to hell with mathematics and Latin, she was lovely and should have a lovely life. Nonsense, she replied, but she didn’t think it was nonsense at all.
1898–1901
‘IN THE FIRST YEARS of the twentieth century to say that a lass, perhaps not out of her teens, had gone prancing off to Paris to study art was to say that she had gone irretrievably to Hell.’ Kathleen didn’t write these words until thirty years later, but she knew at the time that they were true. To say this had no effect on her would be inaccurate; to say it discouraged her would be more so. Despite having every respect for education, and very much regretting that women could not take university degrees—she asked Rosslyn, when he had been to Oxford, to ‘pass on anything that he had picked up there’—Kathleen did not want to teach. Though it was not apparent to everyone, she was going to be an artist.
Kathleen left school at eighteen, and the world was quite clearly, to her eyes, her oyster. To the relatives, it was more the case that something had to be done with her. One option was that she go and stay in Ulster with another old uncle, Sir Hervey Bruce. His father, Tory true-blue and Ulster Orange member for Coleraine for many years, used to stand up on his seat in the House of Commons and crow like a bantam cock whenever a Liberal or Irish member got up to speak. The son, Kathleen’s uncle, was noted for contributing to the collection plate in church in inverse proportion to the length of the sermon—a sovereign for ten minutes, half a sovereign for twenty, and so on. Like Rosslyn, he had the Bruce weakness for animals: he once offered to peel a peach for a dinner guest, saying it was ‘too ripe for the monkey’. Kathleen stayed with Sir Hervey for Christmas 1899 at Downhill, his house in Ulster.
Downhill was huge. Sir Hervey’s son Henry, known as Benjie, who was brought up there, described it as ‘a fantastic place … a flawless gem … a great granite bathing box… a sombre grey granite mass, perched on an Atlantic cliff with nothing but the distant Scotch Isle of Jura between it and the North Pole. On the bleak down on which it stood no tree, shrub or flower could survive. For flowers we had seagulls, assembled in hundreds on the grass and all facing the wind.’ Often it was too windy to leave the house; Benjie’s diary records an occasion when ‘some of the servants went out but couldn’t get back except on their hands and knees. Seagulls tearing past the windows.’
Kathleen liked all that, and the sea and the lake and the wild country, but she didn’t much like her uncle.
He seemed to me an incredibly coarse and vulgar old man, and in my innocence I did not think baronets should be so. But we must remember that I was brought up in a convent, and he at Eton some sixty years before, where shirts were probably not the necessary outfit for a weekly bath, and chastity and propriety were less rigid. My puritanical rearing made me cringe with shame at his playful taunts. Nearly I loathed him, until one fine afternoon he took me across to the church yard, and showed me his wife’s grave, a wife who had died some thirty years before. ‘I miss her, my dear,’ he said, and I was ashamed that I could not express the spontaneity of sympathy that I would have expressed to a young male creature.
That evening after tea he said to me, ‘Look here, my dear, would you like to live here? You would pour out the tea and mend the china and things, and there’s no one here for you to get into mischief with. Think it over. You wouldn’t be in my way.’
She thought it over. She tossed and turned in her four-poster bed, and she concluded: ‘But I want to get into mischief!’
Kathleen declined Uncle Hervey’s offer, and went instead to London. She joined the Slade art school—not yet Paris, but in the right direction. She did stay with relatives, but she fantasized constantly about flats in Chelsea that she might take, either with another girl or—if only—on her own. But twenty-year-old daughters of the clergy did not live alone in Chelsea in 1900.
She managed to have an extremely jolly life all the same. It was made up largely of work, social fun and extra curricular self-improvement. Work was the Slade. She studied under Henry Tonks, whose face, she said, was ‘full of grey old miseries’. He was by all accounts a strict but rewarding teacher. His great respect was for draughtsmanship, and as a former medic he had considerable knowledge of anatomy. Another of his early pupils was Augustus John, whose work Kathleen greatly admired. She studied drawing, painting, criticism, and on 14 November 1901 her diary notes ‘modelling—first clay from life’. She was good at it. ‘Tremendous praise, I wonder why, I can’t really be doing it well I should think,’ she wrote. And ‘Went to modelling. Same as ever, “Very good indeed”, “excellent”, “you’ll make something of this” and so on.’
She loved her studies. ‘Oct 9: Oh how excellently do I want to go back to the Slade,’ she wrote, before term began again, and ‘Monday 14: First day of Slade very pleasant.’ But they were not enough for her. On a visit to the Royal Academy she had come across a quotation from Walt Whitman under a painting: ‘It is not enough to have this globe or a certain time. I will have thousands of globes and all time.’ On the strength of that she invested in a copy of Leaves of Grass, and, she said, ‘life began’.
The immediate globes she went for were art, music, theatre, philosophy, and people, but that was not all. Her diary records her eclectic interests: Wagner’s reaction to Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony (he fell into a fever and took to wearing silk and satin to compose); the fact that codfish lay two million spawn for two to come to maturity; Nietzsche; Herbert Spencer’s Data of Ethics; developing photos; Baudelaire; Swinburne ‘till satiated’; Goethe; Hegel; Hedda Gabler (with Max Behrens—‘Immense’); the British Museum; metaphysics; Egyptology; Rossini. In the late summer of 1901 she was visiting Edinburgh, and she went to the Glasgow Exhibition, which included Rodin’s Burghers of Calais. She thought it ‘marvellous’; and also admired an Adam and Eve by Frank Taubman; and the work of ‘Chas Ricketts and C. H. Shannon’, ‘one of which is a beautiful young man. Must be Ricketts—ask Albert. It’s Shannon.’ In 1901 she was a craning, admiring student, but within five years she was friends with three of these four: Rodin, Shannon and Ricketts. Rossini she never met (though Benjie Bruce met Puccini, who played him parts of Madame Butterfly on the piano, explaining it as he went. ‘Ca, c’est japonais; ca c’est moi,’ he said: That is Japanese, that is me.)
Interspersed with the self-improvement were the people: fellow art students, Rosslyn’s theatrical friends (he was now curate of St Ann’s, Soho, and knew all sorts of people who were generally held to be rather too interesting company for a clergyman), dashing young things about town. Again, Kathleen’s diary speaks: Ernest Thesiger came up; Aveling walked her home; more hysterics from Dolly; awful letter from Evelyn; Stella has dyed her hair; Rothenstein gave her Sappho; gruesome fog; Rover had a stroke; dined with Skenes; long talk with Victor Reynolds about mortality, Aubrey Beardsley, etc; ‘Drank champagne and were amusing’ before seeing Millicent off to Capri; kept meeting Aveling, ‘felt rather a cad about that’.
She became friends with Mabel Beardsley, sister of the late Aubrey. Mabel and Aubrey had been the subject of scandalous rumours of incest, and Mabel had an illegitimate child who some said was his. Kathleen ‘played’ with Mabel after they met in adjoining boxes at Two Little Vagabonds, and later they helped to organize a masked ball, which was a great success although Max Beerbohm didn’t turn up. They forgave him, and went to the private view of an exhibition of his caricatures. She took Rosslyn to ‘pinafore parties’ in studios, where the guests stayed till 5 a.m., and the day before Queen Victoria died in January 1901 Rosslyn took Kathleen to a play at the Garrick, and to a party given by the actress Madge Titheradge.
There were admirers, and admirees. In November 1901 she went to a play of Sherlock Holmes. She noted that the lead, William Gillette, was forty-five, and ‘oh so gorgeous, could love him heaps and heaps’. On December 5 she ‘met the Russian Goldarbeiter in a bus. Clever of him to contrive to make such a meeting romantic.’ One Watts had no such trouble at the Slade ball that Christmas: they danced many times and he proposed to her ‘with great élan’. ‘Percy’ merited only