Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists, and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (review)

Romantic Moderns is a study in reaction. During the 1930s, Harris shows, British artists “who had previously felt compelled to disguise themselves as avant-garde Frenchmen were now to be found on English beaches sheltering their water-colors from the drizzle. . . . Writers and painters were drawn to the crowded, detailed, old-fashioned and whimsical, gathering souvenirs from an old country that might not survive. . . . The appeal of an international language of form began to feel limited: was it really right to resist the lure of eccentricity, locality, difference?” Harris shows it happening across the land, not just in literature, painting, and architecture, but in the homely arts of gardening and cooking: a rejection of “foreign” styles, a return to the sentimental immediacies of traditional English life. She justifies her book’s title with a quotation from its protagonist, the artist John Piper (1903–92): “Romantic art deals with the particular.” So it can, but it also deals with the heroic, the sublime, the introspective. If the domesticated art that served as a refuge from the grand abstractions of French modernism is indeed Romantic, it is a shrunken and de-clawed Romanticism, retaining scarcely a memory of its old powers. Parochial or Pastoral Moderns would be a more realistic title.

Modernism shares the fate of Romanticism, as when Harris comments on one of Piper’s Brighton Aquatints from 1939: “In one print, aptly called ‘Mixed Styles,’ he enjoys the architectural variety of a street in which Regency symmetries give way to Victorian flourishes, before reappearing, rationalized, in a large functionalist structure further down the road.” Harris makes it sound easy, because Piper makes it look easy. And why not? The blending of diverse styles in the broader setting of a town or neighborhood is the lifeblood of the history of architecture. Yet if the transition is too smooth we risk forgetting something almost as important: what a hard-fought thing the birth of modernism was. Modernism is the most innovative style since the thirteenth century discovered the unifying power of visual movement, but less than a generation after modernism first declared itself, a “modern” artist has no trouble portraying it as a pared-down but fully recognizable expression of older themes. Piper even makes it flow naturally from that bête noire of any self-respecting modernist, the Victorian style! Whatever happened to modernism’s ferocity?

From America, where the most uncompromising forms of nonrepresentational art held sway almost until the end of the last century, the English foray into pastoralism looks more like a retreat from artistic difficulty than a life-affirming alternative to abstraction. Indeed the difficulty was more than artistic: the threat of war, the subtle but unstoppable power of modernization. Harris captures the nostalgia of the time and points out shadows around the edges, but real darkness is strangely lacking. Her subjects deserve a tougher grade of sympathy.

In what is essentially a chronicle of antimodernism, the one name I am surprised to find unmentioned is J. R. R. Tolkien. As he emerges from film and fan culture to recognition as one of the twentieth century’s great contrarians, the deeper if less spectacular aspects of his vision will come into their own: the elegiac beneath the heroic, the imbuing of place with the awareness of time past and passing, the almost unbearable sense of loss, even in victory. The writers and artists of Romantic Moderns foreshadow these qualities. As the milieu in which Tolkien’s ideas took shape comes increasingly under investigation, Alexandra Harris should take her place as lively and insightful guide.