“Sketch in the Lobby of the House of Commons” 1881
I do not doubt
that I have been, out of my hearing, called a snob. I would much rather attend the Metropolitan
Opera than the Superbowl, and, in fact, I have never in my adult life watched
any sporting event. I could not name a
single tune of Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, yet I could easily distinguish Mozart
from Brahms. I have read three dozen
books by Trollope and none by Stephen King. I have visited Kathmandu yet never mean to set
foot in Epcot Center. Am I here strutting
or simply stating facts? Do these
preferences make me a snob?
Perhaps the court
of my gentle readers could use more evidence.
If I am to be deemed a snob, I must have achieved that status as early
as my teen-age years. In my freshman
year of high school we read Great Expectations, but our class was given
a shortened version, which I spurned.
For several weeks I, probably with a degree of ostentation, carried a
fat unabridged edition. During my junior
year, the literature textbook [1] contained a photo essay on Richard Wilbur,
whom I have always admired as a virtuoso poet and a skilled translator, but I
saw that the editor’s goal in featuring him was quite clearly to demystify his
arcane profession by depicting a fairly young, rather good-looking, casually
dressed writer in a cardigan sweater who
would not put off the young. Does my
feeling patronized by this appeal constitute snobbery?
Art museums at
one time displayed the visual art of the past with considerable dignified
reserve, only labeling works with title, artist’s name, and perhaps a date. Once these institutions conceived the ambition of increasing their appeal to
the general public, they began adding further information, historical,
biographical, and interpretive. Like textbook introductions to poems, such
editorial additions may have aided some, but at the cost of substituting the
predigested views of accepted experts for the viewer’s or reader’s direct and
spontaneous responses. Then, perhaps
with the 1972 show The Treasures of Tutankhamen in the British Museum
which reached the Metropolitan in New York in 1976, was born the blockbuster
show with its greatly expanded publicity expenditures followed by even greater
revenues. King Tut’s free publicity even reached Saturday Night Live
where it inspired Steve Martin’s amusing song about “the boy king.” Those with a genuine interest in ancient art
noticed that a new profit-oriented, business-based model had replaced the
earlier aims of education and scholarship.
According to the New
York Times eighty percent of visitors to the Louvre come to see the Mona
Lisa [2]. I can personally report that once they have entered the room
these tourists do not even study the painting. Instead, standing shoulder to
shoulder, they take selfies of themselves trying to capture Leonardo’s work in
the background, presumably to prove to their skeptical friends that they actually
made the trip. Is it snobbish to think that these people are getting no
experience of art whatsoever and would have a better time at Disneyland Paris?
Turning to music,
for the past week and a half I have been attending the Bravo!Vail music
festival. The program includes celebrated performers, a good admixture of old and new music, and an
admirable inclusion of non-white musicians and composers. Yet, in pursuit of
larger audiences, the organizers have also included such programs as a showing
of The Princess Bride with the Dallas Symphony playing the soundtrack, then
another evening devoted to movie music, and, far worse, an entire program in
which a reduced corps of orchestral musicians aided by rock performers sang pop
songs of the ‘80s. Such programs scarcely display the classical performers’
skills. The semi-orchestral arrangements of top forty songs are surely no
improvement over the original versions. I do concede that the music of movie
composers like John Williams at least potentially deserves a place in the
concert hall, but I suspect their place in the program was motivated less by
the value of their work than by the artistic director’s ambition to sell tickets
to people who liked Stars Wars
and Jurassic Park. The kids in the audience who were waving their light
sabers are not, I think, more likely to ask their parents to bring them back to
hear Mozart. Does my distaste for the replacement of aesthetic values with
financial ones make me a snob?
As a teen, I was fiercely loyal to “Chicago’s fine arts station” WFMT, often listening with friends and sometimes taping broadcasts of operas or symphonies. The station allowed the inimitable Studs Terkel his Wax Museum, and relaxed its braces for Leadbelly and Tom Lehrer on the Midnight Special every Saturday evening, but concert hall music was central. Now, with classical an ever-declining share of recorded music sales, the far fewer surviving stations playing Bach and Brahms tend to program only single movements while the music occupies ever-decreasing segments of the day. Their standards and their respect for the audience has deteriorated. And in my youth my taste was not so peculiar. A 1955 study of the Minneapolis Symphony (now the Minnesota Orchestra) revealed that the median age of its ticket-buyers was 33, very close that of the nation as a whole, with students making up nearly a quarter of attendees [3]. Now game shows and interviews with pop singers and comedians and endless discussion of the news have supplanted the original cultural role of NPR outlets. One hears virtually no poetry at all on even the best community-supported stations. In spite of radio’s being an ideal medium for the art it has, I suppose, too few enthusiasts to merit inclusion in regular programming when public stations as well as commercial ones are courting numbers.
Something
comparable is seen with public television.
Early PBS shows had been largely those which could not survive in the
marketplace and yet were considered worthy: lessons for GED or
language-learning, music, plays, both classic and modern. Yet these so-called “educational” stations began
to play for a mass audience with soap opera-like features like BBC’s Forsyte
Saga in 1967 which, due to the actors’ accents alone, seemed somewhat
classy.
Higher education has
been similarly degraded. The ignorant
used to complain about professors being evaluated on research rather than on
teaching, but this objection is based on a misconception of the role of
colleges which in fact represent the only place in modern society where
scholars and scientists may pursue new knowledge for its own sake, without
regard to financial considerations. Universities have turned into vocational
schools, with their administrators often welcoming the change in hopes that it
might bring both new tuition-paying students as well as funding from commercial
enterprises, while “impractical” majors like Classics fall to the wayside and
the idea of a liberal education is quite forgotten. My wife accuses me of pretending to
aristocratic values by maintaining that no one should have to be bothered by the
obligation to earn a living through work for wages. I
prefer to think that aesthetic and intellectual pursuits, which are, after all,
ubiquitous in human society, are not elitist, but rather profoundly
popular. The
manipulation of symbols, cognitive exercise in general, is the most
characteristically human of occupations and one of the most pleasurable. Pursuit of knowledge,
like art, is a self-justifying activity. One
knows it is good because it is so achingly beautiful, and one knows beauty
through pleasure, whether contemplating Euclid or Homer, Max Planck or James
Joyce. Yet
the fact remains that many people who are surely in no way less human do not
care to engage with thinkers and artists and might consider those who do
pretentious.
Surely the worst sort of snob is a long-winded
one, and I fear my evidence, whether tending toward guilt or innocence, has
accumulated to a great enough heap, but for any meaningful verdict to be rendered one must first define
the offense. Snobs have been spoken of
for only a few hundred years and the current usage is considerably more
recent. Some authors maintain that the
word arose from the expression “sine nobilitate,” abbreviated “s. nob.,”
which, without evidence, they claim appeared in university records and lists of
ship passengers to indicate people who might be addressed without the use of a
title. Though this ingenious origin has been
disproven, it is not entirely wide of the mark.
Those who were
first called snobs could scarcely have been taken for noble even at first
glance. Francis Grose’s A Classical
Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1785 contains this entry: “Snob, a nick
name for a shoemaker.” Quite likely
the prior and underlying meaning is
simply a person of the lower classes of whom the cobbler was merely
representative, though this can only be speculation about speech unrecorded in
print. A bit of doggerel titled “Epitaph
on a Cobler” from 1790 begins “Here lies poor Bob/ An honest snob.” Cambridge undergraduates around the same time
called the townspeople snobs (while at Oxford the term was cads), rather as if
I and my fellow students at the University of Illinois had referred to the
locals as farmers, whatever their occupation.
Thus from the
start the term was associated with class, though ironically, today it is the
Cambridge students who would be called snobs.
The term was popularized and its meaning altered by Thackery’s Book
of Snobs the title page of which announced that its author was “One of
Themselves,” that is, a snob. Thackery
provided a succinct definition: “He who meanly admires mean things is a
Snob—perhaps that is a safe definition of the character.” In practice, however, he used the term in
several senses. Some of his examples
conform to the early meaning of vulgar or plebeian, for instance the man who
eats peas on a knife or picks his teeth with a fork. Again, to contemporaries it is the diner who
feels superior due to practicing more genteel table etiquette who would be the
snob. Still the enduring comedy of the
practice is suggested by the anonymous verse, variously attributed to Edward
Lear, Spike Milligan, Ogden Nash or Shel Silverstein:
I eat my peas with honey,
I’ve done it all my life;
It makes the peas taste funny,
But it keeps them on the knife.
Yet Thackery
extended the word’s meaning from working class people to those of the middle
class who, usually incompetently, ape a fashionable lifestyle. Major Ponto and his wife bankrupt themselves by
imitating their “betters.” The author is subjected to their daughters’
incompetent piano-playing. The Pontos relish the company of the disagreeable
Lord Gules because of his aristocratic birth and the family us financially
ruined by their son’s expenditures to maintaining an upper-class facade.
There remained
only one further twist to bring the current sense of the word. Today one may properly be called a snob if
one feels that one’s possessions, material, intellectual, or even spiritual,
make one superior to those less gifted.
Looking down on others is an error of taste, it is unseemly, and
constitutes the real heart of true snobbery.
The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest example of this barbed
sort of snobbery has to do not with financial or aesthetic but rather religious
one-upmanship, citing Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma (1911): “All her
childish affectations of conscientious scruple and religious impulse have been
applauded and deferred to until she has become an ethical snob of the first
water.”
The sense of
sharpness that soon accumulated around this sort of disdain is exemplified by
Orwell’s relentless experience of his wealthier classmates’ contempt as
scholarship boy in a prestigious school.
“I suppose,” he comments, “there is no place in the world where snobbery
is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle
forms as in an English public school.” [4] Yet he noted a sort of snobbery as well among
waiters who identify with their genteel clientele and even among tramps who wish to let everyone know
that they had “come down in the world.” [5]
I might defend
myself by claiming my fondness for the films of Chaplin and the Marx brothers,
the cartoons of Winsor McKay and of George Herriman, and the music of Louis
Armstrong and Duke Ellington, but all of these are artists who, though they
worked in popular genres, are applauded by intellectuals. My cousin compiles evidence on the considerable
role of people with my surname in Scottish history, but a coat of arms has no significance
for me. I curse neckties and find my
wardrobe in the Salvation Army, but I am
afraid I might here approach a form of inverted snobbery which has surely a
different meaning entirely.
I must fall back
in then end on my insistence that I feel no shadow of superiority to those of
differing tastes. Unfortunately, the
best support for this claim is subjective.
I can only depend on what I may hope is a reputation for broad sympathies,
extending to all those who have found a way to agreeably pass the day on this
black earth, whether it be among those who relish Taylor Swift or Stravinsky,
Hamburger Helper or bouillabaisse, Star Trek or Wallace Stevens. If
I have failed to convey my appreciation for the myriad sorts of sensibilities
that flourish in our species, my readers may be assured that I embrace those who
fancy professional wrestling no less than those with a taste for Noh drama. Perhaps we potential snobs not only cultivate
special tastes; we may be a special taste as well and attract only those
who will be amused by our affectations.
Let each enjoy what is found to be enjoyable, whether it be playing at
being a snob or laughing at those who do.
1. New York Times,
Jan. 28, 2025, “Mona Lisa to Get Her Own Room as the Overcrowded Louvre Expands.”
2. I think it may
have been Norman Foerster’s American Poetry and Prose, but I am uncertain.
3. Greg Sandow, “Age
of the Audience, Once More,” Arts Journal Blog for December 18, 2007, at
artsjournal.com.
4. The Road to Wigan
Pier (1958), p. 169.
5. Down and Out
in P:aris and London (1933), p. 89.
No comments:
Post a Comment