Confessions of a Heretic Read online

  First, however, we must ignore the factors that distort our judgment. Paintings and sculptures can be owned, bought and sold. Hence there is a vast market in them, and whether or not they have a value, they certainly have a price. Oscar Wilde defined the cynic as the one who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing. And the art market is inevitably run by cynics. Utter trash accumulates in our museums largely because it has a price tag. You cannot own a symphony or a novel in the way you can own a Damien Hirst. As a result there are far fewer fake symphonies or fake novels than there are fake works of visual art.

  Things are distorted too by the channels of official patronage. The Arts Council exists to subsidise those artists, writers and musicians whose work is important. But how do bureaucrats decide that something is important? The culture tells them that a work is important if it is original, and the proof that a work is original is that the public doesn’t like it. Besides, if the public did like it, why would it need a subsidy? Official patronage therefore inevitably favours works that are arcane, excruciating or meaningless over those that have real and lasting appeal.

  So what is the source of that appeal, and how do we judge that a work of art possesses it? Three words summarise my answer: ‘beauty’, ‘form’ and ‘redemption’.

  For many artists and critics beauty is a discredited idea. It denotes the saccharine sylvan scenes and cheesy melodies that appealed to Granny. The modernist message, that art must show life as it is, suggests to many people that, if you aim for beauty, you will end up with kitsch. This is a mistake, however. Kitsch tells you how nice you are: it offers easy feelings on the cheap. Beauty tells you to stop thinking about yourself, and to wake up to the world of others. It says, look at this, listen to this, study this – for here is something more important than you. Kitsch is a means to cheap emotion; beauty is an end in itself. We reach beauty through setting our interests aside and letting the world dawn on us. There are many ways of doing this, but art is undeniably the most important, since it presents us with the image of human life – our own life and all that life means to us – and asks us to look on it directly, not for what we can take from it but for what we can give to it. Through beauty art cleans the world of our self-obsession.

  Our human need for beauty is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people. It is a need arising from our moral nature. We can wander through this world, alienated, resentful, full of suspicion and distrust. Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves. And the experience of beauty guides us along this second path: it tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perceptions as a place fit for the lives of beings like us. That is what we see in Corot’s landscapes, Cézanne’s apples, or Van Gogh’s unlaced boots.

  The true work of art is not beautiful in the way an animal, a flower or a stretch of countryside is beautiful. It is a consciously created thing, in which the human need for form triumphs over the randomness of objects. Our lives are fragmented and distracted: things start up in our feelings without finding their completion. Very little is revealed to us in such a way that its significance can be fully understood. In art, however, we create a realm of the imagination, in which each beginning finds its end, and each fragment is part of a meaningful whole. The subject of a Bach fugue seems to develop of its own accord, filling musical space and moving logically towards closure. But it is not an exercise in mathematics. Every theme in Bach is pregnant with emotion, moving with the rhythm of the listener’s inner life. Bach is taking you into an imagined space, and presenting you, in that space, with the image of your own fulfilment. Likewise Rembrandt will take the flesh tints on an ageing face and show how each one captures something of the life within, so that the formal harmony of the colours conveys the completeness and unity of the person. In Rembrandt we see integrated character in a disintegrating body. And we are moved to reverence.

  Formal perfection cannot be achieved without knowledge, discipline and attention to detail. People are slowly beginning to understand this. The illusion that art flows out of us, and that the only purpose of an art school is to teach us how to open the taps, is no longer believable. Gone are the days when you can make a stir by wrapping a building in polystyrene like Christo or sitting in silence at a piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds like John Cage. To be really modern, you must create works of art that take modern life, in all its disconnectedness, and bring it to fullness and resolution, as Philip Larkin did in his great poem ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. It is fine for a composer to lard his pieces with dissonant sounds and cluster chords like Harrison Birtwistle; but if he knows nothing of harmony and counterpoint the result will be random noise, not music. It is fine for a painter to splash paint around like Jackson Pollock, but the real knowledge of colour comes through studying the natural world, and finding our own emotions mirrored in the secret tints of things, as Cézanne found peace and comfort in a dish of apples.

  If we look at the true apostles of beauty in our time – I think of composers like Henri Dutilleux and James MacMillan, of painters like David Inshaw and John Wonnacott, of poets like Ruth Padel and Charles Tomlinson, of prose writers like Italo Calvino and Georges Perec – we are immediately struck by the immense hard work, the studious isolation, and the attention to detail which have characterised their craft. In art beauty has to be won, and the work is harder, as the surrounding idiocy grows. In the face of sorrow, imperfection and the fleetingness of our affections and joys, we ask ourselves ‘why?’. We need reassurance. We look to art for the proof that life in this world is meaningful and that suffering is not the pointless thing that it so often appears to be, but the necessary part of a larger and redeeming whole. Tragedies show us the triumph of dignity over destruction and compassion over despair. In a way that will always be mysterious, they endow suffering with a formal completion and thereby restore the moral equilibrium. The tragic hero is completed through his fate; his death is a sacrifice, and this sacrifice renews the world.

  Tragedy reminds us that beauty is a redemptive presence in our lives: it is the face of love, shining in the midst of desolation. We should not be surprised that many of the most beautiful works of modern art have emerged in reaction to hatred and cruelty. The poems of Akhmatova, the writings of Pasternak, the music of Shostakovitch – such works shone a light in the totalitarian darkness, and showed love in the midst of destruction. Something similar could be said of Eliot’s Four Quartets, of Britten’s War Requiem, of Matisse’s chapel at Vence.

  Modernism arose because artists, writers and musicians held on to the vision of beauty, as a redemptive presence in our lives. And that is the difference between the real work of art and the fake. Real art is a work of love; fake art is a work of deception.

  2

  – Loving Animals –

  I live on a pasture farm, in a part of England where a thin topsoil covers a sub-soil of clay. You can grow grass on this topsoil; but you cannot plough it without turning up the clay, on which nothing grows; the only human use for the land, therefore, is to support things that live on grass or its by-products. That means cows, sheep, pigs, chickens by way of domestic animals, game birds by way of wildlife, and horses for riding. By far the most profitable of these animals, from the point of view of our local farming economy, are the horses, which bring people who earn real money into the countryside, and encourage them to turn that money into grass. Those who are trying to turn grass into money have a much harder time of it. Still, all in all, I see our little patch of farmland as an example of good-natured animal husbandry. All our animals live in an environment to which they are adapted, enjoy basic freedoms, and are saved by our intervention from the lingering misery of old age and disease, or from a long-drawn-out death from physical injury. This is true, for the most part, of the wildlife too. The game birds are either shot or eaten by the fox, the rats, field-mice, voles and other rodents are taken by the buzzards and hawks, and the fish are qu
ickly swallowed by the visiting heron. Death from old age, disease or injury is rare, and we do what we can to help our wild animals through the winter, with scraps from the kitchen for the carnivores and corn and nuts for the birds.

  Of course there is much room for improvement, and there are aspects of our management that disturb me. In particular it worries me that our natural affections favour some animals over others. Thus we go out of our way to ensure that the predators get through the hard days of winter, but do little or nothing for the mice and voles, and do what we can to exterminate the rats. Of course, we don’t poison the rats, since that would be to poison the owls, buzzards and foxes that eat their remains. But we interfere in the natural order, and could not envisage life on the farm if we did not do so. Hares are welcome, rabbits less so; stoats and weasels enjoy our protection, crows and magpies don’t dare to come within range. So far I have not met any country person who does not make choices of the kind that we make, and when I read of ‘wildlife sanctuaries’ I wonder how far their wardens are prepared to go, by way of managing those species which, if left to themselves, will turn a viable habitat into a desert – grey squirrels, for instance, Canada geese, cormorants.

  Although I worry about our meddling in the order that surrounds us, I take comfort from the fact that species that were never seen on the farm when I bought it twenty years ago are now re-establishing their presence there: bullfinches, wagtails, kestrels, kitty hawks, fallow deer, stoats and grass-snakes. We have many kinds of bee, and the ponds abound in frogs, toads and dragonflies. But we also have neighbours, and by far the greatest threat to the animals that live on our land comes from that source. I don’t refer to the farming neighbours, who maintain the ecological balance in much the way that we do. I refer to the incomers, those who have moved to the country in order to enjoy the tranquillity that is the by-product of other peoples’ farming, and who come with their own menagerie of animals – much loved animals, who have enjoyed all the creature comforts that the town can provide. It is the dogs and cats of these people that do most to upset the fragile order that we have tried to maintain, and I cannot help drawing some conclusions about the distinction between the right and the wrong ways of loving them.

  One neighbour has a dog which she walks along the public bridleway, leaving it free to run in the hedgerows and out into the fields. This dog does what dogs do: it sniffs for quarry and, when it finds something, gives chase. In the winter, when birds are hidden under leaves, conserving their energy as best they can, they cannot easily survive being chased every day. The same is true of hares, rabbits and voles. Of course our neighbour is adamant that her dog would not dream of killing the things he chases – he is only doing what his nature requires. The same is true, of course, of the pheasant, the stoat or the rabbit that he is chasing. The difference is that the dog goes home to a warm house and a supper consisting largely of other animals which have been tortured into a tin, while its quarry goes hungry, trying to recover from the shock and weakened for its next encounter.

  Another neighbour has a pair of cats – attractive animals, which know how to simulate affection towards their human owners, while policing all around them with the invincible insolence of a dominant species. Both dogs and cats are predators; but dogs can be trained not to kill; they can be trained to focus their hunting instincts on a particular species, or they can be bred to focus the very same instincts on some other and more humanly useful pursuit, such as herding sheep or retrieving game birds. Not so cats. Everything in their nature tends towards the single goal of killing, and although they can be pampered into relinquishing this goal, they are by that same process pampered into relinquishing their nature. A true cat wants out, and when out he wants death. The distinctions between fair and unfair game, between vermin and protected species, between friend and foe – all such distinctions have no significance for a cat, which sets off from the house in search of songbirds, field mice, shrews and other harmless and necessary creatures with no thought for anything save the taste in his mouth of their blood. One estimate puts at 180 million the number of wild birds and mammals lost to cats each year in Britain.1 The domestic cat is, without exception, the most devastating of all the alien species that have been brought onto our island, and the worst of it is that, thanks to the sentimentality of the British animal lover, it is a crime to shoot them.

  Love has many forms, and there is no reason to suppose that my love of farm animals and wildlife is in any way superior, as an emotion, to the love of our neighbours for their dogs and cats. But two questions should be asked of every love: does it benefit the object, and does it benefit the subject? Whether or not we agree with Wilde’s bathetic line that ‘Each man kills the thing he loves’, it is certainly true that there are loves that destroy their object, for the reasons given by Blake:

  Love seeketh only self to please

  To bind another to its delight,

  Joys in another’s loss of ease

  And builds a Hell in Heav’n’s despite.

  There are loves that enslave, stifle, exploit and abuse. And there again there are loves that corrupt the subject, giving him a false and flattering view of himself, and a comforting picture of his own cost-free lovableness. Love is not good in itself; it is good when part of virtue, bad when part of vice. In which case we should follow Aristotle, and say that it is not as such good to love, but good to love the right object, on the right occasion and to the right degree.2 Learning how and what to love is part of growing up, and love, like other emotions, must be disciplined if it is not to collapse into sentimentality on the one hand, or domination on the other.

  There is much literature that takes the love between humans and animals as its subject, and we are none of us short of examples, with which to explore what might be good, and what bad, in such a cross-species affection. I am as susceptible to the love of pets as anyone, and still remember my childhood dog, a repulsive creature entirely deficient in canine virtues, as an object of deep and need-filled emotion. When my horse Barney, whom I loved, died beneath me while hunting, I was quite stricken for a while, until setting eyes on Barney’s successor. Cats have always taken a shine to me, purring and kneading in my lap with no knowledge of the contempt in which I hold their species. Still, none of this should impede me from asking the question when, and how, it is right to love an animal.

  The first point to make is that love for animals is only exceptionally love for an individual animal. I love the animals on our farm but few of them are objects of an individual love: it is the presence of bullfinches, not of any particular bullfinch, that delights me, and for which I work as best I can. Of course I am concerned when I come cross a bird or a mammal in distress, and will go out of my way to help it: but this is not love, only ordinary kindness. With the horses it is different, since I stand to them in another relation, knowing their individual traits and foibles, and riding them, often in hair-raising circumstances in which we depend on each other for safety and maybe even survival. A special bond grows from such circumstances – the bond that caused Alexander the Great to mourn the brave Bucephalus and to build a city in his honour. However, it is unclear that horses respond to their riders as individuals, or that they are capable of feeling the kind of affection, either for us or for each other, that we feel for them. They distinguish a good place from a bad one; they recognise and relate to their stable mates; they know what kind of treatment to expect from which of the two-legged creatures that come to care for them. But their affections are weak, unfocused and easily transferred. Barney, for me, had some of the qualities of Bucephalus: bold, eager to be first in the field, and obedient in the face of danger. And that was the ground of my affection: not that he regarded me with any favour or made a place for me in his life as I made a place for him in mine.

  Now it seems to me that there are bad ways of loving a horse: ways that are bad for the horse, and also bad for the one who loves him. A love that regards the horse as a play-thing, whose purpose is to satisfy
the whims of a rider, to be an object of cuddling and caressing of a kind that the horse himself can neither reciprocate nor understand – such a love is a way of disregarding the horse. It is also in its own way corrupt. A person who lavishes this kind of affection on a horse is either deceiving himself or else taking pleasure in a fantasy affection, treating the horse as a means to his own emotion, which has become the real focus of his concern. The horse has become the object of a self-regarding love, a love without true care for the thing that occasions it. Such a love takes no true note of the horse, and is quite compatible with a ruthless neglect of the animal, when it loses (as it will) its superficial attractions. Horses treated in this way are frequently discarded, like the dolls of children. And it is indeed the case of the doll that provides, for the philosophy of love, the most poignant instance of error. Children practise affection with their dolls: it is their way of developing in themselves the expressions, habits and gestures that will elicit protection and love from those around them. But we expect them, for this reason, to grow out of dolls and into proper love – love that bears a cost for the one who feels it, which puts the self in the hands of another, and which forms the foundation of a reciprocal bond of care.

  Each species is different, and when it comes to dogs there is no doubt, not only that dogs reciprocate the affection of their masters, but also that they become attached to their masters as individuals, in a way that renders the master irreplaceable in their affections – so much so that the grief of a dog may strike us as desolate beyond anything that we, who have access even in extremity to consolation, could really feel. The focused devotion of a dog is – when it occurs (and not all dogs are capable of it) – one of the most moving of all the gifts that we receive from animals, all the more moving for not being truly a gift but rather a need.3 It seems to me that the recipient of such a love is under a duty to the creature that offers it, and that this creates a quite special ground for love that we must take into account. The owner of a loving dog has a duty of care beyond that of the owner of a horse. To neglect or abandon such a dog is to betray a trust that creates an objective obligation, and an obligation towards an individual. Hence my neighbour is right to think that her obligation to her dog takes precedence over my duty to care for the wildlife whose welfare he is compromising. She occupies one pole of a relation of trust, and it would be a moral deficiency in her to assume the right to enjoy her dog’s unswerving affection while denying him what she can easily provide by way of a reward for it. Hence I don’t judge her adversely for her irritating dog or her equally irritating love for it: the fault is mine, like the fault of being upset by the selfishness of families, as they strive to secure the best seats on a train. Each of us has a sphere of love, and he is bound to the others who inhabit it.