Civilisation (1969) s01e08 Episode Script

Light.
The light of early morning.
The light of Holland.
It spreads over the flat fields, it's reflected in the canals and it picks out distant towers and spires.
This was the inspiration of the first great school of landscape, one might almost say, skyscape painting.
This is a painting done in the middle of the 17th century of the square in Haarlem.
You can see it's an old painting because of the clothes the people are wearing.
But I can walk into this picture, or rather, into the square.
Looks very much the same, doesn't it? Before the 17th century, the idea that one could walk into a picture this way would have been almost unthinkable.
It seems quite natural to us, and, no doubt, seemed natural when it was painted.
But like so many things we take for granted, it goes back to a revolutionary change in thought.
The revolution in which divine authority is replaced by experience, experiment and observation.
I'm in Haarlem not only because Dutch painting is a visible expression of this change of mind, but because Holland economically and intellectually, was the first country to profit from the change.
When one begins to ask the question, "Does it work?" or even "Does it pay?" instead of asking, "Is it God's will?" one gets a new set of answers.
One of the first of them is this: that to try and suppress opinions which one doesn't share is much less profitable than to tolerate them.
This conclusion should have been reached during the Reformation.
It permeated the writings of Erasmus who, of course, was a Dutchman.
Alas, a belief in divine authority of our own opinions afflicted the Protestants just as much as the Catholics.
Even in Holland, they continued to burn and torture each other right up to the middle of the 17th century.
And the Jews who, in Amsterdam, were at last exempt from persecution by the Christians, the Jews began to persecute each other, too.
Still, when all this is said the spirit of Holland in the early 17th century was remarkably tolerant.
One proof is that nearly all the great books that revolutionised thought were first printed in Holland.
What sort of a society was it that allowed these intellectual time bombs to be set off in its midst? Inside this charming old almshouse at Haarlem, which is now a picture gallery, there's plenty of evidence.
We know more about what the 17th-century Dutch looked like than we do about any other society, except perhaps the 1st-century Romans.
Each individual wanted posterity to see exactly what he was like, even if he was a member of a corporate group.
And the man who tells us all this most vividly, the man who painted these pictures, was the Haarlem painter Frans Hals.
He is the supreme extrovert.
I used to find his works - all except the last - revoltingly cheerful and odiously skillful.
Now, I love their unthinking conviviality, and I value skill more highly than I did.
But I will admit that his sitters don't look like representatives of a new philosophy.
But out of these all too numerous group portraits of early 17th-century Holland, something does emerge which has a bearing on civilisation.
These are individuals who are prepared to join in a corporate effort for the public good.
One can't imagine groups like this being painted in 17th-century Italy, even in Venice.
They're the first visual evidence of bourgeois democracy.
Dreadful words.
So debased by propaganda that I hesitate to use them.
And yet, in the context of civilisation, they really have a meaning.
They mean that a group of individuals can come together and take corporate responsibility, that they can afford to do so because they have some leisure, and that they have some leisure because they have money in the bank.
This is the society which you see in the portrait groups.
They might be meetings of local government committees or hospital governors today.
They represent the practical, social application of the philosophy that things must be made to work.
Amsterdam was the first centre of bourgeois capitalism.
It had become, since the decline of Antwerp, the great international port of the North and the chief banking centre of Europe.
Drifting through its leafy canals, lined with admirable houses one may speculate on the economic system that produced this dignified, comfortable, harmonious architecture.
I don't say much about economics in this programme, chiefly because I don't understand them, and perhaps, for that reason, believe their importance has been overrated by post-Marxist historians.
But, of course, there's no doubt that, at a certain stage in social development, fluid capital is one of the chief causes of civilisation.
Because it ensures three essential ingredients: leisure, movement and independence.
It also allows that slight superfluity of wealth that can be spent on nobler proportions, a better doorframe or even a more extraordinary tulip.
Please allow me two minutes' digression on the subject of tulips.
Because it really is rather touching that the first classic example of boom and slump in capitalist economy, should have been not sugar, nor railways nor oil, but tulips.
It shows how the 17th-century Dutch combined their two chief enthusiasms - scientific investigation and visual delight.
The first tulip had been imported from Turkey in the 16th century.
But it was a professor of botany at Leiden, the first botanic garden of the North, who discovered its attribute of unpredictable variation, which made it such an exciting gamble.
By 1634, the Dutch were so bitten by the new craze, that for a single bulb of one tulip, the Viceroy, one collector exchanged 1000lb of cheese, four oxen, eight pigs, 12 sheep, a bed and a suit of clothes.
When the bottom fell out of the tulip market in 1637 the Dutch economy was shaken.
However, it survived for over 30 years and produced superfluities of the most seductive kind.
What about this little clavichord? Isn't it enchanting? Better to look at than to listen to, I'm afraid.
And large, spacious rooms.
Black-and-white marble pavements.
Carved furniture.
An agreeable way of life.
Along the walls is gold-stamped leather, the most sumptuous wall covering I know.
Unfortunately, this kind of visual self-indulgence very soon leads to ostentation.
And this, in bourgeois democracy, means vulgarity.
One can see this happening in Holland in the work of a single painter, Pieter de Hooch.
In 1660, he was painting these beautiful pictures of clean, simple interiors.
Ten years later, they were very elaborate, hung with gold Spanish leather.
The people are richer and the pictures are less beautiful.
Bourgeois capitalism led to a defensive smugness and sentimentality.
No wonder that early Victorian painters imitated pictures of this kind.
"Every picture tells a story.
" It was a Dutch invention.
This one is called A Visit To The Nursery.
In addition to trivial anecdotes the philosophy of observation involved a demand for realism in the most literal sense.
In the early 19th century, Paul Potter's Bull was one of the most famous pictures in Holland.
It was one of the first pictures that Napoleon wanted to steal for the Louvre.
It's fallen out of favour now.
But I must say, I do find it absolutely fascinating.
There are many ways of achieving reality.
This simple-hearted, laborious way that Potter has followed does seem to me to achieve something which couldn't be done in any other way.
Isn't that fleecy neck of the sheep extraordinary? And look at those wild flowers.
Above all, look at the cow's eye.
The intensity with which Potter has looked at its forehead at its strong hair and wet nose is obsessive what we've come to call Surrealist.
Of course, it's a young man's picture.
It has the intensity of the early Pre-Raphaelites, and indeed there is something almost nightmarish in the way that the young bull dominates the beautifully-painted landscape in the distance.
However, one must admit that bourgeois sentiment and realism can produce the most deplorable kind of art.
And the determinist historian reviewing the social conditions of 17th-century Holland would say that this was the kind of painting the Dutch were bound to get.
But they also got Rembrandt.
Rembrandt was the great poet of that need for truth and that appeal to experience which had begun with the Reformation, had produced the first translations of the Bible, but had had to wait almost a century for visible expression.
At first, truth meant realism.
Behind me is his earliest self-portrait.
Yes, that is the same man that you saw just now.
In this vein, he painted the picture which is his most obvious link with the intellectual life of Holland and his first great success in Amsterdam, The Anatomy Lesson.
It represents a demonstration given by the Leading Professor of Anatomy, named Tulp.
The men surrounding him are not of course students or even doctors but members of the Surgeons' Guild - a sort of Board of Trustees.
Vesalius, the first great modern anatomist, had been a Dutchman.
And Tulp liked to be called Vesalius Reborn.
I fancy he was a quack.
He recommended his patients drink 50 cups of tea a day.
However, he was very successful.
His son became an English baronet.
But it wasn't in such external and quasi-official ways that Rembrandt associated himself with the intellectual life of his time but by his illustrations to the Bible.
An example is this picture of Bathsheba pondering the contents of David's letter.
We may think that we admire it as pure painting, and, in fact, it is a masterly piece of design.
But, in the end, we return to the head where Bathsheba's thoughts and feelings are rendered with an insight and a human sympathy which a great novelist could scarcely achieve in many pages.
From the first Rembrandt wanted to record' his experience of how human beings reveal their emotions.
And as his art grew deeper, he succeeded in doing so with ever greater subtlety.
To my mind, one of the most moving examples is the picture known as The Jewish Bride.
Nobody knows what its real title should be.
But the subject that Rembrandt had in mind is evident.
It is a picture of grown-up love.
A marvellous amalgam of richness, tenderness and trust.
The richness expressed in the painting of the sleeves, the tenderness in the placing of the hands, the trust in the expression of the heads.
Marvellous as Rembrandt's paintings are, I find more of his thoughts on human life, certainly his deepest and most intimate thoughts, in his drawings and etchings.
His etchings are the fullest communication any artist has made since Dürer's engravings.
And as with Dürer Rembrandt has put as much into them as into any of his paintings.
This is one of the most famous and elaborate of them Christ Healing The Sick.
And what a marvellous and completely original conception it is.
Suffering humanity, poor people coming out of the shades, like the prisoners in Fidelio, lugging their sick on wheelbarrows and biers, into the light of Christ's divinity.
And on the left, these prosperous people, wondering, doubting, criticising.
How extraordinary that this great Tolstoyan picture of human life was done in the time of Richelieu and the beginning of Versailles.
One can't talk about Rembrandt without describing the human and, if you like, the literary element in his work.
His mind was steeped in the Bible.
He knew every story by heart down to the minutest detail.
This is one of his favourite stories the Prodigal Son.
Just as the early translators felt that they had to learn Hebrew so that no fragment of the truth should escape them, so Rembrandt made friends with the Jews in Amsterdam and frequented their synagogues, in case he could learn something that would shed more light on the early history of the Jewish people.
But in the end, the evidence he used for interpreting the Bible was the life he saw around him.
In his drawings and etchings, one often doesn't know if he's recording an observation or illustrating the scriptures, so much had the two experiences grown together in his mind.
Did Rembrandt wish to illustrate St Peter at prayer before the raising of Tabitha? Or had he seen a pious old neighbour whose attitude of devotion touched his heart and reminded him of the Acts of the Apostles? Sometimes his interpretation of human life in Christian terms leads him to depict subjects that hardly exist in the Bible, but that he felt convinced must have existed.
An example is this etching of Christ preaching the forgiveness of sins.
It's a classical composition.
In fact, it's based upon two famous Raphaels, which Rembrandt had completely assimilated.
But how different is this small congregation from Raphael's ideal human specimens.
They are, as you see, a very mixed lot.
Some thoughtful, some half-hearted some concerned only with keeping warm or keeping awake.
And the child in the foreground, to whom the doctrine of the remission of sins is of no interest is concentrating upon drawing in the dust.
Rembrandt reinterpreted the Bible in the light of human experience.
But it's an emotional response based on a belief in revealed truth.
The greatest of his contemporaries were looking for a different kind of truth, a truth that could be established by intellectual, not emotional, means.
This could be done either by the accumulation of observed evidence or by mathematics.
And of the two, mathematics seemed to offer to the men of the 17th century the more attractive solution.
In fact, mathematics became a kind of, religion to the finest minds of the time the means of expressing a belief that experience could be married with reason.
The guiding spirit of this new religion was the French philosopher, Descartes.
He's become a symbol of the pure intellect.
But I find him a sympathetic figure.
He started life as a soldier he wrote a book on fencing', but he soon discovered that all he wanted to do was think.
Very, very rare, and most unpopular.
Some friends came to call on him at 11 o'clock in the morning and found him in bed.
They said, "What are you doing?" He replied, "Thinking.
" They were furious.
To escape interference, he went to live in Holland.
He said that the people of Amsterdam were so occupied with making money, they would leave him alone.
However, he continued to be the victim of interruptions.
And so, he moved about from place to place.
Altogether, he moved house in Holland 24 times.
In the end, he was run to earth by that tiresome woman, Queen Christina of Sweden, who carried him off to Stockholm to give her lessons in the new philosophy.
She made him get out of bed early in the morning.
As a result, he caught a cold and died.
But earlier in Holland at some point, he evidently lived near Haarlem, where he was painted by Frans Hals.
He examined everything rather as Leonardo da Vinci had done the foetus, the refraction of light, whirlpools All the Leonardo subjects.
These are the original illustrations of Descartes' ideas.
He thought that all matter consisted of whirlpools, with an outer ring of large, curving vortices and an inner core of small globules sucked into the centre.
And whatever he meant by this - and perhaps he was only thinking of Plato - it's odd that he should have described exactly Leonardo's drawings of whirlpools, which I suppose he had never seen.
But in contrast to Leonardo's restless, insatiate curiosity, Descartes had, almost to excess the French tidy-mindedness.
All his observations were made to contribute to a philosophic scheme.
It was based on absolute scepticism, the inheritance of Montaigne's summing-up "Que sais-je?" "What do I know?" Only, Descartes arrived at an answer.
"I know that I think.
" And he turned it the other way around - "I think, therefore I am.
" His fundamental point is that he can doubt everything, but not that he was doubting.
Descartes wanted to cut away all preconceptions and get down to bedrock of experience, unaffected by custom and convention.
Well, one needn't look far in Dutch art to illustrate this state of mind.
There has never been a painter who has stuck so rigorously to what his optic nerve reported as Vermeer of Delft.
His work is without a single prejudice arising from knowledge or the convenience of a style.
It's really quite a shock to see a picture which has so little stylistic artifice as his view of Delft.
It looks like a coloured photograph, and yet we know that it's a work of extreme intellectual distinction.
It not only shows the light of Holland, but what Descartes called the natural light of the mind.
In fact, Vermeer comes close to Descartes at many points.
First of all, in his detached, evasive character.
Vermeer didn't change house every three months.
On the contrary, he loved his house in the square at Delft, and he painted it continually.
His quiet interiors are all rooms in his house.
But he was equally suspicious of callers.
He told one eminent collector who had made a special journey to visit him, that he had no pictures to show him, which was just untrue, because when he died, his house was full of unsold pictures of all periods.
All that he wanted was tranquillity, in order to enjoy fine discrimination.
"Study to be quiet.
" Ten years before this picture was painted, Issak Walton had inscribed these words on the title page of The Compleat Angler.
And in the same period, two religious sects had come into being - Quietism and the Quakers.
As far as I know, the first painter to feel Descartes' need to tidy up sensations by the use of reason was Pieter Saenredam the scrupulous master of church' interiors.
He did drawings from nature in the 1630s, and often kept them for ten or 15 years until he could give them the stillness and finality which make them ideal meeting places for the Society of Friends.
The precision with which he places each accent - those dark heads, for example, reminds one of Seurat.
In a picture like this, the balance is tilted towards reason rather than experience.
Vermeer manages to preserve an air of complete naturalism.
Yet what a masterpiece of abstract design he creates out of frames and windows and musical instruments.
One is reminded of the most severely intellectual of modern painters, his compatriot, Mondrian.
Are Vermeer's intervals and proportions the result of calculation? Or did he discover them intuitively? No good asking such questions.
Vermeer had a genius for evasion.
But as soon as one mentions Mondrian one remembers that one of Vermeer's characteristics separates him entirely from abstract modern painting - his passion for light.
It's in this, more than anything else, that he links up with the other great men of his time.
All the chief exponents of civilisation from Dante to Goethe had been obsessed by light.
One could take it as the supreme symbol of civilisation.
But in the 17th century, light passed through a crucial stage.
The perfection of the lens was giving it new range and power.
Vermeer himself recorded the increased importance of scientific investigation in pictures like this.
He used the utmost ingenuity to make us feel the movement of light.
He loved to show it passing over a white wall, and then, as if to make its progress more comprehensible, passing over a slightly crinkled map.
At least four of these maps appear in his pictures, and, apart from their pleasantly light-transmitting surfaces, they remind us that the Dutch were the great cartographers of the age.
Thus the mercantile sources of Vermeer's independence penetrate into the background of this quiet room.
In his determination to record exactly what he saw, Vermeer didn't at all despise those mechanical devices of which his century was so proud.
The man seated at table talking to a laughing girl - it's a fairly early picture, later on, Vermeer's figures wouldn't have broken the stillness with extrovert laughter - this man has the exaggerated proportions that one sees in photography.
I fancy that Vermeer looked through a lens into a box with a piece of ground glass squared up, and painted exactly what he saw.
He must have begun this scientific practice quite early.
One finds it in this picture of a woman pouring milk, painted before he had perfected his peculiar stillness.
The light's rendered by those little beads that one doesn't see with the naked eye, but which appear on the finder of an old-fashioned camera.
And yet, this scientific approach to experience ends in poetry.
And I suppose that this is due to an almost mystical rapture in the perception of light.
The enlightened tidiness of De Hooch and Vermeer and the rich, imaginative, experience of Rembrandt reached their zenith about the year 1660.
And in that year, on the night of May 30th, Charles II of England dined in the Mauritshuis.
And the next day, he embarked from the Dutch beach at Scheveningen to regain his kingdom.
And thus ended the isolation and austerity which had afflicted England under Cromwell for almost 15 years.
And as so often happens, a new freedom of movement led to an outburst of pent-up energy.
There are usually men of genius waiting for these moments of expansion, like ships waiting for a breeze.
And, on this occasion, there was, in England, the brilliant group of natural philosophers who were to form the Royal Society.
Christopher Wren, the young geometer, who at that date was a professor of astronomy.
Robert Boyle, who used always to be described as the son of the Earl of Cork and the father of chemistry.
Halley, the discoverer of comets.
And towering above all these remarkable scientists was Newton one of the three or four Englishmen whose fame has transcended all national boundaries.
I can't pretend that I've read the Principia.
If I did, I wouldn't understand it any more than Samuel Pepys did, when, as President of the Royal Society, it was handed to him for his approval.
One must just take on trust that it gave a mathematical account of the structure of the universe which for 300 years seemed irrefutable.
It was both the climax of the age of observation and the sacred book of the next century.
Pope, who had probably not read as much of the Principia as I have, summed up the feelings of his contemporaries: "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night, God said, let Newton be: and all was light.
" Parallel with the study of light was the study of the stars.
This is the Octagon Room of the original Royal Observatory at Greenwich, founded, as Charles II's warrant puts it, "in order to the finding out of the longitude of places, and for perfecting navigation and astronomy.
" And it draws together the threads of this programme - light, lenses, observation, navigation and mathematics.
One can walk into that print almost exactly as one can walk into the square at Haarlem.
And in this bright, harmonious room, one seems to breathe the atmosphere of humanised science.
That was Flamsteed's telescope, or very like it.
This is similar to the quadrant with which he tried to establish the correct time.
It was the great age of scientific instruments - Huygens's pendulum clock, Leeuwenhoek's microscope.
Flamsteed himself made a giant sextant.
They don't look very scientific to us.
Indeed, the telescopes really look like something out of a ballet.
One can't see through them at all.
At least, I can't.
But, nevertheless, the telescope, invented in Holland although perfected by Galileo, seemed to bring the heavenly bodies within reach of understanding.
This is the view of the moon which Newton would have seen.
And the microscope allowed a Dutch scientist, named Leeuwenhoek to discover new worlds in a drop of water.
This ferocious monster is a water flea.
What beautiful pieces of design and craftsmanship astrolabes are, and continued to be for 400 years.
And this armillary sphere is really what we think of as a work of art, a mobile.
By twiddling it around, one can produce a kind of visual counterpoint.
Even this equinoctial dial shows the impress of human personality, what you can call a style.
And what about this diptych dial? One can't imagine a prettier bibelot, and yet, it was genuinely scientific .
.
I suppose.
Art and science haven't yet drawn apart.
And these instruments are not only means to an end but symbols.
Symbols of hope that Man might learn to master his environment and create a more reasonable society.
And such they remained until the end of the 19th century.
When Tennyson was told that a Brahmin had destroyed a microscope because it revealed secrets Man should not know he was profoundly shocked.
Only in the last 60 years or so, have we begun to feel that the descendants of these beautiful, shining objects may destroy us.
This room full of light, this shining enclosure of space, was designed by Sir Christopher Wren.
It was built on the spur of a hill overlooking the old palace of Greenwich.
This, too, was rebuilt by Wren, transformed from a palace into a naval hospital.
How much of what we see is from his design is hard to say.
By the time the buildings were going up, he was prepared to leave their execution to his two very able assistants at the Board of Works, Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor.
But he certainly provided the plan.
And the result is the greatest architectural unit built in England since the Middle Ages.
It's sober without being dull, massive without being oppressive.
What is civilisation? A state of mind where it's thought desirable for a naval hospital to look like this, and for inmates to dine in a splendidly decorated hall, in fact, one of the finest rooms in England, with a magnificent painted ceiling in the Baroque manner.
By the time this building was completed, Wren had long been the most famous architect in England.
But as a young man, people had thought of him only as a mathematician and an astronomer.
Why, at the age of 30, he took up architecture, isn't altogether clear.
I suppose he wanted to give, visible form to his solutions mechanical and geometrical solutions.
But of course he had to learn the rudiments of style.
And so, he bought some books and he went to France drew the buildings and met leading architects.
He even met Bernini who was in Paris at the time and he saw Bernini's drawing for the Louvre.
"I would have given my skin for it," he said, "but the reserved old Italian gave me but a view.
" On his return, he was consulted as an engineer, about old St Paul's which was in danger of collapsing.
He proposed replacing the tower by a dome.
But before this very questionable project could be considered the Fire of London broke out in 1666.
It ended on September 5th.
And six days later, Wren submitted a plan for rebuilding the city.
And only then was the ingenious Dr Wren fully committed to architecture.
Ingenious is the word for the results that followed.
The 30 new city churches.
Each is the solution of a different problem.
Wren's powers of invention never failed.
But when he came to the crown and centre of the whole scheme the new St Paul's then he revealed something more than ingenuity.
Wren's buildings show us that mathematics, measurement, observation all that goes to make up the philosophy of science, wasn't hostile to architecture, nor to music because this was the age of one of the greatest English composers, William Purcell, whose noble strains have accompanied our inspection of Wren's buildings.
But what was the effect of the scientific attitude on poetry? Well, at first, I think it was harmless even beneficial.
When Vaughan wrote, "I saw Eternity the other night, Like a great ring of pure and endless light, All calm as it was bright," he was giving poetic expression to the same impulse that induced Flamsteed to look through his telescope.
I don't suppose that all the members of the Royal Society were hostile to the imagination.
After all, most of them remained professing Christians.
In fact, Newton spent - we could say, wasted - a lot of his time on Biblical studies.
And they continued to use a celestial globe in which the constellations were grouped in the form of men and animals.
They continued to accept the kind of personifications that one gets on the ceiling of the Painted Hall, on which gods and goddesses associate with Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal.
But all the same they recognised that all these were fancies and that reality lay elsewhere, in the realm of measurement and observation.
A rather ridiculous character called Spratt, who wrote a "History of the Royal Society", published the same year as Milton's Paradise Lost said, "Poetry is the parent of superstition.
" And so began that division between scientific truth and imagination which was to kill poetic drama and give a slight feeling of artificiality to all poetry during the next 100 years.
However, there was a compensation - the emergence of a clear, workable prose.
It was a tool of the new philosophy, almost as much as Stevins's decimal system was a tool of the new mathematics.
This was particularly true of France.
For about 300 years, French prose was the form in which the European intelligence shaped and communicated its thoughts about history, diplomacy, definition, criticism, human relationships.
Everything, really, except metaphysics.
It's arguable that the non-existence of a clear, concrete German prose has been one of the chief disasters of European civilisation.
There's no doubt that, in its first glorious century, the appeal to experience achieved a triumph for the Western mind.
Between Descartes and Newton Western man created those instruments of thought that set him apart from the other peoples of the world.
And if you look at the average 19th-century historian, a man like Buckle, you'll find that, to him, European civilisation seems almost to begin with this achievement.
The strange thing is that none of these writers, except perhaps Ruskin, seemed to notice that the triumph of rational philosophy had resulted in a new form of barbarism.
If I look beyond the order of Wren's naval hospital, I see stretching as far as the eye can reach the squalid disorder of industrial society.
It's grown up as a result of the same conditions that allowed the Dutch to build their beautiful towns and support their painters and print the works of philosophers.
Fluid capital, a free economy, a flow of exports and imports, a dislike of interference a belief in cause and effect.
Well, every civilisation seems to have its nemesis not only because the first, bright impulses become tarnished by greed and laziness, but because of unpredictables.
In this case, the unpredictable was the growth of population.
The greedy became greedier, the ignorant lost touch with traditional skills, and the light of experience narrowed its beam so that a grand design like Greenwich became simply a waste of money.