THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

wasteful devastation of the war. The post-war period was haunted by long memories, some tender, some angry, most
sickening. According to the critic and poet Herbert Read, writing in The Criterion in 1930, it had taken more than a
decade for ex-combatants to come to terms with what the war had meant to them and with ‘the debris of its emotional
conflicts’ before they could begin to transform their experience into literature. Nevertheless, it was the incongruity
implicit in the idea of the ‘friendliness’ of the unfeeling wild flowers noted by Lutyens, as much as that of the equally
indifferent poppies, cornflowers, skylarks and rats of the poetry that had emerged from the war, that effectively
marked the end of an art which had once reached for comforting or sympathetic images from nature. Stark and solid
balls of bronze seemed a more appropriate tribute to those sacrificed to the unfeeling might of the machines devised
and exploited by human ingenuity.
The feeling that a new start ought to be made, in politics and society as much as in art, was accentuated rather
than initiated by the war and its immediate aftermath. When Virginia Woolf announced with a devastating flippancy
that ‘in or about December, 1910, human character changed’, she was expressing what seemed by 1924 to be an
accumulated sense of exhilaration at a variety of
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new beginnings and rejections of the past. Although she was referring back specifically to Samuel Butler’s The Way
of All Flesh as an early symptom of cultural questioning and to the plays of Shaw as a record of a continuing shift in
attitudes, the intellectual elite who formed the first audience for Woolf’s paper ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ would
probably have acknowledged the potent influence of other and wider European innovations. In November 1910 the
eyes of London gallery-goers had been opened wide to the blazing colours and visual fragmentations of Cézanne, Van
Gogh, and Gauguin at the exhibition organized by Roger Fry of ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’. Although the
Press had been vituperative and mocking in its criticism, and some visitors had laughed convulsively and shaken their
umbrellas at the canvasses they found offensive, the exhibition’s succès de scandale was to change the course of
British painting in the twentieth century. In 1912 a second Post-Impressionist exhibition introduced the visual
economies, the rethinkings of form, and the abstractions of Matisse, Picasso, Braque, and Derain to a London public.
This second exhibition also included somewhat tamer pictures by English imitators, notably Duncan Grant and
Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell, and a sprinkling of work by Russian artists.
A Russian contributor to the 1912 catalogue noted the significance of a new generation of national painters who
had assimilated themselves ‘to the popular art’, rejoicing in its ‘sincere directness’ as a counterweight to what he saw
as ‘the over-refined and effeminate tastes’ of the ‘aesthetical gourmands’ of St Petersburg. This comment related new
Russian painting to the most familiar Western realization of the Slavic Renaissance, the seasons of ballet and opera
organized in Paris and London by Diaghilev’s company. Diaghilev’s sensational contribution to the Coronation Gala
programme at Covent Garden in 1911 had served to revolutionize English conceptions of dance and set design. On
seeing Diaghilev’s company in London, a gushingly enthusiastic Rupert Brooke wrote: ‘They, if anything can, redeem
our civilization. I’d give anything to be a ballet-designer.’ It was not an ambition that Brooke was to realize, but the
influence of the painters, designers, composers, and choreographers associated with Diaghilev’s company remained
remarkable. Besides ballets by Debussy, the second season of 1912 included the London première of Igor Stravinsky’s
The Firebird. It was followed in June 1913 by four performances of The Rite of Spring, a ballet which had been
greeted with an orchestrated furore in Paris the month before. To ears unattuned to Orthodox liturgical chant and to
Russian popular music, Stravinsky’s aggressively repeated phrases and emphatic rhythms seemed like an excoriating
exposure to something savagely primitive. To eyes accustomed to gently receding sylvan vistas as a frame for smooth
and balanced balletic movement on the stage, the startling backdrops and the angularly athletic choreography jolted
audiences into a new perception of theatrical kinetics. The very subjects of the new ballets commissioned by Diaghilev
were seen as direct challenges to the vaunted ‘refinement’ and urbanity of inherited, aristocratic Western culture and
to the emasculated
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nature of much of its own folk-tradition. Despite its reputation for being straitlaced and insular, pre-war London had
cautiously emerged both as responsive to aesthetic novelty and as a focal point in the international dissemination of an
art which seemed as distinctively ‘modern’ as it was innovative.
The outbreak of hostilities in August 1914 brought an abrupt if temporary end to easy international exchange and
to expensive and overtly Germanic public displays in opera-houses. Even to non-combatants, to women, to middleaged
or unfit men, to exiled Americans, or to Irishmen unaffected by enforced conscription, the fabric of London
intellectual life appeared to have deteriorated. To D. H. Lawrence, writing in 1923, the spirit of the old London
collapsed in the winter of 1915-16: ‘the city, in some way, perished, perished from being a heart of the world, and
became a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears and horrors.’ Political dissent and debate too were suspended