PERSONAL COLUMN

The measure of all things

CHRISTOPHER BOOKER

So strongly did Lord Clark's thirteen tele- vision lectures on the history of western civilisation (and their subsequent publication in book form) establish themselves as one of the major 'cultural events' of the past twelve months, so lavish (and virtually unquestion- ing) was the acclaim rendered them on almost all sides, that I hope I may be forgiven for returning even at this .late date to discuss some of the issues which Lord Clark raised.

For all the pleasure which I, like so many, derived from the way in which the lectures were put across, I was nevertheless somewhat troubled at the time by a certain jarring ele- ment which seemed to run through them, and which has been confirmed by reading them again. It amounts to a sense that somehow the evidence Lord Clark_ provides con- tinually seems to point to a conclusion slightly different frcim that which he is read- ing into it. Let me try to explain.

Undoubtedly the cornerstone of the series is Lord Clark's view of how the story has ended up. The fact that he should scarcely have bothered to disguise how little he likes the present day was indeed for many people a powerful ingredient in his appeal. Apart from stray asides directed throughout the series at modern architects, plays, psychia- trists, 'hellish traffic' and 'all these forces which threaten to impair our humanity—lies, tanks, tear gas, ideologies, opinion polls, mechanisation, planners, computers', his fear that we are no longer truly civilised, his suspicion that we are sinking into a new barbarism, recurrently intrudes on his sweep over the glories of the past fifteen hundred years like a spectre at the feast. In Chartres Cathedral, he cannot restrain himself from remarking that 'even the tourists have not.

destroyed its atmosphere, as they have in so many temples of the human spirit'. From the octagon at the top of Greenwich Observa- tory, surrounded with all the noble impedi- menta of seventeenth century science, his gaze strays out across the trees and the elegant buildings of Wren's Royal Hospital below to the distant skyline of smoking factories and high-rise flats, 'the squalid dis- order of industrial society'.

Why should we have come to such a pass? For the sake of intellectual consistency, this should certainly have been one of the major underlying themes of the series: and indeed, up to a point, Lord Clark seems to be giving an answer. The trouble with our present civilisation, he implies, is that we have lost touch with our spiritual roots, our sense of human scale, our sense of man's proper place in the frame of nature. We have become, in short, materialists on a heroic scale, defying the universe, but at the same time losing that sense of proportion in all things which has been the secret of each of these societies along the way which can truly be claimed to have been civilised.

So where did things go wrong? If one is to see the past fifteen hundred years of our civilisation as an evolutionary development,

and not just as a series of disconnected epi- sodes, then there must have bean some points where these disruptive tendencies now bear- ing such unwelcome fruit began to show themselves. And it is here, I believe, that Lord Clark shows himself reluctant to face the full implications of his em n evidence.

Let us consider briefly how his story runs. He begins with a somewhat melodramatic picture of how civilisation was brought through the Dark Ages following the fall of Rome, `by the skin of its teeth'. He makes no bones about what constituted this holy relic, being carted about on the extreme Western shores of Europe by a handful of barbarian monks—the tradition of Graeco- Roman culture.

Around 1000, this frail flame is fanned back to life. Civilisation is reborn; and par- ticularly significant is the moment he chooses to illustrate this—the re-emergence of a recognisable human figure in Christian art. From then on, despite his previously luke- warm sympathy for Christianity, the Church passes into favour as the chief pillar of Western civilisation, and for the next three episodes, as he discusses the Middle Ages, can do little wrong. But even here, despite his emphasis on the civilising importance of the Christian view that the spiritual world is vastly more significant than the material, it is again revealing what incidents and people Lord Clark chooses to portray this. His fancy is caught by the idea of the 'irrepressible, irresponsible energy' of the Romanesque sculptors, revelling in their skill like 'a school of dolphins'. He naturally homes with delight on the figure of the Abbe Sugar of St Denis, the man who consciously revived the Greek belief that men's minds could only come to appreciate divinity through material beauty. It is hard not to conclude that, for all his apparent sympathy towards the spiritual world-view of mediaeval Christendom, Lord Clark's real appreciation of that time is still at root only aesthetic.

Then, of course, comes the great turning point : as, in the late Middle Ages, men stretch out to find much greater significance in the material world itself, and in them- selves, without necessarily retaining the all- embracing framework of religion. One would naturally expect from what has gone before (and indeed from his background) that Lord Clark would find himself more at home in the Renaissance than anywhere: in the period where, as he borrows from Protagoras for one of his titles, 'Man is the measure of all things'. But here is a curious thing: that in each of the three episodes in which he represents man bursting forth from the medieval frame, covering the Renaissance and the Reformation, he so chooses to arrange his evidence that, after an initial wave of optimism and creativity, they end in blackest pessimism. From the order and light of Urbino and Alberti's Florence to the romantic, disturbed gloom of a Giorgione landscape, from the glories of the High Renaissance to Leonardo's world-destroying deluges, from the humanism of Erasmus to the sense of life's meaninglessness portrayed by Shakespeare ('the first and maybe the last supremely great poet to have been without a religious belief'), each time the great leap forward of those three hundred years is represented as ending in doubt, if not despair. Why should this be so? Is it possible that in that Renaissance leap into the material world, Lord Clark has already sensed the birth of that restlessness, that insatiable curiosity, man's refusal to accept the restraints of an idea of universal order, which has finally led to his nightmarish vision of today?

For the time being, at least, he consoles himself with remarking that 'I feel the human mind has gained a new by outstar- ing this emptiness'; and even more perhaps with his next episode, in many ways the most successful of all, on the Counter-Reforma-

-tion. Lord Clark obviously delights in run- ning counter to the modern grain, as he

extols the re-establishment of authority and certainty in the Tridentine Church. But it is still above all an aesthetic view that he is tak- ing, and once more, as he surveys the attempts to give the idea of spiritual order material form, he ends his story unhappily on the dissipation of late Baroque art into swirling clouds of illusion.

From here on, as the present grows closer, he finds it ever harder to find a secure foot- hold. He rejoices briefly in the seemingly re-ordered universe of Vermeer's Holland and Newton's England—but even this is an order based ultimately (apart from Rem- brandt) on the materialism of scientific observation, and, as he gazes out from Greenwich, he is reminded of what that love of science was to lead to. He finds universal truth in the masters of eighteenth century music, but sees them leading inexorably to Mozart's Don Giovanni: 'the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of love, which had once seemed so simple and life-giving, have become complex and destructive, and his refusal to repent, which makes him heroic, belongs to another phase of civilisation'. Loth to plunge on such a perfect cue into the whirlpool of nineteenth century Roman- ticism, he returns to the Age of Reason—but again, the smile of Voltaire fades into the make-believe and irrationality of the French Revolution. He tries the revolutionary ideals of brotherhood and liberty themselves, but finds them fading faster than ever into 'the Fallacies of Hope'.

Increasingly in his final episodes, Lord Clark is being forced to clutch at straws for anything he can really call 'civilisation'—the defiance of Balzac, the technological roman- ticism of Brunel, the 'love of nature' which he traces through Rousseau and Wordsworth to the cloud studies of Constable and the gaseous canvases of Turner. But this is thin stuff when measured against that confident universality he found in the past; only by intellectual contortion is it possible to see here all those ideals of 'proportion', 'confi- dence', 'a sense of performance' and 'eternity' which he had once considered essential.

And so, with this increasing sense of dis- sipation, of his reluctance to lift his head, we reach Lord Clark's melancholy peroration, his quotation from Yeats: 'Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . . and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned'. And it is hard not to avoid the conclusion that a great deal of his melancholy is nothing less than that of a man who, after a lifetime of believing the opposite, has at last been forced face to face with something he is still not prepared wholly to accept: that the drowning of our innocence began at the very moment when, for the heroes of the Renaissance. it seemed that man and his works could become the measure of all things.