To the Hermitage Read online

  From here, I can see, across the bridge on the harbour island of Djurgarten, some elegant new building, one of those endless modernistic galleries or museums that are springing up everywhere, fresh-formed and concept-designed. Then I suddenly know what it is; and with that an old and well-known northern story suddenly comes back to me. In the days when the Swedish empire presided over the Baltic, when its huge armies marched off down the Elbe as far as Prague, King Gustav II Adolf chose to commission a very great battleship. It would be Number One: the world’s grandest ship of the line. There’d never been anything like it. Deck upon wooden deck it rose, a skyscraper of a vessel, tarred and feathered, high as a prince’s palace, heavy with gold decoration, copper cannon, masts and rigging that reached the Nordic clouds. He named it, of course, the Vasa, after his grandfather, the hero who had made Sweden a nation and a power in the world. In 1618 it was launched, here in the harbour in front of me. It cast its moorings and set off from shore; its overloaded decks were packed with admirals and aldermen, courtiers, courtesans and priests. Guns fired, fireworks cracked, flags waved, church bells rang, bishops blessed. As the crowds cheered, the ship toppled offshore, turned on its side, sank to the bottom. The churchbells ceased, the bishops fell silent, the crowds wept, the dignitaries aboard drowned in public sight, an empire plunged.

  When I last came to Stockholm, quite some time back now, this early version of the Titanic had just been fresh-craned from the water. Timbers black and filthy, its hulk lay on a mudflat by the island, preserved by chemical sprays. But history these days is a theme-park. Nothing is wasted. These are the days of the modern museum, the open-access library, the multimedia experience, the virtual reality ride – high-tech simulations of the way things once might have been in times when people were naïve enough to think they were real. Now over there, as I look through the trees, is the Vasa Museum, complete with a Vasa Experience, built round the old rotting hulk. I rise to my feet, cross the windy bridge, walk through the park, buy myself a ticket for the grand old tragedy. Hundreds of tourists, Japanese, Korean, American, await admission. In these millennial times, all the world likes to attend the drowning of a ship. A young female attendant with a black eyepatch stands in the lobby. For some reason she stops me, offers to steer me round herself. At her side I walk through the great restoration: by computer displays of ships and seafaring, a crackle of multi-lingual tapes. We wander through the disinfected hull: over the great poop, with its regal decorations, through low-roofed gun-decks packed with heavy cannon, past stacks of retrieved water-bottles, rotting uniforms, sailors’ canvas shoes, leather buckets, deckmen’s thimbles, balls of stone and lead.

  My one-eyed guide is pleasant, serious, moral, instructive. Civic, that must be the word. As we walk through the sea-darkened timbers, stinking of preservatives, she philosophizes Swedishly. On the rise and fall of empires, the vanity of human wishes, the delusions of kings and princes, how she and I are here today but gone tomorrow. I nod agreeably as she tells me the sea is a very beautiful thing, but a place of danger, and the Baltic the most dangerous place of all. She says it’s a seaman’s graveyard; over the centuries thousands of ships have foundered in the great archipelago, while captains who lost their vessels were hanged from gallows along the shore. When our tour is almost done, she gestures through the tinted windows at the harbour waters beyond. Great Baltic ferries sail close by: huge horizontal office blocks, casinos, fun-palaces, packed with sinners and illusionists, seeking life’s eternal duty-free. But, she says, looking at me seriously, we are never free of duty. What we are looking at, out there in the seaway, are just the modern Vasas, waiting to take the plunge.

  As I’m intending to sail off on one of these floating coffins tomorrow, this isn’t quite what I need to hear. ‘Tack, tack,’ I say hastily to my one-eyed Virgil, and leave the Vasa Museum. I walk down wide windy Strandgatan, then across the harbour bridges that take me into the old town, Gamla Stan. More guides are waiting, keen to show me the scene of the great Swedish Bloodbath, where forty loyal burghers were hacked to death by the Danes. But Nordic gloom has gone far enough. I prefer to walk on my own, think my own thoughts, down the wet cobbled passages, past the high merchant houses where grain from Prussia met copper from the Upplands, the cloths of Flanders, the furs of Novgorod. They’re all trinket-shops now. The sun has gone for good, the seaborne wind come up. Rain, end of season, the bank and the museum, blonde bankers and one-eyed guides: all do their spiritual work. I walk collar up between high-sided churches and palaces, and start to wonder. What on earth – or for that matter off and beyond it – happened to poor old René Descartes?

  Maybe you recall the story? I thought I did, though as things turned out I didn’t, or not as well as I might. It’s a well-known fact that princes and philosophers have consorted together for just about as long as time can remember, with much desire to mix intelligence with power, but not necessarily much success. Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great. Socrates taught virtue to the gilded youth of Athens, if with unhappy personal results. Plato sought a philosopher-king to guide the nation; the one he served soon sold him into slavery. Noble Seneca taught justice and clemency to the Emperor Nero, though to remarkably little effect. Francis Bacon, who took all knowledge for his province, served James the First of England, Fifth of Scotland: ‘The standing is slippery,’ he warned. Leibniz attended on Peter the Great to spread the spirit of reason; but this did not stop Big Peter killing off his rivals or having his own son hacked to death. By the great Age of the Enlightenment the custom was universal. Reason and humanism were the principles of the age, mind showed its power over God, matter and state. Priests were in discredit, philosophers were in the ascendant. Great kings and queens listened solemnly to tiny thinkers and poets. No European court was complete without its dancing master, astronomer, kapellmeister, map-maker, its physician, mathematician, and its philosophe. How else could the Enlightenment world grow truly enlightened, a monarch become wise, the earthly Utopia be brought into being, than by taking the highest metaphysical advice?

  When Frederick the Great, a small man who hated his militaristic father almost as much as he loathed his militaristic wife, took power in Prussia, he saw himself as the true enlightened monarch: the Philosopher-King. When not taking Silesia, losing his fortune, winning his victories, marching his goose-stepping soldiers up and down the Brandenburg streets, he was no classic tyrant but a triumph of civilization: thinker and talker, patron and poet, composer and editor, flute-player and pianist, a prince among statesmen. He nurtured great Bach (‘give me concertos’), rejected petty religious bigotries, refused to use Christian symbols, wrote learned tracts, sweet flute concertos, and some unbelievably dreary pornographic verse in French. He too yearned for his own philosopher, and called Voltaire from France to become, as he put it, his Talking Bird and his Singing Tree. How charmingly it all went to begin with! ‘One thinks boldly, one is free here,’ foxy Voltaire announced in delight when he settled into his fine pavilion amid the high minds, rustic splendours, wild woodlands, great vine gardens of Sans Souci, on the banks of the Havel near growing Berlin. The summer court was glorious. Tinkling fountains and belvederes, a Chinese pagoda topped with an umbrellaed golden Confucius, bands and barracks, music all hours, intense and philosophical dinners under the lantern roof – for Frederick indeed dined only with men.

  A world-famous relationship, it’s remembered still. New and re-tarted Potsdam, again a summer adjunct to a winter capital, succours it. Today you’ll find the Voltaire-weg leads into the Schopenhauer-strasse, which ends up in Hegel-Allee, which once pointed the way to Karl-Marx-Platz, now the blind alley of Uncertainty Square. You could even call it the world’s first great creative writing class: for, day after day, again and again, the writer-philosopher went over the king’s unfortunate and often depressingly pornographic poems, trying to mine them for faint traces of literary merit. The months passed, and the years, until it became apparent that the first happiness was not destined to last �
�� not after the sage-laureate began falling out with the King’s other academicians, and then overheard his generous monarch remarking, ‘I’ll need this chap for a year at the most. First thing you squeeze the juice out of the orange, then you toss away the peel.’

  Voltaire, a vain, sharp-toothed, angry type, was no monarch’s orange. After three troubled years he resolved to preserve his pips. He haughtily handed back his court titles and honours; soon he was quietly taking the quickest way out of town. But power is power, and thinking isn’t; so it all ended in tears, of course – with the Sage arrested at gunpoint in Frankfurt on his homeward journey, charged with breaching his contract, engaging in illegal financial transactions, running off with some of the king’s unspeakable poems. Yet it simply proved the rule of Enlightenment times; prince and philosopher were bonded to each other. ‘I was born too soon,’ said Frederick unapologetically, ‘but, happily, I have seen the immortal Voltaire.’ An absolute monarch needed an intellectual absolution. Every king or empress sought a philosophe: each needed the absolute homage of the other. Dear Didro, Denis Diderot – and he, by the way, is the chief reason why I’m here in Stockholm – thought for Catherine of Russia. D’Alembert, Condorcet and Rousseau all had need to pass on the lore of reason and human freedom to any who would govern, not least Jefferson and Franklin, makers of the First New Nation.

  Naturally the day would come when – largely thanks to all these rational courtly speculations on liberty, religion, humanity, reason – the great chain of being would snap at last. The kings and princes would mostly disappear, often bloodily and irrationally, in some frenzied and thoughtless (or thoughtful) moment of mob rule. On the other hand, the philosophers survived, more than survived, to become the wisdom of the next new age. They mostly outlived the bloodbath, sometimes they were its greatest heroes. They prospered and flourished. They turned reason into will, will into being, being into nothingness. They enlightened and illuminated; they disputed and critiqued. They considered mind and matter, state and person, history and fatality, reason and madness, order and chaos, the limits of our language and the limits of our world. They looked deep into darkness, and they hungered for the light. They existed without being, they were without existing. They spoke, yet they also knew whereof to be silent.

  And with thinkers as with chefs and milliners, or wines and cheeses, the most important rule was clear. Anyone could think anywhere – given the time, the space, the mental machinery. But the fact remained that the truly great performers, the top of the crop, la crème de la crème, were always assumed to be French. And today, though the kings and princes have nearly all been deposed and are departed (mostly for Lisbon or Gstaad), the philosophes still go on. For even modern democracies need their sages, and modern persons the newest modes of thought. As it was so it is; however many fish swim in the great world of think-tanks, the largest, most shark-like, most powerful are still generally French. Before World War II finished, a desperate America, cut off from thought by the recent hostilities, flew Jean-Paul Sartre by bomber to New York. Simone de Beauvoir soon followed, drawn by such American wonders as Nelson Algren and the electric chair. Onward into our own age of philosophical cafés, and personal thought-trainers who’ll advise whenever you’ve a window in your corporate day. For how else could Americans know their postmodern condition, the strange anxieties of their unbearable lightness of being, their subjectless cogitos, their strange virtuality, without a Foucault, a Derrida, a Lyotard, a Baudrillard, a Kristeva to advise them, a philosopher come by transatlantic jumbo to court?

  But who was the real leader of the great procession? Who was it first brought power and Francophone thought together? The answer is perfectly obvious: it was grand old René Descartes. The year, we may recall, was 1649. The place was Amsterdam, in the Dutch Republic, so long a wet and fishy haven for displaced and unhappy thinkers – the Pilgrim Fathers, the Spinozas, the John Lockes. Its universities were free in spirit, its publishers were plagiaristic but politically open and generous. Descartes was under attack in his French homeland, assaulted by priests, bishops, the Pontiff himself for his speculations on the powers of the human mind. Here, amid rank canals and bustling merchant houses, he could live quietly, nicely. He managed a discreet amour, he even fathered a secret daughter. He conducted small medical experiments on whether animals had souls, supplied with offal by the butcher who lived so conveniently downstairs. Soon he was able to show the human creature was animal too, but a special animal, endowed with reason – a splendid animal who could feel, speak and reason, discern the difference between truth and falsehood, was possessed of the right to know, all thanks to the benevolence of the Great Creator and the splendid workings of the pineal gland.

  Like all great thinkers he won many fond admirers, swarms of philosophical groupies. And one was right here, where I am now, in chilly Stockholm. Her name was Queen Christina, twenty-three years old and well into her reign. She was a spendthrift, hirsute, stoop-shouldered well-read lady, who affected the wearing of men’s clothes and combed her hair only once a week. Thanks to the benevolence of the Great Creator and her own pineal gland, she had been granted a devouring need to know. And she was taken by what, thanks to her generous interest, would prove to be René’s last book, the charmingly titled Passions of the Soul. No sooner had she read a draft of it than she wrote him a fan-letter, demanding more information, a photo. René, never a sluggard in the matter of correspondence, responded at length. It was a fatal kindness; it so often is. Before he knew it a fine Swedish ship with an admiral on board had appeared in the Amstel harbour to collect him, at royal command, and bear him northward to the Swedish court.

  A naturally retiring man, still occupied with dissecting his offals, René declined as politely as he might. As he whispered to friends, he had no wish at all to go to the Land of the Bears. Unfortunately, in Amsterdam, all was no longer going well. Even here, in the great Aulas of Amsterdam and Utrecht and Leiden, the winds of a new political correctness were growing. René’s view that man invented God with the reason God had given him was provoking the annoyance of the freshmen. Soon the professors had ceased to speak his name, and before much longer his books were disappearing from the syllabus. René was a wise old thinker, and had seen these warning signs before. He burned many of his papers, made his will. Then he went out, bought an elegant court dress with fine ruffled sleeves. The admiral had left, but he went to the harbour and boarded a ship for Stockholm, setting off after all for the Land of the Bears.

  Unfortunately it was no longer the best of seasons; he had left the whole thing much too late. The east winds were blowing, the seas were raging, the voyage unusually took an entire month. This may or may not have been due to the fact that Descartes, ever the scholar, decided to teach the captain the newest arts of navigation, cosmologically invented by himself. ‘The man’s a demi-god,’ declared the awestruck captain, when he finally decanted, or perhaps decarted, the savant on to the Stockholm harbour wall. Then there were other problems. The Queen’s interests had shifted just a little. Now she was out of philosophy and into ballet – the sprightly step, the upsprung toe. What’s more she was busy, due out of town for a while to settle some unfinished diplomatic business left over from the Thirty Years’ War. Left to his own devices in the chilly residence of the French Ambassador – it stood where I am standing, right here in the middle of the Stockholm Old Town – René tried to follow the absent Queen’s instructions. He attempted to write a ballet, but found the idea was something of a contradiction in terms. Instead he wrote a play about two princes who thought they were shepherds – a well-known confusion in all the royal courts of the day.

  No wonder. Not all was well at court, as he found when he went in his new ruffled sleeves. In the Queen’s absence, René’s arrival had become a matter of dismay to all courtiers present: the theologians, astrologers, astronomers, mathematicians and medical men who always surrounded the monarchs of the day. It didn’t help that the Queen had asked René to devise a new
Swedish Academy, recommending its members, writing its statutes. So jealous was the general envy of the foreign upstart that, eavesdropping on their conversations, he discovered all the courtiers were discussing was whether or how to murder him. René went home and wisely added a clause to the Academy statutes saying no foreigners should be admitted, above all not himself. By now deep winter had come: Nordic winter, chilly and hard. Old men said it was the worst in living memory, as old men always do. Shivering in his room at the ambassadorial mansion, Descartes now deeply regretted his errand. ‘It seems to me men’s thoughts freeze here, just like the water,’ he sadly reported home.

  Then, in the darkness of January, the Queen returned to court. She thought again of her philosopher, decided to put him to use. Like another great Snow Queen, Our Lady of the Handbags, three centuries later and in another part of Europe, she needed no more than three hours of sleep a night. She rose at four, and her morning toilette took absolutely no time at all. So, each morning at five, our good philosopher was summoned to the palace for a five-hour seminar on the passions of the soul. He was no normal early riser; in fact he was a well-known slugabed. But each stark morning, long before the sun rose (if in this godforsaken country it ever did), he rose himself, put on his nice new ruffles, and walked in black dark over slippery crunching ice to the Royal Palace, ready for his five-hour session with the hirsute and far from well-bathed queen. By the end of January he was visibly shaking with fever: I think, therefore I freeze. Soon he was bedbound, refusing the aid of the doctors the Queen sent to him, knowing they probably shared the murderous jealousy of their colleagues. When he was young Descartes had had the idea that, by thoughtful endeavours, it was possible for a philosopher to live for ever. It wasn’t true. By February, mind and matter were seriously diverging. ‘Alas, my soul,’ he said to his closest companion, ‘it is time for you and me to part. Try to bear the separation with courage.’ He died before the month was over. Some blamed the poisons of the court physician; others blamed the flu.