That was the century that was

It all seems to come down to autobiography in the end.

Recently, fellow blogger Hai Di Nguyen ruminated on which particular century, in terms of the arts, meant most to her, and came down in favour of the nineteenth. I find this question an intriguing one, if only for the light it throws on oneself: for that which draws one most is that which most addresses those matters that particularly concern us, and, that being so, examining the former inevitably sheds light on the latter.

Of course, every work of art is a product of its time, and that some may transcend their time does not make them any the less so. But the specific issues addressed by these works may have, underlying them, more general issues, and this may lead to something approximating universality. So Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, say, while addressing the very specific issue of women’s position in 19^th century western society, addresses also the more general issues of the masks we have to wear to be part of the society we live in; of the compromises we make with ourselves to accustom ourselves to these masks; and of the immense pain and disruption involved should we decide to take these masks off, and discard them. The specific is now of little more than historic interest, but should the specific open doors to a consideration of the general, then something may be produced that resonates across time. And so, from the perspective of our own time, that period of the past that resonates with us the most powerfully reveals much about our own particular concerns, about our own preoccupations. And so, inevitably, it all comes down to autobiography.

Either that, or I have merely become solipsistic in my old age.

And of course, there is more involved in this question than the issues raised by the work. There’s also the aesthetic sense, which, other than perhaps a few obvious observations, is beyond analysis. Some may prefer the Baroque operas of Rameau or Handel, others the Romantic operas of Verdi and Wagner; some may prefer the still lives of the Dutch Golden Era, others the surrealist visions of Magritte or Dali. There’s no right or wrong here: de gustibus, and all that. Here too, it could be that our aesthetic tastes reveal much about our person, but that is not an area I’d care to speculate about.

But back to the question: which century means the most to me, in terms of the arts? (And let us restrict our discussion here to the arts of the western world, as my ignorance about all that was happening in other parts of the globe would become embarrassingly apparent otherwise.) Like Di, who posed the question, I too think that, for me, it’s the nineteenth. Which, in some ways, is a strange choice: after all, the writer who has given me the greatest joy is Shakespeare; the artist, Rembrandt; the composer, Mozart. (Not original choices, I know, but I make no claim for originality.) And conversely, there are many writers, artists, and composers of the nineteenth century, sometimes even major figures, whose art I can find myself merely admiring from a respectful distance (George Eliot, say); or whose art I actually find myself disliking, for reasons I cannot articulate entirely satisfactorily (the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood comes rather obviously to mind here). However, should I list the works of art that mean most to me – and, in this era of Twitter, we all love making lists, especially as that saves us the immense trouble of having actually to talk about the works we are listing – I strongly suspect that the greater part of that list would be works would be from the nineteenth century. And, if I may bend the rules a bit and speak of “the long nineteenth century” – that is, from the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 to that of Ulysses in 1922 – that would, I think, cover virtually everything I value most.

(Reading over that last sentence, I see that the word “virtually” is doing a lot of work. But the sentence does have some rhetorical value, so it might as well stay.)

If we try to take a wide view of the 19^th century, we find, I think, a progression, very roughly speaking, from Romanticism to Modernism. In 1800, we had Goethe and Schiller, and the Young Guns Wordsworth and Coleridge: we were in the era of High Romanticism. And by the end of the century, the plays of Strindberg, the later works of Ibsen and of James, or the earlier works of Conrad and of Yeats, were all, quite clearly I think, laying the seeds of what we would later call Modernism. Most of what came between cannot really be called either Romantic or Modernist: I rather like the term “Inbetweenism”: it’s my own coinage, but I acknowledge it’s not very likely to catch on.

In music, the categorisation is a bit different. The major composers around 1800 were an elderly Haydn, and a young Beethoven, and, while we may see the seeds of Romanticism in even the young Beethoven, both are usually categorised as Classical rather than as Romantic. (Even Schubert, who flourished slightly later, is generally considered Classical, although, to my ears at least, he was very Romantic indeed. Even in terms of dates, the year of Schubert’s birth, 1797, is far closer to those of such acknowledged Romantics as Berlioz, Chopin, Schumann, or even of Verdi and of Wagner, than it is to that of the more classical Beethoven. However, he is categorised in textbooks as a Classical composer, so let’s not start a fight over that.)

And the music composed at the end of the nineteenth century, that is usually classed as “Late Romantic”, seems, once again to my ears, to be significantly different from the works of early Romanticism: the emergence in that era of composers such as Debussy, Mahler and Strauss do, in retrospect at least, appear to be pointing towards something very different. So, whatever the textbook labels may say, there seems to me, once again, a movement from the High Romanticism of the earlier part of the century towards what we would now regard as Modernism.

One may make similar observations about the visual arts. The classicism of Jacques-Louis David gave way to the unabashed Romanticism of Eugène Delacroix, and, by the end of the century, we had Paul Cézanne, whose paintings, many would say, does more than merely point towards modernism.

All of this, I agree, sounds very schematic, and it would be easy to produce counter-examples: but taking a broad-brush view – that is, by blithely ignoring counter-examples that could potentially disrupt the proposed pattern – I see in the nineteenth century a flourishing of Romanticism followed by a movement away from it. One work from almost exactly the middle of that century – Madame Bovary (published 1856) – seems to exemplify that movement: it depicts, to my mind with great regret, a disillusionment with Romanticism, an awareness of its inadequacy in our human lives; and, at the same time, it refuses to propose any worthwhile set of values that may take its place. The movement away from the Romantic is clear, and what it appears to embrace instead, though not with any enthusiasm, is nothingness. This is a question that future generations of artists had to address: the ideals of Romanticism are no longer adequate, but then what? Where do we go from here?

And this, I think, is a question that continues to resonate with me strongly – all the more so because I feel myself still in thrall to Romanticism and to its ideals, and can only read Flaubert’s debunking of those ideals with sadness – a sadness that I have convinced myself the author also shares. And this, perhaps, is why the works of the nineteenth century resonate with me so strongly – in all the branches of the arts.

But of course, all this would mean nothing if these works did not also appeal to me aesthetically. I know of no music I revere more than the later compositions of Beethoven and of Schubert, from the 1820s: I find it hard to believe these are works of mere mortals. Meanwhile Rossini was developing what we now recognise as “Italian opera”. (Earlier Italian operas by, say, Monteverdi, though obviously masterpieces, sound very different). Donizetti and Bellini consolidated the form, before Verdi built upon their achievements to create what, for me, is the body of operatic work I love most. (Alongside Mozart’s, obviously!) And by the end of the century, Puccini had already composed La Bohème, with Tosca just around the corner. Wagner, meanwhile, has claims to be the most towering artistic figure of his time, and perhaps even of the century – and not just for his contribution to opera, immense though that is. And one wonders how we would now be regarding Bizet or Mussorgsky had they lived long enough to produce masterpieces beyond Carmen or Boris Godunov. What little they left us is stunning.

Non-operatic music also flourished – and how! Berlioz doesn’t, admittedly, come to me easily – his music is something I usually need to work on – but I remain entranced by the music of such other early Romantics as Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt and Schumann. Later generations produced Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, Smetana, Fauré …  Yes, I am sure there are other eras that could boast equally fine composers, but none that attracts me more. Even Bruckner, whom I don’t always see eye-to-eye with, as it were, can transport me into another world. And by the end of the century, there was a new rising generation – Mahler, Sibelius, Debussy, Elgar, Ravel, Nielsen, etc – to assure us that the future of the tradition was in good hands.

In painting, Turner and Constable were, in 1800, young artists establishing themselves, but as the years unfolded, they both produced the most extraordinary masterpieces – Constable giving epic form to the English landscape, and Turner painting pure light. And in Spain, there was Goya. By 1800, he was already middle-aged, and was established, but the outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars inspired in him a series of canvases and etchings depicting possibly the darkest and the most disturbing vision of any artist. It is a good idea when visiting the Prado not to start with the later works of Goya: it drains you, making it difficult to take in adequately the other paintings in the gallery.

In the middle of the century, there emerged in France an artistic movement known as Impressionism – although the artists associated with this movement had artistic visions too widely varied to fit comfortably under a single umbrella. Degas painted forms with a firm sense of solidity, while Monet seemed to dissolve everything into light and colour. (The paintings of his extreme old age, well into the next century, seem to me every bit as radical as the school of Abstract Expressionism.) Meanwhile, Manet went his own way, painting scenes from everyday contemporary life that seem to counterpoint the great French novels of that era. No-one, not even the masters of the Renaissance or of the Baroque, has produced a work of greater pictorial brilliance, or of greater emotional depth and complexity, than The Bar of the Folies Bergère (currently hanging in the Courtauld Collection in London).

“Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère” by Edouard Manet, courtesy of The Courtauld Institute, London

It didn’t stop with the Impressionists. The next generation – imaginatively known as the Post-Impressionists – built on these achievements, and gave expression to their own highly charged individual artistic visions – van Gogh, Gauguin, Munch, Cézanne, Seurat, etc. They are often spoken of in terms of their influence, but the actual level of their achievements is apparent enough. And it’s breathtaking. (Even Gauguin – sometimes!)

And then, of course, there’s literature.

As the century started, Romanticism was in the ascendancy – with Wordsworth and Coleridge at their peak, and the next generation – Keats, Shelley, Byron – soon to follow. Blake was still around, but he was possibly too eccentric to be considered part of any school. There were other great Romantic poets around Europe too – Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Pushkin, Leopardi, etc – but I am less familiar with their work than I am with that of the English Romantics: these are still the poets I find myself reaching for first when I want to read poetry.

Scott, at the time, was the most famous and most influential novelist in the world, and while his star shines considerably less brightly now than it used to, his finest novels – Old Mortality, say, or Heart of Midlothian – deserve still to be read. But the novelist from that era who has best weathered the changing fashions of taste is certainly Austen. It has taken me some time to get round to Austen, and I still find myself needing to work hard when I revisit them; but the fact that I do nonetheless revisit them speaks more eloquently than I could of their artistic stature. The other novel of that period that I find more consonant with my temperament is that demonic masterpiece by James Hogg, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

By the middle of the century, the novel had become the principal medium of literary expression; and this dominance continued throughout the century. The names trip off the tongue easily – Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, The Brontës, Gaskell, Eliot and Hardy from Britain; Melville, Hawthorne, Twain and James from across the Atlantic; Balzac, Stendhal, Hugo, Dumas, Flaubert, Maupassant and Zola from France; Benito Pérez Galdós, Leopoldo Alas and Emilia Pardo Bazán from Spain; Manzoni from Italy; and, of course, that extraordinary flowering in Russia – Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Goncharov, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy (not to mention the great short story writers, Leskov and Chekhov).

The flowering of the novel in the nineteenth century may sometimes have been equalled, but has never, I think, been surpassed – not even by giants such as Joyce or Proust. If I had to name my own personal favourites from this formidable list, it’s Dickens and Tolstoy, and that solitary masterpiece Wuthering Heights.

Mention should also be made of the quite remarkable rise in the last decade of the century of popular literature of an extremely high quality. In many ways, Robert Louis Stevenson had been a forerunner of this in the previous decade with his brilliant tales of adventure (he died untimely in 1894), but the 1890s saw, among other things, the adventure yarns of Henry Rider Haggard, the ghost stories of M. R. James, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda and Rupert of Hentzau, and, of course, the appearance of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. This tradition of quality popular literature continued into the early decades of the next century. Popular literature does not often have long shelf lives, but that so many of these books are still read for pleasure – that is, read for reasons other than that of literary scholarship – speaks for itself.

And, of course, there was drama. Drama as a medium of artistic expression had begun to play second fiddle, as it were, to the novel, which was more adept at entering into peoples’ minds, even into the secret and hidden chambers of their minds, and depicting the inner lives of the characters. However, first Ibsen, and later, Strindberg and Chekhov, developed ways to get around this. This flowering of drama, though not as broad in scope as that of the novel, was in its own way every bit as remarkable.

So that’s it, really. Without denying the claims that may be made for other centuries, the nineteenth century holds, for me at least, the greatest fascination, in all areas of the arts. Except for cinema, of course, but I really am not quite the cinephile I sometimes pretend to be. Even without cinema, there’s more than enough here to occupy one for an entire lifetime.