The Art of Civilization by Didier Maleuvre

Author:Didier Maleuvre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US, New York

8.3 At the Salon

A self-interested hedonist though he be, bourgeois man is also an insecure specimen. Being bourgeois is seldom about having one’s way. Livelihood depends on maintaining good relations with non-kin and strangers (partners, providers, and clients). My bourgeois selfishness must make sure your bourgeois selfishness finds its account in our exchange. Bourgeois success thus altered the zero-sum economy of feudal success. There, the few won at the expense of the many—as when, in the Marquis de Sade stories, pleasure gluts on the rape and plunder of subordinates. John Cleland’s rococo novel Fanny Hill (1748), by contrast, gives us the bourgeois version of sexual transaction. How was it for you? Cleland’s insecure libertines fine-tune the balance between the pleasure given and the pleasure received. Affable pleasure-seekers, they are bourgeois enough to understand that long-term interest consists of spreading the goods down the network.

A bourgeois, then, compares notes. So does his artistic pleasure. There the fact that you like Boucher and I don’t is not the end of the matter; it’s the beginning of a conversation. Should I like Boucher a little more? Should you like him a little less? Bound in our separate taste-capsules, you and I want to explain how it is that Boucher is wonderful or hideous, as the case may be. If there is no fact of the matter, no grand goût, no crown-appointed Le Brun to decree whether Boucher is a master, then it is up to our myriad petits goûts to figure things out and make connections and build civic society from the ground up. This realization explains the rash of treatises on taste between 1700 and 1760: Voltaire, Montesquieu, David Hume, the Scottish painter Allan Ramsay, the Glasgow philosopher Thomas Reid—all go about defining taste for the post-academic age. Their essays exhibit the bourgeois concern of keeping pluralities (of taste, of opinion, and of lifestyle) connected. Taste is in the arts and letters what e pluribus unum is in politics. For a good reason, after all, did the century of tastes turn out to be the golden age of conversation—about which, more later.

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Taste involves sensibility, and the Enlightenment prided itself on being exquisitely sensitive. Not that people waited until the eighteenth century to feel. But it took until then to be morally justified in possessing a high-strung heart. The drame larmoyant (weepy drama) supplanted Racinian tragedy on the French stage, tear-stained personal letters became the fashion, sentimental display was approved of even at court, and it was desirable to feel the vapors at the sight of a painting.19 ‘If there is any rule defining beauty’, Diderot said in the Salon of 1765, ‘it is that which prompts these delicious feelings that arise so suddenly, so involuntarily, so tumultuously in the depths of our souls …, forcing our eyes to shed tears of joy, pain, and admiration’. In 1750, the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten coined the term ‘aesthetics’ (from Greek aisthanesthai, to perceive) to mean the study of refined feeling: sensitivity to one’s own perceptions and that of others.

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