Sometime last century in America, I got into quite a lengthy discussion about
culture with a group of people I had happened to run into in my travels. I think
I can best describe them as fully committed middlebrows. They shunned, for
example, all but the very lightest of classical music. 'There aren't any good
tunes in it', one said. Well, well. Verdi's Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves? I've
heard that a hundred times and it never palls. It's a wonderful tune. At the
heavier end of the classical music spectrum, the 11th Symphony of Shostakovich
lives and breathes melody, subtle and changing, sweet and brash. Bartok's
Concerto for Orchestra is lavish with both rhythm and melody. No good tunes: you
might as well say there are no nice flowers at the Chelsea Flower Show.
Their middlebrow mentality seemed more than just a habit of a lifetime; it
seemed a conscious thing with them. They didn't actually call themselves
middlebrows, but they worked hard at being just that. They had inventories of
highbrow works of art that they regarded as too heavy, shows on in New York that
they wouldn't go see. They all loved the theatre, but for them the theatre was
'from Showboat to Sondheim' and excluded 'heavy' drama which lacked
spectacle and consisted mainly of 'actors talking on a stage' as someone else
put it. So much for Chekhov, Ibsen, Lorca, and Miller. Just actors talking on a
stage.
At the same time there was a canon of lowbrow creations that they felt they
could be unreservedly snobbish about. There was unanimity about what they saw as
the trashiness of Roseanne, which is one of the sharpest and funniest
of American comedy shows. But this was working class comedy and not acceptable.
They lived their cultural lives within a narrow strip. Fences ran along both
sides; great art was beyond the pale on one side, and the best of popular
culture on the other.
It was an odd experience, meeting them. I'm sure it was just my bad luck, and
of course there are many Americans who don't build those fences. The American
theatre is vibrant and experimental; American literature needs no introduction.
(Of course, this crowd hadn't read Saul Bellow or Gore Vidal, or if one or two
of them had they weren't admitting it.) I'd known middlebrows before, but never
anyone so self-conscious or defensive about it. At the root of it was this, I
think: they felt threatened, not perhaps by Roseanne, but certainly by 'high
art' - especially by those actors talking on a stage. It wasn't that they were
incapable of appreciating high art - they were all very articulate and must have
been at least High School graduates - they simply chose not to go there. They
had their lives sorted, insofar as they could; they had built their stockades.
They were almost as chary of art as they were of Saddam Hussein. And up to a
point, that would be all right; if they were happy with what Dwight Macdonald
called 'midcult', well that would be fine. But they didn't seem happy with it;
they seemed almost beleaguered - they seemed to suffer from a cultural
insecurity bordering on neurosis. And they gave out other vibes too: knowing,
superior vibes, strong impulses to let the stranger know that they were
culturally so very au courant and sophisticated, and - no less
important - that they were elevated enough to despise Roseanne and all her
works.
This whole experience, and these conclusions I had drawn from it, came back
to me recently when I read a Guardian article by Dylan Evans, titled
'Mozart redeems my mediocrity'. The writer refers to Shakespeare, Leonardo and
others and laments the fact that so many people seem to feel it's 'humiliating
and threatening' to think they could never 'paint or write anything comparable
to their achievements'. It runs very close to that meanness of spirit that
grudges a friend or colleague some well-deserved success.
But, Evans goes on, 'to me [genius] is liberating and inspiring. It is
precisely the realisation that I will never be the equal of Mozart or Goethe
that allows me to sit back and enjoy what they have bequeathed to me. It is my
recognition of their greatness, my admission of the immeasurable superiority of
their talent, that redeems my mediocrity.' I feel exactly in tune with this. It
makes me sadder when I think now of my American acquaintances, and less inclined
to mock them. What a shame they had to stay always within the bounds of their
little buttercup meadow.
What I want to do now is put an object on show that many readers will have
seen before. It is a work of genius. It is my recognition of its greatness, and
the realisation that I can never produce its equal, that allows me to rejoice in
it.
The Chimney Sweeper
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my
tongue
Could scarcely cry 'Weep! weep! weep! weep!'
So your chimneys I
sweep, and in soot I sleep.
There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his
head,
That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved; so I said,
'Hush, Tom!
never mind it, for, when your head's bare,
You know that the soot cannot
spoil your white hair.'
And so he was quiet, and that very night,
As
Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight! -
That thousands of sweepers, Dick,
Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.
And by came an angel, who had a bright key,
And he opened the
coffins, and set them all free;
Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing,
they run
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.
Then naked and
white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds, and sport in the
wind:
And the angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his
father, and never want joy.
And so Tom awoke, and we rose in the
dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Though the morning
was cold, Tom was happy and warm:
So, if all do their duty, they need not
fear harm.
William Blake.
Our experience of it begins with the simple things. We are impressed by the
simple language - this poem of dismay and protest is written in the language of
nursery tales. We feel pity for the boys, that they should be so cruelly abused.
We know that what is done to them is wrong. We extrapolate into our own time and
think of child labour in the poor world. We feel equal pity, and pass judgement
equally on the modern exploiters, who use children because they are cheaper than
adults. We are moved by the boy who is the speaker in the poem, by the way he
comforts his unhappy friend. We are moved by the vision of liberation - though
there seems to be something not quite right about it. Certainly the Angel seems
a poor liberator.
But 'The Chimney Sweeper' isn't a simple thing. It isn't like some plain but
beautifully shaped piece of pottery that we look at and say, 'I like that very
much', and there's an end to it. No, this is a poem with a depth almost beyond
fathoming. Blake's 'Songs of Innocence' might have been given alternative
titles, none of which would have done much to sell copies, but which might have
spelled out for the reader what was meant. The meaning of the book's title is at
least twofold.
First, the Songs might have been called Songs of Unexpanded Consciousness: of
a poverty of awareness of the full context of one's life. This kind of poverty
leads us, among other things, to suppose that our circumstances, our plight, the
way we see human relations operating around us from day to day: that these
things are the natural law, the way human beings are, the way the universe is
ordered. What do mice do? They eat bread and grain and live as long as they can,
until a cat gets them. What do little boys do? They climb chimneys and their
lungs fill with soot, and they live until they die. The chimney-sweepers can't
go to the mountain top and look down, and see the true nature of the master who
possesses them as chattels and who exploits them. They can't see that King
George who reigns over them is no better than the wicked king of the fairy
tales. They can't understand that their situation comes at the end of a century
of cumulative dispossession, which has seen the expansion of manufactories, and
in which the artisan weaver has become the hired servant of the textile industry
capitalist. A century too of growing poverty and inequality, the deliberate
creation of which is not the work of God or Nature but of man - of men who can
be named, of King George and his forebears, of Pitt the Elder and Pitt the
Younger, of Bristol merchants and Norfolk landowners. These men have created the
conditions in which a father has to sell his son to a master of chimney-sweeps.
Of course, the children are too young to understand such things, but even those
who survive into manhood will have little access to such understanding.
Alternatively the Songs of Innocence might have been called Songs about the
Victims of Innocence. Each boy chimney-sweeper is a unique human being of
inestimable worth. The poem resonates with Blake's belief that this is so. In
his later years Blake was once asked what he thought of Jesus Christ. He said,
'He was the greatest man who ever lived. And so am I. And so are you.' And so
are the young chimney-sweepers, every one. But they are reduced to a far, far
lesser status. They are not merely innocent children; they are kept in
innocence, for innocence is blameless ignorance. Their innocence is
a part of their deprivation.
I have said the Angel is a poor liberator. The dream in which he appears is
deceptively beautiful : the boys dive into the river, wash away all the soot, no
doubt dowse each other and wrestle with each other in the water; and then,
magically, they find themselves rising into the air to 'sport in the wind'. But
they have been released from their coffins so that all this can happen. It is
nothing but the old religious pie in the sky. Tom will be sure to sport in the
clouds - after he is dead. Meanwhile he should 'be a good boy', serve his
master, clean the chimneys of the masters of indentured leather-workers and
watchmakers, live humbly and honour the King.
And Tom wakes from his dream, and as he collects his bag and brushes he is
happy. This is innocence. Knowing no better, he is comforted by the promise of
the Angel, and cannot see that the Angel is an agent of the ruling elite and its
hierarchy, and an advocate of the exploitation and cruelty their social system
makes possible. For Tom, an understanding of the conditions of his life, and of
the possibility that he and his comrades might even become historical agents,
able to act against their oppression, is not as out of reach as we might
suppose; and yet it is as remote as the ends of the universe. Tom's happiness is
heartbreaking.
Much of Blake's book is heartbreaking, but it is also a bright illumination.
It's a true vision. Blake is quoted as having said blithely, 'You can see what I
see, if you choose. You have only to work up imagination to the state of vision,
and the thing is done.' Ah, Mr Blake, thank you for the compliment. Alas, the
state of vision comes less easily to me. I may become able to see what you see,
but only because you put what you see into incomparable poetry. But I will try.
I will read your work and share in it, and not place it beyond any pale, not
exile your vision from the country of my imagination.
I can't illuminate the world as Blake did. But how can I envy him or grudge
him his genius? Rather, I stand before his portrait and say, 'Sir, I honour you.
You were a great poet and a good man.'
How sad that my middlebrow American acquaintances, some of whom had travelled
to Alaska and Patagonia and China, and taken the Trans-Siberian train from
Beijing to Moscow, were so afraid to travel in the realms of gold.
James Graham.