How the West was won
Alexander Stoddart unravels the relationship between art and politics
The great British philosopher Brian Magee, writing about Richard Wagner’s political life, points out that it is wrong to think of the Sage of Bayreuth moving to the Right in his later life. Magee’s proposal is compelling; Wagner leaves leftwing politics precisely as men who are maturing leave politics generally. They drift in middle age towards the static wasteland of metaphysics, and this is observed by those still remaining in politics as a move towards the Opposition, since they still cannot think of anything outside the political sphere. It appears that the ageing man ‘goes Tory’. In reality, however, there is every chance that he has simply glimpsed his first sight of the ‘other side’. In the parallel musical experience of the common man today, he has left the North Africa Campaign of Radio One, passed through the demob camp of Terry Wogan, and finally arrived home in the leafy suburban shades of Classic FM. Relax...
In a groundbreaking article published recently by The Spectator, the composer James MacMillan made a public renunciation of his long-standing leftism. He also, bravely, declared that modern art is a field absolutely dominated by political leftism. A certain exhibition in Germany, during the century of Hell, made certain that anyone observing the more vigorous manifestations of Modernism would at least have the sense to keep mum about, not to inquire about, not even notice, its ... what they used to call Bolshevism. You don’t want entirely to ruin your chances. It is by no means to deny MacMillan’s immensity as an artist to suppose that a history of residing on the correct side of the political fence was a mighty assistance to his career. After all, from what we could tell from the music alone he could have been a Tory all along. Or is that exactly the case? My long experience in an art inferior to the super-art of music, sculpture, leads me to believe that certain forms do indeed conform to political ideas. This is to say, some shapes belong to the Left, while others belong to another world. By this I mean that certain forms are counter-political. This goes for sounds too. Such forms are sometimes called ‘reactionary’.
I am inclined to ask if, in music, there is a type of sound that can disclose a conservative bent (or at least a non-leftist disposition). Take the struggle over ‘Jerusalem’. With its screwball verse — all that fighting and not ceasing, building and charioteering — it’s well known on the political hustings, yet Parry’s tune itself has a decided, retreating conservatism. Once it is orchestrated by Elgar, and that woodwind descant twists and climbs with those Arrows of Desire, the patience of your average hood-eyed Trotskyite finally runs out. This sound is surely, in itself, a form of class treason! For the rest of us, of course, those Arrows actually glimpse the truth.
The Left, early in the last century, failed to secure direct revolution in the West, so another tactic was adopted — to dismantle the institutions of the Occident in a long, piecemeal slog. The focus fell on the arts, and this explains why the high music and visual arts of today are so startlingly different from anything you might encounter in undeconstructed times. Where the family, say, was singled out as a sinister and coercive societal institution, so certain artistic forms likewise became suspect: the tune; the rhyme; the moulding; the plinth. Today they are half-heartedly trying to reconstruct the family; but the cultural institutions are proving harder to patch up and this can be attributed to something in the artistic forms of traditionalism that the newly barbarised human being deeply dreads. The Modernism of the last century has forged a sub-sensibility, where man is engineered to be a healthy kind of ignoramus — a Superman — unneedful of the analgesic mercies that art of the old sort delivered into the veins of suffering humanity. The pain is the gain — so let’s write poems that are merely chopped prose, boil our testicles to win the Turner prize, build houses that look like washing machines for living in and, if we make statues at all, make sure they are bolted down at pavement level, so we can ‘interact’ with them (usually with some vomit on a Saturday night).
There is a corner of a foreign (at least to a Scot) square that is forever Bedlam. It is, to my mind, absolutely certain that the several public outrages on that unfortunate empty plinth in Trafalgar Square are committed principally in reference to the monumental statuary from the 19th century that stands in such solemnity while this Punch and Judy show carries on. The authorities that plan it, and the ‘artists’ who carry it out, have not the slightest interest in the politics of the Trafalgar Square sculpture scheme, being, like all contemporists, thoroughly ignorant of history and quite unaware of the existence of the Mariner King, William IV, whose equestrian statue is the natural choice permanently to quell the riot on that unhappy spot. No, it is all in the formal qualities of the statues around that this allergic reaction originates. Look into this, and you will discover something secret and revealing. Proper, old-fashioned-looking statues have stillness, which grates on the nerves of the naturally clamorous. Then they have great scale with which to emphasise that calmness. Observe how the eyes of these statues never follow you about: they ignore you. This offends left-wingers, who are always craving attention. And the statues are far away, in the sky. Why are they not down here, with us, on our level?
I know mere association is not the cause of this kind of aversion, since I have observed certain modernist architects display very odd behaviour just at the very mention of an Ionic column. The panic is visceral, and independent of knowledge. Perhaps, then, it is the case that, in the official arts of the last century, the West was wakened out of its semi-slumber (always guaranteed by the Hypnotic traditional arts) to face a dazzling and perfectly ghastly Nietzschean High Noontide of modernist art, from whose philistinism we and all other decent, homely, conservative types naturally flee. Surely it’s nearly bedtime again? Maybe James MacMillan will write us a lullaby.
Alexander Stoddart’s statue of Adam Smith will be unveiled on the Royal Mile of Edinburgh by the Nobel-prize-winning economist Professor Vernon Smith at noon on 4 July.
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