Recent Reading

I've been progressing at a leisurely pace through Alexandra Harris' Romantic Moderns (2013). Unlike many of the other academic studies I have proposed to read which much of the time weave some wilfully obscure, theoretical line of reasoning, flexing their scholarly credentials in the process, Harris' thesis seems relatively simple by comparison, perhaps even academically naïve. However, what it lacks in depth it makes up for enormously in scope. Simply put, I have learnt a huge amount since I started reading it, savouring the rich variety and nuance of each chapter. It imbues its subjects with life and colour, written with documentary clarity.

'Stonehenge, Wiltshire' by John Piper (1981)

Indeed, each chapter is like a little world in itself and much of my satisfaction emanates from how Harris disentangles the bundle of colours, feelings and ideas which constitute my understanding of that cultural milieu. Ranging across the Georgian and Victorian revivals (the underlying ethics of abstract formalism against frivolous ornamentation), the re-discovery of British watercolour painters like Francis Towne and John Sell Cotman and their influence on contemporary art, or the search for “authentic” British cuisine, the revival of interest in village life and the new capacities for access to the countryside aided by the Shell Guides. What Harris is ultimately attempting to show in this study is how this revival of “English culture” was informed and, in fact, led much of the time by those who, a couple decades previously, been thoroughly avant-garde in sensibility. Harris cites numerous instances of this blurring between progressivism and tradition in the opening chapters which, taken individually, fail to convince, but together demonstrate the nuance and complexity of discourse between “old” and “new” that characterised the cultural concerns of that time.

Another book I have recently been reading from is Jed Esty's A Shrinking Island (2003), which sees this discourse in terms of a cultural shift for modernism he labels “the anthropological turn”. His use of this term alongside the invocation of Raymond Williams' concept of “metropolitan perception” has, for me, balanced out the theoretical ambivalence of Romantic Moderns. Linking this cultural turn to the decline of Britain as an imperial power, Esty writes

The relativization of England as one culture among many in the face of imperial contraction seems to have entailed a relativization of literature as one aspect of culture; together these discursive events constitute the anthropological turn of later modernism in particular and English culture in general after 1930. (Esty, 2003: 8)

As such, documenting the particular and the local became of greater importance than the abstract universalism of the previous decades. The final major works of two major modernists, Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (1941) and T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets (1943), demonstrated this shift in cultural disposition away from forward-looking abstraction to backwards-gazing vernacular. Away from cosmopolitan fragmentation and towards the local and particular. It is important to stress that another motivation for this documentary impulse in the late 30s and 40s was the threat posed by the second world war to the “national” way of life. This is apparent, for instance, from the “Recording Britain” series of landscape paintings commissioned at the time and now held by the V&A, and the Neo-Romantic vision in the films of Powell and Pressburger. Esty sees this project not as a nostalgic lamentation for an unrecoverable past, but instead providing “the basis for both social and aesthetic renewal” (Esty, 2003: 3).

'Buscot Park from the north east' by Felix Kelly (1944)

This morning I read Donald Bassett's article 'Felix Kelly, Herbert Read and Neo-romanticism' (2007). What drew me to this article was not so much the first name, who provides the main focus of the article, but the second; the art critic, poet, writer and philosopher Herbert Read (for whom Kelly provided illustrations for his novel The Green Child (1935)).  I discovered Read from Peter Marshall's Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (1993), where his aesthetic philosophy is described:

Read, like Wilde, saw his anarchist philosophy flower directly from his aesthetic concerns. A life without art, he believed, would be a 'graceless and brutish existence'. Taking up Eric Gill's cry 'To hell with culture', he criticized the elitist culture of his day as 'dope, a worse dope than religion'. In its place, he wanted to develop a democratic culture which could best be achieved through the expansion of personal and social freedom. Read believed human beings to be naturally creative: 'If we follow this Natural Order in all the ways of our life, we shall not need to talk about culture. We shall have it without being conscious of it.' At the same time, the artist can only realize his full creative potential if he is free and art autonomous. There is therefore a vital and organic link between freedom and culture.(Marshall, 1993: 588-589)

Since beginning this project, Read's name has popped up numerous times in relation to the Neo-Romantic school of art of which he was a major supporter. Having strong affinities myself with the arts and crafts quietist anarchism of people like William Morris, Edward Carpenter etc. I find it surprising that I have not already read any of Herbert Read's work, something I intend to correct immediately. His vitalist, anti-elitist view of culture combined with his love of the old certainly chimes with my own but also with the outlook of John Cowper Powys. This is something I wish to pursue in later posts.