A quiet smile at absolute folly
This article appears in The Times tomorrow.
“AS A country we produced such greats as Dickens, Elgar and Constable. Yet our knowledge of the arts is plumbing new depths of ignorance,” exclaimed The Daily Telegraph at the weekend.
Jeremiads about the state of cultural education are a staple of journalism. This one was a large inference from limited information. A poll for the Artsworld television channel had revealed scant public knowledge of classical music. It is a shame that fewer than half the respondents knew that Elgar was British, and more thought Puccini had composed The Marriage of Figaro than Mozart. But the usual expedient of lamenting the neglect of music in schools nicely absolves the media and arts establishment of their share of the blame.
Arts coverage by these sources is often reduced to straw polls of the greatest historical figures, and the annual ritual of scouring the almanacs (and now the internet) to find more or less obscure cultural anniversaries to “celebrate”. Intended to stimulate interest in the arts, they produce a lethal cocktail of lowbrow populism conveyed with earnest didacticism. The BBC’s poll for composer of the last millennium notoriously produced Sir Paul McCartney. While this year ’s 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth is a historical event in its own right, last year’s celebration of the centenary of Sir Michael Tippett, a composer simultaneously portentous and trite, was a marketing device born of some desperation.
Musical appreciation in this country is not poor, but it is ill-formed, and must to some extent reflect the relative weakness of the English contribution to music between Purcell and Elgar. In the other arts, though, where the English contribution is greater and the names more publicly recognisable, there is an essential wisdom that ought to be made more of. A possible way of doing it would be to use one arts-related cliché to dispel another.
Of all the cultural anniversaries touted in the newspaper supplements since the new year, the most risible is the coupling of the 50th anniversary of the deaths of Bertolt Brecht and Max Beerbohm. Brecht is a giant of modern drama. Beerbohm was a quintessentially Edwardian satirist and caricaturist who worked on a minor scale. He is now best — and perhaps only — remembered for his satirical novel Zuleika Dobson. Yet of the two, Beerbohm is far the more worthy of celebration. I modestly suggest, even at this late stage, a series of events to celebrate the one and damn the other. Doing so would not only reintroduce into the public realm the work of a real craftsman, but also underline the merits of an essentially English suspicion of the power of all-embracing ideas.
The last century was big on absolutist ideas, and Brecht was a big propagandist for one of the worst: an orthodox Communism that followed every twist of Stalin’s whims. Brecht’s best plays transcend his political vision to speak to the human condition. In The Good Woman of Setzuan (1943), he movingly depicts a prostitute corrupted by her struggle for survival. In Mother Courage (1941), his heroine is unaware of the role of her original moral compromises in her troubles. But these are exceptions to an exhortatory theatre that mirrored Brecht’s corrosive political obsessions. The philosopher Sidney Hook recorded in his memoirs that Brecht, when visiting him in New York in 1935, had remarked of the victims of Stalin’s show trials: “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.” Hook gave him his hat and coat, and showed him the door.
Brecht’s biographer, John Fuegi, records that in Prague in 1952 a show trial reminiscent of the 1930s took place, when Brecht’s friend Otto Katz and ten others were hanged. Brecht, having a privileged status in a fellow Communist State, “made no note of the death of his friend and failed to protest in any way”. While some compliant authors of Communist East Germany speedily lost their reputations after the collapse of Communism (Christa Wolf most notably), Brecht ’s reputation remains too high. The lure of the encompassing ideology debased the man, and he in turn helped to corrupt the political culture.
Brecht was a caricaturist when he intended something greater. Beerbohm drew cartoons when he intended nothing else. His caricatures were affectionate but not obsequious representations of the great and the good. He was, said The Times, the greatest of English comic artists. His genius can be seen in, among many others, his cartoon of H. G. Wells, with whom he was friendly but whose utopianism he was repelled by. The cartoon shows a wide-eyed Wells conjuring up “the darling future”, a severe-looking bespectacled lady clutching a scientific instrument in one arm and an even more severe-looking baby in the other.
Beerbohm had little interest in politics but he had a social conscience. While strongly supporting the war effort in two world wars, he was opposed to the Boer War and drew a series of cartoons about it. He lent his name shortly before his death to a petition opposing atomic weapons.
Above all, Beerbohm’s sparkling Zuleika Dobson shows the devastating effects of single-mindedness. Beauty, in the form of the eponymous heroine, descends on Oxford and wreaks havoc among the aesthetes of the undergraduate population, who collectively commit suicide. The satire here is most particularly on a Romanticism represented by a brooding young aristocrat. It might have foreshadowed the selfabsorbed European culture that two decades later could not perceive till too late the deadliness of movements that seemed to promise a real historical dynamic.
There is much in modern British society that can be decried. The state of musical appreciation goes uncomfortably with a lack of interest in things European that continues to afflict our culture. But English culture also has a distinctive awareness of scale, proportion and humour. This is as good a time as any to celebrate it.
