We are All Doomed

High up in the Chiltern Hills, looking south across the Thames Valley towards Windsor Castle is the small village of Penn. Readers of the novels of Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that one, another one) will know it well from her enjoyable book 'In a Summer Season'.  Mrs Taylor was an atheist, but did occasionally visit its parish church, where she would have seen a rare survival, the remnants of a  'Doom',  or painting of the Last Judgement. It was rediscovered during repair works in 1938 (bits of it were very nearly thrown away) . If you, too, visit this church, you will find that you have to switch on a special light to view it . The plaque by the switch says (or used to say, it is some time since I visited)  'For Doom, Press Switch', which is alarmingly ambiguous.

There are several other similar paintings though only a few of these survivors, like that in Penn, were done on wood. Most were painted directly on the church walls and so have more thoroughly vanished, though there's a startling example in the parish church at South Leigh near Witney . Sometimes the same scenes are done on glass, as in the astonishing windows at Fairford.

These came to mind at the weekend , which I spent in the lovely English cathedral city of Lincoln. Perhaps because I have spent so much time abroad, I'm more and more convinced that T.S.Eliot was right when he said  (in 'Little Gidding') that the end of all our exploring will to be arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. My own country, almost inexpressibly beautiful at this time of year, is illuminated for me by a hundred memories of elsewhere -  Russia, in and around the sad but very moving city of Moscow,  rural Maryland, the Valley of the Elbe, Brandenburg, the Alps, the intimate country of Burgundy near Beaune,  the French and German Rhineland, the high country of Zululand, the Golan heights, Persia between Esfahan and Qom, the extraordinary landscape on the railway line between Rawalpindi and Lahore, Bryce Canyon in Utah,  the bare, hard hills and the long climb on the railway from Kashgar to Urumchi, the lakes and mountains west of Peking, the hills above Mandalay or the impossibly clear air of the Falkland Islands.

For me, a couple of days in Lincoln is as rewarding and as much of an adventure, as a visit to Prague. In fact the two cities have something in common,  narrow ancient streets climbing up a steep hill to a fortress and a cathedral.  But while Prague has its miraculous concentration of baroque buildings, somehow spared from all the wild destruction of the 20th century, Lincoln has in its cathedral one of the greatest buildings on the planet.
I love the English cathedrals and have spent a rather large part of my spare time visiting all of them and then doing it again, and the only thing which worries me about this is that more of my countrymen do not copy me. There are, it is true, plenty of sights to see abroad, and I have tried to view as many of them as possible. But why do we ignore the astonishing treasures we have here? And why, I might add, do we so foolishly resent paying to see them? How else can they be preserved for the next generation?

Earthquakes and storms have destroyed much of what used to exist in Lincoln. Decay and sectarian fanatics have destroyed quite a lot more. Even so, the West Front of the cathedral remains one of the most arresting sights in this country. Floodlit at night or catching the evening sun, or sombre in the mist and drizzle, the immense and loving detail, combined with the vastness of the structure, are an example of what architecture can do when it really tries.

This really is frozen music, and I will leave it to each person who sees it to work out which passage of music it most thoroughly represents - something involving trumpets at one stage or another, almost certainly , but also deep and powerful drums as in Purcell's 'Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary'.


For a large part of the west front, now being rather wonderfully repaired, is a frieze of the Last Judgement, to which you may respond with nervous laughter or serious thought, depending on your disposition. The little depiction of Dives ignoring Lazarus, as the beggar has his sores licked by dogs, is among the earliest parts to be restored, and the sculptor has made a fine job of recreating the style of the long-dead master whose work appears so simple and natural but is of course nothing of the kind. It is easy to look at because it was so hard to carve. 

What are we to make of these things? The same theme is often to be found among the greatest paintings in the greatest art galleries of the world. Do we treat it as a meaningless fairy tale? As a ghost story with no power to touch us ? Or as a real if allegorical warning that what we do here really does matter somewhere else? I prefer the last. The world will end for all of us, not on some hilltop, gathered into a throng by some mountebank preacher, but on the unknown day when we will all die. And then what? We have no idea.

But pass through the great doors of the Lincoln Minster and see what was done by people who believed that their lives were subject to judgement, as we do not, and wonder if it is quite so easy to dismiss them as ignorant, benighted semi-savages.

What remains of the glass of the two great circular windows at the crossing, the Dean's Eye and the Bishop's Eye, is art of the first class, executed with enormous technical skill. Look at the building itself, inside and out, on a scale, and possessing such grace that it puts to shame almost every British structure of the last century (I except the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool, which is of course a noble effort to maintain this dying tradition). Look at the carving on the great stone choir screen, and see if you can find it in you to scorn the masons who created such lovingly detailed beauty with tools so simple that we would call them crude (if you have time, travel the modest distance to the nearby Southwell Minster and look at the carving there, for further proof that our dim, clumsy, ignorant forebears possessed skills and devotion that we largely lack). 

If our vain and puffed up assessment of ourselves is true, and the past was such a dark age of ignorance and superstition, why did that age of superstition produce art and music so immeasurably better than our own?

I think we might do well to be rather more modest about our achievements. It is interesting that the modern Britain, of motorways and shopping malls and hypermarkets, largely ignores or sweeps round the old cathedral cities.  In London, people walk past Westminster Abbey without glancing at it, unless they are tourists. The one fully modern city which contains one of these masterpieces is Peterborough, where the Cathedral sits in strange solitude in a city centre that has no organic connection with it at all.

Could it possibly be that the difference between the two worlds has something to do with the fact that our forebears felt there might be a higher judgement than the one of their fellow-creatures, so easily fooled by public relations and smiling exteriors? Maybe doom has something to be said for it.