This latter idea was suggested by Alice herself, who held rather unorthodox views about the current literature. “The novel is a dead end,” she told him. “The only thing left is to map out the aesthetics of the new Age.” She believed strongly in some undefined New Era of art which was being ushered in by Dadaism. Baird listened patiently. It seemed to him to be extremely important and necessary that a great critic should arise in England to take the prevailing ideas in hand and synthesize them. He was also secretly rather glad to put off the projected novel, which he felt quite incapable of handling. “The novel is a dead end,” he told his friends, “the only hope is to direct the currents of aesthetics from a vantage-point.” What exactly the vantage-point was he himself was not very clear. At any rate he felt vaguely important and pleased to be doing something, and read industriously in the British Museum every day while Alice painted.
After their marriage they moved to the cottage, where a small car, books and friends confirmed them in their happiness, and in the importance of the work each had to do. It was during this time that Baird had chanced upon a book by Hogarth and had been struck by a passage in it upon the sensibility of the artist. Alice thought it was rubbish.
“Art is a dangerous thing to play with, since it demands self-examination and self-knowledge, and many people do not really wish for either. Its true function, after all, is to insist on the existence in us of unused faculties for experience which custom has staled — or compromise to intellectual order of the society in which we find ourselves. The artist does not invent or discover; rather does he, by making himself unusually receptive, be discovered and re-created. We tend to measure artists by their powers of transmission, but even bad artists suffer of the sense of displacement and anxiety which we see recorded in the lives of the great. Benjamin Haydon and Van Gogh are equals in suffering if in nothing else. Each was lost in the labyrinth of his own spiritual discoveries.”
Alice wrinkled her pretty nose as she closed the book and handed it back to him. No, she said, in response to his question, it was just another attempt by these psychologists to put the artist in the strait-jacket of a clinical definition; she did not want to admit that the individuality of the creative man was not by its very nature beyond definition. John must find some way round the problem or he would find his book on aesthetics a study of the artist in one set of terms. This, of course, was precisely what John wanted to do, but his respect for Alice made him defer judgment until he had read through the whole of Ruskin once more. Several summers and winters passed in this pleasant frivolity. John wrote the best part of his New Aesthetics in dear workmanlike prose, but found that the book had turned out rather a frost. Several friends criticized it in typescript, and it became obvious that it was simply another of those productions by young University men which earn them, at the best, a column in a weekly journal. There was no harm in publishing, but John Baird was determined to publish something first-class or remain silent. Alice thought this very wise. She in the meantime was busy painting and reading books about painting. Less critical and far less self-conscious than her husband, she allowed her work to be shown on more than one occasion, and was known to derive comfort from criticisms written about her in the Burlington Magazine. At this time there was almost no sacrifice too great to make on behalf of her art — so strongly was she under the influence of Vincent (as she called him). She even thought that they might have a baby. “I do not feel fully awakened,” she told an astonished Baird one evening in May, “and I notice I’m painting nothing but Madonnas with infants-in-arms. My subconscious must be getting interested in pregnancy.” It was the High Renaissance of Art in England at that time — a Renaissance that was to come to an end in Sloper and Frampton — and people were in the habit of talking like that. Baird was rather taken aback by her sense of proportion, which, it seemed to him, did little credit to a married woman of several years’ standing, but he said nothing. Indeed there was nothing to say. There was no reason why they should not have a child. They were comfortably off. “You could have one by February,” he said after a brief calculation on his finger-ends. But then it was discovered that this would interfere with their yearly trip across the Channel, and the idea was temporarily shelved. Alice had been promised an introduction to Picasso (she still imagined the artists bore more than a superficial resemblance to their work) and would not trade that for a subconscious gratification.
Their life was a happy one simply because no obstacles presented themselves; but it could not last for ever. After several years John became troubled by a sense of failure, and even she felt an incurable staleness creeping into her work. They did not seem to have advanced a step towards their objectives. T. S. Eliot was not yet overthrown, and, try as she might, Alice found it impossible to make much headway. As the young man in the Oxhead Gallery said to her: “Frankly, you know, dash it all, taken by and large, as it were, everyone’s gone non-representative now. I mean to say, in England, mind you, a lot have even gone heterosexual in a desire to keep up, as it were.” It was a true if sad proposition. If it hadn’t been for the Burlington Magazine Alice would have utterly lost faith in herself. Specially as John was so gloomy and sat about all day by the river, tearing up his manuscript and repeating in hollow accents, “What the hell is the meaning of it all, anyway?” His father had given him the Parmenides for a birthday present.
They travelled briefly in France and Spain, and the sun woke them up a bit. Everywhere they moved along the charming and romantic landscapes with the sense of having found at last their proper environment. They thought of taking a house in Venice, but gave the idea up as expensive and impracticable. The little English cottage cost a lot to keep up. In Madrid they had, enjoyably enough, a terrific quarrel — the first they had ever had. Alice had some trouble over her period and imagined that she was going to have a baby. Instead of being pleased for the sake of her unawakened subconscience, its very idea threw her into a panic. Now it seemed to her that a baby would threaten not only her art but her freedom too — the self-indulgent effortless years of conversation, travel and friendship which lay ahead. Though she still wanted the child the thought of losing both freedom and figure at one blow was too much. She became rather hysterical and, of course, John was to blame; he, for his part, found her rather tiresome as a travelling companion. After a brief passage-at-arms in which Alice broke a plate over his head, he retired to sulk in a nearby hotel until she should come to her senses.
They had both of them been staying in a villa belonging to Coréze, the little South American Jew whose brief run of glory many will remember, and whose acrobatic leaps from style to style had amazed and delighted Alice. “Bounding vitality”, she had told John, “written over every canvas.” It was written all over Coréze’s little Semitic face too. Coréze was for some time a fiery little pace-maker for the Cubists, and had impressed them both with his tales of the great men he knew. His impersonation of James Joyce writing in chalk on a blackboard was impressive to a degree. He even gave the impression that parts of Ulysses would never have been written if he, Coréze … The story of Picasso and the Pernod, too, never failed to bring the house down. His imitation of the way the Master had put the glass down and said: “Tiens — un Pernod quoi?” was funnier and more expressive than Fernandel.