The Fading Enlightenment

...In claiming that modern culture began not with Romanticism, whose flowering in Britain is conventionally dated from the publication of Lyrical Ballads exactly 200 years ago, but with the 18th century, Brewer seems to be arguing against the considerable bulk of his own evidence...

...What it reflects back to us, more than any other era since the Middle Ages, is a set of qualities and a distinctive way of looking at the world that most people on the eve of the third millennium find completely unintelligible...

...The culture of the 18th century seems even more distant than its political ideals...

...That's what relativity means...

...Liberty" in particular, the term common to both credos, has a faintly anachronistic ring, not only because academic multiculturalists and Asian dictators attack it as a form of Western oppression, but also because its meanings become increasingly hard to decipher in our present society...

...Nothing like what their descendants read today...

...His beautifully reproduced illustrations reflect a taste, a set of assumptions about art and life, of which little survives in the 20th century...

...This is the approach I follow in The Pleasures of the Imagination...

...Tautological though this statement may seem, it isn't...

...When he turns later in the book to the big picture—the creation of a new national culture that was (with qualifications) not only English but British—he also composes it painstakingly with the aid of many small facts...

...In this case, of course, the chief artifacts are the books, paintings and symphonies themselves, but a historian whose concern is with development over the century as a whole will naturally look at them in a different way from the critic of individual works, the student of mentalités, or the Foucauldian for whom power is everything...

...By glorifying the untutored child or the illiterate countrydweller, early English Romanticism fed into political and social changes that ultimately discredited the whole value the 18th century placed on intellect, proportion, discipline, restraint...

...Brewer, a British political historian who taught at Harvard and the University of California at Los Angeles before moving to the European Institute University in Florence, follows the familiar "distant mirror" strategy of making a remote period attractive to modern readers by emphasizing how closely it resembled our own...

...Every past century is receding, from a strict chronological standpoint, but some are receding farther and faster than others...

...This outcome, Brewer asserts, was neither inevitable nor "natural...

...Literary theorists and intellectual historians will find this approach irritating, yet Brewer could justifiably point out that all we have of the past is an immense miscellany of facts, artifacts and stories...

...When Scottish philosophers and political economists like David Hume and John Millar wrote about the arts, they did not discuss the merits of individual works but asked how the new system of the arts, with its new institutions and conceptions of taste, had come into being...

...A section entitled "Print" is followed by others with equally laconic headings, "Paint" and "Performance...

...Such statistics, the author warns us, are not terribly reliable...

...In one chapter we leam that "Market town-dwellers were more likely to read than country folk...

...Although the urbane mind ofthat century is well worth studying m all its major products, when used as a mirror it distorts badly...

...The technologies may be different but the broad issues...

...For another, what has happened to the arts in our century is not so much changes in their technology as the eclipse of all art by mechanical entertainment...

...why should cultural history be any different from the reconstruction of village life in medieval Provence...

...None of my skepticism about continuity discredits either 18th-century culture or, for the most part, Brewer's account of it...

...Everything classical feels cold to an age that prides itself on informality and spontaneity...

...Our civilization's whole frame of reference changed shortly before 1800...

...All the arts, he says, "ceased in the 18th century to be the preserve of kings, courtiers, aristocrats, and clerics and became the property of a larger public" throughout the coffeehouses, academies, theaters, auction houses, and concert halls of Europe...

...The universal ideals of the 18th-century revolutions—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...

...These sections proceed by what might be called superior anecdotalism rather than general theories, historical, literary or cultural...

...Paint" deals, according to Brewer's general plan, with the lives of artists and picture-sellers, the importance of connoisseurs, the place of institutions such as the Royal Academy in the shaping of public taste...

...My aim is not to explain how and why certain novels, paintings, plays or oratorios moved and affected their readers, viewers and listeners or to celebrate the merits of authors like Fielding, painters like Hogarth or composers such as Purcell but to understand a larger historical process...

...Even so, the impression his fact-packed tome leaves is of a lively, confident era of noisy consensus in the fine arts— not much akin to any period since...

...Much of the controversy is still with us...

...Culture in Brewer's subtitle means primarily the arts viewed in their social context...

...Somewhere along the line formality and impersonality became dirty words, while enthusiasm, a negative term in the Enlightenment lexicon, underwent precisely the opposite evolution...

...In contrast to intellectual historians who judge the thought of an age by the insides of its books, he is more concerned with the authorship, production and distribution of books as commercial products, along with paintings and other cultural consumer goods...

...The provincial cities that were to dominate the British economy in the 19th century had founded artistic institutions to channel the profits of the Industrial Revolution into art galleries, museums, theaters, and concerts that were marks of civic pride...

...In the place of Jane Austen's heroines, who find happiness and sentiment compatible with duty inside a highly mannered social order, we have Princess Diana...

...We start to recognize traces of ourselves in the early 19th century, not in what it revolted against...

...Except for Mozart, no composer, painter or writer of the period still has a really widespread appeal outside specialist circles...

...Performance' explores the sociology of the theater, the survival of Puritan opposition to it as an institution, and its always important relations to commerce...

...The observation that the arts became more commercial in the 18th century than they had been before is not new, but Brewer, whose approach owes little to Marxism or any other ideology, fleshes it out with mostly well chosen detail...

...remain the same...

...liberty, equality, fraternity—have in some respects triumphed at the conclusion of the 20th century and yet seem increasingly remote...

...It is a valuable reminder that the expansion of publishing in the 18th century increased the availability of traditional works and old forms as well as new types of literature" such as the novel...

...Our contemporary debate about the state of literature and the arts, which we often incline to think of as thoroughly modern, includes much that would have been familiar to our 18thcentury predecessors...

...the highest levels of literacy were recorded in London, where female literacy grew especially fast, rising from 22 to 66 per cent between the 1670s and 1720s...

...Today critics debate the effect of mass media like television on 'good' taste, the role of sexuality and violence in art, the problems of esthetic discrimination in a world of competing moral and social values and the corrupting effect of the marketplace...

...And the British countryside had become irrevocably sanctified as the nation's greatest beauty...

...Only if you define them so broadly that the differences between any two centuries dissolve in the continuities of human nature...

...By the early 19th century," Brewer tells us in his brief conclusion, "most of the cast and set of props of what we now regard as the nation's cultural heritage were in place...

...The formality of 18th-century landscape gardening no longer pleases as it once did...

...This incomprehension points up some of the limitations of our own culture, but no century can have everything...

...Taking the century as a whole, "Religion and theology dominate, poetry far exceeds any new literary forms of prose, classics lord it over the modern languages...

...For one thing, the quotation marks around the word good in the next-to-last sentence would be unintelligible to anyone raised on 18th-century assumptions...

...Liberty to do what, besides choose among 500 television channels and thousands of Internet sites...

...JonnBrewer's sumptuous The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Farrar Straus Giroux, 721 pp., $40.00) reminds us, complete with color plates, exactly what the vanished pre-Romantic world was like...

...We have no understanding of such precise manners and proportions, no wish to seem so mannered ourselves...

...Second Thoughts THE FADING ENLIGHTENMENT By Christopher Clausen As the tail end of the second millennium scurries toward its appointment with history, the 18th century seems longer ago with every passing month...

...What sorts of books did the rapidly increasing number of male and female readers actually read...

...These examples are English, but the situation would not be much different with French or German ones...

...The lucidity of Gainsborough or Constable in painting, the satirical articulateness of Congreve or Pope in letters, the Adam brothers' unassuming perfection in domestic architecture, all intimidate today...

...In the warm-blooded Romanticism that followed, with its repudiation of form and reason, we find our own beginnings...

...Few of the characters whose lives he lovingly recounts would feel happy in modern dress...

...There were well established worlds of theater, music and art and a flourishing professional literary scene, based in London but not confined to it...

...it was accompanied by continual controversy, especially about the relations between art and commerce...