In 1970, the newly hatched Public Broadcasting Service aired a 13-part TV series called Civilisation: A Personal View, which had already been a high-brow hit for the BBC the year before:
“The very simple thought I started from,” said David Attenborough, the BBC executive who dreamed up “Civilisation,” “was to get on the screen the loveliest things created by European man in the past thousand years.” When Clark was invited to serve as its host and writer, he added an urgent imperative of his own: “It’s worth trying . . . to make people realize how fragile civilisation is and how easily it might slip from our grasp.”By “civilisation” Clark meant Western civilization, and the first episode, “The Skin of Our Teeth,” made it clear that he was no less firm a believer in the primacy of high culture and the genius of great men. In the opening sequence, an unseen organist thunders out a toccata as the camera pans across the face of Michelangelo’s David, the façade of Chartres Cathedral and other icons of Western art. Then Clark reads the stately words of John Ruskin: “Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last.” From there he embarks on a discursive tour d’horizon devoted solely to the doings of dead white giants: Charlemagne, Raphael, Bach, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson, Byron, Rodin. If you think Michael Jackson was a musical master, you’ve come to the wrong shop.
Much of the effect of “Civilisation” arose from the witty flair with which Clark conducted this highbrow travelogue. “Lives devoted to Beauty seldom end well,” he proclaimed in one episode. In another he described opera as “one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.” But for all his charm, you were never in a moment’s doubt of his passionate belief in the power and significance of Western culture.
Four decades ago, Time magazine declared “Civilisation” to be TV’s “most distinguished (not to mention only new) cultural series” of the year. Those words have a hollow ring today. For years PBS has been trimming back its high-culture programming, partly because it doesn’t do well in the ratings and partly, I suspect, because such lofty fare has lost favor with the intellectual elite. The notion of devoting a 13-hour TV series to the glories of Western art would now be thought comical—or contemptible—by those well-placed eggheads who regard the West as the source of all evil in the postmodern world. Among such enlightened folk, “Civilisation” is regarded as an embarrassing relic, painfully slow-moving and politically retrogressive.
I doubt that Clark, who died in 1983, would have been surprised to hear that. In “Civilisation” he warned that Western culture rested on a thin crust of ice: “Advanced thinkers, who even in Roman times thought it fine to gang up with the barbarians, have begun to question whether civilization is indeed worth preserving. . . . It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion just as effectively as by bombs.” The day that PBS replays “Civilisation” in prime time is the day I’ll breathe a little easier about the prospects for the preservation of the art that Kenneth Clark championed so eloquently—and unapologetically.
Behold the first six minutes of the first episode:
The whole series is available on DVD.