Humanities 3
Mario123
Gloria_K._Fiero_The_Humanistic_Tradition_Book_5z-lib.org.pdf
5 Book SEVENTH EDITION
The Humanistic Tradition Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World
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Gloria K. Fiero
5 Book SEVENTH EDITION
The Humanistic Tradition Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World
Boston Burr Ridge, IL Dubuque, IA New York San Francisco St. Louis Bangkok Bogotá Caracas Kuala Lumpur Lisbon London Madrid Mexico City
Milan Montreal New Delhi Santiago Seoul Singapore Sydney Taipei Toronto
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Front cover Richard James Lane, Marie Taglioni in the Ballet Flore et Zephyre (detail), 1831. After a drawing by Alfred Edward Chalon. Hand- coloured engraving, 143∕4 × 101∕2 in.
Frontispiece and page x Thomas Phillips, Lord Byron Sixth Baron in Albanian Costume (detail), 1813. Oil on canvas, 50 × 40 in.
THE HUMANISTIC TRADITION, BOOK 5 ROMANTICISM, REALISM, AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY WORLD SEVENTH EDITION
Published by McGraw-Hill Education, 2 Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10121. Copyright 2015 by McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Previous edition © 2011, 2006, 2002, 1998, 1995, 1992. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior consent of McGraw-Hill Education, including, but not limited to, in any network or other electronic storage or transmission, or broadcast for distance learning.
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This book is printed on acid-free paper.
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Permissions Acknowledgments appear on page 351, and on this page by reference.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fiero, Gloria K. The humanistic tradition / Gloria K. Fiero. -- Seventh edition. volumes cm Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: BOOK 1. The First Civilizations and the Classical Legacy -- BOOK 2. Medieval Europe and the World Beyond -- BOOK 3. The European Renaissance, the Reformation, and Global Encounter -- BOOK 4. Faith, Reason, and Power in the Early Modern World -- BOOK 5. Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World -- BOOK 6. Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Global Perspective -- VOLUME I. Prehistory to the Early Modern World -- VOLUME II. The Early Modern World to the Present.
ISBN 978-1-259-36066-4 (volume 1 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 1-259-36066-0 (volume 1 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-259-35168-6 (volume 2 : acid-free paper)) -- ISBN 1-259-35168-8 (volume 2 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-0-07-337666-0 (looseleaf : book 1 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 0-07-337666-3 (looseleaf : book 1 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-259-35209-6 (looseleaf : book 2 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 1-259-35209-9 (looseleaf : book 2 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-259-35210-2 (looseleaf : book 3 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 1-259-35210-2 (looseleaf : book 3 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-259-35539-4 (looseleaf : book 4 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 1-259-35539-X (looseleaf : book 4 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-259-35540-0 (looseleaf : book 5 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 1-259-35540-3 (looseleaf : book 5 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-259-35211-9 (looseleaf : book 6 : acid-free paper)
1. Civilization, Western--History--Textbooks. 2. Humanism--History--Textbooks. I. Title. CB245.F47 2015 909’.09821--dc23
2014037553
The Internet addresses listed in the text were accurate at the time of publication. The inclusion of a website does not indicate an endorsement by the author or McGraw-Hill Education, and McGraw-Hill Education does not guarantee the accuracy of the information presented at these sites
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Commissioning Editor: Kara Hattersley-Smith Production: Simon Walsh Designer: Ian Hunt Picture Researcher: Louise Thomas Text Permissions: Rachel Thorne Copy-editor: Rosanna Lewis
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vSERIES CONTENTS
BOOK 1
The First Civilizations and the Classical Legacy Introduction: Prehistory and the Birth of Civilization 1 Mesopotamia: Gods, Rulers, and the Social Order 2 Africa: Gods, Rulers, and the Social Order 3 India, China, and the Americas 4 Greece: Humanism and the Speculative Leap 5 The Classical Style 6 Rome: The Rise to Empire 7 China: The Rise to Empire
BOOK 2
Medieval Europe and the World Beyond 8 A Flowering of Faith: Christianity and Buddhism 9 The Language of Faith: Symbolism and the Arts 10 The Islamic World: Religion and Culture 11 Patterns of Medieval Life 12 Christianity and the Medieval Mind 13 The Medieval Synthesis in the Arts 14 The World Beyond the West: India, China,
and Japan
BOOK 3
The European Renaissance, the Reformation, and Global Encounter 15 Adversity and Challenge:
The Fourteenth-Century Transition 16 Classical Humanism in the Age of the Renaissance 17 Renaissance Artists: Disciples of Nature,
Masters of Invention 18 Cross-Cultural Encounters: Asia, Africa,
and the Americas 19 Protest and Reform: The Waning of the Old Order
Series Contents
BOOK 4
Faith, Reason, and Power in the Early Modern World 20 The Catholic Reformation and the Baroque Style 21 Absolute Power and the Aristocratic Style 22 The Baroque in the Protestant North 23 The Scientific Revolution and the New Learning 24 The Enlightenment: The Promise of Reason 25 The Limits of Reason 26 Eighteenth-Century Art, Music, and Society
BOOK 5
Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World 27 The Romantic View of Nature 28 The Romantic Hero 29 The Romantic Style in Art and Music 30 Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style 31 The Move Toward Modernism
BOOK 6
Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Global Perspective 32 The Modernist Assault 33 The Freudian Revolution 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts 35 The Quest for Meaning 36 Liberation and Equality 37 The Information Age 38 Globalism: The Contemporary World
VOLUME I
Prehistory to the Early Modern World Chapters 1–19
VOLUME II
The Early Modern World to the Present Chapters 19–38
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vi CONTENTS
Book 5 Contents
Letter from the Author ix
Preface x
27 The Romantic View of Nature (ca. 1780–1880) 209
LOOKING AHEAD 210
The Progress of Industrialization 210
Early Nineteenth-Century Thought 210
Hegel and the Hegelian Dialectic 211
Darwin and the Theory of Evolution 211
EXPLORING ISSUES Creationism versus
Evolution 213
Nature and the Natural in European Literature 213
Wordsworth and the Poetry of Nature 213
READING 27.1 From Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a
Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” 215
The Poetry of Shelley 216
READING 27.2 Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” 216
The Poetry of Keats 217
READING 27.3 Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” 218
Blake: Romantic Mystic 219
READING 27.4 Blake’s “The Tiger” 219
Nature and the Natural in Asian Literature 219
READING 27.5 From Shen Fu’s Six Chapters from a
Floating Life 220
Romantic Landscape Painting 221
MAKING CONNECTIONS 221
Constable and Turner 222
Landscape Painting in France 225
American Romanticism 225
Transcendentalism 225
LOOKING INTO Emerson’s “Brahma” 226
READING 27.6 From Thoreau’s Walden 227
Walt Whitman’s Romantic Individualism 228
READING 27.7 From Whitman’s “Song of Myself” 228
American Landscape Painting 229
America and Native Americans 231
American Folk Art 233
LOOKING BACK 236
Glossary 236
28 The Romantic Hero (ca. 1780–1880) 237
LOOKING AHEAD 238
Nationalism and the Hero 238
Napoleon as a Romantic Hero 238
READING 28.1 From Napoleon’s Diary 240
The Promethean Hero 240
The Promethean Myth in Literature 240
READING 28.2 From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(Chapters 4 and 5) 241
Bryon and the Promethean Myth 242
READING 28.3 Byron’s “Prometheus” 244
Pushkin: The Byron of Russia 244
READING 28.4 From Pushkin’s “Napoleon” 245
The Abolitionists: American Prometheans 245
Frederick Douglass 246
READING 28.5 From Douglass’ My Bondage and
My Freedom 246
Sojourner Truth 247
READING 28.6 From The Narrative of Sojourner Truth 248
Slave Songs and Spirituals 248
Goethe’s Faust: The Quintessential Romantic Hero 248
READING 28.7 From Goethe’s Faust 250
Romantic Love and Romantic Stereotypes 254
READING 28.8 Heine’s “You are Just Like a Flower” 254
The Female Voice 254
LOOKING BACK 256
29 The Romantic Style in Art and Music (ca. 1780–1880) 257
LOOKING AHEAD 258
Heroic Themes in Art 258
Gros and the Glorification of the Hero 258
Popular Heroism in Goya and Géricault 258
Delacroix and Revolutionary Heroism 260
MAKING CONNECTIONS 262
Heroic Themes in Sculpture 263
Trends in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Architecture 266
Neomedievalism in the West 266
Exoticism in Western Architecture 267
The Romantic Style in Music 267
The Genius of Beethoven 268
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CONTENTS vii
Art Songs 270
The Programmatic Symphonies of Berlioz 270
The Piano Music of Chopin 271
The Romantic Ballet 273
Romantic Opera 275
Verdi and Italian Grand Opera 275
Wagner and the Birth of Music-Drama 275
LOOKING BACK 276
Glossary 277
30 Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style (ca. 1850–1900) 278
LOOKING AHEAD 279
The Global Dominion of the West 279
Advancing Industrialization 279
Colonialism and the New Imperialism 279
READING 30.1 From Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” 280
China and the West 281
READING 30.2 From Lin Zexu’s Letter of Advice to
Queen Victoria 281
Social and Economic Realities 283
EXPLORING ISSUES Islam and the West 283
Nineteenth-Century Social Theory 284
EXPLORING ISSUES The Limits of Authority 285
The Radical Views of Marx and Engels 285
READING 30.3 From Marx’s and Engels’ Communist
Manifesto 286
Mill and Women’s Rights 288
READING 30.4 From Mill’s The Subjection of Women 288
The New Historicism 289
Realism in Literature 289
The Novels of Dickens and Twain 289
READING 30.5 From Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop 290
READING 30.6 From Twain’s The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn 291
Russian Realism: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy 293
READING 30.7 From Dostoevsky’s Crime
and Punishment 294
The Literary Heroines of Flaubert and Chopin 295
READING 30.8 From Flaubert’s Madame Bovary 296
READING 30.9 Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”
(“The Dream of an Hour”) 296
Zola and the Naturalistic Novel 297
READING 30.10 From Zola’s Germinal 298
Realist Drama: Ibsen 299
READING 30.11 From Ibsen’s A Doll’s House 299
Realism in the Visual Arts 300
The Birth of Photography 300
Courbet and French Realist Painting 302
Daumier’s Social Realism 303
LOOKING INTO Courbet’s Burial at Ornans 304
The Scandalous Realism of Manet 307
Realism in American Painting 310
MAKING CONNECTIONS 311
Late Nineteenth-Century Architecture 314
Realism in Music 316
LOOKING BACK 318
Glossary 318
31 The Move Toward Modernism (ca. 1875–1900) 319
LOOKING AHEAD 320
Late Nineteenth-Century Thought 320
Nietzsche’s New Morality 320
READING 31.1 From the Works of Nietzsche 320
Bergson: Intellect and Intuition 321
Poetry in the Late Nineteenth Century: The Symbolists 322
Mallarmé 322
READING 31.2 From Mallarmé’s “The Afternoon
of a Faun” 322
Music in the Late Nineteenth Century: Debussy 323
Painting in the Late Nineteenth Century 324
Symbolism 324
Impressionism 325
Monet: Pioneer Impressionist 325
Renoir 327
Pissarro 327
Degas 328
Japanese Woodblock Prints and Western Art 329
Cassatt 331
MAKING CONNECTIONS 332
Toulouse-Lautrec 333
Art Nouveau 333
LOOKING INTO Toulouse-Lautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge 334
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viii CONTENTS
Sculpture in the Late Nineteenth Century 336
Degas and Rodin 336
The Arts of Africa and Oceania 341
Africa 341
Oceania 343
Primitivism 343
Postimpressionism 345
Van Gogh 345
Gauguin 346
Seurat 347
Cézanne 349
LOOKING BACK 350
Glossary 350
Picture Credits 351
Literary Credits 351
Index 352
MAPS 28.1 The Empire of Napoleon at its Greatest Extent,
1812 239
30.1 European Colonies and Independent Nations in 1900 281
31.1 The Kingdoms of Yoruba and Dahomey 341
31.2 The Islands of the South and Central Pacific 343
MUSIC LISTENING SELECTIONS Beethoven, Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, The Eroica,
first movement, excerpt, 1803–1804 268
Schubert, Erlkönig, 1815 270
Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14, “March to the
Scaffold,” fourth movement, excerpt, 1830 271
Chopin, Etude in G-flat Major, Op. 10, No. 5, 1833 272
Debussy, Prélude à “L’après midi d’un faune, 1894 323
ANCILLARY READING SELECTIONS From Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads 213
From Melville’s Moby Dick 238
From Byron’s Don Juan 242
From Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 246
Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” 247
Austen’s Pride and Prejudice 255
The Qianlong Emperor of China’s letter to King George III of
Great Britain 281
From Mill’s On Liberty 285
From Dickens’ David Copperfield 290
From Tolstoy’s War and Peace 293
From Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov 293
From Bergson’s Time and Free Will 322
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ixLETTER FROM THE AUTHOR
The Humanistic Tradition originated more than two decades ago. As a long-time humanities instructor, I recognized that the Western-only perspective was no longer adequate to understanding the cultural foundations of our global world. However, none of the existing humanities textbooks served my needs. The challenge was daunting—covering the history of Western literature, philosophy, art, music, and dance was already an ambitious undertaking for a humanities survey; how could I broaden the scope to include Asia, Africa, and the Americas without over-loading the course?
I found the solution in my classroom: Instead of assuming a strictly historical approach to the past, (as I did in my history classes), I would organize my humanities lectures topically, focusing on universal themes, major styles, and significant movements---gods and rulers, classicism, imperialism, the Romantic hero, racial and sexual equality, globalism---as they reflected or shaped the culture of a given time or place. What evolved was The Humanistic Tradition, a thematic, yet global and chronological approach to humanities, one that provokes thought and discussion without burying students under mountains of encyclopedic information.
Now in its seventh edition, The Humanistic Tradition continues to celebrate the creative mind by focusing on how the arts and ideas relate to each other, what they tell us about our own human nature and that of others on our planet. Its mission remains relevant to the present, and essential (I would hope) to enriching the future of each student who reads its pages.
The Seventh Edition of The Humanistic Tradition To the seventh edition of The Humanistic Tradition I have added a new feature: Looking Into is a diagram- matic analysis of key works, such as Neolithic stone circles (including the latest archeological discoveries in Southeast Turkey), the Parthenon, the sonnets of Petrarch and Donne, Shiva: Lord of the Dance, Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Double Portrait, and Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party.
The new edition expands two popular features that promote critical thinking: Exploring Issues,
which focuses on controversial ideas and current debates (such as the battle over the ownership of antiquities, and creationism versus evolution); and Making Connections, which brings attention to con- trasts and continuities between past and present. To Exploring Issues, I have added the debate over the origins of India’s Vedic culture (chapter 3). To Making Connections I offer a novel illustration of the con- temporary affection for Chinese landscape painting (chapter 14).
The chapter-by-chapter integration of literary, visual, and aural primary sources remains a hallmark of The Humanistic Tradition. In an effort to provide the most engaging and accessible literary works, some selected readings in this edition appear in alternate translations. Marginal logos have been added to direct students to additional literary resources that are dis- cussed but not included in the text itself.
Additions to the art program include the Nebra Sky Disk, Hellenistic mosaics, Delacroix’s Women of Algiers, Oceania’s art of tattoo, Japan’s Amida Buddha, Charles Willson Peale’s Portrait of Yarrow Mamout (the earliest known portrait of a Muslim in America), Ai Wei Wei’s Forever Bicycle, Ernesto Neto’s Anthropodino, and Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Aliyev Center. Chapters 37 and 38, which treat the Information Age and Globalism, have been updated to present a cogent overview of contemporary issues, including terrorism, ecological concerns, ethnic conflict, and the digital arts.
The Humanistic Tradition pioneered a flexible six-book format in recognition of the varying chronological range of humanities courses. Each slim volume was also convenient for students to bring to classes, the library, and other study areas. The seventh edition con- tinues to be available in this six-book format, as well as in a two-volume set for the most common two-term course configuration.
In preparing the seventh edition, I have depended on the excellent editorial and production team led by Donald Dinwiddie at Laurence King Publishing. Special thanks also go to Kara Hattersley-Smith at LKP and Sarah Remington at McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
Letter from the Author
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x PREFACE
Each generation leaves a creative legacy, the sum of its ideas and achieve- ments. This legacy represents the response to our effort to ensure our individual and collective survival, our need to establish ways of living in harmony with others, and our desire to understand our place in the universe. Meeting the challenges of survival, communality, and self-knowledge, we have created and transmitted the tools of science and technology, social and political institutions, religious and philosophic systems, and various forms of personal expression—the totality of which we call culture. Handed down from generation to generation, this legacy constitutes the humanistic tradition, the study of which is called humanities.
Understanding that a global humanities course is taught in varying ways, Gloria Fiero redefines the discipline for greater flexibility via a variety of innovative digital tools. Enhanced by McGraw-Hill Education’s LearnSmart and SmartBook, Fiero delivers a learning experience tailored to the needs of each institution, instructor, and student. With the ability to incorporate new extended readings, streaming music, and artwork, The Humanistic Tradition renews the understanding of the relationship between world cultures and humankind’s creative legacy.
Personalized Learning Experience
In Connect Humanities, you can access all of the art and music from The Humanistic Tradition on your computer or mobile device. Music logos (right) that appear in the margins of the text refer to listening selections available for streaming.
As part of McGraw-Hill Education’s Connect Humanities, LearnSmart is an adaptive learning program designed to personalize the learning experience. LearnSmart helps students learn faster, study smarter, and retain more knowledge for greater success. Distinguishing what students know from what they don’t, and touching on concepts they are most likely to forget, LearnSmart continuously adapts to each students’ needs by building a personalized learning path. LearnSmart is proven to strength- en memory recall, keep students in class, and boost grades. By helping students master core concepts ahead of time, LearnSmart enables instruc- tors to spend more meaningful time in the classroom.
Enhanced by LearnSmart, SmartBook is the first and only adaptive reading experience currently available.
• Making It Effective SmartBook creates a personalized reading expe- rience by highlighting the most impactful concepts a student needs to learn at that moment in time. This ensures that every minute spent with SmartBook is returned to the student as the most valuable minute possible.
• Make It Informed Real-time reports quickly identify the concepts that require more attention from individual students—or the entire class.
The Humanistic Tradition—a personalized learning
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xiPREFACE
Personalized Teaching Experience Personalize and tailor your teaching experience to the needs of your humanities course with Create, Insight, and instructor resources.
Create What You’ve Only Imagined No two humanities courses are the same. That is why Gloria Fiero has personally hand-picked additional readings that can be added easily to a customized edition of The Humanistic Tradition. Marginal icons (right) that appear throughout this new edition indicate additional readings, a list of which is found at the end of the Table of Contents.
To customize your book using McGraw-Hill Create™, follow these steps: 1. Go to http://create.mheducation.com and sign in or register for an
instructor account. 2. Click Collections (top, right) and select the “Traditions: Humanities
Readings Through the Ages” Collection to preview and select readings. You can also make use of McGraw-Hill’s comprehensive, cross-disciplinary content as well as other third-party resources.
3. Choose the readings that are most relevant to your students, your curriculum, and your own areas of interest.
4. Arrange the content in a way that makes the most sense for your course. 5. Personalize your book with your course information and choose the
best format for your students—color, black-and-white, or ebook. When you are done, you will receive a free PDF review copy in just minutes.
Or contact your McGraw-Hill Education representative, who can help you build your unique version of The Humanisitic Tradition.
Powerful Reporting on the Go The first and only analytics tool of its kind, Connect Insight is a series of visual data displays—each framed by an intuitive question—that provide at-a-glance information regarding how your class is doing. • Intuitive You receive an instant, at-a-glance view of student performance
matched with student activity. • Dynamic Connect Insight puts real-time analytics in your hands so you
can take action early and keep struggling students from falling behind. • Mobile Connect Insight travels from office to classroom, available on
demand wherever and whenever it’s needed.
Instructor Resources Connect Image Bank is an instructor database of images from select McGraw-Hill Education art and humanities titles, including The Humanistic Tradition. It includes all images for which McGraw-Hill has secured electronic permissions. With Connect Image Bank, instructors can access a text’s images by browsing its chapters, style/period, medium, and culture, or by searching with key terms. Images can be easily downloaded for use in presentations and in PowerPoints. The download includes a text file with image captions and information. You can access Connect Image Bank on the library tab in Connect Humanities (http://connect.mheducation.com).
Various instructor resources are available for The Humanistic Tradition. These include an instructor’s manual with discussion suggestions and study questions, music listening guides, lecture PowerPoints, and a test bank. Contact your McGraw-Hill sales representative for access to these materials.
and teaching experience in global humanities
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Text The text of a primary source refers to its medium (that is, what it is made of), its form (its outward shape), and its content (the subject it describes).
Literature: Literary form varies according to the manner in which words are arranged. So, poetry, which shares rhythmic organization with music and dance, is distinguished from prose, which normally lacks regular rhythmic patterns. Poetry, by its freedom from conven- tional grammar, provides unique opportunities for the expression of intense emotions. Prose usually functions to convey information, to narrate, and to describe.
Philosophy (the search for truth through reasoned analy- sis) and history (the record of the past) make use of prose to analyze and communicate ideas and information.
In literature, as in most forms of expression, content and form are usually interrelated. The subject matter or form of a literary work determines its genre. For instance, a long narrative poem recounting the adventures of a hero constitutes an epic, while a formal, dignified speech in praise of a person or thing constitutes a eulogy.
The Visual Arts: The visual arts employ a wide variety of media, ranging from the traditional colored pigments used in painting, to wood, clay, marble, and (more recently) plastic and neon used in sculpture, to a wide variety of digital media, including photography and film. The form or outward shape of a work of art depends on the manner in which the artist manipulates the elements of color, line, texture, and space. Unlike words, these formal elements lack denotative meaning.
The visual arts are dominantly spatial, that is, they operate and are apprehended in space. Artists manipu- late form to describe or interpret the visible world (as in the genres of portraiture and landscape), or to create worlds of fantasy and imagination. They may also fabri- cate texts that are nonrepresentational, that is, without identifiable subject matter.
Music and Dance: The medium of music is sound. Like literature, music is durational: it unfolds over the period of time in which it occurs. The major elements of music are melody, rhythm, harmony, and tone color—formal elements that also characterize the oral life of litera- ture. However, while literary and visual texts are usually descriptive, music is almost always nonrepresentational: it rarely has meaning beyond sound itself. For that reason, music is the most difficult of the arts to describe in words.
Dance, the artform that makes the human body itself the medium of expression, resembles music in that it is temporal and performance-oriented. Like music, dance
exploits rhythm as a formal tool, and like painting and sculpture, it unfolds in space as well as in time.
Studying the text, we discover the ways in which the artist manipulates medium and form to achieve a charac- teristic manner of execution or expression that we call style. Comparing the styles of various texts from a single era, we discover that they usually share certain defining features and characteristics. Similarities between, for instance, ancient Greek temples and Greek tragedies, or between Chinese lyric poems and landscape paintings, reveal the unifying moral and aesthetic values of their respective cultures.
Context The context describes the historical and cultural environ- ment of a text. Understanding the relationship between text and context is one of the principal concerns of any inquiry into the humanistic tradition. To determine the context, we ask: In what time and place did our primary source originate? How did it function within the society in which it was created? Was it primarily decorative, didactic, magical, or propagandistic? Did it serve the religious or political needs of the community? Sometimes our answers to these questions are mere guesses. For instance, the paintings on the walls of Paleolithic caves were probably not “artworks” in the modern sense of the term, but, rather, magical signs associated with religious rituals per- formed in the interest of communal survival.
Determining the function of the text often serves to clarify the nature of its form, and vice-versa. For instance, in that the Hebrew Bible, the Song of Roland, and many other early literary works were spoken or sung, rather than read, such literature tends to feature repetition and rhyme, devices that facilitate memorization and oral delivery.
Subtext The subtext of a primary source refers to its secondary or implied meanings. The subtext discloses conceptual messages embedded in or implied by the text. The epic poems of the ancient Greeks, for instance, which glorify prowess and physical courage, suggest an exclusively male perception of virtue. The state portraits of the seventeenth-century French king Louis XIV bear the subtext of unassailable and absolute power. In our own time, Andy Warhol’s serial adaptations of Coca-Cola bottles offer wry commentary on the commercial mental- ity of American society. Examining the implicit message of the text helps us determine the values of the age in which it was produced, and offers insights into our own.
BEFORE WE BEGIN
Studying humanities engages us in a dialogue with primary sources: works original to the age in which they were produced. Whether literary, visual, or aural, a primary source is a text; the time, place, and circumstances in which it was created constitute
the context; and its various underlying meanings provide the subtext. Studying humanities from the perspective of text, context, and subtext helps us understand our cultural legacy and our place in the larger world.
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The Romantic View of Nature ca. 1780–1880
“Beauty in art is truth bathed in an impression received from nature.” Corot
27 Chapter
Figure 27.1 J. M. W. TURNER, The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying: Typhoon Coming On), 1840. Oil on canvas, 2 ft. 113∕4 in. × 4 ft. 1∕4 in. Turner infused many of his paintings with a golden glow, achieved by working from a white (rather than a dark) ground and by the use of new yellow pigments commercially available after 1817. His detractors accused Turner of “yellow fever.”
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210 CHAPTER 27 The Romantic View of Nature
The Progress of Industrialization During the nineteenth century, the population of Europe doubled in size. At the same time, material culture changed more radically than it had in the previous thou- sand years. The application of science to practical inven- tion, begun in the eighteenth century, had already sparked the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution—the mass production of material goods by machine. The first phase of industrialization occurred in mid eighteenth-century England, with the development of the steam engine and the machinery for spinning and weaving textiles (see chap- ter 25). Monopolized by the English for a half-century, the Industrial Revolution spread to the rest of Europe and to the United States by the 1830s. As increasing production of coal, iron, and steel encouraged the further expansion of industry and commerce, the West was transformed from an agrarian to an industrially based society. Goods that had been hand-produced in homes and workshops were increasingly manufactured in newly constructed factories, mills, and mines. Industrialization demanded enormous investments of capital and the efforts of a large labor force; it stimulated growth in Europe’s urban centers. And ultimately, it provided the basis for the West’s controlling influence over the rest of the world (see chapter 30).
Early Nineteenth-Century Thought Romanticism found its formal philosophers largely among nineteenth-century German intellectuals. Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), Friedrich Schiller
(1775–1854), and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860)
followed the philosophic idealism of Immanuel Kant, who exalted the role of the human mind in constructing an idea of the world (see chapter 25). According to the German idealists, the truths of empirical experience were not self-evident, as Locke had argued, and the truths of the mind were not clear and distinct, as Descartes had held. Much like Rousseau (see chapter 25) and the Romantic poets (discussed later in this chapter), the idealists prized the powers of human instinct and viewed nature in deeply subjective terms.
Schopenhauer defended the existence of a “life-will,” a blind and striving impersonal force whose operations are without purpose or design, and whose activities give rise to disorder and delusion. In Schopenhauer’s view, the only escape from malignant reality was selfless contempla- tion of the kind described in Hindu literature and the mystical treatises of Johannes Eckhart (see chapter 15). Welcoming the influence of Indian religious philosophy, Schopenhauer wrote: “Sanskrit literature will be no less influential for our time than Greek literature was in the fifteenth century for the Renaissance.”
While Schopenhauer perceived existence as devoid of reason and burdened by constant suffering, others moved in the direction of mysticism. Some allied with notable visionaries, such as Friedrich von Hardenberg, better known as Novalis (1772–1801). Novalis shaped the German Romantic movement through poems and essays that expressed longing for the lost mythic past and a spir- itually inspired future. “If God could become man,” wrote Novalis, “then He can also become stone, plant, animal, and element and perhaps in this way there is redemp- tion in Nature.” The Romantic reawakening of religion embraced the doctrines of mysticism, confessional emo- tionalism, and pantheism, the last of which stressed the
LOOKING AHEAD
The nineteenth century is often called “the Romantic era.” The term “Romanticism” describes a movement in the history of culture, an aesthetic style, and an attitude of mind. As a cultural movement, Romanticism reacted against the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the depersonalizing effects of Western industrialization. Spanning the late eighteenth century and continuing well into the twentieth, the Romantic movement revolted against academic convention, and authority, and opposed the limitations to freedom in personal, political, and artistic life.
As a style, Romanticism provided an alternative to the Enlightenment values of order, clarity, and rational restraint. In place of Neoclassical formality and the objective exercise of the intellect, Romanticism celebrated spontaneity and the subjective exercise of the imagination. In all the arts, the Romantics abandoned traditional formal constraints to explore new, imaginative avenues of expression.
As an attitude of mind, Romanticism may be seen as an assertion of intuitive individualism and the primacy of feeling. Romantics did not reject the value of reason as such, but they regarded emotions (and the role of the senses) as equally important to human experience—and as essential to creativity. They looked to nature as a source of divine inspiration and seized on the tumultuous events of their time: the exotic, the catastrophic, and the fantastic. They often indulged in acts of nonconformity that alienated them from conventional society.
The lives and works of the Romantics were marked by deep subjectivity—even self-indulgence. If their perceptions and passions were intense, their desire to devise a language adequate to that intensity of feeling often drove them to frustration, melancholy, despair, and early death: the poets Shelley, Keats, and Byron; the composers Chopin and Schubert; and the painters Gros and Géricault, all died before the age of forty.
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unity of God, man, and nature. According to the foremost German Protestant theologian and preacher, Friedrich E. D. Schleiermacher (1768–1834), the object of religion is “to love the spirit of the world” and “to become one with the infinite.”
Hegel and the Hegelian Dialectic The most influential philosopher of the nineteenth cen- tury was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). A professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin, Hegel taught that the world consists of a single divine nature, which he termed “absolute mind” or “spirit.” Spirit and matter obey an evolutionary process impelled by spirit seeking to know its own nature. He explained the opera- tion of that process, or dialectic, as follows: every condition (or “thesis”) confronts its opposite condition (or “antith- esis”), which then generates a synthesis. The synthesis in turn produces its opposite, and so on, in a continuing evolution that moves toward the ultimate goal of spiritual freedom. For Hegel, all reality is a process that operates on the principle of the dialectic—thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—a principle that governs the realm of ideas, artis- tic creation, philosophic understanding . . . indeed, history itself. “Change in nature, no matter how infinitely varied it is,” wrote Hegel, “shows only a cycle of constant repetition. In nature, nothing new happens under the sun.”
Hegel’s dense prose work The Philosophy of History (1807), a compilation of his own and his students’ lec- ture notes, advances the idea that the essence of spirit is freedom, which finds its ultimate expression in the nation- state. According to Hegel, human beings possess free will (thesis), which, although freely exercised over property, is limited by duty to the universal will (antithesis). The ultimate synthesis is a stage that is reached as individual will comes into harmony with universal duty. This last stage, which represents real freedom, manifests itself in the concrete institutions of the state and its laws. Hegel’s view of the state (and the European nation-state in particu- lar) as the last stage in the development of spirit and the Hegelian dialectic in general had considerable influence on late nineteenth-century nationalism, as well as on the economic theories of Karl Marx (see chapter 30).
Darwin and the Theory of Evolution Like Hegel, the British scientist Charles Darwin (1809– 1882) perceived nature as constantly changing. A natu- ralist in the tradition of Aristotle, Darwin spent his early career amassing enormous amounts of biological and geological data, partly as the result of a five-year voyage to South America aboard the research vessel HMS Beagle. Darwin’s study of fossils on the Galápagos Islands of the Pacific Ocean confirmed the view of his predecessors that complex forms of life evolved from a few extremely simple organic forms. The theory of evolution did not originate with Darwin—Goethe, for example, had already suggested that all forms of plant life had evolved from a single primeval plant, and the French biologist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744–1829) had shown that fossils give evi- dence of perpetual change in all species. Darwin, however,
substantiated the theory of evolution by explaining the process by which evolution occurs. Observing the tendency of certain organisms to increase rapidly over time while retaining traits favorable to their survival, he concluded that evolution operates by means of natural selection.
By natural selection, Darwin meant a process whereby nature “prunes away” unfavorable traits in a given species, permitting the survival of those creatures that are most suited to the struggle for life and to reproduction of that species. The elephant’s trunk, the giraffe’s neck, and the human brain were evidence, he argued, of adaptations made by each of these species to its environment and proof that any trait that remained advantageous to continuity would prevail. Failure to develop such traits meant the ultimate extinction of less developed species; only the “fit- test” survived.
In 1859 Darwin published his classic work, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of the Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Less than a year later, a commentator observed: “No scientific work that has been published within this century has excited so much general curiosity.” But curiosity was among the milder responses to this publication, for Darwin’s theory of evolu- tion, like Newton’s law of gravity, challenged traditional ideas about nature and the world order. For centuries, most Westerners had held to the account of the Creation described in Scripture. Some, in fact, accepted the chro- nology advanced by the Irish Catholic bishop James Ussher (1581–1656), which placed earthly creation at 4004 b.c.e. Most scholars, however, perceived the likelihood of a far greater age for the earth and its species.
Darwin’s thesis did not deny the idea of a divine crea- tor—indeed, Darwin initially speculated that “it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.” But Darwin’s theory implied that natural selec- tion, not divine will, governed the evolutionary process. By suggesting that nature and its operations were impersonal, continuous, and self-governing, the theory of natural selection challenged the creationist view (supported by the Bible) that God had brought into being a fixed and unchanging number of species. Equally troubling was Darwin’s argument (clarified in his later publication The Descent of Man, 1871) that the differences between humans and less complex orders of life were differences of degree,
Science and Technology
1799 paleontologist William Smith (British) theorizes that rock strata may be identified by fossils characteristic to each
1830 Charles Lyell (British) provides foundations for the modern study of geology in his Principles of Geology
1859 Darwin publishes The Origin of Species
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not kind, and that all creatures were related to one another by their kinship to lower forms of life. The most likely ancestor for Homo sapiens, explained Darwin, was “a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits . . .” (Figure 27.2).
Clearly, Darwin’s conclusions (which nurtured his own reluctant agnosticism) toppled human beings from their elevated place in the hierarchy of living creatures. If the cosmology of Copernicus and Galileo had displaced earth from the center of the solar system, Darwin’s theory robbed human beings of their preeminence on the planet. At a single blow, Darwin shattered the har- monious world-views of both Renaissance humanists and Enlightenment philosophes.
Yet, the theory of evolution by natural selection comple- mented a view of nature in keeping with Romanticism. As Thoreau (see Reading 27.6) mused, “Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?” And numerous passages from the writings of Wordsworth, Shelley, Emerson, and Whitman (the Romantics treated in this chapter) exhibit a similar pantheistic sentiment. At the same time, Darwin’s ideas encouraged the late nineteenth-century movement of “scientism” (the proposition that the methods of the natural sciences should be applied in all areas of rational investigation). Darwin’s writing also stimulated the rise of natural history museums, which, unlike the random collec- tions of previous centuries, gave evidence of the common order of living things.
The consequences of Darwin’s monumental theory were far-reaching, but his ideas were often oversimplified or misinterpreted. Among some thinkers, the theory of evolution provided the rationale for analyzing civilizations as living organisms with identifiable stages of growth, matu- rity, and decline. Then too, Darwin’s use of the phrase “Favored Races” in the subtitle of his major work contrib- uted to the theory of social Darwinism, which freely applied some of his ideas to political, economic, and cultural life.
The term “social Darwinism” did not come into use until 1879, but the idea that natural selection operated to determine the superiority of some individuals, groups, races, and nations over others was effective in justifying European policies of imperialism (see chapter 30). By their intelligence and wealth, argued the social Darwinists, Westerners (and white people in general) were clearly the “fittest,” and therefore destined to dominate the less fit. Since Darwin meant by “fitness” the reproductive success of a species, not simply its survival, most appli- cations of his work to contemporary social conditions represented a distortion of his ideas. Nevertheless, social Darwinism, expanded on by political theorists, would provide “scientific” justification for European colonialism. It also anticipated more threatening and extreme theo- ries, such as eugenics (which focused on the elimination of society’s “less fit” members) and the racist ideology of Adolf Hitler.
In the course of the twentieth century, modern biology, and particularly the science of molecular genetics (the study of the digital information preserved in DNA), has provided evidence to support Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Nevertheless, today’s scientists continue to probe the origins of life—where and how it first came into being. In the context of the nineteenth century, however, Darwin remains a leading figure. Like all Romantics, he was a keen and curious observer of nature, which he described as vast, energetic, and unceasingly dynamic. In The Origin of Species, he exults:
When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a long history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each
Figure 27.2 Spoofing evolution, a cartoon of the day portrays an apelike Charles Darwin explaining his controversial theory of evolution to an ape with the help of a mirror. The work appeared in the London Sketch Book in May 1874, captioned by two suitable quotations from the plays of Shakespeare: “This is the ape of form” and “Four or five descents since.”
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useful to the possessor, in the same way as any great mechanical invention is the summing up of the labor, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting . . . does the study of natural history become!
And in the final paragraph of his opus, Darwin brings romantic fervor to his description of nature’s laws:
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth and Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
Nature and the Natural in European Literature One of the central features of nineteenth-century Romanticism was its love affair with nature. In nature, with its shifting moods and rhythms, the Romantics found solace, inspiration, and self-discovery. To Enlightenment thinkers, “nature” meant universal order, but to the Romantics, nature was the wellspring of divinity, the phe- nomenon that bound humankind to God. “Natural man” was one who was close to nature, unspoiled (as Rousseau had argued) by social institutions and imperatives.
The Romantics lamented the dismal effects of grow- ing industrialization. In rural settings, they found a practical refuge from urban blight, smoke-belching factories, and poverty-ridden slums. The natural land- scape, unspoiled and unpolluted, revealed the one- ness of God and the universe. This pantheistic outlook, more typical of Eastern than Western religious philoso- phy, came to pervade the literature of European and American Romantics.
Wordsworth and the Poetry of Nature In 1798, William Wordsworth (1780–1850) and his British contemporary Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) pro- duced the Lyrical Ballads, the literary work that marked the birth of the Romantic movement in England. When the book appeared in a second edition in 1800, Wordsworth added a preface that formally explained the aims of Romantic poetry. In this manifesto, Wordsworth described poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” which takes its origin “from emotion recollected in tran- quillity.” The object of the poet is
EXPLORING ISSUES
Darwin’s Origin of Species generated much controversy in its own time and long thereafter. In the last 150 years, fossil research and molecular biology have provided overwhelming evidence to support the theory of evolution. Nevertheless, controversy continues. The debate centers on the question of origins, that is, whether human beings were divinely created or are the product of a series of biological “accidents” governed by natural selection. Creationists hold that the physical structure of the universe argues for the existence of a god whose “intelligent design” produced the world as we know it. While the defenders of Intelligent Design view Darwin’s theory of natural selection as evidence for a random and undirected universe, Darwin himself, observing the “grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally
breathed by the Creator . . . ” speculated that natural selection and biological evolution might be part of a divine design.
Many religious faiths have no difficulty in accepting the idea that biological evolution governs the diversity of living things over billions of years, and thus find evolution and religious belief compatible. However, those who hold to the literal truth of Scripture find Darwin’s theories in direct contradiction of their religious beliefs. The ongoing controversy, which flourishes mainly in the United States, centers on public education: whether creationism should be taught along with evolution in the classroom. The debate has provoked a number of related issues, including the definition and validity of “good science,” and contemporary literal interpretations of the Book of Genesis.
Creationism versus Evolution
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to choose incidents and situations from common life [and] to throw over them a certain colouring of the imagination . . . and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature.
The leading nature poet of the nineteenth century, Wordsworth was born in the English Lake District. He dated the beginning of his creative life from the time— at age fourteen—when he was struck by the image of tree boughs silhouetted against a bright evening sky. Thereafter, what he called “the infinite variety of natural appearances” became his principal source of inspiration and the primary subject of his poetry. Nature, he claimed, could restore to human beings their untainted, childhood
sense of wonder. Moreover, through nature (as revealed to us by way of the senses), one might commune with the elemental and divine forces of the universe.
Wordsworth championed a poetic language that resem- bled “the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation.” Although he did not always abide by his own precepts, his rejection of the artificial diction of Neoclassical verse in favor of this “real language” anticipated a new, more natu- ral voice in poetry—one informed by childhood memories and deeply felt experiences. Wordsworth’s verse reflects his preference for lyric poetry, which—like art song— describes deep personal feeling.
One of the most inspired poems in the Lyrical Ballads is “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” the product of Wordsworth’s visit to the ruins of a medi- eval monastery situated on the banks of the Wye River in
Figure 27.3 J. M. W. TURNER, Interior of Tintern Abbey, 1794. Watercolor, 125∕8 × 97∕8 in. At age nineteen, Turner explored the Wye Valley in search of picturesque subjects. This thirteenth- century abbey had fallen into ruin after the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII in the 1530s.
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southeast Wales (Figure 27.3). The 159-line poem consti- tutes a paean to nature. Wordsworth begins by describing the sensations evoked by the British countryside; he then muses on the pleasures these memories provide as they are called up in recollection. The heart of the poem, however, is a joyous celebration of nature’s moral value: nature allows the poet to “see into the life of things” (line 49), infusing him with “the still, sad music of humanity” (line 91), and ultimately bringing him into the sublime pres- ence of the divine spirit. Nature, he exults, is the “anchor” of his purest thoughts, the “nurse” and “guardian” of his heart and soul (lines 109–110). In the final portion of the extract (lines 111–134), Wordsworth shares with his “dearest Friend,” his sister Dorothy, the joys of his mystical communion with nature and humankind. “Tintern Abbey” set forth three of the key motifs of nineteenth-century Romanticism: the redemptive power of nature, the idea of nature’s sympathy with humankind, and the view that one who is close to nature is close to God.
READING 27.1 From Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798)
Five years have passed; five summers, with the length 1 Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a soft inland murmur. Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, 5 That on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day is come when I again repose Here, under this dark sycamore, and view 10 These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard tufts, Which at this season, with their unripe fruits, Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves ’Mid groves and copses. Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines 15 Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms, Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees! With some uncertain notice, as might seem Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, 20 Or of some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire The hermit sits alone. These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye; But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din 25 Of towns and cities, I have owed to them In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind, With tranquil restoration:—feelings too 30 Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life, His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, 35 To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen1 of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, 40 Is lightened—that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on— Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 45 In body, and become a living soul; While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft— 50 In darkness and amid the many shapes Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart— How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, 55 O sylvan2 Wye! thou wanderer through the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee!
And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, 60 The picture of the mind revives again; While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. And so I dare to hope, 65 Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led: more like a man 70 Flying from something that he dreads than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all—I cannot paint 75 What then I was. The sounding cataract3
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love, 80 That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye. That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this 85
1 Burden. 2 Wooded. 3 A descent of water over a steep surface.
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Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts Have followed; for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompense. For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes 90 The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime 95 Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels 100 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world 105 Of eye, and ear—both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognize In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 110 Of all my moral being. Nor perchance, If I were not thus taught, should I the more Suffer my genial spirits to decay: For thou art with me here upon the banks Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,4 115 My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while May I behold in thee what I was once, 120 My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make, Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy: for she can so inform 125 The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all 130 The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings. . . .
Q What does Wordsworth mean when he calls nature “the anchor of my purest thoughts”?
Q Which lines in this selection best capture the sublime aspects of nature?
The Poetry of Shelley Like Wordsworth, the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) embraced nature as the source of sublime truth, but his volcanic personality led him to engage the natural world with greater intensity and deeper melan- choly than his older contemporary. A prolific writer and a passionate champion of human liberty, he provoked the reading public with a treatise entitled The Necessity of Atheism (1811), the circulation of which led to his expulsion from Oxford University. His pamphlet on the subject of the French Revolution, A Declaration of Rights (1812), endorsed a radical creed for political equality: “A Christian, a Deist, a Turk, and a Jew, have equal rights [in the benefits and burdens of government].”
Shelley was outspoken in his opposition to marriage, a union that he viewed as hostile to human happiness. He was as unconventional in his deeds as in his discourse: while married to one woman (Harriet Westbrook), with whom he had two children, he ran off with another (Mary Godwin). A harsh critic of Britain’s rulers, he chose perma- nent exile in Italy in 1818 and died there four years later in a boating accident.
Shelley’s Defence of Poetry (1821), a manifesto of the writ- er’s function in society, hails poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Such creatures take their author- ity from nature, the fountainhead of inspiration. Shelley himself found in nature metaphors for the inconstant state of human desire. In “Ode to the West Wind” he appeals to the wind, a symbol of creativity, to drive his visions through- out the universe, as the wind drives leaves over the earth (stanza 1), clouds through the air (stanza 2), and waves on the seas (stanza 3). In the last stanza, he compares the poet to a lyre, whose “mighty harmonies,” stirred by the wind of creativity, will awaken the world. Then, finally, he seeks his identity with the wind and nature itself: “Be thou, spirit fierce/My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!” By means of language that is itself musical, Shelley defends the notion of poetry as the music of the soul. Consider, for instance, his frequent use of the exclamatory “O” and the effective use of assonance and tonal color in lines 38 to 40: “while far below/The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear/The sapless foliage of the ocean, know.”
READING 27.2 Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” (1819)
1 O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being 1 Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, 5 Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The wingéd seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow4 Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy.
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Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill 10 (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!
2 Thou on whose stream, ’mid the steep sky’s commotion, 15 Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed, Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread On the blue surface of thine aëry surge, Like the bright hair uplifted from the head 20
Of some fierce Maenad,1 even from the dim verge Of the horizon to the zenith’s height, The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,2 25 Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O, hear!
3 Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, 30 Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,3
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers 35 So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the ocean, know 40
Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves: O, hear!
4 If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share 45
The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven, As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed 50 Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed 55 One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
5 Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, 60 Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, 65
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? 70
Q How would you describe the function of color in this poem?
Q What does this poem reveal about the personality of the poet?
The Poetry of Keats The poetry of John Keats (1795–1821), the third of the great English nature poets, shares Shelley’s elegiac sensibil- ity. Keats lamented the fleeting nature of life’s pleasures, even as he contemplated the brevity of life. He lost both his mother and his brother to tuberculosis, and he himself succumbed to that disease at the age of twenty-five. The threat of imminent death seems to have produced in Keats a heightened awareness of the virtues of beauty, human love, and friendship. He perceived these phenomena as fleeting forms of a higher reality made permanent only in art. For Keats, art is the great balm of the poet. Art is more than a response to the human experience of love and nature; it is the transmuted product of the imagination, a higher form of nature that triumphantly outreaches the mortal lifespan. These ideas are central to Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The poem was inspired by ancient Greek artifacts Keats had seen among those brought to London by Lord Elgin in 1816 and placed on display in the British Museum (see chapter 5).
In the “Ode,” Keats contemplates a Greek vase (much like the one pictured in Figure 27.4), whose delicately
1 A female attendant of Dionysus; a bacchante (see chapter 26). 2 Tomb. 3 An ancient resort in southwest Italy.
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drawn figures are shown enjoying transitory pleasures. Frozen in time on the surface of such a vase, the fair youths will never grow old, the music of the pipes and lyres will never cease to sound, and the lovers will never cease to love. The “little town by river” and the other pastoral vignettes in the poem probably did not belong to any one existing Greek vase; yet Keats describes the imaginary urn (his metaphoric “Cold Pastoral”) as a symbol of all great works of art, which, because of their unchanging beauty, remain eternally “true.” The poem concludes with the joy- ous pronouncement: beauty and truth are one.
READING 27.3 Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1818)
1 Thou still unravished bride of quietness, 1 Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fringed1 legend haunts about thy shape 5
Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe2 or the dales of Arcady?3
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? 10
2 Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave 15 Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! 20
3 Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unweariéd, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! 25 For ever warm and still to be enjoyed, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. 30
4 Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? What little town by river or sea shore, 35 Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e’er return. 40
5 O Attic4 shape! Fair attitude! with brede5
Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! 45 When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all
Figure 27.4 SISYPHUS PAINTER, South Italian volute krater with women making music and centaur fight, late fifth century B.C.E. Red-figured pottery, height 29 in.
2 A valley sacred to Apollo between Mounts Olympus and Ossa in Thessaly, Greece.
3 Arcadia, the pastoral regions of ancient Greece (see Poussin’s Arcadian Shepherds, Figure 21.12).
4 Attica, a region in southeastern Greece dominated by Athens. 5 Embroidered border.
1 A reference to the common Greek practice of bordering vases with stylized leaf forms (see Figure 27.4).
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CHAPTER 27 The Romantic View of Nature 219
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 50
Q How does this work of art—the painted urn— lead Keats to a perception of truth?
Blake: Romantic Mystic The British poet, painter, and engraver William Blake (1757–1827) shared the Romantic disdain for convention and authority. Blake, however, introduced a more mystical view of nature, God, and humankind. Deeply spiritual, he claimed “To see nature in a Grain of Sand,/ And Heaven in a Wild flower.” This divine vision he brought to his poetry and his paintings; the former was often conceived along with visual images that he himself drew. Trained in the graphic arts, he prepared all aspects of his indi- vidual works, designing, illustrating, engraving, and hand- coloring each page. He also illustrated the literary works of others who, like himself, were horrified by the oppres- sive and inhumane treatment of rebellious slaves in the European colonies (see Figure 28.4).
Some of the best of Blake’s artworks are illustrations for books of the Bible, and especially for such visionary landmarks as the Book of Revelation (Figure 27.5). In these impassioned designs he drew more from the mind than from the eye. (Indeed, he credited conversations with angelic emissaries as a source of his imagery.)
Blake’s early poems featured singular images with clear and vivid (and often) moral messages. “The Lamb,” a short poem from his Songs of Innocence (1789), envisions that animal as a symbol of God’s gentle goodness. In his
Songs of Experience (1794), childlike lyricism gives way to the disillusionment of maturity. The most famous poem in this collection, “The Tiger,” asks whether goodness must be accompanied by evil, and whether God is responsible for both.
READING 27.4 Blake’s “The Tiger”
Tiger! Tiger! Burning bright 1 In the forest of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies 5 Burnt the first of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire? And what shoulder, and what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? 10 And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? And what dread feet? What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp 15 Dare its deadly terrors clasp? When the stars threw down their spears, And watered heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? 20 Tiger! Tiger! Burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry.
Q What kind of Creator does Blake envision? What preconceptions color Blake’s view of nature?
Blake’s poetic imagination took much from the Bible and Milton’s Paradise Lost (see chapter 22)—some scholars see in the fifth stanza of “The Tiger” an allusion to Milton’s powerful Satan. Regardless of whether one perceives the Maker as satanic or divine or both, the poem seems to assert the typically Romantic view of the artist as sharing God’s burden of creation and the creative process.
Nature and the Natural in Asian Literature
Although no literary movement in Chinese history has been des- ignated “Romantic,” there are clear examples of the Romantic sensibility in Chinese literature
of the nineteenth century, especially in those works that exalt the emotional identification of the individual with nature. The Chinese writer Shen Fu (1763–1809) shares with Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats the reflective view of
Figure 27.5 WILLIAM BLAKE, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, ca. 1805. Watercolor, 161∕16 × 131∕4 in.
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220 CHAPTER 27 The Romantic View of Nature
nature and a heightened sensitivity to its transient moods. A bohemian spirit, Shen Fu failed the district civil examina- tions that guaranteed financial success for Chinese intel- lectuals. Often in debt and expelled from his family by an overbearing father, he found brief but profound joy in his marriage to a neighbor’s daughter, Zhen Yuen. Shen Fu’s autobiography, Six Chapters from a Floating Life (1809), is a confessional record of their life together, a life in which poverty is balanced by the pleasures of married love and an abiding affection for nature.
In the following excerpt from Shen’s autobiography— a favorite with Chinese readers to this day—the writer describes the simple pleasures he and Zhen Yuen derived from growing flowers and designing “rockeries”: natural arrangements of rocks and soil that resemble miniature gardens. The tender story of the destruction of the “Place of Falling Flowers,” the couple’s tiny version of the natural landscape, anticipates the central event of Shen’s intimate life history: the death of his beloved wife. The story also functions as a reminder that all of nature is fragile and impermanent.
READING 27.5 From Shen Fu’s Six Chapters from a Floating Life (1809)
As a young man I was excessively fond of flowers and loved to 1 prune and shape potted plants and trees. When I met Chang Lan-p’o he began to teach me the art of training branches and supporting joints, and after I had mastered these skills, he showed me how to graft flowers. Later on, I also learned the placing of stones and designing of rockeries. The orchid we considered the peerless flower, selecting it as much for its subtle and delicate fragrance as for its beauty and grace. Fine varieties of orchids were very difficult to find, especially those worthy of being recorded in the Botanical 10 Register. When Lan-p’o was dying he gave me a pot of spring orchids of the lotus type, with broad white centers, perfectly even “shoulders,” and very slender stems. As the plant was a classic specimen of its type, I treasured its perfection like a piece of ancient jade. Yuen took care of it whenever my work as yamen secretary1 called me away from home. She always watered it herself and the plant flourished, producing a luxuriant growth of leaves and flowers. One morning, about two years later, it suddenly withered and died. When I dug up the roots to inspect them, I saw that 20 they were as white as jade, with many new shoots beginning to sprout. At first, I could not understand it. Was I just too unlucky, I wondered, to possess and enjoy such beauty? Sighing despondently, I dismissed the matter from my mind. But some time later I found out what had really happened. It seemed that a person who had asked for a cutting from the plant and had been refused, had then poured boiling water on it and killed it. After that, I vowed never to grow orchids again. Azaleas were my second choice. Although the flowers had no fragrance they were very beautiful and lasted a long time. 30
The plants were easy to trim and to train, but Yuen loved the green of the branches and leaves so much that she would not let me cut them back, and this made it difficult for me to train them to correct shapes. Unfortunately, Yuen felt this way about all the potted plants that she enjoyed. Every year, in the autumn, I became completely devoted to the chrysanthemum. I loved to arrange the cut flowers in vases but did not like the potted plants. Not that I did not think the potted flowers beautiful, but our house having no garden, it was impossible for me to grow the plants myself, and those for 40 sale at the market were overgrown and untrained; not at all what I would have chosen. One day, as I was sweeping my ancestral graves in the hills, I found some very unusual stones with interesting streaks and lines running through them. I talked to Yuen about them when I went home. “When Hsüan-chou stones are mixed with putty and arranged in white-stone dishes, the putty and stones blend well and the effect is very harmonious,” I remarked. “These yellow stones from the hills are rugged and old-looking, but if 50 we mix them with putty the yellow and white won’t blend. All the seams and gaps will show up and the arrangement will look spotty. I wonder what else we could use instead of putty?” “Why not pick out some of the poor, uninteresting stones and pound them to powder,” Yuen said. “If we mix the powdered stones with the putty while it is still damp, the color will probably match when it dries.” After doing as she suggested, we took a rectangular I-hsing pottery dish and piled the stones and putty into a miniature 60 mountain peak on the left side of it, with a rocky crag jutting out towards the right. On the surface of the mountain, we made criss-cross marks in the style of the rocks painted by Ni Tsan2 of the Yuan dynasty. This gave an effect of perspective and the finished arrangement looked very realistic—a precipitous cliff rising sharply from the rocks at the river’s edge. Making a hollow in one corner of the dish, we filled it with river mud and planted it with duckweed. Among the rocks we planted “clouds of the pine trees,” bindweed. It was several days before the whole thing was finished. 70 Before the end of autumn the bindweed had spread all over the mountain and hung like wisteria from the rocky cliff. The flowers, when they bloomed, were a beautiful clear red. The duckweed, too, had sprouted luxuriantly from the mud and was now a mass of snowy white. Seeing the beauty of the contrasting red and white, we could easily imagine ourselves in Fairyland. Setting the dish under the eaves, we started discussing what should be done next, developing many themes: “Here there should be a lake with a pavilion—” “This spot calls for a 80 thatched summerhouse—” “This is the perfect place for the six-character inscription ‘Place of Falling Flowers and Flowing Water’”—“Here we could build our house—here go fishing— here enjoy the view”; becoming, by this time, so much a part of the tiny landscape, with its hills and ravines, that it seemed to us as if we were really going to move there to live. One night, a couple of mis-begotten cats, fighting over food,
1 A government clerk.
2 A famous landscape painter (1301–1374) of the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368).
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fell off the eaves and hit the dish, knocking it off its stand and smashing it to fragments in an instant. Neither of us could help crying. 90 “Isn’t it possible,” I sighed, “to have even a little thing like this without incurring the envy of the gods?”
Q What aspects of this selection reflect East Asian attitudes toward nature and the natural?
Q How does Shen Fu suggest the fragility of life?
Romantic Landscape Painting Landscape painting originated as an independent genre not in the West, but in the East. While the ancient Romans had devised naturalistic settings for mythological subjects (see Figure 6.28), it was in tenth-century China that land- scape painting first became a subject in and of itself (see Figure 14.15). By the thirteenth century, the Chinese landscape had overtaken figure painting in popularity. The genre soon spread to Japan and other parts of East Asia.
MAKING CONNECTIONS
Chinese landscape paintings generally achieve a sweeping unity of air, earth, and water that dwarfs the human figure. In one typically Chinese ink-on-paper album leaf, the artist Shen Zhou (1427–1509) pictures a solitary figure (possibly himself) atop a rugged cliff, overlooking a vast natural expanse (Figure 27.6). To the painting, he has added these lines:
White clouds encircle the waist of the hills like a belt; A stony ledge soars into the world, a narrow path into space. Alone, I lean on my thornwood staff and gaze calmly into the distance, About to play my flute in reply to the song of this mountain stream.*
The paintings of the nineteenth-century German artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), while not directly influenced by Chinese art, share some of its basic features. Friedrich’s views of wintry graveyards and Gothic ruins usually show distant figures contemplating (with what the artist called “our spiritual eye”) the mysteries of time and nature. In one of Friedrich’s most notable paintings, two men stand at the brink of a steep cliff, overlooking an unseen valley (Figure 27.7). A craggy, half- uprooted tree is silhouetted against the glowing, moonlit sky. Somber colors enhance a mood of poetic loneliness. While Shen Zhou’s cosmic vista makes nature itself the subject matter, Friedrich’s landscape—more closely focused and detailed— draws our attention to the figures. Nevertheless, both artists capture nature’s power to free the individual from the confines of the material world. In spaces smaller than 2 feet square, they record the universal dialogue between humankind and nature.
*Translated by Daniel Bryant
Figure 27.7 CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH, Two Men Looking at the Moon, 1819–1820. Oil on panel, 133∕4 × 171∕4 in.
Figure 27.6 SHEN ZHOU, Poet on a Mountain Top, from the “Landscape Album” series, ca. 1495–1500. Album leaf mounted as a handscroll; ink on paper or ink and light color on paper, 151∕4 × 233∕4 in.
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Typically vast and sweeping, Chinese landscapes achieve a cosmic unity of air, earth, and water that dwarfs the human figure (see Figure 27.6). Such landscapes are not literal imitations of reality, but expressions of a benign natural harmony. Executed in monochrome ink on silk, bamboo, or paper scrolls, they were intended as sources of personal pleasure and private retreat. Whether vertical or hori- zontal in format, they are “read” from a number of view- points, rather than from a single one. In all these features, Chinese landscapes differ from those of European artists.
In Europe, it was not until the Renaissance—among such painters as Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer, and Bruegel— that the natural landscape became a subject in its own right. Most Renaissance landscapes were visual records of a specific time and place (see Figure 19.12). During the seventeenth century, French academic painters cultivated the ideal landscape, a genre in which nature became the stage for mythological and biblical subjects (see Figure 21.13). The composition was conceived in the studio; key motifs, such as a foreground tree or a meandering road (often drawn from nature), were then incorporated into the design. Seventeenth-century Dutch masters, on the other hand, rejected the ideal landscape: Vermeer and Rembrandt rendered empirically precise views of
the physical world as perceived by the human eye (see Figure 23.12). During the following century, topographic landscapes—detailed descriptions of popular or remote locales—served the public as the picture postcards of their time. It was not until the nineteenth century, however, that the landscape became a primary vehicle for the expression of an artist’s shifting moods and private emotions. The nineteenth-century “reinvention” of nature also coincided with a new interest in the age and evolution of the earth, a subject popularized by Darwin and his fellow geologists. Romantic painters would translate their native affection for the countryside into scenes that ranged from the pic- turesque to the sublime. Like Wordsworth and Shelley, these artists discovered in nature a source of inspiration and a mirror of their own sensibilities.
Constable and Turner English artists took the lead in the genesis of the Romantic land- scape. John Constable (1776– 1837) owed much to the Dutch masters; yet his approach to nature
was uncluttered by tradition. “When I sit down to make a sketch from nature,” he wrote, “the first thing I try to do is
Figure 27.8 JOHN CONSTABLE, The Haywain, 1821. Oil on canvas, 4 ft. 31∕2 in. × 6 ft. 1 in. The artist originally titled this painting Landscape: Noon. On the specificity of time and place, he remarked: “No two days are alike, not even two hours; neither were there ever any two leaves alike since the creation of the world.”
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to forget that I have ever seen a picture.” Constable’s fresh- ly perceived landscapes celebrate the physical beauty of the rivers, trees, and cottages of his native Suffolk countryside even as they describe the mundane labors of its inhabitants (Figure 27.8). Like Wordsworth, who favored “incidents and situations from common life,” Constable chose to paint ordinary subjects—“water escaping from mill-dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork”— as he described them. And like Wordsworth, he drew on his childhood experiences as sources of inspiration. “Painting,” Constable explained, “is with me but another word for feeling and I associate ‘my careless boyhood’ with all that lies on the banks of the Stour [River]; those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful.”
Constable brought to his landscapes a sensitive blend of empirical detail and painterly freedom. Fascinated by nineteenth-century treatises on the scientific classifications of clouds, he made numerous oil studies of cloud forma- tions, noting on the reverse of each sketch the time of the year, hour of the day, and direction of the wind. “The sky,” he wrote, “is the source of light in nature, and governs everything.” He confessed to an “over-anxiety” about his skies and feared that he might destroy “that easy appear- ance which nature always has in all her movements.” In order to capture the “easy appearance” of nature and the fugitive effects of light and atmosphere, he often stippled parts of the landscape with white dots (compare Vermeer; see chapter 23)—a device critics called “Constable’s snow.” His finished landscapes thus record not so much the “look” of nature as its fleeting moods.
In Wivenhoe Park, Essex, Constable depicts cattle grazing on English lawns that typically resemble well-manicured gardens (Figure 27.9). From the distant horizon, the
residence of the owners overlooks a verdant estate. Brilliant sunshine floods through the trees and across the fields onto a lake that is shared by swans and fishermen. But the real subject of the painting is the sky, which, with its wind- blown clouds, preserves the spontaneity of Constable’s oil sketches.
If Constable’s landscapes describe the gentle spirit of the English countryside, those of his English contemporary Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) invest nature with theatrical fervor. Trained in architectural draftsman- ship, Turner began his career by making elegant drawings of Gothic ruins and popular tourist sites in England and Wales. These he sold to engravers, who mass-produced and marketed them. One of his early drawings, an intricate pencil sketch of the ruined monastery of Tintern Abbey, captures with some nostalgia the transient beauty of the medieval past (see Figure 27.3). Between 1814 and 1830, Turner traveled extensively throughout England and the Continent, making landscape studies of the mountains and lakes of Switzerland, the breathtaking reaches of the Alps, and the picturesque cities of Italy. His European tours inspired hundreds of rapid pencil sketches and luminous, eloquent studies executed in the spontaneous (and port- able) medium of watercolor. His large-scale paintings of Venice, glorious explorations of the play of light on water, were among the most sought-after of his travel canvases.
In his mature style, the lyricism of Turner’s early works gave way to impassioned studies of nature’s more turbu- lent moods. Natural disasters—great storms and Alpine avalanches—and human catastrophes, such as shipwrecks and fires, became metaphors for human vulnerability before the forces of nature. Such expressions of the “sublime”—the terror human beings experience in the face
Figure 27.9 JOHN CONSTABLE, Wivenhoe Park, Essex, 1816. Oil on canvas, 1 ft. 101∕8 in. × 3 ft. 37∕8 in. While Constable often made his sketches outdoors, where he was able to capture the effects of light in the landscape setting, he finished his paintings in his studio.
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of nature’s overpowering forces—occupied the Romantic imagination. The sea, a symbol of nature’s indomitable power, prevails as a Romantic theme in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), Herman Melville’s monumental novel Moby-Dick (1851), and Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the “Medusa” (see Figure 29.5), which Turner had seen in London.
In Turner’s Slave Ship of 1840 (Figure 27.1), the glowing sunset, turbulent seas, impending storm, and fantastic fish (that appear to devour the remains of the shackled body in the right foreground) do not immediately reveal the horror of the subject described in the original title: Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying: Typhoon Coming On. While Britain had finally abolished slavery throughout its colonies in 1838, popular literature on the history of the slave trade published in 1839 recounted in some detail the notorious activity that inspired Turner’s painting: the transatlantic traders’ practice of throwing overboard the malnourished and disease-ridden bodies of African slaves, and then collecting insurance money on “goods lost” at sea. On the threshold of rising British commercialism (see chapter 30), Turner seems to suggest that the human capacity for evil rivals nature’s cruelest powers.
Two years later, in Snowstorm (Figure 27.10), Turner mounted his own Romantic engagement with nature: the 67-year-old artist claimed that, at his request, sailors lashed him to the mast of a ship caught for hours in a storm at sea so that he might “show what such a scene was like.” He subtitled the painting “Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth making Signals in Shallow Water . . . the Author was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel left Harwich.” Since no ship by that name is listed in the records of the port of Harwich, Turner’s imagination may have exceeded his experience. Nevertheless, as with many of Turner’s late works, Snowstorm is an exercise in sensation and intuition. A swirling vortex of wind and waves, it is the imaginative transformation of an intense physical experience, which, recollected thereafter, evokes—as Wordsworth declared— “a sense sublime/ Of something far more deeply inter- fused,/ Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,/ And the round ocean and the living air,/ And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.” Turner’s “landscapes of the sublime” come closer to capturing the spirit of Wordsworth’s nature mysticism than do Constable’s gentler views of the physical landscape. Their expanding and contracting forms and startling bursts of color, comparable to the impassioned
Figure 27.10 J. M. W. TURNER, Snowstorm: Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth, 1842. Oil on canvas, 3 × 4 ft. Turner’s claim that he was lashed to the mast may have been inspired by a similar event in the Greek epic the Odyssey. The English writer John Ruskin described Snowstorm as “one of the very grandest statements of sea motion, mist, and light that has ever been put on canvas.”
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Figure 27.11 JEAN-BAPTISTE-CAMILLE COROT, Ville d’Avray, 1870. Oil on canvas, 215∕8 × 311∕2 in. Even in his own time, forgeries of Corot’s late paintings were produced in great numbers. Some of these were the result of Corot’s practice of allowing his students to copy his works. One French collection is said to contain almost 2500 Corot forgeries.
rhythms and brilliant dynamics of much Romantic music, were daringly innovative at the time. Critics disparagingly called Turner’s transparent veils of color—resembling his beloved watercolors—“tinted steam” and “soapsuds.” In hundreds of canvases that he never dared to exhibit, Turner all but abandoned recognizable subject matter; these experiments in light and color anticipated those of the French Impressionists by more than three decades.
Landscape Painting in France On the Continent, the artists of the Barbizon School— named after the picturesque village on the edge of the for- est of Fontainebleau near Paris—were among the first to take their easels out of doors. Working directly from nature (although usually finishing the canvas in the studio), they painted modest landscapes and scenes of rural life. These unsentimental views of the local countryside were highly successful in capturing nature’s moods.
The greatest French landscape painter of the mid- nineteenth century, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796– 1875), shared the Barbizon preference for working outdoors, but he brought to his compositions a breath- taking sense of harmony and order. Corot’s early land- scapes, executed for the most part in Italy, are as formally composed as the paintings of Poussin and David; they are, however, more personal and more serene. Corot’s luminescent late paintings are intimate and contempla- tive (Figure 27.11). He called them souvenirs, that is,
“remembrances,” to indicate that they were recollections of previous visual experiences, rather than on-the-spot accounts. Like many artists, Corot kept notebooks in which he jotted his everyday thoughts. One passage per- fectly captures the Romantic point of view:
Be guided by feeling alone. We are only simple mortals, subject to error, so listen to the advice of others, but follow only what you understand and can unite in your own feeling . . . Beauty in art is truth bathed in an impression received from nature.
Corot’s poetic landscapes, filled with feathery trees and misty rivers, and bathed in nuances of silver light, became so popular in France and elsewhere that he was able to sell as many canvases as he could paint.
American Romanticism Transcendentalism
Across the Atlantic, along the east- ern shores of the rapidly indus- trializing American continent, Romanticism took hold both as an attitude of mind and as a style.
Romanticism infused all aspects of nineteenth-century American culture: it distinguished the frontier tales of James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), the mysteries of
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Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), and the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) and Herman Melville (1819– 1891). But it found its purest expression in the cultur- al movement known as transcendentalism. The group of New England Unitarian ministers who formed the first Transcendental Club took its name from a treatise by the German philosopher Friedrich Schiller. Schiller’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) defended the oneness of Spirit and Nature and encouraged the realization of the higher spiritual self through sympathy with nature. The American transcendentalists—descendants of the English Puritans—held that knowledge gained by way of intui- tion transcended knowledge based on reason and logic. Reacting against the material excesses of advancing indus- trialization, they found sympathetic ideals in such mystical philosophies as Neoplatonism, and in the religions of East Asia, introduced into the Boston area in the early
nineteenth century. From Hinduism and Buddhism, they adopted a holistic philosophy based in pantheism and in the ideal of a “universal brotherhood” shared by humanity, nature, and God.
The prime exemplar of the transcendentalists was Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), whose essays powerfully influenced nineteenth-century American thought. The son and grandson of clergymen, Emerson was ordained as a Unitarian minister when he was in his twenties. Like Wordsworth, he courted nature to “see into the life of things” and to taste its cleansing power. In the essay entitled “Nature” (1836), Emerson sets forth a pantheistic credo:
In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In
LOOKING INTO
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s admiration for Asian philosophy, and Hinduism in particular, derived from his familiarity with the sacred Hindu texts, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita, in which Brahman is identified as the Universal Spirit. The three expressions of Brahmanic power—creation, preservation, and destruction—are
represented by the gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva (see chapter 14). In his poem “Brahma,” the World Creator, Emerson reminds the reader that a single identity underlies the illusion of all apparent differences in nature. The universal forces, even life and death, are One, the knowledge of which surpasses the prospect of heaven.
Emerson’s “Brahma” (1856)
If the red slayer think he slays, /the Hindu warrior is mistaken to think he kills Or if the slain think he is slain, /the victim is mistaken to think he is dead They know not well the subtle ways /neither understand that Death and Life are the same I keep, and pass, and turn again. /in that I (Brahma) create, destroy, and recreate
Far or forgot to me is near; /far and near are one in Brahma Shadow and sunlight are the same; /dark and light are one in Brahma The vanished gods to me appear; /all ancient divinities are present to Brahma and one to me are shame and fame. /all states of being coexist in Brahma
They reckon ill who leave me out; /any who fail to recognize the Creator misunderstands When me they fly, I am the wings; /the Particular and the Individual are one and the same I am the doubter and the doubt, /Brahma is both subject and object I am the hymn the Brahmin sings. /the prayers of the Hindu priest are identical with Brahma
The strong gods pine for my abode; /powerful deities envy Brahma’s lofty status (passiveness trumps physical might) And pine in vain the sacred Seven; / Brahma is envied by the Saptarishi (seven Hindu sages descended from the
constellation Ursa Major) who brought the Vedas and other sacred texts to humankind But thou, meek lover of the good! /thou=reader Find me, and turn thy back on heaven. /must seek oneness with Brahma, not salvation/heaven
Q What aspects of Hindu religion does Emerson’s poem reflect?
Q How do they compare with typical Western religious beliefs?
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the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.
Although best known for his essays, especially those on the virtues of self-reliance and nonconformity, Emerson was a poet of considerable talent. He shared with Coleridge and Wordsworth (both of whom he had met in England) a mys- tic reverence for nature; but he also brought to his poetry a unique appreciation of Asian philosophy, which he had acquired by reading some of the central works of Hindu literature, including the Bhagavad-Gita (see chapter 3). In Emerson’s short poem “Brahma” (see LOOKING INTO), the pantheistic philosophy of the transcendentalists is given lyric expression.
Emerson’s friend Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) set into practice many of the antimaterialist ideals of the transcendentalists. In his youth, Thoreau earned a bach- elor’s degree at Harvard University and made his way in the world by tutoring, surveying, and making pencils. An avid opponent of slavery, he was jailed briefly for refus- ing to pay a poll tax to a pro-slavery government. In an influential essay on civil disobedience, Thoreau defended the philosophy of passive resistance and moral idealism that he himself practiced—a philosophy embraced by the twentieth-century leaders Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
In 1845 Thoreau abandoned urban society to live in the Massachusetts woods near Walden Pond—an experiment that lasted twenty-six months. He described his love of the natural world, his nonconformist attitude toward society, and his deep commitment to monkish simplicity in his “handbook for living,” called Walden, or Life in the Woods. In this intimate yet forthright diary, Thoreau glorifies nature as innocent and beneficent—a source of joy and practical instruction.
READING 27.6 From Thoreau’s Walden (1854)
Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went 1 down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall, arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber. . . . It was a pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods, through which I looked out on the pond, and a small open field in the woods where pines and hickories were springing up. The ice in the pond was not yet dissolved, though there were some open spaces, and it was all dark-colored and saturated with water. There were some slight flurries of snow during the days 10 that I worked there; but for the most part when I came out on to the railroad, on my way home, its yellow sand-heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy atmosphere, and the rails shone in the spring sun, and I heard the lark and pewee and other birds already come to commence another year with us.
They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man’s discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself. One day, when my axe had come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond- 20 hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience, as long as I stayed there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life. I had previously seen the snakes on frosty mornings in my path with portions of their bodies still numb 30 and inflexible, waiting for the sun to thaw them. On the 1st of April it rained and melted the ice, and in the early part of the day, which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose groping about over the pond and cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of the fog. . . . I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was 40 quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded 50 that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.” . . . Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. . . . Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion. . . . The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature,— of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter,—such health, 60 such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the sun’s brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself? . . .
Q Was Thoreau’s retreat to Walden Pond an adventure in practical survival or an extended mystical experience?
Q What might Thoreau mean by “the indescribable innocence and beneficence of nature”?
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Walt Whitman’s Romantic Individualism Although technically not a transcendentalist, Walt Whitman (1818–1892; Figure 27.12) gave voice to the transcendental world-view and to the Emersonian credo of self-reliance. He worked as a Brooklyn printer and newspaper editor, a teacher, and a nurse in the American Civil War. His essays and poems, which have become an influential part of the American canon, assert his affection for the American landscape and its human inhabitants.
Like Wordsworth, Whitman took everyday life as his subject; he too had little use for the artificiality of tradi- tional poetic diction. What he referred to as his “barbaric yawp” found ideal expression in free verse (poetry based on irregular rhythmic patterns rather than on the conven- tional use of meter). His unmetrical rhythms and sonorous cadences are rich in alliteration, assonance, and repetition. He loved Italian opera, and his style often simulates the musical grandeur of that genre.
The prevailing themes in Whitman’s poetry are nation- alism and democracy. He embraced the ordinary indi- vidual and sympathized with marginal people, felons, and prostitutes. Claiming to be a poet of the body as well as the soul, he defended an honest recognition of the physical self. The American scene was the source of endless inspi- ration for the sprawling, cosmic images that dominate his autobiographical masterpiece, Leaves of Grass (1855).
The first edition of this collection of poems was met with strident criticism for its freewheeling verse forms and its candid celebration of all forms of sexuality—one reviewer attacked the book as “a mixture of Yankee transcendental- ism and New York rowdyism.” “Song of Myself,” the longest of the lyric poems included in Leaves of Grass, proclaims the expansive individualism of America’s Romantic movement. At the same time, it voices Whitman’s impassioned plea for unity with nature and with all humankind.
READING 27.7 From Whitman’s “Song of Myself”(1855)
1 I celebrate myself, and sing myself, 1 And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loaf and invite my soul, I learn and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. 5
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air, Born of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death. Creeds and schools in abeyance, 10 Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy.
24 Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, 1 Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, No more modest than immodest.
Unscrew the locks from the doors! 5 Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs! Whoever degrades another degrades me, And whatever is done or said returns at last to me. Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and index.
I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy, 10 By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.
Through me many long dumb voices, Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves, Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs, Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion, 15 And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and
Figure 27.12 THOMAS EAKINS, Walt Whitman, 1888. Oil on canvas, 301∕8 × 241∕4 in.
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of the father-stuff, And of the rights of them the others are down upon, Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised, Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.
Through me forbidden voices, 20 Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil, Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.
I do not press my fingers across my mouth, I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart, Copulation is no more rank to me than death is. 25 I believe in the flesh and the appetites, Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from, The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer, This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds. 30
52 The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. 1
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds, 5 It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.
I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. 10
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, 15 I stop somewhere waiting for you.
Q How does Whitman’s poetry (and personality) compare with that of the European Romantics (Readings 27.1 to 27.4)?
American Landscape Painting Landscape painters in America mirrored the sentiments of the transcendentalists by capturing what Thoreau described as “the indescribable innocence and benefi- cence of nature.” No less than the European Romantics, American artists took clear delight in the beauty of nature and its fleeting moods. But they also brought to their art a nationalistic infatuation with one of their young nation’s
unique features—its unspoiled and resplendent terrain. Mountain ranges, broad lakes and rivers, and verdant forests are precisely and lovingly documented. It is as if these painters felt compelled to record with photographic precision the majesty and moral power of the American continent and, at the same time, capture the magnitude of its untamed wilderness. Panorama and painstaking detail are features found in the topographic landscapes of the Hudson River School—a group of artists who worked chiefly in the region of upstate New York during the 1830s and 1840s.
One of the leading figures of the Hudson River School was the British-born Thomas Cole (1801–1848), whose Oxbow (Figure 27.13) offers a view of the Connecticut River near Northampton, Massachusetts. In this landscape, Cole achieved a dramatic mood by framing the brightly lit hills and curving river of the distant vista with the darker motifs of a departing thunderstorm and a blighted tree.
Intrigued by America’s drive to settle the West, the German-born Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) made pano- ramic depictions of that virginal territory. Bierstadt’s land- scape of the Rocky Mountains, which includes a Native American encampment in the foreground, reflects his fas- cination with the templelike purity of America’s vast, rug- ged spaces along the Western frontier (Figure 27.14). The isolated settlement, dwarfed and enshrined by snowcapped mountains, a magnificent waterfall, and a looking-glass lake—all bathed in golden light—is an American Garden of Eden, inhabited by tribes of unspoiled “noble savages.” Bierstadt gave cosmic breadth to the ancient Roman genre of the idyllic landscape, in which humankind and nature flourish in perfect harmony. The huge dimensions of the painting (some 6 × 10 feet) heralded the official establish- ment of landscape as a respectable genre, comparable to historical and religious subjects that, in academic tradition, commanded large canvases. Such “frontier landscapes” also gave public evidence of American expansionism and ascending nationalism.
Most nineteenth-century American artists visited Europe and spent years studying abroad; however, for the ordinary public, panoramic landscapes depicting remote locales were substitutes for actual travel, and viewers were known to carry binoculars to their showings, admission to which usually required entrance fees. Such was in fact the case with the paintings of Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), a pupil of Thomas Cole. Church’s celebrated vista of Niagara Falls, displayed in a ticketed exhibition in New York City, was visited by more than 100,000 spectators (Figure 27.15). His rendering of the Falls as seen from the Canadian side includes almost no foreground, thus putting viewers at the brink of the rushing water. The skyborne rainbow, one of Church’s favorite devices, would have been recognized as a symbol of divine benevolence and harmony. One critic called Niagara “the finest picture ever painted on this side of the Atlantic.”
Other Church landscapes, illustrating tropical storms, erupting volcanoes, and gigantic icebergs, transported American gallery patrons to the exotic places—Brazil, Ecuador, Newfoundland—the artist himself had visited.
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230 CHAPTER 27 The Romantic View of Nature
Figure 27.13 THOMAS COLE, The Oxbow (View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a Thunderstorm), 1836. Oil on canvas, 4 ft. 31∕2 in. × 6 ft. 4 in. The loop made by the Connecticut River at Northampton was a well-known early nineteenth-century tourist spot. At the lower center of the canvas, Cole is pictured at his easel; his signature is found on his portfolio at the lower edge of the painting.
Figure 27.14 ALBERT BIERSTADT, The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, 1863. Oil on canvas, 6 ft. 1 in. × 10 ft. 3∕4 in.
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Such scenes, produced in the age of polar exploration and shipwrecks, conjured awe and a sense of the Romantic sub- lime. Called by his contemporaries “the Michelangelo of landscape art,” Church became the most famous American painter of his time.
America and Native Americans The Romantic fascination with unspoiled nature and “natural man” also inspired documentary studies of Native Americans, such as those executed by the artist–ethnolo- gist George Catlin (1796–1872). During the 1830s, Catlin went to live among the Native Americans of the Great Plains. Moved by what he called the “silent and stoic digni- ty” of America’s tribal peoples, he recorded their lives and customs in literature, as well as in hundreds of drawings and paintings (Figure 27.16). Catlin’s “Gallery of Indians,” exhibited widely in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, drew more acclaim abroad than it did in his own country. Catlin popularized the image of Native Americans as people who deeply respected nature and the natural world (see chap- ter 18). He described exotic rituals designed to honor the Great Spirit (or Great Sun) and promote health and fertil- ity. Observing that most tribes killed only as much game as was actually needed to feed themselves, Catlin brought attention to Native Americans as the first ecologists.
Harmony with nature and its living creatures was central to Native American culture, whose pantheistic idealism is eloquently conveyed in the proverbial teachings of the northwestern tribes: “The Earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth . . . We did not weave the web of life; we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web,
we do to ourselves.” Following ancestral tradition, Native Americans looked upon living things—plants, animals, and human beings—as sacred parts of an all-embracing, spiritually charged environment. Their arts, which for the most part served religious and communal purposes, reflect their need, at the same time, to protect the bal- ance between these natural forces, and to take spiritual advantage of their transformative and healing powers. Woodcarving, pottery, basket-weaving, beadwork embroi- dery, sand painting, and other Native American crafts make significant use of natural imagery, but do so in ways that are profoundly different from the artistic enterprises of European and American Romantics: whereas Western artists perceived nature from “without,” as a source of moral and aesthetic inspiration, Native American artists perceived nature from “within,” as a power to be harnessed and respected. A polychrome water jar from the Zuni Pueblos of the American Southwest is treated as a living being whose spirit or breath may escape from the bowl by means of an opening in the path (the double line) painted around the vessel’s shoulder (Figure 27.17). In the body of the deer represented on the bowl, a “spirit” line links heart and mouth—a convention that derives from prehistoric pottery decoration.
Not the panoramic landscape, but the natural forces and living creatures immediate to that landscape, preoc- cupied native artists. As Catlin observed while living with the Plains Indians, natural forms embellished all ceremo- nial objects, one of the most important of which was the carved stone pipe. Pipes were often presented as gifts to seal tribal alliances. They were believed to be charged with
Figure 27.15 FREDERIC EDWIN CHURCH, Niagara, 1857. Oil on canvas, 421∕2 × 901∕2 in. Grand scale and fine detail characterize this typically nineteenth-century American painting. A contemporary newspaper critic exulted, “We know of no American landscape which unites as this does the merits of composition and treatment.”
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232 CHAPTER 27 The Romantic View of Nature
supernatural power, and pipe-smoking—both public and private—was a sacred act. Among the Plains Indians, pipes were considered “activated” when the stem (symbolic of male power) was joined to the bowl (symbolic of the mater- nal earth). Often produced jointly by men and women, Plains pipes were carved out of catlinite, a red stone quar- ried in southwestern Minnesota (so named because Catlin was the first to bring east samples of this distinctive min- eral). Legend identified the stone variously as the flesh of a mythical tribal people or the congealed blood of all dead Indians and dead buffalo. Catlinite pipes served in rituals for healing. They usually carry effigies of legendary birds, bears, or water creatures (Figure 27.18).
Popularizing the culture of the Native American in literature, the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) offered a sentimental picture of American Indian life in his narrative poem The Song of Hiawatha (1885). This fictional tale is based on the life
of a sixteenth-century Mohawk statesman. Unfortunately, neither Longfellow nor Catlin, nor the achievements of the Native Americans themselves, impeded the wholesale destruction of Native American cultures. Beginning in the 1830s, under pressure from the United States govern- ment, tribes were forced to cede their homelands and their hunting grounds to white settlers and to move into unoccupied lands in the American West. The perception of the Native American as the “devil savage” prevailed over the Romantic notion of the “noble savage” and came to justify America’s effort to “civilize” its “savage” populations through policies (strongly criticized by Catlin and others) that forced most tribes to take up residence on “reserva- tions” and, more often than not, to abandon their native languages, religions, and traditions. Persecution, humilia- tion, outright physical attack, and the continuing effects of disease further accelerated the decline and near extinction of America’s indigenous peoples.
Figure 27.16 GEORGE CATLIN, The White Cloud, Head Chief of the Iowas, 1844–1845. Oil on canvas, 28 × 227∕8 in. Catlin considered the Native Americans of the northern plains, the frontier between the United States and Canada, the least corrupted by contact with other Americans. In paintings introduced to Europeans, he presented them as “nature’s sovereign nobility.”
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American Folk Art American folk artists produced some of the most interest- ing artworks of the nineteenth century. Unlike profession- ally trained artists, such as Cole and Church, folk artists lacked technical schooling in the visual arts. Nevertheless, they were inspired to adorn their everyday surroundings with objects that often manifested extraordinary sensitivity to design and affection for natural detail.
One of the most distinctive of nineteenth-century folk art genres was the hand-stitched quilt, a utilitar- ian object produced almost exclusively by women. Unlike
academic art objects, quilts were often communal projects. Several women embroidered or appliquéd designs onto individual fabric patches salvaged from leftover sewing materials. Then, at popular quilting “bees,” they assem- bled the patches into bedcovers some 9 by 8 feet in size. Quilt motifs, frequently drawn from nature, were styl- ized and brightly colored (Figure 27.19). Many became standardized patterns that were passed from mother to daughter and from household to household. Patchwork quilts might commemorate religious or family occasions (such as weddings) or public events, but they rarely
Figure 27.17 Zuni water jar, nineteenth century. Height 91∕2 in.
Figure 27.18 Catlinite pipe (possibly a specialized medicine pipe or one for women’s use) representing a fanged and crested water spirit, with fish effigy stem, 1850–1860. Sioux tribe, carved in Minnesota. Length 85∕8 in. After the Europeans introduced the horse to Native American culture, this animal joined the more traditional motifs used to ornament ritual pipes.
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234 CHAPTER 27 The Romantic View of Nature
Figure 27.19 SARAH ANNE WHITTINGTON LANKFORD, probably Mary Evans, and possibly others, Baltimore Albion Quilt, ca. 1850. Appliqué, 8 ft. 3 in. × 7 ft. At the top of the quilt is pictured an American war memorial and a schematic rendering of the newly completed United States Capitol.
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narrated a story. Rather, they conveyed meaning through abstract signs and symbols. A folk record of nature and the natural, quilt-making and related textile arts constitute a decorative yet intimate nineteenth-century American artform.
The Romantic sanctification of nature is even more vividly configured in The Peaceable Kingdom (Figure 27.20), a painting by the American folk artist Edward Hicks (1780– 1849). A Quaker minister in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Hicks was also a popular sign-painter. His inspiration for more than one hundred versions of this utopian subject came from the Book of Isaiah: “The wolf also shall dwell
with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid . . . and a little child shall lead them” (11:6–9). Hicks set his charming, wide-eyed beasts and weightless, diminu- tive children in a verdant landscape. In the background, at the far left, Hicks’ fellow Quaker William Penn displays the peace treaty signed with the Lenape tribe (an event that had also figured in academic American art). The decora- tive handling of the composition and its disregard for tra- ditional perspective contributes to its visual immediacy; but it is in the gestures of the children, reaching out lovingly to the wild creatures in their midst, that Hicks establishes the link between natural innocence and peace.
Figure 27.20 EDWARD HICKS, The Peaceable Kingdom, ca. 1834. Oil on canvas, 30 × 351∕2 in. Hicks, a great admirer of his fellow Quaker William Penn, painted no less than sixty-one versions of this painting.
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LOOKING BACK
The Progress of Industrialization • Nineteenth-century Europe experienced
a population boom; increased production of coal, iron, and steel encouraged expansion of industry and commerce in the West. In this industrially based society, goods were increasingly made in factories rather than in homes.
• Advancing industrialization encouraged urbanization and spurred Western efforts to find markets and resources in other parts of the world.
Early Nineteenth-Century Thought • German philosophers, influenced by
Asian philosophy and Kantian idealism, viewed nature subjectively and in the direction of mysticism.
• Hegel proposed a dialectical model according to which all reality, all history, and all ideas progressed toward perfect spiritual freedom.
• Darwin argued that by means of natural selection, all living things, including human beings, evolved from a few simple forms: species either develop into higher forms of life or fail to survive.
• While the theory of natural selection displaced human beings from their elevated place in the hierarchy of living creatures, it advanced the idea of the unity of nature and humankind.
Nature and the Natural in European Literature • Nature provided both a metaphor for
the Romantic sensibility and a refuge
from the evils of nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization.
• William Wordsworth, the leading nature poet of the nineteenth century, embraced the redemptive power of nature. Exalting the natural landscape as the source of sublime inspiration and moral truth, Wordsworth and his English contemporaries initiated the Romantic movement.
• The Romantics stressed the free exercise of the imagination, the liberation of the senses, and the cultivation of a more natural language of poetic expression.
• Shelley compared the elemental forces of nature with the creative powers of the poet, while Keats rejoiced that nature’s fleeting beauty might forever dwell in art. Blake’s deeply spiritual poems reflect a visionary and moral perception of nature.
Nature and the Natural in Asian Literature • The Romantic embrace of nature and
natural imagery was not confined to the West: in Chinese literature, as reflected in Shen Fu’s confessional prose, nature became a source of inspiration and personal solace.
• Chinese poets and painters described the natural landscape by way of a few carefully chosen words and images.
Romantic Landscape Painting • It was among Western Romantics that
the landscape became a major vehicle for the expression of the artist’s moods and emotions.
• Constable’s contemplative scenes of English country life and Turner’s sublime vistas are the visual counterparts of the poems of Wordsworth.
• The elegiac landscapes of Friedrich in Germany and Corot in France reflect the efforts of Romantic artists to explore nature’s shifting states as metaphors for human feeling.
American Romanticism • American Romantics endowed the
quest for natural simplicity with a robust spirit of individualism. The transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau sought a union of self with nature; Walt Whitman proclaimed his untamed and “untranslatable” ego in sympathy with nature’s energy.
• In the American landscapes of Cole, Bierstadt, and Church, nature becomes symbolic of an unspoiled and rapidly vanishing world; in the art of George Catlin, the native populations and traditions of America are lovingly documented.
• Among Native Americans, yet another (less Romantic but equally mystical) view of nature flourished, as evidenced in magnificent ceremonial objects.
• American folk art, as typified by the paintings of Edward Hicks, made use of natural imagery for decorative and symbolic purposes.
assonance a literary device involving similarity in sound between vowels followed by different consonants
dialectic in Hegelian philosophy, the process by which every condition (or “thesis”) confronts an opposite condition (or “antithesis”) to resolve in synthesis
eugenics the science of improving human beings by means of genetic manipulation
free verse poetry that is based on irregular rhythmic patterns rather than on the conventional and regular use of meter
lyric poetry “lyric” means accompanied by the lyre, hence, verse that is meant to be sung rather than spoken; poetry marked by individual and personal emotion (see also chapter 5)
pantheism the belief that a divine spirit pervades all things in the universe
Glossary
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The Romantic Hero ca. 1780–1880
“O hero, with whose bloodied story Long, long the earth will still resound . . .” Pushkin
28 Chapter
Figure 28.1 JACQUES- LOUIS DAVID, Napoleon Crossing the Great Saint Bernard Pass, 1800. Oil on canvas, 8 ft. 6 in. × 7 ft. 3 in. When the painting entitled General Bonaparte’s Passage over Mont St. Bernard was first exhibited in London, it was described as follows: “He is here represented braving all the obstacles which Nature seemed to oppose to his passage; the winds, the cold, ice, snow, and thunder; nothing stops him; with one hand he is assisting his horse to mount these impractical rocks, with the other he is pointing out to his brave followers the dangers they have still to surmount, before they arrive where Glory calls them.”
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Nationalism and the Hero Nationalism—the exaltation of the sovereign state—was one of the shaping forces of nineteenth-century culture. While the beginnings of the modern nation-state go back at least to the fourteenth century (see chapter 15), nationalism, an ideology (or belief system) grounded in a people’s sense of cultural and political unity, did not gain widespread acceptance until roughly 1815. Modern nation- alism flourished in the wake of the French Revolution and, thereafter, in resistance to the imperialistic expansion of Napoleonic France. One after another, European states, as well as some in Africa and in Latin America, rose up against foreign rulers. Love of nation and love of liberty became synonymous with the ideals of self-determination and political freedom. In its positive aspects, national- ism cultivated the revival and celebration of a common language, common customs, and a shared history, as expressed in poetry, music, and art. The collection of German fairy tales (1812–1815) by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm serves as an example. But nationalism also manifested a malignant aspect: well into the twentieth cen- tury, nationalism and patriotic chauvinism motivated poli- cies of imperialism and ignited warfare, not only between nations, but also among the ethnic populations of various regions. Indeed, as these chapters reveal, much of the art of the nineteenth century is a visceral response to brutal events associated with nascent nationalism.
Nineteenth-century intellectuals celebrated the heroic personality, especially in its dedication to the causes of liberty and equality. The British historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) published a series of lec- tures, On Heroes and Hero-Worship, in which he glorified hero-gods, prophets, poets, priests, men of letters, and the quasi-legendary Napoleon Bonaparte. Walter Scott (1771–1832) and Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) wrote historical novels that described the heroic adventures of swashbuckling soldiers and maidens in distress, while Victor Hugo (1802–1885) made sentimental heroes out
of egalitarian patriots in the novel Les Misérables. Real-life heroes challenged literary heroes in courage and dar- ing. The Zulu warrior Shaka (1787–1828) changed the destiny of the southern region of Africa by leading aggres- sive campaigns that united the local clans, thus forming the Zulu nation.
In America, heroic themes occupied the attention of the novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) and Herman Melville (1819–1891). Each created brooding, melan- cholic fictional heroes whose moral strength was tested by the forces of evil. The two leading figures (Ishmael and Ahab) in Melville’s great sea novel Moby-Dick are semi- autobiographical characterizations, inspired by Melville’s adventures as the foremast hand on a whaling ship and as a sailor in the United States Navy. Then too, the Americas produced some notable real-life heroes and champions of political freedom, such as Simón Bolívar (1783–1830)— whose victories over the Spanish forces in South America won independence for Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela—and Frederick Douglass (1817–1895), the leading antislavery spokesman, whose autobiography details a heroic life of oppression and struggle.
Napoleon as a Romantic Hero In 1799 the thirty-year-old Corsican army general Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) seized control of the government of France. He ended civil strife, reorganized the educa- tional system, and institutionalized the system of civil law known as the Code Napoléon. “The Revolution is ended,” announced Napoleon as he proclaimed himself emperor in 1804. Over the following ten years, he pursued a policy of conquest that brought continental Western Europe to his feet. Throughout much of the West he abolished serf- dom, expropriated Church possessions, curtailed feudal privileges, and introduced French laws, institutions, and influence. Spreading the revolutionary ideals of liberty, fra- ternity, and equality throughout his empire (Map 28.1), he championed popular sovereignty and kindled sentiments of nationalism.
LOOKING AHEAD
As the Romantics embraced nature, so they exalted the creative individual in the person of the hero. Heroes, whether mortal or divine, symbolize humanity at its best, most powerful, and godlike. Like the literary heroes of the past—Gilgamesh, Achilles, and Roland—the Romantic hero was a larger-than-life figure with extraordinary expectations, abilities, and goals. But whereas the literary hero defended the traditions and moral values of a society, the Romantic hero might challenge or seek to reform them.
The Romantics saw themselves as the visionaries of their time: as champions of a cult of the senses and of the heart. “Exister, pour nous, c’est sentir” (“For us, to exist is to feel”), proclaimed Rousseau, the late eighteenth-century prophet of Romanticism.
The spirit of the heroic self was anticipated in Rousseau’s declaration: “I am made unlike anyone I have ever met; I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different.” Working to fulfill their own personal vision, Romantic poets, painters, and composers freed themselves from dependence on the patronage of Church and state. At the same time, they defended the ideals of liberty and brotherhood associated with emerging nationalism. They opposed entrenched systems of slavery and institutional limitations to personal freedom. The nineteenth century did not produce more heroes than other centuries, but it celebrated the heroic personality as representative of the Romantic sensibility.
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If Napoleon’s ambitions were heroic, his military cam- paigns were stunning. Having conquered Italy, Egypt, Austria, Prussia, Portugal, and Spain, he pressed on to Russia where, in 1812, bitter weather and lack of food forced his armies to retreat. Only 100,000 of his army of 600,000 survived. In 1813, a coalition of European powers forced his defeat and exile to the island of Elba off the coast of Italy. A second and final defeat occurred after he escaped in 1814, raised a new army, and met the combined European forces led by the English duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo (1815). The fallen hero spent the last years of his life in exile on the barren island of Saint Helena off the west coast of Africa.
Napoleon, the first of the modern European dictators, left a distinctly Neoclassical stamp upon the city of Paris (see chapter 26). However, he also became the nineteenth century’s first Romantic hero, glorified in numerous
European poems and paintings, and especially in the majestic portraits of Jacques-Louis David, his favorite art- ist. David’s equestrian portrait of Napoleon (see Figure 28.1), which clearly draws on Roman imperial models, shows an idealized Napoleon—he actually crossed the Saint Bernard Pass on a mule—pursuing the destiny of such great military leaders as Hannibal and Charlemagne, whose names are carved on the foreground rocks. In this painting, one of five similar versions of the subject, David depicts Napoleon as a Romantic hero. Napoleon’s diary, a record of personal reflection, a favorite genre of the nineteenth-century Romantics, corroborates that image. Entries made by Napoleon between 1800 and 1817 reveal many features that typify the Romantic per- sonality: self-conscious individualism, a sense of personal power, unbridled egotism, and a high regard for the life of the imagination.
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Moscow (captured) 1812Borodino
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Map 28.1 The Empire of Napoleon at its Greatest Extent, 1812. In the lands he controlled directly and indirectly, Napoleon tried to initiate revolutionary reforms and institutions, an effort that generally met with resistance.
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READING 28.1 From Napoleon’s Diary (1800–1817)
Milan, June 17, 1800: . . . What a thing is imagination! Here 1 are men who don’t know me, who have never seen me, but who only knew of me, and they are moved by my presence, they would do anything for me! And this same incident arises in all centuries and in all countries! Such is fanaticism! Yes, imagination rules the world. The defect of our modern institutions is that they do not speak to the imagination. By that alone can man be governed; without it he is but a brute.
December 30, 1802: My power proceeds from my reputation, and my reputation from the victories I have won. My power 10 would fall if I were not to support it with more glory and more victories. Conquest has made me what I am; only conquest can maintain me. . . .
Saint Helena, March 3, 1817: In spite of all the libels, I have no fear whatever about my fame. Posterity will do me justice. The truth will be known; and the good I have done will be compared with the faults I have committed. I am not uneasy as to the result. Had I succeeded, I would have died with the reputation of the greatest man that ever existed. As it is, although I have failed, I shall be considered as an extraordinary 20 man: my elevation was unparalleled, because unaccompanied by crime. I have fought fifty pitched battles, almost all of which I have won. I have framed and carried into effect a code of laws that will bear my name to the most distant posterity. I raised myself from nothing to be the most powerful monarch in the world. Europe was at my feet. I have always been of [the] opinion that the sovereignty lay in the people.
Q What, according to Napoleon, is the role of the imagination?
Q Why might Napoleon’s self-image be considered “romantic”?
The Promethean Hero The Promethean Myth in Literature If Napoleon was nineteenth-century Europe’s favorite real-life hero, Prometheus was its favorite fictional hero. Prometheus (the name means “forethought”) was one of the primordial deities of Greek mythology. According to legend, Prometheus challenged Zeus by stealing from his home on Mount Olympus the sacred fire (source of divine wisdom and creative inspiration) and bestowing this great gift upon humankind. As punishment, Zeus chained him to a lonely rock, where an eagle fed daily on his liver, which was miraculously restored each night. A second, less dramatic aspect of the Prometheus story, more popular among the Romans than the Greeks, credited the hero with having fashioned human beings out of clay, in the manner of the Babylonian hero-god Marduk (see chapter 1).
Romantic poets embraced the figure of Prometheus as the suffering champion of humanity—a symbol of freedom and a deliverer whose noble ambitions had incurred the
wrath of the gods. Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom we met in chapter 27, made Prometheus the savior-hero of his four-act play Prometheus Unbound (1820). In this drama, Prometheus frees the universe from the tyranny of the gods. Two years earlier, in 1818, Shelley’s second wife, Mary Godwin Shelley (1797–1851), explored the Promethean legend in her novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The daughter of William Godwin and the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft (see chapter 24), Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein at the age of eighteen. Framed as a series of letters, the novel relates the astonishing tale of the scientist–philosopher Victor Frankenstein, who, having discovered the secret of imparting life to inanimate matter, produces a monster endowed with supernatural strength (Figure 28.2). A modern Prometheus, Frankenstein suf- fers the punishment for his ambitious designs when the creature, excluded from the normal life of ordinary mor- tals, betrays his creator: “I was benevolent and good,” he protests, “misery made me a fiend.” Like the fallen Lucifer, Frankenstein’s creation ultimately becomes a figure of heroic evil.
Frankenstein belongs to a literary genre known as the Gothic novel, a type of entertainment that features ele- ments of horror and the supernatural cast in a medieval (“Gothic”) setting. Such novels, the earliest of which was Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), reflect the rising tide of antirationalism and a revived interest in the medieval past. Shelley’s novel—actually a scientific horror tale—has become a modern classic. The first literary work to question the human impact of scientific research, it
Figure 28.2 The first illustration of the Frankenstein monster, frontispiece from the Standards Novel edition of 1831. Engraving, 31∕2 × 24∕5 in.
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has inspired numerous science-fiction “spinoffs,” as well as cinematic and stage renderings. Ironically, however, it is not the scientist but the monster that has captured the modern imagination, even to the point of usurping the name of his creator.
READING 28.2 From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Chapters 4 and 5) (1818)
. . . One of the phenomena which had peculiarly attracted my 1 attention was the structure of the human frame, and, indeed, any animal endued with life. Whence, I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed? It was a bold question, and one which has ever been considered as a mystery: yet with how many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our enquiries. I revolved these circumstances in my mind and determined thenceforth to apply myself more particularly to those branches of natural philosophy which relate to physiology. Unless I had 10 been animated by an almost supernatural enthusiasm, my application to this study would have been irksome and almost intolerable. To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death. I became acquainted with the science of anatomy, but this was not sufficient; I must also observe the natural decay and corruption of the human body. In my education my father had taken the greatest precautions that my mind should be impressed with no supernatural horrors. I do not ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition or to have feared the apparition of a spirit. Darkness had no effect 20 upon my fancy, and a churchyard was to be merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm. Now I was led to examine the cause and progress of this decay and forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses. My attention was fixed upon every object the most insupportable to the delicacy of the human feelings. I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. 30 I paused, examining and analysing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me—a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that while I became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated, I was surprised that among so many men of genius who had directed their enquiries towards the same science, that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret. Remember, I am not recording the vision of a madman. The sun does not more certainly shine in the heavens than that 40 which I now affirm is true. Some miracle might have produced it, yet the stages of the discovery were distinct and probable. After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter. The astonishment which I had at first experienced on this discovery soon gave place to delight and rapture. After so much time spent in painful labour, to arrive at once at the summit of
my desires was the most gratifying consummation of my toils. 50 But this discovery was so great and overwhelming that all the steps by which I had been progressively led to it were obliterated, and I beheld only the result. What had been the study and desire of the wisest men since the creation of the world was now within my grasp. . . . . . . Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow. 60 When I found so astonishing a power placed within my hands, I hesitated a long time concerning the manner in which I should employ it. Although I possessed the capacity of bestowing animation, yet to prepare a frame for the reception of it, with all its intricacies of fibres, muscles, and veins, still remained a work of inconceivable difficulty and labour. I doubted at first whether I should attempt the creation of a being like myself, or one of simpler organization; but my imagination was too much exalted by my first success to permit me to doubt of my ability to give life to an animal as complex 70 and wonderful as man. The materials at present within my command hardly appeared adequate to so arduous an undertaking, but I doubted not that I should ultimately succeed. I prepared myself for a multitude of reverses; my operations might be incessantly baffled, and at last my work be imperfect; yet when I considered the improvement which every day takes place in science and mechanics, I was encouraged to hope my present attempts would at least lay the foundations of future success. Nor could I consider the magnitude and complexity of my plan as any argument of its impracticability. It was with 80 these feelings that I began the creation of a human being. As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature; that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionately large. After having formed this determination and having spent some months in successfully collecting and arranging my materials, I began. No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to be ideal bounds, which I should first 90 break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs. Pursuing these reflections, I thought that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption. These thoughts supported my spirits, while I pursued my undertaking with unremitting ardour. My cheek had grown 100 pale with study, and my person had become emaciated with confinement. Sometimes, on the very brink of certainty, I failed; yet still I clung to the hope which the next day or the next hour might realize. One secret which I alone possessed was the hope to which I had dedicated myself; and the moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places. Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the
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unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? My limbs now tremble, and my eyes 110 swim with the remembrance; but then a resistless and almost frantic impulse urged me forward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit. It was indeed but a passing trance, that only made me feel with renewed acuteness so soon as, the unnatural stimulus ceasing to operate, I had returned to my old habits. I collected bones from charnel-houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation: my 120 eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion. . . .
It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing 130 that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creation open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and 140 arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips. The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but 150 now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room and continued a long time traversing my bedchamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep. At length lassitude succeeded to the tumult I had before endured, and I threw myself on the bed in my clothes, endeavouring to seek a few moments of forgetfulness. But it was in vain; I slept, indeed, but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. 160 Delighted and surprized, I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel. I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew
covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed; when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters, I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had 170 created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped and rushed downstairs. I took refuge in the courtyard belonging to the house which I inhabited, where I remained during the rest of the night, walking up and down in the greatest agitation, listening attentively, catching and fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the daemoniacal corpse to 180 which I had so miserably given life. . . .
Q What are the dangers of “the acquirement of knowledge,” according to Dr. Frankenstein?
Q Why does he ultimately experience “breathless horror and disgust”?
Byron and the Promethean Myth The Promethean myth found its most passionate cham- pion in the life and works of the English poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824). Byron was one of the most flamboyant personalities of the age (Figure 28.3). Dedicated to pleasures of the senses, he was equally impas- sioned by the ideals of liberty and brotherhood. In his brief, mercurial life, he established the prototype of the Romantic hero, often called the Byronic hero.
As a young man, Byron traveled restlessly throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, devouring the landscape and the major sites. A physically attractive man (despite the handicap of a club foot) with dark, brooding eyes, he engaged in numerous love affairs, including one with his half-sister. In 1816, Byron abandoned an unsuccessful mar- riage and left England for good. He lived in Italy for a time with the Shelleys and a string of mistresses. By this time, he had earned such a reputation of dangerous nonconform- ity that an English woman, catching sight of the poet in Rome, warned her daughter: “Do not look at him! He is dangerous to look at.” In 1824, Byron sailed to Greece to aid the Greeks in their war of independence against the Turks—one of the many episodes in the turbulent history of nineteenth-century nationalism. There, in his last heroic role, he died of a fever. Throughout his life, Byron was given to periodic bouts of creativity and dissipation. A man of violent passions, he once described himself as “half-mad . . . between meta- physics, mountains, lakes, love indistinguishable, and the nightmare of my own delinquencies.” Intent on sharing his innermost feelings, he became the hero of his two great poems, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818) and Don Juan, the latter written in installments between 1819 and 1824, and left unfinished at his death. The first poem narrates the wandering of Childe Harold, Byron’s fictional self, whom he describes as “the most unfit/ Of men to herd with man; with whom he held/ Little in common.”
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The disillusioned hero finds solace, however, in nature, as Byron writes in Canto Three (13):
He had the passion and the power to roam; The desert, forest, cavern, breaker’s foam, Were unto him companionship; they spake A mutual language . . .
Begun in Venice, Don Juan drew on the legendary, fictional Spanish libertine who had also inspired Mozart’s Don Giovanni (see chapter 26). Byron’s don, however, is not the lustful womanizer of Mozart’s opera; rather, he is a figure who stumbles into love in what might be called a romance of roguery, or—in Byron’s words—“a satire on the abuses of society.” Byron’s disdain for the social conventions of his
time and place are brilliantly mocked in a work that the author described as an “epic on modern life.”
By comparison with the other heroes of his literary career, Prometheus, the god who “stole from Heaven the flame, for which he fell,” preoccupied Byron as a symbol of triumphant individualism. For the poet, capturing the imagination in art or in life was comparable to stealing the sacred fire. In a number of his poems, he compares the fallen Napoleon to the mythic Prometheus—symbol of heroic ambition and ungovernable passions. But in the stirring ode called simply “Prometheus,” Byron makes of the Promethean myth a parable for the Romantic imagi- nation. He begins by recalling the traditional story of the hero whose “Godlike crime was to be kind.” He goes on
Figure 28.3 THOMAS PHILLIPS, Lord Byron Sixth Baron in Albanian Costume, 1813. Oil on canvas, 50 × 40 in. Upon the death of his great- uncle in 1798, Byron became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale. Entitled to a seat in the House of Lords when he came of age in 1809, he attended only a few sessions. That same year, he bought this exotic costume (red-velvet jacket and Oriental headdress) while touring Greece and Albania. One of his lovers, Lady Caroline Lamb, characterized Byron as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”
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to identify Prometheus as a “symbol and a sign” to mortals who, although “part divine,” are doomed to “funereal destiny.” Like Prometheus, says Byron, we must strive to defy that destiny by pursuing the creative projects that will outlive us. Byron’s voice sets defiance and hope against melancholy and despair.
READING 28.3 Byron’s “Prometheus” (1816)
Titan! to whose immortal eyes 1 The sufferings of mortality, Seen in their sad reality, Were not as things that gods despise; What was thy pity’s recompense? 5 A silent suffering, and intense; The rock, the vulture,1 and the chain, All that the proud can feel of pain, The agony they do not show, The suffocating sense of woe, 10 Which speaks but in its loneliness, And then is jealous lest the sky Should have a listener, nor will sigh Until its voice is echoless.
Titan! to thee the strife was given 15 Between the suffering and the will, Which torture where they cannot kill; And the inexorable Heaven, And the deaf tyranny of Fate, The ruling principle of Hate, 20 Which for its pleasure doth create The things it may annihilate, Refused thee even the boon to die: The wretched gift eternity Was thine—and thou hast borne it well. 25 All that the Thunderer2 wrung from thee Was but the menace which flung back On him the torments of thy rack; The fate thou didst so well foresee, But would not to appease him tell; 30 And in thy Silence was his Sentence, And in his Soul a vain repentance, And evil dread so ill dissembled, That in his hand the lightnings trembled.
Thy Godlike crime was to be kind, 35 To render with thy precepts less The sum of human wretchedness, And strengthen Man with his own mind; But baffled as thou wert from high, Still in thy patient energy, 40 In the endurance, and repulse Of thine impenetrable Spirit, Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse, A mighty lesson we inherit:
Thou art symbol and a sign 45 To Mortals of their fate and force; Like thee, Man is in part divine, A troubled stream from a pure source; And Man in portions can foresee His own funereal destiny, 50 His wretchedness, and his resistance, And his sad unallied existence: To which his Spirit may oppose Itself—and equal to all woes, And a firm will, and a deep sense, 55 Which even in torture can descry Its own concenter’d recompense,3
Triumphant where it dares defy, And making Death a Victory.
Q How does Byron characterize Prometheus in this poem?
Q What aspects of the Byronic hero are configured in Prometheus?
Pushkin: The Byron of Russia Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 was one of the most dramatic events in nineteenth-century history. Sorely outnumbered by the Grand Army of Napoleon, Russian troops resorted to a “scorched earth” policy that produced severe shortages of food for French and Russians alike. As French forces advanced on Moscow, leaving a trail of bloody battles, the Russians burned their own capital city. Napoleon ultimately captured Moscow, but within a few months he and his badly diminished army retreated from Russia, never to return. Deeply moved by Napoleon’s role in stirring Russian nationalism, Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837)—Russia’s leading lyric poet and dramatist— eulogized the hero who, as he explains in the poem “Napoleon,” had “launched the Russian nation/ Upon its lofty destinies.”
Pushkin, whose maternal great-grandfather was a black African general, came from an old aristocratic family. Nevertheless, he claimed comradeship with Russia’s hum- ble commoners. He boasted: “I am a versewright and a bookman, . . . / No financier, no titled footman,/ A com- moner: great on his own.” Like Byron, Pushkin champi- oned political freedom; he defended liberal causes, which resulted in his banishment to south Russia and ultimately to his dismissal from the foreign service. His agonizing death, at the age of thirty-seven, was the result of wounds suffered in a duel with his wife’s alleged lover.
Pushkin’s Romantic tragedies and long narrative poems reveal his great admiration for Shakespeare and Byron, and earned him a reputation as “the Byron of Russia.” Some of Pushkin’s works, such as Boris Godunov (1825) and Eugene Onegin (1833)—modeled in part on Byron’s Don Juan—would inspire operas by the composers Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881) and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (see chapter 29) respectively. The lyric poem “Napoleon,”
3 Catch a glimpse of the Spirit’s own sufficient reward.
1 Byron replaces the mythological eagle with a vulture. 2 Zeus, the supreme god of the Greeks.
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part of which follows, conveys Pushkin’s gift for buoyant, energetic language and his profound respect for the figure whom he viewed as both oppressor and liberator.
READING 28.4 From Pushkin’s “Napoleon” (1821)
A wondrous fate is now fulfilled, 1 Extinguished a majestic man. In somber prison night was stilled Napoleon’s grim, tumultuous span. The outlawed potentate has vanished, 5 Bright Nike’s mighty, pampered son; For him, from all Creation banished, Posterity has now begun.
O hero, with whose bloodied story Long, long the earth will still resound, 10 Sleep in the shadow of your glory, The desert ocean all around . . . A tomb of rock, in splendor riding! The urn that holds your mortal clay, As tribal hatreds are subsiding, 15 Now sends aloft a deathless ray.
How recently your eagles glowered Atop a disenfranchised world, And fallen sovereignties cowered Beneath the thunderbolts you hurled! 20 Your banners at a word would shower Destruction from their folds and dearth, Yoke after yoke of ruthless power You fitted on the tribes of earth.
. . . . . . . . . .
Vainglorious man! Where were you faring, 25 Who blinded that astounding mind? How came it in designs of daring The Russian’s heart was not divined? At fiery sacrifice not guessing, You idly fancied, tempting fate, 30 We would seek peace and count it blessing; You came to fathom us too late . . .
Fight on, embattled Russia mine, Recall the rights of ancient days! The sun of Austerlitz,1 decline! 35 And Moscow, mighty city, blaze! Brief be the time of our dishonor, The auspices are turning now; Hail Moscow—Russia’s blessings on her! War to extinction, thus our vow! 40
The diadem of iron2 shaking
In stiffened fingers’ feeble clasp, He stares into a chasm, quaking, And is undone, undone at last. Behold all Europe’s legions sprawling . . . 45 The wintry fields’ encrimsoned glow Bore testimony to their falling Till blood-prints melted with the snow.
. . . . . . . . . .
Let us hold up to reprobation Such petty-minded men as chose 50 With unappeasable damnation To stir his laurel-dark repose! Hail him! He launched the Russian nation Upon its lofty destinies And augured ultimate salvation 55 For man’s long-exiled liberties.
Q In what ways does this poem reflect the sentiments of nationalism?
Q What, according to Pushkin, did Napoleon fail to recognize in Russia?
The Abolitionists: American Prometheans Among the most fervent champions of liberty in nineteenth- century America were those who crusaded against the insti- tution of slavery. Their efforts initiated a movement for black nationalism that would continue well into the twenti- eth century (see chapter 36). It is unlikely that the leaders of the abolitionist movement regarded themselves in the image of a Napoleon or the fictional Prometheus, but, as historical figures, the abolitionists were the heroes of their time. They fought against the enslavement of Africans (and their descendants), a practice that had prevailed in the Americas since the sixteenth century.* Although the abolitionists constituted only a small minority of America’s population, their arguments were emotionally charged and their protests often dramatic and telling.
Antislavery novels—the most famous of which was Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811– 1896)—stirred up public sentiment against the brutality and injustice of the system. Originally serialized in an antislavery newspaper, Stowe’s book sold more than one million copies within a year of its publication. But the most direct challenge to slavery came from the slaves themselves, and none more so than the slave rebels who—like Prometheus—mounted outright attacks against their owners and masters in their efforts to gain a prized privilege: freedom. While slave rebellions were rare in nineteenth-century America—between 1800 and 1860 only two reached the level of overt insurrection—the threat or rumor of rebellion was terrifying to slave-owners (Figure 28.4).
One of the most notable insurrections of the cen- tury took place in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831:
1 The site of Napoleon’s greatest victory, where, on December 2, 1805, he defeated the combined Austrian and Russian forces, acquiring control of European lands north of Rome and becoming king of Italy.
2 The iron crown of Lombardy, dating back to the fifth century, which Napoleon had assumed some time after the Italian campaigns.
* The origins and history of the transatlantic slave trade are discussed in chapters 18 and 25.
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Nat Turner (1800–1831), a slave preacher and mystic, believed that he was divinely appointed to lead the slaves to freedom. The Turner rebellion resulted in the deaths of at least fifty-seven white people (and many more black slaves, killed when the rebellion was suppressed) and the destruction of several plantations in the area. Following the defeat of the rebel slaves, the captive Turner explained his motives to a local attorney, who prepared a published ver- sion of his personal account in the so-called “Confessions of Nat Turner.”
Frederick Douglass A longer, more detailed autobiography, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (1845), came from the pen of the nineteenth century’s leading African-American crusader for black freedom (Figure 28.5). Born a slave on the east coast of Maryland, Douglass (1817–1895) taught himself how to read and write at an early age; he escaped bondage in Baltimore in 1838 and eventually found his way north to New England, where he joined the Massachusetts Antislavery Society. A powerful public speaker, who captivated his audiences
with accounts of his life, Douglass served as living proof of the potential of black slaves to achieve brilliantly as free persons. He wrote extensively and eloquently in support of abolition, describing the “dehumanizing character of slavery” (that is, its negative effects on both black and white people), and defending the idea that, by abandoning slavelike behavior, even slaves could determine their own lives. On occasion, he employed high irony—contradic- tion between literal and intended meanings—as is the case with his justification of theft as a moral act if perpetrated by a slave against his master. Although it is unlikely that Douglass had in mind any reference to the Promethean motif of heroic defiance, the parallel is not without signifi- cance. “A Slave’s Right to Steal” comes from My Bondage and My Freedom, the revised and enlarged version of Douglass’ autobiography.
READING 28.5 From Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)
. . . There were four slaves of us in the kitchen, and four whites 1 in the great house—Thomas Auld, Mrs. Auld, Hadaway Auld (brother of Thomas Auld), and little Amanda. The names of the slaves in the kitchen, were Eliza, my sister; Priscilla, my aunt; Henry, my cousin; and myself. There were eight persons in the family. There was, each week, one half bushel of corn-meal brought from the mill; and in the kitchen, corn-meal was almost our exclusive food, for very little else was allowed us. Out of this half bushel of corn-meal, the family in the great
Figure 28.4 WILLIAM BLAKE, A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallows, 1796. Colour engraving, 101∕2 × 8 in. Library of Congress #1835. Private Collection. John G. Stedman was a Dutch naval officer who volunteered for a military expedition to quell slave uprisings in the Dutch colony of Surinam in Guiana, and the east coast of South America. His drawings, produced to accompany his Narrative of a Five-Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, are eyewitness accounts of the varieties of torture inflicted by colonial masters on rebellious slaves. Blake’s color engravings are based on Stedman’s drawings.
Figure 28.5 Portrait of Frederick Douglass, 1847. Daguerreotype, 31∕4 × 23∕4 in.
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house had a small loaf every morning; thus leaving us, in the 10 kitchen, with not quite a half a peck of meal per week, apiece. This allowance was less than half the allowance of food on Lloyd’s plantation. It was not enough to subsist upon; and we were, therefore, reduced to the wretched necessity of living at the expense of our neighbors. We were compelled either to beg, or to steal, and we did both. I frankly confess, that while I hated everything like stealing, as such, I nevertheless did not hesitate to take food, when I was hungry, wherever I could find it. Nor was this practice the mere result of an unreasoning instinct; it was, in my case, the result of a clear apprehension 20 of the claims of morality. I weighed and considered the matter closely, before I ventured to satisfy my hunger by such means. Considering that my labor and person were the property of Master Thomas, and that I was by him deprived of the necessaries of life—necessaries obtained by my own labor— it was easy to deduce the right to supply myself with what was my own. It was simply appropriating what was my own to the use of my master, since the health and strength derived from such food were exerted in his service. To be sure, this was stealing, according to the law and gospel I heard from St. 30 Michael’s pulpit; but I had already begun to attach less importance to what dropped from that quarter, on that point, while, as yet, I retained my reverence for religion. It was not always convenient to steal from master, and the same reason why I might, innocently, steal from him, did not seem to justify me in stealing from others. In the case of my master, it was only a question of removal—the taking his meat out of the tub, and putting it into another; the ownership of the meat was not affected by the transaction. At first, he owned it in the tub, and last, he owned it in me. 40 His meat house was not always open. There was a strict watch kept on that point, and the key was on a large bunch in Rowena’s pocket. A great many times have we, poor creatures, been severely pinched with hunger, when meat and bread have been moulding under the lock, while the key was in the pocket of our mistress. This had been so when she knew we were nearly half starved; and yet, that mistress, with saintly air, would kneel with her husband, and pray each morning that a merciful God would bless them in basket and in store, and save them, at last, in his kingdom. 50 But I proceed with the argument. It was necessary that the right to steal from others should be established; and this could only rest upon a wider range of generalization than that which supposed the right to steal from my master. It was sometime before I arrived at this clear right. The reader will get some idea of my train of reasoning, by a brief statement of the case. “I am,” thought I, “not only the slave of Master Thomas, but I am the slave of society at large. Society at large has bound itself, in form and in fact, to assist 60 Master Thomas in robbing me of my rightful liberty, and of the just reward of my labor; therefore, whatever rights I have against Master Thomas, I have, equally, against those confederated with him in robbing me of liberty. As society has marked me out as privileged plunder, on the principle of self- preservation I am justified in plundering in turn. Since each slave belongs to all; all must, therefore, belong to each.” I shall here make a profession of faith which may shock
some, offend others, and be dissented from by all. It is this: Within the bounds of his just earnings, I hold that the slave is 70 fully justified in helping himself to the gold and silver, and the best apparel of his master, or that of any other slaveholder; and that such taking is not stealing in any just sense of that word. The morality of free society can have no application to slave society. Slaveholders have made it almost impossible for the slave to commit any crime, known either to the laws of God or to the laws of man. If he steals, he takes his own; if he kills his master, he imitates only the heroes of the revolution. Slaveholders I hold to be individually and collectively responsible for all the evils which grow out of the horrid 80 relation, and I believe they will be so held at the judgment, in the sight of a just God. Make a man a slave, and you rob him of moral responsibility. . . .
Q With what arguments does Douglass justify stealing?
Q Does moral responsibility alter according to the status of an individual?
Sojourner Truth While Frederick Douglass was among the first African-Americans to win international attention through his skills at public speaking, his female contem- porary Sojourner Truth (ca. 1797–1883) brought wit and a woman’s passion to the fight against slavery. Born to slave parents in Ulster County, New York, Isabella Baumfree was sold four times before the age of thirty, an inauspi- cious beginning for a woman who would become one of America’s most vocal abolitionists, an evangelist, and a champion of women’s rights.
After being emancipated in 1828, Baumfree trave- led widely in the United States, changing her name to Sojourner Truth in 1843, as she committed her life to “sharing the truth” in matters of human dignity. Although she never learned to read or write, she was determined to have her voice heard across the nation and for future gen- erations. To accomplish the latter, she dictated her story to a friend, Olive Gilbert. The narrative, which was published in 1850, recounts the major events of her life, including the tale of how Isabella engaged in a heroic legal battle to win back her five-year-old son, who was illegally sold into slavery in New York State. Sojourner Truth used her talents as an orator to voice her opposition to slavery, capital pun- ishment, and the kidnapping and sale of black children (a common practice in some parts of the country). She also supported prison reform, helped to relocate former slaves, and defended the rights of women. Sharp-tongued and outspoken (and a lifelong pipe-smoker), Sojourner Truth won popular notoriety for the short, impromptu speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?,” delivered in 1851 to the Woman’s Convention at Akron, Ohio. While scholars question the authenticity of various versions of the speech (which was published by abolitionists some twelve years later), no such debate clouds Sojourner’s narrative, which, even in this short excerpt, captures the spirit of her straightforward rhetoric.
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READING 28.6 From The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850)
Isabella’s marriage
Subsequently, Isabella was married to a fellow-slave, named 1 Thomas, who had previously had two wives, one of whom, if not both, had been torn from him and sold far away. And it is more than probable, that he was not only allowed but encouraged to take another at each successive sale. I say it is probable, because the writer of this knows from personal observation, that such is the custom among slaveholders at the present day; and that in a twenty months’ residence among them, we never knew any one to open the lip against the practice; and when we severely censured it, the slaveholder 10 had nothing to say; and the slave pleaded that, under existing circumstances, he could do no better. Such an abominable state of things is silently tolerated, to say the least, by slaveholders—deny it who may. And what is that religion that sanctions, even by its silence, all that is embraced in the “Peculiar Institution” ? If there can be any thing more diametrically opposed to the religion of Jesus, than the working of this soul-killing system—which is as truly sanctioned by the religion of America as are her ministers and churches—we wish to be shown where it can be found. 20 We have said, Isabella was married to Thomas—she was, after the fashion of slavery, one of the slaves performing the ceremony for them; as no true minister of Christ can perform, as in the presence of God, what he knows to be a mere farce, a mock marriage, unrecognized by any civil law, and liable to be annulled at any moment, when the interest or caprice of the master should dictate. With what feelings must slaveholders expect us to listen to their horror of amalgamation in prospect, while they are well aware that we know how calmly and quietly they contemplate 30 the present state of licentiousness their own wicked laws have created, not only as it regards the slave, but as it regards the more privileged portion of the population of the South? Slaveholders appear to me to take the same notice of the vices of the slave, as one does of the vicious disposition of his horse. They are often an inconvenience; further than that, they care not to trouble themselves about the matter. . . .
Q Why does Sojourner Truth claim that slavery is “sanctioned by the religion of America”?
Slave Songs and Spirituals The nineteenth century witnessed the flowering of a unique type of folk song that expressed the heroic grief and hopes of the American slave community. Slave songs, sometimes termed “sorrow songs,” formed the basis of what later became known as “spirituals.” These songs, the most significant musical contribution of America’s antebellum population, were a distinctive cultural form that blended the Methodist and Baptist evangelical church music of the eighteenth century with musical traditions brought from Africa to the Americas in the course of 200 years.
A communal vehicle that conveyed the fervent longing for freedom, slave songs and spirituals based their content
on Bible stories, usually focused on deliverance—the pas- sage of the “Hebrew children” out of Egyptian bondage, for instance—and the promise of ultimate, triumphant liberation. A typical spiritual, such as “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” tempers despair with enduring faith. In form, spirituals embellished typically Protestant melodies and antiphonal structures with the complex, per- cussive rhythms (such as polymeter and syncopation), over- lapping call-and-response patterns, and improvisational techniques of traditional African music (see chapter 18).
A powerful form of religious music, the spiritual came to public attention only after 1871, when an instructor of vocal music at Fisk University in Tennessee took the school’s student choir on a university fundraising tour. A similar group was established by Hampton Institute (now Hampton University in Virginia) in 1873. Beyond the com- mercial popularity of this song form, spirituals have come to influence the development of numerous musical genres, including jazz, gospel, and blues (see chapter 36).
Goethe’s Faust: The Quintessential Romantic Hero Of all literary heroes of the nineteenth century, perhaps the most compelling is Goethe’s Faust. The story of Faust is based on a sixteenth-century German legend: a trave- ling physician and a practitioner of black magic, Johann or Georg Faust, was reputed to have sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for infinite knowledge. The story became the subject of numerous dramas, the first of which was The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus written by the English playwright Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593). Faust was the favorite Renaissance symbol of the lust for knowledge and power balanced against the perils of eter- nal damnation—a theme that figured largely in literary characterizations of Don Juan as well. In the hands of the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), Faust became the paradigm of Western man and the quin- tessential Romantic hero.
One of the literary landmarks of its time, Faust was the product of Goethe’s entire career: he conceived the piece during the 1770s, published Part One in 1808, but did not complete the play until 1832. Although ostensibly a drama, Faust more closely resembles an epic poem. It is written in a lyric German, with a richness of verse forms that is typical of Romantic poetry. As a play, it deliberately ignores the Classical unities of time and place—indeed, its shifting “cinematic” qualities make it more adaptable to modern film than to the traditional stage. Despite a cosmic breadth, which compares with Milton’s Paradise Lost or Dante’s Divine Comedy, Goethe’s Faust focuses more narrowly on the human condition. Goethe neither seeks to justify God’s ways to humanity nor to allegorize the Christian ascent to salvation; rather, he uncovers the tragic tension between heroic aspirations and human limitations. A student of law, medicine, theology, theater, biology, optics, and alchemy, Goethe seems to have mod- eled his hero on himself. Faust is a man of deep learning,
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a Christian, and a scientist. Having mastered the tradi- tional disciplines, he has turned to magic “to learn what it is that girds/ The world together in its inmost being.” While the desire to know and achieve has driven his stud- ies, he feels stale, bored, and deeply dissatisfied: “too old for mere amusement,/ Too young to be without desire.” On the verge of suicide, he is enticed by Satan to abandon the world of the intellect for a fuller knowledge of life, a privilege that may cost him dearly.
The Prologue of Faust is set in Heaven, where (in a manner reminiscent of the Book of Job) a wager is made between Mephistopheles (Satan) and God. Mephistopheles
bets God that he can divert Faust from “the path that is true and fit.” God contends that, although “men make mistakes as long as they strive,” Faust will never relinquish his soul to Satan. Mephistopheles then proceeds to make a second pact, this one with Faust himself, signed in blood: if he can satisfy Faust’s deepest desires and ambitions to the hero’s ultimate satisfaction, Mephistopheles will win Faust’s soul. Mephistopheles lures the despairing scholar out of his study (“This God-damned dreary hole in the wall”) and into the larger world of experience (Figure 28.6). The newly liberated hero then engages in a passionate love affair with a young woman named Gretchen. Discovering
Figure 28.6 EUGÈNE DELACROIX, Mephistopheles Appearing to Faust in his Study, illustration for Goethe’s Faust, 1828. Lithograph, 103∕4 × 9 in. Dressed in a “suit of scarlet trimmed with gold,” a “little cape of stiff brocade,” and a stylish hat, Mephistopheles invites Faust to dress up like him and prepare to seek “pleasure and action.” Goethe’s drama inspired many contemporary visual illustrations, as well as musical settings by Berlioz and other composers (see chapter 29).
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the joys of the sensual life, Faust proclaims the prior- ity of the heart (“Feeling is all!”) over the mind. Faust’s romance, however, has tragic consequences, including the deaths of Gretchen’s mother, her illegitimate child, her brother, and, ultimately, Gretchen herself. Nevertheless, at the close of Part One, Gretchen’s pure and selfless love wins her salvation.
In the second part of the drama, the hero travels with Mephistopheles through a netherworld in which he meets an array of witches, sirens, and other fantastic creatures. He encounters the ravishing Helen of Troy, symbol of ideal beauty, who acquaints Faust with the entire history of humankind; but Faust remains unsated. His unquenched thirst for experience now leads him to pursue a life of action for the public good. He undertakes a vast land- reclamation project, which provides habitation for millions of people. In this Promethean effort to benefit humanity, the aged and near-blind Faust finally finds personal fulfill- ment. He dies, however, before fully realizing his dream, thus never declaring the satisfaction that will doom him to Hell. While Mephistopheles tries to apprehend Faust’s soul as it leaves his body, God’s angels, led by Gretchen (Goethe’s symbol of the Eternal Female), intervene to shepherd Faust’s spirit to Heaven.
The heroic Faust is a timeless symbol of the Western drive for consummate knowledge, experience, and the will to power over nature. Although it is possible to reproduce here only a small portion of Goethe’s 12,000-line poem, the following excerpt conveys the powerful lyricism, the verbal subtlety, and the shifts between high seriousness and comedy that make Goethe’s Faust a literary masterpiece.
READING 28.7 From Goethe’s Faust (1808)
Prologue in Heaven
The Lord. The Heavenly Hosts. Mephistopheles following (the Three Archangels step forward). Raphael: The chanting sun, as ever, rivals 1 The chanting of his brother spheres And marches round his destined circuit—1
A march that thunders in our ears. His aspect cheers the Hosts of Heaven Though what his essence none can say; These inconceivable creations Keep the high state of their first day. Gabriel: And swift, with inconceivable swiftness, The earth’s full splendor rolls around, 10 Celestial radiance alternating With a dread night too deep to sound; The sea against the rocks’ deep bases Comes foaming up in far-flung force, And rock and sea go whirling onward In the swift spheres’ eternal course. Michael: And storms in rivalry are raging
From sea to land, from land to sea, In frenzy forge the world a girdle From which no inmost part is free 20 The blight of lightning flaming yonder Marks where the thunder-bolt will play; And yet Thine envoys, Lord, revere The gentle movement of Thy day. Choir of Angels: Thine aspect cheers the Hosts of Heaven Though what Thine essence none can say, And all Thy loftiest creations Keep the high state of their first day. (Enter Mephistopheles) 2
Mephistopheles: Since you, O Lord, once more approach and ask If business down with us be light or heavy— 30 And in the past you’ve usually welcomed me— That’s why you see me also at your levee. Excuse me, I can’t manage lofty words— Not though your whole court jeer and find me low; My pathos certainly would make you laugh Had you not left off laughing long ago. Your suns and worlds mean nothing much to me; How men torment themselves, that’s all I see. The little god of the world, one can’t reshape, reshade him; He is as strange to-day as that first day you made him. 40 His life would be not so bad, not quite, Had you not granted him a gleam of Heaven’s light; He calls it Reason, uses it not the least Except to be more beastly than any beast. He seems to me—if your Honor does not mind— Like a grasshopper—the long-legged kind— That’s always in flight and leaps as it flies along And then in the grass strikes up its same old song. I could only wish he confined himself to the grass! He thrusts his nose into every filth, alas. 50 Lord: Mephistopheles, have you no other news? Do you always come here to accuse? Is nothing ever right in your eyes on earth? Mephistopheles: No, Lord! I find things there as downright bad as ever. I am sorry for men’s days of dread and dearth; Poor things, my wish to plague ’em isn’t fervent. Lord: Do you know Faust? Mephistopheles: The Doctor? Lord: Aye, my servant.3
Mephistopheles: Indeed! He serves you oddly enough, I think. 60 The fool has no earthly habits in meat and drink. The ferment in him drives him wide and far, That he is mad he too has almost guessed; He demands of heaven each fairest star And of earth each highest joy and best, And all that is new and all that is far Can bring no calm to the deep-sea swell of his breast. Lord: Now he may serve me only gropingly,
1 The sun is treated here as one of the planets, all of which, according to Pythagoras, moved harmoniously in crystalline spheres.
2 The name possibly derives from the Hebrew “Mephistoph,” meaning “destroyer of the gods.”
3 Compare the exchange between God and Satan at the beginning of the Book of Job (see chapter 1).
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Soon I shall lead him into the light. The gardener knows when the sapling first turns green 70 That flowers and fruit will make the future bright. Mephistopheles: What do you wager? You will lose him yet, Provided you give me permission To steer him gently the course I set. Lord: So long as he walks the earth alive, So long you may try what enters your head; Men make mistakes as long as they strive. Mephistopheles: I thank you for that; as regards the dead, The dead have never taken my fancy. I favor cheeks that are full and rosy-red; 80 No corpse is welcome to my house; I work as the cat does with the mouse. Lord: Very well; you have my full permission. Divert this soul from its primal source And carry it, if you can seize it, Down with you upon your course— And stand ashamed when you must needs admit: A good man with his groping intuitions Still knows the path that’s true and fit. Mephistopheles: All right—but it won’t last for long. 90 I’m not afraid my bet will turn out wrong. And, if my aim prove true and strong, Allow me to triumph wholeheartedly. Dust shall he eat—and greedily— Like my cousin the Snake renowned in tale and song.4
Lord: That too you are free to give a trial; I have never hated the likes of you. Of all the spirits of denial The joker is the last that I eschew. Man finds relaxation too attractive— 100 Too fond too soon of unconditional rest; Which is why I am pleased to give him a companion Who lures and thrusts and must, as devil, be active. But ye, true sons of Heaven,5 it is your duty To take your joy in the living wealth of beauty. The changing Essence which ever works and lives Wall you around with love, serene, secure! And that which floats in flickering appearance Fix ye it firm in thoughts that must endure. Choir of Angels: Thine aspect cheers the Hosts of Heaven 110 Though what Thine essence none can say, And all Thy loftiest creations Keep the high state of their first day. (Heaven closes) Mephistopheles (Alone): I like to see the Old One now and then And try to keep relations on the level It’s really decent of so great a person To talk so humanely even to the Devil.
The First Part of the Tragedy Night (In a high-vaulted narrow Gothic room Faust, restless, in a chair at his desk)
Faust: Here stand I, ach, Philosophy Behind me and Law and Medicine too And, to my cost, Theology—6 120 All these I have sweated through and through And now you see me a poor fool As wise as when I entered school! They call me Master, they call me Doctor,7
Ten years now I have dragged my college Along by the nose through zig and zag Through up and down and round and round And this is all that I have found— The impossibility of knowledge! It is this that burns away my heart; 130 Of course I am cleverer than the quacks, Than master and doctor, than clerk and priest, I suffer no scruple or doubt in the least, I have no qualms about devil or burning, Which is just why all joy is torn from me, I cannot presume to make use of my learning, I cannot presume I could open my mind To proselytize and improve mankind.
Besides, I have neither goods nor gold, Neither reputation nor rank in the world; 140 No dog would choose to continue so! Which is why I have given myself to Magic To see if the Spirit may grant me to know Through its force and its voice full many a secret, May spare the sour sweat that I used to pour out In talking of what I know nothing about, May grant me to learn what it is that girds The world together in its inmost being, That the seeing its whole germination, the seeing Its workings, may end my traffic in words. 150
O couldst thou, light of the full moon, Look now thy last upon my pain, Thou for whom I have sat belated So many midnights here and waited Till, over books and papers, thou Didst shine, sad friend, upon my brow! O could I but walk to and fro On mountain heights in thy dear glow Or float with spirits round mountain eyries Or weave through fields thy glances glean 160 And freed from all miasmal theories Bathe in thy dew and wash me clean!8
Oh! Am I still stuck in this jail? This God-damned dreary hole in the wall Where even the lovely light of heaven Breaks wanly through the painted panes! Cooped up among these heaps of books
4 In Genesis 3:14, God condemns the serpent to go on its belly and eat dust for the rest of its days.
5 The archangels.
6 Philosophy, law, medicine, and theology were the four programs of study in medieval universities.
7 The two advanced degrees beyond the baccalaureate. 8 Goethe’s conception of nature as a source of sublime purification
may be compared with similar ideas held by the nature poets and the transcendentalists discussed in chapter 27.
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Gnawed by worms, coated with dust, Round which to the top of the Gothic vault A smoke-stained paper forms a crust. 170 Retorts and canisters lie pell-mell And pyramids of instruments, The junk of centuries, dense and mat— Your world, man! World? They call it that!
And yet you ask why your poor heart Cramped in your breast should feel such fear, Why an unspecified misery Should throw your life so out of gear? Instead of the living natural world For which God made all men his sons 180 You hold a reeking mouldering court Among assorted skeletons. Away! There is a world outside! And this one book of mystic art Which Nostradamus9 wrote himself, Is this not adequate guard and guide? By this you can tell the course of the stars, By this, once Nature gives the word, The soul begins to stir and dawn, A spirit by a spirit heard, 190 In vain your barren studies here Construe the signs of sanctity. You Spirits, you are hovering near; If you can hear me, answer me! (He opens the book and perceives the sign of the Macrocosm)10
Ha! What a river of wonder at this vision Bursts upon all my senses in one flood! And I feel young, the holy joy of life Glows new, flows fresh, through nerve and blood! Was it a god designed this hieroglyph to calm The storm which but now raged inside me, 200 To pour upon my heart such balm, And by some secret urge to guide me Where all the powers of Nature stand unveiled around me? Am I a God? It grows so light! And through the clear-cut symbol on this page My soul comes face to face with all creating Nature. At last I understand the dictum of the sage: “The spiritual world is always open, Your mind is closed, your heart is dead; Rise, young man, and plunge undaunted 210 Your earthly breast in the mourning red.” (He contemplates the sign) Into one Whole how all things blend, Function and live within each other! Passing gold buckets to each other How heavenly powers ascend, descend! The odor of grace upon their wings, They thrust from heaven through earthly things
And as all sing so the All sings! What a fine show! Aye, but only a show! Infinite Nature, where can I tap thy veins? 220
[Faust uses a magical sign to call forth the Earth Spirit; it appears but offers him no solace. He then converses with his assistant Wagner on the fruitlessness of a life of study. When Wagner leaves, Faust prepares to commit suicide; but he is interrupted by the sounds of church bells and choral music. Still brooding, he joins Wagner and the townspeople as they celebrate Easter Sunday. At the city gate, Faust encounters a black poodle, which he takes back with him to his studio. The dog is actually Mephistopheles, who soon makes his real self known to Faust.]
(The same room. Later) Faust: Who’s knocking? Come in! Now who wants to annoy me? Mephistopheles (outside door): It’s I. Faust: Come in! Mephistopheles (outside door): You must say “Come in” three times. Faust: Come in then! Mephistopheles (entering): Thank you; you overjoy me. We two, I hope, we shall be good friends; To chase those megrims11 of yours away 230 I am here like a fine young squire to-day, In a suit of scarlet trimmed with gold And a little cape of stiff brocade, With a cock’s feather in my hat And at my side a long sharp blade, And the most succinct advice I can give Is that you dress up just like me, So that uninhibited and free You may find out what it means to live. Faust: The pain of earth’s constricted life, I fancy, 240 Will pierce me still, whatever my attire; I am too old for mere amusement, Too young to be without desire. How can the world dispel my doubt? You must do without, you must do without! That is the everlasting song Which rings in every ear, which rings, And which to us our whole life long Every hour hoarsely sings. I wake in the morning only to feel appalled, 250 My eyes with bitter tears could run To see the day which in its course Will not fulfil a wish for me, not one; The day which whittles away with obstinate carping All pleasures—even those of anticipation, Which makes a thousand grimaces to obstruct My heart when it is stirring in creation. And again, when night comes down, in anguish I must stretch out upon my bed And again no rest is granted me, 260 For wild dreams fill my mind with dread.
11 Low or morbid spirits.
9 Michel de Notredame, or Nostradamus (1503–1566) was a French astrologer famous for his prophecies.
10 Signs of the universe, such as the pentagram, were especially popular among those who practiced magic and the occult arts.
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CHAPTER 28 The Romantic Hero 253
The God who dwells within my bosom Can make my inmost soul react; The God who sways my every power Is powerless with external fact. And so existence weighs upon my breast And I long for death and life—life I detest. Mephistopheles: Yet death is never a wholly welcome guest. Faust: O happy is he whom death in the dazzle of victory Crowns with the bloody laurel in the battling swirl! 270 Or he whom after the mad and breakneck dance He comes upon in the arms of a girl! O to have sunk away, delighted, deleted, Before the Spirit of the Earth,12 before his might! Mephistopheles: Yet I know someone who failed to drink A brown juice on a certain night.13
Faust: Your hobby is espionage—is it not? Mephistopheles: Oh I’m not omniscient—but I know a lot. Faust: Whereas that tumult in my soul Was stilled by sweet familiar chimes 280 Which cozened14 the child that yet was in me With echoes of more happy times, I now curse all things that encompass The soul with lures and jugglery And bind it in this dungeon of grief With trickery and flattery. Cursed in advance be the high opinion That serves our spirit for a cloak! Cursed be the dazzle of appearance Which bows our senses to its yoke! 290 Cursed be the lying dreams of glory, The illusion that our name survives! Cursed be the flattering things we own, Servants and ploughs, children and wives! Cursed be Mammon15 when with his treasures He makes us play the adventurous man Or when for our luxurious pleasures He duly spreads the soft divan! A curse on the balsam of the grape! A curse on the love that rides for a fall! 300 A curse on hope! A curse on faith! And a curse on patience most of all! (The invisible Spirits sing again) Spirits: Woe! Woe! You have destroyed it, The beautiful world; By your violent hand ’Tis downward hurled! A half-god has dashed it asunder! From under 310 We bear off the rubble to nowhere And ponder Sadly the beauty departed. Magnipotent
One among men, Magnificent Build it again, Build it again in your breast! Let a new course of life Begin 320 With vision abounding And new songs resounding To welcome it in! Mephistopheles: These are the junior Of my faction. Hear how precociously they counsel Pleasure and action. Out and away From your lonely day Which dries your senses and your juices 330 Their melody seduces. Stop playing with your grief which battens Like a vulture on your life, your mind! The worst of company would make you feel That you are a man among mankind. Not that it’s really my proposition To shove you among the common men; Though I’m not one of the Upper Ten. If you would like a coalition With me for your career through life, 340 I am quite ready to fit in, I’m yours before you can say knife. I am your comrade; If you so crave, I am your servant, I am your slave. Faust: And what have I to undertake in return? Mephistopheles: Oh it’s early days to discuss what that is. Faust: No, no, the devil is an egoist And ready to do nothing gratis Which is to benefit a stranger. 350 Tell me your terms and don’t prevaricate! A servant like you in the house is a danger. Mephistopheles: I will bind myself to your service in this world, To be at your beck and never rest nor slack; When we meet again on the other side, In the same coin you shall pay me back. Faust: The other side gives me little trouble; First batter this present world to rubble, Then the other may rise—if that’s the plan. This earth is where my springs of joy have started. 360 And this sun shines on me when broken-hearted; If I can first from them be parted, Then let happen what will and can! I wish to hear no more about it— Whether there too men hate and love Or whether in those spheres too, in the future, There is a Below or an Above. Mephistopheles: With such an outlook you can risk it. Sign on the line! In these next days you will get Ravishing samples of my arts; 370 I am giving you what never man saw yet. Faust: Poor devil, can you give anything ever? Was a human spirit in its high endeavor
12 The Earth Spirit that Faust called forth earlier. 13 Mephistopheles alludes to Faust’s contemplation of suicide by poison
earlier in the drama. 14 Persuaded; cajoled. 15 Riches or material wealth.
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Even once understood by one of your breed? Have you got food which fails to feed? Or red gold which, never at rest, Like mercury runs away through the hand? A game at which one never wins? A girl who, even when on my breast, Pledges herself to my neighbor with her eyes? 380 The divine and lovely delight of honor Which falls like a falling star and dies? Show me the fruits which, before they are plucked, decay And the trees which day after day renew their green! Mephistopheles: Such a commission doesn’t alarm me, I have such treasures to purvey. But, my good friend, the time draws on when we Should be glad to feast at our ease on something good. Faust: If ever I stretch myself on a bed of ease, Then I am finished! Is that understood? 390 If ever your flatteries can coax me To be pleased with myself, if ever you cast A spell of pleasure that can hoax me— Then let that day be my last! That’s my wager!16
Mephistopheles: Done! Faust: Let’s shake! If ever I say to the passing moment “Linger for a while! Thou art so fair!” Then you may cast me into fetters, 400 I will gladly perish then and there! Then you may set the death-bell tolling, Then from my service you are free, The clock may stop, its hand may fall, And that be the end of time for me! [Faust agrees to sign the pact with a drop of his blood.]
Q Compare the personalities of Faust and Mephistopheles.
Q Why might Faust be considered the quintessential Romantic hero?
Romantic Love and Romantic Stereotypes Romantic love, the sentimental and all-consuming passion for spiritual as well as sexual union with the opposite sex, was a favorite theme of nineteenth-century writers, paint- ers, and composers. Many Romantics perceived friendship, religious love, and sexual love—both heterosexual and homosexual—as closely related expressions of an ecstatic harmony of souls. Passionate love, and especially unre- quited or unfulfilled love, was the subject of numerous literary works. To name but three: Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) told the story of a lovesick hero whose pas- sion for a married woman leads him to commit suicide— the book was so popular that it made suicide something
of a nineteenth-century vogue; Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1830–1831) described the composer’s obsessive infatuation with a flamboyant actress (see chapter 29); and Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde (1859) drama- tized the tragic fate of two legendary medieval lovers.
While Romantics generated an image of masculinity that emphasized self-invention, courage, and the quest for knowledge and power, they either glorified the female as chaste, passive, and submissive, or characterized her as dangerous and threatening. Romantic writers inher- ited the dual view of womankind that had prevailed since the Middle Ages: like Eve, woman was the femme fatale, the seducer and destroyer of mankind; like Mary, how- ever, woman was also the source of salvation and the symbol of all that was pure and true. The Eve stereotype is readily apparent in such works as Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen, on which the opera by Georges Bizet (1835–1875) was based. Set in Seville, Spain, Bizet’s Carmen (1875) is a story of seduction, rejection, and fatal revenge. Carmen, a shameless flirt who works in a cigarette factory, lures the enamored Don José into deserting the army in order to follow her. Soon tiring of the soldier, she aban- dons him in favor of a celebrity toreador, only to meet her end at the hand of her former lover. Bizet’s heroine became the late nineteenth-century symbol of faithless and dangerous Womankind.
At the other extreme, the Mary stereotype is present in countless nineteenth-century stories, including Faust itself, where Gretchen is cast as the Eternal Female, the source of procreation and personal salvation. The following lines by the German poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), which were set to music by his contemporary Robert Schumann (1810–1856), typify the female as angelic, ethereal, and chaste—an object that thrilled and inspired the imagina- tion of many European Romantics.
READING 28.8 Heine’s “You are Just Like a Flower” (1827)
You are just like a flower So fair and chaste and dear; Looking at you, sweet sadness Invades my heart with fear. I feel I should be folding My hands upon your hair, Praying that God may keep you So dear and chaste and fair.
Q What stereotype is established by the simile in this poem?
Q Why does the speaker experience “sweet sadness”?
The Female Voice The nineteenth century was the first great age of female writers. Examples include the English novelists George Eliot, a pseudonym for Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880);
16 The wager between Faust and Mephistopheles recalls that between God and Mephistopheles in the Prologue.
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CHAPTER 28 The Romantic Hero 255
Figure 28.7 LUIGI CALAMATA, Portrait of George Sand, 1837. Pencil on paper, 13 × 91∕4 in. A prolific writer, Sand produced a 0body of work—some of which has still not been translated into English—that would fill at least 150 volumes, twenty-five of which, each a thousand pages long, would contain her correspondence with the leading artists and intellectuals of her day.
Emily Brontë (1818–1848), author of the hyp- notic novel Wuthering Heights; her sister Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855), author of Jane Eyre (hailed as a masterpiece only after her death); and Mary Godwin Shelley, whose novel Frankenstein was discussed earlier. In France, Germaine Necker, known as Madame de Stael (1760–1817), was hailed by her contemporaries as the founder of the Romantic movement; she was a brilliant woman, if not a brilliant novelist, and her writ- ings were widely read and admired in her own time. And in America, the Bostonian Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) produced the classic novel Little Women (1868), a semiautobiographi- cal work inspired by a childhood spent with her three sisters. Some of these writers struck a startling note of personal freedom in their lives. In their novels, however, they tended to perpetu- ate the Romantic stereotype of the chaste and clinging female. Even the most free-thinking of nineteenth-century women novelists might por- tray her heroine as a creature who submitted to the will and values of the superior male. In gen- eral, the dominant male-generated stereotype of the Romantic hero influenced female literary characterization well into the mid-nineteenth century.
The novels of Jane Austen (1775–1817) are something of an exception. In Sense and Sensibility (1811), which the author published at her own expense, Austen wittily attacks sentimental love and Romantic rapture. Here, as in her other novels, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion, she turned her attention to the everyday concerns of England’s provincial middle- class families. Her heroines, intelligent and generous in spirit, are concerned with reconciling economic security with proper social and moral behavior. Austen’s keen eye for the details of family life, and for the comic contradic- tions between human actions and values, show her to be the first Realist in the English novel-writing tradition.
Among French writers of the Romantic era, the most original female voice was that of Amandine Aurore-Lucile Dupin, who used the pen name George Sand (1804–1876; Figure 28.7). A woman who assumed the name of a man, Sand self-consciously examined the popular Romantic stereotypes, offering not one, but many different points of view concerning male–female dynamics. Defending the passions of Romantic love, one of Sand’s heroines exclaims: “If I give myself up to love, I want it to wound me deeply, to electrify me, to break my heart or to exalt
me . . . What I want is to suffer, to go crazy.” Sand held that true and complete love involved the union of the heart, mind, and body. She avowed that “Love’s ideal is most certainly everlasting fidelity,” and most of her more than eighty novels feature themes of Romantic love and deep, undying friendship. But for some of her novels, she created heroines who freely exercised the right to love out- side marriage. These heroines did not, however, physically consummate their love, even when that love was reciprocal.
Sand’s heroines were very unlike Sand herself, whose numerous love affairs with leading Romantic figures— including the poet Alfred de Musset, the novelist Prosper Mérimée, and the composer Frédéric Chopin—impas- sioned her life and work. When Sand’s affair with Musset came to an unhappy end, she cut off her hair and sent it to him encased in a skull. Sand defied society not only by adopting a life of bohemianism and free love, but also by her notorious habit of wearing men’s clothes and smoking cigars. The female counterpart of the Byronic hero, Sand confessed: “My emotions have always been stronger than the arguments of reason, and the restrictions I tried to impose on myself were to no avail.”
Sand may have been expressing her own ambigui- ties concerning matters of love and marriage in her
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third novel, Lélia (1833), the pages of which are filled with musings on the meaning of “true love.” At one point in her spiritual odyssey, the disenchanted heroine openly ventures:
As I continue to live, I cannot help realizing that youthful ideas about the exclusive passion of love and its eternal rights are false, even fatal. All theories ought to be allowed. I would give that of conjugal fidelity to exceptional souls. The majority have other needs, other strengths. To those others I would grant reciprocal freedom, tolerance, and renunciation of all jealous egotism. To others I would concede mystical ardors, fires brooded over in silence, a long and voluptuous reserve. Finally, to others I would admit the calm of angels, fraternal chastity, and an eternal virginity.—Are all souls alike? Do all men have the same abilities? Are not some born for the austerity of religious faith, others for voluptuousness, others for work and passionate struggle, and others, finally, for the vague reveries of the imagination? Nothing is more arbitrary than the understanding of true love. All loves are true, whether they be fiery or peaceful, sensual or ascetic, lasting or transient, whether they lead men to suicide or pleasure. The loves of the mind lead to actions just as noble as the loves of the heart. They have as much violence and power, if not as much duration.
Sand’s writings explore a variety of contradictory ideas concerning the fragile relationship between men and women; they also provide a wealth of information about nineteenth-century European life and culture. In addition to her novels and letters, Sand also left an autobiography and dozens of essays and articles championing socialism, women, and the working classes. She explained the power of Romantic creativity with these words: “The writer’s trade is a violent, almost indestructible passion. Once it has entered a poor head, nothing can stop it . . . long live the artist’s life! Our motto is freedom.”
LOOKING BACK
Nationalism and the Hero • For nineteenth-century Romantics,
the hero was an expression of the expansive subjectivity of the individual. Characterized by superhuman ambition and talents, the hero, whether a historical figure or a fictional personality, experienced life with self-destructive intensity.
• Napoleon Bonaparte’s remarkable career became a model for heroic action propelled by an unbounded imagination and ambition.
• To a great extent, Western literature of the early nineteenth century resembles a personal diary recording the moods and passions of the hero as a larger-than-life personality.
The Promethean Hero • Prometheus, a Greek deity who selflessly
imparted wisdom to humanity, influenced the Romantics as a symbol of heroic freedom. Mary Shelley, Byron, and other Romantics found in Prometheus an apt metaphor for the creative and daring human spirit. Byron in England and Pushkin in Russia took Napoleon as their source of inspiration.
• In America, Frederick Douglass, champion of the abolitionist movement, served as a prime example of Promethean defiance of authority and defense of human liberty.
Goethe’s Faust: The Quintessential Romantic Hero • Faust, the literary hero who symbolizes
the quest to exceed the limits of knowledge and power, became the quintessential figure for Romantic
writers, painters, and composers (discussed in chapter 29).
• Goethe envisioned the legendary Faust as a symbol of the ever-striving human will to master all forms of experience, at the risk of imperiling his eternal soul.
Romantic Love and Romantic Stereotypes • Romantic love was a popular theme
among nineteenth-century writers, many of whom tended to stereotype females as either angels or femmes fatales.
• The nineteenth century, the first great age of female novelists, produced such outstanding writers as George Eliot, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen.
• In the novels of George Sand, the Romantic heroine might be a self- directed creature whose passions incite her to contemplate (if not actually exercise) sexual freedom.
Chronology
1804 Napoleon is crowned emperor
1812 Napoleon invades Russia
1814 Napoleon is exiled to Elba
1815 Battle of Waterloo
1829 Greece achieves independence from Turkey
1832 Goethe completes Faust
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The Romantic Style in Art and Music ca. 1780–1880
“Success is impossible for me if I cannot write as my heart dictates.” Verdi
29 Chapter
Figure 29.1 EUGÈNE DELACROIX, Women of Algiers, 1834. Oil on canvas, 5 ft. 107∕8 in. × 7 ft. 61∕2 in. Delacroix’s trip to North Africa in 1832 inspired more than one hundred paintings and drawings. His harem women in Moorish dress, flanked by a black attendant, reflect the Romantic taste for the exotic.
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258 CHAPTER 29 The Romantic Style in Art and Music
LOOKING AHEAD
As with literature, so in the visual arts and music the Romantics favored subjects that gave free rein to the imagination. Nature and the natural landscape, the hero and heroism, and nationalist struggles for political independence—the very themes that intrigued Romantic writers—also inspired much of the art and music of the nineteenth century. Romantic artists abandoned the intellectual discipline of the Neoclassical style in favor of emotion and spontaneity. In place of the cool rationality and order of a Neoclassical composition, the Romantics introduced a studied irregularity and disorder.
Even the most superficial comparison of Neoclassical and Romantic paintings reveals essential differences in style: Neoclassical artists usually defined form by means of line (an artificial or “intellectual” boundary between the object and the space it occupied); Romantics preferred to model form by way of color. Neoclassicists generally used shades of a single color for each individual object, while Romantics might use touches of complementary colors to heighten the intensity of the painted object. And whereas Neoclassical painters smoothed out brushstrokes to leave an even and polished surface finish, Romantics often left their brushstrokes visible, as if to underline the immediacy of the creative act. They might deliberately blur details and exaggerate the sensuous aspects of texture and tone.
Rejecting the Neoclassical rules of propriety and decorum, they made room for temperament, accident, and individual genius. Romantic composers shared with the artists of their time the development of a more personal and unconstrained style. They tended to modify the “rules” of classical composition in order to increase expressive effect. They abandoned the clarity and precision of the classical composition, expanding and loosening form and introducing unexpected shifts of meter and tempo. Just as Romantic painters made free use of color to heighten the emotional impact of a subject, so composers gave tone color—the distinctive quality of musical sound made by a voice, a musical instrument, or a combination of instruments—a status equal to melody, harmony, and rhythm. During the nineteenth century, the symphony orchestra reached heroic proportions, while smaller, more intimate musical forms became vehicles for the expression of longing, nostalgia, and love. Program music, music-drama, and virtuoso instrumental forms added to the wide range of Romantic music.
Finally, the period saw the emergence of grand opera and the Romantic ballet, artforms that (as with the other arts of the nineteenth century) attracted the growing middle class. The exchange of ideas and themes among the artists of this era encouraged a new and lively synthesis of the arts.
Heroic Themes in Art Gros and the Glorification of the Hero Among the principal themes of Romantic art were those that glorified creative individualism, patriotism, and nation- alism. Napoleon Bonaparte, the foremost living hero of the age and the symbol of French nationalism, was the favorite subject of many early nineteenth-century French painters. His imperial status was celebrated in the official portraits executed by his “first painter,” Jacques-Louis David (see Figure 28.1); but the heroic dimension of his career was publicized by yet another member of his staff, Antoine-Jean Gros (1775–1835). Gros’ representations of Napoleon’s military campaigns became powerful vehicles of political propaganda.
Gros was a pupil of David, but, unlike David, he rejected the formal austerity of Neoclassicism. In his monumen- tal canvas Napoleon Visiting the Plague Victims at Jaffa (Figure 29.2), Gros converted a minor historical event— Napoleon’s tour of his plague-ridden troops in Jaffa (in Palestine)—into an exotic allegorical drama that cast Napoleon in the guise of Christ as healer. He enhanced the theatricality of the scene by means of atmospheric contrasts of light and dark. Vivid details draw the eye from the foreground, filled with the bodies of the diseased and dying, into the background with its distant cityscape.
In its content, the painting manifested the Romantic taste for themes of personal heroism, suffering, and
death. When it was first exhibited in Paris, an awed public adorned it with palm branches and wreaths. But the inspi- ration for Gros’ success was also the source of his undoing: after Napoleon was sent into exile, Gros’ career declined, and he committed suicide by throwing himself into the River Seine.
Popular Heroism in Goya and Géricault Throughout most of Western history, the heroic image in art was bound up with Classical lore and Christian legend. But with Gros, we see one of the earliest efforts to glorify contemporary heroes and heroic events. The Spanish mas- ter Francisco Goya (1746–1828) helped to advance this phenomenon. He began his career as a Rococo-style tap- estry designer and came into prominence as court painter to the Spanish king Charles IV. But following the invasion of Spain by Napoleon’s armies in 1808, Goya’s art took a new turn. Horrified by the guerrilla violence of the French occupation, he became a bitter social critic, producing some of the most memorable records of human warfare and savagery in the history of Western art.
The Third of May, 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid (Figure 29.3) was Goya’s nationalistic response to the events ensuing from an uprising of Spanish citizens against the French army of occupation. In a punitive meas- ure, the French troops rounded up Spanish suspects in the streets of Madrid, and brutally executed them in the city outskirts. Goya recreated the episode with imaginative
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Figure 29.2 ANTOINE-JEAN GROS, Napoleon Visiting the Plague Victims at Jaffa, 1804. Oil on canvas, 17 ft. 5 in. × 23 ft. 7 in.
Figure 29.3 FRANCISCO GOYA, The Third of May, 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid, 1814. Oil on canvas, 8 ft. 8 in. × 10 ft. 4 in. Six years after the French were ousted, the Spanish government commissioned Goya to commemorate the massacre of May 8, 1808. Goya maintained that the work warned against future acts of brutality.
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260 CHAPTER 29 The Romantic Style in Art and Music
Figure 29.4 FRANCISCO GOYA, Brave Deeds Against the Dead, from the “Disasters of War” series, ca. 1814. Etching, 6 × 81∕4 in. Goya himself wrote the biting captions for these etchings. Because some of the prints satirized the Church and other bastions of authority, they were not published until thirty-five years after the artist’s death.
force, setting it against a dark sky and an ominous urban skyline. In the foreground, an off-center lantern emits a tri- angular beam of light that illuminates the Spanish rebels: some lie dead in pools of blood, while others cover their faces in fear and horror. Among the victims is a young man whose arms are flung upward in a final, Christlike gesture of terror and defiance. Goya deliberately spotlights this wide-eyed and bewildered figure as he confronts imminent death. On the right, in the shadows, the hulking execu- tioners are lined up as anonymously as pieces of artillery. Emphatic contrasts of light and dark and the theatrical attention to graphic details heighten the intensity of a con- temporary political event.
An indictment of butchery in the name of war, The Third of May, 1808 is itself restrained compared to “The Disasters of War,” a series of etchings and aquatints that Goya pro- duced during the years of the French occupation of Spain. “The Disasters of War” have their source in historical fact as well as in Goya’s imagination. Brave Deeds Against the Dead (Figure 29.4) is a shocking record of the inhuman cruelty of Napoleon’s troops, as well as a reminder that the heroes of modern warfare are often its innocent victims.
Goya’s French contemporary Théodore Géricault (1791–1824) broadened the range of Romantic subjects. He found inspiration in the restless vitality of untamed horses and the ravaged faces of the clinically insane. Such subjects, uncommon in academic art, reflect the Romantic fascination with the life lying beyond the bounds of reason. The painting that brought Géricault instant fame was The Raft of the “Medusa.” It immortalized a controversial event that made headlines in Géricault’s own time: the wreck of a government frigate called the Medusa and the ghastly fate of its passengers (Figure 29.5). When the ship hit a reef 50 miles off the coast of West Africa, the inexperienced captain, a political appointee, tried ignobly to save himself and his crew, who filled the few available lifeboats. Over a hundred passengers piled onto a makeshift raft, which was to be towed by the lifeboats. Cruelly, the crew set the raft adrift. With almost no food and supplies, chances of
survival were scant; after almost two weeks, in which most died and several resorted to cannibalism, the raft was sighted and the fifteen survivors were rescued.
Géricault (a staunch opponent of the regime that appointed the captain of the Medusa) was so fired up by newspaper reports of the tragedy that he resolved to immortalize it in paint. He interviewed the few survivors, made drawings of the mutilated corpses in the Paris morgue, and even had a model of the raft constructed in his studio. The result was enormous, both in size (the canvas measures 16 feet 1 inch × 23 feet 6 inches) and in dramatic impact. In the decade immediately preceding the invention of photography, Géricault provided the public with a powerful visual record of a sensational contempo- rary event. He organized the composition on the basis of a double triangle: one triangle is formed by the two lines that stay the mast and is bisected by the mast itself; the other by the mass of agitated figures, culminating in the magnifi- cently painted torso of a black man who signals the distant vessel that will make the rescue. Sharp diagonals, vivid con- trasts of light and dark (reminiscent of Caravaggio), and muscular nudes (inspired by Michelangelo and Rubens) heighten the dramatic impact of the piece.
Géricault’s Raft elevated ordinary men to the position of heroic combatants in the eternal struggle against the forces of nature. It celebrated their collective heroism in confronting deadly danger, a theme equally popular in Romantic literature, and, as with Turner’s Slave Ship and Goya’s Third of May, it publicly protested an aspect of contemporary political injustice. In essence, it brought together the reality of a man-made disaster and the more abstract theme of the Romantic sublime: the terror expe- rienced by ordinary human beings in the face of nature’s overpowering might.
Delacroix and Revolutionary Heroism While Goya and Géricault democratized the image of the hero, Géricault’s pupil and follower Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) raised that image to Byronic proportions.
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Figure 29.5 THÉODORE GÉRICAULT, The Raft of the “Medusa,” 1818. Oil on canvas, 16 ft. 1 in. × 23 ft. 6 in. Much like the panoramic landscapes of Frederic Church, Géricault’s painting became an object of popular display and entertainment. Exhibited in London, it drew some 40,000 visitors between June and December 1820.
A melancholic and an intellectual, Delacroix shared Byron’s hatred of tyranny, his sense of alienation, and his self-glorifying egotism—features readily discernible in the pages of his journal. Delacroix prized the imagination as “paramount” in the life of the artist. “Strange as it may seem,” he observed, “the great majority of people are devoid of imagination. Not only do they lack the keen, penetrating imagination which would allow them to see objects in a vivid way—which would lead them, as it were, to the very root of things—but they are equally incapable of any clear understanding of works in which imagination predominates.”
Delacroix loved dramatic narrative. He favored sensu- ous and violent subjects from contemporary life, popular literature, and ancient and medieval history. A six-month visit in 1832 to Morocco, neighbor of France’s newly con- quered colony of Algeria, provoked a lifelong interest in exotic subjects and a love of light and color. He depicted the harem women of Islamic Africa (see Figure 29.1), recorded the poignant and shocking results of the Turkish massacres in Greece, brought to life Dante’s Inferno, pro- duced portrait likenesses of his contemporaries (see Figure 29.17), and made memorable illustrations for Goethe’s
Faust (see Figure 28.6). Filled with fierce vitality and vivid detail, his narrative subjects make evident his declaration: “I have no love for reasonable painting.” In his journal, Delacroix defended the artist’s freedom to romanticize form and content: “The most sublime effects of every master,” he wrote, “are often the result of pictorial licence; for example, the lack of finish in Rembrandt’s work, the exaggeration in Rubens. Mediocre painters never have suf- ficient daring, they never get beyond themselves.”
Delacroix’s landmark work, Liberty Leading the People, transformed a contemporary event (the revolution of 1830) into a heroic allegory of the struggle for human free- dom (see Figure 29.6). When King Charles X (1757–1836) dissolved the French legislature and took measures to repress voting rights and freedom of the press, liberal lead- ers, radicals, and journalists rose in rebellion. Delacroix envisioned this rebellion as a monumental allegory. Its central figure, a handsome, bare-breasted female—the personification of Liberty—leads a group of French rebels through the narrow streets of Paris and over barricades strewn with corpses. A bayonet in one hand and the tri- color flag of France in the other, she presses forward to challenge the forces of tyranny. She is champion of “the
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Figure 29.7 JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID, The Oath of the Horatii, 1785. Oil on canvas, 10 ft. 10 in. × 14 ft.
MAKING CONNECTIONS
Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People (Figure 29.6) is often compared with David’s Oath of the Horatii (Figure 29.7) because both paintings are clear calls to heroic action. But in conception and in style, the two paintings are totally different. While David looked to the Roman past for his theme, Delacroix drew on the issues of his time, allegorizing real events in order to increase their dramatic impact. Whereas David’s appeal was essentially elitist, Delacroix celebrated the collective heroism of ordinary people.
Delacroix was never a slave to the facts: for instance, the nudity of the fallen rebel in the left foreground (clearly related to the nudes of Géricault’s Raft) has no basis in fact—it is uncommon to lose one’s trousers in combat. The detail serves, however, to emphasize vulnerability and the imminence of death in battle. Stylistically, Delacroix’s Liberty explodes with romantic passion. Surging rhythms link the smoke-filled background with the figures of the advancing rebels and the bodies of the fallen heroes heaped in the foreground. By comparison, David’s Neoclassical Oath is cool and restrained, his composition gridlike, and his figures defined with linear clarity. Where Delacroix’s canvas resonates with dense textures and loose, tactile brushstrokes, David’s surfaces are slick and finished.
Figure 29.6 EUGÈNE DELACROIX, Liberty Leading the People, 1830. Oil on canvas, 8 ft. 6 in. × 10 ft. 7 in.
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people”: the middle class, as represented by the gentleman in a frock coat; the lower class, as symbolized by the scruffy youth carrying pistols; and racial minorities, as conceived in the black saber-bearer at the left. She is, moreover, France itself, the banner-bearer of the spirit of nationalism that infused nineteenth-century European history.
Delacroix’s Liberty instantly became a symbol of dem- ocratic aspirations. In 1884, France sent as a gift of friendship to the young American nation a monumental copper and cast-iron statue of an idealized female bearing a tablet and a flaming torch (Figure 29.8). Designed by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi (1834–1904), the Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World) is the “sister” of Delacroix’s painted heroine; it has become a classic image of freedom for oppressed people everywhere.
Heroic Themes in Sculpture In sculpture as in painting, heroic subjects served the cause of nationalism. The Departure of the Volunteers of 1792 (Figure 29.9) by François Rude (1784–1855) embodied the dynamic heroism of the Napoleonic Era. Installed at the foot of the Arc de Triomphe (see Figure 26.31), which stands at the end of the Champs-Elysées in Paris, the 42-foot-high stone sculpture commemorates the pat- riotism of a band of French volunteers—presumably the battalion of Marseilles, who marched to Paris in 1792 to defend the republic. Young and old, nude or clothed in ancient or medieval garb (a convention that augmented dramatic effect while universalizing the heroic theme), the spirited members of this small citizen army are led by the allegorical figure of Bellona, the Roman goddess of war. Like Delacroix’s Liberty, Rude’s Classical goddess urges the patriots onward. The vitality of the piece is enhanced by deep undercutting that achieves dramatic contrasts of light and dark. In this richly textured work, Rude captured the revolutionary spirit and emotional fervor of this battalion’s marching song, “La Marseillaise,” which the French later adopted as their national anthem.
Nineteenth-century nationalism stimulated an interest in the cultural heritage of ethnic groups beyond the European West. Just as Catlin found in the American West a wealth of fascinating visual resources, so Europeans turned to Africa and the East for exotic subjects (see Figure 29.1). Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt (1798–1801) had started a virtual craze for things North African, and such interests were further stimulated by the French presence in Algeria beginning in the 1830s. In 1848, the French government abolished slavery in France and all its colonies.
Science and Technology
1836 Samuel Colt (American) produces a six-cylinder revolver
1841 the breech-loading rifle known as the “needlegun” is introduced
1847 an Italian chemist develops explosive nitroglycerin
Figure 29.8 FRÉDÉRIC-AUGUSTE BARTHOLDI, Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World), Liberty Island (Bedloe’s Island), New York, 1871–1884. Framework constructed by A. G. Eiffel. Copper sheets mounted on steel frame, height 152 ft. While France gave America the statue, it did not provide the pedestal. To assist in raising funds for the latter, the poet Emma Lazarus was commissioned to write a poem. Her concern for the 2000 Russian-Jewish immigrants arriving monthly in New York inspired the famous lines that begin “Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
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Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier (1827–1905), a member of Rude’s studio and a favorite exhibitor in the academic Salon of Paris, requested a governmental assignment in Africa in order to make a record of its peoples. The result of Cordier’s ethnological studies was a series of twelve busts of Africans and Asians, executed by means of innovative polychrome techniques that combined bronze or colored marble with porphyry, jasper, and onyx from Algerian quarries (Figure 29.10). Cordier’s portrait heads reveal a sensitivity to individual personality and a commitment to capturing the dignity of his models. Rather than perceiving his subject as an exotic “other,” he regarded each as a racial type “at the point,” as he explained, “of merging into one and the same people.”
In America, the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, in 1865, which outlawed the practice of slavery in the United States, was met with a similar outburst
of heroic celebration. In the commemorative marble sculpture Forever Free (1867), a young slave who has broken his chains raises his arm in victory, while his female com- panion kneels in grateful prayer (Figure 29.11). The artist who conceived this remarkable work of art, Edmonia Lewis (1845–ca. 1885), was the daughter of an African-American father and a Chippawa mother. Like most talented young American artists of this era, Lewis made her way to Europe for academic training. She remained in Rome to pursue her career and gained great recognition for her skillfully carved portrait busts and allegorical statues, some of which exalted heroic women in biblical and ancient history. Many of her works are now lost, and almost nothing is known of her life after 1885.
Figure 29.9 FRANÇOIS RUDE, La Marseillaise (The Departure of the Volunteers of 1792), 1833–1836. Stone, approx. 42 ft. × 26 ft.
Figure 29.11 EDMONIA LEWIS, Forever Free, 1867. Marble, height 401∕2 in.
Figure 29.10 CHARLES-HENRI-JOSEPH CORDIER, African in Algerian Costume, ca. 1856–1857. Bronze and onyx, 373∕4 × 26 × 14 in. Rich details and sensuous materials characterize Cordier’s portraits, which became famous as examples of a new visual anthropology focused on the physical appearance of what he called “the different indigenous types of the human race.”
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Trends in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Architecture Neomedievalism in the West Architects of the early to mid-nineteenth century regarded the past as a source of inspiration and moral instruction. Classical Greek and republican Roman buildings embod- ied the political and aesthetic ideals of nation builders like Napoleon and Jefferson (see chapter 26); but the austere dignity of Neoclassicism did not appeal to all tastes. More typical of the Romantic imagination was a nostalgic affection for the medieval world, with its brooding cas- tles and towering cathedrals. No less than Neoclassicism, Neomedievalism—the revival of medieval culture—served the cause of nationalism. It exalted the state by recapturing its unique historical and cultural past. On the eve of the unification of Germany (1848), and for decades thereafter, German craftsmen restored many of its most notable Gothic monuments, including its great cathedrals.
In England, where the Christian heritage of the Middle Ages was closely associated with national identity, writers embraced the medieval past: Alfred Lord Tennyson (1802– 1892), poet laureate of Great Britain, for example, fused early British legend with the Christian mission in a cycle of Arthurian poems entitled Idylls of the King; while Sir Walter Scott immortalized medieval heroes and heroines in avidly read historical novels and Romantic poems.
The revival of the Gothic style was equally distinc- tive in architecture. The British Houses of Parliament, conceived by Charles Barry (1795–1860) and Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–1852) and begun in 1836,
Figure 29.12 CHARLES BARRY and A. W. N. PUGIN, Houses of Parliament, London, 1840–1860. Length 940 ft. Following the fire of 1834, which destroyed the earlier structure (also known as the Palace of Westminster), a royal commission directed Barry to design a Neo-Gothic replacement. Pugin was largely responsible for the interior details. His designs seem to have coincided with his conversion to Roman Catholicism. He perceived purity of structure and the meaningful application of details as equivalent to the Catholic faith, but equally appropriate to the ideals of the largely Protestant nation.
Figure 29.13 JAMES RENWICK and WILLIAM RODRIGUE, Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Fifth Avenue and 50th Street, New York, 1853–1858.
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are among the most aesthetically successful large-scale Neo-Gothic public buildings. The picturesque combina- tion of spires and towers fronting on the River Thames in London was the product of Pugin’s conviction that the Gothic style best expressed the dignity befitting the official architecture of a Christian nation (Figure 29.12). Moreover, the Gothic style was symbolically appropriate for the build- ing that epitomized the principles of parliamentary rule, pioneered in England with the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. The Houses of Parliament might be said to reflect the importance of medieval historical tradition—both reli- gious and political—in shaping England’s self-image.
Neomedievalism gave rise to a movement for the arche- ological restoration of churches and castles throughout Europe: it also inspired some extraordinary new archi- tectural activity in North America. Colleges and universi- ties (such as Harvard and Yale), museums (such as the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.), and numerous church- es and cathedrals were modeled on medieval prototypes. One of the most elegant examples of the Gothic revival in the United States is Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City (Figure 29.13), which (along with Grace Church in Manhattan and the Smithsonian) was designed by James Renwick (1818–1895) and William Rodrigue (1800–1867).
Exoticism in Western Architecture Romantic architecture also drew inspiration from the “exotic” East, and especially those parts of the world in which the European powers were building colonial empires. The most intriguing Western pastiche of non-Western
styles is the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, on the south coast of England. Designed by the English architect John Nash (1752–1835) between 1815 and 1821 as a seaside resort for the Prince Regent, it combines a fanciful assortment of Chinese, Indian, and Islamic motifs (Figure 29.14). Nash raised bulbous domes and slender minarets over a hidden frame of cast iron, the structural medium that would soon come to dominate modern architecture (see chapter 30). The bizarre interior decor, which includes waterlily chandeliers and cast-iron palm trees with copper leaves, produced an eclectic style that Nash’s critics called “Indian Gothic.”
The Romantic Style in Music “Music is the most romantic of all the arts—one might almost say, the only genuine romantic one—for its sole subject is the infinite.” Thus wrote the German novelist and musician E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822). Like many Romantic composers, Hoffmann believed that music held a privileged position in its capacity to express what he called “an inexpressible longing.” For the Romantics, music—the most abstract and elusive of the arts—was capable of free- ing the intellect and speaking directly to the heart.
The nineteenth century produced an enormous amount of music in all genres—a phenomenon that is reflected in the fact that audiences today listen to more nineteenth- century music than music of any previous time period. Its hallmark is personalized expression, a feature as appar- ent in large orchestral works as it is in small, intimate pieces.
Figure 29.14 JOHN NASH, the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, from the northeast, 1815–1821.
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During the Romantic era, the orchestra grew to grand proportions. Mid-nineteenth-century orchestras were often five times larger than those used by Haydn and Mozart. While the volume of sound expanded, the varie- ties of instrumental possibilities also grew larger, in part because of technical improvements made in the instru- ments themselves. Brass instruments (such as the trumpet and the tuba) gained new pitches and a wider range with the addition of valves; woodwind instruments (such as the flute and the clarinet) underwent structural changes that greatly facilitated fingering and tuning. Modifications to the violin lent the instrument greater power; and the early nineteenth-century piano, which acquired an iron frame, two or three pedals, and thicker strings, was capable of increased brilliance of tone and greater expressiveness— features that made it the most popular musical instrument of the century. Such mechanical improvements expanded the tonal potential of musical instruments and produced a virtual revolution in orchestral textures.
In terms of musical composition, the symphony and the concerto were the most important of the large orchestral forms. Equally significant, however, were song forms, espe- cially songs that dealt with themes of love and death or nature and nature’s moods. Composers found inspiration in heroic subjects, in contemporary events, and in the leg- ends and histories of their native lands. Like the Romantic painters and writers, they embraced exotic themes. In both small musical forms and large operatic compositions, they made every effort to achieve an ideal union of poetry and music. The close association between the arts is seen in the many operas and symphonic pieces based on nineteenth- century plays, novels, and poems. The Faust legend and Goethe’s Faust in particular inspired numerous musical set- tings. Bizet’s Carmen, discussed in chapter 28, was based on a novella that was influenced in turn by Pushkin’s narrative poem The Gypsies (1824); and Pushkin’s verse poem Eugene Onegin (1832) inspired Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s opera of the same name. But it was Sir Walter Scott’s historical nov- els that were the favorite source for at least a dozen operas by French, British, and Italian composers.
As in the eighteenth century, nineteenth-century com- posers were often also performers. They drew attention to their own technical abilities by writing virtuoso pieces (usually for piano or violin) that only highly accomplished musicians like themselves could perform with facility. No longer completely at the mercy of the patronage system, they indulged, often publicly, in bouts of euphoria, melan- choly, and petty jealousy. The talented Genoese composer and violinist Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840), for instance, refused to publish his own pieces, which he performed with such astounding technical agility that rumor had it he had come by his virtuosity through a pact with the Devil.
The Genius of Beethoven The leading composer of the early nineteenth century and one of the greatest musicians of all time was the German-born Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827). Beethoven’s lifelong residency in Vienna brought him in contact with the music of Mozart and Haydn; he studied
briefly with the latter. It also provided him with the funda- mentals of the classical style. His indebtedness to classical composition, especially evident in his early works, makes him something of a bridge between the classical and Romantic eras.
Beethoven was a gifted pianist, organist, and violinist. While he composed works in almost every musical form and for many different kinds of instrument, his thirty-two piano sonatas reflect a lifelong love for the expressive potential of that instrument. His nine symphonies, which critics claim as his greatest achievement, generally adhere to the classical format, but they move beyond the bounds of classical structure. The Third Symphony, which he sub- titled the Eroica (“Heroic”), is a case in point. It is longer and more complex than any previous orchestral work. While it follows the standard number and order of move- ments found in the classical symphony, it is almost twice as long as its typical twenty- to twenty-five-minute predeces- sors. The first movement, which one French critic called “the Grand Army of the soul,” engages six (rather than the traditional two) themes dictated by the sonata form (see chapter 26). The movement begins with two com- manding hammer strikes of the French horn—symbolic of the hero throughout the symphony. The second move- ment is a somber and solemn funeral march. For the third movement, instead of the traditional minuet, Beethoven introduces a vigorous scherzo (“joke”), which replaces the elegant courtly dance form with a melody that is fast and varied in tempo—a joke in that it is essentially undance- able! The last movement, a victory finale, brings the themes and variations of the first movement together with a long coda that again features the majestic horn section. It is worth noting that for the triumphant last movement of this stirring symphony, Beethoven included musical passages originally written for a ballet on the subject of Prometheus.
Beethoven had originally dedicated the Third Symphony to Napoleon, whom he admired both as a popular hero and a champion of liberty. But when Napoleon crowned himself emperor in 1804, Beethoven angrily scratched out the name “Buonaparte” and replaced it with a gen- eralized dedication: “Heroic symphony, dedicated to the memory of a great man.” “So, he is no more than a com- mon mortal!” Beethoven is said to have exclaimed. “Now he will trample on all the rights of man and . . . become a tyrant.” Ultimately, the symphony was dedicated and presented to a minor nobleman, Prince Joseph Franz Maximilian Lobkowicz.
Beethoven’s genius lay in his use of compositional elements that gave his music unprecedented expressive power. He introduced into his compositions a new rhyth- mic vitality, strong and sudden contrasts of sound, and an expanded range of instrumental textures. By adding piccolo, bass clarinet, trombone, bass drum, and cymbals to the scoring and doubling the number of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, he vastly broadened the expressive range and dramatic power of orchestral sound.
See Music Listening Selections at end of chapter.
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In his use of musical dynamics (gradations of loudness and softness), Beethoven was more explicit and varied than his classical predecessors. Prior to 1812, he made use of only five terms to indicate the softness or loudness of piano performance; increasingly, however, he expanded the classical vocabulary with such words as dolente (“sor- rowful”) and teneramente (“tenderly”) to indicate nuances. Like other Romantic artists—Delacroix, in particular, comes to mind—Beethoven blurred the divisions between the structural units of a composition, exploiting textural contrasts for expressive effect. He often broke with clas- sical form, adding, for example, a fifth movement to his Sixth (or Pastoral) Symphony and embellishing the finale of his Ninth Symphony with a chorus and solo voices. Beethoven’s daring use of dissonance, his sudden pauses and silences, and his brilliance of thematic and rhythmic invention reflect his preference for dramatic spontaneity over measured regularity. The powerful opening notes of the Fifth Symphony—a motif that Beethoven is said to have
called “fate knocking at the door”—exemplify his affection for inventive repetition and surging rhythms that propel the music toward a powerful climax.
Difficult as it is to imagine, Beethoven wrote much of his greatest music when he was functionally deaf. From the age of twenty-nine, when he became aware of a progressive degeneration of his hearing, he labored against depres- sion and despair. Temperamental and defiant, he scorned the patronage system that had weighed heavily upon both Mozart and Haydn, and often sold his musical compositions as an independent artist. He declared contempt for the nobility and ignored their demands. In 1802, he confided to his family: “I am bound to be misunderstood; for me there can be no relaxation with my fellow men, no refined conver- sations, no mutual exchange of ideas. I must live alone like one who has been banished.” In retreat from society, the alienated composer turned to nature (Figure 29.15).
In the woods outside Vienna, Beethoven roamed with his musical sketchbook under one arm, often singing to
Figure 29.15 Beethoven Composing the “Pastoral” by a Brook, from the Twenty-Second Almanac of the Zürich Musikgesellschaft for 1834: Biography of Ludwig van Beethoven. Colored lithograph, 61∕2 × 52∕5 in. In 1802, as his hearing became increasingly worse, Beethoven moved to the small village of Heiligenstadt, outside Vienna. His sense of isolation and his heroic struggle to overcome despair are reflected in his music.
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himself in a loud voice. “Woods, trees and rock,” he wrote in his diary, “give the response that man requires.” His dis- covery that nature mirrored his deepest emotions inspired his programmatic Sixth Symphony (1808), which he subti- tled “A recollection of country life.” Each of the five move- ments of the Pastoral is labeled with a specific reference to nature: “Awakening of happy feelings on arriving in the country”; “By the brook”; “Joyous gatherings of country folk”; “Storm”; and “Shepherd’s Song, happy and thankful feelings after the storm.” In the tradition of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (see chapter 23), Beethoven occasionally imitated the sounds of nature. For example, at the end of the sec- ond movement, flute, oboe, and clarinet join to create bird calls; and a quavering tremolo (the rapid repetition of a tone to produce a trembling effect) on the lower strings suggests the sounds of a murmuring brook.
Some critics regard Beethoven’s last symphony, the Ninth Symphony (1824), as his greatest work. It is the first example of a symphony that uses the human voice as a component of the instrumentation: In the last movement Beethoven took the unprecedented step of including four solo voices and a large chorus. The inspiration for the Choral Symphony was a poem by Friedrich Schiller (see chapter 27): An die Freude (“To Joy”), an ode that celebrates the joy of universal brotherhood. The final, choral move- ment of this long, ambitious symphony is a brilliant expo- sition of Beethoven’s imaginative power and his defense of a humanistic ideal. At the premier performance of the symphony in Vienna, the aging composer shared the stage with the conductor, beating out the tempo for music he could hear only in his head.
Art Songs The art songs of Beethoven’s Austrian contemporary Franz Schubert (1797–1828) aptly reflect the nineteenth-century composer’s ambition to unite poetry and music. Schubert is credited with originating the Romantic lied (German for “song,” pl. lieder), an independent song for solo voice and piano. The lied is not a song in the traditional sense but, rather, a poem recreated in musical terms. Its lyric qualities, like those of simple folk songs, are generated by the poem itself. The lieder of Schubert, Robert Schumann (1810–1856), and Johannes Brahms (1833–1897), which set to music the poetry of Heine and Goethe, among others, are intimate evocations of personal feelings and moods. They recount tales of love and longing, describe nature and its moods (some forty songs are related to water or to fish), or lament the transience of human happiness.
Among Schubert’s thousand or so works (which include nine symphonies, five operas, and numerous chamber pieces) are 600 lieder. Of these, his musical settings of Goethe’s ballads rank as landmark expressions of the Romantic spirit of music. Gretchen am Spinnrade (“Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel”), written when the composer was only seventeen years old, is based on a poem by Goethe which occurs near the end of Part One of Faust. In the piece, Gretchen laments the absence of her lover, Faust, and anticipates the sorrows that their love will bring. Repeated three times are the poignant lines with which the
song opens: “My peace is gone, my heart is sore:/ I shall find it never and never more.” While the melody and tone color of the voice line convey the sadness expressed in the words of the poem, the propelling piano line captures the rhythms of the spinning wheel.
Another of Schubert’s finest art songs is Erlkönig (“The Erlking”), which combines elements of the natural (a rag- ing storm), the supernatural (the figure of death in the person of the legendary king of the elves), and the heroic (a father’s desperate effort to save the life of his ailing son). Here, Schubert’s music mingles the rhythms of the stormy ride on horseback, the struggle for survival, and the threatening lure of death. Schubert himself died of syphilis at the age of thirty-one.
The Programmatic Symphonies of Berlioz The French composer Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) began his first symphony in 1830. An imaginative combination of the story of Faust and Berlioz’s own life, the Symphonie fantastique tells the dramatic tale of Berlioz’s “interminable and inextinguishable passion”—as he described it—for the captivating Irish actress Harriet Smithson. Berlioz wrote the symphony in the first flush of his passion, when he was only twenty-seven years old. Following an intense court- ship, he married Harriet, only to discover that he and the woman he idolized were dreadfully mismatched—the mar- riage turned Smithson into an alcoholic and Berlioz into an adulterer.
The Symphonie fantastique belongs to the genre known as program music, that is, instrumental music endowed with a specific literary or pictorial content indicated by the composer. Berlioz was not the first to write music that was programmatic: in The Four Seasons, Vivaldi had linked music to poetic phrases, as had Beethoven in his Pastoral Symphony. But Berlioz was the first to build an entire symphony around a musical motif that tells a story. The popularity of program music during the nineteenth century testifies to the powerful influence of literature upon the other arts. Berlioz, whose second symphony, Harold in Italy, was inspired by Byron’s Childe Harold (see chapter 28), was not alone in his attraction to literary sub- jects. The Hungarian composer Franz Liszt (1811–1886) wrote symphonic poems based on the myth of Prometheus and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He also composed the Faust Symphony, which he dedicated to Berlioz. The Russian com- poser Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) wrote many programmatic pieces, including the tone poem Romeo and Juliet. European political events inspired the composition of nationalistic program music, such as Beethoven’s Battle Symphony of 1813 (also known as “Wellington’s Victory”) and Tchaikovsky’s colorful 1812 Overture (1880), which, commemorating Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, incor- porated portions of the national anthems of both France and tzarist Russia.
In the Symphonie fantastique, Berlioz links a specific mood or event to a musical phrase, or idée fixe (“fixed idea”).
See Music Listening Selections at end of chapter.
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Figure 29.16 ANDREW GEIGER, A Concert of Hector Berlioz in 1846, 1846. Engraving, 91∕3 × 91∕3 in.
This recurring motif becomes the means by which the composer binds together the individual parts of his dramatic narrative. Subtitled “Episode in the Life of an Artist,” the Symphonie fantastique is an account of the young musician’s opium-induced dream, in which, according to Berlioz’s program notes, “the Beloved One takes the form of a melody in his mind, like a fixed idea which is ever returning and which he hears everywhere.”
Unified by the idée fixe, the symphony consists of a sequence of five parts, each distinguished by a particu- lar mood: the lover’s “reveries and passions”; a ball at which the hero meets his beloved; a stormy scene in the country; a “March to the Scaffold” (marking the hero’s dream of murdering his lover and his subse- quent execution); and a final and feverishly orchestrated “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath” inspired by Goethe’s Faust. (Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust, a piece for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, likewise drew on Goethe’s great drama.) The “plot” of the Symphonie fantastique, published along with the musical score, was (and usually still is) printed in program notes available to listeners. But the written narrative is not essential to the enjoyment of the music, for, as Berlioz himself explained, the music holds author- ity as absolute sound, above and beyond its program- matic associations. Indeed, after the first rehearsals of the Symphonie, Berlioz exclaimed that he had found the “March to the Scaffold” fifty times more frightening than he had expected.
The spiritual heir to Beethoven, Berlioz took liber- ties with traditional symphonic form. He composed the Symphonie fantastique in five movements instead of the usual
four, and combined instruments inventively so as to create unusual mixes of sound. In the third movement, for example, a solo English horn and an oboe create a mood of loneli- ness; thereafter, four timpani (kettledrums) produce the effect of “distant thunder.” He also expanded tone color, stretching the register of clarinets to screeching highs, for instance, and playing the strings of the violin with the wood of the bow instead of with the hair. Berlioz’s favorite medium was the full symphony orchestra, which he enlarged to include 150 musicians. Called “the apos- tle of bigness,” Berlioz conceived an ideal orchestra that consisted of over 400 musi- cians, including 242 string instruments, 30 pianos, 30 harps, and a chorus of 360 voices. The monumental proportions of Berlioz’s orchestras and choirs, and the volume of sound they produced, inspired spoofs in con-
temporary French and German journals. Cartoons showed the maestro, also spoofed for his extravagant hairstyles, beating time with an electric telegraph pole, recruiting orchestra members from the artillery of a garrison, and conducting a sea of instrumentalists (Figure 29.16). But Berlioz, who was also a talented writer and a music critic for Parisian newspapers, thumbed his nose at the critics in lively essays that defended his own musical philosophy.
The Piano Music of Chopin If the nineteenth century was the age of Romantic indi- vidualism, it was also the age of the virtuoso: composers wrote music that might be performed gracefully and accurately only by individuals with extraordinary technical skills. The quintessential example of this phenomenon is the Polish-born composer Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849). At the age of seven, Chopin gave his first piano concert in Warsaw. Slight in build even as an adult, Chopin had small hands that nevertheless could reach across the keys of the piano like “the jaws of a snake” (as one of his peers observed). After leaving Warsaw, Chopin became the acclaimed pianist of the Paris salons and a close friend of Delacroix (who painted the portrait in Figure 29.17), Berlioz, and many of the leading novelists of his time, including George Sand (see chapter 28), with whom he had a stormy seven-year love affair.
In his brief lifetime—he died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-nine—Chopin created an entirely personal musi- cal idiom linked to the expressive potential of the modern piano. For that instrument, Chopin wrote over 200 pieces, most of which were short keyboard works, such as dances, préludes, nocturnes (slow, songlike pieces), impromptus (pieces that sound improvised), and études (instrumen- tal studies designed to improve a player’s technique). See Music Listening Selections at end of chapter.
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His Etude in G-flat Major, Opus 10, No. 5, is a breathtaking piece that challenges the performer to play very rapidly on the black keys, which are less than half the width of the white ones.
Much like Delacroix, Chopin was given to violent mood swings. And, as with Delacroix’s paintings, which although carefully contrived give the impression of spontaneity, much of Chopin’s music seems improvised—the impetu- ous record of fleeting feeling, rather than the studied product of diligent construction. The most engaging of his compositions are marked by fresh turns of harmony and free tempos and rhythms. Chopin might embellish a melodic line with unusual and flamboyant devices, such as a rolling arpeggio (the sounding of the notes of a chord in rapid succession). His préludes provide bold contrasts of calm meditation and bravura, while his nocturnes—like the Romantic landscapes of Friedrich and Corot (see Figures 27.7 and 27.11)—are often dreamy and wistful. Of his dance forms, the polonaise and the mazurka preserve the robustness of the folk tunes of his native Poland, while the waltz mirrors the Romantic taste for a new type of dance, more sensuous and physically expressive than the courtly and formal minuet. Considered vulgar and lewd when it was introduced in the late eighteenth century, the waltz, with its freedom of movement, intoxicating rhythms, and close contact between partners became the most popular of all nineteenth-century dances.Figure 29.17 EUGÈNE DELACROIX, Frédéric Chopin, 1838. Oil on canvas,
18 × 15 in. This unfinished portrait was originally part of a larger double portrait that showed George Sand listening to the virtuoso pianist at the keyboard.
Figure 29.18 JEAN-LOUIS CHARLES GARNIER, the façade of the Opéra, Paris, 1860–1875. The 2200-seat theater is now used primarily for ballet. Both in its exterior design and in its lavish interior, it recalls the Palace of Versailles. The swampy foundation and underground lake that had to be pumped out during the building’s construction were made famous in the French novel The Phantom of the Opera (1909) by Gaston Leroux.
See Music Listening Selections at end of chapter.
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Figure 29.19 JEAN-LOUIS CHARLES GARNIER, the Grand Staircase in the Opéra, Paris, 1860–1875. Engraving from Jean-Louis Charles Garnier, Le Nouvel Opéra de Paris, 1880, Vol. 2, plate 8. The Paris Opéra ruled that all works presented there must be in French, thus requiring foreign composers to translate their librettos. Also required was a second-act ballet, which became a standard device in French operas.
The Romantic Ballet The theatrical artform known as “ballet” gained immense popularity in the Romantic era. While the great bal- lets of Tchaikovsky—Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and Sleeping Beauty—brought fame to Russia toward the end of the 1800s, it was in early nineteenth-century Paris that Romantic ballet was born. By the year 1800, ballet had moved from the court to the theater, where it was enjoyed
as a middle-class entertainment. Magnificent theaters, such as the Paris Opéra (Figure 29.18), designed by Jean-Louis Charles Garnier (1825–1878), became showplaces for pub- lic entertainment.
The Neobaroque polychrome façade of the Paris opera house reflects Garnier’s awareness that Greek architects had painted parts of their buildings; but the glory of the structure is its interior, which takes as its focus a sumptuous grand staircase (Figure 29.19). Luxuriously appointed, and
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illuminated by means of the latest technological invention, gaslight, the Paris Opéra became the model for public theaters throughout Europe. For the façade, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827–1875) created a 15-foot-high sculpture whose exuberant rhythms capture the spirit of dance as the physical expression of human joy (Figure 29.20).
The ballets performed on the stage of the Paris Opéra were the culmination of a golden age in European dance. In Paris in 1830, the Italian-born prima ballerina (the first, or leading, female dancer in a ballet company) Maria Taglioni (1804–1884) perfected the art of danc- ing sur les points (“on the toes”) in ballet shoes that were no more than flimsy slippers made from woven strips of silk ribbon and padded with cotton wool (Figure 29.21). Taglioni’s landmark performance in the ballet La sylphide
(choreographed by her father) was hailed as nothing less than virtuoso. Clothed in a diaphanous dress with a fitted bodice and a bell-shaped skirt (the prototype of the tutu), Taglioni performed perfect arabesques—a ballet position in which the dancer stands on one leg with the other extended behind her, and one or both arms held to create the longest line possible from one extremity to the other. She also astonished audiences by crossing the stage in
three magnificent, floating leaps. While faithful to the exact steps of classical ballet, she brought to formal dance the new, more sensuous spirit of nineteenth-century Romanticism. Taglioni quickly became a celebrity: fol- lowing her performances in London, dolls manufac- tured in the dress and style of the ballerina were in great demand. Legend has it that after her retirement from the stage in 1842, her fans cooked and ate a pair of her ballet shoes, covered with sauce.
Popular myths and fairy tales inspired many of the ballets of the Romantic era, including La sylphide, Giselle, and Tchaikovsky’s more widely known Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty. The central figure of each ballet is usually some version of the angelic female—a fictional creature drawn from fable, fairy tale, and fantasy. In La sylphide, a sylph (a mythical nature deity) enchants the hero and lures him away from his bride-to-be. Pursued by the hero,
Figure 29.20 JEAN-BAPTISTE CARPEAUX, The Dance, 1868. Stone, 137∕10 × 97∕10 × 47∕10 ft. Created for the façade of the Opéra, Paris, now in Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Between 1854 and 1861, Carpeaux worked in Rome, where he studied the sculptures of the Renaissance masters. He broke with Classical and Renaissance traditions, however, in creating sculptures that incorporate spontaneous movement.
Figure 29.21 RICHARD JAMES LANE, Marie Taglioni in the Ballet Flore et Zephyre, 1831. After a drawing by Alfred Edward Chalon. Hand-coloured engraving, 143∕4 × 101∕2 in. Dancing sur les points, a talent that brought her fame as a prima ballerina, Taglioni is pictured here in her 1830 London debut as Flore. The ballet skirt of this era was shortened to display the dancer’s legs, and reveal the virtuoso footwork that previously was reserved for male dancers.
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she nevertheless eludes his grasp and dies—the victim of a malevolent witch—before their love is consummated. The heroine of this and other Romantic ballets symbolized the elusive ideals of love and beauty that were a favorite subject of the Romantic poets. She conformed as well to the stereotype of the pure and virtuous female found in the pages of many Romantic novels. The traditional equation of beauty and innocence in the person of the idealized female is well illustrated in the comments of one French critic, who, describing “the aerial and virginal grace of Taglioni,” exulted, “She flies like a spirit in the midst of transparent clouds of white muslin—she resembles a happy angel.” Clearly, the nineteenth-century ballerina was the Romantic realization of the Eternal Female, a figure that fitted the stereotype of the angelic woman.
Romantic Opera Verdi and Italian Grand Opera Romantic opera, designed to appeal to a growing middle- class audience, came into existence after 1820. The culmi- nation of Baroque theatricality, Romantic opera was grand both in size and in spirit. It was a flamboyant spectacle that united all aspects of theatrical production: music, dance, stage sets, and costumes. While Paris was the operatic capital of Europe in the first half of the nineteenth cen- tury, Italy ultimately took the lead in seducing the public with hundreds of wonderfully tuneful and melodramatic Romantic operas.
The art of singing, as it flourished in Italy in the first decades of the nineteenth century, established the bel canto tradition. Literally “beautiful singing” (or “beautiful song,”) bel canto-style opera emphasizes the melodic line, and the vocalist’s ability to execute such florid embel- lishments as rapid runs and trills. Two of the early nine- teenth century’s most famous bel canto operas are Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), which is based on a novel by Sir Walter Scott, and Gioacchino Rossini’s Il bar- biere de Siviglia (The Barber of Seville, 1816). In these works, showpiece arias with long, winding melodic lines (usually sung in the upper register) demand stunning vocal agility.
The shift to operatic drama, marked by more intense and powerful singing, is evident in the music of the Italian com- poser Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901). In his twenty-six operas, the long Italian operatic tradition that had begun with Monteverdi (see chapter 20) came to its peak. Reflecting on his gift for capturing high drama in music, Verdi exclaimed, “Success is impossible for me if I cannot write as my heart dictates.” The heroines of Verdi’s most beloved operas— Rigoletto (1851), La Traviata (1853), and Aïda (1870)—are also creatures of the heart, who all die for love.
Perhaps the most famous of Verdi’s operas is Aïda, which was commissioned by the Turkish viceroy of Egypt to mark the opening of the Suez Canal. Aïda made a nationalistic plea for unity against foreign domination— one critic called the opera “agitator’s music.” Indeed, the aria “O patria mia” (“O my country”) is an expression of Verdi’s ardent love for the newly unified Italy. But Aïda is
also the passionate love story of an Egyptian prince and an Ethiopian princess held as a captive slave. Verdi’s stirring arias, vigorous choruses, and richly colored orchestral pas- sages can be enjoyed by listening alone. But the dramatic force of this opera can be appreciated only by witnessing firsthand a theatrical performance—especially one that engages such traditional paraphernalia as horses, chariots, and, of course, elephants.
Wagner and the Birth of Music-Drama In Germany, the master of opera and one of the most formidable composers of the century was Richard Wagner (1813–1883). The stepson of a gifted actor, he spent much of his childhood composing poems and plays and setting them to music. This union of music and literature culmi- nated in the birth of what Wagner called music-drama—a continuous fabric of sound and story that replaced the tra- ditional divisions of the opera into arias, duets, choruses, and instrumental passages. Wagner’s conception of opera shattered long-standing Western theatrical traditions. He aimed, as he explained, “to force the listener, for the first time in the history of opera, to take an interest in a poetic idea by making him follow all its developments” as dramatized in music. While earlier composers gener- ally told the story by way of the vocal line, Wagner made the orchestra an equal component in the drama. Heroic in size, Wagner’s orchestra generally engulfs the listener in a maelstrom of uninterrupted melody. Characters and events emerge by way of the application of the leitmotif, a short musical phrase that—like the idée fixe—signifies a particular person, thing, or idea in the story.
Deeply nationalistic, Wagner based his music-dramas almost exclusively on heroic themes from Germany’s medi- eval past. His librettos, which he himself wrote, brought to life the fabulous events and personalities of German folktales and legends. Among his recurring themes are two he shared with Goethe: the redeeming love of the Eternal Female and the Faustian lust for power. Magical devices— the ring, the sword, or the chalice—like the individual characters in the opera, might each assume its own musical phrase or leitmotif.
Of his nine principal operas, the most ambitious is a monumental fifteen-hour cycle of four music-dramas collectively titled Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung). Based on Norse and Germanic mythology, The Ring involves the quest for a magical but cursed golden ring, whose power would provide its possessor with the potential to control the universe (Figure 29.22). Out of a struggle between the gods of Valhalla and an assort- ment of giants, dragons, and dwarfs emerges the hero, Siegfried, whose valorous deeds secure the ring for his lover, Brünnhilde. In the end Siegfried loses both his love and his life, and Valhalla crumbles in flames, destroy- ing the gods and eliciting the birth of a new order. Like Goethe, whose Faust was a lifetime effort and a tribute to his nation’s past, Wagner toiled on the monumental Ring for more than twenty-five years, from 1848 to 1874.
While The Ring gives imaginative breadth to the hero myths of Germanic literary tradition, its music matches
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LOOKING BACK
Heroic Themes in Art • Romantic artists generally elevated the
heart over the mind and the emotions over the intellect. They favored subjects that gave free rein to the imagination, the mysteries of the spirit, and the cult of the ego.
• Increasingly independent of the official sources of patronage, Romantic artists saw themselves as the heroes of their age. They favored heroic themes and personalities, especially those illustrating the struggle for political independence.
• Gros, Géricault, Goya, and Delacroix stretched the bounds of traditional subject matter to include controversial contemporary events, exotic subjects,
and medieval legends. Their paintings gave substance to the spirit of nationalism that swept through nineteenth-century Europe.
• The Romantic turn to heroic themes was matched by new freedom in composition and technique. Neoclassical principles of pictorial balance, clarity, and restraint gave way to dynamic composition, bold color, and vigorous brushwork.
Trends in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Architecture • The search for national identity is
also evident in the Gothic revival in Western architecture. Neomedievalism challenged Neoclassicism in paying homage to Europe’s historic past.
• Increasing familiarity with the cultures of Asia and Islam inspired exotic architecture, such as the Royal Pavilion of Brighton.
The Romantic Style in Music • Romantic music found inspiration in
heroic and nationalistic themes, as well as in nature’s moods and the vagaries of human love. In their desire to express strong personal emotions, composers often abandoned classical models and stretched musical forms.
• The enlargement of the symphony orchestra in size and expressive range is apparent in the works of Beethoven, Berlioz, and Wagner. The creative giant of the age, Beethoven composed nine
its poetry in scope and drama. Wagner’s orchestra for the cycle called for 115 pieces, including 64 string instru- ments. No fewer than twenty individual leitmotifs weave a complex web of dramatic musical density. “Every bar of dramatic music,” proclaimed Wagner, “is justified only by the fact that it explains something in the action or in the character of the actor.” In harmonic style, some Wagnerian passages anticipate the more radical experiments of
twentieth-century music, such as dissonance and the dis- solution of classical tonality (see chapter 32). Orchestral interludes that “describe” raging floods and rings of fire capture the Romantic sublime in musical form. The artist’s mission, Wagner insisted, is to communicate “the neces- sary spontaneous emotional mood.” In music-drama he not only fulfilled that mission, but also brought Romantic music to the threshold of modernity.
Figure 29.22 Metropolitan Opera production of Wagner’s The Rhinegold from The Ring of the Nibelung. In scene four, the giants Fasolt and Fafner refuse to relinquish their hostage Freia unless they are given enough gold to hide her body from view. Critics compare Wagner’s story to J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings (1937–1949), which shares the mythical themes of loss and recovery and the epic quest for magical power.
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• Beethoven, Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, The Eroica, first movement, excerpt, 1803–1804.
• Schubert, Erlkönig, 1815. • Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14,
“March to the Scaffold,” fourth movement, excerpt, 1830.
• Chopin, Etude in G-flat Major, Op. 10, No. 5, 1833.
Music Listening Selections
aquatint a type of print produced by an engraving method similar to etching but involving finely granulated tonal areas rather than line alone
arabesque in ballet, a position in which the dancer stands on one leg with the other extended behind and one or both arms held to create the longest line possible from one extremity of the body to the other
arpeggio the sounding of the notes of a chord in rapid succession
bel canto (Italian, “beautiful singing” or “beautiful song”) an operatic style characterized by lyricism and florid vocal embellishment
dynamics the gradations of loudness or softness with which music is performed
étude (French, “study”) an instrumental piece designed to improve a player’s performance technique
idée fixe (French, “fixed idea”) a term used by Berlioz for a recurring theme in his symphonic works
impromptu (French, “improvised”) a short keyboard composition that sounds as if it were improvised
leitmotif (German, “leading motif”) a short musical theme that designates a person, object, place, or idea and that reappears throughout a musical composition
lied (German, “song,” plural lieder) an independent song for solo voice and piano; also known as an “art song”
music-drama a unique synthesis of sound and story in which both are developed simultaneously and continuously; a term used to describe Wagner’s later operas
nocturne a slow, songlike piece, usually written for piano; the melody is played by the right hand, and a steady, soft accompaniment is played by the left
opus (Latin, “work”) a musical composition; followed by a number, it designates either the chronological place of a musical composition in the composer’s total musical output or the order of its publication; often abbreviated “op.”
prima ballerina the first, or leading, female dancer in a ballet company
program music instrumental music endowed with specific literary or pictorial content that is indicated by the composer
scherzo (Italian, “joke”) in Beethoven’s music and thereafter, a movement involving elements of vigor or surprise
tone color the distinctive quality of musical sound made by a voice, a musical instrument, or a combination of instruments; also called “timbre”
tremolo in music, the rapid repetition of a single pitch or two pitches alternately, producing a trembling effect
virtuoso one who exhibits great technical ability, especially in musical performance; also used to describe a musical composition demanding (or a performance demonstrating) great technical skill
Glossary
symphonies and numerous instrumental works. Berlioz’s idée fixe and Wagner’s leitmotif tied sound to story, evidence of the Romantic search for an ideal union of poetry and music.
• Lyrical melody and tone color became as important to Romantic music as the free use of line and color was to Romantic painters.
• Schubert united poetry and music in the intimate form of the lied, while Chopin captured a vast range of moods and emotions in virtuoso piano pieces.
The Romantic Ballet • Romantic ballet, which featured themes
drawn from fantasy and legend, flowered in France and, later, in Russia.
• The ballets performed on the stage of the Paris Opéra were the culmination of a golden age in European dance. In Paris in 1830, Maria Taglioni perfected the art of dancing sur les points.
• Tchaikovsky heightened the importance of fantasy and story in his popular ballets Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and Sleeping Beauty.
Romantic Opera • Romantic opera, designed to appeal
to a growing middle-class audience, came into existence after 1820. The culmination of Baroque theatricality, Romantic opera was grand both in size and in spirit. It was a flamboyant spectacle that united all aspects of theatrical production: music, dance, stage sets, and costumes.
• Grand opera was brought to its peak in Italy by Verdi and in Germany by Wagner, both of whom exploited nationalistic themes.
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Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style ca. 1850–1900
“Show me an angel and I’ll paint one.” Courbet
30 Chapter
Figure 30.1 JEAN-FRANÇOIS MILLET, Gleaners, ca. 1857. Oil on canvas, approx. 2 ft. 9 in. × 3 ft. 8 in. Millet’s portrayals of rural women at work—harvesting wheat, spinning, sewing, tending sheep, and feeding children—idealized the female as selfless and saintly. Nonetheless, his paintings brought attention to the fact that the French economy depended on the labor of the rural working class.
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The Global Dominion of the West Advancing Industrialization Industrialization provided the economic and military basis for the West’s rise to dominion over the rest of the world. This process is well illustrated in the history of the railroad, the most important technological phenomenon of the early nineteenth century because it facilitated economic and political expansion. It was made possible by the com- bined technology of steam power, coal, and iron.
The first all-iron rails were forged in Britain in 1789, but it was not until 1804 that the British built their first steam railway locomotive, and several more decades before “iron horses” became a major mode of transportation. The drive to build national railways spread, encompassing Europe and the vast continent of North America. By 1850, some 23,000 miles of railway track crisscrossed Europe, linking the sources of raw materials—such as the coal mines of northern Germany’s Ruhr valley—to factories and mar- kets. The second half of the nineteenth century saw the unification of both Italy and Germany, the modernization of Russia, and the transformation of the United States into an economic powerhouse, fueled by abundant resources of iron ore and coal. Across the vast continent of North America, railroads facilitated rapid economic and political expansion. As Western nations colonized other parts of the globe, they took with them the railroad and other agents of industrialization.
Before the end of the nineteenth century, Western technology included the internal combustion engine, the telegraph, the telephone, the camera, and—perhaps most significant for the everyday life of human beings—electric- ity. Processed steel, aluminum, the steam turbine, and the pneumatic tire—all products of the 1880s—further altered
LOOKING AHEAD
Nations have long drawn their strength and identity from their economic and military superiority over other nations. But during the late nineteenth century, nationalism and the quest for economic supremacy took on a more aggressive form. Fueled by advancing industrialization, Western nations not only competed among themselves for economic and political preeminence, but also sought control of markets throughout the world. The combined effects of nationalism, industrialization, and the consequent phenomena of imperialism and colonialism influenced the materialist direction of modern Western history and that of the world beyond the West as well.
It was in this climate that Realism emerged. As a cultural movement, Realism reflected popular demands for greater access to material wealth and well-being. In place of nostalgia and the sentimental embrace of the Romantic past, Realists
manifested a renewed sense of social consciousness and a commitment to contemporary issues of class and gender. Unlike the Romantics, whose passionate subjectivity often alienated them from society, Realists regarded themselves as men and woman “of their time.”
As a style, Realism called for an objective and unidealized assessment of everyday life. Artists, writers, and composers attacked the reigning stereotypes and pursued scientifically-based fidelity to nature. Lithography and photography encouraged the Realist sensibility. Advances in science and technology facilitated increased mobility and transformed urban life. The city, with its monumental skyscrapers and its bustling mix of people, became the site of new ideas and cultural norms that propelled the West toward Modernism.
Science and Technology
1844 Samuel Morse (American) transmits the first telegraph message
1866 the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable is laid
1869 the first American transcontinental railroad is completed
1876 Alexander Graham Bell (Scottish) produces the first functional telephone in America
the texture of life in the industrialized world. This tech- nology, along with such lethal instruments of war as the fully automatic “machine gun,” gave Europe clear advan- tages over other parts of the globe and facilitated Western imperialism in less industrially developed areas. In the enterprise of empire building, the industrialized nations of Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the United States took the lead.
Colonialism and the New Imperialism The history of European expansion into Asia, Africa, and other parts of the globe dates back at least to the Renaissance. Between approximately 1500 and 1800, Europeans established trading outposts in Africa, China, and India. But not until after 1800, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, did European imperialism trans- form the territories of foreign peoples into outright colonial possessions. Driven by the need for raw materials and markets for their manufactured goods, and aided
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immeasurably by their advanced military technology, the industrial nations quickly colonized or controlled vast parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. So massive was this effort that, by the end of the nineteenth century, the West had established economic, political, and cultural domin- ion over much of the world.
European imperialists defended the economic exploita- tion of weaker countries with the view, inspired by social Darwinism, that in politics, as in nature, the strongest or “most fit” prevailed in the “struggle for survival.” Since Caucasians had proved themselves the “most fit,” they argued, it was the white population’s “burden” to care for, protect, and rule over the “less fit,” nonwhite peoples of the earth. Britain, the leader in European industrializa- tion, spearheaded the thrust of colonization.
The self-appointed mission of Western rule in less technologically developed countries is best expressed in a poem by one of the most popular British writers of his time, Rudyard Kipling (1864–1936). Three verses of his poem “The White Man’s Burden” sum up two of the key imperialist notions: racial superiority and the spirit of paternal and heroic deliverance.
READING 30.1 From Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” (1899)
Take up the White Man’s burden— 1 Send forth the best ye breed— Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captive’s need; To wait in heavy harness, 5 On fluttered folk and wide— Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.
. . . . . . . . . .
Take up the White Man’s Burden— Ye dare not stoop to less— 10 Nor call too loud on Freedom To cloak your weariness; By all ye cry or whisper, By all ye leave to do, The silent, sullen peoples 15 Shall weigh your Gods and you.
Take up the White Man’s burden— Have done with childish days— The lightly proffered laurel, The easy, ungrudged praise. 20 Comes now, to search your manhood Through all the thankless years, Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom, The judgment of your peers!
Q To whom might the terms “half-devil” and “half-child” apply?
Q How is the “White Man” in this poem described?
Kipling dedicated “The White Man’s Burden” to the United States to commemorate the American annexation of the Philippines in 1899, but the pattern for colonial- ism had been fixed by the British. In the race for overseas colonies, Britain led the way. The first major landmass to be subjugated was India, where commercial imperialism led to conquest, and, finally, to British rule in 1858. In less than a century, the nation had established control over so much territory across the globe that it could legiti- mately claim that “the sun never set” on the British Empire (Map 30.1).
The most dramatic example of the new imperialism was in Africa. In 1880, European nations controlled only 10 percent of the continent; but by 1900 all of Africa, save Ethiopia and Liberia, had been carved up by European powers, who introduced new models of political and eco- nomic authority, often with little regard for native popula- tions. The partitioning of Africa began in 1830 with the French conquest of Algeria (in the north). In the decades thereafter, Belgium laid claim to the Congo, and the Dutch and the British fought each other for control of South Africa—both nations savagely wresting land from the Zulu and other African peoples.
A century-long series of brutal wars with the Asante Empire in West Africa left the British in control of the Gold Coast, while the conquest of the Sudan in 1898 saw 11,000 Muslims killed by British machine guns (the British them- selves lost twenty-eight men). Profit-seeking European companies leased large tracts of African land from which native goods such as rubber, diamonds, and gold might be extracted; and increasingly Africans were forced to work on white-owned plantations and mines. The seeds of rac- ism and mutual contempt were sown in this troubled era, an era that predictably spawned modern liberation move- ments, such as those calling for pan-Islamic opposition to colonialism (see chapter 36).
By the mid-nineteenth century, the United States (itself a colony of Britain until 1776) had joined the scramble for economic control. America forced Japan to open its doors to Western trade in 1853. This event, which marked the end of Japan’s seclusion, ushered in the overthrow of the Tokugawa regime (see chapter 21) and marked the beginning of Japanese modernization under Meiji rule (1868–1912). In the Western hemisphere, the United States established its own overseas empire.
North Americans used the phrase “manifest destiny” to describe and justify a policy of unlimited expansion into the American West, Mexico, and elsewhere. The result was the United States’ acquisition of more than half of Mexico, control of the Philippines and Cuba, and a dominant posi- tion in the economies of the politically unstable nations of Latin America. Although Westerners rationalized their militant expansionism by contending that they were “civi- lizing” the backward peoples of the globe, in fact their diplomatic policies contributed to undermining cultural traditions, to humiliating and often enfeebling the civiliza- tions they dominated, and to creating conditions of eco- nomic dependency that would last well into the twentieth century (see chapter 36).
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China and the West The nineteenth century marked the end of China’s long history as an independent civilization. The European powers, along with Russia and Japan, carved out
trade concessions in China. And subsequent trade poli- cies by China’s imperial government, including efforts to restrict foreign trade, and the country’s traditionally nega- tive view of profit-taking, delayed any potential Chinese initiative toward industrialization.
More devastating still was the triangular trade pattern in opium and tea between India, China, and Britain. Established by Britain in the early nineteenth century, trade policy worked to stem the tide of British gold and silver that flowed to China to buy tea, a favorite British bev- erage. The Chinese had used narcotic opium for centuries, but as a result of the new arrangement large quantities of the drug—harvested in India—were exported directly to China. In exchange, the Chinese shipped tea to Britain. Opium addiction became an increasingly severe social problem in China. Following the opium-related death of the Chinese emperor’s son, the Chinese made every effort to restrict the importation of the drug and stem the activities of opium smugglers (Figure 30.2). British mer- chants refused to cooperate. The result was a series of wars
between Britain and China (the Opium Wars, 1839–1850) that brought China to its knees. In 1839, just before the first of these wars, the Chinese commissioner Lin Zexu (1785–1850) sent a detailed communication to the British queen pleading for Britain’s assistance in ending opium smuggling and trade. Whether or not Queen Victoria ever read Lin’s letter is unknown, but the document remains a literary tribute to the futile efforts of a great Asian civilization to achieve peace through diplomacy in the age of imperialism.
READING 30.2 From Lin Zexu’s Letter of Advice to Queen Victoria (1839)
. . .The kings of your honorable country by a tradition handed 1 down from generation to generation have always been noted for their politeness and submissiveness. We have read your successive tributary memorials saying, “In general our countrymen who go to trade in China have always received His Majesty the Emperor’s gracious treatment and equal justice,” and so on. Privately we are delighted with the way in which the honorable rulers of your country deeply understand the grand principles and are grateful for the Celestial grace. For this reason the Celestial Court in soothing those from afar has 10 redoubled its polite and kind treatment. The profit from trade
ALASKA (U.S.)
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EquatorEquator
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Map 30.1 European Colonies and Independent Nations in 1900. For many of the “independent states,” such as Persia and China, the political and economic influence of the West presented an often destabilizing threat.
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Figure 30.2 Cartoon from a Paris newspaper, date unknown. The inscription reads: “I tell you that you have to buy this opium immediately so that you can poison yourself; and then you will buy a lot of tea to digest our beefsteaks in a comfortable manner.”
has been enjoyed by them continuously for two hundred years. This is the source from which your country has become known for its wealth. But after a long period of commercial intercourse, there appear among the crowd of barbarians both good persons and bad, unevenly. Consequently there are those who smuggle opium to seduce the Chinese people and so cause the spread of the poison to all provinces. Such persons who only care to profit themselves, and disregard their harm to others, are not 20 tolerated by the laws of heaven and are unanimously hated by human beings. His Majesty the Emperor, upon hearing of this, is in a towering rage. He has especially sent me, his commissioner, to come to Kwangtung, and together with the governor-general and governor jointly to investigate and settle this matter. . . . We find that your country is [some 20,000 miles] from China. Yet there are barbarian ships that strive to come here for trade for the purpose of making a great profit. The wealth of China is used to profit the barbarians. That is to say, the great profit 30 made by barbarians is all taken from the rightful share of China. By what right do they then in return use the poisonous drug to injure the Chinese people? Even though the barbarians may not necessarily intend to do us harm, yet in coveting profit to an extreme, they have no regard for injuring others. Let us ask, where is your conscience? I have heard that the smoking of opium is very strictly forbidden by your country; that is because the harm caused by opium is clearly understood. Since it is not permitted to do harm to your own country, then
even less should you let it be passed on to the harm of other 40 countries—how much less to China! Of all that China exports to foreign countries, there is not a single thing which is not beneficial to people: they are of benefit when eaten, or of benefit when used, or of benefit when resold: all are beneficial. Is there a single article from China which has done any harm to foreign countries? Take tea and rhubarb, for example; the foreign countries cannot get along for a single day without them. If China cuts off these benefits with no sympathy for those who are to suffer, then what can the barbarians rely upon to keep themselves alive? Moreover the 50 [textiles] of foreign countries cannot be woven unless they obtain Chinese silk. If China, again, cuts off this beneficial export, what profit can the barbarians expect to make? As for other foodstuffs, beginning with candy, ginger, cinnamon, and so forth, and articles for use, beginning with silk, satin, chinaware, and so on, all the things that must be had by foreign countries are innumerable. On the other hand, articles coming from the outside to China can only be used as toys. We can take them or get along without them. Since they are not needed by China, what difficulty would there be if we closed 60 the frontier and stopped the trade? Nevertheless our Celestial Court lets tea, silk, and other goods be shipped without limit and circulated everywhere without begrudging it in the slightest. This is for no other reason but to share the benefit with the people of the whole world. The goods from China carried away by your country not only supply your own consumption and use, but also can be divided up and sold to other countries, producing a triple profit. Even if you do not sell opium, you still have this threefold profit. How can you bear to go further, selling products injurious to others 70 in order to fulfil your insatiable desire? Suppose there were people from another country who carried opium for sale to England and seduced your people into buying and smoking it; certainly your honorable ruler would deeply hate it and be bitterly aroused. We have heard heretofore that your honorable ruler is kind and benevolent. Naturally you would not wish to give unto others what you yourself do not want. We have also heard that the ships coming to Canton have all had regulations promulgated and given to them in which it is stated that it is not permitted to carry contraband 80 goods. This indicates that the administrative orders of your honorable rule have been originally strict and clear. Only because the trading ships are numerous, heretofore perhaps they have not been examined with care. Now after this communication has been dispatched and you have clearly understood the strictness of the prohibitory laws of the Celestial Court, certainly you will not let your subjects dare again to violate the law. . . . Now we have set up regulations governing the Chinese people. He who sells opium shall receive the death penalty and 90 he who smokes it also the death penalty. Now consider this: if the barbarians do not bring opium, then how can the Chinese people resell it, and how can they smoke it? The fact is that the wicked barbarians beguile the Chinese people into a death trap. How then can we grant life only to these barbarians? He who takes the life of even one person still has to atone for it with his own life; yet is the harm done by opium limited to the taking of one life only? Therefore in the new regulations, in
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regard to those barbarians who bring opium to China, the penalty is fixed at decapitation or strangulation. This is what is 100 called getting rid of a harmful thing on behalf of mankind. . . .
Q What “balance of trade” is described in this letter?
Q To what extent is Lin’s letter an appeal to conscience?
To the European mind, the benefits of Western science, technology, and religion far outweighed the negative impact of colonialism. But the “gift” of progress was received in China with extreme caution and increasing iso- lationism. No dramatically new developments took place in the arts of China (nor, for that matter, in India) during the nineteenth century; in general, there was a marked decline in both productivity and originality. The full consequences of Western colonialism in Asia and elsewhere, however, would not become clear until the twentieth century.
Social and Economic Realities In global terms, advancing industrialization polarized the nations of the world into the technologically advanced— the “haves”—and the technologically backward—the “have-nots.” But industrialization had an equally profound impact within the industrialized nations themselves: it changed the nature and character of human work, altered relationships between human beings, and affected the natural environment.
Before 1800, the practice of accumulating capital for industrial production and commercial profit played only a limited role in European societies. But after this date, industrial production, enhanced by advances in machine technology, came to be controlled by a relatively small group of middle-class entrepreneurs (those who organize, manage, and assume the risks of a business) and by an even smaller number of capitalists (those who provide money to finance business).
Industrialization created wealth, but that wealth was concentrated in the hands of a small minority of the popu- lation. The vast majority of men and women lived hard lives supported by meager wages—the only thing they had to sell was their labor. Factory laborers, including women and children, worked under dirty and dangerous condi- tions for long hours—sometimes up to sixteen hours per day (Figure 30.3). In the 1830s, almost half of London’s funerals were for children under ten years old. Mass production brought more (and cheaper) goods to more people more rapidly, ultimately raising the standard of living for industrialized nations. But European industriali- zation and the unequal distribution of wealth contributed to a widening gap between capitalist entrepreneurs—the “haves” of society—and the working classes—the “have- nots.” In 1846, the British statesman Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) described Britain under the rule of Queen Victoria (1819–1901) as two nations: the nation of the poor and the nation of the rich.
Beginning in 1848, the lower classes protested against these conditions with sporadic revolts. Economic unrest prevailed not only in the cities but also in rural areas. The
EXPLORING ISSUES
The process of colonization had dramatic effects on the Islamic world. Muslims in the Middle East, India, Arabia, Malaya, and much of Africa regarded the European efforts at colonization as an assault on their cultures and their religious faith. Europeans, who tended to see premodern agrarian societies as backward, looked upon “Orientals” (a term that lumped together all Eastern people) as inherently inferior. Unlike Japan or China, which had never been colonized, and were therefore able to retain many of their economic and political traditions, Islamic states were often debilitated and humiliated by dependency on the West.
European colonization of the Islamic world began in the late eighteenth century. Napoleon had invaded the Near East in 1798, bringing with him a corpus of European literature and a printing press with Arabic type. Despite the failure of Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt, the country made ambitious efforts to modernize. The failure of these efforts, however, which left Egypt bankrupt, led ultimately to British occupation.
A second instance of the Western presence in Islamic lands occurred in Persia (renamed Iran in 1935). Strategically located in the Middle East, Persia was forced into wars with Britain and Russia, whose rival interests in Middle Eastern territory threatened the autonomy of the Qajar dynasty (1794–1925). In the late nineteenth century, the Persian reformer Aqa Khan Kirmani (1853–1896) urged Muslims to adopt a program of Western-style modernization, to replace the sharia with a modern secular code of law, and to institute parliamentary representation. Iran’s first modern college system would emerge in 1848. Others throughout the Islamic world, however, opposed the intrusion of the West and Western ways of life as a threat to Muslim traditions and religious ideals (see chapter 36). One of the most significant differences involved the political gulf between time-honored Islamic theocracy and Western representative democracy. Such issues have continued to trouble the world well into our own time.
Islam and the West
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French population was two-thirds rural, largely poor, and often reduced to backbreaking labor (see Figure 30.10). Wealthy landowners in some parts of Europe treated their agricultural laborers as slaves. In America, until after the Civil War (1861–1865), most of those who worked the great Southern plantations were, in fact, African-American slaves. Between 1855 and 1861, there were almost 500 peasant uprisings across Europe (Figure 30.4). Reform, however, was slow in coming. Outside England—in Germany, for instance—trade unions and social legislation to benefit the working classes did not appear until 1880 or later, while in Russia economic reform would require nothing less than a full-scale revolution (see chapter 34).
Nineteenth-Century Social Theory Among nineteenth-century Euro- pean intellectuals there devel- oped a serious debate over how to address the social results of indus- trial capitalism. Matters of social
reform were central to the development of ideologies that dictated specific policies of political and economic action. Traditional conservatives stressed the importance of maintaining order and perpetuating conventional power structures and religious authority. Liberals, on the other hand, whose ideas were rooted in Enlightenment theories of human progress and perfectibility (see chapter 24), supported gradual reform through enlightened legal sys- tems, constitutional guarantees, and a generally equitable
distribution of material benefits. The British liberal Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) advanced the doctrine of utili- tarianism, which held that governments should work to secure “the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people”; while Bentham’s student John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) expounded the ideology of social liberalism.
Mill emphasized freedom of thought over equality and personal happiness. He held that individuals must be free to direct their own lives, but, recognizing the disadvantages that might result from free competition, he argued that the state must protect its weaker members by acting to regulate the economy where private initiative failed to do so. Mill feared that the general will—the will of unenlight- ened, propertyless masses—might itself prove tyrannical and oppressive. In his classic statement of the liberal creed, On Liberty (1859), he concluded that “as soon as any part of a person’s conduct affects prejudicially the interests of others, society has jurisdiction over it.” For Mill, as for most nineteenth-century liberals, government was obliged to intervene to safeguard and protect the wider interests of society.
Such theories met with strenuous opposition from European socialists, for whom neither conservatism nor liberalism responded adequately to current social and eco- nomic inequities. Socialists attacked capitalism as unjust; they called for the common ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution in the interest of a public good. Society, according to the socialists, should operate entirely in the interest of the needs of the people, communally and cooperatively, rather than competitively.
Figure 30.3 ADOLPH FRIEDRICH ERDMANN VON MENZEL, Iron Mill (Das Eisenwalzwerk—Moderne Zyklopen), 1875. Oil on canvas, 5 ft. 1∕4 in. × 8 ft. 35∕8 in.
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The utopian socialist Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) envisioned a society free of state control, while the more extreme anarchists favored the complete dissolution of the state and the elimination of the force of law.
The Radical Views of Marx and Engels The German theorist Karl Marx (1818–1883) agreed with the socialists that bourgeois capitalism corrupted human- ity, but his theory of social reform was even more radical, for it preached violent revolution that would both destroy the old order and usher in a new society. Marx began his career by studying law and philosophy at the University of Berlin. Moving to Paris, he became a lifelong friend of the social scientist and journalist Friedrich Engels (1820– 1895). Marx and Engels shared a similar critical attitude in respect of the effects of European industrial capitalism. By 1848, they completed the Communist Manifesto, a short treatise published as the platform of a workers’ associa- tion called the Communist League. The Manifesto, which remains the “guidebook” of Marxist socialism, demanded the “forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions” and the liberation of the proletariat, or working class. Marx offered an even more detailed criticism of the free enterprise system in Das Kapital, a work on which he toiled for thirty years.
The Communist Manifesto is a sweeping condemnation of the effects of capitalism on the individual and on society at large. It opens with a dramatic claim: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” It further contends that capitalism concentrates wealth in the hands of the few, providing great luxuries for some, while creating an oppressed and impoverished proletariat. The psychological effects of such circumstances, it holds, are devastating: bourgeois capitalism alienates workers from
their own productive efforts and robs individuals of their basic humanity. Finally, the Manifesto calls for revolution by which workers will seize the instruments of capitalistic production and abolish private ownership.
The social theories of Marx and Engels had enormous practical and theoretical influence. They not only supplied a justification for lower-class revolt, but also brought atten- tion to the role of economics in the larger life of a society. Marx perceived human history in exclusively materialistic terms, arguing that the conditions under which one earned a living determined all other aspects of life: social, politi- cal, and cultural. A student of Hegel (see chapter 27), he viewed history as a struggle between “haves” (thesis) and “have-nots” (antithesis) that would resolve in the synthesis of a classless society. From Hegel, Marx also derived the uto- pian idea of the perfectibility of the state. The product of dialectical change, argued Marx, was a society free of class antagonism, and the ultimate dissolution of the state itself.
Although Marx and Engels failed to anticipate capital- ism’s potential to spread rather than to limit wealth, their manifesto gave sharp focus to prevailing class differences and to the actual condition of the European economy of their time. Despite the fact that they provided no expla- nation of how their classless society might function, their apocalyptic call to revolution would be heeded in the decades to come. Oddly enough, communist revolutions would occur in some of the least industrialized countries of the world, such as Russia and China, rather than in the most industrialized countries, as Marx and Engels expect- ed. Elsewhere, communists would operate largely through nonrevolutionary vehicles, such as labor unions and political organizations, to initiate better working conditions, higher wages, and greater social equality. But the anticommunist revolutions and the collapse of the communist government
EXPLORING ISSUES
In On Liberty, Mill examined the nature of freedom, advocating individual rights over those of the state. He argued, however, that it was the legitimate duty of government to limit the exercise of any freedom that might harm other members of the community. Wrestling with key issues concerning limits to the authority of the state with regard to the individual, he asked: “What, then, is the rightful limit to the sovereignty of the individual over himself? Where does the authority of society begin? How much of human life should be assigned to individuality, and how much to society?”
Enlarging more generally on these questions, Mill’s American contemporary Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) observed: “The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but can not do at all, or can not so well do for themselves in their separate and individual
capacities.” Is providing for the needs of the community—much like providing protection for its citizens—the function of the government? Suppose the political process of providing for these needs (like the obligation to protect the individual) comes at the cost of limiting the absolute freedom of others?
To one degree or another, most of the great political divisions emerging from nineteenth-century social thought proceeded from these questions. They are still debated today, mainly in the opposing political ideologies of liberalism and conservatism. Contemporary liberals would incline toward a relatively greater use of government authority in serving the needs of society. Conservatives would incline toward a relatively lesser exercise of such control.
The Limits of Authority
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in the Soviet Union in the late twentieth century reveal mount- ing frustration with the failure of most communist regimes to raise economic standards among the masses. Although the Manifesto did not accurately predict the economic destiny of the modern world, the treatise remains a classic expression of nineteenth-century social consciousness.
READING 30.3 From Marx’s and Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848)
I Bourgeois and Proletarians1
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of 1 class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master2 and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, 10 a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. 20 Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is splitting up more and more into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East Indian and 30 Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development. The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were 40 pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop. Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires—the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois. Modern industry has established the world market, for which 50 the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages. We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of 60 revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange. Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval
1 By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage-laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.
2 Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild.
Figure 30.4 KÄTHE KOLLWITZ, March of the Weavers, from “The Weavers Cycle,” 1897. Etching, 83∕8 × 115∕8 in. Kollwitz (1867–1945) was a German social realist, a pacifist, and a feminist. The series of prints known as “The Weavers” illustrates a play by Gerhart Hauptmann that dramatized the failed revolt of Silesian weavers in 1842. A sculptor as well as a printmaker, Kollwitz went on to create searing protest images of the two world wars.
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commune,3 here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany), there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France), afterward, in the period of manufacture proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of 70 the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has 80 pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms has set up that single, unconscionable freedom— Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious 90 and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. . . . The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments 100 of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In a word, it creates a world after its own image. 110 The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on
nations of bourgeois, the East on the West. The bourgeoisie keeps doing away more and more with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, 120 and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralized means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization. Independent or but loosely connected provinces with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class interest, one frontier and one customs tariff. The bourgeoisie during its rule of scarce one hundred years has created more massive and more colossal productive forces 130 than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor? . . . But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class, 140 the proletarians. In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed—a class of laborers who live only as long as they find work, and who find work only as long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division 150 of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack that is required of him. . . . Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of 160 officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the
Science and Technology
1839 Charles Goodyear (American) produces industrial- strength rubber
1846 Elias Howe (American) patents an interlocking-stitch sewing machine
1866 the first dynamo, capable of generating massive quantities of electricity, is produced
1876 Nikolaus Otto (German) produces a workable internal combustion engine
3 “Commune” was the name taken in France by the nascent towns even before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters local self-government and political rights as the “Third Estate.” Generally speaking, for the economic development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the typical country; for its political development, France.
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bourgeois class and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overseer and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is. The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labor, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labor of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex no longer have any 170 distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex. No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer so far at an end that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, and shopkeeper, the pawnkeeper, etc. . .
II Proletarians and Communists . . . The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development 180 involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas. But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism. We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the 190 total of productive forces as rapidly as possible. . . .
III Position of the Communists . . . The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
Q Which of the Manifesto’s arguments are the strongest? Which are the weakest?
Mill and Women’s Rights While Marx and Engels criticized a society that made middle-class women “mere instrument[s] of production,” Mill described women of all classes as the unwilling sub- jects of more powerful males. In the treatise The Subjection of Women, Mill condemned the legal subordination of one sex to the other as objectively “wrong in itself, and . . . one of the chief hindrances to human improvement.” Mill’s optimism concerning the unbounded potential for social change—a hallmark of liberalism—may have been shortsighted, for women would not obtain voting rights in Britain until 1928.
In the United States, the first women’s college—Mount Holyoke—was founded at South Hadley, Massachusetts,
in 1836; and in 1848, at Seneca Falls in upstate New York, American feminists, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815– 1902) and Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906), issued the first of many declarations that demanded female equality in all areas of life.
The rights of women had been addressed in the lit- erature of feminists from Christine de Pisan to Condorcet and Mary Wollstonecraft (see chapter 24), but nowhere was the plight of women more eloquently treated than in Mill’s essay. Mill compared the subjection of women to that of other subject classes in the history of cul- ture. But his most original contribution was his analysis of the male/female relationship and his explanation of how that relationship differed from that of master and slave.
READING 30.4 From Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869)
All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely that 1 women should be collectively rebellious to the power of men. They are so far in a position different from all other subject classes that their masters require something more from them than actual service. Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favorite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all other 10 slaves rely, for maintaining obedience, on fear, either fear of themselves, or religious fears. The masters of women wanted more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to effect their purpose. All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will and government by self-control, but submission and yielding to the control of others. All the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature to live for others, to make complete abnegation of 20 themselves, and to have no life but in their affections. And by their affections are meant the only ones they are allowed to have—those to the men with whom they are connected, or to the children who constitute an additional and indefeasible tie between them and a man. When we put together three things—first, the natural attraction between opposite sexes; secondly, the wife’s entire dependence on the husband, every privilege or pleasure she has being either his gift, or depending entirely on his will; and lastly, that the principal object of human pursuit, consideration, and all objects of social ambition 30 can in general be sought or obtained by her only through him, it would be a miracle if the object of being attractive to men had not become the polar star of feminine education and formation of character. And this great means of influence over the minds of women having been acquired, an instinct of selfishness made men avail themselves of it to the utmost as a means of holding women in subjection, by representing to them meekness, submissiveness, and resignation of all individual will into the hands of a man, as an essential part of sexual
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attractiveness. . . . 40 The preceding considerations are amply sufficient to show that custom, however universal it may be, affords in this case no presumption and ought not to create any prejudice in favor of the arrangements which place women in social and political subjection to men. But I may go further, and maintain that the course of history, and the tendencies of progressive human society afford not only no presumption in favor of this system of inequality of rights, but a strong one against it; and that, so far as the whole course of human improvement up to this time, the whole stream of modern tendencies warrants any 50 inference on the subject, it is that this relic of the past is discordant with the future and must necessarily disappear. For, what is the peculiar character of the modern world— the difference which chiefly distinguishes modern institutions, modern social ideas, modern life itself, from those of times long past? It is, that human beings are no longer born to their place in life and chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but are free to employ their faculties and such favorable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable. Human society of old was 60 constituted on a very different principle. All were born to a fixed social position and were mostly kept in it by law or interdicted from any means by which they could emerge from it. As some men are born white and others black, so some were born slaves and others freemen and citizens; some were born patricians, others plebeians; some were born feudal nobles, others commoners. . . . The old theory was that the least possible should be left to the choice of the individual agent; that all he had to do should, as far as practicable, be laid down for him by superior wisdom. 70 Left to himself he was sure to go wrong. The modern conviction, the fruit of a thousand years of experience, is that things in which the individual is the person directly interested never go right but as they are left to his own discretion; and that any regulation of them by authority, except to protect the rights of others, is sure to be mischievous. . . .
Q How, in Mill’s view, does the relationship between male and female differ from that of master and slave?
Q What does Mill consider to be the “peculiar character” of Modernism?
The New Historicism While issues of class and gender preoccupied some of the finest minds of the nineteenth century, so too did matters surrounding the interpretation of the historical past. For many centuries, history was regarded as a branch of litera- ture rather than a social science. The Romantic histories, such as those of Thomas Carlyle (see chapter 28), served to emphasize the role of great men in shaping the destinies of nations. At the same time, the spirit of high patriotism inspired nineteenth-century historians such as Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859) in Britain and Fustel de Coulanges (1830–1889) in France to write nationalistic histories that brought attention to the greatness of their own people and culture.
Patriotism, however, also led historians to renew their efforts to retrieve the evidence of the past. Scholars com- piled vast collections of primary source materials; and, enamored of the new, positivist zeal for objective measure- ment and recording, they applied scientific methods to the writing of history. The result was an effort to recreate his- tory “as it actually was,” a movement later called historicism. Led by the German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795– 1886), historians produced historical works that depended on the objective interpretation of eyewitness reports and authentic documents. Von Ranke himself wrote sixty vol- umes on modern European history that rested on the criti- cal study of sources that he had gleaned from numerous archives. This method of writing history came to dominate modern-day historiography.
The new historicism that scholars brought to the critical study of religious history stirred great controversy. Rejecting all forms of supernaturalism, some nineteenth- century scholars disputed the literal interpretation of the Bible, especially where its contents conflicted with scien- tific evidence (as in the case of the Virgin Birth). Since the facts of Jesus’ life are so few, some also questioned the historicity of Jesus (that is, whether or not he had ever actu- ally lived), while still others—such as the eminent French scholar Ernest Renan, author of the Life of Jesus (1863)— questioned his divinity. Renan and his followers offered a rationalist reconstruction of religious history that worked to separate personal belief and moral conduct from conventional religious history and dogma. As universal education spread throughout the literate world, Church and state moved further apart, and education became increasingly secularized.
Realism in Literature The Novels of Dickens and Twain Inequities of class and gender had existed throughout the course of history, but in an age that pitted the progressive effects of industrial capitalism against the realities of pov- erty and inequality, social criticism was inevitable. Many writers pointed to these conditions and described them with unembellished objectivity. This unblinking attention to contemporary life and experience was the basis for the style known as literary realism.
More than any other genre, the nineteenth-century novel—by its capacity to detail characters and conditions— fulfilled the Realist credo of depicting life with complete candor. In place of heroic and exotic subjects, the Realist novel portrayed men and women in actual, everyday, and often demoralizing situations. It examined the social consequences of middle-class materialism, the plight of the working class, and the subjugation of women, among other matters.
While Realism did not totally displace Romanticism as the dominant literary mode of the nineteenth cen- tury, it often appeared alongside the Romantic—indeed, Romantic and sentimental elements can be found in gen- erally Realistic narratives. Such is the case in the novels
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Figure 30.5 THOMAS ANNAN, Close No. 193 High Street, 1868–1877, print ca. 1877. Carbon print, 11 × 91∕4 in. While Annan spent most of his life in Glasgow, Scotland, his photographs of disease-ridden slums are representative of similar circumstances in late nineteenth-century industrial centers. Annan’s photographs were instrumental in the eventual demolition of Glasgow’s slum areas.
of Charles Dickens (1812–1870) in England and Mark Twain, the pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), in America. Twain’s writings, including his greatest achieve- ment, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, reveal a blend of humor and irony that is not gener- ally characteristic of Dickens. But both writers employ a masterful use of dialect, sensitivity to pictorial detail, and a humanitarian sym- pathy in their descriptions of nineteenth- century life in specific locales—for Twain, the rural farmlands along the Mississippi River, and for Dickens, the streets of England’s industrial cities.
The most popular English novelist of his time, Dickens came from a poor family who provided him with little formal education. His early experiences supplied some of the themes for his most famous novels: Oliver Twist (1838) vividly portrays the slums, orphanages, and boarding schools of London; Nicholas Nickleby (1839) is a bitter indictment of England’s bru- tal rural schools; and David Copperfield (1850) condemns debtors’ prisons and the conditions that produced them.
Dickens’ novels are frequently theatrical, his characters may be drawn to the point of caricature, and his themes often suggest a sentimental faith in kindness and good cheer as the best antidotes to the bitterness of contempo- rary life. But, as the following excerpt illustrates, Dickens’ evocation of realistic detail was acute, and his portrayal of physical ugliness was unflinching. In this passage from The Old Curiosity Shop, he painted an unforgettable picture of the horrifying urban conditions that gave rise to the despair of the laboring classes and inspired their cries for social reform (Figure 30.5). His description of the English mill town of Birmingham, as first viewed by the novel’s heroine, little Nell, and her grandfather, finds striking parallels in nineteenth-century visual representations of Europe’s laboring poor; it also calls to mind the popular conceptions of Hell found in medieval art and literature (see chapter 12).
READING 30.5 From Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)
. . . A long suburb of red-brick houses—some with patches of 1 garden-ground, where coal-dust and factory smoke darkened the shrinking leaves and coarse, rank flowers; and where the struggling vegetation sickened and sank under the hot breath of kiln and furnace, making them by its presence seem yet
more blighting and unwholesome than in the town itself— a long, flat, straggling suburb passed, they came by slow degrees upon a cheerless region, where not a blade of grass was seen to grow; where not a bud put forth its promise in the spring; where nothing green could live but on the surface of 10 the stagnant pools, which here and there lay idly sweltering by the black roadside. Advancing more and more into the shadow of this mournful place, its dark depressing influence stole upon their spirits, and filled them with a dismal gloom. On every side, as far as the eye could see into the heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding on each other, and presenting that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly form, which is the horror of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air. On mounds of ashes by the wayside, 20 sheltered only by a few rough boards, or rotten pent-house roofs, strange engines spun and writhed like tortured creatures; clanking their iron chains, shrieking in their rapid whirl from time to time as though in torment unendurable, and making the ground tremble with their agonies. Dismantled houses here and there appeared, tottering to the earth, propped up by fragments of others that had fallen down, unroofed, windowless, blackened, desolate, but yet inhabited. Men, women, children, wan in their looks and ragged in attire, tended the engines, fed their tributary fires, begged upon the road, or scowled half 30 naked from the doorless houses. Then came more of the wrathful monsters, whose like they almost seemed to be in
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their wildness and their untamed air, screeching and turning round and round again; and still, before, behind, and to the right and left, was the same interminable perspective of brick towers, never ceasing in their black vomit, blasting all things living or inanimate, shutting out the face of day, and closing in on all these horrors with a dense dark cloud. But night-time in this dreadful spot!—night, when the smoke was changed to fire; when every chimney spirited up its flame; 40 and places, that had been dark vaults all day, now shone red- hot, with figures moving to and fro within their blazing jaws, and calling to one another with hoarse cries—night, when the noise of every strange machine was aggravated by the darkness; when the people near them looked wilder and more savage; when bands of unemployed laborers paraded in the roads, or clustered by torch-light round their leaders, who told them in stern language of their wrongs, and urged them on to frightful cries and threats; when maddened men, armed with sword and firebrand, spurning the tears and prayers of women 50 who would restrain them, rushed forth on errands of terror and destruction, to work no ruin half so surely as their own—night, when carts came rumbling by, filled with rude coffins (for contagious disease and death had been busy with the living crops); when orphans cried, and distracted women shrieked and followed in their wake—night, when some called for bread, and some for drink to drown their cares; and some with tears, and some with staggering feet, and some with bloodshot eyes, went brooding home—night, which, unlike the night that Heaven sends on earth, brought with it no peace, nor quiet, nor signs 60 of blessed sleep—who shall tell the terrors of the night to that young wandering child!
Q Which descriptive details are most effective in setting the tone of this novel?
Mark Twain’s literary classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the most widely taught book in American litera- ture. Published as a sequel to the popular “boys’ book” The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), which, like Dickens’ novels, appeared in serial format, the book recounts the exploits of the young narrator, Huck Finn, and the runaway slave, Jim, as the two make their way down the Mississippi River on a ramshackle raft. As humorist, journalist, and social critic, Twain offered his contemporaries a blend of entertainment and vivid insight into the dynamics of a unique time and place: the American South just prior to the Civil War. More generally, he conveys the innocence of youthful boyhood as it wrestles with the realities of greed, hypocrisy, and the moral issues arising from the troubled relations between black and white Americans in the mid- nineteenth century. These he captures in an exotic blend of dialects—the vernacular rhythms and idioms of local, untutored speech.
In the excerpt that follows, Huck, a poor, ignorant, but good-hearted Southern boy, experiences a crisis of con- science when he must choose between aiding and abetting a fugitive slave—a felony offense in the slave states of the South—and obeying the law by turning over his older companion and friend to the local authorities. Huck’s moral dilemma, the theme of this excerpt, was central to
the whole system of chattel slavery. Historically, slaves were considered property (chattel), that is, goods that could be bought, sold, or stolen. Clearly, however, they were also human beings. In opting to help Jim escape, Huck is, in effect, an accomplice to a crime. Nevertheless, Huck chooses to aid Jim the man, even as he violates the law in harboring Jim the slave.
READING 30.6 From Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Chapter 16
We slept most all day, and started out at night, a little ways 1 behind a monstrous long raft that was as long going by as a procession. She had four long sweeps1 at each end, so we judged she carried as many as thirty men, likely. She had five big wigwams aboard, wide apart, and an open camp fire in the middle, and a tall flag-pole at each end. There was a power of style about her. It amounted to something being a raftsman on such a craft as that. We went drifting down into a big bend, and the night clouded up and got hot. The river was very wide, and was walled with 10 solid timber on both sides; you couldn’t see a break in it hardly ever, or a light. We talked about Cairo,2 and wondered whether we would know it when we got to it. I said likely we wouldn’t, because I had heard say there warn’t but about a dozen houses there, and if they didn’t happen to have them lit up, how was we going to know we was passing a town? Jim said if the two big rivers joined together there, that would show. But I said maybe we might think we was passing the foot of an island and coming into the same old river again. That disturbed Jim—and me too. So the question was, what to do? I said, paddle ashore 20 the first time a light showed, and tell them pap was behind, coming along with a trading-scow, and was a green hand at the business, and wanted to know how far it was to Cairo. Jim thought it was a good idea, so we took a smoke on it and waited. There warn’t nothing to do, now, but to look out sharp for the town, and not pass it without seeing it. He said he’d be mighty sure to see it, because he’d be a free man the minute he seen it, but if he missed it he’d be in the slave country again and no more show for freedom. Every little while he jumps up and says: 30 “Dah she is!” But it warn’t. It was Jack-o-lanterns, or lightning-bugs;3 so he set down again, and went to watching, same as before. Jim said it made him all over trembly and feverish to be so close to freedom. Well, I can tell you it made me all over trembly and feverish, too, to hear him, because I begun to get it through my head that he was most free—and who was to blame for it? Why, me. I couldn’t get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way. It got to troubling me so I couldn’t rest; I couldn’t stay still in one place. It hadn’t ever come home to me before, what 40 this thing was that I was doing. But now it did; and it staid
1 Long oars. 2 A city in Illinois. 3 Fireflies.
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with me, and scorched me more and more. I tried to make out to myself that I warn’t to blame, because I didn’t run Jim off from his rightful owner; but it warn’t no use, conscience up and says, every time, “But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody.” That was so—I couldn’t get around that, noway. That was where it pinched. Conscience says to me, “What had poor Miss Watson done to you, that you could see her nigger go off right under your eyes and never say one single word? What did 50 that poor old woman do to you, that you could treat her so mean? Why, she tried to learn you your book, she tried to learn you your manners, she tried to be good to you every way she knowed how. That’s what she done.” I got to feeling so mean and so miserable I most wished I was dead. I fidgeted up and down the raft, abusing myself to myself, and Jim was fidgeting up and down past me. We neither of us could keep still. Every time he danced around and says, “Dah’s Cairo!” it went through me like a shot, and I thought if it was Cairo I reckoned I would die of miserableness. 60 Jim talked out loud all the time while I was talking to myself. He was saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the two children, and if their master wouldn’t sell them, they’d get an Ab’litionist to go and steal them. It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn’t ever dared to talk such talk in his life before. Just see what a difference it 70 made in him the minute he judged he was about free. It was according to the old saying, “give a nigger an inch and he’ll take an ell.”4 Thinks I, this is what comes of my not thinking. Here was this nigger which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children—children that belonged to a man I didn’t even know; a man that hadn’t ever done me no harm. I was sorry to hear Jim say that, it was such a lowering of him. My conscience got to stirring me up hotter than ever, until at last I says to it, “Let up on me—it ain’t too late, yet—I’ll 80 paddle ashore at the first light, and tell.” I felt easy, and happy, and light as a feather, right off. All my troubles was gone. I went to looking out sharp for a light, and sort of singing to myself. By-and-by one showed. Jim sings out: “We’s safe, Huck, we’s safe! Jump up and crack yo’ heels, dat’s de good ole Cairo at las’, I jis knows it!” I says: “I’ll take the canoe and go see, Jim. It mightn’t be, you know.” He jumped and got the canoe ready, and put his old coat in 90 the bottom for me to set on, and give me the paddle; and as I shoved off, he says: “Pooty soon I’ll be a-shout’n for joy, en I’ll say, it’s all on accounts o’ Huck; I’s a free man, en I couldn’t ever ben free ef it hadn’ ben for Huck; Huck done it. Jim won’t ever forgit you, Huck; you’s de bes’ fren’ Jim’s ever had; en you’s de only fren’ ole Jim’s got now.” I was paddling off, all in a sweat to tell on him; but when he
says this, it seemed to kind of take the tuck all out of me. I went along slow then, and I warn’t right down certain whether 100 I was glad I started or whether I warn’t. When I was fifty yards off, Jim says: “Dah you goes, de ole true Huck; de on’y white genlman dat ever kep’ his promise to old Jim.” Well, I just felt sick. But I says, I got to do it—I can’t get out of it. Right then, along comes a skiff with two men in it, with guns, and they stopped and I stopped. One of them says: “What’s that, yonder?” “A piece of a raft,” I says. “Do you belong on it?” 110 “Yes, sir.” “Any men on it?” “Only one, sir.” “Well, there’s five niggers run off to-night, up yonder above the head of the bend. Is you man white or black?” I didn’t answer up prompt. I tried to, but the words wouldn’t come. I tried, for a second or two, to brace up and out with it, but I warn’t man enough—hadn’t the spunk of a rabbit. I see I was weakening; so I just give up trying, and up and says— “He’s white.” 120 “I reckon we’ll go and see for ourselves.” “I wish you would,” says I, “because it’s pap that’s there, and maybe you’d help me tow the raft ashore where the light is. He’s sick—and so is mam and Mary Ann.” “Oh, the devil! we’re in a hurry, boy. But I s’pose we’ve got to. Come—buckle to your paddle, and let’s get along.” I buckled to my paddle and they laid to their oars. When we had made a stroke or two, I says: “Pap’ll be mighty much obleeged to you, I can tell you. Everybody goes away when I want them to help me tow the 130 raft ashore, and I can’t do it by myself.” “Well, that’s infernal mean. Odd, too. Say, boy, what’s the matter with your father?“ “It’s the—a—the—well, it ain’t anything, much.” They stopped pulling. It warn’t but a mighty little ways to the raft, now. One says: “Boy, that’s a lie. What is the matter with your pap? Answer up square, now, and it’ll be the better for you.” “I will, sir, I will, honest—but don’t leave us, please. It’s the—the—gentlemen, if you’ll only pull ahead, and let me 140 heave you the head-line, you won’t have to come a-near the raft—please do.” “Set her back, John, set her back!” says one. They backed water. “Keep away, boy—keep to looard.5 Confound it, I just expect the wind has blowed it to us. Your pap’s got the smallpox, and you know it precious well. Why didn’t you come out and say so? Do you want to spread it all over?” “Well,” says I, a-blubbering, “I’ve told everybody before, and then they just went away and left us.” “Poor devil, there’s something in that. We are right down 150 sorry for you, but we—well, hang it, we don’t want the smallpox, you see. Look here, I’ll tell you what to do. Don’t you try to land by yourself, or you’ll smash everything to pieces. You float along down about twenty miles and you’ll come to a town on the left-hand side of the river. It will be long after sun-up,
5 Leeward; away from the wind.4 An English measure equal to 45 inches.
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then, and when you ask for help, you tell them your folks are all down with chills and fever. Don’t be a fool again, and let people guess what is the matter. Now we’re trying to do you a kindness; so you just put twenty miles between us, that’s a good boy. It wouldn’t do any good to land yonder where the 160 light is—it’s only a wood-yard. Say—I reckon your father’s poor, and I’m bound to say he’s in pretty hard luck. Here—I’ll put a twenty dollar gold piece on this board, and you get it when it floats by. I feel mighty mean to leave you, but my kingdom! it won’t do to fool with small-pox, don’t you see?” “Hold on, Parker,” says the other man, “here’s a twenty to put on the board for me. Good-bye, boy, you do as Mr. Parker told you, and you’ll be all right.” “That’s so, my boy—good-bye, good-bye. If you see any runaway niggers, you get help and nab them, and you can 170 make some money by it.” “Good-bye, sir,” says I, “I won’t let no runaway niggers get by me if I can help it.” They went off, and I got aboard the raft, feeling bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn’t no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don’t get started right when he’s little, ain’t got no show6—when the pinch comes there ain’t nothing to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat. Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on,—s’pose you’d a done right and give 180 Jim up; would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I’d feel bad—I’d feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what’s the use you learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn’t answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn’t bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time. . . .
Q How does Twain bring to life the personalities of Huck and Jim?
Q How does Huck resolve his moral dilemma?
Russian Realism: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy More pessimistic than Dickens or Twain, and more pro- foundly analytic of the universal human condition, were the Russian novelists Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) and Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910). Both men were born and bred in wealth, but both turned against upper-class Russian society and sympathized with the plight of the lower classes.
Tolstoy ultimately renounced his wealth and property and went to live and work among the peasants. His histori- cal novel War and Peace (1869), often hailed as the greatest example of Realistic Russian fiction, traces the progress of five families whose destinies unroll against the back- ground of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. In this sprawling narrative, as in many of his other novels, Tolstoy exposes the privileged position of the nobility and the cruel exploitation of the great masses of Russian people. This task, along with sympathy for the cause of Russian nationalism in general, was shared by Tolstoy’s friend and admirer Ilya Repin (1844–1930), whose portrait
of Tolstoy brings the writer to life with skillful candor (Figure 30.6). Russia’s preeminent Realist painter, Repin rendered with detailed accuracy the miserable lives of ordinary Russians—peasants, laborers, and beggars—in genre paintings that might well serve as illustrations for the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
Dostoevsky paid greater attention than Tolstoy to philo- sophical and psychological issues. His characters are often victims of a dual plight: poverty and conscience. Their energies are foiled by bitter efforts to resolve their own contradictory passions. Dostoevsky’s personal life con- tributed to his bleak outlook: associated with a group of proletarian revolutionaries, he was arrested and deported to Siberia, where he spent five years at hard labor. The necessity of suffering is a central theme in his writing, as is the hope of salvation through suffering.
The novels Crime and Punishment (1866), The Possessed (1871), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) feature protago- nists whose irrational behavior and its psychological conse- quences form the central theme. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, a young, poor student, murders an old woman and her younger sister; his crime goes undetected. Thereafter, he struggles with guilt—the self-punishment for his criminal act. He also explores the problems 6 Has no chance.
Figure 30.6 ILYA REPIN, Portrait of Leo Tolstoy, 1887. Oil on canvas, 484∕5 × 342∕3 in. Repin was celebrated for his realistic depictions of contemporary Russian life and for the psychological insight he brought to his portraits of notable Russian writers and composers.
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arising from one’s freedom to commit evil. In the following excerpt, the protagonist addresses the moral question of whether extraordinary individuals, by dint of their unique- ness, have the right to commit immoral acts. The conver- sation, which takes place between Raskolnikov and his friends, is spurred by an article on crime that Raskolnikov had published in a journal shortly after dropping out of university. This excerpt is typical of Dostoevsky’s fondness for developing character through monologue and dia- logue, rather than through descriptive detail. Dostoevsky’s Realism (and his genius) lie in the way in which he forces the reader to understand the character as that character tries to understand himself.
READING 30.7 From Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866)
“. . . the ‘extraordinary’ man has the right . . . I don’t mean a 1 formal, official right, but he has the right in himself, to permit his conscience to overstep . . . certain obstacles, but only in the event that his ideas (which may sometimes be salutary for all mankind) require it for their fulfilment. You are pleased to say that my article is not clear; I am ready to elucidate it for you, as far as possible. Perhaps I am not mistaken in supposing that is what you want. Well, then. In my opinion, if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton, by some combination of circumstances, could not have become known to the world in any other way than by sacrificing the lives of one, or ten, 10 or more people, who might have hampered or in some way been obstacles in the path of those discoveries, then Newton would have had the right, or might even have been under an obligation . . . to remove those ten or a hundred people, so that his discoveries might be revealed to all mankind. It does not follow from this, of course, that Newton had the right to kill any Tom, Dick, or Harry he fancied, or go out stealing from market-stalls every day. I remember further that in my article I developed the idea that all the . . . well, for example, the law-givers and regulators of human society, beginning with 20 the most ancient, and going on to Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Napoleon and so on, were without exception transgressors,1
by the very fact that in making a new law they ipso facto broke an old one, handed down from their fathers and held sacred by society; and, of course, they did not stop short of shedding blood, provided only that the blood (however innocent and however heroically shed in defence of the ancient law) was shed to their advantage. It is remarkable that the greater part of these benefactors and law-givers of humanity were
particularly blood-thirsty. In a word, I deduce that all of them, 30 not only the great ones, but also those who diverge ever so slightly from the beaten track, those, that is, who are just barely capable of saying something new, must, by their nature, inevitably be criminals—in a greater or less degree, naturally. Otherwise they would find it too hard to leave their rut, and they cannot, of course, consent to remain in the rut, again by the very fact of their nature; and in my opinion they ought not to consent. In short, you see that up to this point there is nothing specially new here. It has all been printed, and read, a thousand times before. As for my division of people into 40 ordinary and extraordinary, that I agree was a little arbitrary, but I do not insist on exact figures. Only I do believe in the main principle of my idea. That consists in people being, by the law of nature, divided in general into two categories: into a lower (of ordinary people), that is, into material serving only for the reproduction of its own kind, and into people properly speaking, that is, those who have the gift or talent of saying something new in their sphere. There are endless subdivisions, of course, but the distinctive characteristics of the two categories are fairly well marked: the first group, that is the material, are, 50 generally speaking, by nature staid and conservative, they live in obedience and like it. In my opinion they ought to obey because that is their destiny, and there is nothing at all degrading to them in it. The second group are all law-breakers and transgressors, or are inclined that way, in the measure of their capacities. The aims of these people are, of course, relative and very diverse; for the most part they require, in widely different contexts, the destruction of what exists in the name of better things. But if it is necessary for one of them, for the fulfilment of his ideas, to march over corpses, or wade 60 through blood, then in my opinion he may in all conscience authorize himself to wade through blood—in proportion, however, to his idea and the degree of its importance—mark that. It is in that sense only that I speak in my article of their right to commit crime. (You will remember that we really began with the question of legality.) There is, however, not much cause for alarm: the masses hardly ever recognize this right of theirs, and behead or hang them (more or less), and in this way, quite properly, fulfil their conservative function, although in following generations these same masses put their former 70 victims on a pedestal and worship them (more or less). The first category are always the masters of the present, but the second are the lords of the future. The first preserve the world and increase and multiply; the second move the world and guide it to its goal. Both have an absolutely equal right to exist. In short, for me all men have completely equivalent rights, and—vive la guerre éternelle—until we have built the New Jerusalem, of course!”2
“You do believe in the New Jerusalem, then?” “Yes, I do,” answered Raskolnikov firmly; he said this with 80 his eyes fixed on one spot on the carpet, as they had been all through his long tirade. “A-and you believe in God? Forgive me for being so inquisitive.”
1 Raskolnikov’s views are similar to those expressed by Napoleon III in his book Life of Julius Caesar. The newspaper Golos (“Voice”) had recently summarized the English Saturday Review’s analysis of Napoleon’s ideas about the right of exceptional individuals (such as Lycurgus, Mahomet, and Napoleon I) to transgress laws and even to shed blood. The book appeared in Paris in March 1865; the Russian translation in April! [Lycurgus: the founder of the military regime of ancient Sparta; Solon: statesman and reformer in sixth-century B.C.E. Athens; Mahomet: Muhammad, the prophet of Allah and founder of the religion Islam.]
2 New Jerusalem, symbolic of the ideal order, after the end of time, is a Heaven on Earth, a new paradise. See the description in Revelation 21 (the Apocalypse). The French phrase means “Long live perpetual war.”
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“Yes, I do,” repeated Raskolnikov, raising his eyes to Porfiry. “A-a-and do you believe in the raising of Lazarus?” “Y-yes. Why are you asking all this?” “You believe in it literally?” “Yes.” “Ah . . . I was curious to know. Forgive me. But, returning to 90 the previous subject—they are not always put to death. Some, on the contrary . . .” “Triumph during their lifetime? Oh, yes, some achieve their ends while they still live, and then . . .” “They begin to mete out capital punishment themselves?” “If necessary, and, you know, it is most usually so. Your observation is very keen-witted.” “Thank you. But tell me: how do you distinguish these extraordinary people from the ordinary? Do signs and portents appear when they are born? I mean to say that we could do 100 with rather greater accuracy here, with, so to speak, rather more outward signs: please excuse the natural anxiety of a practical and well-meaning man, but couldn’t there be, for example, some special clothing, couldn’t they carry some kind of brand or something? . . . Because, you will agree, if there should be some sort of mix-up, and somebody from one category imagined that he belonged to the other and began ‘to remove all obstacles,’ as you so happily put it, then really . . .” “Oh, that very frequently happens! This observation of yours is even more penetrating than the last.” 110 “Thank you.” “Not at all. But you must please realize that the mistake is possible only among the first group, that is, the ‘ordinary’ people (as I have called them, perhaps not altogether happily). In spite of their inborn inclination to obey, quite a number of them, by some freak of nature such as is not impossible even among cows, like to fancy that they are progressives, ‘destroyers,’ and propagators of the ‘new world,’ and all this quite sincerely. At the same time, they really take no heed of new people; they even despise them, as reactionary and 120 incapable of elevated thinking. But, in my opinion, they cannot constitute a real danger, and you really have nothing to worry about, because they never go far. They might sometimes be scourged for their zealotry, to remind them of their place; there is no need even for anyone to carry out the punishment: they will do it themselves, because they are very well conducted: some of them do one another this service, and others do it for themselves with their own hands . . . And they impose on themselves various public penances besides—the result is beautifully edifying, and in short, you have nothing to worry 130 about . . . This is a law of nature.” “Well, at least you have allayed my anxieties on that score a little; but here is another worry: please tell me, are there many of these people who have the right to destroy others, of these ‘extraordinary’ people? I am, of course, prepared to bow down before them, but all the same you will agree that it would be terrible if there were very many of them, eh?” “Oh, don’t let that trouble you either,” went on Raskolnikov in the same tone. “Generally speaking, there are extremely few people, strangely few, born, who have a new idea, or are even 140 capable of saying anything at all new. One thing only is clear, that the ordering of human births, all these categories and subdivisions, must be very carefully and exactly regulated
by some law of nature. This law is, of course, unknown at present, but I believe that it exists, and consequently that it may be known. The great mass of men, the common stuff of humanity, exist on the earth only in order that at last, by some endeavour, some process, that remains as yet mysterious, some happy conjunction of race and breeding, there should struggle into life a being, one in a thousand, capable, in 150 however small a degree, of standing on his own feet. Perhaps one in ten thousand (I am speaking approximately, by way of illustration) is born with a slightly greater degree of independence, and one in a hundred thousand with even more. One genius may emerge among millions, and a really great genius, perhaps, as the crowning point of many thousands of millions of men. In short, I have not been able to look into the retort whence all this proceeds. But a definite law there must be, and is; it cannot be a matter of chance. . . .”
Q Into what two categories does Raskolnikov divide humankind?
Q How does he justify the transgressions of the “lords of the future”?
The Literary Heroines of Flaubert and Chopin Nineteenth-century novelists shared a special interest in examining conflicts between social conventions and personal values, especially as they affected the everyday lives of women. Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877), and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) are representative of the writer’s con- cern with the tragic consequences following from the defi- ance of established social and moral codes by passionate female figures. The heroines of these novels do not create the world in their own image; rather, the world—or more specifically, the social and economic environment—molds them and governs their destinies.
Flaubert (1821–1880), whom critics have called “the inventor of the modern novel,” stripped his novels of sen- timentality and of all preconceived notions of behavior. He aimed at a precise description of not only the stuff of the physical world but also the motivations of his characters. A meticulous observer, he sought le mot juste (“the exact word”) to describe each concrete object and each psycho- logical state—a practice that often prevented him from writing more than one or two pages of prose per week. One contemporary critic wittily claimed that Flaubert, the son of a surgeon, wielded his pen like a scalpel.
Flaubert’s landmark novel, Madame Bovary, tells the story of a middle-class woman who desperately seeks to escape the boredom of her mundane existence. Educated in a convent and married to a dull small-town physician, Emma Bovary tries to live out the fantasies that fill the pages of her favorite romance novels, but her efforts to do so prove disastrous and lead to her ultimate destruction. With a minimum of interpretation, Flaubert reconstructs the particulars of Emma’s provincial surroundings and her bleak marriage. Since the novel achieves its full effect through the gradual development of plot and character,
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no brief excerpt can possibly do it justice. Nevertheless, the following extract, which describes the deterioration of the adulterous affair between Emma Bovary and the young clerk Léon, illustrates Flaubert’s ability to characterize places and persons by means of the fastidious selection and accumulation of descriptive details.
READING 30.8 From Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857)
In the end Léon had promised not to see Emma again; and he 1 reproached himself for not keeping his word, when he considered the power this woman possessed to embroil him in dubious situations, or inspire gossip, quite apart from the jokes that circulated among his fellow clerks every morning, when they gathered round the stove. Besides, he was about to be promoted to head clerk; the time had come to be serious. So he gave up the flute, and transports of emotion, and flights of imagination—for every respectable middle-class man, in the ferment of his youth, has seen himself, if only for one day, or one hour, as capable of 10 grand emotions and lofty enterprises! The most half-hearted libertine has fantasized about Oriental queens; and every notary carries within himself the vestigial traces of a poet. He felt bored, now, when Emma, without warning, burst into sobs in his arms; and, like a listener who can only endure a certain dose of music and no more, his heart was growing torpid with indifference towards this clamorous love, whose delicate nuances he could no longer distinguish. They knew one another too well to experience that wonderment in mutual possession that increased its joy a 20 hundredfold. She was as sick of him as he was weary of her. Emma was rediscovering, in adultery, all the banality of marriage. But how to rid herself of him? And then, despite the humiliation of craving such base pleasures, she had come, either out of habit or depravity, to depend on them, and each day she pursued them with a greater frenzy, exhausting every possibility of happiness by the excess of her demands. She blamed Léon for her disappointed hopes, as if he had betrayed her; and she even longed for some disaster that would occasion their separation, since she herself lacked the courage to bring this about. 30 But in spite of this she did continue to write him love letters, faithful to the idea that a woman should always write to her lover. But, as she wrote, she saw a different man, created from her most passionate memories, her most beautiful passages of fiction, and her most intense yearnings; and in the end he became so real and tangible that her heart would throb in amazement, but without her being able to conjure him up in precise detail, for, like some god, his outline would be blurred by the very multiplicity of his attributes. He inhabited that hazy blue region where silken ladders sway from balconies, and the bright moonlight is heavy 40 with the scent of flowers. She could feel him close to her, he was approaching, he would ravish her with a kiss and carry her off with him. Then, afterwards, she would come back to earth utterly spent and broken—for those vague amorous raptures left her more exhausted than the most extreme debauchery.
Q What insights into Emma’s personality are offered in this brief excerpt? Into Léon’s personality?
Almost immediately after Madame Bovary appeared (in the form of six installments in the Revue de Paris), the novel was denounced as an offense against public and religious morals, and Flaubert, as well as the publisher and the print- er of the Revue, was brought to trial before a criminal court. All three men were ultimately acquitted, but not before an eloquent lawyer had defended all the passages (including those in Reading 30.8) that had been condemned as wan- ton and immoral.
A similar situation befell the American writer Kate Chopin (1851–1904), whose novel The Awakening was banned in her native city of St. Louis shortly after its pub- lication in 1899. The novel, a frank examination of female sexual passion and marital infidelity, violated the norms of the society in which Chopin had been reared. Unlike Flaubert, whose novels convey the staleness and inescap- ability of French provincial life, many of Chopin’s stories deliberately ignore the specifics of time and place. Some are set in Louisiana, where Chopin lived for twelve years with her husband and six children. Chopin was success- ful in selling her Louisiana dialect stories, many of which explore matters of class, race, and gender within the world of Creole society, but her novels fell into obscurity soon after her death. The Awakening, whose heroine defies con- vention by committing adultery, did not receive positive critical attention until the 1950s.
While Chopin absorbed the Realist strategies and social concerns of Flaubert, she brought to her prose a sensi- tivity to the nuances of human (and especially female) behavior that challenged popular Romantic stereotypes (see chapter 28). Her work also reveals a remarkable talent for narrating a story with jewel-like precision. Her taut descriptive style reaches unparalleled heights in the short prose piece known as “The Story of an Hour.” Here, the protagonist’s brief taste of liberation takes on an ironic fatal turn.
READING 30.9 Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” (“The Dream of an Hour”) (1894)
Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, 1 great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death. It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences: veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard’s name leading the list of “killed.” He had only taken time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened 10 to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message. She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralysed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with a sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away
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to her room alone. She would have no one follow her. There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into 20 her soul. She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves. There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window. 30 She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams. She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather a suspension of intelligent thought. There was something coming to her and she was waiting 40 for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air. Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will—as powerless as her white slender hands would have been. When she abandoned herself a little whispered word 50 escaped her slight parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: “free, free, free!” The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body. She did not stop to ask if it were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial. She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death: fixed and grey and dead. 60 But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome. There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination. 70 And yet she loved him—sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being! “Free! Body and soul free!” she kept whispering.
Josephine was kneeling before the keyhole, imploring for admission. “Louise, open the door! I beg: open the door—you will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven’s sake open the door.” “Go away. I’m not making myself ill.” No: she was drinking 80 in a very elixir of life through that open window. Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long. She arose at length and opened the door to her sister’s importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister’s wrist, and together they descended the 90 stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom. Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine’s piercing cry; at Richards’ quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife. But Richards was too late. When the doctors came they said she had died of heart 100 disease—of joy that kills.
Q What does this story imply about the relationship between husband and wife?
Q Would the story be equally effective if the roles of Louise and Brently Mallard were reversed?
Zola and the Naturalistic Novel Kate Chopin’s contemporary Emile Zola (1840–1902) initi- ated a variant form of literary Realism known as naturalism. Naturalist fiction was based on the premise that everyday life should be represented with scientific objectivity: faith- fully and with detailed accuracy. Contrary to Romantic writers, naturalists refused to embellish or idealize expe- rience. They went beyond the Realism of Flaubert and Dickens by conceiving their characters in accordance with psychological and sociological factors, and as products of the laws of heredity. This deterministic approach showed human beings as products of environmental or hereditary factors over which they had little or no control. Just as Marx held that economic life shaped all aspects of culture, so naturalists believed that material and social elements determined human conduct and behavior.
Zola (Figure 30.7) treated the novel as a carefully researched study of commonplace, material existence. In his passion to describe his time and place with absolute fidelity, he studied labor problems, police records, and industrial history, amassing notebooks of information on a wide variety of subjects, including coal mining, the railroads, the stock market, and the science of surgery. He presented a slice of life that showed how social and material circumstances shaped the society of late nineteenth-century France. His twenty novels (known
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as the “Rougon-Macquart” series) exploring the lives of French farmers, miners, statesmen, prostitutes, scholars, and artists constitutes a psycho-socio-biological history of his time. The Grog Shop (1877) offers a terrifying picture of the effects of alcoholism on industrial workers. Nana (1880) is a scathing portrayal of a beautiful but unscru- pulous prostitute. The most scandalous of his novels, it inspired charges of pornography and “gutter-sweeping.”
A later novel in the “Rougon-Macquart” series, Germinal (1885), exposes the bitter lives of coal miners in northern France. The excerpt that follows, which relates the hellish experience of the miner Maheu, reflects Zola’s talent for detailed description that transforms his writing from mere social history to powerful fiction.
READING 30.10 From Zola’s Germinal (1885)
The four cutters [miners] had stretched themselves out, head to 1 toe, over the whole surface of the sloping face. Separated by hooked planks that caught the loosened coal, each of them occupied about fifteen feet of the vein, which was so narrow— scarcely twenty inches at this point—that they were squashed
in between the roof and the wall. They had to drag themselves along on their knees and elbows, and were unable to turn without bruising their shoulders. To get at the coal, they had to lie sideways, their necks twisted and their raised arms wielding the short-handled picks at an angle. 10 Zacharie was at the bottom. Levaque and Chaval above him, and Maheu at the very top. Each one was hacking away at the bed of shale with his pick, cutting two vertical grooves in the vein, then driving an iron wedge into the top of the block and freeing it. The coal was soft, and the block crumbled into pieces and rolled down their stomachs and thighs. When these pieces, caught by the planks, had heaped up beneath them, the cutters disappeared, walled up in the narrow crevice. Maheu was the one who suffered most. The temperature at the top climbed as high as ninety-five degrees; the air did not 20 circulate, and the suffocating heat eventually became unbearable. In order to see clearly, he had had to hang his lamp on a nail right next to his head, and this additional heat beating down on his skull made his blood sing in his ears. But the worst was the dampness. Water was continually dripping down from the rock only a few inches above his face, and there was a never-ending stream of drops falling, with a maddening rhythm, always on the same spot. It was no use twisting his neck or turning his head: the drops kept beating against his face, splattering and spreading without stop. At the end of a quarter of an hour he was soaked 30 through, coated with his own sweat, and steaming like a tub of laundry. a That morning drop ceaselessly trickling into his eye made him swear, but he wouldn’t stop cutting, and his mighty blows jolted him so violently between the two layers of rock that he was like a plant-louse caught between two pages of a book— in constant danger of being completely crushed. Not a word was said. They were all hammering away, and nothing could be heard except these irregular blows, muffled and seemingly far away. The sounds were harsh in the echoless, dead air, and it seemed as though the shadows had a strange 40 blackness, thickened by the flying coal dust and made heavier by the gases that weighed down on their eyes. Behind metal screens, the wicks of their lamps gave off only reddish points of light, and it was hard to see anything. The stall opened out like a large, flat, oblique chimney in which the soot of ten winters had built up an unrelieved darkness. Phantom forms moved about, dull beams of light giving glimpses of a rounded haunch, a brawny arm, a distorted face blackened as if in preparation for a crime. Occasionally, as blocks of coal came loose, they would catch the light and shoot off crystal-like glitters from their suddenly 50 illuminated facets. Then it would be dark again, the picks would beat out heavy dull blows, and there was nothing but the sound of panting breaths, grunts of discomfort and fatigue in the stifling air, and the dripping water from the underground streams.
Q Which of the senses does Zola engage in this description of coal mining?
Elements of naturalism are found in the novels of many late nineteenth-century writers in both Europe and America. Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) in England and Stephen Crane (1871–1900), Jack London (1876–1916) and Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) in America are the most notable of the English-language literary naturalists.
Figure 30.7 EDOUARD MANET, Zola, exhibited 1868. Oil on canvas, 57 × 45 in. Manet’s portrait has the quality of a snapshot. The writer is seen at his desk, which holds a copy of his short biography of the artist. Above the desk, he has posted a black-and-white reproduction of Manet’s Olympia, a Japanese print of a sumo wrestler, and Goya’s etching of a painting by Velázquez, favorite artists of both Manet and Zola.
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Realist Drama: Ibsen The Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) brought to the late nineteenth-century stage concerns similar to those in the novels of the Realists. A moralist and a critic of human behavior, he attacked the artificial social conventions that led people to pursue self-deluding and hypocritical lives. Ibsen was deeply concerned with contemporary issues and social problems. He shocked the public with prose dramas that addressed such controver- sial subjects as insanity, incest, and venereal disease. At the same time, he explored universal themes of conflict between the individual and society, between love and duty, and between husband and wife.
In 1879, Ibsen wrote the classic drama of female libera- tion, A Doll’s House. Threatened with blackmail over a debt she had incurred years earlier, Nora Helmer looks to her priggish husband Torvald for protection. But Torvald is a victim of the small-mindedness and middle-class social restraints of his time and place. When he fails to rally to his wife’s defense, Nora realizes the frailty of her depend- ent lifestyle. Awakened to the meaninglessness of her life as “a doll-wife” in “a doll’s house,” she comes to recognize that her first obligation is to herself and to her dignity as a human being.
Nora’s revelation brings to life, in the forceful language of everyday speech, the psychological tension between male and female that Mill had analyzed only ten years earlier in his treatise on the subjection of women. Ibsen does not resolve the question of whether a woman’s duties to husband and children come before her duty to herself; yet, as is suggested in the following exchange between Nora and Torvald (excerpted from the last scene of A Doll’s House), Nora’s self-discovery precipitates the end of her marriage. She shuts the door on the illusions of the past as emphatically as Ibsen shut out the world of Romantic idealism.
READING 30.11 From Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879)
Act III, Final Scene
[Late at night in the Helmers’ living room. Instead of retiring, Nora suddenly appears in street clothes.] Helmer: . . . What’s all this? I thought you were going to 1 bed. You’ve changed your dress? Nora: Yes, Torvald; I’ve changed my dress. Helmer: But what for? At this hour? Nora: I shan’t sleep tonight. Helmer: But, Nora dear— Nora [looking at her watch]: It’s not so very late—Sit down, Torvald; we have a lot to talk about. [She sits at one side of the table.] Helmer: Nora—what does this mean? Why that stern 10 expression? Nora: Sit down. It’ll take some time. I have a lot to say to you. [Helmer sits at the other side of the table.] Helmer: You frighten me, Nora. I don’t understand you.
Nora: No, that’s just it. You don’t understand me; and I have never understood you either—until tonight. No, don’t interrupt me. Just listen to what I have to say. This is to be a final settlement, Torvald. Helmer: How do you mean? 20 Nora [after a short silence]: Doesn’t anything special strike you as we sit here like this? Helmer: I don’t think so—why? Nora: It doesn’t occur to you, does it, that though we’ve been married for eight years, this is the first time that we two—man and wife—have sat down for a serious talk? Helmer: What do you mean by serious? Nora: During eight whole years, no—more than that—ever since the first day we met—we have never exchanged so much as one serious word about serious things. 30 Helmer: Why should I perpetually burden you with all my cares and problems? How could you possibly help me to solve them? Nora: I’m not talking about cares and problems. I’m simply saying we’ve never once sat down seriously and tried to get to the bottom of anything. Helmer: But, Nora, darling—why should you be concerned with serious thoughts? Nora: That’s the whole point! You’ve never understood me—A great injustice has been done me, Torvald; first by 40 Father, and then by you. Helmer: What a thing to say! No two people on earth could ever have loved you more than we have! Nora [shaking her head]: You never loved me. You just thought it was fun to be in love with me. Helmer: This is fantastic! Nora: Perhaps. But it’s true all the same. While I was still at home I used to hear Father airing his opinions and they became my opinions; or if I didn’t happen to agree, I kept it to myself— he would have been displeased otherwise. He used to call me 50 his doll-baby, and played with me as I played with my dolls. Then I came to live in your house— Helmer: What an expression to use about our marriage! Nora [undisturbed]: I mean—from Father’s hands I passed into yours. You arranged everything according to your tastes, and I acquired the same tastes, or I pretended to—I’m not sure which—a little of both, perhaps. Looking back on it all, it seems to me I’ve lived here like a beggar, from hand to mouth. I’ve lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald. But that’s the way you wanted it. You and Father have done me a great 60 wrong. You’ve prevented me from becoming a real person. Helmer: Nora, how can you be so ungrateful and unreasonable! Haven’t you been happy here? Nora: No, never. I thought I was; but I wasn’t really. Helmer: Not—not happy! Nora: No, only merry. You’ve always been so kind to me. But our home has never been anything but a play-room. I’ve been your doll-wife, just as at home I was Papa’s doll-child. And the children, in turn, have been my dolls. I thought it fun when you played games with me, just as they thought it fun 70 when I played games with them. And that’s been our marriage, Torvald. Helmer: There may be a grain of truth in what you say, even though it is distorted and exaggerated. From now on things
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will be different. Play-time is over now; tomorrow lessons begin! Nora: Whose lessons? Mine, or the children’s? Helmer: Both, if you wish it, Nora, dear. Nora: Torvald, I’m afraid you’re not the man to teach me to be a real wife to you. 80 Helmer: How can you say that? Nora: And I’m certainly not fit to teach the children. Helmer: Nora! Nora: Didn’t you just say, a moment ago, you didn’t dare trust them to me? Helmer: That was in the excitement of the moment! You mustn’t take it so seriously! Nora: But you were quite right, Torvald. That job is beyond me; there’s another job I must do first: I must try and educate myself. You could never help me to do that; I must do it quite 90 alone. So, you see—that’s why I’m going to leave you. Helmer: [jumping up]: What did you say—? Nora: I shall never get to know myself—I shall never learn to face reality—unless I stand alone. So I can’t stay with you any longer. Helmer: Nora! Nora! Nora: I am going at once. I’m sure Kristine will let me stay with her tonight— Helmer: But, Nora—this is madness! I shan’t allow you to do this. I shall forbid it! 100 Nora: You no longer have the power to forbid me anything. I’ll only take a few things with me—those that belong to me. I shall never again accept anything from you. Helmer: Have you lost your senses? Nora: Tomorrow I’ll go home—to what was my home, I mean. It might be easier for me there, to find something to do. Helmer: You talk like an ignorant child, Nora—! Nora: Yes. That’s just why I must educate myself. Helmer: To leave your home—to leave your husband, and your children! What do you suppose people would say to that? 110 Nora: It makes no difference. This is something I must do. Helmer: It’s inconceivable! Don’t you realize you’d be betraying your most sacred duty? Nora: What do you consider that to be? Helmer: Your duty towards your husband and your children—I surely don’t have to tell you that! Nora: I’ve another duty just as sacred. Helmer: Nonsense! What duty do you mean? Nora: My duty towards myself. Helmer: Remember—before all else you are a wife 120 and mother. Nora: I don’t believe that any more. I believe that before all else I am a human being, just as you are—or at least that I should try and become one. I know that most people would agree with you, Torvald—and that’s what they say in books. But I can no longer be satisfied with what most people say— or what they write in books. I must think things out for myself—get clear about them. Helmer: Surely your position in your home is clear enough? Have you no sense of religion? Isn’t that an infallible guide 130 to you? Nora: But don’t you see, Torvald—I don’t really know what religion is. Helmer: Nora! How can you!
Nora: All I know about it is what Pastor Hansen told me when I was confirmed. He taught me what he thought religion was—said it was this and that. As soon as I get away by myself, I shall have to look into that matter too, try and decide whether what he taught me was right—or whether it’s right for me, at least. 140 Helmer: A nice way for a young woman to talk! It’s unheard of! If religion means nothing to you, I’ll appeal to your conscience; you must have some sense of ethics, I suppose? Answer me! Or have you none? Nora: It’s hard for me to answer you, Torvald. I don’t think I know—all these things bewilder me. But I do know that I think quite differently from you about them. I’ve discovered that the law, for instance, is quite different from what I had imagined; but I find it hard to believe it can be right. It seems it’s criminal for a woman to try and spare her old, sick, father, or save her 150 husband’s life! I can’t agree with that. Helmer: You talk like a child. You have no understanding of the society we live in. Nora: No, I haven’t. But I’m going to try and learn. I want to find out which of us is right—society or I. Helmer: You are ill, Nora; you have a touch of fever; you’re quite beside yourself. Nora: I’ve never felt so sure—so clear-headed—as I do tonight. Helmer: “Sure and clear-headed” enough to leave your 160 husband and your children? Nora: Yes. Helmer: Then there is only one explanation possible. Nora: What? Helmer: You don’t love me any more. Nora: No; that is just it. Helmer: Nora!—What are you saying! Nora: It makes me so unhappy, Torvald; for you’ve always been so kind to me. But I can’t help it. I don’t love you any more. 170 Helmer [mastering himself with difficulty]: You feel “sure and clear-headed” about this too? Nora: Yes, utterly sure. That’s why I can’t stay here any longer. . . .
Q What reasons does Nora give Helmer for leaving him?
Q What is Helmer’s perception of Nora?
Realism in the Visual Arts The Birth of Photography One of the most significant factors in the development of the materialist mentality was the birth of photogra- phy. While a painting or an engraving might bring to life the content of the artist’s imagination, a photograph offered an authentic record of a moment vanished in time. Unlike the camera obscura, which captured an image only briefly (see chapter 23), the photograph fixed and preserved reality.
Photography—literally “writing with light”—had its beginnings in 1835, when William Henry Fox Talbot
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Figure 30.8 JULIA MARGARET CAMERON, Whisper of the Muse (G. F. Watts and Children), ca. 1865. Photograph, 101∕4 × 81∕2 in.
(1800–1877) fixed negative images on paper coated with light-sensitive chemicals, a process by which multiple prints might be produced from a single exposure. Slightly earlier, Talbot’s French contemporary Louis J. M. Daguerre (1787–1851) had developed a similar process that fixed the image on a polished metal plate. Unlike Talbot’s prints (produced from paper negatives), however, Daguerre’s images could not be reproduced—each was a one-of-a-kind object. Nevertheless, in the next decades, his more widely publicized and technically improved product, known as a daguerreotype, came into vogue throughout Europe and America, where it fulfilled a growing demand for portraits. Gradual improvements in camera lenses and in the chemicals used to develop the visible image hastened the rise of photography as a popular way of recording the physical world with unprec- edented accuracy.
Photography presented an obvious challenge to the authority of the artist, who, throughout history, had assumed the role of nature’s imita- tor. But artists were slow to realize the long-range impact of photography—that is, the camera’s potential to liberate artists from reproducing the physical “look” of nature. Critics proclaimed that photographs, as authentic facsimiles of the physical world, should serve artists as aids to achieving greater Realism in canvas painting; and many artists did indeed use photographs as factual resources for their com- positions. Nevertheless, by mid-century, both Europeans and Americans were using the camera for a wide variety of other purposes: they made topographical studies of exotic geographic sites, recorded architectural monuments, and produced thousands of portraits. Photography provided ordinary people with portrait images that had previously been available only to those who could afford painted
likenesses. In the production of portraits, the daguerreo- type proved most popular; by 1850, some 100,000 were sold each year in Paris. Such photographs were used as calling cards and to immortalize the faces of notable individuals (see Figure 28.5), as well as those of criminals, whose “mug shots” became a useful tool for the young science of criminology.
Some photographers, such as the British pioneer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879), who began her career at the age of forty-eight, used the camera to recreate the style of Romantic painting. Imitating the effects of the artist’s paintbrush, Cameron’s moody lighting, shallow depth of field, and long exposure times produced soft-focus por- traits that are Romantic in spirit and sentiment (Figure 30.8). Others used the camera to document the factual reality of their time and place. The French photographer Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, known as Nadar (1820–1910), made vivid portrait studies of such celebrities as George Sand, Berlioz, and Sarah Bernhardt. Nadar was the first to experiment with aerial photography (see Figure 30.13). He also introduced the use of electric light for a series of extraordinary photographs that examined the sewers and catacombs beneath the city of Paris.
Inevitably, nineteenth-century photographs served as social documents: the black-and-white images of poverty- stricken families and ramshackle tenements (see Figure
Science and Technology
1835 William H. F. Talbot (English) invents the negative– positive photographic process
1837 Louis J. M. Daguerre (French) uses a copper plate coated with silver to produce the first daguerreotype
1860 production begins on the first Winchester repeating rifle (in America)
1866 explosive dynamite is first produced in Sweden
1888 George Eastman (American) perfects the “Kodak” box camera
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30.5) produced by Thomas Annan (1829–1887), for instance, record with gritty Realism the notorious slums of nineteenth-century Glasgow, Scotland. Such photographs could easily illustrate the novels of Charles Dickens. In a similar vein, the eyewitness photographs of the American Civil War (1861–1865) produced by Mathew B. Brady (1823–1896) and his staff testify to the importance of the professional photographer as a chronicler of military com- bat. Brady’s 3500 Civil War photographs include mundane scenes of barracks and munitions as well as unflinching views of human carnage (Figure 30.9). By the end of the century, the Kodak “point and shoot” handheld camera gave vast numbers of ordinary people the freedom to take their own photographic images.
Courbet and French Realist Painting In painting no less than in literature and photography, Realism came to challenge the Romantic style. The Realist preference for concrete, matter-of-fact depictions of every- day life provided a sober alternative to both the remote, exotic, and heroic imagery of the Romantics and the noble
and elevated themes of the Neoclassicists. Obedient to the credo that artists must confront the experiences and appearances of their own time, Realist painters abandoned the nostalgic landscapes and heroic themes of Romantic art in favor of compositions depicting the consequences of industrialization (see Figure 30.3) and the lives of ordinary men and women.
The leading Realist of nineteenth-century French paint- ing was Gustave Courbet (1819–1877). A farmer’s son, he was a self-taught artist, an outspoken socialist, and a staunch defender of the Realist cause. “A painter,” he protested, “should paint only what he can see.” Indeed, most of Courbet’s works—portraits, landscapes, and con- temporary scenes—remain true to the tangible facts of his immediate vision. With the challenge “Show me an angel and I’ll paint one,” he taunted both the Romantics and the Neoclassicists. Not angels but ordinary individuals in their actual settings and circumstances interested Courbet.
In The Stone-Breakers, Courbet depicted two rural labor- ers performing the most menial of physical tasks (Figure 30.10). The painting, which Courbet’s friend Proudhon
Figure 30.9 MATHEW B. BRADY or staff, Dead Confederate Soldier with Gun, Petersburg, Virginia, 1865. Stereographic photograph using wet collodion and two glass plates, 5 × 5 in. (approx.). The four-year-long American Civil War produced the largest number of casualties of any war in American history. Brady hired staff photographers to assist him in photographing the military campaigns and battles, a project that produced some 3500 photographs but left him bankrupt.
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called “the first socialist picture,” outraged the critics because its subject matter is mundane and its figures are crude, ragged, and totally unidealized. Moreover, the figures were positioned with their backs turned toward the viewer, thus violating, by nineteenth-century stand- ards, the rules of propriety and decorum enshrined in French academic art (see chapter 21). But despite such “violations,” Courbet’s painting appealed to the masses. In a country whose population was still two-thirds rural and largely poor, the stolid dignity of hard labor was a popular subject.
Courbet’s contemporary Jean-François Millet (1814– 1875) did not share his reformist zeal; he nevertheless devoted his career to painting the everyday lives of the rural proletariat. His depictions of hardworking farm laborers earned him the title “the peasant painter.” In Gleaners (see Figure 30.1), three peasant women pursue the menial task of gathering the bits of grain left over after the harvest. Delineated with ennobling simplicity, these stoop-laborers are as ordinary and anonymous as Courbet’s stone-breakers, but, set against a broad and ennobling landscape, they appear dignified and graceful. While Courbet’s scene has the “random” look of a snapshot, Millet’s composition, in which the distant haystacks subtly echo the curved backs of the workers, appears more for- mal and contrived. Against Courbet’s undiluted Realism, Millet’s perception seems somewhat Romanticized.
A landmark even in its own time, Gleaners became a symbol of the dignity of hard work, a nostalgic reminder of a way of life quickly disappearing before encroaching
industrialization. As such, it was copied and mass-produced in numerous engraved editions. Courbet, however, remained brutally loyal to nature and the mundane world; he knew that the carefree peasant was an idyllic stereotype that existed not in real life, but rather in the urban imagi- nation. He would have agreed with his contemporary, the British novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), that “no one who is well acquainted with the English peasantry can pronounce them merry.”
Courbet’s most daring record of ordinary life was his monumental Burial at Ornans (see LOOKING INTO, Figure 30.11). The huge canvas (over 10 × 21 feet) consists of fifty-two life-sized figures disposed informally around the edges of a freshly dug grave. Paintings of this size normally depicted historical or religious subjects. Here, however, inspired by the funeral of his great uncle, Courbet depicts the plain-looking (and even homely) townspeople of Ornans. When the painting was rejected by the Universal Exhibition of 1855, Courbet rented a space near the exhibition grounds, put up a tent, and displayed the Burial along with thirty-eight of his paintings. He called the space “The Pavilion of Realism.” For this exhibition, the first one-man show in history, Courbet charged a small admission fee.
Daumier’s Social Realism The French artist Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) left the world a detailed record of the social life of his time. He had no formal academic education, but his earliest training was in lithography—a printmaking process created by drawing
Figure 30.10 GUSTAVE COURBET, The Stone-Breakers, 1849. Oil on canvas, 5 ft. 3 in. × 8 ft. 6 in.
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LOOKING INTO
In this ambitious painting, Courbet documented an actual event that took place in his hometown. He minimized the ritual aspects of death and disposal, and the display of pomp and ceremony traditional to Western representations of Christian burial. Here, the kneeling gravedigger and the attendant dog are
Courbet’s Burial at Ornans
Figure 30.11 GUSTAVE COURBET, Burial at Ornans, 1849–1850. Oil on canvas, 10 ft. 3 in. × 21 ft. 9 in. For the introduction to the catalogue that accompanied his one-man show, Courbet wrote a Realist Manifesto that stated his aim “to translate the customs, the ideas, and the appearance” of his epoch according to his own estimation. A leading critic claimed that Courbet had depicted “the modern bourgeois in all his ridiculousness, ugliness, and beauty.”
as important to the picture as the priest and his retinue. And the mourners, while crowded together, play a more prominent role in the composition than the deceased. With the objectivity of a camera eye, Courbet banished from his painting all sentimentality and artifice.
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Courbet’s recently deceased grandfather
limestone cliffs of Ornans
two lay church officials
self-portrait of Courbet smoking a pipe Courbet’s father, wearing a tall, silk hat
open grave
gravedigger, Antoine-Joseph Cassard
local priest, the Abbé Benjamin Bonnet
pallbearers (friends of Courbet) Courbet’s three sisters
coffin covered with white shroud bearing crossbones
sacristan crucifix and bearer
Mayor of Ornans, Claude-Hélène-Prosper Teste
Hippolyte Proudhon, a prominent local lawyer
altar boys
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Figure 30.12 Lithography is a method of making prints from a flat surface; it is also called planography. An image is first drawn or painted with an oil-based lithographic crayon or pencil on a smooth limestone surface. The surface is wiped with water, which will not stick to the applied areas of greasy lithographic ink because oil and water do not mix. The greasy areas resist the water and are thus exposed. The surface is then rolled with printing ink, which adheres only to the parts drawn in the oil-based medium. Dampened paper is placed over the stone, and a special flatbed press rubs the back of the paper, transferring the work from the stone to the covering sheet.
on a stone plate (Figure 30.12). Lithography, a product of nineteenth-century print technology, was a cheap and popular means of providing illustrations for newspapers, magazines, and books.
Daumier produced over 4000 lithographs, often turn- ing out two or three per week for various Paris newspapers and journals. For his subject matter, he turned directly to the world around him: the streets of Paris, the theater, the law courts. The advancing (and often jarring) technology of modern life also attracted Daumier’s interest: pioneer experiments in aerial photography (Figure 30.13), the telegraph, the sewing machine, the repeating rifle, the railroad, and urban renewal projects that included widen- ing the streets of Paris. But Daumier did not simply depict the facts of modern life; he frequently ridiculed them. Skeptical as to whether new technology and social progress could radically alter the human condition, he drew atten- tion to characteristic human weaknesses, from the all too familiar complacency and greed of self-serving political figures to the pretensions of the nouveaux riches.
One of the popular institutions mocked by Daumier was the French Salon (Figure 30.14). The Salon de Paris origi- nated with the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, founded in 1648 (see chapter 21). Exhibiting work at the Salon was a sign of royal favor and a sure path to success. Held annually during the eighteenth century at the palace of the Louvre, the juried exhibitions were public events that ran for weeks, attracting huge crowds, including newly minted art critics. Paintings were exhibited from floor to ceiling, taking up all the available space, and printed cata- logues accompanied the exhibition. By the mid-nineteenth century, such annual government-sponsored juried exhibi- tions, held in large commercial halls, had become symbols of entrenched, academic taste. Daumier’s lithographs sati- rized the Salon as a “grand occasion” attended by hordes of gaping urbanites.
The ancestors of modern-day political cartoons, Daumier’s lithographs conveyed his bitter opposition to the monarchy, political corruption, and profiteering. Such criticism courted danger, especially since in mid- nineteenth-century France it was illegal to caricature individuals publicly without first obtaining their permis- sion. Following the publication of his lithograph of 1831, which depicted the French king Louis Philippe as an obese Gargantua atop a commode/throne from which he defecated bags of gold, Daumier spent six months in jail.
Primarily a graphic artist, Daumier completed fewer than three hundred paintings. In The Third-Class Carriage, he
Science and Technology
1798 Aloys Senefelder (Bavarian) develops lithography
1822 William Church (American) patents an automatic typesetting machine
1844 wood-pulp production provides cheap paper for newspapers and periodicals
Figure 30.13 HONORÉ DAUMIER, Nadar Raising Photography to the Heights of Art, 1862. Lithograph, 103∕4 × 83∕4 in. The balloonist, photographer, draftsman, and journalist Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, called Nadar, took his first photograph from a balloon. The aerial balloon, built in 1863, inspired some of the adventure novels of the science-fiction writer Jules Verne (see chapter 37). Nadar also pioneered the use of artificial lighting, by which he was able to photograph the catacombs of Paris.
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Figure 30.14 HONORÉ DAUMIER, Free Admission Day— Twenty-Five Degree Heat, from the series “Le Public du Salon,” published in Le Charivari (May 17, 1852), p. 10. Lithograph, 111∕8 × 85∕8 in. The inscription reads “A day when one does not pay. Twenty-five degree [Celsius] heat.”
captured on canvas the shabby monotony of nineteenth-century lower-class railway travel (Figure 30.15). The part of the European train in which tickets were the least expensive was also, of course, the least comfortable: it lacked glass windows (hence was subject to more than average amounts of smoke, cinders, and clatter) and was equipped with hard wooden benches rather than cush- ioned seats. Three generations of poor folk— an elderly woman, a younger woman, and her children—occupy the foreground of Daumier’s painting. Their lumpish bodies suggest weariness and futility, yet they convey a humble dignity reminiscent of Rembrandt’s figures (see chapter 22). Dark and loosely sketched oil glazes underscore the mood of cheerless resignation. Daumier produced a forthright image of common humanity in a contemporary urban setting.
The Scandalous Realism of Manet The French painter Edouard Manet (1832– 1883) presented an unsettling challenge to the world of art. A native Parisian who chose painting over a career in law, Manet was
Figure 30.15 HONORÉ DAUMIER, The Third-Class Carriage, ca. 1862. Oil on canvas, 253∕4 × 351∕2 in. A lower-class family, consisting of a grandmother, her daughter, and two children, are depicted with the candor and immediacy that typifies Daumier’s on-the-spot visual records of Parisian life.
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Figure 30.17 TITIAN (begun by Giorgione), Pastoral Concert, ca. 1505. Oil on canvas, 3 ft. 71∕4 in. × 4 ft. 61∕4 in.
with two fully clothed male companions, while a second, partially clothed woman bathes in a nearby stream.
From a historical perspective, Manet’s subject matter— the female nude in a landscape—was familiar to artists, as well as to ordinary art patrons. Clearly, Déjeuner looks back to such Renaissance works as Titian’s Pastoral Concert (Figure 30.17). Its three central figures are drawn from a sixteenth-century engraving (Figure 30.18) based on a Renaissance tapestry, itself derived from a lost painting by Raphael. The representation of the female nude was con- sidered the ultimate subject in antiquity, and it remained so in academic art (see chapters 21 and 26). Her identity in Western art history was invariably that of a mythological or allegorical figure, such as Venus or Charity; however, Manet’s nude appears as nothing more than an ordinary, naked woman. His figures are neither woodland nymphs nor Olympian gods; rather, they are the artist’s favorite model (Victorine Meurent), and his future brother-in-law (the reclining male figure).
By taking a Classical subject and recasting it in mod- ern terms, Manet violated academic tradition. And by picturing the female nude (brazenly staring out at the viewer) in a contemporary setting occupied by clothed men, he offended public morality. In “updating” tradi- tional imagery with such off-hand, in-your-face immediacy, Manet was making a statement that—as with Madame
Figure 30.16 EDOUARD MANET, Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863. Oil on canvas, 7 ft. × 8 ft. 10 in. The still life in the lower left testifies to Manet’s technical skills as a painter.
an admirer of the art of the old masters. He was equally enthralled by contemporary life, especially the middle- class pleasures of his fellow Parisians. In 1863, he shocked the public with a large, brilliantly painted canvas entitled Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass; Figure 30.16). This work shows a nude woman enjoying a picnic lunch
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Figure 30.18 MARCANTONIO RAIMONDI, detail from The Judgment of Paris, ca. 1520. Engraving after Raphael tapestry.
Figure 30.19 EDOUARD MANET, Olympia, 1863. Oil on canvas, 4 ft. 31∕4 in. × 6 ft. 23∕4 in. A maid presents the courtesan with a bouquet of flowers from an admirer, who, based on the startled response of the black cat, may have just entered the room. Commenting on the unmodulated flatness of the nude figure, Courbet compared Olympia to the Queen of Spades in a deck of playing cards.
Bovary—targeted the degeneracy of French society. Yet, like Flaubert, who combined authenticity of detail and an impersonal narrative style, the artist took a neutral stance that presented the subject with cool objectivity. It is no surprise that the jury of the Royal Academy rejected Déjeuner, refusing to hang it in the Salon exhibition of 1863.
Nevertheless, that same year it was displayed in an alter- nate venue: the Salon des Refusés, a landmark exhibition of rejected paintings, authorized by the French head of state in response to public agitation against the tyranny of the Academy.
No sooner was Manet’s painting hung in public than visitors tried to poke holes in the canvas, and critics launched attacks on its coarse “improprieties.” Déjeuner was pronounced scandalous. “The nude does not have a good figure,” wrote one journalist, “and one cannot imagine anything uglier than the man stretched out beside her, who has not even thought of removing, out of doors, his horrible padded cap.” While Manet’s paintings met with repeated criticism, they were defended by his good friend Emile Zola, who penned a short biography of the artist in 1867 (see Figure 30.7). Zola praised Manet’s works as “sim- ple and direct translations of reality,” observing with some acuity: “He treats figure paintings as the academic painter treats still lifes . . . He neither sings nor philosophizes. He paints, and that is all.”
In a second painting of 1863, Olympia, Manet again “debased” a traditional subject: the reclining nude (Figure 30.19). Lacking the subtle allure of a Titian Venus (see Figure 17.39) or an Ingres odalisque (see Figure 26.27), the short, stocky nude (Victorine Meurent again) looks boldly at the viewer. Her satin slippers, the black ribbon at her throat, and other provocative details (such as the black
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“alley cat,” a symbol of sexuality) distinguish her as a courte- san—a high-class prostitute. Manet’s urban contemporaries were not blind to this fact, but the critics were unspar- ingly brutal. One journalist called Olympia “a sort of female gorilla” and warned: “Truly, young girls and women about to become mothers would do well, if they are wise, to run away from this spectacle.” Like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Zola’s Nana, Manet’s Olympia desentimentalized the female image. By rendering the ideal in commonplace terms, he not only offended public taste, but also challenged the tra- ditional view of art as the bearer of noble themes.
Manet also violated academic convention by employing new painting techniques. Imitating current photographic practice, he bathed his figures in bright light and, using a minimum of shading, flattened forms in a manner inspired by Japanese prints (see Figure 31.13). His practice of eliminating half-tones and laying on fresh, opaque colors (instead of building up form by means of thin, transparent glazes) anticipated Impressionism, a style he embraced later in his career.
Realism in American Painting Although most American art- ists received their training in European art schools, their taste for Realism seems to have sprung from a native affection for the
factual and the material aspects of their immediate sur- roundings. In the late nineteenth century, an era of gross materialism known as the Gilded Age, America produced
an extraordinary number of first-rate Realist painters. These individuals explored a wide variety of subjects, from still life and portraiture to landscape and genre paint- ing. Like such literary giants as Mark Twain, American Realist painters fused keen observation with remarkable descriptive skills.
One of the most talented of the American Realists was William M. Harnett (1848–1892), a still-life painter and a master of trompe l’oeil (“fool the eye”) illusionism. Working in the tradition of seventeenth-century Dutch masters, Harnett recorded mundane objects with such hair-fine precision that some of them—letters, newspaper clippings, and calling cards—seem to be pasted on the canvas (Figure 30.20).
A master of early nineteenth-century portraiture and the founder of America’s first museum (in Philadelphia), Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827) is renowned for his skillful likenesses of distinguished public figures, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson. But one of his most intriguing portraits is that of the African-American Yarrow Mamout (Figure 30.21). A West African slave freed by his American owner after forty-five years of indenture, Mamout achieved prosperity and ultimately settled in his own home in Washington, D.C. Peale was seventy-seven years of age when he painted the eighty-three-year-old “Muhammad Yaro” (his African name). In his diary, the artist described his sitter as a cheer- ful man, notable for his “industry, frugality, and sobriety.”
Figure 30.20 WILLIAM MICHAEL HARNETT, The Artist’s Letter Rack, 1879. Oil on canvas, 30 × 25 in.
Figure 30.21 CHARLES WILLSON PEALE, Portrait of Yarrow Mamout (Muhammad Yaro), 1819. Oil on canvas, 24 × 20 in. Mamout is pictured wearing the kufic, a brimless hat traditionally worn by natives of West Africa.
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MAKING CONNECTIONS
In 1889, Eakins accepted a commission offered by students at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine to paint a portrait commemorating the retirement of one of their favorite professors. Eakins suggested a clinic scene that would include the surgeon’s collaborators and class members. In drafting the composition, he surely had in mind Rembrandt’s famous group
portrait The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (Figure 30.23). Eakins’ painting (Figure 30.22) shares Rembrandt’s dramatic staging, use of light to illuminate figures in darkened space, and dedication to realistic detail. Both paintings communicate a fresh and stubbornly precise record of the natural world.
Figure 30.22 THOMAS EAKINS, The Agnew Clinic, 1889. Oil on canvas, 6 ft. 21∕2 in. × 10 ft. 101∕2 in. This wall-sized painting is the largest of Eakins’ canvases. At the far right is the likeness of Eakins himself, painted by his wife, Susan.
Figure 30.23 REMBRANDT VAN RIJN, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632. Oil on canvas, 5 ft. 33∕8 in. × 7 ft. 11∕4 in.
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312 CHAPTER 30 Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style
Figure 30.25 WINSLOW HOMER, The War for the Union: A Bayonet Charge, published in Harper’s Weekly, July 12, 1862. Wood engraving, 135∕8 × 205∕8 in.
His portrait—the earliest known painting of a Muslim in American history—captures these qualities as well as Mamout’s confident and resilient spirit.
In the generation following Peale, the Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) mastered the art of pro- ducing uncompromising likenesses such as that of the poet
Walt Whitman (see Figure 27.12). Like most nineteenth- century American artists, Eakins received his training in European art schools, but he ultimately emerged as a painter of the American scene and as an influential art instructor in his own right. At the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, he was criticized for his insistence on work- ing from nude models. After ten years of teaching at the Academy (1876–1886), he was forced to resign for remov- ing the loincloth of a male model in a class that included female students.
Eakins was among the first artists to choose subjects from the world of sports, such as boxing and boating. A photographer of some note, he used the camera to collect visual data for his paintings. He was also among the first artists to use his own photographs as the basis for true-to- life pictorial compositions, and he encouraged his students to follow suit.
Eakins’ fascination with scientific anatomy—he dissect- ed cadavers at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia— led him to produce some unorthodox representations of medical training and practice. One of his most notable canvases, The Agnew Clinic (see Figure 30.22), is a dispas- sionate view of a hospital amphitheater in which the sur- geon and professor P. Hayes Agnew lectures to students on the subject of the mastectomy that is being performed under his supervision.
Eakins’ student Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937)— like many other African-American artists—found Paris more receptive than America. A talented genre painter, landscape artist, and photographer, Tanner brought to his work a concern for simple, everyday events as practiced by working-class people. In The Banjo Lesson, he depicts an intimate domestic scene in which a young boy receives musical instruction from his grandfather (Figure 30.24). A fine technician and a fluent colorist, Tanner showed his work regularly in Paris. In 1909, he was elected to the National Academy of Design, New York.
American Realists were keenly aware of the new art of photography; some, like Tanner and Eakins, were them- selves fine photographers. But they were also indebted to the world of journalism, which assumed increasing importance in transmitting lit- erate culture. Winslow Homer (1836–1910) began his career as a newspaper illustrator and a reporter for the New York magazine Harper’s Weekly. The first professional artist to serve
Figure 30.24 HENRY OSSAWA TANNER, The Banjo Lesson, ca. 1893. Oil on canvas, 49 × 351∕2 in.
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as a war correspondent, he produced on-the-scene docu- mentary paintings and drawings of the American Civil War, which Harper’s converted to wood-engraved illustra- tions (Figure 30.25). Although Homer often generalized the facts of the events he actually witnessed, he neither moralized nor allegorized his subjects (as did, for instance, Goya or Delacroix). His talent for graphic selectivity and dramatic concentration rivaled that of America’s first war photographer, Mathew Brady (see Figure 30.9).
Apart from two trips to Europe, Homer spent most of his life in New England, where he painted subjects that were both ordinary and typically American. Scenes of hunt- ing and fishing reveal his deep affection for nature, while his many genre paintings reflect a fascination with the activities of American women and children.
Homer was interested in the role of African-Americans in contemporary culture, but critical of visual repre- sentations that portrayed America’s slaves as merry and content. One of his most provocative paintings, The Gulf Stream, shows a black man adrift in a rudderless boat sur- rounded by shark-filled waters that are whipped by the winds of an impending tornado (Figure 30.26). While realistic in execution, the painting may be interpreted as a metaphor for the isolation and plight of black Americans in the decades following the Civil War. Homer shared with earlier nineteenth-century figures, including Turner, Melville, and Géricault, an almost obsessive interest in the individual’s life-and-death struggle with the sea. However, compared (for instance) with Géricault’s theatrical render- ing of man against nature in The Raft of the “Medusa” (see Figure 29.5), which he probably saw in Paris, Homer’s painting is a matter-of-fact study of human resignation in
the face of deadly peril. As with many publicly displayed nineteenth-century paintings, it provoked immediate criti- cal response. Answering the critics, Eakins wryly replied: “The criticisms of The Gulf Stream by old women and others are noted. You may inform these people that the Negro did not starve to death, he was not eaten by the sharks, the water spout did not hit him, and he was rescued by a passing ship . . .”
American audiences loved their Realist painters, but, occasionally, critics voiced mixed feelings. The American novelist Henry James (1843–1916), whose novels probed the differences between European and American charac- ter, assessed what he called Homer’s “perfect realism” with these words:
He is almost barbarously simple, and, to our eye, he is horribly ugly; but there is nevertheless something one likes about him. What is it? For ourselves, it is not his subjects. We frankly confess that we detest his subjects—his barren plank fences, his glaring, bald, blue skies, his big, dreary, vacant lots of meadows, his freckled, straight-haired Yankee urchins, his flat-breasted maidens, suggestive of a dish of rural doughnuts and pie, his calico sun-bonnets, his flannel shirts, his cowhide boots. He has chosen the least pictorial features of the least pictorial range of scenery and civilization; he has resolutely treated them as if they were pictorial, as if they were every inch as good as Capri or Tangiers; and, to reward his audacity, he has incontestably succeeded. It . . . is a proof that if you will only be doggedly literal, though you may often be unpleasing, you will at least have a stamp of your own.
Figure 30.26 WINSLOW HOMER, The Gulf Stream, 1899. Oil on canvas, 2 ft. 41∕8 in. × 4 ft. 11∕8 in. Homer added the fully rigged sailing ship at the horizon on the left some time after the painting was exhibited.
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Late Nineteenth-Century Architecture
In the nineteenth century, the history of architecture was revolu- tionized by the use of an exciting new structural medium: cast iron. Providing strength without bulk,
cast iron allowed architects to span broader widths and raise structures to greater heights than achieved by tradi- tional stone masonry. Although cast iron would change the history of architecture more dramatically than any advance in technology since the Roman invention of concrete, European architects were slow to realize its potential.
Figure 30.27 JOSEPH PAXTON, interior of Crystal Palace, 1851. Cast- and wrought-iron and glass, length 1851 ft. Assembled entirely on site from prefabricated components, the Crystal Palace housed some 14,000 exhibitions. The three-story structure, illuminated mainly by natural light, anticipated today’s modern shopping malls.
Science and Technology
1779 the first cast-iron bridge is built in England
1851 the first international industrial exposition opens in London
1856 Henry Bessemer (British) perfects the process for producing inexpensive steel
1857 E. G. Otis (American) installs the first safety elevator
1863 the first “subway” (the London Underground) begins operation
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CHAPTER 30 Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style 315
Figure 30.28 GUSTAVE EIFFEL, Eiffel Tower, Paris, 1889. Wrought iron on a reinforced concrete base, original height 1063 ft.
In England, where John Nash had used cast iron in 1815 as the structural frame for the Brighton Pavilion (see Figure 29.14), engineers did not begin construction on the first cast-iron suspension bridge until 1836; and not until mid-century was iron used as skeletal support for mills, warehouses, and railroad stations.
The innovator in the use of iron for public buildings was, in fact, not an architect but a distinguished horticul- turalist and greenhouse designer, Joseph Paxton (1801– 1865). Paxton’s Crystal Palace (Figure 30.27), erected for the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, was the world’s first prefabricated building and the forerunner of the “functional” steel and glass architecture of the twentieth century. Consisting entirely of cast- and wrought-iron gird- ers and 18,000 panes of glass, and erected in only nine months, the 1851-foot-long structure—its length a sym- bolic reference to the year of the exhibition—resembled a gigantic greenhouse. Light entered through its transpar- ent walls and air filtered in through louvered windows. Thousands flocked to see the Crystal Palace; yet most European architects found the glass and iron structure bizarre. Although heroic in both size and conception, it had almost no immediate impact on European architec- ture. Dismantled after the Great Exhibition and moved to a new site, however, it was hailed as a masterpiece of prefabrication and portability decades before it burned to the ground in 1936.
Like the Crystal Palace, the Eiffel Tower (Figure 30.28) originated as a novelty, but it soon became emblematic of early Modernism. The viewing tower constructed by the engineer Gustave Eiffel (1832–1923) for the Paris World Exhibition of 1889 is, in essence, a tall (1063-foot-high) cast-iron skeleton equipped with elevators that offer visitors magnificent aerial views of Paris. Aesthetically, the tower linked the architectural traditions of the past with those of the future: its sweeping curves, delicate tracery, and dramatic verticality recall the glories of the Gothic cathedral, while its majestic ironwork anticipates the austere abstractions of International Style architecture (see chapter 32). Condemned as a visual monstrosity when it was first erected, the Eiffel Tower emerged as a positive symbol of the soaring confidence of the industrial age. This landmark of heroic materialism remained for four decades (until the advent of the American skyscraper) the tallest structure in the world.
In an age of advancing industrialization, ornamental structures such as the Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower gave way to functional ones. Inevitably, the skyscraper would become the prime architectural expression of mod- ern corporate power and the urban scene. By 1850, there were seven American cities with more than 100,000 inhab- itants, and before 1900 the populations of at least three of these—New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago—swelled as a result of the thousands of immigrants who came to live and work in the metropolitan community. The physical
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character of the premodern city, whose buildings were no more than four stories high, changed enormously with the construction of skyscrapers.
Multistoried vertical buildings were made possible by the advancing technology of steel, a medium that was perfected in 1856. Lighter, stronger, and more resilient
than cast iron, steel used as a frame could carry the entire weight of a structure, thus eliminating the need for solid weight-bearing masonry walls. Steel made possible a whole new concept of building design characterized by lighter materials, flat roofs, and large windows. In 1868, the six- story Equitable Life Insurance Building in New York City was the first office structure to install an electric elevator. By the 1880s, architects and engineers united the new steel frame with the elevator to raise structures more than ten stories. William Le Baron Jenney (1832–1907) built the first all-steel-frame skyscraper, the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, which, ironically, hides its metal skeleton beneath a traditional-looking brick and masonry façade. It fell to his successor Louis Henry Sullivan (1856–1924) to design mul- tistory buildings, such as the Guaranty Building in Buffalo (Figure 30.29), whose exteriors proudly reflect the struc- tural simplicity of their steel frames. “Form should follow function,” Sullivan insisted. Within decades, the American skyscraper became an icon of modern urban culture.
Nineteenth-century steel and cast-iron technology also contributed to the construction of bridges. In 1870, work began on the first steel-wire suspension bridge in the United States: the Brooklyn Bridge (Figure 30.30). Designed by John Augustus Roebling (1806–1869), who had earlier engineered bridges in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Texas, the Brooklyn Bridge (upon its completion in 1883) would be the largest suspension bridge in the world. Its main span, which crosses the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn, measures some 1600 feet. This celebrated bridge reflects the marriage of modern steel technology and Neo-Gothic design, evident in the elegant granite and limestone arches.
Realism in Music In Italian opera of the late nineteenth century, a move- ment called verismo (literally, “truth-ism,” but more gener- ally “Realism”) paralleled the Realist style in literature and art. Realist composers rejected the heroic characters of Romantic grand opera and presented the problems and conflicts of people in familiar and everyday—if somewhat melodramatic—situations. The foremost “verist” was the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924).
Puccini’s La Bohème, the tragic love story of young artists (called “bohemians” for their unconventional lifestyles) in the Latin Quarter of Paris, was based on a nineteenth- century novel called Scenes of Bohemian Life. The colorful orchestration and powerfully melodic arias of La Bohème evoke the joys and sorrows of true-to-life characters. While this poignant musical drama was received coldly at its pre- miere in 1897, La Bohème has become one of the best loved of nineteenth-century operas.
Another of Puccini’s operas, Madame Butterfly, offered European audiences a timely, if moralizing, view of the Western presence in Asia and one that personalized the clash of radically different cultures. The story, which takes place in Nagasaki in the years following the reopening of Japanese ports to the West, begins with the wedding of a young United States navy lieutenant to a fifteen-year-old
Figure 30.29 LOUIS HENRY SULLIVAN and DANKMAR ADLER, Guaranty Building, Buffalo, New York, 1894–1895. Steel frame.
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geisha (a Japanese girl trained as a social companion to men) known as “Butterfly.” The American is soon forced to leave with his fleet, while for three years Butterfly, now the mother of his son, faithfully awaits his return. When, finally, he arrives (accompanied by his new American bride) only to claim the child, the grief-stricken Butterfly takes the only honorable path available to her: she com- mits suicide. This tragic tale, which had appeared as a novel, a play, and a magazine story, was based on a true incident. Set to some of Puccini’s most lyrical music for voice and orchestra, Madame Butterfly reflects the com- poser’s fascination with Japanese culture, a fascination most evident in his poetic characterization of the delicate Butterfly. While neither the story nor the music of the opera is authentically Japanese, its verismo lies in its frank (although poignant) account of the bitter consequences that often accompanied the meeting of East and West.
Chronology
1830 French conquest of Algeria
1839–1850 Opium Wars in China
1848 antigovernment revolutions in France and Central Europe
1868 beginning of Meiji rule in Japan
1860 unification of Italy
1861–1865 United States Civil War
1869 completion of the U.S. transcontinental railroad
1871 unification of Germany
Figure 30.30 JOHN AUGUSTUS ROEBLING and WASHINGTON AUGUSTUS ROEBLING, Brooklyn Bridge, New York, 1869–1883. Currier and Ives print, 1877, 253∕4 × 37 in.
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LOOKING BACK
The Global Dominion of the West • During the second half of the nineteenth
century, as Western industrialization accelerated, Realism came to rival Romanticism both as a style and as an attitude of mind.
• Western industrialization and the materialistic values with which it was allied precipitated imperialism and colonialism, both of which had a shaping influence on the non-Western world. The heavy hand of Western imperialism in some parts of Africa, Asia, and in the Middle East had a crippling effect on independent growth and productivity.
Nineteenth-Century Social Theory • The ideologies of liberalism,
conservatism, utilitarianism, and socialism offered varying solutions to nineteenth-century social and economic inequities. Marxist communism called for violent proletarian revolution that would end private ownership of the means of economic production.
• The leading proponent of liberalism, John Stuart Mill, defended the exercise of individual liberty as protected by the state.
• Mill’s opposition to the subordination of women gave strong support to nineteenth-century movements for women’s rights.
capitalist one who provides investment capital in economic ventures
entrepreneur one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business
Glossary
Realism in Literature • In literature, Realism emerged as a style
concerned with recording contemporary subject matter in true-to-life terms.
• Such novelists as Dickens in England, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in Russia, Flaubert and Zola in France, and Twain and Chopin in America described contemporary social conditions sympathetically and with fidelity to detail.
• Flaubert and Chopin provided alternatives to Romantic idealism in their realistic characterizations of female figures.
• Zola’s naturalistic novels pictured human beings as determined by hereditary and sociological factors, while Ibsen’s fearless portrayal of class and gender opened a new chapter in modern drama.
Realism in the Visual Arts • By the mid-nineteenth century the
camera was used to document all aspects of contemporary life as well as to provide artists with detailed visual data.
• In painting, Courbet led the Realist movement with canvases depicting the activities of humble and commonplace men and women. Daumier employed the new technique of lithography to show his deep concern for political and social conditions in rapidly modernizing France.
lithography a printmaking process created by drawing on a stone plate; see Figure 30.12
proletariat a collective term describing industrial workers who lack their own
• With the landmark paintings Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia, Edouard Manet shocked public taste by modernizing Classical subjects and violating conventional painting techniques.
• American Realism is best represented by the trompe l’oeil paintings of William M. Harnett and the down-to-earth subjects of Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer.
Late Nineteenth-Century Architecture • Paxton’s Crystal Palace, the world’s first
prefabricated cast-iron structure, offered a prophetic glimpse into the decades that would produce steel-framed skyscrapers.
• In an age of advancing industrialization, ornamental structures such as the Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower gave way to functional ones. Inevitably, the skyscraper would become the prime architectural expression of modern corporate power and the urban scene.
Realism in Music • Verismo opera departed from Romantic
tradition by seeking to capture the lives of men and women with a truth to nature comparable to that of Realist novels and paintings.
• In the opera Madame Butterfly, the Italian “verist” Giacomo Puccini presented a timely view of America’s imperialistic presence in Asia.
means of production and hence sell their labor to live
verismo (Italian, “realism”) a type of late nineteenth-century opera that presents a realistic picture of life, instead of a story based in myth, legend, or ancient history
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The Move Toward Modernism ca. 1875–1900
“Is not the nineteenth century . . . a century of decadence?” Nietzsche
31 Chapter
Figure 31.1 PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR, Le Moulin de la Galette, 1876. Oil on canvas, 4 ft. 31∕2 in. × 5 ft. 9 in. Montmartre, the semirural working-class district of Paris, was not incorporated into the city limits until 1860. The Moulin (“mill”) marked the spot of one of Montmartre’s famous old windmills. Galettes, that is, buckwheat pancakes, were a specialty of the house. Dining, dancing, and enjoying the pleasures of urban life were among the favorite subjects of Renoir and the French Impressionists.
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Late Nineteenth-Century Thought Nietzsche’s New Morality The most provocative thinker of the late nineteenth century was the German philosopher and poet Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900). Nietzsche was a Classical philologist, a professor of Greek at the university of Basle, and the author of such notable works as The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1892), and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). In these, as in his shorter pieces, Nietzsche voiced the sentiments of the radical moralist. Deeply critical of his own time, he called for a revision of traditional values. He rejected organized religion, attack- ing Christianity and other institutionalized religions as contributors to the formation of a “slave morality.” He was equally critical of democratic institutions, which he saw as the embodiment of rule by mass mediocrity. His goal for humanity was the emergence of a “superman” (Übermensch), whose singular vision and courage would, in his view, produce a “master” morality.
Nietzsche did not launch his ideas in the form of a well-reasoned philosophic system, but rather as aphorisms, maxims, and expostulations whose visceral force bear out his claim that he wrote “with his blood.” Reflecting the spir- itual cynicism of the late nineteenth century, he asked: “Is man merely a mistake of God’s? Or God merely a mistake of man’s?”
Nietzsche shared with Dostoevsky the view that European materialism had led inevitably to decadence and decline. In The Antichrist, published in 1888—shortly before Nietzsche became insane (possibly as a result of syphilis)—he wrote:
Mankind does not represent a development toward something better or stronger or higher in the sense accepted today. “Progress” is merely a modern idea, that is, a false ideal. The European of today is vastly inferior in value to the European of the Renaissance: further development is altogether not according to any necessity in the direction of elevation, enhancement, or strength.
The following readings demonstrate Nietzsche’s incisive imagination and caustic wit. The first, taken from The Gay Science (1882) and entitled “The Madman,” is a parable that harnesses Nietzsche’s iconoclasm to his gift for prophecy. The others, excerpted from Twilight of the Idols (or How One Philosophizes with a Hammer, 1888), address the fragile relationship between art and morality and the “art for art’s sake” spirit of the late nineteenth century.
READING 31.1 From the Works of Nietzsche
The Gay Science (1882) The Madman. Have you not heard of that madman who lit a 1 lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, “I seek God! I seek God!” As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Why, did he get lost? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances. “Whither is God” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed 10
LOOKING AHEAD
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, France emerged as the center of Western artistic production. Paris became the melting pot for artists and intellectuals, composers and journalists. London and Paris hosted World’s Fairs that brought the arts and cultures of Japan, Africa, and Oceania to the attention of astonished Westerners. In an era of relative world peace and urban prosperity, Western artists were preoccupied with the pleasures of life and the fleeting world of the senses. They initiated styles—Symbolism, Impressionism, and Postimpressionism—that neither idealized the world nor described it literally. Much of their art was driven by aesthetic principles that—similar to music—communicated no specific meaning, but, rather, evoked feeling by way of pure form and color. Their goals were described by Walter Pater in 1868 with the slogan L’art pour l’art, “art for art’s sake.”
Late nineteenth-century science and technology helped to drive this new approach in the arts. The last decades of the century saw the invention of synthetic oil paints available in portable tubes.
In 1873, the British physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) published his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, which explained that light waves consisting of electromagnetic particles produced radiant energy. In 1879, after numerous failures, the American inventor Thomas Edison (1847–1931) moved beyond scientific theory to create the first efficient incandescent light bulb. Edison’s light bulb provided a sharper perception of reality that—along with the camera—helped to shatter the world of romantic illusion. By the year 1880, the telephone transported the human voice over thousands of miles. In the late 1880s, Edison developed the technique of moving pictures. The invention of the internal combustion engine led to the production of automobiles in the 1890s, a decade that also witnessed the invention of the X-ray and the genesis of radiotelegraphy. Such technology accelerated the tempo of life and drew attention to the role of the senses in defining experience.
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him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be 20 lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too 30 great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever will be born after us—for the sake of this deed he will be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.” Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke and went out. “I come too early,” he said then; “my time has not come yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering—it has not yet reached the ears of man. 40 Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.” It has been related further that on that same day the madman entered divers churches and there sang his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said to have replied each time, “What are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?” 50
Twilight of the Idols (1888) L’art pour l’art. The fight against purpose in art is always a fight 1 against the moralizing tendency in art, against its subordination to morality. L’art pour l’art means, “The devil take morality!” But even this hostility still betrays the overpowering force of the prejudice. When the purpose of moral preaching and of improving man has been excluded from art, it still does not follow by any means that art is altogether purposeless, aimless, senseless—in short, l’art pour l’art, a worm chewing its own tail. “Rather no purpose at all than a moral purpose!”—that is the talk of mere passion. A psychologist, on the other hand, 10 asks: what does all art do? does it not praise? glorify? choose? prefer? With all this it strengthens or weakens certain valuations. Is this merely a “moreover”? an accident? something in which the artist’s instinct had no share? Or is it not the very presupposition of the artist’s ability? Does his basic instinct aim at art, or rather at the sense of art, at life? at a desirability of life? Art is the great stimulus to life: how could one understand
it as purposeless, as aimless, as l’art pour l’art? One question remains: art also makes apparent much that is ugly, hard, and questionable in life; does it not thereby spoil 20 life for us? And indeed there have been philosophers who attributed this sense to it: “liberation from the will” was what Schopenhauer taught as the over-all end of art; and with admiration he found the great utility of tragedy in its “evoking resignation.” But this, as I have already suggested, is the pessimist’s perspective and “evil eye.” We must appeal to the artists themselves. What does the tragic artist communicate of himself? Is it not precisely the state without fear in the face of the fearful and questionable that he is showing? This state itself is a great desideratum;1 whoever knows it, honors it with 30 the greatest honors. He communicates it—must communicate it, provided he is an artist, a genius of communication. Courage and freedom of feeling before a powerful enemy, before a sublime calamity, before a problem that arouses dread—this triumphant state is what the tragic artist chooses, what he glorifies. Before tragedy, what is warlike in our soul celebrates its Saturnalia;2 whoever is used to suffering, whoever seeks out suffering, the heroic man praises his own being through tragedy—to him alone the tragedian presents this drink of sweetest cruelty. 40
. . . . . . . . . .
One might say that in a certain sense the nineteenth century also strove for all that which Goethe as a person had striven for: universality in understanding and in welcoming, letting everything come close to oneself, an audacious realism, a reverence for everything factual. How is it that the over-all result is no Goethe, but chaos, a nihilistic sigh, an utter bewilderment, an instinct of weariness which in practice continually drives toward a recourse to the eighteenth century? (For example, as a romanticism of feeling, as altruism and hypersentimentality, as feminism in taste, as socialism in 50 politics.) Is not the nineteenth century, especially at its close, merely an intensified, brutalized eighteenth century, that is, a century of decadence? So that Goethe would have been—not merely for Germany, but for all of Europe—a mere interlude, a beautiful “in vain”? But one misunderstands great human beings if one views them from the miserable perspective of some public use. That one cannot put them to any use, that in itself may belong to greatness. . . .
Q If art excludes moral purpose, what, according to Nietzsche, might be the purpose of art?
Bergson: Intellect and Intuition While Nietzsche anticipated the darker side of Modernism, Henri Bergson (1859–1941) presented a more positive point of view. Bergson, the most important French phi- losopher of his time, offered a picture of the world that paralleled key developments in the arts and sciences and anticipated modern notions of time and space. Bergson
1 Something desired as essential. 2 An orgy, or unrestrained celebration.
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viewed life as a vital impulse that evolved creatively, much like a work of art.
According to Bergson, two primary powers, intellect and intuition, governed the lives of human beings. While intellect perceives experience in individual and discrete terms, or as a series of separate and solid entities, intui- tion grasps experience as it really is: a perpetual stream of sensations. Intellect isolates and categorizes experience according to logic and geometry; intuition, on the other hand, fuses past and present into one organic whole. For Bergson, instinct (or intuition) is humankind’s noblest faculty, and duration, or “perpetual becoming,” is the very stuff of reality—the essence of life.
In 1889, Bergson published his treatise Time and Freewill, in which he described true experience as durational, a constant unfolding in time, and reality, which can only be apprehended intuitively, as a series of qualitative changes that merge into one another without precise definition.
Poetry in the Late Nineteenth Century: The Symbolists Bergson’s poetical view of nature had much in com- mon with the aesthetics of the movement known as Symbolism, which flourished from roughly 1885 to 1910. The Symbolists held that the visible world does not con- stitute a true or universal reality. Realistic, objective rep- resentation, according to the Symbolists, failed to convey the pleasures of sensory experience and the intuitive world of dreams and myth. The artist’s mission was to find a language that embraced the mystical, the erotic, and the ineffable world of the senses. For the Symbolists, reality was a swarm of sensations that could never be described but only suggested by poetic symbols—images that elicited moods and feelings beyond literal meanings.
In literature, the leading Symbolists were the French poets Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), Paul Verlaine (1844–1896), Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891), and Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898), and the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949). Rimbaud, who wrote most of his poetry while in his teens, envisioned the poet as seer. Freeing language from its descriptive function, his prose poems shattered the rational sequence of words and phras- es, detaching them from their traditional associations and recombining them so as to create powerful sense impres- sions. In one of the prose poems from his Illuminations, for example, Rimbaud describes flowers as “Bits of yellow gold seeded in agate, pillars of mahogany supporting a dome of
emeralds, bouquets of white satin and fine rods of ruby sur- round the water rose.” The Symbolists tried to represent nature without effusive commentary, to “take eloquence and wring its neck,” as Verlaine put it. In order to imitate the indefiniteness of experience itself, they might string words together without logical connections. Hence, in Symbolist poetry, images seem to flow into one another, and “meaning” often lies between the lines.
Mallarmé For Stéphane Mallarmé, the “new art” of poetry was a religion, and the poet–artist was its oracle. Inclined to melancholy, he cultivated an intimate literary style based on the “music” of words. He held that art was “accessible only to the few” who nurtured “the inner life.” Mallarmé’s poems are tapestries of sensuous, dreamlike motifs that resist definition and analysis. To name a thing, Mallarmé insisted, was to destroy it, while to suggest experience was to create it.
Mallarmé’s pastoral poem “L’après-midi d’un faune” (“The Afternoon of a Faun”) is a reverie of an erotic encounter between two mythological woodland creatures, a faun (part man, part beast) and a nymph (a beautiful forest maiden). As the faun awakens, he tries to recapture the experiences of the previous afternoon. Whether his elusive memories belong to the world of dreams or to real- ity is uncertain; but, true to Bergson’s theory of duration, experience becomes a stream of sensations in which past and present merge. As the following excerpt illustrates, Mallarmé’s verbal rhythms are free and hypnotic, and his images, which follow one another with few logical transi- tions, are intimately linked to the world of the senses.
READING 31.2 From Mallarmé’s “The Afternoon of a Faun” (1876)
I’d love to make them linger on, those nymphs. So fair, 1 their frail incarnate, that it flutters in the air drowsy with tousled slumbers. Did I love a dream? My doubt, hoard of old darkness, ends in a whole stream 5 of subtle branches which, remaining as the true forests, show that I’ve offered myself (quite alone, too) the roses’ ideal failing as something glorious. Let me reflect . . . What if these women you discuss, 10 faun, represent desires of your own fabulous senses! Illusion flows out of the chilly blue eyes of the chaster one, like a fountain in tears: the other, though, all sighs, do you think she appears in contrast like a day’s warm breeze across your fleece? 15 Not at all: through the lazy languishing release stifling with heat the cool dawn’s struggles, not a sound of water but my flute¹s outpourings murmurs round the thicket steeped in music; and the one stir of air my dual pipes are swiftly shedding everywhere 20 and then dispersing in a sonorous arid sleet, is, over the horizon that no ripples pleat,
Science and Technology
1877 Thomas Edison (American) invents the phonograph
1892 Rudolf Diesel (German) patents his internal combustion engine
1893 Henry Ford (American) test-drives the “gasoline-buggy”
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the visible, serene and artificial sigh of inspiration reascending to the sky. O fringes of a placid mere in Sicily 25 thus plundered by my sun-rivalling vanity, silent beneath the blooms of brilliant light, proclaim —how I was cropping here the hollow reeds made tame by talent, when, across the blue green gold of things far off verdures devoting their vines to the springs — 30 came shimmering to rest a pallid animal glow; and when the pipes were brought to birth, how at their slow prelude this flight of swans—no! naiads—fled away or dived.
. . . . . . . . . .
How purple, freshly ripe, the pomegranates rise 35 and burst and murmur with the bees, my passion knows; our blood, allured by what may seize its fancy, flows for the swarm of desires eternally released. Among the dead leaves, at times when the forest glows with gold and ashen tints, there rises up a feast: 40 Etna!1 across your very slopes, then, Venus goes, and on your laval ground she rests her artless toes when sad slumbers are sounding and the flame has ceased. I¹ve seized the queen! The punishment is certain . . . 45 No, but the soul void of words and heavy body slowly fall before noon’s haughty calm. No more ado; must sleep now, must forget the blasphemy and blame spread on thirsty sands; and as I love to do 50 open my mouth to the wine’s potent star! Both of you, farewell; I¹m going to see the shadow you become.
Q How does this poem compare with those of Wordsworth and Shelley (Readings 27.1 and 27.2)?
Q What aspects of Mallarmé’s poem do you detect in the music of Debussy and the paintings of Monet?
Music in the Late Nineteenth Century: Debussy It is no surprise that Symbolist poetry, itself a kind of music, found its counterpart in music. Like the poetry of Mallarmé, the music of Claude Debussy (1862–1918) engages the listener through nuance and atmosphere. Debussy’s compositions consist of broken fragments of melody, the outlines of which are blurred and indistinct. “I would like to see the creation . . . of a kind of music without themes and motives,” wrote Debussy, “formed on a single continuous theme, which is uninterrupted and which never returns on itself.”
Debussy owed much to Richard Wagner and the Romantic composers who had abandoned the formal clar- ity of classical composition (see chapter 29). He was also
indebted to the exotic music of Bali in Indonesia, which he had heard performed at the World’s Fair of 1889. Debussy experimented with nontraditional kinds of harmony, such as the five-tone scale found in East Asian music. He deviat- ed from the traditional Western practice of returning har- monies to the tonic, or “home tone,” introducing shifting harmonies with no clearly defined tonal center. His rich harmonic palette, characterized by unusually constructed chords, reflects a fascination with tone color that may have been inspired by the writings of the German physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894)—especially his treatise On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (1863). But Debussy found his greatest inspiration in contemporary poetry and painting. A close friend of the Symbolist poets, he set a number of their texts to music. His first orchestral composition, Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun” (1894), was (in his words) a “very free illustration of Mallarmé’s beautiful poem,” which had been published eighteen years earlier. Debussy originally intended to write a dramatic piece based on the poem, but instead produced a ten-minute orchestral prelude that shares its dreamlike quality.
In 1912, Debussy’s score became the basis for a twelve- minute ballet choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky (1888– 1950; Figure 31.2). This brilliant Russian choreographer
1 A volcanic mountain in Sicily.
Figure 31.2 Vaslav Nijinsky, Afternoon of a Faun, 1912. Photograph: L. Roosen. 9 × 5 in. (approx.). Dancing the part of the faun, Nijinsky moved across the stage in profile in imitation of the frieze on an ancient Greek vase. While he performed professionally for only ten years, his provocative choreography ushered in modern dance.
See Music Listening Selections at end of chapter.
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violated the formalities of classical dance by introducing sexually charged gestures and by dancing portions of the ballet barefoot. He outraged critics, who attacked the bal- let for its “vile movements of erotic bestiality and gestures of extreme shamelessness.”
Debussy had little use for the ponderous orchestras of the French and German Romantics. He scored the Prelude for a small orchestra whose predominantly wind and brass instruments might recreate Mallarmé’s delicate mood of reverie. A sensuous melody for unaccompanied flute provides the composition’s opening theme, which is then developed by flutes, oboes, and clarinets. Harp, triangle, muted horns, and lightly brushed cymbals con- tribute luminous tonal textures that—like the images of
the poem itself—seem based in pure sensation. Transitions are subtle, and melodies seem to drift without resolu- tion. Shifting harmonies with no clearly defined tonal center engulf the listener in a nebulous flood of sound that calls to mind the shimmering effects of light on water and the ebb and flow of ocean waves. Indeed, water—a favorite subject of Impressionist painters—is the subject of many of Debussy’s orchestral sketches, such as Gardens in the Rain (1903), Image: Reflections in the Water (1905), and The Sea (1905).
Painting in the Late Nineteenth Century Symbolism In the visual arts, Symbolists gave emphasis to the simpli- fication of line, arbitrary color, and expressive, flattened form. The Chosen One (Figure 31.3), a painting by the Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918), employs these features in depicting a young male child surrounded by a circle of angelic figures. The painting does not repre- sent a specific event; rather, it suggests a mysterious and unnamed rite of passage. Symbolist emphasis on sug- gestion rather than depiction constituted a move in the direction of Modernist Abstraction and Expressionism (see chapters 32 and 33 respectively).
Science and Technology
1841 John G. Rand (American) invents the collapsible metal paint tube
1879 Edison produces the incandescent light bulb
1889 Edison invents equipment to take and show moving pictures
1898 Wilhelm C. Röntgen (German) discovers X-rays
Figure 31.3 FERDINAND HODLER, The Chosen One, 1893–1894. Tempera and oil on canvas, 7 ft. 31∕2 in. × 9 ft. 101∕2 in. Six angelic figures float above the ground on which a nude boy sits before a barren tree. While the images suggest renewal and rejuvenation, no clear narrative attaches to the scene.
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Impressionism The nineteenth-century art style that captured most fully the intuitive realm of experience, and thus closely par- alleled the aesthetic ideals of Bergson, Mallarmé, and Debussy, was Impressionism. Luminosity, the interaction of light and form, subtlety of tone, and a preoccupation with sensation itself were the major features of Impressionist art.
Impressionist subject matter preserved the Romantic fascination with nature and the Realist preoccupation with daily life. But Impressionism departed from both the Romantic effort to idealize nature and the Realist will to record the natural world with unbiased objectivity. Often called an art of pure sensation, Impressionism was, in part, a response to nineteenth-century research into the physics of light, the chemistry of paint, and the laws of optics. The Principles of Harmony and the Contrast of Colors by the nineteenth-century French chemist Michel Chevreul (1786–1889), along with the treatises on the physical properties of color and musical tone by Hermann von Helmholtz mentioned above, offered new insights into the psychology of perception. These complemented the earliest appearance of synthetic pigments, which replaced traditional earth pigments. Of particular importance were chrome yellow, synthetic ultramarine, viridian, and emerald
green, all of which gave the Impressionists a brighter range of color. Until the mid-nineteenth century, paint was stored in a pig’s bladder, which was tapped and resealed as paint was needed. But the invention of the collapsible metal tube made it possible for artists to transport paint to outdoor sites and to store it for longer periods of time.
Monet: Pioneer Impressionist In 1874, the French artist Claude Monet (1840–1926) exhibited a canvas that some critics consider to be the first modern painting. Impression: Sunrise (Figure 31.4) is patently a seascape; but the painting says more about how one sees than about what one sees. It transcribes the fleeting effects of light and the changing atmosphere of water and air into a tissue of small dabs and streaks of color—the elements of pure perception. To increase lumi- nosity, Monet coated the raw canvas with gesso, a chalky medium. Then, working in the open air and using the new synthetic paints, he applied brushstrokes of pure, occasion- ally unmixed, color. Monet ignored the brown underglazes artists traditionally used to build up form. Maintaining that there were no “lines” in nature, he avoided fixed contours. Instead of blending his colors to create a finished effect, he placed them side by side, building up a radiant impasto.
Figure 31.4 CLAUDE MONET, Impression: Sunrise, 1873. Oil on canvas, 195∕8 × 251∕2 in.
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Figure 31.5 CLAUDE MONET, Water-Lily Pond, Symphony in Green (Japanese Bridge), 1899. Oil on canvas, 3 ft. 3∕5 in. × 2 ft. 11 in. The reflections of dense foliage in the surface of the waterlily pond eliminate distinctions between foreground and background and suggest a shifting play of light. Such paintings inspired the Symbolist Charles Morice to call Monet “master and king of the ephemeral.”
In order to intensify visual effect, he juxtaposed comple- mentary colors, putting touches of orange (red and yellow) next to blue and adding bright tints of rose, pink, and ver- milion. He rejected the use of browns and blacks to create shadows; instead, he applied colors complementary to the hue of the object casting the shadow, thus approximating the prismatic effects of light on the human eye. Monet’s canvases capture the external envelope: the instantaneous visual sensation of light itself.
Monet was by no means the first painter to deviate from academic techniques. Constable had applied color in rough dots and dabs, Delacroix had occasionally jux- taposed complementary colors to increase brilliance, and Manet had often omitted half-tones. But Monet went further by interpreting form as color itself—color so rapidly applied as to convey the immediacy of a sketch. Consequently, Impression: Sunrise struck the art world as a radically new approach. One critic dismissed the painting
as “only an impression,” no better than “wallpaper in its embryonic state,” thus unwittingly giving the name “Impressionism” to the movement that would dominate French art of the 1870s and 1880s.
Monet’s early subjects include street scenes, picnics, café life, and boating parties at the fashionable tourist resorts that dotted the banks of the River Seine near Paris. However, as he began to find the intangible and shift- ing play of light more compelling than the pastimes of Parisian society, his paintings became more impersonal and abstract. Wishing to fix sensation, or, as he put it, to “seize the intangible,” he painted the changing effects of light on such mundane objects as poplar trees and hay- stacks. Often working on a number of canvases at once, he might generate a series that showed his subject in morning light, under the noon sun, and at sunset. After visiting London in the 1890s, during which time he studied the works of Constable and Turner, his canvases became even
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more formless and radiant. At his private estate in Giverny, he lovingly painted dozens of views of the lily ponds, and the lavish gardens that he himself designed and cultivated (Figure 31.5). These ravishing paintings brought him pleasure and fame at the end of his long career.
Monet may be considered an ultrarealist in his effort to reproduce with absolute fidelity the ever-changing effects of light. His freedom from preconceived ideas of nature prompted his contemporary Paul Cézanne to exclaim that he was “only an eye,” but, he added admiringly, “what an eye!” Ironically, Monet’s devotion to the physical truth of nature paved the way for modern abstraction—the concern with the intrinsic qualities of the subject, rather than with its literal appearance.
Renoir Impressionism was never a single, uniform style. Nevertheless, it characterized the art of the group of Parisian artists who met regularly at the Café Guerbois and who showed their works together at no fewer than eight public exhibitions held between 1874 and 1886. To a greater or lesser extent, their paintings reflected Monet’s manner of rendering nature in short strokes of brilliant color. Above all, they brought painterly spontaneity to a celebration of the leisure activities and
diversions of urban life: dining, dancing, theater-going, boating, and socializing.
In this sense, the most typical Impressionist painter might be Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919). Le Moulin de la Galette, a popular outdoor café and dance-hall in Montmartre (the bohemian section of nineteenth-century Paris), provided the setting for one of Renoir’s most seduc- tive tributes to youth and informal pleasure (see Figure 31.1). In the painting, elegantly dressed young men and women—artists, students, and working-class members of Parisian society—dance, drink, and flirt with one another in the flickering golden light of the late afternoon sun.
Pissarro Renoir’s colleague Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) was born in the West Indies but settled in Paris in 1855. The old- est and one of the most prolific of the Impressionists, he exhibited in all eight of the Impressionist group shows. Like Monet and Renoir, Pissarro loved outdoor subjects: peasants working in the fields, the magical effects of freshly fallen snow, and sunlit rural landscapes. Late in his career, however, as his eyesight began to fail, he gave up painting out-of-doors. Renting hotel rooms that looked out on the streets of Paris, he produced engaging cityscapes (Figure 31.6)—sixteen of Paris’ boulevards in 1897 alone.
Figure 31.6 CAMILLE PISSARRO, Le Boulevard Montmartre: Rainy Weather, Afternoon, 1897. Oil on canvas, 205∕8 × 26 in. During his long career, Pissarro painted hundreds of rural and urban landscapes. His techniques in capturing the effects of light influenced the work of his fellow Impressionists. Nevertheless, he sold very few paintings in his lifetime.
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Strikingly similar to popular panoramic photographs of turn-of-the-century Paris, Pissarro’s luminous scenes cap- ture the rhythm of urban life; throngs of horse-drawn car- riages and pedestrians are bathed in the misty atmosphere that envelops Paris after the rain. Asked by a young artist for advice on “how to paint,” Pissarro responded that one should record visual perceptions with immediacy, avoid defining the outlines of things, observe reflections of color and light, and honor only one teacher: nature.
Degas Edgar Degas (1834–1917) regularly exhibited with the Impressionists; but his style remained unique. Classically trained—he began copying Poussin at the Louvre when he was eighteen—he never sacrificed line and form to the beguiling qualities of color and light. He produced thou- sands of drawings and pastels, ranging from quick sketches to fully developed compositions. Whether depicting the urban world of cafés, racetracks, theaters, and shops, or the demimonde of laundresses and prostitutes, he concen- trated his attention on the fleeting moment. He rejected the traditional “posed” model, seeking instead to capture momentary and even awkward gestures, such as stretching
and yawning. Degas was a consummate draftsman and a master designer. His innovative compositional techniques balance spontaneity and improvisation with artifice and calculation. In Two Dancers on a Stage (Figure 31.7), for example, he presents two ballerinas as if seen from above and at an angle that leaves “empty” the lower left portion of the painting. In this feat of breathtaking asymmetry, part of the figure at the right seems to disappear off the edge of the canvas, while the body of a third figure at the left is cut off by the frame. The deliberately “random” view suggests the influence of photography, with its accidental “slice of life” potential, as well as the impact of Japanese woodcuts, which Degas enthusiastically collected after they entered Europe in the 1860s.
During the 1860s, Degas became interested in the sub- ject of horse racing, which, like the theater, had become a fashionable leisure activity and social event (Figure 31.8). His drawings and paintings of the races focused primarily on the anatomy and movement of the horses. In his studies of physical movement, he learned much from the British artist, photographer, and inventor Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), whose stop-action photographs of the 1870s and 1880s were revolutionary in their time (Figure 31.9).
Figure 31.7 EDGAR DEGAS, Two Dancers on a Stage, ca. 1874. Oil on canvas, 241∕5 × 18 in. A comparison of this composition with that of the far left woodcut in Figure 31.10 reveals a similar treatment of negative space, a raked perspective, and the off-center arrangement of figures.
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Japanese Woodblock Prints and Western Art Japanese woodblock prints entered Europe along with Asian trade goods (often as the wrappings for those goods) in the late nineteenth century. Although they were new to Europeans, they represented the end of a long tradition in Japanese art, one that began declin- ing after Japan was forced to open its doors to the West in the 1860s. Produced in great numbers between 1660 and 1860, and sold as popular souvenirs, they recorded the pleasures of ukiyo, “the floating—or fleet- ing—world” of the courtesans, kabuki actors, and dancers (see Figure 31.12) who enlivened the streets of bustling, urban Edo (now Tokyo). Like the magnificent folding screens commissioned by wealthy patrons (see chapter 21), the prints feature flat, unmodulated colors, undulat- ing lines, and compositions that are cropped or contain large areas of empty space. Their daring use of negative space and startling perspective was often the consequence of unusual vantage points, such as the bird’s-eye view
Figure 31.8 EDGAR DEGAS, The False Start, ca. 1870. Oil on canvas, 125∕8 × 153∕4 in. The English sport of horse racing took hold in France in the 1830s when a track was built at Chantilly. In 1857, a fashionable racetrack was established at Longchamp in the Bois de Boulogne on the outskirts of Paris.
Figure 31.9 EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE, Photo Sequence of Racehorse, 1884–1885. Photograph, 7 × 10 in. (approx.).
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Figure 31.10 KUNISADA, triptych showing the different processes of printmaking, ca. 1831. Japanese woodblock color print, each panel: 141∕2 × 10 in. Left: the printer has just finished taking an impression by rubbing the baren (a round pad made of a coil of cord covered by a bamboo sheath) over the paper on the colored block; numerous brushes and bowls of color are visible. Kunisada has made the design more interesting by picturing women, although the craftsmen were almost always men (information from Julia Hutt, Understanding Far Eastern Art. New York: Dutton, 1987, 53). Center: a woman (in the foreground) sizing paper sheets that are then hung up to dry; another is removing areas with no design from the block with a chisel. Right: a woman with an original drawing pasted onto a block conversing with another who is sharpening blades on a whetstone.
seen in the prints of Kunisada (Figure 31.10). Such prints were mass-produced, most often by men, despite Kunisada’s rendering.
During the mid-nineteenth century, Japanese wood- block artists added landscapes to their repertory. The landscape prints, often produced as a series of views of local Japanese sites, resemble the topographical studies of European artists. But they operated out of entirely different stylistic imperatives: unlike the Romantics, the Japanese had little interest in the picturesque; rather, they gave attention to bold contrasts and decorative arrange- ments of abstract shapes and colors. The absence of chiaroscuro and aerial perspective reduced the illusion of spatial depth and atmospheric continuity between near and far objects. All these features are evident in one of the most famous mid-nineteenth-century Japanese land- scape prints: Mount Fuji Seen Below a Wave at Kanagawa (Figure 31.11), from the series “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” by Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849).
When Japanese prints arrived in the West (see Figure 31.12), they had an immediate impact on fine and com- mercial art, including the art of the lithographic poster
(see Figure 31.13). Monet and Degas bought them (along with Chinese porcelain) in great numbers, and Vincent van Gogh, a great admirer of Hokusai, insisted that his own work was “founded on Japanese art.”
Théodore Duret, a French art critic of the time and an enthusiast of Impressionist painting, was one of the first writers to observe the impact of Japanese prints on nineteenth-century artists. In a pamphlet called “The Impressionist Painters” (1878), Duret explained:
We had to wait until the arrival of Japanese albums before anyone dared to sit down on the bank of a river to juxtapose on canvas a boldly red roof, a white wall, a green poplar, a yellow road, and blue water. Before Japan it was impossible; the painter always lied. Nature with its frank colors was in plain sight, yet no one ever saw anything on canvas but attenuated colors, drowning in a general halftone.
As soon as people looked at Japanese pictures, where the most glaring, piercing colors were placed side by side, they finally understood that there were new methods for reproducing certain effects of nature.
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Figure 31.11 KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI, Mount Fuji Seen Below a Wave at Kanagawa, from “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji,” Tokugawa period. Full-color woodblock print, 101∕5 × 143∕4 in.
Japonisme, the influence of Japan on European art of the late nineteenth century, proved to be multifaceted: the prints coincided with the Impressionist interest in casual urban subjects (especially those involving women) and inspired a new way of reconciling the illusion of the three- dimensional world with the flatness of the two-dimensional canvas. At the same time, the elegant naturalism and refined workmanship of Asian cloisonné enamels, ceram- ics, lacquerwares, ivories, silks, and other collectibles were widely imitated in the Arts and Crafts movements that flourished at the end of the century (see Figure 31.18).
Cassatt One of the most notable artists to come under the influ- ence of Japanese prints was the American painter Mary Cassatt (1844–1926). Cassatt spent most of her life in Paris, where she became a friend and colleague of Degas, Renoir, and other Impressionists, with whom she exhibited regu- larly. Like Degas, Cassatt painted mainly indoors, cultivat- ing a style that combined forceful calligraphy, large areas of unmodulated color, and unusual perspectives—the major features of the Japanese woodcuts—with a taste for female subjects.
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The pleasures and entertainments of ukiyo, “the floating world,” were nowhere better represented than in Japanese woodblock prints of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The hand-colored prints of kabuki performers are famous for their bright, flat colors, sinuous lines, and the sensitive integration of positive and negative space (Figure 31.12). The popularity of such prints in the West coincided with the introduction of lithographic techniques used to record and publicize urban events (see Figures 30.13 and 30.14). Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (discussed below) was not the first to produce commercial artworks for the world of entertainment. However, he was to become the father of the modern poster, generating some
thirty color lithographic posters during the last ten years of his life. Commissioned to design public advertisements for the popular Montmartre cabaret the Moulin Rouge (“Red Mill”), he immortalized its famous can-can dancer Louise Weber, known as La Goulue (the “glutton”), whose risqué, high-kicking physical displays attracted (and scandalized) audiences. A poster of the Parisian entertainer who replaced La Goulue, Jane Avril (Figure 31.13), reveals the artist’s brilliant combination of unmodulated primary colors, graceful, flowing lines, and the daring interplay of figure and ground—stylistic features that reflect the direct influence of Japanese woodblock prints.
Figure 31.13 HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC, Jane Avril, 1899. Lithograph, printed in color, 22 × 14 in.
Figure 31.12 TORII KIYONOBU, Actor as a Monkey Showman, ca. 1720. Woodblock print, 131∕4 × 61∕4 in.
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Cassatt brought a unique sensitivity to domestic themes that featured mothers and children enjoying everyday tasks and diversions (Figure 31.14). These gentle and optimistic images appealed to American collectors and did much to increase the popularity of Impressionist art in the United States. Yet the so-called Madonna of American art pre- ferred life in Paris to that in prefeminist America. “Women do not have to fight for recognition here if they do serious work,” wrote Cassatt.
Toulouse-Lautrec Cassatt’s gentle visions of domestic life stand in strong con- trast to the paintings of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864– 1901). Toulouse-Lautrec, the descendant of an aristocratic French family, practiced many of the stylistic principles of Impressionism, but his choice of subject matter was often so bohemian that members of his own family condemned his work as unacceptable to “well-bred people.” In paintings often executed on cardboard, he captured the seamy deni- zens of Parisian life—cabaret dancers, circus performers,
and prostitutes who, like Zola’s Nana, lived on the margins of middle-class society. His intimate scenes of brothels, bars, and dance-halls (see LOOKING INTO, Figure 31.15) chronicle the sensuous pleasures of nocturnal Montmartre.
Toulouse-Lautrec mocked traditional ideas of beauty and propriety in both subject matter and style. A pioneer in the technique of color lithography, he stylized figures— almost to the point of caricature—in bold and forceful silhouettes that became the celebrity images of popular urban posters (see Figure 31.13).
Art Nouveau The posters of Toulouse-Lautrec bear the seductive stamp of Art Nouveau (French for “new art”), an ornamental style that became enormously popular in the late nineteenth century. Art Nouveau artists shared with members of the English Arts and Crafts movement a high regard for the fine artisanship of the preindustrial Middle Ages, an era that achieved an ideal synthesis of the functional and the
Figure 31.14 MARY CASSATT, The Bath, 1891–1892. Oil on canvas, 3 ft. 31∕2 in. × 2 ft. 2 in. Cassatt offers a bird’s-eye view of all elements in the painting, with the exception of the pitcher in the lower right foreground and the chest of drawers in the background.
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At The Moulin Rouge shows the patrons and entertainers of Montmartre’s famous music-hall, which opened in Paris in 1889. The painting, a glimpse of bohemian nightlife, stands in contrast to the genteel Impressionist depictions of daytime entertainments in Montmartre (see Figure 31.1). Inspired by Japanese prints (see Figure 31.10), the artist employed an unconventional perspective that forces the eye into the space above the diagonal axis of a railing that separated the promenade from the dance-hall. Here, one encounters a jaded-looking assembly of stylishly dressed and hatted men and women, including the celebrity dancer Jane Avril (see Figure 31.13) and the notable photographer Maurice Guibert, whose manipulated photographs anticipated experimental camera-work of the twentieth century. Flesh tones are distorted by electric lighting (which had recently come into use in Paris), and faces are altered by the stark white make-up (borrowed from Japanese theater) that was current in European fashion. Toulouse-Lautrec, who had been crippled by breaking both legs as a child, pictures himself in the background as a dwarfish caricature.
Toulouse-Lautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge
Figure 31.15 HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC, At The Moulin-Rouge, 1893–1895. Oil on canvas, 4 ft. 3∕8 in. × 4 ft. 71∕4 in.
Toulouse-Lautrec
Toulouse-Lautrec’s cousin Dr. Tapié de Céleyran
Jane Avril, dancer
La Goulue fixing her hair before a mirror
the performer May Milton, English vaudeville dancerbentwood café chairs
designed by Michael Thonet in 1830
newly installed electric lights
Edouard Dujardin, poet and novelist
La Macarona, flamenco dancer
Paul Secau, photographer
Maurice Guibert, photographer and vintner
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decorative in daily life. The proponents of the new style also prized the decorative arts of Asia and Islam, which tended to favor bold, flat, organic patterns and semiabstract linear designs. Acknowledging the impact of the Japanese wood- cut style, one French critic insisted that Japanese blood had mixed with the blood of Art Nouveau artists.
Art Nouveau originated in Belgium among architects working in the medium of cast iron, but it quickly achieved an international reach that affected painting, as well as the design of furniture, textiles, glass, ceramics, and jewelry. The Belgian founder of the style, Victor Horta
(1861–1947), brought to his work the Arts and Crafts veneration for fine craftsmanship and the Symbolist glo- rification of the sensuous and fleeting forms in nature. A distinguished architect and a great admirer of Eiffel’s 1063-foot-high tower (see Figure 30.28), Horta translated the serpentine lines and organic rhythms of flowers and plants into magnificent glass and cast-iron designs for pub- lic buildings and private residences (Figure 31.16).
“Art in nature, nature in art” was the motto of Art Nouveau. The sinuous curves of blossoms, leaves, and ten- drils, executed in iron, were immortalized in such notable
Figure 31.16 VICTOR HORTA, Tassel House, Brussels, 1892–1893.
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monuments as the rapid transport system known as the Paris Métro. They also appear in wallpaper, posters, book illustrations, tableware, and jewelry. In Art Nouveau, as in late nineteenth-century literature and painting, women were a favorite subject: the female, often shown with long, luxuriant hair, might be pictured as seductress or enchantress. She might appear as a fairy or water nymph (Figure 31.17), a poetic, sylphlike creature. In Art Nouveau pins, bracelets, and combs, she is the human counterpart of vines and flowers fashioned in delicately crafted metal armatures and semiprecious stones. Such images suggest that Art Nouveau, although modern in its effort to com- municate meaning by way of shape, pattern, and decora- tion, was actually a waning expression of a century-long Romantic infatuation with nature.
In America, Art Nouveau briefly attracted the attention of such architects as Louis Sullivan (see chapter 30), who embellished some of his otherwise austere office buildings and department stores with floral cast-iron ornamenta- tion. It also inspired the magnificent glass designs of Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933). The son of Charles
L. Tiffany, founder of the famed New York jewelry house, Louis was a great admirer of Chinese cloisonné and ancient glass techniques. His innovative studio methods included assembly-line production, the use of templates, and the employment of female artisans who received the same wages as males—a policy that caused great controversy in Tiffany’s time. Tiffany’s inventive art glass, which featured floral arabesques and graceful geometric patterns, made him one of the masters of the international Art Nouveau style (Figure 31.18).
Sculpture in the Late Nineteenth Century Degas and Rodin The two leading European sculptors of the late nineteenth century, Edgar Degas and Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), were masters at capturing the physical vitality of the human figure. Like the Impressionists, they were interested in life- like movement and the sensory effects of light. To catch these fleeting qualities, they modeled their figures rapidly
Figure 31.17 EUGÈNE GRASSET, Comb, ca. 1900. 51∕4 × 23∕4 in.
Figure 31.18 TIFFANY GLASS AND DECORATING CO., Peacock
vase, 1892–1902. Iridescent “favrile” glass, blues and greens with feather and
eye decorations, height 141∕8 in. A student of ancient and medieval glass practices, Tiffany patented in 1874 a way of mixing different colors of heated glass to produce the iridescent art glass he called “favrile” (a name derived from a Saxon word meaning “handmade”).
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in wet clay or wax. The bronze casts made from these origi- nals preserve the spontaneity of the additive process. Indeed, many of Degas’ bronze sculptures, cast posthu- mously, retain the imprints of his fingers and fingernails.
Degas often executed sculptures as exercises prelimi- nary to his paintings. Throughout his life, but especially as his vision began to decline, he turned to making three- dimensional “sketches” of racehorses, bathers, and balle- rinas—his favorite subjects. At his death, he left some 150 sculptures in his studio, some fully worked and others in various stages of completion. Only one of these sculptures, the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, was exhibited as a finished artwork during Degas’ lifetime. The reddish-brown wax original, made eerily lifelike by the artist’s addition of a tutu, stockings, bodice, ballet shoes, a green satin rib- bon, and hair from a horsehair wig (embedded strand by strand into the figure’s head), was the subject of some controversy in the Parisian art world of 1881 (a world that would not see such mixed-media innovations for another half-century). The bronze cast of Degas’ Dancer (Figure 31.19), whose dark surfaces contrast sensuously with the fabric additions, retains the supple grace of the artist’s fin- est drawings and paintings.
Like Degas, Rodin was keenly interested in movement and gesture. In hundreds of drawings, he recorded the dancelike rhythms of studio models whom he bid to move about freely rather than assume traditional, fixed poses (Figure 31.20). But it was in the three-dimensional media that Rodin made his greatest contribution. One of his
Figure 31.19 EDGAR DEGAS, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, ca. 1880–1881 (cast 1932). Bronze with net tutu and hair ribbon, 3 ft. 21∕2 in. × 141∕2 in. × 141∕4 in. In Degas’ time, young female dancers, called “little rats,” usually came from working-class families, for whom they provided income.
Figure 31.20 AUGUSTE RODIN, Dancing Figure, 1905. Graphite with orange wash, 127∕8 × 97∕8 in.
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earliest sculptures, The Age of Bronze (Figure 31.21), was so lifelike that critics accused him of forging the figure from plaster casts of a live model. In actuality, Rodin had captured a sense of organic movement by recreating the fleeting effects of light on form. He heightened the contrasts between polished and roughly textured sur- faces, deliberately leaving parts of the piece unfinished. “Sculpture,” declared Rodin, “is quite simply the art of depression and protuberance.”
But Rodin moved beyond naturalistic representation. Anticipating Modernism, he used expressive distortion to convey a mood or mental disposition. He renounced for- mal idealization and gave his figures a nervous energy and emotional intensity that he found lacking in both Classical and Renaissance sculpture. “The sculpture of antiquity,” he explained, “sought the logic of the human body; I seek its psychology.” In this quest, Rodin was joined by his close friend the American dancer Isadora Duncan (1878–1927). Duncan introduced a language of physical expression
Figure 31.21 AUGUSTE RODIN, The Age of Bronze, 1876. Bronze, 251∕2 × 95∕16 × 71∕2 in. The influence of Rodin’s teacher, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, can be detected in a comparison of this sculpture with Carpeaux’s The Dance, executed some eight years earlier (see Figure 29.20).
Figure 31.22 Isadora Duncan in La Marseillaise. Lantern slide, 5 × 4 in. Notorious for flouting the rules of academic dance as well as those of middle- class morality, the California-born Duncan achieved greater success in Europe than in the United States. She adopted the signature affectation of wearing scarves, one of which accidentally strangled her in a freak car mishap.
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characterized by personalized gestures and improvised movements that were often fierce, earthy, and passionate (Figure 31.22). Insisting that the rules of classical ballet produced ugly choreography, Duncan danced barefoot, often wearing Greek-style tunics in reference to ancient dance. “I have discovered the art that has been lost for two thousand years,” she claimed.
Figure 31.23 AUGUSTE RODIN, The Gates of Hell, 1880–1917. Bronze, 20 ft. 8 in. × 13 ft. 1 in. Below the Three Shades, in the center of the lintel (where Jesus is usually found in a traditional Christian Judgment scene), sits the Thinker, the human Creator, contemplating humankind doomed by its passions.
Rodin’s most ambitious project was a set of doors he was commissioned to design for the projected Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris. Loosely modeled on Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise (see Figure 17.19), The Gates of Hell (Figure 31.23) consists of a swarm of figures inspired by the tor- tured souls of Dante’s “Inferno” (see chapter 12). Rodin worked on the project for eight years, making hundreds
Figure 31.23 AUGUSTE RODIN, The Gates of Hell, 1880–1917. l Bronze, 20 ft. 8 in. × 13 ft. 1 in. Below the Three Shades, in the center of the lintel (where Jesus is usually found in a traditional Christian Judgment scene), sits the Thinker, the human Creator, contemplating humankind doomed by its passions.
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of drawings and sculptures based on Dante’s poem; but he never completed the doors, which were cast in bronze only years after his death. The figures that occupy The Gates, not all of which are identifiable, writhe and twist in postures of despair and yearning. Arrived at intuitively—like the images in a Mallarmé poem or a Monet landscape—they melt into one another without logical connection. Rodin admitted that he projected no fixed subject, “no scheme of illustrations or intended moral purpose.” “I fol- lowed my own imagination,” he explained, “my own sense of movement and composition.” Collectively, his figures evoke a world of flux and chaos; their postures capture the restless discontent voiced by Nietzsche and by Gauguin (see below), and their ran- dom arrangement gives substance to Bergson’s view of reality as a perpetual stream of sensations.
Throughout his career, Rodin remained com- pelled by the contents of The Gates. He cast in bronze many of its individual figures, and recreated others in marble. The two most famous of these are The Kiss (Figure 31.24), based on the figures of the lovers Paola and Francesca (on the lower left door), and The Thinker. The latter—one of the best known of Rodin’s works— originally represented Dante contemplating his imagined underworld from atop its portals.
Figure 31.24 AUGUSTE RODIN, The Kiss, 1886–1898. Marble, over life-size.
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The Arts of Africa and Oceania During the late nineteenth century, expanding Western commercialism and colonialism brought Europeans into closer contact with Africa and with Oceania (the islands of the South and Central Pacific). Nineteenth-century Africa and Oceania were essentially preindustrial and preliterate. Their social organization was usually highly stratified with clear distinctions between and among vari- ous classes: royalty, priests, and commoners held different ranks. Their economies were agricultural, and their gods and spirits were closely associated with nature and natural forces that were the object of communal and individual worship (see chapter 18). In some parts of Africa, king- doms with long-standing traditions of royal authority were destroyed by colonial intrusion. But in other parts of Africa, ancient ways of life persisted. The royal traditions of Benin, Dahomey, Kongo, Yoruba, and other West African kingdoms (Map 31.1) continued to flourish well into the modern era. During the nineteenth century, the oral tradi- tions of African literature came to be recorded in written languages based on the Arabic and Western alphabets.
Africa and Oceania consisted of thousands of tightly knit communities in which reverence for the gods and the spirits of deceased ancestors was expressed by means of elaborate systems of worship. Reliquaries, masks, and other power objects were created by local artists to chan- nel the spirits, celebrate rites of passage, and ensure the continuity and well-being of the community. As vessels for powerful spirits, they functioned to transmit supernatural energy. While sharing with some Western styles (such as Symbolism) a disregard for objective representation, the
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DAHOMEY KINGDOM
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G H A N A
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A T L A N T I C O C E A N
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AFRICA
Map 31.1 The Kingdoms of Yoruba and Dahomey.
arts of these indigenous peoples stood far apart from nineteenth-century Western academic tradition. On the other hand, they had their roots in long-established cultural traditions—some extending back over thousands of years. Much of the art created in these regions during the nineteenth (and twentieth) century had its origins in conventional forms handed down from generation to generation. So, for example, masks produced in the nineteenth century by the Bambara people of Mali pre- serve the techniques and styles practiced almost without interruption since the founding of Mali’s first empire in the thirteenth century (see Figure 18.8).
Africa In Africa, even as the incursions of the French disrupted the Yoruba kingdoms of Nigeria (Map 31.1), royal author- ity asserted itself in the increased production of magnifi- cent beaded objects, some of which served to identify and embellish the power and authority of the king. The beaded conical crown that belonged to King Glele (1858–1889) of Dahomey (the modern Republic of Benin) is surmounted by a bird that symbolizes potent supernatural powers and the all-surpassing majesty of the ruler (Figure 31.25). Beadwork had been practiced in West Africa since the six- teenth century, when the Portuguese introduced Venetian glass beads to that continent. However, the golden age of beadwork occurred in the late nineteenth century, when uniformly sized European “seed beads” in a wide variety of colors first became available. It is noteworthy that in West Africa beading was an activity reserved exclusively for men.
A second example of high artistic productivity in nineteenth-century Africa comes from the genre of
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free-standing sculpture: the image of the war god Gu, commissioned by King Glele as a symbol of his own mili- tary might, was carved from wood and covered with ham- mered brass (said to have come from spent bullet shells). Brandishing two scimitars, the figure served to guard the gate of the city of Abhomey. Its fierce, scarified face with its jutting jaw, the wide flat feet, and taut, stylized physique reflect a powerful synthesis of naturalism and abstraction that typifies nineteenth-century African art, but, at the same time, adheres to a long tradition of West African sculpture (Figure 31.26). The figure failed, however, in its protective mission: shortly after the death of King Glele in 1889, his kingdom fell to French colonial forces.
Figure 31.25 Yoruba headdress, African, nineteenth century. Beads and mixed media, height 37 in. (approx.). This crown of a Yoruba tribal prince is ornamented with figures of birds, chameleons, lizards, and human faces.
Figure 31.26 Attributed to GANHU HUNTONDJI, The war god Gu, nineteenth century. Brass and wood, height 411∕2 in.
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Oceania Although productivity from island to island in Oceania (Map 31.2) varied dramatically, communities in this region generated some of their finest artwork during the nine- teenth century. Among the Maori peoples of New Zealand, the art of woodcarving, usually involving the construction of elaborate wooden meeting houses, flourished during the 1800s. Teams of woodcarvers using European tools pro- duced fierce totemic images embellished with elaborate patterns of spirals and scrolls (Figure 31.27). Such designs resemble those used in the decorative body art known as “tattoo” (from the Polynesian tatau).
Especially popular among the Marquesas Islanders in the South Pacific, tattooing was considered a sacred art. Applied by specialists using a bone comb with sharp teeth, the tattoo, which might symbolize the specific rank and power of the wearer, served a protective function: a kind of visual armor. Its cultural significance, however, has inspired various interpretations. Expensive and painful, all-over body tattoos were usually worn by the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in the community (Figure 31.28).
The serpentine patterns of Oceania tattoos and wood- carvings appear in the paintings of Paul Gauguin (see Figure 31.31) and in the many prints and sculptures that he produced during his stay in Tahiti. Tragically, as the cultures of Oceania came to be influenced by Western materialism and commercial exploitation, their brilliance and originality began to wane.
Primitivism Europe had been involved in Africa and Oceania since the sixteenth century. By the nineteenth century, trade in goods, guns, and slaves had transformed African cul- ture. In some areas, the availability of guns had led to violence and mayhem. Apart from imperialistic ambition, the Western penetration of the so-called Dark Continent was the product of intellectual curiosity, which had been stirred by Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign (see chapter 29). Following the French invasion of Nigeria in 1830, and especially after medical science had recognized that quinine was effective against the dreaded malaria, Africa began to attract Western travelers and adventurers. Delacroix visited Morocco in 1831, bringing back to Europe seven sketch- books of drawings and numerous watercolors. The British explorers David Livingstone (1813–1873) and Henry M. Stanley (1841–1904) spent years investigating Africa’s vast terrain. Journalistic records of such expeditions drew atten- tion to cultural traditions that differed sharply from those of the West. What often emerged was an oversimplified (and frequently distorted) understanding of the differences between and among a multitude of cultures, some of which were perceived as exotic, violent, and fundamentally infe- rior. Many Westerners characterized indigenous peoples as “primitive,” implying simplicity and lack of sophistication. The French word primitif carried as well a positive charge, implying a closeness to nature exalted by those who decried the damaging effects of proto-modern industrialized society.
Map 31.2 The Islands of the South and Central Pacific.
INDIA
MYANMAR
LAOS VIETNAM
THAILAND
M A L A Y S I A
I N D O N E S I A
CAMBODIANICOBAR ISLANDS
SINGAPORE
CHINA
TAIWAN
SUMATRA
JAVA
BRUNEI SARAWAK
SULAWESI
BALI TIMOR
IRIAN JAYA NEW
GUINEA
BORNEO
KALIMANTAN
PHILIPPINES
A U S T R A L I A
MARSHALL ISLANDS
SAIPAN
GUAM
PALAU
PAPUA NEW GUINEA NEW IRELAND
NEW BRITAIN
SOLOMON ISLANDS
VANUATU
NEW CALEDONIA
TUAMOTU ARCHIPELAGO
SAMOA ISLANDS
FIJI ISLANDS
TONGA ISLANDS
NIUE
COOK ISLANDS
AUSTRAL ISLANDS
SOCIETY ISLANDS
NEW ZEALAND
MARQUESAS ISLANDS
EASTER ISLAND
HAWAIIAN ISLANDS
BAY OF BENGAL
GULF OF THAILAND
SOUTH CHINA
SEA
PHILIPPINE SEA
ARAFURA SEA
GULF OF
CARPENTARIA
P A C I F I C O C E A N
TASMAN SEAGREAT AUSTRALIAN
BIGHT
TIMOR SEA
I N D I A N O C E A N
M I C R O N E S I A
M E L A N E S I A P O L Y N E S I AISLAND
S.E. ASIA
N
EW
S
0 1000 miles
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Figure 31.28 Nuku Hiva islanders with various tattoos, 1813. Hand-colored copper plate engraving after original drawings by Wilhelm Gottlief von Tilenau, from Carl Bertuch, Bilderbuch für Kinder, vol. 8, Weimar (Landes-Industrie-Comptoir) 1813, no. 2. Nuku Hiva is the largest of the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia.
Contributing to the European infatuation with non- Western culture was the Exposition Universelle (World’s Fair) held in Paris in 1889, which brought to public view the arts of Asia, Africa, and Oceania. Reconstructions of villages from the Congo and Senegal, Japan and China, Polynesia and other South Sea islands introduced the non-Western world to astonished Europeans. Non-Western societies and their artistic achievements quickly became objects of research for the new disciplines of anthropology (the science of humankind and its culture) and ethnography (the branch of anthropology that studies preliterate peo- ples or groups). In 1890, the Scottish anthropologist Sir James Frazer (1854–1941) published The Golden Bough, a pioneer study of magic and religion as reflected in ancient and traditional folk customs. Collections of non-Western art filled the galleries of ethnographic museums, such as the American Museum of Natural History, which opened in New York in 1869, and the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris, founded in 1878. Tragically, however, it was often the case that even as these cultures were com- ing to be valued and their art collected and installed in Western museums, their brilliance and originality began to wane. The French painter Paul Gauguin, who recorded his
impressions of Tahiti in his romanticized journal Noa Noa (Fragrance), lamented:
The European invasion and monotheism have destroyed the vestiges of a civilization which had its own grandeur. . . . [The Tahitians] had been richly endowed with an instinctive feeling for the harmony necessary between human creations and the animal and plant life that formed the setting and decoration of their existence, but this has now been lost. In contact with us, with our school, they have truly become “savages” . . .
Gauguin objected to colonial efforts to impose French legal and economic policies on the Tahitians, and he also condemned the eradication of local religious beliefs by Catholic and Protestant missionaries. The appeal of “the primitive” among late nineteenth-century figures such as Gauguin reflected a more than casual interest in the world beyond the West. It provoked protests against what he called the “reign of terror” imposed by the West upon native non-Western populations. It also constituted a rebellion against Western values and societal taboos—a rebellion that would become full-blown in the primitivism of early modern art.
Figure 31.27 Fragment of a Maori doorpost (poupou) in the style of Te Arawa, from New Zealand. Wood, 18 in. (approx.).
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Postimpressionism The art that followed the last of the Impressionist group shows in 1886 is generally designated as “Postimpressionist.” Seeking a style that transcended the fleeting, momentary impression, the Postimpressionists gave increased empha- sis to color and compositional form. They embraced an “art-for-art’s sake” aestheticism that prized pictorial inven- tion over pictorial illusion. Strongly individualistic, they were uninterested in satisfying the demands of public and private patrons; most of them made only sporadic efforts to sell what they produced. Like the Impressionists, the Postimpressionists looked to the natural world for inspiration. But unlike their predecessors, they brought an elemental emphasis to their compositions, following the inspired observation of the French Symbolist Maurice Denis (1870–1943) that a painting, before being a picto- rial representation of reality, is “a flat surface covered with shapes, lines, and colors assembled in a particular order.” This credo, as realized in Postimpressionist art, would drive most of the major modern art movements of the early twentieth century (see chapter 32).
Van Gogh The Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) was a passionate idealist whose life was marred by loneliness, poverty, depression, and a hereditary mental illness that ultimately drove him to suicide. During his career he pro- duced over 700 paintings and thousands of drawings, of which he sold fewer than a half-dozen in his lifetime.
Van Gogh painted landscapes, still lifes, and portraits in a style that featured flat, bright colors, a throbbing, sinuous line, short, choppy brushstrokes, and bold compositions that betray his admiration for Japanese woodblock prints. His heavily pigmented surfaces were often manipulated with a palette knife or built up by applying paint directly from the tube. Deeply moved by music (especially the work of Wagner), he shared with the Romantics an attitude toward nature that was both inspired and ecstatic. His emotional response to an object, rather than its physical appearance, influenced his choice of colors, which he likened to orches- trated sound. As he explained to his brother Theo, “I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcefully.”
Van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night (Figure 31.29), a view of the small French town of Saint-Rémy, is electrified
Figure 31.29 VINCENT VAN GOGH, The Starry Night, 1889. Oil on canvas, 2 ft. 5 in. × 3 ft. 1∕4 in. In 1889, Van Gogh began a year’s stay at the mental hospital in Saint-Rémy near Arles, an area of southern France renowned for its intermittent fierce winds, known as “the mistral.” Mistral winds and clear night skies filled with shooting stars may have provided inspiration for this painting.
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by thickly painted strokes of white, yellow, orange, and blue. Cypresses writhe like flames, stars explode, the moon seems to burn like the sun, and the heavens heave and roll like ocean waves. Here, Van Gogh’s expressive use of color invests nature with visionary frenzy.
In his letters to Theo (an art dealer by profession), Van Gogh pledged his undying faith in the power of artistic creativity. In 1888, just two years before he committed suicide, he wrote: “I can do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, ill as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life—the power to create. And if, defrauded of the power to cre- ate physically, a man tries to create thoughts in place of children, he is still part of humanity.” Assessing his own creativity, Van Gogh claimed that making portraits allowed him to cultivate what was “best and deepest.” “Altogether,” he explained, “it is the only thing in painting which moves me to the depths, and which more than anything else makes me feel the infinite.” For Van Gogh, the challenge of portraiture lay in capturing the heart and soul of the model. His many portraits of friends and neighbors, and the twenty-four self-portraits he painted between 1886 and 1889, elevate Romantic subjectivity to new levels of confes- sional intensity. In the Self-Portrait of 1889 (Figure 31.30), for instance, where the pale flesh tones of the head are set against an almost monochromatic blue field, the skull takes on a forbidding, even spectral presence—an effect enhanced by the lurid green facial shadows and the blue- green eyes, slanted (as he related to Theo) so as to make himself look Japanese. His brushstrokes, similar to those
that evoke the roiling heavens in The Starry Night, charge the surface with undulating rhythms that contrast sharply with the immobile figure. This visual strategy underscores the artist’s monkish alienation. Indeed, Van Gogh con- fessed to his colleague Gauguin that he saw himself in this portrait as a simple Buddhist monk.
Gauguin Van Gogh’s friend and colleague Paul Gauguin (1848– 1903) shared his sense of alienation from middle-class European society. Part-Peruvian, he spent his earliest childhood in South America; in his teens he joined the merchant marines before settling down in Paris. After ten years of marriage, he abandoned his wife, his five children, and his job as a Paris stockbroker to devote himself to painting. He traveled to Brittany in northwest France, to Martinique in the West Indies, to Tahiti in the South Seas, and to southern France, returning for good to the islands of the South Pacific in 1895.
Gauguin took artistic inspiration from the folk culture of Brittany, the native arts of the South Sea islands, and dozens of other nontraditional sources. What impressed him was the self-taught immediacy and authenticity of indigenous artforms, especially those that made use of powerful, totemic abstraction (see Figure 31.27). His own style, nurtured in the Symbolist precepts (discussed earlier in this chapter) and influenced by Japanese woodcuts and photographs of Japanese temple reliefs on view at the Exposition Universelle in 1889, featured flat, often distorted and brightly colored shapes that seem to float on the sur- face of the canvas.
In The Day of the God (Figure 31.31), bright blues, yel- lows, and pinks form tapestrylike patterns reminiscent of Japanese prints and Art Nouveau posters. Gauguin’s figures cast no shadows; his bold, unmodeled colors, like those of Van Gogh, are more decorative than illusionistic. Like the verbal images of the Symbolist poets, Gauguin’s colored shapes carry an intuitive charge that lies beyond literal description. For example, the languid, organic shapes in the foreground pool of water and the fetal positions of the figures lying on the shore are suggestive of birth and regeneration. These and other figures in the painting seem spiritually related to the totemic guardian figure (pictured at top center of the canvas), who resembles the creator god and supreme deity of Maori culture.
Gauguin joined Van Gogh at Arles in southeastern France in the fall of 1888, and for a brief time the two artists lived and worked side by side. Volatile and tempera- mental, they often engaged in violent quarrels, during one of which part of Van Gogh’s ear was cut off, either by Van Gogh himself, or (as some historians claim) by Gauguin. But despite their intense personal differences, the two art- ists were fraternal pioneers in the search for a provocative language of form and color. Gauguin’s self-conscious effort to assume the role of “the civilized savage” was rooted in the notion of the primitif, the condition of unspoiled nature celebrated by Rousseau, Thoreau, and others. His flight to the South Seas represents the search for a lost Eden, and reflects the fascination with exotic non-Western cultures
Figure 31.30 VINCENT VAN GOGH, Self-Portrait, 1889. Oil on canvas, 251∕2 × 211∕4 in.
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Figure 31.31 PAUL GAUGUIN, The Day of the God (Mahana no Atua), 1894. Oil on canvas, 273∕8 × 355∕8 in. The blues in the background are of the same intensity as those in the foreground, thereby flattening space to create a tapestrylike surface. Gauguin denied that his paintings carried specific meanings. “My dream is intangible,” he wrote a friend, “it comprises no allegory.”
that swept through late nineteenth-century Europe. As such, Gauguin’s bohemian nonconformity may have been the “last gasp” of Romanticism.
Seurat Rejecting the formlessness of Impressionism, Georges Seurat (1859–1891) introduced strict methods of pictorial construction. Trained academically, he brought a degree of balance and order to his compositions that rivaled the works of Poussin and David. The figures in a Seurat paint- ing seem plotted along an invisible grid of vertical and horizontal lines that run parallel to the picture plane. Every form assumes a preordained place. A similar fervor for order may have inspired Seurat’s novel use of tiny dots of paint (in French, points). These he applied side by side (and sometimes one inside another) to build up dense clus- ters that intensified color and gave the impression of solid form—a style known as pointillism. He arrived at the tech- nique of dividing color into component parts after studying the writings of Chevreul and other pioneers in color theory, such as the American physicist Ogden N. Rood (1831– 1902), whose Modern Chromatics, with Applications to Art and Industry (translated into French in 1880) showed that optical mixtures of color were more intense than premixed colors. Leaving nothing to chance (Gauguin called him “the little green chemist”), Seurat applied each colored
dot so that its juxtaposition with the next would produce the desired degree of vibration to the eye of the beholder. Although Seurat shared the Impressionists’ fascination with light and color, he shunned spontaneity, for while he made his sketches out-of-doors, he executed his paintings inside his studio, usually at night and under artificial light.
Seurat’s monumental Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte shows a holiday crowd of Parisians relax- ing on a sunlit island in the River Seine (Figure 31.32). Although typically Impressionistic in its subject matter— urban society at leisure—the painting (based on no fewer than twenty drawings and 200 oil studies) harbors little of the Impressionist’s love for intimacy and fleeting sensa- tion. Every figure is isolated from the next as if it were frozen in space and unaware of another’s existence. Seurat claimed that he wished to invest his subjects with the grav- ity of the figures in a Greek frieze. Nevertheless, one critic railed: “Strip his figures of the colored fleas that cover them; underneath you will find nothing, no thought, no soul.” Seurat’s universe, with its atomized particles of color and its self-contained figures, may seem devoid of human feeling, but its exquisite regularity provides a comforting alternative to the chaos of experience. Indeed, the last- ing appeal of La Grande Jatte lies in its effectiveness as a symbolic retreat from the tumult of everyday life and the accidents of nature.
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Figure 31.32 GEORGES SEURAT, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884–1886. Oil on canvas, 6 ft. 91∕2 in. × 10 ft. 3∕8 in. Nothing is left to chance in this highly formalized vision of the good life. Seurat died of diphtheria at the age of thirty-one, having completed barely a decade of mature work.
Figure 31.33 PAUL CÉZANNE, The Basket of Apples, ca. 1895. Oil on canvas, 253∕4 × 32 in. The rear edge of the tabletop marks the horizon line at two different places; the top two lady-fingers are seen from above, while those below and the plate itself are seen straight on. Such deliberate deviations from optical realism characterize many of Cézanne’s still lifes.
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Figure 31.34 PAUL CÉZANNE, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902–1904. Oil on canvas, 271∕2 × 351∕4 in. Between 1880 and his death in 1906, the so-called Master of Aix produced no fewer than twenty-five oil paintings and watercolors of his favorite mountain as seen from the countryside around his native city. In this rendering, dense patches of color come close to pure abstraction.
Cézanne More so than Seurat, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) served as a bridge between the art of the nineteenth century and that of the twentieth. Cézanne began his career as an Impressionist in Paris, but his traditional subjects—land- scapes, portraits, and still lifes—show a greater concern for the formal aspects of a painting than for its subject matter. His effort to “redo nature after Poussin,” that is, to find the enduring forms of nature that were basic to all great art, made Cézanne the first Modernist painter.
Cézanne’s determination to invest his pictures with a strong sense of three-dimensionality (a feature often neglected by the Impressionists) led to a method of building up form by means of small, flat planes of color, larger than (but not entirely unlike) Seurat’s colored dots. Abandoning the intuitive and loosely organized composi- tions of the Impressionists, Cézanne also sought to restore to painting the sturdy formality of academic composition. His desire to achieve pictorial unity inspired bold liberties of form and perspective: he might tilt and flatten surfaces; reduce (or abstract) familiar objects to basic geometric shapes—cylinders, cones, and spheres; or depict various
objects in a single composition from different points of view. Cézanne’s still lifes are not so much tempting like- nesses of apples, peaches, or pears as they are architectural arrangements of colored forms (Figure 31.33). Where nar- rative content often seems incidental, form itself takes on greater meaning.
Cézanne’s mature style developed when he left Paris and returned to live in his native area of southern France. Here he tirelessly studied the local landscape: dozens of times he painted the rugged, stony peak of Mont Sainte-Victoire near his hometown of Aix-en-Provence. Among his last versions of the subject is a landscape in which trees and houses have become an abstract network of colored facets of paint (Figure 31.34). By applying colors of the same intensity to different parts of the can- vas—note the bright green and rich violet brushstrokes in both sky and landscape—Cézanne challenged traditional distinctions between foreground and background. In his canvases, all parts of the composition, like the flat shapes of a Japanese print, have become equal in value. Cézanne’s methods, which transformed an ordinary mountain into a monumental icon, led the way to modern abstraction.
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LOOKING BACK
Late Nineteenth-Century Thought • The provocative German thinker Friedrich
Wilhelm Nietzsche, who detected in European materialism a deepening decadence, called for a revision of traditional values.
• While Nietzsche anticipated the darker side of Modernism, Henri Bergson presented a positive view of life as a vital impulse that evolved creatively and intuitively.
Poetry in the Late Nineteenth Century: The Symbolists • Symbolist poets, such as Paul Verlaine
and Arthur Rimbaud, devised a language of sensation that evoked rather than described feeling.
• In Stéphane Mallarmé’s “L’après-midi d’un faune,” sensuous images unfold as discontinuous literary fragments.
Music in the Late Nineteenth Century: Debussy • Symbolist poetry found its counterpart
in music. The compositions of Claude Debussy engage the listener through nuance and atmosphere.
• Inspired by Indonesian music, Wagnerian opera, and Symbolist poetry, Debussy created a mood of reverie in the shifting harmonies of his Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun.”
Painting in the Late Nineteenth Century • The Impressionists, led by Monet,
were equally representative of the late nineteenth-century interest in sensation and sensory experience. These artists
tried to record an instantaneous vision of their world, sacrificing the details of perceived objects in order to capture the effects of light and atmosphere.
• Renoir, Degas, and Pissarro produced informal, painterly canvases that offer a glimpse into the pleasures of nineteenth- century urban life.
• Two major influences on late nineteenth- century artists were stop-action photography and Japanese woodblock prints. The latter, originally popularized as souvenirs, entered Europe with Asian trade goods.
• In the domestic interiors of Cassatt and the cabarets of Toulouse-Lautrec, scenes of everyday life show the influence of Japanese prints.
Art Nouveau • Originating in Belgium, Art Nouveau
(“new art”) was an ornamental style that became enormously popular in the late nineteenth century.
• The proponents of the style prized the arts of Asia and Islam, which featured bold, flat, organic patterns and semiabstract linear designs. In America, the style was advanced in the art glass of Louis Comfort Tiffany.
Sculpture in the Late Nineteenth Century • The works of Degas and Rodin reflect a
common concern for figural gesture and expressive movement.
• Rodin’s efforts to translate inner states of feeling into physical form were mirrored by Isadora Duncan’s innovations in modern dance.
The Arts of Africa and Oceania • The late nineteenth century was a time
of high artistic productivity in Africa and Oceania. Reliquaries, masks, and free- standing sculptures were among the power objects created to channel the spirits of ancestors, celebrate rites of passage, and ensure the well-being of the community.
• While sharing with some Western styles (such as Symbolism) a general disregard for objective representation, the visual arts of Africa and Oceania stood apart from nineteenth-century Western academic tradition.
Primitivism • Colonialism and travel to Africa and
Oceania worked to introduce the West to cultures that were perceived by some as exotic and violent, and by others as “primitive” and blissfully close to nature.
• The Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889 brought non-Western culture to public attention, encouraging the establishment of ethnographic collections and a broader interest in the world beyond the West.
Postimpressionism • Renouncing their predecessors’
infatuation with the fleeting effects of light, the Postimpressionists explored new pictorial strategies.
• Van Gogh and Gauguin used color not as an atmospheric envelope but rather as a tool for personal, symbolic, and visionary expression.
• Seurat and Cézanne reacted against the formlessness of Impressionism by inventing styles that featured architectural stability.
• Debussy, Prélude à “L’après-midi d’un faune,” 1894.
Music Listening Selection
can-can (French, “scandal”) a high-energy dance popular in Parisian music-halls of the late nineteenth century
negative space the background or ground area seen in relation to the shape of the (positive) figure
Glossary
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351CREDITS
Picture Credits The author and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to use copyright material. Every effort has been made to trace or contact copyright holders, but if notified of any omissions, Laurence King Publishing would be pleased to insert the appropriate acknowledgement in any subsequent edition of this publication.
Bold indicates Figure number or page/position of the image.
Cover © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Frontispiece and page x: © Crown Copyright: UK Government Art Collection
Chapter 27 27.1 Photograph © 2015 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Henry Lillie Pierce Fund 99.22; 27.2 akg-images; 27.3 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London; 27.4 Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek, München. Photo: Renate Kühling; 27.5 Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Rosenwald Collection (1943.3.8997); 27.6 The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 46-51/2. Photo: John Lamberton; 27.7 Erich Lessing/akg-images; 27.8 © The National Gallery, London/Scala, Florence; 27.9 Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Widener Collection (1942.9.10); 27.10 Erich Lessing/akg-images; 27.11 Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence; 27.12 Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. General Fund (1917.1); 27.13 Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence; 27.14 Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence; 27.15 Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., USA Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund/Bridgeman Images; 27.16 Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Paul Mellon Collection (1965.16.347); 27.17 Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Photo: Peter T. Furst, Albany, New York; 27.18 Private collection. Photo: Peter T. Furst, Albany, New York; 27.19 Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Gift of Marsha C. Scott (1976.609.14); 27.20 Brooklyn Museum, New York. Dick S. Ramsay Fund (40.340)
Chapter 28 28.1 Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Château de Versailles). Photo: Franck Raux; 28.2 Wellcome Library, London; 28.3 © Crown Copyright: UK Government Art Collection; 28.4 Private Collection/ Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images; 28.5 Smithsonian Institution/Corbis; 28.6 Yale University Art Gallery, Anonymous gift (1947.188f); 28.7 Luigi Calamatta/Bridgeman Images/Getty Images
Chapter 29 29.1 Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre). Photo: Thierry Le Mage; 29.2 Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre). Photo: Thierry Le Mage; 29.3 White Images/Scala, Florence; 29.5 Musée du Louvre, Paris/Bridgeman Images; 29.6 Photo © RMN- Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre). Photo: Hervé Lewandowski; 29.7 Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre). Photo: Gérard Blot/Christian Jean; 29.8 imagebroker.net/SuperStock; 29.9 Hervé Champollion/akg-images; 29.10 Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay). Photo: Franck Raux/René-Gabriel Ojéda; 29.11 Howard University Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; 29.12 © Peter Ashworth, London; 29.13 World Wide Photos, Inc. © Museum of the City of New York; 29.14 © Angelo Hornak, London; 29.15 Beethoven-Haus, Bonn/akg-images; 29.16 Musee de l’Opera, Paris/Bridgeman Images; 29.17 Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre)/Michel Urtado; 29.18 Erich Lessing/ akg-images; 29.20 Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay). Photo: Hervé Lewandowski; 29.21 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London; 29.22 © Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera
Chapter 30 30.1 Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay). Photo: Jean Schormans; 30.2 Kharbine-Tapabor/The Art Archive; 30.3 BPK, Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin/Photo Scala, Florence; 30.4 The University of Michigan Museum of Art (1956/1.21). © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; 30.5 The Granger Collection/Topfoto; 30.6 RIA Novosti/Topfoto; 30.7 Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay). Photo: Hervé Lewandowski; 30.8 Royal Photographic Society/National Media Museum/Science & Society Picture Library; 30.9 Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; 30.10 Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden/© Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden/ Bridgeman Images; 30.11 Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay). Photo: Gérard Blot/Hervé Lewandowski; 30.13 Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Rosenwald Collection (1954.12.22); 30.14 © The Research Library. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (920048); 30.15 Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence; 30.16 Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay). Photo: Benoît Touchard/Mathieu Rabeau; 30.17 Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre). Photo: Hervé Lewandowski; 30.18 Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris/Giraudon/Bridgeman Images; 30.19 Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay). Photo: Hervé Lewandowski; 30.20 Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence; 30.21 Photo The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence; 30.22 University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine/akg-images; 30.23 Mauritshuis, The Hague; 30.24 Collection of the Hampton University Museum, Hampton, VA; 30.25 Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Rosenwald Collection (1958.3.29);
30.26 Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/ Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence; 30.27 Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; 30.28 © Paul M.R. Maeyaert; 30.29 Jack E. Boucher/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; 30.30 © Collection of the New-York Historical Society/Bridgeman Images
Chapter 31 31.1 Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay). Photo: Patrice Schmidt; 31.2 Fine Art Images/SuperStock; 31.3 © Kunstmuseum Bern; 31.4 Musée Marmottan, Paris/akg-images; 31.5 Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay). Photo: Hervé Lewandowski; 31.6 Private Collection/Photo © Christie’s Images/ Bridgeman Images; 31.7 © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London/Bridgeman Images; 31.8 Yale University Art Gallery, John Hay Whitney, B.A. 1926, Hon. 1956, Collection (1982.111.6); 31.9 Eadweard Muybridge/Photogravure Company of New York/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; 31.10 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London; 31.11 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London; 31.12 Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence; 31.13 Digital Image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence; 31.14 The Art Institute of Chicago, Robert A. Waller Fund (1910.2). Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago; 31.15 The Art Institute of Chicago, Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection (1928.610). Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago; 31.16 © Bastin & Evrard Photodesigners. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOFAM, Brussels; 31.17 Photo © RMN- Grand Palais (Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris). Photo: Agence Bulloz; 31.18 Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence; 31.19 Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay). Photo: René-Gabriel Ojéda; 31.20 Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gift of Mrs. John W. Simpson (1942.5.36); 31.21 Detroit Institute of Arts/Bridgeman Images; 31.22 Arnold Genthe Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; 31.23 Kunsthaus Zürich; 31.24 Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée Rodin, Paris); 31.25 François Guénet/akg-images; 31.26 © Archives Musée Dapper, Paris. Photo: Hughes Dubois; 31.27 Ian Dagnall/Alamy; 31.28 Interfoto/ SuperStock; 31.29 Digital Image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence; 31.30 Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay). Photo: Gérard Blot; 31.31 The Art Institute of Chicago, Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection (1926.198). Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago; 31.32 The Art Institute of Chicago, Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection (1926.224). Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago; 31.33 The Art Institute of Chicago, Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection (1926.252). Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago; 31.34 Photo The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence
Literary Credits The author and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to use copyright material. Every effort has been made to trace or contact copyright holders, but if notified of any omissions or errors, Laurence King Publishing would be pleased to insert the appropriate acknowledgement in any subsequent edition of this publication.
Chapter 27 READING: 27.5 (pp. 220–221.): Shen Fu, from Chapters from A Floating Life, translated by Shirley M. Black, pp.63–65 (Oxford University Press, 1960). By permission of Oxford University Press.
(p.221): Shen Zhou, “Written on A Landscape Painting in an Album” from The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature, edited by Victor H. Mairr, translated by Daniel Bryant (Columbia University Press, 1994), copyright © 1994, University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Chapter 28 28.4 (p. 245): Alexander Pushkin, “Napoleon” from Collected Narrative and Lyrical Poetry, translated by Walter Arndt (Ardis/Overlook, 1984). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
28.7 (pp. 250–254): Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Prologue in Heaven” from Faust: Parts 1 and 2, translated by Louis McNeice (Oxford University Press, 1951). Reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates Ltd.
28.8 (p. 254): Heinrich Heine, “You Are Just Like a Flower” from Heinrich Heine: Lyric Poems and Ballads, translated by Ernst Feise (University of Pittsburgh Press), copyright © 1961, Ernst Feise. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Chapter 30 30.2 (pp. 281–283): Lin Tse-hsü, “Lin Tse-hsü’s Moral Advice to Queen Victoria” from China’s Response to the West: A documentary Survey, 1839–1923 by Ssu-yu Têng and John King Fairbank, pp.24, 25–26, 27, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), copyright © 1954, 1979 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Renewed © 1982 by Sse-yu Têng and John King Fairbank.
30.7 (pp. 294–295): Fyodor Dostoevsky, from Crime and Punishment, translated by Jessie Coulson, pp.249–253, (Oxford University Press, 1987). By permission of Oxford University Press.
30.8 (p. 296): Gustave Flaubert, from Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners, translated by Margaret Mauldon, pp.257–259, (Oxford University Press, 2008). By permission of Oxford University Press.
30.10 (p. 298): Emile Zola, from Germinal, translated by Stanley and Eleanor Hochman (New American Library, 1970), translation copyright © 1970 by Stanley and Eleanor Hochman. Used by permission of Dutton Signet, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC and the translators.
30.11 (p. 299–300): Henrik Ibsen, “A Doll’s House” from Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen, translated by Eva Le Gallienne (Random House, 1957), translation copyright © 1957 by Eva Le Gallienne. Used by permission of Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved, and Rebecca A. Lyman.
Chapter 31 31.1 (p. 321): Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, with The Antichrist and Ecce Homo, translated by Anthony M Ludovicic, pp.61–62, 81, (Classics of World Literature, 2001).
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352 INDEX
Index Numbers in bold refer to figure numbers. Text excerpts are indicated by (quoted).
A Actor as a Monkey Showman (Torii)
332, 31.12 Adler, Dankmar see Sullivan, Louis Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The
(Twain) 290, 291–3 (quoted)
Africa 280, 341, 350 beadwork 341 sculpture 341–2
African-Americans 284, 310, 312, 30.21
literature 246–8 painting 312 sculpture 265
African in Algerian Costume (Cordier) 265, 29.10
Afternoon of a Faun (Nijinsky) 323–4, 31.2
“Afternoon of a Faun, The” (Mallarmé) 322–3 (quoted), 324, 350
Age of Bronze, The (Rodin) 337–8, 31.21
Agnew Clinic, The (Eakins) 311, 30.22
Aïda (Verdi) 275 Alcott, Louisa May: Little Women
255 American Civil War 228, 284, 302,
313, 30.9 Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp,
The (Rembrandt) 311, 30.23 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) 295 Annan, Thomas 301–2
Close No. 193 High Street 30.5 Anthony, Susan B. 288 anthropology 344 Antichrist, The (Nietzsche)
320 (quoted) “Après-midi d’un faune, L’”
see “Afternoon of a Faun” aquatints 260, 277 arabesque 274, 277 architecture
American 267, 315, 316, 336 Belgian Art Nouveau 335 British 266–7, 276 French 273–4 Gothic Revival 266–7, 276 Romantic 267
arpeggios 272, 277 “art for art’s sake” 320,
321, 345 Art Nouveau 333, 335–6, 346, 350 art songs 270 Artist’s Letter Rack, The (Harnett)
310, 30.20 Arts and Crafts movement 331, 333 assonance 216, 236 At the Moulin rouge (Toulouse-
Lautrec) 334, 31.15 Austen, Jane 255, 256
Sense and Sensibility 255
Austria: music 270 Awakening, The (K. Chopin) 295,
296
B ballet 273–5, 277, 323–4 Baltimore Albion Quilt 233, 27.19 Bambara masks 341 Banjo Lesson, The (Tanner) 312,
30.24 Barber of Seville, The (Rossini) 275 Barbizon School 225 Barry, Charles, and Pugin, A. W.
N.: Houses of Parliament, London 266–7, 29.12
Bartholdi, Frédéric-Auguste: Statue of Liberty 263, 29.8
Basket of Apples, The (Cézanne) 349, 31.33
Bath, The (Cassatt) 333, 31.14 Battle Symphony (Beethoven) 270 Baudelaire, Charles 322 beadwork, African 341, 31.25 Beethoven, Ludwig van 268–70,
276–7 Beethoven Composing the “Pastoral”
29.15 bel canto 275, 277 Belgium
Art Nouveau architecture 335 literature 322
Bentham, Jeremy 284 Bergson, Henri 321–2, 325,
340, 350 Time and Freewill 322
Berlioz, Hector 270, 271, 276, 277, 301, 29.16
Damnation of Faust 271 Harold in Italy 270 Symphonie fantastique 254,
270–71 Bernhardt, Sarah 301 Bhagavad-Gita 226, 227 Bierstadt, Albert 229, 236
The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak 229, 27.14
Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche) 320
Bizet, Georges: Carmen 254, 268 Blake, William 219, 236
The Great Red Dragon. . . 219, 27.5
“The Lamb” 219 A Negro Hung Alive. . . 28.4 “The Tiger” 219 (quoted)
Bohème, La (Puccini) 316 Bolívar, Simón 238 Boris Godunov (Pushkin) 244 Boulevard Montmartre: Rainy
Weather. . . (Pissarro) 327, 31.6
Brady, Mathew B. 302, 313 Dead Confederate Soldier. . . 302,
30.9 “Brahma” (Emerson)
226 (quoted), 227 Brahms, Johannes: Lieder 270 brass instruments 268
Brave Deeds Against the Dead (Goya) 260, 29.4
bridges 315, 316, 30.30 Brighton, England: Royal
Pavilion (Nash) 267, 276, 315, 29.14
Britain 281 architecture 266–7, 276, 315 Arts and Crafts movement
331, 333 colonialism 280 historicism 289 literature 212, 213–19, 238,
240–44, 248, 254–5, 266, 289–91, 298
painting 222–5 photography 300–1
Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre 255 Brontë, Emily: Wuthering Heights
255 Brooklyn Bridge, NY (Roeblings)
316, 30.30 Brothers Karamazov, The
(Dostoevsky) 293 Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder 222 Brussels: Tassel House (Horta)
335, 31.16 Buffalo, NY: Guaranty Building
(Sullivan and Adler) 316, 30.29
Burial at Ornans (Courbet) 303, 304, 30.11
Byron, George Gordon, Lord 210, 241, 242, 256, 261, 28.3
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 242, 270
Don Juan 242–3 “Prometheus” 243–4 (quoted)
C Calamata, Luigi: George Sand 28.7 camera obscura 300 Cameron, Julia Margaret 301
Whisper of the Muse 301, 30.8 capitalism/capitalists 283, 284,
285, 318 Carlyle, Thomas 289
On Heroes and Hero-Worship 238 Carmen (Bizet) 254, 268 Carmen (Mérimée) 254 Carpeaux, Jean-Baptiste: The
Dance 274, 29.20, 31.21 cartoons 271, 306, 27.2, 29.16,
30.13 Cassatt, Mary 331, 333, 350
The Bath 333, 31.14 cast iron structures 267, 314–16,
336, 29.14, 30.27, 30.28, 30.30
Castle of Otranto, The (Walpole) 240
Catlin, George 231, 236, 263 The White Cloud. . . 231, 27.16
Catlinite pipes 231–2, 27.18 Cézanne, Paul 327, 349
The Basket of Apples 349, 31.33 Mont Sainte-Victoire 349, 31.34
Charles X, of France 261
Chevreul, Michel: The Principles of Harmony. . .325
Chicago 315 Home Insurance Building
(Jenney) 316 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron)
242, 270 China 281, 283, 285
landscapes 221–2, 236 literature 219–21, 236 Opium Wars 281–3
Chopin, Frédéric 210, 255, 271–2, 277, 29.17
Chopin, Kate 296, 318 The Awakening 295, 296 “The Story of an Hour”
296–7 (quoted) Chosen One, The (Hodler)
324, 31.3 Church, Frederic Edwin 229,
231, 236 Niagara 229, 27.15
cloisonné enamel 331, 336 Close No. 193 High Street (Annan)
301–2, 30.5 Code Napoléon 238 Cole, Thomas 229, 236
The Oxbow. . . 229, 27.13 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 227
Lyrical Ballads 213 colonialism 279–80, 283, 318,
Map 30.1 communism 285–6, 288, 318 Communist Manifesto (Marx and
Engels) 285–8 (quoted) concertos 268 conservatism 284, 285, 318 Constable, John 222–3,
236, 326 The Haywain 223, 27.8 Wivenhoe Park, Essex
223, 27.9 Cooper, James Fenimore 225 Cordier, Charles-Henry-Joseph
265 African in Algerian Costume 265,
29.10 Corot, Jean-Baptiste 209,
225 (quoted), 225, 272 Ville d’Avray 225, 27.11
Courbet, Gustave 302, 318 Burial at Ornans 303, 304,
30.11 The Stone-Breakers 302–3, 30.10
Crane, Stephen 298 creationism 211, 213 Crime and Punishment
(Dostoevsky) 293–5 (quoted)
Crystal Palace, London (Paxton) 315, 318, 30.27
Cuba 280
D Daguerre, Louis/daguerreotypes
301, 28.5 Dahomey 341, Map 31.1 Damnation of Faust (Berlioz) 271
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Dance, The (Carpeaux) 274, 29.20, 31.21
dance 338–9, 31.22; see also ballet Dancing Figure (Rodin) 337, 31.20 Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy
261 Darwin, Charles 211, 212, 222,
236, 27.2 The Descent of Man 211–12 The Origin of Species 211,
212–13 (quoted) Daumier, Honoré 303, 306, 318
Free Admission Day. . . 306, 30.14
Nadar Raising Photography to the Heights of Art 306, 30.13
The Third-Class Carriage 306–7, 30.15
David, Jacques-Louis 239, 258, 347
Napoleon Crossing the Great St Bernard Pass 239, 258, 28.1
The Oath of the Horatii 262, 29.7
David Copperfield (Dickens) 290 Day of the God, The (Gauguin)
346, 31.31 Dead Confederate Soldier. . .
(Brady) 302, 30.9 Debussy, Claude 323, 325
Gardens in the Rain 324 Image: Reflections in the Water
324 Prelude to “The Afternoon of a
Faun” 323–4, 350 The Sea 324
Declaration of Rights, A (P. B. Shelley) 216
Defence of Poetry (P. B. Shelley) 216
Degas, Edgar 328, 330, 331, 336–7, 350
The False Start 328, 31.8 Little Dancer Aged Fourteen
337, 31.19 Two Dancers on a Stage 328, 31.7
Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Manet) 308–9, 318, 30.16
Delacroix, Eugène 260–61, 269, 271, 272, 276, 313
Frédéric Chopin 29.17 Liberty Leading the People 261,
262, 263, 29.6 Mephistopheles Appearing to
Faust. . . 249, 28.6 Women in Algiers 261, 29.1
Denis, Maurice 345 Departure of the Volunteers of 1792,
The (Rude) 263, 29.9 Descartes, René 210 Descent of Man, The (Darwin)
211–12 dialectic, Hegelian 211, 236 Dickens, Charles 289–90, 297,
318 David Copperfield 290 Nicholas Nickleby 290 The Old Curiosity Shop
290–91 (quoted)
Oliver Twist 290 “Disasters of War, The” (Goya)
260, 29.4 Disraeli, Benjamin 283 Divine Comedy (Dante) 261 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe) 248 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen)
299–300 (quoted) Don Juan (Byron 242–3 Donizetti, Gaetano: Lucia di
Lammermoor 275 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 293,
318, 320 The Brothers Karamazov 293 Crime and Punishment
293–5 (quoted) The Possessed 293 War and Peace 293
Douglass, Frederick 246, 247, 256, 28.5
My Bondate and My Freedom 246–7 (quoted)
Narrative. . . 238, 246 Dreiser, Theodore 298 Dumas, Alexandre 238 Duncan, Isadora 338–9, 350,
31.22 Dürer, Albrecht 222 Duret, Théodore: “The
Impressionist Painters” 330 (quoted)
Dutch painting see Gogh, Vincent van; Rembrandt van Rijn
dynamics, musical 269, 277
E Eakins, Thomas 312, 318
The Agnew Clinic 311, 30.22 Walt Whitman 312, 27.12
Eckhart, Johannes 210 economics 283–4, 318 Edison, Thomas 320 Eiffel, Gustave
Eiffel Tower, Paris 315, 318, 30.28
Statue of Liberty (framework) 29.8
1812 Overture (Tchaikovsky) 270 electricity 279, 320 elevators 314, 315, 316 Eliot, George 254, 256,
303 (quoted) Emerson, Ralph Waldo 212, 226,
227, 236 “Brahma” 226 (quoted), 227 “Nature” 226–7 (quoted)
Engels, Friedrich 285, see Marx, Karl
engravings 29.16 entrepreneurs 283, 318 Equitable Life Insurance
Building, NY 316 Erlkönig (Schubert) 3270 etching(s) 260, 29.4 ethnography 344 études 271–2, 277 Eugene Onegin (Pushkin) 244, 268 eugenics 212, 236 Evolution, Theory of (Darwin)
211, 213, 27.1
F False Start, The (Degas) 328, 31.8 Faust (Goethe) 248–54 (quoted),
256, 261, 268, 270, 271, 275 Faust Symphony (Liszt) 270 feminism 288 Fichte, Gottlieb 210 Flaubert, Gustave 295, 297, 318
Madame Bovary 295–6 (quoted), 308–9, 310
Forever Free (Lewis) 265, 29.11 Four Seasons, The (Vivaldi) 270 France 238, Map 28.1
architecture 273–4 literature 238, 255–6, 295–8,
322–3 music 254, 270–71, 323–4 painting and lithography 222,
225, 258, 260–63, 302–3, 304, 306, 307–10, 325–8
philosophy see Bergson, Henri photography 301, 306 sculpture 263, 265, 336–40
Frankenstein (M. Shelley) 240–42 (quoted), 28.1
Frazer, Sir James: The Golden Bough 344
Free Admission Day. . . (Daumier) 306, 30.14
free verse 228, 236 Friedrich, Caspar David 221, 272
Two Men Looking at the Moon 221, 27.7
Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis 289
G Gandhi, Mohandas (“Mahatma”)
227 Gardens in the Rain (Debussy) 324 Garnier, Jean-Louis Charles:
Paris Opéra 273–4, 29.18, 29.19
Gates of Hell, The (Rodin) 339–40, 31.23
Gauguin, Paul 340, 343, 346–7, 350
The Day of the God 346, 31.31 Noa Noa (Fragrance)
344 (quoted) Gay Science, The (Nietzsche)
320–21 (quoted) Geiger, Andrew: A Concert of
Berlioz 29.16 Géricault, Théodore 210, 260
The Raft of the “Medusa” 260, 262, 313, 29.5
Germany 266, 279, 284 historicism 289 literature 238, 248–54 music 254, 267, 268–70, 275–6,
277 opera 275–6, 277 painting 221 philosophy 210–11, 226, 236,
320–21 Germinal (Zola) 298 (quoted) Giorgione: Pastoral Concert
308, 30.17 Glasgow, Scotland 301–2, 30.5
glass, Tiffany 336, 350, 31.18 Gleaners (Millet) 303, 30.1 Glele, King of Dahomey
341, 342 Goethe, Johann von 211, 270
Faust 248–54 (quoted), 256, 261, 268, 270, 271, 275
Sorrows of Young Werther 254 Gogh, Vincent van 330 (quoted),
345, 346, 350 Self-Portrait 346, 31.30 The Starry Night 345–6, 31.29
Golden Bough, The (Frazer) 344 Gothic novels 240–42 Gothic Revival architecture
266–7, 276 Goya, Francisco 258, 276, 313
Brave Deeds Against the Dead 260, 29.4
“The Disasters of War” 260, 29.4
The Third of May, 1808. . . 258, 260, 29.3
Grasset, Eugène: comb 336, 31.17 Great Red Dragon. . ., The (Blake)
219, 27.5 “Gretchen am Spinnrade”
(Schubert) 270 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm 238 Grog Shop, The (Zola) 298 Gros, Antoine-Jean 210, 258, 276
Napoleon Visiting the Plague Victims at Jaffa 258, 29.2
Gu (Huntondji) 342, 31.26 Guaranty Building, Buffalo, NY
(Sullivan and Adler) 316, 30.29
Guibert, Maurice 334, 31.15 Gulf Stream, The (Homer) 313,
30.26 Gypsies, The (Pushkin) 268
H Hardy, Thomas 298 Harnett, William Michael 310,
318 The Artist’s Letter Rack 310,
30.20 Harold in Italy (Berlioz) 270 Harper’s Weekly 312–13 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 226, 238 Haydn, Franz Joseph 268, 269 Haywain, The (Constable)
223, 27.8 Hegel, Georg W. H./Hegelianism
211, 236, 285 Heine, Heinrich 270
“You are Just Like a Flower” 254 (quoted)
Helmholtz, Hermann von 323, 325
heroes Promethean 240–44, 256 Romantic 238–9, 248, 255,
256, 258, 260, 276 Hicks, Edward 235, 236
The Peaceable Kingdom 235, 27.20
Hinduism 210, 226, 227 historicism 289
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Hodler, Ferdinand: The Chosen One 324, 31.3
Hoffmann, E. T. A. 267 (quoted) Hokusai, Katsushika: Mount
Fuji Seen Below a Wave at Kanagawa 330, 31.11
Homer, Winslow 312–13, 318 The Gulf Stream 313, 30.26 The War for the Union. . .
313, 30.25 Horta, Victor 335
Tassel House, Brussels 335, 31.16
Houses of Parliament, London (Barry and Pugin) 266–7, 29.12
Hudson River School, 229 Hugo, Victor: Les Misérables
238 Hungarian music 270 Huntondji, Ganhu: Gu
342, 31.26
I Ibsen, Henrik 299
A Doll’s House 299–300 (quoted)
idealism 210, 227 idée fixe 270–71, 275, 277 Idylls of the King (Tennyson)
266 Illuminations (Rimbaud)
322 (quoted) Image: Reflections in the Water
(Debussy) 324 impasto 325 imperialism 238–9, 279–80, 318,
see also colonialism Impression: Sunrise (Monet)
325–6, 31.4 Impressionism 225, 310, 320,
325–8, 330–31, 345, 349, 250 impromptus 271, 277 India 281, 283 Industrial Revolution/
industrialization 219, 236, 279, 283, 315, 318
Iran (Persia) 283 Iron Mill (Menzel) 30.3 Islam/Muslims 280, 283, 312 Italy 279
music and opera 268, 275, 277, 316–17
J James, Henry 313 (quoted) Jane Avril (Toulouse-Lautrec)
332, 31.13 Jane Eyre (C. Brontë) 255 Japan 280, 281 Japanese woodblock prints
310, 329–31, 332, 350, 31.10–31.12
Japonisme 331 Jenney, William Le Baron:
Home Insurance Building, Chicago 316
Jesus 289 Judgment of Paris, The (Raimondi)
308, 30.18
K Kant, Immanuel 210 Kapital, Das (Marx) 285 Keats, John 210, 217, 236
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” 217–19 (quoted)
King, Martin Luther 227 Kipling, Rudyard: “The White
Man’s Burden” 280 (quoted)
Kirmani, Aqa Khan 283 Kiss, The (Rodin) 340, 31.24 Kollwitz, Käthe: March of the
Weavers 30.4 Kunisada: prints 330, 31.10
L Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste de 211 “Lamb, The” (Blake) 219 landscape painting 221
American 229, 231 British 222–5 Chinese 221–2 Dutch 222 French 222 German 221 Renaissance 222
Lankford, Sarah: quilt 233, 27.19 Leaves of Grass (Whitman) 228 leitmotifs 275, 276, 277 Lélia (Sand) 256 (quoted) Leonardo da Vinci 222 Leroux, Gaston: The Phantom of
the Opera 29.18 Lewis, Edmonia: Forever Free
265, 29.11 liberalism/liberals 284, 318 Liberty Leading the People
(Delacroix) 261, 262, 263, 29.6
lieder (songs) 270, 277 Lin Zexu: Letter. . .
281–3 (quoted) Lincoln, Abraham 285 Liszt, Franz 270 literature
African-American 246–8 American 213, 225–9, 238,
245, 246, 255, 290, 291–3, 296–7, 298, 298, 313
Belgian 322 British 212, 213–19, 238,
240–44, 248, 254–5, 266, 289–91, 298
Chinese 219–21, 236 French 238, 255–6, 295–8,
322–3 German 238, 248–54 Realist 289–98 Romantic 213–19 Russian 244–5, 256, 293–5 Symbolist 322–3
lithography 279, 303, 306, 318, 332, 333, 28.6, 29.15, 30.12–30.14, 31.13
Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (Degas) 337, 31.19
Little Women (Alcott) 255 Livingstone, David 343 Locke, John 210
London 320 Crystal Palace (Paxton) 315,
318, 30.27 Houses of Parliament (Barry
and Pugin) 266–7, 29.12 London, Jack 298 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth:
The Song of Hiawatha 232 Louis-Philippe, of France 306 Lucia di Lammermoor (Donizetti)
275 Luncheon on the Grass see Déjeuner
sur l’herbe lyric poetry 214, 236 Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth and
Coleridge) 213–16 (quoted)
M Macaulay, Thomas Babington
289 machine guns 279 Madame Bovary (Flaubert)
295–6 (quoted), 308–9, 310 Madame Butterfly (Puccini)
316–17, 318 Maeterlinck, Maurice 322 Mali 341 Mallarmé, Stéphane 322, 323,
325, 340 “The Afternoon of a Faun”
322–3 (quoted), 324, 350 Mamout, Yarrow: portrait (Peale)
310, 312, 30.21 Manet, Edouard 307–8, 309
Déjeuner sur l’herbe 308–9, 318, 30.16
Olympia 309–10, 318, 30.19 Zola 30.7
Maori woodcarving 343, 31.27 March of the Weavers (Kollwitz)
30.4 Marlowe, Christopher: Doctor
Faustus 248 Marx, Karl 285
Communist Manifesto (with Engels) 285–8, 318 (quoted)
Das Kapital 285 masks, African 341 Maxwell, James Clerk: Treatise on
Electricity and Magnetism 320 Meiji rule (Japan) 280 Melville, Herman 226, 238, 313
Moby-Dick 238 Menzel, Adolf von: Iron Mill 30.3 Mephistopheles Appearing to
Faust. . . (Delacroix) 249, 28.6
Mérimée, Prosper 255 Carmen 254
Meurent, Victorine 308, 309 Mexico 280 Mill, John Stuart 284, 318
On Liberty 284, 285 The Subjection of Women 288–9
Millet, Jean-François 303 Gleaners 303, 30.1
Milton, John: Paradise Lost 219, 248
Misérables, Les (Hugo) 238
Moby-Dick (Melville) 238 Modernism 279, 315, 321,
338, 349 Monet, Claude 325, 326–7, 330,
340, 350 Impression: Sunrise 325–6, 31.4 Water-Lily Pond. . . 327, 31.5
Mont Sainte-Victoire (Cézanne) 349, 31.34
Moulin de la Galette, Le (Renoir) 31.1
Mount Fuji Seen Below a Wave at Kanagawa (Hokusai) 330, 31.11
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 268, 269
music and musical instruments Austrian 270 French 254, 270–71, 323–4 German 254, 267, 268–70,
275–6, 277 Hungarian 270 Italian 268 Polish 271–2 program 258, 270, 277 Romantic 225, 258, 267–72,
275–6 Russian 244, 270 see also opera slave songs and spirituals 248
music-drama 275, 276 Musset, Alfred de 255 Mussorgsky, Modest 244 Muybridge, Eadweard:
Photo Sequence of Racehorse 328, 31.9
My Bondage and My Freedom (Douglass) 246–7 (quoted)
N Nadar (Gaspard-Félix
Tournachon) 301 Nadar Raising Photography to the
Heights of Art (Daumier) 306, 30.13
Nana (Zola) 310, 333 “Napoleon” (Pushkin) 237,
244–5 (quoted) Napoleon Bonaparte 238–9, 243,
244, 256, 258, 260, 263, 268, 270, 283, 343
Diary 239–40 (quoted) Napoleon Crossing the Great
St Bernard Pass (David) 239, 28.1
Napoleon Visiting the Plague Victims at Jaffa (Gros) 258, 29.2
Nash, John: Royal Pavilion, Brighton 267, 29.14
nationalism 238, 256 Native Americans 231–2, 233,
236, 27.16 Catlinite pipes 231–2, 27.18 Zuni water jar 231, 27.17
natural selection 211, 213, 236 naturalistic novels 297–8 “Nature” (Emerson)
226–7 (quoted) nature, attitudes to 210, 212, 213,
214, 215, 229, 236
LK055_P0351EDFIERO_BK5_351-356.indd 354 12/01/2015 08:48
INDEX 355
Necessity of Atheism, The (Shelley) 216
negative space 329, 350 Negro Hung Alive. . ., A (Blake)
28.4 Neoclassicism 239, 258, 266, 276,
302 Neomedievalism 266–7, 276 Neoplatonism 226 New York City 315
American Museum of Natural History 344
Brooklyn Bridge (J. and W. Roebling) 316, 30.30
Equitable Life Insurance Building 316
St Patrick’s Cathedral (Renwick and Rodrigue) 267, 29.13
Statue of Liberty 263, 29.8 Niagara (Church) 229, 27.15 Nicholas Nickleby (Dickens)
290 Nietzsche, Friedrich 319, 320,
340, 350 The Antichrist 320 (quoted) The Birth of Tragedy 320 The Gay Science
320–21 (quoted) On the Genealogy of Morals
320 Thus Spoke Zarathrustra 320 Twilight of the Idols 320,
321 (quoted) Nijinsky, Vaslav 323–4, 31.2 Noa Noa (Fragrance) (Gauguin)
344 (quoted) nocturnes 271, 277 Norwegian drama see Ibsen,
Henrik Novalis (Friedrich von
Hardenberg) 210 American 245, 291–3, 295,
296–7 British 254–5, 289–91 French 295–6, 297–8, 29.18 Gothic 240–42 Russian 293–5
O Oath of the Horatii, The (David)
262, 29.7 Oceanic cultures 341, 343, 344,
350 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats)
217–19 (quoted) “Ode to the West Wind”
(Shelley) 216–17 (quoted) Old Curiosity Shop, The (Dickens)
290–90 (quoted) Oliver Twist (Dickens) 290 Olympia (Manet) 309–10, 318,
30.19 On Heroes and Hero-Worship
(Carlyle) On Liberty (Mill) 284, 285 On the Genealogy of Morals
(Nietzsce) 320 opera 268, 270, 275–6, 277,
316–17
Opéra, Paris (Garnier) 273–4, 277, 29.18–29.20
Opium Wars (1839–50) 281 opus 277 orchestras 268, 276, 324 Origin of Species, The (Darwin)
211, 212–13 (quoted) Oxbow, The (Cole) 229, 27.13
P Pacific Islands Map 31.2 Paganini, Niccolò 268 painting
African-American 312 American 229, 231, 233, 236,
310, 311, 312–13, 318, 331, 333
British 222–5, 236 Chinese 221–2, 236 Dutch see Gogh, Vincent van;
Rembrandt van Rijn French 222, 225, 258, 260–63,
302–3, 304, 307–10, 325–8 German 221 Impressionist 225, 310, 320,
325–8, 330–31 Neoclassical 239, 262 pointillist 347 Postimpressionist 320, 345–9 Realist 302–3, 310, 312–13 Romantic 221–5, 236, 258–63,
302 Russian 293 Spanish see Goya, Francisco Symbolist 324
pantheism 213, 236 Paradise Lost (Milton) 219, 248 Paris 239, 275, 306, 320, 327
Café Guerbois 327 Eiffel Tower (Eiffel) 315,
318, 30.28 Exposition Universelle (1889)
315, 344, 346, 350 Louvre 306 La Marseillaise (Rude) 263,
29.9 Métro 335–6 Moulin Rouge 332, 334, 31.15 Musée d’Ethnographie du
Trocadéro 344 Museum of Decorative Arts 339 Opéra (Garnier) 273–4, 277,
29.18–29.20 Royal Academy 306, 309 Salon de Paris 306, 309
Pastoral Concert (Titian/ Giorgione) 308, 30.17
Pater, Walter 320 patriotism 289 Paxton, Joseph: Crystal Palace
315, 318, 30.27 Peaceable Kingdom, The (Hicks)
235, 27.20 Peacock vase (Tiffany) 336, 31.18 Peale, Charles Willson 310
Portrait of Yarrow Mamout 310, 312, 30.21
Penn, William 235 Phantom of the Opera, The
(Leroux) 29.18
Phillips, Thomas: Lord Byron in Albanian Costume 28.3
philosophers/philosophy American 226–9, 236 French see Bergson, Henri German 210–11, 226, 236,
320–21 Photo Sequence of Racehorse
(Muybridge) 328, 31.9 photography 279, 300–2, 306,
310, 334, 30.5, 30.8, 30.9 piano music 268, 271–2 pianos 268 Pissarro, Camille 327–8, 350
Le Boulevard Montmartre: Rainy Weather. . . 31.6
Plains Indians: pipes 231–2, 27.18 Poe, Edgar Allan 225–6 Poet on a Mountain Top
(Shen Zhou) 221, 27.6 pointillism 347 Polish music 271–2 Possessed, The (Dostoevsky) 293 Postimpressionism 320, 345–9 Poussin, Nicolas 328, 347 Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun”
(Debussy) 323–4, 350 prima ballerinas 274, 277 primivitism 343–4, 350 printmaking see etching(s);
Japanese prints; lithography program music 258, 270, 277 proletariat 285, 286, 288, 318 Prometheus 240, 245, 270 “Prometheus” (Byron)
243–4 (quoted) Prometheus Unbound
(P. B. Shelley) 240 Proudhon, Pierre Joseph 285,
302–3 Puccini, Giacomo 316–17, 318 Pugin, Augustus W. N. see Barry,
Charles Pushkin, Alexander 244, 256
Boris Godunov 244 Eugene Onegin 244, 268 The Gypsies 268 “Napoleon” 237,
244–5 (quoted)
Q Qajar dynasty 283 Quakers 235 quilting 233, 235, 27.19
R racism 212 radiotelegraphy 320 Raft of the “Medusa”, The
(Géricault) 260, 262, 313, 29.5
railroads 279 Raimondi, Marcantonio: The
Judgment of Paris 308, 30.18 Ranke, Leopold von 289 Realism, 19th-century 279
in literature 289–97, 318 in opera 316–17 in painting 302–3, 304, 306–7,
308–10, 312–13, 318
religion and Darwinism 211, 212 Hinduism 210, 226, 227 and historicism 289 and Romanticism 210
Rembrandt van Rijn 222, 261, 307
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp 311, 30.23
Renan, Ernest: Life of Jesus 289 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 327,
331, 350 Le Moulin de la Galette 327, 31.1
Renwick, James, and Rodrigue, William: St Patrick’s Cathedral, New York 267, 29.13
Repin, Ilya: Portrait of Leo Tolstoy 30.6
Rimbaud, Arthur 322, 350 Illuminations 322 (quoted)
Ring des Nibelungen, Der (Wagner) 275–6, 29.22
Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, The (Bierstadt) 229, 27.14
Rodin, Auguste 336, 337, 338, 350
The Age of Bronze 337–8, 31.21 Dancing Figure 337, 31.20 The Gates of Hell 339–40,
31.23 The Kiss 340, 31.24
Rodrigue, William see Renwick, James
Roebling, John A. and Washington A.: Brooklyn Bridge, New York 316, 30.30
Romanticism 210–11, 212–13, 215, 219, 236, 238
in architecture 267 in ballet 273–5, 277 heroes 238–9, 248, 255, 256,
258, 260, 276 in literature 213–19 and love 254–6 and music and opera 225,
267–72, 275–6, 277 in painting 221–5, 236,
258–63, 302 Rood, Ogden N.: Modern
Chromatics 347 Rossini, Gioacchino: The Barber
of Seville 275 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 210, 213,
238, 346 Rubens, Peter Paul 261 Rude, François 263, 265
La Marseillaise 263, 29.9 Russia 279, 281, 284, 285–6
ballet 274–5 music 244, 270 literature 244–5, 256, 293–5 painting 293
S Sand, George 255–6, 271, 301,
28.7, 29.17 Lélia 256 (quoted)
scherzo 268, 277
LK055_P0351EDFIERO_BK5_351-356.indd 355 12/01/2015 08:48
356 INDEX
Schiller, Friedrich 210, 226 “To Joy” 270
Schleiermacher, Friedrich E. D. 211
Schopenhauer, Arthur 210 Schubert, Franz 210, 270, 277 Schumann, Robert: Lieder
254, 270 science and technology 263, 279,
287, 301, 306, 314, 324 Scott, Sir Walter 238, 266,
268, 275 sculpture
African 341–2 African-American 265 French 263, 265, 274,
336–40, 345 Maori 343 Romantic 263, 265
Sea, The (Debussy) 324 Self-Portrait (van Gogh) 346, 31.30 Sense and Sensibility (Austen) 255 Seurat, Georges 347
Sunday Afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte 347, 31.32
Shaka 238 Shakespeare, William 270 Shelley, Mary 216, 242, 255, 256
Frankenstein 240–42 (quoted), 28.2
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 210, 212, 216, 236, 242
“Ode to the West Wind” 216–17 (quoted)
Prometheus Unbound 240 Shen Fu 219–21 Shen Zhou: Poet on a Mountain
Top 221, 27.6 Sisyphus Painter: krater 27.4 Six Chapters from a Floating Life
(Shen Fu) 220–21 (quoted), 236
skyscrapers 315, 316 Slave Ship (Turner) 224,
260, 27.1 slaves/slavery 238, 245–8,
265, 284 Smithson, Harriet 270 Snowstorm. . . (Turner) 224, 27.10 “social Darwinism” 212 socialism/socialists 284–5, 302–3 sonatas 268 “Song of Myself” (Whitman)
228–9 (quoted) Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe)
254 South Africa 280 Spanish painting see Goya,
Francisco spirituals, slave 248 Staël, Madame de (Germaine
Necker) 255 Stanley, Henry M. 343 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady 288 Starry Night, The (van Gogh)
345–6, 31.29
Statue of Liberty (Bartholdi) 263, 29.8
steel frame construction 316, 30.29
Stone-Breakers, The (Courbet) 302–3, 30.10
“Story of an Hour” (K. Chopin) 296–7 (quoted)
Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom’s Cabin 245
stringed instruments 268, 271 Subjection of Women, The (Mill)
288–9 Sudan, the 280 Sullivan, Louis 316, 336
Guaranty Building, Buffalo, NY (with Adler) 316, 30.29
Sunday Afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte (Seurat) 347, 31.32
Swan Lake (Tchaikovsky) 273, 274, 277
Swiss painting 324 Sylphide, La (ballet) 274–5 Symbolism 320, 322–3, 324, 345,
346, 350 Symphonie fantastique (Berlioz)
254, 270–71 symphonies 268, 269–70 System of Transcendental Idealism
(Schiller) 226
T Taglione, Marie 274, 275,
277, 29.21 Talbot, William Henry Fox
300–1 Tanner, Henry Ossawa 312
The Banjo Lesson 312, 30.24 Tassel House, Brussels (Norta)
335, 31.16 tattoos 343, 344, 31.28 Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilyich 244
ballets 273, 274, 277 1812 Overture 270 Eugene Onegin 268 Roman and Juliet 270
technological advances see science and technology
Tennyson, Alfred Lord: Idylls of the King 266
theater, Norwegian (Realist) 299–300
Third-Class Carriage, The (Daumier) 306–7, 30.15
Third of May, 1808, The (Goya) 258, 260, 29.3
Thoreau, Henry David 212, 227, 229 (quoted), 346
Walden 227 (quoted) Thus Spoke Zarathustra
(Nietzsche) 320 Tiffany, Louis Comfort 336, 350
Peacock vase 336, 31.18 “Tiger, The” (Blake) 219
(quoted)
Time and Freewill (Bergson) 322 Tintern Abbey (Turner) 27.3 “Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth
214–16 (quoted) Titian: Pastoral Concert 308, 30.17 Tolstoy, Leo 293, 318, 30.6
Anna Karenina 295 tone color 258, 277 Torii Kiyonobu: Actor as a Monkey
Showman 332, 31.12 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 332,
333, 334, 350 At the Moulin Rouge 334, 31.15 Jane Avril 332, 31.13
Transcendentalism 226–9, 236 tremolo 270, 277 Tristan and Isolde (Wagner) 254 Truth, Sojourner 247
Narrative. . . 247–8 (quoted) Turner, Joseph M. W. 223, 224–5,
236, 313, 326 Turner, Nat 245–6
Interior of Tintern Abbey 27.3 The Slave Ship 224, 260, 27.1 Snowstorm. . . 224, 27.10
Twain, Mark 290, 310, 318 The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn 290, 291–3 (quoted) Twilight of the Gods (Nietzsche)
320, 321 (quoted) Two Dancers on a Stage (Degas)
328, 31.7 Two Men Looking at the Moon
(Friedrich) 221, 27.7
U ukiyo prints 329, 332 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 245 United States of America
279, 280 architecture 267, 315,
316, 336 colonialism 280 dance 338–9 feminism 288 literature 213, 225–9, 238,
245, 246, 255, 290, 291–3, 296–7, 298, 298, 313
painting 229, 231, 233, 236, 310, 312–13, 318, 331, 333
philosophy 226–9, 236 quilting 233, 235, railroads 279 sculpture 263 see also African-Americans;
New York City Upanishads 226 Ussher, Bishop James 211
V Verdi, Giuseppe 257,
275 (quoted), 277 Aïda 275
verismo 316, 318 Verlaine, Paul 322, 350 Vermeer, Jan 222
Victoria, Queen 283 Ville d’Avray (Corot) 225, 27.11 violins 268 virtuosi 268, 277 Vivaldi, Antonio: The Four Seasons
270
W Wagner, Richard 275,
277, 323 Der Ring des Nibelungen
275–6, 29.22 Tristan and Isolde 254
Walden. . . (Thoreau) 227 (quoted)
Walpole, Horace: The Castle of Otranto 240
War and Peace (Dostoevsky) 293 War for the Union, The (Homer)
312, 30.25 Water-Lily Pond. . . (Monet)
327, 31.5 Watts, G. G. 30.8 Whisper of the Muse (Cameron)
301, 30.8 White Cloud, The (Catlin)
231, 27.16 “White Man’s Burden” (Kipling)
280 (quoted) Whitman, Walt 212, 228, 236,
312, 27.12 Leaves of Grass 228 “Song of Myself”
228–9 (quoted) Wivenhoe Park, Essex (Constable)
223, 27.9 Women in Algiers (Delacroix)
261, 29.1 women writers, 19th-century
254–6 women’s rights 288–9, 318 woodblock prints, Japanese
329–31, 332, 31.10–31.12 woodwind instruments 268 Wordsworth, William
212, 214, 223, 226, 227, 228, 236
Lyrical Ballads 213, 214–15 “Tintern Abbey”
214–16 (quoted) Wuthering Heights (E. Brontë) 255
Y Yoruba, the 341, Map 31.1
beadwork 341, 31.25 “You are Just Like a Flower”
(Heine) 254 (quoted)
Z Zola, Emile 297–8, 309,
318, 30.7 Germinal 298 (quoted) The Grog Shop 298 Nana 310, 333
Zulu nation 238, 280 Zuni water jar 231, 27.17
LK055_P0351EDFIERO_BK5_351-356.indd 356 12/01/2015 08:48
- Cover
- Book 5 The Humanistic Tradition
- Series Contents
- Book 5 Contents
- Letter from the Author
- Preface
- BEFORE WE BEGIN
- 27 The Romantic View of Nature (ca. 1780–1880)
- LOOKING AHEAD
- The Progress of Industrialization
- Early Nineteenth-Century Thought
- Hegel and the Hegelian Dialectic
- Darwin and the Theory of Evolution
- EXPLORING ISSUES Creationism versus Evolution
- Nature and the Natural in European Literature
- Wordsworth and the Poetry of Nature
- READING 27.1 From Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”
- The Poetry of Shelley
- READING 27.2 Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”
- The Poetry of Keats
- READING 27.3 Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
- Blake: Romantic Mystic
- READING 27.4 Blake’s “The Tiger”
- Nature and the Natural in Asian Literature
- READING 27.5 From Shen Fu’s Six Chapters from a Floating Life
- Romantic Landscape Painting
- MAKING CONNECTIONS
- Constable and Turner
- Landscape Painting in France
- American Romanticism
- Transcendentalism
- LOOKING INTO Emerson’s “Brahma”
- READING 27.6 From Thoreau’s Walden
- Walt Whitman’s Romantic Individualism
- READING 27.7 From Whitman’s “Song of Myself”
- American Landscape Painting
- America and Native Americans
- American Folk Art
- LOOKING BACK
- Glossary
- 28 The Romantic Hero (ca. 1780–1880)
- LOOKING AHEAD
- Nationalism and the Hero
- Napoleon as a Romantic Hero
- READING 28.1 From Napoleon’s Diary
- The Promethean Hero
- The Promethean Myth in Literature
- READING 28.2 From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Chapters 4 and 5)
- Bryon and the Promethean Myth
- READING 28.3 Byron’s “Prometheus”
- Pushkin: The Byron of Russia
- READING 28.4 From Pushkin’s “Napoleon”
- The Abolitionists: American Prometheans
- Frederick Douglass
- READING 28.5 From Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom
- Sojourner Truth
- READING 28.6 From The Narrative of Sojourner Truth
- Slave Songs and Spirituals
- Goethe’s Faust: The Quintessential Romantic Hero
- READING 28.7 From Goethe’s Faust
- Romantic Love and Romantic Stereotypes
- READING 28.8 Heine’s “You are Just Like a Flower”
- The Female Voice
- LOOKING BACK
- 29 The Romantic Style in Art and Music (ca. 1780–1880)
- LOOKING AHEAD
- Heroic Themes in Art
- Gros and the Glorification of the Hero
- Popular Heroism in Goya and Géricault
- Delacroix and Revolutionary Heroism
- MAKING CONNECTIONS
- Heroic Themes in Sculpture
- Trends in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Architecture
- Neomedievalism in the West
- Exoticism in Western Architecture
- The Romantic Style in Music
- The Genius of Beethoven
- Art Songs
- The Programmatic Symphonies of Berlioz
- The Piano Music of Chopin
- The Romantic Ballet
- Romantic Opera
- Verdi and Italian Grand Opera
- Wagner and the Birth of Music-Drama
- LOOKING BACK
- Glossary
- 30 Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style (ca. 1850–1900)
- LOOKING AHEAD
- The Global Dominion of the West
- Advancing Industrialization
- Colonialism and the New Imperialism
- READING 30.1 From Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden”
- China and the West
- READING 30.2 From Lin Zexu’s Letter of Advice to Queen Victoria
- Social and Economic Realities
- EXPLORING ISSUES Islam and the West
- Nineteenth-Century Social Theory
- EXPLORING ISSUES The Limits of Authority
- The Radical Views of Marx and Engels
- READING 30.3 From Marx’s and Engels’ Communist Manifesto
- Mill and Women’s Rights
- READING 30.4 From Mill’s The Subjection of Women
- The New Historicism
- Realism in Literature
- The Novels of Dickens and Twain
- READING 30.5 From Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop
- READING 30.6 From Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Russian Realism: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy
- READING 30.7 From Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment
- The Literary Heroines of Flaubert and Chopin
- READING 30.8 From Flaubert’s Madame Bovary
- READING 30.9 Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” (“The Dream of an Hour”)
- Zola and the Naturalistic Novel
- READING 30.10 From Zola’s Germinal
- Realist Drama: Ibsen
- READING 30.11 From Ibsen’s A Doll’s House
- Realism in the Visual Arts
- The Birth of Photography
- Courbet and French Realist Painting
- Daumier’s Social Realism
- LOOKING INTO Courbet’s Burial at Ornans
- The Scandalous Realism of Manet
- Realism in American Painting
- MAKING CONNECTIONS
- Late Nineteenth-Century Architecture
- Realism in Music
- LOOKING BACK
- Glossary
- 31 The Move Toward Modernism (ca. 1875–1900)
- LOOKING AHEAD
- Late Nineteenth-Century Thought
- Nietzsche’s New Morality
- READING 31.1 From the Works of Nietzsche
- Bergson: Intellect and Intuition
- Poetry in the Late Nineteenth Century: The Symbolists
- Mallarmé
- READING 31.2 From Mallarmé’s “The Afternoon of a Faun”
- Music in the Late Nineteenth Century: Debussy
- Painting in the Late Nineteenth Century
- Symbolism
- Impressionism
- Monet: Pioneer Impressionist
- Renoir
- Pissarro
- Degas
- Japanese Woodblock Prints and Western Art
- Cassatt
- MAKING CONNECTIONS
- Toulouse-Lautrec
- Art Nouveau
- LOOKING INTO Toulouse-Lautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge
- Sculpture in the Late Nineteenth Century
- Degas and Rodin
- The Arts of Africa and Oceania
- Africa
- Oceania
- Primitivism
- Postimpressionism
- Van Gogh
- Gauguin
- Seurat
- Cézanne
- LOOKING BACK
- Glossary
- Picture Credits
- Literary Credits
- Index
- MAPS
- 28.1 �The Empire of Napoleon at its Greatest Extent, 1812
- 30.1 European Colonies and Independent Nations in 1900
- 31.1 The Kingdoms of Yoruba and Dahomey
- 31.2 The Islands of the South and Central Pacific
- Music Listening Selections
- Beethoven, Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, The Eroica, first movement, excerpt, 1803–1804
- Schubert, Erlkönig, 1815
- Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14, “March to the Scaffold,” fourth movement, excerpt, 1830
- Chopin, Etude in G-flat Major, Op. 10, No. 5, 1833
- Debussy, Prélude à “L’après midi d’un faune, 1894
- Ancillary Reading Selections
- From Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads
- From Melville’s Moby Dick
- From Byron’s Don Juan
- From Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?”
- Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
- Great Britain
- From Mill’s On Liberty
- From Dickens’ David Copperfield
- From Tolstoy’s War and Peace
- From Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
- From Bergson’s Time and Free Will
-
- 2015-04-08T22:10:28+0000
- Preflight Ticket Signature
