It is vaguely reassuring when something becomes identifiable enough to be a syndrome. It's not my problem anymore. It's known about. It can't just be me that gets cross about it.
In The Observer's TV review on Sunday, on the subject of last week's programme on political correctness by Trevor Phillips, was the first time I'd seen the idea of 'virtue signalling' specified in quite such precise terms. It is defined as 'ostentatious sensitivity'.
I'm sure we've all found ourselves in circumstances where we've had to express more concern that we actually feel, for the sake of appearances and that is thus a social nicety but the problem is those whose personality is made up of chronic or wilful caring beyond the call of duty.
It might make one appear a heartless curmudgeon to object to such a thing until it becomes an overwhelming theme or a deliberate play for the adsmiration of others. It might seem preferable that someone goes out of their way to express sympathy for others as the world turns towards self-interest, self-promotion, Trump, supremacism and isolationism but in the end it is not much better than a sinister attempt to gain favour by other means.
It makes for bad poetry if we are asked to admire the poet's precious feelings more than their use of language and, in a wider context, it makes one suspect that the virtue being signalled is not a real virtue in the first place.
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But, more rewardingly, I've been thinking about Robert Schumann following last week's encounter with the wonderful Steven Isserlis who cites him among his favourite composers.
As I pointed out a little while ago, it is hardly Buxtehude's fault that he came before Bach. Great things are achieved 'on the shoulders of giants' and Johann Sebastian would not have done what he did without Dieterich as a precursor. And so, in a similar way, it is not Schumann's fault, or Mendelssohn's, for that matter, that they arrived after Beethoven.
What were they supposed to do after such a monumental presence. But what they did was admirable and honourable and however overshadowed by such a majesterial achievement, they produced lyrical, gorgeous music of their own that owed a debt to the colossus but didn't attempt it on quite such an outrageous scale. In the same way, perhaps, as generations of post-Bowie pop artists learned from him and developed out of an appreciation of one part of his work and maybe Suede are an adorable example of that.
One can only work in the times one lives in and in the context of what has gone before and sometimes it's not possible to outdo what has gone before and so one has to do what one can do. There's nothing wrong with that and if Schumann and Mendelssohn are not quite Beethoven they are still marvellous in their own right.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
