TASTES CHANGE

We know already that Women are fickle (La Donna e mobile), but the truth is that all Mankind is fickle and the treasures of yesterday are soon discarded while new favourites flourish. I recall my eye being greatly offended by my first sight of Keble College, Oxford, the St Pancras Station Hotel and the old Prudential building in High Holborn, London. I thought all three were hideous red-brick excrescences, but Betjeman has since educated us to think differently and these buildings are now much cherished Victoriana. Our tastes have been changed.

The Great Hall, Keble College, Oxford

      
The female form, a rather basic element in our lives, has also gone through many a metamorphosis. Did our ancestors really find seductive Rubens’ enormous and sturdy nudes (those thighs!) or presentable the somewhat louche ladies of Boucher?  I guess so, as even in recent times we admired the over-upholstered figures of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. The inevitable reaction was extreme as it brought on the almost anorexic figures of Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly and Twiggy though now the pendulum has swung back to the fleshier pleasures of Anne Hathaway, Jennifer Lopez and Cate Blanchett.

At a more intellectual level, opinions and thought-processes change. The oracles of yester-year, like Matthew Arnold or John Ruskin were derided, whatever their considerable merits, and new arbiters of taste emerged, for example Walter Pater, Bernard Shaw or Lytton Strachey, to be deposed in their turn. Forming or leading opinion is a thankless task, as people move on like bees supping on the next flower’s nectar. I wonder if anyone still reads that fine writer and historian, “the Sage of Ecclefechan” Thomas Carlyle, with his declamatory style, hero-worshipping and profusion of capital letters! The baton of popular cultural leadership has been passed on to the likes of Kenneth Clark, Gore Vidal and Alan Bennett until, inevitably, they too are pronounced old hat.

Thomas Carlyle, the Sage of Ecclefechan

Simply growing older is part of the explanation. As usual Dr Johnson expresses this phenomenon most pithily: “Our tastes greatly alter. The lad does not care for the child’s rattle and the old man does not care for the young man’s whore”. I was bowled over as a teenager by Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye but I was left cold when I re-read it more recently. It had caught wonderfully well a young man’s attitude to life in the 1950s but the moment and the magic have long passed. Many seminal books will share this fate; not least Sir Walter Scott’s, once the wonder of Europe, but whose over-descriptive style and slow plots are not to modern tastes.

Political oratory is an area where tastes change radically. Churchill’s matchless prose reads magnificently but audiences no longer want grandiloquent speechifying. Churchill was also very partisan and had much difficulty winning elections; his rival Stanley Baldwin was polished too but spoke simply of national unity and the end of class conflict. This rang a popular chord and his style was mirrored by the famous radio “fireside chats” that so enhanced FDR’s place in American hearts. Politicians strive now to be “just folks” – something which Margaret Thatcher could not easily master but John Major and George W. Bush got right.

Changing tastes are most evident in the arts. Comedy often does not wear well. Our great-grandparents fell about laughing at Charlie Chaplin. I doubt if many people find him funny now. Even Shakespeare lets us down occasionally – the Porter’s Scene in Macbeth is desperately unamusing. The brittle comedies of Noel Coward have lost their vogue but that much neglected but workmanlike playwright Terence Rattigan has enjoyed a series of well-deserved revivals in London. Pre-Raphaelite painters have fluctuated too in the public’s affection and are now a bull market while the manic saleroom stars like Pablo Picasso (Nude, Green Leaves and Bust went for $106m) or Gustav Klimt (his Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer fetched $136m) ignore the laws of gravity. Now must be the time to sell your Klimts and Picassos and buy up neglected High Victorians like Lord Leighton, G.F.Watts and William Dyce!

Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt

Yes, our tastes greatly alter. As a Scotsman I love my country and I hugely enjoyed visiting Fingal’s Cave on Staffa. The 18th century explorer Joseph Banks described it as superior to the Louvre Palace, St Peter’s in Rome, Palmyra and anywhere in Classical Greece. Others call it the 8th Wonder of the World. All this is totally disproportionate hyperbole in my view – or must I change my tastes?


SMD
17.04.12

Text copyright Sidney Donald 2012