Public Taste 100 Years Ago
METZGER, WALTER P.
Public Taste 100 Years Ago The Anatomy of American Popular Culture. 1840-1861. By Carl Bode. University of California. 292 pp. $6.00. Reviewed by Walter P. Metzger Associate Professor of...
...Here a diagnostic bias eschews any esthetic judgment...
...And, in sanctimonious ways, they gave outlets to prurience too...
...far outsold Prescott and Parkman: in the field of poetry, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, the Edgar A. Guest of that time, dwarfed every rival until Longfellow...
...The reader may therefore gauge the level of American common taste before electronics worked its evil, before leisure became a problem, before the audience for these arts grew truly massive...
...and the common arts can be respected as a mirror of important social values...
...A play had to have a moral message, a novel had to promise good results, an essay had to be exhortative...
...One thing emerges clearly: The trite, the flavorless, the mediocre flourished even in that distant era...
...the mass producer's interest in the "sale...
...Writers like Dwight Macdonald adopt a Nietzschean mood: "Popular Culture"' is "Mass Culture...
...Bode thus makes it plain that the divorce of ethics from amusement— the great separation of our time— had not as yet taken place...
...He covers everything from literature to decoration, from art-club paintings to penny newspapers...
...One difference can be perceived: The public arts of that day were incorrigibly didactic and prudish...
...From a distance, "Popular Culture" can be reckoned "Folk Culture," the vernacular style can be paid its due...
...The world was work-minded then...
...This critique is a form of lamentation...
...And high on the list of best-sellers were the "domestic novels"—books by and about suffering women, which differ from the current soap operas largely in that they appealed to male readers as well...
...The character traits he elicits—a powerful urge toward aggression, a tempering piety and religiosity, a concern with the themes of love and death—are at different psychic levels and not coherently related...
...Take, for example, the reading taste of the public (and since functional illiteracy was prevalent, this involves an already selected audience...
...With certain prominent exceptions, like Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, the popular arts of the era ignored the sectional crisis and emphasized diversionary patriotic themes...
...Hiram Powers' nude Greek Slave, for all its solemn Christian symbolism, offered subtle titillations, and the novel was nonetheless suggestive for lingering on the story of seduction and then dropping a moral curtain at the denouement...
...But he neither scolds nor judges: His intention is to derive from these materials the character traits of that generation...
...Rich in illustrative detail, comprehensive in scope, it makes, on almost every page, an interesting qualitative comment on the popular mind of that day...
...Carl Bode, professor of English at the University of Maryland, has written his book in this latter spirit...
...Taken in its own terms, as a psychological study of the common arts, this effort cannot be termed successful...
...The books that most appealed to religious interests—aside from the omnipresent Bible—were ephemeral religious tracts sowed broadcast by the American Tract Society, and a novel by Joseph Holt Ingraham, The Prince of the House of David, which one may judge as about on an artistic par with a De Mille spectacular...
...its product is simply "kitsch," and its triumph over Verity and Art is augured hy every current tendency — by the spread of mass communications, the mass consumer's search for "entertainment...
...On this presumption, Henry Nash Smith in Virgin Land sought in sub-literary works the dreams that Americans used to live by, and Irving Wyllie in The Self-Made Man in America combed the manuals of success for clues to the creed of individualism...
...Dickens and Scott were widely read, but the "most popular writer of the day" was the novelist, George Lippard, whose works have almost been forgotten...
...Yet the book has value nonetheless...
...Reviewed by Walter P. Metzger Associate Professor of History, Columbia University TREATMENTS OF AMERICAN popular culture seem to fall into two distinctive categories...
...After reading this account, few will be willing to believe that our public arts were once Arcadian, or that thereafter they suffered a Fall...
...On the other hand, retrospective studies of American popular culture tend to be calm and analytic...
...In the field of history, Joel Headley (who, one asks, was he...
...The author's theoretical equipment is a compost of bits of Freud and Jung, and not under very sure command...
...Those addressed to the contemporary scene are usually prophetic and despondent...
...recreation to be enjoyed had to be justified...
...He looks for character expressions, but does not give ballast to his speculations with a study of character formation...
...But the difference should not be overstated...
...Somehow, when approached historically, the subject loses heat...
...But sometimes studies in this field achieve a result that is not intended...
...In other fields as well, the average reader was unerring in his choice of the second-rate...
...Turning to the 20 years that preceded the Civil War, he paints a panoramic picture of the popular arts of that time...
...The public arts of that time also fed a demand for escape, as we can tell from the vogue of exotic architecture and the vast consumption of romance...
Vol. 43 • February 1960 • No. 7
