The new century
In 1895 George Bernard Shaw said: “France is certainly decadent if she thinks she is.” The remark is characteristic of Shaw, but it is also indicative of a new wave of energy. From under the despair and decadence, the scattered retreats and the violent nihilism, the same human strength that produced Symbolist and Naturalist art was trying to reshape the civilization that all found so unsatisfactory.
In England, the Fabians, of whom Shaw was one, were preaching the “inevitableness of gradualism” toward the socialist state. It was they, seconded by the growing strength of the trade unions after a spectacular dock strike of 1889, who paved the way to Labour governments and the British welfare state. Throughout Europe, socialism was no longer the creed of a lunatic fringe but was the ideal of many among the masses and the intellectuals. The original fight for liberty and democracy in political action had turned into a fight for economic democracy—freedom from want. Laissez-faire liberalism had turned inside out, and the liberal imagination at work in the many brands of socialism now demanded state interference to remove the appalling conditions causing all the despair.
Arts and Crafts movement
Among the socialists belonging to no party, Ruskin and William Morris worked also to effect immediate changes in the quality of their surroundings: they started the so-called Arts and Crafts movement, whose aim was to make objects once again beautiful. Because machine industry produced only the “cheap and nasty” (as it was commonly called), they tried to produce by hand the cheap and handsome—good furniture, hangings, and household articles; fast dyes of good colour; well-printed books on good paper; and jewelry and ornaments of all kinds that showed visual talent as well as manual skill. In a word, the movement reinstated the ideal of design and succeeded in forcing it on machine industry itself. Within two decades manufacturers began to hire artists as designers, and by 1910 the 20th-century omnipresence of design, from clothes to print and from gadgetry to packaging, was a fait accompli. The visual revolution can be seen easily by looking back with modern eyes to a page of advertising at the turn of the century.
New trends in technology and science
In parallel with the new craftsmanship, the new technology of the 1900s began to give hope of wider improvements. The use and transmission of electric power suggested the possibility of the clean factory, all glass and white tile. Better machines, new materials and alloys, a greatly expanded chemical industry—all supplied more exact, more functional, less hazardous objects of use and consumption, while the application of science to medicine nourished the hope of greatly reducing the physical ills of mankind. Those closest to all these developments were certainly not among the despairers and fugitives from the world. Like all those who struggle successfully with practical difficulties, they were inspirited by what they knew to be demonstrable progress along their chosen lines.
The same outlook animated workers in the natural and social sciences. It was for both a time of transformation, and genuine novelty exerted its usual invigorating effect. From the 1880s onward it had been clear that simple mechanistic explanations based on “dead” matter were inadequate. The Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 had given the coup de grace to the mere push-pull principle by showing that, though light consisted of waves, the waves were not in or of anything, such as the ether, which did not exist. Even earlier, James Clerk Maxwell’s attempt to work out the facts of electromagnetism on Newtonian principles had failed. And on the philosophic front, the notion of natural “laws” was being radically modified by thinkers such as Poincaré, Boutroux, Ernst Mach, Bergson, and William James. All this prepared the ground for the twin revolutions of relativity and quantum theory on which the 20th-century scientific regime is based.
The decline of the machine analogy had its counterpart in the biological sciences. With narrow Darwinian dogmas in abeyance, the genetics of Gregor Mendel were rediscovered, and a new science was born. The fixity of species was again regarded as important (Bateson), while the phenomenon of large mutations (de Vries) caught the public imagination, just as the slow, small changes had done 60 years earlier. The elusive “fitness of the environment” was being considered of as much importance in the march of evolution as the fitness of the creature. Vitalism once more reasserted its claims, as it seems bound to do in an eternal seesaw with mechanism.
The social sciences
Finally, in the social sciences, fresh starts were made on new premises. Anthropology dropped its concern with physique and race and turned to “culture” as the proper unit of scientific study. Similarly in sociology, Durkheim, seconded by Tönnies, Weber, Tarde, and Le Bon, concentrated on “the social fact” as an independent and measurable reality equivalent to a physical datum. Psychology, also long under the exclusive sway of physics and physiology, now established at the hands of William James that the irreducible element of its subject matter was the “stream of consciousness”—not a compound of atomized “ideas” or “impressions” or “mind-stuff” but a live force in which image and feeling, subconscious drive and purposive interest, were not separable except abstractly. A last domain of research was mythology, to the significance of which James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough gave massive witness, thereby exerting proportional influence on literature and criticism.
Reexamination of the universe
The net effect of these innovations in the sciences of man and of nature was liberating. Whatever each specialty or subspecialty meant to its practitioners, the persons who carry in their minds the general culture of an age took the new message to mean that the universe, formerly closed and complete like a machine, had been reopened and shown to be more alive than dead—and by the same token more mysterious, full of questions to be resolved by new research and new sciences. The term astrophysics, replacing astronomy, symbolized the change of perspective from Newton’s cosmology to Einstein’s. In turn, these conclusions furnished a new opportunity for the exercise of individual thought and will in the realm of mind and spirit, of ethics and religion. Man was no longer deemed an automaton, he had free choice in the all-important matters that lay outside physical science.
In philosophy, politics, and criticism this reexamination may be called the pragmatic revolution; in social and moral life, the liquidation of Victorianism. But the Pragmatic Revolution must not be thought of as being only the work of those who, like James, called themselves pragmatists. Nietzsche, Samuel Butler, Shaw, Bergson, and others constitute the headwaters of the stream of thought that issues in present-day existentialism. The common features are the turning away from absolutes and unities to pluralisms and the method of testing by consequences. Subjective and objective tests looking to future thought and action—not authority or antecedents—are to decide what is true, good, and beautiful.
Such an outlook, of which the refinements are, like the defects, beyond the scope of this article, is the logical and appropriate one for an age of reconstruction. It boils down to trying all things new and holding fast to that which is good; but it presupposes the creation of new things to try, and here it is allied to the liquidation of Victorianism. In morals the work of destruction generally begins by affirming the opposite of the accepted rule. An excellent source book for this attitude is Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, written in 1885 but not published until 1903. The Victorian Tennyson had said: “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Butler said: “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.” This inversion of values—don’t weep over loss; there are plenty of loves to be had and the more the merrier—is but an indication of method. At first the denial was uttered as humour and paradox: Butler’s Note-books, Shaw’s Arms and the Man (the soldier wants chocolate, not ammunition), Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Jarry’s Ubu roi, Strindberg’s tragicomedies—to cite but a few subverters of the Victorian—all used derision and topsy-turviness to make their point.
Underneath the joke was the new purpose, which soon found open expression in positive utterance and action. In the plays of Hauptmann and Brieux, the novels and anticipations of H.G. Wells, the essays of Tolstoy, Péguy, Georges Sorel, Ellen Key, Havelock Ellis, Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, or Shaw, the new modes of feeling and the new scale of virtues and vices are set forth with as much earnestness and vigour as the old Victorian kind.
Nor did action wait until all the books were out. From the onset of the overturn, say 1885 onward, the rebellion was a biographical fact. Individuals braved public opinion and got divorced, lived together unmarried, practiced and preached contraception, studied the psychology of sex, and defended homosexuality. Or again, the sons of the rich turned socialist, became labour leaders, and fomented syndicalist (i.e., direct-action) strikes, while the daughters demanded the vote as suffragists, assaulted policemen, and went to jail for chaining themselves to the door handles of government offices. Meanwhile, students rioted about international incidents or university affairs; schools were subjected to the devastation of the softer pedagogies; “rational clothing” exhibited itself in spite of derision, like the bicycle and the newfangled automobile; and new cults multiplied like mushrooms—outdoor sports, nudism, Theosophy, Esoteric Buddhism, Rosicrucianism, New Thought, the Society for Psychical Research, Christian Science, the Salvation Army, and the “Maximinism” of Stefan George.
Of these, hardly any need explanation here. But a word must be added about Theosophy if only because of its historical importance in developing Yeats’s genius and for expressing once again the attraction that the “wisdom of the East” has for Westerners. Not that the doctrine elaborated by Madame Blavatsky rested on any exact knowledge of Hindu religion and philosophy. That is not its point. The point is rather that Theosophy supplied the need for quietude, mystery, transcendence, and immortality in the wearied souls of Europeans. In Theosophy the doctrine of reincarnation offers satisfaction of immortal longings and inspires to wisdom, the demands of which are periodically revealed by mahatmas, or holy men.
As for the poet Stefan George’s worship of his young friend Maximin, who died at age 15, it answers a similar impulse to permanent truth but with the additional urge to abolish (rather than escape) “contemporary materialism.” George was but one among many European writers who wanted to found a new society in place of the actual one. What has fitly been called the politics of cultural despair fastened on a great many saviours as the new hope—monarchy, “integral nationalism,” a new aristocracy (usually tinged with intellect), technocracy (rule by science and the engineers), the proletariat (in syndicalist “cells” or communist collectives), trade and professional guilds federated in a corporate state, or again the mystic unity of “blood” and “race.” In all these creeds, at least at their beginnings, the thirst for the ideal is evident; together they formed a new utopianism, of which the later fruits are familiar but quite other than those predicted: Soviet and Chinese communism, Italian fascism, German National Socialism. As the 20th century ends, the echoes and offshoots of this earlier wave of cultist thought are found in many places. Attitudes and practices derived from the East (Zen, Yoga, meditation) are taken for granted as permanent elements of Western pluralist culture, part of the broad offering of “life-styles.”
In one country, as the 19th century passed into the 20th, all the violent rival energies seeking an ideal found an unexpected outlet. The occasion for battle was the conviction of a French officer for espionage; i.e., the Dreyfus affair. Its cultural suggestiveness is apparent: on one side, the ideal of justice and the regard for the individual as an end in himself; on the other, the social or collective ideal typified by the army and the nation; throughout, the ideal of truth—the facts—pursued, lost, and found again in an embittered struggle that threw up a host of endemic prejudices—about race, about class, for and against intellect—to say nothing of individual egotisms and obsessions that had been charged with the force of pent-up aggression.