From Ruskin to Nietzsche: Michael Sadler and the Leeds Arts Club
Tom Steele, University of Glasgow
Whitechapel Gallery 14 Nov. 2013.
Prologue/synopsis
Barnsley born, but by 1911 very much a metropolitan intellectual, MichaelSadler(pp 2) arrived in Leeds with a reputation as probably the leading educationalist in Britain. He brought with him one of the largest and most progressive private collections of contemporary paintings of any British collector. Many of these were hung around the walls of the university and for many students these were their first contact with ‘Modern Art’. Following in the footsteps of Nathan Bodington, the first Vice Chancellor of the University of Leeds, formed only seven years previously, his professional project was to complete the task Bodington had begun of transforming the young university into a leading educational and cultural centre. Much of his time was spent in cultivating local societies, making close links with industrialists to endow professorial chairs and create scholarships and encouraging whatever cultural talent he found in the wasteland of Leeds, then thought of as one of the ugliest towns in Britain. He appointed many new lecturers and Professors, often from the university extension movement pioneered by Oxford and Cambridge in which he had played a leading role. He dramatically expanded the humanities departments in what was hitherto a largely technical and medical teaching institution. His art collection and charismaattracted thechallenging art critic, Frank Rutter,(pp3) to the post of Director of Leeds Art Gallery and together they turned the Leeds Arts Club into the foremost provincial centre for the promotion and practice of post-impressionist painting and theory. Were the educationalist and the arts patronat one with each other? This paper attempts to demonstrate that the patron was also the educator and that the educationalist was trying to revolutionise the local and national culture. He was a both the Ruskinian who would leave ‘no Giotto among the sheepfolds’ and the Nietzschean Modern for whom the ‘intense and silent power of dynamos and turbines’ were a vital element of a futurist aesthetic.
Education
Michael Sadler arrived in Leeds in 1911, battered but unbowed. His ambitions to lead the Board of Education in reforming British education had been politically rebuffed. Academic life was a kind of compensation for lack of actual policy making power,although his detailed reports to local authorities over secondary education in the wake of the 1902 Education Act had resulted in widespread change. His frustrated political ambitions nevertheless threw him into deep and prolonged depressions during which he profligatelyspent his wife Mary’s dowryon paintings. Fortunately, as the daughter of the wealthy Quaker Barnsley linen maker, Charles Harvey, Mary was for the most part content to indulge him and during his breaks from academic study and report writing, he would sink himself in the art markets of Europe. From these he would emerge with the occasional Gauguin, van Gogh and Cezanne and a host of other talents now less celebrated but well thought of at the time. His taste was catholic, ranging from British water colourists like Cotman,to Turnerand Constable landscapes to Dutch and French post-impressionists and he seems to have been well guided by his dealers and his son, Michael, who introduced him to the work of the Russian post-impressionist, Wassily Kandinsky.
The coexistence of radical views on education and art in Sadler could be dated to his school days at Rugby and as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Oxford. At Rugby he was immersed in Thomas Arnold ‘s atmosphere of ‘Puritan radicalism’, which boiled to down to an intense concern with critical thinking and social reform. Although he remained loyal to his father’s Gladstonian liberalism throughout his life, Sadler grew close to and, for the most part, sympathetic with the socialist reformers he later met in his adult education work. AtOxford, he came under the influence of the philosophical idealism of T. H. Green and the ethic of public service promoted from Balliol by Benjamin Jowett. But he was utterly intoxicated by the lectures of John Ruskin, (pp4) mixing to explosive effect aesthetics, art history and political economy. Ruskin’s lectures were for him ‘inexpressibly splendid. Like seeing a jewel talking to coals in a coal hole’ (quoted in Oliver, 1963: 5).
Ruskin, Sadler told a WEA audience in Leeds in 1913, ‘(w)ould allow no bar of humble birth to shut out a lad of genius from the training which would fit him for leadership and honoured rule. He warned us to leave no Giotto among the sheepfolds’ (Sadler, 1913). But Ruskin’s refusal to separate artistic production and enjoyment from public health and welfare gained him few friends amongst his Oxford colleagues, many of whom regarded him as merely a publicist and showman. But hewas quickly absorbed by the growing ‘working class movement’. Few thoughtful workers who attended university extension classes or committed themselves to cooperative and trade union activities could be found without a well-thumbed copy of Ruskin’sUnto This Last on their shelves. In the West Riding the liberal papers of Leeds and Bradford had devoted many column inches publishing and debating his work (Hardman, 1986). To be a Ruskinian was to embrace the cause of radical progress.
Not surprisingly, Sadler threw himself into the cause of University Extension, the movement begun by James Stuart in Cambridge in 1873 and then taken up by Oxford as a kind of ‘peripatetic university’ to extend the benefits of university learning to working people. Sadler became the Secretary to Oxford’s Delegacy, the department set up by the university to carry out extension work, in 1885, the same year as he married Mary Harvey. He also became the editor of its journal, the University Extension Gazette, which he edited with a remarkable concern for the comparative development of educational activities elsewhere in Europe and the USA, which was to become a hallmark of his approach to educational reform. Sadler was pre-eminently a European and an internationalist who believed that although education was a national issue, educationally backward Britain had much to learn from developments elsewhere. The university extension movement was, moreover, serviced by many passionate idealists, like R.H. Tawney and Alexander Lindsay who would become the leading voices in educational reform over the next few decades (Lowe, 2007).
Pre-eminent among Sadler’s own courses of extension lectures was one on the ‘Future of the Working Classes’, in which he approved of Marx’s analysis of the evils of the capitalist system but criticised his lack of an alternative to it (Lindsay took much the same line in his Glasgow University/WEA classes to the ILP in Clydebank twenty years later (Lindsay 1925). Sadler approvingly witnessed the formation of the WEA in 1903 as the Association for the Promotion of Higher Education for the Working Man (Fieldhouse, 1996: 46-47).In the same year Sadler became convinced of the absolute urgency for reforming secondary education. His recommendation to the Board of Education for, an essentially hierarchical, tripartite system of secondary education consisting of grammar, technical and secondary modern schools, though not entirely original, remained the basis for the structure of secondary education until Labour’s introduction of Comprehensive education in 1965[i].
In 1911 Leeds University was still a fairly raw new institution.(pp4) Although it had been the third member,alongside Owen’s College Manchester and Liverpool College, of the Victoria Universityand had a long standing Medical School and the YorkshireWool College, it had suffered by comparisonwith the other members. When Manchester and Liverpool decided to break away and become independent universities, Leeds stalled, knowing that there was insufficient local funding for its own independence from hard-headed Yorkshire business men. Moreover,Leeds was heavily technologically based and many argued that universities were not the appropriate institution for this kind of education. Indeed in Leeds many classes seemed, as one observer put it , to amount to no more than watching little bits of fabric boiling in little pots’ (quoted in Shimmin, 1954: 19). Many had agreed also with Benjamin Jowett that the ‘older’ universities had a responsibility to humanise the local college movement.
Sadler’s appointment in 1911 was something of a gamble. Although he was feted as a leading educationalist, he was an outsider and socially an unknownquantity. A cause célèbre because of the Morant debacle a few years (Morant was his junior at the Ministry of Education who was promoted by the incoming Tory government over his head as Secretary for Education), with arty leanings and most definitely not a technologist, he was regarded with suspicion bylocal industrialists and many on the university senate. Moreover, Leeds City Council had withheld its grant two years earlier because it was not convinced the interests of the city were being well-served but the university -while it made plainthat far too many sons of the wealthyactually were. Undaunted, Sadler swiftly set about trying to make the university a centre of learning, expanding its size, widening access, enhancing town and gown relations and securing its funding through increased government grant-aiding. Out of his office, he systematically cultivated local authority leaders and business leaders, encouraged cultural activities, founded or rejuvenated clubs like the Leeds Arts Club, involved himself in the WEA, supported charities and generally made himself indispensable to Leeds civic life. Within the university, he established more chairs in the humanities and science and established new departments in languages . Convinced by the Oxbridge model of collegiate fellowship, he established new halls of residence including the first for women, Oxley Hall, and instituted the first staff student committee, (it lapsed under Sadler’s successor, James Baillie, and was unknown in 1968 when student occupiers demanded the same). Pedagogically, Sadler was sceptical of the value of lectures and encouraged a tutorial system, with closer staff-student relationships and more private study time. He wanted students to read, think and debate, to broaden their horizons from narrow curricular matters and take an interest in the social and cultural world around them. He lectured the students on the need for Truth, Beauty and Art, established the mid-day concerts (which still survive) and hung much of his private collection around the walls and corridors of the university, challenging to students to notice them and engagewith them.
But he did not neglect the university’s base in science and technology. During his study of German education carried out when Director of Special Inquiries for the Board of Education, Sadler had been impressed by the way technical and moral education had been brought together and, with his colleague Arthur Smithells, he energetically pursued the academic argument for the inclusion of technological study and its harmonisation with the humanities in a university. In this he marked out some of the defining territory of the northern civic universities and rehearsed an argument for a modernised liberal studies that would test those who could only see an unbridgeable gap between arts and sciences. Later, in a lecture at Columbia University in New Yorkin 1930, Sadler pushed his views a stage further. He developed what Higginson called an idea of a ‘liberating’ education:
We believe that that a liberal education is a discipline of body, mind and spirit; a discipline which is not only individual but communal... (which) subtends the arc of life from nursery to old age. We perceive that the presence of a liberal education is not signified exclusively by any label, certificate or academic degree; above all that a liberal education does not consist in the absorption of inert ideas in cramming for an examination (quoted in Higginson, 1994: 463)
This was a bold restatement of the classical argument for liberal studies for modern times which significantly prepared the path for the humanisation of national education in the post Second World War settlement. It is precisely this vision that Michael Gove and his fellow Gradgrinds are currently so energetically unravelling (though New Labour functionalists should also shoulder some of the blame).
Part Two: Art
A second aspect of Ruskin’s advocacy absorbed by Sadler was what he saw as ‘spirituality’. Sadler was a devout Christian and believed his own vocation in education was,as Tawney noted, a kind of missionary work. He believed that underlying all appearances and outward show of life and art there lay a deeper reality or what he would have called ‘spiritual truth’. Thus while education had to nurture the student’s soul and enable themto gain a deeper understanding, rather than simply filling them with facts, so art had to inspire and enrich this vision. Hence as well as satisfying the senses,art had a vital educational role. In this aspect some might say that Sadler was probably doing no more than expressing the advanced late Victorian liberal sympathies of Ruskin and Morris. But he went a stage further and added a Nietzschean spin derived from Orage at the Leeds Arts Club (Steele, 1990). Ruskin’s nineteenth-century realist aesthetic, he said, could no longer be relied upon to interpret the emerging post-Victorian world because he (Ruskin) couldn’t see the changes in aesthetic perception that the modern industrial world was bringing. Sadler clarified his difference with Ruskin in a highly-charged futurist moment: (pp6)
He failed to see that for us moderns strength and power show themselves in the great arms of travelling cranes, in the gossamer beauty of scaffolding, in the gaunt severity of Lancashire mill sheds and in the intense and silent power of dynamos and turbines. Where there is force, there is beauty (Sadler, 1913).
Sadler’s new vision was developed in the context of a remarkable avant-garde organisation ,the Leeds Arts Club(ppp7) It was founded by a number of artists teachers and journalists in 1903, including the architect A J Penty, the journalist Holbrook Jackson (pp8) and especially a young schoolteacher called Alfred Orage who by 1911 when Sadler arrived was achieving a legendary reputation as the editor of the capital’smost iconoclastic cultural journal The New Age. (pp9)
In the 1890s, when Orage arrived in Leeds as an elementary school teacher he enthusiastically joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP) which had just been formed in Bradford with Leeds socialists Tom Maguire and John Lincoln Mahon playingleading roles. The ILP was the baptismal forerunner to the Labour Party. Ruth Livesey claims the ILP diverged from previous socialist groups such as the SDF and Socialist League in its concern for beauty and love. This attracted many women adherents to what was largely hitherto a men’s occupation of socialist politics. These included the Ford sisters from a leading Leeds Quaker family(pp10). Isabella Ford’s novel On the Threshold had attracted Orage’s sympathy for its critique of masculinity and her pamphlet ‘Women and Socialism’ was widely influential.Much of this first wave feminisms passed into the Club where Isabella Ford played a leading role and strongly influenced another leading suffragette, Mary Gawthorpe (pp11). Gawthorpe maintained that:
in its own sphere the Leeds Arts Club could not have been bettered. Those were living cultural amenities for first-hand enjoyment as opposed to the second-hand approach of scholarly inheritors and custodians. I have sometimes pondered the thought that the Club, founded by Orage and Jackson, had the germ of a new future, not necessarily to be matured in London, but capable of the completest enrichment of a community right on the spot’ (Gawthorpe Up Hill to Holloway, (1947) p197.
Despite his commitment to the ILP,however, Orage’s belief in a ’passion for a remote end’ (174) increasingly distanced him from parliamentary representation and the trade union collectivism of labourist politics.
The young Orage was also a disciple of the socialist mystic and campaigner for homosexual rights, Edward Carpenter (pp12) whose long poem Towards Democracy he virtually knew by heart and Carpenter lectured regularly for the Club. Orage was also a member of the Theosophical Society then led by the charismatic Annie Besant(pp13) whose work Thought Forms will feature later in this talk. Wilde’s Soul of Man under Socialism was a constant reference point. But his introduction by Holbrook Jackson to Thomas Common’s recent translation of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra dramatically changed his life. In Nietzsche’s unashamed, egoistic, individualistic masculinism he found ‘an antidote to current sentimentalism’. But although Orage’s view of women became increasingly chauvinistic, it was not so in the conventional Victorian sense. Indeed that was exactly what he thought he was correcting. Through his reading of Nietzsche he was convinced that the role of women was to enable men find their destiny – an idea that was later taken up by DH Lawrence (an avid reader of Orage’s New Age). For this they needed to throw off domestic shackles of duty and pacificity and assert their ‘womanness’ in their sexuality and in the public sphere, as the suffragettes were doing. But, increasingly, his initial support for women’s suffrage turned into opposition to its limited aims, when what he desired was a total revolution of the spirit and consciousness, as ‘New Women’ like Florence Farr were calling for(pp14).