Christmas is now the only time of the year when nostalgia is allowed, so we take full advantage of it. Once a year we modern folk admit, exhausted, that we cannot stand the headlong pursuit of an abstract future any longer. And we return to sanity: out come the tinsel and the traditions, and the carols and the crackers and the cards. For once the scoffers win nobody over. Supermarkets realise that words like ‘magic’ and ‘wonderland’ will swell their sales. In my London suburb, lights hang from eaves and the innocence of candles is alight in windows: brave beacons of peace and goodwill against the traffic and the darkness. We think of homely things and home — rightly enough, since that is the meaning of the Greek nostos, from which we derive ‘nostalgia’. We gather our families for meals and bake Christmas cakes and dig out board games. We remember childhood Christmasses; we mark old customs; we put the radio on for the carols. ‘And girls in slacks remember Dad, and oafish louts remember Mum’. We turn homewards.
But in many ways the feast we celebrate today is not really very nostalgic. The idea that Almighty God in his limitlessness should take on the limits of man, even to the point of knowing a newborn baby’s helplessness, is an unfailingly disconcerting thought, far stranger and wilder than any pagan winter festival; beyond the rationalisation of the secular mind. And apart from the light and warmth of the manger, and the Lady’s miraculous motherliness, there is nothing particularly homely about the Nativity scene. The census could not have had worse timing; Joseph had come all this way to his home town only to find the dreadful accommodation of a stable, as we all know, and now his wife was actually having to give birth in it; the town was unfamiliar to her at least, the temperature had plummeted in the clear Middle Eastern night, an infanticidal tyrant was abroad, hopping mad with jealousy and with a plan of pre-emptive retribution to match; safety lay only as far away as Egypt. And there are the other things foreshadowed, not least in the gifts that were already on the road with three kings: the Passion and the Crucifixion and the seeming finality of the entombment. ‘He came unto his own, and his own received him not’.
Yet, deeper still, perhaps this mood of Christmas wistfulness is entirely meet and right after all. The child came at Christmas in order to show us the way home. And home is what we are all looking for. We are prone to forgetting that we are not at home here on earth; that we do not really belong here. We may daydream vainly in search of a lost past, an unattainable future or a distant land where we think we could belong, but really we try to suppress our homesickness and have accustomed ourselves to exile. So our real home, though longed-for, is bound to seem unfamiliar to us. Strange and disconcerting though the facts of the Incarnation and the Nativity are, our instinctive reaction is sound: this is the way home. Let us allow the strange homely spirit of Christmas, which is true nostalgia, to break through the cramping walls of our age, and resonate with our inward longing.
We are not the first to feel it. It is there, hauntingly, in the carols of medieval England, for instance; in the wide-eyed-ness there is about them, and the great depth behind their deceptive simplicity:
Lullay, my liking, my dere son, my sweting. Lullay my dere herte, my own dere darling. I saw a fair maiden siten and sing. She lulled a little child, a swete Lording. That eternal Lord is He that made alle thing: Of alle lordes He is Lord, of alle kinges King. There was mickle melody at that childes birth: Alle that were in Hev’ne bliss they made mickle mirth. Angels bright they sang that night, and saiden to that child: Blessed be thou, and so be she that is both meek and mild. Pray we now to that child, and to his mother dere, Grant them blessing, that now maken cheer. Lullay, my liking, my dere son, my sweting. Lullay my dere herte, my own dere darling.
May God indeed grant us His blessing who now make cheer. Merry Christmas!
Philip Lawson’s setting of the carol Lullay, myn liking, from the fifteenth-century Sloane Manuscript 2593 (British Library).
As reported previously (here, here and here) the first performance in the United States of Ruth Gipps' second symphony was given on the 31st March this year by the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Adam Stern. Now Mr. Stern has kindly written with the news that video recording of their rendition is now available on YouTube. Here it is, capturing a contrast of flavour that I think is characteristic of Gipps' music: that between romantic tenderness on one hand, and a light-footed liveliness, almost spikiness, on the other:
Many thanks to the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra for this performance! It is wonderful to know that this music is being played and enjoyed on the other side of the Atlantic. In fact, it is wonderful to hear it being performed like this at all, given the neglect in which Ruth Gipps' music has been languishing, and from which it seems at last to be emerging.
And this is not the only good news about Ruth Gipps' music. In September a new disc was released on the Chandos label of recordings of this same work, the second symphony, along with Gipps' fourth symphony and two other early works, 'Knight in Armour' and the Song for Orchestra. It is the National Orchestra of Wales under Rumon Gamba who have rectified a long-lasting injustice: the almost total absence of proper commercial recordings of this under-performed and overlooked composer's music. The recording and the rendition are of the quality that Ruth Gipps deserves, I feel, and would certainly recommend them. The fourth symphony is perhaps less accessible than the other works, but is pervaded by an otherworldly, rather nocturnal atmosphere, and repays listening.
It is fantastic that this recording has been made. The only improvement I can think to suggest is to record the other symphonies, especially the third and fifth, to complement it!
The thing about evil is that it twists the knife. As if it were not enough that nearly a million men and women of a single generation, in Britain alone, should have perished in the Great War, they had to die as they did, in mechanised massacre, or en masse at sea. As if it were not enough that they should die in such indiscriminate, inhuman swathes, their bodies were never laid to rest: they had to be grieved for without a grave. Or else the cruel converse is true: we have graves with no name to match to them. And as if it were not enough for a woman to lose her brother or husband in one war, she might lose her sons in the next.
Catastrophe on a scale beyond computation can be apprehended only by piecemeal, inadequate measurements of the other, smaller catastrophes that it begets. One mind can meditate on individual engraved names, but not many: barely a dozen at a time before it burns out. Or there are particular kinds of memorials by which a particular category of soldier can be imagined: often passing the memorial for fallen students of my college, I could not miss, with their understated grief, the words 'These Sons of This House Fell in War'. And there are the miscellaneous narratives and vignettes that dispel the exhausting monotony of the names of the dead. For instance, the dismantling for ever of the poets' colony at Dymock as the war began, and the deaths of two of those poets in that war, is a tiny disaster compared to the sinking of the Lusitania or the Battle of the Somme. But it is still a disaster in its own right, and by its scale in proportion to the whole we can glimpse, briefly, how far short we fall of understanding the whole cataclysm to which it is a miniscule footnote. The disastrous ripples of war go on and on and on, resounding deep in the intangible things; we could hardly expect otherwise. Has the world ever recovered from the demoralisation of the Great War? Is this why we are so cynical, so cold-shouldered, so half-heartedly callous in our own day? Are we still paying the price? Philip Larkin, a man who could be cynical enough himself, thought so:
Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past Without a word — the men Leaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriages, Lasting a little while longer: Never such innocence again.
Most of those men hated war as much as I do. I am in my mid-twenties: if I had been born a hundred years before I was, would I have reached my current age?
Now that the hundredth anniversary of the Great War's end has arrived, the test of our remembrance really begins. The grainy and stilted films of the conflict, the careful and restrained language of the time compared to our own, any actual living links with that era, are all receding into the past, and are given the occasional extra shove backwards, into deeper and deeper remoteness from the present day, by ever-crisper liquid crystal screens and taller, sleeker buildings. If we are so concerned with relevance, and so tempted to assume that what is past is irrelevant, how shall we keep in mind, lest we forget, that we may need to learn from events and people not confined to our own age and era? If it is so nearly impossible to meditate on the catastrophe, how will we make sure of keeping at it? Will we maintain our remembrance even when most of us think no-one is watching? We have forgotten much else about that time; will we, at least, remember that this old lesson must be learnt anew in every age? And that the thing about goodness is that it radiates?
Names of missing British and Commonwealth soldiers at the Menin Gate, Ypres. (Two panels of sixty-four in total)
Kimbolton church and the Shropshire Hills, seen from near Hamnish Clifford.
My findings in Herefordshire the other week were these: red apples, blue hills, and all colours in between; oaks, August-laden still but tinged with first rust, and gold leaf in ardent proliferation at sunset. In short, mid-October England illuminated like a manuscript.
The mysteries of the variations in flavour between the different shires and stretches of Britain, their particular characters by which each part is kept not quite like anywhere else, and their elusive boundaries that stubbornly veil where one part ends and another begins, will never be exhausted by the artist's brush, the writer's pen or walkers' conversation. They are as intangible, as fine, as endlessly surprising and as defiant of definition as the changing of the seasons. What is it makes this part of the world so poetic, these English counties nearest Wales? How is their character made? Perhaps I will never work it out! It has the tenderness of arable lowland England, but, lent a Welsh inflection, is hiraeth-tinged, by those ranges of high hills, beacons into the distance beckoning. England and Wales mingle and shimmer against and with each other, like two misty, chromatic chords. This is bittersweet borderland, neither quite one nor the other. Those mythical lands, the distance and the past (the land of lost content, the blue remembered hills) are brought enticingly near. They are almost within reach...
I am sure this is not just fancy. Others have seen the same. A list I once compiled of favourite composers and writers from these counties ran to two dozen. And look at the land itself: to the north are the Shropshire hills, which are Malcolm Saville and Housman country; to the south is Gloucestershire, the land of Herbert Howells, F. W. Harvey and Ivor Gurney, along with Dymock of the five poets; to the east lie the birthplaces of Masefield and Elgar, and westwards — well, out in the west is the heart of Wales, where all speech is song.
If I had come to Leominster in search of a retreat, I was not the first: St Edfrith found it a suitable place for a priory in the year 660 A.D. It was at the priory church — at least its second incarnation, having been suppressed not long after the Norman Conquest and refounded in the twelfth century — that I found this anonymous poem waiting to greet me in the porch, mounted on the inside door:
Pause — ere thou enter, traveller — and bethink thee,
How holy, yet how homelike is this place:
Time that thou spendest humbly here shall link thee
With men unknown who once were of thy race.
This is thy Father's House: to Him address thee
Whom here His children worship face to face.
He at thy coming in with Peace shall bless thee,
Thy going out make joyful with His Grace.
Peace and prosperity to all towns whose church doors are adorned with poetry, especially if the words wear their careful craftsmanship as lightly as these!
Holy and homelike indeed was the church, large as it was (the north aisle was once the Norman nave, which gives an indication of the enlargement it underwent in the Middle Ages). I had been there for a quarter of an hour when the organist, in suit and tie, came out for practice. It was practice which he did not really need: I found myself eavesdropping on some fine music, a serene prelude by Gordon Slater, some full-throated Bach, and some other pieces. Some people had been around at the beginning but they had disappeared. The music played and the sunlight streamed generously through the south windows.
Across the nave and north aisle of the priory church of St. Peter and Paul, Leominster.
Many things are good and right about the town of Leominster: its size, its nearby railway station and the easy reach of unruined countryside from the middle of town. I fell into conversation with a few townspeople, who were very friendly. On the other side of Eaton Hill, eastwards along the Herefordshire Trail, lies a definitive escape from the growl of the A44 and A49, land rising and falling, and boughs laden with summer-sweetened apples, for this is cider country. And this homeliness is always ringed by the 'blue high blade' of hills: Titterstone Clee Hill and Shropshire are particularly visible to the north. And no noise, apart from a hidden tractor, and one or two pheasants exploding ludicrously out of hedgerows. On my way back westwards I came through an orchard at just the moment that the setting sun was aligned with the rows of the trees, and the rays shone straight down the aisles of apples.
Gold leaf in proliferation.
Even apart from this, it would have been worth going all the way there just to make the journey back to London. Not via Newport, Bristol Parkway and Swindon, but by 'the pretty way', as a fellow visitor called it, from Leominster to Hereford, and then by direct train from there to London. It took an hour longer than the Newport route, but what does an hour matter? The start of the journey was all in mist, but a few miles east of Hereford we burst out of it into sunlit clarity, where we remained for the rest of the journey (Ledbury, Colwall and Campden tunnels excepted). This was not only the 'pretty way' but the poetic way: past apple-orchards towards Ledbury, the home town of John Masefield, then tunnelling directly under the Malvern Hills, onwards through Worcestershire, within a few miles of Edward Elgar's birthplace at Broadheath, dramatically high over the river Severn into Worcester and then, turning along Brunel's line, past Evesham, Honeybourne, Morton-in-Marsh, over the north Cotswolds and actually through the old Adlestrop station of Edward Thomas's famous poem, down to Oxford, thence shadowing the Thames via Reading and the high-rise-block-choked route to London.
Great Malvern and the North Hill of the Malverns.
I have the honour, then, to report that in the manuscript of England many old things linger and are still to be seen. What St. Edfrith, many poets and ordinary folk sought and almost found is still there for the almost-finding: something like the mythical realm of Deep England, something like the Land of Lost Content, something like home. It might have been just over the next hill.
As we must one day die they also died, But live now as we hope we too shall live: O keep in prayer all souls; O gladly give Your saints your greeting at Allhallowstide!
'Young People Want Great Things', said Pope Benedict early in his pontificate, and the words leave very little else to say. Young people are full of fire; we brim with energy. But we need to know what to do with it, so that we can set to confidently, with God-given gumption. We have the energy to purify first the Church, then the world. In this age of destruction we yearn to build. Dear Bishops — Thank you for asking us your questions. This is what we would like in the Church, please. We want a challenge, but not without the Church beside us. We want companionship so that we have the strength to face the isolating world. We want more than the insipid, malnutritious menu presented to us by the world, in which anything goes and nothing really matters, but we also want to be able to speak with compassion to people who think that this fare is satisfactory. We want to know how to have the courage, in a world which mistakes lesser evils for positive good, to announce what is really good all the way through — the Gospel, the electrifying news of hope —in a straightforward, calm, sane, unhectoring way, with our example as much as our words. We want the miraculous triumph of the friendship of men and women that we call marriage; we want motherhood and fatherhood, defiantly raising families to the glory of God, or simply to be motherly and fatherly to those around us. We want to be saints and artists and philosophers, holy and humble priests and nuns, teachers and scientists and gardeners and nurses; we want to be good companions. We want to help people and to console them. We want interesting things to read, homely places in which to discuss them, and like-minded people to discuss them with. We want beautiful, beloved churches and energetic movements and associations. And our friends outside the Church want these things too, whether they know it or not. Belonging to the Church is both a great joy and a lot of hard work. But it could be more joyful still. We know that we need help, and instruction, and often forgiveness. We need the gold standard of justice and, being every one of us broken, the medicine of mercy. And, above all, youth wants truth. And the Church's strange and loving founder can give us all of this. Long may the Church make a nuisance of itself by calling us all to greatness. Some revisions made (to improve phrasing) in March 2019.
'Excelsam Pauli gloria' — Westminster Cathedral Choir.
St. Pancras station on the morning of its 150th birthday, 1st October, 2018.
Today is the 150th anniversary of the opening of St. Pancras station in London. The Midland Railway began services from its new terminus on the 1st October 1868, having constructed an edifice fit to beckon travellers to the Kingdom of Heaven, never mind Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, or Sheffield (and eventually Manchester and Scotland). No expense had been spared in the effort to blow King's Cross next door, and their rivals the Great Northern Railway, out of the water. George Gilbert Scott was the architect of the Midland Hotel, which forms the station's façade onto the Euston Road, and William Barlow's cast-iron overall train-shed roof contained the 'widest and largest undivided space' enclosed by any structure in the world at the time of its completion.
St. Pancras station from Midland Road, September 2018.
It has occurred to me recently how unfortunate it was that the Gothic Revival coincided so squarely with the Industrial Revolution. For no sooner than these great buildings were finished than they were exposed to the grime and acidic rain of the cities they had been meant to dignify. The arches and spires that should have soared luminously and goldenly skywards, just as they would have done in the Middle Ages, were gradually blackened and darkened by Victorian dust and soot until, a century later, they had been transformed into the world-weary hulks so detested by modernist architects. Yet, of course, the Gothic revival had been meant largely as a romantic answer to the Industrial Revolution. So perhaps it is simply a tale of noble defeat in its battle against utilitarian commercial enterprise.
Or was it? For there were those like John Betjeman, Jane Fawcett, Bernard Kaukas and others who, when public affection for Victorian architecture was at its lowest ebb, saw through the grime to the glory beneath. Now, thank goodness, most of the building has been restored to its original splendour.
Exactly the same anniversary is celebrated today by the Peckham Rye – Sutton line in south London, which the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway opened also on October 1st, 1868. East Dulwich, North Dulwich, Tulse Hill, Streatham, Mitcham Junction, Hackbridge and Carshalton stations also celebrate their 150th birthdays today. This line, which is probably too ordinary to be called quirky but still not straightforward enough to be wholly dull, diverges just west of Peckham Rye from the South London line that originates at London Bridge, burrows in a cutting through Dulwich, is carried aloft across a valley of surprising green, climbs through a tunnel to Tulse Hill, descends to Streatham, crosses the Wandle plain, and works its way uphill again through Carshalton to join the older line from West Croydon at Sutton, all the time undulating and curving this way and that, threading its way through existing routes. It is a railway that fills in missing links, is not always altogether clear where it is heading, and merrily duplicates other lines. It is still generally used only in sections, rather than from end to end as a through route, except in weekday peak hours.
There must have been a sense in 1868 that the main task of building Britain's railways was accomplished, and that only the finishing touches were needed. It is true that the Severn estuary and the Firth of Forth had not yet been conquered, but it must have seemed that there was not much left for the insatiable builders to achieve. Barely forty years after the railway age had begun, the engineer's task was nearly a matter either of crowning the railways with glory (it must have been hard to imagine what could surpass St. Pancras station) or of filling in any last gaps in the suburbs and the countryside to eliminate any doubt about the system's comprehensiveness.
Update:
It will have been someone's onerous duty to polish off this enormous cake!
One significant milestone in my formation as a stick-in-the-mud, fogey and all-round defender of old things occurred when I discovered, at the age of about nine, that my very ordinary suburb of south London had once boasted its own cinema. For several decades, with its confident Art Deco façade, the 'Majestic' had presided over the Fair Green in the centre of town, and the flickering world of the pictures had dwelt waiting within. Of course I straightaway wanted to know what had become of it. It did not take me long to find out. Having been converted into a bingo hall in the early 1960s, the building had been pulled down altogether in 1978. No trace remained, save in the name of the street beside it, Majestic Way. And what stood in its place? The blank concrete hulk of the Kwik Save supermarket.
This was, I suppose, a particularly iniquitous piece of mid-twentieth-century urban planning, though practically every town in Britain must have a story to rival it. It certainly had a formative effect on me, immunising me once and for all against any tendency to presume any superiority in new things over old things. Certainly I could scarcely comprehend the jettisoning of the cinema, 'Majestic' in name and nature, for the insolent windowlessness of its successor with its gimmicky moniker. It had been ours, and we had thrown it away. All long before my time, but melancholic nostalgia still flooded and intoxicated my being, rich and dark as ale, and not without a bitter edge either.
Mitcham's Fair Green in May 2018, seen from about the same position as above.
But it was not a question just of this particular building. I think I sensed the passage of greater, intangible forces, the tides of culture of which its disappearance was a sign. I felt cheated, not only of the cinema itself, but of the vanished civilisation that had been capable of building it, sustaining it, and, I think above all, of giving it such a name as 'Majestic'. For the word itself spoke volumes. It was plain enough to me that the culture in which I lived would never choose a name like that for a public building, a cinema or anything else — not in a month of Sundays. Yet there had existed, not that long before, a world that did. This modest picture-house with its grand epithet was proof that this world had been alive in my own town. So, too, was the supermarket proof that the cultural revolution had not left it unvisited. This, as they say, was personal, which is why its loss struck me with such force. The old world had been alive here, I realised; and here too it had been lost.
Just as I could see no contest between the Art Deco cinema and the Brutalist supermarket, and none between the names 'Majestic' and 'Kwik Save', I had no trouble in deciding which I preferred of the respective civilisations that built and christened them. Everything about the two institutions was different because everything about their worlds was different. I knew where my loyalties lay. In one age, an age of muscular steam power and palatial trans-Atlantic liners, even a cinema chain, in all its undoubted mercenary-mindedness, could calculate, correctly, that Thirties glamour and a single crowning resonant adjective, would draw in paying audiences far out in these workaday fringes of south London. There had been poetry in that world. But the other, later era, the era in which one might go up a street named Majestic Way only to find, at its culmination, like a grotesque joke, such a thing as a Kwik-Save — this era was hollow, and ironic, and hard of heart. Conscious as I am of the many faults and sins of that old civilisation, and of the weaknesses and cruelties of people in all ages, and of the irretrievability of the past, I am simply still in far greater sympathy with the first era than with what came later. Still I know where my loyalties lie.
Well, that is how I became a curmudgeon before I was out of short trousers, and I have been about eighty years old ever since. But I tell the story because I think it is worth asking the question to which it leads: why is this quality of majesty so singularly lacking in our present age? Except in a few places and on very few occasions, we build or do hardly anything that is majestic, or grand, or solemn. For instance, I think it is remarkable, in an era when the physical scale of most new buildings is greater than ever, that their appearance is not more imposing or magnificent. In London, with its extraordinary rate of new construction, one question asks itself with the completion of nearly every new building: 'Is that all?'. So many buildings are gigantic anticlimaxes, catching the eye not by elegance or ornateness, but by their sheer bigness, by brute size. Surely this is why the nicknames for these new skyscrapers (some Londoners', some the developers' own) stick so instantly. The most prominent of the buildings that have appeared since the new millenium really are shaped like blown-up versions of small objects: gherkins, electric shavers, walkie-talkies. Would they be any less impressive were they built on half the scale? Or, asking another way, how much do their chunky shapes gain by the size they are? They may be 'bold' and 'dynamic', as is typically claimed, but are they majestic? No, and I don't think they were ever meant to be. Of course, aesthetics are not the architects' main consideration: these buildings are big because of the perennial imperative to make economic sense of tiny parcels of astronomically expensive land. So the central doctrine remains the modernists', that form should follow function.
A big Cheese-grater, a big Walkie-talkie and a big Shard, seen from the top of a big Gherkin
Yet many of London's older, laboured-over buildings still defy these efforts to dwarf and outgun them, remaining at least as powerful and impressive to the human eye as their newer neighbours, though a fraction of their size. 'Majestic' is surely the first word we reach for on beholding St. Pancras station, Somerset House, the Royal Courts of Justice, the Palace of Westminster or the Prudential building. How was their effect achieved? At St. Pancras (which is 150 years old next month), George Gilbert Scott began at a human scale, at the level of doors, windows, tiles and bricks, concentrating on the detail, and he achieved his overall effect by repeating these details a hundredfold, a thousandfold, in all their careful design and craft, along and around and upwards. The result, in alliance with the verticality of the neo-Gothic, is a soaring range of glorious multiplication, a towering proliferation of decoration, never (in my view) chaotic or disconcerting, but unified by Scott's eye into a symphony of fine design and accomplished craftsmanship. 'So much detail!', I overheard a tourist exclaim the other month, looking up at it. But one then wonders why the Shard skyscraper, whose architect also seems to have had verticality uppermost in his mind, does not seem to have the same effect, though it is nearly four times taller than the station. It is St. Pancras which invites the eye upwards, whereas the Shard simply defies comprehension and measurement. It is certainly a very impressive work of engineering, but its refusal to make any concession to a human scale means that, to my eye at least, it seems to dominate rather than to crown its surroundings and observers. St. Pancras offers a feast, and allows the beholder to savour the sight of it, ascending slowly and by degrees from arches, to windows, to turrets, to pinnacles, and to the clock triumphant. The Shard is so uncompromisingly and instantaneously impressive that it blows the mind and burns it out.
St. Pancras Cathedral station, London, seen from the Euston Road.
Even the design of ordinary flats and houses has followed a similar path. So much new housing in Britain has an anonymous, mass-produced and plasticky appearance, whereas, well into the twentieth century, even small houses were built with a certain self-contained dignity about them. Their solidness, their more natural materials, and the simple distinctiveness of generous sashed windows, gables and chimneys reveal something about their architects: that they knew their work would serve an important purpose, to shelter human families. What do the flat roofs and blank windows of today's 'exciting new developments' say about the frame of mind in which they were designed?
It is not only in architecture that this change has happened. In music, for instance, sheer volume often serves as the same substitute for majesty as does bigness in architecture. There is no shortage of music that relies on brute force for its impact: just turn it up and hear the windows rattle! But what about music that is instead built up meticulously from the smallest details? For instance, there is William Walton's first symphony, particularly the first minute and a half of the fourth movement. The extraordinary thing about this music is that it is not utterly deafening, even though it sounds as if it ought to be. It derives its magnificence from its ingenious construction. The composer has written majesty into every detail — just as Gilbert Scott did in his own field of work — and the overall effect of the music transcends the sum of its parts: it is transcendental.
And from language, too, solemnity and sonority seem to have evaporated, with the fading of poetry from spoken and written English. Most language in everyday life is firmly earth-bound; if ever we hear it take flight, we do not really know how to respond; we are possibly even embarrassed. Where now, except on the rarest of occasions, do we meet with language such as in the opening of Elizabeth Jennings' poem 'A Chorus'? —
Over the surging tides and the mountain kingdoms,
Over the pastoral valleys and the meadows,
Over the cities with their factory darkness,
Over the lands where peace is still a power,
Over all these and all this planet carries
A power broods, invisible monarch, a stranger
To some, but by many trusted. Man's a believer
Until corrupted. This huge trusted power
Is spirit. He moves in the muscle of the world,
In continual creation. He burns the tides, he shines
From the matchless skies. He is the day's surrender.
Why has majesty vanished so nearly completely from our lives: from speech, from infrastructure, from civic ceremony? Perhaps Jennings' poem strikes straight at the answer. Could it be because we think it is superfluous to and even incompatible with life as we live it now? For where majestic things, though not directionless, are generally sedate, and measured, and invite and reward contemplation, being the result of careful attention to many details, the modern world is now too quick; it outpaces and leaves unexercised our capacity for concentrated attention. Magnificent things once thrilled us with their restrained and dignified power, but these days great many other things are valued above dignity and restraint. Time seems too short for them. It is true that a great deal of modern infrastructure, being invisible, silent or glossily efficient in operation, does not lend itself as well to visible majesty, as older technology did. Immense and elaborate works of software do their work invisibly, imperceptibly and effortlessly, without plumes of smoke or the thrust of pistons. Although the Internet is a system of extraordinary magnitude, we never call its operation majestic. A postal system's mighty empire of apparatus could inspire poetry such as Auden's Night Mail, and even radio and television have great confident transmitters as their visible symbols, but we never see the Internet at work. It appears to accomplish everything with instantaneous ease, and without apparent might or power.
But there is more to it than simple circumstance, I am sure. I wonder if our boredom and urbane cynicism mask a certain fear of the essence of majesty; we are afraid of where it might lead. For above all, majesty heightens what it touches. It draws our eyes upwards, lifting us out of everyday life, so that we apprehend something greater than ourselves. It is held in common by those who behold it: it draws us upwards together. Majesty is close to mystery; it is a cousin of solemnity, that paradoxically serious business of rejoicing. Majesty leads us into the foothills of the sacred, and sometimes higher. But this is where those of us who settle for mediocrity in our individual lives enter dangerous territory: we must avoid, even fear anything that might disturb us. The dull, flat flood-plain of secularism is so congested with distractions — 'exciting new developments!' — that we never notice the higher ground, nor want to notice it. If we were conscious of our appetite for majesty, we would surely try to fill it, however imperfectly.
Majesty has survived in some places, though. Most notably it remains in film, television and fantasy video games. We do sometimes consent to be lifted out of ourselves; we savour the splendour of imaginary worlds and landscapes; we relish orchestral soundtracks. Isn't that half the appeal and sheer fun of the television series Thunderbirds, for instance?—precisely the games of timing and scale they played in order to make the models look as realistic and impressive as possible, and the way the machines and craft all took on pathos and tragic dignity when they inevitably crashed, or collapsed, or exploded so gratuitously? Don't all small boys dream yearn to be in charge of huge things, bringing a city to a standstill as a Martian Space Probe — doomed anyway, of course — is manoeuvred gingerly towards its its site of launch, ably assisted by a full symphony orchestra?
And majesty abides still in the Church, of course, which certainly does lift us out of ourselves, and is willing to make a nuisance of itself in doing so. It was the Church that gave us the most visibly uplifting buildings in most towns and cities, and the beautiful craftsmanship within. What lives in churches is not confined to the past. We have heart-felt home-made music and meticulous liturgies. And the words that are uttered in churches leap out at us, either because they are unfamiliar, or because some new significance in them surprises those who thought they knew them well. Here is an example: all my life I have heard the second half of the Mass beginning with the preface to the Eucharistic Prayer, something like thisthird preface of Sundays in Ordinary Time. Familiarity has masked its poetry, but without my noticing it has become one of my favourite parts of the Mass. Apart from anything else, this is wonderful, ancient poetry which, having first invited its hearers to lift up their hearts, then actually helps them to do so, bearing them heavenwards, towards the angels' Sanctus:
V. The Lord be with you. R.And with your spirit. V. Lift up your hearts. R.We lift them up to the Lord. V. Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. R.It is right and just. It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks, Lord, holy Father, almighty and eternal God. For we know it belongs to your boundless glory, that you came to the aid of mortal beings with your divinity and even fashioned for us a remedy out of mortality itself, that the cause of our downfall might become the means of our salvation, through Christ our Lord. Through him the host of Angels adores your majesty and rejoices in your presence for ever. May our voices, we pray, join with theirs in one chorus of exultant praise, as we acclaim: Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God of hosts. Heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.
And this atmosphere of majesty is capable of spilling over from liturgical settings into the secular world. Simply the heightened form of everyday life that the Church proposes can find fitting expression in uplifting art and music and architecture even outside the liturgy. There is much to savour, for instance, in a promotional film that was made in advance of World Youth Day in Kraków in 2016: the combination of the poetry of the words (which are delivered in sonorous Polish and given subtitles in English), the richness of the music and the grandeur of the cinematographic art all promise a great and noble occasion, which promise was duly fulfilled.
A civilisation will not build what it does not think it needs. Our culture, in which we converse with ourselves about ourselves, often forgetting that later ages will overhear us, presents strong evidence that we believe ourselves content with the superficial. So much about our buildings, art and speech tells of a suspicion of majesty and solemnity. But we cannot distract ourselves forever from it, and our nature cannot long withstand this truncation. This is because we have forgotten the majesty that we ourselves possess. We cannot forever be infants, amused by curiously large and funky shapes on our cities' skylines. Mitcham's Majestic cinema was not all that grand, as majestic buildings go, but it answered a hunger: to paraphrase Philip Larkin, it had been a 'serious house on serious earth' (at least before its bingo-hall days, I suppose). I think we do wish, however secretly, that our lives could be enriched by majesty in our public buildings. We do want to be uplifted by our music; we would not resent being awed by heightened language. But for our pride, we should not mind feeling small in the presence of greatness, if the greatness were also benevolent. We long for the majesty of beauty, for the majesty of things timeless, and, even if we struggle to assent to faith, even if we admit it only on our death-bed, or not at all, we long for the majesty of God to lift us out of ourselves. We think we know already that we long to be taken seriously, but we do not realise quite how deeply, how earnestly, how utterly we long for the solemnisation of our lives — or, at least we are unable to give expression to that longing. And that feeling is so strong because we sense the majesty and dignity in which we ourselves are clothed, however hard we try to quell or mar it for the sake of our appetites. We ourselves are majestic, individual symphonies of fine details, beyond our own power to understand, transcending, in spite of our sins, the sum of our parts.
It is hard and sometimes unconvincing to speak in generalities, and this is why seemingly small details can be so telling. The great unseen spiritual and cultural forces of the last century only sublimated into visibility at moments like the demolition of Mitcham's small suburban picture-house for the sake of a brazenly superficial, shamelessly inhuman supermarket. It was not simply a question of planning or expediency, or the neutral result of the inevitable march of Progress. Like the construction of any building or the utterance of any word, it was a moral act with a moral effect, which in this case has been to alienate the majestic beings, the people of Mitcham, who lived around it. Those who built the cinema, for all that they had a business to run, did not forget to make their cinema worthy of their audience. They raised a house dignified enough to host communal experiences that were secular and yet not entirely profane. One sign of their achievement is the way in which the cinema is still remembered, forty years after its disappearance. A local lady I was chatting to at our local Heritage Day the other week spoke fondly of dancing lessons in a room above the front entrance. The creator of the excellent Mitcham History Notes website has carefully compiled information about the cinema, and transcribed news reports from its lifetime. And how about Kingsway Models' range of card kits, where you can actually buy a model of Mitcham's cinema, along with the Sidcup Regal and the Southall Dominion? But there is no similar model of the Kwik-Save supermarket. Which side, then, are we on? Where do our loyalties lie? Shall we buy-one-get-one-free? Or shall we lift up our hearts?
