001_Introduction.doc
READINGS: INTRODUCTION
Eugen Weber, Introduction to Cultural and Intellectual History, Movements, Currents, Trends (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1992) pp. 1-12
The essays that follow represent the attitudes and programs of the major artistic and literary movements of our time, movements and ideas whose results we read, gaze at, and discuss, whose influence we encounter as part of the history of their period, but whose origins and intentions we no longer quite remember. Yet we hark back to them all the time, for their influence is still fresh and many of their tenets have long since become part of our own way of thinking.
While teaching my own courses in the intellectual history of nineteenth and twentiethcentury Europe, I could not help but see that the most explicit, the really classic expressions of doctrines to which we ceaselessly refer are generally ignored. Some had not been translated into English, many even though translated lay dormant in books that were hard to get, or to get at,, for studentsand even more so for general readers. Yet these essays, relatively few in number, seem to provide the best clear, brief statements of attitude and purpose for anyone who wishes to understand the aims and peculiarities of Romantics and Futurists, Realists, Surrealists, and all the other isms and fists that have helped to make or unmake our world. The material they contain is selfexplanatory, presenting the doctrines at first hand, and helps to make up for the lack of any book in English that can supply an adequate account of them all. Read in sequence, the various and varying points of view seem to fall into place of their own accord as part of a continuum, of a tradition, to which we are the heirs.
I have drawn heavily on the manifestoes of literary and artistic movements, partly because much has already been done to make available the political and philosophical thought of the time; but partly, too, because it was through literature and the arts that ideas developed in the more rarefied air of school and study were funneled in time to a wider public, not overreceptive, but open to their influence and nearly always swayed in the end. The very treatment of literature and art as aids to the study of history, the interpretation of their products as documents which, when examined by competent historians, can help to understand the spirit of an age is itself the discovery of that Romantic spirit which lies behind every other modern movement. It was the German romantics of the eighteenth century who first suggested that literary history was a necessary part of literary criticism, that literature and art were reflections of particular societies and times, knowledge of which could help explain their nature and the ideas behind them just as the works themselves would contribute to our understanding of the age and the milieu that gave them birth. This concept was published to the world by Madame de Stael in the second decade of the nineteenth century and, even when opposed or resented, has contributed to our treatment and comprehension of every sort of work and situation.
Of course, this sort of evidence is seldom obvious or clear, is often misleading, and calls for careful interpretation. But so does the Domesday Book, so does diplomatic correspondence, so do the treaties, monuments, and inscriptions of another day, the Cretan accounts and the Dead Sea scrolls that have caused so much enthusiasm of late. If such artistic evidence is incapable of unbiased and objective interpretation, so is every other kind of evidence in library or court; and if the terms are used in a relative sense only, with a decent awareness of human fallibility, then the capacity for objective and unbiased interpretation rests not in the materials themselves but in those who handle themanother matter altogether. It is becoming ever more apparent that as monuments, as documents, as potential illustrations of an age, the contributions of literature and the other arts cannot be ignored. They are part of intellectual history, as much as the great political and philosophical systems, as much as the story of scientific discovery or technological development. Yet while accounts are available of all of these in their historical setting, the great popular systems which carried their doctrines to the public, which interpreted, misinterpreted and vulgarized their conclusions, these appear only in classic histories of national literature for the use of "Eng. Lit:" classes and the like. There is no book to give us a clear and vivid impression of the shifts and currents of intellectual orientation and popular tastenot in terms of stylistic changes but of an ideological evolution, not as part of a specialized development but against the background of contemporary history. This is what I have tried to provide, very briefly, below.
If there should be about such a panorama a certain element of confusion, the reader might remember that reality is confused and only becomes clear when a great mass of apparently irrelevant material has been eliminated, and what remains is embalmed in the antiseptic pages of history books. A hundred years ago, a great English writer began his account of the French Revolution with a famous description that probably holds good for every other time:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it, was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other wayin short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
It is worth bearing this in mind.
Movements of thought are commonly regardedlike centuries, or generations as separate, easily identifiable and limited wholes. They follow each other like companies passing before the reviewing stand, each with its banner, its company and subordinate commanders, its disciplined, almost identical men in the ranks. According to this view, the seventeenth century which is classical, is followed by the eighteenth century which is rational, and that in turn by the nineteenth which (since we have to examine it a little more closely) appears more variedsay, romantic and scientific both. As far as movements or tendencies go, it is well understood that Romantics, Realists, Naturalists, Symbolists, and Expressionists are distinct species, easily told apart. Like the companies we can tell them by their colors, like the centuries by their number, and count them off as they pass, their tracks in the dirt of the parade ground soon obliterated by the steps of those that follow, leaving behind them only the memory of the songs they sang and a glimpse of banners bravely fluttering in the wind.
No hint in all this that movements, like centuries, are concepts of reason, not of fact, their limits imposed upon them by human agencyinterpretation. No hint, either, of the living forces that cut across these theoretical limitsthe simple survival of fathers and grandfathers, for instance, to teach, to influence, sometimes to dominate, another generation. Voltaire, cold, brittle, brilliant, and spurned by the Romantics, is yet carried deep into the heart of their time by reactionary gentlemen, in exile or returned from it, who could not unlearn their youth. More people still read him in the 1830's and the 1840's than read Stendhal. On the other hand, great heroes of the Realistic school like Flaubert or Courbet are still close to a Romanticism that they continue more than they oppose. Romanticism and Realism: these labels lead us to overestimate differences and oppositions that were often more formal than real. Romantic or RealistVictor Hugo, George Sand, or Balzac? Romantic or NaturalistDickens, Monet, or Zola? Naturalist or SymbolistDostoevsky, Huysmans, or Van Gogh? Both. Either at different stages of their career, or at the same time. And if the difference between Romanticism and Realism is fairly clear, that between Romanticism and Symbolism is less so, and that between Realism and Naturalism, between Symbolism and Expressionism, is not clear at all. It comes down to saying that these movements, which for reasons of convenience are presented as separate, which for reasons of selfidentification selfconsciously stress differences and ignore identities, are not really distinct, are not at all separate, can only be understood in relation to one another, their very differences and oppositions the result of evolution, not revolution, and all of them facets of the same search for truth that began in the eighteenth century with denial of universal, universally valid and apprehensible laws, and that has not ended today.
We shall follow this search to discover reality and express ita reality no longer general and objective after the discoveries of modern scientists and historians, the appeals of Rousseau and Goethe. We shall follow it through the subjective explorations of nature and of self of the Romantic school; the wouldbe objective, but no less passionate, interest in every variety of external reality shown by the "positivistic" Realists and Naturalists; the gradual disintegration of a world taken apart first for scientific experiment, then to achieve a better representation of it, and lastly for the sake of metaphysical penetration and reinterpretation. Only, as the quest continues into the twentieth century, less and less is left to hope for from the search, less is left to grasp for, and man who had begun by thinking that his task was to discover a reality external to himself, ends by concluding that reality and its laws must be of his own making, that they lie not in objective externals, as the eighteenth century still believed, but in his own subjective choice than which there is no other. The Romantic overtones of such a view are hard to miss, and this points once more to the connection between movements more separate in tables of contents than they are in reality.
Like great currents in the sea of time they sweep along, sometimes side by side, sometimes far apart, now mingling their waters, now turning aside in different directions toward a different shore.
And yet the presentation of these movements as separate and separately significant is not as treacherous as it may seem. In the first place it is, quite simply, convenient. To say that all the tendencies we find below often coexisted, does not dispense from the attempt severally to describe them. But, further, it is true that the literature and the living arts of every generation have always reflected the ideas and circumstances of their timeunconsciously in part, as the products must be of men who learn the idiom of their time and express themselves in it, but also deliberately, because a work of art is necessarily the expression of a point of view. The points of view may differ, but they are always there, sometimes revolutionary, sometimes reactionary, sometimes escapist or conservative, and this is what marks the character, furnishes the controversial quality of certain works. A point of view (even for a painter) implies a whole philosophy or, at least, an attitude which, if it differs from what is currently practiced or accepted, makes for trouble and debate. In this sense, the style of a work is less important than the reason for adopting it, less important sometimes than its subject. The style may be acceptable but the subject challenging, the subject may be commonplace but the style objectionable in its implications. In both cases, it is the implications that count rather than the work itself, the matter not the manner of a work that sets the public by the ears. Witness the criticisms addressed to Courbet and Flaubert less, if at all, for their style than for their "vulgar" subjects, to Impressionists and Cubists less for their subjects than for their "shocking" style.
But then, if the artists or the writers so often find themselves in conflict with their age, what is their representative quality? How, even granting their place in the van of a general march, can they be said to reflect the ideas and the circumstances of their time? In one sense, of course, they do not. Our period more than any other has seen a split between the culturally active, productive, significant minority and society as a whole. The very economic developments that set artist and writer free from private patronage, that emancipated them from the service of the ruling order and of its chief representatives at court, in the church, and in the aristocracy, also cut them off from the general publica mass ever vaster, more diverse, and less interested in and connected with contemporary cultural activities. An intelligentsia was born, an educated class lacking the wealth, power, and position of earlier educated classes, cut off by its values and activities from the rest of society which it feared and despised, being distrusted and despised in return or, what is worse, ignored. Freedom, for them, often meant freedom to starve. But also to rebel. And in this rebellion lies the artist's representative character, his championship of new ideas, of more advanced ideas, of counter-ideas, which are often those of the significant part of the younger generation and, when successful, the ideology of tomorrow.
Such works and attitudes, however, are not always theoretical to begin with. One may, and generally does, react against injustice, ugliness, deception, or pain with anger, with a statement that is less theoretical than emotive. Often the work comes first, as experiment or reaction; the theory comes later. Many of the manifestoes that follow were written, not only as most prefaces tend to be writtenafter the book, the play, the paintings, were donebut after the vague, uncertain beginnings had become a movement, after a doctrine or a school had made its point, had won acceptance, had even perhaps begun to wane. Hugo's Preface comes after the battle of Hernani had been fought and won, Courbet's statement on Realism after his paintings had been painted, Zola's explanation of the experimental novel when he was himself getting a bit sick of it all, the Symbolist manifesto when Rimbaud had stopped writing.
Furthermore, many of these declarations were not indicted by the leader of the school but by some secondary figure who had time for theorizing, sometimes even by a man in another field. The painters, in particular, tended to leave doctrines and explanations to their more articulate literary friends, critics like Zola, novelists like Champfleury, poets like Apollinaire, professors like Ruskin. But this, in turn, points up the close relationship between theory and practice, where the scientific discoveries and the political or literary doctrines of the time, discussed in cafes, in studios, and in little reviews, excited poets, painters, and musicians alike, each helping to strike a spark from the others.
The theories these people discussed, or their manifestoes proclaimed, were probably no more the creative inspiration of the schools whose banners they bear than their platforms are for political parties today. There is a great deal of polemical writing, redolent of bygone issues, bristling with names today forgotten, facing up to problems irrelevant today when time has fined things down to fewer personalities and clearer lines. And those who do not mind the irrelevancies may still complain of inadequacies, of too many mots and not enough chosesthe reverberating echoes and explanations of great movements, but not their products. Evidently, this was a chance I had to take: the products, after all, are already known since they are the armory of our civilization. Here, however, are their theoretical expressions, statements, and clarifications of purpose, signposts for actors and spectators, and inspiration for those in search of a pattern of their own. This should warn us not to overrate the significance of the declarations that follow, more valuable as documents than they were effective as acts. It should also warn us not to underrate their importance as expressions of opinions which both affected and were affected by their times and which played a major part in forming our taste, our point of viewthe cultural idiom of today.
There is a pleasant story of Stendhal in Paris during the July days of 1830. The Red and the Black was just in the printer's hands, but it had to wait because all workers had left the shop to fight on the barricadesor perhaps to see what was going on. So the impatient author sat in his room, whence he could hear the firing in the streets, and noted the progress of the uprising on the margins of the Memorial of Santa Helena which he had most appropriately taken up. Stendhal's novels consciously and deliberately hold a mirror up to contemporary history, and none more so than The Red and the Black itself. He was a "true painter of his time," in the Baudelairian sense of "one who can make us see and understand how great and poetic we are in our cravats and varnished boots," who can represent present life very much as it is, yet without stripping it of a certain epic grandeur and worthwhileness. He was, in spite of his wouldbe detachment, a terribly committed artist and, in this respect at least, no exception in a time when genius habitually meddled with propaganda, when inspiration and social consciousness so often went hand in hand, when art and artists set out almost deliberately to provide us with evidence of the issues of their day and spell out the arguments as to how these issues had best be tackled.