The Hidden Pleasures of Life

by Theodore Zeldin

  Haydon was an artist not so much because he painted pictures as because he saw art as changing the shape of the world, and borrowing money meant changing the speed of time, forcing people to hurry up and achieve quickly what they only dream about. Painting for him was not a pleasure or a profession, but a mission. To win appreciation for his talent was only a beginning: his ultimate goal was to transform the taste of the British people, to teach everyone to draw, so that even ‘the merest door-painter might paint the human figure’. The result, he was convinced, would be to ‘lift the soul above this world’, to give ‘strength of mind’ and to stimulate ‘heroism or repentance or virtue’. His pictures were not intended to copy objects and make them look delightful, nor to appeal just to the senses, but rather to have a moral effect and convey inspiring ideas. Though he had an exceptional talent for capturing likenesses, he despised conventional portraiture, still life and Dutch interiors, preferring to devote himself to grand, world-shattering historical subjects, on huge canvases, ten-foot high, which conveyed a powerful message from the Bible or the classics and made the great events of the past more real than those of ordinary life. Applying the techniques of church painting to the ideologies of his time – patriotism and political reform – he wanted all public buildings to be decorated with edifying images of the victories and hopes of the masses. Two centuries later he might have made historical blockbuster films: he loved enhancing his paintings with what he called ‘poetical invention’ and ‘a feminine touch’, saying ‘nothing is beautiful which is not feminine’.

  By borrowing money he was able to pursue his ambition to educate ‘respectable labourers’ to appreciate art, shattering the barrier between ‘high art’ and industrial production. ‘Art must cease to be a mystery for humble mechanics, artisans and journeymen.’ The same principle, he said, should apply to ‘the milk jug as to the heroic limb’, meaning that artistic appreciation of the curves of the human body could enable one to make more beautiful practical objects. Just when artisans were losing their autonomy and being forced to accept factory routines, he toured the country making rousing speeches, urging that all workers should receive the same training as artists, learn to draw the human figure and apply inspiration, originality and aesthetics to manufacturing. But the manufacturers were more interested in discipline, perseverance and profit. So though Haydon helped to establish a School of Design (which fifty years later became the Royal College of Art) with the objective of turning industrial production into creative art, he shocked conservatives by hiring female as well as male models for the students to draw, and his dream of an educational revolution which would ‘elevate the artisan’ came to nothing. Already in the 1840s, practical people were mocking ‘a widespread mania of becoming artists’ and relegating art to third place behind science or technology.

  Choosing to become an artist, and to be idealistic beyond what most practical people aspired to, was Haydon’s first foray into the dangerous territory that lies between adventure and suicide, between maintaining a bridge to normal society and migrating into a land where the only food was imagination and hope. He complained that he was an ‘outcast’ and a ‘victim’, an outsider in a world ruled by people with influence and money unable to appreciate him. He was so scathing about every other kind of art except his own that the Royal Academy refused him membership again and again. Whereas fashionable artists with less talent but more willingness to produce the kind of art most people wanted could make a comfortable living, he could not, being obstinately reluctant to become a bread-and-butter painter of portraits of self-satisfied wealthy men and pretty women, just for the money. He tortured himself searching for ways to deal with those whose taste he abhorred though they were the ones who might have given him lucrative public commissions. He remained short of cash not only because he could not ingratiate himself with them, but because there were limits to his own imagination: he did not know how to cope with people who disagreed with him, how to benefit from their incomprehension, how to derive not just a reinforcement of his own determination, but also inspiration that could have broadened and enriched his ambitions, how to be part of a couple at loggerheads but fruitful all the same. Instead he got angry and saw himself surrounded by ‘adversaries’. Dramatising the disagreements, exacerbating them by hurling sharp insults all around him, accusing his opponents of deliberately promoting ‘mediocrity’, deriding them as ‘despots’, he could never understand why the Royal Academy preferred a banal crowd-pleasing portrait of a little girl with a pink sash to his giant moralising painting of an ancient Roman hero. Sniping at institutions that resist and punish dissidence is rarely effective when practised with only anger for ammunition.

  So convinced was Haydon that he was ‘destined for a great purpose’ that he painted relentlessly, often for twelve or sixteen hours a day, never stinting expenditure on canvases, models and colours whether he could afford them or not. He left enormous debts when he died. Dickens was one of many who were irritated by this apparent contempt for the rules of money and in Bleak House used his character Mr Skimpole to denounce the selfishness of people, however charming they might be, who fell regardless into debt. But on hearing of Haydon’s death, Dickens sent five pounds to his widow.

  Haydon finally realised how hopelessly he was out of tune with the masses he wanted to educate when he was publicly humiliated at his last exhibition, held in the same hall as the dwarf General Tom Thumb of Barnum’s Circus, one metre in height, who attracted 12,000 paying visitors, while only 133 came to see his huge painting, The Blessings of Justice, showing King Alfred instructing the first English jury. And then a friend, at least one whom he believed to be a friend, refused to lend him some money again. That was when he finally felt the world had no place for him. If friendship could not be relied on, what was there left?

  He has been dismissed as having had ‘a genius for failure’. However, when his journals were published after his death he was revealed as an astute analyst of his time and a talented writer. Dickens said he should have been a novelist. Perhaps anyone who wants to change the world should start by being a novelist and practise moulding reality, not in utopian schemes, but out of fragile emotions and unpredictable accidents. Besides, there was as much courage as despair in Haydon’s suicide: most people commit a more cowardly form of suicide when they abandon their ideals, but he did not do that.

  Haydon lived in a country that hesitated between two civilisations, one of neighbourliness and one that rejoiced in the power that money could exert. It was not just that neighbourliness could metamorphose into indifference under the pressure of urbanisation, industrialisation and overpopulation, or that the more society was commercialised, the less were loans and mutual help likely to be inspired by personal sympathy. Haydon was made aware that moneylenders had other priorities by being arrested seven times, and jailed four times, always for not paying his debts to creditors untouched by sentiment, with bailiffs selling all his worldly goods, even his brushes, to pay them off.

  The place of money in life had already begun to change in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Academia, which today complains about being diverted from its disinterested search for truth by ignoble fundraising, in fact played a decisive role in the monetisation that was to transform large portions of life. It provided the intellectual foundations for a new vision of what was important by developing a new concept of nature, no longer seeing it as static and perfect but as dynamic, needing to be constantly measured. The dons of Merton College, Oxford (founded by the Lord Chancellor of England), who were bureaucrats as well as scholars, became known as the ‘Oxford Calculators’ because of their passion to measure and quantify almost every human activity, even the strength of the quantity of grace in each soul and the strength of Christian charity, as well as the price of every examination, continually repeating that money measures all things.

  That coincided with a vast increase in the supply of money: in England in 1170 the Mint produced 1,300,000 pennies; in 1250 fifteen
million. Half of the king’s income came from debasing the coinage, calling it in and reissuing it with a lower silver content. Lords who used to regard their forests as giving them status and pleasure increasingly valued them as sources of income to be exploited for profit. But it was only gradually that the strict fulfilment of contracts eliminated emotion from accountancy. Eventually, fixed prices and exact repayments put an end to the theatrical pleasures of bargaining.

  What completed the transformation was the new ideal of equality. Customers increasingly wanted to assert their independence, ‘for he who is in debt is owned by others’. They preferred hire-purchase loans to come from invisible companies that would not interfere in their private lives. Instead of searching for patronage, they felt resentment at being patronised. Freedom came to mean having no obligations. Paying in cash meant ‘my money is as good as yours’. These changes were welcomed because the old world of close encounters, in which everybody knew everybody, far from being universally warm and cosy, was often asphyxiating, humiliating and cruel, torn by jealousies and bickering, and fomenting a desperatedesire to escape the scrutiny and judgements of one’s neighbours.

  Haydon’s contemporary, the Chinese poet and philosopher Gong Zizhen (1792–1841), complained that humans were becoming more selfish than animals, with no appetite for the personal generosity that comes from intimate contact. But it was in England that a new path leading to another kind of suicide was opened up. When Lord Vestey (1859–1940) revolutionised eating habits in innumerable countries by importing refrigerated meat from Argentina, Russia, China, Australia and elsewhere, he created an offshore multinational corporation which was virtually exempt from taxation. He reduced the tax on the profits of his butcher’s shops to 0.0004 per cent. In doing so, he severed the umbilical cord between rich and poor and whatever emotional ties had once existed between them. He had no outside interests beyond his total dedication to business, six days a week, living in modest houses, basing every decision on how much tax it would save, spending only one-fortieth of his income on raising four children, investing the rest, priding himself even when he owned the wealthiest private company in the world, that ‘I never spend any of my profits, I live on what I earned twenty years ago.’

  In the twentieth century, the British colonial empire was replaced with a less visible but even more powerful financial empire composed of an archipelago of some sixty offshore tax havens presided over by the City of London. A new virtual nation-without-borders was born, armed not with guns but with money, defying democracies and tyrannies alike. It became so omnipotent that it was able to force humble taxpayers to pay off its gambling debts. It revealed itself capable of ignoring with impunity the wishes of whole electorates. When it sold off loans to anonymous firms who had absolutely no personal care for the borrower, it became clear that the rich were cutting their own veins, embarking on a slow suicide by rupturing their emotional links with the rest of humanity. The poor might still dream of becoming rich, but rich and poor were henceforth divorced. There was no sympathy left between them. Money ceased to be a social cement.

  The taste for suicide continues regardless. People with power commit suicide when they cease to believe in themselves, when they feel that nobody believes in them, and when they cannot keep their promises. Experts commit suicide by making predictions which do not come true. Specialists commit suicide when they become incapable of understanding what other specialists say. Kind people commit suicide when they enter professions where there is no room for kindness. The most frequent form of suicide is to lose hope.

  But the saddest suicide of all is the suicide of gratitude. Envy, greed and arrogance are chronic diseases that are unlikely ever to disappear, but they used to be held in check by gratitude. That was the bond that once held society together, or at least dampened its resentments: gratitude to gods, ancestors, parents, teachers, neighbours, nature. But the more equal a society aspires to be, and the more it is based on rights, and the more it is commercialised, the less place there is for gratitude, which is perceived as an insult to independence and a denial of self-esteem. ‘Gratitude is expensive,’ said Gibbon. ‘Gratitude is a burden,’ said Diderot. ‘Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs,’ said Stalin.

  However, that need not be the end of the story. I shall return to the question of suicide in my last chapter: it holds the key to understanding what being alive can mean.

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  How can an unbeliever understand a believer?

  WHAT IS THE RELIGION of a person who can identify the conductor of a Beethoven symphony simply by listening to a recording? And who is a lover of jazz as well as classical music, and French movies, and a wide range of European and American literature, while also having a passion for football, to the point of illustrating alternative strategies for economic development by comparing the different styles of German football teams?

  Abdurrahman Wahid (1940–2009), who for three years was president of Indonesia, inherited from his grandfather and father the leadership of the largest Muslim organisation in the world, the Indonesian Renaissance of Religious Scholars (Nahdatul Ulama), which provided forty million members with education and medicine; while his maternal grandfather was a pioneer of Muslim schools for girls.

  Born in Java, educated abroad at Karachi Grammar School, and then in Islamic studies at Cairo’s Al-Azhar religious university and in Arabic literature in Baghdad, he could quote from the major Arabic religious and philosophical classics, as well as from the works of the Egyptian founders of modern ‘Islamism’, Qutb and al-Banna. But tears came into his eyes when he saw an Arabic translation of Aristotle’s Ethics on display in an exhibition in Morocco, because it made him recall how near he had been to becoming an enemy of the West: ‘If I had not read Aristotle and his great book as a young man,’ he said, ‘I might have become a Muslim fundamentalist myself’: Aristotle had shown him that it was possible to ‘arrive at the truth without the aid of religion simply by using his reason and understanding the human soul’. Wahid also studied Hindu philosophy, and on being elected president of the largest Muslim country in the world, one of his first acts was to pray at a Hindu temple. He ended the persecution of Indonesia’s Chinese minority, came to the defence of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and visited Israel six times, declaring that ‘Those who say I am not Islamic enough should read their Quran. Islam is about inclusion, tolerance and community . . . The essence of Islam is encapsulated in the words of the Quran, For you, your religion, for me, my religion.’ And more than that, ‘democracy is not only not haram [forbidden] in Islam, but it is a compulsory element of Islam.’ Irrepressibly witty, he translated a book of Soviet humour into Indonesian to teach his compatriots to laugh at themselves, and when he lost power he said he regretted it much less than losing the twenty-seven recordings he had collected of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

  The Quran, said Wahid, refers to God as the Truth, and each person may apprehend the truth in a different way. ‘Islam honours and values that difference, recognising that each human being comprehends God according to his or her own native abilities and propensities, as explained in the Hadith Qudsi (the Words of God as repeated by Muhammad): I am as my servant thinks I am . . . Those who presume to fully grasp God’s will and dare to impose their own understanding upon others are essentially equating themselves with God and unwittingly engaged in blasphemy.’ The famous saying in the Quran, ‘Let there be no compulsion in religion,’ he said proudly, ‘anticipates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.’ For him, sharia laws offered a ‘path to God’, but they were man-made not God-given laws, formulated in the centuries following the prophet’s death, and needing to be revised constantly as society evolved. ‘The severe blasphemy and apostasy laws . . . prevent Muslims from thinking outside the box not only about religion but about vast spheres of life, literature, science and culture in general.’ The search for the truth, he concluded, ‘should be allowed free and broad range, whether employing the intellect, emotions or various
forms of spiritual practice’. Islam had reached its ‘intellectual and spiritual maturity’ in the Middle Ages by incorporating a ‘humanistic and cosmopolitan universalism’ based on the amalgamation of Arab, Greek, Jewish, Christian and Persian influences. Its ‘long decline’ was the result of scholastic and government constraints which paralysed it. Wahid married a leading pioneer of women’s rights. He asked that these words should be engraved on his tombstone: HERE LIES A HUMANIST.

  Why was there such a contrast between Wahid’s religion and that of Hassan al-Banna (1906–1949), the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, by whom Wahid was initially attracted but whose ideas he eventually rejected? Wahid valued freedom above all else and expressed that desire through a boundless curiosity. Al-Banna wanted certainty, ‘to do away with the wavering mind and restlessness and shake off perplexity and fluctuation of opinion’. That was a different idea of freedom. Rejecting all frivolous distractions, al-Banna derived his nourishment entirely from the Quran, guided by humble local teachers in his village, and by his father, who was at once an imam, a smallholder, a watch repairer and a seller of religious gramophone records.

  While he was still a schoolboy, he started a Society for the Prevention of the Forbidden to reprove all those who missed prayers or ate when they should be fasting, sending them letters warning them to mend their ways on pain of forfeiting their place in Heaven. A few years later he started another Benevolent Society to eliminate alcohol, gambling, pagan customs and Christian missionaries. He never hesitated to correct people, however eminent, who deviated from Islamic morals, even telling government ministers to remove the gold ring from their finger, because Islam forbade men to wear gold jewellery. Waitresses who served him bareheaded he sent away to cover themselves with a scarf.