Chapter 59 Part Two Results Chapter Fourteen Art 5

5 Whether in art or in life, romanticism is the most typical fashion in the period of dual revolution, but it is by no means the only fashion.In fact, its actual quantitative importance was rather small, since it could neither dominate aristocratic culture nor encompass middle-class culture, let alone that of the working poor.The romanticism tolerated by an art that relies on the patronage or strong support of a wealthy class is that least ideological form, such as music.The arts based on the support of the poor hardly interested the Romantic artists, despite the fact that forms of entertainment for the poor—cheap thrillers, one-sided prints, circuses, sideshows, etc. Acting, troupes, and the like—have been sources of inspiration for the Romantics; conversely, popular performers have borrowed appropriate props from the Romantics' storehouse to supplement their skill at eliciting emotion—Scene Transition , fairy myths, murderer's last words, robbers and so on.

The inherent life and artistic style of the aristocratic society were rooted in the 18th century. However, the addition of the new rich made them secularized to a great extent. Here, it is particularly necessary to point out that the period of the Napoleonic Empire was characterized by ugliness and artificiality. style, and the style of the British Regency.A comparison of 18th-century and post-Napoleonic uniform styles will make this clear, an art form that most directly reflects the tastes of the officers and gentry classes responsible for its design.The invincible hegemony of Great Britain made the English aristocracy a paragon of aristocratic culture, or more properly of non-culture, beyond its borders; Usually don't take off the debauchery of horse racing, playing with dogs, carriages, professional boxing, entertainment fighting games, gentleman's clothes, and focus on yourself.This heroic extremism aroused even the Romantics, who, too, dreamed of conforming to the fashion, but chiefly it aroused the passions of young ladies of lower rank, and made them indulge in their dreams. (as described by Gautier):

In her dreams, Sir Edward was a handsome Englishman.Freshly shaven, ruddy, radiant, well-groomed, spotlessly clean, wearing a rather elegant white tie, wetsuit and raincoat, he greeted the first rays of dawn.Isn't he the pinnacle of civilization? ... I shall have silver from England, she thought, and china from Wedgwood.Carpeted throughout the house, and wig-powdered footman, I'll sit beside my husband and drive a four-horse through Hyde Park... tame deer frolic on the green lawns of our country house, perhaps There are several blond children.The children looked utterly comfortable in the front seats of the big wagon, accompanied by a purebred King Charles Spaniel... an inspiring sight perhaps, but not romantic, rather It's a bit like a king or an emperor coming to the opera or a ball, although he is covered in jewels, he still looks noble, courteous, and graceful.

Middle- and lower-middle-class culture is no longer romantic.Its keynote is moderation and simplicity.Only among the great financiers and speculators or the first generation of industrial tycoons did the pseudo-baroque style that flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century begin to appear, because they never or no longer needed to reinvest large profits in and the imitation-baroque style only appears in a few countries where the old kings or aristocratic classes no longer completely dominate "society".The Rothschild family themselves are financial tycoons and have already shown their prominence like princes.However, this is not the case with the ordinary bourgeoisie.In England, America, Germany, and Protestant France, Puritanism, evangelical Protestant or Catholic Pietism, encouraged abstinence, frugality, moderate asceticism, and unrivaled moral self-satisfaction; Enlightenment and Freemasonry in the eighteenth century The moral tradition of the social program promoted the further emancipation of the mind and the process of anti-religion.Beyond the pursuit of profit and orderliness, the middle class lives a life of repressed emotion and willfully limited scope.Among the middle class in continental Europe, a large number of people do not do business at all, but work in government departments, some are officials, teachers, professors, and some are pastors. They even lack the expansion field of capital accumulation; The same goes for the frugal bourgeoisie, who know that the limit of what they can achieve is the wealth of a small town, which does not give much depth by the actual standards of wealth and power of his time. impression.In fact, the life of the middle class was "unromantic", and its way of life was still mainly influenced by the fashions of the eighteenth century.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the middle-class family, which is, after all, the center of middle-class culture.The post-Napoleonic bourgeoisie houses and street architectural styles were directly derived from, and often followed directly from, the classicism or rococo style of the 18th century.In England, late Georgian architecture survived until the 1840s.In other countries, architectural breakthroughs (mainly from the disastrous rediscovery of the "Renaissance") came later.The popular style of interior decoration and home life can find its perfect expression in Germany, which is the "Biedermayer style".It was a domestic classicism, warmed by the closeness of feeling and the purity of dreams, some elements of which are ascribed to Romanticism, or rather to the pre-romanticism of the late eighteenth century; but its typical The scene boils down to: a frugal and humble bourgeois performing a quartet in a living room on a Sunday afternoon.The Biedermeier style creates one of the most beautiful and livable styles of furnishing.Rough walls set off by plain, plain white curtains, an uncarpeted floor, solid but rather fine chairs and desks, a piano, marble cabinets, vases filled with flowers, but it is still primarily a late classicist style.Perhaps Goethe's residence in Weimar is the most aristocratic example.This style, or something similar, constitutes the domestic scenes of the heroine of Jane Austen's novels, the Clapham Sect combining austerity and pleasure, the haughty Boston bourgeoisie, or the Debate French local readers.

Perhaps the most probable route for Romanticism to enter middle-class culture was through the growing daydreams of the female members of the bourgeois family.It is one of their chief social functions to demonstrate their ability to support themselves in the midst of their idle leisure, and a cherished subordination is their ideal destiny.In any case, the bourgeois girl, like the non-bourgeois girl, is like the harem slaves and nymphs of the anti-romantic painter Ingres, only with the setting changed from Romanticism to the bourgeois world, and they flock to imitate the same effeminate , egg-shaped face, smooth curly hair style, delicate flowers in the shawl, wearing a fashionable toque in the 1840s.They are far from crouching lionesses, Goya's Duchess of Alba, or the new Greek liberated girls who walked through the salons in white during the French Revolution, or Lady Lieven and Harriet Wilson. Such Regency damsels or courtesans were neither bourgeois nor romantic.

A bourgeois teenage girl might play romantic chamber music by Chopin or Schumann.The Biedermeier style might have encouraged a romantic lyrical style, such as the work of Eichendorf or Merik, in which boundless passion is transformed into nostalgia or passive longing.Even active entrepreneurs can marvel at a mountain pass as "the most romantic view I have ever seen" while traveling on business, and at home sketch "The Castle of Udolfo" (The Castle of Udolpho) for pastime; or as John Cragg of Liverpool, "a man of artistic taste" and a blacksmith "introduced cast iron into Gothic architecture".But on the whole, bourgeois culture is not romantic.It was the dynamism of technological progress that hindered the emergence of orthodox romanticism, at least in industrial centers.A figure like Smith, inventor of the steam hammer, was by no means a savage simply because he was the son of a Jacobin painter ("the father of Scottish landscape painting").He had been brought up among artists and intellectuals, had a love of nature and ancient art, and had the broad education of all educated Scotsmen.And what could be more natural than for a painter's son to be a machinist, or what else interested him more than walking with his father to visit the Devonshire Ironworks as a boy?For him, like the well-mannered eighteenth-century Edinburghs he grew up with, things are sublime, but not unreasonable.There is only "a magnificent cathedral and St. Ouen's church in Rouen, which together embellish this interesting and beautiful city with their incomparable exquisiteness and those elegant Gothic architectural ruins".As majestic as the scenery was, he couldn't help pointing out, during this passionate holiday, that it was the product of carelessness.Beauty is glorious, but what is certain is that the problem with modern architecture is that "the purpose of the building ... is treated as a secondary consideration".He wrote: "I left Pisa with great regret, but what interested me most about the cathedral were the two bronze lamps hanging over the nave, from which Galileo's pendulum principle was inspired." Neither savage nor mediocre, but their outlook was closer to that of Voltaire or Wedgwood than that of Ruskin.When the great toolmaker Henry Maudsley lived in Berlin, he was no doubt more connected with Humboldt, the king of liberal scientists, and Schinkel, the neoclassical architect, than he was with the great but elusive black man. Gale was much more comfortable around him.

In any case, in the centers of advanced capitalist society, the status of art is generally secondary to science.A well-educated British and American factory owner or engineer may appreciate art, especially during family breaks and holidays, but his real cultural concern is still to promote the dissemination and progress of knowledge—as far as he is concerned, This is done in organizations like the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and for the general public through the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and similar organizations.Most representatively, the "Encyclopedia", a typical product of the Enlightenment in the 18th century, flourished like never before, and it still retains a fairly militant political liberal component (such as the famous German "Meyer's Conversations Lexicon"). ] is a product of the 1830s).Byron made a fortune writing poetry, but the publisher A. Constable paid Dugald Stewart £1,000 in 1812 simply for writing Preface to an essay entitled "On the Progress of Philosophy".The dream of the bourgeoisie, even when it was characterized by romanticism, was science and technology.The young people inspired by Saint-Simon became the planners of the Suez Canal, the huge railway network connecting all corners of the world, and the insatiable accumulation of wealth, which obviously greatly exceeded the rationality of the Rothschild family, known for their calm and rational In terms of investment scope, they only know how to accumulate a lot of wealth through small speculative surges.Science and technology were the muses of the bourgeoisie, celebrating their triumph - the birth of the railway - on the stately neoclassical porch of London's Euston railway station (sadly destroyed).