the darkness.26 In this passage, Bergson actively invited philosophy to explore the curve of pure intuition. It is no surprise then, that with a practical eye, the lecture on dreams concluded: It is upon this profound slumber that psychology ought to direct its efforts, not only to study the mechanism of unconscious memory, but to examine the more mysterious phenomena which are raised by ‘psychical research.’ I do not dare express an opinion upon phenomena of this class, but I cannot avoid attaching some importance to the observations gathered by so rigorous a method and with such indefatigable zeal by the Society for Psychical Research. If telepathy influences our dreams, it is quite likely that in this profound slumber it would have the greatest chance to manifest itself. But I repeat, I cannot express an opinion upon this point. I have gone forward with you as far as I can; I stop upon the threshold of the mystery.27 113

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Wrapped in qualification, Bergson’s statement is painfully cautious. Was this merely academic rigour, or was he acutely conscious of Golden Dawn reports of inter-conscious activity, and more particularly of the activities of his sister, albeit under her married name? Twelve years later, Bergson was ‘prouder than I can say’ to be elected President of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR).28 His address on survival through memory argued for a synthesis of the methods of reason and psychology, as outlined in Chapter 1. His emphasis on memory was in tune with Society research, notably the work of internationally reputed psychologist Frederick Myers, whose work on the ‘subliminal’ allowed for the widest scope of human perception, not limited to personal or individual consciousness. For all the SPR’s academic scepticism, it was a site of overlap for its own members and those of the Golden Dawn, for example in 1892 Oscar Wilde’s wife, the playwright Constance Lloyd. In 1914 past Golden Dawn members W. B. Yeats and Irish activist Maud Gonne were to travel to France to investigate reports of a bleed­ ing painting at the Sacred Heart at Mirabeau with SPR members Everard Fielding, and Bergson’s successor as President of the Society, F. C. S. Schiller.29 Psychic Vertigo In pure perception we are actually placed outside ourselves, we touch the reality of the object in an immediate intuition.30 To touch the reality of the spirit we must place ourselves at the point where an individual consciousness [. . .] escapes the law of necessity.31 114

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Memory is ‘the point of contact between consciousness and things, between the body and the spirit’.32 In Matter and Memory Bergson gives extended discussion to out-of-body experiences. The first two of these statements admit or seek for a disinterested perception, akin to the focused meditation techniques employed by the Golden Dawn. The last of these statements positions memory as the integer between matter and spirit, the channel for personal insight. As David Lapoujade has clarified, intuition takes us to the ‘limits of human experience’, entering into ‘contact with the other in us’.33 For the Golden Dawn, as Yeats was to write in his essay on ‘Magic’ (1901): ‘memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself ’.34 Yeats is a rich resource for retracing the steps of the Golden Dawn. Not only does he record collective dreaming, but experiences of collective consciousness, willed through magical work at the Mathers’ house Stent Lodge, in Forest Hill.35 Yeats described the process of evoking a vision of the past life of another participant in detail: Mathers held a wooden mace in his hand, and turning to a tablet of many-coloured squares, with a number on each of the squares, that stood near him on a chair, he repeated a form of words. Almost at once my imagination began to move of itself and to bring before me vivid images that, though never too vivid to be imagination, as I had always understood it, had yet a motion of their own, a life I could not change or shape.36 115

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For Yeats, these visions were proof of the supremacy of the imagination, of the power of many minds to become one . . . till they have become a single intense, unhesitating energy . . . all the minds gave a little, creating or revealing for a moment what I must call a supernatural artist.37 This was the active work of the Golden Dawn, accessed through coloured symbols and rituals informed by Mina’s visions, which enabled her to design the interior decoration of the temples, their rituals, and objects. None of the buildings survive but designs in the Minute Books of the Order do, as well as in the individual study books of members. Progression through the Golden Dawn’s orders was charted through the Cabalistic Tree of life, which identified additional knowledge at each grade. This symbolism informed everything the order did. The Minute Book for the Ahathöor Temple in Paris, for example, contains a page showing the relation of the tree of life to the design and making of a ritual cup. For the Golden Dawn, this symbolism combined ‘design, form and colour’, either as a drawing or ‘coloured diagram’ to aid meditation beyond the ‘dead level of materialism’ (Malkuth at the base of the tree of life).38 The passage towards Yesod, or foundation, was marked in vision by ‘a confusion of lights . . . and coloured rays of the Quesheth, the Rainbow of colours spread over the earth’.39 As John Ó Maoilearca has written, ‘the importance of imagery (“thought pictures”) to astral projection, astral clairvoyance or travelling in spirit vision is obvious. These images are fundamentally actual and specific in form’.40 Each subject for meditation in the ‘Rising of the Planes’ had allotted shapes and colours. Although there were ‘several scales of colour’, the Golden Dawn 116

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used only two: the King of the G. D., for Adeptus Minor; and the Queen, used for the Sephirotic colours of the Minitum Mundum diagram and almost the same as the colour scale of the ancient Hindu Tattva system (Figure 3.1).41 In the first, ‘Scarlet is Fire, Yellow is air, Blue is Water, Four dull colours are Earth and White is Spirit.’42 In the second, ‘Red is Fire, greyish White is Water, Golden Yellow is Earth, Blue (greenish) is Air, Violet Black is Akasha or Spirit.’43 Just as Impressionists and Pointillists were exploiting the vividness of complementary colours explained by the theory of Charles Henry, so too did the Golden Dawn recognise the ‘shine by contrast’ of these colour relations, recommending their use in ‘flashing tablets’, for here ‘the elemental forces manifest most readily, and most students can perceive their flashes of radiance . . . They attract and reflect the rays of light from the Akashic plane.’44 In the context of European art of the end of the nineteenth century, the Golden Dawn work seems out of time, bold, bright, simplified abstract forms that arrest our perception to unlock what Fry and Bell twenty years later would describe as ‘aesthetic emotion’: the use of bright colours engenders the recog­ nition of subsisting variety and stimulates that perception of the mind which energises through imagination, or the operation of images. A picture which to the cultured eye beautifully portrays a given subject, nevertheless appears to the savage a confused patchwork of streaks, – so the extended perceptions of a citizen of the Universe are not grasped by those whose thoughts dwell within the sphere of the personal life. 45 117

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Figure 3.1  W. B. Yeats, copy of the Golden Dawn Minutum Mundum © National Library of Ireland

As in Bergson’s – and Fry’s – theory, the ‘extension of our powers of perception so that we can perceive entities, events and forces upon the super-sensuous planes’ was made possible through ‘intuition’.46 The G. D. language of ‘planes’ is mirrored in Bergson’s: his ‘plane of action’ in Matter and Memory transposes to the G. D. ‘plane of matter’; his ‘plane of dream’ the G. D.’s ‘super-sensuous world’. 47 This has led John Ó Maoilearca to speculate that Bergson’s plane of pure perception ‘could be his version of astral projection’. 48 Bergson describes the double working of memory both towards ‘action’ and ‘the pure image’, or a memory arising without needing to be directed to ‘immediate response’ to present circumstance – what in G. D. words would be freed from the realm of matter. 49 The ‘infinite number of possible states of memory’, ‘mental dispositions’ or ‘tones’ in Bergson allows for infinite 118

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super-sensuous intuitive imagination. In An Introduction to Metaphysics Bergson contended that ‘when I replace myself in duration by an effort of intuition, I immediately perceive how it is unity, multiplicity [. . .] In this sense, an inner, absolute knowledge of the duration of the self is made possible.’50 In Lapoujade’s words ‘only intuition can bring me into contact with durations other than my own, because it reveals to me that I am not just inner duration but also élan vital, material movement, voluntary effort, or personal vocation, but only sympathy can propagate or project this alterity throughout the entire universe [. . .] The mind is not all [. . . but] the sympathizer with the whole.’51 For the G. D. this was not a self-oriented process but ontological, the possible states of ‘pure’ intuition unfettered by personal experience. Flying Roll XXVII described the seeking of intuitive perception as akin to a sense of tearing open, as a curtain is drawn aside and seeing the ‘within’ of the symbol before you . . . Losing sight of the symbol you see its inwardness, perceive things as in a mirror by Reflection.52 The tattva cards made and used by Golden Dawn members stimulated and directed this inward vision away from personal concerns to the elements earth, air, fire and water, and to their interconnectedness – the ‘truly spiritual regions of perception [. . .] attained by the process called Rising in the Planes’.53 Each Golden Dawn member made their own cards (or ‘tablets’) using the ‘colour symbolism’ of the four elements in the tattvas. Initiates were warned the process was ‘powerful Occult work [. . . It] exhausts the Vital force [. . .] and you will feel at first distinct exhaustion from the loss of akasha, which however is not lost but transferred to the symbol and there preserved.’54 The 119

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Figure 3.2  W. B. Yeats, tattva card, Akasa (Spirit egg), no date (c. 1890s) © National Library of Ireland

symbol became a repository and container for out-of-body experience, a physical object of the place ‘outside ourselves’ that Bergson required for intuitive perception (Figure 3.2). Yet, as the early experiments at Stent Lodge described by Yeats made clear, this Golden Dawn activity was by no means only a solitary endeavour. Yeats himself became fascinated by collective dreaming, experimenting with astral visits to Maude Gonne with whom he had a ‘spiritual marriage’ from 1898.55 Like so many of Yeats’ Golden Dawn connected experiences, this too appeared in fictional form, The Speckled Bird, where ‘He [Michael] sometimes thought 120

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that there must be some way by which two souls divided by many miles could separate themselves from the body and meet in some country of ideal beauty’.56 Further mirroring real life, the character of Maclagan (based on MacGregor Mathers) warned against such experiments: ‘He talked about their danger [. . .] and began to explain ideas for an aesthetic magic.’57 In an earlier version of the text, Michael visited an artist working in Celtic design and asked her to paint a ‘certain many-angled emblem’ to his description. Michael told her of his visions and of the intensity of their colours. Because there was no shadow and everything seemed made of flame, and because, though there was perfect order, there was no distance [. . .] one could imitate them with patterns such as hers, if only decorations were visionary, they could give these decorations the intensity of religion.58 Yeats’ tattva cards, as well as the objects made by other Golden Dawn members were made in the pursuit of this aspiration. Christian mystic Evelyn Underhill, herself a member of the G. D. from around 1904 and reader of Bergson, began her writing from the position of an expansive non-denominational mysticism, convinced of the crucial role of symbols and deeds as a means to ‘bridge the gap between the sensible and spiritual worlds’, in any religious experience.59 Echoing Bergson’s view that memory was the integer between matter and spirit, even in her late text Worship (1936) Underhill wrote in expansive terms: Particular things and images are accepted and used, as in some way representative of that 121

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which lies beyond all things and images; as carriers of a spiritual reality [. . .] The symbol, or significant image, is [. . .] a point where physical and metaphysical meet – a half way house, where the world of things and world of spirit unite, and produce a new thing possessed of sensible and supra-sensible reality.60 For Underhill as the Golden Dawn it was not merely the creation of objects but their use in ritual that inspired mystical vision. In 1907 we find her writing in an essay ‘The Defence of Magic’: All rituals and ceremonies, whatever explanations of their efficacy may be offered by their official apologists, have, and must have, as the rationale of their existence, a magical – i.e., a hypnotic – character; and all persons who are naturally drawn towards ceremonial religion are in this respect really devotees of Magic.61 She followed this in her 1911 book Mysticism where she writes ‘Sacraments, too, however simple their beginnings, always tend as they evolve, to assume upon the phenomenal plane a magical aspect.’62 Unusual though the Golden Dawn creations may be, they nonetheless drew from an ancient mystical or hermetic heritage that was far more conventionally accepted. Moreover, as Geraldine Beskin has observed, in understanding the power of images for the comprehension and communication of abstract ideas, Mina (and Annie Horniman in her theatre work) found a powerful – and very modernist – use of 122

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their Slade training.63 Is there etymological congruity between Magus – magician, or ‘seer’ and image, from the Latin imago – to form a likeness? In Flying Roll XXXVI, as quoted at the head of this chapter, Mina clearly thought so: Imagination (eidolon) means the faculty of building an Image. The imagination of the artist must lie in the power, which he possesses more or less in proportion to his sincerity, and his intuition, of perceiving forces in the Macrocosm, and allying or attuning himself thereto, his talents naturally and his artificial training permitting him to formulate images which shall express those forces.64 As Bergson put it in Matter and Memory, ‘images outrun perception on every side’.65 ‘A wild phantasmogoric dance’66 The vaults and objects of the Golden Dawn functioned as mediators to another plane brought to presence through rituals that stimulated disembodied or out-of-body perception, in Bergson’s terms, ‘the duration wherein we see ourselves acting’.67 According to Underhill, the ‘greatest creations’ of a religious attitude ‘are sacred dramas, in which the mystery of salvation is re-enacted and re-experienced by the worshipping group’.68 Moreover, she observed, ‘when man enters the world of worship, he enters a world which has many of the characteristics of an artistic creation’.69 Mina’s designs then, can be regarded as an elaborate form of performance art, but crucially one 123

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with a very particular intention. In a letter to Yeats, Mina was adamant that the creation of rituals was ‘a long and difficult business [. . .] Anything of the kind got up without the solid foundation of Truth we will not have anything to do with, and neither will you of course.’70 This is brought home by the recollections of those who experienced the Rites of Isis created by Mina and Mathers first for the highly secret Isis Cult they developed in Paris, later transposed to the Théâtre de Bodnière in Monmartre. For all his dedication to spiritual insight, Mathers was undoubtedly a theatrical and flamboyant personality. He wore full Highland dress in Paris, and despite his claim that he ‘he did not wish to compose rites as for the theatre’,71 Yeats recalled a ‘battered theatrical crown and ermine coat’ from his London lodgings.72 In Yeats’ fictionalised account of the Mathers’ Paris apartment then, theatre matches solemn ceremony: Beyond the folding-doors was an image of [Isis] made out of an Egyptian head carved out of wood and out of draperies which did not look at all very Egyptian. In front of the image was a little altar on which was a censer and a glass of wine and some flowers . . . She was dressed like an ancient Egyptian, and presently, at her turning towards the image and bowing very low, she began to dance. MacLagan murmured to Michael that it was an old Egyptian Fire dance, but Michael could not get out of his imagination that he had seen something very like it on the stage in London. She danced at first slowly, and then more and more rapidly, 124

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and Michael could see by her devout preoccupied eyes that she was full of emotion. ‘Well,’ he said to MacLagan, ‘you have married the pret­ tiest of them all. I always thought her the one really charming and beautiful person among those spiritualists and occultists of yours.’ While he was speaking, Mrs McLagan began to sing. It was a hymn in praise of Isis and as she sang it she moved hither and thither over the floor, weaving, Maclagan whispered, symbols in honour of the divinity; the old symbols he said, were made upon the temple floors by the feet of the dancers. When the dance was over the audience applauded and Maclagan pointed out to Michael [__] and said the cult of [Osiris] would shortly be the principal religion of everybody who was artistic, literally.73 The soirée nature of this gathering is captured by a French lady’s reaction ‘you did that so well my dear, you should be on the stage’.74 With the blessing of Isis, who appeared to Mina in a dream, the Mathers moved their Isis ritual to the stage in March 1899.75 As Dennis Denisoff has written, the public stage was an important place for gaining recognition, and one the G. D. had a long-standing connection to, even though they had not previously put their own rituals directly on it.76 In his article ‘Isis Worship in Paris: Conversation with the Hierophant Rameses and the High Priestess Anari’ published in The Humanitarian in 1900, Frederic Lees described the symbolism of their costumes and their aspiration for their religion to be 125

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taken as a ‘moral guide’. Mathers as Ramases wore a zodiacal belt, and ‘leopard skin, the spots of which symbolise stars in the world atmosphere, what the theosophists call the astral body . . . The whole idea of the dress of the priestess is that the life of matter is purified and ruled by the divine spirit of life from above.’77 (Figures 3.3

Figure 3.3  MacGregor Mathers as Rameses, c. 1897

and 3.4) After censing, and invoking the Goddess Isis, the ceremony at the Bodinière moved to a ‘dance of the four elements’, flowers, representing earth; mirror, water; hair, fire; and perfume, air. ‘Most of the ladies ­present in the fashionable Parisian audience brought offerings of flowers, whilst the gentlemen threw wheat on to the altar. The ceremony was artistic in the extreme.’ Lees

Figure 3.4  Mina as Isis, c. 1897

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goes on to describe Mina’s ‘very original’ art, made ‘of the world of the imagination’, demonstrated by the portrait of her husband as ‘magician adept’, which ‘hangs behind the dining-­room door’. Denisoff is right to interpret this article as an indication of the Golden Dawn ‘positioning of the occult ceremony in an actual theatre for a fashionable audience’.78 The Golden Dawn and occult in general, he writes, was ‘recognized as participating in a broader cultural and artistic development’.79 A year previously, the French journal L’Echo du Marveilleux had described a private ritual to dramatic effect. The author Gaucher recorded being blindfolded and taken in the back of a horse-drawn carriage through the streets of Paris by a silent driver before being led inside. ‘A large room decorated with garlands of flowers . . . roses, camelias, morning glory . . . wisteria (in November!).’80 Participants in coloured robes watched a ‘simple ceremony’ by a man and woman in white, with ‘saffron’ waistbands. Next, after offering flowers and incense, A heavy silence – frightening! – falls on the kneeling crowd, and slowly, as if the earth moved under its base, the statue descends bit by bit. As it passes by the priest, he quickly takes up the veil. Then he lets out a frightful cry which is met by a mournful howl from the kneeling people. The room blackens, lights extinguished. My eyes, accustomed to the darkness, can better distinguish the details of the huge statue. It’s 127

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the Egyptian god wearing a gigantic pschent [the Double Crown]. But how could this colossal statue, this inexplicable prodigy, be transported as far as here? Is it a trick, a disappointing show of painted cardboard? Or is it really the god himself, the art of ancient Egypt torn from the stone bowels of Luxor and Karnak; what mysterious force, what superhuman powers were able to make this great image answer the prayers of his new worshippers? I wonder whether I am the victim of an hallucination – or whether the phenomena are only clever tricks? Anything is possible. But then the skill of the architects of this fantastic scene itself touches on the unreal. One by one the attendants appear haloed by the changing light that seems to move around them in a formidable magnetic effluvium. Round and about, under the eyes of the god, the worshippers fall in ecstasy or catalepsy. Around me sighs, convulsive cries. Their bodies roll on the ground, in the darkness, in the anguish of dreadful nervous spasms. Others stand, straight, rigid, with bloodless faces, haggard eyes. The vision descends into a nightmare. The monstrous head [of the statue] oscillates in darkness, unleashing a dull, deep sound; the indescribable rhythmic motion seems to carry 128

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with it, around the statue, a fantastic array of superhuman beings. Confusedly, I see the hawk-headed god Horus, the muzzle of the jackal of Anubis, the face of the bull god Thor. All the monsters of ancient Egypt. I half-lose consciousness. And with that, the journalist is delivered back to his door at 2 a.m. There is much to enthral an art historian here: walking/moving statues, and overwhelming multi-sensory stimulation. If these effects were created by a troupe of actors, there’s no record. If it was mass hypnotism, it was clearly effective. The event recalls the myth of Pygmalion, in which the sculptor falls in love with his ivory woman, who springs to life on Aphrodite’s feast day.81 Critically the event is not described as theatre or art. Rather, in Denisoff ’s estimation, the ritual was a ‘trans-historical dissolution of selfhood into the universal will’.82 As Underhill spent her career exploring, art and religious ceremony were deeply entwined. For Mina’s part, she wrote to Yeats that she ‘had to abandon any idea of an independent career in that direction, to be kept busy not only with the techniques of magic itself but with the techniques of art in magic’s service’.83 Mina may have mostly stopped painting oil on canvas, but she did not stop creating. And in accordance with the beliefs of the Golden Dawn, she regarded her work in ritual as a means of manifesting a truer, more insightful consciousness in the individual, and by that individual, in society at large – the noblest endeavour possible in a lifetime. In this context, her writing and designs for the Golden Dawn rituals may be regarded as turning her artistic abilities to the creation of life, a life, following the aspirations of Hermeticism in Michael Steober’s words, to ‘contemplate and experience the underlying laws or essence of the universe in order to bring a spiritually 129

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reintegrating and regenerating power to the human soul. The Hermetic goal is spiritual refinement and transformation of the soul.’84 In her interview with Lees in the persona of High Priestess Anari, Mina explained the ‘force’ of the priestess is found in her ‘alliance with the sympathetic energies of Nature’. Continuing to explain nature in terms akin to her brother in Creative Evolution, she says nature is ‘an assemblage of thought clothed with matter and ideas which seek to materialise themselves’. This ‘eternal attraction’ of ideas and matter ‘is the secret of life’.85 Bergson, seven years later described how the ‘impetus of life [. . .] consists in a need of creation [. . .] it seizes upon this matter, which is necessity itself, and strives to introduce into it the largest possible amount of indetermination and liberty’.86 Bergson’s entire work was driven by the aspiration to ‘grasp the primordial intention of life, beyond the variety of living forms’ through access to the élan vital which allowed ‘the continuous whole of the vital to be grasped as mind or consciousness in the first place’. As Lapoujade continues, ‘thanks to sympathy, life becomes a subject for metaphysics (as spirit or consciousness)’.87 Both brother and sister spent their careers celebrating, questioning and exploring life. Flying Roll XXII, dated 8 October 1893 makes startlingly clear the parallel thought of the Golden Dawn to Bergson.88 Positing that ‘each unit or atom possesses Free Will in potentia’, the author wrote that ‘evolution is inherent in involution, that unfolding is implicit in involving’.89 Adopting the metaphor of centrifugal and centripetal movements, the conception mirrors the immanence of Bergson’s process, where becoming is made visible: In this image of a creative action which unmakes itself we have already a more exact representation of matter. In vital activity we see, then, that which subsists of the direct movement in the 130

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inverted movement, a reality which is making itself in a reality which is unmaking itself.90 Flying Roll XXII considered the ‘unfolding from within [. . . of] our Spiritual Sun or Centre of Life’, symbolised by a River of Life.91 In-volution, or a turning in, is the natural complement to e-volution, or shooting out. Both this text and Bergson use the metaphor of currents of energy to describe the inter­ relation of moving states being orchestrated by a vital impetus.92 In this context, the spiritualist undercurrent of Bergson’s Creative Evolution has intriguing resonance: ‘I do not present this centre as a thing’ Bergson wrote, but as a continuity of shooting out. God, thus defined, has nothing of the already made; He is unceasing life, action, freedom. Creation, so conceived is not a mystery; we experience it in ourselves when we act freely.93 Accordingly, in the Golden Dawn, the ‘the work of the Occultist is to render himself positive to his own astral nature by living as much as possible on the creative plane’.94 At the close of Matter and Memory Bergson writes of ‘planes of consciousness, that exist virtually with that existence which is proper to things of the spirit’.95 Are these so far from the planes of the Four Worlds, or Four Elements of Spirit, Soul, Mind and Instinct, so fundamental to the Golden Dawn enterprise?96 Although Yeats recalled Bergson calling in to the Mathers’ apartment, he also recalled Mathers’ complaint that ‘I have shown him all that my magic can do and I have no effect upon him.’97 Bergson had a copy of Annie Besant’s Bhagavad-Gite or Lard’d Song from 1906 in his library, but there is no 131

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indication that he read the Flying Rolls of his sister’s organisation – indeed he could not, unless he was initiated; nor is there any indication from his library that he was interested in any Egyptian culture, or occult texts of any kind. Yet the dates of Mina’s writings and activities and those of her companions are synchronous with Bergson’s own developing thought on consciousness, memory and vitalism. Bergson’s private archive was destroyed according to his wish, but it was said to include his own ‘private philosophy’. Could it have been related to his sister? As Alex Owen has intimated, perhaps the greatest separation between the academic register of philosophy and psychology in the 1890s and the occult was a matter of epistemology.98 Certainly as regarding consciousness of self, the parallels are striking: Golden Dawn members debated the importance of self-disciplined meditation versus practical or ritual activity, some preferring to regard the nature of astral travel as an ‘experiential metaphor’, whereby ‘other worldly realms’ were both ‘recognized to be a subjective emanation’ and ‘part of a hidden reality existing beyond but also in relationship with the inner world of the initiated self ’.99 In both occult circles and Bergson’s philosophy intuition was the key to self-realisation and world understanding; both to an extent supported a concept of animism, either in astral forces or Bergson’s notorious élan vital. For these reasons Owen has claimed the ‘metaphysical implications of occultism were promoted in the vitalism espoused by Henri Bergson’.100 In his presidential address to the Society for Psychical Research, Bergson complimented the group, ‘admir[ing] the courage which it has required, especially in the first years, to struggle against the prejudices of a great part of the scientific world, and to brave the mockery that strikes fear into the boldest breast’.101

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‘A bizarre assemblage of images’?102 It is easy to forget how radical an art school education for women was in the 1880s. In making this step aged only fifteen, Mina had already shown herself to be an independent, spirited character who was not afraid of judgement against the social conventions of her day. As Philip G. Hamerton wrote in Thoughts About Art (1862), ‘A feeble dilettantism in drawing seems to be considered essential to every young lady. But as Society requires that ladies should draw badly, so she carefully made it impossible that they should ever have a chance of drawing well.’ Serious art was deemed ‘unfeminine’.103 In attempting to reconstruct the experience of women at the Slade, founded a decade later (in 1871), and in spite of its revolutionary attitude to women students, evidence of these women’s works and lives is sparse. Since Nochlin’s discipline changing study ‘Why are there no women artists?’, and pioneering research by Deborah Cherry and Lisa Tickner, some of this history has been charted. Yet for all Cherry’s outstanding work on Anna Mary Howitt, Emily Ford or Jessie MacGregor, Bergson’s sister Mina, her fellow student flatmate Beatrice Offor and her best friend Annie Horniman do not feature at all. As contemporary Slade teacher Henry Tonks ruefully commented of his female students, ‘After the[ir] twenties the good work seems to stop. Possibly their powers have not really diminished, but marriage, children or some such interest has interfered.’104 And once they stop painting, or working in more available/ appropriate media such as book illustration (Kate Greenaway, Slade 1871), the trail runs cold. Yet women took the only two prizes at the Slade in its first year, 1872, and soon accounted for two-thirds of the number of students.105 The opening of a government art school that was open to women was life-changing. In contemporary artist-reviewer Charlotte Weeks’ words ‘ Here for the first time in England, indeed in Europe, a public Fine Art School was 133

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thrown open to male and female students on precisely the same terms, and giving both sexes equal opportunities.’106 In his inaugural lecture, Head of School Edward Poynter claimed ‘it is my desire that in all classes, except of course those of the study of the nude model, the male and female students should work together’.107 Even so, the UCL Calendar for 1871–2 reassured prospective students and their parents that: the buildings and their approaches have also been carefully designed in such a way as too make due provision for the admission of Ladies as Students of the Fine-Art-School. The structural arrangements will render it easy to keep the Ladies Classes quite distinct from the others, if it should be thought desirable to maintain such separation; and in any case, there will be entrances and other accommodation reserved for the exclusive use of the Ladies, for whom a female attendant will be provided.108 The Annual General Meeting Report for 1872 decided after discussion to permit women to compete for scholarships. Between 1872 and 1875 four women and four men were awarded the Slade Scholarship in Fine Art. In 1883–4, nine female students were awarded prizes for modelling and two male. Overall five scholarships and twenty-two prizes were taken by women between 1871–83. Even so, life drawing for women was from the ‘draped model’ until 1893, and the Slade staff was entirely male until 1928. So what was it actually like to study there, from a woman’s perspective? Student Mabel Collins [Keningale Cook] wrote on the teaching for Woman magazine in 1872: 134

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The mixed class is much the largest at present, numbering from thirty to forty. It is very hard-working and studious, and shows at last that it is quite possible for young men and women to work together from an almost nude model in perfect quiet and propriety [. . .] Male and female students will never find any difficulty in working together, because their aim is too high and their art too sacred for them to think of false proprieties [. . .] The responsibility of course lies principally with the ladies. If they work in earnest, looking neither to the right or to the left, they will never meet with annoyance, and will gradually form around them a pure, straightforward atmosphere.109 Poynter noted in his 1872 Annual Report that ‘not the slightest inconvenience has arisen from having classes composed of ladies and gentlemen, and the officers of the College are not aware that objections have ever been made by any of the students to this combined instruction’.110 Poynter also observed that students on the full time General Course were more serious than other courses. To the governing board and general public Poynter was outspoken in his progressive attitudes; more privately however he noted that some students have very mistaken ideas . . . and think that a master shd [sic] be always standing over them or be always in the school . . . such complaints are generally from young ladies.111 135

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Hungry for tuition, women recognised the precarious nature of their attendance (Cook’s ‘the responsibility of course lies principally with the ladies’), more critical of the quality of teaching, but also, as Tonks recalled, more pliable: women were ‘far better pupils than men because they will do what they are told, where men are inclined to doubt their teacher’.112 Importantly the form of the life classes at the Slade contrasted with other art school techniques. William Rothenstein recalled from the 1890s: We drew on Ingres paper with red or black Italian Chalk, an unsympathetic and rather greasy material [. . .] The use of bread or indiarubber was discouraged [. . .] at a time when everywhere else in England students were rubbing and tickling their paper with stump, chalk, charcoal and indiarubber.113 In the afternoon class, models moved position every thirty minutes, with the result that students produced rapid linear sketches in contrast to the delicate and lengthy techniques advocated elsewhere. Sidney Colvin, then director of the British Museum considered the teaching at the Slade School ‘contrasts very favourably with that at most others for severity and thoroughness of method’.114 The Slade course was certainly not an easy option. Instead in Hillary Taylor’s words it promoted individual facility and style against academic convention and recognized the need for new kinds of exhibiting bodies, and a vigorous – if not quite uninhibited – approach to 136

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subject matter and execution. It was adventurous, clamorous, stimulating.115 It was clearly going to be a certain character that would be attracted to it, and would most certainly be changed by it. Even the art schools in Paris maintained segregation of the sexes in their studios, expecting women only to sign on for half-day tuition.116 Mapping the Slade environment of Mina’s time is helpful in understanding her personality and life choices, and it was a place where she excelled. Mina was recipient of a scholarship in 1883 and four merit certificates for her drawing at the Slade, 1880–6.117 It was at the Slade that she met Annie Horniman, and through her that Annie joined the Golden Dawn. Prior to her marriage Mina shared a flat at 17 Fitzroy Street with fellow student Beatrice Offor from 1886, a venue for many of the earliest experiments of the Golden Dawn.118 Beatrice seems not to have followed her friends in initiation to the Order; however, she was equally unconventional for her day, defying her Baptist family in her marriage, which, worse, took place when she was already pregnant. Her husband William Littler however was admitted to Banstead Asylum on 19 November 1895 as ‘Said to have been hypnotised and to have been studying spiritualism recently.’119 Meanwhile Beatrice’s paintings betray an interest in esoteric themes. Said to have used her sisters as models, The Crystal Gazer has a definite likeness to Mina in an early photograph. Beatrice’s figures, such as The Crystal Gazer, Circe (the Goddess of magic or enchantress) and A Melody, wear laurel or ivy wreathes, loose gowns and robes, and are often accompanied by smoking censers or shadowy figures of inspir­ ation.120 Destiny (1894, Figure 3.5) shows a woman whose piercing gaze meets us from beneath a veil, holding a spool of wool wound like the traditional swaddling of a baby. Behind, we see a shadowy procession led by a man with 137

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Figure 3.5  Beatrice Offor, Destiny, 1894 © Bruce Castle Museum (Haringey Archive and Museum Service)

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sceptre, or maybe wand, cruciform orb, crown and long deep russet robes; his profile not dissimilar to MacGregor Mathers as portrayed by Mina in his Golden Dawn costume.121 The Love Potion shows a loose robed young woman wearing the serpent eternity bracelet of The Crystal Gazer (Figure 3.6), holding a smoking bowl in which some liquid from a small copper jug has been poured, with a roll of parchment beside her.122 A whorl of ether behind her obscures a shadowy frieze beneath the wainscoting, and her arm rests on a leopard skin – the ‘spots of which symbolise stars in the world atmosphere, what the theosophists call the astral body’ as we learnt from Frederic Lees’ interview with the High Priestess Anari. In the frieze, might there be the head of Anubis, Egyptian god of the underworld, or his brother Wepwaret, whose name translates as ‘opener of the ways’? This undated group of paintings at Bruce Castle Museum is unlike the far more conventional commissioned

Figure 3.6  Beatrice Offor, The Love Potion, n.d.? 1890s © Bruce Castle Museum (Haringey Archive and Museum Service) 139

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‘Offor heads [. . .] known the world over’ that were the subject of exhibitions at the Royal Academy, and favourable reviews.123 This contrast suggests they were completed from personal interest, rather than with a patron in mind. It is hard to know what Beatrice thought of her friend Mina’s extraordinary path, and how closely they remained in contact after her husband’s tragic death. With no certainty of dates for these Bruce Castle paintings it is hard to know if they represent the time of her close friendship with Mina, or whether they suggest a lifelong curiosity in occult subjects. Nor can I be sure if these paintings indicate allegiance to these ideas or ambiguity. In Girl and Witch, the warm rosy light and contented face focused in the far distance tell one thing, her threadbare clothes a life of material hardship, which indeed Mina endured. Destiny shows utter conviction, but its sombre colours do not hold great promise. This ambiguous quality is fascinating in Beatrice’s work as, so far as we know, she watched the occult revival as an outsider who had privileged access to its central figures. In the face of the dramatic scenes of Isis worship related by Gaucher, the visual work that survives by Mina feels terribly demure. In part this could be due to the restrictions Figure 3.7  Mina Mathers, Book of the Sacred in art school relating to drawing Magic of Abremalin the Mage, 1897 from the life model that were in 140

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place during her time at the Slade. Like her fellow Slade student Anna Howitt, Mina reportedly – and unsurprisingly – made spirit drawings, for example her illustration for Mather’s 1897 Book of the Sacred Magic of Abremalin the Mage, about which Mathers told his publisher that the casket presented by the head of the lower triangle was drawn ‘by no mortal hand’124 (Figure 3.7). In 1898 she translated William Sharp/Fiona McLeod’s Ulad into French, offering illustrations which again betray an art nouveau sinuous linearity and decorative flatness – qualities that were encouraged by the rapid poses of the Slade’s life room. Mina wrote to Yeats how stimulated she was by the ‘strangely psychic’ Sharp’s visit, leading her to redo Connla, ‘the maiden on Usna, as well as some other designs of a Celtic nature’,125 one at least of which became the frontispiece to the published ‘La Tristesse d’Ulad’.126 The letter is one of the rare moments where Mina discussed her art: ‘most are unfinished at present on account of the many distractions in other directions – I am praying for a day when I can really concentrate on some art work. It is terrible to have to do such, simply in odd moments.’127 With her Slade training behind her, it would have been hard for an independent young woman to fall to the life of social convention that the 1890s expected. Even if these pioneering graduates did not maintain a career as professional painters, which was almost impossible with the exhibiting regulations and bias against women by commercial sellers, galleries and the press, many of these women forged notable careers in other domains. Most commonly we find Slade students such as Emily Ford and Mabel Cook pushing the boundaries of women’s rights, Anna Howitt becoming a noted medium working with Madame Blavatsky, or Ford again joining the SPR. The common thread for these careers is suffragettism (in its broadest sense) and spiritualism. In this context, the Golden Dawn, like the Slade, offered 141

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equality for women at a time when this was scarce. Prior to its foundation Mathers was unusual in his support for Dr Anna Kingsford’s campaign for women’s rights.128 Mina, taking the celticised name Moina on her marriage, became High Priestess of the Order, the first initiate into the higher, second order, and a noted clairvoyant. The order’s first Temple Isis-Urania (London, 1888) took its name from two goddesses, Isis, the goddess of life, motherhood and magic, and Urania, goddess of universal love, muse of astronomy. The inspiration and direction for the Golden Dawn was powerfully female, reinforced by first Annie then actress Florence Farr taking the lead of the London temple on the Mathers’ move to Paris in 1891–2, where they remained until Samuel’s death in 1918. Art school of any kind clearly attracted forthright, active young women who fought for their education and equality in society. The Golden Dawn, like the Slade, was a space of equality of gender where talent alone dictated prizes or promotion through the orders. Participants shared a conviction in the processual development of selfhood and a desire to use it for social good. In both, images and their production were the foundation of teaching. As Ó Maoilearca has crystalised, Mina regarded the imagination of the artist as ‘central to this occult practice – not the “practitioner” nor the “adept” but the “artist”. Art then was surely fundamental to what she believed she was doing.’129 Could Mina and Annie have found their way to the Golden Dawn without the Slade? Probably, although their roles would have been very different without their visual training. Could the Golden Dawn have been so influential without these artists to realise its abstract thought visually? This is much more unlikely. Ó Maoilearca again: ‘If their art was an avant garde aesthetic, it took the term literally, seeing ahead what had come before: a continuity (truth) that is heterogeneous (beautiful truth).’130

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Re-tracing Steps In re-tracing Mina’s steps, trace itself becomes an appropriate metaphor for the elusive nature of the evidence. A trace is but a weak imprint, a shadow of the original transferred to a new place, time or context. Comparative analysis of Mina and Henri’s thinking on consciousness, memory, perception and life is a rewarding substitution for definite facts; their similarities are arresting and suggest a greater interchange of ideas than the scant documents can prove. In the spirit of both siblings, from evidence to insight requires an imaginative leap; a pursual of their own different register(s) of thinking. Just as Bergsonian intuition famously required us to ‘think backwards’, so in Alison Butler’s words did the Golden Dawn rituals involve an altering of the mental state in preparation for travel on the ‘astral plane’ and for individual and group visions.131 The Golden Dawn was the first to unite imagination and will in Western magic. Co-founder with Mathers, William Westcott in ‘Man, Miracle and Magic’ sounds remarkably Bergsonian: The Imagination un-aided can create an image and this image must have an existence of varying duration; yet it can do nothing of importance, unless vitalized and directed by the Will. When however, the two are conjoined – when the Imagination creates an image – and the Will directs and uses that image, marvellous magical effects may be obtained.132 The concoction of image, imagination and will, and the centrality of the image to insight is uncanny. Uncanny too is the parallel success of both 143

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Bergson’s philosophy and the Golden Dawn, the leading voices in their respective fields.133 For both, the ‘poet, the musician, and the artist’ acted as intermediaries to the uninitiated or unschooled culture at large, to illuminate a desirable change in thinking and action in the world around them.134

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4. Rhythmist (E-)Utopias: Fergusson’s Bergson and the Evolution of Creation You can do the praise in the little obscure papers that appear for two numbers and then collapse. You’re about in tune with that sort of thing; you’re not serious. Have you ever read Bergson, or William James, or that wonderful American professor – I forget his name – who writes about aesthetics? Non, n’est-ce pas? But there must be praise somewhere to emphasize the abuse, and 145

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praise from the little student papers will help on the big move. And it will come well from you. Nobody will take it seriously.1 A witty pastiche of hopeful critics with avant-garde pretensions – desirous of the notoriety of ‘genius’ and not mere success – this passage comes from a short story published in the second issue of a small not-entirely-student paper, Rhythm.2 ‘Anna Vaddock’s Fame’ is not only a wry stab but an amazingly self-assured one, for in it is told not only the history of Rhythm’s foundation, but also the biography of one of its artists, the thinly disguised Anne Estelle Rice.3 The story tells of an unknown English artist of American origin discovered by two friends and transported to unknown heights of fashion by a revered British art critic. The case may be exaggerated, yet the story’s publication in Autumn 1911 was hot on the heels of Rice’s first solo exhibition at London’s Baillie Galleries of April and May, in which her large canvas Egyptian Dancers (c. 1909) caused the uproar of a succès de scandal such as the author’s protagonists dreamed up. 4 Unsurprisingly in a competitive market, reviews of Rhythm in the more established The New Age were generally crushing. ‘Esoteric’ was the kindest word found by Jacob Tonson, who abhorred the quarterly Rhythm for ‘scrappiness’, advising the editors to avoid theorising in the vague, and to give a ‘sight of the new principle put into action’.5 It was the kind of response pre-empted and courted by the author of ‘Anna Vaddock’s Fame’. But what were the ‘vague theories’ Tonson referred to, and were they indeed as convoluted as he suggests? Faith Binckes has contextualised Rhythm in the network of British ‘little magazines’ from The New Age, The New Freewoman and The Egoist to more established numbers The Fortnightly Review and The Yellow Book. Focusing solely on the Bergsonian content of Rhythm, this chapter 146

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identifies an intuitive, immanent conception of art from early experiments in durational portraiture to works that explore visions of a vitalist utopia. As a result, the chapter situates the journal instead in relation to its Scottish heritage as well as its French competitors, particularly Les Tendances Nouvelles and the Abbaye de Créteil. Bergsonian Origins Arriving in Paris in the winter of 1910 to attend Bergson’s lectures with a copy of Creative Evolution in his pocket, the Oxford undergraduate John Middleton Murry threw himself into the Bohemian life of the self-styled aesthete.6 On first meeting the Scottish artist John Duncan Fergusson he ‘plunged into an exposition of Bergson’s distinction between time and duration’, and it was from this lively conversation that the premises of their collaboration in the foundation of Rhythm were developed.7 This history is well known, but to what extent can it be considered ‘visualised’ in Fergusson’s painting or the illustrations, as art editor, he chose for the journal more broadly? Given how little writing there is from Fergusson himself, I shall outline Murry’s reminisces of this time, to map Bergson’s thinking to Fergusson’s portraits and nudes. Tonson’s criticism of the vagueness of Rhythm’s claims had a point. Murry’s texts in Rhythm all too readily fall into imprecise eulogy, and Murry’s later recollections by no means clarify his intentions. Here for instance is a passage from his autobiography: We never made any attempt to define [rhythm]; nor even took any precaution to discover whether it had the same significance for us both. All that mattered was that it had some meaning 147

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for each of us. Assuredly it was a very potent word. For Fergusson it was the essential quality in a painting or sculpture; and since it was at that moment that the Russian Ballet first came to Western Europe . . . dancing was obviously linked, by rhythm, with the plastic arts. From that it was but a short step to the position that rhythm was the distinctive element in all the arts, and that the real purpose of ‘this modern movement’ . . . was to reassert the pre-eminence of rhythm . . . I was baffled by Fergusson’s attempt to make Rhythm all inclusive, and I listened, curious but unconvinced.8 Likewise, art critic Michael Sadleir writing on Post-Impressionism, sought an alternative ‘nom d’école without pretending in any way to describe aims and theories’.9 Yet neither statement can be taken at face value. Murry was principally known in Georgian literary circles as a ‘brilliant young Bergsonian’ directly because of his association with Rhythm.10 Even Tonson recognised that the Rhythmists had a ‘new principle’, even if it was hard to discern. It is this appropriation of Bergson that is one of the group’s best avant-garde credentials. So what from Bergson did the Rhythmists take? Durational Portraiture In Time and Free Will Bergson argued for the attainment of free will by regenerating our awareness of a ‘fundamental’ as opposed to a ‘practical’ self. This was summarised at the start of Creative Evolution with a nod to the aesthetic 148

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movement contemporaneous to the first text as being the ‘moments of our lives, of which we are the artisans’.11 Time and Free Will appeared in English translation in 1910, the result of work by another Oxford graduate, F. L. Pogson, and Bergson’s lecture topic at the Collège de France in Spring 1911 was the ‘Problem of Personality’.12 In this context, Murry’s enthusiasm for Bergson’s durational psychology first outlined twenty years previously makes sense. Bergson argued that as a form of consciousness, duration could give unadulterated cognition of human character. He described it as follows: The form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when it lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states [. . . and] forms the past and present states into an organic whole [. . .] There is no one rhythm of duration; it is possible to imagine many different rhythms, which, slower or faster, measure the degree of tension or relaxation of different kinds of consciousness and thereby fix their respective places in the scale of being.13 ‘Rhythm’ was so important as a term because it reflected change as movement, in Murry’s words, a ‘thing in itself ’.14 Bergson had reinforced change as the basis of personality from his earlier work in a lecture in March 1911: ‘our personality is an unwinding and a winding up. A movement by which the past is conserved in the present.’15 Rhythmist art was not the extrovert theatrics of the self-as-art aestheticism of the 1890s but the expression of immanent consciousness transforming in accordance to its attention to experience. 149

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Murry regarded Fergusson as the mainstay of the rhythmist enterprise, which was bound by the Scots artist’s ‘indefinable charisma’.16 He spoke of Fergusson living in a ‘rhythm of his own’, and, based on this, defined the artist in general as one who assumed the ‘courage of one’s own being’.17 Identity was intricately bound in the concept of rhythm, and art itself a ‘quality of being – an achievement of, or an effort towards integrity’.18 Fergusson became famed for painting the ‘scale of being’. In the rhythmic composition of portraits such as The Persian Scarf 1909 (Figure 4.1), he was praised for ‘particularis[ing]’ his sitter by the ‘delicate adaptation of rhythm’.19 The ‘accentuated syllables’ of paint mimic the woman’s facial shape, and by leaching the scarf into the background, Fergusson strived to soften actual representation to replace it with an immanent personality. The background indicated not a relation to objects in space, but rather a temporal synergy of the figure and her environment. As another critic was quick to realise, Fergusson’s portraits captured ‘prevailing’ characteristics from the flux of changing moments to present the lived experience of change within a larger continuity of temporal experience.20 He ‘compels the fleeting movement, and its rich but evanescent burdens’.21 The artist is presented as a mediator, whose role is as ‘an instrument adopted by nature to recall man to the use of his perceptions; he is the scattered forces of insight, imagination, vision, of a whole human group, concentrated in one point of light’.22 In this visionary guise, the artist achieved a ‘frank recognition of personality’ which was expressed in rhythmic line and colour. Art was therefore suggestive of the ‘spirit’ or ‘will’ of its subject and that subject’s context. The British art critic Frank Rutter’s estimation was that an ‘ineradicable instinct’ and ‘rhythmical quality’ in Fergusson’s work served ‘materiality in emphasising the significant traits of the sitter’ together with his own ‘personal experience’.23 Such synthesis of self and other in the act of representation is a collapse of being subsumed in the 150

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Figure 4.1  J. D. Fergusson, The Persian Scarf, 1909. The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, Scotland © Hunterian Museum & Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images

making of the portrait. Fergusson simultaneously portrayed the subject on its own terms and his experience of it, the meeting of two consciousnesses, two durations in the act of painting. To some critics Fergusson’s ‘empathetic’ portraiture was his outstanding contribution. Recording his ‘personal experience’, he ‘actualised’ the union of his mind with that of the sitter’s, rendering a ‘visualisation’ of this joint state of consciousness.24 Similarly Michael Sadlier reviewed a self-portrait by Anne Estelle Rice in which he considered the ‘vitality and eagerness of the portrait are the artist’s own vitality and eagerness. It is more than a likeness; it is like an intimate conversation’.25 The image of psychological union resonates with Bergson’s identification of 151

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‘group consciousness’ in Creative Evolution, and the experiments in collective consciousness by Yeats and the Golden Dawn explored in the previous chapter, but whereas those experiments remained purely virtual, the claim here is for their representation by the hand of the artist. The most well-known record of this intuitive working process is undoubtedly Matisse’s Bergsonian Notes of a Painter (1908), demonstrating that the Rhythmists did not merely borrow a Fauvist style, but fully understood Matisse’s intention. Unlike Fergusson, Matisse left documents recording his experience of the process involved in capturing a likeness. In a penetrating article, Mark Antliff has brought to light Matisse’s record of his working method in the drawing of Mrs Samuel Dennis Warren, completed in 1913. In a letter to Mr Warren, Matisse said: for some time I thought it too difficult . . . there was a constant movement of her will forwards and backwards, giving and withdrawing, opening and closing; my first drawing was nothing, but when, after hesitating, her being agreed to end itself I was able to work.26 If this sounds a bit far-fetched, it resonates with Bergson’s description of duration, as a ‘tension and relaxation of different kinds of consciousness’.27 And Matisse goes on in still more unusual language: ‘there was no change in her features except in the light of her eyes, but there was a constant vibration, it was like a rippling lake’.28 Intuitive duration allowed Matisse not only a method of working, but also gave him a language to give words to the frisson of creativity. Arguably in this state he is both more conscious of his own approach, and able to give over to the needs of the sitter. This giving up of 152

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any of his own plans he may have had for the portrait, or to put it more strongly, this giving up of self, he put clearly: ‘No-one is more surprised than I am at the results, for I can never tell what a work will reveal to me.’ Correspondingly, he was ecstatic about the drawing he produced: There is a vitality in it, something no photograph can give, there’s movement in the eyes . . . It is a miracle. She is a flowing stream [another Bergsonian metaphor for duration]. She is just a flame, she hangs by a thread, no point is indicated where you can grasp her. In spite of that the drawing is a complete realisation of my vision.29 Across their portraiture, both Matisse and Fergusson simplify the face to formal sparsity emphasised in broad dark paint; both meld their sitter to an unresolved spatially flat background. These artists were interested in presenting the process of perception of self and other, and as such their work articulated a tension between directness and personal artistic expression. As Rhythm advocated, it was the purpose of all good art ‘not merely to illuminate the soul of the subject-matter, but to lift the spectator out of himself, to link him with the universal, and so to blot out for a moment the unattractiveness of life’.30 Continuity of consciousness was not only a persistent thread through Fergusson’s work, but on a larger scale may be regarded as a theme throughout the pages of the journal as a whole. In this frame of thought, the repetition of designs in successive numbers is not stultifying or economising, but rather renewing. The pages dance in the manner of theme and variation, repeated images serve then as metaphorical bar lines, or moments of rest which enable the reader to reflect on the shift in context 153

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from the previous appearance. The journal achieved a modernist multi-point perspective from strictly representational imagery by milking nuanced contextual differences. Intuitive (E-)utopias By the time Matisse was capturing Mrs Samuel Dennis Warren Fergusson was embarked on expanding the lessons in durational portraiture beyond dual consciousness and the private interrelation of persons to the multiplicity of life in totem, mirroring Bergson’s own course from Time and Free Will to Creative Evolution. The extension is marked in works such as Torse Femme (1910–11) and Les Eus (1910, Figure 4.2), most often translated as ‘the happy ones’. With rhythmic abandon, the figures of Les Eus cavort across the canvas in a manner broadly akin to Matisse’s La Danse (1909).31 It is hard to imagine Fergusson painting this canvas without cognisance of Matisse’s work, the second version of which was exhibited in Paris in 1910, at the time he was painting Les Eus. But Fergusson’s rustic woodland setting also recalls Cézanne’s series of Bathers (1894–1900) and Poussin’s Bacchanalian Revel before a Term of Pan (1632–3).32 Fergusson’s sculpted male bodies recall Poussin’s own; he follows Poussin’s differentiation of skin tones between the sexes – deep, almost ochre male bodies and paler (for Poussin, more delicate) female ones; and in the organisation of the group, it is as if Fergusson has rewound Poussin’s circle by two steps: in both paintings the males leap from the same foot, yet for Fergusson they front the canvas, keeping hold of the woman on the far left, Figure 4.2  J. D.Fergusson, Les Eus, 1910. The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, Scotland © Hunterian Museum & Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images 154

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for Poussin they start the circle’s turn, in which the far left woman is left behind. If this visual dialogue is substantiated, it endorses the pagan ritual of Fergusson’s image. It was not merely a decorative decision to transform Poussin’s mixed deciduous trees into ones that bear fruit. Read in relation to his later canvas Rhythm (1911, Figure 4.3), this is a pagan dance on the grave of Eden, one that instigates physical and spiritual freedom, that creates its own utopia.33 Duncan Macmillan has read the title Les Eus as indicative of Fergusson’s knowledge of the work of his fellow Scot Patrick Geddes, whose sociology outlined a ‘Eutopia’, summarised by Helen Meller as ‘what could be achieved [. . .] to create a higher civilisation’.34 Geddes viewed Creative Evolution as a syn­thesis of epistemology and ‘concrete’ biology, contending that in cor­relating the evolution of consciousness and organic evolution, Bergson demonstrated ‘man [to be] fully from the spirit’. Transposing this into ethical importance, Geddes went on to distinguish evolution as ‘useful’ – i.e. in habit, from evolution as ‘effective’ – i.e. ‘to be religious’.35 It was this position that he took for a lecture at the Edinburgh Summer School of 1912, where, salvaging his discipline of biology from Bergson’s charge against the mechanism of science in general, he eloquently described the ‘vital, moving and living world’.36 Archival material demonstrates that Geddes’ evolutionary ethics were built in conjunction with this interpretation of Bergson’s work.37 From a biological perspective he accepted ‘a vital force or the like; [for] the continuous and progressive co-ordination of active growth and manifold differentiation, yet with harmonisation of all differentiations into unity of form and function’ is impossible from a mechanist standpoint. On this basis he supported a ‘psychic evolution’ that bears close proximity to the epicurean reading of Creative Evolution forwarded by his ex-pupil and great collaborator, J. Arthur Thomson.38 It is in Thomson that Geddes’ ‘Eutopia’ 156

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can be affirmatively connected to the ‘ever-pioneering’ Bergson. As Thomson wrote, ‘with his keen and detached insight, reinforced by his vision of evolution beyond our mechanical age and its correspondingly prosaic thought’, Bergson revealed a path ‘towards life more abundant, more free and varied, more happy and joyous’.39 Macmillan’s connection of Fergusson’s title to Geddes’ Eutopia is further supported by the utopian themes of Rhythm as a whole. The essay that opened the very first number by Murry’s Oxford colleague Frederick Goodyear was titled ‘The New Thelema’, after Rabelais’ utopian community. The article discussed the practical effect of the ‘growth of the evolutionary idea’ which has learnt to accept the ‘principle of flux’ as the one continuity of experience. 40 This change in mentality allowed for the ‘development of spiritual freedom’, 41 but Goodyear made clear that the artist was responsibile for the liberation of the mind in his evolutionary utopia, by constructing the ‘intuitive consensus of developed wills’ necessary to the working of the ‘Thelematic idea’ in society. 42 This is the Bergson of Time and Free Will, whose artists would ‘tear aside the cleverly woven curtain of our conventional ego’ to show us ‘under this appearance of logic a fundamental absurdity’. 43 Political change was couched in terms of the will, of the soul, and of human consciousness. Goodyear’s utopia was assertively political. In language closely akin to that of ‘The New Thelema’ he had observed that the ‘Isles of the Blest, the Golden Age, the Garden of Eden were all without constitutions – were all anarchies’.44 In magnifying the role of the artist as visionary, Goodyear’s precedent was surely the Rabelais-inspired Abbaye de Créteil, which appeared in later editions of Rhythm through the writing of Fantasist poet Tristan Derème.45 The comparison with the Abbaye de Créteil is one that clarifies much in Rhythm. The Abbaye itself was a collaboration between artists and writers, 157

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interested in publishing radical books that sought an integration of the arts as a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk combined with a desire to instigate social regeneration. Astutely, Derème’s synopsis of the Abbaye implicitly indicated it to be a Bergsonian anarchist project. 46 The group, founded by Puteaux cubist Albert Gleizes in October 1906 was characterised by Derème for its ‘absolute liberty’, whose communal spirit sought a ‘pure state’ of being by identifying the ‘simple contiguity of individuals and authentic belief within time and space’.47 The summary recalls Créteil associates Jules Romains and Roger Allard: Romains’ vision of Unanimism as the ‘individual personality merged in the multiple life’, and Roger Allard’s general assertion of painting as replicating the ‘essential elements of a SYNTHETIC experience taking place in time’. 48 In his next piece for Rhythm Derème returned to the history of the Abbaye, to reassert the ‘communal tendencies’ to be found in the work of its writers.49 How does a desire for a socialist commune fit with Bergson’s individuation? Curiously Rabelais’ anarchic invitation to ‘do what thou wilt?’ (inscribed above the door of the Abbaye de Créteil) was a means for anarchists to claim Bergson for their own, based on his cry for individual freedom through duration in Time and Free Will. Interestingly J. A. Thomson remarked on Rabelais in a draft on Bergson’s theory of laughter.50 Thomson would probably have discovered Rabelais through Geddes and the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, who Geddes saw much of in the 1890s.51 Just as with the Abbaye de Créteil, for Geddes’ circle, and we can extend, for the Rhythm circle there seems to have been no difficulty in assimilating Rabelais’ anarchist utopia alongside radical regenerative politics that took Bergson’s evolution for its inspiration.52 Although Goodyear regarded the current political reality as a dystopia, ‘For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly, even so is the new democracy still hidden within the bowels of the present mob’,53 nor 158

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were his thelamites un-reasoned anarchists. Rather his intention was ‘to reclaim the lost wastes of the individual human soul’.54 In Goodyear’s thelamatic model, Rhythm’s artists should, like Bergson’s conditional novelist, ‘put aside the veil which we have interposed between our consciousness and ourselves’.55 Just as Bergson developed his nuanced individual duration into a force of evolutionary import, Goodyear’s re-placement of the ideal in the real is expressed in the visual and textual contributions to Rhythm. ‘Primordial’ Perception and Neo-Barbarism Defined by Bergson as the ‘primordial and fundamental act of perception’, intuition was interpreted by the Rhythmists as a call to a subject matter of essentialism and freshness, in keeping with Frederic Worms’ recent definition of Bergson’s philosophy as ‘intervening in life to reform it or to transform it’.56 Writing in Rhythm, psychologist Holbrook Jackson characterised ‘all really great art revivals’ for the way in which they ‘impress by their naiveté. They are actually primitive, because evolution needs the forces of young and uncouth vigour for her purpose. In order to grow we must continually throw back to what is primal.’57 Goodyear’s transformative politics was a ‘long and tedious process of regeneration’ that had been started in a ‘barbarous land’.58 By ‘pioneering into the wilds [. . .] we are being vulgarised and rebarbarised [. . .] preparing the way for a universal and completely self-conscious culture’.59 True to the Rhythm journal as a whole, Goodyear’s language appears at first to collude with the popular ‘primitivism’ extensive in European avant-gardes since the 1880s, which commonly sought invigorating renewal in non-­ Western cultures: the terms here are of domination and colonisation. Explaining the unconventional beauty of Post-Impressionism, Goodyear exclaimed in a letter to Philip Landon, 159

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Now Gauguin, of course, is horrid! But I love him! He is a necessary transitional soul . . . But I hope you gather by now the transcendental connection I am forced to trace between Gauguin and the new democracy . . . The connection is psychological, hard to express in logical terms. But I am inclined to compare the natural but illogical connection of Anarchism and Socialism.60 Just as Robert Louis Stevenson arriving in the Marquesas Islands believed himself on the brink of seeing ‘what men might be like whose fathers had never studied Virgil’, so had this vision been provided visually by Gauguin.61 The phantasmagorical mystique summoned by Stevenson’s lyricism, together with his considerable fame, made him a ready inspiration that pre-war Scottish artists called up with pride. Given the legacy of Scots symbolist painters, it would be natural for Scots artists in Paris to feel that Gauguin somehow evoked their fellow Scot, Stevenson. Eric Forbes-Robertson moved to Pont Aven for two years between 1885 and 1887, meeting Gauguin, Sérusier and Seguin. There he was soon joined by A. S. Hartrick, who lodged at the Pension Golanec alongside Gauguin in 1886. By 1892, C. H. Mackie had become a friend of Sérusier’s, and for all, the acquaintanceships were reinforced by further links to the Academie Ranson.62 It was a heady inheritance which Rhythmist art exploited to the full. As befitted a journal with a Scottish art editor, art critic Michael Sadlier drew out the connection between Stevenson and Gauguin in a lecture at the Glasgow School of Art in 1913, and Sadlier’s articles on Gauguin for Rhythm clarify much of the rhythmist aesthetic.63 Gauguin was much in mind in 160

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1910–11. In Britain Fry had used his Poème Barbare (1894) for the poster to his 1910 exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, Sadleir’s father bought both The Vision after the Sermon (1888) and L’esprits des morts vieilles (now known as Manao Tupapao, 1892) that year, and Sadleir himself was involved with the 1911 exhibition Cézanne and Gauguin at the Stafford Gallery in London, part organised and underwritten by his father.64 Meanwhile in Paris the 1911 Salon d’Automne held a retrospective of Gauguin’s work. Sadlier’s ‘After Gauguin’ charted, as its title suggests, the reverberations of Gauguin’s work amongst the European avant-garde. These followers he denoted as ‘neo-primitives, because they have arrived in their search for expression at a technique reminiscent of primitive and savage art’.65 Believing in the ‘purer’ quality of such art, Sadleir identified ‘different methods of expression’ which he felt Gauguin had been able to revive.66 What these expressive means were was clarified in another article which took its title from a painting by Gauguin, ‘L’esprit vieille’. The painting had been shown at Manet and the Post-Impressionists, thence Sadleir’s title had real connotations for his public. The article is unusual for commencing with a quotation from Noa Noa, which Sadleir viewed as ‘every bit as great as the finest of his painting’. The ‘astonishing reality and power’ of Noa Noa is achieved by a ‘blend of poetry and common place’; Gauguin’s work is characterised in the terms of Bergson’s intuition, by an ‘unspoilt directness of vision, [the] sense of essential form and vitality’.67 More unusually, Sadlier quoted from Noa Noa Gauguin’s momentary insight into his own appalling behaviour. Chastened, Gauguin cast his fellow Europeans as ‘degenerate stock’ as he was brought to realise his inferiority as ‘civilized man’ in his new environment in stark comparison to the better adapted ‘savages’. The experience instilled complete inversion of his principles: ‘I was a savage to them, just as they were to me. Which were right – they or I?’ To his credit Sadleir quoted this passage in full in ‘L’ esprit 161

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vieille’, giving Rhythm a reflective edge amid its competitors who failed to acknowledge Gauguin’s colonising exploitation of the communities, and particularly women, he chose to live among.68 For all his ‘barbarising’ metaphor, Goodyear too was ardently anti-­ colonial: ‘Neobarbarism is a bit of a horrid monster’ he wrote to Landon, ‘a chimaera inflating itself to look like a religion, or a philosophy, or (Lord save us) a MOVEMENT’.69 With this in mind, the challenge for Rhythmist artists was to articulate the freshness, novelty and creativity sought in barbarising aesthetics in a Western European context. In this light Fergusson’s wholesomely Western bacchanalia of Les Eus conformed to Goodyear’s plea to re-find the ‘primitive’ at home. It was Fergusson’s task to return this sentiment – the challenge to perceive the world through the difference of intuition – to Europe, and in Les Eus, to the innocence of dance.70 To explain durational experience, Bergson in Time and Free Will gave the example of a dancer: ‘when the graceful movements submit to a rhythm and are accompanied by movement [. . .] a kind of physical sympathy enters in to the feeling of grace’ – grace another metaphor for intuitive insight in this book.71 Rhythmist élan vital in Fergusson’s Rhythm (1911): A New Deity? Freely and spontaneously given grace is a fundamental teaching of Western Christian theology, and its use by Bergson to describe the accomplishment of liberated durational consciousness was interpreted by many contemporaries in a Christian context.72 It was exactly the ease with which Bergson’s work could be incorporated into Christian teaching that led to all his books being placed on the Index of heretical works by the Roman Catholic Church in June 1914. For the avant-garde art world, Bergson as a figurehead for radicalism was 162

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secured by the action of this icon of institutional tradition. The Rhythmists explored these resonances, although, I shall argue, ultimately with the replacement of Christian teaching with a Bergsonian art. In this they compare with the knotty qualifications of religion and art already seen in the notebooks of Fry and Prichard in Chapter 2. Sadlier regarded Gauguin as a painter of the ‘greatest of modern religious pictures’, for his ability to manifest the ‘spiritual visions of the artist’.73 Goodyear envisaged his Thelema as heaven on earth, where, finding the absolute in the relative, he hoped to rescue mankind from the ‘never-never-land of the theologian’ and instigate a revolution in thought. In a letter to Landon, the ‘soul’s ideal home’ of the ‘New Thelema’ is alter­ natively styled the ‘Golden Age’, ‘Heaven’ and the ‘Elysian Fields’.74 Goodyear regarded Christianity as ‘neo-barbaric’, its vision of the New Jerusalem lacking in vigour and nourishment.75 In contrast the New Thelema was an adaptive, constructive, ongoing process, despite Goodyear’s recourse to primitivising language and outmoded Christian metaphor for its description.76 The limitations of the language of the day are misleading however, for Goodyear’s vision of the new Thelema resonates with the version of Bergson recently described by Diagne as ‘postcolonial’: for Bergson’s commitment to an ‘ “open society” . . . opening still more for the new, the stranger the migrant’.77 In constructing their utopia, the Rhythmists repeatedly suggested the replacement of any god with art. The Rhythmist engagement with traditional religious iconography was not endorsement but critique, a process of transfer from the old ideology to a new spiritualism. Rhythm was a call to a new order of creative evolution, in which ‘all great art is worship’.78 Yet by this was intended no mere icon, rather ‘pictures are the act of worship’: pictures are events denoting the process of their making and the dynamic dialogue of their reception.79 Sounding not unlike Prichard or Fry at this date, Goodyear esteemed ‘religion in its widest 163

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Figure 4.3 J. D. Fergusson, Rhythm, 1911 © The Fergusson Gallery, Perth and Kinross Council, Scotland; University of Stirling J. D. Fergusson Memorial Collection

and best use’ for being ‘an application of philosophy and metaphysics to life’.80 In this light, it is possible to identify ‘secularised’ religious works reproduced in the pages of Rhythm. Chosen to adorn the cover of the journal, Fergusson’s Rhythm (1911, Figure 4.3) must be considered a dominant expression of the journal’s ethos. It is therefore particularly significant that the nude woman should be set in a traditional religious context. Seated under a tree, apple in hand, this ‘Bergson­ ian Eve’ has generally been accepted as the artist’s ‘personification of the spirit of life’.81 Bergson described active evolution as corresponding to an 164

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‘inner work of ripening or creating’ manifested by the dynamism of ‘rhythm’.82 Fergusson’s goddess presents the cusp of the liberation or evolution of know­ ledge, of the creative action of the élan vital. Eve’s action in a traditional context is one both of supreme free will and of supreme weakness in listening to the voice of the serpent; the acquisition of knowledge is both accompanied by guilt at Eve’s wickedness, and in the eschatological sequence of the Christian faith, is to be celebrated for the path it opens to salvation in the free and self-less actions of Christ. Fergusson’s ‘Eve’ however severs this traditional iconography from its religious context. The figure is categorically not named ‘Eve’ despite her iconographical identification but ‘Rhythm’, the ‘new Deity’ for the new utopian Thelema. It is the free action that caused the biblical fall of man that is exalted in Fergusson’s image, a celebration of mankind’s know­ ledge and evolution free of guilt.83 The symbolism of the fall is countered by the rising of spirit as knowledge. As Bergson wrote: ‘what a shock to the soul is the passing from the static to the dynamic, from the closed to the open, from everyday life to mystic life. When the darkest depths of the soul are stirred, what rises to the surface and attains consciousness takes on there, if it be intense enough, the form of an image or an emotion.’84 Fergusson’s Rhythm is this image, this attainment of ‘equilibrium on a higher level’.85 Rhythmists are by implication further evolved than ordinary mankind, their utopian community a Bergsonian answer to Nietzche’s Übermensch. For Bergson the ‘creative emotion’ is a ‘leap against the repression and coercion of intelligence’.86 To test these suggestions, it is useful to turn to a woodcut by Derain reproduced in the Rhythm journal, where it is editorially called Creation. At first glance the image appears to denote a gathering of animals comparable to the Arc, or as Macmillan has noted, the Garden of Eden.87 Alternatively it could be a general expression of the primordial ideal; however, the image has a 165

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more complex history. Produced for Apollinaire’s prose poem L’Enchanteur Pourrissant of 1909, Derain’s woodcut introduces by association Arthurian legend and mythologies shared by many cultures to Rhythm. Apollinaire’s cast includes, besides Merlin and the Lady of the Lake, the Sphinx, the Three Kings, the Archangel Michel, an Ichthyosaur, Helen of Troy, druids, fairies and many animals. Creation is one of nine full-page plates Derain produced to complement Apollinaire’s text, and several of the others are arguably more suited visually to other art reproduced in Rhythm, being large female nudes in harmony with a natural environment. It is only with the accompanying text in the original publication that the choice of this particular woodcut becomes clearer. The image faces a passage in Apollinaire’s poem in which the rotting Merlin calls on the animals to disperse to find fire, an activity which recalls the Promethean legend that so disastrously related the attempt to make man attain god-like status. Viviane, Lady of the Lake, reiterates this cry, sending the animals into the world as awe-inspiring portents.88 For this search, the ‘first herds’ are created, and the image relates to a moment of epoch changing significance in Apollinaire’s text. For readers with this know­ ledge, Creation is not only a secular image but a pagan one that fully complements the spiritually charged vision for a humankind of ‘higher’ consciousness, the inhabitants of the new Thelema. For Bergson god-like abilities are within grasp of mankind through the working of a life force immanent to all things. The infamous élan vital was however evidenced by scrupulous attention to the scientific mysteries that remained unsolved by existing evolutionary theories. Bergson argued that the cases of species from divergent evolutionary lines that had developed identical solutions to their conditions could be explained by the idea of a common life force. Previously such cases had been viewed as extraordinary conundrums, yet from Bergson’s perspective of a ‘common impetus’ it was 166

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possible to see how ‘diverse tendencies appear complementary to one another’.89 As an integral cosmological force, the individual need no longer feel ‘isolated in humanity [and] humanity no longer seems isolated in the nature that it dominates’.90 The élan vital forges a bridge between humankind’s conception of life and place within it, arguably the traditional role of religion.91 Despite the hugely detailed biological evidence Bergson explored, his life force remained a spiritual thread, discovered ‘the higher we ascend the stream of life’.92 The force runs through all natural things as a guide, and it is the perception of this fact that gives these things significance: without insight into its working we would be returned to Geddes’ disputation of the blindness of the vital impetus. Although the evidence of identical but separate adaptation is taken as proof of the actuality of the élan vital, Bergson’s concept remains more than an alternative evolutionary hypothesis. Bergson bridged the rift of biology and spirituality opened by Darwin and Lamarck, and drew biology closer to spirit: Before the evolution of life [. . .] the portals of the future remain wide open. It is a creation that goes on for ever in the virtue of an initial movement. This movement constitutes the unity of the organized world – a prolific unity, of an infinite richness, superior to any that the intellect could dream of, for the intellect is only one of its aspects.93 Statements such as these led Henry Corrance to write in 1913, ‘Bergson’s Creator is immanent in nature, but not, like the God of Pantheism, identical with it’.94

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Immanence against Symbolism Through free will, mankind is able to access a state comparative to that which gave rise to god’s creativity. In this way Bergson shifted the emphasis and responsibility on to humanity; God is no longer an abstract concept and mankind instead is connected to the world’s process through sensation. In consequence, the god or spirit in all things is reinterpreted as immanent to our experience. Sensory perception is no longer only positivist scientific fact but the route to a lived spirituality.95 I simply express this probable similitude when I speak of a centre from which worlds shoot out like rockets in a fire-works display – provided, however, that I do not present this centre as a thing, but as a continuity of shooting out. God, thus defined, has nothing of the already made; He is unceasing life, action, freedom. Creation, so conceived, is not a mystery; we experience it in ourselves when we act freely.96 Bergson is particularly careful to qualify his metaphors in this passage, (a ‘probable similitude’, not a thing but a continuity), because something immanent cannot be symbolised by something else, or stand for anything else. As early as Time and Free Will Bergson had cautioned against symbolisation. When we do not think in duration, ‘consciousness’, he claimed is ‘goaded by an insatiable desire to separate, substitutes the symbol for the reality, or perceives the reality only through the symbol’.97 Immanence can be grasped through the intuitive insights of expanded duration, yet how to communicate 168

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these insights, let alone the thought process or method that opened them to understanding? Maurice Blanchot astutely commented that ‘Bergson . . . was imbued with an extreme distrust of words and an extreme confidence in poetry’, whilst Paul Valéry charged him with having ‘questioned as a professor and replied as [. . .] a poet’.98 Creativity in art, music or poetry has a crucial role in Bergson’s thought for its ability to break the chain of symbolisation dominant in practical life and replace it with a poetics of association which penetrates our stultified perception. Historian Eric Fiser finds a point of congruence between French literary and visual Symbolists and Bergson’s method in describing how by the ‘rhythmic arrangement of words, one arrives at an organisation which animates one original life [. . .] suggest[s] to us things that language cannot’.99 The point of proximity is worth bearing in mind in the context of the heritage of Fergusson’s Scottish progenitors associated with the Nabis which he brought to the journal Rhythm, and also the journal’s French precursor Les Tendances Nouvelles.100 Edited by Gustave Moreau’s pupil Alexis Mérodack-Jeanneau, the journal Les Tendances Nouvelles mixed Symbolist contributours Gustave Kahn, Josephin (Sâr) Peladan and Denis with Bergsonian sentiment.101 The most concise adoption of Bergson’s language in the journal was a contribution from the enigmatic Gerome-Maesse on the general ‘vibration’ in all things. ‘It is a cosmic law’ he wrote, that ‘if one derogates the vital principle, the vibration diminishes, the élan cools, the force crystallises’.102 Meanwhile, Mérodack-­ Jeanneau’s manifesto ‘Le Synthétisme’ serialised in Les Tendances Nouvelles between 1912–14 was a carefully wrought programme that was intended to define the new movement in art. Its Bergsonism is hard to miss in its insistence on movement, rhythm and intuitive vision. Directing the artist to ‘surprise the birth of movement, to follow the rhythm in its intensity, in its complex geometry’, Mérodack-Jeanneau’s purpose corresponds to Rhythm, in 169

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which the artist ‘attains to the pure form, refining and intensifying his vision’.103 Equally, Mérodack-Jeanneau insisted on the ‘ideogramme’ in the notation of vital rhythms . . . the preliminary breaking of forms in an aim for better visual synthesis, on the determin­ ation of the relative movement of forms and the absolute movement of life and on coloured polymorphism. Then there are the sources of artistic energy. Intuition and automatism.104 But Mérodack-Jeanneau’s articles fail to cite Bergson at all. Instead, ‘Le Synthétisme’ is accompanied by an announcement from both editor and students disclaiming the ‘exploiters’ who had ‘scandalously pillaged’ the journal’s ideas.105 It is intriguing to consider whether the contributors to Rhythm could have been the intended victims of this charge of plagiarism. Carol Nathanson has casually remarked on Anne Estelle Rice’s link to the circle of Les Tendances Nouvelles, and indeed Rice is mentioned by Breuil in his review of the journal’s ‘Salon Unioniste’ exhibition of 1910.106 In a separate article another contributor to Les Tendances Nouvelles harangued the visitors to its annual Salon Unioniste for being of the sort who attend ‘tennis, Bergson’s courses, and boxing matches’.107 As for the Rhythmists, Francis Carco ungraciously if not mercilessly disparaged ‘synthetism’ in what is Rhythm’s only reference to Les Tendance Nouvelles.108 The article is significant, for Carco positions the Fantasist group to which he belongs against the immediate opposition of Unanimism, Synthetism, Impulsionism and Futurism, as well as the older Symbolism, and what Jules Romains viewed as its weak progenitor, Naturism.109 170

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As editor of Rhythm Murry was quick to pick up on this synthesis of the earthily material and the metaphysical in an immanentist as opposed to Symbolist understanding. The élan vital he wrote, was ‘beyond the reach of thought’.110 As a consequence it was the responsibility of artists to communicate or visualise the élan vital as a ‘living artistic force’, and as an ‘evolution because it proceeds only by bringing something to birth’.111 Visual art was not a symbol but a realisation of the vital impetus immanent to its subjects. Implicitly, any art that did not fulfil this definition was not art at all: Sadleir had also cautioned that artistic creativity without intention was meaningless, ‘form and colour are mere symbols’, by which ‘anti-naturalism may become pure pattern-making’.112 For this reason in a defining article in the first number of Rhythm, Murry seized upon the ‘supremacy of the intuition, of the spiritual vision of the artist’ which he used to replace the vacuity of the conventional ‘vague something [. . .] called God’.113 In an act of iconoclasm, Murry replaced all previous religious traditions with an immanent, Bergsonian art: ‘art is beyond creeds, for it is the creed itself. It comes to birth in irreligion and is nurtured in amorality [. . .] Art is against religion or [is] religion itself.’114 This interpretation was shared in the analysis of the criticism of a figure loosely associated with the rhythm group: Huntly Carter. A frequent reviewer of Rhythmist artwork Carter never published in Rhythm itself, working instead for The New Age and The Egoist.115 Describing Rhythmist work as ‘lyrics in colour, lyrics in line, lyrics in light to the new deity, rhythm’, Carter consistently provided interpretations of contemporary art as a realis­ ation or manifestation of the élan vital regardless of the subject of his article or place the of publication.116 Just as Bergson hoped to shape philosophy as ‘an inquiry turned in the same direction as art, which would take life in general as its object’, so did Carter (and Murry) see art turned in the direction of Bergson’s philosophy.117 The artist is presented by Carter as the ‘corporeal 171

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personification of a vital or spiritual force’,118 whose role was to ‘form symbols of a force which humanity possesses and through which it may renew itself.119 In ‘The Public Ownership of the Artist’ Carter continued the theme: ‘art is the spirit of life, that substance which informs matter and immortalises form. Thus art forms are spirit forms.’120 Sounding not dissimilar to Bergson’s sister and her circle, for Carter art could mediate between a ‘higher’ life and the material reality from which it was created. From Rhythm to Crystallisation The Egoist is a significant integer between Rhythm and Lewis’ Blast. Whilst Lewis’ own response to Bergson is the topic of Chapter 5, I would like to explore the shared contributors between these three journals here. The concerns of Rhythm and Blast could scarcely be more contrasting: one a popular exposition of Bergsonism, the other dreamt up by an editor who had been fired into an obsessive and multi-faceted revolt against anything that could be interpreted in a Bergsonian context. Previously Dora Marsden’s The New Freewoman, Lewis and Pound were responsible for the alteration in title to The Egoist on the advent of their editorship in January 1914, but their recent appointment prevented the immediate appropriation of the journal to their cause. The Egoist continued to publish broadly Rhythmist articles by Carter, and the overriding tone was in line with Bergson’s vitalism. Shortly following his break with Murry in Spring 1913, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was adopted by The Egoist, illustrating an article by Pound on ‘The New Sculpture’, which referenced a recent lecture on new art given by Hulme to the Quest Society. Gaudier’s drawing had developed dramatically from the six illustrations provided for Rhythm to the condensed sculpture of Redstone Dancer (1914) discussed by Pound in The Egoist, more like the work 172

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that was illustrated in the first issue of Blast, such as Stags (1914). His drawing of a head for Rhythm, for instance, adhered to the mode of durational portrait­ ure practised by Fergusson and Matisse (1912, Figure 4.4), vitality expressed by the dynamic lines which render a fleeting expression particular to that sitter and that moment of drawing. Gaudier read Bergson during his Rhythmist period, c. 1911–12, but Roger Cole cites the importance of his friendship with Hulme as one who could express the relation between Bergson’s philosophy and art in the manner which he had himself sought.121 With inspiration from Hulme’s interpretation of Bergson, Gaudier wrote a vitalist vortex for the first edition of Blast, no doubt the cause of some dismay to the avowed

Figure 4.4  Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Head, 1911, reproduced from Rhythm 173

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anti-Bergsonist Lewis. Commencing with Western Palaeolithic cave painting, Gaudier proclaimed the continuity of an aesthetic ‘driving power’ as ‘life in the absolute – the plastic expression the fruitful sphere’.122 He continued: ‘the intensity of existence had revealed to man a truth to form’, therefore describing the Vorticist effort as one which had ‘crystalized the sphere into the cube’, that had ‘made a combination of all the possible shaped masses – concentrating them to express our abstract thoughts’.123 As a result, Richard Cork has read Bird Swallowing a Fish (1914) as Gaudier’s successful resolution of his ‘dual involvement with nature and the machine’.124 The preliminary drawing for Redstone Dancer exhibits the same tension between the vital and the abstract. Multiple limbs and heads recall de Segonzac’s Rhythmist Boxers, yet its compression and intensity, further accentuated in the final sculpture, lend a Vorticist ‘crystalisation’. Recalling the period immediately before the First World War, the influential art ciritic Frank Rutter could claim that by 1913 ‘rhythm’ had been replaced by ‘crystalisation’ as the watch-word of the avant-garde.125 Conclusions For all Rutter’s claims for crystallisation, Blaise Cendrars still described the paintings of Robert Delaunay as ‘rhythm, speech, life’. Even in 1918, Apollinaire admitted in a letter to Picasso that he had ‘never abandoned rhythm’.126 I have suggested that the energy and vitality of Fergusson’s painting may be read as a visual equivalent for the ‘supremacy of the intuition’, defined as the ‘spiritual vision of the artist’, where Bergson’s thought provided the means to creativity and novelty in an experiential art. Freedom was key to Bergson’s un-determined evolution, as it was to his duration. Likewise it governed Goodyear’s proclamation in ‘The New Thelema’ 174

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that humankind should seize responsibility for its actions. Paradoxically, the loss of Eden signified the gateway to new life, for by abandoning the concept of an unattainable land, we become free to create a new society on earth.127 This was new territory, to be developed, and possibly exploited for avant-garde credentials. Rhythm not only captured the excitement of opening up the unexpected, spontaneous or chance process (themes that were to have great resonance with Surrealism through the 1920s), but also the vigour and zest of these new modern creators, as in Murry’s ringing definition of rhythm as the ‘essential movement of life . . . the splendid adventure, the eternal quest’.128

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5. Blasted Devolution: Wyndham Lewis and Henri Bergson Wyndham Lewis’ vision for a regressive cultural politics in the period before the First World War runs counter to the vitalist, generative vision of the Rhythmists outlined in the previous chapter. Lewis prized objectivity, stillness and distance, he had after all warned that ‘the artist like Narcissus, gets his nose nearer and nearer the surface of Life . . . He should only approach so near as is necessary for a good view.’1 Vorticism then, according to the majority of interpretations, defined its own Kantian disinterest against Bergson’s vitalism. However, from the plurality of Bergsons, Lewis (and this 176

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chapter) takes for its subject another: the ugly analysis of humanity in Laughter, and the bleak underside of Creative Evolution. As Bergson put it in his lecture ‘Life and Consciousness’, successful adaptation is contingent on evolutionary failure: ‘these two forms of existence, matter and consciousness, have indeed a common origin [. . .] I believe that the first is a reversal of the second’.2 From his position of heightened consciousness implied in Gaudier’s vortex, Lewis was concerned with a lack of consciousness. In pursuing this line, Lewis’ reaction to Bergson was by far the most subtle and well thought out of any from within the British avant-gardes. Devolution and Mediocrity Human insanity never flowered so colossally.3 Taking Lewis’ damning diagnosis of the underside of commercial post-­ industrialised culture as the fulcrum of his entire creative programme, this chapter is concerned with the diabolical, elucidating the very particular philosophical, political and social frame in which it operated. 4 The etymology of ‘devolution’ and its connotations underpin the parameters of the chapter: first, the origin of devolution in ‘volute’, suggesting a proto-Vorticist spiralling inwards, the path or shape of the chapter ; second, the common political use of devolution: delegation of power, and inversely the inheritance of authority; third the meaning of devolution for biology as a term synonymous with degeneration: the ‘gradual loss of biological function, specialisation or adaptation’ over successive generations.5 Degeneration is not a theme obviously associated with Bergson, particularly when other of his contempories would have provided Lewis with much stronger support for a regressive view of society and mankind.6 However 177

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degeneration runs as a persistent thread through Bergson’s Creative Evolution, and his philosophically under-studied discussion Laughter. As Douglass has paraphrased, Bergson’s universe is ‘self-creative [. . .] a universe succumbing to the vortex’. In Douglass’ reading, Bergson’s ‘to percieve means to immobilise’ implied ‘ “still” pictures make the world stop whirling’.7 This interpretation brings Lewis’ Vorticism closer to Bergson. Yet Bergson’s broad appeal fired Lewis into an obsessive and multi-faceted revolt against anything that could be interpreted in a Bergsonian context. Despite the work of David Ayers, Paul Edwards and SueEllen Campbell, the relationship between Lewis and Bergson is often too easily glossed over. The concepts of influence, self-definition and flawed humanity create a tightly woven mesh in Lewis’ thought that ensures its lasting opacity. As Lewis said ‘When mankind cannot overcome a personality, it has an immemorial way out of this difficulty. It becomes it. It imitates and assimilates that ego until it is no longer one.’8 Harold Bloom has transformed influence into a theoretical mode for tracing creative process. Influence is ‘a metaphor, one that implicates a matrix of relationships – imagistic, temporal, spiritual, psychological – all of them ultimately defensive in nature [. . .] the anxiety of influence comes out of a complex act of strong mis-reading, a creative interpretation’ in which the original is mutated beyond recognition.9 The anxiety of influence is a construct that Lewis understood well, since his oppositionary tactics have been noted by a host of critics. Bernard Lafourcade, in particular, made much of Lewis’ ‘secret complicity’ and ‘strategy of concealment’ with regard to Freud.10 These strategies are equally in action in Lewis’ early relation to Bergson. Lewis became aware of Bergson at an exceptionally early date for a young British art student. Recollecting his Paris days, he claimed to have ‘followed Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France, and shared the philosophical studies of friends of mine then at the École Normale’.11 From the viewpoint 178

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of 1949 he described how ‘Bergson was an excellent lecturer, dry and impersonal. I began embracing his evolutionary system.’12 It is clear from letters to his mother that Lewis was comfortably established in Paris by 1903, during which year Bergson was lecturing on the history of different methods of thought from the ancients to Kant. According to one attendee, the course concerned the ‘method of intuition and the method of analysis, – of absolute knowledge and relative knowledge, by signs and concepts’.13 Lewis is frustratingly reticent about his artistic and intellectual activities in these letters; therefore that Bergson is not mentioned should not be off-putting in any absolute sense. Three of his editions of Bergson’s texts have survived, however, and they are now in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-­ Austin. The annotations in these copies enable a full reconsideration of Lewis’ Bergson.14 These three editions are: a compendium of extracts from Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution, entitled Henri Bergson; choix de texte avec Étude du Système Philosophique, put together by René Gillouin, and published in Paris, in 1910; T. E. Hulme’s authorised translation of An Introduction to Metaphysics, from 1913; and Creative Evolution, in a 1920 reprint of the 1911 authorised English translation by Arthur Mitchell. A key issue for my research has been the dates of these publications, and in particular that of Creative Evolution. Lewis scholarship is agreed that 1920 was a year in which much pre-war and Vorticist thought was under reconsideration. What then, of Lewis’ annotations? Surprisingly, these seem to reflect his earlier concerns rather than looking forward to other projects of the twenties, or, most obviously, Time and Western Man (1926). Highly informative, they consolidate the intellectual and theoretical context from which Lewis’ most explosive work grew. Little of Lewis’ work, artistic or literary, has survived from his first few years in Paris. Speculative reasons for this need not concern us here, for, in 179

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any event, Lewis claimed that ‘what he started to do in Brittany he was to pursue for ever’.15 It is indicative of the importance that Lewis himself gave to his Breton short stories that he chose to republish them as a collection in 1927, for which he provided two explanatory introductions. In the ‘Meaning of the Wild Body’ (1927), Lewis elucidated the ‘angle from which they are written [. . .] in giving a general rough definition of what “comic” means for their author’.16 Based on this statement, Paul O’Keefe, in his introduction to the Penguin edition, has chosen to contextualise this work by returning to Bergson’s Laughter, noting in concurrence with Alan Munton that Lewis’ definition of the comic is a direct inversion of that found in Bergson’s 1900 treatise.17 For Lewis, the comic is found in the ‘sensations resulting from the observations of a thing behaving like a person’.18 O’Keefe no doubt had in mind Bergson’s maxim that ‘the attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine’.19 However, Bergson’s first contention is not to the mechanisation of the human, but rather to the animation of matter, just as Lewis himself expounded: Several [philosophers] have defined man as ‘an animal which laughs.’ They might equally well have defined him as an animal which is laughed at; for if any other animal, or some lifeless object, produces the same effect, it is always because of some resemblance to man.20 It is arguable that to a degree Lewis viewed Bergson’s theorisation of evolution as an extension of this insight, a mere shifting of the frame in which it could be explored. Bergson, in broaching his infamous concept of the élan 180

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vital, supported the neo-Darwinian view that genetic variation was caused by ‘an impulsion which passes from germ to germ across the individuals’.21 Lewis highlighted this sentence in his copy of Creative Evolution, noting ‘innate impulsation [sic] in all the germs etc’.22 The ‘germ’, the most basic element of life in Bergson’s formulation, is nevertheless the most crucial facet for adaptation even of the highest organisms. Life in general, and humanity in particular, in this formulation is reduced to the lowest common denominator. Lewis’ bizarre imagery of vegetated humanity in both stories and drawings may therefore be read as a satirical critique of Bergson’s evolution, whilst remaining a critique that hinges upon Bergson’s theory of the comic. Lewis first attempted to theorise his intentions in writing the stories collected as The Wild Body in a short article called ‘Inferior Religions’, probably dating from the winter of 1914–15. Here he clarified that his exercise was primarily an anthropological one, which took as its object of study the ‘fascinating imbecility of the creaking men machines’.23 His narrator in The Wild Body takes the role of a ‘showman’ who directs his cast to unveil through the ‘complexity of the rhythmic scheme’ a ‘subtle and wider mechanism’, which we discover is the sociological core of these communities. In their ‘imitation and standardizing of [the] self ’,24 these individuals and the communities of which they are part conform absolutely to Lewis’ definition of the comic. The narrator in one of the first of these stories, ‘Les Saltimbanques’ observed that ‘violence is the essence of laughter [. . .] It must be extremely primitive in origin, though of course its function in civilized life is to keep the primitive at bay.’25 The stories emphasise the barbarism at the root of these mock communities, consequently the Vorticist play Enemy of the Stars could also be read in a comic light. Lewis’ first concern be it expressed in literary or visual terms was the inhumanity, or at least primal bestiality, of mankind.26 He marked Bergson’s 181

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statement that ‘in a large number of animal species (generally parasites) phenomena of fixation, analogous to those of vegetables, can be observed’.27 It is precisely this that informs many of his ‘pseudo-pastoral’ drawings attributed to 1912. As Edwards has said, the figures in these landscapes are fused to the land from the waist down.28 The pencil, ink and gouache Figure Holding a Flower (1912, Figure 5.1) is submerged to the neck, its torso moulded comparably to the rock that surrounds it. The left arm serves not as a division but an echo of the contours whose colours leach across the hesitantly defined limb. It may be suggested that the figure is in an early stage of becoming, for, unlike the merged torso and arm, its legs traverse the space in an attempt at three-dimensionality. Their puny form undoes such a view, however, and the figure’s androgyny assumes greater significance. This compliments the asexual biology of the drooping flower, for which the right arm acts as an impotent stem. The vegetative analogy is equally practised in the untraced drawing Two Figures (1912), whose torsos jut out of the earth in the same direction as the tree behind them, apparently sculpted by the prevailing wind. (And it is worth noting in passing that Two Figures actually depicts three – the foremost figure holding a baby.) These are anthropological specimens, fulfilling Bergson’s warning in Creative Evolution that ‘evolution is not only a movement forward; in many cases we observe a marking time, and still more often a deviation or turning back’.29 For Lewis, Bergson’s descriptive language undermined his thesis of open-ended evolution. For example in drawing a metaphor from a hilly road that proceeded to town, Bergson presented an image with an end in view (Finalism), even though it was contrary to his argument. Lewis’ Figure 5.1  Wyndham Lewis, Figure Holding a Flower, 1912, private collection. On long-term loan to The Courtauld, London. Photo © The Courtauld © The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust/Bridgeman Images 182

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engagement with this section of Bergson’s text is complex and manipulative, and therefore the passage and his response are worth quoting in full. First, Bergson: 30 That adaptation to an environment is the necessary condition of evolution we do not question for a moment. It is quite evident that a species should disappear, should it fail to bend to the conditions of existence which are imposed on it. But it is one thing to recognise that outer circumstances are forces evolution must reckon with, another to claim that they are the directing causes of evolution [. . .]31 The truth is that adaptation explains the sinuosities of the movement of evolution, but not its general directions, still less the movement itself. The road that leads to the town is obliged to follow the ups and downs of the hills; it adapts itself to the accidents of the ground; but the accidents of the ground are not the cause of the road, nor have they given it its direction.32 At every moment they furnish it with what is indispensable, namely, the soil on which it lies; but if we consider the whole of the road, instead of each of its parts, the accidents of the ground appear only as impediments or causes of delay, for the road aims simply at the town and would fain be a straight line. Just so 184

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as regards the evolution of life and the circumstances through which it passes – with this difference, that evolution does not mark out a solitary route, that it takes directions without aiming at ends, and that it remains inventive even in its adaptations.33 Lewis’ criticism was provocative. Taking Bergson’s metaphor rather than his argument, Lewis was unconvinced by Bergson’s view that evolution does not conform to a plan. Picking up Bergson’s image and using it to contrary ends, Lewis developed a counter position none the less contingent upon the idea of evolutionary progress: Here Bergson evidently sees the difficulties and admissions that this simile has created for him, and dismisses them in a few words. (For the town of the figure is the finalists purpose: and the ‘inventiveness’ about the uphill and down dale obstacle race, of which we have a trivial play compared to the inveterate purpose of the push to the town. And what is the town; and is the push merely the impatience to ‘get somewhere’ nothing else, and so to be at rest? In short is it, as Freud suggests, the road to inertia? (a ‘long way round to Nirvana’)).34 Evolution with a point in view cannot be creative change but is rather stasis – a stasis that is synonymous with death. It must not be forgotten that the 185

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achievement of stasis was the Vorticist’s prime intent; so such a closed view of stasis has significant implications for interpretation of this spatial art. By his rejection of the open and forward-looking conception of the élan vital given merely a page earlier, Lewis instead endowed his vision of evolutionary failure with added resonance: a representation of life in which nirvana – inertia – is all. An extension of this metropolitan metaphor returns us to the issue of meritocracy and the untameable chaos, as Lewis saw it, of city-led democracy. In this instance, not only does Lewis question the value of mass migration to the towns (to him an all too recent phenomenon), but also the constitution of these centres themselves.35 It is an image that is contrary to readings of the architectonics of Vorticism as celebratory renditions of the modern metropolis.36 In Lewis’ marginalia, neither the town nor the individual appears to benefit from this arrangement. The social organisation of the town inflicts a static convention that supersedes civilising impulses. It is precisely the barbarity of this structure that unfolds in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, making it a very appropriate subject for Lewis c. 1912, as he explored in his portfolio of drawings, Timon of Athens (1912–13).37 Shakespeare’s play opens with an ostentatious banquet that establishes the largesse of the eponymous central character, Timon. In an attempt to dispel the conventional formality surrounding dinner, Timon unwittingly elucidates the social deprivations engendered by the conventions demanded by civilisation. The situation before Timon exactly concurs with the stultification that Lewis drew out in his reaction to Bergson’s passage in Creative Evolution: Figure 5.2  Wyndham Lewis, A Masque of Timon, 1913, private collection. On long-term loan to The Courtauld, London. Photo © The Courtauld © The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust/Bridgeman Images 186

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Ceremony was but devised at first To set a gloss on faint deeds, hollow welcomes, Recanting goodness, sorry ere ’tis shown.38 It is this scene that informs Lewis’ illustration for Act I, A Masque of Timon (Figure 5.2). It has often been noted that this early portfolio drawing resounds with a dynamic Futurist vitalism characterised as Bergsonian in its dissolution and melding of space to affect an experiential time – where, for instance, the two far-left figures may in fact be one, just stepping into position. Normand is astute to imply a social agenda beneath this heady flux: ‘where there is no stable centre to social and political life’, he argues, ‘there could be no over-arching system of value’.39 But whereas Normand rightly sees Lewis’ stylistic choice as a critique of the ‘democratisation of culture’, this is read as an implicit attack on Bergson’s intuition which Lewis feared for its potential to empower the un-educated. 40 Whilst no doubt true, the folder may equally fulfil Lewis’ preoccupation with the ‘discord’ and ‘set-backs’ that Bergson acknowledged as the counter-weights to the evolutionary process. 41 The folder engages with Bergson at many levels, functioning both as rejection and endorsement of the various aspects of this philosophy. A line of the appropriately named Apemantus can be used in support of the latter reading: And all this courtesy! The strain of man’s bred out Into baboon and monkey. 42 It is surely no accident that the left-hand figure identified by Edwards as Ape­ mantus in Lewis’ A Masque of Timon should take on ape-like proportions. The recurrent visual language of the portfolio is redolent of these themes. The rituals of civilisation appear barbarous posturing where outward display 188

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masks actual emotion, intended instead to give a false, yet acceptable means of communication. The divided space of Act I is one such example, mirrored again in the companion watercolour known as Alcibiades. Lewis problem­ atised communication overtly in his choice of typefaces. The clarity of Act I disintegrates with the downturn in Timon’s fortunes, demonstrably in the woodcuts for Act II–Act IV. Appropriate to the visual sparsity in Act II, the lettering condenses ‘T’ with ‘II’ in a cryptic short-hand, a synthesis which recurs from this point on. In Act II, ‘Athen’ becomes so interlocked that it is barely decipherable, and this is accentuated by its appearing too close to read. The entire title is thrust forward by cinema-style triangular guiding lines, but whereas ‘Timon’ is contained, ‘Athen’ steps outside slipping forward

Figure 5.3  Wyndham Lewis, Timon of Athens, Act III. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK © Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust. All rights reserved 2022/Bridgeman Images 189

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and sideways, away from the man who supposedly had the power to control it. As if in emphasis, the ‘M’ in ‘Timon’ is bent, the ‘O’ ruptured. Timon is crumbling. It is no surprise then, that in Act III, Timon’s name does not appear at all (Figure 5.3). At the centre of the frenetic composition rests a circular void – the still heart of the vortex. 43 Empty, it does not speak of control but rather its absence. The outer flux of faces, cogs and bars now familiar in this portfolio are sucked into a vacuum. The lettering design relates closely to the subject: where III stands firm as the columns in the banqueting hall of A Masque of Timon, ‘Act’ consists of columns toppled. Variously falling away from and precariously leaning towards the III, its firmness is fragile as dominos. The imagistic play with text reveals further subtleties that layer Lewis’ agenda in complexity. In the centre of the portfolio’s cover, ‘Timon’ appears upside down and inverted. Reading it backwards is telling: ‘NOWIL’. Lewis’ typeface here is surely no accident: the change connotes ‘no Will’, a reference perhaps to the shared, and therefore ambiguous authorship of the Shakespeare/John Middleton play; ‘no WL’, a humorous self-reference that may allude to Lewis’ own rescripting of the play in his choice of scenes for illustration; and, lastly, in the light of Lewis’ critique of the élan vital, ‘no Will’ as a reference to his refutation of the possibility of a progressive governing life force. Following Swinburne’s description of the play as ‘a poem inspired at once by the triune of Furies of Ezkiel, of Jussenal, and of Dante’, we are returned to the hell of humanity as a vortex of bestiality.44 Bestiality recurs in the play’s second climactic scene in Act IV, following Timon’s expulsion from Athens. The exchange between Timon and Apemantus is significant, not only to this reading of the portfolio, but for Lewis’ later critique of Shakespeare, The Lion and the Fox (1927) and, arguably, to his sociology as a whole. 190

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Timon:  What wouldst thou do with the world, Apemantus, if it lay in thy power? Apemantus:  Give it to the beasts, to be rid of the men. Timon:  Wouldst thou have thyself fall in the confusion of men, and remain a beast with the beasts? Apemantus:  Ay, Timon. Timon:  A beastly ambition, which the gods grant thee t’attain to. If thou wert the fox, the lion would suspect thee when peradventure thou wert accused by the ass. If thou wert the ass, thy dullness would torment thee, and still thou lived’st but as a breakfast to the wolf. If thou wert the wolf, thy greediness would afflict thee, and oft thou shouldst hazard thy life for thy dinner. Wert thou the unicorn, pride and wrath would confound thee, and make thine own self the conquest of thy fury. Wert thou a bear, thou wouldst be killed by the horse. Wert thou a horse, thou wouldst be seized by the leopard. Wert thou a leopard, thou wert german spots to the lion, and the spots of thy kindred were jurors on thy life; all thy safety were remotion, and thy defence absence. What beast couldst thou be that were not subject to a beast? And what a beast thou art already, that seest not thy loss in transformation!45 Here it momentarily appears as though Timon and his wise council Apemantus have exchanged roles. Whilst Timon realises that regressive animalism is no way forward, Apemantus’ counter indicates Timon’s blindness once again: ‘The commonwealth / of Athens is become a forest of beasts’. 46 Again, Lewis’ woodcuts support this, mapping the continuing degeneracy. The figure in Act II resting at a forty-five-degree angle takes the posture of a praying mantis, its arms cut off at the wrist to accentuate the likeness. But 191

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whereas its head retains a ‘classical’ profile reminiscent perhaps of early de Chirico, by the answering plate, Act V, where this posture is repeated in the opposite direction, the head has lost this clarity. Elegance is replaced with a tension between detail and two-dimensionality: eyelashes to the left eye, a fuller mouth, and hands give this figure identity; flattened nose and straight lines combine to form a head that is more ritualistic. 47 The inscription, ‘Timon hath made his’, is left appropriately unfinished. The spiralling chaos of the diagonal precludes the creation of anything. Autocracy Man must live in society, and consequently submit to rules. 48 If in Lewis’ understanding, democratic and meritocratic societies led to intellectual death then it was natural he should explore the autocratic alternative. In one of his earliest critical essays, ‘Our Wild Body’ (1910), Lewis presented the flaccid Englishman in juxtaposition with the spontaneous and energetic French. In bemoaning the fact that the body has become an ‘out-of-date tool or weapon [. . .] superseded in the art of war’, Lewis claimed that the ‘hypocrisies of our [British] civilisation’ had ‘robbed us of [. . .] frankness and imagination’. 49 Implicitly the long history of mediating parliamentarianism was the cause of the lethargy of the nation in its suffocation of the desire for vital struggle. Channelled once again through Bergson’s brief consideration of social models in Creative Evolution, Lewis’ first support for autocracy was based upon its contingent provocation: social laxity. Ironically, British political liberalism demonstrated that it was necessary to posit a rigid order of governance so as to stimulate revolt from those individuals made of ‘stronger’ 192

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material who could overcome the imposition. In so doing, those individuals could alter the structure of that order for its betterment. The ‘survival of the fittest’ model was transmuted to a form of social eugenics, with, of course, the artist as the chosen agent. Hence, in ‘The Improvement of Life’ Lewis claimed that England, in representing ‘anti-Art, mediocrity and brainliness’ was just the place for ‘great Art to spring up’ in revolt.50 Bergson encapsulated the tension between alternative social models in a passage in Creative Evolution marked by Lewis. In a comparison of the ‘societies of bees and ants’ and ‘human societies’, Bergson wrote: The former are admirably ordered and united, but stereotyped; the latter are open to every sort of progress, but divided, incessantly at strife with themselves. The ideal would be a society always in progress and always in equilibrium but this ideal is perhaps unrealizable: the two characteristics that would fain complete each other [. . .] can no longer abide together when they grow stronger.51 The passage is full of analogy. Bergson highlighted the divergence of evolutionary paths that nevertheless both produced a viable organisation of life. Since Bergson presented evolution as discontinuous and divergent, the priority was clear for Lewis: struggle itself may become the equilibrium that maintains the order. The greatest progress in adaptation was in the divergent leap to the creation of a new order, not in a slavish attunement to an existing cause.52 Lewis’ marginal note at this place in Bergson’s text has complex ramifications. Supporting the claim for leaps of innovation, it reads: ‘c.f. the stereotyping of Chinese civilisation, owing to its isolation from other 193

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cultures . . . The struggle and momentary brightness of the Greeks the contrast.’ Apparently Lewis maintained some faith in a Western civilisation founded on occasional individual genius, despite his critique of the super­ ficial social contact experienced by the majority.53 In this view of Chinese civilisation as predominantly repetitive, Lewis’ metaphorical associations unsatisfactorily leave the analogous relationship between Chinese civilisation and Bergson’s identification of the social organisation of hymenoptera. In the continuation of Bergson’s passage Lewis marked with utter seriousness what Bertrand Russell was later to ridicule: in the supposed ‘impulse toward social life’, the ‘brunt [. . .] was borne along the line of evolution ending in man, and the rest of it was collected on the road leading to the hymenoptera: the societies of ants and bees would thus present the aspect complementary to ours’.54 In Bergson’s mind hymenoptera is presented as an equally complex alter­ native to our own imperfect social structure. Lewis’ understanding of ‘complementary’ has a far more dialectical sense. Just as in the 1912 drawings, his frequent allusions to and representations of the ‘insect life’ in Blast and beyond embody Bergson’s divergent evolution in a far more compromising manner.55 To leave aside such representations for the time being, the opposite direction had equal import for Lewis’ artistic interests. The reference to Greek culture laid the path for an endorsement of the classical style, where classicism was understood as representative of a particular cultural ideology rather than understood in terms of its formal qualities alone. Lewis’ classicism cannot be properly understood without the critical fatalism of T. E. Hulme. Hulme’s thought underwent subtle development prior to his first meeting with Lewis, normally dated c. 1913. Chapter 1 suggested that a residue of Bergson’s thought adhered to Hulme long after his apparent change in allegiance, and it is for this reason that I read his superficially anti-Bergson late 194

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work ‘Humanism and the Religious Attitude’ within the distorted interpretation of Bergson now familiar in Lewis’ work. From Hulme’s earliest writings Cinders (1906–7), through his discipleship to Bergson, to his subsequent waning of interest in that philosophy, Hulme’s system persistently returned to a belief that ‘Man is in no sense perfect, but a wretched creature’.56 Social order was in fact not only necessary, but inescapable, for it mirrored the biological constitution of life as understood by Bergson: Organised matter has a limit of expansion that is very quickly reached; beyond a certain point it divides instead of growing [. . .] Life succeeded in inducing an increasing number of elements, ready to divide, to remain united. By the division of labour it knotted between them an indissoluble bond.57 The progress of mankind as a collective species would forever be limited, something that both Lewis and Hulme felt was too easily forgotten in the wake of the glories of the Enlightenment and successes of industrialisation. Life should be regarded as being held in tense interdependency in which the total fulfilment of one tendency above another is prevented. Such ontological limits were represented on a human level in the distorted perception of our environment gained in response to its practical requirements. Reiterating an argument first put forward in Time and Free Will Bergson in Laughter clarified a position that Lewis grappled with continually in his questioning of the relationship of art to life. The ‘selection made by my senses [. . .] serve[s] as a light to my conduct; what I know of myself is what comes to the surface’. As a consequence, we ‘live in a zone midway between things and ourselves, externally to things, externally also to ourselves’.58 A 195

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no-man’s land where no full knowledge is graspable, either of external events or of one’s self. Beyond this perceptual blindness Bergson considered the increasing limits on individual development imposed by the environment.59 The ‘child-personality’, he posited, ‘though indivisible, united in itself divers persons [. . .] But these interwoven personalities become incompatible in course of growth and [. . .] a choice must perforce be made.’60 Lewis’ astute note at this point gives an excellent example of the manner in which he condensed Bergson’s expansive philosophy to confine it to its negative underside: ‘Our life strewn with the corpses of our incipient selves.’ Once again, it is the analogy that Bergson drew which allowed Lewis the greatest mileage. Bergson’s logical continuation reads as follows: ‘But nature, which has at command an incalculable number of lives, is in no wise bound to make such sacrifices.’ Lewis’ note indicates a lateral imagination that produces a monstrous vision: ‘The world of man – a community – like all these personalities left alive and given a separate existence, instead of in the case of an individual organism being destroyed and abandoned.’61 The community assumes the role of a ‘meta-self ’ with shared characteristics that would negate the individual. So how might this autocracy be translated into Lewis’ visual art? The answer has already been alluded to in his description of the inert stasis of false evolution. Stasis was synonymous with an end – a geographical place, or space that was juxtaposed with the idea of change and was antithetical to vitalism. Bergson himself had contrasted the artist’s role with his conception of life, imagining the artist to ‘carve out in space and fix in time’.62 Far from an art of flux, Bergson’s vision gave the cue for the Vorticist fixation of space. Lewis understood this completely, noting in his French edition of Time and Free Will: ‘ “Time” is simply things felt [?], the visceral sensational, interior life, as opposed to the exterior . . . and contemplative.’ It was erroneous to 196

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find an analogy between a homogenous internal duration and the concept of space proper.63 Rather, Lewis’ markings imply that Space-Time may be conceived as an homogenous unity born of the limitation of man’s vision that is unable to capture individual processes in their entirety. Space may be read as a kind of man-made order to combat his imperfections. Bergson acknowledged that evolution often consisted simply of the ‘marking of time’ (a phrase that translates literally into spatial terms), rather than continual change.64 The most obvious painting on which to test these ideas is surely The Crowd (1915, Figure 5.4). Here the homogeneity of the overall space is achieved by the welding of planes through the interpenetration of the architectural framework. The effect is of tense condensation rather than a harmonious unity, exemplified in particular by the creation of a central vacuum. The joists here seem simultaneously to intersect and pull apart due to Lewis’ harsh mahogany shadows; the glowing cream infill assumes a solidity that prohibits any vanishing point and instead contains the action in claustrophobia. Just as in cubist works, the continual shifting of spatial relations between planes forces the spectator’s eye to rove. The canvas is ungraspable as a whole and the disintegration of a totalising vision may parallel Bergson’s more general discussion of human limitation. Space is physically constructed by the city-grid as a container for the populace, alluded to in the lettering ‘ENCL’ (for ‘enclosure’), decipherable on a small central joist in the lower half of the canvas. Time seems literally ‘marked’ or ‘fixed’ in the ‘lump of compressed life’ – the blocks of human ciphers that are the crowd of the painting’s title.65 Poured, toppled futilely between the various ready-made compartments, this crowd instigates no change in its environment. The fixed space ensures stagnant timelessness. As Lewis’ story ‘The Crowd Master’ identified, containment is necessary to prevent the loss of ‘specific character, which is the privacy of space’.66 It is only from this strategic perspective that

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one is able to envisage the modern populace as ‘a civilised savage, in a desert city, surrounded by very simple objects and restricted number of beings’.67 Unable to envisage overarching processes, space may at least articulate a forum in which the condition of humanity can be explored.68 Lewis’ extra­ ordinary ant-like figure at the far left of the canvas beneath the Tricolour is relevant here. Identified by Normand as possibly representative of the policemen characterised in ‘The Crowd Master’, the figure takes on a more objective relation to the spectacle before him. Responsible for the ‘herding’ of the crowd, the police are both outside the collective yet in the same spatial environment. The ant-like construction of the ‘policeman’ articulates the impossibility of complete detachment since the figure’s chief difference is merely one of scale. His – and our – position in relation to the crowd must forever be relative, recalling Lewis’ social diagnostic that ‘we all today (possibly with a coldness reminiscent of the insect-world) are in each other’s vitals – overlap, intersect’.69 Having entered the realm of the canvas, there is the continual threat of being swallowed by its structure. In making use of the no-man’s land of Space-Time Lewis was able to utilise space to present Bergson’s critique of spatial analysis. In other words, to use space itself to highlight the problems that Bergson found with it. In doing so, Lewis’ space does what Bergson claimed that a spatial perspective could not: provide a ‘truly’ objective analysis of the social structures that are both bred in humankind and responsible for its inability to transcend its state. The Crowd functions as a ‘meta-space’ in which society may be dissected in a philosophical frame. Blenner, the chief protagonist in ‘The Crowd Master’ emphasised the character of the crowd ‘like a white corpuscle under the Figure 5.4  Wyndham Lewis, The Crowd, 1915. Photo © Tate, London © Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust. All rights reserved 2022/Bridgeman Images 199

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microscope, suddenly beginning to praise itself, drawing invidious comparisons between itself and the observant student’.70 It is finally as a separate species that we are invited to analyse the crowd, a collective with all the complexities that are identified in evolutionary theory. And Lewis’ view of this collected species? Surely as wretched and ignorant as ever Hulme suggested. ‘The idea of space in its totality [. . .] realises itself from the surrounding emptiness’, for, as Lewis noted, ‘otherwise you get the living sensation not fixed to any tract, its free feeling’.71 As Normand noted, the painting functions as an attack on the ‘social processes of democracy and standardisation’72 which enables the free feeling of the masses that Lewis is at pains to guard against. In Blenner’s words, ‘stupidity is unhygienic too. A stagnant and impoverished mind requires legislation.’73 Transgression Order is ‘not merely negative, but creative and liberating’ in Lewis’ schema.74 Following Bergson’s Laughter, The Wild Body stories show this in action. Society forever requires a mode for its self-reflection, and for Bergson this was achieved through laughter. In the comedy of carnival, Lewis exposed the contingent underside of society. Carnival may be divided into two forms, both of which are explored in The Wild Body: the subversive tactic, of which the victim is unaware; and the socially endorsed fête.75 The very unconsciousness of daily banality presented in The Crowd created an absurd theatre, only reflective when mediated by a particular form of analysis. The cue for this vision is Laughter, where we are invited to ‘look on life as a disinterested spectator: many a drama will turn into a comedy’.76 This perspective was used to excellent effect by Lewis in his narrator’s stance in ‘Some Innkeepers and Bestre’ (pre-1912), ‘The Pole’ (1909) and ‘A Soldier of Humour’ (1916–17). 200

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In this latter story, Lewis appears to make his sources plain, his narrator, Kerr-Orr, proclaiming ‘I explain everything by laughter’.77 With this in mind, the subversiveness of these stories may be unravelled in relation to Bergson’s treatise.78 The narrator in ‘Bestre’ admits to viewing a ‘human species as an entomologist would take a Distoma’.79 It is surely no accident that the eponymous Bestre should own a name that connotes all species of animals. Indeed his activities are observed as being ‘like phases of a combat or courtship in the insect world’.80 Bestre’s disinterested perspective is many layered, and it is only in relation to Lewis’ reading of Bergson’s social frameworks that Bestre’s mechanical character unfolds fully. For a start, it is plain that Bestre himself believes that he possesses objectivity, for as the narrator describes, ‘he never seems quite entering into reality, but observing it’.81 But Bestre is equally subjected to close observation by the narrator who takes delight in his ‘stagebox’ room that ‘perpetually entertained’ him.82 The opinions and perspective of each character become relative to the next observer, and, to borrow a term from Lewis’ later story, each assumes the role of ‘Crowd Master’, including the reader who is implicated in this chain of observation. The stories require that not only their narrators (in 1927 Kerr-Orr becomes the sole narrator) but also their readers pay close attention to events. This too is grounded in Laughter: ‘Life and society require [. . .] a constantly alert attention that discerns the present situation, together with a certain elasticity of mind and body to enable us to adapt.’83 It is exactly Bestre’s failure to adhere to this maxim that undermines his aspiration to the detached perspective, for the narrator notes his repetition and inflexibility – two of the traits Bergson identifies as absurd: Bestre is ‘immobile as before, and the attitude so much a replica as to make it seem a plagiarism of his kitchen piece’.84 Bestre is not merely engulfed in his environment at the hands of his superior, 201

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but is robbed of his authenticity. In the repudiation of the quality that confirms his vitality (adaptability), Bestre is treated with a curious satirical respect: as something alien to social convention – and, more significantly, to life. In Lewis’ schema, this is almost to make Bestre art.85 By viewing both individuals and society as a whole as some sort of ‘masquerade’ it is possible to sidestep if not actually alter the social structure. ‘As we are both in and of it [society], we cannot help treating it as a living being’ Bergson tells us. ‘Any image, then, suggestive of the notion of a society disguising itself, or of a social masquerade [. . .] will be laughable’, for it gives a false impression that unsettles the security of knowing one’s place within it. 86 Zoborov, chief character in ‘Beau Séjour’, cuts a disconcerting figure, his ‘breton (sic) fancy dress’ giving the ‘disagreeable impression of an obese doll’.87 Zoborov’s Polish, non-Breton origin makes his choice of attire wilfully unhelpful to those desiring to read something of his character from his exterior. He is as inauthentic as Bestre, but by extension Lewis suggests that the Breton customs themselves have become equally inauthentic. Traditional dress could clearly no longer signify a particular cultural difference if it was freely adopted by any foreigner who happened to like it. Moreover, in presenting the erosion of Brittany’s isolation, Lewis questioned the extent to which the set of beliefs that distinguished Breton culture were still adhered to. In an age when modern alternatives were readily available, Zoborov’s attire is rendered purposeless on every level.88 He is made a thoroughly subversive figure, upsetting the expectations of his fellow men, and undermining the cultural conventions against which they could be measured. All is made relative. Yet in this conscious ploy, Zoborov reclaims for himself an element of individuality: he defies categorisation and forces us to reassess the mental pockets in which he, and the culture he undermines, could be put. Nonetheless, this is largely a private occupation on Zoborov’s part, a secret transgression 202

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that secures merely the individual’s own confidence in his separateness from the herd. For collective relief, one must turn to carnival proper. Throughout these short stories everyday life is commonly read as a ‘fiesta’, or ‘fête’.89 There is one in particular however that explores socially endorsed carnival in great detail, ‘Les Saltimbanques’.90 The story revolves around the general obser­ vation that ‘for the primitive peasant audience the comic-sense is subject to the narrowest convention of habit’.91 From this finite bracket the material for comedy is taken. Carnival assumes the comic tropes identified in the ‘modern Circus [. . .] Italian Comedy, or [. . .] Punch’ as renderings of the ‘inversion or failure of force’.92 The comic troupe from Arles appears at first as another trope that indicates a failure of force. Their lifestyle is described as a ‘long pilgrimage through this world inhabited by “the Public”,’ upon whom they are dependent, yet from whom they are ostracised.93 The apparently wilful acts of miscommunication in which scowls are met with delighted gapes confirm a fundamental failing that is beyond the barriers of language and regionalism. The southern origin of the troupe imbues them with an exoticism that emphasises their professional difference and indicates a change of context in which social conventions must be viewed with uncertainty. Whilst the public is barely conscious of the reasons for their caution, it is precisely in the stimulation of this guardedness that the troupe’s function is to be found. Carnival upsets the normal social expectation and momentarily forces the community to behave independently and spontaneously. After all, it is not the troupe itself that comprises the failure, but rather its show which intentionally catalogues every social ill. Lewis’ narrator notes that the public is complicit in this arrangement to a certain degree, entering into a monetary contract for their entertainment, buying the expectation of the unexpected. From the troupe’s perspective, the 203

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public is deemed to confuse the effect of their show with their intelligence. The troupe is subversive, it is thought, because they are not fit enough to behave ‘correctly’, and it is here that the gulf in social exchange is opened. Representing their view, the narrator describes the performers as ‘a human family [. . .] lost in a land peopled by sodden mammoths’ who ‘gibbered in breton’.94 Equally, the public appears unfit for life due to its fixed and mechanical regime. The performer is omnipotent in his ability to manipulate reactions from the crowd, based not on the norms of communication, but by his misunderstood gestures, on their opposites. In this contorted world of social exchange, the public is unquestionably dependent,95 and whilst initially this particular Cornac had some difficulty in settling his audience, this only served the better to demonstrate his craft.96 There is clearly no one correct categorisation of either group, and, indeed, in hoping for a correct pocket we as readers fall into our own conventional habits. Just as Zoborov’s dress forced reconsideration, so too does Lewis’ unwinding of the intricate relat­ ionship and function of these two opposing groups. ‘Les Saltimbanques’ was Lewis’ most thorough exploration of the mach­ inations of carnival in his early work. His methods were twofold: in the action of the story, where the small boy’s unexpected heckling at its close demonstrates the troupe to be victim of its own set convention, at a loss to respond adequately to this surprisingly negative voice; and in the objective position of the narrator who is able to convey meta-data for Lewis’ investigation. The narrator functions as a theoretical component that allies this story to a wider Bergsonian programme. In a long reflection on his observations, the narrator Figure 5.5  Wyndham Lewis, Study for Kermesse, 1912. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund and Gift of Neil F. and Ivan E. Phillips in memory of their mother, Mrs Rosalie Phillips © Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust. All rights reserved 2022/Bridgeman Images 204

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defines the most significant quality of laughter and its purpose: ‘extremely primitive in origin [. . .] its function is to keep the primitive at bay’.97 So far so Bergsonian, for laughter is described as being a ‘social gesture [. . . which] pursues a utilitarian aim of general improvement’.98 Laughter provides a safety valve that enables the continuance of social order. Mass carnival is clearly not as subversive as it seems. The troupe relies on social convention as much as their audience, and laughter signals its endorsement by the institution. Lewis’ narrator in ‘Les Saltimbamques’ contends that ‘violence is the essence of laughter’.99 Abstract theorisations transmute to the visceral barbarism prevalent in so much of his work. Lewis’ lost oil Kermesse (1912), and its surviving study now held at the Yale Center for British Art (Figure 5.5), provide a useful case study of this interplay of idea and its visual realisation. Whilst of the same ilk as the Breton stories (Kermesse meaning ‘carnival’), the focus is shifted by the violence of the image. When on loan to the Cave of the Golden Calf, the work was listed not as carnival but ‘Creation’, leading Edwards to read this painting as a proto Nietzschean/Bergsonian ‘primordial union with nature’.100 In this carnival we are returned to a primitive world which is inherently barbaric. In noting that the dancing couple are locked in a movement of ‘danger and death’, Tickner opens up a tension caused by the juxtaposition of the titular creation and its obliteration.101 Following her observation the work undoubtedly moves towards the death of the individual self that is intrinsically bound to the collective nature of carnival. In the threat of annihilation Durman and Munton identify an ‘ignorant energy’ in the protagonists, lacking ‘comprehension of their own force’,102 the same fundamental ‘ failure of force’ which Lewis’ narrator in ‘Les Saltimbanques’ makes so much of. ‘Les Saltimbanques’ not only provides Lewis’ most complete statement on laughter but also identifies his method: to create ‘a drama of mock-violence of every social relationship [. . .] some frame that 206

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was always a simulacrum of mortal combat’.103 Although overlaying textual and visual expression synonymously may be unwise, certainly this seems to be a good description of the action in Kermesse. Bergson insists that those laughing have ‘lost sight of the fact that they [the objects of laughter] were men of flesh and blood’.104 Respectively both Lewis and Bergson find in laughter the ‘life root’ and ‘inner core’ to which as participants of this laughter we are returned.105 For both, the default position is this primitive, essentially barbaric mode of being; Lewis’ laugher is as a ‘realistic firework’, Bergson’s as ‘volcanic eruptions’.106 The explosive terminology gives new resonance to the title and content of Lewis’ Vorticist journal Blast. Blast illumined the horror of old hypocrisies, but in sweeping them clean could only offer a negative vision for a future governed by barbarism. Imaging the All-embracing Kermesse portrays the failure of self, annihilated in the collective carnival. Lewis’ exploration of self arises mainly from its contingent negation in the default position of fiesta. As a result of Lewis’ and Bergson’s requisite severance of social ties to the victim of laughter, we see that victim as a degenerate organism. According to Bergson the victim is preconditioned for our ridicule, identifying himself as ‘comic in proportion to his ignorance of himself ’.107 How then, Bergson asked, are we able to ‘put ourselves in tune with a soul which is not in tune with itself?’108 The object of comedy lacks empathy, is disconnected from self, others and the environment. Eugène Minkowski, writing on schizophrenia in 1927, found exactly this ‘loss of vital contact with reality’ that Bergson and Lewis associated with laughter to be the prime component of the schizophrenic blueprint.109 Although Minkowski’s text post-dates the work by Lewis discussed here, 207

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Minkowksi himself was eager to stress the important influence that Bergson had upon his thought, so Minkowski can help to illuminate Lewis’ take on Bergson. Certainly, Bergson referenced the relation between laughter, genius and madness, but it is interesting to note the uncanny resemblance between Minkowski’s embellishment of this imbalance between personalities and environments and Lewis’ presentation of it in his Vorticist play ‘Enemy of the Stars’. For Minkowski, such dyssynchrony amounted to an imbalance of space or place and lived time, where beneath the ‘vegetative and automatic surface’, a fantastical vision of ‘abstract speculation’ and ‘monstrous forms’ remained.110 Whilst it would be impossible to argue that the protagonists in ‘Enemy of the Stars’ were intended to be in any way representations of schizophrenia, they do conform to this pattern, indicating perhaps a correspondence in the manner in which both Lewis and Minkowski interpreted Bergson, and another example of Lewis’ sourcing of abnormal functioning in Bergson’s texts. Since Time and Free Will, Bergson had been writing how we ‘live outside ourselves, hardly perceiving anything of ourselves but our own ghost, a colourless shadow which pure duration projects into homog­ enous space’.111 More recently, the pathology of self-ignorance in Matter and Memory has led Lapoujade to qualify that ‘societies live in a sort of permanent dream or nightmare. The human species is a neurosis of life [. . . and] in Matter and Memory, man is virtually psychotic.’112 For Lapoujade this is formulated through an inequality, or imbalance of psychic states: ‘The human in Bergson is humanization – or rather humanization itself oscillates between dehum­an­ization and overhumanization, depending on the different levels at which one grasps it and the different tendencies that act in it.’113 Lewis’ speculation around abnormal functioning implicated the vegetat­ ive state in his exploration of the self. The static figures of the 1912 drawings are as absurd as the idea of the ‘cabbage reading Flaubert’ with which Lewis 208

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illustrated his comic theory in ‘The Meaning of the Wild Body’.114 A passage from Creative Evolution which discussed genetic individuality and aging provoked a sideways comment from Lewis, typical of the way in which he reacted against Bergson whilst adopting his metaphor and imagery. Where Bergson’s text merely read ‘it is easy enough to argue that a tree never grows old, since the tips of its branches are always equally young’, Lewis transformed the statement into a diabolical vision. ‘The Tree’, he noted, ‘interesting comparison with life of a man. If all his life grew and grew like a snowball, dead inside, live only at the surface, till it filled the Universe like the swelling expanding trunk of [a] tree.’115 The figures of the 1912 drawings lack depth, and whilst their physical past may be encoded in their substance, any mental past is entirely absent. It is this belief that underpins Lewis’ conception of the contemporary state of humanity, and that he expounded in ‘Enemy of the Stars’ (1914). In the intervening two years from the production of the 1912 drawings and stories and the writing of the ‘Enemy of the Stars’, Lewis’ engagement with these issues deepened considerably to encompass the psychological and societal effects of the condition of degradation. The stories and images associated with the Wild Body project humorously presented what Lewis, in 1925, was to castigate as that ‘unfortunate by-product of the human state’ – the self.116 The characters who parade across the pages of these stories are without exception ‘puppets’,117 the ‘iron and blood automaton’,118 that rigorously follows its role or fate, without question. They are, with the possible exception of the circus troupe in ‘Les Saltimbanques’, stereotypes that can be identified by characteristic actions, whether met individually or as part of a social group. Lewis’ programme was to reveal the absurdity of these overtly recognisable personalities as being in fact person-less. In the Wild Body, this was achieved by highlighting their lack of originality and their surface 209

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engagement with the life they lead. ‘Enemy of the Stars’, however, profoundly questioned the constitution of a sense of self, and, in the insoluble problem it articulated, provided a sophisticated development from the crudely standardised self satirically exposed in the Wild Body. In ‘Enemy of the Stars’, Lewis adopted a dualistic presentation of the self akin to Time and Free Will. As ever, Lewis’ methodology comprised a complex manipulation of Bergson’s system. Here the superficial life – life on the surface – is equated to space, and the interior life of the mind to time, equated to Bergson’s experiential psychology of duration. Ultimately Lewis’ priority was for a spatial art, yet in Bergson’s system this would fail to provoke sustained reflection. As Bergson made clear in An Introduction to Meta­ physics, the rationalist method of the psychologist which reconstructed selfhood from fragmented states by analysis, merely built ‘form without content’.119 Equally, Lewis argued the interiority of duration precluded its clear communication from individual to individual and led to a dysfunctional society. His task was to expose the flaw of subjectivity inherent in duration, whilst appropriating its insight to an objective spatial realm. In Time and Free Will Bergson provided an explanation of duration in which he elucidated the role of society in the creation, or evolution, of selfhood: Consciousness, goaded by an insatiable desire to separate, substitutes the symbol for the reality, or perceives reality only through the symbol. As the self thus refracted, and thereby broken to pieces, is much better adapted to the requirements of social life in general, and language in particular, 210

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consciousness prefers it, and gradually loses sight of the fundamental self.120 In essence this is the path of ‘Enemy of the Stars’. Of the two protagonists, Hanp and Arghol, Hanp may be read as Arghol’s ‘refracted’ self. Lewis emphasised Hanp’s identity as the ‘physical parallel of his Master’, who in turn is described as a ‘sunken mirror’. Both share ‘one soul’ only.121 The play traces Arghol’s battle against the communal tendencies of his consciousness, and to this end the character assumes the role of visionary. Self ‘is the one piece of property all communities have agreed it is illegal to possess’, he claims. And, transposing his language to evolutionary metaphor, ‘Self is the race that lost.’122 As less well adapted to life within a community, individual identity has been bred out of humanity. Bergson’s vision of man at the apex of evolution, his aspiration for a future ‘superman’, a man more fully in possession of himself, is shown to be impossible.123 Whilst Arghol’s insights might place him as an archaic ‘mastadon’ type survival, his attempt to define his own identity is simultaneously rendered futile by the constraints of his environment.124 Lewis’ descriptions of Arghol emphasise the extent to which he has been swallowed by the evolutionary tendency to backwardness. Physically akin to the vegetative humanity of the 1912 drawings Arghol is first met sitting with his ‘hands [forming] a thick shell fitting [the] back of [his] head, his face a grey vegetable core’.125 Both characters are mere ‘brain specks of the vertiginous seismic vertebrae, slowly living lines of landscape’.126 Whatever Arghol may claim, Hanp and he share a common root, and for this reason his fight with this other self is as doomed as it is inevitable: as a ‘blunt paw of Nature’ he and his actions ‘mechanically [. . .] become part of a responsive landscape’.127 With the tone of a (pseudo-) scientific law Bergson judged that 211

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man’s ‘tendency to individuate is opposed and at the same time completed by an antagonistic [. . .] tendency to associate’.128 The struggle implicit in Bergson’s language of Creative Evolution was taken to extremis by Lewis, for whom such antagonism defined the relationship between Hanp and Arghol. This reading may be supported by another drawing dating from 1912, now in the collection of Tate, London. Entitled Two Mechanics, the figures merge through their feet, yoked together to form one precarious being. The righthand figure takes up the form of the shadow of the foremost figure’s previous position, as if dragging the past into the present. In spite of the postures, there is little evidence of actual movement in Lewis’ drawing: both are anchored leadenly to the earth beneath, sculpted to their stances by the arcs that sweep backwards. Progress is denied, and, to follow the temporal metaphor, there is no change of state during this ‘lived’ experience. Rather it is one ever-lasting monotony. Seen as one figure, they recall Bergson’s diag­ nosis that we mostly ‘live outside ourselves, hardly perceiving anything of ourselves but our own ghost, a colourless shadow which pure duration projects into homogenous space’.129 They are however two figures, as Lewis’ title emphasises. Two selves melded together through their mutual influence, yet both also formed in accordance to an external order. And this order Lewis implies, is no more than the near-empty, undulating landscape that is invisible from their subterraneous space. It is blindly, unconsciously followed, Lewis again giving a pointer in the blank cavernous profiles. For once, the eye to which he gave so much significance in both his stories and visual art is absent. As we have already seen, mechanism was the grounding principle in Bergson’s and Lewis’ theories of the comic. For Bergson, the ‘comic person is unconscious’, having an ‘effect of automatism and inelasticity’.130 In Two Mechanics there is little to identify these figures as comic. The mechanical state is far too great a threat, and, likewise, it is this sentiment that lifts the 212

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drama of Arghol and Hanp from being yet another ‘Wild Body’ experiment to the level of a text that takes such mechanism seriously. Arghol and Hanp function not only as parts of one individual, but as separ­ ate beings. In a moment of insight, Arghol realises ‘Men have a loathsome deformity called Self; affliction got through indiscriminate rubbing against their fellows. Social excrescence.’131 It is this threat of merger with the other and the resulting collapse of fundamental difference to the homogeneity of Bergson’s superficial self that holds Arghol’s vision with tenacity. In a self-­ condemning invocation of Platonic idealism, the ‘process and creation of life, without any exception’ is viewed as a ‘grotesque degradation and ‘souillure’ of the original solitude of the soul’.132 Arghol’s geographical (spatial) escape from the community of the town where he had previously lived can never be a mental escape also. In Hanp’s words, ‘to have humanity inside you – to keep a doss house’ is a recurrent problem regardless of physical separation.133 As Lapoujade counters, a ‘living being is above all a thoroughfare and [. . .] the essence of life is in the movement by which life is transmitted’.134 The point is driven home through Arghol’s dream world, which is manifestly outside space. In the first of three revelatory dream situations, Arghol sees himself visiting a café from his past Berlin days. Just as it was in Lewis’ first published story ‘The Pole’ (1909), the social personality utilised in any meeting of people is characterised as a ‘parasite’, for the relationship is necessarily one of dialogue, dependence and influence.135 Arghol’s friends at the café table are rendered ‘companions of [the] parasite self . . . My dealings with these men is with their parasite composite selves not with them.’136 Bergson himself described the parasitic self, marking ‘great art’ as the route to overcome the ‘parasitic self which continually encroaches’.137 He made a similar point in An Introduction to Metaphysics where he referred to the person met in pragmatic duration who is ‘known to me only by so many 213

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comparisons with persons or things I know already’. These are ‘signs by which he is expressed more or less symbolically’, as opposed to the immanent self expressed in ‘pure’ duration.138 For Lewis, the parasitical personality is identified in evolutionary terms as the lowest form of life, unable even to sustain itself as an independent entity – a ‘transgression’, or ‘awful swerving’ of the progress to more sophisticated life.139 Evidence suggests that the root for this is also Bergsonian: ‘While consciousness sleeps in the animal which has degenerated into a motionless parasite’, Bergson stated, ‘it probably awakens in the vegetable’.140 This passage is extensively lined by Lewis in his edition, with the comment ‘Reverse order of animal and vegetable consciousness. Of what does this consciousness consist in man: and how would it be affected by adoption of the anti-concept?’ Arguably Lewis’ entire project is an exploration of these questions. The 1912 drawings envisage the farcical consequences of their logical conclusion. Equally, it is just this fear of reversal that so drives Arghol’s dire quest. Arghol’s great effort to overcome his fear of merger with another is entropy. Seeing a ‘man directly beneath his friend [who . . .] has been masquerading’ as himself, his defence of the self can only be a negation of that identity which had been appropriated. ‘I am not Arghol.’141 Yet as he had already complained, the statement cannot be fulfilled for ‘self [. . .] is like murder on my face and hands’, the ‘stain won’t come out’.142 Arghol’s flaw is his confus­ ion of the pragmatic aspect of self as something which is identifiable externally, with the elusive, ever-shifting entity which contains his authenticity. To quote again from An Introduction to Metaphysics, Bergson defined the ‘ego’ as merely ‘a sign by which the primitive [. . .] intuition which has furnished the psychologist with his subject matter is recalled, it is only a word [. . .] The error lies in believing that while remaining on the same level we can find behind the word a thing.’143 To perceive the true quality of his 214

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‘stain’ then, Arghol’s alternative course is necessarily one directed away from the social life. A course of isolation combined with acute self-awareness, one in fact comparable to Bergson’s duration. Where Bergson believed that ‘To get a notion of this irreducibility and irreversibility [. . .] we must do violence to the mind’,144 Arghol describes selfhood as a ‘sacred act of violence’ that runs counter to his programmed tendencies. Knowledge gleaned through an ‘offence against the discipline of the universe’ may only be partial, however. 145 In a passage Lewis labels ‘the fringe of INTUITION’, Bergson described how the ‘feeling we have of our evolution and of the evolution of all things in pure duration is [. . .] an indistinct fringe that fades off in darkness’. Thus Arghol: ‘anything I possess is drunk up here on the world’s brink’.146 Arghol’s programme is nevertheless to grasp this intuition as a key by which to transcend, or escape, his condition of humanity. Accordingly, his plan is to ‘accumulate in myself [. . .] dense concentration of pig life. Nothing spent, stored rather in stagnation [. . .] So burst Death’s membrane through, slog beyond, not float in appalling distances.’147 The surface social life is rather a living death; death is cast as ‘anti-manhood’, and in Bergson’s terms it is the plant that has a ‘membrane of cellulose’.148 Arghol’s ardent desire is to ‘leave violently slow monotonous life’ [i.e. death], a feat only possible if one can ‘cling to any object, dig your nails in earth’. Whilst this phrase brings to mind the regressive and sub-human vegetative imagery of 1912, it leads also in an entirely new direction. Curiously, Lewis was to replace the phrase ‘in earth’ in his 1932 re-edition of the play to read ‘into the galloping terra firma beneath you’.149 The revision marks the influence of Bergson’s most florid image: The whole history of humanity, in space and time, is one immense army galloping beside 215

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and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable ­obstacles, perhaps even death.150 Lewis’ adaptation of this passage is particularly noteworthy, for it comes from a section of Creative Evolution that captured popular imagination and pandered to the poetical mind of the lay reader. Often cited in the press, it would have been immediately recognisable by the great majority of Blast’s readers at the time of its publication. If Lewis’ programme in 1932 was to clarify thought implied in the earlier edition, the absence of direct reference in 1914 can only be a considered an act intended to veil his influencing sources. It seems only when Bergson’s impact was greatly diminished did Lewis feel it safe to acknowledge his work. In any event, the real question must be why he felt it necessary to instate (or reinstate) such an explicit reference to this passage at a time when it had certainly become obscure. With regard to Arghol’s resolution, Bergson’s lyrical prose makes plain that his desire to escape all vestiges of human contact remains misguided. The influence of the history of humanity is one that bears down on the individual irrepressibly, yet not to engage in this history is merely to float in appalling distances. Whilst in the Lewisian terms of 1912, to dig oneself into the earth is only to embed oneself in the very [in-]humanity of the vegetable state that Arghol wished to escape, entering the duration of another thing on its own terms, accumulating this duration as part of one’s own, is the key to the method of intuition expounded in An Introduction to Metaphysics. Using lived time to engage in space, one may pass beyond the living death, but only at the expense of the individual self. For logically, to admit these durations is to become multiple, to become therefore, again, ‘inhuman’, or 216

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what Bergson termed ‘superhuman’. This multiplicity is not at all that of the superficial selves of Hanp’s ‘doss house’, but rather what Lewis would come to express as the ‘one synthetic and various ego’.151 It is this that Arghol fails to grasp: that to be fully himself is to be more than himself alone;152 to follow the artistic ‘effort’ that ‘draw[s] out from the self more than it had already’.153 Arghol desires a ‘soul’ that may ‘drop down Eternity like a plummet’.154 His metaphor betrays him, for to materialise the soul would be to give it fixity, the first condition of the mechanisation of human-kind which both Lewis’ and Bergson’s theories of the comic sought to counteract. The image of dropping is therefore more apt than Arghol appears to realise, for the fall symbolises yet another form of degradation. It is therefore appropriate that Arghol’s undoing is to be found in his mechanisation. Hanp’s anger is directed towards the snoring Arghol as a ‘chattel for the rest of mankind’. Following a continuity of thought from the ‘Wild Body’ he sees Arghol ‘ACTING, he who had not the right to act’, being merely a chattel. Arghol is just one more ‘thing behaving like a person’.155 It is then a short step to murder, if murder it be at all, for surely a ‘thing’ cannot be killed, since it has not ‘life’. Hanp’s mental state is one of experiment: ‘see what happened! . . . thoughts – clown in the circus, springing on horses back, when the elegant riders have hopped, with obsequious dignity down gangway’.156 By Arghol’s murder Lewis makes clear that he is unfit to ‘ride’ the life that gallops over death. His search for individuality has apparently failed. At the bidding of the knife plunged in order to stop the noise of the snore, Arghol rose as if on a spring, grotesquely mechanical in the last throes of rigor mortis. He dreamed of existence beyond the living death. It seems there is nothing beyond death in actuality. Yet Hanp, the ‘clown in the circus’, behaved equally like a ‘toy wound up’, and his mechanisation is arrested on Arghol’s death. His sense of his own humanity returns now to the ‘empty 217

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shadow he could hardly drag along’. The form of Arghol’s overwhelming influence lives on; Hanp dashes it with his own suicide. The fulcrum of the entire play has been the reversibility of selfhood, the threat engendered by external influence where any interaction is a form of betrayal of authenticity. In an inversion of biblical imagery Arghol first singled out his ‘half-disciple’ Hanp as his chosen victim by a kiss.157 Arghol’s subsequent discussion of his town life impinges that experience on to Hanp’s identity. By the transference of this epigenetic blueprint, Hanp’s primal self, what could be considered his innocence, is destroyed. As Hanp realises, the friend who offered an introduction to the social life usurped his guiding role: Hanp’s life was ‘being lived for him’. His path to redemption, or self-­ restoration, can only be dependent upon Arghol’s annihilation. Yet Arghol’s own agenda was only a sublimation of those influences which had previously infected him: he had been soiled by the ‘tabernacle of self and unbelief ’ encountered in the city just as he in turn soiled Hanp’s individuality.158 Consequently he also had been a victim of betrayal, a fact alluded to by his threefold dream in which his café friend mutates into Hanp, then finally into Max Stirner. In the ‘strangest dreams’ Bergson wrote, ‘two images overlie one another and show us at the same time two different persons, who yet make only one’.159 In dream, all three – friend, Hanp and Stirner – are only facets of Arghol himself. Moreover, the last mutation demonstrates his impotence against his influencing forces, for it was Stirner’s volume The Ego and its Own (1844) that he had earlier symbolically thrown from his window.160 Once again the Christian imagery is apparently inverted, Arghol assuming the role of the cock that signalled St Peter’s betrayal of Jesus. He is self-condemned, his self merely consisting of a ‘large open book’.161 We are told that Arghol’s ‘sensitiveness, physical and mental’ ran counter to the ‘vigorous glorification of the self ’.162 Arguably then, in Lewis’ system 218

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to be bookish is implicitly not to be virile. In his search for learning Arghol neglected life and negated his self-identity. It is appropriate that the accompanying portrait of the ‘Enemy of the Stars’ (1914) should be unstably grounded. The torso, apparently bloated by his maelstrom of selves, is unsupported and therefore undermined by legs that are clearly impotent for action. Lewis’ thought has typically been judged as intellectual, well informed by works of the past, and manifestly – indeed vociferously – against the banality of ‘instinctual’ sensation-based art. The Vorticist aesthetic is furthermore overtly masculine in contrast to what Lewis perceived as the effete Bloomsbury. It is fundamental to apply Hanp’s question to Lewis: ‘Whose Energy did he use?’163 Having examined this complex manipulation of selfhood in Lewis’ play ‘Enemy of the Stars’, there are two further points that indicate the play could be grounded in Bergson’s work. Firstly, there is a note in Laughter on the case of outward comedy in ‘dealing with persons at the point at which they come into contact and become capable of resembling one another’164 – the case of the collective self which Arghol finds so intolerable in his café friends and that is put in Blast as the condition of being ‘Siamese’.165 As if in emphasis, Bergson goes on to couch this in far more Lewisian terms as being ‘something that lives upon him without forming part of his organism, after the fashion of a parasite’, phrasing that seems directly to relate to Arghol’s realisation that it is merely the parasitical personas at the surface of his friends’ selves that he is acquainted with.166 Secondly, it is another passage of Laughter that seems to underpin Arghol’s dream sequence shortly before his murder: ‘the strange function that a dream often effects between two persons who henceforth form only one and yet remains distinct [. . .] some other “he” has borrowed his body and stolen his voice’.167 This again is Arghol’s predicament, though one in which he, too, has been guilty of thieving the ideas, if 219

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not personalities, of others, which Lewis represents in the portentous volume of Stirner’s The Ego and its Own. This synthesis of ‘Enemy of the Stars’ and Laughter opens the way for ‘Enemy of the Stars’ to be read in a comic light.168 Once opened, many other comic tropes become apparent, for the play adheres to many of the conventions of popular or carnival entertainment. Briefly, the outcome is billed in the opening scene which doubles as a stage direction to the audience at large: ‘breathe in close atmosphere of terror and necessity till the execution is over, the red walls recede, the universe satisfied’.169 As readers we are confronted with a mental audience relatively frequently. Beyond this suggestion of ‘Punch and Judy’-style participation, the audience is also referred to in ‘posterity’, signalling the repetitive cycle of the play’s ‘production’.170 In a further likeness to ‘Punch and Judy’ or Commedia dell’Arte dramas, Arghol is first presented as a ‘heathen clown, grave booth animal’ who is often beaten by his ‘Super’ – the rich merchant employer (in ‘Enemy of the Stars’, owner of a wheelwright yard), so often portrayed in street theatre.171 On a whim, Lewis likens the yard shadows to ‘gawky crocodiles’, again echoing ‘Punch’.172 Finally, not to be exclusive in his sources or audience catchment, Lewis alludes to the legacy of Greek drama in his inclusion of ‘masks with trumpets of antique theatre’, which is nonetheless immediately deflated in his bathetic description of ‘two children blowing at each other with tin trumpets’.173 With such a schema, and a firm foundation in both the high and low traditions of morality plays, Arghol’s role assumes a more symbolic import that potentially transposes ‘Enemy of the Stars’ from low comedy to catharsis. In this meta-text of the play Arghol signifies the rebellious character who consciously refuses to submit to the conventions of the metropolis, resulting in his return to the simpler, more ‘primitive’ rural life at his uncle’s yard. His 220

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regular beatings are representative of a socially endorsed punishment for a ‘miss-fit’ and as such provide an example of the barbarism applied in order to uphold social convention. Arghol’s decision to escape the city was based on insight that had exposed the hypocritical and superficial social existence of much of metropolitan life, and in this role he can perhaps be taken to symbolise civilisation itself, sacrificed to secure the regeneration of social order. The effect of this is to place his function back within a very ancient system: straightforwardly, in a ‘primitive’ context as the sacrificial body so much in the public eye following Sergei Diaghilev and Igor Stravinsky’s spectacular staging of ‘The Rite of Spring’ in 1913; more arcanely, within a specifically Roman heritage, where comparison could be made to the subversive Lord of Misrule sacrificed on the altar of Saturn, the Greek Chronos, or deity of Time. This is not as far-fetched as it might seem, as Lewis possibly indicates such a context in the very opening line of his play, where Arghol is described as being ‘in immense collapse of chronic philosophy’.174 Events are played out in a ‘Golden Age’, the set a primordial ‘rough Eden of one Soul’.175 Apparently Lewis’ classicism, if this can be so classed, is synonymous with the vision of other ‘primitive’ European cultures, encompassed in a wider anthropological study. If such a meta-analysis is accepted, then Lewis has shifted the emphasis of the play from its comic beginning to a subject in which comedy functions far more seriously as a method to ensure the ordered functioning of civilisation; the role for comedy established in Laughter.176 Following the interwoven themes of comedy and degeneracy in ‘Enemy of the Stars’ has led to arcane ritual. On a much less convoluted level, such degeneracy was clearly articulated in the drawings that may be considered the parallel to The Wild Body fiction. Bergson in Laughter claimed that we ‘laugh if our attention is diverted to the physical in a person when it is the moral that is in question’.177 This is undoubtedly the case in ‘Enemy of the 221

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Stars’, and so it is now possible to test this maxim in relation to the much earlier Café (1910) and Dieppe Fishermen (1910), which provide such a good visual alternative to the character of Bestre. The central figure in Café and to a lesser extent the fishermen seemingly conform to the type characterised by Bergson as ‘embarrassed by his body’.178 Hunched posture, prowling yet effete, the café man is obviously cowed by the dominant matron; in the case of the fishermen humour is caused as their bendy legs suggest an inability to fulfil the heavy work of Lewis’ title. They seem ill-adapted to their calling, a fact emphasised by their depiction on land, dwarfing the un-rigged ciphers of boats that net-less conform too readily to an impressionist’s ideal of leisure. Trapped on the quay, an environment that is associated with their lack of work, these men condense their shoulders, and shift in guilty unease. Leisure and immorality are implicitly connected, once again undermining the authenticity of rural Breton life. The figures in both drawings share overly large torsos representative of a lack of proportion that Bergson allied to ‘mechanical arrangement’, thereby undermining the men’s status as ‘living’ beings.179 Lewis’ machine aesthetic was thus under development long before Blast. The early drawings which are so often characterised as belonging to a pre-Vorticist lyricism are manifestations of the same mechanism simply in a less condensed mode. Conclusion Inadaptability, deflation of expectation, mechanism – it is these traits that we see most forcefully in the lead up to as well as within Blast, traits conforming in Bergson’s words to ‘the body taking precedence over the soul’, to deconstruct a symbiosis of body-soul to produce ‘something mechanical encrusted on the living’.180 Comparatively to evolution, the comic is 222

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dominantly identified as the ‘dissolution of continuity’.181 In the intricate matrix of comedy and evolution the themes that so concerned Lewis are synthesised. I have argued that Bergson’s description of evolutionary change – as ‘the resistance life meets from inert matter, and the explosive force – due to an unstable balance of tendencies – which life bears within itself ’ – provided the frame through which Lewis’ politics operated.182 Further, Laughter described the transposition in which ‘comic fancy gradually converts a material mechanism into a moral one’.183 Considered historically, Bergson’s philosophy is categorised as being of the French vitalist tradition. Blast was intended as an invigorating shock to explode the insincere morality and lethargy of Victorian-Edwardian Britain. The provocation of Bergson’s compelling mixture of popular prose with a profound reorientation of perception made his work the obvious candidate for Lewis’ agenda. After all, at the time of its publication, it stimulated a furore of attention of which Lewis himself could only dream. ‘Enemy of the Stars’ may be read as an exposition of Bergson’s system, and I use ‘exposition’ both to mean ‘exposure’ and ‘exploratory discussion’. As John Ó Maoilearca notes in his preface to the 2007 edition of An Introduction to Metaphysics, for Bergson, ‘to understand something is to re-create it for oneself ’.184 Concomitantly in Lewis’ work, it is in its soured, distorted underside that Bergson’s philosophy is salvaged, re[in]stated and recreated. How to navigate between authenticity and author-ity became Lewis’ lifelong concern.

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Conclusion Reflection on Bergson has led to questions that sit at the core of art history. Bergson regarded the activity of perception as an event that traces the changes of states in both object and viewer. Any experience of a work of art becomes a temporal activity, and criticism should reflect this. Yet this approach highlights problems inherent to art history. How can a personal, psychological and empathic response gain the objective validity on which the judgements of society and the academic community have been based? Can we avoid mediocrity in a method in which all subjective relations to works of art assume equal value? Can such subjective experiences ever be found collectively, or are we to be left with a morass of relativity? Do these judgements 224

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made in the present alter the historical past? And can such a creative interpretation of historical objects be regarded as history at all? These questions not only have particular resonance in the revolution that was Post-Impressionism but are transferable across schools, periods and cultures. Critical enquiry of this kind has dictated the methodological approach adopted in this book. Many of these questions return positive answers through adopting a method of intuition. Value judgements on art tend to spring from an empathic relation to the work under consideration – and to this extent the reception of art tells more of the psychology of a given culture in the present. Read in this light, one could quip that there seems to be an inherent problem not solely in being British and Bergsonian, but being British and an art historian. For consideration based on intuition is certainly contrary to the roots of British empiricism and logical deduction. John Middleton Murry defined philosophy as ‘a piece of the history of mind which demands its context in order to be fully penetrated’.1 It is in other words experiential, shifting and plural, subject to the collectivity of perceptions of its moment. It is a psychological history as well as a political, economic and social one. There are many philosophies, and many levels on which to engage with philosophy. Writing on Bergson and his legacy, Merleau-Ponty emphasised the point: ‘Bergsonism distorts Bergson . . . Bergson was a conquest, Bergsonism defends, justifies Bergson. Bergson was a contact with things; Bergsonism is a collection of accepted opinions.’2 This has certainly been true of the protagonists of the case studies here. The question of influence has been central to many instances in this book. Yet influence itself is a product of perception and comes in many guises: conscious, unconscious, casual assimilation, attentive study, disguise, neurosis, (willful) mis-­reading – the list could be endless. More generally, influence may be conceived as an inevitable part of the artist’s or critic’s psychology, what makes us tick. As 225

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John Ó Maoilearca has extrapolated it has been the norm to regard Bergson’s import in his ability to ‘ “foreshadow”, “predate”, or “foresee”.’3 By focusing on the particular moment of 1910–14, the moment before the dismissal of Bergson’s work as an incomplete vanguard system, it is clear that he had a very real impact both within and outside philosophy. The disruption of history by the First World War makes it hard to find a conclusion that avoids superficiality. This is particularly true with Bergson, whose vitalism in its popular image rendered him out of touch with the experience of mass suffering of 1914–18. Holding onto that pre-war mentality however, what I hope to have captured is the excitement and possibility opened by the new directions of pre-war thought. There is also the uncanny truth that Vorticism in particular heralded a portent of war. This acceleration also gives too obvious a conclusion. Vorticist interests catapult forward, obscuring the concerns of the pre-war historical moment, and it is all too easy to view the latter anachronistically, with the benefit of hindsight. Beneath this there is the other face of vitalism that enables a more probing analysis of ‘the modern’. For all its optimism, vitalism was a reaction to and against the scientific progress that mechanised and demystified both man and the natural world. It was not existentialist horror, but it did answer a particular and real spiritual lack. Jean Wahl was later to stress this aspect of Bergson: ‘confidence in the human élan? Yes, without doubt; but Bergson always preserves in himself, mastered, a profound disquietude about this life – even a certain misanthropy’.4 From this point of view, despite the decline of Bergson’s popularity, continuity in thought can be found with the post-war rebuilding of cultures. This altered post-war context is another project, and one that has been briefly outlined by Floris Delattre and more recently by Sarah Wilson.5 The widespread popularity of Bergson resulted in a legacy diffuse to the point of 226

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disappearance, yet as literary critics have sought to demonstrate, there is a strong analogy between duration, memory and the stream of consciousness novel, as expressed in the literary works of H.D., James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, among others. Equally, Henry Moore and the composer Michael Tippet read Bergson in the twenties, and in British philosophy Bergson’s thought was a dominant influence upon Bertrand Russell’s original collaborator, Alfred North Whitehead. Arnold Toynbee’s discovery of Bergson as a student of A. D. Lindsay at Oxford (and contemporary with Murry, 1911–12) was revelatory. A Study of History published between 1934–75 falls outside the remit of this book, however Toynbee attempted to fuse his understanding of Bergson’s history with his academic training.6 In Christian Kerslake’s words, Bergson provided Toynbee with his primary justification for a turn to a global, synoptic view of human history, where the rise and fall of civilizations became a further level of differentiation in the ongoing cosmological and evolutionary differen­ tiations that constitute Bergson’s élan vital [. . . a] vitalist approach to the history of the earth opened up by Bergson and developed by Toynbee.7 As a result, Toynbee’s ‘deep impulse to envisage and comprehend the whole of life is certainly immanent in the mind of the historian’.8 The accumulation of experience through history informs and shapes our present and future. By the time of writing Creative Evolution life itself was characterised by Bergson as the potentiality of pure matter prior to its assumption of recognisable form. Life is perpetual becoming. 227

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Art history requires us to observe cultures past and present in the search for understanding the lives which shaped them. We look attentively, tracing these potentialities as symptoms of the world/life views we encounter in the course of study. By demonstrating that attentive looking is actively embodied, our encounters with works of art are immanently connected, attentive to life in art. As Iris van de Tuin acknowledges, Bergson followed Théodule Ribot in Matter and Memory ‘to define attention as an adaption of the body rather than of the mind’. Evolutionary becoming unites the micro to the macro experience, the particular to the general. As a result, this book has situated a trajectory of thinking, interpre­ tation and inspiration that comes out of Bergson’s immanence, both directly through a reassessment of the relation of Bergson’s philosophy to its historical context and through artists and thinkers who turned to Bergson, and more indirectly through acknowledging the potential of immanence as a method of critical interpretation. For the artist-thinkers of the preceding chapters, intuition enabled novel interpretation, a means to articulate what escapes language. Following this lead, I have pursued a form of art history that experiments with showing, demonstrating, suggesting and thinking that obviates our need to ‘speak for’ these non-verbal art forms. Rather, I have sought to ‘speak with’, to emancipate interpretation from the tyranny of deduction and explanation. From this point of view, representation is not a symbol of something other but a re-presentation of something immanent to the particular experience that stimulated its making, an unfolding or revelation. What distinguishes the early period of Bergson’s impact is the engagements with (and manipulations of) very particular aspects of his work: a phenomenology of perception for Bloomsbury; durational consciousness and evolutionary spiritualism for Rhythm; and regressive sociology for Wyndham 228

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Lewis. It was these differing perspectives that helped to shape the avantgarde factions of pre-war Britain. As I have demonstrated, close attention to these contrasting emphases reveal concerns beyond their strictly Bergsonian beginnings. Discovering their Bergsonism enriches our understanding of these groups and their aggressive competition with each other. It also unveils a commonality of interest seldom admitted by members of these groups. Reviewing the exhibition of twentieth-century art at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1914, Murry complained that ‘modern art is being monopolised and misformed by movements’.9 Whilst his immediate target was the unrepresentative nature of this exhibition which failed to include those artists outside the avant-garde, his point is nonetheless a rare identification of a plurality of positions. Finally then, Bergson may both help to define the modern and in his influence be regarded as immanent to it. For in Robert Pippin’s words, modernism was shaped by a ‘variety of internal tensions and paradoxical ideals’.10

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Epilogue – ‘a momentary displacement of our equilibrium’ 1

The artist exists ‘to see and make us see what we do not naturally perceive [. . .] to show us [. . .] things which did not explicitly strike our senses and consciousness’.2 Like the intention of Bergson’s philosophy as a whole, art acts to enable us to perceive the world differently. The artist or philosopher intuits anew each time, so as to see and to feel, to experience verticality and to traverse its 230

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levels [. . .] ceaselessly torn apart by the experiment that he makes with it, ridding himself of his humanity [. . .] so as to try to ‘realise the unrealisable’.3 Making is an open process, the outcome of which is never certain in advance. The creative state of mind is a break with the limiting conventions of intel­ ligence, against outward perception that orders and quantifies without true understanding of what it is perceiving. 4 Creativity requires a dynamic, active, moving and sympathetic relationship with the subject. Yet the moment the intuition is grasped, the subject seen by the mind and actualised, the process is slowed: ‘all creation is a fall’ from the ‘rising’ of thought.5 Art, Bergson tells us, ‘bring[s] us back to the inner core’.6 Creativity is difficult, disruptive of standard thinking, even violent.7 Art is ‘inherently difficult’ because it ‘must confound thought to evoke intuition’.8 It displaces us, is resistant to cognitive comprehension. Yet, as any philosopher would know, art since Hegel is obsolete, for its ‘driving impulse [. . .] has effectively passed over into philosophy’. As a ‘thing of the past’, art is a matter for historical study; as visual philosophy though Hegel admits art to be non-verbal thought.9 Hegel’s observations had immense influence on Bergson’s contemporaries, the alleged founders of modern-day art history, Alois Riegl, Aby Warburg and Heinrich Wölfflin. Whilst I cannot hope to do full justice to their work in this epilogue, I would like to trace the intersections between their thought and Bergson’s own, drawing Bergson into the field as another precursor to art history as it is practised today, whose ‘convincing justification for art in an empirical age’ still has much to teach us.10 I shall then consider their legacies in contemporary art writing. 231

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Recapitulating Art History On his return from his visit to the Hopi people in Arizona and New Mexico in 1896, Warburg fell out with art history. He was nauseated by the ‘sterile trafficking of words’, the insignificant role art writing had for life.11 Just over 100 years later art historians could not be more eager for the subject to do meaningful work through offering insight into our cultures past and present, with all the political, social, economic, power-driven motivations or abnegations as they are played out visually – and yet, there remain instances of startling blindness.12 We could say that in driving for a change in the conception of art history Warburg’s time is now, and that Bergson’s challenge to every form of conventional thinking should enable us to identify our blindnesses often caused by unthinking acceptance of cultural hegemonies. A brief look at the work of the revered but largely forgotten, unfashionable or unfollowed precursors show that turn of the last century art history occupied rich philosophical, anthropological and psychological ground. In this territory, Bergson fits right in, yet as a philosopher of art in general rather than the particular, he could be regarded as an interloper, whose zoomed out, world-/ life-scale observations went untested by the disciplinary armoury of the archive, close looking, and minute attention to historical detail. Moreover, his understanding of time as duration, a thickening experience of change that is fundamentally creative, is dizzying for a conventional historian whose time is linear and whose artefacts remain safely in the past. Bergson and Warburg have surprisingly many points of convergence: the processes of movement, openness and animation, intuitive perception and durational time. ‘Warburg’s thought sets art history in motion because the movement it opens up comprises things that are at once archeological (fossils, survivals) and current (gestures, experiences).’13 For Warburg, the image is 232

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living, ‘not a closed field of knowledge; [. . .] it is a movement demanding all the anthropological aspects of being and time’. Warburg’s method comprised both ‘cool detachment and passionate attachment’ an intuitive oscillation of perspective that he found to be like breath.14 As Ernst Gombrich said of his teacher, his ‘understanding of art was governed by a polarity between reason and unreason, logic and magic, distance and proximity, frenzy and philosophy’.15 In Riegl we also find an intuitive impulse urging art, the kunstwollen, that has been described as an ‘immanent artistic drive’.16 Even Suzanne Langer’s teacher Ernst Cassirer understood the intuitive method as a fusing with the One Absolute Intellect [. . .] necessary not only to mysticism but to logic as well; for this fusion alone seems capable of really explaining the process of thought and of establishing its necessary validity [. . .] it is a non-personal, substantial being common to all thinking beings.17 These descriptions point to the unselfish nature of intuition, prioritising the sympathy one enters in the process of understanding. We are reliant on the movement, the ‘will to art’, the ‘one absolute intellect’, the ‘vital impetus’ – however it is described – some tendency beyond us but also immanent to us. How untidy, irrational, magical. Is it any surprise that this art history is a minority field, or cleansed, objectified and historicised to fixity (death) in modern times? We prize rethinking, openness and suppressed voices in post-­ modernity yet we obscure this unfortunate origin. Along with this thread of extra vitality, many of these authors prioritised sensation-based understanding, Riegl most famously in Late Roman Art 233

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Industry (1901) where he introduced haptic looking. Recent art historians have been quick to contextualise the turn to sensation in the light of the destruction of the concept of universal vision by scientific knowledge of the individuality of sight, but seldom do the original authors of sensory looking get a mention.18 Despite the Bergsonism of Matisse’s ‘Notes of a Painter’ (1908), first referred to by Prichard in 1910, his philosophy is strangely absent from secondary studies.19 In terms of theories for art (history), there has been a reprisal of the concept of affect, particularly in Anglo-American scholarship, most demonstrably in The Affect Theory Reader (2010). But here, too, Bergson, Riegl, Fry and Warburg are barely referenced. Warburg’s task after his visit to the Hopi was to resist the reduction of artworks to ideas and analysis.20 The desire mirrored Bergson’s despair of language: We instinctively tend to solidify out impressions in order to express them in language. Hence we confuse the feeling itself, which is in a perpetual state of becoming with its permanent external object, and especially with the word which expresses this object.21 Translation between non-verbal perception and verbal articulation risks an opaque, occluded interpretation. The challenge is how to write a non-reductive text that suggests, expands and opens imaginative thought. If artworks reflect or diffract civilisations’ weaknesses or strengths, should art writing reflect or diffract the artwork? Does this become a cumbersome doubling that obscures just when we write for the sake of clarity and insight? However we choose to write, the impetus must be to get nearer to the thinking/being process of the artwork’s maker, to the stimulus that catapulted the maker to take to the 234

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particular medium. Bergson writes that the effort in creating is ‘more precious even than the work it produces, because thanks to it, one has drawn out from the self more than it had already’.22 In tracing the creative process through the art­work, the artist/art writer/philosopher can show a fuller perception of reality. Extending this insight, Bergson is also clear that the image is not equivalent to representation, but is a site between its object and the beholder. Riegl’s and Warburg’s art history is one that attends to this process of transformation. Bergson and History In ‘Bergson in the Making’, Maurice Merleau-Ponty observed that it is ‘hard to understand why Bergson did not think about history from within as he had thought about life from within’.23 But there is in fact a precedent, buried in Matter and Memory: Would not the whole of history be contained in a very short time for a consciousness at a higher degree of tension than our own, which should watch the development of humanity while contracting it, so to speak, into the great phases of its evolution? [. . .] Now bring back consciousness, and with it the exigencies of life: at long, very long intervals, and by as many leaps over enormous periods of the inner history of things, quasi-instantaneous views will be taken, views which this time are bound to be pictorial, and of which the more vivid colours will condense an infinity of repetitions and changes.24 235

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Bergson’s duration is deeply historical, his intention the integration of hist­ ory and the natural world.25 Evolution is a continuous and immanent ‘history’, played out in duration.26 Moreover there is a precedent for writing Bergsonian history – Arnold Toynbee’s monumental series, A Study of History (1934–61).27 Bergson’s philosophy offers ‘strategies for escaping the traditional and dominant conceptions of history as representational, causal-linear and teleological’.28 Rather than the habit of ‘homogenous and independent Time’ with which we tend to regard history, could we not consider a history more attuned to the heterogeneous flow of consciousness that Bergson identified? Bergson did not distinguish between creativity and history. Instead, he restored creativity to history through duration and memory, offering another way to the paradoxical double bind of art history as a discipline that historicises presentness: In reality there is no one rhythm of duration; it is possible to imagine many different rhythms which, slower or faster, measure the degree of tension or relaxation of different kinds of consciousness, and thereby fix their respective places in the scale of being [. . .] To perceive consists in condensing enormous periods of an infinitely diluted existence into a few more differentiated moments of an intenser life, and in thus summing up a very long history.29 The historical moments we select for consideration may be regarded as snapshots of significance, momentary arrests in the continuing stream of time, much like the fleeting moments of intuitive insight acquired through the 236

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effort of thinking in duration. In these terms history itself survives, whatever claims may be made today for its relativity or indecision. History, like art, remains an engaging way to communicate particular experiences and perceptions of the world, a site in which disparate peoples (and species), times, objects and events can be brought into (temporary) co-existence, thereby remaining relevant for so long as humanity retains a curiosity in life. History itself is becoming, subtly altering even in the smallest fraction of time. Historians like any writer or creative practitioner are chained to the time and place of their work; however, by careful arrangement – what we could perceive as an act of resistance – it is possible nevertheless by following Bergson’s method to capture the ‘extraordinary and illogical’, to render ‘outward expression to something of that contradiction, that interpenetrat­ ion, which is the very essence of the elements expressed’. Just as Bergson’s novelist brings us ‘back into our own presence’,30 so too could the good historian in their history bring us back to its own time in our time. Historical writing of this kind would follow the poetical philosophy-art of Bergson’s method, an immanentist resuscitation of the past to make it new. Such historical vertigo characterises Warburg’s version of history. As Michaud shows, Warburg ‘diffracts history, unsettling it to some degree, since it is [. . .] a collision of heterogeneous temporalities’.31 Warburgian art history is a form of haunting by, or even exorcism of, people whose traces remain buried in archives and visual artefacts: ‘By using written and visual sources not simply to understand but to reproduce the past, the scholar changes the nature of historical research itself.’32 Warburg’s concept of the Nachleben or ‘afterlife’ of images turns the art historian into a seismograph ‘alerting us to shifts deep within the contemporary cultural crust’.33 Standard art histor­ ical process charts the narrative of art objects through time since their production. But in tracing this thickening of the object are we not blindly, 237

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unconsciously adhering to the (non-standard) view that all history is party to becoming and change rather than straightforwardly linear? To accept the processes of creativity as part of historical activity is to make a definite shift away from the focus on the ‘finished’ art object as it is served up to us by artists, museums and galleries. For these historians, as for Wölfflin, nothing is ‘finished’.34 Change, time and memory are of course inherent to the survival of works of art through generations, and are useful methods of approach for re-enacting the social systems of value, patronage and exchange through which objects move, but, traditionally, these have been matters of reception as much as they are questions of aesthetics. Paying attention to historical thickening is central to Georges Didi-­ Huberman’s suggestion for the future of art history. In order to ‘effect a true critique’, he asks, is it not necessary to engage in an archeology, of the kind that Lacan undertook with Freud, Foucault with Binswanger, Deleuze with Bergson, and Derrida with Husserl? So it is to the rhythms of an archeology of a history of art that the critique of iconology should proceed.35 In the case of Confronting Images, it is an archeology of Panofsky that concerns Didi-Huberman, as Panofsky had himself engaged in an archeology with his teacher, Warburg. T. J Clark similarly advocates for an archeology of the past, but W. J. T. Mitchell prefers a ‘paleontology of the present’, what he describes as a ‘rethinking of our condition in the perspective of deep time, in order to produce a synthesis of the arts and sciences adequate to the challenges we face’.36 Warburg’s ‘afterlife’ and Mitchell’s ‘paleantology’ however point to the 238

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original vitality of the objects considered. Michael Ann Holly has described our artefacts as ‘dead’, ‘relics’ of a culture from which they have become separated by time. Curiously, she also uses ‘orphans’, suggesting to this reader at least that to some extent she considers them living.37 Objects can survive in several ways not least in cultural memory. In the next section I shall contextualise Bergson’s vitalist immanence in art historical writing. Immanence and Art History I am always waiting for the moment when the picture plane is behind me, and at last I am through the looking glass’.38 The best evidence for the life of images is the passion with which we seek to destroy or kill them.39 Since Daedalus’ statues had to be tied down to stop them running away, and Pygmalian kissed his ivory girl to life, art forms have long been granted animated status. Art writing too has taken this vitalism to heart. Aristotle’s Poetics discusses pictures ‘as if they were living beings, a second nature that human beings have created around themselves’; Vasari prizes ‘animation’ and ‘liveliness’; Winkelmann’s description of the Apollo Belvedere recalls Pygmalian; and Hegel considers the ‘artistic object as a material thing that has received “the baptism of the spiritual”.’40 Didi-Huberman tells us that in order to make art history objective, Panofsky had to ‘exorcise something inherent in the very powers of the object’.41 In other words he had to negate or empty the object, leaving him with a partial shell. Bergson warned against precisely this shell. In its place he advocated that ‘pure change, real duration is a thing 239

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spiritual or impregnated with spirituality’ – in short, animated, the exact quality Panofsky exorcised. 42 Bergson is the ‘philosopher who does not want to discard anything’.43 It is sympathy that enables Bergson to keep everything. Bergson defines sympathy as the means ‘by which one is transported into the interior of an object’, 44 the movement that enables the alterity of intuition. Understanding is no longer a ‘matter of an external resemblance among relations but of an internal communication among tendencies or movements’.45 As Bergson put it in The Creative Mind, ‘intuition is what attains the spirit, duration, pure change. Its real domain being the spirit, it would seek to grasp in things, even material things, their participation in spirituality.’46 To perceive in this way is to adopt an immanent method. To see how this is done, we should turn to Creative Evolution. What assemblage of curves already known can ever be equivalent to the pencil-stroke of a great artist? [. . .] are not the original lines drawn by the artist themselves already the fixation and, as it were, congealment of a movement?47 Bergson’s questions in Creative Evolution are used in support of the intuitive method of creativity, whereby ‘we seize from within, we live at every instant, a creation of form [. . .] a creation of matter’.48 He adds however, that in order that our consciousness shall coincide with something of its principle, it must detach itself from the already-made and attach itself to the being-made. It needs that, turning back on 240

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itself and twisting on itself, the faculty of seeing should be made to be one with the act of willing.49 Bergson argues for reality to be understood as tendency.50 Using the image of an expanding universe, he acknowledged that the reality of tendency and movement ‘suggests to us the idea of a thing unmaking itself ’, rather than one that works towards fixture. For the exploding solar system, ‘the idea of a thing unmaking itself [. . .] is one of the essential characters of materiality’. It follows that ‘the process by which this thing makes itself is directed in a contrary way to that of physical processes, and that it is therefore, by its very definition, immaterial’.51 The inversion of our conventional understanding of making and materiality may be just one more Bergsonian turn – immateriality is not an opposite state to matter, but matter-in-the-making, it is a process. As such, its implications for a discipline founded on the materiality of art objects is surely worthy of further consideration. It asks art historians to reconceive materiality and representation, and, moreover, to address the immateriality of art history itself as a weak shadow of the objects on which it rests. At the same time perhaps, it offers a way to write around the intangible, immaterial or more-than-material aspects of art objects – qualities that are often obscured, in spite of the work of Didi-Huberman and others. A re-turn to materiality in immanence allows for these aspects to be made visible in their becoming: In this image of a creative action which unmakes itself we have already a more exact representation of matter. In vital activity we see, then, that which subsists of the direct movement in the inverted movement, a reality which is making itself in a reality which is unmaking itself.52 241

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The vision of an unfurling in creative action had a precedent in one of Bergson’s great inspirations, Leibniz’s monads, animated substances that are capable of perception and desire and which unfold according to their own natural law. Leibniz too was a great inspiration to Riegl, which perhaps explains a proximity to Bergson in his understanding of the immanence of artefacts. Riegl followed Leibniz in ‘characterizing an artwork as an express­ ive monad, a visual form encompassing its own process of self-realization’.53 For Riegl, then, art became a ‘representation of temporality and history as form’.54 Like Bergson, Riegl rethought the ‘temporal dimension of art and perception’.55 Consequently he conceived the work of art historians as the ‘trac[ing of] the transmission and adaption of creative transfigurations’.56 Immanent practice – whether in Bergson’s suggestion of the possibility of unmaking in the act of making or Riegl’s creative transfigurations – offers a method to turn the object, and to turn past modes of art historical and art critical writing in order to re-make or re-conceive both objects and writing closer together. The strangeness of this Bergsonian-Rieglian vision for research is paralleled as ever in the work of Warburg, for whom ‘research didn’t simply reflect a theoretical attitude; it had to be imagined as a practice aiming to reactivate its object and experiencing its attraction in turn’.57 Like Bergson, Warburg sought a ‘ “living” reciprocity between the act of knowing and the object of knowledge’. By attending to the ‘timbre of unheard voices’ coming from the images [. . .] the scholar must set himself in motion, displace his body and his point of view, proceed to a sort of transfer by which the ‘timbre of those unheard voices’ [. . .] would be suddenly revealed.58 242

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It is for this reason that Fritz Saxl could describe Warburg’s library as being ‘intensely alive’.59 The method is founded on a fundamental relationship between viewer and viewed, the opposite of the analytical tendencies to write a subject to death. Its history continued in Walter Benjamin’s conception of the ‘Aura’, his term for the intertwining of the ‘uniqueness and duration’ of the work of art. Breathing the aura of an object, one perceived its immanent temporality, a timeliness tied to the moment of viewing as well as the moment of creation [. . .] the artwork was] a profoundly temporal relationship between viewer and world.60 Just as the act of creation is in Bergson’s thought an expression of the ‘more than self ’ in sympathetic relation with the other, so does immanent scholarship open a lived perspective of the art object. In Clark’s thesis updating these questions for contemporary times, art works are ‘not fully ours, not disposable and exhaustible, preeminently by the fact of their living (and dying) in the light of day’.61 Therefore, he finds, what I’m trying to intuit is the painting’s overall spatial ordering – the spaces it establishes as unities, steps, substances. ‘Substances’ is the best word. What zones of space emerge in viewing as tangible, with edges and extension you can mentally touch?62 243

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Iverson and Melville concur, ‘we get art history’s writing wrong if we take it to come essentially after art [. . .] we have to see it as belonging to – emergent within – the terms of its objects visibility’.63 Animating Art History The slogan for our times [. . .] ‘things come alive’.64 How many times can art, and art history, be reborn? In The Surviving Image Didi-Huberman reminds us of the rebirth of Antiquity in the Renaissance, and the rebirths of art history by Winckelmann and Warburg.65 He asks what other forms of art and history are possible. Between 2009–11, a pioneering young people’s programme for hard-to-reach 16–19 year olds called ‘Animating Art History’ ran at the Courtauld.66 The final brief was to animate a painting in the Courtauld collection to share with their non-art-literate peers. These familiar, iconic works sprang to life fired by imagination, suggesting extraordinary possibilities. These works were seen afresh, replacing every preconception with speculative, open potential. Bergson’s famous ‘reversal’ of thought in ‘An Introduction to Metaphysics’ asks that we should turn away from conventional systems of thinking. (Re-)turning to this in the light of recent debates in post-modern history might open some probing questions for Bergson studies, as well as these debates themselves. For instance, in the introduction to his Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity, Keith Jenkins writes that ‘however irreducible, stubborn, painful, comic or tragic the past may have been, it only reaches us through fictional devices which invest it with a range of highly selective and hierarchical readings’.67 This selectivity is present irrespective of whether these are presented as ‘upper case’ analyses 244

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of past occurrences or ‘lower case’ academic histories that study events, both significant and mundane, with equal attention (the emphases on conventionally marginalised and obscured histories notwithstanding). In place of this ‘moribund condition’ of history, Jenkins advocated ‘working intellectual potentialities [. . .] to construct new imaginaries of radical emancipation’.68 His terms are provocative, and interestingly so in the context of Bergsonism, a philosophy of potentialities that gives substantial weight to images, virtual and actual, in relation to consciousness, recollection, perception and bodily sensation. Where the image is a productive site for creativity in Bergson’s thought, so too do Jenkins’ radical ‘imaginaries’ acknowledge the creativity of historical discourse. In this light, Bergsonian intuition, the rejection of habits of thought – his ‘reversal’ – has an uncanny resonance for both post-modern studies and John Ó Maoilearca’s work on non-standard philosophies as, in fact, their progenitor. Bergson’s work identifies the experiences of distraction and alienation, prioritising an open vision of society, experience and history.69 To discuss the sovereignty of the art object is in some way to bestow upon it a power or existence separate to its maker or viewers. In What do Pictures Want? Mitchell seeks in various ways to vitalise or animate the art object, working against a ‘tendency of criticism itself to pose as an iconoclastic practice, a labor of demystification and pedagogical exposure of false images’.70 In its place, we are asked to acknowledge that we ‘insist on talking and behaving as if [we] did believe’ that pictures – images – want power, independence, a voice as authoritative and active as the spoken word or written text, however much we might distrust this possibility with every fibre of our rational, academic and professional selves.71 To put it in Bergson’s terms, for intuition, images are equal to us; but for (our) intellect, they must be subordinated to their referents, that is, to what we want images to be ‘about’, what we want 245

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them to represent – a mere means for our ends. Rather than allow the picture its own immanent being, our thoughts (or representations) must transcend it. Only intuition can reverse this attitude and actually perceive the picture or image as a material in a new, vital manner. Clark is unapologetic about his ‘intuitive judgement’ and his temporal, process-led method which enabled different elements to catch his attention, to resonate as ‘an afterimage’, or to slip from memory.72 He becomes fascin­ ated by ‘what prevents the retention’, what escapes us: the immaterial aspects of the work of art.73 This experiment in art writing however had a larger endeavour: ‘ultimately these entries are my way of arguing with the regime of the image now dominant’.74 In ‘discovering the limits of the human’, Clark sought ‘an ethics that will strike a different, more humane balance between the material and the ideal’.75 And yet despite this aspirational balance, his chosen paintings are called on ‘to stand for an ethics and politics I find I can state only by means of them’.76 In other words, the paintings as ever in art history are being used by a secondary voice to carry a weight they did not anticipate, to ‘stand for’ something else, not simply to be. Clark’s endeavour is to open alternative ways of doing art history, which may lead to insights with reach beyond the art historical field. Indirectly he asks us to consider the ‘use’ or ‘value’ of both the artwork and our scholarship. Mitchell too is concerned with value. He advocates the exploration of ‘something that might be called “medium theory,” a middle-level, immanent approach that works mainly by cases’.77 Mitchell’s medium theory rests on two definitions: his own (deeply Bergsonian) understanding of image as ‘both a physical object (a painting or sculpture) and a mental, imaginary entity, a psychological imago, the visual content of dreams, memories, and perception’;78 and Raymond Williams’ definition of medium as ‘a material social practice, a set of skills, habits, techniques, tools, codes and conventions’.79 246

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In both cases the crux is the relation between viewer and viewed, and the environment in which this exchange takes place. ‘We not only think about media, we think in them [. . .] we create them and they create us’.80 This relationship is more central given the interest in our propensity to treat images as living: pictures want equal rights with language, not to be turned into language. They want neither to be levelled into a ‘history of images’ nor elevated into a ‘history of art’, but to be seen as complex individuals occupying multiple subject positions and identities.81 This level of agency is startlingly beyond the arguments for treatment as if the image were alive or had ‘magic’ qualities (another of Mitchell’s interests). His improvisation on the idea of the ‘image-as-organism’, or a parasitology of images, draws his version of art history closer to anthropology and modern biology.82 Whilst the Deleuzian overtones are what might strike most art historians first, the origin is again (unwittingly or not) Bergson, who first proposed that ‘philosophy resembles an organism’.83 In The Creative Mind Bergson posited that resemblance [is] something vital [. . . It] belongs rather to the domain of art: it is often a purely aesthetic feeling which prompts the evolutionary biologist to suppose related forms between which he is the first to see a resemblance: the very design he gives these forms reveals at 247

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times the hand and especially the eye of the artist.84 Bergson’s wider point in this passage is that philosophy and thought resemble the evolutionary structures of the natural world. In ‘organized matter’ we find ‘resemblances that correspond to organs, tissues, cells, or even anything else that goes to make up living beings’.85 Curiously, contemporaneously with Bergson’s metaphor, Oswold Spengler adopted the same thought experiment: Spengler asked us to ‘regard history [. . .] as an organism [. . .] Cultures are organisms’, he wrote, continuing that we should comprehend styles of art as ‘organisms of the same genus [which] possess structurally cognate life histories’.86 He challenged artists to create a ‘species of art [. . . as a] means for the life-history of a Culture’.87 Mitchell also draws the analogy between the realms of living things and pictures, updating for contemporary times so as to regard the ‘value of images as evolutionary or at least coevolutionary entities, quasi life-forms (like viruses) that depend on a host organism (ourselves), and cannot reproduce themselves without human participation’.88 There is some truth in the metaphor ‘going viral’, as we unleash Frankensteinian entities that we can no longer control. Clark, Mitchell and Didi-Huberman all concur, images are ‘survivors’. Correspondingly, in a turn that recalls Henri Focillon’s The Life Forms in Art (1934), is not the space of images an ‘environment’?89 Are the genres, forms, or media in which images appear best understood as habitats, environments, or ecosystems in which specimens can flourish and reproduce? How is it that an environment or ecosystem itself can become imageable or iconic?90 248

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Recent interdisciplinary work across anthropology, philosophy and biology conceptualise this symbiosis as ‘holobiont’, defined as ‘the organism plus its persistent microbial communities’.91 The impact of this perception is to radically alter what it is to be individual, and the relation between self and other (or self and image), for there is truly no ‘Other’ in this ecology of interdependency of all life forms. Our understanding of the world is immanent because as Bergson said, it is in us. In Donna Haraway’s words we are ‘compost, not posthuman’ because ‘beings – human and not – become each other, compose and decompose each other’.92 Her investigation into ‘animating project[s] in deadly times’ calls for a ‘more venturesome, experimental natural history’.93 Following Mitchell, is it not time too for a more venturesome, ‘ontologically inventive’ art history? Towards a Holobiont History of Art The idea of images as living species is a very disturbing one for art historians [. . .] If images are like species, or [. . .] like coevolutionary life-forms on the order of viruses, then the artist or image-maker is merely a host carrying around a crowd of parasites that are merrily reproducing themselves.94 Holobiont art history requires we accept a ‘becoming-with’.95 It accepts that, like many species (and more so than many species) each human is a ‘plurality of ecosystems’ in a plurality of ecosystems.96 ‘Symbiosis is the way of life on earth.’97 In the terrain of art history, Mitchell asked ‘What happens to social 249

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history, to politics, to aesthetic value, to the artist’s intention and creative will, to the spectator’s act of reception if this model has any truth?’98 One provocation comes from biologist Scott F. Gilbert: ‘Only if one thinks of the animal or any other organism as a holobiont are the symbionts full citizens of an evolving and heterogeneous community.’99 For survival in these deadly times we must accept and respect our others, for our lives depend on them. When ‘value is transformed into a question of vitality’, and ‘Images introduce new forms of value into the world, contesting our criteria, forcing us to change our minds’, it follows that we engage in ‘rethinking just what our lives, and our arts, are for’.100 If ‘the test, or point, of art-historical writing is whether it manages to change one’s view or the work of art it centres on’,101 then every time we write we should aspire to ‘rend the veil of familiarity and awaken the sense of wonder’; to ‘open minds’, not just to art, but to life.102 At the time of their publications, The Sight of Death and What do Pictures Want? baffled conventional art history. They were eccentric, controversial even, but were accepted (generously) for the reputations of their authors already made. They were out of time, like their modern originators Riegl and Warburg. Now, it seems they were ahead of time, with both contemporary art turned increasingly to interest in the magical (Tai Shani, Ackroyd and Harvey), and contemporary experimental anthropology and biology turned increasingly to ‘symbiotic scholarship’ and ‘collaborative survival’.103 Increasingly across disciplines there is a move to listen imaginatively as well as empirically, to use every weapon at our disposal to address our man-made ecological disaster. In this vein, T. J. Demos’ pioneering Decolonizing Nature considers the ‘untenable’ position of an autonomous art world, and his conviction that ‘environmentally engaged art bears the potential to both rethink politics and politicize art’s relation to ecology’.104 Regarding art as sympoietic in Haraway’s term, as an equal, valued part of the holobiont of scholarship is 250

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to return to a Bergsonian view, where we turn his metaphors inside out: the ‘living organism’ should be compared to ‘the totality of the material universe’;105 consciousness, like life, is ‘unceasing creation’;106 art lives on and like nature, and implies a latent belief in the spontaneity of creativity.107 To invert the title of Lindsey Sears’ Bergsonian installation Nowhere less Now, Bergsonian thinking, making and art writing is never more urgent ‘now’.108

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Notes

Introduction 1. Roger Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, in Vision and Design (London: Pelican, 1937), p. 36. 2. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), particularly pp. 41, 151; Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), and Suspensions of Perception (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), particularly p. 127. 3. Kamini Vellodi, Refractions series flyer, EUP 2019. https:​/​​/​edinburghuniversitypress. com​/​media​/​w ysiwyg​/​pdfs​/E ​ xtras​/​Refractions​_ S ​ eries​_ F ​ lyer.pdf 253

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4. Alliez’s description of Bergson’s impact on Matisse. Eric Alliez, L’Oeil​- C ​ erveau: nouvelles histoires de la peinture moderne (Paris: Librarie philosophique J. Vrin, 2007). 5. Bergson’s long​-​standing consideration of art is referenced by Maria Star, untitled article, 1908 IX​-B ​ GN​-I​ I​-I​ ; Gilbert Maire, Les annés de Bergson à Clermont​-F ​ erand, BGN 2957 [IV​-​BGN –VI – 98], 1; Matthew Stewart Prichard, uncatalogued letter to Isabella Gardner 4 November 1913, ISGM, Boston; among others. 6. In particular, e.g. ‘Dreams’ delivered to ‘Institut Psychologique’, 20 March 1901, later published in Bergson, Mind​-​Energy, authorised trans. H. Wildon Carr (London: Macmillan, 1920); ‘L’intuition philosophique’, 10 April 1911. Attendees to his lectures comment on their unique character. 7. In African Art As Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude, Souleymane Bachir Diagne uses the concept of Bergsonian intuition to argue that African art is philosophy, in so far as Bergsonian themes compare favourably to the intuitive vitalism of African beliefs expressed in the continent’s art and literature. Diagne, trans. Chike Jeffers, African Art As Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press Seagull Books, 2011). Postcolonial Bergson returns to these themes and explores the complex position of Bergson vis​-​à​-​v is French colonialism. See S. B. Diagne, Postcolonial Bergson, trans. Lindsay Turner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019). 8. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. M. L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), p. 118. 9. Lisa Tickner, Modern Life and Modern Subjects (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 212, 210. 10. T. E. Hulme, ‘Mr Balfour, Bergson, and Politics’, The New Age, 9 November 1911, p. 39. 11. L. Tickner, ‘English Modernism and the Cultural Field’, in David Peters Corbett and Lara Perry (eds), English Art 1860–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 30. 12. D. P. Corbett, F. Russell and Y. Holt (eds), Geographies of Englishness (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2002). McConkey is one of the few to relate Bergson 254

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to the resurgence of insular thought in 1890s. See Kenneth McConkey, ‘A Walk in the Park: Memory and Rococo Revivalism in the 1890s’, in D. P. Corbett and L. Perry (eds), English Art 1860–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 100–12. 13. Corbett and Perry, ‘Introduction’, English Art 1860–1914, p. 11. 14. Claire Davison, Jane Goldman and Derek Ryan (eds), Cross​- ​Channel Modernisms, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020). 15. Tickner stresses that the ‘misapprehension or dilution of continental developments [by British artists] has also been overplayed’ by critics. See Modern Life and Modern Subjects, p. 194. 16. Andrew Stephenson in his article on Whistler in English Art registers the need for nineteenth​-​century artists to set British painting against French in the process of defining a specifically British Modernism. I demonstrate the way in which this was complicated in the following two decades. Peters Corbett, p. 7. 17. J. Mullarkey, ‘Introduction’, in J. Mullarkey (ed.), The New Bergson (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1999), p. 2. 18. M. Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant​- G ​ arde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Alliez, L’Oeil​- ​Cerveau: nouvelles histoires de la peinture moderne; Philippe Geinoz, Relations au travail: dialogue entre poésie et peinture à l’époque du cubisme: Apollinaire, Picasso, Braque, Gris, Reverdy (Genève: Droz, 2014); C. Lever, ‘Bergsonism: An Intellectual Context for Henri Matisse’, PhD dissertation, Oxford, 2002; Lorenz Dittmann, Matisse bregegnet Bergson (Köln: Bölhau, 2008). 19. J. Ó Maoilearca and C. de Mille (eds), Bergson and the Art of Immanence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); P. Ardoin, S.E. Gontarski and L. Mattison (eds), Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism (New York: Continuum, 2013); S. Geurlac, ‘The Useless Image, Bataille, Bergson, Magritte’, Representations 97:1 (Winter 2007), pp. 28–56; F. Luisetti, ‘Reflections on Duchamp: Bergson Readymade’, in Diacritics 38:4 (Winter 2008), pp. 77–93; Isabel Wunsche, ‘Creative Intuition: The Russian Interpretation of Henri Bergson’s Metaphysics’, Experiment 23:1 (October 2017). See also 255

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a special edition of The European Legacy, ‘Bergson and European Modernism Reconsidered’, 16:7 (2011). 20. T. Cronan, Matisse, Bergson and the Philosophical Temper of Modernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). See my review in Art History 38 (June 2015). 21. Yves​-​A lain Bois, ‘Cézanne: Words and Deeds’, October 84 (Spring 1998), pp. 31–44; Yves​ -​A lain Bois, ‘On Matisse: The Blinding: For Leo Steinberg’, October 68 (Spring 1994), pp. 60–121. 22. S. van Tuinen, ‘Mannerism and Vitalism: Bergson and the Mannerist Image’, in Usages de la figure. Regimes de figuration (Bucharest: Bucharest University Press, 2018), pp. 187–99; Adrian Parr, Exploring the Work of Leonardo da Vinci within the Context of Contemporary Philosophical Thought and Art (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003); M. Milz, ‘‘Temporalized Form’: Mediating Romanticism and American Expressionism. Robert Motherwell, Henri Bergson, and the Ontological Origins of Abstraction’, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 8 (2016); Diagne, African Art As Philosophy. 23. Henri Focillon attended Bergson’s lectures. See The Life of Forms in Art, trans. George Kulbler (New York: Zone, 1989). Marie​- ​Claire Bienaimé, ‘La vie comme puissance créatrice’ (Verone, 2019). F. Worms, ‘L’art et le temps chez Bergson. Un problème philosophique au cœur d’un moment historique’, Mil neuf cent. Revue d’histoire intellectuelle 1:21 (2003), pp. 153–66. 24. Vellodi, Refractions. 25. Early Modern philosopher Emily Thomas considers some of these British figures in ‘Space, Time, and Samuel Alexander’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21:3 (2013), pp. 549–69; ‘British Idealist Monadologies and the Reality of Time: Hilda Oakeley Against McTaggart, Leibniz, and Others’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23:6 (2015), pp. 1150–68; ‘The Roots of C. D. Broad’s Growing Block Theory of Time’, Mind 128:510 (2019), pp. 527–49. 26. ‘Ainsi donc, le milieu anglais est devenu aussi familier a Bergson que celui France, et sa voix [. . .] suscite la même attention enthousiaste qu’elle faisait naguere dans la 256

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petite salle fameuse de la Rue des Ecoles. Le cas est exeptionnel, il faut le reconnâitre, d’un penseur moderne satisfait curiosité, ou plutot à l’inquiétude intellectuelle et deux publics nationaux si differents à tant d’egards et se trouvant ainsi, de chaque côte de la Manche, en sympathie vibrante avec l’un et l’autre’. Floris Delattre, ‘La Personalité d’Henri Bergson et l’Angleterre’, Revue de Littérature Comparée, April–June 1927, pp. 309–10, Fond Bergson, Jacques Doucet, BGN 48; IV​-​BGN​-​1​-​48. Though equally he acknowledged that Britain presented a ‘formidable test’. Whilst Delattre is not the most reliable of sources, her claim remains remarkable, and may just be plausible in relation to the squabbles between the École Normale to which Bergson initially belonged and the Sorbonne which regarded the former institution as overly dilettante. See R. C. Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy in France 1900–1914 (Calgary, AB: University of Calgary Press, 1988), pp. 114–15. 27. Henri Bergson, trans. N. M. Paul and W. Scott Palmer, Matter and Memory (New York: Dover, 2004), p. 100. 28. W. L. George’s label, as recalled by Murry in Between Two Worlds (London, 1935), p. 185; Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 330. 29. Particularly as identified by Antliff, Inventing Bergson. 30. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 17. See also C de Mille and John Ó Maoilearca, ‘Introduction: Art’s Philosophy – Bergson and Immanence’, Bergson and the Art of Immanence, p. 1.

Chapter 1 1. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), p. 410. In Philosophy in a New Key Langer referred to the ‘brilliant, though strangely assorted, intellectual generation – Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, Freud, Cassirer to name but a few – ’, Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), p. xiii. 257

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2. H. Wildon​- ​Carr, ‘The Philosophy of Henri Bergson’, Hibbert Journal XVIII (October 1909–July 1910), p. 873. 3. Iris van der Tuin, ‘Bergson before Bergosonism, Traversing Bergson’s Failure’, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 24:2 (2016), pp. 176–202. See also Evelien Geerts and Iris van der Tuin, ‘Diffraction and Reading Diffractively’, New Materialism Almanac, https:​/​​/​newmaterialism.eu​/​almanac​/​d​/d ​ iffraction.html (accessed 5 September 2021). 4. Lytton Strachey, in S. P. Rosenbaum, Edwardian Bloomsbury (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 9. 5. S. P. Rosenbaum, Victorian Bloomsbury (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 17–18. 6. Bear in mind Hulme’s realisation of the ‘two methods of thinking, the rational or mechanical on the one hand, and on the other hand the vital and more instinctive’, Hulme, ‘The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds’, in H. Read (ed.), Speculations (London: Kegan Paul, 1936), pp. 174–5. 7. Bergson’s Gifford Lectures (spring 1914) sparked proposals for more detailed study of his work through Patrick Geddes’ Outlook Tower in Edinburgh for the autumn term. See letter from the Honorary Secretary of Outlook Tower Miss M. C. Forbes, Geddes Archive, University of Strathclyde, PGA, T​-​Ged 7​/​3​/​15. During preparation for the Gifford Lectures, Bergson visited A. J. Balfour in East Lothian. See J. Ridley and C. Percy (eds), The Letters of A. J. Balfour and Lady Elcho (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992), p. 315. 8. Delattre, ‘La Personalité d’Henri Bergson et l’Angleterre’, Revue de Littérature Comparée, April–June 1927, pp. 309–10, Fond Bergson, Jacques Doucet, BGN 48; IV​-​BGN​-​1​-​48. 9. A. J. Balfour notes the importance of values (‘freedom’, ‘creative will’ and ‘joy’) to the foundation of Bergson’s theory. Balfour, ‘Creative Evolution and Philosophic Doubt’, Hibbert Journal 10:1 (October 1911), p. 21. Balfour’s consideration of Bergson contrasts Russell’s view. 10. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), Preface ¶5. 258

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11. Bergson’s intuition is famously for itself, not linked to human action. 12. Bertrand Russell, ‘The Meaning of Good’ [review of Principia Ethica], Independent Review II:6 (March 1904), p. 328. 13. John Maynard Keynes, ‘On the Principle of Organic Unity’, 1910, Keynes Papers, KCA, JMK​/​UA​/​35, 1–2. For Bergson’s exegesis of this problem, see Time and Free Will. 14. Bergson, ‘Life and Consciousness’, University of Birmingham, 29 May 1911, reprinted with some additions in The Hibbert Journal X (October 1911–July 1912), p. 27. On Organic Unity and Duration see A. R. Lacey, Bergson (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 27. I am grateful to Professor Lacey for giving me his book. 15. J. M. Keynes to L. Strachey; R. F. Harrod, The life of John Maynard Keynes, (London: Macmillan, 1931), p. 113, in Rosenbaum, Edwardian Bloomsbury, p. 84. 16. ‘Is the Artist a Chartered Maniac?’, debate topic of the Society of Apostles, 12 November 1892; Fry’s vote was endorsed by Russell, Nathaniel Wedd and the Llwellyn​ -​Davies brothers; in opposition was Dickinson, Furness and an indecisive Wedd, KCA. 17. Russell took this in a different direction, arguing that artists being ‘safe’ from any direct impact on ethics, justice or morality were freed from the constraints imposed by a compromised civilisation. ‘The Free Man’s Worship’, Independent Review I:3 (December 1903), pp. 415–24. 18. Balfour, ‘Creative Evolution and Philosophic Doubt’, p. 15. Balfour characterises Bergson’s ‘spiritual’ view as ‘inconsistent’ with the ‘naturalism’ which provided the support of the philosophy of Mill and Spencer, p. 5. 19. First quotation G. L. Dickinson, J. E. McTaggart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), p. 92; second quotation J. E. McTaggart, ‘Mysticism’, The New Quarterly (July 1909), in Dickinson, p. 97. 20. Ibid., p. 97. 21. Dickinson, Wedd and Masterman. 22. Anon., ‘Introductory Statement’, Independent Review I:1 (August 1903). 259

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23. It is useful to read Clive Bell’s Civilisation in the context of The Independent Review: the ideas of Civilisation stem from 1909, despite the long delay until their publication (1927). 24. Desmond MacCarthy, ‘Nietzsche’, Albany Review (1908), quoted in Edwardian Bloomsbury, p. 28. 25. Bertrand Russell, ‘The Free Man’s Worship’, Independent Review I:3 (December 1903), p. 418. 26. Alfred Sidgwick, ‘Humanism’, Albany Review (August 1907), p. 577. 27. Of ‘attempting to contemplate the intellect in an impossible isolation from the other parts of human nature’, ibid. pp. 577, 575. 28. Ibid., p. 587. Sidgwick’s portrayal of this as ‘easy’ knowledge belies his unfamiliarity with the struggle involved in presenting it lucidly. Nonetheless, he continued favourably – and not without irony in comparison with the reception of Bergson – that ‘It is this modesty and geniality of humanism which keep it so unusually free from the wish to escape from relative criticism.’ 29. G. L. Dickinson, ‘Motoring’, Independent Review I:4 (January1904), p. 579. Dickinson was a keen cyclist. 30. Dickinson, ‘Religion and Revelation’, Independent Review II:8 (May 1904), p. 531. 31. Dickinson, ‘The Newest Philosophy’ [review George Santayana The Life of Reason, or the Phases of Human Progress], Independent Review V:23 (August 1905), p. 190. Schiller was one of the very few to give a paper at the International Congress of Philosophy in Bologna, 1911. The paper was published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society II (1910–11), pp. 14–65. For a report of this paper and the event in general, see Anon. [Thomas E. Hulme], ‘International Philosophy Congress at Bologna’, Nature 86 (18 May 1911), pp. 399–400, in K. Csengeri (ed.), Selected Writings of T. E. Hulme (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 110–14. 32. G. L. Dickinson, ‘Intellectualism’ (14 May 1912), Manchester Guardian, manuscript, KCA, Cambridge, pp. 16–20, 16. 260

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33. Ibid., pp. 18–19. 34. Ibid., p. 18. 35. This last pairing is interesting as twenty years earlier Dickinson supported the shedding of self in order to follow the dictates of a world impulse. See his Apostle paper ‘On the Causation between Matter and Mind’, n.d., read 1885, KCA, GLD 1​/​10, p. 3. Dickinson and Bergson met in work for the League of Nations in 1919. It is unclear whether Dickinson’s view of Bergson altered. 36. L. Strachey, in Rosenbaum, Edwardian Bloomsbury, p. 20. 37. Moore, Principia Ethica, §113–14. Moore’s ‘aesthetic appreciation’ has an interesting bearing on the ‘aesthetic emotion’ later developed by Fry and Bell discussed in Chapter 2. Russell reviewed Principia Ethica in ‘The Meaning of Good’, Independent Review (March 1904), pp. 328–33. Russell picks up on Moore’s distinction between belief in the existence of an object and its existence (Moore’s principle that belief is true to the believer and therefore does not alter the good that can arise from it, even if disproven by fact); Russell, unlike Moore, applies this to art, implying that this is not to the detriment of the aesthetic emotion that arises: ‘In the case of imagination and the representational arts, such a belief is absent’, p. 332. 38. Principia Ethica, §113. N.B. §121: ‘It appears probable that the beautiful should be defined as that of which the admiring contemplation is good in itself. That is to say: To assert that a thing is beautiful is to assert that the cognition of it is an essential element in one of the intrinsically valuable wholes we have been discussing; so that the question, whether it is truly beautiful or not, depends upon the objective question whether the whole in question is or is not truly good, and does not depend upon the question whether it would or would not excite particular feelings in particular persons.’ 39. Rosenbaum’s designation of Moore’s philosophy, Edwardian Bloomsbury, p. 36. 40. E. M. Forster ‘The Road from Colonus’, first published in The Independent Review (June 1904), reprinted in The Celestial Omnibus (London: Snowbooks, 2005 [1911]), p. 144. Rosenbaum draws out another interesting source of influence for Forster’s intuitive 261

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moment: the philosophy of Maeterlinck. Noting that Maeterlinck’s work figures Forster’s early fiction, Rosenbaum seeks to distance Forster’s (and Bloomsbury’s) sentiment from Bergson’s which he considers was only brought to light later. Maeterlinck is quoted extensively by Dickinson in the second of his articles on ‘Religion and Revelation’ (published in The Independent Review, June 1904), so securing a patriarchal link between Forster and his supervisor. The analogy between Maeterlinck and Bergson was common, e.g. John Dewey: ‘Maeterlinck’s Philosophy of Life’, Hibbert 10:4 (January 1911), pp. 765–78. 41. William James, Principles of Psychology (London: Macmillan, 1891, vol. I), p. 239. 42. ‘Incompetence’ is Russell’s word. Russell, ‘Mysticism and Logic’, Hibbert Journal XII (October–July 1914), p. 791; second quotation R. Fry, ‘Do we Exist’, paper read to the Apostle Society 1920, KCA, REF 1​/​10, p. 2. 43. Fry, ‘Do we Exist?’, p. 1. 44. R. Fry, ‘Shall we Temporize’, 1887–9, KCA, REF 1​/​10, 1. Comparison with Keynes’ 1910 estimation of Moore’s stance on time in Organic Unity is intriguing. 45. H. Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Dover, 2001), p. 104. 46. Russell, ‘Mysticism and Logic’, p. 794. 47. Fry, ‘Shall we Temporize?’, p. 5; ‘Do We Exist?’, p. 10. Rather less like Bergson, Fry continues ‘of all the parts as a simple unity’. 48. McTaggart, ‘The Unreality of Time’, Mind 17:68 (October 1908), pp. 459, 458. 49. Ibid., p. 472. 50. Ibid., p. 472. ‘The present through which events really pass, therefore, cannot be determined as simultaneous with the specious present. It must have a duration fixed as an ultimate fact.’ 51. Clifford Williams, ‘A Bergsonian Approach to A​-​ and B​-​Time’, Philosophy 73:285 (July 1998), pp. 379–93, 382, 379, 392. ‘We cannot imagine a set of time​-i​ ntuitions that correspond to “being equally real” and “not being equally real”, p. 384. 52. McTaggart, ‘The Unreality of Time’, p. 472; Bergson, Time And Free Will, p. 126. 262

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53. Ibid., p. 98. 54. Russell, ‘Mysticism and Logic’ (London: George Allen and Unwin, reprinted), last accessed on Project Gutenberg, 28 October 2021, https:​/​​/w ​ ww.gutenberg.org​/e​ books​/​ 25447 (p. 9). 55. Ibid., p. 11. 56. Ibid., pp. 12, 14. 57. Ibid., pp. 12, 14. 58. Ibid., p. 15. 59. On disinterested intuition in Bergson see ‘The Perception of Change’, pp. 153–86. 60. Russell, ‘Mysticism and Logic’, pp. 784, 790. 61. Ibid., p. 788. 62. Ibid., p. 796. 63. Ibid., p. 802. 64. Ibid., p. 17: ‘Whoever wishes to see the world truly, to rise in thought above the tyranny of practical desires, must learn to overcome the difference of attitude towards past and future, and to survey the whole stream of time in one comprehensive vision.’ The sentence is therefore more complex than I allow: he favours the stream of time of TFW against the ‘galloping’ life force of CE. 65. Ibid., p. 23. 66. ‘In our life and movement we are.’ H. Bergson, ‘The Perception of Change’, two lectures delivered at the University of Oxford, 26–7 May 1911; collected in La Pensée et le Mouvant, 1933; trans. M. L. Andison, The Creative Mind (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), p. 158. 67. Ibid., p. 135. 68. Ibid., p. 234. Also reprinted as K. A. Pearson and J. Mullarkey (eds), Henri Bergson, Key Writings (New York and London: Continuum, 2002), pp. 248–66. 69. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (London: Macmillan, 1911), p. 207. 70. Ibid., p. 135. 263

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71. Ibid., p. 135. This follows the arguments of Time and Free Will. 72. Ibid., pp. 135, 136. 73. Moore, Principia Ethica, §113–14. 74. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 138. This follows the method in Introduction to Meta­physics. 75. Ibid., p. 157. 76. Bergson, ‘The Perception of Change’, p. 249. Bergson commented on the ‘depth and originality’ of the study of philosophy at Oxford. 77. H. Bergson, ‘Life and Consciousness’, Hibbert Journal X:1 (October 1911), p. 38. 78. Ibid., p. 39. Whilst art may alter the artist, and (one hopes) viewer, profoundly, this is not to say that it always alters the world in the manner that Moore would wish. Considering the transcendental metaphor here of ‘raising above ourselves’ it is useful to compare the French: ‘La pensée qui n’est que pensée, l’œuvre d’art qui n’est que conçue, le poème qui n’est que rêvé, ne coûtent pas encore de la peine; c’est la réalisation matérielle du poème en mots, de la conception artistique en statue ou tableau, qui demande un effort. L’effort est pénible, mais il est aussi précieux, plus pré​-​cieux encore que l’œuvre où il aboutit, parce que, grâce à lui, on a tiré de soi plus qu’il n’y avait, on s’est haussé au​- ​dessus de soi​-​même.’ Henri Bergson, L’énergie spirituelle. Essais et conférences (1919), p. 18. http:​/​​/​w ww.uqac.uquebec.ca​/​zone30​/​Classiques​_​des​_ ​sciences​ _​sociales​/​index.html (accessed 28 October 2021). 79. For Bergson, actual perception has much greater value than ‘virtual’ (unrealised) perception. See Matter and Memory, pp. 1–8, 24–32. As O’Maoileaca and I show in Bergson and the Art of Immanence (2013), Bergson is the more radically immanent empiricist than Deleuze. See particularly p. 3. 80. Bergson, ‘Life and Consciousness’, p. 42. Lodge’s influential work argued for harmony between science and intuition. 81. A. J. Balfour, ‘Creative Evolution and Philosophic Doubt’, Hibbert Journal 10:1 (October 1911), pp. 1–23. Hulme reported that Bergson found Balfour’s reading of his work almost too probing, asking questions to which he had at present no answer. See T. K. White 264

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[pseud.], ‘A Personal Impression of Henri Bergson’, Westminster Gazette (18 November 1911), p. 2; reprinted in K. Csengeri, Selected Writings of T. E. Hulme (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 168. 82. T. E. Hulme, ‘Mr Balfour, Bergson, and Politics’, New Age (9 November 1911), p. 38. Hulme lists the ‘remarkable’ and inaccurate reproductions of Bergson flourishing in general papers like the Saturday Review and The Nation. Hulme’s comment reflects his own taste for perversion of facts as Balfour’s article appeared concurrently with Bergson’s London lectures. The immediate popularisation of Bergson cannot be solely due to Balfour. 83. Balfour, ‘Creative Evolution and Philosophic Doubt’, p. 23. This article was in turn discussed by Patrick Geddes in ‘Mr Balfour and Mr Bergson’, Saturday Gazette, 1912, Geddes archive, University of Strathclyde, T​-​Ged 21​/​2​/​30. It is not the article that Hulme had in mind (see above). 84. Balfour, ‘Creative Evolution and Philosophic Doubt’, pp. 4–5. 85. ‘ “Phantasms of the Living” and Psychical Research’, 28 May 1913, in Bergson, Mind​-​ Energy, reprinted with introduction by Keith Ansell Pearson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Costelloe was in the audience. See her letter to Bergson, 1 June [1913], Biblothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, BGN 1679; VI​-​BGN​-​I V​-​5 . Bergson’s acceptance of this task supported the serious cause of the Society in contrast to the hoard of mystical sects of the 1890s. See Chapter 3. 86. Schiller gave two papers printed in the SPR’s journal, volume XVII, 1901–3. The list of honorary members for 1903 included Alfred Russell Wallace, Professor Samuel Alexander, G. F. Stout, Nathaniel Wedd, Charles and John Strachey, Louis Mallet (correspondent of Prichard’s, friend of the director of the Wallace Collection Claude Philips), Edward Marsh and William Cecil Marshall. Psychologist and co​-​founder F. W. H. Meyers (arguably the forgotten discoverer of the unconscious) was greatly involved in the 1880s and 1890s. Meyers had direct links to Ribot’s centre for the study of hypnosis, ‘L’Ecole de Paris’, again cementing the association between Bergson and the SPR. 265

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For Meyers see Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy, p. 22. Compare the Cambridge Heretics who maintained a similar profile. 87. J. Harrison, ‘Extract from the Laws’, read 25 November 1912, preface to Unanimism: A Study of Conversion and Some Contemporary French Poets (Cambridge: Express Printing, 1913), p. 2. 88. Papers include: G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Future of Religion: Mr G. K. Chesterton’s Reply to Mr Bernard Shaw’, 1911; J. E. Harrison, ‘Heresy and Humanity’, December 1909, and ‘Unanimism: A Study of Conversion’, November 1912; G. B. Shaw, ‘The Future of Religion’, May 1911; G. M. Trevelyan, ‘De Haeretico Comburendo, or, the Ethics of Religious Conformity’, October 1913; G. H. Wood, ‘The Historicity of Jesus’, 1912; E. Gordon, ‘Tradition and Reason, being a reply to Miss Harrison’s Pamphlet entitled Heresy and Humanity, Cambridge’, 1911. I am enormously grateful to Grace Brockington for bringing these to my attention. 89. B. Russell, ‘The Philosophy of Bergson’, read March 1913, The Monist, July 1912. Interestingly G. F. Stout wrote the sole review of Time And Free Will on its publication in France in 1890. 90. Harrison references her initial reaction to Unanimism in relation to the ‘mental shock’ received from reading William James, Unanimism, p. 5. 91. In distinction Romains is nearer to Durkheim on this assessment, for the doctrine of simultaneity is primarily spatial. Equally interesting is the light this bears on the treatment of Arcos in Rhythm – a subject of Chapter 4. See Harrison, Unanimism, p. 9. This assessment of Arcos has been made quite independently in Cubist literature. See Christopher Green, Leger (New Haven, CT and London: Yale, 1976). 92. Harrison, Unanimism, p. 10. Arcos continues ‘the birth of God in duration’, p. 11. 93. Harrison’s italics; ibid., p. 10. 94. Ibid., p. 9. 95. First quotation ‘Christian Commonwealth’; second ‘The Academy’; both reprinted in Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: II, The Pursuit of Power (London: Chatto and Windus, 1989), pp. 216–17. 266

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96. George Bernard Shaw, draft preface to Back to Methuselah, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, n.d., plays published 1921. 97. ‘Christian Commonwealth’, in Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: II, The Pursuit of Power, p. 216. 98. Ibid., p.216. He continued demonically: ‘it has got into the minds of men as what they call their will’. 99. G. B. Shaw to Charles Trevelyan, c. 1918, in Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: II, The Pursuit of Power, p. 73. 100. Ibid., p. 73. ‘Bergson and I would have written as we did, word for word, each if the other had never been born’. Shaw admitted ‘our very catchwords, Life Force and Élan Vital, are translations of one another’. 101. Letter to Lucy Donnelly, 28 October 1911, The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, ed. Nicholas Griffin (London: Allan Lane, 1992, vol. I), p. 400. Russell’s metaphor is grotesque for he was sitting beside the unfortunate Younghusband who having successfully led the British army to China through Tibet had returned home to be run over by a car. 102. Membership of the society reads as a roll call of prominent thinkers: Bergson, William James, Balfour, Moore, Russell, Schiller, Samuel Alexander, Haldane, Costelloe, Hulme; for one account of a Society dinner, see B. Russell to O. Morrell, 7 July 1911, Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, pp. 381–2. 103. H. Wildon Carr, ‘The Philosophy of Henri Bergson’, Hibbert Journal 8 (October 1909– July 1910), p. 878. Carr distinguishes the intuitive method as a ‘forward movement, the impetus, the pressing into the future’, in contrast to the intellectual, which is ‘reflective’. For Carr’s earlier article, ‘Bergson’s Theory of Knowledge’, see Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society IX, 1908–9, pp. 41–60. Carr’s work reached book length in 1914, published as The Philosophy of Change (London: Macmillan, 1914). He later became the translator of Bergson’s 1919 collection of essays, L’energie spirituelle, published in Britain as The Creative Mind in 1920. 104. Russell, in a letter to Sverre Lyngstad dated 1957 wrote ‘I do not think that Wildon Carr had any influence or importance on anybody [. . .] no one in philosophical circles took 267

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him seriously’, in Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell VI, pp. 342–3, in A. Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 36. This reveals more about Russell than Carr, though whether Carr suffered for his Bergsonism or for his first successful career as a stockbroker is unclear. 105. Probably by T. E. Hulme; however, M. A. Gillies has attributed them to Ezra Pound. If so, it was when Pound was greatly influenced by Hulme in their joint formation of Imagism. 106. Anon., ‘Professor Bergson on the Soul’, The Times, 21 October 1911, p. 4; 23 October 1911, p. 4; 28 October 1911, p. 11; 30 October 1911, p. 10. 107. T. E. Hulme [pseud. Thomas Gratton], ‘Bergson Lecturing’, New Age (2 November 1911), p. 15. Hulme left clues to his pseudonym. A week previously he had used two phrases that appear in this article: ‘the Thirty​-​nine articles’ and to people he couldn’t stand. See ‘Notes on Bergson II’, New Age, 26 October 1911, p. 611. 108. A. F. Thorn, ‘Bergson and the Bundles’, New Age (9 November 1911), p. 46. Thorn questioned the failure of philosophy to address social problems. 109. Sydney Waterlow to Clive Bell, 24 January 1910, KCA, CHA​/​1​/​662​/​SWCB3. 110. S. Waterlow, ‘The Philosophy of Henri Bergson’, 1. Time and Free Will. Translated by F. L. Pogson. 2. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. 3. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. 4. Laughter. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. 5. A Pluralistic Universe. By William James. 6. Body and Mind. By William McDougall’, The Quarterly Review 216 (1912), pp. 152–76; Waterlow wrote another review of Bergson, ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, International Journal of Ethics 24 (1 October 1913), pp. 100–2. 111. Matthew Stewart Prichard to Isabella Gardner, 18 December 1910, archives Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston [henceforth MSPA]. Microfilm of these letters is held at the AAA, Washington, roll 389. 112. Thorn, ‘Bergson and the Bundles’, p. 46. 268

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113. T. E. Hulme, ‘Bax on Bergson’, New Age (3 August 1911), p. 328. 114. Ibid., p. 328. For Wallace Martin’s assessment, see The New Age under Orage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), p. 137, n. 2. 115. Csengeri, Selected Writings of T. E. Hulme, p. x. Henry Mead’s T.E. Hulme and the Politics of Modernism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016) discusses Hulme’s response to Bergson and French syndicalism. 116. Csengeri, Selected Writings of T. E. Hulme, p. xi. She contends vestiges of Bergsonism remained. 117. J. C. Graham, ‘Is He Dead?’, New Age (1 February 1912), p. 333. 118. T. E. Hulme, ‘The New Philosophy’ [review of James’ A Pluralistic Universe; and Creative Evolution], New Age (1 July 1909), p. 198. Matthew Gibson has explored the significance of James on Hulme in ‘Contradictory Images: The Conflicting Influences of Henri Bergson and William James on T. E. Hulme and the Consequences for Imagism’, The Review of English Studies, April 2011, pp. 275–95. 119. T. E. Hulme, ‘Searchers after Reality. 1. Bax’, New Age (29 July 1909), p. 265. 120. Hulme, ‘Bax on Bergson’, Bax’s delusion: p. 330; Haldane: p. 331. Other flaws are highlighted throughout. Referencing Hegel in articles on Bergson was rife in Britain, though few made quite such a cataclysmic statement as Haldane. See for example Russell’s ‘Mysticism and Logic’, Hibbert Journal XII:4 (October–July 1914), pp. 780–803, 797; Balfour’s ‘Creative Evolution and Philosophic Doubt’, p. 13; Carr’s ‘Bergson’s Theory of Knowledge’, p. 49; H. C. Corrance, ‘Bergson’s Philosophy and the Idea of God’, Hibbert Journal (1913), p. 385; W. R. Sobley, ‘A Pluralistic Universe’, Hibbert (1909), pp. 204–5; J. H. Muirhead, ‘The Philosophy of Bergson’, Hibbert Journal 9 (July 1911), p. 901; L. P. Jacks, ‘Does Consciousness Evolve’, Hibbert (1912), pp. 521, 542–3. 121. ‘A Personal Impression of Henri Bergson’, in Csengeri, Selected Writings of T. E. Hulme, p. 168. 122. Hulme, ‘Bax on Bergson’, p. 329. 123. Hulme, ‘Bergson Lecturing’, p. 15. 269

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124. Hulme, ‘Bax on Bergson’, p. 329; compare ‘A Personal Impression’: ‘the elements in Bergson which give him this notoriety are certainly not those to which his real importance is due’, p. 167. 125. Hulme, ‘A Personal Impression’, p. 167. He continued, ‘Even the manner of his delivery seemed to me not at all characteristic.’ 126. Ibid., p. 167: the ‘popular form ideas which he had previously expressed’. 127. Ibid., p. 167. 128. Csengeri’s dates, Selected Writings of T. E. Hulme, p. xvii. 129. T. E. Hulme, ‘The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds’, in H. Read (ed.), Speculations, (London: Kegan Paul, 1936), p. 175. 130. T. E. Hulme, ‘A Notebook’ series of articles in New Age (2 February 1915–10 February 1916), Csengeri, Selected Writings of T. E. Hulme, p. xxx. It was from these texts that ‘Humanism and the Religious Attitude’ was drawn. 131. Hulme, ‘The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds’, p. 183. 132. Ibid., p. 191. 133. Hulme is one of the first to read the élan vital as the widening out, or objectifying, of the subjective interior state of duration. For him, both are intensive manifolds. See p. 198. 134. T. E. Hulme, ‘A Notebook’, New Age (9 December 1915), p. xxxi. 135. Bergson, ‘Life and Consciousness’, pp. 37–8. This is contrary to Patrica M. Rae’s observation that the limitation of the mind that Hulme forwards in the interests of his classicism is ‘violated’ by Bergson. P. M. Rae, ‘T. E. Hulme’s French Sources: A Reconsideration’, Comparative Literature 41 (Winter 1989), p. 70. Rae’s article is concerned with the influence of Ribot as a progenitor of Bergson’s Matter and Memory. 136. On tactics of opposition see Chapter 5. 137. T. E. Hulme, ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’, in Read, Speculations, p. 146. 138. Ibid., p. 169. 139. Ibid., pp. 149, 143. 140. Ibid., p. 150; Bergson, ‘The Perception of Change’, p. 252. 270

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141. Bergson, ‘The Perception of Change’, p. 251; Hulme, ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’, p. 150. 142. Bergson, ‘The Perception of Change’, p. 253; Hulme, ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’, p. 154. Likewise Bergson’s ‘perceive in order to perceive’, and Hulme’s ‘perceive just for the sake of perceiving’. From the sequential pagination of this note and the previous one, it is clear Hulme follows Bergson’s article in content and structure. 143. Hulme, ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’, p. 144; Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 187. 144. Bergson, ‘The Perception of Change’, p. 253. 145. Hulme, ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’, p. 169. 146. Ibid., p. 145. 147. Berenson’s three qualities of structural significance, ‘intimate realisation’ of the object, and an increase in the mental capacities of the viewer are proof of this. Bell’s Art was not published until 1914, but Hulme would have been aware of the direction in which he was working. For Hulme on Berenson, see ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’, p. 168. 148. Csengeri, Selected Writings of T. E. Hulme, p. xxii; Congress 7–9 October 1913. 149. J. Epstein, ‘Forward’, in Read, Speculations, p. vii. 150. Bergson, letter to St John’s College, Cambridge, 1912, in Read, Speculations, p. x. 151. T. E. Hulme, ‘Modern Art III: The London Group’, New Age (26 March 1914), p. 661. 152. Hulme qualifies his term ‘vital’ against philosophical Vitalism – preferring here for it simply to mean ‘good’. See ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’, in Read, Speculations, p. 77. 153. For Byzantine see Chapter 2. 154. Hulme, ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’, p. 79. 155. Russell to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 25 March 1911, Letters of Bertrand Russell, pp. 348–9. 156. For clarity I use her maiden name, though The Misuse of Mind was published under her married name of Karin Stephen. 157. V. Woolf to Margaret Llwellyn​-​Davies, 21 January 1916, in Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, volumes I–IV, ed. Nigel Nicholson, and Joanne Trautmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1975–80), II, p. 76. The event was a lecture given by Russell, where Leonard was seated a mere two places away. 271

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158. Lytton Strachey to Henry Lamb, 4 February 1913, P. Levy (ed.), The Letters of Lytton Strachey (London: Viking, 2005), p. 221. 159. Karin Costelloe, ‘What Bergson Means by Interpenetration’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society XVIII (1912–13), p. 150. 160. Ibid., p.131. 161. A. H. Murray, The Philosophy of James Ward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), p. 1. 162. James Ward, Essays in Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927) [published posthumously], p. 240, in Murray, The Philosophy of James Ward, p. 75. 163. James Ward, The Realms of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911) (Bergson: pp. 464–6); William James refers in a letter to Bergson of 1905 to an article in the Revue Philosophe that compares himself, Bergson and Ward, to which he wrote a reply dispelling the possibility of direct influence. W. James to H. Bergson, 20 July 1905, BLJD, BGN 2867; V​-​BGN​-​4 . 164. Karin Costelloe, ‘Complexity and Synthesis: A Comparison of the Data and Philosophical Methods of Mr Russell and M. Bergson’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society XV (1914–15), p. 275. 165. Costelloe, ‘Complexity and Synthesis’, p. 276. 166. Ibid., p. 286. I distinguish this from the secondary consequences of Bergson’s intuition in which the initial glimpse is ‘complicated’ by the mind. 167. Russell, Knowledge of the External World, pp. 143–4, in Banfield, The Phantom Table, p. 273. 168. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 259, in Costelloe, ‘Complexity and Synthesis’, p. 301; Costelloe’s translation. 169. Henri Bergson, ‘Prefatory Note’ to K. Stephen, The Misuse of Mind (London: Kegan Paul, 1922), p. 7. 170. K. Stephen (Costelloe), The Misuse of Mind, on space and logic, p. 54; facts, p. 36. 171. K. Costelloe to H. Bergson, 1 June [1913], BLJD, BGN 1679; VI​-​BGN​-​I V​-​5 . 272

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172. Ibid. 173. See Chapter 2 for Costelloe’s article on Bergson and Russell, ‘Complexity and Synthesis’. 174. Bernard Berenson to Mary Berenson, 31 March 1907, H. Kiel (ed.), The Bernard Berenson Treasury (New York: Simon Schuster, 1962), p. 135. The letter continues wryly ‘but wrong tracks are perhaps quite as intellectually profitable as right ones’. 175. Berenson to Mary Berenson, 13 June 1909, ibid., p. 135. The relationship had opportunity for further development in August 1911 when the Berensons and Bergson formed part of an unlikely collection of guests at a holiday resort in St Moritz. See letter from Lady Elcho to A. J. Balfour, 2 August 1911, in Ridley and Percy, The Letters of A. J. Balfour and Lady Elcho, p. 272. She implies that discussion with both Bergson and Berenson was a mixed blessing – ‘not that I mind them a bit in their proper place!’ Her daughter however seized the opportunity to discuss ‘Nietzsche, Bergson and W. James’ with Berenson with zeal. 176. B. Berenson, Italian Painters, 1897, in Hayden B. J. Maginnis, ‘Reflections on Formalism: the Post​-​Impressionists and the Early Italians’, Art History 19:2 (June 1996), p. 203.

Chapter 2 1. V. Woolf, Diary, 19 July 1939 in Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 39. 2. https:​/​​/​burlingtonindex.wordpress.com​/​2014​/​03​/​19​/​mary​-​berenson​-​burlington​-​magazine​/​ 3. Robbins, Anna, ‘Manet and the Post​-​Impressionists’, The Burlington Magazine 152:1293 (December 2010), p. 793. 4. H. B. J. Maginnis, ‘Reflections on Formalism: The Post​-​Impressionists and the Early Italians’, Art History 19:2 (June 1996), pp. 191–207, 193. 5. Mary Ann Calo, Bernard Berenson and the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994). 273

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6. For the unity of sensation and observer in the work of C. S. Peirce, Lipps, Nietzsche and Mach, see Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), particularly pp. 59, 172–4, 221. In ‘Life and Consciousness’ Bergson defined sensation as ‘the point at which consciousness touches matter’, p. 34. This exemplifies the compression of subject and object involved in perception, yet is at odds with his nineteenth​-c​ entury colleagues. The issue is the degree to which consciousness can be regarded as embodied or transcendent of the physical. If the former, then sensation is physical; if the latter, sensation is a purely psychological event which drives a wedge between subject and object which it is impossible to cross. 7. Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 28. Bergson’s definition evolved in his later thought to deny this intersubjectivity in La Pensée et le Mouvant (1933), translated as The Creative Mind. See Leonard Lawlor, The Challenge of Bergsonism (New York and London: Continuum, 2003), pp. 63, 64. 8. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), p. 175, in John Ó Maoilearca, Bergson and Philosophy, p. 158. ‘Metaphysics’ is synonymous with Bergson’s ‘duration’. 9. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 11–13. 10. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 26. Deleuze’s emphases. 11. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 297. 12. Ibid., p. 173. 13. Ibid., p. 27. 14. Ibid., p. 84. See also pp. 59, 25. 15. Ibid., pp. 28, 309. 16. Ibid., p. 28. 17. Bergson, ‘The Perception of Change’, p. 253. 18. Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927), in Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, p. 180. 274

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19. C. Green, ‘Into the Twentieth Century’, in C. Green (ed.), Art Made Modern, Roger Fry’s Vision of Art (London: Courtauld Institute of Art, 1999), p. 22. 20. Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 39; Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, p. 27. 21. Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, in Vision and Design (London: Pelican, 1920), pp. 29–30. 22. Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 40, n. 2. In The Creative Mind Bergson defined intuition as ‘reflection’, see Lawlor, The Challenge of Bergsonism, p. 64. 23. Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, p. 39. 24. Ibid., pp. 39–40. 25. Ibid., p. 24. 26. Roger Fry, Last Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), p. 33. Fry emphasised the emotional participation of artist and viewer: ‘This form . . . [is] the direct outcome of an apprehension of some emotion of actual life by the artist.’ 27. A bodily, sensation​-​based understanding of gestural perception recurs in Mearleau​-​ Ponty’s urge ‘to seek out the “primordial silence” ’ which he understood ‘as a gesture, as a movement closely bound to the body’. Roland Barthes wrote of ‘gestures . . . [that] point back to the “body which throbs” ’. It would be curious to know whether either author knew Fry’s ‘Essay’. M. Iverson and S. Melville, Writing Art History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 139, 140. 28. Berel Lang describes Fry’s formal elements as yielding ‘an impure example of something else whose existence may always be confined to the realm of potentiality’ in ‘Significance of Form: The Dilemma of Roger Fry’s Aesthetic’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 21:2 (Winter 1962), pp. 167–76, 173, 171. 29. Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, p. 36. 30. Bergson redefines the image as ‘more than . . . a representation but less than . . . a thing’. Whilst an image is contingent upon its object, it has its own objecthood; Matter and Memory, p. vii. 31. Anne Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 13. 275

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32. Ibid., p. 49. Despite Banfield’s emphasis on ‘knowledge’ her examples hinge on Russell’s least characteristic statements, on perception. 33. Russell, p. 788. Banfield demonstrates Woolf caught the ‘real possibility of Russell’s thought for art which he himself could not see’. Banfield is astute to mark Bloomsbury’s advantage in being both ‘centrally positioned to receive and propagate Russell’s logical philosophy, and led by a compatible intellectual bent to present to the English​-​­speaking world Freud’s psychoanalytic theory’. She finds the group’s ‘espousal of the new French painting . . . to be equally compatible with its philosophical predilections’. Despite marking this unique situation, Banfield fails to engage with the rich cross​-​correspondence of ideas. In seeking to establish Russell as the philosophical influence on the artists and critics of Bloomsbury she follows his ridicule of the ‘Bergson​-​inspired​-​anti​ -​logic’. Banfield, The Phantom Table, pp. xiii, xi. 34. Bertrand Russell to Bernard Berenson, in Banfield, The Phantom Table, pp. 21–2. 35. V. Woolf, Roger Fry (London: Hogarth Press), p. 164. 36. Ibid., p. 164. 37. Fry, ‘Some Problems of Phenomenology’, p. 30. Fry’s analysis of ‘tone​-​perspective’ as the ‘alteration of tone​-​relations through distance’ in particular, gives us a tantalising glimpse of his response to pointillism, p. 5. 38. Fry, ‘The Philosophy of Impressionism’, in Christopher Reed (ed.), A Roger Fry Reader, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 16. 39. Ibid., p. 19. 40. Ibid., p. 14. 41. Ibid., p. 15. This quotation creates an interesting juxtaposition with Bergson in Matter and Memory: ‘things may be present without being represented’. 42. These appear in two separate yellow, bound notebooks. The lists leap around making it hard to pin an exact date, and suggesting that Fry used these notebooks over a number of years; 1909 is the latest date for noting these editions. KCA, REF 5​/​1.

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43. Desmond MacCarthy, ‘Introduction to Manet and the Post​-​Impressionists’, in Manet and the Post​-I​ mpressionists, ex. cat., Grafton Galleries, 8 November 1910–14 January 1911, in J. B. Bullen, Post Impressionists in England (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 94–9, 97. 44. Ibid., p. 99, MacCarthy’s emphasis. 45. R. Fry, ‘Art: The Grafton Gallery: An Apologia’, Nation (9 November 1912), pp. 249–51, in Post​-​Impressionists in England, op. cit., pp. 390–5, 393. ‘Synthesis’ was used by the aesthetician Prichard to describe pure perception. M. S. Prichard, Notebook I, 1909–10, p. 11. 46. Costelloe, ‘Complexity and Synthesis’, p. 302. 47. R. Fry, ‘The French Group’, Second Post​-​Impressionist Exhibition (ex. cat.), in Post​-​ Impressionists in England, op. cit., pp. 352–5, 353. 48. Ibid., p. 352. 49. First quotation Fry, ‘The French Group’, p. 355; second and third quotations Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, p. 27. 50. Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, pp. 26, 32. 51. J. McTaggart to R. Fry, 5 September 1889, Kings College Archives, Cambridge, letter 19. 52. D. Sox, Bachelors of Art, Edward Perry Warren and the Lewes House Brotherhood (London: Fourth Estate, 1991), p. 90. 53. 27 January 1905. Prichard’s purpose was to persuade Mrs Gardner to use her influence to secure for Fry the Lowell lectures in Boston. Fry had recently lost the offer of the Slade Professorship of Fine Arts at Cambridge and it appears he was well enough acquainted with Prichard to enlist his aid. Mrs Gardner had already met Fry in 1904, which Prichard refers to in his letter. For this meeting, see Frances Spalding, Roger Fry; Art and Life (London: Paul Elek, 1980), p. 85. For the texts of lectures given by Fry between 1905–7, KCA, REF 1​/​76 and 1​/​7 7. 54. M. S. P. to I. G. 19 November 1906. Fry became a curator of the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1905.

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55. M. S. P. to I. G. 23 May 1909. He didn’t go: ‘there is so much to learn before I am fit to discuss anything that it would be time wasted if I went’. 56. June 1909. The phrasing is interesting. Whilst it shows Prichard as a willing martyr, it suggests Fry’s view may have been more dubious. The friend was Mrs Sears. From his time in New York, Fry, like Prichard, knew many Boston socialites including Mrs Chadbourne and jewellery designer Mrs Koehler, both of whom took an interest in the developments in painting in Paris. Fry published an article in The Burlington in 1910 on Mrs Koehler’s work. 57. R. F. to C. B. 26 January 1911, KCA, CHA1​/2​ 16​/1​ /​ R ​ FCB5. Knowing Bell’s views he warned, ‘so you must either avoid the subject or be prepared to listen’. 58. Shrove Tuesday 1909. 59. 22 June 1909. Given this context, it is possibly Time And Free Will. 60. M. S. P to I. G. 24 October 1909. 61. Ibid. 62. M. S. P. to I. G. 12 September 1911. 63. M. S. Prichard, Notebook I, c. 1909–10, p. 11, MSPA. He continues, ‘in artistic experience we are united with that object we contemplate and become one with it’, p. 39. In a much later manuscript Prichard rejects this view, following Bergson’s rejection of inter­ subjective intuition in Creative Mind. 64. Ibid., p. 8. 65. M. S. Prichard, Notebook II, p. 25, MSPA. Prichard’s emphasis. Note the opposition of Bell’s theory in this statement. 66. Prichard, Notebook I, p. 12. Prichard’s emphases. ‘Colour’ and ‘tensions’ multiple underlining. 67. M. S. P. to I. G. 12 November 1909. Prichard’s emphases. 68. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 186; Time And Free Will, pp. 14, 165. 69. M. S. P. to I. G. 5 December 1909.

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70. M. S. P. to I. G. 19 July 1910. He continued: ‘I am interested to know the result but it will not be the final word, I think.’ 71. Prichard’s French colleague remains illusive, as the name is spelt inconsistently in Prichard’s often indecipherable writing, but is possibly Charles Suerez, an associate of Doucet’s. 72. M. S. P to I. G. 1 May 1910. T. E. Hulme reported a conversation with Bergson in April 1911 in which he anticipated his next book to be on ‘aesthetics and ethics’. T. E. Hulme [pseud. T. K. White], ‘A Personal Impression of Henri Bergson’, in Csengeri, Selected Writings of T. E. Hulme, p. 169. Bergson delivered a lecture series on ethics at the ­Collège de France in 1912, so working long before the publication of Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). 73. Prichard prepared notes to send to Bergson in the 1930s and returning to London following the war, often visited Bergson’s mother. 74. M. S. P to I. G. 18 December 1910. 75. Ibid., ‘originality’ crossed out in manuscript. 76. Ibid., the text from here to end of the quotation is not transcribed on the microfilm rolls held at the Archives of American Art, Washington. 77. J. Ó Maoilearca, ‘Bergson as Non​-​Philosopher (of) Art’, in J. Ó Maoilearca and C. de Mille (eds), Bergson and the Art of Immanence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 206–25, 225. 78. Clive Bell, ‘The English Group’, Second Post​-​Impressionist Exhibition, ex. cat., Grafton Galleries 1912, in Bullen, Post​-​Impressionists in England, p. 351. Head of Eve shares a prototype in the genre of African tribal sculpture, alluding to Picasso’s Nude with Drapery (1907) which Grant saw at Gertrude Stein’s – in the bold hatching of nose and neck and the woman’s Iberian eyes. 79. Fry, ‘The French Group, p. 352. My emphasis. 80. S. Watney, The Art of Duncan Grant (London: John Murray, 1990), p. 35. The same is true for a surviving work of this title. A conceptual reading of these works is

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strengthened by the contrast in their execution: only sharing a frivolous paganism, one adhering to Matissian primitivism (the palms of Blue Nude, 1907), the other more generally to Venetian pastoral. 81. Art ‘stands on its own two feet instead of leaning upon life’. Bell, ‘The English Group’, p. 351. 82. M. S. P to I. G. 17 September 1912. Prichard appears in the Geddes correspondence as a ‘great Saint​-​Prophet’ whose ‘analysis is Bergson’s’. Letter from Joyananda to P. Geddes, n.d. [c. early 1920s?], Geddes archive, T​- ​Ged 9​/​2144. 83. Fry to N. Wedd, 1899, in D. Sutton, pp. 173–4. Frances Spalding uses this quotation to demonstrate Fry’s fundamental artistic concerns. Spalding, Roger Fry; Art and Life, p. 72. 84. M. S. P to I. G. 17 September 1912. Prichard complains: ‘The progressive decay of European religion from the Twelfth century until today, a continual mouldering, due to the essential defects of the postulates of Christian philosophy, has realized the slow disorganization of Life and Action which were poisoned at their roots, and has given us a distaste for all Religion as though necessarily an engine of death. This dissolution has been accompanied by the gradual and necessary degradation of Art.’ 85. M. S. P to I. G. 20 January 1913. 86. M. S. P., Notebook II, entry c. 1910, p. 22. Compare Vanessa Bell we ‘first feel the emotion and then look at the picture’. Vanessa Bell to Leonard Woolf, 22 January 1913, in V. Bell, Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, ed. Regina Marler (London: Bloomsbury, 1993), p. 133. 87. Prichard attended Dhal’s lectures on Byzantine history at the Sorbonne. M.S.P. to Mrs Gardner, 18 December 1910. 88. Prichard records meeting Bell in a letter to Mrs Gardner, 22 November 1910. Bell ‘confessed . . . we can only learn at this moment from Byzantine expression’. 89. Bathing and its companion piece Football remain the distinguished works from the collaboration which included five other paintings: Fry, Zoo, Etchells, Hampstead Heath, Adeney, Sailing on the Pond, Macdonald Gill, Punch and Judy, Albert Rothenstein, Paddling. 280

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90. B. Adeney, The Modern British, I (ex. cat., Tate Gallery, 1964), Denys Sutton, ‘Introduction’, in D. Sutton (ed.), The Letters of Roger Fry (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972), p. 48. 91. M. S. P. to I. G. 29 September 1907; 27 October 1907. Fry hadn’t always appreciated Byzantine art. Despite finding parts of Ravenna impressive, he described the mosaics as ‘degraded and conventional . . . [although] as explaining the transition from classic to medieval art it must be the most important place to see’. R. Fry, letter to Lady Fry, 14 May 1891, in Sutton, The Letters of Roger Fry, p. 144. 92. R. Fry, ‘Letters to the Editor’, The Burlington 12 (March 1908), pp. 375, 374. Cézanne and Gauguin are revolutionaries, like ‘Byzantinism was the necessary outcome of [late Roman] Impressionism, a necessary and inevitable reaction from it’. 93. The Polytechnic was part of an ideal vision for an extended education programme in Britain, so utopian undertones were appropriate to the political agenda of Fry’s commissioners. Grant to Bell, in Sutton, The Letters of Roger Fry, p. 48. 94. J. B. Bullen, Byzantium Rediscovered (London: Phaidon, 2003), particularly pp. 113, 160, 122, 169. In 1847 Nicholas Wiseman had contrasted the ‘Byzantine school’ with the ‘Christian’, implying a non​-​Christian origin for Byzantine art. By 1894 it was the preferred style for Westminster Cathedral, the Catholics appropriating an earlier style to differentiate their religion from the Protestant Gothic. Key to this redefinition were the publications of Ruskin, Lectures on Art and Poetry 1903–1912; Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, 1891; and the notorious submissions by G. G. Scott of ‘Byzantine’ style plans for public buildings, which were consistently rejected. 95. M. S. Prichard, ‘Greek and Byzantine Art’, private lecture delivered 1921, p. 15, MSPA. An earlier version c. 1916, from Prichard’s time at Rhuleben internment camp is also held at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. In general terms, Greek signified institutionalisation, Byzantine collectivisation. 96. M. S. P to I. G. 18 March 1913; M. S. P. to Mrs Burton​-​Smith 8 July 1914. Prichard quotes a French friend on seeing Matisse’s latest work. 281

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97. Fry, ‘Art: The Grafton Gallery: An Apologia’, p. 393. The impact of La Danse on Grant is well charted – he saw the first version in Matisse’s studio in 1909. This is evident in relation to his designs for the shutters of 38 Brunswick Square of 1912 and Design with Red Nude Male Figure, 1913–14, now at The Courtauld Institute. For Grant on La Danse see Watney, The Art of Duncan Grant, p. 126; Richard Shone dates this visit as after April 1909. R. Shone, Bloomsbury Portraits: Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and their Circle (Oxford: Phaidon, 1976), p. 296. 98. Green, ‘Expanding the Canon’, p. 126. 99. Grant read Darwin and Blake simultaneously during his Italian holiday of 1906. Watney, The Art of Duncan Grant, p. 23. 100. Prichard continued, ‘as works of art in any sense . . . they no more exist than the wallpaper of 1870. They breathe the atmosphere of the nouveau riche’, M. S. P. to I. G. 27 October 1907. 101. R. Shone, The Art of Bloomsbury (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 148. 102. Reed adds another layer of quotation: Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, which Grant visited on his 1911 holiday. This makes sense through the lens of La Danse, as Flam notes the same allusion in relation to the gesture of the front two dancers whose curved fingers break the loop in their un​-​meeting. Implicitly the subject of Bathing is the creation of man, corroborated by The Times’ description of ‘primitive Mediter­ raneans in the morning of the world’. Christopher Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 75; Jack Flam, Matisse, the Man and his Art 1869–1918 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), p. 272; Anon., ‘Wall Painting’, The Times, 19 September 1911, p. 9. 103. C. Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 74. 104. Ibid., p. 76. 105. Ibid., p. 71. Reed finds the ‘Mediterranean’ in the Byzantine manner, making the terms synonymous. Letters from Fry and Grant enthuse about the intensity and spontaneity of Mediterranean people which had a liberating effect on Grant. 282

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106. Anon., ‘Wall Painting’, p. 9. 107. R. Fry, ‘The Grafton Gallery – I’, Nation (19 November), p. 331, in Post​-I​ mpressionists in England, p. 121. Achieved by the ‘bare recital of elementary facts of mass, gesture, and movement’. Compare MacCarthy’s reiteration of the importance of ‘gesture and movement’ for ‘primitive’ art, MacCarthy, ‘The Post Impressionists’, p. 98. 108. M. Denis, ‘Cézanne’, trans. Roger Fry, The Burlington XVI (January–February 1910) (original French 1907), in C. Harrison and P. Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900–2000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 44. 109. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 202–3. 110. Watney’s source is a letter to him from Grant. Watney, English Post​-​Impressionism (London: Studio Vista, 1980), p. 91. N. B. Bergson: ‘reality is movement’, Creative Evolution, p. 319. 111. This recalls Louis Marin for whom ‘representation in paint’ is the ‘deposit of the time of the work, or the artefact, in space’. Marin, ‘Depositing Time in Painted Representations’, in On Representation, trans. Catharine Porter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), p. 285. 112. D. Grant to V. Bell, Watney, The Art of Duncan Grant, p. 57. 113. In a review for The Spectator (1908), where he described the ‘sustained and essential impression’ of Bussy’s work. Watney, English Post​-I​ mpressionism, p. 87. Bussy married Dorothy Strachey, so entering the fringes of Bloomsbury. 114. During this time Clive and Vanessa visited on their honeymoon. 115. Blanche recorded that although out of touch prior to this sitting he and Bergson went to school together. One might infer he maintained a general interest in his colleague, though it is unlikely he ever subjected Bergson’s thought to thorough consideration. Christopher Green argued for the prevalence of Bergsonian thought amongst Blanche’s contemporaries, e.g. Bouguereau in c. 1900. J.​-​É. Blanche, trans. W. Clements, Portraits of a Lifetime, the Late Victorian Era, the Edwardian Pageant 1870–1914 (London: J. M. Dent, 1937), pp. 244–5; C. Green, Art in France (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press), p. 33. 283

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116. D. Grant, ‘Memoir of Paris, Part II’, p. 4, KCA, CHA​/​3​/​3 . 117. Frances Spalding, Duncan Grant: A Biography (London: Pimlico, 1998), pp. 114, 156. 118. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 340–1. 119. Ibid., p. 317. 120. On materiality of paint in pre​-​war British painting, David Peters Corbett, The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England 1848–1918 (Manchester and New York: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), pp. 215–17. 121. Watney, English Post​-I​ mpressionism, p. 98. Watney finds Grant’s use of music an unsuccessful addition rather than true synthesis, comparing the work unfavourably with the more balanced cross​-​disciplinarity of Sonia Delaunay and Blaise Cendrar’s La Prose du Transsiberien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, 1913. 122. Watney, English Post​-​Impressionism, p. 97. 123. Ibid, p. 97. 124. Richard Shone, ‘Duncan Grant’, The Burlington Magazine, 117:864 (March 1975), p. 186. 125. Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, p. 36. 126. Vanessa Bell to Roger Fry, autumn 1914, in Simon Shaw​-​Miller and Michael Turner (eds), Eye​-​Music, Kandinsky, Klee and all that Jazz, ex. cat. (Chichester: Pallant House Gallery, 2007), p. 126. 127. Michelle Ying​-​Ling Huang, ‘The Reception of Chinese Painting in Britain circa 1880– 1920, with Special Reference to Laurence Binyon (1869–1943)’, PhD dissertation, University of St Andrews, 2010; Michelle Ying​-​Ling Huang, ‘Laurence Binyon and the Admonitions Scroll’, Orientations 41:5 (June 2010), pp. 53–7. 128. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London and New York: Continuum, 1983), pp. 191–2. 129. It is tempting to compare Deleuze’s ‘montage’ as ‘composition, the assemblage of movement​-​images as constituting an indirect image of time’. Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 31. 130. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 340. 131. Ibid., p. 305. 284

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132. Ibid., p. 306. 133. Ibid., p. 308. 134. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Hume’, in Pure Immanence, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), p. 38. 135. Deleuze, Cinema 1, pp. 191–2. 136. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 154, 164; Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), p. 164. 137. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London and New York: Continuum, 1987), p. 345. 138. Ibid., p. 345. 139. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 308, 325. 140. Ibid., pp. 320–31. ‘The generative idea of a poem is developed in thousands of imaginations which are materialized in phrases that spread themselves out in words. And the more we descend from the motionless idea, wound on itself, to the words that unwind it, the more room is left for contingency and choice . . . But our mind, by successive bounds, leaps from the words to the images, from the images to the original idea, and so gets back, from the perception of words – accidents called up by accidents – to the conception of the Idea that posits its own being.’ 141. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 27. 142. Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 39. 143. F. C. T. Moore, Bergson, Thinking Backwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. xx–I, 141. 144. This does not ‘re​-​present the past’, but merely ‘acts’ it. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 89–92. 145. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 94–5, 102–3. 146. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 322–4. Compare spontaneous recollection which is analogous to dream, p. 95. Bergson’s organisation of memory bears striking 285

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resemblance to modern cognitive psychology. E.g. Tulving gives five ‘memory systems: procedural, imagined (or perceptual), semantic, episodic, and reflective integration​/​ working memory’. See D. L. Schacter and E. Tulving (eds), Memory Systems (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995). These designations are now being used clinically by, amongst others, Patricia Crittenden. Crittenden cites Damasio in characterising memory as an ‘active process in which past and present neurological states are joined to create dispositional representations that reflect neither past nor present experience with veridical accuracy’, A. R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Books, 1994), in P. Crittenden, SAA, 2006, pp. 18, 24. 147. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 173. 148. V. Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in The Common Reader (London: The Hogarth Press, 1932), p. 106. 149. Vanessa Bell to Roger Fry, 23 June 1911, ed. Regina Marler, Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, p. 100. 150. KCA, REF /​ ​1​/​ 76–77. 151. The text was written with a number of additional conditions in an endeavour to stretch academic writing away from convention and to engage with the sources more imaginatively and creatively. The detailed footnotes were added after the creative writing experiment was complete (the quotes came from memory). It was published in ‘ “Sudden Gleams of (f)Light”: Intuition as Method’, Art History 34:2 (2011), pp. 370–86. Subsequently to this experiment which I conducted in 2011, Kamini Vellodi has written extensively about Deleuze’s diagrams and art history in K. Vellodi, ‘Diagrammatic Thought: Two Forms of Constructivism in C. S. Pierce and Gilles Deleuze’, Parrhesia 19 (2014), pp. 79–95; K. Vellodi, ‘Two Regimes of Fact’, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 60:1 (2015); K. Vellodi, ‘Diagram: Deleuze’s Augmentation of a Topical Notion’, Word and Image 34:4 (2018), pp. 299–309; K. Vellodi, Tintoretto’s Difference: Deleuze, Diagrammatics and Art History (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). 286

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152. Woolf ’s recollection of Fry’s response to the English climate. Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, (London: Hogarth Press, 1940), p. 164. She described English light as ‘pea​-s​ oup dissolved in vapour’, p. 171. 153. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 97. 154. Vanessa Bell to Roger Fry, 11 September 1911, TGA 8010, in Lisa Tickner, Modern Life, p. 121. 155. Francis Bacon, Interviews, p. 56, Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon (New York: Continuum, 2003), p. 134. 156. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 4. 157. As less than a thing but more than a representation, Bergson’s image hovers between fact and our faculty for perception. 158. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 70, my emphasis – original emphasis ‘already’; p. 66, original emphasis. 159. Ibid., p. 71. 160. Ibid., p. 72. 161. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 100. 162. Ibid., p. 242. 163. I follow W. J. T. Mitchell’s ‘multi​- ​dimensional and heterogeneous’ definition of the ‘structure of representation as a trace of temporality and exchange, the fragments as mementos, as “presents” re​-​presented in the ongoing process of assemblage, of stitching in and tearing out’, Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 419. 164. The phrase is Tickner’s from her outstanding reading of this painting in Modern Life, p. 124. 165. Tickner identifies those on holiday at Studland from Tate Gallery photographs, and makes the link to Piero’s fresco; ibid., pp. 118–21, 124. 166. Woolf, ‘The Mark on the Wall’, in The Mark on the Wall and other Short Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 4. 287

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167. Tickner, Modern Life, p. 140. 168. In ‘seeking, within or behind form, the emotions of life’, Tickner warns the biographical content of her reading of Studland Beach is ‘running directly counter’ to the aesthetic that Bloomsbury outwardly espoused. As I have outlined in relation to Fry and Woolf, hidden by the self​-​conscious projection of rationality, intellect and logic is a counter​-​current of thought grounded in intuition. Therefore Tickner’s reading (from which Woolf is separated to an extent) may connect to a particular facet of the Bloomsbury aesthetic which is closer to Bergsonian themes of perception, empiricism, memory and subjectivity. Tickner, Modern Life, p. 141. 169. For Richard Wollheim, perception fell into two kinds of attention: ‘seeing​-​as’, in which the simile negates the object’s own qualities (medium, variation on content, etc.), and ‘seeing​-​in’, in which it is possible to ‘simultaneously be visually aware of the y that I see in x, and the sustaining features of this perception’, ‘Seeing​-​as and Seeing​-​in’, in Art and its Objects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 212–13. 170. J. Ó Maoilearca, Post​- ​Continental Philosophy (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 191. 171. Gillies, Henri Bergson and British Modernism, p. 108. 172. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 295. 173. See W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory; ‘Representation’, in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (eds), Critical Terms for Literary Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 11–22; Barbara Bolt, Art Beyond Representation (New York: Tauris, 2004). 174. Anon. (Harold Child), Times Literary Supplement, 7 April 1921, p. 227, in D. Bradshaw, ‘Introduction’, V. Woolf, The Mark on the Wall, p. xxi; Virginia Woolf, ed. Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin, Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1975), p. 87. 175. Woolf, Roger Fry, p. 164. 176. Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 26. 288

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177. Clive Bell, ‘Post​ -​ Impressionism and Aesthetics’, The Burlington Magazine 22:118 (January 1913), p. 230.

Chapter 3 1. Moina Mathers (Mina Bergson) Soror Vestigia nulla restrorem (V.N.R.), ‘Flying Roll XXXVI: Skrying and Projection’. Collection of United Lodge of England, GBR 1991 GD 2​/1​ /​ 4 ​ Flying Rolls. Also, http:​//​ ​​ goldendawnancientmysteryschool.com​/fl ​ ying​-r​ oll​-x​ xxvi​ -​skrying​-​traveling​-​spirit​-​v ision​/​ (accessed 2 April 2020). 2. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 100. 3. H. Bergson, ‘Brain and Thought: A Philosophical Illusion’ (1904), in Bergson, Mind​-​ Energy, p. 187. 4. Freud, first quote in Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 143, 6. 5. H. Price, ‘Search for Truth’, in Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy, p. 65. 6. F, Lees ‘Isis worship in Paris’, The Humanitarian XVI:2 (February 1900), in Butler, p. 58. These included Edmond Bailly, composer and editor of Isis Moderne, and according to Greer (p. 318) George Sand’s doctor Monsieur Faure. Mina wrote to Yeats that Bailly was keen to ‘start an order at once’, cautioning ‘it would become a regular “Sar Peladan” all over again’. Mina to Yeats 16 March 1897 in Mary K. Greer, Women of the Golden Dawn (Rochester: Park Street Press, 1975), p. 190. The reference to Peladan is interesting, Mina clearly regarding the founder of the French Kabbalistic Order of the Rose​ -​Cross as too quick and popularist, although as Butler acknowledges the French and British Rosicrucian movements had similar goals for self​-​illumination. Alison Butler, Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 177. Greer, Women of the Golden Dawn. 7. Thanks to John Ó Maoilearca for sharing so generously his early research, and the invitation, jointly with Laura Cull, to present at the University of Surrey’s symposium, 289

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‘The Two Bergsons’, 2018. Continuing these discussions and having access to Ó Maoilearca’s Vestiges of a Philosophy, Matter, the Meta​-​Spiritual, and the Forgotten Bergson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022) was critical to the development of this chapter. A more extensive comparison of the siblings in table form appears in this forthcoming text. 8. Bergson, ‘The Soul and the Body’, lecture delivered at Foi et Vie, Paris, 28 April 1912, in Bergson, Mind​-​Energy, p. 32. 9. Mathers, ‘Flying Roll XXXVI: Skrying and Projection’, ibid., n.p. 10. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 57–8. 11. Ibid., p. 59. ‘The totality of perceived images subsists, even if our body disappears, whereas we know we cannot annihilate our body without destroying our sensations.’ 12. Maupassant, The Horla in G. Magnússon, ‘Visionary Mimesis and Occult Modernism in Literature and Art Around 1900’, in T. M. Bauduin and H. Johnsson (eds), The Occult in Modernist Art, Literature and Cinema (Cham: Springer for Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 54. 13. Also influential on van Gogh during the mental collapse leading to his self​-​mutilation of his ear. 14. Guy de Maupassant, The Horla, in Magnússon, ‘Visionary Mimesis and Occult Modernism in Literature and Art Around 1900’, p. 8. https:​/​​/​nmi.org​/​w p​-​content​/​uploads​/​2015​ /​01​/​1334.pdf (accessed 28 October 2021). 15. Ibid., p. 1. 16. H. Bergson and A. Robinet, ‘De la simulation inconsciente dans l’état d’hypnotisme’, Revue Philosophique XXII (9 July 1886), in Henri Bergson, Mélanges, ed. A. Robinet, Paris: Presses Unversitaires de France, 1972, pp. 333–5. Interestingly, as Howard Caygill notes, this report begins much like a gothic novel: ‘It was about two months ago that I heard that an inhabitant of Clermont . . .’; Caygill, ‘Hyperaesthesia and the Virtual, in J. Ó Maoilearca and C. de Mille (eds), Bergson and the Art of Immanence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), p. 249. 290

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17. Henri Bergson, ‘Consciousness and Personality’, lecture delivered at the École Normale Supérieure, Bergson Archive, Bibliotècque Jacques Doucet, IX.BGN.IV.1 [BGN 3000], pp. 11–12. 18. G. H. Frater D.D.C.F., ‘Flying Roll XI: Clairvoyance’, in Francis King (ed.), Astral Projection Ritual Magic and Alchemy: Golden Dawn Material by S. L MacGregor Mathers, (Bexley: Aquarian Press, 1987), pp. 93–5. Also: https:​//​​ ​archive.org​/​stream​/F ​ rancisKing​ -​A stralProjectionRitualMagicAndAlchemyGoldenDawnMaterial​/​FrancisKing​-​A stralProjectionRitualMagicAndAlchemyGoldenDawnMaterialByS.L.MacgregorMathers AndOthers​-​1987​_​djvu.txt (accessed 2 April 2020, pp. 77–8). 19. Mathers, ‘Flying Roll XXXVI: Skrying and Projection’, n.p. 20. Elizabeth E. Straub, ‘Maupassant and Medicine: The Intersection Between the Works of Guy de Maupassant and the Development of Neurology in Fin​-​de​-​siècle France’, Senior Honors thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2015. 21. ‘He related to us at some length the enormous results obtained by English scientists and the doctors of the medical school at Nancy’, Maupassant, The Horla, p. 7. The ‘English’ doctors included C. Lloyd Tuckey, member of the Society for Psychical Research. Axel Munthe records visiting Nancy with Maupassant in The Story of San Michele, where he describes the author’s hunger for knowledge of hypnotism and insanity which he was gathering for The Horla, ‘a faithful picture of his own tragic future’. Munthe, Maupassant and Bergson attended Charcot’s Tuesday evenings at the Salpetrère hospital . See Munthe, The Story of San Michele (London: The Folio Society, 1991), p. 207. Bergson’s paper on hypnotism, ‘Simulation inconsciente dans l’état d’hypnotisme’ inspired by his knowledge gained at the Salpetrière was published in Revue Philosphique XXII (1888), pp. 525–31. The school distanced itself from occultist practice; however, as Owen references, Rosicrucian Stanislas de Guaita also participated in these experiments. Owen, The Place of Enchantment, p. 142. 22. Anatole France, in Le Temps, 19 January 1890, in Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (eds), The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 38. 291

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23. Curiously, R. L. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde was also published in 1886. 24. Henri Bergson, ‘Dreams’, in Revue scientifique, 8 June 1901, pp. 30–1. Compare also the description of the method of ‘seeing’ in the Golden Dawn, ‘Transfer the Vital effort from the optic nerve to the mental perception, or thought seeing as distinct from seeing with the eye; let one form of apprehension glide on with the other – produce the reality of the dream vision, by possessive will in the waking state’. Frater D.D.C.F, ‘Flying Roll XI: Clairvoyance’, in F. King, Astral Projection, p. 77. 25. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 25. 26. Ibid., pp. 241–2. 27. Ibid., pp. 30–1. 28. Bergson, Mind​-​Energy, p. 60. 29. Joseph Maunsell Hone describes the episode in W. B. Yeats 1865–1939 (Cham: Springer, 1989), p. 286. Yeats reported that although there were fresh drops of blood on the oleograph of the Sacred Heart, no new drops manifested during their visit. He was nevertheless moved by the story of the Abbé Vacher, who had reported this occurrence. Vacher also heard spiritual voices, and was condemned by his Bishop. See also Virginia Moore, The Unicorn: William Butler Yates’ Search for Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1954), p. 233, in Greer, Women of the Golden Dawn, p. 369. None of these authors recognises the significance of Schiller’s proximity to Bergson, but then he is not their focus. 30. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 84. 31. Ibid., p. 313. 32. Ibid., p. 70. 33. David Lapoujade, Powers of Time, Versions of Bergson, trans. A. Goffey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), pp. 47, 57. 34. W. B. Yeats, ‘Magic’ (1901), in Ideas of Good and Evil (Dublin: Maunsel & Co., 1905), p. 29. Yeats’ ‘great memory’ is synonymous with Mina’s ‘macrocosm’. 292

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35. Rex Gilliand points to the ‘existence of a group consciousness, which grows stronger as individuals are gradually fused together into a single organism’. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 259–61; Bergson, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (2006) [1932], authorised trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton with W. Horsfall Carter, Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1935), p. 104f.; R. Gilliand, ‘Bergson on Free Will and Creativity’, in P. Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski and L. Mattison (eds), Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 309. Similarly, Lapoujade contends that Bergson invoked ‘psychological endosmosis, a reciprocal penetration of minds’; Powers of Time, p. 41. 36. Yeats, ‘Magic’, pp. 31–2. Yeats gives more anecdotes of this time in his Autobiography. See ‘The Trembling of the Veil’, in R. J. Finnerah and G. Mills Harper (eds), Autobiographies: The Collected works of W. B. Yeats, Vol III (London: Simon and Schuster, 2010), p. 162. 37. Yeats, ‘Magic’, pp. 43–4. Again, Lapoujade reads intuition in Creative Evolution as ‘reveal[ing] us as participating in the great current of life, and it makes us experience what is vital in us . . . It makes us communicate with something that goes beyond it: the emotion of experiencing oneself as living’, p. 52. 38. Frater D.D.C.F., ‘Flying Roll No. XI: Clairvoyance’, in King, Astral Projection, p. 76. 39. Ibid., p. 76. 40. John Ó Maoilearca, Vestiges of a Philosophy, Matter, the Meta​-​Spiritual, and the Forgotten Bergson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). 41. King, Astral Projection, p. 76. Later, King notes the colouring is different for the 5=6 grade. Ibid., p. 109. 42. Ibid, p. 76. 43. Ibid, p. 77. Yeats’ Golden Dawn Notebook 1893–1912 held at the National Library of Ireland includes a Minitum Mundum tree of life diagram. See NLI MS 36276 (1). 44. King, Astral Projection, p. 77. 293

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45. L.O., ‘Flying Roll XXVII: The Principle of Theurgia or the Higher Magic’, in King, Astral Projection, p. 172. Compare Bell: ‘How does a Post​-​Impressionist regard a coal scuttle? He regards it as an object in itself as a significant form.’ C. Bell, ‘The English Group’, catalogue to the Second Post​-​Impressionist Exhibition, 1912, reprinted in J. B. Bullen, Post​-I​ mpressionists in England, p. 349. 46. N.O.M. ‘Flying Roll XIX: Aims and Means of Adeptship’, in King, Astral Projection, pp. 115, 116. ‘It is because the mind is immersed in matter that its powers are so limited, and we can readily understand that a mind freed from the constraints of the body would enjoy vastly enlarged powers. Thus although our senses are the means by which we perceive; yet at the same time they necessarily limit the extent of our perception. It is therefore our material bodily organs which circumscribe as well as bestow.’ The mind freed from the body recalls Maupassant’s despair at our miserable faculties. 47. Bergson, Matter and Memory, chapter 3, particularly pp. 217–18; N.O.M. ‘Flying Roll XIX: Aims and Means of Adeptship’, in King, Astral Projection, p. 116. 48. J. Ó Maoilearca, Vestiges of a Philosophy, Matter, the Meta​-​Spiritual, and the Forgotten Bergson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 89. 49. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 221. 50. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 34. 51. Lapoujade, Powers of Time, p. 57. 52. ‘Clairvoyance’ in King, Astral Projection, p. 78. Bergson first uses a curtain metaphor in Time and Free Will (p. 133): ‘if some bold novelist, tearing aside the cleverly woven curtain of our conventional ego’. Compare the following passage on the intuitive method from Introduction to Metaphysics: ‘many diverse images, borrowed from very different orders of things, may, by the convergence of their action, direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized’. This allows consciousness ‘to appear to itself, as it really is, without any veil’. Intriguingly, Bergson adds a note: ‘The images referred to are those which can arise in the mind of the philosopher when he wishes to make his thought known to others. I am disregarding 294

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the image, near​-​neighbour to intuition, which the philosopher may himself need, and which frequently remains unexpressed’, p. 31. Did Bergson himself meditate on images to unlock his philosophy? 53. ‘Clairvoyance’ in King, Astral Projection, p. 76. 54. Ibid., p. 77. 55. Greer, Women of the Golden Dawn, pp. 214, 216. Yeats and Maude achieved these astral visits during sleep by meditation on two overlapping circles, a gold sun and silver moon (Greer, p. 331). 56. W. B. Yeats, The Speckled Bird, annotated and ed. William H O’Donnell (Toronto: McLelland & Steward, 1976), p. 106. 57. Ibid., p. 107. 58. Ibid., p. 199. 59. E. Underhill, Worship, (London: Nisbet and Co., 1936), p. 29. Underhill wrote two reviews of Bergson: ‘Bergson and the Mystics’, English Review 10 (February 1912), pp. 511–22; ‘University Intelligence: M. Bergson’s Lectures’, The Times, 20 October 1911, p. 8. A letter to Arthur Waite in November 1905 tells that she was about to undergo initiation into the 3 degree = 8 degree. R. A. Gilbert, The Golden Dawn: Twilight of the Magicians (Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1983), p. 72; Armstrong, Evelyn Underhill, An Introduction to her Life and Writings, (London​- ​Oxford: Mowbray, 1975), pp. 36–7, in Michael Stoebher, ‘Evelyn Underhill on Magic Sacrament and Spiritual Transformation’, Worship (March 2003). http:​/​​/​evelynunderhill.org​/​evelyn​-​underhill​-​on​-​magic​ -​sacrament​-​and​-s​ piritual​-​transformation​-​by​-m ​ ichael​-​stoeber​/​ (accessed 2 April 2020). 60. E. Underhill, Worship, p. 38. I am grateful to Rev. Dr Ayla Lepine for alerting me to the relevance of this later text by Underhill. 61. Evelyn Underhill, ‘A Defence of Magic’, Fortnightly Review (November 1907), pp. 751–60. Curiously, Aby Warburg regarded ritual as a valid art historical method: ‘ritual is not an object of study but an instrument of analysis for the art historian’. As a result, Michaud describes ‘The discrete, controlled hallucination to which the art historian 295

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surrendered.’ Philippe​-​A lain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2004), pp. 215, 84. 62. E. Underhill, Mysticism (London: Methuen and Co., 1911), p. 163. Compare Bergson’s description of mystic experience, involving in Lapoujade’s words a ‘leap outside of his intelligence and over his humanity . . . a movement of conversion . . . a manner of freeing oneself up from the normality of the species’. In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion Bergson writes: ‘what a shock to the soul is the passing from the static to the dynamic, from the closed to the open, from everyday life to mystic life. When the darkest depths of the soul are stirred, what rises to the surface and attains consciousness takes on there, if it be intense enough, the form of an image or an emotion . . . But . . . the disturbance is a systematic readjustment with a view to equilibrium on a higher level’; Lapoujade, Powers of Time, pp. 72–3. 63. Compare Underhill: ‘For since the object of man’s worship always lies beyond his comprehension, we are obliged to bridge the gap by means of symbolic images’; Worship, p. 38. 64. See n. 1. 65. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 205. 66. Bergson, ‘Dreams’, p. 92. 67. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 243. 68. Ibid, p. 32. 69. Underhill, Worship, p. 29. 70. Mina Mathers to Yeats, 16 March 1897, in Yeats, The Speckled Bird, p. 65, n. 90. 71. Yeats, Memoir, p. 124, in The Speckled Bird, p. 64, n. 88. 72. Ibid., p. 64 n.88. 73. Yeats, The Speckled Bird, p. 103. The Mathers founded the Ahathöor Temple in Paris in 1893. Mathers’ letter to Florence Farr 16 February 1900 reads ‘My time is just now so enormously occupied with the arrangements for the Buildings and Decorations of the Egyptian Temple of Isis in Paris.’ In Greer, Women of the Golden Dawn, p. 237. 296

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According to Tully, Brodie​-​Innes took these references in Mathers’ correspondence to conclude that he had been involved with the Egyptian Palace at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, however there is no record of this – the architect was Marcel Dourgnon. See Caroline Tully, ‘Celtic Egyptians: Isis Priests of the Lineage of Scota’, in Eleanor Dobson and Nichola Tonks (eds), Ancient Egypt in the Modern Imagination (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), p. 153; C. J. Tully, ‘Spiritual Egyptomania: the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn’, postgraduate diploma thesis, 2009. 74. Yeats, The Speckled Bird, p. 103. 75. F. Lees, ‘Isis Worship is Paris’, The Humanitarian XVI:2 (February 1900) (New York), n.p. The invitation to the Bodinière theatre came from occultist Jules Bois. The Rites were also recorded by a journalist for the Sunday Chronicle. MacGregor ‘looked for all the world like a North Yorkshireman or a Scotchman. And, sure enough, when I made enquiries after the performance a braw Highlander he proved to be.’ See Tully, ‘Celtic Egyptians’, in Dobson and Tonks, Ancient Egypt, p. 154. 76. D. Denisoff, ‘Performing the Spirit: Theatre, the Occult, and the Ceremony of Isis’, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [online], 80 Automne|2014, mis en ligne le 15 janvier 2015, consulté le 20 janvier 2020. http:​/​​/​journals.openedition.org​/​c ve​/​1552; DOI: 10.4000​/​c ve.1552, pp. 5, 7. Apart from Yeats, Annie Horniman’s support for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and the Gaity in Manchester, other theatrical examples include Florence Farr as actor and playwright (including an Egyptian ritual with Olivia Shakespear), director Constance Wilde and author ‘William Sharp’ – the pseudonym for Fiona McLeod. 77. Lees, ‘Isis Worship is Paris’, n.p. 78. Denisoff, ‘Performing the Spirit’, p. 20. 79. Denisoff, ‘Performing the Spirit’, p. 4. ‘The Golden Dawn was a cultural and spiritual hub that produced a collection of related dramatic works, some of which were occult rituals themselves’, p. 10. 80. A. Gaucher, ‘Isis a Monmartre’, L’Echo du Marveillieux (1900), p. 470. 297

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81. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 10. The story was the source of numerous reinterpretations in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, from William Morris to Robert Graves, and most famously George Bernard Shaw, good friend and sometime lover of Golden Dawn member Florence Farr. 82. Denisoff, ‘Performing the Spirit’, p. 22. 83. Mina to Yeats in Greer, Women of the Golden Dawn, p. 225. 84. Stoeber, ‘Evelyn Underhill on Magic Sacrament and Spiritual Transformation’: http:​/​​/​ evelynunderhill.org​/​evelyn​-​underhill​-​on​-​magic​-​sacrament​-​and​-​spiritual​-​transformation​-b ​ y​-m ​ ichael​-s​ toeber​/​ 85. Moina in Lees, ‘Isis Worship is Paris’, n.p. 86. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 265. 87. Lapoujade, Powers of Time, p. 42. 88. ‘Flying Roll XXII’, issued by N.O.M. 8 October 1893, being Essay by V.H.E. Qestor Lucis (no official G.D. authority), in King, Astral Projection, pp. 270–5. 89. Ibid., pp. 270, 271. 90. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 261. Bergson used the recently discovered movements of centrifugal and centripetal nerves to describe bodily perception in Matter and Memory, p. 7. 91. N.O.M., ‘Flying Roll XXII’, p. 272. 92. Flying Roll XXII uses electricity, ibid., p. 273; Bergson on the Law of the Conservation of Energy, Creative Evolution, p. 255. 93. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 262. On Bergson’s mysticism, Lapoujade writes attachment is ‘life itself insofar as this latter now coincides with its creative principle. Life attaches us to it via its creative power as a creation of self by self . . . Nothing separates the demand for creation from the vital principle of the creative act . . . other than their difference of level. As Bergson says, the individual acts at the same as he is “acted”, as if abdicating freewill gave him access to a more powerful will . . . A calm exaltation of all its faculties makes it see things on a vast scale only’, Lapoujade, Powers of Time, pp. 78–9. 94. L.O., ‘Flying Roll XXVII’, p. 169. 298

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95. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 322. Planes of Consciousness from p. 319. 96. The importance of the four elements as planes in N.O.M., ‘Flying Roll XXII’, p. 274. 97. Yeats, Memoirs, p. 73; in Greer as from 1894, Women of the Golden Dawn, p. 141. 98. Owen, The Place of Enchantment, p. 142. 99. Ibid., p. 131. 100. Ibid., p. 50. 101. Bergson, ‘ “Phantasms of the Living” and Psychical Research’ (1913), in Mind​-​Energy, pp. 59–60. 102. Bergson, ‘Dreams’, p. 31. 103. Pamela Nunn, ‘The Mid​-V ​ ictorian Woman Artist: 1850–1879’, PhD thesis, UCL, January 1982, p. 10. 104. Tonks in Nunn, ‘The Mid​-​Victorian Woman Artist’, p. 234. 105. Figures from 1872 for the Slade as a whole show 61 women, 44 men, but on the general course the numbers reversed to 25 men and 12 women. UCL Calendar. 106. Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 58. 107. Alice Strickland, ‘Opening Doors: The Entry of Women Artists into British Art Schools 1871–1930’, in Matthew C. Potter (ed.), The Concept of the ‘Master’ in Art Education in Britain and Ireland, 1770–the Present (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 129. 108. UCL Calendar​/​Prospectus, pp. 1871–2. 109. Mabel Keningdale Cook, ‘University College Art Schools’, Woman, 3 February 1872, p. 35, in Nunn, ‘The Mid​-​Victorian Woman Artist’, p. 111. 110. N. Harte, J. North and G. Brewis (eds), The World of UCL (London: UCL Press), chapter 4. 111. Poynter to Erichsen 30 March 1892, College Correspondence, in Colin Trodd, Governing Cultures: Art Institutions in Victorian Britain (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 109. 112. Hillary Taylor ‘ “If a young painter be not fierce and arrogant God help him’: Some Women Art Students at the Slade c. 1895–9’, Art History 9:2 (1986), p. 243. 299

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113. http:​/​​/w ​ ww.lifestudy.ac.uk​/​museums​/​uclart​/​about​/​collections​/​slade​-​school​-​drawings 114. Colvin letter to Erichsen, 30 March 1892, College Correspondence, in Trodd, Governing Cultures, p. 109, n. 61. 115. Taylor, ‘Some Women Art Students’, p. 233. 116. The Studio, 1903, in Taylor, ‘Some Women Art Students’, p. 239. 117. Ithell Colquhoun, The Sword of Wisdom and the Golden Dawn (New York: G. P. Putmans, 1975), p. 49. 118. https:​//​​ ​w rldrels.org​/​2019​/​08​/​25​/​moina​-​bergson​-​mathers​/​ 119. Farran Littler, entry 19 November 1895, Admissions Book Banstead Asylum, London Metropolitan Archives. H22​/​BAN​/​B​/​01 015. Littler was recorded as age thirty, an artist living at 184 Lots Rd, Chelsea. He was admitted ‘incoherent, maniacal, and deluded generally’, and died 9 February 1899. See H22​/​BAN​/​b​/​03 034 (deaths). 120. The sitter in A Melody appears to hold a psaltery, a form of celtic harp being made by Arnold Dolmetsch and advocated by Florence Farr: see photograph of Farr in Greer, Women of the Golden Dawn, p. 262. If so, it is further evidence of Offor’s continuing knowledge of Mina’s associates. It is known the Dolmetschs visited Stent Lodge. 121. The sceptre​/​wand is painted red with notches similar to that illustrated in K. and S. Grant, Hidden Lore Hermetic Glyphs, c. 1950s. Book collection of Boscastle Museum of Witchcraft and Magic. The museum has such a wand (object 388), noted as a Hegemon’s Wand, or ‘the sceptre of wisdom’. 122. The Love Potion is also the title a work by of fellow Slade student and spiritualist Evelyn Pickering (de Morgan). Here, the woman also wears gold. De Morgan archive curator Sarah Hardy attributes this to Paracelus’ alchemical colour symbolism. In this system the four colours which mark the progressive stages towards spiritual enlightenment are: black – the material state of guilt, sin and death; white – the early stages or purification; red, then yellow – towards the gold of salvation. I am grateful to Sarah for this insight. 123. Beatrice’s Royal Academy paintings were reviewed in Womanhood 12 (1904), pp. 28–30; Punch 126 (1904), p. 320. The quote comes from a feature in ‘The Ladies Column’ of The 300

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Star newspaper for 7 September 1907. Thanks Deborah Hedgecock, Curator at Bruce Castle for bringing this to my attention. 124. Ellic Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical Order, 1887–1923 (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1985), p. 180, in https:​/​​/​w rldrels.org​ /​2019​/​08​/​25​/​moina​-​bergson​-​mathers​/​ 125. Mina to Yeats, Paris, 29 May 1899, in Greer, Women of the Golden Dawn, p. 226. 126. Fiona Mcleod, La Tristesse d’Ulad (Paris: Imp. Chaimbaud, 1898), BNF, département Musique, VM7​-​1 12404. 127. Mina to Yeats, Paris, 29 May 1899, in Greer, Women of the Golden Dawn, p. 226. 128. Catharine Christof, ‘Feminist Action in and through Tarot and Modern Occult Society’, La Rosa di Paracleso 1 (2017), pp. 153–69. 129. J. Ó Maoilearca, Vestiges of a Philosophy of a Philosophy, Matter, the Meta​-​Spiritual, and the Forgotten Bergson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 172. 130. Ibid., p. 173. 131. Butler, Victorian Occultism, p. 147. 132. Westcott, ‘Man, Miracle and Magic’, n.d., in Butler, Victorian Occultism, p. 156. 133. Butler describes the Golden Dawn as the ‘dominant occult organisation of the era’. Butler, Victorian Occultism, lx. 134. Yeats describes artists of all kinds as ‘successors’ to ‘master magicians’, in ‘Magic’, p. 64; Butler writes that the Golden Dawn had ‘the goal of transforming the world through interior and subjective illumination’; Butler, Victorian Occultism, p. 177.

Chapter 4 1. Vincent O’Sullivan, ‘Anna Vaddock’s Fame’, Rhythm 1:2 (Autumn 1911), p. 4. 2. Murry, Goodyear, Sadlier were still students or very recently graduated from Brasenose College, Oxford when Rhythm began in 1910. Fergusson however was thirty​-t​ hree when he arrived in Paris in 1907, and through his Scots connections became a teacher at 301

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Jacques​-​Émile Blanche’s La Palette, where Le Fauconnier, Metzinger and Dunoyer de Segonzac were amongst his colleagues. Grant and Lewis studied at art schools in Paris, rather than teaching at them. 3. I first made this connection in my doctoral thesis in 2009. Faith Binckes independently also identified Rice, and Alicia Foster followed suit. F. Binckes, Modernism, Magazines and the British Avant Garde, Reading Rhythm 1910–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); A. Foster, Radical Women: Jessica Dismorr and her Contemporaries (London: Lund Humphries in association with Pallant House Gallery, 2019). 4. Anna Gruetzner Robins surveys the press on this, recording that one critic spat at the painting; Modern Art in Britain (London: Barbican, 1997), p. 109. 5. Jacob Tonson, ‘Books and Persons’, New Age (3 August 1911), p. 327. 6. John Middleton Murry, Between Two Worlds, p. 126; F. A. Lea, The Life of John Middleton Murry (London: Methuen, 1959), pp. 14–20. Like many of his colleagues, artistic dress was hugely significant to avant​-​garde credentials. Lisa Tickner provides some amusing anecdotes in Modern Life and Modern Subjects, pp. 200–1. The oft​-​cited example is Wyndham Lewis’ chameleon transformations, but Murry too described the low​-​cut waistcoats, cravats and ‘trousers of enormous width’, of his friends; unpublished recollections of the Café d’Harcourt, journal entry dated 20 December 1911, J. M. Murry Archive, University of Edinburgh MS 2509 – 8e. This fascinating tale is worthy of comparison to Lewis’ bohemian novel Tarr, first serialised in The Egoist in 1914. 7. Murry, Between Two Worlds, p. 135. 8. Ibid., pp. 155–6. 9. M. Sadlier, ‘Fauvism and a Fauve’, Rhythm 1:1 (Summer 1911), p. 14. 10. W. L. George’s label as recalled by Murry in Between Two Worlds, p. 185. 11. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 7. 12. A lecture from March 1911 reinforced change as the basis of personality. Notes by an unidentified student, possibly Henri Gouhier, ‘Cours de Bergson 1910–1911’, BGN 2998 IV​-​BGN​-​V I.98. Prichard refers to Bergson’s course on La Personalité given at the 302

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Collège de France in a letter dated 18 December 1910, MSPA Roll 387. See also Bergson, ‘The Problem of Personality’, 1914, Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet, BGN 1453; IB​-​BGN​-​V I​ -​86. 13. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 275. 14. Murry, ‘The Importance of Hegel to Modern Thought’, New Age (28 December 1911), p. 204. 15. Bergson, ‘The Problem of Personality’, Collège de France. Notes by unidentified student, possibly Henri Gouhier, ‘Cours de Bergson 1910–1911’, Notebook II, 3 March 1911, BGN 2998 IV​-B ​ GN​-​V I.98. 16. Murry, Between Two Worlds, p. 157. 17. Ibid, pp. 150–1, 153. 18. Ibid, p. 154. 19. F. Rutter, ‘The Portrait Paintings of John Duncan Fergusson’, Studio 54:225 (15 December 1911), p. 207. 20. ‘TIS’, ‘J. D. Fergusson: His Place in Art’, Colour Magazine 8:5 (June 1918), p. 101. See also Huntly Carter, The New Spirit in Art and Drama (London: Frank Palmer, 1912), p. 228. 21. ‘TIS’, ‘J. D. Fergusson’, p. 102. 22. H. Jackson, ‘A Plea for a Revolt in Attitude’, Rhythm 1:3 (Winter 1911), p. 9. 23. Rutter, ‘The Portrait Paintings of John Duncan Fergusson’, pp. 204, 207. By 1918, such ideas were common currency, e.g. ‘TIS’ writing for Colour Magazine that these works present the ‘visualisation of an impression on the mind and senses of the painter – his own Truth’; ‘TIS’, ‘J. D. Fergusson’, p. 101. 24. See ‘TIS’, ‘J. D. Fergusson’, p. 101. 25. Sadlier, ‘Fauvism’, p. 18. 26. Matisse in M. Antliff, ‘The Rhythms of Duration: Bergson and the Art of Matisse’, in J. Mullarkey (ed.), The New Bergson (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1999), pp. 184–208, 188. 27. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 275. 303

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28. Matisse in Antliff ‘The Rythms of Duration’, p. 188. 29. Ibid., pp. 188–9. 30. R. H. Myers, ‘Debussy’, Rhythm 1:2 (Autumn 1911), p. 34. 31. The comparison is also made by Duncan Macmillan, who, however, also views the overall decoration of the canvas to have some relation to cubism. Scottish Art 1460– 1990 (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1996), p. 323. 32. This likeness has received a passing mention from Murdo Macdonald, in Scottish Art, (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), p. 160. 33. In this I concur with Macmillan’s claims for a utopian interpretation, but I differ from his contention that this canvas is ‘Eden’. See his unpublished paper, ‘Fergusson, Geddes, Bergson’, p. 6. Thanks to Macmillan for sharing this work. 34. She continues: ‘His Eutopia was, in fact, the opposite of Utopia which, by definition, was never to be attained.’ H. Meller (ed.), The Ideal City (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979), quoted in Macmillan, ‘Fergusson, Geddes, Bergson’, p. 4. 35. P. Geddes, Notes, PGA, T​- ​Ged 11​/​18, card 12. It appears Geddes first read Creative Evolution in 1908. This distinction of two faces to evolution is strikingly akin to Bergson’s differentiation of intuition from intellectual habit, thereby confirming Geddes’ knowledge of Bergson’s earlier works. 36. Unknown review of lecture, ‘Bergson’, 25 May 1922, PGA, T​- ​Ged 18​/​1​/​286. 37. Geddes and Bergson first met at the Exposition Universelle of 1900. Prior to this Geddes, as a student, had been sent by his supervisor T. H. Huxley to work on a research project connected to Auguste Comte on a remote island off the Brittany coast. Circuitously arriving at the Sorbonne, Geddes was a regular visitor to Paris during the years that saw the publication of both Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory. His association continued, both through supporting courses at Outlook Tower following Bergson’s Gifford Lectures, and, in 1923, in relation to work for the League of Nations. Geddes’ opinions on education were relayed to Bergson in his role in organising the bibliographic commission of the League of Nations. A letter relates that Bergson would 304

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be ‘delighted’ to meet Geddes regarding this issue; however, it appears no date could be found. PGA, T​- ​Ged​/​[1556] [1563]. Scottish supporters quite sincerely believed that ‘there is nothing in Bergson that he [Bergson] hasn’t got from Patrick Geddes’; comment is attributed to T. H. Huxley’s granddaughter, Mrs Haynes by S. K. Ratcliffe in a letter to P. G., 28 April 1914, PGA, T​- ​Ged 9​/​2397. 38. P. Geddes, Notes, PGA, T​- ​Ged 11​/​1​/​8. Geddes and Thomson jointly published Evolution (London: Williams and Norgate, 1912). 39. A. J. Thomson, draft article on Bergson and Humour, PGA, T​- ​Ged 18​/​1​/​756. It is in this light that Geddes’ own reading of the élan as ‘knowledge of life’ can be best read; PGA, T​- ​Ged 11​/​1/​ ​64, 4. 40. F. Goodyear, ‘The New Thelema’, Rhythm 1:1, pp. 1–3. The article rings with Bergsonism; however, interestingly it is Hegel and Darwin who are referenced and not Bergson. Is this another bizarre conflation of Hegel and Bergson which was so characteristic of the British press at this date? 41. Ibid, p. 2. 42. Goodyear, ‘The New Thelema’, p. 2. 43. Bergson, Time And Free Will, p. 133. 44. F. Goodyear to P. Landon, 23 November 1910, Letters and Remains 1887–1917 (London: McBride, Nast and Co., 1920), p. 31. 45. To cement the connection between Rabeilais and Créteil, Duhamel referred to those on the fringes of the commune as ‘Thelemites of short robe’. These part​-​time members included Jouve of Les Bandeaux d’Or, Romains and Allard. See Daniel Robbins, ‘From Symbolism to Cubism: The Abbaye of Créteil’, Art Journal 23:2 (1963–4), pp. 111–16, 114. 46. Mark Antliff includes a Bergsonian analysis of the Abbaye in Inventing Bergson, pp. 58, 124–58. 47. Tristan Derème, ‘Lettre de France’, Rhythm 2:7 (August 1912), p. 115. The ‘object of their thought and art’, Derème regarded this as in keeping with the aim of the Greeks – thereby instigating a return to classicism in the heart of what is commonly considered 305

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pre​-​war Romanticism. In this context, it is interesting to consider the cover of Les Bandeaux d’Or. From the first issue in 1908 a rough woodcut of Fauvist design, it changed in December 1912, to a more classical Sphinx. Whatever the poets themselves thought of this shift, the ethos of the journal did not change. 48. Robbins, ‘From Symbolism to Cubism’, pp. 114–16. 49. Tristan Derème, ‘Lettre de France, 3: Poetes Nouveaux’, Rhythm 2:9 (October 1912), p. 231. This article contains the sole reference to Gleizes to appear in Rhythm. The Abbaye is described as a ‘phalanstery’ – a weighty term summoning Fourier’s utopian commune visualised in the early nineteenth century. Derème continues to describe the division of the Abbaye members into two groups: Mercereau and Barzun against Romains and Chennevière. 50. I have not discovered whether this was published however, so cannot count on Goodyear regarding Rabelais in a similar frame. See PGA, T​- ​Ged 18​/​1​/​756. 51. For Geddes and Kropotkin, see Reynolds, ‘Patrick Geddes’ French Connections in Academic and Political Life: Networking from 1878 to the 1900s’, in F. Fowle and Thomson, B. (eds), Patrick Geddes, the French Connection (Oxford: White Cockade), pp. 74, 77. French geographer​-​anarchist Elisée Reclus’ article ‘La cité du bon accord’ relates interestingly to Goodyear’s ‘The New Thelema’ in the first issue of Rhythm. It may be instructive also to compare the ethos of Evergreen with the profoundly mystical L’Homme et la Terre by Reclus’ brother Elie. 52. Rabelais’ Abbaye de Thélème was built by the giant Gargantua in his novel Gargantua and Pantagruel. Rabelais, like François Villon received a renaissance in late nineteenth​ -​century France, hailed as fathers of French verse. The desire for a socialist commune fits more easily with the regenerative intentions of Symbolism exemplified by Gustave Khan’s social education or the idea of artist​-​as​-​worker of Les Tendances Nouvelles. Goodyear’s association cannot be surprising in the light of the Abbaye, but it is worth noting that Rabelais infused British thought too: although Macmillan cites Rabelais for Goodyear, he does not draw out the reference in raising another source for 306

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Goodyear in ex​-​Golden Dawn member Aleister Crowley’s Thelamite community in Céfalu. For Crowley see Macmillan, ‘Fergusson, Geddes, Bergson’; for Symbolist regeneration see Robbins, ‘From Symbolism to Cubism’, p. 112. 53. F. Goodyear to P. Landon, 11 May 1911, p. 38. This exaggerated statement referred to the poor return of Socialists in a London by​-​election. 54. F. Goodyear to P. Landon, 2 November 1911, p. 32. 55. Bergson, Time And Free Will, p. 134. 56. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 73, my emphasis. He continued: ‘the act, constituting pure perception, whereby we place ourselves in the very heart of things’. Frédéric Worms, Bergson ou les deux sens de la vie (Paris: PUF, 2004), p. 8. 57. Jackson, ‘A Plea’, p. 7. The primal can be designated in Sadlier’s words, the ‘harmoniser of internal truth’, Sadlier, ‘After Gauguin’, Rhythm 1:4 (Spring 1912), pp. 24–9, 25; it is in this light that Murry’s likeness for ‘primitive harmonies’ is rendered benign. Murry, ‘Art and Philosophy’, Rhythm 1:1 (Spring 1911), p. 12. 58. F. Goodyear to P. Landon, 2 April 1911, p. 36. 59. F. Goodyear to P. Landon, 2 November 1911, p. 32. He continues, ‘my notion of rebarb­ arism is that it is merely temporary and local. We are but on the brink of it. We shall pull through in a few thousand years, not before.’ 60. F. Goodyear to P. Landon, 2 April 1911, p. 32. 61. Stevenson’s collected prose, In the South Seas, was first published in a special edition in 1890, subsequently serialised in Black and White, a journal that also reviewed Fergusson. 62. Macmillan, Scottish Art 1460–1990, pp. 279–80; Frances Fowle, ‘Following the Vision: From Brittany to Edinburgh’, in B. Thomson (ed.), Gauguin’s Vision (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2005) p. 107; F. Fowle, ‘The Franco​-​Scottish Alliance: Artistic Links between Scotland and France in the late 1880s and 1890s’, in F. Fowle and B. Thomson (eds), Patrick Geddes, the French Connection (Oxford: White Cockade, 2004), pp. 27–46; B Thomson, ‘Patrick Geddes’ “Clan d’Artiste”: Some Elusive French Connections’, ibid., pp. 47–68; and Sian Reynolds, ‘Patrick Geddes’s French 307

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Connections in Academic and Political Life: Networking from 1878 to the 1900s’, ibid., pp. 69–82. The shared Celtic heritage of Brittany and Scotland should not go un​-​ missed. It was also during this time that the vigorous Scots dealer Alexander Reid was active in Paris. 63. M. E. Sadler, lecture at the Glasgow School of Art, reported in Herald, 17 November 1913, in Fowle, ‘Following the Vision’, p. 107. 64. For more on the Sadlers’ aid, Fowle, ‘Following the Vision’ pp. 104–5. Anna Gruetzner Robins provides an invaluable summary of the exhibition and the work it contained in Modern Art in Britain. The exhibition of course was commemorated by Spencer Gore’s painting Gauguin and Connoisseurs at the Stafford Gallery, 1911. 65. Sadlier, ‘After Gauguin’, p. 23. 66. Ibid., p. 23. 67. M. T. H. Sadleir, ‘L’esprit vieille’, Rhythm 1:3 (Winter 1911), pp. 31–4. The qualities of Gauguin’s art were to be seen in his pupils Sérusier and Girieud, and also in Derain. 68. Ibid., pp. 30–1. There is a growing post​ -​ colonial literature redressing Gauguin, commencing with Abigail Solomon​- ​Godeau, ‘Going Nature’, Art in America 77:7 (July 1989), pp. 118–29; Griselda Pollock, Avant Garde Gambits 1888–1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993); Norma Broude (ed.), Gauguin’s Challenge, New Perspectives after Postmodernism (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018); Linda Goddard, Savage Tales: The Writings of Paul Gauguin (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2019). 69. F. Goodyear to P. A. Landon, 11 May 1911, p. 38. In a letter to his sister Edith, Goodyear was quite clear that ‘Mr Chamberlain’s Imperialism . . . is utterly and hopelessly immoral’. Arguably it is a stand that was to be developed in his article for Rhythm, ‘The New Thelema’, 12 February 1906, p. 11. 70. Macmillan reads this dance in reference to Bergson’s analysis of the means through which to create an aesthetic feeling of ‘grace’. Macmillan, ‘Fergusson, Geddes, Bergson’, p. 5. 308

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71. Bergson, Time And Free Will, pp. 12–13. 72. The first British article connecting Bergson and Christianity appeared in 1907, twenty​ -​five between 1911–12, and the last in 1917. 73. M. E. Sadler, lecture to Glasgow School of Art, November 1913, in Fowle, ‘The Franco​-​ Scottish Alliance’, p. 107; Murry, ‘Art and Philosophy’, p. 9. 74. F. Goodyear to P. Landon, 23 November 1910, p. 31. 75. F. Goodyear to P. Landon, 2 April 1911, p. 32: ‘We should die of inanition in the New Jerusalem.’ 76. Diagne charts how for Bergson’s readers in the Global South, his call to ‘spiritual energy’ was ‘against the violence of materialism, which is also the violence of a mechanical colonialism’. Bergson’s address to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of 12 December 1914 was translated into Arabic for Al​-​Muqtataf in April 1916, making this an almost contemporary interpretation to that forwarded by Goodyear and Rhythm. S. B. Diagne, Postcolonial Bergson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), p. 15. 77. Ibid., p. 2. 78. Sadlier, ‘L’esprit vieille’, p. 31. 79. Ibid., p. 31. 80. F. Goodyear to his sister Edith, 12 February1906, p. 9. 81. Macmillan, ‘Fergusson, Geddes Bergson’, p. 5. MacMillan mentions a second drawing which apparently relies even more heavily on the iconography of Eve; E. Cumming, ‘Colour, Rhythm, and Dance: Paintings and Drawings by J. D. Fergusson and his Circle’, in Colour, Rhythm, and Dance: Paintings and Drawings by J. D. Fergusson and his Circle in Paris, ex. cat. (Edinburgh: Scottish Arts Council, 1985), p. 9. According to Fergusson’s friend and fellow contributor to Rhythm, O. Raymond Drey, the artist ‘had a way of absorbing the essentials of what was going on in the world of thought’, Drey, ‘Some Memories of John Duncan Fergusson’, Apollo 76:8 (October 1962), p. 624. Fergusson’s woman can be compared to Le Fauconnier’s radical Abundance, of 1910. Fauconnier was introduced to Gleizes and the Abbaye circle by Jouve. The journal cover also establishes 309

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a nice dialogue with Mackie’s heavily entwined and implicitly prelapsarian Tree of Life for the cover of Geddes’ Evergreen. Fergusson’s nude in contrast provocatively asserts the fall, on the brink of destruction and the onset of (a more Bergsonian) pluralism. 82. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 12. 83. It is interesting to compare the Vorticist treatment of this subject. First, the antagonism created by the dual desires for dependency and freedom in Lewis’ play ‘Enemy of the Stars’, in which murder is the attempted resolution. Second, in T. E. Hulme’s construction of an anti​-​humanist theory based on the doctrine of Original Sin, of which authoritarianism is the result. 84. Bergson in Lapoujade, Powers of Time, p. 73. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid., p. 76. However, although the ‘demand for creation is elevation or “rising”; any actualization in matter “all creation is a fall” ’, Bergson, Creative Evolution, in Lapoujade, Powers of Time, p. 78. 87. Macmillan, ‘Fergusson, Geddes, Bergson’, p. 10. 88. ‘Bêtes, dispersez​-​vous d’effroi! . . . quelle famine et quelle abondance annoncez​-​ vous?’, G. Apollinaire, L’Enchanteur Pourrissant (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 60 (facsimile edition). Antliff emphasises the importance of the character Viviane in his brief reference to Apollinaire’s text, for her role fits with his gendered reading of Rhythm. However, if this were Fergusson’s only subject, why then, as art editor, did he not choose an alternative, more conducive woodcut from this text? See Inventing Bergson, p. 85. Moreover, produced during a time of intense Catholic revival in France, Derain’s image was more controversial than this small woodcut subsequently appears. 89. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 53–4, Bergson’s italics. 90. Ibid., p. 285. 91. Bergson makes his intent plain in his introduction: to close the gap he perceived between the theory of knowledge and the theory of life, Creative Evolution, pp. xiii–xiv. 310

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92. Ibid., p. 54. 93. Ibid., p. 110. John Ó Maoilearca addresses the role of the élan vital as movement in relation to Jane Bennett’s theory of new materialism in Vestiges of a Philosophy, Matter, the Meta​-​Spiritual, and the Forgotten Bergson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). 94. Henry Corrance, ‘Bergson’s Philosophy and the Idea of God’, Hibbert Journal 12:2 (October 1913), pp. 374–88, 384. 95. Bergson’s ‘idea of the task of philosophy appears to be that it should keep strictly on “scientific” lines’. Corrance, ‘Bergson’s Philosophy’, p. 387. This is in line with Russell in ‘Mysticism and Logic’, pp. 780–803. 96. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 262. 97. Bergson, Time And Free Will, p. 128. Although all contributors to Rhythm had fluent French, it is significant for the readership that this was the only translation available [1910] when the journal first went to press in early summer 1911. Bergson privileged a fluid representation (process) rather than a static one. John Ó Maoilearca, Bergson and Philosophy (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2000), pp. 152–5. 98. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Bergson and Symbolism’, trans. Joel A. Hunt, in Yale French Studies 2:2 (1949), pp. 63–6, 64. 99. E. Fiser, Le Symbole Litéraire (New York: AMS, 1980), p. 38. 100. Geddes’ journal Evergreen is an important precursor in this context. Published 1885–97 during Geddes’ regular visits to Paris, Evergreen included illustrations from these Scottish symbolists connected to the Nabis, most significantly Mackie, whose design graced the front of the journal. 101. The journal ran from May 1904 to autumn 1914. The list of contributors was impressive: Kandinsky, Alexei Jawlensky, James Ensor, Piet Mondrian and the composer Edgar Varèse. In early 1908, the Committee of Honour included Gabriele d’Annunzio, Albert Besnard, Anatole France and Max Nordau. 102. Gerome​-​Maesse, ‘Les Opinions: l’Individualisme’, Les Tendances Nouvelles 48, p. 117. Gerome​-​Maesse appears only ever to have written for this journal, leading Fineberg 311

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to suggest the name to be a pseudonym of Mérodack​-​Jeanneau. See J. Fineberg, ‘Les Tendances Nouvelles the Union Internationale des Beaux​-​Arts, des Lettres, des Sciences et de l’Industrie and Kandinsky’, Art History 2:2 (June 1979), p. 224. 103. Murry, ‘Art and Philosophy’, p. 12. Continuing: ‘till all that is unessential dissolves away . . . untrue because it is unlived’. 104. Mérodack​-J​ eanneau, ‘Le Synthétisme’, Les Tendances Nouvelles 62, p. 1536. The pairing of ‘intuition and automatism’ is an intriguing one, for in Bergson they could not be further apart. Does Mérodack​-​Jeanneau use ‘automatism’ to refer to a spontaneity that is not mediated by intellectual thought – a tautology of ‘intuition’? His other concerns are less obviously Bergsonian: ‘the recorded signs of the colour scale, the truth and influence of numbers, [and] calculated schematic images’. 105. Mérodack​-​Jeanneau, ‘Le Synthétisme’, Les Tendances Nouvelles 62, p. 1536. Finberg dated the ideas to 1899, and the article to 1909, despite its later publication, ‘Les Tendances Nouvelles and Kandinsky’, p. 223. This would make better sense of the accusation of plagiarism – by 1912 Rhythm was well established. Due to Rice’s association with Les Tendances Nouvelles in 1910, it would not have been impossible for Mérodack​-​Jeanneau’s ideas to reach the Rhythmists prior to their publication; however, the circulation of ideas is almost impossible to trace. 106. C. A. Nathanson, ‘Introduction’, The Expressive Fauvism of Anne Estelle Rice, ex. cat. (New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries), p. 12; Breuil, ‘Le Salon Unioniste’, Les Tendances Nouvelles 49 (August 1910), p. 1160. I have not been able to substantiate whether the author is Abbé Breuil, the notorious French archaeologist. The date of Rice’s inclusion coincides with Les Tendances Nouvelles’ profile of Kandinsky, and this may have endorsed Rhythm’s subsequent decision to publish on him. Les Tendances Nouvelles maintained four British correspondents – Kipling joined its Committee of Honour in autumn 1910, and Stanford, Samuel Butler, Beardsley, Shannon, Sickert, Bailie Scott, Augustus John and Simon Bussy are all listed as indicators of the new tendency in Britain. 312

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107. J. Baldo, ‘Le Salon de l’Union’, Les Tendances Nouvelles 63, p. 1555. 108. F. Carco, ‘Lettre de France: Le Roman Français, Introduction’, Rhythm 2:10 (November 1912), p. 269. 109. According to Carco. The school is typified by the work of Delbauquet, Jammes, Montfort and Viollis. ‘Lettre de France’, p. 270. 110. Murry, ‘The importance of Hegel’, p. 204. 111. Murry, ‘Art and Philosophy’, p. 10. 112. Sadlier, ‘After Gauguin’, p. 29. 113. Murry, ‘Art and Philosophy’, pp. 9–10. 114. Ibid., p. 10. 115. Despite these reviews, there is no extant correspondence between Carter and the Rhythmists. Rhythmist Scot Georges [Dorothy] Banks wrote of Carter’s ‘gone​-​one​-​ better​-t​ han​-L ​ ewis​-​Hind attitude’, so perhaps they felt he was exploiting (or plagiarising) their ideas. G. Banks, ‘Letters’, The New Age (14 December 1911), p. 166. 116. H. Carter, ‘The Independents and the New Intuition in Paris’, The New Age (25 May 1911), pp. 82–3. 117. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 187. 118. H. Carter, ‘The Public Ownership of the Artist’, The Egoist (15 January 1914), p. 33. 119. H. Carter, ‘Schonberg, Epstein, Chesterton, and Mass Rhythm’, The Egoist (16 February, 1914), p. 75. 120. Carter, The Public Ownership’, p. 33. 121. Roger Cole, Gaudier​-​Brzeska, Artist and Myth (Bristol: Sansom, 1995), p. 82. 122. H. Gaudier​-​Brzeska, ‘Vortex Gaudier​-​Brzeska’, Blast I (20 June 1914), p. 156. 123. Ibid., pp. 156, 158. In this model, the Vorticist cone motif may be read as a synthesis of the organic sphere of absolute life and the ‘pointed cone’ of ‘fear’ prevalent amongst African and Oceanic art. 124. Richard Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age (London: Gordon Fraser, 1976, vol. I), pp. 178–9. 313

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125. Frank Rutter, Art in My Time (London: Rich and Cowan, 1933), pp. 140–1. This development is mapped in Jessica Dismorr and Gaudier​-​Brzeska’s transfer of allegiance from Rhythmists to Vorticists. 126. Apollinaire letter to Picasso, 4 September 1918, in Apollinaire, L’ABC du cinema, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: André Balland et Jacques Lecat, 1966, vol. IV), p. 162 (also in P. Nicholls, ‘From Fantasy to Structure: Two Moments of Literary Cubism’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 8:3 (1992), p. 226); Cendrars quoted in Nicholls, ‘From Fantasy to Structure’, p. 229. 127. Further binding Rhythm to Les Eus – but only partially on Macmillan’s terms: his connotation of Geddes’ ‘Eutopia’ in Les Eus functions more strongly without his dual likening of the painting to Eden. Likewise here, a postlapsarian reading of Rhythm is closer to the achievable place Geddes envisions; Macmillan, ‘Fergusson, Geddes, Bergson’, p. 8. 128. Murry and Mansfield, ‘The Meaning of Rhythm’, p. 20.

Chapter 5 1. Wyndham Lewis, ‘Futurism, Magic, and Life’, Blast I (20 June 1914), pp. 134–5. 2. Bergson, ‘Life and Consciousness’, p. 35. 3. W. Lewis, ‘Exploitation of Vulgarity’, Blast I (20 June 1914), p. 144. 4. For Lewis’ politics see: P. Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, Painter and Writer (London: Yale University Press, 2000); T. Normand, Wyndham Lewis the Artist, Holding the Mirror up to Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); D. Wragg, Wyndham Lewis and the Philsophy of Art in Early Modernist Britain: Creating a Political Aesthetic (Lampeter: Edwin Mellon, 2005). 5. OED. 6. H. Nordau, Degeneration (London: William Heinemann, 1898 [1895]). 7. P. Douglass, ‘Bergson, Vitalism and Modernist Literature’, in P. Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski and L. Mattison (eds), Understanding Bergson, p. 108. 314

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8. Lewis, ‘Enemy of the Stars’, Blast I (20 June 1914), p. 67. 9. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. xxiii. Bloom’s thesis has been subject to much revision and critical attention in literary studies; however, for Lewis it remains prescient. 10. Bernard Lafourcade, ‘Off to Budapest with Freud’, Enemy News 15 (Winter 1982), pp. 6, 9. In a psycho​-​biographical reference, he describes Lewis as the ‘champion of static space and armoured shells’. 11. W. Lewis, letter to Theodore Weiss, 19 April 1949, in W. Lewis, Letters of Wyndham Lewis, ed. W. K. Rose (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 488. 12. Ibid., pp. 488–9. 13. L. Constant, ‘Cours de M. Bergson’, Revue de Philosophie IV (January 1904), pp. 105–11, in A. Robinet (ed.), Mélanges (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), pp. 573–8. 14. These are: René Gillouin, Henri Bergson; choix de texte avec Étude du Système Philosophique (Paris: Société des editions Louis Michaud, 1910); H. Bergson, authorised trans. T. E. Hulme, An Introduction to Metaphysics (London: Macmillan, 1912); and H. Bergson, authorised trans. A. Mitchell, Creative Evolution (London: Macmillan,1920), a reprint of the 1911 edition. All held at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 15. Lewis paraphrased by B. Lafourcade, ‘The Wild Body: Bergson and the Absurd’, Enemy News 15 (Winter 1982), p. 25. Lafourcade defends himself, writing ‘I never argued that “Our Wild Body” had Bergson in mind’, p. 25. 16. W. Lewis, ‘The Meaning of the Wild Body’, in W. Lewis, The Wild Body, ed. P. O’Keefe (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 160. 17. P. O’Keeffe, ‘Introduction’, in The Wild Body, p. xiv; A. Munton, ‘Wyndham Lewis: The Relation between the Theory and Fiction, from his Earliest Writing to 1941’, PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1976. As the authorised translation notes, Laughter first appeared as three essays in the Revue de Paris starting in 1899. It therefore reached a wider audience than Bergson’s other works previously had and was readily available. See C. Brereton and F. Rothwell, ‘Translators’ Preface’, Henri Bergson, Laughter, 315

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authorised English translation C. Brereton and F. Rothwell (London: Macmillan, 1911), pp. v–vi. 18. Lewis, ‘The Meaning of the Wild Body’, p. 158. 19. Bergson, Laughter, p. 29. 20. Ibid., pp. 3–4. 21. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 90. 22. Ibid. 23. W. Lewis, ‘Inferior Religions’, in The Wild Body, p. 149. 24. Ibid., p. 151. 25. Lewis, ‘Les Saltimbanques’, reprinted as ‘The Cornac and his Wife’, in The Wild Body, pp. 89–106 (p. 102). 26. In using these terms, I am far from saying that Lewis colluded with any racial connotations that they may have held then or hold now. Lewis’ articulation of the failings of humanity was a warning against any tendency towards laziness in intellect, empathy or physique. 27. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 115, margin scored by Lewis. Bergson reiterated the point in ‘Life and Consciousness’: ‘in principle, this faculty of spontaneous motion probably exists in every living thing; but, in actual fact, many organisms have given it up, – as, for example, the numerous animals living as parasites [. . .] and again, almost the entire vegetable kingdom [. . .] Consciousness is in principle present in all living matter, but that it is dormant or atrophied wherever such matter renounces spontaneous activity’. ‘Life and Consciousness’, p. 32. 28. Edwards, Painter and Writer, p. 67. Edwards also relates these to Creative Evolution. 29. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 109. This passage is unmarked in Lewis’ text. 30. Ibid., pp. 107–8. 31. Bergson continues: ‘This latter theory is that of Mechanism. It excludes absolutely the hypothesis of an original impetus, I mean an internal push that has carried life, by more and more complex forms, to higher and higher destinies.’ 316

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32. Here Lewis writes ‘particularly weak area in his argument’. 33. Lewis’ underlining. This last sentence, from ‘passes’ to ‘adaptations’ is also bracketed. 34. Lewis’ emphasis, and note alongside his copy of Creative Evolution, p. 108. Reference to Freud is remarkably presceint as Freud’s discussion of the ‘Nirvana Principle’ itself dates from 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In this case, Nirvana should not primarily be related to either Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. 35. Compare Geddes. 36. Articles considering Vorticism in relation to the modern city: Christopher Adams, ‘Futurism and the British Avant​- ​Garde’, in J. Black (ed.), Blasting the Future! Vorticism in Britain 1910–1920 (London: Philip Wilson, 2006), pp. 9–18; Michael J. K. Walsh, ‘ “The Eminent English Futurist,’ C. R. W. Nevinson and English Futurism in Peace and War’, ibid., pp. 19–28; Andrej Gasiorek, ‘ “Architecture or Revolution?’ Le Corbusier and Wyndham Lewis’, in Andrew Thacker and Peter Brooker (eds), Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces (London: Routledge, 2005). 37. The desirability of this barbarity in Lewis’ view is ambiguous. Is it desirable in art to prevent mankind from falling either into the complacency of convention or the horror of de​-​civilisation in life? 38. W. Shakespeare, Timon of Athens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 1.2, 14–16. 39. Normand, Wyndham Lewis, p. 56. 40. Alan Munton regards 1912 as too early for Lewis to be thinking in terms of the ‘democratisation of culture’. 41. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 109–10: ‘the discord between species will go on increasing [. . .] the same causes that divide the evolution movement often cause life to be diverted from itself, hypnotised by the form it has just brought forth. Thence results increasing disorder [. . .] between these lines [of progressive evolution] runs a crowd of minor paths in which [. . .] deviations, arrests, and set​-​backs are multiplied.’ 42. Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 1.1, 254–5. 317

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43. This pre​-​dates the naming of Vorticism by around a year; however, the description stands and may be used as evidence for the gradual development of Lewis’ thought towards the movement as it was launched in June 1914. 44. A. C. Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare, 1880, in J. Jowett, ‘Introduction’ to W. Shakespeare, The Life of Timon of Athens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 3. Given Lewis’ interest in the play and through his friend T. S. Moore, it is likely Lewis knew Swinburne’s diagnosis. 45. Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 14, 321–5. Jowett notes that scene 14 correlates to 4.3. The quotation of lion and fox is taken in turn from Machiavelli – the accepted source for the title of Lewis’ book. But whereas Machiavelli recommends a synthesis of man and beast, Shakespeare​/​Middleton and I suggest Lewis does not. The play therefore continued to have a great influence of Lewis, and his critique of Shakespeare requires more considered analysis. 46. Ibid., 14, 347. 47. Ritual could spur this analysis towards Hulme’s zeal for Wilhelm Worringer. But Hulme’s acceptance of Worringer does not necessarily entail rejecting Bergson. 48. Bergson, Laughter, p. 158. 49. W. Lewis, ‘Our Wild Body’, New Age (5 May 1910), p. 9. 50. W. Lewis, ‘The Improvement of Life’, Blast I (1914), p. 146. It takes an artist to revolt in a democratic culture, whereas the masses may only revolt against institutions. In this way the artist is two steps ahead: able to see the privations necessary to mass stimulation and apparently ready to sacrifice their own free speech (inherent in oligarchic rule) to ensure the advancement of civilisation. This creates a circular (and mechanistic) system in which the advancement pursued is illusory. Lewis appears to have realised the paradox of this situation; his ‘Enemy’ stance ensuring his social and intellectual ostracisation in an era of supposedly free speech both highlighting the system’s flaws and precipiating change in the system itself. 51. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 105–6. Cf. ‘Life and Consciousness’, where arthropods are designated the high point of instinct and humans the high point of intellect, p. 37. 318

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52. This position is counter to any form of Mechanism: critiques that have read Lewis’ relation to Bergson in this light have been misled by the distorting and polemical prose of Time and Western Man, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1993), e.g. particularly SueEllen Campbell’s otherwise excellent study, The Enemy Opposite: The Outlaw Criticism of Wyndham Lewis (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1988). 53. David Ayers provides a complex critique of Lewis’ reaction to his culture based upon Jameson’s Marxist reading of Lewis in Wyndham Lewis and Western Man (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992). 54. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 106. Lewis’ underlining. For Russell on Bergson, History of Western Philosophy (Oxford: Unwin University Books, 1946). 55. Lapoujade’s paraphrase of Bergson is intriguing: ‘the philosopher is like the insect, which sympathetically divines its prey’, Powers of Time, p. 51. 56. T. E. Hulme, ‘Humanism and the Religious Attitude’, in Herbert Read (ed.), Speculations (London: Kegan Paul, 1936), p. 71. See chapter one. Comparison can be made to Schopenhauer’s system where ‘the unconscious purpose to exist is sin, and the just penalty is our universal misery [. . .] Life is necessary evil, but the unilluminated man cannot perceive this [. . .] He takes seriously the empirical fact of individuality, and therefore, is a wretched egotist, self​-​a ssertive, and carrying his absurd passion for life so far as to propagate his kind; which is the renewal of ­original sin’; Carveth Read, Review of F. Pillon, ‘L’Année Philosophique’, Mind 3:9 (January 1894), p. 131. 57. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 104. Conventionally Hulme’s institutionalism is read as an indication of his break with Bergson, here I see it as a continuation. 58. Bergson, Laughter, p. 151. This situation may shed light on Lewis’ warning to the artist in ‘Futurism, Magic, and Life’: ‘the artist, like Narcisus . . .’. 59. A sort of social Lamarkism (adaptation caused by exterior forces). 60. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 105. Compare Laughter, pp. 166–7: ‘Our character is the result of a choice that is continually being renewed.’ 319

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61. Lewis’ underlining. Italics signal double lines. Implicitly Lewis would support eugenics. Compare this reading of the collective to M. S. Prichard. 62. Bergson, Laughter, p. 150. 63. Bergson, Time and Free Will, in René Gillouin, Henri Bergson; choix de texte avec Étude du Système Philosophique (Paris: Société des editions Louis Michaud, 1910), pp. 45, 51. 64. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 109. Nor did Bergson advocate thinking in duration all the time; in Mind​-​Energy he remarks on the necessity of the ‘veil’ to shield us from incessant, exhausting intuition. Bergson, Mind​-​Energy, p. 70, quoted in Paul Ardoin, ‘Perception Sickness’, in Ardoin, Gontarski and Mattison (eds), Understanding Bergson, p. 131. 65. W. Lewis, ‘Manifesto’, Blast I, p. 32. 66. W. Lewis, ‘The Crowd Master’, Blast II (1915), p. 101. 67. W. Lewis, ‘The New Egos’, Bast I, p. 141. 68. This conception of space is radically opposite to Bergson’s, where internal investigation occurs only through temporal duration. Lewis’ primary problem with duration was with its personal character. Here however space enables analysis of the collective (which is not to say a collective duration, which would be found in Bergson’s intuition). 69. Ibid., p. 141. 70. Lewis, ‘The Crowd Master’, p. 100. 71. Bergson, Time and Free Will, in Henri Bergson; choix de texte, p. 46. ‘L’idée d’espace dans sa totalité [. . .] Se render compte du vide qui l’entoure’ [Lewis’ underlining]. Since Bergson was in favour of this ‘free feeling’, a further layer of complexity may be added to Lewis’ agenda: a critique of Bergson’s philosophy of freedom. 72. Normand, Wyndham Lewis, p. 82. 73. Lewis, ‘The Crowd Master’, p. 96. ‘Unhygenic’ resonates with popular concepts of degeneration, so Lewis’ use is interesting. 320

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74. Hulme, ‘Humanism and the Religious Attitude’, p. 47. 75. See Michel de Certeau’s Practices of Everyday Life (Berkley and London: University of California Press, 1984). 76. Bergson, Laughter, p. 5. 77. Lewis, ‘A Soldier of Humour’, in The Wild Body, p. 7. 78. References to Laughter are by some Lewis scholars: see P. O’Keeffe’s introduction to the Penguin edition; B. Lafourcade, ‘The Wild Body: Bergson and the Absurd’, Enemy News 15 (Winter 1982); G. Wagner, Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957). Wagner writes ‘Bergson’s Le Rire is a primer of Lewisian satire’, p. 223. 79. W. Lewis, ‘Bestre’, in The Wild Body, p. 79. The variation of title of this story (and others) relates to the 1927 edition. Elsewhere, the narrator compared his position to being ‘within the masonries of the bee, and lived off its honey, while investigating the human species’, p. 80. 80. Ibid., pp. 82–3. 81. Ibid., p. 88. 82. Ibid., p. 78. 83. Bergson, Laughter, p. 18. 84. Lewis, ‘Bestre’, in The Wild Body, p. 77. 85. In ‘Our Vortex’ Lewis desires ‘non​-​Life, that is Art’, Blast I, p. 147. See also David Wragg on a similar point. In suggesting an inhuman quality in Bestre, one can compare Lewis to Apollinaire who first used the term ‘inhuman’ in 1908, and in The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations (1913). 86. Bergson, Laughter, p. 44. 87. Ibid., p. 69. 88. Given the importance attached to Breton culture by the avant​-​garde from Gauguin to the Nabis, Lewis’ treatment of it is particularly satirical. For the effect of industrialisation on Brittany, G. Pollock and F. Orton, ‘Les Données Bretonnantes: La Prairie de la 321

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Représentation’, in F. Frascina and C. Harrison (eds), Modern Art and Modernism (London: Harper and Row, 1982). 89. Lewis, ‘A Soldier of Humour’, in The Wild Body, p. 26; Lewis, ‘Beau Séjour’, in The Wild Body, p. 62; Lewis, ‘Bestre’, in The Wild Body, p. 79. 90. First published in the English Review. I use the 1927 text, retitled ‘The Cornac and his Wife’. 91. Lewis, ‘The Cornac and his Wife’, in The Wild Body, p. 103. 92. Ibid., pp. 102–3. 93. Ibid., p. 90. 94. Ibid., pp. 90, 91. 95. Ibid., p. 92. 96. The name derived from French ‘cornaquer’ to show around; Lewis no doubt intended the pun with the french ‘cornac’ meaning elephant driver. 97. Ibid., pp. 102–3. 98. Bergson, Laughter, p. 20. 99. Lewis, ‘The Cornac and his Wife’, in The Wild Body, p. 102. 100. Edwards, Painter and Writer, p. 81. The title seems to have been interchangeable. It was exhibited at the 1913 AAA as Kermesse. 101. Tickner, Modern Life, p. 104. 102. M. Durman and A. Munton, ‘Wyndham Lewis and the Nature of Vorticism’, in G. Cianici (ed.), Wyndham Lewis: Letteratura​/​Pittura (Palermo: Sellerio, 1982), p. 106. 103. Lewis, ‘Les Saltimbanques’, in The Wild Body, p. 102. 104. Bergson, Laughter, p. 159. 105. Lewis, ‘Les Saltimbanques’, p. 103; Bergson, Laughter, p. 160. 106. Lewis, ‘Les Saltimbanques’, p. 102; Bergson, Laughter, p. 159. 107. Bergson, Laughter, p. 17. 108. Ibid., p. 141.

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109. Eugène Minkowski, Schizophrénie, Psychopathologie des schizoïds et des schizophrènes, (Paris, 1927), p. 5. 110. Ibid., p. 62. Minkowski claimed his work to be shaped ‘under the influence of Bergson’, pp. 5, 7, 85. 111. Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 231. 112. Lapoujade, Powers of Time, p. 71. 113. Ibid., p. 48. 114. Lewis, ‘The Meaning of the Wild Body’, p. 158. 115. Lewis, note in Creative Evolution, p. 17. Lewis’ metaphor of the snowball is from an earlier passage of Creative Evolution: ‘my mental state [here duration . . .] goes on increasing – rolling upon itself, as a snowball on the snow’, p. 17. 116. W. Lewis, ‘The Physics of the Not​-​Self ’, in A. Munton (ed.), Wyndham Lewis: Collected Poems and Plays (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1979). 117. W. Lewis, ‘Inferior Religions’, in The Wild Body, p. 149. The text dates from winter 1914–15. 118. W. Lewis, ‘The Cornac and his Wife’, in The Wild Body, p. 89. This story first appeared as ‘Les Saltimbanques’. 119. Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 37. 120. Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 128. Paul Douglass refers to this ‘dédoublement – this appearance of a shadow self ’. Douglass, in Ardoin, Gontarski and Mattison (eds), Understanding Bergson, p. 109. 121. Lewis, ‘Enemy of the Stars’, p. 71. Hanp is conditioned for city life by Arghol on the following page, and is thence eager to leave for the social world. 122. Ibid., p. 66. 123. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 281. Likewise Nietzsche’s Übermensch. 124. Lewis, ‘Enemy of the Stars’, p. 64. 125. Ibid., p. 65.

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126. Ibid., p. 66. 127. Ibid., pp. 75–6. 128. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 273. 129. Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 231. 130. Bergson, Laughter, p. 18. 131. Lewis, ‘Enemy of the Stars’, p. 71. 132. Ibid., p. 70. Lewis highlighted the passage of Bergson that considers the ‘period in which we now are . . . in which the utilizable energy is diminishing’, Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 258. 133. Lewis, ‘Enemy of the Stars’, p. 71. 134. Lapoujade, Powers of Time, p. 71. 135. ‘The Pole’ was published in the English Review, May 1909, and reworked for The Wild Body, where it appears as ‘Beau Séjour’. 136. Lewis, ‘Enemy of the Stars’, p. 77. Compare Bergson’s analysis of dream in Time and Free Will: ‘The strangest dreams, in which two images overlie one another and show us at the same time two different persons, who yet make only one . . . The imagination of the dreamer, cut off from the external world, imitates with mere images, and parodies in its own way the process which constantly goes on with regards to ideas in the deeper regions of the intellectual life’, pp. 136–7. Also, N. B Bergson, ‘Dreams’, trans. E. Slosson in 1913, (London: 1914). 137. Bergson, Time and Freewill, p. 172; Douglass, in Ardoin, Gontarski and Mattison (eds), Understanding Bergson, p. 109. 138. Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 27. 139. Bloom’s terms in The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) are appropriate. 140. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 118–19. 141. Lewis, ‘Enemy of the Stars’, p. 78. 142. Ibid, p. 66. 324

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143. Bergson An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 36. Lapoujade refers to this in his discussion of alterity: – ‘because the other – the nonhuman – is in us that one can encounter if externally . . . We project our own alterity’; Powers of Time, p. 48. 144. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 31. Lewis underlined ‘must do violence to the mind’ in his edition. Bergson continues ‘go counter to the natural bent of the intellect’ – which Lewis would have been less certain of. It is this irreversibility of self that Arghol fervently desires. See An Introduction to Metaphysics which defines the intuitive method as one which requires the painful effort of mental reversal. 145. Lewis, ‘Enemy of the Stars’, pp. 66, 70. 146. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 49, Lewis’ emphasis. His summation of this passage, p. 52; ‘Enemy of the Stars’, p. 70. 147. Lewis, ‘Enemy of the Stars’, p. 68. 148. Ibid., p. 74; Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 117. 149. Lewis, ‘Enemy of the Stars’, p. 67; 1932 re​-​edition quoted in J. Selby, ‘Enemy of the Stars: An Inquiry into its Intellectual Sources’, Wyndham Lewis Annual (1995, vol. 2), p. 31. This alteration is significant. Is Lewis merely clarifying a thought implicit in the 1914 edition? By 1932 Bergson’s phrase would not be familiar to most readers of Lewis’ play in Britain, whereas in 1914 at the height of Bergson’s popularity it would have been immediately identifiable. Why embellish the text with an obscure reference unless the passage is of particular personal significance? Lewis’ anti​-​Bergson tract Time and Western Man was published in 1927, yet it seems the philosopher was still not out of his psyche. 150. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 286. 151. Lewis, ‘Inferior Religions’, in The Wild Body, p. 151. 152. Lewis explores this in ‘The Physics of the Not​-​Self ’. Typically he appropriates Bergsonian interiority for his own, and gives to Bergson the contrary outward perspective, justified by his claim to a life of action. ​ nergy, p. 29, Douglass, in Ardoin, Gontarski and Mattison (eds), Under153. Bergson, Mind​-E standing Bergson, p. 118. 325

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154. Lewis, ‘Enemy of the Stars’, p. 68. Bergson notes the ‘vision we have of the material world is that of a weight that falls’, Creative Evolution, pp. 258–9. 155. Lewis, ‘Enemy of the Stars’, p. 80; Lewis, ‘The Meaning of the Wild Body’, p. 158. 156. Lewis, ‘Enemy of the Stars’, p. 82. 157. Ibid., p. 65. Edwards discusses the play in relation to Gnosticism, Painter and Writer, p. 144. 158. Arghol to Hanp: ‘I wanted to make a naïf yapping Poodle​-​parasite of you’; Lewis, ‘Enemy of the Stars’, p. 73. 159. Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 136. 160. Mark Antliff explored the connection between Bergson and Stirner and his significance in French anarchism in ‘Revolutionary Immanence: Bergson Among the Anarchists’, in J. O’Maillorcia and C. de Mille (eds), Bergson and the Art of Immanence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 94–111. 161. Lewis, ‘Enemy of the Stars’, p. 71. 162. Ibid., p. 80. 163. Ibid., p. 81. The reply, ‘He [Arghol] had been feeding on him, Hanp.’ 164. Bergson, Laughter, p. 168. 165. Lewis, ‘The New Egos’, Blast I, p. 141. 166. Bergson, Laughter, pp. 169–70; Lewis, ‘Enemy of the Stars’, p. 77. 167. Ibid., pp. 190–1. 168. Eugène Minkowski describes the schizophrenic state as being ‘like pantomimes [. . .] one can play around the self, but does not enter, [instead] resting on the outside’. Schizophrénie, Psychopathologie des schizoïds et des schizophrènes, p. 99. 169. Lewis, ‘Enemy of the Stars’, p. 61. 170. Ibid., p. 55. It also claims the play to be ‘very well acted by you and me’. 171. Ibid., p. 55. 172. Ibid., p. 84. 173. Ibid., p. 60. 326

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174. Ibid., p. 59. Sacrifices to a deity of Time have added resonance in a Bergsonian context, an outward example of Lewis’ critique of temporal philosophy. 175. Ibid., p. 62. 176. Also identified by Jan Walsh, ‘Comedies of Errors: Bergson’s Laughter in Modernist Contexts’, in Ardoin, Gontarski and Mattison (eds), Understanding Bergson, p. 47. 177. Bergson, Laughter, pp. 114–15. 178. Ibid., p. 51. 179. Ibid., p. 87. On inadaptibility to life, see p. 133. Another passage compares with Dieppe Fishermen: ‘stupidly monotonous body, perpetually obstructing everything with its machine​-​like obstinacy’, p. 50. 180. Ibid., pp. 53, 37. 181. Ibid., p. 39. 182. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 103. 183. Bergson, Laughter, p. 77. 184. J. Ó Maoilearca, ‘ “The Very Life of Things”: Thinking Objects and Reversing Thought in Bergsonian Metaphysics’, in H. Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, ed. J. Mullarkey and M. Kolkman, 2007.

Conclusion 1. J. M. Murry, ‘Croce and History’, review Theory and History of Historiography, trans. D. Ainslie, Nation and Atheneum, 30 July 1921, p. 4. Murry archive Edinburgh University, 2506.7 2. M. Merleau​-​Ponty, ‘At the Sorbonne’, in Thomas Hanna (ed.), The Bergsonian Heritage (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1962), p. 135. 3. J. Mullarkey, The New Bergson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 2. 4. Jean Wahl, ‘At the Sorbonne’, in T. Hanna (ed.), The Bergsonian Heritage (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1962), p. 154. Endorsed by Isaac Benrubi’s 327

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recollection that Bergson wondered ‘if war is not indispensable to the existence of a people’; Grogin, Bergsonian Controversy, p. 197. 5. F. Delattre, ‘La Personalité d’Henri Bergson et l’Angleterre’, p. 7; F. Delattre, L’angleterre d’après​-​geurre et e conflit homiller (1919–26), Etude de Psychologie Sociale (Paris, 1930); S. Wilson, ‘Bergson before Deleuze: How to read Informel Painting’, in J. Ó Maoilearca and C. de Mille (eds), Bergson and the Art of Immanence, pp. 80–93. 6. ‘Toynbee in effect brought about a fusion of Bergsonism with a type of historiography rooted in the education of the classics offered at Oxford and Cambridge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’. Kerslake, ‘Becoming against History’, Parrhesia 4 (2008), pp. 17–48, 19. Leon ter Schure remarks the Bergsonism of Toynbee in Bergson and History: Transforming the Modern Regime of Historicity (New York: SUNY, 2019). 7. Kerslake, ‘Becoming against History’, p. 19. 8. Ibid., p. 28. Kerslake compares Toybee’s vision with Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918) which argued ‘civilizations could by analogy be endowed with a “life”, insofar as their birth, growth, maturation and senescence mirrors the developmental sequence of an organism’. Spengler’s vitalist perception of civilisations is the subject of another project. 9. J. M. Murry, ‘Twentieth Century Art’, Westminster Gazette, 20 May 1914. 10. R. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 40.

Epilogue 1. Lapoujade, Powers of Time, p. 62. 2. Bergson, The Creative Mind, p. 112. 3. Ibid., p. 79. 4. Ibid., p. 76. Cf.: ‘Art is certainly a more direct vision of reality, but this purity of perception implies a break with utilitarian convention’, Bergson, Laughter, p. 157. 328

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5. Ibid., p. 84. 6. Bergson, Laughter, p. 160. 7. Bergson’s description in Introduction to Metaphysics that we must do violence to the mind, p. 49. See G. Dowd, ‘Bergson on the Image and Representation’, in Ardoin, Gontarski and Mattison (eds), Understanding Bergson, pp. 315–17. 8. Douglass, ‘Bergson, Vitalism and Modernist Literature’, in Ardoin, Gontarski and Mattison (eds), Understanding Bergson, p. 121. 9. Iverson and Melville, Writing Art History, pp. 152–3. 10. Douglass, ‘Bergson, Vitalism and Modernist Literature’, p. 120. 11. Aby Warburg in Philippe​-​A lain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2004), p. 178. 12. In The Sight of Death T. J. Clark’s focus is what escapes us in looking, how art resists its translation into a verbal medium, and what, ultimately, this leaves us with as art historians. Clark also acknowledges his own resistance to write about certain paintings, which he feels ‘are best left alone’. Scholarly reluctance to address iconic images exists also in the writer’s sense of rightness – or commonly sense of unfitness, for the writing we undertake. Clark, The Sight of Death (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 3. W. J. T. Mitchell pleads for us to work for a ‘critique of images as sources of value, rather than objects of evaluation’, W. J. T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 83; Iverson and Melville ask that we aim at ‘thickening or enriching the discipline’s imagination of its possible objectivity and so can take no particular imagination of objectivity as normative’, Iverson and Melville, Writing Art History, p. 8. Pioneering work on our blindnesses began with Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock; more recently Claire Farago, Denise Murrell, Roger Benjamin and others addresses the male, white, Western model of a linear progress of history. 13. Michaud, Aby Warburg, p. 16. 14. Iverson and Melville, Writing Art History, p. 42. 329

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15. Gombrich, in ibid., p. 40. 16. Saul Ostraw, ‘Introduction’, in Richard Woodfield (ed.), Framing Formalism, Riegl’s Work (Amsterdam: G+B International, 2001), p. 7. 17. E. Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos (1927), in Michaud, Aby Warburg, p. 231. 18. Crary contrasts Cézanne’s ‘broken’ perception with the ‘pure’ ideal of Matter and Memory, which is read as part of a larger programme of synthesis, a desire to unify subjectivity as the continuation of the past in the present. Crary, Suspensions of Perception, pp. 323–8; Richard Shiff, ‘He Painted’, in Nancy Ireson and Barnaby Wright (eds), Cézanne’s Card Players (London: The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2009); Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984); Bois, ‘Cézanne: Words and Deeds’, pp. 31–44; Bois, ‘On Matisse’, pp. 60–121; Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth​-​Century Art (London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Alastair Wright, ‘Arche​-t​ extures: Matisse and the End of (Art) History’, October 84 (Spring 1998), pp. 44–63. 19. Prichard first writes to Isabella Gardner in 1909 and refers to him in the context of Bergson’s lectures of 18 December 1910. See Antliff, ‘The Rhythms of Duration’, pp. 184–208. Jack Flam has subsequently referred to Matisse’s Bergsonism; J. Flam, Matisse on Art, revised edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 20. See Susan Sontag ‘Against Interpretation’, in Against Interpretation and other Essays (London: Penguin, 2009 [1966]); Clark, The Sight of Death. 21. Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 130. ​ nergy, p. 29. Compare Hegel’s conception of art as explained by Iverson 22. Bergson, Mind​-E and Melville: ‘art’s status as a vanishing moment of thought . . . art’s highest end is achieved prior to its becoming visible as art’, which leads in their view to the ‘deep strangeness in the temporality of art history’, p. 172. 23. M. Merleau​-​Ponty, ‘Bergson in the Making’, in Signs, trans. R. C. MacCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 187. 330

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24. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 275–7. 25. See C. Lundy, ‘Bergson, History and Ontology’, in Bergson and the Art of Immanence; ter Schure, Bergson and History. 26. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 37; ‘duration is immanent to the whole of the universe. The universe endures’, Creative Evolution, p. 11. 27. See Kerslake, ‘Becoming against History’, pp. 17–48. 28. Lundy, ‘Bergson, History and Ontology’, p. 17. 29. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 207–8. 30. Bergson, Time and Free Will, pp. 133–4. 31. Michaud, Aby Warburg, p. 12. 32. Ibid., p. 94. 33. Iverson and Melville, Writing Art History, p. 56. 34. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, in Iverson and Melville, Writing Art History, p. 77. 35. Ibid., p. xx. 36. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want?, p. 324. 37. Michael Ann Holly, The Melancholy Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 20. 38. Clark, The Sight of Death, p. 224. 39. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want?, p. 93. 40. Ibid., pp. xv, 31. 41. Georges Didi​-​Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2009), p. xvii. 42. Bergson, Creative Mind, pp. 40, 17. 43. Ibid., p. 20. 44. Bergson: ‘By intuition is meant the kind of sympathy by which one places oneself within an object’, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 28. 45. Bergson, Creative Mind, p. 45. 46. Ibid., p. 40, my italics. 331

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47. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp. 252–3. 48. Ibid., p. 253. 49. Ibid., p. 250. 50. In An Introduction to Metaphysics, Bergson proposes that ‘reality is mobility. There do not exist things made but only things in the making, not states that remain fixed, but only states in process of change . . . All reality therefore is tendency’, in The Creative Mind, p. 222. 51. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 258. 52. Ibid., p. 261. 53. Michael Gusber, Time’s Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and Temporaloty in Fin​-​de Siècle Vienna (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2006), p. 160. 54. Ibid., p. 163. Gusber compares Bergson. 55. Ibid., p. 201. 56. Ibid., p. 183. 57. Michaud, Aby Warburg, p. 32. 58. Ibid., p. 18. 59. Ibid., p. 229. 60. Gusber’s paraphrase, Time’s Visible Surface, pp. 208–9. Recently, the significance of this relationship as the site of investigation has been advocated by James Elkins since his 1997 The Object Looks Back, and Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? 61. Clark, The Sight of Death, p. 12. 62. Ibid., p. 27. Recall that ‘Substance’ is Leibniz’s word for his monads. 63. They continue: ‘To fully succeed in such writing, to find ourselves without limits, would indeed to be to find ourselves at the end of art, as also at a certain version of the end of language’; Iverson and Melville, Writing Art History, pp. 172–3. 64. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want?, p. 172. 65. Georges Didi​-​Huberman, The Surviving Image, trans. H. Medelsohn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), pp. 1–15. 332

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66. Animating Art History was a join initiative between The Courtauld, Central St Martin’s and the University of the Arts, London. It was longlisted for a Clore Award in Museum Learning. 67. Keith Jenkins, Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 2. 68. Ibid., p. 3. 69. S. Guerlac, ‘Foreword’, in Ardoin, Gontarski and Mattison (eds), Understanding Bergson, p. vii. 70. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want?, p. 8. 71. Ibid., p. 11. 72. Clark, The Sight of Death, pp. 3, 5. 73. Ibid., pp. 8, 39. 74. Ibid., p. 43. 75. Ibid., pp. 48, 50. 76. Ibid., p. 43. 77. Ibid., p. 198. 78. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want?, p. 2. Cf. Matter and Memory, pp. 24–5. 79. Ibid., p. 203. 80. Ibid., p. 215. This recalls the first chapter of Matter and Memory: ‘every image is within certain images’, pp. 8–13, 13. 81. Ibid., p. 47. 82. Ibid., p. 10. 83. Bergson, Creative Mind, p. 131. Incorporating new materialist writing by Jane Bennett, Elizabeth Grosz and others into this discussion is a wider project beyond the scope of this epilogue. For an excellent summary of this work, see Vestiges of a Philosophy, ​ piritual, and the Forgotten Bergson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Matter, the Meta​-S 2022). 84. Ibid., p. 67. 85. Ibid., p. 69. 333

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86. Oswold Spengler, The Decline in the West (London: Forgotten Books, 2015), pp. 104, 206. 87. Ibid., p. 202. 88. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want?, p. 87. Mitchell recalls the analogy is ancient. 89. Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, p. 90. Indebted to Bergson, Focillon describes form as part of the ‘mobile life in a changing world’ of images, an ‘eternal transfiguration’ through time. Art forms occur through ‘a kind of fissure through which crowds of images aspiring to birth’, pp. 44, 75, 35. 90. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want?, p. 91. 91. Scott F. Gilbert, ‘Holobiont by Birth: Multilineage Individuals as the Concretion of Cooperative Processes’, in A. Tsing, H. Swanson, E. Gan and N. Bubandt (eds), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), p. M75. 92. Donna Haraway, ‘Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activisms’, in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), p. M45. 93. Ibid., pp. M35, M45. 94. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want?, p. 89. 95. Haraway, ‘Symbiogenesis’, p. M35. 96. Gilbert, ‘Holobiont by Birth’, p. M75. 97. Ibid., p. M84. 98. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want?, p. 89. 99. Gilbert, ‘Holobiont by Birth’, pp. M83–4. 100. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want?, pp. 92, 335. 101. Clark, The Sight of Death, p. 53. 102. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want?, p. 356. 103. H. Swanson, A. Tsing, N. Bubandt and E. Gan, ‘Introduction: Bodies Tumbled into Bodies’, in Tsing, Swanson, Gan and N. Bubandt (eds), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, p. M8. 334

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104. T. J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), pp. 120, 8. 105. ‘Sym​-​poiesis is a simple word; it means “making​-​w ith” ’, Haraway, ‘Symbiogenesis’, p. M25. Bergson original: ‘to the totality of the material universe that we ought to compare the living organism’, Creative Evolution, p. 16. 106. Bergson original: ‘life like conscious activity, is invention, unceasing creation’, Creative Evolution, p. 24. 107. Bergson original: ‘art lives on creation, and implies a latent belief in the spontaneity of nature’, Creative Evolution, p. 48. 108. For the profoundly, doubly Bergsonian resonances of Seers work, see O’Maoilearca, Vestiges of a Philosophy, Matter, the Meta​-​Spiritual, and the Forgotten Bergson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

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Bergson, ‘Consciousness and Personality’, lecture delivered at the École Normale Supérieure, Bergson Archive, Bibliotècque Jacques Doucet, IX.BGN.IV.1 [BGN 3000]. Bloomsbury Papers, Tate Gallery Archives [TGA] 8010. Costelloe, Karin (1913), Letter to Henri Bergson, 1 June, [BLJD], BGN 1679; VI-BGN-IV-5. Dickinson, G.L. (n.d. [1885]), ‘On the Causation between Matter and Mind’, n.d., read 1885, KCA, GLD 1/10, pp. 1–3. Forbes, M. C., to Geddes, P., [PGA], T-Ged 7/3/15. Fry, Roger (1920), ‘Do we Exist’, Society of Apostles [KCA], REF 1/10. Fry, Roger (1911), Letter to Bell, Clive, 26 January, [KCA], CHA1/216/1/RFCB5. Fry, Roger (1887–9), ‘Shall we Temporize’, [KCA], REF 1/10. Fry, Roger (1891), ‘Some Problems of Phenomenology and its Application to Greek Art’, fellowship dissertation at King’s College, Cambridge, [KCA], REF 1/13. Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri (1912), to Fergusson, John Duncan, 12 June, Fergusson Gallery Archive, [FGA], FGA/2419. Geddes, Patrick (n.d.), no title, MSS article for the Saturday Review, [PGA], T-Ged 21/2/30. Geddes, Patrick (1912), ‘Mr Balfour and Mr Bergson’, Saturday Gazette, Sir Patrick Geddes Archive, University of Strathclyde, [PGA], T-Ged 21/2/30. Geddes, Patrick, ‘Notes’, [PGA], T-Ged 11/18. Geddes, Patrick, and Arthur J. Thomson, MSS possibly for Evolution, [GA], T-Ged 18/1/286. Gouhier, Henri (1910–11), ‘Cours de Bergson 1910–1911’, BGN 2998 IV-BGN-VI.98. Grant, Duncan, ‘Memoir of Paris, Part II’, 4, [KCA], CHA/3/3. Husson, Léon (1898), ‘On the Method of Psychology’, notes of lectures delivered at the École Normale in February, Fond Bergson, [BLJD], IX.BGN.IV.1 [BGN 3000]. James, William (1905), to H. Bergson, 20 July, [BLJD], BGN 2867; V-BGN-4. Joyananda, Letter to Geddes, Patrick, n.d., [PGA], T-Ged 9/2144 B. Keynes, John Maynard (1910), ‘On the Principle of Organic Unity’, Keynes Papers, KCA, JMK/UA/35, 1–2. 337

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Littler, William Farren (1895), Admissions Book Banstead Asylum, Entry 19 November, London Metropolitan Archives. H22/BAN/B/01 015. And H22/BAN/b 03 034 (deaths). MaColl, D. S. (1913), to C. Bell, 22 October; 26 October, [KCA], CHA/1/384. McTaggart John Ellis (1889), to R. Fry, 5 September, [KCA], McTaggart Papers, letter 19. Maire, Gilbert, ‘Les annés de Bergson à Clermont-Ferand’, BGN 2957 [IV-BGN-VI98]. Mansfield, Katherine, to John Duncan, Fergusson, [FGA], FGA/2427. Mathers, Moina (Mina Bergson) Soror Vestigia nulla restrorem (V.N.R.), ‘Flying Roll XXXVI: Skrying and Projection’. Collection of United Lodge of England, GBR 1991 GD 2/1/4 Flying Rolls. Murry, John Middleton (1911), journal entry 20 December, archives of John Middleton Murry, University of Edinburgh, [JMMA], MS 2509–8e. Pogson, Frank L. (1910), to H. Bergson, 2 June, Fond Bergson, [BLJD], BGN 2777. Pogson, Frank L. (1910), to H. Bergson, 27 August, Fond Bergson, [BLJD], BGN 2777. Prichard, Matthew Stewart (1921), ‘Greek and Byzantine Art’, private lecture, archives of Matthew Stewart Prichard, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, [MSPA]. Prichard, Matthew Stewart (1902–24), letters to various correspondents, [MSPA]; microfilm of these letters held at the AAA, Washington, roll 389. Prichard, Matthew Stewart (c. 1909–10), Notebook I, [MSPA]. Prichard, Matthew Stewart (c. 1910), Notebook II, [MSPA]. Ratcliff, S. K. (1914), to P. Geddes, 28 April, [PGA], T-Ged 9/2397. Shaw, George Bernard (before 1922), Draft Preface to Back to Methuselah, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, n.d., [HRC]. Star, Maria (1908), untitled article, La Phalange, BGN IX-BGN-II-I. Thomson, Arthur J., Draft Article on Bergson and Humour, [PGA], T-Ged 18/1/756. Waterlow Sidney (1910), to C. Bell, 24 January, [KCA], CHA/1/662/SWCB3. Yeats, W. B. (1893–1912), Golden Dawn Notebook, National Library of Ireland, NLI MS 36276 (1).

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British Reviews of French Editions of Bergson Prior to 1914 Alexander, Samuel (1897), ‘Matière et Mémoire: Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit. Par Henri Bergson’, Mind 6:24, October, pp. 572–3. Anon. (1908), ‘ La Rire’, Nation 4, 28 November, pp. 348–49. Anon. (1907), Review of Introduction à la Métaphysique, Review of Theology and Philosophy 3, October, pp. 249–51. Bode, B. H. (1908), Review of Introduction à la Métaphysique, Philosophical Review 17, January, pp. 84–9. Boyd, W. (1907), ‘L’Évolution Créatrice’, Review of Theology and Philosophy 3, October, pp. 249–51. Ferrar, W. J. (1909), ‘L’Évolution Créatrice’, Commonwealth, December, pp. 364–7. Gardiner, H. N. (1896), Review of Matière et Mémoire, Psychological Review 3, September pp. 578–80. Husband, M. G. (1912), Review of Introduction à la Métaphysique, International Journal of Ethics 22, July, pp. 462–7. Loveday, T.( 1908), ‘Henri Bergson, L’Evolution Créatrice’, Mind 17:67, July, pp. 402–8. MacDonald, M. S. (1902), ‘L’effort intellecuel, par H. Bergson’, Philosophical Review 11, July, pp. 416–17. Mitchell, Arthur (1908), ‘L’Evolution Créatrice’, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 5:22, 28 October, pp. 603–12. Stout, George Frederick (1890), ‘Free will and Determinism’, review of Essai sur les Données Immédieates de la Conscience, Speaker 1, 10 May, p. 520. Taylor, A. E. (1912), ‘L’Evolution Créatrice. Par Henri Bergson’, International Journal of Ethics 22:4, July, pp. 467–9. Tufts, J. H. (1901), ‘Humour: Le Rire, essai sur la signification du comique. H. Bergson’, Psychological Review 8, January, pp. 471–8.

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Tyrrell, G. (1908), Review of Introduction à la Métaphysique, Hibbert Journal 6, January, pp. 435–42. Whittaker, T. (1890), ‘Essai sur les Données Immédiates de la Conscience’, Mind 1, April, pp. 292–3.

Reviews of English Translations Prior to 1914 Anon. (1911), ‘Bergson’s Wonder-working Philosophy’, Current Literature 50, May, pp. 518–20. Anon. (1911), ‘Creative Evolution. By Henri Bergson. Authorized translation by A. Mitchell’, Athenaeum 1, 15 April, pp. 411–12. Anon. (1912), ‘Laughter’, Living Age 272, February, pp. 315–404; [Review of Bergson pp. 315–17]. Anon. (1912), ‘Laughter. By Henri Bergson’, Edinburgh Review 215, April, pp. 383–404. Anon. (1911), ‘Mr Bergson and Others’, Spectator 106, 6 May, pp. 689–90. Anon. (1910), ‘Professor Bergson on Free Will’, Spectator 105, 24 September, pp. 465–6. Anon. (1912), ‘Review of Creative Evolution’, Lancet 181, 10 February, pp. 1710–11. Anon. (1911), Review of Introduction to Metaphysics, Saturday Review 111, 3 June, pp. 685–6. Anon. (1910), Review of Time and Free Will, Saturday Review 110, 1 October, p. 430. Anon. (1910), ‘Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. By Henri Bergson. Authorized translation by F. L. Pogson’, Athenaeum 2, 22 October, pp. 483–4. Balsillie, D. (1911), Review of Time and Free Will, Mind 20, July, pp. 357–78. Blacklock, W. (1912), ‘Bergson’s Creative Evolution’, Westminster Review 177, March, pp. 343–7. Bode, B. H. (1912), Westminster Review 177, March, pp. 343–7. Brown, William (1912), Review Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, and Creative Evolution, Church Quarterly Review 74, April, pp. 126–42. Cockerall, J. D. A. (1911), ‘The New Voice of Philosophy’, The Dial 51, 1 October, pp. 253–5. Fawcett, Edward Douglas (1912), ‘Matter and Memory’, Mind 21, April, pp. 201–32. 340

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Kallen, M. H. (1912), ‘Laughter. By Henri Bergson’, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 9, 23 May, pp. 303–5. Muirhead, J. H. (1911), ‘The Philosophy of Bergson’, Hibbert Journal 9, July, pp. 895–907. Ross, G. T. (1908), ‘A New Theory of Laughter’, Nation 4, 28 November, pp. 348–49. Soloman, Joseph (1912), Review of Introduction to Metaphysics and Creative Evolution, Mind 20, July, pp. 432–33. T., J. A. [J. Arthur Thomson] (1911), Review Introduction to Metaphysics and Creative Evolution, Nature 87, 12 October, pp. 475–7. Taylor, A. E. (1911), ‘Matter and Memory. Henri Bergson. Authorized translation by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer’, International Journal of Ethics 22:1, October, pp. 101–7. Taylor, A. E. (1912), ‘Creative Evolution. By Henri Bergson. Translated by Arthur Mitchell’, International Journal of Ethics 22, July, pp. 467–9. Tuttle, J. R. (1912), ‘Creative Evolution and the Philosophic Doubt by A. J. Balfour in Hibbert Journal 11: 1–23’, [review], Philosophical Review 21, January, pp. 122–3. Tuttle, J. R. (1912), ‘Life and Consciousness. Henri Bergson in Hibbert Journal 11: 24–44’, [review], Philosophical Review 21, January, pp. 125–6. W., B. C. A. (1912), ‘Laughter, translated by C. Brereton and F. Rothwell’, Dublin Review 151, July, pp. 181–4. Waterlow, Sidney (1912), ‘The Philosophy of Henri Bergson. 1. Time and Free Will. Translated by F. L. Pogson. 2. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. 3. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. 4. Laughter. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. 5. A Pluralistic Universe. By William James. 6. Body and Mind. By William McDougall’, The Quarterly Review 216, pp. 152–76. Wolf, A. (1911), Review Introduction to Metaphysics, Jewish Review, July.

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Carr, H. W. (1908–9), ‘Bergson’s Theory of Knowledge’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society IX, pp. 41–60. Carr, H. W. (1912), ‘Modern Science and the Illusions of Professor Bergson, by Hugh S. R. Elliot’, review, Mind 21, October, pp. 579–81. Carr, H. W. (1911), ‘The Philosophy of Bergson, by A. D. Lindsay’, review, Mind 20, October, pp. 560-66. Carr, H. W. (1914), The Philosophy of Change, London: Macmillan. Carr, H. W. (1910), ‘The Philosophy of Henri Bergson’, Hibbert Journal 8, July, pp. 873–83. Carr, H. W. (1910–11), ‘The Theory of Psycho-Physical Parallelism as a Working Hypothesis in Psychology’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society XI, pp. 129–43. Carter, Huntly (1909), ‘Art’, New Age, 18 November, p. 67. Carter, H. (1911), ‘Art and Drama’, New Age, 9 November, p. 36. Carter, H. (1912), ‘Art and Drama in Paris’, New Age, 7 March, p. 84. Carter, H. (1909), ‘Book of the Week: Progressive Creation by H. E. Sampson’, New Age, 20 May. Carter, H. (1911), ‘Letters from Abroad’, New Age, 10 August, pp. 345–6. Carter, H. (1911), ‘Letters from Abroad’, New Age, 7 December, p. 142. Carter, H. (1914), ‘New Books on Art’, The Egoist, 15 June, pp. 235–6. Carter, H. (1914), ‘Schonberg, Epstein, Chesterton and Mass Rhythm’, The Egoist, 16 February, pp. 75–6. Carter, H. (1911), ‘The Blue Bird and Bergson in Paris’, The New Age, 11 May, pp. 43–5. Carter, H. (1911), ‘The Independents and the New Intuition in Paris’, The New Age, 25 May, pp. 82–3. Carter, H. (1912), The New Spirit in Art and Drama, London: Frank Palmer. Carter, H. (1911), ‘The Plato-Picasso Idea’, New Age, 23 November, p. 88. Carter, H. (1910), ‘The Post-Savages’, New Age, 8 December, pp. 140–2. Carter, H. (1914), ‘The Public Ownership of the Artist’, The Egoist, 15 January, pp. 33–5. Carter, H. (1914), ‘Towards a Human Aesthetic’, The Egoist, 15 May, pp. 197–8. 346

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Carus, Paul (1912), ‘The Anti-intellectual Movement of Today’, Monist 22, July, pp. 397–404. Ciolkowska, M. (1914), ‘André Dunoyer Segonzac, Painter’, The Egoist, 1 May, p. 173. Constant, L. (1904), ‘Cours de M. Bergson’, Revue de Philosophie, IV, January, pp. 105–11. Cook, Mabel Keningdale (1872), ‘University College Art Schools’, Woman 3, February, p. 35. Corrance, Henry (1913), ‘Bergson’s Philosophy and the Idea of God,’ Hibbert Journal 12:2 (October), pp. 374-388. Costelloe, Karin (1914–15), ‘Complexity and Synthesis: A Comparison of the Data and Philosophical Methods of Mr Russell and M. Bergson’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society XV, pp. 271–303. Costelloe, K. (1912–13), ‘What Bergson means by Interpenetration’, Proceedings of the ­Aristotelian Society XVIII, pp. 130–55. Cournos, John (1915), ‘Gaudier-Brzeska’s Art’, The Egoist, 1 September, pp. 137–8. Crossthwaite, Arthur (1911), ‘A Railway Vision’, Rhythm 1:3, Winter, pp. 32–4. Denis, Maurice (1910) [1907], ‘Cézanne’, trans. Roger Fry, The Burlington XVI, January– February, in C. Harrison and P. Wood (eds) (2003), Art in Theory 1900–2000, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 39–46. Derème, Tristan (1912), ‘Lettre de France’, Rhythm 2:7, August, pp. 113–16. Derème, T. (1912), ‘Lettre de France, 3: Poetes Nouveaux’, Rhythm 2:9, October, pp. 226–31. Dewey, John (1911), ‘Maeterlinck’s Philosophy of Life’, Hibbert 10:4, January, pp. 765–78. Dias, B. H. (1917), ‘Art Notes’, New Age, 22 November, pp. 74–5. Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes (psued. Don) (1912), ‘Intellectualism’, Manchester Guardian, 14 May, pp. 16–20. Dickinson, G. L. (1904), ‘Motoring’, Independent Review I:4, January, pp. 578–89. Dickinson, G. L. (1904), ‘Religion and Revelation’, Independent Review II:8, May, pp. 530–38. Dickinson, G. L. (1904), ‘Religion and Revelation’, Independent Review II:9, June, pp. 26–30. Dickinson, G. L. (1905), ‘The Newest Philosophy’, Independent Review V:23, August, pp. 177–90. 347

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Drey, O. Raymond (1913), ‘Cubists at the Grafton, A Retrospect’, Rhythm 2:14, February, pp. 419–23. Epstein, Jacob (1936), ‘Forward’, in Herbert Read (ed.), Speculations, London: Kegan Paul, pp. vii–viii. Fergusson, John Duncan (1909), ‘The Autumn Salon’, The Art News, 21 October, p. 7. Forster, Edward Morgan (1904), ‘The Road from Colonus’, first published in the Independent Review, June, reprinted in The Celestial Omnibus, London: Snowbooks, pp. 139–59. Frater, G. H., D.D.C.F. (n.d.), ‘Flying Roll XI: Clairvoyance’, in Francis King (ed.), Astral Projection Ritual Magic and Alchemy: Golden Dawn Material by S. L MacGregor Mathers, Bexley: Aquarian Press. Fry, Roger (1909), ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, New Quarterly, reprint, in Vision and Design, London: Pelican, 1920 [1937], pp. 22–40. Fry, R. (1912), ‘Art: The Grafton Gallery: An Apologia’, Nation, 9 November, pp. 249–51. Fry, R. (1988) [1912], ‘The French Group’, Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, ex. cat., in Bullen (ed.), Post-Impressionists in England, pp. 352–5. Fry, R. (1988) [1910], ‘The Grafton Gallery – I’, Nation, 19 November, 331, in Bullen (ed.), Post-Impressionists in England, pp. 120–4. Fry, R. (1939), Last Lectures, intro. Kenneth Clark, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fry, R. (1972), Letters of Roger Fry, ed. Denys Sutton, 2 vols, London: Chatto and Windus. Fry, R. (1908), ‘Letters to the Editor’, The Burlington 12, March, pp. 374–5. Fry, R. (1937) [1910], ‘The Art of the Bushmen’, The Burlington Magazine, reprint. Vision and Design, pp. 76–7. Fry, R. (1996) [1893], ‘The Philosophy of Impressionism’, in Christopher Reed (ed.), A Roger Fry Reader, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 12–20. Gaucher, A. (1900), ‘Isis a Monmartre’, L’Echo du Marveillieux, pp. 470–2. Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri (1914), ‘Allied Artist’s Association Ltd, Holland Park Hall’, The Egoist, 15 June, pp. 227–8. Gaudier-Brzeska, H. (1914), ‘Letter to the Editor’, The Egoist, 16 March, pp. 117–18. 348

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Gaudier Brzeska, H. (1914), ‘Vortex Gaudier Brzeska’, Blast I, Review of the Great English Vortex, 20 June, pp. 155–8. Geddes, Patrick (ed.) (1895), The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal: The Book of Spring. Geddes, P. (ed.) (1895), The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal: The Book of Autumn. Geddes, P. (ed.) (1896), The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal: The Book of Summer. Geddes, P. (ed.) (1896–7), The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal: The Book of Winter. George, W. L. (1911), ‘The Negress’, Rhythm 1:3, Winter, p. 5. Gerome-Maesse (n.d.), ‘Les Opinions: l’Individualisme’, Les Tendances Nouvelles 48, pp. 1116–19. Gillouin, René (1910), Henri Bergson; choix de texte avec Étude du Système Philosophique, Paris: Société des editions Louis Michaud. Gleizses, Albert (1911), ‘Les Beaux Artes’, Les Bandeaux d’Or, November, pp. 42–51. Goodyear, Frederick (1920), Letters and Remains 1887–1917, London: McBride, Nast and Co. Goodyear, F. (1911), ‘The New Thelema’, Rhythm 1:1, Summer, pp. 1–3. Gould, F. J. (1911), ‘Bergson and Balfour’, Literary Guide and Rationalist Review 185, November, pp. 163–4. Graham, J. C. (1912), ‘Is he Dead?’, letter in New Age, 1 February, p. 333. Harris, Frank (1912), ‘The Holy Man’, Rhythm 2:5, June, pp. 2–7. Harrison, Jane (1913), ‘Extract from the Laws’, preface to Unanimism: A Study of Conversion and Some Contemporary French Poets, Cambridge: Express Printing. Hermit of Prague (pseud.) (1912), ‘Modern Science and the Illusions of Professor Bergson. By H. S. R. Elliot’, review, Bedrock 1, July, pp. 277–80. Hicks, G. Dawes (1911), ‘Survey of Recent Philosophical and Theological Literature’, Hibbert Journal 10, January, pp. 477–88. Hookhan, George (1912), ‘Further Notes on Professor Bergson’s Philosophy’, National Review 59, April, pp. 325–36. Hookhan, G. (1912), ‘Professor Bergson as a Critic of Darwin’, National Review 59, March, pp. 101–18. 349

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Hulme, Thomas E. (1915–16), ‘A Notebook’, series of articles in the New Age, 2 February 1915–10 February 1916. Hulme, T. E. (pseud. T. K. White) (1911), ‘A Personal Impression of Henri Bergson’, West­ minster Gazette, 18 November, in K. Csengei (ed.), Selected Writings of T. E. Hulme, pp. 166–9. Hulme, T. E. (1911), ‘Bax on Bergson’, 3 August, The New Age, pp. 328–31. Hulme, T. E. (pseud. T. Gratton) (1911), ‘Bergson Lecturing’, New Age, 2 November, pp. 15–16. Hulme, T. E., ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’, in Herbert Read (ed.) (1936), Speculations, London: Kegan Paul, pp. 143–69. Hulme, T. E. (1909), ‘Correspondence: Bergson and Bax’, New Age, 22 July, p. 259. Hulme, T. E. (1936), ‘Humanism and the Religious Attitude, in Herbert Read (ed.), Speculations, London: Kegan Paul. Hulme, T. E. (1914), ‘Modern Art III: The London Group’, New Age, 26 March, pp. 661–2. Hulme, T. E. (1911), ‘Mr Balfour, Bergson, and Politics’, New Age, 9 November, pp. 38–40. Hulme, T. E. (1909), ‘Searchers after Reality. 1. Bax’, New Age, 29 July, pp. 265–6. Hulme, T. E. (1909), ‘Searchers after Reality. II: Haldane’, New Age 5:6, 19 August, pp. 315–16. Hulme, T. E. (1909), ‘Searchers after Reality III: Jules de Gaultier’, New Age, 2 December, pp. 107–8. Hulme, T. E. (1909), ‘The New Philosophy’, New Age, 1 July, pp. 198–9. Hulme, T. E. (1936), ‘The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds’, in Herbert Read (ed.) Speculations, London: Kegan Paul, pp. 173–214. Jacks, L. P. (1912), ‘Does Consciousness Evolve’, Hibbert, pp. 521–43. Jacks, L. P. (1911) ‘William James and his Message’, Contemporary Review 99, January, pp. 20–3. Jackson, Holbrook (1911), ‘A Plea for a Revolt in Attitude’, Rhythm 1:3, Winter, pp. 6–10. Jackson, H. (1918), ‘John Duncan Fergusson and his Pictures’, Today, p. 108. Jacoby, G. (1912), ‘Henri Bergson, Pragmatism and Schopenhauer’, Monist 22, October, pp. 593–611. 350

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James, William (1910), ‘Bradley or Bergson?’, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 7, January, pp. 29–33. James, W. (1909), ‘Philosophy of Bergson’, Hibbert Journal 7, April, pp. 562–77. James, W. (1891), Principles of Psychology, London: Macmillan. Jourdain, Philip E. B. (1912), ‘Logic, M. Bergson and Mr H.G. Wells’, Hibbert Journal 10, July, pp. 835–45. Kallen, H. M. (1910), ‘James, Bergson and Mr Pitkin’, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 7, June, pp. 353–7. Lalande, A. (1908), ‘Philosophy in France (1907): 1. Philosophy in the Universities’, Philosophical Review 17, May, pp. 291–306. Lankesteer, E. R. (1912), ‘Preface’ to Elliot, H. S. R., Modern Science and the Illusions of Professor Bergson, London: Longmans, Green and co. Lees, F. (1900), ‘Isis Worship is Paris’, The Humanitarian XVI:2, February, New York, n.p. Lewis, Wyndham (2004), ‘A Soldier of Humour’, in The Wild Body, ed. Paul O’Keeffe, London: Penguin, pp. 5–43. Lewis, W. (2004), ‘Beau Séjour’, in The Wild Body, pp. 44–73. Lewis, W. (2004), ‘Bestre’, in The Wild Body, pp. 75–88. Lewis, W. (1914), ‘Enemy of the Stars’, Blast I, pp. 51–86. Lewis, W. (1914), ‘Exploitation of Vulgarity’, Blast I, pp. 145–6. Lewis, W. (1914), ‘Futurism, Magic, and Life’, Blast I, pp. 132–5. Lewis, W. (2004), ‘Inferior Religions’, in The Wild Body, pp. 149–55. Lewis, W. (2004), ‘Les Saltimbanques’, in The Wild Body, pp. Lewis, W. (1963), Letters of Wyndham Lewis, ed. W. K. Rose, London: Methuen. Lewis, W. (1914), ‘Life is the Important Thing!’, Blast I, pp. 129–31. Lewis, W. (1914), ‘Manifesto’ I and II, Blast I, pp. 30–6. Lewis, W. (1914), ‘Our Vortex’, Blast I, pp. 147–9. Lewis, W. (1910), ‘Our Wild Body’, New Age 17:15, 5 May, pp. 8–11. Lewis, W. (2004), ‘The Cornac and his Wife’, in The Wild Body, pp. 89–106. 351

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Wright, Alistair (1998), ‘Arche-textures: Matisse and the End of (Art) History’, October 84, Spring, pp. 44–63. Wunsche, I. (2017), ‘Creative Intuition: The Russian Interpretation of Henri Bergson’s Metaphysics’, Experiment 23:1, October.

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Index Abbaye de Créteuil, 35, 147, 157–8, 306n, 309n

‘aesthetic emotion’, 23, 49, 62, 69, 117, 261n aestheticism (movement), 19, 149

abstraction, 73, 87, 77

Antliff, M., 7, 8, 152, 305n

action, 5, 16, 20, 22, 34, 48, 72, 74, 80, 83,

Arcos, R., 35–6, 266n

93–4, 99, 106, 118, 131, 144, 146, 165,

Aristotelian Society, 13, 37, 51, 260n

168, 175, 209, 211, 219, 231, 241–2, 259n,

art, 23, 29, 31–2, 35, 47–9, 50, 59, 60, 63–6,

280n, 294n, 325n actual, 28, 44, 48, 54, 59, 60, 61, 65, 66, 85,

68, 69, 70, 72, 73–6, 80, 84, 102, 125–7, 129, 133, 141, 142, 159, 161, 162, 169,

86, 92, 116, 150–1, 167, 231, 245, 264n,

171–2, 174–5, 186, 193, 195, 196, 202, 213,

275n, 310n

224, 225, 227, 230, 231, 234, 239, 242, 377

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244, 245, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 261n, 264n, 276n, 280n, 317n, 321n, 328n, 329n, 330n, 334n, 335n art history, 5, 9, 12, 129, 224, 228, 231, 232,

Berenson, B., 49, 51, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 64, 271n, 273n Bergson, H., 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 16, 22, 27, 29, 33, 34–5, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 55, 60, 68, 70,

233, 234, 235, 236, 238, 239, 241, 242,

75, 80, 83, 84, 89, 91, 93, 98, 102, 104,

244, 246, 249, 295n, 329n, 330n, 333n

106, 110, 118, 130–2, 143, 145, 147, 152,

artist, 18, 32, 48–9, 55, 60, 62, 69, 97, 103,

158, 162, 165, 168–9, 170, 171, 173,

116, 123, 133, 144, 150, 159, 169–71, 174–5,

178–9, 182–4, 195, 197, 208, 219, 224,

176, 179, 193, 217, 225, 228, 230, 235,

225, 231, 236, 238, 242, 243, 244,

240, 248, 249–50, 275n, 301n, 318n

247–8, 267n, 273n, 279n, 283n, 295n,

art writing, 2, 5, 12, 234–25, 237, 239, 241, 242, 243, 244, 246, 250, 286n, 329n, 332n, 333n attention, 10, 12, 30, 49, 53, 60, 69, 82, 85, 89, 91, 97, 201, 221, 225, 228, 232, 238, 244, 246

304–5n and art history, 4, 224–6, 229, 231, 234, 236, 237, 242, 251 and artist, 29, 30–1, 32, 264n lectures, 2, 4, 15, 29, 38, 43–4, 69–71, 179, 258n possible and real, 4–5

Balfour, A. J., 18, 32–3, 259n, 264n, 265n, 267n Bandeaux d’Or, Les, 11, 305n, 306n becoming, 30, 90, 92, 101, 130, 227, 228, 234, 237, 238, 241, 249, 330n being, 5, 149, 150, 152, 158, 207, 234, 236, 285n Bell, C., 39, 49, 56, 76, 102, 117, 260n, 271n, 294n Bell, V., 10, 51, 83, 87, 96, 280n Studland Beach, 95–9

An Introduction to Metaphysics, 58, 61, 65, 119, 179, 210, 213, 214, 216–17, 223, 294n Creative Evolution, 3, 11, 26, 30, 35, 37, 39, 46, 49, 53, 62, 69, 84, 90, 92–3, 130–1, 147, 149, 152, 154, 156, 177, 178, 179, 181, 182, 186, 192, 193–4, 196, 209, 212, 216, 227, 240, 293n ‘Dreams’, 110–14, 245n Laughter, 11, 158, 177, 178, 180, 195, 200–2, 206–7, 219, 220, 221, 223

378

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‘Life and Consciousness’, 31, 38, 177, 264n, 274n, 316n, 318n. Matter and Memory, 3, 9, 10, 30, 34, 38, 39, 41, 59, 61, 68, 93–4, 97, 100–1, 103, 112, 115, 118, 123, 131, 179, 208, 228 ‘The perception of change’, 29–31, 48, 54, 60 Time and Free Will, 11, 20, 21, 25–6, 30,

Carr, H. Wildon, 13–14, 34, 37–8, 267n Carter, H., 171–2, 313n Cézanne, P., 7, 77, 80, 161, 330n change, 18, 21, 31, 39, 46, 54, 84, 93, 97, 144, 149–50, 185, 196, 197, 223, 232, 238, 239, 250, 302n, 332n, 334n Christianity, 34, 75, 121, 162–165, 175, 218, 280n, 281n, 309n

38, 40, 49, 52, 54, 65, 69, 154, 158, 162,

cinema, 12, 82, 86, 90–1, 189

168, 179, 195–6, 208, 210, 294n

civilisation, 16, 19, 20, 66, 80, 81, 156–8, 159,

Bergson, M., 10, 103–6, 116, 122–6, 129–30, 132, 133, 137, 139, 140–1, 142, 143, 148–9, 172, 289n, 292n, 300n ‘Skrying and Projection’, 106, 109, 123 biology, 8, 47, 156, 167, 177, 182, 195, 247–8, 250 Bloomsbury Group, 14–15, 33, 56, 58, 63, 101, 219, 228, 276n, 288n Blast I (journal), 3, 19, 172–3, 207, 216, 219, 222, 223 body, 1, 4, 44, 106, 108, 109, 115, 228, 242, 275n, 290n, 294n, 327n Byzantine, 50, 67, 76–80, 280n, 281n

161, 175, 176–7, 181, 186, 192, 199, 221, 227, 234, 250, 317n, 318n, 328n Clark. T. J., 12, 238, 243, 246, 248, 250, 329n consciousness, 5, 10, 12, 17, 29, 32, 55, 59, 60, 68, 98, 103, 106, 107–9, 130–2, 143, 149, 152–3, 165, 177, 210–11, 214, 225, 228, 230, 235, 236, 240, 245, 274n, 294n, 296n collective consciousness, 105, 112, 114, 115–16, 150–1, 154, 213, 219, 274n, 293n stream of, 10, 23–4, 25, 26, 28, 153, 227, 236, 263n Corbett, D. P., 6, 284n

Cambridge Society of Apostles, 9, 15, 17, 18, 24, 28, 73, 259n Cambridge Society of Heretics, 34– 6, 266n Carco, F., 170

Costelloe, Karin, 15, 50–6, 65, 84, 265n, 267n creation, 36, 58, 66, 75, 81, 84, 97, 101, 111, 123, 129–31, 152, 164, 165, 166, 169, 177, 379

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178, 193, 200, 206, 210, 224, 228, 231,

élan vital, 3, 11, 22, 36, 119, 130, 132, 162, 165,

235, 236, 237, 238, 240–2, 243, 245, 251,

166–7, 169, 171, 180–1, 186, 190, 227,

298n, 335n

267n, 270n, 311n

Cronan, T., 8

embodiment, 1, 18, 58, 62–3, 82 empathy, 58–9, 64, 81, 207, 224, 225

dance, 78, 123, 124–6, 146, 156, 162, 172, 174, 206, 282n, 308n Darwin, C., 34, 167, 181, 282n, 305n

ethics, 18, 246, 250, 279n Evergreen (journal), 306n, 310n, 311n evolution, 28, 130–1, 156–7, 158, 159, 163,

degeneration, 177, 211, 316n, 320n

164–5, 166, 167, 171, 177, 179, 180–1, 182,

Deleuze, G., 5, 59, 82, 88–9, 91, 92, 97, 99,

184–6, 188, 193–4, 196, 197, 200, 210,

101–2, 238, 247, 264n, 284n Derème, T., 157–8, 305–6n Dickinson, G.L., 19, 20–2, 67, 87, 261n, 262n Didi-Huberman, G., 12, 238, 239, 241, 244,

211, 214, 215, 222–3, 227, 228, 235–6, 247–8, 249, 304n, 317n experience, 1, 12, 59, 112–13, 115, 120, 132, 151, 174, 188, 212, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 230, 232, 237, 242, 245

248 diffractive, 13, 17, 46, 53, 234 Dolmetsch, A., 300n dream, 105, 110–14, 115, 118, 120, 125, 208, 213, 218, 219, 246, 285n, 292n, 324n

Farr, Florence, 10, 112, 142, 296n, 298n, 300n Fergusson, J. D., 3, 11, 147–8, 150, 153, 154–6, 164, 169, 174, 301n, 309n, 310n

duration, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 11, 12, 17, 20, 25, 27,

Les Eus, 154–6, 162, 313n

31, 39, 52, 53, 59, 60, 85, 119, 123, 147,

Rhythm, 156, 164–5, 313n

148–9, 151, 152, 154, 158, 159, 162, 168,

The Persian Scarf, 150–1

197, 208, 210, 212, 213, 214, 227, 228,

Focillon, H., 9, 248, 256n, 334n

232, 236–7, 239, 243, 262n, 274n, 320n,

freedom, 20–2, 37, 65, 66, 69, 78, 96, 97,

331n

130–1, 165, 168, 174–5, 258n, 320n Fry, R., 1, 3, 9, 13, 18, 22, 24–5, 49, 56, 57, 58,

Egoist, The (journal), 171–2

59, 60, 61–6, 67–8, 73, 75, 76, 80, 82,

380

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83, 85, 86, 87, 89, 91, 96, 98, 101, 117,

history, 33, 215, 224–5, 226, 227, 228, 231,

118, 161, 163, 234, 275n, 277n, 278n,

232, 233, 234, 235–8, 242, 244, 245, 247,

281n, 288n

248, 250, 328n

‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, 3, 10, 61–4, 87, 96 ‘significant form’, 98, 275n, 294n

Horniman, A., 133, 137, 142, 297n Hulme, T. E., 6, 15, 32, 39, 40–5, 49–50, 51–2, 173, 179, 194, 200, 264n, 265n,

Forster, E. M., 22–3, 261–2n

267n, 268n, 269n, 270n. 271n, 279n,

Freud, S., 104, 178, 185, 238, 276n, 317n

310n, 318n ‘Bergson’s Theory of Art’, 48–9

Gardner, I. S., 67, 277n, 330n Gaudier-Brzeska, H., 49, 172–4, 177 Gauguin, P., 7, 77, 160–1, 163, 308n, 321n Geddes, P., 35, 156, 158, 167, 258n, 265n, 280n, 304–5n, 310n, 311n

‘Humanism and the Religious Attitude’, 195, 319n ‘The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds’, 45–7, 258n Huxley, T. H., 17, 31, 34, 304n

Golden Dawn, 10, 105, 106, 108, 112, 114,115, 116, 117–23, 125, 130–1, 132, 137, 139, 141, 143, 152, 292n, 301n, 307n

image, 4, 10, 12, 59, 60, 63, 81, 93, 93–4, 97, 98, 103, 112, 115, 118, 122–3, 128, 142, 143,

Goodyear, F., 157, 158–60, 162, 306–7n, 308n

202, 209, 232–3, 235, 237, 242, 245,

Grant, D., 10, 73. 83–4, 282n, 302n

246–50, 275n, 285n, 290n, 295n, 296n,

Abstract Kinetic Scroll, 81–2, 85–9, 284n

324n, 333n

Bathing, 76–81, 280n

imagination, 14, 57, 62, 66, 97, 103, 115–16,

Head of Eve, 81, 279n

123, 142, 143, 244, 246, 250, 324n, 329n

Haraway, D., 14, 249, 250

immanence, 4, 5, 10, 12, 31, 60, 63, 85, 93,

Harrison, J., 34–6, 266n

96, 99, 106, 130, 147, 150, 166, 168, 214,

Hegel, G. W. F., 28, 33, 43, 231, 239, 269n,

228, 229, 233, 234, 236, 237, 239, 241,

305n, 330n Heraclitus, 27, 28

242, 243, 246, 247, 249, 264n, 331n Independent Review, The, 9, 15, 19–22, 23 381

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individual, 14, 26, 30, 52, 114, 129, 136, 158,

Figure Holding a Flower, 182–3

159, 196–7, 202, 206, 210, 213, 216–18,

Kermesse, 205–7

247, 249 293n, 298n, 319n

Timon of Athens, 186–92, 318n

insect, 193, 194, 199, 201, 318n, 319n, 321n

The Crowd, 197–200

intellect, 10, 20, 22, 27, 32, 38, 72, 93, 192,

Two Mechanics, 212–13

219, 233, 245, 324n, 325n intuition, 2, 3, 9, 10, 11, 14, 16, 17, 20, 21, 24,

Wild Body, The, 11, 180, 181, 192, 200–7, 209–10, 217, 221, 222, 315n

26, 27, 29, 31–2, 38, 42, 45, 52, 58, 59,

life see vitalism

61, 63, 64, 72, 80, 93, 98, 99, 102, 103,

Lodge, O., 32, 33

105, 109, 113, 115, 118, 119, 120, 123, 132,

logic, 10, 16, 19, 20, 29, 39, 40, 42, 53, 63, 65,

143, 147, 152, 161, 162, 168, 169, 170, 171,

225, 233, 276n, 288n

174–5, 179, 188, 214–5, 216, 225, 228, 230, 231, 232, 233, 236, 240, 243, 245–6,

MacCarthy, D., 19, 65, 283n

254n, 258n, 288n, 320n, 325n, 331n

MacGregor Mathers, Moina, see Bergson, M.

James, W., 21, 22, 23, 34, 42, 64, 145, 266n, 267n. 272n

MacGregor Mathers, S., 105, 115, 121, 124–5, 127, 139, 141, 142, 143, 296n, 297n McTaggert, J. E., 3, 9, 14, 18, 20, 28, 30, 35,

Keynes, J. M., 17, 23, 35 Kropotikin, P., 158

52, 67 ‘Mysticism’, 18 ‘The Unreality of Time’, 24–7, 28, 262n

Langer, S. K., 13, 14, 233, 257n

Mansfield, K., 39

Lapoujade, D., 119, 130, 208, 213, 293n, 296n,

Matisse, H., 58, 65, 77, 78, 84, 152–3, 154,

298n, 319n Lewis, P. W., 3, 11, 84, 172, 174, 176–7, 178–200, 228, 302n Enemy of the Stars, 181, 208–19, 221, 224, 310n, 323n

234, 254n matter, 37, 39, 52, 59, 61, 72, 85, 90–2, 97, 101, 106, 116, 118, 121, 130, 177, 241, 246, 251, 284n, 294n Maupassant, G., 106–10, 291n

382

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mechanical self, 11, 180–1, 201, 207, 211, 212, 222 mechanism, 16, 17, 47, 52, 82, 85, 105, 110, 156–7, 201, 204, 213, 217, 222, 226, 309n, 316n, 319n

multi-sensory, 2, 3, 27, 106, 129, 294n Murry, J. Middleton, 11, 147–8, 149–50, 157, 171, 175, 225, 227, 229, 302n, 307n mysticism, 14, 18, 19, 20, 22, 27, 63, 66, 106, 110, 121, 165, 226, 233, 245, 296n, 298n

memory, 4, 10, 34, 58, 59, 93–6, 97, 99, 100, 102, 105, 111, 113, 114, 115, 121, 132, 143, 227,

New Age, The (journal), 39, 41, 47, 146, 171

236, 238, 239, 246, 286n, 288n, 292n

Nietzsche, F., 19, 21, 28, 165, 206, 273n,

Merlau-Ponty, M., 225, 235, 275n

274n

method, 21, 27, 29–32, 34, 37–8, 42, 44, 49, 58, 59, 64, 72, 82, 91, 98, 104, 152, 169,

Object (/ivity), 28, 59, 61, 63, 100–1, 176,

179, 206, 201, 221, 224–5, 228, 233, 237,

199, 201, 204, 210, 224, 233, 235, 237,

238, 240, 242, 243, 245, 246, 249, 251,

238, 239–40, 241, 242, 329n

292n, 295n, 325n Minkowski, E., 207–8, 323n, 326n Mitchell, W. J. T., 12, 101, 238, 245, 246, 248, 249, 287n Moore, G.E., 14, 16, 17, 20, 23, 46, 51, 264n

occult, 104, 108, 119, 125, 127, 131, 132, 140, 142, 291n, 297n Offor, Beatrice, 10, 133, 137–40, 300n Ó Maoilearca, J., 4, 8, 72–3, 106, 116, 118, 142, 223, 226, 290n

‘Good’, 16, 18, 23, 28, 30

Orage, A. R., 19

‘Organic Unity’, 16–17, 18, 31

opposition, strategies, 11, 50, 178, 216, 315n

Principia Ethica, 23, 261n moral, 19, 22, 221, 222, 223, 308n movement, 18, 39, 53,62, 66, 69, 81, 84, 85,

painting, 30, 55, 64, 82, 99, 101, 102, 114, 133, 148, 150–1, 158, 200, 247, 329n

86, 90–1, 92, 93, 115, 119, 129, 131, 149,

Panofsky, E., 238, 239–40

153, 162, 169, 175, 184, 213, 232, 233, 240,

parasite, 213, 214, 219, 247, 248, 249, 316n,

242, 243, 275n, 296n, 332n, 334n multiplicity, 12, 45, 52, 58, 83, 93, 102, 154, 158, 196, 213, 216–17, 247

326n perception, 2, 3, 4, 10, 12, 21, 28, 29–30, 39, 49, 53, 55, 58, 59, 60–2, 65, 66, 68, 76, 383

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81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 93–4, 101, 102, 104, 106, 107–8, 109, 112, 114–15, 117–18, 123,

religion, 21, 35, 36, 37, 47, 73–6, 121, 122, 125, 162, 163, 167–8, 171, 181, 280n

143, 153, 178, 195, 214, 223, 224, 225,

representation, 58, 59, 60, 65, 68, 85, 100–1,

228, 230–231, 232, 234, 235, 237, 242,

108, 130, 150, 154, 194, 228, 235, 236,

243, 245, 246, 249, 274n, 288n, 328n

241, 246, 283n, 286n, 287n, 311n

plural, 14, 93–4, 98, 100, 106, 176, 225, 228, 236, 249, 310n Post Impressionism, 64, 65–6, 73, 76–7, 86, 96, 98, 101–2, 148, 159, 161, 225, 294n pragmatism, 18, 20, 21, 22, 28, 31

Rice, A. E., 146, 151, 170, 312n Riegl, A., 12, 231, 233, 234, 235, 242, 250 rhythm, 62, 77, 85, 89, 92, 128, 148–50, 154, 162, 163, 169, 171, 174–5, 236 Rhythm (journal), 3, 11, 19, 146, 147, 153,

Prichard, M.S., 66–73, 75, 80, 163, 234,

157–158, 159, 160, 162, 165, 166, 169,

265n, 277n, 278n, 280n, 330n

170–2, 175, 228, 266n, 306n, 308n,

process, 58, 59, 62, 64, 80, 81, 83, 85, 96,

309–310n, 311n, 312n

97, 101, 109, 119, 130–1, 142, 153, 163, 168,

Romains, J., 35, 158, 170, 266n, 306n

175, 213, 231, 232, 233, 234, 241, 242,

Rosenbaumn, S. P., 14–15, 262n

246, 286n, 287n, 311n, 332n

Rothenstein, W., 68, 136

psychiatry, 35, 104, 110 psychic, 104, 105, 106, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 156, 208 psychology, 34, 62, 96, 98, 100, 104, 109, 113,

Russell, B., 3, 9, 14, 16, 18, 20, 21, 30, 35, 37, 38, 50–1, 53, 54, 55, 63–4, 65, 194, 227, 259n, 261n, 267n, 268n, 271n, 276n ‘Mysticism and Logic’, 25, 27–8, 263n, 311n

114, 132, 151, 159, 160, 209, 214, 224, 225, 232, 246, 274n, 276n

Sadlier, M., 148, 151, 160–1, 163, 308n Schiller, F. C. S., 20, 21, 34, 114, 260n, 265n,

Quest Society, 50

267n, 292n Secularism, 14

rationalism, see reason reason, 10, 14, 16, 18, 22, 23, 31, 34, 40, 63, 72, 109, 245

self, 11, 12, 14, 22, 26, 28, 52, 58, 69, 80, 100, 104, 105, 106, 108, 119, 129, 132, 142, 148–9, 150, 153, 159,178, 181,196, 209–11,

384

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213, 214, 216–18, 219, 243, 249, 298n,

symbiosis, 222, 249, 250

323n, 326n

Symbolism (art movement), 110, 168–9, 170,

sensation, 2, 3, 4, 10, 59, 62, 65, 66, 69, 80,

306n

81, 86, 87, 92, 98, 99, 103, 106, 107–8,

sympathy, 17, 58, 61, 231, 233, 240, 243, 331n

118–19, 168, 196, 200, 219, 233–4, 245,

synthesis, 14, 52, 65, 238, 277n, 330n

274n, 275n, 290n

synthetism, 170, 312n

Shaw, G. B., 36–7, 267n, 298n Sidgwick, A., 20, 33, 260n

tattva, 117, 119–20, 121

sight, 1, 12, 292n

temporal painting, 12, 81, 82, 88–9, 150,

Slade School of Art, 104, 133–4, 141 Society for Psychical Research, 33–5, 112, 113, 114, 132, 141, 265n, 291n sound, 12, 69, 82, 92, 106, 107, 128, 242 space, 20, 36, 38, 68, 69, 72, 86, 91, 99, 150,

224, 242, 246 Tendances Nouvelles, Les, 11, 147, 169–70, 312n Thelema, 157, 163, 165, 166, 174, 305n, 306n, 308n

158, 182, 186, 188, 196, 197–200, 208,

Thomson, J. A., 156–8

210, 212, 213, 215, 216, 243, 315n, 320n

Tickner, L., 5, 6, 97, 98, 133, 206, 255n, 288n

Spencer, H., 28, 33

time, 17, 21, 23–6, 28, 46, 52, 59, 81, 99, 150,

Spengler, O., 248, 328n

188, 196–7, 208, 216, 221, 232, 233, 236,

Spirit( /-ualism), 35, 73, 74–5, 76, 81, 104,

237, 238, 242, 243, 250, 263n, 287n,

106, 110, 114, 115, 116–17, 119, 121–2, 126,

327n, 330n

129–31, 137, 141, 150, 163, 164, 165, 167–8,

Tonks, H., 133, 136

172, 174, 226, 239, 240, 292n, 200n, 309n

touch, 12, 55, 57, 58, 69, 234, 243

Stevenson, R. L., 110, 160

Toynbee, A., 227, 236, 328n

Stirner, M., 218, 219, 220, 326n Stout, G. F., 3, 35

Unanimism, 35–6, 158, 170, 266n

Strachey, L., 14, 17, 22, 51

Underhill, E., 10, 121–2, 123, 129, 295n

subjectivity, 1, 2, 10, 12, 25–6, 28, 52, 96,

utopia, 11, 80, 147, 156, 157, 158, 163, 304n,

100–1, 132, 224, 231, 288n, 301n, 330n

306n 385

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van der Tuin, I., 14

Ward, J., 52, 272n

violence, 22, 181, 206, 215, 231, 309n, 325n,

Warburg, A., 12, 231–3, 234, 235, 237, 242–3,

329n virtual, 4, 59, 60, 61, 83, 94, 100, 106, 245, 264n vitalism, 17, 20, 21, 25, 28, 31, 46, 47, 65–6,

244, 250, 295n Waterlow, S., 39–40 Watts, G. F., 34 Wells, H. G., 35

72, 73, 75–6, 101, 119, 129–31, 132, 143,

Wöfflin, H., 231, 238

147, 151, 153, 156, 164, 167, 169, 171–2,

Woolf, V., 51, 57, 61, 64, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101,

173, 174, 175, 186, 195, 196, 202, 209, 222, 223, 226, 227, 233, 234, 237, 238,

227, 276n, 287n, 288n Worringer, W., 49

242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 249–51, 293n, 298n, 319n, 328n, 334n, 335n vorticism, 3, 9, 11, 174, 175–6, 179, 181, 186, 190, 196, 219, 222, 226, 310n, 313n, 318n

Yeats, W. B., 105, 114, 115, 120–1, 124–5, 129, 141, 152, 289n, 292n, 295n, 297n ‘Magic’, 115–16, 301n

386

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