P REF ACE
Like any of its kind, this study is the offspring of other books, and the graveyard of many more—those it might have been but could or would not be. To do justice to its subject would warrant an encyclopedia and a lifetime endeavor—the competence and staying power for which I do not possess. Not that this book doesn’t chew its mouthful; it’s just that this mouthful is but a small cut of the banquet. Inescapably, studies such as this one bare themselves to the criticism that they are partial. I plead guilty on this count—with the implication that it is in the nature of a volume to be finite and therefore selective. If it deals with western civilization only, it is not for wanting to exclude the global east and the south. It is simply an admission of what its author can knowledgeably speak about in the scope of a slender volume. Limited on the inside, this study is expansive on the outside. Dealing with the uses of art, the book overflows the confines of art history. Though its whetstone be art, the sharpened object is our understanding of western mentalities.
In a personal note, it will cost the reader nothing to suppose that the question regarding the idea of art’s civilizing force came to me because art has ‘civilized’ me, by which I mean in this instance that it has brought scope and reflectiveness to my own life. Gratitude prompted the writing of this book, as well as a wish to connect with the gratitude of others—the many to whom art has shown that life is immeasurably more precious than art, and more precious still with art in it.
Santa Barbara, CA Didier Maleuvre
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish, as always, to thank the colleagues of my academic department at the University of California for their intellectual generosity. My fond gratitude especially to Jon Snyder for his editorial advice, to Colin Keaveney who pored over the manuscript when it wasn’t yet presentable, to Maarten Asscher for his conversation and introduction to the Dutch literary scene, to the University of Utrecht and its Department of Comparative Literature whose utter civility did so much to inspire this book.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
1.1 CITY AND CIVILIZATION
Among the artist Paul Gauguin’s many strange adventures in Tahiti, he recalls that of being thought of a useful human being. A young native had watched him carving a figurine and finally declared that he, Gauguin, ‘was useful to others’. Gauguin could hardly believe his own ears: ‘I believe Totefa is the first human being in the world who used such words towards me.’1 Hadn’t Gauguin been taught to regard art as wonderfully detached, beautifully impractical, a rebuke to utilitarian philistines everywhere? And yet he was charmed by this odd new idea—let’s call it the Totefa Hypothesis: that art and artists might be useful components of society. How art indeed is useful to civilization, and one civilization in particular, is the subject of this book. Many have been the forms and uses of art in western societies; many have been the mentalities and sensibilities speaking through them. The aim of this book is to chart a direction through this multitude, starting with ancient Greece, tentatively through the long Middle Ages, then decisively after the Renaissance. I call it a direction, not an ‘order’, because it isn’t primly foreordained. Yet a direction it is, which, to put it briefly, tends toward the rationalization of mentalities. Imaginary and fictive as works of art may be, I argue that, so far as our civilization goes, they have served a demystifying function advancing a rationalized (some say ‘disenchanted’, others ‘bourgeois’) frame of mind which, in the specific sense detailed below, we shall call ‘civilized’.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 D. Maleuvre, The Art of Civilization, DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-94869-7_1
1
The word ‘civilization’, coupled with the adjective ‘western’, has of late come under the suspicion that it truckles to an exclusivist view of European superiority. The unfortunate obverse of ‘civilized’ that springs to mind is ‘savage’, ‘primitive’, ‘barbarian’. This, needless to say, isn’t the semantic binary in which I wish to put the word ‘civilization’. Nor, in fact, will my use of the term rest on the meaning given to it by nineteenthcentury historians, to designate large-scale clusters of cultures held together by geography, religion, and customs. Though this technical definition of ‘civilization’ does circumscribe the geopolitical area of my survey, I will actually prefer a more humble, yet sociologically pertinent and etymologically correct, use of ‘civilization’—one that cracks its abstract shell and brings out the socio-lexical nugget: civilization is per verbum that which pertains to the city. It is the mix of beliefs, attitudes, mores, practices, economic habits, and moral sensibilities that associated with city life. Actually ‘civilization’ elbows its way into the English lexicon in the chaotically urbanizing eighteenth century. The word evoked the effects of bringing people out of rusticity and inducting them into the ways of town-living. Civil, civility, civilian, civilized, and civilization are whatever happens when Homo civitatis, the town-dwelling creature, replaces Homo agri, the agriculturalist, on the cultural driver’s seat. And what has been happening in the city with many false starts and detours since 5000 years ago in the lowlands of Mesopotamia is the development, exchange, multiplication, and hybridization of ideas, technologies, systems of thoughts, religions, and polities.2 The city is where the division and diversity of labor is most developed, where commercial networks are densest and busiest, where political power, administrations, systems of record-keeping and accounting congregate, as well as the education apparatus, the literacy and numeracy to run them. A city, in sum, is where culture adopts managerial and argumentative methods to its own maintenance.
The word ‘culture’ often appears in duality with civilization, and so we a pause to explore their disjunction. It goes back to a polemic begun by German romantics of the late eighteenth century. Kultur, in their scheme, was the native, ancestral, naïve, and wise ways of a locality, a folk, an ethnicity, a kin group. At the opposite end, Zivilization was cosmopolitan, rootless, abstract, impersonal, and deplorably French. Zivilization was the Enlightenment, reason, the demystifying Encyclopédie, the technocracy, Paris; it was fretful, knowing, and cynical—a far cry from the shire, the
glen, and the clan of Kultur, as sheltering and solid as the German forest. This invidious distinction between (overweening, judgmental, rootless, and artificial) civilization and (sincere, natural, communal, and colorful) culture is one of the more durable exports of romanticism. Civilization conjures up the image of an imperialistic juggernaut trampling over regional pluralities, crushing local colors and colored people with the myth of its own pre-eminence, and digesting every neighbor it comes across. Next to it, culture seems a model of pacific non-interference. Though not necessarily tolerant, a culture revolves around concrete practices, interactions, and interests. It is too local and self-referential to meddle with other cultures, and seldom devises policies to formulate and impose itself universally.
These, broadly, are the lines of the Zivilization-Kultur feud, whose merits this is not the place to discuss. Suffice it to remark upon one useful facet of the dichotomy, which is that civilization tends to articulate its identity and explain itself to its members, arguing about its values in a way that a culture, by nature more autarkic, doesn’t, or does but to a much lesser degree and less critical extent. And when we consider what the romantics had primarily in mind when lambasting civilization we supposedly the big, bad, bustling, countryside’s civitas—the arrogantly cosmopolitan city that sucks up all the bounty and gives nothing but unwanted advice in return.
Civilization, given a strictly sociological perspective, is the culture of the city. It is what happens to culture when it makes a city its port of call. And the city is first of all dense interaction between people, trades and occupations. This is where forms of life and belief become cognizant of one another and start a mad competitive race. As the division of labor ramifies, and the contest between economic sectors heats up the rate of innovation springs to life. Rural neighboring communities do swap ideas, of course, but these tend to be of a similar stamp and involve variants of ideas already extant. Genuine new springs of information open up when commerce and industry bring together people from far and wide. In the urban latticework of information, knowledge grows more voluminous and varied, it challenges itself on the agora, the forum, or the commons. Thus something happens to the quality of urban-based knowledge3: it tends to be more context-independent and critically aware of itself. Knowledge gets defined as a technical, demystified means. Citied culture is culture becoming instrumental, objectified—as some say, uprooted.
This uprooting, it appears, is at the origin of all major civilizations identified by ‘longue durée’ historians (Arnold Toynbee, Pitirim Sorokin, Alfred Kroeber, Caroll Quigley, Jean Bodin, Fernand Braudel). Whether Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Sinic, Indic, Greek, Roman, Christian, Arabic, Khmer, and Mesoamerican, all these civilizations radiate out of, or graft themselves onto, urban hubs.4 Of course it’s not always the case that, having a city at the core means that culture will citify. It happened many times throughout history that warlords and landlords were able to countrify the city, planting their courts on top of the ready supply of urban labor and easily seized booty, and commercial routes, all this without adopting the mindset of the city. In ancient Sumer, Egypt and China, the princely court prevailed and feudalized the city. Even Rome, in the end, was swallowed up and provincialized by its military. According to Fernand Braudel, this courtification or imperialization of the city was rather the rule in world history—until it ran into an exception. This oddity took place around the eleventh century CE in the far northwest corner of the Eurasian landmass—a geographical area which at the time was in political disarray, frayed and tottering after the dismantling of the short-lived Carolingian empire. With no prince powerful enough to put the land under his yoke, cities between the Loire and Rhine rivers and of the Italian peninsula were given leave to grow, develop a taste of self-rule, a legal system of exemptions and liberties, together with the city walls to protect them, which by the time feudal barons turned their greedy eyes to them, found they could not terrorize. As Braudel explains, ‘the miracle of the first great urban centuries in Europe was that the city won hands down’ against the state.5 Of course the king’s court had its revenge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but eventually, with the commercial age, the city did citify the martial and ecclesiastical elite, then the countryside and the state at large, creating what the German romantics called the ‘poison’ of civilization: a society that maintains a skeptical, utilitarian, rationalizing stance vis-àvis its own lifeways, an imagined community made up of citi-zens who (unlike deni-zens, or denisein, e.g., acculturated indwellers) stand inside and outside at the same time, looking outward, looking inward, never entirely and reliably autochthonous.
The theme of mental distancing is essential to this study of the ‘civilization of art’. The purpose is to show how the civilizing mind (i.e., the view from the city, the town-dweller’s lorgnette) shapes, and is shaped, by artistic expression. More polemically, the aim is to see how art since ancient
Greece mostly (though not exclusively, and certainly not uncritically) advances a mentality we should now call by its name, to wit, bourgeois.
A point of terminology. When medieval Europe reinvented city-living, sometimes in the eleventh century, a word had to be found for the new town-dwelling genus. This species was the bourgeoisie, and its specimen, a bourgeois—a word I shall use henceforth without the road-accident italics or the prophylactic quotes. Etymoogically and sociologically, ‘bourgeois’ is a resident of the bourg, burgh, borough, borwg, bur, borg, baurgs, and other kindred terms that designated the fortified town, incorporated city, trading municipality, or administrative seat. There, so-called franc-bourgeois enjoyed certain franchises and exemptions, called ‘liberties’, vis-à-vis feudal lords. Gradually, then decisively with the formation of city-states and nation-states, this polity secured control over the food-producing countryside and culturally citified the larger territory. The outcome of the long-running tug-of-war between city and countryside is, so far, a victorious bourgeoisie that has forced barons, warlords, monks, and serfs to play by the rules of the city (commerce, finance, administration, schooling, rule of law, etc.). The long war against the manor and the monastery has left many scars on the bourgeoisie. To this day, ‘bourgeois’ carries saddles of iniquity heavier than ‘civilization’. The word is carbuncled with associations of materialism, money grubbing, small-minded calculation, and smug opportunism—‘petty’, as the obligatory tag goes. If the bourgeois isn’t godless, he has to be a Pharisee, a hypocrite, a hedonist, a devotee of Mammon (to summarize the charges entered by the priestly class)6; and rich though he may be, a bourgeois remains uncouth, timorous, inglorious, addicted to comfort, ‘the contemptible sort of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats’ (to quote Nietzsche).7 To this rap sheet, Marxism added the charge of ‘ruthless exploiter’ and ‘destroyer of tradition’, and then—to nail that coffin shut—imperialistic, fascist, racist, anti-egalitarian, sexist, and patriarchal.
My purpose isn’t to redress this age-long tradition of calumny—the economist historian Deirdre McCloskey has done a thoroughly convincing job of it in her two watershed studies Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2007) and Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (2011) (to which the present book is very much in debt).8 My approach is to maintain a neutral anthropological stance
toward the bourgeoisie (I’ll grant that it is a bourgeois, urban thing to do, that of hedging one’s bets). Bourgeois is for our purpose the towndwelling animal, the ‘citi-zen’ who engages in activities of trade, commerce, manufacture, administration, and education. Bourgeois, as per Simon Schama’s technical classification, is citizen and Homo economicus. 9 The economicus half of the equation assumes that the homo bit possesses literacy and numeracy, hence a measure of abstract thinking, rationalism, and political pragmatism, together with an aptitude for criticism and the examination of taboos as well as a curious, non-tribal, non-dogmatic approach to morality.
Thus for civilization, the city, and the bourgeoisie, there remains the crucial term in our equation: art. What does it have to do with the city (apart, that is, from its being generally made, traded, and exhibited there)? What is it to the bourgeois? And what is the bourgeois to it?
1.2 ART AND THE BOURGEOIS MIND
There is no denying it: bourgeois and art do seem to make odd bedfellows. For most of European history, art was the reserve of the nobility, and therefore a mouthpiece of aristocratic idealism, its mystique, its Platonism, its self-exaltation. As a result, and to this day, art still trails a weightily bejeweled historical mantle. Art was once the princedom of fancy, folly, and divine inspiration. Later it became the redoubt of bohemianism, of romantic dreamers, knights errant of the arrant mind. Always it is descried many miles away from the hardheaded, pragmatic, calculating bourgeois. Art is like the minstrel arthropod in La Fontaine’s ‘Fable of the Cicada and the Ant’: the cicaca sings, is wonderfully impractical, and munificent. Unlike the industrious ant, it doesn’t rationalize and calculate. It sings all summer and makes no provision for winter. Which, when it comes, finds her starving. Told you so, says the petty bourgeois ant who slams the door on her beggary. This poem, incidentally, has been religiously learned by French school boys and girls since the nineteenth century. It’s not just a small example of the resilient strain of anti-ant, bourgeois-stigmatizing prejudice in the French psyche; it betokens a pervasive, atavistically aristocratic way to think about art. Art’s song is careless, big-hearted, generous, noble, and free. It is idealistic, escapist, impractical. It can’t possibly have anything to do with the squinty-eyed ant. In the fable, the latter cruelly abandons the former to her fate.
This schema, which assigns high culture (and by propinquity, art) a place up in the ‘generous’ (code word for ‘noble’) stratum of human activ-
ity, isn’t limited to fables. There is a version of it—albeit considerably nuanced—in the landmark study by German sociologist Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (1939).10 By all means a remarkable achievement, Elias’ work is not free of prejudice. By ‘civilizing’, Elias designates the gradual pacification, rationalization, and defeudalization of manners and customs from the late Middle Ages onward. It is the process whereby a population of violent warlords, lawless knights, and rustic barons, a profiteering and lazy clergy, a disaffected downtrodden peasantry, by and by turned into the reasonably law-abiding, self-controlled, rule-following, generally placid, productive bourgeois individuals of the modern period. But for Elias, the civilizing process mostly flowed from the court. His theory is basically uninterested in the terminological and historical link between civilization and civitas. The court, not the town, set the tone. For him, the civilizing process flows from the courtifying of anarchic individualism under the iron hand of the absolute monarch. In his basically Hobbesian vision, the civilizing process is the downward action of a Leviathan (first the royal court, then the technocratic state) which, monopolizing and centralizing the use of physical force and taxation, bureaucratized and pacified mores, manners, tastes, beliefs, preferences, values, artistic and personal styles. Civilization in Elias’s account is a top-down project which, in keeping with a vaguely pessimistic Rousseauist–Freudian idea of the thing, has to do with gelding the individual. Little do we find in his account that sheds light on the bottom-up processes of personal initiative, incentive, informed self-interest, inquiry, and development. Elias seldom considers what people want to do, only what they are told—at sword’s point—not to do. To the result that, if we follow his analysis, everyone today is a ‘bourgeois gentilhomme’—a booby who successfully apes the ways of his neutered aristocratic betters.
There is much to admire about Elias’s work, and much that rings true especially on the subject of seventeenth-century France. In spite of this, it can be argued that his one-way, monopolistic vision of trickledown civilization places too much (nothing less than ‘being civilized’!) in the hands of too few—the tiny elite who posted its values from its courtly perch down to the grateful lowland burgs and towns (perhaps a domestic trial run of the nineteenth-century ‘civilizing mission’ launched by Parisian technocrats on overseas territories?). My research into the forms, uses, and making of art over the last several centuries has led me to consider a less one-directional, and decidedly more bottom-up model of civilization—one in which the link between civilization and city is given its due.
The thesis that civilized values and habits radiate out of the court and lord it over the town is not defensible outside of the sixty or so years of French royal absolutism in the seventeenth century. And even then the court of Louis XIV had to withdraw from the rubbing elbows of Paris to create, in Versailles, an all-aristocratic mirage (likewise the Spanish Court at El Escorial, twenty-eight miles outside of Madrid). But fleeing the city is hardly a position of supremacy, and rather admits the gravitational pull of its civi-lization. It would be extraordinary indeed if, as the center of trade, commercial innovation, education, technical experimentation, finance, administration, and industry over the last 500 years, and sporadically in many of the centuries before, the city should be found to exercise no cultural influence, not merely over its burghers, but on the aristocratic ruling class. Colbert, the chief architect of seventeenth-century royal absolutism, for one, knew better: ‘Paris is effectively the center of all consumption’.11 He might have added: the center craft, invention, trade, finance, and manufacture.
Indeed, even if the nobility had miraculously maintained a cultural cordon sanitaire against the grubby town, there is in fact an area of activity in which this cordon decidedly frayed—and that is in art. For when the aristocracy needed to broadcast its glory, sing its epics, dramatize its lifestyle, build and adorn its houses, paint its fantasies, and so on, it is artisans it turned to: manual workers, bourgeois tradesmen, people who (heaven forbid) worked with their hands. The aristocratic artifact, so long as it is an artifact, is not a courtly product; it is the product of craft and labor, comes from the workshop, and bears the imprint of its town-dwelling maker, the bourgeois.
It is on the sociological basis that I argue that art is not only a product of the city, but that it has been articulating the town-dweller’s sense of reality most decidedly since the 1200s, but also (with qualification) earlier and in patches. Notwithstanding the mystical, aristocratic, romantic, bohemian, or contrarian aura of art; notwithstanding the fact that for most of the period under study here, art glorified the crown and the cross; notwithstanding the continuous snarl of distaste emitted by modern high culture toward the ant-like bourgeoisie, I aim to show that, on balance, art has assisted the rise of a mostly demystified, rationalized sense of life— the view of the polis, the mindset of civitas, of, sociologically speaking, the bourgeoisie. Art, an offspring of the city, has citified us, laying the groundwork for the historical victory of brain over brawn, of reason over mystique, and of plain bourgeois immanence over the transcendental.
ART AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION
Bourgeois, when it comes to it, is the Totefa Hypothesis. It suggests that the artist is a useful, dare we say productive, human being. What an uncouth, unbohemian thing to say! No wonder Gauguin was amazed—he who had been reared on the milk of aestheticism (‘everything that is useful is ugly since it is the expression of need, and human needs are ignoble and disgusting’, dixit dandy Théophile Gautier with that pseudo-aristocratic sniff that is all so prevalent among the self-hating bourgeoisie).12 For a bourgeois trait it is, this valorization of utility. It It revolves around the utilitarian quid enim and cui bono questions: what for? Who or what gains by it? I happily confess that these questions, bourgeois as they are, drive the progress of this study. Always it keeps in mind the use-value of any given art form to the social class in charge of its making and maintenance. This approach, of course, is no virgin territory. It was the stock-intrade of historical materialism and Marxist criticism. It informs the outlook of cultural history as well as studies in evolutionary sociobiology and anthropology which examine the utilitarian, life-and-death function of art in human societies.13 The sociobiology of art tells us that art is no pastime miraculously stolen from the meter of utility, nor a useless expenditure of social energy. Rather it is part of the cultural apparatus that insures the social resilience of a group of people, large or small, stratified or undifferentiated. Art reinforces the transmission of cultural habits, shared knowledge, and sensibility that are critical to the moral cohesion and resilience of societies. ‘Art must be of its time’, said the French painter Honoré Daumier. The ‘must’ is superfluous. A work of art, whether frenetically retrograde or avant-gardist, is always of its time, together with its time, in cahoots with its time. What other time could it be for?
Culture is the sum of activities by means of which a society copies and transmits itself, recommends itself to its members, and cements its identity. Culture is therefore conservative by nature. To the effect that, as a branch of culture, art is part of society’s conservative system of selfreproduction. This doesn’t mean that art is necessarily retrograde (a society may value innovation, and therefore promote forward-looking art) or ethnocentric (a society may value cosmopolitan openness, and therefore prize ethno-eccentric art). Nevertheless, art is a mechanism of social self-reproduction, and it behooves us to keep this in mind—that at whatever point of history we look, we find the art which its society wanted and maintained for its own advantage . If and when we come
across a work of art that is disruptive and untimely, a good reflex is to ask how untimeliness operates in the host society’s maintenance system. This is important to keep in mind especially in the modern, intensely citified, bourgeois stretch of our journey through western art history.
1.4 CITY ART
Now, to say that art is of its time doesn’t mean it is a slave to it. There are at least two reasons why art isn’t a routine flywheel in the mechanics of social reproduction: one is structural; the second contextual, and is particularly relevant to the times and places surveyed in this volume.
To start with the structural. Art cannot be the mindless mouthpiece of society for the reason that it is reflection: art puts forward an object that is shaped by the awareness of its observation. Representation doesn’t just transmit; it transforms, sets in motion, and reflects upon. Though art preserves and replicates, it does so with the consciousness that it is reproducing and representing. Art looks at things not just for what they are, but for what they are not and what they could be. Art cannot help opining. It cannot help fussing.
This fussiness is especially palpable in the context that oversees the production of art in the West, to wit, the city—dwelling-place of craftspeople, artisan-traders, moneymakers, educators, administrators, and other experts in symbolic coinage. There is an art of the tribe and of the nomad, of the monastery and of the castle. By and large, the bulk of art in northwest Europe comes from the city, is born of the workshop, comes out of an economy of surplus rather than subsistence, and bears the imprint of its bourgeois makers, users, and dealers. The city does strange things to the mind. Eighteenth-century philosophes said that it civilizes it; more neutrally we could say that it citifies it; and poetically we will say that it aestheticizes it. To flesh out what this cognitive citification–aestheticization entails, we could say that the city leads the mind to be detached, more critical, more skeptical, more calculating, more self-seeking, more individualistic, less loyal, less patient than its country cousin.
This is the subject of another fable by La Fontaine, ‘The City Rat and the Country Rat’: the city rat is suspicious, fretful, jumpy, materialistic; the country rat lives slow, hates interruption, prefers certainty over adventure. La Fontaine could have invited a third rat to the table: the vainglorious, charismatic, mystical, prestige-obsessed Court Rat. As to why the City Rat is a cagey skeptic, it perhaps has to do with living around so many peo-
ple—a situation which in evolutionary terms the human brain is probably not geared for, promiscuous a species though we may be. Except from the last 5000 years for the few, and the last fifty years for the many, the average human being seldom encountered more than between 120 and 300 members of her own in any given year or even lifetime species—people whose faces and names and personalities she knew first-hand, and from whom she knew what to expect. Then came the city, and cities multiplied, and soon to set the dominant pattern of human habitation, and urbanization broke up the personable fabric of relationships. In the city, one spends a great deal of time with non-kin, strangers, authorities that override to the family and the clan. Concerted action is mysterious, seems almost absent: each person appears to go about his own in separate business, regardless of the season. One learns to watch others and oneself, to be aware of their peculiarities and therefore of one’s own. At any given time in history, whether Rome in the first century, London in the nineteenth, or Beijing in the twenty-first, cities are made up in great part of immigrants from the countryside, which are needed to offset the (until recently) negative demographic rate of urban swarms (crowded living conditions, a breeding ground for pathogens, bore hard on human beings). An interloper, a transplant, an individual among many, the town-dweller will tend to see society, not as an organic environment, but an artifice, an objective organization which he uses, functionally partakes of, yet from which he remains essentially separate. Moreover the language of the city is abstraction: it is signs, symbols, mediated exchanges. City life runs on communication, parleying, haggling, and networking. Unwittingly the city fosters the more articulate habits of mind—the habits of self-representation, observation, rationalization, and demystification which social psychologists from Elias to Steven Pinker have associated with the ‘civi-lizing’ process.
Woven through and through by representation, the city is artifice. It is in this milieu that the self-consciousness, self-dramatization, and illusionism of art is most at home. Western art, it is often said, starts with ancient Athens. We can argue about this milestone. Less controversially we can say that a particular form of artistic expression began in the Hellenic citystate, which set a template for much of western art thereafter: the sort of art that openly and creatively reflects on society’s modes of representation and reproduction; the art which embodies the cognitive habits of homo civitatis, objective, demystifying, skeptical. For a reason is ancient Athens—the most citified, least monarchical, and most proto-bourgeois of ancient cities—the breeding ground of philosophy, of political debates,
of plays and representations that conceptualized everything under the sun, and especially Athens itself its religion, morals, politics, and art. No such intellectual efflorescence blessed Sparta, the least city-like, most aristocratic and bourgeois-stigmatizing of Hellenic city-states. The city tends to reify and, left to its own devices, is fertile ground for the selfconscious forms of art. And these forms, in turn, are a catalyzing force for the peculiar way of being and thinking that is bourgeois.
This idea inspires the narrative hereafter which maps the development of art since antiquity over that of the bourgeois mind. Like others of its kind, this broad proposal lays open to the charge of simplification and exaggerated truth claim. The reader will want to know that I take general theses, mine included, to be constitutively flawed. No thesis can exhaust all the facts, hence no historical narrative is ever satisfactory. The litmus test is not whether a study of this sort is conclusive, but whether it gives a ground to build upon. To this ground I now invite the reader to turn.
NOTES
1. Gauguin, Noa Noa, p. 18.
2. On cities, Hall (1998) and Mumford (1961).
3. Wright (2000), p. 52.
4. See Sanderson (1995).
5. Braudel (1981), vol. I, p. 511.
6. On how ‘bourgeois’ became a pejorative, Huizinga (1968).
7. Nietzsche [1889], p. 92.
8. McCloskey (2007, 2011); a third volume is forthcoming.
9. Schama (1987).
10. Elias [1939].
11. In Robb (2007), p. 222.
12. Théophile Gautier, ‘Preface’, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835).
13. Notably: Dissanayake (1998); Dutton (2008); Boyd (2009); Rothenberg, Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science and Evolution (2011); Gottschall (2012); Etcoff, (2000); Caroll (1995); Storey (1996).
CHAPTER 2
Birth of the Aesthetic
2.1 A HOUSE DIVIDED
To ask what art is for, there has to be a set of people who agree there is such a thing as art. This condition doesn’t occur by necessity. Though pre-historic societies kept symbolic artifacts, and practiced body painting, carving, potter-making, and weaving, there is little evidence that they wrapped these crafts in the discourse we call art. This perhaps is because, apart from shamans and witch doctors, hunter-gatherer societies did not employ an intellectual class to debate the ins-and-outs of culture. Social reproduction went largely without formal administration, educational directives, cultural ministries, philosophers, educators, and historians and other knowledge specialists who make social reproduction their business. For this situation to obtain, human development had to wait for the emergence of large-scale societies such as the Chinese Shang Dynasty, Sumerian Mesopotamia, and Pharaonic Egypt. Control over a vast territory made the long-term management of resources necessary. Such societies developed classes of experts (priests, scribes, mandarins, eunuchs, officials, civil servants, craftsmen, artists) whose function was to run the complex affairs of state, invent, manage, and interpret the symbols of the tribe, tend the sacred fire, and explain to people how they belonged in the same group. An intelligentsia was born, occupied with the job of defining culture, its boundaries, its orthodoxies, aberrations, and raisons d’être.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 D. Maleuvre, The Art of Civilization, DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-94869-7_2
Unlike small tribal bands, the first full-fledged states of 5000 years ago spread beyond their geographic base, assimilating and inter-penetrating with alien populations.1 Encounter with the exotic, together with social stratification, sharpened the distinction between autochthonous and foreign. People began to see what was typically local and peculiar about themselves. Cultural self-reflection intensified, and it’s in this dry run of modern multiculturalism that we find the Hellenes, not coincidentally the most wayfaring people of the ancient world. Ancient Greek society is where we witness the rise of a class of social experts who make it their job to define and re-define what it means to be Greek, to be human, to think, to perceive, to behave well, to be just, to govern, and to die: philosophers, they were called.
The scene, then, is the Greek trading empire in the early sixth century BCE—a time of busy colonial adventuring, of commercial and military competition between city-states, of unprecedented social segmentation and diversification of labor. Whereas all intellectual work in archaic societies—to wit, the production, safeguarding, and interpretation of the myths and symbols of the tribe—was concentrated in the sage, three distinct groups of knowledge-workers sprung in the Hellenic city-state2: the priest-oracle, who kept the sacred altars; the educator, called sophistes, who taught the skills (logic, planning, numeracy, and rhetoric) needed to formulate and administer state policies; and the ‘artist’ (craftsman, painter, sculptor, bard, dramatic poet, and actor) who took charge of symbolic expression, storytelling, religious illustration, and popular entertainment. This three-way division of intellectual work was the recipe for lively discussion. Most importantly, it transformed society from a thing that is into a thing that wonders what it is.
Greek city-states were small by modern demographic standards but culturally they already had the complexity of urban societies. They comprised a political class and a literate trading class that went to the theater and dedicated places to making and hearing speeches which, among other things, debated what ‘Greek’ meant, and by and by constructed a civil culture. Civil yet spirited was the hubbub around the staging of Aristophanes’s newest play in 423 BCE. The Clouds held the educators to public ridicule. It made out Socrates, a philosopher with ties to the Athenian aristocracy, to be a fraud and a thief, and his so-called school a ‘thinkery’ of jackasses. Naturally the thinkerers didn’t think much of the gibe. Their answer, thirty years in the making, came out in the Republic, the treatise on government by Plato (Socrates’s most famous pupil). In
tit-for-tat Plato glorified educators and accused artists of all the nefarious things (humbug, fraudulence, deception) Aristophanes had heaped on philosophers. In truth the Republic was a regular anti-art screed. It said that artists deal in illusions, that illusions are by definition deceitful, and that artists are therefore harmful. They impose ‘on the weakness of the human mind’ as shamefully as ‘the art of conjuring and many other clever devices’.3 Where the mind should seek reason and knowledge, poets drag it into sensual illusion. Who, then, was the fraud and the thief? Was it Socrates who taught people to think clearly and seek truth and respect their own intelligence? Or was it the artist who peddled illusions to amuse the gallery and rob people of their good sense? In Laws, Plato went so far as to say that ‘he who knows nothing of painting’, can be satisfied of ‘having missed nothing’.4 And to make sure the city was rid of this ‘nothing’, Plato proposed expelling painters, dramatists, and poetasters from the republic.
Plato’s philippic did not strike from the blue. It tapped a well of militant rationalism also palpable in the contemporary historian Thucydides who warned against fanciful Homer: ‘We need no Homer to praise us, no poet to make an impression of heroic deeds in verses which give the audience pleasure but do not really stand up to scrutiny.’5 Half-truths instead of hard facts; pleasure instead of knowledge. Surely Hellenes could do better than derive their morals, cosmology, and folklore from a fantasist. Plato made a similar complaint about Homer’s undue influence in education given the falseness of his views on nature and authority. But was Homer the fabulist Plato and Thucydides made him out to be? Perhaps their idea of the poet as a peddler of fantasy was somewhat naïve and alarmist—especially since, had they read their Homer carefully, they would have much there that demystifies the power of art, indeed cuts poetry down to size.
‘Sing to me, O Muse, of that ingenuous hero who traveled far and wide’, reads the opening verse of Odyssey. But it isn’t long before Homer gives that charismatic muse the heave-ho. Odysseus, at any rate, seldom passes a chance to turn down the delights of enchantment and poetizing. When we meet him, in Canto 5, he yearns to escape from Calypso’s blessed isle. Eternal youth, sweetmeats, leisure, and fineries—the goddess lays them all at his feet. But Odysseus wants none of it. He parleys himself out of this paradise and soon lands on the shore of the happy Phaeacians, a people who, for all it seems, have perfected the art of banqueting, songs, dance, and all-around sybaritic living. Again Odysseus begs to move on. He comes upon a shoal of sirens whose rapturous song he hurries through,
intrigued but not exactly bowled over; and speeds onward after an interlude on Circe’s first-class island prison of perfumed baths, oil rubs, and love-making, which he promptly gives up for the storm and stress of the high seas. Constitutionally averse to contemplation, Odysseus isn’t a man of pleasure. He is terrified it might change him—turn him, like his men on Circe’s island, into a pig. Odysseus tastes imagination in the refusal thereof. On the one occasion that he gives in to fanciful curiosity, all his men perish. Contrast this with his expert handling of aesthetic appreciation when he listens to the Sirens’s ‘crying beauty’. Tied to his mast as a connoisseur clings to his pince-nez, Odysseus hears the Sirens in the secure knowledge that he won’t succumb. He isn’t what we would call an aesthetic enthusiast. A practical man, he subordinates his impulse to the pursuit of long-term goals, which are to get home and recover what’s his. He who embraces the spell—that fool is a dead man. Steer clear of the Sirens’s song. Stay off poetry. Shun the Enchantress. Watch out for those Lotus-eaters: Homer has no end of warnings about how aesthetic enchantment can wreck a good man.
A vase from the sixth century BCE at the Athens National Museum depicts Odysseus roped to the mast and surrounded by a small ensemble of sirens playing the lyre and double flute. The spell of music is akin to enthusiastic (from entheos, i.e., god-filled) ecstasy. In his Theogony, the seventhcentury poet Hesiod voiced the widespread notion that the ‘singers and lyre players of this earth’ channel the Muses, who themselves are the daughters of Zeus (Theogony, I. 94). By keeping poetry at a distance, then, Odysseus sidelines the gods, humbles their emissaries, dispels their magic. If Iliad taught anything, it is that the gods are untrustworthy. Sometimes they help you, sometimes they do everything in their considerable power to ruin you. Odysseus, who witnessed their caprice on the fields of Troy, prefers to give them and their deputies (the sorceress, the siren, the muse) a wide berth. To the effect that the Odyssey is that delectable poem which warns the listener against the charm of poetry, as though it would exorcise its own spell. Not for Homer the mantle of vates, of the blind god-drunk seer of tradition. His poem is clear-eyed, precise, sharp and spare–many leagues removed from the ululations and propitiatory spells of Neolithic and early Bronze-Age poetry. We may imagine Odysseus taking a listen of the Odyssey, intrigued but in his mind already planning tomorrow’s sailing route. Twentieth-century cultural theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno never forgave Odysseus for this.6 His reeked of the trading post, and Homer was culpably in cahoots with
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— Voi, mennään! Mennään heti paikalla! - Nanni, pane meille puhtaat esiliinat! — intoilivat lapset.
Siitä nousi suuri ilo, hyppy ja tanssi. Annilla oli täysi työ pidättää heitä suinpäin juoksemasta portaista alas.
Sanni tuli vastaan kadulla.
— Jassoo, herrasväki on taas menossa "pistellinkiin". Saipas se Vanja sinut vaan lopuksi heltymään, kun aikansa kiersi Vuorikadun seitsemättä niinkuin kissa kuumaa puuropataa.
— Enpä minä hänen kanssaan olisi lähtenyt, vaikka olisi tässä kaiken ikänsä kierrellyt, mutta kun se kerran meitä seurasi tuonne puistoon ja sai nämä lapset hullaantumaan itseensä. Ei niille enää mitään mahda.
— Tokkopa sinullekaan, Anni parka, enää mitään mahtaa. Etköhän jo itsekin liene hullaantunut — sanoi Sanni naureskellen ja pujahti kotiportista sisälle.
— Nanni, älä viitsi välittää mitään — supatti Osmo. — Tulisi Sanni itsekin mielellään puistoon, mutta Vanja ei tahdo, Vanja leikkii vaan meidän kanssa.
— Mutta jos äitinne saa tietää missä me käymme, niin hän suuttuu.
— Minä en ainakaan kerro mitään — vakuutti Osmo.
— Enkä minä kerro muuta kuin että kerran istuin Vanjan polkupyörän tangolla ja se oli niin hauskaa! — puheli Maija.
— Voi sua, pieni kananpää! Et mitään saa kertoa, muuten emme enää huomenna pääse tänne.
— Otetaan äiti mukaan, niin ei se suutu.
— Olet sinä, Maija, semmoinen pieni viisastelija, ei äitisi tänne lähde, estää meidänkin tulomme.
— Kertooko Tuttukin missä oltiin.
— Tuttu keltoo — oltiin.
Anni ja Osmo nauroivat. Pikku Taimesta ei ollut vaaraa.
* * * * *
He poikkesivat maantielle palatakseen sieltä takaisin puistoon.
— Kuinka se Sanni on muuttunut! — ajatteli Anni.
— Kuinka se heti juhannuksesta kylmeni ja vieraantui, aivan kuin olisi mustasukkainen. Toihan se Vanjan kirjeliput, joita hän joskus
Sannin mukana lähetti, mutta aina piili sen puheessa joku pureva sana.
— Vanja, Vanjushka! Trastvuit, Vanjushka! — huusi Osmo riemuiten.
Sieltä se ajaa karautti, rakuuna, pienellä tulisella raudikollansa.
22
— Aa' maltsik! — Trastvuit! huusi vastaan Vanja, viskasi lakkinsa pojalle kiitäen ohi seisoallaan hevosen selässä.
Seurue pysähtyi katselemaan. Tuokiossa oli ratsastaja polvillaan ja seuraavassa silmänräpäyksessä hän jo juoksi täyttä ravia hellittävän hevosensa rinnalla, siitä jälleen satulaan, äkkikäännös ja sieltä se jo tulla porhalsi ihastuneita katselioitaan vastaan.
— Poika, tule tänne! — Hän ojensi kätensä ottaakseen lakkinsa, mutta nostikin koko pelosta ja ilosta kirkaisevan pojan eteensä satulaan. Mutta siinä jo alkoikin puisto. Ratsu sidottiin kiinni, ja silloin olivat jo tytötkin paikalla.
— Äsken minä niin pelkäsin, että putoat hevosen selästä ja kuolet
— puheli Osmo Vanjalle.
— Entä Annushka?
— En sano.
— A' itkikö Annushka, kun Ivana Ivanovitsh makaa kuolleena — ja nuo eloisat silmät katsoivat niin armaasti tyttöön, että tämän jäykkyys suli ja vastaus tuli avoimesti.
— Itkisin, Vanjushka. Tämä puristi hänen kättään.
— Dobra tyttö, minun oma tyttö, — ja kun Anni punehtui aina otsaa myöten, nyppäsi Vanja maasta punoittavan luhdikon kukan.
— Kah, Annushka! Tämä Annushka.
Kun he tulivat tavalliselle paikalleen, pienelle hiekkakentälle, jota puut ja kukkivat pensaat puolikaaressa ympäröivät, olisi ollut vaikeata päättää, ken heistä oli iloisin. He nauroivat, telmivät ja leikkivät, kunnes istahtivat vihdoin väsyneinä nurmikolle.
— Vanja, vihellä taas, tai laula meille, — pyyteli Maija.
— Huomenna Vanja soittaa teille, jos tulette tänne.
— Voi, hauskaa! Tullaanhan taas huomenna, Nanni.
— Jos on kaunis ilma.
— Tullaan kumminkin, vaikka vähän sataisikin.
— Ehkä tullaan. Leikkikää nyt kauniisti keskenänne tytöt. Pian lähdetään taas kotiin.
Osmon päähän pantiin Vanjan lakki ja vyölle kiinnitettiin sapeli, joka pitkältä maata viisti. Ylpeänä lähti hän uudessa asussaan kuljeksimaan pitkin käytäviä.
Pikkutytötkin unohtuivat vähitellen leikkimään hiekalla, joten nuoret saivat tilaisuuden vaihtaa keskenään muutaman sanan.
— Miksi, Anni, pelkäät Vanjushkaa?
— Enhän minä pelkää.
— A' miks'et tule illalla ulos?
— On vaikeata päästä. Emäntäni on myöhäseen poissa nyt, kun hän yksin hoitaa pientä kangaskauppaansa ja kun hän iltasella väsyneenä palaa, en heti kehtaa livahtaa ovesta ulos.
— Uh, njet harashoo! Huono paikka, vähän vapautta, liian vähän vapautta.
— Hyvä on minulla paikka, ei kellään parempata.
— Tehtaassa paras, kahdeksan tunnin työpäivä.
Aurinko oli ruvennut paistamaan kohtisuoraan ja sietämätön kuumuus alkoi täälläkin ahdistella. Tuttu jätti leikkinsä ja painoi päänsä Annin helmaan.
— Nyt Tuttu nukkuu.
— Voi sentään, lapsia alkaa väsyttää. Kyllä meidän täytyy nyt lähteä.
— Ei vielä, Annushka, ei vielä!
Hän nosti lapsen olkapäilleen ja alkoi tanssia. Ei ollut Anni ikinä nähnyt tanssijaa hänen veroistaan. Milloin hän hurjaa vauhtia pyöri piiriä, pitkin hiekkaista kenttää, nyt jo maassa kyykkysillään, viskellen notkeita jalkojaan, siitä taas pystyyn kimmahti, hihkasi, kannusta kilahutti ja seuraavassa silmänräpäyksessä jo maassa Annin edessä polvillaan.
Lapsi oli kietonut kovasti pienet sormensa Vanjan pikimustaan tukkaan ja riemuitsi suuriäänisesti, mutta Maija pyyteli:
— Tanssita minuakin, Vanjushka. Tanssitathan pikkusen! — eikä antanut rauhaa, ennenkuin sai istua Vanjan käsivarrella. Sävel, jota hän nyt vihelsi pyöriessään oli tuo sama, venäläinen valssi, jota soittokunta oli Hupisaaressa soittanut, ja se muistutti Annille juhannusaamuisen vastenmielisen tunnelman. Mutta se nousi enää vain harvoin esille.
Uni oli lapsilta kerrassaan haihtunut. Kuuma aurinko oli kätkeytynyt pilveen ja pääskysten siivet sipasivat läheltä maata. Kaukaa kuului jo ukkosen jyrähtely. Kukin heistä huomasi nyt, että tämän päivän ilot olivat loppuneet.
Vanja hyväili lapsia hyvästellessään, siinä tehtiin myös lujat lupaukset seuraavien päivien kohtauksista.
Polku oli epätasainen. Anni nosti pikkutyttösen syliinsä Vanjan hoidellessa hänen pieniä rattaitaan kahden isomman seuratessa kintereillä. Ja niille puheli Vanjushka:
— Me leikimme nyt, että Anni on maamushka, minä olen paapushka ja te olette meidän lapsiamme.
— Rupeakkin sinä meille isäksi, kun meiltä isä kuoli — sanoi pikku Maija.
— Kysyppäs, jos Anni tulee äidiksi.
— Tuletko, Nanni Vanjalle ja meille yhteiseksi äidiksi?
Mutta Anni vaan hymyili Vanjalle vastaukseksi.
Ratsu oli odotellessa käynyt kärsimättömäksi, se kuopi maata, hirnahteli ja nyt vihdoin liikkeelle päästyään pyrähti tuliseen juoksuun kiidättäen ratsastajan näkyvistä.
III.
Rouva Vuorela istuu ruokahuoneessaan odotellen päivällistään, kun rouva
Alanen pistäytyy ovesta sisälle.
— Eipä juuri näy naapurin emäntää kotosalla.
— Eipä niin. Ei ole ollut paljon aikaa kotona istuskella, mutta nyt kai kohta jo saakin panna kaupan oven kiinni. Silloin sitä taas joutaa kotonakin olemaan.
— Huonostiko käy kauppa?
— Tavara loppuu. Ostajia on liiaksikin. Kulashit kulkevat ympäri kuin kiljuvat jalopeurat ja ostaisivat kaiken, mitä ikänä rahaan voi vaihtaa. Niitä tulee Etelä-Suomesta ja aina ryssänrajoilta saakka tänne pohjoiseen — ostamaan kaiken, minkä käsiinsä saavat.
— Niin, kulashit nyt hallitsevat tätä maata, niiden käsissä on kaikki valta. Me muut kiitämme koreasti, jos saamme ostaa kilon sokeria 14 —16 markasta tai metrin huonoa kangasta kymmenkertaisella hinnalla.
— Minä en kumminkaan ole kankaistani heille metriäkään myynyt.
Olen oikein koettamalla koettanut pitää käteni puhtaina nykyisestä kulashiliasta.
Rouva Vuorela nosti voitonvarmana päätään. Hänen liikkeensä ei kunnolleen tuottanut sitäkään mitä jokapäiväinen kulutus vaati, muiden rikastuessa.
— Ehkä voin kumminkin elättää lapseni kokoamatta tuskaa tunnolleni — sanoi hän puoleksi itsekseen.
— Kauanpa rouva saa päivällistään odottaa.
— Ne ovat olleet ulkona leikkimässä ja unohtaneet ajan kulun.
Toinen hymyili merkitsevästi.
— Ettekö ole huomannut, että se myöhästyminen tapahtuu säännöllisesti?
— Onhan sitä sattunut ennenkin.
— Niin on tuo tyttö sitonut lastenkin suun, että eivät ole äidilleen kertoneet, mutta kun Sannilta kuulin, katsoin velvollisuudekseni avata silmänne.
Rouva Vuorela heitti puhujaan kylmän katseen.
— Kiitän huolenpidostanne! Älkää jatkako. He selvittävät itse tämän asian.
Yksin jäätyään hän kutsui luokseen Annin ja lapset.
He tulivat. Anni oli hiukan kalpea, mutta hänen avoin ja puhdas katseensa ei emännän tutkivan silmän edessä painunut alas.
— Miksi ruoka ei enää koskaan ole valmiina, kun tulen?
Osmo astuu urhoollisesti esiin:
— Meidän on niin hauskaa puistossa, että ei Anni huomaa katsoa kelloa.
— Vai niin, poikaseni, miksi siellä on ruvennut olemaan niin hauskaa?
Nyt hätääntyivät lapset ja piirittivät Nannin kuorossa huutaen:
— Äiti älä toru Nannia, älä vaan toru Nannia, me sinne kovin tahdoimme, kun se Vanjushka on niin kiltti.
— Äiti älä Nannia tolu — soperteli pieninkin.
— Nähkääs, täti — alkoi tyttö. Juhannusyönä olimme Sannin kanssa vaan uteliaisuudesta katsomassa ryssäin tansseja. Siellä tutustuin erääseen rakuunaan, joka senjälkeen kirjoitteli monet kirjeet kanssaan kävelylle pyydellen. En vastannut mitään, enkä koskaan aikonutkaan mennä. Mutta kerran se näki, kun me lähdimme lasten kanssa puistoon, se seurasi meitä ja lapset kiintyivät siihen heti. Nyt olemme olleet yhdessä melkein joka päivä.
— Äiti älä vaan toru Nannia eikä meitä! Vanja on soittanut meille ja laulanut ja tanssittanut ja leikkinyt niin, ettei kukaan muu koskaan.
Rouva Vuorela kuunteli synkin kasvoin näitä kertomuksia, virkkoi sitte
Annille:
— Tyttö parka! Et aavista mihin vaaraan olet joutunut. — Kuulkaa lapset! Äiti ei nyt toru ketään, mutta äiti tahtoo, että te ette lähde
Nannin kanssa pois kotipihalta muutamaan päivään, kunnes ryssä on ehtinyt teidät kaikki unohtaa.
Seurasi äänekäs itku noita tinkimättömiä sanoja, mutta Anni tunsi kovan, jääkylmän väliseinän laskeutuvan hänen ja emäntänsä välille.
IV.
Sadetta ei tullut. Kuumia, helteisiä päiviä riitti yhä. Ruoho maassa paloi ruskeaksi, lehti puissa kellastui keskellä kesää ja alkoi karista. Pelolla katselivat ihmiset tulista kuivuutta äskeisten tuhoisien hallaöiden jälkeen.
Anni viihdyttelee pikku hoidokkejaan auringon ruskeaksi polttamalla pihanurmikolla kaivaten puiston vihreyttä, missä kosteus oli säilynyt suurten puiden ja tiheiden pensasten suojassa. Päivät olivat nyt sietämättömän pitkiä ja ikäviä. -Eivät nuo lapsetkaan muusta puhuneet kuin Vanjasta, hänestä he kertoilivat muistojaan ahdistellen Annia kaikenmoisilla kysymyksillä.
— Miksi se äiti kielsi? — Miksi ei Vanja tule tänne? — Kirjottaisit kirjelipun ja käskisit tulemaan.
Mutta tämä yhteinen suru yhdisti heitä vielä entistä lähemmin toisiinsa ja niin kuluivat päivät kadotettua ystävää muistellen ja yöt hänestä uneksien. Niin kirkastui poissa olevan kuva heidän herkissä mielissään, joten se ennen pitkää oli todellisuutta paljon korkeammalla.
— Miksi sellainen jyrkkä kielto? Miksi hän tuomitsee ihmistä, jota ei edes tunne? Vain siksi, että hän oli ryssä. Eiväthän nekään kaikki ole yhtäläisiä. Onko oikein niitä kaikkia vihata? - Ei ainakaan minun ymmärtääkseni.
Kuta enemmän hän Anni sitä asiaa ajatteli, sitä enemmän hänen myötätuntonsa kallistui Vanjushkan puolelle, samalla kuin tuo kapinoiva ääni emäntää vastaan tuli yhä selvemmin kuuluville. On ilta ja lapset nukkuvat. Rouva Vuorela oli lähtenyt tuttujensa kanssa kaupungille, Anni istui nojatuoliin ja koetti lukea.
Mahdotonta! — Kirjaimet lehdiltä hävisivät ja tilalle ilmestyi Vanjushkan hymyilevä kuva. Hän heitti kirjan ja meni ikkunan luo. Mutta tuskin oli hän sen ääreen ehtinyt, kun kuuli kadulta tuttua vihellystä. Anni kätkeytyi ikkunaverhon taakse uskaltamatta silmäistäkään alas kadulle.
— Siellä hän on! Eipä se sentään niin vähällä unohtanut, kuin luultiin!
Sydäntä hiveli odottavan onnen tuska ja aatokset salaman nopeat risteilivät mielessä eri vivahduksin.
— Hän on siellä! On kenties ikävöinyt ja kaivannut minua kuten minä häntä. On kulkenut päivin puistossa, illoin kierrellyt tätä katua toivoen tapaavansa — sillä aikaa kun minä täällä olen häntä ikävöinyt ja itkenyt. — Mutta nyt ei meitä enää mikään estä toisiamme tapaamasta! Kumminkin hän epäröi, eikä näyttäytynyt, oli kuin olisi nyt valinnan aika.
— "Ryssän tyttö" sanovat ihmiset silloin minua. Eikö niitä ole jo ennestään liian paljon. Tuleehan siitä maine, joka kerran kuuluu
kotipuolellekin ja isä ja äiti kuulevat ja Samppa, kenties velikin vielä kerran palaa matkaltaan - nyt olisi sopiva lopettaa tähän koko tuttavuus.
Hän puristi aatoksissaan kurttuun ikkunaverhon, jonka takana piileksi.
Sydän löi kuuluvasti ja korvissa kohisi.
Mutta seurustelevathan ryssäin kanssa monet muut minua paremmat. Niinkuin F:n neidit, kaupungin rikkaimmat. Kelpaahan ylioppilasneitostenkin upseerien kanssa myöhäisille iltakävelyille. Mitäs ne upseerit ovat muita kuin ryssiä! Tyttökoulun oppilaita, vieläpä opettajattariakin tiedetään, ja virkamiesten rouvia, joita palveliansa ovat nähneet upseerien kanssa seurustelevan. -Mitäs silloin minusta, joka olen vaan pieni piikatyttö! —
— Tokkopa se Samppakaan paljon minusta välittää. Eihän se oikeastaan ollut sanallakaan sitä ilmaissut. Semmoinen oli, juro ja jäykkä. Kenties ei enää välitä senkään vertaa kuin ennen.
Astunta kadulta kuului taas selvemmin, kannukset kilahtivat ja tuttu surunvoittoinen sävel soi kulkijan huulilta kuin kutsuen kuulijaa ulos, kesäisen illan hämärään.
Ikkunaverho riuhtaistiin syrjään ja ikävöivälle kulkijalle ilmestyivät nuoren tytön kukoistavat kasvot.
— Anni, Annushka! — Tule puistoon! — ja tyttö kuuli tuossa äänessä niin hellän värähdyksen ja luki noista kasvoista sen saman, suuren kaipauksen, jota hän itsekin oli näinä päivinä kärsinyt.
Vapisevin käsin sulki hän ikkunan ja kiiruhti alas rappusia, riensi juoksujalkaa, kuin peläten jonkun itseään seuraavan, jonkun, joka tahtoisi häntä estää tapaamasta sydämensä kaivattua.
* * * * *
Puiden suojassa, sinervän hämärän kätkössä astelee Vanjushka tyttöään vuotellen. Ei ainuttakaan ihmistä näkynyt ja kaupungilta tulevat äänet sulivat täällä vienoksi huminaksi, joka soi kuin kaukaisen kosken kohina.
Nyt kuuluivat lähestyvät, kevyet askeleet ja vilahti vihreiden lehvien välistä vaalean punertava hame.
Ilo välähti silmässä muukalaisen, hymy suupielessä värähti ja syli avoinna hän tulijaa vastaan kiiruhti.
— Anni, Annushkani, sinä tulit, vihdoinkin sinä tulit!
V.Kuutamo valaisee huonetta kuvaten suurennetun ikkunan keskelle lattiaa. Anni katselee sitä, näkemättä kumminkaan sitä mitä katsoo
— hän näkee siinä vaan epämääräisiä, levottomasti vaihtelevia kuvia.
Sydän sykkii vielä rajusti äskeisestä pelosta, jos rouva nytkin sattuisi kuulemaan, että hän taas kolmatta käydessä saapuu kotiin.
Hän oli hiipinyt sisälle hiljaa kuin varjo, mutta olihan mahdollista, että se oli hereillä ja sittenkin kuuli.
Lapset nukkuivat levottomasti. Maija äänteli unissaan ja Taimi haparoi
Annin tyhjää tilaa hänen kättään etsien.
— Kuinka se tulee toimeen ilman Nannia! Levottomuus ahdisti tytön mieltä sen äskeisen lupauksen johdosta, jonka Vanja oli häneltä puristanut. — Jättää paikkansa ja lapset! Kuinka se käy päinsä! Ei kukaan tunne niitä niinhyvin kuin hän, ei kukaan hoida niitä sillätavalla kuin hän itse, joka on vaalinut niitä enemmän ajan kuin itse lasten äiti.
— Täti itse ei minua varmastikaan kovin kaipaa, hän on näyttänyt viime päivinä jo kovin kiusaantuneelta. Olen odottanut, milloin se puhkeaa. On tuskallista tuo vaitiolo.
No huomennahan me saamme selvitellä — silloin sen täytyy tapahtua.
Ikkunankuva lattialla oli levinnyt ja siirtynyt ovinurkkaan päin. Anni painoi jyskyttäviä ohimoitaan ja jatkoi mietteitään.
— Eräänä aamuna, kun Taimi herää, on Nanni poissa. — Hän tepastelee yömekossaan ympäri huoneita ja huutaa: — Nanni, Nanni-i-ii! Tule Tuttua pukemaan! — Tulee sitte keittiöstä uusi tyttö ja koettaa houkutella lasta luokseen. -Missä Tutun Nanni? — Poissa on, tehtaaseen meni. — Seuraa suuriääninen itku. Uusi tyttö kyllästyy. Keittiössä kiehuu kahvi hellalle, hän rientää sinne ja tulee taas takaisin koettaen viihdytellä.
Mutta kun väki tehtaasta lappautuu aamiaislomalle, on Vuorelan uusi palvelia kadulla kolmen lapsen kanssa Annia odottamassa.
— En minä näiden kanssa tule minnekään, hän sanoo. On parasta, että tulet takaisin ja minä menen pois — ja lapset tarrautuvat hänen vaatteisiinsa ja pyytelevät tulemaan kotiin.
Miten minä sen kestän?
Tuntui tuskallisen kuumalle täällä sisällä. Hän avasi akkunan. Syksyinen tuuli puheli salaperäisesti pihapuissa ja taivaalla tuikkivat ensimmäiset tähdet.
— Vanja, Vanjushka! — Onhan hän minua kumminkin lähin, onhan hän minulle rakkaampi kuin kukaan.
Anni katseli sormusta, jonka Vanja äsken oli hänen sormeensa painanut. Se välkkyi niin vienosti, se oli kirkas ja uuden uutukainen.
— Morsian! Kyynel kihosi silmään ja huulilla väikkyi onnen hymy.
— Emmehän me täällä kauvan enää, sota loppuu ja me muutamme kotiin Venäjälle, kauvas Mustanmeren rannoille, jossa päivä paistaa ja kukat kerkiävät jo silloin, kun täällä pohjoinen vinkuu ja kinokset korkealle seinän vierustoilla kurkoittelevat. — Niin oli Vanjushka puhellut kaunista kotipaikkaansa kuvaillen.
— Tule kanssani, sanoi. Kotini kauneheksi sinut vien, äitiseni iloksi. — Ja kokoontuu kylältä koko suuri suku katsomaan minkä Ivana Ivanovitsh toi sotaretkeltään Suomesta. Kauniin toi vaimon, sanovat, solakkavartisen ja sorean. Katsokaapas sen tukkaakin, se välkkyy kuin kulta.
Niin oli Vanja puhellut ja mairein sanoin ja valoisin kuvin häntä viihdytellyt.
Anni otti sormuksen sormestaan käänteli sitä ja kädessään punnitsi. Kovin se oli ohut ja kevyt. — Mistäpä se Vanja sen paremman, olihan kullan hintakin kovin kohonnut.
— Mutta entä jos se ei totta tarkoittaisikaan, entä, jos se vaan leikkii kanssani? — Olisi kenties parempi pysyä vielä täällä toistaiseksi, odottaa ja katsella.
— Vanjushkako pettäisi! — Vanja, joka polvillaan oli rukoillut lupausta saada hänet mukaansa Venäjälle ja sen saatuaan suudellut
hänen jalkojaan. Eihän sellainen rakkaus ollut mitään leikintekoa.
Olisi väärin epäillä häntä.
Yön hiljaisuudessa kajahti kirkon kellon kolme kumeata lyöntiä.
Tyttö sulki ikkunan, paneutui maata ja nukkui huulillaan rakkaimpansa nimi.
VI.
Pitkällistä kuivuutta seurasi loppumaton sade, joka öin päivin virtanaan valui harmajalta, tuhruiselta taivaalta. Kadut tuntuivat pehminneen perustuksiaan myöten ja katuojissa virtasi sakea vesi pieninä purosina.
Sähkökello soi, aamiaistunti oli tullut. Koneet seisahtuivat, naiset pukivat kiireellä päälleen ja lappautuivat ulos tehtaan rautaisesta portista.
Anni oli saanut asunnon tehtaan lähettyviltä, joten ei muuta kuin puikahtaa kadun kulmauksesta.
Eipä ollut ylellisyydellä pilattu, tämä pieni kamari kellarikerroksessa. — Tutiseva pöytä, pahainen vuode ja pari maalaamatonta tuolia muodosti sen kaluston. Uunin nurkassa seisoi vielä ruokasäiliö — pystyyn käännetty tavaralaatikko, mutta sen verhoksi oli levitetty puhdas, vanhasta esiliinasta ommeltu verho. Pöytää kattoi valkea liina ja ikkunalaudalla oli kukkiva verenpisara.
Yhteisvoimin Vanjan kanssa oli tämä pieni koti pantu pystyyn, ja se oli nyt kumminkin Annin oma.
Hän etsi esille ruokavaransa, kylmiä perunoita, suolaa ja vettä. Maitokaupan edustalla oli niin suuri "jono", että hän katsoi viisaimmaksi ensin syödä aamiaisen ja "jonottaa" loppuajan saadakseen maitoa illaksi.
Hän taittoi kappaleen mureannäköistä leipää ja katseli palasta: Kuin murha-ase! Pitkät, terävät akanat ja kokonaisina jauhettujen kaurojen kuoret törröttivät uhkaavina vastaan taitetusta syrjästä. O'at silmissä suurenivat, nälkä katosi, mutta omituinen hiukaiseva tunne, joka viime aikoina oli alkanut kalvaa sydänalaa, tuntui taas ahdistavan.
— Olisi voita tuohon päälle, niin saattaisi sitä syödä — hän ajatteli, mutta eihän hän ollut voita nähnytkään, sitte kun Vuorelasta lähti. Koko syksynä ei ollut korttivoita jaettu muruakaan ja salakauppiasten välityksellä se maksoi 16—18 mk. kilo, eihän Annin palkka sellaisiin riittänyt.
Sillävälin oli maitokaupan edustalla odottajien luku vaan kasvanut. Anni kävi siihen kumminkin, vaikka toivottomalle näytti seisominen Jokaisella kadulla sateen virtanaan valuessa. Jono liikehti lakkaamatta. Kukin koetti vartioivan miliisin silmän välttyessä päästä hiukan naapuristaan edelle ja nuo vakinaiset jonottajat, pienet poikaviikarit, joilla oli tällä alalla suuri taito ja kokemus, onnistuivat vähitellen tunkeutumaan loppupäästä etumaisten joukkoon. Varsinkin käyttivät he hyväkseen hetkeä, jolloin naapuri sattui olemaan innokkaassa keskustelussa tai väittelyssä.
— Minulla on kuusi pientä lasta enkä neljään päivään ole saanut niille pisaraakaan maitoa -kuuli Anni vieressään seisovan vaimon lausuvan naapurilleen.
