Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  There may have been (and continue to be) hypocrisy in bohemia, but the existence of what seem to be contradictory moral attitudes needs to be understood in other ways, the first being that it corresponded to the differing origins and attitudes of the “unknown” and “amateur” bohemians. Socially the first came chiefly from families of what was then called the bourgeoisie populaire, sometimes on the border with artisans or workers (the Desbrosses brothers were sons of a cabdriver, and Murger’s father was a tailor who also served as concierge in a largely bourgeois building), while the second had more solid, even comfortable, backgrounds, as the examples of Barbara and Schanne testify. There are good reasons for young people of the first sort in search of an independent career to live frugally, since if they fall into debt they have few resources for getting out of it. Abstention is a logical and prudent strategy for them, whereas giving in to the material temptations of a great capital threatens the future they imagine for themselves. By contrast people at the same age from upper bourgeois backgrounds can expect more support from their families (provided their parents do not reject them for leading what they see as immoral lives, as some in Murger’s time and since have done). Unlike their less favored companions, they are likely to have known material comforts and pleasures in childhood, so that to renounce them for a time may still leave them with a persisting sense of entitlement. Rather than a sign of hypocrisy, the simultaneous rejection of money and fascination for it and what it can obtain reflects the presence in Murger’s bohemia of two distinct moral attitudes, with connections to different levels of bourgeois existence. The two stances were not mutually exclusive however; some people in Murger’s world combined or shifted between them, most notably Murger himself. This moral double-sidedness gave his bohemia a broader correspondence to the bourgeois life that was its counterpart, since both work and enjoyment, production and consumption are central to it. The two sides may sometimes stand in tension with each other, but (as noted earlier in regard to the conditions that encouraged early industrial innovation in England) the desire for goods was one motive drawing people to expend more effort on the activities necessary to obtain them. One way bohemia and bourgeois life mirrored each other was in their simultaneous devotion to both.

  What allowed this complex moral structure to occupy its important place at the center of Murger’s bohemia was his instinctive highlighting of the enlarged sense of the “artist” developed earlier by Vigny and Pyat. Himself a person who felt called to the artistic life, but whose limited talent extended only to writing what Champleury called “slices of his own life,” Murger found in bohemia both material and an environment through which to realize the literary aspirations he could fulfill nowhere else: he never wrote successfully about any other subject. No one embodied better than he the shift of creative imagination from work to life he summed up in the formula of bohemian existence, devoted as it was to adroit stratagems and clever expedients: “their everyday life is a work of genius.” One virtue of this redefinition was that it could serve to recognize the kinship between artistic bohemia and the separate but neighboring realm of people who had or chose to live in comparable ways for different reasons, such as street performers, vagrants, eccentrics, people with non-standard sexual identities, even some petty criminals. It was to them that the extension of bohémiens beyond its original reference to gypsies had first applied, and a full census of the inhabitants of modern bohemia would have to include them, as Murger well knew. By virtue of redefining art as living the life, Murger made room for both. His readers, however, seldom belonged to this “other” bohemia; for them even the implied reference to vagrants or con men was part of what made the world he described of interest above all for the relations it bore to its bourgeois counterpart, which similarly claimed recognition as a realm of innovation and imagination (as well as of order and stability). Murger’s claim that the true bohemians in his world were apprentice artists was not false, but it served, consciously or not, as a move in the strategy that made bohemia the common ground of people engaged in appropriating the life of art for some extra-aesthetic, more personal and social purpose: rebellion, moratorium, or dramatizing the ambivalence they felt toward their beckoning bourgeois destinies. It was bohemia’s ability to serve as a real and symbolic reference point for all these projects, at once for rejecting bourgeois life and for finding an oblique way of entry into it, that put it on the map of modern culture. But it was the permeable boundary between bourgeois life and the life of art that Vigny made evident in spite of himself and that Pyat and Murger specifically confronted that made the space of bohemia so significant in modernity.

  That it long retained this importance, and in terms close to Murger’s, can be seen by attending for a moment to a much greater writer who both felt bohemia’s attractions and feared its dangers, Thomas Mann. Mann, who frequented self-consciously bohemian circles in Munich where his mother (born in Brazil) brought him and his brother Heinrich from their native Lübeck after their father’s death in 1891, recognized bohemia as a field for the shifting and permeable relations between artists and bourgeois, and like Murger saw the temptations of remaining there too long as a danger for an artist, writing at one point that what talent required was not “real hunger but hunger for the real.” Putting a commitment to real life above devotion to imagination was a position to which he came only through much hesitation and struggle, however, or perhaps to which he was always coming, much in the way that Murger was forever leaving bohemia behind without ever getting free of it. Mann began his first novel Buddenbrooks (1901) from a perspective that made him identify with the figure of Hanno, the last of the family and the one whose intense devotion to music (as we saw earlier) was the sign of its having lost the capacity to act effectively in the world, a condition that might be seen as preparation for recognizing the “higher” (in Nietzsche’s terms “aesthetic”) understanding that reality was merely transitory, a fleeting appearance ever-destined to be replaced by other ones. But even in that book the ambivalence that drew him increasingly to the opposite position as time went on made itself felt, and it underlay his remarkable evocation of two simultaneous and opposed tendencies within the bourgeois life he portrayed, one to value appearance and role-playing in a way that drew bourgeois people toward a bohemian kind of “artistism,” the other to attend to the ineluctable power of reality in the way of practical people.11

  The chief vehicle of this dialectic in Buddenbrooks is the relationship between Thomas, later to be Hanno’s father, and his younger brother Christian. The contrast between them appears in the novel’s first scene, when the brothers, still schoolboys, return home; a visitor (“the town poet”) notes the contrast between them, describing Thomas as “a serious, steady intellect; he’ll have to go into commerce,” whereas Christian, while “a lad of wit and brilliant gifts,” appears “to go off in all directions.” To this his father responds with a kind of affectionate exasperation: “He’s a monkey,” a description Christian straightaway confirms by giving a hilarious imitation of one of his teachers. He confuses his mental pictures with actual happenings in the world (once seeming to choke on an imaginary peach pit, already a sign of the psychically rooted weakness that will overcome his nephew Hanno). When, in response to a family conversation about business that he does not understand, Christian wishes “I were a businessman too,” his brother gives back: “Right, you want to be something different every day.” Indeed Christian never becomes a poet, or anything else, merely growing more preoccupied and unworldly as time goes on (the fate Pyat also predicted for those infected with “artistism”); later he attributes his weakness and illness to having nerves that are “too short on one side,” leaving him unable to connect to the world. Thomas grows more critical of him over the years, but from early on he admits to having experienced a similar “preoccupation with one’s self” at times too; this he struggles to overcome, so as to “sit ourselves down and accomplish something, just as our forefathers did” but with less and less succe
ss as time goes on, taking on something of his brother’s concern for making things appear in a certain way as he loses his power to act effectively, so that he gives off signs of the family’s fate before Hanno becomes its bearer.12

  There is another dimension to this concern for show in Mann’s work, namely overt attempts to create or “keep up” appearances, a phenomenon often associated with bourgeois life by its observers and critics. This theme takes on a sinister tonality in the person of Herr Grünlich, whose successful campaign to wed Tony, one of Thomas’s and Christian’s two sisters, is revealed to have been a stratagem on the part of an unscrupulous speculator to enlist the Buddenbrook family’s name and resources to cover his debts and carry on his risky deals. His failure contributes to the family’s decline, and highlights the dangers lurking in the bourgeois need to extend trust and confidence to associates about whom it may be difficult to acquire reliable information, especially at a distance. In Grünlich’s case Tony’s father Johann made the usual inquiries about him, only to learn later that those to whom he turned were in on the scam, creditors of his prospective son-in-law who hoped the marriage would help them recoup their loans.13 The problem of confidence between relative strangers (which as we saw earlier was an ingredient of the bourgeois emphasis on “character”), and the masquerades undertaken in order to create it, drew much attention in the nineteenth-century. One notable instance was the American writer Herman Melville’s novel The Confidence Man, whose title figure appears in a series of shifting disguises as he sells shares in nonexistent companies on a Mississippi River steamboat; a later example is Mann’s own Felix Krull, Confidence Man, whose hero is at once a swindler and a symbol of the artist, about whom Mann wrote (calling up the Nietzschean notion that “reality” itself is an appearance): “He has learnt hoodwinking from the world and makes himself into an ideal, a stimulus to life, a power of seduction vis-à-vis the world … and she falls into his trap.”14 The Buddenbrook family itself was seldom much concerned with strategies for keeping up appearances (for most of their history they did not have to be), but as Thomas’s powers wane he worries more about the face he presents to the world, and Mann finds much that is theatrical in their life, at one point recounting how little Hanno (who like his uncle Christian is entranced by the theater), wandering through a room in the family’s new house after others have left, “found a strange delight in roaming about as if this were a half-darkened stage after the curtain had fallen and he could peek behind the scenery.”15 The author of Buddenbrooks fully recognized the kinship in bourgeois life and in himself between the tendencies Thomas sought to embody and those that drew Christian toward bohemia.

  Artists, markets, and the painting of bourgeois life

  Murger’s bohemia and Mann’s world of burghers were not the only sites where the affinity between bourgeois life and the life of art was displayed; the sphere of productive and recognized artists exhibited it too. I noted in Chapter 12 that the shift from the various forms of personal and official patronage on which artists and writers had long relied toward market relations was – despite what has often been written – welcomed by many figures in modern culture. And, as we saw, the various Secession movements of the end of the nineteenth century all had close ties to art dealers and gallery owners, who were perfectly capable of using the impressionist idiom of independence and pure devotion to art as marketing slogans.16

  The widely diffused view that a conservative public of viewers and buyers kept its finger in the dike of stability to hold back the disturbing flood of creative innovation describes some parts of the cultural landscape to be sure, but as Leo Steinberg pointed out some time ago, resistance to change came from within the ranks of practicing artists too, and not only backward-looking ones. Modern art, by moving constantly on from one form of expression to another, asks us “to discard visual habits which have been acquired in the contemplation of real masterpieces,” giving birth to “a feeling that one’s accumulated culture or experience is hopelessly devalued, leaving one exposed to spiritual destitution.” Attending an exhibition in 1868, the romantic poet and novelist Théophile Gautier found that remembering how he and his generation had passed through the public’s earlier condemnation of their work (including his own novel of 1835, shocking to many, Mademoiselle de Maupin) to a state of greater acceptance was not enough to prepare him for the new art then on view: being confronted with “Courbet, Manet, Monet, and tutti quanti” set him on edge. “One feels one’s pulse in something of a panic, one puts one’s hand on one’s belly and on one’s head to reassure oneself that one hasn’t become stout or bald, incapable of understanding the courage and daring of youth,” and he confessed himself uncertain “whether it is in fact possible to understand any art other than that with which one is contemporary, that is to say the art with which one shared one’s twentieth birthday.” The critic Jules Laforgue, defending the impressionists in 1883, admitted that the new painting was bound to bewilder and exasperate viewers whose perceptual armature had been formed around other styles; his expectation that they would accuse it of “willful eccentricity” was not far from the judgment that Zola, twenty years older than when he had defended Manet in 1867, provided in his novel The Masterpiece (L’Oeuvre), where a painter partly modeled on Manet and Cézanne, and on Balzac’s Frenhofer, declined into isolation and derangement.17

  That even artists identified with innovation found reasons to sympathize with those who resisted or rejected it adds a dimension of significance to the recent demonstration that between the two camps of progressive and academic art into which scholars have chiefly divided the modern cultural landscape there existed a vigorous and fertile middle ground, which Robert Jensen labels the juste milieu. The tag applies to such artists as Jules Bastien-Lepage, Carolus Duran, John Singer Sargent, James MacNeill Whistler, James Tissot, and others, whose widespread and continuing appeal Jensen attributes to their ability to combine “the semblance of modernity with the accessibility [and] the narrative and pictorial coherence of the academic tradition.” Some of these figures, Sargent and Whistler for instance, were subjected to derision of the sort visited on the impressionists and members of later avant-garde movements, and much art-historical writing has put them in this company. But it was chiefly their interest in modern events and experiences, together with an occasional aesthetic provocation such as Whistler’s early White Girl, or a willingness to straddle moral boundaries as Sargent did in his Portrait of Madame X (to whose falling shoulder-strap and the scandal it provoked we alluded briefly in our discussion of morality) that inspired such judgments; engaged observers at the time roundly rejected them. Huysmans, in his early career a champion of the impressionists, insisted that an “unfathomable abyss” separated genuine members of the group such as Degas and Gustave Caillebotte from the likes of Bastien-Lepage; but Caillebotte, who was an important collector as well as an innovative painter, rejected even some candidates Degas was willing to accept as colleagues, such as Jean-François Raffaelli.18 Just who ought to be assigned to which camp does not really concern us here; the point is that the line between tradition and innovation was uncertain and smudged even within what count as advanced artistic circles. This was particularly true within the group canonized as the impressionists, as Caillebotte’s disagreement with Degas suggests; some of Monet’s early pictures (for instance of gardens populated by beautifully clothed and comfortable figures) were both easy to read and affirmative in spirit, and (as Robert Herbert has pointed out) Renoir, whose lower-middle-class origins sometimes found expression in a style that emphasized the artisan-like materiality of paint, often depicted bourgeois scenes and especially the women in them with a longing rooted in his exclusion from their society, “as though he had his nose pressed to the window of the upper-class world,” in contrast to the ironic distance the solidly bourgeois Manet put between himself and his subjects.19

  Just how permeable was the line between aesthetic innovation and more conservative practice only becomes clear when
we recognize that it sometimes ran inside the work of individual artists. This was eminently the case for Degas, as we can see by attending to a pair of pictures he made of a single subject. The two works are especially significant here because they illuminate at once the existence of these different possibilities inside impressionism, and the school’s relationship to bourgeois existence. The pictures both depict the cotton-trading office in New Orleans of which Degas’s uncle Michel Musson was a principal partner. Degas went there with his brother René in 1872 on a visit to relatives, especially his other brother Achille, who worked in the firm and who had married his widowed cousin, Musson’s daughter (a common pattern among nineteenth-century bourgeois). One of the works, Cotton Merchants in New Orleans, is now in the Fogg Museum at Harvard (Figure 1), the other, Portraits in an Office (New Orleans), is in the Musée des Beaux Arts of Pau in southwestern France (Figure 2). Despite their common subject, the two pictures are strikingly different. Much of the space in the Fogg canvas (considerably smaller than the other) is taken up by a table covered in cotton, rendered in a way that makes it appear almost cloud-like; three disconnected figures appear in the upper half, one leaning into the table with his hands in the white substance, one at a small distance holding some, the third, just at one edge of the table, a mere profile emerging from behind a wall where hangs a partially visible print of a ship. The whole is “impressionistic” in a literal way (although the term was not yet in vogue in 1873); sketch-like and blurry in detail, it captures a moment more through the uncertain mood produced by its fuzzy surfaces and the unspecified relations of the figures than through any possible narrative of what is taking place. The other picture, now at Pau, although evidently of the same room (the print of the ship appears here too) makes a clear contrast. “In it,” as Degas wrote in a letter, “there are about fifteen individuals more or less busy with a table covered with the precious material and two men, one half leaning and the other half sitting on it, the buyer and the broker, are discussing the sample.” The scene is rendered in clear detail, with numerous identifiable figures. Degas’s uncle Michel Musson sits in the foreground, examining a piece of cotton stretched between his hands (taken from a larger quantity on a chair to his right); his brother Achille leans against an interior window wall at the left edge, observing the goings-on, while René (who had earlier worked with Musson too) perches on a chair reading a newspaper just to the right of the picture’s center. Other figures either look on or busy themselves with account or record books.20