The new “Horror Victorianorum”

 

The new “Horror Victorianorum”

by Michael J. Lewis

 

On the irrational hatred of the Victorian era.

New Criterion,  December 2015  

via

In 1954, writing as art critic for The Nation, my late colleague Lane Faison described a memorable evening with a party of art students summering in Vermont. They were suitably bohemian—“black beards, blue jeans, and all”—and their views on contemporary art were “properly violent”:

 

The recognized masters of our day were not good; they were old hat, insufferable bores. Critics were blind to the new things, unaware that the future was already becoming the present. I listened with rapt attention, anticipating a memorable enlightenment. When their work of destruction was accomplished, I asked a leading question with the idea of quickening an impending revelation of avant-garde deity. It came, and I am still astonished by it. The patron saint of this group of young zealots was none other than John Singer Sargent.

 

It is easy to see that Faison cleverly crafted his paragraph so as to drop the most shocking words at the end, but it is no longer obvious why they should be shocking. To understand how Sargent, one of the most brilliant painters in American history, was once derided as a mere facile courtier now requires an act of historical imagination. For it has been forgotten just how thoroughly Victorian painting had been once banished from the cultural conversation. And not merely painting, but architecture, sculpture, and the decorative arts; all of Victorian culture, in fact. This state of affairs lasted through the heyday of the modern movement, from the end of World War I into the 1960s, and it would not end until a rising generation became curious about Victorian art precisely because it was despised and forbidden, and began to confess those heretical tastes that alarmed Faison.

 

Faison could not know it, but this was a first harbinger of change. The sudden and unexpected rehabilitation of Victorian culture is one of the great, unstudied phenomena of recent history. one cannot accurately speak of a Victorian Revival so much as the abrupt lifting of a mighty taboo, which had a galvanizing effect on scholarship, fashion, museology, contemporary art and design, and even urban planning. But the neo-Victorian moment is now as much a closed chapter as its anti-Victorian predecessor, although it has faded away so gently that most have forgotten how vital it once was. It is worth a backward glance, if only to see what it got right and what it got wrong.

 

Every new style and fad emerges from the husk of some discarded predecessor, which is usually consigned to history with no more ceremony than a jocular “Roll Over, Beethoven.” But there are those movements that are not content with simply displacing their precursors but insist on discrediting them permanently and definitely. And just as the French Revolution worked to dismantle thoroughly and permanently the ancien régime, so the modern movement condemned the entire Victorian era as one long cultural disaster. Its buildings were laughable failures, tainted by their specious historicism; its paintings wallowed in pedantic and sclerotic academicism. At a certain point, reasonable aesthetic criticism boiled over into an irrational revulsion, for which the late Australian philosopher David Stove coined the useful term Horror Victorianorum.

 

But it is no easy matter to dismiss the collective achievement of a mighty industrial civilization that had brought the modern world into being. Those same decades that brought forth the detested Pre-Raphaelites and the High Victorian Gothic also brought forth the Crystal Palace, the transatlantic cable, and the Brooklyn Bridge. This posed a vexing intellectual problem: how to acknowledge the technological achievements of the nineteenth century while condemning the tastes, values, and even the sanity of the society that created them. This was resolved with the ironically titled Eminent Victorians, a curious, slim volume written by Lytton Strachey and published in the last year of World War I. At once it was taken to be the definitive brief for the prosecution.

 

one might expect a book called Eminent Victorians to deal with the central figures of English political or cultural life: certainly Disraeli, Gladstone, Dickens, perhaps Victoria herself. Instead Strachey chose as his subjects four curious figures from four different spheres of English life: Cardinal Manning, the Anglican clergyman who became the head of the Catholic church in England; Dr. Thomas Arnold, whose leadership of Rugby School is affectionately portrayed in Tom Brown’s Schooldays; Florence Nightingale, who almost singlehandedly created the modern nursing profession; and General Charles George Gordon, “Chinese Gordon,” who put down the Taiping Rebellion only to lose his life in Khartoum, after successfully defending the city for a year against the armies of the Mahdi. It is a peculiar selection: a cleric, an educational reformer, a public health activist, and a colonial administrator, but it is also a microcosm of English society and culture.

 

As cynical exposés go, Eminent Victorians is remarkably gentle. Those who know it only through reputation are correct that it is a masterfully cynical exposé of Victorian folly, but it performs its work subtly and through indirection. Pages and pages of narrative go by, innocent of all editorial commentary, or at most a wry aside. An inattentive reader, pulled along by the urgent narrative, might miss how diligently and silently Strachey goes about the work of demolition. Two strands run through his subjects. All are figures of ferocious energy, every one an administrative genius, and all of them indulged in the Victorian habit of confiding their religious longings and uncertainties to their diaries and letters. This suits Strachey’s agenda of contrasting stupendous public achievement with the fatuity, shallowness, and religious sentimentality of their inner lives.

 

As much as possible he does this simply through wicked juxtaposition. We see, for example, a chronically ill Florence Nightingale writing by hand an 800-page program for the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army, and then writing a proposal for the reform of Christianity with her idiosyncratic logical proof for the existence of God (which she sent to John Stuart Mill, of all people). Or General Gordon organizing the rationing of his food for his besieged city, even as he records his endless pensées on such subjects as Plutarch, the sixteenth chapter of the Koran, and the possible immortality of animals. All this is transcribed more or less without comment and never does he overtly criticize his subjects—as he did in a 1912 letter to Virginia Woolf—as “a set of mouth bungled hypocrites.”

 

It is curious that there are no artists or writers among Strachey’s gallery of Victorian worthies. John Ruskin would have fit in quite comfortably. But Strachey’s target was the ethics, not the aesthetics, of the Victorian world. He depicted a world of immense technological, administrative, and military power, directed by a philosophy of Muscular Christianity that upon closer inspection collapses into so much sentimental inanity. The inevitable consequences of so much power and authority being vested in such pettifogging small minds did not need to be spelled out in a book published in 1918.

 

So persuasively did Strachey make his case that no one thought it necessary to repeat the exercise. If in truth he made no case at all, except by implication, the tragic fact of the war was evidence enough that the Victorian age had failed. This being obvious, its aesthetic achievements could fall of their own accord. The fact is, by the 1920s, the Victorian architectural legacy was looking considerably shopworn, veiled by a half-century’s worth of grime. It was this pall of soot, as much as the Victorian weakness for New Jersey brownstone, that prompted Lewis Mumford to call his study of late-Victorian America The Brown Decades (1931). In reality, the Victorian city was practically built out of color—acid green serpentine, polished columns of red Scottish granite, glazed ceramic tiles of blue and gold, Ohio sandstone the color of tea and cream—but all Mumford could see was the color palette made by the chimney: “mediocre drabs, dingy chocolate browns, sooty browns that merged into black.”

 

The physical corruption of Victorian architecture seemed the outward ｅxpression of its moral corruption. For intelligent observers of the 1920s, there was no question of its moral perfidy. When architecture ought to have squarely faced the challenge of radically new facts, materials, and social conditions, and created radical new forms to express them, it chose instead to rummage through history’s storage locker of dead styles, trying on one costume after another: not only Greek, Gothic, and Romanesque, but preposterous styles such as the Egyptian and Moorish. Architects shirked their duty to confront modern life in all its tragic complexity, preferring to amuse themselves with—as Sir Nikolaus Pevsner put it—a “fancy dress ball.”

 

The problem of such blanket condemnations is that they rarely discriminated between good and bad work. The Victorian era was not monolithic, and it lasted long enough (sixty-four years!) to be fiercely critical of itself. The Aesthetic Movement arose in reaction to mid-Victorian vulgarity, which Oscar Wilde despised no less violently than Strachey. And some Victorian buildings demonstrated high design intelligence, their architects as alert to the social and moral ramifications of their work as any socially conscious latter-day. But these fine distinctions were lost in the general Horror Victorianorum. Thus collective guilt fell heavily on the second half of the nineteenth century, and Sigfried Giedion could proclaim confidently in his landmark Space, Time and Architecture (1941): “There are whole decades of the second half of the nineteenth century in which no architectural work of significance is encountered.”

 

The wholesale discrediting of Victorian culture had tangible consequences. In polite museums, whole categories of painting fell into disfavor—Victorian genre scenes, Hudson River landscapes, anything Pre-Raphaelite; much went into storage or, in a few cases, onto the street. A few painters escaped the purge: Eakins’s forensic realism may have dated but not his absorbingly troubled sitters. And the symbolist seascapes of Albert Pinkham Ryder were given a reprieve (perhaps because no one had yet figured out what they meant). But these were the exceptions, and at the nadir even the term Victorian painting was regarded as a slur. When an exhibition of Soviet art came to London in 1961, the Communist Labour Monthly was scandalized when “critics maliciously suggested that Soviet painting was very like nineteenth-century English Victorian painting: that is to say, painting which was probably as trivial and meretricious as any painting ever.” (Even in a life-and-death struggle over the world, there are some things that one simply does not say.)

 

But paintings are rarely destroyed, unlike buildings, on which the Horror Victorianorum fell cruelly. The life cycle of every building brings periodic danger points at which its owners must choose whether to repair and renovate, or else to demolish. Unfortunately, the moment of truth for Victorian buildings came when their reputations were at their lowest ebb, when their custodians found it convenient to excise an offensive carbuncle and replace it with something more “tasteful” (although almost never as solidly built). The saturnalia of destruction climaxed in 1964 with the demolition of McKim, Mead, and White’s Pennsylvania Station in New York, which was hardly a Victorian monstrosity but rather a brilliantly planned and exquisitely realized monument to civic decorum. The demolition was a cultural catastrophe, and it brought the American historic preservation movement to life, although to a large extent the damage was already done.

 

Victorian architecture was swept not only from the street but from historical memory as well. Except for a garish example or two, meant as a scarecrow, the standard textbooks on architecture ignored Victorian buildings to concentrate on suspension bridges and railroad sheds, which foretold twentieth-century modernism, engineering marvels, or the early skyscrapers of Louis Sullivan. The effect was to create a bleak chasm out of the half-century between the Crystal Palace and the emergence of Frank Lloyd Wright. At this late date it is difficult to conceive how difficult it was even to see images of Victorian buildings. Architects who studied at Yale a half-century ago have described to me the excitement when a fellow student appeared with photographs of buildings by Frank Furness, and which were privately circulated like samizdat.

 

The strange effect of this ignorance was to make the objects of the Victorian era far more mysterious and inscrutable than they actually were. There was hardly an architectural style more scrutable, for example, than the Second Empire. Its language of plump mansard roofs and festive dormers paid tribute to the modern Paris of Napoleon III, and in this country most date from that prosperous interlude between the end of the Civil War and the Panic of 1873. They were straightforward, even complacent assertions of affluence, self-confidence, and good taste, but after a great many subsequent panics they had become psychologically inaccessible and merely looked grotesque. The high-waisted mansarded house with its stilted tower, once proud and now fallen on hard times, became the emblem of the Victorian age. It shows up again and again, in Edward Hopper’s House by the Railroad, acquired in 1930 by the Museum of Modern Art, of all institutions; in the mansion chosen by the cartoonist Charles Addams to house his ghoulish family, created in 1938; and as late as 1960 it was where Alfred Hitchcock decided to place Psycho’s murderous Norman Bates—the physical ｅxpression of wide-eyed staring derangement.

 

But Hitchcock’s gawky tower skated on the edge of irony, and by this time the Horror Victorianorum was beginning to subside. Already the rehabilitation of Victorian cultural and intellectual life, in England and America, was underway. Gertrude Himmelfarb had published her Lord Acton: A Study of Conscience and Politics (1952), the first of her important studies of Victorian political and cultural thought. And Lionel Trilling had written his groundbreaking essay on Huckleberry Finn in 1950, making the startling case that Mark Twain’s uncouth book for boys was the source of “all modern American literature.” The debunking impulse which Strachey had made obligatory when speaking of things Victorian was conspicuously absent from these works.

 

The rehabilitation of the Victorian visual world came more haltingly. The 1954 review by Faison cited above was written on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition of Sargent, Whistler, and Mary Cassatt at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. All three were expatriates and in effect French painters, so were free of the taint of Victorianism that afflicted Anglo-American painters. But in short order, the trompe l’oeil paintings of Harnett and Peto, the landscapes of Frederic Church, even history painting itself, were each deemed acceptable. The last to be welcomed back into the fold were the Pre-Raphaelites, who were still pariahs when I entered graduate school.

 

Several factors eased this massive rehabilitation. one was a shift away from formalism, the doctrine that works of art are to be judged primarily—or even exclusively—according to their aesthetic property. In its place came a new stress on the social history of art, and issues such as patronage, marketing, education, and professional status. To write a dissertation on an artist no longer implied aesthetic approval. Another factor was the collapse of authority and prestige of modernism, especially after the convulsive emergence of Pop Art around 1962. once Pop had embraced the despised world of advertising and commercial packaging, the injunction against Victorian vulgarity no longer carried any force. If anything, vulgarity was one of its chief features of interest, certainly in the case of architecture.

 

While the first Victorian painters to be rehabilitated were the most tasteful and refined, in architecture it was the other way around. Young architects in the 1960s admired the so-called “rogue architects” like Furness, William Butterfield, and Edward Buckton Lamb, wayward individualists who drew the greatest possible contrast with the International Style. There could be no question of reviving their work literally—methods of construction, sculptural practice, and the entire cultural frame of reference had changed—but they nonetheless had a transformative effect on architecture. Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) showed how the forms of these Victorian rogues (and also Edwardians like Edwin Lutyens) could be abstracted to suit modern construction. Here was the origin of postmodern architecture, its vivid language of signs and symbols, which is the most tangible evidence of the neo-Victorian moment of the 1960s and 1970s.

 

Such was the heady moment when the taboo against Victorian art was lifted. It shows that a taboo is not necessarily a bad thing. By holding the entire Victorian era in brackets, as it were, and then revisiting it after a long interval, it became possible to see it with fresh eyes, to discover it as a vast and dazzlingly new continent. Its pariah status forced its defenders to examine its principles and to struggle to justify them. All this unleashed a furious creative energy. Its signs are everywhere, on the walls of museums, on the mighty corpus of international studies on Victorian art and architecture, and on the streets themselves. It is a prodigious achievement, but the spark that brought it into being, it is now clear, is extinct.

 

I was studying in Germany in 1980 when I showed a class of architecture students a slide of Furness’s Provident Life and Trust building, which made them gasp out loud. And Victorian art continued to perplex and enthrall my students, right up to the turn of the century, when it began to diminish in intensity as other topics swam delectably into view. I remember my surprise when a student told me that the topic that fascinated her most was the impact of television sets on the layout of the American house of the 1950s. I suspect my reaction was the same as Lane Faison’s when his bohemian artists confessed their love of Sargent.

 

But scholarship, like tobacco farming, exhausts the soil and then moves on. This is the nature of things. Victorian studies once carried with it the allure of the not quite respectable. This was that frisson or rebellion that is the great spur to youthful research. But that frisson is now gone. The return of the Victorian world to polite society, so desperately resisted, so desperately achieved, has rendered it perfectly inoffensive and therefore, to a new generation of scholars, perfectly uninteresting. To be sure, the place of Victorian art is now secure, in the textbooks and on museum walls. one can comfortably distinguish between its major and minor masters, trace its circuitous development and querulous factions, and even look with understanding on its pious failures—and all this without the collective revulsion that once distorted it beyond recognition Decades from now, historians will puzzle over Victorian historiography: a half-century of neglect, a generation of frenzied scholarship, and then a slow withdrawal. All this will be incomprehensible without some understanding of the strange emotional power of the Horror Victorianorum.

 

 

Michael J. Lewis's latest book is American Art & Architecture (Thames & Hudson).