The Artist in the Society of Friends

by Katharine M. Wilson

Originally published in Reynard, 1965

Note: The Quaker Fellowship of the Arts (QFA) is a British organization founded in the mid-1950s, parent of sorts to the North American Fellowship of Quakers in the Arts (FQA).

Friends in general tend to enjoy communicating with each other. One of my wartime impressions of evacuation to Huddersfield is of how, after a meeting of concerned townsfolk dispersed, Friends could be seen coming together across the empty hall to compare their reactions. This characteristic strikes strangers at once. They are surprised that we linger so long after Meeting for worship to talk to each other. A friend I brought to a Swarthmore lecture was absolutely astounded by its prelude of five or six hundred people all chattering excitedly. She said she had never been so astonished since she first heard the similar phenomenon with starlings at Trafalgar Square. So QFA gatherings have this basis.

But there is more to it than that. Artists are a minority in most societies and often feel a little solitary. Their art absorbs them. In its practice they feel most themselves, and they look out on life from this angle. But in communion with others the door to this vital part of themselves tends to keep shut.

From the other side too, artists seem rather strange folk. An artistic orientation makes people simple, for their reactions tend to be natural, unsophisticated, unconventional and quite unpredictable. They have a sort of untamed quality also. I think I shall never forget the first committee meeting of the QFA. It was launched owing to the imagination and dynamic of Katharine Nix-James, in response to a letter in The Friend from Vera Brittain, who complained that although she very often found herself working with us in common concerns, the Society of Friends offered no religion for an artist. I arrived half-an-hour late, feeling rather guilty and wondering how to excuse myself, to find Katherine Nix-James sitting alone at the table with a young Friend. She greeted me enthusiastically with, "Oh, I am glad you've turned up, for the whole committee has just resigned, and I don't quite know what to do". I thought how marvellous this was that people cared so deeply and uncompromisingly for what they stood for, and acted, I hoped, out of passion. It could hardly nave happened in any other committee of the Society of Friends, conditioned as we are to defer to others, to compromise, to sink our passionate desires in the, by comparison, often tepid atmosphere of total agreement. It was as if the roof had blown off, with the sunlight streaming in. One might have thought that would be the end of the QFA. It was, of course, the beginning. Nothing I can think of so well illustrates the need that Quaker artists have for each other.

To be in a gathering of artists is to feel at ease and relaxed. It is to hear where one was deaf, to speak where one was dumb. In Francoise Gilot's memories of Picasso, coming out in the Observer supplement as I write, he is reported as saying that so often he threw a ball of statement expecting it to rebound in answer as if from a firm wall, only to find that it struck a damp sheet and flopped to the floor. In a meeting of the QFA a ball thrown nearly always has a firm response. The answer may strike one in the face if one cannot catch it, but that is better than finding a damp sheet where one threw.

Nevertheless I disagree with Vera Brittain's complaint that the Society of Friends does not offer a congenial religion for the artist. When I come to think of what differentiates the artist from other people I find that the Society of Friends is differentiated from other sects in precisely the same sort of way. Thus the artist lives from impulses he finds within himself. If he is a creator, these impulses flow into his work, giving it form and determining much of its content. if he is an interpreter, he feels the creator's intention taking hold of him. That is to say, he is accustomed to working with something he finds within himself that he feels is not himself. Thus when I used to play the violin, I always felt that my instrument was like a live thing with a character quite different from my own. I held the bow and it played. Whereas I was methodical, controlled, and conscientious in practice, it was temperamental to a degree. I loved it as a live thing, and got exasperated with it in the same sort of way. Such a sense of something other than oneself with which one co-operates, makes it easy to recognise the truth of an inward life, and to find one's religion there.

Then the Society of Friends places great value on the individual and values individuals for their diversity. This is the artist's approach. He trusts his own individuality; he even feels it has a certain sanctity. This experience makes him respect other personalities. He does not laugh at what he cannot understand, or think strange art must be charlatan work. On the contrary he stands wonderingly before it. The artist distrusts definition and rules to be observed, as the Friend distrusts creeds. Only what is dead can be defined. A living work of art can no more be precisely described, or its meaning defined than can anything in the realm of religion. The good Quaker trusts to the leadings he finds within himself even if they are surprising and irrational. So does the artist. A Friend suspects criticism; a completely adverse judgement seems to him to imply some insensitiveness. Both Friends and artists believe in living out their own inward leadings, not in sitting judgment on the activity of others.

There was something in Vera Brittain's complaint, however. Quakerism has a puritan strand. No artist can be a puritan. Even Milton was not. It took blindness to "purify" his poetry, and that not very thoroughly. It often seems, too, that Quakers without the artist's approach find it too easy to be at peace in dingy and dilapidated Meeting Houses, and may even put this to their credit. Or they quote well-intentioned poetry (and even write it) soaked in mouldy phrases. The QFA came into being to make its protest, and even more to educate. It has succeeded so well that its work may seem to be done. I suppose no Friends now would shut art out as evil in itself because it gives such transports of pleasure, and fewer, than used to, still consider it of secondary importance to practical good works. Yet it is difficult for others to realise that the practice of his art may be as essential and as re-creating for the artist as Meeting for Worship, or that it has an imperative voice demanding to speak. When its work of education is done, the QFA will still be needed to bring Quaker artists together, and their art, so that they may communicate with each other.