An Elegant Epitaph for Civilisation

I have been watching Civilisation, Kenneth Clark’s elegant history of Western culture in the television series first shown in 1969. As the final credits rolled and Lord Clark in his private library the size of a ballroom walked out of shot (patting the top of a Henry Moore on the table as if it were a favourite dog) I felt that the program was itself an epitaph for the world and the values it portrayed. Certainly, television would never again give time to such a civilised view of what used to be thought of as our Western heritage, before gender, race, post-colonialism, queer theory and sundry other agendas began to jostle with each other to re-interpret the past and shatter the shared assumptions that once made people feel a pride in European artistic and intellectual achievements, a pride that, thanks largely to the propaganda of the academy, has now given way to shame.

Kenneth Clark (1903–83) was one of the most accomplished art historians of the twentieth century. In the thirteen episodes of Civilisation he traces the rise of Western civilisation from Byzantine Ravenna and the Celts of northern Scotland to the “Heroic Materialism” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We follow him through the Dark Ages (not dark at all, we’re nowadays told, only differently illuminated) into the Gothic era of faith and the great cathedrals and the rediscovery of classical antiquity and on into the Renaissance. It is here that, beneath his beautifully cut suits and jackets, Clark’s heart seems to lie. He does not tut tut but you have the impression he regards Luther and other Protestants as having showed rather bad form in interrupting this idyllic progression towards refinement. There again, they did provoke the Counter-Reformation and that brought Baroque, which Clark seems to favour as the high point of the European artistic ideal. After that we slip away into Rococo, just a little frivolous by comparison, though this was the era of Bach and Mozart and its leitmotif was the laudable, if unrealisable, pursuit of human happiness—at any rate for those with the means and leisure to pursue it.

Not that his observation of the tastes of the privileged few makes Clark what we would now reprehend as an “elitist”, as is clear from a number of his obiter dicta. But he recognises that an elite with money is needed to commission great art. He is not blind to social issues. Slavery is condemned with compassion and heart-rending images and the Industrial Revolution is portrayed as counter-civilisational, its vast technical achievements and the imposing architecture of industry and transport set against satanic mills and suffering and degradation in the slums.

Civilisation is a noble and cohesive account of the creation of the Western world and, because we in our Australian culture are among the heirs to that world and it is to us that Lord Clark is talking, it is appropriately and admirably “Eurocentric”. Over the years it will have been damned on that account in a hundred fine arts departments, yet such condemnation is unfair because Clark himself was not easy in his mind about its cultural limitations. He knew that the title—suggested by David Attenborough, then head of BBC2—was a misnomer for a series only about the West. He hoped that no one “could be so obtuse as to think I had forgotten about the great civilisations of the pre-Christian era and the east”. If time and money had permitted, the series would have been more comprehensive.

Nevertheless, Civilisation is a great television achievement. Clark’s script is a model of how to write English without a wasted word. He speaks it impeccably with an educated accent never heard on British television these days, even from serious scholars, all of whom have gone plebeian and appear on camera in T-shirts that would have shocked Clark’s tailor (whose own ample contribution to civilisation is on ever-changing display). Clark does not hide his knowledge under a bushel and even at the outset there were those who found his style condescending. Michael Gill, the director of the series, thought his attitudes too patrician, and for a time the project was in doubt. Clark was not patrician, but he had inherited wealth from a Scottish cotton fortune and, as used to happen, been educated into the mannerisms of the upper class. I found his delivery charming and could listen to it as though it were music.

As one episode succeeds another, each development in culture seems a logical next step. If you have a nominal, Gombrich-based familiarity with the history of Western art this teleological approach will not be new, but Clark’s solemn observation that war (as in the Middle Ages when out of it, he explains, came knightly courtliness) could be a necessary preliminary to high art is a salutary reminder that the world is a cruel place in which the state of grace that is civilisation is dearly bought, something today’s cultural relativists tend to overlook. Conquest imposed stability, a necessary condition for cultivating the finer things of life. Commercial prosperity was a further condition.

Although the series is subtitled “a personal view” of civilisation, Lord Clark’s private personal views on such matters of integral significance to his thesis as religion and politics are virtually impossible to detect. He admires the medieval Church for its understanding of human nature but seems to side with the rationalists of the Enlightenment, even if the French Revolution, which he endorses as a cry for liberty, unfortunately goes too far. Right at the end of the series Clark volunteers a little credo in which he sums up what he values in civilisation—unimpeachable sentiments such as “I believe that on the whole knowledge is to be preferred to ignorance”—but you wouldn’t know from it or anything that you had heard him say in the preceding episodes what his politics were or whether he believed in God (he must have, since he became a Roman Catholic when close to death, but we know that from other sources).

A guide as detached from contemporary issues as Clark chooses to present himself is hard to imagine on television today, and that is one reason why Civilisation is an old-fashioned program. Another is that less than half a century later—not a long time in the history of civilisation—such an erstwhile fundamental of art appreciation as Clark’s patent love of beauty has fallen from favour. Clark does not presume to define beauty but he shows us what it is, undefined. He categorically states that some things are beautiful and others not: a fearsome figurehead of a Viking ship does not pass his beauty test, though it might have come straight out of a contemporary gallery of ethnic art. There is never the remotest risk of his suggesting that Chartres Cathedral has no greater aesthetic value than a bicycle shelter. But if he is dated in his admiration of beauty as an ideal he allows great breadth to what beauty includes, and finds it in such unclassical objects as suspension bridges and the Meccano-like Jodrell Bank radiotelescope.

Nor is the language of the series that of public discourse today. I would defy the most reactionary speaker of English not to register some faint surprise at the frequency with which Lord Clark says man, men and mankind. It’s like watching films where everybody smokes. It was normal at the time but looks strange now. We’ve got used to smoking being universally disapproved of and in the same way we have got used to avoiding man when we mean the human race. We have had to get used to it, because although no one in his right mind ever thought the word used collectively meant only male individuals to the exclusion of females, man offended linguistically polemical feminists who asserted disingenuously that it did, and in due course managed to force their view on a society losing its spine. That loss of spine helps explain why civilisation is in dire straits today.