(MUSIC) WILLIAM WALTON: Symphony In B Flat Minor
Dorothy Wordsworth said about the view of London from Westminster Bridge,
that "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.
(MUSIC) WILLIAM WALTON: Symphony In B Flat Minor
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 antislavery movement
and painstakingly discovered all the horrifying evidence.
The political side was the life, work of William Wilberforce
in whose house in Hull I'm now standing.
I've 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 of 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.
Well, so, 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 homemade 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".
(Creaking timbers)
This is one of the irons used for branding the slaves
on chest and back with the proprietor's initials.
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 nine million slaves
died from heat and suffocation in those holds on the way to America.
A remarkable figure, even by modern standards.
The antislavery movement
became the first communal expression of the awakened conscience
but 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'd 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 or70 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 Iron Works in 1787,
scratched these lines on a windowpane.
"We cam na here to view your works,
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.
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 countermeasures of bureaucracy and regimentation.
It must have seemed, may still seem, insoluble.
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 Conditions 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're 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'm more than ever convinced that humanitarianism
was the great achievement of the 19th century.
We're 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 think matters most in human conduct
five to one, his answer will be "kindness".
It's not a word that would have 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 other 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".
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 antimaterialists look at it with contempt,
at the 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.
(Whistle)
(MUSIC) JOHANN STRAUSS: Tales From The Vienna Woods, "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 had built the railway were like a "grande armée",
ruffians, who yet had a kind of pride in their achievement.
(MUSIC) Tales From The Vienna Woods
Their marshals were the engineers.
The strongest creative impulse of the time didn't go into architecture, but into engineering,
partly 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.
Here's the Clifton Bridge, begun in 1836, although not completed till 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 Brunel.
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 Brunel congratulating his son.
Behind them, a table full of notables.
It's typical of Brunel 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 Brunel'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, half of it through rock,
which Brunel, against all advice, left unprotected.
How on earth did they do it?
By men with pickaxes, working by torch light,
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.
Brunel, 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.
Brunel'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.
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 railroads;
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,
but was a piece of pure engineering on Brunel'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 François 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, et cetera, et cetera.
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 "objet 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's 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.
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.
(MUSIC) OFFENBACH: La Belle Hélene
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 became 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.
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.
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
but a 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'd achieved the same quasi-magical relationship with the material world as artists.
In this series, I've 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."
TANNOY: Three, two, one,
Zero,
(MUSIC) BENJAMIN BRITTEN: Shine Out, Fair Sun From The Spring Symphony
(MUSIC) Shine out
(MUSIC) Fair Sun
(MUSIC) The stars in icicles arise
(MUSIC) Shine out
(MUSIC) Fair sun
(MUSIC) And make this winter...
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.
Unfortunately, machines from the Maxim gun to the computer
are, for the most part,
means by which an authoritarian regime can keep man in subjection.
(Computers whir)
(MUSIC) The grey wolf howls
(MUSIC) He does so bite
(MUSIC) The grey wolf howls...
(Engines roar)
Our other speciality is the urge to destruction.
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.
(Explosions)
(Air-raid siren)
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.
(Soundless)
(MUSIC) 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're 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,
don't obtain at all.
I'm 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 "the 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.
(MUSIC) BENJAMIN BRITTEN: The Driving Boy
(MUSIC) And chop-cherry, chop-cherry ripe within
(MUSIC) Strawberries swimming in the cream
(MUSIC) And schoolboys playing in the stream
(MUSIC) Strawberries swimming in the cream
(MUSIC) And schoolboys playing in the stream
(MUSIC) Then, O then, O then, O my true love said
(MUSIC) Till that time come again
(MUSIC) She could not live a maid
(MUSIC) When as the rye reach to the chin
(MUSIC) And chop-cherry, chop-cherry ripe within...
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.
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.
Above all, I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals
and I value a society that makes their existence possible.
(MUSIC) TOMAS LUIS DE VICTORIA: Responsories For Tenebrae
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 1,000 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.
50 years ago, WB Yeats, who was more like a man of genius that 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.
ls 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.
(MUSIC) IGOR STRAVINSKY: Apollon Musagete