Kenneth Clark

by James Stourton

  The episode that gave Clark the most anxiety was the last, Heroic Materialism, in which he felt he was out of his depth. It had to provide some sort of summary, but he had no idea how his series should end, or on what note. Covering the invention of humanitarianism, the rise of engineering, the genius of the Impressionists and Tolstoy, it gave Clark an awkward narrative, but Michael Gill came to his rescue in the envoi. While they were in Bristol shooting the works of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Gill said to Clark, ‘You know, you must end the series with a summary of your beliefs.’53 This was unexpected, but Clark sat down in his hotel bedroom in Clifton and put down on paper what became his famous ‘credo’. His story of Civilisation drew to an end with 1914, followed by a series of images representing the rewards and enemies of civilisation in the twentieth century: the telescopes at Jodrell Bank observatory, space travel and Concorde, overlaid by a dystopian montage of computers, Stuka dive-bombers and atomic explosions. As Gill’s wife Yvonne Gilan recalls, ‘Michael had a hell of a time over their last programme. He thought the ending was confused and a mistake. K’s personal testament was a way of getting around the problem of ending.’54 Clark spoke his ‘credo’ in his study at Saltwood, then got up, and in his own words: ‘I walked into my library, patted a wooden figure by Henry Moore, as if to imply that there was still hope, and…it was all over.’55

  At the end of the whole enterprise Clark gave a party for the crew at Saltwood at which he told them that the making of Civilisation had been among the happiest two years of his life. He had enjoyed himself more than he could possibly have imagined, and wrote to David Attenborough: ‘I can never be sufficiently grateful to the BBC for giving us all these holidays with pay.’56 The BBC, which had spent £500,000 on the project (the equivalent of over £8 million today), was also cock-a-hoop. As Huw Wheldon put it to Gill, ‘What a relief to be standing in gold.’57

  * * *

  *1 ‘Here I am, as usual, very depressed at coming home – You have known it before. I become almost suicidal. I suppose it is partly the renewal of responsibilities, and partly…the feeling that I am in prison.’ Letter to Janet Stone, 6 March 1966 (Bodleian Library).

  *2 The title of this episode caused trouble in America, as the motion-picture rights to Thornton Wilder’s play of the same name had been sold. At Yale there are four thick files of lawyers’ letters on the matter. Wilder’s lawyers advised him that they would not succeed if they sued Clark for damages, but they threatened action nevertheless, and the BBC was obliged to change the US title to The Frozen World.

  *3 ‘I saw no 2 again on Friday. It is foully badly directed. The script is OK and the material sublime, but poor little Peter has muffed it all along the line – no continuous rhythm, no sense of my being in the places or even relating what I was saying. A missed opportunity!…Of course it was 80 per cent worse before Michael and I doctored it – in fact so bad that we seriously thought of postponing the whole series in order to do it again.’ Letter to Janet Stone, 6 March 1969 (Bodleian Library).

  *4 ‘I was rather ashamed of putting Osterley by the sea – the only fake in the series. I must say it looked rather comical to see the portico reconstructed on the Cornish coast.’ Clark to Lady Pansy Lamb, 4 June 1969 (Tate 8812/1/4/98a).

  *5 King Lear, Act IV, Scene vi: Edgar describes an imaginary cliff near Dover: ‘Halfway down/Hangs one that gathers samphire – dreadful trade!’

  33

  Civilisation and its Discontents

  A kind of autobiography disguised as a summary of Western Civilisation.

  KENNETH CLARK to Mme Auerbacher-Weil, 7 October 19701

  Civilisation began broadcasting in February 1969. Because comparatively few people had sets that could receive BBC2,*1 let alone colour, only one million people viewed the series the first time round, and it would have to wait for repeats before achieving its full impact. Despite that, David Attenborough recalled: ‘We knew it was successful but none of us had the faintest idea quite how successful it was going to be…it was one of those legendary things; people invite you in to see it. I won’t say the pubs shut as far as Civilisation was concerned, but colour television sets were in the minority.’2 Evensong was rearranged in some country parishes so the congregation could see the programme on Sundays, and Civilisation parties were held in the homes of those who owned a colour television. At a time when mass travel was only just beginning, for most people the series represented the grand tour they would never make, and they trusted Kenneth Clark to take them to the best places. He succeeded as never before in opening people’s eyes to art, the fulfilment of his Ruskinian mission. Flawed though it may be, for the public Civilisation was to be his ‘great book’. Like Ernst Gombrich’s Story of Art, it gave the subject a framework.

  The first episode opens with Clark in the heart of Paris, quoting Ruskin: ‘Great nations write their autobiography in three manuscripts: the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last.’ The story was to be told through art and individuals – often thinkers and poets – but always referring back to visual sources. What went in and what was left out reflects Clark’s own preferences, as was made clear in the series’ subtitle: A Personal View. Clark put his first question standing with Notre Dame at his back: ‘What is civilisation?’ He answers, ‘I don’t know. But I think I can recognise it when I see it; and I am looking at it now.’

  Clark’s world view soon becomes apparent. Civilisation is a largely Mediterranean story, the honours divided between Italy and France, with Germany, Holland, Britain and America in supporting roles. The series is Gibbonian, in that The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire portrayed the destruction of civilisation as it had grown up in Classical times and its survival as synonymous with the survival of Classical culture. In the first episode Clark presents the remnants of Roman civilisation hanging on in the eighth century as though on a cliff edge. Religion is at the heart of his story, and it is the fusion of Christianity with Classical humanism that provides many of his heroes, from Charlemagne through the Renaissance and beyond. Their hallmarks are literacy, confidence and a sense of permanence: Alcuin and the court of Charlemagne offer us the first powerful demonstration of this. As the Oxford philosopher Stuart Hampshire observed, the series ‘rests on no general theory but reflections on people and places. Civilisation depends upon secure centres of power where artist and patron can flourish.’3

  Civilisation was in a sense Clark’s autobiography – through the various episodes it is possible to trace the books that he had read as a schoolboy and a student at Winchester and Oxford, particularly H.G. Wells (Clark made much of Wells’s distinction between the nomadic communities of Will and the agrarian communities of Obedience), Michelet, Tawney and Ranke.4 His early visits to Iona are recalled by the first episode, while trips to Germany when he was at Oxford and later influence the episode on the Baroque,*2 and holidays in France exploring cathedrals and Burgundian abbeys were no doubt also important. Sometimes familiarity worked against his script; we find him struggling with the early Renaissance: ‘I am strengthening it and hope to give it some of the humanity of the late mediaeval script, but, alas, the subject is rather too familiar to me, and it is hard to give the feeling of discovery which is the merit of some of the others.’5 We can perceive Clark’s friendships in certain episodes: many of Maurice Bowra’s tastes, such as Fidelio and the life of Tolstoy, had become his own; and in the passages on medieval monasticism and the Baroque saints we may recognise the influence of David Knowles. Clark had been brooding on some of his subjects for decades: his 1945 lecture ‘English Romantic Poets and Landscape Painting’ is an obvious forerunner of episode 11, The Worship of Nature, just as his Arts Council exhibition catalogue The Fallacies of Hope (1959), about the Romantic movement, anticipated episode 12, even taking the same name. John Pope-Hennessy gave his opinion that the programmes ‘are K’s true self-p
ortrait. They show him in countless different contexts exactly as he was: sometimes incisive, sometimes extremely funny, sometimes impatient, sometimes intimate, sometimes almost tongue-tied.’6

  Clark’s Civilisation is also a view of great men performing great deeds, so different from the Bloomsbury view – Keynes apart – that civilised men eschewed the life of action. He trumpeted those Victorian virtues of activism that Lytton Strachey had ridiculed in Eminent Victorians, and subscribed to Thomas Carlyle’s view that history is about heroes, adapting the title of episode 5, The Hero as Artist, from Carlyle’s lecture ‘Hero Worship and the Heroes in History’ (1840). Clark and Carlyle shared a dislike of the eighteenth century, but both allowed that even that insincere era had its heroes – Voltaire, Rousseau and the Encyclopédistes. Some of Clark’s heroes were inherited from his boyhood. When he spoke movingly about St Francis he was echoing Monty Rendall’s lectures at Winchester, although he claimed, ‘I felt unworthy to write about him. But in the end I couldn’t leave him out. How much do people nowadays know about him I wonder? He was the saint of Ruskinians like myself.’7 But he had changed his mind about some heroes of his youth. Ever since reading Mark Pattison’s essay on Erasmus as a teenager, Clark had admired him as the voice of tolerance, but as he told Janet: ‘The strange thing is that I have ended up with a kind of distaste for Erasmus – the civilised man, and a much greater admiration for Luther, the destroyer of renaissance civilisation’8 – hence his emotion at proclaiming Luther’s words in episode 6. Clark surprised himself in another way, as he told Janet: ‘strange how my history of civilisation has really turned into a history of religion. I fear it will please nobody.’9

  Throughout the series Clark refers to civilisation as a cart to be pushed up the hill. This seems to suggest a determinist position, but is in fact misleading. There is no ‘process of history’ here; rather, it reflects Clark’s belief in the inherent fragility of a central tradition of art ‘beginning, as Herodotus said, in Egypt; reaching its first perfection in Greece…reaching its second perfection in France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and so forth, down to our own time’.10 There is nothing inevitable in the story he tells, which traces the consequences of impulses generated or expressed by men of genius. Baudelaire, Clark once wrote, ‘declares how these unquiet, mysterious or tragic figures [artists] are beacons to him, the lighthouses which have lit humanity on its way’,11 and he warns us: ‘We got through by the skin of our teeth, and it might happen again.’ The Reformation ends with the Thirty Years War, the French Revolution ends with the Terror, the Industrial Revolution causes the horrors of exploitation of labour, and the twentieth century creates the atomic bomb. Behind these observations is the pessimism with which almost every episode concludes (except for ‘those hundred marvellous years between the consecration of Cluny and the rebuilding of Chartres’). Giorgione’s Tempesta is ‘the first masterpiece of the new pessimism’; in Leonardo’s drawings of The Deluge Clark sees that ‘the golden moment is almost over’, while Shakespeare is controversially described as the poet of unbelief, for ‘Who else has felt so strongly the absolute meaninglessness of human life?’ Don Giovanni arrives to spoil the fêtes galantes in The Pursuit of Happiness. As Clark approaches his own era, his pessimism becomes more pronounced. At the time Christopher Booker observed that very few caught the precise nuances of his premonitory tone, through confusing it with the almost universally shared position that ‘the modern world appears to be going to hell in a handcart’.12

  Perhaps Clark’s authorial voice has worn least well in the last episode, in the famous ‘credo’ that Michael Gill made him sit down and write in Bristol: ‘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…above all I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.’*3 Whether Clark realised it or not, the temper of this tract situates him firmly in Bloomsbury. It elegantly distils the substance of E.M. Forster’s essay ‘What I Believe’, although Clark could never have agreed that ‘Hero-worship is a dangerous vice.’13

  The ‘credo’ struck an astonishing chord with members of the public; hundreds wrote asking for copies, so that Clark’s secretary Catherine Porteous had to have them printed ready to send out. Then as now, however, intellectuals considered it unsatisfactory. Frances Partridge, that latterday doyenne of Bloomsbury, wrote in her diary: ‘It was unexceptional, but he lost some of my respect by prefacing his talk with “I must reveal myself in my true colours as a stick-in-the-mud,” said with a tone of relish. He doesn’t think he is one, so why not have the courage to stand up for his beliefs.’14 This was perhaps a misreading of the ironic modesty with which Clark approached the impossible task of summing up what he had learned from Civilisation. Or perhaps the fact was that he no longer knew what to believe, and didn’t want to come off the fence. Peter Montagnon thought that ‘the Credo was over the top. Nobody believed it for one second, a fake dreamt up by two men in an impossible position who had to finish an epic voyage.’15 Far more eloquent and expressive of Clark’s state of mind was his quotation from W.B. Yeats at the end of the last episode: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.’

  Nevertheless, Clark remained confident that the cultural landmarks he had grown up with were still those worth trumpeting. It was just about the last moment when that view could have been put across successfully to a very wide audience: Clark as a second Moses handing down tablets of European culture. Some critics, mostly from the political left, questioned the whole basis of his approach: the identification with the male, Western, bourgeois concept of civilisation – no Africa, no Asia, no Islam and no South America. But academics and left-wing social theorists were never going to accept Clark’s view of civilisation from the top down. Nonetheless, the success of the series proves that a very large public was willing to have their acquaintance with this canon of famous art initiated or renewed in this way by Kenneth Clark. Michael Ignatieff shrewdly pointed out that the cultural debate in Britain between the elitists and the populists was the class war in another form, and ‘any debate about cultural standards in Britain is necessarily about who gets to talk down to whom, about which accent does the judging’.16

  Clark’s frequent swipes at Marxist historians and ‘modern thinkers’ gave the impression of an old-fashioned liberal historian frightened of the present age. When he talks about the dignity of man, he admits, ‘the words die on our lips today’. At the end of episode 12 he speaks of what ‘impairs our humanity’, and offers a list of such items that still has resonance: ‘lies, tanks, tear gas, ideologies, opinion polls, mechanisation, planners*4 and computers’. And in the final programme, as a thermonuclear reaction mushrooms on the screen, he states that ‘the future of civilisation doesn’t look very bright’. This is the pessimism of a man born in 1903, who had lived through the rise of fascism and two world wars, who had been profoundly affected by the devastation of the atomic bomb, and who now saw a world in disintegration. Not for the first time, Clark found himself uncomfortable at being the hero of the culturally conservative, as he told Colin Anderson: ‘They were intended by the BBC as no more than a sequence of pretty pictures in colour, and I accepted this as my aim. But, as you know, I can’t resist airing my prejudices – also some love of purgatory makes me enjoy saying things that will annoy the orthodox highbrow. The result has been that Generals, Admirals, Lady Dartmouth, Lord Mayors of London etc. all feel that they have found their spokesman at last. Also, I am bound to say a lot of nice humble people.’17

  —


  The press reaction to Civilisation was generally ecstatic. The Times ran a leader headed ‘How Like an Angel’, and J.B. Priestley in the Sunday Times thought the series was ‘in itself a contribution to civilisation’.18 The Sun hailed Clark as ‘the Gibbon of the McLuhan Age’, and Bernard Levin compared him to Goethe. Philip Toynbee in the Observer wrote that Clark ‘is as English as a man could be who loves and understands so much that is so thoroughly un-English in the art and thought of Europe’.19 The dissenters were rarer; the most celebrated was the left-wing Cambridge intellectual Raymond Williams, who attacked Civilisation on the grounds that it was ‘a long last gathering up by sad and polished minds of an Edwardian world view and an enacting of pieties learned very long and very hard and now with all the emphasis of a public corporation’.20 He called it the ‘old dinner-table style’ propaganda for an ignoble past, and a means of rejecting the world today. Another dissenter was the art critic Edward Lucie-Smith (writing later): ‘His programmes…were, I thought, enough to make anyone opt for the barbarians…“Oh not again!” I sighed, as, his eyelids crinkling with condescension, this mandarin figure ambled round yet another ancient monument.’21 Clark occasionally played to the gallery with some after-dinner-isms, as he admitted to one correspondent: ‘It is a safe rule of public life never to make jokes. I was foolish enough to break this rule several times in “Civilisation” and what I said ironically has often been taken literally.’22 David Attenborough saw it differently: ‘Clark had a way of expressing things in absolute mandarin prose, and then in the middle of it putting a colloquialism which brought you up short – and you realised that this man was not just a scholar in the high and ivory tower, but actually knew what went on in human beings’ minds. I found that absolutely bewitching.’23 Noel Annan, looking back in Our Age, thought that Civilisation showed what mettle there was in the Oxford wits.