PERSONAL COLUMN

Where the rainbow ends

CHRISTOPHER BOOKER

Are men less happy today than they were? It is a common human reaction in times of stress and disorder to dwell on visions of a 'golden age' when things seem to have been an improvement on their present state; our own age is of course no exception. Yet few things are harder than these figments of nostalgia to put to the test of reality.

Many people in the past twenty years of mechanised turmoil have, for instance,

found delight in the portrait of country life in North Oxfordshire in the 1880s drawn by Flora Thompson in her book Lark Rise to Candle ford. There is no doubt that Miss Thompson herself looked back

to the hard, rustic simplicities of her child- hood as something of a golden time when 'people knew the lost secret of being happy on little'. 'People were poorer and had not the comforts, amusements or knowledge we have today; but they were happier'.

Even in Lark Rise of the 1880s, however, there were some, such as 'old Sally', who looked back to their own vanished golden age, before the common surrounding the hamlet had been enclosed, before the advent of machine-made furniture and Nottingham lace: 'country people had not been so poor when Sally was a girl, or their prospects hopeless'. And this more distant prospect of an age before the 'graces and simple luxuries of the old style of living had disap- peared', takes us back to the early decades of the nineteenth century—the very time when William Cobbett was riding through rural England, bitterly bemoaning the hard times which had been brought on a de- humanised countryside by the evils of en- closure, paper money, the Speenhamland system, and the monstrous machinations of The Thing. 'Our properties, our laws, our manners, our minds you have changed! This, which I have noticed, has all taken place within forty, and, most of it, within ten years'.

Thus Cobbett's own golden age lay again, at least another forty years previously—in the 1770s. the very time when Goldsmith in turn was crying the lost simplicities of Sweet Auburn, and the time 'there was, ere Eng- land's griefs began, When every rood of ground maintained its man'.

So the golden ages apparently pursue each other down into the vista of history— and naturally, to all this, progressive, hard- headed twentieth century man, with his feet on the ground, says 'of course: all this golden age of the past is so much senti- mental claptrap. The hankering after lost innocence is just a recurrent fantasy'.

Now, it is true that nostalgia is a very misleading commodity; indeed that it fre- quently presents a picture of the past romanticised into almost a complete rever- sal of the truth. One of the great nostalgias of the twentieth century has been for the 'long Edwardian summer afternoon', before the holocaust of 1914. Yet even the most cursory study of the reality of those years will reveal them as a time of extraordinary unrest, when change was accelerating on every hand and political and industrial life were more violent than they have ever been since.

Similarly, we look back on the eighteenth century as an age of ordered calm and Mozartian grace—the very time when the

stresses working themselves up in the Euro- pean mind were about to explode into the cataclysm of 1789, and when Gibbon him- self, far from dwelling on present felicity, was pining for that era under the Roman Empire which represented 'the period in the history of the world when the condition of the human race was most happy and pros- perous'.

But, fired by this insight into the eternal gullibility of human nature, our hard- headed progressive then goes on to draw a very sweeping conclusion. He observes that all ages have hankered after their lost para- dise, even those which seemed outwardly most resigned to the ills of their present life on earth by transferring the paradise from which they felt exiled to a spiritual plane. And he therefore concludes that all such nostalgia is hallucination, and that, al- though we may sometimes be tempted to think we have our troubles, they are really a good deal less than those of any previous generation.

In drawing such a conclusion, there is one very important fact about the past which the progressive ignores; that for all their imaginations of a lost golden age, most of our forefathers did nevertheless accept their lot, because they expected nothing else. The progressive invariably measures his assessment of people's happiness in the past against his own standards, and what he him- self knows. He regards the prevalence of infant mortality (the most favoured cliché), or the lack of colour television or bath- rooms, as grievous afflictions; although such things could hardly have seemed so great an affliction to those who did not know otherwise.

But here in fact lies the real difficulty in making an objective appraisal of the past— that we are unable to appreciate the value of something which has been lost, and which cannot be assessed in material terms. The gulf which divides us from our ances- tors is that between our own outlook, con- ditioned by constant change, and that of men who, for all their mild archetypal illusions of a golden age, at least did not fret at the possibility that things might be different in the future.

As de Tocqueville wrote more than 130 years ago: 'In certain remote corners of the Old World, you may sometimes stumble upon little places which seem to have been forgotten amid the general tumult, and which have stayed still while all around them moves. The inhabitants are mostly very ignorant and very poor; they take no part in the affairs of government, and often govern- ments oppress them. But yet they seem serene and often have a jovial disposition.

'In America I have seen the freest and best educated of men in circumstances the happiest to be found in the world; yet it seemed to me that a cloud habitually hung on their brow, and they seemed serious and almost sad, even in their pleasures.

'The chief reason for this is that the former do not give a moment's thought to the ills they endure; whereas the latter never stop thinking of the good things they have not got'.

For, of course, the essence of the progres-

Rive creed is that it, too, is never content with the present. It also is continually look- ing to something else, its own hallucinatory golden age, not of the past, but of the future; and there is nothing less conducive to that peace of mind which must be the only mature definition of happiness, than the constant, fretful fixing of the mind on elusive futurity which in all matters, large and small, is so supremely characteristic of twentieth century man.

In fact, in one important sense, the various examples of nostalgia for a lost innocence I quoted at the beginning of this article, are not so mutually contradictory as they may seem. In this sense they may all be true, for they are all reporting on what, over the past two hundred years, has been a continu- ing process — the progressive weakening, through the hopes invested in science and technology, of man's acceptance of his lot.

The enclosures and other signs of 'pro- gress' deplored by Goldsmith, Cobbett and old Sally, were all part of the same move- ment to reduce the inhabitants of rural England to the condition of a rootless pro- letariat, dependent on the machine; the mechanised entertainments and other later innovations deplored by Flora Thompson as having destroyed even the remnants of the golden age she remembered, were only Continuations of the same process.

In this sense, all these nostalgias were right: for each in turn recognised a different stage of the undermining of man's self- respect and conscious dependence on nature, and his acceptance of his condition before God. To the progressive this will seem the vilest heresy and wildest delusion of all. But to argue that a man who is content with his lot, for whatever reason, might be made happier if he were less content, is to argue that a man who is happy is not happy. Even for the subtlest of progressives, that is asking a lot.