Vaughan Williams 150

A revised version of an article from 2018.

‘And I saw a new heaven and a new earth…’. From Sancta Civitas (1928), the composer’s favourite of his own choral works. 

Today, 12th October 2022, is the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958).  Was he England’s greatest composer?  He has plenty of strong competition of course, and perhaps half the fun is never quite to settle the question — but as far as I am concerned, if anyone is to match Vaughan Williams, then they too will have to draw me, irresistibly, again and again, yet in a different way every time, into a distinctive, great-hearted, masterfully-crafted musical world that is all its own.  He is in first place in my book.

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Vaughan Williams photographed at home (The White Gates, Dorking, Surrey) in January, 1949.

His was a life that, in many ways, took place in reverse.  He emerged as a composer relatively late — not completing his first symphony until he was thirty-five — but from then on never diminished in his  output, even intensifying as he aged.  Those who might have perceived in his fifth symphony (premièred in 1942, his seventieth year) a mellowing in age, or a mood of valediction, would hardly have suspected that this was actually the half-way mark, and that there were four more symphonies to follow.  Throughout his last decade — well into his eighties — he seemed unstoppable, completing his three final symphonies, the opera The Pilgrim’s Progress (a lifetime’s work), concertos for harmonica and tuba and much more, all the while maintaining an energetic social life, both conducting and attending concerts.  And it was not only musically that he was thriving: after the death of his wife Adeline in 1951 after decades of illness, he was rejuvenated by a second marriage to the poet and playwright Ursula Wood (whose poetry he set to music).  So he seems almost to have been cut off in his prime, though he lived to eighty-five.

Music for the film 49th Parallel.

I admire Vaughan Williams in the first place for the most straightforward reason: because the sound of so much of his music appeals to me so directly.  Time and again he wove melodies, harmonies, textures and cadences masterfully together in the service of beauty, beauty for its own sake.  This beauty often seems so self-evident that I would struggle to explain it.  Yet that first appeal, having drawn me in, makes me all the more willing to listen again more carefully for details I have missed, or to brave the composer’s more challenging works.  In that way he has taught me a great deal about the more intellectual side of ‘serious music’: its forms, its structures, and the depth of expression that they make possible.  So, for example, I have found my life enriched both by the tuneful English Folk-song Suite, which I have loved since I was small, and by the Fourth and Sixth Symphonies, which I discovered in my twenties.  Yet in all his works the same personality is discernible: a companion and a teacher and a seer, who may challenge but never disregards the listener.

The third movement (Scherzo) of the London Symphony, played by the Spanish Radio and Television Orchestra and conducted by Carlos Kalmar.

This capacity for both simplicity and complexity is only part of another remarkable aspect of Vaughan Williams: his sheer versatility, or his ‘tremendous range’, as Vernon Handley put it.  He wrote music of so many flavours, for so many purposes, and all so convincingly, that it is sometimes hard to believe that they flowed from a single pen.  Is the same man really responsible for the tranquil Greensleeves Fantasia and the enthralling anguish of the fourth symphony; for the diabolical chortling of Satan’s Dance of Triumph (from his ballet Job) and the tiny jewel of an anthem, O Taste and See?  He went off searching for ideas in all sorts of directions, but always came back to his own distinctive drawing-board: his work always bears, somewhere or other, the hall-mark of one and the same personality.  There is Vaughan Williams the collector of folk songs, Vaughan Williams the scorer of films, Vaughan Williams the compiler of the English Hymnal.  His music might be sacred or secular, it might last for four minutes or four movements, it might summon full chorus and orchestra or call simply for a solo violin and piano.  For his harmonies he drew on everything from Tudor polyphony to thirties dance-band music; he also experimented with sonority, including a wind machine in his Seventh Symphony, a flügelhorn in his Ninth and ‘all the ’phones and ’spiels known to the composer’ in the Eighth.  And then there are the moods that pass over his music, as many and as various as the English weather’s: serene or furious, reserved or exuberant; proliferating with detail or hanging austerely in clear air. 

 One of the best ways of hearing many of these moods is in that eighth symphony — even in its first movement alone, which is constructed entirely around the very first four notes played.  Sir Mark Elder conducts the Hallé Orchestra.

Another characteristic of his music is — I can think of no subtler word — its manliness.  So much of it seems to express some aspect of, and to be so evidently the work of, the heart and spirit of a man.  In other words, there is a particularly masculine warmth, an outward robustness, a heartiness, a full-bloodedness about it all.  That is not to suggest that he did not mean his music for men and women alike, nor to assume that it was conscious or deliberate — it is simply part of the character and colour of his music.  His work is shot through with the vigour, the spirituality, the moods, the quickness, the temper, the restlessness, the passions, the solitary questing of manhood.

The second movement of the Concerto for Violin and Strings (1925; originally Concerto Accademico).   André Previn conducts the London Symphony Orchestra; James Buswell is the soloist.

Then there is his Englishness, the quality of his music which is perhaps most often commented on.  Vaughan Williams is credited with reviving and developing a particularly English style of music, one that was in contrast with the German idiom of Beethoven and Brahms and Mendelssohn that had prevailed before.  Vaughan Williams was interested in Tudor polyphony and traditional folk-song and the music of ordinary people, not for shallow or jealous reasons, but in a search for authenticity, and in a spirit of revival of old forgotten things and celebration of the particular — and it worked: his music sounds like home.  Hear how well it goes with Shakespeare, or with Chesterton; see how his hymns and carols have passed straight into the canon.  And he was keenly aware of the threats that England faced in his own day — war, the destruction of landscape, the decline in spirit.  Indeed, the sheer spiritual exhaustion of the modern world in general, sated with banality to the point of grief, is prefigured in much of his music.  Hear, for instance, the desolate passages that close the first movement of the Ninth Symphony:

Against despair and nihilism, though, Vaughan Williams was the great champion of the human spirit, and the idea of the lone pilgrim persevering against the odds preoccupied him all his life.  His reverence for folk-culture is precisely an example of this.  There is surely much to be said for founding ‘high art’ on traditional, unaffected idioms: familiar, time-worn songs keep high culture rooted in earth, while transfiguring the familiar elevates and enriches the popular culture.  And even as Vaughan Williams broke new ground with his symphonies and cantatas, he was content, I think, to be a servant of his age.  His heavy involvement in the Leith Hill Musical Festival, and his prolific output of hymns and film-scores and ‘practical music’ (notably the Concerto Grosso for musicians of varying accomplishment, or the Household Music written in wartime for whatever instruments were to hand) reveal a profoundly public-spirited man, unashamed of belonging to a particular time and place, and lending his talents to the service of others.  He himself was quite firm about this: ‘The composer must not shut himself up and think about art,’ he declared; ‘he must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole community.’

For all these reasons and more besides, it is Vaughan Williams whom I hero-worship as Britain’s greatest composer.  Other composers may have shared many of the qualities I have described, but it is  only in him that they are all united.  His music, in all its variety, sounds as fresh as ever, and is still working its magic on lovers of beauty in new generations.  May it continue to lighten lives for centuries to come.

Ballad from the Suite for Viola and Orchestra

It is Meet and Right

Herbert Howells’ anthem for the late Queen’s Coronation in 1953: music that has been much in mind these past few days.  ‘Behold, O God, our defender, and look upon the face of thine anointed.  For one day in thy courts is better than a thousand.’  (Psalm 84)

It is remarkable: Britain has rediscovered solemnity.  Amid my grief — and it certainly has been grief, with the immovable knot of dread in the gut, the catch in the heart, the oblique recurring waves of disbelief — there is a deep well of consolation in seeing the dignified, fond farewell that we are giving our beloved Queen.

Of course, plenty of people are carrying on more or less as normal — loud phone conversations on trains, and so on — and conversations with friends and colleagues have revealed that not everyone is feeling particularly bereaved — several have admitted as much.  Some try to find something humorous to say, while others, perhaps wary of the ambush of sorrow, say breezily, ‘Well, it’s all part of history.’  Maybe at moments like these it has always been so: not everyone sees things in the same way and, after all, feelings cannot be forced.  But to me there is a real change in the air.

For instance, there was the sight of the flowers in Green Park on Sunday, the aisles and aisles of them under the September-heavy trees.  At first, as I wandered up and down them, my thoughts snagged on a mild anxiety that this might all be a little too sentimental, a little too much about us and not enough about the Queen, but then I saw the volunteers, going steadily through the flowers to remove the plastic wrapping — the sort of unglamorous but necessary task that the Queen herself would have noticed and admired — and was reassured.  I made my way up the Mall, past St. James’ Palace from whose window-sills the new King had been proclaimed the previous day, caught the conclusion of the Changing of the Guard at Horse Guards Parade, cut through into Whitehall, went on across Parliament Square and down Millbank, over the Thames at Lambeth Bridge, and ultimately to a beautifully said and sung Requiem Mass at St. George’s Cathedral.  I signed the condolence book there which had been carefully laid out.

This change in the air is a reassurance and a consolation.  Whereas normally, and above all in the pandemic ‘lockdowns’, we have had row after row of identical days like the cells of a blank spreadsheet, these days are heavy with meaning.  That weight tells us that we are right to mourn and to grieve, and to miss the Queen; that we are not being silly or over-sensitive in our sorrow.  Dignity and reverence and solemnity have returned, and for the right reasons.  (The sole mistake so far has been the decision to bring the Queen’s coffin to London by air, rather than by rail as was the original plan.)  Even the screens that usually flicker their deranging advertisements at us now display still pictures of the late Queen with a sober message of condolence.

And then there was yesterday’s cortège, the slow drum-beat, the polished sombre brass, the thud of the guns and Big Ben tolling once every minute.  We of the smartphone generation, the children of the Internet Age, saw the coffin borne in sorrowful dutiful stateliness to the Palace of Westminster.  And  in Westminster Hall, where for now she lies in state, how fitting it all is, how right.  How rich all the colours are, so deep that they can be felt imbuing themselves into the memory.  They are as rich and deep as our grief: the thick warm yellow translucence of the candle-wax, the scarlet and gold of the furled standard, the clean stone, the purple-shrouded catafalque.

The BBC’s live stream of the vigil in Westminster Hall is, though a little intrusively zoomed-in on occasions, very moving to watch.  How strangely beautiful is the grief in the faces of the mourner-pilgrims who have waited many hours to pause, or to bow, or to make the sign of the Cross, or to salute, or even to blow a kiss.

The Queen has ‘surprised a hunger in ourselves to be more serious’ — and this, I think, is the first, immediate example of the way in which her life continues, and will continue, to bear fruit for us.  This is how it works, the life of faith: light catches light, heart speaks unto heart.  Those of us who shared or sympathised with her hopes and beliefs now feel the burden of responsibility falling on us, the duty to be little bolder in standing up for those beliefs, and living by them.

Part of our duty to the late Queen is, of course, giving the new King the acclamation he deserves.  And so we have, with such wonderful sonorous language — ‘Whereas it has pleased God to call to Himself our late Sovereign Lady Elizabeth of happy memory…’

I feel strangely at home in these otherworldly days of sorrow.  This is a deeply sad parting, a real wrench, and it is hard not to worry about the future — I am trying not to think about the loneliness which may well sweep in again after the funeral, that sense of an autumn of many things — but, as Joanna Bogle has pointed out, this is fundamentally not a horrible grief, as one feels after an outrage or a tragedy — it is a gentle farewell, mingled with deep gratitude and with confidence that the Lord whom our Queen served so well will say, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant,’ and receive her at last into Heaven.  And since, after all, as Her late Majesty herself told us, ‘grief is the price we pay for love’, it is only fair that I should settle my account.  So, strange to say, thanks be to God for this moment of togetherness in grief and love, and for all His bittersweet blessings.

Our Sovereign Lady Elizabeth

Her Late Majesty outside Hitchin station, 14th June 2012

Queen Elizabeth, for seventy years our unfailingly good and just sovereign, died earlier today.  

Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her.  Welcome her into the kingdom of Heaven.  Amen.

For the moment I have no other words than these, written for her Platinum Jubilee:

Beacons

After the fanfare the beacons flare 
Out in the dusk and the still June air; 
Thousands of parishes blaze brave light 
Loyally into the nearing night, 
And on the hillside a quiet prayer 

Lifts, though the words are hard to find, 
Up from the heart; because, behind 
These great festivities, we know 
There are some deeper thanks we owe —
Thanks for deep faith, the quiet kind; 

Faith shown in small things that fulfil 
Great vows of youth; that sows good-will; 
Faith that has long encouraged us; 
Faith without faltering or fuss, 
Plain as a beacon on a hill. 

This long example that you have set 
Shows us, Your Majesty, how we yet 
May find eternal jubilee: 
We see, we understand and we 
Will not forget, will not forget.

Jubilee Thoughts

I had been worried that I would not enjoy the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee — not because I lacked enthusiasm for the occasion, but because I feared that the national celebration would not do it justice.  There is an impression often given by the purveyors of mainstream or at least mass culture, that they think the Crown exists merely on licence, so to speak, and that they are entitled to permit it to survive solely in the measure that it conforms to the tone, the language and the beliefs of secular modernity.  I worried too that the general inability of our culture to take anything seriously would drain the whole Jubilee of the solemnity, of the mystery, that underlies the celebration.  

Many of these fears did materialise, at least in part, but one way and another I found myself not minding too much.  At least, it certainly did not spoil a thoroughly enjoyable weekend which left me with plenty of happy memories.  There were some wonderful occasions which seemed to capture the spirit of the celebration marvellously — the lighting of the Jubilee beacons on a local summit of suburban south London, and a trip to Windsor to see a flotilla of barges and a display of classic cars — and in general it was heartening to see proper cheerful Union Jacks hung from houses and to know that people were making merry and having a good time together.  The flypast and Trooping the Colour (seen via television) were magnificent; the service at Westminster Abbey was dignified and beautiful.  There was also, on BBC Four, the very moving and warmly recommended programme ‘The Unseen Queen’: a compilation, presented by the Queen herself, of personal cine-films from her early life.  My strong impression was that Her Majesty intended this film less as an autobiography than as a tribute to her father George VI.

This Jubilee was the first chance for a national celebration we have had for some time — indeed for far too long.  The pandemic is the obvious cause of this drought, but we have had other troubles too.  Immediately before that we had had a great deal of understandable disagreement over the result of the European Union referendum, wrangling which, in retrospect, feels like something whose development and duration ought to have been expected but which, until the General Election in 2019, felt as if it would never end.  As it was, we went into the pandemic without those divisions properly healed.  The pandemic itself might have brought about a degree of unity, but of course not for celebration — and even that unity began, probably inevitably, to break down.  Then, during that strange and disturbing summer of 2020, partly, I think, in revenge for the referendum result, advantage was taken of our mutual isolation to push radical and alarming political agendas to the very top of non-political institutions.  So, all in all, for quite some time we have not been ourselves, and have been in need of a cause for proper and convivial unity, a chance for some national sentiment — and our Queen’s unwavering reign gave us one.

How long the good sentiments will last I do not know.  The Queen by her own example makes it clear to us what sort of a country, what sort of a people, she believes we ought to be.  Too many of us pretend not to hear her.  She must know — and, deep down, so must we — that she has been a better Queen to us than we have been subjects to her.  Rather like a grandmother who never ceases to love the grandchildren who have turned their backs on her and all her wisdom, she says no word of reproach, but neither does she concede one shred of principle.  Those of us who still believe in the old values, the eternal verities, hear and understand her, and we will keep her words in mind long after the bunting has been taken down.

For what we are celebrating — the mystery beneath the merriment — is the fulfilment of a great vow.  The Jubilee reminds us, among other things, that such achievements, such greatnesses, remain possible.  It is a wondrous and a fearsome truth, and reason for heartfelt thanksgiving.

On Praying for Ukraine

In recent days two notices, each outside different Anglican churches, have happened to catch my eye.  One read, ‘We Pray for Ukraine’; the other, ‘Ukrainians Welcome Here’.  

And so we should, and so they should be.  But ought we not also, albeit in a different way, to be praying for Russia; should Russians of good will not also be made welcome?  The obvious plight of Ukraine makes our prayers as straightforward as they are ardent, but it seems to me to be no less important to pray for Russia, even if the words are necessarily more complex and rather harder to say.  The sparing of the young army conscripts and their families, the consolation of the unjustly bereaved, the success of those working underground or behind the scenes to bring a just end to the whole situation, in general the liberation of Russia’s people from their thousand-year nightmare, and — perhaps most difficult of all — the conversion and ultimately the forgiveness of her leaders and soldiers who have willingly spilled blood and brought disgrace on their nation — all these we can surely pray for without excusing or overlooking in any way the evil that has been done in Russia’s name.

Since a nation is a larger, looser version of a family, the bonds that bind it implicate all its members in its collective reputation, its collective fate.  But although the fate is collective, responsibility for that fate is not.  Thus, while the name of Russia is soiled by this new outrage, only a minority of Russians are actually to blame for it.  It is a horrible situation for them — certainly, more abstract and less raw in its horror than having one’s homeland blasted to ashes, but horrible nonetheless.  To pray for them is an act both of mercy and of justice.

The intentions behind the churches’ signs were good and sincere, I do not doubt, and I am confident that any Russians appearing in the pews would be welcomed there in practice, but we should do our best not to leave these things in any doubt, nor to let it be thought that our prayers are too hasty, or too reflexive, or unduly partial.  So, hard as it may be in this one-sided situation, we should try to pray for consolation wherever there is suffering, for justice wherever there is injustice, for mercy wherever there is contrition.

Six years since World Youth Day in Kraków

Six years ago today I was sitting at my laptop in my student flat, watching the opening Mass of World Youth Day in Kraków, and wishing more with every minute that I were there.  I was struck particularly by the music, which was supplied by a full choir and orchestra and consisted of fine, uplifting hymns and a beautiful Mass setting — full of a kind of joyful stateliness for the occasion, and all with rich, even cinematic orchestration.  

My endeavours to try and find out more, or indeed anything, about it all — what the hymns were called and how to spell them, let alone who had composed them! — sparked an effort to learn Polish pronunciation (which turned out not to be as hard as it looks) and a tentative but continuing attempt to learn the language itself.  And it drew me into the discovery and deepening love of Polish church music and the life that surrounds it — everything from their travelling liturgical music workshops, which draw hundreds of people to make music together, to the enormous outdoor hymn-concerts held every year in the city of Rzeszów.  The discovery of the Dominican Liturgical Centre in Kraków has been a revelation, and last October it was a joy and a privilege to take part in a workshop given by the composer Paweł Bębenek at St. Dominic’s Priory in London, and then to sing music composed by him and his fellow composers in an unforgettable candle-lit vigil.

Today is also, of course, the sixth anniversary of the martyrdom of père Jacques Hamel of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, near Rouen.  The mingling of the two events as they reached me from afar — of the joy of World Youth Day and the sharp sorrow of that news — is something else which has fixed that day in my memory.

The Agnus Dei of Henryk Jan Botor’s Missa Ioannis Paoli Secundi, written specially for World Youth Day and sung at its opening Mass at Błonia Park, Kraków, on the 26th July 2016.  This setting has proved popular with our parish Youth Choir in South London.

Finding Adlestrop

Yes.  I remember Adlestrop —

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly.  It was late June.

In fact it was the twenty-fourth of June: today is the anniversary of the ‘afternoon of heat’ that inspired this much-loved poem.  On this day in 1914 Edward Thomas was aboard the London to Hereford express, climbing up over the north Cotswolds, on his way to the poets’ colony at Dymock in Gloucestershire.  It was, as he recorded in his journal —

[…] a glorious day from 4:20 am and at 10 tiers above tiers of white cloud with dirtied grey bars above the sea of slate and dull brick by Battersea Park — then at Oxford tiers of pure white with loose large masses above and gaps of dark clear blue above haymaking and elms.

Then we stopped at Adlestrop, through the willows could be heard a chain of blackbirds songs at 12:45 and one thrush and no man seen, only a hiss of engine letting off steam.

Stopping outside Campden by banks of long grass willowherb and meadowsweet, extraordinary silence between the two periods of travel — looking out on grey dry stones between metals and the shining metals and over it all the elms willows and long grass — one man clears his throat — greater than rustic silence.  No house in view.  Stop only for a minute till signal is up. 

Another stop like this outside Colwell [Colwall, just west of the Malverns?] on 27th with thrush singing on hillside above on road.

I hope I do Edward Thomas no disservice in observing that it is as much because of circumstance as the poem’s beauty in itself that this poem is so fondly and firmly remembered.  Within three months of that afternoon Britain was at war; three years later Thomas was dead, killed by a shell at Arras.  In March 1963 they came for the station as well: if you turn in your copy of Richard Beeching’s ‘The Reshaping of British Railways’ part 1, section 3, to page 109, the list for England of ‘Passenger Stations and Halts to be Closed’ — a list which reads, Ian Hislop has observed, ‘like the names on a war memorial’ — there it is, the fifth item from the top, ‘Adlestrop’, in cold dispassionate print between Addingham and Ainsdale: so callously tin-eared, so ruthlessly bureaucratic and ignorant, so bone-headedly inevitable, that there is something actually poetic and tragic about its presence on this list.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop — only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Thomas recorded the event because he knew it was fleeting, one of those in-between moments that we so seldom remember to remember — but did he realise how fleeting how much of it was?  For it is not only the moment that is now lost, but the country, the world in which it was possible.  Not only ‘that minute’ but most of what was in it and around it: the locomotive, the station, the silence aboard stationary carriages; no doubt most of the birdsong too.  The Dymock colony, the whole reason for the journey — the whole set of circumstances upon which it was contingent.  The railway survives — Brunel’s ‘Cotswold line’ from Oxford to Worcester is still one of Britain’s loveliest —  but of the station, other than the stationmaster’s house, nothing is left but the sign, mounted on a bus stop in the village  — only the name.  

The poem itself seems in retrospect as fragile and precious as the moment it is describing: written just in time, in the last years when such a poem could be made, by Thomas or anyone else.  This one vignette of a single signal-check has been pressed and hardened by the tremendous historical forces around it into a tiny treasured gem, standing not only for itself, but for all those other unwonted moments of ‘extraordinary silence’ that were possible, and about which poems could have been written, in that old world before the war.  Almost by accident, then, we have this snapshot from a time, perhaps the last time, when Deep England could still make a riposte to the modern world, could conspire to bring a modern express train to a grinding halt and ambush its passengers with her shocking stillness.  Thomas’s sketch — which even in finished form retains the jotted-down freshness of his original journal entry — is now as strangely dizzying as one of those old autochrome photographs, so real we can scarcely believe it.

The site of Adlestrop station is between Kingham and Moreton-in-Marsh stations on the climb to Chipping Campden summit; the precise coordinates are 51.9360°N 1.6591°W, immediately north-west of the overbridge carrying the road from Adlestrop to Oddington.  On this cab-ride video of the journey from London Paddington to Hereford, the site can be seen just after the bridge at 1h 16m seconds.  (The former stationmaster’s house can just be glimpsed on the left).

Thomas was absolutely correct, by the way, to speak of ‘Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire’ — the county boundary crosses the railway less than a mile from the station in the up direction. (Its rough position is indicated by a caption on the cab-ride video at 1h 14m 40s; the line it takes is rather convoluted but it makes its final crossing of the railway at the end of the wall of tall trees on the right).  Thomas’s last line was as accurate as it was evocative.

What does it mean, I wonder, that at the poem’s centenary in 2014, a special train was organised to recreate the ‘unwonted stop’, slowing down at the old station so that the lines could be read over the loudspeaker?  Here is a video taken from aboard the train —

— and here is another from the overbridge itself, where the poem was also read as the train rounded the curve.

I cannot help feeling that something deep and beautiful is happening here.  These people have come to a particular place at a particular time — in other words, come on pilgrimage — for the sake of a much-loved, long-remembered poem.  Poetry often seems to be at its strongest when it works through the memory, and this poem, in touching not only our minds and hearts but the English landscape and time itself, has become a kind of memorial — one not of marble or granite, but made up of all four of those elements: minds, hearts, landscape, time.  Thus, just as the poem has come to stand for a whole vanished world, so this remembrance of the poem was a remembrance of that world.  To remember Adlestrop is to remember England.  And, even though it has been blotted out of the landscape and is no more than a memory, Adlestrop station still persists; it still somehow belongs to the English landscape, and the poem keeps it there. 

So for that minute a lost world lived again, proven still to abide in many minds and hearts; and poetry sustained it, poetry summoned it into sight.  Poetry is deeper than we know; it is as deep as England, as history, as life itself.

‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’ at full strength once more

The feast of Corpus Christi was celebrated last Thursday in Poland (where indeed it is a national holiday), and in the south-eastern city of Rzeszów there was the welcome return in its full form of one tradition: ‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’, ‘Of One Heart, Of One Spirit’, the great annual outdoor hymn concert.  (I have written more about these concerts here, and this year’s edition, which I’ve been catching up with, can be watched in full here).  

These past two years the concert has of course been constrained by various pandemic restrictions — though the organisers heroically put together an online concert in time for Corpus Christi in 2020, and then organised two live concerts with reduced audiences in September 2020 and Corpus Christi 2021.  This is the first time that it has been possible to relax a little more about the virus, and to enter more freely into its old mood of joyful, prayerful togetherness — a mood which persisted in spite of a terrific rain-storm whose arrival coincided squarely with the beginning of the concert!  Amid the wind and the rain it was nice to see some by now familiar faces once again: Hubert Kowalski conducting the orchestra, Joachim Mencel playing the hurdy-gurdy, Jan Budziaszek the percussionist and one of the main founders, and the various Pospieszalskis and Posieszalskas: Marcin, Lidia, Barbara…

This has also, of course, been the first edition of the concert since the beginning of the Russian war on Ukraine.  Rzeszów is only fifty or so miles from the western Ukrainian border, and it is this part of Poland which has been at the forefront of the country’s heroic response to the refugee crisis.  And of course, although Russia’s wrath is now mostly concentrated in eastern Ukraine, her forces have proved themselves capable of firing missiles well into the west, with seemingly gratuitous strikes on the city of Lviv and military positions only ten miles from Poland’s border.  So to the musicians and the concert-goers the war will be and remain an immediate and pressing concern.  And it only reinforces a paradox at which I have wondered before: that this hymn-concert, one of the most hopeful, joyful sights in Europe, has grown up in a part of our continent which has seen some of its worst and longest suffering.

It was as right and just as it was to be expected that some Ukrainian musicians were invited to contribute to the music. The band ‘Kana’ are already regulars at the concerts, but there were also some bandura players from Lviv, bringing to the stage a haunting sound that was new to me.  As well as these there were the old favourite of course: a big orchestral number at the beginning followed by Paweł Bębenek’s ‘Dzięki Ci, Panie’ (‘Thank you, Lord’); the exuberant ‘Jezus zwyciężył’, ‘Jesus has triumphed’, which is the cue for the multitude to go wild; and Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus.

The flavour of the concert seems in recent years to have been moving in more of an American-style ‘praise-and-worship’ direction, but what I have always preferred and looked forward to most are the home-grown orchestral arrangements and jazzings-up of favourite Polish hymns.  Several of these seem to appear every year — I’m never sure who is responsible for them but I think usually either Marcin Pospieszalski or Hubert Kowalski are the culprits — and at least one of them always strikes me as a real gem.  This year I was rather taken with a setting of lines from a much-loved poem by the Polish Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski (1530–1584):

Czego chcesz od nas, Panie, za Twe hojne dary?
Czego za dobrodziejstwa, którym nie masz miary?
Kościół Cię nie ogarnie, wszędy pełno Ciebie:
I w otchłaniach, i w morzu, na ziemi, na niebie.

Tyś Pan wszytkiego świata.  Tyś niebo zbudował
I złotymi gwiazdami ślicznieś uhaftował.
Tyś fundament założył nieobeszłej ziemi
I przykryłeś jej nagość zioły rozlicznemi.

Tobie k woli rozliczne kwiatki Wiosna rodzi,
Tobie k woli w kłosianym wieńcu Lato chodzi,
Wino Jesień i jabłka rozmaite dawa,
Potym do gotowego gnuśna Zima wstawa.

Here is a translation (from StaroPolska.pl,
http://www.staropolska.pl/renesans/jan_kochanowski/czego_chcesz_Panie.html):

What do You want from us, Lord, for Your lavish gifts?
What for the benefactions, which have no limits?
The Church will not contain You; You are everywhere:
On the earth, in the depths, the sea, the open air.

You are the Lord of the whole world, You built the sky,
And embroidered it splendidly with gold stars high.
Of the earth untraversed You lay the foundation
And covered its bareness with rich vegetation.

By Your will Spring brings flowers, in abundance born,
By Your will Summer wears wreaths made from ears of corn.
Autumn gives out wine and apples of various kinds,
Idle Winter rises, when ready meal she finds.

The melody of the song in the concert was composed by Jacek Sykulski (1969–), a beautiful setting which has become a popular hymn —

— but Mateusz Pospieszalski — brother of Marcin, the bass-guitarist and Jednego Serca stalwart — has given it a lavish arrangement, jazzing it up with a syncopated five-time rhythm, a clever lyrical part for strings, a refrain which proves delightfully contrapuntal, and some irresistible ripplings from the harp.  I don’t think they needed to change key halfway through, but otherwise I thought it a very affecting rendition, and loved especially the low, clear, pure tone of the upper voices in the second verse.  By the way, the soloist on the left, Barbara Pospieszalska, is Mateusz’s niece.

So, as I have had occasion to say before, there are plenty of good things going on in Poland.  New music with old roots, spontaneous youngsters dancing the conga, ladies with flowers in their hair, thousands of voices singing hymns in the rain…  Niech żyje Polska!  Long live Poland, and happy Corpus Christi!

Beacons: a poem for the Jubilee

to Her Majesty the Queen, on the occasion of her Platinum Jubilee

After the fanfare the beacons flare 
Out in the dusk and the still June air; 
Thousands of parishes blaze brave light 
Loyally into the nearing night, 
And on the hillside a quiet prayer 

Lifts, though the words are hard to find, 
Up from the heart; because, behind 
These great festivities, we know 
There are some deeper thanks we owe —
Thanks for deep faith, the quiet kind; 

Faith shown in small things that fulfil 
Great vows of youth; that sows good-will; 
Faith that has long encouraged us; 
Faith without faltering or fuss, 
Plain as a beacon on a hill. 

This long example that you have set 
Shows us, Your Majesty, how we yet 
May find eternal jubilee: 
We see, we understand and we 
Will not forget, will not forget. 

   Pentecost Sunday, 5th June, 2022.

The Jubilee Beacon, St. Helier, south London, 2nd June 2022.

Happy Jubilee!

Well, the moment is here.  Wishing a very happy Jubilee holiday to one and all, but most of all to our beloved Queen Elizabeth, who has reigned over us so long and so well, and whose example has been unfailing.  May God bless her and keep her always.

A new portrait by Ronald Mackechnie

“I cannot lead you into battle; I do not give you laws or administer justice; but I can do something else: I can give you my heart and my devotion to these old islands and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations.”

— from the Christmas Broadcast of 1957

The Elizabeth line: more pictures

Of course, I haven’t been able to resist some more rides on the Elizabeth line in its first week of operation.  On Friday I ventured to Liverpool Street station, whose new platforms are so long that at their western end there is a direct connection to Moorgate station.  Similarly, the eastern end of Farringdon has a connection with Barbican on the Metropolitan line.  That gives an idea of the colossal scale of this project — as do, I hope, the pictures below.  All show the Moorgate exit at Liverpool Street.

Perhaps, too, I will withdraw my previous comment about the trains feeling narrow and dull… on subsequent trips they have seemed much more spacious than I first thought.  The lighting is subtle, rather than dull.  And they are British-built (by Bombardier in Derby) too.

The Elizabeth Line is Open

London’s long-awaited new railway, the Elizabeth line, or Crossrail, is open at last.  Three colleagues and I could not resist going down yesterday lunchtime for a ride on its first day, and found our newest underground railway just as impressive as I had hoped.  The first impression — conveyed mainly by the ambience of the stations — is extraordinary.  They are immensely spacious — goodness knows how much earth they have brought up out of them — and the arches and vaults are of cathedralline proportions.  Their gentle contours, combined with the clever up-lighting of the arched ceilings, produce a remarkably soft, calming effect.  The acoustics, too, are soft, almost homely; neither echoing nor claustrophobic.  There were plenty of people around, but they were being absorbed effortlessly into the space.  There is a clear intelligibility and straightforwardness to the layout, and therefore to navigation.  There seems to be far less of the disorientation that one can find in the narrow corridors of the old Tube.

Farringdon station

The platforms are similarly wide and generous.  As on the Jubilee line extension (a different line for a different Jubilee!), a long row of glass doors protects waiting passengers from arriving trains —  and it is along this structure, not the ceilings or walls, that the departure boards are mounted.  This is another factor in the remarkably clean, uncluttered atmosphere — there is a clear line of sight right down the long, dead-straight platforms.

At Paddington

The class 345 trains, too, are excellent.  By comparison to the stations they feel a little narrow and less brightly-lit, and the platform barriers add to a slight sense of stepping into the unknown, but I think this was bound to be the case by comparison, and it should not take long to get used to.  Beyond question, though, they are very sleek, very fast, very smooth, and very quiet.  The line speed must be something like 40–50mph, but it would be hard to tell this either by the noise or the vibration; indeed, the ride quality is superior to that of some inter-city trains!

Farringdon

‘Space-age’ is YouTube personality Geoff Marshall’s verdict, and I think he is quite right: not only in its architecture and atmosphere, but also in the way it warps space and time.  I had expected the excitement of seeing the new line, but I did not anticipate another, deeper, sensation that came on gradually during the first journey, and which still has not fully subsided: a kind of semi-euphoric vertigo, a disbelieving wonder at the change; not just at the new infrastructure in itself but the change it has brought to London as a whole.  To see the name ‘Tottenham Court Road’ appearing through the window when I had only just got on at Farringdon seemed impossible, as if some rule of physics had been broken; it was a little like seeing water flowing uphill.  My known city has been remoulded and remade, its entire east-west dimension shrunk or tightened by an elastic belt.  Back on the surface I found myself struggling slightly to believe that it had all been real, and not some cheese-sandwich-induced lunchtime daydream.  It was a feeling exactly opposite to my disbelieving horror at the fire at Notre-Dame in Paris: a struggle to comprehend to a new reality, though in this case the change is altogether welcome.  

Farringdon

This sensation has probably been intensified by its rarity.  One way and another, I am used to bracing myself against dismay at most major events or developments in today’s Britain, including most construction projects.  Yet in contrast to so many dispiriting new developments, with their chunky and plasticky intrusions into our city-scape, this line is, as Mary Harrington points out in a new article, beyond question ‘something London wants and London needs’.  It is an unambiguous and unequivocal contribution towards our common good.  What is more, down underground, with no well-weathered or hand-made surroundings to clash with, its modernist and futuristic architecture not only makes sense but works in practice.  Here, then, for once, is something new that still corresponds to my Britain as I imagine it.  A new 50-mph underground line named after the Queen is something I myself might have dreamt of, something I would have had built if I were in charge!  Somehow, in spite of everything that has gone wrong in our poor country, we have got this right.  The air of excited discovery among the first-day passengers, our delight at the transfigured city — even the smiles, a rare sight indeed on the Underground! —  is surely testament to this.

Farringdon

The new line has summoned up the spice of excitement, the thrilling realisation that bold things really are possible; that it is possible to change a city — to change the fabric of the world! — for the better.  It is a rare taste of the Victorian age, or alternatively of what it is like to be French.  But the overall impression of sleekness and effortlessness belies how hard-won this triumph has been.  It has been a gigantic and complicated task, completed against considerable odds.  

This is a historic day for London and indeed the whole country.  The Elizabeth line may have suffered severe delays to its opening, but it has worked out all right as it now constitutes a magnificent Jubilee present for us all.  It is a superb addition to Britain’s railways, and worthy of the name it bears.

Farewell to the 455s

Through Mitcham Eastfields on a Horsham train, 10 August 2011

This coming Saturday, 14th May, sees the withdrawal from the suburban routes of the South Central Division — the tangle of railways running out of Victoria and London Bridge into south London — of the class 455 electric multiple units that have held sway in these parts for nearly forty years.  Their siblings on the South Western lines out of Waterloo will apparently follow in the next few months.

Basking in the sun at Victoria, 28 August 2013

Few ordinary passengers are likely to mourn them.  They are not glamorous, nor were they built to be, though I think better care could still have been taken of their interiors in recent years.  They were designed for mass short-distance transport, to lug commuters around the Hills and Commons of the southern boroughs; to venture to climes no more exotic than Crystal Palace, Epsom Downs, Caterham or Dorking.  I doubt they have averaged more than around twenty miles per hour over the course of their working lives.  But they have worked solidly, clocking up thousands upon thousands of rush-hours since the early 1980s.

Rumbling across the South Circular overbridge into Tulse Hill, bound for the Wimbledon loop, 11 April 2019

I am among those who will miss them.  It was against the backdrop of these faithful workhorses, plying their way up to London or down to Dorking, their acceleration distantly, enticingly audible over the suburban rooftops, that my rail enthusiasm was first contracted and swiftly found to be incurable.  The aforementioned South Western sister-class ran right past my grandmother’s garden, and I used a 455 as my subject for the centre-piece of a school art project (because I knew I could draw trains and buildings, but not people!).  More recently — until the pandemic in fact — my train into work was reliably formed by one of these units.

A Victoria-bound semi-fast accelerating through Mitcham Eastfields, 4 January 2011

Like the slightly younger 319s (themselves a familiar sight around South London until a few years ago) and their cousins the recently-scrapped two-car 456s, the 455s were built at York by British Rail Engineering Limited, as lettering on the step-plates proudly declared.  However, in contrast to the 319s — which were more souped-up trains, designed for Luton and Gatwick routes, for people with flights to catch, always seeming cramped by the chords and spurs of suburban south London, itching for the open stretches of the Brighton or Midland main lines — the 455s seemed gentler and more sedate, more suited to the way we do things here, south of the river, in the land of the electrified third rail.  To a 455, with its seldom-attained top speed of 75 mph, it did not seem to matter if we got to Ewell East now or some time next week.  They trundled their way around, taking their time about everything.  No point rushing this curve or that junction; there’ll only be something else to brake for around the next bend.  

Through the window onto dawn-lit commuterland, 1 October 2018

Adding to the dreamy aura of these trains were the various reassuring sounds they made: the chirruping of the brakes and the soft sigh on their release, the warble-piping of the original door alarms, the clunk of the camshaft on departure, and the leisurely thrumming of the brake compressors, this last being the sound I will miss the most.  Then there were the motors, matching the register of a cello, rising from a growl from a standstill to the very top of the tenor range if given the chance to stretch their legs.  The only alarming sound was the occasional crunch of electricity arcing from the third rail. 

Arriving at Streatham Hill on the 1617 to London Bridge, the once-daily parliamentary service via the Leigham Spur and Tulse Hill, 25 April 2019

The motors themselves are worth remarking on, for they are actually recycled.  Incredible as it may sound, they are over eighty years old, and more than twice the age the trains they have been powering.  The early Eighties, when these units were built, were not an easy time for British Rail, which, struggling under persistent inadequacies in government subsidy, had constantly to make do and mend with their scarce resources.  Their solution in this case was to fit the new trains with not only second- but third-hand motors built originally by the Southern Railway for its electric units in the 1930s.  Though now into their ninth decade and effectively dating from the electrification itself, the motors still seem perfectly sound to my ear.  Whatever the reason is for the withdrawal of these trains, I doubt it has anything to do with the traction equipment.

A down train draws into Wandsworth Common, 9 December 2018

I am not the only one sad to see them go.  ‘South London is [going to] feel weird without them,’ said one contributor to the ever-perusable Rail Forums.  Another chap, a driver who also films the modern railway scene and has a presence on YouTube, told me in an exchange in the comments, ‘These were the trains I grew up on, the trains that took me on all sorts of adventures and when I passed out [i.e. qualified] as a driver became my core traction.’

Epsom train rounding the curve south of Mitcham Junction, 4 February 2022

There is always a pang to see the clearing out of the furniture of our beginnings, however ordinary these things may be.  Perhaps, in fact, the more ordinary and the more constant they have seemed, the sharper the pang.  Bit by bit, the railscape of my childhood is disappearing (the analogue signals, the bell at Eastfields level crossing, the late Phil Sayer’s voice over the speakers…), and by the end of this weekend another major part of it will have crumbled completely away.  I will certainly miss the familiar presence of these old units, with the many associations they hold for me.

A final farewell, Mitcham Common, 4 February 2022

But let us end with the nearest a 455 ever came to attaining railway glory.  Under the pre-2018 timetable, one single passenger service each weekday was booked to run non-stop down the fourteen-mile line from Dorking to Horsham, and this was generally allocated to a 455 unit.  So, just before that timetable was abolished, I took one of the last opportunities to experience this run, and filmed the journey from just beyond Betchworth Tunnel to just short of Horsham.  As I have said, 455s hardly ever had the chance of a clear non-stop flat-out run like this, and certainly in their latter years Horsham was the furthest south they ever ventured in regular service.  So it was a rare treat to see this humble suburban unit reliving the glory days of the old Bognor expresses, accelerating to the full line speed of 75 mph along probably my favourite stretch of railway in south-east England.  (We really begin to pick up speed after Holmwood, five minutes in, and after Ockley, at six minutes, there is the added bonus of some jointed track, which we hammer over at full tilt.)  The date was the 14th May, 2018 — four years to the day, as it turns out, before the final withdrawal of the class.

Gipps’ Fifth to receive its U.S. première

Now this is very exciting news: on the 15th April 2023, the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra will give the United States première of Ruth Gipps’ Fifth Symphony.  Of her four ‘mature’ symphonies, this is the only one yet to have an outing in the ongoing Gipps Revival, yet it is a work as beautiful as, if not even finer than, any of the others.

In the past few years the Seattle Philharmonic, under its director Adam Stern, have excelled themselves in their dedication to Gipps’ music, putting the American premières of both the Second and Fourth Symphonies to their name.  It is no small risk to perform such large-scale works by a composer whose name until recently has, however unjustly, been so little-known to audiences.  Yet this orchestra has now proven itself bold enough to do so three times — each time bringing the music to new and appreciative listeners — and they surely deserve to be known as Gipps’ foremost champions in America.

The story of the Fifth Symphony offers a perfect example of the frustration and injustice that dogged Gipps’ career.  Completed in 1982, when atonalism still reigned triumphant, its persistence in clear melodies and unveiled romanticism were the final proof, if any were needed, of her refusal to compromise her artistic convictions for the sake of the Zeitgeist.  The symphony’s intricate craftsmanship, imaginative sonority and varied palette of moods counted for nothing, it seemed, against the tide of fashion.  Gipps’ previous symphonies had received at least one broadcast on BBC radio, but this time the composer fought in vain even for that.  In the end, a sole performance was given by the London Repertoire Orchestra, the ensemble founded by Gipps herself for newly-trained musicians.  A scratchy but complete recording of this rendition can be heard on YouTube.

Next year’s concert in Seattle will, then, incredibly, be only the second time that this symphony has ever been heard in the forty years since it was written.  And yet, as I hope can be heard in the extract below, this neglect is no reflection of the quality of the music.  It is, as I have said so often before, intricate, distinctive, at turns characteristically spiky and mellifluous, full-throated and beautifully-crafted music.  Many thanks to all involved in the decision to perform this symphony, and very best wishes for its success.  I have only one question — might there please be the chance of streaming the concert online, or of releasing a recording of it, for those of us who find ourselves on the wrong side of ‘the pond’?

Full information here: 

https://seattlephil.org/concerts-and-tickets/concert/gipps-fifth/

https://visitseattle.org/events/seattle-philharmonic-orchestra-presents-a-major-u-s-premiere-ruth-gipps-fifth/

This article has been updated to reflect a change in the scheduling of this concert from an initial date of September 4th, 2022.

The first movement of the fifth symphony, in which one of the most beautiful clarinet solos ever written develops eventually into a majestic anthem-like summit.  The London Repertoire Orchestra is conducted by the composer.

Poetry, Our Daily Bread

‘What poetry needs is a place at the table,’ begins a recent piece by my friend Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh which I heartily enjoyed and recommend, not just because he goes on to write very attentively and generously about a poem of mine, but because I agree so strongly with the more general point he is making: that poetry has become strange to us, and that this is a tragedy.

The reason for its scarcity in our lives these days, he argues, is not that we do not revere it, but almost that we revere it too much, so that, thus ‘safely exalted and ignored’, it has been forgotten and grown strange.  When we do meet with it, it seems unfamiliar and discomfiting.  We know that it is Important Language, but we don’t know why; we forget, except on rare occasions, what the poetic register is for.  We intuit its sincerity and its seriousness, but not its purpose, even though our forbears throughout the ages understood this naturally.  We think it is perhaps a kind of public therapy session for the poet, an unburdening of his emotions and preoccupations, and listen to it out of politeness if nothing else.  Perhaps we think of it as a porcelain dinner service, kept in the dresser for special occasions.  We think it is only for the solemnest moments, for funerals and centenaries, to be intoned only by professional actors and public figures.

But this is to miss a vital element of poetry.  Poetry is a craft, something that belongs to a community, and is to be shared and enjoyed by many, and often.  We treat music and film in this way; Maolsheachlann argues; why not poetry?  He says,

Whenever I’ve shared my poetry with people (with a very [few] exceptions), the reaction is generally twofold:

1) I like it.

2) It makes me think of X or Y or Z.

But what I was really gunning for is a critical reaction. What is good about it? What is bad about it? What does it suggest to you in terms of meaning and association? Exactly the sort of critique anyone would have about a film, a novel, a painting, a piece of music. I just want my poem to be treated as a piece of work, not as pure sacred self-expression, immune from analysis.

The price of our present misunderstanding is that we hardly encounter poetry at all.  And yet it is an essential vitamin, a vital mineral; it should be our daily bread.  It involves emotion, yes, but also the distillation and disciplining of emotion.  It is elevated language, yes, but not actually sacred.  We should not shrink from its invitation to attentiveness any more than we would begrudge such an invitation from a film or a piece of music.  We should welcome it into our lives.  It should season our speech like salt, deepening its flavour, and, by making us more attentive to our words, make us in turn more mindful of our human dignity.  

But like all good things, like all gifts, it is also an end in itself, to be cherished and rejoiced in for its own sake.

Maolsheachlann’s whole article can be read here.

Happy St. George’s Day!

May St. George and indeed St. Edmund and Our Lady of Walsingham save and protect England, this small precious portion of the Earth’s surface: much misunderstood, much maligned, much afflicted in various ways, but still the home of many people of good will, and still to be honoured, cherished and defended.

The Fantasy in E Major by Harold Darke (1888–1976) in an arrangement for strings by C. Jenkins, accompanied by a sequence of paintings by James Lynch (b. 1956) mainly of scenes in Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.  Many thanks to YouTube user David Harris for putting the two together. 

Happy Birthday to H. M. the Queen

Wishing a very Happy Birthday to Her Majesty the Queen, who celebrates her ninety-sixth birthday today.  May God save and bless and keep her always. 

Happy Easter!

Where all was dark there is suddenly fire; where there was death there is life once more.  Happy Easter to one and all!

In Święta Lipka in north-eastern Poland, on the 4th May 2019, an irresistible arrangement of a familiar tune is sung by participants in one of the many Liturgical Music Workshops that are run by Hubert Kowalski (conducting) and others across the country and elsewhere in Europe.  They sing, ‘Pan zmartwychwstał i jest z nami’ — ‘The Lord is risen, and is with us’ — or, as we know it in Britain, ‘Jesus Christ is risen today’.

In the Next Few Years

Half the battle, in these next few years, will be to keep our heads.  These are troubled, unreal, topsy-turvy times, and even leaving aside, if we can, the war in Ukraine, where the horrors of the 1940s have come howling back into our continent; even if we concentrate on our own society and culture, there is a widespread sense that the world has gone mad, and is going steadily madder. 

The first thing is not to follow it: we must not panic and go mad ourselves.  There are at least two false paths to be avoided — to give in and simply go along with the world’s insistent lunacies, or to allow ourselves to be goaded into an opposite, contrarian madness.  Both are easier than we think, even for honest and well-intentioned people.  Not for nothing do we speak of sanity as the state of being ‘well-balanced’, as a kind of equilibrium which has to be maintained, and which by implication it is more than possible to lose.  And such a balanced mind can indeed be hard to maintain, or to be sure of having maintained, especially if all around are losing theirs.

How, then, do we keep ourselves steady?  There is some considerable strength to be drawn simply from calm observation of the situation at hand.  With the right bearings we can, in all humility, taking into account our own flaws and follies, still have the confidence to point out the world’s madnesses, and to be sure that they are indeed the world’s, and not ours.  We can say that women and men, though radically equal in dignity, are also different from each other in certain essential ways, and that the blurring of such distinctions carries great risks, including to that same equal dignity.  We can say that an undue preoccupation with racial and ethnic characteristics, even with the ostensible goal of eradicating unjust prejudice, will actually do more harm than good to race relations.  We can say that the freedom of adults must not take precedence over the flourishing of children.  We can say that political causes do not make good religions.  And so on.  It helps simply to be able to say these things, to reassure ourselves that we at least have kept our heads.

 

All the same, the situation we find ourselves describing may still be a grave one.  We churchgoers, for instance, are trying not to find particularly daunting the displacement, by means of a potent blend of secularist, materialist and progressivist ideologies, of the Christian imagination of Europe: a process which has been going on for several centuries but which seems in our times to be ascending to a new climax.  Now because we are churchgoers we know too, of course, that this is nothing new.  The forces of chaos — and human beings in general — have been in rebellion against God and good sense since time immemorial.  We saw it yesterday, on Good Friday, which I find more shocking with every passing year.  The silent treachery of Judas, the queasy pragmatism of Pilate before the hissing Sanhedrin, the spittle-flecked blood-thirst of the mindless mob, Peter’s three (three!) denials, the exquisite ingenuity of the malevolence of the soldiers, the agony beyond agony of the road to Golgotha and the anguish of the Mother who stood beside it, the skull-stark desolation of the Cross itself, and then the final, unthinkable horror actually coming to pass: ‘He bowed his head and gave up his spirit.’  We were not there, and yet in truth we are there all the time.  For we know what this is all about: we have all heard of such things, or witnessed them, or indeed committed them; it is the history of the world.  Yes, we know all this.  And yet, since the forces of rebellion take different forms in different times and places, it is possible to make observations about the particular circumstances of different ages; and in our own day, it seems to me, the various threats to the Church add up to something that is without precedent in history.  

In part this is because these threats are not usually overtly violent: they are often invisible or intangible as well as appearing sophisticated and civilised, and therefore more insidious, disorienting and difficult to oppose.  So, for instance, here in Britain we have, in only a century or so, and with scarcely any controversy, transformed ourselves from an at least outwardly Christian civilisation into a largely secular-progressive one.  Perhaps because the trend itself has remained constant for most of our lifetimes we might not realise how great a shock this is, but we should not underestimate its effect: even taking into account the atheism and scepticism already widespread in the British establishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it amounts to a swift and drastic revolution, and one by which we have made serious alterations to the moral and ethical foundations and fabric of our society.  Partly it came about by the sheer cost of the the two world wars, whose shattering violence left intangible things as well as tangible beyond straightforward repair: social solidarity, love of country, standards of decency, trust in institutions.  Then since the war we have had the Revolution of the Self, a phenomenon that Ed West has gone so far as to call a second Reformation, and whose general coarsening and cheapening influence successfully ushered in a radical transformation of our understanding of family, morality, culture and of truth itself.  The attack was deep, determined and aimed more or less directly at Christian morality.  Wise and brave people sounded warnings to no avail.

In recent years, though, something else has begun to happen.  Partly it is something we might have been expecting: some kind of counter-reaction to that Revolution of the Self, as the sheer magnitude of the cost of its false promises became clear.  Something along these lines has now indeed begun to materialise, but it not the sort of thing we might have hoped for.  Angry beyond coherence, it rails indiscriminately against more or less anything that is inherited from the past, so that, instead of vindication for the Church, we now, to our horror, find ourselves actually lumped in with the Sixties revolutionaries, as if we straightforwardly share the blame for the problems they caused.  Never mind that it is the Church that has, say, warned most strongly and consistently against the myth of ‘free love’: no, the traditional Christian understanding of marriage is still considered as grave a threat to the fulfilment of women as the post-Sixties status quo.  Likewise, in the renewed focus on the wounds left by the slave trade, there is scant acknowledgement of the Christian motivations of the abolitionists, still less a willingness to make the distinction between the teaching of a religion and the decision by some nations and individuals at times to disregard this teaching.  We might also have hoped for any counter-revolution to have a cleansing, refreshing effect on our culture and language, and to restore some of the old care and courtesy in self-expression, but what has happened instead is that new and arbitrary speech-codes have been drawn up, so that we are terribly nervous about words like ‘Christmas’ and ‘Easter’ or ‘man’ and ‘woman’ or ‘unborn baby’, while the public conversation in general remains as casually crass and foul-mouthed as ever — and they accuse us of using hurtful language.  It is all deeply unfair and demoralising.

A hostile culture is by no means an unprecedented proposition for the Church.  But what seems different in our own time — what makes our mission a New Evangelisation — is precisely this complexity, this many-layeredness of the hostility of the twenty-first-century West towards the Church to which it owes so much.  We are not dealing with straightforward persecution, but a sulky, cynical, irreverent, suspicious, yet also strangely gullible society.  Meanwhile it often feels as if the Church has no traction, no way on it; that we lack the language and credibility to address the world (though this is partly our own fault as well).  The words of the Gospel, however rich and life-giving they may sound within our sanctuaries, can seem to ring hollow or trite in the stale atmosphere outside.

In the face of all this, our feelings, too, are complex.  We might be fearful of being wrong-footed by our culture’s many self-contradictions, never mind embarrassed by its vulgarity and narcissism.  We know we need a new kind of courage, and a great deal of it.  All this understandably makes us hesitant about what to do next.  

There is often, too, a sense of not only being attacked but tormented and goaded.  To use the famous phrase of Benedict XVI (to whom Happy Birthday, for he turns ninety-five today!), the steadily consolidating ‘dictatorship of relativism’ — which, as he put it so presciently, ‘does not recognise anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires’ — has brought about some maddening, bewildering situations.  For instance, we are witnessing simultaneously this aforementioned obsession with fundamentally unimportant distinctions regarding ethnicity, yet also the vehement rejection of essential and crucial distinctions between the sexes.  To take another example, the long revolution against marriage has not demolished it straightforwardly, as one might have feared in the Sixties, but instead captured and refashioned it in a new image by means of sleight of hand and word games.  For the meaning of such a fundamental word to change underneath our feet, for it to be stripped of its transcendent, cosmic significance and shrunk to something beholden to human whim, is almost more dismaying than plain iconoclasm would have been.  It was not enough for marriage to be destroyed; it had to be disfigured and then destroyed.  It is not enough for abortion to be permitted as a necessary evil or last resort; it must now be championed as a positive good and a civil right.  It is not enough that the Church should be defeated — the Church must be humiliated and then defeated.  Truth must be twisted and then toppled.  Christ must not only be crucified; He must be mocked and crucified.

This being Holy Saturday, these words are necessarily sombre.  I know that, amid all these woes, opportunities for good are emerging all the time — such as the fact that most ordinary people, whether believers or not, remain reassuringly normal and sane; or the youth and vitality of the pro-life movement — and also that, every minute of every day, we have the unwavering assurance of Providence that all manner of thing shall, in the end, be well.  But even if all evil is ultimately in retreat — even if any advancing menace or host can only hope for a Pyrrhic victory, and a temporary one at that — this Triduum gives us the opportunity to acknowledge the dreadful strength that evil can and does wield.  Evil is frightening; it roars and ambushes and twists the knife and goads us even as it wounds us.

But however many bearings we feel we are losing, we always have the faith and the saints and the True North of the Mass.  For alongside the long history of human power and human misery is the other, parallel, unsung history, forgotten by the chronicles but every bit as true: the history of all the Masses said every day, all the prayers uttered, as well as all the words and deeds of kindness and courage done by people of good will.  It is by this compass, always present, never erring, that we keep ourselves sane and rooted.  Let it be recorded, not on this ephemeral blog but in hearts and minds now and in years to come, that even in these unreal years there were those who still believed in the eternal verities, who still cared about the inheritance of their forefathers; who cherished such things and passed them to their descendants in the confident hope that evil shall in the end be outlasted, outweighed and outdone by good.  If we do this, then we shall have kept our heads; if we keep our heads, then that will be half the battle won; and a half-won battle is one we can hope to win outright.  Let us keep heart too, then, as well as our heads, so that generations to come will enjoy heart’s ease and happiness in a gentler culture, a fairer society, and a world closer than our own to the will of its Creator.

DrewCR2 · There is a green hill

The too-seldom-heard setting by Herbert Sumsion (1899–1995) of Cecil Frances Alexander’s hymn ‘There is a green hill far away’, sung here by the choristers of Grimsby Parish Church, directed by Andrew Cantrill, and with the organ played by David Leigh.  I have a soft spot for ingenuous Victorian Evangelical hymns like these, and the fine balance they strike between sentimentality and starkness.

He died that we might be forgiven,

He died to make us good,

That we might go at last to Heaven,

Saved by His precious blood.