Clive Bell and the Genteel Conception of Civilization
Friday 03 November 2023
Among those who come to be interested in civilization as a field of research, some receive their initial impetus through discovering Spengler; others receive their impetus from Toynbee. Of course, there are other pathways, and many of them, but Spengler and Toynbee remain major figures, whether they are regarded as founders upon whose work one can build, or as malign influences to contravene. I took one of the alternative pathways; a large part of my impetus for studying civilization came from Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation: A Personal View, first the television documentary, and then the book, which latter so closely follows the television documentary that it is almost a transcript. Just as some people read favorite poems over and over again, I watch favorite documentaries over and over again, so this past week I re-watched all of Clark’s Civilisation, enjoying it as much as ever. A small detail I hadn’t noticed previously: at the end of episode 5, “Protest and Communication,” there are some scenes from Shakespeare played, and in the Hamlet scene a young Patrick Stewart is one of the players.
When I was re-watching Civilisation I asked myself if it would be possible to cover the same ground without using any of the same examples that Clark used, i.e., would be possible to reconstruct a complementary account of civilization that took as its examples that which Clark passed over in silence, and which passed over in silence that which Clark put front and center. I have pursued this kind of intellectual exercise previously. More than ten years ago, in If I Lectured on the Philosophy of History…, I sketched out a series of lectures complementary to Darren Staloff’s The Search For a Meaningful Past: Philosophies, Theories and Interpretations of Human History, a series of lectures from the Great Courses (no longer available from the Great Courses, but the videos are available on Youtube from Michael Sugrue, who also has his Great Courses lectures available). All these years later I would do this differently, but the idea remains interesting, and I guess that is why it occurred to me in relation to Clark’s Civilisation.
A complementary formulation of Clark’s Civilisation poses problems that a complementary formulation of Staloff’s lectures on the philosophy of history does not. With philosophy of history the exercise is reasonably straight-forward: recount the development of a tradition of thought not making use of previously mentioned philosophers, while using other philosophers in their place. Clark’s Civilisation, however, is a unique treatment because it is so centered on art history. Clark himself says that the history of civilization is not the history of art — “Far from it!” — but he, as an art historian, naturally told the history of civilization through the lens of art. So it would be very easy to write another history of Western civilization from the dark ages to the present time — there are a great many examples of this — different from Clark’s account at every point of detail, but to do so from the same art historical angle would be difficult. Difficult, yes, but not at all impossible.
For example, in discussing the role of the Vikings in Western history, Clark shows a few works of Viking art and the Viking ships at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo. One could narrate the contribution of Vikings while showing other works of Viking art. This would give a different emphasis, and perhaps also a different interpretation, but it could be done, and it might afford some insights not to be found from only taking the highlights. If you visit any of the great historical cities of Europe you will find that the most trafficked places are very trafficked indeed, but it requires only a small effort to divert oneself from the usual tourist path and to find things that are not thronged by sightseeers. I was quite surprised to see how busy the tourist areas of Kraków and Toruń were when I was in Poland recently, but all I had to do was to walk into the museums to find them almost empty. Even the museum in Kraków that has Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine, which museum insists upon timed entry, was nearly empty (this as there were large tour groups and school groups crowded around the Veit Stoss St. Mary’s altar elsewhere in Kraków). So too it is with great works of art and well known books: everyone has heard of the famous ones, but pass just a little outside the limelight of fame and one can often find equally worthy works of art and books that don’t get anything like the same amount of attention, even if they should.
Because of the emphasis on art and art history in Clark’s Civilisation, a complementary presentation could take the path of an alternative presentation of art or an alternative presentation of civilization. Michael Wood’s Art of the Western World does not purport to be an account of civilization, but it does attempt to place works of art in the social context, so that it coincides with Clark’s television series at many points. I’ve also started re-watching this series, which, though enjoyable, doesn’t have quite the same fascination for me as Clark’s series. Wood begins earlier, with classical antiquity, and elaborates on recent art in a way that stands outside the scope of Clark’s Civilisation, but we can still compare the two for the various works of art they feature, and we can immediately see the difference in emphasis. Clark has three episodes on the Middle Ages, four on the Early Modern period, three on the Enlightenment, and three on modernity. Wood has an episode each on Romanesque and Gothic art, but six episodes on modern art.
Over the years of my repeated re-watching of Civilisation and continuing to find relevant books on history and civilization I have been slowly finding the sources of Clark’s ideas. For example, Clark gives a subtle exposition of the Pirenne thesis in his account of the end of classical antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages. He isn’t combative; he doesn’t say or even imply that the traditional view is wrong, but he supplements the traditional view with Pirenne’s argument — without mentioning Pirenne by name. And back in newsletter 139 I mentioned Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962) by Lynn White as a likely influence on Clark.
I think I’ve come across another such influence on Clark. I have been reading Clive Bell’s Civilization (1928) and am half way through it. I only learned about this book in May of this year. Bell is known as the least likeable member of the Bloomsbury group; Civilization has a flowery dedicatory epistle (three pages in length) to Virginia Woolf, usually reckoned to be the leading literary light of the group. The Bloomsbury group read G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica the way the Vienna Circle read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, absorbing Moore’s ideal utilitarianism as their credo. There is an amusing account of Moore’s influence on the Bloomsbury group in John Maynard Keynes’ “My Early Beliefs” (included in Essays and Sketches in Biography):
“I went up to Cambridge at Michaelmas 1902, and Moore’s Principia Ethica came out at the end of my first year. I have never heard of the present generation having read it. But, of course, its effect on us, and the talk which preceded and followed it, dominated, and perhaps still dominate, everything else. We were at an age when our beliefs influenced our behaviour, a characteristic of the young which it is easy for the middle-aged to forget, and the habits of feeling formed then still persist in a recognisable degree. It is those habits of feeling, influencing the majority of us, which make this Club a collectivity and separate us from the rest. They overlaid, somehow, our otherwise extremely different characters — Moore himself was a puritan and precisian, Strachey (for that was his name at that time) a Voltairean, Woolf a rabbi, myself a nonconformist, Sheppard a conformist and (as it now turns out) an ecclesiastic, Clive a gay and amiable dog, Sydney Turner a quietist, Hawtrey a dogmatist and so on. Of those who had come just before, only MacCarthy and Ainsworth, who were much influenced by their personal feelings for Moore, came under his full influence. We did not see much of Forster at that time; who was already the elusive colt of a dark horse. It was only for us, those who were active in 1903, that Moore completely ousted McTaggart, Dickinson, Russell. The influence was not only overwhelming; but it was the extreme opposite of what Strachey used to call funeste; it was exciting, exhilarating, the beginning of a renaissance, the opening of a new heaven on a new earth, we were the forerunners of a new dispensation, we were not afraid of anything.”
And consider this remarkable tribute from a little further on:
“The New Testament is a handbook for politicians compared with the unworldliness of Moore’s chapter on ‘The Ideal.’ I know no equal to it in literature since Plato. And it is better than Plato because it is quite free from fancy. It conveys the beauty of the literalness of Moore’s mind, the pure and passionate intensity of his vision, unfanciful and undressed-up.”
Keynes noted that the Bloomsbury group set aside in Moore’s ethics, “…the part which discussed the duty of the individual to obey general rules.” He continued:
“We entirely repudiated a personal liability on us to obey general rules. We claimed the right to judge every individual case on its merits, and the wisdom, experience and self-control to do so successfully. This was a very important part of our faith, violently and aggressively held, and for the outer world it was our most obvious and dangerous characteristic. We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and traditional wisdom. We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists.”
This is the spirit that infused the work of Clive Bell also. Bell repeatedly makes implicit reference to Moore’s ethics without ever naming Moore. He even goes so far as to offer a formulation that appears to consciously subvert Kant:
“Anyone who realizes that the sole good as an end is a good state of mind, and that there are no grounds for supposing that such a thing as a collective mind exists, will naturally set store by the individual in whom alone absolute good is to be found.”
Kant, of course, said that the only thing that is good without qualification is a good will. It can’t be the case that both a good will is the sole good and good states of mind are the sole good, so when Bell says that good states of mind are the sole good, he is in effect denying that the good will is the sole good. There are ambiguities both in Kant’s formulation and Bell’s formulation, so that one could plausibly deny that Bell was intending to contradict Kant, but it seems clear enough to me. Keynes’ description of the low opinion that the Bloomsbury group held of duty should be a clear enough indication of how Kant would have been received in this milieu.
Bell is one of the few writers to fail what I have called the Spengler Challenge: search the works of any writer active in the 1920s, and the likelihood is that you will find references to Spengler. Bell doesn’t mention Spengler anywhere, which is doubly odd as he is writing about civilization in the immediate post-war period when almost everyone else was talking about Spengler (whether or not they actually read Spengler is another question). The opening of the book is an ironic discussion of having civilization as a war aim. It is impossible that the Bloomsbury group did not discuss Spengler, so I imagine that Bell did not want to mention Spengler in his inquiry into the nature of civilization, in the same way that most historians do not want to mention Toynbee, for fear that a mention might be taken for advocacy.
Recently in a PS to newsletter 258, discussing Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed, I pointed out that Cline individuated eight civilizations in the Levant during the late Bronze Age, and I said that this makes the familiar lists of civilization that we find in Spengler and Toynbee seem overly simplistic. Reflecting on Bell’s book and re-watching Clark’s documentary, I realize now how many treatments of civilization are focused on only giving an account of what they call “higher” civilization. Bell’s method makes this most explicit. In order to make his point, in Chapter III, “The Paragons,” he selects and justifies his choice of identifying only three societies be believes exemplify the highest point of civilization — Periclean Athens, renaissance Italy, and France from the Fronde (a period of civil war) to the French Revolution — in order to have paradigmatic cases of high civilization to which he might derive the distinctive properties of civilization. In this way Bell makes no attempt to give a list of all civilizations, and doesn’t even try to be exhaustive when it comes to “higher” civilizations (he considers the case for early Imperial Rome, but dismisses it); he only seeks to name a few examples upon which he can count on agreement that they represent a high state of civilization.
Traces of this view can be found in Clark also, though he occasionally pushes back at the implications of this. For my part, the conception of civilization I am aiming at is that of Cline, and not of Bell. I’m not sure if this should be called an anthropological conception of civilization, or an archaeological conception of civilization, or something else in order to differentiate it from a conception of civilization that only wants to identify “higher” civilizations (which we may call the genteel conception). Even when it comes to higher civilizations, I think most lists fall short, since if we are to judge civilizational accomplishment by their artifacts — be these books or works of art or monumental architecture — then there are any number of civilizations that have left masterpieces behind them. Both Bell and Clark, however, openly acknowledge that non-civilized societies often produce striking art, so it seems, by their criteria, we need to have something more than a remarkable artifact to identify a higher civilization. How much more? That is an interesting question — a quantifiable question that Bell does not seek to quantify.
In any case, a purely general theory of civilization that seeks to develop an account of civilization in the sense that Cline uses the term will eventually also provide a framework to discriminate relative levels of civilizational accomplishment, though, at the present moment of history, rank-ordering all civilizations is not a research program that is going to be receiving any academic or foundational largess. But if I am right about this, if a rank-ordering of civilizations would be implicit in a purely general account of civilization (even if we turn away from it and pretend it isn’t implied by our theory), then the genteel conception of civilization that seeks to focus only on “higher” civilizations is only a fragment of a more general theory of civilization, so that if we want to truly understand the phenomenon of civilization, we cannot rest content with the genteel conception only.
