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Page 19 text:
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Page 18 text:
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FOREWORD, 18S5 — the facade of reactionary serenity which the Congress of Vienna had so carefully pieced together, which the absolutism of monarchs so brutally preserved, and which the socially-acccptahlc artists so piously echoed, was slowly but continually being weakened. The ideals of the French Revolution were neither forgotten by the nationalists nor forgiven by the imperialists. It was a time of revolution. The whole of the year of 1818 had been given over to political upheaval. The university students, the political radical, even some of the more liberal nobles, had risen against the autocracy of the kings. Politically, the revolutions were a failure; but even their very failure could only etch more sharply in the mind the fact that old ways and old peoples would either have to answer the question of the young, or be themselves destroyed. All of the arts were involved in this time of revolution: yet their revolution was only in part of a political nature. The great movement in vogue, romanticism, was an intensely personal form which treated solely of the individual and his communication with reality. The freedom of the individual was the very basis of the romantic credo which led the artist to create works of art solely to express himself, and not merely to conform to a particular. The fashionable painters of this time, the habitues of the Salon and the Royal Academy, found themselves being challenged by such radicals as Turner. Manet. The latter dared to show that all in the world was not pretty and moral. So even while the Messoniers and Bourgereaus painted their pleasant, socially-accepted pictures of so-cially-acceptabic scenes, there was a rising tide of young painters who dared to taint what they saw, not merely what they were expected to see. Romanticism was even stronger in music. Liszt. Wagner, Berlioz, and the intensely patriotic Chopin, created floods of untrammeled, deeply personal sound, which made the listener sharply aware of his emotions. The intense Polish essence of Chopin’s music made him a rallying-center not only for lovers of Poland, but for all devotees of freedom. It was commonly recognized that the Wagner operas were teeming with revolutionary sentiments, and that their creator himself was a dangerous political radical. 14
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Page 20 text:
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Literature was an even stronger social force. The Victorian novels, behind their facade of seemingly tacit confirmation of Her Majesty’s benevolent rule, were powerful documents of social criticism and judgment. With the French novelists — Balzac, Hugo, Stendhal — the novel was a great weapon for a stinging denunciation of corrupt society. Poetry of the romantic age. as far back as Shelley, was a continuous cry for freedom. Then, too, poets such as Foe and Baudelaire were telling society of emotions of which it preferred to pretend ignorance. Religion was torn by modernism, rationalism. Its only answer to all of these objections seemed to be a reaffirmation of conservatism and reaction, which answers failed to crush the ever-mounting tide of question and doubt. Hegel. Marx, and soon Darwin, in their analysis of man in all of his ramifications, bewildered the European by their deft and complete revision of early notions, of everything which in former times had been accepted as correct. This was the age of revolution in Europe. Man was not content to purchase bread at the price of freedom. It was an age of questions which demanded answers, of answers whose application frightened the mind. On the other side of the world lay America, still swathed in the comfortable provinciality which was as yet untroubled by great revolutions. In New England, the country’s only intellectual area, there were great minds who were aware of the revolutions in Europe. Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott all knew of German transcendentalism, and were heavily influenced by it. The curious Utopian experiment at Brooke Farm saw the New England intellectuals milking cows in the morning and reading Aristotle at night. And then there was the unique genius of Thoreau: at Walden Pond he pondered on the individual and his relation to society. But, save for these intellectual islands, the rest of America cared little for Europe and its new ideas of revolution. Vet America itself was in the throes of great movement. The discovery of gold in California forced that long-dormant region into a lusty and bustling life. Its past Spanish glory was only a dim memory. The missions of the Franciscans and the Jesuits, the glamorous California of the Spanish haciendas, had disappeared with the political dissolution from Spain. The secularization of many of the. missions had precipitated the state into a soporific coma from which only the coming of the lively Americans could raise it. But in 1855, life had roared back into California. Life was disordered, in great part purposeless, and had only the most flimsy of motives: but it was nevertheless life. The hunger for gold was only the cause by which California began to grow. For the few who found it, their search was a cause for rejoicing; for the many who failed, it was imperative, for the sake of survival, to chart a new life in a new land. Of the needs faced by these people, education was one of the most pressing. And it is in this that the Jesuits and the embryonic University of San Francisco enter history. 16
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