Civilizations are not destroyed from without; they collapse from within. That collapse may be in slow motion ...

Barbarians among the ruins

by Anthony Daniels

On the sad state of the West English town.

The first entry in Simon Leys’s idiosyncratic and highly personal book of quotations, Les idées des autres (Other People’s Ideas), is from Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian Antarctic explorer who, thanks to his meticulous organization, was the first man to reach the South Pole, not only beating Captain Scott to it but—unlike Scott—living to tell the tale. “Incompetence,” he said, “is the origin of adventure.” (This was hubris, and he paid for it. He died in a Polar expedition.)

But we in Britain love, or perhaps I should say once loved, noble failure. Success somehow seemed to us almost vulgar by comparison, and certainly much less romantic. We believed that failure offered a man a better opportunity to demonstrate his true character, his moral fiber, than success ever could. I think this a mistake: success is merely a moral examination of another type.

One of Captain Scott’s last companions was Edward Wilson, the doctor, naturalist, and watercolorist. He, Wilson, is also the most famous son of Cheltenham, the spa town in the West of England otherwise famed for its Ladies’ College, its annual racing week that attracts a quarter of a million Irishmen, and its elegant Regency terraces.

Its municipal museum and art gallery is named after Wilson, but is now coyly called “The Wilson” rather than, say, “The Wilson Museum and Art Gallery.” It is as if the words “Museum and Art Gallery” would bring that blush to the cheek of a young person that Mr. Podsnap so assiduously tried to avoid, and whom the museum is trying to attract. Nevertheless, it is a museum and art gallery, and a good one of its type, too, which I happen to like. A Victorian officer’s uniform, a splendid Venetian townscape by Guardi (a better painter than Canaletto), Chinese porcelain, Arts and Crafts furniture, an early nineteenth-century landscape of a ploughing competition by an amateur artist best known for his portraiture of prize pigs, Edward Wilson’s snow boots, a stuffed albatross and penguin: you’d have to be disenchanted with life itself to be interested in nothing that the museum contained.

There also happened to be an excellent exhibition when I visited recently called “Still Small Voice: British Biblical Art in a Secular age (1850–2014).” Funded by the Ahmanson Foundation of Los Angeles, it was precisely the kind of exhibition that I like: uneven in quality, small in size, and attended by no more than three people at a time

Unevenness of quality is a great aid to appreciation. For example, there was a garish and sickly painting by William Charles Thomas Dobson (1817–1898) called The Childhood of Christ, a powerful reminder of why modernism was so imperatively necessary. A critic in a Victorian evangelical magazine wrote of one of Dobson’s efforts:
Not a face in the picture exhibits any speciality of character, and that which is intended for the countenance of the child Jesus is mildly meaningless and innocently insipid. . . . Even in respect of workmanship Mr. Dobson’s picture is defective, the painting being neither powerful, nor delicate, nor true.

Spot on, even if one does not normally expect acute art criticism in Victorian evangelical magazines! Looking at Dobson’s picture, one is inclined to exclaim, “Thank God for secularism!”

But there were also works of great quality in the exhibition. Archangels of the Apocalypse by Stanley Spencer (1891–1959), painted in the year of my birth, depicts avenging angels flying over the rolling English countryside, not so much heavenly creatures as members of the Women’s Institutes of the time, dressed in tweed and with the gluteal equivalent of embonpoint. They are all too human and not the least celestial: and that is the point, the transcendent that exists in the most workaday reality, if we only would but pause to see it.

A sketch of the Madonna and child by Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975), drawn in 1953 in the wake of her son’s death while flying for the Royal Air Force, was of surpassing, and to me surprising, beauty, serene in the face of what must have been terrible personal suffering and sorrow. But the painting that most moved me was by Craigie Aitchison (1928–2009), painted in the year before his death. It was a crucifixion on a ground of scarlet, the figure of Christ being small, alone, and half-insinuated rather than fully depicted. It achieved an emotional and pictorial intensity that I do not associate with the current age, with its horror of both religious sentiment and genuine self-revelation that so easily invites the mockery of the sophistical. The likes of Dobson (of whom there were many) not only painted bad pictures but also did lasting damage to our artistic tradition, making the avoidance of their kitschy sentiment and sickly “beauty” almost the first duty of any artist, especially the second-rate; there is no trace of this neurosis in Aitchison.

I left The Wilson exhilarated: I had not expected to be so uplifted when I entered. But uplift in Britain cannot last long—perhaps it never can, anywhere in the world. As I walked down a deserted stuccoed street nearby I passed a splendid chapel, I should guess of the early-middle nineteenth century, of honey-colored Cotswold stone. It was early Gothic revival, but managed to combine the elaboration of Gothic detail with the simplicity of the Regency. It was a small architectural masterpiece.

It no longer served as a chapel, however, but was given to other purposes, namely to drinking, taking drugs, and deafening with loud music. It now belonged to a large chain of bars called Revolution, the website for the Cheltenham branch stating that “This stunning building has once again become a place of worship in the centre of Cheltenham!” The object of worship appeared to be the row of bottles of different vodkas that would help the customers forget who and where they were; the photographs on the website scarcely show the building at all. The photographs on the website also showed averagely vulgar (which means very vulgar) young British adults supposedly enjoying themselves, screaming, shouting, laughing loud enough to wake the dead, and pulling crude faces like talentless mime-artists.


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