Civilisation
by Kenneth Clark
(London: Folio Society, 1999)
Often the sequence of images controls the sequence of ideas.
Page 9.
Generalisations are inevitable and, in order not to be boring, must be slightly risky.
Page 9.
I cannot distinguish between thought and feeling, and I am convinced that a combination of words and music, colour and movement, can extend human experience in a way that words alone cannot do.
Page 9.
Few people can resist the opportunity of airing their opinions.
Page 9.
I have the feeling that one should not try to assess a culture without knowing its language; so much of its character is connected with it’s actual use of words.
Page 10.
What is civilisation? I don’t know, I can’t define it in abstract terms - yet. But I think I can recognise it when I see it.
Page 13.
If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a Minister of Housing or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should believe the buildings.
Page 13.
Great works of art can be produced in barbarous societies.
Page 13.
At certain epochs man has felt conscious of something about himself - body and spirit - which was outside the day-to-day struggle for existence and the night-to-night struggle with fear.
Page 14.
If you had gone into the square of any Mediterranean town in the first century you would hardly have known where you were, any more than you would in an airport today.
Page 14.
The nature of civilisation. It shows that however complex and solid it seems, it is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed. What are its enemies? Well, first of all fear - fear of war, fear of invasion, fear of plague and famine, that make it simply not worthwhile constructing things, or planting trees or even planning next year’s crops. And fear of the supernatural, which means that you daren’t question anything or change anything. … And then exhaustion, the feeling of hopelessness which can overtake people even with a high degree of material prosperity.
Page 14.
Civilisation requires a modicum of material prosperity - enough to provide a little leisure. But, far more, it requires confidence - confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one’s own mental powers. … All the great civilisations - or civilising epochs - have ha a weight of energy behind them.
Page 15.
All the great civilisations - or civilising epochs - have had a weight of energy behind them.
Page 15.
If one asks why the civilisation of Greece and Rome collapsed, the real answer is that it was exhausted.
Page 15.
The strength of Islam was its simplicity. The early Christian Church had dissipated its strength by theological controversies, carried on for three centuries with incredible violence and ingenuity. But Mahomet, the prophet of Islam, preached the simplest doctrine that has ever gained acceptance; and it gave to his followers the invincible solidarity that had once directed the Roman legions.
Page 16.
The subject of Mediterranean art was man, and had been ever since early Egypt. But the wanderers, struggling through the forests, battling with the waves, conscious chiefly of the birds and animals that hung in the tangled branches, were not interested in the human body.
Page 18.
It is arguable that western civilisation was saved by its craftsmen.
Page 19.
The copying of books needed more settled conditions.
Page 19.
If one wants a symbol of Atlantic man that distinguishes him from Mediterranean man, a symbol to set against the Greek temple, it is the Viking ship.
Page 22.
Civilisation means something more than energy and will and creative power: something the early Norsemen hadn’t got, but which, even in their time, was beginning to reappear in Western Europe. How can I define it? Well, very shortly, a sense of permanence. The wanderers and the invaders were in a continual state of flux. They didn’t feel the need to look forward beyond the nest March or the next voyage or the next battle. And for that reason it didn’t occur to them to build stone houses, or to write books.
Page 23.
Civilised man, or so it seems to me, must feel that he belongs somewhere in space and time: that he consciously looks forward and looks back. And for this purpose it is a great convenience to be able to read and write.
Page 23.
Great men, even ecclesiastics, normally dictated to their secretaries, as they do today and as we see them ding in tenth-century illuminations.
Page 23.
What with prejudice and destruction, it’s surprising that the literature of pre-Christian antiquity was preserved at all. And in fact it only just squeaked through. In so far as we are the heirs of Greece and Rome, we got through by the skin of our teeth.
Page 23.
The monasteries couldn’t’ have become the guardians of civilisation unless there had been a minimum of stability: and this, in Western Europe, was first achieved in the Kingdom of the Franks.
Page 24.
All great civilisations in their early stages, are based on success in war.
Page 24.
Without Charles Martel’s victory over the Moors at Poitiers in 732, western civilisation might never had existed, and without Charlemagne’s tireless campaigning we should neve have had the notion of a united Europe.
Page 25.
People don’t always realise that only three or four antique manuscripts of the Latin authors re still in existence: our whole knowledge of ancient literature id due to the collecting and copying that began under Charlemagne, and almost any classical text that survived until the eighth century has survived till today.
Page 26.
Like most able men who have had to educate themselves the hard way, Charlemagne felt strongly the value of education.
Page 26.
On the whole Byzantium was more remote from the west than Islam which had established a basis of evolved intellectual life in southern Spain. No eastern emperor had visited Rome for three hundred years, and when Charlemagne, the great conqueror, went there in the year 800 the Pope crowned him as the head of a new Holy Roman Empire, brushing aside the fact that the nominal emperor ruled in Constantinople.
Page 27.
Maybe the tension between the spiritual and worldly powers throughout the Middle Ages was precisely what kept European civilisation alive. If either had achieved absolute power, society might have grown as static as the civilisations of Egypt and Byzantium.
Page 27.
Under Charlemagne Western Europe was once more in touch with the outside world.
Page 27.
The idea that material substances could be mad spiritual by art alone belongs to a later phase of medieval thought. And yet this use of art to encase objects of religious value was really an indirect expression of the same state of mind.
Page 30.
In the tenth century Christian art took on the character it was to retain throughout the Middle Ages.
Page 30.
We have grown so used to the idea that the Crucifixion is the supreme symbol of Christianity that it is a shock to realise how late in the history of Christian art its power was recognised. … The simple fact is that the early Church needed converts, and from this pint of view the Crucifixion was not an encouraging subject. So, early Christian art is concerned with miracles, healings, and with hopeful aspects of the faith like the Ascension and the Resurrection.
Page 31.
If you had asked the average man of the time to what country he belonged, he would not have understood you; he would have known only to what bishopric.
Page 32.
Three or four times in history man has made a leap forward that would have been unthinkable under ordinary evolutionary conditions. One such time was bout he year 3000 BC, when quite suddenly civilisation appeared, not only in Egypt and Mesopotamia but in the Indus valley; another was in the late sixth century BC when there was not only the miracle of Ionia and Greece - philosophy, science, art, poetry, all reaching a point that wasn’t reached again for 2000 years - but also in India a spiritual enlightenment that has perhaps never been equalled. Another was round about the year 1100. It seems to have affected the whole world; but its strongest and most dramatic effect was in Western Europe - where it was most needed. It was like a Russian spring. In every branch of life - action, philosophy, organisation, technology - there was an extraordinary outpouring of energy, an intensification of existence.
Page 33.
It could be argued that western civilisation was basically the creation of the Church.
Page 33.
The Church was powerful for all kinds of negative reasons: she didn’t suffer many of the inconveniences of feudalism; there was no question of divided inheritances. For these reasons she could conserve and expand her properties. And she was powerful for positive reasons. Men of intelligence naturally and normally took holy orders, and could rise from obscurity to positions of immense influence.
Pages 33-35.
The Church was basically a democratic institution where ability - administrative, diplomatic and sheer intellectual ability - made its way. And then the Church was international. It was to a large extent, a monastic institution following the Benedictine rule and owing no territorial allegiance. The great churchmen of the eleventh and twelfth centuries came form all over Europe.
Page 35.
Where some way of thought or human activity is really vital to us, internationalism is accepted unhesitatingly.
Page 35.
Pilgrimages were undertaken in hope of heavenly rewards: in fact they were often used by the Church as a penitence or a spiritualised form of extradition. The point of a pilgrimage was to look at relics.
Page 38.
The medieval pilgrim really believed that by contemplating a reliquary containing the head or even the fingers of a saint he would persuade that particular saint to intercede on his behalf with God.
Page 38.
That’s the medieval mind. They cared passionately about the truth, but their sense of evidence was different from outs. From our point of view nearly all the relics in the world depend on unhistorical assertions; and yet they, as much as any factor, led to that movement and diffusion of ideas from which western civilisation derives part of its momentum.
Page 39.
To medieval man geometry was a divine activity. God was the great geometer, and this concept inspired the architect.
Page 44.
Good faces evoke good artists - and conversely a decline of portraiture usually means a decline of the face, a theory which can now be illustrated by photographs in the daily papers.
Page 46.
Chartres contained the most famous of all relics of the Virgin, the actual tunic she had worn at the time of the Annunciation, which had been presented to Chartres by Charles the Bald in the year 876.
Page 47.
The great Romanesque churches were dedicated to the saints whose relics they contained.
Page 47.
A strong influence in spreading the cult of the Virgin was certainly the beauty and splendour of Chartres Cathedral. Its very construction was a kind of miracle. The old Romanesque church had been destroyed by a terrible fire in 1194: only the towers and the west front remained.
Page 47.
The faith in France couldn’t have rebuilt the cathedral if the see of Chartres hadn’t been extremely rich.
Page 48.
We must accept that in a non-utilitarian age, people under the stress of some powerful emotion are prepared to make and do things for their own sakes or, as they would have said, to the glory of God.
Page 48.
Medieval man could see things very clearly, but he believed that these appearances should be considered as nothing more than symbols or tokens of an ideal order, which was the only true reality.
Page 50.
A ‘love match’ is almost an invention of the late eighteenth century. Medieval marriages were entirely a matter of property, and, as everybody knows, marriage without love means love without marriage.
Page 53.
For two hundred years the Roman de la Rose was, with Boethius and the Bible, the most-read book in Europe.
Page 54.
In the Middle Ages, civilisation seems to fly in at one window and out at another.
Page 57.
Under feudalism men and animals were tied to the land: very few people could move about - only artists and birds. Birds were cheerful; hopeful, impudent and mobile - and in addition had the kind of markings that fitted in with medieval heraldry.
Page 57.
The great, indeed the unique, merit of European civilisation has been that it has never cease to develop and change.
Page 59.
His [Francis of Assisi] belief that in order to free the spirit we must shed all our earthly goods is the belief that all great religious teachers have had in common - eastern and wester, without exception. It is an ideal to which, however impossible it may be in practice, the finest spirits will always return.
Page 61.
There is no better instance of how a burst of civilisation depends on confidence than the Florentine state of mind in the early fifteenth century.
Page 68.
Almost the first man to read classical authors with real insight was Petrarch.
Page 68.
In Florence the first thirty years of the fifteenth century were the heroic age of scholarship when new texts ere discovered and old texts edited; when scholars were teachers and rulers and moral leaders.
Page 69.
An architectural style cannot take root unless it satisfies some need of the time.
Page 70.
Gravitas, the heavy tread of moral earnestness, becomes a bore if it is not accompanied by the light step of intelligence.
Page 72.
The belief that one could represent a man in a real setting and calculate his position and arrange figures in a demonstrably harmonious order, expressed symbolically a new idea a bout mans place in the scheme of things and his control over his own destiny.
Page 75.
The early Florentine Renaissance was an urban culture, bourgeois properly so-called.
Page 76.
Our contemporary attitude of pretending to understand works of art in order not to appear philistines would have seemed absurd to the Florentines.
Page 76.
Medieval people were presented to the eye as figures that symbolised their status.
Page 78.
One of the weaknesses of Renaissance civilisation … was that it depended on a very small minority. Even in republican Florence, the Renaissance touched relatively few people, and in places like Urbino and Mantua it was practically confined to the court. This is contrary to our modern sense of equality, but on e can’t help wondering how far civilisation would have evolved if it had been entirely dependent on the popular will.
Pages 86-87.
It is sometimes through the wilful, superfluous actions of individuals that societies discover their powers.
Page 87.
To bring order out of chaos is a process of civilisation.
Page 87.
When the men of the Renaissance looked at the countryside it was not as a place of ploughing and digging, but as a kind of earthly paradise.
Page 87.
Awareness of nature is associated with the desire to escape and with hope of a better life.
Page 88.
The civilisation of the early Italian Renaissance was not broadly enough based. The few had gone too far away from the many, not only in knowledge and intelligence - this they always do - but in basic assumptions.
Page 90.
The lively and intelligent individuals who created the Renaissance, bursting with vitality and confidence, were not in a mood to be crushed by antiquity. They meant to absorb it, to equal it, to master it. They were going to produce their own race of giants and heroes.
Page 92.
In what is commonly described as the decadence of the papacy, the Popes were men of unusual ability who used their international contacts, their great civil service and their increasing wealth in the interests of civilisation.
Page 92.
Great movements in the arts, like revolutions, don’t last for more than about fifteen years. After that the flame dies down, and people prefer a cosy glow.
Page 93.
When the average painter set out to depict a scene from antique literature he did so in the costume of his own time.
Page 93.
To despise material obstacles, and even to defy the blind forces of fate, is man’s supreme achievement; and since, in the enc, civilisation depends on man extending his powers of mind and spirit to the utmost, we must reckon the emergence of Michelangelo is one of the great events in the history of western man.
Page 96.
Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes.
Page 97.
People sometimes wonder why the Renaissance Italians, with their intelligent curiosity, didn’t make more of a contribution to the history of thought. The reason is that the most profound thought of the time was not expressed in words, but in visual imagery.
Page 98.
The Sistine ceiling passionately asserts the unity of man’s body, mind and spirit.
Page 98.
It is possible to interpret the whole of the Sistine ceiling as a poem on the subject of creation.
Page 99.
Michelangelo took no interest in the opposite sex; Leonardo thought of women solely as reproductive mechanisms.
Page 103.
The convention by which the great events in biblical or secular history could be enacted only by magnificent physical specimens, handsome and well-groomed, went on for a long time - till the middle of the nineteenth century.
Page 106.
He [Leonardo da Vinci] was the most relentlessly curious man in history. Everything he saw made him ask why and how.
Page 106.
Reading the thousands of words in Leonardo’s note-books, one is absolutely worn out by this energy. He won’t take yes for an answer. He can’t leave anything alone - he worries it, re-states it, answers imaginary antagonists.
Page 107.
The dazzling summit of human achievement represented by Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci lasted for less than twenty years.
Page 109.
The fifteenth century had been the century of revivalism - religious movements on the fringe of the Catholic Church.
Page 109.
In 1498 there arrived in Oxford a poor scholar who was destined to become the spokesman of northern civilisation and the greatest internationalist of his day - Erasmus. Erasmus as a Dutchman - he came for m Rotterdam - but he never went back to live in Holland, partly because he had ben in a monastery there and had hated it, and partly (as he said repeatedly) because people drank too much: he himself had a delicate digestion and would drink only a special kind of Burgundy. All his life he moved from place to place, partly to avoid the plague (the King of Terrors kept all free men on the move throughout the early sixteenth century), and partly due to a restlessness that overcame him if he stayed anywhere too long.
Page 110.
Considering the barbarous and disorderly state of England in the fifteenth century, the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge are surprising creations.
Page 110.
Clearly Erasmus was an intellectual charmer. His charm comes through in his letters and must have been irresistible in is company.
Page 111.
In the last chapter I was concerned with the enlargement of man’s spirit through the visual image, in tis one I am chiefly concerned with the extension of his mind through the word. And this was made possible by the invention of printing.
Page 113.
On balance, I suppose that printing has done more good than harm.
Page 113.
The first printed books were large, sumptuous and expensive. The printers still thought of themselves as competing with the scribes of manuscripts. Many of them were printed on vellum and had illuminations, like manuscripts. It took preachers and persuaders almost thirty years to recognise what a formidable new instrument had come into their hands, just as it took politicians twenty years to recognise the value of television. The first man to take full advantage of the printing press was Erasmus.
Page 113.
To an intelligent man, human beings and human institutions really are intolerably stupid and there are times when his pent-up feelings of impatience and annoyance can’t be contained any longer.
Page 113.
The illiterate faithful had for centuries been instructed by wall-paintings and stained glass, but the vast multiplication of images that was made possible by the printed woodcut put this form of communication on quite a different footing, at once more widespread and more intimate.
Page 114.
Whatever else he may have been, Luther was a hero; and after all the doubts and hesitations of the humanists, and the hovering flight of Erasmus, it is with a real sense of emotional relief that we hear Luther say: ‘Here I stand.’
Page 120.
Luther didn’t approve of destruction, not even the destruction of images. But most of his followers were men who owed nothing to the past - to whom it meant no more than an intolerable servitude. And so Protestantism became destructive, and, from the point of view of those who love what they see, was an unmitigated disaster.
Page 121.
There can be no thought without words. Luther gave his countrymen words. Erasmus had written solely in Latin. Luther translated the bible into German - noble German, too, as far as I can judge - and so gave people not only a chance to read Holy Writ for themselves, but the tools of thought.
Page 121.
Nearly all the steps upward in civilisation have been made in periods of internationalism.
Page 121.
The wars of religion evoked a figure new to European civilisation, although familiar in the great ages of China: the intellectual recluse.
Page 122.
There was one country in which, after 1570, men could live without fear of civil war or sudden revenge (unless they happened to be Jesuit priests) - England. I suppose it is debateable how far Elizabethan England can be called civilised. Certainly it does not provide a reproducible pattern of civilisation as does, for example, eighteenth-century France. It was brutal, unscrupulous and disorderly. But if the first requisites of civilisation are intellectual energy, freedom of mind, a sense of beauty and a craving for immortality, then the age of Marlowe and Spenser, of Dowland and Byrd, was a kind of civilisation.
Page 123.
One of the first ways in which I would justify civilisation is that it can produce a genius.
Page 123.
Shakespeare must be the first and may be the last supremely great poet to have been without a religious belief, even without the humanist’s belief in man.
Page 124.
We have been conditioned by generations of liberal, Protestant historians who tell us that no society based on obedience, repression and superstition can be really civilised.
Page 126.
Symbols sometimes feed the imagination more than facts.
Page 126.
Michelangelo, by his longevity, no less than by his genius, became the spiritual link between the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation.
Page 126.
One of the reasons why medieval and Renaissance architecture is so much better than our won is that the architects were artists.
Page 126.
Perhaps only Michelangelo had the energy of spirit to pull together the vast inchoate mass of St. Peter’s Four admirable architects had worked on it before him; the central piers were already built and part of the surrounding walls; but he was able to give it the unifying stamp of his own character.
Page 128.
The last stone of the dome of St. Peter’s was put in place in 1590.
Page 130.
The mid-sixteenth century was a period of sanctity in the Roman Church almost equal to the twelfth.
Page 131.
I think that intellectual life developed more fully in the freer atmosphere of the north. The great achievements of the Catholic Church lay in harmonising, humanising, civilising the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.
Page 132.
The leaders of the Catholic Restoration had made the inspired decision not to go half-way to meet Protestantism in any of its objections, but rather to glory in those very doctrines that the Protestants had most forcibly, and sometimes, it must be admitted, most logically, repudiated.
Page 133.
For all these reasons, the art we call Baroque was a popular art. The art of the Renaissance had appealed through intellectual means - geometry, perspective, knowledge of antiquity - to a small group of humanists. The Baroque appealed through the emotions to the widest possible audience.
Page 137.
The leading families put painters under contract like athletes - and the painters really got paid, which they never did in the Renaissance. As often happens, a sudden relaxation and affluence after a period of austerity produced an outburst of creative energy.
Page 139.
All art is to some extent an illusion. It transforms experience in order to satisfy some need of the imagination.
Page 142.
The sense of grandeur is no doubt a human instinct, but, carried too far, it becomes inhuman.
Page 143.
To try to suppress opinions which one doesn’t share is much less profitable than to tolerate them.
Page 144.
A belief in the divine authority of our own opinions afflicted the Protestants just as much as the Catholics.
Page 145.
The spirit of Holland in the early seventeenth century was remarkably tolerant; and one proof is that nearly all the great books which revolutionised thought were first printed in Holland.
Page 145.
We know more about what the seventeenth century Dutch looked like than we do about any other society, except perhaps the first-century Romans. Each individual wanted posterity to know exactly what he was like.
Page 145,
Amsterdam was the first centre of bourgeois capitalism. It had become, since the decline of Antwerp and the Hanseatic League, the great international port of the north and the chief banking centre of Europe.
Page 146.
At a certain stage in social development, fluid capital is one of the chief causes of civilisation because it ensures three essential ingredients: leisure, movement and independence.
Pages 146-147.
Bourgeois capitalism led to a defensive smugness and sentimentality. … Also the philosophy of observation involved a demand for realism in the most literal sense.
Page 149.
I must admit that bourgeois sentiments and realism can produce a vulgar trivial art.
Page 150.
In studying the history of civilisation one must try to keep a balance between individual genius and the moral or spiritual condition of a society.
Page 150.
I believe in genius. … Nevertheless, one can’t help feeling that the supremely great figures in history - Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Newton, Goethe - must be to some extent a kind of summation of their times. They are too large, too all-embracing, to have developed in isolation.
Page 150.
Rembrandt was the great poet of that need for truth and that appeal to experience which had begun with the Reformation, had produced the first translations of the Bible, but had had to wait almost a century for visible expression.
Page 150.
Rembrandt reinterpreted sacred history and mythology in the light of human experience.
Page 154.
All the greatest exponents of civilisation, from Dante to Goethe, have been obsessed by light. But in the seventeenth century, light passed through a crucial stage. The invention of the lens was giving it a new range and power.
Page 156.
Although one may use wo4ks of art to illustrate the history of civilisation, one must not pretend that social conditions produce works of art of inevitably influence their form.
Page 158.
The leadership of intellectual life passed form |Holland to England. The change began in 1660, when Charles II embarked from the Dutch beach at Scheveningen to return to England, and ended the isolation and austerity which had afflicted England for almost fifteen years. As so often happens, a new freedom of movement led to an outburst of pent-up energy. There are usually men of genius waiting for these moments of expansion, like ships waiting for a high tide; and on this occasion there was in England the brilliant group of natural philosophers who were to form the Royal Society.
Page 158.
Parallel with the study of light was the study of the stars.
Page 158.
It is arguable that the non-existence of a clear, concrete German prose has been one of the chief disasters to European civilisation.
Page 164.
Between Descartes and Newton, western man created those instruments of thought that set him apart from the other peoples of the world.
Page 164.
In a period when poetry was almost dead, when the visual arts were little more than a shadow of what they had been, when the emotional life seemed almost to have dried up, music expressed the most serious thoughts and institutions of the time, just as painting had done in the early sixteenth century.
Page 165.
Organs have played a variable role in European civilisation. In the nineteenth century they were symbols of newly won affluence, like billiard tables; but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they were expressions of municipal pride and independence.
Page 168.
Organists were respected members of the community.
Page 168.
Great men have a curious way of appearing in complementary pairs. This has happened so often in history that I don’t think it can have been invented by symmetrically minded historians, but must represent some need to keep human faculties in balance.
Page 170.
Baroque first came into being as religious architecture, and expressed the emotional aspirations of the Catholic Church. Rococo was to some extent a Parisian invention, and provocatively secular.
Page 173.
Rococo was a reaction against the academic style.
Page 173.
It’s always been difficult, even for the saints, to represent spiritual love without having recourse to the symbols of physical love.
Page 177.
Many buildings of the eighteenth century were erected simply to give pleasure by people who believed that pleasure was important, and worth taking trouble about, and could be given some of the quality of art.
Page 179.
It may be difficult to define civilisation, but it isn’t so difficult to recognise barbarism.
Page 179.
Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.
Page 180.
In Catholic countries, not only in Europe but in South America, the opera house is often the best and largest building in the town.
Page 180.
The philosophers of the Enlightenment pushed European civilisation some steps up the hill, and in theory, at any rate, this gain was consolidated throughout the nineteenth century. Up to the 1930s people were supposed not to burn witches and other members of minority groups, or extract confessions by torture or pervert the course of justice or go to prison for speaking the truth. Except, of course, during wars. This we owe to the movement known as the Enlightenment, and above all to Voltaire.
Page 182.
Eighteenth-century England was the paradise of the amateur; by which I mean, of men rich enough and grand enough to do whatever they liked, who nevertheless did things that require a good deal of expertise.
Page 183.
In talking a out the twelfth and thirteenth centuries I said how great an advance in civilisation was then achieved by a sudden consciousness of feminine qualities; and the same was true of eighteenth-century France. I think it absolutely essential to civilisation that the male and female principles be kept in balance.
Page 185.
The success of the Parisian salons depended very largely on the fact that the court and government of France were not situate in Paris, but in Versailles.
Page 187.
If one turns from the arts of design to the play of intellect, then life at Versailles in the eighteenth century had little to offer, and Parisian society was fortunate to be free from the stultifying rituals of court procedure and the trivial day-to-day preoccupations of politics.
Page 187.
A margin of wealth is helpful to civilisation, but for some mysterious reason great wealth is destructive. I suppose that, in the end, splendour is dehumanising, and a certain sense of limitation seems to be a condition of what we call good taste.
Page 189.
Our whole society is based on different sorts of exploitation.
Page 190.
The people who frequented the salons of eighteenth-century France were not merely a group of fashionable good-timers: they were the outstanding philosophers and scientists of the time.
Page 191.
The aims of L’Encyclopédie seem harmless enough to us. But authoritarian governments don’t lie dictionaries. They live by lies and bamboozling abstractions, and can’t afford to have words accurately defined.
Page 192.
The Renaissance had taken place within the framework of the Christian Church. A few humanists had shown signs of scepticism, but no one had expressed any doubts about the Christian religion as a whole. … But by the middle of the eighteenth century serious-minded men could see that the Church had become a tied house - tied to property and status and defending its interests by repression and injustice.
Page 195.
The eighteenth century was faced with the troublesome task of constructing a new morality, without revelation or Christian sanctions.
Page 196.
One can’t understand the new morality of the Enlightenment without reckoning with the belief that the simple goodness of natural man was superior to the artificial goodness of sophisticated man.
Page 196.
For almost a thousand years the chief creative force in western civilisation was Christianity. Then, in about the year 1725, it suddenly declined and, in intellectual society, practically disappeared. Of course it left a vacuum. People couldn’t get on without a belief in something outside themselves, and during the next hundred years they concocted a new belief which, however irrational it may seem to us, has added a good deal to our civilisation: a belief in the divinity of nature.
Page 200.
England was the first country in which the Christian faith had collapsed.
Page 200.
The ruins of the Age of Faith had become part of nature - or rather they had become a sort of lead into nature through sentiment and memory.
Page 200.
When Pope described ‘this scene of man’ as ‘a mighty maze of walks without a plan’ he was expressing a profound change in the European mind.
Page 201.
For over two thousand years, mountains had been considered simply a nuisance: unproductive obstacles to communication, the refuge of bandits and heretics. … To Erasmus, Montaigne, Descartes, Newton, practically any of the great civilisers I have mentioned in this series, the thought of climbing a mountain for pleasure would have seemed ridiculous.
Pages 201-202.
When an ordinary traveller of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries crossed the Alps it never occurred to him to admire the scenery - until the year 1739, when the poet Thomas Gray, visiting the Grande Chartreuse, wrote in a letter: ‘Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry.’
Page 202.
Rousseau’s belief in the beauty and innocence of nature was extended from plants and trees to man. He believed that natural man was virtuous. It was partly a survival of the old myth of The Golden Age, and partly a feeling of shame at the corruption of European Society.
Page 203.
Belief in the superiority of natural man became one of the motive powers of the next half-century.
Page 203.
Goethe’s |Nature is slightly different from Rousseau’s Nature. He meant by it not how things seem, but how things work if they are not interfered with.
Page 205.
A sympathy with the voiceless and the oppressed, be they human or animal, does seem to be a necessary accompaniment to the worship of nature.
Page 206.
Wordsworth recognised that simple people and animals often show more courage and loyalty and unselfishness than sophisticated people; and also a greater sense of the wholeness of life.
Page 207.
Both Byron and Wordsworth fell deeply in love with their sisters.
Page 208.
The simple life: it was a necessary part of the new religion of nature.
Page 211.
Civilisation, which for so long had been dependent on great monasteries and palaces, or well-furnished salons, could now emanate from a cottage.
Page 211.
How closely the worship of nature was connected with walking. … For over a hundred years, going for a country walk was the spiritual as well as the physical exercise of all intellectuals, poets and philosophers.
Page 211.
Wordsworth, and indeed the whole cult of nature, was associated with mountains.
Page 212.
Nature-worshippers concentrated on the clouds.
Page 214.
The periods in which men can work together happily inspired by a single aim last only a short time - it’s one of the tragedies of civilisation.
Page 217.
Total immersion: this is the ultimate reason why the love of nature has been for so long accepted as a religion. It is a means by which we can lose our identity in the whole and gain thereby a more intense consciousness of being.
Page 218.
Symmetry is a human concept, because with all our irregularities we are more or less symmetrical.
Page 219.
An enclosed world becomes a prison of the spirit.
Page 219.
One realises that symmetry and consistency, whatever their merits, are enemies of movement.
Page 219.
The escape from symmetry was also an escape from reason.
Page 219.
The French Revolution evolved from the protest of a few discontented lawyers, through the honourable grunts and groans of the bourgeois constitutionalism, to the raw cry of a popular movement.
Page 221.
Most of the great episodes in the history or civilisation have had some unpleasant consequences. But none have kicked back sooner and harder than the revolutionary fervour of 1792; because in September there took place the first of those massacres by which, alas, the Revolution is chiefly remembered.
Page 223.
For a few years her leaders suffered from the most terrible of all delusions. They believed themselves to be virtuous.
Page 224.
War and imperialism, so long the most admired of human activities, have fallen into disrepute.
Page 224.
The dream of limitless conquest goes back to Alexander the Great, whose perfectly senseless expeditions to India may be seen as the original protest against classical enclosure.
Page 227.
Communal enthusiasm may be a dangerous intoxicant; but if human beings were to lose altogether the sense of glory, I think we should be the poorer.
Page 227.
When the Bastille fell in 1792 it was found to contain only seven old men who were annoyed at being disturbed.
Page 229.
Beethoven, in spite of his tragic deafness, was an optimist. He believed that man had within himself a spark of the divine fire revealed in his love of nature and his need for friendship. He believed that man was worthy of freedom.
Page 229.
Consciousness of the sublime was a faculty that the Romantic movement added to the European imagination.
Page 230.
The early nineteenth century created a chasm in the European mind as great as that which had split up Christendom in the sixteenth century, and even more dangerous. On one side of the chasm was the new middle class nourished by the Industrial Revolution. It was hopeful and energetic, but without a scale of values. Sandwiched between a corrupt aristocracy and a brutalised poor, it had produced a defensive morality - conventional, complacent, hypocritical. … On the other side of the chasm were the finer spirits - poets, painters, novelists, who were still heirs of the Romantic movement, still hunted by disaster … They felt themselves - and not without reason - to be entirely cut off form the prosperous majority. They mocked at the respectable middle class and its bourgeois king.
Page 238.
In the energy, strength of will and mental grasp that have gone to make New York, materialism has transcended itself.
Page 241.
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 of the nineteenth century.
Page 241.
The early pictures of heavy industry are optimistic. Even the workers didn’t object to it because it was hellish but because they were afraid that machinery would put them out of work. The only people who saw through industrialism in those early days were the poets.
Page 242.
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. So, for that matter, is abject poverty.
Page 243.
It has been estimated that over nine million slaves died from heat and suffocation on their way from Africa to America: a remarkable figure, even by modern standards.
Page 243.
In its early stages the Industrial Revolution was also a part of the Romantic movement.
Page 244.
The nineteenth century, with its insecure middle class dependent on an inhuman economic system, produced hypocrisy on an unprecedented scale.
Page 245.
Much as one hates the inhuman way in which the doctrines of Malthus were accepted, the terrible truth is that the rise in population did not ruin us. It struck a blow at civilisation such as it hadn’t received since the barbarian invasions. First it produced the horrors of urban poverty and then the dismal countermeasures of bureaucracy and regimentation.
Page 246.
Dickens himself, for all his generosity of spirit, took a kind of sadistic pleasure in the horrors he described.
Page 246.
The early reformers’ struggle with industrialised society illustrates what I believe to be the greatest civilising achievement of the nineteenth century - humanitarianism. We are so much accustomed to the humanitarian outlook that we forget how little it counted in earlier ages of civilisation.
Page 246.
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.
Page 247.
It is … true that kindness is to some extent the offspring of materialism, and this has made anti-materialists look at it with contempt.
Page 248.
The application of steam to manufacture had only intensified what had existed before. Wordsworth’s factory was powered by water.
Page 248.
At the very beginning of this series I said that I thought one could tell more about a civilisation from its architecture than from anything else it leaves behind. Painting and literature depend largely on unpredictable individuals. But architecture is to some extent a communal art - at least it depends upon a relationship between the user and the maker much closer than in the other arts.
Page 248.
The public buildings of the nineteenth century are often lacking in style and conviction; and I believe this is because the strongest creative impulse of the time didn’t go into town halls or country houses, but into what was then thought of as engineering.
Page 249.
All modern New York, heroic New York, started with Brooklyn Bridge.
Page 252.
Never before in history have artists been so isolated form society and from official sources of patronage as were the so-called Impressionists. … In their best years - from 1865 to 1885 - hey ere treated as madmen or completely ignored.
Page 257.
The Impressionists did not set out to be popular. On the contrary, they became resigned to public ridicule. … The only great painter of the nineteenth 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.
Page 258.
Van Gogh’s hero - the hero of almost all generous-minded men in the late nineteenth century - was Tolstoy.
Page 259.
Tolstoy towered above his age as Dante and Michelangelo and Beethoven had done. His novels are marvels of sustained imagination; but his life was full of inconsistencies. 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 eighty-two he ran away from her.
Page 260.
Science had achieved great triumphs in the nineteenth 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 would call a scientist at all, but a supreme ‘do-it-yourself’ man - the successor of Benjamin Franklin. But form the time of Einstein, Niels Bohr and the Cavendish Laboratory, science no longer existed to serv human needs, but in its own right.
Page 260.
Sweeping, confident articles on the future seem to me, intellectually, the most disreputable of all forms of public utterance.
Page 260.
Unfortunately machines, from the Maxim gun to the computer, are for the most part means by which a minority can keep free men in subjection.
Page 261.
One doesn’t need to be young to dislike institutions. But the dreary fact remains that, even in the darkest ages, it was institutions that made society work, and if civilisation is to survive, society must somehow be made to work.
Page 262.
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 than human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven’t changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. … 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.
Page 262.
Western civilisation has been a series of rebirths. Surely this should give us confidence in ourselves.
Page 262.
It is 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.
Page 262.
The moral and intellectual failure of Marxism has left us with no alternative to heroic materialism.
Page 262.