Modernism and the Popular: Eliot's Music Halls

Perhaps no question has proved as vexing as the troubled relationship between modernism and popular culture. It is a commonplace to note that modernist works of art were tireless in citing items drawn from the popular, whether it was Picasso's inclusion of popular song titles (e.g., Ma jolie), Joyce's complex reworkings of music hall in Ulysses, or Weill's adaptations of contemporary jazz in Die Dreigroschenoper. This essay considers the context of T.S. Eliot's 1923 memorial essay for music-hall singer Marie Lloyd, the most celebrated performer of English variety entertainment, and attempts to unpack the specific meanings compressed in Eliot's invocation of the popular. His use of that term cannot be properly interpreted, nor can relations between English modernism and the popular be fully grasped, unless we situate these phenomena within the larger context of the processes which constitute authority in modernity.

Our standard readings of Eliot's essay miss the tensions that inform it. ¹ This is partly because they rush to confirm some pre-conception of the popular, but chiefly because they neglect a considerable corpus of late Victorian and Edwardian discourse that addressed the English popular and shaped Eliot's understanding of it. The popular elaborated by Eliot in 1923 had specific historical ties to the culture of the Victorian professional-managerial classes. Late-Victorian literati addressed the popular via the events taking place on the stages of London's many music-halls, events which their discourse on the halls linked to a larger narrative about English national character and history. These representations of music-hall provide a background indispensable to understanding a notion of the popular which Eliot knew and endeavored to further, even as he reconfigured it. Taken together they formed a discourse which repeatedly lamented music hall's imminent decline. Tracing its contours will enable us to specify more fully that version of the popular which preoccupied Eliot and Anglo-American modernism.

Recent attempts to explore modernism and the popular have often relied on two sources, Eliot's essay "Marie Lloyd" and T. J. Clark's gloss on it. ² And rightly so. Clark's reading of Eliot rests on a profound grasp of the popular's historical derivation within the rise of commodity culture. In his remarkable book, The Painting of Modern Life, he pinpoints the origins of the popular in a class-based discourse. The modern popular has two prerequisites for its crystalization. First, there must be a prevalent working-class cultural form (the café-chantant in France, for example), one which is being developed into a full-scale, commercial leisure enterprise, appropriated and standardized by business-minded entrepreneurs and impresarios. The popular is built on working-class culture which is on the verge of becoming the commercial culture of urban and industrial capital.

Second, the making of the popular as a discursive realm also requires the active presence of a bourgeois subject acting in a manner hitherto mostly unacknowledged by later historical accounts. The popular, in this view, receives its shape and definition from a curious, intrusive fraction of the middle-class, one more interested in artistic production or conspicuous consumption than investment, thrift, or moral convention. ³ These middle-class cognoscenti patronized the popular and represented it in painting and aesthetic discourse, representations which neither elaborate nor instantiate the popular, but obfuscate it. The popular, in Clark's account, is a fiction forged to confiscate the new-found authority of working-class performers and their culture; it is an interpretation which contains the working-class character of the popular and conceals the core of class difference that remains in a social world privileging the spectacle of social mobility over its reality.

Clark's insight, that the popular had a mid-Victorian genesis, and was a discourse of incipient professional authority, of a new class of salaried burghers intent on pursuing an aristocratic cultural hedonism, is a precondition for understanding how Eliot responded to...