despised and rejected of men;
a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief
Through its command of aesthetic resources, of buildings, paintings and Masses, Christianity created a bulwark against the authority of earthly values and kept its spiritual concerns in the public eye and at the forefront of the public mind.
In the four centuries between approximately 1130 and 1530, in towns and cities all over Europe, more than a hundred cathedrals were erected, their spires coming to dominate the skyscape, looming above grain stores, palaces, offices, factories and homes. Possessed of a grandeur that few other structures could rival, they offered a venue in which people from every walk of life could gather to ponder ideas that were, at least in the context of the history of architecture, highly unusuaclass="underline" ideas about the value of sadness and innocence, of meekness and pity. Whereas a city’s other buildings were designed to serve earthly needs—housing and feeding the body, allowing it to rest, manufacturing machines and implements to assist it—the cathedral had as its unique functions to empty the mind of egoistic projects and lead it towards God and his love. City dwellers engaged in worldly tasks could, during the course of a day, on seeing the outlines of these great massings of stone, be reminded of a vision of life that challenged the authority of ordinary ambitions. A cathedral such as Chartres, whose spires soar 107 metres into the sky (the height of a thirty-four-storey skyscraper), was understood to be the home of the dispossessed, a symbol of the rewards they would reap in the next life. However ramshackle their present physical dwellings, the cathedral was where they belonged in their heart. Its beauties reflected their inner worth, as its stained glass windows and coffered ceilings made vivid the glory of Jesus’ message to them.
3.
Christianity did not, of course, ever succeed in abolishing the Earthly City or its values, and yet if we retain some distinction between wealth and virtue and still ask of people whether they are good rather than merely important, it is in large part due to the impression left upon Western consciousness by a religion that for centuries lent its resources and prestige to the defence of a handful of extraordinary ideas regarding the rightful distribution of status. It was the genius of the artists and craftsmen who worked in the service of Christianity to give enduring form to its ideals and to make these real to us through their handling of stone, glass, sound, word and image.
In a world where secular buildings whisper to us relentlessly of the importance of earthly power, the cathedrals that punctuate the skylines of great towns and cities may continue to furnish an imaginative holding space for the priorities of the spirit.
V
BOHEMIA
Lee Miller, Le Déjeuner sur L’Herbe, 1937. A group of Surrealist friends on a picnic in Mougins, France: on the left, Nusch and Paul Eluard; on the right, from top, Roland Penrose, Man Ray and Ady Fidelin.
1.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a new group of people started to attract notice in western Europe and the United States. They often dressed simply; they lived in the cheaper parts of town; they read a lot; they seemed not to care much about money; they were frequently of melancholic temperament; their allegiances were to art and emotion rather than to business and material success; they sometimes had unconventional sexual lives and some of the women wore their hair short before it was the fashion. They came to be collectively described as “bohemian.” Traditionally used to refer to Gypsies (because they were mistakenly thought to have originated in central Europe), the word evolved—especially following the success of Scènes de la vie de Bohême (1851), Henri Murger’s account of life in the garrets and cafés of Paris—to encompass a wider range of people who did not, for one reason or another, fit into the bourgeois conception of respectability.
From the outset, bohemia was a democratic church. Early reporters suggested that bohemians could be found in every social class, age group and profession: they were men and women, rich and poor, poets and lawyers, scientists and the unemployed. Arthur Ran-some, in Bohemia in London (1907), observed,“Bohemia can be anywhere: it is not a place but an attitude of mind.” There have been bohemian enclaves in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Venice Beach, California; bohemians living in grand houses with servants and in huts on the shores of quiet lakes; outwardly conventional bohemians and ones with a taste for bathing naked by moonlight. One can wind the label around a number of different artistic and social phenomena of the last two hundred years, from romanticism to surrealism, from the Beatniks to the Punks, from the Situationists to the Kib-butzniks, and still not break a thread that binds together something important.
In London in 1929, the bohemian poet Brian Howard invited his friends to a party. The invitation card bore a list of his likes and dis-likes—which, for all their peculiarly early-twentieth-century En-glishness, impart some flavour of the characteristic inclinations and fears that bohemians have manifested throughout their history.
What Brian Howard and his fellow bohemians disliked might more succinctly have been summed up in a single term: “the bourgeoisie.” Having come to prominence during the same historical period—in France, after the fall of Napoleon, in 1815—bohemians
J’Accuse
J’Adore
Ladies and Gentlemen
Men and Women
Public Schools
Nietzsche
Debutantes
Picasso
Sadist devotees of
Kokoschka
blood-sports
“Eligible bachelors”
Jazz
Missionaries
Acrobats
People who worry they
The Mediterranean
can’t meet so-and-so
because they’ve got “a
D. H. Lawrence
bad reputation”
Havelock Ellis
The young men one meets
The sort of people who
at boring parties in stuck-up
know they haven’t got
moronic country houses
immortal souls; and are not
xx
anticipating—after death—
xx
any rubbishy reunion,
xx
apotheosis or ANYTHING
nursed a ferocious disdain for almost everything the bourgeois stood for, and took particular pride in heaping extravagant insults on them.
“Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom,” wrote Gustave Flaubert. It was a standard utterance for any self-respecting mid-nineteenth-century French writer, such contempt being as much a matter of professional honour as having an affair with an actress or taking a trip to the Orient. Flaubert accused the bourgeois of extreme prudery and materialism, of being at once cynical and sentimental, of immersing themselves in trivia—so that they might spend an age, for example, debating whether melon was a vegetable or a fruit and whether it should be eaten as a starter (in the French manner) or a dessert (the English way). Stendhal, no fonder of this class, com-plained,“The conversation of the true bourgeois about men and life, which is no more than a collection of ugly details, brings on a profound attack of spleen when I am obliged to listen to it for any length of time.”