MUSIC: Symphony No.1 in B Flat by Philharmonia Orchestra
Dorothy Wordsworth said about the view of London from
Westminster Bridge, that it was like one of nature's
own grand spectacles.
Well, nature is violent and brutal,
and there's nothing we can do about it.
But New York... After all, New York was made by men.
It took almost the same time to reach its present condition
as it did to complete the Gothic cathedrals.
At which point a very obvious reflection crosses one's mind,
that the cathedrals were built to the glory of God, New York was built
to the glory of Mammon, money, gain,
the new God for the 19th century.
So many of the same human ingredients have gone into
its construction that, at a distance,
it does look rather like a celestial city...
at a distance. Come closer and it's not so good.
Behind this grim uniformity lurks an even grimmer poverty
and problems that seem almost insoluble.
One sees why heroic materialism is still linked with an
uneasy conscience - it has been from the start.
I mean that, historically, the first discovery and exploitation
of those technical means which made New York possible coincided
exactly with the first organised attempt to improve the human lot.
The first large iron foundries in England, like the Carron Works or
Coalbrookdale, date from roundabout 1780.
Howard's book on penal reform was published in 1777
and Clarkson's essay on slavery in 1786.
Clarkson laid the foundations of the anti-slavery movement and
painstakingly discovered all the horrifying evidence.
The political side was the life work of William Wilberforce,
in whose house in Hull I'm now standing.
I've often heard it said - by people who want to seem clever -
that civilisation can exist only on a basis of slavery.
In support of their thesis, they point to the example of the
fifth century Greece, or the antique world in general.
If one defines civilisation in terms of leisure and superfluity,
there is a grain of truth in this repulsive doctrine,
but I have tried throughout this series to define civilisation
in terms of creative power and the enlargement of human faculties.
And from that point of view, slavery is abominable.
Well, so for that matter is abject poverty.
Poverty, hunger, plagues, disease,
they were the background of history right up to the end of
the 19th century and most people regarded them as inevitable -
like bad weather.
Nobody thought they could be cured.
All that was required was an occasional act of charity.
This pretty scene is entitled Rustic Charity
and under it are written the lines, "Here, poor boy without a coat,
"take this halfpenny."
Not an indication of very serious concern.
But slaves, and the trade in slaves, that was something different.
It was esoteric, it wasn't something that surrounded one
like the air, as home-made poverty did,
and the horrors it involved were far more horrible.
Even the un-squeamish stomachs of the 18th century were turned
by accounts of the Middle Passage.
WAVES LAPPING
CREAKING
This is one of the irons used for branding the slaves on chest
and back with the proprietor's initials.
And this is the actual model of a slave ship,
which Wilberforce produced in the House of Commons to show how
the slaves were crammed together.
It's reckoned that over nine million slaves died from heat and
suffocation in those holes on the way to America.
A remarkable figure, even by modern standards.
The anti-slavery movement became the first communal
expression of the awakened conscience.
It took a long time to succeed.
The trade was prohibited in 1807 and, as Wilberforce lay dying
in 1835, slavery itself was abolished.
Well, I must regard this as a step forward for the human race
and be proud, I think, that it happened in England.
But not too proud.
Victorians were very smug about it,
and they chose to avert their eyes from something almost equally
horrible that was happening to their own countryman.
England had entered the war against Napoleon in the first
triumphant consciousness of its new industrial powers.
After 20 years, England was victorious,
but by failing to control her industrial development,
she'd suffered a defeat, in terms of human life,
far more costly than any military disaster.
I needn't remind you of how cruelly the Industrial Revolution
degraded and exploited a mass of people for 60 or 70 years.
After about 1790, there appeared the large foundries and mills,
which dehumanised life.
Arkwright's spinning frame, invented in about 1770,
is always quoted as the beginning of mass production,
on the whole, rightly.
There he is, faithfully recorded for us by Wright of Derby,
typical of the new man who
was to dominate industry until the present day.
He and his like gave England a flying start in the economy
of the 19th century,
but the result of their inventions was a dehumanisation
that obsessed almost every great imaginative writer of the time.
From the start, poets had recognised the nature of the satanic mills.
Robert Burns, passing the Carron Ironworks in 1787,
scratched these lines on a window pane -
"We cam na here to view your warks
"In hopes to be mair wise
"But only, lest we gang to hell
"It may be nae surprise."
This new religion of gain had behind it
a body of doctrine, without which it could never have maintained
its authority over the serious minded Victorians.
Its sacred books, the works of Malthon population
and Ricardo on economics,
were taken as gospels by pious men, who used them to justify actions
they would never have thought of defending on human grounds.
Hypocrisy?
Well, hypocrisy has always existed.
Where would the great comic writers have been without it?
From Moliere downwards.
But in the 19th century, with its insecure middle class
dependent on an inhuman economic system,
there was mass hypocrisy on an unprecedented scale.
For the last 40 years or so, the word hypocrisy has been
a sort of label attached to the 19th century, just as frivolity
was attached to the 18th century, and with about as much reason.
The reaction against it continues.
And although it is a good thing to have cleared the air,
I think that the reaction has done harm by bringing into discredit
all professions of virtue.
The very words - "pious", "respectable", "worthy" -
have become joke words, used only ironically.
Much as one hates the inhuman way in which the doctrines of Malthus were
accepted, the terrible truth is that the rise of population did
nearly ruin us.
It struck a blow at civilisation more ominous than anything
since the Barbarian invasions.
First it produced the horrors of urban poverty
and then the dismal countermeasures of bureaucracy and regimentation.
It must have seemed, may still seem, insoluble.
Yet this doesn't excuse the callousness with which
prosperous people ignored the conditions of life among the
poor on which, to a large extent, their prosperity depended.
And this in spite of the most detailed and eloquent
descriptions that were available to them.
I need mention only two.
Engels' Condition Of The Working Class, written in 1844,
and the novels written by Dickens between 1838 and 1854,
between Nicholas Nickleby and Hard Times.
Engels' book is presented as documentation, but it is in
fact the passionate cry of a young social worker and, as such,
it provided, and has continued to provide,
the emotional dynamo of Marxism.
Marx read Engels. I don't know who else did. That was enough.
But everybody read Dickens.
The pictures you are looking at are by the French artist
Gustave Dore,
whose illustrated books on London appeared in 1872.
You see, things hadn't changed much since the '40s.
Perhaps it took an outsider to see London as it really was
and it needed someone of Dore's marvellous graphic skill to
make this great slice of human misery credible.
I think that Dickens did more than anyone
to diffuse an awakened conscience,
but one mustn't forget the practical reformers who preceded him.
At the beginning of the period, the Quaker Elizabeth Fry,
who in an earlier age would certainly have been canonised
because her spiritual influence on the prisoners of Newgate
was really a miracle.
And in the middle of the century, Lord Shaftesbury,
whose long struggle to prevent the exploitation of children in
factories puts him next to Wilberforce
in the history of humanitarianism.
It's an almost incredible fact that, in the middle of
the 19th century, there was no children's hospital in London
and children weren't taken into ordinary hospitals for fear
that they might be infectious.
Shaftesbury was one of the founders of the Hospital for Sick Children,
Dickens helped to raise the money for it,
and there is its first ward in Great Ormond Street.
Here is its successor today.
And, as I look at it, I'm more than ever convinced that
humanitarianism was the great achievement of the 19th century.
We're so much accustomed to the humanitarian outlook that we
forget how little it counted in earlier ages of civilisation.
Ask any decent person in England or America today what
he thinks matters most in human conduct -
five to one his answer will be kindness.
It's not a word that would have crossed the lips of any of
the earlier heroes of this series.
If you'd asked St Francis what mattered in life, he would,
we know, have answered, "Chastity, obedience and poverty".
If you'd asked Dante or Michelangelo,
they might have answered, "Disdain of baseness and injustice".
But kindness, never.
Nowadays I think we underestimate the humanitarian achievement
of the 19th century, we forget the horrors that were taken for
granted in early Victorian England,
the hundreds of lashes inflicted daily on perfectly harmless
men in the Army and Navy.
The women chained together in threes rumbling through the
streets in open carts on their way to transportation.
These and other even more unspeakable cruelties were
carried out by agents of the establishment,
usually in defence of property.
Some philosophers tell us that humanitarianism is a weak,
sloppy, self-indulgent condition, spiritually much inferior to
cruelty and violence.
And this point has been eagerly accepted by novelists,
dramatists and theatrical producers.
Of course, it's true that kindness
is to some extent the offspring of materialism
and this has made anti-materialists look at it with contempt...
at a product of what the German philosopher Nietzsche called
a slave morality.
He would certainly have preferred the other aspect of my subject,
the heroic self-confidence of the men for whom nothing was impossible.
The men who forced the first railways over England.
WHISTLE BLOWS
The railway engine created a situation that was really new.
A new basis of unity, a new concept of space,
a situation that is still developing.
The 20 years after Stephenson's Rocket had made its momentous
journey along the Manchester-Liverpool railway
were like a great military campaign.
The will, the courage, the ruthlessness,
the unexpected defeats, the unforeseen victories.
The Irish navvies who built the railway were like a Grande Armee,
ruffians who yet had a kind of pride in their achievement.
Their marshals were the engineers.
The strongest creative impulse of the time didn't go into
architecture, but into engineering.
Partly because, at this date, it was only in engineering that
men could make full use of the new material that was going to
transform the art of building - iron.
The first iron bridge in the world was built at Coalbrookdale in
Shropshire in 1779.
Almost archaic.
By 1820, Telford could build the Menai Bridge -
the first great suspension bridge -
an idea that combines beauty and function so perfectly that it's
hardly been varied, only expanded down to the present day.
And here's the Clifton Bridge, begun in 1836,
although not completed till long after,
still one of the most beautiful suspension bridges in the world.
It was designed by a man who deserves to rank with the
earlier heroes in this series, Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
He was a born romantic.
Although the son of a distinguished engineer,
brought up in a business that depended on sound calculations,
he remained all his life in love with the impossible.
In fact, as a boy, he fell heir to a project which
he himself believed to be impossible, his father's plan
for the construction of a tunnel under the Thames.
At 20, his father put him in charge of the work and thus began the
sequence of triumphs and disasters that were to mark his whole career.
Here's one of the triumphs,
a grand dinner held in the tunnel when it was halfway across.
On the left, Father Brunel congratulating his son.
And behind them, a table full of notables.
It's typical of Brunel that, in the next bay of the tunnel,
there was an equally grand dinner for 150 of his miners.
Two months later,
the shield collapsed and the water poured in for the third time.
In the end, the tunnel was completed.
That was the way with Brunel's designs,
they were so bold that shareholders were frightened and withdrew.
Sometimes, I'm bound to say, with reason.
But one thing he did push through and complete,
and that was the Great Western Railway.
Every bridge, every tunnel was a drama
demanding incredible feats of imagination, energy and persuasion
and producing works of great splendour.
The greatest drama of all was the Box Tunnel,
two miles long on a gradient and half of it through rock,
which Brunel, against all advice, left unprotected.
How on earth did they do it?
By men with pickaxes working by torchlight
and horses to pull away the debris.
There were floods, collapses.
It cost the lives of over 100 men.
But, in 1841, a train steamed through.
And from that day forward, for over a century,
every small boy dreamt of becoming an engine driver.
Brunel, by his dreams no less than by his practical application
of engineering techniques, is the ancestor of New York
and I must say he looks it.
There he is, complete with cigar,
the first hero in this series of whom we have a photograph.
He's standing in front of the trains used in launching,
or rather in failing to launch, his vast steamship, the Great Eastern.
This was his most grandiose dream.
The first steamship to cross the Atlantic in 1838
had been only 700 tonnes.
Brunel's Great Eastern was to be 24,000 tonnes, a floating palace.
The amazing thing is that he got it built at all,
but no doubt he had taken too big a leap forward.
And although the Great Eastern
ultimately floated and crossed the Atlantic,
the delays and disasters it had involved killed its designer.
But the transatlantic liner was one more way in which
the 19th-century created its new world of shape, its architecture.
"The shapes arise," said Walt Whitman writing in the 1860s.
"Shapes of factories, arsenals, foundries, markets,
"shapes of the two-threaded tracks of railroads,
"shapes of the sleepers of bridges, vast frameworks, girders, arches."
This is our own style,
which expresses our own age as the Baroque expressed the 17th century,
and it's the result of 100 years of engineering.
It's a new creation
but it's related to the past by one of the chief continuous
traditions of the Western mind,
the tradition of mathematics.
In the middle of the 19th century, it might well have looked as
if art that set out to be artistic had much all better be scrapped.
Think of the Great Exhibition of 1851.
It was contained in a building, the so-called Crystal Palace,
that was a piece of pure engineering on a Brunel's principles,
and in fact greatly admired by him,
dateless and impressive in a somewhat joyless style,
but inside this piece of engineering was art.
Well, funny things happen in the history of taste,
but I doubt very much if many of these objects would ever
come back into favour.
The reason being that they are a giant spoof,
not responding to anything new or controlled by any stylistic impulse.
But in France at exactly the same time,
there emerged two painters whose
social realism was in the centre of the European tradition,
Jean-Francois Millet and Gustave Courbet.
They were both revolutionaries.
In 1848, Millet was probably a Communist,
although when his work became fashionable
the evidence for this was rather hushed up.
Courbet remained a rebel
and was put in prison for his part in the Commune,
very nearly executed.
In 1849, he painted a picture of a stonebreaker,
alas destroyed in Dresden during the last war.
He intended it as a straightforward record of an old neighbour
but it was seen by a communist friend who told him that it
was the first great monument to the workers, etc, etc.
Courbet was delighted by this idea
and said that the people of Ornans wanted to hang it over the
altar in the local church.
This, if it were true, which I very much doubt,
would have been the beginning of its status as an objet de culte,
which it has retained to the present day.
It's the indispensable picture to all Marxist-art historians.
The following year, Courbet painted an even more impressive
example of his sympathy with ordinary people,
his enormous picture of a funeral in his native town of Ornans.
By abandoning all pictorial artifice,
which must inevitably involve a certain amount of hierarchy
and subordination,
and standing his figures in a row,
Courbet achieves a feeling of equality in the presence of death.
How seriously he's accepted the truth of each head.
But I mustn't leave you with the notion that the relationship between
art and society is as simple and predictable as this.
A pseudo-Marxist approach works fairly well
for the decorative arts and for mediocrities,
but artists of real talent always seem to slip through the net
and swim away in the opposite direction.
I'm standing in front of one of the greatest pictures of
the 19th-century, Seurat's Baignade, in the National Gallery.
And although it contains factory chimneys
and a bowler hat and proletarian boot tabs,
it would be absurd to speak of it as a piece of social realism.
The point of the picture is not its subject but the way in which
it unites the monumental stillness of a Renaissance fresco
with the vibrating light of the Impressionists.
It's the creation of an artist independent of social pressures.
All the greatest pictures of the late 19th century are quite
different in subject and mood from what one might expect,
and before one makes gloomy generalisations about
the period, the miseries of the workers,
the oppressive luxury of the rich and so forth,
it's as well to remember that among its most beautiful
productions are these paintings by Renoir.
No awakened conscience, no heroic materialism, no Nietzsche,
no Marx, no Freud...
..just a group of ordinary human beings enjoying themselves.
The Impressionists didn't set out to be popular.
The only great painter of the 19th century who longed for
popularity in the widest possible sense was, ironically enough,
the only one who achieved absolutely no success in his lifetime,
Vincent van Gogh.
In its earlier phase, the awakened conscience had taken
a practical, material form. Even Elizabeth Fry,
with her powerful religious gifts, had lots of common sense.
But in the later part of the 19th century,
the feelings of shame at the state of society became more intense.
Instead of malevolent action, there arose a need for atonement.
No-one expressed this more completely than van Gogh,
in his pictures, his drawings, his letters and his life.
For the first part of his working life,
he was torn between two vocations, painter and preacher,
and for some years the preacher was in the ascendant.
Preaching wasn't enough.
Like St Francis, he had to share the poverty of the poorest and
most miserable of his fellow men.
And it wasn't the hardships that made him give up this way of life,
it was his unconquerable need to paint.
Van Gogh's hero, the hero of almost all generous-minded
men in the late 19th century, was Tolstoy.
There he is sawing wood,
expressing the feeling that one must share the life of working
people, partly as a sort of atonement for years of oppression,
partly because that life was nearer to the realities of human existence.
Tolstoy towered above his age as Dante and Michelangelo and
Beethoven had done. His novels are marvels of sustained imagination.
His doctrines are full of contradictions.
He wanted to be one with the peasants,
yet he continued to live like an aristocrat.
He preached universal love but he quarrelled so painfully with
his poor demented wife that at the age of 82 he ran away from her.
After a nightmare journey,
he collapsed at a country railway station.
He was laid out on a bed in the station master's house.
Almost his last words were, "How do peasants die?"
There he died,
with all the horrors of modern publicity
stewing outside the station.
After his death, when the peasants were singing a lament,
soldiers were sent in with drawn swords to stop them from
mourning the subversive infidel.
However, there was no way of preventing the funeral.
That scene took place in 1910.
Within two years, Rutherford and Einstein had made
their first discoveries.
So a new era had begun even before the 1914 war.
It's the era which we're still living.
The radio telescope at Jodrell Bank.
Of course, science had achieved great triumphs in
the 19th century, but nearly all of them had been related to
practical or technological advance.
For example, Edison, whose inventions did as much as any to add
to our material convenience, wasn't what WE should call
a scientist at all, but a supreme do-it-yourself man.
But from the time of Einstein, Niels Bohr,
the Cavendish Laboratory,
science no longer existed to serve human needs, but in its own right.
When scientists could use a mathematical idea to
transform matter, they'd achieved the same quasi-magical
relationship with the material world as artists.
In this series, I've followed the ups and downs of civilisation
historically, trying to discover results as well as causes.
Well, obviously, I can't do that any longer.
We have no idea where we are going
and sweeping, confident articles on the future seem to me
the most intellectually disreputable of all forms of public utterance.
Scientists who are really qualified to talk have kept their mouths shut.
JBS Haldane summed up the situation when he said,
"My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer
"than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose."
Three, two, one, zero.
However, in the world of action a few things are obvious,
so obvious that I hesitate to repeat them.
One of them is our increasing reliance on machines.
They have really ceased to be tools
and have begun to give us directions.
And unfortunately machines, from the maxim gun
to the computer, are for the most part means by which an authoritarian
regime can keep men in subjection.
Our other speciality is the urge to destruction.
With the help of machines, we did our best to destroy ourselves
in two wars and in doing so we released a flood of evil.
AIR-RAID SIREN WAILS
Add to this the memory of that shadowy companion who is
always with us like an inverted guardian angel, silent,
invisible, almost incredible
and yet unquestionably there,
and one must concede that the future of civilisation
doesn't look very bright.
And yet, when I look at the world about me
in the light of these programmes, I don't at all feel that
we're entering on a new period of barbarism.
The things that made the Dark Ages so dark - the isolation, the lack of
mobility, the lack of curiosity, the hopelessness - don't obtain at all.
I'm at one of our new universities, the University of East Anglia.
Well, these inheritors of all our catastrophes look cheerful enough
and not at all like the melancholy late Romans or pathetic Gauls
whose likeness have come down to us.
In fact, I should doubt if so many people have ever been as well-fed,
as well-read, as bright-minded,
as curious and as critical as the young are today.
Of course, there's been a little flattening at the top.
But, you know, one mustn't overrate the culture of what used to be
called "top people" before the wars.
They had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans.
They knew a little bit about literature, less about music,
nothing about art and less than nothing about philosophy.
The members of a music group or an art group at a provincial
university would be ten times better informed and more alert.
CHORAL MUSIC PLAYS
Well, naturally, these bright-minded young people think poorly
of existing institutions and want to abolish them.
One doesn't need to be young to dislike institutions.
But the dreary fact remains that, even in the darkest ages,
it was institutions which made society work.
And if civilisation is to survive,
society will somehow be made to work.
At this point, I reveal myself in my true colours
as a stick in the mud.
I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the
liveliest intellects of our time.
I believe that order is better than chaos,
creation better than destruction.
I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta.
On the whole, I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance
and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology.
I believe that, in spite of recent triumphs of science,
men haven't changed much in the last 2,000 years...
..and, in consequence, we must still try to learn from history -
history is ourselves.
I also hold one or two beliefs that are more difficult to put shortly.
For example, I believe in courtesy,
the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings
by satisfying our own egos.
And I think we should remember that we are part of a great whole
which, for convenience, we call nature.
All living things are our brothers and sisters.
Above all, I believe in the God-given genius
of certain individuals
and I value a society that makes that existence possible.
CHORAL MUSIC PLAYS
These programmes have been filled with great works of genius...
..in architecture, sculpture and painting, in philosophy,
poetry and music, in science and engineering.
There they are, you can't dismiss them.
And they're only a fraction of what Western man
has achieved in the last thousand years,
often after setbacks and deviations
at least as destructive as those of our own time.
Western civilisation has been a series of rebirths.
Surely this should give us confidence in ourselves.
I said at the beginning of the series that it's lack of confidence
more than anything else that kills a civilisation.
We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion
just as effectively as by bombs.
50 years ago, WB Yeats, who was more like a man of genius than
anyone I've ever known, wrote a prophetic poem and in it he said...
"Things fall apart.
"The centre cannot hold.
"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
"the blood-dimmed tide is loosed
"and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
"The best lack all conviction
"while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
Well, that was certainly true between the wars
and it damn nearly destroyed us.
Is it true today?
Not quite, because good people have convictions,
rather too many of them.
The trouble is there is still no centre.
The moral and intellectual failure of Marxism has left us with
no alternative to heroic materialism
and that isn't enough.
One may be optimistic,
but one can't exactly be joyful at the prospect before us.