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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
I confess at the outset that I am somewhat surprised at the direction my response to Bernard Porter's vigorous and provocative essay has taken. That I find his acceptance of Laing's Theorem (“Art flourishes in inverse proportion to Capitalism”) and his assertion that “free market capitalism [is] fundamentally philistine” (p. 253) reductionist may possibly be due to the fact that, as I proofread this, Texaco, one of capitalism's giants, is about to air its 1,000th opera broadcast on the New York Times' WQXR (one of the glories of commercially-sponsored East Coast culture), or that my college, like many others, receives generous funding from philanthropic capitalism, and indeed would not even exist without the vision and culture of a “bourgeois” brewer, Matthew Vassar. But there are other, deeper, reasons. I say my response surprises me, for I once thought that Matthew Arnold had it right and that the Victorian middle classes were uncultured (“bourgeois” = “philistine”), and that “free market capitalism” was infused with the conviction (Arnold's scorn notwithstanding) that civilization could be measured in, even achieved through, coal or cotton. This was nowhere better expressed than by Richard Cobden in his rhapsodic paean to Manchester's civilizing mission.
I take my title from G. M. Young's “The New Cotegiano,” Victorian Essays (Oxford, 1962), p. 121: “The statisticians tell us that certain phenomena, weather for instance, move in cycles of different periods, and that when the crests and troughs of two or three cycles chance to coincide, the result is a climatic Age of Gold, or Mud.” Unless otherwise stated, place of publication is London. I would like to thank my colleague in the Vassar Art department, Brian Lukacher, for his valuable insights and suggestions and stimulating conversations.
1 In his conclusion, Porter, perhaps understandably dismayed by his own thesis, rightly offers a caveat that potentially undermines it: “The extent of the penetration of capitalist values in a society at any particular time is difficult to measure” (p. 268). Agreed. But let us, for the sake of the discussion, argue, as has Walter Arnstein, that the ideology of laissez-faire “was never as all-inclusive as popular stereotype would have it, but it was dominant” (Britain Yesterday and Today: 1830 to the Present [5th ed.; New York, 1988], p. 188)Google Scholar.
2 Quoted in Thomson, D., England in the Nineteenth Century (Harmondsworth, 1950), p. 32Google Scholar, and by Wiener, M. J., English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar, quoting Thomson, p. 28. Cobden's attitudes are very similar to Laing's (Porter, p. 260).
3 Macaulay, T. B., “Lord Bacon,” in Essays, Cultural and Historical (1872), p. 396Google Scholar, originally published in the Edinburgh Review, July 1837. For Macaulay as anti-intellectual, see Houghton, W. E., The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven, 1957), pp. 123ffGoogle Scholar, and for the defense, Clive, John, Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian (New York, 1973), pp. 486ffGoogle Scholar. I agree with Porter's introduction. Thatcherite “free market capitalism” is doctrinaire (“stiff-necked and perverse” to use Arnold's phrase for the Philistine) and as damaging as it is demoralizing to artist and academic alike. In its preoccupation with doing, and doing measured by productivity and profit, it compares itself to one of the dominant strains of mid-Victorian England, but it also recalls the seventeenth-century Protestant ethos, secularized it is true, that held that only doers shall be saved. For Arnold see, Trilling, Lionel, ed., The Portable Matthew Arnold (New York, 1956), p. 530Google Scholar.
4 How representative is Laing? In his own time, judging from the scant attention the reviews gave his work and the notice in the Dictionary of National Biography, he was regarded as something of a fringe thinker.
5 Simon Gunn rightly takes historians to task for viewing the middle class in terms of “figurative and psychological stereotypes” and adds, “It is impossible to conceive this order of caricature passing for analysis…in contemporary debates in labour history or popular culture” (“The ‘failure’ of the Victorian Middle Class: a Critique,” in The Culture of Capital: Art, Power and the Nineteenth-Century Middle Class, eds. Wolff, J. and Seed, J. (Manchester, 1988), p. 17Google Scholar.
6 Hansard, 3rd Series, 8 (1831), p. 251. Wingfield-Stratford, E., Those Earnest Victorians (New York, 1930)Google Scholar, argued that Ihe middle classes had “contempt for all those things that cannot be appraised in terms of the currency…,” p. 54. One of my favorite index entries is Ensor's, R. C. K. “Art, why bad in the Victorian age,” in his England, 1870–1914 (Oxford, 1936), p. 615Google Scholar. Ensor dismisses mid-Victorian art as “visible ugliness…it was costly, flashy, pretentious, insincere, preferring new ways (or archaisms) which really always proved ugly,” ibid., p. 152. “The numerical dominance of a class of uneducated rich” was one of the factors that “rendered the rot even worse than it need have been” (p. 154). Students consulting more modern, good, solid textbooks will probably come away with the notion that the Victorian bourgeoisie and their England were uncultured. Altick, Richard, for example, in his Victorian People and Ideas (New York, 1973)Google Scholar quotes the Westminster Review for 1825: “‘Ledgers do not keep well in rhyme, nor are three-deckers [battleships] built by songs….’ This was the true spirit of the Victorian businessman, ancestor of the twentieth-century Babbitt” (p. 270). Webb's, R. K.Modern England (New York, 1980)Google Scholar, has only about a page or so on the arts. Walter Arnstein, in his Britain: Yesterday and Today has only one dismissive sentence, “The most popular paintings were large, realistic, and sentimental, and they were painted by artists whose personal morality was beyond cavil” (p. 80). Young's, G. M.Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (Oxford, 1964)Google Scholar is rich in literary references, but has only one disparaging reference to art (p. 16). Typical of the brusque dismissal of the middle classes' sensibilities without supporting evidence is R. J. Morris: the Leeds middle classes, he writes, “were in the very best way the ‘philistines’ of Arnold's Culture and Anarchy,” “Middle-class Culture, 1700–1914,” in A History of Modern Leeds, ed. Fraser, Derek (Manchester, 1980), p. 201Google Scholar.
7 “—I believe I'm always introduced so now, that is to say — the remark is invariably made in an undertone…,” he continued. Moore, J. N., Edward Elgar, A Creative Life (Oxford, 1984), p. 130Google Scholar. Thatcher's philistinism and hostility towards the arts is only to be expected, it is argued. She is, after all, “only” a shopkeeper's daughter. If Major continues her policies towards the arts then we shall doubtless hear it was because his father, among other plcbian occupations, had a garden gnome business (true, it failed, but this type of criticism is more aesthetic than Freudian.)
8 Kennedy, M., Portrait of Elgar (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar: Elgar felt victimized on account of his religion and complained, “post after post would have been open to him but for the prejudice against his religion, of golden opportunities snatched from his grasp by inferior men of more acceptable views. It was a subject on which he evidently felt very bitter…” (p. 52).
9 Porter, following Martin Wiener, associates Elgar with a reaction against industrialization. But one could argue that Elgar's love of the Malvern Hills, and indeed his life in Worcester, had little to do with urbanization or reactions to it—his inspirations in the country and in that old cathedral city were independent of, rather than reactions against, industrial Britain.
10 Wiener, , English Culture, p. 14Google Scholar; Porter, p. 254.
11 Gunn, , “The ‘failure’ of the Victorian Middle Class”, pp. 38–39Google Scholar. For Potter, who spent two years organizing the exhibit, see Wolff, J. and Arscott, C., “Cultivated Capital,” History Today (March 1987): 25Google Scholar.
12 Gunn, , “The ‘failure’ of the Victorian Middle Class,” p. 39Google Scholar. The Times called it “an event almost unique in the history of art in England, or perhaps the world” (May 6, 1857, p. 9.)
13 Seed, J., “‘Commerce and the liberal arts’: the political economy of art in Manchester, 1775–1860”, in The Culture of Capital, eds. Wolff, and Seed, , pp. 53, 54Google Scholar. Corporate sponsorship of the arts is hardly as “notoriously conventional” as Porter indicates (p. 267) —one has only to cite the role the Philip Morris company has played in furthering the modern arts.
14 “Art dealers were more than merely retail outlets. They became a cultural institution of sorts —a kind of art gallery, a forum for art lovers to meet and debate, and a place where the art dealer could exert a measure of influence on his clients. In this way some of these dealers…succeeded in shifting the interests of Manchester buyers away from shoddy and third-rate ‘old masters’ towards contemporary English artists” (Seed, , “‘Commerce and the liberal arts’”, p. 54Google Scholar).
15 Art Journal, 1849, p. 251Google Scholar, quoted in Haskell, F., Rediscoveries in Art. Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion, and Collecting in England and France (Ithaca, 1976) p. 52 n. 39Google Scholar. “Many of [the middle classes] are gathering round them galleries of Art which, at some future day, will rank as high as any of past times, and in monetary value will be as marketable” (ibid.).
16 Thompson, M.L., The Rise of Respectable Society. A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830–1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), pp. 267, 265Google Scholar. Typically, Thompson is suggestive in his analysis of middle-class art patronage: he cites, among other things, the Tate Gallery, built with money from sugar, and the great Turner collection of Joseph Gillot, the largest pen manufacturer in Birmingham “and possibly the world,” suggests that English art received more from middle-class than upper-class patronage, and argues that the middle classes were fast removing themselves from the taint of “money-grubbing philistinism,” even before Arnold got around to indicting them! (pp. 265–67). In 1857 it was claimed that “the principal support of British art proceeds from wealthy Lancashire” (quoted ibid., p. 267.)
17 Seed, , “‘Commerce and the liberal arts,’” pp. 67ffGoogle Scholar. Culture as a form of urban image-building is as old as the Greeks, and has been a prominent feature of modern urbanity in the America of Szell's Cleveland or Ormandy's Philadelphia, as it is in Simon Rattle's Birmingham. Porter should note that the Chairman of Birmingham's Economic Development Committee (in a Labour-dominated Council) has argued, “if Birmingham was to become a truly international city, there needed to be an arts development program, and it needed to be seen as part of the [city's] revival….In a sense, we wanted to buy in culture.” Thus, when London's Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet became available “we made a grab for it” (New York Times, December 17, 1990, section A, p. 4).
18 They were assisted in this by the institutions that the wealth of Manchester created, the Royal Manchester Institution, established in 1823, for example. According to John Seed, the Institution “constituted a significant art market in the town, generating annually several thousands of pounds' worth of business. But the institution did more than that. Its very existence and its fine building on the town's most fashionable street — built at considerable expense [by Charles Barry] — declared that art was an important part of the emerging public culture of an increasingly powerful Manchester” (“‘Commerce and the liberal arts,’” p. 55).
19 Ibid., p. 73. Seed writes: “To affirm the significance of art to a commercial-industrial capital like nineteenth-century Manchester is not simply a matter of indicating that among its prosperous businessmen were serious art collectors who exemplified learning, taste and discrimination. Nor is it to deny that among this same class there were those who were profoundly ‘philistine.’ There were men —and women — of both kinds among the middle class of Manchester, as there were, of course, among the gentry and landed aristocracy. Rather, it is a matter of showing that art was being produced and consumed in the town on a significant scale; that there was considerable investment of resources in organisations and events connected with art; and that, in a variety of ways…art was being appropriated into the discourses of private and public life in Manchester” (ibid.).
20 Arscott, Caroline, “‘Without Distinction of Party’: the Polytechnic Exhibition in Leeds, 1839–45,” in The Culture of Capital, eds. Wolff, and Seed, , p. 142Google Scholar. “Bankers, shareholders, barristers, solicitors, newspaper proprietors, professors of music, school masters, booksellers, engravers, pawnbrokers, jewellers, gun dealers, suppliers of floor coverings and wallpaper, wine and spirit merchants, flour dealers and tea merchants were all included in the catalogue, regardless of shades of social standing and differences in politics or religion” (ibid.), Arscott concludes: “A study of the Leeds Polytechnic Exhibitions establishes that Leeds was not a cultural desert, peopled by philistines, in the mid-nineteenth century” (p. 154). See also Haskell, , Rediscoveries in Art, pp. 41–52Google Scholar, for the remarkable collections, including contemporary English painters, of the timber merchant, Edward Solly, and the army contractor, Robert Vernon.
21 Moral earnestness, like the capitalist ethos, is “contentious.” For two very different approaches to this question, both of which suggest that it was never as pervasive as Houghton and others have suggested, see Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society, and Gay, Peter, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. Volume I. Education of the Senses (New York, 1984)Google Scholar. Gilbert and Sullivan might be cited as an example of the escape from earnestness and the product of the commercial-capitalist spirit. One could also argue that if, to cite the German jibe, England was “Das Land ohne Musik,” it might have something to do with the cult of manliness (to which Laing is clearly a subscriber), which held that music-making and art were “un-manly.” See Trend, M., The Music Makers. The English Musical Renaissance from Elgar to Britten (New York, 1985), pp. 2–4Google Scholar.
22 Altick, , Victorian People, pp. 271, 272Google Scholar. Altick says that “Poetry and painting supplemented the pulpit if they did not actually replace it,” p. 272. Interestingly, the Frenchman, Francis Wey, thought that “if this rich and most flourishing country has only boasted a museum [National Gallery] these last seventeen years, it must be attributed to the cold austerity of the Anglican religion” (A Frenchman sees the English in the 'Fifties, trans. Pirie, V. [London, 1935], pp. 27–28Google Scholar).
23 Wingfield-Stratford, , Those Earnest Victorians, p. 217Google Scholar. For a strong criticism of the high Victorian renaissance see Kramer, H., “New Vogue for Victorian Art,” New York Times Magazine, February 4, 1979Google Scholar.
24 Arnold, M., “Culture and Anarchy,” in The Portable Matthew Arnold, pp. 504, 530Google Scholar.
25 The Times, May 6, 1857, p. 9. That the Exhibition was also designed to bind classes together is clear from the Bishop's comment: “And as this undertaking is intended for the good of many, so may it too contribute to draw them together in mutual love and kindness”.
26 Quoted in Arscott, , “‘Without Distinction of Party’”, p. 148Google Scholar.
27 The wording and emphasis are Porter's (p. 262) not Laing's.
28 Baudelaire considered the society in which they grew up as incapable of understanding “true art,” and the dominant Academy of Fine Arts was denounced by Ingres for stifling and corrupting “feelings for the great, the beautiful.” It was, he said, “literally no more than a picture shop, a bazaar…and business rules instead of art” (Rewald, J., The History of Impressionism [New York, 1961], pp. 33, 20Google Scholar).
29 To Van Gogh “the English black-and-white artists are to art what Dickens is to literature” (Pickvance, R., English Influences on Vincent Van Gogh [London, 1975], p. 26Google Scholar). See also Treuhertz, J., et. al., Hard Times. Social Realism in Victorian Art (London, 1987), pp. 114, 119Google Scholar. “Sullivan was the genuine, creative, thoroughly musical talent of English Victorian music, the creator of a genre, the Savoy operas — Offenbach in gaiters…” (Kennedy, , Portrait of Etgar, pp. 37–38Google Scholar). For the “singing mania” that hit England in the 1840s, see Trend, , The Music Makers, pp. 14–15Google Scholar. The celebrated Berlin music critic, Otto Lessmann, wrote in 1889 that he had heard “choral performances of greater beauty in Leeds than in any town on the Continent…have we any occasion, or even right, to jeer at the sincere interests of the English in music, or even to question it” (ibid., p.15). It is interesting to note that Ralph Vaughan Williams felt English composers were laboring under what he called the “cigar theory”—good music, like good cigars, had to be imported from abroad (ibid., p. 5).
30 Kennedy, Michael, The Hallé Tradition: A Century of Music (Manchester, 1960), p. 19Google Scholar. Kennedy calls Leo “one of those music-loving businessmen whom Manchester has produced for the past 150 years, and…the leader of musical life in Manchester” (p. 19). Julius Delius was the father of the composer, Frederick. Behrens managed to combine a vigorous business life (he was head of his firm and also a director of the Midland board of the L.M.S. railway, in which capacity he attended 655 of a possible 672 board meetings) and a keen commitment to music (ibid., p. 98). James Forsyth, Hallé's business manager and a music-shop owner, gave his services free to the orchestra for four years after Hallé's death.
31 de Jouvenal, Bertrand, “The Treatment of Capitalism by Continental Intellectuals,” in Capitalism and the Historians, ed. Hayek, F. A. (Chicago, 1954), p. 118Google Scholar. This “fundamental difference” seems no longer to exist according to the Chairman of Esso, U.K.: “Similarities [exist] between producing a great painting and running a modern technical business,” for artists and businessmen alike strive “at the boundaries of technical knowledge,” quoted by House, John in the The Times Literary Supplement, no. 4597 (December 21–27, 1990) p. 1376Google Scholar.
32 Wiener, , English Culture, p. 30Google Scholar; Kennedy, , The Hallé Tradition, p. 93Google Scholar.