Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone

by Craig Schuftan

  The Age of Simple Faith

  WORDSWORTH, HAVING REJECTED Revolution and Reason in quick succession, had found the faith that saved his life in nature. Likewise, after the crisis documented in ‘Blasphemous Rumours’, Martin Gore found himself advocating a spell in the country:

  Come with me

  into the trees

  we’ll lay on the grass

  and let the air pass1

  These lyrics from ‘Stripped’, a song on Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration album, might seem like unusual sentiments coming from pioneers of industrial dance music. But the song’s arrangement casts a grim cloud of irony over Gore’s Rousseauish lyrics. It’s an industrial symphony of steam hammers and stamping presses, and the effect is of the lovers being chased down the road by a factory even as they drive off into the country.

  For the romantic, the degraded present often implies an ideal past — a Garden of Eden to which we might return. Accordingly in nineteenth-century England where the rise of industry was faster and more widespread than anywhere else, the romantic escape tended to take the form of a flight into nature. In the same way, the torturous problem of trying to accommodate God into a scientific universe led many romantics to attempt a flight back in time, to the simple faith that characterised Christianity in the Middle Ages. As the nineteenth century wore on, and the ‘dark Satanic mills’ continued their steady march across the landscape while God remained missing in action, later offshoots of romanticism would be motivated by an attempt to combine these two ideal pasts — the pre-industrial society and the age of simple faith — which were really one and the same.

  Nostalgia for the Middle Ages was as Eric Hobsbawm has noted in The Age of Revolution, one of the three most popular cures for romantic displacement in the nineteenth century — nostalgia for the French Revolution and nostalgia for the Noble Savage being the other two.2 Its first stirrings could be detected by observing the crowds of tourists trekking out to see Walpole’s Strawberry Hill in the 1760s, or the even bigger crowds turning up for the stage adaptation of The Castle of Otranto ten years later. The success of Walpole’s gothic novel paved the way for later phenomena such as the historical novels of Walter Scott, whose swashbuckling heroes were important precursors of Byron’s. Scott’s stories, while not actually set in the Middle Ages, were jam-packed with medieval paraphernalia.

  Meanwhile, the gothic revival in architecture began to gather momentum — and a new sense of purpose. By 1837 it was virtually the national style in Britain, a moment signalled by A W Pugin’s design for the Houses of Parliament. Some years later, critic John Ruskin went further, advocating not just the gothic style, but the whole medieval ethos as one worth returning to. In his essay ‘The Nature of the Gothic’ Ruskin argued that industry and progress had cut human beings off from the wellspring of their creativity — nature. Instead of shoddy goods made by unhappy people in ugly factories, Ruskin posited a return to the days of the guild and the artisan; decorations, tools and buildings made by passionate individuals with love and creativity.3

  Designer and social reformer William Morris began to put Ruskin’s ideas into practice when he opened the doors of his firm, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. in 1861. Today, Morris is best known for one of the world’s most famous wallpaper designs — but the wallpaper was in fact just a small part of a far-reaching scheme to improve the world through arts and crafts. For Morris, one of the most damaging effects of the industrial revolution was the standardisation and mass production of the applied arts and crafts. He hoped to reverse the alienating processes of capitalism and industrialisation by recreating, within his own firm, the world of the medieval artisan’s guild. In between, he found time for pamphleteering, experiments in communal living, learning to paint, and writing fiction. His House of the Wolfings is both fantasy and polemic — clearly influenced on the one hand by the romances of Walter Scott, while implicitly using an imagined Middle Ages as a stick to beat the nineteenth century with on the other. Unfortunately, Morris’s enthusiasm for all things medieval led him to write the entire book in some kind of archaic eighth-century dialect — which made it pretty tough going for the average reader.

  What aileth thee, O Wood-Sun, and is this a new custom of thy kindred

  and the folk of God-home that their brides array themselves like thralls

  new-taken, and as women who have lost their kindred and are outcast? Who

  then hath won the Burg of the Anses, and clomb the rampart of God-home?4

  Morris was also closely associated with a group of painters and poets called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Brotherhood began in 1848, with just two brothers answering the rollcall. Painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti tracked down William Holman Hunt after seeing the latter’s The Eve of St Agnes, and the two bonded over Keats — upon whose poem the painting was based. They called themselves Pre-Raphaelites because they believed that after Raphael, European art had begun a slide into irrelevance — empty displays of technical bravado and pointless imitations of Greek or Renaissance art — from which they hoped to rescue it. ‘Study nature’ was their motto, and in early successes like Holman Hunt’s Our English Coasts, you could see that they had.5

  But the best known of the Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti, seemed to abandon this principle quite early on — and many younger artists followed his example. His painting is beautifully observed, but the degraded present disappears, and is replaced by an idealised fourteenth century. Rossetti’s The Annunciation (1849–50) recreates the atmosphere of early Renaissance art, the breakthrough paintings of Fra Angelico and Gozzoli, to the letter — from the carefully planned perspective to the golden disc hovering over the Virgin’s head.6 Rossetti’s paintings look back at a time when the divinely inspired artist provided people with objects and images they could believe in.

  The handicrafts Morris designed and sold through his firm were undoubtedly beautiful and true in many ways to the spirit of the medieval artisan’s guilds he so admired. But having insisted on the handmade over the mass produced, Morris was forced to sell his goods at many times the price of the competition — placing his wallpaper and ceramics completely out of the price range of the ordinary folk whose lives he hoped to improve. There was, it seemed, no going back. ‘Dreamer of dreams’, is how Morris later described himself, ‘born out of my due time’.7 This feeling of having tried to turn back the clock — and having failed — dogged both William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites to the end of their days. To the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, the chances that art and artists might be able to stop the industrial rot and improve the world looked increasingly slim: ‘Rossetti could not set it right and Morris could not set it right — and who the devil am I?…’8 The age of simple faith was long gone by 1850 — eroded by the achievements of the Enlightenment, and finally blown to smithereens by the shock of the Revolution — and all the golden haloes in the world could not bring it back.

  Robert Smith: The pious frauds of religion.

  Faith

  THE COVER of the Cure’s 1981 album Faith looks like nothing at first — a grey, abstract blur to match the indistinct gloom of the album itself. But just as repeated listening to Faith will cause its clouds of sound to coalesce into songs, so too does the cover eventually resolve itself into an image. It’s an out-of focus photograph of Bolton Abbey, a Gothic church in North Yorkshire. Bolton was built in 1151, and has been alternately falling apart and being restored ever since. August Pugin, the Gothic Revival architect, did some work on it during the Victorian era.1

  Earlier in the nineteenth century, the ruined abbey had inspired a poem of Wordsworth’s, ‘The White Doe of Rylstone’. The story is of a woman named Emily whose brothers and parents were killed in a revolt against Queen Elizabeth. Emily finds solace from her despair — and ultimately faith — in the visits of a white doe. The doe was a childhood pet, raised by her in the days when she was still surrounded by family and the world seemed full of hope and promise. Here, as in ‘The Prelu
de’ or ‘Tintern Abbey’, childhood memories, nature, and the passage of time work their magic to restore faith.

  Wordsworth, as Karen Armstrong has noted in her History of God, was a religious man, who often spoke of God when he was discussing ethics or morality.2 But the word never appears in his verse. In ‘The White Doe of Rylstone’, as in many other poems, Wordsworth evokes the spirit that he felt to be moving through all things, the presence ‘whose dwelling is the light of setting suns’.3 But he never calls this ‘God’. Wordsworth’s Enlightenment side made him distrust organised religion, his romantic side lead him to resist categorising the ineffable. In ‘Tintern Abbey,’ he simply calls it a ‘something’.

  It’s this same ‘something’ that Robert Smith searches for in the final moments of Faith. But it seems to have got away from him. The whole album feels elusive and faraway, as though it’s being heard from a great distance no matter how close you put your ear to the speaker. As the singer retreats into his loneliness, the world goes out of focus. In early Buzzcocks-inspired songs like ‘Jumping Someone Else’s Train’, Smith’s lyrics described characters — now, they’re just ‘other voices’. It becomes hard for him to make distinctions. ‘All cats are grey,’ he sings.4

  The word that emerges most distinctly from the fog of Faith is ‘nothing’ — perhaps because it’s repeated so many times. The same ‘nothing’ Smith found when he went running into the forest on ‘Seventeen Seconds’ has become the whole world of Faith. And yet, in the album’s final song — the title track — the singer dares to hope for something more. Faith is the epitome of The Cure’s early ’80s sound — guitars like distant church bells, a stripped-bare drum kit ticking away in an empty hall — a song that sounds like a memory of a song. Smith’s lyrics rise fitfully out of the gloom, describing the singer’s final descent into solitude. Outside, it’s 1982, and New Wave pop music is taking over the world. ‘The party just gets better and better!’ Smith observes — he spits out that last ‘better’ like Johnny Rotten singing ‘pretty’.5 He’s turned his back on all of it. ‘I went away alone,’ he says, ‘with nothing left but faith.’6 Smith, like some kind of post-punk monk (or, as he puts it, ‘an unknown saint’) has renounced this world of temptation and illusion — now he has only his belief to sustain him. But belief in what? At the beginning of the album, he’d rejected what Keats called the ‘pious frauds’ of religion, standing up in the middle of a church service, he’d screamed ‘a wordless scream at ancient power’.7 Like Wordsworth and the Romantics, he’s renounced dogma and tradition in favour of a direct experience of the ineffable ‘something’. This is the kind of faith people knew in the Middle Ages, the kind that drove the hands of the stonemasons who built Bolton Abbey. This is what Smith is searching for in the final seconds of ‘Faith’. Even after the rest of the band have disappeared, and the drum machine has run out of batteries, Smith is still wailing in the empty church hall, ‘there’s nothing left but faith!’8

  Dave Gahan: Personal Jesus.

  World in My Eyes

  BY THE MID-NINETEENTH century, others were more willing than the Pre-Raphaelites to look the modern world’s spiritual crisis in the eye. In ‘Dover Beach’ Victorian poet Matthew Arnold admitted that the age of simple faith was long gone:

  The sea of faith

  Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

  Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.

  But now I only hear

  Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar…1

  Arnold, wrote William J Long in his History of English and American Literature, ‘reflected the doubt or despair of those whose faith had been shaken by the alleged discoveries of science’.2 In ‘Dover Beach’ we see clearly the despair lurking behind the uncannily still fantasies of the Pre-Raphaelites. Arnold wrote the poem on his honeymoon, while staring out at the French coast from Dover. This view gave him the poem’s central metaphor — the ocean, which Arnold likens to the faith in God that once seemed so boundless. Now, he writes in ‘Dover Beach’, this faith has drained away from the world like water through a sieve. There is no sign, even, of the solace Wordsworth found in nature or Keats in the imagination. The world is used up, containing ‘neither joy, nor love’.3 Love, where it does exist in ‘Dover Beach’ is something that takes place outside of the world, in spite of it, almost. It’s the love of two people who have turned their backs on the world, who find themselves unable to place their faith in anything but themselves — and each other.

  Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another! for the world which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.4

  This image of lovers united against a hostile and dangerous world would turn up more and more in Martin Gore’s songs after Some Great Reward. In fact, the cover of that album already shows a couple who could have stepped out of Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’. The scene is of a grim industrial landscape. It’s night, but there are no stars — just the glare of halogen lights throwing the forbidding geometry of the factory into sharp relief. In the midst of this desolate scene, dwarfed by the inhuman scale of their surroundings, is a pair of newly-weds — just married, in fact — he in his tuxedo, she in a bridal gown. It would be wrong to describe them as happy, or even hopeful. But given that their love for each other is all they have, what else can they do but stare into each other’s eyes and try to will this nightmare world out of existence?

  The young couple has been left stranded in the world of blasphemous rumours — a world in which God is either cruel or incompetent, and has subsequently been relieved of his duties. This desolate landscape was the one Martin Gore began exploring on Depeche Mode’s next album Black Celebration. In ‘Nothing’ Gore, like Robert Smith, waits hopefully for a word from God and hears only silence. Now his faith is long gone, and with it any meaning life might have held. He resigns himself to his fate. He will ‘learn to expect — nothing’.5 In the space of two albums, Gore has made the whole journey from the optimistic enquiries of the Enlightenment to the despair of the mid-nineteenth century. Gore has moved into the world of ‘Dover Beach’ — or the even bleaker one of James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night, in which the poem’s narrator is shown around a desolate city by a mysterious guide. The traveller is baffled by what he sees. Here, humanity seems to have reached the end of its tether: the ties that bind people together — love, family, brotherhood — have all finally snapped. Nobody here believes in anything, nothing has any meaning, no-one seems to have any reason to go on living. And yet life goes on, but why? ‘When faith and hope and love are dead indeed’, he asks his companion, ‘can life still live? By what doth it proceed?’

  … He answered coldly, Take a watch, erase

  the signs and figures of the circling hours

  detach the hands, remove the dial face

  The works proceed until run down; although

  Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go…6

  This is Newton’s universe turned ugly — a machine with no-one at the controls. Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan echoes the solitary traveller’s confusion in Black Celebration when he wonders — a little enviously — how his friends can carry on living in the face of all this cosmic meaninglessness.

  Your optimistic eyes

  Seem like paradise

  To someone

  Like me7

  Two albums later, Depeche Mode would do away with this simile. In the world of 1990’s Violator, the idea of paradise in another’s eyes is not just an idle thought, it’s the tenet of a new religion. Violator was a landmark album for the band — in which Gahan and Gore seemed to have discovered an antidote, of sorts, to the despai
r of Black Celebration. The mood of Violator was religious — but God was nowhere to be found. His replacement was a lover. In the album’s first song, the scenario of Black Celebration is reversed — the singer tells his beloved that there’s no need to give another thought to the meaningless world outside — he’s found a better one. ‘Let me show you the world in my eyes,’ he croons.8 The singer has already made this leap of faith himself — he’s turned his back on worldly temptation in favour of a new religion based on…worldly temptation! In ‘Blue Dress’ he insists that the meaning of life is nothing more than the feeling he gets looking at a beautiful girl in a beautiful dress. Here, he seems to say, is the faith that will sustain him, and on the album’s first single, Gahan takes this idea to its logical conclusion. If a woman could be God for him, then he can be God for you: ‘your own personal Jesus’.9 In the song’s towering chorus, Gahan preaches his new religion to the waiting world. God has deserted you, he says, but I’m right here. ‘Reach out and touch faith.’

  Richard Wagner: So might we die together…

  We Can Be Heroes

  Nature, Medievalism, Satanism; of all the possible escape routes from society at the romantic’s disposal, none have quite the pulling power of ideal love. Being a solitary, inspired individual acting in defiance of society’s laws is heroic, but it also gets lonely — which is why the romantic goes looking for a soul mate, the perfect, untarnished love of two people united in pure feeling, who live in a zone untouched by the world of dull care. It never really works out, but this is hardly the lovers’ fault. The world, with its painful compromises, social conventions and moral laws keeps coming between them. Ideal love has a hard time standing up to the onslaught of reality, and eventually becomes impossible to maintain. So love becomes a recipe for tragedy — the now-familiar stand-off between the romantic individual and society is rewritten for two. The odds, sadly, are not much better than before: