Not a lot, all told and given her purposes; the books sold well for a reason.

But they have a devastating fault, at least for any writing that hopes to last and be described as literature, as poetry. They are transparent. You always know what she meant. 

And of course there are real monsters, grotesque failures that don’t bear quotation (see “Two”, Poems (London, not dated), 296-7). Everything a nauseated first-time reader might report is probably often true in her pages, but there are virtues as well, and not mere saving graces, for the verse is genuinely well made. Indeed, if anything disgusts the sophisticated reader it is the simple ease with which the sentiments are revealed, leaving no room for the critic to pretend that they are otherwise than the well-trodden common ground of humanity.

Then again, who would, for example, think of this; describing the meadow (drearily, the archetype of woman) longing to be ravished by the mountain (words fail us… the archetype of man), but separated by a mighty and impassable river:

What could the meadow do but look and yearn,

And gem its bosom to conceal despair.

(“Attraction”, Poems (London, not dated), p. 63)

Perhaps it was obvious: at the front of the collected edition that I happen to have in hand, we find this:

Address at Event on 19^th September 2010 to mark

the bicentenary of John Constable RA’s painting for Nayland Church

This text is a very slightly edited version of a short talk given in Nayland Church to mark the return of the painting after restoration.

Thank you all for inviting us to be here tonight. We do in fact, come back to the Stour valley quite often, though we are, as Ronald has just reminded us that Constable was, very definitely river people, and we rarely stop in the villages, staying close to the river on foot or afloat, fishing as we go. So it is splendid to have a reason to see that these are also inhabited regions, and be with you tonight to mark this unique occasion with words and music.

It is particularly enjoyable for me because it is an opportunity to hear Ronald speak on the subject of this painting and my ancestor. It is an easy matter for a writer or a thinker to be striking, it is very much harder to be sincerely so, but Ronald makes this seem like a matter of course.

Indeed, sincerity is a curious quality, not simply a question of saying what you mean and meaning what you say, but finding something that you genuinely wish to mean and then saying it.

There is no bigger problem for a writer, or, I suppose, for an artist, and the available resolutions are not always true friends.

Somewhere in his early writings, in Daybreak I think, Nietzsche remarks that weaker personalities in the arts are drawn to greater subjects, because they need their support. Whereas, a greater mind, by which I take it he indicates one in confident possession of its knowledge, can afford, as he puts it, “to intercede on behalf of simple things”.

We may think of Chardin, or of Vuillard, but it seems to be quintessentially true of Constable, who preferred to paint the earth-born humble beauties of his home fields and water meadows, rather than those of re-manufactured history or Alpine tourism.

The strength required for such a preference is easily appreciated even today in any gallery where his paintings hang beside those of other great European masters.

And it is a contrast that goes on growing.

The humility of this approach is as distant as can be imagined from the theatrical transgression of moral boundaries or the aggressive rejection of simple personal and social pleasures that has characterized so much painting in the last hundred years.

For some, it seems, the world just isn’t good enough.

But whether any of us will or can ever know enough about ourselves, or the world, to be sure that the tree turning its leaves silver side up to the wind, the “ragged scoop and burst”[1] of a rain storm, the passing sparkle on the river glimpsed through trees, the everyday hedges, the dripping bankside plants, are not up to our demanding scratch.

However, I cannot say that the painting behind me is a humble subject. Indeed for a Christian there are few more significant. Nor is it entirely typical of Constable.

More familiar are those pictures of scenes still more familiar to you, the paintings of the river valley in which we now stand.

But there is a direct route from one to the other. Constable famously looked at the Elder flowers in the vale, and saw “the resurrection and the life”.

We, in our turn, can look at this depiction of Christ blessing the bread and wine and think of a world made up of simple and beautiful things that are by any measure a blessing.

Redistributionist inclinations dominate contemporary democratic politics, and show no signs of weakening. Ostensibly, the reasons for this are a desire for fairness, while its critics, and there are very few, tend to suggest that such claims are a cloak for self-serving envy. However, such criticism is easily deflected, since it is not hard to show that many, perhaps most, of those who call for high levels of taxation and public spending do not stand to benefit directly from these measures, at least not more so than any other member of the general public. Further, they may often be much affected by the measures that they demand. I can think of several well-off friends who honestly express the desire to pay more in tax.

Yet the charge of envy persists, perhaps because it seems to describe some part of the tone rather than the content of redistributionist demands, however moderate or self-wounding. Perhaps, in spite of appearances, there is something in it.

It is certainly true that only the most saintly do not experience a brief shooting sensation of distress at the achievements and success of others, particularly those close to us, whether friends or blood relations. We learn to suppress the outward and even the inward evidence of such feelings, but the traces are present nonetheless, though much easier to observe in others than in ourselves. I suggest that this envy is the emotional correlate of an awareness that another person has some degree of comparative advantage over us. We find this distressing because success in any endeavour matters much less than comparative failure. In other words, in any competitive situation, if we cannot exceed the achievement of our competitor, we prefer to see them on a level with us, even if that entails an absolute reduction in our own level of welfare. This is not careless spite, pure and simple, where we may harm ourselves very badly in order to hurt another. It is calculated spite, where we aim to reduce the comparative advantage enjoyed by another, and will accept a reduction in our absolute wellbeing as the necessary price.

A fictional example may demonstrate the concept. Imagine two apes beneath a large fruit tree that they cannot climb because of thick thorns round its base. The branches are high above their heads, and loaded with fruit, but with an athletic jump it is possible to pick some of the fruit, and this occasionally shakes other pieces of fruit from the branches.

One ape can jump rather better than the other, and succeeds where the other fails, though his efforts sometimes dislodge fruit that falls to the ground where it is taken by the weaker ape. Both are better off, but the good jumper obviously has the pick of the fruit, gets more, and is now at an advantage.

Conscious of his relative failure, the weaker ape surreptitiously snaps a few of the thorns and scatters them on the ground, so what when his friend lands after one of his attempts to seize some fruit he injures his feet and can jump no more or cannot jump as high or as often.

The weaker ape feels that this is beneficial, since though both are now fruitless, the stronger creature has no relative advantage. In addition, although it cannot be picked at present the fruit remains available, so the weaker ape has preserved his option of obtaining better access to the fruit at some time in the future.

The analogy with human politics should be clear. Politicians and economists might urge tolerance of the financially successful, the high leaping ape, on the grounds that a system which creates opportunities for such wealth disparities also creates general wealth and a higher level of average wealth. But such urgings are in vain; the rich are nonetheless resented.

It is tempting to suggest that this is an irrational response, and that we should recognise that wealth disparities bring about an increase in our absolute wealth (or at least so it is argued). However, I suspect that the emotion of envy is the product or at least the accompaniment of an accurate intuition of comparative disadvantage, to which we are extremely sensitive since our psychologies have been shaped by biological evolution driven by differential reproductive success. We are here today because of the relative reproductive success of our ancestors, not reproduction beyond an absolute threshold.

There is, I recognise, no certainty that these evolved psychological intuitions still reflect our reproductive interests today; we may be maladapted to current circumstances. However, we appear to be well adapted in many other respects, and given this it is not unreasonable to assume that the resentment of comparative advantage is still an adaptive response. At any rate, it appears to be a real response, adaptive or not.

I propose that this, probably rational and adaptive, resentment of relative success accounts for the powerful pressure in even very rich societies, and perhaps particularly in such societies, for the redistribution of wealth, largely through taxes on the rich, and benefits and public spending in the common interest.

On this view, the value of such taxes to those who advocate them is not so much in the redistribution or in the public spending itself, though doubtless there are some who gain much from both, but rather that the process of taxation erodes wealth differentials. Indeed, the fact that critics of tax-and-spend policies find it so difficult to turn to political advantage the manifest waste, gross inefficiency, and lamentable ineffectiveness of public services, indicates, to me, that the utility of the policy is elsewhere and beyond the reach of these attacks. That is to say, benefits to the poor and public services are beside the point, which is the punitive effect of taxation and the consequent economic levelling.

This, then, is the explanation of the otherwise very surprising erosion of economic liberty in democracies, a hallmark of the last two centuries. When we have our will, and we largely do in the democratic West, we wish for more equal distribution of wealth even at the cost of absolute wealth, and we do this not out of altruism, however much we may pretend that this is so, but out of a powerful and probably rational abhorrence for being at a comparative disadvantage.

In non-democratic systems the effects are reversed; force is employed to secure comparative advantage over others, and the compliance of the subordinate agents of force is secured by the offer of a compensating and ever growing sense of advantage, sometimes real and sometimes merely honorific, over those further down in the hierarchy. Each tier is allowed to feel itself an increasingly big fish in its own little pond. But this is inherently unstable since it requires constant growth in the perceived differentiations. This dynamic process is itself dependent on economic growth or the acquisition of wealth by conquest, for honorific tokens of hierarchical superiority, titles and gongs, are not in themselves sufficient or sufficient for long; some advantage must be economically real. Furthermore, without economic growth the lowest tiers in the system will be at a significant absolute disadvantage, lack of food for example, and this may be sufficient to provoke rebellion.

Democratic systems, by contrast, can be fairly stable and economically free so long as they are relatively poor in the absolute sense, since differentials in wealth will be low. With economic growth wealth differentials will also grow, and so will a corrosive sense of relative disadvantage, and with that a growing demand for taxation even at the cost of greater absolute average individual and aggregate wealth.

Growth and punitive taxation are, on the view I am currently arguing, closely linked, one actually leading to the other, since growth results in greater disparities of wealth, and these are perceived, largely correctly I think, as being genuinely threatening to the interests of those at a relative disadvantage. Since taxation acts as a brake on economic growth, an equilibrium results, with low growth and creeping taxation in balance, as it is in the developed world today.

Such 'fairer' societies may well be happier, as Wilkinson and Pickett seem to suggest in their strikingly popular study The Spirit Level (2009). But this contentment is bought at the cost of overall absolute wealth and, thus, in spite of a more cohesive or co-operative population, at the cost of long term security. For in spite of appearances, the desire for a more equal society springs not from altruistic or collectivist inclinations, but from an individually selfish and entirely rational insistence on low wealth differentials that as an accidental byproduct reduce aggregate societal wealth and sophistication and thus makes that society both less effective in competition with other groups and less robust in the face of natural disasters.

It is difficult to see any politically viable way of resolving this problem.

Pre-scientific conceptions of deity burden the godhead with endless work; divine fingers are curled around the thunderbolt, the supernal hand moulds the clay and the heavenly lungs breathe instil it with life; he or she or it watches over falling leaf and sparrow.

 The situation now is rather different, not because there is any definite proof of non-existence (there can be no such thing). But our understanding of physical process and the record of that process over time has pushed god, gods, and godesses to the margins of time and space. There is almost nothing for such creatures to do, almost "no need for such hypotheses". If we bother with the concept of a god at all, we sketch an almost infinitely distant prime mover, an all but insignificant and only blandly benevolent royalty hesitantly breaking a bottle of cheap fizz over the bows of a universe already sliding down the slipway under its own weight.

"Good morning, I'm Daniel your train guard". The contrast with Japan is sharp: "Tanaka desu." (Not that Japanese train staff would think of introducing themselves personally. Indeed, if their company required them to do this, and I suspect that "Daniel" was under orders, they would almost certainly refuse, very politely of course.)

We struggled for long to gain surnames, with all the collection of entitlements (and obligations) and dignities that go with them, and they are not lightly to be cast aside.

Lord Lawson has today published a powerful article, "I'll be voting to quit the EU" (07.05.13), arguing that the United Kingdom should leave the European Union. My own views on this matter have turned round completely in the last decade. I began by being in favour of the EU on the grounds of affection and admiration for Europe; the same grounds now lead me to conclude that the EU is a threat. Lord Lawson's article makes the point well:

This has nothing to do with being “anti-European” [...] The issue is not Europe, with its great history, incomparable culture and diverse peoples, but the European Union. To confuse the two is both historically and geographically obtuse.

Curiously, the 'issue' with Europe is not so much its strength, but its overall weakness, which makes it harsh and bullying in those areas where it does in fact have some control. I tried to make this point in a letter to The Times (published 06.11.09):

Sir:

In the United Kingdom much public anxiety about the European Union mistakenly revolves around its supposed intrusive and unbridled strength. On the contrary, the fundamental cause for concern is that the EU is in practice far too weak to protect the interests of its member states.

Indeed, the EU bureaucracy, for all its bluster, cannot effectively exercise even a small part of the power currently sought by the executive. The contrast with the United States is sharp and instructive. But this weakness cannot be remedied through any Lisbon or other treaty fiat. Power of a Federal kind can only be built incrementally, and with the consent and approval of the member states, who will cede actual authority when it is justified by an increase of security and wellbeing, and not otherwise.

Until the EU deserves respect and earned the right to rule we will need national governments to order and defend our societies.

In practice this is precisely what is occurring, as witness the gulf between the increasingly pragmatic national approaches to energy and climate change, and the infeasible and counterproductive mess that passes for European Union policy on these matters.

Yours sincerely,

John Constable.

I still believe this to be the case, and my experience of visits to the European Parliament have reinforced this feeling. Consider the motorcades of Washington, which for all their grandeur, star-spangled banners, and outriders, simply carry elected representatives in the dignity that the American people believe fit; it is demonstration of public self-respect. Compare this with the aggressive convoys that force their way through the traffic of Brussels, their windows blacked out and only the yellow and blue commission flags and the sheer arrogance of their sirens to identify them. The passengers are unknown, unknowable, and unelected. It is a ceremony of pure oppressive power. There is no denying that it is authentically European, such is the history, but it is not a Europe that deserves resurrection.

The patriotic collectivism of Empire and its apologists laid the groundwork for British socialist politics in the 20th Century, and like so many other Victorian constructions it has proved immensely durable, and today Britain has one of the most thoroughly socialist cultures and populations anywhere in the world. Other states with an imperial heritage appear to have been less prone to subsequent social-democratic drift, though the United States is an interesting case, since the Roosevelt years seem to have achieved a deep socialisation of the economy without any previous imperial phase, unless we are to see this as a result of the empire of federated states that emerged after the Civil War.

Certainly, where we find patriotic collectivism we often find the emergence of intense varieties of socialism, and the growth of Nazism from Prussian militarism, amongst other fertile sources, is a good example, but an extreme one that failed to last. A more useful illustration is the moderate, enduring, and all-pervading socialism of British politics, where the major parties offer only slightly different varieties of the same fundamental approach, is a more useful illustration. It is commonplace to refer to this as the Post 1945 Settlement, and I would be the last person to underestimate the importance of the Attlee government in realising and fixing this ideology. However, the transformation of a train of thought into a set of grounding presumptions  is clearly evident in the inter-war period, and can be seen coalescing throughout the nineteenth century. Throughout its growth the Empire is a distinct and notable causal factor.

Perhaps we can go further and suggest that insofar as British socialism has characteristics that distinguish it from other kinds, then the Empire is a plausible explanation. The continuities are to me at any rate striking, for far from being a purely rapacious commercial operation, the imperial administration, certainly in the later 19th Century, and arguable exceptions such as Milner aside, has the appearance of a condescending and intensely conceited philanthropic enterprise, determined to do good regardless of the cost to the taxpayer in Britain or the lucrative opportunities it presented to the companies employed to do its bidding overseas. Indeed, this unrealistic altruism was carried over into the post-imperial phase, and accounts for part of the otherwise paradoxical patriotism and imperialism of the Attlee governments, which jeopardised its domestic programme through a stubborn adherence to a world role in Korea and elsewhere.

It may at first seem odd to claim Kipling as the herald of modern socialism, and no one will deny that the implications of his writings are mixed; but his world-view often, though not invariably, puts a collective aim above that of individual satisfaction, and this commits the mind to a process of reasoning that inevitably tends leftwards, in spite of the numerous disadvantages and falsehoods of that orientation.

I have just posted a new article on the publications page: "The Doom of Youth: Wyndham Lewis' Conspiracy Theory". The piece was written in 1995, or thereabouts, but I made no attempt to publish it. The subject is a detailed analysis of the argument of Lewis', The Doom of Youth (1932), a book that very few people have read, and I couldn't see that it would be of interest to general literary critics or historians, and the points that I felt bound to make were and still are very unlikely to please most Lewis specialists, who are by and large enthusiasts first and truth-seeking scholars second. I kept it on hand to use as a chapter in a book on Lewis, if such a thing ever presented itself as worth the writing, which it never did. No attempt has been made to update the article in the light of more recent research on Lewis, indeed I haven't kept up with that work, but I have a hunch that the thesis is still novel. To be straightforward, I think the book is an important element in Lewis' antisemitic conspiracy theory, and by saying this I do not mean to suggest that Lewis' antisemitism was of a superficial, or golf-club, type. Indeed, my conclusion is that Lewis's views were part of a extended and systematic interpretation of cultural and racial history that produces an ideological antisemitism with few British but many European correlates.

Unhelped by anaesthetic dullness,
And strangers to euphoria,
They see far and clearly,
But speak in halting spasms,
Short flights of unrhymed words.

Then, brooding on the landscape,
They hang in that thick emptiness,
Like fish.

Contemporary architects, in common with many writers subsequent to the modernist revolution, seem deliberately to affront the passerby with their independence of the need to respect the interests of the viewer. The austere building is deliberately vile, and boasts of its aggressive economy, as if the inhabiting institution or company were to say "We are rich but won't spend money on your feelings." It also declares that the views of neighbours, their vistas and their opinions, have no weight for those in that building. By contrast the decorated building is generous, and grants that its builders and residents are concerned, if only a little, with what others think. Such a considerate structure offers intricate surfaces, and pointless swags of leaves and flowers to entertain the mind of the external inspector, a delight not available to those within the structure.

Curiously, this distinction makes official buildings of the past very much less intimidating, however impressive they may be. Think of the Banqueting House, or the Royal Courts of Justice, or the gates of Nanzen-ji. These structures certainly give evidence of power, and were presumably designed for such a purpose. A provincial priest visiting the Kyoto headquarters would be delighted to think that "This is us!", or a little fearful ("This is them"), depending on whether he felt welcome or not. However, these buildings are implicit with an acknowledgement that the viewer's opinions are not without value. After all, the building seeks to persuade and influence. By contrast the sheer-sided and angular concrete structure of a modern British Crown Court, for example, suggests, at least to me, a deliberately anonymous, harsh and indifferent power quite independent of the individual standing before it, rather than, as one might hope, an institution aware that its being and its authority are constituted from the respect of a supporting population.

Contemporary architects have a very low reputation with the general public, a hostility that the architects themselves think of as being only a reactionary reluctance to accept the new. However, it seems to me more likely that the man in the street is revolted by the architectural profession's servile complicity with the scornful corporate or bureaucratic power that so deliberately turns its back on the neighbouring society. Of course, it is possible to like brutalists buildings, but the pleasure that architectural critics take in such structures is not dissimilar, in my view, to the delight of the listener stretching out their arms to salute the Tyrant Singer (discussed in earlier piece here). The viewer projects themselves into the position of the independent autocrat and finds freedom in the implied domination of others. That is a loathesome aesthetic, and deserves our contempt.