IN the final set of essays addressing the question What Good are the Arts?, Alan Riach considers a range of writers and musicians, from Flaubert to George Herbert, from the Sex Pistols to Richard Wagner. The turn is towards tragedy, the world corrupted, wasted potential, things gone bad beyond repair. No need to emphasise the relevance here!

IN France, Gustave Flaubert, who was to be such a crucial influence on James Joyce through the panoptic, form-shifting works The Temptation of Saint Anthony and Bouvard and Pécuchet, was painstaking in his attention to exactly those details of language that, in Synge’s words, could give “the reality” of life. In the ninth chapter of Madame Bovary, there’s an evocation of that peculiar feeling called ennui that has always seemed to me perfect:

She gave up playing the piano. What use, with no one to hear her? ... it wasn’t worth the boredom of practising.

She let her drawing-folios and her needlework lie in the cupboard. What was the use? What was the use? Sewing got on her nerves.

“I’ve read everything,” she said to herself.

So she sat there holding the tongs in the fire or watching the rain fall.

How sad she was on Sundays when vespers rang! She listened in a trance to the cracked chimes falling one by one. On the roof opposite a cat stepped slowly, arching its back in the pale sunbeams. Along the highroad clouds of dust rose in the wind. Occasionally a dog howled in the distance. And the bell kept on tolling, a steady monotone that died away over the fields.

Try it in the original and ask, does the sound of the language itself contribute to the meaning of what’s being described?

Elle abandonna la musique. Pourquoi jouer? Qui l’entendrait? … ce n’était pas la peine de s’ennuyer à étudier.

Elle laissa dans l’armoire ses cartons à dessin et la tapisserie. A quoi bon? A quoi bon? La couture l’irritait.

– J’ai tout lu, se disait-elle.

Et elle restait à faire rougir les pincettes, ou regardant la pluie tomber.

Comme elle était triste, le dimanche, quand on sonnait les vêpres! Elle écutait, dans un hébétement attentif, tinter un à un les coups fêlés de la cloche. Quelque chat sur les toits, marchant lentement, bombait son dos aux rayons pâles du soleil. Le vent, sur la grande route, soufflait des traînées de poussière. Au loin, parfois, un chien hurlait; et la cloche, à temps égaux, continuait sa sonnerie monotone qui se perdait dans la campagne.

Emma Bovary returns us to our theme, for the compassion we might feel for this foolish but helpless woman is something her creator shows us happening in the words themselves. Elsewhere in the same novel, Flaubert puts it like this: “...no-one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, his thoughts or his sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we strum out tunes to make a bear dance, when we would move the stars to pity.”

We are back with the gift of Prometheus: the special gifts of being singularly human – love, the arts and now language itself. I said earlier that the Promethean fire might flame to a marvellously sustaining warmth, or it might die and go out altogether. It’s time to face up to the third possibility: the fire that destroys.

John Donne’s contemporary, the devout Christian George Herbert, begins his poem “The Collar” like this:

I struck the board, and cry’d, No more.

I will abroad.

What? Shall I ever sigh and pine?

My lines and life are free; free as the rode,

Loose as the winds, as large as stone.

By the end of the poem, however, his commitment to freedom and reaching out into the large, free world has led him to a state of raving, “fierce and wilde”. At exactly that point, he hears, or thinks he hears, a voice calling “childe” and he replies: “My Lord.” He is saved. But that first moment of liberating energy, that break from the lines and the collar, is the brutal beginning of a quest which might lead others to press beyond further limits, not to reply to any paternal saviour, but to cross the boundaries. And art has much to do with this. As Blake said, all poets are of the devil’s party.

This was also the promise of punk rock. To paraphrase Steve Watts and Steve Xerri, punk rock was a release of dark energies, a feast of inversion in which all the positive, socially proper values of youth – freedom from cares, beauty, innocence, and so on – were transformed into parodic carelessness, incomprehensible canons of attractiveness, and a knowingness that transcended sexual precociousness and became a sort of gestural ennui. What a scary carnival!

It was a scary carnival that passed, but it reminds us of other disastrous conclusions, the end of the quest of all Romantic Sinners, from Prometheus and Faust to Captain Ahab and Wagner’s Gods. Michael Long describes Wagner’s Promethean operatic cycle like this: “Two characters break the primal quiet in The Ring. The first is Wotan, who began the long chain of fatal deeds and offences with which the operas are concerned. In the quiet of the primeval earth he was ready to pay the required price of self-mutilation to get the power for which he lusted.” He goes on: “The second disrupter is Alberich. He too acts boldly. He too is ready to pay in a different kind of self-mutilation by forswearing love, and he too savages nature by tearing the gold from the rocks of the Rhine and plunging its waters into darkness.”

In other words, we might describe Wagner’s Ring cycle as the greatest tragedy of the 19th century. What it depicts is a terrible descent into loss and devastation. There is no redemption. The triumphalism for which Wagner is often noted, the sense of overbearing power by which he seems to have appealed to Nazism, when you look more closely, is not pre-eminent at all. Rather, it’s the failure of human aspiration and its corruption in greed and violence that sends the world of The Ring spiralling down.

Long continues: “Wotan and Alberich ... seek power by separating themselves from what Wagner wonderfully evokes in the music of the forest and the spring, the music of unpolluted water and streaming light, the vast, effortless, radiant quiet which precedes the interventions of these two fatal Prometheans. In the beginning was not the word. In the beginning was the forest, with the great ash tree in it, and the Rhine flowing through it lit with gold. These things were then desecrated and polluted, caused to wither and darken as the lonely quest for power began. The Ring follows the consequences of that quest down the weary but grandiose logic of its unfolding. It contains a great vision of light; and then it contains another, terrible vision of the light seized, and bent into the ring of gold while the rest of the world falls into darkness.”

This is not only prophetic of what Wagner came to mean through and immediately after the Second World War, it also has a deep lesson for us now, in the 21st century, if only we could read it right. Long concludes: “In Wagner’s operas, the primal crime is, as primal crimes are apt to be, of irreversible consequence, for the last of the operas, Götterdämmerung, does not sound like a work in which the world is saved. The Ring charts the irreversible logic of pollution, the unavailing efforts of Wotan to devise a means of recovery and the heart-breaking failure of Siegfried in the impossible task of redemption.”

Or in Jack Yeats’s words: “Man is only part of a splendour, and a memory of it.”

All of which brings us towards our final consideration of what the arts are good for: our understanding of tragedy.

When King Lear is dying, he asks his two final questions and comes to two final realisations. He realises the common helplessness of mortality: his daughter Cordelia is dead and Lear cries out the question “Why?” – “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life/And thou no breath at all?”

In this anguish, the commonness of mortality does not bring living things together. It keeps separate the dead daughter and the despair of the witnessing father.

This leads to the very last question: “Do you see this?” And “this” is so singular, so particular, we cannot pull back into generalisation, we cannot seek a common truth for solace. All last things are lonely, every final departure, is unique. Lear’s final words immediately follow: “Look on her, look, her lips/Look there, look there!”

What is he looking at? What is he telling us to look at? Cordelia’s dead lips, the place where all her breath and language have passed. It is this final, unspoken understanding that brings Lear’s life to its end.

Lear comes to understand that he is no longer only the centre of a universe which he broke up in the first act, nor that is he only the specific man, “more sinned against than sinning” – the central character in a story with others – but that he is only “a” man – just a man – a mortal being equal, and no different from any living thing in this respect.

Lear’s story has taken him to this extremity of lonely understanding. He dies in its grief. But tragedy commemorates more than merely suffering. There is a strange quality of joy here, a way of remembering, of embodying contradictory feelings and thoughts and beliefs and giving them substance, and the truth of this is not unique to Shakespeare.

We’ll need a bit more time with this one.