Breaking Beauty

Rouen Cathedral, 1820

       How have we changed the world over the past 200 years – both landscapes and townscapes? It’s an impossibly huge question, but a recent exhibition at Dulwich Gallery in London gave me a chance to get a partial but very specific idea by looking at Normandy - a part of the world I know and love well. John Cotman was among a small tidal wave of British artists enabled to visit France when the defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of the monarchy brought an end to 30 years of enmity with England. Cotman focused his attentions on Normandy, principally because he found there a sublime and compelling combination of evocative landscape and grand architecture.

       Normandy had been for many centuries one of the wealthiest and most developed provinces of France, trading with the world through its ports at Dieppe, Harfleur and Rouen. Being relatively near to Paris, its rich fields and pastures provided much of the butter, cheese, eggs and milk consumed in the capital – and the places which Cotman depicted, just before the Industrial Revolution started to transform them, seem to have grown slowly and literally organically into their present condition, whether crumbling ruins or vast busy cathedrals, great sweeping water-meadows or brooding jagged outcrops of grey-brown rock.

Rouen from a distance, 1823

The same, today

       I too love Normandy because much of it still has that quality, but how much of it has been wiped out, smashed, swept away since Cotman’s day! Take these two views of Rouen from a distance, for a particularly grim and telling example.
       Much of the damage to Normandy, of course, came from the Second World War, which reduced many glorious old towns like St-Lô and Lisieux, which so entranced Cotman, to piles of smoking rubble, and their inhabitants to homeless refugees.

Falaise, 1944

Falaise, 1822

              Incidentally, most of the damage to Norman cities during the war had nothing to do with German actions. It was the result of the huge Allied bombing campaigns which preceded the invasion: over 50,000 French non-combatants were killed – far more than Germans – during repeated air raids which destroyed over 75% of all major Norman towns near the coast.  And when they were rebuilt – hastily – during the 1950s, it was in the cheerless and charmless reinforced concrete which today is the first and last impression of most British visitors to Norman cities like Caen, Le Havre or Lisieux.

Rue St Jean, Caen

Rue St Jean today

         No wonder they’re so eager to put as many kilometres behind them as possible on their way to the sun-charmed South. It’s difficult to imagine today how still lovely these places were even in the not so distant days when Jean-Paul Sartre taught in a lycée in Le Havre, or when the future Saint Thérèse became a novitiate in Lisieux.

       So where am I going with this? To point out that most of the picturesquely coiffed peasant women in Cotman’s pictures wouldn’t live past 40, worn out from years of gruelling physical labour and almost annual childbirth in appallingly insanitary conditions? Or that the Second World War became inevitable as soon as Hitler came to power – and that it couldn’t have been won without dislodging the Germans from France? All true, and obvious, and irrelevant:  no one was ever asked how much destruction of their heritage they were prepared to accept in exchange for material progress and the defeat of Nazism.

Mont St Michel

          And what would they have said; how could anyone make such an exchange consciously and deliberately? It’s only the fact that these things have happened in an area which seems to lie beyond anyone’s volition or conscious choice that has made them possible.

       Or here’s another way of looking at it: a Buddhist might say that the only problem lies in our attachment to form. Forms will change, of course, over 200 years, that’s their nature, and we make ourselves unhappy through value judgements about them and preferences for one rather than another.

Mont St Michel, parking lot

       Yes, but. A very big but: the forms which Cotman and his contemporaries show us – the forms we see today in what remains of that heritage – are far more than arbitrary shapes. His was the generation who grew up reading the Romantic poets – and before visiting France he had been attracted to the wilder parts of Britain: to Wales, North Yorkshire, and the Lake District. In such landscapes, as Wordsworth put it:
     “… with an eye made quiet by the power
     Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
     We see into the life of things.”

        So there’s the question for us: how able are we today to feel ‘the power of harmony’, and ‘to see into the life of things’? Cotman and his contemporaries in their travels around Europe were consciously in search of that lifting and ennobling of the spirits which great landscapes bring – with a humility of the heart which can only have been enhanced by the slowness, the dangers and the difficulties of the journey in those days before railways and before metalled roads.
       In our conquest and domination of the physical world around us we’ve laid waste to our internal landscapes, as well as those outside us – and the process is not only continuing but accelerating, as climate change starts to bring about even more dramatic changes. What will be recognisable of these or any other landscapes after a further 200 years to inspire quiet joy in the hearts of our distant descendants?

      

The Abduction of Europe

          It  all started, as many of the best stories do, with sudden, overwhelming, peremptory love. The god Zeus, possibly struck by an arrow from Eros/Cupid, or possibly acting from his own impulses – fell for the most beautiful of the daughters of the King of Tyre (in modern day Lebanon). She, meanwhile had had a dream in which two continents in the form of women disputed her – the one where she was born, and the as yet nameless one over the sea. 

       When Zeus appeared to her in the form of a gentle and graceful white bull as she gathered wild flowers by the seaside, Europa felt no fear for the huge animal and mounted upon its back –whereupon it plunged into the water and took her across the waters to Crete. There she bore him many sons, the first of whom was Minos, legendary founder of the earliest known European civilisation.

          Going further back into its origins, the Greek name (which means ‘broad face’) is generally taken to indicate a link with an ancient Egyptian goddess representing the feminine principle in the form of a lunar cow. This seems to make intuitive sense, given the link with Zeus as a bull, as representing in some way the spirit and force of settled agriculture as the foundation of European culture as we know it now and have done so for thousands of years. By way of a further indication, the name of Europa was often given also to Demeter, goddess of corn and of harvests.
          So, taking the longest view possible, there we have the origin of our continent, and of the idea or ideal which lies behind all the bureaucracy, all the endless speeches in vast half-deserted halls, all the aimless wastage of taxpayers’ money/the impossible yearning to make amends for centuries of bitter conflict (depending on your point of view). Agriculture, fertility, abundance – and abduction, albeit in a consensual form.

          And now it seems that Britannia – who always occupied in any case a very different area of the mythological universe – is drawing away from Europa, and may sever her connection altogether. It isn’t hard to see why these two were never destined to get along together: their gender is essentially all that they share. On the one hand a submissive maiden, ravished by a gentle god and mother to dynasties of powerful men – and on the other a warrior woman, subjugated only through the overwhelming force of the Roman armies. In their later depictions – as if to emphasise the courage which it took to subdue her – she’s typically shown with a trident and a helmet.

          And this is the image which was of course taken up by jingoists and patriots from the 16th century to the present day, on coins and banknotes, innumerable paintings and pub signs. Britannia ruling the waves – fierce, belligerent, domineering; she never seems to have the almost voluptuous femininity of France’s Marianne. (Well, what would one expect of the French?)
          Britain vs. Europe: it’s at its deepest the difference between a nation which still defines itself through war and a yet-to-emerge one which seeks to define itself through overcoming the conflicts which lead to war.

           Perhaps it’s just too soon for this to happen – considering where the myth of Europa originates, the fate of Greece in the hands of the EU is a distinctly bad omen. And the Common Agricultural Policy has much less to do with Demeter-esque  fertility and abundance than with craven servility towards a handful of overweening food multinationals.
          Perhaps in the end we can only echo Mahatma Gandhi, and say that European civilisation would be a good thing – if and when it happens.