Civilisation (1969–1970): Season 1, Episode 13 - Heroic Materialism - full transcript
(# WALTON: Symphony No. 1 in B Flat Minor)
Dorothy Wordsworth said about the view
of London from Westminster Bridge,
"It was like one of Nature's
own grand spectacles.”
Well, nature is violent and brutal,
and there's nothing we can do about it.
But New York, after all,
New York was made by men.
It took almost the same time
to reach its present condition
as it did
to complete the Gothic cathedrals.
At which point a very obvious reflection
crosses one's mind,
that the cathedrals
were built to the glory of God -
New York was built
to the glory of Mammon.
Money, gain -
the new god of the 19th century.
So many of the same human ingredients
have gone into its construction
that, at a distance,
it does look rather like a celestial city.
At a distance.
Come closer and it's not so good.
(STIRRING BRASS-HEAVY ORCHESTRAL PIECE)
Behind this grim uniformity
lurks an even grimmer poverty,
and problems that seem almost insoluble.
One sees why heroic materialism
is still linked with an uneasy conscience.
It has been from the start.
I mean that historically,
the first discovery and exploitation
of those technical means
which made New York possible,
coincided exactly
with the first organised attempt
to improve the human lot.
The first large iron foundries in England,
like the Carron Works or Coalbrookdale,
date from round about 1780.
Howard's book on penal reform
was published in 1777,
and Clarkson's Essay On Slavery in 1786.
Clarkson laid the foundations
of the anti-slavery movement,
and painstakingly discovered
all the horrifying evidence.
The political side was the life work
of William Wilberforce,
in whose house, in Hull,
I am now standing.
I have often heard it said,
by people who want to seem clever,
that civilisation can exist only
on a basis of slavery.
And in support of their thesis,
they point to the examples
of 5th-century Greece,
or the antique world in general.
If one defines civilisation
in terms of leisure and superfluity,
there is a grain of truth
in this repulsive doctrine.
But I have tried, throughout this series,
to define civilisation
in terms of creative power
and the enlargement of human faculties.
And from that point of view,
slavery is abominable.
Also, for that matter,
is abject poverty.
Poverty, hunger, plagues, disease,
they were the background of history
right up to the end of the 19th century
and most people regarded them
as inevitable - like bad weather.
Nobody thought they could be cured.
All that was required
was an occasional act of charity.
This pretty scene is entitled
Rustic Charity.
And under it, are written the lines -
"Here, poor boy, without a coat,
take this ha'penny.”
Not an indication of very serious concern.
But slaves,
and the trade in slaves -
that was something different.
It was esoteric - it wasn't something
that surrounded one like the air,
as home-made poverty did.
And the horrors it involved
were far more horrible.
Even the unsqueamish stomachs
of the 18th century
were turned by accounts of
the middle passage.
(LAPPING WATER,
CREAKING OF TIMBERS, JINGLING CHAINS)
This is one of the irons
used for branding the slaves
on chest and back
with the proprietor's initials.
And this is the actual model
of a slave ship
which Wilberforce produced
in the House of Commons,
to show how the slaves
were crammed together.
It's reckoned that over 9 million slaves
died from heat and suffocation
in those holds on the way to America.
A remarkable figure,
even by modern standards.
The anti-slavery movement
became the first communal expression
of the awakened conscience.
It took a long time to succeed.
The trade was prohibited in 1807,
and as Wilberforce lay dying in 1835,
slavery itself was abolished.
Well, one must regard this
as a step forward for the human race,
and be proud, I think,
that it happened in England.
But not too proud.
The Victorians were very smug about it
and they chose to avert their eyes
from something almost equally horrible
that was happening
to their own countrymen.
England had entered the war
against Napoleon
in the first triumphant consciousness
of its new industrial powers.
After 20 years, England was victorious,
but by failing to control
her industrial development,
she had suffered a defeat,
in terms of human life,
far more costly
than any military disaster.
I needn't remind you of how cruelly
the Industrial Revolution
degraded and exploited a mass of people
for 60 or 70 years.
After about 1790,
there appeared the large foundries
and mills which dehumanised life.
Arkwright's spinning frame,
invented in about 1770,
is always quoted as the beginning of
mass production - on the whole, rightly.
There he is, faithfully recorded
for us by Wright of Derby,
typical of the New Man who was to
dominate industry until the present day.
He, and his like, gave England
a flying start in the economy
of the 19th century.
But the result of their inventions
was a dehumanisation that obsessed
almost every great imaginative writer
of the time.
From the start, poets had recognised
the nature of the satanic mills.
Robert Burns,
passing the Carron ironworks in 1787,
scratched these lines
on a window pane -
"We cam na here to view your warks,
"In hopes to be mair wise,
"But only, lest we gang to Hell
It may be nae surprise.”
This new religion of gain
had behind it a body of doctrine,
without which it could never have
maintained its authority over
the serious-minded Victorians.
Its sacred books,
the works of Malthus on population
and Ricardo on economics,
were taken as gospels by pious men,
who used them to justify actions
they would never have thought
of defending on human grounds.
Hypocrisy?
Well, hypocrisy has always existed.
Where would the great comic writers
have been without it -
from Moliere downwards.
But in the 19th century,
with its insecure middle class
dependent on an inhuman economic system,
there was mass hypocrisy
on an unprecedented scale.
For the last 40 years or so,
the word "hypocrisy” has been a sort
of label attached to the 19th century,
just as frivolity
was attached to the 18th century -
and with about as much reason.
The reaction against it continues.
And although it is a good thing
to have cleared the air,
I think that the reaction has done harm
by bringing into discredit
all professions of virtue.
The very words, "pious”, "respectable”,
"worthy",
have become joke words,
used only ironically.
Much as one hates the inhuman way
in which the doctrines of Malthus
were accepted,
the terrible truth is that the rise
of population did nearly ruin us.
It struck a blow at civilisation
more ominous
than anything
since the barbarian invasions.
First it produced
the horrors of urban poverty,
and then the dismal counter-measures
of bureaucracy and regimentation.
It must have seemed -
may still seem - insoluble.
And yet this doesn't excuse the
callousness with which prosperous people
ignored the conditions of life
among the poor,
on which, to a large extent,
their prosperity depended.
And this in spite of the most detailed
and eloquent descriptions
that were available to them.
I need mention only two.
Engels's Condition Of The
Working Class, written in 1844
and the novels written by Dickens
between 1838 and 1854 -
between Nicholas Nickleby and Hard Times.
Engels's book is presented
as documentation
but it is, in fact, the passionate cry
of a young social worker,
and, as such, it provided,
and has continued to provide,
the emotional dynamo of Marxism.
Marx read Engels. I don't know
who else did - that was enough.
But everybody read Dickens.
The pictures you are looking at
are by the French artist Gustave Doré,
whose illustrated books on London
appeared in 1872.
You see, things hadn't changed
much since the '40s.
Perhaps it took an outsider
to see London as it really was.
And it needed someone of
Doré's marvellous graphic skill
to make this great slice
of human misery credible.
I think that Dickens did more than anyone
to diffuse an awakened conscience
but one mustn't forget
the practical reformers who preceded him.
At the beginning of the period,
the Quaker Elizabeth Fry,
who, in an earlier age,
would certainly have been canonised,
because her spiritual influence
on the prisoners of Newgate
was really a miracle.
And in the middle of the century,
Lord Shaftesbury, whose long struggle
to prevent the exploitation
of children in factories
puts him next to Wilberforce
in the history of humanitarianism.
It's an almost incredible fact
that in the middle of the 19th century
there was no children's hospital
in London,
and children
weren't taken into ordinary hospitals
for fear that they might be infectious.
Shaftesbury was one of the founders
of the Hospital for Sick Children -
Dickens helped to raise the money for it.
There is its first ward
in Great Ormond Street.
Here is its successor today.
And, as I look at it,
I am more than ever convinced
that humanitarianism
was the great achievement
of the 19th century.
We are so much accustomed
to the humanitarian outlook
that we forget how little it counted
in earlier ages of civilisation.
Ask any decent person
in England or America today
what he thinks matters most
in human conduct,
five to one
his answer will be "kindness".
It's not a word
that would've crossed the lips
of any of the earlier heroes
of this series.
If you'd asked St Francis
what mattered in life,
he would, we know, have answered,
"Chastity, obedience and poverty."
If you'd asked Dante or Michelangelo,
they might have answered,
"Disdain of baseness and injustice.”
But kindness? Never.
Nowadays, I think we underestimate
the humanitarian achievement
of the 19th century.
We forget the horrors that were taken
for granted in early Victorian England.
The hundreds of lashes inflicted daily
on perfectly harmless men
in the Army and Navy.
The women, chained together in threes,
rumbling through the streets
in open carts, on their way
to transportation. These,
and even more unspeakable cruelties,
were carried out by
agents of the Establishment,
usually in defence of property.
Some philosophers tell us
that humanitarianism is a weak, sloppy,
self-indulgent condition,
spiritually much inferior
to cruelty and violence.
And this point has been eagerly accepted
by novelists, dramatists
and theatrical producers.
Of course it's true that kindness is to
some extent the offspring of materialism
and this has made anti-materialists
look at it with contempt,
as a product of what
the German philosopher Nietzsche
called "a slave morality".
He would certainly have preferred
the other aspect of my subject,
the heroic self-confidence of the men
for whom nothing was impossible,
the men who forced
the first railways over England.
(# EDUARD STRAUSS: Bahn Frei!)
The railway engine created
a situation that was really new.
A new basis of unity,
a new concept of space -
a situation that is still developing.
The 20 years after Stephenson's Rocket
had made its momentous journey along
the Manchester-Liverpool railway
were like a great military campaign.
The will, the courage, the ruthlessness,
the unexpected defeats,
the unforeseen victories.
The Irish navvies who built the railway
were like a "grande armée”,
ruffians who yet had a kind of pride
in their achievement.
Their marshals were the engineers.
The strongest creative impulse of the time
didn't go into architecture,
but into engineering.
Partially because, at this date,
it was only in engineering
that men could make full use
of the new material
that was going to transform
the art of building - iron.
The first iron bridge in the world
was built at Coalbrookdale
in Shropshire in 1779 -
almost archaic.
By 1820, Telford could build
the Menai Bridge -
the first great suspension bridge.
An idea that combines beauty
and function so perfectly
that it's hardly been varied,
only expanded, down to the present day.
And here's the Clifton Bridge,
begun in 1836,
although not completed until long after.
Still one of the most beautiful
suspension bridges in the world.
It was designed by a man
who deserves to rank with
the earlier heroes in this series,
Isambard Kingdom Brunei.
He was a born romantic.
Although the son
of a distinguished engineer,
brought up in a business
that depended on sound calculations,
he remained all his life
in love with the impossible.
In fact, as a boy,
he fell heir to a project
which he himself
believed to be impossible,
his father's plan for the construction
of a tunnel under the Thames.
At 20, his father
put him in charge of the work
and thus began the sequence
of triumphs and disasters
that were to mark his whole career.
Here's one of the triumphs.
A grand dinner held in the tunnel
when it was halfway across.
On the left, father Brunei
congratulating his son,
and behind them,
a table full of notables.
It's typical of Brunei
that in the next bay of the tunnel
there was an equally grand dinner
for 150 of his miners.
Two months later the shield collapsed,
and the water poured in
for the third time.
In the end, the tunnel was completed.
That was the way with Brunei's designs.
They were so bold that shareholders
were frightened and withdrew,
sometimes, I'm bound to say,
with reason.
But one thing he did push through
and complete,
and that was the Great Western Railway.
Every bridge, every tunnel, was a drama,
demanding incredible feats of
imagination, energy and persuasion,
and producing works of great splendour.
The greatest drama of all
was the Box Tunnel.
Two miles long, on a gradient,
and half of it through rock, which Brunei,
against all advice, left unprotected.
How on earth did they do it? By men
with pick-axes working by torchlight,
and horses to pull away the debris.
There were floods, collapses.
It cost the lives of over 100 men.
But in 1841
a train steamed through.
And from that day forward,
for over a century,
every small boy dreamt
of becoming an engine driver.
Brunei, by his dreams,
no less than by his practical application
of engineering techniques,
is the ancestor of New York.
And I must say he looks it.
There he is, complete with cigar,
the first hero in this series
of whom we have a photograph.
He's standing in front of
the chains used in launching,
or rather, in failing to launch,
his vast steamship,
the Great Eastern.
This was his most grandiose dream.
The first steamship to cross the Atlantic
in 1838 had been only 700 tons.
Brunei's Great Eastern was to be
24,000 tons - a floating palace.
The amazing thing
is that he got it built at all.
But no doubt
he had taken too big a leap forward.
And although the Great Eastern ultimately
floated, and crossed the Atlantic,
the delays and disasters
it had involved killed its designer.
But the transatlantic liner
was one more way
in which the 19th century created
its new world of shape - its architecture.
"The shapes arise!" said
Walt Whitman writing in the 1860s.
"Shapes of factories, arsenals,
foundries, markets.
"Shapes of the two-threaded tracks
of rail-roads.
"Shapes of the sleepers of bridges.
"Vast frameworks, girders, arches."
This is our own style,
which expresses our own age,
as the Baroque expressed the 17th century.
And it's the result of
100 years of engineering.
It's a new creation,
but it's related to the past
by one of the chief continuous traditions
of the Western mind,
the tradition of mathematics.
In the middle of the 19th century,
it might well have looked as if art
that set out to be artistic
had much better all be scrapped.
Think of the Great Exhibition of 1851.
It was contained in a building,
the so-called Crystal Palace,
that was a piece of pure engineering
on Brunei's principles. And, in fact,
greatly admired by him. Dateless and
impressive in a somewhat joyless style,
but inside this piece of engineering
was art!
Well, funny things happen
in the history of taste.
But I doubt very much if many of these
objects will ever come back into favour.
The reason being
that they are a giant spoof,
not responding to anything new,
or controlled by any stylistic impulse.
But in France, at exactly the same time,
there emerged two painters
whose social realism was in the
centre of the European tradition -
Jean-Francois Millet
and Gustave Courbet.
They were both revolutionaries.
In 1848 Millet was probably a Communist,
although when his work became fashionable
the evidence for this
was rather hushed up.
Courbet remained a rebel and was put
in prison for his part in the Commune -
very nearly executed.
In 1849,
he painted a picture of a stone breaker -
alas destroyed in Dresden
during the last war.
He intended it as a straightforward record
of an old neighbour.
But it was seen by a Communist friend
who told him that it was the first
great monument to the workers, etc, etc.
Courbet was delighted by this idea
and said that the people of Ornans
wanted to hang it over the altar
in the local church.
This, if it were true,
which I very much doubt,
would have been the beginning of
its status as an ob jet de culte,
which it has retained to the present day.
It's the indispensable picture
to all Marxist art historians.
The following year, Courbet painted
an even more impressive example
of his sympathy with ordinary people,
his enormous picture of a funeral
in his native town of Ornans.
By abandoning all pictorial artifice,
which must inevitably involve a certain
amount of hierarchy and subordination,
and standing his figures in a row,
Courbet achieves a feeling of equality
in the presence of death.
How seriously he has accepted
the truth of each head.
But I mustn't leave you with the notion
that the relationship
between art and society
is as simple and predictable as this.
A pseudo-Marxist approach
works fairly well
for the decorative arts
and for mediocrities,
but artists of real talent
always seem to slip through the net,
and swim away in the opposite direction.
I'm standing in front of one of the
greatest pictures of the 19th century -
Seurat's Baignade in the National Gallery.
And although it contains factory chimneys,
and a bowler hat
and proletarian boot-tabs,
it would be absurd to speak of it
as a piece of social realism.
The point of the picture
is not its subject,
but the way in which it unites
the monumental stillness
of a Renaissance fresco
with the vibrating light
of the Impressionists.
It's the creation of an artist
independent of social pressures.
All the greatest pictures
of the late 19th century
are quite different in subject and mood
from what one might expect.
And before one makes gloomy
generalisations about the period,
the miseries of the workers,
the oppressive luxury of the rich
and so forth,
it's as well to remember that among
its most beautiful productions
are these paintings by Renoir.
No awakened conscience,
no heroic materialism.
No Nietzsche, no Marx, no Freud.
Just a group of ordinary human beings
enjoying themselves.
(# OFFENBACH: La Belle Helene: Overture)
The Impressionists
didn't set out to be popular.
The only great painter
of the 19th century
who longed for popularity
in the widest possible sense,
was, ironically enough,
the only one who achieved
absolutely no success in his lifetime,
Vincent van Gogh.
In its earlier phase,
the awakened conscience
had taken a practical, material form.
Even Elizabeth Fry, with her powerful
religious gifts, had lots of common sense.
But in the later part of the 19th century,
the feelings of shame at the state
of society become more intense.
Instead of benevolent action,
there arose a need for atonement.
No-one expressed this
more completely than van Gogh
in his pictures, his drawings,
his letters, and his life.
For the first part of his working life,
he was torn between two vocations -
painter and preacher.
And for some years,
the preacher was in the ascendant.
Preaching wasn't enough.
Like St Francis,
he had to share the poverty
of the poorest and most miserable
of his fellow men.
And it wasn't the hardships
that made him give up this way of life -
it was his unconquerable need to paint.
Van Gogh's hero -
the hero of almost all generous-minded men
in the late 19th century - was Tolstoy.
There he is, sawing wood,
expressing the feeling
that one must share the life
of working people. Partly as a sort of
atonement for years of oppression,
partly because that life
was nearer to the realities
of human existence.
Tolstoy towered above his age,
as Dante and Michelangelo
and Beethoven had done.
His novels are marvels
of sustained imagination.
His doctrines are full of contradictions.
He wanted to be one with the peasants,
yet he continued to live
like an aristocrat.
He preached universal love,
but he quarrelled so painfully
with his poor demented wife,
that at the age of 82
he ran away from her.
(WIND HOWLS)
After a nightmare journey,
he collapsed at a country railway station.
He was laid out on a bed
in the stationmaster's house.
Almost his last words were -
"How do peasants die?"
There he died,
with all the horrors of modern publicity
stewing outside the station.
After his death, when the peasants
were singing a lament,
soldiers were sent in with drawn swords,
to stop them from mourning
the subversive infidel.
However, there was no way
of preventing the funeral.
That scene took place in 1910.
Within two years, Rutherford and Einstein
had made their first discoveries.
So a new era had begun even before
the 1914 war.
It's the era in which we're still living.
The radio telescope at Jodrell Bank.
Of course, science had achieved
great triumphs in the 19th century,
but nearly all of them had been related
to practical or technological advance.
For example Edison,
whose inventions did as much as any
to add to our material convenience,
wasn't what we should call a scientist
at all, a very supreme do-it-yourself man.
But from the time of Einstein, Niels Bohr,
the Cavendish Laboratory,
science no longer existed to serve
human needs, but in its own right.
When scientists could use
a mathematical idea to transform matter,
they had achieved
the same quasi-magical relationship
with the material world as artists.
In this series, I have followed the ups
and downs of civilisation historically,
trying to discover results
as well as causes.
Well, obviously
I can't do that any longer.
We have no idea where we are going.
And sweeping,
confident articles on the future
seem to me
the most intellectually disreputable
of all forms of public utterance.
Scientists who are really qualified
to talk have kept their mouths shut.
JBS Haldane summed up the situation
when he said,
"My own suspicion is that the universe
is not only queerer than we suppose,
"but queerer than we can suppose.”
NASA COUNTDOWN: Three, two, one...zero.
(# BRITTEN: Spring Symphony, Opus 44)
(STRIDENT, STIRRING ORCHESTRA)
(VOICES JOIN ORCHESTRA)
However, in the world of action
a few things are obvious -
so obvious that I hesitate to repeat them.
One of them
is our increasing reliance on machines.
They have really ceased to be tools,
and have begun to give us directions.
And, unfortunately, machines,
from the Maxim gun to the computer,
are, for the most part,
means by which an authoritarian regime
can keep men in subjection.
(TICKING OF MACHINES SET AGAINST
MODERNIST ORCHESTRAL PIECE)
(CONCORDE ENGINE ROARS)
(MENACING MUSIC)
(ENGINES WHINE AND ROAR)
Our other speciality
is the urge to destruction.
(EXPLOSIONS AND AIRCRAFT WHINE)
With the help of machines, we did
our best to destroy ourselves in two wars,
and in doing so
we released a flood of evil.
(EXPLOSIVE RUMBLING)
(SIREN WAILS)
Add to this the memory of that
shadowy companion,
who is always with us,
like an inverted guardian angel,
silent, invisible, almost incredible,
and yet unquestionably there.
And one must concede that the future
of civilisation doesn't look very bright.
(# BRITTEN: Spring Symphony
Opus 44: Shine Out, Fair Sun)
And yet, when I look at the world about me
in the light of these programmes,
I don't at all feel that we are entering
on a new period of barbarism.
The things that made the Dark Ages
so dark - the isolation,
the lack of mobility,
the lack of curiosity, the hopelessness -
I don't obtain at all.
I am at one of our new universities -
the University of East Anglia.
Well, these inheritors of
all our catastrophes look cheerful enough
and not at all like the melancholy
late Romans or pathetic Gauls
whose likenesses have come down to us.
In fact, I should doubt
if so many people have ever been
as well-fed, as well-read,
as bright-minded, as curious
and as critical as the young are today.
Of course there's been
a little flattening at the top.
But, you know, one mustn't overrate
the culture of what used to be
called "top people"” before the wars.
They had charming manners,
but they were as ignorant as swans.
They knew a little about literature,
less about music, nothing about art
and less than nothing about philosophy.
The members of a music group
or an art group at a provincial university
would be ten times better informed
and more alert.
(# BRITTEN: Spring Symphony, Opus 44:
Part I: The Driving Boy)
(MUSIC CONTINUES
OVER INAUDIBLE CONVERSATIONS)
Well, naturally,
these bright-minded young people
think poorly of existing institutions
and want to abolish them.
One doesn't need to be young
to dislike institutions.
But the dreary fact remains
that even in the darkest ages,
it was institutions
which made society work.
And if civilisation is to survive,
society must somehow be made to work.
At this point I reveal myself in
my true colours, as a stick-in-the-mud.
I hold a number of beliefs
that have been repudiated by
the liveliest intellects of our time.
I believe that order is better than chaos.
Creation better than destruction.
I prefer gentleness to violence.
Forgiveness to vendetta.
On the whole, I think that knowledge
is preferable to ignorance.
And I am sure that human sympathy
is more valuable than ideology.
I believe, that in spite of
recent triumphs of science,
men haven't changed much
in the last 2,000 years.
And, in consequence,
we must still try to learn from history.
History is ourselves.
I also hold one or two beliefs
that are more difficult to put shortly.
For example, I believe in courtesy,
the ritual by which we avoid
hurting other people's feelings
by satisfying our own egos.
And I think we should remember
that we are part of a great whole,
which, for convenience, we call nature.
All living things
are our brothers and sisters.
(COOT'S PIPING CALL)
(# TOMAS LUIS DE VICTORIA:
Responsories For Tenebrae)
Above all, I believe in the God-given
genius of certain individuals,
and I value a society
that makes their existence possible.
These programmes have been filled
with great works of genius -
in architecture, sculpture and painting,
in philosophy, poetry and music,
in science and engineering.
There they are. You can't dismiss them.
And they're only a fraction
of what Western man has achieved
in the last thousand years -
often after setbacks and deviations
at least as destructive
as those of our own time.
Western civilisation
has been a series of rebirths.
Surely this should give us
confidence in ourselves.
I said at the beginning of the series
that it's lack of confidence,
more than anything else,
that kills a civilisation.
We can destroy ourselves
by cynicism and disillusion,
just as effectively as by bombs.
Fifty years ago, WB Yeats,
who was more like a man of genius
than anyone I've ever known,
wrote a prophetic poem,
and in it, he said...
"Things fall apart
The centre cannot hold
"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,
and everywhere
"The ceremony of innocence is drowned
"The best lack all conviction,
while the worst
"Are full of passionate intensity."
Well, that was certainly true
between the wars,
and it damn nearly destroyed us.
Is it true today?
Not quite, because good people have
convictions - rather too many of them.
The trouble is
that there is still no centre.
The moral and intellectual failure
of Marxism
has left us with no alternative to
heroic materialism, and that isn't enough.
One may be optimistic,
but one can't exactly be joyful
at the prospect before us.
(# STRAVINSKY: Apollon Musagète:
Tableau II: Apothéose)
Dorothy Wordsworth said about the view
of London from Westminster Bridge,
"It was like one of Nature's
own grand spectacles.”
Well, nature is violent and brutal,
and there's nothing we can do about it.
But New York, after all,
New York was made by men.
It took almost the same time
to reach its present condition
as it did
to complete the Gothic cathedrals.
At which point a very obvious reflection
crosses one's mind,
that the cathedrals
were built to the glory of God -
New York was built
to the glory of Mammon.
Money, gain -
the new god of the 19th century.
So many of the same human ingredients
have gone into its construction
that, at a distance,
it does look rather like a celestial city.
At a distance.
Come closer and it's not so good.
(STIRRING BRASS-HEAVY ORCHESTRAL PIECE)
Behind this grim uniformity
lurks an even grimmer poverty,
and problems that seem almost insoluble.
One sees why heroic materialism
is still linked with an uneasy conscience.
It has been from the start.
I mean that historically,
the first discovery and exploitation
of those technical means
which made New York possible,
coincided exactly
with the first organised attempt
to improve the human lot.
The first large iron foundries in England,
like the Carron Works or Coalbrookdale,
date from round about 1780.
Howard's book on penal reform
was published in 1777,
and Clarkson's Essay On Slavery in 1786.
Clarkson laid the foundations
of the anti-slavery movement,
and painstakingly discovered
all the horrifying evidence.
The political side was the life work
of William Wilberforce,
in whose house, in Hull,
I am now standing.
I have often heard it said,
by people who want to seem clever,
that civilisation can exist only
on a basis of slavery.
And in support of their thesis,
they point to the examples
of 5th-century Greece,
or the antique world in general.
If one defines civilisation
in terms of leisure and superfluity,
there is a grain of truth
in this repulsive doctrine.
But I have tried, throughout this series,
to define civilisation
in terms of creative power
and the enlargement of human faculties.
And from that point of view,
slavery is abominable.
Also, for that matter,
is abject poverty.
Poverty, hunger, plagues, disease,
they were the background of history
right up to the end of the 19th century
and most people regarded them
as inevitable - like bad weather.
Nobody thought they could be cured.
All that was required
was an occasional act of charity.
This pretty scene is entitled
Rustic Charity.
And under it, are written the lines -
"Here, poor boy, without a coat,
take this ha'penny.”
Not an indication of very serious concern.
But slaves,
and the trade in slaves -
that was something different.
It was esoteric - it wasn't something
that surrounded one like the air,
as home-made poverty did.
And the horrors it involved
were far more horrible.
Even the unsqueamish stomachs
of the 18th century
were turned by accounts of
the middle passage.
(LAPPING WATER,
CREAKING OF TIMBERS, JINGLING CHAINS)
This is one of the irons
used for branding the slaves
on chest and back
with the proprietor's initials.
And this is the actual model
of a slave ship
which Wilberforce produced
in the House of Commons,
to show how the slaves
were crammed together.
It's reckoned that over 9 million slaves
died from heat and suffocation
in those holds on the way to America.
A remarkable figure,
even by modern standards.
The anti-slavery movement
became the first communal expression
of the awakened conscience.
It took a long time to succeed.
The trade was prohibited in 1807,
and as Wilberforce lay dying in 1835,
slavery itself was abolished.
Well, one must regard this
as a step forward for the human race,
and be proud, I think,
that it happened in England.
But not too proud.
The Victorians were very smug about it
and they chose to avert their eyes
from something almost equally horrible
that was happening
to their own countrymen.
England had entered the war
against Napoleon
in the first triumphant consciousness
of its new industrial powers.
After 20 years, England was victorious,
but by failing to control
her industrial development,
she had suffered a defeat,
in terms of human life,
far more costly
than any military disaster.
I needn't remind you of how cruelly
the Industrial Revolution
degraded and exploited a mass of people
for 60 or 70 years.
After about 1790,
there appeared the large foundries
and mills which dehumanised life.
Arkwright's spinning frame,
invented in about 1770,
is always quoted as the beginning of
mass production - on the whole, rightly.
There he is, faithfully recorded
for us by Wright of Derby,
typical of the New Man who was to
dominate industry until the present day.
He, and his like, gave England
a flying start in the economy
of the 19th century.
But the result of their inventions
was a dehumanisation that obsessed
almost every great imaginative writer
of the time.
From the start, poets had recognised
the nature of the satanic mills.
Robert Burns,
passing the Carron ironworks in 1787,
scratched these lines
on a window pane -
"We cam na here to view your warks,
"In hopes to be mair wise,
"But only, lest we gang to Hell
It may be nae surprise.”
This new religion of gain
had behind it a body of doctrine,
without which it could never have
maintained its authority over
the serious-minded Victorians.
Its sacred books,
the works of Malthus on population
and Ricardo on economics,
were taken as gospels by pious men,
who used them to justify actions
they would never have thought
of defending on human grounds.
Hypocrisy?
Well, hypocrisy has always existed.
Where would the great comic writers
have been without it -
from Moliere downwards.
But in the 19th century,
with its insecure middle class
dependent on an inhuman economic system,
there was mass hypocrisy
on an unprecedented scale.
For the last 40 years or so,
the word "hypocrisy” has been a sort
of label attached to the 19th century,
just as frivolity
was attached to the 18th century -
and with about as much reason.
The reaction against it continues.
And although it is a good thing
to have cleared the air,
I think that the reaction has done harm
by bringing into discredit
all professions of virtue.
The very words, "pious”, "respectable”,
"worthy",
have become joke words,
used only ironically.
Much as one hates the inhuman way
in which the doctrines of Malthus
were accepted,
the terrible truth is that the rise
of population did nearly ruin us.
It struck a blow at civilisation
more ominous
than anything
since the barbarian invasions.
First it produced
the horrors of urban poverty,
and then the dismal counter-measures
of bureaucracy and regimentation.
It must have seemed -
may still seem - insoluble.
And yet this doesn't excuse the
callousness with which prosperous people
ignored the conditions of life
among the poor,
on which, to a large extent,
their prosperity depended.
And this in spite of the most detailed
and eloquent descriptions
that were available to them.
I need mention only two.
Engels's Condition Of The
Working Class, written in 1844
and the novels written by Dickens
between 1838 and 1854 -
between Nicholas Nickleby and Hard Times.
Engels's book is presented
as documentation
but it is, in fact, the passionate cry
of a young social worker,
and, as such, it provided,
and has continued to provide,
the emotional dynamo of Marxism.
Marx read Engels. I don't know
who else did - that was enough.
But everybody read Dickens.
The pictures you are looking at
are by the French artist Gustave Doré,
whose illustrated books on London
appeared in 1872.
You see, things hadn't changed
much since the '40s.
Perhaps it took an outsider
to see London as it really was.
And it needed someone of
Doré's marvellous graphic skill
to make this great slice
of human misery credible.
I think that Dickens did more than anyone
to diffuse an awakened conscience
but one mustn't forget
the practical reformers who preceded him.
At the beginning of the period,
the Quaker Elizabeth Fry,
who, in an earlier age,
would certainly have been canonised,
because her spiritual influence
on the prisoners of Newgate
was really a miracle.
And in the middle of the century,
Lord Shaftesbury, whose long struggle
to prevent the exploitation
of children in factories
puts him next to Wilberforce
in the history of humanitarianism.
It's an almost incredible fact
that in the middle of the 19th century
there was no children's hospital
in London,
and children
weren't taken into ordinary hospitals
for fear that they might be infectious.
Shaftesbury was one of the founders
of the Hospital for Sick Children -
Dickens helped to raise the money for it.
There is its first ward
in Great Ormond Street.
Here is its successor today.
And, as I look at it,
I am more than ever convinced
that humanitarianism
was the great achievement
of the 19th century.
We are so much accustomed
to the humanitarian outlook
that we forget how little it counted
in earlier ages of civilisation.
Ask any decent person
in England or America today
what he thinks matters most
in human conduct,
five to one
his answer will be "kindness".
It's not a word
that would've crossed the lips
of any of the earlier heroes
of this series.
If you'd asked St Francis
what mattered in life,
he would, we know, have answered,
"Chastity, obedience and poverty."
If you'd asked Dante or Michelangelo,
they might have answered,
"Disdain of baseness and injustice.”
But kindness? Never.
Nowadays, I think we underestimate
the humanitarian achievement
of the 19th century.
We forget the horrors that were taken
for granted in early Victorian England.
The hundreds of lashes inflicted daily
on perfectly harmless men
in the Army and Navy.
The women, chained together in threes,
rumbling through the streets
in open carts, on their way
to transportation. These,
and even more unspeakable cruelties,
were carried out by
agents of the Establishment,
usually in defence of property.
Some philosophers tell us
that humanitarianism is a weak, sloppy,
self-indulgent condition,
spiritually much inferior
to cruelty and violence.
And this point has been eagerly accepted
by novelists, dramatists
and theatrical producers.
Of course it's true that kindness is to
some extent the offspring of materialism
and this has made anti-materialists
look at it with contempt,
as a product of what
the German philosopher Nietzsche
called "a slave morality".
He would certainly have preferred
the other aspect of my subject,
the heroic self-confidence of the men
for whom nothing was impossible,
the men who forced
the first railways over England.
(# EDUARD STRAUSS: Bahn Frei!)
The railway engine created
a situation that was really new.
A new basis of unity,
a new concept of space -
a situation that is still developing.
The 20 years after Stephenson's Rocket
had made its momentous journey along
the Manchester-Liverpool railway
were like a great military campaign.
The will, the courage, the ruthlessness,
the unexpected defeats,
the unforeseen victories.
The Irish navvies who built the railway
were like a "grande armée”,
ruffians who yet had a kind of pride
in their achievement.
Their marshals were the engineers.
The strongest creative impulse of the time
didn't go into architecture,
but into engineering.
Partially because, at this date,
it was only in engineering
that men could make full use
of the new material
that was going to transform
the art of building - iron.
The first iron bridge in the world
was built at Coalbrookdale
in Shropshire in 1779 -
almost archaic.
By 1820, Telford could build
the Menai Bridge -
the first great suspension bridge.
An idea that combines beauty
and function so perfectly
that it's hardly been varied,
only expanded, down to the present day.
And here's the Clifton Bridge,
begun in 1836,
although not completed until long after.
Still one of the most beautiful
suspension bridges in the world.
It was designed by a man
who deserves to rank with
the earlier heroes in this series,
Isambard Kingdom Brunei.
He was a born romantic.
Although the son
of a distinguished engineer,
brought up in a business
that depended on sound calculations,
he remained all his life
in love with the impossible.
In fact, as a boy,
he fell heir to a project
which he himself
believed to be impossible,
his father's plan for the construction
of a tunnel under the Thames.
At 20, his father
put him in charge of the work
and thus began the sequence
of triumphs and disasters
that were to mark his whole career.
Here's one of the triumphs.
A grand dinner held in the tunnel
when it was halfway across.
On the left, father Brunei
congratulating his son,
and behind them,
a table full of notables.
It's typical of Brunei
that in the next bay of the tunnel
there was an equally grand dinner
for 150 of his miners.
Two months later the shield collapsed,
and the water poured in
for the third time.
In the end, the tunnel was completed.
That was the way with Brunei's designs.
They were so bold that shareholders
were frightened and withdrew,
sometimes, I'm bound to say,
with reason.
But one thing he did push through
and complete,
and that was the Great Western Railway.
Every bridge, every tunnel, was a drama,
demanding incredible feats of
imagination, energy and persuasion,
and producing works of great splendour.
The greatest drama of all
was the Box Tunnel.
Two miles long, on a gradient,
and half of it through rock, which Brunei,
against all advice, left unprotected.
How on earth did they do it? By men
with pick-axes working by torchlight,
and horses to pull away the debris.
There were floods, collapses.
It cost the lives of over 100 men.
But in 1841
a train steamed through.
And from that day forward,
for over a century,
every small boy dreamt
of becoming an engine driver.
Brunei, by his dreams,
no less than by his practical application
of engineering techniques,
is the ancestor of New York.
And I must say he looks it.
There he is, complete with cigar,
the first hero in this series
of whom we have a photograph.
He's standing in front of
the chains used in launching,
or rather, in failing to launch,
his vast steamship,
the Great Eastern.
This was his most grandiose dream.
The first steamship to cross the Atlantic
in 1838 had been only 700 tons.
Brunei's Great Eastern was to be
24,000 tons - a floating palace.
The amazing thing
is that he got it built at all.
But no doubt
he had taken too big a leap forward.
And although the Great Eastern ultimately
floated, and crossed the Atlantic,
the delays and disasters
it had involved killed its designer.
But the transatlantic liner
was one more way
in which the 19th century created
its new world of shape - its architecture.
"The shapes arise!" said
Walt Whitman writing in the 1860s.
"Shapes of factories, arsenals,
foundries, markets.
"Shapes of the two-threaded tracks
of rail-roads.
"Shapes of the sleepers of bridges.
"Vast frameworks, girders, arches."
This is our own style,
which expresses our own age,
as the Baroque expressed the 17th century.
And it's the result of
100 years of engineering.
It's a new creation,
but it's related to the past
by one of the chief continuous traditions
of the Western mind,
the tradition of mathematics.
In the middle of the 19th century,
it might well have looked as if art
that set out to be artistic
had much better all be scrapped.
Think of the Great Exhibition of 1851.
It was contained in a building,
the so-called Crystal Palace,
that was a piece of pure engineering
on Brunei's principles. And, in fact,
greatly admired by him. Dateless and
impressive in a somewhat joyless style,
but inside this piece of engineering
was art!
Well, funny things happen
in the history of taste.
But I doubt very much if many of these
objects will ever come back into favour.
The reason being
that they are a giant spoof,
not responding to anything new,
or controlled by any stylistic impulse.
But in France, at exactly the same time,
there emerged two painters
whose social realism was in the
centre of the European tradition -
Jean-Francois Millet
and Gustave Courbet.
They were both revolutionaries.
In 1848 Millet was probably a Communist,
although when his work became fashionable
the evidence for this
was rather hushed up.
Courbet remained a rebel and was put
in prison for his part in the Commune -
very nearly executed.
In 1849,
he painted a picture of a stone breaker -
alas destroyed in Dresden
during the last war.
He intended it as a straightforward record
of an old neighbour.
But it was seen by a Communist friend
who told him that it was the first
great monument to the workers, etc, etc.
Courbet was delighted by this idea
and said that the people of Ornans
wanted to hang it over the altar
in the local church.
This, if it were true,
which I very much doubt,
would have been the beginning of
its status as an ob jet de culte,
which it has retained to the present day.
It's the indispensable picture
to all Marxist art historians.
The following year, Courbet painted
an even more impressive example
of his sympathy with ordinary people,
his enormous picture of a funeral
in his native town of Ornans.
By abandoning all pictorial artifice,
which must inevitably involve a certain
amount of hierarchy and subordination,
and standing his figures in a row,
Courbet achieves a feeling of equality
in the presence of death.
How seriously he has accepted
the truth of each head.
But I mustn't leave you with the notion
that the relationship
between art and society
is as simple and predictable as this.
A pseudo-Marxist approach
works fairly well
for the decorative arts
and for mediocrities,
but artists of real talent
always seem to slip through the net,
and swim away in the opposite direction.
I'm standing in front of one of the
greatest pictures of the 19th century -
Seurat's Baignade in the National Gallery.
And although it contains factory chimneys,
and a bowler hat
and proletarian boot-tabs,
it would be absurd to speak of it
as a piece of social realism.
The point of the picture
is not its subject,
but the way in which it unites
the monumental stillness
of a Renaissance fresco
with the vibrating light
of the Impressionists.
It's the creation of an artist
independent of social pressures.
All the greatest pictures
of the late 19th century
are quite different in subject and mood
from what one might expect.
And before one makes gloomy
generalisations about the period,
the miseries of the workers,
the oppressive luxury of the rich
and so forth,
it's as well to remember that among
its most beautiful productions
are these paintings by Renoir.
No awakened conscience,
no heroic materialism.
No Nietzsche, no Marx, no Freud.
Just a group of ordinary human beings
enjoying themselves.
(# OFFENBACH: La Belle Helene: Overture)
The Impressionists
didn't set out to be popular.
The only great painter
of the 19th century
who longed for popularity
in the widest possible sense,
was, ironically enough,
the only one who achieved
absolutely no success in his lifetime,
Vincent van Gogh.
In its earlier phase,
the awakened conscience
had taken a practical, material form.
Even Elizabeth Fry, with her powerful
religious gifts, had lots of common sense.
But in the later part of the 19th century,
the feelings of shame at the state
of society become more intense.
Instead of benevolent action,
there arose a need for atonement.
No-one expressed this
more completely than van Gogh
in his pictures, his drawings,
his letters, and his life.
For the first part of his working life,
he was torn between two vocations -
painter and preacher.
And for some years,
the preacher was in the ascendant.
Preaching wasn't enough.
Like St Francis,
he had to share the poverty
of the poorest and most miserable
of his fellow men.
And it wasn't the hardships
that made him give up this way of life -
it was his unconquerable need to paint.
Van Gogh's hero -
the hero of almost all generous-minded men
in the late 19th century - was Tolstoy.
There he is, sawing wood,
expressing the feeling
that one must share the life
of working people. Partly as a sort of
atonement for years of oppression,
partly because that life
was nearer to the realities
of human existence.
Tolstoy towered above his age,
as Dante and Michelangelo
and Beethoven had done.
His novels are marvels
of sustained imagination.
His doctrines are full of contradictions.
He wanted to be one with the peasants,
yet he continued to live
like an aristocrat.
He preached universal love,
but he quarrelled so painfully
with his poor demented wife,
that at the age of 82
he ran away from her.
(WIND HOWLS)
After a nightmare journey,
he collapsed at a country railway station.
He was laid out on a bed
in the stationmaster's house.
Almost his last words were -
"How do peasants die?"
There he died,
with all the horrors of modern publicity
stewing outside the station.
After his death, when the peasants
were singing a lament,
soldiers were sent in with drawn swords,
to stop them from mourning
the subversive infidel.
However, there was no way
of preventing the funeral.
That scene took place in 1910.
Within two years, Rutherford and Einstein
had made their first discoveries.
So a new era had begun even before
the 1914 war.
It's the era in which we're still living.
The radio telescope at Jodrell Bank.
Of course, science had achieved
great triumphs in the 19th century,
but nearly all of them had been related
to practical or technological advance.
For example Edison,
whose inventions did as much as any
to add to our material convenience,
wasn't what we should call a scientist
at all, a very supreme do-it-yourself man.
But from the time of Einstein, Niels Bohr,
the Cavendish Laboratory,
science no longer existed to serve
human needs, but in its own right.
When scientists could use
a mathematical idea to transform matter,
they had achieved
the same quasi-magical relationship
with the material world as artists.
In this series, I have followed the ups
and downs of civilisation historically,
trying to discover results
as well as causes.
Well, obviously
I can't do that any longer.
We have no idea where we are going.
And sweeping,
confident articles on the future
seem to me
the most intellectually disreputable
of all forms of public utterance.
Scientists who are really qualified
to talk have kept their mouths shut.
JBS Haldane summed up the situation
when he said,
"My own suspicion is that the universe
is not only queerer than we suppose,
"but queerer than we can suppose.”
NASA COUNTDOWN: Three, two, one...zero.
(# BRITTEN: Spring Symphony, Opus 44)
(STRIDENT, STIRRING ORCHESTRA)
(VOICES JOIN ORCHESTRA)
However, in the world of action
a few things are obvious -
so obvious that I hesitate to repeat them.
One of them
is our increasing reliance on machines.
They have really ceased to be tools,
and have begun to give us directions.
And, unfortunately, machines,
from the Maxim gun to the computer,
are, for the most part,
means by which an authoritarian regime
can keep men in subjection.
(TICKING OF MACHINES SET AGAINST
MODERNIST ORCHESTRAL PIECE)
(CONCORDE ENGINE ROARS)
(MENACING MUSIC)
(ENGINES WHINE AND ROAR)
Our other speciality
is the urge to destruction.
(EXPLOSIONS AND AIRCRAFT WHINE)
With the help of machines, we did
our best to destroy ourselves in two wars,
and in doing so
we released a flood of evil.
(EXPLOSIVE RUMBLING)
(SIREN WAILS)
Add to this the memory of that
shadowy companion,
who is always with us,
like an inverted guardian angel,
silent, invisible, almost incredible,
and yet unquestionably there.
And one must concede that the future
of civilisation doesn't look very bright.
(# BRITTEN: Spring Symphony
Opus 44: Shine Out, Fair Sun)
And yet, when I look at the world about me
in the light of these programmes,
I don't at all feel that we are entering
on a new period of barbarism.
The things that made the Dark Ages
so dark - the isolation,
the lack of mobility,
the lack of curiosity, the hopelessness -
I don't obtain at all.
I am at one of our new universities -
the University of East Anglia.
Well, these inheritors of
all our catastrophes look cheerful enough
and not at all like the melancholy
late Romans or pathetic Gauls
whose likenesses have come down to us.
In fact, I should doubt
if so many people have ever been
as well-fed, as well-read,
as bright-minded, as curious
and as critical as the young are today.
Of course there's been
a little flattening at the top.
But, you know, one mustn't overrate
the culture of what used to be
called "top people"” before the wars.
They had charming manners,
but they were as ignorant as swans.
They knew a little about literature,
less about music, nothing about art
and less than nothing about philosophy.
The members of a music group
or an art group at a provincial university
would be ten times better informed
and more alert.
(# BRITTEN: Spring Symphony, Opus 44:
Part I: The Driving Boy)
(MUSIC CONTINUES
OVER INAUDIBLE CONVERSATIONS)
Well, naturally,
these bright-minded young people
think poorly of existing institutions
and want to abolish them.
One doesn't need to be young
to dislike institutions.
But the dreary fact remains
that even in the darkest ages,
it was institutions
which made society work.
And if civilisation is to survive,
society must somehow be made to work.
At this point I reveal myself in
my true colours, as a stick-in-the-mud.
I hold a number of beliefs
that have been repudiated by
the liveliest intellects of our time.
I believe that order is better than chaos.
Creation better than destruction.
I prefer gentleness to violence.
Forgiveness to vendetta.
On the whole, I think that knowledge
is preferable to ignorance.
And I am sure that human sympathy
is more valuable than ideology.
I believe, that in spite of
recent triumphs of science,
men haven't changed much
in the last 2,000 years.
And, in consequence,
we must still try to learn from history.
History is ourselves.
I also hold one or two beliefs
that are more difficult to put shortly.
For example, I believe in courtesy,
the ritual by which we avoid
hurting other people's feelings
by satisfying our own egos.
And I think we should remember
that we are part of a great whole,
which, for convenience, we call nature.
All living things
are our brothers and sisters.
(COOT'S PIPING CALL)
(# TOMAS LUIS DE VICTORIA:
Responsories For Tenebrae)
Above all, I believe in the God-given
genius of certain individuals,
and I value a society
that makes their existence possible.
These programmes have been filled
with great works of genius -
in architecture, sculpture and painting,
in philosophy, poetry and music,
in science and engineering.
There they are. You can't dismiss them.
And they're only a fraction
of what Western man has achieved
in the last thousand years -
often after setbacks and deviations
at least as destructive
as those of our own time.
Western civilisation
has been a series of rebirths.
Surely this should give us
confidence in ourselves.
I said at the beginning of the series
that it's lack of confidence,
more than anything else,
that kills a civilisation.
We can destroy ourselves
by cynicism and disillusion,
just as effectively as by bombs.
Fifty years ago, WB Yeats,
who was more like a man of genius
than anyone I've ever known,
wrote a prophetic poem,
and in it, he said...
"Things fall apart
The centre cannot hold
"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,
and everywhere
"The ceremony of innocence is drowned
"The best lack all conviction,
while the worst
"Are full of passionate intensity."
Well, that was certainly true
between the wars,
and it damn nearly destroyed us.
Is it true today?
Not quite, because good people have
convictions - rather too many of them.
The trouble is
that there is still no centre.
The moral and intellectual failure
of Marxism
has left us with no alternative to
heroic materialism, and that isn't enough.
One may be optimistic,
but one can't exactly be joyful
at the prospect before us.
(# STRAVINSKY: Apollon Musagète:
Tableau II: Apothéose)