A golden age?
Charles Zigmund
time probably all of the following would have been working at or near
their peaks: Wagner, Nietzsche, Darwin, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy,
Turgenev, Brahms, Bruckner, Verdi, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov,
Tchaikowsky, Liszt, Saint-Saens, Grieg, Baudelaire, Henry James,
William James, Sand, Eliott, Manet, Monet, Cezanne, Degas, Van Gogh,
Seurat, Gauguin, Morrisot, Cassatt, Whistler, Sargent, Rodin,
Toulouse-Lautrec, Winslow Homer, Melville, Shaw, Twain, Eakins, Louis
Sullivan, Maxwell, Edison, Mendel, Debussy, Rimbaud, Verlaine... the
list goes on and I'm sure I've left many out, especially in math, the
sciences and philosophy. I left out Marx on purpose. (I'm really not
trying to show off here, but am truly amazed at the breadth of this
period's creativity.) Can anyone here think of a comparable period in
the history of culture as known to us? This is the period that both
Wagner and Nietzsche, even after their bitter split, agreed was
decadent and virtually irredeemable.
And it is interesting, in the context of discussions on this forum
about Wagner's antisemitism, to realize that a good many of these
people were also antisemites.
Stephen Worth
Zigmund <cha...@verizon.net> wrote:
> Can anyone here think of a comparable period in
> the history of culture as known to us?
I would say that the period between World Wars was particularly rich
too.
See ya
Steve
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Barney
cha...@verizon.net (Charles Zigmund) writes:
>I may be off a little on the years, on either end, but during this
>time probably all of the following would have been working at or near
>their peaks: Wagner, Nietzsche, Darwin, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy,
>Turgenev, Brahms, Bruckner, Verdi, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov,
>Tchaikowsky, Liszt, Saint-Saens, Grieg, Baudelaire, Henry James,
>William James, Sand, Eliott, Manet, Monet, Cezanne, Degas, Van Gogh,
>Seurat, Gauguin, Morrisot, Cassatt, Whistler, Sargent, Rodin,
>Toulouse-Lautrec, Winslow Homer, Melville, Shaw, Twain, Eakins, Louis
>Sullivan, Maxwell, Edison, Mendel, Debussy, Rimbaud, Verlaine... the
>list goes on and I'm sure I've left many out, especially in math, the
>sciences and philosophy. I left out Marx on purpose. (I'm really not
>trying to show off here, but am truly amazed at the breadth of this
>period's creativity.) Can anyone here think of a comparable period in
>the history of culture as known to us?
Just yesterday I was having a similar argument on another newsgroup about
(don't yawn) "the decline of literacy." Someone was saying that there never
really was a "good old days" when it came to culture but I maintained that
there was a golden age of literacy from about 1860-1910 - which just about fits
the time frame you're talking about here. So I'm obviously on your side. I
don't think there's ever been such an explosion of such genius. We're talking
prodigal energies released on a grand scale. It makes the Renaissance seem
paltry.
> This is the period that both
>Wagner and Nietzsche, even after their bitter split, agreed was
>decadent and virtually irredeemable.
>
LOL. As someone said, "People who live in golden ages are always complaining
about how yellow everything is."
>And it is interesting, in the context of discussions on this forum
>about Wagner's antisemitism, to realize that a good many of these
>people were also antisemites.
>
I know you left out Marx for this reason, but despite being Jewish he is often
described as anti-Semitic, too. (So is Chomsky, but we agreed not to bring him
up either.)
Your pal,
Barney
Popular Christianity has for its emblem a gibbet, for its chief sensation a
sanguinary execution after torture, for its central mystery an insane vengeance
bought off by a trumpery expiation.
--- Bernard Shaw
Mike Scott Rohan
from cha...@verizon.net (Charles Zigmund) contains these words:
> I may be off a little on the years, on either end, but during this
> time probably all of the following would have been working at or near
> their peaks: Wagner, Nietzsche, Darwin, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy,
> Turgenev, Brahms, Bruckner, Verdi, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov,
> Tchaikowsky, Liszt, Saint-Saens, Grieg, Baudelaire, Henry James,
> William James, Sand, Eliott, Manet, Monet, Cezanne, Degas, Van Gogh,
> Seurat, Gauguin, Morrisot, Cassatt, Whistler, Sargent, Rodin,
> Toulouse-Lautrec, Winslow Homer, Melville, Shaw, Twain, Eakins, Louis
> Sullivan, Maxwell, Edison, Mendel, Debussy, Rimbaud, Verlaine... the
> list goes on and I'm sure I've left many out, especially in math, the
> sciences and philosophy. I left out Marx on purpose. (I'm really not
> trying to show off here, but am truly amazed at the breadth of this
> period's creativity.) Can anyone here think of a comparable period in
> the history of culture as known to us? This is the period that both
> Wagner and Nietzsche, even after their bitter split, agreed was
> decadent and virtually irredeemable.
Now this is a fascinating and perceptive point, for which many thanks.
There have been other such eras, I'm sure, though many of these saw
concentrations of genius in a single place -- Vienna in the early 19th
century, with Beethoven, Weber, Schubert and the rest, and all sorts of
developments in science, art and architecture. Or Edinburgh during the
late 18th century, the Scottish Renaissance which saw the birth of steam
power, the Industrial Revolution, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the
philosophy of David Hume, modern surgery and pathology (aided by a
little graverobbing), modern-style portrait painting, the historical
novel, the science of economics (by Adam Smith) and much else, an era in
which it was said you could stand at the city cross for half an hour and
shake hands with a dozen geniuses. The Spanish universities of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, where the translation of Arab texts by
generations of brilliant scholars regained so much lost classical
knowledge and literature, and brought in new thinking in everything from
mathematics and medicine to philosophy, triggering off the Renaissance
proper...
But in the period you mention, the culture was much more widespread, and
instead of a city or even a country becoming a hotbed of geniuses, it
was the whole of Europe, plus its satellites (as they then were) Russia
and America. I think much of this was due to the gradual success of the
democratic movements after 1848, when they became the acceptable
alternative to the violent revolutions of that year. Combined with the
new prosperity brought by improved industry, transport and
communications, which rendered society able to feed the arts on a
personal level, rather than through royal patronage alone, this
unleashed a new level of creativity. Composers could expect to be taken
seriously, to be treated as gentlemen and paid good money instead of
dying in garrets; for the first time successful painters could paint
what *they* wanted, and choose their portrait subjects with much more
freedom. Religious strictures were also being loosened or withering,
allowing for a new freedom of thought. But all of this meant a
considerable amount of disorder, and the lower classes with more
opportunity to enjoy themselves than in years previously, to choose what
they wanted to see at the theatre rather than what their patrons said
they should. That kind of social reshaping was anathema to Wagner
precisely because he was a high-minded, aristocratic artist who knew his
audience was predominantly from the highly educated, if not especially
wealthy, classes. Like them, he felt an older and simpler social order
was breaking down, or being broken, to favour the arrivistes -- who
seemed to prefer the kind of pap he despised.
Cheers,
Mike
Barney
<mike.sco...@asgard.zetnet.co.uk> writes:
>But in the period you mention, the culture was much more widespread, and
>instead of a city or even a country becoming a hotbed of geniuses, it
>was the whole of Europe, plus its satellites (as they then were) Russia
>and America. I think much of this was due to the gradual success of the
>democratic movements after 1848, when they became the acceptable
>alternative to the violent revolutions of that year.
And ironically, this international renaissance coincided with the birth of
nationalism as we know it today. It was the liberals and radicals of Wagner's
day (that is, the artists) who embraced the new nationalism.
> Combined with the
>new prosperity brought by improved industry, transport and
>communications, which rendered society able to feed the arts on a
>personal level, rather than through royal patronage alone, this
>unleashed a new level of creativity.
I agree. So why, I wonder, did this golden age end? Prosperity continued to
spread, as did education; and industry, transport, and communications continued
to vastly improve.
> Composers could expect to be taken
>seriously, to be treated as gentlemen and paid good money instead of
>dying in garrets; for the first time successful painters could paint
>what *they* wanted, and choose their portrait subjects with much more
>freedom. Religious strictures were also being loosened or withering,
>allowing for a new freedom of thought. But all of this meant a
>considerable amount of disorder, and the lower classes with more
>opportunity to enjoy themselves than in years previously, to choose what
>they wanted to see at the theatre rather than what their patrons said
>they should. That kind of social reshaping was anathema to Wagner
>precisely because he was a high-minded, aristocratic artist who knew his
>audience was predominantly from the highly educated, if not especially
>wealthy, classes.
I think that was an attitude he developed late in life, though, and there's a
great deal of self-justification to it, since he did, of course, have to rely
on royal patronage.
> Like them, he felt an older and simpler social order
>was breaking down, or being broken, to favour the arrivistes -- who
>seemed to prefer the kind of pap he despised.
>
Nietzsche felt the same way - only of course the pap he came to despise was
Wagner's music. In the period we're talking about, there was a beautiful
mixture of upstarts and traditionalists. Men like Victor Hugo assumed that the
newly-educated masses would naturally prefer great art to the cheap stuff. But
that high-mindedness had evaporated by the turn of the century, and WWI killed
it off completely. Artists retreated back into being a rarefied community that
created works for each other, disdaining the mass audience. The modernist
movements that erupted in the twenties simply turned most people off of the
fine arts, and that cleavage remains to this day.
Mike Scott Rohan
from schlitz...@aol.comekingdom (Barney) contains these words:
{snip}
> I agree. So why, I wonder, did this golden age end? Prosperity
> continued to
> spread, as did education; and industry, transport, and communications
> continued
> to vastly improve.
War, I think, and the complacency that led to it. WWII was in many ways
a shattered echo of WWI, which was a louder echo of the Franco-Prussian
war. War defined the first half of the twentieth century, and the Cold
War the second.
> I think that was an attitude he developed late in life, though, and
> there's a
> great deal of self-justification to it, since he did, of course, have
> to rely
> on royal patronage.
Yes indeed. He found he valued the royal social structure rather than
the idealism of his youth, and I think it created considerable tension.
> > Like them, he felt an older and simpler social order
> >was breaking down, or being broken, to favour the arrivistes -- who
> >seemed to prefer the kind of pap he despised.
> >
> Nietzsche felt the same way - only of course the pap he came to despise was
> Wagner's music. In the period we're talking about, there was a beautiful
> mixture of upstarts and traditionalists. Men like Victor Hugo assumed
> that the
> newly-educated masses would naturally prefer great art to the cheap
> stuff. But
> that high-mindedness had evaporated by the turn of the century, and
> WWI killed
> it off completely. Artists retreated back into being a rarefied
> community that
> created works for each other, disdaining the mass audience. The modernist
> movements that erupted in the twenties simply turned most people off of the
> fine arts, and that cleavage remains to this day.
True, though I think there's more to it -- the rise of populism, which
treated any attempt to define taste as paternalism, for example, and the
concept of art as expression rather than communication. But I just don't
have time to develop that right now!
Cheers,
Mike
Stephen Worth
<mike.sco...@asgard.zetnet.co.uk> wrote:
> True, though I think there's more to it -- the rise of populism, which
> treated any attempt to define taste as paternalism, for example, and the
> concept of art as expression rather than communication.
Art broke in to two parts, fine arts and popular arts. Between the wars,
the popular arts were where the action was. The flowering of cinema,
the development of jazz and the refining of design and architecture to
its essence... those were the three areas that matched the pinnacle of
literary and formal art of the late 19th century. Different times just
had different media.