The culture trail

Asa Briggs

The Nationalisation of Culture Janet (Hamish Hamilton £8.50) It is almost as difficult to write about the history of the arts as state-supported activities as it is to administer them. It is all too easy to get lost in a tangle of time-consuming but trivial detail, to take sides on issues which inextricably entwine public and private themes, and to concentrate, even if the first two difficulties are overcome, on one particular 'branch' of the arts—opera or ballet or film or museums—at the expense of the rest.

Janet Minihan, writing from a comfortable distance in Washington D.C., has not allowed herself to be daunted. Her book is scholarly and readOle and, above all, well balanced. It is also timely. No previous book has covered the ground in quite the same way, and although she goes back to 1805 for her first quotation, it—and the many which follow—still has topical point. Few things are being said about public support for the arts today which have not been said before, often better. There were nineteenth-century Mentmores and nineteenth-century precursors of the business support associations which are now seeking to unite private and public funds, while the 1805 quotation itself —from a future President of the Royal Academy—hinted that there was a threat to humanity in the increasing mechanisation of labour. No one would go quite so far nowadays, however, as to claim that 'a drop from the ocean of our expenditure would sufficiently impregnate the powers of taste, in a country naturally prolific in every department of genius.'

Impregnation, like propagation,.cultivation or even broadcasting, is a word which points to natural processes. The arts are nurtured and they grow. There has always been an alternative way of thinking about them, however, a way expressed in such terms as diffusion, provision, planning or amenities. Miss Minihan might have made more of the language and the attitudes it reveals. She uses the term 'welfare state' a little too uncritically herself, and even the term 'nationalisation of culture' begs questions. Is a public policy for the arts necessarily a national policy when state funds are employed? Is it not possible to conceive of public funds being employed to generate local or regional activity ? Where are the real loci of initiative and creativity to be found? I missed in Miss Minihan's pages the significant late nineteenth-century shift from provincial to 'nationalised' culture, the debate on regionalism which enlivened but alarmed the BBC between the wars, the continuing argument which goes on in the Arts Council and the British Film Institute, an argument which is concerned with more than mere 'delegation.'

The great value of Miss Minihan's book is that it sets out, almost for the first time, neatly and carefully the outlines of a new cultural chronology which may in time make its way into our textbooks as naturally as the chronologies of public health or of social

security'. It is only a preliminary chronology, of course, and it stops well short of our own

time, but it identifies many of the landmarks and the individuals associated with them. The significance of Keynes in these matters is familiar enough (it has been stressed as much as his significance in the making of economic policy) but how many people know of Henry Cole, a remarkable mid Victorian, who surely deserves a major new life? His attempt to unify and systematise attitudes as well as institutions was bound to

make him almost as many enemies as Chadwick made in the struggle for public health

, Miss Minihan deals well with the curious links between public health legislation and the fostering of 'culture,' links which per sisted as late as 1942, when local-authority provided education had also come into the centre of the picture. It was a Labour Party manifesto of that year which bracketed together the organisation of social services at a level which secures adequate health: nutrition and care in old age, for all citizens and 'educational opportunities for all which ensure that our cultural heritage is denied to none.'

There are, of course, many difficulties in the way of integrating 'social' and 'cultural' history. Often it has been the artist himself who has got in the way of legislators and administrators who have wanted to fit him

into their plans, rightly reminding them that the arts cannot be treated like sanitation. Nor can any 'provision' (without much else s of a 'nurturing' kind) guarantee that there will not still be creative atrophy. The re

lationships here are complex, not simple.

And there have always been both conservative and radical critics of the attempt

to integrate the arts with everything else,

individualists and dissidents, as well as 'communicators' and 'missionaries.' While Miss Minihan describes clearly the role that rebel artists had in the late nineteenth century, when they would have made it very difficult for the state to support them had it wished to do so, she is less interested in the role of their twentieth-century successors. In

the last parts of her book she concentrates more upon the basic and far-ranging influences brought about by the development

of new technologies, although she mentions television only once and has little to saY about the possibilities of our moving out of

a culture increasingly shaped by mass com munications into a culture (or set of related cultures) offering (through new technol

ogies) far greater possibilities of choice and discrimination. We have not arrived at a destination, as the end of her book seems to imply. We are still on the trail or even, God help us, at sea.