Pleasure Wars by Peter Gay HarperCollins 324pp, £29.99 in UK
The pleasure wars of the title are those fought between the artistic avant-garde and the hopelessly conventional middle class. The purpose of the book is to show that the middle class was not hopelessly conventional and that the avant-garde yearned for respectability as much as those they delighted to attack.
It was during the Victorian era that the middle class, swollen by the demands of trade and of the industrial revolution, began to accumulate money and gradually replace the Church and the Aristocracy as patrons of the arts. It was the moneyed middle class that supported the new movements in the arts. Prosperous industrialists commissioned paintings, subsidised composers, founded orchestras, promoted architects and, by presenting their collections to the public, shared their pleasures with the less well-off.
The lower echelons of the middle class, struggling to maintain their position on earnings that were often less than those of a skilled artisan of the working class, had no surplus income to spend on the arts. But even if badly paid, a poor clerk could share the ideals of the doctors, lawyers, clergy and other professionals who were above him in the social scale. Thrift, probity in commercial dealings, fidelity to one's spouse, the need for privacy, the gospel of work, the love of beauty, good taste - these were not only desirable in themselves but also signs of status.
How was it, then, that the Victorian middle classes, the bourgeoisie, became the target of so much obloquy? "Victorian", from being a historical term of a vaguely complimentary nature, became a synonym for unequalled hypocrisy, prudery and bad taste: "bourgeois", originally denoting a member of an urban community (burg), expanded to mean middle class, and then became a derogatory epithet to describe an uncultured person with no feeling for the arts. After Marx, the word acquired the connotation of a money-grabbing parasite on the working class.
It was to get behind received ideas on the Victorian bourgeoisie that twenty-five years ago Peter Gay embarked on his opus The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. Pleasure Wars is the fifth and final volume of the series. Previous volumes explored private lives, attitudes towards love, public activities, and cultivation of the emotions. The more he delved into forgotten journals and expense accounts the more richly varied he discovered the life of the bourgeois to be and the more unjustified the abuse it had received.
Most of the abuse came from within the bourgeoisie itself. The creative spirits who, thanks to the money and leisure made available to them by the efforts of their forebears, could intellectually ennoble themselves, tried to hide their humble origins under impassioned tirades. Flaubert, whose father was a very respectable bourgeois, a surgeon who had made money by investing in real estate, declared himself a Bourgeoisophobe. His hatred of the bourgeoisie could be physical in its intensity, the mere sight of them making him want to vomit.
Flaubert was not alone in his phobia, and denunciations of bourgeois materialism are so common as to suggest that there was some justification for them. But not all bourgeois deserved to be so pilloried. A prosperous industrialist set up the Halle Orchestra. A banker financed the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Rich Germans left their collections, witnesses to a wide range of tastes, to local museums. The less well-off created a demand for engravings of the pictures they could not afford. And though the bourgeoisie only amounted to some ten per cent of the total population they had a disproportionately large influence on the efflorescence of the arts. Without them there would have been no Cezanne, no Schoenberg, no Charles Rennie Mackintosh, to name but three Modernists whose reputations, if not their careers, thrived on controversy.
Peter Gay underlines the paradox that "the very class that derided modern poets as lunatics, modern playwrights as pornographers, modern painters as apostles of the repulsive also provided these seditiondists with forums for their ventures into unmapped domains, if not invariably with quick acceptance or a lavish income".
The history of the development of bourgeois taste, and its relationship to economics, politics and geography, is here delineated with a light hand. The Victorians are not idealised but neither are they traduced. Their behaviour may often be deserving of censure but after this book the old stereotypes will no longer fit.
Douglas Sealy is a critic and translator