176
PARTISAN REVIEW
England in Arnold's attack on the "philistine" and his plea for
"Hellenism" :
"Our puritan middle classes," said Arnold, "present a defective
type of religion, a narrow range of intellect and instruction, a stunted
sense of beauty, a low standard of manners."
"If,"
wrote Baudelaire, "if a poet asked the State for permission
to keep a few bourgeois in his stable, everyone would be greatly aston–
ished; but if a bourgeois asked for some roast poet, it would be con–
sidered perfectly natural."
Baudelaire's violent tone may appear today to be somewhat
exaggerated, but the conflict between the artist and the bourgeois
was a real one and we need to see it in its historical setting.
In
Stendhal's
Lucien Leuwen
one of the characters remarks to
another:
M. Grandet is like myself at the head of the Bank, and since July8
the Bank has been at the head of the State. The bourgeoisie has taken
the place of the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the Bank is the nobility
of the bourgeois class.
The Revolution had placed in power a middle class which was
almost entirely devoted to money making. We know that the artist
very properly refused to sell his pen to the bourgeois and their Bank,
but this.in itself is not sufficient to explain the violence of the opposi–
tion between the two.
It
seems at first as though there was nothing
to prevent the artist from going on with his work without bothering
about the banking activities of the bourgeois; but the conflict went
much deeper than that. What the artist disliked was the bourgeois
outlook, was Arnold's "narrow range of intellect and instruction, a
stunted sense of beauty, a low standard of manners," because it was
a threat to alI" that he stood for.
Now the conflict was sharpened because social and political
changes had produced a change in the artist's vision.
In
the old uni–
tary society the artist had been much more a "craftsman" than a
"visionary." He might criticize abuses as Dante, Chaucer and Lang–
land had criticized them, but there was no conflict between the artist
and society. He not only expressed a communal as opposed to an
in–
dividual experience; his work glorified an order in which he believed.
3. The advent of the
July
Monarchy.
