Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  It was this combination that underlay nineteenth-century listeners’ sense that music could serve at once as a vehicle of individual development and of integration with others. A number of observers from late in the eighteenth century recognized that dethroning socially prominent people from their position as taste-setters, together with the emerging regime of silent listening, allowed for a much wider variety of individual reactions to the pieces heard, and this mix of singular experience and universal form, interwoven with the compound of feeling and intellect, was a major reason for the central a place music assumed in nineteenth-century culture. As Gunilla Budde puts it:

  Music was understood by the nineteenth-century concert public not primarily as a mirror of reality, but as an autonomous world with its own structures, themes, forms of order, and encodings, one that required a high level of knowledge and analytical understanding for an adequate response, and which thereby fostered a communal and unifying potential for achieving such a response. At the same time, however, it provided room for freedom of personal experience and elaboration, whereby the subjectively variable “emotional chaos,” subdued by the formal laws of harmony and rhythm, was transformed into an extensively individual version of “cosmic order.” More than any other genre of high culture, concerts and operas made it possible to gather the feelings of individuals at a single place and time together in a shared experience of artistic pleasure.

  If Budde is right, and her account is based on wide reading in memoirs, letters, and commentary, then music provided a point of interchange at once between feeling and intellect, and between individual and social being. The sense that it did so, even if seldom explicitly articulated, must have been one reason why nineteenth-century people attributed such importance to it. Claims for the “sacred” or “religious” status of secular music were persuasive in part because it was experienced as a vehicle for both personal and social integration.46

  This was a highly positive function, but behind it lay some pervasive and powerful anxieties, whose connection to the exaltation of music deserves more notice than it has received. The sentiments aroused by music were deep and compelling, and it is clear that many people recognized how close they lay to sexual feelings and desires; music, as many noted, was the pure language of the passions. Schopenhauer (writing in the era of the Restoration but expressing views that would acquire widespread impact only after 1850) made this dimension more explicit than did George Sand, and his ideas would provide justification for the frank sexuality Richard Wagner wrote into some of his works (above all Tristan and Isolde). Even some descriptions that attribute music’s power to its intellectual qualities end up lodging music closer to sexual experience than they may intend, as in Wackenröder’s description of Joseph left “quite limp and exhausted” afterwards. Music’s power to draw listeners “downward” toward sensuality as well as “upward” toward contemplation and understanding had long been recognized, in the classical and Renaissance opposition between “noble” (usually string) and “base” (often wind) music, and echoes of this distinction appear in the nineteenth century, for instance in Felix Mendelssohn’s often expressed disdain (noted by John Toews) for the egotism of mere virtuosic display and his “mistrust of sensual, ‘materialistic’ music that produced titillation of he senses rather than elevation and discipline of the feelings.” Peter Gay suggests that the possibility music might affect listeners in the first way was one reason for the appeal of silent listening: to demand silence of those with whom one shared a musical experience was not a snobbish disapproval of others who boorishly let their feelings hang out, but a protective reaction against the possibility of “a deeply regressive communion with one’s [psychic and unconscious] past.”47

  We have only to add that listening was widely recognized as a highly individualistic act, one with a potential to cut individuals off from those around them and retreat into a personal universe of imagination – for “Joseph” this was the essential precondition for the intense experience he sought – to see that music was capable of inhabiting the same force field as an activity whose presence likewise bulked larger as the public for culture expanded, namely solitary sex. As noted a moment ago, Thomas Laqueur and Isabel Hull have both helped us to see the intense anxiety about masturbation that lasted well into the twentieth century as a specifically modern phenomenon, fed by fears that the same liberation from traditional restraints that allowed individuals to develop previously dormant powers and energies also brought grave personal and collective dangers. Access to distant resources both material and imaginative offered many openings for personal and social development, but society could exercise little control over the uses particular minds might make of them; fantasy and the passions it could feed might go wild, exposing susceptible people to a tempting and dangerous world of illusory satisfactions. The kind of consuming, highly individualistic, often deeply emotional and at least potentially solitary experience offered by music, detached from religion and externally grounded morality, resembled that of novel-reading, widely feared as encouraging the resort to fantasized and solitary sexual pleasure.

  The connection was made nearly explicit, albeit in a subtle way, in Thomas Mann’s description of the pleasure that the teenage Hanno, the last member of the Buddenbrook family (sickly, he would not survive into manhood), took in the piano playing whose power to absorb him was a sign of his inability to invest his vital energy in the practical ethic of worldly achievement exemplified by his forbears. Hanno delighted in the equivocal moments when harmonies were suspended between expectation and resolution, finding in them “the delight of sweet rapture … insistent, urgent longing,” a sustained intimation of the happiness that “lasts only a moment.” When he tells his friend Kai that when left alone he could not hold himself back from improvising, instead of practicing studies and sonatas as he should, descending into the realm of unfettered imagination and desire it opened up, Mann describes the sequel as follows:

  “I know what you’re thinking when you improvise,” Kai said. And then neither of them spoke.

  They were at a difficult age. Kai had turned beet-red and was staring at the ground, but without lowering his head. Hanno looked pale and very serious; he kept casting Kai enigmatic, sidelong glances.48

  This, however, was music as it affected a “decadent” person, cut off from the social involvements that pulled it back from such abysses for others. For “Joseph,” as for the larger class of listeners pointed to by Budde, music’s potential to encourage a descent into insidious solitude was restrained by the collective settings where hearing and performing it usually took place, as well as by the high level of attention required to perceive the formal structure of a piece. For listeners able to experience music in this way – and both their numbers and their exemplary power were greater, proportionally, in the nineteenth century than today – the potentially unbridled reverie spoken about by George Sand and others could be reined in by the desire for rational understanding music also called forth. Modern culture offered individuals ways to expand their imaginative reach and develop potentials hemmed in by the bounds of everyday experience, but it simultaneously confronted people with the need to set limits to the potentially dangerous liberation it promised. As musical experience was reconstructed, it intimated a possible solution, a frame that brought passion within the compass of comprehension, and where a potentially anarchic individuality could be drawn back toward sociability. This was not the least of the reasons why it occupied so central a place in nineteenth-century culture.

  13 Bourgeois and others

  Culture high and low

  From the beginning the forms of cultural activity that found expression in the more public settings emerging at the end of the eighteenth century exhibited a characteristic set of tensions. Like cultural practices in practically every time and place, they aspired to broad, even universal, validity, treating the content they presented as capable of enhancing human life in general. It became apparent quickly that these assu
mptions would be undermined or frustrated by the social distinctions they sometimes sought to ignore. In the case of visual art the tension was already implicit in the ways public exhibits were set up during the late eighteenth century, but it became more salient and troubling when the Revolutionary Louvre opened in 1793.

  Eighteenth-century public art spaces seldom offered unrestricted entry, and when they did the results often led the organizers to think again. The British Museum admitted only small groups and for a brief time, save for students and critics who were given privileged access on certain days. The Luxembourg gallery in the 1750s was in theory open to anyone, but publicity about it was directed to the higher ranks of society, those one writer described as “men of good sense … and good faith” who possessed “sensibility and quality of mind.” After Joseph II offered free access to his collection in the Upper Belvedere in 1770 he was met with sharp criticism from both artists and his own curators, who complained that a rowdy crowd interfered with giving serious attention to the works. When a Society of Arts set up the first public show of contemporary painting in London in 1760 the art dealers who ran it offered free and open admission, but the next year they decided to impose a fee, explaining that without one the room was “crowded and incommoded by the intrusion of great numbers whose stations and education made them no proper judges of statuary or painting and who were made idle and tumultuous by the opportunity of a show.”1

  These difficulties surfaced more distressingly at the remodeled Louvre, since the nation as a whole was held to be the owner of the works put on display. Foreign visitors were troubled by the presence of “the lowest classes of the community,” to which administrators quickly responded by publishing regulations for proper behavior and setting up safeguards against theft. It rapidly became evident that many of the visitors had little notion of what they were seeing, apart from a show of power and grandeur like that projected in earlier private or princely collections. When some classical statues seized from emigré nobles were exhibited in 1795, with labels listing their former owners, viewers mistakenly thought the names were those of the people portrayed, to the distress of curators who had assumed that the public would recognize a Greek bust by its look and know its subjects were not modern. The incomprehension manifested by many visitors quickly became a subject of mockery, as in Honoré Daumier’s cartoon showing one viewer of a frieze telling another that “those Egyptians weren’t very good-looking.”2

  As the first major museum aimed at a broad audience, the Revolutionary Louvre made evident a set of problems and tensions that have remained alive ever since. What was the aim, and what would be the effects, of displaying art objects with little connection to most people’s experiences and tastes to a diverse and fractured public, the ancient works rooted in an unfamiliar form of life, and the modern ones originally produced to please a narrow circle of well-off and highly placed patrons? Similar questions would resound not just in museums but also in exhibitions of new art, where they would be deepened as modern painters and sculptors produced work that did not hide and sometimes self-consciously insisted on the distance artists felt between themselves and their assumed audience. Historians and critics have often answered these questions in terms of class differences, some even arguing that a chief function, even purpose of such public displays of art has been to make social distinctions evident and even to solidify them. Many readers have been drawn to Pierre Bourdieu’s argument that a chief role of public culture has been to justify and perpetuate class hierarchies, by highlighting the contrast between the sense of satisfaction and validation such sites provide to those whose upbringing, education, and access to leisure allow them to feel at home in them, and the indifference, confusion, embarrassment, and sense of inferiority they not uncommonly engender in those who lack such assets.3

  I will come back to Bourdieu’s views in a moment, but first it should be noted that the kinds of contrasting reactions found in the Louvre during the 1790s have also been documented in many later settings. These have included some provided by middle-class figures with a clear political commitment to advancing lower-class well-being, and who believed in the capacity of audiences with little formal education to understand and benefit from high-quality art. One such case is provided by the exhibitions of paintings mounted in poverty-stricken East London during the 1880s and 1890s by Henrietta and Samuel Barnett, in connection with their pioneering settlement house, Toynbee Hall, established in 1884. The Barnetts, who supported the workers in the famous 1889 Dock Strike, were determined not to impose middle-class ideas on the local people who came to view their shows, an intention supported by their conviction (however naive or misguided it may appear today) that workers were capable of “purer” reactions than middle-class viewers, by virtue of being less exposed to the materialism that corrupted modern life. All the same, they found it necessary to provide Oxbridge-educated guides to explain the pictures, as well as explicit catalog descriptions. A number of workers were deeply moved by what they saw, especially the religious images (Samuel Barnett was an Anglican curate), but they often reacted in unexpected or distant ways. At least one compared a domestic scene to a poster advertising tea, some found the moralistic optimism that certain paintings sought to convey irrelevant to the difficulties poor people faced, and others lamented that seeing such beautiful things only made their spare and limited lives seem more tawdry.4

  Historians and critics have recognized culture as an agent in both highlighting and consolidating class divisions in the history of music too. A particularly striking account of the social relations involved in the development of art music and its audiences is the one Lawrence Levine has provided for the United States. There, as in Europe, musical life by the end of the nineteenth century was increasingly characterized by silent listening and the performance of symphonies or concertos in their entirety, in contrast to an earlier situation where a buzz of social interaction accompanied programs made up of songs or movements taken from various works, providing a variety that kept audience attention alive without demanding sustained concentration. In Levine’s account this earlier regime was popular and democratic, giving a mixed audience freedom to enjoy the music and express itself in spontaneous ways (much the same was true of drama, especially for performances of Shakespeare, whose plays were often presented to diverse and sometimes happily rowdy audiences); by contrast the later one embodied the program of an increasingly self-conscious elite, determined to impose its standards on cultural life by damping down forms of expression out of harmony with their vision of culture as a quasi-sacred realm. In part Levine sees this shift as a response to new threats to social order, some of them from tensions between workers and employers in new and larger workplaces and others, in the American case, generated by the burgeoning numbers of new immigrants – Irish, Italians, Jews, and East Europeans, all strange and suspect in the eyes of entrenched Protestant Americans. In part too the new cultural regime was an attempt to counter what many saw as the rampant materialism of the “Gilded Age.” Levine is careful not to portray the campaign for what was increasingly identified as “high” (and even “highbrow”), “true,” or “legitimate” culture as a mere disguised attempt to impose social order, since cultural advocates were first and genuinely devoted to elevating life and expanding people’s horizons. But if shoring up order was not the hidden purpose of these changes, order was “one of culture’s salutary by-products.” Turning away from the earlier situations where “audiences that cut across the social and economic spectrum enjoy[ed] an expressive culture which blended together mixed elements of what we would today call high, low, and folk culture,” the new order instituted a strict separation between the artistic heights and the vast terrain beneath them, putting in place a hierarchy that would prevail until late in the twentieth century.5

  Levine’s account cannot be transferred directly to Europe, because there pre-nineteenth-century cultural life was organized in accord with an older and more deeply rooted hierarchy, whose pres
ence gave a different shape and significance to the kinds of developments on which he focuses. In the private aristocratic spaces where most concerts took place until late in the eighteenth century, the musicians had roles analogous to those of servants; public concerts and operas were free of the earnest atmosphere introduced by the regime of silence, but the social relations on display were anything but democratic, and (as we saw above) deference was regularly paid to nobles and court figures. Against this background the changes introduced during the nineteenth century emerge as anti-hierarchical in both intention and effect. All the same, there is no doubt that the new and more public forms of culture chiefly benefitted sites and practices that appealed primarily to interested bourgeois and aristocrats; this was true no less of intellectually ambitious newspapers and books than of museums and concert halls; popular enjoyments and activities both rural and urban remained largely within the bounds where they had long operated. In addition, the claims for the quasi-sacred nature of visual art, music, and poetry put forward by romantic writers such as Wackenröder (as by Wordsworth and Coleridge) applied to high culture rather than popular forms (despite the high valuation given to them on other grounds by Herder and romantic writers); thus they too sharpened the boundary between cultural levels, much in the way Levine describes for late nineteenth-century America.