"A bright future..."
Dec. 30th, 2007 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbIf you are not British, or for that matter if you are British and under 30, the odds are that you never heard of Sir Harry Secombe. Yet he was an important figure in his time, a popular singer and comedian, above all a founding member of the legendary Goons – he, Spike Milligan, Michael Bentine and Peter Sellers. I heard it said more than once that this anarchic group of comedians taught Monty Python everything.
But while the crazed energies of Peter Sellers and the ultimately bleak view of Spike Milligan drove their long and illustrious career paths, Secombe proved over the years quite another kind of showman. Short and tubby, ever-smiling, naturally pleasant (while both Sellers and Milligan could be alarming company from time to time), he was a comfortable kind of conservative, happy with the system of values of his country (if we can call it a system). We may well see him as the last spokesman of a vanished Britain, a homely compromise between a vague but revered idea of Christianity and a set of domestic and civic values whose superiority was taken for granted. It is typical of Secombe that, although he had members of the Anglican clergy in his family, and although he became in his later life something like a public spokesman for the Christian religion, nevertheless his grip of Christian doctrine and belief cannot be called firm. His TV program Highway, and the hymn records made from it, contain plenty that any rigorous Christian would define as at best sentimental and at worst heretical.
I don’t know that I want to blame Secombe for this. We cannot all be St.Thomas Aquinas, and to revere Christianity because it is a part of what you love and respect about your country is not, to me, to be despised. I say this, then, not because I want to condemn this attitude, but because it is relevant to what the rest of this essay will say.
One of Sir Harry’s main gifts as a showman was a beautiful high tenor voice, which he kept well into his old age, and which was the main feature of his Sunday TV hymn program. It can be enjoyed in a number of albums, and in his occasional appearances in musicals (he created the character of Mr.Bumble in Oliver!). And I recently heard him singing his own version of the main tune from Beethoven’s Ode to Joy – to words, I assume, of his own writing.
My first reaction was to wonder at how truly brilliant a tune Beethoven produced for his great symphony. Sir Harry and his arrangers had arranged the melody to suit their purposes, but the wonderful drive and joyful energy remained untouched.
However, it was the use to which Sir Harry put this drive and joy that made me think. His version of the Song of Joy has to do with the future: men, in his lyrics, will be together, there will be peace and understanding – the future is not only better than the present, it positively shines with hope and enthusiasm. And I found myself thinking: is this what Beethoven meant?
Heck no.
Read the text. Listen to the music. Nowhere is there any promise of improvement, indeed anything utopian or futuristic at all. It is not the future for which Schiller and Beethoven sing their song of joy: it is the present. Their promise is not “pie in the sky when you die”, let alone the much sillier promise of pie on earth before your great-grandchildren die: what they sing about is the great fact that here, now, we mortals are allowed to share in one divine emotion – that is, joy. Schiller makes no bones about it: not only all the good and all the bad, but the very worm in his mud, shares in the experience that the Seraphs feel as they contemplate the face of God Himself.
It is not, let us be clear on this, a matter of dumb optimism for its own sake. Rather, it is that Schiller’s specific subject is joy. Joy transfigures daily human life, and can reach pretty much anyone and anything capable of feeling. Schiller makes one significant exception – if you never in your life managed to win one lover or one true friend, then you have no idea what joy is. In that case, you’d just better run and hide. But one moment of joy is, in Schiller’s and Beethoven’s assessment, different not just in degree but in kind from all the dull and painful things that can be raised against life and against its Creator; and it is one reason – which they duly underline – to be grateful and to love the “loving father” who “must live above the canopy of hearven”.
When Beethoven wrote this titanic song of thanks, he had lived through twenty years of war and social convulsion. His political hopes and beliefs had been disappointed. He had made a mess of his own life and driven his nephew, whom he loved like the son he never had, to flight and to attempted suicide. Many of his friends were dead. He was stone deaf, and suffered from a nightmare ghost of hearing which filled his ears with whistles and pointless noise. He had been rejected by every woman he had ever loved. He was aging, sick and poorly housed. He certainly was in no condition to indulge any stupid optimism for its own sake, even if he had been the kind of man who did – and he was not.
That is what makes the Ninth – and indeed, all the documents of Beethoven’s positive, courageous, indestructible attitude to life – such a great, such an overwhelming experience. When a man who, like Beethoven, has really experienced everything that life can throw at you, still tells you that life is worth living, that th experience of joy makes it worth living, that there is no common measure between joy and pain, that one minute of joy justifies and redeems a lifetime of pain, he says it with authority. We believe him.
As compared with this direct and powerful take on real life, on the life we all lead, which ennobles and consecrates the life of the very worm, Sir Harry Secombe’s moral futurism is both poor and conventional. You know that he took it up exactly because it was conventional; even though, of all things, it is the most opposite to Christianity (My Kingdom is not of this world). And it is interesting that such a conservative soul should take up what was once the song of all the revolutionaries and everything-must-change merchants, both of the left and of the right. Has it become a conservative idea? I would not quite go so far, but one does seem to hear echoes of it even in the steadfast pacifism and earnest hopes for moral improvement that constantly come to us from the very Vatican. It seems a reflex of elderly, kindly gentlemen to hope for the improvement of mankind in this world.
Come to think of it, we haven’t heard any “progressive” sing that song for quite a while – forty, maybe fifty years. What makes the contemporary “progressive” such an uninspiring creature is that, while they are more obstinate than ever on behalf of any group they regard as downtrodden, they no longer seem possessed of any hope. In fact, their favourite literary genre seems to be the dystopia.
What do we conclude from this? Two things. First, that our generation has seen the future, and that it is... mediocre. The first generations to see the potential of science and technology were so overwhelmed by it – little though it affected many of their members – that they started dreaming a collective dream that Eartb could become Heaven. The paths to this Heaven were many and various, but the fact itself was not doubted. But to us, technological innovation has become a daily fact, which we all experience and understand – and has changed nothing in the moral make-up of man. As the elderly Jack Kirby said in his last significant work, “Man by any other name is no more than his own sweet self”. And technological innovation is too close to our daily life to keep the wonder that a steam train or a needle full of vaccine had for our ancestors.
And two, there is nothing in modern Christian and Catholic teaching that is more common-minded, more conservative, and more dangerous, than the frequent recourse to pacifism and semi-utopian thinking. It is easy to perceive it, alas, even in the teaching of our own beloved Pope. And it is immensely dangerous. First, it is the place where a dead orthodoxy really cuts across the reality of Christian teaching – that this is a fallen world, and that the redemption of it belongs to God alone; we have trouble enough helping Him redeem our own single souls. And this sort of social convention always manages, in different ways according to the ages, to undercut Catholic teaching. And second, in that it does not really resonate with people, as real and severe Christian teaching does. Whatever superficial respect it may receive from hearers, it does not actually shake or reach them in any deep place. And this not only does not make for conversion, but even weakens, by connection, every true and powerful statement the Church may have to make.
But while the crazed energies of Peter Sellers and the ultimately bleak view of Spike Milligan drove their long and illustrious career paths, Secombe proved over the years quite another kind of showman. Short and tubby, ever-smiling, naturally pleasant (while both Sellers and Milligan could be alarming company from time to time), he was a comfortable kind of conservative, happy with the system of values of his country (if we can call it a system). We may well see him as the last spokesman of a vanished Britain, a homely compromise between a vague but revered idea of Christianity and a set of domestic and civic values whose superiority was taken for granted. It is typical of Secombe that, although he had members of the Anglican clergy in his family, and although he became in his later life something like a public spokesman for the Christian religion, nevertheless his grip of Christian doctrine and belief cannot be called firm. His TV program Highway, and the hymn records made from it, contain plenty that any rigorous Christian would define as at best sentimental and at worst heretical.
I don’t know that I want to blame Secombe for this. We cannot all be St.Thomas Aquinas, and to revere Christianity because it is a part of what you love and respect about your country is not, to me, to be despised. I say this, then, not because I want to condemn this attitude, but because it is relevant to what the rest of this essay will say.
One of Sir Harry’s main gifts as a showman was a beautiful high tenor voice, which he kept well into his old age, and which was the main feature of his Sunday TV hymn program. It can be enjoyed in a number of albums, and in his occasional appearances in musicals (he created the character of Mr.Bumble in Oliver!). And I recently heard him singing his own version of the main tune from Beethoven’s Ode to Joy – to words, I assume, of his own writing.
My first reaction was to wonder at how truly brilliant a tune Beethoven produced for his great symphony. Sir Harry and his arrangers had arranged the melody to suit their purposes, but the wonderful drive and joyful energy remained untouched.
However, it was the use to which Sir Harry put this drive and joy that made me think. His version of the Song of Joy has to do with the future: men, in his lyrics, will be together, there will be peace and understanding – the future is not only better than the present, it positively shines with hope and enthusiasm. And I found myself thinking: is this what Beethoven meant?
Heck no.
Read the text. Listen to the music. Nowhere is there any promise of improvement, indeed anything utopian or futuristic at all. It is not the future for which Schiller and Beethoven sing their song of joy: it is the present. Their promise is not “pie in the sky when you die”, let alone the much sillier promise of pie on earth before your great-grandchildren die: what they sing about is the great fact that here, now, we mortals are allowed to share in one divine emotion – that is, joy. Schiller makes no bones about it: not only all the good and all the bad, but the very worm in his mud, shares in the experience that the Seraphs feel as they contemplate the face of God Himself.
It is not, let us be clear on this, a matter of dumb optimism for its own sake. Rather, it is that Schiller’s specific subject is joy. Joy transfigures daily human life, and can reach pretty much anyone and anything capable of feeling. Schiller makes one significant exception – if you never in your life managed to win one lover or one true friend, then you have no idea what joy is. In that case, you’d just better run and hide. But one moment of joy is, in Schiller’s and Beethoven’s assessment, different not just in degree but in kind from all the dull and painful things that can be raised against life and against its Creator; and it is one reason – which they duly underline – to be grateful and to love the “loving father” who “must live above the canopy of hearven”.
When Beethoven wrote this titanic song of thanks, he had lived through twenty years of war and social convulsion. His political hopes and beliefs had been disappointed. He had made a mess of his own life and driven his nephew, whom he loved like the son he never had, to flight and to attempted suicide. Many of his friends were dead. He was stone deaf, and suffered from a nightmare ghost of hearing which filled his ears with whistles and pointless noise. He had been rejected by every woman he had ever loved. He was aging, sick and poorly housed. He certainly was in no condition to indulge any stupid optimism for its own sake, even if he had been the kind of man who did – and he was not.
That is what makes the Ninth – and indeed, all the documents of Beethoven’s positive, courageous, indestructible attitude to life – such a great, such an overwhelming experience. When a man who, like Beethoven, has really experienced everything that life can throw at you, still tells you that life is worth living, that th experience of joy makes it worth living, that there is no common measure between joy and pain, that one minute of joy justifies and redeems a lifetime of pain, he says it with authority. We believe him.
As compared with this direct and powerful take on real life, on the life we all lead, which ennobles and consecrates the life of the very worm, Sir Harry Secombe’s moral futurism is both poor and conventional. You know that he took it up exactly because it was conventional; even though, of all things, it is the most opposite to Christianity (My Kingdom is not of this world). And it is interesting that such a conservative soul should take up what was once the song of all the revolutionaries and everything-must-change merchants, both of the left and of the right. Has it become a conservative idea? I would not quite go so far, but one does seem to hear echoes of it even in the steadfast pacifism and earnest hopes for moral improvement that constantly come to us from the very Vatican. It seems a reflex of elderly, kindly gentlemen to hope for the improvement of mankind in this world.
Come to think of it, we haven’t heard any “progressive” sing that song for quite a while – forty, maybe fifty years. What makes the contemporary “progressive” such an uninspiring creature is that, while they are more obstinate than ever on behalf of any group they regard as downtrodden, they no longer seem possessed of any hope. In fact, their favourite literary genre seems to be the dystopia.
What do we conclude from this? Two things. First, that our generation has seen the future, and that it is... mediocre. The first generations to see the potential of science and technology were so overwhelmed by it – little though it affected many of their members – that they started dreaming a collective dream that Eartb could become Heaven. The paths to this Heaven were many and various, but the fact itself was not doubted. But to us, technological innovation has become a daily fact, which we all experience and understand – and has changed nothing in the moral make-up of man. As the elderly Jack Kirby said in his last significant work, “Man by any other name is no more than his own sweet self”. And technological innovation is too close to our daily life to keep the wonder that a steam train or a needle full of vaccine had for our ancestors.
And two, there is nothing in modern Christian and Catholic teaching that is more common-minded, more conservative, and more dangerous, than the frequent recourse to pacifism and semi-utopian thinking. It is easy to perceive it, alas, even in the teaching of our own beloved Pope. And it is immensely dangerous. First, it is the place where a dead orthodoxy really cuts across the reality of Christian teaching – that this is a fallen world, and that the redemption of it belongs to God alone; we have trouble enough helping Him redeem our own single souls. And this sort of social convention always manages, in different ways according to the ages, to undercut Catholic teaching. And second, in that it does not really resonate with people, as real and severe Christian teaching does. Whatever superficial respect it may receive from hearers, it does not actually shake or reach them in any deep place. And this not only does not make for conversion, but even weakens, by connection, every true and powerful statement the Church may have to make.
