Conservatism and Popular Art

     Popular art, which belongs to the masses either as oral literature and folklore or as mass commodified culture such as movies and television shows, might seem likely, to one who has not studied such work, to suggest progressive themes, voicing social protest and proposing reforms that would benefit most people. This is hardly the case. Indeed, popular art is most often quite conservative, siding with the status quo or with reactionary alternatives.
     Indeed, literature can sometimes encourage critical thinking about one’s preconceptions and can introduce or spread new ideas. To some the artist is thought even to occupy a privileged viewpoint, from which literary works may enrich their consumers’ knowledge of any subject, be it psychology, politics, indeed even theology. Yet surely the only field in which writers excel others is in the use of words. Further, when poems or stories do foreground their themes, by which I mean what they suggest is true about lived reality, they seek to reinforce the views readers already hold more often than they introduce new ones.
     Unsurprisingly the works that reinforce preexisting prejudices are in general not only more common but more popular (which comes to much the same thing) than those which challenge them. Traditional oral literature and modern works directed at a mass audience teach for the most part what is already accepted in a given culture while those which emphasize new ideas, ambiguity, and mystery, those which violate conventional thought, are characteristic of elite art consumed by only a few. This distinction by no means implies a value judgement. Beautiful poems and stories occur at either extreme of the spectrum and at any point along it, and the same may be said of failures.
     While it may be impractical as to provide adequate definitive support for such a grand generalization, evidence is ample. In the first place in traditional societies, in which all art is “popular,” which is to say, consumed by all people alike, the role of song and story is primarily and explicitly dogmatic. Rituals, folk-tales, indeed all genres, tend to transmit the assumptions of the past to each generation. The young are systematically taught how a man should behave, or a woman, or a child, what priests are capable of, what the animals have to tell people, and the secret meaning of the stars. Each young person learns the culture’s cosmology and ethics, not systematically but anecdotally, as it were, through the accumulation of lyrics and stories, forming in the end a coherent pattern.
     It is only in belated societies like our own that the artist is seen as a rebellious outsider, and people look to works of art for new ideas rather than those which have been accepted and validated over a long period of use.
     What is true of oral literature is largely duplicated by recent mass culture. Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart were quite right to label Donald Duck a tool of imperialism. [1] Plots of the family situation comedies of the nineteen-fifties, shows such as Make Room for Daddy, Ozzie and Harriet, and Leave it to Beaver, are regularly based on minor conflicts or misunderstandings that test the strength of connubial love, parental authority, or other accepted norms, only to be resolved after twenty-two minutes of action with an emphatic reinforcement of social convention. In very much the same way, police and detective stories always concluded with retributive justice that reassures the viewer that all is basically right, the police do what they should, malefactors are punished, and, though a few bodies of the upright may fall in sacrifice along the way, the most important good people prosper in the end.
     With widespread literacy and the rise of middle-class leisure and lending libraries, Victorian fiction provides a useful field of data. Among those who enjoyed genuine popularity as well as critical acclaim during this period were Scott, Dickens, and Trollope. Each was prolific enough to record a detailed image of the society of his day. (It matters little that Scott wrote about earlier periods. The politics in his novels is always far more reflective of his own present time.) Each is profoundly conservative. While they were able to perceive social injustices in their own times, and to urge some measure of relief, none was able to imagine a systematic response to the evils of early capitalism.
     Sir Walter Scott was clear and consistent about his support for the status quo and his opposition to the reform movements of his day. He endorsed what E. P. Thompson called the myth of paternalism, trusting in the landed gentry to be the most wise and secure governing class. These would, due to their upbringing, recognize their obligations under the principle of noblesse oblige. Though more often in financial straits than comfortable affluence, he as a baronet was an active participant in local government as well as serving as Clerk of Session and Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire. To him the country gentleman is, as a part of the order of nature, "the natural protector and referee of the farmer and the peasant." [1] He considered that the Scots suffered less privation because of their benevolent landlords looked after them than laborers in the south where “accursed poor-rates” in fact oppressed those they aimed to assist. He blamed poverty and want not on an exploitative economic system, just then shifting from a feudal land-based aristocracy to an urban capitalist one, but rather to the loss of old ideals in a welter of “reforming mania.” [2]
     When his Toryism conflicted with his Scots nationalism, he chose conservatism over regional pride. In Old Mortality, for instance, the struggle of the Covenanters is represented as in part justified by the high-handed actions of rogue dragoons and by the claims of religious conscience, but he satirizes mercilessly the more militant leaders such as the fanatic preacher Habbakuk Mucklewraith and the violent John Balfour. Henry Morton is depicted as the reasonable moderate whose good will and common sense is far preferable to the extremists’ ideology and zeal. In fact, Morton has no quarrel with the better representatives of the crown. Conflict appears to be generated not by the order of society, but by its abuse, caused by bad actors in both parties.
     Scott’s most explicit comments on current events are perhaps in the anonymous pieces titled The Visionary (1819) in which he calls for a sort of reactionary popular front in which all patriots belong, all Britishers, in fact, but the wicked radicals. “All must unite now . . .in support of our existing laws and constitution, or all will be swallowed up in a ruthless despotism – a despotism that would soon crush all useful spirit.” He calls for all people of good will to “put a bridle on the jaws of the Leviathan multitude.” Rob Radical appears in a dream to destroy a noble house which, admittedly imperfect, was, like the system, yet grand and well worth preserving. To Scott radicals are “the wildest of untamed animals,” their representative a “half naked ruffian,” “rather brutal than human.” Though the poor are kindly offered makework by their benevolent betters, they remain ungrateful and unsatisfied until they have entirely ruined economic production through agrarian reform. The result is that “we have stirred up the cauldron so efficiently, that the dregs are now uppermost,” and the ignorant masses end by crowning an emperor.” Raising the specter of Napoleon seals Scott’s case.
     Dickens, the only one of the three who could be said to have endured at least some of the trials of the underclass, is generous with charitable feeling, to the deserving poor, at least. In fiction the convention of retributive justice guarantees that all will come out right in the end. Yet he portrays a revolution as a terrifying mob in Tale of Two Cities and the opportunities that magically open up for long-suffering lads such as Pip in Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and David Copperfield come by way of private charity: from Magwitch, Mr. Brownlow and Rose Maylie, and Betsey Trotwood. While well aware of the horrors of the life of the poor in Victorian England, he was never receptive toward any of the numerous schemes to uplift them other than the benevolence attentions of the comfortable. The novel that most directly engages the working class movement is Hard Times in which all Dickens’ sympathy for the exploited workers, exemplified by the upright but tragically doomed Stephen Blackpool [3], does not lead to his sympathy for their cause. Blackpool’s antagonist in fact is the mendacious union organizer Slackbridge.
     Though never in danger of the factory work in which Dickens found himself at the age of twelve, Trollope, descended from landed gentry with a title of baronet descending to his cousins, felt himself in straitened circumstances until elevated by his popular success as an author. Yet never a hint enters his novels, many of them directly concerned with politics, that society would be well-served by fundamental changes. His model for social intervention in his own private practice of charity was Urania House, a “Home for Homeless Women” funded by heiress Angela Burdett Coutts. Though the institution, in which Dickens took a direct management role, was certainly more humane than the alternatives offered by the church and the state to assist “fallen women,” it today seems fatally paternalistic, with its emphasis on sewing and laundering, system of points and demerits, and the ultimate goal of the women’s emigration and marriage abroad. Urania House sought to ameliorate the harshest conditions for the most virtuous but never otherwise challenged society’s assumptions.
     When he stood for Parliament, it was as a Liberal, but in a district in which corruption so governed the outcome that he had no hope of winning, but only of proving his opponents’ criminality. Perhaps the clearest expression of Trollope’s political views is to be found in his account of this political foray in his Autobiography.in which, while conceding what he calls “terrible inequalities,” he still fears any “sudden disruption of society in quest of some Utopian blessedness.” He is obliged to take shelter behind the unassailable walls of religion, which one might here call the very last refuge of a scoundrel, saying that, while certain “enthusiastic but unbalanced minds” have been so bold as to imagine equality, they prove only by their efforts “how powerless they are in opposing the ordinances of the Creator.” Trollope’s conscientious Conservative, “being surely convinced that such inequalities are of divine origin, tells himself that it is his duty to preserve them.” After all “We do not understand the operations of Almighty wisdom” and are thus unable to understand “why so many, should have so little to make life enjoyable, so much to make it painful, while a few others, not through their own merit, have had gifts poured out to them from a full hand.” [4] Radical social reform was to him tantamount to blasphemy, and this conviction justifies his resistance to change while admitting the evils of pocket boroughs and all the other defenses of the old ruling class.
     It is precisely this sort of certainty that defines an ideal allowing popular writers to note the extent of people’s falling short. Often such a model rests more securely in the imagined past than a hypothetical future. Further, a work is more like to reach a mass audience if it may be rapidly understood with unambiguous meaning; such themes typically rely on fully formed codes of conduct. Because of the privileging of innovation, not to say idiosyncrasy, since the Romantics, it is necessary again to stress that popularity does not imply lesser value. The business of literature has always been equally to affirm preconceptions and to challenge them, often simultaneously.
     Such affinity of art with ambiguity reminds the critic that the rule associating popularity with conservative views is by no means absolute. Exceptions abound, in particular those cases in which what is accepted by a subculture is rejected by a majority. Thus bebop, rap music and the poetry of Allen Ginsberg may be both transgressive and “popular” with a well-defined audience. The ambivalence so frequently highlighted by art may at times make judgements less than straightforward. What effect do the words of the deceased Achilles in the Odyssey have on the valor of the hero in the Iliad when alive? Does Falstaff’s dismissive “there’s honour for you” make the honor of Hotspur and Henry IV (and the V) meaningless? Though popular art may be in intention conservative its reception and use may point in the opposite direction.
     The fact remains, however, that, though the more sophisticated of our own era make a hero of the rebel and the outsider, every society prescribes, indeed, enforces norms of behavior. The works which appeal to the greatest number will be quite naturally those representing a common denominator of belief, by definition then “conservative” in the fundamental sense of seeking to preserve and transmit standards. The system would be static, however, were it not that inscribed within every conclusion is a nagging doubt and within every daring proposal a warning against change.



1. See How to Read Donald Duck. Compare Shaan Amin’s “The Dark Side of the Comics that Redefined Hinduism” s in The Atlantic for Dec. 30, 2017. Amin details the racist and classist Hindu nationalism taught by popular Indian comic books.

2. Life of Napoleon.

3. Andrew Lincoln, Walter Scott and Modernity, 68.

4. See in particular the chapter titled “Men and Brothers.”

5. Chapter XVI “Beverley.”