The belief that the world should be viewed realistically, frequently expressed after 1850, was closely related to the materialistic outlook. The term Realism was first employed in 1850 to describe a new style of painting and soon spread to literature.
The literary Realists of the mid-nineteenth century were distinguished by their deliberate rejection of Romanticism. The literary Realists wanted to deal with ordinary characters from real life rather than Romantic heroes in unusual settings. They also sought to avoid flowery and sentimental language by using careful observation and accurate description, an approach that led them to eschew poetry in favor of prose and the novel. Realists of ten combined their interest in everyday life with a searching examination of social questions.
The leading novelist of the 1850s and 1860s, the Frenchman Gustave Flaubert (goo-STAHV floh-BAYR) (1821-1880), perfected the Realist novel. His Madame Bovary (1857) was a straightforward description of barren and sordid small-town life in France (see the box on p. 685). Emma Bovary, a woman of some vitality, is trapped in a marriage to a drab provincial doctor. Impelled by the images of romantic love she has read about in novels, she seeks the same thing for herself in adulterous affairs. Unfulfilled, she is ultimately driven to suicide, unrepentant to the end for her lifestyle. Flaubert’s contempt for bourgeois society was evident in his portrayal of middle-class hypocrisy and smugness.
William Thackeray (1811-1863) wrote Britain’s prototypical Realist novel, Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero, in 1848. Thackeray deliberately flouted the Romantic conventions. A novel, Thackeray said, should “convey as strongly as possible the sentiment of reality as opposed to a tragedy or poem, which may be heroical.” Perhaps the greatest of the Victorian novelists was Charles Dickens (1812-1870), whose realistic novels focusing on the lower and middle classes in Britain’s early industrial age became extraordinarily successful. His descriptions of the urban poor and the brutalization of human life were vividly realistic.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the classical school of painting had paralleled Romanticism in art, but both were superseded by the new mood of the mid-nineteenth century. In art, too, Realism became dominant after 1850, although Romanticism was by no means dead. Among the most important characteristics of Realism were a desire to depict the everyday life of ordinary people, be they peasants, workers, or prostitutes; an attempt at photographic realism; and an interest in the natural environment. The French became leaders in Realist painting.
COURBET Gustave Courbet (goo-STAHV koor-BAY) (1819-1877) was the most famous artist of the Realist school. In fact, the word Realism was first coined in 1850 to describe one of his paintings. Courbet reveled in a realistic portrayal of everyday life. His subjects were factory workers, peasants, and the wives of saloon keepers. “I have never seen either angels or goddesses, so I am not interested in painting them,” he exclaimed. One of his famous works, The Stonebreakers, painted in 1849, shows two road workers engaged in the deadening work of breaking stones to build a road. This representation of human misery was a scandal to those who objected to his “cult of ugliness.” To Courbet, no subject was too ordinary, too harsh, or too ugly to interest him.
MILLET Jean-François Millet (ZHAHNH-frahnh-SWAH mil-YEH) (1814-1875) was preoccupied with scenes from rural life, especially peasants laboring in the fields, although his Realism still contained an element of Romantic sentimentality. In The Gleaners, his most famous work, three peasant women gather grain in a field, a centuries-old practice that for Millet showed the symbiotic relationship between humans and nature. Millet made landscape and country life an important subject matter for French artists, but he, too, was criticized by his contemporaries for crude subject matter and unorthodox technique.
The mid-nineteenth century witnessed the development of a new group of musicians known as the New German School. They emphasized emotional content rather than abstract form and championed new methods of using music to express literary or pictorial ideas.
LlSZT The Hungarian-born composer Franz Liszt (FRAHNTS LlST) (1811-1886) best exemplifies the achievements of the New German School. A child prodigy, he established himself as an outstanding concert artist by the age of twelve. Liszt’s performances and his dazzling personality made him the most highly esteemed virtuoso of his age. He has been called the greatest pianist of all time and has been credited with introducing the concept of the modern piano recital.
Liszt’s compositions consist mainly of piano pieces, although he composed in other genres as well, including sacred music. He invented the term symphonic poem to refer to his orchestral works, which did not strictly obey traditional forms and were generally based on a literary or pictorial idea. Under the guidance of Liszt and the New German School, Romantic music reached its peak.
WAGNER Although Liszt was an influential mentor to a number of young composers, he was most closely associated with his eventual son-in-law Richard Wagner (RIKH-art VAHG-nur) (1813-1883). Building on the advances made by Liszt and the New German School, Wagner ultimately realized the German desire for a truly national opera. Wagner was not only a composer but also a propagandist and writer in support of his unique conception of dramatic music. Called both the culmination of the Romantic era and the beginning of the avant-garde, Wagner’s music may be described as a monumental development in classical music.
Believing that opera is the best form of artistic expression, Wagner transformed opera into “music drama” through his Gesamtkunstwerk (guh-ZAHMT-koonst-vayrk) (“total art work”), a musical composition for the theater in which music, acting, dance, poetry, and scenic design are synthesized into a harmonious whole. He abandoned the traditional divisions of opera, which interrupted the dramatic line of the work, and instead used a device called a leitmotiv (LYT-moh-teef), a recurring musical theme in which the human voice combined with the line of the orchestra instead of rising above it. His operas incorporate literally hundreds of leitmotivs in order to convey the story. For his themes, Wagner looked to myth and epic tales from the past. His most ambitious work was The Ring of the Nibelung, a series of four music dramas dealing with the mythical gods of the ancient German epic.
Between 1850 and 1871, the national state became the focus of people’s loyalty, and the nations of Europe spent their energies in achieving unification or reform. France attempted to relive its memories of Napoleonic greatness through the election of Louis Napoleon, Napoleon’s nephew, as president and later Emperor Napoleon III. Louis Napoleon was one of a new generation of conservative political leaders who were practitioners of Realpolitik.
Unification to achieve a national state preoccupied leaders in Italy and Germany. The dreams of Mazzini became a reality when the combined activities of Count Cavour and Giuseppe Garibaldi finally led to the unification of Italy in 1870.
Under the guidance of Otto von Bismarck, Prussia engaged in wars with Denmark, Austria, and France before it finally achieved the goal of national unification in 187l.
Reform characterized developments in other Western states. Austria compromised with Hungarian nationalists and created the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War led to reforms under Alexander II, which included the freeing of the Russian serfs. In Great Britain, the pressures of industrialization led to a series of reforms that made the realm of Queen Victoria more democratic. The American Civil War ended with the union of the states preserved and slavery abolished. Canada achieved dominion status from Britain, which included the right to rule itself in domestic affairs. Political nationalism had emerged during the French revolutionary era and had become a powerful force for change during the first half of the nineteenth century, but its triumph came only after 1850. Associated initially with middle-class liberals, it would have great appeal to the broad masses as well by the end of the century as people created their national “imagined communities.” In 1871, however, the political transformations stimulated by the force of nationalism were by no means complete. Significantly large minorities, especially in the multiethnic empires controlled by the Austrians, Turks, and Russians, had not achieved the goal of their own national states. Moreover, the nationalism that had triumphed by 1871 was no longer the nationalism that had been closely identified with liberalism. Liberal nationalists had believed that unified nation-states would preserve individual rights and lead to a greater community of European peoples. Rather than unifying people, however, the new, loud, chauvinistic nationalism of the late nineteenth century divided them as the new national states became embroiled in bitter competition after 187l.
The period between 1850 and 1871 was also characterized by the emergence of Marxian socialism, new advances in science including the laws of thermodynamics, a germ theory of disease, and Darwin’s theory of evolution. In the arts, Realism prevailed, evident in the writers and artists who were only too willing to portray realistically the grim world in which they lived.