“The Apotheosis of the Dwarf”. Groups of dwarves by Gertler and Spencer seemed to menace me from every wall.”14 Rupert Brooke, returning from Tahiti in June of 1914 and staying in the guest room, promptly christened the painting ‘the Bogeys’. This, thought Marsh, deflated, was ‘a disappointing reaction’.15
But for Stanley these were halcyon years of both hope and accomplishment. He remained at Fernlea but acquired a ‘studio’, Wistaria Cottage, a then empty Georgian house at the east end of the High Street in need of structural repair. He rented it from his cousins the Hatches for eighteen pence a week, and liked it for the quiet and for the light from the east-facing rear windows which overlooked the extensive gardens of St George’s Lodge as they sweep down to a branch of the Thames at Odney Common, a location in which he was to set his Zacharias and Elizabeth (1913–14).
The family visited frequently. Will would come over from Cologne in the summer breaks while Johanna joined her family in Berlin. Harold and his wife Natalie – a dancer from Gibraltar were occupied in light orchestral work, abundant then. Horace’s conjuring took him on music-hall engagements at home and overseas. Annie remained reluctantly but dutifully at Fernlea, taking charge of a succession of live-in maids or domestics, for Ma was now confined at times to a bathchair which Stanley would cheerfully push the three miles or so into Maidenhead and back. Florence had married a Cambridge don, J. M. Image, brother to Selwyn Image, Professor of Fine Art at Oxford and an expert on stained glass. Sydney, having worked like a Trojan to matriculate, was overwhelmed by the delights of scholarship, for he had been accepted as a divinity student at Oxford. Percy remained an administrator with his London building firm, and kept a fraternal eye on Gilbert, who was starting his Slade course and, like Sydney, back at Fernlea in vacations.
Stanley’s acquaintance with Henry Lamb continued: ‘I have seen a lot of Lamb recently when I was having my teeth done a few weeks ago. … He had me at his place and he played me – God alone knows what he didn’t play me. I went there twice, and he did heaps of Beethoven, the Diabelli Variations. I was glad to hear a lot of Mozart16 [with J. S. Bach, Stanley’s favourite composer]. His playing is very good; he gets everything clear.’ ‘Getting everything clear’ – vital to Stanley, in music, in literature, in art, in vision.
Both Gilbert and Stanley were attracting the attention of cognoscenti. Several brought excitement into the lives of Ma and Pa by asking if they could call to see the artists at work. Edward Marsh was followed by Henry Lamb, who during a stay at Marlow walked over to Cookham in March of 1914 and for the first time saw Stanley on his home ground. On 30 May of that long hot summer he was in Cookham again on a ramble with Percy, Gilbert and Stanley, during which Percy took them birdwatching, and ‘told the tale of the birds’. During the visit Gilbert showed him his final painting in a trio he called The Seven Ages of Man. Lamb was so impressed that he submitted it on Gilbert’s behalf to the Contemporary Arts Society. It was Lady Ottoline Morrell’s turn to act as buyer. To the family’s joy she chose it in June for purchase at £100.* Thus Gilbert achieved the success so narrowly denied Stanley. Lamb promptly wrote to Gilbert to warn him that at their next meeting the drinks were on him.
Intrigued to meet the brothers, Ottoline herself came with her husband the Liberal MP, Philip Morrell, by train in July for tea at Fernlea and a walk along the Thames with the family. Stanley had just finished his first oil self-portrait, in which he painted himself in a mirror tilted to see part of the ceiling. The effect is to emphasize the jaw and mouth. Did the Morrells, one wonders, sense that in the set of the face and the quest of the eyes, the owner was beginning to see visions denied to many?†
During the visit there was, according to Sydney, ‘keen discussion’ of Mozart’s music, and ‘much fun’ over the taking of group photographs, Ottoline being an enthusiastic photographer. The Morrells stunned the Spencers by airily hailing a local taxi for the return journey. A few weeks later Ottoline, having been offered the use of Lady Ripon’s box at Covent Garden, reciprocated by inviting the Spencers to a Mozart opera. Evening dress was required. Ma was no problem, and Pa had an aged dress suit. Ottoline arranged for Gilbert to be pinned into one of Philip’s, while Stanley disappeared into Edward Marsh’s, which he had lent for the purpose. The procession of the party into the opera-house was a spectacle long-remembered with hilarity by the participants.
Darsie Japp was another welcomed visitor. He had previously visited, and walked ‘twenty miles into Buckinghamshire’ with Stanley; the Thames at Cookham forms a boundary between Buckinghamshire and Berkshire. On their return to Fernlea they were given boiled eggs for tea by Ma, a simple fare which Japp enjoyed, for, he told Stanley, ‘I shall have plovers’ eggs tonight.’22 In August Henry Lamb visited again. Will was there from Germany. Sydney captures in his diary for August the echoes of that last summer before the impact of war: ‘Yesterday Henry Lamb came down and spent some hours with us. We walked to Odney, then to Cliveden. … Suddenly we all concluded we wanted to bathe. So Gil fetched towels and Guy Lacey came with us. The water was delicious. Coming home, Lamb begged Will to play the Hammerklavier Sonata.’
Significant though music was to both Henry Lamb and Stanley, it was a mutual recognition of the importance of art which drew together in friendship this otherwise contrasting pair. For all his more worldly literacy, savoir-faire and sophistication, Lamb seems to have shared with Stanley those moments of self-doubt, even of despair, which all artists suffer. But whereas Lamb’s bouts of despondency would become prolonged, Stanley’s natural buoyancy would quickly lift him to the surface. Perhaps Lamb occasionally needed the help of such optimism from his new friend. Eight years older than Stanley, he was a son of Horace Lamb, a distinguished professor of mathematics, later knighted. He had almost completed the medical course intended for him when he suddenly abandoned it, married the notoriously sensual model Nina Forrest, his ‘Euphemia’ – it was said to be a forced marriage – and went to Paris to study art, particularly under Augustus John. There his marriage disintegrated. He returned to England in 1911 to help extricate John from a relationship with Ottoline Morrell which was becoming tiresome. A slim, pale man, according to Lady Ottoline he was as fascinating to women as he was attracted to them. But essentially he was a man of wide cultural, social, musical and artistic sensibilities. He and Stanley shared an honesty of purpose and a clarity of outlook which all their lives resented pretension. When they met it, their reactions differed. Where Stanley would rant or grumble in protest, Lamb would pick up his lance and charge. The jousting blow he delivered to Clive Bell over the Apple Gatherers affair was not mortal, but at least gave him the satisfaction of displaying his contempt. Neither he nor Stanley was greatly interested in material possession, nor in money save as the means to artistic freedom. But both remained in thrall, despite all obstacles, to the ‘divine fire’.
Artistically, Stanley’s prospects were encouraging. His work was increasingly recognized among connoisseurs, even if not always for the reasons he intended. Materially, it sold. By 1914 he told Gwen: ‘I have £52 in the bank and I think I shall take the money I have in the Post Office Savings bank and make a deposit account at the London County & Westminster Bank where I already have a current account. I think you get 4 per cent interest.’23 He also asks Gwen’s advice on whether he should increase his contribution to the family housekeeping; he was paying his mother £1 a month, perhaps £10 a week now. Interesting projects were in the offing. In 1913 Jacques and Gwen Raverat had made moves to get Stanley and Eric Gill involved in illustrating and lettering a version of the four gospels. Gill, however, declined the project as too onerous, and the Raverats, it seems, were modifying it to discussions of an illustrated version of Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, with drawings by Stanley, woodcuts by Gwen, layout by Jacques and lettering by Gill. Rupert Brooke was urging Edward Marsh to promote a theatrical venture with text by himself, scenery by Stanley, and Cathleen Nesbitt as the leading actress.24 Marsh had already in 1912 published the first of the anthologies of contemporary verse he called Georgian Poets. Stanley enjoyed the volume – ‘Marsh gave me a book of English poets. I like Rupert Brooke because he knows what teatime is’25 – and suggested a companion series of ‘Georgian painters’ to include Gertler, Currie, Nash, the Spencers, Seabrooke, Roberts, Rosenberg, Nevinson, Wadsworth and Gaudier-Brzeska. In addition Stanley