Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

The Jewish leaders present themselves as loyal subjects of Caesar. They accuse Jesus of being a rebel, a political agitator who tells the people not to pay taxes and who challenges Caesar’s authority by claiming that he himself is a king. Now, if Pilate does not condemn him, Pilate himself would be disloyal to Caesar.

Pilate interrogates Jesus. Naturally, he finds Jesus’ notion of a spiritual kingdom quite fanciful, but it seems also harmless enough. The accused appears to be neither violent nor fanatic; he has poise; he is articulate. Pilate is impressed by his calm dignity, and it quickly becomes obvious to him that Jesus is entirely innocent of all the crimes of which he has been accused. Pilate repeats it several times: “I can find no fault in this man.” But the mob demands his death, and the Gospel adds that, hearing their shouts, “Pilate was more afraid than ever.” Pilate is scared: he does not want to have, once again, a riot on his hands. Should this happen, it would be the end of his career.

In the course of his interrogation, as Pilate questions Jesus on his activities, Jesus replies: “What I came into the world for, is to bear witness of the truth. Whoever belongs to the truth, listens to my voice.” To which Pilate retorts: “The truth! But what is the truth?” He is an educated and sophisticated Roman; he has seen the world and read the philosophers; unlike this simple man, this provincial carpenter from Galilee, he knows that there are many gods and many creeds under the sun…

However, beware! Whenever people wonder “What is the truth?” usually it is because the truth is just under their noses — but it would be very inconvenient to acknowledge it. And thus, against his own better judgement, Pilate yields to the will of the crowd and lets Jesus be crucified.

Pilate’s problem was not how to ascertain Jesus’ innocence. This was easy enough: it was obvious. No, the real problem was that, in the end — like all of us, most of the time — he found it more expedient to wash his hands of the truth.

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THE PRINCE de Ligne did not have a very high opinion of literary life in our Belgian provinces. Aware of the poverty and isolation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (of whom he was a wholehearted admirer), he had visited him in order to offer him a refuge on his estate; when Jean-Jacques did not respond to this invitation, the Prince renewed his initiative, writing Rousseau a letter that has remained famous: “Consider my proposals. No one reads in my country; you will be neither admired nor persecuted.”[1] So the Prince would no doubt be pleasantly surprised to know that, two hundred and fifty years later, here in Belgium, there is not only a witty and cultivated woman to celebrate his genius but also a Royal Academy of Literature to republish her exquisite book. Towards the end of his life, during his Viennese exile, he had already been overjoyed by the anthology of his writings compiled and presented by Madame de Staël (whose sometimes muddle-headed ideas he had once gently mocked). Women, and not only literate and intellectual women, were always full of kindness for him.

“The Prince de Ligne is the eighteenth century incarnate.” Thus Paul Morand. So accurate is this characterisation that in his old age, which is to say during the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century, the Prince cut the figure of the last survivor of a bygone age. Today, by contrast, it is precisely to that anachronistic aspect that we feel the closest.

Ligne shares a good many traits with Mozart, apropos of whom George Bernard Shaw made a comment that it may be useful to quote here. Mozart’s greatness, Shaw argued, lay not in innovation, but on the contrary in his success in bringing a tradition to an unsurpassable perfection: “Many Mozart worshippers cannot bear to be told that their hero was not the founder of a dynasty. But in art the highest success is to be the last of your race, not the first. Anybody, almost, can make a beginning: the difficulty is to make an end, to do what cannot be bettered.”

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Gay and lively, always effervescent and unable to stay still, Ligne was ever on the move, traveling on horseback, by carriage, barge, galley or sleigh; he spent his life rushing from one end of Europe to the other. His prose has a breathless allegro quality that echoes this rollicking mobility. Despite the trials of life, the death of a beloved son, the failure of a military career brilliantly initiated only to be prematurely wrecked by a conspiracy of mediocrities — there was a deep source of joy and a grace in him that never ran dry. He was disarmingly thoughtless, yet astonishing in his psychological insight. His overdeveloped sensitivity tended easily to be concealed behind the mask of a buffoon; he never missed the chance to make a bad pun, for instance, or to play a practical joke. In this way he put idiots off the scent, but in the end they would get their own back. Wagner rebuked Mozart for a “lack of seriousness”;[2] a similar reproach took its toll on Ligne: no sooner was he no longer dealing with the great intelligence of a Maria-Theresa of Austria or a Joseph II in Vienna, or of Catherine the Great in Russia, his own “lack of seriousness” concealed his genius from mediocre sovereigns who no longer dared employ him, thus condemning him to a premature semi-retirement.

But parallels with Mozart, no matter how illuminating, should not be overdone.[3] We must not forget, above all, that Ligne, as Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, Lord of Baudour, Chevalier of the Golden Fleece, Grandee of Spain, Seneschal of Hainaut, and Field-Marshal of the Imperial Armies, was first and foremost an aristocrat who assumed his high birth (going back to Charlemagne!) completely, and remained ever aware of the demanding ethic that it required of him. He wrote on this subject, defining nobility as “the obligation to do nothing ignoble,” and it was by this yardstick that he measured and lucidly assessed his peers. At the same time he treated his subjects and subordinates with a courtesy that came from the heart: “I have made emperors and empresses wait for me, but never a soldier.” So his vassals, like the simple troopers of his Ligne-Infanterie regiment with whom he shared the dangers and miseries of campaigning, made no mistake when they demonstrated such a fierce loyalty.

Like every true aristocrat, Ligne was basically a man without a profession. If he was a man of war, and indeed he was, as we shall see in a moment, it was by nature rather than by occupation. (Could one ever say of a poet, or a monk, that they practiced their calling professionally ?) In the worlds of letters and of the arts (including the designing of gardens), Ligne was an amateur in the deepest, most complete and most fruitful sense of the word; free from considerations of utility, he pursued such disciplines for his own satisfaction, following his whims and at his leisure, with grace, nonchalance and detachment, ever guided by sudden inspiration. At bottom there is only one art that matters, and that is the art of life. Hired artisans can achieve great technical mastery, but they have no access to higher values of this kind, the pursuit of which embodies an exquisite inexpertness beyond the reach of the professional’s virtuosity.

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I am drawing here on the aesthetic discourse of traditional Chinese scholars, of which of course Ligne knew absolutely nothing; but had he encountered that approach, it would surely not have disconcerted him. After all, it was he who, apropos of the Ottoman Empire, addressed “observers, travellers, spectators” in the following terms: “Instead of thinking trivial thoughts about the nations of Europe, which are all for the most part alike, meditate rather on everything having to do with Asia if you would discover new, beautiful, great, noble, and very often reasonable things.”