Art and Philistinism

Art and Philistinism names a conflict between forms of attention: art makes beauty and meaning perceptible, while conventional respectability measures value through status, utility, and what can be safely possessed. The novel does not leave that opposition in the abstract. It appears in Parisian disputes over painting, in the humiliating authority of an art teacher, in Philip’s encounter with an unfamiliar vision of Toledo, and finally in the deliberate destruction of the objects that had made his modest home his own. Its irony is that art may resist Philistinism, but artistic taste and artistic reputation are themselves entangled with social standing, money, and performance.

Artistic Taste and Social Position

When Philip enters the Latin Quarter, artistic judgment is already a form of affiliation. Impressionism has recently won ground against older schools, and young artists distinguish themselves by taking sides: Carolus-Duran and Bouguereau are set against Manet, Monet, and Degas; Whistler influences English painters; Japanese prints attract connoisseurs; and Raphael, once held in centuries of esteem, becomes a target for fashionable derision. A provocative comparison makes the hierarchy vivid: the young men would surrender Raphael’s works for Velasquez’s portrait of Philip IV at the National Gallery. Art is not simply a collection of masterpieces here; it is a field in which people display that they know how taste is changing.

Philip’s own conversion is both aesthetic education and social transformation. At first he is amazed by the Impressionists; gradually he admires them and argues for Manet, Monet, and Degas as emphatically as his companions. He pins photographs of Ingres’s Odalisque and Manet’s Olympia side by side above his washstand, so that their beauty accompanies the daily act of shaving. His changed taste takes on a visible, almost theatrical form: the bowler hat and neat spotted tie give way to a broad soft hat, flowing black cravat, and romantically cut cape. He learns to drink absinthe without distaste and walks along the Boulevard du Montparnasse as if it had always been familiar. Artistic allegiance becomes a way of inhabiting a new world, though the novel’s description of its fashions also shows how easily cultural distinction can be performed through clothes, habits, and opinions.

That world’s confident judgments have a harsher face in the studio. Fanny Price, who has worked on a drawing since the beginning of the week, asks her teacher, Foinet, to attend to it. In front of Mrs. Otter, he declares the drawing bad, badly drawn, without merit, and wrong throughout; he tells her to tear it up. Fanny is furious not only because her work has been dismissed but because he has humiliated her publicly. She protests that she pays him to teach her and that this is not teaching. The scene exposes an imbalance between the authority of the person who judges and the vulnerable position of the person who has paid to learn: artistic criticism can claim to serve art while becoming an exercise of power.

A different model of art appears in Fanny’s insistence that Philip learn to see. At the Louvre she directs him to Rembrandt’s The Disciples at Emmaus and tells him that feeling its beauty would teach him something about painting. Her instruction is serious, but also peremptory: she tries to compel his admiration and will not let him look freely at the works he prefers. The episode therefore preserves a tension within artistic education. Close attention can awaken perception, yet an imposed canon can itself become restrictive; genuine response cannot simply be ordered into existence.

The Limits of Artistic Authority

The novel refuses to make artistic devotion a guarantee of talent. After Philip has submitted his work and sought an honest judgment, Foinet acknowledges his manual dexterity and says that hard work and perseverance might make him a careful, competent painter. But he sees no talent in what Philip has shown him, and predicts that he will never be more than mediocre. Philip keeps his answer steady and thanks him for taking the trouble. The verdict brings artistic aspiration face to face with a limit that enthusiasm cannot dissolve: discipline may produce competence, while recognition of exceptional ability remains beyond the aspiring artist’s control.

That distinction complicates the romance of art as a refuge from ordinary standards. Artistic institutions and teachers judge work, while artists depend on resources and recognition that do not arise from vision alone. The Paris episodes show aesthetic movements acquiring adherents, reputations, and recognizable styles; Foinet’s criticism shows the individual artist exposed to judgment without assurance of success. Art may challenge conventional taste, but it does not abolish hierarchy. It establishes its own standards and authorities, and those who seek admission to its world remain vulnerable to their decisions.

Philip’s later response to El Greco offers a more unsettling alternative to the realism he has learned to value. Athelny shows him photographs of the painter’s work. Philip is initially troubled by the elongated figures, tiny heads, and extravagant poses, which seem arbitrary and unlike realism. Yet even in reproduction the pictures convey a disturbing reality. He is moved before he can explain why. The scene makes artistic perception an experience that precedes ready-made judgment: Philip does not adopt a position because it is fashionable or because he can immediately translate it into rules; he finds himself confronted by an art that his existing standards cannot contain.

The photograph of Toledo especially arrests him. Its houses crowd a hill; a boy holds a map of the town, the Tagus appears as a classical figure, and the Virgin and angels occupy the sky. Athelny says that the city is represented so precisely that its citizens recognized their houses. Yet Philip feels a reality greater than the realism he had once tried to emulate. The picture’s force lies in the conjunction of exact observation and spiritual vision: the painter, Athelny explains, painted what he saw, but saw with the eyes of the spirit. For Philip, the encounter makes artistic truth larger than literal likeness and opens the possibility that a work can disclose a world ordinary vision would miss.

Respectability, Irony, and Cronshaw

The opposition between art and respectable convention becomes explicit in Leonard Upjohn’s posthumous article about Cronshaw. Upjohn transforms the poet into a picturesque English Verlaine, describing his life in the Latin Quarter and his sordid end in a shabby Soho room. He recounts how a friend tried to move him to a cottage among honeysuckle and an orchard, only for the effort to end instead in the vulgar respectability of Kennington. In Upjohn’s version, Cronshaw’s last weeks expose the well-meaning clumsiness of the young student who has appointed himself his nurse, while the poet’s death among middle-class surroundings becomes an emblem of art’s defeat by Philistia.

The article’s style both strengthens and unsettles its protest. Upjohn makes Cronshaw’s end beautiful through elaborate language: he describes a laurel wreath placed on the dead poet’s heart and hands resting on Apollo’s leaves, then contrasts that imagined dignity with the ordinary, prosaic funeral. He frames the burial as the final victory of Philistia over art, beauty, and immaterial things. Yet his prose also converts Cronshaw into a carefully arranged literary figure, and the article advances Upjohn’s own standing as a critic. Its tenderness may be sincere, but its aesthetic triumph depends on turning a life and death into a persuasive composition. The novel thus makes artistic opposition to Philistinism vulnerable to its own elegant self-display.

This irony matters because respectability is not merely an aesthetic insult; it is a social arrangement that can appear kind and still fail to understand the person it means to help. Upjohn’s account contrasts the proposed cottage with Kennington and the poet’s imagined artistic distinction with the conditions of his actual death. But it is Upjohn who gives that contrast its polished form and public circulation. Art rescues Cronshaw from anonymity by shaping his memory, even as the account risks making his suffering useful to the critic who narrates it.

The Domestic Destruction of Art

The conflict becomes brutally material when Mildred leaves Philip’s home. After their rupture, Philip finds the rooms wrecked, with Mildred gone and the baby’s things removed. Her destruction reaches from ordinary domestic objects to the traces of Philip’s artistic life: Lawson’s portrait of him is cut across; his drawings are torn apart; the photographs of Manet’s Olympia, Ingres’s Odalisque, and the portrait of Philip IV are smashed with blows from a coal-hammer. His books are slashed, pages are torn from the unbound French volumes, and the ornaments on the mantelpiece lie broken. The violence is not an abstract rejection of art. It is a sustained attack on the particular things through which Philip has assembled a life and a home.

The Persian rug receives special emphasis because it holds a meaning Mildred has explicitly rejected. Hanging on the wall above Philip’s desk, it is a small fragment of the rug Cronshaw gave him. Mildred says, "If it's a rug it ought to go on the floor," and calls it a dirty, stinking piece of stuff. She becomes angry when Philip tells her that it contains the answer to a great riddle, taking his explanation for mockery. Now the rug is torn through three times, the knife having required real strength to cut it. The contrast is sharp: for Philip, the fragment carries a question about life; for Mildred, it is a useless and objectionable object. Her attack destroys not only a possession but the material token of an interpretation he has cherished.

The damage also shows why the scene cannot be reduced to a neat opposition between an artist and a philistine. Philip’s possessions were not expensive; everything he owned would have fetched less than thirty pounds. Their worth came from association, from the fact that he had bought some items gradually and had made his small home pretty and characteristic on little money. Mildred’s destruction is devastating because these things mattered to him, not because they possessed a high market price. The episode places artistic value among the intimate attachments of ordinary life, while showing how little protection such value has when another person refuses to recognize it.

After surveying the wreckage, Philip sinks into despair and wonders how Mildred could have been so cruel. The photographs, drawings, rug, plates, books, and furnishings give the loss a visible inventory; their destruction turns a private quarrel into an assault on the world he had made for himself. Yet the scene ends in a further reversal. Once he sees that she has apparently forgotten the cupboard containing his clothes, Philip gets himself food and becomes cooler. Thinking of the child with a pang, he imagines that she may miss him briefly but would soon forget him; he is thankful to be rid of Mildred and feels boredom rather than wrath. Art and domestic attachment have been violated, but his final response is not a renewed idealization of the relationship. The novel’s conflict leaves beauty and meaning vulnerable to material violence, while refusing to pretend that aesthetic ideals can undo the damage or restore love.