Gotham Diary:
The Broccoli Problem I
23 July 2014
In the Book Review this weekend, David Lehman published an essay, “Sing to Me, O Muse (But Keep It Brief),” that, in the course of assessing the state of poetry — the literary equivalent of recycled hints about keeping your nails long and lovely between manicures — delved into The Two Cultures, a book that ought to need no introduction here. Originally an essay, CP Snow’s fashionably “controversial” book proposed, as Lehman pithily puts it, that “humanistic values were possible without humanistic studies.” This infuriated many on what was already the liberal-arts wing of the higher-education divide, but the rage stopped there. “Put on the defensive,” Lehman writes, “advocates for the humanities have failed to make an effective case for their fields.” Fifty-odd years after Snow’s manifesto, the humanities are still on the defensive. They have yet to find a public champion capable of singing their praises without harping on the nutritional values of “culture” — broccoli.
Although I have thought and written about this situation for more than ten years, I’m still coming to grips with it. I’ve only just learned, for example, that “the broccoli problem” is a very good way of expressing the problem. If I never had a broccoli problem myself, in school or later, that’s not to say that I welcomed boring studies with an unnatural embrace. Something of a magpie as a child, I picked up shiny bits and bobs, some of which turned out later to have “cultural significance”; as I got older, my collections became more polished and coherent. Every once in a while, I would be overcome by the conviction that I really must learn more about something, but these enthusiasms were always more pleasurable than dutiful. Of course, I was a dilettante with nothing intelligent to say for most of my life, but the world wasn’t a worse place for that. I ought to note that my bone-deep aversion to serious rock ‘n’ roll was negatively liberating; the fire hoses of popular culture never had much for me to absorb. And, from a very early age, I was aware that I had an unusual, but quite inborn, consciousness of the past.
Consciousness of the past may be uncommon, but it is not rare. What I think distinguished my consciousness of the past was that it was not my past that interested me. Learning of my adoption at the age of seven effectively canceled any personal past. I could adopt my parents’ pasts, if I liked, but only on the understanding that they were not really mine to begin with. I was also free to adopt other pasts, and that is what I did. Even though I found military history tedious and unpleasant, and political history boring beyond belief, what kept me reading history generally was the dynastic tracery that linked the histories of all the European countries. I collected kings and dukes the way normal boys collected baseball cards. It was, for a long time, a sloppy, disorganized collection, full of holes and half-remembered bits, but it grew into an armature upon which a consciousness of European history took shape. Eventually I would take an interest in the politics, and even in the wars. But from the very start, I was most aware of the connections between princes and their patronage of the arts.
As an example, I first encountered Emperor Joseph II while reading about Mozart. Mozart, thanks to the inspiration of a muse to whom I can never discharge my gratitude, was the first serious composer in my life, and his music still sits at the center of my awareness of things, just as the birth of Jesus sits at the center of the calendar. Also from Mozart, I learned that Vienna lies more deeply in Central Europe than Salzburg does, and that it is due east even of Prague. One thing usually leads to another.
I never idealized the aristocratic way of life that prevailed in Europe until what, when I was growing up, was still “the last century” (the Nineteenth). I did not daydream about pomp and circumstance. I had no taste for ceremony, and I preferred a solitary life. Although I learned how to ride a horse before I was fully grown, I could not stop feeling sorry for the horse, having to lug me around, and, again, the repetitious introductory stages of riding partake of the ceremonial. I should have been no good at all in the ancien régime and I knew it. Never for a moment have I ever wanted to turn the clock back. Even now!
But if didn’t admire the popes and princes personally, I appreciated their more material legacies — the portraits and the palaces, the plazas and gardens. I liked those very much. I just did. No broccoli problem whatsoever.
Well, some of the stuff was a bit rich. In bad taste, even — most of the painted ceilings that I’ve seen in person are pretty dreadful. I prefer magnificence to be somewhat understated and indirect. It is often easier to attain tasteful obliquity if one’s means are not unlimited. If kings had a lot of money, dukes had a bit less, and so on down the line, right to the prosperous burgher in his canal-side counting house. But wait. As early modern Europe developed, that burgher began to have as much money as a count, or perhaps even a duke. Why, he might even be lending to the crown! Rich burghers could afford the opulence of royal courts, but they generally opted for ostentation was on a smaller, more prudential scale. They picked and chose among the artefacts of earlier potentates. And when much of the old world was swept away after 1789, European men increasingly fell in behind a trend away from dress uniforms and in favor of the street clothes of the English gentleman. Talk about understatement!
That gentleman, however, might very well live in a Regency terrace, a row of graciously porticoed houses that exemplified the aesthetic principles first nourished at the courts of Renaissance princes. The world — our more permanent buildings and their more permanent furnishings — had grown much wider since the early days, and much more varied, but the eye of Europe’s art (which designed this world) remained the same.
More about that eye tomorrow, and about its shutting, in the artists’ strike known as “modernism,” soon. Woven in the narrative will be the rudiments of a history of the humanities in the modern west — leading, I hope, to a better understanding of why people actually believe that there are two cultures.
Daily Blague news update: Power, Not Prices.