Civilisation (1969–1970)

Kenneth Clark: Self - Narrator

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Quotes 

• Narrator : It's arguable that the nonexistence of a clear, concrete German prose has been one of the chief disasters of European civilisation.

• Narrator : I have tried throughout this series to define civilisation in terms of creative power and the enlargement of human faculties.

• Narrator : The great religious art of the world in every country is deeply involved with the female principle.

• Narrator : And later Baroque artists, like Bernini, delighted in the emotive close-up, the tears and open lips and restless movement - all those devices that were to be rediscovered in the movies. The extraordinary thing is that Baroque artists did it in bronze and marble, and not on celluloid. Of course, in a way, it's a frivolous comparison, because however much one admires the films, one must admit that they are often vulgar, always ephemeral, whereas the work of Bernini is ideal and eternal.

• Narrator : From great poets like Goethe and Pushkin down to the most brainless schoolgirl, his works were read with an almost hysterical enthusiasm which, as we struggle with the rhetorical nonsense of Lara or The Giaour, we can hardly credit, because, although Byron wrote quite a lot of good poetry, it was his bad poetry that make him famous.

• Narrator : It's arguable that Western civilisation was saved by its craftsmen.

• Narrator : [on the Abbot Suger]  He said, "The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material". Well, this was really a revolutionary concept in the Middle Ages. It was the intellectual background of all the sublime works of art of the next century and in fact has remained the basis of our belief in the value of art until today.

• Narrator : And even up to 1945, we still retained a number of chivalrous gestures. We raised out hats to ladies and let them pass first through doors, and in America pushed in their seats at table. We still subscribed to the fantasy that they were chaste and pure beings in whose presence we couldn't tell certain stories or pronounce certain words. Well, that's all over now.

• Narrator : "The dignity of man". Today, those words die on our lips. But in 15th-century Florence, their meaning was still fresh and invigorating.

• Narrator : It may be good for us to leave our daily chores and move in high company for a short time, but this convention by which the events in biblical or secular history could be enacted only by magnificent physical specimens, handsome and well-groomed, went on for too long, till the middle of the 19th century in fact. Only a very few artists, perhaps only Caravaggio and Rembrandt in the first rank, were independent enough to stand against it. And I think that the convention, which was an element in the so-called grand manner, became a deadening influence on the European mind. It deadened our sense of truth, even our sense of moral responsibility, and led as we see in modern art to a hideous reaction.

• Narrator : [on Martin Luther]  No doubt he was extremely impressive: the Leader for which the earnest German people is always waiting. Unfortunately for civilisation, he not only settled their doubts and gave them the courage of their convictions, he also released their latent violence and hysteria. And beyond this was another northern characteristic that was fundamentally opposed to civilisation, an earthy, animal hostility to reason and decorum. One fancies that Nordic man took a long time to emerge from the primeval forest.

• Narrator : I suppose it's debatable how far Elizabethan England can be called civilized. Certainly, it doesn't provide a reproducible pattern of civilisation as does, for example, 18th-century France.

• Narrator : Well, the founders of the American constitution, who were far from frivolous, thought fit to mention "the pursuit of happiness" as a proper aim for mankind, and if ever this aim has been given visible form, it's in rococo architecture - the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of love.