MICHAEL YOST is a poet and essayist living in rural New Hampshire with his wife and children. His essays and poems have been published in places like Modern Age, First Things, The University Bookman, Dappled Things, The Brazen Head, and others. He substacks at The Weight of Form
DEREK TURNER finds a well-meant quest for authenticity obscured by Angst
Britain’s folk culture is world-famous, and perennially popular – the Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance, Padstow’s ‘Obby ‘Oss, Lewes’s Bonfire Night, and Lincolnshire’s Haxey Hood Game, to name just some of the rituals that even in a digital age help anchor the English to their earth. In recent decades, a young generation of “new countryphiles” have become involved in folk culture, joining in with traditional festivities and activities like Morris dancing and well-dressing, yet also exploring new ways of expressing identity and strengthening community.
Lally MacBeth is a representative figure among these countryphiles, as founder of the Folk Archive to foster interest in new forms of folk culture, and co-founder of the Stone Club, which celebrates Britain’s Megalithic monuments. In this, her first book, she builds on her Folk Archive work to call for greater recognition of folk objects that too often go unnoticed, and to help formulate a folk culture fit for the future. She is herself a Morris dancer, and an apparently indefatigable collector of curiosities – trawling charity shops and car boot sales in search of whatever is autochthonous, personal and locally distinctive, from church hassocks to horse brasses, pieces of old costume to tourist ware tea-towels, and shop fittings to pub signs.
Her own interest was sparked when she came across a photograph of her great-great aunt, taking part in a 1934 Ludlow pageant of Milton’s Comus – such pageants a form of folk culture now extinguished, and not even generally considered as being aspects of folk culture. She has concluded that folk culture, as conventionally defined, is too categorically confining – the filtered choices of a particular class at a particular period, now become stale and tired.
Folk culture builds community by formulating folk memory and repeating rituals that can link classes and generations to each other, and all classes and generations to particular places. MacBeth is right to aver that folk culture can be fostered by institutions as well as by individuals; churches can be repositories of folk beliefs and folkish items, and county councils can be custodians of local character. The author pays overdue tribute to many different kinds of people – dance teachers, event organisers, gravestone carvers, preservers of vernacular buildings, signwriters, topiarists, and yet others – whose largely unsung activities have helped perpetuate local distinctiveness.
Folk items can be reassuringly solid – like the eleventh century reindeer antlers used at Abbot’s Bromley, shell grottoes, ships’ figureheads, or model villages like Buckinghamshire’s Bekonscot. But they can also be disconcertingly ephemeral – badges, costumes, posters, or even sandcastles that only stand for a day. They can even be ideas – like the piquant folk-memory that a statue of Pan was once carried in church processions in the Gloucestershire town of Painswick.
The only locally distinctive items she wants to exclude from her ethnographic catalogue are “problematic and offensive historical language.” She accuses the folksong collector Cecil Sharp of recording “incredibly racist dance practices,” and creating “a folk world that suited him: sanitised, classist, racist and very, very male.” She loathes the blackface traditionally used by some Morris sides, for reasons that until the 1970s were considered more or less innocent (albeit infra dig). She expends anguished paragraphs on one solitary Morris side which has so far resisted pressure to whiten up its act. One can understand why such things make the author uneasy; yet is this not ‘sanitisation’ of the kind of which she accuses Sharp? Sharp, it should be noted, was a Liberal and a progressive, who for several years collaborated productively with the socialist collector-dancer Mary Neal (although they later fell out).
Morris dancer at Rochester Sweeps’ Fair. Image: Derek Turner
The author’s well-intentioned wish to embrace folk objects of all kinds from all kinds of marginalised or newly-arrived communities carries the obvious risk of ultimately overwhelming globally unique native objects. Folk culture allows communities to define and defend themselves – as the author says, to “feel a sense of home, and a sense of belonging.” But if everyone is to ‘feel at home,’ can anyone actually be at home? Authentic folkish manifestations are spontaneous responses to specific situations in space and time, as ‘instinctive’ and enjoyable as treading the measures of a Morris; should they also be objects of anthropological Angst?
The author is on easier ground when she asks us to honour undeservedly overlooked figures like Florence Elsie Matley Moore, who devoted much of the 1930s to painting, photographing and restoring Worcestershire antiquities and popularising country dances. Somerset’s Ruth Tongue emerges engagingly as eccentric fabulist-folklorist, who alienated more serious-minded students of folklore by toying with traditions, and claiming to speak with fairies. So too do Pamela Colman Smith, folktale-teller, occultist and Tarot card illustrator – and poor, paralysed Nellie Sloggett, who forged a successful writing career from her bedroom in Padstow, regaling readers with lively tales of ‘piskies’ and other Cornubian conceits.
Raconteurs help perpetuate folk-memory as much as scholars like the 1930s writers Dorothy Hartley and Florence White, who recorded country cooking and other crafts, or the oral historian George Ewart Evans, whose classics Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay (1956) and Pattern Under the Plough (1966) recorded authentic voices of rural Suffolk that were soon to be stilled. Fond fantasies as much as facts help underpin rescue and restoration efforts like those carried out by the too little known “Ferguson Gang” – five admirable women who between 1927 and 1957 helped raise huge amounts of money to save areas of the West Country threatened with development.
Whatever reservations we may have about some of the author’s political stances, she deserves commendation for calling such people to mind. She also deserves credit for raising important questions about the nature and future of ‘folk’ in an age of mass movement and social media shallowness. Yet in the end folk culture may not be amenable to even the most earnest analyses, and will evolve in its own way. As the author herself observes, folk culture is “…inexplicable, something that just is.”
DEREK TURNER is the editor of The Brazen Head, as well as a novelist (A Modern Journey, Displacement, and Sea Changes) and widely-published reviewer. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published June 2022. Some of his writing may be found at www.derek-turner.com He is also on X – @derekturner1964
LIAM GUILAR is Poetry Editor of The Brazen Head, and the author of several poetry collections, including the series A Man of Heart, Presentment of Englishry and The Fabled Third (Shearsman), set in post-Roman Britain
This is from a translation of Culhwch and Olwen, ‘the oldest surviving Arthurian tale’ from medieval Welsh prose to modern English Verse. The story tells how Culhwch marries Olwen, the giant’s daughter. However, before he can marry her, he must complete forty tasks for her father. Many are obviously impossible; some merely extremely difficult. The tasks are completed not by Culhwch but by King Arthur and his men. What follows is the second and third task.
The translation is based on Culhwch and Olwen.An edition and study of the oldest Arthurian tale, by Rachel Bromwich and D. Simon Evans, (University of Wales Press, 1992)
The tale of the oldest animals (The freeing of Mabon mab Modron)
After they’d told Arthur all that had happened,
he said, ‘Which of these wonders should we seek first?’
‘It’s best to seek Mabon mab Modron
And to find him we need his kinsmen,
Eidoel mab Aer.’
Arthur and his knights arose,
and sought throughout Britain
until they came to the outer walls of Gliwi
where Eidoel was a prisoner.
Gliwi stood on the top of his fort:
‘Arthur, what do you want?
Life’s bad enough on this crag
without you coming to ruin me.
I have neither wheat nor oats,
nor goods nor pleasure.’
‘I haven’t come to harm you,
I seek your prisoner.’
‘You can have him, although
I never intended to give him up.
And on top of that my help and support.
The men said to Arthur: ‘Lord, go home.
You cannot go with your host,
to seek such a petty thing as this.’
Arthur replied: ‘Gwrhyr the Translator,
It is good for you to go on this quest,
You know all the languages of men,
and some of the animals and birds’.
Eidoel, it is good that you go with my men
to seek Mabon, as he is your cousin.
Kei and Bedwyr, it is my hope
that whatever you seek you will find.
Go on this quest for me.’
They went until they found the Blackbird of Gilgwri.
Gwrhyr asked her: ’For God’s sake,
Do you know anything of Mabon mab Modron,
who was taken from between his mother and the wall,
when he was three nights old?’
The Blackbird replied:
‘I was a young bird
when first I came here
and found this anvil.
It hasn’t been touched
except by my beak,
tapping each evening.
Today you can see
all that’s left is the size
of a nut. God’s
vengeance on me
if I know of this man
you ask me about.
However, I will do
what is proper for
Arthur’s messengers.
There is another
creature God made
before me, and I
will take you to him.’
They went until they found the Stag of Redynure.
‘Stag of Redynure, we are messengers of Arthur,
we know of no animal older than you.
Say if you know anything of Mabon mab Modron,
who was taken from between his mother and the wall
when he was three nights old.’
‘When first I came here,
I had but a single tine
on either side of my head.
There were no trees but a single sapling.
That sapling grew into an oak with a hundred branches.
Then it fell to the earth, and now
there’s nothing of it left but a red stump.
Though I’ve been here from that day to this,
I’ve heard nothing of this man you mention.
But because you are Arthur’s messengers,
I will be your guide to an animal God made before me.’
They came to the place
where they found the Owl of Cwm Kawlwyt.
‘Owl of Cwm Kawlywt these are messengers from Arthur.
Do you know anything of Mabon mab Modron
who was taken from his mother on the third night?’
‘What I do know, I will tell to you.
When first I came here
the great valley you see
was thick with trees.
Then came a race of men
and laid waste the wood.
A second wood grew.
You now see the third.
The roots of my wings
are mere stumps now.
From that day to this
I have heard nothing
of the man you are seeking.
But I will be a guide
for Arthur’s messengers
until you come to the oldest
creature in the world
who has travelled the furthest:
the Eagle of Gwern Abwy.’
Gwyhyr said: ‘Eagle of Gwern Abwy
We have come, as messengers of Arthur,
to ask if you know anything about Mabon mab Modron
who was taken from his mother
when he was three nights old?’
The Eagle replied:
‘I came here
a long time ago
and when I first came here,
I had a stone,
and each evening,
from the top of my stone
I pecked at the stars.
Now it is not a handsbreadth in height.
From that day to this I have been here.
I have heard nothing of this man.
However,
when I was seeking my food in Llyn Llyw,
I sunk my talons into a salmon,
thinking he would feed me for a long time
but he pulled me down into the depths.
It was with difficulty I got away.
What I then did,
with all my kinsmen,
was to launch an attack.
We sought to destroy him.
He sent messengers
to me
to make peace,
then came
to me,
in person,
to have fifty tridents
removed from his back.
Unless he knows something
of the man you mentioned
I don’t know of anyone who does.
However, I will take you to him.’
They came to the place where he was.
The eagle said: ‘Salmon of Llyn Llyw,
I have come to you with Arthur’s messengers,
to ask if you know anything of Mabon mab Modron
who was taken from his mother on the third night.’
‘As much as I know I will tell you.
With every flood tide I go up the river
until I come to the bend
beneath the walls of Kaer Loyw.
Never in my life have I encountered,
such misery as I found there.
So you may believe me,
let one of you climb
on each of my two shoulders.’
Kei and Gwrhyr climbed on his shoulders.
They travelled upstream until they came
to the other side of the wall from the prisoner.
They could hear a-weeping and a-wailing.
Gwrhyr said: ‘What man laments
in this house of stone?’ ‘Alas, man,
I have cause for lamentation.
Mabon mab Modron is the prisoner here.
And no one has ever been imprisoned so cruelly,
neither Llud Silver hand nor Greit mab Eri.’
‘Is there hope of obtaining your freedom,
with gold or silver or worldly goods?
Or will it require assault and fighting?’
‘Whatever you can get of me,
will be got by fighting.’
They returned to Arthur
and told him where Mabon was.
Arthur summoned the fighting men of the island,
and they went to Kaer Loyw.
Kei and Bedwyr went upstream
on the shoulders of the salmon.
While Arthur’s warriors were attacking the fort,
Kei broke the wall, fighting with the men inside,
even when he was carrying the prisoner on his back.
LIAM GUILAR is Poetry Editor of The Brazen Head, and the author of several poetry collections, including the series A Man of Heart, Presentment of Englishry and The Fabled Third (Shearsman), set in post-Roman Britain
Alexander Adams, Imperium Press, pb., 233 pps., £16.23
SAMUEL MARTIN welcomes a valuable ‘handbook’
Alexander Adams starts his book with a warning – “If anyone is in need of a practical manual of how to organise a counter-cultural vanguard, this is not the book you want.”
One may argue that Adams could’ve chosen a more accurate title. That would however be uncharitable. While not a “practical manual,” Adams nonetheless tries to show what works (or doesn’t) as derived from his own personal experience. The work isn’t a manifesto produced at the inaugural meeting of revolutionaries, declaring their intention to begin the world over again, but the progress report of a soldier who has been in the trenches for a while.
Specifically, the book is a compendium of essays, speeches, and letters by Adams in his crusade against ‘State Art.’ The term State Art is never explicitly defined, although it’s immediately clear what Adams is talking about – aesthetically heterogeneous but ideologically homogenous work arbitrarily foisted upon the public it simultaneously despises and depends on for subsidy.
Adams is however not a populist in either a political or aesthetical sense. His writing shows a clear minoritarian, elitist bent – lauding the handful of innovators, dynamos, and deviants who drag society kicking and screaming into the future. Adams regards himself (and the movement) as being revolutionary, and, like all good revolutionaries, seeks to capitalise on popular discontent, especially where it aligns with the movement’s objectives.
While this might invite accusations of opportunism, it’s clear that if Adams truly is motivated by self-interest, he’s chosen a terrible line of work as an outlet, something he outlines frankly to like-minded artists: “Any dissident arts centre will attract the ire of the governing elite… from media hit pieces and petitions to zoning-regulation alterations and de-platforming from banking systems should be expected.” It is for this reason Adams proposes a Moltke-esque ‘plans never survive contact with the enemy’ approach to dissident organisation.
In conjunction with his disdain for State Art, more cynical and reductive critics may dismiss Adams as speaking out of both sides of his mouth – nominally seeking to remove politics from art while vying to supplant one caste of ideologues with another, utilising art for a different set of political ends. But while Adams states that he’s not part of the ‘Left,’ his work forms a running argument that the enemy is not progressivism per se, but the incremental bureaucratic capture of imagination – the slow domestication of art into a credentialed, subsidised, token-dispensing machine. Progressivism is not so much an eternal enemy, but something that presently, circumstantially, stands in the way of art itself.
In that sense, his criticism of State Art is less a partisan swipe than a structural diagnosis; once art depends on public subsidy and ideological gatekeeping, risk evaporates, and merit is denounced. This is why he can simultaneously praise Old Masters, defend bad folk art, and encourage radical innovation—he sees them all as living vital expressions.
The charge that he is merely swapping one ideological caste for another misunderstands this point. Although he doesn’t seek to equivocate the marginalisation of Right-leaning artists with the liberals of yesteryear, Adams does not offer a checklist of acceptable themes or styles; his ultimate red line is that art be judged on its intrinsic qualities, not on the demographics or politics of its maker. “To be deemed a dissident,” he says, “all it takes (potentially) is being committed to art being judged on its intrinsic qualities and refusing to assess art according to the demographic characteristics of its maker or performer.” Adams’ funniest description of the prevailing art establishment view – and one that is oddly prescient in the light of highly charged current politics – goes as follows “An arts administrator in the UK would be as likely to programme a stage play – provocative but with artistic merit – that was sympathetic towards white nationalism, as he would place a live explosive in proximity to an audience…”
Self-portrait in full sunlight, by Alexander Adams, 2025
Adams’ determination to avoid sounding like a flippant curmudgeon place his work far ahead of other writers on this subject; he can credibly claim to having a vested interest in art, not merely acknowledging it when it gets caught in the crosshairs of political punditry. In this respect, Adams’ book is timely and useful. It can serve as a powerful counter to the pseudo-profound but popular notion that because art is made in society, and society is a compound of political decisions (past and ongoing), that all art is political.
This really matters. If all art is political, then the distinction between art and propaganda is entirely arbitrary – a figment of power to perpetuate the status quo. This not only makes it legitimate to reject technically sophisticated art for political reasons, but gives licence to work that, if hung in any place other than an established gallery, would be regarded as lowest-of-the-low slop. Just as telling truth in a world of lies becomes a political act, making art in a world of propaganda too becomes a political act – if not political in the eyes of the maker, then in the eyes of those who regard the artist as some kind of ideological enemy.
Adams’ core principle – art first, politics second – means that even when he speaks of “working for your people” or “building parallel institutions,” he is not calling for counter-propaganda but for the creation of conditions in which genuine creativity can flourish on its own terms. The most politically proficient thing one can do create good art – not as political art, but as art itself.
Adams’ twelve ‘rules’ for artists stand out as the work’s backbone: (1) Take yourself seriously (2) find friends (3) look at and talk about art seriously (4) work for your people (5) balance group interest and self-interest (6) make, destroy, monitor (7) keep records (8) write letters (9) art is a social business (10) find homes for your art (11) take risks and 12) take responsibility, suffer well.
There is a refreshing moral seriousness and sincerity to these rules that is rare in either art or politics – perhaps especially in dissident circles, where grifting and Internet histrionics are too often present. Dissecting these rules individually is beyond the scope of this review – which is unfortunate, because they constitute good advice not only for dissident artists, but for anyone with any kind of creative, intellectual, moral or political imperative.
As a writer, the rule to “Destroy a lot” stands out in particular to me. I have known this intuitively for a while, yet never thought to express in such indulgently brutal yet intimate terms:
It does you good to destroy your work and relinquish the substandard. Reuse your material when you can. Without the ability to be ruthless, you will accumulate too much and will be unable to see your achievements clearly. You will incur costs that will burden you with preserving the poor and thereby prevent you from making the better. Take pride in the best you have done and do not become too sentimental regarding the weak, secondary or superseded. Preserve samples of preparatory materials, experiments and unfinished pieces, but preserve sparingly.
These rules are the closest Adams gets to a coherent system of comportment. It’s at this point one begins to realise that Adams’ movement – for all the words he spends justifying its necessity, not to mention shopping list of logistics and strategic pointers – lacks a name.
Drawing on the Impressionists, Adams notes they had no explicit creed or aesthetical guideline beyond opposition to what was ‘the system’ at their time of formation. Here, Adams’ use of Nietzsche and Heidegger on the essence of art could have been tied more explicitly into his views on strategy. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger viewed Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” as emblematic of everything rational, detached, and sterilising we associate with the Enlightenment – contaminating all ensuing intellectual development, including the arts, with a litany of -isms (subjectivism, individualism, scepticism), by presupposing the existence of an “I.”
Adams is determined to avoid punishing self-definition, in order to allow for flexibility. Should dissident artists tell us immediately exactly what they believe and intend to create, they will labour under the pressure to do so, jeopardising their solidarity, and as a result, extinguish themselves.
In the end, we discover that the title isn’t a misnomer but a subtle hint. Adams’ movement isn’t something you announce with a press release. It is something that shows itself gradually in the work, piece by piece, until the proponents of State Art realise it exists. By then, it’ll be too late to stop.
MARLY YOUMANS is the author of sixteen books of poetry and fiction. Recent work includes a long poem, Seren of the Wildwood (Wiseblood), a novel, Charis in the World of Wonders (Ignatius), and a poetry collection, The Book of the Red King (Phoenicia).
’Ælfstan the Illuminator Begins a Work’ was the President’s Choice Award and Runner-up, Formal Verse Contest 2024, The English-Speaking Union (Victoria Branch, Australia)
Ælfstan the Illuminator Begins a Work
A flock of images allures the monk, Seizing hold of thought, and he remembers Unburning limbs and leaves that waved in fire, How branches seemed to sprout and stir in flame As if in water, how light grew to voice And spoke to Moses, boy fished from the Nile, Flame becoming illuminated word, Sight and hearing jumbled as one in play. He hesitates and feels a burning catch At him, his fingers with the brush and paint Floating above the vellum quires and text… The parchment maker and the scribe have done Their tasks and left a space for ornament And figures framed by snow or greenery.
And so, he thinks, a naked page is like The Uncreated who sustains the world, The spheres, the moon, the sky pricked out in stars. All-things are in his care who is not-thing, Who is the blossoming causer-to-be, Who clasps all mortal instants that to us Are past and present like an arrow flung Flashing from dark to light and back again, As if a sparrow fled the ravened night —so black when winter’s wolves gulp sun and moon!— Through slots in stone, into the mead-hall cheer Of feasting, bardic song, and Christmas tales, Only to make a calligraphic dash Across the light and toward another gap And then be lost in inks of mystery. What will the art in me begin this day? The cosmos gleams with possibility: All space, all time, the round of season-flux, Apocalypse of birth that cracks the dark, Hoe-scratchings at the ground once past Twelfth Night With milk and honey, oil and yeast slow-dripped On turf, with mass and thrice-blessed rowan cross, And through the cycle of the turning year. So strange it is, this sparrow-line of us, The tick by tick of human lives ensnared By year-long wheels of saints and feasts and fasts. We are the sparrow with its dark-light-dark Of arrow flight that’s fletched with pain and joy, And we are dancers weaving in a ring Of births and deaths and resurrection days, Fragrant with the scents of hay and flower.
His hand trembles, the sable hair of the brush Is blued with azurite, and now he sees The unconsuming flames of burning bush And hears sigla and words in hawthorn ink Begin to scatter notes and sing for him, Below the blanks that soon will come to be The rich illuminations of the year, The glass-locked stream, the flag-decked castle spire, A prince with hound and hunting tapestry And board with gold salt cellar and venison, Some peasants warming their backsides by a fire, Tunics and gowns a hoisted comedy. He ponders the hoop of seasons and how it is The sparrow flies in straightness like a pin… His hand dips and he makes first marks in blue As he dreams that linear or rounded time’s A pin of gold and a jeweled, hammered hoop: The ring-brooch on a cloak of endlessness, Abundance of the uncreated light.
MARLY YOUMANS is the author of sixteen books of poetry and fiction. Recent work includes a long poem, Seren of the Wildwood (Wiseblood), a novel, Charis in the World of Wonders (Ignatius), and a poetry collection, The Book of the Red King (Phoenicia).
’Ælfstan the Illuminator Begins a Work’ was the President’s Choice Award
and Runner-up, Formal Verse Contest 2024, The English-Speaking Union (Victoria Branch, Australia)
STUART MILLSON enjoys music linked by metropolises
The 2025 season of the BBC Proms was in its final furlong on Sunday 7th September, with an 11am performance of three highly descriptive works from the early part of the 20th-century – Respighi’s ‘Technicolor’ 1924 description of the Eternal City, The Pines of Rome (sun-drenched, but with a perfumed nocturne at its heart), Milhaud’s jazzy and wine-overflowing Le Boeuf sur le Toit, and the immediate pre-Great War London Symphony by Ralph Vaughan Williams. All connected by the theme of great cities, each work was given a velvety performance by the ever-euphonious, silky-toned Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (but with additional antiphonal brass to set those Roman Legions marching in the Respighi). And relishing the writing of each musical postcard was the RPO’s conductor, St. Petersburg-born-and-educated, Vasily Petrenko, an expressive, energetic conductor of the younger generation. Ottorino Respighi was the greatest film-score composer — who never wrote for the movies! He should have really been there for those great directors of the past, with their Xanadu grandeur and appetites for the mass-drama of the ancient world, but instead his epic scores accompany the picture-house of the mind: the rush and swirl of a heady city, full of the dust of the past, as children’s games in the park open his Roman pines holiday.
The Stravinsky-like opening, with its dainty little fanfares and marches, builds to a brazen crescendo — and suddenly the audience is plunged into a sepulchral atmosphere of ruins, remains, skulls, catacombs; and like an incantation from Roman worship, with seers and soothsayers never far away, the movement slowly lurches forward like a procession of colour plates from a history-book, come to life. The warmer, sensuous sounds of the night then waft into the score in The Pines of the Janiculum Hill, switching the panorama to one of soothing, delicate ultra-romanticism — the sweetness of the warm darkness crowned by a recording of a nightingale’s song played over the loving woodwind and strings. Respighi was right: not even a composer or first-class orchestra could imitate the such a bird. Finally, a theme of some disquiet begins to rise and rumble on the horizon of the Via Appia — the occasional glint of sun on a shield, the faint sense of Legions’ standards coming into view. With batteries of brass and percussion standing by, the RPO made the slow, yet unmistakably glorious march to the capital of one of the world’s great empires, before the full weight of dazzling orchestral sound — reinforced by the hundreds-strong pipes of the Royal Albert Hall organ — brought Pini di Roma to its blazing finale.
Josephine Baker, by Paul Colin. 1930
Mid-20th-century Gallic wit, insouciance, even surrealism is the heady cocktail for Darius Milhaud’s Le Boeuf sur Le Toit — the jazz-age scena (with orchestral, rather human voices) which sparkles on the dance-floor of a nightclub named, bizarrely, ‘The Ox on the Roof’. This is carnival time, 1919, in a fictitious bar, a ballet of weird characters tapping their feet in time to jazzy tunes and dancing the night away — although a night-spot did open in Paris, using this very name, and they made the bon viveur Milhaud a member. Even though our Proms performance was nearing noon, the Royal Philharmonic made us all feel as though we were in a late-night, Bogart-type bar, with the Gitanes-smoke smouldering in the dark corners and the hedonists relishing every syncopated note on the dance-floor.
Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1917
When the English composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams takes an audience to a place — whether a lark ascending over the downland, or the oceans of A Sea Symphony — you can bet that there is more to it than just a portrait coloured in by an orchestra. The lark soars to an unknown region, or you steer, not for the deep waters of the mid-Atlantic, but navigate around your own deepest thoughts in the dark night of the soul. In the composer’s A London Symphony, written just before the Great War, we find ourselves seeing through the clearing of the morning mist, just like Wordsworth’s vision of the city from Westminster Bridge — or in the elegiac nocturne, the autumn leaves in Bloomsbury Square. But it is, too, a city of dreadful night — music which in its final movement Betjeman chose to accompany his 1977 television poetry anthology, but using the music for scenes of the stark grandeur of wintry hills, rather than the town: a sense of the life-cycle of the year — of us all — meeting the maker of our being. Maestro Petrenko felt every pulse of this most English journey, bringing forth playing of nervy beauty in what is a complex, enigmatic, deep-water score. The finale, inspired by a passage from H.G. Wells’s novel, Tono-Bungay, depicts a vessel sailing by night along London’s river, to the Thames estuary and open sea… “London passes, England passes… all the old certainties glide astern…” — and here, the RPO’s woodwind and sepia strings conjured a Time Machine feel of dates, time, reality, all dissolving and meaningless as the city fades into a memory. A Proms concert that won’t be easily forgotten, in this, my 44th year at these concerts.
Directed by Asa Bailey, co-written by Asa Bailey and Jack Marsden, starring Bruce Jones and Jack Marsden
In the world of film and cinema today, it is something of a relief to find, not just a story without improbable car chases through Los Angeles, AI-generated explosions or extreme-weather calamities, but which centres itself upon the quiet north Wales town of Llandudno and the lives of two men: army veteran, Major Harris, and his carer, Gary.
It is the kind of film at which our country excels – slow-burn, minimalist drama, set against the background of ordinariness – the result being the sense of an even more acute build-up of tension than one would find in any blockbuster. It is a simple enough idea: the retired soldier, looking back on a life of action, but unable to adjust completely to the banality of everyday life, coming into contact and conflict with the equally tedious world of care and social services. Gary (played by BAFTA winner, Jack Marsden*) – volunteer carer, dressed in casual clothes – knocks at the Major’s door, and at once there are the unmistakeable signs of an impending personality and culture clash. Gary seems domesticated enough and willing to help, but Harris is accustomed to his own household rituals and his emotional short-fuse (the result of his war-experiences) leads to a grand bust-up.
Jack Marsden
Taking the role of Major Harris is the well-known Coronation Street star, Bruce Jones, who brings something of the all-in-a-day weariness of a ‘soap’ character to the story. And yet, because of the pauses, the silences, the sense of brooding, anxiety, misery in the Major, the viewer is given far more than a low-budget film with an efficient, half-hour TV script. Jones’s performance is worthy of the highest accolades – and this is because he is completely believable in his role, so much so, that you – the viewer – may find yourself wanting to reach out and help him.
And it is Gary, the casual care-worker – a man who resides in a mobile home – who doesn’t even know his next step in life, who wants to give Harris the assistance he clearly needs. Rejected, though, and ordered out by the old soldier, Gary seems to pass from the story. A new carer arrives, a cheerful-enough girl (played by Sophie Anderson), this time, wearing a uniform; more what you would expect a care-assistant to look like, but it is soon clear that she, too, is just drifting in our modern Britain. Gary, meanwhile, breathless and in disarray, and unable to find any other work, tries to cling to his identity: ‘I’m Gary, I’m Gary,’ he says – as if trying to prevent himself from tipping into complete despair. Yet at this point, we discover something of his own identity: he, like Harris, has a past, but one which he hardly talks about and acknowledges to himself only in moments of extreme emotion.
Bruce Jones and Jack Marsden
The film, recalls Jack Marsden, was first premiered in Liverpool, in the presence of HM Lord Lieutenant of Liverpool – to a standing ovation, with many ex-servicemen in the audience clearly profoundly moved by the screenplay. Jack also notes the role played by Anthony H. Wilson of Factory Records, the founder of a Manchester-based charity concerned with suicide among men; and it was Anthony’s wide knowledge of this problem which helped Jack to shape his on-screen character.
Jack had also worked with Bruce Jones, prior to Duty of Care, on Ken Loach’s Cannes award-winner, Raining Stones; and it was with great pride that all those involved with the new film received the praise and endorsement of the senior filmmaker. Yet it is also the town of Llandudno that stars in Asa and Jack’s compelling work: a place, perhaps, of sleepy anonymity, where Major Harris and Gary spend so many of their hours looking out to sea, churning over the past and wondering what the future holds…
*Jack Marsden, BAFTA award-winner for his role as PC Rylance in The Cops
WILLIAM G. CARPENTER is the author of Eþandun (Beavers Pond Press, 2020), which depicts King Alfred’s struggle with the pagan Danes in 878 AD. Available from Amazon, Itasca Books Distribution and www.williamgcarpenter.com
This is an excerpt from a poem-in-progress on the English Civil War. Previous sections have been published in Expansive Poetry On Line and The Brazen Head. [1]
The Trial of Charles Steward
A-riding through the rain on miry roads, Harrison fetched the king to Windsor Castle, where Hamilton met him, kneeling in the mud. That very day, the Commons formed a committee to stipulate how to proceed against him. When Charles shunned Feilding-Denbigh’s last-ditch offer – his crown for bishops’ lands and the royal veto – the army council stripped him of his state and let him dine alone and read his Shakespeare. The Commons passed, and sent the Lords, a bill for a High Court of Justice for to try him. The Lords denounced the Commons’ treason charge as lawless and absurd. Said Feilding-Denbigh, named a judge, “I’d rather be torn in pieces than take part in so infamous a business.” Whence the Commons espoused the army’s notion, originating, plainly, with the Levellers, that the people being the source of all just power, its acts alone were law, sans king or Lords.
Late-coming Oliver eschewed the Council, meeting instead with Widdrington and Whitelocke, with Lenthall and Rich-Warwick, to explore ways other than the officers’ Agreement. He asked the Duke of Hamilton at Windsor to say who had invited him to invade – Charles, LG Browne, remains of the Eleven? No answer was forthcoming from the Scot. O.C. disliked fixing a term for Parlament and thought Charles might be spared, his trial deferred till after those of other malefactors, Hamilton, Rich-Holland, Goring-Norwich, Owen, Lingen, Dyve, and Hastings-Loughborough. As ever, Cromwell waited on the Lord.
But when Charles rebuffed Feilding-Denbigh’s mission as envoy of a clutch of glorious peers – and the Commons and the army rose together in calling for the trial of the tyrant – then Oliver discerned the hand of God in His clear witnessings and dispensations, albeit the Holy Ghost had not yet singed him. He mused, when added late to the committee charged to draft the ordinance for the trial, “Only the greatest traitor in the world – the greatest rebel – would dare carry on a plan to try the king for capital crimes. But God’s providence has cast us upon it – myself can but submit. God bless your counsels, though I am not provided to give mine.”
The act to frame the High Court of Justice (which Rushworth called an ordinance of attainder) alleged a wicked design by Charles Steward to raze our ancient laws and liberties and in their place to plant an arbitrary and tyrannical state – the which design Charles Steward had maintained with fire and sword, levying war against the Parlament, wasting the public wealth, and murdering thousands. Some seven score MPs and officers, citizens, City magistrates, and lawyers were named to be commissioners and judges.
Fifty or so attended the first meeting (the Lord General’s last) in the Painted Chamber. Fewer met next session, and the next, and fewer still the next, when Serjeant Bradshaw declined, at first, the unwanted dignity, unwanted but rewardful, of Lord President. Cooke, Aske, and Dorislaus would draft the charges – Steele had fallen suddenly, sadly ill. Despite the fervor for a large indictment reaching back to James’ suspicious death, the court kept out the bulk of Charles’ misdoings, save those of substituting will for law and levying war against the Parlament.
Harrison and Peter led the train that ferried Charles in bitter cold from Windsor. The trial commenced in vast Westminster Hall sub Second Richard’s oaken hammer beams, where Strafford had been tried, and years before, Frances Howard, Essex’ sometime countess, for murdering Sir Thomas Overbury. Led in by Hacker’s thirty halberdiers, Charles eyed the Lord President where he sat in crimson chair, behind a crimson cushion, and eyed the great sanhedrin of commissioners to either side, on rows of scarlet benches. A mace and sword lay on the Turkey carpet that decked the table where the clerks awaited. Charles turned to view the gentry in the galleries, Axtell’s musketeers, the thousand groundlings, then settled on the velvet chair provided, and rose, and sat again. Silence commanded, Bradshaw declared the Commons had empowered that court to make inquisition for blood.
When Cooke commenced to speak, Charles sought to stay him, rapping him on the shoulder with his stick – a harmless battery – whose silver head fell to the floor, beyond poor Herbert’s reach. Charles stooped to fetch it. Cooke preferred the charge, which a clerk then read, from Charles’s fell design to substitute his private will for law, to the dire raising of his wind-blown standard at Nottingham, to the great fights at Edgehill, Brentford, Caversham, Gloucester, Newbury, Cropredy, Bodmin, Newbury, Leicester, and Naseby Field, where many thousand free people were slain, to the mad outbursts of the present year. Charles listened sternly, till he scoffed aloud at “tyrant, traitor, murderer, and public enemy to the Commonwealth of England.” Bradshaw then demanding Charles’s answer, Charles held the ground he’d seized from the beginning – that court had no authority to try him.
Repeatedly, the court asked Charles to plead guilty or not guilty to the charge – this, repeatedly, he refused to do. Repeatedly, he asked whence came their power – repeatedly was told, the people of England. This Charles Steward sturdily denied. First, no earthly court could try a king, his crown having come to him from God. He reigned not by consent but by descent, lawful descent, above a thousand years. Second, no law provided for such trial by Parlament – the Commons being none, lacking king and peers and judicial powers. To answer, to submit to usurpation, was counter to his duty as their king. The court, said Bradshaw, overruled his demurrer, and barred him from persisting in such reasons. “Show me the court where reason is not heard,” said Charles. Bradshaw said, “The Commons of England.” That second day, he ordered Charles’ default.
Despite default, the court chose a committee of colonels and MPs to hear the witnesses. Some thirty testified that day and Thursday, including gentlemen and husbandmen, a yeoman, and men standing for the trades of ironmonger, painter, maltster, weaver, cordwainer, barber-surgeon, vintner, scrivener, and soldier. They had seen the king himself in helmet, armor back and front, sword drawn at or near the several battlefields where thousands on both sides had spilt their blood. He’d countenanced the cruelty of his men in plundering and cutting on their prisoners. Later, whilst he treated on the Isle of Wight, he’d schemed to bring an Irish host to England. The witnesses avowed their depositions in open court held in the Painted Chamber. Thus Charles was not judged solely pro confesso, as men had been in the old Star Chamber days.
The court reconvening to sentence Charles, he asked for leave to address both his Houses in the Painted Chamber, as much concerning peace. Bradshaw was scarlet-gowned for the day’s business and wore as before his high-crowned, steel-lined hat. Charles too was covered, as all times before. Bradshaw said twas but a more delay and denial of the forum’s jurisdiction, but Charles denied denying jurisdiction, though owning he could not acknowledge it.
“Have we hearts of stone?” asked Colonel Downes, seated back of Bradshaw, “are we men?” Downes’ neighbors on the bancs, Cawley and Walton, and O.C. just below, essayed to calm him, but Downes stood up and asked for an adjournment, which Bradshaw ordered, leading the commissioners to the Court of Wards. There O.C. and others angrily chided Downes for “a peevish man” who “knew not that the court now had to do with the hardest-hearted man that lived on Earth.” Said Cromwell, “He would fain save his old master.” Downes went apart and wept. The court returning, Bradshaw said twould brook no more delays, and answered Charles’ objections to its powers.
Briefly, the king’s deeds spoke not of peace. Nor were our kings superior to the laws that often-summoned Parlaments enacted, the king’s task being to administer justice. The people kept the right to bridle kings, as peers had nobly done in the Barons’ Wars, every nation furnishing suchlike precedents, including Charles’s native land of Scotland. His grandmother Mary was set aside, as in England, Edward Two and Richard Two. The people set them up and took them down – the people, not descent, made English kings. Truly, Charles was a tyrant and a traitor who’d fouled the land by shedding guiltless blood. Bradshaw prayed the Lord might mend his heart and make him sensible of his miscarriages, then, refusing further to hear from Charles, who all along had disavowed the court, ordered the clerk (Broughton) to read the sentence:
which was that Charles Steward be put to death by the severing of his head from his body. The whole court rose to acknowledge the sentence. Charles was led out. No rioting erupted, save calls for “Justice!” and “God save the king!” Two ladies had cried out against the trial, one of whom was said to be Lady Fairfax. Charles rode in a sedan chair back to Whitehall, hid from view by soldiers lining King Street. No force of reformadoes rose for him, no turbulent apprentices from London, nor those who’d marched to disband Fairfax’ army, nor those who’d risen up against the excise, nor those who loved the Book of Common Prayer.
On Sunday he was carried to St. James’s, where Juxon preached and prayed with him all day, the king excluding others from his presence. Cromwell would not have judged him so hard-hearted had he seen with what feeling he gave his daughter, when the children visited him on Monday, his Hooker, Andrewes, and Laud contra Fisher.
“Remember” was the king’s last word to Juxon up on the freezing platform outside Whitehall. He’d likewise urged Elizabeth to remember his last words to his sons and to his lady. Glancing at the sword, he’d said in court he did not fear “the bill” – he now made good that piece of bravery. Charles had always dared to plant one footstep, then the next – to face the thunder of the guns, the gusting lead, and the blind, smoking countenance of Mars transpierced by stabbing red and yellow fires. Before he stepped from James’s Banqueting House, he took a bite of manchet and some claret.
High above the Parlamentarian troopers who held back the crowd from the black-draped scaffold, Charles made his last defense to those nearby, the colonels, clerks, and executioners, styling himself anew the people’s martyr, defender of their wealth and liberties, who had defied the tyrannous usurpers – he who’d raised forced loans and so-called ship money, who’d jailed his Parlamentary opponents, dissolved the Houses for eleven years, who’d mutilated Bastwick, Prynne, and Burton, persecuted godly folk in their churches, and lastly levied war against the Houses, scheming to bring in foreign arms to best them.
When the bright axe from the Tower struck its blow – unlike the flurry needed to quell Mary – one cried aloud, “Behold the head of a traitor!” A huge groan, twas said, broke from the crowd, as if Dagon had crushed them in the temple – so sunk were they, were we, in fond idolatry, illumining one small, obstinate prince with borrowed glimmers from our Lord and King. Hacker’s troopers swiftly cleared the streets.
[1] “Parlament” was Milton’s preferred spelling, as being more faithful to the word’s Late Latin origin. Steward is not a spelling error.
WILLIAM G. CARPENTER is the author of Eþandun (Beavers Pond Press, 2020), which depicts King Alfred’s struggle with the pagan Danes in 878 a.d. Available from Amazon, Itasca Books Distribution and www.williamgcarpenter.com.
STUART MILLSON enjoys a rhapsodic favourite as well as world premieres at the English Music Festival
Friday 23 May 2025 marked the beginning of the eighteenth English Music Festival, a much-looked-forward-to annual event in the classical calendar and a testimony to the considerable organisational and fundraising skills of its founding director, Mrs. Em Marshall-Luck. Despite receiving no support from the Arts Council of England, no help from the ‘Department of Culture, Media and Sport’ and no visit or encouragement from Government ministers (either Labour or Conservative – save for one brief appearance by Boris Johnson in the early days), the Festival has managed to galvanise a loyal following of supporters, benefactors and artists – thus ensuring the continuation, not just of the main four-day event, but a host of other concerts, events and recording initiatives. A lesson in self-reliance and self-belief, the EMF must be considered as one of the most remarkable events of its kind – not least because of its presentation of a forgotten part of our national musical heritage.
Usually when one thinks of an English music concert, works such as Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’ or Vaughan Williams’s TheLarkAscending come to mind, and many such prominent works are indeed to be found in the Festival’s programmes. But what distinguishes the EMF is its patient work – hours spent in archives and in tracking down lost scores – reconstructing a lost world of English music. Thanks to the musicological detective work of figures such as Martin Yates, the conductor of the opening-night’s concert, audiences are taken way beyond the usual boundaries.
Stanley Bate
This year, we were treated to the enigma and variations of Stanley Bate’s SecondSymphony – Bate, a pupil of Vaughan Williams and the German composer, Hindemith, yet who has been practically forgotten by the musical establishment in this country. The presentation of his searing four-movement symphony from the late 1930s amounted to a posthumous world-premiere for a potentially great but tortured figure, who died tragically before his time. It also brought home to the audience (and performers) just how avant-garde English composers could be – resetting our idea of our native music, as something that could be as Shostakovichian as pastoral or romantic.
Bate’s work had some radiant moments within its taut structure, like an exhalation of breath amid the angst, but on the whole, some of the febrile nature (and phraseology) reminiscent of Vaughan Williams’s FourthSymphony made it a muscular, physical, challenging – even shattering – musical experience. The beginning of the last movement brought to mind the stretched tonality and astringent string writing of Britten’s VariationsonaThemeofFrankBridge, making the piece very much the province (you would have thought) of BBC Symphony Orchestra repertoire, those specialists of 20th century music. But I doubt that any ensemble could have rivalled the faultless, totally-committed rendition given at Dorchester by the BBC Concert Orchestra – musicians who seem to have the gift of versatility, allowing them to roam from show music to popular classics, and the pinnacles of British music of the last century.
William Alwyn
Alongside the Stanley Bate, the BBC CO gave us an injection of springtime energy, in the form of William Alwyn’s TheInnumerableDance – AnEnglishOverture. This was a vision of sensuality and radiance, every bit as transcendental as a Wagnerian Tristan and Isolde. It was followed by Delius’s well-known TheWalktotheParadiseGarden, although the setting is Switzerland rather than our own land. The rich, expansive acoustic of Dorchester Abbey, full of reverberation and ‘air’ was just right for the Delius, as it was indeed for the HeroicElegyandTriumphalEpilogue, an early work (1901) by Vaughan Williams, the monumental conclusion of which included the magisterial tones of the Abbey’s organ, ringing out over and through the orchestra.
The Festival paid tribute to Sir Arthur Bliss, in this the 50th anniversary year of his death, with another exceptional interpretation, the CelloConcerto of 1970, a piece premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival under the baton of Benjamin Britten. Originally written for the Russian cellist Rostropovich, the Dorchester performance was given by one of the greats of our own era, Raphael Wallfisch, who brought this neglected, fine and fluent score to life. Having performed Finzi’s CelloConcerto at the Festival some ten years ago, Wallfisch has the full measure of English music – bringing a warmth, detail, spirit and true authority to another part of England’s music that has tended to languish in a backwater. Sitting as I was on the second row, I found myself admiring the chamber-like detail of the cello playing, the soloist given a full spotlight of sound, thanks to the sensitive accompaniment of Martin Yates and the BBC Concert Orchestra.
Rupert Marshall-Luck and Peter Cartwright Image: Stuart Millson
The next day at the Festival’s Saturday morning recital, the official chamber players took centre-stage – violinist, Rupert Marshall-Luck and pianist, Peter Cartwright, a powerful partnership dedicated (again) to works and composers who have become distant to us. First was Norman O’Neill’s (1875-1934) Suite in B minor for Violin and Piano, and then Alan Rawsthorne’ s 1933-34 Violin Sonata. Rawsthorne attained fame as a film composer in the 1940s and ‘50s, but his Violin Sonata is little known. In fact, the recitalists were giving the first public performance of the work in the United Kingdom. Both violinist and pianist were as skilled in delivering the foot-tapping finale to the Rawsthorne, as they were in the gentler, dreamier lines of Delius’s Sonata in B major and the Cradle Song by Herbert Howells (the latter, another premiere, thanks to the determination of the EMF) – confirming them as two of our country’s very finest performers and advocates of English chamber music.
WADE SMITH revisits Decline of the West, and its critics
To paraphrase a famous Tory lexicographer, a death-sentence concentrates the mind wonderfully. People are born, flourish, weaken, and pass away, but so do nations and empires. Although the comparison is metaphorical, the phenomenon is real.
Surely the gradual crumbling of Great Britain from Lord Salisbury’s imperial zenith to Ed Miliband’s imbecile zero is undeniable. It fits into a general Euro-American deterioration, exacerbated by welfare-dependence, industrial unrest and defence-alliance disarray. Consequently, a revival of interest has occurred over questions of historical change, and in its successive commentators, from Plato and Polybius, through Ibn Khaldun and Giambattista Vico, to Paul Kennedy and Paul Cooper.
Overshadowing them all is Oswald Spengler, who died 89 years ago this May. His huge work on “Western decline” drew admirers. Nirad Chaudhuri called it “one of the greatest books of our time.” Henry Kissinger saw it as an “attempt at the resolution of the problems of existence,” while Fernand Braudel praised “its tone, the breadth of its views, its passion for understanding.” Christopher Dawson wrote that “Spengler wishes to make the present generation conscious of the crisis through which it is passing and of the true task that lies before it.”
However, the well-known historian Niall Ferguson, under the impression that Spengler had been influenced by Wagner (it was actually Goethe), once asserted that his “turgid” prose was nowadays seldom read [1]. But his giant Geist has rematerialized – to haunt the current geostrategic gloom of international trade turmoil and knife-edge security risks.
Many references to Spengler have lately appeared in print journalism, scholarly monographs, timely podcasts and specialist websites, from Professor David Engels [2] to Professor Stephen R. L. Clark [3]. His early historical studies and family photos have been publicised. The glib dismissal of his magisterial oeuvre as a ‘gargantuan horror-scope’ ceases to amuse in the world he so accurately predicted.
Recent books include the richly researched, indispensable Oswald Spengler & the Politics of Decline, by the Marxist scholar Dr Ben Lewis, on his principled “Prussian” activism and mutual incompatibility with Hitler, who (I discovered) specifically denounced him in a public address on May Day 1935. TheDecline& Fall of Civilisations is a considerable survey from the prolific and idiosyncratic writer Dr Kerry Bolton, who endorses Spengler’s suggestion of the next major Culture emerging from the Russian landscape. Especially important is his place among Dr Neema Parvini’s constructively analytical Prophets of Doom, alongsideGobineau, Carlyle, Brooks Adams, Glubb Pasha, Evola, Sorokin, Toynbee, Turchin and Tainter. Ulrik Rasmussen’s relevant Fall of Western Civilization: The Cycle of Supremacy also deserves close attention.
Spengler began life near the Harz mountains and his heart finally failed in Munich when only fifty-five. His masterwork on the downslide of Occidental civilisation was conceived before and partly written during the first world war. Its so-called “cyclic” theme, preceded by the Slavophile Nikolai Danilevsky’s Russia & Europe, and echoed, less substantially, by the Anglo-Saxons Flinders Petrie [4] and Correa Moylan Walsh [5], made a dramatic impact and engendered serious debate in his defeated Fatherland.
The sinking-sun imagery powerfully evoked by its “Teutonic Title” was attenuated as Decline of the West in an excellent translation for English-speakers, whose more subdued response, admirably documented by John Carter Wood [6], in some cases recalls a notorious lordly dismissal of Gibbon’s narrative about the fall of Rome as just another scribbled tome. A contemporary classicist, E. H. Goddard, nonetheless ably supported its fundamental cross-cultural alignments with corresponding pull-out civilisation timetables [7].
I first encountered this book in the library of my then 430-year-old former grammar-school in Walthamstow. Its thick black spine made a welcome contrast to its Left Book Club amber-cover shelf-companions; and its fascinating contents likewise. My adolescent appetite was promptly reinforced by seemingly corroborative material in Geoffrey Barraclough’s History in a Changing World, Eric Bentley’s Cult of the Superman, Amaury de Riencourt’s Coming Caesars and Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd.
By an odd coincidence, the late Roger Scruton made a similar youthful discovery, but disappointment with Spengler’s “unscholarly inaccuracy” diminished this conservative intellectual’s approval of his “grim” prognosis. Given the arduous circumstances of its original composition, and the information then available for revision, however, occasional errors are forgivable; several disputed aspects have also since found defenders.
After initially greeting his magnum opus, the anti-Nazi novelist Thomas Mann afterwards recoiled as if handed a demonic grimoire. The Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg complained that its “morphological view” of destiny denied “race and personality.” Irving Babbitt described the singularly erudite and earnest polymath as a “charlatan of genius.” Martin Heidegger and Wyndham Lewis attacked him much more thoughtfully, along with established historians. Aurel Kolnai ridiculed his “harsh Olympic coldness,” whereas Theodor Adorno granted the “destructive soothsayer” a nuanced appreciation.
Nevertheless, the book impressed poets like W. B. Yeats, David Jones and Robinson Jeffers, authors as different as D. H. Lawrence, Whittaker Chambers, Colin Wilson and Camille Paglia, the mythologist Joseph Campbell, the systems-theorist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and surprisingly Ludwig Wittgenstein. And it left me personally with a lifelong interest in “philosophies of history.”
Spengler wrote with the eye of an artist and the pen of a poet, producing beautiful passages of keen sensibility, exemplified by his account of infant Christianity:
Tame and empty all the legends and holy adventures of Mithras, Attis and Osiris must have seemed [compared] to the still recent story of Jesus [whose utterances resembled] those of a child in the midst of an alien, aged, and sick world…. Like a quiet island of bliss was the life of these fishermen and craftsmen by the Lake of Gennesaret, while all around them glittered the Hellenistic towns with their theatres and temples, their refined western society, their Roman cohorts, their Greek philosophy…. The one religion in the history of the world in which the fate of a man of the immediate present has become the emblem and the central point of the whole creation.
This delicate passage appears within a mammoth text, whose martial attitude elsewhere was ironically condemned by communists [8] as brutal advocacy for the Junker aristocrats they sought to eradicate in the “violent overthrow” of existing society and “bloody struggle or extinction,” as Karl Marx expressed it. Even during Spengler’s short literary lifetime, millions perished in the USSR.
He depicted the West as one of eight self-contained Hochkulturen, in addition to the Babylonian, Egyptian, Mesoamerican, Indian, Chinese, Magian, and Classical. Each possesses a distinctive ethos characterised by its cosmology, symbolism and architecture, yet all pass through comparable stages, like the inevitable transition from spring to winter, though without recurrence. We need not discuss pertinent definitions of “civilisation”, as previously covered by Samuel Huntington, Pitirim Sorokin and Naohiko Tonomura, except that Arnold Toynbee responded to the challenge with over 20 “mortal” examples, historians Philip Bagby and Caroll Quigley choosing fewer, and Nicholas Hagger listing 25.
Setting aside Spengler’s own metaphysical “collective-soul determinism”, complex macro-societies often proceed through almost parallel patterns, such as solely waning average intelligence [9]. The empirical examination of the multiple causes of their growth, decay and collapse is a legitimate and rewarding pursuit.
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s “environmental features,” Claire & Bill Russell’s “population cycles,” Jim Penman’s “behaviour biodynamics,” David Hackett Fischer’s “price revolutions” and Heiner Rindermann’s “cognitive capital” are among numerous contributions towards a fresh and fruitful development in objective social science, aided by comprehensive data-led websites like Peter Turchin’s valuable Cliodynamica and Seshat.
Several terminal phases have been linked to urban sprawl and congestion, and failing competence and character among the rulers of a largely hedonistic populace. Cluttered with material and mental sewage, the “megalopolis” becomes vulnerable to farmland depletion, infections and addictions, depravity and disability, sectarian discord and organised crime, plus susceptibility to invasion. In 1927 the pacifist Aldous Huxley voiced the fear that industrialisation of numerically greater races could put us at their military mercy. By 1951 Shephard Clough’s economic analysis of the rise and descent of civilisations expected envious outsiders eventually to attack Europe.
The validity of Spengler’s century-old foresight is easily overlooked precisely because of its present familiarity. The literary critic Northrop Frye described at length, fifty years ago, how the “detail of Spengler’s vision is all around us… What [he] said would happen is happening, to a very considerable degree” [10]. Does not parliamentary democracy, for instance, operate by deception, bribery and “shameless flattery,” so that “election affairs” become “games staged as popular self-determination” to suit obscured wealthy interests? “People want to think only what they are supposed to think, and this they consider freedom.” Ideological convictions are dissolving into disposable fashions, except for an emergent “second religiousness,” possibly indicated by Gen Z revival of Bible study, and potentially focused on the Holy City of Jerusalem.
Entering the epoch of less heavenly inner-cities and global skyscraper competition, we find, exactly as he said, “primitive instincts” let loose in sexual relations, the “reappearance of the panem et circenses in the form of wage-disputes and football-grounds,” “incomprehension of tradition,” the “extinction of great art” and of “courtesy,” “betting and competitions” for excitement,“ alcohol and vegetarianism” as prominent issues, and crucially the “childlessness and ‘race suicide’ of the rootless strata, a phenomenon not peculiar to ourselves but already observed – and of course not remedied – in Imperial Rome and Imperial China.”
The 1939-45 titanic “war of contending states”, which bypassed Spengler’s ignored warning to Germanic nationalists against “biological antisemitism” and a “Napoleonic adventure in Russia,” shifted the “imperium” from Berlin to Washington, thereby fatally disarranging his anticipated sequence for conclusive contests between “blood” and “money.” Caesarism today is manifested not in fascist legions, but in the formlessness of American politics, despite ambiguity over machine-technics, financial-flux and armed-force deployment; Musk rather than Mussolini.
His phrase “the world as spoil” neatly applies to impending rare-earth search and supply-lane safety from the Arctic to the Black Sea, and beyond. The invention of “weapons yet unforeseen” has alarmingly accelerated, with continental territories “staked – India, China, Russia, Islam called out, new technics and tactics played and counter-played.” We can match his futurology against reflections by present-day writers like Thomas Frey, Bruno Macaes and Ian Morris, regarding particularly the tumultuous interactions of Putin, Trump, Xi and “great cosmopolitan foci of power.”
Shortly before his death, Spengler further envisaged a devastatingly concurrent underclass and colour conflict. It would make no difference, he explained, if Bolshevism “ceased to dictate”, for “the work goes forward of itself.” Did not this danger arrive, a mere three decades later, from the US New Left “race, gender, class revolution,” subsequently exported as “critical theory” for a “long march” or (more accurately) incremental infiltration, through Western institutions, targeting “white privilege,” “white patriarchy” and “embedded whiteness,” and culminating, for example, in both DEI regulations and BLM rioting?
Perhaps Paris 1968, Brixton 1981, Madrid 2004 and Munich 2025 are pointers. The Network Contagion Research Institute reports a surge in approval of political violence, mainly among left-wing networkers. Effective protection against foreign-community intrusions remains morally paralysed as uncharitable “racism,” despite unabated mass-exodus of the multi-million ‘wretched of the earth,’ aided by profiteering traffickers, in a “nomad century.”
Number-philosopher Philip J. Davis thought his fellow-mathematician from the Kaiserreich classrooms was correct to discern the advent of “theories of everything” in science, and possibly, in the outcome of mass-media and telecommunications, the control “like that of Faust” of human minds by a self-operating computer-system “wrapping the earth with an endless web of delicate forces, currents and tensions.”
Spengler’s refutation of universally inevitable linear “progress” has anyhow been largely vindicated, in my judgement, by the evils of vacuous postmodernism, compulsory multiculturalism and suicidal wokeism [11]. Was he too imaginatively attached, however, to ancient and classical models to follow through his unique insight into the heroic exploration, energetic curiosity and infinite endeavour that typify our exceptional “Faustian” ethos? Maybe our railways will lie ultimately forgotten “as dead as the Roman wall” and monuments “ruined like Memphis,” but the last prolonged turn of the western wheel must entail extensive fulfilment as well as senescent exhaustion.
“Only the future,” observed another academic admirer, Professor John Farrenkopf,
…and not Spengler’s innumerable detractors, is in a position to authoritatively answer the question if mankind is nearing in apocalyptic fashion, whether through nuclear Armageddon, the synergistic interaction of international economic collapse and the explosive North-South conflict, or the intensification of the global ecological crisis, the much-discussed end of history. [12]
Nevertheless, could Western science, which has split the atom and spliced the gene, reached the outer planets and penetrated the brain itself, under sagacious guidance, yet modify our caducity with robotics, ecological management and biological enhancement? “Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” we should at least respect the venerable advice of der Weissager to face up to facts, with fortitude and fidelity to our noblest values.
NOTES
[1] War of the World (2007), p.645; cf. Doom (2022); The Great Degeneration (2014); Civilization (2012)
[2] Oswald Spengler: Introduction au ‘Declin de l’Occident (2024); Spengler: Pensando en el Futuro (2022),&c. The author presides over The Oswald Spengler Society
[3] “New Histories of the World: Spenglerian Optimism,” Philosophical Journal of Conflict & Violence (2022) online
[4] The Revolutions of Civilisation (1911)
[5] The Climax of Civilisation (1917)
[6] “’German foolishness’….Spengler & the Inter-war British Press,” www.academia.edu/3315175, online
[7] Civilisation or Civilisations [with P. A. Gibbons & F. C. S. Schiller] (1926)
[8] E.g. Nikolai Bukharin (1934); cf. Melvin Rader, No Compromise (1939)
[9] Elmer Pendell, Why Civilizations Self-Destruct (1977); Cf. Edward Dutton & Michael Woodley, At Our Wits’ End (2018); Robert Klark Graham, The Future of Man (1981); Raymond Cattell, A New Morality from Science (1972), pp.146-147; Donald Kagan (ed) Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire (1962)
[11] Cf. David Ashton, “Decline of the Best?” Council of European Canadians, February 12, 2024, online
[12] John Farrenkopf, “Spengler’s ‘Der Mensch und die Technik’,” German Studies Review (October 1991), p.548; Prophet of Decline (2001)
ADDENDUM
I have long thought and expressed the view that the exceptional “Faustian” character of our Western civilization would enable its successful prolongation. Since completing the above, I came across an interesting National Interest article online which covered some of the same ground, including a similar thought about that future possibility. This was a welcome coincidence, not plagiarism on my part. Here is that article, by Robert W. Merry, an adapted extract from his 2005 book Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition – Spengler’s Ominous Prophecy – The National Interest
