The Church Lives

World Youth Day, the Church’s international gathering for young people, has begun in Krakow.  The great festival finds itself in the home city of St John Paul II, whose idea it was in the first place.

I have been watching the opening Mass and wishing I could be there!  All the same, how marvellous to be able to watch it and enjoy the atmosphere live over the Internet.

One thing I am determined to know is the name of the composer of the Mass setting.  (Any information about this will be gratefully received!) [Update here: the composer is Henryk Jan Botor] There is plenty of health in Poland, if they are writing new music like this.  This is the Sanctus:

And here are all the sung parts of the liturgy:

Kyrie Eleison

Gloria

Gospel Acclamation

Sanctus

Agnus Dei

Also worth a listen are the three hymns sung at Communion: the first, the second and the third.

[Update: as far as I have been able to tell, in spite of my appalling ignorance of the Polish language, the hymns at this opening Mass are as follows:

Offertory hymn: Wypłyń na głębię — Jacek Sykulski  — ‘Don’t be afraid — put out into the deep’, which I think are words of St John Paul II (It certainly sounds like him…)

Communion hymn no. 1: O panie, tyś moim pasterzem  — Sr. Imelda (CSSF), J. Kosko.  ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’, Psalm 23.

Communion hymn no. 2: Witaj, pokarmie — Paweł Bębenek.  Submitted to Google Translate, this comes out as ‘Hello, diet’! — so I assume it would be better rendered as ‘Hail, our sustenance’…

Communion hymn, no. 3: Skosztujcie i zobaczcie — Fr. Dawid Kusz OP.  ‘Taste and See’, Psalm 98.
Much of the music can also be found here, and the words in the WYD Prayer Book which is downloadable here.

See also this post, which has a little more about the Mass setting, which was composed by Henryk Jan Botor.]

Thus the Church flourishes in the face of those who would destroy her, such as the murderers of père Jacques Hamel, assistant priest of St-Etienne-du-Rouvray near Rouen.  Having served God quietly in Normandy all his long life, he was martyred today as he celebrated Mass.  (Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him; St Stephen, patron of his church and martyr, pray for us; St Denis, patron saint of France and also martyr, pray for France). 

Persecutors seem never to realise how unoriginal their actions are.  The Church, however, which answers a day of bloodshed with a ‘cri vers Dieu’ (a cry to God), fine and majestic music, a three-hundred-thousand-strong gathering of ‘apôtres de la civilisation de l’amour’ (apostles of the civilisation of love) and the unanswerable Eucharist, wins every time.  And endures in Jesus Christ.

Vaughan Williams and England’s loss of heart

All his life Ralph Vaughan Williams’ finger lay on England’s pulse.  It is for those works in which he managed to distil particular aspects of the English spirit that he is best known: her landscape in The Lark Ascending or In the Fen Country, her musical inheritance in the Tallis Fantasia, her ordinary people in arrangements of folk-songs, her reserved simplicity of religion or the heady otherworldliness of Shakespeare.  Vaughan Williams’ music has a tremendous variety in mood, colour, scale and scope, but it is all somehow distinctively his, and all somehow distinctively English.

Lately I have been venturing cautiously into some of his more difficult and troubling music: his fourth symphony (1935) and his sixth symphony (1948), particularly their first movements.  Of Vaughan Williams’ nine symphonies, each of which has its own character, it is these two works which most shocked their first audiences.  From the opening of the Fourth it is easy to hear why:

At first it seems like the work of a different man.  I would never have thought that music like this would be my cup of tea.  Yet I have been listening particularly to this first movement again and again, even though it is hard to swallow.  Something has been drawing me back to it, and I think this something is another portrait of England.

Some have said that this music is a reflection of its time, perhaps of the overcast mood in Europe in the 1930s.  Vaughan Williams, who was well-known for disliking the reading of such messages or programmes into his work, gave very little away.  His most famous comment on the symphony is often paraphrased as ‘I don't know whether I like it, but it’s what I meant'.  Neither do I quite know whether I like it, but am beginning to think I know what he means.  In spite of the composer’s own reticence, and although I am no musicologist, I think it could be understood, among other things, as depiction of England’s broken heart.  After the restrained sorrow and dignified mourning of the third symphony (the misleadingly-named ‘Pastoral’, which is in fact a programmatic depiction of the war-blasted landscape of northern France), here is the deeper grief and the rawer anguish.  It is as much a return to the First World War as a prophecy of the second.  

No wonder it is not easy music.  I can hardly stand the opening bars, but am moved and astonished by the inconsolable theme on the violins at 3 minutes and 48 seconds.  At 5'06'' a furious third theme on the brass is added to the storm, and the whole outpouring of anguish, hysteria and rage culminates, at 8'19'', in a moment that could be the sound of a heart breaking.  The remainder of the movement is a slump from rage into exhaustion in which the third theme is ‘transfigured' (Piers Burton-Page’s word in Radio 3’s CD Review) from trumpeting rage to dully groaning lament.  It is as accurate a portrayal of a failing will as I have ever heard.  When I brace myself to listen to this music, I hear first England's heart broken, then England’s loss of heart.

The sixth symphony, first performed in 1948, is even more difficult.  It begins not with a cry of anguish but an annihilating crash:

Again it has been the first movement that has intrigued me.  Just as I have to grit my teeth through the opening of the Fourth, so I struggle to tolerate the first ferociously discordant minute of the Sixth.  Again it is a second theme that makes the listener stay: this time a strangely catchy, snappy and jazzy segment with an almost shady quality, which begins at 3'13'' with a snarky jeer immediately irritated at having to repeat itself.  The composer was in his mid-seventies when he wrote this music, but this is not the work of a man mellowing into old age; he is raging, not necessarily against the dying of the light, but certainly against something, and in every way he can think of.

The unsettling mood prevails; at 4'28'' a third theme appears unobtrusively on the violins, tense and slightly whingey.  It is handed over to the brass at 5'33'' and lent a tone that Stephen Johnson, in this edition of  Discovering Music (Radio 3) programme, calls sarcastic, I think with good reason; the next phase of the onslaught is a return to the fury of the opening. But then at the seven minute mark something rather extraordinary happens.  The mood softens; the same theme reappears in a rich, sunlit major; the listener, lifted out of the yapping and sneering, suddenly hears music as purely beautiful as anything else Vaughan Williams ever wrote.  This is the original theme, we feel; surely its previous appearances were only variations.  At last the symphony seems to have a footing; at last we are at home; at last there is some beauty to savour, all the way up to 8'26'', when, just when we have settled into the music and it seems about to brighten into brilliance, it is abruptly — cruelly — obliterated by the same bomb-shell that began the movement. 

Below you can hear the moment taken in isolation as the incidental music for ITV’s drama A Family at War, and accompanied by an understated but singularly apt sequence of film (The crash is at 1 minute 28 seconds):

This is not easy music.  What was Vaughan Williams thinking?  Some critics immediately saw visions of nuclear war and apocalyptic man-made wastes.  As always, the composer kept his cards close to his chest.  'I suppose it never occurs to these people that a man might just want to write a piece of music,’ he grumbled.  But we can hardly be expected to settle for that.  This is a symphony of enormous things, and the enormous rage in this movement seems to be inhuman and heartless, in contrast to the fourth symphony’s  heartfelt and very human rage.

We are surely meant to think, as Chris Dansey comments below this video, that this is — 

A seriously disturbing piece of music, especially when played as it is here (and as VW intended) with no gaps between the movements. Particularly devastating is that awful moment when the lovely folk-like tune that (nearly) ends the first movement is crushed beneath the final chords before all memory of it is utterly smashed under the jackboots of the second movement'.  

 James Brauer's view, posted under the same video, is indeed that —

The significance of this piece is nothing less than the spiritual death of the West.  The first movement is a discordant, fearful lamentation of a world where “the center cannot hold”; a brief, nostalgic lyrical remembrance of the old world appears towards the end, but is engulfed […] The second is an obvious musical interpretation of firebombing; the third--the demoralization of the masses; the fourth--a spiritual desert.  Total nihilism.  This is what you are hearing.'  

I think I agree with this verdict until the phrase ‘total nihilism'.   If Vaughan Williams had meant total nihilism, he would have presented it without comment.  But I think that minute of sunlight in the first movement referred to earlier, that is brought to an end with the crash described by Chris Dansey, has a significant bearing on the whole symphony.  Why is there a warm goblet of familiar England in the desolation's frigid midst; why has it already been twisted and mocked so much before it appears properly?  Stephen Johnson's verdict on its previous appearances is that they are not simply variations but parodies, and it is this idea that I find interesting.  If these are parodies, Vaughan Williams is making fun of his own musical idiom with its Englishness, its melodies and folk-tunes and its well-worn tenderness.  This has made me wonder whether Vaughan Williams might have predicted the deliberate trashing of many aspects of England's culture, by her own people, in the 1960s and 1970s.  If the fourth symphony might be England's broken heart, the sixth is a depiction, or at least a prediction, of a hardening of heart, which in my view is what led to the 1960s revolution, even if it has not yet led to the complete ‘spiritual death of the West'. 

This now sounds very far indeed from my cup of tea.  Surely there is now little to distinguish this music from the work of modernist composers?  I think there is an essential difference, though: Vaughan Williams’ motives are not gratuitous.  He may be depicting unfeeling darkness and evil, but he is not himself unfeeling; his message is as bleak as any modern artist’s, but he does not himself adopt their off-hand, ironic tone.  He paints the end of England not as a matter of course but as the catastrophe we know it would be.  If, in presenting a parody of his own style, appearing to scoff at the very beauty for which he himself has striven, he makes the decision to place the original after the spoofs, then it is the parody itself, and not the original, that is in inverted commas. He does not mean the parody as a parody; he means it as a demonstration of the ugliness of parody.  It is mockery in brackets.

The proof of this is that the original and beautiful theme outlasts the jeers and sniggers, even if it is itself ‘crushed beneath the final chords’.  For I think he is still listening to the heart of England even as he drops the discord onto the end of the first movement.  Beauty does not survive cataclysm, but at least it outlasts ugliness and parody.  Here Vaughan Williams sacrifices one of his greatest tunes in order to paint darkness, but the important thing is that this darkness is seen for what it is.  He does not glorify it or merely depict it detachedly: he hammers it out for us to mull over its horror.   It is a human depiction of inhumanity.  And he wrote this music because he understood England deeply, even England's uglinesses, and he understood England deeply because he loved England deeply, uglinesses and all.

Vaughan Williams wrote his fourth and sixth symphonies in peacetime, but I have said nothing so far about the fifth, which was given its première performance in the middle of the Blitz in London.  Surely this would be a similar register of distress and despair at the wanton wreckage all around with no end in sight?  But the fifth symphony is not like this.  It is a serene pool of comfort.  Again Vaughan Williams listens to the heart of England and hears the steady beating below the surface.  Where in the fourth he brings out the grief beneath the veneer of peace, and in the sixth the hardened heart behind outward victory, in the fifth he perceives English tradition, character and gentleness intact amid the wreck of war.  The whole symphony is bathed in this calmness and sounds all the more achingly beautiful for the tumult that we know surrounds it in space, time and the composer’s own œuvre.  My favourite is probably the Romanza, the third movement:

Yes, if we English wish to understand ourselves properly, I think we could do a lot worse than to study this man’s music.

Embed from Getty Images

Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine…

…et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Today is the centenary of the beginning of the battle of the Somme.

May today’s young men especially give thanks for the comfort and plenty they enjoy; may they not squander it or take it for granted; may they, spared being sent ‘over the top…, spend their lives in the service of goodness, justice and peace.

The music is the ‘Shropshire Lad’ rhapsody by George Butterworth (1885–1916), killed at the Somme on the 5th August, 1916.

Referendum, part III

Having spent months dithering in the seemingly miniscule ‘Undecided’ camp before making a decision about the E.U. referendum, I now don’t know what to feel about the result: on the one hand the unexpected exhilaration that anyone might feel as a wave of history breaks over them, and on the other anxiety about the country’s mood.  And exasperation that the ugly word-phrase-pun-thing ‘Brexit’ is going to have years of use and end up in the O.E.D.  Am I the only person in the land who sympathises with both the victors’ ‘We’ve done it!’ Orb-and-Sceptre jubilation and the Remainers’ lament of ‘What have we done?’, a nasty feeling that we have forgotten how much easier it is to tear down than to build and thrown something away without really considering its value?  I don’t think we have been very prudent, but neither can I tell whether this is necessarily a bad thing.  Either way, there is a sensation that the twentieth century has just been given a heavy shunt into the past, and the European Union’s construction project a similar shove into the future. 

I don’t think sudden shocks are good for the health of nations and I don’t like revolutions: this, though peaceful, seems to have been one.  A referendum like this sounds the country out, like a hammer striking a bell, unmuffled by the ambiguity of a general election.  The note struck by Thursday’s vote has not rung entirely purely, and I fear there are some cracks in the bell that were not apparent before.  Mark Easton of the B.B.C. has written a good article here about the divisions that it has laid bare.

Some of these are old divisions that the dazzling modern world, distracting us from our history, seemed to have papered over: but here they are again, the traditionally rebellious east of England which snapped up the Book of Common Prayer so enthusiastically, the North of England holding its own politically against London as it did when the industries thrived, Scotland (alas) setting her face against England.  What has happened feels both very old and very new.  It is new because it is unprecedented: no nation has left its membership of the European Union before.  By ‘old’ I mean the resurgence of regional differences and rivalries and old-fashioned, even patriotic instincts.  I think the referendum proves that we have spirit if nothing else, and the idea that nations have spirits has of course been scoffed at for decades.  This is certainly not the result of a nation limply and entirely in thrall to plastic modernity, as I have been believing.

I am not sure whether this is a good or a bad thing either.  I wrote yesterday about being less worried about the actual result than the motivations behind it; now I am realising that there is a lot of anger in this vote.  One thing that I admitted to myself before making my own decision was that I hadn’t actually altogether lost patience with the European Union.  A lot of people have, however.  There is anger in the other direction, too, among my generation and in the universities.  I have spoken to only two other people in their twenties who thought we should leave, though being students from overseas neither of them was eligible to vote.  I am a hopeless curmudgeon as far as social media is concerned, but am told that people on Facebook are furious about the referendum, and saying so.  (Can we vote to leave Facebook?).  In an informal reading group of graduates all under thirty yesterday, I was taken aback by how some of them seemed to be trying to outdo each other in their disgust (not merely disappointment) in the result, and by their scathing remarks about the voters and their supposed motives.

Yet I think most of the seventeen million voters to leave have thought quite carefully about their choice, even if I disagree with some aspects of their arguments and sentiments.  Many have certainly felt disenfranchised and many are even angry, but the scale of this result compared to others is evidence that they do not allow anger to cloud their judgement.  Discontentment has not led even a fraction of these people to support far-right parties with whose names I won’t deface this blog, though the implication by some on the Remain side is that they might have done.  They were not even tempted to vote in such numbers for the (surely now defunct?) UKIP: even though it offered what they wanted, they sensed its air of tackiness and did not fall for Nigel Farage’s salesmanship.  Only when offered the possibility of a plain vote without party or brand did they vote to ‘Rebel’.

I am not under the illusion that this is simply an inversion of the 1975 referendum.  There will be no return to the past and this result, for all that it is supposed to ‘take back control’, will not necessarily bring back the old, gentle Britain where my loyalties lie.  I’m not at all confident about our national culture in general.  Are there any great statesmen or stateswomen in Parliament?  Who are our great philanthropists?  Who is the greatest engineer, the greatest novelist, the greatest architect of our day?  I can’t name any.  Where is our Vaughan Williams, where is our Tennyson and where is our Constable?  (While I am on the subject, if she is at all worth her salt, or rather her sherry, we should have some words from our Poet Laureate on this of all occasions).  And although the E.U. is no friend of the Church, I don’t see much of a reversal of secularism after our departure.  If this is so, the referendum will be in vain, as Joanna Bogle points out here, for ‘at heart, the problems of Europe and all of the West are spiritual ones. Only a great re-evangelisation, a new flowering of the Christian faith, can really offer hope — for Britain and for other lands that are currently sensing a loss of their sense of identity and heritage. It will be a tragedy if this is ignored and a misplaced nationalism, albeit with occasionally Christian overtones, takes centre-stage.’  Here is the real challenge that as many of us as possible need to take as seriously as we can.  Non-churchgoers are not exempt: they can do their bit to build up the spiritual life of the nation as well.

Of course very few of us know how exactly we are meant to proceed now.  Fr. Alexander Lucie-Smith has written a very reassuring article here: the most important thing we need to remember is that ‘it is the future that is important now, our common, shared future, and we need to put the divisions of the past behind us. Our European friends who live in Britain, and those abroad, need to know that friendships that have been important in the past are still important to us.’  This country has dealt with severer trials and blanker pages of history: let the 23rd June 2016 open a hopeful chapter in these islands’ tale.

Referendum, part II

What a surprise I had, turning on the radio this morning, to hear a member of the ‘Remain’ campaign being asked why he was feeling ‘dejected’.  For the result of yesterday’s referendum — a result I had thought wouldn’t actually happen — is that the United Kingdom has voted to leave the European Union.

It’s an exciting result, but is it a good result?  That depends, as I said yesterday, on my countrymen’s motivations and inward thoughts.  We have proved to ourselves that our democracy works, and that a cross on a ballot paper can actually do something, but have we remembered what our democracy is for? I hope it isn’t simply a strop or ‘a vote of no confidence by the British in what their country has become’, as a Radio 4 commentator has just suggested; I hope the votes have been cast in favour of something good rather than against something bad.  This is bound to be the case in some quarters, but surely not (I have enough faith to believe) in 51% of quarters.  I hope it has been a principled vote.  Otherwise it is a hollow result indeed.

Of course, the result is not quite as simple as I said: in saying that the United Kingdom has voted to leave, some strain is placed on its ‘United’ aspect.  London, the deafening cauldron of mostly sound and fury, has proven itself to be almost its own country.  More seriously still, 63% of votes cast in Scotland have been to Remain.  I am saddened that this result, compared with last year’s independence referendum, suggests a greater attachment in Scotland to the European Union than to ‘our’ Union (though the turnout there was much lower this time; I don’t know how numbers of votes actually compare).  The Union is precious to me and I fear this result might endanger it.

Another interesting statistic is that 75% of 18–24 year-olds voted to Remain (compared to 39% of voters aged 65 and older).  If the referendum had been of people aged 56 and below, the outcome would have been the opposite.

Well, that is that, for now at least.  Mr. Cameron has announced his resignation: an honourable thing for which he deserves credit, I think.  Let us forge our untrodden path with wisdom and understanding, retaining friendly relations with our European neighbours (especially France and Germany, of which I am especially fond), strengthening the circle of friendship that we have in the Commonwealth and keeping our eye on the common good, not only for ourselves but for the whole world.

I just wish I knew what the Queen thinks about it all!

Referendum

A prayer today for our country, as we go to the polls and decide whether to remain a member of the European Union or to leave it, that all cast their votes with wisdom and understanding and for the sake of the common good.

I have come to my own decision, though the difficulty I have had in choosing a side throughout the campaign seems to leave me in a small minority.  All I have known is that I want a high turnout and a close result (and the banishing of complacency).

I have found the debate unedifying and the campaigns unrepresentative of my interests.  They have spoken only in simple terms about the economy, the question of migration and why the other side is wrong.   And the tone has been unpleasant, the fashionable ‘Remain’ camp worse than the rebellious ‘Leave’ brigade, though they would not like to think so.

Another problem is the question itself, of course.  There is no way of expressing reluctance or reservation.  How I wish there were some way to answer ‘Remain, in spite of myself’ or ‘Leave, but not in a strop, keeping friendly relations with European countries’.  The question means what it means, even if I want it to mean something else.  It is not ‘Is the E.U. a good thing?’.  In spite of its simplicity there is an inevitable tinge of bias, since the question as far as I am concerned ought really to be ‘Now that we are a member of the E.U., shall we remain or shall we leave?’.  If we were still outside the European Union I would not vote to join it as it presently stands… but that is not an answer to the question on the ballot paper.

Our options are not quite even, either.  We are not choosing between two candidates or two parties: we are choosing between relative certainty (for better or worse) and great uncertainty (from which could emerge good or bad). We have some idea what a ‘Remain’ vote would produce, but ‘Leave’ could mean all kinds of things.  Remain is concrete; Leave is a labyrinth: this is unfair on the latter.

Perhaps I am less worried about the actual result than by the motives that will have lain behind the result.  May they not lead us ‘to do the right thing for the wrong reason’; may they be the good and just motives of good and just hearts and minds.

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.

The New Evangelisation: ten thoughts

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?  The question asks itself now not in ancient Babylon but in our own country and our own day, and with growing urgency.  The Church’s answer is the New Evangelisation —  a great call to re-evangelise Christian cultures that have forgotten the faith — but it can be hard to see how we are to fit into it, or where to begin.  I am not a convert, still less an expert, but I thought it might be worth putting up this list of reflections, even if most of them might seem obvious.

1. Apathetic agnosticism is a greater, a subtler and a more widespread challenge than aggressive secularism.  Our country is awash with spiritual apathy (or acedia): a number of people are openly opposed to Christianity, but far more in modern Britain seem almost to sleepwalk through life, hurled by busy lives from distraction to distraction, not seeing what weighs them down.  There is a lot of unwise, stupid and wrong behaviour as well, but we should never confuse this, the result of sin to which believers are hardly immune, with the actual intelligence and goodness of non-churchgoers.   Easy though it might be to forget in a culture opposed to the Church in so many ways, people really do examine the human heart carefully without any particular grudge against Christianity.  We should remember that our faith does not make us, in ourselves, superior to them — see Galatians 6:14.  Another point is that people have different reasons for not going to church, and these cannot necessarily be bashed aside with a copy of the Catechism.  For instance, many young people, having been brought up without regular church attendance, might feel that to start practising would be a slight to their parents and their values; it would be wrong for us to ride rough-shod over that loyalty.  Many people stay away from church without resenting churchgoers; many pray without practising; many believe in God but lack faith in the visible institution of the Church; many people are of good will but spiritually unadventurous. There are also more people with misgivings about modern values than the media suggest: I know a number of (young!) people who reverence marriage, dislike bad language, seek beauty in poetry, and so on.  To be evangelised is to discover something that is not completely unfamiliar.
2. We should announce the Gospel by asking people questions.  This is an age, in thrall as it is to the doctrines of self-determination and relativism, in which people dislike being lectured to, and in any case, it is better to invite people to discover the faith for themselves and in their own time.   Proclamations, however resonant, can be taken as slogans and brushed off quite easily.  Even quietly-posed questions are less easy to ignore.  They are more likely to percolate unobtrusively through the mind, reappearing every so often, never really going away, gently nudging and pestering for an answer.  We could learn from our Evangelical brethren here:  the talks and discussions they organise often have a question as the title, such as ‘Is there more to life than this?’, ‘What if the Resurrection really happened?’, and so on.  Even rhetorical questions demand unspoken answers.  Do you believe that you have an absolute and irreducible dignity as a human being?  Would you prefer to be excused for your wrongs, or to be forgiven?  Do you remember that we believed because it is true?
3. We must evangelise the arts and culture.  We must have the courage to answer the cults of sarcasm and ugliness with works of art, literature and music that uphold human dignity and strive for beauty.  The right artistic intention is, I think, to be prized even more than accomplishment or execution.  A  sincere true utterance with some rough edges is better than a thousand polished works calculated to trample goodness and truth gratuitously (I think works of art or literature can be evil, as well as simply bad).  The ideals by which all art was once made have been so neglected that they now represent a niche in the market, and it is up to us to fill it.  We need writers, composers and architects whose subjects are not necessarily explicitly religious but whose faith can be seen to leaven their work.  We need audibly beautiful, even musical poetry.  Popular music must be prized out of the hands of the industry that has dragged it down into sordidness, and the airwaves filled with simple, unaffected, authentic and uplifting tunes.  Films, too, could explore the world and the soul far more deeply, and without sermonising (Inside Out, which I have already praised, is a case in point).  These things matter because art is not inanimate: it always acts upon us for better or worse.  If beauty is a reflection of God, and God is love and truth, beautiful art will lead us towards deeper understanding and purer love of each other and of God.  Such love is several orders of magnitude above a love of music or poetry, but both have the same essence and the same divine origin.
4. Our position should not be a merely anti-modern or reactionary one, even though we are right to mourn to much of what the past has taken with it.  Although we should cherish tradition, resist our culture’s chronological snobbery with energy and revive certain aspects of the old world, our aim is not simply to return to the past.  Likewise, given that much of what we say and believe might be called ‘conservative’, we should remember that we are so confident in its truth because it is Christian orthodoxy, not because it is conservative.  We should look for opportunities in the modern world; we should embrace new technology.  This is, for instance, the age of the image, and ours is the religion of the image: the modern ‘explosion of imagery’, Fr. Robert Barron has said, even makes this a ‘Catholic moment’.  Why should the Church not encourage the building of beautiful websites or beautiful graphic design?  I am probably guiltier than most of yearning for the past and raging against the present, but we should make the effort to receive the ‘sacrament of the present moment’ gratefully.
5. We must never tire of striving and praying for Christian unity.  Christians have inherited a difficult and a painful tangle and our divisions, though less raw than they once were, remain scandals and obstacles to faith.  We should make a greater effort to collaborate with Evangelical Christians who, like us, hold to Christian faith in the teeth of fashion, their concern for what is ‘Biblical’ corresponding to ours for what is ‘orthodox’.  We should make an effort to understand the Eastern Orthodox faith: last February’s meeting between Pope Francis and the Russian Patriarch Kirill, and good relations with the Patriarch of Constantinople, are valuable and significant.  (I have heard a priest say that fifty years might suffice for full communion to be restored between East and West.)  Even within the Catholic Church, we should overcome our differences by trying to keep them in perspective, avoiding airing them in public if possible, and also by keeping our minds and hearts fixed on Jesus Christ (see point 10). 
6. Marriage, the family and childhood matter.  It is on this front that the modern world has declared war most explicitly on the Church.  We need courage to defend it.  A preoccupation with the welfare of adults, though not unjustified, has contributed to the social and cultural neglect of children and the elderly, who in their own ways have become almost second-class citizens.  Children in particular are segregated from the world of adults: because the adult world believes itself entitled to violent and sordid entertainment, children must be given their own isolated culture.  This, among other things, means that the passage from childhood to adulthood is no longer a steady growth or slow mellowing but a series of disillusioning shocks and blows, the worst of which fall between the ages of eleven and fourteen.  Surely most of us have seen this happen: the descent of the grey veil of cynicism; the deliberate self-vandalism of the soul; the hideously thorough revolt against childhood.  The New Evangelisation reminds us of the importance of the family, in which all people have their place and by which all understand their own lives.  Somewhere (I wish I could remember where!) I have heard and heartily agreed with the statement that ‘all men are called to be fatherly and all women to be motherly’.  I think it would also be good rule to behave at all times as if children might overhear.  Unfashionably, I also believe that men can and should cultivate chivalry towards women and that women should demand excellent manners of men.  Both men and women, if they are called to do so, should steel themselves joyfully for the mission of marriage and parenthood.
7. There is a good deal of health in the Church’s youth.  I can report this from belonging to it!  In university chaplaincies, in diocesan ministries, in parishes, however small in number, there is plenty of energy, intelligence and good humour to be harnessed.  The Church has great strength in its youth, as World Youth Day has proved again and again, and will surely do again this coming July. 
8. A sense of vocation is the antidote to the myth of self-determination.  There is more strength to be gained from the feeling of being called to do something than from simply wanting to do something.  The current idea that we may do as we please as long as we think it harms nobody else will, I think, pall, since it leaves nobody but oneself to blame for plans going wrong or indeed for suffering.  As people tire of endless fruitless avenues, the Church should be there to propose a robuster way of life, something requiring service and devotion and even vows, which nevertheless brings far greater happiness than the path of self-absorption and quick gratification.  I never tire of quoting Cardinal Newman’s meditation about service and vocation, from which this blog’s name is taken: ‘God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission — I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next […] I have a part in this great work; I am a link in a chain, a bond of connexion between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do His work; I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments and serve Him in my calling.  Therefore I will trust Him’. One way of telling whether something is a real vocation, it has occurred to me, is to feel a strong desire to do something good, to be terrified of doing it, and to be determined, almost in spite of oneself, to do it all the same.
9. We are sharing a revealed faith, not advocating a philosophy or policy.  Our faith is not an idea that we came up with one afternoon in the pub and are rather pleased with.  It is not a theory to be evaluated, nor a strategy to be risk-assessed.  It is not our idea but God’s.  If we invite people to understand the Church, we do so because we believe they will be happier for knowing it, and we want happiness for them out of love: it is something that we can hardly help telling other people about, like the urge to share music or discuss favourite books. 
10. Who do we say that He is?  Our first task is to evangelise ourselves.  In a lecture that is well worth listening to, Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth says (here to be precise) that in the modern world we are to concentrate above all on the person of Jesus Christ.  Where, before the Council, the emphasis might have been too often on ‘The Church of the Lord’, we are invited now to found our lives more clearly upon ‘The Lord of the Church’.  The New Evangelisation may be a great task, but it begins here, and is a futile exercise without it.  It may also be a great task, but it is to be gone about in small, even unseen ways.  Whatever happens, we should not worry: we have already been told that it will all come right in the end.

Do readers have thoughts about these?  I would be interested to read any comments.

‘Oak Apples’ and ink for England

For reasons of shortage of time, no doubt in common with much of the rest of the country, this blog failed in two respects to mark the 29th of May, last Sunday.  Firstly, it was mysteriously silent on the subject of Chesterton, whose birthday it was.  Then the second unmarked occasion was Oak Apple Day, one of those English traditions that deserve vigorous revival.  It marks the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, and was in fact a public holiday from that date until 1859.  The ‘oak apples’ of the name are a kind of plant gall, and these or sprigs of oak were worn to recall Charles II’s escape from the Roundheads, hiding himself inside an oak tree after the Battle of Worcester.  Oak Apple Day traditions still survive in some English towns and villages — and it was a delight to wake up and hear it mentioned on Radio 3’s Breakfast programme — but there’s no reason why every parish should not cast off care and cynicism and keep this (and other) traditions unashamedly alive.

The previous week I had happened to learn that a particular kind of oak gall has a significance to English history even greater than this tradition.  There is a particular species of wasp which, when it lays its eggs in an oak tree, induces a unique kind of gall.  This can be ground and mixed with iron sulphate and water to produce an ink that is both cheap and, importantly, indelible.  This ‘iron gall ink’ was used in this country in important documents from the ninth almost to the twentieth century, not least in the Magna Carta.  And this ink has lasted to our own day, as explained in the extract from Oak Tree: Nature’s Greatest Survivor (B.B.C. 4) below:

So it turns out not only that oak apples owe their festival to an episode of English history, but that English history itself owes its survival largely to oak apples.  Is this perhaps an even better reason to reclaim the 29th May for them?

‘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).

Geburtstagsglückwünsche…

…für den emeritierten Papst Benedikt XVI, der heute sein neunundachtzigtes Lebensjahr feiert!

Yes, today is the great Pope Emeritus Benedict’s eighty-ninth birthday.  I say ‘great’ and mean it because, as I explained in one of my first posts on this blog, I think he is one of the most important public figures to have appeared on the world stage since the millennium (and he had been doing mighty work long before then).  Not only did he hold the Church’s tiller steady against wave after wave in this age of tumult, but he went out to do battle with the forces of secularism and relativism: not with sound and fury, as they expected, but with lucidness of intellect and steadfastness of goodness.  He dedicated his intellectual gifts to the cause of goodness and truth.  He reminded a world unwilling  (especially in the West) to acknowledge its burden of disillusionment, cynicism and selfishness that it is, in fact, possible to speak of such things as absolute truth, intellectual faith and authentic love: “I have come,” he once said, visiting Berlin, “to speak about God".  He was undaunted when the apostles of secularism scoffed, “Truth?  What is that?”. He continued to use old words like ‘beauty’, ‘love’ and ‘faith’ with a straight face, and yet without raising his voice.  Having witnessed evil for himself, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, he taught my generation that goodness and gentleness are not the same as blandness, or even as kindness, but often have to be proved with moral courage and honesty before God.  Above all, he gave us a tremendous example, itself founded on the example of Christ.  He (along with St. Peter) has a magnificent successor in Pope Francis, but his writing and example remain a rich treasure-trove for the Church and for the New Evangelisation.  It is as much a gift as a challenge to number among the ‘Benedict generation’, and so I here express my gratitude for his long life, pray for his good health, and propose a Bavarian ‘Prost!’.

Pope Benedict toasting last year’s 88th birthday (It is right and just)

(Photo: The Ratzinger Forum, possibly ultimately L’Osservatore Romano)

‘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:

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus!

To live in Wales is to be conscious

At dusk of the spilled blood

That went into the making of the wild sky,

Dyeing the immaculate rivers

In all their courses…

‘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.