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?

On Monarchy

In my post written to commemorate the Queen’s ninetieth birthday I mentioned that I wanted to give a proper explanation of my monarchist sentiments.  The week of Elizabeth II’s official birthday (why shouldn’t she have two?) seems a good chance to do so.  This is a written version of a monologue with which I have bored many friends but which explains, as well as I can manage, why I believe this country owes its peace and freedom mainly to its monarchy, judging not simply by how things have turned out in practice, but also in principle.

Portrait to mark H.M. the Queen’s official ninetieth birthday and H.R.H. the Duke of Edinburgh’s ninety-fifth birthday

(Source: The Royal Family at Instagram.com)

The United Kingdom has a constitutional monarchy as its system of government.  Parliament and the head of Government receive their political power by democratic election, whereas the position of head of State can only be inherited, that is, held by a monarch.  Many nations, particularly during the last century, have abolished the hereditary elements of their governments, but not this country, where the monarchy (I believe) remains of essential importance to the nation’s health and freedom.  I have two reasons for saying this.  The first is pragmatic and a little unoptimistic about human nature; the second emotional and more hopeful.  Either by itself, in my view, would justify and reinforce the Crown’s continued position at the summit of government.

It is easy for us who live in Great Britain, politically one of the safest and stablest places on earth, to forget the fragility of all civilisations and political entities.  Most of our borders have followed the same lines, mainly the coast, for centuries; no land invasion has been attempted on us since 1797; our throne comes down to us from the year 1066 and before.  The changes undergone by our nation have tended to take place glacially, even organically; the important exceptions are all the more notable by their rarity.  Yet few countries have enjoyed such clarity and tranquillity of national identity.  For instance, even Germany, made up as it is of states with strong regional identities, has only existed in its present form since 1990. Poland, invaded from all four points of the compass, partitioned and repartitioned, emerged as an independent state in 1918 only to be plunged again into the whirlwind of the twentieth century, and when it was again re-established seemed to have been moved bodily a hundred miles westwards.  Other nations, even if they have kept their borders, have undergone change after change, not simply of governments but of forms of state: occupations to dictatorships to republics, and so on.  The British constitutional monarchy has not simply dawdled into the twenty-first century.  It has outlasted many forces which might have destroyed it, and its survival should not be taken for granted.

Why are nations so fragile?  It is because of the fluidity and volatility — even the intoxicating quality — of raw political power.  Those who win it may have just intentions but, if unimpeded, tend quite often to be seduced and then corrupted by it, using it not for the nation’s sake but to prop up their own positions.  Power like this has an intoxicating quality; it is alcoholic.   This is the pessimistic part of my argument: that few people can be relied upon to handle it in quantity, however legitimately or democratically they may have obtained it.    History teaches us, with examples beyond number, of the danger posed by too much ready power in too few hands which, sooner or later, are bound to become the wrong hands.

If concentrated power is so hazardous, and so must be restricted, the obvious reaction might be to distribute it very widely and thinly so as to restrict the influence of any single person.  This results only in dilution, however: it makes competent government difficult and might lead to division, disintegration or even anarchy.  Somewhere there must be a single meaningful authority that is recognised by the whole nation and which keeps it whole.  This tension between the concentration and the distribution of power requires a fine and carefully-observed balance.  Any country is only as stable as this equilibrium: every nation has to find its own way to achieve it.

The trick of the constitutional monarchy is to control the readiness of political power without watering it down.  It may repose all the power and authority of government in a single person, the Queen, whose position is made unassailable by heredity, but the power is safe with her because she cannot wield it directly: it is not ‘live’.  She can only delegate her power to others, which what happens at a General Election.  First Her Majesty’s subjects elect members to the House of Commons to represent them in Parliament.  Seeing the result, she will ask one of these members to form a government as Prime Minister.  In doing so, she delegates to the Members of Parliament the responsibilities of state, the authority to bring Acts before her for assent, the power to take the country in a particular direction (notwithstanding the House of Lords, unelected though no longer entirely hereditary).  Yet it remains always Her Majesty’s Government, which in theory she can dissolve at any moment if she thinks it unfit to govern her subjects.  It is rather as if the Queen were teetotal, but possessed the only key to a wine-cellar.  She can bring out bottles and pour out glasses for others of any size she likes, she can refuse a drink if people have ideas above their stations, and she can even close the bar altogether, but she cannot herself take a single sip.  By this mechanism of Parliament and Crown power may be balanced and counterbalanced without being weakened or diluted.

Some might object that this is mere formality, pointing out that the Queen is unlikely to reject the result of a general election or to refuse to give royal assent to an Act of Parliament.  It is certainly likely that, like a bee-sting, the threat to pull the plug on a government could be carried out only once and at the cost of the whole institution.  This might be so, but I think even formalities carry far more weight than is often thought, not least with regard to language, for instance.  Mr. Cameron might be tempted to speak of ‘his government’, but he is not allowed to: it is Her Majesty’s Government which he runs on her behalf.  (see for instance John Major, calling the 1997 election here, who has to be careful to say that he has ‘sought Her Majesty’s permission to dissolve Parliament’).  Similarly, politicians are elected to ‘office’, not to ‘power’.  These rules about language are important checks on politicians’ habits of thought, and if they are broken can produce important warning signs for the rest of us.

The system of constitutional monarchy also has other, happier effects, doing us a lot of good as well as sparing us harm.  By reposing national authority in a person who is always above ordinary politics and so untainted by them, the monarchy gives us a head of State to whom we can be loyal without even thinking about, still less embracing, any political cause.  Everyone, of any political persuasion or indeed none, can gladly allow the Queen to represent our country and us, her people, and cheer her without anything sticking in the throat.  Compared to the United States or France, where as much as half the electorate must accept  a president whom they voted against as a symbolic as well as an administrative leader, I think there is little contest (though there are many admirable aspects to both these countries’ political traditions).  Where Americans have to resort to pledging allegiance to a flag and the French to principles (la République and les valeurs républicaines; what are they exactly when all’s said and done?), we have a Crown and the real and living person who wears it, robed in majesty and lifted up with ceremony that we can enjoy wholeheartedly and without cynicism.  We can be the Queen’s loyal subjects without being overly inquisitive about her personality, treating her as a celebrity (it is precisely because of my loyalty to her that I despise any journalistic poking and prying into the Royal Family’s privacy) and certainly without worshipping her.  The important thing is that she is on the throne, occupying a supreme position and receiving loyalty and affection that (significantly) many a politician probably envies.  Indeed, the monarch makes it very easy for us to disapprove of the members of the House of Commons without ever calling the institution into question.  The government does not get in the way of our relationship with the State.  We uphold the Queen’s majesty because, in a certain way, this majesty is ours to share in, and is an expression not of the Queen’s might only, but also of our own pride in our country.

The Queen’s ninetieth birthday and her recent surpassing of the length of Victoria’s reign has also reminded many people of the continuity brought by monarchs to our sense of national history.  Presidents are limited by terms, so history marches on in time to the political clock.  This is far less the case with monarchs, who tend to reign for a generation at a time.  It is true that our Queen’s sixty-three years on the throne have made this continuity a particularly notable aspect of her reign — not least since sometimes very little else seems to link us with the vanished Britain of 1953 — but even the passage of the crown down the generations is a story told not in multiples of five years but at the slower, more natural pace of most families’ histories.

Monarchs can certainly be good or bad and wise or unwise (in which respect I have already explained, here and here, why I think in our present Queen Elizabeth we have been given the blessing of a personal example that this country hardly deserves but sorely needs).  The important point is that the same applies to elected presidents and chancellors.  All nations need ways — the simpler and less heavy-handed the better —  to appoint a source of just but not overbearing authority to which all are willing to pledge loyalty, and to guard against malevolent political designs without stifling the government.  The constitutional monarchy may not seem at first to be the most obvious solution, still less a sleek, rational, twenty-first century solution, but I think it remains the best and fairest, if not for all countries, certainly for the United Kingdom, in which case the results arguably speak for themselves.

‘Where a Crown shines, the courage cannot fail…’

H.M. the Queen visiting Hitchin on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee in June, 2012.

Strange though it seems to write for the second time in a week in honour of a great person’s birthday  (after Pope Emeritus Benedict’s on Saturday), nevertheless I feel that the occasion calls for it: Elizabeth II, our Queen for sixty-three years, has reached her ninetieth birthday. 

I hope soon to try to write a defence of the monarchy in principle, but for today it is Elizabeth herself who matters.  I feel all the more keenly a duty to mark her birthday because she has been such a just monarch and good example, made all the more radiant in an age with infrequent regard for justice and goodness.  This is the ninetieth year of a life that she herself vowed at the age of twenty-five to give, and ever since has given, to her kingdom.  It might not have been so.  She has reigned unfalteringly, making a deliberate decision to understand the verb ‘to reign’ to be very close in meaning as the verb ‘to serve’.  Neither did this have to be the case.  She chose goodness, similarly to Benedict XVI, and has prevailed.

Three women, I think, deserve most of the credit for the British crown’s continuity since the early nineteenth century.  Queen Victoria is the first, Queen Mary of Teck the second and our present Queen the third.  Queen Mary, wife of George V and Elizabeth II’s grandmother, taught her grand-daughter the importance of duty, something that Elizabeth has taught us in turn, mainly by example.  She has shown us that the greatest strength is often proved not in impressive activity or energetic deeds, but in endurance and steadfastness (and I might add that she is echoed by her husband).  She is also unembarrassed to be a woman of faith, and an ordinary, simple faith at that, and it is clear that her sense of duty is bound up with an awareness of vocation.  Her duty is not only to her subjects.

Elizabeth is strong, and knows where her strength comes from, in a weak age unaware of the source of its weakness.  Long may she reign, and may her subjects strive in loyalty to her and to follow her example!

This post’s title is taken from a poem written by John Masefield (1878–1967) for Elizabeth’s marriage when Princess in 1947; the music is by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958).

‘Rise heart; thy Lord is risen’

After Lent’s long flatness and sinking into bitter hollowness in Holy Week, especially on Good Friday (which this year, for the first time I can remember, was not shrouded in pallid cloud at three o’clock), Easter has dawned upon us.  Happy Feast!

Here is a setting by Ralph Vaughan Williams (again, sorry) of fitting words by George Herbert:
  

Easter.

Rise heart; thy Lord is risen.  Sing his praise
                                                  Without delayes,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
                                                  With him mayst rise:
That, as his death calcined thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and much more, just.

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
                                                  With all thy art.
The crosse taught all wood to resound his name,
                                                  Who bore the same.
His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.

Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song
                                                  Pleasant and long:
Or, since all musick is but three parts vied
                                                  And multiplied,
O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part,

And make up our defects with his sweet art.

George Herbert (1593–1633)

I cannot resist including another monunental rendition of the same music at the Royal Albert Hall in London on the Last Night of the Proms in 2004:

‘O the mind, mind has mountains’: Pixar, the Poets and the Teenager

This post has somehow ballooned into a 2,000-word tract.  Nevertheless, I don’t think I have said anything that will spoil the film for those who have not seen it, nor given away the plot beyond about the film’s half-way mark, though I let slip clues to the mood of its resolution.  Put simply, two hours spent watching the film is recommended over two hours trying to read my review of it. 

Film fare at the university Cathsoc on Shrove Tuesday was Pixar studios’ Inside Out.  I suppose I had been expecting something fairly light after all those pancakes.  Yet here I am a week afterwards still puzzling out this unusual film.

Inside Out has been selling itself on the point of its being set mainly inside the main character’s own head.  Riley is an ordinary American girl, with a strong and steady mother and father, who has been steered through her eleven years (and counting) by five characters who are her emotions personified: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust.  They oversee her mind, react to all she meets, influence her actions, send off a daily consignment of memories to the archives and engage themselves perpetually in a well-intentioned squabble for the upper hand.  The apparently whimsical premise is rather like the Numbskulls series in the Beano comic, except that, for all its bright colours, for all its lashings of humour and for all its characteristically American warm-heartedness, this is a not a trivial film.  It has something serious to say to adults and children alike.  In other words, it does not reach over the heads of the young audience but has two rare qualities: firstly, it is a children’s film which takes itself seriously because it takes its young audience seriously, and secondly it remembers most of the time, as it also speaks seriously to an older audience, that both old and young are in the same room.

Inside Out’s first triumph, in my view, is its astonishing animation.  It is slick without quite being too rushed and lavishes detail on the viewer.  No stone is left unturned in recreating wan sunlight on concrete or the cold yellow sweep of street lamps through a moving car.  Most impressive of all is that, out of nothing but pixels under a computer’s bonnet, it is now possible to breathe the very subtleties and shadows of emotions into a character’s face: the face falling, the collapse into laughter, the dawning of disappointment, the hesitant brightening of hope, the dance of dozens of movements or half-smiles or twitches or blinks in conversation, and (crucially, as it turns out) the zero of numb expressionlessness.  Even in this age of commonplace technological wonder it is amazing to watch.  The personified emotions may be very clever on their own, but they are, after all, (deliberately) undisguised stock characters.  The really remarkable achievement is their way of mingling and moderating each other in the heroine’s expressions.  The whole film has surely been designed to show off this animation; at any rate, it certainly depends upon its success.  I think the ambitious gamble has paid off.  

I am hoping that it is all right to link to this short extract from the beginning of the film,  which gives a better impression of its cleverness than the trailer does.

Then there is the film’s setting, the landscape of the mind.  They have the most important thing right: its scale is enormous.  The five emotions sit dizzyingly high up in a sort of control tower, from which they and the viewer can see miles of shelves of long-term memory in the distance.  There is also an archipelago of ‘islands of personality’, great floating citadels to Riley’s particular strengths and talents, which are (if I remember properly) ‘Family’, ‘Friendship’, ‘Hockey’, ‘Honesty’ and something like high spirits.  Between these and the control-tower yawns a dark void, a hopeless pit of forgotten memories.  They have depicted Gerard Manley Hopkins’ lines exactly:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there.

The mind is not a mere safe or chamber.  It is its own country.  Yes, this scale is completely right: yes, this setting is entirely fitting, as the film’s audience will have known, in fact.

Having built up this mountainous mythology of the mind, the directors have kept the narrative simple.  All that is made to happen to Riley is that her family moves from the Mid-West of the U.S. to San Francisco in California.  Yet the setting’s palette means that this realistic uprooting and her understandable struggle to settle in her new home can be depicted in scrupulous, meditative detail.  In Riley’s mind its effect is literally upheaving, even seismic.  Setbacks and threats, real or imagined but all of an unfamiliar potency, suddenly come thick and fast at home and at school.  The five emotion characters struggle to maintain control over the mind.  There is a panicked tussle over the memory-mechanism, and then there is catastrophe: the Joy character — the sole optimist — and the Sadness character — a combination of Eeyore and King Midas, who cannot help tainting anything she touches with a contagious blue gloom — manage to catapult themselves out of the control tower, across the mind’s chasm and into the archives of memory, hopelessly far away from any influence over their charge and leaving to hold sway over the mind only Fear, Disgust and Anger who, as might be expected in spite of their efforts, cannot sustain Riley’s character by themselves.  One by one, her ‘islands of personality’ begin to founder and topple; a tectonic catastrophe threatens and weakens her whole person.  (How puny and trivial San Francisco’s immense Golden Gate bridge, seen in opening shots, is made to seem now).  That is the plot seen from the inside.  From the outside, and from the perspective of her parents, she withdraws into herself, turns her back on her surroundings and slumps into disillusion.  Come to that, the narrative can be stated more simply still.  The move to California jolts Riley’s mind into a new age: her growing up enters a painful phase.

This linearity and simplicity of narrative leaves plenty of room for a remarkable richness and dignity in the portrayal of her character which, it is also worth noticing, also provides the film’s setting.  This richness of character is its fourth and crowning triumph in my book, and the reason why I think so many people have found it so powerful.  Just as the animation shows the emotions mingling in Riley’s face, so their overall effect is to mingle in her character.  Inside Out’s heroine is at intervals joyful, sorrowful, disgusted, angry, fearful, or somewhere in between, but remains always plainly the same person.  She is exalted and deepened where, in many modern children’s books and films, characterisation often suffers from being crowded out by over-complicated narratives.  Even though I had trouble keeping up with the frenetic dialogue (once a line is missed it is gone), I can see that such slickness is justified here.  It makes sense for these emotions, being the voices in Riley’s head, to chatter away at the speed of thought: their speech, perhaps along with the musical score, is the very sound of her thinking.  (The film’s dialogue outside the mind is very well paced and particularly cleverly delivered).  The distinction between first person and third person is gloriously vague. The result, then, is a meticulous and self-unconscious chronicle not only of a character’s actions and words but also of her every thought.  It might even be possible to treat this film as a moving portrait instead of as a story, and to be content with studying and contemplating a single character, painted as richly as any in literature, for its two hours’ length.  

I have longed for a work of literature for children (for I think this is literature) that is brave and serious enough to do something like this.  I have often thought that the most moving stories work on this sort of scale, painting the apparently prosaic or normal in monumental colours without taking leave of a realistic world, and by making characters deep enough to let their young audiences almost befriend them.  Such literature triumphs because it upholds human dignity — as I persist in believing all literature ought to, one way or another — by portraying its majesty.   For majesty is the cornerstone of Inside Out, in spite of its psychedelic appearance.  Riley’s loss of heart, manifested on the outside only in despondency and flouncing (which I thought her parents indulged too much!), is actually the interior landscape’s very ruin. The doomed realm of childhood imagination is depicted as a sprawling rubble-strewn demolition site, leered over by lofty cranes; the collapse of an ‘island of personality’ is always slow, grave and noble, more terrible than the foundering of a battleship, or the schism of an iceberg or indeed a San Franciscan earthquake.  ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’, and, come to that, O it carries enough quests and perils for a trillion trilogies, even at eleven. 

For all that I praise the film, I must also admit to being unsettled by it.  This is not really the directors’ fault but the fault of the culture that engulfs Pixar Studios and audience alike.  I have two criticisms to make of the film’s powerful depiction of growing up, which I think is what most moves its older audience.  Firstly, curmudgeon that I am, I find myself deprived of the film’s cathartic relief because I do not see much hope in the culture into which Riley is about to graduate.   The end of the film shows that the screen-writers are uncritical of the principles, and the implications, of modern Western teenager- and adulthood.  When Riley is more than once given the line ‘I’ve got to go’ — just before some setback, always ‘I’ve got to go’, words delivered casually but which become profoundly haunting once they are recognised as a refrain — it really feels like a permanent farewell.  This is why I find myself hoping that they do not attempt a sequel and instead leave Inside Out alone atop a plinth of its own.  My second regret is that this growing up produces in her mind nothing short of revolution, rather than a less traumatic formation — or, in other, broader words, I lament that she must be delivered up to teenagerhood without comment or criticism.

I am compelled to wonder why the growth from child to adult must now, since the invention of the teenager, necessarily involve more ruin and revolution than mellowing and deepening.   Why a campaign of levelling and rebuilding, rather than a programme of refurbishment and extension?  Why must the teenage attitude be one of self-repudiation, a developer’s instead of a gardener’s?  We have all surely seen it happen: young people, feeling compelled to rebel against themselves, vandalise any part of their character they perceive as childlike and re-engineer themselves aggressively into almost a different person.  In fact, one of Inside Out’s finest strokes is to look briefly into the mind of a worldly, eye-shadowed-up ‘in-crowd’ girl from school during the credits.  Underneath the façade her emotional characters are wailing, ‘We’re a complete fraud; do you think they can see through us?’, ‘It’s so tiring being cool’, and so on.  Teenagers will go to such lengths because they are now even more afraid of being thought childish than of being thought stuffy.  Of course we must all in the end put aside childish things; of course we squirm at some of the things we have said and done in childhood; of course the teenager plumbs depths unknown by the child; of course we must arm ourselves for the adult world.  But why is that adult world so unforgiving of childhood at present?  What is the attitude, I wonder, of the ordinary modern man to his boyhood, or the ordinary modern woman’s to her girlhood?   What does the adult do with the child’s spirit and ambitions?  Do we remain loyal to the principles, if not the practice, of youth?  (Shouldn’t we?).  What do old and young versions of the same person have in common?  Were such a thing possible, could they any longer have a sincere conversation with each other?  What would the child think of the teenager’s later policy of disinterest, scoffery and sullenness adopted precisely in order to spite the old earnestness, enthusiasm and high spirits?  

In response to Wordsworth, who was able to sing

My heart leaps up when I behold 
  A rainbow in the sky: 
So was it when my life began, 
  So is it now I am a man, 
So be it when I shall grow old
    Or let me die! 
The child is father of the man: 
And I could wish my days to be 
Bound each to each by natural piety,

Gerard Manley Hopkins, who might have been joking, went to the trouble of cementing into a triolet his view that ‘the words are wild’, scoffing ‘Suck any sense from that who can’.  Supposing Wordsworth was certainly not joking, though?  If the child is indeed father of the man, then the parental authority against which the teenager actually rebels is not, in the first instance, that wielded by the real mother and father.  The struggle is more against the authority of the childhood self.  This is why, in Inside Out, Riley’s personality must be torn down and demolished rather than refurbished from within; why there must take place not merely a broadening and deepening of the mind but its wholesale razing and rebuilding.  Watching the film, I thought this dramatic, even violent depiction of the end of her interior childhood was unwarranted except, of course, by cinematic purposes.  Surely we ought to grow up more steadily, more slowly, more gently, than that?

There is, of course, a sorrow about the necessary fading of childhood that is sewn into us irrevocably.  I do not take these lines, also by Wordsworth (from his Intimations of Immortality, set vividly to music by Gerald Finzi) altogether as the whole truth, but they are very moving, and perhaps we all know what he means:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

        Hath had elsewhere its setting,

          And cometh from afar:

        Not in entire forgetfulness,

        And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

        From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

        Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

        He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

    Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,

      And by the vision splendid

      Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

And how about the note struck here (by Cecil Day-Lewis, in his poem Walking Away), also sounded in  Inside Out’s ‘I’ve got to go’ refrain:

                                                              … I can see

You walking away from me towards the school

With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free

Into a wilderness, the gait of one

Who finds no path where the path should be.

For all its pain, felt by the self and by others, the farewell to childhood is necessary.  Why, though, must our culture insist on so high a price, paid in full and not in instalments, as ransom for the passage into modern adulthood?  Why must it harden children so swiftly into so hollow a cynicism; why must its economics compel parents to leave their children for days on end in nurseries and child-care; why must even its entertainment exclude the young for the sake of adults’ freedom to snigger?  Why should we not revere childhood to the point of costing ourselves and society something?  We might even keep in mind Herbert Howells’ titanic Hymnus Paradisi, which, as I have written about here, he saw fit to consecrate to his small son, lost suddenly to polio at the age of nine?  Why should we not say of the child, with Eliot, 

Let him continue in the spirit of wonder…

… So that the reverence and the gaiety

May not be forgotten in later experience,

In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,

The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure…  ?

I ask all these questions, but see no good answers.

Comparison of Inside Out to the age that has produced it also makes me restless because it throws light on all the good things that Western culture — not simply American culture, though this is an American film through and through — is capable of if only it tried.  Why do we not make more films like this instead of the catastrophic waste of money and time and talent there is, I am tempted to fume, on idiotic, violent or lurid films that trample human dignity in a stampede for fame and wealth?  Pixar has produced a justly popular film (and incidentally made a great deal of money) without graphic violence, almost entirely wholesome humour and, apart from three rather surreal scenes that might alarm very young children, no gratuitously upsetting scenes.  (I should say that there are upsetting scenes, but they are not gratuitous!).  Why can we not have more films with fine actors and symphonic musical scores, dispensing with the low and the sordid but confronting the great questions of the spirit and soul, elevating the detail of ordinary life, depicting the fortress of a traditional family deepening and strengthening in love even in crisis, and underlain by an uplifting vision of human life and dignity?  Whole swathes of this film resound in a majestic minor key that, astonishingly for a children’s film, never quite resolves wholly to major.  If I had seen it at the age of its intended audience — as the reviewers interviewed here on BBC Radio 5 have done — I suspect that I would impulsively have declared it film of the century.  It is tempting to do so even now.

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Further viewing / listening:

Readers who have seen the film might appreciate this.