Culture and Society

HIGH ARTS AND GENERAL CULTURE

Richard Hoggart

r ~ c a e arts, specifically what are here unapologetically lled the High Arts, and the general culture, the

health of the general culture itself, are twinned. To have the confidence of Matthew Arnold in moving between the two meanings is no longer possible. But even a cen- tury and a half after Arnold, and confidently or not, the effort to connect asks to be made.

Each to his last. I am not competent to discuss the relations between a general culture and music or the visual arts. My field is literature. Luckily, literature is the art which most directly raises the question of rela- tionships with the culture as a whole, most unavoid- ably and impor tan t ly - -o r is that last claim merely a way of saying: "What interests me most is what I believe to be most important. There ' s nothing like leather?" I think not, and so far as may be done in a short space will give the elements of the case. Recently it has been well put from several directions by Ameri- can writers; by Harold Bloom, Sven Birkerts and Neil Postman, among others.

It is fairly commonly claimed that music is the 'high- est' of the arts, the peak of human imaginative achieve- ment. Maybe. Certainly, literature is the art most ex- plicitly and openly involved in the exploration of human experience. It is of the earth, earthy; "it's gotta use words when it talks to us," to adapt Eliot. Whatever some mod- ern theories may argue it has at bottom its own mean- ings, not simply a series of different meanings drawn from it by whoever reads it. At its height it takes that most everyday tool, language, and transforms it into a way of leaving the everyday, inviting us to observe ex- perience within another, not so contingent, perspective.

It has many aspects but the one most pertinent here is its relationship with the moral texture of our lives. Think of a handful of novels which, if the word still means anything, can be called 'great': Jane Austen's Emma, George Eliot 's Middlemarch, Thomas Hardy ' s The Mayor of Casterbridge, and D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love (a similar American list would be easy to draw up and as intricately involved with its culture). Such

books are both 'of this time, of that place' and 'univer- sal', rising clear of time and place.

Whatever their other qualities, and they are many and different, all those books and others like them offer themselves as subtle and penetrating explorings of our moral beings, of our sense of ourselves and our rela- tionships with others, of our response to the natural world, of our reaction to the 'common culture' we have inherited and either accept or seek to reject. And of much else. To have felt the shame of Emma in the incident on Box Hill, traced by a mind much subtler than our own and with a grasp of the intricacies of language to match those insights; to have responded, if we can and are willing, to Mrs. Bulstrode's immensely complex and honest facing of her husband after she has heard of his corruption (time, place, class. Puritan ethics all coming together)-- to have known all this can be a revelation which no other medium can give. It offers us the expe- rience in a most complex analytic degree, but not as analysis; rather as something recreated, felt in the blood and the heart, realized.

We are lucky enough to have been offered such ex- periences; and should be sorry that so much in current culture not only assumes but asserts that such creations are replaceable, have nothing special to offer, are no different in kind from the latest written-to-order block- buster, and anyway can be found in other media such as television or the internet. Literature is dead.

Here is a point where the interweaving of High Cul- ture, High Art and the life of the General Culture in any age are sharply revealed. That literature offers us a con- tinuing, a deeply intelligent and imaginative, illustra- tion, recreation and valuing of the terms of our ordi- nary lives. Nothing can in these senses replace it; it can be an embodied revelation, liberation.

In what ways does it then affect these ordinary lives? Having seen the moral terms, the costs, the obligations, perhaps even the gains, do we then go out and make use of the lesson? There are passages in Arnold where he seems sometimes to think that the influence of great

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literature may be as direct as that; but he was no fool and will not have meant this. Nor did many intelligent, surprisingly many and surprisingly intelligent, later critics mean anything quite so simple and direct. But they spoke unevasively. Recall only I. A. Richards: "To set up as a critic is to set up as a judge of values. For the arts are inevitably and, quite apart from any intention of the artist, an appraisal of existence."

To assume a directly transferable influence would reduce our free-will, our right and freedom to go to Hell in our own ways, no matter how many great books we have read; and understood, not skimmed. One can' t claim that to have 'properly read' King Lear is thereaf- ter in some ways to have become a better person. It is to say that thereafter one may- -on ly ' m a y ' - - h a v e a fuller sense of the possibilities--the depths, the heights, the complexities, the ambiguities, the disorder, the striv- ing for order--within human life. One may have had an analogical or symbolic exploration, in itself absorb- ing and beautiful perhaps but always pointing beyond itself, one which challenges our relentless tendency to narrow life to the predictable and repeatable. Some- thing such as this can lie at the heart of the artistic achievement at its highest and may point to its possible effects.

Perhaps the most we can say is that, after we have read, enjoyed and admired such works, have followed into the heart of their mysteries those insights into the nature of our own lives and into the inescapable moral weight of them, that those explorations stand available thereafter' if we so will, to influence our own conduct, to inform and enhance and make more sensitive our responses to our own dilemmas. At first glance that may sound little. It can be, rather, an immense gain. Out of language used as the most sensitive of tools placed at the service of minds more gifted than most, we are offered the chance to think more clearly and richly about the ways before us. If that seems an over-solemn way of regarding great literature and its connections with both the individual and the collective life then that is a pity; an indication of a recurrent theme in this paper: the aversion from accepting other than relativistic atti- tudes towards life, the wish to refuse precisely those terms which great literature makes it harder to ev ad e - - even in the course of engrossing us in its unique plea- sures. One has to repeat that pleasure here is as impor- tant as any other aspect of reading since to suggest weightier elements today is to be accused of reading only and directly for 'self-improvement' . Characteris- tically and even at his most solemn, Dr. Johnson did not forget to include 'consolation'; and pleasure; and John Stuart Mill spoke of poetry's unique contribution for him to 'the very culture of the feelings'.

The question of how far the state should intervene in the way we live our lives rolls on and always will. Necessary interventions are obvious; we agree to drive on one side of the road only. After that and a few simi- lar cases, agreement may be hard to find. The state provides education; but that can seem to be justified in purely practical terms: society needs literate and nu- merate citizens. Beyond that kind of thing there are in many advanced societies, by tradition and custom, com- mon state initiatives which some people, no matter how long the tradition, would still claim are none of the state's business: public parks and public libraries, mu- seums and art galleries; and the high arts, those not likely to be patronized and paid for by the great major- ity of people but which informed opinion insists should be 'kept up' in 'any civilized society'.

It is always important not to be tempted to fall into the low-functional argument (especially attractive to British governments) and base the case on the degree to which the arts attract money from foreign tourists.

' In formed opinion ' makes its claim also on the grounds that, though few may want such things, more will come to understand their value if they are properly presented, that the current condit ion of the market should not be allowed to define and circumscribe the potentialities of all, that democracies should always al- low greater leeway to the mind and spirit.

The above could be called the high-minded case for state intervention. It rests on an ideal and cannot be proved or weighed. In Britain it is rarely made. Those who defend the Royal Opera House's right to a sub- stantial subvention from the state (whose effect is to do little more than put wealthy bums on seats at margin- ally reduced but still horrendously high prices) do not usually make the case on disinterested social grounds. They assume that since they pay so much in taxes they have a right to subventions for their favorite arts. The management hears the argument but seems not to take its measure or any countermeasure. It provides cheaper seats, available to most, way up near the ceiling, and thinks its duty done.

As was noted earlier, most other Western European countries have different assumptions; and have more in common with one another than with the British. 'Cul- ture', meaning the high arts has long been regarded, especially in France and Germany, as an important ele- ment in a nation's sense of itself, especially of the feel- ing of prestige enjoyed by its high bourgeoisie. Of course they quarrel nowadays about how much public money should be allotted to the arts; but they are quarrelling from within a set of firmer positive assumptions than the British, and so of assumed minimum justified lev- els of funding.

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They are likely to extend those convictions to mat- ters outside the arts as, e.g., to the preservation of the material heritage. French controls on, for instance, what is done to historic city centers are far more centralized than those of Britain. The British assurance that al- most all such decisions can safely be left to even the smallest locally-elected authorities is excessive; af- ter the last war many of those local authorities sold their historic centers to developers who substituted, from drawing-boards in London, almost identically uninspired shopping malls and the like. We lost many comely old complexes. The main agent was not petty corruption among the councilors, though that likely occurred; blindness to the issues at stake and over-wean- ing assurance were sufficient to bring about the de- struction.

The further argument is that the state's activity should move out from the high arts and the living environ-

merit to many another matter which is involved with the health of the general culture: the provision of open spaces, libraries which will always make available good literature not (as increasingly nowadays) with commu- nications software which displaces books, with the be- havior of the press and with broadcasting. And of course with universally available high-level education and a universally available and effective Health Service. All these things are then seen as part of a whole for which we are all responsible.

Richard Hoggart, author of the classic, The Uses of Lit- eracy, first published in 1957 and republished with a new introduction 1998, is author most recently of Everyday Language and Everyday Life both published by Transac- tion Publishers along with several other seminal works. This article is based on his A.W. Franks Lecture at the British Museum.

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