The kingdom of Bevan

PERSONAL COLUMN CHRISTOPHER BOOKER

I recently had the bizarre experience of listen- ing to a conversation between Malcolm Mug- geridge and Aneurin Bevan on the subject of Pilgrim's Progress, recorded some years ago for the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Apart from the unlikely nature of any confrontation between these two protagonists on such a sub- ject, what gave the discussion its particular piquancy was the startling interpretation of Bunyan's allegory put forward by Mr Bevan.

The book, he argued, was not to be looked on as a religious tract at all. Bunyan dressed up his story in religious terms only because of the climate of the time. The real message of Pilgrim's Progress, written by a social non- conformist in the age of the Levellers, was social and political. Christian was in fact a symbol of the downtrodden masses; the burden on his back was not Sin but Poverty. His struggle towards the Celestial City was the workers' struggle against riches and oppres- sion, towards the vision of the Socialist State, the Kingdom of Heaven on earth in which all would be equal—and in which, although Bun- yan forebore to mention it, presumably.heavenly false teeth and spectacles would be liberally dispensed by the Great Founder of the Celestial Health Service himself.

The interesting thing about Bevan's reading of Pilgrim's Progress was that he clearly meant every word of it. Here he was, after all, a highly intelligent, twentieth century materialist man, confronted with a widely respected classic which, by any standard he knew, if read by its traditional interpretation, made no sense at all. Celestial City—pie in the sky! How could such a book be anything but nonsense, unless . . unless it could be read in an entirely new way, and, furthermore, one exactly conforming to Bevan's own view of the nature of the world and man's predicament.

In a sense, this experience of Nye Bevan's illustrates a plight in which we all, to a greater or lesser extent, find ourselves today. We

believe that we know infinitely more about the way the world works than our ancestors, we have moved from the darkness of superstition into the light of scientific progress; increasingly a vast gulf opens up between our own assump- tions and almost the entire canon of those which our forefathers took for granted. And yet the difficulty remains that we still possess an enormous amount of evidence of the way in which our forefathers thought about the world for which we are forced to have a pro- found respect—their works of art, their writ- ings, their buildings. Not only do we respect Bach's B Minor Mass or the paintings of Rem- brandt or Chartres Cathedral; we even have a sneaking sense that they are profounder ex- pressions of man's highest instincts than,any- thing being produced today. So how do we reconcile this with the fact that most of us re- gard the attitudes and beliefs which gave rise to those works as miserable superstition from which we have been happily emancipated?

One common way out is simply to disregard the explicit intentions of those bygone artists altogether, and to take their work just as 'art' for its own sake. Recently a critic in the Times made the rather attractive suggestion that, at performances of the St Matthew Passion, the audience should on occasion be encouraged to join in singing the chorales. A most irate gentleman wrote in reply, asking

whether the critic in question thought she was 'the PRO for some church'; as if mixing up the St Matthew Passion with Christianity was like trying to drag religion into Christmas.

A more promising approach, perhaps, is to follow the example of Mr Bevan, taking the line that these old fellows were not really so very different from us after all, and that, give or take the odd idiosyncrasy of expression, they ' were really on about exactly the same sort of things we all believe in today. The mediaeval cathedrals can thus be reduced to 'brilliant exercises in engineering'; the paintings of Rem- brandt seen as, above all, 'attempts to solve the problem of light'; the music of Bach as 'pure essays in the beauty of higher mathe- matics'; and so forth.

Seen in these terms, the past certainly opens up in a most striking way. We find a pop painter who specialises in pictures of 'bathing beauties in bikinis and "dragster" motor racers,' for instance, able to declare that the major influence on his work is Paolo Uccello, because 'after all, Uccello's figures were always in the latest fashion.' Or Mr William Mann, chief music critic of the Times, able to confess to us how he loves to search for 'Jungian psycho- analysis in Euripides, or patches of abstract painting in Diirer or Leonardo.'

Mr Mann is indeed one of our major pioneers in this refreshing approach to the past, for it was he who penned the imperishable words: 'If the essence of Bach, Mozart and the Beatles has bitten into a person, that person will, barring prejudice and narrowness of in- terest, listen delightedly to The Incredible String Band and Tyrannosaurus Rex, Bob Dylan, Jacques Loussier, Simon and Garfunkle, T-Bone Walker, Julian Bream, Ewan MacColl and Stockhausen.' One almost wonders how he could possibly have been so restrictive as to exclude Liberate, Victor Sylvester and the BBC Northern Dance Orchestra.

Again, it is this comforting assumption that our forebears were really only 'moderns under the skin,' not just sharing the same beliefs but by implication our equals, which permits Miss Joan Littlewood to condone her stringing to- gether the bawdier passages in the two parts of Henry IV by claiming that Shakespeare himself was only 'a terrible old hack,' and therefore presumably would have done the same himself if audiences at the Globe had fallen off; or that allowed Ian Fleming to defend his novels from the charge that they were pornographic on the grounds that 'sex was a perfectly reasonable subject as far as Shakespeare was concerned, and I don't see wby it shouldn't be as far- as I am concerned' —although one might be tempted to wonder

just which play of Shakespeare's it was that Fleming had in mind.

Yet it must be confessed that these attempts to gloss over the difference between past and present do present some snags. Certain incon- sistencies remain awkwardly persistent. Sir Laurence Olivier, for instance, recently gained some éclat when he was campaigning on behalf of the play Soldiers, by allowing himself to be reported as having quoted to the doubtless awe- struck board of the National Theatre from Aristotle's Poetics, on the essence of tragedy. But a year or so earlier, Sir Laurence had gone into the list on behalf of another play, Saved, defending the scene in which a baby is gratuitously stoned to death by claiming (in the Observer) that 'like Shakespeare, in. Mac- beth and Julius Caesar, Mr Bond places his act of violence in the first half of the play.' Inevitably speculation arises as to just how Sir:!Laurence might have equated this some- what arbitrary view of the structure of tragedy with that of Aristotle, particularly with Aris- totle's view of the necessity of catharsis—since the one point about Saved which might have struck Aristotle (or indeed Shakespeare) most forcibly was that, for all its 'act of violence in the first half,' unlike the subsequent fate of Macbeth or the conspirators on the Capitoline Hill, there was apparently no suc- ceeding catharsis or nemesis awaiting its per- petrators at all.

The fact is that Shakespeare's view of tragedy and morality was not just different from but diametrically opposed to that fashionable today. He believed, as did so many other of our ancestors, that there is an order of the universe, reflected in the order of human morality and society, which, if offended against, leads to disaster. This belief in a superhuman framework of order which lies beyond that per- ceived with material eyes marks in fact the greatest gulf which separates us from our past. We read in the notes to a recording of Haydn's Creation that in his initial portrayal of chaos he displays a 'breathtaking harmonic modernity' —when the very purpose of the passage in which those dissonances.occur is that it should represent all the formless darkness of the uni- verse before the light and order of God came upon the world—that very system of order which the rest of The Creation, and indeed the rest of Haydn's music, was explicitly intended to celebrate.

Ultimately, those who wish to believe that there is little fundamentally to separate us from the beliefs of our ancestors end up by uncon- sciously revealing more about our own age that they do their capacity for getting under the -skin of the past; as when we read in a sleeve note to Mozart's celebrated 'Musical Joke' that 'the average listener might well notice very little wrong with what is other-

wise a very charming little suite . for the "shocking" effect of those wrong notes do not fall so terribly on the more catholic modern ear, and who, anyway, save the learned, is to derive amusement from a musical solecism?' But as anyone familiar with the 'Musical Joke' will recall, the whole point of the piece is not just its wrong notes, its technical solecisms —but that it is deliberately designed to be as vapid as possible. a succession of aroused anticipations leading to nothing, a charming burlesque aimed at those who have been able to mistake mere tricks of technique and flashy sensations for real art, by abandoning any sense of the meaning underneath. For Mr Bevan, Mr Mann, old Uncle Sir Laurence and all, it could not be a better epitaph.