2.
Arnold accepted the ribbing with good grace until finally, in 1869, he was goaded into composing and publishing a systematic, book-length defence of art, detailing what he believed it was for and what crucial functions it served, and must continue to serve, in life—even for a generation that had witnessed the invention of the foldaway umbrella and the steam engine.
Culture and Anarchy began by reviewing some of the charges that had been laid at art’s door. In the eyes of many, Arnold acknowledged, it was nothing more than “a scented salve for human miseries, a religion breathing a spirit of cultivated inaction, making its believers refuse to lend a hand at uprooting evils. It is often summed up as being not practical or—as some critics more familiarly put it—all moonshine.”
But far from being a mere salve, great art was in fact, Arnold argued, an effective antidote for life’s deepest tensions and anxieties. However impractical it might seem to “the young lions of the Daily Te l e graph,” it was capable of presenting its audience with nothing less than an interpretation of and solution to the deficiencies of existence.
Every great work of art, suggested Arnold, was marked (directly or not) by the “desire to remove human error, clear human confusion, and diminish human misery,” just as all great artists were imbued with the “aspiration to leave the world better and happier than they [found] it.” They might not always realise this ambition through overtly political subject matter—indeed, might not even be aware of harbouring it at all—and yet embedded within their work, there was almost always some cry of protest against a status quo, and thus an impulse to correct the viewer’s insight or teach him to perceive beauty, to help him understand pain or to reanimate his sensitivities, to nurture his capacity for empathy or rebalance his moral perspective through sadness or laughter. Arnold concluded his argument with the idea upon which this chapter is built: Art, he insisted, was “the criticism of life.”
3.
What are we to understand by Arnold’s phrase? First, and perhaps most obvious, that life is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art—novels, poems, plays, paintings or films—can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world.
Given that few things are more in need of criticism (or of insight and analysis) than our approach to status and its distribution, it is hardly surprising that so many artists across time should have created works that in some way contest the methods by which people are accorded rank in society. The history of art is filled with challenges—ironic, angry, lyrical, sad or amusing—to the status system.
Art and Snobbery
1.
Jane Austen began writing Mansfield Park in the spring of 1811 and published it three years later. The novel tells the story of Fanny Price, a shy, modest young girl from a penniless family in Portsmouth, who, in order to relieve her parents of some of their burden, agrees to go and live with her aunt and uncle, the plutocratic Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, at Mansfield Park, their stately home. Standing at the pinnacle of the English county hierarchy, the Bertrams are spoken of with awe and reverence by their neighbours. Their two daughters, Maria and Julia, are coquettish teenagers who enjoy a generous clothes allowance and have their own horses; their eldest son, Tom, is a bumptious and casually insensitive lout who spends most of his time in London clubs, lubricating his friendships with champagne while focusing his hopes for the future on his father’s death and the inheritance of the paternal estate and title. Adept though they are at affecting the self-deprecating manner so beloved of the English upper classes, Sir Thomas Bertram and his family never forget (nor allow others to forget) their superior rank or all the distinction that must naturally accompany their ownership of a large, landscaped garden through which deer wander in the quiet hours between tea and dinner.
Fanny may live under the same roof as the Bertrams, but she cannot be on an equal footing with them. Her privileges have been given to her at the discretion of Sir Thomas; her cousins patronise her; the neighbours regard her with a mixture of suspicion and pity; and she is treated by most of the family like a lady-in-waiting whose company they may take some modest pleasure in but whose feelings they are fortunately never under any prolonged obligation to consider.
Before Fanny’s arrival at Mansfield Park, Austen allows us to eavesdrop on the family’s anxieties about their new charge. “I hope she will not tease my poor pug,” remarks Lady Bertram. The children wonder what Fanny’s clothes will look like and whether she will speak French and know the names of the kings and queens of England. Sir Thomas Bertram, despite having proffered the invitation to Fanny’s parents in the first place, expects the worst: “We shall probably see much to wish altered in her and should prepare ourselves for gross ignorance, some meanness of opinions and a very distressing vulgarity of manner.” His sister-in-law Mrs. Norris insists that Fanny must be told early on that she is not, and never will be, one of them. Sir Thomas avers, “We must make her remember that she is not a Miss Bertram. I should wish to see Fanny and her cousins very good friends but they cannot be equals. Their rank, fortune, rights and expectations will always be different.”
Fanny’s advent seems only to confirm the family’s prejudices against those who have failed to grow up on estates with landscaped gardens. Julia and Maria discover that Fanny owns just one nice dress, speaks no French and doesn’t know anything. “Only think, my cousin cannot put the map of Europe together,” Julia exclaims to her aunt and mother, “nor can she tell the principal rivers in Russia and she has never heard of Asia Minor—How strange! Did you ever hear anything so stupid? Do you know, we asked her last night, which way she would go to get to Ireland and she said, she should cross to the Isle of Wight.” “Yes, my dear,” replies Mrs. Norris, “but you and your sister are blessed with wonderful memories, and your poor cousin has probably none at all. You must make allowances for her and pity her deficiency.”
The novel’s author takes a little longer than Mrs. Norris to make up her mind as to who is deficient, and in what capacity. For a decade or more, Austen follows Fanny patiently down the corridors and into the reception rooms of Mansfield Park; listens to her mutterings in her bedroom and on her walks around the gardens; reads her letters; eavesdrops on her observations about her adoptive family; watches the movements of her eyes and mouth; and peers into her soul. In the process, she picks up on a rare, quiet virtue of her heroine’s.
Unlike Julia and Maria, Fanny does not concern herself with whether every young man she meets has a large house and a title. She is offended by her cousin Tom’s indifferent cruelty and arrogance and flinches from her aunt’s financial considerations of her neighbours. The Bertrams themselves, meanwhile, so highly ranked within the conventional county status hierarchy, are more troublingly placed in that other, even more exacting status system, the novelist’s hierarchy of preference. Maria and her suitor, Mr. Rush-worth, may have horses, houses and inheritances, but Jane Austen sees how they go about falling in love, and she cannot forgive them for it: