Now it can be told: What the Pope thinks of Cherie Blair
Searching in the end-of-the-year newspapers for any sign of what the new year would be like, a Daily Telegraph headline struck the eye: 'Get rid of sexism, Cherie tells the Pope'. So 2004 — like most years in these past three decades or so — will be a year for diversity.
Mrs Blair was delivering the Tablet lecture. She had visited the Vatican privately during the year with her husband and children. She had not liked what she saw. Most of us, when we visit Rome, see various wonders of antiquity and Renaissance. But Mrs Blair keeps an eye out for gender inequality, and similar cruelties. 'After the trip', said the Telegraph, by way of background to her lecture, 'she expressed her , disappointment at the lack of women working in the Vatican curia, the Church's equivalent of the Civil Service.'
We were not told the Pope's opinion of her. 'That Signora Blair,' he could well have confided to a senior member of the , curia. 'She was the guest from hell.'
'You mean, literally from hell. Holy Father? A representative of the Devil? We must exorcise her at once.'
`No, worse, a representative of Signora Greer. She complained to me that all the apostles were men, and that not one of the gospels put in the Bible was by a woman, even though she knew that women wrote plenty of gospels in those days but the Church burnt them. Burnt the books, she meant, but also the women. She said women in the Bible get all the unskilled jobs, like washing Our Lord's feet with their hair. But, I told her, a woman was chosen to bring Our Lord into the world. Being Our Lord, he could have done it himself. She said that was all very well, but the Bible makes it pretty clear that she didn't have the chance to go to university, and be a barrister just like her.'
'And what was her husband doing while she was going on like this, Holy Father?'
'He rolled his eyes upwards, and winked at me. He was very nice. Later we had a quick word together, when she went off to check how many women there were in my Swiss Guard. He was very devoted to her. He said, "You know what it's like when you've lived with a woman for many years. You get used to their little ways." I told him, "Of course, I don't. I'm the Pope.But I knew what he meant.'
Mrs Blair is in a noble tradition among British women. She knows what is good for us. Florence Nightingale knew that better field hospitals were good for our troops. Lilian Baylis, founder of the Old Vic and later Sadler's Wells, thought that serious drama, opera and ballet would be good for the London working class. But, it may be objected, an opinionated barrister — whose opinions never surprise us — is hardly the same as Miss Nightingale or Miss Baylis, especially since, unlike those two, she also seems to have a taste for the material joys of life when offered free.
But most people must make do with the predominant values of the age in which they live. Miss Nightingale and Miss Baylis, though separated by several decades, were born into ages of earnestness. Mrs Blair is a child of the self-indulgent 1960s and 1970s. It is as well that she did not found Sadler's Wells, since it would resound to heavy metal and Bob Dylan if she had. Mrs Blair's age does not think that the workers should be led, in the arts, to the tastes of the elevated. It believes that nearly all tastes are equally `valid'.
So Mrs Blair's generation must espouse what the age most values. This seems to be two, on the face of it, incompatible things: diversity and equality. But they are not incompatible in Mrs Blair's mind. For her, people of diverse background should have an equal opportunity to be the same as one another. That is liberal and feminist. For many of us, this would be a dreary spectacle. But the 'many' in the 'many of us' is important. Mrs Blair would get her way in Scandinavia and Holland, and probably has already. But in an eccentric country such as Britain. there are enough of us not to conform to her orthodoxy.
But we should still admire her. Her husband is the most brilliant living practitioner of a profession in which most principles and con victions have to be negotiable. People who have dealt with him nearly all say the same thing about him: that he agrees with them. Could anyone imagine him lecturing the Pope on gender equality in the curia? Although the right one is running the country, we do not need two Blairs like that. It is a relief also to have the other one. We should wish her an opinionated New Year.
This year is the 100th anniversary of a book which achieved the feat of being the most influential, and least influential, work in its field, for a while at the same time. It is Shakespearian Tragedy by A.C. Bradley (1851-1935).
I discovered Bradley, and took him seriously, because when I was of university age I was lucky enough not to go to university and be taught that he was a fool, which was what they said about him in universities in the 1960s and presumably still do. For those less lucky than I, it should be explained that Bradley, following Dr Johnson and Coleridge, but going into greater detail, treated Shakespeare's characters as if they were real people. Their emotions, strengths, weaknesses and flaws explained their actions, and the plays'. His book had enormous influence. Then the academics announced that the most important thing about Shakespeare was not the characters, but the imagery and structure. The mid-century's must influential academic critic, Leavis. mocked Bradley for being, among other things, sentimental, and that looked like the end of Bradley.
A few authorities remained loyal to Bradley's principles, including almost everyone who actually went to the plays rather than read them in the study or, especially, taught them in the study. The most brilliant was the mid-century theatre critic John Palmer, in his Political Characters of Shakespeare. But the academy took no notice.
Unwittingly, however, notice is taken of him in the place for which Shakespeare wrote. Not necessarily among actors or directors in the theatre, but among audiences. In their seats, the plays do not grip them because of their imagery or structure, but because of the characters. The plots' structures are generally as chaotic and implausible as in Italian opera, as popular an entertainment, when new, as Shakespeare was in Elizabethan times. In this centenary year of his masterpiece, Bradley has won.
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