Paul Johnson

Taking Holy Communion the other day, I reflected how grossly physical religious observance is, even though the progress of humanity tends to turn its more primitive aspects into symbolism. Occasionally I participate in a Jewish Sabbath meal, and find it a calm and decorous occasion, religious ritual at its most civilised. But it is important to remember that such a practice had its distant origin in services at the great Temple in Jerusalem. They ended with a ritual drinking of wine, scripture readings, and the singing of hymns and psalms. But the physical and earthy aspects were tremendous. The Temple, built by Solomon on a princely scale but enormously enlarged by Herod the Great, was a theatre of conspicuous consumption in Yahweh’s honour.

To someone of my age, who has seen the world and now wants only repose and beauty, Lake Como is the perfect place. I do not know how many times I have visited it in the last two decades, but over 100 watercolours (not counting the ones I have given away or sold) testify to its hold on my affections. Twice a day I walk up from the castle to my painting-tower, whence the whole stupendous panorama of the lake can be seen, pointing to St Moritz mountain in the north, and to the south to Como itself, city of silk. It is quiet up there. You hear, of course, the tinkling of bells round the necks of the semi-tame mountain goats. But they have a cunning way of creeping about when near me, so that their bells do not sound, and silently purloining one of my brushes, spread about on the grass.

An intellectual is someone who thinks ideas matter more than people. If people get in the way of ideas they must be swept aside and, if necessary, put in concentration camps or killed. To intellectuals, individuals as such are not interesting and do not matter. Indeed individualism is a hindrance to the pursuit of ideals in an absolute sense. The individual, with his quirks and quiddities, his mixture of good and bad, intelligence and stupidity, longing for justice but anxiety to promote his own selfish interests, does not fit into a utopian community. Hence utopians, if they are in earnest, tend to become terrorists. A significant case was Robespierre, who invented both utopianism and terrorism in their modern forms.

How long will Darwin continue to repose on his high but perilous pedestal? I am beginning to wonder. Few people doubt the principles of evolution. The question at issue is: are all evolutionary advances achieved exclusively by the process of natural selection? That is the position of the Darwinian fundamentalists, and they cling to their absolutist position with all the unyielding certitude with which Southern Baptists assert the literal truth of the Book of Genesis, or Wahabi Muslims proclaim the need for a universal jihad against ‘the Great Satan’. At a revivalist meeting of Darwinians two or three years ago, I heard the chairman, the fiction-writer Ian McEwan, call out, ‘Yes, we do think God is an old man in the sky with a beard, and his name is Charles Darwin.

Lying is a terrible thing in any circumstances. When politicians and governments lie, it is a sin against society as a whole, against justice and civilisation. In Ray Monk’s admirable life of Wittgenstein, I learn that at the age of eight he asked himself the question: ‘Why should one tell the truth, if it’s to one’s advantage to tell a lie?’ This was the first time he posed a philosophical query. His answer was a kind of Kantian categorical imperative: ‘One must be truthful, and that is the end of the matter. The “Why?” is inappropriate and cannot be answered.’ He concluded, quite young, that one had an inviolable duty to be true to oneself, and part of this duty was to be truthful to others.

There are times when I think that a great bridge is the noblest work of man. I recently had the thrilling experience of travelling under the famous Forth Rail Bridge on a 52,000-ton ocean liner. I was up on the top deck before 7 a.m. to see this remarkable event, which had to be timed exactly to coincide with the right tide. At high tide the clearance of the bridge is 44 metres, and as the liner’s mainmast is 46 metres, its captain has to come in on mid- or low tide. Even so, the clearance is only a few feet, and the magic moment when the vast ship moves into the steel jaws of the structure is vertiginous; the distortions of perspective make you certain a horrible crunch is bound to occur.

It is remarkable that the English, so reserved in their emotional displays in ordinary existence, should have always shown such capacity, even genius, for enacting them on the stage. Or perhaps it is only logical, theatre being for us an escape from our natural inhibitions. Whatever the explanation, we have led the world in acting for half a millennium now, and still do, emphatically. Such performances as Michael Gambon as Falstaff, or Eve Best as Hedda Gabler, or Laura Michelle Kelly as Mary Poppins — and these are only the outstanding examples — are not to be seen anywhere else on earth.

International affairs would go more smoothly if leading politicians had better manners. It must be said that Tony Blair sets a good example in this respect. He is one of the most courteous men I have come across in public life and shows up his European colleagues, on the whole an ill-bred lot. During the recent acrimonious summit in Brussels he never once lost his temper or showed signs of irritation, though much provoked, and at his press briefing declined to engage in personal jibes, indeed kept his remarks deliberately impersonal in true diplomatic fashion.

Americans grumble to me that the price of cabs in London is outrageous, and they are right. I tell them to take a double-decker red bus, but they look doubtful. Too complicated? Certainly, when I am in New York, I hesitate before I take one of those convenient buses that go up and down Fifth Avenue because the drivers are so impatient and sarcastic, and when I fiddle for dimes and nickels to pay them, call out, ‘Oi, oi! Hoy Foynance! Hoy Foynance!’ Reading Thackeray’s Collected Letters the other day, I see he had the same experience with a Manhattan streetcar (horse-drawn of course) in the 1850s.

In his book of proverbs, Blake writes, ‘A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.’ That is true enough but it is not my tree-proverb, which runs, ‘An artist sees trees he can paint.’ When I look at trees, my eyes search instinctively for paintable ones, whose trunk and branches, leaves and swagger — for every worthwhile tree has pride of ancestry and wishes to cut a bella figura — I can get down on my paper and make lovable. Trees whose portraits I can paint. Trees are the nearest things in vegetable nature to human beings, with parents and offspring and lineage and long lifespans, whose shape and appearance — and health — are influenced by heredity and accident, place and quality of nourishment.

The decisive culture war of the 21st century is likely to be between the Darwinian fundamentalists and those who believe in God and the significance of human life. It will be prolonged and bitter. Culture wars do not usually end in bloodshed but they break hearts and minds and bring terrible sufferings to the losers (and to many of the winners too). Most observers today would put their money on the Darwinians. They already control the universities of the West, or at least their science departments, and persecute with ferocity any who deviate from their narrow orthodoxies. Such heretical scholars — whatever their qualifications or the strength of their arguments — are simply labelled ‘creationists’ and dismissed or barred from academic posts.

The passing of a great pope promotes thoughts about goodness, and what constitutes it. What is goodness? And, for that matter, what is good itself? Joseph Addison was quite clear: ‘Music is the greatest good that mortals know.’ But among the greatest evils of our time, I would put pop music, its idols, its drugs and its diabolic possession of tender susceptible youth high on the list, certainly among the top ten. Edmund Burke was equally sure: ‘Good order is the foundation of all good things.’ That is arguable, anyway, though most dictators would support it ex officio. And all good things? Surely not. Most poetry, art and literature spring from disorder. Art is itself an ordering process.

When spring finally reached London after those Arctic weeks with the bitter wind from the east, I hurried out to Kew to see what was happening to Nature. And there it all was: millions of daffodils in massed marching ranks, spreading golden carpets between the still bare specimen trees. The crocuses broke ‘like fire’ at my feet, as Tennyson says, and the magnolia blossoms were bursting on the trees with all the pent-up energy stored during the long, cold winter months: an extravaganza in ivory. But first I looked in at the parish church of St Anne on Kew Green. It is one of my favourite churches because it has expanded from a tiny box, built as a chapel in 1714, being added to or embellished on no fewer than ten occasions, the latest being in 1988.

We are living through, or so it is universally assumed, the last days of a great pope. John Paul II rescued the Catholic Church from the self-destructive course on which it was drifting into oblivion, and put it firmly back on its traditional verities. He is a man of long and painful experience, acquired in dealing with the twin evils of Nazism and communism; a wise, bold and strong man, but also a priest of deep and rational compassion, a pontiff for all seasons of turbulence and trial. The aim of his philosophy is to inculcate in us what he calls ‘a just use for freedom’, and his thoughts on this point are set out in a little book, just published.

Like many journalists, I can write anywhere and under any conditions. I honestly believe I could do an article in the middle of the street provided there was somebody to fend off the traffic. Certainly I could manage on the rim of Alfred Gilbert’s delightful Eros fountain in Piccadilly Circus. More impressive, to my mind, is Mozart’s ability to write bits of a violin concerto while playing a game of billiards. He wrote all five of his admirable exercises in this genre during a single summer, aged 19. While his opponent clicked off a long cannon he had time to jot down an entire cadenza. Rossini was, if anything, even more hard-boiled. I believe he composed his admirable aria ‘Di tanti palpiti’ in Tancredi during the time it took a saucepan of rice to boil.

I don’t give a damn for grammar, or syntax either. Having learned to ‘parse’ as a small boy, and done ten years of Latin and eight of Greek, I take it all for granted. But I love semantic and grammatical niggles and rejoice in the way some people get red in the face with rage at the lapses of others. Thus Earl Granville, when foreign secretary, telegraphed to Sir Stafford Northcote in Washington that the substance of the treaty between Britain and America (eventually signed 8 May 1871) was all right but that ‘in the wording of the Treaty Her Majesty’s Government would under no circumstances endure the insertion of an adverb between the preposition “to” and the verb’. The Earl was something of a stylist.