Social History of Art, Volume 4

Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

Arnold Hauser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134637386
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Media Studies

First published in 1951 Arnold Hausers commanding work presents an account of the development and meaning of art from its origins in the Stone Age through to the Film Age. Exploring the interaction between art and society, Hauser effectively details social and historical movements and sketches the frameworks in which visual art is produced.
This new edition provides an excellent introduction to the work of Arnold Hauser. In his general introduction to The Social History of Art, Jonathan Harris asseses the importance of the work for contemporary art history and visual culture. In addition, an introduction to each volume provides a synopsis of Hausers narrative and serves as a critical guide to the text, identifying major themes, trends and arguments.

CHAPTER I
NATURALISM AND IMPRESSIONISM

1. THE GENERATION OF 1830

IF the purpose of historical research is the understanding of the present—and what else could it be?—then this enquiry is approaching its goal. What we are now to be concerned with is modern capitalism, modern bourgeois society, modern naturalistic art and literature, in, short, our own world. Everywhere we are faced with new situations, new ways of life and feel as if we were cut off from the past. But the incision is probably nowhere so deep as in literature, where the frontier between the older works which are merely of historical interest to us and those that arise from now onwards and are still more or less topical today represents the most remarkable breach in the whole history of art. It is only the works produced on our side of the divide that constitute the living, modern literature directly concerned with our own contemporary problems. We are separated from all the older works by an unbridgeable gulf—to understand them, a special approach and a special effort on our part are necessary and their interpretation is always involved in the danger of mis-understanding and falsification. We read the works of the older literature differently from those of our own age; we enjoy them purely aesthetically, that is, indirectly, disinterestedly, perfectly aware of their fictitiousness and of our self-deception. This pre-supposes points of view and abilities which the average reader in no way has at his command; but even the historically and aesthetically interested reader feels there is an irreconcilable difference between works which have no immediate relationship to his own age, his own feelings and aims in life and such as have grown out of these very feelings and seek an answer to the question: How can one, how should one, live in this present age?

The nineteenth century, or what we usually understand by that term, begins around 1850. It is only during the July monarchy that the foundations and outlines of this century are developed, that is to say, the social order in which we ourselves are rooted, the economic system, the antagonisms and contradictions of which still continue, and the literature in whose forms we on the whole still express ourselves today. The novels of Stendhal and Balzac are the first books concerned with our own life, our own vital problems, with moral difficulties and conflicts un-known to earlier generations. Julien Sorel and Mathilde de la Mole, Lucien de Rubempre and Rastignac are the first modern characters in Western literature—our first intellectual contemporaries. In them we meet for the first time the sensibility which throbs in our own nerves, in the delineation of their characters we find the first outlines of the psychological differentiation which for us is part of the nature of contemporary man. From Stendhal to Proust, from the generation of 1830 to that of 1910, we are witnesses of a homogeneous, organic intellectual development. Three generations struggle with the same problems, for seventy to eighty years the course of history remains unchanged.

All the characteristic features of the century are already recognizable around 1830. The bourgeoisie is in full possession and awareness of its power. The aristocracy has vanished from the scene of historical events and leads a purely private existence. The victory of the middle class is undoubted and undisputed. It is true that the victors form a thoroughly conservative and illiberal capitalist class adopting the administrative forms and methods of the old aristocracy often without alteration, but a class that is absolutely unaristocratic and untraditionalistic in its way of life and thought. Romanticism was, no doubt, already an essentially bourgeois movement, which would have been inconceivable without the emancipation of the middle classes, but the romantics often behaved rather aristocratically and flirted with the idea of appealing to the nobility as their public. After 1830 these whims come to an end entirely and it becomes obvious that there is in fact no massive public apart from the middle class. But as soon as the emancipation of the middle class is accomplished, the struggle of the working class for its rights already begins. And that is the second of the decisively important movements which proceed from the July revolution and monarchy. Hitherto the class struggles of the proletariat had been fused with those of the middle class, and it had been mainly the political aspirations of the middle classes for which the working class had fought. The developments after 1830 first open its eyes and supply it with the proof that, in fighting for its rights, it can rely on no other class. Simultaneously with the awakening class-consciousness of the proletariat, socialist theory acquires its first more or less concrete form and there also arises the programme of an artistic activist movement which for radicalism and consistency surpasses all previous movements of a similar nature. ‘L’art pour l’art’ goes through its first crisis and has from now on to fight not only against the idealism of the classicists but also against the utilitarianism of both ‘social’ and ‘bourgeois’ art.

The economic rationalism which goes hand in hand with advancing industrialization and the total victory of capitalism, the progress of the historical and exact sciences and the general philosophical scientism connected with it, the repeated experience of an unsuccessful revolution and the political realism which results—all this paves the way for the great fight against romanticism which pervades the history of the next hundred years. The preparation and institution of this fight is a further contribution of the 1830 generation to the foundations of the nineteenth century. Stendhal’s wavering between ‘logique’ and ‘espagnolisme’, Balzac’s ambivalent relationship to the middle class, the dialectic of rationalism and irrationalism in both of them, shows the fight already in full swing; Flaubert’s generation deepens the conflict, but finds it already under way. The artistic outlook of the July monarchy is partly bourgeois, partly socialistic, but unromantic on the whole. The public is, as Balzac remarks in the preface to Peau de Chagrin (1831), ‘fed up with Spain, the Orient and the history of France a la Walter Scott’, and, as Lamartine laments, the age of poetry, that is, of ‘romantic’ poetry, is past.¹ The naturalistic novel, the most original creation of this period and the most important art form of the nineteenth century, gives expression, despite the romanticism of its founders, despite Stendhal’s Rousseauism and Balzac’s melodramatics, to the unromantic spirit of the new generation. Both economic rationalism and political thinking in terms of the class struggle refer the novel to the study of social reality and socio-psychological mechanisms. The subject and the point of view are both in full accord with the aspirations of the middle class and the result, the naturalistic novel, serves this rising class as a kind of textbook in its endeavour to secure complete control of society. The writers of the period turn it into an instrument for sounding man and dealing with the world and thereby conform to the taste and needs of a public that they hate and despise. They strive to satisfy their middle-class readers, no matter whether they are Saint-Simonites and Fourierites or not, and believe in social art or Tart pour l’art’—for there is no proletarian reading public, and even if there were, its existence would only embarrass them.

Until the eighteenth century, authors had been nothing but the mouthpiece of their public;² they looked after their readers’ minds, just as servants and officials managed their material goods. They accepted and confirmed the generally recognized moral principles and criteria of taste; they did not invent them and they did not alter them. They produced their works for a clearly defined and clearly limited public and made no attempt whatsoever to gain new readers. Thus there was no tension of any kind between the real and an ideal public.³ The writer knew neither the tormenting problem of having to choose between different subjective possibilities, nor the moral problem of having to choose between different strata of society. It is not until the eighteenth century that the public divides into two different camps and art into two rival tendencies. From now on every artist stands between two opposing orders, between the world of the conservative aristocracy and that of the progressive bourgeoisie, between a group that holds fast to the old, traditional, allegedly absolute values and one based on the view that even, and above all, these values are historically conditioned and that there are other, more up-to-date values, more in accordance with the general good. The middle class renounces its aristocratic models and the aristocracy itself begins to doubt the validity of its own standards; partly it goes over to the bourgeois camp, in order to promote a literature which is hostile and pernicious to its own interests. For writers an absolutely new situation develops; those who continue in the service of the conservative classes, the Churches, the court and the court nobility, betray their own social compeers; those, on the other hand, who represent the world-view of the rising bourgeoisie fulfill a function never before discharged by representative writers, apart from isolated individuals—they fight for an oppressed class, or at least for a class that is not yet in possession of power.⁴ They no longer find the ideology of this public ready and waiting for them, they have themselves to contribute to its conceptual system, its philosophical categories and standards of value. They are, therefore, no longer merely the mouthpiece of their readers, they are at the same time their advocates and teachers, and even regain something of that long-lost priestly dignity which neither the poets of antiquity nor of the Renaissance had enjoyed, least of all the clerics of the Middle Ages, whose readers were themselves merely clerics and who came into no contact at all with the lay public. During the Restoration and the July monarchy the littérateurs lose the unique position they had occupied in the eighteenth century; they are no longer either the protectors or the teachers of their readers, they are, on the contrary, their unwilling, constantly revolting, but none the less very useful, servants. Once again they proclaim a more or less readymade, prescribed ideology, namely, the liberalism of the victorious middle class, derived from the enlightenment, but falsifying it in many ways. They are compelled to base themselves on this philosophy, if they want to find readers and sell their books. The peculiar thing is, however, that they do it without identifying themselves with their public. Even the authors of the enlightenment counted only a part of the literary public among their supporters; they, too, were surrounded by a hostile and dangerous world, but at least they were in the same camp as their own readers. Even the romantics still felt themselves related to one or other stratum of society, in spite of their home-lessness, and were always able to say which group, which class they were supporting. But to what section of the public does Stendhal feel himself related? At best to the ‘happy few’—the outsiders, the outlaws, the defeated. And Balzac? Does he identify himself with the nobility, with the bourgeoisie, or the proletariat?—with the class for which he has certain sympathies, but which he abandons without turning an eyelash, or with the class whose inexhaustible energy he recognizes, but for which he feels a loathing, or with the masses by whom he is as frightened as he is by fire? The writers who are not merely the ‘maitres de plaisir’ of the bourgeoisie have no real public—Balzac, the successful, no more than Stendhal, the failure.

Nothing reflects the tense, discordant relationship between the literarily productive and the receptive sections of the 1830 generation more sharply than the new type of novel hero appearing in Stendhal and Balzac. The disillusionment and Weltschmerz of the heroes of Rousseau, Chateaubriand and Byron, their remoteness from the world and their loneliness, are transformed into a forgoing of the realization of their ideals, into a contempt for society and often into a desperate cynicism concerning current norms and conventions. The romantic novel of disillusionment becomes the novel of hopelessness and resignation. All the tragic and heroic characteristics, the self-assertiveness, the belief in the perfectibility of one’s own nature, yield to a readiness to compromise, to the readiness to live aimlessly and die obscurely. The romantic novel of disillusionment still contained something of the idea of the tragedy which allows the hero fighting against trivial reality to be victorious even in defeat 5 in the nineteenth-century novel, on the other hand, he appears inwardly defeated even, and often precisely, when he has reached his actual goal. Nothing was further from the minds of the young Goethe, Chateaubriand or Benjamin Constant than to let their heroes doubt the raison d’être of their own personalities and aims in life 5 the modern novel first creates the bad conscience of the hero in conflict with the bourgeois social order, and demands that he accept the customs and conventions of society at least as the rules of the game. Werther is still the exceptional personality to whom the poet grants the right to revolt against the unappreciative and prosaic world from the very outset; Wilhelm Meister, on the other hand, ends his years of apprenticeship with the realization that one has to adapt oneself to the world as one finds it. External reality is more bereft of meaning and more soulless, because it has become more mechanical and self-sufficient; society, which had hitherto been the individual’s natural milieu and only field of activity, has lost all significance, all value from the point of view of his higher aims, but the requirement that he should comply with society, live in and for it, has become more imperative.

The politicization of society, which began with the French Revolution, reaches its climax under the July monarchy. The quarrel between liberalism and reaction, the struggle for the reconciliation of the achievements of the Revolution with the interests of the privileged classes, continues and embraces every sphere of public life. Finance capital triumphs over landed property, and both the feudal aristocracy and the Church cease to play a leading rôle in political life; the progressive elements are opposed by the bankers and industrialists. The old political and social antagonism has not become any less, but the positions have shifted. The deepest antitheses are now between industrial capitalism, on the one side, and the wage-earning workers with the petty bourgeoisie, on the other. The aims of the class struggle are clarified and the methods of warfare intensified ⁵ everything seems to point to the imminence of a new revolution. In spite of constant setbacks, liberalism gains ground and the way for Western European democracy is gradually prepared. The electoral law is altered and the number of electors is increased from some 100,000 to two and a half times its previous size. The rudiments of the parliamentary system and the foundations of the coalition of the working class come into being. In parliament, in spite of the electoral reforms, the possessing classes continue to be represented exclusively, and the liberalism that comes to power represents merely a liberalism within the bounds of the upper middle class. The July monarchy is, in brief, a period of eclecticism, of compromise, of the middle way—if not precisely the period of the ‘right’ middle way, as Louis-Philippe calls it and as it is now called by everyone, sometimes approvingly, sometimes ironically. It is outwardly a period of moderation and tolerance, but inwardly one marked by the most severe struggle for existence, an epoch of moderate political progress and economic conservatism after the English pattern. The Guizots and the Thiers extol the idea of the constitutional monarchy, desire that the king should merely reign, not rule, but they are the instrument of a parliamentary oligarchy, of a small government party which keeps the broader strata of the middle class spellbound with the magic formula of ‘Enrichissezvous!’. The July monarchy is a period of glorious prosperity, a flowering time for all industrial and commercial undertakings. Money dominates the whole of public and private life; everything bows before it, everything serves it, everything is prostituted—exactly, or almost, as Balzac described it. It is true that the rule of capital does not in any sense begin now, but hitherto the possession of money had been only one of the means by which a man had been able to gain a position for himself in France, and neither the most refined nor the most effective method either. Now, on the other hand, all rights, all power, all ability, are suddenly expressed in terms of money. In order to be understood, everything has to be reduced to this common denominator. From this point of view, the whole previous history of capitalism seems no more than a mere prelude. Not only politics and the higher strata of society, not only parliament and the bureaucracy, are plutocratic in character, France is dominated not merely by the Rothschilds and the other ‘juste-millionaires’, as Heine called them, but the king himself is a wily and unscrupulous speculator. For eighteen years the government represents, as Tocqueville says, a kind of ‘trading company’; the king, the parliament and the administration share the tasty morsels amongst themselves, exchange information and tips, make each other a present of transactions and concessions, speculate in shares and rents, bills of exchange and mortgages. The capitalist monopolizes the leadership of society and gains a position for himself that he had never had before. Hitherto, in order to play this part, the man of property had to have some kind of ideological halo; the rich man had to come forward as a patron of the Church, the Crown or the arts and sciences, but now he enjoys the highest honours simply because he is rich. ‘From now on the bankers will rule!’—Laffitte prophesies after Louis-Philippe has been elected king. And: ‘No society can continue without an aristocracy’—a deputy says in parliament in 1836.—‘Do you want to know who the aristocrats of the July monarchy are? The captains of industry; they are the basis of the new dynasty.’But the bourgeoisie is still fighting for its position, for the social prestige that the nobility concedes to it reluctantly and hesitantly. It is still a ‘rising class’ and still has the dashing offensive spirit and unbroken self-consciousness of the disfranchised. But it is so certain of victory that its self-consciousness already begins to turn into self-satisfaction and self-righteousness. Its good conscience is based partly on self-deception and develops into a state of mind in which the exposures of socialism will later break its self-confidence. It becomes more and more intolerant and illiberal, and takes for the foundations of its philosophy its worst inadequacies, its narrow-mindedness, its shallow rationalism and its idealistically disguised striving for profit. It suspects all real idealism and laughs at all unworldliness; it struggles against all intransigence and radicalism, persecutes and suppresses all opposition to the spirit of the ‘juste-milieu’ and the prudent concealment of antagonisms. It trains its satellites to be hypocrites, and shelters all the more desperately behind the fictions of its idealogy the more dangerous the attacks of socialism become.

The basic tendencies of modern capitalism, which had been becoming increasingly apparent ever since the Renaissance, now emerge in all their blatant and uncompromising clarity, unmitigated by any tradition. The most conspicuous of these tendencies is the attempt to withdraw the whole mechanism of an economic undertaking from all direct human influence, that is, from all consideration for personal circumstances. The undertaking becomes an autonomous organism, pursuing its own interests and aims, conforming to the laws of its own internal logic, a tyrant turning everyone who comes into contact with it into its slave.⁶ The absolute devotion to business, the self-sacrifice of the entrepreneur in the interest of the competitive system, the prosperity and extension of the firm, his abstract, ruthless, self-centred striving for success, acquires an alarming monomaniacal character.⁷ The system becomes independent of those who sustain it, and transformed i...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF ART VOLUME IV
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Illustrations
• General Introduction
• Introduction to Volume IV
• I Naturalism and Impressionism
• II The Film Age
• Notes
• Index