On Majesty

One significant milestone in my formation as a stick-in-the-mud, fogey and all-round defender of old things occurred when I discovered, at the age of about nine, that my very ordinary suburb of south London had once boasted its own cinema.  For several decades, with its confident Art Deco façade, the ‘Majestic’ had presided over the Fair Green in the centre of town, and the flickering world of the pictures had dwelt waiting within.  Of course I straightaway wanted to know what had become of it.  It did not take me long to find out.  Having been converted into a bingo hall in the early 1960s, the building had been pulled down altogether in 1978.  No trace remained, save in the name of the street beside it, Majestic Way.  And what stood in its place?  The blank concrete hulk of the Kwik Save supermarket.

The Majestic Cinema, Mitcham, circa 1970. 
Photographer: E. N. Montague.  © Merton Historical Society; reproduced by their kind permission.

This was, I suppose, a particularly iniquitous piece of mid-twentieth-century urban planning, though practically every town in Britain must have a story to rival it.  It certainly had a formative effect on me, immunising me once and for all against any tendency to presume any superiority in new things over old things.  Certainly I could scarcely comprehend the jettisoning of the cinema, ‘Majestic’ in name and nature, for the insolent windowlessness of its successor with its gimmicky moniker.  It had been ours, and we had thrown it away.  All long before my time, but melancholic nostalgia still flooded and intoxicated my being, rich and dark as ale, and not without a bitter edge either.

Mitcham’s Fair Green in May 2018, seen from about the same position as above.

But it was not a question just of this particular building.  I think I sensed the passage of greater, intangible forces, the tides of culture of which its disappearance was a sign.  I felt cheated, not only of the cinema itself, but of the vanished civilisation that had been capable of building it, sustaining it, and, I think above all, of giving it such a name as ‘Majestic’.  For the word itself spoke volumes.  It was plain enough to me that the culture in which I lived would never choose a name like that for a public building, a cinema or anything else — not in a month of Sundays.  Yet there had existed, not that long before, a world that did.  This modest picture-house with its grand epithet was proof that this world had been alive in my own town.  So, too, was the supermarket proof that the cultural revolution had not left it unvisited.  This, as they say, was personal, which is why its loss struck me with such force.  The old world had been alive here, I realised; and here too it had been lost.

Just as I could see no contest between the Art Deco cinema and the Brutalist supermarket, and none between the names ‘Majestic’ and ‘Kwik Save’, I had no trouble in deciding which I preferred of the respective civilisations that built and christened them.   Everything about the two institutions was different because everything about their worlds was different.  I knew where my loyalties lay.  In one age, an age of muscular steam power and palatial trans-Atlantic liners, even a cinema chain, in all its undoubted mercenary-mindedness, could calculate, correctly, that Thirties glamour and a single crowning resonant adjective, would draw in paying audiences far out in these workaday fringes of south London.  There had been poetry in that world.  But the other, later era, the era in which one might go up a street named Majestic Way only to find, at its culmination, like a grotesque joke, such a thing as a Kwik-Save — this era was hollow, and ironic, and hard of heart.  Conscious as I am of the many faults and sins of that old civilisation, and of the weaknesses and cruelties of people in all ages, and of the irretrievability of the past, I am simply still in far greater sympathy with the first era than with what came later.  Still I know where my loyalties lie.

Well, that is how I became a curmudgeon before I was out of short trousers, and I have been about eighty years old ever since.  But I tell the story because I think it is worth asking the question to which it leads: why is this quality of majesty so singularly lacking in our present age?  Except in a few places and on very few occasions, we build or do hardly anything that is majestic, or grand, or solemn.  For instance, I think it is remarkable, in an era when the physical scale of most new buildings is greater than ever, that their appearance is not more imposing or magnificent.  In London, with its extraordinary rate of new construction, one question asks itself with the completion of nearly every new building: ‘Is that all?’.  So many buildings are gigantic anticlimaxes, catching the eye not by elegance or ornateness, but by their sheer bigness, by brute size.  Surely this is why the nicknames for these new skyscrapers (some Londoners’, some the developers’ own) stick so instantly.  The most prominent of the buildings that have appeared since the new millenium really are shaped like blown-up versions of small objects: gherkins, electric shavers, walkie-talkies.  Would they be any less impressive were they built on half the scale?  Or, asking another way, how much do their chunky shapes gain by the size they are?  They may be ‘bold’ and ‘dynamic’, as is typically claimed, but are they majestic?  No, and I don’t think they were ever meant to be.  Of course, aesthetics are not the architects’ main consideration: these buildings are big because of the perennial imperative to make economic sense of tiny parcels of astronomically expensive land.  So the central doctrine remains the modernists’, that form should follow function.

A big Cheese-grater, a big Walkie-talkie and a big Shard, seen from the top of a big Gherkin

Yet many of London’s older, laboured-over buildings still defy these efforts to dwarf and outgun them, remaining at least as powerful and impressive to the human eye as their newer neighbours, though a fraction of their size.  ‘Majestic’ is surely the first word we reach for on beholding St. Pancras station, Somerset House, the Royal Courts of Justice, the Palace of Westminster or the Prudential building.  How was their effect achieved?  At St. Pancras (which is 150 years old next month), George Gilbert Scott began at a human scale, at the level of doors, windows, tiles and bricks, concentrating on the detail, and he achieved his overall effect by repeating these details a hundredfold, a thousandfold, in all their careful design and craft, along and around and upwards.  The result, in alliance with the verticality of the neo-Gothic, is a soaring range of glorious multiplication, a towering proliferation of decoration, never (in my view) chaotic or disconcerting, but unified by Scott’s eye into a symphony of fine design and accomplished craftsmanship.  “So much detail!” I overheard a tourist exclaim the other month, looking up at it.  But one then wonders why the Shard skyscraper, whose architect also seems to have had verticality uppermost in his mind, does not seem to have the same effect, though it is nearly four times taller than the station.  It is St. Pancras which invites the eye upwards, whereas the Shard simply defies comprehension and measurement.  It is certainly a very impressive work of engineering, but its refusal to make any concession to a human scale means that, to my eye at least, it seems to dominate rather than to crown its surroundings and observers.  St. Pancras offers a feast, and allows the beholder to savour the sight of it, ascending slowly and by degrees from arches, to windows, to turrets, to pinnacles, and to the clock triumphant.  The Shard is so uncompromisingly and instantaneously impressive that it blows the mind and burns it out.

St. Pancras Cathedral station, London, seen from the Euston Road.

Even the design of ordinary flats and houses has followed a similar path.  So much new housing in Britain has an anonymous, mass-produced and plasticky appearance, whereas, well into the twentieth century, even small houses were built with a certain self-contained dignity about them.  Their solidness, their more natural materials, and the simple distinctiveness of generous sashed windows, gables and chimneys reveal something about their architects: that they knew their work would serve an important purpose, to shelter human families.  What do the flat roofs and blank windows of today’s ‘exciting new developments’ say about the frame of mind in which they were designed?

It is not only in architecture that this change has happened.  In music, for instance, sheer volume often serves as the same substitute for majesty as does bigness in architecture.  There is no shortage of music that relies on brute force for its impact: just turn it up and hear the windows rattle!  But what about music that is instead built up meticulously from the smallest details?  For instance, there is William Walton’s first symphony, particularly the first minute and a half of the fourth movement.  The extraordinary thing about this music is that it is not utterly deafening, even though it sounds as if it ought to be.  It derives its magnificence from its ingenious construction.  The composer has written majesty into every detail — just as Gilbert Scott did in his own field of work —  and the overall effect of the music transcends the sum of its parts: it is transcendental.

And from language, too, solemnity and sonority seem to have evaporated, with the fading of poetry from spoken and written English.  Most language in everyday life is firmly earth-bound; if ever we hear it take flight, we do not really know how to respond; we are possibly even embarrassed.  Where now, except on the rarest of occasions, do we meet with language such as in the opening of Elizabeth Jennings’ poem ‘A Chorus’? —

Over the surging tides and the mountain kingdoms,

Over the pastoral valleys and the meadows,

Over the cities with their factory darkness,

Over the lands where peace is still a power,

Over all these and all this planet carries

A power broods, invisible monarch, a stranger

To some, but by many trusted. Man’s a believer

Until corrupted. This huge trusted power

Is spirit. He moves in the muscle of the world,

In continual creation. He burns the tides, he shines

From the matchless skies. He is the day’s surrender.

Why has majesty vanished so nearly completely from our lives: from speech, from infrastructure, from civic ceremony?  Perhaps Jennings’ poem strikes straight at the answer.  Could it be because we think it is superfluous to and even incompatible with life as we live it now?  For where majestic things, though not directionless, are generally sedate, and measured, and invite and reward contemplation, being the result of careful attention to many details, the modern world is now too quick; it outpaces and leaves unexercised our capacity for concentrated attention.  Magnificent things once thrilled us with their restrained and dignified power, but these days great many other things are valued above dignity and restraint.  Time seems too short for them.  

It is true that a great deal of modern infrastructure, being invisible, silent or glossily efficient in operation, does not lend itself as well to visible majesty, as older technology did.  Immense and elaborate works of software do their work invisibly, imperceptibly and effortlessly, without plumes of smoke or the thrust of pistons.  Although the Internet is a system of extraordinary magnitude, we never call its operation majestic.  A postal system’s mighty empire of apparatus could inspire poetry such as Auden’s Night Mail, and even radio and television have great confident transmitters as their visible symbols, but we never see the Internet at work.  It appears to accomplish everything with instantaneous ease, and without apparent might or power.

But there is more to it than simple circumstance, I am sure.  I wonder if our boredom and urbane cynicism mask a certain fear of the essence of majesty; we are afraid of where it might lead.  For above all, majesty heightens what it touches.  It draws our eyes upwards, lifting us out of everyday life, so that we apprehend something greater than ourselves.  It is held in common by those who behold it: it draws us upwards together.  Majesty is close to mystery; it is a cousin of solemnity, that paradoxically serious business of rejoicing.  Majesty leads us into the foothills of the sacred, and sometimes higher.  But this is where those of us who settle for mediocrity in our individual lives enter dangerous territory: we must avoid, even fear anything that might disturb us.  The dull, flat flood-plain of secularism is so congested with distractions — ‘exciting new developments!’ — that we never notice the higher ground, nor want to notice it.  If we were conscious of our appetite for majesty, we would surely try to fill it, however imperfectly.

Majesty has survived in some places, though.  Most notably it remains in film, television and fantasy video games.  We do sometimes consent to be lifted out of ourselves; we savour the splendour of imaginary worlds and landscapes; we relish orchestral soundtracks.  Isn’t that half the appeal and sheer fun of the television series Thunderbirds, for instance? — precisely the games of timing and scale they played in order to make the models look as realistic and impressive as possible, and the way the machines and craft all took on pathos and tragic dignity when they inevitably crashed, or collapsed, or exploded so gratuitously?  Don’t all small boys dream yearn to be in charge of huge things, bringing a city to a standstill as a Martian Space Probe — doomed anyway, of course — is manoeuvred gingerly towards its its site of launch, ably assisted by a full symphony orchestra?

And majesty abides still in the Church, of course, which certainly does lift us out of ourselves, and is willing to make a nuisance of itself in doing so.  It was the Church that gave us the most visibly uplifting buildings in most towns and cities, and the beautiful craftsmanship within.  What lives in churches is not confined to the past.  We have heart-felt home-made music and meticulous liturgies.  And the words that are uttered in churches leap out at us, either because they are unfamiliar, or because some new significance in them surprises those who thought they knew them well.  Here is an example: all my life I have heard the second half of the Mass beginning with the preface to the Eucharistic Prayer, something like this third preface of Sundays in Ordinary Time.  Familiarity has masked its poetry, but without my noticing it has become one of my favourite parts of the Mass.  Apart from anything else, this is wonderful, ancient poetry which, having first invited its hearers to lift up their hearts, then actually helps them to do so, bearing them heavenwards, towards the angels’ Sanctus:

V. The Lord be with you.
R. And with your spirit.

V. Lift up your hearts.
R. We lift them up to the Lord.

V. Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
R. It is right and just.

It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation,
always and everywhere to give you thanks,
Lord, holy Father, almighty and eternal God.

For we know it belongs to your boundless glory,
that you came to the aid of mortal beings with your divinity
and even fashioned for us a remedy out of mortality itself,
that the cause of our downfall
might become the means of our salvation,
through Christ our Lord.

Through him the host of Angels adores your majesty
and rejoices in your presence for ever.
May our voices, we pray, join with theirs
in one chorus of exultant praise, as we acclaim:

Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God of hosts.
Heaven and earth are full of your glory.
Hosanna in the highest.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest.

And this atmosphere of majesty is capable of spilling over from liturgical settings into the secular world.  Simply the heightened form of everyday life that the Church proposes can find fitting expression in uplifting art and music and architecture even outside the liturgy.  There is much to savour, for instance, in a promotional film that was made in advance of World Youth Day in Kraków in 2016: the combination of the poetry of the words (which are delivered in sonorous Polish and given subtitles in English), the richness of the music and the grandeur of the cinematographic art all promise a great and noble occasion, which promise was duly fulfilled.

A civilisation will not build what it does not think it needs.  Our culture, in which we converse with ourselves about ourselves, often forgetting that later ages will overhear us, presents strong evidence that we believe ourselves content with the superficial.  So much about our buildings, art and speech tells of a suspicion of majesty and solemnity.  But we cannot distract ourselves forever from it, and our nature cannot long withstand this truncation.  This is because we have forgotten the majesty that we ourselves possess.  We cannot forever be infants, amused by curiously large and funky shapes on our cities’ skylines.  Mitcham’s Majestic cinema was not all that grand, as majestic buildings go, but it answered a hunger: to paraphrase Philip Larkin, it had been a ‘serious house on serious earth’ (at least before its bingo-hall days, I suppose).  I think we do wish, however secretly, that our lives could be enriched by majesty in our public buildings.  We do want to be uplifted by our music; we would not resent being awed by heightened language.  But for our pride, we should not mind feeling small in the presence of greatness, if the greatness were also benevolent.  We long for the majesty of beauty, for the majesty of things timeless, and, even if we struggle to assent to faith, even if we admit it only on our death-bed, or not at all, we long for the majesty of God to lift us out of ourselves.  We think we know already that we long to be taken seriously, but we do not realise quite how deeply, how earnestly, how utterly we long for the solemnisation of our lives — or, at least we are unable to give expression to that longing.  And that feeling is so strong because we sense the majesty and dignity in which we ourselves are clothed, however hard we try to quell or mar it for the sake of our appetites.  We ourselves are majestic, individual symphonies of fine details, beyond our own power to understand, transcending, in spite of our sins, the sum of our parts.

It is hard and sometimes unconvincing to speak in generalities, and this is why seemingly small details can be so telling.  The great unseen spiritual and cultural forces of the last century only sublimated into visibility at moments like the demolition of Mitcham’s small suburban picture-house for the sake of a brazenly superficial, shamelessly inhuman supermarket.  It was not simply a question of planning or expediency, or the neutral result of the inevitable march of Progress.  Like the construction of any building or the utterance of any word, it was a moral act with a moral effect, which in this case has been to alienate the majestic beings, the people of Mitcham, who lived around it.  Those who built the cinema, for all that they had a business to run, did not forget to make their cinema worthy of their audience.  They raised a house dignified enough to host communal experiences that were secular and yet not entirely profane.  One sign of their achievement is the way in which the cinema is still remembered, forty years after its disappearance.  A local lady I was chatting to at our local Heritage Day the other week spoke fondly of dancing lessons in a room above the front entrance.  The creator of the excellent Mitcham History Notes website has carefully compiled information about the cinema, and transcribed news reports from its lifetime.  And how about Kingsway Models’ range of card kits, where you can actually buy a model of Mitcham’s cinema, along with the Sidcup Regal and the Southall Dominion?  But there is no similar model of the Kwik-Save supermarket.  Which side, then, are we on?  Where do our loyalties lie?  Shall we buy-one-get-one-free?  Or shall we lift up our hearts?

The Permanent Way (and the Truth and the Life?)

‘The line to heaven by Christ was made,

With heavenly truth the Rails are laid,

From Earth to Heaven the line extends
To Life Eternal where it ends.’

On a tablet in the southern porch of Ely Cathedral is inscribed a poem called ‘The Spiritual Railway’, written in memory of William Pickering and Richard Edger, who lost their lives in a railway accident on Christmas Eve, 1845.  That year was only a decade and a half after the opening of the first modern railway between Liverpool and Manchester, but England had already gained two and a half thousand miles of track.  The ‘Railway Mania’ construction boom of the 1840s, gathering pace all the time, had reached Ely the previous July, when the Eastern Counties Railway opened the first route from London to Norwich.  The elegist saw a homiletic opportunity in the transport revolution, and the fruit of his labour has survived, even if, to us, it sometimes seems strained by his determination to make the analogy work and the verse scan:

‘God’s Word is the first Engineer

It points the way to Heaven so clear

Through tunnels dark and dreary here,

It does the way to Glory steer.’

This poem may sound ripe for a round of twenty-first century scoffing, and easy to dismiss as a rather contrived effort.  But the idea of a bond between religion and the railway is more compelling than it might seem.  For two bodies with such apparently different purposes there seem to be a surprising number of similarities, of all kinds, between them.  I find myself as determined as the poet to make something of it!

For instance, to set off on one track, there is the disproportion of railway enthusiasts among the clergy.  An obvious example is the Revd. W. V. Awdry, author of the ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ books.  But there is also Eric Treacy, Bishop of Wakefield from 1968 to 1976 and a prolific railway photographer, who incidentally died at Appleby station on the famous Settle-Carlisle line, having gone to photograph a steam-hauled excursion.   Then there is the Revd. H. D. E. Rokeby’s collection of photographs of British railway stations.  Others have noticed this phenomenon, especially with regard to model railways: Paul Roberts, himself a self-described ‘Restless Rector’ with a model railway in his garage, has written an interesting blog-post here, and there is an article by Christopher Howse here, with a nice reference to Canon Tony Chesterman’s ferroequinological reading of a verse from the prophet Isaiah: ‘I saw the Lord… and His train filled the temple… and the temple was filled with smoke…’ 

Both these authors consider the idea that the appeal to clergymen lies in order, without which no railway could be run properly.  One of Howse’s sources makes a suggestion (upon which Howse himself actually pours cold water) that the clergy seek in the model railway an ‘antidote to the often more nebulous realm of theology.’  The Restless Rector imagines that, for many, the antidote is rather to the ‘stress of parish life and… awkward people that one sometimes has to deal with.’  Railways appeal to him because of their ‘order and communication’, and he also wonders whether ‘building and running a model railway [might reflect] something of the creativeness of God, and his fatherly care.’  A model railway is an ideal world, built on a blank slate, cut off from the world’s chaos.  Even the real railway forms its own self-contained system, even its own world.  It is run from signalling centres as if its signals, track-circuits and points were isolated from the elements.  That world may be broken into by trees falling onto the line and lorries colliding with bridges, but, still, there is a sense that the railways, needing a higher level of order than other transport systems, give themselves a better chance of running as they ought by sealing themselves off from the outside world and having as little as possible to do with it.

I would agree with both writers that order is indeed the main link between railways and churches, but would go further.  My contention is that, far from being an antidote to parish life and still less to theology, the appeal of the railway is that it actually resembles the Church, in that the order of a railway is a mirror of the divine order of the Church.  Naturally I am not suggesting that we should all go on pilgrimage to Clapham Junction, or will all reach Heaven by way of Kensal Green.  But it seems that a railway — precisely by being reasonably cut off or set aside from the world — can be seen as a kind of model or proto-Church, or in which ideas unappealing to modern man, such as discipline, or self-sacrifice, or assent to a given doctrine, can be shown to be necessary, rewarding and ennobling.  

‘From Earth to Heaven the line extends…’ 

This idea becomes especially interesting when compared with other forms of transport: for example, with the motorway.  Surely it is not a coincidence that, in a secular, self-centred and ungentle culture, this should be the foremost means of national transport.  In both construction and operation, motorways leave us languishing in chaos, whereas railways elevate everyone and everything they touch to the level of their order.  Here is an example.  Victorian engineers had to thread their railways through difficult terrain, obliged to avoid too sharp a curvature in the track and any gradient steeper than 1 in 100.  These rules made the work more difficult but the result more beautiful, just as the constraints of rhyme and metre, used properly, make poetry ring with beauty.  Railways fit into the landscape; often they even embellish it, exactly as churches do.  But since motor-cars can deal more readily with gradients and curves than can trains, the builders of the motorways could be much freer.  They simply planted their highways virtually unrestrained across the countryside, or carved straight through the landscape, as at Stokenchurch in Buckinghamshire, and they threw up concrete flyovers however they pleased.  My perhaps rather controversial theory is that, just as railways fitted in perfectly with the Victorian revival of church architecture and indeed church-going, so do motorways with the profane self-indulgence of modern Britain.  It is not a coincidence that the Victorian age, for all its flaws, produced such masterpieces as London’s St. Pancras station, while the motorways have nothing to match (the sole exceptions, to my mind, being the Humber Bridge and first Severn Crossing).

I think the same pattern applies to the way each mode of transport works, too.  For instance, a railway journey explicitly requires discipline, and rewards it.  Between railway passengers there is an unspoken contract: without realising it, they all agree to turn up at a given place, at a given time, in order to travel together more efficiently and reduce each other’s costs.  With this contract comes the risk of missing the train, as painful experience teaches us, but those who do catch it should enjoy relatively rapid, comfortable, spacious, relaxing and (importantly) safe transport.  Motorists face no such obligation and no such discipline.  No arrangement exists, even between those making similar journeys.  They have the freedom to set off whenever they like, with the result that a thousand individual cars, most containing only one or two people each, burn countless gallons of fuel in order to achieve the same result.  Moreover, the freedom of the motorway is selective.  The flexibility it offers the motorist comes at the cost of swathes of countryside, of further untold swathes of silence around it, the freedom of nearby residents to live in peace and quiet, the freedom to go freely across the land on foot, and so on.  Railways, by comparison, take up far less space and make far less noise.

Railways are formative; we are the better for them.  Passengers looking out at the landscape gain a geographical understanding of the journey.  They will pass the Chilterns, then Cannock Chase, then undulating Cheshire; they will see the Forest of Bowland to the east and Morecambe Bay to the west.  Their picture of the country will be built up by passing directly through its towns and cities: Peterborough, Grantham, Newark, Retford, Doncaster, York.  Road travel, however, is not really experienced as movement through a landscape that could be learned, recognised or loved.  It is not a journey but a process, and often a dull one at that.  Driver and passengers are strapped into their seats, and progress is less intuitively apparent, not sliding past sideways but flickering and enlarging in the windscreen.  Anonymous numbered junctions diverge and merge from left and right.  The landscape can barely be seen beyond the crash-barriers, the sheer breadth of the carriageway and the far rim of concrete.  It is possible to make a road journey without any reference to the points of the compass or any sensation of having travelled anywhere.  Motorways do not even fit the landscape.  The road-signs and furniture have no human scale.  No art there; only artifice.

A minor motorway sign is still perhaps eleven feet tall and wide: compare its scale to the footpath on the left!

Railways have dignity and majesty.  Whenever a train calls at a station, particularly on inter-city services, there is still ceremony and custom, even this long after the age of steam.  A familiar voice announces a platform, a litany of cities is read, the signal changes, the train draws solemnly in, passengers alight or board, the doors slam, the whistle is blown and the train heaves itself into motion again.  Procedures introduced solely for safety’s sake take on the vestures of ritual.  But roads have no time for ceremony; motorists are in no mood for custom.  Clutch in, accelerator down.

Railways leaven our communal lives, too.  Passengers on a railway journey often fall into conversation, discover common interests and keep common courtesy alive.  They are encouraged to have consideration for others in order to share a common space.  They must stand clear, move aside, open doors, lift down luggage, move down inside the carriage and mind the gap.  These are all things in which far too many fail, but they are more likely to learn from these social encounters, in which people actually meet face-to-face, than they are on the road, where we are all shielded from each other by walls of metal which must be made ever thicker and Darwinian as the manners for which they are substitutes decline.  Cars offer us two temptations: to intoxicate ourselves with power, and to blind ourselves to others.  So many people give into these temptations so habitually, and to the point of such callous selfishness, that a road journey in modern Britain is now nearly impossible without at least one near-accident.

I think my theory stands even in the realm of law and obedience.  Many motorists tend to react to the rules of the road by pushing them as far as they will go: speed limits are regarded as a target to be hit; vehicles push in against right of way; traffic lights are just squeezed past at amber.  The Highway Code becomes surprisingly elastic when there are a few extra seconds to gain: I think I will go so far as to say that this is moral relativism in full operation.  Meanwhile, safety on the railway is quite a different affair.  The rules are absolutes; nobody is above them.  Every action made by a modern train driver is recorded electronically and the records downloaded for inspection at any point.  If the line speed (speed limit) is exceeded by even three miles an hour, a formal warning can be issued.  The rules must never be disobeyed.  A train must never enter a section of single track without a token.  A signal must never be passed at danger without permission.  Everything must be done to prevent any accident.  Many of these rules seem over-zealous and fussy at first, but there is often a death or serious injury behind them.  All railway staff have to do something that is very unfashionable these days: to profess their obedience to an authority higher than themselves.  The overall result, on British railways and elsewhere, has been an excellent safety record.

Lincoln Central station and 11th-century church of St Mary le Wigford.

My refrain, then, often repeated to long-suffering friends, is that rail travel is the most civilised means of transport known to man.   Whereas railways have an improving and uplifting effect upon those who run them and use them, even on those most in need of redemption, such as London commuters, car culture seems to corrupt drivers by the tens of thousands.  And what better evidence of the fundamental benevolence of this invention of the railways than the instinctive delight taken by children — who have a perceptive, if imperfect, grasp of good and evil — in railways and the trains they carry, even the nondescript electric trains of suburban south London?  Children love railways; they do not love motorways.

Fundamentally benevolent

Just as the railways dignify and uplift us, so does the Church.  Just as motorways wear us down with false freedom, so do many aspects of secular society.  The Church, like the railway, has its illogical aspects, and the failures of both are used by their opponents to call for their abolition in their entireties.  Motorways, like secular society, make too much sense: that is because they are seen only from one perspective, that of the Self.  Motorways and secularism promise cheap freedom, but turn out to deaden the spirit.  Railways and the Church ask for self-sacrifice, self-restraint and self-discipline, and give in return beauty, order, ceremony and majesty.  (The railway cannot quite manage the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body or the life everlasting, of course).

I don’t know whether any of this enormous tract sounds at all convincing to any reader patient enough to have trawled through it…?  To me the comparison seems to work consistently enough for there to be something in it.  If nothing else, I can appeal to the story told by Michael Flanders about the lady who said, ‘If God had intended us to fly, he would never have given us the railways’!  (If only she had made that remark in reaction to the development of motorways).  Incidentally, I do not really think that modern British car culture can easily be defeated, nor that the railways will again come to be seen as the country’s principal means of transport, even though passenger numbers at the time of writing are at their highest for about fifty years.  Perhaps all that can be done is to persuade some poet to write a verse, perhaps entitled ‘The Spiritual Motorway’, describing souls hurtling around the M25 of secularism until they all end up snarled up in a traffic-jam.

Ely Cathedral, with station in the foreground, seen across the river Great Ouse. 

Music’s Patroness

It is the feast-day of St. Cecilia; she is the patron saint of music and musicians.  In these days of mass-produced and mass-broadcast music, the age of the microphone, the loudspeaker and the re-wind button, it is very easy to take music for granted.  Yet it is important to give thanks for music, as our ancestors did who had to make their own if they wanted to hear any.  Curmudgeons like me also pray that St. Cecilia can do something to improve the standard of most modern pop music and give us some fare that is easier on the ear!

Orazio Gentileschi — St. Cecilia with an angel.

Here is a hymn to St. Cecilia by Herbert Howells, setting words by Ursula Vaughan Williams (incidentally Ralph Vaughan Williams’ wife).  The words are rather good — I like the phrase ‘Sing […] in words of music’, which captures exactly the character of an utterance that good music has.  The same phrase could also be taken as a definition of poetry: that makes me like it even better because, I think, the two worlds are very close in purpose.  It is fascinating that, even though the practice is quite different (there are no Conservatoires for poets!), composers and poets alike have the same calling to hammer out their works, however great the struggle. St. Cecilia is also a patron of poets — I am very glad of that!  Ursula Vaughan Williams and her husband (who twice read the complete works of Shakespeare to each other) probably thought it fitting as well.  

Destructive criticism

Lately I have been listening my way through the podcast editions of B.B.C. Radio 3’s ‘Composer of the Week’.  They are wonderful programmes and Donald Macleod’s warm, clear and conversational voice welcomes in even those unversed in musical theory or history, bringing the composers to life in the ear.

One effect of hearing several editions in fairly quick succession is a growing sensation that this calling to write music, made as it is to people of all kinds of circumstances and characters, as ‘Composer of the Week’ shows, is felt remarkably similarly by all those who hear it.  There are outbursts of fruitfulness followed by dry patches; there are projects carried off triumphantly or abandoned in despair; there are works forged in weeks or left unfinished even after a lifetime.  And there is never any barometer: changes of scene or fallings in love sometimes produce a great harvest, and sometimes not, and of course it is the same with sorrow and despair. 

That said, there is one fairly reliable threat to a composer’s muse, and that is unfavourable criticism.  The effects of an ill-received performance seem often quite extreme, to the extent that composers have fallen into weeks, months, even years of silence or sparseness: this happened to Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky and Herbert Howells. Almost the only composer completely immune to this seems to have been Gustav Holst, who cared not a jot either way!

Howells’ second piano concerto (second movement below; here are the first and third) had been a strong candidate for my Desert Island for some time before I discovered that, at its premiere in 1925, a critic evidently forgot the second commandment and audibly thanked God that the performance was over.  For all that the man in question apparently had a reputation for this sort of conduct, Howells could not overcome the block that followed, which was to be redoubled in 1933 by the sudden and unforeseeable death of his son, aged nine, from polio.  When he did return to composing, it was not to orchestral music as before, but to the choral music for which he is now best known.  The second piano concerto — this mellow, shadowy, tender music! — was left to gather the dust of oblivion until after his death.

Does this happen because of petulance, spoiledness or childishness?  The last is closest, I think: I would say that it is a kind of childlikeness that is in fact excusable, understandable, and even essential to the artist’s calling.   G. K. Chesterton is supposed to have said (though I cannot just find where) that a composer cannot merely ‘get his music out of his head’, but has also to ‘get it into somebody else’s’.  (This is a godsend for those of us flummoxed by the question, ‘What is art?’!).  Just as a child lavishes pictures and other creations on parents, the artist’s vocation is not only to set down beauty but also to share it with others; this is what the composer does in allowing a work to be performed.  

If a performance ‘fails’, it is because the exchange of beauty is not made and something has misfired between composer, musicians and audience.  Whichever of these three is to blame, it the composer (of good will) who feels the wound most personally and most keenly.  In spite of a concert’s ceremonial and public nature, the listeners are really the composer’s guests, for whose delight he has generously provided heart-felt music.  They are gathered by the very mind’s hearth.  No wonder careless words can wreak such damage.

An Irish Easter Prayer

One of the good things about Easter’s forty days is that, even in the sixth week, it is still not too late for me to recommend this post by Maolsheachlann O Ceallaigh, the ‘Irish Papist’, though I had meant to do so much sooner than this…

‘Amen’ is my hearty response to all the prayers, but one set of petitions in particular I would like to reproduce and make my own (my own prayer, that is, as opposed to my own blog-post!):

I pray that the arts, entertainments and manners of our society will reflect more gentleness, idealism, chivalry, respect and wonder. I pray especially that childhood innocence will be protected and valued, in this era when there are so many forces ranged against it. I pray, too, that our societies will come to have a greater honour and esteem for old age.

These words particular resonate with me, and I echo them fervently.  It seems to occur to people so rarely to express a wish for such things, perhaps because they often seem so remote in our brash era, or maybe even because of fear of being shouted down by the very coarseness in question, that I sometimes feel quite alone in believing that they should be upheld.  Whenever I am reminded that in truth I am far from alone, I feel a surge of hope.

Since I am recommending that particular post, I might as well recommend the whole ‘Irish Papist’ blog (hopefully without damaging its reputation too much!).  Recommending a blog, as opposed to a book, for example, is actually more difficult than it might sound: it is surprisingly easy to misread blogs and writers, which can change in character and flavour in unforeseen ways.  Still, of all the blogs I read, even the most regular, this has been my favourite for some time, because its articles are thoughtful, uplifting and principled, though never gratuitously confrontational.  Maolsheachlann O Ceallaigh is a writer and university library assistant in Dublin, and has plenty of opportunity to observe the pageant of life — from an Irish perspective, which is interesting for me, writing in Britain — and from a Christian perspective, with misgivings about modernity, but not without a good deal of hope and joy.   It is certainly a Catholic blog, but serves less to comment specifically on matters Catholic than to house a Catholic writer’s all-purpose, all-subject journal.

What is more is that, every so often, new metrical verse is posted — a thing almost unthinkable in the twenty-first century!  Thank goodness somebody is keeping the flame alight.