THE OPPORTUNIST

Press, Volume LXXVI, Issue 22941, 10 February 1940, Page 16

THE OPPORTUNIST

Bourgeois Vitality and Culture

A bourgeois is by the original meaning of his name and generally in fact a townsman. He is a man who has taken advantage of opportunities and has established a position or a career for himself. He. has fought, or his ancestors have, for the extension of economic and political rights. When peasants revolt, they demand the redress of local, particular grievances; but townspeople revolt for wider reasons, to assert “the rights of man,” “social justice,” and “equality of opportunity.” The lists of grievances supplied by rural communities during the French Revolution concerned people living within sight of the village square; but the townspeople, more united by intercourse with their fellows, more enlightened by education, and more originally guided by zealous leaders, fought for reform on a wider, more unselfish scale. The reform-seeking bourgeois has fortitude and vitality; for events show that he has suffered and not been broken. His resistance and protest are made, not when conditions are becoming worse or are at their worst, but after the worst has been endured. Having endured the worst he is determined to hasten the rate of progress. The bourgeois looks for opportunities, seizes them, increases his numbers as opportunities grow and as he makes- more opportunities for other men. He needs opportunity and profits by it. Thus the English bourgeoisie grew strong when trade, colonisation, and exploration gave opportunities at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of ihe seventeenth centuries. During the seventeenth century it increased its economic and political power. The bourgeois, using many and great opportunities in the nineteenth century after the Industrial Revolution, grew in numbers and in individual importance. As bourgeois had resisted feudal oppression when towns grev. out of villages, so in the nineteenth century bourgeois "developed through the increase and variety of careers made by industrial development and multiplied by bourgeois energy. Bourgeois are parasitical; but so are all men, their hosts being the animal and plant life of the world. The most intelligent parasite appears to be urban, for he is most adaptable; he is, like the farmer, careful to develop arid improve his hosts,' and like the ant, careful to accumulate reserves. The Creative Bourgeois Andre Siegfried calls bourgeois •'people with and the reserves are not merely reserves of property, but of knowledge, culture, and vital force. - The bourgeois: has no wish to restrict bis numbers: He brings into bis group, by effective competition, some who by inheritance had at first greater reserves of power and property, and he draws up, by the increased opportunities he\has created, those who had inferior' reserves. In the nineteenth century he multiplied his numbers many times, and he set no limit to the proc6ss, for he believed in the perfectibility of mankind. He believed - in growth. Thus Rusldn taught that Englishmen could and should be eaual in enjoying the benefits of culture, the comprehenslon >o£ art, the inspiration of patriotism, and the consolations _ of religion. Man should respect himself mid improve himself. Ahies:"oar> civilisation was built amid cries of "the land of opportunity,” “do not build to last; progress is continuous; improvements will come!” America had no aristocratic rule or

special culture to resist and has had little oroletarian activity to resist. In no other country have so many bourgeois been made so quickly, the process continues, and much planning is intended to facilitate that process. Proletarian activity comes from those who, by their own incapacity or (in hard times) by lack of opportunity, cannot become bourgeois, or from bristling spirits like Saroyan and Hemingway who seek a kind of martyrdom. A bourgeois system succeeds and should succeed as long as the national temper remains liberal enough to believe in the perfectibility of man and has vital force enough to use Its strength to make opportunities for the. amassing of reserves of culture, knowledge, wealth. If this statement, is true, bourgeois literature and taste should represent the enterprise and vitality shown in economic and political regions. The Pulse of London English literature appears to do so. In politics a Disraeli achieves more than a Balfour or a J. H. Thomas. A Balfour is courageous, his motives are pure, his abilities great; a Thomas is sincere, hard-working, generous: but a Disraeli has a wider view, a *more certain aim, and greater reserves. In poetry a Tennyson moves more people and for a longer time than a Swinburne; a Masefield is more important to his race than a T. S. Eliot, and though an Ella Wheeler Wilcox may for a time outsell a Masefield, she cannot affect a nation’s experience as a Masefield can. If poetry is a special department which, 1 by tradition, has too often come to be thought by poets themselves and most readers as an esoteric communication to be directed at and apprehended by a few, other forms of writing are not so restricted. It is not chance that, when the City of London is most active, then citizens produce some form of literature in which fellowcitizens delight. London is always interesting ard active; it was unusually so at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, in the early eighteenth Century, in the mid-nineteenth century. Then her citizens had opportunities, their minds were active, they could feel growth, vital force was strong, and bourgeois art Was good. There were writers of great talent, and men to appreciate them, men whom life did not bore and lead to extravagance in art and tqste, men who were able to concentrate. Writers and readers supplemented each, other. The Elizabethan drama slorified the first age; Defoe, Swift, Richardson, and Fielding the second. The Victorian age was the most selfconsciously bourgeois, most, aware of its growth and reserves, most bent on Making arid using opportunities of early nineteenth century England. Fremantle wrote, “No country in the world had So wellinformed a middle class.” In the ’3o’s began the formation of groups of bourgeois men and women for self-cultivation: Athenaeums, mechanics’ institutes, mutual improvement societies, and their like. This bourgeois age was recorded, guided, attacked, and inspired in prose and verse by writers singularly aware of the economic, . cultural, and moral state of their fellow-countrymen. writers who wrote very directly about contem-, porary subjects, writers whose feelings and convictions were shared by their readers: Dickens. Thackeray. Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, ‘ and Tennyson. Bourgeois taste valued these writers highly and a hundred years later thev are.still, for the most part, valued - highly, though some of them have since been out of fashion and in again.-

Tennyson and England Tennyson is the plainest instance of a: bourgeois poet, his talents high, and his quality appreciated by his own generation and admired by posterity. His genius was national and seemed timed to the hour (though much of his verse is timed to any hour); and he expressed better than others the instincts, beliefs, and convictions which Englishmen held, or believed they held. His patriotism was English, his faith English, all his persons and places English, and, by and large, every line he wrote was clear and direct. Every verse of “In Memoriam*’ is an aspect of the religious conflict of mid-Victorian years. “Locksley Hall” recognised the material: progress and personal temptations of Englishmen. “The Idylls of the King” are weak only because they are- too narrowly English , poems, with, associations and lore. . that separate them from the rest of 'mankind- Victorian literature-is, as it appears to be, the bourgeois product of-a bourgeois age, the appellation is not to be discredited. Cloister or Forum? What is to be said of the taste of such a generation? It appears, to have been less extreme —less esoteric at one end, more thoughtful at the other. It denies the' assumption

that what is popular cannot be good, and suggests that what is good is popular. This statement is, of course, hot true of any known generation; but it is desirable that it should be true, and the evidence shows that it was more nearly true a hundred years ago than it is now. Victorians had not to contend with so many distractions as modern Georgians; but their zeal for selfcultivation, their energy of mind and body, and the use made of opportunities caused a wide appreciation of good literature. Writers, poets especially, were more willing that their thoughts and ideals; should be communicated to the mass of their fellow-countrymen, an attitude which Eliots, Audens, and Mrs Woolf’s friends seem to regard as. useless or hopeless. I can see little good—aesthetic, emotional, moralin forms of literature so cloistered as to be accessible to only a few choice spirits. When literature has many competitors it should first be clear and direct; that is, a work of art should have, among other purposes laid effects, that of affecting human beings. Victorian literature did have that purpose and effect; 4 to redress wrongs, to stir up the wills of the people, to kindle in men an appreciation of human strength, and to arouse a sense of the power of the work of man and of God. Smug, But Also— In the list of novels'most popular in the ’forties and ’fifties there are few that can be belittled or laughed at. These years include “Vanity Fair,” “Adam Bede,” “Jane Eyre”; forgotten are “Paul Ferroll” and “Ten Thousand a Year”; “John Halifax, Gentleman” and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” are the nearest to raising a smile, though “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is not so sentimental as “Dombey and Son” or “The Newcomes”; it is a good story and no mere piece Of propaganda would have been carried into 23 languages. The bourgeois is traditionally smug and respectable. To be respectable is'no offence, to be smug is not heinous. If Victorian bourgeois were smug, they were also earnest. and self-improv-ing; they heeded things of the mind and spirit; and their standards of literary appreciation were higher than ours. These millions of men and women tried to be cultured, and they were ready and eager to encourage others to share their own benefits. ___