Civilisation (1969–1970): Season 1, Episode 10 - The Smile of Reason - full transcript
(STRING QUARTET PLAYS)
What witty, intelligent faces.
They're the successful dramatists
of 18th-century Paris,
and their busts stand in the foyer
of the French National Theatre,
that theatre which for 100 years
did so much to promote good sense
and humanity.
And here is the wittiest
and most intelligent of them all.
In fact, at a certain level,
one of the most intelligent men
that have ever lived...
Voltaire.
He's smiling. The smile of reason.
You know, there's a character called
Fontenelle, a French philosopher,
who, by living to be nearly 100,
bridged the 17th and 18th centuries -
the world of Newton
and the world of Voltaire.
He held a position known as Perpetual
Secretary of the Academy of Science.
He told an interviewer that he had
never run and never lost his temper.
The interviewer asked him
if he had ever laughed.
He said,
"No, I have never made ha-ha."
But he smiled. And so do
all the other distinguished writers,
philosophers, dramatists
and hostesses of the French 18th century.
It seems to us shallow.
We've got into deep water
in the last 50 years.
We feel that people ought to be
more passionate, more convinced,
or, as the current jargon has it,
more committed.
The smile of reason may seem to betray
a certain incomprehension
of the deeper human emotions,
but it didn't preclude
some strongly held beliefs.
Belief in natural law,
belief in justice, belief in toleration.
Not bad.
The philosophers of the Enlightenment
pushed European civilisation
some steps up the hill.
And in theory, at any rate,
this gain was consolidated
throughout the 19th century.
Up to the 1930s, people were supposed
not to burn witches
and other members of minority groups,
or extract confessions by torture,
or pervert the course of justice,
or go to prison for speaking the truth.
Except, of course, during wars.
This we owe to the movement
known as the Enlightenment,
and, above all, to Voltaire.
Although the victory of reason
and tolerance was won in France,
it was initiated in England,
and the French philosophers never
concealed their debt to the country
that, in a score of years,
had produced Newton, Locke
and the Bloodless Revolution.
When Voltaire visited England
in the 1720s,
it had enjoyed a quarter of a century
of very vigorous intellectual life.
And although Swift, Pope and Addison
might give and receive
some hard knocks in print,
they weren't physically beaten up
by the hired gangs of offended noblemen,
or sent to prison for satirical references
to the Establishment.
Both these things happened to Voltaire
and, as a result,
he took refuge in England in 1726.
It was the age
of the great country houses.
And in 1722,
the most splendid of all
had just been completed for Marlborough.
There it is - Blenheim Palace.
(# HANDEL:
Music for the Royal Fireworks: Minuet II)
A superb setting,
but not everybody's idea
of a pleasant country retreat.
When Voltaire saw it, he exclaimed,
"What a great heap of stone,
"without charm or taste."”
Well, it was built as a monument
to military glory,
and the architect, Sir John Vanbrugh,
was a natural romantic,
a castle builder, who didn't care a fig
for good taste and classical decorum.
18th-century England was
the paradise of the amateur,
by which I mean
men rich enough and grand enough
to do whatever they liked,
who, nevertheless, did things
that required a good deal of expertise.
One of the things they chose to do
was architecture.
Wren began as a brilliant amateur
and although
he made himself into a professional,
he retained the amateur's freedom
of approach to every problem.
And two of his chief successors
were amateurs by any definition.
Sir John Vanbrugh wrote plays,
but he also designed the vast
and complicated structure of Blenheim.
Lord Burlington was a connoisseur
and a collector and arbiter of taste,
the sort of character nowadays
much despised,
but he built this small masterpiece
of domestic architecture, Chiswick.
(# RICHARD MUDGE: Concerto in D Major)
One may wonder
how many professional architects today
could handle these problems of design
as expertly as Lord Burlington has done.
These steps and colonnades
look very imposing,
but the building behind them
is quite small,
about the size of an old parsonage.
In fact, Chiswick was not meant
for day-to-day existence,
but for social occasions.
Conversation, intrigue, political gossip,
and a little music.
Of course, it's only a miniature,
a kind of glorified jewel box,
and yet I don't feel
that it's at all pinched or constricted.
In a way, these 18th-century amateurs
were the inheritors of
the Renaissance ideal of universal man.
And it's significant that the typical
universal man of the Renaissance,
Alberti, had also been an architect.
If we may still consider architecture
to be a social art,
an art by which men may be enabled
to lead a fuller life,
then perhaps the architect should
touch life at many points
and not be too narrowly specialised.
18th-century amateurism
ran through everything -
chemistry, philosophy,
botany and natural history.
It produced men like
the indefatigable Sir Joseph Banks,
who refused to go
on Captain Cook's second voyage
because he wasn't allowed
to have two horn players
to make music for him during dinner.
There was a freshness
and a freedom of mind in these men
that is entirely lost
in the rigidly controlled classifications
of the professional.
And they were independent,
with all the advantages
and disadvantages to society
that result from that condition.
They wouldn't have fitted in
to our modern Utopia.
I recently heard a professor of sociology
say on television,
"What's not prohibited
must be made compulsory.”
Not a suggestion that would have
attracted those eminent visitors,
Voltaire and Rousseau,
who drew inspiration from
our philosophy and our institutions...
and our tolerance.
But, as usual, there was another side
to this shining medal.
And of this, we have an exceptionally
vivid record in the work of Hogarth.
WOMAN: # In the days of me youth
I could bill like a dove
ALL: # Fa la-la-la [a-la a-la-la-la-de
MAN: # In the days of our youth
you could bill like a dove
# Like a sparrow at all times
was ready for love
ALL: # Fa la-Il-de-la-de
# Fa la-li-de-la-de
# Fa-la-la la-la-la la-la-la-de
WOMAN: # The life of all mortals
in kissing should pass
ALL: # La-la-la-la [a-la-li-de-la-de
MAN: # The life of all mortals
in kissing should pass
# Lip to lip while you're young
then the lip to the glass
ALL: # La-de-li-de-la-de
# Fal-de-li-da-la-de
Fa-la-la-la-la-la fa-la-la-de. #
Drinking? Wenching? Stealing?
No more than today, I suppose,
but rather more openly.
All this coarse life is painted
with great delicacy.
And although Hogarth's compositions
are rather a muddle,
one can't deny that he had
a gift of narrative invention.
In later life, he did pictures
of an election that are easy to follow
and are very convincing comment
on the much cracked-up democracy
of 18th-century England.
Here's the polling booth,
with imbeciles and moribunds
being persuaded to make their marks.
And an old soldier loyally voting
for the Establishment with his hook.
And here's the successful candidate,
like a fat, powdered capon
borne in triumph by his bruisers
who are still carrying on
their private feuds.
And I must confess that Hogarth conquers
my prejudice by this blind fiddler.
A real stroke of imagination
outside the usual range
of his moralising journalism.
The truth is, I think,
that 18th-century England,
in the aftermath
of its middle-class revolution,
had created two societies,
very remote from one another.
One was a society
of modest country gentlemen
of which we have a perfect record
in the work of a painter called Devis,
comically stiff and expressionless
in their cold, empty rooms.
True, it developed into the world
of Jane Austen,
which was not lacking
in critical intelligence,
but was somewhat deficient in energy.
The other was the urban society of which
Hogarth has left us many records.
Plenty of animal spirits,
but not what we could call,
by any stretch, civilisation.
I hope you won't think it too facile
if I compare this print
called
A Midnight Modern Conversation
with a picture painted in the same decade
called A Reading From Molière
by the French artist de Troy.
In this series, I've tried to go beyond
the narrower meaning
of the word "civilised”
but, all the same, it has its value
and one can't deny
that this is a picture of civilised life.
Even the furniture contrives to be
both beautiful and comfortable
at the same time.
And one reason is that whereas
all the characters in Hogarth's
Midnight Conversation are male,
five out of the seven figures
in the de Troy are women.
In talking about
the 12th and 13th centuries,
I said how great an advance
in civilisation
was achieved
by respect for feminine qualities.
And the same was true
of 18th-century France.
I think it absolutely essential
to civilisation
that the male and female principles
be kept in balance.
And I've observed
that where, at a party,
men and women hive off
into separate groups,
the level of civilisation declines.
In 18th-century France,
the influence of women was benevolent
and, on the whole, creative.
And it produced that curious institution
of the 18th century, the salon.
Those small social gatherings
of intelligent men and women
drawn from all over Europe
who met in the rooms of gifted hostesses,
like Madame du Deffand,
were for 40 years
the centres of European civilisation.
They were less poetical
than the court of Urbino,
but intellectually a good deal more alert.
The ladies who presided over them were
neither very young nor very rich.
Here's Madame Geoffrin eating dinner
while her servant reads to her.
We know exactly what they looked like
because French artists at the time
have portrayed them without flattery,
but with a penetrating eye
for their subtlety of mind.
How did these ladies do it?
Not by beauty or physical charms,
they did it by human sympathy,
by making people feel at ease...
by tact.
The success of the Parisian salon
also depended on two accidental factors.
The court and government of France
were not situated in Paris,
but here in Versailles.
It was a separate world.
Indeed the courtiers of Versailles
always referred to it as "ce pays ici" -
this country of ours.
And to this day, I enter this huge,
unfriendly courtyard with mixed feelings,
panic and fatigue,
as if I were going into an alien world.
But the remoteness of Versailles
had this good result
that Parisian society was free from
the stultifying rituals of court procedure
and the trivial, day-to-day
pre-occupations of politics.
The other thing that made 18th-century
salons a source of enlightenment
was that the French upper classes
were not destructively rich.
They'd lost most of their money
in a financial crash
brought about by
a Scottish wizard named David Law.
As I've said several times, a margin
of wealth is helpful to civilisation,
but for some mysterious reason,
great wealth is destructive.
I suppose that
some discipline and economy
is as necessary in art as it is in life.
Also, great display is heartless.
The south front of Versailles
is a masterpiece of architectural design,
but it doesn't touch us
like something loved and familiar.
For example,
look at Chardin, the greatest painter
of mid-18th-century France.
No-one has ever had a surer taste
in colour and design.
Every area, every interval, every tone,
gives one the feeling
of perfect rightness.
Well, Chardin didn't depict
the upper classes, still less the court.
He sometimes found his subjects
in the thrifty bourgeoisie -
and what sweet people they are -
sometimes among the working class,
where I think he was happiest
because he loved the basic design
of pots and barrels.
They are noble in a way that
a piece of Louis XV furniture couldn't be.
Chardin's pictures show
the qualities immortalised in verse
by La Fontaine and Moliere -
good sense, a good heart,
an approach to human relationships
both simple and delicate.
And they show that these survived
into the mid-18th century
and survive to this day
among skilled workmen -
what the French call "artisans" -
who still maintain the character
of French civilisation.
The salons, where the brightest intellects
of France were assembled,
were more luxurious,
but still not overwhelming.
The furniture was in a style
that may seem to us rather extravagant,
but the rooms were of a normal size.
People could feel that they had
some human relationship with one another.
After the Law crash,
many of the French upper classes
couldn't afford houses in Paris
and lived in apartments.
Comfort and elegance
took the place of grandeur.
(# MOZART: Piano Quartet in G Minor,
K.478: III. Rondo: Allegro moderato)
We have a complete record of how
people lived in mid-18th-century France
because there were innumerable
minor artists who were content to record
the contemporary scene,
instead of expressing themselves.
Here's part of a series modestly
known as The Monument of Costume,
small masterpieces of design
and execution.
The ladies have come to see their friend
who's about to have a baby.
"Don't be afraid, dear friend,"
they say.
In this painting by Boucher,
a lady is dressing by the fire,
her maid asking her
what she's going to wear.
And here, also by Boucher,
is the family sitting by the window
having their morning coffee,
or more likely, chocolate.
The little girl is showing off her toys.
Well, nobody but a sourpuss
or a hypocrite would deny
that this is an agreeable way of life.
Why do so many of us
instinctively react against it?
Because we think it
based on exploitation?
Well, do we really think that far?
If so, it's like being sorry for animals
and not being a vegetarian.
Our whole society is based on
different sorts of exploitation.
Or is it because we believe that
this kind of life was shallow and trivial?
Well, that simply isn't true.
The men who enjoyed it were no fools.
Talleyrand said that only those
who experienced the life of 18th-century
France had known the "douceur de vivre" -
the sweetness of living.
And Talleyrand was certainly
one of the most intelligent men
who had ever taken up politics.
The people who frequented
the salons of 18th-century France
were not merely
a group of fashionable good-timers.
They were the outstanding philosophers
and scientists of the time.
They wanted to publish their
very revolutionary views on religion.
They wanted to curtail the power
of a lazy king
and an irresponsible government.
They wanted to change society.
In the end, they got rather more
of a change than they bargained for.
The men who met each other in the salons
of Madame du Deffand and Madame Geoffrin
were engaged in a great work.
Here it is.
An encyclopaedia,
or, Dictionnaire Raisonné Des Sciences,
Des Arts Et Des Métiers.
It was intended to advance mankind
by conquering ignorance.
It was a gigantic enterprise,
as you can see.
Eventually -
this is only a small part of it -
eventually there were 24 folio volumes.
And, of course,
it involved a great many contributors,
but the dynamo of the whole undertaking
was Diderot.
There he is in a picture by van Loo
smiling the smile of reason,
which enraged him.
He said he'd been made to look like
an old cocotte
who was still trying to be agreeable.
He was a many-sided man,
very intelligent, a novelist,
a philosopher, even an art critic -
the great supporter of Chardin.
And in the encyclopaedia,
he wrote articles on everything
from Aristotle to artificial flowers.
The aims of the encyclopaedia
seem harmless enough to us.
But, you know, authoritarian governments
don't like dictionaries.
They live by lies
and by bamboozling abstractions.
They can't afford to have words
accurately defined.
The encyclopaedia was
twice suppressed,
and, by its ultimate triumph,
the polite reunions
in these elegant salons
became precursors
of revolutionary politics.
They were also precursors of science.
The illustrated supplement
of the encyclopaedia is full of pictures
of technical processes.
Here's one of the plates,
for example,
showing the...polishing of wood.
And then, another...
Or the beginning...
The beginning here, shows
the making of silk for the tapestry.
And this is the actual dyeing of the wool
for the Gobelins tapestries.
And throughout the book,
there are extremely interesting examples
of the techniques of the day.
In the mid-18th century,
science was fashionable and romantic,
as one can see from this picture
by Wright of Derby.
The experiment with the air pump
brings us to the new age
of scientific invention.
The natural philosopher,
with his long hair and dedicated stare,
perhaps a trifle theatrical, but the other
characters are awfully well observed.
The little girls who can't bear
to witness the death of the poor pigeon,
the sensible, middle-aged man
who tells them
that such sacrifices must be made
in the interests of science,
and the thoughtful man on the right
who is wondering
if this kind of experiment
ls really going to do mankind much good.
They're all taking it quite seriously,
but nonetheless science was,
to some extent,
an after-dinner occupation, like
playing the piano in the next century.
Even Voltaire,
who spent a vast amount of time
on weighing molten metal and
cutting up worms was only a dilettante.
He lacked the patient realism
of the experimenter.
And perhaps such tenacity exists
only in a milieu
where quick-wittedness
is less highly valued.
In the 18th century,
it emerged in a country
where civilisation still had
the energy of newness - Scotland.
(# EWAN MACCOLL:
Will Ye Go Tae Sheriffmuir)
# Will ye go tae Sheriffmuir
Bauld John O'Innisture
# There tae see the noble Mar
And his Hielan' laddies
# A' the true men o' the north
Angus, Huntly and Seaforth
A Scourin" on tae cross the Forth
Wi' their white cockadies
# There ye'll see the banners flare
There ye'll hear the bagpipes rare
# And the trumpets' deadly blare
# M' the cannon '5 rattle
# There ye'll see the bauld McGraws
Camerons and Clanranald's raws
# A the clans wi' loud hussas
# Rushin' tae the battle. #
The Scottish character -
and I'm a Scot myself -
shows an extraordinary combination
of realism and reckless sentiment.
The sentiment
has passed into popular legend
and the Scots are proud of it,
and no wonder.
Where, but in Edinburgh,
does a romantic landscape
come right into the centre of the town?
But it's the realism that counts
and it made 18th-century Scotland -
a poor, remote, semi-barbarous country -
a force in European civilisation.
Let me name some 18th-century Scots.
In the world of ideas and science -
Adam Smith, David Hume,
Joseph Black and James Watt.
It's a matter of historical fact
that these were the men
who, soon after the year 1760,
changed the whole current
of European thought and life.
Joseph Black and James Watt
discovered that heat,
in particular steam,
could be a source of power.
Well, I needn't describe
how that has changed the world!
In The Wealth Of Nations,
Adam Smith invented the study
of political economy
and created a social science
that lasted up to the time of Karl Marx.
In his Treatise On Human Nature,
Hume succeeded in proving
that experience and reason
have no necessary connection
with one another,
that there's no such thing
as a rational belief.
Hume, as he himself said,
was of an open, social
and cheerful humour
and he was much beloved
by the ladies in the Paris salons.
I suppose they'd never read
that small book
which has made all philosophers
feel uneasy till the present day.
All these great Scots lived
in the grim, narrow tenements
of the old town of Edinburgh,
piled on the hill behind the castle.
But even in their lifetime,
the great Scottish architects,
the brothers Adam,
had produced one of the finest pieces
of town planning in Europe -
the New Town of Edinburgh.
(VIOLIN PLAYS SCOTTISH AIR)
In addition, they exploited -
I think one may almost say invented -
the strict, pure classicism
that was to influence architecture
all over Europe.
In fact another Scot, named Cameron,
took it to Russia with tremendous effect.
And then, a Scot having popularised
Neoclassicism,
Sir Walter Scott popularised
the Gothic Middle Ages
and furnished the imagination
of the romantically minded for a century.
Not bad, for a poor,
underpopulated country!
Through the practical genius
of the Scots and English,
those technical diagrams
in the encyclopaedia became a reality.
And before the political revolutions
of America and France had taken effect,
a far deeper and more durable
transformation was already under way,
what we call the Industrial Revolution.
Wright of Derby,
whose imagination had been stirred
by the scientific exercises
of the intellectuals,
was also moved
by their first commercial application
and he painted this picture
of Arkwright's mill at Cromford.
He's felt the romance of industrialism
as it begins to usurp
the power of the old regime.
If, on the practical side,
we had to visit Scotland,
on the moral side,
we must return to France.
Not to Paris, but to the borders
of Switzerland
because it was there,
a mile or two from the French frontier,
that Voltaire made his home.
After several bad experiences,
he'd become suspicious of authority
and he liked to live in a place where
he could easily slip over the border.
He didn't suffer from his exile.
He'd made a lot of money by speculation,
and his last bolt hole,
the Château of Ferney, is, as you see,
a large, agreeable country house.
Voltaire built the wings at either end.
He also planted this alleyway of beeches
for a cool promenade on a hot day.
When he was visited
by the self-important ladies of Geneva,
he would receive them seated on a bench
at the far end, down there behind me.
It amused him to see how they struggled
to prevent their towering, powdered wigs
from getting entangled in the branches.
Well, it's grown up a good deal
since then.
It was in this room that he thought up
devastating witticisms
with which to destroy his enemies.
He may even have done so
in this very chair,
one of a set with the covers worked
by his niece, Madame Denis.
I wish I could convey
the quality of his wit to you,
but Voltaire's one of those writers
whose virtue is inseparable
from his style.
And true style is untranslatable.
He himself said,
"One word in the wrong place will ruin
the most beautiful thought.”
Still more would it ruin the wit and irony
which were his peculiar gifts.
To the end of his life,
he couldn't resist a joke.
But on one subject he was
completely serious - justice.
Many people in his lifetime, and since,
have compared him to a monkey.
But when it came to fighting injustice,
he was a bulldog.
He never let go.
He pestered all his friends,
he wrote an unending stream
of pamphlets,
and finally had some of the victims,
like these members
of a Protestant family named Calas
who had been cruelly persecuted
in Bordeaux,
living at his expense at Ferney.
Gradually, the world ceased to think
of him as an impudent libertine,
but as a patriarch and sage.
And by 1778, he at last felt it safe
to return to Paris.
He was 84.
No victorious general,
no lone flyer, has ever been given
such a reception.
He was hailed as the universal man
and the friend of mankind.
People of all classes
crowded round his house,
drew his carriage,
mobbed him wherever he went.
Finally, his bust was crowned
on the stage at the Théâtre Français.
Naturally, it killed him.
But he died triumphant.
The remarkable thing about the frivolous
18th century was its seriousness.
It was, in many ways,
the heir to Renaissance humanism,
but there was a vital difference.
The Renaissance had taken place within
the framework of the Christian church.
A few humanists had showed signs
of scepticism,
but no-one had expressed doubts
about the Christian religion as a whole.
People had the comfortable moral freedom
that goes with an unquestioned faith.
But, by the middle of the 18th century,
serious-minded men could see
that the church had become a tied house -
tied to property and status
and defending its interests
by repressions and injustice.
No-one felt this more strongly
than Voltaire.
"Écrasez l'infâme" -
crush the vermin.
It dominated his later life
and he bequeathed it to his followers.
I remember HG Wells,
who was a kind of 20th-century Voltaire,
saying that he daren't
drive a car in France
because the temptation to run over
a priest would be too strong for him.
All the same, Voltaire remained
a kind of believer.
He even built a chapel at Ferney.
Over the door, he had inscribed
the words "deo erexit Voltaire",
Voltaire in larger letters. It was
an affair solely between him and God.
However, several of the contributors
to the encyclopaedia
were total materialists.
And so the late-18th century
was faced with the troublesome task
of constructing a new morality
without revelation or Christian sanctions.
This morality was built
on two foundations.
One of them was the doctrine
of natural law,
the other, the stoic morality
of ancient republican Rome.
Republican virtue inspired
the most gifted painter of his day, David.
In The Lives Of Plutarch,
people read about those grim,
puritanical heroes of the Roman republic,
who sacrificed themselves and their
families in the interests of the State,
and they took these monsters
as models for a new political order.
Here's David's first great revolutionary
picture, The Oath Of The Horatii.
It was painted in 1785
and it created an effect
which those of us who remember the first
appearance of Picasso's Guernica,
may be able, faintly, to imagine.
The Oath Of The Horatiii is the supreme
picture of revolutionary action,
not only in its subject,
but in its treatment.
Gone are all the melting outlines
and pools of sensuous shadow
of a Fragonard.
And in their place are these
firmly outlined expressions of will.
The unified, totalitarian gesture
of the brothers,
like the kinetic image of a rotating
wheel, has an almost hypnotic quality.
Even the architecture
is a conscious revolt
against the refined,
ornamental style of the time.
These Tuscan columns assert
the superior virtue of the plain man.
Two years later, David painted
an even more grimly Plutarchian picture -
the lictors bringing back
to the house of Brutus
the bodies of his two sons whom
he had condemned to death for treachery,
one of those incidents in Roman history
that don't appeal to us,
but which was horribly acceptable
to French feeling
on the eve of the Revolution.
One sees how completely
the "douceur de vivre"
had lost its hold
on the European imagination,
even before 1789.
In fact, the new morality had already
guided a revolution outside Europe.
Once more, we must leave
the ancient focus of civilisation
and travel to the edge
of the civilised world - America.
For it was in this virgin soil,
and not in the compost heap of Europe,
that the aims of the encyclopaedia
were first realised.
In the 18th century, no white man,
except hunters,
had penetrated beyond that range of hills.
(TRIBAL DRUMS BEAT)
But here, on the border territory of
the Indian, the trapper, the buffalo,
a young Virginian lawyer elected
to build his home in the 1760s.
His name was Thomas Jefferson,
and he called his house Monticello -
the little mountain.
It must have been an extraordinary
apparition in that wild landscape.
Jefferson made it up out of the book by
the great Renaissance architect Palladio,
of which he is said to have owned
the only copy in America.
But of course, he had to invent
a great deal of it himself
and he was highly inventive.
The interior of the house betrays
the obstinate ingenuity of a creative man
who is determined
to work out everything for himself.
This is his idea for a bed,
placed between two rooms in the wall
so he could get out either side,
either into his study or his sitting room.
And to dress, he went up
this circular stair to the room above.
This was his own design for spectacles
in a little box the size of a patch box.
They look a little small, but in fact,
you can read by them perfectly well,
and with them I can read
his own edition of Vitruvius,
the classical architect
who inspired so much of his building.
It's placed on a table, a revolving table,
which he designed himself,
which works very well,
and a revolving chair.
Everything, everything in the room,
he designed,
the drapes, the mouldings,
every single thing.
And it all has a kind of simple,
homespun, independent air,
which is the stamp of Jefferson.
He was the typical universal man
of the 18th century -
linguist, scientist, agriculturalist,
educator, town planner and architect,
almost a reincarnation
of Leon Battista Alberti,
the universal man
of the Renaissance,
even down to a love of music,
and the management of horses
and a certain crankiness -
what, in a lesser man,
could have been called
a touch of self-righteousness.
What a wilful, independent head!
Of course, Jefferson wasn't
as good an architect as Alberti,
but then, he was also
President of the United States
and, as an architect,
he was by no means bad.
Monticello was the beginning of
that simple, almost rustic classicism
that stretches up the eastern seaboard
of America, right up to Massachusetts,
and lasted for 100 years,
producing a body of simple,
civilised, domestic architecture
equal to any in the world.
And it reflects the grave self-assurance
of the founders of the American Republic.
Jefferson is buried
in the grounds of Monticello.
He left instructions for his tomb.
On it were to be inscribed the following
sentences and not a word more -
"Here was buried Thomas Jefferson,
"author of the Declaration
of American Independence,
"of the Statute of Virginia
for Religious Freedom
"and father of
the University of Virginia."
Well, the establishment
of religious freedom
that earned him so much hatred and abuse
in his own day, we now take for granted.
But the University of Virginia
is still a surprise.
It was all designed by Jefferson
and it's full of his character.
He called it an "academical village".
There are ten pavilions
for ten professors, and between them,
behind this colonnade,
the rooms of the students,
all within reach and yet all individual -
the ideal of corporate humanism.
And then, outside the courtyard
are small gardens
that show his love of privacy.
Those serpentine walls were
Jefferson's speciality.
Nobody knows where he got them from.
Needless to say, they had a practical
as well as an aesthetic intention.
The great courtyard was round
three sides of a rectangle.
The fourth side, you saw
over the mountains to Indian territory.
How confidently,
in their semi-wild domain,
the Founding Fathers of America assumed
the mantle of republican virtue
and put into practice the notions
of the French Enlightenment.
They even called on the great sculptor
of the Enlightenment, Houdon,
to commemorate
their victorious General Washington.
And here's the result, standing
in the Capitol at Richmond, Virginia.
This programme began with Houdon's statue
of Voltaire smiling the smile of reason.
It could end with Houdon's statue
of Washington.
No more smiles.
Houdon saw his subject as
that favourite Roman republican hero,
the decent country gentleman
called away from his farm
to defend his neighbours' liberties.
(# HEWITT: The Battle Of Trenton)
In fact, the War of Independence
lasted six years,
and at the end of it,
the British totally withdrew their forces
and the new republic was born.
Washington retired
to his farm at Mount Vernon.
The ideas of the French Enlightenment
influenced the founders
of the American constitution,
and in return,
the success of the American rebellion
played a part in inspiring the French
to overthrow their monarchy.
After the storming of the Bastille,
Lafayette sent the key
of that infamous prison
as a present to Washington.
Washington hung it in the hall
at Mount Vernon,
and there it has stayed ever since.
By this date, Washington had little time
to spend at his home farm
on the banks of the Potomac.
He had been elected
first President of the United States.
His monument dominates the new
capital city which was named after him.
Facing it,
across the tidal basin of the Potomac,
is the monument to Jefferson,
who became the third President.
Not only the Palladian architecture,
but the music has crossed the Atlantic.
God Save The King has become
My Country 'Tis Of Thee.
(# God Save The King)
On the inner walls are quotations
from Jefferson's writings.
First, the familiar, noble, indestructible
words of the Declaration of Independence -
"We hold these truths to be self-evident -
that all men are created equal,
"that they are endowed by their creator
with certain inalienable rights,
"among these are life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness,
"and that to secure these rights,
governments are instituted among men.”
"Self-evident truths."”
That's the voice of
18th-century enlightenment.
But on the opposite wall
are less-familiar words by Jefferson,
that still give us pause today.
"I tremble for my country
when I reflect that God is just,
"that his justice cannot sleep forever.
"Commerce between master and slave
is despotism.
"Nothing is more certainly written
in the book of fate
"than that these people are to be free."
A peaceful-looking scene.
A great ideal made visible.
But beyond it, what problems -
almost insoluble,
or at least not soluble
by the smile of reason.
(# CHARLES IVES: Variations On America)
What witty, intelligent faces.
They're the successful dramatists
of 18th-century Paris,
and their busts stand in the foyer
of the French National Theatre,
that theatre which for 100 years
did so much to promote good sense
and humanity.
And here is the wittiest
and most intelligent of them all.
In fact, at a certain level,
one of the most intelligent men
that have ever lived...
Voltaire.
He's smiling. The smile of reason.
You know, there's a character called
Fontenelle, a French philosopher,
who, by living to be nearly 100,
bridged the 17th and 18th centuries -
the world of Newton
and the world of Voltaire.
He held a position known as Perpetual
Secretary of the Academy of Science.
He told an interviewer that he had
never run and never lost his temper.
The interviewer asked him
if he had ever laughed.
He said,
"No, I have never made ha-ha."
But he smiled. And so do
all the other distinguished writers,
philosophers, dramatists
and hostesses of the French 18th century.
It seems to us shallow.
We've got into deep water
in the last 50 years.
We feel that people ought to be
more passionate, more convinced,
or, as the current jargon has it,
more committed.
The smile of reason may seem to betray
a certain incomprehension
of the deeper human emotions,
but it didn't preclude
some strongly held beliefs.
Belief in natural law,
belief in justice, belief in toleration.
Not bad.
The philosophers of the Enlightenment
pushed European civilisation
some steps up the hill.
And in theory, at any rate,
this gain was consolidated
throughout the 19th century.
Up to the 1930s, people were supposed
not to burn witches
and other members of minority groups,
or extract confessions by torture,
or pervert the course of justice,
or go to prison for speaking the truth.
Except, of course, during wars.
This we owe to the movement
known as the Enlightenment,
and, above all, to Voltaire.
Although the victory of reason
and tolerance was won in France,
it was initiated in England,
and the French philosophers never
concealed their debt to the country
that, in a score of years,
had produced Newton, Locke
and the Bloodless Revolution.
When Voltaire visited England
in the 1720s,
it had enjoyed a quarter of a century
of very vigorous intellectual life.
And although Swift, Pope and Addison
might give and receive
some hard knocks in print,
they weren't physically beaten up
by the hired gangs of offended noblemen,
or sent to prison for satirical references
to the Establishment.
Both these things happened to Voltaire
and, as a result,
he took refuge in England in 1726.
It was the age
of the great country houses.
And in 1722,
the most splendid of all
had just been completed for Marlborough.
There it is - Blenheim Palace.
(# HANDEL:
Music for the Royal Fireworks: Minuet II)
A superb setting,
but not everybody's idea
of a pleasant country retreat.
When Voltaire saw it, he exclaimed,
"What a great heap of stone,
"without charm or taste."”
Well, it was built as a monument
to military glory,
and the architect, Sir John Vanbrugh,
was a natural romantic,
a castle builder, who didn't care a fig
for good taste and classical decorum.
18th-century England was
the paradise of the amateur,
by which I mean
men rich enough and grand enough
to do whatever they liked,
who, nevertheless, did things
that required a good deal of expertise.
One of the things they chose to do
was architecture.
Wren began as a brilliant amateur
and although
he made himself into a professional,
he retained the amateur's freedom
of approach to every problem.
And two of his chief successors
were amateurs by any definition.
Sir John Vanbrugh wrote plays,
but he also designed the vast
and complicated structure of Blenheim.
Lord Burlington was a connoisseur
and a collector and arbiter of taste,
the sort of character nowadays
much despised,
but he built this small masterpiece
of domestic architecture, Chiswick.
(# RICHARD MUDGE: Concerto in D Major)
One may wonder
how many professional architects today
could handle these problems of design
as expertly as Lord Burlington has done.
These steps and colonnades
look very imposing,
but the building behind them
is quite small,
about the size of an old parsonage.
In fact, Chiswick was not meant
for day-to-day existence,
but for social occasions.
Conversation, intrigue, political gossip,
and a little music.
Of course, it's only a miniature,
a kind of glorified jewel box,
and yet I don't feel
that it's at all pinched or constricted.
In a way, these 18th-century amateurs
were the inheritors of
the Renaissance ideal of universal man.
And it's significant that the typical
universal man of the Renaissance,
Alberti, had also been an architect.
If we may still consider architecture
to be a social art,
an art by which men may be enabled
to lead a fuller life,
then perhaps the architect should
touch life at many points
and not be too narrowly specialised.
18th-century amateurism
ran through everything -
chemistry, philosophy,
botany and natural history.
It produced men like
the indefatigable Sir Joseph Banks,
who refused to go
on Captain Cook's second voyage
because he wasn't allowed
to have two horn players
to make music for him during dinner.
There was a freshness
and a freedom of mind in these men
that is entirely lost
in the rigidly controlled classifications
of the professional.
And they were independent,
with all the advantages
and disadvantages to society
that result from that condition.
They wouldn't have fitted in
to our modern Utopia.
I recently heard a professor of sociology
say on television,
"What's not prohibited
must be made compulsory.”
Not a suggestion that would have
attracted those eminent visitors,
Voltaire and Rousseau,
who drew inspiration from
our philosophy and our institutions...
and our tolerance.
But, as usual, there was another side
to this shining medal.
And of this, we have an exceptionally
vivid record in the work of Hogarth.
WOMAN: # In the days of me youth
I could bill like a dove
ALL: # Fa la-la-la [a-la a-la-la-la-de
MAN: # In the days of our youth
you could bill like a dove
# Like a sparrow at all times
was ready for love
ALL: # Fa la-Il-de-la-de
# Fa la-li-de-la-de
# Fa-la-la la-la-la la-la-la-de
WOMAN: # The life of all mortals
in kissing should pass
ALL: # La-la-la-la [a-la-li-de-la-de
MAN: # The life of all mortals
in kissing should pass
# Lip to lip while you're young
then the lip to the glass
ALL: # La-de-li-de-la-de
# Fal-de-li-da-la-de
Fa-la-la-la-la-la fa-la-la-de. #
Drinking? Wenching? Stealing?
No more than today, I suppose,
but rather more openly.
All this coarse life is painted
with great delicacy.
And although Hogarth's compositions
are rather a muddle,
one can't deny that he had
a gift of narrative invention.
In later life, he did pictures
of an election that are easy to follow
and are very convincing comment
on the much cracked-up democracy
of 18th-century England.
Here's the polling booth,
with imbeciles and moribunds
being persuaded to make their marks.
And an old soldier loyally voting
for the Establishment with his hook.
And here's the successful candidate,
like a fat, powdered capon
borne in triumph by his bruisers
who are still carrying on
their private feuds.
And I must confess that Hogarth conquers
my prejudice by this blind fiddler.
A real stroke of imagination
outside the usual range
of his moralising journalism.
The truth is, I think,
that 18th-century England,
in the aftermath
of its middle-class revolution,
had created two societies,
very remote from one another.
One was a society
of modest country gentlemen
of which we have a perfect record
in the work of a painter called Devis,
comically stiff and expressionless
in their cold, empty rooms.
True, it developed into the world
of Jane Austen,
which was not lacking
in critical intelligence,
but was somewhat deficient in energy.
The other was the urban society of which
Hogarth has left us many records.
Plenty of animal spirits,
but not what we could call,
by any stretch, civilisation.
I hope you won't think it too facile
if I compare this print
called
A Midnight Modern Conversation
with a picture painted in the same decade
called A Reading From Molière
by the French artist de Troy.
In this series, I've tried to go beyond
the narrower meaning
of the word "civilised”
but, all the same, it has its value
and one can't deny
that this is a picture of civilised life.
Even the furniture contrives to be
both beautiful and comfortable
at the same time.
And one reason is that whereas
all the characters in Hogarth's
Midnight Conversation are male,
five out of the seven figures
in the de Troy are women.
In talking about
the 12th and 13th centuries,
I said how great an advance
in civilisation
was achieved
by respect for feminine qualities.
And the same was true
of 18th-century France.
I think it absolutely essential
to civilisation
that the male and female principles
be kept in balance.
And I've observed
that where, at a party,
men and women hive off
into separate groups,
the level of civilisation declines.
In 18th-century France,
the influence of women was benevolent
and, on the whole, creative.
And it produced that curious institution
of the 18th century, the salon.
Those small social gatherings
of intelligent men and women
drawn from all over Europe
who met in the rooms of gifted hostesses,
like Madame du Deffand,
were for 40 years
the centres of European civilisation.
They were less poetical
than the court of Urbino,
but intellectually a good deal more alert.
The ladies who presided over them were
neither very young nor very rich.
Here's Madame Geoffrin eating dinner
while her servant reads to her.
We know exactly what they looked like
because French artists at the time
have portrayed them without flattery,
but with a penetrating eye
for their subtlety of mind.
How did these ladies do it?
Not by beauty or physical charms,
they did it by human sympathy,
by making people feel at ease...
by tact.
The success of the Parisian salon
also depended on two accidental factors.
The court and government of France
were not situated in Paris,
but here in Versailles.
It was a separate world.
Indeed the courtiers of Versailles
always referred to it as "ce pays ici" -
this country of ours.
And to this day, I enter this huge,
unfriendly courtyard with mixed feelings,
panic and fatigue,
as if I were going into an alien world.
But the remoteness of Versailles
had this good result
that Parisian society was free from
the stultifying rituals of court procedure
and the trivial, day-to-day
pre-occupations of politics.
The other thing that made 18th-century
salons a source of enlightenment
was that the French upper classes
were not destructively rich.
They'd lost most of their money
in a financial crash
brought about by
a Scottish wizard named David Law.
As I've said several times, a margin
of wealth is helpful to civilisation,
but for some mysterious reason,
great wealth is destructive.
I suppose that
some discipline and economy
is as necessary in art as it is in life.
Also, great display is heartless.
The south front of Versailles
is a masterpiece of architectural design,
but it doesn't touch us
like something loved and familiar.
For example,
look at Chardin, the greatest painter
of mid-18th-century France.
No-one has ever had a surer taste
in colour and design.
Every area, every interval, every tone,
gives one the feeling
of perfect rightness.
Well, Chardin didn't depict
the upper classes, still less the court.
He sometimes found his subjects
in the thrifty bourgeoisie -
and what sweet people they are -
sometimes among the working class,
where I think he was happiest
because he loved the basic design
of pots and barrels.
They are noble in a way that
a piece of Louis XV furniture couldn't be.
Chardin's pictures show
the qualities immortalised in verse
by La Fontaine and Moliere -
good sense, a good heart,
an approach to human relationships
both simple and delicate.
And they show that these survived
into the mid-18th century
and survive to this day
among skilled workmen -
what the French call "artisans" -
who still maintain the character
of French civilisation.
The salons, where the brightest intellects
of France were assembled,
were more luxurious,
but still not overwhelming.
The furniture was in a style
that may seem to us rather extravagant,
but the rooms were of a normal size.
People could feel that they had
some human relationship with one another.
After the Law crash,
many of the French upper classes
couldn't afford houses in Paris
and lived in apartments.
Comfort and elegance
took the place of grandeur.
(# MOZART: Piano Quartet in G Minor,
K.478: III. Rondo: Allegro moderato)
We have a complete record of how
people lived in mid-18th-century France
because there were innumerable
minor artists who were content to record
the contemporary scene,
instead of expressing themselves.
Here's part of a series modestly
known as The Monument of Costume,
small masterpieces of design
and execution.
The ladies have come to see their friend
who's about to have a baby.
"Don't be afraid, dear friend,"
they say.
In this painting by Boucher,
a lady is dressing by the fire,
her maid asking her
what she's going to wear.
And here, also by Boucher,
is the family sitting by the window
having their morning coffee,
or more likely, chocolate.
The little girl is showing off her toys.
Well, nobody but a sourpuss
or a hypocrite would deny
that this is an agreeable way of life.
Why do so many of us
instinctively react against it?
Because we think it
based on exploitation?
Well, do we really think that far?
If so, it's like being sorry for animals
and not being a vegetarian.
Our whole society is based on
different sorts of exploitation.
Or is it because we believe that
this kind of life was shallow and trivial?
Well, that simply isn't true.
The men who enjoyed it were no fools.
Talleyrand said that only those
who experienced the life of 18th-century
France had known the "douceur de vivre" -
the sweetness of living.
And Talleyrand was certainly
one of the most intelligent men
who had ever taken up politics.
The people who frequented
the salons of 18th-century France
were not merely
a group of fashionable good-timers.
They were the outstanding philosophers
and scientists of the time.
They wanted to publish their
very revolutionary views on religion.
They wanted to curtail the power
of a lazy king
and an irresponsible government.
They wanted to change society.
In the end, they got rather more
of a change than they bargained for.
The men who met each other in the salons
of Madame du Deffand and Madame Geoffrin
were engaged in a great work.
Here it is.
An encyclopaedia,
or, Dictionnaire Raisonné Des Sciences,
Des Arts Et Des Métiers.
It was intended to advance mankind
by conquering ignorance.
It was a gigantic enterprise,
as you can see.
Eventually -
this is only a small part of it -
eventually there were 24 folio volumes.
And, of course,
it involved a great many contributors,
but the dynamo of the whole undertaking
was Diderot.
There he is in a picture by van Loo
smiling the smile of reason,
which enraged him.
He said he'd been made to look like
an old cocotte
who was still trying to be agreeable.
He was a many-sided man,
very intelligent, a novelist,
a philosopher, even an art critic -
the great supporter of Chardin.
And in the encyclopaedia,
he wrote articles on everything
from Aristotle to artificial flowers.
The aims of the encyclopaedia
seem harmless enough to us.
But, you know, authoritarian governments
don't like dictionaries.
They live by lies
and by bamboozling abstractions.
They can't afford to have words
accurately defined.
The encyclopaedia was
twice suppressed,
and, by its ultimate triumph,
the polite reunions
in these elegant salons
became precursors
of revolutionary politics.
They were also precursors of science.
The illustrated supplement
of the encyclopaedia is full of pictures
of technical processes.
Here's one of the plates,
for example,
showing the...polishing of wood.
And then, another...
Or the beginning...
The beginning here, shows
the making of silk for the tapestry.
And this is the actual dyeing of the wool
for the Gobelins tapestries.
And throughout the book,
there are extremely interesting examples
of the techniques of the day.
In the mid-18th century,
science was fashionable and romantic,
as one can see from this picture
by Wright of Derby.
The experiment with the air pump
brings us to the new age
of scientific invention.
The natural philosopher,
with his long hair and dedicated stare,
perhaps a trifle theatrical, but the other
characters are awfully well observed.
The little girls who can't bear
to witness the death of the poor pigeon,
the sensible, middle-aged man
who tells them
that such sacrifices must be made
in the interests of science,
and the thoughtful man on the right
who is wondering
if this kind of experiment
ls really going to do mankind much good.
They're all taking it quite seriously,
but nonetheless science was,
to some extent,
an after-dinner occupation, like
playing the piano in the next century.
Even Voltaire,
who spent a vast amount of time
on weighing molten metal and
cutting up worms was only a dilettante.
He lacked the patient realism
of the experimenter.
And perhaps such tenacity exists
only in a milieu
where quick-wittedness
is less highly valued.
In the 18th century,
it emerged in a country
where civilisation still had
the energy of newness - Scotland.
(# EWAN MACCOLL:
Will Ye Go Tae Sheriffmuir)
# Will ye go tae Sheriffmuir
Bauld John O'Innisture
# There tae see the noble Mar
And his Hielan' laddies
# A' the true men o' the north
Angus, Huntly and Seaforth
A Scourin" on tae cross the Forth
Wi' their white cockadies
# There ye'll see the banners flare
There ye'll hear the bagpipes rare
# And the trumpets' deadly blare
# M' the cannon '5 rattle
# There ye'll see the bauld McGraws
Camerons and Clanranald's raws
# A the clans wi' loud hussas
# Rushin' tae the battle. #
The Scottish character -
and I'm a Scot myself -
shows an extraordinary combination
of realism and reckless sentiment.
The sentiment
has passed into popular legend
and the Scots are proud of it,
and no wonder.
Where, but in Edinburgh,
does a romantic landscape
come right into the centre of the town?
But it's the realism that counts
and it made 18th-century Scotland -
a poor, remote, semi-barbarous country -
a force in European civilisation.
Let me name some 18th-century Scots.
In the world of ideas and science -
Adam Smith, David Hume,
Joseph Black and James Watt.
It's a matter of historical fact
that these were the men
who, soon after the year 1760,
changed the whole current
of European thought and life.
Joseph Black and James Watt
discovered that heat,
in particular steam,
could be a source of power.
Well, I needn't describe
how that has changed the world!
In The Wealth Of Nations,
Adam Smith invented the study
of political economy
and created a social science
that lasted up to the time of Karl Marx.
In his Treatise On Human Nature,
Hume succeeded in proving
that experience and reason
have no necessary connection
with one another,
that there's no such thing
as a rational belief.
Hume, as he himself said,
was of an open, social
and cheerful humour
and he was much beloved
by the ladies in the Paris salons.
I suppose they'd never read
that small book
which has made all philosophers
feel uneasy till the present day.
All these great Scots lived
in the grim, narrow tenements
of the old town of Edinburgh,
piled on the hill behind the castle.
But even in their lifetime,
the great Scottish architects,
the brothers Adam,
had produced one of the finest pieces
of town planning in Europe -
the New Town of Edinburgh.
(VIOLIN PLAYS SCOTTISH AIR)
In addition, they exploited -
I think one may almost say invented -
the strict, pure classicism
that was to influence architecture
all over Europe.
In fact another Scot, named Cameron,
took it to Russia with tremendous effect.
And then, a Scot having popularised
Neoclassicism,
Sir Walter Scott popularised
the Gothic Middle Ages
and furnished the imagination
of the romantically minded for a century.
Not bad, for a poor,
underpopulated country!
Through the practical genius
of the Scots and English,
those technical diagrams
in the encyclopaedia became a reality.
And before the political revolutions
of America and France had taken effect,
a far deeper and more durable
transformation was already under way,
what we call the Industrial Revolution.
Wright of Derby,
whose imagination had been stirred
by the scientific exercises
of the intellectuals,
was also moved
by their first commercial application
and he painted this picture
of Arkwright's mill at Cromford.
He's felt the romance of industrialism
as it begins to usurp
the power of the old regime.
If, on the practical side,
we had to visit Scotland,
on the moral side,
we must return to France.
Not to Paris, but to the borders
of Switzerland
because it was there,
a mile or two from the French frontier,
that Voltaire made his home.
After several bad experiences,
he'd become suspicious of authority
and he liked to live in a place where
he could easily slip over the border.
He didn't suffer from his exile.
He'd made a lot of money by speculation,
and his last bolt hole,
the Château of Ferney, is, as you see,
a large, agreeable country house.
Voltaire built the wings at either end.
He also planted this alleyway of beeches
for a cool promenade on a hot day.
When he was visited
by the self-important ladies of Geneva,
he would receive them seated on a bench
at the far end, down there behind me.
It amused him to see how they struggled
to prevent their towering, powdered wigs
from getting entangled in the branches.
Well, it's grown up a good deal
since then.
It was in this room that he thought up
devastating witticisms
with which to destroy his enemies.
He may even have done so
in this very chair,
one of a set with the covers worked
by his niece, Madame Denis.
I wish I could convey
the quality of his wit to you,
but Voltaire's one of those writers
whose virtue is inseparable
from his style.
And true style is untranslatable.
He himself said,
"One word in the wrong place will ruin
the most beautiful thought.”
Still more would it ruin the wit and irony
which were his peculiar gifts.
To the end of his life,
he couldn't resist a joke.
But on one subject he was
completely serious - justice.
Many people in his lifetime, and since,
have compared him to a monkey.
But when it came to fighting injustice,
he was a bulldog.
He never let go.
He pestered all his friends,
he wrote an unending stream
of pamphlets,
and finally had some of the victims,
like these members
of a Protestant family named Calas
who had been cruelly persecuted
in Bordeaux,
living at his expense at Ferney.
Gradually, the world ceased to think
of him as an impudent libertine,
but as a patriarch and sage.
And by 1778, he at last felt it safe
to return to Paris.
He was 84.
No victorious general,
no lone flyer, has ever been given
such a reception.
He was hailed as the universal man
and the friend of mankind.
People of all classes
crowded round his house,
drew his carriage,
mobbed him wherever he went.
Finally, his bust was crowned
on the stage at the Théâtre Français.
Naturally, it killed him.
But he died triumphant.
The remarkable thing about the frivolous
18th century was its seriousness.
It was, in many ways,
the heir to Renaissance humanism,
but there was a vital difference.
The Renaissance had taken place within
the framework of the Christian church.
A few humanists had showed signs
of scepticism,
but no-one had expressed doubts
about the Christian religion as a whole.
People had the comfortable moral freedom
that goes with an unquestioned faith.
But, by the middle of the 18th century,
serious-minded men could see
that the church had become a tied house -
tied to property and status
and defending its interests
by repressions and injustice.
No-one felt this more strongly
than Voltaire.
"Écrasez l'infâme" -
crush the vermin.
It dominated his later life
and he bequeathed it to his followers.
I remember HG Wells,
who was a kind of 20th-century Voltaire,
saying that he daren't
drive a car in France
because the temptation to run over
a priest would be too strong for him.
All the same, Voltaire remained
a kind of believer.
He even built a chapel at Ferney.
Over the door, he had inscribed
the words "deo erexit Voltaire",
Voltaire in larger letters. It was
an affair solely between him and God.
However, several of the contributors
to the encyclopaedia
were total materialists.
And so the late-18th century
was faced with the troublesome task
of constructing a new morality
without revelation or Christian sanctions.
This morality was built
on two foundations.
One of them was the doctrine
of natural law,
the other, the stoic morality
of ancient republican Rome.
Republican virtue inspired
the most gifted painter of his day, David.
In The Lives Of Plutarch,
people read about those grim,
puritanical heroes of the Roman republic,
who sacrificed themselves and their
families in the interests of the State,
and they took these monsters
as models for a new political order.
Here's David's first great revolutionary
picture, The Oath Of The Horatii.
It was painted in 1785
and it created an effect
which those of us who remember the first
appearance of Picasso's Guernica,
may be able, faintly, to imagine.
The Oath Of The Horatiii is the supreme
picture of revolutionary action,
not only in its subject,
but in its treatment.
Gone are all the melting outlines
and pools of sensuous shadow
of a Fragonard.
And in their place are these
firmly outlined expressions of will.
The unified, totalitarian gesture
of the brothers,
like the kinetic image of a rotating
wheel, has an almost hypnotic quality.
Even the architecture
is a conscious revolt
against the refined,
ornamental style of the time.
These Tuscan columns assert
the superior virtue of the plain man.
Two years later, David painted
an even more grimly Plutarchian picture -
the lictors bringing back
to the house of Brutus
the bodies of his two sons whom
he had condemned to death for treachery,
one of those incidents in Roman history
that don't appeal to us,
but which was horribly acceptable
to French feeling
on the eve of the Revolution.
One sees how completely
the "douceur de vivre"
had lost its hold
on the European imagination,
even before 1789.
In fact, the new morality had already
guided a revolution outside Europe.
Once more, we must leave
the ancient focus of civilisation
and travel to the edge
of the civilised world - America.
For it was in this virgin soil,
and not in the compost heap of Europe,
that the aims of the encyclopaedia
were first realised.
In the 18th century, no white man,
except hunters,
had penetrated beyond that range of hills.
(TRIBAL DRUMS BEAT)
But here, on the border territory of
the Indian, the trapper, the buffalo,
a young Virginian lawyer elected
to build his home in the 1760s.
His name was Thomas Jefferson,
and he called his house Monticello -
the little mountain.
It must have been an extraordinary
apparition in that wild landscape.
Jefferson made it up out of the book by
the great Renaissance architect Palladio,
of which he is said to have owned
the only copy in America.
But of course, he had to invent
a great deal of it himself
and he was highly inventive.
The interior of the house betrays
the obstinate ingenuity of a creative man
who is determined
to work out everything for himself.
This is his idea for a bed,
placed between two rooms in the wall
so he could get out either side,
either into his study or his sitting room.
And to dress, he went up
this circular stair to the room above.
This was his own design for spectacles
in a little box the size of a patch box.
They look a little small, but in fact,
you can read by them perfectly well,
and with them I can read
his own edition of Vitruvius,
the classical architect
who inspired so much of his building.
It's placed on a table, a revolving table,
which he designed himself,
which works very well,
and a revolving chair.
Everything, everything in the room,
he designed,
the drapes, the mouldings,
every single thing.
And it all has a kind of simple,
homespun, independent air,
which is the stamp of Jefferson.
He was the typical universal man
of the 18th century -
linguist, scientist, agriculturalist,
educator, town planner and architect,
almost a reincarnation
of Leon Battista Alberti,
the universal man
of the Renaissance,
even down to a love of music,
and the management of horses
and a certain crankiness -
what, in a lesser man,
could have been called
a touch of self-righteousness.
What a wilful, independent head!
Of course, Jefferson wasn't
as good an architect as Alberti,
but then, he was also
President of the United States
and, as an architect,
he was by no means bad.
Monticello was the beginning of
that simple, almost rustic classicism
that stretches up the eastern seaboard
of America, right up to Massachusetts,
and lasted for 100 years,
producing a body of simple,
civilised, domestic architecture
equal to any in the world.
And it reflects the grave self-assurance
of the founders of the American Republic.
Jefferson is buried
in the grounds of Monticello.
He left instructions for his tomb.
On it were to be inscribed the following
sentences and not a word more -
"Here was buried Thomas Jefferson,
"author of the Declaration
of American Independence,
"of the Statute of Virginia
for Religious Freedom
"and father of
the University of Virginia."
Well, the establishment
of religious freedom
that earned him so much hatred and abuse
in his own day, we now take for granted.
But the University of Virginia
is still a surprise.
It was all designed by Jefferson
and it's full of his character.
He called it an "academical village".
There are ten pavilions
for ten professors, and between them,
behind this colonnade,
the rooms of the students,
all within reach and yet all individual -
the ideal of corporate humanism.
And then, outside the courtyard
are small gardens
that show his love of privacy.
Those serpentine walls were
Jefferson's speciality.
Nobody knows where he got them from.
Needless to say, they had a practical
as well as an aesthetic intention.
The great courtyard was round
three sides of a rectangle.
The fourth side, you saw
over the mountains to Indian territory.
How confidently,
in their semi-wild domain,
the Founding Fathers of America assumed
the mantle of republican virtue
and put into practice the notions
of the French Enlightenment.
They even called on the great sculptor
of the Enlightenment, Houdon,
to commemorate
their victorious General Washington.
And here's the result, standing
in the Capitol at Richmond, Virginia.
This programme began with Houdon's statue
of Voltaire smiling the smile of reason.
It could end with Houdon's statue
of Washington.
No more smiles.
Houdon saw his subject as
that favourite Roman republican hero,
the decent country gentleman
called away from his farm
to defend his neighbours' liberties.
(# HEWITT: The Battle Of Trenton)
In fact, the War of Independence
lasted six years,
and at the end of it,
the British totally withdrew their forces
and the new republic was born.
Washington retired
to his farm at Mount Vernon.
The ideas of the French Enlightenment
influenced the founders
of the American constitution,
and in return,
the success of the American rebellion
played a part in inspiring the French
to overthrow their monarchy.
After the storming of the Bastille,
Lafayette sent the key
of that infamous prison
as a present to Washington.
Washington hung it in the hall
at Mount Vernon,
and there it has stayed ever since.
By this date, Washington had little time
to spend at his home farm
on the banks of the Potomac.
He had been elected
first President of the United States.
His monument dominates the new
capital city which was named after him.
Facing it,
across the tidal basin of the Potomac,
is the monument to Jefferson,
who became the third President.
Not only the Palladian architecture,
but the music has crossed the Atlantic.
God Save The King has become
My Country 'Tis Of Thee.
(# God Save The King)
On the inner walls are quotations
from Jefferson's writings.
First, the familiar, noble, indestructible
words of the Declaration of Independence -
"We hold these truths to be self-evident -
that all men are created equal,
"that they are endowed by their creator
with certain inalienable rights,
"among these are life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness,
"and that to secure these rights,
governments are instituted among men.”
"Self-evident truths."”
That's the voice of
18th-century enlightenment.
But on the opposite wall
are less-familiar words by Jefferson,
that still give us pause today.
"I tremble for my country
when I reflect that God is just,
"that his justice cannot sleep forever.
"Commerce between master and slave
is despotism.
"Nothing is more certainly written
in the book of fate
"than that these people are to be free."
A peaceful-looking scene.
A great ideal made visible.
But beyond it, what problems -
almost insoluble,
or at least not soluble
by the smile of reason.
(# CHARLES IVES: Variations On America)