The message may seem a melancholy one, but it is arguably much more so for those who anchor their lives on the pleasures of a highstatus position than it is for those whom society ignores and who are therefore already well acquainted with the oblivion in which their privileged counterparts will someday join them. It is the rich, the beautiful, the famous and the powerful for whom death has in store the cruellest lessons—the very categories of people, that is, whose worldly goods take them, in the Christian understanding, furthest from God.
In England, in the middle of the eighteenth century, this Christian-inspired moral was given repeated expression by a group of poets known as the Graveyard School. The name referred to their specialty: poems in which the narrator finds himself in a churchyard on a starry, moonlit night and, beside some semidefaced graves, begins musing on the power of death to wipe away success and glory (a phenomenon that clearly did not distress the poets overmuch but seemed indeed to be a source of barely suppressed joy). In Edward Young’s poem “Night Thoughts” (1742), for instance, the speaker, sitting on a moss-covered gravestone, lets his mind turn to the shared fate of all the great men of the past:
The sage, peer, potentate, king, conqueror
Death humbles these.
Why all this toil for triumphs of an hour?
What though we wade in wealth, or soar in fame,
Earth’s highest station ends in “Here he lies”:
And “Dust to dust” concludes her noblest song.
Young’s contemporary, Robert Blair, in “The Grave” (1743), set in another churchyard, picked up on the same theme:
When self-esteem, or others’ adulation,
Would cunningly persuade us we are something
Above the common level of our kind
The grave gainsays the smooth-complexioned flattery
And with blunt truth acquaints us with what we are.
The message was reiterated by the most distinguished poet of the Graveyard School, Thomas Gray, in his “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751):
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth ever gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
For those treated roughly by society, there is some sweet, preemptive revenge to be had in anticipating the eventual demise of certain of its members.
A number of artists have similarly delighted in depicting their own civilisation in a tattered future form, as a warning to, and reprisal against, the pompous guardians of the age. So fond was one such, the eighteenth-century painter Hubert Robert, of painting the great buildings of modern France in ruins that he earned himself the sobriquet Robert des Ruines. Across the Channel, meanwhile, Robert’s contemporary Joseph Gandy would make a name for himself by portraying the Bank of England with its ceiling caved in.
Hubert Robert, Imaginary View of the Grande Gallerie of the Louvre in Ruins, 1796
Joseph Gandy, View of the Rotunda of the Bank of England in Ruins, 1798
Some seventy years later, Gustave Doré was to illustrate London as he fancied it would look in the twenty-first century. His latter-day version of ancient Rome is complete with a caped figure—identified in the work’s title as a New Zealander, an inhabitant of the country that in Doré’s day symbolised the future—sketching the ruins of the then-brand-new Cannon Street Station, much as Grand Touring Englishmen had once gone to Athens or Rome to sketch the Parthenon or the Colosseum.
From the eighteenth century onwards, inspired by like sentiments, European travellers set out on journeys to contemplate ruins of the past: Troy, Corinth, Paestum, Thebes, Mycenae, Knossos, Palmyra, Baalbec, Petra and Pompeii. The Germans, masters that they were at formulating compound names for fugitive and rare states of the soul (We ltschmerz, Schadenfreude, Wanderlust, to cite just a few), coined terms to describe the new feeling for old stones: Ruinenempfindsamkeit, Ruinensehnsucht, Ruinenlust. In March 1787, Goethe twice visited Pompeii.“Many a calamity has happened in the world,” he wrote from Naples, “but never one that has caused so much entertainment to posterity as this one.” “What wonderful mornings I have spent in the Colosseum, lost in some corner of those vast ruins!” remembered Stendhal in his Promenades dans Rome (1829). After recommending ruin-gazing as “the most intense
Gustave Doré, The New Zealander, 1871
Above: David Roberts, General View of Baalbec, 1842 Left: David Roberts, Doorway at Baalbec, 1842
pleasure that memory can procure,” he went so far as to declare that the Colosseum was more attractive in its present, crumbling state than it ever could have been when newly built.
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” reads an inscription on the pedestal of a statue of Ramses II of Egypt, according to Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (1818). But there is no need for the mighty, or even the humble, to obey the second command, for the Pharaoh himself lies in pieces on the ground, and “round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Ruins reprove us for our folly in sacrificing peace of mind for the unstable rewards of earthly power. Beholding old stones, we may feel our anxieties over our achievements—and the lack of them— slacken. What does it matter, really, if we have not succeeded in the eyes of others, if there are no monuments and processions in our honour or if no one smiled at us at a recent gathering? Everything is, in any event, fated to disappear, leaving only New Zealanders to sketch the ruins of our boulevards and offices. Judged against eternity, how little of what agitates us makes any difference.
Ruins bid us to surrender our strivings and our fantasies of perfection and fulfilment. They remind us that we cannot defy time and that we are merely the playthings of forces of destruction which can at best be kept at bay but never vanquished. We may enjoy local victories, perhaps claim a few years in which we are able to impose a degree of order upon the chaos, but ultimately all will slop back into a primeval soup. If this prospect has the power to console us, it is perhaps because the greater part of our anxieties stems from an exaggerated sense of the importance of our own projects and concerns. We are tortured by our ideals and by a punishingly high-minded sense of the gravity of what we are doing.
Christian moralists have long understood that to the end of reassuring the anxious, they will do well to emphasise that contrary to the first principle of optimism, everything will in fact turn out for the worst: the ceiling will collapse, the statue will topple, we will die, everyone we love will vanish and all our achievements and even our names will be trod underfoot. We may derive some comfort from this, however, if a part of us is able instinctively to recognise how closely our miseries are bound up with the grandiosity of our ambitions. To consider our petty status worries from the perspective of a thousand years hence is to be granted a rare, tranquillising glimpse of our own insignificance.