- 1 Call for papers for the 37th International D.H. Lawrence Conference Acoustic awareness in D.H. Lawr (...)
1Whilst my title is partially taken from a favourite phrase of the musician Hans von Bülow (1830-1894), my addition, “and art,” points to the particular area of rhythm that I want to explore. Importantly, rhythm has an intrinsic connection to sound, as is highlighted by this conference’s statement that “sounds deploy themselves in space where untouchable and invisible soundwaves vibrate.”1 This also reminds us of the crucial link between sound and rhythmical movement, which is evident in dance or in the sight and sound of a wave breaking on the shore. We may also think of Ernest Chladni’s famous experiment in 1787 when he showed that grains of sand move in response to sound—Lawrence’s oft-quoted reference to this extending the idea of rhythm to the behaviour of his characters in his novels:
Again I say, don’t look for the development of the novel to follow the lines of certain characters: the characters fall into the form of some other rhythmic form, like when one draws a fiddle-bow across a fine tray delicately sanded, the sand takes lines unknown. (2L 184)
2Nevertheless, all this only gives a hint of the expansive nature of rhythm, which is something that is hard to define, particularly in relation to art where the difficulty was seen by some as a weakness and attracted criticism. However, as Laura Marcus observes in her remarkable book on rhythm, the poet and art scholar Laurence Binyon, who was associated with Roger Fry and on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group, whilst acknowledging the elusive nature of rhythm, robustly defended its value. In Binyon’s book about Chinese and Japanese art, Flight of the Dragon (1911), he questions, “But what is rhythm?” and reveals, “No-one seems to know precisely, though we can often recognise what we cannot define” (15). He then goes on to discuss rhythm acting on “material things” and, in what can be seen as a parallel to Wassily Kandinsky’s thinking in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, highlights the crucial relevance of rhythm in visual art:
A study of the most rudimentary abstract design will show that the units of line or mass are in reality energies capable of acting on each other; and, if we discover a way to put these energies into rhythmical relation, the design at once becomes animated, our imagination enters into it; our minds are also brought into rhythmical relation with the design, which has become charged with the capability of movement and of life […]. When the rhythm is found we feel that we are put into touch with life, not only our own life, but the life of the whole world. It is as if we moved to a music that set the stars in motion […]. Whatever rhythm is, it is something intimately connected with life, perhaps the secret of life and its most perfect expression. (18-19 qtd. in Marcus 205)
3Marcus also records that Binyon considered that in ancient China “Rhythm is recognised as the vital essence of art,” and he identifies a similar position in Greece, the home of the “great original art tradition of Europe” (66, 49 qtd. in Marcus 204).
4Marcus’s book on rhythm is helpful in exploring this vast topic as it meticulously traces the history of interest in rhythm and, importantly, its relevance to modernist thinking. In explaining how rhythm became firmly associated with the modern movement, Marcus points out that in Frances Spalding’s discussion of Roger Fry’s use of the term “rhythm denoted modernity at this time” (167). This association is also reiterated in the comments of Lawrence’s sometimes friend, John Middleton Murry, who in his 1935 autobiography notes “rhythm was the distinctive element in all the arts, and the real purpose of ‘this modern movement’ […] was to re-assert the pre-eminence of rhythm” (156).
5These ideas provided the basis for the magazine Rhythm that Murry co-founded with Michael Sadleir in 1911 and Marcus points out that “this assertion is developed by Faith Binckes in her illuminating study of Rhythm magazine.” Marcus recognises how the establishment of Rhythm “followed on from the highly influential lectures that Henri Bergson gave in Britain, as well as the publication of the English translations of the texts through which his work is best known” (131-133). It offers helpful insights into the importance of rhythm to modernist art. Hence this essay will look at some aspects of Rhythm relevant to the connection Marcus identifies between this magazine and modernist art, and also consider some of Lawrence’s own paintings and works by other artists that evidence this interest in rhythm.
6It is important to appreciate that, in the early decades of the twentieth-century, interest in rhythm became something of a cult in Europe. This was, in a large part, due to Bergson’s work and, in particular, to his book Creative Evolution, which was translated into English in 1911. Therefore, the editors of Lawrence’s letters are mistaken when they state that only two English translations of Bergson’s work, Laughter (1911) and The Philosophy of Change (1912), were available to Lawrence in April 1913 when, in a letter, he mentions a Bergson book Arthur MacLeod had sent him to read.
- 2 Marcus recognises that Bergson’s “lectures in Britain, delivered to unprecedented large and appreci (...)
7Between 1911 and 1914, Bergson gave a large number of phenomenally successful lectures in Oxford, London, Birmingham and Edinburgh.2 He also lectured in Bologna in Italy and in several cities in the United States of America. In these lectures he discussed Creative Evolution and ideas of rhythm, which generated enormous popularity for this book amongst both academics and the general public (remarkably, his publisher issued twenty-one editions of this book between 1907 and 1918). In light of all this, it may even seem very probable that Creative Evolution was the Bergson book MacLeod sent Lawrence in 1913.
8Nevertheless, Lawrence’s response to the Bergson book is fairly damning: “The Bergson book was very dull. Bergson bores me. He feels a bit thin” (1L 544). But it is easy to read too much into this; Lawrence is characteristically contradictory in his opinions. For example, he disliked the writing of Giovanni Verga describing it in 1916 as “not at all good” (3L 53). Until he changed his mind. When Lawrence recognised Verga’s qualities, he worked on translations of several of his books and was responsible for a resurgence of interest in this hitherto neglected Italian writer.
- 3 Marcus notes Lawrence read Herbert Spencer’s First Principles as a young man and depicts Paul Morel (...)
9Furthermore, circumstantial evidence indicates otherwise. As Marcus explores, many of Lawrence’s writings evidence his keen—and long standing—interest in ideas of rhythm. Highlighting, perhaps, the most obvious example of this in Lawrence’s 1926 novel The Plumed Serpent where he gives a memorable description of “two drums beating against one another with the peculiar savage rhythm which at first seems no rhythm […]” (69), Marcus also draws attention to evidence of Lawrence’s interest in rhythm in his depiction of the Pueblo dancing in that novel, where she detects that “the rhythmic focus is […] complex and significant” (307). Again, Marcus considers that ‘“Rhythm’ is a concept central to The Rainbow, as structure, theme and style” (265). She also notes the fact that “Lawrence does not refer directly to [Herbert] Spencer’s chapter on ‘The Rhythm of Motion’ in First Principles, with its claim that ‘all motion is rhythmical’” (268).3 Nevertheless, she observes “There are, however, close links between Spencer’s treatise and The Rainbow in which Lawrence writes […] of the ceaseless teeming of heaven and earth”:
They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seed to begetting, and falling back, leaves the young-born on the earth …The young corn waved and was silken, and the lustre slid upon the limbs of the men who saw it. (R 9-10)
10In this section of her book, Marcus also notices the rhythm of Women in Love where, in the foreword (unpublished in his lifetime), Lawrence speaks of the “passionate struggle into conscious being [original emphasis] which informed the novel,” Lawrence observing that this work attracted criticism for its “continual, slightly modified repetition” style of writing, which he claimed was “natural to the author” (WL 486 qtd. in Marcus 267). Marcus also discusses the well-known scene in the chapter “Water Party” where Gudrun performs rhythmical Dalcroze movements as she dances towards the Highland cattle. Marcus illuminates other examples of rhythm in Studies of Classic American Literature, Lawrence’s unfinished play Altitude, St Mawr, “The Princess” and The Woman Who Rode Away. Therefore, it seems evident that, despite Lawrence’s comments about Bergson’s book, he did have a keen interest in ideas of rhythm and even claimed they were “natural” to him.
- 4 With Frieda, David Garnett and also E. M. Forster (who made his excuses and left). See David Garnet (...)
11We also know that Lawrence was passionate about art. Although we may recall the infamous incident in January 1915 when Lawrence visited Duncan Grant’s studio and was excruciatingly critical of his more abstract art,4 this unfortunate episode actually underlines the depth of Lawrence’s feelings about art. Moreover, perhaps surprisingly, in view of Lawrence’s rebuttal of Grant’s abstract art, it can be suggested that, in some of his paintings, Lawrence actually has more in common with the abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky than might at first be thought, in terms of Bergsonian intuition, rhythm and expression; the influential art critic Herbert Read recognising Lawrence as “an expressionist, an extreme example of that type of artist who seeks a direct correspondence between feeling and representation” (63).
12In thinking about Lawrence’s art, it is helpful to first briefly look at Fauvism, an influential art movement in France, led by Henri Matisse and André Derain. This flourished, particularly in Paris, between 1905 and 1908 and is often distinguished by wild brush strokes and bold colours—it also has strong connections to rhythm and, significantly, to intuition.
13In identifying the celebration of rhythm as “the essence of modernity,” Marcus points out how this “could also entail looking for its roots in the remote past” (157). This can also be seen in an essay by Angela Smith, in a passage that recalls the polarity Lawrence indicates between intuition and intellect, and that brings to mind Lawrence’s depiction of an African carving in Women in Love. Smith describes how Derain showed Matisse a Fang mask from the Congo, which he had purchased and found “a source of inspiration,” commenting that:
The description of Africans as “uncomplex” and “uncultured” appears today to damn them with patronising praise but Derain’s intention is clearly to celebrate primitivism as the binary opposite of civilisation, in admiration of its supposed authenticity and responsiveness to intuition rather than intellect. (9)
14This places civilisation in opposition to the modern movement that the Fauvists promoted, which relies on intuition seen as crucial to the understanding of the hard-to-define quality of rhythm. Antliff points out that “Intuition […] gives access to what Bergson termed “the logic of the imagination that is not reason” whose laws “hold the same relation to imagination that logic does to thought” (101). Thus Antliff, in discussing an essay by Henri Le Fauconnier which “underscores the role of intuition in artistic expression,” argues that by embracing intuition artists were able to “reject past artistic conventions and art forms that were based on logical systemisation of emotion” (112). In addition, considering that “Only in Creative Evolution does the artists’ manner of perceiving and acting assure their privileged participation in the creative activity of the universe” (84), Antliff puts forward the idea that “critics can only grasp a work’s qualitative uniqueness, it’s charm or power, if they rely on intuition” (113).
15In the first edition of Rhythm, Michael Sadleir wrote the first of his many articles for this publication, “Fauvism and a Fauve,” which emphasises the crucial interpenetration between Fauvism and rhythm, stating that in Fauvist art he found:
one fundamental desire with which all start—the desire for rhythm. Be it of line and colour, be it simple or intricate, in every true product of Fauvism it will be present […]. The work must be strong, must be alive, and must be rhythmical. (Marcus 163)
16Antliff also notes that “Fauvists subscribed to a theory of intuitive self-expression and to the direct transposition of emotional reactions” (79).
- 5 Dismorr later becoming an important figure in the Vorticist movement founded by Percy Wyndham Lewis
17Hence, we perhaps come to see why Bergson’s ideas of rhythm became fundamental to the thinking, and the resultant work, of a group of international artists, including Anne Estelle Rice, S.J. Peploe, Margueritte Thompson, Benoit Dunoyer de Segonzac and Jessica Dismorr,5 who gathered in Paris around the Scottish artist J.D. Fergusson, a largely self-taught artist who first visited the city in the late 1890s before settling there in 1907. It was the café society of Montparnasse which drew Fergusson back and, in her essay on his paintings, Elizabeth Cumming considers that “The expression of feeling through colour and composition, attributing to the objects represented his own emotions, was the mark of a Fauve painter” (6). Antliff further notes that “After 1909 Fergusson’s attempts to represent his vision […] became part of a more complex theory concerning the function of rhythm in Fauvism” (79). Therefore, this group of artists in Paris led by Fergusson became known as the Rhythmic Fauvists.
- 6 Lawrence subscribed to this magazine in 1908-1909 (John Worthen, The Early Years, 210), reading and (...)
- 7 Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde, Princeton: Princet (...)
- 8 The New Age was a weekly magazine edited by A.R. Orage to which Lawrence subscribed in 1908-1909.
- 9 Antliff, 69. Whilst this overlooks the important role of Michael Sadleir in this enterprise, it doe (...)
18Antliff notes that in a contemporary magazine, The New Age,6 Huntly Carter talked of how this group “extract the fundamental design” from a “‘central object of vision’ by means of Bergsonian intuition” (80). In discussing the strong influence of Bergson’s ideas on these artists, Antliff observes that “These Rhythmic Fauvists had all the trappings of an art movement; public exhibitions, a group identity and a number of critics willing to advance their cause in a literary journal. They embraced Bergson.”7 Furthermore, Antliff points to the significance of magazines in spreading ideas of Bergson and rhythm in England, noting that these artists’ “existence as a movement was not only acknowledged by Carter in The New Age,8 but advanced by the artists themselves in […] Rhythm (1911-1913), which was founded by Fergusson and Murry for that very purpose.”9
- 10 Bergson’s book Creative Evolution was published in France in 1907. Murry’s fellow undergraduates Mi (...)
- 11 Fergusson had many contacts in Paris which enabled him to secure contributions to Rhythm from many (...)
19However, in reading Murry’s account of the founding of Rhythm, it becomes abundantly clear that Murry had little idea of what rhythm was. It was some of Murry’s fellow undergraduates at Oxford University—including Sadleir—who introduced Murry to Bergson’s ideas. One of these, Philip Landon, then persuaded Murry to go to Paris in the 1910 winter recess to attend Bergson’s lectures and read his book Creative Evolution.10 In Murry’s biography he tells us that he was in the Café d’Harcourt in Montparnasse when he began expounding “Bergson’s distinction between Time and Duration” and briefly met Fergusson who believed his paintings were “somehow related to Bergson’s philosophy” (135). The following year, Murry returned with Sadleir, having the explicit plan of appointing Fergusson as the Arts Editor of the magazine they intended to found and name Rhythm.11 In a passage that reveals Murry’s naivety, and also suggests his homosocial attraction to Fergusson, Murry later reflected in his autobiography:
I was baffled by F[ergusson]’s attempt to make rhythm all-inclusive, […] it was at this point that my function in life began to be revealed. I was appointed to be the man who should carry the new doctrine of rhythm into literature. Nor did I demur; I was only too pleased to have a function that linked me with F[ergusson]. It was a trivial detail that I had no notion at all of what that function could really be. […] It was very evident to me that F[ergusson]’s own life had rhythm; and equally evident to me that my own had none. (156)
20Marcus points out that Murry’s autobiography, which contains this retrospective account of the founding of Rhythm, suffers from two serious omissions; I suggest both of these exclusions are of particular significance when looking at this publication’s relationship to art. The first is that Murry does not make any mention of Sadleir’s significant role in this enterprise, which acts to conceal the importance of Sadleir’s strong connection to avant-garde art, which was encouraged by his father. They both avidly collected modern art and were the first collectors in Britain of the work of Wassily Kandinsky—Sadleir purchasing four woodcuts by Kandinsky from the 1911 Allied Artists Exhibition and subsequently writing to Kandinsky asking for permission to reproduce one of them in Rhythm. This led to their friendship and to Kandinsky’s ideas about rhythm—and about colour as “vibrations of the soul”—being published in Rhythm magazine years before his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art was translated into English by Sadleir in 1914.
21Kandinsky was a leader in Expressionist art and pursued the ideas he explained in his book through his work; he became fascinated by the idea that the placement of forms and the merging of colours in his work could create vibrations—or rhythms—that could affect the soul of his viewer. In his book Kandinsky describes this getting into an emotional correspondence with a work of art, “Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another to cause vibrations in the soul” (25). Kandinsky’s book is now recognised as “a ground-breaking theoretical publication and acknowledged as one of the most influential art texts of the first decades of the Twentieth Century” (Tate online). His most vibratory—or rhythmical—composition is generally thought to be his 1914 work Painting with Red Spot.
22The second omission that Marcus detects in Murry’s account is that there is not “any substantial discussion of Fergusson’s art” (158). Which seems remiss as Fergusson provided the striking artwork for Rhythm’s cover. Antliff considers that:
[the] woman in Rhythm takes the form of a benign earth goddess, a feminine principle of fecundity more conducive to the world view found in Creative Evolution. To symbolise woman’s proximity to a “natural” condition, Fergusson conflates her role as a child bearer with nature’s fecundity by picturing her as the bearer of nature’s fruit, the apple. (86)
- 12 On the grounds that “The gendered dimensions of the images and the sexual politics underlying them” (...)
23Marcus challenges such gendered readings,12 but Cumming points out that Rhythm is also “an academic work” and makes the salient point that although the subject was “A summer goddess of nature,” to Fergusson she was “the Bergsonian impulse of life” (9).
24Nonetheless, Marcus is more complimentary about Fergusson’s 1910 painting Les Eus which she chose for the dustjacket of her book. In her discussion of this painting, she sees it as echoing the incomplete circle of dancers in Henri Matisse’s 1910 work La Danse and notes the point that Fergusson was making by adding two male figures to the “living line”; Marcus acknowledges this gives an “erotic twist” to the “Apollonian ‘purity’ of the Greek frieze represented in Dalcrozian photographic images,” which she reproduces from The Eurhythmics of Jacques-Dalcroze, a 1912 book written by Dalcroze in collaboration with Sadleir who provided the introduction. Marcus also points out the inference in the name in that the “eu” prefix was often used to denote things perceived to be good, so providing an alternative to utopia (“no-place”); the name “eutopia” being “most frequently translated as ‘the good place’, connoting not only ‘Greekness’ but harmony and ethical life” (181-184).
25Cumming regards Les Eus as the most ambitious of all Fergusson’s works and a “tour de force in his entire career” and points to inspiration from André Derain’s 1906 work The Dance (11). Whilst Antliff considers “Eurythmics’ salutary effects are seen” in this painting where the “Dionysian dancers in their natural state” are “surrounded by a fertile landscape whose élan they will undoubtedly emulate” and notes that Les Eus is unique in Fergusson’s oeuvre in that “both sexes are subsumed within nature’s primeval rhythms” and that “For Bergson organic regeneration and evolution were especially powerful expressions of la durée” (92-94).
26This interest in rhythm and the incomplete living line can also be seen in the work of British artists, such as in Duncan Grant’s 1911 work Bathers. And when we start to look properly at Lawrence’s own paintings, done towards the end of his life, ideas of rhythm emerge. We can see this particularly in works such as Dance Sketch (1928), where we have not only the rhythmic movements and placement of the man, woman and goat, but even the trees give a sense of flowing movement as does the harmonious mingling of colours. In his book on Lawrence’s art, Tetsuji Kohno discusses this painting in some detail and links it to the images of the Etruscan dancers that Lawrence saw in Tarquinia (244); perhaps endorsing Binckes’ suggestion about looking for the roots of rhythm in the remote past. Rhythmic elements can also be seen in Lawrence’s paintings Leda (1928) and in Spring (1929), which Kohno again discusses in some detail, suggesting that it may have been inspired by Duncan Grant’s 1911 painting Football (247).
27Furthermore, if we think back to Kandinsky’s ideas of getting into an emotional relationship with a painting, this would seem to be relevant to one of Lawrence’s drawings, sometimes untitled, although named as Electric Nude by Kohno. Brewster Ghislein feels that at this time Lawrence was:
trying to find some expression in paint for the relation of things […] perhaps by means of the touching and mingling of colours flowing from different things. […] Later in his room he showed me a black and white drawing he had been doing of a nude man and woman in a complicated electric field. […] In it he had tried to show the special rhythms of the different parts of the body […] as they subsisted in themselves and in a pattern of relations. (Nehls III 295-296)
28Whilst this is Ghislein’s interpretation, the drawing could equally be expressing the “vibrations” between the subjects and between them and the viewer that Kandinsky suggests.
29Therefore, all this would appear to demonstrate that Lawrence did have a keen awareness and interest in ideas of rhythm and that he expressed this in his art. Furthermore, as Michael Bell aptly concludes in his review of Marcus’s book, “For Lawrentians, the principal value of this remarkable book will be to indicate his place in a widespread multi-faceted network of reflections on the significance of rhythm. Seen in this light, the very qualities that once made him seem eccentric suggest his centrality to an important strain of contemporary thought” (329).