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FROM DAWN TO 
DECADENCE 



1500 to the Present 



500 Years of 
Western Cultural Life 



ACQUES BARZU 






"Jacques Barzun's summa is the work of a very great historian and of a seer. 
The phrase from the Bible is apposite: 'The hearing ear, and the seeing eye' is his great 
gift — and a gift to his readers." 

— JOHN L.UKACS, author of Five Days in London, May 1 940 

"This astonishing and monumental work may fairly take its place alongside Gibbon, and for 
much the same array of qualities: a majestic view of five hundred years of history, done in 
great style, with vast erudition and a continuously entertaining idiosyncrasy of judgment." 

— Alistair Cooke 

"A conversational tour de force. . . . To every one of these pages Barzun brings a quiet good 
sense, a more than encyclopedic knowledge, and an unfailing indignation at opportunities 
lost and ideals betrayed. On almost every page he makes sure that other voices are heard, 
from Martin Luther, Erasmus, and Montaigne to Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, and Andy 
Warhol. . . . This book is what used to be called a 'liberal education,' and it should bring that 
phrase back into favor." 

— JOHN RUSSELL, author of Matisse: Father & Son and London 

"To define Western culture is the most delicate and difficult of aU operations. Jacques 
Barzun is one of the most cultivated exemplars of Western civilization and his book 
contains the experience and the reflection of a lifetime. He tells us not to> judge past 
centuries by our standards and to recognize that, however different, those centuries have 
made us what we are." 

— Noel Annan, author of Our Age 

"From Dawn to Decadence is a personal, witty, learned, bold, and above all wise retrospect of 
the past half . . . millennium. One will read it through with mounting interest, and then go 
back again and again to savor favorite parts of it." 

— GERTRUDE HimmELFARB, author of One Nation } Two Cultures 

"This masterful, provocative, and highly readable assessment of the last half-millennium of 
Western culture is the perfect antidote to the dumbed-down consumerism of our times. It is 
hard to imagine anyone other than Jacques Barzun as the writer of this engaging history, 
Reading it is akin to participating in a fast-paced seminar with one of the liveliest and best 
informed minds of the day." 

— DIANE RaViTCH, New York University 



ISBN 




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5 3 6 



9"780060"175863 




USA $36.00 

CANADA $54.50 



[A] stunning five-century study of 
civilizations cultural retreat" 
— WILLIAM SaFIRE, New York Times 



Highly regarded here and abroad for some thirty works of 
cultural history and criticism, master historian Jacques Barzun 
has now set down in one continuous narrative the sum of his 
discoveries and conclusions about the whole of Western culture 
since 1500. 

In this account, Barzun describes what Western Man 
wrought from the Renaissance and Reformation down to the 
present in the double light of its own time and our pressing 
concerns. He introduces characters and incidents with his usual 
literary style and grace, bringing to the fore those that have 
been forgotten or obscured. His compelling chapters — such as 
"Puritans as Democrats," "The Monarchs' Revolution," "The 
Artist Prophet and Jester" — show the recurrent role of great 
themes throughout the eras. 

The triumphs and defeats of five hundred years form an 
inspiring saga that modifies the current impression of one long 
tale of oppression by white European males. Women and their 
deeds are prominent, and freedom (even in sexual matters) is 
not an invention of the last decades. And when Barzun rates 
the present not as a culmination but a decline, he is in no way a 
prophet of doom. Instead, he shows decadence as the normal 
close of great periods and a necessary condition of the creative 
novelty that will burst forth — tomorrow or the next day. 

Only after a lifetime of separate studies covering a broad 
territory could a writer create with such ease the synthesis 
displayed in this magnificent volume. 



0600 



"Jacques Barzun was born to write this book, but he could not possibly 
have written it when he was fifty. It is a masterwork that required a 
master: a man whose entire life has been spent acquiring the perspective 
that only wisdom, and not mere knowledge, can grant. Thank heaven he 
has lived long enough to complete a book no one else could even have 
begun." — ANNE FaDIMAN, editor of The American Scholar 

"What has been the value, to the world, of the American Revolution of 
the 1770s? And of the French Revolution that began in 1789? Jacques 
Barzun has addressed these questions, and the questions which these 
questions raised, repeatedly — in an extraordinary series of books (not to 
mention his lectures, informal talks, and conversations) over the course 
of half a century and more. . . . No one else could put together such a 
rich and diverse summing-up of everything as From Dawn to Decadence," 

— ERIC BENTLEY, author of The Playwright as Thinker 

"This is an extraordinary book. Jacques Barzuns erudition is unrivaled in 
its comprehensiveness and penetration. No one else could have deployed 
such erudition over a half-millennium of history with such clarity, grace, 
narrative drive, and constant and illuminating insight. More than ever it 
is clear that Jacques Barzun is one of the greatest cultural treasures of 
our time." 

— JOHN SlLBER, chancellor, Boston University 

"Jacques Barzun has not just studied European culture; he has lived it, 
with rare intensity. This book is the summa of his historical teaching, 
for everyman. Four great eras since the Renaissance provide its frame. 
Within it, sustaining the themes of social and intellectual concerns that 
link the eras with each other, there throng the myriad creative 
individuals — artists and intellectuals — who have struggled to give shape 
and meaning to our restless, dynamic culture. Drawing on his personal 
encounters with them all in his life of learning, Barzun has created a vast 
number of miniature portraits which serve him as their many-hued 
stones served the mosaic artists of Byzantium: to give vital substance and 
color to their grand designs. An extraordinary work." 

— Carl E. SchORSKE, Princeton University Emeritus 

Born in France in 1907, JACQUES BARZUN came 
to the United States in 1920. After graduating 
from Columbia College, he joined the faculty of 
the university, becoming Seth Low Professor of 
History and, for a decade, Dean of Faculties and 
Provost. The author of some thirty books, he 

received the Gold Medal for Criticism from the American Academy of 

Arts and Letters, of which he was twice president. 

Jacket design © 2000 by Marc Cohen 

Jacket photograph by Erich testing/ Art Resource 

Author photograph courtesy of Jacques Barzun 

HarperCollinsP#&/*s/?ers 

www.harpercollins.com 




FROM DAWN 
TO DECADENCE 



Other Books by Jacques Barzun 

Race: A Study in Superstition 

Darwin Marx Wagner 

Classic Romantic and Modern 

Berlio^ and the Romantic Century 

The Energies of Art 

The House of Intellect 

Science the Glorious Entertainment 

The Use and Abuse of Art 

Clio and the Doctors 

Critical Questions 

A Stroll with William James 

The Culture We Deserve 



FROM DAWN TO 
DECADENCE 



500 Years of Western 
Cultural Life 

1500 to the Present 



JACQUES BARZUN 



HarperCollins/^/w/jm 



FROM DAWN TO DECADENCE. Copyright © 2000 by Jacques Barzun. All rights reserved. 
Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in 
any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations 
embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers 
Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022. 

HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. 
For information please write: Special Markets Department, HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 10 
East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022. 

FIRST EDITION 

Designed by Nancy B. Field 

Printed on acid-free paper 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for. 

ISBN 0-06-017586-9 

00 01 02 03 04 ♦/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 



To All 

Whom 

It May Concern 



Contents 



Author's Note • ix 

Prologue: 

From Current Concerns 

to the Subject of This Book • xiii 

Part I: 
From Luther's Ninety-five Theses 
to Boyle's "Invisible College" • 1 

Part II: 

From the Bog and Sand of Versailles 

to the Tennis Court • 237 

Part III: 

From Faust, Part I, to the 

"Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2" • 463 

Part IV: 

From "The Great Illusion" 

to "Western Civ Has Got to Go" • 681 

Reference Notes • 803 
Index of Persons • 829 
Index of Subjects • 853 



Author's Note 



It TAKES only a look at the numbers to see that the 20th century is coming 
to an end. A wider and deeper scrutiny is needed to see that in the West the 
culture of the last 500 years is ending at the same time. Believing this to be 
true, I have thought it the right moment to review in sequence the great 
achievements and the sorry failures of our half millennium. 

This undertaking has also given me a chance to describe at first hand for 
any interested posterity some aspects of present decadence that may have 
escaped notice, and to show how they relate to others generally acknowl- 
edged. But the lively and positive predominate: this book is for people who 
like to read about art and thought, manners, morals, and religion, and the 
social setting in which these activities have been and are taking place. I have 
assumed that such readers prefer discourse to be selective and critical rather 
than neutral and encyclopedic. And guessing further at their preference, I 
have tried to write as I might speak, with only a touch of pedantry here and 
there to show that I understand modern tastes. 

Because the plan of the work is new, and thus unlike that of excellent his- 
tories that might be named, special care has been given to the ordering of the 
parts. Linking is particularly important in cultural history, because culture is a 
web of many strands; none is spun by itself, nor is any cut off at a fixed date 
like wars and regimes. Events that are commonly said to mark novelty in 
thought or change of direction in culture are but emphatic signposts, not 
boundary walls. I punctuate the course of my narrative with events of that 
kind, but the divisions do not hang upon them. Rather, the chapter divisions 
suggested themselves after rethinking the given past to find in it the clearest 
patterns. They are framed by the four great revolutions — the religious, 
monarchical, liberal, and social roughly a hundred years apart — whose aims 
and passions still govern our minds and behavior. 



* 
* * 



x <^> Author's Note 

During the writing of this book I was frequently asked by friends and col- 
leagues how long its preparation had taken. I could only answer: a lifetime. My 
studies of separate periods and figures, which began in the late 1920s, disclosed 
unexpected vistas and led to conclusions at variance with a number of accepted 
judgments. After further study and a review of what I had published, it seemed 
possible to shape my findings into a continuous tale. In it, as will appear, figures 
worth knowing emerge from obscurity and new features appear in others. 
Familiar ideas are reassessed, particularly the notions in vogue today as to 
where in the past our present merits and troubles come from. 

I do not expect the reader to be steadily grateful. Nobody likes to hear a 
rooted opinion challenged, and even less to see good reasons offered for a 
principle or policy once in force and now universally condemned — for exam- 
ple, the divine right of kings or religious persecution. Our age is so tolerant, 
so broad-minded and disinclined to violence in its ideologies, that to find a 
case made out for the temper of the 1 6th or 1 7th century is bound to affront 
the righteous. Yet without exposure to this annoyance, one's understanding 
of our modern thoughts and virtues is incomplete. 

Not that I am in favor of royal masters or persecution or any other evil 
supposedly outgrown. I cite these examples as a hint that I have not consulted 
current prejudices. My own are enough to keep me busy as I aim at the histo- 
rian's detachment and sympathy. For if, as Ranke said, every period stands jus- 
tified in the sight of God, it deserves at least sympathy in the sight of Man.* 

Claiming detachment need not raise the issue of objectivity. It is waste of 
breath to point out that every observer is in some way biased. It does not fol- 
low that bias cannot be guarded against, that all biases distort equally, or that 
controlled bias remains as bad as propaganda. In dealing with the arts, for 
example, it is being "objective" to detect one's blind spots — step one in detach- 
ment. The second is to refrain from downgrading what one does not respond 
to. One has then the duty to report the informed judgment of others. 

Since some events and figures in our lengthy past strike me as different 
from what they have seemed before, I must occasionally speak in my own 
name and give reasons to justify the heresy. I can only hope that this account- 
ability will not tempt some reviewers to label the work "a very personal 
book." I would ask them, What book worth reading is not? If Henry Adams 
were the echo of Gibbon, we would not greatly value the pastiche. 

On this point of personality, William James concluded after reflection 
that philosophers do not give us transcripts but visions of the world. 
Similarly, historians give visions of the past. The good ones are not merely 

* "Man" is used throughout in the sense of human being(s) of either sex, except when the con- 
text makes it clear that the secondary sense of male is intended. The scholarly reasons that war- 
rant adhering to this literary usage are set out on pages 82-85. 



Author's Note <^> xi 

plausible; they rest on a solid base of facts that nobody disputes. There is 
nothing personal about facts, but there is about choosing and grouping them. 
It is by the patterning and the meanings ascribed that the vision is conveyed. 
And this, if anything, is what each historian adds to the general understand- 
ing. Read more than one historian and the chances are good that you will 
come closer and closer to the full complexity. Whoever wants an absolute 
copy of what happened must gain access to the mind of God. 

Speaking of meanings, I must say a word about the devices and symbols 
used in the text; and first about the role of the quotations in the margins. They 
are meant to supply the "real self and voice" of the persons in the drama. In 
form, these extracts resemble the familiar "pull-outs" in magazines — sentences 
lifted out of the article to lure the reader. In this book they are not pull-outs but 
"add-ins." Their insertion without preamble helps to shorten the text by dis- 
pensing with the usual: "As Erasmus wrote to Henry VIII, ..." "As Mark Twain 
said about Joan of Arc, . . ."; after which, more words are needed to sew up the 
cut. This small innovation also permits juxtaposition for contrast or emphasis. 
By the end, the reader may find that he has been treated to an anthology of 
choice morsels. 

Likewise for brevity, I use the formula 1 6C, 1 9C, and so on for the quick 
recognition of centuries. The indications early ', mid, or late next to these spec- 
ify times more closely. There are as few multi-digit dates as possible, because 
persons, works, and events do not modify culture the moment they enter it. 
Readers who wish precise limits to the lives of culture-makers will find the 
birth-and-death dates opposite the names in the Index of Persons. 

Another device that calls for comment is my use of THEMES, that is, ideas 
or purposes that I find recurring throughout the era. The ideas are expressed, 
the purposes are implied in the event or tendency I describe. I shall say more 
about the nature and scope of themes on a later page. 

As an additional help to seeing wholes, the mark (<) or (>) with a number 
attached directs the reader to a page where the topic is carried forward or has 
been introduced. For further light from other minds, I insert from time to time: 
"The book to read is . . ." such and such. These are almost always short books. 
When the phrase is: "The book to browse in is . . ." it indicates a longer work 
which is worth sampling. These referrals seem to me more likely to be service- 
able than the usual list of titles at the back "for further reading." A good many 
of these books are not of recent date, which does not make them any less infor- 
mative and pleasant to read. It is a false analogy with science that makes one 
think latest is best. No footnotes will be found except the one above. Source 
references (when needed) are in the backnotes, marked (°) in the text. 

* 
* * 



xii q^> Author's Note 

Although in the usual author- fashion I speak possessively of what this 
book contains, it is in truth the product of a vast collaboration. When I think 
of all that I have garnered from other minds in my extended sojourn, of what 
I owe to reading, to my teachers, to conversation with students, colleagues, 
friends, and strangers; to travel, to the artists who have exercised my wits and 
delighted my soul since infancy, I am overwhelmed by the size of the debt. To 
list the names of these helpers would amount to a directory, but again and 
again as I wrote I vividly recalled my obligation. 

Chance has also aided the enterprise: family, time, and place of birth gave 
shape and direction to effort; insomnia and longevity — sheer accidents — 
helped to crystallize fleeting insights by obsessive recurrence. A student of 
cultural history is the last person who can believe he is self-made or the sole 
begetter of his most original idea. To quote from William James: "Every 
thought and act owes its complexion to the acts of your dead and living 
brothers." He addressed this reminder to himself; it defines both the situation 
of the candid author and the principle of a work of history. 



PROLOGUE 



From Current Concerns 
to the Subject of This Book 



Looking AT the phrase "our past" or "our culture" the reader is entitled to 
ask: "Who is we?" That is for each person to decide. It is a sign of present dis- 
array that nobody can tell which individuals or groups see themselves as part 
of the evolution described in these pages. 

This state of affairs has its source in that very evolution. Our culture is in 
that recurrent phase when, for good reasons, many feel the urge to build a wall 
against the past. It is a revulsion from things in the present that seem a curse 
from our forebears. Others attack or ignore selected periods. In this latter mood, 
national, religious, or cultural ancestry becomes a matter of choice; people who 
feel the need "dig for roots" wherever they fancy. The storehouse of traditions 
and creeds offers an over-abundance, because the culture is old and unraveling 

This passion to break away explains also why many feel that the West has 
to be denounced. But we are not told what should or could replace it as a 
whole. Anyhow, the notion of western culture as a solid block having but one 
meaning is contrary to fact. The West has been an endless series of opposites — 
in religion, politics, art, morals, and manners, most of them persistent beyond 
their time of first conflict. To denounce does not free the self from what it 
hates, any more than ignoring the past shuts off its influence. Look at the youth 
walking the street with ears plugged to a portable radio: he is tied to the lives of 
Marconi and of the composer being broadcast. The museum visitor gazing at a 
Rembrandt is getting a message from the 17C. And the ardent follower of 
Martin Luther King might well pause over his leader's given names, which 
evoke ideas from the Protestant Reformation and link the 20C to the 16th. 

On the workaday plane, anyone receiving some form of social security 
here or abroad is the beneficiary of a long line of theorists and activists along 
which are found such disparates as Florence Nightingale, the Comte de Saint- 
Simon, Bismarck, and Bernard Shaw The political refugee who finds his host 
nation evidendy more congenial than the one he fled from can now breathe 



xiv z&> Prologue 

freely thanks to the heroic efforts of thousands of thinkers and doers, famous 
or obscure, martyrs or ordinary folk, embatded in the cause of political free- 
dom — though often enemies when so engaged. 

If the new-minted citizen then turns critic of his adopted country, attack- 
ing policies and politicians with impunity, he enjoys this privileged pastime 
because of the likes of Voltaire, who also had to skip across frontiers to escape 
persecution and keep dissenting Even the terrorist who drives a car filled with 
dynamite toward a building in some hated nation is part of what he would de- 
stroy: his weapon is the work of Alfred Nobel and the inventors of the internal 
combustion engine. His very cause has been argued for him by such propo- 
nents of national self-determination as President Wilson and such rationalizers 

of violence as Georges Sorel and 
Mankind does nothing save through initia- Bakunin, the Russian anarchist. 
tives on the part of inventors, great or small, To see these connections is also to 

and imitation by the rest of us. Individuals see that the fruits of western culture — 
show the way, set the patterns. The rivalry of human rights, social benefits, machin- 
the patterns is the history of the world. ery— have not sprouted out of the 

—William James (1 908) ground like weeds; they are the work of 

innumerable hands and heads. 
I have cited famous names, but they had predecessors now forgotten, and 
then followers who harped on one idea until it was made actual at last by the 
consent of the multitude. The enduring force of these deeds is what is meant 
by the living past; they form the substance of what is now called "the culture." 
Culture— what a word! Up to a few years ago it meant two or three 
related things easy to grasp and keep apart. Now it is a piece of all-purpose 
jargon that covers a hodge-podge of overlapping things. People speak and 
write about the culture of almost any segment of society: the counterculture, 
to begin with, and the many subcultures: ethnic cultures, corporate cultures, 
teenage culture, and popular culture. An editorial in The New York Times dis- 
cusses the culture of the city's police department, and an article in the travel 
section distinguishes the culture of plane travel from the bus culture. On a 
par with these, recall the split between the "two cultures" of science and the 
humanities, which is to be deplored — like the man-and-wife "culture clash," 
which causes divorce. Artists feel the lure — no, the duty — of joining an 
adversary culture; for the artist is by nature "the enemy of his culture," just as 
he is (on another page of the same journal) "a product of his culture." In edu- 
cation, the latest fad is multiculturalism, and in entertainment the highest 
praise goes to a "cross-cultural event." On the world scene, the experts warn 
of the culture wars that are brewing. 

At the bottom of the pile, "culture," meaning the well-furnished mind, 
barely survives. Four thousand cultural facts in dictionary form have recently 
been laid on the coffee table, but it may be doubted whether this bonanza 



Prologue <^> xv 

will by itself cultivate the fallow mind, lift it out of day-to-day interests, and 
scrape it free of provincialism. A wise man has said: "Culture is what is left 
after you have forgotten all you have definitely set out to learn." ° How did 
culture in this sense — a simple metaphor from agri-culture — lose its author- 
ity and get burdened with meanings for which there were other good words? 
These mini-cultures created on the spur of the moment are obviously ficti- 
tious. But again, they express the separatism already mentioned. It arises from 
too much jostling with too many people — nothing but constraint at every 
turn, because the stranger, the machine, the bureaucrat's rule impose their 
will. Hence the desire to huddle in small groups whose ways are congenial. 

The hope of relief is Utopian; for these small groups are not independent. 
Their "culture" consists only of local customs and traditions, individual or 
institutional habits, class manners and prejudices, language or dialect, 
upbringing or profession, creed, attitudes, usages, fashions, and superstitions; 
or, at the narrowest, temperament. If a word is wanted for the various pair- 
ings of such elements, there is ethos. The press — not to say the media — with 
their love of new terms from the Greek, could quickly make it commonplace. 

* 
* * 

But what are the contents of the overarching culture? By tracing in broad 
outline the evolution of art, science, religion, philosophy, and social thought 
during the last 500 years, I hope to show that during this span the peoples of 
the West offered the world a set of ideas and institutions not found earlier or 
elsewhere. As already remarked, it has been a unity combined with enormous 
diversity. Borrowing widely from other lands, thriving on dissent and origi- 
nality, the West has been the mongrel civilization par excellence. But in spite 
of patchwork and conflict it has pursued characteristic purposes — that is its 
unity — and now these purposes, carried out to their utmost possibility, are 
bringing about its demise. This ending is shown by the deadlocks of our time: 
for and against nationalism, for and against individualism, for and against the 
high arts, for and against strict morals and religious belief. 

The now full-blown individual wields a panoply of rights, including the 
right to do "his own thing" without hindrance from authority. And any right is 
owed to all that lives: illegal immigrants, school children, criminals, babies, 
plants, and animals. This universal independence, achieved after many battles, 
is a distinctive feature of the West. EMANCIPATION is one of the cultural themes 
of the era, perhaps the most characteristic of all. And of course it requires more 
and more limitations in order to prevent my right from infringing yours. 

- A parallel theme is PRIMITIVISM. The longing to shuffle off the complex 
arrangements of an advanced culture recurs again and again. It is a main 
motive of the Protestant Reformation, it reappears as the cult of the Noble 



xvi <^> Prologue 

Savage, long before Rousseau, its supposed inventor. The savage with his 
simple creed is healthy, highly moral, and serene, a worthier being than the 
civilized man, who must intrigue and deceive to prosper. The late 1 8C returns 
to this Utopian hope; the late 19C voices it in Edward Carpenter's Civilisation: 
Its Cause and Cure; and the 1 960s of the 20C experience it in the revolt of the 
young, who seek the simple life in communes, or who as "Flower People" are 
convinced that love is an all-sufficient social bond. 

Our five centuries present some ten or twelve such themes. They are not 
historical "forces" or "causes," but names for the desires, attitudes, purposes 
behind the events or movements, some embodied in lasting institutions. 
Pointing out this thematic unity and continuity is not to propose a new phi- 
losophy of history in the tradition of Marx, Spengler, or Toynbee. They saw 
history as moved by a single force toward a single goal. I remain an historian, 
that is, a storyteller who tries to unfold the intricate plot woven by the actions 
of men, women, and teenagers (these last must not be forgotten), whose 
desires are the motive power of history. Material conditions interfere, results 
are unexpected, and there can be no single outcome. 

The story accordingly deals not only with events and tendencies but also 
with personalities. The recital is studded with pen portraits — some of the 
presumably well-known, but more often of others too often overlooked. We 
meet of course Luther and Leonardo, Rabelais and Rubens, but also 
Marguerite of Navarre, Marie de Gournay, Christina of Sweden, and their 
peers down the ages. They appear as persons, not merely as actors, for history 
is above all concrete and particular, not general and abstract. It is for conve- 
nient remembering only that in the retelling of many facts the historian offers 
generalities and gives names to "periods" and "themes." The stuff itself is the 
thoughts and deeds of once living beings. 

But why should the story come to an end? It doesn't, of course, in the lit- 
eral sense of stoppage or total ruin. All that is meant by Decadence is "falling 
off." It implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or 
moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, 
but peculiarly resdess, for it sees no clear lines of advance. The loss it faces is 
that of Possibility. The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of 
development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. 
Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are 
great historical forces. 

It will be asked, how does the historian know when Decadence sets in? 
By the open confessions of malaise, by the search in all directions for a new 
faith or faiths. Dozens of cults have latterly arisen in the Christian West: 
Buddhism, Islam, Yoga, Transcendental Meditation, Dr. Moon's Unification 
Church, and a large collection of others, some dedicated to group suicide. To 
secular minds, the old ideals look outworn or hopeless and practical aims are 



Prologue <^> xvii 

made into creeds sustained by violent acts: fighting nuclear power, global 
warming, and abortion; saving from use the environment with its fauna and 
flora ("Bring back the wolf!"); promoting organic against processed foods, 
and proclaiming disaffection from science and technology. The impulse to 
primitivism animates all these negatives. 

Such causes serve to concentrate the desire for action in a stalled society; for 
in every town, county, or nation, it is seen that most of what government sets out 
to do for the public good is resisted as soon as proposed. Not two, but three or 
four groups, organized or impromptu, are ready with contrary reasons as sensi- 
ble as those behind the project. The upshot is a floating hostility to things as they 
are. It inspires the repeated use of the dismissive prefixes anti- vend post- (anti-art, 
post-modernism) and the promise to reinvent this or that institution. The hope is 
that getting rid of what is will by itself generate the new life. 

* 
* * 

Granted for the sake of argument that "our culture" may be ending, why 
the slice of 500 years? What makes it a unity? The starting date 1 500 follows 
usage: textbooks from time immemorial have called it the beginning of the 
Modern Era. Good reasons for so doing will be found on nearly every page 
of the first half-dozen chapters. The reader will note in passing that era is used 
here to mean stretches of 500 years or more — time enough for an evolving 
culture to work out its possibilities^mWor age denotes the shorter distinctive 
spans within an era. 

Strictness on this point helps to clear up the confusion by which "mod- 
ern" has been made to cover both the era since the Middle Ages and the ill- 
defined periods when "modernism" is said to begin — in 1880 or 1900 or 
1920 (>713). The divisions within the modern era will be seen to differ from 
those in college texts, whose subject is general history The cultural perspec- 
tive requires a different patterning. Three spans, each of approximately 125 
years, take us, roughly speaking, from Luther to Newton, from Louis XIV to 
the guillotine, and from Goethe to the New York Armory Show. The fourth 
and last span deals with the rest of our century. 

If this periodizing had to be justified, it could be said that the first period — 
1500-1660 — was dominated by the issue of what to believe in religion; the 
second — 1661-1789 — by what to do about the status of the individual and the 
mode of government; the third — 1790—1920 — by what means to achieve social 
and economic equality. The rest is the mixed consequence of all these efforts. 

What then marks a new age? The appearance or disappearance of partic- 
ular embodiments of a given purpose. Look out of the window: where is the 
town crier?° where are the idlers watching the bear-baiting or laughing at the 
gates of Bedlam, the madhouse? Again, does anyone now use "noble" to 



xviii <^> Prologue 

praise a person or, like Ruskin, to classify types of art? Turn to the dedication 
of a new book: why are there not three or four pages of convoluted flattery 
addressed to a lord? Each of these items now lacking is the token of a change 
in: technology, moral attitudes, social hierarchy, and the support of literature. 

With such things in mind, newspapers are fond of referring to the "dust- 
bin of history," a notion they borrow not from Karl Marx, as they think, but 
from an English writer and member of Parliament, Augustine Birrell. On 
inspection the bin is much less full than is commonly believed. The repeats 
and returns in the last five centuries have been frequent. To cite an example, 
one need only note the present resurgence of intellectual interest in the text 
of the Bible and the life of Jesus. Or consider another survival that could qual- 
ify for the dustbin but has been overlooked: the newspaper column on astrol- 
ogy. The rivalry of patterns rarely ends in a complete victory; the defeated 
survive and keep fighting; there is a perpetual counterpoint. 

Having said all this on the strength of the western experience — its reckless 
inclusion of peoples, outreach for exotic novelties, endless internal conflict of 
leading philosophies, repeated changes deep enough to produce distinct ages — 
it may seem contradictory to speak of one culture flourishing from end to end 
of our half millennium. There is in fact no inconsistency. Unity does not mean 
uniformity, and identity is compatible with change. Nobody doubts the unity of 
the person from babyhood to old age. Again, in a civil war, though all political 
and social bonds are broken, the cultural web is tough and it still links the two 
sides together. Both speak the same language, fight over one set of issues, and 
remember a common past, full of wrongs for one side, seen as rights by the 
other. Both live at the same level of civilization. Family, type of government, 
moral standards remain alike in both. Both use the same weapons, lead their 
armies in similar fashion, wear the same sort of uniform, and in naming ranks 
and carrying flags show that the practice has but a common meaning. 

One last question: do ideas really exert force? Skepticism about their 
influence in history has always appealed to certain temperaments. Says the 
skeptic: "Art and thought should be kept in their proper place. Elizabeth I did 
more to shape the everyday life of a modern Englishman than Shakespeare." 
With a firmer grasp on his example, the critic might have seen that one of 
Elizabeth's chief troubles was how to cope with the threat of ideas, those of 
her newly Protestant subjects, embattled against their Catholic compatriots, 
also acting on ideas. 

Again, if the last five centuries present the spectacle of a single culture, it 
is also because of the tenacious memory, aided by the practice of obsessive 
record-keeping. Our distinctive attitude toward history, our habit of arguing 
from it, turns events into ideas charged with power. And this use of the past 
dates precisely from the years that usher in what is called modern times. 



Part I 

From Luther's Ninety-five Theses 
to Boyle's "Invisible College" 



The West Torn Apart 

The New Life 

The Good Letters 

The "Artist" Is Born 

Cross Section: 
The View from Madrid Around 1540 

The Eutopians 

Epic & Comic, Lyric & Music, Critic & Public 

Cross Section: 
The View from Venice Around 1650 

The Invisible College 



The West Torn Apart 



The Modern Era begins, characteristically, with a revolution. It is com- 
monly called the Protestant Reformation, but the train of events starting early 
in the 1 6C and ending — if indeed it has ended — more than a century later has 
all the features of a revolution. I take these to be: the violent transfer of power 
and property in the name of an idea. 

We have got into the habit of calling too many things revolutions. Given 
a new device or practice that changes our homely habits, we exclaim: "revo- 
lutionary!" But revolutions change more than personal habits or a widespread 
practice. They give culture a new face. Between the great upheaval of the 
1 500s and the present, only three later ones are of the same order. True, the 
history books give the name to a dozen or more such violent events, but in 
these uprisings it was only the violence that was great. They were but local 
aftershocks of one or other of the four main quakes: the 16C religious revo- 
lution; the 17C monarchical revolution; the liberal, individualist "French" 
revolution that straddles the 18th and 19th; and the 20C "Russian," social and 
collectivist. 

The quotation marks around French and Russian are meant to show that 
those names are only conventional. The whole western world was brooding 
over the Idea of each before it exploded into war, and the usual dates 1789 
and 1917 mark only the trigger incidents. It took decades for the four to work 
out their first intention and side effects — and their ruling ideas have not 
ceased to act. 

One must speak of the West as being torn apart in the 16C because Europe 
would be inexact. Europe is the peninsula that juts out from the great mass of 
Asia without a break and is ridiculously called a continent. In the 16C revolu- 
tion only the westernmost part of that peninsula was affected: from 
Germany, Poland, Austria, and Italy to the Adantic Ocean. The Balkans 
belonged to the Moslem Turks and Russia was Orthodox Christian, not 
Catholic. For the West, in this clearly defined sense, it would be convenient to 
say "the Occident." 



4 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

To call the first of the four revolutions religious is also inadequate. It did 
indeed cause millions to change the forms of their worship and the concep- 
tion of their destiny. But it did much besides. It posed the issue of diversity of 
opinion as well as of faith. It fostered new feelings of nationhood. It raised 
the status of the vernacular languages. It changed attitudes toward work, art, 
and human failings. It deprived the West of its ancestral sense of unity and 
common descent. Lastly but less immediately, by emigration to the new world 
overseas, it brought an extraordinary enlargement of the meaning of West 
and the power of its civilization. 



When the miner's son from Saxony, Luther, Lhuder, Lutter, or Lotharius 
as he was variously known, posted his 95 propositions on the door of All 
Saints' church at Wittenberg on October 31,1517, the last thing he wanted to 
do was to break up his church, the Catholic (= "universal"), and divide his 
world into warring camps. 

Nor was he performing an unusual act. He was a monk and professor of 
theology at the newly founded university of Wittenberg (where Hamlet later 
studied), and it was common practice for clerics to start a debate in this fash- 
ion. The equivalent today would be to publish a provocative article in a 
learned journal. A German scholar has recently argued that Luther never 
posted his theses. Whether he did or not, they circulated quickly; he had made 
copies and sent them to friends, who recopied and passed them on. Soon, 
Luther had the uneasy surprise of receiving them back from South Germany, 
printed. 

This little fact is telling. Luther's hope of reform might have foundered 
like many others of the previous 200 years, had it not been for the invention 
of printing. Gutenberg's movable type, already in use for some 40 years, was 
the physical instrument that tore the West asunder. But one point about the 
new techne° is worth noting: the printing press by itself was not enough: bet- 
ter paper, a modified ink, and a body of experienced craftsmen were also 
needed to make type a power. Pamphlets could now be produced quickly, 
accurately, in quantity, and, compared to manuscript copies, cheaply. 

Many of the Protestant tracts were illustrated with woodcuts, by Cranach, 
Durer, and other leading artists, which helped propaganda by attracting the 
illiterate: their friends read them the text. No longer always in Latin for cler- 
ics only, but in one of the common tongues, the 1 6C literature of biblical 
argument and foul invective began what we now call the popularization of 
ideas through the first of the mass media. 

Some notion of the force wielded by this new artifact, "the book," may 
be gathered from the estimate that by the first year of the 1 6C, 40,000 sepa- 



The West Torn Apart <^> 5 



An indulgence can never remit guilt; the 
Pope himself cannot do such a thing; God 
has kept that in His own hand. 

It can have no efficacy for souls in Purgatory; 
penalties imposed by the church can only 
refer to the living. What the Pope can do for 
souls in Purgatory is by prayer. 

The Christian who has true repentance has 
already received pardon from God, altogether 
apart from an indulgence, and so does not 
need one. 

— From Luther's "Ninety-five Theses" 



rate editions of all kinds of works had been issued — roughly nine million vol- 
umes from more than a hundred presses. During the Protestant struggle 
some towns had half a do2en firms working day and night, their messengers 
leaving every few hours with batches of sheets under their cloaks, the ink 
hardly dry, for delivery to safe distributors — the first underground press. 
[The book to browse in is: The Coming of the Book by Lucien Febvre and Jean 
Martin.] 

If Luther had no thought of set- 
ting off a revolution, what was his aim? 
He "only wanted to elicit the truth 
about the sacrament of penance." An 
innocent question, but timely, because 
of the current sale of "indulgences." 
These were a sort of certified check 
drawn by the pope on the "treasury of 
merit accumulated by the saints." In 
popular belief, buying one enabled the 
holder to finesse penance and shorten 
his or her time in Purgatory — or that 
of a friend or relative. Luther wanted to 

know whether any substitute for true remorse and active penance could be 
bought in the open market. He thought the only treasure of the church was 
the gospel. 

Many besides Luther had felt true piety and wanted to worship sincerely, 
not buy their way into heaven. One form of awakened faith was significantly 
called devotio moderna. The formation of groups like the Brothers of the 
Common Life, the founding of new grammar schools, works such as The 
Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis, and the spontaneous attitude of ordi- 
nary folk showed that the work of earlier reformers was bearing fruit. 

These reformers had been many. From Wycliff in 14th-century England 
to John Huss in Bohemia in the 1 5th, heroic attempts had been made to "go 
back to the primitive church," the humble early Christians, whose only 
church was their elected overseers. For 
them the gospel had been enough — 
and so it should still be. 

Even before Wycliff, who was 
later called "The Morning Star of the 
Reformation," a whole region around 
the southern French town of Albi had 
in the 13C achieved this simplification. 
The Albigenses were exterminated. 
Later movers of heresy were burned at 



So many pointed caps 
Laced with double flaps 
And so many felted hats 
Saw I never. 

So many good lessons, 
So many good sermons, 
And so few devotions, 
Saw I never." 



-John Skelton (c. 1500) 



6 s^s From Dawn to Decadence 

the stake. Within the church hierarchy itself, repeated demands had been 
heard for "reform of the head and members"; but institutional self-reform is 
rare; the conscience is willing, but the culture is tough. 

In this setting, Luther's downright assertions proved explosive. He had 
sent the text to the Archbishop of Mainz, a gross and greedy young man who 
could not help taking an interest, since he was to get one- third of the pro- 
ceeds of this indulgence sale as reimbursement for the cost of the bishopric 
he had just bought. Getting no reply, Luther sent another copy to the pope 
and pursued his meditations. 

Now 34 years old, he was not a young hothead. For seven years he had 
lived in anguish, often in despair, about the state of his soul. He had fought 
the urgings of the flesh — not only desire but also hatred and envy — and he 
had always lost the battle. How could he hope to be saved? Then one day, 
when a brother monk was reciting the Creed, the words "I believe in the for- 
giveness of sins" struck him as a revelation. "I felt as if I were born anew." 
Faith had suddenly descended into him without his doing anything to deserve 
it. His divided self or "sick soul," as William James called the typical state, was 
mysteriously healed. The mystery was God's bestowal of grace. Lacking it, the 
sinner cannot have faith and walk in the path of salvation. Such is the sub- 
stance not merely of the Protestant idea, but of the Protestant experience. 

Seeing how thick and fast the response came when Luther proclaimed his 
discovery, it is plain that fellow sufferers could be numbered by the thousand. 
Sensitive souls could be found among poor peasants at the plow, stolid mer- 
chants in the free cities, ambitious princes, impoverished knights in their 
crumbling castles, and sincere priests at the altar. To the pope, who at the time 
was the esthetic voluptuary Leo X, Luther's outburst was just another little 
monk's showing off his learning. The document was handed over to clerical 
bureaucrats who took three years to pick out the heresies. 

But Luther was not waiting. His revelation of grace, coupled with the 
memory of his visit to Rome half a dozen years earlier as an envoy of his 
order, brought him to another simplifying idea: every man is a priest. He is far 
from being "another Christ," as the Catholic ordination of priests puts it, but 
he does not need the Roman hierarchy as middleman; he has direct access to 
God. That top-heavy apparatus, a burden throughout the West, is useless. To 
make the proposition absolute, Luther added the principle he called Christian 
liberty: "A Christian man is a perfectly free lord, subject to none." 

This proclamation — every man a priest, a free lord, and no church — 
broadcast to the Germans in German, could only mean a new way of life. But 
Luther had no mind to manufacture anarchists and he stated the counterpart 
of the claim to liberty: "A Christian man is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, 
subject to all"; that is, to the secular society ruled by princes. 

This reassured the lay authorities and marked out Luther's course. Side- 



The West Torn Apart <^> 7 

stepping quite unconsciously the dangerous role of religious prophet, he was 
taking on the popular role of anti-clerical. It rallies many interests. Pope- 
bashing had long been a high-toned enterprise, doubling as a form of black- 
mail. By it, kings got political concessions; others, cardinal's hats. It had done 
nothing to reform the church, which, many agreed, must be rid of abuses, 
but everyone stood firm — yes, but not my privileges. 

The incipient revolution had defined the enemy: not the Catholic religion 
and its faithful, but the pontiff, his employees, and their hocus-pocus, that is, 
the trappings of worship. When the pope's bull condemning 41 of the 95 the- 
ses arrived in Wittenberg, it gave Luther an opportunity for a demonstration: 
he burned it publicly, to the great delight, naturally, of the university students 
crowding around him. For good measure he threw in some rescripts, the de- 
cretals of Clement VI, the Summa Angelica, and a few books by a colleague who 
championed the pope, Johann von Eck. "It is an old custom," said Luther, 
"to burn bad books." 

* * 

How a revolution erupts from a commonplace event — tidal wave from a 
ripple — is cause for endless astonishment. Neither Luther in 1517 nor the 
men who gathered at Versailles in 1789 intended at first what they produced 
at last. Even less did the Russian Liberals who made the revolution of 1917 
foresee what followed. All were as ignorant as everybody else of how much 
was about to be destroyed. Nor could they guess what feverish feelings, what 
strange behavior ensue when revolution, great or short-lived, is in the air. 

First, a piece of news about something said or done travels quickly, more 
so than usual, because it is uniquely apt; it fits a half-conscious mood or caps 
a situation: a monk questions indulgences, and he does it not just out of the 
blue — they are being sold again on a large scale. The fact and the challenger's 
name generate rumor, exaggeration, misunderstanding, falsehood. People 
ask each other what is true and what it means. The atmosphere becomes elec- 
tric, the sense of time changes, grows rapid; a vague future seems nearer. 

On impulse, perhaps to snap the tension, somebody shouts in church, 
throws a stone through a window, which provokes a fight — it happened so at 
Wittenberg — and clearly it is no ordinary breach of the peace. Another 
unknown harangues a crowd, urging it to stay calm — or not to stand there 
gaping but do something. As further news spreads, various types of people 
become aroused for or against the thing now upsetting everybody's daily life. 
But what is that thing? Concretely: ardent youths full of hope as they catch 
the drift of the idea, rowdies looking for fun, and characters with a grudge. 
Cranks and tolerated lunatics come out of houses, criminals out of hideouts, 
and all assert themselves. 



8 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Manners are flouted and customs broken. Foul language and direct insult 
become normal, in keeping with the rest of the excitement, buildings defaced, 
images destroyed, shops looted. Printed sheets pass from hand to hand and are 
read with delight or outrage — Listen to this! Angry debates multiply about 
things long since settled: talk of free love, of priests marrying and monks break- 
ing their vows, of property and wives in common, of sweeping out all evils, all 
corruption, all at once — all things new for a blissful life on earth. 

A curious leveling takes place: the 
Immortal God! What a century do I see common people learn words and ideas 

beginning! hitherto not familiar and not interest- 

If only it were possible to be young again! ing and discuss them like intellectuals, 

—Erasmus to Guillaume Bude (1517) while oth ers neglect their usual con- 

cerns — art, philosophy, scholarship — 
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, because there is only one compelling 

But to be young was very heaven. topic, the revolutionary Idea. The well- 

— Wordsworth Remembering the to-do and the "right-thinking," full of 

French Revolution (1805) fear, come together to defend their 

possessions and habits. But counsels 
are divided and many see their young "taking the wrong side." The powers 
that be wonder and keep watch, with fleeting thoughts of advantage to be had 
from the confusion. Leaders of opinion try to put together some of the ideas 
afloat into a position which they mean to fight for. They will reassure others, 
or preach boldness, and anyhow head the movement. 

Voices grow shrill, parties form and adopt names or are tagged with 
them in derision and contempt. Again and again comes the shock of broken 
friendships, broken families. As time goes on, "betraying the cause" is an 
incessant charge, and there are indeed turncoats. Authorities are bewildered, 
heads of institutions try threats and concessions by turns, hoping the surge of 
subversion will collapse like previous ones. But none of this holds back that 
transfer of power and property which is the mark of revolution and which in 
the end establishes the Idea. 

The seizure by Henry VIII of England's abbeys and priories, openly in 
the name of reform and morality, is notorious. But this secularizing of church 
property went on during the 1 6C in every other country except Italy and 
Spain. During this transfer, treaties were made every few years to confirm or 
reverse the grab, as the fortunes of war dictated. To the distant observer the 
course of events is a rushing flood; to those inside it is a whirlpool. 

Such is, roughly, how revolutions "feel." The gains and the deeds of 
blood vary in detail from one time to the next, but the motives are the usual 
mix: hope, ambition, greed, fear, lust, envy, hatred of order and of art, fanatic 
fervor, heroic devotion, and love of destruction. 

Chance also plays its capricious role. Henry VIII, sincerely convinced that 



The West Torn Apart ^ 9 

his marriage to Queen Catherine was When Love could teach a monafch to be 

incestuous and prevented his begetting ^ise 

2L male heir, asked the pope for an And Gospel light first dawned from Bullets 

annulment at a time when Lutheran eyes. 

ideas were spreading The king had pre- [Bullen is Anne Boleyn.] 

viously attacked Luther in a learned — "On the Pleasures of Vicissitude," 

tract, for which the pope had named "Elegy" Gray on Henry VIII's 

Henry "Defender of the Faith." Now Predicament 

the defender had to break with a pope 

who dared not grant the divorce, because Emperor Charles V would not hear 

of it: Catherine was his aunt. Out of this operatic plot came a new church, the 

Anglican, headed by the king, not a cleric, and forever independent of Rome. 

In fact, the king was working for himself, for royal power. His theology 
was unchanged, but his taking the church lands was a step in the silent march 
of the next revolution (239>). 

* 
* * 

One may wonder why Frederick, Elector of Saxony, did not discipline 
Luther and his followers as the pope requested — a request accompanied by a 
high honor, the Golden Rose, to make it persuasive. Frederick was Luther's 
sovereign as well as his employer, having set up and staffed the University of 
Wittenberg. And he was a pious Catholic who collected saindy relics; he 
seems to have owned 8,000, including straw from Jesus 's crib. Yet all his life 
he kept protecting the monk-professor who burned papal bulls. 

In this and other signs of resistance to the pope one detects the feelings 
of secular rulers against the religious, the antagonism of local authority 
toward central, and now a heightened sense of German nationhood that fret- 
ted at "foreign" demands. For in the conflict with the pope and riis Roman 
hierarchy, the feeling that "those Italians" were interfering in "our affairs" 
would seem natural to some. Others would also find cause for national 
pride — though there was really no German nation — in the litde tract entided 
Germania, by the ancient Roman historian Tacitus. He portrayed Rome as 
decadent and slavish and the German tribes as nobly moral and free. 
Frederick of Saxony may not have been taken by this doubtful parallel, but in 
his defense of Luther a private emotion came into play: he was offended that 
a faculty member of his cherished university should be called to account by 
Vatican officials. 

The pope, still combating heresy, not as yet secession, enlisted the aid of 
the recendy elected emperor, the chivalric teenager Charles V, who agreed to 
try the Wittenberg trouble-maker at the next imperial congress, the now 
famous Diet of Worms. The strategy was to alternate threats and entreaty. 



10 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

But the defendant's heroic stubbornness on the second day, after a momen- 
tary weakening on the first — a touch worthy of the tragic stage — made 
Frederick fear the worst. He had Luther kidnapped and hidden in a castle that 
is now a tourist attraction, the Wartburg. 

Luther's life and the fate of his doctrine everywhere thus depended on 
the secular arm being exerted in support, and in many places at once. A revo- 
lutionary idea succeeds only if it can rally strong "irrelevant" interests, and 
only the military can make it safe. 

At the Wartburg, despite the rude noises that the Devil kept making to 
thwart him, Luther translated the New Testament into German, choosing the 
dialect most likely to reach the greatest number. The gospels, if read by 
everybody, would prove him right. Hence the name of Evangelicals. It pre- 
ceded and long prevailed over the accidental name of Protestants, which 
arose when some delegates protested against a tentative agreement with the 
Catholic partisans. 

From his unexpected sabbatical onward, Luther kept addressing the 
Germans on every issue of religious, moral, political, and social importance. 
Pamphlets, books, letters to individuals that were "given to the press" by the 
recipients, biblical commentaries, sermons, and hymns kept streaming from 
his inkwell. Disciples made Latin translations of what was in German and 
vice versa. It was an unexampled barrage of propaganda to pose a country- 
wide issue. Opponents retorted, confrontations were staged at universities 
and written up. A torrent of black-on-white wordage about the true faith and 
the good society poured over Christian heads. It did not cease for 350 years: 
1900 was the first year in which religious works (at least in England) did not 
outnumber all other publications. 

The late 20C has resumed the battle. Fundamentalism is Luther's 
Biblicism in a new phase (>40; 261), and throughout the West, sects multiply 
as they did 450 years ago — there are 172 such groups registered in France 
alone, most of them Christian. And the results of this renewed search for 
faith are the same now as then. The modern stirrings are of course less root- 
and-branch efforts than those of the 16C. They demanded a full-scale return 
to the conditions of the early church, sounding the theme of PRIMITTVISM — 
Back to the basics! When people feel that accretions and complications have 
buried the original purpose of an institution, when all arguments for reform 
have been heard and have failed, the most thoughtful and active decide that 
they want to be "cured of civilization." Needless to add, Luther's "Christian 
liberty" was also the first blast heralding that highly conspicuous theme of the 
modern era, EMANCIPATION. 



The West Torn Apart <^t> \\ 

What were in fact the things in the church's "head and members" that 
people wanted to be rid of? First, the familiar "corruptions" — gluttonous 
monks in affluent abbeys, absentee bishops, priests with concubines, and so 
on. But moral turpitude concealed a deeper trouble: the meaning of the roles 
had been lost. The priest, instead of being a teacher, was ignorant; the monk, 
instead of helping to save the world by his piety, was an idle profiteer; the 
bishop, instead of supervising the care of souls in his diocese was a politician 
and businessman. One of them here or there might be pious and a scholar — 
he showed that goodness was not impossible. But too often the bishop was a 
boy of twelve, his influential family having provided early for his future hap- 
piness. The system was rotten. This had been said over and over; yet the old 
hulk was immovable. When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, 
the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label. A deca- 
dent culture offers opportunities chiefly to the satirist, and the turn of the 
1 5C had a good many, one of them a great one: 

Erasmus 

The well-known portrait by Durer shows him with eyelids modestly, 
thoughtfully down, the face smooth- featured and serene. Later portraits — in 
words — often make him out a cautious, middle-of-the-road academic charac- 
ter who, in the battle of his time, took the line of compromise. Luther was the 
strong man, Erasmus the intellectual; therefore the good that came out of 
rebellion we owe to the strong man. 

No summary could be falser. Erasmus was a courageous, independent 

fighter, as easily roused to anger — if anger is a revolutionary virtue — as Luther 

himself. He was impetuous in pushing his cause well before Luther thought of 

having one. Erasmus was the greater scholar, had more wit, and a different kind 

of literary genius. From his earliest days 

he denounced the monks, discredited 

the saints, and declared "almost all The "* is 8oft and deiici °™- The men «* 

^ • • i 11 iii sensible and intelligent. Many of them are 

Christians wretchedly enslaved by — © / 

.... . . „ learned. They know their classics, and so 

blindness and ignorance. , , _, ,. , . 

° accurately that I have lost little in not going to 

He was himself a monk, made into Italy The EngUsh ^ m ^^ pretty 

one against his will by his guardian; for and they have one custom which cannot be 

though not abandoned by his father, too much adm ired. When you go anywhere 

he was illegitimate, and had been on a visit, the girls all kiss you. They kiss you 

trapped into his vows. He had no when you arrive. They kiss you when you go 

thought of a career in religion, any away. They kiss you when you return. Once 

more than Luther and Calvin, who you have tasted how soft and fragrant those 

both chose the law. Luckily, by the spe- U P S are > vou would s P end vouf me here - 

cial favor of a friendly bishop, Eramus — Erasmus on England in 1497 



12 q^d From Dawn to Decadence 

was exempted from residence, permanendy — another sign of clerical laxity. 
The young monk was able to lead the life of a Renaissance Humanist (74>). 

His mastery of Greek, then a new accomplishment, made him a favorite of 
princes eager for learning, and he became the oracle of the enlightened on all 
subjects of timely interest. Popes consulted him and offered him bishoprics 
and (twice) a cardinal's hat. Universities wanted him on their faculty, Henry 
VIII tried to keep him at his court, Charles V took his advice, Luther begged 
for his support — and turned vindictive when it was refused. In between these 
flattering gestures he was reviled — by the monks in loud chorus, or censured 
by the pope when Rome's policy wavered, or cold-shouldered by erstwhile 
friends when he wrote a letter they disagreed with: before and during the revo- 
lution, much public argument was carried on in correspondence. Seeing the 
effect of his writings, Erasmus righdy judged that his power lay in his pen, not 
in tides or partisan activism. 

Erasmus had welcomed the Evangelical movement and he contributed 
to it both by his edition of the Greek text of the New Testament and by a vari- 
ety of popular works. He was the first Humanist to earn his living by his writ- 
ings, which is a measure of his influence. Nothing like his sway over the minds 
of his contemporaries has been seen since; not even Voltaire or Bernard Shaw 
approached it; for by their time Protestantism itself, in making the clergy and 
men of letters two distinct social groups, had broken the link between the 
thinker and the bulk of the people. Erasmus was called many hard names but 
never "highbrow," as he would be today. 

Difference of generation plays a large part in the batde of ideas. Given his 
age — Erasmus was Luther's elder by nearly 20 years — he could not become 
an Evangelical. He was a good Christian, but he did not experience faith as a 
passion. As a scholar, too, he read scripture differendy; he gave credence to 
the message but not to all the sayings and events — many were poetic state- 
ments, fables, allegories. And when he read the ancient classics he found fig- 
ures of such near-Christian piety that he could exclaim only half-humorously, 
"Saint Socrates, pray for us!" 

To Luther this was blasphemous frivolity. The Evangelicals despised the 
Humanists, even though some Humanists had long discarded the supersti- 
tions that Protestantism still attacked. When Erasmus would not accept 
Luther's denial of free will, the break was complete: Erasmus must be an athe- 
ist. The sectarians used that word to mean: disbeliever in my belief. 

Erasmus was among other things a humorist, which to the earnest means 
one who trifles with serious things. But Erasmus was serious enough when he 
refuted Luther's doctrine that most of mankind was damned from all eternity, 
only a few being saved, and these not for leading a good life but, unaccount- 
ably, by God's grace. When this last phrase is used today, only a vague notion 
of chance or mischance is in the speaker's mind. Not so when John Bradford 



The West Torn Apart <^*> 13 

on seeing a criminal led to the gallows exclaimed: "There but for the grace of 
God goes John Bradford." He felt it in his bones that God had from the 
beginning settled the outcome of the two men's lives. This was Predestin- 
ation. The belief is still strong today and not among Protestants or religious 
believers alone (>29). 

While Luther thought this mystery central to Christianity, and indeed 
"comforting," Erasmus rejected it as against reason. In his satirical skits 
depicting the life around him, he saw the interplay of wills free enough to 
choose good or bad, wise or foolish actions. These immensely popular 
Colloquies, dialogues between ordinary people, dealt with their petty predica- 
ments — the soldier's troubles in civilian life, the wrangles of married folk, the 
tricks of an alchemist, the traveler's shabby treatment in German inns as com- 
pared with the French. 

Though often poor and ailing, — Let me tell you: Fve been on a visit to St. 
Erasmus loved travel and the good James of Compostello. — From curiosity, I 
things of life, including the rapid, flash- suppose? —No, for the sake of religion. My 
ing conversation of learned friends in w^' 8 mother bound herself by a vow that if 
Paris, Oxford, and (at the end) in Basel, her daughter should give birth to a live male 
where he had his favorite printer- child, I, her son-in-law, should go to St. James 

i ,. i fT^M ,i it in person and thank him for it. — Did you 
publisher. [The book to read is James r J 
.. _ i , t -r it r salute the Saint in your name or your mother- 
Anthony Froudes Life and Letters of . , , _ _ , , , _ ., 
J J J m-laVs? — In the name of the whole family. 

J — And what answer did you get? — Not a syl- 

Erasmus summed up his criticism lable Upon handing over my present> he 

of life in one great work, The Praise of see med to smile and gave me a gende nod. — 
Folly. His friend Holbein the Younger a most gracious saint, both in hospitality and 
liked it so well that he made in his copy midwifery! 
pen-and-ink illustrations that have —Erasmus, Colloquies 
been often reproduced in modern edi- 
tions. Folly, speaking for herself, shows how people of every rank and occu- 
pation prefer her to common sense, yet they give her a bad name, especially 
the worst fools. She at least is honest — no pretences — anybody can see what 
she is like. Her father was Plutus, the god of riches, by whom everything in the 
world is governed. (Denouncers of the current "materialistic culture," as if 
ours were the first of the kind, should take note.) Folly concludes that, all in 
all, the greater the madness, the greater the happiness. 

By the author's art this entertaining paradox is expanded into a panorama 
of the times. The fiction is not strained. Unfortunately, the second half of the 
book, though still effective in its way, abandons "story" and drops into a direct 
attack against clerical and other abuses. The vivid reality is still there, but art has 
succumbed to political passion. This verbal assault against the hierarchy came 
a good while before Luther felt doubts about his church or even about his soul. 
Eight years elapsed between The Praise of Folly and the 95 Theses. 



14 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 



By the time Luther and his followers had launched their onslaught, not 
seeing that it must lead to violence — or not caring — sober men on both sides 
kept seeking compromise. The Erasmian outlook did not vanish because 
Luther thundered. More than one bishop and cardinal was eager for reform 
and found the Evangelical vision congenial. Some Protestants also were 
ready to accept a halfway house if it was free of corruption and "supersti- 
tion." After the open break, Melanchthon, Luther's young protege and 
spokesman, drafted a statement meant to reconcile and reunite the church; it 
was rejected by both parties. Still, the best minds, including the emperor, 
viewed a civil war with horror. When a courtier spoke to Charles of "heads 
rolling," he replied: "No, my dear lord, no heads." And the elector Frederick 
would say: "It is easy to take a life, but who can give it back again?" 

Among the high clergy there were conciliators also. Cardinal Contarini 
spent his life trying to regain the loyalty of the Lutheran seceders while cor- 
recting the abuses of his own church. So outspoken was he on these points 
that he was suspected of being a crypto-Protestant. But he was a superb 
diplomat, highly esteemed as statesman and political theorist in his native 
Venice and ever welcome at Charles's imperial court; so he survived, though 
he failed to recapture the straying flock. 

An idea newly grasped stirs the blood to aggressiveness. From safe cor- 
ners such as universities and monasteries, force was called for, and many lay- 
men were not afraid to use it. They quoted Luther: "One must fight for the 
truth." When possessions were at stake, whether simply threatened or taken 
over by the Protestants, armed conflict was inevitable. Pulpits, churches, and 
other religious houses, town offices, and the privileges that went with all of 
these changed hands — and more than once. Local sentiment, coupled with 
power, decided ownership. 

Again it was chance that Emperor Charles V did not quickly give armed 
support to the Catholic princes and put an end to the revolution. But he was 
at war on another, even more endangered front. The armies of Islam — the 
Turks — held the Balkans, and their fleet, aided by accomplished pirates, the 
Mediterranean. Vienna, gateway to the West, was forever being threatened. 
Charles had to fight in North Africa as well as in Central Europe, while he 
must also defend his lands in Italy and the Netherlands against France and the 
heretics. There seemed no way he could finish off the Protestant usurpers at 
one stroke on the field of battle. 

Civil war broke out when the imperial knights, an independent, poverty- 
stricken order, tried to recoup their fortunes under cover of the general 
unrest. Their leader, Gotz von Berlichingen, became a German national hero, 
further glorified later in a play by Goethe. The knights were defeated, but a 



The West Torn Apart <^> 15 

satire written by another of them, Ulrich von Hutten, Letters from Obscure Men, 
so inflamed the monks, whom he held up to hatred, ridicule, and contempt, 
that the war fever became unquenchable. 

Two years after the knights, the peasants rose up, with far better excuse. 
Luther at once approved their twelve demands, one of which was the right to 
choose their own ministers. The other articles begged for relief from the 
princes' pitiless exploitation. When the petition was rebuffed, thousands 
under the lead of Thomas Munzer took to pillage and killing. Luther back- 
tracked and in his most vituperative vein called on the princes to destroy 
them. The end was massacre or exile for some 30,000 families. 

Munzer had won their allegiance by proclaiming that all men were created 
equal and should remain so. An impossible idea, but how suggestive! Gospel 
simplicity, self-rule, faith unencumbered by authorities — PRimTTVTSM. These 
sentiments traveled wide. At Miinster in 1 534, a tailor known as John of Leyden 
set up with his Anabaptist followers the Kingdom of Zion. They terrorized the 
rest of the citizens, also in the name of equality but equal under John the 
despot, who kept a harem. The kingdom satisfied one of the recurrent dreams 
of the occidental mind: community of goods and of women. 

It is interesting to note that when East Germany was under Soviet rule 
Munzer was a hero, and called so again in a New York Times article of recent 
date. As for John of Leyden, he could point to the New Testament on shar- 
ing goods and to the Old on plural wives. He was overthrown after a year, and 
in the usual fashion of this evangelical time put to death as horribly as it could 
be contrived. His reign furnished the matter for Meyerbeer's grand opera Le 
Prophete (1849). 

Violent events were to be typical 
of European life till the middle of the Antwerp, 2nd May 1581 

17C. Riot, combat, sieges and sacks of Eight days ago the so idiery and the 
towns, burnings at the stake, and Calvinists mutilated all the pictures and 
escape by self-exile repeat without altars in the churches and cloisters of 
letup. In Germany, 23 years of war, Belgium. The clergy and nearly 500 Catholic 
with breathing spells, kept in the field citizens were driven out and several cast in 
two unstable leagues of princes, Protes- prison. Thus an end has been made of the 
tant and Catholic. In the Netherlands, Catholic faith in Brussels. 
the seesaw went on for a somewhat Antwerp, 6 May 1581 

shorter time; likewise in the Swiss can- Four ships were laden ^^ sculptured and 
tons, where the capable leader Hul- carved statues, bells, brass and stone effigies 
dreich Zwingli, by combining theology of saints, candlesticks and other such-like 
with economic reform, provoked the ornaments from the churches. All are to be 
war in which he met his death. In despatched to Narva and Moscow. The con- 
France the last 30 years of the century signers hope to do good business with them. 
were devoted to eight bouts of civil — Fugger Newsletters 



16 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

war, with ambush, assassination, and massacre in between, including the 
famous one on the feast day of St. Bartholomew. The English Civil War, also 
impelled by sectarian passions, was reserved for the next century (>263). 
Luther admitted with his usual honesty that "he had never meant to go as far 
as he did." 

Erasmus had remained a reformer and it is his temper that has prevailed 
until very recently. The faith of most Christians in the centuries after him 
gradually became less literal, mystical, hellfired, and sectarian. The leading 
churches grew resigned to toleration and adopted the social gospel of doing 
good to others, while the expanding secular knowledge came to be seen as 
compatible with scripture. The interesting fact is that the great initiator of 
sectarian attitudes was himself not a sectarian through and through. This 
observation refers to 

Luther 

The image that the mindless jade Posterity retains of him is of the rough- 
hewn peasant, ready with blind courage and foul language to rout all oppo- 
nents — "typically German," some will say. It is true that according to Luther 
himself he did his best work in anger, and by a reverse snobbery he kept 
stressing his peasant origins, although he was the son of an artisan. But his 
need of that internal tonic rather suggests a character more complicated than 
the legend. 

His achievement puts him in the class of great deflers and self-made 
rulers — Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon, Bismarck — and like them he is only 
half understood if one ignores his imagination and sensibility. Certainly, 
Luther's anxiety about his soul bespeaks not simply self-consciousness but 
also imagination; nor must his aggressiveness blind one to the passionate 
warmth of his affections and the rich variety of his gifts. Fortunately, his Table 
Talk, a work that ought to be as popular as BoswelTs Johnson, gives us the 
whole man. [A good version to read is that edited by Preserved Smith. ] 

After the break with Rome, Luther turned his house into a kind of stu- 
dent hostel. Fellow preachers, disciples, scholars, refugees — mostly young — 
came from all over, unannounced, and used and abused his hospitality. At the 
big downstairs table in the Black Cloister, which was a wing of his former 
monastery, he would hold forth on the creed, on current events, on people 
and life at large. He was often poor and his wife, Kathie, would complain 
about the number of free boarders eating their heads off. He would then do 
some manual labor for cash or sell a silver drinking cup. Eight of his hangers- 
on, aided by two secretaries, have paid their debt by noting down and verify- 
ing one another's reports of "the doctor's" conversation. It tells us at the 
same time what the eager young wondered and argued about. 



The West Torn Apart q^> 17 

Luther alone among the Reformers stands beside Erasmus for range of 
mind. Well might he say, in spite of his humility, that "God could not do with- 
out wise men." The daily side of him is all common sense and tender feelings. 
He married, not for love but from conscience, a plain-looking nun made 
homeless by having followed his teachings. He grew to value her loyal help 
and to love her dearly. And friendship was with him a cult. In his 50th year — 
old age then — he found himself bewailing the loss of one friend after 
another. The death of the closest, Haussmann, left him weeping distractedly 
for two days. 

The soft-spoken Melanchthon, his early disciple and fourteen years his 
junior, he treated like a son and prized as his superior: "he is concise, he 
argues; instructs. I am garrulous and rhetorical." Melanchthon, he adds, is a 
master of Greek and Latin; his own Latin vocabulary is insufficient and lacks 
elegance. But the young Humanist's pamphlets are bitter. "I prefer to hit out 
like a boy." This meant that the "boy" used an adult vocabulary of abuse. His 
antisemitic utterances are sheer vituperation. In the 1 6C and for a good 200 
years more, insult was the accepted seasoning of intellectual debate. The 
solemn Milton, the sons of the Age of Reason, the aristocratic reviewers of 
Keats and Shelley used it freely. The mildest of Luther's jibes was to call Dr. 
Eck, his chief antagonist, Dr. Geek (Dr. Goose). Yet Luther deplored the 
roughness of German manners and named it Grobiana, pseudo Latin from the 
German grob, which means coarse, boorish, uncouth. He inveighed against its 
frequent cause, drunkenness, "a filthy, scurvy vice." 

But Luther was no prude; his common sense shines in his repeated ref- 
erences to sexuality. He knew its power: as a monk he had tortured himself to 
fight desire, slept on stones, and found this treatment only making it worse. 
As he said, it is thoughts of "rosy cheeks and white legs" that drive young men 
to get engaged. "Early love is fervid and drunken, blinds us and leads us on." 
So it is cruelty to young people to bind them to celibacy as priests, monks, or 
nuns. Even in marriage it is hard to be chaste. No fierce penalty ought to be 
visited on those who yield to a force of nature divinely ordained for the beget- 
ting of children. 

A difficult case in point was put to him by his strong ally among the 
princes, Philip of Hesse, who, already married, wanted to marry a second 
wife. The first one was uncongenial and he was devoudy opposed to keeping 
a mistress. Luther of course wanted to save a good Evangelical from trans- 
gressing, and he found among the patriarchs of the Old Testament full justi- 
fication for bigamy. He gave Philip citations and a caution: "Go ahead, but 
keep it quiet." It could not be kept quiet. Protestants denounced the crime; 
Catholics gained a fine argument. 

Even so, no one could accuse Luther of kow-towing to the great. He (and 
later Calvin and Knox) had a habit of addressing princes and princesses as if 



18 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

they were naughty boys and girls. Clearly, the revolution did not stop one from 
playing the old role of priest — was he not called "father" for his exercise of 
moral authority? In the same spirit, with his prime defender the Elector 
Frederick, whom he never met but dealt with through a majordomo, Luther 
behaved like an intimate friend, not hesitating to reproach him with neglect. 

After all, Luther was the head of a powerful party. Some called him the 
Protestant Pope, whose ruling must be sought on all questions. This he found 
an appalling chore. "Princes," he said, thinking also of himself, "are gods bur- 
dened and tempted, whereas the people are blessed and without temptation." 
He admired his political foe Charles V for shouldering such painful duties qui- 
edy and steadily. For 28 years Luther preached three or four sermons every 
Sunday, in addition to writing the innumerable tracts, Bible commentaries, 
translations, and the letters already mentioned. They come to 55 volumes in the 
standard English edition. It is no wonder that he left money matters and other 
domesticana to Kathie. 

For relief from heroic deskwork he relied on the sights of nature. He had 
an intense love of living things and became something of a naturalist. He 
played the flute and the guitar, composing or adapting tunes to his own 
words. Some 40 hymns are attributed to him, including the superb Einfeste 
Burg ist unser Gott. Contemporaries said that these hymns did as much for the 
cause as his books. Indeed, the place of music was for Luther "next to theol- 
ogy. The Devil hates music because it drives away temptation and evil 
thoughts." In the schools for boys and girls that Luther wanted to see estab- 
lished he would allow no man to teach who could not sing, "nor would I let 
him preach, either." 

Alternating with passionate work 
I don't understand this wretched malady at were bouts of deep depression, illness 
all. I take it that it is made up, first, of the ("the stone"), plus the self-discipline 
ordinary weakness of advanced age; second, required by his faith. He must force his 
of the result of my labors and habitual tension expansive heart-and-mind to obey the 
of thought; third and above all, of the blows of commands he found in the Bible. He 
Satan. If so, there is no medicine in the world rea j i t through twice a year and 
that will cure me. thought it perfection, but concluded: 

— Luther (1543) "If one consults reason alone, one can- 

not assent to the articles of our faith." 
It was full of mysteries; "we are fools to try to explain them." This makes 
preaching Christianity not only a hard task but also dangerous. "Had I 
known, I should never have been a preacher." 

This avowal from the rediscoverer of the gospel distinguishes him from 
most of his followers — one cannot imagine Calvin or Knox making such 
admissions — and brings him nearer to Erasmus than he knew But one thing 
he did know: he was not "one of the prophets." He "heard no voice"; he did 



The West Torn Apart q^ 19 

not even think himself "justified," meaning saved. Yet here he was, doing 
God's work, in part against the grain. "I smote the peasants; all their blood is 
on my head; the Lord God ordered it."; some of his early books he found 
offensive. In touch with the unseen, he kept arguing with the Devil, and he 
was sure that witches must be put to death, quickly, to prevent great harm. 
Magistrates must not be squeamish. "Consider how harsh is the law of God 
the merciful when he says: 'He that curseth his father or mother shall be put 
to death.' " 



This unhappy reflection of Luther's brings out one trait that marked the 
age. Once literal biblicism had taken hold, all imaginable acts of cruelty, 
moral, social, and political, found their warrant somewhere in scripture. And 
this, even though the two Testaments were at odds — harsh and merciful, as 
Luther observes. As in later secular ideologies that command total submis- 
sion — say, Marxism — much depends on which part of which scripture is 
invoked. In the Protestant revolution, the Old or the New dominates one 
generation, one place, one leader or another. Or again, both are followed, 
inconsistently, and the interpreter alternately forgives like Christ and pun- 
ishes like Jehovah. For merciful souls, piety can amount to a sacrifice of nat- 
ural feeling in obedience to righteousness; to punish becomes a painful 
"work" in the Catholic sense. 

Characteristically, Luther's zeal in punishing was reserved for criminals 
and those in league with demons. Others, he thought, should not suffer for 
their opinions as he saw that they did in Geneva under Calvin. Luther also 
saw Melanchthon working at astrology and continually predicting the 
emperor's death; this was idolatry: "the stars have nothing to do with us." But 
astrologers and alchemists were not to be punished or even badgered. 
Copernicus with his sun-centered astronomy was a fool exploiting a crazy 
point of view — let him alone. Humanists such as Erasmus were atheists and 
would be taken care of hereafter. It does not do to be grim about "big things 
without remedy." 

A strong sense of humor kept Luther (like Erasmus and unlike almost 
every other Reformer) from fretting about human weaknesses. He knew he 
shared them, and in keeping with the gospel, he preferred the repentant sin- 
ner to the self-righteous. In fact, he burst out several times against "the 
merely good man." This antagonism between faith and moral conduct has 
been repeatedly manifested in western culture. A latter-day form of it appears 
in the scorn of "the bourgeois and his values." Respectability seems dull and 
cowardly compared to sin and crime. It was in this mood that Luther pre- 
pared himself to give a sermon about Noah, the patriarch noted for his 



20 c^s From Dawn to Decadence 

drunkenness: writing it the night before, Luther "laughed as he took a big 
swig of beer." 

But then comes the difficulty. To hold the true faith, Scripture is the only 
guide: every word of it is "a precious fruit," of plain meaning, not to be turned 
into allegory. Doing so was what made atheists. Luther mocked the breed: 
"I'll write them a few allegories myself." At the same time, a man of intelli- 
gence and honesty such as Luther cannot be blind to the many contradictions 
in the divinely inspired text. He must have suffered when, on Old Testament 
authority, he recommended bigamy (and secrecy) to Philip of Hesse, knowing 
that St. John and St. Paul, his favorite apostles, would never have condoned 
that solution. Again, he had to dismiss St. James as "a gospel of straw," 
because it called for good works as an earnest of faith. 

At the end as at the beginning in his monastic days, he confessed how 
feelings and belief struggled within him. His favorite daughter had died, and 
he cried out: "Darling Lena, it is well for you. I am happy in spirit, but the 
flesh is sorrowful." Every passing year added to his unhappiness — defections 
from the new teachings; the lessening of his influence; increasing greed 
everywhere ("the princes are profiteers"). The world was "ungrateful for the 
gospel"; the Turks were "invincible"; the emperor kept making gains against 
the Protestant League; in short, his life's work was unraveling. Surely the end 
of the world was near. People were seeing visions — blood, figures, and fiery 
crosses in the sky. It could not last; the finish was at hand. 

His own end came not quite 30 years after the posting of the theses, in 
1546. The next year Wittenberg was besieged and the then Elector of Saxony 
captured and dispossessed. Luther's revolution was doomed. Another eight 
years of struggle had to pass before peace within Germany was concluded. It 
recognized the independence of the new sect, but collectively. Every German 
prince could go the Evangelical or the Catholic way (likewise every town), but 
his subjects would be bound by his choice; they could leave freely; self-exile 
would be the lot of the recalcitrants. In this last provision INDIVIDUALISM was 
implied and partly actual. Nothing had been achieved universally, but the rev- 
olution was a fait accompli and for large portions of the Occident life had rad- 
ically changed. 



The New Life 



In his Judgments on History, Burckhardt summarizes the Reformation 
as an escape from discipline, emancipation is indeed the immediate appeal 
of all revolutions. They inflame the feeling that life in society is perpetual con- 
straint, the eternal cause of Freud's "discontents." This feeling goes with 
another, that the ancestral scheme of things is a heavy routine, not sufficiently 
relieved by the free play of Erasmian "folly." Again, boredom and fatigue. 

Burckhardt's verdict reminds us that the thick crust of custom that broke 
in the early 1 6C did not consist solely of abuses; nor did the revolution bene- 
fit in a material way only the princes. It threw off Everyman's shoulders a set 
of duties that had become intolerable burdens. The "works" denounced by 
the Evangelicals took a daily expenditure of cash, time, and trouble. The ser- 
vice of the Mass had been free, but celebrating the other milestones of life — 
a child's christening and first communion, a couple's marriage, and the final 
rites at bedside and gravesite — cost money. Penance after confession of sin 
might entail a pilgrimage to a shrine or some other tangible sacrifice and, lat- 
terly, the purchase of an indulgence. 

The good Christian must give alms regularly and pay for votive candles or 
special masses for the sick or the dead. Then would come the "Gatherer of 
Peter's Pence," to help the pope rebuild St. Peter's in Rome; and next, the 
begging friar knocking at the door. To carry a body across town to the ceme- 
tery the fee was one noble (about six shillings), the price of 20 prayers for the 
departed. In certain predicaments a dispensation was required, an expensive 
necessity. It was galling, too, to see one's tithes (the 10 percent church tax on 
land) going not to the poor parish priest but to the prosperous monks nearby, 
who did little or nothing toward saving the souls of the taxpayers. 

The demands on time and effort included confession, fast days, and taking 
part in processions on the many holidays. Some of the pious rich might feel 
obliged to establish a chantry, an endowment for singing masses in perpetuity 
for the dead. Others, at death's door, would bequeath their goods and land to 
the church, thus depriving their heirs and shrinking the supply on the market. 



22 £<&> From Dawn to Decadence 

These good deeds created the clerical interest — and the anti-clerical 
opposition. Princes saw their territories nibbled away when large estates were 
handed over to bishops already heads of provinces. Merchants and artisans in 
the free cities lost gainful working days as more and more saints' days were 
declared feast days. And since bishops had to pay their first year's revenue to 
the pope, while the people's pence took the same route, secular rulers felt 
alarm at the drainage of coin Romewards. 

How much more anxiety than solace resulted from the incessant formal 
devotion cannot of course be gauged. A pilgrimage to far-off St. James of 
Compostella in the extreme west of Spain, or a trip to worship relics in the 
large town nearby, might gladden some sinners as a welcome break in routine, 
and so could the feasts and processions. Taking ritual trouble regularly was 
like our precautions for keeping up bodily fitness; prayer, confession, and fish 
on Friday were akin to jogging and counting calories; the distant shrine was 
the Mayo clinic. These analogies hold only for those who lacked fervor — 
always the greater number; but all knew that to fail in care about one's soul 
meant perdition. Regular exercises buttressed faith in sound psychological 
fashion until the system was denounced as a crude scheme of debits (sins) 
and credits (works) to be totted up on Judgment Day. When this banking 
operation collapsed, Luther could exclaim, "We have found the Savior again!" 

To invoke the Savior in the place of works was to change reality; that is, 
to reshape culture and individual behavior. Worshipping the saints had been 
a kind of polytheism: they were the powers to entreat. Every living person, 
every activity and institution, every town and village was dedicated to a patron 
saint, and aware of living under his or her protection. Many Catholics in 
Europe still celebrate not one's birthday, but the day of the saint after whom 
one is named. Travelers would rely on St. Christopher, sailors on St. Elmo, 
old maids on St. Catherine. One prayed to St. Germain for sick children, to 
St. Sythe for lost keys, and to St. Wilgefortis for getting rid of detested hus- 
bands. Those in hopeless trouble beseeched St. Jude. 

This distributed worship had come into being when the early church 
converted the pagan populations of the West. To make the new creed intelli- 
gible and congenial, Christian rites and holidays were adapted to existing cus- 
toms. Saints took the place of local deities; Christmas, Easter, Rogations (the 
springtime blessing of the fields) re-enacted the original pagan festivals. 
Hence the Puritan hostility to Christmas, forbidden by law for 22 years in 1 7C 
Massachusetts and, in our day, by the Truth Tabernacle in South Carolina 
(125 members), who hanged a Santa Claus in 1982 to make the point clear. 

Luther was induced by overwhelming tradition to condone the worship 
of the Virgin Mary. The late Middle Ages, thinking of mercy as peculiarly 
maternal had made her, not Christ, the intercessor in forgiveness. Luther 
recalled that in his youth to mention Christ in a sermon was considered 



The New Life <^> 23 

"effeminate." But Luther did not allow prayers to the Virgin's mother, St. 
Anne, or to the rest of the blessed troop. 

These details of the new life after Luther point to something easily over- 
looked: the revolution was strictly speaking not religious but theological. 
Christianity was not replaced by another religion. The Occident continued to 
believe in the same revelation of the divine events described in the old Scrip- 
tures. Everybody still moved about not only in fields and streets but in an 
unseen world full of dangers, though ruled by a Power righteous and eternal, 
who governed every event and took note of every motion of the spirit within 
the individual soul. 

The overturn, then, was in the slowly built-up system of ideas surrounding 
the faith, which is to say ideology. The more modern term makes it easier to 
understand the fury unleashed among the multiplying sects, each differently 
revisionist. It also explains the moral paradox of "wars of religion" in the name 
of a Christ who preached the brotherhood of man. On that injunction there 
seemed to be a meeting of minds; it meant: "Be my brother or I will kill you." 

* * 

To understand the feelings that kept up the sectarian bloodshed, it is not 
enough to cite material interests. These did lead to war, but the passion was 
for more than winning back possessions or exacting revenge. What makes it 
hard to recapture the quality of religious beliefs in the 16C is that so much has 
happened since to draw the human mind and heart away from the goal of sav- 
ing one's soul. The meaning of faith has changed, its native quantity has been 
divided, its quality diluted. People blithely speak of someone's (or their own) 
religious preference — as if it were something like a taste in food or sport. 

The change has come about not simply because, for the majority in the 
Occident, physical science has usurped the place of "our best hope and 
trust." It has come about because every believer is surrounded by a host of 
non-believers, as well as by believers in many different creeds. All being tol- 
erated, all must be worthy of belief, all are in some way "right." In the 16C and 
earlier too, there were some atheists, but Disbelief is one thing — it can be 
explained away as perverse wickedness. £M>elief is something else, far more 
unsettling to the believer, especially when it becomes the norm. When faith 
loses its singleness, its central role in life fades away, and with it the feeling 
that comes from knowing one's view of the world universally shared. When 
all around take fundamental ideas for granted, these must be the truth. For 
most minds there is no comfort like it. 

This is not to say that the Protestant Revolution ended by destroying all 
belief. Millions of church-goers today, hundreds of sects, prove its vigorous 
survival (<10; 28>). Indeed, in the 1990s the believers' attacks on what they 



24 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 



Religion defined, Middle Ages and Early 
Modern Times: 

— A monastic order. — A reference to out- 
ward signs rather than inward faith. Root 
meanings, various: — To collect, bring 
together. — To tie back, to bind. — To read 
over. — Tradition. — To reverence from fear. 
— Scrupulous attention, to re-collect oneself. 

— From dictionaries in several 

LANGUAGES 



call "secular Humanism" are so vehement that after a long slump religion has 
regained an important place in public debate (40>). But Protestantism did 
destroy in the West the possibility of that ancient solace, single truth and 
unanimous belief. 

Not that in what is called "the ages 
of faith" everybody understood the 
one faith alike or with the same degree 
of devotion. To some, as always, salva- 
tion meant only personal safety, or 
even less: mere conformity. The point 
is that in earlier times people rarely 
thought of themselves as "having" or 
"belonging to" a religion. The word 
itself had various uses. Everybody 
"had" a soul, but did not "have a God," 
for God and all that pertained to Him 
was simply what is, just as today nobody has "a physics"; there is only one and 
it is automatically taken to be the transcript of reality. 

The 20C obviously needed a new word to recharge belief with, its full 
meaning. Hemingway in his book on Spain tried to do this by saying: "It was 
not something he believed in. It was his Belief." With a like intent, some mod- 
ern theologians call belief "the interruption of faith" — virtually a heresy — 
because belief implies a statement or thought "about" the object of faith, 
which distracts the mind from being suffused by its reality. This view in fact 
dates back to St. Augustine in the 5C. 

Whether more or less faithful, 

people before, during, and after the 

revolution never doubted that they 

needed God's help from moment to 

moment. In their letters they invariably 

call for God's blessing on the recipient, 

on the sinful age, on the writer's next 

trip or project. Merchants opening a 

new ledger dedicate it on the first page: 

"In the name of God and profits." 

Striking incidents are divine warnings 

or commands, as when young Luther, 

terrified by a thunderstorm on his way to law school, felt his fright as a sign 

of God's will that he should serve Him. Then and there the youth took a vow 

to become a monk. 

Prayers were in order several times a day, like our hygienic ablutions, 



Catholicism has a conception of the 
Christian ideal: to become nothing in this 
world. Protestantism is worldliness from 
beginning to end. 

— Kierkegaard (a 19C Protestant) 

The Reformation was the scraping of a little 
rust off the chains which still bind the mind. 
. . . Darwinism is the New Reformation. 

— T. H. Huxley (a 19C agnostic) 



The New Life <^> 25 

because the Devil and his minions were as ubiquitous as our viruses. Satan 
went up and down the earth like a campaigning politician making promises. 
During his own travels Luther found him in woods, thick clouds, and waste 
places. He knew that the Devil's interference accounted for the varying for- 
tunes of the Evangelical cause. Witches close at hand were a menace too, even 
when they offered to cure ailments and did so. Catholics of course could 
counteract Satanic intentions by calling on saints or relics for help. Practical 
Christianity for both groups resembled the eastern heresy called Manichean: 
two powers run the world, the evil one must be fought and the good placated. 

These vicissitudes were a reminder of the worth of salvation. To gain it 
puts an end to all troubles and the assurance of it is the greatest boon — hence 
the "comfort" that Luther found in predestination. By it salvation is guaran- 
teed to the elect. They have grace, a free gift that no deed can obtain. Even so, 
the best of Christians might feel anxious when ill or on the point of death: was 
he or she really destined for eternal life? Salvation in the 1 6C and long after was 
understood as "resurrection of the flesh." The promise of the gospel was lit- 
eral: the body would come into being again. As the learned told those who 
asked, St. Augustine had explained that the hair shed in life and the fingernails 
cut would be restored in full, though invisibly, in the new heavenly body. 

The different phrase now in use, 
"immortality of the soul," promises The Turks teU ^^ People of a Heaven 
something less definite, a faceless, dis- wne re there is a sensible Pleasure, but of a 
embodied bliss. It had no wide currency Hell where they shall suffer they don't know 
till later centuries. As a Catholic dogma, what. The Christians quite invert this order; 
it dates only from 1513 and it was not they tell us of a Hell where we shall feel sensi- 
then addressed to the people, but to the ble Pain > but of a Heaven where we shall 
learned. It was intended to refute cer- enjoy we can't tell what. 
tain philosophers who had talked about —John Selden, c. 1 650 
a "unity of the intellect," meaning by it a 

fund of spirit emanating from God, out of which the soul is fashioned and to 
which it returns. These philosophers' notion anticipated 19C European and 
American Idealism with its Absolute as both God and reservoir of soul- 
substance. The prospect of individuality lost in a merger with others would 
have been intolerable to Evangelicals and Catholics alike, particularly the for- 
mer, whom William James called "the unsocial Protestants" for their insistence 
on having each what one might call today his "hot line" to God. 

So important did some 16C believers consider individuality that they 
declared each soul separately created. Others were content with a collective 
origin. The former were called Creationists. The name now refers to those 
who attack Evolution and believe that the whole human race was created in 
and through Adam and Eve. 



26 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 



* 
* * 



So much for ideology. The revolution also changed other parts of cul- 
tural reality. The Protestant church, the building itself, was no longer the town 
hall for public business, the banquet hall on feast days, and the theater for 
moral dramas. Nor were any burlesques put on there, no Feast of Fools, run 
by a "lord of misrule" for the annual saturnalia that afforded a relaxation of 
discipline. If newly built, the Protestant "meeting house" could not serve like 
the cathedrals as a refuge for women and children in wartime, and certainly 
not as a sanctuary for criminals; its central and civic role was gone. 

With each new sectarian reform, the houses of worship became more and 
more bare of ornament. Luther did not object to flowers, nor did he, like some 
zealots, want to break the stained glass of the ancient churches or vandalize the 
sculptures. But pictures and altar cloths, candles and relics, and the crucifix 
must go, incense too, and the priests' vestments, of which the Roman church 
had a profusion. Color and cloth, shape of hat or stole, gold or silver ornament 
or piping went with rank or occasion and made up an impressive show. It was, 
said the English Puritans and Presbyterians, "idolatry dressed up." Significantly, 
for those on whom the pull of religion is partly sensuous, Catholicism has 
remained their church; it has recaptured them in each generation. For the rest, 
the age-old association of the church with art was broken forever. 

In the new church the minister, probably a married man with children, offi- 
ciated in ordinary clothes. The parson was none other than the person appointed 
to serve the rest, though he was still expected to have some learning and to be 
more or less formally ordained. The congregation acting as an independent 
body had chosen him; and as dissident sects multiplied, the congregations more 
and more assumed the support of their leader and their activities. The Lutherans 
still employed bishops, sometimes elected, and paid by the state. The Anglicans 
retained the hierarchy; other churches used laymen as deacons or elders. The 
thoroughgoing souls at last took Luther literally — "everyone a priest" — the 
Pietists and the Quakers "minister" to themselves. 

Protestants of all types became self-sufficient also during the musical part 
of the service. No choir, no clerics sang on the congregation's behalf the praise 
of the Lord. All the faithful gathered together sing, inexpertly but sincerely, 
simple words and tunes. The hymns, composed perhaps by Luther, are based 
on a psalm or a gospel idea versified, uttering threat or promise: 'Whatever, 
Lord, we lend to Thee, Repaid a thousandfold will be." No one kneels or con- 
fesses. Everybody partakes of communion "in both kinds," meaning that each 
receives bread and wine — and it is real bread, a bit stale, not a consecrated 
wafer. Formerly, only the priest drank the wine, lest a layman should acciden- 
tally spill the blood of Christ. Clerics who did had their thumbs cut off. 



The New Life <^> 27 

Another discard: the mumbling in Latin to uncomprehending ears by an 
absentminded priest. Clear words in everyday language carried the homily, 
now called sermon. It has shrunk in size over the years, but when it first 
became the main part of the Evangelical service, and particularly when it cel- 
ebrated public events, it could last three hours. Well into the 19C the "lesson" 
expounding a sentence or two from the Bible still needed an hour, and atten- 
dance at two services on one day was no uncommon habit. "The English 
Sunday" came to signify a peculiar division of human time/ Lacking relics 
and images, Protestants go to church only for services (children for Sunday 
school), instead of at any hour of the day for prayer or recollection, as 
Catholics still do. 

The Evangelicals made the sacraments less awesome. No rites for the 
dying, and the others ceremonial rather than magical. Communion — earlier, 
the Eucharist — was celebrated less often than the Mass had been; Luther 
thought four times a year was enough; and it could no longer help the dead 
or relatives and friends. Other emancipations: a Protestant could marry a 
first cousin and, if really "advanced," could refuse to take oaths or serve as 
magistrate. 

The change of greatest consequence, a cultural step comparable to 
Mohammed's gift of the Koran to his people, was making the new life find its 
mental and spiritual food in the Bible. Luther had never seen a Bible until he 
was twenty. His very thorough religious education had been based on a selec- 
tion from the church Fathers. But more than one thinker before him had 
wanted to bring the word of God to the people and a dozen translations into 
the common tongues had been made. Once again, it was Luther who com- 
pounded these efforts and made the Bible The Book for all Protestants (bible 
means book) and even forced it into the Catholic consciousness. 

The results for Protestants were remarkable. To start with, it gave whole 
populations a common background of knowledge, a common culture in the 
high sense of the term. A 19C incident makes the point vivid: when Coleridge 
was lecturing in London on the great English writers, he happened to men- 
tion Dr. Johnson's finding on his way home one night a woman of the streets 
ill or drunk in a gutter. Johnson carried her on his broad back to his own poor 
lodging for food and shelter. Coleridge's fashionable audience tittered and 
murmured, the men sneering, the women shocked. Coleridge paused and 
said: "I remind you of the parable of the Good Samaritan" and all were 
hushed. No amount of moralizing could have done the work of rebuke and 
edification with such speed and finality. 

The Bible was a whole literature, a library. It was an anthology of poetry 
and short stories. It taught history, 

biography, biology, geography, philos- Bibles laid open, millions of surprises! 
ophy, political science, psychology, — George Herbert, "Sin" (1633) 



28 ^^ From Dawn to Decadence 

hygiene, and sociology (statistical at that), in addition to cosmogony, ethics, 
and theology. What gives the Bible so strong a hold on the minds that once 
grow familiar with its content is its dramatic reporting of human affairs. For 
all its piety, it presents a worldly panorama, and with particulars so varied that 
it is hard to think of a domestic or social situation without a biblical example 
to match and turn to moral ends. 

With the Bible most often the only book in the house, kept in a place of 
honor, and with its first blank page containing the family records — names, 
dates of birth, marriage, and death — came the practice of family prayers three 
or four times a day, besides grace at meals. It was natural that if father or 
grandfather read a story from scripture to the assembled clan, servants 
included, the feelings aroused should be summed up in the Lord's Prayer or 
some other appropriate to the moment. When secularism came to prevail, 
Bible reading disappeared among the majority, and with it the background of 
ideas and allusion common to all. In this role, the only ecumenical replace- 
ment one can think of is the daily newspaper's comic strip. 



During the modern era dozens, scores, hundreds of Protestant sects have 
grown out of the first Evangelicism — the count at present is around 325 and 
unstable. Inner light, coupled with brooding over scripture, has been the effi- 
cient cause. Dissent has kept arising about details of practice as often as about 
articles of belief or the authenticity of the new prophets. Differences might 
be small but symbolic. The Amish reject machinery and the Mennonites but- 
tons. The unbalanced but charismatic George Fox, to equalize ranks, made 
the Friends (the Quakers) use (misuse) thee instead ofj0#and not take off their 
hats to anyone. The Mormons favor polygamy in obedience to an additional 
latter-day scripture; and by a still more recent prophecy, the Christian 
Scientists deny pain and, quite logically, medicine. Reserved to our own time 
are the cults in which salvation is reached by group suicide/ 

The longest, most violent — and indeed blood-spattered — clashes were 
about the Eucharist, the Trinity, baptism, grace and merit, and predestination. 
The one tenet common to the Evangelicals was abhorrence of the Catholic 
church, the "whore of Babylon." Only one group centered at Strasbourg and 
led by two able thinkers, Martin Bucer and Oecolampadius (Johann Huszgen), 
pleaded for agreement on the fundamentals and an end to lethal hair-splitting 
They were called Fundamentalists, or even better, Adiaphorists, which means 
anti-destructionists. They were hated by all the others, excepting a scattering of 
thoughtful scholars or statesmen. Mildness and wisdom did not suit the times. 
Today, in Islam as in Christian lands, Fundamentalism means the opposite of 
the Strasbourgers' temper and its expression is expectably violent. 



The New Life <^d 29 

Were these issues matters of Let us drop these diabolical words, these 
moment to their time only? Not if one party names, these factional, seditious 
makes some effort to see the cultural terms— Lutheran, Huguenot, Papist— let us 
continuity between two modes of inter- not change the name of Christian. 

preting human experience. Granted the — Chancellor Michel de l'Hopital at 
differences of language and social envi- THE opening of the Estates General 

ronment, the parallels will show the OF 

path we have traveled. 

To the first Reformers, the Eucharist, which means thanksgiving and 
commemorates Christ's Last Supper with the Aposdes, was the central sacra- 
ment, as it was to the Catholics. But the Protestants balked at the notion of 
the priest as a miracle-worker who transformed the bread and wine into 
Christ's flesh and blood — transubstantiation. Lutherans believed in consub- 
stantiation: the blood and flesh side by side with the ordinary materials. This 
was called the Real Presence, a mystery, but not a magical act done by a man 
in a cassock. The Calvinists took the bread and wine as symbols only, simple 
reminders of the Last Supper. When Calvin was questioned about the Real 
Presence, he said that Christ was everywhere and hence present at the sacra- 
ment also. The mystery was removed to a distance. 

The Calvinist thus edges a little closer to seeing poetic meaning and psy- 
chological truth in periodic thanksgiving to lessen pride and ego. The natu- 
ralistic interpreter goes the whole way and sees that it is the sinner, cleansed 
of sin and grateful for pardon, who has undergone a wondrous transforma- 
tion: his spirit is now as Jesus would have it. Is this a mystery or not? No 
answer seems conclusive if we ponder any important change in ourselves — 
for example, how our bodies cure themselves, sometimes nudged by "mira- 
cle" drugs; sometimes by placebos in the form of bread pills; occasionally by 
an emotional shock. Again, when our minds undergo sudden, profound alter- 
ations — in opinion or belief, in love, or in what is called artistic inspiration — 
what is the ultimate cause? We see the results, but grasp the chain of reason- 
ing at a link well below the hook from which it hangs. 

Next, consider Predestination, which states that individual merit does 
not ensure salvation and that man has no free will. This has been the most 
widely held Protestant dogma. When an idea possesses so many minds and 
such good ones, it is foolish to write it off as fantasy; one must look for the 
experience on which it rests. Luther supplies it: his seven years of helplessness 
till lifted up by grace. It was said earlier that predestination was still main- 
tained by a good many non-believers (<12); they might be surprised to hear 
it; they do not, indeed, believe that eternal damnation is decreed for the many, 
including unbaptized infants. But they do believe in scientific determinism — 
the unbreakable sequence of cause and effect, and that is predestination. It is 
the assumption all laboratory workers make and it rules out free will. Any 



30 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

present state of fact, any action taken, is the inevitable outcome of a series of 
events going back to the Big Bang that produced the universe. 

Social scientists and common folk who babble about genes or the 
Unconscious or "man a chemical machine" similarly account for others' 
actions and their own as did Luther and Calvin. The road taken was set from 
all eternity, with no choice at any moment: will is an illusion. The sense of 
being driven by a power not ourselves is not uncommon, especially among 
great doers and creators. Some temperaments seem born worshippers of 
Necessity — Frederick the Great for instance, who outgrew his Calvinist 
upbringing but remained a tierce determinist. Modern criminology is rooted 
in this conviction and public opinion in the main agrees: the criminal is not 
responsible for his acts; he is "conditioned." Grace (the right heredity or envi- 
ronment) has been denied him. 

Other root beliefs of the 16C also have their present counterparts. 
Luther's agonizing about sin is matched by the Existentialist preoccupation 
with Angst, or despair at "the human condition." Unaccountable "guilt" may 
be said to be popular today, notably among the many sufferers of depression. 
It is sometimes cured, as Luther's was, by introspection, on the analyst's 
couch and by acceptance of what is thus revealed. Catholic confession was a 
summary form of the therapy. 

Nor has the word sin disappeared from the vocabulary of the enlight- 
ened. More than one modern novelist, poet, or social theorist has attributed 
the horrors of our time to original sin, although its definition is left vague. It 
presupposes that human nature is fatally flawed. This is a more ruthless belief 
than the theologian's, since it does not include a Redeemer from sin or the 
efficacy of baptism. In the 16C both together lifted that terrible burden. For 
some in our day what redeems "scientifically" is political revolution, after 
which history will stop and society will know happiness without laws — in 
other words, the Kingdom of the Saints fought for by the Anabaptists and 
others for 100 years (<15; 265>). 

Keeping in mind the endless translation of ancestral thoughts and feelings 
effected by evolving culture, we can follow with sympathy the Reformers' argu- 
ments and the choices among the mysteries that they confronted. Luther said 
of the Trinity that he did not so much believe it as find it true in experience. 
What could he have meant? In the present century that excellent scholar and 
fine critical mind Dorothy Sayers affirmed the same thing and explained it 
(742>): the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit preside over all acts of creation, 
artistic and other, each Person playing a distinct part. [The book to read — 
hers — is The Mind of ~the Maker."] It is true that she allegorizes in the way Luther 
reproved, but can he have done anything else if it was experience and not faith 
alone that made him a Trinitarian? 

Some of his contemporaries clamored instead for Unity. Servetus, a 



The New Life <^> 31 

Spanish physician, paid with his life at The minister and his lay visitor, both 
the hands of Calvin for disbelieving Protestants, had talked over amiably the dif- 
that three could simultaneously be one. ferences between their creeds. It was a beau- 
He has been called "a martyr to truth," tiful lesson in toleration, which the minister 
but it is only fair to say that he was just nead y summed up: "Yes, we both worship 
as rabidly bent on persecution as his the same God ' y° u m y° m wa y and 1 m His " 
opponents, and he did much to pro- —Traditional in New England 
voke Calvin in secular ways before the 

reluctant decision was taken to put him to death. Again about the Trinity, the 
Sozzini, uncle and nephew, Italian refugees in Poland, argued that rejecting 
polytheism and the worship of the saints must mean one God and not three. 
Their adherents, first called Socinians, have been the Unitarians, notably 
influential in the thought and literature of New England (505>). Logically, 
the existence of only one God must mean that all religions are one. 
Innumerable thinkers, from Voltaire and Victor Hugo to Bernard Shaw and 
Gandhi, have said so, without much effect on western religious institutions. 

The point of drawing parallels between 1 6C conceptions and the latter- 
day naturalism, which has obscured but not abolished them, is to show the 
persistence of meanings within altered expressions of life's mysteries. It is an 
abstract continuity, for likeness is not sameness. In history everything 
observed wears its own dress and raises images peculiar to itself. Protestants 
and Catholics 500 years ago were not "for all practical purposes" our doubles 
who happened to talk poetically instead of scientifically. The Socinian's God 
was not "the principle of unity"; he was Christ the Lord saving sinners. The 
likeness in these similars is in the human motive: the idea of worshipping one 
God is akin to the scientific hope of bringing all phenomena under one law. 

* 
* * 

Juniors are impatient. In any movement, the second generation is likely 
to be dissatisfied with what it has inherited, including the confused state of 
affairs produced by the pioneers. The urgent duty is to create a system, a sin- 
gle doctrine, that will exclude the new dissenters, rally the uncertain, and 
make one flock of the faithful. 

For this kind of task, ambition is the agent that selects the leaders. There 
is no "legitimacy" in revolution; power belongs to whoever can seize it; and 
the newcomer is most apt to gain it who is most "pure," strict, and systematic. 
John Calvin was such a man. With a politician's eye and a lawyer's mind, he 
saw that Luther's piecemeal polemics, coupled with everybody's access to the 
Bible, endangered Reform. Anybody who could read might think himself 
"called" to found the true church of God. Extreme views encouraged crack- 
pots and rabble rousers, and the Adiaphorists of Strasbourg were compro- 



32 q^d From Dawn to Decadence 

misers, too broad to be right. Some Catholic priests who had turned 
Protestant ministers went so far in diversity as to keep offering Mass to their 
old flock and the Lutheran service to others. 

So in 1534 Calvin issued his first book, a small one. It was the germ of 
Calvin/>^, which brought about the division of the Protestants into two main 
bodies. The book was The Institutes of the Christian Religion (institutes then 
meaning teachings), a work often compared to Aquinas 's Summa Theologica. It 
cannot compare. The Institutes as we have it grew by periodic additions to 
what was no more than an essay, and though in its final form it is coherent 
enough, it is not a comprehensive philosophical system. It simply organizes 
the several evangelical beliefs and anchors them in scripture; it is in fact and 
purpose a textbook. Its effect on ordinary minds was powerful, but it did not 
put an end to all innovations. The fertility of the western intellect is great. 

For example, Agricola, a good theoretical mind, preached a kind of early 
Quakerism. He argued that Luther's repudiation of "works" forbade doing 
anything at all to express belief; if one had genuine faith, one could choose 
the rules one would obey Martin Bucer, mentioned earlier, had a vision of the 
cosmos that was widely adopted, 200 years later, under the name of Deism: 
God endowed the world that He created with laws to make it endure and He 
does not intervene in their working. With Providence thus eliminated, the 
interpretation of events as signs of divine displeasure goes by the board and 
the importance of prayer and ritual is nil. 

In this galaxy the figure of Sebastian Castellio is particularly attractive. He 
was born in French Burgundy, his original name being Chateillon. His 
humanistic studies at Lyon soon led him to Protestantism and so to 
Strasbourg, where he met Calvin. Called by him to Geneva, Castellio was 
made rector of the academy at the age of 25. But in his biblical studies — he 
was a master of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew — he interpreted texts in a spirit 
too liberal to suit his patron and he was refused ordination as minister. He 
moved to Basel and suffered poverty, but was at last appointed professor of 
Greek at the university. 

Like his colleagues everywhere, he had to argue about predestination and 
the Trinity and over this latter issue he condemned the Calvinists' execution 
of Servetus. Out of this debate came what is the first appearance in print of 
the momentous question: 'Whether Heretics Should be Persecuted." 
Castellio argued the negative. The date was 1554. His translation of the entire 
Bible, first into classical Latin, then into lively vernacular French, did not keep 
him from being persecuted and he ended his life poor and a wanderer. His 
merits were known to a kindred spirit, Montaigne, who has a warm word for 
him in the Essays. 

A few others arrived at Castellio 's position on heretics: Conrad Mutian, a 
Deist in the sense given above, believed that all religions are one and thus 



The New Life <^> 33 

could see no point in persecution. Tyndale, another translator of the Bible, 
argued that to make a belief prevail by fear was wrong and contrary to Christ's 
word (though "Compel them to come in" could be instanced on the side of 
force). These solitary Tolerationists were regarded with horror: they simply 
did not understand the reasons, religious and secular, that justify the drive to 
uniformity (271 >). 

Yet another innovator, Carlstadt, once Luther's good friend, took it into 
his head that as a preacher he must live like the lowest of the low, in shabby 
clothes, "acting the peasant on his dunghill" (so Luther jeered). Carlstadt 
denied the Real Presence of Christ at communion, which made him a kind of 
Calvinist in the Lutheran fold. 

The gentlest among dissenters from dissent came to be known, with the 
usual mocking intent, as Pietists. Their prophet was Jacob Boehme, a shoe- 
maker. He carried Luther's simplification as far as it could go. God, he said, 
knows whether one's piety is genuine. If it is, that is enough — no need of min- 
isters or deacons, of church buildings and services, not even of a name to 
define a group. In quiet sessions at home or anywhere convenient, pious 
friends come together to pray and meditate on divine truths. Did not the 
gospel say that the Lord was wherever two or three are gathered together? 
Pietism had a lasting influence. It inspired several cohesive sects, such as the 
Moravian Brothers still extant in Pennsylvania, the Familists (who emulate 
the Holy Family), the Society of Friends (Quakers), and a quickly suppressed 
outburst of Catholic mysticism in France, which pitted in controversy two of 
the greatest writers of the age (298>). 

In the Netherlands, Jacob Hermansz, known as Arminius, put forth a doc- 
trine unwelcome to the tough-minded: Redemption through Christ was for all 
souls, predestination was not absolute but conditional. Everyone can by his 
efforts cooperate in attaining grace and be saved — there is free will after all. Akin 
to the Catholics' "natural grace," this 

view was soon condemned by all parties, We have a Calvinist creed, a Popish liturgy, 
but it quietly found favor among and an Arminian clergy. 
Anglicans and was adopted in the 1 8C —William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (c. 1760) 
by John Wesley and his Methodists. 

A last eccentric who should not be forgotten is the German Kaspar 
Schwenkfeld. If, he said, each soul has a unique destiny, then each man and 
woman may frame his or her creed within the common Christian religion. 
They deserve to have faith custom-tailored to their needs. Today, when 
Individualism has turned from a fitful theme to a political and social right, 
this seer deserves to rank as the Reformer with the greatest following — 
millions are Schwenkfeldians sans le savoir. A suitable name for their one-man 
church would be Privatist, if its very character did not forbid its having any 
name at all. 



34 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

There remains to look into the work of the pre-eminent ideologist of the 
1 6C, the reformer of Reform, 

Calvin 

His achievement was to combine in practice Luther's two statements 
about the Christian's liberty: individual salvation through faith, and subjec- 
tion to society as antidote to anarchy. The second clause means the control of 
morals and manners by the state, a system that Calvin brought about without 
any planning. A provincial French lawyer and humanist scholar, he had gone 
to Paris and picked up Lutheran ideas. The Sorbonne, keeper of Catholic 
orthodoxy, reprimanded him and he went to Strasbourg, then the center of 
Protestant polemics. A bit later, by the age of 32, he was governing souls and 
behavior in Geneva, one might say, through no fault of his own: in passing 
through the city he was urged to stay and help out a Reformist minority strug- 
gling with the city fathers. 

Contrary to common belief, Calvin was not fond of power. Generally in 
poor health, he preferred study and he did not repine when, in the local strug- 
gle, Geneva expelled him. He was soon called back, after which his life was 
that of a prime minister fighting the crown — the municipal government. 
Calvin guided, threatened, and conciliated by turns to keep Protestantism in 
being. Under such conditions no practical detail was too trivial for his atten- 
tion, just as no backsliding seemed a trifle to his moral sense. But unlike most 
martinets and bureaucrats, he also had large ideas which he knew how to set 
forth persuasively. His Institutes, now a classic in Latin and French, grew to full 
length from 1535 to 1559 as the needs of instruction increased with the flood 
of students pouring into Geneva to hear him. He made the town a second 
Wittenberg. 

The two oracles respected each other, warily. Luther, who had only five 
years to live when Calvin's fame began to spread, was not best pleased to see 
so many new recruits differing from his theology only in details and yet bear- 
ing a new name. But Calvin — a sort of Lenin to Luther's Marx — may well 
have saved Protestantism when it was at a low ebb. In Germany after Luther's 
death, Charles V was winning the war. While Wittenberg and the Elector of 
Saxony were vanquished, Calvinism was flourishing to the north and west. 

Its pulling power was not due to a book alone. The Academy or college 
that Calvin founded to train ministers and that was to become the city uni- 
versity, made Geneva a European center of learning. The latest converts, the 
young seekers, the lost souls went there, listened, and more often than not 
came out missionaries. John Knox, for instance, who a few years earlier had 
been a galley slave in the Mediterranean, got his training at the Academy 
before "conquering" Edinburgh. Once there, he sent promising young Scots 



The New Life <^> 35 

to the source of light in Geneva. The place was buzzing with foreigners of all 
ages and origins. It was a Mecca for the enthusiasts, a city of refuge for exiles. 

To talk of Calvin and Knox inevitably brings to mind the label Puritan. It 
belongs to England and New England rather than Switzerland and Scotiand, 
and like other nicknames it is made to cover too much (262>). Only one fea- 
ture properly connects it to Calvin: the desirability of self-restraint, in itself 
not a strange idea. Revolutions paradoxically begin by promising freedom 
and then turn coercive and "puritanical," to save themselves from both dis- 
credit and reaction (428>). Creating a purer life requires that people forget 
other aims; therefore public and private conduct must be regimented. That is 
why the theme applicable to revolution is EMANCIPATION and not Freedom. 
Old shackles are thrown off, tossed high in the air, but come down again as 
moral duty well enforced. 

In Geneva under Calvin people The Church has no punishment but with- 
must go to church twice daily. When a holding the Lord's Supper. It has no sword to 
truant from services, an adulterer, or a punish or restrain, no empire to command, 
blasphemer was reported by the vigilant no P rison > no other P^ 8 - 
elders, someone was sent at once to the —Calvin, Institutes (1 536) 
erring brother or sister to admonish 
gendy and plead rather than scold. 

But there was also "the Discipline." If stubborn and persistent in sin, the 
dear soul must be turned over to the civil authorities. Adultery might mean 
death, quite as if Jesus had not dealt rather differentiy with the woman taken 
in adultery Blasphemy, that curious crime of "damaging God by bringing 
Him into ill-repute," was even more unforgivable. Sometimes, alas, for polit- 
ical reasons, a culprit in Geneva might be spared, but social pressure was 
intense, and the threat of hellfire ever present. Besides, by withholding com- 
munion, that is, by excommunication, Calvin could cut off a person from all 
social intercourse whatever. 

Calvinism, it has been said, makes Hell's Flames Avoided and Heaven 's 
every man the enemy of every other, as Felicities Enjoyed 

well as his own. Certainly its rigor by John Hayward, D.D., 10th Edition, 1696, 
accounts for the agonizing fear of sin 33 f d Edition, 1733 
that has been recorded in many lives — 

Bunyan's two years of terror; the poet Cowper's repeated plunge into wild 
despair when he knew that his soul was lost; Byron's lifelong conviction, born 
of his harsh Calvinist rearing, that everything he found good would turn to 
evil because wrong. Still more surprising, Rousseau's Genevan birth and 
upbringing influenced his philosophy of life and of the state. The number of 
plain people, especially adolescents, whose minds were tortured by Calvinist 
sermons in England and America may be imagined. 

In theory at least, Calvin himself was not the extinguisher of pleasure that 



36 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 



There is no middle way between these two 
things: either the earth must be worth noth- 
ing to us, or keep us fettered by an intemper- 
ate love of it. % The contempt which believers 
should train themselves to feel for the present 
life must not beget hatred of it or ingratitude 
to God. It has many enticements, a great 
show of delight, grace, and sweetness. We 
ought to have such fondness for it that we 
regard it as one of the gifts of divine goodness 
which are by no means to be despised. % If 
heaven be our country, what can earth be but 
a place of exile? Let us long for death and 
constandy meditate upon it. 

— Calvin, "Of Meditating on 
the Future Life" 



Calvinism has come to suggest. In 
Geneva, playing cards and other recre- 
ations were not forbidden. As for 
enjoyment in general, it was a point on 
which he and Luther were as Box and 
Cox: Luther wrote that "the Christian 
man is dead to the world," yet, as we 
saw, he granted a large place to instinct 
and nature; he relished life (<17). The 
ailing Calvin was not a relisher; his 
advice is contradictory and leaves 
nature a rather narrow crack through 
which to manifest God's goodness. 



When the two great sects are taken as wholes, the geographical lines of 
demarcation at the end of the 16C are clear, though not exact. The German 
states were generally Lutheran, part of France and of the Netherlands were 
Calvinist. Sweden and its neighboring dependencies were Lutheran, 
Switzerland two-thirds Calvinist. England made a creed of its own more anti- 
papal than thoroughly reformed. Scotiand was Calvinist. But everywhere 
enclaves of heresy and rash individuals occupied the persecutors for nine 
generations. 

Self-repression for the sake of freeing the spirit had other than strictiy reli- 
gious consequences. It resembles the ethos of the ancient Stoics, and we shall 
not be surprised to find their doctrine adopted as a living philosophy by many 
humanists in Calvin's day and the century following (52>). Clearly it was not his 
influence alone but something in the common temper that made discipline 
congenial. After the expansiveness of rebellion and the excitement of a new 
turn in culture, there is savor in austere deportment and sober expectations. 
Oddly enough, these ways of dealing with the self have in our day been believed 
to throw light on a complex economic question: the rise of Capitalism. Thanks 
to repetition, the thesis proposed by two scholars, one German, the other 
English, has become a thought-cliche: the Capitalist system owes its birth and 
success to the moral teachings of the Reformers. The Protestant "work ethic" 
created the entrepreneur, the economic man as we know him under capitalism. 

But was the God-fearing Protestant — anxious soul — really predestined 
to be a capitalist? The sociologist Max Weber and the socialist R. H. Tawney 
wrote quasi classic books that give complementary accounts of this supposed 
cultural connection. It pleased the modern critics of Capitalism by linking 



The New Life <^> 37 

that system and its evils to a "straitlaced morality" and "a discredited theol- 
ogy," at the same time as it vexed the strict Marxists by substituting a spiritual 
for a materialistic agency in the march of history 

Weber and Tawney based their thesis on social and psychological 
grounds: Protestantism, by leaving the believer in doubt about his salvation, 
yet holding out the chance of grace, encourages him to act as if already an 
elect — sober, earnest, hardworking. His moral code makes him calculating at 
every turn — the ideal man of business. On earth and beyond, he faces risk 
with fortitude while taking all thoughtful precautions. The Catholic, by com- 
parison, is easy-going, pays his way spiritually by symbolic "works," most of 
which have no practical effects on earth. Far from praising real work, he sees 
it as Adam's curse. His church condemns as usury any demand for interest on 
loans. And the model man is not the one who achieves material success; on 
the contrary, poor and humble is the mark of sanctity. 

These two studies brought out some interesting cases of moralizing about 
life and work, ranging from the Puritan Baxter to Benjamin Franklin and his 
canny Poor Richard. But neither Weber's nor Tawney's somewhat different 
demonstrations has stood up to criticism. For one thing, Weber's notion of 
Puritan "asceticism" is an exaggeration, both verbal and factual (262>); and 
more important, Capitalism long antedates the Protestant revolution and 
hence must have had a "spirit" at that earlier time. Permitting usury and trade 
by means of capital were argued for in the late Middle Ages — and practiced. 
Medieval abbots lent their surplus funds at interest, and if the rate was no 
higher than ten percent, they received dispensation from the guilt of usury. 

Again, large-scale banking thrived early in Italy — the Medici are the out- 
standing example — and so it was not the child of Protestantism. When it 
occurred, it was in Italy that it made the least headway. Facts from the 
Protestant side itself refute the thesis: both Luther and Calvin attacked profit- 
making and deplored "the materialism of the age." (Every age is "materialistic" 
and fit for deploring.) Calvin reluctantiy agreed to allow charging five percent 
interest in certain narrowly defined cases. He urged his flock to live as modestly 
as possible, so as to always leave something for charity. Whoever went in for 
Capitalist enterprise in the 16C was not spurred on by Calvin's teaching or 
Luther's. And throughout the 17th, preachers everywhere kept denouncing 
usury and lust for gain. 

Besides, the newly Protestant countries did not lead Europe in economic 
progress. Catholic France outstripped all others till its costly wars in the late 
17C set back its prosperity. As for the great towns of north Germany, the 
Netherlands, and the Baltic, their trade was flourishing long before the 
Reformers' ideas reached them. A final point, which incidentally shows how 
poorly knowledge percolates in our "age of communication": Weber in his 



38 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

argument lists the Protestant ethic as only one element, which further study 
must relate to half a dozen others before it can be known how far "the 
Protestant ethic" promoted "the spirit of capitalism." 



The cultural predicament after a revolution is how to reinstate commu- 
nity, how to live with those you have execrated and fought against with all 
imaginable cruelty. Here and there, to be sure, compromisers still existed after 
three decades of violence and abuse, and as late as the year before Luther's 
death the Protestants were invited to send delegates to a Council of the 
church that was to meet at Trent to review Catholic teaching and practice. 
The opportunity was declined. 

The Protestant Reformation being a revolution, it would seem logical 
that the Catholic Counter-Reformation devised at Trent should be called a 
counter-revolution. In fact, the theological and administrative decisions taken 
by the Council were not revolution but reform, the only reform of the cen- 
tury — a deliberate large-scale change without violence. The bishops were cer- 
tainly deliberate: they took 18 years, in three bouts of discussion to reach a 
consensus. It was a providential schedule: old resisters could be gradually 
argued into their graves. 

The English cardinal delegate Reginald Pole tells us what the Council 
aimed at: "the uprooting of heresies, the reform of ecclesiastical discipline and 
of morals, and lastly, the eternal peace of the whole church. These we must see 
to, or rather, untiringly pray that by God's mercy they may be done." 

One of the means was to restate things clearly and require them strictly: 
the creed, the catechism and missal, the exclusive use of the Vulgate version 
of the Bible, and the guidelines governing the Index of Prohibited Books. 
The Roman Inquisition was revitalized and assisted by the bishops' visita- 
tions; seminaries were established in Rome, one for each nation, and a mis- 
sion given to designated orders, chiefly the recently founded Oratorians and 
the Jesuits. An interesting coincidence: the order founded by Loyola as The 
Society of Jesus to reconquer the countries lost to Protestantism came into 
action within a few months of Calvin's parallel Discipline for those who 
would go forth to make Protestant converts. 

To counter the Evangelicals' PRIMITTVISM, Cardinal Baronius wrote a his- 
tory of the early church, a classic that gained topical interest from the discovery 
of the catacombs, the underground passages in Rome in which the earliest per- 
secuted Christians took refuge. The traces of their presence reinvigorated the 
worship of relics and strengthened the papacy by reminding the faithful that 
the church triumphed thanks to its first martyrs, including St. Peter, at Rome. 

The resolve sealed at Trent recaptured a good deal of territory, notably 



The New Life <^> 39 

Poland. It succeeded because it was in large measure organized against indi- 
vidualism. It enlisted the minds of men as zealous and capable as the first 
Evangelicals and readier than they to work in teams on a common plan. One 
of these, Ignacio de Loyola, a Spanish soldier, self-converted, who had a genius 
for administration, united a small band of seven (later ten) for a pilgrimage to 
the Holy Land. When war on the Mediterranean with the Turks made this 
impossible, he thought of creating an active society for re-awakening faith and 
he began writing his Spiritual Exercises — rules for meditation and discipline. The 
Exercises are a masterpiece of applied psychology. Unlike earlier guides — 
indeed, contrary to their teaching — the rules called for the user to picture the 
topic of his thought or prayer, to see the incidents of Christ's life, and at times 
to form an image of the self at these tasks. This "application of the senses" 
formed a group of missionaries at once spiritualized and in touch with the 
imaginings of common folk. 

The popes after Trent were simi- Perform the acts of faith and faith will come. 
larly zealous "gospel men" with large —Loyola, Exercises (\ 548) 

ideas. The Jesuit Order having been 

i , , , Assume a virtue, if you have it not, .. . 
recognized at last by the Vatican, its 

, For use can almost change the stamp 
members soon spread beyond the con- 

r J of nature 

fines of Europe and began making 

~ , ,. c , , r i xt — Hamlet to His Mother (1602) 

Catholics of the people of the New 

World and the Far East, defending So with faith, if it does not lead to action, it is 

them, often, against the greed of their in itself a lifeless thing. 

conquerors. At home, the cultural split — The Gospel According to St. James 

in the new life was tangible: the _ , . ,,,, , .,. , *. 

° Only act in cold blood as if the thing in ques- 

Catholic effort to regain ground pro- don wete ^ ^ fc ^ become so ^ ^ 
duced new works of architecture and habit and emodon thM our ^^ ;„ it ^ 
the fine arts; the Protestant effort pro- be d,,^ wbich characterize belief, 
duced literature and large works of _ mLL1AMiAME s, Principles of 
doctrine. The Calvinist courts in par- Psychology (1890) 

ticular favored learning and Scotland 

started popular education. The Catholics put up or restored churches, com- 
missioned altar pieces and paintings and sculptures of the Virgin and the 
saints — witness the abundance of Baroque art. The Protestants contributed 
Pilgrims Progress ^ the poems of Milton and Marvell, Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living 
and Dying and (as will appear) a spate of tracts, many of them in favor of rule 
by the people (265>). 

At the same time as it cleansed and refurbished the ancestral fabric, the 
Council of Trent tied reform to narrow views; in this respect, it too went prim- 
itive. The aim was to oppose Protestant errors: the result was to freeze 
Catholic beliefs at the point that European ideas had reached by 1 500 or even 
earlier. Doing this was to go against tradition. The very meaning of that word 



40 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

for the church had been that teachings not central to the faith changed over 
time, unhampered by the Bible, which was not yet in the hands of the people. 
The clergy being the only literates, they were the active, thoughtful public opin- 
ion whose debates and conclusions were the march of the Occidental mind. 

This give-and-take maintained a common ground in large matters, but not 
close uniformity. Henry Adams's view of the happy 13C undisturbed by diver- 
sity is a Utopian retrospect. Adams ignored or forgot that Thomas Aquinas, 
the great synthesizer, was nearly excommunicated twice. An accusation of 
heresy was a way of starting an argument, and knowledge made headway. 

The ideas in the heads of 1 6C bish- 
Heretics are given us so that we might not ops were obviously well in advance of 
remain in infancy. They question, there is those held as true by the contempo- 
discussion, and definitions are arrived at to raries of Charlemagne in the 9th. Now 
make an organized faith. in the 1 6th, instead of an intellectual 

St. Augustine free-for-all and gradual enlightenment, 

the church decided to arrest the cur- 
rent of thought. This stand was in effect dictated by their Protestant enemies. 
One could say that in roundabout fashion, it was these Bible-ridden revolu- 
tionists who got Galileo condemned for his astronomy. If the literalism of the 
Word had not been adopted at Trent to show that Catholics too revered 
Scripture, there would have been no need to make science conform to 
Genesis. By commanding belief in matters not essentially religious or moral, 
Trent laid the ground for that "warfare of science and religion" which is still 
being waged/ It has kept making unbelievers, or rather — since it forces a 
choice — it has deprived many of the chance to believe. 

The widespread discontent among western Catholics as our century 
ends — the public wrangling among bishops, the desertion of clerics and lag- 
ging recruitment of priests, the "liberal" doctrines sprung up in South 
America or taught at Catholic universities in defiance of papal decrees — all 
have their ultimate source in the success of the Tridentine reforms. Yet it 
would be a mistake to think that these actions and reactions are part of a con- 
tinued trend toward a secular world ruled by science. On the contrary, divi- 
sions within the churches suggest a renewed search for the transcendent. 
Though today in the West the schools and governments, the press and the 
habits of public life, are no longer blended with religion, more and more 
demands are expressed that they should do so once again. 

And more than demands: efforts to reconquer souls and institutions. 
Fundamentalisms are vocal everywhere; religious issues and personalities 
occupy the media as never before. Noting headlines at random, one learns 
that Protestantism is making converts in Brazil and in France; that the 
Church of England, now outnumbered by the English Catholics, has rede- 
fined Hell to eliminate its "sadistic tortures"; that the Reverend Sun Myung 



The New Life ^ 41 

Moon is touring Europe lecturing on Popular interest in matters spiritual, so much 

Evolution, and has married 36,000 a feature of life in the 1990s, has provided 

couples in Seoul; that Satanism is a fad publishers with a ready audience for all sorts 

among the young in more than one of books about angels, miracles, and visions 

country, while other cults, meditative, of ^ afterlife - Jt has meant a market for more 

t-. ^ ^ i i ir • i • serious works, too, like studies of Jesus and 

Eastern, televised, or self-immolating * ' J 

. . r most lately of the Virgin Mary. 

proliferate. J 6 J 

Meantime, the Virgin Mary appears ~ The New York Times ^ August 1 7 ' 1 " 6 
in sophisticated American suburbs and 

crowds gather to await her second appearance. More orthodox events also 
attract notice. The annual appeal of the Taize order of monks in Poland brings 
together some 70,000 young people from all over Europe to "restore a soul to 
the mechanized world." The pope's visits are attended by hundreds of thou- 
sands, new translations of the Bible are published, and science is attacked on 
intellectual grounds by writers free of religious motives. Lasdy, Islam — or part 
of it — is again fighting the West, and where it conquers it is much more intol- 
erant than it was in the 1 6C. It is plain that the Protestant revolution has not 
ended in diffuse indifference to faith, nor has the Catholic self-reformation set- 
tied doctrine with finality. 

* 
* * 

The Jesuits' activity impinged on culture in other ways than the stricdy 
devotional. In undertaking to deal with the young, the stubborn, and the hes- 
itant souls, the Order developed casuistry, penetrated domestic life, and 
acquired a virtual monopoly of education. "Casuistry" and "Jesuitical" have 
become synonyms for deviousness, thus obscuring an important subject. The 
famous casuists of the 1 6C, such as the Spanish Mariana and the Anglican 
Jeremy Taylor, were men of high moral and intellectual caliber. Casuistry is 
the theory of cases: the casuist shows how to apply the general rules that gov- 
ern conduct to the particular moral problem — exactly what the judge does 
with a statute when he decides a case. All the recent codes of conduct for 
lawyers, physicians, and other professionals require casuistry for their appli- 
cation. Casuistry is also the mental operation of the moral person when he or 
she faces an ethical dilemma. It is a difficult art. 

The sad fate of Jesuit casuistry came about when in the course of making 
the old faith attractive once more, some writers set down ingenious ways of 
evading plain but painful duties. Such books, full of tantalizing, often sexual, 
cases (as in psychoanalytic literature) became popular as guides to miscon- 
duct. Before psychiatrists and magazine articles on psychology, counselors 
were needed and easily found among the Jesuits. The well-disciplined Order 
supplied father confessors who found a permanent role in great houses. In 



42 0*0 From Dawn to Decadence 

more modest settings, as "directors of conscience," they were regularly con- 
sulted by the members of the family, most often the women. Moliere's Tartuffe 
depicts the arrangement. In time, it led to such abuses that it was denounced 
on both moral and intellectual grounds (219; 345>). 

Meanwhile, by care and thought and continually revised methods, the 
Jesuits shone as schoolmasters — unsurpassed in the history of education. 
They taught secular subjects as well as church doctrine and did so with unex- 
ampled understanding and kindness toward their pupils. Their success was 
due to the most efficient form of teacher-training ever seen. They knew that 
born teachers are as scarce as true poets and that the next best cannot be 
made casually out of indifferent materials, so they devised a preparation that 
included exhaustive learning and a severe winnowing of the unfit at every 
phase of a long apprenticeship. 

The Jesuits set up schools by the 

>ru tt • •_ rr» • j *u t •* score. In mid-17C Europe there were 

The University of Pans opposed the Jesuits r 

not merely because they were from abroad more schools and P U P^ than in *** 
but because they competed with those in mid-1 9C. Indeed, there soon was corn- 
salaried posts at the University by offering plaint of too many schools for the pop- 
education free. It is not hard for firmly illation. All likely youths, rich or poor, 
united, clever, and courageous men to do were given the means to attend, and the 
great things in the world. Ten such men merits of the system were shortly seen 
affect 100,000. m me galaxy Q f brilliant minds that it 

— Burckhardt, Judgments on History produced. From Descartes to Voltaire 

and beyond, a good many philosophers 
and scientists were educated by the Jesuits. Some of these bright pupils went 
on to undermine the dogmas they had so well learned; they became leaders of 
the 18C Enlightenment, to whom the church was the "infamous thing" they 
must crush (361 >). 



The Good Letters 



So FAR IN THIS STORY, events and ideas have suggested three themes: PRIM- 
ITIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, and EMANCIPATION. The first and last, audible in 
Luther's proffer of Christian liberty and based on what might be called the 
churchlessness of the gospels, succeeded in putting an end to the West's unity 
of belief. It also foreshadowed the third theme, INDIVIDUALISM, not as a 
political or social right, but as an assumption behind the proliferation of sects, 
themselves a result of the individual's untrammeled relation to God. 

Side by side with this revolutionary idea, another of equal power was also 
at work strengthening the awareness and the claims of the individual. This was 
Humanism, to which passing reference has been made in characterizing figures 
important in the revolution. Humanism, too, grew out of concern with the 
past, but not a primitive past; on the contrary, a civilized one, the recovery of 
which came to mean not a purer religion but a more secular world. 

The name Humanist has a familiar aura but commonly conveys no well- 
defined affiliation. We heard Luther call Erasmus an atheist because he was a 
humanist and condemn humanist pursuits as frivolous, while he himself 
regretted his lack of proficiency in classical Latin, which his protege 
Melanchthon had mastered like any good humanist. And Calvin, we saw, was 
trained humanistically without turning atheist. The appellation obviously had 
several connotations at the dawn of our era and has acquired more since. 
Various adjectives have been added to it: secular, theistic, naturalistic, and 
even esthetic Humanism. 

To make things more complicated, the name is associated with that of 
Renaissance, which is also an elastic term. One meets the latter in reading 
about many things — painting, diplomacy, or the geniuses who possess more 
than one talent — Renaissance men. And both its meaning and its date are in 
permanent dispute. But this confusion is not hopeless. If one is willing to go 
back to origins, one sees the usual growth of a new cultural interest, a change 
of direction in purposes and feelings. Those origins take us back some 1 50 
years before the Modern Era. 



44 q^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Oh century! Oh letters! It is a joy to be alive. The term humanist was first applied 

— Ulrich von Hutten to Pirckheimer, by German scholars of the early 1 9C to 

Secretary to the Emperor (1518) writers who in the 1 4C and 1 5C reject- 

ed parts of the immediate past in favor 
of the culture they perceived in the classics of ancient Rome. They were par- 
ticularly keen about the Latin style of these classics. 

The label Humanism is odd — the ism of being human — but it is not arbi- 
trary: it originally described the style of the ancients: litterae humaniores, the 
more human letters, meaning a literature less abstract than medieval philoso- 
phy and expressed in a more elegant grammar and concise vocabulary. These 
qualities defined what the humanists liked to call the "good letters." By com- 
parison, the prose of the medieval scholastics was barbaric and fit only for 
discussing theology. It was far from ignoring Man, but it was logic-chopping 
and it linked all human concerns to the hereafter. Such was the animus of cer- 
tain gifted writers born in Italy in the first third of the 14C, notably Petrarch, 
Salutati, and Boccaccio, whose disciples made humanism the culture of the 
next centuries. 

Their negative view was unfair; the Humanists owed more to the past 
than they knew or acknowledged — the typical attitude of innovators. But 
since their positive views have shaped western thought and action to this day, 
the conception of humanitas that came out of the preoccupation with style 
wants looking at. We still speak of "the humanities" and keep trembling at the 
danger they are in, apparently their permanent condition. But we are not 
always sure of what they are or why so called. Are they just college subjects or 
something besides? 

For the original Humanists, the ancient classics depicted a civilization 
that dealt with the affairs of the world in a man-centered way. Those books — 
poems and plays, histories and biographies, moral and social philosophy — 
were for the ancients guides to life, important in themselves, rather than 
subordinate to an overriding scheme that put off human happiness to the 
day of judgment. The theme of SECULARISM emerges from this outlook. 

Humanitas, that is, the studies it involved, opened a vista on the goals that 
could be reached on earth: individual self-development, action rather than 
pious passivity, a life in which reason and will can be used both to improve 
worldly conditions and to observe the lessons that nature holds for the 
thoughtful. The Humanists were scholars, but they had no use for an ivory 
tower. With this vision in mind, it is not surprising that Cicero became the 
humanists' culture hero. A writer of superb prose, an orator and statesman, a 
moral philosopher, and the last defender of Republican Rome, he had all the 
virtues and talents of the ideal Humanist, except that of able warrior. His 
"imperishable fame" perished only when physical science began to drive Latin 
out of the curriculum around 1 890. Until then, which is to say for 500 years, 



The Good Letters <^> 45 

ideas and catchphrases from Cicero's The new degree of Bachelor of Science does 

speeches and writings, together with the not guarantee that the holder knows any sci- 

works of other Romans, filled the ence. It does guarantee that he does not 

minds of educated western man and know any Latin. 

woman after bedeviling the young in — Dean Briggs of Harvard College 

school. The structure of thought and ( c 1900 ) 

argument in the western languages has 

been influenced by Cicero, and the oration long flourished as a literary form 

(51>). 

Besides Cicero's works, Livy's patriotic history of Rome and its wars with 
Carthage; theArwa/s and Germania of Tacitus (<9); the tragedies and moral 
essays of Seneca; the comedies of Plautus and Terence; the poems of Virgil, 
Ovid, Lucretius, Catullus, and Horace; and — lone specimen — Pliny's ency- 
clopedic natural history — made up the portrait of a complete culture that 
seemed to its 14C devotees grander and far more highly civilized than the one 
they lived in. 

Why no mention of the Greeks? To be sure, Plato and Aristotle, long 
used by the Scholastics in their speculations, were important to the human- 
ists, and Homer, Thucydides, and Demosthenes as well. But learning Greek 
in order to read these authors came late — hardly before the Turks captured 
Constantinople, capital of the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire at the mid- 
point of the 15C. It was then that learned refugees from that city came to 
Rome and made a living by teaching Greek. But reading Greek was never so 
general an accomplishment. Humanism as the common possession of the 
intellectual class meant old Rome — witness a custom of the English 
Parliament: a member could quote a Latin tag to round out an argument and 
he was laughed at if he uttered a false quantity; but to quote Greek was a faux 
pas — it might not be understood by everybody, Whig or Tory. 

Humanists saw Greece through Roman eyes anyway. The vivid awareness 
and worship of Greece — the Parthenon, Pericles, the Venus of Milo — came 
later in our era (514>), and different conceptions of Greece have flourished in 
successive periods. But throughout, the highly educated were supposed to have 
mastered both the ancient languages, and the clergy must know Hebrew in 
addition. It is a noteworthy feature of 20C culture that for the first time in over 
a thousand years its educated class is not expected to be at least bilingual. 

* * 

The path between the onset of the good letters and the modern 
Humanist as freethinker or simply as scholar is circuitous but unbroken. If we 
look for what is common to the Humanists over the centuries we find two 
things: a body of accepted authors and a method of carrying on study and 



46 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

debate. The two go together with the belief that the best guides to the good 
life are Reason and Nature. Finding this assumption all-important, some 
moderns have carped at the early Humanists for fussing over grammar and 
words, but it is hard to see how they could have produced scholarly editions 
of the ancient works that they valued so highly without first mastering the 
minutiae of language. In any case, what is the point of saying about innova- 
tors that they should have done what later comers were able to do after the 
ground had been cleared for them? 

As for the Humanist method, it is the one still in universal use. Its con- 
ventions are commonplace everywhere: in government, business, the weekly 
magazines, and even in schoolwork — who has escaped "research"? who 
dares ignore exact quotation and date, consulting previous work, citing 
sources, listing bibliography, and sporting that badge of candor, the foot- 
note? 

The accepted authors have not been as stable, though drawn from the 
same pool. Cicero's rise and fall has been mentioned; with every shift of 
mood new names emerge from relative neglect or oust others from the top 
places. The new choices point to a recurrent cultural need that can be 
described as "elements that are wanted," because lacking at that moment. 
The freshly admired figures correspond to that felt need. The passing of a 
generation usually ends a batde and installs those who urged new heroes, who 
deserve what is amusingly called lasting fame. Today, the whole Occidental 
canon is under attack by many people who find it out of tune, useless, 
although they could not readily say who is in it. 

In the 1 5th and 1 6C the continuing enthusiasm for the ancients was rein- 
forced by the feeling that the inherited culture was dissolving and here was a 
storehouse of ideas and attitudes with which to rebuild. It was like going up 
to the attic and polishing up semi-discarded treasures. The names of authors, 
the tides of their books, the topics treated were fresh, not the old bores; they 
formed a field of discovery all untouched, a mine to exploit for those ambi- 
tious of literary fame. Hence the passionate search for old manuscripts to 
save from loss, to compare and edit. Scholars traveled widely to ransack cas- 
des and monasteries; wealthy amateurs sent agents to buy in Constantinople 
and the Greek cities. The monks had copied and recopied the old texts and 
housed them for a millennium, but they had regarded them in another light. 
To be sure, as early as the 12C when Frederick II of Hohenstaufen had held 
court at Naples, he had shown a true humanist interest, extending even to 
Arabic works, but he was a lone exception. 

To explain the curious fact that the Middle Ages valued the ancients 
enough to keep their works copied but did not breed Humanists calls for a 
Theory of Aspect. It would state than an object or idea is rarely seen in the 



The Good Letters <^& 47 

round. Like a mountain, it presents a variety of faces. Moved by an ulterior 
purpose, observers take a few of these for the whole. This is a cultural gener- 
ality. It accounts for the surprising differences in the value put on the same 
artist or thinker at different times and for the different pasts depicted by dif- 
ferent historians. This partiality should not be surprising; it is a familiar fact 
of life: each individual "takes" only some elements of experience, and that 
spontaneous choice governs tastes, career, estimates of worth, and the feel of 
life itself. 

For the early Humanists, the aspects that shone out in the works of antiq- 
uity were the beauty of the language and the novel features of a vanished civi- 
lization. Both gave rise to a new sense, the sense of history, which may be 
defined as the simultaneous perception of difference and similarity between 
past and present. But had the medievals no historical awareness? They thought 
of themselves as descendants of the Roman Empire; they venerated the first 
Christian emperor, Constantine, and his feudal inheritor Charlemagne. They 
read Virgil and thought that one or another of the Trojan heroes in his poem 
had founded this or that western nation. That same poem was also used as a 
means of foretelling the future, by opening it at random and reading some one 
line on the page. For Virgil had been a magician. All this is a clue to the Middle 
Ages' attitude toward history. They merged time and space indiscriminately. 
They mingled fact and legend and miracle, and being preoccupied with eternity, 
they "took" sameness and continuity as more real than development and 
change — hence, no history in the modern sense (234>). 

With the usual pride of advanced thinkers, the Humanists saw their 
repossession of a great past as a Renaissance — a rebirth of civilization itself. 
The immediate past was "Gothic" in language, thought, and sensibility. This 
boast of rebirth was accepted without demur until our own century. When 
contrary-minded researchers, tired of hearing praises of Renaissance 
Humanism, tackled the Middle Ages with gusto, they unearthed evidence to 
show that many of the achievements credited to the Renaissance had a root in 
the previous period, including certain scientific ideas. So if any renaissance 
ever did occur, it was in thel2C, leading to the high medieval civilization of 
the 13th.° 

The dispute is not one of those that can be settled; judgment depends on 
how the viewer takes the unquestioned facts. But it can also be held that there 
is no need to "take" sides. In the first place, the traditional Renaissance is like a 
movable feast. The Italian Petrarch in the 14C is deemed the first full-blooded 
Humanist. "Renaissance" painting is the great achievement of the 15C. 
Erasmus, Ariosto, Tasso, Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and the Pleiade 
poets in France are all labeled Renaissance writers, and they belong to the 16C 
So does Renaissance music. As we saw, Erasmus, arriving in England in 1497, 



48 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

was glad to find that English scholars were now abreast of "the good letters." 
In short, the cultural features of the so-called Renaissance moved north and 
west from Italy during a cultural lag of some two and a half centuries. 

These dates can serve to calm the dispute: since the Modern Era is seen 
as beginning around 1 500 and Petrarch is seen as the earliest Humanist, the 
Renaissance is a going concern in the 14C and 15C, which is to say before the 
Modern Era, and thus part of the medieval, its germs present in the late 
Middle Ages, its fruitfulness intensified in the early modern era. So viewed, 
the black-and-white contrast between eras disappears: it was an illusion of the 
innovators, serviceable to them as self-encouragement. To us, it is tenable 
only if we make comparisons over a wide gap, say between 1250 and 1550 — 
Aquinas with Erasmus, or the two towers of Chartres cathedral, built 200 
years apart. In this perspective, the inquiring reader can safely enjoy both 
Burckhardt's History of Civilisation in the Renaissance and his challenger 
Huizinga's Waning of the Middle Ages° — two masterpieces of cultural history, 
two visions that complement each other in spite of partial disagreement. 

Since the passage of time always brings on difference, "the" Humanist is 
an abstract figure that must be made concrete by examples. Nuances in an 
evolving ideal and the turbulent culture then appear together as they should. 
One must obviously begin with the veneration for the ancients and their lan- 
guage as recorded in the life and work of 

Petrarch 

The son of a Florentine notary, young Francesco, born in 1304, began by 
studying law, but being left impoverished after his father's political exile to 
southern France, he became a priest. By his 30th year he was famous as a 
poet — so famous that in a revival of the ancient custom of crowning a hero 
with laurel leaves, a Roman senator crowned him "poet laureate." Petrarch gave 
thanks in a Latin oration on a text by Virgil. But this Latinity was only part of 
his renown. Petrarch's name today evokes that of Laura, to whom the poet 

wrote sonnets and odes for years, and 

Thinkyou,ifLaurahadbeenPetrarch's these were ^ ItaHan ' Incidentally, he 

^fe made no attempts at intimacy; indeed, 

He would have written sonnets all his life? so varied was the purely literary tribute 

—Byron in Don Juan tliat some scholars classify the poems as 

pro-Laura, anti-Laura, and neutral — 

deconstruction with a vengeance. 

This early Humanist ritual of laureateship, somewhat dimmed, is still 

with us. As everybody knows, it persists in England, where it is a lifetime post 

whose holder is expected to celebrate great events in verse. The harvest of 

poetry has been small. In the United States since 1985 a series of incumbents 



The Good Letters q^> 49 

have held the title for one year each, with the modest expectation that their 
elevation will publicize the importance of literature. Petrarch's celebration at 
Rome signifies much more: it means that the aura of the Roman past was in 
the air, intimations of what was to come. It is in his combining "elements that 
were wanted" and adding one or two that Petrarch is a new man, who inspired 
imitation without end. 

The one thing of monetary value that he inherited from his father was a 
manuscript of Cicero. The work filled his mind with ancient facts and ideas; a 
trip to Rome fixed his vision. For there he saw and marveled at the antiquities, 
tangible remains of a culture once alive and complete. It may have helped the 
vision that the city just then was no longer papal Rome: a schism in the 
church had exiled the popes to Avignon, where Petrarch grew up. The pope's 
court there gave the young man a distaste for intrigue, which made him refuse 
official posts — even university rectorships — all his life. 

Instead, he set himself to earn his keep as a writer, though not, of course, 
by the sale of his works. He was at first part of the household of the Colonna 
family; then, when famous, he served as envoy to various princes. Diplomacy 
in his day was occasional, not a permanent exchange of resident ambassadors, 
as it became in the 16C. In the mid- 14th, someone with a ready choice of 
words — Latin words — was despatched to make a formal speech on the mat- 
ter at issue. Petrarch excelled in the required rhetoric, and though his 
speeches rarely produced results, his distinguished presence flattered the 
recipient prince and his words were appreciated by an invited audience as 
high entertainment. 

To earn a more than passing repute as a poet, Petrarch started an epic in 
Latin on the deeds of the Roman hero Scipio, the commander-in-chief in the 
second war against Carthage — hence the title Africa for the epic. It was 
never finished, partly because Petrarch never gained ease in handling the 
classic metres — any more than he mastered Greek, though he tried more 
than once. This falling short of the later Humanists' panoply accounts for 
one modern scholar's quaint description of him as only "the vanguard of the 
changed emphasis." 

During a wide tour of Europe, Petrarch found another manuscript of 
Cicero — the letters to his friends. This familiar style he did master and popu- 
larized. At the same time, his poems in Italian — by no means all sonnets or all 
addressed to Laura — he fashioned into a shapely quasi narrative work, a kind 
of allusive autobiography. This was new. And it was also an expression of his 
intense interest in himself: "I am unlike anybody I know." He declared that art 
is an individual matter, not something within the reach of all professionals. 
"Everyone should write in his own style." The theme to note here is SELF- 
CONSCIOUSNESS. It is allied to individualism but it differs from it in being 
not a social and political condition but a mental state. One can be in prison, 



50 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

individuality all but submerged, and yet be acutely self-conscious. 
Individualism has limits imposed by the coexistence of many other individu- 
als; self-consciousness has none. Over the centuries it has dug ever deeper 
into the ego, with no boundary in sight. 

Another singularity in Petrarch's life was that he climbed a high hill in 
southern France in order to admire the view/ If it was done before him, it was 
not recorded. Nature had been endlessly discussed, but as a generality, not as 
this landscape. As for Petrarch's nurture of his unique self, it included chang- 
ing his name, for a purpose that can only be called esthetic. Petrarch was born 
Francesco di Petracco, but with a poet's ear he decided that it was not a 
euphonious run of syllables. Cutting a c, adding an r to lengthen the middle a, 

and changing o to a at the end to make 

Petrarca (in Latin poeta ends in a) was as 
Whether we wish to leave some memory of , c c , , . , 

deft a piece or work as making a good 
ourselves to Posterity by thinking or writing 

something and thus to arrest the flight of 

days and extend this short span of life, we Nearl y the whole ° f Petmch ' S Verse 

must flee and spend the little time that is left and P rose ls ln effect autobiography. 

us in solitude. He wrote an explicit one entitled Letter 

-V^^CH,ONTHESOLrrARyLlFE t0 P ° tteri f>' ™ A WS Xcttt ™ t0 ( ™ MS 

recount what he has done, while his 
poems tell what he has thought and 
felt. Introspection followed by self-portraiture is linked in Petrarch with 
another novelty, the express desire for eternal fame. It too is a revival of an 
ancient habit, and not the kind of passion that one would readily confess to in 
an age that still desired eternal bliss. Since Petrarch, every poet has followed 
him (and Horace) by appealing to Posterity and promising eternal renown to 
the patron of the work through its being tied to the author's own. 

* * 

Although in the Laura poems Petrarch strikes the personal note, and the 
emotions are fresh and vividly described, we are not given the kind of detail 
that brings out a unique character such as we find (say) in Meredith's Modern 
Love. "Character" is a later invention (135; 140>). It was no doubt Petrarch's 
simpler notion of self that made him so imitable. After him and without end, 
Europe has been flooded with lovelornery in sonnet form. The species that 
we owe to Petrarch is now regarded as if the command: "thou shalt stop at 
fourteen lines" had been uttered on Mount Sinai. But it was a happy turn of 
practice that established it; no ancient model existed, and in Petrarch's day 
sonnets — verses to be sounded, to be sung — were of various lengths. The now 
traditional length is just right for a small oration — exposition, development, 
and conclusion. And that classical form, so closely studied and practiced by 



The Good Letters <^> 51 

the Humanists, has remained a pattern that governs western creations, from 
public speaking to poetry, drama, prose, and the symphony (41 9>). 

True, the span of fourteen lines does not suit all languages equally well, 
which is why (for instance) French poets have used the form sparingly. But 
sonnet sequences like Petrarch's or Shakespeare's make possible a narrative- 
by-episode; the poet need not versify any connective matter as he must in an 
epic. Rather, he anticipates by five or six hundred years the technique of film 
and television. Meredith found he needed sixteen lines for the sonnets of 
Modern Love and his great story is none the worse for this return to the free- 
dom of choice abolished by Petrarch. 

The imitators, with their exaggerated sighs of love and cries of despair 
addressed to an idol in female shape have repeatedly brought the love lyric 
into disrepute. Germany at one time went Petrarch-mad and during such high 
tides of production Petrarchist became a term of abuse. But the genre always 
rebounded, and not solely to express love; it has conveyed passion allied to 
descriptions of nature or to moral reflections and political opinions. 

Petrarch himself showed that a poet bent on the contemplative life could, 
at the shock of an event, turn political. A commoner named Cola di Rienzi led 
an uprising in 1347 and "restored the Roman republic" — for a few months. 
(Wagner's early opera uses his name and story.) Petrarch, then in his early for- 
ties, was overjoyed at this revival of another classical institution, though he 
did not give up hobnobbing with the tyrants who ruled the several Italian 
cities; his ideal remained untouched by the facts. Like his predecessor Dante 
and other writers yet to come, he longed for a united Italy. His "Ode to Italy" 
and other pieces foretold glories of the kind he read about in Livy. 

This Utopian wish was another Humanist departure: educated men and 
women began to revere the Roman republic instead of the empire that had so 
deeply stirred the Middle Ages. Cicero fighting to save a free government 
became the model citizen, even to the loyal subjects of 16C princes. Caesar was 
the hated usurper and Brutus a hero for killing him — witness Shakespeare's 
Julius Caesar. Like the value put on the judgment of Posterity, this excitement 
about political ideals shows the importance that the Humanist temper attached 
to worldly things. 

But one must not overlook opposites and contradictions. Humanists 
were not indifferent to religion or wanting to replace Christianity with pagan- 
ism. Those called Humanists today may rule out the divine and make Man the 
measure of all things, but Petrarch, for one, remained deeply religious. All 
secular works, he said, took second place to the gospel; he had a cult for Saint 
Augustine and late in life wrote a tract on Contempt for the World. It was a 
sort of confession of sins paralleling the anti-Laura poems. He even attacked 
the followers of Averroes, the Arab physician-philosopher, for being materi- 
alists and infidels. One can imagine Petrarch in old age retiring to a Humanist 



52 q^3 From Dawn to Decadence 

convent, had there been such a thing. All he wanted to do then was cultivate 
the good letters so as to "shut out the reality of my own times." 

What may mislead about the Humanists' genuine faith is that, after 
Petrarch, writers of all tendencies mingle the pagan mythology, history, and 
geography with the Christian. Milton, the firm believer, is a prime example: 
his poems are filled with nymphs and ancient myths. Poets took pleasure in 
using a set of fresh words; the names of the gods, heroes, places, and deeds 
formed a treasury of new images and sounds. Humanists freely refer to the 
"divine Plato," the "divine Seneca"; some use Jove to mean God or Jehovah, 
or call it Providence when a god in Homer protects a warrior — all this with- 
out a thought of being freethinkers, heretics, or atheists. From reading the 
ancients the conviction grew that some of them, by their thoughts and lives, 
were almost Christians. We saw Erasmus invoking "Saint Socrates." Many 
believed that Plato failed to be a Christian only because Revelation had not 
yet occurred. Seneca the Roman Stoic was revered for his austere ethics and 
his conception of a universe obedient to a single god, remote though Seneca 
thought him. 

After this merger of traditions it is not surprising to see the Renaissance 
Humanists followed in the 17C by thinkers who professed themselves Stoics 
without abandoning their equal claim to being Christians. These things being 
so, it seems bad history to keep referring today to "our Judaeo-Christian her- 
itage." Pagan or Graeco-Roman ought to be added to the phrase, not to mark 
a separate strand but as a fused element like the other two. To cite but one 
item, the endless effort to change society for the better, which is a character- 
istic of the last five centuries, comes from the Graeco-Roman tradition. To 
say this is to point again to the presence of Humanism throughout the 
Modern Era. 



Between Petrarch and Erasmus the development of Humanist knowl- 
edge and taste took place mainly in Italy. Its great cities and universities were 
magnets that drew adventurous minds from other countries, just as 
Wittenberg and Lyon, Strasbourg and Geneva successively drew partisans of 
the new creeds. Nor was it learning and atmosphere alone that brought the 
talented young and the inquisitive tourist: the new painting and sculpture and 
their amazing new methods, the ancient ruins and the new churches and 
palaces were also powerful attractions. Still other minds felt the pull of Italy's 
advanced ideas in science, law, and business methods, to which may be added 
a new regard for elegance in cookery and table manners (183>). 

Returning home, the visitor spread the news of this many-sided civilizing 
influence, which other countries acknowledged in the catchphrase "Italy the 



The Good Letters <^ 53 



mother of the arts." It should have been: "Italy the mother of all high culture." 
This dominant role is recorded in the vocabulary we still use about the arts, to 
say nothing of all the Italian names in the plays of Shakespeare and his con- 
temporaries, English and foreign. What 

would we do without such technical They have no concern for music or rhetoric or 
terms as sonata, rondo, aria da capo, the metrical art. Oratory and poetry are 
folio, octavo, impasto, chiaroscuro, terza almost unknown. For them, all study in logic 
rima, intermezzo, solo, tremolo, 'cello, is fotile «K*P»t*ion. You rarely find anyone 

prima donna, bravo, and many more? who owns ** works of Aristotle md other 

T r ji ir i philosophers. The students at the new uni- 

Italian remained the obligatory Ian- r r 

r r . . r . versity devote themselves largely to pleasure 

guage for men or letters down to fairly , . , . . , , . 

00 J and are avid for food and wine, nor are they 

recent times: they must read Boccaccio, restrained by any ^^^ Day and ^ 

Tasso, and Ariosto in the original, part they roam about iomcdng mjuries on dti2ens 

of "the canon" and inspirers of operas, and their heads ^ completely turned by the 

the genre itself being an Italian inven- shameless women. 

tion and for a time a monopoly (1 59; _ PopE Pius n ABOUT Vienna, c. 1458 

174>). 

For all these reasons, during the 1 7th and 1 8C the young well-to-do from 
elsewhere must make the Grand Tour, of which the peak experience was to 
enjoy, under a tutor's informed guidance, the art and easy life of Rome and 
Florence, possibly of Naples and Venice. Milton's tour was decisive for his 
vocation, and it has been plausibly suggested that Paradise Lost owes much to 
the Italian author of Adamo Caduto (The Fall of Adam). ° As for those aspir- 
ing to be artists, it was imperative that they go and "finish" themselves at the 
source, Italy. France and the United States still maintain for them under the 
name of Academy residences in Rome. 

That the rest of Europe freely conceded its own barbarism and praised 
Italy was not a wholly poised judgment. It partook of the social climber's 
repudiation of his origins and eagerness for acquiring abroad the right tastes 
and behavior. To be fashionable in some particular foreign way has been a 
recurrent phenomenon in the west. After Italy, it was Spain that radiated light; 
then France imposed its ways and later went Anglophile, not once but twice 
(361; 498>). After a short-lived Germanism in England and France, the 
Orient, and last the United States have been the irresistible model, followed 
even when denounced. 

Almost always, though not in that first Italian example, these fads come 
in the wake of the political or economic might of the admired nation. This is 
curious, since it is artists and intellectuals, noted for being above such mun- 
dane realities, who generate these cultural infatuations. 

At the beginning of the successive "ages of the Renaissance" north and 
west of Italy, when Italian poetry, drama, and prose fiction were taken as 
models, together with the Humanist scholarly methods, attention to the writ- 



54 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

ten word affected enlightened opinion on law, history, politics, and religion. 
Establishing a text by comparing sources, verifying dates, weighing evidence 
and witnesses' credibility, while also analyzing usage, impressed on the 
European mind the effect of the passage of time: documents began to be read 
critically; oral traditions lost authority unless confirmed. The age of indis- 
pensable literacy had begun. The first fruit of this organized skepticism was 
the demonstration by Lorenzo Valla that the Donation of Constantine was a 
forgery. This document, purporting to be from the hand of the first Christian 
emperor, gave the popes their territorial possessions, thus adding the worldly 
to the spiritual power. Valla showed that the language and allusions belonged 
to a later age than the emperor's. 

This proof gave comfort to the Reformers: their enemy the pope was a 
usurper on earth as he was in heaven. And although the Evangelicals looked 
down on the Humanists' pursuit of the telltale word, pious students of 
Scripture had to use that same method themselves. The many new editions 
and translations of the Bible could not have been made without it. These 
works embodied the primary criticism of Scripture. Soon followed what is 
known as the "higher criticism" of the Testaments: questioning the substance 
after questioning the words (359>). This discipline is still at work today, 
though with a freedom that would have petrified the pioneers. The special- 
ized journals discuss such questions as whether King David ever existed and 
"Did Sarah Have a Seminal Emission?" In general, 16C scholarship 
strengthened the Protestant idea that the gospel, not the church, was the 
fount of doctrine. It is a Humanist principle that if you want to know the 
truth, go to the sources, not the commentators. In short, Humanism and 
Reform, without being allies, converged in one point toward the same goal. 
This fact would seem enough to justify the usual phrase "Renaissance and 
Reformation" to label the culture of the 16C. 

* 
* * 

The leading Humanists did not, of course, share the Evangelical passion. 
The Renaissance popes, Humanists by taste if not by works, despised the 
Protestants as bigots and heretics. Were the Humanists in fact atheists? If not, 
what was their faith? Erasmus, we know, was sure he was a good Christian. 
Petrarch went from faithful to devout, first wooing the world then wanting to 
give it up. The difference between these two representative positions is one of 
theology, of ideology. Each is based on different parts of the gospel: Christ 
came to forgive sins as a spur to living the right life; this is a moral and social 
concern. He also preached giving up the world, a prerequisite to the soul's sal- 
vation. Can one follow both commands? 



The Good Letters q^> 55 



The truth that religion and moral- May not a man be a Christian who cannot 

ity are at odds with each other is rarely explain how the nativity of the Son differs 

acknowledged, probably because the &om the procession of the Holy Spirit? If I 

two desires are equally strong in the beUeve in the Trinity in Unity, I want no argu- 

human breast, reflecting there the res- ments ' U1 do not beUeve > 1 shaU not be con " 

• i j r • x_ j c ^i vinced by reason. The sum of religion is 

pective demands or society and or the J ^ 

.-,_,.. , peace, which can only be when definitions 

self. The dogma that a repentant sin- „ ., , „ 

° i • i o are as * ew as possible and opinion is left free 

ner — say, the Prodigal Son — is to be ,. ~ , , 

Ji to on many subjects. Our present problems are 

cherished ahead of the merely moral said to be waiting for me next Ecumenical 
character has great appeal. Like Luther, Council. Better let them wait till we see God 
popular opinion prefers the rogue, face to face. 

once he is tamed, to those dull clods Erasmus (1522) 

who have resisted temptation. But if 
adopted by most people as a rule of 
life, the sentiment would make for anything but a peaceful society. 

The Italian Humanists witnessed one fit of Evangelical zeal and it was 
enough. Toward the end of the 1 5C the monk Girolamo Savonarola roused 
the Florentines to a high pitch of devotion that led to the famous "bonfire of 
the vanities." Such a high ideal tension cannot be sustained by a whole com- 
munity for very long, and when this one broke, the prophet was declared a 
heretic and burned at the stake with public approval. Savonarola had been too 
literal — too Evangelical — in using the words of Christ to convert the masses. 

Good Christian Humanists were moral beings of the conventional sort, 
but their trained minds wanted something more: a metaphysics that would 
reformulate or at least parallel in classical terms the Catholic theology. Most 
of them found it in Plato. He had taught that human beings are in a cave with 
their backs to the entrance and looking at the inner wall, which reflects dimly 
the reality outside. Interpreted, this means that the senses give an imperfect 
copy of the eternal forms of Being. These are the proper object of human 
attention. By steady effort, the individual can raise his sight from the love of 
earthly things to the love of eternal beauty, which consists of those pure 
forms. Such is the Platonist's grace and salvation. 

Perhaps because this prospect is somewhat dry and abstract, a number of 
these Neo-Platonists added to it various beliefs from the Cabbala and the tra- 
ditions of "white magic." Plato, thus turned into a theologian, had the advan- 
tage of getting rid of Aristotle, the great buttress of scholastic theology, now 
rejected. Aristode was a physicist, biologist, social scientist, and aesthetician. 
His system gave matter basic importance. He taught that wealth, friends, and 
comfort were part of the good life and prerequisites of virtue; for every ideal 
possibility rests on a natural (material) base. Though Plato's ladder to eternal 
forms was closer to Christian aspiration, a minority among Humanists, 



56 Q ^> From Dawn to Decadence 

attracted by the new findings of science, still adhered to the Aristotelian phi- 
losophy, especially after it became known in its original texts, another fruit of 
the new scholarship. 

From then on, the two parties — are they temperaments? — have carried 
on this same debate over Matter and Idea, but not on equal terms. In succes- 
sive periods one outiook tends to predominate and to permeate every intel- 
lectual activity, including natural science itself, where the opposite of 
Materialism takes the name Vitalism (665 >). This seesaw has been greatiy 
productive; the stimulating effect of toppling the orthodoxy is a cultural con- 
stant. [The book to read is Renaissance Thoughtby Paul Oskar Kristeller.] 

For natures inclined to mysticism, Plato (and his later expounder Porphyry, 
who showed how to lift one's gaze from sensuous to abstract beauty) satisfied 
a strong desire akin to the Reformers' for a pure faith. Michelangelo, for exam- 
ple, whose hand was subdued to matter like any ditch digger's, valued his works 

not for their artistic merit, as we do, but 
No mortal thing enthrall these longing eyes for the ideal beauty that he put into 

When perfect peace in thy fair face I found; them and that, for him, made their 

But far within, where all is holy ground, materiality disappear. His love sonnets 

My soul felt Love, her comrade of the skies worship the same ineffable entity in a 

— Michelangelo, from Sonnet 52 woman, Vittoria Colonna, to whom 

they are addressed. 
To all this the materialist opposition says that the ideal does not exist 
apart from the natural, the abstract from the concrete. It is too bad that in 
popular use "Platonic love" means only absence of sexual relations. That 
typical reduction of an important idea prevents one from using the term 
convenientiy to denote a recurrent striving in occidental culture, the longing 
for the Pure. Individuals and movements, not all rooted in religion or meta- 
physics, have repeatedly proclaimed their pursuit or their achievement of 
pure love, pure thought, pure form in art (622; 639— 40>). It is a yearning 
akin to PRIMITIVISM. 

* 
* * 

The Humanist fusion of faith and philosophy had a by-product which 
deserves to be called "toleration by absentmindedness." A church hierarchy 
thoroughly Humanistified is able to appreciate the varieties of religious expe- 
rience and, short of extremes such as Savonarola's, tends to permit variations. 
After all, a good many of those ardent Platonists were in holy orders and felt 
easy about their role. Lorenzo Valla provides a good example: when he 
exposed the Donation of Constantine, he feared sanctions in Rome and fled 
to Naples, where like a true Humanist he opened a school of oratory. But 
even at that early date, the pope forgave him and found him a secretaryship. 



The Good Letters <^ 57 

Favoring neither Plato nor Aristotle, Valla has even been classed among 
Luther's forerunners. His chief interest, history, led him to translate 
Herodotus and Thucydides into Latin, for most readers were as yet unable to 
read Greek. This reminds us that for a good while after the Humanist awaken- 
ing, half the ancient world and its fund of wisdom were still a vague or second- 
hand reality. The entry of Greek into minds overflowing with Cicero's Latin 
was a dramatic event and another Italian scoop. With Greek came Plato in the 
guise just described, and through the career and works of Valla's contemporary 

Marsilio Ficino 

we see at close range how lives and culture mesh. Chief mover of the 
Florentine Academy, inspirer of poets and statesmen, teacher of the leg- 
endary Pico della Mirandola, Ficino was acclaimed in his time as supreme. 
Then he was unread for a long time and he remains largely untranslated. 

He was six years old about the mid-1 5C when the Byzantine emperor 
came to Rome with one of his scholars, the 80-year-old Geminthus Pletho. 
They were seeking an alliance against the Turks, who were advancing upon 
Constantinople, the Byzantine capital. A reconciliation of the Greek with the 
Roman church might also be discussed but it was not concluded. Pletho lec- 
tured in Rome and starded his hearers by showing a firsthand knowledge of 
Plato, who was still generally thought an infidel. The Byzantines themselves 
were deemed schismatics: they did not accept the Holy Ghost as an equal 
member of the Trinity, they celebrated Easter on the wrong date, and gave 
other signs of wrong-headedness. 

Accordingly, when Pletho talked Plato, the lecturer was suspected of 
being the Devil come to seduce the faithful. But Cosimo de' Medici, the 
wealthiest banker and political boss of Florence, took a chance and invited 
Pletho to dinner. At the end of it Cosimo decided to found a school of Greek 
thought. The idea simmered a while, and four years after the fall of 
Constantinople in 1453 the school opened. Cosimo called it Accademia in 
honor of the place where Plato had taught in Athens, a grove honoring the 
hero Academos. Hence the modern term for schools, universities, and official 
guardians of learning, while "academic" has had a checkered career in fine art 
and social opinion. (But Academe is not a synonym of academy: it is a variant 
spelling oi Academos) Cosimo 's institution was a self-selected group of schol- 
ars who met regularly to keep abreast of one another's findings. It needed a 
director, and Cosimo appointed to the post the son of his own son's physi- 
cian: Giovanni de' Medici and Marsilio Ficino were close friends. Though 
Marsilio was only 25, he was already a fine Latinist. He had also a passion for 
music and a boundless curiosity. 

About that time, another Byzantine, a refugee from the Turks named 



58 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Argyropoulos, was trying to earn a living by lecturing. He adopted the tide of 
Public Explainer of Aristode, but on getting pressing requests he altered 
course and talked about Plato, while also teaching Greek in its ancient form. 
Ficino, who had accepted the traditional Aristotelian creed, took these lan- 
guage lessons, heard the lectures on Plato, and suffered a crisis of conscience. 
He was losing his Christian faith and here he was in training for the priest- 
hood. He confessed. The head of his seminary forbade his attending lectures 
and sent him home. At home, Marsilio was found reading the Epicurean 
materialist Lucretius, so his father packed him off to Bologna to study law. At 
that point Cosimo intervened, telling the father: "You doctor bodies; he will 
doctor souls." 

As a "domestic" in Cosimo's Villa Careggi, Ficino decorated the walls in 
fresco with astrological images and the figures of Democritus and Heraclitus, 
the rival Greek philosophers of nature, the one (says tradition) always laugh- 
ing, the other weeping. Aristotle was nowhere to be seen. Next, Marsilio 
began to translate Plato, gathered around him students, artists, bankers, and 
politicians, and conducted what we should call seminars on Platonic and 
post-Platonic ideas — Porphyry, Plotinus, and also Hermes Trismegistus, the 
master magician. The prevailing mood was the mystical; Cosimo on his 
deathbed asked his young protege to read to him from these works. When 
Marsilio shortly completed his commentary, The Platonic Theology, he had pro- 
vided his fellow Humanists with a system that enabled them to replace the 
Catholic orthodoxy by Platonic mysticism while remaining good Christians. 

The naturalistic strain in Marsilio had not vanished in Platonic mists. His 
Book of Life is a treatise of physical and mental hygiene for thinkers and writers. 
Its three parts are entitled: On Caring for the Health of Students; How to 

Prolong Your Life; and On Making 

Your Life Agree with the Heavens. In 

Someone will say: "Is not Marsilio a priest? pmcticing j udicial astro logy, Ficino was 

What do priests have to do with medicine? A - C r ^ r ^ n 

r . no different from many other Human- 

And furthermore, what business of his is . 

^ wm . „ . . , ists; to them it was a science, not a 

astrology? What does a Christian have to do . . 

. , . , . „, superstition, for it was based on obser- 

with magic and images? r 

"But come, tell us what you condemn in vation and calculation and it enabled 

the use of the stars? That it takes away free one to predict. This view was long held 

will and goes against the worship of one by scientists such as Copernicus, Kepler, 

God? Well, I condemn and detest the same and their contemporaries. 

things you do. Nor is Ficino talking about the The advice given brain workers in 

magic that is the cult of demons, but the nat- The Book of Life is not out-of-date: eat 

ural kind that seizes from the heavenly bodies anc J drink in moderation, sleep well, 

through natural things benefits for one's kugh and be meffy as often as you can; 

do not repress sexual desire or over- 
— Ficino, The Book of Life indulge it. All these precepts are needed, 



The Good Letters q*& 59 

says Ficino, because intellectuals are prone to depression (then called melan- 
choly), "a body-and-soul destroying disease" (222>). 

As Cosimo had predicted, Ficino also doctored souls. He studied theology 
anew, was ordained a priest, and although still residing at the Villa Careggi, was 
appointed rector of a church at Nacoli, without duties, of course. It was this 
Humanist phase of Catholicism which, 

as the 1 5C ended, gave a good ground Now may every thoughtful mind thank God 
for the Protestant revolution about to for having been allowed to be born in this 
come: the quiet attachment to Christian new a g e > so fo 11 of ho P e and promise, which 
belief was offset by an open delight in akead y re i oices m a & e * tet arra y of noble 

the here-and-now; and an approving and ^ ed souls than the world has seen fa 
i I,- i i • i the last thousand years. 

church hierarchy was giving these intel- J 

lectuals support as non-resident priests, -Matteo Palmieri, On Civic Life (1440) 
at the expense of pastoral care. 

If anything showed that this blend of human and divine was widely 
accepted, it is the fame accorded in his day to Pico della Mirandola. He was a 
Count who had been a child prodigy destined for the church. Appointed by 
way of encouragement to a papal office at the age often, he studied the good 
letters at the universities of Bologna, Padua, and Florence, and Hebrew and 
Arabic on his own. At the age of 23 he set down 900 theses, of which the 
pope condemned seven and murmured about six more. Pico unwisely pub- 
lished a defense and had to take refuge in Paris, where he was imprisoned. But 
several Italian noblemen pulled strings and had him released, after which he 
lived and wrote and consorted with the "academicians" in Florence until his 
early death at 31. 

His name is preserved — or used to be — by the curious tradition in Latin 
Europe of holding him up as a model to lycee students: he was represented as 
a walking encyclopedia whom they should emulate. (In my time, this ideal of 
becoming "a veritable Pic" — the French for Pico — was accepted very 
unevenly as between teachers and students.) What distinguished Pico, apart 
from erudition, was the originality of his faith, Humanist and Christian, but 
not limited to the gospel and the fashionable Plato. He did reject much of 
Aristotle, but as he explained in poetry and prose and summed up in his ora- 
tion "On the Dignity of Man," all theologians and philosophers had seen a 
portion of the truth; he would reconcile the two well-known Greeks, the neo- 
Platonic mystics, Thomas Aquinas, the Jewish authors of the Cabbala, and 
the Persian Zoroaster as well. 

This breadth of view suggested to some the danger of knowing too many 
languages. Today, we agree with him though knowing hardly any. Pico argued 
that this "dignity" of man lay in the scope which God had bestowed on Adam 
before the Fall and which redemption had restored. A Humanist would also 
think of the ancient maxim of Plautus the playwright: "I am a man. Nothing 



60 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 



O sublime generosity of God the Father! O human is alien to me." The word dignity 

highest and most wonderful felicity of Man! can of course be interpreted as flouting 

To him it was granted to be what he wills. the gospel's call to humility and deny- 

The Father endowed him with all kinds of i ng the reality of sin. Humanism is 

seeds and with the germs of every way of life. accordingly charged with inverting the 

Whatever seeds each man cultivates will ^^ between man and God> ^ 

grow and bear fruit in him. , . , , i •• c 

fe atheism and the secularizing of society. 

Who then will not wonder at this „ rn . . „ ... 

.,, A , . What humanism at its fullest did 

chameleon, Man, who was said by Asclepius • i • i 

r a.u ui * . c u- *, reiect, by implication as much as 

of Athens able to transform his own nature > ' J r 

owing to his mutability, and who is symbol- &*<*H was me ascetic ideal of physical 

ized in the mysteries as Prometheus? and mental repression. Asceticism is 

-PICO, "ON THE DIGNITY OF MAN" (1486) ° ften ^^ ^"^ bUt '* 1S > USt aS 

much a human tendency as its oppo- 
site. The ascetic is often a sensualist 
who has reached the limit of his capacity. In any case, we play fast and loose 
with the words human and inhuman^ flattering ourselves by making human 
mean only the good things in our makeup or simply what we approve. The 
historian cannot subscribe to this policy, knowing as he does that cruelty, 
murder, and massacre are among the most characteristic human acts. 

In declining the ascetic life and even the milder forms of self-reproach, 
the Humanists liberated the impulses that fuel individualism, the desire 
that goes beyond the awareness of one's talents and demands room to 
develop them. The good society fosters Pico's sense of endless possibility. 
Individualism thus works toward EMANCIPATION, the modern theme par 
excellence. 

Anything that can be said about the good letters implies the book, the 
printed book. To be sure, new ideas and discoveries did spread among the 
clerisy before its advent, but the diffusion of manuscripts is chancy and slow 
Copying by hand is the mother of error, and circulation is limited by cost. As 
was noted earlier, print made a revolution out of a heresy (<4). Speed in the 
propagation of ideas generates a heightened excitement. Besides, the hand- 
written roll or sheaf (codex), on vellum or primitive paper, makes for awk- 
ward reading and for clumsy handling and storing. Indexing, too, was long 
absent or unsatisfactory, because the medieval mind rejected the alphabetical 
order — it was "artificial," "irrational," since no principle governs the sequence 
a, b, c, d, and the rest. To the modern lover of books, the product of the press 
is an object that arouses deep feelings, and looking at Diirer's charcoal draw- 
ing of hands holding a book, one likes to think the artist felt the same attach- 



The Good Letters q^> 61 

ment. The book, like the bicycle, is a The Book Versus the Cathedral 
perfect form. This will loll that. 

With multiple copies of works —Victor Hugo reflecting on the 
available and new works rapidly coming storytelling walls and glass of 

out, the incentive to learning to read Notre Dame (1831) 

was increased. The one drawback to 

print is that the uniform finality of black on white leads the innocent to believe 
that every word so enshrined is true. And when these truths diverge from book 
to book (for the incentive to write and publish is also increased), the intellectual 
life is changed. From being more or less a duel, it becomes a free-for-all. The 
scrimmage makes for a blur of ideas, now accepted as a constant and fondly 
believed to be, like the free market, the ideal method for sifting truth. 

Italy was a pioneer in that transformation also. In Venice at the end of the 
15C an inventive printer-Humanist who called himself Aldus Manutius (from 
Aldo Manuzio or Manucci) founded a house which for a century issued the 
Greek and Latin classics in the best form. An Aldine edition meant excellence 
and is now for collectors to hoard. Aldus designed simpler forms and styles 
of letters, notably the italic, which tradition says was based on Petrarch's 
handwriting/ The regular font is, again by apt tradition, called roman, with- 
out capital r. Before these now familiar fonts printers had imitated in metal 
the latest form of the copyists' handwriting, thereby producing the "black let- 
ter" volumes, now even more precious to collectors. There were ligatures 
between pairs of letters and special forms of the same letter for use when next 
to another. One font is known to have numbered 240 characters. The page 
was beautiful but not easy to read, especially for the recendy illiterate. A mod- 
ified black letter remained in German books until nearly the mid-20C. 

Aldus was not the only great printer-designer. Every country could boast 
several of comparable genius, such as the Estienne brothers in France and the 
Elzevirs in Holland. To them collectively we owe several conveniences: punc- 
tuation, accents in the Romance languages, the spacing that makes words, 
sentences, and paragraphs stand out as units of meaning, with capital letters 
adding to this clarity. The first call for uniform spelling was also of that time 
and had the same purpose. 

Another potent publisher was William Caxton. Starting out in life as a 
merchant and becoming wealthy, Caxton turned his thoughts to literature and 
began translating and writing out by hand a popular work. His "pen grew 
weary," as he tells it, so he learned printing, set up a press in Cologne, and 
after two years as publisher there returned to England. From then on, unlike 
his colleagues abroad, he kept translating and publishing works only in the 
vernacular. First and last, he brought out nearly all the best extant in English, 
notably Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Malory's Morte a" Arthur. Caxton's own 



62 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

prose is not fluent, but his choice of one English dialect and his steady output 
for a public of lords, gentry, and clerics contributed to the eventual standard- 
ization of the language/ 

This first generation of international publishers did not merely make and 
sell books; they were scholars and patrons who translated the classics, nurtured 
their authors, and wrote original works. Their continual redesigning of letter 
forms gave rise to the new art of typography. Dozens of fine artists since 1 500 
have created typefaces for every kind of use without making the earliest ones 
obsolete. Books have a period look to the connoisseur; he can spot the date by 
the typeface, except that new books are still printed in Caslon, Jenson, 
Garamond, and other fonts made and named after these early printers. It is 
only very recently that an ugly, bastard alphabet (and numbers as on printed 
checks), has been contrived under silent pressure from non-human "readers." 

As a whole, the early printed book of good quality was a work of art. The 
page was a composition — whence the name compositor for the typesetter. 
Margins, space between lines, indents, capital letters — everything was in stud- 
ied proportion, and the woodcut illustrations were by master hands — 
Holbein, Diirer, Cranach among the most prolific. This regard for beauty was 
not new; it continued the medieval tradition and was in one respect inferior to 
it: it lacked illuminated initials. It made up for it by a handsome title page, 
which named and often described the author: "Marsilio Ficino, Florentine 
and Celebrated Doctor and Philosopher"; to which was added the rudimen- 
tary blurb: "On caring for the health of students or those who work in 
Letters, taking care of their good health." Next came the dedication to a 
patron, chief source of the author's income. It was an ingenious device: in 
praising expectantly or uttering gratitude for past gifts, it gained a protector 
and, thanks to print, it might indeed bestow "immortal fame." Both parties 
had an equal chance of profiting from the bargain. (Speaking of profit, the 
late 1 5C also saw the faint outline of the thought of copyright.) 

As a physical object, the Humanist book differed in several respects from 
those that now overcrowd the city dweller's shelves. To 16C scholars our 
usual octavo volume, although another Aldine invention, seemed miniatur- 
ized. Theirs was a thick and heavy folio measuring 12 by 15 inches or more. 
Folio means that the large printer's sheet of thick rag paper was folded once to 
provide four pages. These were bound in leather- or vellum-covered 
boards — real boards, of wood, held shut by a metal clasp at midpoint of the 
vertical; cloth binding is only 175 years old. Often, a chain was attached to the 
book for safekeeping; it might be stolen — strange idea! As late as the 1 750s, 
one such book, a folio Shakespeare, could be found moored to a lectern in the 
library at Yale. A notice specified that it was for the students' "diversion" 
from the less frivolous reading of the real classics elsewhere in the room. 

The use of the book in the modern era was marked by several other inno- 



The Good Letters <^> 63 

vations. People were now reading silently and alone. The monk in the gallery 
of the refectory reading to his brothers at mealtime was becoming a memory; 
likewise the university lecturer, insofar as his tide means only "reader." 
Medieval students had not been able to own the expensive hand copies of the 
learned works and libraries were rarely nearby or open to them; medieval dis- 
putation was a by-product of that scarcity. When the press made the pam- 
phlet commonplace, in the 1 7C, one could contradict a colleague by rushing 
into print. 

Printers and booksellers, as friends, confidants, and protectors of literary 
men, were often led to publish daring books that would sell because they were 
scandalous. They suffered for it in various ways. Among them, Etienne Dolet 
had the distinction of being burnt at the stake along with his works — "a mar- 
tyr of the Book." Originally a writer, he was a passionate admirer of Cicero 
but not a humane Humanist; on the contrary, brutal and unbalanced, he was 
known to have killed a man in a brawl, like Ben Jonson. Books, books every- 
where, like home computers today; yet a shadow of the old oral habits lin- 
gered: it is seen in the Humanists' partiality for the dialogue form to argue a 
case in print. It is an imitation of the ancients and an echo of the medieval sic 
et non (pro and con) oral disputing. The genre seems fair, but shows the 
author-character always winning. The oration, more often printed than deliv- 
ered, was an equally popular Humanist genre, also modeled on the ancient 
classics, its tone based on the spoken word. 

From these various aspects of the book important results may be deduced: 
print brought a greater exactness to the scholarly exchange of ideas — all copies 
are alike; a page reference can kill an argument by confounding one's opponent 
out of his own words. A price is paid for this convenience: the book has weak- 
ened the memory, individual and collective, and divided the House of Intellect 
into many small flats, the multiplying specialties. In the flood of material within 
even one field, the scholar is overwhelmed. The time is gone when the classical 
scholar could be sure that he had "covered the literature" of his subject, the 
sources being finite in number. That is why E. M. Forster used to call "pseudo 
scholarship" anything not relating to the ancient classics — a rather harsh way 
to acknowledge the modern predicament. Lastly, in reading classical texts and 
Renaissance publications, one becomes aware of the ambiguity that has over- 
taken the word book. In the 1 6C and for a good while after, works carry titles 
that state the number of "books" within; for example, Jean Bodin's Six Books 
About the Commonwealth (245 >). Using "book" for "part," and "chapter" for a 
short section, reminds us that the parchment roll or sheaf that was a book 
could not be very long or thick without being unwieldy, whence several 
"books" in one work. 



64 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

Humanists were not all professional bookmen. Among the most pas- 
sionate were popes, beginning in the mid-1 5C with Nicholas V, a sincere 
Christian who made his court an art center and engaged the architect Alberti 
to draw plans for rebuilding not only the Vatican but also the shabby basilica 
of St. Peter's. This had not been the papal church, but it stood on the site of 
the oldest Christian cemetery, where the apostie named by Christ to head the 
church was presumably buried. In this rebuilding of St. Peter's, for which peo- 
ple to the north gave so many pence, the Humanist historical spirit was at 
work. 

After a gap of a few years came another Humanist pope and author of a 
remarkable autobiography, Pius II, who wanted to be called Aeneas after plus 
aeneas, the hero of Virgil's epic. Similarly, Alexander VI took his name not 
from a saint, but from Alexander the Great. In between reigned one anti- 
Humanist pope, but his negative program failed. Apart from their varying 
moral caliber, the "Renaissance popes" are best known for their legacy in 
stone and paint, but they also relished poetry and music, plays, philosophical 
arguments, and exotic animals for their zoo. They paid lavishly for this 
princely display and set the pattern of the cultivated court. 

By the third quarter of the century Julius II was on the throne — famed as 
fisherman and soldier, and victorious in wars that recovered papal territory. 
He was one of the ablest judges of artists and their works. It was he who actu- 
ally started the reconstruction of St. Peter's. At the Vatican he created a sculp- 
ture garden around the "supreme statue," the Apollo Belvedere, and the no less 
famous Laocoon group, unearthed in 1 506. Julius was bent on making Rome 
once again a beautiful city, using Bramante and Michelangelo as his designers. 
Julius also devised the indulgence scheme that recoiled on his successor 
Leo X, the connoisseur to whom Raphael owed his greatest commissions. 

Such was the scene that revolted the young Luther. Viewed with his eyes, 
humanism was only a name for worldliness. The low morals of high church- 
men often justified his verdict, yet on the whole, the Humanists were perhaps 
more truly Christian than the run-of-the mill priests and monks or the fanatic 
Evangelicals who lived by violence yet deemed themselves saved by faith. For 
one thing, in filling their minds with the facts of the two ancient civilizations, 
the Humanists were forced to settie the perennial questions that precede reli- 
gious belief: What is life for? What is man's duty and destiny? What is the sig- 
nificance of death? 



The "Artist" Is Born 



Eager FOR NOVELTY in all things, confident of possessing vast quantities 
of new knowledge, proud of their scholarly and other fresh methods, the 
Humanist generations, armed with print, set about educating the world in all 
the arts and sciences. From anatomy to arithmetic and from painting to met- 
allurgy, the presses kept issuing treatises, treatises. The later the date, the less 
likely were they to be in Latin; the common language of each country was eas- 
ier for the printer, and the reading public was no longer exclusively clerical. 

None of this means that the Middle Ages had failed to diffuse advances 
in practical knowledge, but this effort was restricted by their institutions. The 
guilds of artisans kept the tricks of the trade secret; they were valuable prop- 
erty, as are today patents and copyrights. By an unconscious pun, the French 
for craft — metier — was thought (erroneously) to be derived from mistere 
(= mystery). The men of science — alchemists and astrologers — also used to 
compete in secret for gainful ends. From the late 1 5C on, moved by a nascent 
INDIVIDUALISM and the decline of the guild spirit, all these brain workers 
relied more on talent than on secrets to protect the value of their services. 
Benefiting themselves from others' inventions, they publicized their own in 
manuals that gave the latest news on technique. 

One of the first to feel the urge to teach was the sculptor Ghiberti in the 
mid-15C. He was also the first to believe that an artist's life was important to 
record for its lessons in craftsmanship. In this view of handiwork lay the germ 
of a new social type, the Artist. He or she was no longer a common performer 
of established manual tasks, no longer ruled by group rules, but an uncom- 
mon individual free to innovate. The treatises kept the artist class up to date 
about these innovations. 

After Ghiberti's, the deluge. His greatest, most prolific successor was 
Leone Battista Alberti, the 15C architect, who considered his art one with 
sculpture and painting and wrote on them — or it — accordingly. New build- 
ings needed to be decorated, old ones restored, with additional figures in the 
round, and on the walls scenes in color, more impressively lifelike than ever. 



66 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Like most of his fellow theorists, Alberti was also a practitioner. He drew up 
the plans which, with some alterations, were carried out by Bramante, 
Michelangelo, Maderno, and Bernini to create the grandest monument of 
modern Rome, St. Peter's. This undertaking has been thought to mark the 
"rebirth of Rome," in parallel with the much questioned rebirth of the west- 
ern mind (<47). A true polymath, Alberti expounded for painters the rules of 
perspective, and for businessmen those of computation and bookkeeping. 
His treatise on architecture, in Latin, was translated into French, Italian, 
Spanish, and English. We see here again the immense benefit of print. 

Another Italian, Giorgio Vasari, impelled by the unexampled artistic out- 
burst of his time, divided his energies between his profession of painter and 
builder in Florence and biographer of the modern masters in the three great 
arts of design. His huge collection of Lives, which is a delight to read as well 
as a unique source of cultural history, was an amazing performance in an age 
that lacked organized means of research — no interlibrary loan or union cata- 
logue of books, much less the habit of interviewing, tape recorder in hand. 

Vasari wanted to record more than 

facts and dates and anecdotes about 

We who cast figures often call in the help of .1 - t ■ • c ^ 1 j 

^ y the commissioning of great works and 

ordinance founders, but their insufficient , . TT , ., , 

their execution. He describes tech- 
experience and want of care may lead to tern- 

, , . . , , , niques and discusses their merits and 

ble misfortunes, as nearly happened to my ^ 

Perseus, a figure more than five cubits high, difficulties, adding to his estimates a 

in a difficult pose, and with much rich detail. ^ory of place, climate, and milieu that 

I therefore made a great number of air vents proves Rome unhealthy for men and 

and many flow-in mouths, all diverging from works (the bad air ages both prema- 

the main one down the back. All these little turely). Florence was ideal in all 

hints are part of the craft. But because my respects. Throughout, Vasari makes 

methods were different from the usual ones, sufe that his reader will appreciate the 

they neglected the furnace, the metal began enhanced human powers shown in the 

to curdle, and none knew a remedy for the WQrks ^ he calls « gQod painting » in 

bhmder * parallel with "good letters." 

— Benvenuto Cellini, Two Treatises on That so much ^ could be shed 

Goldsmithing and Sculpture *i; j j l- ^ ^u u 

on method and achievement through 

books created the temptation that has 

ever since accompanied every technical advance: the oversupply of guides, 

manuals, and instructive "lives." The exuberant output of the Renaissance, 

besides Alberti's writings, included works now classic: Benvenuto Cellini's 

autobiography and a pair of monographs on small-scale sculpture and the 

goldsmith's art,° Palladio's treatise on building, Piero della Francesca's on 

design, Diirer's outline on painting and human proportions, and Leonardo's 

wide-ranging Notebooks. 

Among other artist-theorists are names that raise but a faint echo today: 



The "Artist" Is Born <^ 67 

Serlio, Filarete, Lomazzo, Zuccaro, Ammanati, Van Mander, Von Sandrart — 
all dealing with the same topics, almost all describing the new science of per- 
spective, several giving its geometrical rules in great detail, and along the way, 
much miscellaneous advice, ranging from the best way to grind pigments to 
the proper handling of apprentices. 

What would strike a modern textbook publisher is the space given in 
these works to the importance for artists to have true faith and strict morals. 
Virtue is inseparable from good art. It is taken for granted that a work reveals 
the artist's soul as well as his mind. But what is more important, the work of 
art must by its order mirror the hierarchical order of the world, which is a 
moral order. Whether by intuition or by convention, the artist must know 
how to convey this reality. Hence the (to us) irrelevant injunctions in the trea- 
tises. For example, in his Notebooks [which is a book to read]/ Leonardo 
makes excuses for not being a writer, but he nonetheless shows himself a 
moral philosopher, a psychologist, and a creator of semi-mystical parables. 
That all art must be moral is the rule until the 1 9C, when it cuts loose from 
moral significance, from regard for virtue in the maker's character, and from 
the expectations of the public (474; 61 6>). 



The sheer number of Renaissance treatises tells us something about the 
nature of a cultural movement. One tends to think of what goes by that name 
as comprising a handful of geniuses with a group of admirers, patrons, and 
articulate supporters whose names appear (so to speak) as footnotes in 
smaller type. Actually, it is a large crowd of highly gifted people — the mass is 
indispensable. This is a generality. And these many co-workers must be great 
talents, not duffers. They may be incomplete or unlucky as creators, their 
names may remain or turn dim, but in retrospect we see that this one or that 
contributed an original idea, was the first to make use of a device. Together, 
by what they do and say, they help to keep stirred up the productive excite- 
ment; they stimulate the genius in their midst; they are the necessary mulch 
for the period's exceptional growths. 

This reflection goes some way toward answering our question when we 
wonder what conditions bring about great artistic periods, seemingly at ran- 
dom, here or there, and for a relatively short time. It is not, as some have 
thought, prosperity, or wise government support, or a spell of peace and 
quiet — Florence at its height was in perpetual conflict inside and outside. The 
first requisite is surely the clustering of eager minds in one place. They may 
not be on the spot to begin with; they come mysteriously from all over, when 
some striking cultural event bruited abroad, some decisive advance in techni- 
cal means, draws them to its place of origin. Like the spread of the revolu- 



68 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

tionary temper, the feverish interest, the opposition, and the rivalry among 
artists working, comparing, and arguing, generate the heat that raises perfor- 
mance beyond the norm. It takes hundreds of the gifted to make half a dozen 
of the great. The late-discovered genius who by mischance had to work alone 
in a remote spot is a sad survivor of solitude and is often maimed by it. 

In the best periods practice precedes theory — works before notions. But, 
again in the best periods, the theories derived from practice tell us something 
(not all) about the intentions of the leading artists and the criteria applicable 
to their work. These commonplaces hold for 400 years and should not be 
laughed out of court to please late-20C critics whose own intention is to dis- 
count artistic intention (621; 757>). 
I saw behind the King's house at Brussels the The Renaissance treatises declare that 
fountain, maze, and beast garden; anything apart from his moral mission, the 
more beautiful and pleasing to me, and more artist's duty (and thereby his intention) 
like a paradise, I have never seen. i s to imitate nature. He must minutely 

Erasmus is the name of the litde man who observe "God's footstool"; it is a way 
wrote out my supplication at Herr Jacob de tQ worship Him . This discipline paral- 
Bannisis' house. I took [made] a portrait at ^ ^ sdentist > S) and more than one 

night, by candlelight, and drew Doctor ri • i i • i n • ic 

^ J -» » artist of the period thinks or himself as 

Lamparters son in charcoal, also the hostess. 

a natural philosopher. No two cul- 

-DURER, TRAVEL DLARY (XS20) ^^ ^ ^ ^^ ^ bes{ ^^ 

Although in the Middle Ages natu- 
ral forms served graphic artists as starting points, they felt no obligation to 
copy them faithfully. The different Humanist intention rests on the more 
concrete interest in nature that reading the ancients encouraged. Horace's Art 
of Poetry states the ideal of imitating life in literature and draws an analogy with 
painting. The same principle fitted the other arts, as anybody could see. The 
ancient figure sculpture that survived looked more lifelike, humanior, than the 
stylized saints lining the porches of Gothic cathedrals. The Greeks had no 
scruples about portraying their gods and goddesses in the guise of perfect 
human bodies. To the Humanist, the broken pieces of statuary discovered 
while digging the foundations of new buildings in Rome were golden hints of 
"nature." 

It was a prime instance of familiar things being "taken" in a new way. The 
ancient temples, the Coliseum, the great memorial arches had been in plain 
sight for centuries, but now they were no longer pitiable remnants of pagan- 
ism; they were majestic creations to be studied and copied. The architecture 
of northern Europe, which must now be called Gothic to stamp it as barbaric, 
had never been dominant in Italy. The climate favored wide windows, round 
arches, and interior spaces unlike those suited to the gray wintry north; so that 
when the desire for change arose in Petrarch's time, the mid-14C, there were 
elements at hand for a new style. The Certosa at Pavia, built not as a copy but 



The "Artist" Is Born <^> 69 

making an original use of classical features, shows the transition from old to 
new as if designed to serve the cultural historian. 

The same need for change in painting Vasari explains by saying that the 
good art had been obscured and forgotten in wars and tumults, leaving only 
the "crude manner of the Greeks" (meaning the Byzantines), whose medieval 
mosaics in the eastern Italian cities were never meant to look "natural." The 
accepted story of the turnabout in painting is that in the late 13C the 
Florentine Cimabue, after some works in the rigid tradition, depicted a Virgin 
in softer lines "approaching the modern manner — nobody had seen anything 
so beautiful." Vasari goes on to tell how the people of Florence carried the 
painting in a triumphal march from the painter's house to the church of Santa 
Maria Novella for which it had been commissioned. 

Cimabue's protege, Giotto, took the next step by basing himself on what 
Vasari calls "the true human form" and reproducing it as closely as he could. 
Nature entered in a further way through a Petrarchan interest in rocks and 
trees as settings: Giotto's St. Francis receives the stigmata not against a neu- 
tral background but in the countryside. 

This new style is sometimes described as "realistic." This adjective and its 
opposite have become not only critical terms in the several arts, but also the 
commonest retort in the arguments of daily life: "That's unrealistic."^"Be 
realistic!" In all uses it is a regrettable pair of words. It begs the difficult ques- 
tion, what is the reality? Artists and ordinary people alike spend much of their 
time trying to find out — what do I perceive? what are the facts? If 
Renaissance painting gives us "the real world at last," why does it look so 
blindingly different in Michelangelo and in Raphael? And it goes on diverg- 
ing: is nature — is reality — in Rubens or in Rembrandt? Reynolds or Blake? 
Copley or Allston? Manet or Monet? 

True, all these artists present features of the world that are recognizable, 
in addition to common features of the art of painting itself. But the total 
effects differ; they correspond to the different visions of reality that dwell in 
the minds of different individuals, whether painters or not. Reflecting on the 
evidence, one would venture the generality that reality is to be seen in all of 
them and in others too. All styles of art are "realistic." They point to varied 
aspects and conceivings of experience, all of which possess reality, or they 
would not command the artist's interest in the first place and would not spark 
any response in the beholder. The variety of the Real confirms the impor- 
tance of "taking" as a factor in life. Realism (with its implication of Truth) is 
one of the great western words, like Reason and Nature, that defy stable def- 
inition. It will come up again for discussion (552>). Here it is enough to ques- 
tion the term, and if one is needed to mark the difference between works that 
"resemble" rather than "symbolize," the word naturalistic is the less mislead- 
ing of the two — perhaps. 



70 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Whatever may be the right word, the Renaissance artists believed that 
they had found the only true goal in art, and this for a "scientific" reason 
shortly to be told. But reason or no reason, the artists who count, in any 
school at any time, know that they are aiming at the right goal; it is the normal 
and necessary conviction for good work. 

As for the terms nature and imitation, one must ask, how much do time 
and place, which is to say the surrounding culture, come between the object 
and its representation? To some extent, but not entirely. Artists tend to imi- 
tate other artists; a style or mood once adopted for its technical interest, or 
emotional value, or because it is in demand, becomes "nature" for both artist 
and viewer. The Venetian painter shows "Sacred and Profane Love"° glowing 
in primary colors, even though the climate he works in is not invariably sun- 
nier than that of Rome or Florence. In the north, the Flemings created an 
altogether different feeling about nature by showing in muted tones but fine 
detail quiet interiors, civic scenes, and tall ships. In between, the Germans 
retained a dark "Gothic" line and spirit in their recording of persons and 
places. 

The various kinds of paint give a different appearance to equally faithful 
imitations, nor can pigments ever reach the brightness of light. The painter 
creates his illusion by favoring some colors and proportioning their intensi- 
ties to match those in what he likes to look at; and there are many ways of 
accomplishing this relativism. He further creates emphasis by so-called func- 
tional lines, not dictated by strict perspective; or he distorts in other subtle 
ways for drama, as in Leonardo's Last Supper, combining the effects of two 
points of view in place of one; or having the light come from two directions, 
as often in Rubens. Perspective is not "scientific"; it is an art of calculated fu- 
sion. In clever hands it can create trompe I'oeil pictures so "real" that one 
stretches one's hand out to test its objects by touch; or again, so neatly fore- 
shortened that a ceiling seen from far below shows Tiepolo's figures ade- 
quately lifelike. 

In the Renaissance it was assumed that the graphic arts must treat of clear 
subjects — indeed, must "tell" something, in addition to pleasing the eye and 
the sense of composition while also observing the rules of perspective. 
Classical myths naturally had a great appeal, but Christian subjects did not 
lose ground, especially after the Catholic counter-revolution, which pro- 
moted the decoration of new churches and the renovation of old ones. 

Religious and moral edification moved, 
I look upon a picture with no less pleasure so to speak, from the windows and 
than I read a good history. They are indeed porches of the church building to its 
both pictures, one done with words, the other interior walls, altars, and ceilings: the 
with paint. medieval "sermons in stone" now ser- 

— Alberti, On Architecture (1452) mons in paint. 



The "Artist" Is Born <^> 71 

The Bible and the lives of the saints supplied the figures and scenes as 
before, but in many ways secularized: the Virgin looked like a peasant girl, the 
costumes were contemporary, the scenery local. Veronese went too far. When 
he put some drunkards and a dog in his hast Supper, he was summoned for 
sacrilege but after a long grilling got off rather lighdy (76>). 

* 
* * 

With the artist becoming independent, a dedicated being, art itself begins 
to be an entity distinct from work, thought, faith, and social purpose. In the 
16C it had not yet sworn off morality or ignored existing tastes, but the roots 
of autonomy were there. When a mural or altar piece came to be judged not 
for its pious effulgence and fitness for the spot in need of decoration, but 
instead for what we now call its aesthetic merit, art for art's sake was just 
below the horizon. Aesthetic appreciation is something more than sponta- 
neous liking; a good eye for accurate representation is not enough; one must 
be able to judge and talk about style, technique, and originality. This demand 
gives rise to a new public character: the critic. The future professional begins 
by being simply the gifted art lover who compares, sees fine points, and works 
up a vocabulary for his perceptions. He and his kind are not theorists but con- 
noisseurs and ultimately experts. 

This rise in status ultimately led to the split between the knowing and the 
ignorant, who only "know what they like." We are told that the division did not 
yet exist in Renaissance Florence — everybody was a born appreciator — as in 
ancient Athens. In both cases this is a mere belief — or hope. Elsewhere in the 
1 6C the two groups of beholders were at peace because they shared the same 
view about the role of art in society. Together they dictated fashion and taste, 
by purchase or utterance. From then on to the end of the 1 8C common opin- 
ion held that religious and history painting were the highest genres. The one 
edified, the other reminded; both decorated. Portraits came next, landscapes 
lagged behind. For nature was not yet loved for itself alone. In the early 
Renaissance it served as background only, and even then it was "humanized" 
by the presence of temples, columns, or other architectural fragments, along 
with actual figures. In the late 1 6C, other subjects made up the oddly named 
"genre painting" — aspects of day-to-day existence and bits of "still life," the 
less-than-natural assemblage of a dead bird, a hunting horn, and crockery. 

As time went on, secular subjects gained in importance, in part because 
of a new technique: painting on canvas with pigments carried in oils. 
Michelangelo scorned this new trick "fit only for women and children," 
because the amateur or the inept professional could so easily correct a mis- 
take — scrape it off and try again. Before oils, pigments dissolved in pure or 
lime water were applied to a wall which the artist himself had plastered; or 



72 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

again, the colors were mixed with egg yolk and water, to a panel of poplar or 
other wood. To paint, one must have an infallible hand and a far-seeing mind; 
each stroke was final, as in watercolor today. 

But the oil painting had a merit all its own: it was portable; it domesti- 
cated art. By the 17C the well-to-do citizen who was devout or fond of his 
own likeness could order or buy ready-made a canvas of modest dimensions 
and with it enliven a room. The work might depict a sacred subject or a famil- 
iar scene — the harbor and its fishing fleet, a girl sewing, the peasantry rois- 
tering on a holiday, or the night watch on its rounds. When "personalized," it 
showed the members of the town council, complacent in their finery, or the 
purchaser himself, his wife and children, with a dog and sometimes a book. 
These uses of art anticipated the camera and its extravagant output of faces 
and places, but with one difference: early portraits do not seem to flatter the 
subject — witness Holbein's Henry VIII. In the 16C no airbrush fix by a fash- 
ionable photographer revised nature. 

Two other arts gained impetus from the general taste for reproducing 
"life": book illustration — the woodcut with its thick lines matching the heavy 
type of the page at first, then the steel engraving, better suited to go with the 
finer fonts. Equally popular was the art of tapestry, in demand as much for 
wall insulation in cold climates as for decorative effect. 

Faithful imitation implied an indefatigable study of human anatomy and 
the shape and texture of inanimate objects. The nude thereby became a regu- 
lar part of subject matter and schooling. Still, a painting is art only if it is an 

organized whole. For composition and 
Painting is a thing of the mind [cosa mentale]. harmony and even more for dramatic 
The painter who draws by practice and judg- f orce5 nature must be rearranged. Some 
mentofthe eye without the use of reason is distortion in the figures themselves, 

like a mirror, which reproduces in itself all ^ placementj and in me rektions 

the objects placed before it, with no knowl- 1 i i_ r i i j i i 

r marked by light, shade, and color is 

edge of what they are. 

called for, in addition to the use of con- 

-Leonardo, Notebook? ventional symbols that designate the 

saint or hint at the burgher's occupa- 
tion. In short, the painter must think. 

Such was the meaning of the dictum that imitation must not be slavish. 
That warning opened the door to every imaginative possibility. It meant that 
the artist's goal could be beauty, that "divine attribute." And beauty being a pre- 
conceived idea, it requires compromise with what nature gives us in the raw 
state. Michelangelo explicidy rejects the copying of externals. Platonists like 
him drew out of each natural object its more perfect, transcendent model, 
while Aristotelians saw in the ideal form the fulfillment that matter must reach 
in order to become reality. Both philosophies led to the same plastic ends. 

Stoics and Epicureans, for their part, also regarded nature as supplying 



The "Artist" Is Born <^*> 73 

the ideal pattern that human life must try to attain. But knowing that nature 
continually destroys and re-creates individual things, they placed a modest 
value on the imitation of transitory objects. If undertaken, let it be done 
soberly. Such ideas about Nature — nature as model and yardstick — long 
antedated the Renaissance. They have not ceased to mold belief and behavior 
in many departments of life; "follow nature and you cannot go wrong" has 
been reiterated with unblushing confidence. But what Nature includes or 
what its dictates are remains in debate. Still more often, the word natural is 
simply invoked as self-evident proof of whatever is being urged. 

The grand innovation that made Renaissance painters certain that theirs 
was the only right path for art was the laws of perspective. The discovery 
made them as proud as the men of letters after their discovery of the true path. 
For some Nature had been rediscovered; for the others, civilization had been 
restored. Perspective is based on the fact that we have two eyes. We therefore 
see objects as defined by two lines of light that converge at a distance, the 
painter's "vanishing point" on the horizon. Since those two lines form an 
acute angle, plane geometry can show the size and place that an object at any 
distance must be given in the painting to make it appear as it looks in life. 

Another way to grasp the situation is to imagine a pyramid with its point 
at the spot where the lines from the eyes come together and its base touching 
one's nose. Then a slice made anywhere across the pyramid will show the rel- 
ative size that distant objects and figures must have on the canvas to look 
"real." Or again, when the jet plane is about to land and one looks down, the 
size of the cars on the highway gets larger as the plane gets nearer the ground, 
because one is pushing forward (so to speak) the base of the pyramid. This 
relativism of size according to distance when figures and things are seen 
against a flat surface is exact. Hence the statement in an early Renaissance 
treatise that painting consists of three parts: drawing, measurement, and 
color. One of the uses of color is to create "aerial perspective." A light blue- 
gray makes distant objects in the painting look hazy, as they appear to the eye 
owing to the thickness of the atmosphere. Combined, the two perspectives 
create the illusion of depth, the three-dimensional "reality" on a flat surface. 
Our seeing objects "in depth" is itself an illusion, for without the sense of 
touch to make us aware of solids and the habitual expectation thus created, 
what we see from the jet plane would be as flat as the patterns of wall paper. 
But early in life we associate the findings of hands and eyes and reconstruct 
the world from the signs that imply three dimensions. 



In any art a new technical power leads to uses and ideas not suspected at 
first. With lifelikeness, painting gained more and more autonomy from social 



74 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

use as illustration of religious ideas. It could stand by itself, whatever it 
showed. The viewer needed less imagination to make out the intention, thus 
enlarging subject matter indefinitely and giving interest to things in and for 
themselves. With so much knowledge written down and disseminated and so 
many ardent workers and eager patrons conspiring to produce the new, it was 
inevitable that technique and style should gradually turn from successful trial 
and error to foolproof recipe. The close study of antique remains, especially 
in architecture, turned these sources of inspiration into models to copy. The 
result was frigidity — or at best cool elegance. It is a cultural generality that 
going back to the past is most fruitful at the beginning, when the Idea and not 
the technique is the point of interest. As knowledge grows more exact, origi- 
nality grows less; perfection increases as inspiration decreases. 

In painting, this downward curve of artistic intensity is called by the sug- 
gestive name of Mannerism. It is applicable at more than one moment in the 
history of the arts. The Mannerist is not to be despised, even though his high 
competence is secondhand, learned from others instead of worked out for 
himself. His art need not lack individual character, and to some connoisseurs it 
gives the pleasure of virtuosity, the exercise of power on demand, but for the 
critic it poses an enigma: why should the pleasure be greater when the power is 
in the making rather than on tap? There may be no answer, but a useful corol- 
lary is that perfection is not a necessary characteristic of the greatest art. 

To anyone in the mid-16C who looked back to Petrarch or Giotto or 
Wycliffe and thought of recent work in literature and the graphic arts or 
scholarship and religious thought, it must seem evident that the accumulation 
of desirable changes meant Progress. The word and a theory about it arose 
and provided a new standard of judgment: are we improving? Change came 
to be judged a move forward or backward, the latter being pointiess. This in 
time generated the familiar labels progressive, conservative, and reactionary. 
The doctrine of progress was thus no foolish fantasy of the 18C philosophes, 
as is generally believed, which the 1 9C made into a creed certified by the for- 
ward march of industry. Now that the notion is generally decried — "the arts 
do not progress, nor does the moral character of man" — a look at its 16C ori- 
gins makes clear how reasonable, how irresistible, how useful the new cultural 
yardstick was. 

First was the conviction at the heart of Humanism — "more human," 
therefore better than the medieval outiook, behavior, and language. Next, the 
awareness of techniques obviously "advanced" — perspective in painting, 
polyphony in music (158>), improvements in the practical arts and the sci- 
ences. Finally, a sense of refinement in manners and the consciousness of reli- 
gion purified, for both churches, by the Evangelical revolution. Ramus (Pierre 
La Ramee), who perished in the massacre of the St. Bartholomew, was confi- 
dent that in the century just past greater advances had been made "in man and 



The "Artist" Is Born ^ 75 

works" than in the preceding fourteen The whole world is full of learned people, 
hundred years. Another observer, learned teachers, and large libraries, and it's 
Guillaume Postel, who had traveled to my belief that neither in Plato's time nor 
the Orient, foresaw continual progress Cicero's were there so many facilities for 
and world unity, unless the wars and study as now. 

plagues that Providence might decree —Rabelais, Letter to Pantagruel from 
destroyed all the knowledge stored in His Father Gargantua (1532) 

books. Otherwise, latest was best. 

To be aware of progress means being also aware of who has done the new 
thing, who is campaigning for the new idea. The individual gains in value: so- 
and-so is the talent to employ, to talk about and praise — or attack from a 
rival's point of view Renaissance enthusiasm thereby built up the artist into a 
figure destined to be more and more extra-ordinary, more and more exempt 
from convention and the law. His predecessor, the artisan — any man who 
worked with his hands — now rose in status if he worked in one of the fine arts, 
again a new distinction. It was not established all at once; for the people at 
large, the taint of the grubby hand persisted. It was no doubt to placate the 
other servants, including the paymaster, that Philip IV of Spain put Velasquez 
on the payroll as an upholsterer. [The book to read is Artist and Craftsman by 
H. Ruhemann.] ° 

The marks of the new type were none the less clear. The artist was no 
longer anonymous as he had almost always been in the Middle Ages (in con- 
tradistinction to the author, whose hand was not grubby). The builder, sculp- 
tor, painter now signed his work or was credited in print. Again, he chose his 
patron as often as his patron chose him. Cities and burghers hired his services 
only for the specified task; he traveled where money and fame awaited him, 
or at least were held out as bait, for payment was often hard to collect. The 
great are lavish in words but stingy or impecunious in cash (334>). This foot- 
loose practice enabled the artist to serve simultaneously two patrons who 
might be at war with each other. It even made artists useful as ambassadors 
from one court to another if they had the right personality. Rubens is the 
great example of the artist as statesman, supreme in both roles (334>). 

Clearest sign of independence, the patron (or his majordomo) who tries 
to inject his ideas into the design is told not to meddle in matters which he 
does not understand. In time it became 

impossible for the patron to coerce or And ^^ x lamtodoim y work for Y our 
even direct "his" artist. Holiness, I beg that none may be set in 

The artist is occasionally a writer authority over me in matters touching my art. 
as well. He describes his work and his I beg that full trust may be placed in me and 
views, he tells of his struggles, pub- that I may be given a free hand. 
lishes his grievances, gives good and —Michelangelo, sculptor, 
bad marks to his employers — Cellini Florence (1 524) 



76 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

It is a duty incumbent on upright and credi- flunked Clement VII — and like Petrarch 

ble men of all ranks who have performed any appealed to Posterity. [The book to 

thing noble or praiseworthy to record in their browse in is Cellini's autobiography.] 

own words the events of their lives. But they 

should not undertake this honorable task * 

until they are past the age of forty. * * 

-BENVENUTO CEIXINI, OPENING Aftef ^ q^j q{ -j. when 

Sentence of His Autobiography _ _ .. . 

, , 558 x every form or religious opinion was 

more or less under surveillance by 
church authorities, works of art were 
liable to censorship. The case mentioned earlier of Veronese's Last Supper is 
notorious. His interrogatory shows the painter confident that in the exercise 
of their art artists are free agents. The tribunal pressed hard but did not shake 
him. Asked first about his trade, the accused said: "I paint and compose fig- 
ures." The quizzing goes on: 

Q. Do you know why you have been summoned? 

A. I can well imagine. Your Lordships had ordered the Prior of the Convent 
to have a Magdalen painted in the picture [of the Lord's Last Supper] 
instead of the dog. I told him that I would do anything for my honor and 
that of the painting, but that I did not see how a figure of Magdalen 
would be suitable there. 

Q. Have you painted other Suppers besides this one? 

A. Yes, my lords. [He mentions five.] 

Q. What is the significance of the man whose nose is bleeding? And those 
armed men dressed as Germans? 

A. I intended to represent a servant whose nose is bleeding because of some 
accident. We painters take the same license as poets and I have repre- 
sented two soldiers, one drinking and the other eating on the stairs, 
because I have been told that the owner of the house was rich and would 
have such servants. 

Q. What is Saint Peter doing? 

A. Carving the lamb to pass it to the other end of the table. 

Q. And the one next to him? 

A. He has a toothpick and cleans his teeth. 

Q. Did anyone commission you to paint Germans, buffoons, and similar 
things in your picture? 

A. No, my lords, but to decorate the space. 

Q. Are not the added decorations to be suitable? 

A. I paint pictures as I see fit and as well as my talent permits. 

Q. Do you not know that in Germany and other places infected with heresy, 



The "Artist" Is Born <^> 77 

pictures mock and scorn the things of the Holy Catholic Church in order 
to teach bad doctrine to the ignorant? 

A. Yes, that is wrong, but I repeat that I am bound to follow what my supe- 
riors in art have done. 

Q. What have they done? 

A. Michelangelo in Rome painted the Lord, His Mother, the Saints, and the 
Heavenly Host in the nude — even the Virgin Mary. 

The Illustrious Judges decreed that My beard turns up to heaven; my nape 
the painting must be corrected within falls in, 

three months, at the expense of the Stuck to my spine. My breastbone visibly 

painter. In the end, he changed nothing Grows into a harp; a rich decoration 

except the tide of the work. Adorns my face with paint drops thick and 

It should not be thought that in thm * 

i • ^ . ^ ii- My loins into my paunch like pistons grind, 

becoming artists, painters and their J J r r s 

, . , , . - - My buttocks like a saddle bear my weight. 

kind ceased to be artisans in the physi- „ „ . , , , /* 

L J My feet unguided wander to and fro; 

cal sense. Painter and sculptor, engraver ~ . T A . , ,. 1M , 

r ' & Crosswise I strain, bending like a bow. 

and architect did not throw off their ComCj Giovanni 
smock and keep their hands clean like Help save my pictutes and goo d name, 
the writer at his desk. The graphic arts since I'm so badly off and painting is my 
are rooted in matter and the least com- shame. 

petence requires skill and knowledge —Michelangelo, "On Painting 
about pigments, oils, glue, wood, wax, THE SlSTINE Chapel" 

plaster — and how to handle raw eggs. 

[The book to browse in is The Artist's Handbook by Ralph Mayer.] The sculptor 
is equally a workman, his hands roughened by chipping stone and his hair full 
of plaster dust; the architect oversees the masons and bricklayers as one famil- 
iar with their routines, and he scampers up scaffoldings — like the painter of 
frescoes. 

The painter's ad hoc chemistry has to be learned, and in the Renaissance 
and for two centuries more, the training of artists was by the apprentice sys- 
tem inherited from the medieval guilds. It would have been folly in the 1 6C to 
transfer the teaching of art to the universities or to special schools as we have 
done. The 16C artist needed a group of trainees to help him in the routine 
manual tasks and the "filler" portions of the very large works commissioned 
for churches and city halls. This system was so effective that it is the cause of 
present-day puzzles that bedevil museum curators and art dealers: Is this a 
Rembrandt? Or is it a superb piece by So-and-so, known to have been one of 
his best assistants? The master's teaching imparted the master touch. And in 
doing so well, the "ghost" Rembrandt was unwittingly carrying out the 
medieval principle, which was that the good artisan reproduces the model 



78 c ^d From Dawn to Decadence 

exactly, whether it is a picture for the guild hall or a felt hat for the Lord 
Mayor. The artist does the opposite: he follows his bent, creates his own style, 
as Petrarch recommended. In the course of time, he must be original alto- 
gether if he is not to be deemed academic, worthless. But even before the cult 
of the new (160>), the users of new techniques advertised their ars nova, dolce 
stil nuovo, or via moderna. 

Emancipated from guild rules, the 
Contract for the Pieta, August 7, 1498 art i st becomes an independent con- 

... the Most Reverend Cardinal di San Dinizio tractor. He deals with any member of 
has agreed that Maestro Michelangelo, statu- the public on his own terms; willy-nilly 
ary of Florence, shall make a Pieta of marble, he is a businessman, not always a con- 
a draped figure of the Virgin Mary with the genial role. For as usual with EMANCI- 
dead Christ in her arms, the figures being life- PAT ION, hard conditions limit the new 
size, for 450 ducats, 150 to be paid before the freedom> If to win recognition the 

work is begun. And I, Tacopo Gallo, promise • ^ ^ i i • • • _ i ^ 

6 ' J y iy artist must show a distinctive style, the 

that the said Michelangelo will complete the , ...-.-.. 

7 , command may strain his fund or oriPi- 

work within a year and that it shall be more J ° 

. .r t , f . I.. u nality at the same time as he faces 

beautiful than any work in marble to be seen J 

in Rome today. vicious competition. To gain the favor 

_ of the rich he must cultivate their taste 

GALLO, A COLLECTOR OF ANTIQUES, .... 

acting as agent for the sculptor and earn the applause of critics fronting 

for the public, not to mention the spec- 
ulative eye of the art dealer, who also first appears in the 1 6C. Society mean- 
while, though a willing customer in a general way, fumbles at that insoluble 
problem, the patronage of art (338>). 

* * 

By a pleasant custom dating back to the last century, a noted brain-surgeon 
who plays the violin, can sail a boat, and keeps up with new books is known 
among his friends as a Renaissance man. He deserves credit, certainly, for bat- 
tling against the force of SPECIALISM, but his qualifications for the honorific 
tide fall a litde short when he is compared with, say, Alberti, who not only 
painted and built and theorized, but was also a poet and playwright, a musician 
(organist), and a writer on theology and philosophy. 

What Pico thought man could develop in himself and what Castiglione 
was to describe as the perfect creature of a civilized court (85>) excluded no 
faculty of the mind — hence the label uomo universale. But it called for at least 
the basis of Humanism, "the good letters"; and this is why the figure so often 
cited nowadays as the Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci, does not deserve 
the tide. He has obviously been chosen to flatter our dominant interests: art 
and science. Towering as a painter, he was also preoccupied with civil engi- 



The "Artist" Is Born <&* 79 

neering, aviation, and scientific observation generally. His machines did not 
work, but his sketches and calculations for them are remarkable. The combi- 
nation of the "two cultures" is to us striking and so is his persevering 
"research." Yet of all the men of his period he is the outstanding case of the 
genius who was not a Renaissance man in the intended sense: he lacked the 
good letters. He speaks of this limitation himself. He cared nothing about 
Latin and Greek. He never wrote poems or orations. He had little to say about 
philosophy and theology. He took no interest in history; to paint a mural in 
the Governors' Palace in Florence, he had to borrow Machiavelli's notes on a 
famous battle. Nor was he an architect or a sculptor. Worst of all, he had no 
use for music, which (he said) had two great faults — one mortal, in that music 
ceased to exist as soon as the piece was over; and one he called "wasting": its 
continual repetition, which made it "contemptible." 

A close ranking of candidates would place Luther higher than Leonardo, 
for Luther was a great writer and orator (though not a great classicist), a musi- 
cian, a theologian, a practiced observer of nature and (as we saw) a willing 
partaker of the life of the senses (<17). To Leonardo, a picture was more fully 
expressive than the products of any other art, and even in painting his out- 
put was small. The point of this comparison is not to disparage Leonardo, 
whose genius is beyond question, or to replace him in the hall of fame with 
Alberti, the encyclopedic talent. It is only to restore the proper meaning of 
the honorific title now bandied about heedlessly. A once popular book that 
used the phrase Renaissance man as a 

title offered Machiavelli, Castiglione, If you [poets] call painting "dumb poetry," 
Aretino, and Savonarola as representa- then the painter may say of the poet that his 
tives.° They are not the best that might art is "blind painting." Consider which is the 
be chosen, but they suggest the inter- more grievous affliction, to be blind or 
disciplinary mind, a cultural type more dumb? 
wondered at today than truly appreci- — Leonardo, Notebooks 
ated. In a genuine instance, the mur- 
mur "jack-of-all- trades" is likely to be heard. 

Actually, the true Renaissance man should not be defined by genius, which 
is rare, or even by the numerous performing talents of an Alberti. It is best 
defined by variety a of interests and their cultivation as a proficient amateur. A 
Renaissance man or woman has the skill to fashion verses and accompany or sing 
them; a taste for good letters and good paintings, for Roman antiquities and the 
new architecture; and some familiarity with the rival philosophies. To all this 
must be added the latest refinements in manners as practiced in the princely 
courts, where men and women were expected to talk agreeably, to dance grace- 
fully, to act in masques, and improvise other at-home theatricals. Social life for 
them was a species of serious work for mutual pleasure, one motive being to 



80 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

fend off boredom. The men must be soldiers; both sexes could be adept at pol- 
itics. In short, it is the exact opposite of our intellectual and social specialisms, 
the reverse of our prefabricated hobbies and entertainments. 

It was of course easier in the 16C and 17C than now to be a generalist in 
the arts and to some extent in science (191 >). These subjects were not so much 
accessible as manifest, and the lines between them were hardly drawn. One 
might say that life itself was general. Under colorful differences, similar cultural 
attitudes and arrangements prevailed in Rome, Florence, Venice, and Padua; in 
Paris and London, in Antwerp and Lisbon. A sizable group from the upper 
classes accepted the talented; the latter being "domestics" in the residential 
sense. All as it were "practiced high culture" in the newest forms that had 

reached the place, all were ready to fol- 
Travel in the younger sort is part of low the latest whims of taste as these 
Education; in the elder, a part of we re wafted from whichever was then 
Experience. He that travels into a country ^ most acnve center of innovation. 
before he has some entrance into the Ian- Seconding this movement of ideas 

guage goes to school and not to travel. The wag ^ astonishing amount of ttavd _ 

things to be seen are: the courts of princes, j j •„. i_ j i_- ji_ 

& r ing done, despite hardships and haz- 

the courts of justice, the churches, the mon- • , i r i i 

, „ ._ . , , ards. The switchabout of scholars 
uments, walls, and fortifications, harbors, 

. .,. . j ... . « between universities, the tide of artists 

antiquities, ruins, and libraries, colleges, ' 

shipping and navies, houses and gardens, to the Hveliest s P ot and of gentlemen 
armories and arsenals, exchanges, ware- and ladies to the capital cities— none of 
houses, exercises of horsemanship, fencing, this organized — was incessant. It went 
and training of soldiers, comedies of the with a polyglot frame of mind; the 
better sort, treasuries of jewels, robes, and nation-state had not yet concentrated 
rarities, as well as triumphs, masques, mind-and-heart on one country and 
feasts, weddings, and capital executions. one language. In Rome and Paris the 

— Bacon, "Of Travel" (1 626) very beggars made their pitch in several 

languages as the stranger approached. 
Because this group of globe-trotters belonged to the upper orders (and 
were not as yet too numerous), they could count on being received abroad by 
one of their peers without previous notice or acquaintance, even in a small 
town. Word would come from the innkeeper to the burgomaster or to the 
squire that a person of quality had arrived, and an invitation would follow. 
[The travel book to read is Montaigne's Diary of 1580— 81.]° Artists, unless 
famous, would carry letters of introduction. 

The prerequisite for these activities was leisure. Nobles and their kept 
artists, not being workers captive to the nine-to-five, enjoyed freedom not at 
stated times but in scattered fragments throughout the day. Artists are envied 
now for the same reason. But leisure is not the simple thing it seems. The 
people who supported 1 6C culture were embroiled in politics, love intrigues, 
and vendettas; they fought in wars, and bore the usual burden of managing 



The "Artist" Is Born <^> 81 

their estates and of adding to them by complicated marriages and long- 
drawn-out negotiations. They were not idlers or free of worries. Yet they did 
things that appear impossible without casual ^zr niente. The paradox has only 
one explanation: leisure is a state of mind, and one that the modes of society 
must favor and approve. When common routines and public approval foster 
only Work, leisure becomes the exception, an escape to be contrived over and 
over. It is then an individual privilege, not a custom, and it breeds the special- 
ized recreations and addictions of our time. 

As for the artists in the noble palace, they too were kept busy at other 
things than their art. They must devise the frequent elaborate entertainments 
and also serve in humbler ways. Velasquez "the upholsterer" had to supervise 
King Philip's house staff. But these arrangements, usual in the 16th and 17C for 
living a hundred or more under one roof, facilitated the pleasurable activities. 
The palaceful of retainers afforded quick communication and direct execution. 
Planning a ball or a masque went from my lord to the poet, the musician, and 
the carpenter without the deliberations of a committee. Besides, living and 
working together softened the distinctions of rank. Antagonism, if any, was 
individual rather than class -inspired, though arrogance at the top and envy at 
various levels below found its opportunities. Not a family and not a clan, the 
"house" was nevertheless a protective institution. All within the group had a 
role and a living, regardless of status, talent, or schooling; and as the master's 
"people," wearing his livery, they could count on his support inside and defense 
outside. It was a society in little. [The book to read is The Marriage of Figaro — 
Beaumarchais' play,° not Da Ponte's opera libretto.] 

It is a temptation to credit the Renaissance with another new social type, 
the journalist. But that would be playing with the word type: the age produced 
one specimen, not a type: Aretino, and he proved a sample of the kind not 
much in favor with the conscientious writer for the press today. The son of a 
cobbler and entirely self-educated, Aretino used his extraordinary narrative 
style in the vernacular tongue to purvey news in avisi (broadsheets) and letters 
that everybody wanted to read, because they were often scandalous. The per- 
sons and politics of the highly placed were his target, and it has been thought 
that sometimes he used his information for blackmail. He could praise as well 
as ridicule and would receive propitiatory gifts, one from the French king, 
Francis I. The poet Ariosto put Aretino in his epic (147>) under a nickname 
that has stuck: "the scourge of princes." Nowadays it takes a staff of paid 
informers among the fashionable to keep a scandal sheet going. Being a 
Renaissance man, he did it alone. 

Aretino attached himself to various princes, rarely for very long until 
mid-career, when he setded in Venice and periodically published collections 
of his letters. He wrote plays and dialogues that are esteemed as high-class 
erotica. He was loyal to the friends he made among the painters, notably 



82 <&> From Dawn to Decadence 

Titian, and led in their appreciation by the public. He closed his career, pre- 
dictably, with two works of devotion. 



The suggestion made about the term Renaissance man coupled it with 
woman in italics. This was no afterthought but a heralding of the truth that 
16C society was molded and directed by a host of women as brilliant as the 
men and sometimes more powerful (85>). On an earlier page I said that in 
this book I would adhere to the long use ofmanas a word that means human 
being — -people — men and women alike, whenever there is no need to distin- 
guish them. Why then make a point of Renaissance women if already 
included in Renaissance man? First, to emphasize the presence in the group 
being discussed of the women we are about to meet, and secondarily for a 
chance to discuss the usage of man followed in these pages. Here, then, is 

A Digression on a Word 

The reasons in favor of prolonging that usage are four: etymology, con- 
venience, the unsuspected incompleteness of "man and woman," and literary 
tradition. 

To begin with the last, it is unwise to give up a long-established practice, 
familiar to all, without reviewing the purpose it has served. In Genesis we 
read: "And God created Man, male and female." Plainly, in 1611 and long 
before, man meant human being. For centuries zoologists have spoken of the 
species Man; "Man inhabits all the climatic zones." Logicians have said "Man 
is mortal," and philosophers have boasted of "Man's unconquerable mind." 
The poet Webster writes: "And man does flourish but his time." In all these 
uses man cannot possibly mean male only. The coupling of woman to those 
statements would add nothing and sound absurd. The word man has, like 
many others, two related meanings, which context makes clear. 

Nor is the inclusive sense of human being an arbitrary convention. The 
Sanskrit root man, manu, denotes nothing but the human being and does so 
par excellence, since it is cognate with the word for "I think." In the com- 
pounds that have been regarded as invidious — spokesman, chairman, and the 
like — man retains that original sense of human being, as is proved by the word 
woman, which is etymologically the "wife-human being." The wo (shortened 
from waef) ought to make woman doubly unacceptable to zealots, but the word 
as it stands seems irreplaceable. In a like manner, the proper name Carman is 
made up of car, which meant male, and man, which has its usual human being 
application. Car, originally carl or kerl, was the lowest order of freeman, often 
a rustic. (CWhas further given us Charles and churlish}) 



The "Artist" Is Born <w 83 

In English, words denoting human beings of various ages and occupa- 
tions have changed sex over time or lost it altogether. Thus at first gir/ referred 
to small children of either sex, likewise maid, which meant simply "grown- 
up," and the ending -ster, as in spinster and webster, designated women. It is no 
longer so in gangster and roadster. Implications have shifted too. In Latin, homo 
was the human being and vir the male, so that virtue meant courage in battle; 
in English it long stood for chastity in women. The message of this mixed-up 
past is that it is best to let alone what one understands quite well and not insist 
on a one-sided interpretation of a word in common use. 

Some may brush aside this lesson from usage old and new with a "Never 
mind. Nobody knows or thinks about the past and man remains objection- 
able." At this point the reformer must face practical needs. To repeat at fre- 
quent intervals "man and woman" and follow it with the compulsory "his 
and her" is clumsy. It destroys sentence rhythm and smoothness, besides cre- 
ating emphasis where it is not wanted. Where man is most often used, it is the 
quick neutral word that good prose requires. It is unfortunate that English no 
longer has a special term for the job like French on. But on is only the slimmed 
down form of hom(me) — man again. 

For the same neutral use German has man, true to the Sanskrit and mean- 
ing people. English had the identical word for the purpose until about 1 100. 
German has also Mensch with the sense of human being. So at bottom both 
French and German carry on the same double meaning of man as English, 
just more visibly; it is the only convenient generic term when it is not per- 
versely interpreted. There is after all an obligation to write decent prose and 
it rules out recurrent oddity or overinsistence on detail, such as is necessary 
(for example) in legal writing. Besides, the would-be reformers of usage utter 
contradictory orders. They want woman featured when men are mentioned 
but they also call for a ban on feminine designations such as actress. 

The truth is that any sex-conscious practice defeats itself by sidetracking 
the thought from the matter in hand to a social issue — an important one, 
without question. And on that issue, it is hardly plausible to think that tinker- 
ing with words will do anything to enhance respect for women among people 
who do not feel any, or increase women's authority and earnings in places 
where prejudice is entrenched. 

Finally, the thought occurs that if fairness to all divisions of humanity 
requires their separate mention when referred to in the mass, then the listing 
must not read simply "men and women", it must include teenagers. They have 
played a large role in the world and they are not clearly distinguished in the 
phrase "men and women." Reflection further shows that mention should be 
given to yet another group: children. The child prodigy in music is a small cat- 
egory. But one must not forget the far larger group of 8-, 10-, and 12-year- 
olds: boys (and sometimes girls in disguise) who in the armies and navies of 



84 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

the West have served in fife-and-drum corps or as cabin boys. Columbus's 
ships had a large contingent; all the great explorers of the New World relied 
on sizable teams of these hard-worked crew members. Manet's painting of 
the small fife player and one by Eva Gonzales remind us of the continued use 
of these little waifs past the mid-1 9C. Perhaps the last child to be so memori- 
alized is to be seen in Eastman Johnson's "The Wounded Drummer Boy,"° 
portrayed at the height of the American Civil War. 

Western culture is also indebted to children in a less cruel way, through 
the age-old institution of the boys' choir in church. In Renaissance England 
the "Boy Players" were actors, not amateurish as in the modern school play, 
but professionals and organized in companies. One of these was a serious 
competitor of Shakespeare's troupe. 

The teenagers' cultural contribution is more varied and better recorded, 
and the thought it brings to mind is the marked difference between earlier 
times and our own in the feeling about age. When the 19C novelist George 
Sand at 28 declared herself too old to marry (by custom she had been an old 
maid since 25) or when Richard II, 14 years old, alone in a large field, faced 
Wat Tyler's massed rebels and pacified them with a speech, attitudes were 
taken for granted that are hard for us to imagine. Nearly to the beginning of 
the present century, society accorded teenagers roles of social responsibility. 
Rossini first conducted an orchestra at 14 and led the Bologna Philharmonic 
at 1 8. Weber was even younger in a comparable position. 

In war and government, posts of command were won early. Alexander 
Hamilton, also at 14, set the rules for captains who traded with the firm that 
employed him on St. Croix Island, and he was 19 when Washington made 
him aide-de-camp. Pitt the Younger was prime minister at 23. Lagrange was 
professor of mathematics at the Turin School of Artillery at 19. And in 
Castiglione's manual of Renaissance manners, The Courtier (85>), one of the 
engaging figures is Francesco della Rovere, nephew of the pope, Lord 
General at 17, and soon to be "General of Rome." In the book he has just lost 
a battle but not the respect of his friends. His rank, his charm, and his mind 
ensure his being listened to as if he were a mature philosopher. Teenagers 
could lead armies in battle, for an older warrior's young page might be made 
a knight at 12 and there was no ladder of ranks between the first signs of tal- 
ent and the top — witness several of Napoleon's marshals. 

Cultural expectations were based on early mortality and spurred the 
young to live up to them. Melanchthon wrote an acceptable play when not 
quite 14 and Pascal's essay on conic sections, written at the age of 15, won the 
praise of Leibniz and other mathematicians. Halley — later famous for his 
comet — was a serious astronomer at the age of 10. The same often held good 
of the women. Catherine de' Medici was married early to her husband Henry, 
heir to the throne of France. She was 14 (a little older than Shakespeare's 



The "Artist" Is Born <^> 85 

Juliet) and he a few weeks older than his wife. The marriage had been 
arranged by the pope as part of a complex political scheme, and to make it 
secure it was imperative that Catherine should produce a son in short order. 
When Henry proved unequal to the work, the pope challenged Catherine 
with the words: "A clever girl surely knows how to get pregnant somehow or 
other." We shall shortiy meet this great stateswoman in her prime (86>). 

* 
* * 

In that same book of The Courtier, which is nearly contemporaneous with 
Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, one soon notices that two of the characters, 
Gaspar and Octavian, are declared enemies of women and that they are 
steadily refuted by the rest. The majority opinion is that women are equal to 
men in understanding, virtue, and ability, including at times physical prowess. 
They are shown to be great rulers, poets, and conversationalists. Two of the 
four women in the dialogue are the moderators, and their decisions show 
them to be as well informed as the men about the topics being discussed. 
That (still in this portrayal) women's wish to preserve tenderness in their con- 
duct may lead them to use different ways of doing what men do is true, but 
the result is nonetheless excellent. Men, although benefiting from women's 
civilizing influence, should not lose through refinement the robust aggressive 
qualities they are born with and need for their special tasks. 

The vindication of women was not a mere notion of Castiglione's. The evi- 
dence for his assertions was all around him. The 16C was full of women who 
exerted their talents like men for all to see and judge. The Vatican under the 
Renaissance popes was crowded with women politicians — nieces or sisters-in- 
law of the reigning power and others less closely related, who struggled among 
themselves for the exercise of that power. One or two of them remained the 
ultimate decision-maker for years. Their world of court intrigue brought out 
abilities that in another setting would have successfully ruled a modern nation. 

That setting did exist and was well occupied. Isabella of Castile, as will 
appear (98>), was again and again Ferdinand's betterhalim governing Spain at 
a critical time in the making of the nation. Later in the century, Philip II had 
Spain well in hand but was beset by an over-extended empire, and needed a 
deputy to govern the unruly Netherlands. He appointed as governor his ille- 
gitimate sister, Margaret of Parma. In the nine years of her authority over a 
growling rebellion, her skillful efforts to achieve reconciliation postponed the 
outbreak. She has not been celebrated because she was "on the wrong side," 
and because her successor, the Duke of Alva used cruel means of repression. 
Modern Liberal feeling cheers for the Dutch and condemns all who tried to 
prevent their emancipation. But the cause and outcome of a struggle give no 
measure of the ability displayed by either side. Fair judgment should follow 



86 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

the model that has made a hero of General Robert E. Lee although he lost a 
war fought to preserve slavery. 

Another 16C stateswoman, well worth notice, is Louise of Savoy (also a 
14-year-old bride), without whom her son Francis would very likely not have 
been King of France, the line of succession being in dispute. She adored that 
vain and self-indulgent youth and she deployed her diplomatic genius to such 
affect that he did gain the throne and once on it performed not badly. Why is 
Louise not listed among history's king-makers? Or mentioned as the negotia- 
tor of the Treaty of Cambrai that ended France's War with Spain in 1 529 and 
was soon known as the Paix des Dames, because the other contracting party was 

Margaret of Austria, aunt of Charles V. 
Elizabeth I of England Elizabeth of England has received her 

She assigned Thursday as bear-baiting day due and there is no need to rehearse her 
and decreed that the giving of plays on that superior arts of delay and defusion. But 
day was "a great hurt to this and other pas- she should also be remembered as one 
times which are maintained for Her Majesty's of the most learned minds of her time, a 
pleasure." The Master of the Bears requi- character of the type traditionally called 
sitioned bears and dogs anywhere for her manly, and an expert organizer of public 
entertainment. (1565) relations. 

A good many other leading women 
in 16C politics could be mentioned. One more will suffice: the Catherine 
whose teenage marriage was mentioned above. She also has suffered in repu- 
tation from serving interests not to our taste. But as queen and queen mother 
of France she guided policies that upheld the royal prerogative and the 
integrity of the kingdom. She faced ruthless factions, including the Protestant 
Huguenot party. She is blamed for the massacre of the St. Bartholomew, but 
it is not clear that the responsibility is hers — and we never hear about the 
"Michelade," when the Huguenots massacred Catholics on St. Michael's day. 
[The book to read is Balzac's semi- fictional Catherine de Medicis.] 

The many Italians who found a post at Catherine's court were resented as 
foreigners, but their influence under her leadership brought into French life 
many of the refinements from their homeland. (One odd trace of their pres- 
ence is embalmed in the French language. Apparentiy in imitation of their 
speech, it became fashionable to pronounce r's as j's; so the French word for 
chair, originally and sensibly chaire, turned into present-day chaise}) 

Turning to the gender sort, we encounter another "pearl," Marguerite of 
Navarre (also d'Angouleme), sister of Francis I and protector of Rabelais. At 
her court in southwestern France she entertained a coterie of writers and 
thinkers of all persuasions, including for a time Calvin. She encouraged local 
trade and art, wrote poetry, and tried to reconcile Catholics and Huguenots. 
Her great work, The Heptameron, is a collection of 72 tales patterned after 
Boccaccio's Decameron, but original in mood and different from his by the 



The "Artist" Is Born <^> 87 

change in manners over two and a half centuries. It has been called "a mas- 
terpiece of pornography" and it is certainly erotic: all are stories about the 
tricks and turns of love affairs, mostly illicit. But the porn-monger of today 
would look in vain for the physical exploits that have become commonplace 
in high and low fiction. 

Marguerite's contemporaries thought her "as good as she was beautiful 
and as brilliant as she was good," and her stories praise in all sincerity honor- 
able love and chastity. The tales in which adultery, murder, or clerical concu- 
binage are features of the entertainment are not fantasy for titillation; they 
could have been documented by the author from contemporary life. And 
when her tone is serious and the case is one of grave sin, retribution follows. 
Toward the end of the unfinished series — it was planned to number 100 — 
she verges on a somber naturalism in which love is still a force but the erotic 
disappears. Her prose is among the best of its day, simple — there is no occa- 
sion for philosophical abstractions — and it is therefore lucid. 

Marie de Gournay, the adoptive daughter of Montaigne {she adopted him), 
did go in for philosophy. She was a woman of prodigious erudition, hobnob- 
bing in Paris with all the leading celebrities. She edited two enlarged editions 
of Montaigne's Essays, wrote a Defense of Poetry, a discourse On the French 
Language, a tract On the Small Value of Noble Rank. Most important, she wrote 
The Equality of Men and Women. In this, it must be added, she had the support 
of others, who were men, notably the German Cornelius Agrippa, who 
defended the "superexcellence of women." Marie tested her self-reliance by 
traveling across France alone to visit Montaigne's family and "console them" 
after his death. 

No less striking is the personality of another 1 6C artist, Louise Labe, 
poet and musician, adept at horsemanship and other sports, who mastered 
several languages — all this after serving in the army with her father at the age 
of 16. Most remarkable at the time, she was of bourgeois origins and perhaps 
the first woman who gathered around her poets and artists to form a salon, the 
bourgeois equivalent of a court. Her writings include sonnets and elegies still 
anthologized and an unusual prose work, The Debate Between Folly and Love. 

Louise Labe's counterpart in England, Lady Pembroke, has been duly 
celebrated. Edmund Spenser named her among the great contemporary 
poets. Known as Urania (the muse of astronomy), she was a patron of poets 
and playwrights. With her brother Philip Sidney she versified the Psalms and 
is thought to have introduced a note of feminism in his noble Arcadia (155>), 
as well as changed passages that were "too free." 

Because all but one of these women belonged to the nobility it should not 
be supposed that artistic talent and managerial ability in women existed or 
had a chance to come into play only at the top of the social scale. There 
were — there always have been — hundreds of women in all ranks who were in 



88 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

fact rulers — sometimes tyrants — of their entourage, as well as hundreds of 
others who wrote, sang to their own accompaniment, or practiced one or 
another of the ornamental crafts. The notion that talent and personality in 
women were suppressed at all times during our half millennium except the 
last fifty years is an illusion. Nor were all women previously denied an educa- 
tion or opportunities for self-development. Wealth and position were prereq- 
uisite, to be sure, and they still tend to be. The truth is that matters of freedom 
can never be settled in all-or-none fashion and any judgment must be com- 
parative. Individual cases moreover show that what happens in a culture 
always differs in some degree from what is supposed to happen; possibilities 
are always greater than custom would dictate. 

One standard for judging the status of women is the contemporary sta- 
tus of men. In the hierarchical society of the 1 6C and later, they too were 
deprived — of education, of openings for talent, of the means to leave the nar- 
row space where they toiled — hence there was little or no lateral mobility, let 
alone vertical. In the Renaissance this constriction was greater than before 
because of the diminished prestige of the clergy. The Middle Ages had 
offered the humblest boy a chance to be educated and to rise to high posts in 
church and state. After the Reformation, laymen more and more filled these 
places. What John Stuart Mill in the 19C chose to call the subjection of 
women was thus matched for a long time by the subjection of men. And since 
Mill had in mind his own day, in which a good many women did emerge into 
public notice and power, a second mode of comparison might well be to mea- 
sure their status against that of women in Mohammedan countries. 

The cultural point here is not to condone the presence of obstacles to 
self-development, at any time, against anybody It is to mark a difference 
between social norms and cultural actualities. If we see "the artist" emerge in 
the Renaissance as a self-directing individual who can say to his employer: 
"Hand's off. Be quiet. I know my business better than you," it implies that 
formerly he suffered "subjection" — to the employer and the guild. Nor did 
subjection completely disappear: the agent, the patron, and the public have 
continued to this day to limit and hinder artistic free will. 

This is to say that cultural absolutes do not exist, pro or con. Nobody in 
the Renaissance circles so far looked at was shocked by the rise to eminence 
of the women whose mention here is far from closing the roster. The names 
of others are known and their lives recorded in detail; their deaths memorial- 
ized in poems, letters, and other expressions of praise and grief. The debate 
in The Courtier suggests that the reality was ahead of the stereotype and this 
fact was the spur to the arguments in defense of equality for the sexes. 

Over our five centuries, the changes in social structure, economic life, and 
cultural expectations have worked fairly steadily toward EMANCIPATION and 
made individualism a common form of SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. The artist is 



The "Artist" Is Born ^d 89 

the conspicuous and congenial example. But free play for the self is still a goal 
to be achieved and not a gift. Under any system, whoever wants self-fulfillment 
must exert willpower over a long stretch of time, besides possessing talent and 
knowing how to manage it. And as is plain from daily experience, many who 
make this effort fail nonetheless and complain of "subjection." Meanwhile, the 
great majority feel no wish for public fame or self-expression, which does not 
mean that they are denied respect or some scope for their modest powers. The 
society in which everybody finds his or her proper level and due recognition 
has yet to be designed and made to work. 



Cross Section 

The View from Madrid 
Around 1J40 



In THIS FIRST and later "Cross Sections" the aim is to survey events and 
ideas of mixed kinds as they might be noted or heard about by an alert 
observer at a given time and place. A wide-awake youngster "of good family" 
(however defined) begins to be aware of the wide world in his or her early 
teens. By then, knowledge of the recent past has also been absorbed auto- 
matically: it was "the present" for the parents, who keep referring to it. Its 
striking events and startling notions come through this hearsay to seem part 
of the youth's own experience, so that with this headstart his mind keeps 
abreast of developments; that mind is in fact the place — or one of the 
places — where culture has its being Given a life expectancy of forty years — 
a generous allowance for the 1 6C — such a viewer commands a panorama of 
at least half a century — thirty years of direct knowledge and twenty or so of 
gatherings from the collective memory of his milieu, which may on certain 
points stretch back indefinitely into the past. 

The cities from which such viewings will be taken have been chosen for 
their timely connection with the cultural topics discussed up to that point. 
These were set out in roughly consecutive patterns for the sake of clarity. But 
life actually lived, as Hazlitt reminds us, is "a miscellany," a jumble of appar- 
ently unrelated incidents and tendencies, so many daily cross sections of the 
world. For this tutti-frutti of impressions one must simulate the casual con- 
junction of significant items, adding only background for clear portrayal. 

First, a word about the center from which this first survey is to take place. 
Madrid, like a good many of the things so far looked at, was a 16C innovation. 
Before the Modern Era it was the merest village in central Spain, perched on 



92 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

a plateau some 600 feet high, 2,100 above sea level. Not until 1540 did it seem 
possible that it would enlarge into a European capital. In that year, Charles V, 
just turned 40 and suffering from gout and perhaps malaria, repaired to this 
spot, thinking that its brisk air, which he remembered from two previous vis- 
its, would do him good. 

The place was otherwise unattractive and remained so for a good many 
years. It had poor soil, few trees, and not enough water. Its adobe houses were 
mean in size and looks, the streets a blend of mud and garbage along which 
pigs ran wild, protected by their local patron saint. Its very name had a doubt- 
ful meaning. In its Arabic form it stood for "place of winds" or "running 
waters" or perhaps simply "fortress." The population of about 3,000 did not 
grow or prosper until the site was made the capital of the realm by fiat. This 
last feature is but one of the curious parallels between Spain and Russia, the 
two appendages of the Occident. 

Not being on a river but on a stream likely to vanish in summer heat, 
Madrid lacks easy communication with the rest of the country. When it 
started growing to 30,000 in half a century, food had to be brought up by end- 
less trains of mules. The Spanish and foreign "immigrants" who came there 
did so only because the town had been decreed the "sole court, loyal and 
crowned." And yet in 1543 a visitor described some amenities — a pleasant 
park where well-dressed women and their escorts promenaded and, the 
brothel having been removed, some handsome houses and public buildings 
to be admired. Others among the newcomers thought of Madrid as "nine 
months of winter, three of hell." 

So much for the site. Nobody had been looking for a new capital; the 
country had a surplus of them: Valladolid, Toledo, Saragossa, and Seville — 
evidence of the lack of integration that has characterized Spanish history 
from the beginning. With these details in mind, what might a Madrid resident, 
new or old, think of most often as the 16C neared the midpoint? First and 
foremost, surely, it would be the creator of Madrid himself, 

Charles V 

By 1 540 the Spanish had become used to him. When he first came to the 
place as king and emperor two decades earlier, he was an unknown quantity, 
a foreigner barely out of his teens, a Fleming who did not speak Spanish. He 
brought a Burgundian adviser and Flemish hangers-on: he could hardly be a 
popular sovereign. But he was a conscientious youth and he learned fast. He 
had been well brought up on a mixture of modern knowledge and medieval 
ethics, that is to say, the chivalric ideals of faith in God, honor on earth, and 
scorn of greed and cunning. 

Yet as the grandson of that gifted pair, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand 



Cross Section: Madrid <^ 93 

of Aragon, whose union and hard I was not invested with the imperial crown in 
work had made a start on unifying the order to take over yet more territories, but to 
peninsula, he had worldly duties as well ensure the peace of Christendom and so to 
as spiritual. But his position was diffi- "*** ^ forces against the Turks for the glory 
cult: he was not King of Spain; there of the Christian faith. 
was no such entity. He ruled four king- —Charles V in 1521 
doms — Navarre, Valencia, Aragon- 

Castile, and Catalonia, each with an assembly and claims to some form of 
independence. To this day, Catalonia is still at odds with central authority, and 
the Basques of Navarre are rebels and terrorists. Nor was Charles technically 
the sovereign; his mother Joanna was. But she was mad and confined. [The 
book to read is Through Spain with Don Quixote by Rupert Croft-Cooke.] 

The young man was made aware of his uneasy role at his coronation in 
Aragon, where the assembly declared that it was a republic with an elective 
king. It served notice that "we who are as good as you, make you, who are no 
better than we, our king. And we will bear true allegiance if you observe our 
laws and customs; if not, not." No wonder that for many years after Charles's 
reign, the well-informed in Europe spoke of "the Spains" as they did of "the 
Germanies. ,, 

Yet by 1540 from Madrid, Charles's person, his realms, and his authority 
over them formed a grandiose prospect. He was the head of an empire that 
stretched from Italy in the south to the Netherlands in the North and from 
Spain to Mexico and Peru, including dozens of islands in the Mediterranean, 
the overlordship of the Germanies, and measureless areas of the Western 
Hemisphere. The extent was twenty times the size of the ancient Roman 
Empire; it prompted the first use of the boast that "on our lands the sun 
never sets." It made Spain the leading power in Europe. Never mind the mud 
of Madrid or the arrogance of the Aragonese: the countries thus assembled 
by inheritance gave reason to hope that Charlemagne's empire might be re- 
created and Dante's dream of "universal monarchy" fulfilled. 

But so much power and territory in Europe meant perpetual war, the 
issue being: which king shall dominate the Continent. One must say king, not 
nation, because that political creation was not yet a clear or firm reality. The 
feeling that came to be called nationalism was mainly negative — resentment 
of foreign advisers at the royal court. That they could be there holding office 
shows how limited the idea of nation was. Except for commanders and staff, 
the armies that fought each other for the kings of France and Spain were nei- 
ther French nor Spanish but German and Swiss (95>). 

Another detail that did not surprise the Madrid observer of Charles's 
mission was that the battles — none conclusive — were mostly fought in Italy, 
though the object of the campaigns was the control of Burgundy, the duchy 
that Charles's ancestors had nearly made into the Middle Kingdom of 



94 q^*> From Dawn to Decadence 

Europe. His enemy Francis I of France laid claim to portions of it, for a very 
practical reason: if Charles held them, Francis's kingdom would be encircled. 
That stretch along both sides of the Rhine — Flanders, Alsace, Lorraine, and 
Burgundy proper — has in fact been the stake of the repetitious European 
wars. It is prosperous and strategic, and it is no accident that today it is the 
active center of the European Union; its chief agencies sit in Brussels and 
Strasbourg. 

In the 16C the theater of war was Italy, because it was the traditional bat- 
tlefield (as Germany later became) because its cut-up condition provided 
allies — the pope, the republic of Venice, the duchy of Milan, and so on, who 
varied their alliances. Intermarriage among rulers being the basis of posses- 
sion and diplomacy, it created overlapping rights to this or that province, and 
the muddle, complicated by unexpected deaths and births, was the occasion 
of these ever-renewable wars. 

The degree to which the conflict was felt as personal, in addition to 
dynastic and strategic, is shown by a little drama that mid-century Madrid 
dwellers well remembered. In 1 525, Charles V defeated Francis I in a great 
battle at Pavia, in Italy, and by accident Francis was taken prisoner. The 
French king wrote to his political mother, Louise of Savoy: "All is lost save life 
and honor." Charles, embarrassed by this loot in human form, had him sent 
to the Alcazar, the castle-prison of Madrid, to be treated there as a distin- 
guished guest. 

What honor could survive defeat and capture is now hard to see, but as 
mentioned earlier, the medieval ideas still had influence, especially on 
Charles's mind. The feudal notion of war as a contest between two knights 
aided by their friends and servitors went with the feeling that if well fought, 
the battle and its outcome left honor intact. The loser goes home to bind up 
his wounds and start again. Although both warriors have been fighting for 
property, they think rather that it was for the (legal) right; neither imagines 
that he represents a nation, which is another reason why defeat is not dis- 
grace. 

The Spanish shared this outlook. When Charles first came among them 
they greeted him with a tournament in which he took part and which ended 
in many wounds and broken bones. At a crisis later than Pavia he offered to 
fight Francis in single combat and thus avoid another expensive war. Nor is it 
surprising that Charles quickly learned to enjoy the favorite Spanish sport of 
bullfighting and went into the ring himself to enjoy it even more. [The book 
to read is Wars of Ideas in Spain by Jose Castillejo.] 

The Pavia situation seemed to him another instance of these one-to-one 
encounters. He went to visit his prisoner and found him in bed. Francis strug- 
gled to his feet. Charles took off his hat and embraced him. Francis said: "Sir, 
you see I am your slave." Charles replied: "No, you are my good brother and 



Cross Section: Madrid s^> 95 

free friend." "No," repeated the other; "I am your slave." And again Charles 
called Francis "my free friend and brother." Charles had in fact the greatest 
respect for "The House of France" and had given orders that the king be 
shown every courtesy. But Francis, as his behavior soon showed, seems to 
have had inklings of a more modern, more national conception of war, and he 
was despondent. He was kept from suicide by his guardian, Alarcon, the head 
of the Spanish armies, but he kept worrying: what would be the terms of his 
release? 

The medieval solution would have been the payment of a ransom. 
Francis's sister, the brilliant Marguerite, whose court was a center of art and 
letters (<86), pleaded with Charles to let her brother go, as if the war had been 
a tournament. When the plea failed, Francis, although he had given his word 
to stay put, decided to escape "disguised as a negro slave" — whatever cos- 
tuming this may have meant. Clearly, Francis did feel like a slave and not a 
knight. He was caught escaping, Charles was shocked, unbelieving. How 
could a Christian gentleman who had given his word act like a varlet? The 
transition from princely conduct to raison d'etat, from knight to head of state, 
from medieval to modern was painful. 

The ensuing Peace of Madrid proved it again: Francis gave his two sons 
as hostages for his good faith in renouncing all claims in Italy and Burgundy. 
But once home he denounced these terms as having been obtained under 
duress. War resumed for another two years. At the height of it an event 
occurred that outraged all Christendom: Charles's army sacked Rome. The 
looting and savaging of the people was fearful and prolonged. Neither 
Charles nor the leader of the forces, the Constable of Bourbon, condoned the 
action. The troops were uncontrollable; they had been unpaid for too long. 
Here again are signs of the times: first, the mercenary army and then the 
Constable from Southern France fighting against a "French" army that had 
hardly any French in the ranks. 

It was during this campaign that Bayard, "the knight without fear or 
reproach," who was French and who lay dying, supposedly admonished the 
Constable for betraying his country. The anecdote implies loyalty to nation at 
a time when it was hardly felt, even by the most honorable. For another 300 
years, soldiers and statesmen could without blame serve a king and country 
other than their own. Where whole provinces kept changing hands every few 
years, there was no fully defined nation, no "citizenship," only "subjects" who 
were traded about according to the chances of war. 

That same campaign was concluded in unusual fashion: negotiations for 
the terms of peace were carried on by two women: Francis's mother Louise and 
Charles's aunt Margaret. As we saw (<86), the treaty was at once dubbed the 
Ladies' Peace. Francis got his two boys back unharmed and Charles, ten years 
after his election, was at last crowned emperor by the pope. 



96 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

That election had also been secured with the aid of a woman. The other 
Margaret, Charles's sister, had helped to distribute the bribes — one million 
gold ecus borrowed from the amiable Fuggers (<15), half the sum going 
direct to the seven electors, the rest to such princes as might interfere. 
Margaret later helped Charles again as regent of the Netherlands: he could 
not be everywhere. Nor was the semi-permanent war with Francis his only 
preoccupation. He had the indefatigable Turks to contend with. To the east 
his brother Ferdinand would hold the gates of Vienna and Hungary against 
them, but the infidels were also a menace at sea, allied as they were with an 
outstanding pirate named Barbarossa, based in Algiers. To dispose of him 
Charles planned to conquer North Africa and was partly successful, but the 
menace to trade and travel was not abated until the American navy destroyed 
the "Barbary pirates" in the early 19C. 

Seeing Charles's manifold activities the Madrid observer might won- 
der — and worry — about the emperor's apparent neglect of Germany, where 
the heretics flouted the true faith with impunity. Charles was devout but not 
narrow. In religious matters he consulted and followed Erasmus. Luther's 
rebellious words at Worms and later did not change Charles's tolerant temper, 
which was reinforced by his impression that in practice the Evangelicals did 
not differ very much from the moderate Catholics. Reconciliation, a return to 
the one church, seemed to him possible for a long time. The primacy of the 
pope proved to be the only immovable barrier. But there was also the ques- 
tion of who owned and ruled which of the German states. It must be settled. 
Near the mid-century, with the support of Philip of Hesse, betrayer of the 
Protestant cause, Charles nearly extinguished it by a decisive battle at 
Muhlberg. Not long after, the agreement by which the princes could choose 
either religion and rule the like-minded populations put an end to Charles's 
sympathetic stand (<20). He was revolted by the number of princes who 
became converts in each direction for the sake of grabbing land. 

* 
* * 

The people of Madrid — and many other places — knew Charles V as 
something other than the head of a great empire. He had the knack of the 
politician who can speak to everybody in a way easy for both parties. He 
learned Spanish, Italian, and French and adapted his Flemish to German forms 
so that he could seem homegrown throughout his realm. He was well built and 
dignified in bearing, but not handsome. The Habsburg jaw (which Titian por- 
trays without flattery) gave the face an equine look that failed to show intelli- 
gence. No matter. Charles's prowess in field sports and his courtly accomplish- 
ments (<92; 97 >) made him popular; his rectitude was felt and respected even 
where he was the persistent enemy: Luther's admiration — and, on one occa- 



Cross Section: Madrid <^> 97 

sion, defense — of his sovereign is indicative. At the beginning of his reign he 
had been faced by a rebellion in Spain that paralleled the Peasants' Revolt in 
Germany (<15) and similar outbreaks elsewhere. The Spanish Comuneros 
were put down like the rest, but Charles deplored the executions that took 
place in his absence. They haunted him for years, because he understood the 
reasons for the uprising. 

Charles had two love affairs, one early and long-lasting, with a Flemish 
noblewoman who bore him a daughter; the other with an Austrian bour- 
geoise who bore him a son. These children, Margaret (of Parma) and Don 
John (of Austria) proved abler and dearer to the father than his heir, the later 
Philip II. Philip was the conscientious, bigoted soul and born bureaucrat 
under whom the Great Armada was built and Spain began her decline. 

Though none could foresee it at the time, the imperial kind of state that 
Charles felt it his mission to make solid in Europe (he had scruples about rul- 
ing unknown lands overseas) was no longer workable. It was yet another 
medieval longing, inherited from Rome and Charlemagne. The new idea of 
the nation-state glimmered in royal minds, though still confused with the 
hope of empire, which seemed more practical — the pieces were there in plain 
sight, and the old rights of towns and provinces were compatible with it, not 
with nation. One clear hint of national reasoning was given in Charles's time 
when at mid-century a treaty gave France the bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and 
Verdun, "because French is the language spoken there." Such an argument 
would break up any empire. 

Charles's polyglot realm was impossible not only to defend but to gov- 
ern. He had a good network of agents and a fair system of communication, 
but administration and war were too expensive. It was money troubles that 
led to his abdication. To meet his costs he had to borrow from two to four 
million ducats a year. Taxation was unavoidably haphazard, the amount hav- 
ing to be haggled over, time and again, separately, with each town and district. 
After half a dozen years of deficit, unlike 20C presidents, Charles had a ner- 
vous collapse. Thirty- five years of toiling and immense self-control brought 
him down. He felt death coming; he abdicated. He recovered quickly once he 
had shuffled off the burden. He left Spain and New Spain to his son Philip 
and central Europe, with the imperial title, to his brother Ferdinand, from 
whom it descended to the Austrian Habsburgs exclusively. 

The news of his retirement caused consternation, and much weeping 
when he reviewed before a Brussels audience the main points of his steward- 
ship. His remarks (and a "political testament" written shortly before) consti- 
tute, with his letters, an important addition to the literature of practical politics. 

In his three years of retreat at the monastery of Yuste (St. Just, near 
Toledo), Charles did not lead a monastic existence. He relished the quiet life 
that he filled with his favorite recreations — gardening and field sports, enjoy- 



98 s^o From Dawn to Decadence 

ment of the fine arts — he was proficient in music — and good conversation. 
He had gathered about him a select company that shared his tastes. Looking 
back, one thinks of him as a somewhat less ascetic counterpart of another 
dutiful emperor and man of thought, Marcus Aurelius. 



To say that empire in Europe ended with Charles seems contradicted by 
the continued presence of Spain in America. And it may seem to make the 
Madrilefio unobservant that there has been no mention till now of that conti- 
nent's discovery. Columbus made his four voyages as the 1 5C ended and one 
supposes that the cultural consequences must have been felt soon after. It was 
not so. The delay in this narrative reflects the delay in fact. Although the sea- 
faring crowd in Europe were excited at once, the general public were slow to 
take in what happened when Columbus landed on a Caribbean island on 
October 12, 1492. For one thing, it was not till 1513, when Balboa (not Cortez 
as in Keats's sonnet) first beheld the Pacific Ocean, that anyone could know a 
continent lay between Europe and the Far East. And it was not till 1 522 — a full 

generation after Columbus — that Mag- 
'Jesus!" I said, "is there a New World?" ellan ' s circling the globe disclosed its 

OA n _ /1CT-.N size and the place of its land masses. 

—Rabelais, Pantagruel (1532) # r 

Until then America was India; Cuba or 
California was Japan. 

It is idle to discuss the landings of earlier discoverers than Columbus; 
there are a dozen plausible and implausible ones. None was the discovery of 
a new world by Europe, by the whole West. Explorers had been sailing down 
the African coast and westward to the Azores for many decades — ever since 
Prince Henry of Portugal (called the Navigator though he never left dry land) 
had set up a research center at Sagres in 1415. Much knowledge and many 
maps accumulated there till they inspired the great feats at the century's end. 
It had been known since the Greeks that the world was round, but its girth 
was greatly underestimated by Columbus — luckily. The error encouraged the 
obsession that sustained him through the incredible rebuffs and delays at the 
hands of the Portuguese and the French authorities. The Spanish queen 
Isabella is rightly credited with sponsoring him, but not till she had turned 
him down several times like all the others, while committees argued: he was a 
braggart, a bore, and a bit cracked. God would not have hidden land for so 
long if He had meant it to be found. 

Yet the prelates consulted were more favorable than the laymen (in one 
case two Jewish physicians), because Columbus was so obviously candid and 
pious. His speech and dignity impressed. Anyhow, he was not looking for the 
lost Atlantis; he wanted to reach the Far East, trade with the natives, convert 



Cross Section: Madrid q^> 99 

them, and — who knows? — perhaps find the legendary Christian kingdom of 
Prester John and encircle the infidels. Finally, the queen's private treasurer 
pointed out that this sailor's request amounted to less than the cost of enter- 
taining a royal visitor and he urged her to give the money. 

The man Columbo, Colombo, Columbus, Colomb was without question 
competent and experienced. He came of well-to-do Genoese stock, and had 
first gone to sea at age 1 0. He looked hardy. Once, having fallen overboard, 
he floated and swam six miles to shore. He was married to one of the leading 
Portuguese families, worked at mapmaking with the Sagres experts, and had 
even persuaded a Spanish Count— shipowner to subsidize his plan. But the 
queen insisted that if the attempt was made it must be a crown enterprise. 
Hence an ultimate delay of six years out of the twelve. 

The preparations for the voyage were level with the state of the art. The 
type of ship chosen, the caravel, was swift, easily maneuvered, and reliable. 
Oddly enough, no plan or sunken hull of the type was found until recendy. 
The crew was both professional and aristocratic. The "gromets," ship's boys 
paid about $4.60 a month, were recruited to say the Lord's Prayer and sing 
religious songs when turning the hourglass: "Five is past and Sixth followeth, 
More shall flow if God willeth." There were a surgeon and an Arabic transla- 
tor for bartering with the natives of China and Japan, some convicted felons, 
and a few expelled Jews — in all a complement just short of 100. [The book to 
read is Christopher Columbus, Mariner, by Samuel Eliot Morison.] 

The whole saga, including the sailors' distrust and their leader's deliber- 
ate deception; the success and the mistake at the heart of it; the glorification 
followed by the disgrace during and after the second voyage (the hero led 
back home in chains); the persistence and the final neglect and poverty — 
every feature of his career is part of a typical pattern. Not all, but many of the 
great achievements of western man have followed this tortuous course, visit- 
ing more or less harsh punishment on the doers. This "tradition" is not the 
result of perversity. It is not the clash of stupid men opposing an intelligent 
one: Columbus's interviewers were right to question his calculation of the dis- 
tance to India: he made it 2,400 miles short of the actual 10,600. And it is true 
that the promoters of the really new more often than not look and talk like 
cranks and mis-state or mistake their goal. Their behavior is often arrogant or 
seems so from their impatience with cautious minds. The upshot — humilia- 
tion and penury — is disproportionate to the offense, but it expresses the cul- 
ture's need to defend its rational ways, to ward off the genuine cranks, and to 
avoid moving too fast into the untried. There is no evidence that the present 
system of subsidizing innovations — government and foundation grants — 
works any better than that of the kings and queens of earlier times: the same 
committee is always sitting at the gate. 

The outcry in the United States denouncing Columbus during his 500th 



100 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

I am the voice of Christ saying to you that you anniversary year takes us back to 
are all in a state of mortal sin for your cruelty Madrid around 1 540;° for contrary to 
and oppression in your treatment of this common opinion, the concern about 
innocent people. Are these Indians not me exploitation of the natives dates 
human beings? Have they not a soul and the almost from the beginning of Spanish 
use of reason? colonization. Queen Isabella herself 

—The monk Antonio de Montesinos condemned the abuse and issued edicts 

( 1511 ) against it; so did Charles V. The 

strongest of the protesters, Bartolome 
de Las Casas, had continual access to the emperor and aroused the public by 
his vehement writings. In "New Spain" itself, the clergy and the religious 
orders, Dominican and Jesuit, were active opponents of the evils of forced 
labor and lawless brutality. By Charles's legislation these were crimes with 
definite penalties attached; enforcement was the difficulty: it depended on 
the character of the officials on the spot. Preaching the truth that these 
"Indians" were not red devils but fellow men loved by God even though they 
were not Christians could influence but few. The men and women who left 
the homeland for America were a mixed lot with mixed motives; on 
Columbus's second voyage were "ten convicted murderers and two Gypsy 
women." 

The conquistadors' impelling goals have been summarized as "Gold, 
Glory, and the Gospel." At any time, neither Gold nor Glory is a respecter 
of persons, and Gospel occasionally sins; together they do their worst when 
the scene is vast and sparsely populated, when communication is slow and 
policing haphazard. If we think back to the western frontier of the United 
States down to 1 890, we find not exactiy anarchy but free-wheeling crime and 
violence that took its toll of lives and goods, and sent not a few venturers 
scuttling back to the relatively civil order of the Midwest. 

The Spanish colonists committed atrocities from greed and racist con- 
tempt that nothing can palliate or excuse. But to blame Columbus is a piece of 
retrospective lynching; he was not the master criminal inspiring all the rest. It is 
moreover a mistake to think that because the native peoples were the sufferers, 
all of them were peaceable innocents. The Caribs whom Columbus first 
encountered had fought and displaced the Anawaks who occupied the islands. 
The Aztecs whom Cortez conquered had originally descended from the north 
and destroyed the previous civilization. To the north and east many of the 
tribes lived in perpetual warfare, the strong exploiting the weak, and several — 
notably the Iroquois — had slaves. In short, what happened on the newfound 
hemisphere in early modern times continued the practice of the old: in ancient 
Greece alien tribes marching in from the north; likewise in the making of the 
Roman Empire, in the peopling of the British Isles by Romans, Angles, Saxons, 
Jutes, Danes, and Normans; in France, Italy, and Spain by Franks, Normans, 



Cross Section: Madrid <^> 101 

Lombards, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and later by Arabs. Everywhere the story is 
one of invasion, killing, rape, and plunder and occupation of the land that 
belonged to the vanquished. Today, this fusion or dispersion of peoples and 
cultures by means of death and destruction is abhorred in principle but flour- 
ishing in fact. Africa, the Middle and Far East, and South Central Europe are 
still theaters of conquest and massacre. And Columbus is not the responsible 
party. 



Parallel to the migration of persons westward was the migration of food 
eastward. It was accompanied by the transfer both ways of plants and ani- 
mals. One of the aims of the Portuguese and Spanish in going west was to 
reach the source of spices, silks, and gems — the Far East — more quickly and 
easily than by the traditional caravans on land. The new route would also 
break the Venetian monopoly of trade in these goods. It is often said that this 
land route had been cut off when the Turks captured Constantinople in the 
mid-1 5C. An American scholar riddled that notion 80 years ago.° The Turks 
had more sense than to stop it when they could tax it. 

Apropos of food, it remains a mystery why in earlier times spices should 
have been so much in demand as to impel merchants and sailors across 
deserts and oceans. It is said that a note on an old map, close to the spot 
marked Calicut, inspired Vasco da Gama to be one of those. The note read: 
"This is where pepper is born." The usual explanation — that spices con- 
cealed the bad taste of spoiled meat and gave variety to dull foods too often 
served — seems unconvincing. Though we are told that dishes in 1 6C Madrid 
were few and unappetizing, pepper on everything would be tiresome too and 
the fancier spices inappropriate — cinnamon on cabbage? Besides, Europe 
had many herbs of its own and we do not hear about them. 

The cookbooks that might enlighten us did not yet exist; the "revolution 
in cuisine" often attributed to the 16C belongs in fact to the next (183>). But 
it is likely that the imports from America gave it a great push. The advent of 
potatoes, tomatoes, squash, beans (white, kidney, and lima), vanilla, avoca- 
does, pineapples, "wild rice," and maize (U.S. corn) began to enlarge agree- 
ably the 17C menu. The bird misnamed turkey (in French d'inde — from India 
and for a while in Britain Indian fowl) also made its appearance, these names 
being another indication of the long ignorance about America. 

The strange foods were not accepted at once in all places. France resisted 
potatoes as poisonous because they are of the nightshade family. Other veg- 
etables remained luxuries. The first novelties to be popular, though dissent 
lasted a while, were the drinks tea, coffee, and chocolate. All were addictive in 
a genteel way, but how was life possible without them? And they brought in 



102 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 



Don't talk of chocolate! 

Don't talk of tea! — 

Medicines made — ye gods' — as you see 

Are no medicines for me. 

I'd sooner take poison 
Than a single cup lay eyes on 
Of that bitter stuff ye 
Talk of called coffee 

— Francesco Redi (mid-1 7C) 



another insidious tyrant: sugar — 
needed in these bitter drinks, sugar in 
solid foods, sugar in everything. The 
sugar cane had been taken by Irish 
colonists to Montserrat in the West 
Indies; there it grew larger and more 
quickly and was carried to the other 
islands. The products, rum and sugar, 
were cheap and profitable. Sugar not 
only seduced the palate, undermining 
teeth and encouraging slavery, but as a modern scholar has shown, its trade 
corrupted politics/ 

Best (or worst) of all these sophistications was tobacco. It made its way 
first in pipes — the Indians' pipe of peace and meditation — and only gradually 
multiplied its forms of intake, each curiously dominant at a particular time: 
where are the 1 8C snuff-takers today? Tobacco was also the earliest lucrative 
export from South America, and from the first it aroused in Europe strong 
feelings of opposite kinds. It was extolled and denounced in poetry and prose. 

These cultural changes in Europe 
were matched by their like in the New 
World. The "Indies" had few domestic 
animals besides dogs and cats. Wild pigs 
and bison frisked about in the north, and 
in the south the llama and vicuna had 
been tamed. But cattle were unknown. 
The first horse arrived with Columbus. 
And as everybody (perhaps) remem- 
bers, it was Cortez's horses that fright- 
ened the Mexicans into believing the 
invaders a species of god. Pizarro had 
the same advantage against the Incas of 
Peru. 
Without the importation of many more animals and plants, the Spanish 
could not have established their authority and culture so quickly and exten- 
sively in both halves of the western continent. Cattie, swine, mules, sheep, 
goats, rabbits, and European dogs peopled the new landscapes, making them 
home to the colonists. Plants were more difficult to carry across the ocean 
and adapt to a climate that was often tropical. But wheat, the grape vine, the 
sugar cane, olives, lemons, oranges sweet and sour, bananas, and in hopes of 
making silk, the mulberry tree, successfully took root in America. Some few 
of these could have been found already there in wild species, but they were 
not at once usable. 



Tobacco, Nectar, or the Thespian spring. 
Are all but Luther's beer, to this I sing. 
Of this we will sup free, but moderately. 

— Ben Jonson, "Inviting a Friend 
to Supper" 

It is a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to 
the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to 
the lungs; and the black, stinking fumes 
thereof nearest resembling the horrible Sty- 
gian smoke of the pit that is bottomless. 

—James I of England (1604) 



Cross Section: Madrid <^ 103 

These domestic details make clear that the Spanish were not merely 
exploiters but true colonists, settlers. Theirs was the first European civiliza- 
tion in the newfound land. After them the continual interchange of goods 
and habits made old world and new more and more alike, mingling hemi- 
spheric specialties to the point where western culture means what is found on 
either or both sides of the Atlantic. 

* 
* * 

The great to-and-fro of courtiers and prelates, of colonial governors and 
literati at Charles's Spanish court kept supplying it with news and rumors of 
life in New Spain, of the Portuguese "factories" (trading posts) in India, 
Malaysia, and Japan, and of the nascent efforts of other countries to join in 
what has been called the Expansion of Europe. But what was fact or fiction 
in the common mind it would be difficult to sort out. The same holds true of 
the effects produced by the seemingly sounder means of information, books. 
From about the middle of the century the works in the vernacular that finally 
established the genre "travel book" began to be popular. [The essay to read is 
English Maritime Writing from Hakluyt to Cook, by Oliver Warner. ] The first 
samples were pretty well confined to the regions of their language, but the 
great Universal Cosmography by Sebastian Miinster, first published in 1544, 
turned after its reissue of 1550 into a best-seller translated into six languages 
and running into 36 editions before the end of the century. [For an amusing 
description of the work, read Dorothy Sayers' short story "The Adventure of 
Uncle Meleager's Will."] The Cosmography contained fact and fantasy in liberal 
amounts; the careful and comprehensive accounts came later and correct 
ideas filtered slowly. 

The most famous source, Richard Hakluyt's Divers Voyages of 1584, was 
enlarged into three folios in the next decade, as if it were for Shakespeare to 
read. But that voracious learner made small use of the work in his plays. For 
him and his audience in 1596, over a century after Columbus, it is still The 
Merchant of Venice, not of Cadiz or London or Rotterdam. A few years earlier, 
in The Comedy of Errors, the words "America, the Indies" form an exclamation, 
followed by a lush but fanciful definition: ". . . all o'er embellished with rubies, 
carbuncles, sapphires, declining that rich aspect to the hot breath of Spain, 
who sent whole armadoes to be ballast at her nose."° It is not till The Tempest, 
two decades farther on, that we find the famous reference to "the brave new 
world," coupled with the "still-vexed" (stormy) Bermudas and a scene mak- 
ing fun of Utopias (124>). 

From this haphazard spread of information a long and permanent con- 
fusion in names and places was to be expected. Columbus's error begot "the 
Indies" and "West Indies," with the surviving appellation Indian for the 



104 q^o From Dawn to Decadence 

inhabitants. (The general use of the anthropologists' Amerind is long over- 
due.) The Venetian printer of Vespucci's fourth report coined the unusual 
term new world as a tide for it; Columbus had called it "other world." As for 
"America," from Amerigo (Vespucci), it was the mapmaker Waldseemuller's 
mistake about who made the first landing. Vespucci a few years later adopted 
the printer's "New World," gave the first (questionable) news of cannibalism, 
and by the success of his work — 30 editions before the end of the century — 
made the use of any other name than America unlikely. 

It is surely the appropriate name. Columbus, though by far the greater 
navigator, the true hero and sole pioneer, never knew what he had found. 
Vespucci knew first and at firsthand that the Brazilian shoreline was that of a 
continent as yet unexplored. Let it be added that "American" as noun and 
adjective referring to the United States is a usage born of necessity, not a cul- 
pable confiscation. The citizens of Canada, Mexico, and other Latin- 
American countries would not give up "Canadian," "Mexican," "Peruvian," 
and the rest, even if the United States adopted some other designation. In the 
early 19C, when Columbus's name had gained currency owing to the first 
anniversary celebration in 1792, some wanted to glorify him and depose 
Vespucci. Washington Irving was one of the fervent admirers who argued for 
Columbus and for Columbia as the continental name. The debate was hot but 
conclusive. When a little later Signora America Vespucci, the explorer's direct 
descendant, came to petition Congress for a monetary award in recognition 
of her ancestor's gift of his name, she was politely turned down. 



The glorious empire, the pestiferous Turk and his North African pirates, 
the brash King of France cooped up right there in Madrid, the shameful Sack 
of Rome and the Ladies' Peace — these images afloat in the mind of Madrid 
residents in the second half of the 1 6C were surely coupled with pride in the 
success of Spanish arms. Two victories stood out in particular, the one on 
land against the heretical Protestant League, at Miihlberg in 1 543, the other 
on the sea at Lepanto in 1571; the former led by Emperor Charles, the latter 
by his beloved bastard son, Don John of Austria. 

The Spanish infantry was famous everywhere, its pre-eminence due to 
another innovation of the century: the foot soldier supplanting the horseman 
as the decisive force in battle. (Note the meaning of infant — small foot sol- 
dier — in infantry.) Cavalry and chivalry, cognate in sense and medieval in 
character, declined together. The new tacticians were the Swiss — of necessity, 
since their terrain is discouraging to the horse. They devised the discipline 
and the use of the new army, though the first form of "infantry," infantera, is 
Spanish. Soon the North German landsknecht rivaled the Swiss as mercenar- 



Cross Section: Madrid <^> 105 

ies. The new battle formation was the tight square of men wielding extraordi- 
narily long lances to break up the formerly decisive cavalry charge. [For a 
vivid impression of the lancer, look at Velazquez's painting of "The Surrender 
at Breda."] 

To this return of the ancient Greek phalanx, the 16C added firearms. 
Gunpowder had been known and used for 200 years, but it was not really 
effective until this second half of the great century. Now a couple of dozen 
field pieces could breach the walls of a castie, as happened at Metz in 1552, 
and the pistol enabled the horseman to kill more handily than with sword or 
lance. So armed, the light cavalry found a new use in the opening clash of bat- 
tie and as protectors of the infantry's flanks. Artillery compelled towns and 
provinces to rebuild their strongholds, enlisting for the purpose engineers 
who were often artists or mathematicians able to apply the latest findings of 
the science (243; 31 3>). Leonardo was their forerunner in this new profes- 
sional specialty. 

The emperor's victories naturally led to the Spanish officers' being 
regarded as "born soldiers" and invincible. This is a roving tide: The French 
inherited it a century later and the Germans in the next but one after. "Born" 
is a figure of speech. Changing conditions — and ambitions — stimulate a 
capacity common to all, as shown in our century by the warlike Israelis, once 
thought "born merchants," with the merchant's timidity and bent for com- 
promise. The conditions and ambitions that energized the 1 6C Spanish went 
back a long time: the people of the center and north of the peninsula were at 
war for 800 years; sometimes among themselves, more often against their 
enemies to the south: the Moors, Islamic in religion and North African or 
Arabian in origin (not black as mistakenly in Othello). 

A final "Reconquista" against the 
highly civilized Moorish kingdom of Gentle river, gentle river 
Granada took place in the same year as Lo > th Y streams are stained with gore 
Columbus's landing far to the west. Many a brave and noble captain 
The Spaniard's fighting spirit was thus Floats * on Z th * wfflowed shore ' 
rooted in a religious hatred that All beside thy limpid waters 
included the Jews, who were numer- All beside thy sands so bright 
ous, tolerated, and influential among Moorish chiefs and Christian warriors 
the Arabs. The vanquished of either Joined in fierce and mortal fight 
faith could become converts — Moriscos Spanish ballad 

or Christians — but they kept being 

persecuted on suspicion of having only feigned conversion; they were ulti- 
mately expelled or executed after "inquisition." Meanwhile, there had been a 
good deal of intermarriage and some of the highest and proudest of Spanish 
families perforce numbered Moorish or Jewish ancestors. 

A long tradition develops a cultural type that looks genetically produced: 



106 s^s From Dawn to Decadence 

the hidalgo, which is said to mean "son of something"; the Spanish peasant, 
not a fighter, is presumably son of nothing. Hidalgos embody the warlike 
spirit, which in private life bristles at a hint and ends in dueling. Among them 
some were grandees, distinguished not by any emoluments but solely by the 
privilege of keeping one's hat on in the presence of royalty. It is an uncom- 
mon trait to be content with style and no substance. The hidalgo as grandee 
found compensation in being haughty, austere, and reconciled to being 
poor — sometimes visibly underfed. He was poor because inflation due to the 
flow of gold and silver from New Spain cut down the value of his rents 
(107>), or because his estate had been lost through indifferent management 
or the mischance of local war. 

Part of the ethos of this class was to despise work and practicality, one 
could only choose between two careers: soldier or priest, the red and the 
black or their variants — explorer or civil servant, the one being a kind of sol- 
dier, the other a kind of "cleric", that is, able to read and write. This mighty 
aloofness from worldly goals offers the spectacle, unique in the west, of a 
society at least partly "anti-materialistic." Again like old Russia ("Muscovy" in 
the 16C), it lacked a bustling middle class and was thus bound to resist new 
ideas, since these often travel as by-products of trade and are put forward as 
advantageous. Denouncers of "bourgeois values" should meditate on Spain 
and its long isolation from mainstream European developments. Not until 
the turn of the 1 9C, when the Spanish- American War put an end to the pride 
of empire, did Spain begin to prosper again and seek modernity. [The book 
to read is Invertebrate Spain by Jose Ortega y Gasset] 

In 1 6C Spain the common people did, of course, work for their living, 
and some magnates could be found who drew wealth from the country's 
main industry: raising sheep to export wool. The "Mesta" was a huge guild of 
sheep-owners, large and small, who took part in the semi-annual trek from 
the central plateau, where the animals summered, to the less wintry south 400 
miles away, and back again. The wool, made into cloth in Flanders, was then 
re-imported. However large, this commerce together with the slender output 
of other goods did not keep up with the amount of precious metals being 
coined out of the intake from America. The inevitable result was inflation. 

What created the silver flood was the discovery made at Potosi in 1545. 
While chasing a goat, some natives of Upper Peru, now Bolivia, ran into a 
mountain of silver ore. It proved richer than the fabled El Dorado, the golden 
king, who had been sought in vain that he might be robbed at leisure. Potosi 
became an instant mining town, a boom city of over 1 50,000. News of the 
miraculous process just discovered in Germany, which used mercury to 
extract the silver, brought to Potosi an international population of prospec- 
tors, gamblers, thieves, prostitutes, and slave-drivers, unmatched until the 
mining frenzy of the mid-19C in the far- west United States. Only, at Potosi 



Cross Section: Madrid <^> 107 

the natives were maimed and killed by forced labor. Potosi today is a museum 
town protected by Unesco. Silver is still mined on a modest scale, but raising 
coca is a better source of livelihood. 

In Madrid, the safe return of the Silver Fleet was a cause for regular 
rejoicing. For although the English pirates boasted of their frequent captures, 
and ventured close enough to the coast to "singe the King of Spain's beard," 
the great convoy failed to arrive only twice during the half century. The 
crown's annual revenue from this source — some four million pounds — 
amounted to 16 times that of Queen Elizabeth. The real disaster was the 
spread of inflation to the rest of Europe. The long spell of high prices impov- 
erished all those on fixed incomes, not all the landlords, but all workers and 
artisans. 

Their protracted plight stimulated economic thought. Some argued that 
an excess of exports, others that declining population, or luxury, or debased 
coinage was the cause of the depression. Two Spaniards, Martin de Novarro 
and the friar Tomas de Mercado, had glimpses of the truth. At last a French 
jurist who will be met again (245 >), Jean Bodin, made unmistakable the rela- 
tion between the amount of goods and that of money in circulation. He thus 
laid the ground for the "quantity theory of money" which, refined over the 
years, still rules central banks in their fight against inflation by the exquisite 
tuning of interest rates. Yet another effect of the sudden increase in precious 
metals was the final replacement of barter by money, which in turn led 
nations in the 17C to adopt the principle of Mercantilism; it is the merchant's 
outlook extended to the whole nation (292 >). Tariffs and export bounties are 
its modern descendants, still debated and debatable. 

* 
* * 

Out of the battle over souls and bodies that Las Casas and others waged 
in Madrid and New Spain to protect the mistreated natives came the revival 
of an ancient idea. The Roman Tacitus, it will be remembered, had portrayed 
the Germanic tribes of the first century in such a way as to shame the citizens 
of Rome (<9). The Germans led the simple life, in which candor, truthful- 
ness, courage, and loyalty are as normal as falsehood, deceit, treachery, and a 
cowardly fear of death are in civilization. This contrast was exemplified for 
the 16C by a number of the American tribes — at least as they seemed to 
observers 3,000 miles away. Thus arose the figure of the Noble Savage, which 
has ever since reinvigorated the successive PRIMITIVISMS. 

Note that it dates back virtually to Columbus, who gives a hint of the 
natives' simple life in his earliest report. 

Further facts of the sort inspired all the Utopias beginning with Thomas 
More's in the first decade of the 16C (117>). These things being so, one 



108 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

I sent two of our men. They traveled for three should try to cut the Noble Savage 
days and found people and houses without loose from the name of Rousseau, who 
number, but they were small and without flourished 200 years later and who did 
government; therefore they returned. not cherish this imaginary figure any- 

— Christopher Columbus, First letter way (384>). 

from the New World (March 14, 1493) The fine barbarians in Tacitus were 

used as models in Luther's Germany to 
stimulate resentment against the foreign authority of Rome, and these two 
attitudes, favoring the Indian and the German, combined to change the west- 
ern peoples' notion of their origins. For a thousand years they had been the 
sons and daughters of the ancient Romans. Now the idea of different "races" 
replaced that of a single, common lineage. The bearing of this shift is clear: it 
parallels the end of empire and the rise of nations. Race unites and separates: 
We and They. Thus the English in the 1 6C began to nurse the fetish of Anglo- 
Saxonism, which unites them with the Germanic and separates them from 
the Roman past. [The brief book to read is Racial Myth in English History by 
Hugh A. MacDougal.] We shall see how a similar notion influenced politics in 
France up to and beyond the 1789 Revolution (247; 295>).° 

From the changed oudook a new group of words came into prominence: 
not only German, Saxon, and Angle, but also Jute and Dane, Gaul, Celt, and 
Frank, Norman, Lombard, and Goth (Ostro = eastern and Visi = western). 
The conviction moreover grew that the character of a people is inborn and 
unchangeable. If their traits appear odd or hateful, the theory of race justifies 
perpetual enmity. We thus arrive at some of the familiar prejudices and hos- 
tilities of our time. "Race" added the secular idea of inborn difference to the 
theological one of infidel and Christian. 

In the popular mind Spain and Inquisition are so closely tied together as 
to suggest that the search for heretics and their despatch to a better world 
existed nowhere else. That is contrary to fact. It is true that, as we saw, the 
Spanish inquisitors had special groups to suspect — the converted Moors and 
Jews who might be shamming their change of faith, as some were. It is also 
true that the ill-famed auto-da-fe — action of faith in Portuguese — at which 
the condemned suffered, took on the form of a public drama, a popular 
entertainment. But inquisition with a small / was active throughout Europe. 
In Protestant Scotland and Geneva, it was called the Discipline and it too 
relied on the secular arm to punish offenders such as Servetus (<30— 1). 
England had its burnings, in good number, of Protestants and Catholics by 
turns during three reigns, all legalized by one statute: De haeretico comburerendo 
"On the Duty to Burn the Heretic." 

In France it was the University of Paris, the Sorbonne, that persecuted; 
the Humanist printer Etienne Dolet was one victim of its inquisition. As for 
Italy, where the Inquisition was created as a department of the church gov- 



Cross Section: Madrid <^> 109 

ernment, the vigor of its pursuit varied with the city. Stern but inefficient in 
Rome, it was tempered in Venice, where it was content with remonstrance; 
the governors felt no wish to bother foreign traders, often from Protestant 
countries; their continued presence mattered to the commercial republic. 

Inquisition as such, that is, apart from methods and severity of results, 
has remained a live institution. The many dictatorships of the 20C have relied 
on it and in free countries it thrives ad hoc — hunting down German sympa- 
thizers during the First World War, interning Japanese- Americans during the 
second, and pursuing Communist fellow-travelers during the Cold War. In 
the United States at the present time the workings of "political correctness" 
in universities and the speech police that punishes persons and corporations 
for words on certain topics quaindy called "sensitive" are manifestations of 
the permanent spirit of inquisition. 



How many in Madrid thought of other things than religion, empire, and 
high prices is beyond conjecture; but as always there must have been a good 
few who cared for literature and the arts. This we know, because the second 
half of the century saw the beginning of what the Spanish have called their 
Golden Age of culture. Unfortunately, the names of its great figures other than 
painters have not spread beyond the ranks of scholar-specialists. The main 
cause lies in Spain's isolation when its imperial glory faded. 

But neglect of this kind has not been limited to works produced in Spain. 
It is a mistake to believe that "anything really good" will cross frontiers and 
find its due place. Such countries as Portugal, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, 
Hungary, Poland, and other parts of Slavic Europe cherish classics that are 
still confined to home ground. The prime 16C example is the poem about 
Europe's expansion westward, the epic Lusiads by the Portuguese Camoens, 
himself an explorer and Humanist (153>). Why is fame so capricious a god- 
dess? In any country its favor depends on attention by one group of critics 
rather than another, or again by the fanatical devotion that goes to the right 
man at the right time. Some element in the work must chime in with some 
concern of the moment. 

And for literary works the right translator must be there. The loss of 
Latin made the 16C a great age of vernacular translations, but what is or is not 
translated depends on casual preferences. Some masterpieces fail to be 
exported and are thus not read in the five leading languages. And then, like 
certain wines, there are books that do not travel well. In effect, Goethe's con- 
ception of "world literature," like the label Great Books or "the canon " is an 
ideal only part-fulfilled. When our century keeps urging a global view that 
would enlarge the list of classics by adding the contributions of the Far East 



110 s^> From Dawn to Decadence 

and the Third World, it is worth remembering that Europe itself has not yet 
discovered all that it has produced. 

Spain's cultural achievements in the 16C consist of the poetry of 
Garcilaso, Boscan, and Montemayor; the political theory of Vives and 
Vitoria; and the early poetic dramas of Lope de Vega. Theater continued to 
flourish in the ensuing age, influencing writers in France and England; and in 
that same later time painting and music reached new heights (334>). These 
last two arts cross frontiers more easily than literature and obtain recognition 
accordingly. 

Garcilaso, who died at 36 fighting in Provence, has been called the great- 
est poet of his age.° Whether the age cited here embraces all Europe or is lim- 
ited to Spain, the encomium suffices to mark pre-eminence. With his friend 
Boscan he published a collection of the popular Spanish ballads, a rich poetic 
heritage that has inspired the poets of Spain down to Lorca in our time. 
Simplicity and pathos mixed with angry resentment are the notes struck, as 
they are also in that other Spanish genre, the flamenco, which is song and 
dance expressing popular feeling. 

Juan Luis Vives was a disciple of Erasmus, who among other works 
wrote a treatise promoting the education of women. He had been tutor to 
Henry VIII's daughter Mary before that unhappy woman earned for her per- 
secutions the tide of Bloody. Vives' other writings dealt with the good life, 
international peace, and the relief of the poor. Of special interest today is his 
attack on the philosophers at the University of Paris. They spent too much 
time (according to Vives) on analyzing the meaning of meaning and the pro- 
cess of inference, and some were trying to quantify phenomena. What Vives 
objected to was not these topics as such, but the exclusive attention paid to 
them. This narrowness, apparendy due to the influence of a Scot named John 
Major, left untouched the great philosophical questions that puzzle the 
thoughtful in every age. One finds in Vives more than a touch of the future 
Baconian spirit of science. He urged more observation of nature and more 
self-confidence; and he disputed the philosophers' cliche of the time that said 
the present generation were "dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants." 

Vives' exact contemporary, Francisco de Vitoria, was the long- 
unrecognized pioneer in the study of international law. A Dominican from 
the Basque country, he studied in Paris, edited Thomas Aquinas, and ended 
his career holding the most coveted chair at the newly reformed University of 
Salamanca. (The term reformed has here the sense of adopting the Humanist 
oudook and methods.) In that setting Vitoria helped Charles V to frame laws 
for the colonies and formed a host of disciples. It is they who after Vitoria's 
death published their lecture notes about government in general and war and 
peace in particular. On this last topic his ideas are those also found in the 
work of Hugo Grotius 75 years later. It is not a case of plagiarism, but if pri- 



Cross Section: Madrid «^> 111 

ority and fullness of treatment establish the title of founder, it belongs to 
Vives. The Dutch Grotius Association acknowledged the fact in 1 926 by pre- 
senting a gold medal in honor of Vitoria to the University of Salamanca. 

International law sounds like a contradiction in terms: who is to enforce 
law on powers that boast of their independence and act as they please? The 
United Nations agree on some principles — in principle — but find it hard to 
live up to them. Vitoria as a proponent of Natural Law asserts that society is 
not an agreement or convention, but a set of necessary relations which, under 
God, protect the rights of all individuals equally. His application of that doc- 
trine is universally accepted — again, in principle: international society has the 
same structure of rights and duties as the national — the right of states to exist 
as independent equals, unless unable to govern themselves. The duty of 
equals is to maintain free communication and trade. Interfering with these is 
just cause for war, as is also intervention to save a people from a tyrant or give 
help to one wantonly attacked by a stronger neighbor. But war is always a last 
resort; and when waged, its ends must not outweigh the good aimed at. 
Defensive war is always justified, and all means to victory are allowable. The 
victor should then act with Christian moderation. Little progress in enforcing 
these "laws" has been made since Vitoria (and Grotius), although many west- 
ern thinkers have proposed plans, and a number of courts, leagues, and tri- 
bunals have been established (672; 758>). [The book to read is Peace Gamesby 
Theodore Caplow] 

* 
* * 

It was another Spanish writer of the period who gave the first sketch of a 
new genre: the novel. He was not Cervantes, as some critics assert, but the 
anonymous author of La Vida de La^arillo de Tormes. Why Cervantes's master- 
piece is not a novel will appear in a moment. And in any case Don Quixote 
belongs to a later generation than La^arillo. His is the story of a friendless waif 
who becomes the servant successively of half a dozen common social 
types — friar, priest, squire, a seller of indulgences, and so on. At each move, 
the foibles of the master and the defects of society emerge from the incidents, 
mostly painful to Lazarillo, yet spurs to his growth in cunning and self-help. 
He ends up as a town crier. What makes the work, though short, a true novel 
is this double subject: character and social scene, both treated matter-of- 
factly and by inference critically. [The translation to read is that by W. S. 
Merwin.] Don Quixote does indeed contain elements of what is the distinctive 
subject matter of the novel, but it merges them with allegory and philosophy. 
It is not bound by the plausible, whereas the novel pretends to be genuine his- 
tory, full of real people and places (1 53; 352>). 

Lazarillo inaugurates at the same time a subgenre, the picaresque, so 



112 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

called from thepkaro (root of the later Figaro), the youth without prospects 
who makes his way by his wits, and as he goes sheds light on human relations 
as they are, not as convention supposes them to be. In later centuries the 
picaresque becomes the "novel of education" {Bildungsroman), in which an 
able but naive and not necessarily poor young man learns about the world 
through trial and error — Tom Jones or Pierre in Tolstoy's War and Peace. 

Another kind of 1 6C story — fact plus fantasy — reached a wider public 
than this first novel, and it caused a shiver of fear or a glow of righteousness 
wherever it was heard. It told of a German named Dr. Faust, half sage, half 
charlatan, who came to a violent death precisely in 1 540 — and deservedly so: 
he had sold his soul to the Devil, a creditor who is strict in his accounts. Why 
was the bargain made? For three things, the first of which every 16C creature 
could readily understand: to eat his fill. It was not only in Spain that poverty 
prevailed, although on more favored soils it could alternate with plenty. But 
everywhere famine recurred at frequent intervals; so hauntingly, in fact, that a 
modern scholar has put forward the idea that in the 1 6C most people lived in 
a state of perpetual hunger that gave them hallucinations. 

Faust wanted more than food: enough money to buy good clothes and 
the power "to fly among the stars"; the doctor evidendy had aspirations 
beyond physical well-being. It is noteworthy that in the original story there is 
no hint of making love to a beautiful woman — Gretchen or Helen of Troy; 
these variants came after the story got into print at the end of the century. As 
everybody knows, the Faustian bargain has had a long and rich career. It is not 
solely an emblem of Humanist pride, it is a great western myth. To "fly 
among the stars" stands for the restless discontent with mere humanness and 
for any aspiration so lofty that to fulfill it Man is willing to barter his most 
precious possession. Marlowe's play at the end of the 16C is but the first 
philosophic embroidering of the myth; it has been worked and reworked in 
poetry, drama, music, paint, and the dance. In Fielding's England it appeared 
as a puppet show competing with his own satirical comedies, and it was in this 
same attenuated form that it first aroused Goethe's youthful imagination 
(479>). 



The observer scanning the scene beyond the borders of Spain found it full 
of novelties other than this edifying tale from Germany. A few deserve a quick 
glance now as affording contrast with Spain's resistance to the new. Next door, 
over the Pyrenees, Francis I seemed not too engrossed in war and court frivoli- 
ties to indulge his genuine taste for art and thought. He imported Italian artists 
with a free hand, among them Benvenuto Cellini, Primaticcio, and Leonardo, 
the last-named died at his royal patron's favorite residence, Fontainebleau. 



Cross Section: Madrid <&> 113 

Francis renovated the Louvre, and built grand chateaux, including the magnif- 
icent Chambord on the Loire. An "advanced" mind in the Humanist manner, 
he supported scholars such as Guillaume Bude and made the wisely liberal 
Lefevre d'Etaples his chancellor. To offset the intolerance of the Sorbonne he 
founded the College de France, which has remained a forum for the presenta- 
tion of unofficial thought. 

Like his sister Marguerite, Francis wanted to tolerate the Protestants, but 
the sect were not content with being let alone. Their attacks were so fierce 
and so crude — as on the Day of the Posters, when Paris was placarded with 
gross insults against church and pope — that their provocation could not be 
overlooked. (Calvin naively thought that it would be.) Severe punishments 
followed and toleration lost its supporters. 

In administration too Francis was a modernizer. Besides tightening his 
control over his agents in the provinces — one more step toward the mon- 
archs' revolution, he ordered the law courts to render their decisions no 
longer in Latin but in the vernacular. Again, aware of the increased number 
and mobility of the population, he decreed that every person take or be given 
a surname. About the same time Henry VIII did likewise for his English sub- 
jects. This expansion of the self by a double name has interesting social impli- 
cations. It raises the common man nearer the noble lord, fully tagged and dis- 
tinguished by a coat of arms. Today the tendency is to revert to the tribal 
simplicity of Ben, son of Thomas; strangers now call each other Susan and 
John ten seconds after meeting, and public figures are ashamed of their full 
double names. To be popular, heads of state and other politicians must be 
Jimmy and Betsy and Bill. 

In the 16C the surname was a consequence of cutting loose from one's 
native soil. Many late medieval and Renaissance poets and artists were and are 
still known by their first names: Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo; Dante is 
even a nickname, the short form of Durante. When confusion with another 
had to be avoided, the place name supplied it: Raphael da Urbino, Leonardo 
da Vinci. The peasant or artisan, the monk or midwife were content with a 
baptismal name as long as they kept to their usual narrow orbit. But with 
travel (and exile) more frequent, with the needs of stricter tax collecting and 
religious conformity, rulers at every level wanted to register their subjects 
unmistakably. In Spain no edict was needed. The long conflict (and intermar- 
riage) with the Moors and Jews had made descent a matter of uncommon 
pride and at times a claim to privilege. From this came the practice of double 
and sometimes multiple surnames, showing father, mother, title, and place of 
origin — Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra — and the longer the better: Maria 
Teresa Velez del Hoyo y Sotomayor. 

In other countries, after the call for verbal ID, the question was, where to 
look for a good tag. Four main kinds were hit upon: the nickname given by the 



114 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

— What was your father's name? Grig? That's neighbors — Bright, Stout; the dwelling 
Gregory — oh no, we've got a Gregory place: Hill, Woods; the trade or office: 
already. We'll call you Samuel Grigson. Smith, Marshall; and paternity: John(son) 

—What do you do? Thank you, then: William or MacShane, which also means John's 
Chapman son. That this last leads to the contradic- 

— The parish official under Henry VIII, tion of Mary }ohnson only shows how 

carrying out the royal demand for words can defy their derivation. [The 

surnames book to read is: Is Thy Name Wart? by 

James Pennethorne Hughes.] 
It is not stretching things too far to see in this demand for clear naming 
an early instance of a trend in western culture that has itself no name: it might 
be called "the sharpening of identification." The feudal lord, probably illiter- 
ate, used visual symbols, his heraldic shield, to make himself known. The 
modern commoner, who can spell, has been using two names and a middle 
initial; exact designation goes with heightened INDIVIDUALISM. But with vast 
populations and multiplied roles and wants, names are proving insufficient, 
especially with literacy in decline. To remain distinct within the mass we must 
be branded with a series of numbers and must recite them to be known and 
served and allowed to pursue one's life. 

The identifying habit applies to things as well. Art, techne, science, and 
industry have gradually labeled and numbered every object from star to lawn 
mower and canvases in a series of paintings. The 1 6C, rich in discoveries and 
inventions, was already busy at the game. For example, at the University of 
Padua, long dedicated to medicine, the two anatomists Eustachio and 
Fallopio described and gave their names to a pair of important tubes of the 
human body. Their work owed much to the pioneering effort of Vesalius, 
who had struggled against church authorities and popular prejudice to make 
dissection a recognized part of medical training (199>). In the next century, 
Rembrandt could paint the solemn "Anatomy Lesson" without shocking any 
but bigots. Meanwhile in physics, astronomy, botany, and practical arts such 
as metallurgy, workers were contributing new words that are still part of the 
present terminology and nomenclature. 

Like physicians at the present time, their 16C predecessors were suddenly 
faced with a new and appalling plague. The familiar one (bubonic), which 
decimated towns every few years, was bad enough, being untreatable. The 
new was first called the French evil by the Italians and the Italian evil by the 
French, both logical names since it was first noted during a late-15C invasion 
of Italy by the French. The soldiers were the first sufferers and carried it 
abroad. Its full character and horror were first celebrated — if that is the right 
word — by the poet-physician Fracastoro. His epic in three cantos, full of 
striking images and elegant Latin versifying, he named after the hero, Syphilus 
(= swine lover). His name did not replace the insulting national nicknames; 



Cross Section: Madrid <^> 115 

the poet himself used the subtitle de morbogallico ("about the French disease"). 
Girolamo Fracastoro was a gifted man, or rather teenager, since he began 
teaching at Padua in his 1 8th year. He practiced medicine besides, came to be 
First Physician to Pope Paul III, and was later sent as medical adviser to the 
bishops in council at Trent. Among his writings are works of philosophy and 
cosmography and a treatise on the cure for rabies. 

Science may lessen superstition but does not abolish it. Beyond the reach 
of the Padua scientists, a work called Centuries and Presages, by a Frenchman 
who called himself Nostradamus, was a perennial bestseller. It is a book of 
prophecies, still in print in several languages. In a recent biography of the 
author that quotes many of the forecasts and applies them to past and present 
events, hardly a doubt is voiced about their validity. Nostradamus wrote his 
pseudo poetic quatrains in a mixture of French, Italian, Latin, and Greek and 
by his own admission used "cloudy, twisted sentences" so as "not to shock 
people" by the horrors in store for them. The interpreting, still lively among 
his devotees, shows how the lines can be made to fit events time after time. 
The urge to know the future and the love of mystery are thus jointly satisfied. 

Nostradamus was no mere prophet; 
he was also a physician, an almanac- The unhappy marriage will be celebrated 
maker, a magician and occultist scholar, Amid great rejoicing, but will remain 
a psychic, and a beautician: his first unhappy. 

book, published at mid-century, was a Mary and her mother-in-law will detest 
Treatise on Make- Up, which for good each another 

measure includes recipes for love Phybe once dead, the in-law shall be more 
potions and jam. The compounding of piteous. 

makeup and skin creams was as serious a —Nostradamus, supposedly on the fate 
business in the Renaissance as it is today. OF M™ Q UEEN OF ScoTS < 1555 ) 

For strange as it may seem, humanism, 

for all its love of the natural, did nothing to keep the human face from being 
heavily painted. Some men and all self-respecting women other than the lowly 
or rural applied thick coats of color and varnish to their features. Elizabeth of 
England and her ladies in waiting (we are told) put on a mixture of mashed 
apples (whence the word pomade), rose water, and hog's fat. But as the queen 
wanted her face to be perfectly white, it would seem that chalk was used as the 
overriding ingredient of the compost. She could test its effect with the aid of a 
new device, the mirror as we know it, made of clear glass with a backing. She 
completed her improvement on nature by dying her hair red (later wearing a wig 
to the same effect), and plucking her eyebrows out of existence: nobody could 
catch her looking surprised — it was her permanent expression, and no doubt an 
asset to any ruler and especially to one trying to be absolute. 



The Eutopians 



The TITLE OF THIS CHAPTER will cause the open-eyed reader to think: "a 
misprint," or worse: "a misspelling." It is neither. The slight shock is intended 
to fix in the memory a point of interpretation that has a cultural bearing and 
is moreover a piece of literary criticism. 

The first user of the word Utopia was Sir Thomas More, in the well-known 
book that he wrote and published just a year before Luther's 95 Theses. He 
coined the name from the Greek roots meaning "no place," and the term has 
since meant, in all languages, a work describing an ideal state. The adjective 
Utopian has acquired the further meaning of "unworkable"; but that implication 
has not kept writers since More from designing happy societies (593 >). Writing 
Utopias is a western tradition, and it is found in other genres than explicit 
accounts of imaginary countries. All extended discussions of social justice, 
from Plato to Marx and down to Rawls's treatises of our own day° are of simi- 
lar bearing. Why not call them Eutopian, the Greek prefix altered to mean the 
good place? "Eutopias for Euphoria" 

might be the motto of all these writers, Literature is my Utopia. 
including some novelists, as we shall see — Helen Keller (1 908) 
(124>). 

In the Renaissance, the three overt and famous Eutopias are those by 
Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella {The City of the Sun), and Francis Bacon 
{The New Atlantis). A gap of about a hundred years separates the pioneer from 
the other pair, of whom Campanella needs a word of identification. He was a 
poet whose sonnets were good enough to be translated by John Addington 
Symonds and published by him together with those of Michelangelo. 
Campanella was also one of the new scientists. He wrote a defense of Galileo 
and a treatise on physiology and psychology combined. This work has left a 
trace in American literature: Poe quotes him in "The Purloined Letter," 
though not from having read him: the reference is lifted from Burke's Essay 
on the Sublime and Beautiful (417>), where presumably it came direct from the 
source. 



118 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

As theater-goers know from Robert Bolt's play, A Man for All Seasons, 
More was Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VIII. It was during a 
diplomatic mission in Antwerp that remembering the account of Amerigo 
Vespucci's Fourth Voyage, and full of ideas about present discontents, More 
began writing in Latin what is now Part II of the work that he called The Truly 
Golden Book About the Best Condition of a Commonwealth and About the New Island 
of Utopia. More showed his work in progress to friends, and they, familiar like 
More with Plato's Republic, were so enthusiastic about the modern parallel 
that nine of them, with Erasmus most prominent, contributed letters or 
poems for inclusion at some convenient point in the story. 

Utopia is thus in a very full sense a Renaissance book. Four editions 
quickly appeared in different cities. But Part I, which introduces the explorer- 
narrator and his new island, was so severe a description of social and eco- 
nomic evils in England that it could not be published there until fifteen years 
after the author's death, forty after it was written. It is now an English classic 
in Ralph Robinson's engaging translation. 

More's thesis is simple and straightforward: everywhere "a certain con- 
spiracy of the rich" works against the poor and makes it absurd to call the 
state a commonwealth. (We have heard this somewhere more recendy.) It fol- 
lows from the indictment that a good society must rest on holding goods in 
common. Communism is also the basis of Campanella's City of the Sun, which 
lies below the equator in Africa. Bacon, intent upon making his "Bensalem 
Island" a vast research institute, says nothing about property, but from the 
general peace and quiet of "that happy land," one infers that it is free of 
poverty and class struggle. 

By inference all Utopias tell us about what is deemed good in the present 
state. The three 16C Eutopias are intensely religious communities, governed 
ethically by the Christian revelation, either obtained in miraculous fashion or 
paralleled by local inspiration. Like More, Campanella is broad-minded about 
other religions; their prophets seem to preach much the same creed, and it is 
the Christian Aposties whose example justifies communism in Campanella as 
in More. At the same time, Campanella does not believe that the world was 
created from nothing or that it is eternal: the scientist peeps out in this way 
from time to time. 

Does communism in goods mean wives in common too, as in Plato? 
Campanella brings up the controversy of the early church between St. 
Clement, who answered Yes, and Tertullian, who said: "all in common, 
except wives." Being in favor of eugenic breeding, Campanella reports that 
the Citizens of the Sun side with St. Clement (like the first Anabaptists), but 
he hedges by adding that they misunderstood the argument. 

More is for monogamy, but like Campanella and Bacon, he treats mar- 
riage as an economic concern of the state. Seeing in England the devastating 



The Eutopians <^> 119 

effects of the enclosure of farming land for the raising of sheep, which made 
landowners rich and tenant farmers homeless, More comes to wonder 
whether there is such a thing as overpopulation. In a time of high mortality, 
large families were a blessing — youthful hands help with the work and when 
adult, support their old parents. In Utopia the average household numbers 
twenty, which is low, given the presence of servants, apprentices, and three 
generations of kindred. It makes the total population of the 54 cities six and 
a half million, about a million more than England's in the 16C. Since trade — 
the wool trade — seems unavoidable, More's solution for justice to all classes 
is state regulation of all business. 

As for the individual aspect of marriage, an institution that all three 
authors regard as causing painful restraint, More wants to make it more 
attractive by having the intending bride and groom see each other naked, very 
gravely, in separate sessions presided over by an older relative. Bacon, a cen- 
tury later, had read Utopia and calls this custom cruel when one or the other 
party refuses the match "after so intimate an encounter." Since its only pur- 
pose is to detect disease or malformation, Bacon suggests that a friend of 
each party view the other swimming naked in a pool. Campanella cannot 
leave an entirely free choice to those who will ensure the continuance of the 
race in marriage. They must be fit. But he foresees difficulties: suppose a 
young pair fall in love: well, they can meet and talk freely, but not go any far- 
ther. And what about the greater attraction of beautiful women? There aren't 
enough to satisfy the demand. High-minded deception must be practiced to 
prevent disappointment and jealousy. Besides, nobody in the City of the Sun 
is ill-favored. Such are the tangles that beset the creators of new institutions. 
As for contentment in marriage, the parties must take a chance. Divorce is a 
last resort. It is granted after a long 

investigation by a magistrate, adultery There is not under heaven so chaste a nation 
being a valid cause, to which More as this. It is the virgin of the world. There are 
compassionately adds radical incom- no stews, no dissolute houses, no courtesans, 

1 i- nor anything of that kind. Nay, they wonder, 

„ ., r , . „ , with detestation, at you in Europe who per- 

Details of this sort, as well as the . , , . / , , „ , 

nut such things. And therefore there are 
reasons given for them, are composite r , . _ . , 

& ' r found among you infinite men that marry 

indications. They tell us something not , but choose rame r a Ubertme and impure 

about the cultural norms of the time single Me man to be yoked ^ marriage; ^ d 

and they also express the critic's own many that do marry, marry late, and what is 

quirks. To make existence better, marriage to them but a bargain, wherein is 

which for these three Humanists sought alliance or portion or reputation, with 

means not more godly, but happier, some desire (almost indifferent) of issue and 

each drives at a main goal. More wants not me faithful nuptial union of man and wife 

justice through democratic equality; that was first instituted. 

Bacon wants progress through scien- —Bacon, The New Atlantis {c. 1624) 



120 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

tific research; Campanella wants permanent peace, health, and plenty through 
rational thought, brotherly love, and eugenics. All agree on a principle that the 
West adopted late: everybody must work. When that happens, Campanella 
estimates that four hours a day will be enough to create prosperity for all, 
leaving ample leisure for (he suggests) attending lectures. 

He alone holds enlarged views about women. They are fit to do every- 
thing that men do. (In More, they can be priests.) In Campanella they can 
even train for armed combat, being especially good at throwing fireballs. No 
men are unfit until old, when they may become government spies. But all 
Eutopians find war detestable, except in self-defense or (in one case) to liber- 
ate an oppressed people. For Campanella, trade being a cause of war, it should 
be limited to absolute needs. The ideal is autarky — total self-sufficiency, 
which means: no money. 

Eutopian laws are invariably few, plain, and posted for all to know. 
Lawyers are unknown; everyone pleads his own cause. In treating crime, the 
three evince great tenderness. Reproach and advice are the first measures 
taken; then hard labor, death in very few cases. Yet prisoners of war automat- 
ically become slaves. It is an odd harking back to ancient times, for slavery had 
long disappeared in western Europe. The Eutopians soften it by making the 
slaves' children, also automatically, free citizens. The vagary reminds us that 
in writing their works these Humanists kept an eye on Plato's Republic, which 
contains several of the proposed institutions — communism, eugenics with 
wives in common, and an end to poverty and class envy, though not to per- 
manent class duties and distinctions. 

On teaching the young, the note struck is the one that resounds again and 

again in our half millennium: schooling should be about things, not words, 

and it must be made attractive. In Campanella the whole city is designed as an 

exhibit of all the arts and sciences, so that it helps to instruct as it were by 

environmental force. It anticipates in this the famous work of the school 

reformer Comenius (180>). 
On the interior wall of the first circuit all the j n B ^ Q ^ thinking about science is 

mathematical figures are conspicuously me aim of Ufe, and deKghtful it is. Only 

painted, marked symbolically and with the ~ .. r , . 

, . / . Campanella cares for machinery — 

explanations neatly written each in a little r J 

_, , c . . . . wagons moved by sails and gears and 

verse. There are definitions, propositions, ° J ° 

and the like. On the exterior wall is first an shi P s h Y " a marvellous contrivance," 

immense drawing of the whole earth, given in unspecified. (Aristotle had the farsee- 

one view; then tablets that set forth for every ing idea that there would be no need 

country the curious customs, public and pri- for slaves if one had the requisite 

vate, the laws, the origins and power of the machines.) 

peoples and their different alphabets, dis- As for moral education, in all 

played above that of the City of the Sun. Eutopias elaborate religious and civic 

— Campanella, The City of the Sun (1623) ceremonies provide it, while they also 



The Eutopians <^> 121 

unite the people through patriotic emotions. In our day, celebrations with sig- 
nificant phrases and music have become obsolete; and the words pomp and 
patriotism invite ridicule. But for centuries such public reminders of commu- 
nity proved indispensable as popular spectacle and conveyor of tradition. 

Indeed, the use of music in the 16C Eutopias is a striking feature carried 
over from the life of the times. Music was always in the air (155>), at home, 
in church, in the street, on feast days and at guild functions, at burials and 
weddings; and again on special occasions such as the arrival in town of 
princes, officials, or ambassadors. Voices, trumpets, and drums dialogued 
with speeches. Music was not the frill it later became and to a certain extent 
remains, divided into separate species for separate groups and enjoyed at 
one's choice when convenient. 

Just as the Eutopians take pleasure in lavishly describing houses, temples, 
clothing, and domestic customs, so they all delight in telling us how healthy 
their people are, how handsome, kindly, and completely reasonable. For 
example, they work briskly and faithfully, because they have figured out that 
slacking on the job will reduce the common stock of goods and everyone will 
have less. Soviet experience showed that this intricate reasoning does not 
always take place. 

Again, although the citizens are a ^ ^^ ^ ^ ^ souls ^ of 
prion healthy and wise, the spectre of mese scafcdy ten or meen ^^ do ^ 
European plague could not be forgot- work> and ibey m ^^ lean from overwork . 
ten. Campanella is curiously worried The rest become a prey to idleness, avarice, 
about epilepsy, and he is the only one ill-health, lasciviousness, usury, and other 
who mentions washing the body often vices, and corrupt many families by holding 
and at the behest of physicians. Euto- them to servitude for their own use. But in the 
pias cannot avoid having free public Citv of me Sun » as dutv a* 1 ** work Me dw- 
hospitals and physicians who continu- tributed among all, it falls to each one to work 

ally search for new drugs and make up about four hours a d ^ The remainin g hou * s 

• c • i -o i ^ i- are spent in learning; joyously, in debating, 

artificial ones. Bacon alone is not much r * ' J J9 ^' 

, . , , reading, writing, reciting, in walking and 

interested in workaday arrangements; . . . , , , „ , , 

J . exercising mind and body, and in play, but in 

he merely posits that the pious and - . , , UM . . 

J r r no game that is played while sitting. 

humane" people of "that happy place" 

. • i i-r i « i- — Campanella, The City of the Sun(\(>2?>) 

have organized life so that everything 

is well kept and without disorder." 

It is the assumption of ready compliance with rational demands that 
makes Eutopias Utopian. True, the absence of the blind struggle among the 
many for a bare livelihood and among the few for wealth and honors is a plau- 
sible cause of social amity and amenity. The authors make sure that merit is 
recognized; fame and rewards are plentiful for every kind of service; so that, 
fed and praised, the people are content and loyal to the government. But they 
are strangely free of those likes and dislikes in small matters that bring on 



122 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

neighbors' quarrels, family feuds, and racial hatred. Custom may create con- 
sent to some measure of uniform behavior, but is there no grumbling or 
resistance against taking all meals at the common table with its eutopian 
menu, or against having to attend all state ceremonies ready to sing with 
unfeigned joy? In the 300 pages of the three Eutopias, there is only one touch 
of psychology: the young in the City of the Sun do not mind waiting on their 
elders, but "it is alas unwillingly" that they wait on one another. 

* 
* * 

In reading Eutopias one must take care to distinguish, as suggested, 
between the living conditions of the author's time that are implied by their 
Eutopian opposites and the quirks of the particular author. Thus More sug- 
gests that if fools, that is, lunatics, are treated kindly there is no harm in their 
being used to entertain the people by "their foolish sayings and ridiculous 
actions." It will ensure their being valued and well taken care of. In the 16C, 
clever fools — jesters — were often supported by kings and nobles for the way 
they acted and spoke — freely— (302 >), but except in a village with only one 
"Natural" (idiot), the ordinary mental cases, whether at large or herded in a 
"bedlam," were subjected to baiting, jeering, and abuse. More's benevolence 
here landed him in callousness. 

And looking at his career one wonders how he reconciled his Eutopian 
rule of religious toleration with his willing persecution of heretics when he 
was in power. Nor is this all. His reputation as a great and good man was 
given a fine start by his son-in-law's biography; it was furthered by martyrdom 
for his faith and ultimate canonization. The modern play about him confirms 
it all. Thus most readers are hardly aware of a disturbing fact: More either 
invented, or allowed himself to propagate in a work of his own, the "big lie" 
in favor of the Tudors under whom he served — the lie that Richard III, the 
king whom the Tudor Henry VII overthrew, was a deformed monster who 
murdered his nephews, the young princes in the Tower. Ever since Horace 
Walpole in the late 1 8C raised doubts, a number of scholars have come to 
believe that Richard was the very opposite of the legend — handsome, able, 
and innocent of blood. It is not remembered, either, that the phrase "a man 
for all seasons," now applied to More as a compliment, was used in the past 
to mean an opportunist. 

Incidentally, Walpole's work created a great stir on the Continent and had 
the distinction of being translated into French, then the universal language, by 
no less a scribe than Louis XVI. [The book to read is Josephine Tey's fictional 
account, The Daughter of Time; and for the present state of the case, Richard III, 
by Charles Ross.] Of course, Shakespeare's great melodrama has made a rever- 
sal of common opinion impossible. And that too is cultural history. 



The Eutopians <^> 123 



* * 



In pictures of perfect states and less formally, as we shall see in Rabelais, 
Montaigne, Shakespeare, Swift, and others, the theme of EMANCIPATION from 
present hardships is the author's main motive; but there is at least one other 
timely reason to account for the 16C cluster of such works. For the generation 
after Columbus, knowledge of the New World and its inhabitants began to 
modify the western mind about its own culture. The explorers' voyages had 
become a literary form, which the Eutopians imitate minutely. They describe 
the ship's going off course, the remote island, the natives' treatment of the for- 
eign crew, touchy at first, then friendly. Eutopia must always be isolated, to 
account for its being so long unknown and to prevent its being corrupted by 
the bad customs of the rest of the world — which incidentally suggests how 
fragile a good commonwealth is expected to be. 

Now, new knowledge about alien 
customs creates SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. We then sailed for three days without 

This is a fact and a theme: as soon as discovering anything. 
comparisons are made, one's own cus- — [Rabelais' Dig at Explorers] 
toms no longer seem inevitable. To be Pantagruel (1532) 

sure, the neighboring people, the enemy, 

has always behaved differendy from us, but he is simply wrong-headed. It is 
when two or three cultures far-off provide large contrasts that the question 
thrusts itself on the mind: If others can do common things differendy, why 
shouldn't we? The idea of deliberate change is born, social engineering is 
around the corner and begins to find expression in literature. 

It was remarked above that other genres than imaginary travels were 
eutopias. Castiglione's living-room debate about "the Courtier" (<85) is 
imaginary in large part, portraying as it does an ideal type which, as always, 
owes much to what may already 

exist, though not in perfect form. If 

i ■, i Here enter you — and welcome from our 

only there were enough courtiers on J 

this model, society would be vasdy A „ , , 

. J All noble sparks endowed with gallant 

improved: the book is a Eutopia on a 

limited scale. Again, in Rabelais' prose Th f s 7 s * he glofious place which nobly shaU 

epic and in Montaigne's Essays, the Afford sufficient to content you all. 

messy real world is shown without dis- Here enter Ladies all, of high degree, 

guise or softening, but the ideal one Of goodly shape, of humor gay and free; 

runs alongside in the author's com- This bower is fashioned by a gentle knight, 

ments, and in both authors this Ladies, for you and innocent delight. 

shadow is supplemented by a small, — Rabelais, from the inscription on the 

explicit Eutopia (1 26; 1 39 >) . gate of the Abbey of Theleme (1 562) 



124 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Don Quixote also breathes the same air. Cervantes divides his fiction in 
two by means of his characters, the knight continually acting out of the 
noblest feelings, and the squire not ignobly but in the crude way of the world. 
The folly of Don Quixote's actions does not contaminate his principles; they 
are reasonable and just, as one can see if one listens carefully to his precepts 
and reproofs, especially when he collects them into little harangues in the 
wonderful second part of the work. They define the perfectly ethical man, 
both virtues recorded in the word quixotic, which does not mean crazy but 
idealistic — Eutopian. It would not be hard to go through a list of the great 
novels from Tom Jones down to the works of Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, 
and Hardy, and still further to D. H. Lawrence, Gide, Joyce, and Fitzgerald, 
and point out the Eutopian features sketched or implied in the depiction of 
what is. 

Shakespeare too, at the end of his playwriting life, makes in The Tempest a 
clean sweep of all but one of the evils he had so faithfully reproduced in all his 
other plays. Speaking for him (with some irony), Gonzalo declares: 

T the commonwealth I would by contraries 
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic 
Would I admit; no name of magistrate; 
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, 
And use of service, none. . . . 
No occupation; all men idle, all; 
And women too, but innocent and pure; 
No sovereignty — 

but the dramatist in Shakespeare never sleeps and another speaker breaks in: 

— Yet he would be king on't; 

after which Gonzalo, unfazed, pursues his dream, decreeing all things in com- 
mon, no marrying, and all abundance. At which all cry: "Long live Gonzalo!" 
It is a paradox that in most Eutopias (Rabelais' is an exception) the com- 
mon good is achieved by enforcing a uniformity of behavior that seems 
tighter than any that is felt in the bad societies. The better state aims at reliev- 
ing the body of hunger and the mind of anxiety; it does not promise freedom 
for society in the abstract, but only from the concrete privileges of the upper 
orders. All the battles for social justice have been fought against the tyranny 
of poverty and class. How do the Eutopias deal with their possible recur- 
rence? They rely on the force of good habits. But they also recognize that the 
magistrates must occasionally step in to prevent abuses, and at times one 



The Eutopians <^d 125 

senses the presence of a dictator at the top to run all things right, an anticipa- 
tion of the 1 8C Enlightened Despot. 

The great argument used to sustain right conduct is: "Live according to 
Nature. Nature is never wrong and we err by forgetting it." Nature here 
replaces God's commandments, but although Nature is His handiwork, His 
commandments are a good deal clearer than Her dictates. Throughout west- 
ern history the appeal to natural law resounds as the great absolute, but its 
guidelines vary with each interpreter, and in Eutopia as elsewhere social life is 
in the hands of a ruling group. True, the magistrates are elected from among 
the elderly and wise, and there are periodic assemblies of the whole people to 
setde policies; but these purely political rights do not cover civil whim or 
eccentricity, the violence of the bloody-minded, the vagaries of genius or of 
adolescence. Significandy, in none of our three Eutopians is there any men- 
tion of laughter — except once, in derision at a custom of the West. 

Despite the hints of regimentation, INDIVIDUALISM is also a motive 
behind the literature of complaint, so often bitter against nobles and clergy. 
By the mid-16C the human being who not only bewails but resents his lot and 
his master has attained that SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, which is one part of indi- 
viduality. It is also the prerequisite for the amazing self-control and rational- 
ity ascribed to the Eutopian populations. At the same time, the early Eutopias 
are a literature of longing. In the decaying 1 5C and the ensuing 1 50 years of 
sectarian wars, the Eutopias in their several ways express the occidental pas- 
sion for unity. The west Europeans could no longer think of themselves as 
the progeny of the Christianized Roman Empire, and the comfort of the uni- 
fied nation-state was not yet in plain sight (239 >). Third and last motive: the 
Humanist attachment to the here and now that made vaguer the reality of 
heaven, while scholarship discredited the belief in a Golden Age in the past. 
The Modern Era was to be one of plans and proposals, which is to say futur- 
ist to the point of bigotry. 

* 
* * 

When this change of expectations occurred in the late Renaissance, it 
began to reverse the original creed of the Renaissance itself: thou shalt ape 
and worship the ancients. The cluster of ideas that make up the later, revised 
outlook has been called the Counter-Renaissance." The ancients were now 
antiquated and the word modern, besides the meaning of "present-day," 
acquired the connotation of total praise. "Progress," "the latest science," 
"advanced ideas," "up to date" are the perennial markers of this cultural shift. 
It did not take place without opposition. For a century and a half — say, down 
to the time of Voltaire — there was all over Europe a "battle of the ancients 



126 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

and the moderns." It affected literature, made a tangle of religion and philos- 
ophy, and often determined the fate of particular works and authors (204; 
348>). Only in natural science was it firmly settled by the 17C that latest is 
truest. 

By an unconscious play on words, the dogma that "science is the best 
truth" became fused with the idea just cited of "living according to nature"; 
for men of science undoubtedly were trying to read the meanings that Nature 
held for Man. This progressive revelation gave the word natural the same 
authority that clings to modern-, natural foods are the most healthful, natural 
behavior is more agreeable than affectation, the natural environment and its 
fauna and flora are primary treasures, natural law is the test of man-made law 
and government. 

In the 16C, the tales about the inhabitants of the New World chimed in 
with this preconception. Those peoples were remarkably free of western 
vices and complexities; they were wonderfully natural; hence they have much 
to teach us. The Eutopia in Montaigne is a description of such a tribe, and its 
tide "Of Cannibals" does not detract from the admiration we should feel. 
Here and in other accounts of the time we meet that western creation men- 
tioned earlier: the Noble Savage. He acquired that name a little later but his 
portrait was complete from the first. He is fearless, healthy in his unspoiled 
habitat, devout in the spontaneous worship of the one god of nature. He may 
be cruel to his enemies, but he is altogether moral in his relations to kin and 
enemy alike. Knowing nothing of kings and courts, popes and churches, he 
needs no improving tracts like Castiglione's for his manners to be impeccable. 
He attracts, because an old encrusted culture likes to think that a simple exis- 
tence means an easy life. Tacitus, as we saw, believed it in late Roman times. 
The Germanic tribes were to him what the "wild Indians" were to 
Montaigne — or the Apostles to Luther and Thomas More. PRIMITIVISM takes 
many forms. 



Eutopias were flawed by taking it for granted that under fair conditions 
people would be sensible; they are in fact so sensible that they would make any 
system work. But more must be said about this obvious criticism. The com- 
mon impression that eutopias have been useless pipe dreams is contrary to 
fact. In letting wish and fancy roam, this galaxy of writers have imagined insti- 
tutions that are workable. The modern program of welfare and "social security" 
is a Eutopia in little. The guidelines for its application by the bureaucracy 
remind one of the details Eutopian authors like to multiply for lifelike effect, 
and the 20C efforts to ensure universal contentment by means not only of laws 
governing health, livelihood, education, and equity but also of incessant unof- 



The Eutopians ^d 127 

ficial advice carries out the central idea There is a great number of noblemen among 

of Eutopia. It is the opposite of charity you that are themselves as idle as drones, that 

to the sick and the poor, seen as being subsist on other men's labor, on the labor of 

always with us, and its upward-pulling their tenants, whom, to raise their own 

power has been constant through the resources they pare to the quick. Besides 

centuries. Whether modern societies this, they carry about with them a great num- 

! . i c • i r j ber of idle fellows, who never learned any 

are happier because of it or chafe under J 

,,i r ii i i trade by which they may gain a living, and 

rules that do not fully secure their ends , ,.,,,. 

J these, as soon as their lord dies, are turned 

is not an answerable question. The o^,^ !,,„,, tunledllmiou , f doo „ 
social-bliss meter for comparing pen- ^^ keen ^ they rob no less keenly> for 
ods has not been invented. what else can a,^ do? 

If we ask what the eutopian legacy _ The rtLAVBI£R TALKING TO MoRE IN 
has been, it may be summed up in five Utopia (1516) 

points: social equality is more humane 

than hierarchy. (In this the Counter-Renaissance men diverge radically from 
Plato.) Next, everybody must work and earn his living or his honors. Then, rulers 
should be chosen by the people: it fosters a more willing obedience. In addition, 
marriage and divorce need accommodation to actual experience: adultery is not 
the sole cause of hopeless disunion. Finally, the existing order is not fixed forever 
by divine fiat and doomed to be evil by original sin. Clear thought and strong 
wills can improve the human lot. Humanism takes it for granted that this worldly 
aim is legitimate. 

On reflection, one must add communism to the list of contributions 
from the Eutopians, since our century has seen that system established for a 
time over fairly large areas, though with a difference: The Eutopians had of 
course no inkling of machine industry; their peoples were farmers, to whom 
Providence in the form of droughts and flood, pests and soil erosion, was 
more vivid than it became as control of natural processes increased. Prayer 
and righteousness were still pillars of society for the Eutopians. The idea of 
an atheist state did not occur to them as a possibility — nor even the idea of a 
secular government indifferent to all creeds. The related conviction that 
social order required religion to buttress the force of law died hard in western 
culture, if indeed it has died altogether. 

Eutopian morals show how mistaken are modern critics who keep com- 
plaining that science has made great progress in improving material life but 
has lagged in doing the same for the ethical. There was no progress to make. 
Men have known the principles of justice, decency, tolerance, magnanimity 
from an early date. Acting on them is another matter — nor does it seem eas- 
ier for us to act on our best scientific conclusions when we deal with bodily 
matters: an age that has made war on smoking and given up the use of the 
common towel and the common cup should prohibit shaking hands. 

A word ought to be said about the Eutopian writers' effort to make their 



128 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

tales plausible — it is one more difference from Plato's Republic. After telling us 
how the ship went off course, the moderns describe the geography of the new- 
found land, with its cities, architecture, and — most important — fortifications. 
But it is the smaller details that suggest the actual; we hear much about trivial 
things: "They use linen cloth more than wool and they value cloth only by the 
whiteness of the linen or the cleanness of the wool, without regard to the fine- 
ness of the thread." The color and savor of a fruit ("a little sweeter than our 
own"), the size of common objects, the idioms, garments, and gestures used 
on various occasions add verisimilitude to what would otherwise be an uncon- 
vincing narrative. For examples one need only turn to the adventures in 

Rabelais 

The world has made the adjective Rabelaisian stand for something con- 
spicuous on the surface of the text, but contrary, almost, to its message. It is 
not for bawdiness and scatology that Rabelais claims serious attention. The 
young who are tempted by the common misconception to look for the 
naughty passages find them not very titillating. Still, the impression persists 
that in Rabelais grossness is all, and the man himself a sort of Falstaff of lit- 
erature. A look at the one portrait we have is a swift antidote. It may have 
been painted from tradition rather than from life, but that makes it all the bet- 
ter as an index of the author's mind. What we see is a somewhat narrow rect- 
angular face, well-proportioned features, bright eyes that suggest inner 
amusement, matching the shadow of a smile on the lips — no coarseness of 
flesh or spirit anywhere. 

It is also helpful to remember that Rabelais was not solely an author and 
that like many other notable men, he had an uncommon history. He was an 
unwanted child who, as happened to Erasmus, was forced into a monastery: 
the family would then not have to share the property into one more part; 
young Francois would be "dead under the civil law." Thanks to influential 
outside help he was able to study medicine and he soon became a leader in the 
profession. He made public dissections of human bodies when it was still a 
dangerous innovation; he became a specialist in the new disease, syphilis, and 
in hysteria; he taught at Lyon, then the cultural center of France, as professor 
of medicine and astrology, and published both almanacs and scientific papers. 
He also invented devices for the treatment of hernia and fractured bones. 

In addition, he mastered Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and read widely in 
history, geography, and general literature. Competent in jurisprudence, he 
was an attendant of the powerful family of du Bellay in political and other 
capacities. He was, in short, one of the most learned men of his time and he 
happened besides to be a literary genius. In his ardor about social and moral 
issues, he set forth one of the broadest world views of the Modern Era. 



The Eutopians <^> 129 

He evidently thought that putting his ideas in a treatise would be neither 
safe nor likely to reach a large audience. Instead, he worked up a narrative about 
giants and explorations, interspersed with vulgar anecdotes. These three appe- 
tizers drew on the common stock: Gargantua had a model/Voyages" were cur- 
rent fare, and bawdy jokes are ever welcome adaptations of earlier ones. It is in 
the descriptions of persons between the events of the leisurely tale and in the 
Prologues full of verse and wit that Rabelais insinuates his radical opinions. At 
other times he speaks straight out, and just as often he makes a point through 
the purpose or outcome of actions and incidents. Thus the great debate 
between Panurge and the Englishman Thaumast (= Thomas More) is carried 
on entirely by signs and gestures; the point is: words fail to express all that can 
be thought and felt in human life. But when Rabelais attacks the monks or the 
theological faculty at the Sorbonne, he does not mince words: "Reason? We 
never use it here." 

The voyage that the admirable Hundreds of absurd stories have been made 
Pantagruel, son of Gargantua, grand- up about the author of Pantagruel, one of the 
son of Grandgousier, undertakes is in finest books in French literature. Rabelais, a 
search of an oracle, that of "the Holy sober man who drank nothing but water, is 
Bottle." This, like the repeated injunc- thou g ht of as a lover of food and dshik and a 
tion "Drink!" and the author's frequent confirmed ti PP ler - 
reference to "his beloved topers," are —Balzac (1840) 
symbols that may puzzle or mislead. 

Like the giants' meals, for which thousands of cattle must be killed, the 
repeated references to bodily functions and their satisfaction mean only one 
thing: the basis of human life — and therefore of all higher endeavors — is 
physical. This "grossness" is part of Rabelais' attack on the ascetic ideal of the 
monk — the ideal, for the monastic reality (as we saw through Erasmus and 
Luther) was very different. But ideals take a good deal of killing even after the 
fact has fled — hence Rabelais' repeated blows. The moral of the physical is 
that human nature is good, not corrupt. (Calvin vituperated the author of 
such a heresy, and no wonder.) For if Man were hopelessly bad and in contin- 
ual need of divine help, civic education and social reform would be useless, 
and Rabelais is full of ideas under both these headings. 

Whereas Gargantua's education is monkish like Rabelais' own, 
Pantagruel's begins with the development of a healthy body by exercise and 
games; it goes on with the observation of things — all things. Nature supplies 
endless object lessons, and the creations of man are to be examined in an 
inquiring way. It is again the pedagogy of "things, not words," independent 
thought, not ready-made opinions. The great revolution, which, in Rabelais' 
story, pits the Papefigues (Protestants) against the Papimanes (Catholics) is 
proof of the harm done by fierce and doubtful opinion. The physician-author 
is in tune with the spirit of the new science and it is by concrete details that he 



130 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

utters his own "Live according to nature." What is more, it includes laughter, 
for to him is due the maxim "To laugh is natural to man." 

The philosophic outlook that has acquired the clumsy name of 
Pantagruelism does not spring fully formed at some point in the story. It devel- 
ops little by little in Book III, The Heroic Deeds and Sayings of the Worthy 
Pantagruel. Rabelais published this part for the first time under his own name 
when he had become well-known by common report. In exchange for his inor- 
dinate praise of Francis I as patron of culture, Rabelais received a royal privilege 
(= copyright) for ten years. The work is dedicated to the king's sister Margaret 
of Navarre who was Rabelais friend and protector (<86). 

Pantagruelism is rooted in a noble quality of mind: to take nothing in bad 
part. Rabelais ascribes this power symbolically to a plant, pantagruelion, 
which, as its made-up Greek name suggests, is the giver of all good things — 

knowledge, self-improvement, space 
The plant Pantagruelion will give perfect travel, and above all: contentment. 
assurance, incredible liberation for every- Pantagruel's actions and comments 

thing that men look, work, sail, and fight for. during the dazzling variety of adven- 
— Pantagruel (1532) tures that befall the travelers in search 

of the Holy Botde are, again, as many 
concrete demonstrations of the Rabelaisian philosophy. The persistent 
"Drink!" is the symbolic invitation to perfect oneself by quaffing from the 
right source. Rabelais chooses to cite Pandora's bottle (in place of box), which 
is inexhaustible. Her name means "all gifts" and modern usage remembers 
only the bad, but Rabelais' bottle is a barrelful of good ones. It contains wis- 
dom on every subject, salted with wit and floated on laughter. 

Even when his philosophy takes the form of definite precepts, it must 
remain a free choice and its adherents must never become fanatical. "Drink, 
but do not souse or carouse German-fashion." There are no formulas for the 
good life, nor can Rabelais be called an optimist or a pessimist. He knows 
how difficult it is for man to live up to the principles they most believe in, and 
rigidity in principle defeats its own end. From Book III onward, the figure of 
Panurge becomes the center of attention as the living proof of that truth. His 
name means "all-action," restless impulse, thoughtless energy. He does think, 
but after the act. He cares only about himself. He cheats, lies, plays ugly tricks 
on others, and is a coward. But he is no fool and he is often engaging, as such 
people can be, by his buoyancy and cleverness in getting in and out of scrapes, 
which is why Pantagruel tolerates and helps him. For him he is also an object 
of study. It is the Panurge in everyone of us who must be molded into a 
Pantagruel. 

By this point the giant features of the narrative have disappeared and the 
doings are altogether of and about men, although exaggeration for satire — or 
simply out of high spirits — continues. Rabelais measures everything in high 



The Eutopians q^> 131 

figures. Pantagruel when a student in Paris had posted 9,764 Theses. Distance 
in travel and estimates of population when discovering new lands, heroic 
deeds and casualties in the armed encounters, are astronomical. This exuber- 
ance is Rabelais' way of showing life as it really is — bursting out multiform all 
over the globe, chaotic, resisdess, seeking only its own perpetuation. Hence 
his insistence that Sir Gaster — the stomach — is the ultimate power and 
source of all that matters — society, the arts, poetry, and war. {His wars, by the 
way, are moralizers — the decent spared and helped, the brutish or tyrannical 
put down.) 

Parallel with nature's opulence, Rabelais' huge lists of things, such as the 
marvelous contents of the Library of St. Victor, depict the endless works of 
Man. The flood of synonyms for ideas, sensations, or parts of the body; and 
the creation of unheard-of compounds of Greek, Latin, and French all spell 
abundance — and resurgent appetite. It is a unique literary method of conjur- 
ing up a conception of the world. 

But to contemplate this "hippocervus buzzing in a void" is not an end in 
itself. It arouses the will to tame it, precisely through social order, poetry, sci- 
ence, and the arts. And social order depends on the Pantagruelian virtues. 
They reach their sublime goal in the Abbey of Theleme, whose single com- 
mandment is: "Do as you wish" (< 1 23) . This is Rabelais' Eutopia, four pages 
long. It is an abbey, so as to shame the existing orders of monks and nuns, and 
for the same reason it houses men and women together. Their life there is 
notable for courtesy and mutual respect. Elegance of setting is matched by 
elegance of behavior, which means that beyond conversation in the mode of 
Castiglione's courtier the relations must be of perfect decency, not necessar- 
ily chastity. That is what makes the life of the senses "pure" and "innocent," 
and not abstention from it as the ascetics preach. The monks (and the 
Calvinists), looking at life through peepholes, hate it; Rabelais hates them in 
return. 

There is deep feeling about men and women in his description of ideal 
human relations, as there is also in his account of Gargantua's love for his son 
Pantagruel and the son's reciprocal devotion. Rabelais lost his own son, 
Theodule, when the boy was only two years old. Like the world of giants and 
verbal exaggeration, the ideal existence at Theleme is not isolated from the 
actual 16C; it is surrounded by contemporary persons and events and real 
places, named and described with marked affection or criticized in overt 
polemics. The quarrels he discusses — the cake-peddlers', for instance — are 
patterned on well-known facts. Panurge's going about for advice whether to 
marry or not is inspired by the long Querrelk des Dames between critics and 
defenders of women. And factual also are a host of small incidents of the day. 
True or made up, the various details give us the world as we find it in the mod- 
ern newspaper and the modern novel. A judicious critic has said that Rabelais 



132 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

foreshadows the whole of French literature, meaning that he supplies brilliant 
examples of all the forms, from fable and epigram to dramatic dialogue and 
satire. This last element is often distilled in phrases three words long, tacked 
on to the end of an otherwise harmless sentence. What the critic did not point 
out is that Rabelais' five books show up the cliche about the French genius 
consisting exclusively in classical order and symmetry — as if the cathedrals 
did not visibly refute it also. 

Rabelais' influence has been repeatedly felt abroad. Swift's Gulliver, 
Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Peacock's delightful "novels" (564>) come to 
mind among works by writers who have sat down "to laugh and shake in 
Rabelais' easy chair." Jean- Paul Richter in Germany owed more to 
Rabelaisian technique than to substance, but Balzac took up both and even 
produced a set of pastiche tales in something like Rabelais' idiom, the Contes 
Drolatiques. One wonders why James Joyce in Ulysses made Molly Bloom say 
she disliked Rabelais; Ulysses itself at times suggests a sort of Rabelais in low 
spirits, exposing the grubbiest corners of society, parodying the professions, 
and insisting tonelessly on the body's needs and acts; all this besides the 
would-be Rabelaisian play with language. The contrasts of course outweigh 
the likenesses. Rabelais leaves one exhilarated, as one is after seeing a Greek 
tragedy; Ulysses leaves one depressed, as one is after seeing a modern play like 
Death of a Salesman. It is the difference between the 1 6C and the 20th, between 
the dawn of a new culture and its close in disenchantment. 

Typical of that contrast is the treatment of the body and especially of sex- 
uality. In Joyce with Bloom, Molly, and Mulligan as its representatives, the 
body is mean, furtive, unfulfilled, and disgusting, the main reason being that 
its importance is exhibited seriously. It is observed as a naturalist looks at 
other animals and judged in the light of higher things. This is to Joyce's credit 
as an interpreter of his age: we have a "problem" of sexuality and of pornog- 
raphy. We try to define obscenity — helplessly — and argue for and against its 
exploitation in life and in films. We misuse the word sex, saying we "have sex" 
when we mean coupling, quite as if everybody did not have sex day and night 
by being either male or female. Our confusion is part of the excess of ideas 
typical of old civilizations. Joyce's poet Stephen Daedalus can only stand aside 
from the maze, not above it like Pantagruel. 

Rabelais, we know, sees the physical as the power that spurs man to all 
achievements. But once these are in being — society, the arts, and the felicity of 
Theleme — then Sir Gaster (and Madam Lust) look comical and not degrading. 
The antics we go through to satisfy the belly and the bollocks are ridiculous, 
hilarious, excruciatingly funny. The funniest aspect is perhaps the fact that we 
go on repeating those acts even after seeing how ludicrous they are — gobbling 
three meals a day, with the known consequence, and re-enacting the beast with 
two backs ad libitum. 



The Eutopians <^> 133 

It may seem a paradox — but it is not — that the Rabelaisian view upholds 
the dignity of man. By keeping the sense of proportion continually awake, it 
makes clear that the natural does not contaminate the spiritual. It may even, 
by relaxing tension through laughter, soothe the anxiety that the sexual emo- 
tions occasion in certain souls, confusing it with the guilt of real sin. 

Rabelais' intent to reform man rather than the state did not amuse every- 
body equally. The monks who had plotted against Erasmus were still power- 
ful and they succeeded at least once in their machinations against Rabelais; he 
had to take refuge in Metz, from which his patron and friend Cardinal du 
Bellay rescued him. But there was no general outcry against the book, thanks 
to the garniture that concealed from the common reader the writer's outra- 
geous ideas and insane proposals, such as softening the laws of marriage and 
accepting religion without theological barriers. Rabelais ended his life peace- 
fully as the vicar of Meudon, near Paris, no longer writing or practicing 
medicine, but teaching plainsong to the young. 

His great work is in five "books" and the authenticity of the fifth has 
been questioned because it was published posthumously. That any forger 
could have imitated style and thought and carried out the indicated scheme as 
perfecdy as we find it done is not credible. Writing is not like painting, an art 
in which mechanical skill can deceive. Of all the translations of Rabelais into 
English, the first, by Urqhart and Motteux, should be at least browsed in. It is 
not altogether faithful, but it is the only one that re-creates the atmosphere of 
verbal exuberance. [The book to read is A Journey Into Rabelais' France by 
Albert Jay Nock;° but note that the author's naming one of Rabelais' charac- 
ters John of the Funnels is a mistake. The name/^« des Entommeurs is not des 
Entonnoirs*. substitute John the Hacker.] 

* 
* * 

Next in order of time but not second in importance to Rabelais is 

Montaigne 

All of us readers are slaves to spelling, and whether speakers of French or 
not, we pronounce this well-known name with the at sounding eh, as in mais 
otfai. The fact is that the name is but the common word montagne, meaning 
mountain, and it was so pronounced in the author's time, when it and many 
other words sported an ai where today the single vowel is found. 

Storing away that small fact, one likes to think of him as the wise old man 
of the mountain and to describe his Essays as mountainous — a chain of 
uneven peaks which, like Rabelais' work, defy the regularity of form that is 
believed to limit the genius of the French. The very tide Essays, coined by 



134 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

Montaigne, refutes the idea of a prescribed form. Its ordinary meaning, at the 
heart of Montaigne's intention, is attempts. Essayer in French means to try; the 
word is cognate with English assay, to test and weigh in order to judge quality. 
What was Montaigne essaying to do? What did his assaying show? 

One has only to read the first page of "To the Reader" to get the answer: 
"Himself." But the book is not an autobiography. It is such only over short 
stretches along the self-exhibition, which uses the confession of faults, the 
recital of opinions, tastes, and emotions, and the quoting of events from 
ancient and modern history to describe one specimen of the human being in 
society. This undertaking is the first of its kind, in more than one respect, for 
unlike, say, the Confessions of St. Augustine or Bunyan's autobiography, it has 
no purpose beyond the description itself. Those other books were written to 
show through what mental travails the author went before reaching "the 
truth." The truth in Montaigne is the portrait of the writer. 

But was he not a skeptic whose motto, Que s^ais-je? — What do I 
know? — denies the possibility of truth? The debate on that question is a 
piece of futility. Turn the pages and read: the book contains a thousand pos- 
itive assertions. Besides the big subjects — creeds, love, poetry, experience, 
politics, education, history, old age, and death — that Montaigne exhaustively 
treats in varied contexts, he sheds glancing lights on a multitude of incidental 
topics — houses, Caesar, cats, poisons, the island of Cea, "and more," as 
modern sales catalogues like to say 

Montaigne, then, is not "a skeptic" in the sense of a shoulder-shrugging 
philosopher who looks at the world with tolerant amusement; he is skepticalm 
the sense of the reader who does not believe without evidence and the scholar 
who does not take any particular truth as final. This outiook in no way pre- 
vents having rooted convictions. To name only one, Montaigne is sure that 
people ought not to be burnt alive for their beliefs. 

Montaigne lived in an age full of people who knew that they, and they 
alone, had the truth, direct from God — and these truth-bearers all disagreed. 
Reflecting on a far wider set of facts and with greater self-knowledge, 
Montaigne was at pains to make the point that Cromwell later phrased so 
superbly: "By the bowels of Christ, bethink ye that ye may be mistaken." 

The Essays have been called the ideal bedside book — it invites browsing. 
But a greater and subtier pleasure rewards the reader who begins at the begin- 
ning and follows the self-portraiture to the end. For what the full course shows 
is the evolution of a mind from a negative to a positive philosophy. As a good 
Humanist, Montaigne starts out believing that "to philosophize is to learn how 
to die." The stoics — Seneca, Epictetus — had said so and the Renaissance 
thinkers who were not devout found in these ancients a sober moral philoso- 
phy that was consistent with Christianity, without requiring that one "die to the 
world" before life was over. Instead, one lived in obedience to nature and its 



The Eutopians <^> 135 

God, resigned to any ills that Fortune I, who make no other profession, find in 

might bring, but free of the Evangelical myself such infinite depth and variety, that 

anxiety for grace. what I have learned bears no other fruit than 

So things stood with Montaigne to make me reali2e how much I stm have to 

when he began his exploration. Grad- learn ' To m y ^akness, so often perceived, I 

ually, without any upheaval of feeling owe m y ^ clination to coolness * m Y °P™- 

! • j j ions and any hatred for that aggressiveness 

such as accompanies sudden conver- J °° 

- t n ., and quarrelsome arrogance that believes and 

sion, he came to see that to philoso- „ 

r trusts wholly in itself, a mortal enemy of dis- 

phize is to learn how to live. One can cipUne and tmm 

only speculate about what brought on 

. \ r . .. ° — Montaigne, "Of Experience" (1588) 

the change: it seems reasonable to sup- 
pose that the turn came from the 

increasingly vivid sense of the inmost self and its frequent independence 
from the intellect. To learn to die is a mental project born of worldly obser- 
vation; to learn to live is also a project, but it takes in that "depth and variety," 
that "weakness" to which Montaigne attributes the temper of his opinions, 
and indeed of his experience as a whole. 

The theme of SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS can never be more manifest than 
here, and its embodiment in the Essays has a cultural import that has hardly 
been recognized: Montaigne discovered Character. I mean by this that when 
he calls Man ondqyant et divers, a phrase so precise that it is difficult to trans- 
late — "wavelike and varying" will have to do — he replaced one conception of 
the individual by another, deeper and richer. 

Before him, the accepted idea of personality was that it was ruled by one 
of the body's "humors." A man, woman, or child was choleric, sanguine, 
phlegmatic, or melancholic. All acts, attitudes, and moods depended on the 
given disposition. The system, as will appear in Burton's masterpiece (223 >), 
was well worked out to allow for temporary deviations and it fitted pretty well 
the impression that one gets from our own neighbors: they always tend in one 
direction while responding to the way we tend toward them. And in the fam- 
ily, habit creates this same sense of uniformity — "there he (she) goes again." 
This sameness is broken only by occasional vagaries that are explained away 
as "not being oneself." 

This psychology of the humors, also called the ruling passion, kept its 
ancient authority for a long time. In the 17C Ben Jonson based on it two of his 
plays Every Man in His Humor and Every Man Out of His Humor, and Pope versi- 
fied it as late as the early 18th. To this day, the suppliers of popular novels are 
incapable of anything better, which is good enough for ordinary consumption. 

Meanwhile, in the essay "Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions," 
Montaigne points out the elements that make the difference between a type 
and a character. The type may exhibit all kinds of tricks and tastes and ges- 
tures that make him different, recognizable, but his "stance" is unchanging, 



136 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

"typical.' ' Not so in the Character. He is, as we say, many-sided ("mountain- 
ous"), which is why we also speak of seeing someone "in the round." For 
practical purposes, the character exists only in literature, because nobody has 
the time or the opportunity to look as roundly at anybody else as Montaigne 
looked at himself. 

This contrast between type and character as we meet them in life and in 
fiction explains why so many biographers declare the subject of their book "a 
bundle of contradictions." This misleading cliche occurs to them when, on 
surveying the life of the man or woman, they find the variations that belong 
to character: he or she was generous to strangers and public charities and 
stingy with the family. Contradiction! Not at all, inconsistency; a contradiction 
kills its opposite; inconsistencies exist side by side, in response to different 
situations. How could an unbending self survive in a variable world? In win- 
ter, hot soup; in summer, cool drinks. And when the need is less apparent, as 
in the shift from open-handed to stingy, it is real enough to the doer: he has 
come to dislike his family, or they fail to give him the praise he gets from 
strangers, or some other point of contact with reality alters the posture of the 
"wavelike and varying self." 

This disparity between logic and action enables Montaigne to understand 
history, of which he is so eager a student. Character (in his sense) and history 
are two facets of one reality: becoming. As he declares: "I do not portray being 
but passing." The mass of observations in the Essays is backed up by telling 
facts from history and biography. The quotations from the ancient Greek and 
Roman writers that pepper his text increased in number with each edition he 
published; they are evidence piling up about what he calls the "human condi- 
tion." Our modern use of the phrase to mean man's sad lot is quite wrong; it 
means only the power of circumstance — for evil or for good. Acting together 
with character, circumstance accounts for the chaos of history and its unpre- 
dictable twists and turns, which cannot always be referred to motives. When 
asked the reason for his close friendship with La Boetie, the answer was no list 
of traits in the abstract; it was: "because he was he, because I was I." The com- 
plexity of things, the plurality of minds and wills, and the uncertainty of out- 
comes form the grounds for keeping one's opinions ever subject to revision. 

* 

* * 

Montaigne, unlike Erasmus or Rabelais, had a pleasant childhood and a 
good start in life: nobody forced him into a monastery. His father, to whom 
he was devoted, taught and reared him with tender care — he would have a 
servant play the flute to wake him gently. The family estate in southwestern 
France could have afforded young Michel Eyquem the easy life of the lesser 



The Eutopians <#*> 137 

nobility, living on his rents and never to There is nothing so inimical to my health as 
be heard of again. But his temper was boredom and idleness. Melancholy is the 
active, his curiosity intense; he despised death of me and m Y irritability. 

idleness and felt his responsibilities. — Montaigne, Travel Diary (1 580) 

Not only did he serve two terms as 
mayor of Bordeaux, a post he did not seek — he was ordered to accept it by 
Henry III — but he also served the king with advice and help in negotiation. 
At the same time he admired the Huguenot Henry of Navarre, who by war 
and religious conversion gained the throne as Henry IV. The introspective 
mind was also competent in worldly affairs. If classed at all, Montaigne 
should be seen as a. politique, that is, a sympathizer of the party that earned the 
name for wanting an end to the religious wars and a re-united France. During 
those wars, Montaigne refused to be a partisan, which was almost as danger- 
ous as being one. When he met on the road a roving detachment of armed 
"gendemen" and told them the truth about his indifference, it seemed to 
them very strange. He escaped murder, but he would not dissemble. He 
proved his courage again by remaining at the post of mayor during the plague. 

This rare combination of active strength and love of meditation made 
not only for balanced views but also for the kindliness of the strong, the 
Pantagruelist. It also guarantees the truthfulness of the self-revelations; in his 
circumstances, what had Montaigne to fear from "telling all"? And how con- 
ducive to sincerity for a writer not to have to sell books, worry about reviews, 
and keep the public favorable to his "image." [The book to read is the brief 
diary of Montaigne's travels, in which, among other surprises, the reader will 
find the account of a homosexual marriage in Rome.] 

Critics in his day charged him with vanity for talking so much about him- 
self and with triviality for paying attention to intimate and workaday details. 
Who cares, they said, whether when he is ill he is most comfortable on horse- 
back? Ethical opinion in our day, while recognizing his genius and originality, 
has been disconcerted to find a skeptic with strong convictions and a radical 
with conservative leanings. It has failed to grasp the nature of the double 
mind — the ability to see both sides of the mountain at once. Thinkers of this 
type are few: Diderot, Walter Bagehot, William James, spring to mind as 
examples. They are not to be written off as undecided or vacillating. Their 
minds are simply multilinear and perspectivist: when Montaigne was playing 
with his cat, he wondered whether the cat was not perhaps playing with him. 

For a more consequential example, one thinks of the longest of the 
Essays, the "Apology for Raymond Sebond," a Spanish theologian who gave 
a start to "Natural religion," the creed that Man can know God by seeing Him 
in His handiwork. Montaigne had been asked by his father to translate the 
work, and then by a Valois princess to defend the thesis of the book. 



138 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 



In truth, knowledge is a great and very useful Montaigne's defense turns out to be a 
quality; those who despise it give evidence grudging admission that Sebond's ideas 
enough of their stupidity. Yet I do not set its ma y d religion some good at the pre- 
value at that extreme measure that some sent dme) when p eo ple are rabid sec- 
attribute to it, such as the philosopher ^^ and nQt ^ religious< But on 
Herillus, who find in it the sovereign good ^ whok Sebond ^ ghown ^ ^ 

and think it has the power to make us wise . , , , llA , „ , , . 

guided: the Apology leaves him 
and happy. * ' F * y 

behind and goes on to discuss the con- 

— Montaigne, from the "Apology • fU ^ r ■ ■> i 

' „ __ ceit or human reason, the limited value 

for Raymond Sebond" (1569) . 

of human knowledge. The attitude is 

the one that Rabelais expressed in hit- 
and-run fashion. It raises the great question whether knowledge leads to 
virtue and thereby to happiness. 

Our century possesses an amount of knowledge immeasurably greater 
than that Montaigne or Rabelais could gain access to. Are we proportionately 
wiser and happier? There is today a body of opinion that ascribes our unhap- 
piness precisely to the knowledge we have. What has been called here the 
double mind can logically desire more knowledge, like any touter of Progress, 
and at the same time recognize that getting it will not necessarily improve the 
quality of life. The knowledge of atomic fission and genetic interference is 
double-edged. Montaigne had a shrewd foreboding about gunpowder. 

Still, he devoted fifty pages to the education of children. In that essay he 
anticipates Rousseau by insisting on the need of a tutor, and he acknowledges 
the daunting challenge of teacher training by declining to say what the tutor's 
qualifications should be. But as Nature is the best guide; teaching must be the 
development of natural inclinations, for which purpose the tutor must watch 
his pupil and listen to him, not continually "bawl words into his ears as if 
pouring water into a funnel." Good teaching will come from "a mind well- 
made rather than well-filled." 

For the learner, no more memorizing and regurgitation. The pupil being 
a young nobleman whose mother had requested the advice, he is to be made 
fit for governing, not for dialectical argument. But there must be serious 
study. Solid learning is "a wonderfully serviceable tool" and philosophy a lib- 
erating art, although now (says Montaigne) it has become "empty quibbling, 
a thing of no use or value." As might be expected, after arming the mind with 
superior common sense, the plan ensures the health and strength of the body 
by exercise, martial arts, games, riding — and dancing. In a well-conducted 
education, everything teaches, and if the good is to last, practice — habitual 
use — must be kept up. But the harsh discipline of common masters is sure to 
make the pupil reject as soon as possible all he has been taught. The right 
course is to use, in double-minded fashion, "a severe gentleness." 

The Eutopia in Montaigne is not imaginary. It summarizes the report of 



The Eutopians ^ 139 



When the vines freeze in my village, my priest 
infers that the wrath of God is upon the 
human race. Seeing our civil wars, who does 
not exclaim that the system is topsy turvy and 
judgment is at hand, not reflecting that many 
worse things have happened and that 10,000 
parts of the world to our one are having a jolly 
time. 

— Montaigne, "On Educating Children" 
(1588) 



an explorer who has studied the man- 
ners and institutions of "the canni- 
bals." It is of course fanciful at many 
points, but its lesson is clear: ways of 
life vastly different from our own have 
merit. Their simplicity in this particular 
case allows the natural virtues free play; 
ours are repressed by the need to over- 
come the barriers and complications of 
an old society. We plot and lie and 
cheat our way through them and are as 

cruel, and with less excuse, as the peoples we call savages. Again and again in 
this essay, Montaigne interrupts to castigate the western way of life. 

Montaigne is far from recommending that Europe imitate the wild men 
overseas. In the uncertainty of our knowledge and the extreme difficulty of per- 
suading others of our point of view, it is wisest to conform to established 
usages in morals and government. 
Custom is an enormous force that 
makes for peace and order; yet there 
should be checks to a king's power and 
social ranks are hard to justify — men 
are equal by their very diversity; they 
cannot be measured and hence cannot 
be ranked. In spirit, Montaigne is a true 
cosmopolite, opposed to national boast- 
ing. He loves his country and is loyal to 
his king and his church; they are the 
supports of such liberty as can be had. 
Before the violent Evangelical revolu- 
tion, the laws maintained the public 
peace and the custom of Christianity 
was the adequate corrector of morals. 

Montaigne and Rabelais are Eutopians and Humanists whose reliance on 
history and the bearing of contemporary events issues into philosophic 
Pragmatism (666>). But one external difference separates their work. 
Montaigne can be read by the educated French citizen of today, with only an 
occasional footnote to define an obsolete word. Rabelais needs much more 
assistance to make clear his vocabulary and constructions, especially because 
he often invents words out of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew that are not found in 
any other author. The prose of Montaigne is not yet limpid, rhythmical, ele- 
gant as it became half a century later (219>). His sentences bear the 
Humanist marks of the Latin syntax, and he affected a certain carelessness, 



I should like to say to Plato: "here is a nation 
that has no kind of trade, no knowledge of 
letters, no science of numbers, no word for 
magistrate or statesman, no use for slaves, 
neither wealth nor poverty, no contracts, no 
inheritance, no occupation but to be idle, 
only a general respect for parents, no cloth- 
ing, no agriculture, no metals, no use for 
wine or wheat. The very words for falsehood, 
treachery, deceit, avarice, envy, detraction, 
and pardon are unheard of. How far from 
this perfection would he find the Republic 
he imagined!" 

— Montaigne, "About the Cannibals" 
(1588) 



140 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

making fun of "some men so stupid that they go a mile to chase after a fine 
word." Even so, he wanted to "fit words to things" and he did revise. When 
he is difficult to follow, it is often the jump that he makes by sudden associa- 
tion, and it is this very jump that makes him inexhaustibly re-readable; spon- 
taneous novelty does not fade. 



Montaigne settles for himself so many live questions in passing that the 
Essays &tz the equivalent of some other philosophers' complete works — 
ethics, aesthetics, sociology, and the rest. As a result, his influence has been 
great but hard to trace. Montesquieu, Voltaire, and the philosophes in general 
owe much to him; his closest beneficiaries are Pascal, as we shall see, and 

Shakespeare 

The lines quoted above from The Tempest suggest that the poet did not 
take detailed Eutopias very seriously. Yet as pointed out, the whole play is 
eutopian, in form and atmosphere. It begins with a shipwreck that allows the 
survivors to land on a favored isle, and everything that ensues comes out hap- 
pily with a minimum of thwarted will. But it is all the work of magic, not 
human contrivance. The quoted remark about the "still-vexed Bermoothes" 
(Bermudas) is a sign that the playwright linked happy lives with the New 
World. It is his only exact reference to it (<124).° 

The traces of Montaigne in the play are unconcealed. Some dozen lines 
from the essay on cannibals are reproduced almost word for word in Act II, 
scene i, and the name of the gross Caliban is a spoonerism for cannibal, no 
doubt intentional. The human link between the two writers is John Florio, 
whose translation of the Essays made Montaigne known quickly in England; 
and it may well be that something of Shakespeare's lack of a positive creed, for 
which Bernard Shaw reproved him, was due to the Essays. Shakespeare at any 
rate found in Montaigne a kindred temperament. [The book to read is 
Shakespeare and Montaigne, by Jacob Feis, a hostile work that blames the latter 
for perverting the former's mind.] 

The strongest evidence of the kinship lies in their identical (and doubt- 
less independent) invention of "character." Montaigne, as we saw, pioneered 
in viewing man as ondqyant et divers, the variable sport of self and circumstance 
(<135). Making character a category of thought yielded nothing less than a 
rival to the physiology of the humors, namely psychology. The cognate fact is 
that in the drama before Shakespeare there are no characters, only types. 
Literature presented great figures made distinct from one another by a well- 
marked trait or two, but not rendered unique by complexity. 



The Eutopians <^ 141 

This is not to say that before Shakespeare the persons in the drama were 
unlifelike "cardboard." They were by no means abstractions as in the 
medieval plays, where "the Vice" is one of the actors. But they were single- 
tracked in their headlong roles, the shifts in their actions being due to the 
actions of others, who were similarly conditioned by mutual buffeting. This 
conflict enabled the playwright to portray the human passions in their variety 
and fatal consequences. This was enough for ancient Greek drama, the 
Elizabethan, and the French classical to hold the spectator breathless. But we 
cannot say that we know Oedipus or Phedre as we know King Lear or Lady 
Macbeth. The latter are as various as we feel ourselves to be, the others not; 
in types there are (so to speak) no irrelevancies. 

How does Shakespeare create the roundness of character? By throwing 
light on new aspects of the person in successive relations. Polonius as a 
courtier is obsequious, as a royal adviser overconfident, as a father to his 
daughter callously blind, as a father to his son, endearingly wise. The grand 
result of this method, this multi-dimensional mapping, is that since 
Montaigne and Shakespeare, plays, novels, and biographies have filled the 
western mind with a galaxy of characters whom we know better than our- 
selves and our neighbors. We say: she is a Jane Eyre or a Madame Bovary; he 
is a touching Billy Budd, or a regular Pecksniff. Note that although the world 
understands what Freud meant by the Oedipus complex, nobody has the 
slightest notion of how Oedipus felt when he killed his father and married his 
mother. His later sense of guilt is general, not particular. Note also that in dis- 
cussing Greek tragedy, Aristode says that the action, the plot, is all-important; 
never mind the characters. In short, the full theme of INDIVIDUALISM had not 
yet resounded. 

* * 

The Montaigne-Shakespeare link calls for the mention here that in the 
story of western culture Shakespeare belongs at two points quite distant from 
each other. He is a different figure in the two centuries, 1 6th and 1 9th. In the 
first, he is a Renaissance man in the fullest sense of the word: concerned with 
everything in the universe. He is also a semi-Eutopian, negatively: he depicts 
every species of infamy Then he is quasi forgotten, only to reappear in full 
(51 6>) near the beginning of the 19C as the bard, the Shakespeare who now 
lives in the textbooks, supplies actors with good material to cut from, and is 
so handy in advertising as the symbol of excellence. 

The one who lived two-thirds of his life in the 1 6C was a popular and 
profitable playwright, who was the object of much admiration and some jeal- 
ousy among his colleagues, and who earned the friendship of one of his rivals, 
Ben Jonson. The sincerest praise he received was as the author of the "sweet 



142 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

poems" Venus and Adonis, and The Rape ofLucrece; and later for some "sugared 
sonnets." There was fine poetry in the plays too, but it is not clear that his 
plays — or writing plays at all — had then the towering importance we now 
attach to such works. The craft carried with it a hint of pot-boiling; being a 
professional author was not a gentlemanly pursuit. Gentlemen — in palaces 
or at Oxford — wrote verse as a pastime, as a form of letter- writing or as com- 
pliments and small gifts, never for money. Besides, plays were rough-hewn 
things, fiddled with by the actors, directors, and printers, not polished works 
of art. Shakespeare's had the further demerit of not observing the classical 
rules. Ben Jonson was more conscientious and rated higher. 

These facts, limiting Shakespeare's contemporary fame and enhancing 
his friend's, are reflected in the references of the next century to their respec- 
tive works. The comments about them have been tabulated: not only is Ben 
Jonson rated the first great English dramatist, but his name appears three 
times as often as that of his inferior rival. Shakespeare performances after his 
death were few and we shall see on what grounds this low estimate was based 
(356>). 

Ben Jonson himself, in his retrospective words of praise and of love for 
his departed friend, utters the often-quoted wish that Shakespeare had "blot- 
ted a thousand lines." It might be an amusing parlor game to sit around a table 
with the text and match wits over which lines to blot. For despite what has 
been well-named bardolatry, readers since its start in the 19C have found 
much in Shakespeare that they wished away, but did not dare condemn 
openly. R. H. Hutton justified his own courage: if he was qualified to admire 
the great things in the bard, he was also qualified to reprove the bad — and not 
just fallings-off from sublimity, but the dreadfully bad. 

Among these would be the playing on words that spoils the mood, as in 
the song that ends: "boys and girls, like chimney sweepers, must come to 
dust." Again, crude comments, like the one about Ophelia drowned: "too 
much of water hast thou," or silly conceits: "the fringed curtains of thine eye 
advance," to mean shut your eyes. One also finds passages that defy sense — 
enough of them to suggest that they cannot all be attributed to printer's errors 
following bad stage copies. Finally, there are the "horrors" that made even an 
admirer like Voltaire, who knew the works in the original, call him a barbaric 
mind — the putting out of Gloucester's eyes on stage, for example, or "Exit, 
pursued by a bear." 

Bringing out the objections that the first Shakespeare was long liable to is 
a reminder of an easily forgotten fact of cultural history, and also a striking 
example of an important recurrence in that history: the radical, white- to- 
black, up-and-then-down variations in the periodic estimates of men and 
works. This has been aptly called "the whirligig of taste," the phrase itself 
alluding to one of Shakespeare's. To the Renaissance, Cicero was the 



The Eutopians <^> 143 

supreme man of letters; today he has been banished even from the classroom. 
Until the 1920s, John Donne was a name encountered in passing, mainly in 
the writings of other poets, such as Coleridge. Then Donne became a great 
poet, deemed by the New Critics, finer than Shakespeare because more philo- 
sophical and "better structured." The same Montaigne-like inconsistency 
occurs about periods: After 1 50 years of contempt, the Baroque, especially its 
music, has become a valued acquisition. And so on ad infinitum. 



Epic & Comic, Lyric & Music, 
Critic & Public 



A WIDELY READ NOVELIST of the 20C who had a talent for crime-and-spy 
fiction and occasionally wrote in that genre called those tales "entertainments." 
His novels dealt seriously with moral and religious issues. This unusual double 
role mirrors the literary situation of the late medieval and early Modern Era: 
writers then — poets for the most part — wrote to entertain a circle of friends or 
a princely or royal court, or else went in for moral edification, hoping to save 
the unregenerate and possibly produce literature with a large L. 

But there is a difference between Graham Greene and the Renaissance 
poets: today, the entertainments — by him or anybody else — are considered a 
lower sort of production, even when they are excellent in their kind. In the 
early Modern Era there was no such discrimination. For centuries, poetry and 
storytelling had no purpose but to entertain. There were no other means of 
spending leisure time, of chasing away boredom, than to sing, recite, or listen. 
This pastime itself became a device of fiction: in Boccaccio's Decameron, the 
famous set of erotic tales, these are presented to the reader as having been 
told to entertain a group of Florentines who fled their city to escape the 
plague. Marguerite of Navarre 200 years later used the framework again for 
her Heptameron (<86). 

But contemporary with Boccaccio, Petrarch wrote his Italian sonnets to 
"express himself" and a Latin epic to establish his fame in the way of the 
ancients. Thus entertainer and amateur slipped into professional. The recog- 
nized names: poet, playwright, essayist, novelist suggest the theme of SPE- 
CIALISM, then at the start of its career. Humanist awareness of the ancients 
gave this transformation a strong push. The Greeks and Romans, the 
ancients, had a literature in the formal sense and the moderns must build one 
too, a set of works that would reach beyond one's friends or fellow courtiers; 
Literature was for all time. 

The older role did not yield at once — or in full — to the new. Down to the 



146 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

1 9C one finds the poet writing for his circle, which may be the members and 
retainers of his patron's family (whence "occasional verse" = for an occasion) 
and also the royal poet laureate. The amateur survived too, especially the noble- 
man, who must affect nonchalance, tossing off sonnets and madrigals by virtue 
of his blue blood. Lord Byron was the last of the breed, though he tossed off 
larger fruit than the sonnet. Neither poet nor musician could as yet rely on pub- 
lishing to earn a livelihood. There was nothing like the modern maze of agents 
and editors, royalties, and reprint rights, although a kind of copyright was 
beginning to take shape: obtaining a "royal privilege" gave the possessor the 
exclusive right to print and sell a work, usually for ten years (< 1 30) . The scheme 
served censorship as well. The author sold this right and his text to the pub- 
lisher for a single flat sum. Milton's Paradise Lost, late in the 1 7C, when the prac- 
tice had become usual but not regular, went for 10 pounds. 

These arrangements explain why until recent times authors could claim, as 
they brought out their works, that a manuscript copy had got into print with- 
out their knowledge or consent — it was full of mistakes and now here was the 
work as it should be. The enduring practice of circulating hand- written copies 
of verses among friends, or even of philosophic and scientific papers, was a 
constant temptation to the pirate printer or the false friend. 

In short, at the start of the Modern Era we see only the rough outline of 
organized authorship and publishing and of similar institutions for the other 
arts. Yet the passage from the patron to legally protected public sale and 
yearly support by governments and foundations has not turned the artist into 
a certified professional whose license and abilities permit him to expect a rea- 
sonable livelihood. 

* * 

The Humanists believed that of all the literary forms, the epic was the 
highest. Being longer, it is hard to keep at a high level. This difficulty chal- 
lenged Petrarch, but his Latin proved unequal to the task (<49). The ancients 
offered but few models — Homer and Virgil were the outstanding pair, and 
Aristotle supplied virtually no rules for the genre. He only said that a true 
hero was essential, meaning that incidents and scenic details were not enough 
to sustain interest. 

Lacking or ignoring the many heroic poems of the early Middle Ages, 
from the Song of Roland to the Germanic and Icelandic sagas, the chief 
Renaissance epics were a peculiar blend, created by four Italian poets: 
Boiardo, Pulci, Ariosto, and Tasso. The first two belong to the 1 5C, the other 
pair to the 16th. Once as familiar throughout the West as Shakespeare and 
Goethe are now, those four names and their glory survive only in their coun- 
try of origin. When the gondoliers of Venice sing for the tourist, it may well 



Epic & Comic, Lyric & Music, Critic & Public <^> 147 

be bits of Tasso's epic. As late as the beginning of the 19C, Ariosto and Tasso 
were read, quoted, and enjoyed by educated Europeans. At the same time, 
Dante's Divine Comedy, also an epic adventure and now one of the "great 
books," was looked down on as "Gothic," a piece of medieval obscurantism. 
What is the "more human" subject of the other four Italian epics? The first 
three in the list take up some aspect of the legendary tale about Charle- 
magne's paladins or chosen knights whose mission in life is to fight the infi- 
del Saracens. They are betrayed by the villain Gan (in French, Ganelon) and 
are defeated at the famous battle of Roncesvalles in the Pyrenees. The early 
medieval Song of Roland, in Old French, gives the details in stark matter-of-fact 
language. Boiardo, Pulci, and Ariosto add the element of love, and with it the 
intervention of magic. Instead of the old epic's warriorlike sober sadness, they 
provide for the sophisticated Humanists and courtiers the excitement of 
love-making and of what has been called "The Marvelous," the miraculous, 
performed by black or white magic. 

The wizards and goblins and enchantresses are not meant to be believed 
in; they entertain by their unexpected powers and their malicious tricks, and 
they come to a bad end. It is wild fantasy: in Ariosto 's Orlando Furioso, the wiz- 
ard survives decapitation. In Pulci, the giant Morgante dies from laughing too 
much on seeing a monkey put on a pair of boots. In Tasso, one of the paladins 
sets out to clear a wood occupied by the forces of evil, and his dead mistress 
appears: she has been one of the trees. Women of great moral and physical 
strength play a large part in these adventures, especially the Valiant Amazon 
who occurs in the popular ballads and is here turned into a heroine and lover. 
Even the enchanting Armida, who helped the infidel, wins our admiring 
regard when she is converted by love. 

All this at first sight seems alien to Love against anger rose, and their dispute 
the Renaissance rejection of medieval Proved that her flame still glowed, though 
superstition in favor of the human and hid from view; 

lifelike. In effect, those epic magicians Three times her arms she stretched abroad 
fill the role of the gods and goddesses in to shoot > 

the ancient Greek and Roman epics, Three times took aim and thrice her arm 

while the paladins represent and behave ' 

. _ Disclaim at length prevailed: again the yew 

like the gentlemanly courtiers in Cas- _, . , , , . . . 

° J She with an eager and unshrinking arm 

tigUone's book of etiquette. Warfare B ent, and the bowstring twanged. The shaft 

between Christian and infidel, it must outflew- 

be remembered, was still going on in Q ut flew the shaft, but with the shaft this 

the 16C, medieval Saracen being charm: 

replaced by modern Turk: Ariosto's She the next moment breathed: "God grant 

Orlando Furioso ends with the hero's it do no harm!" 

killing the King of Algiers — precisely —Armida fighting Rinaldo in Tasso's 

what Charles V had been trying to do. Jerusalem Delivered (1 581) 



148 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

In three of the four poems — Boiardo's Orlando in Love, Pulci's Morgan the 
Great, and Ariosto's sequel to Boiardo, Orlando's Madness — the hero pursues 
several goals, but each comes to a different end. The name Orlando, by the 
way, is a metathesis for Roland. His madness is only fitful and is due to jeal- 
ousy in love. But what matters is not the plot but the charm and variety of the 
episodes. 

Tasso, a generation after Ariosto, chose a new theme in his Jerusalem 
Delivered, but it still combines religious zeal and love. His hero is the historical 
leader of the first Crusade, Godfrey of Bouillon, and the climax is the equally 
historical capture of the holy city. All the crusaders except Godfrey are in 
love; he is content to be kindness personified, quite unlike the real Godfrey. 
The others' amorous diversions are skillfully interwoven into the martial plot, 
so that the goal of the expedition is not lost sight of, only delayed. 

It is of course this unbusinesslike concern with lovemaking, together 
with the battle pieces, alienates the 20C reader. But to judge the poems fairly 
one must remember their audience. After the advent of the book, the plea- 
sure it afforded could still take the form of reading aloud to a group. The 
modern habit of silent and solitary intake was not yet ingrained, let alone the 
addiction to reading in bed, dependent as it is on central heating and a good 
steady light. In an epic tale, interest is best kept up by variations on the famil- 
iar. No large array of entertainments had trained the mind, as ours is, to 
accept the wholly unexpected and unconventional. In the Italian poems, sep- 
arate stories and digressions are inserted at intervals; these and the long 
speeches did not destroy suspense, on the contrary. In fact, the story-within- 
story device persisted as late as Dickens. As for love — or rather courtship — 
it is the pastime of the idle in any age, just as fighting is the diversion of the 
well-born as long as rank has any meaning. Denizens of courts never tired of 
either in their literature. 

In the light of these facts, the Italian epics must be seen as thoroughly up 
to date for their time. Their immense popularity, immediate or nearly so in all 
four cases, is the best proof. The poets' contemporaries in high places praised 
the works as masterpieces and used them as founts of truth; that is what epics 
are for. Galileo, for one, knew Ariosto by heart and loved it so much that he 
said mean things about that upstart, 

Tasso 

Socially, the poet was no upstart: he sprang from a large clan of nobles in 
Lombardy that had branches all over Europe, notably the Taxis family in 
Germany. In Latin, taxus means badger or yew-tree. The Tasso coat of arms 
sports the animal; but the poet preferred the tree, and his life makes this 
emblem of sadness appropriate. Among the Renaissance poets, he is the one 



Epic & Comic, Lyric & Music, Critic & Public <^> 149 

whose destiny has evoked lasting inter- ... I make 

est and been taken as typical of the artist A future temple of my present cell, 

mistreated by society. Because he was Which nations yet shall visit for my sake. 

confined to a lunatic asylum for seven While thou, Ferrara, when no longer dwell 

years by his patron, the Duke of Ferrara, The ducal chiefs withhl thee > shalt faU 
the poet has been pitied by other poets, down, 

and the patron and "society" pilloried. And crumbling piecemeal view thy 
^ , i -ii hearthless halls — 

Goethe wrote a play suggesting that the 

. . . A poet's wreath shall be thine only crown, 

duke was punishing the impudence or A , , 

r ° r A poet's dungeon thy most far renown. 

the genius for winning the love of the 

ii,. *r • •■ i « • — Byron, "The Lament of Tasso" (1817) 

duke s sister. After visiting the prison v 

cell" Byron wrote a poem that depicted 

the victim's mental torture. Liszt composed a symphonic vindication in two 

movements, the first entitled "Lament," the second, "Triumph." 

The legend should not be accepted uncritically. The quasi dungeon shown 
to the tourist is not where Tasso spent those seven years. In his actual apart- 
ment he wrote poems and essays and endless letters and he received visitors 
(including Montaigne), as well as gifts and praise from other writers and tided 
amateurs. What his life and undoubted misery exemplify is one kind of relation 
between genius and patron. Duke Alfonso was a show-off, touchy, ever con- 
scious of his rank. Torquato Tasso was a manic-depressive inclined to paranoia, 
and so resdess that his seven years' confinement was his longest period in one 
place after his first decade at Ferrara. His upbringing had bred him to wander- 
lust. His father, a poet of renown in his own time, was poor and feckless. He 
sought and held posts here and there, taking with him his son, the youngest 
child, and leaving his wife at home. She died when the boy was 1 3. Torquato did 
not resent this broken-family existence and — like Montaigne, Mozart, and 
Berlioz — loved and admired his father all his life. 

Shordy after his 16th birthday the youth was sent to the University of 
Padua to study law. There he wrote a verse romance, Rinaldo, which was soon 
published in Venice; at 19, he began his epic, Jerusalem Delivered. In Padua also 
he joined the Academy of the Ethereals founded by his friend Scipio 
Gonzaga, later a famous cardinal and Tasso's rescuer- friend. Academies then 
were informal groups of amateurs, mosdy young, who met to discuss the 
intellectual and religious issues of the day. They studied Plato, and read for 
comment each other's productions in verse and prose. Every self-respecting 
Italian city had at least one academy, each labeled with an evocative tide. 
Imitated abroad, these gatherings grew into the formal king-sponsored 
academies of the 17th and 18C, which in turn became the specialized learned 
societies of the 19th. 

For the Ethereals Tasso wrote three essays on the heroic poem as a 
genre — theory a bit ahead of practice. By then the father was resigned to his 



150 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

son's neglect of the law and Torquato went to Bologna to study "the good let- 
ters." Noticed for his talents and his tall, handsome bearing, he was taken into 
the retinue of Cardinal d'Este, to whom Rinaldo was dedicated. This appoint- 
ment (after a year's illness spent in Mantua) brought the youth of 21 to 
Ferrara, seat of the house of Este, the rabid enemies of the Medici. Alfonso's 
two sisters at once befriended the young poet, who saw in the duke his own 
epic hero: Alfonso was ready to help the emperor against the Turks with 300 
knights appareled in velvet and gold. 

Tasso, who had left a first love in Padua, now fell for a second, the beau- 
tiful Lucrezia Benedidio. But she did not respond to his suit and married 
Machiavelli instead. Tasso's loves were plentiful, a by-product no doubt of his 
restless moves from place to place; novelty of setting included the appeal of a 
fresh conquest. It would seem that a good number of these amours were lit- 
erary rather than passionate. A few fine sonnets recording the new ardor suf- 
ficed to fulfill the desire. Such was the fashion of the day — languishing in 
verse, suffering lyric despair, and sharpening the quill to besiege the next 
inamorata. Young Tasso, giddy and vain, wrote in praise of all the princesses 
around and took part in a pseudo debate three days long on "Fifty 
Conclusions About Love," a mixture of logic-chopping and erotic utterances. 
It made many jealous men and women. 

At one point, Cardinal d'Este took Tasso with him on a diplomatic visit 
to Charles IX of France. The king was a good judge of poetry and gratified 
Tasso's thirst for praise. But the poet made a tacdess remark about the sur- 
prising toleration of Protestants at the French court. The cardinal dropped 
him and from that moment on (though not cause and effect) Tasso's troubles 
began. He could not be happy in spite of honors, affection, and praise. 
Everything seemed to him false. In a pastoral play, Aminta, which he wrote at 
that time and which was performed to everybody's delight both at Ferrara 
and a neighboring town, he denounces courdy life: it is "the House of Idle 
Talk" where "one sees things as they are not." 

He had become suspicious of his very success. The more compliments 
he received the more he imagined he had enemies who were denying him the 
genuine praise he deserved. He was also worried about the orthodoxy of his 
Jerusalem epic and, wanting a papal license, he submitted it to the Vatican, 
where niggling censors took two years to riddle the work with objections. The 
edicts of Trent were being applied. Tasso grew wildly irritable, demanding 
attention, challenging criticism. He had a scuffle in public over an insulting 
word, feared assassins, and then bragged that he had scattered a squad of 
them. This tale was long believed outside Ferrara, so plausible was the 
sequence of events. But Tasso's truly grave offense was that he negotiated 
secretly with the aid of his friend Gonzaga for an invitation to Rome by the 
house of Medici, the D'Este's enemies. 



Epic & Comic, Lyric & Music, Critic & Public ^ 151 

The offer he obtained was so generous that it raised all his apprehen- 
sions: Was it for him really and truly, or against the D'Estes? He turned down 
the Roman welcome, went back to Ferrara, fell in love with a newly arrived 
beauty, believed the duke would burn his great poem not quite finished, and 
attacked a servant with a knife. Alfonso used the mildest means to have him 
confined to his apartment and treated by a physician. Tasso wrote to some 
friends that he was being taken care of like a brother, and to other friends, 
"treated like a criminal." The duke meanwhile was doing all he could to keep 
the epic poem from being pirated in other cities. 

It would be tedious to recount all that followed Tasso's first move away 
from Ferrara. The pattern goes something like this: he entreats friends to 
receive him in another town; they comply. In two months, he moves again. As 
with D. H. Lawrence in our century, the first few weeks' stay satisfies every 
wish; then: "This place is no good." Tasso yearns to go back to Ferrara. The 
duke is willing to forgive — and does so more than once. Tasso takes to a con- 
vent and resolves to become a friar. Then he flees to his widowed sister in 
Naples. He comes dressed as a shepherd for security in traveling alone and 
arrives so haggard that she does not recognize him. She lavishes tender care, 
but it is no good. He must go to Rome, and the round begins again: a few 
months each at Rome, Mantua, Naples, Florence, Turin, Urbino, Ferrara. 
There, at last, at the age of 35, he thinks he will be able to put die finishing 
touches to the grand story of the Crusaders' capture of Jerusalem. 

Unfortunately, the duke is getting married for the third time and he and 
his entourage are too busy to pay as much attention to the returning prodigal 
as he is entided to. He goes frantic and shouts curses and invectives in public. 
Alfonso and his court are a crowd of ungrateful debauchees and cowards. 
Tasso is taken to the hospital of St. Anne for the poor and lunatic. The blow 
is unexpected. He implores the duke to set him free, but he suffers delusions 
and hallucinations. He sees the Virgin Mary, he eats and drinks too much "so 
that he can sleep"; he begs his physician to make the medicine less bitter. But 
he also writes sonnets and answers rationally, learnedly, the reviews of his 
work. For his Jerusalem has at last been printed, though in a garbled edition, 
and he reads avidly all the comments it evokes. The pope was ready to honor 
him with the laurel crown in Rome when the poet died in 1 595. 

* 

Like its three predecessors, Jerusalem Delivered combines holy war and 
love affairs, lifelike adventure and magic spells. The duels and batdes are vig- 
orous and convincing; there is a talking bird and a wizard who walks on 
water; the Devil appears, complete with horns and tail, and as mentioned 
earlier, at the very end the lovely witch Armida, whose evil enchantments 



152 vk From Dawn to Decadence 

have helped the infidels, is converted by love for her dedicated foe. Orlando 
himself is shrewd and touching by turns, and the "marvels" are so well done 
that when one is in the mood they produce the effect that modern taste 
finds in science fiction. 

The work has been aptly called an epic for lovers. Charlemagne's paladins 
would have been disgusted with it, and the ancients would have called it a 
romance, not an epic. The Italians' side dishes of the erotic and the marvelous 
are so good of their kind that they have furnished characters and plots for 
innumerable grand operas, from the inception of the genre (1 74>) through 
the centuries up to the rise of opera, that is, from Monteverdi, Handel, Gluck, 
and Rossini to Meyerbeer (498; 499 >). 

If, as critics seem to agree, epic means heroic, the Italian attempts at the 
genre must be called failures, or else classified under some other rubric. 
[The book to read is W P. Ker's Epic and Romance^ Their authors knew but 
disregarded or misunderstood Aristode's dictum that the source of interest 
in epic is character in the sense of "person of character." The hero must be 
firm in danger and undeviating from the line of duty. Achilles' defection at 
the opening of the Iliad is part of a struggle for power; and Aeneas is not 
afraid to boast: "I am the faithful Aeneas," meaning faithful to his mission — 
and therefore unfaithful to Dido. This artistic principle excludes the self- 
indulgence of the lovelorn. To be sure, there are love passages in the Odyssey 
and the Aeneid, but they are few, brief, and shown as hindrances, not priori- 
ties. In the 8C Song of Roland, the only mention of a woman in love — Roland's 
betrothed Aude — is half a stanza about her death from grief at his being 
killed. In the Italians' would-be epics the women are finer, stronger charac- 
ters than the men — another sign that the tone of the poems was up to date. 

But whatever misdirected intentions may be listed as flaws in these 
works, we know that they exerted their charm on the best judges down to the 
first quarter of the 19C, partly for a cultural reason now forgotten: Italian was 
the language, next to French, that the educated must know: the mother of the 
arts dare not be ignored; and so we find — to name a few others than Byron 
and Goethe — Voltaire, Landor, and Thomas Love Peacock quoting the 
Italian poets from memory and exclaiming at the beauties that now lie buried 
there. Shelley was also a devotee, who in his "Defence of Poetry" credited 
Tasso with being the first to call a poet a creator. Tasso scholars have not 
found that bold comparison, now a cliche. 

Reasons for the eclipse of a classic are not easy to find. The retreat of 
Tasso and Ariosto within their native frontiers coincided with the West's dis- 
covery of German culture, which required the literate to learn German and 
possibly to visit Germany, but this conjunction in time may be accidental. A 
more plausible reason is that the merits of Tasso and his predecessors were 
literary rather than intellectual and moral. They have never been satisfactorily 



Epic & Comic, Lyric & Music, Critic & Public <^> 153 

translated, whereas Dante with his system of ideas keeps inciting foreigners 
to translate him. 

Again, there is the ever-watchful Boredom, ready to pounce and destroy 
what has been too often tasted and touted. And when the really new is abun- 
dant, as it was in the Romanticist period, it swamps the old by sheer weight of 
numbers. Finally, there is the pressure of social evolution. The sequence of 
dominant genres during our half millennium has paralleled the march of the 
Individual toward equality; it runs: epic, tragedy, the lyric speaking for the self, 
and the novel and the play in prose criticizing life. This is to say that it goes 
from the hero of a whole people to the great hero of tragedy, to the common- 
man hero, to the anti-hero. 



* 
* * 



While Tasso was garnering praise for his work, another poet in another 
southern land was composing a true epic. If the name of Camoens and the 
tide Lusiads do not at once evoke recognition, the reason is again that of lan- 
guage: Portuguese is not widely read or studied outside its native limits in 
Europe and America. Camoens chose a subject more factual than the pal- 
adins and had a more useful experience than the Italians for epic work. He 
was a soldier and sailor. He fought the Moors in north Africa, lost his right 
eye in batde and was invalided, re-enlisted to find adventure in the Indies, and 
there became an official in charge of a trading post. Accused of embezzle- 
ment and put in prison, he managed to get free and sail home. There, like 
everybody who could hold a pen, he wrote plays and sonnets and began the 
epic that made him the great national poet — indeed, a great poet tout court. 

His subject was contemporary: the conquest of the ocean sea by the 
Portuguese. And his ostensible hero was a recent, historical character, Vasco 
da Gama. The actual hero is the Portuguese people, "the illustrious heart of 
Lusitania"; the name of the ancient Roman province that recurs in the tide 
Lusiads. The adventures of the hero as man and people are the real and alle- 
gorical events of the explorer's voyage home from the East. What there is of 
the marvelous in the incidents is due not to magic but to the well-known gods 
and goddesses of the ancients. Thus in the great episode of the Isle of Love, 
the domain of Venus, where the sailors take the Nereids, nymphs of the sea, 
as brides, Gama is the lover of their queen, Thetis, hitherto unattainable. 
Gama succeeds in his wooing after the repulsive giant Adamastor, typifying 
the enemies of the Portuguese, has failed. The union of godly beauty with 
human courage is to produce the future heroes of Portugal. In Greek mythol- 
ogy, when Thetis is subdued by Love, her offspring is the daundess Achilles. 

This sample episode from The Lusiads is enough to show that it is a 
Humanist epic. Women other than goddesses play important parts in several 



154 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

of the main scenes. Among these is the story, told with lyrical tenderness, of 
Ines de Castro, the historical mistress of Prince Pedro of Portugal, whose 
close advisers compelled him to have her put to death. In tone and concep- 
tion, the poem is equidistant from the popular ballad and the learned pas- 
tiche. Camoens has been blamed for mixing the pagan myths with Christian, 
but it is standard Humanist practice (<52). It is not sacrilege but spiritual syn- 
onymy. In The Lusiads the allegorical and the historical planes are traversed by 
physical action, told with unabating vigor and vivid detail. It came naturally to 
one who, though writing on terra fir ma, had spent many days on the deck of 
a ship. The fervor with which Camoens celebrates the conquest, first of the 
sea by rounding the Cape of Storms at the tip of Africa, and then of the 
natives and the trade of the southeast Indies, makes his poem the first and last 
national epic — this at a time when the nations of the West were not so much 
made as in the making. The work withstands comparison with Virgil's impe- 
rial Aeneid. Using a longer line than the Italians, Camoens was able to achieve 
grandeur more easily, especially in the speeches. And he shares with the 
ancients and the writers of sagas something one might call epic pessimism. 
He is also considered Portugal's greatest lyric poet, as well as the man whose 
writings fixed the Portuguese language. 

Os Lusiadas has been translated four times into English, the latest version 
being in prose. [The one to read is Leonard Bacon's, in verse.] But there is 
another means of access that is strongly recommended to anyone who knows 
Spanish: it is to study in a comparative grammar the forms that differ regu- 
larly in Spanish and Portuguese and then to plunge into the poem with a dic- 
tionary at hand. 

In their own explorations the Spanish had as good materials as Camoens, 
but their one effort, Ercilla's Araucana, took a South American locale for its 
events and is said by good judges to contain only one passage of epic quality: 
the natives' resistance to the colonists/ In France, poems in that genre were 
attempted in the next two centuries, with the same intent as Camoens 's — to 
glorify the nation, now full fledged. But they failed to an even worse degree 
than the Italians and Spanish. Germany meanwhile could show only folk bal- 
lads and the comic adventures of Till Eulenspiegel; which leaves the 
Elizabethans to be accounted for. They knew their Ariosto at least and were 
variously influenced by him, perhaps to their detriment. Spenser's Faerie 
Queene is a long narrative poem in praise of Queen Elizabeth, but no national 
emotion emerges from the allegory The pleasure lies in the superb poetry 
that conveys rich scenery and high morality, with no immediacy in what pur- 
ports to be epic adventure; it has even been said that its language is not gen- 
uine English, meaning vernacular and contemporary. But admirers of Keats 
should read his master if they do not already know him. 



Epic & Comic, Lyric & Music, Critic & Public <**> 155 

More vivid and more varied, Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia might be called 
"epical." It is made up of verse and prose and offers, despite its pastoral tide 
drawn from an Italian work by Sannazaro, strong characters and good plotting. 
It has the distinction of embodying passages by the author's sister, the learned 
charmer and intellectual Lady Pembroke. Sidney did not at first regard it as an 
epic on classical lines, he thought it a romance. But as he added adventures the 
heroic element increased, only to be overborne by debates on politics and 
morals, discussions of beauty and suicide and the existence of God. The work 
is imbued with the chivalric spirit of its creator, truly a "perfect, gentle knight," 
who died of his wounds in battie: he had taken off his leg armor when he saw 
another captain refusing to put on anything as strong as his own. 

* * 

It was not until the advent of the long-playing disk in the mid-20C that 
the general public had, or could have, any idea of the richness and beauty of 
Renaissance music. In the mid-1 9C Victor Hugo wrote a long poem entitied: 
"That Music Dates from the Sixteenth Century." This proposition states all 
that was known on the subject then and later. In its flat assurance the state- 
ment is of course wrong. It should have said modern music. The poem in fact 
tells us very littie about music — Hugo was no musician — and much about 
16C art and artists. To complicate matters, there is disagreement about the 
degree of novelty in Renaissance music as there is about the period as a 
whole° ( < 47). This need not cause surprise: the many-facetedness of written 
music and the fluid testimony of the ear make for contradiction. Besides, as 
shown earlier, antecedents can be found for nearly any innovation. What may 
properly be called new is any work or artistic practice that is not isolated in its 
originality, but visible and potent. 

On this premise, several points may safely be made: the first is: the 
Renaissance found new programs for music. "Programs" is used here advis- 
edly and for a critical purpose that will emerge later on (639>). All music has 
a program, a formal plan that must also be functional. A composer puts 
sounds together for a purpose — to fit the steps of a dance, the words of a 
song, the character of each part of a religious service, or any other goal that 
may fire his imagination. It may be an outward demand or event or simply a 
private thought or memory — the range is unlimited. That is what makes 
music an art on a par with the rest. 

In the late 1 5C and thereafter, the programs were increasingly secular, in 
keeping with the importance that the period attached to human actions and 
feelings. These programs — as noticed earlier (<121) — arose out of the activ- 
ities of courts, the cities' love of festivals, the demand for entertainment in 



156 c^s From Dawn to Decadence 



All their music, both vocal and instrumental, large and small households, the abun- 

is adapted to imitate and express the pas- dant production of poetry (including a 

sions and is so happily suited to every occa- widespread revival of Petrarch's), and 

sion that whether the subject of the hymn be fa e Humanists' passion for emulating 

cheerful or formed to soothe or trouble the ^ andent Greeks, whose writings 

mind, or to express grief or remorse, the ascfibed tQ musk a ^^ ^ ^ ^ 

music takes the impression of whatever is ^, , i • i i i i 

r The courtly round included wed- 

represented, affects and kindles the passions, „ . . 

, . , dings, official receptions, funerals, tour- 

and works the sentiments deep mto the ° ' r 

hearts of the hearers. naments, and wars. We find Jannequin, 

for example, composing; a choral work 

—Thomas More in Utopia (1516) . . . ,f_ _ r . 5\ r . 

entitled The Battle of Mangnan, as 

well as pieces on workaday subjects 
such as "The Hunt" and "Paris Shouts and Cries." A sizable group of choris- 
ters singing in parts suggested such imitative effects of ordered confusion. 
With its shadings by means of voice combinations, its variety of dynamics 
(volume) and rhythmic and harmonic possibilities, the 16C chorus prefigures 
not the orchestra as such but its effects — dialogue between sections, variety 
of tone-color, and physical impact. 

The period was one of musical expansion — larger choirs in churches, 
bigger and better organs, larger "families" of instruments and more numer- 
ous players in town bands — all encouraged by more patrons of the art. 
Castiglione in his Courtier had required the gentleman and lady to be practic- 
ing musicians and he set the scene for the pastime: when close friends of both 
sexes were together it was to be an interlude during conversation. Others 
argued platonically that the art was conducive to order and harmony in pri- 
vate life and the state. Certainly the men and women in the half-dozen Italian 
towns where the new music developed with the help of a duke or a learned 
lady were bent on more than casual pleasure. In Rome, Florence, Venice, 
Ferrara, Mantua, Urbino, and Naples, poets, musicians, and mathematicians 
debated what music should be. They worked at devising new forms and tech- 
niques, wrote theories, and tried their innovations on the amateurs who gath- 
ered in academies like the scholars and philosophers. 

The resulting works were of various kinds. The resident poet at court 
would write a pastoral or allegorical story in episodes that called for music, 
lyrical or dramatic and interspersed with dances. Petrarch, once again in 
favor, had given the model of a sequence of poems on one subject. The 
Renaissance composers followed suit. They set groups of madrigals treating 
of one theme or unfolding a tale. Vecchi entitled such a sequence commedia har- 
monica. One thinks at once of Schuman and Schubert, masters of the song 
cycle. In 16C Italy the numerous patternings of poetry and music were fore- 
runners of the later forms, cantata and oratorio, plus one other easy to guess 
and soon to be named. 



Epic & Comic, Lyric & Music, Critic & Public <^o 157 

The church service itself, which had always used music to heighten the 
devotional mood, was reformed in the interest of musical appropriateness. 
The Mass had for some time been used by composers simply as a chance to 
give a concert; now it was to be set so that the music of each section was in 
keeping with the words. And care must be taken to avoid breaking those 
words in half or distorting their accentuation. 

The Protestants managed this very well with their hymns and chorales 

sung by the congregation in unison. These changes of practice can be 

summed up as a universal effort to 

achieve expression in music, expres- In college or monastery it is still the same: 

sion through music. The tendency is music, nothing but music. Words nowadays 

itself an expression of the modern mean nothing. They are mere sounds strik- 

temper in the arts, which aims at the ^ u P on me ear > imd men are to leave meir 

particular in place of the general and work *"* 8° to church to Usten to worse 

concentrates all means and devices on noises ^ were ever heard m Greek or 

^ i • ^i ^ • ^ Roman theater. Money must be raised to buy 

portraying what is unique, that is to say J J 

organs and train boys to squeal. 
INDIVIDUAL. & J -i 

— Erasmus (1513) 

* * 

A full understanding of the musical means newly devised in the 
Renaissance would naturally require the use of technical terms and illustra- 
tions in notes. But a skeletal idea of the significant change may be given in 
words alone if a brief retrospect is first supplied. 

For most of the Middle Ages, church music consisted of the so-called 
Gregorian chant — one line of melody attached to the words of the service. 
And of course the large repertory of popular and domestic music was also 
melodic — one voice. In the 12C flowering of art and thought it was found that 
two or more melodies could be combined agreeably, though this blurred the 
words. In the next two centuries the ars nova (new technique), as it was called by 
its first theorist, Philippe de Vitry, added voices and tempted composers in 
northern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands (called for short the Flemish 
School) to play with the technique for the sole pleasure of exploring its possi- 
bilities. This complex art developed luxuriantly to the detriment of expressive- 
ness. Zeal for discovery rather than use is a repeated occurrence in all the arts. 

Vitry also devised the symbols for noting music and showing its measure 
by means of numbers (binary time and so on). Armed with all these, the 
Flemish School had the great merit of demonstrating the resources and estab- 
lishing the rules of the style called polyphony. By an obvious image it is called 
horizontal: the composer writes melodic lines that move forward along four, 
six, or more paths simultaneously. In these combinations, the notes sound 
together pleasantly most of the time — hence the other name, counterpoint: 



158 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

There is a certain hidden power in the one point or note jammed against 
thoughts underlying the words themselves, another. But this piling up occasionally 
so that as one meditates and constancy and proves harsh or intolerable. Out of this 
seriously considers them, the right notes in predicament comes the idea of corn- 
some inexplicable fashion suggest them- posing 'Vertically," ma t is, taking care 
selves spontaneously. about ^ coUisions that occur betwe en 

— William Byrd, Preface to Graduaija horizontal lines. This musical style 

' ' bears the other obvious name of har- 

mony It offers the listener a melody 
visualized as being on top (though all notes are equidistant from the center of 
the earth) and having "below" a group of notes (a chord) so chosen as not to 
shock the ear — or if they do, to do it in a passing way, quickly "resolved" into 
harmoniousness. Both styles, polyphony and harmony, are equally capable of 
expressiveness, although harmony is better suited to the lyrical, individual 
voice and its nuances of feeling. The seesaw in the history of music between 
harmony and polyphony is a characteristic instance of response to external 
demands, coupled with fatigue-and-boredom prompting change. 

The technical innovation of the 16C was to combine elements of the two 
musical styles, the polyphonic and the harmonic. This merger produced a 
number of new forms, both for voice alone and for voice accompanied by 
instruments. Chief of these was the madrigal, a verse form more flexible than 
those sung by the troubadours — the minstrels — in the Middle Ages: ballade, 
sestina, and others. Like the popular songs that continued to be written and 
sung, the 16C lyrics dealt with the eternal subjects — love, sorrow, death, the 
springtime, and drinking. The music of a madrigal could vary from stanza to 
stanza and, as we have seen, a series of such poems could be made into a quasi 
dramatic work; there was no refrain or lines repeated word for word to halt 
the forward motion of the idea. The madrigal originated in Italy and was cul- 
tivated there by many gifted hands, but it also inspired in England a school of 
brilliant composers (161>) who flourished from the mid-16C to the early 
part of the next. Though long ignored, they have come in our century to be 

ranked among the master musicians. 

Other 16C forms such as the pas- 
It would not be fitting to use a sad harmony : , 

. , . , toral, the masquerade, and the ballet 

and a slow rhythm with a gay text or a gay ^ 

harmony and quick lightfooted rhythm to a (^ speech-and-dance ancestor of 

tragic matter full of tears. [The composer] what we ^^ undef that name ) 

must set each word to music in such a way embodied the same intention. Whether 

that where it denotes hardness, cruelty, etc. the subject was the loves of shepherds 

the music must be similar to it, without and shepherdesses in the pastoral or 

offending. pagan gods and goddesses in the ballet 

— Zarlino of Venice, Harmonic or masquerade (in English, the 

Principles (1558) masque), the emotions to be under- 



Epic & Comic, Lyric & Music, Critic & Public <^d 159 

lined by music were worldly, not the familiar religious ones. A set of rules 
must therefore be devised to ensure a comparable fitness. 

Another problem to solve came from the Humanist devotion to the 
ancients, which urged that some form be devised to emulate Greek drama. 
Those plays, as everybody knew, were musicals — dialogue, song, and dance. 
The word tragedy means "goat song," a reminder of the animistic and musical 
origin of the genre. To re-create it after a thousand years, modern music must 
be at once expressive and transparent: it must leave the words of the play 
intelligible. 

With so many purposes to fulfill, battle was joined among theorists and 
practitioners. The main conflict was between the lyricist, who cherished his 
expressive words, and the lover of musical complexity, who reveled in coun- 
terpoint of 4 and up to 16 different voices and who argued that a vocal 
ensemble was fully expressive. The masses and secular works of Orlando 
Lasso, Josquin des Pres, Palestrina, and Victoria are there to prove the con- 
tention. The 1 6C gave the world the richest legacy of purely vocal music, 
polyphonic and expressive in character. 

The attackers of polyphony won out. They had in mind not only the ele- 
gant playlike forms of the court but also the public occasions cited earlier. 
Any gain in clear expression would improve all festive uses. The lyricist sided 
with them because his role too had changed. He had, figuratively speaking, 
dropped the lyre. Formerly, the troubadour-minstrel sang his own song to his 
own strumming, or if accompanied by one or two jongleurs (players) to pluck 
the strings, the work performed was still the entire product of his mind — as 
it is again today in pop, rock, rap, and other explosive musics. The new, 
words-only poet still hankered after performance and when his poem was set 
to music he wanted its verbal beauties appreciated — hence no polyphony. 

Better than arguments was the 

actual creation of various attempts at 

j j t c The melody must not depict mere graphic 

music drama and the setting or poems J r ° r 

. , i • i • ii details in the text but must interpret the feel- 

and church ritual in a manner that has 

ing of the whole passage. 
been called word-painting (an unfortu- 

, r r • -1 — GiulioCaccini(1601) 

nate term since the effect is not visual 

but visceral; 640 >). Thus Vincenzo 

Galilei, father of Galileo the astronomer, set Ugolino's monologue from 

Dante's Inferno; others took passages from Tasso; still others — in France — 

invented the vaudeville, a storytelling song in many stanzas; while the English 

school of madrigalists produced, as mentioned earlier, a body of work of the 

first magnitude in both amount and quality. In short, the single voice, fully 

expressive, survived side by side with the relentless search for the perfect 

form of dramatic music, the search that ended with the century itself in a new 

genre: the opera (174>). 



160 c^> From Dawn to Decadence 



The divorce between the poet, who is content to write and publish words 
by themselves, and the musician, who sets the verses he happens to like> is now 
an irreversible division of labor. The terms we use mirror the facts: when we 
refer to the lyrics of a musical, we mean the words only; and we call accompa- 
niment the music that goes, like a jongleur, with the utterance. A second implied 
theme is emancipation. Sixteenth-century music freed itself from the 
rigidities of the Flemish polyphony. It gave poet and musician greater scope by 
separating their functions; it added to the choral registers the bass voice, not 
commonly included before; it ventured into chromaticism ("color" by means 
of notes foreign to the scale being used; here the uninhibited Gesualdo was a 
pioneer); it made the playing of instruments alone seem natural: the creation of 
the orchestra is plausibly dated 1470;° and it inaugurated the grand music festi- 
val: the two Gabrielis, uncle and nephew, made San Marco in Venice resound 
with compositions for masses of players and singers in dramatic exchanges 
across an open space. A new term, concerti (striving together), indicated instru- 
mental combinations of various types and sizes. And of course the rampant 
expressionism had to find expression marks for the score to decree speed and 
mood: the familiar adagio, allegro, tremolo, and so on — technical terms for which 
the Italian language seemed predestined. 

The Italian musicians were fully aware of their advances upon new 
ground. The title pages of their published works bear the words new music or 
some equivalent. A curious, possibly related fact: in the city of Lyon, then a 
buzzing center of occidental culture, a printer who specialized in music pub- 
lishing brought out a notable work in the new style, Musicque dejoye. His name 
was Jacques Moderne. Was it his real name or a deft piece of advertising? In 
any case, the "cult of the new" attributed to recent times has a history that 
goes back at least to Philippe de Vitry — 700 years. 

As might be said again, not all the new ways became universal at once. 
Some styles and usages died out slowly. Polyphony was indestructible. And 
the poet-musician and the musician-poet survived, especially among ama- 
teurs, who exercised their double gift nobly like the Englishman Thomas 
Campion, or mechanically, like the German cobbler Hans Sachs, who turned 
out products in bulk and at top speed: 4,275 songs, 1,700 poems, 208 plays. 

It is only fair to add that music in the Renaissance had its enemies, some 
merely censorious, some radical. Among the latter, Savonarola was prince. 
His bonfire reduced to ashes all the instruments he could collect. In the 
north, a similar opinion, but less effective, inspired Hieronymus Bosch (antic- 
ipating Bernard Shaw) to put musical instruments in two of his panoramas of 
Hell. These attitudes are consistent with an undercurrent of Renaissance cul- 
ture that may be called its dark thoughts. Gesualdo's lyrics often invoke death. 



Epic & Comic, Lyric & Music, Critic & Public <^> 161 

The melancholic and the moralists, as well as the devout, read the times as 
wicked and bound for perdition. Endless wars, recurrent plague, the new 
curse syphilis, the readiness to murder for gain or revenge — all these fre- 
quently depicted in the Dance of Death — justified gloom. In any period it is 
hard to believe in the maxim Emollit musica mores — music makes behavior 
gender. Among the censors were the bishops at Trent, who edicted rules for 
religious music, thus ensuring an unstoppable controversy: is music that dra- 
matizes the service acceptable, or does piety require, even when facing the 
Last Judgment, the unbroken calm of prayer — the Requiem of Berlioz or that 
of Faure? 

The bishops had reasons for their A , .. , , , 

r Many evil and depraved men misuse music 

crackdown. Some of the early poly- as an excitant m order to plunge klto earthly 
phonists did not scruple to use pop- delights, instead of raising themselves by 
ular tunes — often linked to obscene means of it to the contemplation of God and 
words — as themes for their church to praise His glories. 
compositions. The faithful were upset; —Victoria [greatest of Spanish 1 6C 
recognizing the tune made the service composers, whose works are 

a burlesque. But purism went further: uncommonly exciting]. (1581) 

some said that only vocal music a cap- 

pella (no accompanying instruments) was fit for worship. The basilica of St. 
Peter's in Rome held to that view, though the pope's own chapel tolerated 
organ accompaniment. Philip II of Spain banned all styles but Gregorian 
chant. Beyond excluding the tune of vulgar songs, no citing of reasons can 
settle the issue. 

One further fact about Renaissance music is notable: it was not only 
boldly inventive and in some genres unsurpassable, it was also international. 
Much came from Italy, but England, the Netherlands, France, Spain, and 
Portugal could boast great masters. To take but one illustration, the English 
madrigalists Dowland, Byrd, Tallis, Morley, Gibbons, Weelkes, and their kind, 
who set poems by Ariosto, Ben Jonson, Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, John 
Donne, and Sir Walter Raleigh, form a galaxy of artists whose eminence is 
acknowledged by all qualified judges. [For the amateur musician the practical 
guide to read is The English Madrigal School by Edmund H. Fellows.] There is 
still need to correct the general impression that the Germans have at all times 
been the musical people, especially the contingent living in and around 
Vienna. In the early Modern Era the Germanies were certainly not in the 
vanguard, and their output of folk songs has been meager compared to that 
of other peoples. Why should humankind everywhere be obliged to shine 
steadily in all the arts? The spirit bloweth where it listeth. 

* 
* * 



162 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

One has only to look at the songs scattered through Shakespeare's plays to 
see what the Renaissance poet felt free to do. Whether or not he had a tune in 
mind, he was emancipated from the medieval stanzas shaped for music. The 
result was a great outpouring of passionate verse, particularly fine in England 
and France. The harvest of the English Renaissance is so abundant and so well 
known that it is only necessary to mention it, although from Sidney's eloquent 
Defence ofPoetrie one gathers that the art was appreciated only by the elect. In any 
event, from Wyatt and Surrey to Jonson and Donne, the list of great names is 
continuous and long in relation to the span of years. Sonnets, singly and in 
sequences, odes, madrigals, narratives retelling classical myths flooded the court, 
the universities, the theater, the great houses — and correspondence; for one of 
the genres now almost extinct was the letter or message in verse, sent to a friend 
or patron on the occasion of a birth or wedding, an invitation to dine or simply 
a topic under discussion. Anybody and everybody was likely to produce these 
improvisations. Some might be no more than an exclamation on the spot. 

The love sonnet and other love 
Oh, Fortune! How thy restless wavering lyrics outnumbered all other forms and 

state subjects and established conventions 

Hath fraught with cares my troubled wit! about feeling and courtship so narrow 

Witness this present prison, whither fate that it is a wonder they lasted so long. 

Could bear me, and the joys I quit. For 300 years the poet wooed a reluc- 

— Queen Elizabeth when prisoner at tant mistress by turns indifferent, 

Woodstock, written with charcoal hard-hearted, coquettish, cruel, and 

on a shutter (1554) faithless. This state of affairs was self- 

perpetuating: mutual love generates no 
extensive riming. The beloved's features too were standardized in certain 
adjectives of color and shape and likened to natural objects, fruit and flowers 
especially. As a result, ingenuity in finding fresh ways to follow the pattern 
was required in addition to actual poetic powers. The challenge was great and 
it accounts for the quantity of verbal lovemaking in the blue, addressed to the 
remote or non-existent tribes of Celias and Delias. 

This last detail need not lower the value of the poetry, though readers 
prefer what seem to them the cries really wrung from the soul, the genuine 
pangs of jealousy in Shakespeare's sonnets or the desperate calm of Chidiock 
Tichborne awaiting execution. [The book to read is the anthology, The English 
Poets, Volume II: Marlowe to Marvell, edited by W. H. Auden and Norman 
Holmes Pearson.] 

* 

* * 

The comparable French poets, a smaller group, were perhaps the first 
anywhere who thought of themselves as a "school." At their beginnings they 



Epic & Comic, Lyric & Music, Critic & Public <^ 163 

called themselves a brigade; then, their fame increasing and their numbers 
decreasing, they took the name of Plei'ade, in English Pleiades, after the 
Greek myth of the seven stars and the constellation so named by the 
astronomers. The 20C publisher of well-edited French classics took the label 
again for his series, to suggest their excellence on a par with the poets'. But 
this implication is relatively recent. The seven, so much admired in their own 
day, were eclipsed at the turn of the 1 6C for reasons that mark an epoch in 
French politics and society (187>). 

As we see in the poems they addressed to one another, the seven saw 
themselves as revolutionaries bent on making all things new in poetry. In their 
exuberant awareness of novelty and mastery of form they knew they were the 
avant-garde, a metaphor, as it happens, first used by their contemporary, the 
social historian Etienne Pasquier. For a time, some of the group tried to 
revive the ancient meters, scanning the verse not by accent but by quantity — 
the length of the vowel and syllable. Jacques de la Taille supplied a theory, 
while independendy in England and Italy similar attempts were made. The 
modern languages refused to cooperate; under the pressure of accent their 
syllables are indeterminate. 

Innovation in language and meter was nonetheless the merit of the Plei'ade, 
manifested most fully in the work of its chief, Ronsard. He faced a great diffi- 
culty: the enthusiasm of the early Humanists had borne hard on the French 
vocabulary. Its neat, brisk old words had been replaced by new ones made up 
of Greek and Latin roots. For example, the people of the early Middle Ages had 
taken the Latin potionem and whittled and polished it down into poison. The 
Renaissance re-introduced potion. This must be considered a gain because the 
two words mean different things; but in a multitude of other cases the new dis- 
placed the old. (English experienced a similar influx that doubled its share of 
words: motherhood, maternity?) In French, moreover, as Rabelais' diction shows, a 
flood of long Greco-Roman hybrids had swollen literary diction and made it 
pedantic, abstract, ridiculous, and vague. English owes to the same source its 
use oiph, th, and j in words formerly content to use/ /, and / or u. 

One of the stars of the Plei'ade, Du Bellay, wrote a Defense of the French 
Language to make clear that trying to rival the ancients in Latin was passe; the 
vernacular was rich enough for all needs. To make it so, Ronsard and his fel- 
lows established a balance among the new and old elements of the current 
tongue; they produced a body of work in what begins to be modern French. 
The bulk of it is by Ronsard. He outlived his peers and cultivated every genre: 
odes, sonnets, elegies, love lyrics, episties, and epigrams. Coming after the flu- 
ent, lighthearted, Italianate Clement Marot, he gave the models of the grand 
style in his long poems, notably the Hymnes. 

It was for these works that he rescued and improved the line called 
alexandrine after a medieval poem on Alexander the Great. The meter had 



164 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

been long abandoned. Ronsard gave it a majestic ring and showed how it 
could serve the many subjects dear to the Plei'ade: love, of course, but also 
nature, history, faith, and all that belongs to the seven ages of man. For the 
next three centuries the alexandrine, though subjected to stricter rules than 
the Plei'ade 's, remained dominant in French poetry. 

The verse is 12-syllables long with a pause in the middle and it rimes in 
successive pairs of lines. [The book to read is An Essay on French Verse for 
Readers of English Poetry by Jacques Barzun.] It is interesting to note that about 
the same time poets in England settled on the 10-syllable blank verse as the 
line best suited to great subjects and convenient equally for rapid dialogue 
and long speeches in plays. Marlowe was the poet who, in Tamburlaine, gave it 
the speed and cadence that distinguish it from the alexandrine and from its 
18C English counterpart, the heroic couplet rimed like the French (356>). 

The earlier history of these two main lines is circuitous. The underlying 
type originated among the Prove^al troubadours in the 12C. It traveled to 
Italy, where it established the 10-syllable line used by Dante, Petrarch, and 
others, and also to northern France, where it acquired two extra syllables. 
Meanwhile, the Italian line was taken up in England and served Chaucer, still 
riming. Then the needs of playwriting turned it into the rimeless instrument 
that has served the diverse aims and temperaments of Shakespeare, Milton, 
and Wordsworth. 



The status of drama in the 16C and the quality of the works in the genre 
are hard to account for. As everybody knows, English plays in the latter part 
of the 16C were numerous, full of passion and poetry, and popular with all 
ranks of society. The best of the Elizabethans are still performed. In Spain, 
Lope de Vega was then at the start of his amazing output. Elsewhere, the 
showing was a perpetual disappointment. In Italy the pastoral play prevailed 
over other kinds. The shepherds' loves happy or unhappy but touching had 
an irresistible appeal, and no wonder. The idyllic state of Arcadia was a 
change from the civil and foreign wars that beset Florence and its turbulent 
sister cities. The pastoral served as a therapeutic primitivism. In France, for 
decades, playwrights translated Italian comedies or dutifully wrote tragedies 
on ancient themes, supplying conscientious effort instead of art. 

It should be recalled that in the Renaissance and occasionally later, the 
word comedy meant any sort of play — drama in general. In French to this day 
comedien means simply an actor. And nobody supposes that Dante's Divine 
Comedy is comedy in the laughter-provoking sense. This usage tells us that 
before the rise of the modern theater there was no fixed nomenclature. Plays 
in the previous era had been religious stories or folk scenes, the ones moral- 



Epic & Comic, Lyric & Music, Critic & Public <^> 165 

istic, the others farcical. In the 1 6C, with its liking for clear-cut genres, com- 
edy begins to mean fairly elaborate predicaments that portray ordinary peo- 
ple and end more or less happily. The one masterpiece of this sort comes 
early: it is Machiavelli's Mandragola, a play of intrigue that makes one think of 
Dangerous Liaisons (a recent film based on a cynical French novel of the 18C). 

La Mandragola was "modern," like Machiavelli's Prince (256>). Other 
authors of comedies tried in vain to make something new by imitating the 
Romans Plautus and Terence, who themselves had imitated the still older 
Greek Menander. The copies of copies of copies were bound to be faint. 
What remained vigorous in Italy was the commedia deWarte, the slapstick comic 
play with traditional characters, improvised on the stage along predictable 
lines. It led in the 18C to the brilliant comedies of Goldoni, who made mas- 
terworks by adapting this popular art form to the uses of high comedy. 

Another form of the comic was the burlesquing of serious genres. The 
epic lends itself to it most readily, being often close to burlesque as it is. 
Already in Pulci there are intentionally light moments. But it was the 16C 
Italian Berni who in parodying Boiardo showed how to ridicule the heroic 
and combine it with serious reflection. Later, Scarron in France used the 
recipe and made a popular success of his Virgile Travesti. We may infer that 
readers in the neo-classical age were not humorless. The best product of 
Berni's technique was the farthest in time and place: Byron learned from the 
Italian model and, having studied Tasso and Ariosto, and translated a part of 
Pulci's poem, tried his hand at the satirical epic in a short work called Beppo. It 
was the rehearsal (as it were) for his masterpiece Don Juan (486 >). 

All the while, poets and critics had been discussing the rules that tragic 
poets must obey in order to succeed. These rules came from Aristotle's Poetics 
and Horace's Technique of Poetry. The one had made a survey of Greek drama, 
the other had expatiated on vividness and sincerity in poetry as antidotes to 
the permanent threat of boredom. The preoccupation with Aristotle's rules 
was paradoxical: more than one theorist was clear-minded enough to reject 
one or another of them as unnecessary or misunderstood. Some even said 
that not all that were current could be found in the Poetics. Yet writers by the 
score kept arguing these points for generations — a vast library of comment 
on a very short treatise. After a time, play-goers themselves began to babble 
about "the three unities" and to pass judgment on playwrights accordingly as 
they respected or violated "the rules." 

WTiat did Aristotle say? That a tragedy must show a hero whose downfall 
is brought about by some false step in his behavior. The action, the plot, is all- 
important, not the persons in conflict. To be effective, this action must be 
single and straightforward — no subplots. This is unity number one of the 
later theorists. Given the hero's headlong course toward destruction, the 
spectators during performance are moved to pity for him and fear for them- 



166 ^> From Dawn to Decadence 



I venture to say that such plays, simply acted 
by intelligent actors who recite in a language 
not smacking of Latin, not pedantic, but 
direct, and fearless in pronunciation, would 
be the most pleasant of pastimes for the great 
when they come to the city for rest after their 
hawking and hunting. 

— Jean de la Taille (1 548) 

Those battles or sieges that are fought out in 
two hours do not please me, nor is it the part 
of a discreet poet to pass from Delphi to 
Athens in a moment of time. 

—Julius Caesar Scaliger (1561) 

Whoever studies with care the works of the 
greatest of the ancients will discover that the 
action of the dramatic poem takes place in a 
day — or is never prolonged beyond two. 

— Antonio Sebastiano Minturno (1563) 

The time of action should never exceed the 
limit of twelve hours. 

— Lodvico Castelvetro (1570) 

What can be more absurd than the introduc- 
tion in the first scene of a child in swaddling 
clothes, who in the second appears as a 
bearded man? 

— Cervantes, Don Quixote (1603) 

Tragedy mixed with comedy — Terence with 
Seneca — will cause much delight. Nature 
gives us the example, being through such 
variety beautiful. 

—Lope de Vega (1609) 



selves, after which purging of their anx- 
ieties they come away emotionally on 
an even keel. It is a fact of experience 
that a true tragedy — not just a sad 
play — is exhilarating. 

The critics also debated the notion 
that a tragedy must take place on one 
spot on one day — opinions wavered 
between 12 and 24 hours. The argu- 
ment was that these two other unities 
were necessary to foster belief; some- 
how three hours in the theater could 
seem equal to 24 but not to 36 and 
never to 10 days. That the English and 
Spanish audiences swallowed with plea- 
sure works that broke every one of the 
unities, including that of tone, mixing 
as they did tragic and comic scenes, did 
not figure in the debates outside those 
two countries. 

The determination to follow the 
ancients — or what was taken to be their 
practice — apparendy did not include 
the demand for the song-and-dance 
part of Greek drama. This omission 
certainly made plays more lifelike, an 
appeal that proved as strong as formal 
correctness. The moderns wanted plau- 
sible plots; so the historical were better 
than the mythical. They wanted human 
beings on the stage, instead of biblical 
figures or the medieval abstractions — 
Truth, Goodness, The Vice. 



The other literary lawgiver, Horace, 
had made a fundamental assertion: "poetry is like a picture." It followed that 
the dramatic poet must present real situations. But on the stage what is real? 
The play-goer, to be sure, knows that the actors are not kings and queens or 
young lovers and scamps, yet (answered the critics) the good dramatist cre- 
ates complete illusion. He does so by taking advantage of the ancients' expe- 
rience and going by the rules. When one is tempted today to permit oneself 
an impatient word or two about this dogma, one ought to remember that in 
its 16C beginnings "the play" needed to persuade spectators of its merit by its 



Epic & Comic, Lyric & Music, Critic & Public q^& 167 

truthfulness. Centuries later, we are sophisticated and believe in Art. 
Aesthetics, which is our Scripture, makes us accept as important and truthful 
anything offered as such. The question of rules does not occur; on the con- 
trary, breaking rules has become a test of true art. 



The first modern critics did not spend all their time discussing tragedy 
Other forms of poetry enjoyed their minute attention, most often in the light 
of Horace's precepts. Applying such pre-existing standards was the very def- 
inition of criticism until the 19C. The process was analytic and judicial. A sort 
of stencil was laid over the work and the places noted where the right features 
showed through the holes. The more points scored, the better the work. [The 
book to read is Literary Criticism in the Renaissance by J. E. Spingarn.] ° 

Now, ANALYSIS, the breaking of wholes into parts, is fundamental to sci- 
ence, but for judging works of art, the procedure is more uncertain: what are 
the natural parts of a story, a sonnet, a painting? The maker's aim is to project 
his vision by creating not a machine made up of parts but the impression of 
seamless unity that belongs to a living thing. Looking at an early example of 
systematic criticism by analysis — say, Dante's comments on his sonnet 
sequence La Vita Nuova — one sees that the best he can do is to tell again in 
prose what the first two lines mean, then the next three, and so on in littie 
chunks through the entire work. We may understand somewhat better his 
intention here and there, but at the same time we vaguely feel that the exer- 
cise was superfluous and inappropriate. Reflection tells us why: those nota- 
tions taken together do not add up to the meaning of the several poems. In 
three words: analysis is reductive. Since its patent success in the natural sci- 
ences, ANALYSIS has become a universal mode of dealing not merely with 
what is unknown or difficult, but also with all interesting things as if 'they were 
difficult. Accordingly, ANALYSIS is a theme. Depending on the particulars of 
its effect, it can also be designated REDUCTrviSM. 

In the arts other than literature, the professional, specialized critic did not 
come into being until late, say, the mid-1 8C. Until then, qualified criticism 
came from fellow practitioners, sometimes aided by amateurs of the art when 
a quarrel over style was raging, or by journalists, who might take up the cause 
of a particular artist. 



Cross Section 

The View from Venice 
Around 16 JO 



As the American humorist Robert Benchley found out on his first visit 
to Venice, and thought so remarkable that he cabled the news to his friends in 
New York, the streets there are full of water. The lagoon on which the great 
city is built was the shelter for refugees from the mainland when north Italy 
was overrun by Germanic invaders in the 5C. Up to that time, Venice was but 
a village. It grew into a center of trade by sea with the Near East, and by 1400 
was the vast channel for the goods that Europeans to the north and the west 
(England included) wanted as part of their increasingly luxurious life. 

The medieval Crusades had shown the westerners the amenities of life in 
the Levant, and through the pilgrims who came back from these mass move- 
ments had inspired in the barbarous Occident a widespread desire for gold 
and silver cloth, cotton, silk, and muslin (from Mosul in Iraq); for glassware, 
porcelain, and swords of Damacus steel; for oranges, apricots, figs, and wine 
from Cyprus grapes; for rugs, gems, drugs, pepper, incense, and perfume. 
Venice at the head of the Adriatic Sea had the geographical advantage over 
Genoa, which had tried to share this many-sided trade from the opposite side 
of Italy. Even after the Portuguese had found an ocean route to the east 
(<103) and Venice was no longer sole trader, it retained a monopoly in some 
of those expensive goods. It was envy of its wealth that had stimulated 
Portuguese exploration; it was a Genoese sailor, Columbus, whose westward 
longings led him to the King of Portugal for help in fulfilling them. By 1650, 
Venice was on the slope of decline, but slowly. Its manufactures were still 
profitable and its naval power unbroken. The inhabitants of the city and of 
the territory it ruled on the mainland were aware of change only as increased 



170 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

Oh Venice! Venice! When thy marble walls competition. They knew that they were 

Are level with the waters, there shall be still the wonder of the world. One such 

A cry of nations o'er thy sunken halls, reason was the Venetian government, 

A loud lament along thy sweeping sea!... unique in form and amazing in effi- 

Oh agony! That centuries should reap ciencv 
No mellower harvest! Thirteen hundred Everybody has heard about the 

y Doge, the head of the state, who each 

Of wrath and glory turned to dust and 111 r 

year went through the ceremony or 
tears ... ....... 

throwing his ring into the sea as a sym- 

' ^ ^ bol of the wedding of Venice with the 

element that gave it life. But long 
before the mid-17C the Doge had become a figurehead, a constitutional 
monarch whose only power was that of personal influence if he chanced to 
have it through character and brains. The governing was done by a system of 
interlocking councils, all in the hands of the patrician families, a nobility of 
merchants. As in no other European society, the Venetian gentleman lived by 
trade and governed too. 

The Great Council at the base of the state pyramid was a self-renewing 
body made up of patricians 25 years old or over. It elected or appointed the 
other officials: the Senators; the "Ten Men"; the Procurators of St. Mark, the 
city's patron saint; the justices; some special committees; and a College of 
Sages — altogether some 300 who met on Sunday to do the choosing of per- 
sons but not to discuss policy except in grave emergencies. 

So far there is nothing extraordinary about these arrangements. What 
was so is the rules and customs these officials observed. The Ten — the exec- 
utive branch elected for one year — was a policing and a defense department. 
It dealt with morals, public decency, rebels, and foreign enemies. Readers of 
Casanova's memoirs remember how he began his libertine adventures by 
escaping from the prison in Venice, called "The Leads," because it was under 
the roof of a building next to the Ducal Palace. Casanova's high-colored story 
and the legend to the effect that an anonymous note dropped through the 
mouth of the Lion of St. Mark's on one dark night ensured that the next day 
the person named was heard of no more have given the Ten the reputation of 
arbitrary and merciless enforcers of the law 

The legend is pure legend; the "Bridge of Sighs" is real but no warrant for 
melodrama. Venice had eleven courts of first instance and two of appeals; no 
juries, but the accused was allowed counsel centuries before the English and 
other systems of criminal law adopted the practice. The courts tried patricians 
as well as commoners and the Ten were popular. The people could petition 
them and were protected from oppression. Justice was quick — trial within 
one month of offense — and by contemporary standards not severe: the death 
penalty for grievous felonies; for forgery loss of one hand; one hand and one 



Cross Section: Venice <^> 171 

eye for rape and adultery; and five modes of execution in capital cases, which 
meant drowning for ordinary criminals. Torture for confession was practiced 
as elsewhere, but the law — whether observed or not, it is hard to say — speci- 
fied strict limits. 

For their multifarious work the Ten chose three as leaders who served 
alternately for one month each. Other departments had a head for one day. 
During his term, the "Capo" was forbidden to go into the city or talk to any 
citizen. This quarantine carried out the resolve to keep the people entirely 
unpolitical. To that end also the Ten used detectives to help nip subversion in 
the bud. Whereas all the other Italian states lived through incessant plotting 
and treason, exile and assassination, the tyrants and their kindred taking turns 
at massacring one another, Venice remained free of "times of trouble" for 
five centuries. 

Among other political devices, Venice used one intended to ensure faith- 
ful service, at least from the Doge, whose wealth made him a suitable subject: 
the review of his tenure of office after his death. If the report was adverse, his 
heirs were fined or otherwise punished. He dared not appoint any relative to 
a government post. In life, the Doge's six Ducal Councillors watched him all 
day, especially when he opened letters. 

More important, all offices were filled by men who had been trained in the 
most direct way. A young patrician who showed talent was enlisted as a 
teenager, watched the Great Council at work, and as soon as eligible was tested 
in successive posts. Nobody could refuse or resign office. With the short terms 
of power, rotation was rapid and the men at the top knew the work of every 
bureau. The pleasures of feuding among departments were much reduced. 
Vigilance behind a stiff facade could be the defining formula for the Venetian 
Republic. It resembles the principle that made the early Roman one great. Both 
have been admired but never again imitated. By comparison, other states — and 
modern democracies especially — look as if they did not take government seri- 
ously enough to run their affairs with rigor and gravity. 

Taken all in all, Venice was the nearest approach ever made to Plato's sys- 
tem of rulers by duty and dedication who govern soberly. The commons are 
excluded but happy to consent. Not that the Venetians read The Republic; their 
inspiration was Trade, coupled with being vulnerable on a small island perch. 
But unlike Plato's Utopia, Venice was neither isolated nor intolerant. It 
allowed foreigners their ways and their places of worship — Greek Orthodox, 
Protestant, Armenian, Slavonian, Albanian, and Jewish — and at the same 
time resisted any clerical interference with the city's laws. Papal officers must 
be approved by the Doge and report their proceedings to him. The 
Inquisition, reluctantly established, could try only Catholics. All in all, it was a 
clear case of Trade broadening the mind. 

But the means of trade, and at the same time the well-being of the citi- 



172 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

zens, were closely regulated. There were inspectors of weights and measures 
and of the Mint; arbitrators of commercial disputes and of servants and 
apprentices' grievances; censors of shop signs and taverns and of poor work- 
manship; wage setters and tax leviers, consuls to help creditors collect their 
due; and a congeries of marine officials. The population, being host to sailors 
from all over the Mediterranean, required a vigilant board of health, as did the 
houses of resort, for the excellence of which Venice became noted. All the 
bureaucrats were trained as carefully as the senators and councillors and every 
act was checked and rechecked as by a firm of accountants. 

Two great institutions — the Mint and the Arsenal — were famous 
throughout Europe for the quality of their output. For centuries the gold 
ducat, first struck in 1284, circulated everywhere at par value — it was the 
"Euro" of its day, to be succeeded for a short time only by the English gold 
sovereign in the 19C. Even earlier, in the 12th, Venice created a public debt, 
which helped to make its taxation the lightest in Europe. The popes invested 
in these highly rated bonds, but the Senate could deny some undesirable 
applicants the right to purchase them. In the mid-16C the city established the 
first state bank. The products of the Arsenal were ships and their armaments 
and munitions of all kinds. The long galleys, built to convoy the "round" 
cargo ships, could carry 250 soldiers, and by way of obbligato a group of 
musicians. The traditional enemies, other than the onetime trade rival Genoa, 
were the Turks and the pirates. 

Well ahead of the other states, Venice pioneered in legal theory. For its 
own needs, it developed a body of marine law, and by acting as patron to the 
University of Padua, it taught students from other countries the Roman and 
other systems of civil law. Regrettably, one must mention a breach of the city's 
own law by some of its citizens — those who engaged in the prohibited trade 
in slaves. Men and women were brought from southern Russia and Slavic 
Europe (the name Slav means slave), the men being sold in Egypt and the 
women in the West. Prisoners of war were also goods for sale, but all this had 
come to an end by the 17C. 

In keeping with its desire to maintain peace for trade, Venice had a large 
corps of ambassadors. As we saw, when Petrarch served as envoy in the 14C, 
diplomacy was carried on by orators. They had to be handsome; they enter- 
tained the target court and then went home. The resident ambassador with 
his instructions and immunities, his cipher code and his order of precedence, 
became the rule spottily and after many backtrackings. [The book to read is 
Diplomacy by Harold Nicolson.] By the 17C the institution was fairly solid. 
One result was that the Venetian ambassadors' daily reports (Rela^ioni) form 
one of the fullest sources for the history of the times. 

In the years here surveyed, Venice was embroiled in a 25-year war that 
was not the cause but one of the signs of its decline. The Republic had lost 



Cross Section: Venice <^> 173 

Cyprus, its eastern outpost in 1571; in In and out of these glittering strands of 
1 645 a pirate crew based in Malta cap- development ran the homely worsted of the 
tured a Turkish vessel coming from mercantile conception of diplomacy governed 
Algiers and carrying 30 members of b Y the reasonable bargaining of man with 
the Sultan's harem, including (it is said) man - Sound diplomacy was the invention of 
his favorite wife. The Turks made this a middle-class citizens. 
pretext for an attack on Crete, the — Harold Nicolson (1939) 
island that was to Venice what Cuba is 

to the United States, a place the enemy must not occupy. The city was hard 
pressed. It had lost much of its revenue to the traders on the Atlantic and the 
treasury was short of money. To raise the means of defending Crete the gov- 
ernment took the unheard-of step of selling state offices. Worse, it sold the 
rank of patrician for cash. As the war showed, courage and ability were still 
plentiful; as late as the end of the 17C Venice was besieging Athens, but by the 
end of the prolonged wars Crete had been lost and the republic's decay 
through the next 125 years proved irreversible. 

* * 

As the Venetians who lived around 1650 could see for themselves or 
heard from visitors and their own ambassadors, the world outside was full of 
novelties other than westward explorations for trade. In that rising country, 
France, the great canal of Briare had opened, connecting the central region 
with the north, and the Mediterranean was joined to the Adantic by the Canal 
du Midi. In Paris, the new Pont Royal was another sign of revival in French 
civil engineering. But the heads of state, Louis XIII and his minister 
Richelieu, had recendy died and a confused struggle of parties, mainly in 
Paris, threatened the royal succession. The heir, Louis XTV, was a teenager 
and not ready for ostentation, but much building was going on, and a 
resourceful architect, Mansart, revived the kind of roof now known by his 
name. 

Science and mathematics were flourishing everywhere. Pascal in France 
had invented a calculating machine, and several other devices and discoveries 
excited an international group of searchers (207 >) who corresponded regu- 
larly. These activities drew attention to the deaths of Galileo and Descartes. 
But that Newton was born on the same day — or was it the same year? — as 
Galileo died passed unnoticed until somewhat later. The confusion was natu- 
ral: England had refused to adopt the Gregorian calendar, so that errors in 
matching the continental dates with the English, 1 1 days behindhand, was 
frequent. It was said that the kingdom was on the verge of civil war; at the 
same time, Dutch workmen had been imported to drain the fen country. 

In the New World, the small English colony of Massachusetts Bay was 



174 c^ From Dawn to Decadence 

likewise divided on the politico-religious question that agitated the mother 
country. The governor, John Winthrop, argued vehemendy against moves to 
make his government more democratic: there was no warrant for it in 
Scripture. In that same year the colony (and Virginia to the south) passed laws 
establishing schools to teach the true religion and promote Bible reading. The 
first book published in New England, the Bay Psalm Book of 1 640, was an 
encouragement to the same end. 

But these remote affairs, like the discovery of Tasmania in the South 
Pacific, probably reached the Adriatic city after some delay. The belief that 
contemporaries are aware of what history records as significant is not well- 
founded, which is why history has on the whole a more balanced view of the 
past than the past had of itself. At any time the amount of general knowledge 
about any important subject, past or present, varies with fashion and shrinks 
or widens at the whim of accident. Who now thinks of Venice as a supreme 
creator in political science? The name raises only aesthetic ideas and even 
these are incomplete: Venetian painting and architecture — the collective 
memory stops there. They are solild, visible, much written about — Ruskin's 
Stones of Venice is a monument itself. But Venice in its prime made no contri- 
bution to world literature — a curious fact since Ferrara, the home of Tasso 
and Ariosto (<151), was only a day's journey away; and this lack may account 
for the forgetfulness about what Venice did contribute, because it is poems, 
tales, and plays, rather than paintings, that carry to posterity the details of life. 

Venice did produce one fine historian, Paolo Sarpi, but his main subject 
was the Council of Trent; and the two great comic writers of the 18C, 
Goldoni and Gozzi, wrote in the Venetian dialect, which even other Italians 
find a virtually foreign tongue. Thus not only the statesmen and ambassadors, 
but also the first great printer-publishers — Jenson, Aldus Manutius, 
Wendelin, who created type and layouts for all subsequent makers of books 
(<61) — might as well never have existed. For public opinion "the book" 
means Gutenberg alone, that is to say, from the Bible to the paperback with 
litde in between. 

The collective memory has done even worse: it has forgotten the cradle 
of opera. It was the love and nurture of opera in Venice that made it a genre 
of endless possibilities. Forgotten with it are the other Venetian innovations 
in music referred to earlier (<160). It is true that the first operas of which the 
music has survived were composed and performed in Florence. They were 
the work of amateurs who followed a theory derived from the cult of antiq- 
uity and aiming at re-creating Greek tragedy (<159). These works were jusdy 
criticized in their own day for being monotonous. The wish to make the play 
understood word for word limited the music to a few solos, the rest being 
recitative. True opera is a kind of music rather than a kind of play — no one 
reads a libretto as a source of pleasure — and to express drama, the music 



Cross Section: Venice <^> 175 

must be composed by a master of many talents. Claudio Monteverdi is thus 
righdy regarded as the founder of the genre. 

His first opera, Orfeo, was first performed in Mantua in the early years of 
the 1 7C. But he was soon appointed choirmaster of St. Mark's in Venice and 
there spent the rest of his life. After Orfeo he produced 18 other works in the 
new dramatic genre, two of which, The Return of Ulysses and The Crowning of 
Poppea, written near the mid-century, are masterpieces on a par with the famil- 
iar works in the repertoire of modern capitals. 

The same cannot be said of the numerous "court operas" that prolifer- 
ated after Orfeo, especially in Rome. These were domesticated pieces, pro- 
duced for the entertainment and glorification of noble families, and they 
would not withstand revival. So to Venice must go the credit of producing 
publicly, supporting, and appreciating the singular creation. Incidentally, the 
word opera is not, as one might suppose, the plural of opus, Latin for work. It 
is another Latin word, opera, plural operae, which means m//wgwotk instead of 
the necessary or forced labor implied by opus. By extension, opera was used by 
the ancient Romans for any elaborate undertaking, just as we say "a produc- 
tion." The word certainly fits the reality of staging one of these works as it is 
described in the history of the great opera houses: a batde with wounded and 
vanquished before roles and wills are subdued into temporary unity. 

Monteverdi's genius lay in finding the means to express character and sit- 
uation while fulfilling the musical requirements of form. In all such forms — 
recitative, aria, or choral ensembles — the composer conveys the fitting sig- 
nificance by melody to begin with, and next by shifts in harmony, long held 
notes, cadences, sequences, and other musical devices, all supported by a rich 
instrumentation. 

Audiences today are getting used to certain features of 17C music, thanks 
to the efforts of several scholar-conductors — the use, for example, of the 
high male voice called counter-tenor, which in earlier periods was obtained by 
the mutilation of gifted youths, the castrati. The liking for the sounds of the 
top register was due to familiarity with the voices of choirboys in church. The 
Monteverdian orchestra included a good number of chord-playing stringed 
instruments, only a few winds, and no percussion. The "tinny" sound that 
results is disconcerting until the ear gets accustomed to the nuances actually 
there — another proof that music is not a homogeneous substance for all 
good ears to enjoy as soon as heard. 

This observation applies to the operatic genre itself. Until about the mid- 
20C, people who regarded themselves as devotees of music looked down on 
opera-goers; and these, it is true, often showed no interest in music other than 
operatic. The long-playing disc had the effect of an Act of Toleration, com- 
pelling both parties to recognize the obvious: operas on disc, without staging, 
are pure music too, while other genres can also be dramatic music, as full of 



176 c&o From Dawn to Decadence 

thrills as opera. The subjects chosen for the genre doubtless contributed to its 
former discredit. Born of the classical temper of the Renaissance, the early 
operas used the ancient myths and a sprinkling of pastoral subjects. Then for 
freshness came events drawn from history, ancient and modern; next in the 
18C, fantasy was added, followed in the 19th by history once more; after 
which any topic or period, any contemporary play or novel might be adapted 
to exhibit the twin staples of opera: Vanity and Violence. 

To name these staples is to say that the literary side of opera is melodrama, 
not tragedy, not social criticism or the play of ideas, all of which require words 
to make the intellectual and moral distinctions cross the footlights. Tolstoy 
wrote a withering description of opera showing it to be inherently absurd/ In 
dialogue and action operatic relationships are etched in crude or dull lines that 
inspire the familiar mode of acting and delivery — violent denial, stalking, turn- 
ing the back, snatching the letter, struggling over the poisoned cup, singing 
with emphatic repetition words of contempt, anger, and hate. And the 
singing — in duets, trios, and so on up to septets — rises to what is often — 
alas — shouting. A contemporary singer candidly describes her loud top notes 
as "a controlled scream." Besides, the situations of conflict tend to be complex, 
legalistic, and arbitrarily insoluble: hero, heroine, ruler, rival never give in, and 
the reasons adduced usually show this to be personal or official ego, that is, 
vanity. When the ballet was introduced into opera late in the 17Q it added to 
the spectacular element, but one suspects that it also provided relief from tur- 
moil, although at times the librettist made the dancers represent the fiends of 
hell already invoked by the chief antagonists. 

But what of love? and what of comic opera? The comic genre parodies 
the predicaments of the serious genre. Equally make-believe obstacles to 
peace and bliss hold up the denouement, which is happy instead of mortal. As 
for love in grand opera, it is indeed celebrated in an aria or two, but its role is 
really to incite jealousy and intrigue. These standard features, which could be 
regarded as defining the least honored of literary forms, have not prevented 
the great operas from being as diverse as the works in any other genre. When 
one thinks successively of Monteverdi's Poppea, Rameau's Indes Galantes, 
Handel's Xerxes, Gluck's two Iphigeneias, Mozart's half dozen, Beethoven's 
Fidelio, Spontini's Vestale, Weber's Freyschut^ Berlioz's Les Troyens, Rossini's 
Comte Ory, Wagner's Tristan, Verdi's Otello, Moussorgsky's Boris Godunov, 
Chabrier's Gwendolyn, and Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd, one must admit that 
the art of opera has lodged in the western mind a set of images and emotions 
that no possessor would willingly give up. And the revivals today of totally 
forgotten works and their composers show us that the riches of the genre are 
still imperfectly known. 

It is true that a kind of seesaw is noticeable as one or another of the three 
components of opera dominates the other two — words, music, or scenic 



Cross Section: Venice ^ 177 

effects. But the force of the images — of It is sad to think that so much beauty lies 
the mythology created by opera — has buried in the silence of the past, that all these 
been the work of the musician who, things which so mightily pleased our forefa- 
inspired diversely by the repetitious thers have become things of yesterday. 

framework of the genre, endowed the — Donald Grout, from the last 
frigid ideas and inane words with the paragraph in his History of Opera 

warmth and the nuances of life — all this ^ ' 

from the earliest flowering in Monte- 
verdi's Venice, at the Theater of St. John and St. Paul, where The Crowning of 
Poppea was first performed in the autumn of 1642. 

* * 

The Venetians who looked abroad in that decade could follow the fortunes 
of several other wars besides their own with the Turks. In Germany, the strug- 
gle that had begun more than two decades earlier was in its final phase. In a few 
years more it would qualify for the tide of Thirty Years' War. In England, civil 
war had at last broken out, and in France the partisans of royal power faced var- 
ious enemies in violent incidents verging on civil war also (296 >). Meanwhile, 
French soldiers were skirmishing on the Spanish frontier. One of them was 
D'Artagnan, later glorified in The Three Musketeers, who was defending his native 
Gascony." 

The war in Germany began as a religious sequel to the conflicts between 
the parties created by the Protestant Revolution. It ended as a dynastic war 
for domination in central Europe. The imperial house of Austria, the 
Habsburgs, found itself pitted against unexpected allies, Protestant Sweden 
and Catholic France, both bent on territorial gains. Sweden had risen to the 
status of great power, owning provinces in north Germany and wanting 
more. Cardinal Richelieu's policy for France was to make its eastern frontier 
the Rhine. Each side nearly succeeded, which might have brought back the 
Germanies to one religion. But the opposing commanders were equally bril- 
liant and kept the balance even until King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden was 
killed in batde and the Czech Wallenstein was assassinated a year later by his 
officers: He was about to go over to the Swedish side. In the outcome, some 
of the lands that had been lost to the Protestants in the Reformation were 
regained by the Catholics, to the benefit of Austria. 

One piece of literature that came out some time after the war tells us 
about it at firsthand. This was the picaresque novel Simplicissimus by 
Grimmelshausen. It is the tale, told by himself, of a young boy of humble 
birth and no education whatever — hence his tide designation of "simple to 
the utmost" — who is set adrift in the world when the soldiery plunder his vil- 
lage and burn down his home. He flees to the nearby woods, where he finds 



178 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

shelter with a forester in his hut. From him the boy learns something of the 
big world, into which he has to plunge when his rescuer dies. His next savior 
is a state official who turns him into his court jester, his fool. The role devel- 
ops the boy's wits, but his tenure is not long. Soldiers again break into his life 
and this time carry him off. After more vicissitudes he becomes a soldier him- 
self and goes through a variety of adventures that depict, amid the horrors of 
war, the coarsening of the individual's moral fiber, the misery endured by all 
classes, and the dulling of the mind by the fighting, which, when prolonged, 
makes the contenders forget what it is about. 

The work had great success, which induced Grimmelshausen to add a 
sixth book to the original five, and this is the reason why it cannot be called a 
masterpiece: the latter portions were written under the spell of the contem- 
porary romances. Simplicissimus turns hero in the literal sense; he wins hon- 
ors and travels as far as Turkey, losing along the way his appealing character 
and our interest. 

Nearly at the end of the war the French defeated the invincible Spanish 
infantry. France was now the largest, richest, most populous, and most war- 
like country in Europe. It was following the traditional top-dog policy called 
universal monarchy; that is, trying to dominate the entire Continent. The 
Thirty Years' War proved fruitless in the end. More significant, indeed 
momentous, were the treaty concluded at mid-century and the cultural con- 
sequences of the war. 

The battles, the sieges, the marches and countermarches devastated large 
parts of Germany, depopulating villages, reducing towns to poverty and the 
numerous states to perpetual weakness. The upshot was that for the next two 
centuries the disunited Germanies were the theater of war, the indicated play- 
ground for the European powers to fight out their dynastic rivalries. The 
Germans were the people without a country. To others they seemed — and 
pardy were — dull, patient, defenseless drudges, their heads full of fanciful 
dreams and murky philosophy, and their art, language, and manners back- 
ward and coarse. A time came when the memory of this long humiliation 
strengthened the resolve to show the world the opposite of all these sheeplike 
traits; the docility imposed in the 17C and 18C generated the self-discipline, 
civic duty, and military might of the 19th and 20th. 

The Thirty Years' War, the last of the "wars of religion," had turned dur- 
ing its own course into the monarchic type. The treaty that ended it implicitly 
recognized the national idea by declaring the Netherlands and Switzerland, 
two mainly Protestant countries, independent. That word means sovereign, 
which means in turn that the interests of the state come first, ahead of any 
religious allegiance to the papacy or to a state church. For the same reason — 
raison d'etat — an alliance with a country of opposite religion incurs no blame. 
The Venetians at one point had begged the Turks to aid them against a great 



Cross Section: Venice s^> 179 

league headed by the pope, who at another time had done the same and had 
received subsidies from the infidel. In short, by the mid-1 7C and the close of 
the war, the West had taken a great step in secularizing public life. 

With this decisive parting from the ancestral idea of the community of 
Europe, the Continent became a group of distinct societies, each wanting to 
go its own way in language and laws, in manners and the arts. The danger of 
anarchy prevailing among these separate and equal sovereignties was so evi- 
dent that it stimulated thought about law and order through some overarch- 
ing rule. The example of the Italian states was disheartening. They never 
ceased battling each other, undeterred by a common religion. Venice had to 
contend incessantly with four neighboring powers, including the papacy. 
Hugo Grotius (de Groot), pondering the recent past in his newborn Dutch 
nation, set down the principles of international law. He had been preceded by 
the Spanish scholar Vitoria, whom few had heard of (<1 10). Both had to face 
a question without answer: the sovereign — man or state — is by definition not 
subject to law. There is God's moral law, but who is to enforce it? To obey it 
can only be agreed upon, out of self-interest. Grotius's work On the Laws of 
War and Peace ranks as the first attempt to make public such an agreement; the 
latest is the charter of the United Nations. 

The other war observable from Venice at the same time was the civil war 
in England. It combined religion and politics, that is, dissent from the 
national church and limits to the exercise of sovereign power at home were 
the issues fought about. The seven years of bloodshed with a lull midway did 
not settle either question, but they brought out others, social and economic, 
that made the struggle far more fruitful than the three decades of mutual 
harassment in the Germanies. 

In counterpoint to the English and the German wars there occurred the 
first wild speculation ending in a crash of international scope: the tulip mania. 
The flower, an import from the Near East, had first been seen in Europe 
around the mid-1 6C and had been especially prized in Central Europe and 
the Netherlands. Bypassing Venice, it continued to be sent direct from 
Constantinople to its fanciers. Owning a gardenful became a status symbol 
and the desire to buy and grow tulips spread among the Dutch of every rank. 
By 1635 the demand had raised prices to vertiginous heights; a Haarlem mer- 
chant was reported to have given half his assets for a single bulb — not to 
resell but to show off. 

Some shrewd minds began to see that trading might be even better than 
owning, and soon the stolid Dutch were buying and selling bulbs like company 
shares. Exchange markets were set up in several cities; brokers ("tulip 
notaries") quoted varying prices according to the name, color, and weight of 
each bulb; and selling short and trading in futures developed and flourished. 
Fortunes were quickly made, the poor grew rich overnight. At one point an 



180 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

The tulip next appeared, all over gay, "Admiral Lifskin" was worth 

But wanton, full of pride and full of play; 4,400 florins or "44 times the 

The world can't show a dye but here has price of a bed complete with bed- 

P lace ~ ding." For two years the fever 

Nay, by new mixtures she can change her mged> ^^ Lonc j on and Paris as 

ace suburbs showing a lesser degree 

Her only study is «o please, he eye q£ ^ ^^ ^ Dutch re 

And to outshine the rest in finery. 1 - . . 

gained their senses and the mar- 

-ABRAHAM COWLEY (1656) ^ coUapsed> ^ govemment 

and the courts tried to find fair 
solutions to the tangle of troubles — buyers defaulting, vendors suing, and 
bankrupts groaning in jail. Months of debate and reams of decisions were in 
vain. Given the character of the adventure, nothing seemed just or enforceable. 

A quite different cultural offshoot of the selfsame war was the work of a 
man who twice suffered the looting and burning of his house and 
manuscripts by the soldiery, the Czech thinker 

John Amos Comenius (Jan Komensky) 

Born into a Moravian family, he was pious, but it was not religious devo- 
tion that made him oppose the highly successful practice of the Jesuit teach- 
ers (<42). A lifelong refugee, his wanderings took him to Poland, where he 
established a school on a model of his own; then to Sweden, and finally to 
England, where his ideas spurred thought in the minds of Milton and Locke. 
While there he received an invitation from John Winthrop to head Harvard 
College. 

Of the many books that he managed to write, the most famous is Orbis 
Sensualium Pictus — the world portrayed to the senses, published at the exact 
mid-century point. Others of his school texts were widely used and translated 
into a dozen languages, including Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Mongolian. 
Despite Luther's early appeal for free public schools to teach Protestant chil- 
dren, few were founded and none had a philosophy of education to match the 
Jesuits'. Comenius supplied it. He was another in the long line of school 
reformers who, with interesting variations, always say the same thing; it is 
their fated role. The nature of a school being to ossify, it must be periodically 
galvanized into life. The reason for the loss of vitality is that the school is a 
government on the small scale; it aims at forming a common mind as gov- 
ernment aims at a common will. Both need periodic overhaul, a re-injection 
of the original idea that got lost in routine. 



Cross Section: Venice <x*> 181 

At this point anyone who has had much to do with education or has 
dipped into its history can guess what Comenius said: things, not words — 
hence the Sensualium of the textbook. Change school from a prison to a scholae 
Indus (play site), where curiosity is aroused and satisfied. Stop beatings. 
Reduce rote learning and engage the child's interest through music and games 
and through handling objects, through posing problems (the project 
method), stirring the imagination by dramatic accounts of the big world. The 
Orbis Pictus teaches objects and places, simultaneously with words, by means 
of pictures to be studied and talked about, a first hint of the audiovisual in 
education. Comenius would also teach a universal religion compatible with 
modern science, "Pansophia." All children should be schooled at state 
expense, starting very early in affectionate surroundings: nursery school for 
the four- to six-year-olds. He added the substance of the 20C thought-cliche: 
education goes on as long as life. 

This program aroused the enthusiasm of Samuel Hartlib in England, 
who took steps to publish it but was delayed by the Civil War. It saw the light 
in the 1660s and competed successfully with current notions of school 
reform put forward by men who were — or would be — scientists. It was then 
that Milton wrote his "Letter to Samuel Hartlib. , ' In part obscure, it ranks as 
a notable tract on education by reason of its authorship rather than its merits. 
Milton wanted towns to set up a sort of barracks for 120 boys, who between 
the ages of 12 and 21 would learn through books about things and through 
these things would attain knowledge of God and likeness to God. That, said 
Milton, is the aim of education. By it a man performs justiy and skillfully all 
the duties of private and public life, including war. Hartlib cannot have felt 
encouraged in his crusade. 

Comenius did not limit himself to school reform. He was a feminist and 
a pacifist, a political scientist and a philanthropist. He recommended pre- 
natal clinics, marriage counseling, and geriatrics. He believed that men could 
be improved and, like Bayle and the 18C Encyclopedists (360>), that "light" 
would bring about peace and concord. The spectacle of war during his whole 
adult life (said Comenius) had moved him to promote these ideas. The school 
reformer went on to practice what he 

preached, which is more than can be j began to concentrate my designs upon ^ 
said about most educationists. Wher- endeavor to reconcile the whole human race. If 
ever he went Comenius set up schools me n were shown what their complete and real 
and taught in them. No less invariably good is, they would be drawn to it. Were they, 
he received bids to go elsewhere and moreover, shown the right means for its 
repeat his success. His methods were achievement, an all-inclusive and all-satisfying 
adopted, and some of his textbooks philosophy, religion, and statecraft would be 
were used down to the mid-19C. In an *"% attained - 
essay of 1957, Jean Piaget asserted the —Comenius (c. 1660) 



182 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

tightness of his great predecessor on all important points. But fame has 
bypassed Comenius, as it has Lichtenberg and some others of the same cal- 
iber (440>). Time, place, and nationality have the power to confer or with- 
hold renown. 



This generality takes us from the public realm to the private. The late 1 6C 
observer saw changes in manners and domestic life — not all on the lagoon, 
but here and there throughout Europe. Italy was again a Mother, this time of 
refinements. Venice apart, the big prosperous cities — London, Paris, 
Amsterdam, Strasbourg, Geneva — were by modern standards litde better 
than mud holes crisscrossed by row houses. Narrow streets, ill- or unpaved, 
served as sewers for the waste dumped into them from the upper stories that 
overhung and nearly touched above the way. Venice had a board of health, 
but in other capitals nobody inspected the turbid, foul-smelling stream that 
ran through all passageways except one or two main thoroughfares. 

The houses of the great had grounds around them for protection, yet the 
spacious ones that survive to amaze the tourist were in fact crowded, filled not 
only by a fully extended family but also by dozens of servants and hangers- 
on — proteges, tutors, scribblers — among them possibly a great artist earning 
his livelihood by a special kind of servitude. A palace housed a clan; the word 
house designated both the members of the family and those who were owned 
and fed by it. 

Inside, whether palace or bourgeois dwelling, the rooms in the mid-17C 
were more numerous than before; the all-purpose big hall had been cut up, by 
curtains at least, and several chimneys let out the smoke instead of one. But 
windows remained few, narrow, not always glazed, and in some places highly 
taxed as luxuries. A large chamber was still the center of work, rest, and plea- 
sure, as well as the site of birth and death. Its furnishings had improved: the 
chairs had arms, higher backs, and a fixed cushion; and chests that had been 
mere boxes tended to turn into chests of drawers. 

In this main room, ladies received while dressing or still in bed, though 
there might be an alcove to one side for the bed. When some men and women 
friends became habitues, the ruelle or space between bed and wall became a 
regular meeting-place for conversation; it was the germ of the salon. The mas- 
ter likewise carried on his business affairs in the chamber — whence the sur- 
vival of that word (rather than office) in many phrases: judge in chambers, the 
chamber of commerce, the chamber of deputies. 

This mode of home life implies a sense of self in relation to others that 
differs from ours. Consider the bed. It was large, high off the floor, curtained 
all around to keep off drafts, and topped by a ceiling cloth to cover the sleep- 



Cross Section: Venice <^> 183 

ers — sleepers in the plural, for it might serve several members of the family, 
sleeping naked but wrapped in some incomprehensible way in a single sheet 
under the coverlet. The elderly wore a gown and nightcap. At times, a visiting 
friend would be offered a place with the rest of the crowd. Similarly, the ailing 
poor in hospitals and travelers at the inn must expect to share the bed. This 
practice lasted for a long time in America, as we learn from a letter of 
Lincoln's. 

People ate in the kitchen or the chamber on a removable trestie table, on 
which — except in Italy — there might be no plates and certainly no forks. 
These effeminate innovations became common only toward the end of the 
century, and even then the forks were used only to convey a portion for one- 
self, not to eat it with: what were fingers for? The spoons were large ones for 
serving; one brought one's own knife for the meat, which one put on a thick 
piece of bread called in French tranchoir. This means cutting board and has 
given us the word trencherman to denote the hearty eater. For drinks there were 
cups of various metals to pass around and for foods other than meat, wooden 
bowls, generally one for two persons. The sole touch of refinement in dining 
was the customary washing of hands before and after the meal. 

As to diet, literature has made familiar the great feasts at which an 
extraordinary number of dishes were heaped up. These banquets, required at 
public ceremonies, were not frequent at home. They marked the good har- 
vest and served as a palpable offset to the remembered famine. Not all the 
diners partook of all the dishes. Footmen in livery stood at a sideboard and 
carried the dish called for by his master at the table. Leftovers were eaten by 
the servants or given to the poor. We know less about regular meals, but in 
good bourgeois houses they seem to have run to eight courses, beginning 
with soup, then several meats, custardlike preparations, fish, fruit, and sweets. 
The 1650s rarely saw a vegetable, never a vegetarian. The authority on the 
subject, J. F. Revel, says that the period was about to see the passage from 
cookery to cuisine — gastronomy. Maybe there was a cultural link between 
gourmet menus and the bel canto of opera being developed at Venice. 

That washing of the hands at meal times was the one recurrent act of 
hygiene in the whole of life. The body was washed at birth, before marriage, 
and after death. The century that laid down the fundamentals of science is the 
one that got rid of public baths and of the very idea of regular bathing. In the 
Middle Ages and the Renaissance even small towns had bathhouses. Lyon 
had 28. They were shut down throughout Europe out of a moral concern 
probably heightened by syphilis: to control prostitution and other miscon- 
duct. We blame the Puritans in England for this raid on the "stews," but the 
Continent had no Puritans as such; it was the Zeitgeist that took action there. 
Even when used, baths had not stopped the plague; it was carried by rats and 
fleas, striking every 1 5 or 20 years to decimate townspeople and send refugees 



184 o*& From Dawn to Decadence 

to the countryside. By plague was meant the killing fever that took one of 
three forms, the most common being the bubonic, indicated by the ring of 
bubos or red swellings. The outbreak in London that Defoe described in his 
Journal of the Plague Year was no extraordinary event, any more than the one in 
Milan in 1630, both devastating. 

The other recurrent catastrophe was fire. Control or escape were equally 
difficult in towns laid out in the huddled way described above. The London 
fire of 1 666 drove 200,000 from their homes; they encamped in neighboring 
fields during the five days that it raged. But instances are on record of the 
population's making no effort to save themselves or their household goods, 
particularly when some Mother Shipton or other had predicted the calamity 
as a punishment from God. By chance, 15 of the 20 years being reviewed here 
passed untouched. 

Clothing, in thick layers and uncleanable, was not healthful either. Dress 
has of course never been rational, except in Tahiti. Even the Roman toga, 
which looks so comfortably loose, took two helpers to put on and was formal 
dress for ceremonial occasions only. Around 1650 garments for either sex 
could still express individual fancy, but the previous exuberance was gone; 
bright colors gave way to black, dun, and dark green. Women continued to 
wear stomachers, now of whalebone instead of metal, but the skirts were less 
puffed out. Clothes for gala evenings were garnished with gold or silver braid 
or elaborate lace or precious stones attached to the cloth itself. Men's legs no 
longer showed up in tights but were hidden in knee breeches of the cut now 
called plus-fours, The rather indecent Spanish invention for carrying odds 
and ends, the masculine codpiece, had vanished, but is making a reappearance 
in 1997.° Its equivalent for women, the broad belt to hang things from, had 
narrowed and become only an ornament. Men needed theirs to trundle the 
inevitable sword. 

Both sexes had given up ruffs in favor of the flat Vandyke type of collar. 
Shoes and boots had turned sober also — no long points, though some 
women began to teeter on high heels. Boots for outdoors came up high for 
protection against mud and filth. They were a necessity in any case, because 
the horse was the only means of rapid transit. At mid-century two innova- 
tions, less for speed than comfort, were taking hold. One was the chaise — an 
armchair fitted with a pair of poles at the sides for a servant fore and aft to lift 
and carry the sitter. The other was the coach, adapted from the rural cart, but 
not yet hung on straps or springs to soften the ride. Even so, it was 
denounced as weakening the moral fiber, and in Germany it was prohibited 
outright and in vain. 

At all times hair has carried significance. It shows rank, or sophistication, 
or rebelliousness. Its dressing varies frequentiy and sometimes mere chance 
alters the fashion. Louis XIII, being at loose ends while Richelieu was at the 



Cross Section: Venice <^ 185 

helm, decided that the royal officer guard should shave. Soon, the previous 
full or rounded beard was everywhere replaced by a mustache and a little tuft 
on the chin. Hair from the head was allowed to grow long, straight or curled, 
depending on the degree of vanity and youth. This style continued until about 
1 660 when for dubious reasons wigs of many sizes and shapes crept in and 
grew into a combination headgear and picture frame for the face. The French 
king's whim had distant repercussions: when later in the century Peter of 
Russia decided to modernize his country, he levied a tax on beards. 
Meanwhile, women's hair (not yet pulled up high off the forehead and built 
into complex structures) was simply arranged to show a fringe over the fore- 
head, with a shower of curls hanging on each side, often wired in a fan shape. 
When frizzed instead of curled, the head was called a la moutonne, meaning like 
wool on a sheep. 



Given these various tastes and physical limitations, it is not surprising 
that social behavior was simultaneously crude and elaborate. Letter writing, 
for example, aimed at formal elegance by a mixture of conventional and 
improvised compliments. The tone blended humility with devotion: "Your 
obedient servant." The feeling involved in the old feudal relation of lord and 
vassal had not yet turned into the pure formality that makes us start our let- 
ters with Dear and end them with Yours. From the courtesy books of the 
period we also learn that what we would call the ordinary physical decencies 
of social intercourse were rarely practiced. For the sorry details, go to the gos- 
sipy memoirs of the day or infer them from the fact that in 1600 the King of 
France owned only five handkerchiefs, the queen three, and his mistress two. 
We get another hint when we see in museums the collections of small, deco- 
rated perfume bottles that people carried defensively in crowded gatherings. 

Disregard of bodily offense went with extreme sensitiveness to every 
other kind — hence the prevalence of dueling. To be sure, it was an improve- 
ment on the family feud, which goes on for generations. Still, as wise heads 
argued, how can skill in fencing be the rule of justice? For the touchy ego — 
or the bully — the "point of honor" was so delicate that a duel could be trig- 
gered by a mere look. In the Memoirs that the Duke of Sully, chief minister 
under Henry IV, published in 1638, he estimates that some 8,000 gentlemen 
were killed in duels during the previous dozen years — over 12 each week. His 
successor, Richelieu, enforced the royal prohibition with severity, but the 
practice did not stop. Once again, read The Three Musketeers — or even more 
telling, because evidence from the period itself, read Corneille's tragedy Le 
Cid, in which there are two duels justified for our admiration. Honor takes 
priority over love. Duels, of course, often grew out of rivalry over a woman, 



186 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

who might encourage it from vanity; but the result was self-defeating all 
around: one man killed, the other forced to flee the country; the woman 
deprived and left as fair game for other admirers. 



In those same years, other excellent arguments were heard on another 
subject, also not heeded and not new: equality between the sexes. The 16C 
had seen a galaxy of great women — rulers such as Queen Elizabeth, Louise 
of Savoy, and Margaret of Parma, poets and novelists like Louise Labe and 
Margaret of Navarre, to say nothing of the Italian stateswomen who made 
policy at the Vatican (<85). These examples spurred reflection, and in the 
1640s several women and two clerics wrote books about the injustice of treat- 
ing women as inferior and denying them education. As we saw, the most 
vehement and best argued was by Marie de Gournay, the "daughter" of 
Montaigne and posthumous editor of his Essays (< 1 34) . She and those who 
agreed with her faced one grave difficulty: the dogma, based on precedent as 
old as the Garden of Eden, of female mental and moral weakness. How could 
a faithful Christian question and oppose Scripture? Marie and also a broad- 
minded priest, who wrote the longest and most learned plea for women's 
rights, managed to get around the theological bar.° 

And so, apparently, did the universities of Padua and Bologna. Padua 
conferred an honorary degree on the famous Anna von Schurman, the most 
learned woman of her time, master of seven languages, including Syriac, 
Chaldean, and Ethiopian; and Bologna gave her a lectureship. She too argued 
for women's rights, in 15 irresistible propositions. One other woman com- 
pelled recognition for her intellectual stature: Queen Christina of Sweden. 
Even before she abdicated in 1650 to devote herself to study, she was known 
as a serious thinker (208 >). Earlier, another woman, the Princess Palatine 
Elizabeth, had elicited from the scientist-philosopher Descartes his most 
serious reflections on certain philosophical issues. His letters to her form a 
volume to which one must refer for answers to some of the points not cov- 
ered elsewhere in his works. 

Far away from Sweden and the Palatinate, in rugged New England, yet 
another woman was asserting her right to compete with men on their own 
ground. Anne Hutchinson was a preacher with liberal views on religion that 
threatened to split the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a fiercely theological pop- 
ulation. She was finally declared guilty of 80 erroneous opinions and ban- 
ished. She went to Providence, founded not long before by Roger Williams 
after his banishment, and later to Hellgate, New York, where she was killed by 
the Indians. 

It was women's ideas and influence that in the mid-century effected in 



Cross Section: Venice q^» 187 

France a notable change in manners. The Marquise de Rambouillet gathered 
around her a group of like-minded friends (including a few men), who by 
their conversations, well publicized, made it fashionable to aim at precise 
speech, to use language free of grossness, and to behave in society — and in 
marriage — with considerateness for one another's feelings. This choice com- 
pany legislated on grammar and vocabulary, the formulas of love-making and 
amiability, and it made compliance the basis of self-respect. What 
Castiglione's Courtier (<85) urged in book form was here put into practice, 
with improvements suggested by the passage of time and the imagination of 
the participants. 

This circle will be recognized as the Precieuses whom Moliere later made 
fun of as Ridicules, thereby giving to preciosity its unfavorable meaning. But 
Moliere came when the refining movement had done its good work, and 
exaggeration among late followers had turned delicacy into — preciosity. 
Excess had led to absurdity: avoiding crude talk had become false shame 
about calling ordinary things — door, table, chair — by their right names; some 
far-fetched euphemism had to be found. But this tailing off should not 
obscure the truth that the Chateau de Rambouillet was the site of rehearsals 
for the civility that ruled the court of Louis XIV. And in the three ensuing 
centuries, whether in courts or salons or family drawing rooms, it was women 
and their tastes that determined proper speech and deportment. 

By an odd but perhaps significant coincidence, while the Precieuses were 
at their good work, a group in Hamburg led by Philip von Zesen was reach- 
ing ridicule at one bound. They were bent on purifying the German language 
in a manner pathetically national: for all foreign words or of foreign deriva- 
tion, even though long accepted, a roundabout substitute must be coined. 
Thus for Natur, the phrase "nurturing mother." All the Greek and Roman 
deities must be renamed. Venus was to be Lustinne- — that is, Pleasuress. The 
mid-17C was indefatigably laboring at self-improvement. 

Besides these lofty pastimes, plain athletic ones existed, one of which was 

growing less popular, at least in France: 

the game of royal tennis. It is played on «.,,.- 

J L Tennis — the king of games and the game of 

indoor courts whose complex arrange- . . , . „. _ , 

r & kings — was mentioned by Chaucer two hun- 

ment of walls and ceilings has a role in ^ yeafs before Shakespeare put the game 

the volleys and in the scoring. Orig- on me Uterary map; Erasmus devoted a collo- 

inally the ball was hit with the palm of quy to it, Rabelais made Pantagruel play ten- 

the hand; the racquet was invented in nis at Orleans, and people playing tennis 

the late 1500s. About that time there were a feature of Swedenborg's vision of 

were 250 tennis courts in Paris. Half a Heaven. A print shows Charles IX of France 

century later only 1 1 4 were left. But as at the age of mo wi* a tennis racket ^eady 

it declined in France it spread across in his hand. 

Europe. — Jeremy Potter, Hazard Chase (1 964) 



188 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Dutch skating was also popular, together with its related game, some- 
thing like ice hockey. When the ice was gone, the game moved to grassy lawns 
where the ko/f (Dutch, for club) was used to strike a ball rather than a puck. In 
this form the sport was taken up by princes and deemed royal also. The com- 
mon people in rural places enjoyed other games of various vintages that 
required an animal skin blown up, to be thrown, kicked, or carried to a goal. 
Once a year they organized the May Festival, in which a lord and lady of the 
May lead a semi-dramatic pageant with dialogue, song, and dance around the 
Maypole. Everybody had a role in it, from the milkmaid, who was always 
pretty and merry, to the chimney sweep, who was always black-faced and 
comic. 

The indoor equivalent was the upper-class masque, a series of verses 
recited, sung, and danced, the whole hung on a slender thread of story — a 
classical myth, or a pastoral love affair, always quite moral. [The sample to 
read is Milton's "Comus."] The sets and costumes were elaborate and expen- 
sive; the words and the music were written and composed by the noble fam- 
ily's talented pensioners, and sometimes by the lord and lady themselves, who 
in any case sang and acted in the event. At other times, dancing filled the 
leisure hour. The choice of steps was large, though one or another might sud- 
denly become the raging fashion: the others were boring. 

Of the new ones, the minuet reached Paris in 1650 and long prevailed. It 
was derived from a brawl of Poitou and got its new name from the small steps 
that were thought to make it graceful, dignified, and stately — in a word, 
monarchical. Louis XIV's court musician Lully composed minuets, Moliere 
used them as interludes in his plays, and the musical form later became part 
of the classical symphony Other dances — the coranto, galliard, jig, pavane, 
branle (brawl), Bergamask (from the Venetian town of Bergamo) — each had 
its heyday. In some parts of Europe every trade had its special dance; the 
German brewers, for instance, appropriated the waltz in this same century, 
with the tune "Ach, du lieber Augustin"; it remained local for 200 years 
(500>). In Spain, the grandees consented to dance only the slow and grave; 
the lively dances, such as the gallega with castanet accompaniment, were for 
the lower orders, whose dignity survived going wild as the pace grew faster 
and faster. 

People of all ranks went to plays (344>), where they more or less jostled 
one another, made one by the common pleasure. But ladies protected their 
identity by wearing masks, and gentlemen might do the like, unless they chose 
to show off their face and finery by sitting on the stage; it was their right as 
noble patrons. Much has been said against the English Puritans for closing 
the theaters in 1 642, a ban that lasted two decades, until the Stuart kings were 
restored. The motive was not hostility to plays, they continued to be written 



Cross Section: Venice <^> 189 

and acted by dons and students in the universities and by lawyers at the Inns 
of Court. It was the theater as a place of assignation and the players as dis- 
reputable characters that were aimed at. And yet, shortly before the closure, 
when the highly moral Charles I and his French queen were still on the 
throne, a troupe of French actors was invited to London, where it presented 
works with the women's roles played by women, instead of boys as the 
English custom was. They were not hissed off the stage, as happened earlier 
when a native troupe included actresses. 

It should be added that the 1640s of the century saw the fall of 
Shakespeare and his works into disrepute and neglect, Ben Jonson being by 
far preferred (<142). Waller emerged as the first of poets. 

The fit of morality that made an end of theaters and baths was no affec- 
tation. It was pervasive and may be seen in the more subdued clothing, the 
toning down of rhetoric, the more rigorous good manners; perhaps also in 
Hobbes's joyless vision of man and in the chiaroscuro of Rembandt's later 
works. At any rate, the fashionable philosophy was Stoicism. Christina of 
Sweden was a Stoic before her conversion to Catholicism; Pascal had been 
one before the accident that made him a fervent Christian; many others, with- 
out reading Stoic doctrine in Epictetus, fell in with the mood of its sober 
expectations. 

These changes may be attributed to the normal swing of social atti- 
tudes — the "whirligig of taste" — or in other words, fatigue and boredom. 
Warring in Central Europe for a whole generation, then further wars in which 
England, France, Spain, and Venice took part after the mid-century point, 
had some dampening effect on the spirit. The long struggle over religion had 
not put an end to fervent faith; the number of sects and of shades of belief 
within them kept growing; and by division these yearnings lessened public 
hope, the hope of overcoming others' errors and of seeing the fulfillment of 
God's plan. 

In addition, the public mind was affected by the tone of the natural 
philosophers. A universe of mindless, colorless matter in motion is not a 
cheering sight. Nor is there much gaiety in mathematics — geometry looks 
bare and algebra is even one more step away from the familiar, friendly num- 
bers. Stoicism is abstract like algebra and unarousing. It sees a fixed order in 
the universe, in which it is best not to resist or repine — whatever is, is right. 
God or Providence governs wisely and does not interfere with its own laws, 
nor does it reward or punish in this world. The question of another, it leaves 
untouched, so that apart from the hope of immortality, a Christian may be a 
Stoic without feeling heretical. Stoicism does teach that to make the best of 
life, moral conduct is imperative; it causes the least trouble and leaves the 
fewest regrets. In the face of life the goal is composure. 



190 q^> From Dawn to Decadence 



What were you taught to call exile, slander, 
prison, and death? — Externals, indifferent 
things. — How do you define indifferent 
things? — Those that are not dependent 
upon our Will. — What is the inference from 
that statement? — Things independent of our 
Will are nothing to us. — Upon what does the 
good of Man depend? — Upon the rectitude 
of his Will and an understanding of those 
things that are external to us. — What is your 
goal in life? — To follow God. 

— Epictetus the Stoic (1C a.d.) 



But the practice of Stoicism uses 
up energy to coerce the natural 
impulses; and among these it denies the 
urge to explore the world. Stoic and 
scientist is not a likely combination. 
True, Newton thought that studying 
the ways of Nature was trivial com- 
pared with interpreting Revelation; but 
other natural philosophers were nei- 
ther true Christians nor old Stoics; they 
were Epicureans, which does not mean 
pursuers of pleasure, but believers in 



the importance of the sensory world. 
Among them were some who earned the name of Libertines — again, not 
loose-livers, but freethinkers. This intellectual EMANCIPATION did not simply 
facilitate the scientific enterprise; it also revived the hopeful vision of Man as 
capable of improvement and creator of Progress. 



The Invisible College 



When WE SPEAK of 17C science and scientists we are committing an 
anachronism. At that time the word science had not been narrowed down to 
one kind of knowledge; it meant whatever was known, and men of learning 
were still able to possess most of it. Those who spent much of their time in 
investigating nature were called natural philosophers; what they used in their 
work were "philosophical instruments." The mathematician was generally 
called a geometer, by reference to the then most advanced branch of mathe- 
matics. Calculations on paper were still a relatively recent innovation (199; 
200); the word scientist dates from 1840.° 

These distinctions are important, because they show that science in the 
modern sense had its source not solely in the new facts brought out by 
Copernicus and Galileo, but in a large pool of ideas dating back to the Middle 
Ages and beyond. Astrology, alchemy, and magic were serious enterprises, 
and the physics and biology of Aristotle, the medicine and physiology of 
Galen, the astronomy of Ptolemy, were highly developed systems grounded 
in solid reasoning — too solid, as Whitehead pointed out long ago. Not until 
the systems were revised and simplified, while made to accommodate newly 
observed facts, did the "march of science" as a concentrated effort begin all 
over Europe. 

It is thus misleading to see in the 1 7C a scientific revolution, not because it 
is best to keep the word revolution for vast changes in power and property, but 
because the new conception of the cosmos was rather an evolution, with 
stumbles and backtrackings along the way. Points in Aristotle's physics were 
refuted at the University of Paris as early as 1300, others soon after at Oxford. 
The dismantling of the reigning systems went on bit by bit in halting fashion, 
speeding up in the 1 6C and taking another fifty years or more to make an end. 

That Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Jung, Pascal, and Descartes — all men of the 
17C — are better known than their elders in science is the kind of wrong that 
happens repeatedly in all fields of culture. The pioneers, the first who strug- 
gle out of the established systems and who form new and useful conceptions, 



192 <^» From Dawn to Decadence 

Science has never shaken off the impress of appear only half fight, incomplete; and 
its origin in the historical revolt of the later their names stay remote. But they are 
Renaissance. perhaps more to be cherished than 

—Whitehead, Science and those who come after, who clear off 

the Modern World (1 925) the debris and offer a neater, more full- 

blown view. 
In any case, the 16C must not be left out of the supposed revolution. It is 
the century of Copernicus, Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Paracelsus, Pare, Vesalius, 
and the less noted Telesio, whose work of 1565, On Nature, led Bacon to call 
him "the first of the moderns." It is to the point that the best short account 
of the growth of modern science, by H. T. Pledge, is called Science Since 1500, 
not 1600.° 

The road to the present was hard and long because the old systems were 
good. They had consistency and completeness; only at a few points did con- 
trary facts or gaps in explanation threaten their validity. One such fact was the 
odd behavior of the planets, especially Mars, which at times went backward 
instead of forward. Another ill-explained phenomenon was that of horizon- 
tal motion: what keeps an arrow flying so far and no farther? Does the push 
of the bowstring put something into the arrow? Or, as some thought, does 
the air get displaced around the head and keep propelling it? Lastly, why do 
these forces give out? 

The larger picture was this: in the heavens, with Earth at the center, were 
several huge spheres, one within the next, each made of finer and finer stuff, 
and all revolving and emitting the "music of the spheres." The planets, then 
the stars, studded the two nearest spheres, the rest being the dwelling place of 
angels and other spirits in the service of God the Creator, the Unmoved 
Mover at the farthest boundary. Sphere and circle, the two perfect figures, 
were essential to this perfect movement; it was unconscionable on the part of 
Mars that it should retrogress. Other irregularities were taken care of by old 
Ptolemy's epicycles, circular paths around the point where the errant body 
should be. 

It made a very complex structure, and at last the mind rebelled at more 
and more contortions. William of Occam's principle of economy, that the 
best explanation is the one that calls for the least number of assumptions, was 
an argument against Ptolemy, in addition to the awkward facts. It impelled 
Copernicus to revise — not destroy — the system, by supposing the sun to be 
the center instead of the Earth. He was thereby able to reduce the epicycles 
from 84 to 30. But even his scheme is not quite sun-centered. His work, pub- 
lished in the mid-1 6C after his death, proposed an important change indeed, 
but it was not the shattering blow it is commonly taken for; it raised new dif- 
ficulties, and those who rejected it were not simply diehards refusing evi- 
dence. 



The Invisible College q^> 193 

Kopernik (to use his proper name) was a devoted admirer of the ancients 
and obsessed with the perfection of circles and spheres. Such notions (and 
several others) had to be abandoned before the modern planetary system 
could be suggested and tested; he did not bring this about single-handed. And 
another thing he did not do is what the textbooks would have us believe: 
"Science has cut Man down to size and broken his pride: Copernicus 
removed him from the center of the universe; Darwin reduced him to the sta- 
tus of animal; and Freud dethroned his intellect and put instinct in its place." 

The last two of these claims will be dealt with later (571; 662>). The first 
betrays absentmindedness: what pride was felt when men thought of them- 
selves as miserable sinners fearful of an angry God, who visited on them the 
punishment of plague, famine, and earthquakes? When Satan was free to 
"roam the world in great wrath" and doom his victims to eternal fire? When 
it took endless pains and costs to pray in aid from the saints and their relics, 
from pilgrimages, and from self-abasement? True, the Humanists felt the dig- 
nity of the human being, because his powers were achieving wonders, but it 
was not because of his cosmic location. He was still under God, no matter 
what Ptolemy or Kopernik might say. Montaigne himself found no cause for 
men to be proud. The notion of medieval or early modern man saying to him- 
self: "I am at the center of the universe and what a glorious thing it is!" is an 
invention of SCIENTISM centuries later. 



The Middle Ages did not "neglect observation." They examined the heav- 
ens minutely (mostly for astrological prediction) and the earth eagerly for what 
it could yield of food, medicines, materials, and elemental power for use in 
machines (230>). But observation is rarely neutral; it rests on pre-conceptions 
and pre-perceptions; and it was these that had to change. In fact, close obser- 
vation can be a hindrance to scientific thought if it fastens too hard on outward 
appearances. A better way of observing consists in overlooking visible details, 
in neglecting observation (to put it rather strongly) and in viewing objects in geo- 
metrical fashion — seeing the Rabelaisian quintessence (<130). It is the method 
used in Picasso's bull: in the series of sketches he starts lifelike — massive, 
glossy, beautifully drawn in every part. Then, in a dozen or so of gradual reduc- 
tions, he loses one characteristic after another until, at the last, he is the bare 
outline of what he was at first. He is the abstract bull, the bull, so to speak, of 
science. 

For centuries, movement was studied by thinking of the arrow in flight or 
the cart drawn by a horse — it was push or pull by an unknown force. But what 
about falling bodies? After Galileo and Newton, by abstraction, motion no 
longer raised images of movement; it was defined geometrically as change from 



194 <^d From Dawn to Decadence 

place to place, its rule being that it will continue forever until something stops 
it — an obstacle or the friction of the air. Similarly, an object at rest stays put 
until a force is applied to it. The two statements make up the law of inertia. It 
is a law not because objects "obey" it — that again is a skewed interpretation; 
the law is only a statement of regularity in behavior. 

It is clear why science is closely allied to mathematics, but the link is not 
solely with numbers, so as to count and measure. Mathematics includes 
geometry, the science of figures and their relations. As one can count only 
exact similars — not apples and oranges, but "fruit" or "things," so measuring 
the relations of objects requires the use of their geometrical forms. In both 
cases, abstraction is the stripping away of the qualities that make a thing dis- 
tinct, useful, rough or smooth, friendly or hostile. This reduction is the work 
of the geometrical mind (216>). It sees the piece of wood of triangular shape 
that holds together the balls on the pool table not as a triangle; its measure- 
ments would not give the answers that the triangle of geometry supplies. 
Even the printed figure in the textbook is not the triangle of geometry; it is 
only a reminder of the definition of triangle and the properties deducible 
from it. 

In other words, for science to arise from previous speculations, a strange 
idea had to become clear and fully accepted — the idea of body as such, the 
purely physical, devoid of qualities so as to be capable of quantity. Earlier 
conceptions were not sufficientiy geometrical; their truth was pictorial and 
poetic. They mirrored the universe clearly but symbolically, which is to say 
full of meanings; whereas the purely physical has no meaning; it just is. The 
transitional outiook — a little of both worlds — is exemplified in one of the 
prime contributors to 1 6C scientific thought, 

Giordano Bruno 

He believed the cosmos to be infinite and full of inhabited worlds. He 
agreed with Kopernik about the sun-centered galaxy of planets. He espoused 
the atomic hypothesis of the ancient thinkers Democritus and Lucretius, but 
his atoms were animated units — "monads" (366>), so that everything that 
exists is alive. He was an able psychologist who wrote on memory, on the 
imagination, and on the religious impulse as the source of cosmologies. Long 
protected by princes and cities for his skill in magic, Bruno was at last accused 
of heresy by the Inquisition. He recanted, was imprisoned for eight years, and 
then re-examined. This time he did not recant and was burned alive in the 
year 1600. 

Thinkers in every succeeding period have claimed Bruno as a great fore- 
runner — in the 18C, of Deism; in the 19th, of German Naturphilosophie 
(Coleridge was much taken with his "polar logic and dynamic psychology"); 



The Invisible College <^ 195 

in the early 20C, of Vitalism. The two terms atom and monad stand for matter 
versus units of the "life force"; the debate between Bruno and his 16C peers 
was thus the first of the conflicts between physicists and biologists, most of 
whom may be found in one or the other of the two camps — Materialists and 
Vitalists (365>). 

Both atom and monad are concepts that reduce the visible world to "sim- 
ple natures," fundamental things that are all alike and do not change. The com- 
mon-sense look of things is not to be trusted; it is too variable. The human 
aspect of the world and human use of objects must be ignored by the student 
of nature. In this purging of variety the importance of words is considerable: it 
helps to keep the geometrical idea in mind. Thus mass is better than weight, 
which suggests a burden pulling at one's arms. Force also seems to imply our 
own exertion, and energy does not — or not so much. The abstract word gravita- 
tion conceals "heavy" very nicely Again, references to spirit or principle to 
account for what happens are too vague and suggest unseen "powers." As for 
the biological sciences, they must use a system of words — nomenclature, which 
is names, and terminology, which designates parts and functions. To sum up, 
any "anthropomorphic" — manlike — view of things is wrong in principle and 
will mislead. Especially wrong is the belief that anything in nature fulfills a pur- 
pose. Aristotle's physics relied on a doctrine of ends, of final purposes and 
meanings. The reverse assumption yields the truth of science, not movement 
toward goals but purposeless push or 
pull that need not end. There is inherent in Nature's works no pru- 

It goes without saying that the cul- dence, no artifices, no intelligence, but these 
tural consequences, the effect on only appear to our thinking to be there 
human lives, of this shift in outlook because we judge of the divine things of 
have been profound. To begin with, as Nature according to our special faculties and 
success in "natural philosophy" pecuKar manners of thought. 
became evident in one realm after —William Harvey (1649) 
another, scientists, as we now call 

them, came to be regarded as "those who really know." This in turn meant 
that reality was split — scientific fact and human experience, no longer one 
and often contradictory. If the one was real, the other must be illusion. 

The only way out of the contradiction was to regard Man as not part of 
Nature. He confronted it as an enemy. The search for knowledge began to be 
spoken of as the "conquest of nature," the hostile cosmos being regarded as 
"blind"; for once man was excluded from it, it had no consciousness. Next, 
man himself must be regarded as nursing a fantasy when he thought he was 
pursuing a purpose. Being made of matter, he was a thing too, possessing no 
free will, only the illusion of it. The chain of causes determined his every act. 
He was predestined, as Luther and Calvin had said, though they said it for a 
different reason (<6). 



196 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

A further consequence of re-thinking nature geometrically was to make 
ABSTRACTION an obsessive habit of mind. Ever enlarging its scope, it has 
become so infectious that it ranks as a theme. For the moment, consider 
abstraction as the urge to disregard the features that lie on the surface of 
things, in hopes of finding the kernel within that does not change and is 
therefore felt to be the reality. This urge has always existed; it makes experi- 
ence orderly But the scientific use of abstraction has modified the very feel- 
ing of life on a scale unexampled, as will appear in the sequel. 



The great advantage for science of an aimless universe is that it frees the 
imagination. Since there are no preconceived "ends" that things must 
"reach," anything is possible. Thus Galileo could assert that the earth moved, 
when obviously it didn't/ His assertion could be true for reasons that out- 
weigh direct sensation, provided he could explain why people and their 
houses did not fly off in all directions. Circles are perfect, as anybody can see, 
but Kepler could assert that planets moved in ellipses, because he had calcu- 
lated on that basis their actual positions. Numbers had the last word. 

But that freedom of imagination was not achieved all at once in the 17C. 
Obstacles crumbled only after much hesitation and long debate. The minds 
of the 16C philosophers, both the traditionalists and the radicals, were full of 
ideas inherited from antiquity. They were Humanists who knew Pliny's large 
Natural History; a work of mixed observation and fantasy. The physicians, as 
we saw, knew their Galen, the Greek who had made a system of what the 
ancients knew about disease. In addition, the medieval Arab scholars who 
had transmitted Greek learning had tacked on their own speculations. There 
was, besides, an occult tradition comprising the Jewish Cabbala, works on 
magic highly esteemed by those called Rosicrucians (still an active sect), and 
ideas that Ficino among others attributed to Egyptian wisdom. Some of these 
ideas also entered into the doctrine of the nascent "Freemasons," whose later 
political influence is recorded on the back of the U.S. one-dollar bill in the 
green pyramid and mottoes. 

Add to this massive background the well-rooted theory and practice of 
astrology and alchemy and it is obvious that the new notions that we perceive 
as budding science had a thick armor to penetrate. New ideas do not batde so 
much with ignorance as with solid knowledge. Nor was the batde confined to 
individual opponents; it went on inside the head of each thinker; hardly any 
was totally "a modern." Kepler was a practicing astrologist, Newton a dedi- 
cated alchemist. [The book to read is The Alchemists by F. Sherwood Taylor.] 
We saw Bruno leaping forward to an unheard-of vision of the cosmos but still 
working magic. Vesalius came to think his dissecting human bodies was sin- 



The Invisible College <&> 197 

ful, and Philip II, his patron, persuaded him to atone for it by a pilgrimage to 
Jerusalem. On the return journey he died. Van Helmont, Boerhaave, and 
other true innovators continued to believe that "directive spirits" were at 
work in the phenomena they observed and saw the operation of male and 
female principles in chemical reactions. Cardano, who was sound in his geol- 
ogy and brilliant in mathematics, had the further gift of prophecy and pre- 
dicted the date of his own death, with fatal accuracy. A last example: Newton 
virtually gave up science during the last third of his life and spent his time 
studying the book of Daniel to find the truth about Armaggedon and the end 
of the world. 

Among these early seekers the ones little known today were figures of 
European reputation, continually moving from court to court and university 
to university. The courts wanted magic and predictions, the universities 
polemical teaching. It was a hard way to earn a living and an easy one for mak- 
ing enemies. These traveling salesmen in ideas were not philosophers in the 
sense of pale meditators tied to a desk, yet they managed to write an incredi- 
ble number of books, often not published till after their death but widely cir- 
culated in manuscript. This was the case of the most extraordinary character 
of the first half of the 1 6C: 

Paracelsus 

The extraordinary in him begins with his real name: Philippus Aureolus 
Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. His Latin moniker means either 
"higher than Celsus," the ancient Roman encyclopedist, or is meant to trans- 
late Hohenheim (high homestead), a place in Switzerland. From his physician 
father he learned the principles of natural philosophy, which led him to study 
botany, mineralogy, and metallurgy. He actually worked in the mines owned 
by the Fugger cartel. 

Next, he qualified as a military surgeon and used this traveling opportu- 
nity to search for works on medicine — mainly to refute them. His outspoken 
opinions ("the ravings of a monomaniac" said the city fathers of Basel) 
caused him to be fired from more than one lucrative post. Hot with anger 
against authority, he coolly proclaimed that the whole world should listen and 
follow him. This very egotism brought him innumerable adherents. In the 
end, they became a kind of international, semi-secret society, disturbing to the 
medical and alchemical establishment and helping to shake up conventional 
ideas at large. Nothing quite like it appeared in the West until the spread of 
Freudian psychoanalysis in the 1 920s. 

Paracelsus thought of himself as a fighter against Evil with a capital E. 
Thinking in symbols and using astrology, he was at the same time a naturalis- 
tic researcher and practitioner. He treated syphilis with guiacum and distin- 



198 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

guished the congenital from other causes. He urged the unviolent treatment 
of wounds and ulcers. He was the first to diagnose silicosis in miners and to 
connect tuberculosis with occupation. He gave a medical account of chorea 
(St. Vitus' dance), described the symptoms of hysteria, including blindness, 
and saw that goiter and cretinism were endemic owing to minerals in the 
drinking water. All this went against the ruling doctrine of the "balance of 
humors" (223 >). Instead, he saw disease as externally caused and localized in 
some part of the body. Hence specific drugs, preferably chemical and not 
"simples" from the garden. 

In pure chemistry, Paracelsus described some new products of combin- 
ing metals, he concentrated alcohol by freezing it, found a new way to make 
aqua fortis (nitric acid), and gave more than a hint of the system of elements, 
defined by their behavior in given processes. His Handbook of Chemistry went 
through many editions. His restless imagination brought him to the verge of 
the modern conception of the purely physical. 

He and his fellow natural philosophers were nonetheless believers in 
God and immortality. They reconciled Christianity with semi-materialistic 
science by what is called Fideism — "faith-ism." In the words of one of its 
early expounders, Pomponazzi, "I believe as a Christian what I cannot believe 
as a philosopher." In this latter guise he tried to give natural explanations of 
miracles and argued that the soul is immortal, "but not in the usual sense of 
the word." Pico, Rabelais, Montaigne, Bacon, Pascal, Sir Thomas Browne, 
like many 20C Catholic men of science, have been fideists. 

The doctrine — or perhaps it is only an attitude — exposes its adherents to 
being called either hypocrites or heretics. Pomponazzi, who taught at Padua, 
the center for new ideas, was accused of heresy but escaped condemnation, 
partly because in him and others Fideism is ambiguous: it may mean a "dou- 
ble truth," with a contradiction between the two halves, so that half the 
believer is not a Christian. Or it may mean — and this is the argument for the 
defense — that the human mind is unable to grasp why God's Revelation dif- 
fers from Reason and must take them as equally true without reconcilement. 

* 
* * 

What did these pioneers of the 16C and 17C find that has stood the test 
of time? 

— in physics and astronomy, that the planets, including Earth, circle 
about the sun in elliptical orbits (Kopernik, Kepler, Galileo); that motion and 
acceleration occur in the same way and in regular fashion for all bodies, these 
being subject to the pull of a force known as gravitation. This force ties 
together the planetary system, the power exerted being directly proportional 



The Invisible College <^> 199 

to the masses involved and inversely so to the distances between them 
(Hooke, Newton); that air exerts pressure and does this with greater force on 
the surface of the earth than on top of a mountain, because there is a smaller 
mass of it bearing down as one goes up into it (Toricelli, Pascal; the barome- 
ter); that light occurs in waves, is reflected and refracted according to for- 
mula, and that colors result from the different frequencies of these waves 
(Descartes, Newton); and, most generally, that everything hangs together like 
clockwork, because everything is matter, a uniform, invisible substance that 
underlies all appearances. The things we see and touch do not belong to dif- 
ferent realms governed by different rules. In a word, the cosmos is a machine. 

— in medicine, that the human body is also like a machine (Vesalius), part 
of it being a pump that keeps the blood circulating (Harvey). The body is also 
a vessel in which chemical reactions take place; accordingly not only plants but 
minerals can cure disease (Paracelsus); that wounds can be better treated with a 
dressing than by red-hot iron; that the blood vessels should be tied to prevent 
bleeding during amputation; that the skull may be trepanned for relieving pres- 
sure on the brain; that difficult births should be aided by instruments (Pare); 
that upbringing and culture play a role in mental illness (Burton). 

— in botany (despite much error in ascribing functions to parts of 
plants), much good description of various species, acute comparisons of 
forms, and a systematic arrangement in kinds, based on accurate observation 
(Caesalpino); improved classifications by Joachim Jung, Vegetius, Grew, and 
Ray, all leading to the famous synthesis of Linnaeus in the 18C. 

— in chemistry, that substances showing active properties, such as salt, 
sulfur, mercury, quick lime, and the various acids — all used for centuries by 
the alchemists — are not in fact activated by a spirit or principle within, but 
interact mechanically (Boyle). Equally important, the idea of a gas and the law 
of its behavior (Van Helmont, Boyle). Van Helmont coined the ugly word, 
probably from the German G'dscht, which is the foam that occurs in fermen- 
tation. He also showed by quantitative methods that substances persist in 
dieir compounds. 

— in geology, that fossils are evidence of the sea's having covered the hills 
in earlier times (Cardan). The definitive descriptions of many minerals, their 
color, luster, weight, cleavage, and crystalline form (Agricola = Georg Bauer); 
the suggestion that the strata of rocks are formed of sediments such as would 
be deposited by turbid waters (Nicolas Steno). 

— in mathematics, the shift from machine calculation (with the abacus or 
computing table) to arithmetic on paper (Treviso and others) soon leading to 
the use of decimals and later of logarithms (Napier), the invention of calculus 
(Leibniz and Newton), of a calculating machine (Pascal), and the combining 
of algebra and geometry into analytical aeometry by 



200 <^t> From Dawn to Decadence 

Let me see. Every wether tods; Descartes 

Every tod yields pound and odd shilling; 

Fifteen hundred shorn, what comes wool to? He has been made the cause of many 

I can't do it without counters. things — of ruining French education 

—Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale (1610?) down to the present, of having exerted 

the greatest influence on Newton's intel- 
To multiply one number by itself or by , 111 n ^1 r 1 

r J J J lectual development, of being the father 

another number is to find a third number \ r 

, . , . . t , or German philosophy, or having pre- 

which contains one of these numbers as r . , 

. . .„ . . aU ceded Adam Smith in seeing "the invis- 

many times as there are units in the other. & 

This is done by . . . [etc.] ible hand " of ^ free market at work '° 

^ A „ _.™ In our day, he has inspired the linguistics 

— Tkeviso, Arithmetic (\ 47 8) Ji , , 

of the Transformationist school and the 

music of a ballet with spoken text. It 

takes a great genius to do so many right and wrong things. 

Descartes was a soldier, educated by the Jesuits, who in the 1630s, during 
one of the more desultory campaigns of the Thirty Years' War, was in winter 
quarters near Ulm in southern Germany. He found there the leisure to phi- 
losophize. He wanted to put an end to the doubts created by the rival systems 
in current debate — the old Aristotelianism and new Stoicism, Epicureanism, 
atheism, and Pyrrhonism, the complete skepticism that went so far as to deny 
one's own existence. To settle his own mind, he had to sweep out of it all that 
he had ever learned. This once done, his first conclusion was the famous cog- 
ito, ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. The test of this or any truth was its being 
a "clear and distinct idea." By distinct he meant unmixed with any other idea. 
This is what a born mathematician would assume from his specialty: a circle 
is not a square. 

The next clear distinction is that between thought and what it thinks 
about — things regarded as essentially matter. Matter is bulk — what occupies 
space; in philosophical language, it has extension. Mind is impalpable, without 
extension. In this respect it is akin to God, who created Man and endowed 
him with a mind or soul. God exists because the human mind thinks of Him 
as in all ways perfect, and the idea of perfection can only have come to man's 
mind from a perfect Being, who is God. Mind and matter are thus the two 
constituents of reality and they are distinct. 

True or not, this simple system was ideally suited to the needs of 17C sci- 
ence. It left a place for God and thereby averted the charge that dropping spirit 
and taking everything as matter must make atheists; and it separated mind and 
matter, so that the several sciences could forget what impresses the mind so 
forcibly: qualities, meanings, and purposes. Those things were in the mind and 
not in matter, which is entirely neutral stuff. Such is the view of the man in the 
lab today. 

Descartes had cleared the ground. It seemed to him covered by an accu- 



The Invisible College <^ 201 

mulation of rubbish. A curious psychological fact is that his first impulse to 
build a system came to him in a dream, or rather a nightmare. In it he was pos- 
sessed by a genius and overcome by a dazzling light that suggested to him that 
he would be given answers to the questions he had been wrestling with. There 
followed three dreams full of disparate images — of an exotic fruit, of a noisy 
storm and lightning in his room, then of silence and a book of poetry at hand, 
followed by a conversation with a man about verses ending with a line of his 
own that said: "What path shall I follow in Life?" Still in the dream, all this 
struck him as supernatural and he at once prayed to the Virgin Mary and 
vowed to go on a pilgrimage on foot. 

The answer Descartes gave to the question in his dream was: unify all 
knowledge by the use of exact reasoning, the kind used in geometry — the 
world mathematicized. During nearly twenty years he worked productively at 
various sciences, including biology and psychology, in preparation of The 
World, Or a Treatise on Light. But news of the vigilance exercised by the 
Inquisition made him abandon the work. Instead, urged by friends, he pub- 
lished a small book entided Discourse on the Method of Rightly Using the Mind in 
Seeking Truth in the Sciences. 

It is an epoch-making work in Now that we have studied them all [the pas- 
more than one way. It is in French, not sions] we see that we have much less reason 
Latin, and it tells in simple words how to fear them than before. For we see that they 
the author discovered his method; that are ^ g° od b Y nature and ^ we need do is 
is, the book is a piece of intellectual avoid their excess or bad uses. And these can 
autobiography addressed to the general be cured by separating in oneself the motions 

, ,. T ,, , , ., of the blood and spirits from the ideas they 

public. It tells how the root idea came r 

., .. ... are usually linked with. 

while the philosopher was lying in one 

r .1 i _ i • — Descartes, Treatise on the Passions 

of those huge porcelain stoves, com- 
mon in northern and central Europe, 

that provide a shelf or recess for the householder to lie on and keep warm. 
Lasdy, the book flatters the reader by telling him that all the method takes is a 
faculty that almost all people have enough of for the purpose: common sense. 
What is the method? It is to look long and hard at any question or prob- 
lem and break it down into as many parts as make it up; then deal with each 
part separately — a much easier task than trying to solve the whole — and 
finally, to re-assemble the parts, making sure to count them so that none is left 
out. The method, in short, is ANALYSIS — Greek for "breaking down." It is 
the ideal method for science not only because it is standardized, but also 
because it takes for granted that the thing studied is made up of parts — is a 
mechanism: the kitchen clock once taken to pieces, the function of each 
wheel and pinion can be clearly seen, the lot is put together again, and the 
analyst understands the whole. ANALYSIS is a theme, the twin of ABSTRAC- 
TION, as will appear. 



202 ^> From Dawn to Decadence 

A less obvious cultural influence of the Cartesian philosophy and its 
method has been to promote faith in Reason. Mankind has always used rea- 
son/;^ — argument went on in cave, tent, or prairie hut — but the Cartesian or 
scientific reason is of a particular kind. Like geometry, it starts from clear and 
distinct ideas that are abstract and assumed to be true. Faith in this type of 
reason is a creed, often passionate, called Rationalism. It differs from the 
workaday use of our wits by its claim that analytical reasoning is the sole 
avenue to truth. 

This conviction is one that is being questioned today, and not for the first 
time. Unfortunately, the combatants on both sides keep arguing whether the 
modern mind is harmed — some say victimized — by "too much reason," the 
attackers holding that science and numbers are not the only truth; the defend- 
ers retorting that if reason is given up, intellectual anarchy and wild supersti- 
tion will reign. The latter are right about reason as an activity — reason/^ the 
former are right about Rationalism, the dominance of a particular form of 
reason and its encroachment where it does not belong 

In the 17C itself, this misapplication of "reason" was exposed, as we shall 
see, and this by a scientist and philosopher of equal stature with Descartes 
(219>). Still earlier, as we saw in Rabelais and Montaigne, the caution was 
given: do not reduce all experience to formulas by reason: leave room for 
impulse and intuition, those acts of the whole being that are often called 
"nature," or again, "the heart," both by contrast with "the mind." Wisdom 
lies not in choosing between them, but in knowing their place and limits. 

That is the great difficulty. The more science proves its worth, the harder 
it is for "nature" or "the heart" to feel free. Reason should guide — all moral- 
ists agree — but, as others point out, mind is not separate from heart. The 
astute Chinese have a character for heart-and-mind.° They perceived that the 
urge to reason is itself a drive from the heart, which explains why rationalists 
are often fanatics. The arbitrary distinction may be unavoidable for denizens 
of a well-developed culture, where the result is SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 

* 
* * 

Whether Descartes used his method to arrive at the scheme that under- 
lies analytic geometry may be questioned. After all, his vocation was revealed 
to him in a series of dreams, they were not the workings of pure reason. Great 
ideas come to men of science as to poets, all at once, after long internal incu- 
bation. But Descartes' new mathematical tool deserves its epithet analytic, 
because it expresses spatial relations in algebraic terms and conversely: 
numerical relations in visual fashion. It does this by coordinates along which 
related entities are measured off, producing the familiar graph. The curve or 
jagged line or other figure represents — analyzes — the relation between time 



The Invisible College <^> 203 



and crime, or higher education and In 1594, being then seventeen years of age, I 

divorce, or locality and lung cancer. We finished my courses of philosophy and was 

lead today a compulsively graphic exis- struck with the mockery of taking a degree in 

tence (535>). arts " * therefore thought it more profitable to 

ANALYSIS is a form of ABSTRAC- examine myself and I perceived that I really 

TION in that it takes every object of koew nothm g worth knowm ^- J had onl y to 

^i i . c j 11 ii talk and wrangle and therefore refused the 

study as being fundamentally a clock, ^ 

. r i • i • i • i title of master of arts, there being nothing 

made up or parts, and identical with , , 

r , . . . . sound or true that I was master of. I turned 

every other object of its kind. To take aU - „ ,. . , , , aU 

3 ' my thoughts to medicine and learned the 

the examples above, all crimes, all emptiness ofbooks. I went abroad and found 
divorces, all residents, all lung cancers everywhere the same deep-rooted ignorance. 
are identical units. Analysis by abstrac- _ Van Helmont (1648) 
tion has turned into an ordinary habit 
of thought. It governs not only the 

newspaper graphics and all the "studies" of everything under the sun, but 
also the stock market, conversation, political debate, advertising, the 
Olympics, education, literary criticism — nothing has escaped it. 

This handling of life by numbers, together with all the "marvels" of engi- 
neering science, are so familiar and so glorious a proof of human ability that 
any account of the history of science is almost sure to suggest a triumphal pro- 
cession. The troops with their banners look small at the 16C horizon, but they 
swell steadily and approach to full size in the present. This is a pleasant illusion. 
The march of mind that is often equated with the progress of science has not 
been in a straight line, even though it is true that the results of scientific work 
accumulate and many remain valid over time. Between the 16C dawn and the 
20C high noon, many external battles had to be fought, quite aside from those 
within the body of searchers, about the place, role, worth, and harm of science. 
Battles is of course a metaphor; they were propaganda campaigns aimed at 
established opinion, the first important one being that led by 

Bacon 

The titles he gave his works tell of his aim and effect: The Advancement of 
Learning, The Great Instauration (= renovation), The Novum Organum (= the new 
tool). Bacon, a judge, Lord Chancellor of England like Thomas More, and 
guilty of taking bribes when he ought to have taken only presents, made it his 
true business to serve as both prosecutor in the case against the ancients' 
modes of knowledge and as defender of the moderns. In so doing he formu- 
lated all the cliches about the merit of investigating nature and the usefulness 
of physical science. 

The ancients, he pointed out, can no longer be invoked as authority, 
because we know more than they did. We are the ancient and wise, they were 



204 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

the young and ignorant. Besides, authority is worthless. The notion that 
something is true because a wise man said it is a bad principle. Is the thing 
true in fact, tested by observation? The new tool consists in applying this test. 
Observe closely, record findings exactly, and frame generalities that cover the 
facts, without coloring from myth, poetry, or other preconceived idea. "Go to 
the earth and it shall teach thee." The lessons will enable you to predict with- 
out fail the future behavior of things and thereby guide action with assurance 
and wisdom. Knowledge is power. 

This pleading was set forth so ably, 

the message was so simple and direct, 
For my name and memory, I leave it to men's ^ BacQn SOQn became ^ hero of ^ 

charitable speeches, to foreign nations, and sdentific ^^^ By the mid-18C, the 
8 ' Age of Reason, Bacon was what 

-From Bacon's will (1621) Aristotle had been for so long, "the 

master of those who know" 
In recent times, Bacon has been ungratefully debunked. Historians of 
science have pointed out with scorn that Bacon did nothing for science since 
he never devised or carried out experiments; and they cry up Gilbert, who 
worked diligently on magnets. Bacon is said to have frozen a chicken to see if 
it would keep fresh, but that would not earn a Nobel Prize. Bacon has also 
been accused of not understanding how scientists work, because he recom- 
mends observation free of preconceived ideas. He said "Do not anticipate 
Nature," and his critics point out that all great advances are made by framing 
a possible view of what happens and then testing it; so Bacon was wrong. But 
surely he had good reasons for ruling out anticipation, in the sense of ideas 
such as the perfection of circles, to explain how nature works. And to say that 
science proceeds only by means of new conceptions is to generalize beyond 
the facts. Sheer observation by Tycho Brahe sitting at his telescope enabled 
Kepler to reach his conclusion about the planets. Only observation could dis- 
cover the way dew forms, and at what temperature; observation, again, is the 
mainstay in the study of plants, insects, the earth, and human life. 

On all scores Bacon's critics err by considering him and his work in a 
vacuum. They do not see that the progress of science needed all the help it 
could get from the general culture. They write indignantly about Galileo's 
condemnation by the church, but they fail to note that his noble and clerical 
patrons defended him as long as they could. The rest of the public were 
against them. His was — so to speak — a defeat at the polls. Had the public, the 
culture, not been taught to think differently, the work of science would have 
continued risky and its advancement been more often retarded than it was. 
Hence any effort to change opinion was a contribution to science, and Bacon 
was, in his own words, the trumpeter who called the troops to battle. In sober 
history Bacon remains a hero. 



The Invisible College <^> 205 






Science should not be credited alone with all the material advantages that 
modern man is said to enjoy. Technology, or more exacdy techne, the practical 
arts, not their ology, came earlier and was for a long time the foster mother of 
science. The working inventions of the mechanic, who fiddles to improve his 
tools, accumulate into large aids to science. We are now used to the reverse 
effect: so-called pure science finds some new principle and applied science — 
engineering — embodies it in a device for industry or domestic use. That is 
why industry devotes part of its profits to Research and Development, an 
innovation that dates only from 1890 (601 >). 

Techne preceded science in another way. Inventors made machines 
before anybody could explain why they worked — the pump, for instance. The 
vacuum was known but not why the water gushed. All that could be said was: 
"Nature abhors a vacuum, therefore fills it up — but not above 32 feet." The 
pressure of the air was invisible until the day when Toricelli and Pascal mea- 
sured it and devised the barometer. Again, Bolton and Watt made a good 
steam engine in the late 1 8C, but it was a generation before Joule in the 1 840s 
made clear the mechanical equivalent of heat. Under engineering comes the 
development of cannon and other machines for war. This sequence of prac- 
tice before theory has its parallel in literature and the fine arts, which says 
something important about the workings of the human mind and the essence 
of culture. 

Pure science, moreover, with the one exception of theoretical physics, is 
not so pure as it thinks it is. Experimenting requires equipment. Many great sci- 
entists — Faraday, the wizard of electricity comes to mind — could not have got 
their results without the ingenuity to build one instrument after another. The 
cyclotron is a piece of engineering as well as of pure thought aided by numbers. 
In the 17C the instrument needed to observe the heavens more accurately — 
the telescope — had to be invented and then improved. These steps required 
better glassblowing and metalworking. Glass was a Venetian specialty, metal a 
German. The two combined made for perfected instruments — not only the 
telescope but the microscope that soon followed (essential to biology), as well 
as the balance and the aids to navigation — compass, quadrant, and sextant, to 
which the superior clock or chronometer was later added. Without it the sailor 
could not determine his longitude, or westward distance from Europe, no mat- 
ter how certain he was of his latitude or distance above or below the equator. 
[The book to read is Longitude by Dava Sobel.] 

The sailors' crisscrossing the globe ever more often spurred mapmaking, 
which soon made use of geometry (the Mercator projection) and popularized 
the mathematical turn of mind. Seventeenth-century artisans, tradesmen, 
even butchers grew excited by what numbers could do. Hobbes, picking up a 



206 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

work of geometry and browsing in it exclaimed, "By God, that can't be true!" 
then went on to learn the science. Newton, aware of the vogue, was per- 
suaded to write his Principia in mathematical form. One may regard Spinoza 
as doubly emblematic of his time: he offered his Ethics as "geometrically 
demonstrated" and he earned his modest living in Amsterdam by grinding 

lenses. Geometry (as we saw) had 
When the laboratory had been kept warm for already proved its value to artists who 
some months, and they expected the golden used perspective. It made its way into 
fruit and there was not so much as one grain architecture and the design of fortifica- 
of gold in the Vessels (for the Chemist had tions PaUadio5 the builder of elegant 
wasted all that too), another obstacle was chssic ^ mans i ns in Italy and Eng- 

found out: the glass they used was not of the i j • ^ j ^i ^ j^ilu 

& J land, invented the truss, and the build- 

right temper — for every glass will not make ri .., , i • „ -^ 

ing or large bridges and canals in 17C 

France relied on novel calculations that 
— Erasmus, "The Alchymist," i j • ^ ^ j • u 

„ „,-„,-, led in turn to advances in mechanics 

Colloquies (1 525) 

and hydrostatics. 

Public opinion took a good while 
to connect science with practical benefits such as bridges and machines and to 
disconnect it from the useless experiments of alchemists and astrologers. But 
as mentioned earlier, some of the findings and calculations of these investiga- 
tors had value; and looking back one can see that the habits of the merchant or 
banker also proved helpful to scientific workers. The niggling attention to 
detail, the respect for small numbers, and the demand for exact information 
were not aristocratic traits; they were the lowly tradesman's. As we saw from the 
Fugger Letters, international trade had long been capitalist, based on credit, 
protected by insurance, and ruled by rigorous accounting. As early as the dawn 
of the 16C, the leading treatise on arithmetic, algebra, and geometry, by Pietro 
Pacioli, contained a section on double-entry bookkeeping {doppia scrittura), the 
first description of the system in print. Thanks to it, this "method of Venice" 
was shortly available in other countries. Pacioli at one time was a traveling com- 
panion of Leonardo's and it was Leonardo who drew the solid figures in sev- 
eral of his friend's works. These included books on the golden section (for 
artists and builders) and arithmetical problems offered as pastime. 

Double-entry bookkeeping is quasi scientific in two ways: it supplies a 
test of accuracy and it rests on equations: at the bottom line (now a famous 
metaphor) the figures must match to the last penny. Further, in the body of 
the account, the line items are abstractions from common-sense reality. That 
is why to learn accounting is not quick or easy — or obvious: in given circum- 
stances, a merchant who exports gold as part of a transaction must put it 
down as a debit. Trade also contributed to mathematics the idea of negative 
numbers, essential to algebra. The minus quantity appears to have arisen 
when bales of goods for shipment varied a little in weight. To be fair to buyer 



The Invisible College <&> 207 

and seller alike, they would be marked in chalk plus or minus the standard 
weight. Parenthetically, the present symbols, including a, b, c and x,j, % but 
not the equal sign, were fixed for all users by Descartes; his = sign was <», 
which now stands for infinity. From these parallels between science and trade 
one might say without much exaggeration that the scientist at work is a prime 
exemplar of the bourgeois virtues. 



To grow rapidly and flourish, science needed one more type of cultural 
assistance: communication. The alchemist worked in secret, for the excellent 
reason that if he did find the "philosopher's stone" (a magic powder) and 
transmuted lead into gold, or distilled the "elixir of life" and contrived 
immortality, he did not want to share the glory or the profits. The physician 
likewise kept his means and methods to himself. A common trick was to note 
one's findings in anagrams — a series of figures and letters, such as 
IT2NNOWE to mean "Newton," himself a user of this device for his early 
work. The 1 7C man of science and geometer began to think and act in the 
opposite way. Experience had taught him that a great truth is discovered bit 
by bit (Bacon pointed this out) and that mutual review and correction bene- 
fit every worker. Fame will not be denied to anyone who helps to build "the 
great edifice of science." 

The free exchange of ideas and results corrects error and speeds up dis- 
covery. In the formative period print was of course available and put to use, as 
shown by the works of Kopernik, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Boyle, and the 
rest; but it is remarkable how much of the new thought was conveyed in private 
letters between congenial minds; or again, between a person of scientific tastes 
and a cluster of thinkers. Father Mersenne, a classmate of Descartes', served as 
a kind of post office or clearinghouse for the scientists of Europe. People of 
rank might get in touch with a particular celebrity of the new kind. Thus 
Descartes came to write a book-length batch of letters to Elizabeth, the 
Princess Palatine, and it is in them alone that we learn his belief — not clear 
from his other works — that the will, which connects the mind with the body 
and directs its actions, is lodged in the pineal gland of the brain. 

Another crowned head had the same wish to learn from Descartes, but 
not by letter, face-to-face. He was also to help her found an academy of sci- 
ence. This fatal invitation came from 

Christina of Sweden 

She was a virgin queen like Elizabeth of England and a political intriguer 
like Mary Queen of Scots, but in variety of interests and cultural influence, 



208 c^> From Dawn to Decadence 

superior to both. As she herself said, she thanked God that she had a man's 
soul in a female body. She was in fact uncommonly strong, loved hunting and 
riding unruly horses, wore low-heeled shoes, and had a voice that went from 
girlish to mannish without modulation. At birth she had been taken for a boy, 
her whole body being covered with hair. She viewed women with contempt, 
especially as rulers; and in this scorn she included herself. 

As the daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, the hero of the Thirty Years' 
War, she found herself at 1 8 the responsible head of a European power that 
dominated the whole Baltic area. She had been brought up a Lutheran and a 
Humanist, both, which is to say that her creed was Christian stoicism. Her 
tolerance was wide and her intellectual curiosity boundless. She spoke Latin 
and four modern languages, her fluency in French punctuated by swear 
words. By the age of 20 she had a European reputation as the "Minerva of the 
North" for her patronage of thinkers and scientists. Grotius, Saumaise, and 
Voss had been previous tutors at her court when she invited Descartes to 
come and teach her philosophy. He kept refusing but she prevailed. Daily at 
5 A.M. he had to expound the rules and results of his method. Although her 
prime minister, the wise Oxenstierna, judged her intelligence "extraordinarily 
brilliant," Descartes thought it unsuited to philosophy. This view of 
Christina's powers did not stop Pascal from dedicating to her, in a long letter 
of eulogy, the calculating machine he had just invented. Under the strain of 
teaching a mind of the wrong type, the early hours, and the cold of 
Stockholm, Descartes fell ill with pneumonia and died in a few days in the 
middle year of the century. 

Christina, defying the traditions of royalty, refused to marry. She says in her 
autobiography that she did not lack normal desire — indeed, she thought that if 
she had been a man, she would have been a rake; but she could not bear the 
idea of pregnancy and of losing her independence. She began to be unpopular 
on this account, though she handled affairs of state with judgment, balancing 
the claims of the nobility by an alliance with the middle class and using in crises 
the good old method of deceit and delay that had served Elizabeth so well in 
England. Finally, the lack of an heir, criticism at home, and false rumors abroad 
about her lovers induced her to give up the throne to her cousin. She was 28. 

From that moment on, Christina was the object of vicious slander that 
lasted until fairly recendy. Three French playwrights, including Dumas, have 
depicted her titillating misbehavior. Adoration turned to contumely, pardy 
because she had yielded her post of duty, pardy because she was brilliant and 
still a power in her retreat. She had 35 years of life ahead of her, and she filled 
them with political ventures and cultural extravaganzas. 

All this took place in Rome, after some travel in Germany and France. 
The papal city found her court a welcome addition to its pleasures. It was 
crowded with poets and musicians, thinkers and talkers, who enjoyed the 



The Invisible College <**> 209 

round of dinners, dances, plays, masques, ballets, and conversations that she 
devised for her own pleasure. The successive popes approved and partook. In 
the papal atmosphere Christina was drawn to the Catholic faith. Earlier, in 
Sweden, she had gone through a period of doubt, induced in part by her inter- 
est in science. Disbelief in miracles and in the resurrection of the body had 
left only faith in some supreme being. The Protestant theologians disagreed 
with one another — none of them was right. When Stoicism went out of fash- 
ion, she was left without any system by which to interpret the universe. But in 
Rome she found Catholicism seductive, more tolerant than any sect and intel- 
lectually coherent. She became a Catholic "in her own way." She read theol- 
ogy with renewed interest, side by side with mathematics and literature. 

She also came to view her abdication as a sign of wisdom and promise of 
fame: she would be compared to the great emperors Diocletian and Charles V. 
Yet in other ways (she thought) she was unique and known to be such, a fault- 
less creature who had been a representative of God on earth. Pride, she later 
recorded, was her besetting sin. Others thought that her ordering the execution 
of an upper servant who had betrayed her secrets was a greater sin. But her act 
was within the law; Italian political customs were still merciless, and the judg- 
ments passed on her by writers of the Enlightenment for what took place a 
century earlier are wrongheaded. 

Christina's efforts to find a role in the world, other than as a patron of 
thought and culture, began in Sweden while she thought of abdication. She 
would be Queen of Zeeland in the Low Countries if Cromwell would con- 
quer the province for her. In Rome, she wanted to be Queen of Naples, where 
a ruler was wanted. And in a more steady fashion she took part in papal poli- 
tics, then often in the hands of powerful women relatives of the incumbent. 
The practice of religion itself was chaotic; it swung from processions of pen- 
itents, whose bare backs were whipped by their servants, to occasions where 
refreshments consisted of pastries depicting the crucifixion. And as usual, 
there were sincere souls, mostly noblewomen, who led pious lives or 
renounced the world altogether. It was in Rome also that Christina found at 
last a man to love, Cardinal Azzolino, a worldly, cultivated cleric and ladies' 
man who helped her in her practical undertakings but who did not return her 
passionate feelings. She kept them under control, except in the many letters 
she wrote him, in which she calls herself his slave forever. 

Christina's many exertions brought her in touch with the great Baroque 
sculptor Bernini, who designed a car- 
riage for her, and with Mazarin, the The world is threatened with peace and 
French king's maker of policy, which quiet. 

she wanted more favorable to the pope. I love storm and dread it when the wind 

She took singing lessons and com- abates. 

missioned music from her resident — Christina of Sweden (n.d.) 



210 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

composers, Corelli and Alessandro Scarlatti; she organized archaeological 
excavations, filled her palace with objets d'art and her library with classical 
and oriental manuscripts. She kept up with French literature and wanted to 
put on Moliere's Tartuffe as soon as she heard what a scandal it had created, 
but Louis XIV would not permit the export of the play. She founded three 
academies for art and science that sponsored lectures and discussions; she 
had an observatory and a "distillery" — a laboratory (her adored father having 
been something of an experimenter) — and she illustrated a work on chemical 
problems. 

If this incomplete list of her doings may be called picturesque, the details 
of each enterprise deserve to be called fantastic — and representative of the 
crosscurrents that marked her age: Baroque exuberance and neo-classic 
severity; the Jesuits' casuistry and Puritan morals; preciosity side by side with 
grossness in manners; restraint and extravagance in literature; the conscien- 
tious persecution of witches and the new science. 



While noble heads were poring over Descartes' little book on method or 
"distilling" in palace laboratories, and serious searchers were writing to 
Mersenne about their latest calculation, a group of like-minded persons 
began in 1 645 to meet weekly in London to discuss points in the "new phi- 
losophy." Three years later at Oxford, a similar group founded a society with 
the same purpose. After a dozen years the groups combined, and Robert 
Boyle, the "Skeptical Chemist," wrote a detailed memorandum sketching the 
plan of a formal organization. In the document he referred to the company 
of searchers as the Invisible College. It was soon to be the Royal Society of 
London for Improving Natural Knowledge. 

Having started with some 80 members, the groups that joined came to 
feel the need for selectivity. When in 1660 a royal charter was requested, 
Charles II approved the statutes, and the number of members was set at 35, 
divided into classes: physicians, professors of physics and of mathematics, 
and barons. Tided patronage was desirable even if it was of the lowest rank. 
Learned dukes were too few or less committed to experimentation. 

Even with the downsizing, the Royal Society was a rather motley assem- 
blage. Sir Robert Moray (= Murray) was the baron-president. Others were: 
Christopher Wren, a budding chemist, not yet an architect; John Evelyn, an 
expert on trees and later a famous diarist; Sir William Petty, the initiator of 
social statistics; Samuel Pepys, a civil servant and secret diarist; and thirty other, 
less familiar names. Two secretaries were appointed, of whom one, Henry 
Oldenburg, a German fluent in several languages, became like Mersenne a live 
center of European scientific correspondence. The academy's Journal recorded 



The Invisible College <^ 211 

the members' lectures and discussions and two series of Transactions — A for 
physics and mathematics, B for biology — enshrined selected papers. Foreign 
corresponding members — "the Ingenuous from many considerable parts of 
the world" — were eagerly recruited. 

Such was the model of the innumerable professional associations now in 
being. It took the first step in SPECIALIZATION after the original, Humanistic 
academies. A French Academy of Science soon followed the English, then a 
Spanish, and so on. Later in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin founded the 
American Philosophical Society; at Schweinfurt in Franconia, the Leopoldine 
issued the first medical journal, dated 1670.° The usefulness of association 
for testing new ideas at meetings and publishing reports was implanted, with 
the result that nearly every trade has re-acquired the medieval guild spirit — 
bankers, realtors, and cake-decorating artists have their annual gathering and, 
at the very least, a newsletter. 

Some are better than others. When Bishop Sprat came to write the his- 
tory of the Royal Society, he complained that his fellow members wrote badly. 
This deficiency was the start of a tradition. It is explained partly by the con- 
venience of numbers and fixed technical terms to tell colleagues exactly what 
one has found: correct syntax looks inessential; it may be safely left to the 
intuitive, who really need it. In truth, science needs it too, and today one finds 
many specialized journals outfitted with busy re-write editors. Bad writing 
harms science even more seriously at another place, the textbooks that 
instruct the next generation of workers. The faults that escape author and 
publisher are frequent and little remarked on; they seem as invisible as Boyle's 
college. 

It is hard to erase from the imagination all that now fills our secular cul- 
ture when it thinks of "science" and equates it with the Only Real. One can 
more easily picture the street without cars or the desk without a computer, 
because these are concrete objects of fairly recent birth, than recapture the 
17C mixture of new science and revivified magic. Failing to do so, one enter- 
tains a biased view of that century's scientific progress as crowded with defi- 
nite outcomes when much was but the germ of later triumphs. 

The Cartesian-Newtonian view of matter filtered slowly into the well- 
read mind. It was not easy to conceive a uniform substance, invisible yet 
measurable, when the senses show us color, texture, smell, which science 
disregards. It not only ignores these "secondary qualities," but by abstraction 
it reduces the world to the testimony of the eye — on the pointer of a balance, 
on a yardstick, or on the shape of an equation. But when everything is matter, 
on earth and beyond, it spurs speculation about the origin of the universe. 



212 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Everybody (roughly speaking) becomes a cosmogonist. A poor Italian miller 
named Menocchio was put to death, just a year before Bruno, because he 
maintained that out of original chaos a solid lump developed like cheese out 
of milk, then a worm appeared in it, which was the first angel. His analogy 
was not bad; it has points of resemblance with our Big Bang Theory, followed 
by Evolution. What grew more and more evident as time went on was that 
motion is everywhere and rest is the unusual state. The upshot was that in 
place of the age-old static world the new was what is called dynamic. 

Needless to say, the source of truth likewise shifted, from setded revela- 
tion to resdess experiment; truth itself was no longer static. Science took 
pride in having the courage to discard its own views. Why, then, should it be 
trusted, a platform moving underfoot? Because the method was sure and the 
results covered an ever-wider area of the previously unknown or misknown. 
Someday all the truths would have been won and they would form a coherent 
system, for Nature is regular and uniform. 

At this point comes the paradox already hinted at: the age of the new 
method and the new revelations (in the plural and without capital letter) saw 
a resurgence of superstition, most violendy expressed in the persecution of 
witches (21 3>). Yet it should be no surprise that when novel ideas set minds 
wondering and tongues wagging, strong minds with well thought out convic- 
tions should resist and defend the intellectual status quo. Not everybody has 
the mental elasticity to be a fideist, believe in Genesis and in Galileo at the 
same time. There is always a conservative party, and by a kind of Newtonian 
law of the mind, action is matched by an equal reaction; one branch of the 
conservative party turns reactionary and clings more intensely to the old con- 
victions. 

In the 17C there were also some who accepted both science and 
witchcraft and whose acts and writings fostered the two alike — such men as 
Joseph Glanvill and Sir Thomas Browne, the former a good astronomer and 
the latter an experimental physician and biologist. Their posture is not that of 
the fideist with his mind working on two levels; it is a fusion of systems 
incompatible on the surface but that may have common elements. It is rea- 
sonable in a period of challenge to established truths to be skeptical and to 
test any new proposition by seeing whether it is consistent with the great 
body of established truth. Browne considered the witch question carefully 
and concluded that to disbelieve would violate the cosmic hierarchy of 
beings — God at the summit, then angels of various grades, Man, and at the 
bottom evil spirits, the minions of Satan, who by their doings also carry out 
the divine plan. They account for the temptation of men as well as for a host 
of otherwise unexplained mishaps in daily life. To remove them from the 
orderly scheme would make God responsible for Evil and bring man down to 
the lowest level of spirits. The world would no longer be the battlefield on 



The Invisible College ^ 213 

which souls are tested by the continual assaults of the Devil. Witches, in 
short, were necessary to the system called The Great Chain of Being, the 
hierarchy of living things. 

This reasoned conclusion did not conflict with another of Browne's rea- 
sonings, his exhaustive book on Vulgar Errors, in which he discredited a great 
many superstitions in a manner that still makes good reading. It could not be 
expected that "the new method" would immediately get rid of them all. As 
for Glanvill, a productive scientist, member of the Royal Society, who turned 
propagandist against witchcraft, that mysterious power of certain women 
(and fewer men, called wizards) seemed no more unlikely to him than the 
equally mysterious powers that natural philosophy was discovering; only, the 
witches' power, known as "fascination," was of evil origin, even when it cured 
cattle or people. 

Besides, the existence of witches is not a clear-cut issue. There is no 
doubt that old women — and often enough, young girls — acted in odd ways 
that conformed to the definition of witch. They themselves believed in their 
craft and power, they confessed or boasted about it. Some must have been 
insane, others subject to hysteria, and still others sought the egotistical satis- 
faction that criminals enjoy — of being conspicuous and of having done evil. 
At any rate, the witch-hunting that flourished in the midst of science and is 
typified by the trials in Salem, Massachusetts, was rooted in the work of rea- 
son upon fragments of experience, like all great errors of the human mind. 



The two themes ABSTRACTION and ANALYSIS here singled out as charac- 
terizing the task and method of the natural philosopher have aspects that call 
for attention if they are to help in understanding the Modern Era. From early 
childhood, ABSTRACTION serves to organize the world: from this red apple we 
learn to think of all red apples in general, then of apples regardless of color; 
then come fruit, things, and finally the largest, the thinnest category: Being. 
Climbing the ladder of abstraction enables one to deal with large groups of 
things or ideas on the basis of their common features. The law is a good 
example. If it states that first offenders shall receive lenient sentences, the 
individual traits of this offender are irrelevant; he may be thin or fat, black or 
white, Christian or Buddhist, he is solely a first offender — a category, not a 
description. 

ABSTRACTION is a calculated departure from experience, from what is 
seen and felt as the real, which goes by the opposite name of concrete. The 
Modern Era has endowed the world with more abstractions than any other 
culture on record; our ubiquitous use of numbers is a sign of it: THP-35R is 
not a car that you can drive; but the formula stands for it at the bureau of 



214 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

motor vehicles and the insurance company; it is "real" in both places at once. 
In the 20C we may be said to be living a largely abstract life; and we suffer 
concretely from it when for lack of a classifying number on a piece of card- 
board, our desires are balked, our rights denied, our identity doubted. Your 
declaration and even your presence have become worthless as proof under 
the reign of ABSTRACTION. 

The other operation, ANALYSIS, distorts reality in a different but related 
way. To follow Descartes is to split into fragments the subject of one's inter- 
est. An idea, a thing, or a human being lies disintegrated like the kitchen clock. 
The modern phrase is apt: "find out what makes him tick." The abstracting 
that underlies analysis consists in regarding anything whatever as a thing 
made up of parts. We keep subdividing downward, expecting that we shall 
reach a unit that refuses to be broken — an atom (= uncuttable) — but the 
uncuttable within the atom still eludes us. Meanwhile we divide and subdi- 
vide, taking it for granted that when we put the pieces together again we have 
the original whole. 

That is a useful assumption, but is it always true? When we carefully fit 
the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together, we have obeyed Descartes' last rule, 
but we also see that the pretty picture was spoiled when it was cut up. Analysis 
and abstraction are indispensable. If the mind were incapable of either, there 
would be no such thing as physical science, medicine, law, education, criti- 
cism, or the moral conscience. But it is also possible that the utility of the two 
A's has limits and that their indiscriminate use is full of danger. In the 17C one 
man at least was aware of the error, if not of the danger. That man was 

Pascal 

He is generally thought of as a mystic who was also a mathematician. Some 
few remember that he conducted experiments that led to the barometer and 
that he invented the first calculating machine, La Pascaline. (To help his father's 
staff of tax accountants, he had 50 made, only to see them rejected by the stub- 
born quill-driving clerks.) At his death Pascal left a large collection of notes for 
a work defending Christianity against freethinkers. These notes were published 
by his family under the modest title of Thoughts, but they are often referred to in 
English in the original French Pensees. Readers such as T S. Eliot admire them 
for their originality and wisdom, quite apart from their religious intention. 

These few facts give no hint that Pascal, in his Pensees and other writings, 
set forth a philosophy of man and society that throws a critical light on what 
has happened in western culture since his day. In the conventional judgment, 
Pascal's mathematics and scientific work atone for the Christian apologetics 
and passionate "mysticism," both of which are ascribed to his desperate ill 



The Invisible College <^> 215 

health — he died at 39 — and as the observations of one remote from the 
world of normal actions and feelings. 

That judgment is at fault and nothing more is wanted to disprove it than 
Pascal's essay on love. It is the fruit of the two years he spent in the world, the 
fashionable world of conversation, gambling, gossip, and lovemaking. There 
is a rumor that his heart, if not his hand, was engaged — and disappointed — 
but there is no doubt that he shone in society by his manners and his wit. 
Gambling, whether it entertained him or not, fixed his attention and he made 
contributions to the theory of probability. 

"On the Passion of Love" is a piece of psychology worthy to be com- 
pared to Stendhal's "On Love" (475>),° and although much briefer it is in its 
way more thorough, because Pascal begins by considering the passions as 
thoughts coupled with feelings and occasioned by the body. This is the 
important notion of heart- and-mind (<202; 453>). The more mind, the 
greater the passion, says Pascal, particularly in the two "adult passions" — 
Love and Ambition. They contradict and weaken each other; a life is there- 
fore happy when it begins with love 

and ends with ambition. It would be 

i, i • ,i Does one need to love? Don't ask — feel it. 

rascal s choice, given man s short span, 

its length to be measured from the age - Pascal > "° N ™ E PASSION OF LovE " 
of reason — say, 12 years old. 

Next come some typically Pascalian insights into character and society: a 
tumultuous life pleases great minds; for it keeps feelings astir and action con- 
tinuous. Man at rest is unhappy, bored (as we say) to death. Pascal understands 
what rationalists do not, which is that the body and its feelings are primary, not 
mind and reason. As to the mind by itself, Pascal sets down here the distinction 
he develops in Thoughts, between two types: the one, rigid, inflexible; the other, 
supple and born with the impulse to love, especially what is beautiful. When 
both minds are combined in one, what great pleasure arises from love! One has 
within oneself the image of that Other whom one seeks in order to complete 
oneself. Here our psychologist notes the phenomenon of projection — painting 
the desired image on a person whom it does not fit; he thinks women very 
liable to this self-deception. A passage about loving above one's station has 
suggested a factual origin for the essay. Scholars have named Mademoiselle de 
Roannez, of a ducal family, as the person alluded to. What follows is a series of 
astute comments about the vicissitudes of love in society, the fashions and pre- 
tenses it inspires; all this interspersed with subde remarks on the emotions and 
the sense of beauty. 

Pascal was not a mystic. It is a misuse of the term to apply it to his reli- 
gious fervor. A mystic is one who seeks union with God. Catholic dogma 
frowns on mysticism, because it makes God a Being that a human soul can 



216 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

consort with, overlooking Christ and blurring the relation of creator and 
creature. Pascal, on the contrary, sees God's majesty as so far removed from 
earth, and His designs as so incomprehensible, that mortal man has no con- 
nection with Him except through Christ, who was both man and God. And 
what Pascal sought in Christ was love. If one wants to psychologize Pascal's 
faith, one can attribute it to some childhood deprivation of love or his 
unhappy attachment to Mile de Roannez. Or again, one may say like Voltaire 
in his retrospective attack: "Pascal, you are sick." 

He was sick, but his religion is so rationally tied to his science that it is best 
to judge it as if he had been in robust health. The truth is, Pascal was kin to the 
modern existentialist — to Kierkegaard or Gabriel Marcel, both ardent believ- 
ers. When Pascal wrote his famous Pensee: "the eternal silence of this infinite 
space frightens me," he was seeing the cosmos like the existentialist — empty, 
bleak, and meaningless. How had all these rotating spheres come to be? Why 
all this void? And how absurd was that enigma, Man! To repeat: God's design 
was inscrutable. Christ was the sole link with Meaning, and Christ's message 
was forgiveness and love. The divine was no abstract essence in which to merge 
for the ecstasy of forgetting self; it was the living God. His miracles were all 
humane in purpose, and the miracle and mystery of His existence mediated for 
man the mystery of the infinite space and silence of creation. 

* 
* * 

The distinction that Pascal touched on in writing about love, the contrast 

between two types of mind, is for our time his most pregnant idea. In the 

Thoughts it is fully expounded as the difference between the geometrical and the 

intuitive temperaments {esprit geometrique, esprit de finesse). By geometrical, Pascal 

means the mind when it works with 

exact definitions and abstractions in sci- 

In the spirit of geometry, the principles are ence or math ematics; by intuitive, the 

obvious but remote from common under- mind when k wQf kg ^ ^ ^ pef _ 

standing, so that it is hard to turn one's mind , , r , r . . 

^ ceptions not capable of exact definition. 

in that direction — from lack of the habit. In . . ... 

. . , . A right-angle triangle or gravitation is a 

the intuitive spirit, the principles are in com- ° ° . ° ° 

j . , A , * j , perfectly definite idea: poetry or love or 

mon use and in front of everybody's eyes — no r / >r j 

need to turn the mind and do violence to g ood government is not definable. And 

habit. But the principles are so many and this lack of definition is not due to lack 

subde that it is almost impossible not to over- of correct information; it comes from 

look some. All geometers would be intuitive the very nature of the subject. 
if their eyesight was good and the intuitive "Geometrical" matters are han- 

would be geometers if they could bend their dl e d by all good minds without any 

attention to unfamiliar principles. argument over their interconnections, 

— Pascal, Pensees and mistakes in reasoning are quickly 



The Invisible College q^& 217 

noticed and readily admitted by the culprit; whereas in matters of intuition, of 
finesse, the details to take in are so numerous and fugitive that reasoning about 
them is chancy and good minds arrive in all honesty at different conclusions. 
Pascal might have added that this large number of elements rules out the use 
of Descartes' method: one can never be sure of having found all the parts of 
the problem or of having put back all those one thinks one has found — no 
complete analysis is possible of Love or Ambition. 

It is from this incapacity that the belief in science and mathematics as the 
only forms of truth has arisen. Such has been the faith of most scientists and 
mathematicians, who in turn have persuaded the people that apart from their 
experimental findings and deducings all is mere opinion, error, and fantasy. 
Even so, in every generation, thinkers — including some notable scientists — 
have maintained that the geometrical spirit and the method of Descartes do 
not apply to everything. Truths of a different order are attainable by finesse, 
even if consensus is lacking. The language itself recognizes the source of the 
distinction: to know and to know about express the difference between inti- 
mate awareness and things learned. Some languages in fact use different 
words for the contrast: wissen and kennen, savoir and connaitre. Man as scientist 
has come to know a great deal, but as human being knows and feels intuitively 
love and ambition, poetry and music. The heart-and-mind reaches deeper 
than the power of reason alone. 

Longing for unanimity in belief is understandable (<23). The bloody 
conflicts of the world have their source in the realm of finesse, and to deplore 
the fact leads to such skepticism as Montaigne's. It is also the best argument 
for toleration. But although the realm of finesse does not yield unshakable 
conclusions, it is not alone in variability. Science is continually revising its dec- 
larations and at no time do its practitioners fully agree with one another. The 
unbroken confidence in it rests on the fixity of the objects defined, which 
makes every worker talk about the same thing and deal with it in the same 
way, thanks to numbers. But not even this admirable rigor ensures eternity to 
the results of its application. Still, when by a combination of science and 
finesse, useful inventions are created and benefit the common life, the public 
is doubly convinced that science has a monopoly of truth. 

The two "minds" that Pascal describes do not constitute two species of 
individuals. They are but two directions that the one human mind can take. 
Pascal himself is proof that one can be a great geometer and a profound intu- 
iter. And in fact any good mind properly taught can think like Euclid and like 
Walt Whitman. The Renaissance, as we saw, was full of such minds, equally 
competent as poets and as engineers. The modern notion of "the two cul- 
tures," incompatible under one skull, comes solely from the proliferation of 
specialties in science; but these also divide scientists into groups that do not 
understand one another, the cause being the sheer mass of detail and the 



218 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

diverse terminologies. In essence the human mind remains one, not 2 or 60 
different organs. 

What, then, is the importance of Pascal's distinction? It is as an axiom for 
the critic and a warning against SCIENTZW. Ten succinct paragraphs of the 
Pensees state it with finality. Scientism is the fallacy of believing that the 
method of science must be used on all forms of experience and, given time, 
will settie every issue. Again and again, the bright thought has occurred, "If 
we can only define our terms, if we can only find the basic unit, if we can spot 
the right 'indicators,' we can then measure and reason flawlessly, we shall have 
created one more science." And nearly as often, the shout has been heard: 
"Eureka! We are scientists," the new science being some portion of the 
desired Science of Man — history, sociology, psychology, archaeology, linguis- 
tics, and other more or less short-lived ologies. This hope and this pretension 
began to be heard in a mild way early in the 18Q before Newton's death; 
Vico's New Science, for example, is an important theory of history (314>), but 
no more a science than its many successors with the same confident tide. 

The motives behind scientism are culturally significant. They have been 
mixed, as usual: genuine curiosity in search of truth; the rage for certainty and 
for unity; and the snobbish desire to earn the label scientist when that became 
a high social and intellectual rank. But tiiese efforts, even though vain, have 
not been without harm, to the inventors and to the world at large. The "find- 
ings" have inspired policies affecting daily life that were enforced with the 
same absolute assurance as earlier ones based on religion. At the same time, 
the workers in the realm of intuition, the gifted finessers — artists, moralists, 
philosophers, historians, political theorists, and theologians — were either 
diverted from their proper task, while others were looking on them with dis- 
dain as dabblers in the suburbs of Truth. The case of Karl Marx is typical. 
Infatuated with the kudos of science, he persuaded himself and his millions 
of followers in and out of the Soviet Union that he had at last formulated the 
mechanics of history and could predict the future scientifically. (One can find 
Marx and Lenin in the otherwise admirable Dictionary oj Scientific Biography. 
They were included under pressure, not by the free choice of the editors.) 

The clue to the fallacy of SCIENTISM is this: geometry (in all senses of the 
term) is an ABSTRACTION from experience; it could not exist without the 
work of the human mind on what it encounters in the world. Hence the realm 
of abstraction, useful and far from unreal, is thin and bare and poorer than 
the world it is drawn from. It is therefore an idle dream to think of someday 
getting along without direct dealings with what abstraction leaves untouched. 
The meaning of this contrast is that the enterprise of science has its limits. 



The Invisible College <^ 219 

Pascal does not stop at showing the difference between the two distinct 
grips that the human mind has on the world. In a widely quoted passage he 
adds: "The heart has its reasons that the reason does not know" The heart 
here is not merely the seat of the affections; it is desire in general, the 
impulses to action, and Reason is the discriminating servant that carries out 
some of them. Note that the word reason in the dictum is used in two senses: 
the reasons of the heart — its needs and motives — are not products of rea- 
son/^ or there would be no spontaneity in conduct, no sympathy, friendship, 
or love in the world. Throughout the Pensees one hears Montaigne speaking. 
Pascal's mentor is present in many of the observations on custom, law, and 
social life; the disciple echoes, refines, or disputes passages in the Essays. At 
times, Pascal argues with Montaigne as if face-to-face with him. At other 
times he turns a sentence of the master's into an epigram: "Whoever tries to 
turn angel turns beast," punning on bete, which also means stupid. Or again: 
"Truth on this side of the Pyrenees [is] error on the other side." These are 
"mountainous thoughts" compressed in Pascal's characteristic way. Mon- 
taigne never had a better reader than Pascal. 

It may seem strange that the skeptic should be so congenial to the reli- 
gious enthusiast in a work that urges total belief. But for Pascal it is precisely 
the uncertainty arising from human truths that requires taking refuge in the 
bosom of God. Pascal, we are told, was converted by the Jansenists of Port- 
Royal, a famous retreat of disciples of Jansen, an Augustinian theologian. 
They were men and women of great piety and learning, who represent at the 
heart of Catholic France the Puritan passion then rousing England to Civil 
War (263>). 

So convinced a recruit was Pascal that he employed his genius in a public 
defense of his friends' austere oudook against their all-powerful enemies, the 
Jesuits. A conscious literary artist, Pascal in his Jansenist polemic created the 
model of classical French prose (353>). Colloquial, eloquent, satirical, and 
witty by turns, these Letters from a Provincial to a Friend of His had immediate 
success with the public and made "casuistry" and "Jesuitical" forever terms of 
reproach. All this is familiar French history, but it has not been sufficiendy 
noted that in the Pensees, the status of man differs from the Jansenist-Puritan 
image of the miserable sinner. For Pascal, man is miserable and great. On the 
scale of the universe, he is puny — "a drop of water can kill him; he is a feeble 
reed." But he is "a thinking reed." The blind universe destroys him and all his 
works, but he is conscious — he knows that which is stronger than he; that is 
why the silence of space frightens him. Yet Thought (and here one includes 
science) remains master of that which does not know its own size and power. 

In this vision of human greatness Pascal differs not only from the Puritan 
and the Existentialist, but also from most men of science since the 19C. These 
last sided with the universe; they enjoyed telling their audience that man was a 



220 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

negligible accident and that in the future they had mapped, earth and man 
would be bits of cold matter whirling pointlessly as if they had never been 
(570>). As a true believer, Pascal had no need to revel in destruction; he was fond 
enough of his fellow men to want them saved, on any terms — hence "Pascal's 
Wager." He pleads with the increasing number of freethinkers, atheists, who 
had been "freed" by science and who were the first to be called Libertines — 
Mersenne thought there were 2,000 in Paris. Pascal says to them: "If you dis- 
believe in God, you have no eternal life — you yourselves say there is none. But 
if you believe, you have at least one chance out of two; for if there is no God, 
you are where you were before; and if there is, your have won salvation." 

To some judges the wager seems so 
What is faith but a kind of betting or specula- cold-blooded as to cast shame on 
tion after all? It should be: "I bet my Pascal's religion. But his mathematics of 
Redeemer liveth." probability went with the psychology of 

— Samuel Butler, Notebooks (late 1 9C) a good Augustinian: make-believe after a 

time generates true belief (<39). Besides, 
as a Catholic Pascal did not espouse predestination or the need of special grace 
to obtain faith. This leaves the question, was Pascal a fideist? He probably was 
early in life; later there are grounds for saying No. He did not live to work out his 
system, but the elements given do not demand the split-level mind. God being 
All-mystery and All-encompassing, His will and the searchings of humankind 
into His cosmos cannot be in conflict — any more than the geometrical and the 
intuitive minds are in conflict when righdy understood. In people like Pascal, the 
two capacities interpenetrate. When very young, he came upon Euclid by chance 
and was at once a geometer: at fifteen he wrote a paper on conic sections that 
the great Leibniz found useful. In manhood, besides love, society, and science, 
he experienced revelation — the night of vision and possession by the divine that 
enhanced his power to think and manifest his genius. 

Digression on a Word 

Like ideas and styles of art, certain words belong to a given period. The 
word genius, in the sense in which it is now used, belongs to the 19C (474>). 
Esprit, as in Pascal, is the special property of the neo-classical age; a look into 
its meanings is therefore in order. Of course, no words of this kind are the 
creations of their time, only their special usage. 

Esprit, as Pascal uses it, is slighdy ambiguous. It means mind when he 
talks about the two intellectual types; it also means direction, tendency, and 
even realm. In English, spirit is not so apt for this second meaning. We do say: 
"Please take this in the spirit in which it is offered"; but the tide of Montes- 
quieu's book L Esprit des lois is poorly conveyed when translated The Spirit of the 



The Invisible College <^> 221 

Laws. One wants to add the notions of essence, bearing, purpose, intention-and- 
results. 

The trouble is that esprit has several applications, only loosely related. It 
can characterize a person: an esprit eclaire, juste, faux, profond, which mean 
respectively an enlightened, fair, twisted, or deep intellect. The faux kind is an 
interesting category, unknown in English. Faux here means twisted but not in 
the sense of deceitful; such a mind is unreliable, because it's "out of alignment," 
like a damaged device. 

Next, esprit means wit, and this again in a double sense. When Dryden 
wrote "Great wits are oft to madness near allied," he did not mean witty per- 
sons; he meant great minds — geniuses. Likewise, in French, un homme d f esprit 
is a fine mind, but un trait d' esprit (a stroke) is a witty remark. This ambiguity in 
both languages is still with us: a nitwit has no brains, while a wit keeps the 
company amused. The Germanic root wissen, meaning to see, to know, has 
branched out in two directions, giving us wise and wit. 

Esprithzd 2. different origin, with the meaning breath, leading to inspiration, 
aspire, expire, and so on. The highest decoration awarded by the French kings 
in the 17C was the Saint-Esprit — the Holy Ghost, who is both spiritual and 
intellectual, thus giving the award super-eminence. With us, ghost and spirit 
designate the souls of the dead who revisit this world, and the notions of thin 
and pure account for spirits of wine, alcohol. It should be added that esprit de 
corps — another 17C usage — is not in French the admirable "team spirit" that 
it conveys in English. It denotes instead the selfish sticking together of a pro- 
fession or government bureau against the legitimate claims of the public. The 
German for ghost or spirit — Geist — again conveys ambiguously the ideas 
attached to esprit and wit. Geist is mind; geistvoll, geistreich — intelligent or witty; 
and by a later invention, Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Age. 

Spirit, finally, has in English the additional sense of liveliness and even of 
courage; and in the plural it means mood, high or low. This meaning, devel- 
oped out of the original breath, is a survival of the fully developed physiology 
of ancient and medieval times — the theory of the four humors, the four ele- 
ments, and the several spirits. A good introduction to the system with its cul- 
tural importance is to browse in the famous Anatomy of Melancholy by 

Robert Burton 

who called himself Democritus Junior He was an Oxford don, who by the first 
third of the 17C, when he published his book, had read everything that con- 
tained the slightest reference to his subject: not medicine alone, but ancient 
and modern literature (poets included), biography, alchemy, astrology, 
botany, and the biological sciences generally. His subject, moreover, is con- 



222 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

ceived so broadly as to become virtually man's fate on earth. Love and the 
other emotions, the ranks and customs of societies, the endless vicissitudes of 
social inequality are treated or glanced at. Burton has a darting mind and he 
comments freely on his own time and state. He repeats himself, but the mat- 
ter follows a fine logical scheme that is graphically displayed at the head of his 
work. The work itself inspired an American poet to compare it to a cathe- 
dral. 

Anyone who starts reading the Anatomy anywhere comes upon entertain- 
ing anecdotes, surprising facts, and a mind full of imagination and verbal 
felicities. The conversational style reminds one of Rabelais at times, at other 
times of Sir Thomas Browne, a near-contemporary of Burton's. Both were 
rediscovered by Charles Lamb, who drew on them for a good deal of his own 
contrived quaintness in the Essays ofElia. Although Burton does not figure in 
the vast Dictionary of Scientific Biography and is fitfully mentioned in general his- 
tories of science, he deserves to figure there, for he was the first systematic 
psychiatrist, an extraordinary collector of widely scattered case histories. In 
its own time the book had a wide audience — it was a perennial best-seller — 
and in ours it has impressed a qualified student of mental science. [The book 
to read is The Psychiatry of Robert Burton by Bergen Evans.] ° 

What did Burton contribute? And first of all, why this elaborate study of 
melancholy — the "black choler," the condition now known as manic-depressive 
illness? Burton was subject to it, and all around him he saw fellow sufferers. He 
decided to learn everything that was known about it. He amassed descriptions 
and diagnoses going back to the Middle Ages, when the affliction was much 
noticed. The Anatomy contains what is surely the largest "literature" ever gath- 
ered for a scientific inquiry. It is handled critically, even though one may smile 
occasionally at what Burton is willing to accept. Far ahead of his contempo- 
raries on more than one topic, he coud not avoid sharing their ignorance on 
some others. Burton's originality begins with his view that mental cases should 
be treated with tender sympathy. A century and a half elapsed before this view 
was officially adopted by the French physician Pinel, who ordered the manacles 
taken off the lunatics at La Salpetriere hospital in Paris and who has been duly 
credited with the reversal of an age-old attitude. If priority matters, Burton was 
the (unheeded) initiator. 

He also perceived that melancholy was linked to the deepest feelings, 
including the sexual. Lack of affection in childhood, such as he himself expe- 
rienced, could never be compensated for, and it might so warp the character 
that the person could not feel proper love for himself or others. Hence the 
round of depression and excitement. Burton also notes that melancholy 
tends to attack the more gifted, an observation as old as Aristode, yet recendy 
put forth as quite fresh by a physician at Johns Hopkins/ The melancholy 
individual is the plaything of opposite forces; he despises himself and then 



The Invisible College <^> 223 

acts arrogantly; he is envious of others and knows he is undeserving; he wants 
friends and lovers but does not know how to make the right approach and he 
alienates those who begin to feel affection for him. Yet the cause of this per- 
petual mismatch is not entirely within him. The structure of society exacer- 
bates the disharmony. Burton again and again lashes out at the ways the upper 
ranks behave toward the lower, without conscience and without reproof. 

It follows from this analysis that the cure of melancholy — or rather its 
alleviation, for there is no cure — can only come from a good regimen, aided 
by certain drugs and more surely by the patient's acknowledging of what he 
really wants and by his becoming aware of the circumstances that led to his 
twisted feelings. To gain this SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS and deal with its revela- 
tions he must talk things out with someone who has sympathy and who 
understands the pattern of melancholic causes and behavior. 

To Burton and the people of his time, "black choler" was a substance like 
blood, part of the body's normal components. A reader of Burton's Anatomy 
becomes familiar with the long-accepted theory of temperament and illness 
based on the four humors: black and yellow choler (= bile), phlegm, and blood. 
It ruled the western mind until the mid-18C, explaining character and actions; 
we still use the familiar terms melancholic, phlegmatic, choleric, and sanguine. 

The origin of this physiology goes back to the Greek physician 
Hippocrates, whose views were amplified and systematized by Galen, his suc- 
cessor and chief authority for 1,000 years. In the 16C, as we saw, Paracelsus and 
others disputed Galen on important points (<198), but not on the four 
humors. It was the four elements of ancient physics — earth, air, fire, and 
water — that had suggested the system, their qualities being seen as reproduced 
throughout nature: weight, lightness, heat, and moisture. Add that absence of 
heat is cold, that flames go upward and weights downward, and you have the 
makings of a scheme applicable to the human body. In the various central 
organs one or another humor resides and may produce too much heat or cold 
or moisture. Subtler elements called spirits emanate from certain parts and 
move about as the body seeks to maintain that equilibrium among humors 
which is health. Suitably recast, this scheme still holds, the endocrine glands 
doing the work of the humors. (And by the way, the phrase "animal spirits," 
which we use to suggest a doglike friskiness, are really the spirits of the anima or 
soul, and should therefore mean liveliness of mind rather than of limb.) 

Now, perfect health is rare and balance easily upset. At the best of times, 
individual character tips in one direction under the pressure of one of the 
humors — hence the names listed above, which designate human types: san- 
guine, from too much blood, and so on. Burton believes that the melancholic 
is the most prevalent; and he seems borne out by the historical record and the 
present-day multitudes of the depressed. 

The detailed workings of the humors and spirits were seen to be com- 



224 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

plex, and being subject to debate they filled volumes of argumentative medi- 
cal literature. Burton tells without partisanship what his army of authorities 
variously say. But he is also sure that ideas, occupations, modes of life, and 
kinds of reading matter will help the melancholic, whom he cares for so ener- 
getically because he is one himself. His self-examination, as relentless as that 
of Montaigne, leads him even farther: he believes that contemporary culture 
could be a cause of "his" disease. He has hard words against the people in 
place, public indifference to merit, and the hypocrisy of clerics and moraliz- 
ers. The worst melancholy, though, is that caused by love — worst because it is 
the hardest to avoid or overcome. The chapters on the subject are as eloquent 
and introspective as Shakespeare's sonnets and — at times — as humorous as 
Rabelais in their enumeration of antics and sensations. 

Burton has sometimes been dismissed by modern psychiatrists because, 
in accepting the orthodox physiology, he failed to develop an "independent 
view" of the mind. Again, he "lacked a dynamic psychology" such as Freud's. 
These unhistorical critiques may be dismissed. It could be argued that Burton 
at least did not separate mind and body; that he was alive to cultural influ- 
ences in mental illness; and that in digging for causes he came close here and 
there to positing the unconscious. Today, die phrase psychosomatic medicine 
continues to imply a separation, as if any physician had ever seen a soma enter 
his office without a psyche, or the psychiatrist a psyche without a soma. The 
latest psychiatric practice uses drugs together with talking-out by the patient, 
which is a departure from Freud in the direction of Burton. 

An Interlude 

The omission of Burton's Anatomy from general accounts of 17C science 
is without excuse. Because he took the humors as sound physiology, his 
sound psychiatry is ignored. Such eclipses of a source of light by some dark 
matter in the surroundings are familiar to the student of cultural history They 
are the cause of stereotypes; one trait alone stands out in a figure or a period 
and that is all that is remembered. The mind is an impressionable organ rather 
than a recording instrument. 

Since one aim of this book has been to show the Modern Era as a unit 
distinct in many ways from its predecessor, the amount of evidence offered 
may have produced or confirmed a stereotype of large dimensions. Cautions 
given here and there, reminders of important starts before 1 500, may have 
failed of their effect and thus the existing impression of the Middle Ages as 
"dark" may have been reinforced. To dispel it from at least the minds of pre- 
sent readers calls for a brief interlude in the main narrative. 

The name Middle Ages is a modern usage. It was hardly known until the 



The Invisible College <^> 225 

late 17C.° The wish to set off that era from antiquity on one side and from 
modernity on the other probably expressed pride — men of science and free- 
thinkers generally wanted to separate themselves from the "centuries of igno- 
rance." Soon the 18C made that consciousness of superiority explicit and 
convinced posterity that "Gothic" art, scholastic thought, and pious behavior 
were barbarism incarnate. The residue of that conviction is the use of 
"medieval" in journalism and common talk to condemn anything felt as out- 
dated and crude. Everybody knows that the Middle Ages were brutal, brutish, 
and superstitious in every way. 

The truth is that during the 1 ,000 years before 1 500 a new civilization 
grew from beginnings that were uncommonly difficult. The breakup of the 
Roman empire in the 5C had left a few towns and many isolated setdements 
to fend for themselves against outer anarchy. But the Middle Ages, as the plu- 
ral indicates, were several ages. Their varied achievements include creating 
institutions, reforming others (more than once), and — according to some — 
showing the world two renaissances before the one that has monopolized the 
name. The latest view is that instead of two such flowerings, there was only 
one great one, from 1050 to 1250. Much earlier, it is true, the intellectual and 
political activity during the time of Charlemagne in the 8th and early 9C had 
been remarkable. But this burst of genius was limited to his court, and then 
swamped by a fresh wave of Germanic invaders — Franks, Vandals, and 
Goths of all stripes; while from the south Arabs and Berbers, lumped under 
the name Saracens, attacked and though repulsed were not eliminated. 

While the occidental populations were being re-formed out of these ele- 
ments, monks in Ireland worked to preserve the treasures of high culture by 
copying manuscripts and compiling books. St. Patrick and his followers did 
more than rid the island of snakes. On the Continent, from the latter half of 
the 9C to the middle of the 11C, practical life-or-death concerns were 
paramount and the period may be called dark if it gives anybody pleasure. 
Later, its application is absurd. Far from scared or gloomy, the mood por- 
trayed in much of the popular literature of the Middle Ages is jollity; contin- 
ual danger can lift the spirits and energize action. Even during the worst times 
strong traditions endured. Neither the Roman code nor the canon (church) 
law faded away, and the Germanic invaders brought a type of custom law that 
some later thinkers have credited with the idea of individual freedom. 

The use of descriptive terms in speaking of the medieval era is always a 
delicate task. Within any one period, any one region or town, there was great 
diversity in language, law, government, and other components of culture. As 
Agubard wrote to Ludwig the Pious in the 9C: "One frequendy sees convers- 
ing together five persons no two of whom are governed by the same law." 
The situation resembles that of ancient Greece; it is the modern habit to say 



226 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

"Greek drama," when "Athenian" would be the proper word, while other 
city-states should be named in describing some one work of architecture or 
history or lyric poetry. 

Accordingly, though the term Feudalism springs to mind when the word 
medievally uttered, it is best forgotten unless one wants to study the period in 
detail. In its place, one should put the idea of loyalty between man and man, 
the strong feeling backed by an oath that bound a vassal to his lord for mili- 
tary service and other aid. This bond was the practical means of defense 
against threats to life and sustenance from whatever quarter they might come. 
Vassalage did not necessarily imply a fief, that is, the possession of land by the 
vassal, but it did imply the moral force that held society together. It underlies 
the familiar stories and traditions, from King Arthur's Round Table to 
Wagner's operas. 

Below the fighting man and his knights were the serfs and in the next 
town the artisans. The serfs, bound to the soil, supplied the food and the arti- 
sans the handmade goods. But as in all ages, the system was unsystematic and 
anything but fixed in its ways for all time. Upward mobility was a fact; a serf 
could run away or buy his freedom; a poor boy could become priest and even 
pope. When lords came to need help in managing their increasingly large 
domains, they employed serfs, and the privileges attached were so envied that 
some freemen wangled the status of serf so as to qualify for the post. In 
short, medieval society was no tyranny; it was layered and less than rational, 
like all societies. 

In a fitful way it had one principle, which it found in Aristotie and which 
is returning to favor: no rule was held valid if not approved by those it 
affected. A large institution, of course, could not function under such a con- 
straint; but in the medieval university, as we shall see, students were in a good 
position to enforce it, and when the machinery of consent failed to work, 
strikes and riots ensued. To the extent that generalities inform, the medieval 
personality, molded by extremely harsh and variable conditions, tended to be 
impetuous and violent. ° Different laws, claims, and rights arising from over- 
lapping sources — marriage, inheritance, promise, gift, ransom — encouraged 
the kind of temper that now inspires instant rage, immediate litigation, and 
summary dismissal. The endless local wars were not, as is believed, the doing 
of "robber barons": almost invariably they could show a legal right. When 
William the Conqueror crossed the Channel to make England his own, he 
had three substantial claims to the kingship. Land being the main form of 
wealth and the only source of a meager and chancy subsistence, owning more 
or less of it was not solely a question of pride or greed. 

War, moreover, had some civilized features — it was a game. The rules 
were strict. The word of honor, courtesy between foes, the captured knight 
deemed a "friend and brother" until ransomed (<94-95) — the full code must be 



The Invisible College q^> 227 

observed if the accusation of foul play was to be avoided. "In 1415 the 
English and the French heralds watched the battle together from a high place. 
When the French had fled, King Henry [V] waited anxiously until the princi- 
pal French herald confirmed that the English were the victors. And it was also 
for him to name the battle. He named it Agincourt."° 

More than a game, the Feast of Fools was a kind of mental health mea- 
sure that indicates the attitude of medieval man to his church, as distin- 
guished from his faith. The Feast was staged in the church itself, where, after 
electing a "king of revels," the forms of worship were mocked by parody. The 
brothers in abbeys chose a "lord of misrule" to conduct the same sort of 
organized relief from rigor, something that our time conspicuously lacks. The 
model for both gaieties was the pagan saturnalia enriched by the Christian 
mythology. It was the Protestant Revolution, obsessed with the difficulties of 
salvation, that introduced into the idea of churchgoing the hushed voice and 
tiptoe solemnity. 

Neither of these was dreamt of in the boisterous fervor that led to the 
Crusades in the 11C. These did serve the desire to gain spiritual merit, to do 
penance for repented sin, to obtain a relic for use as protection; but also: to 
find adventure, escape home drudgery, partake of the famed luxuries of the 
East, and enjoy a good fight with the paynim. One more motive was trade. In 
the end it produced the account of Marco Polo's 1 7 years in China. Marco 
went with his merchant uncle for that reason and remained there to become 
the adviser of the last Mogol emperor, Kubla Khan, the inspirer of 
Coleridge's poem." Marco's visits to Indochina, Japan, Malaysia, and India 
made known to the West the extent of the East. It now seems that his was not 
the first venture. Three who preceded him in the mid-1 3th and 14C also 
wrote accounts. [The book that reprints them in translation is: The 
Contemporaries of Marco Polo, ed. Manuel Komroff.] 

Like earlier times and ours, the Middle Ages entertained many supersti- 
tions. Theirs were the more picturesque and some were beliefs about natural 
phenomena that were not fanciful. The collective folly frequently cited as typ- 
ically medieval is the great fear that the world would end in the year 1000. It 
has been mentioned again as we approach the year 2000. It never happened. 
An American scholar long ago showed that the story is a fabrication contrary 
on many points to medieval habits of thought/ The date itself is suspect: tens, 
hundreds, and thousands meant little compared to threes, sevens, and 
twelves. Besides, the year began in different months in different places, which 
would make the panic somewhat straggling. The end of the world had been 
frequently predicted — and still is. In the enlightened, secular, and Protestant 
17C it was a reflex action following calamities. 

The supernatural did play a role in medieval justice. Since God directs all 
events, trial by ordeal and later by combat was the infallible way to prove one's 



228 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

case. Those who today believe in the same premise ought to call for a return 
to the custom. Anglo-Saxon law provided a simpler, more practical means. It 
defined crime literally as breaking the peace; it could therefore be repaired 
with money. Murther was the name of a fine before denoting one type of 
killing; the payment "bought back" the peace; one notes in passing that the 
moral sense is not always engraved on the human heart in exactly the same 
terms. The English jury, also at first, was a group of 12 whose position as 
neighbors enabled them to testify to the facts at first hand. They rendered no 
verdict but told what they knew of the parties and the place. 

A third procedure, combat (due//um), was instituted by William the 
Conqueror for both criminal and civil cases. It followed fairly sensible guide- 
lines: a professional could be hired for the day and he fought with specified 
weapons less than deadly. If by nightfall either combatant had cried "craven," 
the losing party to the suit was deemed a perjurer and was fined. If the issue 
was felony, he was hanged. Championship was a recognized profession and 
local courts kept on a yearly retainer one such qualified man to defend itself 
against potential claimants. 

* * 

Two medieval institutions remembered today with respect are the uni- 
versity and its arts curriculum. The Sorbonne, Oxford, and Cambridge live in 
the memory together with the cathedrals and pretty well make up the sum of 
merit accorded the era. The cathedral is known fairly accurately, being still 
extant. Not so Universitas, which means corporation and refers to the group 
of teachers in the cathedral school who set up with a few students a place for 
higher education. These early teaching firms dating from the 11C were self- 
governing like a guild. 

As for the arts curriculum, its meaning also differed from what we know 
under the name. Art meant know-how, techne, as in our "mechanical arts." The 
"liberal" ones were for free men and prerequisite to teaching, to serving the 
government, or simply to leading the life of the mind. There was a growing 
body of "intellectuals" who were not in the church or the professions/ The 
arts they studied were seven — four and three: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, 
and music; grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Bachelor, master, and doctor expressed 

the degree of qualification attained. In 
I would there were no age between sixteen the separate grouping of subjects the 
and three-and-twenty; for there is nothing the primacy of science is already evident. 
between but getting wenches with child, From the mix came the modern notion, 
wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting, now in decline, that the liberal arts pro- 
dnnkm g- vide any future leader in civilian life or 

— Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale government with what his duties will 



The Invisible College <^> 229 

require. After changing some of the contents to keep up-to-date, England as 

nation and empire thrived for a century and a half on that understanding. 

Medieval undergraduates were unruly and some had a better right than 

later comers to dictate to their teachers, namely when students were officially 

the administration of the university. At Oxford, the faculty was in charge, but 

in Paris, those enrolled paid their teachers direct and could complain of the way 

the courses were given — as well as of 

anything else not to their taste. _. TT TTT -_ , , 

3 ° -King Henry III of England to the masters 

Representatives from the four "nations" and smdents rf the University of Paris> greet . 
(not national but mixed) rotated rapidly ^ Because of the many tribulations and dif- 
by law, while factional struggles ensured Acuities you have undergone under the evil 
a steady round of grievances, disputes, l aw of Paris, we desire out of reverence for 
riots, and wounds. The townsmen were God and the holy church to aid you in restor- 
fair game for mugging and murder with ing your condition to its due liberty. If it 
impunity. As for town life itself, its set- pleases you to come to our kingdom of 
ting is familiar to present-day travelers England and make it your permanent center 
and its crowded, unhygienic conditions of students > whatever cities, boroughs or 
fairly known from literature. [For towns you choose we shall assign to you. 
greater detail, read The Medieval Town by ULY 16 > 1229 ) 
John H. Mundy and Peter Riesenberg.] 

The oudook of the developing class referred to above as intellectuals 
appealed to students even before graduation — they had entered at 13 or 14 — 
and they joined this subversive element, which was united not by doctrine but 
by temperament and habit; they were not advocates of reform or revolution 
but practitioners of anarchy. The ballades of Francois Villon give without ret- 
icence an insider's view of the life and its perils. Graduates, students, vagrants, 
criminals together, they roamed the countryside in bands, unwelcome to vil- 
lagers, but by now much admired for their songs of love and sadness and 
drink. Among many collections, a choice of some found in a German abbey 
form the text of Carl Orff 's popular cantata Carmina Burana." Not until early 
modern times were the lawless students of Europe put down by the royal 
heads of the budding nations. 






In science and techne the Middle Ages progressed well beyond the 
Romans and Greeks. Aristode supplied the framework of Thomas Aquinas's 
theology, but the Stagirite's physics were refuted at the University of Paris. 
The first of the Bacons, Roger, practiced experiment, produced results in 
optics — he was credited with inventing eyeglasses — and promoted the idea 
that the test of truth is not authority or logic but experience. Toward the end 
of the period the versatile Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa ranged over physics, 



230 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

mathematics (he suggested infinitesimals), astronomy, and geography (he 
commissioned the first map of Central Europe). He wrote on philosophy and 
jurisprudence and fruitfully advanced these disciplines. He gave up the 
Scholastics' way of settling questions by formal debate pro and con, and 
before Copernicus and Kepler, he intimated doubts of the circular motion of 
the planets and the earth's fixity at the center of the universe. Today, Cusa is 
honored by cosmologists for having conceived the cosmos as continuous, 
instead of divided into spheres of different materials. His ideas were not ade- 
quately followed up; he is a prime example of the truth that before science 
could prosper it had to become an institution. At the same time, to be fair to 
the Scholastics, one must heed Whitehead's reminder that by their logic- 
chopping they contributed to science the habit of asking what a statement 
implies and of not being satisfied with merely plausible answers. 

Logic as an antidote to loose inference was helped in the Middle Ages by 
the use of the international language, not Latin, but Medieval Latin, 2. medium 
of exact expression, simplified in syntax and enriched in vocabulary. The 
modern tongues owe to it the subject- verb-predicate form of sentence and 
most of the abstract terms used in science, philosophy, government, business, 
and daily intercourse. By the end of the era, searchers after truth were well 
supplied also with "philosophical instruments" and machines: various types 
of measuring and drafting tools; and the compass and the astrolabe, supple- 
mented by charts, to guide sailors on their way. Tacking (sailing against the 
wind) probably dates from the 1 5C if not earlier. And a comprehensive trea- 
tise on magnets served more than one purpose in science and daily life. 
Technicians could boast a vast experience in building, mining, and manufac- 
turing, and a tradition of seeking the new. 

The invention and utility of machinery depend on a source of power 
stronger than man's right arm. Before steam that power was water. The mill 
was the medieval machine par excellence; it served grinding, fulling, and other 
industrial needs. Using metal forged into exact shapes for gears and shafts, 
the mill was sturdy and its action continuous. The metallic ores mined in 
Germany were treated in new ways for durability and strength. In France steel 
was first made by some Carthusians monks well before their brothers in the 
Alps invented Chartreuse. [The book to read is The Medieval Machine by Jean 
Gimpel.] There is no need to point out the solidity and sound design of the 
bridges, houses, and churches that still stand to show their workmanship. The 
stone dressing and carving and the stained glass that we cannot duplicate are 
duly recognized, together with the priority of the cathedral as a skyscraper: it 
was the first building which, to attain height, is a frame and not a pile. The 
walls fill in the sides, they do not support the fabric. 

Hardly remembered are the smaller artifacts — utensils, jewelry, orna- 
ments, and the plate and chainmail armor, all of which presuppose refined 



The Invisible College ^ 231 

methods and high individual skill. [The book to read is The Fate of Medieval Art 
by G. G. Coulton.] Still more virtuosity went into the first mechanical clocks, 
which date from the last quarter of the 13C. The reliable watch came two cen- 
turies later. The importance attached to Time in the West is a distinctive trait: 
Swift's Gulliver looks at his watch so often that his hosts the Brobdingnagians 
think he is consulting his god. [The book to consult is A Revolution in Time by 
David S. Landes.] 

Nor should it be forgotten that it was by medieval techne that firearms 
and movable type were first made. Muskets and cannon changed the tactics 
of war and the meaning of the word artillery^ which gave the infantry superi- 
ority over the cavalry, thereby socially demoting the knight. As to movable 
type, now that it seems no longer needed thanks to the ubiquitous digitals, the 
moderns must not imagine that they invented it and built the machine that 
begot the book. Even the use of small letters in place of capitals throughout 
is due to a scribe contemporary with Charlemagne. 

* 
* * 

When a book was a scroll or a codex (fastened sheets) it was expensive and 
rare, yet if one could have counted the number of separate tides, one would 
have found a good many about, including those that were compilations of the 
knowledge in the other books. Encyclopedias make their start with Isidore of 
Seville's in the 8C and reach the 1 5th with that of Bartholomeus Anglicus. 
From Spain, where (as we saw) a high Arab civilization lasted for those same 
800 years, a great deal of scientific and philosophical knowledge flowed into 
northern parts, matching the goods and refinements, also of eastern make, that 
the crusaders brought back. 

By oral tradition ultimately written down, the Middle Ages enjoyed a vast 
literature, so vast that it has not yet been entirely studied and ticketed. The 
cycle of stories about King Arthur and his knights has already been men- 
tioned. Other figures and legends have likewise fed the modern imagination 
after filling the medieval: Roland and Oliver, Tristan and Isolde, Parsifal, the 
Nibelungen, Beowulf, Burnt Njal, and other characters in the Icelandic sagas. 
Huge epics about Alexander the Great or The Romance of the Rose or Bertha 
Bigfoot need for their appreciation a different training from that on the market 
today. The shorter works of poets were in strict forms meant to be sung; of 
these the ballade has remained in steady use. By the side of this output we 
have their poems in Latin and mainly on religious themes, the first in the West 
to use rime. The modern listener to a Te Deum or Requiem who reads the text 
samples the style. [A selection to read is in Medieval Latin Lyrics, translated by 
Helen Waddell.] 

The cargo of poetry and wisdom in those and other than popular works 



232 <j^> From Dawn to Decadence 

may be gauged from the summary statement that Chaucer in the 14C found 
in the literature of the Continent "a wealth of romances, lives of saints, contes, 
fabliaux, drama, history, biography, all of great interest and importance." 
Chaucer's own output in the 14C forms a kind of anthology of high medieval 
literature. Reflected in it is the place women occupied in the culture and life 
of the time, a mirroring that as always must be adjusted by what appears in the 
histories and official records. During the crusades women necessarily had a 
hand in the management of households and estates. As widows or regents 
they ruled counties and dukedoms and sometimes kingdoms, for example: 
Matilda of England, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Blanche of Castille, Isabel of 
Spain. [The book to read for the lives of outstanding figures, including two 
women is Medieval Lives by Norman Cantor.] The world for obvious reasons 
remembers most vividly Heloi'se and Joan of Arc (properly Dare and no of). ° 
In the fabliaux, popular pieces in the vulgarest comic vein that criticize 
every habit, class, custom, and institution of their day, it is possible to find 
hostility to women. But given the other subjects that are equally attacked, this 
testimony needs interpreting. The vicissitudes of marriage expose the 
women to satire — and the men as fornicators, the jokes being the eternal 
ones on the subject. Nobody has ever believed that they apply to all men, 
women, and married couples. [The book to read is The Fifteen Joys of Marriage, 
translated by Richard Aldington.] By the 14C the literary and other evidence 
shows women as men's social and intellectual partners. The good society as it 
is then conceived and shown in practice could not exist without them. In that 
very time we meet a witness who is also a professional writer, 

Christine de Pisan 

Christine was the daughter of a Venetian who held office in France. He 
educated her and provided a husband with good prospects at court. But soon 
the king died, the father lost his post and died too, followed not long after by 
the husband. He left Christine with three children to rear. Knowing Latin and 
Italian, besides French literature and the manners of high society, she put this 
capital to use in a stream of works in verse and prose — manuals of etiquette, 
ballades, rondeaus, virelais, and other pieces for special occasions, all graced 
by fulsome dedicatory episties. 

Christine missed no chance to defend women and their rights, notably in 
her Epistle to the God of Love. The cause was taken up by another poet, Martin 
LeFranc in Le Champion des Dames^ and the issue became a free-for-all known 
as "la querelle desfemmes" (<131). This episode makes clear a point in the per- 
during "woman question," namely, that there is a difference in the status of 
women, which has varied from free in the Renaissance to depressed in 
Victorian times, and different again in law, in custom, and in common talk. It 



The Invisible College q^d 233 

is a difference which, with variations, applies likewise to the status and rights 
of men and of children too. Society hardly ever follows its blueprint, a fact 
that makes comparisons extremely difficult and judgments more than usually 
fallible. 

At the origin of the woman question in modern times is a medieval nov- 
elty called courtly love. It probably accounts for Christine's addressing her 
book to the god of love. The troubadours and jongleurs, the poet's accompa- 
nist on the lute, invented romance. While it lasts, it is a state of being like no 
other — out of bounds in relation to society and yet in many ways conven- 
tional. It has nothing to do with marriage, which is a means of cementing 
alliances and redistributing wealth among families. A marriage may be con- 
tracted for, rather than by, a boy and a girl before their teens; nor does the 
institution shy at pairing an old widower with a young girl, complete strangers 
to each other. Arranged marriages still obtain in many parts of the world; and 
where obsolete as in the West, members of the family still interfere as of right. 
Romance re-installs the state of nature and re-asserts the individual will. 

This medieval institution is called courtly, because it is grafted on the 
ideal and ritual of chivalry — the ethos of the warrior on horseback. When 12 
years old, the page, in order to become a knight, goes through a long night's 
vigil in prayer, and he vows to fight only for pure causes, such as aiding the 
weak and distressed. Channeling the adolescent emotions, this program 
includes Woman — not just attractive women — but Woman as a sex. The 
beloved must be married, not a young girl still at home, and the marriage vow 
must be respected, both on religious grounds and to ensure the legitimacy of 
offspring. Notwithstanding the bold words amid the sighs, poems, and tender 
messages, the passion must remain 

ideal, often no doubt, in the teeth of Faif ? sweet lovef ? why m j not do ^ that you 
temptation. The lecherous Dante's asked of me? The churls whom I feared hin- 
worship of the nine-year-old Beatrice, dered me so that I could never reward you for 
Petrarch's distant devotion to Laura your service. 

were romances of courtly love. [The —Duchess of Lorraine, "Elegy" (13C) 
anthology to read is Medieval Lyrics of 
Europe, translated by Willard R. Trask.] 

In parallel fashion, the mystics such as St. Teresa of Avila direct their pure 
love to God. That they use the language and imagery of earthly lovers does not 
debase their attachment; it only shows the common ideality of the two desires. 
Conversely, modern romantic love makes free use of the religious idiom. The 
beloved is an "angel," her nature "divine"; the lover declares he is in heaven in 
her presence. It is foolish to laugh or even to smile; much of the best poetry of 
the world has sprung from this adoration, as it has from the religious passion. 
It is easy to see how the ideal can degenerate into mawkishness, and equally 
easy to sympathize with women's irritation at being worshipped — "put on a 



234 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

pedestal." It makes either staying there or jumping off risky and ridiculous. Still, 
by depicting woman as a being instead of an object of political, economic, and 
marital utility, courdy love established in theory the rights and privileges that 
women deserve and that many have enjoyed in reality, beginning with respect 
of their person and admiration of their qualities. 

For to suppose that from antiquity they have been uniformly oppressed, 
used as drudges by their husbands, as chattel by their lords, is to accept a 
stereotype and forget their possession of the very qualities women want to 
vindicate: intelligence, self-respect, and resourcefulness in exerting their 
native powers. There have always been brutes, of either sex, for the reasons 
stated earlier. Until late in the Middle Ages men were doubdess more bestial 
than in imperial Rome or the 1 8C salons of Europe; and it is plausible to think 
that courdy love was a softening influence. Still in the comparative mode, it 
must be pointed out that the brutish type fills the daily news today, when we 
have no courdy love to bring to bear on their rugosities. Romance exists, and 
it is a refugee from the reign of the sexual, to which "courdy" does not apply. 

* 

One more topic needs attention before this interlude comes to a close. 
The Middle Ages were far from indifferent to the past, but their way of look- 
ing upon it was not the same as our "sense of history"; or to be more exact, 
the sense developed in the 19C and which is fast fading (775>). The Middle 
Ages welcomed any books and traditions that told them about the Roman 
empire; and the learning transmitted by Arab and Jewish scholars (<231). But 
what medieval writers themselves produced in the way of history was of a dif- 
ferent cast. 

They compiled chronicles, a day-by-day recital of events, into which 
might be interwoven hearsay about previous or remote incidents. These 
works are valuable for their firsthand factual reports, but in these and other 
types of medieval literature the unhistorical mind is betrayed by the authors' 
failure to perceive differences of time and place: under Providence life has 
been the same as we see it to be; the past is uniform with the present. What 
interests the medieval writer is the details of visions and miracles, of sin and 
repentance, which explain events and individual lives. Medieval biography 
follows a like moralistic and theological interpretation of earthly doings, the 
lives of the saints being rich in lessons and miracles. Some are nonetheless 
informative, pleasant to read, and models of the narrative art. Toward the end 
of the Middle Ages, the accounts by Villehardouin, Froissart, and Commines 
of their own deeds contain much about their times and their travels, but with- 
out evincing that perpetual awareness of time and change that has become 
congenital since their day. 



The Invisible College <^d 235 

And yet it is a fact, a stupendous Careful with your fingers! Don't touch writ- 
fact, that a whole literature has come ing! You don't know what it is to write. It's a 
down to us from the ancient world crushing task; it bends your spine, blurs your 
thanks to the tireless activity of the eyesight, creases your stomach, and cracks 
medieval scribes. They copied and your ribs. 
recopied the texts, apparendy without — Late medieval manuscript 
noticing Difference in what that litera- 
ture portrayed. This is one of the great paradoxes of history. For if we suppose 
that this blindness came from contempt for pagan society, why spend time pre- 
serving its records? Enough minds must have been in some way captivated if 
certain parts of Cicero or Tacitus were among those that the delegated Brother 
read aloud at meals. And then, for lack of cultural context (so to speak), that 
interest had no sequel. In any event, the modern world must remain grateful to 
the medieval copyist for copying, not only the local chronicler's exciting pages 
but also the scattered remnants of the previous civilization. 



Part II 

From the Bog and 

Sand of Versailles 

to the Tennis Court 



The Monarchs' Revolution 

Puritans as Democrats 

The Reign of Etiquette 

Cross Section: 
The View from London Around 1715 

The Opulent Eye 

The Encyclopedic Century 

Cross Section: 
The View from Weimar Around 1790 

The Forgotten Troop 



The Monarchs' Revolution 



One revolution calls forth another. When the Protestant Revolution of 
the 1 6C had done its best and its worst while destroying unified Christendom, 
its worst — namely the protracted war of sects — hastened the Monarchical 
Revolution of the 1 7th. Its twofold Idea was "monarch-and-nation" and its 
double goal was stability and peace. The sects had challenged or broken 
authority everywhere; some means must be found to restore order through a 
new loyalty and a new symbol. 

The symbol was monarch, not king. There had been kings in Western 
Europe for a thousand years, but no matter what their ambition had been, 
they had remained "first among equals" rather than "one and only." Their 
peers, the great nobles, had endlessly challenged or infringed their authority, 
fought to usurp their tide, and ruled like kings large parts of the country. Each 
was the legitimate force in his own county or dukedom. As a result bound- 
aries were always shifting. What was France? Burgundy? Italy? Austria? 
Savoy? Wholes or parts, they were at the mercy of rulers seeking wealth and 
power by conquering provinces not only nearby but far afield. France and 
Spain fought in Italy to annex some piece of it, just as the English had done 
in France for centuries. Indeed, for 400 years after their departure, the 
English in their coronation service continued to claim France as part of the 
king's realm and to sport the lilies of France on the English coat of arms. 
Within each country, strong nobles kept enlisting the aid of some foreign king 
to dislodge their own and take his place. The idea of a nation, a continuous, 
stable territory with an increasingly homogeneous population, was hardly 
clear in theory, let alone in practice. 

Nation implies the nation-state, the one source of authority, just as 
monarch when compared to king means undisputed rule by one alone. This 
double development — king into monarch, realm into nation — is the mark of 
the revolution, in keeping with the definition given earlier (<3): a violent 
transfer of power and property in the name of an idea. 

This change in the meaning of kingship and country did not take place all 



240 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

at once throughout Europe. Local traditions and the chances of war and of 
character in kings account for the variations of speed and of phase that made 
this revolution take about 200 years. If this seems odd for "a revolution," 
remember that revolution is a process not an event. We think of the French 
Revolution in capsule form — 1789 to '94, but what occurred then had 
antecedents in polemics and practice, and the Idea of the outbreak — the 
rights of man, equality, suffrage, and "no king" — took 100 years to be finally 
accepted, either in France or among the other western nations (548; 587>). 
As for the idea of the nation-state, it is still in the future for some peoples in 
various parts of the world. Their struggles are a remote consequence of the 
revolutionary monarch-and-nation idea, as well as a paradox in our time, 
when kings are few and the nation as a form is falling apart in the countries 
that first made it a reality (774-776>). 

The story of that accomplishment is long and complicated and need not 
occupy us at length. A reminder of a few facts will suffice to show the pattern. 
In 15C Spain, the union of the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile through the 
marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella was enhanced by the conquest of 
Granada and the expulsion or assimilation of the Moors and the Jews. The 
local assemblies were gradually subdued to the central power, the very test of 
monarchy. In the 1 6C Portugal came under Spanish rule but broke away after 
a half century, making two nations in the peninsula. 

In England, again in the late 15C, the Wars of the Roses (coalitions of 
great lords) came to an end, also by a marriage and a victory, and the first two 
Tudors ruled almost as monarchs. Henry VIII had to face one rebellion, and 
by Elizabeth's time internal troubles returned and weakened autocratic rule. 
Tried again by Charles I it collapsed in the Civil Wars (263 >). Not until the 
Glorious Revolution of 1688 (no revolution but a glorious compromise) was 
the English monarchy a solid institution. Two failed attempts to overthrow it 
in the 18C showed its strength. Note in passing that after 1066 the English 
never had a line of English kings: William the Conqueror was Norman; the 
Plantagenets were French; the Tudors were Welsh; the Stuarts were Scots, 
and the Hanoverians, German. These shifts and turns no doubt helped 
Parliament to retain powers that a sustained monarchy might well have extin- 
guished. 

In Sweden, the Vasa family succeeded early in governing the entire 
Scandinavian region, and did not falter, despite the death of Gustavus 
Adolphus in the Thirty Years' War and the abdication of the wondrous 
Christina (<207). Poland in the late 16C was a nation in spirit and seemed to 
have a sole ruler, but unhappily he was an elective monarch, and one particu- 
larly hamstrung, because the nobles who chose him enjoyed each a veto on 
the acts of the law-making body. It was institutional anarchy and contradic- 
tion. The two semi-nations, Netherlands and Switzerland, created by the 



The Monarchs' Revolution <^> 241 

comprehensive treaty that ended the Thirty Years' War, managed their affairs 
without a monarch by schemes as composite as their group of provinces. Two 
larger, indefinite regions, known as Germany and Italy, were unable to over- 
come their past and seize the benefits of the revolution. They remained 
divided into small units for another 200 years, suffering the harm of division 
and causing harm to others by their tempting weakness. 



On hearing the words absolute monarchy, one is likely to think of France 
and of Louis XIV in particular. There is truth and error in this association of 
ideas (284>). What is true is that for the concrete details of the monarch-and- 
nation scheme, 17C France is the place to look; it supplies them most fully, 
and well before Louis XIV. The French kings and their ministers from the 
15C onward worked to control the nobles, to round out the territory, and 
by being careful about money to become independent. This last is the all- 
important requisite. A king is a monarch when he holds the monopoly of war, 
and this means money for a standing army. Money also confers the monopoly 
of justice, taxation, and coinage — all this made secure by a legion of civil ser- 
vants to enforce the rules. These indispensables presuppose direction from a 
center. Monarchy implies centralization. Without it, the well-defined region 
called nation could not be a nation-state. Its agents replace local authorities 
and govern as uniformly as possible. Thus bureaucracy is born or at least 
gready expanded. 

The mastermind who set up such a system in France was Cardinal 
Richelieu, minister to Louis XIII for a quarter century. He did it in the teeth 
of plotting nobles and clerics bent on thwarting him. Dumas' Three Musketeers 
gives a good idea of Richelieu's corps of henchmen and spies and the hatred 
he and they incurred. Under his rule the nation solidified — foreign powers 
were kept at arms' length, the dissident Huguenots restricted to specified 
towns, and the nobles cowed by conspicuous and unexampled executions as 
lawbreakers. 

One peculiar measure that was also needed had to do with an ancient cul- 
tural institution, the duel. Its prohibition goes back to the previous reign, 
when the annual toll of casualties in the pastime was high enough to alarm the 
Duke of Sully (<185). One might suppose that a king aiming at monarchy 
would rejoice. The bumptious and braggart who go in for dueling as a sport 
might as well dispose of one another. But of course, that breed might make 
up only half the participants, the other half being decent, peaceable subjects 
forced into fighting by the code of honor. And these, if killed or maimed, 
would be a loss to the country. Richelieu's severity did not put a stop to the 
custom or the needs that it served. 



242 <^*> From Dawn to Decadence 

Conflicting interests were at stake: if monarchy promises law and order, 
all types of brawl must be forbidden, all disputes settled in court. But dueling 
exists because it settles matters that courts cannot take notice of — insults, 
offenses against dignity or against women or elders in one's family. When 
pride is high by reason of rank, honor can be compromised in a thousand 
ways and tolerating affronts is either cowardice or lack of self-respect. 
Besides, a duel settles matters between individuals and is thus more rational 
than the blood feud that keeps two families (those of Romeo and Juliet come 
to mind) killing each other off after the original offense. With dueling not 
only is there an end, but the wiping out of the insult is accomplished not by 
stealth or ambush but according to rules under the supervision of seconds. 

Despite these advantages, dueling is seen today as not quite rational 
enough, although there are occasions — say, of unpunishable cruelty or injus- 
tice — that make one long for redress through single combat. Our enlightened 
century has in fact witnessed a return to a kind of blood feud. Instead of the 
family, it is the local clan or gang or sect. Schoolchildren are keen for it, and 
so are criminals, the Mafia, the inhabitants of Northern Ireland, Lebanon, 
Corsica, and other places at present known to all. 

This vendetta-style warfare gives a measure of the force that monarchy 
tried to repress. It succeeded to some extent, but appeal to sword or pistol 
kept playing a part in political and cultural history. It killed Galois, the young 
mathematical genius; Pushkin, the first among Russian poets; Alexander 
Hamilton, the leading statesman of his generation. In modern France, from 
Armand Carrel, the political theorist of the 1 820s, down to Clemenceau, the 
head of state a century later, duels put at risk the lives of a large number of 
statesmen and writers. It lasted democratically in the American West, later 
proving a boon to the movie industry. 

The desire for self- vindication is deeply ingrained in western man. In the 
17C it was called "the point of honor." Its moral force derived from medieval 
chivalry, which regarded the knight as the champion of all that is noble and 
fair and as an independent judge in his own cause. No monarch wanted his 
subjects to lose all of these qualities, and the ethos persisted. When 

Montesquieu classified forms of gov- 
ernment in the 18C, he assigned honor 
The sense of honor is of so fine and delicate a . . r 

. . . . . . . as the mainspring ot monarchy. It 

nature that it is only to be met with in minds r ° J 

,. , _ u U1 . . , , , implies loyalty, honesty, and courage, 

which are naturally noble or cultivated by r J :•> j> &> > 

good examples and a refined education. which remove or reduce the need for 

_ _, _ ,----v inspectors and written codes of ethics. 

— Sir Richard Steele (1713) r 

One also sees in the triumph of 

Honor lies in honest toil. monarchism under Louis XIV the shift 

— Grover Cleveland, accepting the that Burckhardt pointed out, of the 

presidential nomination (1892) thirst for honor into "honors"— titles, 



The Monarchs' Revolution <^> 243 

decorations, favors slight in themselves but of infinite value, such as being 
spoken to by the king before anyone else among a cluster of courtiers. 
Topping all these, honor for the nation was served by glorious action in war. 
Though muted in the late 20C, the popular response to a victorious general 
(or woman prime minister) is still the same. As for the love of titles and dec- 
orations, it has become the rage in the democracies — prizes for everything 
and everyone. Montesquieu miscalculated when he made virtue the main- 
spring of republics. 

* * 

No king wanting to be monarch could succeed by means of soldiers and 
bureaucrats alone. Mere coercion would only produce a tyranny, and with 
tardy means of communication it could not last long. There must be wide 
consent, tangibly expressed in the form of money paid into the treasury. By 
the 1 7C the cost of war had greatly increased: cannon and firearms were more 
expensive than bows and arrows, and national defense was now based on 
enormous fortresses built on scientific lines (>313). The great sums required 
gave the edge to rulers of large territories that included prosperous cities. The 
artisans and merchants who lived there were the future monarch's natural 
allies in his rise to centralized power. 

They had every reason to support him. The nobles were their natural 
enemies and humiliators, and as anti-national warlords they were lawless dis- 
turbers of trade and ravagers of towns. Besides, the bourgeoisie supplied the 
king's best servants for administering the realm in a systematic, businesslike 
way. An aristocrat conquers and commands; he does not record and report in 
ignoble paperwork. Under the illiterate kings of the Middle Ages, the clergy 
had been their aides; the enlarging demands for able bureaucrats installed the 
bourgeoisie as the main agency of monarchical rule. 

The name bourgeoisie has been put to so many uses since the vogue of 
Marxism and sociology, that it needs a moment's attention. One of the dullest 
cliches one encounters in books is: "the rising bourgeoisie." Most often it is 
represented as emerging in 19C England as a class made up of manufacturers. 
The phrase also serves to explain various reform movements in England and 
revolutions abroad; it is made to account for improved police organization 
and the popularity of the novel. The rising bourgeoisie resembles a perpetual 
souffle. For Karl Marx, the bourgeois were the masters of a stage in history, 
as if aristocrats and peasants no longer exerted any power. After him, novel- 
ists and critics used the name as a term of abuse denoting stuffy moralism and 
philistine tastes. 

To begin with, the chronology is wrong. The time of the rising bour- 
geoisie is not the 1 9C but the 1 2th. It was then that after much travail the 



244 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

towns of Europe began to revive, roads improved, and trade flourished again 
beyond the town walls. By the beginning of the Modern Era, this trade was 
inter-European and soon global. The people who carried it on got the name 
of bourgeois from being inhabitants of the burg or town; they were burghers 
or, in the early American assemblies, burgesses. They were well-to-do; as early 
as the 14C they were lending money to kings and replacing the clergy as gov- 
ernment officials, for they knew how to read and write and especially to 
count. By the time of Louis XIV they occupied the most important posts and 
were being ennobled right and left for their services. So the bourgeoisie was 
not rising 200 years later in the days of Queen Victoria. It was fully risen. 

A further error is to regard the bourgeoisie — or any class — as a solid 
mass of people moving up or down the centuries in concert. If the bour- 
geoisie (or middle class) is made up of the medieval and later town dwellers, 
it is clear that at any given time some were wealthy patricians ruling the town; 
others were ordinary tradesmen, others lawyers, builders, artists and writers, 
still others shopkeepers, makers of hats and shoes; and some, the shabby gen- 
teel, lived on charity. And these categories were occupied by ever-shifting 
groups. Long before Louis XIV, many French bourgeois had bought them- 
selves a tide by buying a piece of land or an office/ Lawyers and the judiciary 
were such buyers and were known as the nobility of the robe. In England, a 
merchant's daughter entered the aristocracy by marriage and produced a suc- 
cession of noblemen and -women whose bourgeois ancestors evidendy had 
finished rising. 

Similar results occurred from distinguished service to the state. The 
Duke of Marlborough was plain John Churchill to start with. His descendant 
Winston was content with a knighthood. Generally speaking, the tides of 
noble families in Europe do not go back much farther than the 15C and a 
good number were at some point fradulent. It follows that their stock was 
originally peasant or bourgeois, there being no other human material that 
could rise. Besides, within the bourgeoisie as within the aristocracy there are 
gradations determined by wealth or occupation, by talent, manners, or simple 
tradition. It is therefore idle to speak of the bourgeoisie or the middle class or 
even the petty bourgeoisie as if one knew what one was talking about. One 
must make clear in any given context what kind of bourgeois is invoked, spec- 
ifying the distinguishing marks of riches, education, or profession. In the 
monarchical recruitment from that mixed group, it is obviously the literate 
and well reared who qualified for service. 

In that revolution we accordingly detect the theme of EMANCIPATION. 
The king is finally rid of his resdess rivals scheming to supplant him, and the 
capable among the bourgeois are now free to exert power over their former 
oppressors, who feel, if not actually oppressed, deeply offended. The Duke 



The Monarchs' Revolution <^ 245 



of St. Simon at the court of Louis XIV resents this topsy-turvy development 
and writes in his memoirs: "This has been a century of vile bourgeoisie." 






Like all revolutions, the monarchical looks like a mainly political and eco- 
nomic change, but its origins and effects were cultural to an equal degree. 
Literature and the arts, philosophy and commonplace states of mind were 
affected (333>). For example, the word noble turned from simply denoting a 
person (= knowable, worth knowing) to naming an abstract quality that even 
became a label for certain words (355>). Again, through the idea of nation, 
the revolution enlarged the scope of one's attachment to the place of one's 
birth. The words a native of Italy would have meant nothing to a 1 6C beggar in 
Naples: he was a Neapolitan, if not a son of some neighboring hamlet still 
closer to his heart. This expansion of citizenship made less personal, more 
abstract, the feeling of obedience, no longer to the local lord but to the dis- 
tant king, and finally to the wholly abstract state. ABSTRACTION is another 
theme implicit in monarchy. 

And by way of unexpected effect, the rapprochement between kings and 
the bourgeoisie led to an amalgam of chivalric ideals and mercantile rigor in 
material things that became the code of civilized manners for 300 years. This 
code improved the personality of both noble and commoner, making the one 
considerate instead of arrogant and the other dignified instead of obsequious. 
The code lasted about halfway into the 20C. 

To find the beginnings of monarchical theory one must go back to the 
contemporaries of Montaigne and the politiques in the late 1500s who wanted 
an end to civil war in France. Earlier in that century, Machiavelli also qualifies 
as a forerunner, for reasons that will appear (> 256). But the most direct the- 
orist of the revolution was the French jurist Jean Bodin. His work On the 
Republic (= the state) was no humanist Utopia, but a historian's study of gov- 
ernments in ancient and modern times, aimed at defining a government fit 
for the immediate present. For Bodin, the new system should embody all the 
good provisions of previous and foreign laws and should be closely tailored 
to fit the nation — not any nation, but the one in view. This demand was 
meant to counter the worship of Roman law as the source of all wisdom in 
political theory; comparative history is the true source (he said) and it shows 
that the fundamental question for the political scientist is: where in the state 
is power to be lodged? 

For France, Bodin is sure that a division of powers, a so-called mixed 
government, will not work. Sovereignty is not divisible, though he admits that 
in some situations a difference may exist between the form of the govern- 



246 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

It is necessary for the wise government of a m ent and the type of state — a democ- 

people to understand fully its humors and racy may be run not by the people but 

nature before it can expect anything from by their delegates. In France, a monarch 

changes in the state or the laws. For the main is necessary The clashing interests and 

foundation of a commonwealth lies in the groups (he is thinking of the Huguenot 

adaptation of the state to the nature of the cit- power and the ambitious nobles) 

izens, and the edicts and ordinances to the require a powef aboye them ^ abk tQ 

nature of the place, the persons, and the baknce ^ daims ^ ^ ^^ of 

the whole, the republic or common- 

— Bodin, On the Republic (1 576) ° wealth 

The only check on monarchy that 
Bodin would retain was the Estates General, the irregularly summoned 
assembly that voted new taxes; Bodin was their secretary in the year his book 
was published. The Estates represented the three orders — clergy, nobles, and 
commoners — and sat and voted as units after the separate orders had con- 
ferred among themselves. Once the monarchy began to prosper under 
Henry IV, they met only once until 1789, when they took on unknowingly the 
opposite task of destroying it (423>). 

Bodin's Republic was widely read in France, influential also in England, 
and reissued at frequent intervals; all of which shows that the public mind was 
prepared by other influences to find it good. A thoroughly new idea gets no 
response. One element of the book's success was that the proposals were 
shown as practical inferences from history Bodin had previously urged the 
value of thinking historically in his Method for the Easy Understanding of History. 
In it he anticipates Montesquieu's idea that climate and soil and their joint 
products condition forms of government, and that in framing laws these con- 
ditions should be taken into account — experience before theory. This belief 
that history has a present use when properly read is a mark of the modern 
temper (482>); whole periods and peoples have done quite well without it 
(<234). Now we take it for granted that the physician is wise to take the 
patient's history and that the chairman of the board must review the past year 
in his annual report. To have not only the knowledge but the sense of history 
is deemed an asset in practical life. This sense detects likeness and difference 
under the facade and the names of things. To take a crude example, someone 
who "sees" the same objects when he reads the words coat, hat, and shoe in a 
book about ancient Greece and again in a book about colonial America lacks 
the sense of history. 

Its acquisition is not automatic — hence Bodin's Method, which sums up 
what the Renaissance scholars were the first to make clear. Not until Valla, 
Bude, and others studied texts comparatively did it dawn on them that an 
author's meaning depended in part on the time when he wrote. The relation 
was also true in reverse: an author can be dated by his phrasing. Out of verbal 



The Monarchs' Revolution ^ 247 

analysis came the notions of "an age," of "period style," and of their trans- 
formation into something different. The feeling of fixity, of permanence 
under eternal law, which characterized the religious view of life gave way to 
the secular view of its ceaseless evolution. Comparative history promotes 

SECULARISM. 

A little before Bodin, another lawyer, Francois Baudouin, had suggested 
that jurisprudence should be taught historically, so that its rules should 
appear not as abstract notions but as practical devices. He wanted men 
trained for public office by a combined course of history and legal reasoning. 
Infectious history finally persuaded those influential men, the doctors of the 
Roman Law, that the first kings of Rome were a different kind of prince from 
the emperors in the years of decline. The ruler of modern times (they argued) 
should be a composite of early king and late emperor, close to his people like 
the former; revered as quasi divine like the latter. These theorists were 
preaching to the converted. Most people — lawyers, politiques, bourgeois, and 
kings too — wanted a central power at once strong and popular. 

But there was a minority view. What might be called the native and con- 
servative tradition was expounded by the well-named Francois Hotman in a 
book called Franco-Gallia, also a best-seller. A master of polemics, Hotman 
inveighed against all appeals to the Roman Law that could serve the monar- 
chical idea. He urged a limited kingship. The "liberties" of France must not 
be wiped out; the town charters, the local and general assemblies, the special 
privileges won or bought from lords and kings — this was a heritage not to be 
given up: security lay in these, not in a monarch who was bound to be uncon- 
trollable. 

The title of Hotman's book alludes to the Franks, a free German tribe, 
and the Gauls, a free people until the hateful Romans came. This formula for 
the racial origins of the nation and its classes was destined to survive its first 
use. It played a role under Louis XIV, in the French Revolution of 1789, and 
in 19C Liberal politics (295>). Finally, reinforced by other elements, it 
formed the core of the murderous 20C theories of race (748>).° 

* 
* * 

With the metamorphosis of king into monarch and of realm into nation, 
religion also shifted its position in culture. Laymen, as we saw, replaced clerics 
in government, while the longing for a strong central power came out of weari- 
ness with sectarian fighting. Religious faith as such did not weaken, but many 
saw its ideologies as interfering with governance. What weight, if any, should 
they have in the conduct of state affairs? A striking event gave one answer. In 
1 593, Henry, king of Navarre and a Protestant, was at war to make good his 
claim to the throne of France; he needed to win over the Parisians, who were 



248 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

staunch Catholics. He gave up his Huguenot faith, saying: "Paris is well worth 
a Mass." Similarly, and about the same time, the future James I of England, a 
Protestant king of Scotland, was promising to turn Catholic if the leaders of 
that party would help him to secure the English throne. And during the Thirty 
Years' War (as we saw), Cardinal Richelieu, believing the national interest to lie 
on the Protestants side, allied himself to Lutheran Sweden. 

Yet the monarch could not be an altogether secular ruler. The separation 
of church and state was far in the future and indeed has never been complete. 
In the 17C no monarch could do without the support of the church, 
Protestant or Catholic. Each had wealth and numbers and the clergy were 
permanent leaders of public opinion. The devout and the conventional 
believers were equally firm Christians; for Christianity gave the plainest pic- 
ture of moral and physical reality. It followed that the consent of the governed 
was identical with the people's double loyalty to God and king. When James I 
got his throne he recorded his conviction that "No bishop, no king." 

On its side, a national church feels it at once a duty and an act of self- 
interest to support the legitimate government. The church served the people 
and the state in ways we have forgotten. The humble parish priest, parson, or 
minister was the best instrument of telecommunication. In a period that had 
no press and no wide literacy, the daily sermon was a news bulletin with edi- 
torial comment. The people were kept in line not only morally but also polit- 
ically by the main device of propaganda, repetition. The church moreover 
was the dispenser of what we know as social services — teaching, taking care 
of the poor, the sick, and the troubled, and by its recurrent occasions of gath- 
ering the people it sustained the sense of community. 

Monarchs made one other use of religion: they reasserted the divine right 
of kings. Much derided in later centuries, because misunderstood, this doc- 
trine was a pillar of the system, metaphysically and practically. At the Estates 
General of 1614, the bourgeois order made it Article I of their petition; they 
wanted the king's right to oppose papal interference and to put down the 
lords made explicit. A decade earlier, James I again, the scholarly king, had 
published two important works on the subject: The True Taw of Free Monarchies 
and Basilikon Down (the royal gift). Both gave offense to some groups, but the 
dogma proved stronger than the critics. Note the phrase Free Monarchies. 
As for the people, they needed the comfort of divine right to replace the 

former means of protection against 
And shall the figure o£ God's majesty, tyranny — local assemblies, customary 

His captain, steward, deputy elect, privileges, and the like, which under 

Anointed, crowned, planted many years, monarchy were neutralized or swept 

Be judged by subject and inferior breath? away. Security was now to be found in 

— Shakespeare, Richard II (1 594) the renewed scriptural assurance that 



The Monarchs' Revolution <^d 249 

the monarch, though absolute, reigned Let him go, Gertrude, do not fear our 
by the grace of God and exercised person: 

power under His watchful eye. St. Paul There,s such ^^^ doth hed g e a ldn S 
had said it: God gives his assent to the That treason can but P ee *> to what h would - 
choice of ruler. Kings had claimed — Shakespeare, Hamlet (1602) 
divine authority from earliest times 

because it reinforces obedience. The Roman Emperors had done likewise, 
and the Middle Ages knew that Providence allowed or brought about the 
events ascribed to this or that ruler. The monarchical revolution made sys- 
tematic and public a traditional assumption. Divine sanction thus made the 
monarch right in reason, and not merely by might; his power was in every way 
legitimate. 

At the same time, the theory imposed terms: the king must feel the deep- 
est awe in the face of his responsibilities. If he governs badly, he will suffer. 
On the other hand, if he does govern badly and the people suffer, it is because 
they have sinned and are being punished. If the repentant people pray for 
relief and it is deserved, God will grant it. The king is no ordinary human 
being: he is "the father of his people"; he does not represent, he embodies 
them, which is why in his edicts he says We, not I.° The entire scheme is made 
believable by the fact that Christianity 

too is an absolute monarchy Every Though not known to you, Sire, he feels love 
story and precept in the Bible shows for you and sees God in your person. 
God, the king of kings, ruling the uni- _ Fe nelon, referring to himself in his 
verse according to His will. Prayer is to "Letter to Louis XIV" (1714) 

our Lord, petition to our lord the 

king. Monarchy and monotheism go Kings, you are gods. 
together; in heaven there are no strug- — Bossuet, sermon in the Louvre (1662) 
gles such as one sees among the pagan 
gods and goddesses. 

To the atheist these are empty imaginings, but the atheist should not fall 
into his own imagining that "no sensible man" ever trusted this guarantee of 
right with perfect sincerity. When thinkers and populace agree in an interpre- 
tation of the world, it is foolish to suppose that they have lost their reason. 
One has only to observe how believers in, say, Marxism or Islam feel about 
their teachings. Like these, the 1 7C divine-rightists found practical evidence 
of the system's final validity. Consider Mark Twain. He declared that 
"Monarchy is nothing but piracy"; and in his journal of travels abroad he 
keeps ranting in the same vein. His dogmatic conviction helps us to under- 
stand how most people in the 1 7C felt about their king and his divine right: 
like Mark Twain, they knew that the current system and its rationale were the 
only tenable ones; all others are absurd and wicked. 



250 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 



* * 



The thought occurs, why theories of government at all? The forms and 
devices have varied greatly with times and places, changing with needs and 
with the push-pull of interests and the ups and downs of armed combat. To 
find a logical or metaphysical basis for each of these turns of the wheel seems 
wasted effort, especially since no actual government matches its theory 
exactly. 

The answer is that the western mind has steadily wanted to stand off 
from its experiences, label them, and put them in a communicable order. 
There must be reasons other than chance and convenience for what we do or 
endure. Only by stating principles can argument go on, and argument is 
unavoidable among people who accumulate traditions and have some degree 
of SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. From rationalizing past and present experience it is 
but a step to promoting change by the same method: propose to the world a 
new rationale or metaphysics. It works in all fields: art, manners, science — a 
hypothesis is a projection of what might be — and as in divine-right theory, 
the new system embodies pieces of the old. 

In assessing that theory one should not forget that the more recent dogma 
of popular sovereignty is but a transfer of monarchical absolutism from the 
One to the Many As the king is divinely right, so the voice of the people is the 
voice of God.° This republican maxim expresses the fact that there is no way 
of finding on earth a warrant for the topmost authority, the sovereign. The 
British parliament is as absolute as the worst dictator; the king's possible 
decline into tyranny is matched by the potential tyranny of the majority. 

The comparison should also remind us that absolute does not mean arbi- 
trary. Monarchs from the 1 7C on ruled more freely than before, as the people 
wished, but none with total freedom. At least one historian has concluded 
that France from 1500 to 1789 was a limited monarchy. Quite apart from the 
usual pressures of economic interests and influential persons — ministers, 
favorites, mistresses, confessors — monarchs had to observe not just one 
code of civil and criminal law, but several sets of custom law and a good many 
special rights. Some had been accorded by their predecessors, others by their 
own sales of privileges or grants or charters for revenue. That fact alone was 
enough to prevent absolutism in the textbook sense. 

How do these facts square with that part of the theory which says that the 
king can do no wrong? That principle is a logical inference from sovereignty 
itself: the ultimate source of law cannot be charged with making a wrong law 
or giving a wrong command. Modern democracies follow the same logic 
when they give their lawmakers immunity for anything said or done in the 
exercise of their duty; they are members of the sovereign power. Consti- 
tutions, it is true, limit lawmaking; but the sovereign people can change the 



The Monarchs' Revolution ^^ 251 

constitution. There is no appeal against the acts of the sovereign unless the 
sovereign allows, as when it is provided that citizens can sue the state. 

Of course, the monarch can do wrong in another sense — in a couple of 
senses. He can add up a sum and get a wrong total and he can commit a 
wrongful act morally speaking — cheating at cards or killing his brother. To 
make clear the distinction between sovereign and human being, theorists 
developed quite early the doctrine that "the king has two bodies"; as a man 
he is fallible, as king he is not. Similarly in elective governments, a distinction 
is made between the civil servant acting in his official capacity and as a private 
citizen. Whether a monarch or a president would be prosecuted for a non- 
capital crime is doubtful; it might seem a danger to the state and the author- 
ity of the office. For high crimes and misdemeanors the president of certain 
nations must be impeached — a laborious process workable only when the 
head of state is elected for a term and the people is used to frequent new 
faces. It would not suit a monarchy, of which the root idea is permanence. 

So permanent is the monarch that at his crowning the chief prelate 
wishes him to live forever — and in one sense he does: in the ritual exclama- 
tion "The king is dead, long live the king!" it is the same kingship (one of the 
two bodies) that is wished a long life. Stability through continuity is the rea- 
son why monarchy is vested in the eldest son of the one family known to all. 
It was not always so in the Middle Ages. Later, by this device of primogeni- 
ture the West has guarded against what has happened from time immemorial 
in the East: one son killing his brothers (or sisters) to gain the throne, and 
occasionally the king killing his son or sons to prevent their killing him for the 
same elevated end. Since such acts may lead to civil war, primogeniture is 
politically sound and humane to boot. And it contains a lesson of political sci- 
ence: a feature of government must be judged good when for a given purpose 
it uses the force of convention instead of physical force and its evil chances. 

* 
* * 

Convention is in truth too weak a word when applied to monarchy. Ritual 
is the more appropriate term; one has only to think of a royal court and what 
antics it makes people perform. The acme of ritual is seen at the corona- 
tion — in French le sacre or the "making sacred" of the new holder of an undy- 
ing sovereignty. Its pageantry makes such a strong impression on the populace 
that Napoleon did not disdain it when he sought to establish a line of emper- 
ors. Here is a description, abridged, of the crowning of the last of the 
Bourbons, Louis XVI, in 1774. In symbolism and drama it is no less elaborate 
and effective than the enthronement of the Venetian doge or the Vicar of 
Christ at the Vatican. 

The sacre takes place at the Cathedral of Reims, where it is supposed that 



252 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

in 496 the Germanic chieftain Clovis was baptized a Christian with his 3,000 
warriors and accepted as the first king of a region called France. The Clovis 
story is pure legend, but so potent that the anniversary of that event was offi- 
cially celebrated in France in 1 996 and sanctified by the presence of the pope 
(776>). Reims is the chosen place because the holy oil (or chrism), which 
came from heaven to anoint Clovis, is kept there for all time. It is indispens- 
able to making the king sacred. By it he becomes another person. (Similarly, 
the king of Madagascar changes his name on gaining the throne.) In 1774, for 
Louis XVI, the canons of the cathedral went to it at dawn, soon followed by 
the higher clergy, who set the scene. The archbishop put on the altar the 
crown, the spurs, the "hand of justice," and the garments of purple silk 
embroidered in gold and of priesdy cut. 

By then, all the high orders — civil, military, and religious — have been 
mustered and arrive in procession to attend mass and witness the unction 
(anointing) of the king. He is not yet in sight. He has to be fetched from 
behind a closed door by a delegation of notables. They knock on the door. 
"What do you want?" asks the king's chamberlain without opening. "We want 
the king." "The king is asleep." Challenge and response are gone through 
twice again — in vain. The highest ecclesiastical peer then calls for the partic- 
ular king: "We want Louis XVI whom God has given us as king." 

The door opens and the king is borne in on a litter richly draped. The 
prelate then delivers a harangue: "Almighty and eternal God, who hast raised 
Thy servant Louis to be king, grant that he shall secure the good of his sub- 
jects and that he shall never stray from the path of justice and truth." The king 
is lifted bodily by two bishops and brought into the main aisle of the church, 
the choir all the while singing prayers. He is led toward a group of lay lords 
whom the king has appointed to hold the ampulla of oil. They have sworn on 
their lives, and vowed moreover to be hostages, to ensure that no harm shall 
come to that holy vessel until its present use is over. 

Before Louis can receive the ointment, he must swear to protect the 
church and to exterminate heretics. Thereupon he is presented to the assem- 
bly and asks for its consent to the act that will make him king. This is given by 
a moment of silence. The primate hands the king the Holy Scriptures for him 
to take the oath of office. The words state particulars such as enforcing the 
prohibition of dueling. Sworn in, he is handed the sword of Charlemagne. 
Prayers follow, calling for prosperity to reach all classes of the nation during 
the reign. For the seven unctions administered to the king, he lies facedown 
toward the altar; one drop of the holy oil has been mixed with the ordinary 
kind. He is anointed on the chest, shoulders, top of the head, middle of the 
back, and inside each elbow 

During and between the main phases of the ceremony, choral music 
resounds. There follows another harangue by the archbishop, who enjoins on 



The Monarchs' Revolution q^> 253 

the king charity to the poor, a good example to the rich, and the will to keep 
the nation at peace. Yet he also recommends that the king not give up his 
claims to "various kingdoms of the north." Last comes the clothing of the 
king, from the shirt to the coat of purple velvet lined with ermine. He is then 
led to the throne. The archbishop doffs his mitre, bows, and kisses the 
sovereign, exclaiming in Latin, "May he live forever!" The doors of the 
church open and the people rush in. 

So far, the clergy has been conferring the elements of power. Now it is 
the role of the nobility to perform the concurring rite. The Keeper of the 
Seals of France goes to the altar and summons the peers of the realm one by 
one to participate in the solemn act. They come forward, the archbishop 
takes from the altar the crown of Charlemagne and places it on the king's 
head, and the peers raise a hand to touch it in a gesture symbolic of their sup- 
port. Then a sort of petition to the Almighty that varies each time is recited. 
On one occasion the wish was made that "the king, with the strength of a 
rhinoceros, may scatter enemy nations to the ends of the earth." 

In this collection of symbols and vows it is easy to see the layers of his- 
torical memory and the practical intentions. These last are akin to the presi- 
dential inaugurals in democracies — the promise of prosperity, respect for the 
laws, regard for the poor, justice for all, and a firm foreign policy. 

The visual and musical dressing up under monarchy was in keeping with 
the tastes of a time when holy days, processions, public prayers, and hymns to 
the Almighty saturated the daily life of the people with religious feeling. There 
was entertainment in worship, and nothing else was so well organized as to 
compete with it. The secular world of today entertains itself in other ways, not 
less mass-designed, and feels it can afford to do without lavish public rituals. 
Besides, its desire for government is not the same, less deferent, more greedy. 
Nothing in any case warrants Mark Twain's imputation that kingly ritual was 
"hypocritical mumbo jumbo." At the death of a good king the people wailed 
and wept — at home, in church, in the streets. They prayed between their 
bouts of grief. The loss was personal and intense and charged with anxiety 
about the future. Today, such a collective emotion about rulers is felt only 
after certain assassinations. 

* 
* * 

Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it 
is understood that hasty moral judgments about people in the past are a form 
of injustice. But one may forget that hasty intellectual judgments are equally 
deplorable. On the evidence given above, it is plain that the tenets of monar- 
chical theory answered a need of the century that gave them birth. One has 
only to read Elizabethan drama or a sampling of Shakespeare to be sure of the 



254 <xk From Dawn to Decadence 

Our moral criticism of past ages can easily be f ac t. Of his 37 plays, the 10 based on 

mistaken. It transfers present-day desiderata English history are about kingship and 

to the past. It views personalities according ks duties> legitimacy, and the chaUenges 

to set principles and makes too little to it from noble lords. Among his other 

allowance for the urgencies of the moment. , , i i • i i • i 

& plays, the greatest deal with the right or 

-BURCKHAKDTjUDGMENTS ON HISTORY wfong ^^ and ensuing ^ of 

monarchs and princes: Hamlet, King 
Lear, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus. 
The same theme enters into Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus, Troilus and 
Cressida, and Timon of Athens; and a number of the comedies down to the 
last — The Tempest — use as framework the familiar feature of usurpation and 
exile, coupled with the woes of rulers. If one did not know from our special- 
ist scholars that Shakespeare had a perfecdy balanced mind, one would say 
that he was obsessed with "the problem of kingship" and his audience also. 

The failure to understand these facts and feelings accounts for a blunder 
in literary history which is worth a moment's attention. The common notion 
of Hamlet is that he vacillates. In Olivier's film, the play is called "the tragedy 
of a man who could not make up his mind." That the play is first and fore- 
most political is ignored. Everybody since Coleridge has concentrated on 
Hamlet's character and forgotten his situation. It is true that his character is 
finer than that of his entourage; he has a conscience and does not kill first and 
think afterward. Killing a king accepted by the populace is not a bagatelle. 
Laertes is the impetuous boy, put in to make the contrast clear. Hamlet has to 
think and watch, because from the outset he is in danger, a threat to the 
usurper and his aides; all conspire against him, including, though unwittingly, 
his betrothed. And he has his mother to consider. His soliloquies show him 
superior to his barbaric times, but what he thinks must not be taken for what 
he does. He wipes out the hired killers sent with him to England; he comes 
back resolved but wary and fails only by treachery. 

Two further facts reinforce the corrective view. One is what the warrior 
Fortinbras says about Hamlet at his burial: he would have been a great king. 
This forecast would sound ridiculous if through five acts the hero had shown 
nothing but indecision. The other is the conclusion of a modern playwright 
that the text of Hamlet transposes scenes which, in a different order, would 
make the action go straight and fast. To appreciate the argument and the 
result, read Shakespeare's Game by William Gibson. 

In treating of kingship, Shakespeare has much to say about honor. He uses 
the word 692 times. The idea can attach itself to many things. Being the 
apanage of the nobleman, the sign not only of his superiority to the commoner 
but of his independence from most mundane constraints, honor resents and 
resists monarchy on two counts: it creates a superior over equals — all are 
equally subjects of the king. Next, the king can subdue the noble lords but can- 



The Monarchs' Revolution q^> 255 

not abolish them; so the conflict between central authority and local power 
continues. It is what makes the theory of monarchy still interesting; it deals with 
a permanent issue: local liberties versus centralization, unlimited power versus 
limited. The terms differ over time, but not the struggle of interests: states' 
rights resist federalism, central planning leads to calls for decentralization. Also 
perennial is the complaint against bureaucracy, the monarchical institution par 
excellence, because it works with ABSTRACTIONS — rules that impose from the 
center a uniform law that often fails to fit. And to resist these onenesses is to 
challenge the very idea of nation, twin of the monarchical. 

The ups and downs of this struggle are manifest in events so important 
that they have been given names — the English Civil War (263 >), the American 
Revolution (397>), the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution (434>), out of 
which have come the slogans and doctrines of today. The parties are still in 
conflict, because they express the opposite demands of INDIVIDUALISM and of 
social cohesion. The cultural aspects are literacy for all, universal suffrage, reli- 
gious toleration, the opportunity to rise in the world and to participate in gov- 
ernment,^/^ all the modes of social security and protection against harm now 
summed up under the label of natural or human rights (430>). 

One result of the union between monarch and nation remains a problem 
for theorists of government. The king takes a vow of justice and peace as 
God's chosen steward. Yet as head of the nation he takes away ancestral rights 
and pursues selfish interests by the deceit of diplomacy and the immoral acts 
of war. How reconcile the divine sanction with behavior admittedly unjust? 
(This last issue is called today ethics in foreign affairs.) The contradiction is 
supposedly taken care of by the phrase raison d'etat. The reasoning in the rai- 
son goes something like this: human beings in groups do as they please unless 
prevented by stronger groups. Observe how, within the nation itself, peace 
and justice cannot exist without the threat and use of force. It would be 
unsafe to expect that self-restraint, which fails to control crime in each 
nation, will deter entire foreign nations whose interests clash widi ours and 
one another's. 

Such is the first lesson of political science. It may best be read in the work 
of its founder, 

Machiavelli 

The name evokes self-righteous horror; intellectuals tend to want villains 
so as to show moral sensitivity and Machiavelli ranks highest in that abhorred 
group. Yet with few exceptions, the great minds in the 16C and since have 
acknowledged his genius and the moral value of his teaching. The reason for 
this estimate, as for the others' hissing, is the small book entided The Prince. 

He wrote it in retired old age after a career in the politics of Florence, 



256 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 



A principality is created either by the people mainly as ambassador, which had been 

or by the nobles. He who obtains sovereignty C ut short by a violent change of fac- 

by the assistance of the nobles maintains tions. Suspected of treason, he had suf- 

himself with more difficulty than he who fered i m p r i sonme nt and torture and 

comes to it by the aid of the people, because fmaUy ^ Sedng ^ detachment 

the former finds many around him who con- 1 r r , . , , , , 

3 the rate ol his city, then the cultural 

sider themselves his equal, and he cannot . 

„ t t center or the peninsula, and reflecting 

rule or manage them. But he who reaches r . . 

. _ u i r u r on its history and that of ancient times, 

sovereignty by popular favor has none or few J ' 

who are not prepared to obey him. You can- MachiaveUi distilled in quick, plain 

not satisfy the nobles without hurt to others, words his direct and vicarious political 
because their object is to oppress. You can experience. He thought the time was 
satisfy the people, for their only desire is: not ripe for "a new prince," who would 

to be oppressed. establish peace and order and even 

— Machiavelli, The Prince (\5\3) unify Italy. Machiavelli in effect drew 

the picture of a monarch. 
So far the teaching raises no hackles. It is the means Machiavelli proposes 
for achieving princehood and staying in power that have caused the furor. 
These ways have given rise to the epithet Machiavellian, which now implies 
the quintessence of fiendish conduct. (In the vast register of unpublished dis- 
sertations there is one entitied Machiavellianism Among Hotel Employees. I have 
never looked it up, preferring to speculate freely about the path of influence 
from The Prince to chambermaids and concierges.) In youth, before coming to 
the throne of Prussia, Frederick II wrote an Anti-Machiavel (a common form 
of the name in Europe). It is an able argument and no wonder, since Voltaire 
licked it into shape. It denounces deceit and broken promises in statecraft and 
condemns unjust war and the elimination of enemies by violence, all of which 
Machiavelli is presumed to have recommended as the ideal ruler's guide to 
success. 

The truth is rather different and calls for judgment with appropriate 
nuances. It is best arrived at by recalling the condition of Italy in the early 16C 
when Machiavelli wrote — divided into numerous towns and city-states, all 
but one (<171) subject to death-dealing factions, coup d'etats, assassinations, 
aggression and defeat in war. For the details, one may read Machiavelli's own 
Florentine History. It was that spectacle, clearly unending, that posed for 
Machiavelli the question: is there a way or a device for making an end? The 
facts showed a total absence of moral principle; worse still, the immorality 
produced no visible good — no peace and quiet for individuals, no stability for 
the city and its leaders. Yet all of them professed the Christian ethics. Only, 
they interpreted the "do unto others" as: "I must kill you who killed my first 
cousin." 

Machiavelli's program rests on the conviction that since one must start 
from the present state of things, one can work only with the material at hand. 



The Monarchs' Revolution <^> 257 

It is useless to say, only be good and you will all find life better. The human 
material at hand (he saw and said) was bad: "Italians are cowards, poor, and 
vain." This badness must be used to create not good conditions but tolerable 
ones; both morality and immorality must contribute. The prince must be 
honest and decent as far as he can and he must certainly uphold the precepts 
of Christian ethics. He must be just and if possible popular. But he had better 
be feared than loved. He dare not let ethics keep him from doing whatever 
evil must be done to preserve himself and the state. 

This making the best of both worlds is not a surefire recipe. Machiavelli 
as historian is alive to the role of chance — fortune, as he calls it. No prince 
can command it, but if a prince has virtu, that is, courage and foresight, and if 
fortune favors his plans, he can be the new prince that the times call for; he 
may even unify Italy. One might say that The Prince is a Utopia that has aban- 
doned ideal measures for possibly workable ones. 

Hostile critics fasten on two points. One is that — to put it briefly — 
Machiavelli gives the show away. Everybody knows that Christian ethics are 
violated right and left, in plain sight — business, government, private life are 
riddled with immorality. Christianity says so in the one word sin. But these 
critics think nonetheless that institutions should not be stripped of their 
facade. If you proclaim that bad faith may serve a state purpose, it will make 
for more bad faith everywhere. The rejoinder is: unless political theory shows 
the truth about the occasional utility of evil, the existing forms of evil will 
continue undiminished and useless besides. 

The second criticism rests on an oversight. It is easy to forget that 
Machiavelli is describing a prince who has to get into the saddle before he can 
rule wisely. There was in Italy no legitimate line of kings out of which to make 
a monarch. Lacking legitimacy, the new prince has to do many more indeli- 
cate things. His descendant can be more fastidious. In fact, every royal line in 
Europe had its origin in force. Reading The Prince without noting this differ- 
ence leads to the belief that Machiavelli urges established monarchs to con- 
tinue being — in his famous metaphor — fox or lion on all occasions. 

The ruler's ambiguous moral character makes one see that he cannot 
behave like a private person — the king has two bodies. As ruler he is trustee 
for his whole people's interests, mingled with his own. He may not indulge his 
sentiments, generous or vindictive. He cannot give away a province, though a 
liberal response to others' claims is a virtue; for what would the inhabitants 
say to being deprived of their nationality? Again, he may disavow an envoy as 
he would not disavow a friend. "He" throughout is not the king alone, but his 
chief minister or council or power behind the throne — it is the state, acting 
on the reason of state. 

When young Frederick of Hohenzollern was writing against The Prince he 
no doubt imbibed from it ideas which, contrary to his thesis, helped him later 



258 <&> From Dawn to Decadence 

to make Prussia a power and, later still, to defeat the coalition that intended 
to crush it. At the partition of Poland with other monarchs he noticed Maria 
Theresia weeping and he remarked afterward: "She wept, but she took." The 
words sum up the paradox of government — doing the unjust thing as the way 
to do the best for the state, perhaps on quite mistaken lines. Hence the ways 
of the eternal politician, who breaks promises, conceals, palliates, distorts 
facts to maintain the show of rightness, the rightness aimed at even when not 
reached. 

* 

* * 

In the five centuries since The Prince was written, enough scholars have 
read it closely to clear the author (at least among the learned) of die character 
of moral monster. If he were, a long list of thinkers, from Plato (advocate of 
the "big lie") and Aristotle through St. Augustine and St. Thomas down to 
John Adams, Lipsius, Montesquieu, Hume, Tasso the poet, Sir Walter 
Raleigh, Montaigne, Bacon, Pascal, Spinoza, Gracian, Bodin, Herder, 
Coleridge, Shelley, Leopardi, Dostoevsky, and most historians (including the 
peaceful and religious Ranke) would form a legion of fellow immoralists. 
They have advised, approved, or borrowed Machiavellian maxims. The view 
in which they concur with Machiavelli is that the state is not immoral but 
amoral; half of it exists outside morality. 

To this it has been objected that for political theory to base itself exclu- 
sively on "things as they are" is to discourage the improvement of mankind; 
it is "pessimistic," "cynical," a bar to progress. It does not seem to have done 
so. A good many evils, legal and political, have been got rid of in our half mil- 
lennium — and Machiavelli wrote at its dawn. As a Renaissance man he found 
a disparity between the buoyant new arts and letters and the political morass; 
it called for a remedy. He did not choose half measures, nor did he want them 
used in perpetuity. In another work, the Discourses on Livy the Roman histo- 
rian, he showed how admirable a republic with liberties can be. On a trip to 
Germany, he wrote a letter that gives a Utopian view of the free cities there, 
free (among other things) of Florentine plotting and fighting. After his death, 
the Discourses excited some Florentine shopkeepers to such a degree that they 
called on the government to install tribunes of the people in place of the 
nobles and other officials. 

But again, when he portrayed his contemporaries in the comedy La 
Mandragola, he found no cause to flatter them. The play is witty, vulgar, full of 
puns and wisecracks that point up the ways in which people are devious, 
gullible, corrupt, and greedy The plot makes one think of Restoration com- 
edy and of the later novel by Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, in which the cun- 
ning cajole or coerce others into serving the intriguers' own ends. 



The Monarchs' Revolution <^*> 259 

In his other works, Machiavelli shows himself a true Humanist in taste 
and style. He translated Roman plays, borrowed from Vegetius when writing 
The Art of War, and wrote verse and prose that show him a lover of women. It 
was his opinion that they were as fit for rule as men, and he referred to 
"heroic examples" of their virtu and capacity. In spite of his exile, he had a 
wide circle of friends and admirers to whom he wrote unbuttoned letters. In 
the most famous of these, to Francesco Vettori, we glimpse his addiction to 
hobnobbing with simple people over cards and drinks at the tavern. When in 
the late afternoon he is through with that recreation, he goes home, dresses 
in handsome garments, and converses with the ancients, "asking" them about 
their lives and actions. During these four studious hours he is never bored; he 
forgets his poverty and disgrace, and does not fear death. 



The prince or monarch and the nation-state reached their flowering in 
the 1 7C, fulfilling the intent of the era's second revolution and implanting 
ideas that have not lost their power. But simultaneously another set of ideas 
and another form of government were highly visible facts of the age. The 
republic of Venice was that conspicuous form (<170); and the Civil War in 
England was the carrier of those other ideas. Republican Venice, as a stable, 
orderly city-state, kept fascinating Europe while monarchy and nation 
became the dominant mode of governance. As for the drama in three acts 
played out in England between absolutism and its opponents, it had ambigu- 
ous results and its lessons were forgotten. When the buried ideas emerged 
again, ultimately to set off a third revolution, they were attributed to another 
set of historical deeds, and the name Puritan kept only the narrowest of 
meanings. 



Puritans as Democrats 



The HISTORY of ideas is a string of nicknames. They may start as a crude 
insult, or again they may carry a fairly definite meaning; even so, they will 
soon degenerate. Throughout western culture the image aroused by the name 
Puritan is that of the killjoy. In the United States he is the thin-lipped New 
Englander who passed "blue laws" against all innocent pleasures, his only 
pastime being to hang witches. In England, he wore pointed hats, spoke 
through his nose, sported names like Praisegod Barebones, and after killing 
the king ruled a country deprived of gaiety. As usual we can turn to 
Shakespeare for an early snapshot: the Puritan is Malvolio in Twelfth Night, 
who thinks that because he is righteous there will be no more cakes and ale. 

The trouble with this portrayal is that it omits much, takes one feature for 
the wfcole set, and yields a caricature. What brought the false face into being 
is perhaps that in England the Puritan regime of Cromwell and his army 
petered out and was repudiated after a dozen years. Defeat, unless it is dra- 
matic and poignant, blots out the memory of things accomplished. Dim in 
England, the collective idea of the historical Puritans is contradictory in the 
United States. There the Puritan settlers, condemned for their ethos, are nev- 
ertheless admired as the Pilgrim Fathers — and credited with much that they 
did not do. 

It is not merely concern with historical accuracy that warrants a review of 
the word and the movement it denotes. Social prophets today are warning 
against the onset of a new Puritanism. They see it in the so-called fundamen- 
talism of certain religious groups and in the secular animus against smoking. 
Alcohol is threatened with the same hostility, and the outcry against sexual 
freedom, "obscene art," and "godlessness" is gaining volume. The violent 
conflict about abortion is related to these issues. Does this late 20C outbreak 
of moralism reproduce the Puritan of the 1 7th? And equally important, were 
the Puritans of history exercised only about individual behavior? They did 
not prohibit drink or tobacco, and when they shut down the theaters, they did 
it (as we saw) to suppress not plays but seduction and prostitution, a policy 



262 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

that was also enforced by other, non-Puritan states of Europe, when they 
shut down public baths (<183). 

The pure in Puritan refers to religious institutions and to the political 
reforms needed to do the purifying, the same effort as Luther's with his 
Evangelicals: get rid of the bishops and their train of officials; omit the trim- 
mings in the services — candles, crucifix, vestments, and the rest: simplify 
worship, back to the gospel. It is PRIMITIVISM coupled with a quasi scientific 
feeling against "Romish superstition" and "popery" 

That the gospel rule enjoins good behavior and a consciously moral atti- 
tude to life is true, but to infer from this stripping of worship and arousal of 
conscience that the Puritans oudawed pleasure and the arts goes against the 
evidence. England and New England were not turned into places of system- 
atic dullness and hypocrisy Fifty years ago an English scholar delved into the 
records on both sides of the Adantic and his findings explode the myth of the 
Puritan constipated in faith and thought. 

The massive book, though called The Puritans and Music, covers the full 
range of cultural activity. One discovery in it is that the "blue laws" of 
Connecticut never existed; the reference to them is a fabrication by an 
overzealous minister. As for the use of music, poetry, and the other arts, not 
only did the Puritans not reprove them, they cultivated and relished them. 
This generality of course applies to the self-selected group that in any culture 
finds pleasure in art and intellect. In mid-1 7C England the taste for music was 
widespread, with poetry as its twin. The English school of madrigalists and 
keyboard composers was numerous — like its audience — and remains one of 
the peaks in the history of the art (<161). The two poets of like eminence, 
Milton, who wrote in praise of music and dance and "jollity," and Marvell, 
who urged his "coy mistress" to yield, were highly regarded. Cromwell 
employed them to serve the state as writers of sound views and ready pens. 

Milton's performance is peculiarly telling. He was a propagandist for the 
regime but also an independent critic of it. His tract in favor of divorce out- 
lined the qualities of mind that a wife should have to be a good companion. 

His political sonnets offered com- 

rr .. . , t. • • . i_ ments on the party line, and he 

If we think to regulate Printing, thereby to r J 

rectify manners, we must regulate all recre- inveighed against the censorship of 

ations and pastimes, all that is delightful to printing. The strongest passage of his 

man. No music shall be heard, no song be set Areopagitica has been quoted thread- 

or sung, but what is grave and Doric. And bare, but in that same essay his linking 

who shall silence all the airs and madrigals freedom of thought with art and plea- 

that whisper softness in chambers? It will ask sure has been overlooked. 

more than twenty licenses to examine all the His words testify not to his tastes 

lutes, the violins, the guitars in every house. ^ on ^ but to those Q f fa Q whole coun _ 

—Milton, Areopagitica (1 644) try At the same time, Milton served the 



Puritans as Democrats <^> 263 

Council of State as censor and editorial supervisor of the Mercurius Politicus, 
the leading newspaper of the Commonwealth. This inconsistency with 
Areopagitica is on the surface. Milton and his fellow Puritans never doubted 
that writers were accountable for the possible danger of their ideas. 
Areopagitica ends with praise of the law requiring authors' names on all publi- 
cations. If "mischievous," those responsible might incur the "remedy of fire 
and the executioner." 

During the violent reaction against the Puritan regime, under the 
restored Stuart Charles II, Milton's head was at risk. He had to go into hiding, 
and in obscurity he wrote the two-part epic Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, 
and the drama Samson Agonistes, this last not for the stage but, like the epic, a 
treatise on morals and politics. Sovereignty; the rule of law; obedience and 
revolt; truth and its attainment through debate; science, nature, and pleasure; 
reason and revelation, justice and mercy — all these find their assessment 
somewhere in the poems. Add the prose works, which are political journal- 
ism, and Milton becomes the living embodiment of the batde of ideas in his 
time. Thousands of pamphlets and sermons record the intensity of the strug- 
gle and its thoroughness. Those ideas still agitate the western mind, and the 
contradictory merits of that mid-17C debate suggest that resolving the con- 
flict is impossible, not because of human ignorance or perversity, but because 
of the nature of human needs and the hopes that call forth ideas and systems. 

* 
* * 

The political aim of the parties in the English Civil War was to settle the 
question, who is sovereign in England? In effect this was to test the strength 
of the monarchs' revolution. When Charles I tried to overawe the nation's 
elected representatives and to keep on ruling alone as he had done for 11 
years, he only made their resistance more stubborn. The monarch by defini- 
tion is he who holds the monopoly of taxation and war (<241). Parliament's 
demands were, first, that the militia and all fortified places be put under the 
command of officers appointed by Parliament. The second similarly denied 
the king sole authority: recendy made peers could be unseated by the 
Commons; even the royal children's guardians must be appointed by 
Parliament. The king would cease to be a monarch. He would hardly be a 
king, old style, but a figurehead. Evidendy, the representatives of the English 
people in the mid-1 7C had a vision of the country as it came to be ruled 250 
years later; or conversely, as it would have been ruled 300 years earlier if 
Simon de Montfort's program had been carried out when the king's Great 
Council was first called Parliament. That early hope failed, and by the 1 640s 
the royal tradition was so strong that in the half dozen years of the civil strug- 
gle, Charles was nine times offered a chance to keep his throne; he only had 



264 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

to accept some modified form of the original 19 demands. When he agreed 
to the last approach, but with further modifications of his own, it was too late. 

The English Civil War was not clear-cut like the one that split the United 
States in the 19C. England's closest neighbors were messily involved: Ireland 
gave the king troops; the Scots were divided and fought on both sides, their 
concern more tribal and religious than constitutional. Parliament was largely 
Presbyterian, the army under Cromwell was Independent — Puritan. The 
London mobs that periodically staged protests were unpredictable. The royal 
forces won the first battles; their ultimate defeat showed that Cromwell had 
in fact trained a model army. But the conventional picture of Cavaliers 
(Royalists) with long hair and floppy hats against close-trimmed Roundheads 
is a fiction. There were lords and gentlemen on the parliamentary side who 
continued to wear their usual "cavalier" dress and there were Puritans whose 
tenets required long hair. 

Out of these motley elements a republic — the Commonwealth — 
emerged: the two words translate each other. Then, when the republic 
became ungovernable, a Protectorate followed, with Cromwell as Lord 
Protector. In the midst of these events, Charles was tried and executed, an 
Irish rebellion was fearsomely put down, the Scots were semi-pacified, 
Parliament, showing great elasticity, was purged and restored and re-purged; 
and England had her first and only written constitution. A demand for one is 
being heard as this 20C ends. 

The notion of some historians that the conflict arose because English 
agriculture was backward and landholders suffered in the expanding interna- 
tional trade, thereby setting them at odds with the merchant class, requires 
one to believe that a whole generation argued, preached, published, 
denounced, condemned, went to prison or to the block in a state of pure illu- 
sion as to their real motives. They were moved (according to the class warfare 
view) not even by economic self-interest but by their diverse relation to the 
means of production. It is the tectonic-plate theory of earthquakes applied to 
human affairs. 

That the English wrapped up every idea and attitude in religious language 
and used precedents from Scripture as their best authority gives the period 
the aura of a struggle about obsolete causes. But these causes were double, 
and the ideas hidden by the pious language were, as is foolishly said, "ahead 
of their time," meaning pregnant for the future. The sects and leaders classed 
as Puritans, Presbyterians, Independents, were social and political reformers. 
They differed mainly in the degree of their radicalism. 

Now, social reform must appeal to some accepted standard. In our day it 
is the general welfare, or the needs of a neglected group, or the desirability of 
more trade for employment and a better standard of living — in a word, utility 
of a material kind. The Puritans, many of whom were called Levellers, agi- 



Puritans as Democrats q^> 265 

tated for equality of rights and Condi- Sir, I see that it is impossible to have liberty 

tions. Soldiers and officers serving in but all property must be taken away. If it be 

the army demanded a decent living for lai <* down for a rule and if you will say it, it 

all. Allowing for inevitable deviations must be so - But l would fain know what the 

by individuals and using modern words soldier has fou S ht for ^ this wnile - He hath 

to suggest rather than define tenden- fou g ht to enslave ""^ to ^ P ower to 

i A i men of riches, men of estates, to make him a 

cies, the Anabaptists were commu- 

, „ i-i perpetual slave. 

rusts, the Ranters were anarchists, the 

Diggers were collectivists, and the Colonel Thomas Rainborow.M.P. (1647) 

Fifth Monarchy men were Utopians 

awaiting the Second Coming of Christ and the absolutist rule of the saints. 

Still others, such as George Fox and his disciples, the Friends (later 
Quakers), who would not take off their hats to anybody, were egalitarians too. 
The Millenarians worked to establish the New Jerusalem, the reign of the 
saints on earth. The Familists, emulating the Holy Family, taught that love 
inspired by faith sufficed to maintain society — no need of laws or ranks. This 
type of anarchism is perennial in the West — witness the Flower People of 
1968. 

The drive toward something close to democracy came from these 
Christian sects which, by later accepting the status quo, are not remembered 
as revolutionary. The Anabaptists were still political, though no longer favor- 
ing communism and polygamy as they had been under John of Leyden (<1 5). 
And the groups bearing the Dickensian names of Muggletonians and 
Brownists showed how readily a headstrong preacher or pamphleteer could 
gather around him a crowd of followers demanding a better world. All were 
certain that it consisted in one or another overhaul of the present church and 
state. 

It had to be church and state, for no people had ever lived in a state with- 
out a church, and any reform in the one must affect the other. After all, it was 
the Evangelicals, with their doctrine of EMANCIPATION from the Roman 
hierarchy, who had started the whole unrest. The steps to greater freedom 
followed logically: why lords and gentry? When every congregation was inde- 
pendent and elected its minister, the whole people should be politically 
empowered through the vote. The religious parallel was decisive: if a purer 
religion, close to the one depicted in the gospel, was attainable by getting rid 
of superiors in the church, a better social and economic life, close to the life 
depicted in the gospels, would follow from getting rid of social and political 
superiors. 

The monarchs themselves had recognized the analogy. Charles Fs father, 
James I, had said that without bishops the king would not last long. The 
clergy as a whole sustained royal authority by exerting theirs direcdy: from the 
pulpit they spoke every day to every man, woman, and child. Monarchism had 



266 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

prospered on the Continent only when both nobility and assemblies were 
neutralized. The position in England differed: Parliament, of which the lower 
house — the Commons — had stood up to the king more than once, was 
accustomed to lawmaking. But now the spread of proposed reforms split the 
body that had been at one against the king, and with an army in being that 
held militant political views, orderly legislation by majority rule succumbed. 
Trying to remake the whole state led to dictatorship. 

To follow the parliamentary history of the Civil War would not add any 
ideas to those so far mentioned. It is the vast pamphlet literature that shows 
the full variety of the period's original and constructive thought. In the 
clamor of economic proposals and biblical quotations the common man 
must have found it hard to decide who was right. Every amateur thinker had 
a scheme of his own. The professional resorted to a type of argument char- 
acteristic of western culture, the appeal to things that all parties must 
acknowledge as real and potent. These were the familiar pair of backstops: 
Reason and Nature. As pointed out earlier, although they sound universal and 
compelling (<69), they only seem to be sturdier than other props. 

The Puritans who appealed to reason in support of popular rights 
pointed out that human institutions were a matter of choice designed for a 
purpose and maintained by custom. They should be changed when the pur- 
pose was no longer served. Mere length of time — custom — is arbitrary, not in 
itself a reason. Consciously or not, some of the Puritans shared the scientists' 
trust in experience, in results, in utility. With these tests one could condemn 
any part of the status quo. The great lawyer of the period, Sir Edward Coke, 
made it a maxim that the common law was the embodiment of reason; it fol- 
lowed that judges must not only give reasons for their decisions, but must use 
reason to iron out the kinks created by bad cases. Coke himself did a piece of 
rationalizing when in one of the early parliamentary scuffles before the Civil 
War he seized on Magna Carta, which was then unremembered, and smug- 
gled into the lore about the document rights that the 13C barons had not 
dreamed of. {Magna, by the way, meant that the charter was long, not neces- 
sarily great.) 

Nature is the twin of reason in that both are given-, man is the reasoning 
animal by nature, and nature is what man finds ready-made to be reasoned 
about. It acts apart from his will and wishes. Many Puritans thought that God 
was to be known in and through nature. Natural law and natural rights seem 
plain when one argues about fundamentals; for instance, that every human 
being has a right to live unmolested, that government is needed to ensure that 
right, and that man-made laws must serve and not defeat natural rights. If any 
civil law does work against a natural right, the law of nature warrants dis- 
obeying the law and even overthrowing the government. 

These reasonings are familiar to those who remember the preamble to 



Puritans as Democrats <^ 267 

the Declaration of Independence and who read current debates about the 
contents of social justice/ The 17C produced two great works on what the 
polity should be. The best known, Hobbes's Leviathan, set forth with finality 
one line of reasoning on this ever-open question. It is written in splendid 
prose, yet the author's contemporaries were not sure which camp Hobbes 
belonged to. He was praised and pelted equally by Puritans, Presbyterians, 
and Royalists. Another point of interest is that the opening chapters form a 
little treatise on psychology. It is plain that government must be based on 
Nature — the nature of man. But as soon as that nature is defined, political 
theorists disagree. Hobbes saw man in the state of nature as an aggressor; 
man is a wolf to man. Unless controlled, he and his fellows live a life that is 
"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." From these premises reason con- 
cludes that government must be strong, its laws emphatic and rigorously 
enforced to prevent outbreaks of wolfish nature against other men. 

Hobbes saw how England had drifted from repeated acts of lawlessness to 
civil war, a type of war that is always brutish — and not short. No compromise 
could reunite men under arms, who were doing "God's work," and other men, 
who were bent on saving king and church, law and order, tradition and prop- 
erty. In that war, worse than the battles were the sieges of towns; most casual- 
ties took place there — starvation and plague, often followed by massacres that 
did not spare women and children. At Leicester the Royalists' plunder and 
killing knew no bounds. Revenge was meted out by the Puritans at Naseby, 
where the enemy's camp followers — servants, hostlers, and mistresses — were 
slaughtered with a will. From near the beginning, the war brought penury to 
artisans, drovers, and others who lost their employment, and sent beggars and 
cripples and marauders over the land. The lives snuffed out is estimated at 
200,000 or two and a half to three percent of the population. 

Long years of such a spectacle stirs the mind to reflection on the makeup 
of state and church. For Hobbes, the only viable state is one headed by an 
absolute ruler and lawgiver. The title of his book Leviathan and the fron- 
tispiece illustrate its theme: it is a monster whose body is made up of the bod- 
ies of all the citizens of the state — under one massive head. Their individual 
strengths are fused in the sovereign, and this union is the fruit of a contract 
not subject to revision. 

At first sight, Hobbes looks like a partisan of the monarchs' revolution 
and one wonders why the Royalists did not embrace him. But the absolute 
that he argues for is a sovereign; he does not say a king, much less the king-in- 
waiting, Prince Charles Stuart. The members of the Commons could there- 
fore find in The Leviathan the justification for an absolute Parliament. As 
pointed out earlier, that is exactly what England is ruled by now. It is an elec- 
tive Leviathan with royalty like a dab of whipped cream on top. 

The second work of the period, which surpasses all but Hobbes's by its 



268 q^> From Dawn to Decadence 

orginality and foresight, is The Commonwealth of Oceana by James Harrington. 
Although it describes the ideal state, it does not belong to the Utopia class. 
Harrington, born of noble stock, was from early life a republican. He nonethe- 
less earned the regard of Charles I and failed at first to win Cromwell's. In fact, 
Oceana was seized midway in its publication during the Commonwealth and 
came out only later, at the urging of Cromwell's daughter. 

Oceana is a republic whose instigator resigns after he sees it well estab- 
lished. It has a written constitution, a legislature of two houses, rotation in 
office, and a president elected indirectly, as in the later Constitution of the 
United States, by a secret-ballot vote of all citizens. To ensure stability, 
Harrington is at pains to demonstrate that the political power and the eco- 
nomic must be in agreement. Where the two are at odds, there is trouble and 
soon revolution. This acknowledgment of the power of wealth was previ- 
ously made by Aristotle in his Politics, and it is the basis of the modern com- 
monplace that for democracy to be born and survive there must be a large 
middle class flanked by as few rich and as few poor as possible. This need jus- 
tifies the legal and populist resistance to cartels, trusts, and big business when 
it gets too big. It also explains the 20C collapse of democracy into dictator- 
ship in Central and Eastern Europe, in South America and the many new 20C 
nations of the Third World, and elsewhere: no middle class means no habits 
of self-restraint and compromise such as are generated by trade. 

Clearly, Harrington was a political mind of the statesman type rather than 
the theoretical, and it is a pity that, as in his own time, his views and fame have 
filtered mainly through specialists — except in the United States, where 
Jefferson and other democrats read his work with care and profit. After 1660, 
Harrington suffered the odium of being a republican and of having a cousin 
who was a regicide. Excluded from the general amnesty, he was imprisoned 
and released only when ailing in body and in mind. 



To grasp the tenor of Puritan politics one should wade through all the 
pamphlets — a life's work. The next best thing is to read The Rise of Puritanism: 
The Way to the New Jerusalem by William Haller. Strange and wonderful charac- 
ters emerge from the mass, including vigorous women preachers. We have 
already met Milton as the literary representative of the myriad debaters. For 
the activist role, the agitator who risked his head, the obvious choice is 

John Ulburne 

He was the son of a gentleman from Durham, but for some reason he 
was apprenticed at the age of 12 to a clothing merchant in London. There, 



Puritans as Democrats <^ 269 

while still in his teens, he showed his I dare not hold my peace, but speak unto you 
lifelong trait of rebelling against things the things which the Lord in mercy hath 
as they are. He was full of ideas, which made known unto my soul, come life, come 
he urged as aggressively as he could. death. 

Having decided that the Church of — Lilburne, speaking to the crowd (1638) 
England was the Church of Antichrist 

(being then 24), he fell foul of the Court of Star Chamber for importing and 
circulating subversive tracts, notably some by the anti-bishop sectarian 
William Prynne, to whom Lilburne had become law clerk. Lilburne was sen- 
tenced to be publicly whipped over a long stretch of London streets, and at 
the end put in the pillory for two hours. He was then to be jailed until he paid 
a fine of 500 pounds. 

The event made him a public figure and popular with the mob. During 
his two years behind bars, he wrote blasts at large and detailed petitions to the 
House of Commons. One of these was the occasion of Cromwell's first 
recorded speech, supporting the request. Lilburne was freed and the next 
year was granted 3,000 pounds in compensation. To be a victim of Star 
Chamber was a certificate of righteousness. Lilburne next enlisted in the 
army, was captured, tried as a rebel, and would have been executed by the 
Royalists but for the threat by Parliament to retaliate. He was exchanged and 
returned to the field, rising to lieutenant-colonel. Still dissatisfied — the army 
was too full of Presbyterian moderates for a radical Puritan — he resigned his 
commission and devoted himself to collecting his back pay by means of 
another petition to Parliament. In carrying out this difficult task he used such 
insulting words about the Speaker and members of the House that he was 
jailed again, but let out three months later. 

He now supported the Levellers and aimed demands and accusations at 
persons and institutions alike. When he attacked Cromwell in 1 647, Lilburne 
was sent to the Tower but released once more. He clearly belonged to that 
rare species, which can put its head in the lion's mouth again and again and 
survive to die of natural causes. Prison was a tonic to the man. His pamphlets 
became even more personal while expressing his Apprehensions of a Part of the 
People on Behalf of the Commonwealth. He declared England's New Chains Discovered 
(in two parts), and saw himself and four followers as "five small beagles hunt- 
ing the foxes from Newmarket and Triploe to Westminster," the seat of 
Parliament. Cromwell and his aides were the foxes. Their misconduct was 
endangering the army and the Commonwealth. England was groaning under 
the dominion of the Council of State. 

This broadside earned Lilburne another stay in the Tower, but his trial on 
charges of sedition and scandal ended in his acquittal. Another kind of free- 
dom then engaged his attention: monopolies and chartered companies were 
unjusdy privileged; trade must be free. The reasoning, again, had a biblical 



270 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

base — the parable of the talents, which must be put to use. An argument 
from Scripture was hard to counter; no prison term ensued. But an outburst 
against a powerful guild, which Lilburne believed had done an injustice to his 
uncle George, proved more damaging to the rebel than all his assaults on 
Cromwell and Parliament. Lilburne was fined 7,000 pounds and banished 
from the Commonwealth, under pain of death if he returned. This was in 
1652. In 1653 he returned. He had gone to Holland, which was then the asy- 
lum country for political and other refugees as England became in the 19C. 

In the dock once more, Lilburne, after an unusually long trial, was acquit- 
ted; he was the saint and hero of the London populace. At the same time he 
received a left-handed tribute from the state: he was to be kept captive "for 
the peace of the nation." In the Channel Islands, and at last in Dover, he sim- 
mered down and was finally set free. He turned Quaker and preached that 
quietest of doctrines until his death at 43. 

Lilburne deserves more fame than 
Christ doth not choose many rich, nor many ne has been granted by posterity. 
wise, but the fools, idiots, base and con- Plumb in the middle of the 17C here is 
temptible poor men and women in the a writer who declares and demands the 
esteem of the world. rights of man. His program was the 

Lilburne (1645) one that has made the glory of the 1 8C 

theorists and his behavior has become 
standard policy for revolutionists down to the present. His handicap is that 
although at times he invokes the law of nature, his argument is full of bibli- 
cisms. 

What Lilburne carried whole in his mind, dozens of his fellow Puritan 
pamphleteers advocated piecemeal. Many called for a republic; the vote for 
all; the abolition of rank and privilege; equality before the law; free trade and 
a better distribution of property. Few urged toleration. Again, because these 
goals were justified out of Scripture, the substance of Puritan political 
thought has been eclipsed. Later historians' secular minds prefer to read 
about free trade in Adam Smith than in Lilburne and his parable of the tal- 
ents. It is easier to credit John Locke than some obscure Anabaptist preacher 
for the thought that all men are born free and equal. The preacher quoted St. 
Paul, who said that God has "no respect of persons" and that there is "no dif- 
ference between Jew and Gentile." Others insisted that God's grace is free — 
all share in it as they share in Adam's sin. Hence superior rank has no warrant; 
the only superiority is of the spirit. To rationalists this was no way to argue. 
Nor did the plea for freedom seem sincere when many of its proponents, 
Cromwell included, thought that they were close to the end of the world. 

This failure of understanding and sympathy marks a great divide in the 
Modern Era. It takes place neatiy around 1750, the midpoint of the 500 years. 
Religion, it is true, did not disappear along with the Puritans themselves; but 



Puritans as Democrats <^> 271 

the progress of science made Nature more and more convincing than 
Revelation as a source of truth. God went into respected retirement; His 
works (if one happened to remember that they had an author), formed a suf- 
ficient reference to buttress one's rationalist arguments about society and the 
state. 

The Puritan democrats did not wrangle only among themselves; they 
had opponents who defended the old institutions root and branch, notably 
the spokesmen of the Anglican church. These reactionaries made fun of the 
new pieties, of the worried souls and grave looks, and especially of the 
riffraff with their Bibles talking and writing as if they were intellectuals. The 
most picturesque of these satirists was John Taylor, called the Water Poet, 
because he was for a time a waterman on the Thames, famous for having 
once rowed up the river in a boat made of brown wrapping paper. His verses 
preceded by a generation the like- 
minded work of Samuel Butier, whose When women preach and cobblers pray, 
comic epic Hudibras delighted the The fiends in Hell make holiday. 
Restoration Court of Charles II (355>) . —John Taylor (c. 1 640) 

* 
* * 

Conscience, which is SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS about morals, brings on the 
issue of Toleration. For conscience implies individualism, and its exercise 
threatens perpetual dissent. Paradoxically, the Puritan legacy of libertarian ideas 
helps us to understand Persecution a little better; one almost comes to sympa- 
thize with it, as Dostoevsky did with the Grand Inquisitor in his novel (769>). 
Singly or by sects, the Puritans were ready to devour one another. Lilburne 
embodies the prevailing animus. 

What is the reasoning behind If the world were emptied of all but John 
exclusion and persecution? The keener lilburne, Lilburne would quarrel with John, 
the individual conscience, the sharper and John with Lilburne. 
is its judgment of human beliefs and — Harry Marten, a fellow Leveller and 
behavior, its own included. In propor- regicide (n.d.) 

tion to its "love of truth and hatred of 

sin," it develops suspicion of others' faith and morals. The smallest diver- 
gence from the absolute is grave error and wickedness. From there it is a 
short step to declaring war on the misbelievers. When faith is both intellectual 
and visceral, the overwhelming justification is that heresy imperils other 
souls. If the erring sheep will not recant, he or she becomes a source of error 
in others. (That was the argument of the 20C scientists who caused the pub- 
lisher of Velikovsky's works to suppress them and fire their editor: The 
author had put forth gross errors in cosmogony as science. Later, some of the 
errors were proved facts.) Earlier miscreants were seduced by the Devil and 



272 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

must be rescued from his toils. Nowadays the so-called whis de-blower, he 
who denounces falsehood or fraud in his workplace, is similarly persecuted 
for the good of the firm, and the Devil is not even blamed. In other words, 
religious persecution is a health measure that stops the spread of an infectious 
disease — all the more necessary that souls matter more than bodies. Since 
God expects his faithful to defend every detail of His revelation, persecution 
is a duty; as well as self-defense against a spiritual invasion; it is the domestic 
form of religious war. 

When this oudook is aggressive it is a crusade, as in the religious and 
political fundamentalisms of our century. It is a mistake to say that because 
fundamentalists suppress free thought they are anti-intellectual. On the con- 
trary, they over-intellectualize, like all literalists; they interpret a text as a judge 
does a statute. In Soviet Russia, deviationists (as the West learned to call 
them) were condemned for straying from the sense of some sentence by 
Marx or Lenin. 

These latter-day holy writs were political, not religious, which raises the 
question why governments in nations formerly permeated by liberal and sci- 
entific thought came to adopt a method once justified more plausibly by a 
supernatural religion. Extreme diversity of opinion makes certain individuals 
uncomfortable; it affronts their own opinions. Then this discontent brings 
together a group that opposes pluralism in the name of some absolute such 
as moral or national unity. This opposition to freedom of thought must, 
according to that very thought, be tolerated, thus creating a general lack of 
direction that a dictator will supply. 

What is curious about 20C dictatorships is that with their powerful 
means of repression they fear the slightest murmur of dissent. A careless 
word, a mistimed joke is enough to suggest heresy. This remains true under 
present-day "political correctness," but so far the penalties have been mild — 
opprobrium, loss of employment, and virtual exclusion from the profession. 
Any form of persecution implies an amazing belief in the power of ideas, 
indeed of mere words casually spoken. How this consorts with the Marxist 
dogma that the only true causes of events are material is not clear. The 
Catholic Inquisition had a better estimate of what was harmful and why. At 
any rate, governments in all parts of the world today keep killing and exiling 
for the sake of uniformity. The collective zeal that helped monarchs to forge 
the ultimately pluralist nation-state seems dormant in the nearly 200 new 
nations born of anti-colonial EMANCIPATION. 

To succeed as a model, the monarch's nation-state had to rely on the 
enlargement of local patriotism into the feeling of national pride, the satisfac- 
tion of belonging to a very large and distinguished group. Being secular, it 
aimed at unity rather than at the former religious Unanimity — except in time 
of war. But the monarch as God's anointed needed the benefits of agreement 



Puritans as Democrats ^ 273 



Experience teaches us that sword and fire, 
exile and persecution are more likely to exac- 
erbate our ills than to cure them. 

— Chancellor De Thou, Universal 
History (1604) 



A right to toleration seems to me a contradic- 
tion in terms. Some criterion must in any case 
be adopted by the state; otherwise it might be 
compelled to admit whatever hideous doc- 
trines and practice any man might assert. 

The only true argument for a discriminating 
toleration is that it is of no use to stop heresy 
by persecution, unless, perhaps, it be con- 
ducted upon the plan for direct warfare and 
massacre. 

— Coleridge, Table Talk (1834) 



in religion and had a duty to promote 
it. He therefore aided the established 
church in persecuting or at least 
in discriminating against dissenters. 
This policy increased the division that 
it wanted to prevent. Thoughtful 

observers notice that it solidifies dissent and also contradicts the idea of 
nation; they argue for a smoother unity not achievable (they say) by repres- 
sion; they plead for tolerance. 

Unfortunately, neither persecuting 
nor tolerating ensures the expected 
result. Toleration does not guarantee 
social peace, and persecution may be 
effective. Repression got rid of the 
14C English Lollards, the French 
Albigenses, and the Czech Hussites, 
which is why it took two centuries for 
their reforms to triumph in Luther's 
day. As for toleration, it may induce a 
permanent soreness among believers. 
They see it as a lack of moral authority 
in their government. Secularists mean- 
while keep fighting these "religious bigots," and exclude them from schools 
by law and from official posts by pressure of opinion. 

Toleration — allowing freedom of expression — has no logical limits. In 
religion it includes ritual, which is action as well as words. But does it include 
burning the country's flag? Law in the United States says yes. What of behav- 
ior onstage that many consider obscene? Or sacrificing animals for a ritual 
purpose? Facing such questions, reason shrinks back and is mute. Nor is this 
all. The facts compel us to make a distinction between Toleration, a public 
policy useful to the secular nation, and tolerance, the very rare individual state 
of mind that "lives and lets live." When found it is decried as "lukewarm," 
"latitudinarian," "Laodicean," "lacking in principle." Words beginning with / 
seem indicated for the charge; the 
human intellect is imperialist. In spite 
of the occasional, perfunctory "I may 
be wrong," all assertors defend their 
position like wolverines their cubs. 
And they can defend the defense by 
saying that all social progress depends 
on the aggressive promotion of right 
ideas, theirs. 



For of what use freedom of thought if it does 
not produce freedom of action? 

— Swift, "On Abolishing Christianity" 
(1708) 



We are none of us tolerant in what concerns 
us deeply and entirely. 

— Coleridge (1836) 



274 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

It is moreover a common trait of innovators that they are rude, noisy, 
rambunctious: Lilburne, Servetus, Roger Bacon, George Fox, William Lloyd 
Garrison — the list is endless, and it includes saints, artists, and scientists. Tact 
and reasonableness, loyalty and fair play are foreign to their genius, and it is 
no wonder that persecutors feel offended twice over, by the heresy and by the 
heretic. These things being so, the character and career of a promoter of 
Toleration who was also tolerant merit attention, especially since he was also 
a dedicated Puritan, namely 

Oliver Cromwell 

His life and mind put one in mind of Julius Caesar — not Shakespeare's 
Caesar, the bugbear of republicans, but the man who in middle life turned 
himself into a soldier with outstanding success and used his military author- 
ity to guide his countrymen's return to a settled state. Each of the pair was 
offered a crown, which was refused, while the people they led also refused to 
agree among themselves and make their own innovations work. Only the 
leader's armed power and skill maintained any social peace. With his death — 
Caesar's by assassination, Cromwell's from natural causes — the new and 
improved order ended in confusion. 

The essential likeness between these two solider-statesmen may be seen 
in a trait that is often noted with surprise — their clemency. But this readiness 
to welcome and make use of former enemies is the clearest mark of the 
statesman: he understands that what he has to govern is the whole country, 
not just his own party and good friends. The mere politician talks about the 
public good but acts only for a portion of it. 

Given the kaleidoscope of religious and political aims of the Puritans and 
the hatred aroused in the Royalists and Anglicans by the rebels' radicalism, 
anybody willing and able to rule England needed uncommon talents. They 
germed and blossomed in Cromwell. A country gentleman of modest means, 
he had no ambition of greatness. By chance, his early teacher was a Puritan, 
and at Cambridge his college was known for its Puritan leanings. Young 
Cromwell did not distinguish himself academically, but is said to have been 
good at mathematics and a keen reader of history; Raleigh's History of the World 
was his favorite book. These two studies he urged on his son Richard, 
because "they fit for public services for which a man is born." (If Richard 
took the advice, it did not help him when he succeeded his father. He fell 
from power and is best known for his subsequent fame on pub signs as 
"Tumble-down Dick.") 

Cromwell made a happy marriage with Elisabeth Bourchier. She wrote to 
him: "My life is but half a life in your absence"; and he to her: "Thou art 
dearer to me than any creature." His occupation for a dozen years was farm- 



Puritans as Democrats <^> 275 

ing the land he had inherited. Though capably done, it yielded but a small 
income. Nonetheless his neighbors sent him to represent them in Parliament 
at the very time when it began to quarrel with the king over "ship money" — 
a tax not authorized by law — and other abuses of royal power. Though 
Charles granted a Petition of Right that 

let go some of his powers, he went on For neither didst thou from the first apply 
to rule without a Parliament for 11 Thy sober spirit unto things too high; 
years, nullifying the rights. Litde is But in thine own fields exercising long 
known about Cromwell's life during A healthful mind within a body strong. 
that decade; presumably it was a round —Andrew Marvell, "Ode on Oliver 
of farming until he sold his fields and Cromwell" (1650) 

rented some grazing land nearby. 

The Thirty Years' War was then in its Swedish period (<177) and 
Cromwell, anxious like others about its bearing on Protestantism in Europe, 
apparently read accounts of Gustavus Adolphus's military methods, for his 
own later command of troops was based on them. But before war was 
thought of, he showed his resistance to royal authority in small ways. He 
refused the ritual of knighthood and was fined 10 pounds; he stood up 
against his fellow local officials when they tried to infringe the rights of the 
poorer users of common land. Cromwell was jailed, released after trial, then 
reconciled with the mayor who had impugned him. 

A believable tradition has it that Cromwell had at one point considered 
emigrating to New England. The home country, under the king's last minister, 
seemed drifting toward permanent repression of conscience. Troubled also 
inwardly, Cromwell underwent a conversion to Calvinism in its fullest form. A 
deep depression followed, as in Bunyan later. The torturing thought was: Have 
I the divine grace that certifies faith and opens the way to salvation? (<6). Both 
men, like many since Luther, believed themselves "chief of sinners." 

When such an attack of SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS was relieved by the sense 
of grace bestowed, it was logical to regard events as also expressing the will of 
God. The Puritans could believe that He willed the king and the lords to be 
overthrown. Providence, like predestination, lifts the burden of responsibility 
from the individual, as does their equivalent today: scientific and psychologi- 
cal determinism eliminates responsibility for behavior, crime included. But 
Cromwell's and Bunyan's torment beforehand seems a stage that 20C people 
skip, unless it is the guilt without cause that many people labor under. 

Having God in their hearts, 
Cromwell's soldiers were sure that He Oh, I lived and loved darkness and hated 
was on their side, but Cromwell was not light. I hated Godliness, yet God had mercy 
an ordinary believer. Though confident on me. 

that "faith will answer all difficulties," he — Cromwell, to his cousin Mrs. St. John 
also knew that ' 'we are very apt, all of us, (1638) 



276 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 



Sir, the state, in choosing men to serve it, to call that faith which perhaps may be 

takes no notice of their opinions; if they be but carnal imagination and carnal rea- 

willing to serve it, that satisfies. I advised you soning." Carnal then meant human and 

formerly to bear with minds of different men fallible. It will be remembered how he 

from yourself. Take heed of being sharp besought his opponents to entertain the 

against those to whom you can object litde ^ ^ ^ ^^ be ^^^ (<134) 

but that they square not with you in matters ^» . M .,. . r , ^ „, 

J ^ J This possibility reinforced Cromwell s 

of religion. ,. • , , , 

political sense about toleration. He 

^ROMWEL^, TO MAJOR GENERAL found some q{ ^ ^^ ^^ ^ 

Crawford (1643) ... . . ... . . . ? . 

ble by making military judgment depend 

on a kind of religious test. 
Diversity, inside or outside his army, could not be reduced. Cromwell's 
toleration was of course not complete — nobody's has ever been or ought to 
be: the most tolerant mind cannot tolerate cruelty; the most liberal state pun- 
ishes incitement to riot or treason. To all but the Catholic minority in 
England, the church of Rome was intolerable. Popery was not simply super- 
stition, the word designated a power in the world that was hostile to England 
and its faith. The Catholic nations — Spain, France, Austria, often instigated 
by the pope — kept plotting in Ireland and Scodand when they were planning 
to invade England or to seduce the Stuart kings. Anti-popery lasted in 
England until the first third of the 19C. It had the quality of the 20C Cold War 
against Communism. Both fears were pardy justified and pardy exaggerated. 
Cromwell's fierce putting down of the Irish rebellion was, again, pardy for- 
eign policy and pardy traditional English contempt for the Irish. It did not 
affect his domestic policy of toleration. 

Under his rule the Catholics and the Anglicans were somewhat better off 
than before; he had wanted to pardon a Catholic priest who in 1654 was put 
to death for his zeal. The verdict on Cromwell himself is that he was not the 
cruel, tyrannical ruler nor the narrow-gauge Puritan of legend. 

His policies made England pros- 
I desire from my heart— I have prayed for— I perous. By "navigation acts," he in- 
have waited for the day to see — union and creased trade in English ships; he 
right understanding between the Godly peo- favored the colonies and furthered col- 
ple— Scots, English, Jews, Gentiles, Presby- onization; he may be called the founder 
terians, Anabaptists, and all. of ^ British Empire. These actions 

—Cromwell, after the religious war brought on a trade war with the Dutch 

in Scotland (1648) in whkh ^^ fleetS) though ably led, 

were defeated by the naval hero of the 
age, Robert Blake. In the Elizabethan tradition, Spain's treasure cargo was 
seized off Cadiz; and for safe shipping, the Mediterranean pirates were got rid 
of. (Lloyd's insurance reports today that their professional descendants now 
flourish in the Far Eastern waters.) 



Puritans as Democrats <^> 277 

On land, Cromwell's effort to form a league of Protestant states failed 
like other grand alliances (299 >). Nation-states rarely see their interests as 
steadily convergent, but his views were nonetheless global: "God's interest in 
the world is more extensive than all the people of these three nations," mean- 
ing England, Scotland, and Ireland, then bound together by common law- 
making This union, too, came apart after Cromwell's death in 1658. He had 
contracted malaria in Ireland and died of it, aged 59. 

His dictatorship during the latter half of his tenure as head of state came 
about because the army and Parliament could not agree. Cromwell later 
blamed himself for the purge of Parliament that led to his Protectorate, 
entailing censorship and local government by army officers. He described it 
as "wickedness and folly," though it is hard to see what other choice he had. 
In the first half of his governance he had behaved like a model monarch, that 
is, a king who is a good administrator and obeys the law His successor 
Charles II had different concerns: staying in power, doing without Parliament 
by accepting periodic bribes from Louis XIV, and enjoying himself. After a 
long exile such as Charles endured, this mode of existence is understandable. 
But within half a dozen years, according to Pepys, many people remembered 
"Oliver" with a sense of longing 



The fact without precedent about Puritanism is that it was the first radi- 
cal movement to have representatives in America. Noteworthy also is that 
they began their adventure on this soil by writing down a social contract. 
Earlier English colonists, in Virginia, had carried with them their orthodox 
Anglicanism, scarcely troubled by a scattering of Quakers and other 
eccentrics. The French, north and west, like the Spanish in Mexico and South 
America, were Catholics who felt no qualms about bishops, the Eucharist, 
and the Inquisition. And the wide-ranging Jesuit missionaries had no thought 
of mixing reform politics with their promotion of Christianity. 

The hardy band honored as the Pilgrim Fathers were one offshoot of the 
earliest 17C agitation to purify the church. James I, seeing the growing num- 
ber of these dissenters, swore that he would "harry them out of the land." 
They did not wait, and here they were in 1620, perched on the edge of the 
wilderness, facing Indians and starvation just so they might live without bish- 
ops. There was then no cultural lag. Men, ideas, and passions traveled back 
and forth between England and New England, creating the same doubts and 
divisions and individual calamities. 

As one reflects on the narrow meaning of Puritan, which unfairly colors 
the movement as a whole, one is tempted to think that without its American 
branch the attitude to life that it stands for might have left little or no trace in 



278 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

the public memory. In the United States the New England adventure has 
been unforgettable: the Mayflower, the Thanksgiving holiday, the witch trials in 
Salem, and the story of Hester Prynne wearing her scarlet A. for adultery 
make up the popular picture of the country's beginnings. For there is a gen- 
eral impression that the Pilgrims were the first English-speaking colonists in 
North America and that they brought with them the doctrine of freedom for 
all. This error does not rob Jefferson, Samuel Adams, or Patrick Henry of 
their contributions to that ideal, yet the New England images, more pic- 
turesque, remain the core of the national myth. 

As for the equation of Puritan with killjoy, the English scholar cited ear- 
lier who showed its falsity blames Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter and his gray- 
tinted short stories for making it take root. The charge is fair enough, but it is 
also true that the New England Puritans were more strait-laced than those 
they left behind, and understandably so: they were in a foreign country and 
beset by dangers. Rules had to be strict and relaxation limited. The setders 
were a very small group too — about 100 to start with — which makes devia- 
tion difficult: everybody's behavior is common knowledge, and social pres- 
sure to conform is great. Hence litde room for original ideas and even less for 
toleration. Besides, in those early days there was no need to argue in favor of 
leveling ranks or sharing goods: the American situation by itself established 
the arrangement. Things changed when land was parceled out and hamlets 
grew into towns. The issue then was whether the governor and top officials 
should make policy or the General Court, the Assembly. But nobody ques- 
tioned that the civil magistrates ought to ensure religious unanimity. 

On this point, as we saw, England differed. Cromwell and the indepen- 
dent sects found themselves feeling like the earlier French politiques (<137): 
after prolonged religious war, they yearned for peace, which required some 
degree of toleration. By contrast, in Massachusetts Bay Colony, "sectarians" 
were given short shrift. As noted earlier, the woman preacher Anne 
Hutchinson, guilty of 80 heresies, was expelled. Also banished, Roger 
Williams founded Providence in Rhode Island. Others, less iron-willed, were 
admonished into silence; religious "wars" continued in Massachusetts to 
1780 at least and full toleration had to wait another 50 years. 

The governors, though chosen by 

«,.,.« „ . vote, tended toward authoritarian rule, 

Toleration of all upon pretence of conscience 

T . , ^ , , .. . ~« „ . although one of them, John Winthrop, 

I thank God my soul abhors it. The godly in & ' J r ' 

former times never fought for the liberty of was elected for Ws one-year term 

consciences by pleading for liberty for all. because of his tolerant, amiable charac- 

-Thomas Shepard of Newtown ter - Yet bein g hard-pressed by his coun- 

(Cambridge), to Hugh Peter of Salem cillors, he resisted all popular demands 

(1645) to share in making policy. The fear of 



Puritans as Democrats <^ 279 

"anarchy" must have been great, since after a defeat or two he was re-elected 
again and again. At the end of his life he regretted having yielded principle 
and inclination to fear. 

Toward freedom as represented by toleration on the one hand and demo- 
cratic rule on the other, the Puritans in America appear to have been driven 
into ambivalence — and such the country has remained. Nothing could show 
more precisely the difference between emancipation and freedom: the 
oppressed demand their freedom, which will surely not upset society; but how 
dangerous it would be to accord it to others! The popular belief in the 
Pilgrims' devotion to liberty rests on this confusion of ideas. Among the prin- 
cipal actors in the founding of the colonies, only two were thorough liberty- 
men: Roger Williams and William 

Penn° — and Roger Williams himself II were better to be of no church than to be 
showed a small flaw: he wanted any bitter for any. 
dissenter to earn his freedom by first — William Penn (n.d.) 
denouncing the Church of England. 

On the score of conduct in daily life, the Puritan record in New England is 
also ambiguous. The moral atmosphere varied at different times under the influ- 
ence of crises and outside events. One is surprised to see Christmas outlawed for 
22 years, then re-accepted, and to find civil marriage required in addition to the 
religious. How to treat the Indians also divided ethical minds. But the morally 
precarious device of bundling was made into an ordinary custom (280 >). A lit- 
tle-known aspect of moralism comes to light in the case of Robert Keayne, and 
the witch trials at Salem were not exactly what they have come to seem. 

To get to know Robert Keayne it is only necessary to read his will, a doc- 
ument which he spent five months in composing — 50,000 words of justifica- 
tion for his alleged misdeeds. He was a Boston merchant who began life in 
England as a poor butcher boy. In America he grew wealthy and aroused 
among his competitors suspicion flavored with envy. The General Court and 
the church, alike intent on economic morality, accused him of taking too high 
a profit on bridles, nails, and gold buttons; for example, one penny on 100 
sixpenny nails, two on the sevenpenny variety, and eight on a dozen gold but- 
tons. It was tantamount to usury. The General Court had not read Max Weber 
on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (<36-37). 

The Court's "unchristian, uncharitable, and unjust slanders" caused 
Keayne both acute and chronic suffering. His church also conducted an 
"exquisite search" into his behavior, and he was reproved for "dishonoring 
God's name." He had to repent. Against the Court he fought back with des- 
peration, his innocence and piety affronted beyond endurance. 

The result of his appeal was to split the Court, physically: the disagreeing 
legislators sat apart, thereby making Keayne if not the father, then the occasion 



280 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

I renounce all manner of known errors, all of a bicameral legislature in Mass- 
Popish and prelatical superstitions, all ana- achusetts. Besides the recital of his 
baptical enthusiasms and familistical delu- grievances, his encyclopedic will details 
sions, with all other feigned devices and all fa e half a dozen public institutions to be 
old and new upstart opinions, unsound and buik ^^ money from Ws egtate If 
blasphemouserrors,andotherhighimagina- BostQn ^ nQt h ^ ^^ ^ gum 

tions against the honor and truth of God. TT , ~ n ,— , ^ ri 

& goes to Harvard College. The rest of the 

-Robert Keayne, 2nd paragraph of his pkce describe s the testator's dealings 

WILL ("6:1:1653 COMMONLY CALLED ., , . j r- i j i • 

with relatives and mends and explains 
August ) r 

why they do or do not get a legacy. This 

accounting is not egotism but deference 

to the Puritan principle of the stewardship of wealth. Andrew Carnegie and 

John D. Rockefeller consciously acted as heirs of this tradition. 

* * 

In the late 1620s present-day Quincy, a suburb of Boston, enjoyed under 
the name of Merry Mount, a reputation exactly opposite to that of its sur- 
roundings. It was founded by Thomas Morton, who came over to be a fur 
trader and was a strong believer in the free-and-easy life. His character and 
the temper of the town furnished Hawthorne with matter for a short story 
and John Lothrop Motley with enough more for two novels, Merry Mount and 
Morton's Hope. Morton offended Massachusetts by his festive life (character- 
ized as wild), by celebrating the pagan May first with its sacrilegious May 
queen, and by selling guns to the Indians. He was arrested three times and 
shipped back to England twice. There he gave rein to his revenge by publish- 
ing a scathing denunciation of his American neighbors' ideas and comport- 
ment, including what he thought excesses in religious purity; he cited their 
seeing in the use of a ring in marriage a relic of popery. How dissolute he may 
have been, it is hard to say. What is clear is that the means and extent of his 
pastimes went beyond the limits considered legitimate by Puritans not wholly 
averse to recreation, and certainly not ignorant of human instincts and emo- 
tions: witness Bundling 

This ingenious custom is defined as "sleeping together with the clothes 
on, especially applied to lovers." It was an ancient means of comfort in Wales 
and other rural districts of the British Isles, as well as in Switzerland and parts 
of India. Its convenience is plain: lack of heating in winter and of room and 
furniture at any time is obviated in the simplest way. [The book to read is 
Bundling by Henry Reed Stiles.] 

When the practice was resorted to, not to accommodate visitors but for 
courtship, the theory was that the young people would adopt it for acquain- 
tance stopping short of all tempting familiarities. Experience showed the diffi- 



Puritans as Democrats <^> 281 



culty of restraint and, sexuality regularly 
prevailing, the rule was made absolute 
that pregnancy after bundling imposed 
marriage. When this untoward result 
ensued it had to be confessed by the 
parties in front of the congregation. So 
frequent was this occurrence that the 
church records repeatedly show the 
abbreviation FBM — fornication before 
marriage. What happened when no 
pregnancy disclosed what may yet have 
taken place is not known, but the reali- 
ties of the bundling life were certainly 
known and condoned. 



"Mr. Ensign," says she, "our Jonathan and I 
will sleep in this, and our Jemima and you 
shall sleep in that." I was astonished and 
offered to sit up all night, when Jonathan 
immediately replied, "Oh, la! Mr. Ensign, 
you won't be the first man our Jemima has 
bundled with, will it Jemima?" She was a very 
pretty, black-eyed girl of about sixteen or sev- 
enteen, who archly replied, "No, father, not 
by many, but it will be with the first 
Britainer." 

— Letter from Lt Anbury from 
Cambridge, Mass. (1777) 



* 
* * 



What remains to be told is often regarded as the one unfortunate blot on 
the Pilgrim Fathers' just fame — the witch trials at Salem. There again the 
facts are partiy misconceived. The witches were not burnt but hanged; some 
were self-confessed; and most important, the belief in witchcraft did not pre- 
vail among Puritans alone, much less the New England contingent alone. It 
gripped the whole West, Catholic and Protestant. Nor was it sheer old-style 
medieval ignorance; it was tied closely to the new concerns of the scientists. 
Witchcraft is mentioned in the Bible, but it was not until the end of the 1 3C — 
an age of enlightenment — that it took hold of the best minds by its connec- 
tion with the several magics or "-mancies": geo-, hydro-, aero, pyro-, necro- 
and chiro-; that is, divination by means of earth, water, air, fire, the dead, and 
the hand. These powers may be used for good or evil, depending on the rea- 
son for invoking the "mystery" The choice is like the modern physician's pre- 
scribing of a narcotic. When the magic is for "carnal lust," it is witchcraft; 
exercised for doing evil to others, it is "fascination," but even when it per- 
forms cures, it abets the Devil and is the "mystery of iniquity." 

How this system of ideas was compatible with the rise of science is 
shown in the career of 

Joseph Glanvill 



We saw how his contemporary, the physician and naturalist Sir Thomas 
Browne, accepted as fact the existence of witches: they fitted the hierarchical 
scheme of created beings (<212). Knowledge and reasoning supported the 
belief. Glanvill was an early member of the Royal Society and took part in its 



282 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

work with papers on natural history and the mining of lead. But his great con- 
tribution was to defend science and the Society against its attackers. He 
argued the utility, the harmlessness, the modernity of science. One gains 
knowledge, he said, by first admitting ignorance; causes may remain 
unknown, but mathematics gives certainty. Glanvill was in effect a philoso- 
pher of science and one of its first historians. 

In matters of faith he was a broad-church Anglican who favored the use 
of reason in religion. Ordained at 23, he wrote at 24 a long essay on "The 
Vanity of Dogmatizing," which depicts nature as an object of contemplation 
that heightens admiration of the Divine Architect. Glanvill's worldly heroes 
were "Galilaeo [sic\ 9 Gassendi, Harvey, and [Des] Cartes." When the attacks 
on the Royal Society did not stop but rather increased after its favorable his- 
tory was published by Bishop Sprat, Glanvill was urged to further defense. 
He wrote Plus Ultra, in which, while explaining "deep research," he boasted 
that more knowledge had been garnered in the recent past than in all the years 
"since Aristotle opened his shop in Greece." 

Such was the man who by reasoning arrived at the conviction that he 
must combat skepticism about witches. His early books on the subject bear 

on the tide page his designation as 
Millions of spiritual beings unseen Fellow of the Royal Society. Since all 

Walk the earth up and down. phenomena must be studied, he pro- 

— Milton, Paradise Lost (1667) posed that the Society investigate the 

facts of the spirit world. 
Facts depend on witnesses, and the testimony about "Satanic work" were 
abundant. When we recall that Newton worked at alchemy and the prospect 
of the world's end and that others, like John Wilkins, the prolific writer on 
mechanics, thought that the mission of the Royal Society was to promote the 
teachings of the Rosicrucians, one can judge how difficult it was then to 
achieve a totally naturalistic view of science. 

That view, indeed, was not only not wanted but must be resisted; for its 
triumph would mean that only matter existed, that atheism was the truth, that 
Hobbism (as they called Hobbes's mechanical psychology) was correct. In 
short, the believers in spirits foresaw the state of mind that now dominates 
and that disquiets not merely the devout but many freethinking Humanists 
and some scientists. In the 17C conception of spirit (or mind) versus matter, 
it was logical that witches should figure among real beings. 

The New Englanders who tried and hanged some of them — 35 in all — 
could hardly doubt that they had reason and evidence on their side. Some of 
the adolescent girls actually said they were witches — proud of the fact or glad 
of being the center of attention. Once started, the notion took on the charac- 
ter of crowd hysteria and had to run its course like a disease. Later in life the 



Puritans as Democrats <^*> 283 

persecuters saw their error and felt repentance — too late, like John Winthrop 
regretting his different but no less high-minded political persecution. 

The Puritan legacy as a whole is mixed: toleration of the individual con- 
science, linked to the democratic right of participation in government and the 
demand for social justice. These co-exist with the hounding of dissenters and 
the extermination of witches. Mixed again is the welcome to the full enjoyment 
of life, art, and pleasures of the body, coupled with a strain of asceticism, born 
of a high sense of duty. Of these components, the narrow moralism and the 
social repression of dissent were to affect the future United States for a long 
time and more deeply than their opposites. 



The Reign of Etiquette 



Louis XIV was much too clever to have said, "The State? I am the State." If 
he ever did, it was not meant in the sense that it is quoted for. In any case it 
was not true. His own words, deliberately written for the guidance of his son 
and heir, say the exact opposite. His hold on the throne, and even more on the 
court, depended on Regularity. The last thing he wanted was to be thought 
arbitrary; he would not boast of behaving as the nobles did in their domains. 

Centuries later, De Gaulle may have remembered the cliche when he 
said of his role in the Second World War: "I was France, the state, the gov- 
ernment. I was the independence and sovereignty of France — a quite unten- 
able position." 

The other cliche about Louis The interests of the state come first. When 

XIV — his tide of Sun King — is also one gives these priority, one labors for one's 

misinterpreted. It does not refer to the own good. The advantage to the state 
golden glory he coveted in his ruinous redounds to one's glory. 
wars, nor was he the first to be so — Louis XIV, "Reflections on the 
called. His father was: Louis XIII was Business of Kings," Memoirs (n.d.)° 

described by that phrase, because 

thanks to Richelieu he had become the sole center of power — like the sun.° 
The sun's rays — authority — radiated to all parts of France unopposed — or 
almost. Under Louis XIV this figure of speech became blended with that of 
military might and its more important meaning was forgotten. At the same 
time, the principle of sovereignty was misconstrued as personal rule — despo- 
tism — which is the error embodied in L'etat, c'est mot. 

As monarch, Louis XIV made it his business to carry on two distinct 
activities. He worked daily, faithfully, like a top civil servant, sitting in council 
with his four secretaries of state; and in parallel he ran the court on a plan that 
he had devised for political stability. Both duties were anchored in his 
makeup, were implanted there by his childhood experiences. One could say in 
modern jargon that he came from a troubled family. He was brought up by a 
single parent, having lost his father at the age of five. His mother, the queen 



286 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

regent, soon contracted a secret marriage with the chief minister, Cardinal 
Mazarin, who was a foreigner — an Italian surrounded by Italian dependents. 
Extremely able at devious diplomacy, Mazarin took pains to instruct the 
child-king in the role of monarch, and the lessons took. 

But Mazarin's unpopularity, combined with the infancy of the king, gave 
the nobles and others an opening for revolts that amounted to a civil war. It 
began just after the Thirty Years' War had ended, at mid-century, lasted four 
and a half years, and coinciding in time with the rise of the English 
Commonwealth, it also aped some of the features of that republic. The tur- 
moil forced Mazarin and his queen to flee Paris with the young princes. At 
one point, the mob rushed into the little king's room while he was in bed. 
Twice Mazarin went into exile, and during one of his absences the queen had 
to surrender the children to one of the warring parties. She pleaded for the 
maintenance of the monarchy. The outright battles were few but bloody, and 
the leaders switched sides so erratically that the situation ought perhaps to be 
called anarchy rather than civil war. This perpetual insecurity that Louis lived 
through between the ages of 10 and 15 he never forgot. It taught him the 
necessity of taming the nobles and it explains the extraordinary self-mastery 
that he developed to make etiquette serve as an anti-revolutionary force. 

Before looking at the ways in which this was done, a word or two are in 
order about the rebels of those four years. They were of three kinds — first, 
ambitious nobles who thought that Richelieu's work, the triumph of monar- 
chism, could be undone; next, the Paris Parlement, a body of 200 lawyers, not 
legislators, who thought that like the true Parliament which they saw govern- 
ing England they could make the French king share power with them; and 
last, the Paris mob which like its London counterpart vaguely thought that 
some measure of democracy could be won out of the confusion. The 
Parlement alone had definite plans — a written constitution in 27 articles pro- 
viding for such things as the granting of taxes, the abolition of Richelieu's 
provincial agents, the intendants (<241), the cessation of arbitrary imprison- 
ment by lettres de cachet, and a form of habeas corpus. 

Nobody got his wish. The nobles, divided into unstable factions, tried to 
get foreign help and thus ensured their unpopularity. The Parlement suffered 
from inept leaders, and the Paris mob had no single goal or head. The contem- 
poraries found the fitful fighting so capricious that they nicknamed the whole 
operation la Fronde — "the sling" — suggesting children at play with stones and 
catapults. The outbreak ended up being neither a parallel to the English over- 
throw of royalty nor a foretaste of the French revolution of 1789. It was the last 
attempt of some nobles to bring the king back to his position of first among 
equals (<239). But one circumstance matched the state of affairs just before 
the actual revolution of 1789: the state was bankrupt. That condition too Louis 



The Reign of Etiquette q^> 287 

kept in mind, though unfortunately not In the presence of the absolute monarch the 

as long as he did the nobles' ambition to great became the small. It was with venera- 

demote him. rio* 1 tnat tne courtiers approached a king 

Life at the court of Louis XIV was who was ihe sole ob J ect of thek aspect and 

a daily drama in which he played the the sole arbiter of thek f ° ft ™ es - Those who 

lead. He was also its director and pro- had been the Utde * nmtB of ^ P rovince 
, iii-ii- i r were now nothing more than their tutors. To 

ducer, and he built his own theater tor & 

obtain favors from them, it was no longer nec- 
lt as soon as he was or age and fully 

° J essary to bluster or to fawn. 

king: the palace at Versailles. It was 

, r -p. . — Antony Hamilton, Memoirs of 

wise to move the court out or Pans, _ /--^^ 

' Gramont (1704) 

away from the restless populace and 

the intellectuals. When the chateau 1 1 

miles away was completed, the show, underwritten by the vanity of the nobles 

themselves, put them at the mercy of the Grand Monarch. Every hour of 

every day they wanted his favor, his glance — a nod was enough reward, a 

blessing By watching one another, making little plots, and getting in each 

other's way, the mischief-makers of the Fronde were kept amused and tamed. 

To stay out of the production was impossible. Louis, with the memory of 
a politician, knew everybody and noted at once the absentees. "Where is So- 
and-so?" Any relative who was present was rebuked by the question alone, 
thus compelling attendance from whoever had stayed away out of sulks or 
love of country life. By this simple device potential rebels were under perma- 
nent surveillance. It was an automatic "Divide and rule," because the compe- 
tition for favors made each courtier the enemy of every other, and not in a 
trivial way. For in addition to the short-lived joys of vanity, there were real 
plums to be got — posts of high honor, tides affording privileges, decorations 
and favors giving access to his majesty and thus to other benefits — gifts of 
land or cash, appointments and promotions in the army and the church. 
Incidentally, one decoration created in Louis's reign, though not by him, has 
had a circuitous history. The period was one of marked advances in cookery, 
in which some women distinguished themselves. To honor their talents, the 
blue ribbon of the highest state medal was chosen as appropriate. The con- 
nection with the Medal of the Holy Ghost has been forgotten and the ribbon 
is now freely bestowed on male chefs, restaurants, and grand juries. 

The fulfillment of desire hung on first obtaining the favor of a word or a 
smile. It was in this way that the monarch was absolute and arbitrary. An ear- 
lier Louis, the eleventh, had coined the formula "For such is my pleasure. . . ," 
which might better be rendered "such is my whim" — not a compliment but 
notice served that luck, not merit, secured the boon. Besides tossing around 
whims, the later Louis had to keep inventing new pastimes to keep his huge 
retinue diverted; it was a feat of high imagination. To go with him on a hunt 



288 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

or a country outing or be a guest at camp during war required special desig- 
nation beforehand. He chose the group in the light of recent remarks, atti- 
tudes, costume, or facial expressions. Everyone was on tenterhooks. If at the 
appointed place a room had the magic word Pour (for), followed by the name, 
this touch doubled the delight. Permission to keep one's hat on at various 
times was another honor, which the king's call: "Hats, gentlemen!" made vis- 
ible to all. He, by the way, always raised his hat in passing by a woman or an 
upper servant. 

To provide such lures, the royal master of ceremonies thought up enter- 
tainments without cease — rides, balls, masques, ballets, plays, banquets, 
games — and made the most of birthdays, christenings, receptions of foreign 
notables, all this besides the feast days of the church, his days of taking 
medicine (purge), and whatever little circumstance in the life of his family, 
legitimate or "natural," gave excuse for some form of pageantry. His 
resourcefulness in this domain kept the crowd continually busy — getting new 
clothes, wondering and arguing about the moves to make, the words to say if 
this person or that was to be the center of attention, and worrying about 
precedence — one's place on the ladder that reached the sun. The fuss, the 
frenzy can readily be conceived if one thinks of such lesser models of court 
life as Washington, D.C., or Hollywood in its prime. A court under any clime 
is a mass of resourceful people with only one aim in life. 

At Versailles what one might call the fusion of revelry and rivalry was an 
instrument of government, expensive but efficient — no need of any army of 
spies throughout the country as Richelieu had needed, or of soldiers to fight 
coalitions of nobles. They fought each other, without bloodshed, under their 
king's eye and over such things as footstools and "bonnets" (caps), these 
being the cause of famous quarrels too involved to go into. Louis looked on 
impassively like a teacher in the playground at recess time. 

At other moments, each day, he 
His Majesty's meals shall be brought in thus: sacrificed his privacy to the good of the 

two of the guards will walk in first, then the state: rising and going to bed, at meals 
doorkeeper, the maitre d'hotel carrying his and at stool, he occupied center stage. 
staff, the gentleman who serves bread, the He chose what noble fingers should 

controller-general, the controller's clerk, the hand him his shirt or who should sit 

squire of the kitchen, and the keeper of table opposite him across the table or per- 
settings. form some other rite. These privileged 

—Louis XIV, House Rules, Article 21 beings shone in rotation as did the 

(revised 1681) select crew allowed to stand near the 

chamber door and feast their eyes on 
the daily spectacle. But none in the audience ever saw him without his wig: 
Louis had lumps — sebaceous cysts — on his scalp. 



The Reign of Etiquette q*& 289 

The words just used — audience, show, spectacle, pageant — suggest the 
resuming word facade. It is the means of ruling by keeping the mind entranced 
through the eye. Facade imparts grandeur, brilliance, power. It is the contrary 
of another artifice of government, the calculated mystery of dictatorships. 
The western world today wants the opposite of both facade and mystery, 
destroying them as soon as suspicion of either arises. We speak of the impor- 
tance of "image," and the kind desired is one of anti-facade. It must dispel, 
not create, the aura of grandeur and power and even of dignity. Heads of state 
insist on being Tony or Jimmy; they grow in popularity when they are inartic- 
ulate. The plain man with the boyish, rather helpless look is the figure conge- 
nial to a democratic society (785>). 

It might be thought that there was a likeness between the sun king's self- 
display in the bedroom and the photographs of our leaders jogging or the 
diagram of their organs after surgery. But Louis's exhibitionism fostered no 
intimacy; it was solemn and stylized; it implied that majesty permeated the 
least action, making it different from its analogue in you and me. The fact is 
that far from these antics making him (in our favorite phrase) "more 
human," they set him apart from the rest of mankind. The king has two bod- 
ies (<253) and the one on show was at all times the royal being. 

The proof is that from his accession to his death, Louis terrified all who 

came near him. No source of pride or strength — great estates or wealth, fame 

as a soldier or genius as an artist — helped anybody to withstand his glance; all 

were reduced to humility. Physically, Louis was well designed for his role; he 

was of medium height and sturdy build. His features were regular, the mouth 

firm and eyebrows strongly marked over a wide-open glance. And as we see 

in the standard full-length portrait by Rigaud, which obviously makes a point 

of it, Louis had an athlete's legs. Nor 

did Louis achieve this mastery by any 

r _ , . , -ii Not without dread do I approach the sub- 

rorm or thunder — he was said to have . , 

. ject — I mean the monarch at whose court I 

lost his temper only twice. He domi- . , A , A , r 

r J spent the best and most numerous days of my 

nated by his stance and his gaze, his iif e , imbued with the most religious respect, a 

self-control and his vigilance about the being who created and foster ed in me the 

minutest infraction of what he regarded mos t justified admiration, a prince who was 

as his due. This peculiar power is well more a master than any other whom one can 

illustrated by a remark on record: "I remember, even by recourse to books, who 

was almost kept waiting." It was part was such for a long time abroad as he was at 

of his grand strategy to mention with home and whose aura of terror persists owing 

a shudder his escape from that catas- to me impression it once made. 

trophe . — Saint-Simon, Memoirs (n.d.) 

* 
* * 



290 <&* From Dawn to Decadence 

Plentiful as were the king's expensive entertainments, they did not fill 
every moment of the day or night. The hours left over were occupied by two 
other pastimes — gambling and lovemaking. 

Gambling propels itself, an excellent time filler and a mode of excitement 
without strain on the muscles. The Versaillese used cards and dice (especially 
in tric-trac = backgammon), unaware of its cultural by-product: Pascal, who 
enjoyed it in his worldly period, was led by it to work on probability theory 
and then to his theological "wager" (<220). 

It is a fact of nature that people who are well-fed and idle in the sense of 
free from steady work feel a restlessness that inevitably turns amorous. That 
is why for chastity monks and nuns give themselves a full schedule of "works." 
But love at court would also grow tedious if it were merely what people who 
labor tend to make it — finding sexual opportunities and satisfactions. The 
courtier, male and female, dresses up everything, from their bodies to their 
ways of speech, and sexuality is no exception; for them lovemaking is a ritual 
with tactical moves, progressive phases, fulfillment, and retreat. This explains 
why one of La Rochefoucauld's maxims asserts that nobody would fall in 
love if one hadn't heard about it (350>). Obviously, the sexual impulse as 
such needs no previous notice to make its demands; its plain urge marks 
its distinction from love, which means whatever a period may fancy to 
embellish lust. 

This is not to say that the men and women at Versailles were all ingenious 
and delicate amorists who made the affair a work of art. Still, many differed 
radically from those who today haunt bars for "singles" on the prowl. Married 
or unmarried, the courtiers' opportunities were at hand and in readiness, a per- 
petual stimulus to the verbal imagination as well as the physical, everybody pic- 
turesquely poised in a kind of sensual Eden. Marriage did not hinder, because 
it was almost always an alliance of material interests and nothing more. But dis- 
cretion and tact must be used in violating the formal vows, and again in disen- 
gaging from a liaison. Some liaisons moreover were lifelong attachments and 
praised by all, every move in the pairings being commonly known and the 
details handed down to posterity in letters and memoirs (477 >). 

The one disdainer of this minuet was the king himself. Acting this time in 
his proper person, he obtained his successive mistresses without the use of 
tactics. Some offered themselves and any who were summoned were obliged 
to surrender. Unlike recent times, when the sexual relations of public figures 
are leaked out and in some quarters carry a little discredit, a 1 7C monarch's 
love passages were rather a sign of his lofty role and virility — his two bodies 
manifest at once. Secrecy was difficult but could last a little while, after which 
the title of official mistress (maitresse en titre) might be earned and made pub- 
lic. A good indication of the state of fact was the set of persons — relatives and 
friends of the mistress — who bore off the bounty from on high. 



The Reign of Etiquette <&> 291 

One of the women whom the king favored obtained her post by means 
unique in modern times. On the road from Paris to Orleans stood a chateau in 
the chapel of which a priest named Guibourg officiated from time to time. His 
notion of the service was peculiar. On a certain day near the mid-century the 
altar in that chapel, covered with a black cloth, supported the semi-naked body 
of a woman in her twenties. The priest placed the chalice on her midriff and 
intoned the black mass, winding up with the ritual kiss bestowed on Satan's new 
recruit. Then came the sacrifice of a live offering to the lord of Evil, to ensure 
the fulfillment of a petition shortly to be made. The live victim this time was 
unusual: an infant who had been bought for a few francs. And the petition was 
also out of the common: "I want the king's affection so that he will do every- 
thing I ask for myself and I want him to give up La Valliere and look with favor 
on my relatives, my servants, and my retainers." The infant's heart was set aside 
to be burnt and reduced to powder "for the king's use."° 

The woman on the altar was Athenais de Mortemart, Marquise de 
Montespan. She became lady-in-waiting to the queen and acknowledged mis- 
tress of the king at 27. Her reign lasted 14 years. 

During that time she was eulogized in verse by many, and notably by 
Racine and La Fontaine. They did not know, of course, any more than the 
king, the unorthodox means by which she had made her way to the foot of 
the throne. She produced eight children and managed to get two legitimized, 
inevitably creating permanent dissension between partisans of the true line 
and of the bastards. Before being supplanted by the formidable (and pious) 
Mme de Maintenon, Montespan had been converted by Bishop Bossuet — or 
so he believed — but she still showed a restless spirit and nursed the ambition 
of recapturing her long- forgotten husband — in vain. He was one of the few 
who kept away from the circus at Versailles. 

The king's and others' adventures in love, by being open and continual, 
made observant minds reflect on the human emotions. Their interplay in 
heart-and-mind, their consequences in society, and their role in history, 
became a subject of study by French playwrights, tragic and comic, and espe- 
cially by essayists of the kind called politique et moraliste. We shall shortly meet 
some of them and the genres they cultivated (342.ff>). 

* * 

The monarch, meaning his supra-human body, came to the direction of 
affairs at the same time as he ordered work begun on the building of 
Versailles, in the sixth decade of the century. Labor in both proved arduous. 
The site of the chateau was a sandy and boggy flat ill supplied with fresh 
water (337 >). Louis' daily meetings with his ministers and domestics were 
perhaps no less dry and swampy by turns, but he listened patiently and 



292 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

gravely to their reports and advice. He insisted on reading all documents; he 
would not sign any that he did not understand. He was a reading man, 
although his spelling was capricious like everybody else's. 

An early decision shocked the court: the Superintendent of Finance, 
Nicolas Fouquet, was in disgrace, arrested, and to be tried for corruption. He 
was the wealthiest man in France, popular among those he favored with gifts 
of money from the public treasury, and he had just given the king several days' 
magnificent entertainment at Vaux-le-Vicomte, his stupendous garden- 
estate. He was condemned to banishment, which the king interpreted as 
prison, in various towns. Fouquet's peculations had been tracked down by a 
man named Colbert, a bourgeois, who wanted the superintendent's post; he 
meant to put order in the nation's economy. The king was eager to crush 
Fouquet for a second reason: the man had bought and fortified an island off 
the coast as a safe retreat if need arose: Louis scented the spirit of the Fronde. 

Colbert's plan was in effect a reform of the whole administration of the 
kingdom. It must be made efficient and profitable. Finances in disarray, high 
officials keen only about taking and giving bribes, their departments neglect- 
ing their mission and keeping no records — such a state of affairs was intoler- 
able to a bourgeois mind. To reverse the headlong march to bankruptcy, 
Colbert's first move was to trim oudays and accumulate cash. Taxes would 
keep flowing only if the country was prosperous; therefore exports must be 
spurred and imports reduced. This was Mercantilism, the economic theory in 
vogue since the previous century. 

To carry out his scheme, Colbert devised "maxims of order" to replace 
what he termed "maxims of confusion." He and his growing body of agents 
were bourgeois who put into practice a conception of the state as a business 
enterprise. The class as a whole had long supported the monarchy in its strug- 
gle against the nobles; now under Louis XIV the bourgeoisie was virtually in 
power; the king's reading and initialing memos made him in part a bourgeois 
king. Before his day, collecting and spending the revenue was — even when 
honest — a hapha2ard operation. Colbert with his tireless eye looked over 
everybody's shoulder, wanting to see records, receipts, minutes, audits, and 
figures so as to guide action. He began by ordering a survey of the country's 
resources and products of all kinds. Consciously scientific, he promoted 
"government by inquiry." 

At the head of the treasury was the Controller-General — Colbert — with 
his bookkeepers. Each department had a Register — a large book of specified 
format and number of pages, the first 25 of which were to be left blank for an 
index. The rest were subdivided for each type of transaction. Nothing could be 
ordered, no payment made without an order signed by Colbert and immedi- 
ately entered in the daybook, to be summed up with others in the Register. 
Each month the Register was totaled up, verified, brought to the king in 



The Reign of Etiquette ^ 293 



Bureau. The wise man will set everything 
down on his bureau to weigh it in the balance. 

— Rabelais (1573) 

Bureau. A chest of drawers with a writing 
board. 

— Richardson's Pamela (1740), quoted in 
the Oxford English Dictionary 

Bureaucratique. Power exercised by the 
bureaus. A hardly correct neologism, but 
made necessary by the wide influence that 
government exerts on all undertakings. 

— Littre dictionary (1889) 

Bureaucracy. "The inexpediency of concen- 
trating in a dominant bureaucracy all the 
power of organized action. . . ." 

— John Stuart Mill (1 848) 



Council. Each page was re-verified by 
him; he said Bon if the figures tallied and 
his initials were affixed. Bureaucratic 
ways are a form of etiquette. 

The value of centralization through 
bureaus was soon proved. France 
became the workshop of Europe. That 
role was won not by dumping but by 
producing high-quality goods — linens, 
lace, silks, wines, pottery, tapestries, 
clocks, and other artifacts of wood and 
metal. Colbert's innumerable officials — 
new and old civil servants — were punc- 
tilious: a bolt of cloth an inch too 
short was stopped at the border and 
destroyed. These men did not so much 
displace as take over the duties of the 
nobility that had governed locally. To 

them and to certain landowners and tradesmen, Colbert was a menace; they 
found the new regulations oppressive and often absurd, for the drawbacks of 
centralization showed up as promptly as its great merits. To this day, 
Colbertisme is a term of praise and dispraise in French political debate. But as 
the king himself noted in his jottings for the Dauphin, the local governors 
had often been little tyrants. 

Meantime, there is no doubt that the aim was to promote the general wel- 
fare. Colbert felt concern about the poor, whether artisan or peasant, and he 
used his officials to gather statistics for remedial action. He had roads repaired, 
swamps drained, canals built, and took measures to lighten burdens such as 
tolls and other levies. Had it not been 
for the king's ambition to be a hero in 
war as well as a paternalistic monarch, 
the history of the reign might have been 
a worldwide lesson in political econ- 
omy. The lavishness of Versailles and 
the patronage of art would not have 
bankrupted the country. But another 
man's ambition interfered with the 
peaceful plan: Colbert had in Louvois, 
the minister of war, a rival for the 
supreme power. Louvois fed the king's 
dreams of glory and cut Colbert's influ- 
ence in half using his own to help bring 



Not one provincial governor but commits 
some injustice, no body of troops but lead 
dissolute lives, no gendeman but acts the 
tyrant toward his peasants, no tax collector, 
no delegate, no common sergeant but per- 
forms his role with insolence. These crimes 
are the worse for being committed in the 
name of the king. Even the upright among 
officials get corrupted, unable as they are to 
go against the current. Instead of a single 
ruler that the people ought to have, they have 
a thousand. 



-Louis XIV, Memoirs (n.d.) 



294 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

about the four costly struggles that made France the warmonger nation for 
over a century and a half. 

The continued presence of lesser nobles and others in their old places, 
but without clear duties to perform, created friction and added to the confu- 
sion caused by rigid and complex rules. Besides, paperwork made for slow- 
ness, and as always, some officials were arbitrary and arrogant. Half a dozen 
years after the start of Colbert's system, the export tariff bewildered even the 
government agents, and honest merchants were forced to pay whatever they 
were asked/ 

The central bureaus were not indifferent to complaints; they applied 
remedies when made aware. But from the outset protests were heard about 
more than Colbert's plan. Attacks were aimed at the monarchical idea itself. 
They grew in volume and intensity as the years passed, their expression rang- 
ing from lists of grievances to theories of government and economics. 
Pamphlets, books, verses, and epigrams fed a public controversy, centered at 
first on the long trial of the disgraced Fouquet. Men and women of letters 
took sides, divided as deeply — so says the leading authority — as intellectuals 
were again by the Dreyfus case in the early 20C.° 

In the opposition to the monarchy, some bourgeois and nobles found 
themselves making common cause. Their cries of pain or anger, it should be 
noted, were not suppressed: there existed a genuine public opinion in word 
and print. Among its views were some heard as far back as the 16C. 
Merchants objected to high tariffs; aristocrats to the loss of "liberties." When 
Colbert put pressure on mercantile wealth to invest in state trading compa- 
nies, more protests ensued; but well-to-do nobles jumped at the chance, 
because doing so was declared no breach of the rule that an aristocrat "dero- 
gates" — loses his status — if he engages in trade. In the noble tradition only 
land is clean. 

Colbert also caused irritation by conducting an inquiry into titles, so as to 
ascertain who was truly exempt from taxation. Some of the verifiers collected 
bribes, the unavoidable accompaniment of inspection. The results threw 
doubt on the classification. With a bourgeois fortune one could buy an office 
that carried a title. All magistrates, forming "the nobility of the robe," owed 
their rank to that practice — and the title was inherited: such was the Baron de 
Montesquieu's. Again, some portions of land on the market carried a de but it 
implied no title — for example, the Seigneurie de Barzun in the Pyrenees, was 
for resale as late as this century/ In addition, kings and ministers had dis- 
tributed titles for special services, or for cash, or to ennoble royal bastards. 
For service, Colbert's son became Marquis de Seignelay. Saint-Simon's peer- 
age was of very recent creation, his father being the first duke. Finally, people 
of note, writers especially, assumed an implicit title by means of a de: Jean de 
Racine, Francois de Voltaire, Caron de Beaumarchais. Annexing the particle 



The Reign of Etiquette <^ 295 

was for convenience: these men had aristocratic friends; when calling on 
them, the visitor must give his name, and without the de he might be refused 
entrance or treated with contempt by the snob in charge of the front door. To 
sum up: in the 17C a de or even an explicit title was no sure sign that one's 
ancestor had fought by the side of Charlemagne/ 

Among those who felt oppressed by the two-headed monarchical sys- 
tem — by Louis at Versailles and by Colbert everywhere else — were the 
adherents of a theory that expressed a corporate sense of wrong. Saint- 
Simon's outburst about "a century of vile bourgeoisie" (<245) was con- 
signed to his secret memoirs (355>); but the Comte Henri de Boulainvilliers 
published a theory of race superiority that later played a part in the politics 
of nationalism and ultimately of National Socialism (671 >). 

Race as the word was then understood meant family descent. In common 
usage the kings of the Capet family were the "third race" of French kings. The 
great noble clans were each a race, and when all these were thought of 
together they formed the aristocratic race, distinct "by blood" from the bour- 
geois and the peasant races. The nobility was obviously the superior one: they 
had come out of the German forests and conquered the mixed race of 
"Gallo-Romans" who peopled France; they had remained fighters, masters, 
leaders of crusades, and had enjoyed power until the kings, betraying their 
own race, had made the kingdom a monarchy. 

In the process — the argument ran on — the liberties of the people had 
perished. The local assemblies had disappeared; the Estates General of the 
realm were no longer convened, the last dating back half a century (<246). 
Likewise, the privileges accorded to individuals by rank and to provinces and 
towns by charter had been eliminated. In a word, the constitution of France 
had been subverted. Every so-called reform, every regulation made plain the 
march of tyranny. A far-seeing thinker of the preceding century, Francois 
Hotman, had given warning in his Franco-Gallia (<247), though with different 
details and little stress on the idea of race. What was carried over was the 
dogma that the Germanic element in France is the bearer of liberty (>482). 

That the historical fiction was not buried with its obscure author may 
cause surprise. Two sources contributed to its survival and its spread beyond 
the dwindling circle of resentful aristocrats. For one, Montesquieu devoted 
many pages to it at the end of his Esprit des Lois, the influential rationale of con- 
stitutions. Published in the mid-18C, the book was in the hands of every well- 
read person in Europe and America. Earlier, Pierre Bayle had given Hotman 
favorable notice in his Dictionary (360>). In addition there was behind the 
"German race equals freedom" doctrine the indestructible Tacitus and his 
Germania (<9). Note in conclusion that Saint-Simon's "vile" bourgeoisie meant 
only that it was low, not vicious. The Gallo-Roman inhabitant of the villa, or 
settlement, started the "villain," on his downward course. 



296 <^*> From Dawn to Decadence 



* 
* * 



Moved by anger, ambition, and hard times in the mid- 1670s, a Chevalier de 
Rohan in Normandy organized an uprising with the aim of seceding from the 
realm and establishing an independent state. It was to be an aristocratic repub- 
lic. The organizers grouped themselves into two classes, the nobility and the 
people, who jointly swore not to lay down their arms until they had won the 
power to enact new laws, especially regarding taxation. The program was not 
exclusive: Protestants could be elected to assemblies and preside over them. 

The revolt was put down and the 

. ,,,,. . • • 1.1 * i_ leaders tried and executed. The king was 

Seeing the hardships and pitiable state of the ° 

people, to which the cruelty and greed of the at ** time undertaking his second war 

partisans [meaning Colbert and his aides] of annexation in the midst of poor har- 

have brought the kingdom internally and by vests, low prices, and a level of taxation 

evil or heedless counsel have created many above the people's capacity to pay. In 

enemies externally, the nobility and the peo- these circumstances, taxation did not 

pie of Normandy have pledged each other cause unrest in Normandy alone. It 

never to separate their interests, but to sacri- spurred a debate that brought into ques- 

fice their goods and their lives for the com- tion ^ fa c current ideas about eco- 

mon welfare. nomics. Why, for example, should the 

—Placard of the Republican nobles' ancestral tax exemption be con- 

CONSPIRATORS(C.1672) ^^ ^ & ^^ economy? Some 

writers put forward statistics; others 
tried to find fixed relations between the sources of wealth and the regulations 
of trade. These gropings pointed the way to the discipline that was first called 
political economy and later economics. The original name might well be 
revived now that the state is once more partner and regulator in business. 

What was surely unexpected by the monarchy was that men of strong 
religious views should enter the debate and side with the opposition. Yet it 
was not unreasonable for devout moralists to object to the increasing SECU- 
LARISM and to the behavior of a court whose confessors were the flexible 
Jesuits. This opposition, moreover, included thinkers who argued once again 
in the light of Reason and Nature. 

The religious who took this high ground were a group of solitaries named 
Jansenists, after the Dutch theologian Cornells Jansen, bishop of Ypres and 
author of a learned tome on St. Augustine. Their retreat was at Port-Royal, near 
Paris, where a convent for titled ladies was headed by a remarkable woman, 
Mere Angelique. She persuaded her son, Antoine Arnauld, to settle in the vicin- 
ity for meditation. Others joined him, and their friends, including Pascal, 
Fenelon, and Racine, became regular visitors, thus forming without prearrange- 
ment a group embattled against the political and religious orthodoxy. Inspired 



The Reign of Etiquette <^> 297 

by their talks, Pascal's devastating tract Letters from a Provincial summed up the 
Jansenist attack on the morals condoned by the Jesuits (<219), while Arnauld's 
polemics blasted the Sorbonne. This was only a beginning. In 135 volumes 
Arnauld set the world straight on theology, ethics, grammar and style, logic, and 
geometry. The good fight kept him alive to the then uncommon age of 82. 

Port-Royal thus became a significant institution in French history The 
19C critic Sainte-Beuve devoted years of research and eight volumes to delin- 
eating its character and achievements. Flaubert ridiculed him and the coterie 
by remarking how odd it was that a group of men who lived in common for 
30 years called each other Monsieur to the end. But that period style was in 
keeping with the tone of their creed. Like their master Jansen, they disbe- 
lieved in free will, were convinced of predestination like Luther, and like him 
trusted in efficient grace for their salvation. But despite these Protestant ideas 
and personal austerity they professed fidelity to Catholic dogma. They were 
nonetheless declared heretics by the pope. Some modern scholars have seen 
in their animus the start of the political dissent that split the country perma- 
nently into "two Frances," this, long before the radical division caused by the 
revolution of 1789 (432>). 

The link between Jansenist thought and that of the 18C philosophes is the 
cult of reason. The Jansenists regarded it as divine in origin and superior to 
prayer. Further, they took utility as a test of value. They believed that natural 
science led to important truths, since the laws of nature are an expression of 
God's will. Accordingly, the study of 

geometry trains the mind to reach the Going into a bookseller's shop, I asked for 
ultimate verities. This forward-looking Montaigne's Essays; he told me he had it not. 
blend of faith and science was recom- A young fellow standing by presently said: "I 
mended by Arnauld, Lamy, and— some have il at home " He told me he loved 
Jansenists affirmed— by St. Augustine. Montaigne's Essays because they were so like 

Complications do not end there. A St ' A"*™*"* Confessions. I kissed his 
,. , , c , hands and made an end of the story. 

dissenting branch of the movement 

took a different tack. Pascal, as we saw, ~ SlR WlLLIAM Temple ( 1652 ) 

imbued with the thought of Montaigne, 

deemed human reason wavering and fallible and urged unquestioning 

reliance on God, whose ways were unfathomable. Geometry was useful, of 

course, but its method stopped short at the mundane. 

These skeptical warnings, supported by arguments and references to the 

radical diversity of human opinion, were plainly another way of invoking 

Reason and Nature. The two Jansenisms illustrate to perfection the elastic 

strength of these twin ultimates of western debate. But of all the attacks on 

monarchism by men of religion the most direct (and ineffectual) was 

launched by 



298 <^s From Dawn to Decadence 

Fenelon 

Of noble lineage, an intellectual in holy orders, an eloquent preacher and 
writer, he served Louis XIV as tutor to his grandson and heir, the Due de 
Bourgogne. For his instruction Fenelon wrote some fables and a series of 

Dialogues of the Dead, and for a girl's 
Sire: For thirty years your ministers have vio- sch ° o1 a treatise on women's education. 
lated all the ancient laws of the state so as to In middle life he met a Mme Guyon, 
enhance your power. They have increased a mystic who made converts to her 
your revenue and your expenditures to the Quietism, the religion of pure piety, 
infinite and impoverished all of France for the free of ritual and clergy, that Boehme 
sake of your luxury at court. They have made had initiated in Germany during the 
your name odious. Protestant Revolution and there called 

For twenty years they have made the Pietism (<33). Fenelon, a fervent soul, 
French nation intolerable to its neighbors by wag attracted by the doctrine and 

bloody wars. We have no allies because we -, r i i • i 

de tended its author. 
only wanted slaves. Meanwhile, your people ,_,, r . . . . 

_ .. . . ,. , That act or loyalty was the beein- 

are starving. Sedition is spreading and you J J ° 

a a. .u i ~j •* a nine of his misfortunes. His friend, 

are reduced to either letting it spread unpun- & ' 

ished or resorting to massacring the people Bossuet, also a renowned preacher and 
that you have driven to desperation. writer, turned on him and worked at 

-Fenelon to Louis XIV (c. 1694) court and at Rome to have Rnelon 

condemned and disgraced. It took 

some time, for Fenelon had friends and 
the king thought him the "subtlest and most inspired thinker in the king- 
dom." On his part, Fenelon revered Louis, yet reprobated his conduct, pub- 
lic and private. About the time when Bossuet was forcing his heretical friend 
to recant, the friend was composing a "Letter to Louis XIV" denouncing his 
character and policies. 

It was anonymous, but the author of the unsparing words as of a father 
confessor must have been guessed. Fenelon was already renowned as one of 
the leading prose writers of the age. To his surprise, no doubt, the king's retal- 
iation was to make Fenelon Archbishop of Cambrai. But that did not stop the 
conspiracy against him, and by a mischance it succeeded: a secretary who was 
copying a new work of Fenelon's gave it out to his employer's enemies. The 
work was Telemaque, a fiction based on Homer. It contrasted the behavior of 
an upright prince — Odysseus 's son Telemachus — with the various agents of 
evil surrounding him. The work became a best-seller, being read as a satire on 
the court and the king. Fenelon was doomed. 

Since it would have been difficult to try him like a layman, he was con- 
fined to his bishopric. There he devoted his time and resources to the relief of 
the poor and the comfort of the afflicted. On the edge of the war zone, he did 



The Reign of Etiquette <^> 299 

so much good to both armies that the enemy generals gave orders to prevent 
their troops from foraging or otherwise harming the territory. 

Telemaque is a classic, which until lately French schoolchildren were made 
to read. The Dialogues of the Dead'v$> an early example of that genre, in which 
famous men and women are made to discuss perennial questions of morals, 
politics, and literature. But these two works do not give the full measure of 
Fenelon's remarkable mind. In his voluminous works — sermons, treatises, 
"letters" that are really essays — he draws a picture of the government he 
thought France should have: a limited monarchy with a written constitution, 
representative assemblies, and a strong aristocracy discharging important 
duties. There should be equality before the law, public education, the mutual 
independence of church and state; the liberation of agriculture and trade 
from oppressive burdens, and due respect to all who work — in shops, fields, 
or the lower ranks of the clergy and government service. 

Fenelon died in his place of exile a few months before the king died at 
Versailles. The next year a final "Letter" of Fenelon's came out, also radical in 
purpose. It was addressed to the Academy and dealt ostensibly with the ques- 
tion proposed by that body to its members: what should they be working at 
now that the dictionary had been completed? Some said: a French grammar; 
others, a rhetorie, a poetics, a theory of criticism. Read at a sitting before his 
death, Fenelon's answer was found so full of interest on so many more sub- 
jects than those proposed that it was scheduled for publication. Fenelon had 
just time to revise and make it into a small book of some hundred pages. It 
takes up grammar and usage, the nature of literary genres, the rules of poetry, 
the character of tragedy and comedy, the method of history, and the question 
whether the ancient writers are superior to the moderns. 

On all these topics, Fenelon criticizes the conventional view of his time. 
He is against the excessive "purifying" of the French language that kept exclud- 
ing words and idioms as "low," unfit for literature and polite conversation. 
Indeed, he wants to enrich the vocabulary by borrowing from foreign tongues 
and he encourages writers not to be shy about making new vocables and com- 
pounds. Arguments for EMANCIPATION appear throughout the "Letter." 
Fenelon wants preachers to be simple and spontaneous instead of formal and 
pompous. Poets are needlessly hampered by the French rules of versification; 
they should aim, like painters, at passion and truth in place of prettiness or 
bombast. And this goes for tragedy and comedy, where naturalness should pre- 
vail over affectation and thought-cliches. 

As to history, the need is for a treatise on the subject, because it is a dis- 
tinct genre that has not yet been recognized as such. Its importance is double: 
it is a work of literary art that records cultural change and it is a moralizing 
influence by its striking examples of virtue and vice. Discussing history leads 



300 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

easily to the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns which, as we shall see, 
had flared up twice in the preceding 15 years (348>). Fenelon knew his own 
mind, but having urged the historian to be impartial, he did not render an 
explicit verdict for one party or the other. This restraint was further justified 
by his being at that moment regaining royal favor as president of a national 
council on Jansenism. His long detachment from court affairs was a qualifi- 
cation: he would be the perfect judge. 

By then his long years as an admired writer made him the grand old man 
of French letters. Natively temperate and charitable, he took care not to rein- 
vigorate the disputants but to calm them down. He does not shuffle but 
balances the merits of the old and the new. The ancients were the great orig- 
inators. The moderns in imitating them should be able to surpass them. The 
best ancients were few in number and none perfect (as had been claimed), but 
then they were hampered by their imperfect religion and morals. Still, their 
capacity for the simple and the sublime deserves the highest praise. The mod- 
erns, Fenelon implies, have the opportunity to surpass if they adopt the lib- 
eral views he offers on usage, style, and the rules of the genres. 



The life of this extraordinary man takes us to nearly the end of the reign 
and at the same time to the end of Jansenism: the pope and the national coun- 
cil condemned it without appeal; its partisans died or submitted. Meanwhile 
another break in continuity had taken place in the court. When Louis was 45 
years old — with 32 years of life ahead of him — he experienced a change of 
heart. He was persuaded to discard Mme de Montespan, whom the Devil had 
promoted (<291), and he bestowed his favor on Mme de Maintenon, whom 
God evidentiy sponsored, for she was pious and used no black arts. Only 
Providence could have contrived for her an odyssey that defies probability. 

Franchise d'Aubigne came of a good Protestant family; her grandfather 
had been a friend of Henry IV, and she was born in prison during her parents' 
internment as heretics. Taken as a child to the island of Martinique, then back 
to France while still young, she became a Catholic in the convent where she 
was being educated. She was beautiful, of placid temperament, and very poor. 
At 17 she married Paul Scarron, a comic poet 25 years her senior, a hunch- 
back and a cripple. For him she presided over a salon of the best wits in Paris. 

Her next role, as a widow, was to bring up in secrecy the children of Mme 
de Montespan. When the king acknowledged and ennobled them, Mme 
Scarron came to live at court and soon received a piece of land at Maintenon, 
also ennobled for her benefit into a marquisate. From then on her influence 
steadily increased. Her first aim was to reform the king's morals and reunite 
him to the queen. Bishop Bossuet aiding, la Montespan was dismissed and 



The Reign of Etiquette <^> 301 

Mme de Maintenon installed in her place. The new marquise remarked that 
"nothing is more adroit than irreproachable behavior." She was 38 (therefore 
middle-aged) and in power. Her secret marriage to the king when a widower 
followed within a few years. 

Overnight the court had to change course; the sun now shone through 
dark glasses. Etiquette remained much the same, but social tactics were bur- 
dened with a new apprehension — how to express sufficient piety. For some, 
it was a vindication of good morals and sincere devotion. For the rest it was 
an exercise in hypocrisy, another and less merry form of playacting than 
before. The king himself did not always seem to Mme de Maintenon sincere 
in his conversion. With a character such as his — a manufactured character, so 
to speak — whose purpose was to maintain authority by living a role, it is likely 
that his turnabout was not so much to religion as to religiosity. What is certain 
is that his new wife nagged him, incessantly disapproving. After a time her 
entourage joined in this exertion of Christian charity for the sake of his soul. 

The work had practical results. The most fateful was the hounding out of 
France of its best artisans. They were Huguenots (Protestants), shielded from 
outright persecution by the Edict of Nantes, which Louis' grandfather Henry 
IV had promulgated almost a century before. Now to please God and Mme 
de Maintenon it was revoked. Conversion, exile, or death was the choice. As 
usual, the carrying out of the order was an exercise in horror and injustice. 
Bureaucrats and busybodies oversaw the operation. Local vendettas led to 
denunciations, the justice system was perverted. The dragoons were called 
out and indulged in the inevitable cleansing by massacre. 

The refugees settled in England, Holland, and in Prussia, where their 
industrious habits and respectable lives earned them a good reception and a 
livelihood. They contributed their expert skill in many trades. They and their 
descendants — Englishmen and women with French names — soon became 
prominent in every branch of activity. The same future awaited these dispos- 
sessed families in Prussia, where they developed a strong loyalty to the wel- 
coming authorities. They never forgot the benefaction: after the First World 
War, when the Kaiser lost his throne, the Huguenots of Berlin laid the only 
wreath on the shrine of the Hohenzollerns. 

At Versailles after the conversion, favors as well as policy were dictated 
by the king's secret wife or one of her coterie. Not all their decisions were bad. 
She induced Racine to write two plays for the school that she founded for 
well-born girls that were poor. But it was also she who maneuvered against 
Fenelon. At first, when the king consulted her on various subjects it was in 
the presence of his other trusted advisers; and she acted the modest partner 
who speaks not until spoken to; in the end, she initiated and directed as one 
in charge. 

This relationship suggests a variety of questions about the executive life. 



302 s^ From Dawn to Decadence 

You know how many princes, kings, and How is it best secured for public pol- 

republics have been saved, how many battles icy? Rulers, royal or republican, all have 

won, how many predicaments setded by the to take advice from one or more 

advice, counsel, and prediction of fools. No among their entourage, but rarely get it 

need to refresh your memory with examples. absolutely sincere. The adviser almost 

Take the fact for granted. always hag gome ^^^ interest ^ 

— Rabelais, Pantagruel (1532) deflects judgment. There is only one 

exception to this generality: the medieval 
and early modern fool. The post — the institution — of king's fool is a political 
device based on sound psychology, as well as on ancient religious belief. As he 
occurs in Shakespeare and elsewhere" the traditional fool is not quite normal; 
at best, his mind is like a child's, innocent, therefore truthful and sometimes 
inspired. His sallies are unexpected and amusing. This makeup, native or 

assumed, is essential to the profession 
Tycoon: "I need a man who can say <No> that the foo1 exercised for centuries at 
when I talk nonsense. Are you that man?" the side of kings. Much of the time he is 

Applicant for job: "No." ™ entertainer > the ) ester in ca P and 

bells; but at other times he says things 

— Current in Hollywood in the 1940s i i T 

nobody wants to near and nobody 

dares to utter. The wise ruler listens 

and benefits. But by the monarchical age, rationalism had progressed so far 

that it drove out the belief in the inspired idiot; he or his intelligent facsimile 

disappeared. There were women fools too: Queen Mary in 16C England had 

Jane Cooper, who was well paid and well treated and decently retired on a 

pension. The last thing Louis XIV wanted near him was a jester telling him 

and the court home truths. Gravity and a single source of wisdom were the 

strength of his system. His protecting Moliere therefore stands in need of 

explanation (344>). After the death of Colbert, lacking a minister truly bent 

on the public good, Louis XIV relied for advice on his wife and his father 

confessor. He forgot the maxims he had lavished on his heir. Physical ills 

added their tacit influence to make him more self-regarding than attentive to 

his people's needs. Finally, his fourth and last war, in which Marlborough 

repeatedly defeated the best French generals, concentrated Louis' mind on 

his relation to the Almighty. After one of the worst battles he exclaimed, 

"Why is God doing this to me?" 

* 
* * 

One can only guess to what degree Louis was conscious of the motives 
behind his policy of war. They were certainly mixed and not pure egotism and 
love of fame. He had been told by Mazarin that he must beware of Spain and 
the House of Austria. Spain was taken care of by making his grandson its 



The Reign of Etiquette q^> 303 



king, an alliance solidified by Louis' last A mighty king who, for the space of above 30 

war. A Bourbon is still king of Spain. yrs amused himself to take and lose towns; 

The struggle with the other powers beat armies and be beaten; drive princes out 

was rendered permanent by the prox- of their dominions; fright children from their 

imity of the two non-nations, the Ger- bread and butter ' burn > la ^ waste > P lunder > 

manies and the Italies. Their weakness dfa 8 oon ' massacre sub ' ect and stran S er > 
, , 11/- friend and foe, male and female 

made them temptations and therefore 

danger zones. Seizing even one region - SwlFT > "° N THE UsE OF Madness in a 

,, , i i , r Commonwealth," Tale of a Tub (1704) 

would change the balance or power, 

and its maintenance was the goal. 

Conquests for security upset that balance and war resumed to restore it. 

The domestic reasons for war were also strong. Keeping the nobles over- 
awed required that they should regard the king as their superior in all ways. By 
tradition they were warriors, lovers of danger, careless of life. He must be as 
in the past a knight in armor at the head of his vassals. The monarch as impre- 
sario of minuets and musicals was all very well, but he must also outshine the 
party-loving aristocrats at their former game. Now, Louis was not a soldier, 
much less a military genius; he could be a conqueror only vicariously. He 
therefore organized campaigns on the same plan as Versailles. He was present 
at the scene and exposed himself moderately to shot and shell in front of a 
select group of lords and ladies, well catered for, while their sons and broth- 
ers led the mercenary troops against the foe. 

A third necessity was to consolidate the nation. War has that effect natu- 
rally by creating a common goal, and victory heightens the effect. Since 
nation is an idea inseparable from continuous territory, annexing provinces to 
the east, north, and southeast of France would round out the shape of the 
country and make it so rich, so strong, so clearly top nation that no other 
could ever threaten it. This is the dream called universal monarchy. Its theory 
goes back as far as Dante, who wrote the treatise De Monarchia to expound it; 
its frequent recurrence shows the western passion for unity. With Christ- 
endom broken up by the Protestant Revolution, the nation-state was the 
form through which that passion found vent. Charles V also strove for unity, 
but had he succeeded, his scattered materials could have made only an 
empire. Henry IV, shortly before his death, had a "Grand Design," which 
may have been national or imperial; it remains ambiguous. By the mid-17C 
Louis XIV had a clearer idea and a better opportunity. But so had the 
Hapsburgs in Austria, and 200 years later Germany acted on the same plan. 

Whether Louis' success would have lasted if he had acquired what is now 
Belgium, made the Rhine his frontier, and added Nice and Savoy as they now 
have been, is doubtful. A popular feeling for national expansion was not fully 
developed. There was little awareness that fellownationals must have a com- 
mon language and uniform laws, must know enough to look back with pride 



304 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

to a common past, and must feel possessive, not rebellious, about their soci- 
ety. It is not possible to glue pieces of territory together and expect national 
fervor. 

Under Louis France itself had not achieved unity. He ruled over five 
kinds of districts called pays, which differed in status and privilege. Indeed, 
one kind bore the name of "pays considered foreign." Provence was one of 
these, the reason for the tide being a special tariff rate and other regulations. 
Further subdivisions differentiated regions under written law from those 
under custom; those that paid the salt tax from others that had bought 
exemption from it. Colbert had to thread his directives through the interstices 
of this conglomerate. Had the king really been Louis the Unopposed, as com- 
monly believed, he would have swept away these hindrances by fiat. 

As for the elements just cited that make for oneness of feeling, 17C 
France (and other nations) were wanting. When Racine, the poet and histori- 
ographer to the king, went to Uzes in the south, he could not understand nor 
make himself understood by the natives. In 1789, according to one observer, 
the Marseillais spoke no French. The Alpine region of Dauphine, with its 
capital Grenoble, which had been added to the crown in the 14C, continued 
for centuries to consider itself somehow independent — a kind of Texas. 
When crossing the border its people spoke of "going to France." (I heard the 
expression as late as the 1 920s.) Similarly in England, local dialects that per- 
sist create a sort of sub-nationality. And nearly everywhere today these old 
diversities are resurgent. The French government subsidizes the regional lan- 
guages and their teaching in the public schools. 

The paradox that the nation-state existed before the "nationalist nation" 
may be explained by the obstacles to communication. But it should be added 
that a monarch, being both a person and a simple idea, is a stronger unifying 
force than the abstract nation with elected rulers who are temporary. Hence 
the significance of the flag, the nation's one concrete symbol. When citizens 
burn it to make known their opinion and the law takes no notice, something 
must have happened to the nation-state. 

* * 

Despite the advantage that a living person has over an entity, Louis lost 
that personal allegiance as he lost his wars. He had learned that glory costs 
money, not sheer derring-do: "Victory," he remarked, "lies with the last gold 
piece." On his deathbed he was conscious also of his other sins of extrava- 
gance. When his shrewish wife blamed him for "leaving restitution unmade," 
he replied that he owed no private one to any one of his subjects, and as for 
that which he owed to his people, he "trusted in the mercy of God." 

The sun king went down without any lingering rays of glowing color. 



The Reign of Etiquette ^ 305 

Rather, the end of the reign recalled on a small scale the circumstances of the 
beginning: disputes among the powerful and resentment in the populace. 
Neither sorrow nor respect attended Louis' passing. Some half dozen 
courtiers went to the funeral at St. Denis, and although on the path of the 
cortege the people showed no hostility, they did show indifference. It was left 
to the satirical scribblers to stigmatize the departed in epigrams and qua- 
trains: "Our eyes were too full of tears during his life to leave us any for his 
death." 

The Regency that followed during the minority of Louis' great-grandson, 
the future Louis XV, took the usual course: relaxation after excessive strain. 
Saint-Simon and his friends had entertained high hopes of the Regent, the 
Due d'Orleans; he was uncommonly able but proved incurably lazy. Morals 
and manners plummeted into debauchery, corruption, misgovernment, and 
slovenliness generally (308 >). 

Yet the impetus that the monarch had given to the arts did not slacken. 
Styles changed but mastery remained steady. Nor was it visible only at 
Versailles. Louis failed in his try at universal monarchy, but without trying he 
conquered large territories outside France for French culture and the French 
language. As remarked earlier, the pressure of politics on intellect seems irre- 
sistible; it takes effect, as in this case, even between enemy nations. To judge 
the fruits of this peculiar form of empire will take us back to the start of what 
much later came to be called the ancien regime. 



Cross Section 

The View from London 
Around 17 1J 



The happy THOUGHT in the Londoner's mind as 1 71 5 came to a close was: 
Louis XIV is dead. The endless war had ended with a long-drawn-out treaty 
the previous year and now, the prime mover being gone, the conflict would 
surely not be renewed. Forty-six years of it, with three interruptions, was long 
enough. 

The cause had no doubt been dynastic ambition but beneath the claims 
and counterclaims, both sides — all parties — had the same purpose: to pre- 
vent the re-creation of Charles V's empire. France fought in Spain, Italy, the 
Netherlands, and Germany to capture as much there as could be got, but also 
to head off the Hapsburgs, who hoped to rule in all four places. The Dutch 
having gained their independence from the Spanish empire had no desire to 
lose it to a French one; and being unequal to the struggle by themselves, 
organized a grand alliance that finally joined in one anti-French coalition: 
England, Holland, Brandenburg, Portugal, and Savoy. 

By provoking this union Louis XIV had managed to bring on the first 
and second world wars, fought on three continents. The peace treaty allowed 
his grandson to occupy the Spanish throne, but there was to be no union of 
the two kingdoms in future. France lost Canada to Great Britain, which for its 
trouble and expense took Gibraltar from Spain, along with a contract to sup- 
ply African slaves to South America for 30 years. For the rest, most of the 
places won or lost by battle were restored to their former owners. The per- 
manent gain for Europe as a whole was the sovereign nation-state, and with 
it, the "European system" or balance of powers. Empire hereafter meant pos- 
sessions in other continents. 



308 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Associated in each country with this longed-for peace were particular 
changes in government and social attitudes. In France, the great-grandson of 
Louis XIV was too young to rule by himself and for eight years was under the 
tutelage of his great uncle, the Duke of Orleans. This regency, like the 
Restoration in England (355>), reversed the policies and pieties of which 
court and town were weary. It was symbolic as well as merciful that the 
regent's first act was to set free all the prisoners in the Bastille. The new mood 
not only replaced but condemned the old. 

At the same time it welcomed debauchery. The regent set the example. 
He had great qualities and did not neglect affairs of state but he was lazy and 
dissolute and unashamed. The grossness of the vice and its public display 
reminded observers of the time of the Fronde (<286), and to the extent that 
during the last years of Louis XIV the men and women at court were hyp- 
ocrites, the adulterers, gamblers, and drunkards, bribe-takers and plunderers 
of the regency were not a wholly new type. 

In this period of frankness, the masked ball at the opera was invented, 
thanks to a friar who suggested putting a removable floor in the large space 
to accommodate the revelers. The mask facilitated assignations and the 
crowd effect smothered self-restraint. Other festivities, such as the public 
shows and banquets when a new mistress was installed by the regent, made 
sexual license fashion as well as pleasure. The public knew too the exact price 
in grants and cash that the latest incumbent had received for her favors. 
Husbands took part in the bargaining, or tried to. The turnover was rapid, 
and yet die regent remained popular among women of all ranks. Only the 
ever-present naysayers spoke out in squibs and epigrams and lampoons either 
indignant or satirical. 

What was perhaps worse was that manners degenerated. From a polished 
courtier the regent turned into a foul-mouthed ruffian, and in this set the 
tone. With manners coarsened, feelings become promiscuous too; that is, no 
longer in proportion with the things that arouse them. Respect for oneself 
and others, friendship and fair dealing, disappeared, and the fiercer emo- 
tions — jealousy, resentment, revenge itself — were diluted in a common 
acceptance of all human relations as momentary and trivial. Only the force of 
social example remained unchanged. It is on record that some previously 
decent men and women, upon being appointed to certain posts, adopted the 
proper misbehavior so as to be in step with the elect. 

An innovation, an idea with a great future, made its appearance at this 
time. A very young man named Cartouche, trained as a soldier, gained imme- 
diate renown for his daring and success as a thief. He was arrested, escaped, 
and next invented the role of mastermind in crime. He organized bands of 
fellow professionals, male and female, recruiting even young noblemen who 
had talent and inclination. At a dinner party, a man who had been robbed on 



Cross Section: London <^> 309 

the way recognized the pair of practitioners among the guests. Cartouche was 
soon a hero to the populace. Adept at disguise, he was able to hold his own in 
good society. He headed a delegation to greet the Turkish ambassador and 
relieved him of the gifts intended for the court. While one band was working 
in Paris on the foreigners about to invest in the Mississippi scheme (321 >), 
another robbed the mailcoach from Lyon that carried treasure. 

His downfall came from treachery by an accomplice. Arrested again — it 
took 40 men to do it — Cartouche nearly escaped once more. The surprise at 
his trial was that he was so short. Earlier he had withstood hours of torture 
without confessing or incriminating his followers. But for some reason he did 
both later on, though without any chance of escaping the punishment of 
being broken alive on the wheel. His disciples — several hundred men, 
women, and teenagers — were executed in the same way or died under torture. 

It was understandable that Londoners should have a counterpart of 
Cartouche in Jonathan Wild (celebrated in novels by both Fielding and 
Defoe), because the police system was primitive. But Paris was expected to be 
much better served, thanks to Colbert (338>). What had happened there in 
40 years to let crime develop was that the city had grown in area and popula- 
tion and the relaxed manners and morals had loosened the discipline of the 
bureaus. The English statesman Bolingbroke, an exile in Paris, in a letter to 
his friends Swift, Pope, and Arbuthnot, speaks in praise of "the divine sci- 
ence, la bagatelle" The word means trifle, but with a wide application: it can 
refer to a modest meal or entertainment, to a loss of small amount, or again 
to an ephemeral piece of writing or a sexual encounter. Bolingbroke 's point is 
that life should be taken lightly and its little pastimes enjoyed to the full. 

* 
* * 

Closer to home, a concern of the year 1715 in London was a possible 
invasion of England by a force of French and Scots. Two decades earlier 
Charles IPs brother James II had been deposed, and his adherents were plot- 
ting his return. The English call the former the Glorious (and also the blood- 
less) Revolution. This is another historical misnomer. The change of kings 
was a coup d'etat. A small group of politicians invited to the throne the Dutch 
head of state William of Orange and his wife, Mary, daughter of the said 
James. The transfer was for the sake not of making a change in the govern- 
ment but of preventing one. James II had taken steps to reinstate Catholicism 
and given signs of doing without Parliament. The first of his moves to that 
end, curiously enough, was through a law of toleration for all religions. 

The "revolution" was thus reactionary, not in favor of a new idea but of 
a change of personnel in the old framework. Nor was it entirely bloodless. 
One need not be pedantic and cite James's nosebleed at a critical point, but 



310 q**> From Dawn to Decadence 

William had to fight the Stuart forces — Irish and French — in Ireland. His sol- 
diers' harsh suppression of the country, an echo of Cromwell's, is what gave 
the name of Orangemen to all later supporters of the English interest in the 
unhappy island. 

In 1715 the attempt at restoration in England failed after two skirmishes. 
Eight years earlier England and Scotland had formed a Union and the clans 
did not rise for James, despite their long association with France. Yet the 
English did not feel that their new arrangements were secure. "The '15" was 
in fact followed by "the [17] '45," which did entail battles. In between, the 
people continued to fear the Catholic menace at home and abroad. English 
Catholics were few, but the Protestants were split into two groups that were 
and have remained social castes, Anglicans and Dissenters. The latter were 
tolerated but subject to many disabilities, so that every topic was colored and 
often poisoned by the politics of religion. When shortly before 1715 the bril- 
liant journalist Defoe wrote "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters," recom- 
mending that they be totally uprooted, he incurred the wrath of both sides, 
the dissenters failing to see the irony. He was tried for seditious libel, jailed, 
and put three times in the pillory. But while in prison his "Hymn to the 
Pillory" made his position clear and during his public ordeal the London pop- 
ulace drank his health and pelted him with flowers. 

King William being a foreigner and from Holland, long the traditional 

enemy, had to endure attacks on the score of nationality. The sentiment was 

now conscious and it began to merge the idea of native with that of descent — 

nation and race, blood and soil. On this point Defoe defended the new king; 

his poem entitled "The True-Born Englishman" satirizes the notion that 

such a type exists. For this and other poems and pamphlets and especially for 

his Review, a one-man political journal, weekly at first and later thrice weekly, 

Defoe has been called the father of modern journalism. It would be more 

accurate to say political journalism. By 1715 most countries of the West had 

"journals," "gazettes," or "magazines" that supplied news, miscellaneous 

comment, or essays on moral and social topics, or all of these together. The 

press as an institution in several forms 

_, _ „ . , T t . _ was born between 1630 and 1650. It is 

The Romans first with Julius Caesar came, 

T , j. « - . - - , the pamphlet much reduced in size, 

Including all the nations of that name, r r ' 

Gauls, Greeks, and Lombards and by issued regularly at short intervals, and 

computation witn advertising added. 
Auxiliaries or slaves of every nation, The journalist developed into a 

[nine other peoples are cited] social type, exemplified in the London 

From this amphibious ill-born mob began of the years of our concern by Defoe, 

That vain, ill-natured thing, an Englishman Addison, Steele, Swift, and a large 

— Defoe, "The True-Born Englishman" group of lesser lights. Their common 

(1701) characteristic is allegiance to a political 



Cross Section: London ^ 311 

party. The press that attacks the government claims that it is working for lib- 
erty and justice, against corruption, and for the general welfare. The press 
that supports the government claims that it informs the busy or ignorant cit- 
izen about the complex activities of the men in power, all single-minded in 
their devotion to the general good. 

These rival advocacies are particularly useful under a mixed government, 
one with an elected assembly, a party system, and public discussion; under an 
absolute monarchy, the journalist must be heroic. But under both systems 
alike, censorship and the repressive use of the courts make journalism an 
adventure for the hardy. That may be why it has not setded into a profession; 
like its prosperity, its ethics vary with the degree of its political animus; Defoe 
and Swift, for example, wrote brilliant polemics for ministers of state, though 
they followed their conscience and switched parties when they disagreed with 
their patrons' policies. Defoe endured prison a second time and Swift lost his 
chance of becoming a bishop because of their opinions. 

Defoe's political activism included service as an intelligence gatherer. But 
Addison and Steele, who made their Tatler and Spectator famous as classics of 
English prose and as sources of social history, were political merely by ten- 
dency, not of set purpose, much less by employment. The ideal of the news- 
only journalist came late in the history of the press, and it did not last long 
(786>). 

What the journalists of every type see as their proper task is to form, with 
the help of rumor and current prejudice, what is called public opinion. 
Though the noun is in the singular, it is not one set of ideas. When relatively 
few could read, the influence of the press depended on those few being them- 
selves influential. The ideas of the masses were molded from the pulpit. 
Public opinion is thus a mob of jostling views that turn into a single one only 
under the impact of clear events. For the public as well as the journalist, the 
facts reported must be striking — scandalous or unexpected. For example, 
around our starting date here, Londoners learned that Thomas Britton, "the 
small-coal music man" had died. It was unusual that a man who sold small 
coal and delivered it himself should be an accomplished musician (and also a 
chemist), who held soirees above his shop, where the best performers, includ- 
ing Handel, were glad to take part. 

About the same time there occurred the strange affair of the poltergeist 
at Epworth. The Reverend Samuel Wesley, rector of that village in the fen 
country, lived with his large family in an isolated spot. Suddenly, the rectory 
was the scene of knockings and other unaccountable disturbances. So trou- 
blesome and persistent were the phenomena that members of the family 
wanted to move. But he was stubborn, especially against the Devil, who was 
obviously trying to dislodge him. The minister had been equally steadfast 
against his neighbors when they expressed displeasure about his views and 



312 q*& From Dawn to Decadence 

his pastoral care. It now seems probable that the poltergeist was the neigh- 
bors resourcefully trying to drive him away° They did not know (nor did he) 
that his sons John and Charles, both at Oxford, were brewing there a mixture 
of religious and social ideas that did not take long to become effervescent. 

Equally strange and not so easily explained away was the performance of 
the Orffyreus Wheel, which occupied for a number of years some of the best 
minds of the Royal Society and other learned bodies in Europe. Within a cas- 
ing shaped like a drum, a wheel three feet in diameter and four inches thick 
revolved when started by hand, then picked up speed, raised weights, and kept 
going — all this without any external source of power. The inventor, one Johann 
Bessler, who went by the name of Orffyreus, declined to say how this motion 
without motor was effected or how he had come to discover the principle. 
The mystery was a serious matter. Many educated persons were familiar with 
the new physics and believed perpetual motion impossible. The enemies of 
Orffyreus assailed him with the passion of the inquisitors against a heretic. 
He fought back and built three other wheels, larger than the first; the last 
lifted a weight of 70 pounds. He had a tided patron and never tried to earn 
money by his exhibitions. The correspondence on the subject is abundant 
and precise. There it was: experts had examined the sphinxlike machine and 
had shrunk back discomfited. No solution has ever been found. 

It was remarked earlier that scientific advances more often than not depend 
on instruments, whether common and ready for use or devised by the 
researcher. In return, the engineer takes advantage of theory when applicable 
and at times works side by side with another technician, the architect. These 
links are evident in the rebirth of civil engineering at the turn of the 17C. 
Newton's theory of gravitation aroused a desire to measure the earth with more 
precision. Out of it came the combined telescopic sight and spirit level of Mallet, 
a French military engineer. The existing instruments for surveying, measuring, 
and building — a panoply of rulers, compasses, protractors, proportional 
dividers, angle and level meters, surveying pins, rods and chains, micrometer, cal- 
lipers, the pantograph, and other "philosophical instruments" — were for the 
first time made the subject of an illustrated treatise. Their development explains 
how the notable roads, canals, bridges, aqueducts, waterworks, and harbor 
defenses of the period — not a few still standing — were built. 

In addition, war and preparation for war added to knowledge by the 
study and building of fortifications. During the dynastic struggles the critical 
batdes were often fought between besiegers and besieged. The fortresses 
around towns that were the gateway to a region were enormous works of 
engineering science and Baroque art (333 >). They consisted of trenches, 
walls, bastions, watchtowers, corridors, breastworks, and ditches filled with 
water. Geometry presided over the design — a succession of vertical angles 
and horizontal slopes — to magnify the difficulty of approach and entry and 



Cross Section: London <^> 313 

to minimize the effect of head-on gunfire. For cannon of that period did not 
fire shells and their horizontal shots did not go through earthworks. Siege 
artillery consisted of mortars and howitzers, pieces that lobbed stones or iron 
balls over barriers and did damage only where they fell. A fort could best be 
breached by sapping and blowing up the "works," and this was done when- 
ever conditions permitted. 

The leading artists in this architectural genre were the Hollander 
Coehoorn and the Frenchman 

Vauban 

The former was an intuitive practitioner, the latter a many-sided genius 
who developed theory and also directed construction on the spot. He could 
size up at a glance the features of a site that could be part of his design. He 
built 160 fortresses, never exacdy alike. They were made not only to hold out 
but also to last. Some of them played a role as late as the war of 1914—18. 

As a teenager he enlisted in the army, was wounded eight times, and rose 
to the double rank of marshal and chief miliary engineer. But he was no glo- 
rifier of war. When in charge of operations he did everything he could to 
reduce casualties and end the fighting. The contrivances of his fortifications 
had this purpose in view. When the encounter reached a certain stage he 
judged the situation like a chess player and advised surrender or retreat. For 
half a century he devoted his wisdom and his strength to the service of Louis 
XIV, his duties at times bringing him near physical collapse. As he wrote to 
the minister of war after tramping around works in progress, "in reviewing 
troops they march past you on their own feet, whereas not a single watch 
tower will stir an inch at my command." 

Vauban also supervised works of peace. His wide-ranging interests led 

him to study and promote plans for naval strategy, political economy, and 

national welfare. Saint-Simon, ever-vigilant on that last topic, gave a new, 

honorific meaning to a hitherto neutral word by calling him patriote.° When 

near his death in the first decade of the 

18C, Vauban was busy wrestling with T * * *. * *- *- *- t 

J ° I fear for the state of the monarchy when I see 

corrupt bureaucrats in charge of the ^^ made up of companies of chfldren 
royal tithe. or other p Qor ^^ e wretches who have been 
The man's tireless endeavors pre- snatched from their homes and subjected to 
sent a fourfold paradox that is an all kinds of ill-treatment and who are corn- 
emblem of his times: Vauban was ten- manded for the most part by officers who are 
derhearted, full of sympathy for both as badly off as they are — lodged like pigs, 
individuals and social groups, yet he half-naked and half-dead of hunger. 
worked at killing and destroying. He — Vauban to Louvois, minister of war 
opposed financial extravagance and (1675)° 



314 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

the weight of taxation, yet his fortifications were the biggest military expense. 
His genius was lavished on creating enormous structures for defense, yet the 
king's wars were all offensive and with this in mind Vauban devised an excel- 
lent scheme for overcoming strongholds with the least loss of life. Lasdy, he 
himself was always in command outside a fortress, never inside. [The book 
for laymen to read is Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne/ Readers keen on 
technicalities will enjoy the text and plates of The Fortress in the Age of Vauban 
and Frederick the Great by Christopher Duffy.] 



* * 

At a good distance from Europe's leading centers of intellect, in the uni- 
versity of Naples, one of the towering minds of the Modern Era was occupy- 
ing in 1720 an ill-paid chair of secondary importance and revising a large 
book. It was a seminal work, but the seeds produced no visible crop. Today, 
except to some students of the history of history and of the social sciences, 
the names of the man and his book remain unknown. That man was 
Giambattista Vico. Like Blake, Vico must be called a prophetic writer in that 
he said what his fellow geniuses said later on. Only, Blake's poetry can be read 
and enjoyed by the modern reader, whereas Vico's masterpiece is a closed 
book. The men of his stature found it open only when they themselves were 
doing or dunking what he foretold. 

The son of a poor Neopolitan bookseller, Vico grew up in dire poverty, 
he had wretched schooling, and only when industriously self-taught did he 
enter a circle of learned men and lively thinkers. They were debating 
advanced views, those of Gassendi, Bayle, Hobbes, Spinoza, and John Locke. 
The reigning philosophy was that of Descartes, interpreted to give method 
and logical demonstration authority over all human affairs; the Age of Reason 
was on the point of declaring itself to be such. Vico began his war of inde- 
pendence by opposing Descartes as dangerously incomplete. 

Without knowing anything of Pascal's two esprits (<220) — the Pensees 
were not yet a classic work — Vico made the same critique of Reason in dif- 
ferent terms: man is not all rationality and the other ingredient in his makeup 
is of equal worth with reasoning; indeed it is of immense importance. The 
purpose of Vico's objection differed from Pascal's religious concern, though 
both men took Christianity as the unquestioned truth to start from. What 
Vico aimed at was a redefinition of man's history and a new philosophy to go 
with it, so as to form a unified vision of man and the world. 

He performed this feat in a complex, ill-written work that he called La 
Scien^a Nuova — the New Science. He had difficulty getting it published, not 



Cross Section: London ^ 315 

on account of its defects but of its merits. (Bad writing, it is easily verified, has 
never kept scholarship from being published.) Vico saw mankind — nations, 
civilizations, cultures — as going through progressive stages from bestiality to 
high civilization and then sinking back into barbarism. To call the first stage 
bestial was an inkling of evolution and, of course, a heresy. 

Vico thus started the tradition of dividing history not by years alone but 
also by levels of culture that rise, stay fixed, or fall, or possibly rise and rise. 
From his studies he derived generalities and issued predictions. His most 
shocking one was that the second barbarism that engulfs civilization after it 
has reached its summit is worse than the first. The original barbarians possess 
rude virtues; the later have none left. He listed the marks of the second and 
how it came about. Crowded city life produces men who are unbelievers, who 
regard money as the measure of all things, and who lack moral qualities, par- 
ticularly modesty, duty to the family, and virile courage. Emancipated from 
ethics generally, they live by mutual spying and deceit. 

By this description Vico hoped to warn his contemporaries against what 
might befall. He had read and assimilated the facts of human action and social 
decay in Tacitus the historian and Machiavelli the political scientist. But The 
New Science dealt with other large subjects that he as it were invented and that 
are still of moment: the character of the state, the methods of anthropology 
and ethnology, the origin and role of social inequality (like Pascal, he had 
fallen in love with a woman of tide), and most provocative, the limits of 
Providence in shaping human history. Despite the religious and lay predesti- 
narians who are ever present, Vico committed himself to a second heresy, 
that men make their own history. 

Vico died near the midpoint of the The free peoples mean to shake off the 
18C, not isolated or desperately poor yoke of their laws and they become sub- 
but without the status and flattering ject to monarchs. The monarchs mean to 
attentions that he deserved. It is plausi- strengthen their own position by debasing 
ble to think that the strong sense of their subjects with all the vices of dissolute- 
history perceptible in whatever he ness, and they dispose them to endure slav- 

wrote is the reason why recognition ^ at the hands of stron S er nations ' The 

, . .... r . nations mean to dissolve themselves, and 

came to him at the beginning or the 

,. iii^^^t— xi- their remnants flee for safety to the wilder- 

history- wedded 19C. First, some Italian , ,.,,,. ■ 

J ness, whence, like the phoenix, they rise 

students of public law, then Goethe, again That wWch m ^ ^ was ^^ for 

Michelet, Auguste Comte, and a few men ^ it ^ mtelli gence; it was not fate, 

others admitted a debt to Vico for con- for they ^ d it by cho ice, not chance; for the 

firming their views. They did not stint results of their always so acting are perpetu- 

their adulation. Hegel and Karl Marx ally the same. 

presumably also read him and profited; _Vico, Conclusion, The New Science 

their works, though not their words, (1744) 



316 c ^> From Dawn to Decadence 

suggest it. A good deal later, anthropologists claimed him as one of their own. 
Today, one must ask several dozen well-read persons before any of them says 
he or she has heard of Vico. How many more would have to be asked before 
a reader of The New Science or the Autobiography was found and verified is a prob- 
lem in probability theory. 

* * 

London, unlike other European capitals, looks west as much as it does 
south and east, perhaps more; and in the early 18C, concern and curiosity 
alike drew its gaze to the distant west, where the colonies planted a century 
earlier were thriving. At the same time they were experiencing and causing 
trouble, for the usual reasons of trade and politics. The colonists wanted from 
England the manufactured goods they lacked the machinery to make for 
themselves. They obtained these goods by selling grain, dried fish, and other 
raw materials to southern Europe and the West Indies, in exchange for wine 
and other products that England would buy. This was the "triangular" trade. 
By a less roundabout route, New England bought Caribbean molasses (from 
sugar cane), distilled it into rum, and with it got slaves out of West Africa to 
sell to the West Indian sugar growers. When the English decided to tax the 
molasses for revenue, the price rose for the rum runners, and the political 
unrest every-simmering in the colonies boiled up once more. 

The size of the North American colonial population at that time is esti- 
mated at 1 62,000, but it was not a unified body; the links to the mother coun- 
try varied from colony to colony. When the original settlement had been by 
charter — akin to the statutes of a corporation — the colonists felt they lived 
under a constitution affording permanent privileges, such as an assembly. If 
established otherwise and subjected to a governor appointed in England, 
or if a governor was sent to supersede charter rule, the desire for self- 
government turned into rebelliousness. Add to this the democratic animus of 
the poor against the landed class that was part of the Puritan tradition (<265), 
and it is evident that colonial resistance to English rules and rule was inher- 
ent and incurable. 

It flared up in Bacon's rebellion against "aristocracy" in Virginia and it 
kept agitating New England until the English "revolution" of 1688 (<309) 
turned it into violence the next year. Charles II had hoped to rule the colonies 
by fiat and James II to make them into one unit for the same purpose, send- 
ing Sir Edmund Andros to govern it. The Bostonians, however, revolted, put 
Andros in prison, and restored the charter provisions that Charles had 
annulled. The struggle for American independence clearly dates from early 
days. "Virtual representation" of the colonials by members of Parliament 
wore out its credibility and would have done so sooner if Robert Walpole, 



Cross Section: London <^ 317 



It was now plainly affirmed, both by some in 
open Council and by the same in private con- 
verse, that the people in New England were 
all slaves, and the only difference between 
them and slaves is their not being bought and 
sold. 



Anonymous, On the Rebellion 
Against Governor Andros (1 689) 



Whig prime minister during the second 
and third decades of the 1 8C, had not 
chosen the colonial policy of salutary 
neglect. 

American sentiment on politics 
and economic class could seldom be 
completely radical. The hostile pres- 
ence of the Indians, the French, and 
the Spanish had a sobering effect, and 

colonial troops willingly took part on American soil in the European wars 
that they called King William's and Queen Anne's — the names show loyalty 
rather than deny responsibility. The status quo was also buttressed by the 
churches, although religious attitudes did not remain unchanged. In the last 
decade of the 17C Massachusetts enacted toleration for all except Catholics; 
Pennsylvania and Rhode Island enjoyed it without restrictions. And as sug- 
gested earlier, the witch trials at Salem in that same decade were manifesta- 
tions not so much of religious belief as of a curious kind of psychiatric science 
(<213). 

Besides differing in class, wealth, and religion, the 162,000 were divided 
also by status and origins. The African slaves were property and lived under 
special laws. Above them were indentured servants — men and women who 
had obtained passage as immigrants on condition of serving a master for a 
stated number of years. There were also what might be called "contract 
wives," women brought over as willing to supply a deficiency and hoping to 
better their lot. ° 

The remaining layers of the population belonged to the ranks observed 
in the mother country, whichever it might be. It is a backward illusion to think 
of the United States as founded wholly by freedom-loving English yeomen, 
full of love and tolerance for one another. The emigrants were English, and 
also Welsh, Dutch, French, and German. A large Scotch- Irish immigration 
was beginning at the time surveyed 
here; and already a complaint was 
heard that newcomers (to Georgia, just 
then being setded) were of lower char- 
acter than their predecessors. 

The leading cities were Boston and 
Philadelphia, each of about 12,000 
souls, and New York, with only 5,000. 
Three new ones were founded by the 
French: D'Etroit, Mobile, and New 
Orleans; and another by the Spanish: 
San Antonio with its mission, the 



Those that went over were chiefly single 
men, who had not the encumbrance of wives 
and children in England. Such as had left 
wives in England sent for them; but the sin- 
gle men hoped that the plenty in which they 
lived might invite modest women without 
any fortune. The first planters were so far 
from expecting money with a woman that 
'twas a common thing for them to buy a 
deserving wife at the price of £100. 

— Robert Beverley (1705) 



318 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 



I am forced to work hard with axe, hoe, and Alamo. But founding cities was not the 

spade. I have not a stick to burn but what I common goal. The prevailing social 

cut down with my own hands. I am forced to typ e was the frontiersman who must 

dig a garden, raise beans, peas, etc., with the earn a living by facing the wild in all its 

assistance of a sorry wench my wife brought forms— rugged country, animals, and 

with her from England. Men are generally of ^^ The vkme q£ self _ reWe) 

all trades and women the like within their , . . 

later eulogized by Emerson, was thus 
sphere, except some who have slaves. ? . 

embedded in the national ethos by sim- 

-THE REVEREND JOHN URMSTONE (1711) pk necessity . ^^ undef ^ pressure 

of machine industry and increased 
population, the ideal eroded and was gradually replaced by its opposite. 

Under these harsh conditions, American culture in the high sense was 
sparse. The output of poetry was negligible, although in the late 17C 
Benjamin Thomson wrote an epic, The New England Crisis, and Anne 
Bradstreet imitated at length the Franco-English best-selling poet Du Bartas.° 
She started the tradition of imitating English models that lasted till the end of 
the 19C. Prose writers on secular subjects, such as the historian of Virginia 
William Byrd, had the advantage of having fresh and picturesque subjects. In 
New England the reflections of a lifetime gave unique merit to Judge Samuel 
SewalTs Diary. 

In painting, the lack of places where one could train or copy had the for- 
tunate effect of producing primitives, chiefly portraitists, who are now the 
envy of modernists and the joy of collectors. Music, largely for religious uses, 
drew on English hymns and other tunes, and for the rest consisted of folk 
songs, also imported — there was no reason to break the continuity. But out of 
this material, the musically gifted, largely self-taught, fashioned variations and 
creations as original in their faults as in their spirit. Sometimes the American 
composer's dramatic intention succeeds by innovative means that the 20C in 
the person of Charles Ives would not disown/ 

The demands of practical life pointed cultural energies in other directions. 
Schools had sprung up early, and Harvard College — a sort of high school — 
was established within a decade and a half of the Pilgrims' landing. More truly 
collegiate studies came at the turn of the century with the College of William 
and Mary (honoring the new sovereigns) and Yale, originally the Collegiate 
School at Saybrook, Connecticut. It was transplanted to New Haven 17 years 
later, thanks to a benefactor named Elihu Yale, then serving the East India 
Company in Madras. From there he sent the college goods to sell and books to 
keep. At all three colleges it was not unusual for students to enter at the age of 
13 or 14, a good many of them planning to become churchmen, like their 
teachers. Society had not yet discovered the need to equip everybody with an 
academic degree as the ticket of admission to a well-paid job. 



Cross Section: London <^ 319 

While the English colonies in America remained well short of being a 
nation — a unifying plan by William Penn had no more success than the fiat of 
James II — another people at the other end of Europe was being coerced into 
a likeness of the real thing. The Russian czar Peter came to power at the age 
of 1 7 in the year when William of Orange became King of England. Both had 
to assert their authority against resistance, but Peter had the further task of 
forging a modern state. He had the help of two West Europeans, Lefort, a 
Swiss, and Gordon, a Scot. But he himself felt his ignorance of the western 
model and set out to see it for himself. At the turn of the century he went 
incognito to the Netherlands, worked there in a shipyard; then to France — 
this time appearing in his own name and style — and finally to England, once 
more incognito. 

He learned fast, and wisely recruited helpers for his scheme of bringing 
Russia at one jump to a cultural level with the Occident. It proved much more 
difficult than he had expected. He could, and did, cut off beards and heads 
and issue edicts. He built a new capital city, Saint Petersburg; he imported for- 
eign books and made French the language of the court; he founded an 
Academy of Science — but for decades all its members were foreigners, owing 
to a lack of native candidates. And the 

country's 500 wealthy families lived as By our feats of arms we have emerged into 
before on vast estates, holding from the light of day. Even those who still do not 
100 to 5,000 "souls" (= serfs). Such know us, give us respect. 
was the elite soon to be esteemed — Peter the Great (1714) 
abroad for its high cultivation, chan- 
neled through an acquired knowledge of foreign tongues. In the rest of the 
population, even when emancipated in the 1 9C, ancestral ways persisted. The 
men whom Peter took on his tour of the West gave their hosts a fair idea of 
those ways: they were steadily drunk and uncouth and gave the name 
Muscovite a connotation it never lost. 

Even now, western capitalists who hope to do business on a large scale in 
Russia are frustrated by habits that antedate the Soviet regime. The acclaimed 
writer and former exile Solzhenitsyn condemns Peter for the brutality of his 
reforms, estimating that a million Russians died or were driven out between 
1719 and 1727.° The critic goes on to ask whether Russia will survive as a 
nation. Perhaps it never was one. The question these days can be asked about 
other states. In Peter's time there is no doubt that the nation as a political 
form was solid along the Atlantic seaboard of Europe, but weaker as one 
moved eastward. Though recognized as independent units, Switzerland and 
Holland (officially the United Provinces) were not yet tight-knit, and the 
Scandinavian countries had not separated into the present threesome, 
Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. In the true nation-states there was an excep- 



320 <^s> From Dawn to Decadence 

tion to fully national consciousness: the military. During the wars of the 17C 
French troops fought for the Dutch against France, and German troops for 
France against the rest of Europe, with a scattering of other nationals shifting 
sides and sites according to mercenary opportunities. 

* * 

The Londoners who heard of Peter's visit were not limited to that bizarre 
event for the satisfaction of their curiosity. An extraordinary spectacle across 
the Channel was keeping the public rooted in suspense as if at a play. It ran for 
about a year and a half and was also connected with America, if only by a 
thread. This was the Mississippi Bubble. Its creation and collapse were in 
large part the work of circumstance. As will be remembered, the regency that 
followed the death of Louis XIV faced bankruptcy. The state owed about two 
and one-half times the amount it raised in revenue, a sum that barely covered 
the expenses of government. The situation provoked an outcry against the 
tax "farmers." They were made to disgorge their illicit surplus and one was 
put to death. But the money recovered volatilized on the way to the treasury 
at the hands of the regent's favorites and his friends' fine ladies. On that typ- 
ical scene appeared 

John Law 

He was a Scot of middle age who combined the life of an adventurer with 
a genius for finance. The son of an esteemed goldsmith and banker in 
Edinburgh, he was apprenticed to the firm at 14. He worked hard and learned 
much, but living in London after his majority, he became a gambler and man 
about town. He was tall, handsome, of alluring address. In a duel over a 
woman, he killed his man and was convicted of manslaughter but allowed to 
escape. His travels abroad took him as far as Hungary and Venice. He became 
an expert on European trade. Years before, he had proposed to the Scottish 
Parliament a scheme by which a bank would issue notes backed by the value 
of land and would thus stimulate trade. The scheme was turned down. 
Submitted next to Louis XIV it met the same response. Returning to France 
during the regency's critical days, Law quickly won the regent's friendship and 
trust and proposed his bank scheme once more, with success. 

Promptly chartered, Law and Company founded a central bank with 
branches in several provinces. It issued shares on such terms that they were 
soon taken up. Trade and industry revived and the notes gained 1 5 percent in 
value. Paper money was being for the first time established as common cur- 
rency and found preferable to metal, because governments had the habit of 
re-coining and devaluing silver and gold. This success led to the formation of 



Cross Section: London q*& 321 

the Mississippi Company, whose shares were to earn dividends from trade, 
first with Louisiana and soon after with the Indies. On the strength of Law's 
reputation, thousands rushed to subscribe and the value of the stock rose 120 
percent. Only two public figures held out: Saint-Simon and the Marshal of 
Villars. The common people risked their savings in hopes of a fortune. 

At this high point Law made his great mistake. He let himself be per- 
suaded by the authorities to issue more shares. The country drowned in 
paper, coins grew scarce, and trade was hobbled. Some 6,000 men were 
enlisted or coerced into leaving for Louisiana to perk up trade and profits, 
and an edict forbade anyone's holding more than a small amount of metal 
currency. This last measure set off a panic. A rush on the bank smothered 1 5 
people to death. M. de Chirac, a physi- 
cian, frightened nearly out of this Here Hes the Scot of world-wide fame 
world a patient whose pulse he was For counting anything you please. 

taking by murmuring to himself, "It's Thanks to his skillful numbers game, 
going down, down, down." Law and France has a terminal disease. 

his family were mobbed; many wanted —Anonymous French squib 
him hanged. Satirical verses and epi- 
grams went the rounds. 

Law acknowledged his mistake but was treated generously by the 
regent — given money for future expenses and allowed to leave for Italy. He 
returned to England after obtaining a pardon for his homicide and ended his 
days in Venice poor and dishonored. Since then and as recentiy as 1996, he 
has been regarded by some economists as a pioneer in the arts of credit and 
banking, whose misstep was due to unescapable pressure by ignorant gover- 
nors. 

The English observers of Law's rise and fall had no call to feel superior. 
Some half dozen years earlier they had embarked on a scheme devised by the 
chief minister, Harley, to restore public credit. This was the South Sea 
Company, financed by shares anyone could buy. The beginnings were favor- 
able, for the plan was sound enough. But when news of Law's early success 
reached England, the directors of the company over-extended themselves 
and speculation started. Parliament wrangled over measures to help or hin- 
der; except for half a dozen peers, the only statesman to oppose further devel- 
opment was Robert Walpole. 

While legislation was pending, innumerable companies were formed and 
"went public." Most of their stated purposes were absurd on sight — every- 
thing was to return huge profits, from "rebuilding houses throughout 
England" to trading in hair and teaching the theorbo (a lute with two sets of 
strings). These enterprises rapidly turned into bubbles and vanished into the 
same thin air as Law's. But in England there was punishment and some resti- 
tution from profiteers. Gibbon the historian gives in his autobiography an 



322 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

Some in clandestine companies combine, account of his grandfather's role as a 

Erect new stocks to trade beyond the line, director of the South Sea Company. 

With air and empty names beguile the He was arrested and fined nearly 

town > £100,000. But Parliament left him 

And raise new credits first, then cry them 10>000> wkh whkh he buik another 

own ' fortune and thus afforded his grandson 

— Defoe the l e i sure to write one of the world's 

masterpieces. 
Subscribers here by thousands float The schemes ta ken all together 

And iostle one another down, i i i i i ^ r ^ i i 

' had a double result tor the advanced 

Each paddling in his leaky boat, 

. , , , _ , . t , , . nations of the West: banks, credit, 

And here they fish for gold — and drown. 

insurance (Lloyd's was booming), a 
national debt, a stock exchange, and 
speculators were now permanent insti- 
tutions. Paper money circulated but remained suspect for another 100 years. 
Said the poet Peacock in the early 1800s: "Experience seems to settle/That 
paper is not metal." But as early as 1710, Swift's piercing eye had seen the irre- 
versible social and cultural transformation: the new men of importance are 
"quite different from any that were ever known before the Revolution [of 
1688]; consisting of those . . . whose whole fortunes lie in funds and stocks; 
so that power, which . . . used to follow land, is now gone over into money." 

* * 

As journalists Swift and Defoe not only wrote for opposite political par- 
ties, but were also far apart in status. Defoe with his Review was a "con- 
temptible scribbler," popular with the dissenters and the London mob; Swift 
was an Anglican clergyman, ultimately Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in 
Dublin. He hobnobbed with ministers of state and so forceful were his advice 
and propaganda that he could boast of having ended the next-to-last 
European war with his pamphlet The Conduct of the Allies. 

But as creators of enduring literature the two men stand level. Defoe cre- 
ated a classic type of story all his own: he made actual events into fiction that 
read like history — The Journal of the Plague Year, The Year of the Great Wind; and 
of course Robinson Crusoe. The first relates the calamities London endured just 
before the great fire of 1666 sanitized the city by destroying 400 acres at the 
center; the second describes what happened in 1 709; and the last tells how the 
solitary sailor hero survived, like Alexander Selkirk marooned on Juan 
Fernandez, off the coast of Chile. These works are not the same as Scott's 
later invention, the historical novel; they are what is often believed to be a 20C 
genre called the non-fiction novel/ Defoe also wrote picaresque tales — Moll 
Flanders, Colonel Jack, and others detailing a character's hard life and shady 



Cross Section: London <&> 323 

expedients, all imaginary but undoubt- I am most entertained by those actions which 
edly based on facts observed. These give me a light into the nature of man. 

stories also have the ring of reportage. Daniel Defoe 

Defoe's genius consists in the power to 

show rather than tell. The flat fact is there before you, and the moral obser- 
vations sound like the neighbors commenting. This cunning eclipse of the 
author is achieved by a style that is transparent and brilliandy undistinguished. 
Remarks of a very different order are called for when we come to 

Swift 

First one must clear the air of the conventional catchwords, namely that 
he was a misanthrope and a misogynist obsessed with scatology, and more- 
over a bigoted politician who never got over his failure to be made a bishop 
and died mad. Far from being a hater of mankind, Swift deserves to be called 
a philanthropist of the most practical kind. Throughout his life he went out 
of his way to help those who approached him for help — men and women, 
young or old, with or without talent. When in Dublin he put his whole heart- 
and-mind into defending the Irish people against England's economic 
oppression. His relations with "Stella," the woman he cared for from his ear- 
liest youth, were tender and protective; he had taught her when she was a 
child and both were part of Sir William Temple's household. Swift appreci- 
ated his patron coolly, but warmed to the personality of Lady Temple, known 
to fame as Dorothy Osborne, the sprighdy letter writer. The misanthrope, 
niggardly with his affections and good actions, acts otherwise. 

But what of Swift's epitaph, written by himself, which speaks of the "sav- 
age indignation" that he no longer will have to feel in the hereafter? The word 
savage is true but the key word is indignation — the feeling of outrage on seeing 
injustice. It can be a cheap feeling, indulged right and left to seem virtuous. It is 
warranted only when the case is clear and the object of one's sympathy deserv- 
ing. The object for Swift is the individual human being. "All my love is toward 
individuals — -John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth." But men acting as groups — 
"all nations, professions, and communities," he "hates and detests." And he 
adds, "not in Timon's manner," meaning not taking to the woods as a hermit. 
Man the animal and his mass behavior is what calls forth Gulliver's recurrent 
epithet of "odious." The tribal name Yahoo, which he invented, wonderfully 
expresses human brutishness. 

This careful compound of love and hate is not peculiar to Swift. What have 
religious prophets, poets, philosophers, thoughtful men and women done 
through the ages but express love toward the lovable and dismay and horror at 
what history records of Man collectively? Swift had more than the usual rea- 
sons for his strictures: he passed his whole childhood in wartime. On an imag- 



324 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

inative mind (as I can testify) the impression is indelible. Then in adulthood 
Swift lived in a period, first of continuous disarray in government, and next of 
unabashed political corruption. Close to the powerful, he was privy to the jeal- 
ousies, betrayals, and injustices of day-to-day politics. He could feel nothing but 
disgust. To be a lover of humanity en masse requires a sedentary life at a great 
distance and an exclusive devotion to abstract ideas. The hearty Defoe himself, 
at the end of Crusoe's adventures, has telling scenes of what happens when a 
few sailors land on the island. It is paradise lost. 

Under the stress of experience 

., .,,.,,,. . Swift became a satirist, his natural mode 

He was perfectly astonished with the histon- 

cal account I gave him of our affairs during of literary expression being irony. Hence 
the last century, protesting it was only an The Tale °f a Tuh > Gullmr > The Battle °f the 

heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, Books, The Modest Proposal (that the Irish 
massacres, revolutions, banishments, the should raise infants to sell to the 
very worst effects that avarice, faction, English as food), and a stream of short 
hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, mad- pieces on topical subjects. In these 
ness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, or ambition same pieces, including the series on 
could produce. I r j sn affairs, Swift, dropping irony, is 

— The King of Brobdingnag frequently a farsighted political theorist 

reported by Gullliver anc j an astute economist. In still others, 

he preaches a sincere but temperate 
religion. The rest of his output discusses manners, language, and literature. 
He sides with the ancients rather than the moderns. His letters to men and 
women writers, the quasi-diary called Journal to Stella, his epigrams, riddles, 
and occasional verse show that in his hands topicality is compatible with per- 
manent interest. 

The third voyage in Gulliver — to Laputa, the Floating Island — deserves 
special attention for its early depiction of SCIENTISM, the attempt to use sci- 
entific method in domains where it does not belong. The Laputans have an 
Academy where "projectors," stuck on one idea, work for years in vain. They 
toil to extract sunbeams from cucumbers and seal them in bottles; they want 
to replace silkworms with spiders and endeavor to make clothes by trigonom- 
etry. That Swift was no enemy of progress, science, or invention is shown by 
his famous maxim that the greatest benefactor of mankind is he who can 
make two blades of grass grow where one grew before. But make-believe 
never escaped his lash. 

Remains his poetry and the scatology question raised by the Celia poems. 
In the first place, the use of scatology for social argument is not Swift's inven- 
tion; it is as old as Aristophanes — and Rabelais came before Swift. Nor was 
Swift the only writer of his own day to resort to it.° Celia, Chloe, and the oth- 
ers stand for the contemporary beauty verbally adored by the swains and son- 
neteers. After parodying the conventional praise of the nymph's body, Swift 



Cross Section: London ^ 325 

administers the reader a shock by a reminder of the body's natural functions. 
In one poem the aids applied to face and physique are detailed to reveal the 
natural creature. Swift was unmasking both the pastoral myth of the angel in 
human form and the civilized myth that sexual appeal depends on accou- 
trements. He wanted his contemporaries to accept men and women in their 
human shape and skin, womanhood neither distilled nor camouflaged. As to 
the civilized mode, one suspects from many remarks about cleanliness that 
Swift was more sensitive than most to the effluvia that his century's minimal 
hygiene, coupled with elaborate clothes, made usual at social gatherings. 

Swift's verse proves him a true poet. His imagination is endlessly fertile 
and astonishing. His diction is plain, often colloquial, and free of the ready- 
made in phrasing as in ideas. [The poem to read is his apologia, "On the 
Death of Dr. Swift." ] The man who early in life had declared his love of "the 
two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light" died not of insanity but 
of what was possibly Alzheimer's disease/ 

* 
* * 

In poetry Swift was no innovator. He acknowledged a superior to whom 
he submitted some of his work before publication. This was Alexander Pope. 
The style that both cultivated had been attempted earlier by minor poets ° and 
brought to perfection by Dryden, who died in the last year of the 1 7C. The 
characteristic of the new style was its declarative, matter-of-fact diction. It 
rejected both the Elizabethans' high evocative rhetoric and the involuted 
symbolism of the Metaphysicals who came next. Pope and the other 1 8C 
poets were not merely content but proud of being sensible. This called for 
discoursing without raising the voice; their subjects were too important to 
risk using far-fetched metaphors. Order was further ensured by adopting as 
the chief medium the ten-syllable iambic line riming in pairs, the heroic cou- 
plet. It proved the philosophic couplet par excellence. 

When, after 50 years and miles of carefully counted syllables had been 
written, some poets and critics rebelled, they called those works not poetry 
but metered prose in snippets of equal length. Thus does the whirligig of taste 
bring in his revenges. Today, when much that is offered as poetry is not only 
prose cut up irregularly but bad prose, denying the name of poet to Pope and 
his "Augustan" followers would be shameful. But what makes the 1 8C style 
poetry? Compression of thought and feeling in fluent phrasings that rein- 
force the clear meaning. Pope recommended the use of words that echo the 
sense — loud and harsh ones when describing the rough or violent aspects of 
nature. The belief that the sound of certain words echoes their meaning is a 
fallacy, but Pope's adopting it shows that he and his peers were not indiffer- 
ent to the sensuous in poetry. Nor are the sounds they worked with quite the 



326 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

same as the ones we hear in their works. Pronunciation has changed, which 
makes many of Pope's rimes bewildering. The 18C gentry "drank tay out of 
chainey coopps and went to the city of Room to spend their goold there" — 
and so on, according to qualified scholars/ 

A clinching point in favor of these poets is that their tone fits perfecdy 
the sober subjects they chose — A.n Essay on Criticism and one On Man; The 
Rape of the Lock, 2. mock epic; The Dunciad, an attack on bad poets — these 
works all by Pope; The Vanity of Human Wishes (Johnson); The Deserted Village 
(Goldsmith); The Seasons (Thomson); Grongar Hill (John Dyer). This last and 
others of the kind were prized for exact description rather than unexpected 
thought, and so were the openly informative such as Grainger's Sugar Cane. It 
should also be remembered that all long poems, whatever the period or the 
style, cannot help containing prosy lines. "To be or not to be, that is the ques- 
tion" does not give the thrill of lyric flight; it simply serves its purpose where 
it occurs. The Augustans, from Dryden on, were by no means deaf to 
Shakespeare's other tones. Pope published an edition of the plays in 1725 and 
took the trouble of adding an anthology of the "beauties" by way of educat- 
ing readers in the old-fashioned style. But when one of Shakespeare's plays 
was occasionally staged, it had to be extensively improved by professionals of 
the theater, and even then the need was felt for additional entertainment, such 
as performing bears between the acts of KingLear 

The living theater was supplied by 
Of all English poets Shakespeare must be the prolific pen of Colley Cibber, aided 
confessed to be the fairest and fullest subject by Addison, Nahum Tate, Susannah 
for criticism, and to afford the most numer- Centlivre, and the late Aphra Behn. 
ous as well as the most conspicuous Cibber producd as well as wrote, and 
instances both of beauties and faults of all ^ very rea dable autobiography gives a 
sorts - colorful account of the stage world of 

—Alexander Pope (1725) his day. It had fully recovered from not 

only the Puritans' apprehensions (<189), 
but also from a strenuous attack during the Restoration. Yet producers and 
public lacked the wit to appreciate the dramatic talent of young Henry 
Fielding. His Tom Thumb the Great, the Tragedy of Tragedies shows he understood 
theater. By good fortune, the rejection of his comedies turned his genius else- 
where and he created the modern novel (352; 380>). 

More lasting than the plays that Londoners attended in the first quarter 
of the 18C, were the operas, native and imported. The genre had begun to be 
cultivated at the wane of the English school of madrigal composers (<161); 
their power of dramatic expression leading naturally to works made up of airs 



Cross Section: London <^> 327 

connected by spoken dialogue and prefiguring opera. The form was then 
reaching its full power with Monteverdi in Venice (<174) and England had 
his equal (musically speaking) in the quasi operatic creations of Henry 
Purcell. His King Arthur and Dido and Aeneas still enchant opera-goers today. 
Then came, by way of Italy, France, and Germany, opera as we know it, sung 
throughout, the connecting tissue being recitative. The first English import 
was the German musician Georg Friedrich Handel, soon followed by the 
Italian Bononcini. Handel became a fixture, changed his name to George 
Handel (without umlaut and pronounced handle} , and for the next 40 years 
composed prodigiously for state, and church, and the king's pleasure on the 
river Thames. 

This courtly endeavor, the famous Water Music, celebrated the coming of 
the King of Hanover to the throne of England as George I in 1714. But 
Handel had made himself known a bit earlier by his comic opera Rinaldo and 
next by a Te Deum in honor of the treaty that ended the long war (<307). The 
later works were of the genre known as opera seria — serious opera — on sub- 
jects taken from mythology, legend, or history: Orlando, Tamerlano, Giulio 
Cesare, Radamisto, Agrippina, and half a dozen more. (But note that Xerxes is 
not about the Persian king) 

The main interest in these productions was the music, particularly the 
vocal parts, which were given to famous, highly paid divas or castrati. The 
composer's task was to give dramatic force to the words of an unobtrusive 
libretto consisting of lyrics and dialogue. The result was a regular seesaw of air 
and recitative. The pleasure came from the virtuosity of the performers and 
the composer's rendering of a given passion — love, jealousy, hate, deceit. Plot 
and action were negligible, sometimes absurd, and character secondary or 
non-existent. No large ensembles or choruses interfered with this ANALYSIS 
of feeling; it was the musical parallel of neo-classical tragedy (342>). By con- 
trast, the contemporary French opera was pure Baroque entertainment 
(341>). 

The English poets were virtually unanimous in satirizing the new fad. 
Few were musicians. They ridiculed the pointless repetition of words and the 
"irrelevant" coloratura vocalizing by the singers — their Italian names were 
funny and their salaries outrageous. Besides, the connoisseurs of opera never 
agreed about the merits of these identically foolish yodelers and fiddlers — all 
in all, opera was an affront to common sense. The public for serious music is 
always a small minority — as Handel learned through the financial difficulties 
that in spite of patrons beset him all his life. This stringency was what led him 
to composing oratorios, a form that grew slowly out of short religious works 
for voice: an oratorio is an offstage opera, almost always on a subject at once 
religious and dramatic. It shares with opera expressive music, instrumental 
and vocal, and to opera seria it adds the power of choral singing. Handel's 



328 s^ 5 From Dawn to Decadence 



Some say, compared to Bononcini 
That Myneer Handel's but a ninny. 
Others aver that he to Handel 
Is scarcely fit to hold a candle. 
Strange all this difference should be 
Twist tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee 

— John Byrom 



masterpiece of the type has become the 
Christmas offering of first choice in the 
English-speaking world, The Messiah. 

Among those who derided opera 
was the coterie consisting of Swift, 
Pope, John Gay, and Dr. Arbuthnot. 
They were all-purpose critics applying 
the principle "common sense in every- 
thing." Under the name Martinus Scriblerus they issued papers ridiculing 
almanac makers who prophesied, illiterate hack writers, bad poets, and bad 
preachers. In the mid-1 720s Swift suggested to Gay that the morals of the 
people in Newgate prison hardly differed from those of men and women in 
high places, and that a good play or opera could be made with an all-criminal 
cast. Gay set to sketching lyrics and dialogue and enlisted the help of another 
German musician setded in London, John Pepusch, to fit them to popular 

songs. The result was The Beggars Opera. 
An immediate success, it ran for two 
years. Later it inspired Kurt Weill and 
Bertolt Brecht's Dreigroschenoper {The 
Threepenny Opera) , produced exactiy 200 
years after Gay's. 

The wider public that preferred 
Gay to Handel and Bononcini had 
another novelty at their command: the 
ballet pantomime. Like opera, it was 
derived from the masque (<188), being 
that part of it in which simultaneous 
song and dance carry the plot forward. 
At the court of Louis XIV, the Italian 
Lully — musician, choreographer, stage designer, and impresario — provided 
opera-ballets (with song) in collaboration with Moliere and other poets. These 
shows would end with a surprise, such as a banquet or a rich gift for all the 
spectators. But often the singing was omitted and the king took the leading 
part, dancing, say, as Apollo. This form took the name of ballet-pantomime 
or ballet tout court. An English counterpart, "The Loves of Mars and Venus," 
dates from 1717 and was solemnly presented as a revival of an ancient Greek 
and Roman art form: "the first trial of this nature that has been made since 
the reign of [Emperor] Trajan." 

Lully also composed straight operas. They were spectaculars in the 
Hollywood sense — opulent in decor and costume, elaborate in machinery for 
the descent of gods or devils, and musically more varied than the Italian and 



... an established Rule, which is receivM as 
such to this very day, that nothing is capable 
of being well set to Musick that is not 
Nonsense. This Maxim was no sooner 
receivM, but we immediately fell to translat- 
ing the Italian operas; and as there was no 
great Danger of hurting the Sense of those 
extraordinary Pieces, our Authors would 
often make Words of their own, entirely for- 
eign to the Meaning of the Passages they pre- 
tended to translate. 

— Addison, in The Spectator (1711) 



Cross Section: London <^» 329 

English opera seria. It was not long before they included one or two ballets as 
interludes, usually underlining some part of the action. But the two genres, 
opera and ballet, kept their separate appeals and publics, both with a pros- 
perous future as forms of art with devotees, innovators, critics, and theorists. 
The familiar conventions of the ballet — toe dancing, tights, and tutu (the 
short tulle skirt) — appeared gradually, like the steps themselves and the ges- 
tures to represent love, rejection, horror — the physical representation of the 
stuff of neo-classical tragedy, where action is restrained to allow words full 
play 

* 
* * 

While these highly conscious endeavors flourished, politics in its usual 
direct or indirect way affected daily life. Early in the century, a treaty with 
Portugal introduced the English to port, the wine of Oporto, and by its lower 
price displaced the French vintages. With this thick fortified drink (ruby or 
tawny) served with meals came the alternative after-dinner ritual, at home or 
in the Oxford common room, and the spectacle of the English squire with his 
foot on a stool, immobilized by gout. Simultaneously, the new French cuisine 
of the late 17C was making converts among the rich and traveled. They had 
to be rich if they were to hire a French chef who could adapt French methods 
to English materials. It is significant that this was the time (1 707) when the 
London firm of Fortnum and Mason, still suppliers of delicacies, was 
founded. In France, the radical change from cooking to gastronomy con- 
sisted in using flavoring and sauces not to hide but to bring out the unique 
natural taste of each product. The partaker who knew when this had been 
achieved could boast of being a gourmet, though the name originally meant 
only a taster of wine. 

Gourmetry and gout raise the specter of illness and medication. Early in 
the 1700s Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was carrying on a crusade that did not 
let Londoners forget their health: she had the paradoxical idea that inserting a 
bit of matter taken from a smallpox patient under the skin of a healthy person 
would fend off the disease. Inoculation (later, vaccination when cows were 
used for the purpose) won over a few daring citizens and physicians; they 
proved her case and George I had his grandchildren inoculated. Cotton Mather 
in Boston urged the practice, but only Dr. Zabdiel Boylston adopted it; he did 
not persuade many Americans. The epidemic of 1721 in London was severe. It 
seemed an unwelcome substitute for the plague, which had struck the year 
before at Marseille, the last outbreak in Europe till the late 20C. 

Less dreaded than the smallpox was the big pox — syphilis, because only 
some of its consequences were perceived. Still, they were bad enough to call 



330 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

for a cure, and Dr. Thomas Dover was so confident of his that he became 
known as Dr. Quicksilver. He prescribed mercury for the pox as well as for 
other venereal diseases and earned popularity from success and an agreeable 
eccentricity It was a family trait: his grandfather had revived, in spite of cen- 
sure, the Cotsworld Games, competitive sports which a contemporary 
declared "truly Olympick." They included horse races and these, imitated in 
other towns, were at last legalized by Queen Anne in the grandson's time. 

In mid-career Dr. Dover's odd character launched him into a no less odd 
adventure. He gave up his practice to join with others in a moneymaking 
scheme based on privateering. Two ships were outfitted to capture foreign 
vessels, an occupation close to piracy but licit under the cover of the more or 
less permanent trade war at sea. Though a landlubber, Dr. Dover found him- 
self on deck and in charge, faced a mutiny, and after three years' roaming, 
returned to enjoy his share of the spoils and resume doctoring. The feat that 
sealed his fame was that he rescued and brought home Alexander Selkirk, the 
man marooned on the island off Chile. Defoe pounced on the facts to fash- 
ion his indestructible hero (<322). 

The state of medical thought at this time was taking an important turn. 
Dover had studied under Sydenham, who is credited with reaffirming the 
paired ideas of Paracelsus (< 1 96) that disease comes from outside the body 
and that the role of medicine is to help nature to cure itself after repelling the 
invader. In this view, the old notion about disorder among the humors (<222) 
was to be discarded. Lady Mary's preventive inoculation (perhaps borrowed 
from Turkey where her husband was ambassador) certainly implied an exter- 
nal agent for smallpox, and so did the onset of all the venereal afflictions. 

These may incidentally have been reduced by the growing adoption of a 
contraceptive device, which in Dover's day the son of the bishop of 
Peterborough satirized in a poem entitled Armour. Whatever its (disputed) 
origin, the sheath made of silk or linen got its English name from a Colonel 
Cundom, of the Guards/ A trio of rakehell poets headed by the Earl of 
Rochester at once praised the invention. In time, international courtesy 
required that the English should call it a French letter and the French an 
English cloak {capote anglaise). Mme de Sevigne passed severe judgment upon 
it in writing to her daughter: "an armor against enjoyment and a spider web 
against danger." 



During this crowded period the Occident did not relax its production of 
fine art, music, and architecture, as we shall see. Simultaneously, a resurgence 
of religious feeling in England found expression in the "Methodist" move- 
ment of the young Wesleys (<312) and in the hymn writing of the prolific Dr. 



Cross Section: London <£*> 331 

Watts, author of "O God Our Help in Ages Past." But while the renewal of 
faith filled the minds of the humble, the educated took a course that led rather 
to science and SECULARISM. The activities, the arts, the careers sketched in 
the foregoing pages all imply the ANALYSIS of experience and the SELF- 
CONSCIOUSNESS of INDIVIDUALISM. In combination these themes character- 
ize the main effort of the entire 1 8C. Its achievements, which form our next 
topic, were so potent that today many thinkers condemn them as the source 
of present intellectual errors and social ills. 



The Opulent Eye 



Whoever WANTS TO feel at once the majesty of 17C kingship and the 
magnificence of Baroque should seek out the room in the Louvre that dis- 
plays the cycle of paintings by Rubens celebrating the life of Maria de' Medici 
and her marriage to Henry IV of France. At first sight these panels may repel 
the modern viewer accustomed to gazing at a few objects at a time — or none; 
whereas Rubens depicts a multitude: royalty, hangers on, sailors, soldiers, 
ships, angels, cherubs, animals, weapons, clouds, waves, and stars, all in lus- 
cious colors and crowded relations. The scene in each panel seems as improb- 
able as a modern poster advertising holiday travel, but close attention shows 
everything justified, well ordered, and significant. So it is with monarchical 
pomp and the Baroque. Their common characteristic is profusion dignifying 
a central purpose. 

For both the art and its political parallel one has to go back to the begin- 
ning of the 17C. The monarchical revolution does not begin with Louis XIV, 
nor the Baroque with Rubens. Toward the end of the 16C, under Louis' 
grandfather Henry IV and through the work of Caravaggio, the Renaissance 
spirit passes into the Baroque and the nation-state as a political form begins 
to look secure. 

The name Baroque comes from the Portuguese barroco, which designates 
a pearl of irregular shape. Until relatively recentiy the word was used to dis- 
credit some 150 years of western art. In French, the adjective is still a com- 
mon way of saying that something is lopsided. It is in our ever-enlightened 
century that the style has been rehabilitated, its music found pleasing and its 
monarchism ignored. Nevertheless the link between the two is close: the 
works are larger than life size, ostentatious, as infinite in detail as royal eti- 
quette and as theatrical in effect, although the drama is static like the daily 
round at the court. To exemplify the element of size one can do no better 
than begin with the artist named above, 



334 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Peter Paul Rubens 

Of Flemish descent, he was born in Germany, where his father was a 
refugee for his Calvinism. Back in Antwerp after his father's death, young Peter 
Paul was educated at a time when the painters later known as the Antwerp 
School were beginning to flourish. The boy early showed his ability to draw, but 
his mother insisted on making him a page to a countess, in which position he 
learned to be a courtier, a craft that after leaving pagehood and taking lessons 
in art, he plied as much as his brush. By the year 1600 he was ready for Italy, 
where he stayed eight years and where the Venetian colorists made the deepest 
impression. His own works earned him the favor of the Duke of Mantua. 
Going with his patron to Florence, he witnessed there the wedding by proxy of 
the duke's sister-in-law, Maria de' Medici and Henry IV. 

Young Rubens was used as an envoy to neighboring courts and received 
commissions to paint altarpieces and other small works. He had studied the 
masters of every style — Michelangelo, Raphael, Mantegna, Giulio Romano, 
and he may have met Caravaggio, whose striking new style in painting he had 
seen in Rome. The innovator's influence on Rubens equaled the Venetians'. 
Next he was given a mission so difficult and full of perils as to make of him at 
the age of 26 a seasoned diplomat. He was to travel to the Spanish court, car- 
rying a load of gifts — gold and silver vases, horses, tapestries, and copies of 
paintings by Raphael and Titian — all this in order to woo the king into an 
alliance with Mantua. The danger of being robbed during the slow-moving 
journey and the difficulty of getting the king and his officials to decide any- 
thing made the embassy interminable; but it was worth it to be in Spain dur- 
ing its Golden Age of literature and painting: Calderon, Tirso de Molina; El 
Greco, Ribera, Murillo, Velasquez and other less familiar names. Rubens had 
set out in March. He did not get back to Mantua to announce the desired 
result until the following February. His reward was commissions for several 
paintings and a grant of 400 ducats. The duke was a collector of portraits; he 
was also poor at paying what he promised. Patronage would be less bountiful 
and much more expensive if it entailed actual payments. 

After another rewarding stay in Rome, Rubens returned to Antwerp, 
married, and established a studio; that is, a group of pupils and helpers com- 
petent to produce portions of a large composition's "first draft." The master 
outlined it, gave instructions, and, the routine parts once done, put the fin- 
ishing touches that made the work a master piece. This cooperation, based on 
the medieval guild system and abandoned in deference to an increasing INDI- 
VIDUALISM late in the 1 8C, had the double advantage of teaching the young in 
an exacting way and of giving employment to older talents short of genius. 
(Alexandre Dumas adopted the scheme for his historical novels.) Since the 
19C, artists of genuine but limited ability let loose on the public their quickly 



The Opulent Eye <^ 335 

perishable works, instead of making solid contributions to the more lasting. 

Antwerp, together with the rulers of France, Spain, and England, gave 

the firm of Rubens and Company full employment. These royal commissions 

diverted Rubens 's later career into a double channel. Being in touch with 

heads of state as artist, he became something like a roving negotiator to avert 

war: the widowed archduchess Isabella, governor of the Spanish Netherlands, 

found his connections in Spain and 

France ideal in her effort to maintain . . «.»,.« , * , 

A picture of Achilles clothed as a woman, 
peace. Rubens was entrusted with con- painted by my best pup{[ and entkely 

fidential missions to his powerful ^touched by me^ charrmng work full of 

friends and was joined by the Duke of many beautiful young girls. (600 florins) 

Buckingham when England entered _ RuBENS LISTING WORK s available to the 

the conflict — on the wrong side from English ambassador (1618) 

the point of view of Rubens as Flemish 

patriot. 

In Spain he met Velasquez, officially the court painter, though only 29. 
Their friendly understanding probably led the younger man to make the 
Italian journey. With Philip IV Rubens had a hard time, but he finally won 
him over and was asked to paint five portraits of the mulish king, one on 
horseback. The whole family followed, single file. Tired and eager for home, 
Rubens was still not let go. The king loaded him with a complicated mission 
that took him to Paris, Brussels, and London, where Charles I welcomed him. 
It turned out a long half-year's stay but well spent. Rubens was amazed at the 
beauty of English men and women and the amount of good art. Along the 
way he had been ennobled and knighted. Home at last, he began painting for 
Charles the ceiling canvases of the Banqueting House in Whitehall, the build- 
ing in front of which the king was executed twenty years later. 

Rubens married again — a bourgeoise, although his friends urged union 
with a lady of the court — any lady But he feared "the special blemish of the 
nobility, snobbish pride," which might make his wife "blush to see him han- 
dle a paint brush." Commissions poured in and his Helena inspired him again 
and again as the main beauty of every scene. His royal patron required his ser- 
vices again in a further political tangle that arose in France and lasted eight 
months, and yet once more for one in Holland. There the artist was insulted. 
A Flemish duke to whom Rubens had written a dignified letter justifying one 
of his actions was told that such words could only be used by a person of 
equal rank; and the noble lord, showing his breeding, published his rebuke. 
Rubens retired from foreign service and stayed home. The remaining eight 
years of his life were devoted to two kinds of work, the one typified by The 
Ascent of Calvary, and the other by The Offering to Venus. The titles suffice to 
indicate the kinds. [For an idea of the painter's range, leaf through the color 
plates in Rubens by Charles Scribner III — and even read the text.] 



336 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 






Exuberance by design and not from wildness — the spirit of Rubens — is 
the dominant trait of the Baroque. It was replaced in mid-career by a taste for 
the sober that acquired the name of classical. Often the two styles mingled, as 
at Versailles, where the facade is flat and calm and the interior exuberant. The 
artists of the long century seem to divide, some like Vermeer and Claude 
Lorraine (/<? Lorrairi) preferring quiet interiors or landscapes as subjects, and 
others such as Bernini and Tiepolo choosing intense activity and crowds 
drawn, more and more accurately, from history and myth. Still others, 
Poussin — for example — vary: he too liked quiet landscapes with correct clas- 
sical architecture as background, but in his Rape of the Sabine Women mass vio- 
lence is required, and the two impulses of the age are fused. Because of this, 
some critics speak of Baroque classicism, but it seems a needless label when 
one can see the two styles in opposition, as usual in cultural movements, and 
occasionally combined. 

One of the tireless exhibitors of energy, the long-lived sculptor Bernini, 
may be the artist who embodied most vividly the spirit of Baroque and thus 
contributed the most to its later ill-repute. The perfection of his craft left no 
doubt as to the conceptions that it served, and these were called theatrical, 
outre, false to nature, by a new generation that preferred suggestiveness to 
pronouncement. This verdict is a good example of a common critical error: 
different periods conceive differently and each must be granted its premise 
before one judges its conclusions, in art or any other form of expression. This 
fair play does not exclude preferring the products of one age to those of 
another, but it does avoid blindness. 

To enjoy and admire Bernini one must accept the minute care of detail 
within the hugeness of scale, the roundness of every line as if an angle would 
hurt the eye, and perhaps hardest of all, the suppliant or suffering poses, eyes 
turned to heaven, limbs contorted by passion. The magnificent exaggeration 
tells us that in any given instant everything in heaven and on earth is at stake. 
So it is in the tragedies of the time: death and dishonor hang over everybody's 
head from start to finish; there is no relief from tension such as might come 
from commonplace concerns; life is at the mercy of fortune or of the 
demigod on the throne who will not grant a second chance. [The book to leaf 
through and read is Bernini, also by Charles Scribner III.] 

The architecture of the Baroque period is similarly unforgiving. The 
facades whether encrusted like Borromini's Church of San Carlo in Rome or 
classically flat like the east front of the Louvre by Perrault, stun the viewer 
from a distance, rather than seduce him into coming close. And the profuse 
detail of the one, like the regular repetitions of the other, convey the same 
message of grandeur self-assured. 



The Opulent Eye ^ 337 

Versailles, the palace — one ought to say, the theater — in view of what has 
been reported earlier (<288), deserves a few words to itself. It arose on an 
unlikely spot, the top of a plateau of no great height, and its erection by fits 
and starts cost many lives. At one time 36,000 men and 6,000 horses were at 
work. Accidents and "fever" took their toll, this last no doubt from unsani- 
tary conditions that persisted within and without the structure when finished. 
The back of the palace faced the privies, which were inadequate, and the 
courtiers' required presence indoors at certain times led to their surreptitious 
use of columns or corners for urgent relief. 

The scale had to be vast not only to match the ideal of sovereignty but also 
to accommodate the population of the court, its servants and its entertainers. 
The facade is 650 yards long. The portion that juts out in the middle contains 
the king's apartments; one of the wings, the chapel and theatre, the other, the 
living quarters of the most favored. The park in front stretches for miles. It is 
in two sections, the smaller and nearer being a series of rectilinear gardens dot- 
ted with innumerable statues — gods and goddesses, nymphs, tritons, and other 
classical figures, in addition to pools and fountains that also bear classical 
names. When turned on, the fountains create the liquid spectacle of jets and 
cascades known as "the Great Waters of Versailles." At the far end is a canal 
forming a visual boundary. To supply the system, builders installed a huge con- 
duit and pump that draws water from a stream some distance away. At one time 
the minister of war, Louvois, proposed that his military engineers divert and 
split a large river, the Eure, to supply both Versailles and the pleasance at Marly, 
four miles away. Subduing nature is one element in the Baroque. 

Above the park, at a height of some 50 feet, is a spacious terrace. The 
stairs at all points are monuments in themselves and all the statues are by mas- 
ter hands — Puget, Pradier, Coysevox, and others. The gardens were laid out 
by another creator, Le Notre. Mansart and Hardouin-Mansart shared the 
design and ornamentation of the palace, including the neighboring pavilion, 
the Grand Trianon. (The small Trianon belongs to the next reign.) 

Inside the huge palace are great halls, galleries, and drawing rooms 
{salons). The Hall of Mirrors is famous; Louis XIV liked mirrors as decora- 
tion; he started the practice of putting them over mantelpieces, which makes 
a room look larger than it is. One of the drawing rooms is Le Salon de la Guerre, 
with appropriate murals expressing his fondness for the sport. It is matched 
by one for Peace, as promised to his people at coronation (<251). The whole 
interior of the palace — woodwork, furniture, ceilings, chandeliers — was 
entrusted to the official painter Lebrun. His taste favored massiveness and 
gold. The total cost of the edifice and its embellishments over 20 years has 
been estimated at 214 million francs, a sum hard to translate but certainly 
implying numbers of billions. 

Gorgeous display without stint makes Versailles a part of the Baroque. 



338 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

But as noted above, the lines are straight, the pools and gardens rectangular, 
and inside or out what the eye sees, rich and glowing, is massive, not fretted 
into minute effects. This variation, when pushed to its extreme, appears in the 
work of Le Nain, who interpreted the workaday world as perfect stillness in 
subdued tones. Obscured after success in his day, he was not re-discovered till 
the late 19C. Yet his vision must have been soothing to some contemporaries, 
for he prospered. There is no law about patronage. 

That last word has a plain meaning, which is: money to pay artists. In the 
Middle Ages and the Renaissance the church was its main source, gradually 
replaced by princes and rich burghers (<72; 81). These two classes of men 
still ordered works of fine art for churches and civic buildings, but more and 
more the commissions were for the palace or the merchant's house — art 
domesticated. The idea took hold that a house should contain not merely the 
portraits of its owners but also some beautiful scenes to look at and show off. 
Humanist popes were popes by election but Humanists by collection. Kings 
followed suit and by the time of Louis XIV, private individuals as well as 
rulers felt an obligation — they "owed it to themselves" — to care for art and 
support its makers. Beautifying the world with the aid of the royal purse is an 
integral part of monarchism; the democratic state has been of two minds 
about taking on the burden. 

Louis' taste in literature and music was natively good, and in the other 
arts he used able counselors, among them Colbert, who helped his master 
sponsor still other cultural things. He added science to the scope of state 
patronage. He reorganized the Academy of Painting and Sculpture and its 
annex in Rome. He refurbished the Royal Observatory, and brought in the 
celebrated astronomer Cassini to head it. He despatched an envoy to collect 
ancient and modern medals for the king's gallery. He added a colonnade to 
the Louvre and built huge gates at two of the entrances to Paris. He wanted 
the city clean, safe, and beautiful. He had the streets lighted and appointed a 
Lieutenant of Police, whose agents made them secure — the first systematic 
scheme of the kind. The sizable library that Mazarin had left was enlarged by 
purchases of books and manuscripts from all over Europe, while by grants 
and good rules Colbert brought the manufacture of pottery and of tapestries, 
notably at the Gobelins, to a high point of perfection. His aim was to make 
France supreme in the arts and in the crafts of luxury. 

Choosing the artists who were supposed to glorify the reign can hardly be 
a straightforward process, because choice is a cause of strife between cabals. 
One notable instance illustrates how uneasy the patron-artist relation is, and 
why. In the late 1630s the French painter Poussin was living and working qui- 
etly in Rome. His renown reached Paris, and Louis XIII, possibly at 
Richelieu's suggestion, invited him to bestow his genius on his native land. 
The cardinal ordered Sublet de Noyers to conduct the negotiations. Poussin, 



The Opulent Eye <^> 339 

valuing his comfort, had the good sense to decline, but he took a year and a 
half to do it, not wanting to seem ungrateful. Angered, M. de Noyers pointed 
out that the king "had a long arm," meaning that his influence in Rome could 
be used to create (unspecified) trouble for the artist. Poussin gave in. 

In Paris, very definite trouble awaited him. To begin with, he was ordered 
to paint allegorical murals: his specialty was small works. True, he did paint 
subjects from history or mythology, but they were really pretexts for a classi- 
cal dreamland with a few figures and architectural fragments. Murals would 
have required large expanses of canvas showing many-sided action. Next, he 
was to decorate a long gallery in the Louvre, although he had never worked at 
architectural decorations. He went to work making sketches athletically but 
not peacefully. It seems the court wanted him to outdo Vouet, the painter 
favored by the town. Vouet's clique thereupon devised every sort of hin- 
drance and embarrassment to get rid of the interloper from abroad. 

After a few months Poussin gave up the struggle, giving the excuse that 
his wife in Rome was ill and he must return. In the next reign, Colbert sum- 
moned Bernini, the all-purpose designer. He came, after making and sending 
what he had been asked for — plans for altering parts of the Louvre. They did 
not suit. He arrived in person and made a third and fourth plan before he 
became convinced that they would not be carried out. He left, disgusted, to 
rejoin more sympathetic patrons in Rome. When these are of high estate, 
their habit of unopposed command means tyranny for the artist. What is 
worse, command is often delegated to a majordomo, who sees his role as sup- 
plying art in the same way as he supplies food for his master's kitchens. 

In truth, the patronage of art is an insoluble problem. There are no rea- 
sonable rules for it. How to distinguish among talents? How far should the 
artist comply with requests? What measures can be taken to prevent intrigues 
for the fame and money at stake? In the silence that follows these questions 
one may hear the words "committee of qualified persons."If so, the rejoinder 
is: remember the ordeal of Christopher Columbus (<98), which was of the 
same species as that of any artist. And if reliance is placed on the market as in 
recent times, the artist must woo the buying public and keep it eager for his 
goods, a constraint that may be as galling as the arbitrariness of a prince. 

* * 

It is generally assumed that the plays and books that entertained courtiers 
and townsmen in the 17C were all of the classical type, tragic and comic. 
Racine and Moliere, Dryden and Congreve — these cliche-names back up the 
impression. This is to forget the large output of "heroic romances" that were 
far more popular than the works that have won a place as classics, still much 
admired and perhaps litde read. 



340 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

The romances began to be written about the turn of the 16C, when the 
Baroque of which they are a part began to flourish. Patterned after the handful 
of ancient Greek and Roman romances, they were a mixture of pastoral and 
chivalric episodes, something like a prose version of the Italian epics (<146). 
Many were titled "The Loves of . . ." some kind: Fortunate, Unfortunate, 
Remarkable, and so on, followed by the name of the hero or heroine. Several 
were written by members of the nobility and a few by the clergy, but they were 
soon outnumbered by the works of bourgeois professionals, men and women, 
who turned out for an eager public reams of amorous-perilous adventure. One 
of the attractions of the genre was its length, which guaranteed extended plea- 
sure. The most highly prized in the mid-17C were the narratives of Madeleine 
de Scudery, two of which were in 20 volumes each; her trifling ones ranged 
from four to eight. 

Naturally, such productions could not be one story; they were a succes- 
sion of tales linked, sometimes loosely, sometimes adroitly, with the fortunes 
of the perdurable hero or heroine. When the true novel came into being 100 
years later, the device of the inserted tale hung on; it survived as late as 
Dickens. In the 17C genre, one finds many plums: stories well told, characters 
that hold one's interest, whether believable or not, and sensible discourse 
about morals and philosophy. In the best writers there are scenes of real life 
and genuine passion. Some, in fact, made use of contemporary scandals, 
whose participants could be identified under their fictional names. The most 
readable at this distance are Honore d'Urfe's A.stree and Mile de Scudery's 
Clelie, although in her time the most popular was Le Grand Cyrus. But to enjoy 
them now one must be a practiced skipper, for what has denied all these 
works permanent shelf life is the long stretches between oases. 

One suspects that to the first readers those stretches were not dull, and 
herein lies a cultural generality. What pleases most people in the art of their 
time is work that deals with the bits and pieces of knowledge and feeling that 
make up the common stock in everybody's mind. It may also include the 
memory of past art. A well-crafted mixture of old and up-to-date common- 
place feeds and flatters the reader or beholder's sensibility; it is popular as 
long as that mental mosaic of the time persists. That such success depends on 
small detail is shown by the fact that contemporaries see differences between 
writers (or painters or musicians), whose works seem to posterity indistin- 
guishable. 

To be sure, the masterpieces also carry with them a cargo of such details, 
but they are subordinated to a comprehensive vision of the world. In them the 
timely touches are means, not ends in themselves, and the work that contains 
them still has force after the inevitable change in customs and conventions. 
The heroic romances on the continent, like Dryden's heroic dramas in England 
or Calderon's in Spain, fulfilled the Baroque desire for size and convolution. 



The Opulent Eye <^» 341 

These pieces were also steeped in monarchism. The attention to fine degrees 
of rank; the gallantry, the period-style of lovemaking; the elaborate flattery and 
elegant diction of the letters that forward the plot are so many echoes rever- 
berating from the walls of Versailles. But the public for the genre was not con- 
fined within those walls. The town, to be in fashion, had to read and talk about 
the latest of the 20 volumes. So did the residents of towns and courts in 
Germany, England, and elsewhere, who had learned French to be an courantoi 
everything or who read similar fictions in their own language. 

Balancing this bulky, melodramatic literature is the compact 1 7C French 
tragedy. But one must immediately add that the neo-classic plays were spoken 
and produced in a Baroque mariner. The costumes of the players were unlike 
anything seen elsewhere in the world. Feathered hats wider than the wearer, 
dresses draped and bespangled so as to live up to the hats alternated with 
reconstructions of the antique that aimed at simplicity but faltered on the 
way. These phantasms moved little and spoke much, against a backdrop and 
between portals of Berniniesque design: richly carved paneling pricked out 
with gold and bright colors, massive clouds, sometimes peopled with gods 
visibly anxious about the outcome of the drama. None of this seemed false, 
given the sound idea that greatness demands large size. The full-bottomed 
wig was Baroque, and stage costuming was but a heightening of the norm — 
as in all theater. 

The play itself was about kings and queens and must present their like- 
ness. The tragic subject came from some episode in Roman or Greek history 
or myth, though no attempt was made to be accurate in language or material 
detail. Exact local color was not yet one of the merits of literature. What the 
playwright offered was his poetry and his ANALYSIS of the human emotions. 
This was done by showing the phases of a conflict between very few charac- 
ters under tension from the outset of the play. It ended in defeat and death for 
some and implied a moral or political lesson. Here were no characters in the 
Shakespearean sense and hardly any physical incidents, but human types 
deeply studied. 

The poets had to observe excruciating rules. The three unities (< 1 66) 
were rarely violated, never the code governing rime and meter. These prohi- 
bitions suggestive of bureaucracy at work had the force of etiquette. The pub- 
lic knew the rules and enforced them without mercy. The vocabulary too was 
more and more limited as pedants kept extending the veto of the Precieuses 
against calling a chair a chair or saying "It is midnight." [For a summary of the 
constraints, look into A.n Essay on French Verse cited (<164).] 

Under such conditions, writing a five-act play was a tour de force. Yet it 
was repeatedly achieved during the 150-year span of the neo-classic temper, 
from Corneille to Voltaire. The masterpieces were few but the laws held firm. 
How did this literary straitjacket get fashioned? About the time Louis XTV was 



342 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

born, Pierre Corneille, partly influenced by the heroics of the Spanish stage, 
produced on a Spanish subject Le Cid (<105). But he tamed the form and the 
language, using the 12-syllable line inherited from Ronsard (<164). The work 
created a furor for and against. The public relished the chivalric tone, rapid 
pace, and solid construction and called the piece the first genuine tragedy in 
French — genuine because it conformed to the ancient rules. 

Critics damned the play because it didn't. It was "irregular" in letting the 
hero survive and enjoy a fair chance of winning the hand of his enemy, the 
heroine. Richelieu, who fancied himself a playwright, incited a group of aca- 
demicians to prosecute these crimes. The Academy's verdict found the accu- 
sations true but with extenuating circumstances. Corneille defended himself 
and the public stood by him. He went on to write many more plays, four of 
them still in the repertory and all obedient to the rules. Thereafter they were 
sacrosanct, although angry debates on small points kept breaking out. 

Corneille 's younger contemporary Racine is deemed the peak of perfec- 
tion in that his language is pure, his action compressed, and his dissection of 
motives relentless. His subjects being drawn from the ancients (besides two 
from Bible history), account for the name neo-classical tragedy that has been 
given to the genre. But the substance itself is Baroque. The five-act structure, 
the uniform meter, the absence of music and dance make for something alto- 
gether different from the supposed Greek models. And the tormented 
hearts-and-minds, their long arguments and self-analysis, like the rhetorical 
elegance and the subtle charm of the poetry that flows within the strict 
boundaries of diction and rime — these suggest the richness of detail and the 
virtuosity of Bach and Bernini. 

These same elements are today what make Racine, for one, hard to fol- 
low on the stage. The unprepared listener grasps the sense of the action 
but — as often in Shakespeare — the involutions of the thought are too fine to 
seize at the speed of their delivery. Our syntax, moreover, is childlike in com- 
parison. Not that these obstacles were the reason why Phedre, Racine's most 
powerful tragedy, was hissed off the stage; after which the poet resolved to 
write no more plays. A noble lord and lady had organized a cabal to help out 
their protege, Pradon, who had also done a Phedre. [For a modern approxi- 
mation of Racine's, read Robert Lowell's translation, Phaedra. ] 

Louis XIV was not put off by the public's biased verdict. He knew the 
worth of the poet whom he had made royal historiographer and he did him 
the further honor of requiring his services as reader — "the best one in 
France" — at those times when his majesty was troubled by insomnia. That 
may have happened often if he drank too much of the new black brew called 
coffee, first made known some half-dozen years before Racine's play by the 
Turkish ambassador. No doubt Racine, as an accomplished courtier, could at 
any time of day or night read aloud as if fully awake. 



The Opulent Eye <^ 343 

Twelve years after the fall of Phedre, Mme de Maintenon called upon 
Racine to write a play on a sacred subject for the girls of the school she had 
founded; acting in it would not expose them to the dangers of plays about 
love. Racine complied, was asked for another, and thus produced his last two 
masterpieces, Esther and Athalie. But this connection with the king's wife 
ended badly: she also bade him write a memoir on the wretched condition of 
the people. It fell into the king's hands and all favors were at an end. Much 
earlier, Racine had written a dazzling comedy, The Litigants, which criticized 
the justice system, but it did not offend, because everybody agreed that the 
courts were corrupt and immune to reform. The other subject — the misery 
of the poor — implied that the king was to blame and this could not be toler- 
ated. 

Social critic is evidendy not a recent role for poets. Nor was Racine the 
only one in his time (>345). But the vagaries of his career show an artist- 
intellectual of modern type, rather than the man of reason and self-control 
associated by convention with the notion of classicism. Although Racine, an 
orphan, regarded his Jansenist teachers as parents, as a young man he 
prompdy sloughed off their beliefs and attacked them in viciously witty let- 
ters. In the theater world he led a fast life punctuated by stormy love affairs. 
The prefaces to his plays suggest (under wraps) an arrogant awareness of his 
genius; after the public insult to Phedre, anger and haughty retirement were a 
characteristic answer. This incident and the onset of middle life brought 
about a complete spiritual turnaround. He renewed contact with Port- Royal, 
recanted his scornful words, and accepted his mentors' judgment that by his 
plays he had been "a poisoner of souls." His friendship with Mme de 
Maintenon likewise rested on piety shared and a common concern for the 
state of the nation. 

The Louis XIV system — a court run as by a drill sergeant — is no protec- 
tion against changes of fortune and revulsions of feeling. Behind the facade 
there unrolls the intimate history that we may read in the letters of Mme de 
Sevigne and the Memoirs of Saint-Simon. And on reflection, what else does 
tragedy, the chosen genre of the period, put before us but greatness, reverses, 
and downfall? The use of select words and faultlessly regular verse to show 
willful and violent acts ought not to conceal their ugliness: Phedre is eaten up 
with lust and Britannicus acts like an infatuated fool. The conflict is with law 
and reason as much as with other human beings. But for these common flaws 
and misdeeds to be tragic, they must affect persons of high station. Nowadays 
this axiom is denied; the democratic mind argues that the death of a salesman 
is no less tragic than the death of King Lear. In common speech every fatal 
accident is tragic. This is the language of INDIVIDUALISM — every human 
being is as important as any other; the premise of politics is applied to aes- 
thetics. If human feelings are basically the same, their portrayal when under 



344 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

any kind of stress will surely create in the spectator the same emotion and 
self-knowledge. 

This reasoning leaves something out: the acts of a prince or a great sol- 
dier affect a whole people, decide the course of history. In the tragic theater, 
apprehension about consequences makes every moment as thrilling as in the 
finals of a sports tournament. Compared with this the common man's lot is 
inconsequential. The non-hero makes no stir — and he is replaceable. 
Salesmen are plentiful. Besides, proud words and penetrating thoughts are 
more plausible in the mouths of movers and shakers than in those of the aver- 
age man. Whether these points are valid or not, to interest courtiers and their 
prince in the 17C, the mishaps of a merchant would not do. Comedy took 
care of portraying the lower orders, and by no means always to their disad- 
vantage. The most daring of the critics of king, court, and nobility was 

Moliere 

His name, like Voltaire's, is a mystery. He was born Jean-Baptiste 
Poquelin and adopted the other cognomen when in his 24th year he decided 
to be an actor. His father was upholsterer and valet to the king, a good-paying 
post, and the son followed in it for a time. Then he qualified as a lawyer, hav- 
ing received (the first in his family) an excellent college education. Reading 
the philosopher Gassendi (346>) made him an Epicurean, but it was amateur 
theatricals with friends that made him a playwright. To earn a living he 
formed a troupe, left Paris, and toured the provinces for 12 years, acting and 
supplying the skits and one-acters for the one-night stands. Some of these 
reappeared, adapted, in his full-length works. 

Back in Paris shortly before Louis assumed full power, Moliere acted in a 
play by Corneille and immediately won the king's support. To Louis' credit it 
never faltered. One may surmise that given his own solemn playacting the 
king was glad of a chance to laugh. With that backing Moliere and his com- 
pany were able to use, part of the time, the stage that the Italian players had 
monopolized. (Competition by Italians in theater, opera, and the other arts 
continued in France for more than a century.) 

Moliere and his company's first great success was Les Precieuses Ridicules, in 
which the two marquis are ridiculous as well as the ladies. For the next 15 
years Moliere put forth his satiric genius in every type of play from farce to 
high comedy. His targets are familiar: silly young bloods, jealous husbands 
and henpecked ones, misers, physicians (again and again), lords and ladies, 
bluestockings, coquettes, shopkeepers, extremists, and hypocrites. Nor was 
satire his only object. In other plays he created light comedy of the As You 
Like It order; and in his satiric works insinuated opinions critical of the exist- 
ing order of things. In Don Juan he voiced religious doubts and was accused of 



The Opulent Eye <^> 345 

atheism, and in two playlets in which He wants to sample all kinds of life — 

he was the central figure he refuted his There's a god who isn't dumb! 

critics by expounding his theory of I'd think him pretty miserable, 

comedy. ^° matter h° w humans regard him, 

Moliere was not alone in showing If he sta y ed U P there alwa y s stiff and stuff y- 

,1*1* i • i r. I'm sure there's nothing stupider 

that valets and serving maids often # 6 r 

. ii- Than being a prisoner of one's grandeur. 

have more common sense than their 

masters. It is the staple of comedy as -Moliere, Mercury speaking of Jupiter 
r , , • • -r. i i i in Amphitryon, Prologue (1668) 

far back as antiquity. But he endowed 

his people with life and individuality 

and gave them lines that verge on social rebellion. His dramatic irony about 

rank is at its best in the Bourgeois Gentilhomme, which ostensibly makes fun of a 

wealthy merchant who wants to hobnob with the aristocracy. M. Jourdain 

does get fooled in the riotous pseudo-Turkish ceremonial, but on all other 

counts it is he who is the forthright and sensible man: he prefers a simple 

touching folk song to artificial nonsense versified; he sees through the verbiage 

of the philosophers; he can tell the difference between practical knowledge in 

teaching and the jargon of theory. At every encounter with convention and 

affectation he grasps the truth and tells it. As for his desire to rise in the 

world, though ridiculous, it is universal. A good half of the tided audience that 

laughed at him must have thought privately of their own more or less recent 

bourgeois origins. 

Moliere was passionately in love with an actress in his company and had 
with her an unhappy marriage. She was flighty and unfaithful. His views on 
husbands and wives in the two "Schools" that he wrote, one about each side 
of the predicament, leave the impression that he saw the institution as irra- 
tional but inevitable. Love and society are incompatible. The lesson is still 
clearer in the Misanthrope, in which the clever womanly woman is irresistible 
and the sensible friend a model character, while the "misanthrope" cannot be 
faulted in his critique of conventional society. All are in the right; the play is a 
tragic comedy. 

In his relations with the king Moliere had no cause to be anything but 
grateful; Louis stood by him against powerful enemies. They thought they 
had caught him at last when he wrote Tartuffe — an insult to religion, they said, 
choosing to disregard the real subject: hypocrisy. (Incidentally, a late 20C pro- 
duction of the play in France makes Tartuffe a sincere lover of Orgon's wife 
who chastises himself for this sinful passion; we therefore should pity him.) 

It would not do to call Moliere a democrat, but his work displays the 
independence of mind that shocked his friend Boileau the critic. Indeed, a 
modern biographer sees Moliere as an anarchist and atheist. Like Boileau, 
Fenelon deplored Moliere's "low tone" in the comic scenes, especially when 
the speakers were not low characters. The charge could have gone further: 



346 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

Moliere 's vocabulary, far from following the restrictive tendency of the sensi- 
tive souls, is expansive; it makes use of vivid words and idioms spoken by the 
people. The 12 years of touring through the provinces afforded Moliere a 
good supply and they occurred to him spontaneously as the right word; he 
saw no reason not use it. M. Jourdain's preference for the old folk song was 
also his creator's. 

In another way and another genre, La Fontaine embodied the same resis- 
tance to orthodoxy. He wrote fables about animals that depicted in the sim- 
plest, most concrete terms of the vernacular the thoughts and acts of every 
social type, including the courtiers and their king. All the ambitions and 
meannesses, all the vanity, flattery, and servility that flourish in a layered soci- 
ety are reproduced in the dealings La Fontaine attributes to the animals. They 
enable the vices of the day to be seen from a distance and to be hidden from 
the slow-witted. Here and there the virtues emerge, but against odds. Thanks 
to the rapid, colloquial turns of speech and the animal vesture of the satire, 
the Fables have been imposed on French children as pieces to memorize. 
Their significance has thus been diluted, as happened also to Gulliver's Travels 
and Robinson Crusoe; making a children's book out of a masterwork is to defuse 
a bomb. [The translation of the fables to read are those by Howard Shapiro, 
not Marianne Moore's, which give the sense without the conciseness.] In a 
second series of poems, La Fontaine retold or invented tales of love, classical 
and modern. These are also in the plain style, but fuller of imagery in order to 
veil their eroticism. If they carry a moral, it is the Epicurean, that pleasure is 
the only good, pain the only evil. 

Unlike Racine, La Fontaine was no courtier. He was not even at court. He 
did hold a sinecure as a forester, but did not pay back the favor by obedient 
attendance. He remained rural, indeed rustic — in dress, manners, and speech. 
He was incredibly feckless. When his friends urged him to go and offer his 
book to the king, he grudgingly showed up but forgot to bring the book. He 
died impenitent. 

Others than La Fontaine and Moliere were disciples of Epicurus by way 
of Gassendi and his school of freethinkers. The shift from the Christian sto- 
icism of the previous period (< 1 90) coincided with the victory of monar- 
chism: it needs luxury and there is nothing stoical about luxury. Neither were 
the ancient Epicureans atheists or voluptuaries, but theirs was a non-interfering 
god, so that pursuing pleasure in moderation was not evil but wise. The name 
of libertines given to the 17C Epicureans meant no more than freethinkers — 
free in opinion, with no suggestion of sensual license. The way in which 
Gassendi exerted this freedom was to oppose the orthodox view, established 
by Descartes, that our ideas are innate and hence from God. Nothing is in the 
mind, said Gassendi, that does not come through the senses; no ideas, feel- 
ings, memories are born in-house. This is the root principle of empiricism, 



The Opulent Eye <^> 347 

generally credited to Locke (365>), although Gassendi's main work appeared 
half a century before Locke's." 

In between came the writer who popularized the Epicurean ethics of 
pleasure, 

Saint-Evremond 

What he did was simple and obvious, though he himself was an odd char- 
acter. Banished from France by the young Louis XIV for supporting the dis- 
graced financier Fouquet (<292) and thereafter a lifelong resident of 
England, Saint-Evremond made many friends although he never learned the 
language. Charles II and James II liked his company; he corresponded with 
the Duchess of Mazarin and with tided and learned persons in France and 
Holland, including William of Orange and Spinoza. He filled his 90-year span 
with good talk and with writing small essays, not for publication. Given to 
one friend or another, they were copied and passed from hand to hand until 
pirated, translated, and — finally — counterfeited: a Paris publisher told one of 
his hacks, "Write me some more Saint-Evremond." 

His subjects were the popular ones: whether the ancients were superior 
to the moderns; comparisons between Virgil and the Italian epics; French and 
English comedy; the merits of theater and the absurdity of opera. Having 
gained favor with these commonplace topics, he went on to discourse "On 
the Right Conduct of Life," "Of Pleasures," "Of Loves." His longest piece is 
a satirical "Conversation Between the Mareschal D'Hocquincourt and Father 
Cornage." The Father cautions against freethinking, which has the inevitable 
result of subjecting religion to reason. The Marshal speaks for Saint- 
Evremond and argues that a rational religion is not atheism. 

The attraction of these pieces was their brevity and ease of reading, even 
when they were obscure here and there from careless writing. Preaching plea- 
sure gets a welcome response and scruples are quieted when one hears that 
one must be sure to preserve health by cultivating cheerfulness and good 
temper and enjoying sensual delights in 

small doses. To Saint-Evremond, Marshal- A Devil of a philosopher so puzzled 
friendship was a delight closely tied to my brain about the Parents, the Apple, the 
good thoughts and good talk. His bal- Serpent that I was ready to believe nothing at 
anced program went well with the all. Not that I see more reason in it now; on 
Baroque — better at any rate than the contrary, I see less than ever. 
Stoicism; there is nothing tight-lipped Father: So much the better, my lord. No 
and resigned to fate in Rubens or Reason! That's the true religion. No Reason! 
Bernini or the music of Bach (388>). What an extraordinary grace has Heaven 

It was widely known that the bestowed upon you! 
essayist's Epicurean advice did not — Saint-Evremond (1728) 



348 <**> From Dawn to Decadence 

Tis fifty years, and perhaps more, that his come from a pedant in his book room. 
works have been admired; the Publick has a The exiled author had commanded 
sort of traditional respect for him, which troops with distinction in important 
makes them look upon the least of his frag- battles; he was an aristocrat, and when 
ments as mysteries which people adore in people urged him to publish his 
silence without presuming to dive into. "works," he expressed surprise that 

—Charles Cotolendi on Saint- they should so refer to his "triflings." 

Evremond (n.d.) Clearly, Saint-Evremond was the "rep- 

resentative man," par excellence. In any 
age such a man is influential because his ideas chime in with those of other 
influential people. He is thereby of historical importance, but gradually he 
sinks into the third or fourth rank and is read only from curiosity. If the past 
could really be described as it felt when it was the present, it would show a 
large gathering of personages like Saint-Evremond, their contemporary 
admirers sure that here were the classics of the age and unable to believe that 
a later time would not even recognize the names. 

The labels "ancient" and "modern" and the contrast between their ways 
in art and literature have been used in debate since Petrarch (<49). But it was 
not until the end of the 17C that the words fired up two factions that divided 
the world of letters. We saw just now that Saint-Evremond held forth on what 
was openly called a quarrel. He was a middle-roader inclining toward the 
moderns. 

The fierceness broke out over a speech by Perrault in the French 
Academy; an earlier flare-up had occurred in Italy about Tasso's epic (<148). 
Matching it with Homer's Iliad 'or Odyssey was not straight thinking, no matter 
which side one took, and this first fracas died down. The later and longer set- 
to seemed better defined: are the present poets and prosaists as a group bet- 
ter than the Greek and Roman? Everybody must choose. The moderns, who 
said: "We are, because we know more," had the disadvantage of advancing 
their own merits. The others, now deemed the geniuses of the age, benefited 
from the modesty of their position: "We are but imitators of the unsurpass- 
able." Poor Perrault, the author of the now classic fairy tales and of the 
Mother Goose stories, was vilified. Homer having popped up again, though 
few read and none thought of imitating him, was ably defended by his trans- 
lator, Madame Dacier. The combatants all took it for granted that the uphold- 
ers of the ancients did imitate them. Nobody asked where in modern tragedy 
one could find the manners and thoughts of the ancients, to say nothing of 
the choruses, the music, and the dances. And just as everybody agreed that 
Virgil outshone Homer, so the subjects imitated by the moderns came more 



The Opulent Eye q^> 349 

often from Roman history, or from the Roman playwright Seneca than from 
the Greeks — a thin slice of antiquity for a large spread of modern butter. 

The moderns won out in the end, carried by a cultural tide rather than by 
literary arguments, because like a piece of fireworks the controversy kept 
shooting out branches of all colors. Not that painting could get very far: there 
were no ancient models. But sculptors and architects fell to and wrangled and 
once the moderns had staked out their claim, quick minds pointed out that 
superior work, greater wisdom — in a word, progress — takes place in all 
things. 

This conclusion was far-reaching. With progress admitted, it follows that 
man and society are perfectible; and if this is possible, schemes for changing 
the world should be attended to. By the next century programs of reform began 
to flow in an endless stream. The western mind had turned from backward- 
looking to future-making. And when the re- orientation became general, soci- 
ety was kept in paradoxical discomfort: cheerful because working to improve 
life, and suffering guilty SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS because present conditions 
are so bad. Also endless was the war between the bold and the cautious, who 
ended up forming political parties under various names, ultimately shortened 
to the Left and the Right. These in turn are split into factions by the diversity 
of hopeful plans, though the ancients and the moderns, who are always with 
us, now seem to agree that the Christian view of the world as irremediably evil 
is not absolute. Progress is possible, an admission that points to an ever- wider 
SECULARISM. 

* 
* * 

Besides essays, Saint-Evremond wrote a few maxims. In its pure form 
this genre is something new in the mid-17C. What preceded it is the "Table 
Talk" and the so-called ana. This last is the suffix tacked on to a proper name 
as in Menagiana — the sayings of the writer Menage or the anecdotes about 
him. Anas were published anonymously and without warrant of truth or accu- 
racy. The similar table talk sampled earlier in dealing with Luther (<16) was a 
kindred genre. Maxims differ from both in that they are sayings written down 
by the one who thought them up. They made the anas fade away, but table talk 
survived into the 19C (511>). 

The best-known writer of maxims is La Rochefoucauld, a duke, once a 
hothead of the Fronde (<286), in maturity a saturnine observer of Louis' 
court. Like neo-classical tragedy, maxims embody the ANALYSIS of human 
motives. Their art consists, again like tragic verse, in compressing observation 
into memorable form; they are epigrams without levity. A collection of max- 
ims amounts to a moral philosophy, and in fact the tide of La 
Rochefoucauld's book is Maxims or Moral Reflections. 



350 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

The impression these have left on posterity is that they undermine any 
faith in goodness and truth. La Rochefoucauld is a cynic who sees in human 
actions nothing but selfishness, vanity, and envy. Example: "Men could not 
continue to live in society if they did not deceive one another." But that 
impression of universal undermining is false. There is no denying that a good 
number of the maxims question the integrity of the virtues and point out the 
role of self-interest. But La Rochefoucauld does not enjoy doing it, and he does 
much else; he is saddened to find human motives not always pure. The proof 
of his regret is that out of his 500-odd reflections fewer than a third are 
destructive. A larger number are neutral; they merely describe what happens 
in life and society. A small but emphatic group deals with the motives and 
actions of men and women of honor and with the sources of greatness — 
courage, friendship, gratitude, and true love. 

In all three groups love is a frequent subject, for obvious reasons. But the 
moralist's experience was not that of Versailles alone; he had lived through 
the war of the factions that preceded, and it is the corrupt politics of that time 
(about which he wrote a memoir) that inspire his distrust of appearances. 
Before condemning him as one soured by misfortune, one should remember 
that this moral skepticism is also Christian — everybody is a sinner, even when 
doing right. Pascal had said "The ego is hateful," in part because of this uni- 
versal flaw. In La Rochefoucauld the term for ego is amour propre — self- 
regard, which can underlie all other motives. At several points, the analyst 
ascribes this duplicity to an unconscious source, which makes for even deeper 
pessimism since the impulse is uncontrollable. 

The fashion in his day was to sketch one's own character in a few pages, 
and he complied. After a physical description, he paints himself as melancholy, 
incapable of laughter not only by temperament but from "outward causes 
that fill his imagination"; that is, life at court. He tries to be "open" to his 
friends but finds it hard to be other than "reserved." Yet he loves conversation, 
especially with women; they speak with more precision than men. He has a 
clear mind and good wit and prefers serious talk about moral questions; but 
he is often too vehement in discussion. As for gallantry, he has given it up; 
but he admires grand passions: they show a corresponding greatness of soul.° 

A double contradiction appears between some of the maxims and the 
rest, and between the portrait and those same maxims. It can be accounted 
for by an inherent weakness of the genre rather than of the writer. Maxims 
sound universal, whereas they are true only on occasion. If one reads at ran- 
dom in a book of familiar quotations one finds many shrewd sayings and as 
many others stating the opposite, both true. They are like proverbs: "Look 
before you leap"; but "He who hesitates is lost." Characters and situations 
differ so endlessly that no wise thought can fit them all, especially when 
uttered in capsule form. 



The Opulent Eye q^> 351 

One of La Rochefoucauld's neutral remarks opens up a subject of cul- 
tural import — his definition of the honnete homme. The phrase designates the 
model character of the 17C Still a courtier, the type (of either sex) differs 
from its Renaissance ancestor described in Castiglione's work (<85). There 
the human being had unlimited interests and capacities. Honnete does not 
mean honest in the modern sense; it means honorable, with a suggestion of 
adorned with grace, as in the Latin honestas, and it implies a group of qualities: 
well-bred, polished in manners and speech, controlling without visible effort 
the ego, for in social life it easily offends or encroaches on other egos. The 
proper man should be trustworthy as well, but what matters first is this 
absence of rough surface and angular behavior, caused as much by shyness 
and false modesty as by self-importance and superior worth. La 
Rochefoucauld gives a lapidary definition hard to translate: the perfect honnete 
hommeis "he who does not make a point of anything in regard to himself" {qui 
ne se pique de Hen). 

It was a social ideal, which found expression in related phrases: la bonne 
compagnie, le beau monde, lesgens comme ilfaut. This ideal was due to the influence 
of women. They were the arbiters of taste and the judges of comportment, 
exercising that preciseness that La Rochefoucauld noted in their speech. The 
salon was a staged play and they were the critics. [The book to read is The Lady 
by Emily James Putnam.] Manners have been called "litde morals," both 
showing the respect due from one human being to another. In truth, one 
finds that the degree of formality in social intercourse varies in step with 
other cultural characteristics; it ranges from the etiquette of Versailles (or 
ancient China) to the casual style of the 20C; it matches the dogmas of the age 
in politics, psychology, and aesthetics. [The book to read is Good Behavior by 
Harold Nicolson.] 

The duke's Maxims generalize, but if one imagines likely examples to fit 
what he says, one finds in the epigrams censure of Louis XIV, his system, and 
his courtiers. The moralist questions the means by which royal glory and social 
fame and every kind of power are attained. He despises cunning and intrigue 
and calls hollow and futile the triumphs of the moment. He is at one with 
Moliere and La Fontaine. 

Another critic of the regime, La Bruyere, used a different literary form to 
chastise the same traits in his contemporaries. His classic Characters sketch types 
and classes of men as they talked and paraded around him. By way of safeguard 
he first translated a collection of such portraits by the ancient Greek 
Theophrastus. In substance and effect there is no comparison between the two 
works, or between La Bruyere's and those of other users of the form. 
Theophrastus devotes a page of generalities to the Flatterer, the Impertinent, 
the Loud Mouth, the Miser, the Shameless, and so on. The whole gallery of fig- 
ures takes up only 85 pages. La Bruyere transformed the genre. By means of 



352 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 



No matter with what skill the great manage dialogue and action and vivid settings, 

to seem other than they are, they cannot con- his 1 6 chapters fill 750 pages. ° His subti- 

ceal their malignity. tie appropriately announces "the mores 

of this century." 

One comes across certain wild animals, La Bmy £ re > s exercise of free speech 

male and female, scattered over the country- i i_i >-r-r i_ ^ i-i 

J is remarkable. The chapter on the nobil- 

side, who cling to the soil, dig into it, and , . . , , ,. v , . v . 

, . , . _ lty is more daring than Moliere s ridicule 

turn it over with tireless persistence. They •. . 

. r • i • j u u of the marquis, because the author 

have a sort of articulate voice, and when they ^ ' 

stand up one sees a human face. They are in speaking in his own voice discusses the 
fact men. At night they huddle in their lair, wa Y s of an entire class - His tar g ets are 
where they live on bread and water and roots. named in his chapter headings; the 
They spare other men the trouble of working list covers all of society: the Great, the 
for a living and thus they ought not to lack the Wealthy, the Town, the Court, the Sov- 
bread they have worked for. ereign, Man and the Morals of Our 

— La Bruyere, Characters (1688) Time, Fashion, Preachers, Freethinkers, 

Journalists, and a few more who appear 
scattered among the rest. By the end of this procession one has the feeling that 
one has read a novel — or more exactly, a novelist's notes for one, with the full- 
ness Henry James adopted when describing his projected works. 

La Bruyere 's tone is by turns ironic, derisive, straight-faced, and somber. 
It was fortunate that the Prince of Conde, though difficult to live with, was 
his steadfast patron, because the readers of Characters quickly put actual names 
to the persons depicted, and like any roman a clef 'the work generated a coali- 
tion of powerful enemies. La Bruyere, born a bourgeois but self-ennobled 
by purchase of an office, needed more than usual support to win election to 
the Academy — as Moliere never could, owing to his disgraceful profession 
of actor. 

The word novel applies to Characters only so far as it aims at portraying 
a society. Its dramatis personae are still types, not individuals. The true 
novel, with its blend of psychology and sociology, comes a good deal later 
(380>). But in between there is a 17C work that might fairly be called a 
novella. It is The Princess ofCleves by Mme de La Fayette, the companion of 
La Rochefoucauld during the latter part of his life. She had once written a 
standard romance (<340) but in her later book the story she tells is that of a 
love never consummated between a duke and the princess, who is married to 
a man whom she respects but does not love. The duke woos her impatiently. 
She tries flight but is prevented by her husband, whom she finally informs of 
the situation. He shortly dies of jealous despair; the duke presses his suit; the 
princess remains a widow. It is a study in the growth of a passion, its links to 
other feelings and to social realities, its anguishing pains and the delicate plea- 
sures of expression and repression. 

Although it contains no violence, the work resembles the neo-classic 



The Opulent Eye <^> 353 

tragedy in its relentless analysis. The treatment of love often reminds one of 
La Rochefoucauld's maxims, which is not surprising, since the two writers 
worked on the text together. It would be too much to say that the heroine's 
impeccable morals were intended as a reproof to Louis' court. The time of 
the fiction is the 16C and the plot imaginary. The work appeared (anony- 
mously) five years before the court's enforced conversion to good behavior 
and it was received with immediate enthusiasm. These three facts together 
seem significant — of what , it is not easy to say. The work was translated into 
English while a French critic praised it in Latin, Italian, and his native tongue. 



One 17C creation that was neither Baroque nor a pretended imitation of 
the ancients was its prose. Monsieur Jourdain in Moliere's Bourgeois 
Gentilhomme is amazed when he is told that he has been speaking prose all his 
life. The joke is excellent on the stage, but his surprise is well-founded; he is 
right, as he so often is. What he spoke all his life was not prose but speech. 
Prose is the written form of deliberate expression, a medium that can become 
an art. It is as artificial as verse. Whereas speech is halting, comes in frag- 
ments, repeats, puts qualifiers after the idea, and often leaves it half expressed, 
prose aims at organized thought in complete units. The qualifiers of each idea 
often come before or during its exposition, as required by clarity, the sound 
of the words, or their rhythm. 

The modern languages took a much longer time to develop a prose wor- 
thy of the name than to find poetic meters that suited their idiom. True, writ- 
ers who described action produced readable works fairly early; they were 
guided by the sequence of what happens in the world. But with rare excep- 
tions they failed when they tried to impart what happens among feelings and 
ideas. In early modern times they were hampered by their virtually native 
mastery of Latin: it spoiled the vernacular syntax. Thanks to its case endings, 
Latin leaves the writer free to throw the makings of his sentence into one spot 
or another without changing the sense. That cannot be done when meaning 
depends on the right sequence and right linking of words. As late as Milton in 
his political pamphlets, English prose makes hard reading; sentences are long 
and cluttered with clause after clause: the mind has to detach and realign, 
which slows understanding; the prose does not breathe but chokes. 

The same was true in French until the time of Pascal. It is generally 
agreed that it was his Letters from a Provincial (<219) that gave the nation a 
model of modern prose, rapid and rhythmic. Dryden rendered the same ser- 
vice to English prose a litde later. Italian and Spanish started from a simpler 
syntax and reached the same goal sooner. German was kept from it altogether 
by its retention of case endings and a glutinous syntax. As the young William 



354 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

James on his travels in the 1 9C wrote to his parents, the language "is in fact 
without any of the modern improvements." In technical terms, German did 
not become ANALYTIC like other modern languages. Few of the great poets 
and thinkers using German have been masters of both their subject and their 
prose. [The little book to read is German Style (with annotated examples) by 
Ludwig Lewisohn.] 

It is thoughtiessly repeated that writers of fine English prose have 
learned their art from the King James Version of the Bible, issued in 1611. 
Nothing can be more easily seen to be false. When English writers sound bib- 
lical, they are quoting, consciously or not, isolated turns of phrase; they are 
not adopting a coherent style found in the Bible. The prose of the 17C 
Authorized Version is a composite of wordings that go back over 300 years of 
successive translations of the text. The committee appointed by King James 
did not start from scratch; it borrowed from Wycliffe and Coverdale and 
Tyndale — from this last, the ablest, more than from the others. The Preface 
said that the aim was simply to make a good version better. [The book to read 
is Translating For King James (a participant's notes) edited by Ward Allen.] The 
result was a language that never was the vernacular of any period. Often, the 
turns of phrase, instead of being English equivalents, are word-for-word ren- 
derings of Greek or Hebrew idioms; and common sense is flouted in defer- 
ence to the original: "When they arose early in the morning, behold, they 
were all dead corpses." 

What did help to shape English prose was Cranmer's Book of Common 
Prayer (= prayer in common). Its tone and phrasings were heard during the 
service more often and at greater length than the biblical, and they were in a 
language spoken outside the church as well as inside. Cranmer labored to 
make his renderings of the collects and litanies of the Roman missal plain and 
easily remembered. It was a work of art, as one can see by comparing it with 
his other writings. Good prose means hard work; as a modern practitioner 
put it, it is "heavy lifting from a sitting position." 

It should be added that the English prose that suggests the influence of 
Scripture is of the ornate type, halfway between prose and poetry, and not for 
common use. An outstanding 17C example is Sir Thomas Browne's Urn 
Burial Closer to us, Ruskin occasionally employed the style. Indifferent to 
transparency, reserved for impressiveness, it awaits the opportunity for lofty 
reflection — the rejoicing over a victory, the solemnity of regretful death — 
these alone afford sufficient warrant for the orotund periods, the concatena- 
tion of awesome images, and the cadences that close gratefully to the ear in a 
studied succession of polysyllables. Such utterance should have a special 
name, and a third one should designate the clotted abstractions of the mod- 
ern trades and specialties. The term prose, it should be remembered, comes 
ftomprosa oratio, which means discourse that goes in a straight line. 



The Opulent Eye <^> 355 



A piece of writing was shown not long ago to 
an illustrious personage who smiled and 
said: "These words must be greatly aston- 
ished to find themselves together, for 
assuredly they had never met before." 

— Father Bouhours (1671) 



The French followed that line, and 
it is clear why they found it easier to do 
so than the English. As Catholics they 
were not subjected to the weekly ser- 
mon; they had no Book of Common 
Prayer, the service being in Latin and 
entirely spoken by the priest. Only on 

great occasions such as state funerals was the ornate style required. Fenelon's 
enemy Bossuet and his fellow prelates used it, but only for religious purposes. 
All other writers (with one conspicuous exception) cultivated the simple and 
direct. They were not bound like the poets to use only noble words and 
euphemisms — -flame or chains for love, feathered kind for birds, and the like. 

To achieve lucidity, the spontaneous surge of ideas must be sorted out 
and the parts fitted into sentences not longer than a normal breath, the con- 
nections shown by clear syntax. With correct usage and a minimum of imagery 
(which might distract the reader) the words seem the natural way to think and 
to speak. But it is not natural. It is a product of extreme self-consciousness, 
as in Descartes' Method. The good sentence is the clockwork put back 
together again after careful ANALYSIS. The one 1 7C exception to this achieve- 
ment is the Duke of Saint-Simon. He is perhaps the only writer of genuine 
stream-of-consciousness prose in all literature. He violates all the guidelines 
for clarity and he must be read in French, because translators comb out his 
sentences and distill his meaning. 

But like a 20C novelist, like Proust 
in some ways, he persuades the reader 
that his mode of utterance is the natu- 
ral one, truer than the analytic. Yet the 
duke was at times a self-conscious 
worker, as we know from his own lips; 
and the vast Memoirs — 41 volumes 
unpublished till the 19C — are a work 
of art. Profusion of detail, richness of 
substance, order in apparent disorder, 
put it among the masterpieces of the 
Baroque. 



Shall I add a word about the style — its care- 
lessness, the same words recurring too close 
together, too many synonyms, especially the 
long sentences that cause obscurity, and per- 
haps repetitions of fact. I am aware of these 
faults. I couldn't avoid them, carried away by 
the matter and inattentive to the manner of 
conveying it, not to say explaining it. I 
haven't been able to cure myself of writing 
too fast. 

— Saint-Simon, on his Memoirs (n.d.) 



With French becoming by the end of the 1 7C the second language of the 
educated European, literature began to follow French models. This influence 
was particularly strong in Restoration England. Charles II and his friends had 
been refugees in France for nearly 20 years and his later hangers-on learned 



356 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

French so as to be aufait. The Francophile Restoration mood is well known: 
relief from Puritan earnestness, easygoing morals; the king, frequently in love, 
no taskmaster like his patron across the Channel. In the leading genre of the 
period, comedy of manners, the concerns, conventions, and smart talk paral- 
lel those of the court. Vanbrugh, Wycherley, Farquhar, and Congreve made 
their characters intriguers, extravagant, cynical, unscrupulous, and witty. 
French plots were copied or adapted — Moliere's in particular — but their tone 
is more Baroque than neo-classical. The language highly spiced: the charac- 
ters utter worldly wise maxims like La Rochefoucauld, but their similes verge 
on the obscene. [The account to read is Comedy and Conscience After the 
Restoration, chapters 1—4, by Joseph Wood Krutch.] 

In the same period, English tragedy in Dryden's hands abandoned the 
Elizabethan pattern to follow the French — long tirades in rimed couplets — 
but again, with more emphatic effects. His subjects — Aureng-Zebe, The 
Conquest of Granada — came not from the ancients but from modern (though 
distant) historical events. The audience was plausibly treated to high heroics 

in rutilant language. It was not surpris- 
$2w Romeo and Juliet, a play of itself the worst ingly the low point in Shakespeare's 
that ever I heard in my tote.— Midsummer reputation. The poets who read him at 
Night's Dream, which I had never seen before, home admired his power — in spots. 
nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid, But when his plays were produced they 
ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.— were called poor, crude, old-fashioned 
Twelfth Night, acted well, though it be but a things Samuel Pepys, the able secretary 
sm yP lav - of the navy, loved the theater and 

—Samuel Pepys (1661-1662) records in his famous diary the sophis- 

ticated judgment of the day. 
Other critics were even more contemptuous: Shakespeare and the other 
Elizabethans "ne'er knew the laws of heroick or dramatick poesy, nor — 
faith — to write true English neither." Dryden himself wobbled between fer- 
vent regard and near-contempt: Shakespeare "is many times flat, insipid, his 
comic wit degenerating into clenches [bickerings] and his serious swelling 
into bombast." He then quotes from Hamletznd says: "What a pudder is here 
kept in raising the expression of trifling thoughts!" 

The Restoration produced a good deal of lyric poetry, from which the 
work of Vaughan and of Traherne stands out, together with the presence of 
some half dozen women who were more than casual writers. One of them, 
Aphra Behn, was also a successful playwright. But Dryden easily dominates 
the scene as poet and prosaist. By his political satires, his translations of Virgil 
and other ancient Romans, and his bawdy lyrics, he set the tone, diction, and 
rhythms for the Augustans who came after him (<325). A piece of verse in 
10-syllable lines riming in pairs remained for 100 years the passport into liter- 



The Opulent Eye s^ 357 

ature that the novel is today. Dryden the critic — in his essays, prefaces, and 
one masterly dialogue — ranks with the greatest in western literature. 

* 
* * 

In the midst of this display of virtuosity that mingled Baroque and neo- 
classical tastes, there appeared a little book that had no connection with either 
style. It was by a tinker named John Bunyan and its tide was The Pilgrim's Progress. 
It told in the simplest language how the narrator, Christian, had a dream that 
made him acutely anxious about his soul. In the dream, he left his family and 
friends to venture on a journey toward 

the Heavenly City. It was a dreadful Some said, John, print it; 
journey: The Slough of Despond, the others said ' Not so< 

Valley of the Shadow of Death, Vanity Some said ' * "^ d ° good; 
_ . . lit . c „ ^ . others said, No. 

Fair, the Mountain of Error, Giant A , T , , _. 

At last I thought, Since you are 
Despair, and other dangers and deceits , « ., , 

tested his resolve. Dialogue with ordi- 1 prfnt it wm> an ' d so the case decided 

nary tempters such as Mr. Money-Love 

1 r J — Bunyan, to the Reader of 

and the Atheist added to the difficulty The Pilgrim's Progress (\61%) 

of the quest. 

It is an allegory, but unlike other works of the kind, it is full of action that 
creates genuine suspense and depicts believable types. It appealed at once to 
large numbers of English non-conformists, who did not share the 
Restoration temper or morals and had no use for its sophisticated, London- 
centered literature; they could not have understood a Congreve character 
speaking. Whether taken up for the religious message or as a lively fiction, The 
Pilgrims Progress remained a popular book for young and old until the end of 
the 19C. Bernard Shaw admired it as one of the supreme interpretations of 
human life. A reader of secular mind today would be surprised to find many 
of Bunyan's opinions congenial. The tinker systematically attacks the ways 
and what are now called the values of the Establishment. He sees govern- 
ment, the law, manners, morals, and social conventions as devices of the pow- 
erful well-to-do for oppressing the poor. They alone are simple, truthful, and 
charitable. He does not, of course, urge revolution. All he wants is self- reform 
to save one's soul. 

Bunyan was jailed more than once for preaching his radicalism, but he 
did not write his book in prison, as was once thought. And he wrote other 
books (and poems) quite unreadable, except one: Grace Abounding to the Chief 
of Sinners. It is an account of his years of torment as one possessed by evil and 
his delivery from it. Bunyan the Calvinist felt even more tortured than Luther, 
because in the interval the Bible had become the absolute encyclopedia and it 



358 c ^ 5 From Dawn to Decadence 



Ignorance: I know my Lord's will, and I have 
been a good liver; I pay every man his own; I 
pray, fast, pay tithes, and give alms. 

Christian: But thou earnest not in at the 
Wicket-Gate; thou earnest in hither through 
that same crooked lane, and therefore I fear 
thou wilt have laid to thy charge that thou art 
a thief and a robber, instead of gaining admit- 
tance into the city. 

— Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (1 678) 



was contradictory in its threats and 
promises. 

Christian embodies the INDIVIDU- 
ALISM implicit in the Protestant's direct 
relation to God, with no "good works" 
possible to help acquire merit and 
avoid Hell. He gives no thought to any- 
one but himself. No "family values" 
keep him from leaving wife and chil- 
dren behind so that he may not be 
damned. But when the book proved a 
success, Bunyan wrote a sequel of the same length and inferior, in which 
Christiana and her sons are rescued with the help of Mr. Great Heart. 

Bunyan and his book could hardly have gained a moment's attention 
from the elegant roisterers at the court of Charles II or in the London literary 
world. The Puritan ethos was no longer matter for hatred, only for ridicule. 
And the work that had helped to turn hatred into ridicule was Samuel Butier's 
Hudibras. Buder, a farmer's son, was a "domestic" in successive noble houses 
and popular for his rough-hewn humor. The poem which made him famous 

is a mock-heroic epic patterned on Don 
Quixote. Hudibras and his squire Ralpho 
are Puritans who go through ludicrous 
adventures that show the piety and 
social ideals of Cromwell's era as 
hypocrisy and self-seeking. Interspersed 
are recognizable portraits of promi- 
nent figures of Butier's day. 
The fun is supposed to come from such things as a fight between the 
knighdy pair and a group of bear baiters and also from the trick riming of the 
eight-syllable lines — the device familiar in Byron's Don Juan and W. S. 
Gilbert's comic operas. In Buder the versifying is rather crude and rarely 
witty. But King Charles enjoyed the work and gave Buder a pension. By the 
end of the 17C both the author and the subject that inspired him had slipped 
into oblivion. The Restoration mood was giving way to serious thoughts. 



What makes all doctrines plain and clear? 
About two hundred poundes a year. 
And that which was true before 
Proved false again? two hundred more. 

— Samuel Butler, Hudibras (1 668) 



The Encyclopedic Century 



Encyclopedia — "the circle of teachings" — may be taken as the emblem 
of the 18C. Like the Renaissance, the age was confident that the new knowl- 
edge, the fullness of knowledge, was in its grasp and was a means of EMAN- 
CIPATION. Confidence came from the visible progress in scientific thought. 
Science was the application of reason to all questions, no matter what tradi- 
tion might have handed down. Everything will ultimately be known and 
"encircled." The goal of exploring nature and mind and broadcasting results 
was to make Man everywhere of one mind, rational and humane. Language, 
nation, mores, and religion would cease to create differences, deadly as every- 
body knew. With a single religion and its universal morals and with French as 
the international medium of the educated, it would be a world peopled 
with — or at least managed by — philosophes. 

Before its realization a good many things had to be got out of the way, the 
principal one being Christianity — not its ethics of love and brotherhood, but 
its supernatural history, theology, and church. The Bible must be shown to be 
a set of fables invented by ignorant or designing people. This was not exactly 
the purpose of Father Richard Simon, an Oratorian monk of the preceding 
century, who wrote a Critical History of the Old Testament disputing Moses' 
authorship of the Pentateuch. But he led the way in what is known as the 
higher criticism of Scripture, the ANALYSIS of its meaning and truth, and not 
just of the purity of the text. About the same time in Holland, the excommu- 
nicated Jew Spinoza, a quiet thinker, went much farther in his interpretation. 
He had elaborated a philosophy deeply marked by natural science, which was 
incompatible with a literal belief in the Bible. For Spinoza, God was in all 
things and all things were alive with His power. Though impersonal and 
impassive, He deserved man's "intellectual love." This faith was part of an 
ethics and metaphysics that Spinoza demonstrated geometrically, by more 
than a hundred propositions deduced in strict order from a few definitions 
and axioms. The Bible, when closely read, appeared to be a compilation by 
anonymous scribes and full of contradictions. The moral teachings were 



360 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 



We may therefore say, without having admirable, the historical parts uncer- 

recourse to miracles, which ought to be kept tain, and the stories allegorical. 

as far as possible for cases of great necessity, Spinoza was highly regarded by the 

that the good constitution of Sarah, and her handful of 17C philosophers and sci- 

being exempt from lying-in and nursing, entists whom he corre sponded with. 

might preserve her beauty even to the age of He pubUshed Utde; he Uved very mod _ 

ninety. Procopius thinks that when she was , i i r j i • 

estly as an artisan and declined a chair 
made capable of conceiving, she recovered TT . 

_ at Heidelberg. But from a distance he 

her lost beauty. Procopius may say what he ° 

jj, seemed just another freethinker and 

atheist, though not harmful. Like 

— Bayle on Sarah, sister and wife _. . . . . .. r .. 

of Abraham bimon he had no immediate following. 

So far, the higher criticism was under- 
ground preparation. But shortiy a work 
appeared that exploded the mine and breached the fortress. Its author was 
Pierre Bayle, also a refugee in Holland. He produced a massive dictionary 
labeled "historical and critical." By comparing, juxtaposing, questioning, and 
describing ironically the familiar parts of the Christian revelation, he left the 
reader as skeptical as himself — or outraged by the blasphemy. 

To avoid censorship Bayle wrote short entries that merely defined the 
subject: the doctrine was in the appended notes, long and in small print, that 
encouraged the censor to skip. The Century of Light was thus inaugurated, 
but also divided. When we regard the philosophes and their Encyclopedie as 
triumphing easily, we are influenced by the now prevailing assent to their 
views, which helped to make our secular world. But the opposition they met 
was not crushed; it revived in the 1 9C and is increasingly vehement today. Its 
target, the "Enlightenment," is not reason or light but the 18C idea and use 
of it. 

Bayle's Dictionary was a work that would attract mainly intellectuals. One 
is not surprised that Jefferson owned it in five folio volumes. But it took 
Voltaire to carry its message to the ordinary educated reader, the well-to-do 
bourgeois, the men and women in high society, and the mixed group in the 
salons. His message was simple: the Book of Genesis is not wrong on one 
point: God did create the universe, but nobody knows how, and He set it 
going according to rules — the laws of science — with which He has no reason 
to interfere. This is Deism, the religion of reasonable men. Therefore drop 
the ritual, the prayers and candles — and the fears. At the same time open your 
eyes to the imposture practiced on you by the church for its sole beneficiaries, 
the priests and monks, bishops and popes. 

To convey this creed, Voltaire used every device and medium at hand; it 
could be slipped into a political pamphlet, the rebuttal of a personal attack, a 
five-act tragedy, a short occasional poem, an edition of a classic, or a private 
letter. Finally, Voltaire condensed the argument in a series of alphabetized 



The Encyclopedic Century q^> 361 

articles — four or five pages long on such topics as Angel, Atheist, Fanaticism, 
Moses, Miracles, Messiah, Equality, the State, Toleration — in all 73 entries 
entitled^ Portable Philosophic Dictionary. He might have added: Easy to read 
and Entertaining It is Bayle in reader's digest form. The prose is transparent, 
wit is present but subdued; the tone of common sense is irresistible. 

Religion as such is not attacked; it is redefined into simplicity. One may 
well be overawed by the Great Architect and His handiwork — and there an 
end. All peoples have this same feeling about the Creator, for Man, like 
Nature, is fundamentally the same the world over. Good morals are 
untouched; they too are universal. With this underlying unity about ultimate 
things, there should be no causes of conflict, no religious wars, no crusades, 
heretics, conversions, inquisitions, burnings at the stake, and massacres. 

But the infamous church is only one cause of man's inhumanity to man. 
The other is bad government. It too must be made rational. And Voltaire here 
again is gadfly and honeybee in one, pardy by accident. While still young and 
brash he had said something that offended a noble lord and was beaten up by 
the lord's lackeys. Whereupon Voltaire had the impudence to challenge the 
lord to a duel. This brought on a second stay in the Bastille (he had had an ear- 
lier taste of it) together with an order to leave the country. Voltaire chose exile 
in England, where he rapidly made friends, learned the language, and studied 
the institutions. Returning after two years, he wrote his Letters on the English — 
an immediate success and a powerful influence. France became Anglophile; 
some writers were moved to learn English, translations of English works 
became more frequent, fashions and manners took an English air. 

Before the publication of these Letters, the French philosophy of science 
was Cartesian (<201). There were, according to report, only two Newtonians 
in Paris. Voltaire followed up his social and political survey with a work on the 
Elements of Newton's Physics, and soon he and others began to explain John 
Locke's ideas on government. The most enticing was that of toleration. 
Voltaire did not make the quip to the effect that the English had only one 
sauce but a hundred religions. Nor did he write to Helvetius "I wholly dis- 
approve of what you say — and will defend to the death your right to say it"; a 
20C woman biographer said it for him.° But the two statements together 
fairly represent his principle of freedom of speech and religion. The epigram 
over-simplified the facts: Protestant sects in England were indeed all legal, 
but unequal in rights and opportunities, and Catholics were more or less per- 
secuted. Still, the English church and state had allowed the Earl of Shaftsbury 
to print his scandalous view that religion should be optional and atheism con- 
sidered a possible form of belief. The rationale was that argument brings out 
the truth, no matter what errors are put forward in what should be in the lit- 
eral sense a free-for-all. French intellectuals readily saw the advantages of free 
expression: they remembered Galileo; they knew that Descartes, Gassendi, 



362 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Simon, Bayle, and other original minds had been forced to modify or conceal 
their views for fear of persecution by the Sorbonne. 



Who was this John Locke? He was a physician, a friend of Newton's, who 
under the Stuarts had not enjoyed much toleration in his native land and had 
spent some eight years a wanderer in Holland and France. In both countries 
he had consorted with advanced thinkers. When James II was forced out in 
1688, Locke returned home and became the voice of the party that had 
effected the change. The Declaration of Rights that went with it needed a the- 
orist to make it respectable. Locke was the man to do it, because he had 
absorbed abroad much of what he ably set forth in his own writings on meta- 
physics and politics. 

For the latter he was indebted to the theorists from Bodin to Hobbes, 
who had dealt with the origin of human society (<245; 267). The argument 
that toleration makes a state stronger, not worse off, could be found, for 
example, in a work by the secluded thinker Spinoza — the only one he pub- 
lished. And the good reasons for representative government had been clearly 
laid out in Harrington's Oceana (<268), to say nothing of the Puritan 
democrats (<264). In short, Locke earned his fame by a series of well- 
organized summaries in plain prose of well-ripened ideas. It is not his fault 
but the result of a not uncommon cultural squint that Locke has been hailed 
as the discoverer and original expounder of the principle that civil and politi- 
cal rights are lodged in the people. 

Since these rights replace the divine rights of monarchy, Locke began by 
denying the latter. A tract by Sir Robert Filmer gave him the opportunity. 
Filmer spoke for the sizable English party that was appalled at the violence 
done to legitimate kingship in 1688. Sharing their religious faith, Filmer 
derived absolute monarchy from Adam's paternal and universal authority, 
handed down to all rulers by divine decree. This has been called an absurd 
idea, but to the multitude who believed like Shakespeare that divinity doth 
hedge a king, the transmission of power from God to the first man and 
thence to his anointed descendants is logical; it is a piece of reasoning; and the 
premise from which it starts is the Bible, revealed truth. 

Compared with it, Locke's premise is an assumption about the origin of 
society. As in Hobbes, it springs from the state of nature — we are dealing once 
again with those eternal standbys, Reason and Nature (<69). The reasoning 
goes like this: Man in Nature has every right that his individual power 
affords — no limits, no prohibitions. But this violent free-for-all proves incon- 
venient, so he enters into an agreement with his fellows to set up an authority 
that will restrain violence and settie disputes. That is the social contract or 



The Encyclopedic Century <&> 363 

compact. Once established and gen- The end of government is the good of 

erating laws, this arrangement is bind- mankind, and which is best for mankind, that 

ing on everybody forever, unless the the people should be always exposed to the 

sovereign — a person or a group — mis- boundless will of tyranny or that the rulers 

uses the authority conferred. Such a should be sometimes liable to be opposed? 

breach of the contract the members of U P on the forfeiture of *«* rulefS > [P ower l 

• ^ . . ., • ^ r reverts to the society and the people have a 

society may resist, even to the point or j r r 

, . , / \ -r. 1 • right to act as supreme and place it in a new 

overthrowing the p-overnor(s). By this „ , f. , 

° •(- i form or new hands, as they think good. 

provision Locke justifies those who 

ii i t TT j i 11 • -i — John Locke, An Essay Concerning the 

expelled ames II and replaced him with -L ^ ' ^ ^ 

r J r True Original, Extent, and End of 

someone— William of Orange— who Civil Government (1690) 

will abide by the terms of the contract. 
The significant difference between 

Locke's reasoning and Filmer's is that Locke's is entirely secular, a telling point 
when Reason had come to seem more solid than Revelation. There are refer- 
ences to God in Locke's two treatises, but they are pro forma. Again, it seems 
stronger to base a reasoning on Nature than on faith when advanced opinion 
is enthralled by the study of Nature. But the starting point is as shaky in the one 
case as the other: the picture of wild men, accustomed to grabbing each other's 
food, shelter, and women, spontaneously getting together to make a contract, 
is as fanciful as the providential descent of authority from Adam to James II. 

For Locke and the English who bargained with the new King, William III, 
the terms of the social contract were the 13 provisions of the Declaration of 
Rights. But Locke wanted his essay to be theory, higher ground than local 
needs, good for all places and times. The universal rights came down to three: 
life, liberty, and property. This last is based on the notion that when a man has 
"mixed his labor" with some material thing, he has made the product his 
unconditionally. As for the authority that shall enforce these rights, it cannot 
be Hobbes's absolute ruler. Power unlimited is too likely to establish a 
tyranny, as divine monarchs had not done but attempted to do. Locke vests 
sovereignty in the people. Since they cannot convenientiy exercise it, they 
choose representatives. Of these, some make the law, others are appointed to 
execute it. 

By further reasoning it appeared that the form of government that best 
embodies these conclusions is the English system called mixed: the king in 
Parliament (Commons and Lords), the elected Commons being in full con- 
trol of taxation and the army. No power can be secure without the army; and 
the Commons have a neat device for retaining that power: each year they pass 
the Mutiny Act, good for one year only, without which no discipline, no 
court-martial, would have the force of law The United States Constitution 
copied that shrewd provision and reinforced the principle by making the 
president commander in chief of the army. 



364 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 



By coincidence, during the time of Voltaire's stay, England welcomed 
another French observer, the Baron de Montesquieu. He came from the 
south of France, where he was vice president of the district court, and as such 
a member of the nobility of the robe. He hardly needed letters of introduction 
to be well received by Lord Chesterfield and other eminent men, for 
Montesquieu was the well-known author of a best-seller, The Persian Letters. It 
was the fictional account of a visit to the French court by a Persian. The satire 
was spicy and double-edged. Both French and Persian attitudes toward reli- 
gion, rulers, morals, women, and manners were derided equally. The book 
was a European success. Nobody reading or talking with the witty young 
judge could guess that 20 years later, at mid-century, after publishing a serious 
study of Rome's greatness and decay, Montesquieu would produce a large 
work combining history, political science, and sociology, L'Esprit des Lois. 

The title suffers when translated Spirit of the Laws (<220). The connota- 
tion of spirit here is: intent-and-fitness; and "laws" really mean constitu- 
tions — forms of government. The work is a vast survey, so vast that the 
author tells us at the outset how his courage failed him more than once when 
trying to organize his materials. His readers everywhere applauded the feat, 
and the French in particular were confirmed in their Anglomania: six early 
chapters devoted to liberty describe its embodiment in the English constitu- 
tion. The separation of powers — legislative, executive, and judicial — ensures 
freedom and civil rights; the equal weight of those powers keeps government 
on an even keel. 

Montesquieu gives a hint that he may be embellishing the scheme. It was 
a wise precaution, because the practical working of the government in 
Chesterfield's England differed markedly from so rational an order. The 
prime minister (a new title), who was the agent of the executive power vested 
in the king, had to control Parliament to execute anything, and he often used 
this power to oppose a king who tried to interfere with legislation. 
Montesquieu wrote that the independence of the judiciary consisted not in a 
law but in the jury system. In fact, judges and juries often followed orders 
from the executive, and Parliament could convict individuals simply by pass- 
ing a law: the powers were not distinct. In spite of these overlaps, 
Montesquieu's theory of separation and equipoise caught on as one of the 
wonders of the world. The American colonists found it most congenial. 
Montesquieu was the author most often quoted in what they read, and when 
they gained their freedom they wrote his theory into their constitution. 

The outcome of what has been reviewed here — late 17C critical thought, 
the events of 1688, and the writings of Locke, Voltaire, and Montesquieu — 
may be summed up in a few points: divine right is a dogma without basis; gov- 



The Encyclopedic Century <^> 365 

ernment grew out of nature itself, from it is not for me to inquire whether the English 
reasonable motives and for the good of at this time enjoy such liberty or not. It is 
the people; certain fundamental rights enough that I should declare it established by 
cannot be abolished, including prop- A^ laws - l do not look farther. 

erty and the right of revolution. A still — Montesquieu, L'Esprttdes Lois (17 '48) 
shorter roundup could be: the political 

ideas of the English Puritans aiming at equality and democracy were now in 
the main stream of thought, minus the religious component. 

The elimination of the Christian tradition and Scripture from social the- 
ory, and thus from the public debate, left a void that was filled by philosophy 
popularized. That is how the 1 8C publicists come to be called philosophes. 
For them, Gassendi's maxim that all knowledge is drawn through the senses 
from experience of the outer world was undoubted truth, but this empiricism 
did not prevent differences — or difficulties. Here again, Locke has been cred- 
ited with establishing that truth and removing the main objection by the prin- 
ciple of association: sensations felt together form mental pictures of things, 
that is, ideas, which by the like process form significant connections. The 
mind has no pre-existing ideas; it creates its own order out of what happens 
to it. This mode of exploration finds its highest fulfillment in natural science: 
experiment is experience channeled and closely observed, so as to ascertain 
more and more permanent connections or "laws" of nature. 

Most of these empiricists of the first generation acknowledged God as 
the Creator. The Great Watchmaker who set the cosmos in motion and then 
let it run on its own. But He had also endowed Man with the gift of reason, 
with which he discovers this orderly scheme. The thought then occurred that 
sensations imply the existence of matter; therefore ideas, feelings, knowl- 
edge — life itself — are but the interplay of bits of stuff. Matter in motion acts 
as cause, and the effect is another part of matter in some other motion. God 
has no point of entry into the relation; very likely He does not exist. There is 
in truth no need for Him. Did not the Roman Lucretius write a magnificent 
poem to teach this lesson? He demonstrated that all things and beings are but 
the combining, breakup, and recombining of atoms. Atomism is perfect for 
science, being simple and deterministic. By this route the belief in 
Predestination returns in full strength. 

In the 1 8C the marriage of science with philosophic materialism had to 
be performed under wraps for fear of the religious authorities. But it was con- 
summated in the mid-century — notably in the writings of the Baron 
d'Holbach, Helvetius, and others. And it has ever since been a cause of wide 
cultural debate, in seesaw fashion: when materialists are up, physics is the 
"model" and vitalists and idealists are down; when these last two are up, biol- 
ogy is strong and materialists muted (632— 3>). In the time of the philosophes a 
grand battle on this issue took place between the adherents of Newton and 



366 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

those of Leibniz, who has so far been mentioned here only in passing. He was 
worth reserving for this representative role. 

The controversy started over an unrelated question: which of the two 
champions had first invented the calculus, the method for determining 
curves, acceleration, and other relations between quantities that vary at the 
same time but differently? The point is moot. Newton's symbols proved the 
more convenient and are the ones now in use, but both men are entitled to 
the glory of having devised an instrument essential to physical science. 

Now, Newton was not a materialist, as may be inferred from his biblical 
research (<197) and explicit statements. But his followers made him into one 
for their own purpose. Leibniz, whose aim was to build a comprehensive sys- 
tem showing how matter and mind fitted together, saw in God's wisdom, 
goodness, and power the active, continuous cause of the order that science 
discovers. Leibniz dealt like a scientist with the current problems of space, 
time, and motion. Objects, he thought, hold together by virtue of the moving 
particles within. He built an improved calculating machine. He called for an 
international language of ideas, so framed that one could deduce new truths 
with it as with numbers. His curiosity and inventiveness knew no bounds. 

But by depending on the traditional God to provide a "pre-established 
harmony" between our ideas and the things they relate to, and also by posit- 
ing the monad 'as the unit of mind (spirit, soul), Leibniz seemed at odds with 
the new thought that had sent God into honorable retirement. In fact, the 
monad was no arbitrary conception. The argument for it was this: by defini- 
tion mind cannot be analyzed like matter into smaller and smaller bits; it is a 
whole or it is nothing; the monad is the counterpart of the atom. The 1 8C 
anti-materialists should have welcomed the monad. Unfortunately, the 
Leibnizians were led by an orthodox believer, Christian Wolff, who used old- 
style theology (and daunting German pedantry) to make his points. The sec- 
ularists were resolved to keep religion and philosophy apart, so Leibniz was 
shot down with Wolff regardless of the merits of the monad. Later on, 
Voltaire in Candide let fly a barbed arrow at Leibniz for saying that ours is the 
best possible world. In Wolff's interpretation, the dictum had turned into the 
best conceivable world. Voltaire had no trouble ridiculing that notion by piling 
up mishaps and disasters on his innocent hero. The further implication was 
that if God could not make a better world than the one we know, his good- 
ness or his power must be deficient. 

The materialists were not allowed to rest on their laurels. From another 
quarter had come a troubling argument. Young George Berkeley, later a 
bishop, but by no means an enemy of science, had a flash of inspiration: what, 
after all, was meant by matter? We never see it; we see only color and shape, 
we feel hardness and softness, and so on with taste and smell. Combined in 
this way or that, these sense impressions signalize an object and we give it a 



The Encyclopedic Century ^^ 367 

name. We then imagine — we do not see or feel — a support for all these 
impressions and we call it matter. As Coleridge put it, matter is like an invisi- 
ble pincushion that we suppose necessary to hold the various "pins" that are 
our sensations. [The work to read, short and delightful, is Berkeley's 
Commonplace Book, which details the birth and growth of his thought.] 

Berkeley asked: is the pincushion needed? Dr. Johnson — no professional 
philosopher — hearing of Berkeley's critique of matter, kicked a large stone 
"with mighty force till he rebounded from it," and said: "I refute it thus?' But 
Berkeley never denied that things were real, hard as stone and heavy as Dr. 
Johnson. He pointed out — and he has never been refuted — that matter is a 
notion added to what the senses actually report. Today, they report to the 
physicists who own a cyclotron a collection of some 40-odd "particles" 
whose tracks have to be photographed because their life flashes by in an 
instant. They do not seem to need the invisible pincushion, being a charge of 
energy or convertible into one. 

Nonetheless, common sense finds the supposed matter useful in daily 
life, and the scientist — whatever his faith or philosophy — assumes its 
Johnsonian existence when pursuing his experiments. Out of all these specu- 
lations the general public retains the image of the Newtonian world machine. 
Everything in it is a cog subject to the universal push-pull of cause and effect. 
So congenial is this picture that in the mid-18C a French soldier named La 
Mettrie caused a scandal and pleased the materialists with his book Man a 
Machine. Frederick of Prussia rejoiced in it and rewarded him. This application 
of materialism also rides up and down on the seesaw. In the 19C, after a vital- 
ist interlude, Thomas Huxley declared Man an Automaton (572>). He aban- 
doned the notion, others took it up and in our century once more, man has 
been portrayed as a chemical, glandular, and electrical machine; and still 
nearer and more subdy, as one predestined and worked by the instrumental- 
ity of cells and genes. 

* 
* * 

The spread of such ideas throughout the Occident during the 1 8C and the 
passion with which they were cheered by some and abominated by others, pre- 
supposed an eager reading public and a publishing industry in proportion. An 
ever-increasing number of journals supplied frequent news and fresh specula- 
tive ideas on every subject and at every level, from pure science to chitchat. 
And in this outpouring the monarchical and religious interest was not silent. 
With the aid of the court, led by the king's mistress, Mme de Pompadour, abbes 
and bishops, jurists from the Parlement, members of the Sorbonne faculty, and 
freelance publicists counter-attacked the avant-garde. The name phz/osophe, 
which has stuck as a badge of honor, many uttered with a scorn imputing shal- 



368 q*& From Dawn to Decadence 



In order to appeal to all classes and charac- lowness and a hatred powered by the 
ters, Disbelief has in our time adopted a light, charge of infidelity. Ruder tongues corn- 
pleasant, frivolous style, with the aim of pared the writings of the group to the 
diverting the imagination, seducing the croaking of frogs and dubbed the 
mind, and corrupting the heart. It puts on an authorg ^.^ The angef went ^ 

air of profundity and sublimity and professes ■, ^ i ■, ^ • • . 

r J j v because not merely opinions but institu- 

te rise tome fkst principles of knowledge so 1 T^ • 1 

, . . , , , , tions were at stake. Deism meant that 
as to throw off a yoke it considers shameful to 

, . , , ». ta • • ir ^t • the church was superfluous; Reason 
mankind and to the Deity itself. Now it r 

declaims with fury against religious zeal yet meant Aat reverence and obedience, 
preaches toleration for all; now it offers a traditional props of government, were 
brew of serious ideas with badinage, of pure in the discard. For the side attacking the 
moral advice with obscenities, of great truths status quo, the theme of the hour was 
with great errors, of faith with blasphemy. In EMANCIPATION, which the Other side 
a word, it undertakes to reconcile Jesus met with the counter-cry "Anathema!" 
Christ with Belial. Opposition to the view of the 

— Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris (1 762) enlightened was not limited to the eccle- 

siastics and officialdom generally. It was 
deeply rooted in the minds and habits of a large part of the European popula- 
tion. To them, warnings and reassurance were addressed from press and pulpit 
incessantly. But owing to the theological tone and substance of this effort, it did 
not make for entertaining reading. It tended to deal with separate items and 
lacked the universality of Reason, Nature, Science, Freedom, and other lofty 
ABSTRACTIONS monopolized by the avant-garde. It must moreover be said that 
the orthodox defenders mustered few minds of the first order. The negative 
position in any dispute needs a double dose of brilliance if it is to arouse enthu- 
siasm, and this was missing. It is significant that in none of the several present- 
day anthologies of the 18C thinkers, any more than in works on the subject by 
historians of ideas, does one find the church party well represented. The 18C is 
made to look all of one mind. 

What happened to the Jesuits may have led to this picture of a steamroller 
at work. They had been for 200 years the best-educated debaters; by the 18C 
a good many had been charmed away, tacit members of the secular camp. 
Pope Clement XIII, himself a cultured man, defended the Society rather 
weakly against this expulsion from several countries, and he established the 
worship of the sacred heart of Jesus to rally the faithful. Eight years later, his 
successor, under pressure from heads of state in Catholic Europe, abolished 
the order, "perceiving that it could no longer produce the abundant fruits and 
advantages for which it was instituted and approved by so many of my pre- 
decessors." And members of other orders, priests, church officials, either 
shared or tolerated with a smile the increasing infidelity. So true is it that great 
institutions are undone as much by its presumable guardians as by its enemies 
(>427£; 779>). 



The Encyclopedic Century <w 369 



* 
* * 



In the heat and smoke of battle, 
the shades of belief on each side are 
unclear, causing some participants to 
be as much confused as enlightened. It 
therefore seemed desirable to the tacti- 
cians that the elements of the new 
creed should be brought together in 
one place and made easily accessible. A 
chance to carry out this purpose was 
seized, thereby giving birth to the 
Encyclopedie. Its designer, part-author, 
copy editor, and bodyguard was 



... to stop with our Apostolic Authority the 
circulation of such unreasonable remarks, 
which are being spread on every side and 
which are seducing souls . . . We declare and 
state that the Institution the Society of Jesus 
breathes to the highest point piety and holi- 
ness in final aim, which is none other than 
the defense and the propagation of the 
Catholic religion. 

— Clement XIII, Papal Bull, 
January 9, 1765 



Diderot 



Not by this achievement alone but for several others, he is the pivotal fig- 
ure of the entire century Voltaire outshone him in their day and till nearly the 
middle of the 20C, but since then the magnitude of Diderot's genius has been 
felt and his works have been increasingly read — all this without detracting 
from Voltaire's brilliance, courage, and resourcefulness in the war that the 
two men waged side by side. 

Diderot was the younger and less well-born. He was a country boy, son 
of a cuder, and he had to make his way in Paris by hack writing, giving lessons 
in mathematics, and translating English books. A proposal for one of these, 
Chambers' Encyclopedia in three volumes, sparked the undertaking that took 26 
years of Diderot's life and taxed to near breaking point his strength of body 
and spirit. Instead of translating and expanding Chambers^ the publisher Le 
Breton and his advisers decided to issue an entirely new work — eight vol- 
umes, "by a company of men of letters." It would surpass in every way the 
dozen or so compendiums available/ Its sub tide tells the scope: Encyclopedia 
or Systematic (Raisonne) Dictionary of the Arts, Sciences, and Crafts. Such a range of 
subjects would afford innumerable opportunities to insinuate the advanced 
ideas. It is a measure of public opinion at mid-century that Diderot found in 
France the scores of qualified contributors that he needed. As a warrant of 
reliability, the well-known mathematician d'Alembert was recruited as co- 
editor in charge of the articles on his subject and Diderot found in the modest 
Chevalier de Jaucourt — quite unknown — a tireless researcher and prolific 
drafter of entries. 

Being in so many volumes, the set was expensive to produce and to buy; 
affluent subscribers must be found. A prospectus stated the aims of the editors 



370 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 



The good of the people must be the great 
purpose of government. By the laws of nature 
and of reason, the governors are invested 
with power to that end. And the greatest good 
of the people is liberty. It is to the state what 
health is to the individual. 

— L'Encyclopedie: Article on 
Government 



without guile and the money poured in. 
Evidently, an audience was ready for 
doctrines counter to tradition and ortho- 
doxy; no truly new thought receives such 
wide welcome. Soon there were 3,000 
subscribers; by volume five there were 
4,000. The Encyclopedie was the prosper- 
ous grandchild of Bayle's Historical and 
Critical Dictionary (<360). 

While this engine of war was being 
assembled, the opposition did not sit still; it was stimulated. The censorship 
was tightened; a rival reference work was put in hand — the Dictionnaire de 
Trevoux, its name referring to the Jesuit center that was already publishing the 
vigorous Journal de Trevoux\ the court, guided by Mme de Pompadour, roused 
the faithful to attack the other sinister publication. The Sorbonne and the 
Parlement, bishops and playwrights, the Academy — enlisted men or volun- 
teers — joined ranks in a campaign of mingled ridicule and fulmination. The 
old enemies, Jesuits and Jansenists, for once united in denouncing the blas- 
phemous work. 

The war lasted a quarter century, with victories and defeats on each side. 
The publisher was jailed then released and his license canceled. The volumes 
already out were officially condemned — but not burned as they should have 
been, for it so happened that the censor, M. de Malesherbes, was a believer in 
freedom of the press. More than once he warned Diderot that his agents would 

be coming to seize all manuscripts ready 
for the printer. They found none. The 
volumes kept appearing, printed in 
France, but sometimes bearing the 
name of a Swiss publisher. What is 
more, the work expanded under the cas- 
cade of copy: by volume 7 the text was 
only at the letter G. Diderot now 
counted on 17 volumes of text and 11 
of plates instead of 2. In the end, 
Diderot completed 28 volumes. Another 
editor added 7 for the ultimate version 
of 1777 in 35 volumes. 
Meantime, the worst blow had been dealt: Le Breton, fearing for his 
future in publishing, began to take out or alter sentences and paragraphs after 
Diderot had seen page proofs and passed them for printing. Diderot, who, 
like Adas, had borne the whole burden of gathering, coordinating, verifying, 
editing, and often writing the text, was incensed at the treachery; all he could 



Some will find my estimate too low. Still, 
40,000 pieces of bread for communion will 
cost 80,000 livres which, multiplied by 52 
Sundays adds up to more than 4 million 
livres. Why can't we be spared this expense? 
We are too childish and slaves to custom to 
see that there are more truly religious ways of 
worship. Now let me say something about 
candles. . . . 

— L'Encyclopedie: Article on 
Consecrated Bread 



The Encyclopedic Century <^> 371 

do was to keep hammering his publisher with demands for the sheets, hand- 
written or in print, that had suffered the cuts — in vain. They were not recov- 
ered until 1933, when a bound volume came out of Russia that plainly was Le 
Breton's set of suppressed and garbled pages, 318 in number, mosdy 
Diderot's work. 

It was persecution in earnest, but it should not be supposed that the mil- 
lions of words from A to Zwere all devoted to propaganda. If, for example, 
one opens the first volume at random, one's eye may fall upon the entry 
Asparagus, a serious essay that took three people to write: a botanist to 
describe and classify it; Diderot, who tells you at some length how it tastes 
and how to cook it; and a physician, who offers useful medical remarks. The 
Encyclopedie was and is a reference work as well as a giant pamphlet. 

Of the whole, the 1 1 volumes of plates that Diderot planned and pro- 
duced are as useful as the rest and in one respect highly original. A large part 
of them illustrates the tools and processes of manufacture in current use. The 
aider's son, who was disappointed when his father's portrait showed the man 
in his Sunday suit instead of his workman's apron, had a boundless curiosity 
about trades and crafts and their fundamental role in society. Exhibiting to 
the world their ways and means marks a date in the history of techne: crafts 
had hitherto been the secret property of each guild. But by the mid-18C, 
inventions by outsiders and rapid communication had weakened guild con- 
trol; Diderot visited the workshops unhindered. Directing his draftsman, he 
took notes for the explanatory captions. His attitude was in keeping with that 
of the scientists: free exchange; and with that of the enlightened economists: 
free trade (382>). On the customs of publishing Diderot had also a word to 
say. His Letter on the Trade of Publishing is a classic statement of the conditions 
then existing and the EMANCIPATION that should take place for the good of 
public and author. 

* 
* * 

The vicissitudes of the Encyclopedie reveal something more than the hero- 
ism of Diderot and the cohesion of the cacouacs. In spite of the forces of the 
state arrayed against the writers and the publisher, the fat folios kept coming 
out and none who collaborated lost his freedom or his life. A repressive gov- 
ernment in the 20C would have been more efficient. The 4,000 subscribers to 
the book would have found themselves in labor camps together with the 
lesser contributors, while the leading ones — Diderot, d'Alembert, Voltaire, 
Rousseau, Jaucourt, Montesquieu, Turgot, Quesnay, Marmontel, d'Holbach, 
Vaucanson, Haller, Daubenton, Condorcet — would have been liquidated. 

This tells us that the ancien regime was beginning to feel the loss of nerve 
typical of periods of decadence. The aristocrats bought the volumes that 



372 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

attacked kings and priests and enjoyed a kind of revenge against the monar- 
chical system that had tamed them, but did not foresee that their class would 
also be tamed, by the guillotine; likewise the abbes and Jesuits who paraded a 
liberal theology. One of them was asked if he thought Hell existed. "It does," 
he replied, "but nobody goes there." Among these backsliders some were 
close friends of the philosophes and they helped them in emergencies. 

Voltaire's career illustrates in great detail the ambivalence of the authori- 
ties toward what they knew was open subversion. As we saw, Voltaire was in 
trouble early and from the time of his Letters praising England (<361), he 
never stopped giving offense. Yet while discharging his broadsides he was 
Gentleman-in-ordinary of the royal chamber, historiographer to the king, 
and secret envoy on wartime missions abroad. But these official positions did 
not keep him safe. For a time he had been in Berlin as honored guest and con- 
fidant of Frederick the Great, helping him polish his French verse and prose. 
Intriguers made the pair quarrel and Voltaire became a wanderer who had to 
find asylum in Brussels, Saxe-Gotha, Colmar, Geneva, and finally Ferney, on 
the French border, four miles from Geneva, for quick escape. 

By then there were standing orders against him and his works — the 
Parlement's for his arrest, the Sorbonne's for the public burning of his books, 
the Council of State's in general condemnation. Yet his books circulated 
freely and he was not a hunted man. His letters reached his friends, among 
them — crowning paradox — Mme de Pompadour. Only when Voltaire raised 
his voice above normal, as when he defended the Protestant Calas family 
against vicious persecution, was he again in danger. Such a hot-and-cold pol- 
icy was a trait of the Age of Reason. Kings and noble lords paid Voltaire their 
due of flattery; anybody of note, from Boswell to Casanova, felt it imperative 
to visit him at Ferney; the place was often referred to as Ferney- Voltaire. He 
gave audiences like royalty and the conversations with visitors that were 
recorded and published make excellent reading. 

At the end of 20 years as a glorious refugee, Voltaire went unmolested to 
Paris to receive at home, at the Academy, at the theater — wherever he was — 
the honors reserved for a poet and a hero. He shortly died, a demigod. But to 
escape the indignities prepared by church people at his burial, he had to be 
smuggled out of Paris at night, embalmed, and propped up in a coach. 

During the latter years of the century some of the pressure on the "party 
of humanity" had begun to ease. No disaster had struck in the wake of 
Reason; the troublesome Jesuit order was expelled from France by the 
Parlement, now dominated by Jansenists; the last 10 volumes of the 
Encyclopedie came out with the authorities , tacit consent. Diderot at last had 
his reward — or at least his well-earned holiday — at a distant resort. 

Catherine the Great of Russia, as soon as she had seized her throne and 
heard of Diderot's publisher troubles, had invited him to carry on the work 



The Encyclopedic Century <^> 373 

under her protection. He chose to fight it out in Paris, but the invitation 
remained open and, once a free agent, he set out on a leisurely trip through 
Holland and Germany, visiting art collections and ending up in St. 
Petersburg. There he spent five months in comfort and pleasant conversa- 
tions with the empress. They got on extremely well; he lectured her and when 
she seemed distrait he took hold of her knee and shook it. Only one unpleas- 
ant incident occurred. Some loutish courtiers plotted his discomfiture. 
They burst in on him in front of the court and one said "Sir, a+b / z = x. 
Therefore God exists. Reply!" According to a report, that has been repeated 
with variations, Diderot was struck speechless. This is absurd. He had taught 
mathematics and written papers that were genuine though not brilliant con- 
tributions to the science. And no knowledge of algebra is needed to see 
through the absurdity. Diderot's silence expressed contempt and the refusal 
to make a scene. 

Diderot's writings other than the articles in the Encyclopedie are volumi- 
nous and encyclopedic in another sense: he dealt with the philosophy of sci- 
ence, with physiology and psychology, the woman question, the art of acting, 
and education. He wrote tales and plays and newsletters and two other 
groups of works of unique merit: dialogues on the physical and moral life of 
man; and salons — the first critical reviewing of exhibitions of paintings. 

Diderot ranks as the pivotal figure of the century because his thought 
evolved, passing from critical effort based on Reason to a conception of man 
and society in which impulse and instinct are seen as stronger than Reason. 
The philosophe's love of ABSTRACTION, which yields uniformity, is replaced 
by a keen sense of concrete diversity. The pivot for Diderot's gradual turn is 
the Encyclopedie. It was toward the end of its production that Diderot began to 
write the masterpieces embodying his doubts and his new inferences. His 
darting mind was by nature cross-disciplinary. When he deals with compara- 
tive grammar, he brings to bear not only his knowledge of the Latin and 
Greek poets and of Italian and English syntax, but also of painting and music; 
he inserts four bars from an opera, and analyzes them in technical terms to 
show a parallel with five lines of Virgil. 

From his views on art, human life, and the character of experience, 
Diderot foreshadows Romanticism and at certain points looks as far ahead as 
Symbolism. This relation to the future explains why his contemporaries gave 
him a rather narrow place in their regard: he had done good work through the 
Encyclopedie, but was otherwise the incomplete thinker and wayward son. It is 
only fair to add that his most revelatory works were still in manuscript, but 
even had they been known it is not likely that his age would have prized them 
as we do. Diderot was one of history's born conversationalists and his writ- 
ings repeatedly fall into dialogue. A tale, an essay, a rebuttal will start out 
sedately in expository form, and soon dash and question mark break up the 



374 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

line as a living or imaginary interlocutor doubts or denies — it is "interactive 
prose." In the long dialogues that he never published Diderot gives the floor 
to people he knew and makes them say what they may have thought about 
their own subject so that he can utter what he does think. 

One of the best is the "Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage." The refer- 
ence is to a famous circumnavigation of the globe. Diderot's dialogue deals, 
among other things, with the mores of Tahiti, where sexuality is free and 
without guilt. The island society, gender and wiser than the civilized ones, 
inspires the longings of primittvism. But Diderot is no Eutopian. He is 
tough-minded and has been generally called atheist and materialist. His 
mature vision does without God, certainly, but he is no militant atheist. As for 
materialism, I believe in the teeth of the authorities that the term is misap- 
plied/ Diderot's philosophy rests on his study of physiology, amplified by his 
conferring with physicians. Life, instinct, sexual reproduction, animal behav- 
ior, the passions and emotions were his concern. He had no doubt that man 
is an animal, but animals are not machines, as La Mettrie believed. Diderot 
thought it likely that "Trans f or mis m," the precursor of Evolution, was well- 
founded. In this again he pivots away from Newton and astrophysics to 
Buffon and biology (376>). But one looks in vain for his ultimate conclusions 
about matter and life. 

He concluded nothing: he proposed, saying he preferred an explanation 
that did not require two different principles, matter and life. His single entity 
was "matter that thinks," matter that has "sensibility" (ability to sense). This 
matter is not the dead matter of the materialist's world machine. When 
Helvetius in his book on Man ascribed the varieties of human experience to 
bare matter, Diderot objected: "I am a man and I want causes appropriate to 
man." Undogmatic, Diderot confessed that he could not understand the pas- 
sage from matter to thought, though it must exist if one did not suppose an 
invisible something not in space or time. He added that his system is "open to 

the same unsurmountable difficulty as 

„ ,.. . . , ,. • i j j Berkeley's argument against the exis- 

He: Everything that lives, man included, J & & 

seeks its well-being at the expense of who- tence of matter." The body-mind prob- 

ever withholds it. If I let my little savage grow lem has in fact not been solved. If 

up without my saying a word to him, he Diderot was not a materialist in the 

would of his own accord want to be rich, accepted sense, what must he be called? 

loved by women, and draw to himself all the The most fitting term is the one William 

goods of life. James chose for himself: radical empiri- 

Ai^#: If your little savage were left to himself cist° (668>). For both thinkers it has 

he would strangle his father and sleep with the advantage of reconceiving matter 

his mother. as something close to its present-day 

— Diderot, Rameau's Nephew aspects — not dead weight, but multi- 

(first publ. 1 832) form energy. 



The Encyclopedic Century <^> 375 



* 
* 



The most spectacular discoveries in the Age of Reason were those in 
electricity. Before and after Franklin's near-suicidal experiment as human 
lightning rod, many amateurs and professionals worked with the "Leyden 
jar," which stores static electricity. They recorded the facts of positive and 
negative charges, measured the output (Coulomb); devised an electric pile 
(= battery — Volta); and perceived a link between electricity and the action of 
the nerves (Galvani). Two technical units and the familiar galvanised remind us 
of their names and findings. Very few searchers as yet specialized; all phe- 
nomena challenged their minds. Franklin, for example, made contributions to 
general physics, oceanography, and meteorology. His studies in electricity 
established the one-fluid theory and the terms charge, negative and positive, and 
battery. He measured and predicted effects and explained the fact of ground- 
ing. He added to the understanding of storms and of the Gulf Stream and 
invented useful things, notably the stove named after him.° Unfortunately, a 
phenomenon just as elusive as electricity did not fare well at the hands of an 
investigating committee on which he sat with Lavoisier and others. A Dr. 
Mesmer had come to Paris from Germany and treated patients by what he 
called animal magnetism — hypnosis. The committee declared the theory and 
practice both without merit. By inference Dr. Mesmer was a fraud. His 
method is in medical use today. 

Franklin had come to Paris on a diplomatic mission after the American 
colonies' declaration of independence and he remained nine years as cultural 
envoy and negotiator of treaties. He was soon idolized as the embodiment of 
everything the Enlightenment stood for: reason at work in science, and eman- 
cipation from kings and priests. What is more, his simple overseas manners and 
dress, both "put on," fitted in nicely with the mood of the last quarter of the 
century (386>); indeed, in his fur hat he was hailed as the Noble Savage. 

Another fluid, one that all could see — water — was also being studied in its 
large effects, the results giving a start to the science of hydrodynamics and 
yielding improvements in bridge- and shipbuilding. Momentous in its conse- 
quences, this renewed interest in water included the effort to hitch it in the 
form of steam to metal parts and so to form an engine. The first, Newcomen's, 
worked a pump; next Watt's, more efficient, put man in possession of locomo- 
tive as well as stationary power. Steam gave vast importance to certain devices 
invented some time before: Kay's "flying shuttle" threw the thread across the 
work in weaving; Hargreaves' "spinning jenny" was a multiple spinning wheel, 
both devices being intended to increase domestic production. The next inven- 
tion, Arkwright's water frame, was too large and expensive for home use and it 
needed power; likewise, Crompton's "mule," which combined the jenny and 
the frame, ruled out home application: the factory was inescapable. 



376 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Practical devices and theoretical understanding gave each other mutual 
aid. The thermometer belongs to this period, two scales — Fahrenheit's and 
Reaumur's — being offered to chemists and physicians. After long efforts and 
the offer of a prize, a clock was built that was accurate enough to measure the 
time elapsed after travel from a given point — the Greenwich meridian — and 
thereby to fix a ship's longitude. Like any instrument that measures, John 
Harrison's chronometer (made of wood) served the needs of pure research; 
his being denied the prize is one of the scandals in the history of science. [The 
book to read is Longitude by Dava Sobel (Penguin ed.).] 

The interest in the earth was fed by numerous expeditions. Bougainville's 
(<374) was spectacular. Another team braved the Lapland weather to ascer- 
tain the size of the earth. An open space near the pole was convenient for 
measuring a portion of the rotundity and determining the length of one 
degree. In Sweden, the philosopher Swedenborg, an avowed materialist until 
his later years, made discoveries in geology and paleontology; and in Lapland 
again, the botanist Linnaeus searched for exotic plants. On his return he 
devised the system still used for naming and classifying them. At the other 
end of the earth, La Condamine sailed the length of the Amazon River, col- 
lecting flora and fauna and discovering the rubber plant. Others, like Captain 
Cook, made voyages to the South Seas, adding archipelagos to the known 
islands and coming upon New Zealand, whose addition completed the map 
of the world. Most of these ventures were sponsored by crowned heads or 
their enlightened ministers, who also maintained botanical and zoological 
gardens: it was the dawn of "government in science." 

Back home, findings were sifted and theories framed. Georges Le Clerc, 
comte de Buffon, was a naturalist who undertook to gather into one work all 
that was known about the animal world and, with the aid of Daubenton, to 
extend the compendium to plants. For his part, Buffon came to believe that 
the higher vertebrates, including man, were built on a single pattern, the limbs 
and other organs having related forms. He described the features which by 
transformation must have led to the anatomy of Homo sapiens. Buffon sug- 
gests no means for the process. It was bad enough to contradict God's sepa- 
rate creation of all living things, beginning with Man, who was "in His image." 
To protect himself from the Sorbonne's wrath, the naturalist had to couple 
his hypothesis with rhetoric to the effect that were we not perfectly sure by 
revelation that no such interconnections are possible, we should be tempted 
to believe that. . . . 

A censor would find it hard to impugn the disclaimer, but a docile reader 
might miss the scientist's irony. It was in fact missed by the 19C historians of 
evolution, but not in its own day. "Trans for mism" was an idea in the air and, 
as we saw, firm in Diderot's mind through his contacts with physiologists. By 



The Encyclopedic Century <^> 377 

the end of the century, two complete theories of evolution, one English and 
one French, were in print for public attention (455>). 

Research threw new light also on medicine and the workings of the body. 
Leeuwenhoek and Stahl discovered the human spermatozoa; physiologists 
noted the similarities between the human male and female organs of repro- 
duction. Harvey's earlier discovery that the blood circulated and exerted pres- 
sure on the vessels inspired in Boerhaave a system of medicine based on 
hydraulics: if the vessels were too thin or weak, illness developed. In other 
cases, such as digestive trouble, the cause was chemical. Medical "systems" 
still ruled practice; Boerhaave's, eloquently conveyed to large classes at 
Leyden and propagated in seven textbooks throughout Europe, held the 
stage for 50 years. One advance in preventive care was Jenner's use of cow 
vaccine, instead of human material, to immunize against smallpox; milder 
cases and fewer deaths from "vaccinia" resulted. 

One study in which system was appropriate found in the 18C its defini- 
tive maker, the chemist Lavoisier. He had the right materials and the right 
method — isolating elements, finding them again in compounds, weighing the 
proportions in which they combine, and giving them indicative names. This 
firm foundation for the science was made possible by the separate discover- 
ies of oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen (Priestley, Cavendish) and the long- 
delayed explanation of fire. It had been thought that when something burned 
a subtle element called phlogiston (flame) was set free. Instead, experiment 
proved that fire resulted from the combining of oxygen with other sub- 
stances. [The book to leaf through for illustrations of 18C laboratory work in 
all fields is The Album of Science: Leonardo to Lavoisier^ ed. by I. Bernard Cohen.] 

Underlying all advances was the progress of mathematics. The work of 
Halley on comets, of Laplace in cosmology, or (as just noted) of Lavoisier in 
chemistry depended on numbers. The calculus of Newton and Leibniz was 
prerequisite to all studies of motion. And in the age that revered Bacon, 
mathematicians were also physicists who passed readily from mechanics to 
astronomy and from the theory of fluids to the theory of numbers. 
D'Alembert, Euler, Laplace were at home in many parts of the single field, 
"natural philosophy." In one instance, mathematics seemed the inherited 
craft of a single family, the Bernoulli. Nine of them earned distinction by dis- 
coveries in astrophysics, mechanics, botany, and chemistry, and this without 
incurring reproach for scattering their talents. The clan wound up with an 
artist of considerable merit as a painter. 

It was the encyclopedic yet piecemeal activity of the discoverers that held 
the interest of the educated public and enabled it to stay up-to-date with sci- 
ence. In many towns — not capitals alone — academies were founded where 
learned persons mingled with eager ones, titled and bourgeois, to hear papers 



378 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

on the latest item of discovery or speculation. They offered prizes for 
answers to disputed questions, the winners gaining instant renown. Echoing 
these centers were the innumerable salons presided over by ladies, also 
learned, who steered discussion, invited foreigners, and promoted the gifted 
young. Less selective, the coffee shops gathered "regulars" of like-minded 
opinion or avocation. 

One of them, the Cafe Procope in Paris, was made outstanding by Diderot 
and his friends, while the salons gave lasting fame to such women as Mme du 
Deffand, Mme d'Epinay, Mme de Tencin, Mme d'Houdetot, Mme Geoffin, 
Mile de Lespinasse. Others shone by correspondence of the same caliber as 
the conversations, nobtably Voltaire's intimate companion, Mme du Chatelet, 
expert in physics and mathematics; and Diderot's great love, Mile Volland, 
whose exchange of letters is a source for the genesis of his ideas. 

The variety of topics and the zeal for explanation by measuring the regu- 
larities of nature kept strengthening Deism and atheism and weakening the 
credibility of a Providence concerned with individuals. Western culture was 
inching toward its present SECULARISM. A shocking event at mid-century 
supplied a brutal confirmation of disbelief. On the eve of All Saints' Day in 
1755, while the faithful were in church, an earthquake shattered Lisbon. Fire 
and flood from the Tagus river completed its destruction. Tens of thousands 
perished. Instantly, Voltaire set to work on a long poem that drew the moral: 
how could a personal God endowed with power and justice ordain such a 
holocaust? For what conceivable reason kill worshipping men, women, and 
children in a peculiarly horrible manner? That they were worse sinners than 
the same number of Parisians or Londoners was a contemptible answer. 
There was no answer, except that the forces of nature acted independently of 
their creator. [Worth reading is the translation of the main parts of "The 
Lisbon Earthquake" by Anthony Hecht] ° 

* * 

Voltaire at 60 was the Grand Old Man of letters throughout the western 
world. He was the Enlightenment personified and the supreme master in all 
genres. But the touchstone of his eminence was his output of tragedies in 
verse. They duly followed the pattern set in the preceding age by Corneille 
and Racine (<342), and though to us lacking the fire of the innovators, they 
were good imitations, and in one respect were new: Voltaire abandoned the 
hackneyed Greek and Roman subjects. He went to T&sso's Jerusalem Delivered, 
medieval France, and the Near East. He made Mohammed a hero, and when 
he tackled Caesar, it was to show by comparison that Shakespeare was only a 
gifted barbarian who had no notion of tragic art. Voltaire ought to know, hav- 



The Encyclopedic Century <&> 379 

ing read him in English, and now that translations were appearing in French, 
there was need of a judgment on the foreigner who might lead young poets 
astray. 

Voltaire's output in comedy was inconsequential, like his early attempt at 
an epic about Henry IV, but his wit and worldly wisdom found vent in num- 
berless occasional poems. The contemporary of his who wrote true comedy in 
French was Marivaux, and his mode of doing it was unique — so much so that 
it acquired the name of Marivaudage. It consists in showing by innumerable 
touches — a word, a pause, a gesture — how people in love or on the brink of it 
are moved by prejudgments, illusions, uncertainty, and blind error, psychologi- 
cal and social. One thinks of Marivaux's dialogue in reading Henry James's 
plays and later novels. [On Marivaux the book to read is by Oscar A. Haac] 

Marivaux was not a satirist, nor was Voltaire successful when he 
attempted to ridicule the figure and fate of Joan of Arc. The poem has been 
held against him as tasteless and given him the 1 9C reputation of vicious, 
grinning defiler of all that is fair and noble in humanity. This judgment over- 
looks the works in prose and notably the tales: not Candide alone, but Zadig, 
The Princess of Babylon, Micromegas, The Man with Forty Shillings, and others, in 
which we find the Voltaire who prized justice, courage, fidelity, and the sim- 
ple life. In Candide, moreover, though the fact has been strangely overlooked, 
Voltaire no longer believes in progress through light and Reason. The world 
cannot be cured of greed, fraud, superstition, and violence. The only course 
for the wise man is to retreat and cultivate his garden. 

Needless to say the spirit of Candide is not that of the musical that has 
been made from it,° but neither is Voltaire's advice in Candide that of a disillu- 
sioned old man. He held the same view of human affairs long before the tale, 
when he was busy as a writer of histories. The world has forgotten how much 
he did to inform his age and create in it the sense of history that was to dom- 
inate the next century. The Age of Louis XIV, the lives of Peter the Great and 
of Charles XII, ° and the vast survey he called an Essay on the Customs and 
Manners of Nations occupied him during many years; and they filled his mind 
with facts that went against what he as philosophe expounded. 

Despite the lack of preliminary studies by other hands, the Essay on cus- 
toms is an attempt at a history of the world seen in cultural perspective — the 
first of its kind. It takes the reader from the geological setting of prehistory to 
the Near and Far Eastern civilizations, and thence to medieval and modern 
times in the West. Here is Voltaire the concrete mind. Gone are the universal 
reason, single religion, and uniform Man; a close look at the what-happened 
dispels them. The truth arrived at is that periods of civilization are rare; 
Voltaire the historian finds only four: ancient Athens, Rome, the Renaissance, 
and the age of Louis XIV, which carries over into part of his own time. 



380 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

The idea that cultures rise and fall was not original with Voltaire. As we 
saw, it was set forth in great detail earlier in the century by Giambattista Vico 
in his neglected book The New Science (<314). Before Vico, the doings of kings 
had been the staple of historiography, for the good reason that kings were the 
patrons of historians. National and cultural history date from Vico and 
Voltaire. But during and apart from the writing of royal histories, historical 
scholarship flourished among certain religious orders such as The Bollandists 
and the Benedictines of St. Maur. They studied and edited tons of records 
dating back to early times. Voltaire's work owed much to German and Swiss 
collections of this sort and their amiable curators. His historical vision influ- 
enced his contemporary peers Gibbon, Hume, and Robertson, and spurred 
Herder, mosdy through disagreement, to lay down the principles that 
inspired 19C historians everywhere (482>). 

* 
* * 

To call Candide and similar works tales and not novels is to make a point 
related to the historical sense. We last looked at the novel in its picaresque 
stage (<1 1 1), when it offers a critique of society and its members by leading a 
hero through mishaps as he rises on rungs of the social ladder. At the turn of 
the 1 7C Lesage enlarged the canvas without changing the method, and Mme 
de Lafayette made a departure into the study of passion (<352). It was left to 
the 18C to achieve the full-fledged genre properly called the novel. Furetiere 
had taken a step forward in Le Roman bourgeois by describing a class setting, 
but without much skill. And Marivaux the playwright added subde psycho- 
logical interest in The Jumped-up Peasant and The Life of Marianne. 

Litde by litde these two elements of the true novel, character and social 
milieu, were centering attention, now one, now the other predominating. 
England produced the definitive models: Richardson's Pamela and Fielding's 
Tom Jones. The richness of introspective and domestic detail in Pamela, 
repeated to the saturation point in the author's other two novels, makes him 
the founding father of the psychological novel. The species is deep but not 
broad. Tom Jones presents the balanced form; so that if one compares 
Richardson to a biographer, Fielding must be looked upon as a historian. He 
virtually tells us so in those wonderful "prefaces" that occur at intervals to 
explain his work. He calls it an epic, which, as we know, is a poetic history. His 
apology for Tom's not being a hero makes a related point. He had parodied 
Pamela and, wanting his story to be true to life, he had not made Tom heroic 
in virtue like her. 

Richardson was enthusiastically read in France, especially after Diderot's 
long essay in his praise. Pamela's high moral tone, her resourcefulness though 
a simple maidservant in resisting her social superior, her amazingly analytic 



The Encyclopedic Century <^> 381 

self-respect were the cause for many hearts-and-minds to weep at her trials 
and triumph. The age was heading toward sentimentality (41 0>). The hard- 
bitten Voltaire himself said that the best plays were those that made one weep 
the most. And Diderot in his two plays and occasionally elsewhere shows that 
he enjoyed nothing better than the spectacle of storybook benevolence. It 
must overcome evil, reconcile enemies, clear up misunderstandings, reunite 
families. Fielding was not immune: Mr. Allworthy in Tom Jones proves it by his 
very name. But the rest of Tom Jones portrays fact and feeling, not sentiment. 

Since stage plots with happy endings and sober dialogue were neither 
tragedies nor comedies, they were called bourgeois dramas, a term that indi- 
cates their link with the philosophe temper: the bourgeois was the straight- 
forward man or woman, simple in manners and ethics — altogether respectable; 
whereas the aristocrat, though called honnete homme (<351) was not honest but 
an intriguer in gaudy array, treacherous and corrupt under the surface. The 
age that declared men were all born equal and that said kings were lucky war- 
riors and priests confidence men logically found the worthy man in the 
bourgeois. 

The contradictory attitudes that may be read in the works and lives of a 
Voltaire or Diderot are found in others, of course, and in their crusades as 
well. It is hard to reconcile in the Enlightenment the assault on kings and con- 
querors and the enthusiasm for Frederick and Catherine — both dubbed 
Great, although they ruled Prussia and Russia like dictators. The royal minis- 
ters Pombal in Portugal, Aranda in Spain, and later Joseph II of Austria joined 
with public acclaim this club of "Enlightened Despots." 

The first two bestowed favors on Voltaire and Diderot and on others 
among the academicians of Berlin and St. Petersburg. The same mutual admi- 
ration graced some of the German courts ruled by lesser despots who talked 
French and Reason (390>). The expectation was that these heads of state 
would carry out reforms of the kind wanted by the avant-garde. It was not an 
altogether foolish hope: who else could change the structure of govern- 
ments? No machinery existed for the purpose; and given this difficulty, the 
more despotic the ruler the greater the likelihood of change — provided he 
made the Encyclopedie his bedside book. The men of the Enlightenment did 
not promote democracy or contemplate revolution. Voltaire even while prod- 
ding others to help him crush I'infdme, the infamous church, pointed out the 
need for religion to keep the masses from killing and looting the propertied 
classes. Not that the people were stupid or evil, but untaught and brutish. In 
the event, the failure of plans for education and reform in Russia and Austria 
confirmed the difficulty and dimmed the luster of enlightened despotism. 

Meanwhile a group of economists sought another kind of reform, one 
that despots might not favor: free trade. In the 17C one Boisguilbert had dis- 
puted the dogma of Mercantilism: piling up gold by spurring exports and 



382 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

deterring imports was short-sighted. It pleased kings but harmed the king- 
dom. Prosperity depended on the greatest possible production and exchange, 
with only one tax imposed on the producers. In England too a Dutch doctor 
named Mandeville had written a popular tale, The Fable of the Bees, in which he 
argued that consumption and even luxury and waste were good for the coun- 
try — his maxim was: private vices ^public benefits. In the encyclopedist gen- 
eration Quesnay, Turgot, and Dupont de Nemours (later the founder of the 
American corporation and dynasty of that name) developed a theory inspired 
by Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood. It was more than a 
rhetorical analogy. Free-moving goods and money would sustain every part 
of the body politic. Agriculture was the only source of wealth — industries 
only transform a product without adding to it — hence a single tax. As things 
were, towns, counties, provinces, and builders of highways all levied tolls and 
tariffs that must be abolished. All the good lands must be tilled, and by the lat- 
est methods. This faith in the primacy of agriculture seemed rational before 
machine industry had shown its fruits, and the name Physiocrat (= Nature 
the ruler) was appropriate for these budding economists. 

Improvement in agriculture was in fact making great strides in England. 
Jethro Tull had invented a drill that directed the seed in planting, avoiding 
waste. Lord Townshend had found that certain root crops replenished the 
fertility of the soil; and he campaigned for their use; he rose to fame as Turnip 
Townshend. The plow was improved and cattle bred more carefully; all of 
which reinforced the platitude that the richest and happiest country is the one 
that has the largest rural population; the family was blest that had the most 
children to work the land and take care of the old folk in their last years. This 
picture of the good life went well with the longing that Diderot expressed in 
his moments of primitivism. It was congenial also to one who had been 
Diderot's closest friend and a valued contributor to the Encyclopedie, but came 
to be feared by the avant-garde as the worst enemy of reason and truth, 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau 

His books on government, morals, education, and social life did give the 
course of ideas a wrench. To understand how, one must erase from the mind 
every remark or allusion one has come across about him and his thought. In 
academic writings as in journalism, his name and the adjective Rousseauian 
are used to characterize opinions that he never held. These statements con- 
trary to fact are repeated by rote when certain subjects arise, just as 
Shakespeare's phrase "sea change" is set down when the writer thinks of 
change. For the record: Rousseau did not invent or idolize the noble savage, 
did not urge going "back to nature," did not say that since men are born free 
and are now in chains, we must break the chains. He did not base his political 



The Encyclopedic Century ^ 383 

conclusions on the social contract, and when he argued that plays were harm- 
ful and the arts and sciences had not improved mankind, he was neither the 
first nor the last great thinker to hold these views. Finally, his feeling at the 
end of life that he was the victim of persecution was not paranoid. 

What then did he think and say? The catalogue of negatives seems to 
strip him bare of originality and importance. Let us follow him from his 
beginnings. Born in Geneva, he came from a family of artisans, his father a 
watchmaker who taught him "goodness" in a gende way at odds with the sur- 
rounding Calvinism. But the Puritan influence nonetheless went deep. Young 
Rousseau emigrated to France to make his way and found himself a servant 
in the house of a provincial lady with intellectual pretensions, Mme de 
Warens. As her quasi son and actual lover, he learned the manners of society 
and was converted to Catholicism. He then had a spell of monastic life, and 
next went to Paris, where Diderot befriended him: they were brother spirits. 
A prize offered by the Dijon Academy on the question, whether the revival of 
the arts and sciences had helped to improve manners and morals, stirred their 
ambition; they conferred about it, Rousseau wrote the essay, taking the nega- 
tive, and won the prize. He was famous overnight; for it was an arresting para- 
dox to deny the value of what the brightest of the age took pride in and 
worked to extend. It must be remembered that in the 1 8C "arts" meant all the 
arts — mechanical as well as fine, the entire techne of civilized life — as may be 
seen in Article I section 8 of the United States Constitution. 

Diderot may have suggested the resounding "No!" as offering a better 
chance of winning, but note that it was the Academy, a large group of intel- 
lectuals, who raised the doubt. In any case Rousseau never backed away from 
the position; it was congenial to his Puritan-bred temperament and sincerely 
held; it led logically to his most influential ideas. But this was not foreseen by 
those who henceforth made him a literary lion and a potential Encyclopedist. 
In due course he wrote for the great work all the articles on music; for he was 
proficient in that fine art, and when the vicissitudes of patronage forced him 
to earn his living, he did so by copying music. He had married a woman of 
humble birth and had children to support. 

All the while, in every situation, he kept educating himself by voracious 
reading and searching observation. The ups and downs of his career made 
him a unique social being: he had waited on table and been an attache of the 
French embassy in Venice; he had lived frugally with his family in a Paris back 
street and been the guest of honor in noble houses; he ended up as an anony- 
mous cottager in a small village. Rousseau was thus the only critic of society 
to have seen it from every established rank and that of petted genius besides. 
What he saw in his own person now has to be dug out by teams of Ph.D.s 
armed with questionnaires. 

After the prize piece, Rousseau, then aged 43 and once more a Protestant, 



384 c^> From Dawn to Decadence 

wrote another tract, On the Origin of Inequality Among Men. It is here that the 
myths about his views begin. Voltaire, who had felt annoyed by the first essay, 
was outraged by the second, declaring that Rousseau wanted us to "walk on all 
fours" like animals and behave like savages, believing them creatures of perfec- 
tion/ From these interpretations, plausible but inexact, spring the cliches 
Noble Savage and Back to Nature. We saw that 1 6 centuries after Tacitus the 
noble savage was resurrected as a help to the Evangelicals and that the discov- 
ery of America proved this creature a real being; his tribal society shortly 
inspired the Eutopias. The type reappeared in Gulliver's fourth voyage as the 
Houyhnhnm, the ever- judicious horse. In short, the myth embodies a perma- 
nent ideal, reborn in the Modern Era and satisfying the urge to PRIMITTVISM. It 
recurs when society faces too much complexity and condemns it as artificial. 

Rousseau did inveigh against the characteristics of high civilization, but 
he did not preach a return to the savage state. He thought it in many ways 
unattractive— lacking morality, acting by instinct without thought and at one 
stage without language, and living from hand to mouth. What is preferable 
when society and property have become established and the inequality of tal- 
ents is revealed, is that ability should be rewarded for the advantage of the 
community. This stage, Rousseau says, is the happiest and most lasting in the 
history of mankind. But he says nothing about returning to it. He does say 
that when in time wealth and rank no longer correspond to merit, the dispar- 
ity becomes an injustice and leads to instability. This conclusion, he points 
out, is easily reached by simply reflecting, reasoning in good Enlightenment 
fashion. It is not a rabble-rousing argument. Nature and the savage are 
ABSTRACTIONS like the figures of geometry. 

Taken together, these first two essays form a negative critique of things as 
they are. The later, positive recommendations show that the society to be re- 
instituted is a revised form of the middle stage just described — the model man 
is the independent farmer, free of superiors and self-governing. This was cause 
enough for the philosophies' hatred of their former friend. Rousseau's unfor- 
givable crime was his rejection of the graces and luxuries of civilized existence. 
Voltaire had sung "The superfluous, that most necessary thing." For the high- 
bourgeois standard of living Rousseau would substitute the middling peasant's. 
It was the country versus the city — an exasperating idea that, and so was the 
amazing fact that every new work of Rousseau's was a huge success, whether 
the subject was politics, the theater, education, religion, or a novel about love. 

The best known of the political works, The Social Contract, is the one in 
which occurs, near the beginning, the over-quoted sentence about men born 
free and everywhere in chains. The journalist mind assumes that the words 
can only mean "Break the chains." But Rousseau's next sentence, left 
unquoted, says: "I will now endeavor to show how they [the chains] are legit- 



The Encyclopedic Century <^> 385 

imate." Farther on we come upon the savage once more and learn that 
although he is free of some faults, he is not a moral being — not immoral, 
amoral. So he cannot be the material for building a society and running a gov- 
ernment. So much for the charge of wanting us "to walk on all fours." 

As for the social contract, which critics then and now think ridiculous, it 
was Locke's starting point a quarter century before Rousseau's birth; yet 
Locke is praised as sound. The contract is an ancient idea and Rousseau used 
it as a title that would immediately indicate the subject of his book. In the 
course of it he says he does not care whether there ever was a contract. He 
does not need it for his purpose, which is to define his best form of govern- 
ment for men who are free and also moral. Pure democracy, in which all 
citizens vote on every issue (the New England town meeting) is too good for 
fallible human beings, and it would be workable only in very small city-states. 
The next best is representative government, which he calls with great preci- 
sion: "elective aristocracy." 

The people is sovereign in Rousseau as in Locke; the representatives must 
therefore act for the people's best interests. But human failings — stupidity, self- 
ishness — frequendy prevent the "will of all," that is, the majority, from carrying 
out the "general will," which is the common welfare. All really want it, but 
blinded in some way they often fail to enact it. The question whether this plan, 
coupled with a "civic religion" opens the way to dictatorship, as some have 
argued, would require more quoting and rebutting than is worthwhile here. 
More important is the neglected fact that when Rousseau was asked to recom- 
mend a constitution for Poland and again one for Corsica, he replied not as in 
the Contract^ general propositions but in a concrete spirit and with insistence 
on the need to suit the traditions, customs, and present needs of the people. 
The Rousseau of the essays based on reasoning alone is often adversely com- 
pared with Burke, the practical statesman. An American scholar long ago 
showed in her Rousseau and Burke how false the contrast is and how much the 
two theorists were at one on principles of government/ 

Because school is the place where the mind and feelings are molded, 
Rousseau defined the proper education for the citizens of a republican state. 
The Emile (the name of his pupil) shows how the native curiosity and other 
impulses of the child should be made use of to develop intelligence and 
acquire learning. It is once again "things, not words" (<181). Reading is to be 
postponed and rules must arise from observation and reflection if they are to 
be accepted as reasonable. In a word, the program is: the pupil is a child, not 
a small adult; he or she develops, and the training must be adapted to each 
phase of the change. Molding in the literal sense is what must not be done. 
Every subsequent "progressive school," down to John Dewey's in the early 
1900s (608>) has applied the intent of Rousseau's precepts. 



386 ^> From Dawn to Decadence 

The book angered all parties — Deist, Atheist, and Catholic — by its sec- 
tion on religion, but pleased many on topics of domestic concern. Rousseau 
wanted mothers to nurse their children, not farm them out to unknown girls; 
and fathers should not stay aloof from their offspring. If Emile has a tutor, it 
is because of the incessant attention the plan requires. Rousseau did not write 
a manual — and said so; he was giving a new conception of the individual and 
the growth of his mind. The setting is rural, so that the child learns about liv- 
ing things, the rhythm of the seasons, and the beauty and variety of nature. 
His daily round is simpler and healthier than in town, free of the conventions 
and fads that make clever worldlings, prone to dissipation and shallow ambi- 
tions. The portrait of Emile makes us think of Fielding's Tom Jones, who also 
is good-natured and fundamentally honest. Unfortunately Tom's tutors 
Thwackum and Square were horrors, and if we may take them as only slight 
exaggerations of the type employed by good families in the 18C, we can 
gauge the appeal of Rousseau's pedagogy, a distant revival of Montaigne's 
(<138). Tom was saved by his love for Sophie. Sophie is also the name of 
Emile's destined spouse — it means wisdom and she embodies it as the help- 
mate of the citizen- farmer, the man whom Jefferson counted on to make the 

United States a great nation, the man 

uo . , , , - Tocqueville found when he visited the 

"Sir, you see before you a man who has ^ 

brought up his son according to the princi- j' 

pies so happily to be found in your Emile" Having grasped Rousseau's aims 

Rousseau looked at him hard. "That's too and seeing what has taken the place of 
bad, sir, too bad for you and your son. I did the society he lived in, one must agree 
not intend to furnish a method; I wanted only with the scholar who concluded that 
to prevent the evils of education as it the 1 8C troublemaker's motto was not 
existed." back but forward to nature. In his own 

— Report of a conversation with M. day Rousseau witnessed a response to 

Angard (n.d.) his views besides applause: nursing 

mothers, ladies on their estates playing 
at being dairy maids — Marie Antoinette, suitably dressed, did it at court — 
and a more conscious interest in the countryside, especially after Rousseau 
published descriptions of his rambles among woods and streams. The con- 
viction grew that time spent in that way repaired the wear and tear of the city. 
Everybody's paid vacation, now ordained by law, is a remote effect of The 
Reveries of a Solitary Saunterer. 

In Emile nature had yet another role. The country-bred adolescent begins 
to ask philosophic questions: how do we come into the world? Who made it? 
What is the meaning of life? On the subject of procreation, Rousseau urges 
giving frank answers as soon as the question is asked; it will soon be accom- 
panied by sexual desire, which also needs discussion. As for the larger cre- 
ation, it cannot be explained in the repellent terms of theology or the remote 



The Encyclopedic Century <^?o 387 

abstraction of Deism. Visible nature, its infinite beauties and tremendous 
power are the living witness to the living God. Religion is a feeling. It com- 
bines humility with wonder and sustains the moral law imprinted on the indi- 
vidual conscience. 

Rousseau puts religion among the passions, which are the energy behind 
reason and action. All the passions are good when hitched to the right 
thoughts, and this linkage, which results from a good upbringing, does not 
need the apparatus of eternal rewards and punishments or earthly rituals and 
revelations. Rousseau reminds the reader that two-thirds of mankind are nei- 
ther Christians nor Jews, nor Mohammedans, from which it follows that God 
cannot be the exclusive possession of any sect or people; all their ideas as to 
His demands and His judgments are imaginings. He asks only that we love 
Him and pursue the good. All else we know nothing about. That there should 
be quarrels and bloodshed about what we can never know is the grossest 
impiety. 

The Emile was condemned by the bishop of Paris not only for teaching 
men to bypass the church but for implying universal salvation and denying 
original sin. Rousseau replied that according to the gospel, Christ had died to 
redeem mankind of sin and that baptism seconded that redemption, after 
which only individual sins kept one from being saved. In a last work, the 
Confessions, he taught by showing his own faults and misdeeds that he enter- 
tained no illusions about human conduct. The gap between moral intention 
and performance remains a perpetual challenge to the will. 



The Encyclopedie had a great deal to say about music — it would fill three 
ordinary volumes — and it is all by Rousseau. Hence we may not dismiss him 
yet. Under Diderot's whip, protesting, he turned out the work in three 
months. This haste accounts for some of the mistakes that Rameau, the 
formidable theorist and composer, enjoyed publicizing. It was retaliation for 
Rousseau's hostility to French music in favor of the Italian, a judgment based 
chiefly on the ease with which Italian words can be sung as well as set to 
music. Rameau had made still grander the kind of spectacle created by Lully 
for Versailles. A recent production of Rameau 's Indes Galantes gave a taste, but 
not the full measure, of 1 8C extravagance in ballet and decor. Only the rich 
harmony remained. One might label the French style Baroque and the Italian 
neo-classical. The Italians also offered opera buffa, the comic genre, which the 
French were slow to imitate. 

About all this, Parisian opera-goers argued vehemently; Rousseau was 
not alone in preferring the foreign product to the French, from dislike of 
pomp and thick musical texture. He made fun of the apparatus, and wanting 



388 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Imagine a crate 15 feet wide and long in pro- to show what simplicity in opera could 

portion. On each side are screens roughly be he composed LeDevindu Village {The 

painted to represent chasms or holes in the Village Soothsayer). It was indeed sim- 

sky. Behind is a curtain, always torn. When pl e _ a tale of rustic love and fatherly 

people walk behind, it flutters, not unpleas- wisdom> sung to balladlike tunes; no 

antly. Four timbers and a flat board make up i ,, i • i • r i 

J r gods or goddesses shrieking rrom cnar- 

the chariot of the gods. It hangs from a rope . . r . . 

. „ „ , r .., * , lots — " we are to trust me partisan 

in front of a rag meant to look like a cloud. t. 

_ , . , . , description of the other style. Le Devin 

But what you cannot imagine is the cries, the r J 

bellowings of the divas, convulsed, faces P roved a SUCCess for half a century, but 

aflame, fists tight against their breasts, fore- me charm arisin g from naive sentiment 

ing out groans from their lungs, this being has evaporated. 

the only thing the spectators applaud. Preceding as well as contemporary 

—Rousseau, on the Paris Opera (1760) with the Baroque phase of French 

music was the double bill, Italian and 

German, inaugurated in London, as we 

saw, by the operas and oratorios of Handel and Bononcini (<327). In 

Germany itself, Baroque reached its summit in the many-sided — one might 

say the encyclopedic — work of 

Johann Sebastian Bach 

He needs his first names, because he belonged to a family numbering 53 
musicians over 300 years and because he fathered at least one son — Carl 
Philip Emanuel — who outdid him in popularity though not in genius. Johann 
Sebastian had a normal career as organist, cantor, and teacher, died in the 
middle year of the century, and was not much heard of again until the 1 830s. 

Since then he has received his due in full measure, though some of his 
most fervent admirers make him out exclusively one type of musician. 
Because he composed works illustrating the art of fugue and the use of equal 
temperament (the tuning system that makes it easy to pass from one tonality 
to another) and has also written many fugues, he has been regarded as the 
supreme master of so-called absolute music. He knew and practiced no such 
specialty. In addition, the number and variety of his works, the size of his 
finest ones, his many brilliant pieces that bring out the virtuosity of soloists, 
have combined with the self-reproach for his long neglect to induce a wor- 
shipful attitude that does him an injustice: he has been made president of the 
immortals and deemed infallible in the one genre, whereas his works show a 
much more versatile and profound character. 

Fortunately, he has had one recent admirer who responded to the works 
with both knowledge and sensibility and whose detailed study set the god in a 
new light. This was a Renaissance man of our century, Albert Schweitzer, musi- 
cian, physician, philosopher, man of letters, and philanthropist. His detailed 



The Encyclopedic Century ^ 389 

study demonstrated that Bach was not Its convincing demonstration of the pictorial 
merely a master of complexity in musi- bent of Bach's mind must necessarily lead to 
cal form, but also a creator of drama in a reconsideration not only of the older view of 
sound. The cantatas, the masses, the Bach as a mainly "abstract" musician, but of 
three Passions, and most of the smaller the aesthetics of music in general. 
works are expressive music and not —Ernest Newman, on Schweitzer's 
"absolute," if by absolute is meant an Bach (1911) 

interest in pattern only. 

Schweitzer divides composers into poetic and pictorial, and he assigns 
Bach to the pictorial class. These terms are regrettable for reasons that will find 
a place later on (495>). But Schweitzer's demonstration of Bach's expressive 
intentions and results remains unassailable. It should have been plain long ago 
that the St. Matthew Passion, say, or the cantata Nun Komm' der Heiden Heiland is 
not a virtuoso exercise in patterning but the fusion of patterns with dramatic 
purpose: there is a text, the words describe a scene, the music fits the words and . 
the action. Bach's genius for adapting music to meaning is such that it appears 
even in works without text or title, we see it, we hear it in Bach's suites, concer- 
tos, partitas, and even in works where the opportunity would seem minimal, as 
for instance in the Chaconne for unaccompanied violin. The drama is there, 
neither poetic nor "pictorial," but visceral (>639). 

Besides the use of equal temperament, the time of Bach and Handel wit- 
nessed other innovations. Today's taste for what is too roughly lumped 
together as Baroque music, felt as soothing after the 19C's orchestral thun- 
ders, tends to regard it as fittingly restrained for civilized ears. The truth is 
that the expressive purposes that moved Bach impelled other composers to 
want musical instruments improved, notably their range and power 
increased. They had the organ, which can whisper and raise storms, and Bach 
for one sought the most powerful available. After all, in the St. Matthew Passion 
he had to evoke the feelings that accompanied the rending of the veil and the 
earthquake. The feeble clavichord did not carry far; the harpsichord was only 
a little stronger; but Cristofori in Italy was working at these defects; he built a 
machine he called clavicembalo piano e forte — a keyboard instrument to play 
"soft and loud." Contrary to all experience, we now call it simply "a soft." 

Other ingenious artisans were making progress toward the same end. 
Stradivarius built violins and other stringed boxes with a power and richness of 
tone that have not been surpassed. At the same time the oboe was improved 
for accurate intonation and the transverse flute replaced the recorder, all for 
loudness' sake. For a different pleasure, Father Castel built a "Color organ" 
which played fanlike patterns on a screen. At the very end of the century, 
Tourte bent the violin bow inward and equipped the end with a screw for tight- 
ening the horsehair and thus not only increased the volume of sound when 
rubbing the string, but enlarged the variety of bowings for new effects. 



390 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

These advances compare favorably with those in spinning and weaving: 
the modern orchestra and industrial machinery are first cousins whose gene- 
sis belongs to the 1 8C. What Louis XIV heard at Versailles was his father's 
"grand band" of 24 strings of the violin family Lully pleaded for the addition 
of a "small band" of 16, made up of strings, oboes, and bassoons. The Paris 
Opera raised the total to 21. At other places, ensembles varied greatly; some- 
times 10 or 12 bassoons played against the strings in four parts, sometimes 
trombones, cornets, and keyboard instruments added their color for operatic 
effect — there was no standard combination. But it was gradually emerging as 
individual composers tried new blends or solo passages in particular compo- 
sitions for the expressiveness of tone color. Thus the rustic shawm was intro- 
duced into the band as the clarinet/ The prevailing instrumental form being 
the overture, called sinfonie, it needed the best means to express drama. From 
these pre-orchestral groupings the symphonic forms developed, not the 
other way around. 

As for the word orchestra, its use had an odd beginning. The German 
opera composer Johann Mattheson, who had helped young Handel early on, 
published in Hamburg a book with a long tide in which Orchestre was the strik- 
ing new word. He explained that it meant the place in front of the opera stage 
and that he was using it for a new method of instruction. The usual training 
in music prepared church musicians. Mattheson wanted to cut loose from 
stricdy choral music and polyphony — EMANCIPATION called for in aid of 
SECULARISM. Through the connotation of orchestre he was pointing toward 

opera and homophony With these, of 
The newly revealed Orchestre, or Universale course, would come the new instru- 
and fundamental instructions whereby a me ntation, which was discarding lutes 
Galant Homme may obtain a complete con- ^ theofbos and trompes marims (a 

ceptionof the eminent value of lofty MUSIC, , . . N 

r J string instrument despite its name) as 

formiren his Gout for it, understand the tech- . 

, , .»r n i unsuitable tor an ensemble seeking vol- 

nical terms, and raisonniren skillfully about ° 

this excellent science. ume > balance > smoothness, and variety 

of timbre. For cultural sidelights on the 
— Johann Mattheson, Das Orchestre 

(1713) [The italicized words are developing orchestra, one may parse 

French or derived from French.] Mattheson's title. It suggests a cluster 

of contemporary facts and attitudes: 
the French domination of German high culture, the figure of the well-bred 
cosmopolite and man of taste {galant homme, gout), and the Enlightenment 
shibboleth (raisonniren), the art with which one discovers the laws of all things 
(universelle). 

* 



The Encyclopedic Century <^ 391 

Mattheson's evocative phrasing leads our thoughts back to the Encyclopedie, 
and thence to Diderot, to look at one more of his decisive contributions: the 
Salons. Beginning in 1760, he visited the annual exhibition of paintings at the 
Louvre with the novel purpose of reviewing them for others' benefit. He had a 
good eye, he talked with painters in his usual searching way, learned their jargon 
and the techniques behind their effects, and produced essays that could be read 
by amateurs with pleasure and practitioners with profit. Diderot's main 
demands, as one might expect, were expressiveness and truth to nature. But 
this truth was far from mere accurate imitation of things. The conception, the 
scene, the figures, the harmony of shapes and colors, the total emotion aroused 
must satisfy him before he could admire. For twenty years he discoursed about 
the works of Boucher, Van Loo, Fragonard, Lancret, Joseph Vernet, Greuze, 
Chardin, and others. It is a token of his critical acumen that of them all he sin- 
gles out Chardin as "the greatest magician." 

In the period of Diderot's reviewing, the fashionable taste and artistic 
style acquired the name rococo. The very sound of it suggests "not quite seri- 
ous." Originally it meant decorated with shell (rocaille) and it was first applied 
to screens, tabletops, and furniture generally. It ended by implying delicacy 
and skillful artifice and finally it connoted clever with a touch of silliness. 
After the gravity of the age of Louis XIV, lightness of spirit and color, fantasy 
in thought, profusion of curlicued detail were welcome, together with free 
imitations of exotic styles, Chinese and other. Rococo was the Enlightenment 
at play, a relief from Reason, matching the sentimental sallies of Diderot, 
Richardson, and Rousseau, congenial forms of irresponsibility (41 0>). 

Nevertheless, Rococo in its sweep 
of cultured Europe produced master- What colors, what variety, what wealth of 
pieces in architecture, painting, sculp- objects and ideas! The man has everything 
ture, and interior decoration. What its except truth. Where has anybody seen shep- 
taste could do in stone was shown in herds so elegantly dressed? What occasion 
the facade of the Zwinger in Dresden. has brought together in open country, under 

Its emotional range in painting was a brid g e > far fiom ^ house > women > men > 

i „_ „_ i • „i i rw; .. children, cows, sheep, dogs, bunches of 

demonstrated in the works of Watteau, ' ' r» © » 

, , , i • • 11 straw, fire and water, pots and pans? What is 

who brought nostalgia into mythology, , „ , , , . -, 

that well-dressed, voluptuous woman doing? 

and those of Boucher, who made A , .... , ->»,,. 

' Are those children hers? And this man carry- 

insouciance ubiquitous. Even a reli- ing ^ that he's about to heap on her head, is 

gious subject could adopt the style, as he ^ husband? what a clutter of disparates! 

in Guenther's Pieta. I t > s obviously absurd. But one can't look 

Rococo had its contrary, equally away from it. One lusts after it, the extrava- 

flourishing The portraits in pastel by La gance is inimitable. It is magic. 

Tour are a silent rebuke to Boucher's —Diderot, on a Pastorale by Boucher 
frivolous oils, the busts by Houdon, (1765) 



392 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

who sculped the century's notables — Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Franklin, 
Washington — showed them musing soberly. And in England, where Rococo 
influenced furnishings more than the graphic arts, the outstanding painters 
Gainsborough, Reynolds, and Raeburn were not inclined to fantasy, except in 
some accessories when portraying ladies. Before photography only portrait 
painters could earn a good living and they must cater to their tided customers' 
mosdy downright tastes. This English school should not make us forget that 
working by their side was a company of watercolorists of the first rank, also 
bent on being true to life in their depiction of landscapes, houses, and horses. 

Apart from both groups stood the first painter who consciously set out 
to be a critic of society. This was William Hogarth. He took (in his own 
words) "modern moral subjects similar to representations on the stage." 
Looking at the aristocrats' relations to the other orders of society, he showed 
in satirical drawings the rake, the harlot, the idle apprentice, the stages of cru- 
elty. His crowded scenes in connected series form a kind of novel in pictures, 
the objects when repeated supplying links and suggesting the "progress" (as 
in a film) of the moral ills he denounced. {The Rake's Progress has been made 
into a ballet by Gavin Gordon and an opera by the collaboration of W H. 
Auden and Stravinsky.) Hogarth's works in oils are uninhibited in subject, and 
like his few portraits were not popular. To find one's class or profession stig- 
matized in the novels of Fielding or Smollett is something easier to stomach 
than to see it done with figures and poses and dresses and furnishings that 
look indecentiy like those of your friends and possibly like your own. 

If it is asked whether the Encyclopedic century was a critical age or a cre- 
ative one, the fair answer is: it was both of these. Take away its creations and 
our museums, libraries, and concerts would look stripped, unrecognizable. 
The 18C seems more critical than creative, because it undermined beliefs and 
institutions that still number many adherents. They naturally resent the cru- 
sade that ushered in disbelief and the secular state, brought techne into 
prominence, and demanded rights for all; whereas there is nothing to resent 
or regret about Dr. Johnson, Ledoux, or Mozart, whom we have yet to meet. 



Cross Section 

The View from Weimar 
Around 1790 



"The Germanies," some 2,000 disparate units that survived the Thirty 
Years' War, had been reduced by the mid-1 8C to about 300. Of these, the 
duchy of Saxe- Weimar was not among the large and influential ones like 
Hanover, Bavaria, or Saxony. It was a small town with a pleasant countryside 
of hills and woods. The town still seemed to George Eliot very provincial 
when she visited it in the mid-19C. Yet during the last 25 years of the 18th it 
had not only acquired fame as the literary center of Germany, but it had initi- 
ated among its neighboring courts a remarkable reversal of their habits and 
cultural outlook. 

For 100 years, as noted before in various connections, the influence of 
Louis XIV had been overpowering German princes and princelings spent 
fortunes on building palaces to which they gave French names, imposed on 
their courts an absurdly detailed etiquette, entertained themselves with 
French plays or imitations, and ruled their subjects despotically — absolute 
monarchs in the literal sense, which Louis XIV neither was nor wanted to be 
(<284). There were of course degrees in this cultural subjection as in other 
features to be mentioned; but on the whole these Frenchified Germans were 
bored. They found relief in drunkenness as regular and compulsory as the 
protocol, in hunting and gambling, and in love affairs devoid of gallantry. The 
poverty all around them was extreme, yet the oppressed subjects were for- 
bidden to emigrate. Among the worst victims of this semi-Oriental type of 
rule were the princes' wives — married for dowry, used to produce offspring, 
otherwise steadily neglected, virtually imprisoned in a routine without the 
escapes open to the males. When cruel taxation had exhausted the means of 



394 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

a small state, it became the possession of a richer one through purchase or 
kinship. That is how the 2,000 simmered down to 300. 

At Weimar, the dowager duchess Anna- Amelia was of a different temper: 
she looked for pleasure in freedom — from routine, from etiquette, and from 
protocol, and she delighted in reading, theater, music, and conversation. She 
invited the poet-philosopher-historian Herder to her court, and he helped her 
impart the same attitudes to her son Charles Augustus. And when the son 
needed a tutor who would also be a companion of his own age, she made the 
momentous choice of bringing to the court a young writer of 26, whose name 
as the author of a best-seller everybody knew: 

Goethe 

The young duke found his tutor as eager as himself to carry on studies by 
roaming the countryside, lunching at a tavern, and talking about things that 
young men talk about. This was not progressive schooling derived from the 
Emile\ it was rather the partnership of like-minded youths hoping each to 
benefit from the other for success in his chosen task. This comparison may 
seem odd, since Goethe needed no help as a writer nor could expect any from 
Charles Augustus. It has been forgotten that in Goethe's extraordinary 
makeup there was room for political ambition, the desire to rule. Though this 
can be simply lust for power, in complex natures it is also an aesthetic love of 
order. So it was in Goethe and he had the requisite gifts, beginning with tact. 
When he was made privy councillor, the head of the council, Fritsch, was 
offended by the rash elevation of "Doctor Goethe" and resigned. Goethe 
stepped into his new role easily and took pains to turn Fritsch into a friend. 

From then on, Goethe was (so to speak) the city manager of Weimar. He 
supervised or directed all activities from the state theater to the conservation 
of natural resources. Not that Charles Augustus was a do-nothing duke or 
that Anna- Amelia did not have strong views on policy, nor was the Duchess 
Louise, though maritally neglected, altogether silent. But Goethe was the 
executive and innovator who effected the compromises and saw them carried 
out. At times he was so beset by the mingled troubles and duties that he was 
tempted to give up. But he persevered and made Weimar both the intellectual 
center of the Germanies outside Prussia and, indirectly, the leader in civiliz- 
ing the manners of the other courts. 

It should be added to the earlier description that as the figure of Louis 
XIV receded, the princes turned to a new model, Maria Theresia's court in 
Vienna, with its even stiffer and stupider etiquette, the core of which 
remained in force in Austria until the destruction of the empire in 1918. 
Perhaps the very excesses of the Austrian model helped the new ways of 
Weimar to take root elsewhere in Germany. Adopting the milder manners 



Cross Section: Weimar ^ 395 

was also fostered by the influx of Rousseau's ideas about domesticity and the 
love of nature. Their novelty dispelled the eternal boredom. Only Wurttem- 
burg resisted change until the French Revolution. And Prussia, long since an 
independent kingdom, needed no example: it was already in the mainstream 
of western culture. Frederick the Great, poet, philosophe, flutist, host to J. S. 
Bach, and patron of the arts and sciences, had made Berlin a city of light since 
his accession a generation before Weimar. Goethe had been "a Fritz partisan" 
since his own youth in Frankfort. 

In the cultural overturn lurked another element — national feeling. Earlier, 
princes and peoples thought of themselves as Bavarians, Hanoverians, Saxons, 
Hessians, and so on. They were Germans only when traveling abroad. At 
home, consciousness of linguistic unity at last began to develop after a few 
writers attacked the French literary hegemony and Voltaire in particular. The 
David who brought down Goliath was Lessing, a critic in Hamburg and also a 
playwright. His drama reviews pulled Voltaire's talented tragedies to pieces and 
preached the solid genius of Shakespeare's. Herder, on his side, pointed out the 
depth and truth to life of popular literature. Rousseau's rejection of the artificial 
was bearing fruit, and in the process Herder discovered the Volk, the people. In 
this shift of interest, a person was necessarily German, not Hessian or Thur- 
ingian or Darmstadter. The birth of the German people's SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
dates from 'Weimar." 

Perhaps because several of the strongest minds in the German enlight- 
enment had pastors for fathers, but surely because the French Enlightenment 
seemed divorced from strong moral consciousness, the German resistance to 
the French cultural domination was grounded in Lutheran morality. The 
authors who have become the classics of the German nation along with 
Lessing and Goethe — Schiller, Herder, Novalis, Hegel, Fichte, Tieck, 
Schleiermacher, and the Schlegels — made a point of earnestness and 
courage. Kant's design to give equal room and authority to science and to the 
moral law shows that he felt a need that the philosophies ignored. In the Sturm 
und Drang period (396 >) the youthful rebels chose Prometheus as the 
emblem of their defiance, and in Schiller's early plays, the attack on authority 
differs from Beaumarchais' in being not self-assured impudence (400>), but 
daring from righteousness outraged: the hero stands on the same plane as the 
oppressed. 

This type of rebelliousness prefigures the turnabout that the Germanies 
began to perform by the mid-century or a little after. From a people univer- 
sally derided as dreamers and private philosophers, they ultimately became a 
nation of self-assertive leaders in war, government, education, science, and 
philosophy itself. Harnessed by Prussia at first, they helped to defeat 
Napoleon in 1815, learning in the process disciplines that became cultural 
traits — practical order and system and respect for rules that served to promote 



396 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

national unity and strength. Two hundred years of humiliation as the play- 
ground of dynastic wars needed to be avenged. By the end of the 19C the rest 
of Europe began to think of the Germans as born in uniform and helmet and 
possessed of traits mostly unpleasant and probably racial. 

In what may be called Germany's awakening, Weimar's contribution was 
literary as well as moral, but a question left hanging must be answered first: 
what was the popular book that qualified Goethe for his administrative post? 
It was The Sorrows of Young Werther. The story is about a young man who loves 
his friend's betrothed, later wife, and is loved in return — nothing very origi- 
nal. The account of their feelings recalls the substance of the Princesse de Cleves 
(<352) and the manner of Richardson. Werther, loyal to his friend, respects 
the marriage vow and commits suicide. The ANALYSIS was apparently so 
accurate that there ensued a wave of suicides. They and the book have been 
deplored as the culmination of sentimentality, then rampant also in other 
countries (41 0>). 

The judgment is not wrong, but it overlooks one thing: part of Werther's 
complaint is his resentment against social discrimination. The love of etiquette 
at court had seeped down into the bourgeoisie and subdivided it into levels of 
rank and title bruising to the ego and revolting to the mind. So ingrained had 
this punctilio become in Germans high, medium, and low that even the 
Weimarians could not get rid of it altogether: the poet Schiller's wife was looked 
down on: her French was not up to standard. She had to go to Switzerland to 
improve it before she could be accepted as a lady-in-waiting to the duchess. But 
Werther's self-defeat and similar acts of submission quickly gave place to an 
energetic revolt of the young, inspired and expressed by two authors of violent 
dramas: Klinger, whose Sturm und Drang gave its name to the whole movement, 
and Schiller's Brigands, which set up the outlaw as the critic of society. 



A year after Goethe arrived in Weimar in 1775, he and his coterie learned 
that the English colonies in North America had declared their independence. 
The document proclaiming it opened with the maxims of the Enlightenment. 
These were not Jefferson's or his associates' alone; they appeared in declara- 
tions of the several states. What followed was more old-fashioned: a list of con- 
crete particulars. For a year or more English soldiers and native guerrillas had 
had bloody encounters, and now all-out war needed an explicit statement of the 
cause. But despite the ringing preamble of the Declaration, is it a fact that the 
struggle was the outcome of enlightenment ideas? The utterance did suggest a 
vast modern nation asserting its right to govern itself on advanced principles 
unrealizable in the old world. This interpretation was congenial to progressive 



Cross Section: Weimar <^> 397 



In happy climes, the seat of innocence, 
Where nature guides and virtue rules, 
Where men shall not impose for truth 

and sense 
The pedantry of courts and schools; 
There shall be sung another golden age, 
The rise of empire and of arts, 
The good and great inspiring epic rage, 
The wisest heads and noblest hearts 
Not such as Europe breeds in her decay. . . . 

— Bishop Berkeley, "Verses on the 
Prospect of Planting Arts and 
Learning in America" (1726-52) 



Europeans. The truth was different. 
The American population of 2.2 million 
was still crude in manners and mode of 
life. It was not a nation, nor was the fun- 
damental temper of the colonials that of 
the philosophes. The Americans fought 
and cheated the Indian tribes on their 
borders and the southerners lived off 
the toil of 200,000 African slaves. 
Despite the admiring regard of the 
primitivists and the prophecy of Bishop 
Berkeley half a century earlier, it did not 
seem as if Europe had much to learn 
from the people overseas or to fear from their economic competition. 

Viewed from the colonies themselves the economic concern was one of 
the motives to independence. Tom Paine, the sympathetic English publicist, 
said it in so many words. England had spent much on the big war that got rid 
of the French in America and had been trying to recoup its ouday by taxing 
and monopolizing colonial trade. Protests and acts of violence had taken 
place in the colonies for ten years or more before the indignant Declaration. 
That its preamble read like the doctrines of Locke and Montesquieu only 
showed that there was an elite that had visited Paris or read imported books. 
But the list of grievances showed that the armed resistance to the English 
imposts was not a revolution. The war acquired that name by confusion with 
later events in Europe. 

If anything, the aim of the American War of Independence was reac- 
tionary: "Back to the good old days!" Taxpayers, assemblymen, traders, and 
householders wanted a return to the conditions before the latter-day English 
policies. The appeal was to the immemorial rights of Englishmen: self- 
government through representatives and taxation granted by local assemblies, 
not set arbitrarily by the king. No new Idea entailing a shift in forms of 
power — the mark of revolutions — was proclaimed. The 28 offenses that King 
George was accused of had long been 
familiar in England. The language of 
the Declaration is that of protest 
against abuses of power, not of pro- 
posals for recasting the government 
on new principles. 

The same is true of what preceded 
the Declaration — the mass of pam- 
phlets, speeches, letters, resolutions, 



But oh my friends, the arm of blood 

restrain, 
(No rage intemperate aids the public weal;) 
Nor basely blend, too daring but in vain, 
The Assassin's madness with the patriot's 

zeal. 

— John Trumbull, "An Elegy on the 
Times" (1774) 



398 <5^> From Dawn to Decadence 

reports of conferences, and articles in the press. The question is always what 
steps to take? Shall we go as far as independence? The battle of Concord and 
Lexington itself, a year before the Declaration, can hardly rank as an out- 
burst of revolutionary ardor. Compare Washington's army with Cromwell's 
Ironsides and the difference is clear. There was heroism in both wars and 
Washington's perseverance with an unstable force is of epic caliber. But then 
the English waged the American war at times halfheartedly. The popular ani- 
mus was often fierce against those who opposed independence, causing 
many exiles to Canada; but again many escaped persecution by pleading ill- 
ness — "Loyalist fever" — and suffered no harm later on. None of this has 
the air of revolution. 

The strength of will that won 
If anything were wanting to this necessary the War of Independence was best 
operation of the form of government, religion described by Burke just before Lex- 
would have given it a complete effect. The ington. He was trying to persuade the 
people are Protestants, and of the kind which House of Commons to conciliate the 
is the most adverse to all implicit submission stubborn Americans. They were not 

of mind and opinion. All Protestantism is a i • 1 ^r 

v insurgents, he said; they were pro- 
sort of dissent. But the religion in our north- , . . 

, . . ,. , . . , testers — and protesting on one single 

ern colonies is a refinement on the principle . . 

- . T • i_ j- -j rj- point, the power of granting taxes, on 

of resistance. It is the dissidence of dissent r > r & & > 

and the protestantism of the Protestant reli- which the y thou g ht aU other "liberties" 

gion> depended. The colonies that became 

t, independent states contrived onlv a 

BURKE, SPEECH ON CONCILIATION WITH V ol^l o x v^ w y 

America (March 1775) feeble Confederation and wanted to 

remain the semi-aristocratic societies 
they had always been. Even during the war, national spirit was wanting. If one 
scans the facsimile of the original Declaration one notices that the heading 
reads: "of the thirteen united States." That small u promises no future U. 
Only toward the end of the Seven Years' War, 15 years before, had some 
demands been heard here and there for union and "democracy." And even 
these went only as far as extending the vote to those without property. In 
sum, the American spectacle that Europeans rejoiced at or deprecated at the 
end of the 1 8C was not the Democracy in America described by Tocqueville 
half a century later. Nor was it a model for the French revolutionists of 
1789-93. 

What remains true is that one intellectual ingredient links in retrospect 
the two events, the spirit of the Encyclopedic and some of its ABSTRACTIONS. 
The men known as the Founding Fathers of the United States were influ- 
enced by these and used them when theory was needed to support the con- 
crete "liberties of Englishmen." It was the same spirit which moved in France 
the most effective helper of the colonists in their war: 



Cross Section: Weimar <^> 399 

Beaumarchais 

Opera-goers who read their program notes recognize the name. It is 
that of the man who wrote The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro 
before the librettists of Rossini and Mozart gave the two plays another 
meaning for the musical stage. But the creator of these dazzling comedies 
was many other things than a playwright. His achievements during a tempes- 
tuous career make him an extraordinary man in an age full of extraordinary 
men. Indeed, it is the multiplicity of his deeds of genius that, combined with 
his dying during the French Revolution (424>), has eclipsed the renown he 
enjoyed in his lifetime. Not only France, but Spain, England, and Germany 
marveled at his adventures. 

Without him the American war of independence might have taken 
another turn (>402). Without him the public opinion that clamored for 
reform just before the French revolution of 1789 might not have been so 
determined against all existing institutions short of the king (>402). More 
than Voltaire and Diderot, and differently from Rousseau, Beaumarchais 
incarnates the spirit of his age. He represents the bourgeoisie in charge of 
affairs, the man of letters as spectacular celebrity, the intellectual indispens- 
able to government, the rebel in words giving the public a sense of its rights 
and its strength. All this, Beaumarchais exemplified in the teeth of opposi- 
tion, personal and social. He chose the motto: "My life is one long fight." His 
influence was all the more potent that he was daring in action, not solely a 
skillful diplomat and publicist. 

His rise from humble beginnings is the first of the features that make him 
a representative man. Son and grandson of clockmakers named Caron, his 
first occupation was in his father's shop. But the father was a well-read man, 
full of Encyclopedic ideas. The boy Pierre-Augustin had a scanty formal edu- 
cation, but he was ambitious and taught himself. He had a good singing voice 
and played the flute and the harp. He wrote well and spoke with eloquence 
and wit. As an artisan he invented a superior escapement for watches and an 
improved pedal for the harp. His marriage to an older woman at the age of 25 
brought him a small fief that entitled him to become Caron de Beaumarchais, 
and since that footing in nobility seemed to him a little narrow, he bought a 
royal secretaryship that gave it breadth. He soon mingled with dukes and 
peers, chatted with Louis XV, and was the musical and literary companion of 
Mesdames de France, the king's four daughters. There was no longer a Louis 
XIV or Saint-Simon at court to rebuff and exclude upstarts risen from the 
vile bourgeoisie (<395). 

Beaumarchais found other kinds of enemies. His device for watches was 
claimed by someone else and it took a committee of experts to award Caron 



400 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

the priority. An early love affair led to an insult that he could not overlook and 
in the ensuing duel he wounded his opponent so severely that he died; this 
plunged Beaumarchais into remorse. His sympathy was always quick and 
deep, in this case especially, because dueling was a capital offense and his 
noble opponent refused to say who had caused his grievous wound. 

We next find Beaumarchais in another affair of honor. He had two bril- 
liant sisters — wits and poets too — one of whom became engaged to a penni- 
less Spanish grandee named Clavijo. She accompanied him, chaperoned, to 
Spain, where he was to obtain a sinecure enabling him to marry. Once there 
he broke the engagement. Beaumarchais rushed to Spain and persuaded the 
young man to think again, but soon caught him deviously working to slip 
away once more. Beaumarchais threatened violence and obtained the 
acknowledgment needed to save his sister's good name. She must break an 
engagement recognized by the suitor or she would never find a husband in 
any country. On this contemporary imbroglio, soon widely known, Goethe 
wrote the melodrama Clavigo. 

Like his later mouthpiece Figaro, Beaumarchais never doubted his own 
powers. It was not vanity but spontaneous energy, which looked so irre- 
sistibly, impudently cheerful that it made him admiring followers and devout 
enemies. Again and again in deep trouble or danger, he seldom felt cast down; 
in fact his genius rose to emergencies with redoubled inventiveness and 
strength. 

While occupying the quasi- judicial post of lieutenant for forests and 
hunts, and under attack as a result of being fair in his decisions, he embarked 
on a literary career at age 35 with the five-act play Eugenie. (Bernard Shaw 
waited till he was nearly 40 but warned that this was the age limit for begin- 
ners.) Eugenie belongs to the sentimental, bourgeois genre initiated by 
Diderot, Sedaine, and others (41 5>). Beaumarchais appears to have been the 
first to use the word drama to designate a play that is neither a tragedy nor a 
comedy in the traditional sense. The first three acts of Eugenie were very well 
liked; the last two were hissed, apparendy because they sounded like the start 
of another play. Unabashed, the author cut and pruned and re-presented the 
piece; it found fair success in France and, adapted by Garrick, a warm recep- 
tion in England. One passing remark in Beaumarchais' prefatory defense is 
worth noting: while denouncing the long-established rules of playwriting, he 
calls them "barbaric, classicist." This is the first use of classicist m a derogatory 
sense. 

Beaumarchais' next role was political and of great consequence to two 
continents, as hinted above. The first, affecting France but astonishing also to 
the Germans and the English, arose out of the complicated lawsuit known as 
the Goezman Affair. It was an unplanned exposure of the state of justice in 
France, and no doubt in other places. While Beaumarchais was engaged in 



Cross Section: Weimar <^> 401 

suing a count to obtain money due under the will of a third party, he was also 
engaged in a love affair that got him physically assaulted by a duke. 
Beaumarchais fought back. For breaking the peace, both combatants were 
sent to jail by lettres de cachet. (Such "letters with seal," by the way, were the only 
ones issued by the king that did not carry his seal.) 

Beaumarchais jailed could not visit the judges in his lawsuit, as he must 
do by custom if he were to have a chance of winning it. In fact, a court coun- 
cillor had filed a report asserting that the document Beaumarchais relied on 
was forged; the court had no choice but to declare it null and void and to dis- 
miss the suit with costs, damages, and interest. That councillor was named 
Goezman. The court order incited several unknown persons to file claims 
against Beaumarchais for money supposedly owed; they proved to be false, 
got up out of pure mischief. But rumors about them dealt the last blow: the 
talk of the town turned against him: he was a scoundrel finally unmasked. 

Before his imprisonment Beaumarchais had taken the duke's attack 
lighdy. On the evening when it happened, which was the day before his arrest, 
he went, bandaged up, to a friend's house to read the first draft of The Barber 
of Seville. But now, if things stood as they seemed in this his 41st year, he was a 
ruined man, financially and in repute. Here he was, the only support of his 
parents and his sisters and nieces — and in prison. For once his spirits failed 
him; he felt (as he said) shame and self-pity. He appealed to the Lieutenant of 
Police, who granted him daytime leave under guard so that he might plead 
with the judges for a hearing at which to argue against Goezman's report, 
even though being under guard would be prejudicial. A second appeal set him 
free after two and a half months of poindess prison. 

Beaumarchais was convinced that his opponent La Blache had won in 
the courts by bribing Goezman more generously than he himself had. This 
sounds like the pot calling the ketde black, but the custom was such that even 
to get a hearing from certain judges — let alone a decision — a gift, several 
gifts, were required. Judge Goezman's wife rejoiced in the practice, telling all 
comers that the family couldn't live decendy without this steady income. 
Advised by his friends, Beaumarchais had given her 100 louis (about 2,400 
francs) and a diamond-studded watch of equal value. If he lost the suit, she 
promised to return the money. She then asked — and was given — 15 addi- 
tional louis for the judge's clerk. Beaumarchais, who had already given him 10, 
suspected that she meant to pocket the 15. In the end he demanded them 
back, accusing her of cheating within the framework of the larger cheat. She 
denied having received the money and set a rumor afloat that he had tried 
through her to bribe the upright husband and judge. Since Beaumarchais had 
lost the case, she evidendy did mean to keep the 15 after returning the rest, 
counting on Beaumarchais' making no fuss over the smaller sum. 

For his part, Goezman, feeling caught, first tried the universal remedy — 



402 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

a lettre de cachet to shut up Beaumarchais. It was not forthcoming and fresh 
rumors about the facts began to circulate. Attack being often the best 
defense, Goezman got one of his minions to sign an affidavit stating that 
Beaumarchais had approached him, money in hand, for a favorable ruling. 
With this false document ready, Goezman summoned Beaumarchais. In such 
a broil, no lawyer would take his case; he must defend himself, and not only 
in court but before public opinion. 

He started telling and publishing his side of the affair. The Memoirs 
about the Goezmans have become a classic of literary and forensic art. They 
succeeded because Beaumarchais wove into the factual and legal narrative a 
large measure of social and political criticism and made the whole entertain- 
ing. Dialogue in which he appears by turns cheerful, indignant, witty, and 
sensible showed up persons and incidents as in a comedy. The public eagerly 
awaited each installment. Goethe in Frankfort says they were read aloud to 
large gatherings. 

In France, the political effect of the pamphlets and the trial together was 
heightened by a recent event. The court of justice — the Parlement — had 
been reorganized by its new president in a dictatorial way — authority cur- 
tailed, judges dismissed, others such as Goezman put in. By adroit allusions 
to these unpopular acts, Beaumarchais gained numberless supporters. He 
became the hero of the hour to all but a minority. When a re-trial established 
the truth of every point in his defense, along with the misdeeds of the 
Goezmans, his disgrace was wiped out. 

The Memoirs' exposure of the Parlement as a politico-judicial institution 
was not forgotten a dozen years later, when the whole country debated 
reform on the eve of 1789. But what preoccupied Beaumarchais during that 
same stretch of time was an equally fateful enterprise. As early as September 
1775, while revising The Barber of Seville, which had fallen flat, Beaumarchais 
wrote a long letter to the king (now Louis XVI), telling him that the royal 
council was ill-informed about the situation of the North American colonists. 
They were so determined in the pursuit of their cause, said Beaumarchais, 
that if well armed they would certainly win their freedom. And he added: 
"Such a nation will be invincible." 

Beaumarchais had a double purpose. He relished the idea of a people set 
free from tyranny. It had been the theme of the opera libretto he had written 
when Gluck had shown in Paris the new form he was giving to the genre 
(41 5>). Gluck had declined composing Beaumarchais' text but had recom- 
mended his own pupil, Salieri, who produced a feeble score; it was not wor- 
thy of the dramatic and spectacular scenes, in which a high-minded soldier 
overthrows a despotic king and saves his own wife from the king's evil 
designs. Freedom and justice in his heart, and aware of how divided English 
politicians were on the American issue, Beaumarchais wanted France to sup- 



Cross Section: Weimar <^*> 403 

ply the means of the colonies' liberation. Its success would at the same time 
lessen English power in the world. The royal council rejected his proposal for 
fear of war with England. But Beaumarchais was not to be stopped by one 
rebuff. He insisted that his knowledge of English opinion was accurate. Louis 
XV had sent him to London as a secret agent to buy off a blackmailer who 
threatened Countess du Barry, the king's mistress, with a defamatory book. 
Beaumarchais not only got 3,000 copies of the book burned on the spot, but 
turned the author into an informant in the French interest. Now his reports 
were invaluable. 

With a renewed plea Beaumarchais offered a new scheme. Let the gov- 
ernment give him a million and he would do the rest — in a word, privatize the 
pro-American campaign. This time the minister agreed. Beaumarchais 
became the imaginary firm of Rodrigue, Hortalez, and Company. Its activities 
were officially forbidden, but it was to supply the Continental Congress with 
200 cannon, with mortars, with 25,000 firearms and ammunition in scale, 
including 200,000 pounds of powder, besides clothing and camping equip- 
ment for 25,000 men. All this was to be so secretly collected that the English 
ambassador and his staff in Paris would not hear of it. 

The assignment was grueling by itself; it was made nearly impossible by the 
usual bureaucratic resistance to action, plus the ill-will of one American agent 
and the suspiciousness of another. Beaumarchais won over the latter, assuring 
him: "I will serve your country as my own!" That left only the taming of heads 
of royal factories and arsenals, of admirals in charge of navy yards and of cap- 
tains for convoys. Everybody questioned and argued and delayed; all had ideas 
of their own. In the end, Beaumarchais mastered his workforce. He issued 
orders in the king's name that the king knew nothing about, until admirals and 
others began to refer without irony to "y our fleet, your navy." 

The score of ships that played their part at a critical moment in the war of 

independence were indeed Beaumarchais' in the literal sense: the agent of 

Congress had promised to send back 

produce — chiefly tobacco — in exchange 

r ■, i- t<t i • • • • our affairs are in a more distressed, 

for the war supplies. Nothing; came . 

1 * ill ruinous, and deplorable condition than they 

from America. Beaumarchais had to ... , r , 

have been since the commencement of the 

borrow the money for his shipments, war Ffom what , have seetlj heard> ^ m 

which on arrival brought him no part know, I should say that idleness, dissipa- 

thanks. At long last, three and a half tj onj an d extravagance have laid fast hold. 

years after his first move, Beaumarchais Speculation and an insatiable thirst for 

received from John Jay, president of the riches; party disputes and personal quarrels 

Congress, a letter of thanks and the are the great business of the day, while ruined 

promise that measures would soon be finances, depreciated money, and want of 

passed to repay the debt that was owed. credit are but secondary considerations. 

Meanwhile, the recipient should know —George Washington (December 1778) 



404 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

that he had "gained the Esteem of this Infant republic and will receive the mer- 
ited applause of a new world." 

The whole saga was worthy of a real-life Figaro. Its contribution to the 
success of America's war of liberation was surely as great as that of 
Washington's aide-de-camp, Marie-Joseph de Lafayette. That brash young 
man's courage and love of freedom entitie him to his place in all the books, 
along with the skillful sailors De Grasse and Rochambeau, but the continued 
omission of Beaumarchais is inexcusable. 

Worse yet, when 40 years later Beaumarchais' daughter, who had fallen 
into poverty, petitioned Congress for the 2.25 million francs still owed her 
father (Alexander Hamilton's estimate in 1793) Congress replied: "Take one 
third or nothing." 



Although in European eyes the North American culture remained back- 
ward and contemptible, by the end of the 18C the colonists had made real but 
uneven progress. At a distance, a simple fact went unperceived: the division 
between the Americans who were pushing forward and settling the open 
spaces to the west, and those who on the east coast constituted after 150 years 
a cultivated establishment. 

From the start, religion had been an intellectual force; in the 18C, it 
exerted a renewed influence on the broadest class. America like England wit- 
nessed a resurgence of religious passion, which put forward old ideas: con- 
sciousness of sin and recognition of God's mercy; self-reform imperative to 
ensure grace and salvation. The movement was known in England as 
Methodism, in America as the Great Awakening. The appeal of the eloquent 
preachers — -John and Charles Wesley in England, George Whitefield in 
America — produced the mass phenomenon called "revival"; Whitefield was 
said able to address audibly crowds of 25,000. They sang, they groaned, they 
chanted and rolled on the ground. The wealthy, the rulers, and the learned 
were unlikely to enjoy the physics of this renewed faith, of which the political 
side tended toward democracy. 

The surge of feeling about the "infinite concern" benefited another 
movement, quite different, that of "Mother" Ann Lee and her followers, the 
Shakers. Starting from Harvard, Massachusetts, it spread first to Connecticut 
and New York and then to the Midwest. Ann Lee was a factory worker in 
Manchester, England, whose disgust at industrial life made her a pietist, an 
immigrant, and a feminist. Her sect believed in the equality of the sexes and 
in the Return of Christ, who was both male and female, like the Deity. 
Meantime, the Shakers (so-called to mark their closeness to the Quakers) 
lived extremely sober lives and developed, untaught, a style of spare domestic 



Cross Section: Weimar <^> 405 

architecture that anticipates the principle of form follows function and is still 
justly admired. 

Jonathan Edwards, who was a minister in New England and a philoso- 
pher of the first rank — his complete works are being republished at this 
moment — rejoiced to see piety regain its place. The two waves of the move- 
ment set an American tradition of religious enthusiasm unbroken down to 
the present. With the microphone and television, the crowds can be even big- 
ger than Whitefield's and the choice now is between the bodily warmth of the 
camp meeting and the tete-a-tete of the listener in the living room. 

For the upper-class Americans of the 1 8C, the genuine novelty lay not in 
religion, which was a return, not a departure, but in science and the fine arts. 
The country suddenly had a group of accomplished painters — Gilbert Stuart, 
Copley, Peale, Ralph Earl, Benjamin West. The last-named moved to England 
permanently but continued to exert his influence as mentor of visiting 
American artists. It is to these men that we owe the likenesses of the contem- 
porary notables, men and women, the historical scenes and landscapes that 
together give to our imagination the "period look" of the times. It is largely 
missing for the earlier century, stylized as it is by the primitives. 

The other cultural step forward in science, generated before the middle 
of the century, was the American Philosophical Society, founded in 
Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin. "Philosophy" included pure science, 
medicine, and the mechanical arts. His own inventions and discoveries have 
been noted earlier (<375). His city could also boast of the astronomer and 
physicist David Rittenhouse, who contributed to mathematics and made 
clocks and other instruments for scientific use. While the Declaration of 
Independence was being written, he petitioned the Pennsylvania Assembly 
for funds to build an observatory, so that he might serve as Public 
Astronomical Observer. The proposal was well received, but the war killed it. 

What the war favored was the work of Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the 
Declaration, who taught and practiced also in Philadelphia. Formal training in 
medicine had begun in the 1760s at the College there, as well as at King's 
College (shortly to become Columbia) in New York. Ten years later the first 
textbook in surgery was published. The colonies had some 3,500 physicians, 
but only one in 10 had a medical degree, earned, like that of Rush himself, in 
Edinburgh, then the center of medical advance under the leadership of the 
great William Cullen. At home, Rush fostered medical education, insisted on 
the importance of chemistry in understanding disease, and published the first 
textbook on the subject. He worked heroically during the Philadelphia epi- 
demic of yellow fever, although his treatment by bleeding proved disastrous. 
He redeemed himself by a number of useful observations in the diagnosis of 
disease and the correlation of symptoms. As head of the hospital for the insane, 
he applied his conviction that body and mind must be treated together. 



406 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

In original literary works, the colonies in the 1 8C were plainly deficient. 
Of the two earlier poets of merit, Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, the 
one was neglected, the other is still not in print. The coterie of the 1770s at 
Yale — -Joel Barlow, David Humphreys, Timothy Dwight, and John 
Trumbull — lacked talents adequate to the grandiose subjects they chose, 
besides having a misguided idea of poetry. Trumbull's stanza (<397) shows 
his notion of elevated language. Barlow's Vision of Columbus is a versified essay. 
His theory of the natural growth of society and his predictions about postwar 
America would have shown their wisdom and originality better in prose. 

Playwriting was still weaker in substance and output, though one of the 
two native works, Royall Tyler's The Contrast, an intricately plotted sentimen- 
tal comedy, "plays" well and is sometimes revived as a curiosity. Until the 
1760s no native professional theater existed — no actors, singers, or dancers, 
and no playhouses. But the demand that did exist divided society. The peren- 
nial objection to the theater — harm to morals — was supported by local laws, 
and the Confederation Congress passed a resolution that classed under 
"extravagance and dissipation" gambling, horse-racing, cockfighting, and "all 
shows and plays." 

The dissipated were nonetheless served by an English troupe with David 
Douglass as actor-manager. He toured the colonies twice with his repertory 
of English plays by Farquhar, Mrs. Centlivre, Colley Cibber, and George Lillo, 
interspersed with ballad operas such as Arne's Love in a Village and Gay's 
Beggars Opera. Some of Shakespeare, heavily improved and sometimes offered 
in thin slices, also figured on the programs. The people of Charleston loved 
plays and perhaps Boston did too, or why should a law have been passed there 
in 1750 to prohibit them? It must be added that audiences needed stamina to 
face an evening in the theater: it consisted of one five-act tragedy or a full- 
length comedy or ballad-opera, followed by an afterpiece (farce or masque), 
and further spiced with interludes of vocal and instrumental music that often 
called forth encores. This ordeal of entertainment, sustained by solid eating 
and drinking on the spot, began at six o'clock, the patrons' seats being held 
for them by their servants. In the south whole rows of Black slaves were there 
from an early hour. 

Apart from the struggling professional theater, amateurs at home or 
youths at school satisfied their fondness for "the play" and their even greater 
love of music. The Puritans, as we saw (<188), were not inimical to it, and a 
century after their landing the art thrived in all ways — teaching and compos- 
ing, church uses, orchestral and domestic performance. Boston itself had 
more than one music school. The Moravian Brethren in Pennsylvania were 
steeped in music, they played Bach during his lifetime and began the annual 
festival in his honor in Bethlehem that still draws crowds. 

The war for independence added to the musical offering: frequent per- 



Cross Section: Weimar <^> 407 

formances by military bands, native, I am almost sick of the world and were it not 

French, Irish, English, and German, for the Hopes of going to singing-meeting 

the Hessian mercenaries showing the tonight and indulging myself a little in some 

highest instrumental competence. of me carnal DeUghts of the Flesh, such as 

Washington urged all his officers to Kissing, Squeezing, etc., etc., I should leave it 

provide music for their troops. The w * 

civilian repertory before and after the —William Bentley, Yale undergraduate 

(1771) 
war was kept up-to-date by the pres- ^ ; 

ence of British soldiers and their com- 
manders, who favored Handel, Haydn, C. P. E. Bach, Purcell, and Arne. The 
English composers of hymns were well represented, and the publication of 
manuals and methods, the manufacture of instruments, and the production 
of original works warrant calling the colonists, before and after indepen- 
dence, a musical people. 

American political and social thought found expression to a comparable 
extent and with the same display of ability. One thinks at once of The Federalist, 
the book-length collection of papers written by Hamilton and Madison to 
secure the ratification of the proposed Constitution. It sets forth a complete 
theory and practice of representative government. Before The Federalist a vast 
amount of political thought filled the colonial press, especially when the con- 
flict with the mother country began to threaten, which was also when the 
number of periodicals rapidly increased. To these must be added the speeches 
and resolutions of the assemblies, among them the well-known documents 
by Thomas Jefferson — his part in drafting the Declaration, his plan for edu- 
cation in Virginia, his charter for the university he founded, to say nothing of 
his essays on other topics, architectural designs, and domestic inventions. 

Unfortunately, the equally decisive thought and writings of Franklin have 
not found their rightful place in the popular memory. When the Founding 
Fathers are listed byway of reminder, his name is often missing, just as his sci- 
entific discoveries are whittled down to the experiment with lightning. What 
is remembered is the proverbial wisdom of Poor Richards Almanack and the 
advice about friends and mistresses in various squibs and in the Autobiography. 
The impression left is of mere shrewdness, in fact of low cunning, recom- 
mended not so much for promoting worthy ends as for "getting on." 

In France his remembered figure is more true to life (<375). It is that of 
a philosopher-scientist and a hero in the cause of liberty. A rereading of his 
many terse, lucid pieces on the grave issues facing the colonies before and 
during the war would show his statesmanship. He was a partisan neither for 
his state nor his region but for the colonies as a whole. In political and social 
argument none of the pettiness suggested by his worldly recipes appears. He 
perceived the importance of demography; he urged regularizing land grants; 
he understood that to maintain good relations with the Indians, the attempt 



408 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 



Our North American colonies are to be con- 
sidered as the frontier of the British Empire on 
that side. The frontier of any dominion being 
attacked, it becomes not merely "the cause" 
of the people immediately attacked but prop- 
erly "the cause" of the whole body. It is there- 
fore invidious to represent "the blood and 
treasure" spent in this war as spent in "the 
cause of the colonies" only; and that they are 
"absurd and ungrateful" if they think we have 
done nothing unless we "make conquests for 
them" and reduce Canada to gratify their 
"vain ambition." If ever there was a national 
war, this is truly such a one. 

— Benjamin Franklin, "The Interest of 
Great Britain in Her Colonies," 
quoting and refuting an english 
opponent (1760) 



to educate their youths in British ways 
was wrong, because it made them sus- 
pect to their own people. Franklin 
wanted union well before the war. For 
nearly two decades he had used his 
diplomatic skill in London, explaining 
America in hopes of changing the pol- 
icy of exploitation. When he failed, he 
wrote two pieces of Swiftian irony fore- 
telling Britain's loss of empire. Lasdy, he 
kept France friendly to the new nation, 
being by virtue of his modest public 
demeanor, his scientific reputation, 
and his fur cap the living presence of 
diat New Man, the American. 

As for Hamilton, he too would 
benefit from a fresh scrutiny, not at the 



expense of Jefferson, but as a thinker 
and doer whose part in making the new nation was not limited to writing 
most of the Federalist essays. It is forgotten that Hamilton was a "Conti- 
nentalist" before he was a "Federalist"; that is, he wrote under the former 
pseudonym some of the earliest arguments for a strong union before the 
Constitution was in demand. And when union was established, he saw that 

promoting manufactures was the only 
means by which a nation that exports 
raw materials and imports finished 
goods can ensure a prosperous stability 
by a fair balance of trade. That manu- 
facturing creates a new business class 
and spoils the Jeffersonian ideal of a 
people thriving as small self-sufficient 
farmers is true; and for that reason 
populist sentiment has considered 
Hamilton an enemy of simple happiness and made Jefferson the hero of 
democracy. In truth, the conflict does not arise simply from rival opinions; it 
is the result of the evolution of techne at the end of a century of invention. 
The disparity in standard of living between industrialized nations and those 
that are not is clear enough today, and its remedy is the same. 



This is [a project] to raise two, three, or four 
battalions of Negroes by contributions from 
the owners in proportion to the number they 
possess. I have not the least doubt that the 
Negroes will make excellent soldiers. An 
essential part of the plan is to give them their 
freedom with their muskets. 

— Alexander Hamilton (March 1779) 



* 
* * 



Cross Section: Weimar <^ 409 

Germany's EMANCIPATION was not from secondhand French culture 
alone. The change came about as the sequel of battle and devastation every 
few years for a total of 43 out of 96. The self-imposed tyranny that was lifting 
in the 1 770s, and with it the retreat of French ideas, made room for native tal- 
ents. Minds in search of models turned to England and its traditions. We have 
seen Lessing citing Shakespeare as such a model. The English novelists were 
read and admired. The curious prose of Sterne gave Jean-Paul Richter a pat- 
tern for his own. Visitors to England brought back artistic and political ideas. 
Georg Lichtenberg, well informed, went to London in search of Hogarth 
(<392). Haydn found there audiences for which he composed the last 12 — 
the finest — of his symphonies. 

It was a one-way traffic: these visits were not returned till the next century, 
when England discovered cultural Germany. And from Weimar at this earlier 
time it was probably not clear that English literature was abandoning the heights 
that the Augustans had occupied and was finding its way through yearnings and 
hesitations to another peak called Romanticism. The late 18C poets — -Joseph 
and Thomas Warton, Collins, Gray — all took up subjects that showed a desire 
to range outside the well-trodden field of clear ideas and the declarative tone. 
Dryden and Pope, Swift and Johnson and their followers had left nothing to do 
in their perfected style. Among the later generation, Goldsmith and Cowper, 
who used the old methods, sometimes gave intimations of something new — of 
melancholy, of mystery, of a new nature itself. There was praise of enthusiasm 
(formerly deemed a vice of the mind), respect for superstition, and an effort to 
give up generality in favor of concrete particulars. 

Equally indicative were Charles Wesley's religious lyrics, the "medieval" 

songs that young Chatterton forged (and expiated by his suicide, the age 

being still too rationalist to forgive being misled), and the poems in Scottish 

dialect on rural themes by Jean Adams, Lady Anne Lindsay, and Lady Nairn. 

This poetic medievalism and PRIMITIVISM meant the recognition that un- 

Enlightenment had merits. A startling novelty put artistic partisanship to the 

test. This was Ossian, a work published by James Macpherson that soon swept 

Europe in translations. He presented the poem as his rendering into English 

of an ancient Gaelic epic of which only 

fragments remained. It caused raptur- _ . . t _ , . t * ..„ i- 

° r It is night. I am alone, forlorn on the hill of 

ous admiration and violent contro- A ~ u . , . u A . , u 

storms. The wind is heard in the mountain. 

versy Dr. Johnson denounced it as a The torrent pours down me rock No hut 

fraud— and was right. But the evoca- receives me from the rain, forlorn on the hill 

tions in archaic tones of antique man- Q f winds. Rise O moon from behind the 

ners in the midst of wild nature filled a clouds. Stars of the night, arise! 

need not merely emotional but intel- —Macpherson, Colma's Lament, 

lectual: new names, new scenery, new from Ossian {\1 62) 



410 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

modes of life were in demand: boredom had done its work of preparing for 
renovation. Ossian, now unreadable, served its therapeutic purpose down to 
the time of Napoleon, who admired it and encouraged his court composer 
Lesueur to make it into an opera (461 >). 

In prose fiction, three distinct genres shared the public's interest. 
Richardson's and Fielding's followers numbered a good many women, some 
of whom provided far-flung adventure, others society manners. Of these last, 
Fanny Burney, daughter of the historian of music, won over London with 
Evelina: 300 copies out of 500 printed established her leadership over such 
prolific rivals as Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Susannah Gunning, 
Amelia Opie, and Elizabeth Inchbald. More than a few of their works contain 
hints of women's resentment of male dominance. The one male novelist of 
stature, Smollett, bears comparison with Fielding and Defoe for his surveys 
of the rough texture of life in the 18C. 

A second genre owed its start to Horace Walpole, dilettante, connoisseur 
of painting and architecture, who for his amusement built himself — plump in 
the middle of the Century of Light — a "Gothic" house filled with "Gothic" 
curios. This occupation caused him to dream, and one dream supplied the 
germ of the first Gothic novel, The Castle ofOtranto. His aim was to frighten by 
weird events and leave them without rational explanation. In due course this folly 
spawned multitudinous offspring. [The book to read is the Selected Letters of 
Horace Walpole in the Everyman Library Edition.] At the turn of the century 
Mrs. Radcliffe and Clara Reeve cultivated the genre, which has remained 
fruitful, largely in women's hands. One work by their younger contemporary 
Matthew Gregory Lewis added a strand of sexual interest to the fabric: 
Ambrosio, often known as The Monk (and the author as Monk Lewis) contains 
a mysterious bleeding nun, whose role in the story has been described as just 
short of pornography. But by the operation of relativism it is now purged of 
all titillating effect, so many have been the subsequent audacities. 

The third type of novel goes by the name of sentimental. This quality (or 
fault), as noted earlier, was endemic in the age of Reason. Voltaire, Diderot, 
Rousseau, and their congeners displayed it in words and tears, overwhelmed 
as they were by the idea of goodness, generosity, and innocence. Richardson 
and Fielding are not free from the affliction; Sterne made it a badge of honor; 
their imitators increased the dose, and their readers, handkerchief in hand, 
followed suit. At the end of the century, a novel by Henry Mackenzie, The Man 
of Feeling, portrays with approval a character not occasionally but perpetually 
sentimental. The fictional type has never died out, and its existence is justi- 
fied: real life keeps producing many models. [The book to read is Before fane 
Austen by Harrison Ross Steeves.] 

But what is sentimentality? If one asks somebody who ought to know, 
one is told: an excess of emotion; or again, misplaced emotion. Both answers 



Cross Section: Weimar <^> 411 

miss the point. Who can judge when emotion is too much? People vary not 
only in the power to feel and to express feeling, but also in their imagination, 
so that a stolid nature will deem it excessive as soon as love or grief is 
expressed vividly and strongly. Shakespeare is full of "exaggerated" emotion, 
but never sentimental. The same remark applies to the other answer. When is 
feeling misplaced? at the sufferings of the tragic hero? at the death of a pet? at 
the destruction of a masterpiece? One may argue that any emotion out of the 
common should be restrained in public, but that is another question, one of 
social manners that has nothing to do with a feeling's fitness to its occasion. 
The diagnostic test must be found somewhere else. 

Sentimentality is feeling that shuts out action, real or potential. It is self- 
centered and a species of make-believe. William James gives the example of 
the woman who sheds tears at the heroine's plight on the stage while her 
coachman is freezing outside the theater. So far is the sentimentalist from 
being one whose emotions exceed the legal limit that he may be charged with 
deficient energy in what he feels; it does not propel him. That is why he finds 
pleasure in grief and when he is in love never proposes. Sterne accurately enti- 
tled his story A Sentimental Journey, the tears he shed over the death of the don- 
key and his preoccupation with the girl at the inn caused him no upset nerves, 
no faster pulse or quickened breath. He reveled in irresponsible grief and 
love. This condition explains why the sentimentalist and the cynic are two 
sides of one nature. In such matters the arts are transparent and the connois- 
seur can easily tell imitation feeling from the real thing. 



In the England of the 1780s a literary event of more than local interest 
was the death of Dr. Johnson, followed not long after by Boswell's account of 
their friendship. Johnson had been for 30 years the Great Cham° of English 
letters, a dictator, and also an arbiter of opinion and conduct. He was a poet 
and biographer of poets, editor of Shakespeare, moral essayist, author of 
Rasselas, a tale comparable in mood to Candide and only a little less entertain- 
ing, and, pre-eminently, creator of the first and largest dictionary of the 
English language. When Boswell's work came out, the world could see that 
Johnson also deserved his fame as a conversationalist. 

It is on purpose that the words Boswell's "Life of Johnson" have not been used 
here, although that is the title of the book. It is not truly a biography, not a por- 
trayal but a self-portrait. It begins with a spotty summary of the subject's first 
53 years, including many of his letters, after which three-quarters of the total 
1,200 pages, covering the final 21 years, consist of reported conversations, with 
more letters interspersed. [The book to read is Samuel Johnson by Joseph Wood 
Krutch.] Boswell deserves all the praise he has received; his work is a master- 



412 c^o From Dawn to Decadence 



My dear friend, clear your mind of cant. You piece in a rare genre beyond the power 

may say to a man, "Sir, I am your most hum- of most biographers. The bulk of the 

ble servant." You are not his most humble book — the talk — is a delight, because it 

servant. You tell a man, "I am sorry you had presents a strong character full of sur- 

such bad weather and were so much wet." prises He is leamed but p^c^ unmss- 

You don't care sixpence whether he is wet or takably of ^ ^ but naivdy rdigiouS) 

dry. You talk in this manner; it is a mode of • , ^ • , T t- 

3 conservative but unconventional. His 

talking in Society: but don't think foolishly. .. 

genius lies in common sense, not com- 

-Johnson to Boswell (May 15, 1783) mot] pl ace s like those of Franklin's Poor 

Richard, but unusual judgments made 
by clear-eyed observation and couched in lapidary words. 

Johnson is said to have made English prose pompous by his example, too 
easily imitated for too long. Balanced clauses in sentences full of long abstract 
words impress at first by their majesty but end by lulling the reader to sleep; 
rhythm and syntax should not be so regular. When early in the next century 
Macaulay wrote his first essay, he is said to have shocked and pleased like a lib- 
erator. This account exaggerates. Johnson, it is true, used "Johnsonese" in his 
Rambler and Idler essays. These were short pieces on moral subjects, where 
both balance for contrast and abstract terms for marking nuances between 
ideas could be justified. But Johnson did not invent the style, he perfected it 
in his own way, Gibbon in another. And when Johnson wrote his three vol- 
umes of Lives of the Poets, he did not use it but wrote rapid narrative in short 
enough words. One exchange in Boswell has perpetuated the myth about his 
prose: Johnson utters a terse epigram and immediately translates it into 
Ramblerese. It was play of mind and may well have been a joke on himself. 

For a fair judgment of the Augustan style as Johnson practiced it, con- 
sider the famous letter in which he rebukes Lord Chesterfield for promising 
and then delaying his patronage of the Dictionary. The prose perfecdy fits the 
respective social positions of writer and recipient. It is dignified, not 
pompous, and it lucidly delineates the facts and the subdeties of feeling. So 
much about style. The contents of that letter need a gloss that was not sup- 
plied for a couple of centuries: Johnson wrote under a misapprehension. 
Chesterfield did not commit the offense as charged, and to his great credit he 
did not put Johnson in the wrong by rebutting the letter. Rather, he showed it 
to his friends as an example of masterly writing. 

One among the prejudices that Johnson liked to flaunt but did not act 
upon points to an achievement of cultural importance: he denounced the 
upstarts — writers and others — who came from Scodand to conquer London. 
By the 18C the Scottish ministers' insistence on giving all children some 
schooling for the sake of the faith had at last produced an intellectual class. 
Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews, and Aberdeen had flourishing universities 
and were centers of mental ferment. This supply of intellect overflowed into 



Cross Section: Weimar <^> 413 

London and irritated the Great Cham. Yet when he made the voyage north he 
was courteous and appreciative. [The book to read is his own Journey to the 
Western Isles of Scotland^ 

In higher education, it must be said, Scotland did not have much compe- 
tition from the south. The two English universities were in the doldrums. 
Holders of chairs, like the poet Gray, lectured once in a lifetime and any 
research done was well hidden. Across the Channel, the Sorbonne specialized 
in condemning books, and it was the town academies that were astir with 
ideas. Alone on the Continent, the German universities performed, despite 
enclaves of somnolence, the task of transmitting knowledge; they prepared 
the many Protestant ministers who fathered the generation of poets and 
thinkers later known to posterity. 

To this period belong two educational novelties that did not reach far in 
their day but deserve a note in the light of the present confusions about 
schools. The first is trivial but indicative of the urge to blur distinctions. The 
Edinburgh Scot John Witherspoon, president of the College of New Jersey 
(later Princeton University), first used the word campus (Latin —field) to des- 
ignate the site of the institution. The word has traveled, and with its meaning 
inflated. Lower schools in America now use it, France also, and even business 
firms, especially when there is no field but only a city square. In addition, 
campus means all colleges and universities — campus rioting, campus crime. 
The other 1 8C contribution was the proposal called in our time the look-and- 
say method of teaching reading. Two French thinkers can lay claim to it.° 
Both based their inspiration on the fallacy that resurfaced disastrously in our 
time: adults read whole words in one glance; therefore teach infants to do the 
same. The 20C application has been a long failure wherever tried and 
acknowledged only very recendy. 

To return to Edinburgh, it got the name "Athens of the North" by virtue 
of possessing, as the century ended, the leading medical school in Europe; a 
trio of philosophers — Hume, Reid, and Hartley; a pair of distinguished histo- 
rians — Hume again and Robertson; and the unique Adam Smith, economist 
and moral philosopher (456>). It is pleasant (or sad, depending on one's bias) 
to think that the outcome of schooling for religion was a materialist system of 
medicine and a group of secular skeptics, Hume at their head. He demon- 
strated in a beautiful dialogue that belief in miracles and the religion based on 
them is irrational. But he was evenhanded and showed that science had no 
solid basis in reason either, the fact being that cause and effect are nothing 
more than the habitual succession of events in time — there is no detectable 
link between them. To be doubly boxed in by these conclusions agitated 
Immanuel Kant in Germany and "awakened him" (he said) "from his dog- 
matic slumber." By the 1780s Kant was well on the way toward reconstruc- 
tion in philosophy and religion (508 >). 



414 <&*> From Dawn to Decadence 



Although the anti-French crusade began in Germany when the century 
was about two-thirds over, it did not put an end to the widespread curiosity 
about cultural events in Paris. Diderot's reviews of the painters' new works, 
the Salons described earlier (<391), were but one type of article that came 
from France in the Correspondance Litteraire, the newsletter that the Baron 
Grimm, a German settled in Paris and a friend of Diderot's, started for the 
benefit of the sophisticated courts in his home country The two men took 
turns writing lively reports, mosdy about things of the mind, but not exclud- 
ing news of persons — deaths or scandals. The readers abroad passed the 
sheets from hand to hand as was still common practice everywhere for 
poems, essays, or whole books in manuscript. This habit explains why the 
subscription list of the Correspondance never numbered more than thirty and 
yet helped to give Central Europe its cultural tone. 

One of the events that Goethe and his Weimar friends doubtless read 
about was the success of a new comedy by Beaumarchais called The Marriage of 
Figaro. The author had made his name abroad not by scandal alone (<403-4) 
but also with a first Figaro play, The Barber of Seville, full of satirical shots. In 
this second, he seemed to be making an all-out attack on the aristocracy. 
Figaro the valet appeared, in one long speech at least, to embody and 
denounce the principle of "careers closed to talent." The Count, by "taking 
the trouble to be born," enjoyed the good things of life that Figaro with all his 
ability could not attain. At the first performance of the play, it was said, some- 
one in the pit threw an apple core at a duchess in the boxes, and some have 
seen in the act the first hint of the French Revolution. 

But it is doubtful whether Beaumarchais wrote a revolutionary play. 
Showing up the do-nothing aristocrat was an old device of the theater; 
Moliere had used it. It followed logically from Louis XIV's taming of the war- 
rior-nobleman and there was little risk in doing so. Beaumarchais' theme in 
Figaro is love and intrigue as before — and as in Schiller's Kabale undLiebe {Love 
and Intrigue) of the same date. Both plays do depict a social order in which rank 
and ability no longer correspond, and Schiller's is the more vehement criti- 
cism, not being a comedy but a bourgeois drama with republican sentiments. 
In it the prince sells his subjects as mercenaries to fight in America (as the 
Hessians had done) so that he may afford jewelry for his mistress. But as in 
Figaro, the target is the deceit and manipulation of people for vicious ends. It 
recurs in yet another work of the time, Laclos' novel Les Liaisons dangereuses 
(<165). Beaumarchais, then battling to help the Americans, derided in his 
play the crassness of those who hindered his purpose. But he was their con- 
queror, not their victim, and we may think that he felt joy more than once 
when like a Figaro he outwitted the counts who tried to thwart him. 



Cross Section: Weimar <^d 415 

Across the Channel about the same time, the wittiest man ever to sit in 
Parliament while also managing a theater was striking a blow against that 
monotonous genre, sentimental comedy. It had been a French import, 
exploited mainly by a man named Cumberland, aided by several women writ- 
ers. Their subduer was Richard Brinsley Sheridan. He was the son of one of 
these women, who doubled as a novelist and was the most gifted of the group. 
Like Beaumarchais and Schiller, Sheridan acquired from his early struggles a 
combative attitude toward the world, and in The Rivals, The School for Scandal, and 
The Critic, he brought back the vigor of the Restoration dramatists, but without 
their grossness. Morals had refined and the works of that galaxy of playwrights 
were in eclipse. Indeed Fanny Burney's heroine Evelina is made to blush at a 
performance of Congreve's Love for Love. The English ethos was edging toward 
Victorian respectability half a century before Victoria was born. 

In the decades here concerned, while the comic playwrights were coun- 
tering sugar with acid, a new type of opera was replacing the old, not quietly 
but by a head-on attack. The creator-champion of the new was 

Le Chevalier Gluck 

This first mention calls for the French form of his tide, because the oper- 
atic warfare took place chiefly in Paris between his devotees and the partisans 
of the Italian Niccolo Piccinni, who was made quite unjustiy the standard- 
bearer of the old style. He was anything but a negligible composer. Gluck 
himself frequentiy shutded to Vienna, where he had had his first triumph, and 
back to Paris, where he was music master to the new queen Marie-Antoinette, 
wife of the easygoing Louis XVI. She was fond of her teacher, sent him on 
errands to her home country, and by this patronage made him as many ene- 
mies as friends. 

In music, his good or evil deed was to break the rules of opera seria (<327). 
These had gone so far in the love of symmetry that in the hands of the 
Neapolitan School every opera presented three pairs of singers in fixed alter- 
nation, each given a fixed type and length of aria. For some people reliable 
expectations no doubt added to the pleasure of the music, which remained 
undisturbed by the plot; it was cut to fit 

the formula. Versailles, Feb. 13, 1778— Madam My 

Instead, Gluck wanted drama. It Deafest Mothef: mtml6onot j^ whether 

must be visible on stage and of real Gluck ^ arrive before me regular maiL By 

human interest. Music should subserve his care I have sent word to my dear mother 

expression at every turn — lyrical, that my period resumed on the 8th— six days 

amorous, violent, gloomy, jubilant. And ahead of time. 

drama called for the presence of more —Marie-Antoinette to the Empress 

than stated pairs of mismatched lovers — Maria Theresia 



416 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

there must be crowds. The resulting music would be varied in volume as well as 
purport — and there would be less of it, thanks to cutting out the pointless rep- 
etitions called for by the aria system: pusga di musica, said Gluck, it stinks of 
music. 

Such was the new Credo, not implied but written out in prefaces to scores. 
The works conformed to it. Gluck retained the subjects of neo-classical 
tragedy, but the music spoke out in all the voices of the passions involved. 
Gluck's masterpieces — Orpheus and Eurydice, Alceste, and the two Iphigeneias — 
in Aulis and in Tauris — carry out the theory that Wagner was to revive under 
the name of music drama (637>). In the interval, operas in various styles 
made efforts to recapture the original conception of the genre, which is: 
expressing through music action as well as feeling, the latter done too sedately 
in opera seria. 

Without detracting from Gluck's merit — he himself credited his librettist 
Calzabigi with the principle of the new opera — it must be said that the reform 
was an idea in the air. It seemed obvious to Gluck's other librettist, Du 
Roullet; and also to Da Ponte, who was Mozart's. The new principle of 
expressing aptly subjects emancipated from rigid programs was to govern not 
music only but all the arts. Gluck's demand for a serious drama was implicit in 
the ridicule that men of letters had leveled at opera as such when the only kind 
they knew was Handel's (<327). More sweeping was the conviction in many 
minds that the fine arts dealt with life and must remain lifelike by conforming 
to actual or truly imagined experience. 

As Vico had pointed out early in the century, the purpose of art was not 
to give pleasure or teach morality but to enlighten about human action 
(<315). About the same time the Abbe Dubos, whose influence was broad 
and long-lasting, declared that the function of art was "to excite the passions 
without dire consequences," again so that we might know their true nature. A 
few years later, Baumgarten launched the term aesthetic. He could not know 

what ravages it would cause in the years 

La musique doit ainsi que lapeinture t0 Come ' He waS sim P ! y tr y in g t0 fmme 

Retraceranosyeuxlevraidelanature a science of perception and to prove 

. , „ that art required a special use and delib- 

Like painting music has a single goal: . . 

^ .. , , r , , erate training; of the senses. As he 

To limn the truths of nature as a whole & 

pointed out, so does the microscope: at 
— Abbe Dubos (1719) * 1,11 11 

first, one who looks through the eye- 
piece sees nothing but a blur. This jibed 
with Dubos's assertion that Taste is a sixth sense, a faculty denied to many; it 
is not the mere application of reason: the philistine — he who lacks a sixth 
sense — was emerging in faint outline. 

In England, the young Irishman not yet turned politician, Edmund 



Cross Section: Weimar <&> 417 



Burke, had published an Inquiry into the When we have before us such objects as 

Causes of the Sublime and Beautiful, in excite love and complacency, the body is 

which he described in minute psycho- affected, so far as I could observe, much in 

logical and physiological detail the the following manner: the head reclines 

qualities of each and the differences smithing on one side; the eyelids are more 

between them: Beauty is smooth and closed than usual and ^ eyes roU 8 endy 

. , i i »-r.i i with an inclination to the object; the mouth is 

harmonious and agreeable. The sub- ,. , , , , , ' , , , 

. °. . . r . a httle opened, and the breath drawn slowly, 

lime is rugged, outsize, and terrifying. ., Jt _ , • *_ ,_ *_ , . . 

&& j n with now and then a low sigh; the whole body 

The ancients and the men of the is composedj and ^ hands fall idly to the 
Renaissance had not been indifferent sides. 

to the nature of the several arts and n ~ r „ 

— Burke, on The Sublime and Beautiful 

their effects on the soul; but not until (1756) 

the 1 8C was ANALYSIS carried to such a 

point. Theory was in the saddle, spurring the critic to outdo his competitors 
in seeing deep and drawing hairline distinctions. The 1 8C, that is, Diderot on 
Painting, Lessing on the Laokoon, and finally Winckelmann on Greece, made 
detailed art criticism an institution. Its role is part scholarship, part advocacy. 
Winckelmann's lifelong work was to glorify Greek art and discredit the 
Roman and thus to revivify Plato's belief that Beauty is divine and to be loved 
and worshipped. It may be a symbolic coincidence that Winckelmann was the 
victim of a homosexual murderer. 

Every age has a different ancient Greece. Winckelmann's is the one that 
moved the 1 9C. By way of Goethe, Byron, Keats, and Lord Elgin, it inspired 
the universal urge to put a picture of the Parthenon in every schoolroom. It 
also aroused the Occident to support the Greeks' war of independence 
against the Turks (514>). Most important, the new Greek ideal helped to 
evade the old axiom that art imitates nature in the sense of copy. The slippery 
nature of Nature has bedeviled theorists of government; it also confounds 
the critics of art. They are forced to say that the object to imitate is la belle 
nature, which suggests that the painter or poet must often tamper with nature 
to make it beautiful. But what natural model does architecture imitate? If you 
substitute order and harmony as the requisites, the difficulty does not vanish, 
it only recedes. But with the lifelike and dramatic also in demand, how well do 
order and harmony stand the pressure? These uncertainties give rise to the 
unending batde about music (638 >). 

* * 

On May 9, 1 781 , the Chamberlain of the Archbishop of Salzburg berated 
an undersized young man of 25 and with a parting kick husded him out of the 
palace door. The young man was named 



418 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 



Mozart 



He had been the archbishop's musical drudge and treated worse than a 
domestic, until he rebelled. As everybody with a classical ear now knows, 
young Wolfgang, taught by his father, was a prodigy On the date of his expul- 
sion he had composed dozens of works of all kinds, including 1 1 operas or 
other pieces for the stage. But up to that point these accomplished works 
were all imitative in form, though full of originality and Mozartean touches. 
Still, they are notable only because of the composer's youth. Mozart estab- 
lished his unique voice and style in this 

w/u t- • u* u iau a very decade of the 1780s, when Gluck's 

When I imagine what an opera should be, fire J ' 

runs through my veins and I am a-tremble reform had become irreversible. Mozart 
with eagerness to show the French that they had no need to do battle about forms 
must get to know, appreciate, and fear the or genres, and he was barely affected by 
Germans. Gluck's work. But it was opera that, 

—Mozart, aged 22 (1778) beyond any other kind of music, he 

loved to compose. 

For the chance to express charac- 
ter in sound Mozart even composed a melodrama, that is, a series of scenes 
linked by words, some of them spoken through the music. To him the 
thought of persons in action was not simply a stimulus, it was a stimulant. 
More than once since his day his music has been admired for its charm, ele- 
gance, delicacy — in a word, as Rococo — and at those times some "stronger" 
master has been taken as "more serious." This is to listen to Mozart with half 
an ear and half a mind. His depth of feeling and grasp of human predicaments 
put him among the handful who have made music convey truths. But Mozart 
does not depart from aristocratic good manners. A critic has pointed out that 
while hearing Mozart it is often hard to know whether the music is merry or 
sad. It is thereby the perfect expression of its time: looking at that tin de sie- 
cle one cannot decide whether those were delightful years to live in thought- 
lessly or the golden moments of a final sunset. It was both. 

In opera Mozart's genius lay in making every musical element serve the 
delineation of character. And this not once for all at the start: each figure in 
the drama inflects his or her voice in keeping with the situation, the orchestra 
blending subliminal nuances with those vocally expressed. Nothing is static in 
the interplay of wills, and each of the operas has its differentiating atmo- 
sphere. The miracle in this display of expressive power is that the stream of 
variousness is held within forms of classic regularity — the Grecian harmony 
of Winckelmann reproduced in blocks of sound. Part of the unforced sym- 
metry arises from the melodic material, which strikes the ear as abundant and 
original, but is in fact spare — rarely more than four and eight measures 
long — and it does not depart from the common 18C vocabulary. It is the 



Cross Section: Weimar <^> 419 

unerring fitness of the melody and the adaptive treatment it undergoes that 
make one exclaim "Perfection!" 

Harmoniousness precludes the sublime which, as Burke made clear, 
requires roughness and magnitude. But at moments, in Don Giovanni and in 
the last of the operas The Magic Flute, Mozart reaches it in his way. It is hard to 
keep from speculating about the effect the artistic fervor of Romanticism he 
did not live to see would have had on his style. Certainly nothing in his char- 
acter held him prisoner to fin de siecle attitudes. One has only to read his let- 
ters to find a robust nature, sometimes heartily vulgar, and always prompt to 
rebel. The Freemason's creed, which he celebrated in The Magic Flute, would 
have prepared him to welcome the revolution of Reason. 

Mozart composed in all the current musical genres. He depended for his 
livelihood on commissions and concerts that he organized himself as a piano 
virtuoso, and it is an indication of the low status of musicians as a profession 
that despite continual invitations from kings and lords, Mozart, who was not 
careful about money, was always in need. The upper orders had not yet caught 
up with the theorists of art; to these patrons, music outside the church was 
entertainment. Accordingly, much that Mozart composed was superior pot- 
boiling. But among the vast number of symphonies, concertos, sonatas, and 
other chamber works, many possess the same lyrical-dramatic intent and the 
same perfection as the operas; and from the symphony in G minor onward, 
Mozart freely expresses his sense of life, comic and tragic, together with his 
inventive interest in form. 

The symphony is a creation of his time. A prolific school of composers 
at Mannheim, led by Stamitz, father and son, established the pattern; and 
Mozart's older contemporary and revered friend Joseph Haydn exploited it in 
the 104 that he composed to entertain his hosts at Eszterhazy. In the Haydn 
symphonies and string quartets one finds signs of emancipation from the 
neo-classic — extended melodies, not always symmetrical, yet in balance, and 
movements that begin in one key and end in another without shocking the 
ear. In addition, Haydn was fond of folk songs and of scenic effects in his ora- 
torios, The Creation and The Seasons. The likeness is strong between his art and 
that of the English poets who strayed beyond the Augustan limits, were 
moved by the people's ballads, and sang about nature. 

But what is free, rich, and new in Haydn lies side by side with merely 
pleasant, sometimes moving patterns of sound. One cannot put into each of 
the 104 symphonies the density that Beethoven crammed into 9. Similar 
ratios — and reflections — about operas emerged after the conception of the 
art of music changed in these very decades. Some 18C composers turned out 
operas by the dozen; the record being 1 60. Haydn's facility has fixed him in a 
role below that of his genius. Except among chamber- music players, who dis- 
cover his depth, he gets respect without enthusiasm. 



420 q^s> From Dawn to Decadence 

Relevant to the transition is the character of the late 1 8C orchestra. It 
makes all possible use of tone color but is still hampered by the mechanical 
inadequacy of some of the woodwinds, and it has not yet achieved a standard 
balance between winds and strings. Often the brass is optional and enters in 
by ones and twos. A very full ensemble numbers about 45. Aside from opera, 
music remains domestic. It takes a wealthy patron or a court to have a sizable 
and permanent band. In Paris, it was only a tax farmer, La Poupeliniere/ who 
could match the band at Eszterhazy Few concerts were really public until one 
departure was made: the bourgeois of Leipzig decided to have a concert hall. 
They chose the wool-exchange hall — Gewandhaus — for their permanent 
orchestra. Tickets were for subscribers; only five seats were kept open for the 
intermittent music lover or the visitor from out of town. [The book to browse 
in is The Orchestra, ed. by Joan Peyser.] 



The public for classical music has never been a majority of the whole 
population, not even of the educated class. Painting is more accessible and lit- 
erature still more. And beyond these sources of refined pleasure there are at 
least two things that create the sense of belonging to an age of civilization at 
its apex. One is an indefinable ease of living. At the end of the ancien regime it 
was of course limited to the well-to-do and particularly those moving about 
in the cosmopolitan society of the Occident; for it had organized both man- 
ners and material things to make life smooth and agreeable. The outstanding 
success to that end was Venice, now in full decline, but surviving beautifully 
(and commercially) as the city of pleasure. Its polyglot company was the most 
polished, its gambling the most civilized, its courtesans the most entrancing. 

It could even boast a small artistic renaissance in the work of Canaletto 
and Guardi, who abundantly depicted the city. Every youth making the 
Grand Tour must go through Venice on his return, to gild his cargo of unfor- 
gettable memories and purchase a Canaletto or two. Guardi, with his hints of 
future Impressionism, was less of a souvenir postcard. A glimpse of this 
Venice by an acute observer will be found in Rousseau's Confessions, and a 
modern scholar's sidelights on both in Rousseau's Venetian Story by Madeleine 
B. Ellis.° 

Also a force in making civilization more than an idea in the mind, a feel- 
ing, is that important things keep happening, and not disasters alone, but 
reminders of achievement. During the decades in review this sort of curiosity 
was well satisfied. The deaths of Rousseau, Diderot, and Voltaire close 
together could not fail to be noted. And a sailor, Captain Bligh, became famous 
because of the mutiny on his ship, The Bounty. Other marine news: in America 
a steam engine had been fitted by one John Fitch on a boat that he sailed on 



Cross Section: Weimar <^ 421 

the Delaware River. In France, a certain Dr. Beyer made a machine that 
uttered the vowels; Cugnot built a steam car and the brothers Montgolfier a 
balloon which, filled with hot air, lifted their hardy friend Pilatre Des Rosiers 
into the blue. The sphere was made of wallpaper (thickened) for that was 
what the brothers manufactured. The feat was repeated the next year at Lyon 
by Elisabeth Thible, who soared a mile above the city, singing as she went. 
Before long a pair of travelers crossed the English Channel in the new vehi- 
cle. The first parachute was made, in Paris again, with fatal results. 

Meanwhile a French engineer named Vaucanson used his spare time to 
make automata — robots. His flute player performed agreeably and his duck 
waddled, swam, picked up grain, and (shall we say?) digested it. More useful, 
the Argand lamp came into being. It is the long familiar one — the wick that 
dips into the bowl full of oil is regulated by a little wheel and the flame is 
enclosed in a glass tube. An attempt was made to light by gas but did not suc- 
ceed. Steel pens made their appearance, relieving writers of the irritating 
chore of cutting quills and re-shaping them as they break or wear unevenly. 

Also from Paris came a gratifying amount of scandal, proving once more 
that Age of Reason did not mean the end of human folly. A man calling him- 
self Count Cagliostro was performing miraculous cures. He also foretold the 
future and obtained messages from the dead. People in high society relied on 
his services, courted him, assured their friends that he was a supernatural 
being. He was in fact the son of an Italian innkeeper and a charlatan. One of 
his schemes is famous as the affair of the queen's necklace/ With a tided 
adventuress, Countess de la Mothe, he persuaded the erratic Prince Cardinal 
de Rohan, who was in love with Marie-Antoinette, that if the prince gave the 
queen a particular diamond necklace worth 1.6 million francs, she would 
grant him her favors. The necklace passed first through the hands of the plau- 
sible pair, who removed the diamonds and sold them in London. Their plot 
and the cardinal's infatuation got to the ears of the king and prosecution fol- 
lowed. La Mothe was convicted and branded but escaped, as did Cagliostro, 
who wound up in Rome. There, toward the end of his life, he was condemned 
to death as a Freemason, but the sentence was commuted to life imprison- 
ment. 

London supplied the newsmongers no less steadily. In the central year 
the city was in the grip of 50,000 rioters. Lord George Gordon, raising the old 
cry of "No Popery!," marched with a mob to petition for the repeal of a 
recent act relieving Catholics of some disabilities. The protest swelled into 
vandalism lasting a whole week. Gordon, not quite sane, was acquitted of 
treason and ultimately embraced Judaism. Meanwhile, Newgate prison had 
been destroyed. It was shortly rebuilt and a place found for him there. 

By way of compensation there was a new tragic actress, Mrs. Siddons, 
who was giving connoisseurs of the stage thrills they never forgot. Poets and 



422 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 



When the hand of time shall have brushed off 
his present Editors and Commentators and 
the very name of Voltaire and even the mem- 
ory of the Language in which he has written 
shall be no more, the Appalachian mountains, 
the banks of the Ohio, and the plains of Sciota 
shall resound with the accents of this 
Barbarian [Shakespeare]. There is indeed 
nothing perishable about him. 

— Maurice Morgann (1777) 



essayists are on record as awarding her 
supremacy among English actresses, 
and none has challenged her ranking 
since. Close to her debut, another 
event — now forgotten — marks a sharp 
turn in English dramatic criticism. A 
writer named Maurice Morgann pub- 
lished a long essay to argue for an opin- 
ion he had expressed in conversation 
against general ridicule. Alone against 
the crowd he had maintained that 
Shakespeare was unequaled as poet and dramatist, as seer and thinker. 
Morgann was the first of the idolaters — and not by rote, like most of his 
progeny. 

Clustered around the well- filled date of 1776 were several other publica- 
tions of note in intellectual history. On the date itself there appeared the first 
volume of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Adam Smith's 
Wealth of Nations. The others were the Scottish historian Robertson's History of 
America, original and comprehensive and unfortunately cut short by the out- 
break of the War of Independence; Jeremy Bentham's Principles of Legislation, 
which one tends to place in the next century because his ideas took effect 
then; and Hume's Dialogues on Natural Religion, the last of the quiet demon- 
strations by which the Scottish rationalist undermined belief in Christianity 
and belief in Reason (507 >). 

On the workaday plane, readers could depend on two new sources of 
information: The Times of London and The Encyclopedia Britannica, in three vol- 
umes. And the same Londoners, musical or not, might enjoy the first Handel 
Commemoration in Westminster Abbey. It expressed at once devotion to the 
master's memory and love of huge vocal and instrumental ensembles — 525 at 

each of the five concerts, the first hav- 
ing been so popular that it had to be 
repeated. 

In 1788 the treasury of France was 
empty. Bankruptcy was only a matter 
of days away. In this emergency the 
king was persuaded to call for a meeting 
of the Estates General, an assembly of 
the three estates — nobles, clergy, and 
commoners — that had not been con- 
voked in 175 years. Its function had 
always been advisory, not lawmaking, 
except for voting new taxes. Now it was 



laughter. An affection peculiar to man- 
kind, occasioned by something that tickles 
the fancy. In laughter, the eyebrows are raised 
about the middle and drawn down toward the 
nose; the eyes are almost shut; the mouth 
opens and shows the teeth, the corners of 
the mouth being drawn back and raised 
up; the cheeks seem puffed up and almost 
hide the eyes; the face is usually red and nos- 
trils open, and the eyes wet. 

— Encyclopedia Britannica, 1st edition 
(1768-71) 



Cross Section: Weimar <^ 423 

expected both to supply funds and to advise on the reform of the govern- 
ment. To that end it must represent the whole country, hence its members 
were to be elected by nearly universal suffrage. Simultaneously, opinions on 
reform were to be sought and gathered in cahiers — the equivalent of English 
"blue books" — drawn up in each region or district. These turned out amaz- 
ingly alike in their demands. The enlightened ideas had reached into far cor- 
ners and nearly all advocated a constitutional monarchy, a silent tribute to the 
ideas of the Anglophiles Voltaire and Montesquieu. Nobody wanted to get 
rid of the king; everybody wanted to put an end to what was termed despotism^ 
the arbitrary, uncontrollable acts of the vast bureaucracy and of the corrupt 
and clogged judiciary (<402). The very business of electing members of the 
Estates General showed in what a confused mess the institutions of govern- 
ment were. Some towns belonged to two districts; some districts were in two 
pieces miles apart. Records were missing; jurisdictions overlapped; special 
courts and rules and exemptions made nonsense of regular ones; and taxation 
was a perpetual injustice. 

To help make reform thorough and widely accepted, the king had 
decreed freedom of the press. A torrent of books and pamphlets materialized 
as if by magic. Clearly, every man, woman, and child in France was a political 
scientist. They somehow knew their Rousseau and the Encyclopedists: it is 
remarkable how ideas can spread without overt communication, atmo- 
spherically. One voice among the thousands electrified the country, that of a 
taciturn abbe called Sieves, who said in a brief manifesto: "the Third Estate 
[the commoners] is the whole country — a complete nation." Here and 
there, improvised assemblies met and passed resolutions to similar effect. 
Constitution-making was the ruling passion. 

All this in 1788. The next year, after wrangling over procedure, the Estates 
General met and wrangled further, forcing the upper estates to merge with the 
Third and become a National Assembly. Shordy, Dr. Guillotin proposed to it 
the machine he had improved and that bears his name. The Bastille was 
stormed and the guard needlessly massacred, riots broke out in several cities, 
the nobles helped abolish their own privileges, and Sieves as a member wrote 
another essay specifying the contents of the later Declaration of the Rights of 
Man. The reform of the monarchy seemed on the right path, especially after 
the royal family was brought from Versailles to Paris — a symbol. 

The year 1789 had additional meanings outside France. George 
Washington was elected president of the United States, indeed, the first pres- 
ident of a nation in the history of the world. The first House of Repre- 
sentatives met in New York; the first bourbon whiskey was distilled by a 
Baptist minister in Kentucky; and Tammany Hall was established as a chari- 
table foundation, whose fate was to become an irreplaceable politico- 
philanthropic institution. 



424 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Everybody knows roughly by hearsay, film, or schoolwork what ensued 
in France from the events of 1789 and how liberal reforms turned into a new 
despotism. Some details to remember will find a place later (428— 9>). The 
fragility of the reform temper in the first phase is plain from the mixture of 
the sentimental and the violent, the brotherhood of all citizens and the hatred 
toward the many types of "suspect." 

One man's vicissitudes illustrate the feverish mood. The valiant friend of 
America, Beaumarchais, was asked by the mayor of Paris to supervise the dis- 
mantling of the now empty Bastille on the once more renamed Place de la 
Concorde. He went to work with his usual zest, but by 1790 unaccountably 
became one of these suspects. He was brought to trial and by good luck was 
spared prison: he would have been killed there with thousands of others two 
years later. During his trial he had the pleasure of seeing a revival of his opera 
Tarare, revised for the occasion. The hero had originally downed the bad king 
and taken his place with benevolent intent. Now, in an added scene, one sees 
the people as hero crowding an altar dedicated to liberty. The tenor and the 
chorus sing constitutional lyrics. Operas are easier to reform than nation- 
states. 



The Forgotten Troop 



There are many reasons why the words French Revolution, all by them- 
selves, evoke at once recognition and appropriate images. The exact date 
1789 may not be remembered everywhere as it is in France, but the upheaval 
occurred "not so very long ago"; it was bloody in a dramatic, personal way. 
Then it merged with the epic story of Napoleon, still a celebrity. 

Many of the issues raised in those 25 years remain a cause of partisan 
debate, being sources of our political and social system/ The proposition that 
simply by being born one has certain inherent rights was the Idea of that rev- 
olution. The germ of it, as we saw, lay in the Protestant Revolution, which 
asserted the "Christian liberty" of everyone's free and equal access to 
God (<6). The germ was developed indirectly by the Monarchical 
Revolution, which lowered the prestige and power of the nobility and tended, 
despite exceptions, toward making everybody alike subjects of the king 
within the nation-state. Next, the "Century of Light" launched doctrines, 
political, social, and economic, that should have caused France to transform 
its monarchy from so-called absolute to constitutional like England and even 
more thoroughly. This purpose was widely understood by the population 
(<423); it inspired the first moves of the Estates General convened at mid- 
year 1789, and it brought about the nobles' stripping themselves of their priv- 
ileges. It missed happening by a narrow margin. 

Instead of a rough time of steady change, there ensued a chaotic time of 
regimes and violence lasting a quarter century. The first span, five years long, 
may be divided into two parts. During the first three and a half, an attempt 
was made to liberalize the monarchy and modernize the country. In the next 
one and a half, dictatorship carried on terror at home and war abroad. Then 
came an interim of relative freedom — five years of successful war that 
brought Bonaparte to the fore, and then a return to dictation under him as 
consul and emperor for a decade and a half, war unabating. 

The men and ideas that produced this cascade of outcomes are many and 
cannot be given individual notice here. But one condition of cultural import 



426 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

can be suggested. The men who came to lead factions or who gained power 
for a time lacked mature political talent. To govern well requires two distinct 
kinds of ability: political skill and the administrative mind. Both are very rare, 
either in combination or separately. The former depends on sensing what can 
be done, at what moment, and how to move others to want it. Anyone who 
has served open-eyed on a committee knows how many "good ideas" are 
proposed by well-meaning members that could not possibly be carried out, 
because what is proposed consists only of results, with no means in sight for 
getting from here to there. After serving on a local government body, 
Bernard Shaw guessed that perhaps 5 percent of mankind possess political 
ability. 

But one can be a true politico and be at the same time incapable of 
administration. To administer is to keep order in a situation that continually 
tends toward disorder. In running any organization, both people and things 
have to be kept straight from day to day. Otherwise, workable ideas will not 
work. More than talent, genius, is required to set up a national system of 
administration. Napoleon's success at home and abroad was due to this gift as 
much as to the art of command in battle. 

It is sometimes said that the example of the Americans — a free people — 
influenced the French revolutionists. Some of their words about the blessings 
of liberty did at times include references to American independence, but 
unfortunately no wisdom radiated from the makers of the American 
Constitution to those making one in France. Only in the war that overtook 
the French did the American experience come into play in Europe. Lafayette, 
De Grasse, Rochambeau, Gneisenau, and others had fought in America and 
seen the inadequacy of the old-line tactics against the sharpshooting 
Americans and Indians. Europe adopted the flexible line of small columns 
protected by skirmishers. It needed much less drill, and with lighter artillery 
increased mobility and speed. [The book to read is Understanding Warhy Peter 
Paret] 

It is not surprising that the men who filled the three successive French 
assemblies were not well equipped for their demanding tasks. Many were 
small-town lawyers like Robespierre, or members of other learned profes- 
sions; some were artisans, or again small landowners or local officials. A num- 
ber may have been used to politicking, but not to fashioning a constitution or 
resolving great national issues under the pressure of emergencies. They were 

certainly articulate. They wrote and 

At this point don't ask for more time to con- delivered endless speeches and debated 

sider. Grave trouble never grants time. ad infinitum. The one statesman in 

-Mirabeau, to the Assembly on the their ****** Mirabeau, vainly kept urg- 

"patriotic income tax" proposed by ing them to take action. What is left of 

Necker(Sept. 26, 1789) French revolutionary eloquence is 



The Forgotten Troop <^> 427 

enormous in bulk and a model of all future campaign oratory — abstract, dif- 
fuse strings of generalities aiming at applause for virtuous attitudes and vague 
on details except when attacking rivals or denouncing "traitors." Again, one 
exception to verbosity: the lucid and vigorous Danton. 

During the first two years of the new order, Mirabeau might have led the 
way to lasting reforms and averted the series of legal and illegal changes that 
amounted to coups d'etat. He meant to turn the government into a constitu- 
tional monarchy and be its leader. Unfortunately, his private financial dealings 
with the king made his arguments seem venal and his driving energy was an 
offense. He foresaw the impending rhythm of revolutionary politics: any 
measure toward stability could be construed as treason to the forward march 
of liberty and equality. And when the threat of counter-revolution came from 
foreign kings and princes, the sincerest revolutionists had to compete with 
the demagogues. This is an historical generality. 

Hence the maxim that a revolution devours its children. But that is only 
a high probability. It is permissible to speculate that with Mirabeau alive and 
a king and queen endowed with an ounce of political sense, the monarchy 
could have survived. But again and again wrong choices were made. It was 
the king who declared war on Austria; it was the king's blunders, often at the 
queen's urging, that dethroned him; after which a new force came into play: 
the societies, clubs, and "sections." 

The Jacobin Club is remembered for its name, which has come to be 
used, especially in English, to denote rabble-rousing radicalism. In the revo- 
lution the Jacobins were the best-organized party, with "cells" throughout the 
nation. The "sections" were the 48 new divisions of Paris, each bearing a 
symbolic name (of heroes such as William Tell) and ruled by a local assembly, 
with committees and other members, everyone free to debate. The societies 
were independent groups promoting a self-appointed mission. An early one 
was called the Fraternal Society of Both Sexes; another, the Society of Equals; 
a third, founded by the actress Claire Lacombe, was the earliest to argue for a 
republic. These groups published newspapers, the most violent and popular 
being Dr. Marat's Ami du Peuple. This "friend of the people" called for a dic- 
tator and acted as such toward his worshippers in all groups, including Claire 
Lacombe. 

What the textbooks call the Paris mob was thus an organized and articu- 
late mass of people, not united on every issue, yet enough of one mind to act 
together at critical moments. The series of riots, revolts, and massacres that 
bedeviled the lawmakers was their work. They sent delegations again and 
again to the assembly, lobbying or threatening. They were patriots, defenders 
of truth and virtue, guardians — no, "saviors" of the revolution. 

This political force acquired the nickname of sans-culotterie (434>). It was 
made up of workmen, shopkeepers, teachers, artists, writers, minor civil ser- 



428 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

vants, with only a sprinkling of the well-to-do. "Lower middle class" does not 
sufficiently suggest their intellectual pastimes, their desire for education (they 
were not all literate), their pride of skill, their self-respect and earnestness. 
They gathered for readings of Rousseau, Volney, and other masters, as well as 
to make speeches, sing songs, and enjoy moral recitations by young girls — in 
short, to lead a life of the mind. 

It was, besides, a fraternity of activists. When the tocsin sounded from 
the steeple and the drums beat the generate, they marched out to do what the 
leaders — regular ward politicians — had decided. Some sections were more 
fiery than others. Hence the lynchings and petty massacres that marked each 
turn of events and created the "Days" that history remembers. The principles 
upheld in this way were few and consistent: sovereignty of the people, equal- 
ity, and what was termed honorable mediocrity. This last has no belittling impli- 
cation; it means a middling station in life — Rousseau and Jefferson's ideal. 
(The former's Social Contractors reissued 32 times in the 10 years after 1789, 
not counting pocket editions.) This ideal easily lapses into anti-elitism: the 
sans-culottes regarded dogs as aristocratic (because of hunting); true democrats 
must be content with cats. 

Out of this ferment came a vision with a future: the old idea of establish- 
ing the good society through communism (<1 5). It was to be engineered by a 
terrorist dictatorship. A couple of these theorists perished in the Terror (not 
theirs) that did take place. Another Communist, named Gracchus Babeuf, 
also went to the scaffold for attempting a coup based on his "Manifesto of 
the Plebeians." But his friend Buonarotti, a descendant of Michelangelo's, 
survived and wrote a tract entitied "Babeuf 's Conspiracy for Equality." Its 
teachings were echoed and re-echoed by leaders of small revolutionist groups 
throughout the 1 9C, notably the one led by Blanqui, from whom Lenin is said 
to have borrowed if not the goal the method. 

* * 

The direct legacy of the revolution was of course something quite other 
than communism. That legacy was Nationalism; and coupled with it, 
Liberalism in the sense of individual rights and representative government. 
The struggle to implant both of these throughout Europe, and the competi- 
tion between the two, define the political history of the 1 9C. The liberal rev- 
olution had to forgo Liberalism because of war: the Terror was a by-product 
of seeing "the fatherland in danger." The foreign enemy was at Verdun, 
another was at home — the royalist peasants of the Vendee. And the food cri- 
sis was acute and permanent. The Committee of Public Safety had to take 
strong measures: fix prices and hunt down dissidents and black marketeers. 

Robespierre, first among equals on that committee, had come a long way 



The Forgotten Troop ^ 429 

in a short time. As a local judge in his native Arras, he had felt so upset at hav- 
ing to condemn a man to death that he resigned his post. In the first of the 
Assemblies, he promoted a bill to abolish capital punishment. He changed his 
mind, but his concern for the poor and oppressed never lagged; price-fixing 
protected the common man, as well as helped to keep the troops supplied. He 
led the first efficient police state. His agents in the country directed the 
vicious purges, of "suspects" and "traitors" and their wives and children. At 
the front, other agents could remove field commanders, on suspicion or 
because they ordered a retreat. In Paris, the revolutionary tribunal was in per- 
manent session and thanks to the diligent prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville, in 17 
months (as he boasted) some 2,000 heads rolled in the sawdust. 

But no tendency in culture, no sentiment — let it be said again — is ever 
unanimous, not even under extreme force. The word totalitarian is acceptable 
shorthand to mean what the 20C understands by it, but the reality is never total. 
In the late 1790s a stubborn minority opposed every step of the revolution, 
their hostility expressed or concealed. Some outwardly conformed; others lived 
in hiding, sheltered by people who were above suspicion, sincere revolutionists 
but willing to harbor friends or relatives. The prominent had to flee, in waves, 
as different opinions prevailed at the center or on the streets. Emigres clustered 
east of the Rhine and plotted to return at the head of the armies they were try- 
ing to muster by pleading with Austria and Prussia. Of those at home some 
miraculously survived: when the Abbe Sieyes (<423) was asked in later years 
what he had done during the Terror, he replied: "I lived." A few found refuge 
in the United States. Others gave themselves away, weary of being hunted, or 
were denounced and seized triumphantly, each one a prize for the catcher, who 
felt he had struck a blow for Liberty. 

The roster of victims was distinguished. Lavoisier the chemist was guil- 
lotined because he was related to a former tax-gatherer; the learned and ded- 
icated Charlotte Corday, because she had come from Normandy on purpose 
to stab the fanatical Marat. Andre Chenier the poet, because of a defiant edi- 
torial; Mme Roland, also an intellectual and known as the "Muse of the 
Girondists," because that entire party was accused and sent to its doom. On 
the scaffold, she cried, "Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!" 
Louis and Marie- Antoinette, of course, and, killed by neglect or otherwise, 
their two children, and with the queen, the beautiful Princess de Lamballe, 
who had refused to leave her mistress; before and after these, many titled men 
and women, because of their title. One marquise who could have saved her- 
self said: "No. Life is not worth a lie"; by the end, the chief party leaders from 
Danton to Robespierre inclusive. 

The executions were punctuated by striking incidents. The spectacle was 
better than a play, and the painter David was there, making pencil sketches. 
When Mme Du Barry, Louis XV's last mistress, found herself on the plat- 



430 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

form, she screamed, she howled, she had to be dragged and pushed. The 
bloody-minded spectators were stunned. It dawned on them for the first time 
that a human being was about to be killed. All the others had been aristos, 
traitors, enemies of the people — abstract items in a category. 

But fear and hatred had been mounting and spreading among the mem- 
bers of the assembly. They heard Robespierre preach the pure society that 
was to issue from a purified revolution, meaning one still further purged. In 
his policy of Public Safety they no longer saw their own. Two long days of 
stormy debate set off organized tumult in the streets. Robespierre and his 
team were seized and oudawed, and after a further scuffle during which he 
perhaps attempted suicide and fractured his jaw, another 22 patriots went the 
way of their predecessors — in a tumbril to the Place de la Revolution. 

The relative ease and speed with which the coup d'etat was accomplished 
shows the weakness of the strongest political leadership when it is fresh risen 
from rebellion: it took much longer to dethrone Louis XVI than to get rid of 
Robespierre. [For a reminder of the events and fates of the participants, read 
The French Revolution by Charles Downer Hazen. It is so vivid a narrative that 
its two volumes seem shorter than many a treatment in one. For a more mod- 
ern view: The French Revolution by Albert Goodwin. Carlyle's, in his special 
idiom, is picturesque and also important as the first account in English that 
was sympathetic without being partisan. Finally, the monumental Citizens, by 
Simon Schama, is a chronicle rich in fresh and evocative details.] 

* 
* * 

This summary recital should not leave the thought that the revolution did 

nothing that lasted. It did a great deal — in some ways too much beyond the 

original purpose of reforming an entire government. It was driven to this 

excess by its Idea, the faith of the Encyclopedie in universal reason, and by the 

unanimous enthusiasm with which the feelings embodied in the Declaration 

of the Rights of Man and Citizen were applauded at home and abroad. Young 

and old in all occupations, and intellec- 

„ . , . ,. , tuals especially, exulted in the news of 

When France in wrath her giant limbs L 

, French EMANCIPATION from what was 
upreared 

And with that oath which sounds air, earth, taken to be centuries of servitude. In 

and sea Wordsworth's recollection, it was a 

Stamped her strong foot and said she would heavenly feeling (<8; 43). The German 

be free, philosopher Kant viewed it as "the 

Bear witness for me, how I hoped and enthronement of reason in public 

feared. affairs." Others sang and danced. 
— Coleridge's memory of 1789 in Goethe, who was by then 40, did 

"France: an Ode" (1 798) not weep with joy but shared the general 



The Forgotten Troop <^> 431 

satisfaction that he says spread throughout Germany. In England the parlia- 
mentary leader Charles James Fox declared the fall of the Bastille the greatest 
event that had ever happened: the British ambassador in Paris judged the revo- 
lution "the greatest in history, achieved with the least bloodshed." Those in 
England who for a dozen years had wanted to reform Parliament counted on 
events in France to help their cause. 

In addition, a movement that resembles the sans-culotterie, but more intel- 
lectual and better informed, developed in England, fed by the writings of 
Paine and members of the "Corresponding Societies" that Burke inveighed 
against. It explains the split among the poets and critics of that time; on one 
side, the "turncoats" Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, who joined "the 
forces of reaction"; and on the other, the persecuted Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and 
their friends (>506). They were reviled for wanting a "bloodbath" French 
style, though that was far from their intention. English popular sentiment was 
for recognition of political rights through parliamentary reform, not for a 
new type of government. Burns's poem on the theme "a man's a man for a' 
that" echoes the 17C moderate Puritans' demand for fair play and social 
respect; it does not aim at leveling or communism. 

In France, the fervent oneness had not lasted many months; each logical 
or accidental change alienated individuals or groups. But the tributes received 
made the assemblies think that they were legislating for the universe, saving 
the whole world from ignorance and tyranny. The extraordinary thing is that 
in the long run the revolution did impose its Idea on the world — the Rights 
of Man, now expanded into "human rights." The doctrine did not spread by 
itself nor by French efforts alone, and it still has much territory to conquer; 
but everywhere today men and women cry out and die for it. 

The contents of these rights of men always seem clear to those in the 
struggle; actually, they vary with the arrangements made for their application. 
The men of 1789 who wrote the first constitution found that they could not 
give the vote to all: ignorant and illiterate men without property could not be 
trusted, and only a few cranks thought that women should be. Still, the vote 
was given to all men who owned the equivalent of three days' wages — a far 
wider electoral base than the English; and when need arose for a new assem- 
bly, France had manhood suffrage. To work the new scheme, the 32 
provinces were abolished to make French men and women out of Bretons, 
Provencals, or Dauphinois. For a new life as brothers their pays natal must 
wear other names and different shapes. At first the shapes were to be squares 
with other squares inside them. But "nature" prevailed and 83 departments 
were drawn and named in keeping with geographical features. 

This will to make all things new, coupled with financial woes, inspired 
what would now be called nationalizing the church. Its vast holdings were 
declared state property and used as backing for paper money. Sold to the 



432 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

land-hungry peasants (and speculators), they would produce the cash to 
redeem the notes. Bishops and priests, after taking a loyalty oath, were put on 
salary like civil servants, after being elected by a vote of the parish and dio- 
cese. Soon the too convenient issue of notes outran the proceeds of the land 
sales and inflation ensued, while the assault on the church alienated a large 
part of the people. Secularism progressed but at the cost of creating "Two 
Frances" (<297; 630>). 

These drawbacks did not halt other reforms. A system of national edu- 
cation was set up — on paper only, for lack of funds. The old and variable 
measures of length, weight, and volume were unified "scientifically." The 
new system, now in global use, used as its central unit the meter, from the 
Greek for measure. It was the length of the earth's meridian or great circle 
divided by 40 million. Weight and volume were defined by corresponding 
measures of water or length. They increased or decreased in decimals instead 
of by thirds, quarters, or twelfths as formerly, and so did the unit of money, 
the franc. The names for all units were neo-classical. 

The friendly figure 10 was used again in the "revolutionary calendar": 
months of 30 days, divided into three "decades" (the word means 10 days, not 
years), the last day of each being a day of rest. Five days more were needed at 
the end of the year to make 365 and these too were holidays. They were soon 
nicknamed "the sans-culottides." The new vocables for the 30-day months 
invoked nature {Floreal, Prairial) or suggested seasonal fact by their Greek 
roots: Thermidor — the "gift of heat" that comes from mid-July to mid- August. 

The arts received no less attention than science. The existing academies 
for literature, for painting and sculpture, music (and separately, the opera), 
were recast into the five specialized units still extant. The royal library was 
reorganized as the Bibliotheque Nationale, and a new establishment, the 
Conservatoire, was founded to train musicians of all kinds at public expense. 
It has proved a model school, abundantly fruitful. This last concern of the 
revolutionists was linked to their use of festivals to create mass enthusiasm — 
or perhaps one should rather say to express it, because the pride, hope, and 
joy excited by the various "Days" when some coup took place aroused col- 
lective feelings never before experienced in the towns of France and needing 
an outlet. 

These festivals were for speeches, pageantry, worship, and music. David 
or one of his studio designed the decor, including giant allegorical statues 
(made of temporary material), and he organized the event. Meanwhile, some 
member of the gifted "Paris school" (461 >) — Gretry, Gossec, Mehul, 
Monsigny — composed songs, marches, and secular hymns. These were of 
equal importance. From the first outbreak, people had sung rebellious or 
jubilant words to popular tunes or had made up new ones. Later, something 
had to be done to fill an emotional void by offering occasions for religious 



The Forgotten Troop <^> 433 

feeling in secular guise, a sursum corda — elevate your hearts to an accompani- 
ment of lofty music and ritual. Bred on Deism (<360), the revolutionists 
tended toward godlessness and at one point thought of promoting a Cult of 
Reason, with a visible goddess in the shape of a personable actress scantily 
attired. But Reason did not last long. Under the austere Robespierre it was 
found that atheism is "the luxury of aristocrats," and a "Worship of the 
Supreme Being" was installed. It could have, of course, no human embodi- 
ment, but it kindled more feeling than the philosophes' nod to an abstract 
deity. 

What part of this worship was inspired by Freemasonry it is hard to 
say What is clear is that this fraternal society flourished during the 
Enlightenment and created a strong bond among thinkers and politicians 
alike. Freemasons were a particular kind of Deist, fond of ritual and of myths 
that they took for history They revered the Great Architect of the cosmos 
and followed practices they believed inherited from builders — masons — as 
far back as Egypt. Haydn and Mozart were Masons who composed great 
music for their order. Many of the American Founding Fathers were 
Freemasons and as mentioned earlier, the current dollar bill still bears the 
symbol of the pyramid, earliest and hugest of masonic feats. 

In truth, the guild of masons dates back only to the Middle Ages and its 
emergence as a fraternal order with a political cast and open to all Deists has 
been assigned to a lodge founded in England in the early 1 8C From there it 
spread rapidly over Europe and made recruits of leaders in all fields of 
thought and action. On this account some historians have attributed the rev- 
olution in France and later upheavals to the Freemasons acting as a body of 
conspirators." More likely, the connection works in reverse: men who broke 
away from the church and who fought for a republic would join the order. It 
offered a substitute religion that was secular and a politics that was liberal. 

The curious blend of politics, nation worship, and music signaled the cel- 
ebration of Bastille Day, on July 14, 1792. The provincial cities sent large del- 
egations of National Guards to that festival, despite prohibition from the 
central government, and the capital was crowded with roistering characters at 
a moment when news from the front was bad. One such group, the 600 from 
Marseille, had marched 27 days, singing revolutionary songs to make the time 
pass more quickly. One of these songs, the newest, had come by the 
grapevine from Strasbourg, where a young lieutenant, Rouget de Lisle, had 
composed words and music to cheer "The Army of the Rhine." The rousing 
tune, roared again in Paris by the 600, made it a national anthem and gave it 
the name of "Marseillaise" — a lucky escape from "Strasbourgeoise." 

Manners during revolutions change automatically, as we have seen. In 
1789 the temper that produced the motto Liberty, Equality, Fraternity 
directed such changes, more and more emphatically as time went on. Tides 



434 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

were abolished, de vanished from signatures and salutations; everybody was 
known or greeted as Citizen So-and-so (forerunner of Comrade in another 
revolution and century) and tu and tot instead of vous was politically correct. 
Louis XVT was tried as Citizen Capet, the name of the founder of the line 800 
years earlier. 

Men's clothes started on their democratic simplification. Though not 
altogether colorless, they became subdued and gradually dropped such frills 
as wigs, powder in the hair, ribbons, knee breeches (hence sans culottes) , garters 
and silk stockings, silver buckles on shoes, and felt hats. Instead: the carmag- 
nole, the blue smock, which gave its name to the revolutionary song and 
dance, and the red cap, neo-classically derived from the "Phrygian bonnet" of 
the emancipated slaves in antiquity. Robespierre, fond of neatness in all 
things, kept to a modest version of the former fashion, but it was safest to 
look as much as possible like a workman. That is how trousers made their 
entry as the garment for males, now almost a global uniform, adopted when 
so desired by women in the West. The show of legs that served the vanity of 
Louis XIV and his courtiers has been reassigned to the more frankly exhibi- 
tionist sex. 

* 
* * 

Meanwhile, from late 1792 onward, war was being fought in two direc- 
tions. For in addition to repelling the German force that had slowly got under 
way, the revolt in northwest France proved stubborn and menacing. The 
peasants of Brittany and the Vendee were devout Catholics and royalists and 
ably led by their noble lords and peasant tacticians. They were crushed at last, 
and the armies in the east won early victories. As in 17C England, the side ani- 
mated by a faith triumphed over seasoned professionals. Nor did the French 
armies lack well-trained officers from the royal service — Bonaparte was one 
of those. In addition, youngsters in their early twenties, such as Hoche and 
Marceau, or their early thirties, such as Jourdan and Kleber (445 >) rose 
quickly to command and showed brilliant generalship. 

Behind them, close to Robespierre, was Carnot, the administrator par 
excellence, soon called "The Organizer of Victory" He raised 750,000 men, 
supplied them, kept up the production of all necessaries, used the visual tele- 
graph to transmit his orders and balloons for reconnaissance, and by staying 
aloof from the murderous politics of the assembly and its committees, sur- 
vived. His son, a physicist, and grandson, a president of the Third Republic, 
kept his name conspicuous in French minds, especially as the last was assas- 
sinated (695>). But the founder of the line deserves fame on a par with that 
of his political colleagues. The task facing him was heroic, because the 14 
armies of the revolution were in fact the nation-in-arms, the first perfor- 



The Forgotten Troop <^> 435 

mance of the kind. Known as a levy en From now until the enemy has been harried 
masse, it has been the model for the out of the land, all young men will fight. 
main wars of the 20C. Married men will forge arms and cart sup- 
Common usage makes nation and plies, women will make tents and help in hos- 
people synonymous, but they do not pitals. Nobody will hire substitutes. Civil ser- 

always point to the same entity. A further vants ^ remain at their P osts * Male citi2ens 

v . , , , ,,. , aged 18 to 25 who are single and childless will 

distinction may be made by calling the ° 

... . J & . march first. 
old regime a nation-state — a state that 

governs its people as if it were a nation ~ AcT OF AuGUST 23 ' 1793 ' DRAFTED 
& ,. , ,f J .. , byCarnot 

centralized, ruling according to laws, 

striving for regularity and uniformity 

over a wide territory. Tocqueville in his study of the old regime shows how 
closely the structure of France after the revolution resembles that of the old 
monarchy. But as we saw, inherited divisions and poor communications crip- 
pled the old order. The very names of the provinces kept the people from 
being one nation. It takes a national war to weld the parts together by giving 
individuals and groups memories of a struggle in common. Needless to add, 
nationals can arise only when a nation in this full sense has come into being. 
The armies of the revolution and those of Napoleon Bonaparte carried the 
contagious germ of the nation and its ism to the rest of Europe, not solely by 
example but also by forcing the peoples to resist the invader and giving them 
a glimpse of that extraordinary conception, Equality. 

In arithmetic equality is a simple idea; once grasped, never unsure. In 
society it is complex and elusive. Thinkers who argue from the state of nature 
find it easy to say that all are born free and equal (<362); but that is only 
because in that imagined state there are no standards to measure people by 
and at birth no talents to compare. The equality of souls in the sight of God 
also depends on a judgment to which we have no access. From these abstrac- 
tions, the mind moves next to equality in rights, implying "equality before the 
law," that is, the same procedures for like cases. These can be made visible up 
to a point. Beyond it come human decisions — as by a jury and a sentencing 
judge, where equality is again untestable. 

At the third level — equality in social life, business, and politics — the prin- 
ciple is both in force and missing. There are so many facets to the human will 
and the civilized world that as many 

good minds have argued for as against The idea that men are created free and equal 
the truth, the worth, and the meaning is both true and misleading: men are created 
of equality. It was for equality of different; they lose their social freedom and 
opportunity that the French revolu- their individual autonomy in seeking to 
tionists decreed public instruction. But become like each other. 
does schooling provide it? The answer —David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd 
at once shifts to the question of indi- (1950) 



436 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

vidual ability: "human beings are not equal: see the test scores." To which the 
rejoinder is that schoolwork is only one measure and a vague one. There fol- 
lows a list of great figures who were dunces in class. Besides, consider the illit- 
erate guide in the Canadian woods: is he not in his domain the superior of 
Churchill or Einstein? Finally, if merit is measured by ability and it gives 
unequal results, is it iniquitous? The sans-culottes discovered this and their rad- 
ical wing demanded "equality of enjoyments" (Jouissances). Today the com- 
plaint is that the meritocracy forms an elite; it is aristocracy under another 
name; social justice demands equality of conditions. Logically, this should 
mean equal wages for all, but these have been rarely argued for. 

So difficult is it to define equality and nail down its conditions that in dic- 
tatorships where it is proclaimed and enforced in dozens of ways, the needs 
of government and daily life re-introduce distinctions; as Philip Guedalla 
observed early in the Soviet regime, "some are more equal than others." The 
paradox reminds us that international law has no option but to assume, in the 
teeth of the evidence, that all sovereign nations are equal. 

There is but one conclusion: human beings are unmeasurable. It follows 
that equality is a social assumption independent of fact. It is made for the sake 
of civil peace, of approximating justice, and of bolstering self-respect. It pre- 
vents servility, lessens arrogant oppression, and reduces envy — just a little. 
Equality begins at home, where members of the family enjoy the same privi- 
leges and guests receive equal hospitality without taking a test or showing 
credentials. Business, government, and the professions assume equality for 
identical reasons: all junior clerks, all second lieutenants, earn so much. In other 
situations, as in sports and the rearing of children, equivalence based on age, 
weight, handicap, or other standard, is computed so as to equalize chances. 
That is as far as the principle can stretch. 



The chief actors in the first act of the great French drama are identified 
as soon as named. The same is true as one moves to the next decade and 
its prominent figures: Pitt, Nelson, Bonaparte, Wellington, Talleyrand, 
Metternich, have kept their names in the books and in common reference. 
But looking at the joint list one notices that it is almost entirely political and 
military. The men of action have used up the collective memory and deprived 
of renown a group of equally remarkable minds. This forgotten troop num- 
bers writers, artists, philosophers, scholars, physicians, and men of science. It 
would take long and tireless efforts to inoculate the public mind with their 
names and deeds; the tight web of culture resists insertions and fame does not 
favor the squeezed-in look. 

This is not to say that these noteworthy talents were hidden in their own 



The Forgotten Troop <^ 437 

time or have been neglected by widely read biographers. What they have 
missed is not praise but its routine repetition, which is fame. Among the peo- 
ple, the glamour of the soldier or war minister outshines every other merit. 
Accordingly, no description of other specimens in a few pages can reverse the 
settled impression. All that can be done is to give hints to the inquisitive by a 
rapid who's who with its usual few details. Other books, not hard to find, will 
supply facts with which to satisfy curiosity and confirm the presence of a 
galaxy worth getting to know It will also serve to date back certain cultural 
advances to their true beginnings. 

Perhaps the most surprising discovery to be made is that of the men who 
in the quarter century 1 790—1 815 started medicine on its experimental career. 
Their main achievements were in physiology. Bichat, Magendie, Chaussier, 
Leclerc, Dupuytren, Legallois, and half a dozen others made rapid progress in 
both the normal and pathological workings of the human body. The new 
chemistry, the use of trial and error, and the new practice of taking notes 
throughout the course of a disease combined with a team spirit to produce 
lasting results. Dupuytren's name, linked today with the "contracture" of the 
palm of the hand, was for a long time associated with a salve for syphilis that 
enjoyed great popularity. But it is for his experimental work on the role of the 
brain and the nerves in the functioning of other organs that he deserves 
notice. He too was a teenager, beginning his studies at sixteen and becoming 
a prosector two years later. His second career as a brilliant army surgeon 
points to one of the impulsions that forwarded medical discoveries. [The 
book to read is Science and Medicine in France 1790—1855 by John E. Lesch.°] 
Even before the revolution, hospitals in France and elsewhere were being 
turned from indiscriminate refuges for the poor and the sick to establish- 
ments run on system for the study and cure of diseases. Nursing had become 
a lay profession and the complexity of the new physiology encouraged physi- 
cians to specialize. In the same rational spirit, the insane asylum was trans- 
formed from a prison for the hopeless to a place for study and cure. In this 
reform Pinel was the leader who may be called the first psychiatrist. One 
should also give his due to Laennec, who invented the stethoscope and laid 
down the bases of chest medicine. 

The English physician to note and remember is 

Thomas Beddoes 

He was the father of the poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes, also a physician, 
and both of them original minds and strong characters. The elder startled his 
colleagues and patients by his farsighted innovations. Among those he treated 
in Clifton near Bristol were Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. Dr. 
Beddoes was interested in scrofula, the swellings of the lymph glands that 



438 q^j From Dawn to Decadence 

betoken the great 19C disease "consumption" (tuberculosis). He prescribed 
a good diet and fresh air at even temperatures, and he experimented with the 
"new airs" — oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen. He found the first of these 
helpful in respiratory complaints, devising for its use the first crude oxygen 
tent. Having worked with Humphry Davy on nitrous oxide, which proved 
anesthetic, he suggested that surgeons make use of it. His lifelong concern 
for the rural poor led him to find modes of treatment adapted to their means. 
He would tell a farm laborer to put his ailing child to sleep in the barn, where 
the cattle would heat evenly the large air space, healthier than the fug in the 
hovel. 

Beddoes was a Humanist who studied at Oxford and who, in Germany 
and at Edinburgh, mastered all the newly booming sciences, especially chem- 
istry. He believed it would govern the 

future of medicine; he therefore trans- 
Those who decry experiments in medicine kted fof Ws colleagues a German trea- 

do not perhaps perceive that they cut off all , . 0/ . , , 

r r r J tise, and by age 26 was lecturing on the 

hope from those at present incurable; [but] it 

. subiect at Oxford to large student 

is a poor project to lay oneself out for the ' . ° 

r . . . . , ,. , groups. A quarrel on doctrine, both sci- 

praise of ingenuity by proposing plans which & r n > 

are in no danger of being tried. entiflc and political, forced him to 

~ ~ „ , « n ~- resign. For Beddoes approved of the 

— Dr. Thomas Beddoes (c. 1807) & rr 

things happening in France, where he 

had met and talked with Lavoisier. 

Beddoes devoted his life to practice and to expanding in published works 
his own "revolutionary" ideas. He argued for preventive medicine and public 
health; he taught his patients hygiene, believing as he did that cleanliness, 
fresh air, and a good diet were more healthful than drugs. He was strongly in 
favor of girls' education, and was appalled at the catering of girls' schools: 
"forty fed for two days on one leg of mutton." Women's minds were the equal 
of men's, and they were "victims of a studied neglect." Boys and girls should 
be taught together at home and in schools. He also suggested the use of toys 
designed for early instruction, but made no headway with so absurd an idea. 
He recommended that the young be taught about sexual matters — physiol- 
ogy and emotions both — and without mincing words. 

A minute observer, he concluded that "consumption" was contagious 
and he told stricken mothers not to breast-feed their babies. The parents, he 
wrote, should be "the first inspectors of health." He inveighed against the 
current evening fashions for young women, bare from the bust upward and 
perspiring in drafty ballrooms. He thought that hypochondria in males was 
the same as hysteria in females, using the word hysteria in the modern techni- 
cal sense. The close link between illness and "low spirits" — psychosomatic 
diseases — was plain to him, and he saw mania and melancholy as alternating 
symptoms of one affliction, now called the manic-depressive syndrome. 



The Forgotten Troop <^> 439 

What is more, he attributed it and other neuroses to "passions without grati- 
fication." 

These diagnostic insights brought Beddoes to formulate a theory of the 
imagination as the faculty that generated the products typical of the human 
mind: religious fears, delirium, paranoia, inventions, and poetic power. He 
also took into account in his diagnosis of mental cases the effects of debauch- 
ery, the deadening routine of artisans, and brain concussion. He regretted that 
no serious studies had been made of the nature of sleep. Thomas Beddoes 
died of emphysema at 48. Coleridge "wept convulsively" on hearing of his 
death/ 

The leaders in pure science during the revolution and the ensuing 
Empire are not household names any more than Beddoes'. Humphry Davy 
has been mentioned, and when coal mining was still a leading industry, Davy's 
lamp, which prevents by a gauze funnel the explosion of methane, was a 
familiar term. Science owes him much more. His studies in chemistry cor- 
rected Lavoisier on several points, including the nature of combustion; Davy 
explained the chemical working of the Voltaic battery, and as head while still 
a young man of Dr. Beddoes' Pneumatic Institution, it was Davy's experi- 
ments that established the anesthetic properties of nitrous oxide. He also 
showed the relations of the new gases to long-known acids. 

The Dictionary of Scientific Biography opens its entry on Laplace (Marquis 
de) by saying that he was "among the most influential scientists in all history." 
The grounds for this estimate is the work done in the revolutionary decade 
that Laplace summed up in his Celestial Mechanics and Theory of Probability. 
Earlier, he had dealt with game theory; in 1 789 he took part in the prelimi- 
naries for the metric system (<432); the 19C used his mathematics to solve 
problems in electricity and magnetism; and his rigorous methodology had "a 
part in forming the modern scientific disciplines." In addition, he took the 
trouble to write on his subject for educated readers, acquainting them with his 
System of the World. 

For the educated man or woman of today, the failure to signalize out- 
standing genius in the lost group under review is perhaps most grievous in 
the case of 

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg 

In the 1790s the German university town of Gottingen harbored a 
thinker who had become such a "personality" that people of all ranks up to 
princes and down to students came from the wider world to hear his lectures 
on physics. From the age of 26 he held a chair at the university, but it was in 
his living room that he offered knowledge with entertainment. For with cap- 
tivating charm and a smile always on his lips, he spiced his talk about the lat- 



440 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 



Do not use the word hypothesis, even less the- est scientific findings with wit and far- 

ory, but mode of imagining./ He swallowed a flung digressions and asides. Among 

lot of knowledge, but it seemed as if most of his discoveries was the principle of 

it had gone down the wrong way./ 1 know thermography that is embodied in the 

from undeniable experience that dreams lead 20C copying machine. 

to self-knowledge./Taking off one's hat is an But physicS) which for hkn included 

abridgment of one's body, a making smaller./ ^^ researches m geolog% met eorol- 

Every man has his moral backside, which he • i_ • j 

J ogy, astronomy, statistics, chemistry, and 
keeps covered as long as possible by the . _ _ , • , • 

,„ , mathematics, was far from being his 

trousers of decorum./Everyone should study ° 

at least enough philosophy and literature to onl y ""dlectual interest Known as a 

make his sexual experience more delectable./ philosopher, a moralist and psycholo- 

His beatings showed a sort of sex drive: he gi st > an essayist and a critic of art and lit- 

beat only his wife. erature, he emerged posthumously as 

— Lichtenberg, Notebooks (n.d.) one o£the most ™gnA inditers of max- 

ims. His 16 notebooks contain thou- 
sands of aphorisms, and his letters and 
the articles he wrote for his popular almanacs contain still more samples of his 
extraordinary imagination, at once perceptive of hidden realities and question- 
ing of what seems absolutely evident. In physics, for instance, he entertained 
the ultramodern notion that the wave theory of light and the corpuscular might 
both be true, and in geometry that Euclid's axioms based on common sense 
might not be the only right ones. It is not too much to say that Lichtenberg was 
a Renaissance man — almost the last (<409). 

Lichtenberg was part of the spontaneous movement in Germany that 
sought fresh air, culturally speaking, in England. He made two trips there and 
although London was "hell" he enjoyed the atmosphere of political freedom. 
There also he found in Hogarth's engravings a moral and pictorial imagina- 
tion akin to his own. His book The Explanation of these works, Goethe tells us, 
created a sensation. Lichtenberg praised English common sense as a virtue, in 
opposition to the German habit of building large abstract systems on a nar- 
row base of observation; these distracted the mind from practical politics 
(45 1>). But the French Revolution had taught the people a set of ideas that 
would not be easily uprooted. Would then — Lichtenberg wondered — the 
autocrats in power resort to planned barbarism? His metaphysics went 
beyond mundane advice. Precisely not erected into a system it arose out of 
reflection on things and human behavior and contained the root ideas of 20C 
speculation, from Pragmatism and Phenomenology to linguistic analysis and 
logical positivism. Goethe, Kant, Herschel, Volta paid Lichtenberg tribute 
during his lifetime; and since then, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, 
and Isaiah Berlin. 

Apart from his native and cultivated skepticism, Lichtenberg was for 
most of his life a cheerful man. He was a hunchback and of amorous disposi- 



The Forgotten Troop ^o 441 

tion and it is on record that his charming ways enabled him to satisfy his 
desires without recourse to mercenary means. Two of his loves were deep and 
lasting, one of them leading to his marriage. Despite domestic happiness with 
his wife and children, his last decade was darkened by an organic ailment; a 
year and a half in bed induced a state of continual depression. He doubtless 
knew its twin sources, for much earlier he had detected the physical role of 
neurosis, pointed out the large scope of psychosomatic disease, and put a 
proper value on madness as contributing to genius. He was not the first to do 
so but he was certainly well qualified for noting it. 

Mention was made earlier of 
Kant's preoccupation in the 1 780s with Enli ghtenment is humanity's departure from 
the theoretical basis of natural science its self-imposed immaturity. This immaturity 
(<413). This concern proved so fruit- i s self-imposed when its cause is not lack of 
fully exploited in the next century that intelligence but failure of courage to think 
it has eclipsed the figure of Kant as without someone else's guidance. Dare to 
ardent disciple of the Enlightenment know! That is the slogan of Enlightenment. 
and sympathizer with the early revolu- — Kant (1783) 
tionists. His study of Rousseau com- 
plemented his philosophe rationalism, and the joint influence inspired his 
Plan for Universal Peace. With the same hope, a Scottish soldier named John 
Oswald, who fought in the War of American Independence and was killed in 
the French Army of the Vendee, was moved to propose a Plan for a Universal 
Republic, with political democracy and permanent economic equality. 

Another, much younger, idealist who put pen to paper on moral matters 
during the fin de siecle was a second lieutenant in the French Army named 
Bonaparte. Although from the petty nobility, as a Corsican he was and felt 
socially an outsider. He spoke French with an accent at the military schools 
that he attended and was subjected to ridicule and snobbery. True, he could 
take comfort in excelling, especially in mathematics, but his first essay at age 
16 was appropriately "On Luxury in Military Schools." From then on he pro- 
duced in 12 years some 40 pieces, a few political and military, called forth by 
events or his own situation, and the rest ranging from fiction to ethics and 
social theory. For example: "The Hare, The Hound, and the Huntsman, a 
Fable"; "On Suicide"; "The Mask of the Prophet, an Arabian Tale"; "New 
Corsica, a Corsican Tale"; "A Dialogue on Love" (with notes on love and 
friendship); "Republic or Monarchy?"; 

an essay on what leads to happiness, Buonaparte is of a middle size, rather slim, of 
for a prize offered by the Academy of a tawny complexion, and there is nothing 
Lyon; and Clisson and Eugenie, a novel. particular in his appearance, except his black 

This last is known only through a eyes, which are extremely brilliant and habit- 
set of notes, but these show narrative uall y Sxed on me ground. 
skill and grasp of character. Its genesis — The Times ov London (Aug. 4, 1797) 



442 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

has been plausibly assigned to his wholehearted love for Desiree-Eugenie 
Clary to whom he became engaged, although some scholars date it earlier. If 
the later time is correct, as the heroine's name strongly suggests, the romance 
in the style of Rousseau's Nouvelle Helo'ise coincides with critical events in the 
young soldier's life and embodies some of them. As a Jacobin he had been 
under house arrest after the fall of Robespierre. Soon released, he was given 
a brigade to command in the war against the Vendee peasants; he found this 
inglorious and refused to join his troops. Having thus defied the minister of 
war, he was discharged from the army. Unemployed, killing time in the 
Bibliotheque Nationale or at the theater, he was in deep gloom and contem- 
plated suicide. But an emergency, the violent outbreak of October 1 795 in 
Paris, recalled him to the ranks. The demands of his career broke his engage- 
ment to Mile Clary. Six months later he was head of the Army of Italy. 

Success there made Bonaparte foremost among generals, and after fur- 
ther prowess, he undertook another adventure, which might be called 

With the Brain Trust in Egypt 

It is not surprising — but it is shameful — that an unprecedented enter- 
prise by occidentals that was mighty in size and in cultural consequences has 
remained virtually unknown to the educated in the western world. Most his- 
' tories and biographies, if they mention it at all, give it a few lines that associ- 
ate it with Bonaparte's military failure and not with his cultural success. The 
subject that has been ignored is the expedition of French scholars, scientists, 
and artists to Egypt in the year 1798. It is a forgotten troop indeed: 167 men 
of high qualifications, plucked from schools, studios, and laboratories, pur- 
suant to the order of the French government and led by General Bonaparte. 
The original idea was Talleyrand's. 

The government, Bonaparte, and the savants (as the group was called by 
the accompanying Army of the Orient) each had a different purpose in mind. 
The government (the short-lived Directory) wanted to hold at a distance the 
young general whose victories in Italy had made him popular. Bonaparte 
thought that glory beckoned to him as the founder of an empire in the East: 
if he won India, England would be weakened and he could be a second 
Alexander. The path was through Egypt. As for the savants, what they 
wanted was new knowledge and possibly adventure. 

Their average age was 25. The oldest, the mathematician Monge, whom 
Bonaparte had befriended, was twice that age, and he shared with his friend 
Berthollet, a chemist, the lead in most operations. The youngest, not quite 1 5, 
was one of a half dozen students from the Polytechnic School, with as many 
again of its faculty and 33 of its alumni. The rest were: physicists, chemists, 
engineers, botanists and zoologists, geologists, physicians and pharmacolo- 



The Forgotten Troop <3^> 443 

gists, architects, painters, poets, musicians (one of them a musicologist), and 
a master printer on the supporting staff. Of those invited only two scientists 
and four artists refused, pleading age and family obligations. Many tried to be 
taken on, though not one among the 167 (or in the army) knew where "in the 
Orient" the group was bound for. Secrecy until the landing itself was impera- 
tive: Nelson with the English fleet patrolled the Mediterranean. 

Would the brilliant mathematician Sophie Germain have been of the 
group had she been old enough? In principle, no women were to form part of 
the expedition, but some smuggled themselves in, disguised as men, and the 
troops took on female food servers and nurses. The sailors as usual had the 
help of young boys for odd jobs. 

The organization was splendidly encyclopedic. Besides an amount of 
supplies and equipment that could have set up a town, the ships carried the 
scientific instruments used in each of the mechanical arts and the sciences; 
two whole printing presses with Greek, Arabic, and other fonts, materials for 
writing, drawing, and painting; and 500 works of reference. In May 1798, 
Toulon harbor was a forest of masts: 15 ships of the line, a dozen frigates, 
plus brigs, avisos, tartans — in all 300 vessels, to be joined in Corsica by three 
other convoys, to transport 38,000 troops and 10,000 civilians. The army 
numbered more officers than usual, especially generals. 

Of the savants, those who were graded as "generals" included authorities 
such as Dolomieu (the geologist for whom the Dolomite mountains were 
later named), Fourier (physicist and mathematician), Conte (chemist), 
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (zoologist), Quesnot (astronomer), Larrey and 
Desgenette (physicians), Lancret (surgeon), Le Pere (engineer), Redoute 
(flower painter), Villoteau (musician). There were two pairs of brothers and 
one of father and son. No Egyptologist on the outgoing trip, many returning. 

The repeated, painful vicissitudes of the journey were many and beyond 
full recording For the savants the trip meant roughing it. The soldiers 
resented them and showed their contempt; the generals did not. The armada 
escaped Nelson and captured Malta without trouble, Bonaparte showed 
there his ability to rule and reform. He abolished slavery and overhauled the 
administration, finances, and educational system. Landing in Egypt — for 
now all knew their destination — was another thing altogether. Nelson ven- 
tured into the safe haven where the French fleet lay and sank several ships 
with loss of soldiers and sailors but not of savants. 

From this moment on, the learned corps was repeatedly exposed to 
pitched battles and violent native revolts. Possibly worse was the torture of 
the many long treks through the desert in various directions, with fatigue, 
thirst, sunstroke, sand blindness, and the jibes of the soldiery as the price of 
scientific findings and amazing discoveries. Not the least of these, for the his- 
torian, is that these men, freshly out of their laboratories and studios and 



444 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

classrooms, turned themselves overnight into soldiers on the firing line, 
builders of fortified places, governers of occupied villages, excavators of 
ruins, and makers of machinery with unfamiliar materials. The savants' 
courage was equaled only by their versatility. Conte, a chemist and a painter, 
invented a new kind of pump, made pencils without graphite, improved the 
gears of water mills, and found a way to reproduce color drawings — this, 10 
years before lithography — all of it in response to Egyptian predicaments. 
Nectoux, a botanist, studied the agriculture and habits of the fellahin, the 
native peasants. The mathematician Monge worked out the peculiar 
hydraulics of Moses' Fountain. Le Pere, an army engineer, built a stairway and 
terrace for the palace that Bonaparte appropriated as his headquarters. 
Fourier shuttled between differential equations and presiding at trials in an 
improvised, necessary court. Marcel, an Arabist, became the publisher of the 
journal issued every ten days, which contained the reports of the learned at 
intervals and, more frequently, news for the troops. The surgeon Larrey took 
anthropological notes on the mixed population — Egyptian, Turk, Armenian, 
Greek, Jewish, and Bedouin. When mummies were found he studied 
embalming. At the onset of bubonic plague and typhoid the astronomers 
turned meteorologists to help the physicians predict wind and weather. 
Science conquers all. 

So it went. The official program of the expedition was: (1) To study all of 
Egypt; (2) to spread enlightened ideas and habits; and (3) to furnish the gov- 
ernment any information it might require. Duties 1 and 3 were abundantly 
fulfilled and 2 moderately so. The native population was not at all impressed 
by the machines and techniques. What they marveled at was that so many for- 
eigners studied Arabic and dashed about the desert for silly reasons. The peo- 
ple of Cairo, the capital numbering 200,000 inhabitants, submitted to having 
the main streets swept twice a day and the garbage removed. They were 
shocked by the women's unveiled faces, a little less by having their own 
appearance sketched in pencil, but horrified when color was applied to the 
portrait, which made it an aid to witchcraft. 

On their side, the westerners were delighted by the sights, the mode of 
life, and the people, whom after a few months they came to think of as 
French. This has been a (very un-English) characteristic of the French 
colonists everywhere. In Egypt they tolerated all but the unsanitary practices, 
they took native mistresses (one general married a Muslim wife and was con- 
verted), and they studied native mores without condescension. Villoteau the 
musician was at first repelled by the several musics of the different peoples; 
he came to enjoy and distinguish their merits and share the emotions they 
were meant to arouse. In the survey of diseases the physician Desgenette told 
his aides to pay close attention to popular medicine — "superstitions may 
teach us something useful." Except for this last piece of wisdom, the perfor- 



The Forgotten Troop <^> 445 

mance and the attitudes of the corps of savants could be called the 
Enlightenment in action. 

Bonaparte was its prime interpreter. He suggested, organized, criticized, 
and inspired. He set up at once an Institute patterned on the home academies 
(<432); he was, it will be remembered, a member of its scientific branch. In 
Egypt, Monge was named its president and Bonaparte vice president, to suc- 
ceed the president in three months. The members discussed papers written 
on the spot as data and discoveries were gathered in. When approved, they 
went past Nelson's watch, together with everybody's letters to the family. 
Even at leisure in his palace Bonaparte made ideas into entertainment. A 
small company would be divided into two sides to debate prepared questions 
in philosophy, government, religion, or ethics. 

To give an adequate idea of what this brain trust, the first and largest of 
its kind, achieved in 20 months is impossible in a few pages or yet a book. The 
Description of Egypt fills 20 volumes of mega-elephant size — approximately 54 
inches by 28.° The reason for this format was to make the plates of the 
Egyptian monuments — one in particular (446 >) — illustrative in the utmost 
detail. Egypt was mapped in 47 plates. Publication, begun after the return to 
France, was laborious and took a quarter century. The royalties were to bene- 
fit the authors, most of whom were then by current standards old men, and 
not a few were dead. There had been only a handful of casualties during the 
expedition, the most damaging being the assassination of General Kleber 
after he had succeeded Bonaparte as chief. 

On the joint epitaph of the 167, so to speak, one could inscribe the fol- 
lowing items. They gathered all the fauna and flora within reach, found new 
species, filled gaps in the known ones. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was the inde- 
fatigable searcher and his collection of fishes and mammals played a decisive 
part in forming his ideas of evolution and those of Lamarck after him (455 >). 
In chemistry, geology, geography, and mathematics, a number of important 
advances were made, thanks to new facts supplied by the Egyptian environ- 
ment. To give but one example, Berthollet proved wrong the notion of affin- 
ity in chemistry by studying sodium and magnesium carbonates which are 
found ready made in Egypt, and he proposed a better hypothesis. The ancient 
civilization of Egypt was laid open for further study. At first, the explorers 
reared on Greco-Roman sights found barbaric the Sphinx and the Pyramids, 
but the Valley of the Kings, the sarcophagi, the mummies — one with a 
papyrus in her hand — the bas reliefs, the zodiac on the temple ceiling, won 
their unreserved admiration. They measured, made architectural plans, and 
inferred history and religion from the vestiges. The unresting pencil of Vivant 
Denon drew everything and everybody, alive or dead, and the panels of hiero- 
glyphics besides. 

When the big block of black granite was found at Rosetta, where the sol- 



446 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

diers were clearing the ground for defensive earthworks and where that stone 
had no reason to be, the savants' jubilation was at its height: it bore three 
texts, one in hieroglyphics, one in demotic (Egyptian cursive for common 
use), and one in Greek; it promised the decipherment of the Egyptian lan- 
guage. This was done 20 years later by the independent but combined work 
of two stay-at-homes named Champollion and Thomas Young. In the 
Description volume, the picture of the stone is life size. In the British Museum, 
where the stone reposes, the caption reads: "Captured by the British Army 
(1 801)," which is literally correct. Adding "from the retreating French army in 
Egypt" would fit the facts still better. 

Egyptian society, government, law, religion, economy, and techne were 
surveyed as statistically as conditions permitted, a by-product having been to 
extend social services and amenities in Cairo and elsewhere, notably, 19 hos- 
pitals and an ambulance service based on the local common carrier, the 
camel. For themselves, the savants established baths, a theater and dance hall, 
and reading rooms, to all of which no doubt the elite of Cairo (men only) had 
access. Bonaparte had insisted that the native notables were his friends and 
the populace his people — was he not the most devout worshipper of Allah? 

Another survey, literal this time, was also undertaken and completed for 
the purpose of carrying out an old idea; or rather, to re-create an old reality: a 
canal at Suez to link the Red Sea with the Mediterranean. All the topographic 
measurements were made and the placement of trenches, locks, and the like 
indicated and ready for use. Money was lacking and the project slumbered 
until a French consul in Cairo reawakened it in the next generation and the 
canal (on a different plan) was opened in 1869. 

Seventy years earlier the concentration of efforts in all directions was a 
feat without example; the savants worked like maniacs, not against a deadline, 
but in part because there was no other object in life, and in part to make the 
most of a unique opportunity. It was also unique that a large group of intel- 
lectuals should be let loose in a country much less advanced in art and sci- 
ence, but with a past highly civilized, "monstrous and sublime." Uncommon 
too that such a group of civilians should without preparation be plunged into 
war. And soldiering was not the only ordeal. Both in Egypt and in Syria, 
where Bonaparte made a disastrous side-campaign, the French troops com- 
mitted atrocities on a large scale and appalled the gender breed of men who 
had to witness the carnage. Not until film and television brought these things 
into the living room did the like occur. Well before The Description of Egypt 
appeared, Europe learned about the country from the several books pub- 
lished and illustrated by members of the corps. Denon's was the first, at once 
widely translated and in print through 40 editions. Street names in Paris make 
up a hit-and-miss record of the expedition. 

Bonaparte was the gainer too, though his self-portrait as Alexander the 



The Forgotten Troop <^> 447 

Great was a mirage. He abandoned his The Spirit Sinister: Peace is poor reading. So I 
Army of the Orient in Egypt, returning back Bonaparte for the reason that he will 
home to dispossess the Directory and g* ve pleasure to Posterity. 
make himself First Consul, then Consul — Hardy, The Dynasts (1 903) 
for life, then Emperor. The title of con- 
sul was to quiet fears by suggesting the Roman Republic, and its aura revived 
a pseudo-classic style in dress and manners. It was not suitable for the impe- 
rial regime that ensued. There being no former style to revive, everything 
Egyptian seemed ideal to fill the gap. It was massive, severe, and adaptable. 
The lion's foot claws for chair legs and other Egyptian and Near Eastern 
motifs inspired designers, and the resulting Empire style enjoyed a longer 
vogue than the Consular. It included the planting of obelisks in cities here and 
there. For more lasting effects one must look to the work of administrative 
reform that Bonaparte accomplished during the Consulate: clear-cut and effi- 
cient centralization, coupled with a masterly code of laws that was widely imi- 
tated abroad and inherited by the American state of Louisiana. 

*. 
* * 

Young Bonaparte's writings before his name emerged did nothing to 
enrich contemporary literature or to lower further its low quality. Throughout 
the revolution and for another two decades, belles lettres suffered from poli- 
tics and patriotism. Verse, playwrighting, fiction reproduced current attitudes 
and platitudes. Virtue in the fraternal citizen, heroism for liberty and the 
nation yielded nothing but cliches and melodrama. The plot of Beethoven's 
Fidelio is a fair sample: for upholding the truth Florestan has been imprisoned 
for two years. The governor of the prison, fearing an imminent inspection by 
a high official, decides to kill and bury the prisoner for fear he might talk. The 
latter's wife, disguised as a man, interrupts these proceedings and holds the 
governor at pistol point just as the Minister of State arrives to deal out justice 
to all parties. The librettist was reworking the French play Leonore, or Wedded 
Love by Bouilly. The titles of others — The Day of Marathon, or the Triumph of 
Liberty; The Return of the National Fleet; The Liberator — suggest tortured repeti- 
tions of one idea for propaganda. 

To this dearth of genuine literature and original thought there is only a 
handful of exceptions: one poet, three novelists, two writers of maxims, a psy- 
chologist, and a gastronomer. Andre Chenier, who died on the scaffold at 32, 
was a true poet. His works, when published for the first time in 1819, were 
found to herald a rebirth of lyrical and elegiac poetry, together with some of 
the technical innovations of the Romanticists soon to appear on the scene. 

The first of the two writers of fiction, the Comte (often called Marquis) 
de Sade was in his day considered by turns mad and criminal and spent a good 



448 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

part of his life in jail and insane asylums. This is one cause of his appeal to our 
time. Between then and now, his name has served psychiatry to designate the 
addiction to cruelty for enhancing sexual pleasure: a sadist does not simply 
enjoy inflicting pain; he is a blender of ecstasies. De Sade repeatedly hired 
prostitutes (or abducted boys and girls) to take part in orgies of his devising 
and was then denounced by some of the abused. Getting married did not stop 
his entertainments; rather, his wife took part in the carnivals. Incarceration, 
when it came, gave him the leisure to write. His novels — 120 Days of Sodom, 
Justine, Juliette, and his other writings — gave promotional descriptions of his 
practices. These were meant not merely to popularize the varieties of sexual 
experience but to emancipate everybody from the conventional taboos — and 
this in the name of scientific truth: an unfinished manuscript, burned by his 
heirs, bore the tide Nature Revealed. 

As to De Sade's literary art, there is no doubt that he had a gift for graphic 
narrative and picturesque detail. He had inventiveness, wit, and a modern sort 
of irony in his matter-of-factness: "When calm had been restored, they buried 
the two bodies." It is logical that this century's taste for aberrations, which it 
sees as a norm previously obscured by prejudice, have made of De Sade's 
doings and writings "an important moment in the history of ideas and of lit- 
erature." The 20C German play by Peter Weiss known in English as Marat- 
Sade (also a film) brings together faithfully two figures from the revolutionary 
period in whom we recognize some of our own celebrities. 

De Sade's little-known contemporary Restif de la Bretonne also intended 
his novels, essays, and diaries to qualify as "nature revealed." He was a peas- 
ant from Lower Burgundy named Restif (without the de and attachments), 
who received a good education at a Jansenist grammar-school, and managed 
in his 72 years to produce 240 volumes — 1 6 of them his autobiography. Ten 
were devoted to his father's life, 42 to portraying the women of his day, the 
remainder filled with anecdotes and observations: in all upwards of 1 ,500 sto- 
ries, fictional or partly true. 

In this effort to tell all, his motive was to complement Rousseau, who had 
(Restif said) shown forth the man of ideas, the genius. The thoughts and acts 
of the common man were now in order. If Paul Valery is to be believed, Restif 
is superior to Rousseau. But if one is not dazzled by the relendess sociologi- 
cal "research," one will grant Restif only intermittent genius. He was indeed 
"modern" in his preoccupations — in being pedantic, a fact-grubber subject 
to paranoid anxiety, a severe critic of cities, and in always thinking of sexual 
matters. He was vain about his record: he itemized 700 liaisons (12 of them 
before the age of 15) and a score of illegitimate children before his majority. 

He has been compared to Casanova, whose first installment of amorous 
adventure came out when Restif was at the peak of his own literary produc- 
tion. But the similarity in seduction is numerical only. Casanova had a winning 



The Forgotten Troop <^> 449 

appearance; Restif was short, thick, dark of face, with a hook nose and bril- 
liant black eyes, not always clean, prone to rage and verbal obscenities — by no 
means the common man that he wanted to portray His obsessions included 
perambulating at night and writing graffiti on walls to mark dates in his life so 
that he might return on anniversaries and compare his earlier feelings with the 
present ones. He haunted dance halls and other places favored by 
trans vestites; intruded somehow on a man of tide to take down the list and 
kind of amours the nobleman could remember; spoke at a dinner of lords and 
ladies presided over by Talleyrand and all wearing masks, and told them how 
women should dress: tight at the waist to lift the bust and wearing high heels 
"to sylphidize the leg." 

In everything Restif did and wrote he aimed at moral reform. For exam- 
ple, in The Pornographer (he is said to have invented the word) he meant the 
sociology of prostitution and he told how to abate its evils. The book was one 
of his series of "-graphers" on large issues. A good many of his reforms have 
been adopted, but not as a result of his exposes. The same is true of his liter- 
ary style, which has been credited also 

as a kind of reform. Restif wrote care- I was walking along the rue Dauphine. [then 
lessly and often very badly, mixing sen- three H^ 8 of sentimental cant] A man was 
timental rhetoric with a terseness that knocked down. People shouted "Stop!" The 
suggests the prose of Hemingway but coachman > a heardess brute-the guilty 
r i . , v coachman cracked his detestable whip to get 

is not artful; it soon becomes tedious. r & 

wn • • i t> -r> i r away. The wheel rolled over the wretched 

What was original was Restir s mode or , , 

° man's chest, [three more lines of rant] A gush 

composition: he set up his text in type r U1 , ~« . . , A *» c 

r r ■>£ of blood. The carnage vanished. My former 

direct from his bubbling cauldron of agility is gone j could not catch up ^ it 

ideas. This touch only heightens the [pitiful tale of girl bystander: it's her father]. 

picture of a tireless and eccentric spec- The man died at midnight. 

tator of an age in its decadence. [The _ Restif de ^ bretonne, Paris Nights 

book to read is Paris Nights by Restif de (i 794) 

la Bretonne.] ° 

After reading Restif, one is willing to believe in the reality of the incredible 
yet real-life character, Vidocq. He told his own life and Balzac made good use 
of it in creating his Vautrin, the first criminal mastermind in fiction. Vidocq is 
also the prototype of the double agent. He started life as a criminal, served time 
as a galley slave, organized some less-gifted colleagues into an efficient robber 
band, and then turned policeman. But this was no crude one-time betrayal for 
gain or safety. It was the vision of a new calling, which produced a security 
force largely made up of the best experts, criminals themselves. Vidocq saw to 
it that they were adept at the savate, the street fighting that uses legs and feet and 
is now enjoying a renaissance in France. His recruits proved as efficient in their 
new role as they had been in the old. [The book to read is The Memoirs (proba- 
bly ghost-written) in the one-volume English translation.] When Vidocq 



450 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

retired, very well off and in high repute, he lost his fortune through another 
good deed: he staffed a factory with ex-convicts. 

A writer of novels and social criticism whose work differs radically from 
that of the pair just discussed was the daughter of Louis XVI's last minister of 
finance, the Swiss Jacques Necker. Married early to a Swedish baron, but sep- 
arated from him for most of her life in letters, she nonetheless wrote and pub- 
lished under her married name and is known as 

Germaine de Stael 

She began early, with essays on Rousseau, on fiction, and on happiness. 
Next came the novel Delphine, in which the heroine may be called a prototype 
of the New Woman, superior in mind and willpower and thereby feeling iso- 
lated. The theme recurs in Corinne, years later, with an added element that 
must be credited with a share in the enormous influence that Mme de Stael 
exerted on her contemporaries. Readers who would have shown their 
respect for her other works by not going near them, read this second novel 
and discovered in it that life could be molded by something missing from 
their 18C life of reason: the sensuous and aesthetic. The story itself is of little 
moment and the prose not the author's best, but the idea clearly conveyed is 
that art and the quality of art matter in a new way: they modify the inner being 
and thereby society. The 1 9th and 20C religion of art originates in this period 
and Mme de Stael is, with her contemporary Chateaubriand, one of its prime 
aposties (467 >). 

In the interval between the two novels she wrote her first trailblazing 
work: Literature Considered in Its Relation to Social Institutions. To start with the 
Greeks and hew her way through and beyond the Middle Ages was an ambi- 
tious task — 600 pages barely sufficed. In the doing she had to bypass all 
poetry. "Literature" amounted to thought and culture and "institutions" 
meant manners and morals. Her work launched the dogma that "an artist 
must be of his own time." The touchstones for high culture are: virtue, liberty, 
glory, happiness, and religion — how they thrive and to what effect. The con- 
cluding section, which elicited the greatest applause, was prophetic: liberty, 
ever-increasing in extent and power, would bring literature to new heights 
and thus promote what she called the perfectibility of mankind, meaning the 
growing store and use of knowledge and perceptions. 

Consul Bonaparte admired but did not care for Germaine de Stael: she 
was a politician. The father whom she idolized had made her as a girl his com- 
panion in gatherings with the Encyclopedists. She had chatted with Buffon 
and Quesnay and Turgot, and forever after she thought and spoke like one of 
the mentors of the world. Her companion, Benjamin Constant, was a mem- 
ber of the Tribunate, the council that debated proposed laws during the 



The Forgotten Troop <^*> 451 

Consulship, and he led the opposi- In a democratic state, one must be continu- 
tion, making speeches that Bonaparte ally on guard against the desire for popular- 
thought written by his mistress. Her ity. It leads to aping the behavior of the worst. 
salon too brought together trouble- And soon people come to think that it is of no 
some heads. Three years after her big use— indeed, it is dangerous— to show too 
book, which ended on the note of lib- P lain a su P erioritv over the multitude which 

, t t A r r\ one wants to win over. 

erty, she was ordered to move 150 

miles from Paris — De Stael > On Literature and Society 

She chose to go to Weimar instead, ^ ' 

but her father's death shortly took her 

to Coppet, the family homestead in Switzerland. There she wrote his life, 
then traveled in Italy and, returning loaded with artistic experiences, wrote 
Corinne. A stay in France was soon cut short by order of her enemy, now 
Emperor of the French. It was a second trip to Germany that provided the 
substance for her second masterwork, two years in preparation: On Germany. 

Through Swiss connections she had known something of German life 
and literature; visits to Frankfort, Munich, Berlin, and again to Weimar com- 
pleted her acquaintance with the varied regions of the country. She inter- 
viewed aggressively Goethe and Schiller, Wieland, the Schlegel brothers, and 
anybody else who might supply facts or enable her to judge attitudes. Her 
book was a revelation to Europe of a hardly known culture. True, her por- 
trayal of the German people as slow-moving, musical, and pensive; more 
interested in ideas than in action and in tomes than in salons, was not new. But 
the names and works of the poets and playwrights, the system of the philoso- 
phers, the love of nature, the shades of piety, and the depths of the moral con- 
science, were new topics presented with amazing vivacity and fullness of 
detail. 

In this way two novel conceptions were introduced to the mind of Europe 
that modified it permanently. One was that German culture grew out of the 
chivalric ideal and its literature. In this light, the Middle Ages, far from barbaric, 
appeared a true civilization. The other novelty was the sharp contrast between 
"classical" and "romantic," not alone in poetry, but also in feeling and taste. 
The classical is descended from the pagan Roman past, dominant in southern 
Europe; the romantic from the knightly and Christian world of the North. This 
explanation will not stand a second look, since the chivalric literature was cre- 
ated by the troubadours, whose origin and very name are Provencal (<233). 
But no matter: Mme de Stael fashioned one of the great cliches in the history 
of ideas. She charged it with productive energy by her praise of two previously 
reproved human traits: enthusiasm and imagination. 

On Germany, the physical book, was nearly obliterated. The French cen- 
sorship saw no harm in it except here and there and would have passed it with 
few alterations, but the minister of police, no doubt reading his master's 



452 q^> From Dawn to Decadence 

mind, ordered all 1 0,000 copies seized and destroyed, manuscripts and proofs 
likewise if any were found. One escaped and a fresh edition came out in 
England, with resounding success. Her praise of Shakespeare (with the usual 
reservations) pleased his scattered English and German boosters, and so did 
her remarks about the "sterile literature" of the French. 

During her last half dozen years, Mme de Stael, hitherto content with 
sequential liaisons, married a young Italian, visited Austria, Russia, and 
Sweden; then England, where her interrogations petrified most of the writers 
she interviewed; traveled again in Italy, and after Waterloo returned to France. 
There, one year before her death, she married once more, this time into the 
celebrated De Broglie family. She finished some Considerations on the French 
Revolution, and although partly paralyzed, resumed presiding over a salon. 

* * 



A pair of moralists who expressed themselves in maxims, Chamfort and 
Joubert, are not well enough known to be widely enjoyed and appreciated, 

regrettably. The former, who commit- 
ted suicide in prison to foil the guillo- 
tine, had been a good republican and 
patriot before his arrest and was known 
for his sayings in the astringent vein. 
Even more persistently than Swift or 
La Rochefoucauld (<349), Chamfort 
views men acting en masse as hateful 
or contemptible. As in Swift, it is affec- 
tion for individuals that prompts the 
revulsion (<323). 

As for Joubert, who survived the 
Terror to become one of the most 
sought-after conversationalists of the 
ensuing two decades, he is less biting 
than Chamfort but an equally keen 
observer. His epigrams do not attack 
but explain and advise. Needless to say, 
both aphorists are masters of the art of 
condensing thought and are propor- 
tionably difficult to translate. 
The systematic psychologist of the period was Destutt de Tracy who, 
with a physician named Cabanis, inspired a small group of thinkers known as 
Ideologues. The term has none of the modern connotations; it means spe- 
cialists of the idea, the mind, hence psychologists. Their innovation, related to 



Any man aged forty who is not a misanthrope 
has never loved mankind./A man of integrity 
is but one species of humanity./ The public, 
the public — how many fools does it take to 
make a public?/Love as we know it in society 
is only the exchange of two fantasies and the 
contact of two surfaces of skin. 

— Chamfort 



In taking a wife, choose only the one you 
would choose as a friend if she were a 
man./If you want to be heard by the public, 
which is deaf, speak in a lower voice./When 
one writes with ease one always thinks one- 
self more talented than one really is./When 
one of my friends is one-eyed I look at him 
only in profile. 

— Joubert 



The Forgotten Troop ^ 453 

the medical advances noted earlier (<437), was to study the diseased mind in 

order to learn how the healthy think. Because they studied brain and nerve 

function and the bond between the senses of the thinker and his thought, 

their findings displeased Napoleon. He needed the support of pope and 

church and so had to condemn their "materialism." They were not exiled but 

worked under a cloud. Nor were they totally unnoticed: Stendhal regarded 

himself as a disciple, and in his novels 

and other works (476 >), applied 

_ , . r i i • • r A deep analysis of our memories shows why 

Destutt s view or the driving forces in . t , 

° it has been thought necessary to see two 

" " ' essentially different things in feeling and 

The Ideologues, Restif, De Sade, thinking> ^so called the mind and the heart. 
Germaine de Stael, and the two Actually, this is a superficial conclusion. 
authors of moral maxims all bear wit- There is no difference between these two 
ness through their work to the grow- kinds of perception, except a degree more or 
ing SCOpe of SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. less of energy and vividness: both are alike 

Goethe, also of their lime, was alarmed feeling. 

by its spread and wondered how far it — Destutt de Tracy, Elements 
would go and do damage to spontaneity OF Ideology (1817) 

in art and human relations. The con- 
scious mind is not continually self-conscious: Socrates had to insist upon his 
"know thyself." The medieval church, requiring confession of sins, made 
frequent self-survey unavoidable, and from the Reformation onward a new 
intensity of religious feeling imposed the question: "is my soul destined for sal- 
vation?" The search for an answer could be excruciating and take years, as 
Luther and Bunyan told the world. But the effort had a definite range and pur- 
pose, whereas secular self-consciousness knows no limits and rarely has a 
stated goal; it is exploration without end and can become paralyzing (785 >). 

It is in fact the parallel to the scientists' delving into nature, their method 
of analysis turned upon the inner world. But unlike the scientific, the addic- 
tion lacks a test of truth. The laboratory worker's imagination may frame a 
hundred notions and by experiment settle on one. The lay imagination retains 
its hundred and utters them, letting them take their chance in the people's 
minds. The plausible, the picturesque are taken as truths, influence conduct, 
and generate fears. 

Should it be said that the philosopher of gourmet cookery, Brillat- 
Savarin, also contributed to a harmful self-consciousness? His meditations 
(as he called them) on the makeup of dishes and the savoring of meals took 
place during the Revolution and Empire but appeared, published at his own 
expense, a decade later. That it escaped translation into English for a hundred 
years says something about English and French Weltanschauungen.° The 
Physiology of Taste is not the work of a fanatic; it digresses pleasantly from its 
proper subject to a variety of others — "Of Corpulence," "Napoleon," "Of 



454 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

Animals feed, man eats; wise men alone Sleep" that reveal a cultivated man who 

know how to eat. was primarily a jurist. Except for cook- 

The discovery of a new dish does more for er Y ne lived in a time not suited to his 

humanity than the discovery of a new star. nature. During the Terror he had to 

Dessert without cheese is like a pretty girl take refu g e in Switzerland and, briefly, 

with only one eye. ln ^ United States - 

-BRILLAT-SAVARIN,^Z,/^r/OA^(1825) ^ ^ ^™% in the ^ 

appears significant if we recall the main 
concern of the new medicine, but the 
book discusses only the art, not the science of nutrition. The "scientific" tide 
had become common for other uses; Balzac's Physiology of Marriage was one 
among a hundred others on different topics. An earlier period had used 
anatomy in the same sense. 

What made Brillat-Savarin's work timely was that it coincided with an 
epoch in the history of cuisine. Cookery was being regarded as a minor art 
deserving serious — indeed learned — attention and it was producing a large 
technical literature. Its authors were practitioners who earned princely 
salaries in the courts and wealthy bourgeois houses of Europe. When 
Napoleon put on his crown, the leading authority and performer was Marie- 
Antoine Careme, who made 196 French soups and 103 of foreign birth. He 
took notes on every change he made in the preparation of every dish and 
published virtually a whole library of texts, culminating in The Imperial 
Pastryman. If names affect destinies, his presents a puzzle, for it means Lent. 

As for the principle of French cuisine, it is not what many suppose — that 
every food is but a vehicle for a fancy sauce. As remarked earlier, it is that 
cooking should bring out the taste peculiar to each, sometimes direcdy by 
seasoning, sometimes by contrast with that of the sauce. There are other 
excellent ways of preparing food, notably the plain French called cuisine bour- 
geoise and the plain English, unjusdy derided on the basis of the low standard 
widely tolerated, which is a social not a culinary deficiency/ 

Brillat-Savarin's meditation entided "Sojourn in America" is six lines of 
dots. He evidendy agreed with Talleyrand, the unfrocked bishop and noble- 
man, revolutionist, Bonapartist, and royalist — a man for all regimes — who is 
reported to have said that nobody could imagine how sweet life could be who 
had not lived during the last years of the monarchy. Allowing for the distort- 
ing effect of the violent years that ensued, one can agree with him that the 
time was a belle epoque. Ideas were excitingly bold, amours and conversation 
were perfected arts, manners could be exquisite, and the very awareness that 
the institutions of government were stalled produced a sense of coasting 
which is pleasant while it lasts. When decadence is not anxious, it is the best 
of times, as Dickens perceived and put on record at the opening of A Tale of 
Two Cities. Two years before the calling of the Estates General, the upper 



The Forgotten Troop <^> 455 

orders had a chance to save the situation and refused. It seems significant that 
the admirable precept noblesse oblige was never uttered until the noblesse had 
become a thing of the past/ 

* 
* * 

While physiology was progressing by experiment and redirecting psy- 
chology, searchers in a cognate domain were advancing a bold hypothesis 
based on the comparative study of animal forms: evolution. It will be recalled 
that in the mid-18C Buffon had drawn attention to the structural similarity 
among mammals and by cautious hints had cast doubt on the biblical account 
of separate creations (<376). On the eve of the 19th, his direct successor 
Lamarck proposed an explanation for the natural emergence of species — the 
use and disuse of organs for adaptation. What is remarkable, across the 
Channel the botanist and poet Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the famed 
Charles, published a two-volume work also expounding evolution and 
stressing the perpetual struggle among creatures. 

The two theorists quite independentiy agreed on the central fact of evo- 
lution; they differed as to its means; or, more exactiy, as to the application of 
the means. Lamarck posited that environmental conditions caused the animal 
to change its functions and hence its form. These changes, he believed, were 
inherited, thus producing in time a different species. The elder Darwin 
inferred on the part of the creature a will to change and adapt itself to the 
outer world. The rule of life, said Darwin, was eat or be eaten. Changes of 
characteristics making new species — evolution — would result either way, the 
Lamarckian or the Darwinian. When Charles Darwin came to read his grand- 
father's book, well after the publication of his own, he exclaimed: "whole 
chapters are laughably like mine." 

Many cognate things happened in science during the years that separate 
the two Darwins (502>). One of the earliest was that geology underwent revi- 
sion, and it was in a summary of the new view by Lyell that Charles (still 
ignoring his grandfather's work) found a precis of Lamarck's theory; found, 
that is, the idea of evolution. It awoke in him the desire to ascertain the means 
by which it took place (570>). The reason Lyell brought the zoologist 
Lamarck into geology was to buttress by a parallel his own demonstration 
that the earth also had evolved. 

Now Lyell and his young reader Charles Darwin belong to the 1 830s. To 
see things in proper perspective, one must go back a little and note that the 
geologist Hutton, disregarding the Bible, had told an unbelieving world how 
the earth had changed through the ages; how its rocks had risen from the sea, 
molded by natural forces still at work. He described the cyclical process so 
exactiy that today he is the acknowledged founder of scientific geology. But 



456 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

the acceptance of his two-volume Theory of the Earth took a generation. Lyell 
shines in the younger Darwin's glory while Hutton, with Lamarck and 
Erasmus Darwin, remains one of the troop. 

It is chronologically in order to add here a word about a pseudo science, 
because its sequels had lasting and dire consequences. A little before the 
French Revolution a Swiss pastor named Lavater, published a treatise on 
physiognomy — the face taken as a clue to character. Two reputable 
anatomists went to work in hospitals and asylums and shifted the hypothesis 
from the features of the face to the bumps and hollows of the skull. This they 
called phrenology (= "brain science"). It became a worldwide superstition, 
popular in part because it could be turned into a kind of parlor game. At the 
same time it was the means of a comfortable livelihood for the "professors" 
consulted by people who took it seriously. Manuals for home use had the cit- 
izenry palpating one another's scalps and delivering irreversible verdicts 
about character and prospects (503 >). 

Never popular, another kind of science — economics — numbered at this 
time a forgotten pioneer: Simonde de Sismondi. He was a Swiss, a man of 
means, and a member of Mme de Stael's circle. To scholars he is known as a 
voluminous historian of the Italian republics in the Middle Ages and the early 
literature of southern Europe. But he also wrote four works of political econ- 
omy that are of more than historical interest. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations 
had set forth in concrete detail, in the year of the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence, the 1 8C principles of laissez-faire — the free market as regulator of 
supply and demand — "liberal economics" is the name of the doctrine. 
Politically, it dictated that government should scrap mercantilism and no 
longer interfere with the market mechanism. Sismondi, also a believer in lib- 
erty, at first promoted Smith's ideas, relating them to some of his own about 
population and constitutional government. 

But he also urged factual observation in what he was the first to call "the 
social sciences"; and when the Encyclopedia Britannica asked him for an article 
on political economy, further thought and documentation led him to ques- 
tion the validity of liberal economics. 

He thus became the first, and for a time 
What is the object of human society? Is it to , , . „ . . , .. . 

, , . „ . , . the only, heretic among Smith s disci- 

dazzle the eye with an immense production J ° 

r . t , . A .. - T . , pies, the founders of the system. It tes- 

of useful and elegant things? Is it to cover the r ' J 

sea with ships and the earth with railways? Is tifleS to ^ Suavit y in debate Aat he 

it, finally, to give two or three individuals out retained their friendship and high 

of each 100,000 the power to dispose of esteem. 

wealth that would suffice to maintain in com- Sismondi had visited England and 

fort those 100,000? had been struck by the misery resulting 

—Sismondi, Studies in Political from industrial progress. Why did the 

Economy (181 8-36) seemingly beneficial production of 



The Forgotten Troop <^> 457 

goods by machinery bring on "poverty in the midst of plenty"? The answer 
was: free competition keeps wages low, free enterprise makes for overpro- 
duction, which leads to recurrent "crises" — shutdowns or failures entailing 
unemployment and starvation. 

His detailed criticism of the new society includes the observation that it 
splits labor from capital and makes them enemies, with the power all on one 
side. The idea of their "bargaining" over wages is absurd. Tyrant and victim 
describes the relation, yet without cruel intent of the one or knowledge by the 
other of who his oppressor is. Again, with overproduction the capitalist must 
seek foreign markets and precipitate national wars, while at home a class strug- 
gle goes on without end: "the poor could say that the employer's life is their 
death, and therefore his death would be their life." But Sismondi does not urge 
revolutionary massacre. What is needed is protective legislation. 

Sismondi does not oppose machinery; he rejects the idea that the eco- 
nomic situation is the inevitable effect of a law of nature, as the orthodox 
then affirmed. He saw the evils as the result of social and legal arrangements 
that could be changed. And he instances the guild system, of which one 
advantage was prudence in procreation. For the modern worker population 
Sismondi coined the term proletariat, from the class oiproletarii (from proles, 
Latin for offspring) the lowest class in ancient Rome. To give one more sample 
of Sismondi's perceptiveness: he pointed out that the combination of capital 
and labor under existing conditions increased the value of each and produced 
a mieux-valeur [sic]. This is close to the Mehrwert by which Marx demonstrated 
that labor was exploited (588>). Sismondi's critique of political economy 
dates from 1818, the year of Marx's birth. 

* 
* * 

Although the Encyclopedists were in no sense democrats, inequality and 
its evils had been one of their concerns. The revolution ostensibly cured it by 
the Declaration of the Rights of Man. But did Man include women as it does in 
other contexts? (<82) One vehement and articulate woman thought not and 
she undertook to make it so in the simplest way: she wrote a Declaration of 
Women's Rights, matching the other, point for point, and in full detail. 

Olympe de Gouges was illegiti- 
mate, married at 16, and left a widow Men! a^ you ca p a bi e of justice? It is a 
with a large fortune within a few woman who asks the question. At least you 
weeks. This backing heightened the cannot deprive her of that right. Tell me, who 
independent temper that caused her has given you the sovereign power to oppress 
discredit through undignified behavior my sex? Your strength? Your talents? 
as well as through affairs. She tried to — Olympe de Gouges, The Rights of 
write plays, unsuccessfully, and ended Woman (1790) 



458 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

as a lobbyist for her two causes, women and the monarchy. She proposed for 
marriage a single form of contract with reciprocal rights, recourse to the law 
in cases of seduction and paternity, and of course participation in govern- 
ment. This would ensure making all legislation equal for the sexes. She paid 
with her life for her championship not of women but of the monarchy. 

A second agitator of the period was Theroigne de Mericourt, who orga- 
nized a corps of women as Amazons. They marched in street protests one 
breast bared in memory of their ancient predecessors, who were supposed to 
have mutilated themselves so as to draw the bow in batde. Theroigne is said 
to have led the march of the women of Paris to Versailles that brought Louis 
XVI to the capital. She recruited for women's political clubs, addressed the 
assembly, and was regarded by its leaders as one of them. In a demonstration 
she was attacked by the mob, perhaps by mistake. Her career ended in the 
insane ward of the Salpetriere.° 

While these two activists were making their presence felt in Paris, a work 
of theory was being worked out and published in England. Until fairly 
recendy the name of Mary Wollstonecraft elicited no recognition among well- 
read people, not even when her married name, Mary Godwin, was appended. 
Godwin himself has been eclipsed; his is one of those names always listed and 
ever obscure. His wife's claim to renown is the Vindication of the Rights of 
Women. She had previously written A Vindication of the Rights of Men to refute 
Burke's book on the French Revolution, and even earlier some Thoughts on the 
Education of Daughters. Her feminism antedates the revolution, her marriage to 
Godwin being itself a feminist act: they agreed not to live together and pre- 
serve independence for their respective work. 

The feminist Vindication was immediately attacked, because it was seen as 
part of the revolutionary agitation in Britain — all radicals must be put down. 
The book did owe something to the French Declaration of Rights and to 
Tom Paine 's Rights of Man, but it owed much more to the experiences of its 
author as a self-supporting woman: Mary Wollstonecraft earned her living as 
a reader and translator from the French for the publisher Joseph Johnson; his 
firm was a meeting place for the radicals, and there she was treated as an intel- 
lectual equal. She also practiced the right to be as sexually free and initiative as 
men. A semi-autobiographical novel, Maria, unfinished at her death, deals 
with The Wrongs of Woman, which are legal, moral, and emotional. 

The Vindication is less easy to read. Its force lies in outstanding passages 
within an ill-organized and repetitive discourse, and this may account for its 
neglect until the end of the 19C, when feminism was resurgent (696 >). But 
even then it did not gready fuel the fire, because it lacked rhetorical force and 
advanced no new arguments to make up for diffuseness. The philosophes 
had not neglected "the woman question." Almost all were for women's edu- 
cation and many women were even then receiving it, as their writings and 



The Forgotten Troop <^> 459 

political activity amply prove. Diderot wanted a reform of sexual morality and 
marriage customs for the benefit of both men and women. Rousseau 
preached tenderness and respect and pointed out how often in history 
women called to rule had proved superior to any number of princes. 
Condorcet showed the logic of giving women all rights equally with men. 
Restif proposed laws to protect the seduced by giving them a claim on the 
seducer's property. He argued for divorce on demand against a physically 
abusive husband, a drunkard, a gambler, or one venereally diseased. 

These wide-ranging thoughts make up a sizable literature, and it encoun- 
tered little or no rebuttal — only hostility from traditionalists. The 19C as a 
whole did not abandon social concern and the ideal of EMANCIPATION for 
the oppressed. Rather, it made a choice of some among reforms often pro- 
posed and postponed the others, particularly what related to women. One 
reason was the fear of everything that smacked of "French ideas" (even 
though most were English as well). Another was that this fear, shared by the 
rest of Europe, brought about a fusion of containment politics with repres- 
sive moralism. This peculiar innovation narrowed down not reforms alone 
but also art, human relations, and human feelings (551 >). 



In the transition period the graphic arts and music largely escaped the 
propaganda style that afflicted the theater and the novel, but a mere indica- 
tion of accomplishments will have to suffice; appropriate detail would fill a 
book. Fortunately, the music of the period has at last been ably surveyed in 
recent works. 

Claude Ledoux was an architect imbued with social ideals. He designed 
buildings for workers in a manner suggestive of the work of Le Corbusier in 
the 20C, simplifying the neo-classical forms into cubes and cylinders of rough 
texture and massive size. His originality was evident in many ways: in the the- 
ater at Besan^on he provided seats for the common people — they would 
cease to be the groundlings. In Paris, he built for its many gates 50 tollhouses 
in stupendous geometrical forms, the Portes de Paris. Nearly all were 
destroyed, the one at La Villette surviving as a token of his genius. He 
summed up his artistic creed in a treatise whose title, Architecture in Relation to 
Art, Manners, and Law, shows again the awareness of culture — art and society 
as sparring partners. 

Pierre L'Enfant, who had fought as a volunteer in the War of 
Independence, the man whom President Washington commissioned to 
design the new capital of the nation, was Ledoux 's counterpart. He laid out 
the city on a plan never seen before, which took account of the uneven 
ground and permitted indefinite extension. Elsewhere, he built houses on the 



460 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

large scale within and without, notably the Morris mansion in Philadelphia. 
Spaciousness was then uncommon, as may be seen in Jefferson's Monticello 
or Alexander Hamilton's Nevis on the Hudson. The government owed 
L'Enfant a good round sum, which with characteristic congressional thrift 
was reduced to a pittance (<404); L'Enfant died penniless. 

Some of the painters of that generation showed a corresponding origi- 
nality. The Swiss Fuseli, settled in England because his liberal politics did not 
suit Zurich, was encouraged by Reynolds, made the usual stay in Italy, and 
then used his perfected technique to depict nudes in strained postures 
expressing violent feelings, or else to create fantasies by turns erotic and 
macabre. His friend Blake felt his influence. 

Meanwhile in France, Prud'hon disregarded the classic linear stiffness of 
David's heroic scenes — the reigning style — and cultivated soft, sensual 
effects, especially in his portraits of women, whom he endowed with a mys- 
terious appeal rather than a revolutionary militancy. His canvases have turned 
dark from bad pigments; his many works on paper place him among the great 
draftsmen. One other artist, Fragonard, is thought of as a poetic painter of 
1 8C scenes and fully of that century in style. But his few late works, done dur- 
ing the revolution, call for another characterization — stark and suggestive of 
the much later Expressionists (650>). 

Two women cultivated the art of portrait painting with conspicuous suc- 
cess: Angelica Kauffmann and Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun. The first of these 
also made wall paintings for the elegant English houses designed by Robert 
Adam. A close friend of Reynolds's, she helped him in founding the Royal 
Academy of Art and was one of its first members. Much in his late manner, 
she depicted representatives of the upper classes. Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun 
filled the same role, specializing in portraits of women: Marie-Antoinette sat 
for 25 likenesses. The other 600 (by the artist's own count), she made as she 
traveled across Europe from palace to palace and expensive town houses. 
Two of her works show us how Mme de Stael and Byron looked. In effect, 
this duo of painters were the photographers of the age and as such deserve 
the credit we give to a Brady or Nadar for pictorial sociology (586>). And the 
same must be said of the sculptor Nollekens, who made busts of Garrick and 
Sterne, Pitt and George III, Benjamin West, and Charles James Fox. He 
belongs with Houdon, whose gallery ranges from Voltaire to George 
Washington (<391). 

Two other sculptors — Canova and Thorvaldsen — were neo-classicists, 
but with a drive toward life-likeness. Canova was in fact accused of using life 
masks to give his faces a live aspect. He made a full-length semi-nude statue 
of Napoleon's sister that she and others regarded as a portrait, despite the 
mythological label of Venus Victorious. Thorvaldsen has lost renown latterly, 



The Forgotten Troop <^> 461 

but he was in his day the perfect reproducer of the human figure. He is now 
said to be "cold"; but if the painter David, who is not noticeably warm, is 
admired for what he aimed at and did, the same indulgence must be granted 
his two contemporaries. All the while, the American school of painters 
(<405) was producing masterpieces only lately appreciated. 

An identical chiaroscuro effect has kept the musicians of the revolution 
and the Napoleonic Empire mere names in books. Their pieces for the revo- 
lutionary festivals are unknown — it was they who inaugurated outdoor clas- 
sical music — and their operas and instrumental works are never played. Yet at 
least three of the revolutionary works, half a dozen of the operas, several 
overtures, some religious and some chamber music match in quality and in 
technical importance other works familiar to concert-goers. All it would take 
to bring Gossec, Mehul, Le Sueur, Boieldieu and one or two others into the 
charmed circle would be to play their music. 

As for the composers of popular music, the revolution saw in its first half 
year the printing of 116 songs, followed four and five years later by 590 and 
701 more. The output dropped to 137 in the half year of the coup d'etat; the 
total: 2,438 in five years. From these a capable mezzo-soprano of our time° 
has made a selection and shaped it into a semi-staged program that has met 
with success in various European countries. Among the classical masters of 
the period, Spontini and Cherubini are perhaps better known than their 
peers — but not enough. The eager listener today is limited to single record- 
ings; live performances are met by chance. 

What did this Paris School (so-called though full of foreigners) accom- 
plish? They sought expressiveness and in their modest way enlarged the 
means to achieve it: to rich gifts of expressive melody they added chromati- 
cism, dissonance, rhythmic irregularity, and inventive orchestration. They 
originated the use of pauses — silence — for dramatic effect and placed per- 
formers in groups distant from each other for contrast and dialogue, the spa- 
tial element, often attributed to certain composers of the electronic age. It 
was in fact used in the medieval church and later by composers in Venice. 

Centering in the Conservatoire, where a number of these composers 
taught, musical life in Paris was intense. Napoleon favored opera and was a 
reliable patron; his ballet master Gardel was a true creator of new forms, and 
Le Sueur, the imperial composer, was a theorist who held original ideas that 
influenced his best pupil, Berlioz. The whole group received Beethoven's 
unmixed admiration. 

Even in this rapid run-through, it is easy to detect signs of the desires and 
techniques of Romanticism. The feelings, thoughts, and modes of expression 
summed up under that period name were already fully conscious in England 
and Germany during the interregnum when the southern countries were held 



462 <&> From Dawn to Decadence 

It was Beethoven who absorbed the full back by war and censorship. A whole 

impact of the French revolutionary [com- generation there suffered a cultural lag 

posers]— a fact not always recognized in all anc j caught up with the rest of Europe 

its significance by his biographers. After only after another outbreak of fighting 

Beethoven we see Weber and — to a lesser f or Hj^gj-^y (493 >) 

degree— Schubert and Mendelssohn accept ^ Engknd) ±e move away from 

certain French influences. i •• 111 i i r 

neo-classicism had taken place berore 

—Boris Schwarz, French Instrumental the kst deca d e of the century (<409). 

Music: 1789-1 830(1987) A ., . .„ . r . . . 

v J A striking illustration of it is given in 

the Discourses on Painting by Reynolds. 
He was the grand old man of the brush and president of the Royal Academy 
of Art. In 1790 he had for a decade given an annual lecture to its students. In 
the first ones all his advice supported the established rules and prescribed the 
ideal of neo-classical balance, serenity, and generality. By 1788 and to the end, 
he says that there are really no rules: "nature," inspiration, genius are the only 
guides to making the work live and move the beholder. 

As a further twist in the time warp, it should be noted that the early 
English Romantic poets — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, and Southey — also 
belonged, for a time, to the forgotten troop. In 1783, Blake in "To the Muses" 
ends by saying of contemporary poetry: "The sounds are forced, the notes 
are few." Some dozen years later, Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads 
appeared, with a preface-manifesto defining the new art; it exists. But for the 
public it does not. More than a decade will be needed for recognition and 
enjoyment. The same delay affected the first generation of Romantics else- 
where. Full appreciation came only after the nations had laid down their arms 
in 1815. 



Part III 

From Faust, Part I, 

to "Nude Descending 

a Staircase No. 2" 



The Work of Mind-and-Heart 

Cross Section: 
The View from Paris Around 1830 

The Mother of Parliaments 

Things Ride Mankind 

Cross Section: 
The View from Chicago Around 1895 

A Summit of Energies 

The Cubist Decade 



The Work of 
Mind-and-Heart 



After Waterloo had been fought and Napoleon was at England's 
mercy, France was occupied by the Allies and the Bourbons were restored to 
the throne, the Treaty of Vienna was signed, and the victorious powers 
formed a defensive alliance. The task then facing Europe was twofold: con- 
tainment of revolution and reconstruction in culture. Each of these dominant 
concerns had its opponents. Containment was to be achieved by the Russian 
tsar's Holy or the powers' Quadruple Alliance. But force of arms could serve 
only against new uprisings after the fact. Some other force was needed as pre- 
ventive restraint. We shall see later what it was and how it worked (550>). 

Meantime, the flood of emotions 
stirred, the hopes and ideas raised Captain Sartorius of the Slaney frigate arrived 
between 1789 and 1815— ideas that yesterday, confirming all the antecedent 
were fought for, suppressed, misdi- accounts of Buonaparte's surrender and his 

. i i . i i .i safe conveyance to England. He is, therefore, 

rected, or misunderstood during the J ^ ' 

, , what we may vail, here. 

quarter century — were to be reviewed, 

adapted to the times, shaped into some ~ The Times > London ^ uly 25 > 1815 ) 

kind of order. The outburst against 

abstract reason and the search for order make up one continuous effort, 

which has acquired the historical name of Romanticism. What began as a 

cluster of movements became the spirit of an age. As a result, the name has 

seemed to some critics unusable because it was attached to disparate sets of 

facts and tendencies. There is first the galaxy of artists — poets, painters, 

musicians, and theorists of art and society — an outpouring of genius hard to 

match in any period for variety and numbers. Then there is the many-sided 

religious revival that made 1 8C Deism and atheism look like dry, shallow ways 

to confront the mystery of the world. Next, Romanticism included political 

and economic ideas either new or developed forms of earlier views. Finally, 

there are Romanticist philosophies, morals, and attitudes, scientific innova- 



466 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

tions, and the rediscovery of certain past periods, thanks to the characteristic 
discipline of History. 

Such are the reasons why Romanticism was not a movement in the ordi- 
nary sense of a program adopted by a group, but a state of consciousness 
exhibiting the divisions found in every age. Hence all attempts to define 
Romanticism are bound to fail. The critics ask: "What about this element?" — 
or: "What of the thought of So-and-so?" A respected American historian of 
ideas found 18 different Romanticisms, which has suggested dropping the 
name altogether. That is impossible; the term is there, embedded in history 
and in a billion books and minds, where it will continue to lead an active life. 
Like Puritan, it must be retained and — to repeat — shown to be a Zeitgeist 
and not an ideology. The spirit was inclusive: the liberal Victor Hugo, his 
reactionary compatriot Joseph de Maistre, the radical Hazlit, his enemies 
Coleridge and Southey — all are, were, and must be called Romanticists — and 
not in different degrees but equally. One unifying thought was the altered 
conception of Man — necessarily altered by the extraordinary experience of a 
doctrinaire revolution, the spectacle of the self-made master of Europe, and 
a series of wars waged by nations instead of dynasties. 

In the 1 820s the Romanticist Stendhal drew a helpful distinction. He said 
that a Romanticist work was "one meant to give pleasure to us living today, 
whereas a classicist one was designed to give pleasure to our grandfathers." 
This does not define Romanticism, but it points to the state of mind and feel- 
ing of three generations. Because the 18C — the grandfathers — put their faith 
in Reason, some have described this difference as "a revolt against reason," a 
caricature that has tended to vitiate scholarship and criticism ever since. The 
term Reason is ambiguous and ought to be replaced by Intellect. Romanticism 
said: "Intellect is not enough — which does not exclude intelligence, reason- 
ing. Reason was an 18C passion; the Romanticist passion was for the work of 
mind-and-heart. 

As soon as it is seen that Romanticism was a phenomenon like the 
Renaissance, the need for a definition disappears. The two periods are alike in 
their sweep and their wealth of talents, in their inner oppositions and their 
overarching unity. In that earlier age some were Platonists, others Aristotelians; 
some had faith, others did without or pretended to have it. Some thought 
"good letters" the superior art, others that painting was supreme. And a solid 
clerical phalanx still held to the ideas of the medieval Scholastics, whom the 
new thought despised ( <56). Likewise, the dominant Romanticism faced the 
ever-present old guard. 

Romanticism being relatively near to us, its internal divisions loom larger, 
more radical than those of the Renaissance. And if one asks why in the face of 
such divisions, one speaks of unity at all, the answer for all periods is that the 
ultimate unifying force of an age is its predicaments: the urgent demands, the 



The Work of Mind-and-Heart ^d 467 

obstacles to social peace or progress, the need for new art that Stendhal 
pointed out — things that alert minds cannot ignore: every living thinker or 
artist works to fulfill these calls or deny them in some way The ways differ 
but converge on the challenge. 

There were Romanticists who wanted a king and others a parliament, 
some were Catholic, others Protestant; some were drawn by the Middle Ages, 
others by the Orient; some relished poetic prose, others abhorred it. Still oth- 
ers, such as Victor Hugo, passed during a long life from royalism to socialism 
and from orthodox Catholicism to a creedless but fervent faith like 
Rousseau's. In poetry, diction varied from the symbolic to the colloquial, as 
painting did from exuberance to matter-of-fact. The Baroque musical dramas 
of Bach were revived from long obscurity (<388), while grand opera flour- 
ished within conventions of its own. 

One obstacle to a dispassionate understanding of Romanticism is the 
word itself. Puritan connotes one thing; romantic, a hundred. This is no figure 
of speech. In a work of my youth, published over fifty years ago, I added to a 
discussion of the period a sampling of usage in print, ranging from scholar- 
ship to advertising — 90 small paragraphs, annotated to show from the con- 
text what the writer meant by romantic (ism). ° No two meanings agreed. Nor 
were they related in the usual way of many-faceted words. The extremes 
included: formless and formalistic, erotic and ascetic, unreal and realistic. 
One statement, about Mazzini, managed in nearby sentences on his role in 
unifying Italy to qualify it as romantic but not romantic. This quasi perma- 
nent state of affairs calls for a 

Digression on a Word 

The use of romantic in English goes back to the 17C when it was used to 
denote imagination and inventiveness in storytelling and, soon after, to char- 
acterize scenery and paintings. It served as a synonym to harmonious, pic- 
turesque. At the core of the epithet, obviously, is a proper name: Rome, Roman. 
From the start, the image is many-sided. Centuries after the fall of the empire, 
the vernacular spoken along the Mediterranean was no longer vulgar Latin 
but a variable dialect called roman. From it came French, Spanish, Italian, and 
other romance languages, still called by that name in academic departments. 
After a time, roman was applied to tales written in that dialect as spoken in 
southern France. 

These tales were often about love and adventure, as contrasted with epic 
narratives or satires. In French today the word for novel is still roman, while in 
English a romance is one kind of novel and by further extension one kind of 
love affair. On this account romantic gets used to denote the blissful state and 
character of the participants. The next step comes when the affair, the 



468 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

"Romantic" in my lexicon means unreal, romance, has ended unhappily. 
glossed over with a false attractiveness to Romantic at that point takes on a clutch 
entrap those who will not see through the Q f new meanings: illusory, foolish, 
gloss to the truth beneath. Advertizing is unreal, incapable of learning from 
wholly dependent on romance. So is the posi- experience, downright stupid— quite 
tion of women in society. as [£ ^ previous situation had had no 

—Carolyn Heilbrun (1986) real existence and value while it lasted. 

Cliches such as "romantic scheme," 
"incurable romantic" come into circulation and the supposed contrary realis- 
tic develops into the highest term of praise for a plan, opinion, or action. Yet 
the contemptuous word retains some of its glamour — indeed, it means glam- 
orous when the travel agent promises "romantic nights" on board ship. Nor 
do all married couples despise the romance of their youth. 

In the last years of the 18C in Germany and England, Romantic generated 
the -ist form to designate those dissatisfied with the neo-classic style and 
enthusiastic about new forms in art and thought. None of the modey mean- 
ings of romantic gives any help in understanding that oudook. It is obvious that 
an age that left scores of masterpieces in every art and original ideas still cur- 
rent cannot have been populated exclusively by men and women weak in 
judgment and continually lovelorn and subject to illusion. The one link 
between the temper of the period and the original meaning of the word is that 
Romanticism validated passion and risk. The two are inevitably connected; 
but as we shall see, they neither exclude reason, nor overlook the real. On the 
contrary, the spirit of adventure in Romanticism aims at enlarging experience 
by exploring the real. 

Before coming to particulars, it may be helpful to bring two other words 
that have the same root as romantic and that lead in still other directions. 
Romanesque is the name given to the architecture that departed from the 
ancient Roman style and preceded the Gothic. In French today romanesque 
refers not to architecture but to the novel — roman. It means novel-like, as in a 
novel, and applies to an experience or mode of behavior. All these things being 
so, clarity might be secured by giving romantic and romanticist different roles, 
thus keeping the loose, promiscuous implications of the degraded word apart 
from the achievements of the first half of the 19C. But this suggestion breaks 
down where the shorter adjective naturally suits sentence rhythm, or when, in 
speaking, the -ist noun used as adjective sounds clumsy or affected. A better 
safeguard is to know Romanticist work at firsthand. 

Of course, classic and classical are also ambiguous, though less so. In 
Germany, Poland, and Russia, the Romanticists were the first poets and nov- 
elists of European reputation. On this account they were soon dubbed the 
country's classic or classical writers: Goethe and Schiller, Pushkin and 
Mickiewicz are classical in their respective homelands. But they are not clas- 



The Work of Mind-and-Heart <^> 469 

sicists or neo-classical. Schiller created further confusion by calling all litera- 
ture since the ancient Greeks and Romans sentimental. What he meant was that 
ancient poetry was spontaneous, direct in its vision, free from any models, 
and he called it naive. Ever after, he pointed out, poets have had to study their 
own feelings (sentiments) in addition to life itself and the ancients' works 
besides. Schiller's sentimental means modern SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 

* 
* * 

The span of years when Romanticism was the spirit of the age is roughly 
the last decade of the 1 8C and the first half of the 1 9C. Those 60 years wit- 
nessed the work and struggles of three generations, but this work is not 
chronologically parallel in every country. Germany and England were first in 
line: the artists and writers born in the 1770s brought out their innovations in 
the 1790s and early 1800s (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Constable). At that time 
France, Italy, Spain, and East Central Europe seemed culturally stagnant 
under the Revolution and Napoleon (<447). The second generation, born 
around 1 800, showed its powers beginning in the 1 820s (Pushkin, Lamartine, 
Delacroix, Emerson), and was the last contingent fully to share the prevailing 
temper. The next was a broken wave. The talented born around 1810 partake 
of the original source (Wagner, Liszt, Gautier, Melville), but in their mid- 
career the world changed and they re-oriented themselves and their beliefs 
(558>). 

Since Romanticism produced much more than art, and the arts were 
superabundant, the whole panorama cannot fit into a single chapter; it will take 
three. The present one deals with the revised conception of man and the rep- 
resentation of this new man in the several arts by the pioneers. "The View from 
Paris Around 1 830" will continue the story of artistic production down to the 
mid-century, coupled with that of philosophy. The theories and institutions of 
society and the march of science will occupy the chapter after next, "The 
Mother of Parliaments." To re-enact in the imagination the three-dimensional 
reality requires thinking in counterpoint to these three linear narratives. 

By the end of the story it should appear that the present age is not simply 
"the heir of the Enlightenment" as many complain or boast; it is also the heir 
of the age that corrected the Enlightenment's errors and, while adding errors 
of its own, deepened and amplified all the categories of art and thought. [The 
small book to read is Classic, Romantic, and Modern by Jacques Barzun.] 

Behind the first unmistakable Romanticist works stands the thought of 
four men who by date and upbringing belong to the 1 8C but were at odds 
with it: Rousseau, Burke, Kant, and Goethe. Rousseau alive and dead was 
studied in depth by poets and artists as well as political scientists. What his 
readers learned from him was that human beings are moved by passion. 



470 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

What wiser and what juster and what more Thought or "reason" is the instrument 

really merciful law than that man shall not be of desires. It is not their opponent 

able to receive into his head what he will not always at war; it chooses ends and the 

receive into his heart also? means tQ fulfm them To say thi$ is tQ 

—Newman (1841) say that heart-and-mind or mind-and- 

heart is the single engine of moral, 
social, and scientific progress. So said Destutt de Tracy (<453). Hume, con- 
sidered a pure 1 8C rationalist mind, held exactly the same view. But not hav- 
ing made the point vivid, he is never accused of throwing away reason and 
giving the loose to impulse. Had the western languages had for mind-and- 
heart a single word such as the Chinese hsin (<202), much futile debate might 
have been spared. 

Man, then, is conceived by Romanticism as a creature that feels and can 
think. His every thought is charged with some emotion. When this opinion is 
new in the culture the need is felt to study the ways of mind-and-heart as one 
force, while giving form to its less conscious stirrings. We may see in the 
Romanticist image of the Doppelganger a symbol of the two levels that thought 
traverses (473>). This close attention to the inner life explains the "egotism" 
and "subjectivity" of Romanticist writers. The poetry of the period is predom- 
inantly lyrical — it speaks in the first person to report on its findings within the 
self. From this search other discoveries follow. The Imagination emerges as a 
leading faculty, because it conceives things in the round, as they look and feel, 
not simply as they are conceived in words. Enthusiasm turns from being a dan- 
gerous form of folly to the prerequisite of all great deeds. As Goethe's Faust 
says at the start of his adventure, "In the beginning was not the Word, but the 
Act." The Word — an abstraction — comes after. Wordsworth, confirming 
Rousseau, sees in "the feeling Intellect" the human urge to sympathize with all 
living things, which reason alone could not arouse. 

He who is possessed by these ideas and can communicate his discoveries 
is the Genius. For the Romanticists and since, the name stands for productive 
power. One now is, a genius, not as formerly "has a genius for" — some activ- 
ity or other. The genius is an uncom- 
Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; mon tyP e of " human being and the out- 
sold Reason is the bound or outward circum- ward sign that he deserves the title is 
ference of Energy. the scope of his imagination, matched 

Blake (1793) by means adequate to its concrete and 

lasting expression. 
Inborn like genius, but not limited to the few, religious feeling was vali- 
dated anew by many Romanticists; and its outgrowth, organized religion, 
enjoyed a renaissance as one of the indispensable works of mind-and-heart. 
In every country of Europe, the teachings of the ancestral creeds replaced the 
abstract propositions of Deism. But it was thanks to a modified orthodoxy, 



The Work of Mind-and-Heart <&> 471 

which relied first on the religious impulse and then in varying degrees on two 
other emotions characteristic of the time: the love of nature and the respect 
for history. In Rousseau's Emik, the eloquent profession of faith offers 
Nature — the works of God — as the proof of His existence and attributes. 
The concrete beauty of nature speaks directiy to the receptive mind. And 
from the same source comes, as we saw, the cult of nature — the love of trees 
and flowers, gardening for pleasure, bird-watching and camping, and the 
belief that one must leave the unnatural city at least once a year and restore in 
the countryside something essential to life. 

At the same time nature moves us enjoyably; Byron in his journeyings 
says: "Mountains are a feeling." The 18C feared them as horribly ugly obsta- 
cles to travel and pitied those who resided nearby. For the Romanticists, the 
vastness of the universe created awe and instilled the sense of man's contra- 
dictory nature, powerful and weak, great and wretched, as in Pascal (<219). 
To find a resting place for one's impulse of love and submission one seeks 
God through nature or in nature. 

Spinoza had shown the way (<359). 

^ i i i r 4 C n Call it not vain, they do not err, 

Condemned as an atheist for 150 years, J 

. iiii cc^ i Who say that when the poet dies 

he was now rehabilitated as a God- _ _ 

Mute Nature mourns her worshipper, 

intoxicated man"; for he saw the divine And celebrates Ws obsequies . 

as pervading all things and the believer 

1 ,,«,.„ ,, r — Walter Scott, The Lay of 

aspossessedby the intellectual love of the La^ Minhkel {\WS) 

God." Pantheism was one form of 
Romanticist faith. 

The other path, that of history, was taken by the Oxford Movement that 
revivified the Church of England. Inspired by Newman (later a Catholic and 
a cardinal), the Tractarians (so-called from their propaganda by means of 
scores of tracts on single topics) went to the early Christian church fathers to 
recover beliefs and practices that would restore fervor and concreteness to 
worship. Asserting that the continuity of tradition made Anglicans catholic 
with a small c, the reformers created the High church segment of the estab- 
lished Church. Their contemporaries in strength of belief, the Methodists, 
had founded their sect earlier to fulfill the comparable desires of the lower 
middle classes. They were the first "enthusiasts." In America, a decade of rev- 
elations to Joseph Smith led him to found in 1830 the Church of the Latter- 
Day Saints or Mormons. 

Meantime in France an extraordinary work had appeared called The 
Genius of Christianity. The tide was an argument in itself. By applying genius in 
the double sense of message and mastery to an institution that was also a 
revealed religion, the author testified to the greatness of the one and the spir- 
itual truth of the other. That author was the Vicomte Rene de Chateaubriand, 
a writer on politics, a historian, a novelist, temporarily a statesman, and ulti- 



472 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

On the face of it, it seems to me a rather mately the greatest French memorialist 

remarkable thing to have found a way, by since the Duke of Saint-Simon (<355). 
means of a single hammer stroke, to awaken I n his thick book about Christianity 

in one instant in a thousand hearts the same Chateaubriand unites into an apologia 

emotion. Considered moreover as harmo- evefy topk m any way touche d by reli- 

nious sound, a bell unquestionably possesses ^ feding . d ^ y ^ ^^ ^ ^^ 

a beauty of the first order, that which artists ir • ^ i • ^ j 

J self, society, government, history, and 

call grandeur. . ,_,, . . 

the arts. The appeal is to every interest, 

-CHATEAUBRIAND, "Of CHURCH BeU*» ^ a g ^ m fevor of ±e aes . 

The Genius of Christianity (1802) , . ... . r , , _ 

thetic and visionary. After a resume of 

the Christian story and the fitness of the 
sacraments in the course of life, one finds in the work a succession of brief 
comments and suggestive links that form a coherent and delightful pilgrimage 
through such subjects as: astronomy, the Deluge, the earth and living creatures, 
and birds' nests. Then come patriotism, the conscience, immortality, and 
Judgment Day. Skipping, one lights on Poetry, and the epics of Dante, Tasso, 
and Milton; a comparison of Virgil and Racine; Heloi'se and Abelard. And later 
on: history in modern literature, the pagan gods, the saints, angels, and Satan's 
crew; and still further some contrivances in the fine arts; Hell, Purgatory, and 
Heaven. Thus is fulfilled the promise of the subtitle: "The Poetic and Moral 
Beauties of the Christian Religion." The book had an enormous vogue; 
Chateaubriand had to dash all over France to stop printers who were busy 
pirating it. This success coincided neatly with Bonaparte's making the Roman 
Catholic once more the established church. The charm of Chateaubriand's 
scattered vignettes is gone, but the essence of his argument has continued per- 
suasive; in each generation converts are made by the church's appeal to artistic 
sensibility. 

* 
* * 

First included in The Genius of Christianity, though intended as part of a 
series of tales, Rene also captured a moment in the rise of Romanticism. It is 
the story of a youth reared in solitude with a sister who finds that her love for 
him is a guilty passion. She enters a convent. Horrified, he flees to America, 
where he unburdens his soul by recounting his life to an Indian chief. They 
share the cult of nature, and the youth delves into what he calls le vague des pas- 
sions, that is, the troubled state when the passions are strong but unfocused. 
This mood — also called mal du siecle — was apparently widespread, for Rene 
had many echoes. Sainte-Beuve said: Rene, c'est moi and Berlioz records a kin- 
dred feeling in his Memoirs. The melody which opens his Symphonie Fantastique 
and which he composed in adolescence, is undoubtedly another expression 
of the same emotional uncertainty characteristic of puberty. In Germany 



The Work of Mind-and-Heart q^& 473 

somewhat earlier, this aimlessness had been desperate and violent (<393). All 
these symptoms remind us that many artists of the period matured very early, 
not a surprising effect of the unsetded world in which they grew up. 

Such conditions predisposed to religion. The pastor Schleiermacher in 
Germany led the Protestant revival, basing his call for faith on "the autonomy 
of the religious feeling" — a given in Man, as Rousseau said. The idea of God 
does not arise from thought or will, but from the inborn sense of depen- 
dence, man's weakness felt in the moments of SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 
Granting this premise, one can argue the rationality and utility of particular 
beliefs, and as in the 16C, Protestantism in the 19th argued the merit of being 
free of superstition and blind submissiveness. The Romanticist pattern could 
not be clearer: feeling first, reason giving it form and direction, life the adven- 
ture propelled by faith. 

In general, the new wave of believers took their creed as consistent with 
the modern scientific assumption that God has no reason to disturb the laws 
of nature. But the poets — believers or not — had reasons for respecting 
superstition. For one thing it offered 

splendid opportunities for fiction, Superstition is the poetry of life. Both invent 
yielding such masterpieces as Burns's imaginary beings. Both sense the strangest 
Tarn O'Shanter and Scott's Wandering connections between real, tangible ele- 
Willie's Tale. For another, superstition ments — an interplay of sympathies and 
could be regarded as the poetic antipathies. Superstition does no harm to the 
imagery of the people. In Faust two P oet » because he can turn his half-delusions 
powerful scenes depict Satanic rites to advantage in a variety of ways. 
that give vent to the dark forces in us — Goethe (1823) 
and in nature. Superstitions have 

meanings that the Enlightenment forgot or ignored. For example, the 
German legend of the Doppelgdnger, the exact double visible at times behind 
the galloping horseman, represents the second man within us, who can be 
moral or devilish. Such embodied wisdom was forgotten again until the 
1890s, when psychology and anthropology recovered it under the name of 
myth. And once more it was welcomed and used by poets and storytellers. 

What links myth with literature is the Romanticist faculty par excellence, 
the Imagination. As we saw, the faculty regained respect, but the word remains 
ambiguous. Coleridge pointed out that it is not mere fancy; little effort is 
needed to put together in thought bits and pieces of experience — say, a talking 
animal. To imagine is not to fashion charming make-believe. But it takes imag- 
ination to write a fable in which the talking animal satirizes with insight and wit 
some feature of society. Out of the known or knowable, Imagination connects 
the remote, reinterprets the familiar, or discovers hidden realities. Being a 
means of discovery, it must be called "Imagination of the real." Scientific 
hypotheses perform that same office; they are products of imagination. 



474 <5^& From Dawn to Decadence 

This view of the matter explains why to the Romanticists the arts no 
longer figured as a refined pleasure of the senses, an ornament of civilized 
existence, but as one form of the deepest possible reflection on life. Shelley, 
defending his art, declares poets to be the "unacknowledged legislators of the 
world." The arts convey truths; they are imagination crystallized; and as they 
transport the soul they reshape the perceptions and possibly the life of the 
beholder. To perform this feat requires genius, because it is not a mechanical 
act. To be sure, all art makes use of conventions, but to obey traditional rules 
and follow set patterns will not achieve that fusion of idea and form which is 
properly creation. It was Romanticist discussion that made the word creation 
regularly apply to works of art. As mentioned earlier, Shelley thought that 
Tasso in the 16C had been the first to use it, but that cannot be shown. Note 
that 1 9C creation by genius is something rather different from late 20C cre- 
ativity (787>). 

These Romanticist words, recharged with meaning, helped to establish 
the religion of art. That faith served alike those who could and those who 
could not partake of the revived creeds. To call the passion for art a religion 
is not a figure of speech or a way of praise. Since the beginning of the 19C, art 
has been defined again and again by its devotees as "the highest spiritual 
expression of man." The dictum leaves no room for anything higher and this 
highest level is that which, for other human beings, is occupied by religion. To 
1 9C worshippers the arts form a treasury of revelations, a body of scriptures; 
the makers of this spiritual testament are prophets and seers. And to this day 
the fortunate among them are treated as demigods. 

* 
* * 

As prophets, from the earliest days of the religion, they castigated the 
society in which they lived. It was sunk in the mire of commerce and industry, 
activities that blunted the senses, narrowed the mind, killed the imagination. 
With these tenets the campaign against the middle class had begun. In the 
coruscating preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, Gautier denounced the materi- 
alist view of life that prevails because of trade, sole concern of the bourgeois. 
The mark of this contemptible creature is his incapacity to understand 
and enjoy art — except the academic or sentimental kind. What is more he 
does not know that genuine art is not a vehicle for moral lessons. It serves its 

own ends and none outside itself — 
A novel is not a pair of hand-sewn shoes, a except to enchant the fit beholder. This 
sonnet a patent syringe, or a drama a railroad i s the doctrine of "art for art's sake," 
line, for all of those— not these— are the usually believed to be a new idea of the 
things that civilize mankind. 1890s (>617). The philistine was born 

— Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin simultaneously with the start of the 



The Work of Mind-and-Heart <^> 475 

artists' hounding of the bourgeoisie, the class that gave them birth and from 
which came their best patrons and admirers. 

Admiration, it must be said, is not a uniform trait in all periods. A 
strongly critical one like the Enlightenment disdains the enthusiastic kind, 
because it suggests gaping at things not understood. Admiring fervor 
returned with the Romanticists, especially the young, for whom it was a test 
of imagination. One admires a genius because one has the imagination to see 
that there is no mechanism in him or his work, nothing that can be analyzed and 
rationalized. Shading upward from admiration is an equally strong passion, 
caused by the power of love. Its importance might have been deduced from 
the erotic meaning of romance, but its character goes beyond that meaning. 
Romance is simple, naive, all on one plane of dazzled awareness. Nineteenth- 
century love repudiated also its 1 8C conception: a courtly minuet in which 
both parties knew the steps and found pleasure not only in the goal but 
also — perhaps more — in the game. Nor was the crude course of the hunter 
and the hunted acceptable. As with the art of music, the Romanticists insisted 
that in love the pleasure of the senses was not enough. High significance, the 
deepest motions of the spirit were of the essence. A book has been written 
about some famous liaisons of the period under the title The Love Affair as a 
Work of Art* but its 20C biographical and psychological treatment tends to 
blur the 19C aspect of things. The Romanticist love affair combines passion 
with imagination and desire with risk. Passion means suffering and the lover 
feels that he is possessed. The dark side of nature, the Dionysiac element 
(Satanic in Faus?), propels him. But he is also uplifted by celestial emotion on 
beholding the beauty of the beloved, not solely the physical beauty, but that 
which derives from harmony achieved between one's nature and one's 
spirit — what the Germans called the beautiful soul (schbne Seek). In that exal- 
tation, the Romanticist further recognized the impetus that produces art. 

Goethe in Faust called this spur the Eternal feminine. Love begets devo- 
tion to the particular being; each seeks to find in the beloved another self, dif- 
ferent but equal, especially in emotional and artistic sensibility. The conception 
had practical results. After Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise, which Shelley read so 
assiduously, there was no question among advanced thinkers but that women's 
education must be as complete as men's and of the same quality. Passing from 
theory to event, it appears that the artists of the time found many "muses" to 
inspire them, gifted, heroic, and honored. To name but a few: Caroline 
Schlegel, Queen Louisa of Prussia, Rachel von Varnhagen, Princess Lieven, 
Jeanne Recamier, and not the least animating, Germaine de Stael (<450). It 
hardly needs saying that such unions were subject to the usual vicissitudes. 
Social conditions and individual faults had their well-known effects, and the 
high romances did not abolish other types of love. 

Stendhal, who was nothing if not critical, wrote a treatise On Love, based on 



476 <^d From Dawn to Decadence 

the psychology of Destutt (<452) and firsthand observations in more than one 
country He distinguishes four species — the physical; the tasteful (the 18C 
game of dallying); love from vanity (the man or woman flattered by the lover's 
beauty or status); and love from passion. The last, says Stendhal, is the source 
of the highest happiness; it is very rare in France, it thrives in Italy. Here again 
the imagination creates. It "crystallizes" (his term) one's feelings of wonder and 
admiration and projects them on the beloved. This is the love of Heloi'se and 
Abelard and of many Romanticists, including Stendhal himself. 

In society this passion requires equality between the lovers, because the 
happiness comes from being and talking together far more than from sexual 
pleasure. Stendhal credits women with all the talents that men can ever have 
and wants for both an identical education, though women will probably use 
their abilities with a difference. In any case, the man capable of passion-love 
does not act the overlord; he is diffident in that relation; he is possessed by it 
as he is by high art. 

In muted counterpoint to the doctrine of passion-love between beautiful 
souls there ran one of frank fleshliness. Gautier's Maupin novel makes the 
rounds of carnality, hetero- and homosexual, and adds transvestism, all in the 
mood of gaiety. In the year of its appearance, Karl Gutzkow published Wally, in 
which his heroine "marries symbolically" the man she loves by standing naked 
before him on the eve of her marriage to another. And both Schlegel in Luanda 
and Mundt in Madonna glorify the adventures of free sexuality. 

In keeping with his claim that he is 
I have had proof this evening that when writing a "physiology of love," 
music is perfect, it sets the heart in exactly Stendhal affirms that the two experi- 
the same condition as that produced by the ences of the most concentrated aware- 
presence of the beloved; which is to say ness — love and art — are due to the 
music gives the most intense happiness avail- same excitement of nerves and brain. 
able on this earth. He adds that passion-love serves to 

— Stendhal, On Love (1822) keep alive the youthful feelings of sym- 

pathy and generosity that soon dry up 
as human beings learn the ways of the world. He does not deal with Eros in 
isolation; his discourse brings in history and biography, contemporary poli- 
tics, and varieties of law and national character — further proof that 
Romanticist love is no pastime for empty heads-and-hearts. 

In Stendhal's day the book had no influence. Its form and style were too 
strange. Three small editions sufficed for 1 5 years. He himself said that he 
wrote for 100 readers. He nonetheless expressed beliefs and attitudes widely 
applicable to his age. His remark about human sympathy and generosity is a 
case in point: in social oudook the 19C may well be called the century of love. 
Both individuals and groups bestirred themselves to protect systematically 
the poor and the weak from the rigors of life. This was especially true in 



The Work of Mind-and-Heart ^ 477 

England. John Howard had started prison reform in the 1780s; the Earl of 
Shaftesbury pushed legislation to save women and children from long hours 
of labor; workers themselves formed benevolent societies to help one 
another in bad times; Bentham's followers humanized the criminal law; 
church groups set up refuges for "fallen" women; orphan asylums were taken 
away from heartless profiteers; cruelty to animals began to be seen as 
heinous; and the administering of the Poor Law was re-organized; Clara 
Barton founded the Red Cross; Father Damien gave his life to caring for the 
lepers on Hawaii; the missionary at home and abroad was half a preacher and 
half a social worker. Not all the schemes were well designed, but by mid-cen- 
tury they were there, in action. And novelists from Dickens onward used their 
medium to arouse the public conscience about some social evil. The 
Continent gradually followed suit. 

True, the promoters of this neighborly love were not all moved to it by a 
Stendhalian passion combining love and music; their motives often had a 
political or religious component; but the aim was deliberate and new. That it 
arose from a general shift in ideas about human beings appears from the 
change in manners, steadily more gentie and restrained. Half a century ear- 
lier, when Fielding, ill and crippled, was leaving England for the warmer cli- 
mate of Portugal, the sailors who saw him come on board shouted insults 
and jeered at his helplessness. And as Fielding himself showed in his novels, 
the manners of the gentry were often gross and those of the commonplace 
nobility coarse. Slowly developing, the ideal of the lady and the gentieman 
was taking hold; it was an ideal distilled from the best aristocratic and upper 
middle-class behavior. Meantime, the abstract idea of rights had awakened 
an impulse to make law and convention the vehicles of fairness and respect 
to all (<431). 

* 
* * 

Stendhal's 400 pages contain perhaps 100 anecdotes, illustrative of love 
and lovers; their names often given in full. He did not do this to titillate the 
reader or create scandal, but to produce "an exact scientific study." He was 
always in search of the, petit fait vrai, the small true fact. Contrary to common 
opinion, his fellow Romanticists were equally keen about the factual. They 
knew not only that they were living in a 

changed world that must be charted, During my life I have seen Frenchmen, 
but also that much "enlightened" Italians, Russians, and so on. Thanks to 
knowledge had been made useless by Montesquieu I even know that one can be a 
generalizing. This new world must be Persian; but I must say that as for Man, I have 
described in concrete detail. Thus never come across him anywhere. 
Wordsworth in the preface to Lyrical — DeMaistre(1795) 



478 <^» From Dawn to Decadence 

Ballads quotes and condemns an 1 8C sonnet for its string of abstractions and 
he demands that poetry use the common speech of common men to record 
their thoughts and feelings. Later poets — Vigny, Musset, Pushkin, Shelley, 
Leopardi — agreed. Plain diction and ordinary life had become the materials 
of literature; Victor Hugo said that even the ugly could be used in art. Note 
that in Wordsworth the ballads are not love stories like the olden tales of the 
Scottish Border; they are patterned after the street ballads that relate com- 
monplace incidents in rough meter and crude detail. 

Fact, detail, the ordinary is the 
To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particular- bad S e of truth— of one kind of truth. 
ize is the Alone Distinction of Merit. Balzac fllls ^ novels with ^ particu- 

— Blake (c 1808) lars of banking, country medical prac- 

tice, the way clerks live, the manufac- 
ture of gold braid, and endless other 
matters of fact. Scott, especially in his Scottish series, is an accurate historian 
of common and lordly life in his native land at a given moment. Manzoni, 
Dumas, Stendhal, Eugene Sue, and a crowd of other practitioners of the his- 
torical novel that Scott invented rely on the force of the circumstantial to 
make what they invent seem also true. In Victor Hugo's Notre Dame the chap- 
ter on the beggars' quarter makes one think of Zola: it is sheer Naturalism 
(623>). 

Pushkin gave Russian poetry a new directness, especially in his verse 
tales, by a diction that conveyed common details in a conversational tone. Yet 
it is unmistakably poetry, not prose cut up and printed in uneven lines. In 
painting, from Gericault taking as a subject a recent shipwreck, to Goya 
depicting the ravages of war when the armies of Napoleon and Wellington 
fought over Spain and Portugal, and further to Delacroix showing the victims 
of the Turkish massacres in Greece, the preoccupation with lifelikeness 
encourages the portrayal of contemporary incidents. In England meanwhile, 
John Constable had shown that color in nature was far brighter over a wide 
range than prevailing practice allowed. His demonstration was simple: he 
took a violin as brownish green from old varnish as a standard painting of the 
day and held it close to the grass. His patron Sir George Beaumont was con- 
vinced. Independentfy, the young watercolorist Bonington used color grada- 
tions for seaside scenery that caused Delacroix to change his palette radically. 
The painters' term local color soon came into literary use to mean the accurate 
portrayal of manners and costume as a means of conveying reality. With a like 
intent, the young sculptor Antoine Barye studied the large animals of the 
Paris zoo (where he was ultimately appointed professor) and after overcom- 
ing the resistance of the Beaux-Arts school, was commissioned to make the 
groups of bronze wild beasts, life-size, that embellish several of the gardens 
of the city. Simultaneously in America, Audubon was sailing down the 



The Work of Mind-and-Heart ^ 479 

Mississippi on the lookout for birds to draw and paint, achieving his purpose 
with the completion in 1838 of his 435 plates of life-size depiction. 

These creations prove one neglected truth about the Romanticists in art: 
they were Realists. But "as everybody knows," Realism arose about 1850 in 
reaction against Romanticism. This critics' cliche need cause no confusion if 
the works of the first half of the century are described accurately as above. It 
is then seen that Romanticism contains in itself the practice characteristic of 
the three movements that followed it: Realism, Symbolism, and Naturalism. 
The difference between the later tendencies and Romanticism is that each 
specialized in one of the techniques developed by their common ancestor. 
That the descendents worked in a different mood for a different purpose has 
blurred the relation. 

To put it another way, the arts after neo-classicism went through four 
phases, the first comprehensive and the next three exclusive, each developing 
in full one tendency of the original movement. Consider again the Lyrical 
Ballads. Part of the work was characterized on the previous page: common 
subjects, common words — the realistic part. Next come lyrics about love or 
nature, still in simple language and true to life, but not re-creating the com- 
monplace atmosphere that came to be seen as the sign of the truly real. The 
third part is Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a narrative in which 
strange, "unreal" events symbolize the truths of the moral world — a 
Symbolist poem. 

In the next generation and in France, not only Hugo and Musset and 
Vigny but Gerard de Nerval present the same inclusiveness. He translates 
Goethe's Faust m its various styles ranging from vulgar to lofty; in Chimeres he 
writes "romantic" sonnets; he collects the folk poetry of his native province; 
and in Vers Dores (Golden Verses), he writes lines in which every noun is a 
symbol pointing to a hidden spiritual realm. He is so much a Symbolist poet 
that the sonnet "El Desdichado" is still argued over for its possible meanings, 
and the prose poem Aurelia likewise. 

In Blake, setting the allegories aside, it is symbolism that gives signifi- 
cance to most of the Songs of Innocence and Experience. In Holderlin, in Novalis, 
in Kleist, descriptions of nature and feeling have the same purpose. The last 
named, who was so deeply persuaded of the ambiguity of all experience, has 
been regarded as a forerunner of Rilke and even of Kafka and Pirandello. 
Ambiguity, when used on purpose, is the device of symbol par excellence. 
Akin to ambiguity and symbol, the fantasy that pervades the work of Jean- 
Paul Richter (132>) seems a response to Ackermann's suggestion that poetry 
should find some of its materials in dreams. It was Jean-Paul, so popular that 
he was generally referred to in that shortened form (or else as DerEin^ige the 
Unique) that Carlyle chose to discuss him first when he introduced German 
literature to the English. By contrast, Heine like Byron used his satirical bent 



480 q^> From Dawn to Decadence 

to make poetry out of little scenes of daily life in colloquial language, with an 
occasional foray into legend and history 

As for the surcharged realism later called Naturalism (623>), the germs 
of it may be found in certain poems by Gautier and by Hugo" and in the work 
of Petrus Borel, who was not afraid of entitling some of his fiction Immoral 
Tales. That these ventures belong to the Romanticist years does not mean that 
later comers were imitators or exploiters of perfected styles. The meaning is 
rather that when the ground is cleared as it was by revolution and rebuilding 
is called for, every kind of thing is attempted, but not everything is pursued; 
and much turns out wasted effort, all three outcomes being the usual result of 

EMANCIPATION. 

In the domain of Form, the Romanticist emancipation entailed no waste. 
The freedom enjoyed by the arts today was their achievement. When Hugo 
boasted that he had stuck the Jacobins' red cap on the dictionary, 
Wordsworth had already given the same signal: no words forbidden because 
they were not noble (<477). To make the ugly acceptable, Hugo declared that 
'Whatever is in nature is in art."° And poets everywhere made free with every 
meter, rhythm, stanza, and longer form, in their several languages. Hugo, 
again, went quite far in permitting himself "irregularities" that scholars credit 
with having shown the way to the late 20C poets/ 

A by-product of openness was the rehabilitation of earlier ages of litera- 
ture — the medieval in Germany; Chaucer, the Elizabethans, and the Anglo- 
Saxon Beowulf in England; Ronsard and the Pleiade in France (<163), with 
Villon and Rabelais thrown in for good measure. Balzac was so enamored of 
the latter that, as noted before, he wrote some excellent pastiches in an 
approximate 16C idiom, the Contes Drolatiques (Droll Stories). 

Prose also underwent reform. One has only to compare the style of 
Voltaire with that of Chateaubriand. The former is entirely lucid, flexible, and 
smooth and it says what Voltaire wants it to say, but it is all saying. 
Chateaubriand's is equally clear and as fully under control, but it kindles the 
imagination and stirs the senses to seeing. The gain is in unsuspected thoughts 
and feelings. The Romanticist Stendhal and a few others rejected this depar- 
ture from their own matter-of-factness. Stendhal made a point of reading a 
page or two in Napoleon's terse Civil Code before sitting down to write his 
novels. Chateaubriand went farther along his own path. In one of his works 
some have seen an anticipation of Rimbaud in the Illuminations. And in the 
Memoirs the verbal compounds, the discontinuities, and other syntactic 
devices have struck critics as prefiguring elements of the modern prose of 
Gide, Proust, Joyce, and the Surrealists. Such likenesses do not prove direct 
influence; similar inventions arise out of the general state of the art. But 
recalling these innovations makes it clear that the period was formative pre- 
cisely because it was not uniform. 



The Work of Mind-and-Heart q^> 481 






With their searching imagination in literature and art, it could be 
expected that the Romanticists' intellectual tastes would be anything but 
exclusive. They found the Middle Ages a civilization worthy of respect; they 
relished folk art, music, and literature; they studied Oriental philosophy; they 
welcomed the diversity of national customs and character, even those outside 
the 18C cosmopolitan circuit; they surveyed dialects and languages with 
enthusiasm. This was a genuine multiculturalism, the wholehearted accep- 
tance of the remote, the exotic, the folkish, and the forgotten. Victor Hugo 
delved into all the histories and literatures he could get access to and forged 
out of their figures and incidents the panoramic Legende des Siecles. When he 
came across the Malay verse form called pantoum, he wrote one. Gerard de 
Nerval collected French regional songs in dialect and translated them. Liszt, 
who as a virtuosos pianist crisscrossed Europe repeatedly, noted down the 
local forms of popular music and composed pieces in the genre: his catalogue 
of songs reads like a gazetteer. He rehabilitated native Hungarian music and 
brought out that of the Gypsies (properly Romani), hitherto unknown. It is 
from his efforts that all the Zigeuner art music of the Viennese composers 
has come. 

These interests have persisted and some are now scholarly disciplines. 
But taking them together, critics of Romanticism have not hesitated to call 
them "escapes." And as everybody knows, escapism is a federal crime. 
Perhaps a more sensible way of judging Romanticist curiosity along multiple 
lines is to see it as a release from parochialism. The preceding age aimed at 
reality only in the form of general truths and, worse, it limited civilization to 
four periods in six countries. True, Voltaire in his large history of manners 
and customs (<379) had made an effort to contradict this, his own formula 
about the past; but it remained his inner conviction and that of the 
Encyclopedists, Diderot alone excepted. 

It was the creed of the Complacent Cosmopolite, productive of much 
that was new and good but limited by its program. When Hume, for example, 
wrote an essay on national characters, he showed a knowledge of history 
without the intimate sense of it. To him, the French were the new Romans; 
the English were the Greeks. The 19C was imbued with the fee/ of the past. It 
came, first, from the flood of personal memoirs and large-scale histories that 
described in a multitude of ways the experience of the quarter century that 
followed 1789. No such amount of detail, passionate and tendentious, true 
and false, had ever poured from the presses in so short a time. Next, that lit- 
erature gave rise to the idea of collecting all the extant documents indicative 
of the national past. In France, England, and Germany owners of archives 
were solicited, attics of public buildings were ransacked, and large series of 



482 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

volumes began to be compiled at government expense. Political debate made 
increasing use of history as precedent for action or model for the future/ 
Reading history became a common 19C pastime, soon making the historical 

a natural way to approach any subject. 

My son should read much history and medi- Even now when the habit is obsoles- 

tate upon it; it is the only true philosophy. cent, the physician takes the patient's 

—Napoleon, Political Testament history before diagnosis and the busi- 

(April 1821) nessman in his annual report offers the 

past as harbinger of a rosy future. 
In view of this eagerness and these materials, what the 20C historian 
G. M. Trevelyan, echoing Carlyle, meant by saying that "Scott taught Europe 
history" was that the novelist's Scottish and medieval stories accustomed the 
public to seeing the past as a vast, colorful panorama in motion, filled by liv- 
ing men and women who were busy at common tasks. Kings and queens 
making treaties or speeches from the throne were history also, but far from 
being all of it. In a mood of self-irony Scott dedicated his first "researched" 
novel, Ivanhoe, to the Reverend Doctor Dryasdust. The earlier Scottish novels 
were written out of an abundant memory the reverse of bookish. In retro- 
spect, the French historian Albert Sorel opined that one should "read and 
absorb" Balzac before writing history. The sense of "how things go" presup- 
poses that people and their habits, speech, and costume vary wonderfully 
from place to place and time to time. Change is seen to come in curious ways 
from the interaction of leader and led, coupled with accident and coinci- 
dence. History reads like a novel and a novel is a history — almost. 

Scott's "Waverley" series began to appear anonymously one year before 
Napoleon's exit from Europe. Their popularity spread and persisted. In 
Germany five different translations were published, one of which made the 
fortune of Schumann's father. Scott's ecumenical conception of history had 
in fact been put forward in Germany a decade earlier by Herder. His Ideas 
Concerning the History of Mankind," describes a totality made up of peoples that 
are diverse because of their different pasts. Each people or Volk is shown to 
be the creator and preserver of the group culture. Through contact with oth- 
ers it becomes aware of its identity. Underlying the theory was fact: the revo- 
lutionary and Napoleonic armies had redrawn the mental map of Europe. In 
place of the 18C horizontal world of dynasties and cosmopolite upper classes, 
the West now consisted of vertical units — nations, not wholly separate but 
unlike. So far, no mutual hostility was implied; Europe was a bouquet of var- 
iegated flowers; Romanticist pride in the nation was cultural nationalism. It is 
significant in this regard that the novels Scott wrote about his country 
changed the English attitude toward it from contempt to sympathetic curios- 
ity. George IV went north and wore kilts to pay his respects to the country 
and its literary portrayer and give him a knighthood. 



The Work of Mind-and-Heart <^> 483 

This new genre, the historical novel, brought with it the historical heroes, 
and it is interesting to note how they grew in Scott's mind. From an early age, 
stimulated by the Border ballads in Bishop Percy's collection he turned him- 
self into a living source of knowledge about the clan feuds and the wars with 
the English. He also read ancient French romances and then German ones 
and translated Goethe's Goet% von Berlichingen (<14). The first fruits of this 
preparation were the six verse tales that made his reputation as a poet. The Lay 
of the Last Minstrel and the others are imaginary plots full of action and accu- 
rate local color. They are no longer what one expects of either verse or fiction, 
but they are worth leafing through for the handful of beautiful songs. 

Scott went on to publish editions of local lore and of English authors and 
to write history and biographiy in between the creation of his vast double set 
of novels." Nor should the Journal of his final, heroic years be overlooked. The 
novels are seldom read today and that is a great loss; they contain characters 
and scenes of such power that, once read, they remain indelible. In their own 
day they were compared to Shakespeare's most dramatic moments and the 
judgment was not outre. But one must know where to turn for them and be 
patient through the preliminaries. [The book to consult is Walter Scott by 
Edgar Johnson.] 

* 
* * 

Given the task of reconstruction, the Romanticists could not do without 
the ideal of the hero. They filled it with diversified but not incompatible con- 
tents. They may have known that by etymology the word is related to servant 
and protector. To begin with, they revered the genius, conceived chiefly as the 
artist who is a seer. Goethe sketched the model first in Wilhelm Meister, then 
with finality in Faust: he is the seeker. In the old legend of Dr. Faustus (<112), 
two-thirds of his demands on the Devil are material — food and cash — but the 
last is "to fly among the stars," and that is also what the 19C desired, figura- 
tively. The Faustian adventure that so gripped the Romanticists aims at discov- 
ery as such; the cosmos and human consciousness are infinite and there can be 
no end to their exploration. Shakespeare 

appealed to men of this temper precisely T r i i- j r i- ■ ^ . TJ 

rr r r j I feel a kind of religious sentiment as I dare to 

because his plays propound no thesis. ^ the fiwt sentence of a history of 
Conclusions about life or character are Napoleon. It deals with the greatest man 
temporary and reversible. Goethe wrote s in C e Caesar. His superiority lay entirely m 
an essay entided: "Shakespeare and No his way of finding new ideas with incredible 
Ending." speed, of judging them with complete ratio- 
It was the will to take heroic risks nality, and of carrying them out with a 
that setded the place of Napoleon in willpower that never had an equal. 
the imagination of artists and peoples. — Stendhal on Napoleon (1816) 



484 q^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Hazlitt wrote his life, making him the symbol of the revolution; Scott also, but 
with grudging admiration. Stendhal, who had served in his army during the 
retreat from Russia, devoted a book to his character. Byron mourned his loss 
after having alternated praise and condemnation. Goethe said he could not 
hate such an enemy. Beethoven dedicated his third symphony to the hero 
Bonaparte (the tide Eroica has stuck) and canceled the tribute only when the 
soldier turned upstart emperor. Lamartine, Manzoni, Hugo, among others, 
wrote extolling or pensive poems. Berlioz was inspired by Bonaparte's cross- 
ing the Alps with his army to sketch a work of which the extant Triumphal 
Symphony and Te Deum contain portions. Painters innumerable portrayed him, 
and out of their imagination put on canvas scenes from his decisive battles. 
He had been everywhere doing great things. The questing hero is the repre- 
sentative of mankind on the march. 

Hegel in his Philosophy of History describes the figure under the name of 
"world-historical character" — the man who at a given moment embodies the 
scattered volitions of his age and is mysteriously empowered to carry them 
out. This incremental force drawn from the masses explains how periodically 
a mere man comes to look superhuman: he is able to change the face of soci- 
ety when all previous efforts have met unshakable resistance. Hegel was well 
placed for making this portrait from life: he was in a cellar at Jena while 
Napoleon was fighting to victory above ground. Although when he was 
finally brought down all Europe cried "Ouf!" as he had predicted, the relief 

erased no memories. For the majority 
I wish to award the sum of six thousand of thinkers and artists he remained the 
francs as encouragement to the person who geniug m whom they recognized and 

will advance our knowledge of electricity. It is i i .. j ^ ^i i • i -j 

/** J celebrated not themselves as lndividu- 

my aim to urge physicists to concentrate on , . , , . , . 

, „ , r f . . als, but their drive to achievement. 

that branch of physics, which in my opinion 

. , , ,. . Almost all deplored the dark side of the 

is the road to great discoveries. r 

hero, the foibles, the mistakes some 
On a fountain with figures of naiads spouting n i i „i i „. 

J j & j r & called crimes, and the destructiveness. 

water from their breasts: "Get rid of those wet „ , * r i i • i T t 

, . , „^ x But the other facet stayed bright. Here 

nurses: the naiads were virgins.' (1811) !r 

was no ordinary conqueror for booty, 
That woman [MmedeStael] teaches think- but a man who fashioned a new 

ingto those who never thought of thinking or -,-- ^i ru- • n ^i_ 

^ & *& Europe. The areas of his influence, the 

who have forgotten how to do it. (c. 1800) cr . r , . , . . , . 

efficiency of his administration, his 
-Bonaparte (1802) code of kws> Ws active rok in aft and 

Napoleon understood the spirit of the times. science, his lapidary judgments of men 

As a German I have been his greatest enemy, and society, even his ambition, ruthless 

but actual conditions have reconciled me to but lofty, bespoke the heroic character. 

him. He understood art and science and The mixed and scattered impres- 

despised ignorance. sions were confirmed by the fallen 

— Beethoven (c. 1820) emperor's reflections, gathered and 



The Work of Mind-and-Heart <^> 485 

published by his companions on Saint Helena. Some enemies found their 
hatred dissipating. 

In Central Europe the benefits of a network of good roads, of improved 
harbors, and especially of the reduction of states from 300 to 36 that he 
effected (<393) did not go unappreciated. It completed the extinction of feu- 
dal vestiges and his cavalier handling of kings and princes sustained his char- 
acter of champion of the people. The world at large seems still to side with 
him, not Wellington, since everywhere Waterloo has become a synonym for 
defeat, not victory. 

That downfall had a meaning beyond the political. It added an aspect to 
the ideal of Napoleon as hero. Life is tragic and all heroes succumb to fate. 
The foreknowledge that this is so is a reminder of the Romanticist concep- 
tion of man as great and weak, the weakness often being the doing of evil. 
Some natures feel this fatality from the start of their career and one such, 
often seen as the archetypal Romanticist, gave through both fiction and his 
own life, vivid expression to this awareness. He was the youthful poet 

Byron 

By word and deed, he made as lasting an impression as Napoleon; 
Byronism is a phase in the history of the western mind. It is made up of dar- 
ing, rebelliousness, melancholy, self-reproach, and the imagination of disas- 
ter. The heroes of Byron's tales and plays are, like himself, greatness and fail- 
ure personified. His leap to fame overnight with the publication in 1812 of 
the first two cantos of Childe Harold was no accident. For ten years the 
English had been fearing invasion. Across the Channel Bonaparte had an 
Army of England equipped with balloons, and in the west country rumors 
were frequent that he had landed at night to reconnoiter.° Anxiety and hatred 
were the staple of talk and journalism. Suddenly here was in fluent verse a tale 
of pensive, leisurely travel in southern Europe. The hero's name suggested a 
young knight errant {childe) , who took delight in art and nature and made the 
reader feel his own flexible emotions at each site. To the beleaguered English 
this moving vista seemed a window opened to fresh air and sunny skies. One 
may call its enjoyment an instance of escape, but it was an escape by a pris- 
oner of war; nor was it liberation to a never-never land, but to parts of Europe 
that everybody knew existed and many had visited. 

Childe Harold was the first sketch of the Byronic hero. The full-fledged 
character appears in slighdy varied forms in the verse tales that quickly fol- 
lowed — The Corsair, The Giaour, The Bride o/Abydos, and three others that were 
avidly read from one end of Europe to the other. One feature that made the 
leading figure in each melodramatic plot congenial was his being or becom- 
ing an oudaw Students, intellectuals, artists — rebels by reflex action — had 



486 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

had a taste of the liberalized institutions set up by Bonaparte wherever he 
went. As time went on and the repressive regimes in power after the peace of 
1815 appeared to have erased the rights of man (<431), those restless spirits 
felt represented in the strong, brooding, vindictive Byronic brigand-adven- 
turer who is ruthless toward his foes and, although passionate toward 
women, not subdued to their will either. Women readers responded no less 
admiringly. To them the dark sense of overhanging evil and obsessive guilt 
added the last touch to complete the seductive affinity. Byronic heroes soon 
filled poems and novels and have continued to fascinate — witness Emily 
Bronte's Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, the Regency novels of Georgette 
Heyer, and one profitable line of popular romance and film. 

But as pointed out above, the Romanticist has more than one idea in his 
head, and Byron's works bear out the generality. His love lyrics, his political 
verse, the Ode to Venice, The Lament of Tasso, and that enchanting vision, The 
Dream, show as many different impulses of his mind. And yet another is the 
one preferred today: the poet Byron began and ended as satirist. He began by 
assailing "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" and ended with Don Juan. 
This masterpiece, written simultaneously with two kindred satires, describes 
life as it can be, comic or sordid, and riots in wit and irony. The sharp drop 
from high sentiment or tense drama into comment that ridicules the situation 
or the self is a Romanticist device, powered in Don Juan by the virtuoso two- 
syllable rimes.° The epic was left unfinished, Byron thinking that to help the 
Greeks win their independence (514>) was more important. He died of fever 
at Missolonghi, aged 36. 

In biographies, Byron's mismarriage and love relations with women have 
monopolized attention. Lives keep appearing; he belongs to the class of inex- 
haustible subjects with Mary Queen of Scots and Napoleon. This "romantic" 
curiosity has neglected Byron's friendships with men and practical activities 
generally. In these relations he was the epitome of calmness and good judg- 
ment, just as he proved a good organizer in Greece and statesmanlike when 
he argued in the House of Lords. He spoke there against the harsh punish- 
ment of the "Luddites," the workers who destroyed the machines that put 
them out of work. Lastly, there is Byron the critic and fact-seeker like 
Stendhal, and first-rate letter-writer. Byron preferred Pope to Shakespeare 
and said he did not give a lump of sugar for his own poetry, but the historical 
details in it were reliable. [The book to read is The Letters of Byron, chosen to 
give an outline of his life and opinions, ed. by Jacques Barzun.] 

* 
* * 

At the beginning of the present account of Romanticism, Rousseau's 
Emile was cited as having moved many 1 9C minds with its exposition of reli- 



The Work of Mind-and-Heart ^^ 487 

gious faith. The rest of the book was equally potent on the subject of educa- 
tion. To Rousseau, rearing a child in the proper way would make the "man 
and citizen" necessary to the success of a republic. It would be a state of free 
and responsible human beings, free not of the civilizing arts and sciences, but 
of the artificialities and inequalities of the ancien regime. The subsequent 
destruction of that regime made a scheme of education all the more urgent to 
those engaged in Reconstruction, and to that political purpose was added the 
characteristic love impulse of the new age — sympathy and generosity toward 
the individual as such. That resolve was doubly strong when the individual 
was the child. In the 1820s and 1830s three thinkers almost simultaneously 
proposed a new type of schooling. The most inspired, Friedrich Froebel, fol- 
lows Rousseau in the now universal belief that true education is an unfolding 
of the person, the development of native gifts through the free but guided 
activity of the self. His own unhappy childhood, the very opposite of this 
ideal, made him innovate as well as try to reform. 

Under a hostile stepmother and a neglectful father, and without play- 
mates, Froebel grew into a moody, maladjusted man, incapable of consistent 
effort, at once rebellious and domineering, and generally unloved. He had a 
hard time learning to read and, being considered stupid, was apprenticed to a 
woodcutter. An intense love of nature was his refuge from humiliation. What 
saved him from suicidal despair was a brother who opened to him the plea- 
sures of intellect and enabled him, after study at Gottingen, to become assis- 
tant to Pestalozzi, the other theorist of Romanticist education. Froebel first 
established a school for his five orphaned nephews with the program of 
"educating men to be free." Denying original sin, he asserted that all social 
evils come from bad education and that after mother care, the all-important 
need of the growing child is self-expression. In his writings Froebel mixed 
irrelevant and fanciful ideas which together with his character hampered all 
his efforts. 

Then, at the age of 55, having failed at everything, he invented the kinder- 
garten. It was designed for the very poor and it made him feel that he had 
found his true vocation. To this new institution he gave the memorable name 
of Kleinkinderbesch'dftigungsanstalt. Not till three years later did he coin, by 
chance, the word Kindergarten. It had struck the nature lover that the child was 
a plant meant to grow freely. FroebePs creation was quickly imitated. The role 
of the mother was made important, songs were written, and toys "suggestive 
of the unity of the world" were called gifts as they were handed to the chil- 
dren. Paper cutting, molding clay, weaving, and games of "finger play" 
became part of the curriculum. All seems harmless, but opposition was 
strong and the school failed. Froebel managed to find a patron in the 
Baroness von Marenholtz-Biilow. She lectured about his invention at home 
and abroad, and in London won over Dickens as a supporter. By mid-century, 



488 c ^ 5 From Dawn to Decadence 

when Froebel had died and while the kindergarten was prohibited in Russia 
as subversive, it made headway in the United States. It appeared first in 
Watertown, Wisconsin, then in Boston, thanks to the ever-active Elizabeth 
Peabody. Twenty years after this first acceptance it reached New York. 

Pestalozzi, whom Froebel had briefly assisted and regarded as his men- 
tor, was also a fervent disciple of Rousseau, so that both men drew on a com- 
mon source rather than the one from the other. By theorizing in print first, 
Pestalozzi gained a lasting reputation throughout the West. His practical work 
began in 1798, after the French Army destroyed a town on Lake Lucerne and 
left orphans to be cared for — many more than Froebel's five nephews. 
Pestalozzi fed and housed them and made them the material for testing his 
doctrine. It was the one that must be called perennial (<181) — things instead 
of words; or in the master's phrasing: "living souls instead of dead characters, 
deeds of faith and love instead of abstruse creeds, substance instead of 
shadow." 

Expelled by the returning French, Pestalozzi opened a school elsewhere 

and endured the usual opposition, but within half a dozen years had succeeded 

well enough to arouse wonder and approval. Natural development, mind-and- 

heart expanding with age as a single fac- 
Education can neither consist entirely of ^ spontaneky and j^ use of me 

mere unfolding — for everything that keeps i iL ^ u . ■> 

^ J ^ r senses to observe, the teacher a guide 

living unfolds — nor of developing all the ... .... , 

, „ „ instead of a force-feeder of facts — these 

powers, because we can never act upon all of 

, familiar notions were (as always) felt to 

them at once. v J J 

The child is not to be educated for the be a long-awaited EMANCIPATION. It 

present— this will happen without our help recufs and in time defeats itself (>793). 
unceasingly— but for the remote future and Independently of Froebel and Pestalozzi, 
in opposition to the immediate one. the Bavarian novelist mentioned earlier, 

— Jean-Paul Kichter, Levana (1806) me "Unique Jean-Paul," wrote a long 

book to modify what he considered in 
Rousseau and his followers the too negative role of the teacher. A positive 
teacher must go beyond practicalities and aim at an ideal goal. 

Thirty years after Richter and across the ocean, a young lawyer who was 
state senator in Massachusetts was invited to become secretary of the newly 
established Board of Education. He had never thought about the subject, but 
he took the chance, sold his law books, and, chided by his friends, gave up the 
lease on his office. This was Horace Mann. In politics he had been wedded to 
principle, and his thoughts about education when he got around to them 
were a compound of the political and moral. His concern was not to reform 
but to promote. Like Jefferson legislating earlier for the state of Virginia, 
Mann thought of education and the republic as intimately linked. This was 
Rousseau again, but probably a spontaneous conviction. Knowledge must be 
widespread, free, and common to all, in order to make self-respecting, inde- 



The Work of Mind-and-Heart ^^ 489 

pendent characters. Without them no constitution, no rights, no system of 
justice can endure. Mann was struck by American diversity in origins and tra- 
ditions secular and religious. The public school should foster a sense of com- 
munity by sharing what he called a "public philosophy," as yet unformulated, 
but obviously to be based on civics, ethics, and history. 

From these premises Mann derived and expounded in his twelve reports 
a program of liberal education ranging from good books to vocal music, lay- 
ing stress on the three R's, and topped by instruction in human physiology (in 
our jargon, health education). To carry out the second half of the precept mens 
sana in corpore sano, the schoolhouse must be airy, clean, and full of light. 
Though Mann attained his ends and has a secure place in the history of 
American education, he has been blamed in our time for limiting his 
demands: why not free higher education and why not public education exclu- 
sively? This second criticism may come to be considered again. In any event, 
Mann's conception should be judged in the light of the social and political 
conditions of the 1 840s. Children were counted on to help the farmer, who 
saw litde good in book-learning, and public money for schools was not pop- 
ular with legislators. Mann's arguments for the free public school, inseparable 
from the existence of political rights and duties under a republic, also remind 
us that governments in the world of 1 840 were not all republics, that consti- 
tutions were few, and that the rights proclaimed in France in 1789 were 
thought by many in Europe and elsewhere to have been abolished for good. 



Cross Section 

The View from Paris 
Around 1830 



If ROMANTICIST Mind-and-Heart has been properly sketched and illus- 
trated, it should have left a summary impression something like this: in 
Romanticism thought and feeling are fused; its bent is toward exploration and 
discovery at whatever risk of error or failure; the religious emotion is innate 
and demands expression. Spirit is a reality but where it is placed varies and is 
secondary: the divine may be reached through nature or art. The individual 
self is a source of knowledge on which one must act; for one is embarked — 
engage, as the 20C Existentialists say. To act, enthusiasm must overcome indif- 
ference or despair; impulse must be guided by imagination and reason. The 
search is for truths, which reside in particulars, not in generalities; the world 
is bigger and more complex than any set of abstractions, and it includes the 
past, which is never fully done with. Meditating on past and present leads to 
the estimate of man as great and wretched. But heroes are real and indispens- 
able. They rise out of the people, whose own mind-and-heart provides the 
makings of high culture. The errors of heroes and peoples are the price of 
knowledge, religion, and art, life itself being a heroic tragedy. 

It was with these conscious or unconscious perceptions that the 
Romanticist period pursued the task of reconstruction after the quarter cen- 
tury of struggle and doubt. By 1 830 the ground had been leveled flat. As 
Musset said: "Everything that was no longer exists; everything that is to be 
does not yet exist." As it happened, strong original minds were not lacking; 
their thoughts and deeds in politics, economics, and science have been noted 
from their inception to the point where we now take up their parallels in high 
culture. 



492 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Paris in the 1 820s and 1 830s became conspicuously the meeting place of 
artists and writers native and foreign. The latter date brought to the fore the 
leaders of the second generation of Romanticists. But first, Paris itself claims 
a moment's attention. Supposing one sailed over it in a balloon, one would 
see none of the landmarks now well known even to people who have never 
been there — no Eiffel Tower, no Place de la Concorde, only an expanse of 
mud crossed by ditches and without any obelisk in the middle. The Champs- 
Elysees too was but a broad dirt road leading merely to some masonry 
stumps — the unfinished Arc de Triomphe. 

Through the heart of the city the Seine ran turbid and was crowded with 
barges, laundry boats, and floating baths moored to uneven banks not yet faced 
with stone. Spanning the stream were fourteen bridges — about half the present 
number — and some still had houses or shops along their roadway. One would 
find the Louvre almost complete and in it some works of art, some artists who 
lodged there, and some rooms used for government storage. Opposite, in the 
Tuileries gardens was the spacious palace (now destroyed) where the restored 
Bourbon King Charles X resided. Next to it, the rue de Rivoli would take one, 
as now, to the rue Roy ale, which gave as yet no sight of the templelike church 
of the Madeleine at the end — only the foundations had been laid. Land specu- 
lators (among them Balzac) would shortly be rivals for the surrounding lots; 
they expected the building to be a railroad station. The first line, Paris to Saint- 
Germain, was about to be opened. Nor was the massive opera yet thought of. 
As for that other monument, the column at the Place Vendome, cast from the 
cannon captured in the years of war, it stood tall, but instead of Napoleon on 
top there was a huge fleur-de-lis. 

Venturing into the side streets would be risky. Many were narrow, some 
dead ends, most of them unpaved and without sidewalks. Not a few had the 
ancestral gutter in the middle for the slops daily emptied from the houses on 
each side. In a word, a good part of the capital was still the original, unplanned, 
overcrowded town. Stendhal, who had seen Milan and found it clean, always 
cursed the sticky black mud of Paris and its lack of trees. The walls around the 
town kept it small. They were not moved outward until the mid-1 840s, after 
which the surrounding villages were able to join the metropolis. Before that 
date it was an outing into the country when Chopin and Vigny went to 
Montmartre to visit Berlioz. 

Even so, Paris could show some signs of progress. After long neglect, 
buildings were being scrubbed and paving realigned along main arteries. New 
residential districts had opened up: Victor Hugo went to live in one near the 
Etoile. In the 12,000 lampposts gas began to replace the smoky, stenchy oil; 
and two innovations were making a timid beginning: the use of John 
McAdam's recent invention for surfacing roads and public transportation in 
the form of the omnibus/ The population had reached 786,000 — an increase 



Cross Section: Paris <^d 493 

of nearly 50 percent in 30 years — and the city was more and more in need of 
the modern style of abode, the tall apartment house. The rooms were poorly 
laid out in it, but by and large it marked a great advance: the social classes min- 
gled there as on the streets or in the 14 theaters. On the ground floor there 
might be a shop whose owner also resided there with his family, servant, and 
apprentice. The first floor above was for people of wealth, the next higher for 
the "comfortable" — say a retired couple or a general on pension. Clerks or 
artisans (not factory hands) lived yet higher up, while in the garret a milliner's 
girl and a starving poet might halve their misery by huddling together. 

For the Parisians that made up the so-called Tout Paris (not all of Paris, but 
the culture-makers and their hangers-on), three events made 1830 memo- 
rable. The first, in February, was the "battle oi Hernani" waged by the Jeunes- 
France (or bright youth) against the old guard. The young poet Theophile 
Gautier, wearing a red waistcoat as a sort of rallying flag, directed his band of 
crusaders at the premiere of Victor Hugo's play Hernani to make sure that it 
was not hissed off the stage. Everybody had heard the word romantique which, 
coupled with Jeunes-France, meant the overthrow of rules in poetry and of 
proper language on the stage. The enormities that night were palpable: the 
riming lines did not come out even with the sense; it ran over to the next line, 
and this displaced the pause that ought to come regularly at the middle. 
Elegant singsong gave place to rhythmic stumbling Worse was the verbal 
indecency: common words jostled noble ones. At one point a character said: 
"It is midnight," instead of some roundabout phrase. And like a bombshell 
one heard the syllables mouchoir — handkerchief. 

Well before that crisis the staid audience was hissing (done in France by 
whistling), stamping its feet, and shouting murder — all this to a ground bass 
of applause by the young literati, also armed with expletives. From the first 
gallery a contingent had come prepared with fishhooks on a string with 
which to lift the wigs of the bourgeois below, thereby enlarging the sense of 
perruque (wig) to mean an intellectual or artistic diehard. The young troops 
won the day; a second performance confirmed the victory. Note in passing 
that Hernani is a bandit who wins the love of a titled lady, herself sought after 
by both a nobleman and a king. This Byronic hero, who makes a high-minded 
sacrifice at the end, was brother to all the young rebels-in-art in the audience; 
the play felt like an allegory acted out. 

The next liberating event came at the end of July. The efforts of the two 
successive Bourbon kings to bring back the forms and powers of the ancien 
regime had been a crescendo culminating in press censorship to stifle protests 
of many kinds. It finally provoked an explosion. Three days of fighting got rid 
of Charles X, King of France, and installed his cousin Louis -Philippe as king 
of the French, a distinction that hints at accountability. The uprising, backed 
by a banker and other solid citizens, cheered by the journalists, and manned 



494 s^> From Dawn to Decadence 

by students and artisans, was signaled by the singing of the revolutionary 
"Marseillaise" (hitherto forbidden) and the flutter of the bright tricolor flag in 
place of the all-white. It waves at the center of Delacroix's painting, Liberty 
Leading the People, which is not entirely poster art: next to the striding woman 
who is Liberty is the lifelike street urchin brandishing a gun amid the tumbled 
debris of the fighting. It left 2,212 dead and 5,451 wounded. For the 4,054 
barricades the rebels had torn up 8,125,000 cobblestones. The loose paving 
and narrow streets were a godsend. 

On the first day of the outbreak, one of the young enthusiasts had been 
writing music, locked in at the Institut with other competitors for the Rome 
Prize. As he came out at noon and saw a group merely talking on the street 
corner, he hailed them and setting the example led them in singing the 
"Marseillaise." His name was 

Berlio^ 

He was to provide the third epoch-making event of the year, but that was 
in December, four months off. At the moment he was a 26-year-old student 
who had come from his native village near the Alps six years earlier to study 
medicine. His father was a doctor, and the well-to-do, well-respected family 
hoped that the boy's early talent for playing and composing music would 
remain an avocation. But once in Paris, going to the opera and hearing 
Gluck's scores (<416) blotted out medicine. The venerable Le Sueur had 
taken the 20-year-old as a pupil, and when trouble arose with the family over 
the neglect of medicine, the late emperor's official composer pleaded that 
they should not hinder a great career to come. 

Berlioz next attended the Conservatoire and, while enduring further 
periods of strain with his parents — allowance cut off, often restored — fol- 
lowed the set curriculum, which led each year to the Rome Prize contest. 
Now that some of Berlioz's pieces that failed three times to win the prize are 
played in concert halls the world over, it is easy to gauge the originality that 
baffled his judges. At last in 1 830 the prize was his. In the meantime he had 
composed three overtures, two cantatas, a requiem mass, part of an opera, 
plus a symphony in five movements that he wanted to hear before leaving for 
his two years in Rome. He called it Symphonie Fantastique. 

He had made friends among instrumentalists at the opera and elsewhere 
who were willing to play for him. Having also begun to write music criticism, 
he had discovered the power of the press. It was a time, Sainte-Beuve tells us, 
when a newspaper, with its small circulation, made of its readers virtually one 
family; everybody knew all that was happening. With this in mind, Berlioz 
wrote program notes for his symphony, linking the movements with verbiage 
to form a story It had an air of autobiography and aroused curiosity accord- 



Cross Section: Paris <^> 495 

ingly. Actually, the symphony is not a Expression is by no means the sole aim of 
narrative; music cannot tell a story The dramatic music; it would be foolish and 
five movements express moods — pedantic to disdain the purely sensuous plea- 
love-longing in the first, pastoral in the sure of melody, harmony, rhythm, and instru- 
third— and action in the rest: the waltz, mentation, independently of their power to 
the march, the witches' dance. eplc e P asslons * 

What made a story line seem plau- — Berlioz (c. 1835) 
sible was the purely musical device of a 

leading theme that blends or contrasts with the music of each section. This 
innovation provided a model for the genre later called Symphonic Poem, 
which has enabled composers to write works entitied Tasso or Dante, Don 
Quixote or Ein Heldenleben. These "stories" are taken in stride, but Berlioz's 
combination of music and program note has had the unfortunate result of 
creating the myth of "program music"; that is, the notion that some music is 
"pure," self-standing, and some "literary" and requiring printed words to be 
understood and enjoyed. The proof that this difference is imaginary will be 
spelled out on a later page, when a parallel dogma ordaining "pureness" in all 
the arts infected the mind of critics and aesthetes (639>). Here it is only nec- 
essary to say that Berlioz's first symphony was and is pure music, since musi- 
cal sounds organized intelligibly cannot be anything else. Whether a piece is 
associated with something else by means of a label does not change its char- 
acter, and that association can always be ignored. 

At the same time, the confusion arising from the words pure and program 
calls attention to an important fact in the history of music. The symphonies 
of Beethoven, beginning with the Eroica, were found hard to follow by their 
first Listeners. To assist understanding, musical minds that did grasp the form 
wrote comments for the bewildered, and since the music was dramatic in pur- 
pose and effect, the obvious way to help was to suggest a story, with persons 
and events — as in opera, with which people were familiar. The "plot" sug- 
gested for a symphony need not fit closely — a hint about certain passages 
would prime the imagination. One of Beethoven's early admirers was E.T. A. 
Hoffmann/ a conductor and composer, whose fantastic tales (Offenbach's 
opera Tales of Hoffmann draws on them) have obscured his merit as an opera 
composer. It was he who led the way in programmatizing the Beethoven sym- 
phonies. Then Schumann, Liszt, Berlioz, Wagner, and a host of others filled 
their writings on music with these supposititious dramas, until by the last 
third of the century the public was fully prepared to hear a piece of instru- 
mental music that carried associations indicated in a tide or by the composer's 
telling about the idea, book, place, or occasion of its making. Being sensible, 
listeners today do not wonder whether Debussy in composing From Dawn to 
Noontime on the Sea had an hour-by-hour timetable in front of him. Yet in 
another part of their mind they still harbor a suspicion of program music. 



496 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

That spectacular event of December 1 830 makes such good copy for writers 
of program notes that they repeat it ad nauseam. 

When Berlioz said that he took music where Beethoven had left it, he 
meant that the art of continuous expressiveness in instrumental music, initi- 
ated by Beethoven (who called it "poetizing"), was the Romanticist contribu- 
tion to music. Berlioz saw it as his mission to further it by amplifying the 
means. He broke through the convention of "four-squareness" in melody, the 
rigidity of rhythms, and the predictability of harmonic formulas. He not only 
extended the use of timbre for tone color, he made it an element of structure 
and of contrapuntal effect — all this without abandoning the resources 
already exploited by his revered masters — Gluck and Spontini, Weber, and 
Beethoven. That the Berlioz style was his own could not be mistaken. 
Nothing like the sound of the witches' rampage in the Fantastique or, in the 
[Childe] Harold in Italy, the brigands' roistering had ever been heard on earth. 
[For a technical analysis, the book to read is The Berlio^ Style by Brian 
Primmer.] 

Not that the new music was all fireworks. In his "Note on Romanticism," 
the poet William Ernest Henley depicts "the heroic boys of 1830" as frenzied 
in "their hatred of restraint" and determination "to return to truth and 
nature." The plausible remark confuses two things. Great periods of art do 
raise the temperature of the place where the artists congregate and argue and 
compete. But this "frenzy," like the excitement caused by such events as 
Hernani and the Symphonie Fantastique, does not change the permanent condi- 
tions of artistic creation: hours of solitary, painstaking work, much acquired 
knowledge, long reflection and revision, which together increase mastery. 

In the ten years following his first 
It was then that I began my Thirty Years' War masterpiece, Berlioz produced five 
against the professors, the routineers, and more: Harold in Italy, the Requiem, the 
the deaf. opera Benvenuto Cellini, the dramatic 

— Berlioz (1855) symphony Romeo and Juliet (which 

impressed Wagner, aged 26 and newly 
in Paris), and the Funeral and Triumphal symphony, of Napoleonic inspiration. 
The remaining 30 years of his life he devoted to conducting his works (and 
Beethoven's) throughout Europe. He taught the musical world the substance 
and the poetics of Romanticist music. In parallel with this effort carried on 
without manager or subsidy, he wrote music criticism for the leading Paris 
newspaper and contrived to produce five more works of the first magnitude, 
including the epic music drama Les Trqyens. He died on the eve of the Franco- 
Prussian War and was thus spared its madness and hardships. 

That Berlioz did not form a school in the sense of recognizable followers 
was a result of his uniqueness as well as of the breadth of his teaching. His 
melodic invention — the greatest since Mozart, according to Van Dieren — 



Cross Section: Paris <^> 497 



was not imitable. "With his rhythms," Berlioz not only showed his contemporaries 

says Robert Craft, "Berlioz enters the the way in which music could most profitably 

20C," which suggests that the emanci- develop, but he also summed up everything it 

pation he afforded was more extensive had akead y achieved. He restored to melody 

than the innovations his contempo- ^ freedom of movement " had lost - His 

1 j r r 1 tonal changes exploited all the possibilities 

ranes took advantage or; tor example, s r r 

. . r vr , t, Beethoven had envisaged. His harmonic 

his use of space to modify sound. But . , , , , 

1 progressions showed how the grammar of 

in his scores and his Treatise on . .,, - ,. , T 

music could be refashioned. It was a tremen- 

Instrumentation and Orchestration student dous te , AniiM/achievemen ,. 

composers found more than a practical „ ^ 

r . — Brian Primmer, The Berlioz Style 

guide. They found an aesthetics of (\9iy\ 

music, not a system to follow, but a 

conception to exploit. Similarly, apart 

from some themes and harmonies borrowed by other composers (notably 

Wagner), it was not these that proved formative, but rather the Berlioz mode 

of creating out of the musical elements what might be called figures of 

rhetoric, expressive turns and tropes that enticed others to coin their own. So 

true is it that in any art style is the ultimate communicative force. 

* 
* * 

In the decades before and after the outstanding year 1830 the majority of 
Parisians saw or heard about many things that doubtless interested them 
more than any artistic event. Insurrections broke out in many places: Spain, 
Portugal, Naples, the Papal states, Poland, the American South; Belgium 
revolted against the Netherlands and shortly became an independent state. 
There was rioting in Germany, and in England's second city, Bristol, violent 
clashes took place over the pending Reform Bill. And while the new French 
government of Louis -Philippe conquered Algeria as a colony and was orga- 
nizing the Foreign Legion, it was embroiled for two years with the striking silk 
workers of Lyon. 

In the capital, the cholera, which had crept across Europe from the Far 
East, began its devastation. It could strike in a dramatic, a Romanticist man- 
ner: people at the opera ball suddenly cried out, collapsed, and died. The 
immediate cause was dehydration. The treatment devised by a Scottish physi- 
cian — drinking a glass of salt water — was known only locally. In Paris, in spite 
of all nostrums, the popular prime minister Casimir Perier died of the disease; 
in Berlin it struck down Hegel. [The book to read is King Cholera by Norman 
Longmate.] At the same time, the Parisians were enjoying one of their bouts 
of Anglomania. The ways of the English Regency had given the model to imi- 
tate. Like all regencies it was a time of easy morals and conspicuous con- 
sumption. Entertainment was at a premium: George IV and his court needed 



498 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

it. They started more horse race "meetings" and they raised boxing to a high 
place among fashionable spectacles. At Brighton a gorgeous pavilion and a 
pier were built to provide a variety of pastimes, including sea-bathing. Seaside 
resorts became common, while the inland town of Bath attracted social but- 
terflies, valetudinarians, and gamblers. [The description to read is that in 
chapter 25 of Dickens's Pickwick Papers^ 

And then there was the Dandy This picturesque invention was due to 
Bryan Brummell, by no means a lord — he was the son of an upper servant — 
who, as the Regent's friend, imposed an original standard for male fashion 
and behavior. The figure is often confused with that of the 18C Fop; it is in 
fact the opposite. Far from showy, the dandy dresses very plainly, but he 
dresses to perfection: not a line or crease or a hair out of place. He does not 
dazzle the company with his wit, but speaks little and soberly; animation 
might disarrange the folds of his neckcloth. But in this austere mood of 
ambulant fashion-plate he permits himself from time to time a repartee that 
wounds and is worth repeating. [The book to read is The Dandy From Brummel 
to Beerbohm, by Ellen Moers.] 

The dandy soon begot analogues in France — the Count d'Orsay and the 
fine poet Musset in particular. The only English writer to adopt the pose was 
the novelist Bulwer-Lytton. For an artist it serves to provoke, indeed, to defy 
bourgeois manners. In Brummell's version it is hard to keep up, but when 
merged with earlier elements — aristocratic ease and high bourgeois sincer- 
ity — it helped form the ideal of the gentleman, as imperturbable as the beau, 
but more gracious. [The book to read is Good Behavior by Harold Nicolson.] 

Of the other English fads, the French took up horse racing and founded 
the Jockey Club; the young bloods went about in the light carriage called 
after the mountain goat cabriolet (whence cab), and if really aufait, they tacked 
on to the equipage a young boy, sometimes Black, called for obscure reasons 
a "tiger." As for their dress, they improved on the dandy, flaunting bright 
colorful coats, short and tight, pointed collars sticking into the chin, trousers 
pulled tight by a strap underfoot, and tall hats of high polish. The authorities 
call this costume "the second original dress period of the century." One 
true advance was that in view of this rigorous garb, children were no longer 
dressed like small adults. 

Less faddish entertainment was also available and popular. Italian operas 
were being composed and produced in abundance thanks to a trio of 
geniuses — Bellini, Rossini, and Donizetti. They made Stendhal swoon with 
delight, as he had begun to do somewhat earlier on hearing their forerunner 
Cimarosa. Together they inspired him to write a large Life of Rossini that re- 
creates the atmosphere generated by the whole school. What was entrancing 
about the Italian operas was their inexhaustible fount of melody, more lyrical 
than dramatic, but varied, full of verve, and easy to remember. It was adapted 



Cross Section: Paris <^ 499 

to character and situation, but without stressing the somber side. Bellini's 
Romeo and Juliet, for example, is musical comedy in place of Shakespeare. 
Donizetti was moving toward a tragic style when in the mid- 1840s his mind 
began to give way. Levity of plot and make-believe in treatment have con- 
signed to oblivion much of this beautiful music. The names of some of 
Rossini's operas survive thanks to their overtures, which in this period were 
becoming another independent genre. 

Berlioz's symphony had been played in the concert hall of the Conservatoire. 
Somebody sitting somewhere else, say at the opera, might have argued that the 
really great musical event of 1830 was Auber's new opera in Brussels. By depict- 
ing the tragic story of the 1 7C rebel in Naples, Masaniello, it was the spark that set 
off the insurrection which freed Belgium from the Dutch — and no wonder: in 
the last act of the opera Vesuvius erupts. This uncommon artistic success was 
followed the next year by the premiere in Paris of Robert le Diable by Meyerbeer. In 
retrospect it has been called the fast grand grand opera, because everything about 
it was large (five acts) and lavish (all velvet and gold). The new work appealed 
by its seriousness, often factitious, but then taken at face value; it proved a model 
for composers and librettists until Wagner broke the spell (637 >). Emphatic 
arias and dramatic recitatives gave singers opportunities for a way of performing 
that could give the impression of tragedy. 

This sense of the real thing was guaranteed — so to speak — by the new 
accessories — furniture, carpets, doors, pillars, cloisters, tombstones were all 
solid — real (as were later goats and waterfalls), all forbidding disbelief. 
Trapdoors allowed dramatis personae to emerge or disappear in clouds of 
steam, and the new gas lighting enabled the time of day to vary at will. On the 
first night of Robert the Devil & piece of cloud fell on the ballerina and the trap- 
door swallowed down the tenor, but they resumed unhurt and the evening 
ended to great applause. Opera in all its forms and styles dominated the cen- 
tury with its offshoot, the ballet, as another sumptuous genre, both indepen- 
dent and adjunct to opera. The breathtaking Maria Taglioni (516>) inaugu- 
rated the full-sized spectacle the year after Robert the Devil. The scale of 
concerts generally was large too. A recital might bring together virtuoso 
pianists and diva vocalists in more than a dozen alternating numbers. One 
reviewer noted that by midnight part of the audience was seen to be leaving. 
It is true that in the hall music lovers mingled with lovers of keyboard acro- 
batics, but all had an insatiable gust for ballads, romances, solos for various 
instruments, and especially for arias from well-known operas, rendered by the 
divas, and "brilliant" variations on those tunes, hammered by the pianist. 
Liszt thrived for a time on this demand but grew weary and turned to more 
solid works. Chopin decided early not to compete with Liszt or Thalberg, 
who were the rival champions on the piano. Two other stars shone on other 
platforms: Paganini and Beriot, both violinists. Singers of great renown came 



500 £<&> From Dawn to Decadence 

from abroad, the soprano Maria (Garcia) Malibran being the most acclaimed 
before and after her death at 28. Musset wrote one of the world's great elegies 
about her as the archetypal artist who gives her life to art and although 
applauded by the masses is truly prized only by the few 

Added to the bonanza of popular novelties were the new dances. The 
waltz had begun the procession; now other countries outside the Occident 
were drawn on and the repertory of the rustics as well. The polka, the mazurka 
from Poland, the seguidilla from Spain, the galop, and other rural brawls were 
adopted or adapted to dainty shoes and polished floors. In every country the 
citizenry were tripping it to the tunes of another nation. Chopin did not disdain 
using these rhythms of his native land for enchanting concert pieces, and a host 
of lesser musicians exploited the vogue by composing in every one of the 
species for ballroom use. 

Of the waltz it must be said that it effected a radical change in manners; 
indeed, it marks a date in the history of sexuality. All dancing has this carnal 
component, but for centuries its full enjoyment was the privilege of the rural 
lower classes alone. City people deemed it their duty to civilization to limit 
themselves to figure dances, the entire company moving gracefully in set pat- 
terns. The steps were reduced to measured walking, with curtsying at inter- 
vals and touching hands only for turns or shifts of partners. 

The waltz, originating in Germany, 

changed all that. As mentioned before, 

Judge of my surprise to see poor dear Mrs. • ■, j i , • c 

J ^ J r r it had long been a pastime tor artisans 

Hornem with her arms half round the loins of , ., , , , , , 

„., in their guilds and when transplanted 

a huge hussar-like gentleman I never set eyes ii-i t • i 

. - ,,. i_i_ir ji_ brought with it the traditional tune of 

on before and his more than half round her & 

waist, turning round and round and round to " Ach > du Ueber Augustin." What words 

a d- - - -d see-saw, upside down sort of tune. I and music & d was to break U P forever 

asked what all this meant: "Can't you see the elegant dance of groups into cou- 

they are valtzing — or waltzing?" (I forget pies and to turn the diffident romp into 

which). Now that I know what it is, I like it. — a whirl. The shock of seeing (and 

Horace Hornem, Country gendeman. being) the sexes paired in a close clutch 

— Byron, "To the Publisher" of and moving in 3/4 time at a dizzy 

"The Waltz" (1812) speed was severe and prolonged. 

Resignation to the indecency (on the 

usual ground of "there is nothing to do; it has come to stay") took over a 

decade. Byron wrote a short satirical poem "The Waltz" in 1812; Berlioz in 

1 830 was free to make the second movement of his Symphonie Fantastique a 

waltz. [Read Byron and listen to Berlioz.] 

Except for the enterprise of one devotee, the violinist Baillot, chamber 

music was little appreciated in Paris. Goethe, who much enjoyed it, described 

the pleasure as that of hearing the conversation of four civilized people. If the 

genre struck others the same way, its aura was perhaps too suggestive of 1 8C 



Cross Section: Paris <^> 501 

salons. Besides, the Beethoven quartets were not known; the late ones had 
bewildered the hearers when attempted. 

* 
* * 

One important incident of the year 1 830 did not stir up Tout-Paris, natu- 
rally enough, because it happened within the walls of the Academy of 
Sciences. But the news reached Goethe in Weimar and, though he was usually 
unmoved, he showed excitement. In those days he was being pleasandy 
pestered by a young poet named Eckermann, who recorded their conversa- 
tions. This is the core of the one that took place on August 2 of that year: 

"Tell me," cried Goethe as I entered. "What do you think of the great 
event? The volcano has broken out, everything is in flames, and it's no longer 
something going on behind closed doors." 

"A dreadful affair," I replied, knowing the revolution of 1830 had just 
broken out . . . "the reigning family will be driven into exile." 

"We do not seem to understand each other, my dear fellow," rejoined 
Goethe. "I am not speaking of those people. ... I am speaking of the open 
break that has occurred in the Academy between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint- 
Hilaire over a matter of the highest importance to science . . . you cannot 
imagine what I felt on hearing the news of the sitting of July 19." 

The scientific controversy was over the hypothesis proposed by Lamarck 
about the transformation of species — Evolution (<455). Saint-Hilaire, with 
his researches in Egypt behind him (<445), had contradicted the leading 
anatomist — the man who said he could reconstruct a whole animal from a 
single bone. Goethe's interest was not merely that of a foreign intellectual 
with a taste for science: he was a scientist. His work on the metamorphosis of 
plants had been accepted by botanists and his discovery of the intermaxillary 
bone by anatomists. He offered some useful views in geology, and although 
his protracted studies of color had not displaced Newton's, he had every right 
to consider himself an experimenter on a par with those who gave all their 
time to the pursuit. 

The idea of evolution inevitably appealed to him, chiming as it did with 
the Romanticist view that everything is alive and in motion — a dynamic uni- 
verse, as modern jargon has it. Biology was accordingly the "period science" 
rather than physics. As in the 18C, expeditions kept being launched to all 
parts of the earth to study living forms, including "races of men." Young 
Charles Darwin, fresh out of Cambridge and not cut out for the church, 
sailed in 1831 on one of these catchall ventures (503>). Humboldt, roaming 
with Bonpland in Central America, collected 60,000 plants, of which a tenth 
were unknown in Europe. On his return he helped to form the idea of "sci- 
ence" as a unitary enterprise by writing for the general reader an attractively 



502 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 



"You know, all is development — the principle serious book, The Cosmos. By contrast, 

is perpetually going on. First, there was noth- such novelties of the decade as Ross's 

ing; then there was something; then— I for- ascertaining the magnetic north or 

get the next— I think there were shells; then Lobachevsky's non-Euclidian geome- 

fishes; then we came-let me see-^did we ^ [n whkh ^ angks of a trkngle do 

come next? Never mind, we came at last and ^ MOA , ,j ^ nr^u 

not equal 1 80 degrees, did not call rorth 
the next change will be something very supe- . . ,_,, , , 

„ general interest. They were harder to 

nor to us, something with wings. ' ° J 

understand than evolution, which had 
— Lady Constance in Disraeli's , , ^ c v „• 

^ „ nArn also the news value of contradicting 

Tancred (1847) & 

Genesis. In 1 844, not quite a generation 

before Darwin's Origin of Species, an 
anonymous work created a scandal among the devout. It was called The 
Natural History of the Vestiges of Creation. It gave cosmic scope to the idea of 
evolution and titillated free spirits such as those Disraeli satirizes in his novel 
Tancred. 

Biological evolution was made plausible by progress — visible — and by 
the popularity of history. From the 1820s onward, accounts of the past 
tended to be written as growth, the development of some idea or institution. 
Burke had shown that society is organic, since it consists of a living chain that, 
perishing as individuals, is ever renewed as the human race. Organicism, biol- 
ogy, history, evolution — all professed to explain the present or any given 
entity by finding out its antecedents. Informative as it is, it can be a dangerous 
method. When a thing is made out to be but the sum of its past states, the 
conclusion is as reductive as ANALYSIS; it mistakes a group of elements for a 
going concern and it implicitly denies novelty. This tempting error has been 
labeled the "genetic fallacy." 

* 
* * 

Studies of development in all things logically included the history of lan- 
guages. The 1 8C had given a great deal of thought to the origin of language 
and the forms of grammar, both important to worshippers of reason. The 
early 19C moved from these topics to the concrete facts of language and their 
variations from place to place. This research brought out regularities that 
were dubbed "laws," such as the sequence of vowel change in Germanic lan- 
guages, established by the brothers Grimm, and also likenesses among large 
groups of dialects, Germanic and Romance, as well as definable subgroups 
(Celtic, Semitic). When the languages of the Orient, traced back to Sanskrit, 
were compared with the western group, likenesses were found that warranted 
seeing one line of descent. The "Indo-European" languages were thereafter 
the family of greatest interest to the western scholars who called themselves 
philologists — lovers of words. 



Cross Section: Paris <^> 503 

As speech implies a human being, so languages imply whole peoples; 
philology began to talk about Celts, Latins, Semites, Hindus, and as many 
other tribes or nations as the written records might suggest. These records 
being by nature haphazard and hard to verify, they generated a batde of schol- 
ars that kept hundreds of 19C writers out of other mischief, but generated 
one of their own. The source of the Indo-European tongues was assigned to 
a supposed original form called Aryan. From this original language a people 
was in turn deduced, and since the word aryas means noble, the imagined peo- 
ple was taken to be of the highest caliber. 

The sequel is easy to guess: the notion of distinct races bearing exclusive 
traits was launched on its juggernaut road. That old standby, the Germania of 
Tacitus was exhumed once more to define the Germanic "race." For other 
peoples Caesar's Wars in Gaul were made to serve, and so were all ancient writ- 
ings that contained any "ethnic" information. In the polemics of an earlier 
day the claim had been made that the nobility everywhere in Europe came 
from the Germanic conquerors of Rome (<295). Philology revived the sup- 
position and out of it came the belief in a superior type, the Germanic or 
Nordic, who also appeared under other aliases; the early 19C scholar John 
Pinkerton, for example, was a grammatical "Saxonist." 

It was taken for granted that the characteristics, both physical and moral, 
that an ancient author had noted remained unchanged during the centuries and 
were uniform within the tribe. The Germans were tall, blond, blue-eyed. In the 
ancient Oriental record there was evidence that the aryas people had similar 
looks. Therefore the people living in the North of Europe in the 19C were the 
remote, unspoiled offspring of the Aryans. Defying evolutionary thought, it 
was descent without modification. It was also uncritical history, crude ethnology, 
and brash philology mixed to suit national pride. Not altogether by chance (as 
we saw, <456), the study of human traits had taken the physical turn called 
phrenology — bumps and valleys in the skull might denote "amativeness," 
which was love in the erotic sense, or "philoprogenitiveness," which was love 
of one's children. Faith in the system was not another superstition of the illiter- 
ate; good minds trusted and acted on the results. When Darwin applied for the 
post of naturalist on the Beagle, Captain Fitzroy palpated his head and, being 
also a physiognomist, took a long look at his dubious nose. We may laugh at 
phrenology now, but its direct heir, the now discarded "skull anthropology" of 
the 19C, with its implication about superior and inferior "races" was the work 
of some leading men of science (578>). 

* 
* * 

The East, near, middle, and far, has always been a magnet to the West. 
The crusaders to Jerusalem brought back civilized ways; the Renaissance sent 



504 <^o From Dawn to Decadence 

out missionaries and imported goods; the 17th and 18C knew enough of east- 
ern literature to use it in pastiches of travelers' reports as a means of under- 
mining Christian theology and monarchical theory. The Romanticists — 
Byron, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Kinglake — went east in person and wrote 
about the entirely different outiook on life of those who live beyond the east- 
ern edge of Christendom. Concurrently, scholars of the first rank — Bopp and 
Brockhaus in Germany, Burnouf in Paris, William Jones in England — men 
who had mastered Persian or Sanskrit, or Hindi, were by their lectures and 
publications giving prominence to texts that were read by poets and philoso- 
phers. Around 1800, Goethe was moved by them to write his "Oriental" 
poems. Ultimately, the corpus was edited for the public by Max Muller as The 
Sacred Books of the East and published in England by the East India Company. 

These ancient scriptures, such as the Rig Veda, confirmed the travelers' 
accounts of a world in which Time, having little urgency, does not lead the 
mind to take movement and change as matters of prime interest. Hence a cos- 
mos in which events have meaning but little force and repeat eternally. Effort 
is futile; individuals are unimportant specks within the unchanging All in All. 
To this vision of life, certain Romanticists in their despondent mood gave 
their assent. Schopenhauer was one (556>). More remarkable, a group of 
thoroughly active young thinkers managed to adapt the Oriental scheme to 
their optimistic ends. These were the New England Transcendentalists, the 
first galaxy of artistic genius in North America. 

From Paris and other European centers in 1 830 the United States were 
not a prepossessing sight. Visitors who had been well received and were in 
general complimentary to their local hosts were censorious about the rest of 
the country. The revolutionaries of 1789 in France had considered the 
Americans of 1 776 freedom fighters of their own temper — mistakenly, but 
that image had vanished with the century. In the next, from Captain Basil Hall 
to Charles Dickens and Mrs. Trollope (>517), the picture is that of a people 
without manners or discrimination and boastful besides. With one exception 
to be noted, the other critics — those who stayed away — interpreted the new 
nation as the land where equality was maintained at the expense of intellect 
and the arts, both virtually non-existent. In their place, energetic go-getting 
and beaming self-satisfaction fulfilled everyone's aspirations. The election of 
the common-man President Jackson in 1828 had eliminated any remnants of 
the cultivated outiook acquired by the Founding Fathers from the French and 
English Enlightenment. 

Crude though the portrait was, it is true that the American intellectual class 
that did exist in the 1830s looked less and less to England and France for ideas. 
It was Germany that fed them. Even when they read Coleridge and Carlyle, the 
leaders of advanced thought in England, they were receiving a dose of German 
ideas (<409). Chief among American Germanists was professor George 



Cross Section: Paris <^> 505 

Ticknor of Harvard. He, George Bancroft (later the first national historian), 
and a few others had gone to German universities and carried home the mes- 
sage of Herder and Goethe, Kant and Schiller in all its poetical and philosoph- 
ical strength. Ticknor in turn imparted it to young Emerson and his classmates. 
The virgin soil of the New World 

was without Middle Ages waiting to be 

. . . . . 111 Far or forgot to me is near, 

rediscovered, and the people had no , , 

r r Shadow and sunlight are the same; 

firsthand memories of Bourbons and ~ u . , , , „ 

The vanished gods to me appear, 

Napoleons. So what dominated the And one to me are shame and fame. 

minds of the young American geniuses ^ cm „ ,„ 00/ ^ ,„ „ r ^ 

7 5 6 —Emerson, "Brahma" (1830/1857) 

was the religious emotion, the love of 

nature, the spirituality of art, the value 

of INDIVIDUALISM, and the hope of creating a national culture based on the 
uniqueness of the American experience. On all points Emerson is represen- 
tative. Trained for the Unitarian ministry, the least demanding of Christian 
sects, he gave it up under the influence of Montaigne, who led him to ponder 
the lessons of nature and to vivify his own poetic version of Eastern thought. 
The impassive divinity diffused through the cosmos afforded him not resig- 
nation as in the Vishnu Purana that he read, but a cheerful serenity. 

In the mid-1 830s Emerson gave a Phi Beta Kappa address that influ- 
enced many minds by summoning the native thinker and artist, whom he 
called "the American Scholar," to cut loose from European models. Oliver 
Wendell Holmes (Sr.) hailed it as "our intellectual Declaration of 
Independence." Setded in Cambridge or Concord, Massachusetts, a group of 
congenial spirits formed the first self-conscious American "School." It 
included Thoreau, Hawthorne, Holmes, Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller, 
Theodore Parker, Jones Very, Bronson Alcott, and Elizabeth Peabody. 
Emerson alienated some of his other friends when he declared the church 
dead and all forms of ministry an anachronism. But he remained a preacher: 
his essays, which were first lectures, are lay sermons on the topics that natu- 
rally arose out of his philosophy; and his success as a speaker — the source of 
his livelihood — suggests that people outside the Boston area responded 
favorably to his original creed. The realm of spirit defined by the new 
German philosophy and already numbering American converts merged eas- 
ily with the eastern cosmology in Emerson's conception of an "Oversoul." 

The strength of its appeal in another individual guise is shown in the 
career of Emerson's neighbor and companion Thoreau. He found publishers 
for his writings and was tolerated by the town of Concord, most notably by 
the tax collector, whose demands he kept ignoring. If one wonders how 
building a native American culture is compatible with Brahma (to use a short- 
hand term for the Transcendentalism), what suggests itself is that Brahma 
mainly served the same purpose as the European artists' repudiation of the 



506 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

bourgeois world. The artist lives in an ideal realm and from there bestows cul- 
ture on society. An American critic has made a cognate point; both Emerson 
and Thoreau (and later Whitman) exhibit what he calls "the imperial self." 
That self, confident in its INDIVIDUALISM, tells others to shuffle off commu- 
nal ties and enjoy a self-made universe in all its purity. 

This lesson proved congenial to many Americans, especially in Thoreau's 
variation. To this day Walden is a name to conjure with; it means fleeing the 
daily grind, living at the heart of nature, free to breathe and contemplate. Self- 
reliant PRIMITIVISM is the intended message, but not the truth about 
Thoreau's escape: he took civilization with him: clothes, nails, seed, and lum- 
ber, none of which he had made. Like Crusoe he survived thanks to essential 
fruits of social effort; indeed, Thoreau required direct help from friends to 
put the roof on his hut, nor did he give up going back to Concord during the 
two-year demonstration. These and other inconsistencies pass unnoticed in 
the bliss one shares with the narrator. The vacationer camping out, the hunter 
and woodsman, the Boy or Girl Scout feels it a birthright to live a facsimile of 
the Pilgrim-and-pioneer existence. 

Going much farther than Emerson, Thoreau has encouraged in every 
generation the urge to Civil Disobedience. His tract with that title is the most 
engaging and incoherent discourse ever written on government/ Good and 
bad reasons and self-contradictions wind up in an astonishing sober state- 
ment of compliance with the legitimate demands of the state. The essay is 
effective because its meanderings correspond to the feelings of rebellion that 
the young generally feel on the threshold of the big world and that artists of 
all ages tend to share. And Thoreau was a poet. His travel books and journals 
ought to be read as prose poems strung on a philosophic narrative thread. 
Similarly, the descriptive parts are more often allegories than writings about 
nature in the manner of Gilbert White or John Muir. 

What the Transcendalists, unlike the Romanticists abroad, rarely showed 
was a cultural interest in The People. For one thing, their historical sense was 
dim — as it must be when Brahma rules: past, present, and future are all one. 
Hawthorne did recall the past, but it did not make him happy. And without 
historical perspective The People lacks grandeur — its name evokes only one's 
contemporaries, dull and misguided, instead of the patient, anonymous mak- 
ers of one's treasured inheritance. And in New England no daily physical 
reminders of inheritance were present — no ancestral mansions, ancient 
churches, scarred ruins, battlegrounds fought over again and again. Goethe, 
the exceptional European who thought well of America, congratulated the 
country on this very deficiency. 

Outside New England the same happy insouciance prevailed. 
Washington Irving in New York echoed conscientiously the manner and the 
concerns of English writers, his local subjects being legend for humor's sake. 



Cross Section: Paris <^*> 507 



To the south, Poe used his genius as America, you're better off than 

poet and critic to disown "the man in Our continent, the old. 

the crowd" and chastise the would-be You have no castles which are fallen, 

literati who wrote imitative verse and No basalt to behold. 

prose. Not a Transcendentalism he felt You ' re not disturbed within your inmost 

the double attraction of death-haunted being 

i • • • Right up till today's daily life 

mystery and ratiocinative science, & r J J 

r , . . By useless remembering 

inventing for their expression the / , ,. .„ 

. ° iii And unrewarding strife. 

detective and the horror story, and TT „ - A , , , , A 

Ji Use well the present and good luck to you 

relying for stimulus rather more on And when your children begin to write 
French literature than on English. poetry 

Of course, the French public of Let them guard well in all they do 
the late 1 830s had a chance to set its Against Knight-robber-and-ghost story. 
mind straight on the new nation by —Goethe (Weimar, 1821) 
consulting Tocqueville's Democracy in 

America, but although its tide might lure readers anxious about the revolu- 
tionary threat in Europe, its title would leave artists and intellectuals uninter- 
ested and secure in their prejudices. To both groups, it must be remembered, 
the word democracy did not mean representative institutions and the rule of 
law; it meant a form of government untried since ancient Greece and the rule 
of the illiterate mob. 

* 
* * 

It might seem as if a few strong heads in the northeastern United States 
had disposed of the country's strong attachment to religion quickly in almost 
noiseless fashion. Many people around them in fact remained steadfast, and 
so did the rest of the country. But among intellectuals the knowledge of 
German literature and thought brought with it a substitute religion. It had its 
roots in Kant's wrestling with Hume's problems and it is known as German 
Idealism. To avoid confusion the word should be spelled Idealism. Hume's 
poser was this: if reasoning shows that what we call cause-and-effect is 
merely our habit of seeing one thing come after another — yet not invari- 
ably — what becomes of our vaunted sciences? The mind learns everything 
from experience, uncertain and not alike for all; any hope of system is there- 
fore illusory. 

Kant did not question the analysis; instead, he redefined experience. He 
made a "critique of pure reason," by which he distinguished two realms. One 
is that of things as they are and the other of things as they appear to the 
human mind. We can never know things as they are, and when we perceive 
things in experience our minds have had a formative part in the way they 
appear. We see them in time and in space, in separateness that allows them to 



508 <&> From Dawn to Decadence 

be counted, and so on. One of these contributions of the mind is the relation 
of cause and effect, not illusory, but as real as time, space, and number. Men 
of science can sleep in peace again, confident that their investigations reveal 
a true connection. Common sense too is reassured. 

Hume's demonstration was the logical end of Empiricism — the mind 
shaped by things "out there." Kant posited a mind that acts like a waffle iron 
on batter. The difference explains the name Idealism: the philosopher, 
instead of going from thing to idea, goes from idea to thing Kant's reversal 
and its varied modifications convinced a vast following on both sides of the 
Atlantic; Idealism was the dominant western philosophy down to the 1 890s 
(668>), especially in the form that Hegel developed from it after the first gen- 
eration of Kantians. 

In Hegel's system the Ideal and the Real are two aspects of one Being, 
which is the Absolute. The Real manifests itself as experience or history; the 
Ideal is spirit in all things and the equivalent of soul in human beings. At death 
the spirit-soul returns to its fount in the Absolute, the equivalent of God. 
This worldview was bound to attract minds that could no longer believe the 
Christian account of reality and yet, moved by religious feeling, wanted a 
scheme that affirmed soul and immortality. The scheme was made still more 
persuasive by Hegel's keen sense of the world's concrete diversities. All things 
and beings are in restless motion and hostile confusion. His most readable 
work, the Philosophy of History, resolves these conflicts by a novel "logic": the 
battle of ideas ends by pitting two antagonistic "theses" against each other: 
the thesis confronts the antithesis and out of the struggle comes the synthe- 
sis, preserving the best elements of each. Thus history evolves, the Idea is not 
static but progresses, and Hegel asserts that its forward march is that of ever- 
enlarging freedom. Karl Marx, to establish his own view of history and the 
goal ahead, borrowed Hegel's logic wholesale (549>). For Hegel, living after 
the French Revolution and Napoleon, freedom had visibly been granted to 
western Man. 

How in the light of these facts Hegel has been made the apostle of 
tyranny by the state and the advocate of German aggression can be explained 
only by the effect of two world wars, coupled with the vice of literalism. Hegel 
did express himself in favor of a strong state. What intelligent German who 
remembered 200 years of helplessness would want a weak one? In Hegel's 
day, the state created by the Prussian awakening (<395) was less than 20 years 
old and must not be allowed to droop again. If one were to ignore historical 
conditions such as these, one could describe the makers of the United States 
Constitution as also advocates of a strong state. Hegel said the state was more 
important than the individual, yet as early as 1821 he demanded representa- 
tive institutions; and 10 years later, when near death, he wrote in praise of the 



Cross Section: Paris <^> 509 

pending Reform Bill in England. So clear was his position that well past the 
middle of the century he was regarded as a revolutionary/ 

A thinker who deviated from both Kant and Hegel needs a word, 
because he has recently regained the attention of philosophers. This was 
Schelling, who called his system Natur-philosophie. It made the Idea less 
abstract by affirming the independent objectiveness of the natural world. Its 
essence is energy and so is human consciousness. Schelling's definition of art 
as organic form influenced Coleridge, and the depiction of "the human con- 
dition" as a source of anxiety anticipated the Existentialists. 

In metaphysics the only 19C rival of German Idealism was the system of 
Auguste Comte. To him, metaphysics was an error to discard. Primitive soci- 
eties were animistic, seeing live agents inside every natural event. Then 
medieval thought explained things by making abstract words into causes, 
powers literally meta-physical = behind physics/ Modern science at last dealt 
directly with fact. This is Positivism. Comte defined and placed the several 
sciences in ascending order from mathematics and astronomy up to biology 
and sociology, each drawing materials from the one below and adding its own 
complexity. He coined the word sociology for a new science that should com- 
plete the total survey of the real world, leaving nothing outside the grasp of 
scientific method. 

Positivism found adherents among the empiricists dismayed by Hume 
(<508) and among scientists who saw no need of any philosophic backing for 
their work, and who would certainly not be lured by the involuted language of 
Kant and Hegel. In England, the young Stuart Mill was drawn to the Positive 
philosophy and publicized it, and Harriet Martineau, a prolific writer on 
moral and social issues, gave in one tome an abridgment of Comte's four vol- 
umes. English Positivists formed a dedicated group that lasted until the 1 890s 
but never threatened the supremacy of Idealism, English version. Being a 
Positivist after all required little effort of thought and offered no occasion for 
elaborate argument. To a scientist or a businessman who lacked the specula- 
tive turn of mind, Comte's doctrine, which had its longest influence in South 
America, was not abstruse and one's metaphysical neighbors could be left to 
their illusions. 

Meanwhile in France a routine accident impelled Comte to build upon 
his down-to-earth system a quasi religious superstructure: he fell in love. He 
had started his career as a mathematician, became secretary to Saint-Simon 
(522>), and made an unhappy marriage. After his great work, he met Clotilde 
de Vaux, who was married to a convict. She kept Comte a mere passionate 
friend, and this emotional awakening made Comte a feminist and the 
founder of a creed of which Clotilde was the patron saint and himself the high 
priest. Worshipped beside them were certain chosen heroes and benefactors 



510 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

of humanity. No transcendence irradiates the Positive religion; every aspect 
of it remains mundane, but its catechism, including the reading of some 100 
great books, was meant to satisfy a need not met by the stricdy positive. 

Comte's religion made few converts anywhere, but his plain system was 
ecumenical; it survived longest as the favored philosophy in the Argentine. 
Though his name is rarely mentioned, his simple view of science is implicit in 
the public mind the world over. 

* * 

A death that occurred in 1830 went unnoticed in Paris and received 
hardly any attention in England, yet it has significance as marking the end of 
the greatest literary and political critic of the age, 

Hazlitt 

He could have figured as one of the Forgotten Troop (<436), because his 
name is not a household word. But he is not so much forgotten as half- 
known, his mode of thought is out of favor and his range is too broad to let 
him be classified. Unlike his friend Charles Lamb, he does not invite that 
coziness which generates a "Friends of " Society with a quasi schol- 
arly newsletter. 

Hazlitt was first a painter and a metaphysician, then a drama critic, a polit- 
ical commentator, an autobiographer, and a master of the familiar essay. In all 
genres he excels; in every line he wrote he was Criticism personified. He ranks 
moreover among the distinctive English stylists. As Stevenson said with the 
perspective of half a century: ' We are all clever fellows, but we cannot write like 
Hazlitt." One reason that he is not linked as a critic with Coleridge, De 
Quincey, and Landor is that he was their political enemy, hated and abused in 
their periodicals. The Quarterly said that he wrote Cockney English, or again 
called him "pimply-faced," though he had a clear, smooth complexion. His 
crime was that he had not abjured the French Revolution like the Coleridge 
coterie, nor had he joined the nation in making a bogeyman of Napoleon. Like 
Scott, he wrote a four-volume life of the emperor, but taking the other side. 

It is easier to describe what Hazlitt does in his critical essays than to con- 
vey the impression they make. Perhaps one's strongest feeling is that the ideas 
are not conclusions "recollected in tranquillity" but worked out in front of 
you. Those long enveloping sentences feel hot from the forge. In his 
Characters of Shakespeare s Plays, in his Lectures on the English Poets, in his essay 
"On Genius and Common Sense," indeed, in whatever his mind lights on, 
Hazlitt finds the deep source of the matter and traces its implications and 
ramifications; he sees how the event, the impulse, or the vision took shape; he 



Cross Section: Paris <^> 511 

relates what is there to other parts of If we have a taste for some one precise style 

the same work, to the work of others, or manner, we may keep it to ourselves and 

to the author's life, to life in general, to let othefs have theks - If we are more catholic 

his own life. It is not analysis, it is judg- m our notions and want variet y « f ^ellence 

i . i and beauty, it is spread abroad for us to pro- 
ment encompassing its ob ect, leaving j> r r 

. . . ... . fusion in the variety of books. Those who 

it whole and illuminated. , , ., t . „ t 

... would proscribe whatever falls short of lmag- 

As remarked earlier, criticism of - . , r , . . 

' inary perfection do so, not from a higher 

this order is out of favor today because capacity of taste or range of mteUect than oth . 
it follows no system, lacks a jargon, and ers> but to des troy, to "crib and cabin in" all 
affords pleasure when read. How can it enjoyments and opinions but their own. 

be "rigorous"? It is "impressionistic." _hazlitt, "On Criticism" (1821) 
These and other strictures must be 
understood as part of the competition 

between art and science. To be up-to-date and acceptable nowadays, any 
mental activity must use principles couched in special abstract terms and 
forming a system (>730). What is poured into the mold other than impres- 
sions drawn from the work is not stated. But one has only to read Hazlitt 
without preconceptions as to what he ought to do to see that he is both rig- 
orous and exhaustive. His practice is to describe and define and to describe 
again, adding a line, a touch, developing the complete image. You see a drafts- 
man, a painter at work. He persists and insists that you shall see the way he 
perceives — not that he is trying to persuade you of an idea, only to make you 
as good a reader as he is. And that means one who not merely knows more 
than the careless or unguided but enjoys more. 

In his familiar essays Hazlitt gives pleasure and wisdom like Montaigne. 
He speaks of himself as a witness in the same way and he quotes almost as 
much. But he does so in English and he sticks rather more closely to his 
announced subjects: "On People With One Idea"; "On the Indian Jugglers"; 
"On Living to Oneself"; "Why Distant Objects Please"; "On the Feeling of 
Immortality in Youth"; "Whether Actors Ought to Sit in the Boxes." His sub- 
jects divide between the unexpected and those born of common experience. 
[A good group to begin with is the small collection entitled Winterslow, ed. by 
his grandson W C. Hazlitt.] 

The reader who is captivated will want to go on in two directions: to The 
Liber Amoris and to The Spirit of the Times. This last consists of bio-critical essays 
on the leading political figures of the day. The characterizations are verbally 
sharp, but never caricatures. For example, describing Lord Eldon, the Lord 
Chancellor, Hazlitt says: "He has a fine oiliness in his disposition which 
smooths the waves of passion as they rise." The most remarkable portrait is 
the one of Burke. Here is the man whose ideas had given strength to counter- 
revolutionary thought in England, who was the embodiment of Conser- 
vatism, a party that but for him would have ruled in mere dumb resistance, 



512 q^> From Dawn to Decadence 



My favorite guide to reading would be the 
critical writings of William Hazlitt and 
Samuel Johnson and Emerson, who are the 
critics in the English language who have 
most influenced me. I don't know anything 
better than The Characters of Shakespeare's 
Plays by Hazlitt. 

—Harold Bloom (1998)° 



with nothing to say for itself — here, in 
short, was Hazlitt's quintessential 
enemy. Yet so balanced is the judgment 
at work that the essay turns out the 
finest of eulogies. Hazlitt makes clear 
the wrongness (as he thinks) of Burke's 
ideas of freedom, of government, of 
religion, and of the English Parliament. 
But Burke's genius as a thinker and 
writer and the worth of his character are represented in glowing lights and 
delicate shades. It is a perfect exhibition of critical genius. 

The Liber Amoris, "the book of love," relates the curious behavior of a 
young woman Hazlitt fell in love with and his baffled response to it. The 
telling, again, is immediate, yet detached; it stands halfway between a case 
study and a novel, like the Adolphe, of Benjamin Constant, in which the narra- 
tor dissects his love-subjection to Germaine de Stael (<450). One more work, 
the Conversations with Northcote, show Hazlitt matching opinions with a painter, 

as he was qualified to do by his early 
practice of the art and lifelong passion 
for it. [The book to read on Hazlitt in 
all his aspects is William Hazlitt by John 
Kinnaird.] 

Hazlitt as philosopher is not with- 
out originality and will receive a 
moment's attention later on, when 
German Idealism and its variants are 
shown losing their hold at the end of 
the 19C (668>). As for being philo- 
sophical in the ordinary sense, Hazlitt qualifies for the label: after years of 
quasi persecution and disappointments, on his deathbed and no doubt think- 
ing of his intimacy with art and literature, his last words were: "Well, I've had 
a happy life." 



We might consider whether Hazlitt could 
have performed this function [of mediator] 
so well if his mind had not been central to 
Romanticism. His thought moves with the 
advancing storm center of Romanticist cre- 
ativity. Its great issues meet, intersect and 
interpenetrate, converging toward resolution 
or conflict. 

—John Kinnaird (1978) 



* * 



Northcote was of an older generation, and there is no sign that Hazlitt 
paid attention to the artists of his own time. Two of them, Turner and the 
much younger Delacroix, were the great pioneers showing the way for 
decades to come. But in 1 830 they occupied the ambiguous position of the 
strangely talented who fail to please current taste. It took a long vehement 
book by Ruskin to gain Turner his rightful place; and Delacroix owes his 
more to other painters down to Picasso than to the majority of critics. This is 



Cross Section: Paris <^> 513 

understandable when we see that their innovations were many and radical. 
Turner's transmutation of actual scenes into sunbursts of pigment, grand 
designs of light and color, startled their viewers looking for hard outlines and 
human figures. Violent contrast was one of his devices. Ruskin once found 
him sticking a piece of black paper on a spot of the work in hand — "nothing 
else was black enough." By an odd coincidence, Balzac, who never saw these 
works, wrote a novella called "The Unknown Masterpiece," in which a mysti- 
cal painter creates a new type of work, made of light and color alone (644>) 

It is light and color and color and light that defines Romanticism in paint. 
In 1834, Delacroix went on a government mission to Morocco and was struck 
by the difference between its sunshine and what goes by that name in Paris. 
Bonington had already modified Delacroix's palette. The sand, the skies, the 
animals, the white burnous, and the bronze complexions of North Africa 
changed it again and gave him the 

means to project on canvas what What made the drapery glisten so? 
Turner also intended, which is drama. Not a man but Delacroix. 
That period characteristic also animates —Yeats, "A Nativity," Law Poems 
Victor Hugo's monochrome fantasies (1936-39) 

and "abstract" works on paper. 

Both Turner and Delacroix left an enormous number of works — oils, 
etchings, drawings, watercolors. Delacroix in addition decorated the walls of 
the two palaces where the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate of France 
hold their sittings. Abundance is another period characteristic. The quantity 
of prose and poetry, of essays, fiction, histories, and lives, the amount of 
music for church, stage, and concert hall are astounding. So is the harvest of 
masterpieces compared to the wastage. One may say this was to be expected 
from so many cohorts of geniuses, but a great many died young. The enabling 
condition of the plethora was what one may term the "cultural courage" of 
Romanticism. Its makers were not afraid of failure — nor of being foolish. 
They did not exercise caution to look acceptable, dignified, "mature" or 
"realistic." 

Aside from the heap of silly ventures and spoiled efforts, Romanticism 
failed to produce lasting work in two domains: architecture and the theater. 
When the "romantic" tendency was only a mood, in the mid-1 8C, its expo- 
nents had pitched on Gothic ruins for their satisfaction — and never got away 
from them. The power of Gothic, reinforced by study of the Middle Ages, 
was too strong. The gifted Pugin in England adapted Gothic elements to 
practical needs — the Gothic Revival style — and he shared the design of the 
new Houses of Parliament after the destructive fire of 1 834. But in other 
hands than his, the idea generated only imitation. In France, Viollet-le-Duc 
was so entranced by Gothic that he spent his talented energy clamoring for 
restorations and carrying out a good many, now disapproved yet preservative. 



514 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Time and the revolutionists had damaged many beautiful churches. In Berlin, 
Schinkel also built in Gothic Revival style but did not on that account give up 
the neo-classical. It is a great pity that Ledoux (<459) had no successor. 

One creation of the period that doubtiess had a limiting effect on archi- 
tecture was the new image of Greece. The 18C had seen Greece mainly 
through the works of Rome; Virgil was generally preferred to Homer. Now in 
the 1 820s support for the Greeks, rebels against the Turks, brought ancient 
Greece closer to the Occident. Sympathy not only led Byron to the land itself 
(<486) but rallied spirits all over Europe. Pan-Hellenic societies sprang up all 
over Europe. Poets wrote odes (Berlio2 set one to music); studies made the 
two ancient civili2ations distinct, especially after Lord Elgin saved and 
shipped to England the sculptured frie2e of the Parthenon, where the Turks 
were housing gunpowder. The "new Greece" now figured as the cradle of 
western civili2ation and the home of perfect art. Athens had been entirely 
populated by artists; Greek tragedy contained the ultimate wisdom on human 
life; Socrates was the wisest man who ever lived. He had been put to death by 
a vote of those consummate artists, but never mind. Read Plato and forgive. 
The 1 9C cult of Greece, the Greek temple which is a bank on Main Street, 
and the picture of the Parthenon in the classroom date from this moment of 
enthusiasm. 

German poets and thinkers often combined attachment to their native 
traditions with a longing for the Southland. Goethe, who had visited Italy and 
written a famous poem of longing about the lemons in bloom, was a con- 
spicuous example. He tried in several works to recapture the classical 
equipoise that the scholar Winckelmann had been the first to eulogi2e 
(<417). Now in 1 832, Goethe had just died and Faust, Part II 'at last published. 
This sequel to the poem that made the spirit of Romanticism into a world 
character invokes it again in a symbolic scene that shows Goethe's wish to 
mingle romantic with classical: Faust marries Helen of Troy and their off- 
spring is Euphorion = well-being. The poet let the world understand that he 
was thinking of Byron. This episode in Faust's odyssey through the world of 
affairs is important because in an earlier moment of classical fervor Goethe 
had called Romanticism sickness and Classicism health. Critics hostile to 19C 
culture as a whole are fond of quoting this contrast as final, although Goethe 
himself retracted it before Faust II, which is his last word. The play ought to 
end with Faust's death, because he asks for more time, the present moment 
being so fine. His bargain with the Devil stipulated that on making that wish 
Satan would sei2e Faust's soul. But Faust is saved by the reason for which he 
asks for time: it is not self-centered enjoyment; it is that he has not finished 
supervising a work of engineering for the public benefit. 

The second Faust drives the hero through the worldly world after his 
adventure through nature and the self. Lifelike or not in the play, the symbolic 



Cross Section: Paris <^> 515 

events involve current issues that Goethe was concerned about. A modern 
student has suggested that the work is a kind of tract on sound economic pol- 
icy. Its merit is its many-sidedness, but whatever it may mean, it is not a stage- 
able drama, nor (so to speak) permanendy dramatic. It shares this negative 
with a large number of Romanticist plays. Byron's six tragedies; Vigny's, 
Balzac's, and the elder Dumas 's dramas in prose; Lamb's and Coleridge's 
efforts are not without interest but are without theatrical force. The defi- 
ciency afflicted the entire age, yet with interesting exceptions. Hugo's verse 
dramas still show the impress of his genius when read, but it is the plays which 
he wrote "in freedom," from current conventions {Theatre en Liberie), and thus 
were never staged in his day, that are now put on and admired. Their appeal 
lies in the strangeness of oudook and discontinuity in dialogue, both sugges- 
tive of the 20C Theatre of the Absurd (754>). 

The same qualities inform the work of Georg Buchner, the German 
rebel of the 1 830s who died at 24, leaving two plays and the fragment of the- 
atrical Naturalism that Alban Berg seized on to make his opera Wosgeck.° Of 
Biichner's other plays, Danton's Death depicts with tremendous force the 
drama of a defeat that is virtually willed by the victim. It should be staged as 
it was by Max Reinhardt: a play of mass action and multiple conflicts. As for 
Biichner's comedy Leonce and Lena, it resembles the purposeful incoherence 
of the Hugo pieces and the same flouting of common sense that is the point 
of Musset's several Comedies et Proverbes. These too are relished now on the 
French stage. To these Romanticist anticipations of Naturalism and the 
promptings of the unconscious, one is tempted to add Pushkin's so-called 
tabloid plays as yet another Romanticist manifestation of theatrical power. 
But since Pushkin is not to be seen staged in the West, it may be risky to make 
the connection. 

A related exception was the ballet. It is drama in pantomime and subject 
to the same demands of clarity in action and progress toward climax and 
denoument. The late 1 8C was fond of ballets built on myth and familiar 
ancient history, both easily depicted and imagined from fairly conventional 
bodily movement and groupings. The 1 9C took on for its three-act spectacles 
more difficult themes, less generalized, and based on some of the little- 
known subjects favored by the 

Romanticist poets and composers. In Mter ^ Sy lphide, the opera house was 
1827, Eugene Scribe, a prolific young invaded by gnomes, mermaids, salamanders, 
playwright, wrote a complex libretto, nixes, peris, will o' the wisps— weird, myste- 
The Sleepwalker, or The Advent of a New rious beings that lend themselves wonder- 
Land, which the choreographer Jean fully to the fancy-rich authority of the chore- 
Aumer enriched with symbolic nuances. ographer. The thick buskin of Greek drama 
Five years later, La Sylphide electrified 8 ave P lace to the satin sli PP er - 
the audience with its innovations, per- — Gautier, Le Ballet Romantique (1858) 



516 <^& From Dawn to Decadence 

formed by Maria Taglioni (<499), whose slim figure, hairdress, and blending 
oipointes (rising on toes) with other steps set the standards of 19C style. From 
then on, ballet writing became a specialized profession. Gautier's Giselle is but 
one of a huge output on a wide variety of subjects, not a few of its best exam- 
ples being still produced, plain or distorted for modern taste. 

The likely reasons why there are not more masterpieces among 
Romanticist plays are several. With the drama of revolutionary lives and a 
hero such as Napoleon present to everybody's mind, the would-be play- 
wrights were at a disadvantage when it came to inventing situations and char- 
acters. The dramatic sense was not at all blunted — it came out in their poems 
and novels, and as we saw, in painting and music. In all of these the beholder's 
imagination was effectively moved without recourse to embodied action. 

A further, mighty obstacle was 

Shakespeare 

We left him a successful 1 6C playwright who satisfied the public high and 
low, was admired and loved by the more learned and superior craftsman Ben 
Jonson, but criticized by him and others for hasty production and "want of 
art." In the next two centuries Shakespeare's presence was noted as a maker 
of pretty poor stuff (Pepys) and then of pieces worth cutting and doctoring 
because of their good parts (Garrick), while poets found the plays full of great 
poetry — in patches — and of faults beyond belief (Dryden, Dr. Johnson). 
Finally, one voice in England proclaimed him a deathless dramatist and por- 
trayer of character (Morgann) (<422). 

But before Morgann, Germany had started Shakespeare on his second 
wind of reputation. Lessing first prized him as a rebuke to Voltairian tragedy; 
Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Tieck, and the Schlegels, by dint of praising, com- 
menting, and translating, erected the towering figure. The Shakespeare that 
we revere is a German creation. Then came the devoted propaganda of 
Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt in the first and second decades of the 19C, after 
German opinion had spoken and been heard. 

The upshot was: Shakespeare's art was equal to his genius; his judgment 
in characterization and dramatic fitness was impeccable; his knowledge of life 
and human beings was not equaled by any other poet or playwright. Next to 
these powers his faults counted for nothing; and many of these were not his 
faults but ours or those of his time. Carlyle near the end of the campaign 
summed it up when he called Shakespeare "the greatest of poets hitherto." 

Thus was "the bard" born. Bardolatry in turn produced the Shakespeare 
of school and commerce. Charles Lamb and his sister Mary had written the 
attractive Prose Tales from Shakespeare. The painstaking Dr. Thomas Bowdler 
fumigated the plays, ridding them of all that might offend a chaste ear and 



Cross Section: Paris <^> 517 

making them suitable for reading aloud by the family after dinner, each taking 
a part. Bowdler's Family Shakespeare filled a void in an age when mechanized 
pastimes were unknown, and his benefaction contributed the verb bowdlerize 
to the language. 

The rescue of Shakespeare from the role of "pure child of nature" utter- 
ing "native woodnotes wild" was necessary and long overdue. Until it was 
done, less than half Shakespeare was visible, just as he appears in the painting 
by Ingres called The Apotheosis of Homer. Ingres was a classicist. Again, the 
refutation in France and Italy of the "Gothic barbarian" charge amounted to 
a vindication of the new in art. Stendhal's Racine et Shakespeare came out just 
after an English Shakespeare company had been hissed off the stage in Paris. 
When another troupe arrived five years later, in 1827, the Jeunes-France went 
wild and carried with them a good many of their elders. 

It was at last seen that Shakespeare was the first poet to put on the stage 
rounded characters instead of types, characters whom we know better than it 
is possible to know anyone in life, including oneself. These figures 
Shakespeare presents in striking actions and situations that are modern 
instead of antique — nation, monarchy, Christianity make them so. Besides, 
for life's predicaments and the feelings they arouse, Shakespeare coins defini- 
tive phrasings by the hundred; this in addition to stretches of poetry verbally 
and emotionally miraculous. 

After the critic, the actor, and the schoolmaster had made the name 
sacrosanct, an industry arose outside the academy and the theater and the 
Shakespeare establishment became impregnable. It was henceforth embar- 
rassing to criticize the bard, unless one enjoyed defiance as such. An amusing 
incident of the 1 830s in America illustrates the orthodox attitude. Frances 
Trollope, mother of the two novelists, emigrated to Cincinnati to restore the 
family fortunes by opening a dry goods store. During her stay she spent an 
evening in the company of one of the city notables, "a serious gendeman," as 
she reports in her lively Domestic Manners of the Americans, and they compared 
views about Byron and other poets. 

"And Shakespeare, sir?" 

"Shakespeare, madam, is obscene, and thank God we are sufficiendy 
advanced to have found it out."° 

The man was perhaps a bit succinct in his estimate, but it showed that he 
had read the plays and understood a good many passages; whereas her con- 
temptuous indignation is that of the blind worshipper. Better critics than 
either Mrs. Trollope or her host have, again and again, quiedy set down in 
diaries and letters, in essays and reviews, the tenable objections to 
Shakespeare's mind and art: the dull passages, including the puns, often 
obscene and prolonged; the inflated sentiments, the ludicrous images, the 
insoluble syntax, the contradictory details, the theatrically awkward turns, and 



,518 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

the sheer excess where terseness or silence would be best. Several adept at 
stagecraft like Gide, condemn whole plays; Yeats saw only "beautiful frag- 
ments"; others, like John Crowe Ransom, find Shakespeare "the most inac- 
curate of poets." Goethe himself in his long eulogistic commentary has an 
aside on "the comics in Romeo and Juliet," who are "unbearable." Over the 
years, many devotees such as Lamb and Thomas Hardy have said that the 
plays are really for reading only; then the blemishes can be looked upon as it 
were in soft focus. 

These strictures are confirmed by the fact that actors and producers 
since his day have found it necessary to cut and transpose his scenes with a 
liberal hand. The public never hears all he wrote. Only about half of the 37 
plays are ever staged; and although the producers do not, as in the 1 8C, use 
performing bears to pull in the crowd, they do add acrobats, change the place 
and time of the action, impose modern dress and telephones, and reinterpret 
the plot in flat contradiction to its plain meaning. In short, these 1 6C pieces 
are quality yardage for anybody to tailor according to whim. 

None of the defects that have disturbed previous and later critics affected 
the enthusiasts of the 1 830s. They were not blind or deaf, but like every gen- 
eration they knew when they had found the perennial "elements that are 
wanted" — ideas, forms, names to serve the combative purposes of the 
moment. As Fausth^A made concrete the Romanticist vision and faith, so the 
Shakespeare play — no matter which — sanctioned the tone and ingredients of 
Romanticist art. By ranging from common prose and actual vulgarity to sub- 
lime lyric flights and from philosophic despair to imperious violence, 
Shakespearean drama fulfilled the Romanticist ambition to embrace and 
express whatever is. 



The Mother of 
Parliaments 



In SPITE of all its contradictory acts, the French Revolution of 1789 must 
be called the Liberal Revolution. The word liberal, it is true, acquired its polit- 
ical and economic meanings well after the five high-fevered years were over, 
but as pointed out on earlier occasions, a revolutionary Idea endures, and this 
one received its central definition in an actual law within two years of the first 
outbreak. It stated that "No other interests exist but the particular interest of 
each individual and the general interest of all. Nobody shall be permitted to 
gather citizens around intermediate interests and thus cut them off by the 
spirit of association from the public interest." 

This explicit language against guilds or other groups and their special 
wants decrees that the nation shall be dedicated to INDIVIDUALISM — everyone 
free to act as he sees fit in all ways that do not infringe the rights of others, 
whether taken separately or as the whole nation. The entire 19C fought with 
words or guns over this proposition and part of the 20th is still doing so 
(777>). The demand for the vote, for charters and constitutions, and for 
reforms in existing governments had in view this simple scheme, which was to 
be worked by elected representatives of the people. It promised to each and all 
a fair field on which to compete for an endless variety of further benefits. 

The demand for this new power, vocal throughout Europe, beset the vic- 
torious restored monarchs of 1815 and generated a common policy of con- 
tainment, orchestrated by Prince Metternich, chief minister of Austria. It was 
hard going for a full generation. The upsurge of angry claims and the armed 
uprisings were continual. Students, professors, and other educated bourgeois, 
sometimes helped by artisans and occasionally by bankers and manufacturers, 
agitated for the vote, brandished a charter, or shouted for a republic. Los lib- 
eraleswas first used in Spain in the 1820s to designate the "freedom fighters" 
opposing the monarchy and wanting to maintain the "Charter of 1812" that 
Napoleon had bestowed. A little later the young Alfred Tennyson, still 



520 <^*> From Dawn to Decadence 

unknown as a poet, enlisted in another bout of this typical "Spanish Civil 
War," but thought better of it and backtracked while still in southern France. 
In neighboring Portugal, the same demands led to armed conflict also and 
the same triumph of monarchy. 

In the Germanies the universities and student fraternities were the cen- 
ters of resistance to the Metternich system. Celebrating the tercentenary of 
Luther's 95 Theses proved a fit occasion to agitate against "reaction" in the 
name of "liberty." Two years later, Karl Sand, a student at Jena, expressed the 
same defiance by assassinating the illiberal playwright Kotzebue. It was a 
Thirty Years' War, intermittent like the first, but breaking out over a wider ter- 
ritory: France, Greece, Poland, Russia, northern Italy, Naples, the papal 
states, and Belgium, kept tsar, emperors, and kings on the qui vive. Little 
changed except that Belgium won independence as a state. In England, the 
riots of 1831-32 in favor of the pending bill to reform Parliament came close 
to being a nationwide revolt; in the United States, the election of President 
Jackson was a decisive victory for "the people" as against the "aristocracy" 
established by the Founding Fathers; in Canada, eight years of unrest and 
armed conflict ended by uniting the provinces and securing political rights. In 
South America, the struggles for independence from Spain, which went back 
to the 1 8C, became general in the early 1 800s and finally succeeded in a dozen 
states. Brazil likewise cut loose from Portugal. The desire for EMANCIPATION 
was universal. 

Significantly, England, even though as keen for suppression as the rest of 
Europe, gave military help to the rebellious Spanish and Portuguese — in 
vain — but it did ensure the freedom of the South American colonies by sup- 
porting the United States in the Monroe Doctrine, which warned the 
European powers against interfering in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere. 

To the men of the Enlightenment the English form of government had 
been the bulwark of liberty; or rather, the House of Commons was seen as 
playing that role. Rousseau had himself asserted that for large countries pure 
democracy was not workable and that representative government must serve 
as substitute. It now became the common aspiration of all rebels to install 
such a system in their own lands. In every language the word parliament meant 
all that went with it. 

Democratic hindsight should not prompt the thought that Metternich's 
policy of suppression was doomed from the start and that the monarchists 
were plain evil doers. To the question who wants another 25 years of war and 
revolution? the reasonable answer was nobody. The universal need was sta- 
bility and peace, and there seemed no other recourse but Legitimacy; that is, 
the appeal to long-established forms and rulers. It was the common-sense 
position. The greatest political thinker of the late 1 8C, Edmund Burke, had 
demonstrated that stable governments depend not on force but on habit — 



The Mother of Parliaments <^> 521 

the ingrained, far from stupid obedience to the laws and ways of the country 
as they have been and are. 

It follows that to replace by fiat one set of forms with another, thought 
up by some improver, no matter how intelligent, ends in disaster. To expect 
such a scheme to prosper is unreasonable because habits do not form 
overnight. Change is inevitable and often desirable, but it serves a good pur- 
pose only when gradual — evolution, not revolution, yields betterment, if only 
because at any time a people is composed of several generations. They do not 
see things all the same way; and even the youngest, some of whom may favor 
radical change on the large scale, lack the habits needed to make novelty 
work. Those who favor revolution do not even agree on its details, as events 
since 1789 amply proved, and this double lack: habitual consent and agree- 
ment on change accounts for the never-setded state. Hence the value — 
indeed the necessity — of Legitimacy, which is another name for the habit of 
consent. It should be added that at the end of his life Burke, without adhering 
to the "ideas of 1789," conceded that there are moments in history when 
political evolution is for one reason or another impossible — the dam bursts 
and the land is submerged in the flood until a new legitimacy builds up. 

What Legitimacy would also restore was the "concert of Europe," or as 
it is also termed, the balance of power. France under Danton and Bonaparte 
had broken the concert, upset the balance, changed the use of war from a bal- 
ancing device to a predatory scourge. Any liberated people whose policy 
would be set by the vote of an assembly would act in the same way. Wars may 
be necessary, but they are justified only if they are limited wars and not the 
rush of a nation in arms bent on re-creating a polyglot empire in the place of 
nation-states. [The book to read is A World Restored: Europe After Napoleon by 
Henry A. Kissinger.] 

* * 

Burke himself came to recognize that by 1 790 history had turned a wide 
corner politically and socially. The observer must say the same about culture. 
The Renaissance, with its worship of the ancients, had given all its fruits. 
Three centuries of Classicism, and Neo-classicism remained as touchstones 
for critics and brickbats for die-hards; but the enormous body of master- 
pieces created in the three centuries was now bound for the museums and 
libraries. In the great quarrel the Moderns had won. And thanks to the exam- 
ple of science and engineering, the word modern itself had taken on a new 
force. It no longer meant simply a fresh addition to what we possess from the 
past; rather, it dismisses each yesterday with something like contempt. The 
typical 19C voice prates continually of evolution, improvement, progress in 
all things. The speaker is born a future-ist. This new temper made it hard for 



522 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

the principle of Legitimacy to play its role in government and explains why it 
had to be sustained, paradoxically, by force. 

But if this great breach made by the revolution and Romanticism is so 
wide, did it not interrupt the continuity of the themes supposedly persistent 
through 500 years? To ask is to forget that themes do not designate only con- 
tents or results; they also tag hopes and wants. Themes remain as desires shift. 
The 1 9C wanting self-governing parliaments sounds the dominant theme of 
EMANCIPATION. The ever-enlarging scope of science extends that of ANALY- 
SIS to other parts of life, carrying secularism with it. All three tend to 
enlarge the great cloud of ABSTRACTION. Liberty, Equality, Nation, Progress, 
Evolution are abstract ideas that may be filled with manifold contents. In the 
same vein the century refers more and more to Art, Science, Politics as enti- 
ties that do or fail to do their duty, and likewise Labor, Capital, the People. 
This is convenient if the concrete world is close behind the word and pic- 
tured. Otherwise, discussions of policy become a war of words. 

This is what occurred during the 1830s and 1840s among those who 
fought for "freedom," especially in Central Europe and Italy. Did freedom 
consist in winning political rights or in becoming an independent nation? 
Similarly, in France and England, the demand for extending the vote, the sup- 
port for the broader Charter (to reform Parliament), took it for granted that 
political power would bring economic relief. These overlapping goals moved 
the several dissident groups — English Chartists, German Burschenshaften, 
Carbonari and Young Italy, French underground Republicans — until the 
cacophonous and murderous debacle of 1848-51 (547 >). 

Meanwhile a contrapuntal chorus made plain in its social critique that 
clamoring for the vote was aimed at the wrong target. Changing political 
arrangements would not cure the evils of the new industrial order. The 
machine had changed everything. Wielded by a few ruthless owners, it was 
dissolving the social bond and crushing the individual, now helplessly iso- 
lated. Worse still, the substitution of wheels and gears for the hand of man 
robbed the "operative" of the natural rhythm and fulfillment of Work. Nor 
did the abundant production of goods bring about widespread prosperity. 
"Poverty in the midst of plenty," the recurrent fact that bothered Sismondi, 
was the defining phrase of the age. 

The first and most influential among these critics of industry were the dis- 
ciples of the Comte de Saint-Simon, a distant relative of the 17C duke (<294; 
355). Under the name of New Christianity, Saint-Simon depicted a society in 
which an orderly distribution of tasks and goods would be ensured by the rule 
of bankers and scientists, these callings making them expert planners and cal- 
culators and their role being central in any society that uses machines. The doc- 
trine turned into a movement when the count's disciples, being good 
Romanticists, perceived that expertise and calculation were not enough. Only 



The Mother of Parliaments q^> 523 

when feeling propels thought does it The Golden Age, which a blind tradition has 
become active and communicable. hitherto placed in the past, is ahead of us. 

Therefore the artists must be enlisted to Saint-Simon (1 825) 

make the ideal society attractive and the 

new life congenial. A quasi religious ritual was designed which clothed the rigor 
of science and of money in mythic fashion through songs and festivals. For a 
sample, Parisians were treated to demonstrations by the disciples, who caroled 
as they paraded along the boulevards in their light blue troubadour costume. 

This appeal for help from the arts is a familiar revolutionary ploy. It flat- 
ters and it awakens the social conscience in minds otherwise indifferent to 
politics. Among those who in the 1 830s responded to the call with enthusi- 
asm were the already famous young virtuoso Lis2t and the vibrant character 
whose loves, friendships, and feminist fiction made her a force in many 
domains, George Sand. Lis2t attended meetings, composed suitable songs, 
and wrote an eloquent article on the unsatisfactory situation of the artist in 
bourgeois society. Lis2t and Sand became friends — not lovers — and shared 
for a time the Saint-Simonian ideal. But this program was not alone in the 
field. Remolding society was a desire haunting many different types of intel- 
lectual. It harked back to Babeuf and his expounder Buonarotti (<428), who 
rank as the first conscious and deliberate socialists on the Continent. In the 
19C the urge to complete the political revolution by the social was a 
widespread desire. Thus the Abbe Lamennais, an intense believer, had the 
vision of a Christian social community that enticed Lis2t (again) to join his 
prayerful coterie at La Chenaie, where he composed more music for the 
cause. 

Sand, who had meanwhile been swept off her feet by Michel de Bourges, 
the republican who preached revolution by blood and iron, also cultivated the 
abbe, scaring him by her erotic aura. Still full of revolt about the place of 
women and of love, she then drifted into the orbit of Pierre Leroux. He was 
an inventor on a small scale, who began his public career by writing for Le 
Globe, the Saint-Simonian journal that traveled all over Europe — Goethe read 
it and John Stuart Mill wrote for it. But Leroux struck off on his own and 
preached the gradual elimination of property, the equality of women (with the 
right to love, married or not), and immortality through reincarnation — all this 
topped off with the rehabilitation of Satan. Mme Sand was Leroux's steadfast 
disciple and though she let some of these tenets lapse, she remained an 
avowed socialist all her life. 

Yet another theorist was Charles Fourier, not to be confused with his 
almost exact contemporary, Jean, a mathematician of outstanding achieve- 
ment. The former's plan for a regenerated society was the most detailed. It 
sought to equali2e labor and rewards, and by classifying tasks, talents, and 
impulses, adapt the work assigned to the individual's temperament: emotional 



524 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

satisfaction was prerequisite to a consenting population and a stable society. 
It should be added that Auguste Comte, as Saint-Simon's former secretary, 
owed a good deal of his system to this early association, including the idea 
that myth and ritual are needed for social cohesion. 

The French proposals of the early 19C have been lumped together as one 
tendency and dubbed Utopian Socialism. The fact is that their theorizing 
shortly led to practice — to actual colonies living more or less according to 
plan. America was the predestined place where this could happen. There was 
room, land was cheap, and best of all, there was a tradition not so much of tol- 
erating as of ignoring singularity when it applied to a whole group. Long 
before these new Eutopians, there had been a dozen or more "peculiar" com- 
munities, beginning in 1 694 in Pennsylvania with the "Society of Women in 
the Wilderness." Those founded two centuries later numbered upward of 80 
and were scattered from Maine to Texas. The best known were inspired by 
Fourier, thanks to his influence on the minds of the New England 
Romanticists. Emerson, Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, and C. A. Dana were 
leading Fourierists, while in New York Albert Brisbane, Horace Greeley, and 
Henry James, Sr., were also strong adherents and propagandists. The New 
Englanders formed at Brook Farm and again at Fruitlands the "phalanx" 
specified by the master mind, though without following his intricate particu- 
lars. Brook Farm is the setting of Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance, which is 
really a tragedy. 

The several dozen other plantations followed diverse schemes, all playing 
variations on the idea often used as their chosen name: Harmony. The one at 
New Harmony in Illinois deserves special note. It was the creation of Robert 
Owen, a Scottish cotton manufacturer, who had made a success at home of 
the model town he created around his factory at New Lanark. It gave the 
workers good housing, schools, recreations, and a good livelihood. Its 
American duplicate flourished as long as he was in charge. In England and 
Ireland, Owen spread his reasoned-out doctrine by lecturing and writing and 
he gathered a very large following. They founded no communities but set up 
"cooperatives," as he recommended, the consumer-members reaping the 
benefit of wholesale prices and shared profits. 

On one point all the would-be social engineers agreed: the reigning school 
of political economists was fundamentally wrong. Adam Smith, Ricardo, 
Malthus, Nassau Senior, J. B. Say, Bastiat, J. S. Mill, proclaimed that they had 
found the eternal laws of economic life; present conditions were dictated by the 
nature of things; one must submit to them as one does to gravitation; from 
which followed the dogma "laissez-faire," already taught in the 18C by the 
Physiocrats, restated with full historical evidence and some caveats by Adam 
Smith, and now proved deductively by the laws of economics. 



The Mother of Parliaments <^» 525 

What was in fact the proof? By nature the individual pursues his self- 
interest. In a money economy he seeks the lowest price when he buys and the 
highest when he sells. Prices are not arbitrary but go up and down according 
to supply and demand. For example, the price for sale or rent of a piece of 
land depends on the value of its yield in produce compared with the yield and 
price of neighboring pieces. "Economic man" makes strict comparisons. 

As for wages, they come out of a "fixed fund," the size of which is regu- 
lated by the condition of the market for capital (money and equipment) and 
the supply and demand for labor. If the supply of labor is abundant, the wages 
are lower. The manufacturer cannot pay higher wages than the rate imposed by 
all these ratios working together. Robert Owen up in Scotland might do wild 
things for his people, but if everybody did the same, the whole of English 
trade would collapse. He ignored "Classical Economics." 

It is a mistake to suppose that its creators and proponents were hyp- 
ocrites moved by the desire to justify their friends, the captains of industry, 
while callously disregarding the sufferings of the workers. The science disre- 
garded equally the sufferings of the factory owner who failed when overpro- 
duction periodically caused a string of failures. An economist such as the 
Reverend Thomas Malthus was deeply concerned about the working poor. 
Their numbers were increasing at an unusual rate. Economically, they ought 
not to have so many children; it enlarged the supply of labor and they were 
making themselves poor. One could surmise that the working people had lit- 
tle other pleasure than that of the bed. Malthus would not deny it, though he 
had nothing to recommend but sexual abstinence; he took bitter comfort in 
the thought of wars and plagues that mowed down the living, because he cal- 
culated that the food supply could only be increased by small amounts in the 
ratio of 1-2-3-4 — while people increased as 2-4-8-16. His worry has not been 
dispelled; demographers continue to speculate about the rapid increase of 
people as hygiene and medication recklessly prolong life. 

Most of the American "anti-economics" communities lasted but a few 
years. One reason was that, unlike the Shakers, Amish, Moravian Brothers, 
and Mennonites, who survived despite pressures from outside, the 
Fourierists and others lacked a religious bond of equal strength. The 19C 
revival of faith (<471) was not dogmatic enough to exert the same binding 
force; and the myths freshly made up were flimsy make-believe. This loose- 
ness of dogma, in turn, is explained by the second divisive cause: INDIVIDU- 
ALISM dominant. If one thinks of the New England Transcendentalists one 
by one and then tries to imagine life at Brook Farm, the spectacle makes one 
smile. Here was a cluster of talents who exalted the independent thinker and 
the self-reliant character and showed little regard for the mass of common 
people building a new country all around them. Their hero in life and fiction 



526 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

was the genius, the single pioneer, the solitary wanderer like Thoreau, the 
lone woodsman Natty Bumppo in Fenimore Cooper's novels. By what magic 
could these be harmoniously drilled into a Fourierist phalanx? 

Questioning, often denying, Progress, another type of critic added his 
testimony on the rightness of Eutopias, at least in principle. A planned soci- 
ety must be the remedy for the worsening conditions of life. Both the work- 
ing poor and the luckless manufacturer caught in "overproduction," later 
renamed "business cycle," were victims of the inflexible laws of political 
economy. Everybody was morally degraded by the decline of true work, by 
the flood of poor-quality goods (known as "cheap and nasty"), and by the 
new mode of thinking and feeling — always quantity', price, cost, output, 
growth: it was the tyranny of numbers over generous feelings, peace of mind, 
moral conscience, and religious faith. 

The chief deliverer of this message was Carlyle. A preacher by tempera- 
ment, who devised a singular but effective sermonizing style, he acted as 
England's director of conscience for half a century. Other denouncers of indus- 
try, utilitarianism, and progress came from the church, the literary world, and 
the ranks of the Tory party. Mostly landowners, its members had a keen eye for 
the flaws of the manufacturers' regime, their rivals for wealth and power. 
Influenced also by the propaganda of the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, they 
passed laws limiting hours of labor and the exploitation of women and chil- 
dren. These were the earliest in the huge code regulating machine industry that 
receives additions daily, hourly, from all the nations of the West. But Carlyle put 

little faith in legislation. It cured only the 
One age, he is hag-ridden, bewitched; the symptom s of the evil. Parliament was a 
next, priestridden, befooled; in all ages, ^ shop „ frQm ^^ ^ gQod 

bedevilled. And now the Genius of , , , ,. 

could come as long as wrangling went 
Mechanism smothers him worse than any . 

^ T . , ,. , T _ , j . TT t on between two seesawing forces. 

Nightmare did. In Earth and in Heaven he ° 

- . , A ,, u . u u r Things must be taken in hand by a 

can see nothing but Mechanism; he has fear & J 

for nothing else, hope in nothing else. leader and made to g° ' m one direction, 

* , P „ the right direction. Such a leader, whom 

— Carlyle on Man in Sartor Resartus & 

n83i) ne ca ll s hero, the people must recognize 

and worship. 
Because these words have acquired fearsome associations in our century, 
Carlyle's intentions need explicating. First, his hero is not bound to be "the 
man on horseback." In the six lectures On Heroes and Hero Worship, the histor- 
ical examples range from the pagan hero-gods such as Odin to the founders 
of religions (Mohammed) to the great poets (Dante, Shakespeare), and to 
"men of letters," by which Carlyle means intellectuals: Rousseau, Dr. 
Johnson. In short, the hero is anyone who by standing out from the crowd 
exerts an influence on what happens. There are military heroes, of course — 
Cromwell, Napoleon — but Carlyle says in so many words that it is the thinker 



The Mother of Parliaments ^ 527 

and writer who is the needed hero now, the leader through ideas and words. 
And he "may be expected to continue as the main fount of heroism for all 
future ages." Similarly, worship is not superstitious groveling but whole- 
hearted admiration. It is not an age that rewards popular entertainers above 
all other talents that can cavil at hero worship. 

In a later preachment entitied Past and Present Carlyle gives an example of 
what he means. Using a 12C chronicle, he shows how a community of monks 
at St. Edmundsbury fell into moral and financial disorder and was restored to 
proper monastic ways and solvency by Abbot Samson. He is a modest but 
steadfast man, not especially popular, who is appointed head. He did not 
know until then that he was a born leader and he has to improvise the policies 
for recovery. They are strict but not dictatorial: he reasons with his people; 
sometimes he has to compromise. The only absolute command is Work — 
faithful, exact, productive performance. Everything good flows from this 
center, which is the justification for man's life and the way of guarding his soul 
from evil. 

So much for the lesson of the past according to Carlyle. The present by 
contrast is chaos: no leadership and therefore no clear direction, wasted 
efforts, pointiess conflicts, behavior led by greed, because utility is gauged 
solely by material measures. Selfishness overrules all other considerations. 
Had not Bentham said that to those it made happy "pushpin (bowling) is as 
good as poetry"? The "happiness of the greatest number" as a guide to pol- 
icy was a leveling down. All these falsities produced the common distress in 
the present inhuman state miscalled civilization. So far Carlyle. Scattered in 
other corners of England, a dozen or so of anti-capitalist writers, each inde- 
pendentiy, were urging some form of socialized society. William Thompson 
(a feminist), J. E Bray, Charles Hall, Thomas Hodgskin, Mary Hennell, are 
among those now reckoned the first socialists with programs not looking to 
establish small communities but to undo the work of the economists and 
redirect society toward justice for all. 

John Stuart Mill was a special case. He had given brief attention to Saint- 
Simon and to Auguste Comte (<509), had in fact written for Le Globe, but had 
drawn back, foreseeing that in Comte 's system life would be "like that of a 
beleaguered town." It was in revising his Principles of Political Economy that Mill 
broke with the liberal school by asserting that the distribution of the national 
product could be redirected at will and that it should be so ordered for the 
general welfare. That final phrase, perpetually redefined, was a forecast. For 
all these disparate schemes — the Eutopias that failed sooner or later, the 
complaints of Carlyle and his acolytes, England's Socialist Five and their 
counterparts abroad (549 >) — remained for a century the views of a minority, 
often noisy but unable to arrest Progress and quash public optimism about it. 
Yet it was their underlying idea — essential socialism — that ultimately tri- 



528 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

umphed, taking the twin form of Communism and the Welfare State, either 
under the dictatorship of a party and its leader or under the rule of a demo- 
cratic parliament and bureaucracy. 

The interval of a century was filled with various voluntary movements: 
Christian socialisms that put remedial responsibility on the church, Catholic, 
Lutheran, or Anglican; Lassalle's socialist "corporate state" (for Germany) to 
direct enterprise for economic justice; there also, Lassalle's growing party of 
militants bent on setting up a workers' state — socialism in one nation, the 
most advanced. The poet Heine, an exile in France, seeing his country astir 
with these desires, in addition to its pent-up passion for nationhood, warned 
Europe against that double menace to civilization: Germany and Com- 
munism — all this before Marx was much heard of. 

* * 

In the forefront with Progress, was the Liberals' demand for parliaments 
and a wider franchise. They promised that nothing fanciful like changing 
social habits and hierarchies was to result, but giving political power to all 
educated and propertied individuals would guarantee free speech and a free 
press, and out of free public opinion would come peace and prosperity. 
England was leading the way. This middle-class conception of the desirable 
government had the support of many artisans and other workers, which 
brought on demonstrations and riots in the hope of full democracy ahead. 

One would suppose that an institution as old and long-admired as the 
British Parliament would be well understood and easy to copy. It has not 
proved so. The reputed Mother of Parliaments on whom the gaze of the world 
has centered for over two and a half centuries has borne no equally handsome 
or really healthy children. All have needed therapy; more than one has died 
ingloriously, and of the survivors some lead a visibly malarial existence. This 
generality applies to Europe. The United States is a happy exception, owed to a 
direct inheritance of the life-giving tradition. In the non- western world elected 
legislatures are either make-believe institutions or bodies in recurrent disarray. 

Instability and ineffectiveness have been due for the most part to the 
elaborate written constitutions that set up these assemblies. The document 
usually tries to protect the legislature from the executive power, following (as 
was thought) the English precedent that let the king reign but not rule. What 
was not understood was that technically England is not ruled by the House of 
Commons, but by "the king in Parliament" meaning the House of Lords as 
well as the Commons. This phrase in turn denotes a network of customs that 
govern what each of the three parts may or may not do. For example, to make 
the House of Lords pass the Reform Bill of 1832, the king was requested to 
create enough Liberal peers to overcome the resistant majority in that 



The Mother of Parliaments q^> 529 

house — and he would have complied, against his private opinion. This char- 
acteristic sort of thrust-and-yield when the time is ripe was and is incompre- 
hensible outside the British Isles. 

It cannot be written into any charter, nor would it be desirable to do so if 
it could be done, because conditions change and custom, if it is appropriate, 
can be more smoothly modified than a constitution. England is thus the only 
country that can boast at any time of having an up-to-date constitution; all 
others (including the American) grow obsolete in some of their fundamental 
arrangements and risk those parliamentary "crises" that punctuate the mod- 
ern history of nations. France, Italy, and Germany have gone through five 
constitutions each since achieving an elected assembly; and Spain a dizzying 
number, like the Balkan states. 

This knack of judging when and how things must change without upset- 
ting the apple cart was painfully acquired by the English over the centuries. 
They were long reputed the ungovernable people. But fatigue caught up at 
last and a well-rooted anti-intellectualism helped to keep changes unsystem- 
atic and under wraps. Forms, tides, decor remain while different actions 
occur beneath them; visual stability maintains confidence. It was the knack of 
rising above principle, the reward of shrewd inconsistency. That state of 
being, it should be noted, is not contradiction, which makes an institution 
work against itself. What is not consistent is nonetheless functional and will 
probably be brought into line later. There are times, to be sure, when one 
change at a time is not enough; a broader scrubbing up is in order. This 
occurred in the English constitution in the second third of the 1 9C when 
those Whigs who were called Radicals and later formed the Liberal party 
ousted the Tories at the end of 20 years of stubborn anti-revolutionary sup- 
pression. A representative Radical Whig, who merits acquaintance also as a 
polemicist and humorist of genius was 

Sydney Smith 

He came on the scene when England had been debating reforms for fifty 
years and had adopted none. Although a mere vicar stuck away in a country 
parish, Smith sprang into a leadership role when he published anonymously 
the Peter Plymley Letters on the mooted subject of "Catholic Emancipation" — 
the lifting of the barriers that kept Catholics out of Parliament, the universi- 
ties, the professions, and offices under the crown. His was a new voice and a 
new type of voice. He wrote in a way calculated to persuade both the ordinary 
mind and the professional politician, and the firm anti-Catholic besides. 
Smith prevailed because he understood the objector's feelings and met his 
resistance on the practical plane. Smith's discourse was conversational, often 
humorous; it dramatized ideas by describing situations and it could be elo- 



530 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 



How very odd, dear Lady Holland, to ask me quent at the right pitch and the right 
to dine with you on Sunday the 9th, when I places. Here was a pamphleteer pro- 
am coming to stay with you from the 5th to pounding what is just, humane, and tol- 
the 12th. It is like giving a gentleman an erant without himself ignoring these 
assignation for Wednesday when you are ykm&s by writing Hke a fanatk 
going to marry him on the preceding Sydney Smkh sQon became ±& 

Sunday — an attempt to combine the stimu- r , it i- i 

J r intimate of the leading lights — men 

lus of gallantry with the security of connubial ' , . 

, . and women — or the Whig party. They 
relations. & r J J 

found the short, stout cleric an ideal 

— Sydney Smith (1811) ,. c „ c . , , 

dinner guest, full or wit and good 

humor and good sense, astute in his 
judgment of men and politics, replete with knowledge of past and present. 
The vigorous intellect of this fresh recruit was a tonic and his fearlessness was 
heartening. He would take on a "persecuting bishop" in print and though 
unable to convince him of anything, would not incur his enmity, meanwhile 
edifying the bystanders. To list Sydney Smith's campaigns is to define the tem- 
per of Liberalism and to reveal contemporary attitudes, social and cultural. 
Next after Catholic Emancipation, which was finally achieved in 1 829, came 
the reform of the ways in which England chose its members of Parliament: 
no more boroughs in some lord's pocket, because it was a mound of grass 
with no voters left; representatives given to towns that had none — 
Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, and others; and an electorate enlarged to 
include those who owned or rented a middling amount of property. Roughly, 
one family in six numbered a voter. [For an impression of the English voters 
in action soon after the Reform Bill, read the account of the Eatanswill elec- 
tion in Dickens's Pickwick Papers, chapter 13.] 

In one of his four speeches on the bill, Smith answered the objection that 
if it were passed, agitators would not let the people alone but ask for more and 
more: "If the winds would let the waves alone, there would be no storms. If 
gendemen would let ladies alone, there would be no unhappy marriages and 
deserted damsels. And so we must proceed to make laws for a people who we 
are sure will not be let alone." Smith's Johnsonian mind could always find the 
lapidary phrase to make a point clear: Apropos of the self-serving practice of 
judges, he wrote: "It is surely better to be a day longer on the circuit than to 
murder rapidly in ermine." At the same time he knew that reform does not 
come about from good sense alone. "The talk of not acting from fear is mere 
parliamentary cant. From what motive but fear, I should like to know, have all 
the improvements in our constitution proceeded? If I say, Give this people 
what they ask because it is just, do you think I should get ten people to listen 
to me? The only way to make the mass of mankind see the beauty of justice is 
by showing them in pretty plain terms the consequence of injustice." 



The Mother of Parliaments <^> 531 

Although he spoke well, in a warm, encouraging voice and without thun- 
der or antics, he preferred engaging his opponent in print. He founded with 
a few friends the Edinburgh Review, a quarterly that immediately became a 
power in politics and letters as the organ of Whig opinion. It was an entirely 
new form of magazine, no longer a house organ for publishers and written by 
hacks, but the forum of independent critics. Its articles were by present stan- 
dards extremely long, virtually monographs. The "hook" on which a piece 
hung might be a new poem or novel or history or somebody's travels, but the 
work and the author might be disposed of in a paragraph while the author's 
subject was treated in full as the reviewer thought it should be. 

Macaulay's famous essays were first published in the Edinburgh and eagerly 
awaited. A beginning writer was "made" if his work appeared in the "buff-and- 
blue"; the articles were unsigned, but readers could tell them apart. Besides 
Macaulay, the mainstays of the review were Smith, Hazlitt, Horner, and its edi- 
tor Francis Jeffrey. It was these whom Byron satirized in his early poem English 
Bards and Scotch Reviewers. To Jeffrey, Smith once wrote a letter indicative of his 
own temper: "I exhort you to restrain the violent tendency of your nature for 
analysis and to cultivate synthetical propensities. What is virtue? What's the use 
of truth? What's the use of honor? What's a guinea but a damned yellow circle? 
The whole effort of your mind is to 

destroy. Because others build slightly 

rL . I never read a book before reviewing it; it 
and eagerly, you employ yourself in ... 

<=»■"■'_ r j j prejudices a man so. 

kicking down their houses and contract 

c . r , ,. rr , , — Sydney Smith, on the critic's task 

a sort or aversion tor the dirricult task 

of building well yourself." 

One anomalous law that Smith labored to get repealed was that which 
denied counsel to those charged with a felony. He took up the agitation and 
riddled the "most absurd argument advanced in the honorable House, that 
the practice of employing counsel would be such an expense to the pris- 
oner — as if anything was so expensive as being hanged! 'You are going to be 
hanged tomorrow, it is true, but consider what a sum you have saved!'" To 
allow prisoners counsel in cases of high treason had taken seven sessions of 
debate: "Mankind are much like the children they beget — they always make 
faces at what is to do them good; and it is necessary sometimes to hold the 
nose and force the medicine down the throat." 

Equally cruel and unjust were the game laws that protected the landlord 
and his wild fowl: "An unqualified man who kills a pheasant shall pay five 
pound, but the squire says he shall be shot — and accordingly places a spring- 
gun in the path of the poacher. The more human and mitigated squire man- 
gles him with traps; and the supra-fine country gentleman only detains him in 
machines which prevent his escape but do not lacerate their captive. Of the 



532 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

gross illegality of such proceedings there can be no reasonable doubt. There 
is an end of law if every man is to measure out his punishment for his own 
wrong." 

Incensed like Blake, Sydney Smith cried out against the practices of the 
chimney-sweeping trade: "An excellent dinner is the most pleasing occur- 
rence and a great triumph of civilized life. It is not only the descending morsel 
and the enveloping sauce, but [the setting and the company] . In the midst of 
all this, who knows that the kitchen chimney caught fire and that a poor little 
wretch of six or seven years old was sent up amid the flames to put it out? 
Boys are made chimney sweepers at the age of five or six. Little boys for small 
flues is a common phrase in the cards left at the door by itinerant chimney 
sweepers. Girls are occasionally employed." Smith concludes with irony: "It 
was quite right to throw out the bill for prohibiting the sweeping of chimneys 
by boys — because humanity is a modern invention. Such a measure could not 
be carried into execution without great injury to property and gready 
increased risk of fire." 

There are matters of moment to Liberals that cannot be made into bills for 
Parliament to vote on. One that caused Smith concern was the education of 
women. "If it were improved, the education of men would be improved also," 
because "the formation of character for the first seven or eight years of life 
seems to depend almost entirely on them." Besides, a country should employ 
as many "understandings" as possible, which should include "the capacities 
that women possess — wit, genius, and every other attribute of mind of which 
men make so eminent a use." At present, "half the talent in the universe runs 
to waste." As for the feeling that "educating women is something ludicrous," 
consider that "a century ago, who would have believed that country gentlemen 
could be brought to read and spell with ease and accuracy, which we now so 
frequently remark? Nothing is so stupid as to take the actual for the possible." 

Not that Smith had any respect for the public (= private preparatory) 
schools of England or its two universities. All of them disgraced the ideal and 
the practice of education. The schools spent years teaching resistant young 
minds to write Latin verses; a compliant graduate, says Smith, "will have writ- 
ten 10,000 — more than in the Aeneid — and will never write another." The 
older boys, left idle, were so unruly that a master was entitled to a "pebble 
fund" — compensation for the risk of being pelted. As for the universities, 
their teaching was sparse and narrow. Sending a youth there ensured only 
"instruction in vice and waste of money." 

In religion and morals, the vicar showed the same penetrating mind as in 
politics and social affairs. His faith as an Anglican was sincere and strongly 
held, but not proselytizing. He ridiculed the Methodists, the Puseyites 
(Tractarians <471), and the "Clapham Sect" of intense evangelicals; but he 
would have fought against their persecution. In all these ways, he reminds one 



The Mother of Parliaments <^> 533 

of Swift, and like him too, he gave solicitous care to his parishioners — their 
health and housing, their disputes and other human predicaments. The wis- 
dom of his moral outlook appears notably in his dislike of the Society for the 
Suppression of Vice. "It is hardly possible that a society for the suppression of 
vice can ever be kept within the bounds of good sense and moderation. The 
loudest and noisiest suppressors will always carry it against the more prudent 
part of the community; the most violent will be considered as the most moral." 
And as to the brand-new situations that the invention of the railroad placed 
people in, his usual logic finally prevailed: "The very fact of locking the doors 
will be a frequent source of accidents. Mankind, whatever the directors [of the 
Great Western] may think of that process, is impatient of combustion and will 
try to get out through the windows. And why stop at locking doors? Why not 
strait-waistcoats? Why is not the accidental traveller strapped down?" 

Sydney Smith was not exclusively a political animal. His literary judg- 
ments were acute. He praised Scott's masterpiece The Heart of Midlothian when 
everybody was damning it; he was almost alone in his low estimate of Samuel 
Rogers as a poet; he did not care much for novels of contemporary life, but 
Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby won him over; the ethics of Mme de Stael's 
Delphine (<450) reminded him of Restoration comedy; and he was the first to 
acclaim Ruskin's defense of Turner's art in Modern Painters. 

Being represented as common sense incarnate, Smith has been denied 
imagination. But humor of the highest kind such as Smith's is pure imagina- 
tion. Reviewing travels in South America, Smith describes the sloth always 
hanging beneath a branch: "he passes his life in suspense, like a young clergy- 
man distantly related to a bishop." The printer of the Edinburgh is always 
tardy: he shall be fired "and compelled to sell indecent prints in the open air for 
a livelihood." Macaulay monopolizes conversation — yes, but "he has occa- 
sional flashes of silence that make it quite delightful." It was Macaulay's judg- 
ment that Smith was "the greatest master of ridicule that has appeared in 
England since Swift." Although he kept the company exploding with laugh- 
ter, Smith like many humorists was frequendy plagued with melancholy. And 
again like such minds he incurred blame for showing the ludicrous side of 
serious matters. He understood how this judgment came about: people go by 
outward signs and "the outward sign of a dull man and a wise man are the 
same, and so are the outward signs of a frivolous and a witty man." The 
genius he accounted for in similar terms that fit his own case: "He is eight 
men, not one man; he has as much wit as if he had no sense and as much sense 
as if he had no wit; his conduct is as judicious as if he were the dullest of 
human beings and his imagination as brilliant as if he were utterly ruined." 

During the first half of his life Sydney Smith had to struggle with poverty 
and disappointment. He was poor and had a large family to support. No 
sooner was he a favorite in London than he was forced by a new law (of which 



534 q**> From Dawn to Decadence 

he approved) to reside in his parish, deprived of all intellectual conversation. 
His irrepressible fun was the strong will's victory over the dumps, just as his 
energetic pastoral care was the victory of the moral conscience over tempting 
self-pity — again a likeness with Swift exiled in Ireland. Smith was finally 
rewarded by his political friends with the post of Canon of St. Paul's in 
London, and he ended his days in financial ease and in the midst of his cher- 
ished and cherishing friends. One of them said what might well serve as an 
epitaph: "You have been making fun of me, Sydney, for 20 years, and I do not 
think you have said a single thing I should have wished you not to say." [For 
his life, the book to read is The Smith of Smiths by Hesketh Pearson; and for 
extracts from his writings and correspondence it is Selected Writings of Sydney 
Smith, ed. by W H. Auden.] 

Requiring that people who vote should own some property was for most 
of the 19C a matter of course — and of logic: to use a share of the political 
power responsibly, one must own a share of the commonwealth, as a stock- 
holder does when he votes for the company's board of directors. According 
to the thought-cliche, the restriction was due to the selfishness of the "rising 
bourgeoisie" (<243) — manufacturers and bankers — who wanted to keep all 
the power to themselves. But as indicated earlier, that all-purpose explanation 
is a myth. The 19C success of the so-called Industrial Revolution did put 
money into the hands of a new group of people — clever mechanics, good 
men of business, lucky speculators — and as always it was not a class but indi- 
viduals who rose as others fell. In France, when the lower middle class com- 
plained of not having the vote because they lacked the property qualification, 
the prime minister Guizot told them: "Get rich!" The assumption was that 
affluence betokened ability. It also guaranteed that the newly enfranchised 
would not use their votes to the detriment of property rights. For the steadily 
poor, it was the time before compulsory public education and the penny 
paper, and it is hard to imagine now the degree of ignorance and narrowness 
of these illiterates kept out of public affairs. They exemplify the very point of 
EMANCIPATION anywhere, at any time: it is not to give power to those who 
have earned the right to it, but to lift the helpless to a level where they are free 
to learn how to use the right. 

Those who oppose that freedom argue that as illiterates, as slaves, as chil- 
dren, they cannot manage the household, which is true though illiberal. The 
political history of the West has been a running battle between the "realistic" 
deniers of one freedom after another and the generous ones who gambled on 
another truth, that capacity is native to all and depends only on fair condi- 
tions for its development. 



The Mother of Parliaments <^> 535 

In England, the parallel situation was modified after the Reform Bill of 
1 832 had opened the door a crack to the voteless. The "bourgeois" who were 
"risen," thanks to their business or industrial skill and were now represented 
in Parliament, had to contend there with the gentry and aristocrats — the Tory 
party — who, as shown earlier (<526), were bent on passing labor laws unwel- 
come to factory owners. Both sides succeeded in their hostile intentions, and 
it turned out that when the Tories lost their old protective tariff on grain, the 
benefit went not exclusively to bourgeois merchants and employers but to the 
whole population. 

What should not pass unnoticed is that the start of social legislation, 
beginning with the new Poor Law and going on to the control of labor con- 
ditions, required two devices that must be called epoch-making, not to say 
ominous: inspectors and statistics. The modern individual has been emanci- 
pated from subjection to rank and has exchanged it for "inspection" over the 
whole range of life's activities. This control takes the form of permit, license, 
and stated limitations, as well as actual inspection. At the same time, state 
agencies and private researchers gather totals by kind and publish numbers. 
Most often the purpose is to show why there is cause to foster or restrain an 
activity. The concerned citizen develops the habit of living by statistics. He 
may be said to live a Stat Life (795 >). These developments were unavoidable. 
The nature of industry in its strange new meaning — no longer: steady appli- 
cation to the task, but steady submission to the machine — made regulation 
imperative; and the ingress of techne into everything that serves human 
needs, from food, clothing, and shelter to locomotion, medicine, and enter- 
tainment, has required counting and control without end to save life itself. 



A further reason for the difficult times suffered by imitation parliaments 
was that for ages the mother type, with all its anomalies, did not represent peo- 
ple but interests — land, trade, the church, the universities. These interests 
might split into factions, but as issues changed so did the alignment of parlia- 
mentary spokesmen. When the scheme of "one man, one vote" was substi- 
tuted, the foundation shifted unperceived under the system. INDIVIDUALISM 
replaced a handful of interests by "public opinion" — vague, wavering, 
unformed, unpredictable, the views (as Bagehot put it) of the bald-headed man 
in the omnibus. To corral millions of such private notions into fairly defined 
interests required new means. Direct bribery would no longer serve to unite as 
it had done in the past. Appeals to self-interest, coupled with indirect bribery, 
required political parties, public programs, and strict voting discipline. And for 
steady policy there must be only two parties and a clear winner. 

The English two-party system owes some of its solidity to another tradi- 



536 q^d From Dawn to Decadence 

tional arrangement never imitated: the aisle across the meeting hall. After the 
houses of Parliament burned down in 1 834, they were rebuilt on the same 
plan, which divides the members into two groups facing each other. The vis- 
a-vis begets speeches conversational in tone. One can hardly "orate" at an 
opponent who looks at you across a narrow space; whereas the semi-circular, 
theaterlike layout of all other parliaments, besides creating the Left, the Right 
and shadings in between, encourages the high-flown and the abstract. 

Even in campaigning, the English address the crowd quite as if talking 
informally to one person. That does not exclude rabble-rousing or the palpa- 
ble bribery of promising benefits. Both are standard practice in all democra- 
cies that hold real elections. But to call it "appealing to the emotions instead 
of the reason" is a stupid cliche. All appeals are to ideas. No candidate says: 
"Let me awaken your angry feelings." He must stir up the feeling by giving it 
something to attach it to. Electioneering ideas are familiar ideas ready-charged 
with strong emotion: Die rather than yield; For God and Country; no more 
immigrants, soak the rich, more well-paid jobs, my opponent is a crook — 
these are ideas as truly as the Ten Commandments. And strange new ideas 
such as ecology or abortion can acquire the same sort of familiarity and emo- 
tional force. 

But as industrial society has grown more complex, individual opinion has 
grown more diverse and confused, and parties have multiplied. Rarely does 
one party obtain a solid majority. Coalitions form and fail and re-form, hold 
up action or promptly reverse it, making for incoherent governance. The 
people become distrustful, discontented — and bored. After the age-long 
struggle for the vote, democratic countries show an extraordinary attitude 
toward it: they boast of their form of government and express nothing but 
contempt for politicians — the men and women they have themselves chosen. 
Worse, of those who have the vote, fewer than half use it. Lastly, exerting 
influence on the people's representatives, "lobbies" re-create on a large scale 
the former role of organized interests (780>). 

A little before 1 870, a double survey of the London underworld had been 
carried out independently by Dr. William Acton and by Henry Mayhew The 
former studied prostitution. London was the reputed world center of that 
trade, or rather the showpiece for numbers and variety that Venice once had 
been. De Quincey gave an unforgettable picture of the world in which he met 
the endearing "Ann the Outcast" who saved his life. Three decades later, Dr. 
Acton concluded from his interviews that prostitution was for a good many 
women a temporary expedient; that others took it up from liking; and that the 
number of hopeless cases should make the existing charitable organizations 
multiply their work and their facilities. 

Mayhew's four volumes on London Labour and the London Poor are better 
known, and abridgments have been reprinted in our time/ The work deals 



The Mother of Parliaments <^> 537 



with many diverse groups under the two categories of the tide, giving sharp, 
detailed descriptions (often in the subject's actual words) of the lives led by 
each type of man or woman. It pardy overlaps Acton's domain and it includes 
the deliberately homeless and the criminal. Both writers maintain their 
detachment; it is the substance itself that creates by turns sympathy or dis- 
gust, impatience or despair. 

Still, life in cities had brought some material improvements: life expectancy 
had risen; huddling in tenements was preferable to living in filthy, weather- 
beaten hovels on the farm in decline; 

and sheer numbers in close proximity The voun g [among] the poorly paid English 
had put ideas into the vacant mind. It labourers, the product of long centuries of 

was of course with these darker images <««■*» ^ d ne g lect > look fofward to *e 

• j ^i ac\ r^ -ii-i i moment of their abandonment of field labour 

in mind that 19C social thinkers kept 

. . r r cc i -,-, f° r the more lucrative work on railways or in 

expressing their fear of democracy. T „ ,,,.,. 

the mine. I well remember the little group in a 

y / & Yorkshire village who would frequently walk a 

ment but the masses, the "great CO uple of miles to watch the express dash 

unwashed." They remembered the through the small station in the darkness. 

Paris mobs of the two French revolu- „ XT ^^^^ zw,„ T ,-,„>_ T ^. „^ 

— E. N. Bennett, Problems of Village 

tions. Not until after 1870 did the free Life (\9\0) 

school turn the mob into the crowd. 

Visitors to the United States who published their experiences on return- 
ing to Europe gave a less alarming view of government by the people, yet 
never expressed enthusiasm like the later visitors to Soviet Russia. Actually, 
only one report about the United States was thorough and reliable: 
Tocqueville's Democracy in America. The first volume, the one full of detail, 
appeared in the mid- 1830s after a concentrated study of not quite 18 months. 
It was descriptive and dispassionate. It showed the many admirable human 
traits that come with self-government and equality: the firm, upstanding 
character who shows servility to none; the ease of mind about local affairs, 
since they are discussed and acted openly, all concerned being present; in 
addition, a sense of freedom from the past and its compelling errors and 
injustices; a legitimate feeling of power used at will in setting up voluntary, 
uncontrolled associations for group benefits or good works. 

Tocqueville's minute account of the Constitution and the federal govern- 
ment, local institutions, the press, and prevailing ideas and attitudes about 
each element in the structure amply proved that the United States was not 
ruled by the least capable. Rather, everybody could be and generally was a 
responsible citizen, able to take part in policy making, whether poor and illit- 
erate or not. The picture was a vindication of Rousseau and Jefferson and the 
spirit of the Enlightenment. That image has become so congenial to 
Americans that quoting Tocqueville has the force of Scripture. American 
presidents never leave the White House without quoting him. The official 



538 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

mission that Tocqueville had been entrusted with at his own request — he was 
a judge 24 years old — was to study the prison system. His separate report on 
the subject contributed to a more favorable view of America. Widely read, it 
proved useful to several European countries then engaged in reforms. But 
side by side with the evident good in democracy, Tocqueville's first volume 
contained observations and predictions that gave pause even to sympathetic 
readers. The great danger was the tyranny of the majority. No protection 
against it was provided — or could be, given the principle of one man, one 
vote. And that tyranny was not legal only but social also — pressure from the 
neighbors, tacit or expressed. As for equality, it breeds envy among those 

neighbors and resentment of any sign 
I know of no country in which there is so lit- of superiority. The effect is to bring 
tie independence of mind and real freedom of down the quality of every performance 
discussion as in America. The majority raises to the average level and sometimes 
formidable barriers around the liberty of below it. With his unusual gift of 
opinion; within these barriers an author may prophecy, Tocqueville gave a descrip- 
write what he pleases, but woe to him if he ^ on f " tne American poet" that 

goes beyond them. sounds like the specifications for Walt 

—Tocqueville, Democracy in America Whitman and his themes; but he found 

(1 835 ) no works of American literature out- 

standing — it was a little early for the 
New England school — and no aspect of the civilization would evoke the 
word elegance. Summing up the genuine achievements and prosperity of the 
American people and asking to what they should be mainly attributed, 
Tocqueville answers: "To the superiority of their women." 

Tocqueville's second volume is a masterwork of a different sort, not an 
armory of facts and explanations, but a set of inferences from chosen data to 
suggest the future of political institutions in the West. Tocqueville thinks the 
onward march of democracy irresistible, and he means by democracy both 
representative institutions and the power of the masses. He did not like the 
prospect but did not rail against it; he merely totted up the losses as he had 
done the benefits. 

Another work on the United States, contemporary with Democracy in 
America, has been regrettably ignored. Tocqueville did not come over alone, 
but with his friend and fellow magistrate Gustave de Beaumont. They 
decided to observe together but to write separately, and it turned out that 
their surveys overlapped very little. Beaumont was mainly concerned with 
manners and mores. He produced three long essays on "The Social and 
Political Condition of Negro Slaves and Freedmen"; "Religious Movements 
in the United States"; and "The Early State and Present Condition of the 
Indian Tribes of North America." Unfortunately, Beaumont chose for the 
wider dissemination of his findings the medium of a novel entitied Marie. It is 



The Mother of Parliaments ^ 539 

the tale of a young Frenchman who Few pleasures are either very refined or very 

marries a southern girl "of mixed coarse, and highly polished manners are as 

blood." The book has never been uncommon as great brutality of tastes. 

translated; as a novel it is negligible in Neither men of great learning nor extremely 

spite of some strong scenes. But the ignorant communities are to be met with; 

essays and many of the chapters of the S enius becomes more rare > **»«»*» more 

, ..... r . diffused. There is less perfection but more 

tale are pure social criticism or the r 

. . . . _. abundance in all the productions of the arts. 

highest order. Beaumont recounts a 

race riot and a visit to the Utopian -Tocqueville, on the effects of future 

-. . , . . rr ,. . DEMOCRATIZATION (1840) 

Oneida colony; he offers a discussion 

of the fine arts and a forecast of the 

dangers inherent in Negro slavery and the mistreatment of the Indians. He 

lacked his companion's genius for synthesis but he was an equally perceptive 

reporter. 

Tocqueville's conclusions in the second part of his work led him to the 
subject of his next study, the ancien regime and the revolution of 1789. In it he 
concluded that bureaucratic centralization under the three Louis had already 
destroyed the internal balance of powers and prepared the way for a state in 
which all are subject to a single authority, unprotected by the old-established 
liberties of each class. Powerless as individuals, they were launched into com- 
petition with one another. Self-interest being thus made strictly individual, 
isolated, it reduces public opinion to "a sort of intellectual dust, scattered on 
every side, unable to cohere." 

* 
* * 

While ideas of democracy, plans of social justice, reform legislation, and 
the remaining strength of Suppression were changing the culture of Europe, 
another force was silently adding its influence in the same direction. At first, 
machinery affected only those who organized its use and the men and women 
who worked in factories. But by 1 830 a different type of machine came into 
being that changed the life and the minds of all peoples. The memory of it is 
nearly gone, but it was the completest change in human experience since the 
nomadic tribes became rooted in one spot to grow grain and raise cattle; it 
was in effect a reversal of that settling down. Locomotion by the force of 
steam, the railroad, uprooted mankind and made of it individual nomads 
again. This and other cultural consequences were quickly felt from the little 
stretch of land where the first public railway journey was made. 

That locus classicus was the 30 miles between Manchester and Liverpool, 
and the date was September 15, 1830. On that inaugural trip the backers of 
the engineer George Stephenson rode with government officials and their 
guests, including the Duke of Wellington and William Huskisson, well-known 



540 <^*> From Dawn to Decadence 

economist and president of the Board of Trade. Thirty-three cars carried 
them in eight trains drawn by as many locomotives. The whirlwind ride at 20 
to 25 miles an hour took them across country and over a large bog, Chat 
Moss, that everybody said was impassable and would sink the cars and the 
enterprise. But Stephenson found a way to float his rails on it and the cortege 
did not even hesitate at the supposed obstacle. 

But about halfway, at a stop to refill the engines with water, the first rail- 
road accident occurred. Amid exclamations of wonder and delight, the crowd 
poured out of the leading train on one track, while another passed slowly on 
the other. Huskisson, standing at the open door of the Duke of Wellington's 
carriage and conversing, was confused by the cry of "Get in! Get in!" He tried 
to get around the door, was knocked down by the engine and fatally injured, 
tiiough conveyed to medical help in 25 minutes. 

The accident is charged with a special meaning: from then on, human 
beings have had to sharpen their reflexes under the threat of moving objects. It 
has been a continual re-education of the nervous system as ever new warnings 
by sight and sound command the body to halt, or step in the safe direction. The 
eye must gauge speed, the ear guess the nearness of the unseen. And besides 
sheer survival, the daily business of life calls for taking in and responding to an 
ever-enlarging array of lights, beeps, buzzes, and insistent rings. 

Multiform danger on the track had to be guarded against from the start. 
Employing a man on a horse to wave a flag ahead of the train had a comic 
implication and did not last long. But for a quarter-century the risk of acci- 
dent was ever-present and multiform. One of the early catastrophes occurred 
on the Paris-Versailles line a dozen years after the English inaugural journey. 
It was doubly shocking, doubly fatal, because the passengers had been locked 
in "for safety." When the axle of the leading of two locomotives broke and the 
momentum piled up the second and the cars behind, fire broke out and made 
a funeral pyre of the injured and the dead — upward of 50. The locking-in, 
which persisted for many years on the Continent and about which Sydney 
Smith had pungent things to say while it lasted in England (<533), testifies to 
the mental disturbance caused by mankind's hurtling through space in a box. 

As a mechanical invention, the railroad consists not merely of a steam 
engine mounted on a cart and dragging another. Equally important are the 
flanged wheel, which gives automatic direction by following the rail, and the 
roadbed, which holds the rails firm and equidistant under tremendous peri- 
odic stresses. Startied and unobservant, Tennyson early got the impression 
that train wheels run in grooves, which accounts for the line in his poem 
about the world running forever "in the ringing grooves of change." Not 
long before the inaugural trip, De Quincey had written one of his finest 
essays, that on "The English Mail Coach." It celebrated the improved roads 
and solid carriages, the superior horses and expert coachmen that together 



The Mother of Parliaments ^> 541 

provided the swiftest postal service on record and thrilled the passengers — 
especially the four on top — by racing along at nine miles an hour. 

The mail also required a network of inns with horses ready to relay the 
exhausted arrivals, but that organization was simple compared with what the 
railroad soon had to install. First, enclosing the tracks to keep off people and 
catde; then, a mode of signaling to make possible "single-track working," that 
is, having trains go in each direction on one track. Fortunately, the electric 
telegraph was ready to hand, thanks to S.FB. Morse and his code. The system 
needed men to send and to convey these wire messages — despatchers — and 
also station masters, signalmen, track inspectors, brakemen, and conductors, 
in addition to the engine's fireman and driver. Putting up barriers and lanterns 
at grade crossings, installing signal-and-switch towers at short intervals, 
improving these and their successive adjuncts: the air brake, electric track cir- 
cuiting, steel-car construction, automatic stopping of engines, central 
despatching, and numerous other means took seventy-five years and many 
deaths, but made the railroad a nearly perfect human achievement. 

Railroad workers soon constituted 

a vast army, with officers and a manual D ; 1}( Tfr - r .. r - U1 . 

3 ' Rule 331 . If from the failure of telegraph lines 

of rules. They performed their tasks or other causCj a Signalman is mudMe to com . 
under constant pressure and a severe mun icate with the next block station in 
discipline, while being also subject to advance [i.e., farther ahead], he must stop 
the penalties of the law for infractions every train approaching in his direction. 
that led to accident or death. This too Should no cause for detaining the train be 
was a transformation of the character known, it may then be permitted to proceed 
of Work. Earlier, the factory had meant ™ th a Caution signal or a Caution card. [One 
regimentation, but it was plain, simple, of M Possible situations requiring stoppage 
relatively static— nothing like the life- and caution l 

and-death decisions required of the —Rule Book of the Pennsylvania Lines 
railroader, for whom avoiding injury ' ' 

was intrinsically more difficult. The 

railroad developed an aristocracy of labor marked by physical strength, skill, 
and judgment of entirely new kinds. As for increasing passenger safety by 
means of new rules or devices, it was considered at first no duty of the gov- 
ernment. In England, where progress was steadiest, the task was taken on by 
a group of brilliant engineers (often from the army) who studied each acci- 
dent and published recommendations to the competing companies; they 
were not conclusions enforceable by law. Since then, plane travel has been 
dealt with in the same Liberal fashion. 

For a good while, the men and women who traveled on the railway kept 
being amazed by it and also appalled. They wrote descriptions and prophecies 
and polemics. Wordsworth inveighed against the disfigurement of tranquil 
valleys; Vigny versified the magic change of mankind from shepherd to flying 



542 <^*> From Dawn to Decadence 



The Loco Motive machine was to be upon 
the railway at such a place at 12 o'clock. So of 
course we were at our post in 3 carriages and 
some horsemen at the hour appointed. I had 
the satisfaction, for I can't call it pleasure, of 
taking a trip of five miles in it at 20 miles an 
hour. As Accuracy was my great object I held 
my watch in my hand at starting and all the 
time, and as it has a second hand, I knew I 
could not be deceived. 

During the five miles, the machine was occa- 
sionally made to put itself out or go it; and 
then we went at the rate of 23 miles an hour, 
and just with the same ease as to motion or 
absence of friction. But the quickest motion 
is to me frightful; it is really flying, and it is 
impossible to divest yourself of the notion of 
instant death. It gave me a headache which 
has not left me. Altogether I am extremely 
glad to have seen this miracle, but having 
done so I am quite satisfied with ray first 
achievement being my last. 

—Thomas Creevey° (1829) 



adventurer on untold missions; 
Lamartine saw in the ease of travel the 
growth of mutual understanding across 
frontiers and the prospect of interna- 
tional peace. Dickens, with his quick 
sense of disaster, turned the traveler's 
sensations into a nightmarish vision 
that he reproduced in fiction more 
than once. The common people fell 
into an inevitable cliche: "Believe it or 
not, I took the eight o'clock train to X, 
getting there at 12; did my business, 
took the 2 o'clock back, and was home 
by 6." We know this, because Flaubert 
ridiculed it with scores of other plati- 
tudes in his Dictionary of Accepted Ideas." 
To the philosophical mind, the new 
marvel caused only the sad reflection 
that moving from place to place added 
nothing to intellectual or spiritual 
worth. One was the same fool or knave 
at either end of the journey. And the 



"business" done more quickly only 
added to the dominion of materialism. The businessman naturally ignored 
this jaundiced estimate and built railroads as fast as capital could be raised to 
do it. The 1 840s in England suffered the "railway mania" — dozens of lines 
projected, too many built; hence failures, lawsuits, much countryside spoiled, 
towns angry at being passed by, the coal and iron trades booming, rival 
designers steadily improving engines, rails, ballast, cars, brakes, signals, and 
operations. 

For a country such as the United States, the railroad was the means of 
rapidly developing the open spaces and their natural resources. In spite of 
recent revisionist opinion, the Middle and Far West would not have become 
populated and prosperous so quickly with the sole aid of canals and the 
pony express. Russia's hinterland remained backward for lack of railroad 
builders with greedy intentions. In Africa and the Far East, the Westerners' 
railroads gave the start to the New Imperialism by pushing trade inland from 
the treaty ports and the old outposts dating back to the 15th and 16C 
(<103). The railroad did not begin or complete the making of "one world" 
in habit and outlook, but it gave the infiltration by the West of other parts of 
the globe its strongest push. 

Alone among the products of the industrial age, the railroad generated a 



The Mother of Parliaments ^ 543 

special kind of admiration, indeed of affection blended with poetry — the so- 
called romance of the railroad. It is associated with the sound of the train whis- 
tle at night and the fleeting squares of Hght as the express rushes north; and 
during the day, with the first sight of the engine down the track, its hissing white 
plumes as it slows to a stop, the exchange of mysterious words and billets doux 
between driver and stationmaster, and the majestic departure of such a bulk of 
iron and human freight — without us. These and kindred impressions, recorded 
innumerable times, have inspired poems down to our day.° The train is a pres- 
ence in literature throughout the 1 9C in a way that the plane has not been in the 
20th. Zola's Human Beast, Hardy's "The Journeying Boy," and Anna Karenina's 
choice of suicide on the track are but a few examples out of many. 

Tolstoy, incidentally, thought the railroad an invention of the devil; 
descriptions of Russian trains in his day tend to confirm his surmise. 
Crowding in the stage coach meant four bodies with cramped limbs; but the 
railroad introduced another kind of oppressiveness by the size of the masses 
it gathered and delivered. The well-known painting by Frith, The Railway 
Station, gives an idea of the new promiscuity. And as Daumier showed in his 
painting, The Third-Class Carriage was the equivalent of steerage on ships or a 
late 20C jet plane. But between, say, 1890 and 1940, first-class railroad travel 
afforded not only speed in comfort but a unique cluster of pleasures, from 
excellent meals cooked on the train and served in style to roomy and private 
overnight quarters, and from punctuality throughout the trip to the perfect 
base for seeing the country in its three-dimensional aspect. Today, "the train" 
evokes only charmless convenience in Europe and overlong discomfort in 
the United States. Nor is the uprooting of one's being a sensation any longer 
felt; people are no longer vegetables attached to the soil but self-packing 
objects always between destinations. Motion is the normal state. [The book to 
read is The Railway Revolution by L.T.C. Rolt.] 

The railway in its prime gave the art of architecture a new direction by its 
need for a type of building unheard of before, the urban railway station. The 
ways in which iron, steel, and glass were used did not come from textbooks 
or the Beaux- Arts school in Paris; they were invented by the engineers who 
had also found new ways to design bridges for the long spans and heavy loads 
of rail traffic. In all these works, they were functionalists; that is, content to 
show rather than conceal structure. Among these innovators, Isambard 
Kingdom Brunei was the pre-eminent genius who should rank among artists 
as he does among engineers. The latest in skyscrapers and, earlier, the Crystal 
Palace where the Great Exhibition of 1 851 dazzled the world, owe their mag- 
nitude and their metal-bound glassiness to the railway and the unfettered 
genius of its builders. [The book to leaf through and read is The Railroad Station 
by Carroll L. V. Meeks.] 

Three other cultural by-products date from early in railway history. One 



544 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

is the ticket, which burst on the world in 1838 and is now the universal proof 
of entitlement — ID, theater admission, key to the hotel room, and credit card. 
The second is artificial time. Before the railroad and universal moving about, 
each town or village had its own reckoning, more or less accurately based on 
the overhead sun indicating noon. Fifty miles away to the east noon was ear- 
lier, and later to the west. This pluralism was incompatible with a railroad 
schedule. Instead, wide territories must be made to share a single arbitrary 
time, false and unnatural everywhere but along one meridian. The resistance 
to this ABSTRACTION was unexpectedly strong. In the United States it took a 
crusader who argued the cause from state to state to achieve a common time. 
A third, more readily acceptable innovation, was the new taste for 
whiskey as a drink, first for the hoi polloi and ultimately for the gentry. It was 
brought into gin-soaked England by the Irish navvies who dug the earth (by 
hand) for the "cuttings" and wheelbarrowed it aloft for the embankments. 
Their nickname, since then a byword for grueling work, is the diminutive of 
"navigator," so-called because originally recruited to build canals but diverted 
to the swifter carrier. 

* 

* * 

Trial and error in making steam engines and locomotives spurred the 
pure scientists in their research; the time of the railway mania was also that of 
Kelvin, Joule, and Mayer, who established the equivalence of work and heat. 
The motion of molecules in gases under pressure was measured and so was 
the speed of light. Whether light was propagated by corpuscles or by waves 
was argued, for the spectroscope showed discontinuous bands for colors. 
Since no one believed in action at a distance, the invisible "ether" was posited 
as the medium in which all waves, corpuscles, and other stresses and strains 
took place to produce visible phenomena. The scale might be that of the 
heavens or of the test tube, the great push-pull of Mechanism ruled, as the 
recent mathematics of Laplace and Lagrange had foretold (<439). 

So engrossing were such investigations that the amateur who also pur- 
sued other interests disappeared; seeing which, William Whewell of 
Cambridge decided that a more exact name was needed than "natural 
philosopher." He proposed scientist and nobody objected." What was not 
noticed was that in a field where equally rapid advances were being made, 
electricity, a sort of counterpoint was developing that would in future disrupt 
the mechanical scheme. The endlessly fertile mind of Faraday created the 
electromagnet and the electromotor, showed that chemical action yielded 
current, and current created heat and magnetism. Talents of the same cal- 
iber — Ampere, Oersted, Ohm, Henry (in the United States) — contributed 
essential discoveries to a science whose practical application was also in the 



The Mother of Parliaments ^ 545 

future, but which at this time helped to confirm the gratifying generality that 
all forms of energy are conserved. What is more, these energies can be con- 
verted into one another. True, the result of a conversion was not as usable as 
the original output; the steam that has driven the locomotive dissipates once 
its work is done, and the molecules that form the white condensed water 
vapor that one sees are not "available"; but none are destroyed. This is 
entropy — a turning away from use — recorded in the second law of thermo- 
dynamics, which in its generality foretells the end of the universe. 

In biology, meanwhile, besides continued thought about evolution (<455), 
the progress of organic chemistry at the hands of Liebig and Pasteur, the iden- 
tifying of the cell by Schwann, and pioneer work on nerves and brain by others 
all validated Lavoisier's notion that the living body burns like a candle, which in 
turn means that life can be reduced to the laws of mechanics. Out of these 
interchanges and parities, the synthetic mind of Helmholtz framed a general 
view of the universe as a concert of atoms linked by central forces. 

* 
* * 

At the same time as some Romanticist composers fashioned the period's 
favorite musical entertainment by uniting song with historical plots and real 
furniture on stage — in short, grand opera — other Romanticists created the full 
orchestra. It may be defined as a band of some 100 instruments in balance; that 
is, distributed by kinds in fixed ratios to ensure that any desired volume of 
sound does not obscure distinct tone colors. This grouping constituted an 
instrument by itself, the counterpart of the organ with its own tone colors 
obtained from its many stops and registers. This full orchestra and the so-called 
Romantic organ were alike products of the new industry. Improvement in the 
clarity and volume obtainable from strings came late in the 1 8C with the Tourte 
bow (<389), and some headway was made with the tubes of the woodwinds, 
but it was not until the device of keys and the invention of valves that winds 
and brass became accurate and acquired the independence that made the 
orchestra truly multicolored and capable of expressiveness in all its sections. 

The keys enabled the player to open and shut holes that he could not reach 
with his fingers when these holes were correcdy spaced for just intonation. 
Flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, and English horn — could now sound perfecdy 
in tune and perform passages formerly unplayable. Similarly, the valve pro- 
vided exact tone and wider range for the French horn, trumpet, and other 
brass. Throughout the winds, metal replaced wood (woodwind recalls an almost 
obsolete fact), and new brass instruments evolved out of imperfect but desir- 
able old ones — the tuba out of the ophicleide, itself a parvenu "serpent." 
Adolphe Sax, the inventor of the saxophone and the saxhorn (a kind of bugle), 
was at once improver like Edison and manufacturer like McCormick. 



546 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

In the same decades, at the hands of Erard in France, Broadwood in 
England, and (last) Steinway in Germany, the piano likewise underwent 
mechanization. Armed with steel wires and pegs, an improved pedal assem- 
bly, and a highly refined "action," it began its career as the first machine dis- 
seminator of music at large. Anything and everything could be arranged for 
piano. The creation of its ugly stepchild, the upright, reduced its price and 
made it usable in small quarters — it was to be found in log cabins of the 
American West. From this popularity the false impression grew that the piano 
was a kind of domestic orchestra on which any transcribed piece could be 
played and remained the same as the original. The young were made to learn 
the piano rather than other instruments; the genteel lady in "reduced circum- 
stances" turned piano teacher, and the piano tuner became a regular visitor. 

Lastly, orchestral composers tended to use the keyboard as incubator and 
testing ground for their ideas, instead of thinking orchestrally from the start. 
That the piano is percussive and monochrome and can hardly sustain a note 
should have served as a warning, but the custom prevailed of composing a 
work and then "orchestrating" it. The word should rather be "instrumenting 
it," since it is the choice of instruments at any point that gives both character 
and color to the passage. The result was a great deal of excellent music whose 
qualities are compromised by clumsy or routine instrumentation. Liszt is the 
outstanding example of a creator on the piano who had to hire others to 
orchestrate for him, until by sheer will he taught himself an instrumental style 
of his own. 

The enhanced organ owed its advent to one very young man in particular, 
Aristide Cavaille-Coll. The 19C profited from several other inventor-builders, 
but he was the early innovator, himself early in being a capable artisan at the age 

of 11 , when he was already working in 
All vertical rollers shall be made of iron, their his father's organ-building shop. Still 
pivots lathe-turned and their bearings of young, he solved two long-baffling 
brass; each part shall be carefully filed and mechanical difficulties having to do 
polished. All wooden pipes shall be varnished ^^ wind pressure an( J me smooth 
inside and out to improve their tone and their changing of stops> He went ff om frs 

durability. All metal pipes shall be made of tin tv T _ n- ^ ™ • jt->^ 

J ^ r native Montpellier to Pans, aged 22, to 

and the thickness of the metal in each pipe . . . . . . , 

, „ , , . , „ . give his talents wider scope, and by a 

shall be gauged with the utmost care, using ° L J 

. , . , happy chance had at once the opportu- 

mstruments to measure precisely without rr/ rr 

guess work. The metal in each pipe will then °^Y to compete (in three days) for the 

have a thickness proportional to the length building of a new cathedral organ of 84 

and diameter of the pipe, giving uniformity stops at St. Denis, near Paris. The young 

of tone throughout the keyboard. man got the commission, which started 

—A. Cavaille-Coll, Specifications for him on a long career of innovation, for 

the St. Denis organ (1833) he believed in adapting each instrument 



The Mother of Parliaments <^ 547 

to its individual place and use. Cavaille-Coll organs, the authorities tell us, were 
instrumental (literally in this case) in shaping the works of both the schools of 
French music for the organ. 

The recent interest in playing old music with the instruments of its own 
day has shown the difference it makes not merely in dynamics but in mean- 
ing. The absence of certain timbres and the presence of others affect the 
force and the atmosphere of the passage and dispose of the idea that a note is 
a note whether played on the kettledrum or the ocarina. Also of our time, the 
retreat from the 19C orchestra and the popularity of chamber music, pardy 
due to economic reasons, have arisen from the feeling that Romanticist pas- 
sion is passe. Lyrical love outpourings, the pangs of melancholy, the storms of 
revolt against fate, the realism of "nature painting" — all these no longer cor- 
respond to our anxieties and resentments. Just as there is today no poetry 
expressing public emotion, but only the private individual's testimony, so the 
full orchestra, with its antecedents in the collective zeal of the French 
Revolution and its equipment born of the industrial, belongs to the museum; 
or rather, serves as one for the repertoire that made it a creation unique in the 
world: Beethoven, Berlioz, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt, 
Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and their descendants down to Strauss, Debussy, 
Bruckner, Mahler, Sibelius, and Shostakovich. 

* 
* * 

The year 1848 has come to live in the official mind of western nations as 
significant of many diverse things. Its 1 50th anniversary was elaborately cele- 
brated in France, with echoes elsewhere on the Continent. The distant date 
was taken as marking the victory of Liberalism, the rebirth of democratic 
institutions, and the spontaneous awakening of working-class solidarity. Long 
memories would also recall the abolition of slavery in the French overseas 
possessions and, aimed at the same goal, the first issue of William Lloyd 
Garrison's Liberator in Boston, while in Seneca Falls, N.Y., a convention of 
women issued a "Declaration of Rights and Sentiments" demanding the vote. 

And there are concrete events to remember. Early in 1848 an armed 
revolt broke out in Paris that toppled after 18 years the constitutional but 
conservative monarchy of Louis-Philippe and his prime minister, Guizot. He 
was not a reactionary: he had battled the restored Bourbons and was a 
respected historian; but as an austere Protestant who remembered that his 
father had been guillotined during the self-purges of the revolutionists, he 
stood for order, which in his day he interpreted as let-things-alone. Unrest 
had been visibly growing for half a dozen years. Widespread economic 
depression afflicted Europe — it was the time of the Irish famine, England 



548 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

had suffered through the "Hungry Forties." In France, bad times for industry 
and bad harvests caused severe distress. Reform groups organized "ban- 
quets" for discussions that were really demonstrations against the govern- 
ment, while underground republican groups enlarged their network and pro- 
paganda. The Paris press kept up an effective critique in word and picture. 
Every week, Daumier's deadly lithographs caricatured the king and his adher- 
ents, giving his face the shape of a pear and showing up the doings and cliches 
of the middle-middle class as tawdry and dull. 

After a few days' fighting and the king's abdication, the Second French 
Republic was set up (the first dated back to 1792), the poet-orator Lamartine 
taking the lead in the assembly against Louis Blanc, the leader of the Socialist 
parties. Blanc forced the recognition of "the right to work," and as relief for 
the unemployed established "national workshops." They provided "made 
work" of doubtful use, but took care of some 100,000. But hostility devel- 
oped between Liberals and Socialists, bourgeois and workingmen — those 
who would be satisfied by purely political changes and those demanding eco- 
nomic reforms for the working class. Four months of mutual provocation 
ended in a second armed outbreak, the bloodiest street fighting Paris had ever 
seen. The workers were cut down, and the victors, by providing the new con- 
stitution with a strong executive, laid the ground for their own destruction in 
the near future (587£>). 

Abroad, the events of those six months in France fired up enthusiasm in 
the many groups that had for three decades plotted against Metternich's sys- 
tem of Suppression. Revolts occurred at many points in central Europe. 
Hungary rose up against Austria; in Italy Mazzini and his followers set up a 
Roman republic. The Irish rebelled; the Belgians fought back French insur- 
gents on the frontier. Polish exiles left Paris in droves to stir up revolt at 
home. Shortly, the Continent was the theater of local wars in which the 
demand for a Liberal constitution and a national state were confused. [The 
book to read is 1848: The Story of a Year by Raymond Postgate.] 

The conflict was savage, victories impermanent, like the several rebel 

regimes that emerged in Italy, Hungary, and elsewhere. Massacres, executions, 

forced exile, betrayals, concessions 

. , . . . .. never meant to be lived up to, a halt to 

How comes it that trade is too often dis- r 

guised cheating? Law, chicanery? Medicine, cultural activities, created a flood of 

experimental manslaughter? Literature, refugees bound for London— lnclud- 

firoth? Politics, a lie? And society, one huge ing Metternich, who fled from Vienna 

war? in a laundry cart. Suppression was at an 

— G. Ludlow in Politics for the People, end > but & e &**& and Ponces were still 

a Christian Socialist weekly fighting for their prerogative. In 

(May 13, 1848) Dresden the young Richard Wagner 



The Mother of Parliaments <^> 549 

barely escaped being shot, as were some of his fellow musicians. In Paris, 
both trade and art had come to a standstill and the press was muzzled. Berlioz 
among a good many others had no recourse but to cross the Channel to find 
a livelihood. 

In London, during the early spring of 1 848 the Chartists (= bearers of a 
charter signed by the thousands) bore down on Parliament in a huge parade. 
The main points of their petition demanded male suffrage, the secret ballot, 
no property qualification, and a salary for members of Parliament. Special 
constables were recruited to prevent rioting, one of them being Napoleon's 
nephew, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, of whom the world was soon to hear. 
The demonstration and petition had no results and Chartism faded away. 
Similarly in Germany, an assembly that had gathered at Frankfort to give all 
the Germans a national state and a Liberal constitution worked hard to reach 
consensus, but the effort came to nothing. The delegates were able but with- 
out political experience; their constitution provided for too many situations 
and too many interests; it resembled a philosophical system rather than an 
outline for action. 

At the same time, a young German philosopher exiled in London, whom 
Heine had met in Paris and thought brilliant, was also working at a plan for a 
future society. This was Dr. Karl Marx, a disciple of Hegel and already a 
marked man in both Germany and France for his revolutionary temper. With 
the son of a Manchester manufacturer named Engels, Marx was writing a 
manifesto for the Communist League. It combined an analysis of industrial 
society with a review of European history and a list of ten legislative reforms 
(income and inheritance tax, and the like) with a call upon workers every- 
where to unite in overthrowing the existing order. 

Taken all together, the ferment and bloodshed of 1848—50, lengthened to 
1852 in France, carry one message: merely Liberal demands, that is to say polit- 
ical and parliamentary, had failed. They had not overcome the monarchies and 
they had not satisfied the aroused peoples. This again was due to lack of expe- 
rience rather than of intelligence. 

Lamartine had said long before, apro- 

r ,,. .,, , t ., 1-1 Look at what is happening within the work- 

pos of poetry, it will be philosophical, rr & 

,. . i ; .,,.i \ . i m g classes. Can you not see that their pas- 

political, and social, like the times that . . , . ,. . , , 

r sions, from being political, have become 

humanity is about to go through." And social? Cjm you M ^ ^ ideas afe ^^ 

in the republican assembly of 1848, ^ spreading among them which are not 

Victor Hugo thundered: "Replace polk- only going to overthrow certain laws, but 

ical policies with social ones"; in other society itself, knocking it off the foundations 

words, provide for the well-being of on which it rests today? 

every individual, for equality has _ Tocqueville, Speech to the Assembly 
become the rule. The Romanticist liter- (Jan. 27, 1848) 



550 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

ary generations had all been "committed" — engages — and most of their spokes- 
men had written poems and prose for the Liberal cause and social justice. All 
the makers of Socialist eutopias, all the critics of mechanical progress, all the 
dissenters from classical economics said the same thing That transition from 
purely political thought to social was to be the task of the next 100 years. 
Meantime it wore the guise of an enigma to be solved. 



Things Ride Mankind 



"Mid- Victorian" is a term commonly used to condemn attitudes 
regarded as ridiculously pompous and dangerously repressive. It denotes the 
substitution of moralism for morals, which it is thought blighted the entire 
period called Victorian. But that was a span of 64 years and no moral or other 
outlook can last so long unchanged. The image as a whole is historically false. 
To begin with, moralism set in some 20 years before Victoria was born. It was 
a response to disorder ensuing from the French Revolution and its sequels in 
France, and particularly obnoxious in the English regency under the prince 
who became George IV Byron noted the early signs of "cant moral, cant 
political, cant religious." In fact, it was the force that exiled him. Its origins go 
back to Methodism, and in the early 19C its impulse to do good inspired the 
Evangelicals of the Church of England to agitate for such causes as the abo- 
lition of slavery. 

Moralism had an even wider purpose. By repressing in each individual 
the actions, words, and even thoughts that run athwart the conventions, it 
represses what might disturb the existing state of things. Everyone is a police- 
man set over himself — and as a living unit of social pressure, over his neigh- 
bor. Moralism served in parallel with overtly political Suppression. The goal 
aimed at is Respectability. The equivalent in French — la consideration avant 
tout — makes clear the role of others: how they consider us helps to keep us 
worthy of respect. To this invisible coercer is added another: the class above 
and below one's own. There is a point of difference between this balance of 
forces, internal and external, and the democratic social pressure (783>); the 
latter is not necessarily matched within 

the individual by self-control. That dif- Shopkeepers and retailers of various goods 
ference explains why the Victorian will do well to remember that people are 
period produced so many strongly respectable in their own sphere only, and that 
marked characters, fearless in promot- wh en they attempt to step out of it they cease 
ing original views and often eccentric to be so. 
in habit and deportment. Self-control —Anon., Hints on Etiquette (1836) 



552 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

at least develops a self. And the multiple achievements of the Victorian Age 
testify to the abundance of such men and women. The French phrase also 
tells us that Victorian moralism was not limited to Great Britain. The entire 
Continent lived under its sway and so did the United States. It must be added 
that in England and elsewhere the aristocracy, though diminished in power, 
could flout the conventions if they chose, and the lowest class enjoyed the 
same independence: for both it was a case of having nothing to lose. 

This freedom was most often exercised in sexual matters, for it was sex- 
uality that moralism needed most to repress. It is the strongest of the 
instincts; it makes men and women want to break through all restraints. 
Others' feelings and their rights, the judgment of family and friends, regard 
for one's safety are no barriers to erotic passion at its peak (575>); and since 
passion in its general form of libido is at the heart of every kind of fierce 
ambition, political or artistic, in either it may mean revolt. So close is sexual- 
ity to politics that nearly all revolutions and social Utopias begin by decreeing 
free love and then turn puritanical when the leaders see that license under- 
mines authority 

It is therefore a mistake to think that "the Victorians" in their pursuit of 
a purified life became blind to sexual realities. To ignore does not mean to be 
ignorant of; on the contrary, the effort heightens awareness. Hence the verbal 
absurdities of 19C moralism that were devised to conceal facts and drive away 
wrong thoughts. The body and its parts must not be mentioned; even a piano 
was debarred from having legs. The parallels today are the words used to con- 
ceal bodily and mental infirmities and spare their victims; it has been held that 
"hard of hearing" is an offensive phrase/ 

The 19C apprehension of lust also explains the theoretical character of 
the respectable woman; that is, not the living person, but the specified model. 
She must not be a temptress, which for the Bible-reading majority was the 
role that by nature and precedent she was expected to play. It is an error to 
suppose that the "angel in the house" denounced today has been the ideal for 
centuries. Although the medieval poets of chivalry exalted their lady, they 
were not self-deceived. Only in the late 1 8C, when Sentimentalism infiltrated 
the Enlightenment, did woman begin to be fragile by definition; and then, for 
shelter, the 1 9C added ignorance of large parts of life. Pure and ethereal, she 
was to be an object permanendy sacred to the male, not just in poetry or while 
being courted. 

The corresponding male image was that of a strong but coarse creature 
of instinct, who showed no emotion, never wept, and who if left alone with a 
woman for ten minutes would infallibly molest her sexually. Unless close rel- 
atives, therefore, men and women must never meet alone. This etiquette and 
what it presupposes need only to be stated to show that it could never have 
been observed to the letter by any society of human beings. It was contra- 



Things Ride Mankind <^> 553 

dieted in its own day by other theoretical and practical schemes; for example, 
the notion that the young girl must be properly trained in certain accom- 
plishments to entice the male into marriage — music, sketching, household 
management. The 1 9C was the golden age of manuals for girls and matrons. 
Mrs. Beeton wrote a classic of the genre, and in books for the perfect educa- 
tion of girls, much more than music and sketching was recommended — the 
sciences of nature and physical exercise. Accordingly, there was no outcry 
but, rather, recognition when Dickens in David Copperfield marries his hero 
first to Dora, who is close to ideal helplessness — she doesn't know that oys- 
ters have to be opened — and after the author has shown the drawbacks of a 
sweet, pure, animated doll, disposes of her and installs in her place the solid, 
competent Agnes. In a later novel, Dickens makes the young Bella say: "I 
want to be something much worthier than the doll in the doll's house." These 
last words became the tide of Ibsen's famous play about the New Woman 1 5 
years later. 

The historical record and Victorian literature alike show women of abil- 
ity with strong minds, not a few of whom wielded the power in the house. 
Had all been Doras, as the abstraction "Victorian woman" takes for granted, 
there would have been no next generation of able men, and the age would 
have been barren of accomplishment by either sex. Among the rural and 
urban workers, who got along very well without Respectability, men and 
women toiled side by side in field, factory, or shop, with no thought or wish 
for the ideal feminine role. 

These wage earners also contradicted the notion of the perpetually 
aroused male victimizing the helpless maiden. The Victorians of the class 
above adopted and established the late 1 8C meaning of gentleman. Earlier, the 
term implied birth. Now a gentleman was whoever behaved like one — in 
speech and dress to start with, but also in manners, civility, and above all in 
deference to women. There is more to say about the vigorous sexuality of 
Victorian times; here the last item to note about 1 9C moral coercion is the 
family. Its choke hold on the individual was widely effective, though the 
paternal (or maternal) tyranny was not always as extreme as represented in 
Samuel Butler's Way of All Flesh (633>). 

Good behavior in the streets was another by-product of respectability, sec- 
onded by the policeman on the beat. Nineteenth-century London was safe as it 
had not been before, lagging behind Paris and other capitals. Sir Robert Peel's 
creation of 20 years earlier, named after him the "bobby," had been slowly 
accepted after objections in defense of the Englishman's immemorial liberties. 
Unarmed and of civil manners, the disciplined men in blue swinging idle trun- 
cheons were the living image of Respectability. English became a synonym of 
law-abiding. This was a gratifying discovery, made clear to all after the opening 
of the Great Exhibition in 1 851 . The six million people, native and foreign, who 



554 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

thronged the Crystal Palace did not loot or riot but conducted themselves like 
ladies and gentlemen at a soiree. The same was true of the popular open-air 
resorts, Vauxhall, Ranelagh, and half a dozen others — except after midnight, 
when these places were tacidy reserved for assignations, though not for vio- 
lence. Wanting tranquillity after long unrest, Europeans obtained it in good mea- 
sure by what might be called home remedies. 



When Emerson wrote: "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind," he 
covered in one sentence the feature of his time that many perceived and oth- 
ers dumbly responded to. Like Carlyle, with whom he exchanged ideas, 
Emerson saw mechanism governing the mind after machinery had coerced 
the body. A people or nation was now judged by the annual output of coal and 
iron, the total tonnage of ships, the number and variety of inventions 
designed to multiply goods — all expected to increase in quantity each year. 
Classical economics was a mechanism too, and by the common measure of 
things, the makers and dealers were said to be "worth" so much. Worthiness 
was not so readily ascertained. 

Besides this revulsion against things and numbers, the complaint against 
mechanism in the 1 9C and ours has included the direct effect of machinery 
on the spirit. This is not imaginary, and it is rarely seen to be not a single but 
a double effect. The obvious part is that the machine makes us its captive ser- 
vants — by its rhythm, by its convenience, by the cost of stopping it or the 
drawbacks of not using it. As captives we come to resemble it in our pace, 
rigidity, and uniform expectations. But there is in mechanism a subtler influ- 
ence. The machine is an agent of ABSTRACTION. It is itself an abstraction in 
that it does one particular task (or at most two or three) and yields identical 
products. There is no fringe of fancy, no happy error or sudden innovation as 
in the handworker's performance. That is why machine-made things rarely 
draw our glance more than the few times when they are new and handy. They 
induce no subsequent reverie, no speculation, and no love. The robot is a 
repulsive caricature of Man. When the domestic or public landscape is filled 
with objects deprived of any aura, it is as if the world of living things had been 
reduced by abstraction to something emphatically not alive. 

It is of course true that the first stone axe or pump handle was a machine 
and looked just like another axe or handle — but not quite, the irregularity 
kept it individual; besides, most pre-industrial tools were made of wood, 
which has a life of its own. One cherishes a Boule cabinet in preference to a 
filing cabinet. It is not that metal is without appeal to the senses or that geo- 
metrical forms are unaesthetic — Art Deco showed how pleasing they could 
be; the oppression of mechanism begins when every horizon is crowded with 



Things Ride Mankind <^ 555 

the means that abstract from life and reduce it to functions. What this com- 
plaint overlooks, of course, is that the enthusiasm for progress as measured 
by production was not wholly blind or selfish. It carried the humanitarian 
hope that the ancient spectre of penury and famine would be exorcised by the 
abundance flowing from the mills and dispatched everywhere by rail and 
steam. The machine moreover relieved man of some back-breaking toil. 

Hence that booming 19C institution, the world's fair. In early modern 
times, fairs were markets held on regular dates when lack of roads made it 
hard to distribute goods. In the 1 7C Rome and Paris held the first fairs for a 
single kind of goods — fine art. Then in the mid-18C the Royal Society of 
Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London was founded, and it shortiy 
organized a fair of the now familiar kind — artifacts displayed so as to be cov- 
eted and copied. The French Revolution followed suit in 1791, with compe- 
tition stimulated by prizes. From the year 1844 in Paris and 1851 in London, 
large industrial fairs have been held at short intervals down to the present day, 
when sight-seeing tourism has been added to the lure. 

That of 1851 in London deserved to be called great in more than one 
respect. Victoria's consort, the German prince Albert, eager to make his new 
people value him, took on the project. An able organizer, he was also gifted 
with a sense of scale. The Crystal Palace erected in Hyde Park proved an 
architectural triumph. Sir James Parton built of prefabricated parts a structure 
of iron rods enclosing clear glass. A vaulted transept rose high in the center of 
the long gallery that extended (symbolically) 1,851 feet and afforded a total 
floor space of 800,000 square feet. Spread out over it were eight miles of 
tables displaying the works of 1,300 exhibitors. The striking United States 
contributions were Colt's "repeating pistol" and a smoothly working set of 
false teeth. Queen Victoria believed like others in the primacy of Things, and 
at the opening on May 1 declared it "the greatest day in our history." In New 
York City the following year a copy-cat exhibition in a "crystal palace" 
opened on the present site of the Public Library. 

* 
* * 

Who can arbitrate between the Machinists and their adversaries? In the 
second half of the century nobody denied that material betterment was a wor- 
thy goal; but many, unable to cheer progress, had to be content with decrying 
the loss of moral and intellectual elevation that progress seemed to entail. The 
imaginative philosophies and poetical passions of Romanticism, its cultural 
nationalism and generous social schemes had come to be replaced by some- 
thing called Realpolitik in one domain and Realism in all the others. The Realm 
the German word denotes things — a Realgymnasium is a largely vocational 
school. Applied to politics, the term means the policy of seeking material 



556 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

advantage instead of furthering principle. In this view Nationalism is for terri- 
tory not culture. Social reform is for feeding the masses and it must come or 
there will be violence — the class war. Until then, compete and get rich. 

It might be said that such conduct has always been the way of states, 
classes, and individuals. But the atmosphere one breathes is different when 
the vulgar way becomes the ideal. It turns the thoughtful into cynics or pes- 
simists. In the Germany of the 1 840s a group known as Die Freien asserted 
their desperate freedom by the declaration: "God is dead"; all is permitted. 
One of their number, Max Stirner, developed a system under the tide of The 
Ego and His Own that made it a duty for the individual to fulfill all his wants 
by any means at hand; there is no reason not to; EMANCIPATION has no nat- 
ural limits. 

Other types of anarchism thrived in France and elsewhere. Proudhon, 
famous for his paradox "Property Is Theft," preached the replacement of the 
central state by small, spontaneous self-governing units. Blanqui, ready for 
violence (<428), adopted the slogan "Neither a God nor a Master." Out of 
Russia, two wandering agitators and writers — Bakunin, the total anarchist 
and ferocious enemy of Karl Marx, and the more liberal (at first) Alexander 
Herzen, made converts to the Proudhonian idea that the state must be 
destroyed by the spontaneous action of the working class and replaced by 
self-governing cooperative groups. These might be federated if they choose. 
Within Russia, the new generation, according to Turgenev's novel Fathers and 
Sons, is typified by the hero, Bazarov, the systematic nihilist. 

The term implies living without doctrine, seeing no point in action. Such 
despondents found their mood philosophically accounted for by 
Schopenhauer. Born in the same year as Byron, he belonged to the 
Romanticist generation. He had helped bring into notice the sacred books of 
the East that underlay his well-worked-out philosophy in The World as Will and 
Idea. But it had been rejected for almost half a century; now its vision was 
found to be the answer to the riddle of existence. The world is will in the 
sense of desire: human life is a perpetual striving for satisfaction — in vain. 
Desire follows upon desire and in so doing creates images of truth, love, hap- 
piness, justice, or other alluring wants that can never be satisfied. It is all a vast 
illusion. The Hindus call it Maya and personify it as a goddess. There is but 
one exception to the fate of desire — art. This is a scrap of solid western 
Romanticism: art is not illusion nor always vanishing. The desire it arouses is 
fulfilled by its object. Thus the cult of art serves as refuge to the bystanders 
alienated by Progress. From his coffin corner, Schopenhauer also issued sev- 
eral volumes of essays and aphorisms in highly readable prose, salted with sar- 
casm, that treat of the disagreeables of ordinary life and how they are dealt 
with by the wise. 

What of the art that is supposed to appease desire? In the shift from 



Things Ride Mankind <^> 557 

Romanticism, the cult of poetry sub- Not long ago I read in a London newspage, 
sided into the love of prose; that is, of concerning some report of a miserable state 
the novel. Its program acquired the of things among a certain class of workfolk, 
name of Realism and made it a vogue that Umis realistic description is absolutely 
word. The ^/-portion of the word is truthful," where by realistic the writer simply 

intended to mean factually true, obvi- meant P ahiM or revoltm * 
ous in everyday experience. It was sug- — George Gissing (1895) 
gested on an earlier page that in a pre- 
cise critical sense all artists are realists: what they depict in words or paint is to 
them an object of consciousness; a dream, a ghost, an illusion is as real as a 
beer barrel or a toothache. "Realism," "realistic," as used in talking about lit- 
erature, therefore have a crabbed sense, and that sense became so rapidly cor- 
rupted that it is unfit for use by anybody who likes to be precise. 

The novel was bound to become the dominant genre of the 19C, in part 
because it apes the stance of history. It is written to sound as if its incidents 
had happened. Moreover, by describing human predicaments in a social set- 
ting, it combines psychology and sociology and discourses freely about its 
own invented people and events for the purpose it shares with history — 
explanation by ANALYSIS. 

Flaubert's Madame Bovary is often taken as the original model of Realism 
in fiction, although the ism was made a literary slogan earlier by Champ fleury 
and exemplified by his fellow theorist Duranty. Both had been impressed as 
early as 1848 by the declaration of the painter Courbet (566>), who 
announced that he would paint nothing but "the modern and the vulgar," 
meaning the commonplace. Flaubert detested the label Realist — or any 
other — but his apprenticeship is enlightening as to the intention of the term. 
Born in the second decade of the century, he imbibed Romanticist ideas and 
ideals from which he never really departed. The subject he chose for his first 
novel was Saint Anthony tempted in the desert. When the long work was fin- 
ished, Flaubert read it to his closest friends, who damned it without pity, 
unanimously. The color, the imagery, the luscious rolling sentences, the 
events themselves were found unconvincing — false and boring. Flaubert was 
crushed. Saint Anthony was burned, a martyr to Realism. Flaubert must find 
another subject and do the opposite of what he had done. 

The opposite was Madame Bovary^ the story of a provincial woman mar- 
ried to a dull man and leading a dreary life. She has vague aspirations toward 
lively society and romance in love. As a girl she had read Walter Scott and she 
pines for adventure. She takes the plunge into successive love affairs with two 
men who are differently mediocre and finds herself caught in financial dis- 
grace and passional despair that must end in suicide. Though somewhat 
expurgated for serial publication, the book was taken to court as immoral, 
though one would have thought Emma Bovary duly punished for her trans- 



558 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

gressions. Not that Flaubert killed her on that account; it was society that 
offered no escape. The book — that is, author and printer — was not con- 
demned. But in killing Emma, Flaubert had killed part of himself, as he 
implied when he said: "Emma, c'est mot'' Her aspirations, in clearer and 
stronger form, were his and were thwarted, made to look foolish, by the tem- 
per of his times. 

He took revenge in his second novel, UEducation Sentimentale, which 
means the education of the feelings, without any connotation of sentimental- 
ity. Set in Paris during the uprisings of 1 848, it takes a hero, again, full of vague 
longings and weak principles through events and among people that exhibit 
nothing but cynicism, vice, pessimism, and listlessness. [The translation to 
read is that by Perdita Burlingame.] Flaubert thus vented his hatred of "the 
bourgeois," whom he defined as "one whose every thought is low." This 
floating target was already Gautier's a quarter century earlier; it was now every 
artist's; the bourgeois ethos was regularly blamed for the lack of public hope. 

As the Realists professed to take a sober view of all things after what they 
considered the misplaced enthusiasms of Romanticism, so in discussions of 
aesthetics the word Classicism recurred in rebuke to the artistic freedom — the 
freedoms — taken by the Romanticists. This Neo-Neo-Classicism could obvi- 
ously not reinstate the forms and feelings and social attitudes that existed at 
the court of Louis XIV or the standards by which the 18C judged art and lit- 
erature. The Neos could only try to recapture the spirit of obedience and 
apply a curb to the imagination. 

In many who shared this tendency, it was by instinct rather than reason- 
ing and implicit rather than expressed. Brahms, for example, whom Berlioz 
had greeted as an accomplished young musician, did not theorize; he simply 
came to think that his technical training was incomplete and he took lessons 
in counterpoint. In the same reflex way he chose to write symphonies like 
Beethoven's instead of symphonic poems like Liszt. Hanslick, the leading 
music critic of Central Europe, did theorize and write aesthetics. He had wel- 
comed the Berliozian influence in that part of Europe when it began to be felt 
in the 1 840s, but now concluded that it had gone too far in Wagner and Liszt, 
whom he attacked in the name of Beauty in Music. 

In the fine arts one finds the painter of murals, Puvis de Chavannes, 
bending his genius to the allegorical genre so as to satisfy the need of quiet 
harmonious beauty in the place of drama. One may regard the English 
painters of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as performing the same retreat 
from the present (567>). In all these moves it is clear that the retreat was as 
much from the ugly world of industry and commerce as from the energies of 
Romanticist art. It too had disliked the world's ways, but it had braved them 
head on and offered its own massiveness as a countervailing force. 

In tune with Puvis in France, the most conscious artists other than nov- 



Things Ride Mankind <^> 559 

elists were the poets called Parnassians. Their fighting periodical was called Le 
Parnasse contemporain\ the title by itself suggests their program: stay on the 
heights with Apollo and the Muses, scorn the vulgar below Their leading tal- 
ent, Leconte de Lisle, was not a writer of manifestos. His poetic output con- 
sisted of long, beautifully wrought poems in strict form that celebrated 
scenes and stories from the ancient world. He made a point, like a number of 
other European writers, of spelling Greek names "correctly," for aesthetic 
distance, no doubt: Sokrates, Kleopatra — and not as the modern languages 
had adapted them. Leconte also chose subjects from the Near and Far East, 
labeling these poems "barbaric," that being the name the ancient Greeks gave 
to all aliens. These exotic scenes were not offered in the Romanticist tone of 
happy discovery; they were "murals" in words, exact in detail, and well- 
designed to foster serenity in the reader. As in Schopenhauer, the Oriental 
universe is a cure for agitation. Only in one sonnet did Leconte break out of 
his reserve to affirm that never would he exhibit his mind-and-heart to enter- 
tain a world dominated by "mountebanks and prostitutes." The Parnassians' 
counterpart in Italy was Carducci, who from his college days yearned for a 
return to the poise of classical antiquity and gave that need of refuge expres- 
sion in his mature work. 

The contemporary poet who at once reveled in that world and made ver- 
bal music out of it while condemning it as Satanic was Baudelaire. He made it 
his specialty to describe and raise disgust not alone at the grossness and vices 
of mankind, but at the very conditions of life. The title of his famous book, 
Flowers of Evil, is an ironic labeling of the fruits of evil that the poet finds in 
both the inner and the outer worlds. So perverse do human beings seem to 
Baudelaire that some have seen in him the influence of De Sade. In a few 
poems, for contrast and as it were relaxation, he praises sensuous beauty and 
the mind calmed by achieving order; but Realism prevails and behind his 
objectivity he despises what he believes he sees. That, in turn, is the reason he 
asks for "something new, even if there be none in the world." [The book to 
read is The Horror of Life by Roger L. Willliams.] Gautier like Flaubert, but 
without any crisis, doused his Romanticist fervor. He said he could no longer 
love, from too much ANALYSIS. He wrote poems that are, as he explicitly 
wanted, formally fine and cold; the collection is significantly called Ceramics 
and Cameos. 

Flaubert's two other novels show that he had had enough of Realism. His 
imagination wanted free play. He had been to the Near East and had found 
the Arab world a delight to the senses. He chose to re-create ancient Carthage 
as the scene of a melodramatic tale about a femme fatale, Salammbo. Then, 
undeterred by his early discomfiture, he returned to his hermit in the desert 
and produced his final masterpiece, The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Both 
works allowed him to make his pages glow with color, myth, exotic details, 



560 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

and strange words. When he was attacked for setting down improbable 

things, he referred for his facts to ancient sources about animals, geography, 

and gems that cure diseases. This circuit with Saint Anthony first and last tells 

us what literary Realism was: the search for the thoroughly commonplace and 

its minute delineation. Without help from theory it had been the technique of 

Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, and of the 

Romanticists from Scott and Balzac to 
"Very good story," he said, "but it's not what r „ . . , r • ^^ i 

, „ z, ,. , , , . , Stendhal and Manzoni, although as 

I call Realism. You don t say when it hap- i i i • * 

, , * . e . remarked earlier it was not the 

pened or where or the time of year, or what 

color your aunt's second cousin's hair was, Romanticists' single technique in any 
nor what the room was like, nor what hap- one work - George Sand herself, at the 
pened afterwards." en d of her career, toned down her exu- 

-].]. Farjeon, Number Seventeen (\92S) berance to de P ict Ae rural Hfe she 

knew so well. [The book to read is The 

Realists by C. P. Snow] 
The contrast between Flaubert and Balzac gives the best idea of the pas- 
sage from one set of thoughts and feelings to its successor. The bulk of 
Balzac's 35 volumes is devoted, like Flaubert's first two novels, to a critique of 
society by exact depiction. In Balzac's mind, his observations were as trust- 
worthy as science. In a first scheme he gave the name "Study" to each of three 
groups of stories. In a preface he stated that as Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire the 
zoologist (<501) had mapped the ways of the animal species, so he Balzac 
was mapping the human species in their native habitat. The later title Comedie 
humaine, paralleling Dante's Divine Comedy, points to the modern aspect of the 
work, Time as against eternity. "A generation," said Balzac, "is a drama in 
which four or five thousand play the leading parts. My book is that drama." It 
contains in fact over 2,000 characters and the grouping is regional — "Scenes 
of Parisian Life" — of Provincial — of Private — and so on. The unity of cul- 
ture is shown by the reappearance of certain characters in more than one of 
these Scenes. 

The amount of sheer information that the plan of his work enabled 
Balzac to impart shows him to be a Realist in purpose and execution — multi- 
tudinous accurate detail. But the scope also allowed him to have his say about 
the current state of affairs. He found it deplorable: money was everything. He 
wanted a monarchical government seconded by a pious and pastoral church 
and guided by an aristocracy of talents. It would disdain the present corrup- 
tion: "The national budget is not a safe-deposit box; it is a spray can." 

Flaubert might have seen and thought comparable things but he would 
have shown, not said them. Nor would he have ventured, as Realist, to treat of 
subjects such as Balzac treats in "A Passion in the Desert," which links a tiger 
with a woman in a way that anticipates one of Izak Dinesen's African sketches; 
or in "The Girl with the Golden Eyes," a mysterious character suggestive of 



Things Ride Mankind q*& 561 

Henry James with hints of lesbian lean- We do not get away from him; he is behind us 
ings; or "The Unknown Masterpiece" when he is not before. So far as we do move, 
(644>). To repeat the generality: we move round him; every road comes back 

Romanticism includes Realism as one to him. 

of its perspectives and techniques. — Henry James on Balzac (1905) 

Because Flaubert adopted the 
Realist's astringent technique and found it difficult, he has come to be 
regarded as a hero of literature. His friends have told us how he wresded with 
words to make each the only possible one, sweating over one page a day and 
testing every sentence aloud in his gueuloir (roaring den). It is assumed that the 
result must be flawless French. That is an error. Flaubert's prose is often 
slovenly in grammar and syntax, like that — curiously enough — of most nov- 
elists. The criticism is heard over and over about the masters; yet it may be 
this careless ease that lends their work verisimilitude. At any rate, what 
Flaubert aimed at and achieved was perfect accuracy in description, using 
technical terms if need be; spare and undistinguished dialogue; no repetition 
of words close together, because it draws attention; and of course no elo- 
quence. 

But again, Flaubert paid himself back for this torture in a satire he left 
unfinished. Bouvard and Pecuchet (names meant to depress) are retired 
clerks who talk in cliches and copy out longhand commonplace things they 
cull from print — they have forgotten why. And as an appendix to what was to 
be a dully lugubrious novel, there is a list of current bourgeois platitudes, The 
Dictionary of Accepted Ideas. The summit of Realism must be total dullness, and 
George Gissing near the end of the century makes the point. In a novel of his 
own, one of his characters is writing a novel and striving for prose and events 
so dull that nobody will be able to keep reading. 

* * 

The preeminence of the novel did not at once prevent poets from gain- 
ing the attention of a broad public; the retreat into little magazines comes 
later. England, France, and the United States had each a national poet, a 
bard — Tennyson, Victor Hugo, and Longfellow. They filled the imagination 
with lyrics and tales and gave counsel in verse on public concerns. Of these 
Victor Hugo was the only one surviving from the 1830 generation of 
Romanticists, and as political exile from the Second Empire his message in a 
volume of dazzling philippics was an indictment of that regime. Beside it 
came La Legende des Siecles — a vast panorama of human history forming a kind 
of discontinuous epic, and an equally epic novel Les Miserables* In all these 
works, no lyric abandon but grim preoccupation with social fact. 

Tennyson, especially as poet laureate, performed the same service. Maud 



562 o^& From Dawn to Decadence 

(579 >) expressed anger and despair at selfish, unpoetic mankind. InMemoriam 
tried to answer religious doubt after the shocks from science. The Idylls of the 
King allegorized the moral failings of the modern world. Only in a few discur- 
sive poems are man and his life contemplated cheerfully, with some hopes for 
the future outlined. The younger poet of equal range, Browning, was the 
more sanguine of the two, but apart from a few bouncing lyrics, he dealt in 
Realism like a novelist. His dramatic monologues depict cynicism and crime, 
and The Ring and the Book is a historical novel in verse. What is more, 
Browning's verbal technique was to force commonplace words into cragged 
lines, often producing instead of the intended Realism a series of puzzles that 
generated the Browning societies — groups of readers determined to help 
each other find out the obscured meanings. 

In the United States, Longfellow was Tennyson's twin in popularity. His 
work in that role has unfortunately drowned out his private voice; he should 
be read for such poems as the three sonnets prefixed to his translation of 
Dante's Divine Comedy and for a few fine meditations such as "My Lost 
Youth." His versions of foreign lyrics and tales are often well done. In a dif- 
ferent way, his contemporary Emerson also warrants going back to, now that 
the dry prosaic type of poem is not only in vogue but dominant. But of the 
American writers before 1 848 it is Poe whose outlook, doctrine, and genius 
left the deepest mark on western literature, thanks to Baudelaire, who served 
as his interpreter. A deliberate misfit in the United States and an acute critic 
of its literature, Poe delved into European works of all kinds for help to frame 
what would now be called his aesthetic. The product was nonetheless origi- 
nal. In "The Philosophy of Composition" he launched an idea that had a 
future: he pointed out that in any long poem only brief passages here and 
there are poetry; the rest are connecting tissue versified. True poetry, more- 
over, is not made out of ideas and it must be word music. Out of these axioms 
came the theory and practice of "pure poetry" dear to the Symbolists at the 
end of the century. Mallarme's sonnet "On the Tomb of Edgar Poe" 
acknowledges the debt. 

In addition, Poe devised and defined the short story. The form concen- 
trates the strictly necessary details so as to leave but one impression — of char- 
acter, or situation, or atmosphere. The result can rank as "pure" too, in com- 
parison with the sprawl of the novel. Early in the 20C the short form seemed 
about to displace the long from the first rank in popularity, at the same time 
as yet another of Poe's inventions was becoming an object of worldwide 
addiction: the detective story (739 >). In his fiction, Poe's predilections are 
Romanticist: the supernatural, the macabre, the erotic, the etherealized. 
Except for crime and detection, he eschewed the drabness of Realism and 
proved an isolated forerunner of Symbolism. 



Things Ride Mankind <^ 563 



* 
* 



In 1 9C England, the novel was both a source of entertainment and a 
medium of reform. The railway journey doubled the demand for it and 
installed the bookshop on the platform. Filling that appetite gave many intel- 
ligent women who were denied the professions a chance to earn a decent liv- 
ing. The output, by male, female, or genius, was abundant/ Dickens began 
with entertainment, went on to social reform, and ended with more somber 
works that combined criticism of life with study of character. At no time was 
his art restricted by the dogmas of Realism. He too loathed moneygrubbing 
and its side effects on the mind-and-heart, as he showed in Hard Times, and he 
knew how to describe the back alleys. But he also reveled in the color and 
diversity of life, to render which he made language perform miracles. He has 
passages of rhetoric and its parody, others of pure stream of consciousness; 
then too he erupts in coruscating images; he makes malaprops reveal the 
speaker's point of view; and he coins innumerable phrases that capture a 
familiar emotion and its cause. He is the most inventive manhandler of the 
language after Shakespeare. No alert reader will tolerate the foolish comment 
that Dickens's people are not characters but caricatures. Santayana long ago 
showed that the saying betrayed poor observation of the common scene; and 
were the judgment true, Dostoevsky would not have named Dickens as an 
influence on his own creations. 

Both George Eliot and Thackeray came closer to the soberness of Realist 
narrative, but her moral and social dissertations and his satirical whispers to 
the reader make them compromisers with the creed. The same holds true for 
the Bronte sisters and Mrs. Gaskell. In all of these the photographic impulse 
is strong and well seconded by the ability to convey its discoveries. But for its 
perfect employment one must go to the indefatigable Trollope and the sad, 
impassive Hardy. The one other master of the novel worked outside all cate- 
gories but his own. Meredith had a system of ideas to embody in story form 
and for this a prose of his own making. It is this medium, no doubt, and this 
purpose behind the scenes that today keep him out of favor. The prose moves 
forward by crimped metaphors that have been compared to small Imagist 
poems. They are indeed occasionally difficult, but not enough to make read- 
ers turn academic and band together in painful exegesis as they did for 
Browning and now do for Joyce. What Meredith has to offer for reflection 
and literary pleasure is not to be found in any other writer. 

His philosophy affirms confidence in nature's workings, and his ideal of 
society is the civility achieved when the natural man or woman submits to the 
policing of the comic spirit. This spirit reigns in a quarter equally far from 
Moralism and from Realism. It calls for high intelligence and quick wits in the 



564 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

service of self-criticism, not harsh or loud but uncompromising; it is acute 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS with a smile. Perhaps the best showing of the comic 
spirit's performance occurs in The Egoist No other representation of male 
self-love and arrogance undone comes close to this one, which is all the more 
edifying that the hero who is to be toppled is no fool, except along one line. 
He has charm enough to beguile, and then by impercipience to lose, one of 
the most enchanting of heroines. Meredith favors women over men, and his 
novels are full of attractive creatures who outshine — and civilize — the mis- 
guided sex. 

Readers of The Egoist vn)\ remember the character of Dr. Middleton, the 
heroine's father, who is already civilized. He is a portrait of Thomas Love 
Peacock, Meredith's first father-in-law, and he calls for special notice, not as 
such but for his own unique genius. Peacock was a satirist in verse and prose 
who has to this day a choice group of devoted readers. His novels, so-called, 
are a blend of the tale and the dialogue, ornamented with poems and bathed 
in humor that suggests Rabelais and Swift. These short works' nearest kin are 
the fictions of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (585>). Because Peacock's narra- 
tives also bring in points of classical scholarship, arguments about music and 
food and drink, and loving descriptions of Welsh scenery, they are not to 
everybody's taste; but that by their very eccentricity they represent part of the 
19C English mind in superb literary form cannot be denied. [The venture- 
some reader might well begin with Nightmare Abbey] 

The novel is the one type of literature that a good many people read con- 
tinually, every day, like the paper or the Bible. That is why it is educational and 
can be reformist. It teaches readers of all classes what happens outside their 
own ambit. City dwellers know nothing of the little village world with its rep- 
etitious ways; and small-town folk cannot imagine the diversities of the 
metropolis. The novel supplies the want. With the novel, such English 
authors as Harriet Martineau, Charles Reade, Mrs. Oliphant, Charles and 
Henry Kingsley, and Mrs. Humphry Ward had a forum where current ques- 
tions about the social system or the state of the church could be broached 
through the emotional troubles of likable individuals with names and identi- 
ties. Thus spread the awareness of a "problem." As early as 1845, Disraeli's 
Sybil or, The Two Nations had pointed to the gulf between rich and poor and had 
stimulated factory reform. As for the tons of run-of-the-mill fiction for the 
trade, it is possible that its teachings did some harm. Novels of high society 
by remote observers and romances about angelic girls and prince charmings 
could certainly turn weak heads. But the socializing effect and the soothing 
influence of the genre have been on the whole anodyne, and in the stressful 
climate of Mechanism even necessary. 

For the bright youth, one type of novel served another need: it is the 
Bildungsroman, as the Germans call it after Goethe's early model, Wilhelm 



Things Ride Mankind <^> 565 

Meister. In all its imitations it is the story of the talented youth who stumbles 
about before finding his true beliefs and his place in the world. The story of 
Pierre in Tolstoy's War and Peace is the example that stands out among the 
dozens produced in the later 19C. In today's jargon, "the identity crisis" con- 
tinues to furnish text and sermon for rearguard novelists. 

Germany alone cultivated a quiet genre of Realism in miniature, the 
novella. Its triumphs have not traveled abroad, although the names of 
Gottfried Keller, Brentano, Grillparzer, and Storm awaken vague recogni- 
tion, especially Storm's, whose Immensee has often been drafted to help teach 
intermediate German in college. The novella has been called by the writers 
themselves Poetic Realism, because compact and laconic, the form unites a 
poetic vision of the world and stark events that clash with it. The technique is 
strict: concrete details and no comment. 

A last offshoot of the novel, science fiction, was created in 1863 by Jules 
Verne. He is remembered today as the author of Round the World in Eighty Days 
because it was made into a film, but he wrote equally stirring tales about going 
to the moon, traveling under the sea, and using power at a distance by means 
of rays. He lived long enough to learn that he had a wide-ranging disciple in 
H. G Wells, but whether he actually did so is not clear. 

The balance sheet of the 19C theater is short and simple. Once the vogue 
of the Romanticist historical play in the manner of Hugo subsided in the 
1840s, stage needs were supplied by melodrama. It could be crude like the 
plays made out of Uncle Tom's Cabin, or it could be dressed up as the serious 
mirroring of life in the "well-made play."° Its best exponents were the prolific 
Scribe and the competent Dumas fits in France, well imitated abroad. In 
England, Shakespeare was put on when in despair of anything better, usually 
much cut to make the play a proper star vehicle. [The book to read is 
Melodrama by Wilson Disher, with illustrations.] 

It was Shakespeare, as suggested earlier, who inspired and discomfited 
the best poets of the time: Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne all wrote long 
verse tragedies. Like Byron's attempts, all they lacked was stagecraft — they 
were "closet drama" — Byron said "water closet" of his own plays, which was 
unjust. All these works are worth reading — once. Comedy in England found 
no successor to Sheridan, but France had Feydeau and one or two others, 
some of whose farces — for example The Italian Straw Hat— have been revived 
with success and even supplied a film. 

Submerged among those who worked to formula was Henry Becque. His 
natural sense of theater, allied to his strong yet subtle mind, produced the 
stunning comedy La Parisienne and two other plays and much drama criticism. 
Now he is seen as the founder of the Naturalistic theater; he was discouraged 
from writing more by rejections and cabals. A comparable resistance held 
back Ibsen and Bjornson for a time, and in self-defense they organized in 



566 <s^> From Dawn to Decadence 

1859 the "Norwegian Society for Theater, Music, and Language." But any 
recognition that Ibsen had created a new type of drama had to wait 30 years. 
In the sixties, he was rather admired as the author of a poem on the death of 
Abraham Lincoln/ 

* 
* * 

If in the mid-1 9C one was a reader of Schopenhauer and looked to the art 
of painting for the lasting satisfaction of restless desire, one had to go to the 
past or the Neo-Classicists for it (<558). The Realist school did not beget 
serenity. The new master Courbet offered to contemplation strictly workaday 
sights. His elder, Daumier, had done the same in his few paintings, but with 
Romanticist passion had cast a glow on the squalid. It could be argued that in 
any case the subject of a painting is of no importance; the eye should take in 
"the art" and nothing else. But that is later sophistication unheard of for most 
of the century. Response, as always during the preceding 400 years, was to the 
work's power or charm felt through the subject and its treatment — dramatic, 
psychological, allegorical, or other. Courbet's paintings have vitality as well as 
commonplace truth. The scene in which he portrays himself with his country 
neighbors, Good Morning, M. Courbet, is cheerful; and his Atelier, where he 
paints a nude amid a group of fellow artists and writers, was meant to shock: 
as a painter he had by convention the right to look at the unclothed model; as 
visitors, they have none to stand around and watch. So determined was 
Courbet to tilt at convention that he painted a female nude in an outstretched 
pose that modern magazines of superior pornography reserve for their cen- 
terfold; he entitled it The Origin of Life. 

More moving were his "Stone-breakers," weary drudges on the road, and 
The Burial at Ornans, another village scene that has the requisite grimness of 
Realism. Only when Courbet painted nature — forest glades, running deer, or 
the sea — did the doctrine relax its hold. These works are exact too, but if they 
were meant as "criticism of life," they succeed in a very distant way. They rank 
with the landscapes that members of the open-air Barbizon School, now 
elderly, were still painting: Corot with his delicate woods, Millet with his peas- 
ants, had been conscious precursors of Realism in its concern with the plain 
fact and with mute suffering. It is not surprising that Courbet had political con- 
victions that led him to side with the Commune in its rising against the gov- 
ernment after the fall of the Second Empire (588>). He helped to bring down 
the column on the Place Vendome, reminder of the Napoleonic legend, and his 
photo was taken standing by it. This nearly cost him his life; he ended it an exile 
in Switzerland. [The book to look at and read is Courbetby Sarah Faunce.] 

Pictorial Realism made adherents in Central Europe and Switzerland but 



Things Ride Mankind <^> 567 

not in numbers to be termed a school. In England it never took hold as such, 
but the cult of detailed truthfulness did bring together a group of high talents, 
who banded together as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (<558). Their name 
is ambiguous: they did not mean to station themselves before Raphael, as one 
might think, but before those who followed him — the -ites. The preferred 
subjects of the P.R.B., as it came to be known, were myth and legend, partic- 
ularly the Christian. Beauty of body and spirit was their way of criticizing 
life — the life of industry and Realpolitik. Dante Rossetti, Holman Hunt, 
Millais, Burne-Jones, and in Central Europe Moritz von Schwind were so far 
Realists that they lavished laborious care on precise representation — no dra- 
matic distortion in the manner of Delacroix (whom they admired) tempted 
them, nor anything stylized like Blake (whom they brought out of obscurity), 
nor again the fluid light of Turner. The subdued colors of the Pre-Raphaelite 
paintings, the ornamentation, the symmetry, and especially the repose sug- 
gest Plato's faith that the true reality does not inhere in the crude objects we 
move among, but in the ideal world of forms and essences. It is worth noting 
that Ruskin, who had persuaded the world of Turner's genius, gave the young 
Pre-Raphaelites his support, moral and material. To him, good painting was 
the sole test — let the artist choose his subject — short of the obscene: being in 
charge of Turner's studio after his death, Ruskin found a large collection of 
erotic drawings, which he conscientiously destroyed. 

Realism in painting obviously had a shorter life than in literature. Even 
before Courbet left the scene, Manet was leading painters away from the flatiy 
tangible, and soon the shimmering lights of Impressionism would puzzle and 
attract. It was a new way to overcome the physically harsh world: go up to the 
railway station and reduce its bulk and grime to the sparkling colors of 
Monet's Gare St. La^are (644>). All the while, of course, there flourished the 
"chromo, the lithograph in color, cheap in price and hack-produced, which 
was representational in deadly fashion. The word has remained as shorthand 
to damn a painting so lifeless in imitation that it amounts to a falsehood. The 
art of sculpture, by contrast with manifestations of Realism, remained faith- 
ful to its traditional models, from myth, history, and religion to straightfor- 
ward portraiture. 

As for music, the only "things" in it are on the operatic stage, and there 
the 19C audiences of resolute realists were given full satisfaction. Scenery and 
props and unexpected effects were provided in their native substance to the 
farthest extent manageable (<499). Other types of music, vocal and instru- 
mental, expressed realities of another kind and were appreciated by audiences 
looking for different sensations; which is not to say that among the operas of 
Meyerbeer, Verdi, Gounod, and the young Richard Wagner there are not mas- 
terpieces of the art of sound. 



568 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 



* 
* * 



A close second to the novel in educational power was the mass of histor- 
ical writing that the 19C turned out and the public absorbed. Here was the 
real without a doubt. The genre had setded its scope and style in the previous 
period (<379), but the general eagerness for it was brand new Scott's novels, 
we are assured, whetted the taste (<482) and curiosity bore on past and recent 
in equal measure. The evolutionists, well before Darwin, taught that knowing 
yesterday explained today and could be used to justify or condemn current 
positions in politics. Most of the histories of the French Revolution and 
Napoleon proved a thesis. The large works of Michelet in France and 
Bancroft in the United States unfolded the rise of the nation and its achieve- 
ments. German and Italian historians, for lack of a nation, glorified the folk. 
The progress of liberty was another organizing principle. Macaulay's History 
of England, and Froude's, Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic are classics of the 
type. The German Mommsen's vast panorama depicts the loss of liberty in 
ancient Rome and Caesar's statesmanship in the crisis. 

Macaulay has since been blamed for begetting a school of "Whig histori- 
ans," Whig meaning Liberal in the 1 9C sense. They are accused of falsifying 
our past by showing it as Progress. This objection takes it for granted that 
some interpretation will be the true view, and if so, final. Any writer of history 
aims at stating the truth, but that is only ancillary to the central role of the dis- 
cipline, which is to present patterns and permit the welter of facts to be 
reconceived. On the grand scale, Macaulay encompasses the years of the 
Stuarts' overthrow in 1 688 and the beginnings of Parliament's independence 
during the later wars with Louis XIV. If one is well versed in the facts one may 
question the historian's estimate of persons or deplore events that he cele- 
brates, but these disagreements leave a vast edifice standing and not to be 
seen anywhere else. In short, Macaulay offers more than a point of view. He 
was a master of narrative, of portraiture, and of synthesis. His famous Third 
Chapter is a model of social and cultural history, and his separate biographi- 
cal essays show their subjects as living 

_ i . T . i r . and thinking beings. 

On another occasion I was with far more emi- ° ° 

nent men, the two most learned men in the The Center who says "it was not 

world. I need hardly tell you their names— Uke ^t" is in the situation of friends 

they were Mommsen and Harnack. On each passing judgment on another friend: 

occasion the question arose: who was the "He did this, which means that." "No, 

greatest historian the world had ever pro- it doesn't, because he also did that, 

duced. On each occasion the name first men- which means this." The dispute cannot 

tioned and the name finally agreed upon was en d unless each side responds to the 

that of Macaulay. challenge: "Tell me what your standard 

— Lord Acton (n.d.) of action is." At that point, barring fac- 



Things Ride Mankind <&> 569 

tual errors that both sides will acknowledge in good faith, each will retire 
probably unconverted. Such is the reason for saying that a reader of history 
must be a reader of histor/kr — several on the same topic — and a judge at 
leisure on the points in conflict. 

Topping interpretation is the larger question: is the past recoverable? 
Some thinkers maintain that history cannot be known; the past has disap- 
peared and its debris are not adequate to resurrecting it. This metaphysical 
issue may be left to those it torments because they trust their logic at the 
expense of their memory. The 19C German historian Ranke trusted his and 
put that intuition in words that have become famous as a sort of Hippocratic 
Oath in four words for the historical profession: me es eigentlich gewesen — "as it 
really happened." 

The phrase states what the candid historian believes he is telling when he 
consults his sources and writes down his findings. Part of his confidence 
comes from another intuition, which is that the intelligent propagandist 
knows that his version of events is not what really happened; he is distorting 
for a purpose. The difference does not certify the honest man's every word, 
but it does show that just as the memories of one's own past can be verified 
by letters, diaries, and the testimony of others, so by the same method, rooted 
in memory, the past can be in large measure described and known. 

Reliableness in history is linked with one more subject, easily confused, 
particularly by historians themselves when uttering the pretension that his- 
tory is a science (654; 655 >). It commits them to minute accuracy: they think 
no piece of work valid, much less "definitive," if every statement in it could 
not be defended in a court of law So strong is the fetish that at one time 
young professionals were virtually forbidden to write about subjects covering 
more than a few years of the past in a region correspondingly narrowed — 
what a derisive critic called "biennial history." Otherwise, it was impossible 
to make sure of every last detail. 

Out of this decree came the most illogical of thought-cliches: "If I find 
this error on a small point, how can I trust the author on the big ones?" On 
this principle Froude was for years maligned as "inaccurate" by Freeman. 
This impeccable colleague was found after his death to have been even more 
lavish of small errors than Froude. ° In the physical sciences, to be sure, it is at 
times imperative that every decimal be 

right. At other moments, ranges of fig- His ^^^^ m neither specious nor 
ures or simple orders of magnitude misleading. There are qualities that outweigh 
suffice. But in the popular conception occasional and trivial inaccuracy and Parton 
of science small and large are of equal has them while the other biographers of Mr. 
moment and the superstition has been Jefferson have not; and the worth of the book 
transferred to history, where a rational should be assessed accordingly. 
Theory of Error would legislate just — Albert Jay Nock, Jefferson (1926) 



570 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

the opposite: attend most carefully to the big points and judge the impor- 
tance of details by their consequence. Albert Jay Nock dealt with the issue in 
his Jefferson, with a finality that should silence the pedants. 

The zeal to produce only cautiously curtailed works assumes that, as in 
science, the historian's work will form part of a coherent structure — the final 
report "on what really happened." The monograph to setde a particular ques- 
tion is indeed useful and admirable, and the great historians depend on many 
such for their large works. But these single-point studies do not, as they stand, 
fit in with others to form an edifice. Again, the would-be scientists gave 
themselves another commandment: history must not be literary; that is, 
agreeable to read. Macaulay was the horrid example. His style is sinewy, dra- 
matic, its rhythms suggest the public speaker's voice, the portraits are life- 
like — the whole is literature as the author intended it to be; he struggled with 
the arrangement of parts like a novelist. ° Most 1 9C historians can be read 
with pleasure; those who came after and were afraid to write well encouraged 
worse writing in their disciples and these ended by seeing the public for his- 
tory turn away, leaving the glib popularizer a free field. 

* 
* * 

The 19C historians who were not Whiggish and not fond of heroes were 
likely to be pessimists and fatalists — Guizot, for example. They must have 
known in handling their sources that each piece of paper was the work of a 
human hand and mind, but the feeling of an irresistible push embodied in the 
great anonymous mass of peoples and nations drove these writers to the phi- 
losophy that sees fate in geography, climate, race, or some other material fact. 
The individual has no true choice in what he does and mankind is a cast of 
puppets. 

This assumption current science seemed to be proving. The philosopher 
Ludwig Buchner, writing in die 1 840s, put the dogma in striking fashion: Ohne 
Phosphor Kein Gedanke — without phosphorus, no thinking possible. The false 
inference followed: thought is nothing but phosphorus. The "nothing but" in 
any form is REDUCTIONISM. Not all scientists were avowed materialists, but 
nearly all assumed the primacy of matter, which is why the appearance of 
Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 produced at once acclamation and conster- 
nation. Up to that time, evolution had been explained as the result of some 
action on the part of the creature, and this meant an intrusion of the will, even 
if unconscious, in the workings of nature. Now Darwin proposed a purely 
mechanistic operation. It made the old idea of evolution fit under physics by 
means of the idea of Natural Selection — not wholly new but well neglected. 
Ten years earlier, the philosopher Spencer had coined the phrase "Survival of 
the Fittest," but the suggestion needed the support of the heap of facts that 



Things Ride Mankind <^> 571 

Darwin had observed during his voyage on the Beagle and since. He and 
Alfred Russel Wallace independently adopted the same hypothesis a few 
months apart, which, in view of Spencer and the forgotten forerunners, indi- 
cates that the notion was in the air. It was made most congenial by the 
renewed vigor of materialism generally — things in the saddle first and last. 

Thinkers of opposite mind (includ- 
ing notable scientific figures) rejected Life and the Universe show spontaneity: 
Darwin's hypothesis with vigorous Down with ridiculous notions of Deity! 

arguments from many standpoints, Churches and creeds are all lost in the mists; 
especially the religious. Thus began a Truth must be sought with the Positivists. 

controversy lasting half a century and Wise are their teachers beyond all 
known as the warfare of science and comparison, 

religion. As for the public, it could no Comte, Huxley, Tyndall, Morley, and 

longer take the casual view of evolution Harrison. 

as "interesting" or merely plausible. Who will venture to enter the lists 
The crowd was gradually convinced With such a squadron of Positivists? 

that Darwin had proved it. The popular There was an ape in the days that were 
view was: Man is descended from the earlier; 

apes. It lent itself to jokes, cartoons, and Centuries passed and his hair became 

epigrams by skeptics. Disraeli said that curlier; 

as between Man an ape or an angel, he Centuries more gave a thumb to his wrist- 
was "on the side of the angels." Then he was Man and a Positivist. 
Gobineau said: "not descended from —Mortimer Collins (1860) 
the apes, but rapidly getting there." 

Everybody could see that Natural Selection was another link in the stout chain 
of Things uniting physical science, materialism, Realism, and Positivism. 

Nothing said or written has, to this day, succeeded in erasing the confu- 
sion between Evolution and Natural Selection. Likewise, scientists are still 
convinced that Origin of Species assigns natural selection as the cause of evolu- 
tion, whereas the sixth and last edition of the book reinstates two others: 
Lamarck's use and disuse and environmental influences. Darwin later wrote a 
large book illustrating the further role of sexual selection. This cloudy state of 
affairs has even thickened. Here is not the place to trace out the lines of 
thought that lead from Darwin to the quite different Darwinism and on to the 
conflicting beliefs that are now held by the authorities in various centers of 
research and publication. Nobody questions evolution — there seems no rea- 
son to, but what is taught about its character and its mechanism is by no 
means consistent; yet the diversity of views is rarely confided to the student 
or educated reader. [One small book to read is Darwin Retried 'by Norman 
Macbeth.] 

In its own time, the vogue of natural selection among intellectuals 
affected other concerns than religion. Applied to politics it bred the doctrine 



572 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

that nations and other social groups struggle endlessly in order that the fittest 
shall survive. So attractive was this "principle" that it got the name of Social 
Darwinism. Thomas Huxley, "Darwin's bulldog," finally felt bound to disown 
the notion. In the same Oxford auditorium where 30 years before he had 
ridiculed and routed Bishop Wilberforce for invoking moral and Scriptural 
considerations, Huxley now preached the distinction between evolution and 
ethics: human groups are bound by moral laws. 

But this backtracking did not change the minds of struggle-for-lifers any 
more than Huxley's recanting his article on man as an automaton influenced 
the materialists. The public was only the more bewildered and disturbed, as 
Tennyson had been very early by the Spencerian spectacle of nature no longer 
Wordsworthian, but "red in tooth and claw" Tennyson was the national poet; 
and Spencer the international philosopher. If these leaders of opinion por- 
trayed a universe in which mankind is moved by blind forces, then their pre- 
diction that all was for the best gave doubtful comfort — how did they know? 
What should one believe? The physicists had calculated exactiy when the sun 
would go out. These thoughts alone were enough to darken life. 

The Rock of Ages itself was crumbling, for science, history, and ANALY- 
SIS had reinvigorated the Higher Criticism (<359). In German hands, the 
Bible was being parsed and it yielded many reasons for doubting. David 
Strauss had secularized the life of Jesus and George Eliot had translated his 
book into English; the French had a version by an even worse desecrator, an 
unfrocked priest celebrated as a scholar and man of letters, Ernest Renan. He 
was sure that science would make all other works of the mind obsolete: phi- 
losophy, theology, literature would disappear. Faith was folly. An Anglican 
bishop from Africa had told an ecclesiastical court that was trying him for 
"errors" that one of his Zulu converts, after learning his catechism, asked: 
"Do you believe all that?" And a handful of other Anglican clergymen wrote 
a collection oi Essays and Reviews that conscientiously undermined Christian 
beliefs. They too were tried but not defrocked. Apart from the dying remnant 
of Oxford "Puseyites" (<532), only the Catholics, with Newman their superb 
writer and apologist, seemed unshaken. 

When the Victorians are lumped together as complacent hypocrites and 
prudes, it is forgotten what dismay and self-searching was occasioned by this 
debate on religion and science. The agony that a believer who was also a man 
of science could undergo may be read in Edmund Gosse's memoir Father and 
Son. The wider battle of ideas was carried on in periodicals and also in the 
Metaphysical Society, a group not of professional philosophers but of leaders 
of social and religious thought who read and discussed papers at each other 
without convincing anyone. Their views and characters were well dramatized 
by W H. Mallock in his fictional (and amusing) New Republic. 



Things Ride Mankind <^> 573 

These imperative choices for thinking men and women formed the sub- 
stance of Matthew Arnold's work as critic and interpreter of the chaotic 
scene. He himself was a sufferer. His father, with never a doubt, had created 
at Rugby the model English "public school' ' on the principle that moral con- 
duct according to the Decalogue was the core of the good life and should 
therefore be the center of education. His son could have no such confidence. 
To him religion was but "morality touched with emotion," and if moral rules 
derived from religious revelation, neither had a solid base. 

According to Arnold, the behavior of the English social classes was 
touched neither by spiritual nor by intellectual forces; the upper orders were 
barbarians, the middle classes philistines. Those farther down — he called 
them the Populace — could not be blamed for anything they did. Instead of a 
society there was anarchy. The only cure Arnold could think of was culture, 
which he defined as the best that has been thought and said in the world. The 
prescription embraced the Greco-Roman and the Hebrew (biblical) tradi- 
tions, amplified by the literature of the West in modern times — in other 
words, the humanities or liberal arts. 

Another critic of the anarchic temper was of a different cast. James 
Fitz james Stephen (later to be Virginia Wolf's uncle) was a learned judge and 
political theorist who in the early 1 870s published Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 
a rejoinder to Mill's essay On Liberty. Stephen was a Liberal and a firm 
upholder of free speech and action, but he opposed Mill's principle that the 
ideal of liberty forbids interfering with any individual act that is "self-regard- 
ing" — for example, drunkenness. Stephen argued that very few acts are 
entirely self-regarding and that the strength of the social bond depends on a 
general agreement about what is acceptable in behavior — an agreement that 
must be enforced. His experience in court and as codifier in India of laws that 
prohibited such (self-regarding) customs as widows' throwing themselves on 
their husbands' funeral pyre confirmed his study of English law, which 
showed libert/kf concretely defined as they grew. 

In countering the abstractions of Mill and Bentham, Stephen used words 
which, although perfectly true, shocked the loving temper of the age, made 
him seem /liberal, and account for his remaining misknown. For example, he 
says that through the criminal law, "men rightfully, deliberately, and in cold 
blood, kill, enslave, or otherwise torment their fellow-citizens." The reader 
cannot refute the statement but would rather not have it thrust upon him. 
Again, Stephen favored government by consent of the governed, but he 
pointed out that all governments depend on force and the threat of force — 
the greater the force and the surer the threat, the better for peace and justice. 

These stark truths did not make him an ogre on the bench; he was an 
energetic defender of the weak and wretched when they were mistreated, and 



574 <5*& From Dawn to Decadence 

he had the respect and even the friendship of his opponents, thanks to the 
civil habits of Victorian debate. Today he must be counted as a harbinger of 
Liberalism's Great Switch (688>). 

It must be added that since Arnold, the indefinite cure by culture has 
been expounded by many minds, from Woodrow Wilson to Robert Hutchins, 
and on practical — not fanciful — grounds. It is part of the resistance to SCI- 
ENTISM. In Arnold's day, Oxford and Cambridge were far from founts of cul- 
ture in his sense. Most undergraduates caroused, and the queen opined that 
education ruined the health of the aristocracy. The Workingmen's Institutes 
did much good by giving the able in the underclass an opportunity to better 
their lot, but the training was mainly technical or scientific, for obvious prac- 
tical reasons. At the universities, so feeble was the teaching and faint the 
research that Parliament ordered a review leading to reforms. It is from this 
mid-century overhaul that Oxford and Cambridge acquired the aura their 
names still exhale. 

But this academic renovation hardly fulfilled Arnold's hopes. As an 
inspector of secondary schools he recommended an adaptation of the French 
lycee; but die improvement of die old English "grammar schools" and of the 
ones set up after the Education Act of 1870 was slow, and he did not live to 
see any rising tide of culture. Arnold died full of the melancholy that moves 
one so deeply in his poem "Dover Beach," which ends by urging a desperate 
remedy, one that has often been echoed since: let us two forlorn lovers be 
true to one another. [The book to read is Victorian England: Portrait of an Age 
by G. M. Young.] Moments when despair is redeemed by love do not occur 

on demand and would not satisfy per- 
... the world which seems sons who, resentful of materialism, on 

To be before us like a land of dreams, the one hand, and an outworn creed on 

So various, so beautiful, so new, the other? fed con f lne d and bored. 

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light. They ^ ready for adventure into me 

—Arnold, "Dover Beach" (1867) unknown, provided it respects intu- 

ition, hope, and the improbable. 
This is what happened in the middle of the century. A craze swept over 
Europe and America for communicating with spirits by table-turning. A 
game for some, for others it was a solemn enterprise; many drew comfort 
from ghostly seances. Mediums sincere and fraudulent emerged from dark 
corners, bringing messages or apparitions from the dead. The leader of the 
profession was Daniel Dunglas Home (pronounced Hume), who supplied 
answers and evidences from the other world and performed superhuman 
feats, such as floating out of one window and back again through the adjoin- 
ing one. It was not only the credulous bourgeois who believed in these proofs 
of the supernatural. The poet Elizabeth Barrett was a believer in Home's 
"powers," and thereby enraged her husband, Robert Browning. He subli- 



Things Ride Mankind <^> 575 

mated his fury in a graphic poem, "Mr. Sludge, the Medium." Victor Hugo, 
exiled on his Channel Island, spent a good many evenings at table-turning 
before deciding that it was foolishness. Berlioz satirized the practice in his 
music column on hearing what inanities were being attributed to Mozart and 
Beethoven. The physicist Tyndall took care of the phenomena rather 
unphilosophically by clamping one of the table legs between his own. But 
other men of science credited some of the "manifestations" and thoughtful 
curiosity ultimately led to founding a Society for Psychical Research that 
would conduct systematic inquiry (664>). The paradox of spiritism is that 
starting out as an antidote to the tyranny of matter — things — it ends up prov- 
ing spirit by producing things to see, hear, and feel. 

* 
* * 

The Darwinian discussions about animals and descent brought up topics 
not commonplace before and thereby encouraged a preoccupation con- 
nected with both love and moralism. After the date of Origin of Species, one 
hears of a physician — Dr. Allbutt — who held radical views on sexual matters 
and who imparted them to selected groups of listeners. George Eliot was one 
and Herbert Spencer very likely another. The subject was the physiology of 
reproduction. Lady Amberley, then aged 24, and her husband, who were to 
be Bertrand Russell's parents, were attending other lectures on physiology 
given by a woman doctor named Garrett. Scattered hints elsewhere warrant 
thinking that exchanges of opinion and information about birth control were 
also taking place. 

As indicated earlier (<552), Victorian awareness of the sexual instinct 

was ever-present. Now it seemed to be finding expression under the aegis of 

science, thus opening the educated mind to its actual workings. The London 

Times taught the public a more general lesson on the same subject apropos of 

the Northumberland Street case of 

1861. A respectable major had been 

, j . i rr- r 111 At the bottom of the whole story lies one 

lured into the office of a man who had J 

. powerful, absorbing, and uncontrollable pas- 
lent money to the maiors beautiful . . , , , . 

J ' sion. A sight has met the eye, a sense is awak- 

mistress and had tried to kill him so as enedj a new ^ faftd dtaccwefy is made; me 

to win the woman. The major, though powers of fascination have ^o^ meir spell , 

badly hurt, killed his attacker instead. an( j a sou i mat was foe a mom ent ago is cap- 

The Times offered what amounts to an tive and enthralled. No human mind has an 

apology of the crime passionnel. immunity from the danger of such attacks; 

The silence was broken also on a everyone is exposed, whatever be the texture 

higher plane. In the late 1860s young of his mind, coarse or refined; he is exposed 

Swinburne published Poems and Ballads, as bem g a man - 

in which a dozen and a half pieces — The London Times (August 8, 1861)° 



576 <5^> From Dawn to Decadence 

praised the sexual act and its vagaries too. The author was "an unclean imp 
from the pit," but he was read. In France a little earlier, Baudelaire had caused 
a similar outcry with poems in his Fleurs du Ma/ that took as subjects physical 
disgust and sexual perversion. They were condemned at law, even though 
their tone was not cheerful like Swinburne's. To the same decade belong two 
other works by masters: Wagner's Tristan and Isolde in which the adulterous 
love driven by the potion inspires the Liebestod music which simulates the sex- 
ual act; and Meredith's narrative in sonnets, Modern Love, in which, with fleet- 
ing physical details, the intellectual type of mismating is dissected. 

One part of the community had no need of such awakenings. Artists and 
literary men had by and large not put on Respectability; they had no need of 
it, not being in business, politics, or the professions; their work made its way 
by and for itself — or it did not. But to be at ease and in good company while 
producing it, they created in the 19C an institution tailored to their wants: 
Bohemia. It afforded cheap living, enforced no moral code, allowed modes of 
dress as singular as desired, and required no sustained solvency. It was first 
established in the "Latin Quarter" on the left bank of the river in Paris [see 
the two operas on this Boheme\\ it had branches (spontaneously) in other cap- 
itals; and it has remained a refuge for the gifted young and the anti-social of 
any age. There too the artist failures, often headed for drink or drug addic- 
tion, are fraternally looked after. Economic support comes not alone from 
the working girl who lives with the poet and feeds him, but also from the local 
shopkeeper or restaurant owner, patrons of the arts who should have a com- 
memorative plaque on their premises. 

Toward the indiscretions of artists prominently before the public or fig- 
ures from politics or the professions, the Victorians' attitude was ambiguous. 
Like the valiant major in Northumberland Street, Samuel Butler had a mis- 
tress, but not for love and not to live with — as a mere convenience, though 
she was evidently an intelligent woman whom he treated generously and with 
respect. He himself qualified as respectable, being discreet and his books 
hardly known. Dickens offers another illustration on the positive side. He had 
wedded the wrong sister and endured a painful marriage for many years. He 
then fell in love with a young actress and rumors of adultery circulated that 
were in fact untrue. Thereupon, against all advice, Dickens felt compelled to 
explain his domestic situation and deny the rumor by publishing a statement 
in his own paper and in others by a press release. (He was angry when Punch 
thought the news outside its purview.) The press criticized and the public was 
stunned but did not withdraw its admiration or esteem. Later, the young 
woman did become his mistress — without his advertising the news — but 
both felt guilty ever after. Marian Evans (George Eliot) was not ostracized by 
all good people for "living in sin" with another well-known writer, G. H. 
Lewes. 



Things Ride Mankind <^> 577 

Although Dickens's hold on his public and George Eliot's on hers were 
undamaged, the career of the most promising liberal politician, Sir Charles 
Dilke, was ruined when his mistress's husband sued for divorce. The facts dis- 
closed were in truth unsavory and he made a poor witness in his own defense. 
Meanwhile, Gladstone, the recurrent prime minister, came close to disaster 
when he was seen talking with prostitutes on his way home from Parliament 
late at night. He was able to prove that he did not pursue the accost except to 
find out if he could help redeem the woman from her sexual bondage. This 
modey of arrangements and outcomes sounds remote from the Romanticist 
loves of Byron, Liszt, George Sand, Musset, and Metternich. It is rash to 
draw broad comparisons from scattered instances, but there is about the lat- 
ter-day cases a suggestion of the low spirits, a resigned acceptance of the sec- 
ond best, that belong to the mood of Realism. 

A last word must go to a subject which, even though not concealed today, 
is as obsessive now as it was in the 1800s. The Victorian output of pornogra- 
phy was abundant as at present, at both times a by-product of frustration; the 
word is in order, for sexual activity, however free, does not necessarily bring 
sexual satisfaction (790>). As to literary skill and inventiveness, some of the 
Victorian fantasies in print attained heights that the paperback and the Web 
have yet to scale. [The book to read is The Other Victorians by Steven Marcus.] 

* 
* * 

When Darwin and Huxley talked about "favored races," meaning the sur- 
viving fittest, they were referring to the varieties of any animal species. But 
another group of scientists and publicists, using the same words, meant 
specifically varieties of men. The 19C was the heyday of physical anthropol- 
ogy, which divided mankind into three or more races. It was taken for an 
exact science in spite of its conflicting statements, and it was also the play- 
ground of historians, social theorists, and politicians, who surfeited the pub- 
lic with tomes, monographs, pamphlets, and magazine articles. The words 
Celt, Caucasian, Aryan, Saxon, Semite, Teuton, Nordic, Latin, Negro, 
Hamitic, Alpine, Mediterranean mingled with "cephalic index" — "dolicho-" 
"brachy-" and "/ff&ro-cephalic" — and other technicalities of the laboratory. 

Mention has been made of what came before: the explorations of the 
18C, which supplied data about distant tribes physically distinct; the early 19C 
linguists' launching of the Aryan language and "race"; the anatomists' 
phrenology (<456; 503). All these merged in or with the skull. For it was the 
skull, its bumps forgotten, that the mid-century anthropologists took as the 
diagnostic sign of the races. Yet in another quarter there persisted the histori- 
ans' loose system going back to Tacitus about the different traits of the 
Germans, Romans, and Celts, and their innumerable subdivisions with sepa- 



578 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

rate names. And in addition there was the biblical division into Semite, 
Hamitic, and Japhetic, which overlapped one more, the visual: red, yellow, 
black, and white. 

Using the latter scheme loosely, the Comte de Gobineau published in the 
1 850s a two-volume work on The Inequality of Races. It dealt more with cultures 
than with races, being an early cry of alarm about the fate of the West's high 
civilization: it would perish by the admixture of the yellow and black races' 
folkways. Not widely read until much later, when the book by its title chimed 
in with the floating hostility of groups and nations, it then gave the word race 
increased prominence. Gobineau himself talked race but behaved always 
unlike a racist, as if on the individual plane his conclusions did not apply — a 
notable case of theory without practice/ 

All these fragments of thought and meaning attached differently by dif- 
ferent intellectuals to the notion of race obtained their scientific coloring 
from the skull anthropologists. They measured the dry specimen lengthwise 
and across, divided the latter measure by the former and multiplied by 100 to 
obtain their index. The three Greek prefixes cited above mean long, broad, 
and middle, and by the range within which an index falls, an individual is clas- 
sified. The line separating one range from another is of course arbitrary, and 
some zealous workers found more races than others by subdividing groups. 

The principal scientist engaged in this measuring and speculation was Paul 
Broca in Paris. Noted as a surgeon and an authority on anatomy, his contribu- 
tion to physiology (among others reviewed in a recent book) ° was the localiza- 
tion of the speech function in the brain: Broca's convolution. That he spent so 
much time on the outside of the skull (so to speak) testifies to the power of 
ideas in the air. He acknowledged that the cephalic index was not a natural fea- 
ture and hence that the races derived from it were likewise an artifice. 

The next step was to find concentrations of each type of skull in the pop- 
ulation. This game was facilitated, unexpectedly, by the building of railroads. 
The land taken for them often included disused cemeteries, and the exhumed 
skulls went to those most eager to exploit them. The former inhabitants of 
the locality were then found to belong, all, or most, or few, to the long- or the 
broad-headed race. The final step was to link the index with other character- 
istics by ascertaining the traits of the skulls' owners when alive. (Measuring 
skulls in the living was uncertain owing to hair and tissue.) To find these traits, 
history and geography were consulted. It appeared that long skulls clustered 
in northern parts, had blue eyes, blond hair, and tall stature; southerly people 
had broad skulls, with brown eyes and hair and were short. Broca's terms and 
digits soon formed the underpinning of a new "science" named anthroposo- 
ciology. In it blond hair and blue eyes meant Nordic, which meant Aryan, 
which meant superior. 

Rudolf Virchow, famous as a physician, public man, and anthropologist, 



Things Ride Mankind <^> 579 

noticed what apparently nobody else had seen, that the Germans were not all 
tall, blue-eyed blonds. He conducted a vast survey of German schoolchildren 
which showed over a third of them to be short and brown in coloring. It 
should have put an end to anatomical chauvinism, but it did not. The fantasy 
went on: in the superior long skull resided a brain that was self-reliant, enter- 
prising, a likely planter of colonies and founder of empires. His German 
ancestors were truly noble — read Tacitus (<9). By contrast, the broad skull 
denoted a subject race. Living under regimentation by a strong state (the 
Roman empire) had affected its character permanently. A broad skull would 
most likely be a proletarian and a socialist. 

Not all who argued about race for 60 years believed the same solemn fic- 
tions, but almost educated westerners believed in the root idea that race equals 
character and uttered some fiction of their own. There were Celtists who 
exalted the race's imagination. Many in England had attacks of Saxonism. In 
southern Europe, "Latin" leagues were founded to fend off the Teutonic bar- 
barism. In Central Europe, Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism (mostly reli- 
gious) opposed each other and all others. History and literature were ransacked 
for evidence of former eminence and "purity of stock." There were a few crit- 
ics such as Alfred Fouillee, who reaffirmed the unity of the human race and the 
autonomy of ideas. They were rare. Until the end of the century, the best men 
of letters kept explaining art, tempera- 
ment, or destiny by some casual or Masses of men will be exterminating one 
extended reference to race. [The book another for one degree more or less in their 
to read is Race: A Study in Superstition by cephalic index. 
Jacques Barzun.] — Alfred Fouillee (1893) 

* 
* * 

The contentions about race, which often meant nation, expressed vari- 
ous kinds of aggressive feelings, triumphant or balked. There was pride in 
industrial power and in the New Imperialism making inroads into China and 
Africa. In Europe, after eight wars, with and against different partners, Russia 
and the Turks had been defeated and Italy and Germany at last unified. The 
first of these wars, the Crimean, brought to light such incompetence in the 
organization of the English army, at home and in the field, that it could not 
be concealed. The suicidal Charge of the Light Brigade caused by a blunder 
got celebrated in Tennyson's poem and the paradox of a corrupt and ignorant 
officer corps being versified and as it were honored by the poet laureate 
heightened the longing for the soldier's selfless courage. Tennyson had 
expressed it earlier in his monodrama Maud, which contains his finest love 
lyrics. The hero is a despondent critic of society who sees his true love lost to 
wealth. The worldly, exploitive, "realistic" society, says Tennyson, needs cau- 



580 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

Why do they prate of the blessings of terizing by the fire of war. In the war 

peace? that came, more soldiers in the Crimea 

We have made them a curse. died of disease and insanitary hospitals 

Lust of gain in the spirit of Cain, than by gunfire. Nor did the war 

Is it better or worse? accomplish much. Its one great benefit 

When the poor are hustled and hovelled tQ Enghnd and? by extension, to the 

together like swine ... , , •, c 

& world, was the emergence of a true 
And chalk and alum and plaster are sold to 

„ , , heroine, 



the poor for bread. 

-Tennyson, Maud: a Monodrama (1855) 



Florence Nightingale 



Her story has so often been told — and so well told° — that here it is nec- 
essary only to give a reminder of it in outline. She felt the stirrings of her voca- 
tion as a teenager, and then had a long struggle with her family before she was 
able to take the first steps. It was reasonable for people of high standing to 
prevent their daughter from becoming a nurse. The occupation was not 
unjustly associated with drunkenness and loose morals. Florence's strong will 
prevailed. After a tryout in Germany when aged 33, she was at last able to 
show what she could do. She set new practices and new standards for nursing 
in a small private hospital in London. Her demonstration attracted notice in 
the medical world and an intelligent minister of war, Sidney Herbert, enlisted 
her help in the Crimean theater. 

What she found defies description, but with scant resources and few 
assistants she installed sanitation and system, and developed new treatments, 
making ward rounds daily, even if it meant being 20 hours on her feet. The 
stricken soldiers — upward of 5,000 at one time — soon regarded her as a 
saint, an angel sent to save their lives. 

Back home she refused further official work, but kept up her influence 
with the aid of the large sum that had been raised in her honor. Her genius 
was obviously not limited to the practice of nursing. The activities with which 
she filled her long life show that she was one of the great administrators of 
history. The art always implies political sagacity, and so true was this in her 
case that for years the British government kept consulting her on many deli- 
cate subjects, including India, where she had never been. Her glory is to have 
turned a menial and despised livelihood into an honorable profession. 

England's ally in the Crimean War was Napoleon III, the destroyer of the 
Second Republic of 1848. He had done so by getting elected as its president, 
on the strength of being "the nephew of my uncle," and once in office had 
first made himself "Prince president for life" and then Emperor. (The son of 
Napoleon I, who should have been II, died young and never ruled.) The steps 
to the throne entailed the coercion, imprisonment, and exile of opponents, 



Things Ride Mankind <^> 581 

after some street fighting. The illegalities were covered by plebiscite, the vote 
of the entire nation. With this device Napoleon III showed the way to those 
20C dictators who can say their rule is democratic because it was sanctioned 
by a popular vote. 

During the republicans' last stand in Paris there was in the city a young 
Englishman of extraordinary character, who should be known for his later 
accomplishments, as well as for his bystander's view on the new Caesarism. 
This youth of 25 was 

Walter Bagehot 

The first thing to know about him is how to pronounce his name. It is 
Badjet. And the next is that his singular genius derives from his double vision. 
In any conflict of persons or of ideas he was always able to see that neither 
side was perverse or stupid, but had reasons for militancy; and he entered not 
only into these reasons but also into the feelings attached. This is a rare talent, 
especially when it does not lead to shilly-shallying in the double -viewer's own 
course of action. Bagehot could always state the reasons for his choices with 
the utmost clarity. 

In 1851, he was in Paris as the special correspondent of an English peri- 
odical and he told its readers that after the disorder of the Republic's last days 
a strong executive was unavoidable: trade had stopped, life and property were 
insecure, Paris and the big cities could not stand it any longer. But while jus- 
tifying the move toward dictatorship, Bagehot was expressing his private 
preference by helping the last republicans to build their barricades. Ten years 
later, reviewing the course of events in France, Bagehot concluded (before 
the empire's collapse) that Caesarism is a remedy for the short term and a 
calamity when prolonged. As things turned out, the Second French Empire 
saw an increase in manufacture and trade and a beginning of social welfare. 
But a dangerous foreign policy was required by the regime's shaky founda- 
tion, and this need of vainglory finally brought it down. The new upper crust 
at the court and in town was showy rather than elegant and intellect was at a 
discount. The atmosphere is well captured in the excellent comic operas of 
Offenbach — parodies of the classics in the mood of rather vulgar gaiety. 

Bagehot's due fame has been hampered by his dying too soon — at 51 — 
and even more by the variety of his writings. In each of his domains he is 
highly prized, but versatility looks like a division, not an addition of powers. 
He was a political journalist, succeeding as editor of The Economist his father- 
in-law, who had founded it. For 1 7 years Bagehot commented on the political 
and economic affairs of the week. One outcome of this close study was a pair 
of classic works: Lombard Street, which is a description of the British financial 



582 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

system; and The English Constitution [it is the book to read], which describes in 
short compass the social and psychological reasons for the successful work- 
ing of the induplicable English Parliament. 

These works alone would justify ranking Bagehot among the original 
thinkers of the 19C. But every one of the 12 volumes of his writings offers 
additional proof: the essays on past and present English statesmen show the 
consummate political historian; another collection of articles on particular 
situations in trade and finance show the economist; the dozen more on liter- 
ary figures and topics reveal a literary critic, while his reflections on philoso- 
phy and religion throw a light on his time not to be had from any other 
source. To G. M. Young, the master historian of the Victorian age, Bagehot 
was "the wisest of his generation." 

Bagehot's ability to make ideas live appears on every page he wrote. A 
student in an American business school once found in its library a slim vol- 
ume entided The Love Letters of Walter Bagehot It proved to be, once more, the 
carrier of a double message: sprighdy missives to the author's fiancee inter- 
spersed with comments on the current state of certain firms and the stock 

exchange that would be sure to interest 
I get tired of either sense or nonsense if I am the fiancee's father. Both recipients 
kept very continuously to either and like my were doubdess entertained. Bagehot's 
mind to undulate between the two as it likes prose is rapid and enveloping, some- 
best - what in the manner of Bernard Shaw; it 

— Bagehot to his fiancee (Feb. 1, 1858) leaves no uncertainties as it voices also 

what the opponent or the reader is no 
doubt thinking. It is humorous and sad, because Bagehot, though an expert 
in business and politics, never feels his mind-and-heart fulfilled by them. 
When he says: "Unfortunately mysticism is true," he means that it is too bad 
for the man always after the main chance; for himself, Realism is not enough. 
Bagehot's gift of double-mindedness appears strikingly in his short work 
Physics and Politics, which William James called a "golden litde book." It under- 
takes to apply Darwin to politics, but Bagehot is no Social Darwinist (<571). 
He begins indeed by showing "Natural Selection" in the early stages of the 
march of civilization — the better organized, more cooperative groups con- 
quer the less unified. But then more and more other qualities, initiatives, and 
ideas — liberty, free discussion, written law, habits of calm reflection, of toler- 
ance and generosity — conduce to survival, because they make for an ever 
higher degree of cohesion. These virtues are the strength of the national state, 
whose power a less developed people cannot successfully withstand. In such 
a struggle, conquest makes at least possible the enlargement of civilization. 

But the New Imperialism of the 19C worked neither all for civilizing nor 
all for mercenary ends. It civilized by side effect. Missionaries did not merely 
bring "moral pocket handkerchiefs," as Dickens scoffed; they were often 



Things Ride Mankind <^> 583 

doctors of the body as well as disturbers of the soul. Colonial officials intro- 
duced goods, means of transport, and control of nature; they kept the peace 
and abolished inhuman rites. Still, it was the application of force, not free- 
dom, which is extremely difficult to restore, and after its installation, to man- 
age. At the same time, the second 1 9C expansion of Europe took thousands 
of its natives to the other continents, bringing about a continuous mixing of 
cultures on a larger scale than before. Language, customs, diet, art, the con- 
ception of man and of life — all were modified. Within Europe itself, more 
people were incited to travel abroad, and this to such an extent that Thomas 
Cook immortalized his name by inventing the guided tour and bringing to 
birth that feral creature, the tourist. Lasdy, the wide world beckoned direcdy 
or by marital connection to a special group, whose public presence changed 
an eccentricity into a vocation, 

The Women Travelers 

They were mainly British. Travelers includes explorers and travel writers, 
and they are too numerous to chronicle individually. A sampling list must suf- 
fice, with the suggestion of a sampling book to read. The roll of honor and 
interest combined, pushing the date down to the early years of this century, 
runs as follows: Lady Atkinson, Gertrude Bell, Lady Florence Dixie, Lady 
Easdake, Amelia Edwards, The Hon. Impulsia Gushington, Harriet 
Martineau, Fanny Park, Ida Pfeiffer, Janet Ross, Isabel Savory, Lady Sheil, and 
Mrs. R. H. Tyacke. [The book to read is Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology, ed. 
by Jane Robinson. For nautical readers, a supplement is Seafaring Women by 
Linda Grant.] 

* 
* * 

In North America, the imperialist urge manifested itself in the conquest 
by the United States of vast territories to the south and west. A short war with 
Mexico added California and the area between it and the Rio Grande bound- 
ary, which had been in dispute. Then the United States annexed the large state 
of Texas, recendy seceded from Mexico. These acquisitions upset the balance 
of power between the states where slavery existed and those where it was pro- 
hibited. After two compromises and the rise of a strong Abolitionist move- 
ment, civil war broke out in 1861, splitting the nation into a free north and a 
slaveholding south. 

The war attracted a number of European observers, in part because it 
was the first to take full advantage of modern industry, not only for the mak- 
ing of weapons and equipment but also in the use of the railroad for trans- 
porting both materiel and men. Ten years earlier in Germany, an attempt had 



584 q*& From Dawn to Decadence 

been made to collect troops in one place and move them quickly by rail to 
another. It failed disastrously, from lack of experience in mustering the rolling 
stock and doing the complicated despatching. Another novelty, at least in the 
United States, was the tactical use of balloons. Two plans of the previous 25 
years had been turned down by the military. The first Army Balloon Corps 
was added to McClellan's army at the very beginning of the war. 

Peace and Reconstruction made an end of slavery in western society 
(<547). But in the United States the constitutional amendments that emanci- 
pated the Blacks were enforced only for a brief time; the southern states man- 
aged to deny their former slaves civil and political rights, equality in education 
and other advantages, and socially decent treatment (592>). This gross 
breach of the law laid up for the future the troubles that have darkened the 
years beginning almost exactly a century after the Civil War ended. 

As usual the war called forth ability of all kinds and it made plain the 
genius of Lincoln. Though often reviled during the struggle, he soon after 
took his place among the great leaders of history. It is only recendy that note 
has been taken of his genius as a writer. Earlier opinion held that suddenly, as 
a result of the enlargement of his soul by his responsibilities, Lincoln was vis- 
ited with inspiration in two or three pieces now famous. It has been easy to 
show, once the truth was glimpsed, that from early manhood he handled 
words in a manner unsurpassed for compression and lucidity, rhythm and 
force. 

Whitman, also a Civil War hero, achieved force in Leaves of Grass by the 

opposite means. His vision of America is conveyed by piling up, seemingly 

helter-skelter, details either of the landscape or of the social scene or of the 

traits and habits he assumes are common to every man or woman in the 

country. His conception of his main subject (death being a second one) was 

perhaps influenced by the character in one of George Sand's novel who is a 

"people's poet"; the fitness of Whitman's method was foretold by 

Tocqueville. Of the other American 

poets writing on public themes, James 
As all the citizens of a democracy are nearly . 

. ... , , „ Russell Lowell needs mention here 

equal and alike, the poet cannot dwell on any 

c *u u * *u ^ •. ir • •* *u because he is rarely thought of, 

one of them; but the nation itself invites the J & ' 

exercise of his powers. It allows the poet to although he produced classic works. 
include them all in the same imagery and The Biglow Papers, first series, about the 
make a general survey of the people itself. Mexican War, and the second about the 

— Tocqueville, Democracy in America war between the states, are masterly 

(1840) satires of current opinion in the rural 

speech.of New England. A third poem, 
"A Fable for Critics," is in standard English and gives a good idea of the liter- 
ary scene, while distributing prizes and bad marks with a free hand. One more 
product of the Civil War, a piece of reporting entitied "My Hunt After 'the 



Things Ride Mankind <^> 585 

Captain'" (586>) provides an opportunity to introduce its author, a figure of 
importance on several counts: 

Oliver Wendell Holmes 

He is the man of thought and science, the poet and humorist, not his son, 
the justice of the Supreme Court. The elder Holmes distinguished himself 
early by a medical discovery that made him wonder whether he would "ever 
again have so good an opportunity of being useful." It was indeed of 
immense benefit: he proved the contagiousness of puerperal fever, which 
killed many women soon after childbirth. By neglecting sanitary measures, 
the attending physician carried it from one mother to the next. Holmes had 
to fight the whole system — doctors and nurses and hospital managers — to 
obtain recognition of the fact. In Vienna, Semmelweis would meet the same 
hostility on the same issue a litde later. It was the dawn of Hygiene, the god- 
dess incarnated in Florence Nightingale, struggling with old habits, and pro- 
moted by the intolerable "new dirt" of industry 

Holmes made other contributions while teaching generations of 
Harvard medical students and pursuing at the same time a writing career in 
prose and verse. His facility for vers de societe\ the knack of suiting an occasion 
with riming lines, has concealed a body of excellent poems that are a litde less 
than serious and a litde more than light; for example, his sonnet on writer's 
itch, "Cacoethes Scribendi." The mastery displayed in "The Wonderful One- 
Hoss-Shay" has been noted by the critics as if unique, but it extends to many 
other poems. They are satire blended with sympathy but nonetheless acute. 
Similarly, "The Chambered Nautilus" and "The Last Leaf" are by no means 
Holmes's only moving pieces in the serious mood. 

In prose, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, which dramatizes lives and 
opinions with an art that conceals art, deserves a place not far from the nov- 
els of Thomas Love Peacock (<132). The sequels to The Autocrat are less sus- 
tained, but even the last of them, Over the Teacups, contains original reflections. 
What a vigilant reader will find is that Holmes, liberated by his medical train- 
ing, was always pushing as far as he dared against the fencing-in of 
Respectability. In morals, religion, established authority, love between the 
young, he keeps saying — and hinting when the subject is delicate — that 
"there is more to it than you know or will admit." One character in The 
Autocrat, a wounded spirit who lives a mysterious existence in an upper room, 
seems intended to show up the strained placidity of those around the down- 
stairs table. If this is true, the silly sentimental verses with which Holmes 
interlards his chapters begin to look like tokens of concession to conventional 
feeling. Dull as they are, their workmanship equals that of the verses where he 
satirizes freely. 



586 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

"My Hunt After 'the Captain"' is the story of Holmes's adventures when 
he went looking for his son, the future justice, reported wounded in battie but 
lost sight of by the army and possibly dying. A different kind of medical con- 
cern inspired the three novels beginning with Elsie Venner'm 1861. Its interest, 
like that of the other two, is not as literature, but as one of the very first "stud- 
ies" of abnormal psychology in fiction; Elsie is a schizophrenic. A present- 
day psychiatrist has found in these novels more than one anticipation of his 
science and of Freud himself. If in Holmes's Boston there had lived a Boswell 
to record the doctor's table talk we might have a counterpart of that other 
doctor, who is popular for that alone. According to the alert Henry James, Sr., 
Holmes's display of "superior intelligence" went with "genuine modesty." 

The son has monopolized the father's three names and with them repu- 
tation. There is no need to lower it for one Holmes in order to raise it for the 
other. The justice had an enormous and beneficial influence on the law and 
deserves well of his country on constitutional issues. But he can show noth- 
ing to justify attributing to him the same power in philosophy or literary art. 
He adopted early the shallow materialism that marked the mid-century, and 
with it a routine cynicism that often spoils the pleasure of reading his vigor- 
ous correspondence. No two temperaments could be imagined more oppo- 
site than the father and the son. 



Thanks to an invention that quickly turned into an industry, the 
American Civil War qualifies once again as a "first" by the new mode used to 
record it systematically. Mathew Brady roamed the fields with his large box 
and took more than 3,500 photographs. The practical form of the invention 
was some 20 years old. Around 1 830, after much trial and error, the brothers 
Niepce in France were able to put to use Josiah Wedgwood's earlier discovery 
that silver nitrate turns black in sunlight. They devised means of "fixing" on 
paper, glass, or metal the substance once exposed. The image itself comes 
from the camera obscura, an instrument long used by artists, which consists 
of a box — or a room — with one very small aperture to let in light. The scene 
outside appears upside down on the wall opposite for the artist to draw or 
imitate. Hence the name camera (room in Latin) for all the boxes successively 
armed with lens, timer, flash, light meter, and lately digital computer. The pic- 
ture too has evolved, its first exploiter in partnership with Niepce being 
Daguerre, whose portraits on copper (daguerreotypes) are still family trea- 
sures after being the popular novelty of the 1840s. 

Photography was a marvel that inspired professionals to use it in all 
departments of life and lured amateurs to capture and store their fugitive 
experiences in the home or on their travels. Flaubert and his friend Maxime 



Things Ride Mankind <^» 587 

du Camp made a long voyage to the Near East and up the Nile, from which 
du Camp brought back the makings of a volume. It was a novelty widely 
admired; the machine-made coffee-table book could celebrate today its 
sesquicentennial. But in one quarter photography was seen at first with a lack- 
luster eye. It is the French painter Paul Delaroche who is credited with saying: 
"It will kill painting." More than one artist must have said or thought so. In 
the event, it was mainly portrait painting that was hurt, in addition to the trade 
of engraving, which had long served the public by supplying reproductions of 
works of art. With the portrait in oils went the strong and varied faces that 
even obscure artists knew how to transmit down to the middle of the 19C and 
that one sees on the walls of universities and public buildings. The photo- 
graphic studio tended more and more to fashion a countenance that was 
smooth, rounded, characterless, airbrushed into a one-face-fits-all likeness, 
flattering and democratic. There have been fine and truthful portraits in paint 
since the camera, but they are rare. 

By way of compensation, photographs of scenes and people not posed 
for good looks have won a place as works of art. Effects of lighting and com- 
position, and the skill shown in exposing, developing, and printing the work 
qualify at least as high artisanship. And the subjects chosen, especially when 
in series, have influenced opinion by "exposing" society, much like that exten- 
sion of Realism, the Naturalistic novel (625>). The picture in motion and 
geared to sound was a cultural offshoot of the turn of the century that does 
not now call for explanation. 

* * 

While the United States was fighting a civil war to determine whether it 
would survive as one nation, Napoleon III was losing prestige at home and 
had what he thought "the great idea of his reign." Mexico had undergone an 
anti-clerical revolution; Napoleon sent an army to put it down and to impose 
the Austrian prince Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico. The expedition was a 
failure, and Maximilian faced a firing squad, as one can see in Manet's paint- 
ing. Napoleon had already tried to refresh his popularity in France by conces- 
sions called "the Liberal Empire." Now, after the Mexican fiasco, he had to 
deal with the moves, including littie wars, that Bismarck was making to unify 
the Germans into a nation at long last. The French, never able to tolerate that 
desire and fearing the outcome, made representations clumsily, and war fol- 
lowed in 1870. Ill-prepared, the French were quickly defeated, after which 
came a four-month siege of Paris. In the interval, the Prussians sitting in 
Louis XIV's Versailles proclaimed the resurrection of the German empire, 
while out of the debacle (about which Zola wrote a stirring novel), emerged a 
third French republic. It seemed in a good way to succeed, when the artisans 



588 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

and casual laborers of Paris, fearing a conservative government, took up arms 

and captured the city. They killed indiscriminately, took hostages, murdered 

some of them, and so terrified the rest of the nation that the second siege of 

Paris could only end in savage mutual bloodshed. 

All Europe, including many liber- 

AprillJ. The organized corps of Petroleuses als and socialists disavowed the Com- 

[women fighters] were a savage crew delug- mune, which was the name chosen by 

ing what public buildings they could with the insurgents to show their organic 

petroleum and setting light to them. They b onc j as c iti 2e ns of the municipality. 

fought at the barricades showing superhu- fiut Karl Mafx in Londori) seeing me 

man courage. On the Rue de la Paix, the first chance for a ^^ ^^ ^ d ^ 

to mount it was a woman. , i i i r i • j 

haps also the value or that name, issued 

May 12. The edict has at last gone forth that a p am phlet that represented the insur- 

all between 19 and 40 who will not fight shall rection ag a foretaste of ^ class war to 

be shot. There were 60 executions in the Rue come _ the pro l e tariat aroused and 

about to establish Communism. This 
-Col. j. C. Stanley on the Paris was a kce of bi Ue pro p aganda . The 

Commune (1871) „ r , i i i 

Commun^ra(f were neither the prole- 
tariat nor Commun/k The "municipal 
republics" they wanted set up in the rest of France were the opposite of the 
central dictatorship of Marx's program. But Marx had rightly judged that the 
event had given worldwide notoriety to workingmen in arms. The image 
could be a vivid myth for the Idea of the next revolution. 

Marx, with the continual help of Engels, worked on two planes. On the 
political, theory and consistency gave way to opportunism, as in the instance 
just cited. On the theoretical he wrote elaborate treatises arguing points of 
history, philosophy, and economics against all previous and current authori- 
ties. Shordy before the pamphlet on the Commune, he had finished the first 
part of a central treatise, Das Kapital. It is one of those famous works, like 
Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois and Spengler's Decline of the West, that every intel- 
lectual thinks he has read. Its style and organization are demanding; the 
Russian censor in the 1 860s decided to let it into the country because very few 
could work their way through it. When Marxism became a subject of research 
and of college courses to be taught, more academics mastered the contents 
than socialist politicians and militants had ever done. 

Capital professed to show scientifically how the worker was exploited. 
His labor adds value to the material he works on and this addition is worth 
more than the value of his wages. (Sismondi had said the same <457.) This 
"surplus value" is taken by the capitalist. Since Marx, the "labor theory of 
value" has been discarded by the economists and the reasoning is no longer 
valid, but the error, when restated for propaganda, is a simple and powerful 
argument. About history, Marx's thesis is (in his words) "Hegel turned on his 



Things Ride Mankind <^> 589 

head." Instead of a battle between ideas — thesis and antithesis — out of which 
comes a synthesis, the clash is between purely material forces: "dialectical 
materialism." Marx's view here is that of the Realist, for whom only tangibles 
exist. The rest — art, thought, law, religion — constitute only a superstructure 
of no effect by itself. History moves forward by the shifting relation of things, 
and in its present phase will bring about proletarian Communism inevitably. 
Its final stage, after the dictatorship of the proletariat, will be the "withering 
away of the state," a happy anarchy It is curious to note this hope or expecta- 
tion, characteristic of the 19C: Herbert Spencer predicted it as confidently as 
Marx. 

Yet although for Marx thought is ineffectual, he kept on having thoughts 
and putting them to work. He saw the revolution as taking place in Germany, 
the most advanced industrial nation, having the most numerous proletariat. 
The prediction was logical, because in the Marxist system it is not from the 
individual's will to gain economic power that one class replaces another, but 
from its "relation to the means of production." And what the revolution aims 
at is not the destruction of the state but possessing it for Communist ends. 

Marx believed these formulas and principles to be science, as did Lenin 
after him, who fought diluters of the creed and brought the teachings up to 
date. As noted earlier, both men, and Engels too, appear in the American 
Dictionary of Scientific Biography, where Marx is credited with a simple contribu- 
tion, that of having aided the understanding of science by seeing it as a social 
product. Sociologist is in fact the status that Marx retains after his history, 
economics, and prophecy have lost persuasiveness. Bernard Shaw justiy 
granted him another merit: like Darwin he gathered fifty years of critical 
thought about the system that kept the majority poor and he made the world 
listen in earnest. As a onetime Hegelian Marx indulged liberally in ABSTRAC- 
TION, but first and last his vision of history and of reality is that things drive 
mankind. 



Cross Section 

The View from Chicago 
Around 189 J 



The DECADE that followed the Franco-Prussian War witnessed a good 
many changes in outlook and manners — long beards came off, women grew 
more self-assertive, social conventions were questioned one after another, 
and the innovations in techne and in social theory were of the kind that 
promises lasting developments. Many young artists who were to impress the 
world received their first exposure to the public. Sporadic agitation for many 
causes began to form actual movements. The 1 870s and 1 880s are crowded 
with cultural starts. 

But the noisy world of boom-and-bust business and raucous politics was 
not diverted from its habits. To the observers on the sidelines it seemed 
cruder than ever in its goals and practices. In the United States, Mark Twain 
and his friend Charles Dudley Warner described the scene in a jointly written 
novel as The Gilded Age. It is a lurid tale of deceit, fraud, political corruption, 
seduction, and murder. The subtitle of the book is "A Tale of Today." Shortly, 
Henry Adams published his novel Democracy (anonymously) with the same 
intention, castigating the Grant administration in particular. Both fictions 
portray a senator of fluctuating ethics as the emblem of the moral weakness 
of representative government. Both Adams and Mark Twain remained pes- 
simists to the end of their days and recurrently in their writings, while 
Ambrose Bierce on the West Coast, besides producing a series of stunning 
war stories, wrote prose and verse in which human beings and institutions are 
portrayed as hypocrites and frauds. His Devil's Dictionary had rightly been 
called at first The Cynic's Word Book. 

Looking back from the 1 930s, Lewis Mumford drew a picture of the 



592 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

period as one barren of art and full of random agitation. He called it the 
Brown Decades. The financial panic of 1873 afflicted the entire capitalist 
world. Unemployment, strikes violently put down, boycotts (a new word and 
thing), farmers ruined by the fall of consumption, railroad gouging, oil and 
steel trusts and cartels provoked popular hatred; political assassinations dark- 
ened the horizon (695>). 

In the United States, a wave of "Jim Crow" enactments formally denied 
the Black population their civil rights; in 1896 the Supreme Court decided in 
Plessy v. Ferguson that providing "equal but separate accommodations for the 
white and colored races" satisfied the constitutional requirement of equality 
among citizens. This reversed the movement that was beginning to give 
recognition and status to Black talent. Frederick Douglass was valued as an 
eloquent speaker and as editor of the National Era, and he held the posts of 
marshal of the District of Columbia and ambassador to Haiti. Mississippi 
sent John Roy Lynch to Congress, and he served as vice chairman at the 
Republican National Convention of 1 884. But these exceptions did not mul- 
tiply. 

Whether it meant repression or reform, the time inspired crusades 
against drink and other things classed as vice: free love, contraception, and 
abortion. The Women's Christian Temperance Union formed local centers, 
and the outcry against Demon Rum erupted into guerrilla warfare when 
Carry Nation went about, hatchet in hand, vandalizing saloons. She financed 
her vocation by selling "souvenir hatchets." In England, Parliament enacted 
rules to reduce the open hours in pubs, the poor man's clubhouse. Was it to 
combat alcoholism or social unrest? 

In the United States, Anthony Comstock had no doubt that he was 
appointed to dam up sexuality in all its manifestations. At the age of 28, in 
1873, he founded the Society for the Suppression of Vice and persuaded 
Congress to pass the Comstock Law that made it a crime to send through the 
mails information or devices in aid of contraception. He had a stalwart enemy 
in Victoria Woodhull, a declared champion of free love, a believer in spirit 
return, and an expounder of the social benefits, under given circumstances, of 
abortion. She did not prevail. Comstock went on to rid New York of the evil 
presence of Mme Restell, a fashionable abortionist, and finally drove her to 
suicide. He decreed that small replicas of the Statue of Liberty showed too 
much breast. He protected New York theater-goers from the infection of 
Shaw's early plays and also the readers at the Public Library, which he com- 
pelled to lock up Man and Superman. His reign lasted till the First World War. 

Some of the new religious sects were explicitly anti-modern and repres- 
sive. So was the decree of the Vatican Council of 1 870 that held the pope 
infallible in matters of faith and morals. Six years before the Council, Pius IX 
had drawn up a long list of "modern errors," which good Catholics must now 



Cross Section: Chicago <^> 593 

take as condemned by God Himself. Of the new religions, Christian Science, 
denying the reality of matter, disallowed medicine; Jehovah's Witnesses iso- 
lated its members in various ways from the present world, which was shordy 
to be destroyed; and the Salvation Army, militant against drunkenness and 
other profane failings, at least waged war with a warm heart and rousing 
music. 

The population that endured these protective measures was assailed on 
another front: a crowd of political and economic reformers, who had every rea- 
son to claim public attention. Panics, unemployment, violence such as the anar- 
chist bombing and hangings in Chicago (linked with the demand for the eight- 
hour day), the Pullman strike of 1894, the blowing up of the warship Maine in 
die Spanish- American War; the widespread feeling that entrepreneurs were 
"robber barons" and the government of cities a "machine" run by greedy 
bosses; that financiers opposed for their 

own benefit the coinage of silver that We want to feel the Sunshine, 
would help the common man— all We want to smell the flowers; 

these made for permanent anger and We are sure that God has **" h > 
.1 A • , , 1 And we want to have eight hours. 

turmoil. Agitation was kept up by the & 

barnstorming of the powerful orator Chorus: Eight hours for work, 

William Jennings Bryan and to com- eight hours for rest, 

plete the unsettling of minds, Robert eight hours for what we will 

Ingersoll carried on his crusade against — Sung in Chicago and elsewhere (1885) 

all religious beliefs. 

These conflicts in society and the emotions moved a thoughtful journal- 
ist to write a work that condemned the status quo by indirection. Edward 
Bellamy's Loo king Backward of 1 887 depicted society as it would be in the year 
2000. The scene is Boston, and peace and prosperity reign there and else- 
where in America thanks to state socialism, though not under that name. 
Money is unknown; there are credit cards, which entide anyone to a large vari- 
ety of goods in the national stores. One's share has limits, but it is ample for 
all but the insanely extravagant, because the elimination of waste caused by 
competition makes for plenty. 

Hence no anxiety among the poor, no hostility toward the rich; the dis- 
tinction has disappeared. But everybody must work four hours a day until the 
age of 45. The rest is leisure, for which the usual high-minded occupations are 
provided. This Eutopia was an immediate best-seller, the Utopian assumption 
being swallowed — again as usual — that the sole cause of social strife is the 
starving of the simpler material needs and that they can be fulfilled by simple 
planning. 

The practical reformers had no unified program. The closest to the grass 
roots was Jacob Coxey's. A compassionate businessman from Ohio, he 
wanted the government to issue money and relieve unemployment by public 



594 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

works. He planned a peaceful march to Washington — a "living petition," but 
"Coxey's army" numbered only 500 when it reached the capital. Coxey was 
stopped from speaking and arrested; after which some 1,200 more arrived 
from other states. Still, the movement publicized the need, and in the 20C the 
march has become a frequent and effective instrument of protest here and in 
Europe. In our more responsive time, 500 or 1,200 have sometimes been 
enough to reverse policies, at least locally. 

In the 1 870s the spectacle of immense wealth cohabiting with poverty 
struck the self-taught San Francisco printer and journalist Henry George and 
incited him to study the question. After two or three essays he wrote the clas- 
sic Progress and Poverty. It points out that land values rise automatically wherever 
business activity (progress) takes place, and it creates poverty among those who 
own nothing but their labor. Wealth comes from rent, and since it is unearned, 
it should be taxed for the general good, making all other taxes unnecessary. 
George did not know that his analysis and conclusion were first set forth by the 
18C physiocrats and variously restated by James and John Stuart Mill and Karl 
Marx. Most of his readers did not know it either; the Single Tax movement 
grew and made him a public figure. He lectured here and in England and 
Ireland, and ran two vigorous but unsuccessful campaigns for mayor of New 
York. In the first of these he shared with Theodore Roosevelt the reform 

ticket. His influence abroad was lasting. 
Henry George once remarked how strange it Bernard Shaw and his Fabian friends 
was that human beings were smart enough to thought him the equal of Marx, if not 
build [the] Brooklyn Bridge, but not smart superior in practical sense, and Progress 
enough to keep a lot of condemned wire from and p ovej ^ guided l an d reforms in 
going into it. Austria-Hungary. A Henry George 

—Albert Jay Nock (1933) Society still meets and sponsors discus- 

sion and publication in New York. 
An economist of a different kind, Thorstein Veblen dissected business 
and industry from the shelter of Chicago and other universities, according as 
the difficulties caused by his wayward behavior propelled him from one to 
the next. But his thought was straight and rigorous through a dozen works, 
beginning with The Theory of the Leisure Class. It made his name at the turn of 
the century, though written in a style that parodied academic prose — long 
words and involved sentences. "Theory" meant the ways of the class and the 
use of their means. The rich judged all of life in terms of price and were con- 
demnable from an economic point of view since they reveled in waste. 
Veblen's phrase "conspicuous consumption" entered the language to label 
the habit of buying expensive things to impress the neighbors. Later, cars, 
yachts, furniture, and home appliances that serve this purpose came to be 
known as "status symbols." Earlier, at the princely courts, extravagance for 
ostentation had to be content with jewels and silks, banquets and gardens. 



Cross Section: Chicago <^> 595 

Progress in conspicuous consumption has been made possible by industry's 
multiplication of expensive objects. 

But it must be added that by the end of the 19C the leisure class had dis- 
appeared. Rich or poor, nobody in the present world has leisure or would 
know what to do with it, except perhaps the homeless. The English weekend 
dates from about 1880, but everybody is now busy at all times, even on holi- 
days — this too a side-effect of things in abundance. By dealing once more in 
his other works with the actions of social groups, Veblen founded "institu- 
tional economics," a new branch of the subject, which challenged the primacy 
of the classical school and ensured him the rank of initiator among 
economists. 

Among the mixed company of reformers who kept in the public eye dur- 
ing the double decade and whom Theodore Roosevelt called "muckrakers" 
(after the man in Pilgrim's Progress who with his eye looking down at the mud 
did not see the crown above his head), were two women whose work had 
notable influence. One was Helen Hunt Jackson, a classmate of the poet 
Emily Dickinson. "H.H.," as she was generally known, felt deeply about the 
cruel treatment of the Indians and after success as a novelist, she wrote A. 
Century of Dishonor as an indictment of the national policy. This led to her 
being made a special commissioner to investigate the conditions afflicting 
certain tribes, after which she drew on her experience for another novel, 
Ramona, a further popular success. The plight of the Indians was not over, but 
the problem had been stated and was not buried again. 

Ida M. Tarbell is perhaps better 
remembered than Helen Jackson, When I contemplate him [Andrew Carnegie] 
because in the Marxist 1930s her name as the representative of a particular class of 
was recalled with that of her fellow millionaires, I am forced to say, with all per- 
muckraker Lincoln Steffens as critics of sonal respect, and without holding him in the 
capitalism. Both were contributors to least responsible for his unfortunate circum- 
McClure's Magazine, which S.S.McClure, stances, that he is an anti-Christian phe- 
an Irish immigrant, founded to crusade nomenon, a social monstrosity, and a grave 
against big business and other per- political peril. 

ceived enemies of individual rights —The Reverend Hugh Price Hughes 
(Arthur Conan Doyle invested in the (1890) 

venture). After seeing that her youthful 

hope of a career in biology was barred by the male monopoly, Ida Tarbell made 
herself a scholar in literature and history by studying at the Sorbonne and the 
Bibliotheque Nationale. On her return, at McClure's suggestion, she wrote 
biographies of Napoleon and Lincoln and went on to investigate John D. 
Rockefeller's spectacular rise from clerk to tycoon. Five years of research pro- 
duced The History of the Standard Oil Company, the most thorough description of 
contemporary methods in business. 



596 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 



The problem of our age is the proper admin- This expose and others by the 

istration of wealth, that the ties of brother- McClure forces gradually persuaded 

hood may still bind together the rich and lawmakers to begin regulating financial 

poor. There [is] one mode of using great for- operations and seeing to it that trusts 

tunes, the true antidote to the temporary were prose cuted under the Sherman 

unequal distribution of wealth. Under its Act of 189Q p resident Rooseve l t him- 

sway the surplus wealth of the few will , r 111 r ^^ • • 

J r self conceded the necessity or limiting 

become, in the best sense, the property of the 11 

. . . , - , property rights. But the other side also 

many, because administered for the common r r J ° 

A claimed to represent individualism. 

good. r 

_ Andrew Carnegie argued that through 

— Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of ..... .°. 

Wealth 7190Ch competition it accumulated wealth 

which, properly used, would do more 
for the common good than if it were 
divided among the people. He set up public libraries, founded institutions to 
improve education and promote world peace. Rockefeller from his earliest 
employment regularly gave some 1 5 percent of his income for public uses. He 
and others gave large sums to found universities and colleges, which the ordi- 
nary wage earner could not do. But the reformers were not appeased. Quite 
logically, Ida Tarbell ended up espousing the then modest version of the wel- 
fare state. It was the start of the Great Switch (688>). She had not supported 
the suffrage movement, because she thought that voting and passing laws had 
little influence when unsupported by popular feeling; she could see how the 
Blacks, now legally "free," were treated. 

The most hurried sketch of political thought in that effervescent time 
would be incomplete if no word was said about Mr. Dooley. His remarks in 
Irish brogue began to edify readers through a column of the mid- 1890s in the 
Chicago Post Mr. Dooley is a Chicago saloonkeeper who chats with his friend 
Hennessy and other characters in Archey Road about every aspect of the 
world and a few things besides. These lifelike encounters were the creation of 
Finley Peter Dunne, whose political understanding and gift of satirical phras- 
ing put him on a level with all the other American and English writers who 
made the 1 890s an age of sagacity and wit. The man who noted the advent of 
canned goods by a passing mention of "a taste of solder in the peaches" is 
nothing less than a literary genius. His seven volumes of Mr. Dooley's table 
talk furnish the proof of this judgment and constitute a panorama of the time. 
There is hardly a subject — from Roosevelt's charging up San Juan Hill in the 
Spanish war° to nationalism at the Olympics (just then revived after 1,700 
years), from "Reading Books" to "The Supreme Court" — that the saloon- 
keeper does not enliven with pregnant observations applicable to like cases in 
any year. [The collection to start with is the first, dated 1898: Mr. Dooley in 
Peace and in War.] It is a disgrace to American scholarship that he is not stud- 
ied, and thus republished and enjoyed on a par with Mark Twain and 



Cross Section: Chicago <^ 597 



Ambrose Bierce. The dialect in which 
Mr. Dooley dialogues with his crony is 
no more an obstacle than the several 
types of back-country speech in 
Huckleberry Finn. 

Finley Peter Dunne is only one of 
the names on a list of great native sons 
whose neglect is a reproach to the 
American mind, that is to say the aca- 
demics and the critics (780; 798>). A 
second is George Perkins Marsh, who 
in the 1 890s submitted to the Secretary 
of Agriculture a report on irrigating 
the western lands. He had been asked 
to study the question because he had 
recently re-issued his Man in Nature 
under the more arresting tide of Earth 
as Modified by Human Action. Marsh was 
the first ecologist. For over 30 years 
he observed and reflected and publi- 
cized the need to be vigilant about the earth and how to replenish it. Under 
that nature-lover, President Roosevelt, conservation began — and Gifford 
Pinchot got the credit. At the present time, when Earth Day comes around 
one hears not a word about George Perkins Marsh. 

His pioneering in ecology should be enough to clinch his fame, but he 
had additional interests and powers. He was the first diplomatic envoy to Italy 
and served there with more than common skill during the American Civil 
War and for the ensuing 20 years. Previously, his post had been Turkey, 
because of his fluency in foreign languages, which were in fact his second life- 
long preoccupation. His scholarship was deep and wide; he wrote a grammar 
of Old Icelandic, and his Lectures on the English Language is full of fresh findings 
and original ideas — virtually a cultural history. It qualified him to be one of 
the earliest of Murray's collaborators in the OED — the dictionary that details 
the history of every discoverable English word. 



On John D. Rockefeller. He is a kind iv Society 
f 'r th' Prevention of Croolty to Money. If he 
finds a man misusin' his money, he takes it 
away fr'm him and adopts it. 

On the Paris Exposition of 1900'. I was deter- 
min' to probe into th' wunders iv science. 
Where did I bring up, say you? In th' front 
seat iv a play house with me eye glued on a 
lady iv th' sultan's hare-em tryin' to twist out 
iv hersel'. 

On the Negro Problem: I freed th* slave, 

Hennessy, but faith, I think 'twas like turnin , 

him out iv th* pa-antry into th* cellar. 

— You can't do ennythin' more f 'r thim than 

make him free. 

— Ye can't, Hennessy, only whin ye tell 'em 

they're free, they kno-ow we're only stringin' 

them. 

— Mr. Dooley (1898) 



* * 



By definition, the reality known as "the state of the art" in industry or 
techne lags behind the "state of the mind" of innumerable inventors. There, 
innovative things are fermenting endlessly, many of them making no head- 
way, either because, as in the fine arts, they meet with incomprehension, or 
because they are not quite fit for use. The story of the zipper is an epic of per- 



598 z&z From Dawn to Decadence 

severance. It is yesterday's novelty, now perfected, that is the boasted "state of 
the art." In the period traversed at this point, this mixture of novelty pro- 
posed and novelty accepted included: the telephone; the phonograph and the 
player piano; the lightbulb (very crude) and the typewriter (likewise); the 
lightweight (so-called safety) bicycle; a rudimentary internal combustion 
engine; man-made fiber not quite rayon; the pesticide DDT; Tiffany stained 
glass; Eastman's box camera; the cash register; and that unnatural wonder, 
Ivory soap. [One book to read among others is The Bicycle by R. John Way] 

But perfection was not altogether missing. Two engineering marvels 
received international acclaim: Roebling's Brooklyn Bridge (<594), which 
used his twisted-wire cable for suspension, and James Eads's bridge across 
the Mississippi at St. Louis. The latter's elegance belied its strength, which was 
demonstrated at the inaugural by having a clutch of locomotives steam slowly 
on the two tracks to the center of the cantilevered structure, firm under the 
700 tons.° These two works made the use of steel henceforth imperative. The 
then recent collapse of the bridge across the Firth of Tay in Scotland had 
proved the danger of relying on wrought iron. But steel was a scarce com- 
modity for another 10 years. 

As for the making of everyday things, it was entering a new phase with 
the paper bag and the cardboard box, both mass produced. They led the pro- 
cession of objects now made to be thrown away after use. The box and the 
bag were due to the discovery that other materials than rags — straw, bark, 
esparto grass, wood pulp — could be turned into paper, thereby cheapening 
newspapers, magazines, and books. Still other intellectual and social conse- 
quences of the paper deluge it is better not to contemplate. Instead, it is com- 
forting to think that about the same time Levi Strauss began to make blue 
jeans, complete with copper rivets. Other beginnings are well enough indi- 
cated, at least for Americans, by naming firms that date from these same 
decades and are still producing: Borden, Heinz, Pillsbury, Coors, Anheuser- 
Busch, Edison, Gillette, Lipton, Nestle, De Beers, Montgomery Ward, J. 
Walker Thomson, and — until quite recently — the ubiquitous Woolworth. 
Again a period piece, the Blue Train sleepers began running between Calais, 
Nice, and Rome and soon begot the Orient Express, which afforded a luxu- 
rious, unbroken journey from Paris to Constantinople. The corresponding 
one across the United States followed after the completion of the Union 
Pacific in 1869, but the run soon lapsed for all time into the irrational and 
inconvenient changeover at Chicago. 

To close the account of what might be called the burgeoning time of nov- 
elty before the flowering of the 1 890s, one may rapidly run through a list of 
news and events that the dwellers in that city doubtless took note of. After the 
fire that in two days of October 1871 engulfed one-third of its area and made 
100,000 homeless, the clearing of the ground proved an unsought opportu- 



Cross Section: Chicago q^> 599 

nity for moderni2ing. From abroad came word that Henry Morton Stanley 
had found Dr. Livingstone in Central Africa and made a certain remark; the 
rich grocer Schliemann, whose plans for excavation had been thought mad, 
was bringing to light the remains of ancient Troy; in another journalistic coup, 
Pulit2er sent the bold and beautiful Nellie Bly (Elisabeth Seaman) around the 
world with the mission to better Jules Verne's (imaginary) record of 80 days 
(<565). She beat him by eight days, a measure of the progress in transportation 
between 1872 and 1890. A photograph was taken of a galloping horse, show- 
ing that he had all four feet off the ground; Carlo Collodi published Pinocchio 
and Robert his Rules of Order; Oscar Wilde visited the United States and 
proved a good mixer with all classes of people. Alfred Nobel's dynamite, and 
Dr. Allbutt's clinical thermometer came into general use; white workers jeal- 
ous of Chinese coolies precipitated a race riot in Los Angeles; in New York 
the Tweed Ring's pocketing of millions of public money was exposed, elicit- 
ing from the boss the answer "What of it?"; out west the Jesse James gang 
made the train holdup a classic performance; at sea the Mary Celeste was found 
floating undamaged, with breakfast on the captain's table and nobody aboard. 
All this valuable information was of course disseminated by newspapers. 
Everywhere they kept increasing their circulation. The well-paid advertising 
made possible a nominal price for the issue itself, and the features already 
noted of scandal and whipped-up excitement over things big and little 
brought about the lowest form of competition. In 1896, Pulit2er's New York 
World was running a one-panel cartoon called The Yellow Kid. Hearst per- 
suaded the cartoonist Richard Outcault to extend the Kid into a strip for the 
New York Journal. The angry squabble over rights that went on in public for 
months is said to have given rise to the epithet Yellow Journalism. It certainly 
was in use a year or so later, when the World and the Journal raucously cam- 
paigned for "action" in Cuba and pushed country and government into the 
Spanish- American War. Unlike later students, those then in college clamored 
for it. At Harvard, William James, who addressed the bloodthirsty crowd, 
vainly urged: "Don't howl with the pack!" 

* 
* * 

Not since the "Hungry Forties" had a decade earned a nickname when 
the 1 890s came to be called the Naughty Nineties. Next, it was associated in 
England with the color yellow, because of The Yellow Dwarf, The Yellow Book, 
and it finally came to rest as the Mauve Decade. Mauve superseded Brown 
(<591) as fitter to evoke Aestheticism (621 >). Naughty replaced the gloom of 
the Gilded Age by approving enjoyment and buoyant spirits. In retrospect, 
the time seems far more complex than a batch of adjectives can suggest. If 
"the Nineties" are to be thought of as a cultural unit, the term should stand 



600 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

not for one but for two decades, stretching from 1885 to 1905. This would be 
both indicative and convenient, because the important innovations of those 
years cannot be pinned down to single events, ideas, or works with a date 
attached. The full-size turnaround required the energy of men and ideas from 
diverse activities strung across time and space during those 20 years. 
Accordingly, the view from Chicago (or anywhere else) around 1895 does not 
reach into every corner; a further swing of inspection will be needed to com- 
plete the survey (615>). 

As host to the world in 1 893, Chicago looked with pride at the contents 
of its Columbian Exposition. It housed the products of 46 foreign nations 
and was visited by more than 25 million people. In size and architectural dis- 
play its 1 50 buildings made it a much grander show than the Centennial held 
at Philadelphia in 1876. At Chicago, the occasion was the 400th anniversary 
of Europe's discovery of America; what was really shown off was the differ- 
ence between 1 492 and the present: metal and machinery had virtually elimi- 
nated wood and manpower. 

Again unlike previous world's fairs, the Columbian paid attention to ideas 
as well as things. It had a Building of Manufactures and Liberal Arts. It held 
conferences of experts on religion, peace, women's demands, and the prob- 
lems of youth. As to the fruits of science and techne that it put on view, it was 
so rich and well organized that Henry Adams said it was an education in itself. 
What mesmerized the visitor on arriving was the electric glow of the huge 
portal. Illumination was the feature at many points within, especially at 
Electricity House. So much light, not from the sun, was a new phenomenon, 
and the fair as a whole got the name of White City. True, faulty insulation of 
the wiring caused a few fires, but they were soon forgotten in the joy of 
defeating darkness. 

Two years earlier, when electric lights and bells had been installed in the 
White House, President Harrison's large family were frightened and would 
not touch the switches or press the buttons for fear of shock; the current was 
turned on for the evening and disconnected in the morning. But the habit of 
accepting the new as always preferable to the old spread fast, not only 
because by now the factory product was not shoddy — it really worked as 
promised — but also because (so it was assumed) behind innovation was the 
push of forward-marching science. It is from this time that one dates another 

category of marketable product, the 
Science finds, Industry applies, Man con- antique. Putting science ahead of 
forms. Science discovers, genius invents, industry in the program was more 
industry applies, and Man adapts himself to prophecy than fact. Up to that time 
or is molded by new things. nearly every device had been the work 

—Guide to the Columbian Exposition of inventors and engineers building on 

(1893) previous working devices. It was only 



Cross Section: Chicago <^> 601 

in the year 1890 that Sir Alfred Mond, a chemist of German descent, urged 
upon a group of businessmen the advantages of what is now known as 
R&D — research and development: pure scientists hired by industry to find 
processes that engineers can embody in machines and appliances. 

Invention in the Nineties kept pace with desire, and world's fairs in rapid 
succession showed its fruits to the multitudes. There had been a large one in 
1889 in Paris, where the Eiffel Tower proved that a metal structure 300 
meters high would stand up and that by searching far and wide enough steel 
for it was available. It was not long before Louis Sullivan, a Chicago architect 
(648>), made use of a similar metal rib cage as the skeleton of an office build- 
ing, the model skyscraper. Its principle is that of the medieval cathedrals: the 
walls do not support but fill in. Sullivan laid down the rule: "Form follows 
function." He meant that a building must clearly show the structure that 
serves its purpose. He deplored the neo-classical, highly ornamented style of 
the Columbian Exposition, which was bound to be widely imitated: "It would 
set back architecture for fifty years." 

The lag was much shorter, even though the fine arts do not make their 
way in the world as fast as the mechanical. In Paris, when it was decided not 
to take down the Eiffel Tower with the rest of the fair, some hundred artists 
and writers signed a protest saying that M. Eiffel's ugly folly was a blot on the 
beauty of the city. But techne won out; the Tower still stood at the next Paris 
fair of 1900 and was shortiy put to use as a post for wireless telegraphy. 
Going Chicago one better, ideas were the sole object of the fair at St. Louis 
in 1904. 

Next to fairs as a recurrent event, another old practice expanded and 
became a mighty institution: advertising. Its rapid development was in fact a 
necessity when the leviathan of the age spewed forth continually new prod- 
ucts, many of them for the ordinary citizen and not expensive. Advertising 
had long existed as simple publicity — at first a few lines announcing a lost 
article or the opening of a shop. Then the paragraph, descriptive and boast- 
ful. The Nineties saw the rise of the craft as we know it: the arresting display 
in type and picture with repetitious slogans and extravagant claims: Post 
Toasties, the first breakfast cereal, would cure appendicitis; contraptions with 
wires implying electric power would relieve lumbago and housemaid's knee. 
Bottled liquids and Pink Pills for Pale People worked miracles. Bicycles, cars, 
bathtubs, stoves and carpet sweepers, cameras and fire escapes, shoes and 
hats, corsets and locomotives received public encomiums from the makers, 
often backed up by ecstatic users, and starkly illustrated in black-and-white 
line cuts. The object was shown in association with human figures seductively 
posed and faces radiating happiness. 

McClure's and other magazines grew thicker by as much as 100 pages of 
advertising in one issue. Flyers littered the streets; "sandwich men," so-called 



602 <s^) From Dawn to Decadence 

from the tall placards strapped to their chest and back, paraded along the 
main avenues; the billboard was erected and the brick wall of the apartment 
house painted for the benefit of tradesman and public. Those were the exten- 
sion of the political and theatrical poster to every other kind of production. 
[The book to look through is Scrapbook of Early Advertising Art by Floyd 
Clymer.] The choice of goods on the market kept enlarging and, oddly 
enough, required that people be perpetually reminded to buy bread or soap or 
candy or sales would decline. The text and design of these early appeals was 
crude, but the principles have proved eternal. The Nineties could even boast 
the first professional writer of advertising copy, an anonymous hero. 

How advertising turned into a force acting on the public mind so success- 
fully that it now serves to propel every kind of purpose, dogma, political and 
private ambition, health measures, and private or public institutions is a long 
chapter of cultural history that has yet to be written. Its changing substance and 
tone will be instructive. For example, when Ivory Soap declared itself "99 and 
44/100 percent pure," it banked on the fact that the public had learned enough 
science to know that perfect purity is not attainable and that the precise mea- 
surement implied in the fraction testified to the superior quality of the article. 
The overcrowding of the modern mind with names, phrases, and pictures is 
another effect of this uncontrolled haranguing which, among yet other cultural 
effects, diverts literary talents and dilutes the new styles in painting. 

A bird's-eye view of the goods and appliances that the Nineties, when 
taken as a double decade, offered the public makes it clear that nearly all our 
modern conveniences date from the turn of the century. Here is a gradually 
gathered list that only approaches completeness. Obviously, some of the 
items needed improvement before finding a market: 

for the home-, central heating; the bathtub of modern size and shape with 
hot and cold running water; the safety razor; the chlorinated water supply; 
stainless-steel implements; the electric toaster, iron, oven, sewing machine, 
and dishwasher; 

for the office: the electric elevator; the dial phone; wireless telegraphy; the 
punched-card sorting system; the portable typewriter; the coffee- vending 
machine; 

for health'. Salvarsan for syphilis; various antitoxins; radium treatment for 
breast cancer; heart surgery; the beginning of organ transplant (in animals); 
appendectomy; the psychiatric clinic; the baby incubator; contact lenses; 
toothpaste in a tube; 

for recreation', motion pictures, musical comedy; the gramophone; ice 
dancing; volleyball and basketball; the Ferris wheel; the jukebox; the newspa- 
per headline; the cabaret song relayed by phone (in Paris); the screen kiss; and 
the striptease; 

for food and drink, breakfast cereals; milk delivered in bottles; packaged 



Cross Section: Chicago ^ 603 

produce (prunes); Coca-Cola; margarine; the ice cream cone; chop suey; 
canned fruit; the gin cocktail; the refrigerator; and the thermos flask; 

for instruction-, public libraries; the correspondence course; the syndicated 
article (McClure's invention); the questionnaire method; the language course 
on gramophone; the publisher's blurb; 

for shopping, the full-range department store; the chain store; die escalator; 
the shopping center (Cleveland, Ohio, 1893: a four-tiered, glass-covered 
arcade with 112 luxury shops); the coin telephone; the traveler's check; 

for law and order, fingerprinting; telephone tapping; the automatic pistol; 
and the electric chair; 

for transportation and other needs', the automobile and the aeroplane; the city 
subway (underground) train; the pneumatic tire; wireless telegraphy; vocal and 
orchestral recording; color photography; the roll film; rayon and other artificial 
textiles; celluloid; chewing gum; book matches; rubber heels; the zip fastener; 

prophetic firsts-, the hunger strike; women's football club; woman stockbro- 
ker; the acronym SCAPA = Society for Checking the Abuses of Public 
Advertising. 

In short, those were the years when Comfort was replaced by 
Convenience. The home appliance and the packaged product are additions to 
the panoply of life and they relieve it of chores, but they do not simplify it; 
they are often a burden. The appliance must be fed and cared for, repaired 
and "upgraded." It demands a new skill, rigid habits, and vigilance — and 
despair ensues when it fails. Emerson had observed the drawback of any such 
possession: "If I keep a cow, that cow milks me." A device fulfills one need at 
the expense, possibly, of several others. New means of communication 
diminish privacy and wastefully multiply human contacts, robbing one of 
time. It is a sidelight on this last consequence that the leading writers of the 
19C produced, without typewriters and telephones, bodies of work that 
astonish us by their volume, and this often in a span of years much shorter 
than our average lifetime. The modern situation has been described in detail 
by a Swedish scholar who explains "the decline of service in a service econ- 
omy" and gives the mathematical model for the relation between increased 
mechanization and loss of free time. [His book, brief and non-technical until 
the last chapter is: The Harried Leisure Class by Steffan Linder.] 

Besides, designers of domestic products often lack imagination or think 
only of visual appeal, or consult economy in manufacturing, and for these rea- 
sons neglect points of discomfort in the device. This is so general a drawback 
to living among machines that the term user-friendly has had to be coined to lure 
the purchaser, who frequently finds the reassurance in the printed leaflet rather 
than the object itself. The one clearly good result of labor-saving by home 
appliances has been the EMANCIPATION of the servant class. 

Long ago, John Stuart Mill pointed out that mechanizing man's work had 



604 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

changed but not lightened his toil. But it has not been noticed that mechaniz- 
ing the home has laid another load on the laborer's back: it has made simple 
poverty impossible. No household today can remain without the conve- 
niences, beginning with the telephone and other utilities (as they are called), 
and going on to the car, radio, and television. Needed for holding one's job or 
socially imposed by the neighbors and one's children, they are part of an 
oppressive "standard of living." For some families this means moonlighting 
or perpetual debt; for others, who refuse the struggle, it is abject poverty 
instead of the tolerable life that an earlier age might have afforded. 

The implication is not to side with the inhabitants of Erewhon, who 
decreed that all machines must be abolished. Certain side effects have been 
admirable. For example, turning night into day at the flick of a switch has bet- 
tered the conditions of study and white-collar work and has relieved small 
children of many fears. Electricity transformed the factory from a smoky hell 
into something of a showplace. For the machine is one of the works of man, 
not an alien intruder; it is born of handwork and imagination, like art, and its 
material shape may achieve beauty fused with utility. This perception has rein- 
forced Sullivan's aesthetics of Functionalism (<601; 605>). 



On his visit to these shores in 1 882, Oscar Wilde did nothing to convert 
the country to the religion of art. In any case, the American temper was too 
earnest and headlong in another direction. Critical thought, when it was not 
bitter as in Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce, was bent on reform. As we saw, 
it was big business, incipient colonialism, corrupt politics, and the condition 
of the poor, the young, and the Blacks that disturbed the men and women 
with a moral conscience. But another group — artists, thinkers, scholars — 
often felt isolated in a country whose main interest lay in settling land and 
building railroads. When able to do so, such "outsiders" lived abroad. It was 
almost a tradition. In the 1860s W W Story, a lawyer turned sculptor, had 
lived in Italy and gathered around him a shifting circle of like-minded dilet- 
tantes; Stuart Merrill lived most of his life in France and is considered one of 
the French Symbolist poets (620>); scholars felt they must spend time in 
Germany; in mid-career Henry James made England his permanent home; 
his brother William had a European education. Of those who stayed in the 
United States, most painters were students and disciples of European 
schools, who modified their chosen style to suit American subjects. These 
were usually the large and wild aspects of the continent, but presented as 
enticing or mysterious rather than rugged and threatening. Such were the 
works of Cole, Church, and Asher Durand. One painter, Albert Ryder, stood 
apart. His treatment of subjects signified a retreat into an unknown world 



Cross Section: Chicago <^> 605 

that contains neither landscape grandeur nor workaday plainness. His con- 
ception of The Race Track, for example, suggests a tantalizing dream akin to 
the visions of the Symbolists, though Ryder was unaware of them or their 
works. 

Another who went against the stream was the architect Richardson. To 
counter the routine imitation of European historical styles, he designed pur- 
posely heavy-looking buildings of fine proportions, with strongly marked 
windows. Then he simplified the externals, especially for private houses; but 
his liking for large indoor spaces was for some time unpractical from lack of 
central heating. Progress toward bareness in architecture was hastened by the 
development of the skyscraper: its size makes moldings around windows, 
cornices at each floor, or any other decoration look ridiculous, and the doc- 
trine of Functionalism forbids it in any case. 

That American artists felt their native land to be still wild both in topog- 
raphy and in manners may seem a paradox when it is remembered that the 
year 1 890 is said to mark the closing of the western frontier. But the several 
"Oklahoma Openings" by which parts of that territory were auctioned off 
began in 1 889 and continued through 1 906, so that there was still frontier life 
behind the closed frontier. Throughout the Great Plains (as the classic work 
of that name by Walter Prescott Webb makes clear), farming or ranching life 
was dependent on barbed wire and the Colt revolver. The Indians pushed out 
of their homelands had not yet been subdued, and the settlers' police forces 
were often distant and uncertain. Seeing or hearing about these facts gave the 
sense of an unfinished country. 

East of the Mississippi, the situation was different. For many, the attrac- 
tions of the city were irresistible. Hamlin Garland depicted their effect on a 
village girl in Rose of Dutchess Coolley, and a pioneer statistical study listed the 
advantages of urban life: better educational facilities; a higher standard of liv- 
ing aided by conveniences; more lively intellectual contacts; and more varied 
amusements, including music and the arts. Especially in the Northeast, long 
settled and closer to Europe, a growing body of people were reversing the 
current and enhancing the existing means of thought and culture. Museums 
were founded or consolidated in Boston, New York, and Washington; choral 
societies and orchestras were established in several more cities. Universities 
replaced colleges — and not merely in name, as happened recklessly in the 
1950s, but in earnest, by the creation of graduate schools. Columbia, Chicago, 
Johns Hopkins, Cornell, led the procession; and several newly founded state 
universities in the Middle West began to fulfill local demands, both intellec- 
tual and agricultural or industrial. 

The notion of making the university serve the public came to John W 
Burgess when, at the age of 17, a Union soldier in the Civil War (though his 
family owned slaves), he reflected that minds better trained than the political 



606 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

leaders on each side of the struggle would have found means of averting it. 
After graduating from Amherst, he went to Germany to observe the system 
of higher education, then to the Ecole des sciences politiques in Paris. On his 
return he organized at Columbia College the Graduate Faculty of Political 
Science, the first in the country and the nucleus of the university, the designa- 
tion assumed a few years later. The next demand came from the scientific 
interest. The president of Harvard, Charles W Eliot, a chemist, transformed 
the college into a university by adding one school after another — the 
Lawrence Scientific School and the Medical School being his special care — 
and by making the Divinity School non-denominational. He won his fight to 
establish the elective system that allowed students to make up their own pro- 
gram of study. But he insisted on laboratory work, and the new degree of 
Bachelor of Science, which helped to kill Latin, was instituted. 

Further, in helping Daniel Coit Gilman on his career, Eliot indirectly 
helped to set up the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale and the rise to emi- 
nence of the Johns Hopkins University. There, inspired by the German exam- 
ple, Gilman invented the American Ph.D. and created the first research med- 
ical school, headed by such luminaries as Osier and Halsted. Earlier, Andrew 
D White had dreamed of a university that would admit any qualified student 
regardless of means, sex, or color and would be "an asylum for science." After 
struggles in which Ezra Cornell supported him and provided money, White 
combined a land-grant school of agriculture in upstate New York with a full- 
size university and became its president. In retirement he wrote a widely read 
work indicative of his own philosophy, the History of the Warfare of Science and 
Theology in Christendom. Also after conflict with his faculty, Woodrow Wilson 
made Princeton a modern university of the first rank/ 

Meanwhile at Chicago, William Rainey Harper organized with Rockefeller 
backing the University of Chicago. Being a biblical scholar, Harper did not spe- 
cially favor science, but he insisted on a "senior college" — the upper two 
years — where research methods would be taught. It is this combination of sci- 
ence and research with a spreading policy of "come one, come all" that makes 
the 1890s the starting point of modern American higher education, dedicated 
to science and public service. Its sheltering of the fine arts came later (746 >). 

Then begins also the sad story of the humanities, the endemic "plight of 
the liberal arts." In earlier days they had lived on excellent terms with sci- 
ence — what there was of it, usually a professor of physics and astronomy and 
one of chemistry or "natural history." Those sciences had nothing illiberal 
about them; all types of knowledge were born equal. But in the 1 880s and 
1890s the increasing squadron of specialized sciences invaded the academy 
banners flying and claiming a monopoly of certified knowledge. It would be 
wrong to suppose that the scientists went out of their way to maim or kill the 
humanists. The latter's wounds were self-inflicted. In the hope of rivaling sci- 



Cross Section: Chicago <&*> 607 

ence, of becoming sciences, the humanities gave up their birthright. By teach- 
ing college students the methods of minute scholarship, they denatured the 
contents and obscured the virtues of liberal studies. 

"Research" was the deceptive word that made humanists devote their 
efforts exclusively to digging out facts about their subject without ever getting 
back into it. Nicholas Murray Butler, another university builder of the period 
(746 >), used to relate a telling example. When he was an undergraduate tak- 
ing a course in the Greek dramatists, the professor opened his first lecture on 
Euripides by saying: "This is the most interesting play of our author: it con- 
tains nearly every irregularity in Greek grammar." It is this fallacy of mis- 
placed significance that continues to deprive the humanities in college of 
their attractiveness and their practical value. The curriculum may have a large 
offering of "liberal arts courses," but they are worthless as education if they 
are not taught humanistically. But again, the science faculty is not responsible 
for the folly of their colleagues across campus. The humanist's fear and envy 
of science in the 1 890s was groundless. Huxley had truthfully pointed out 
that science appealed to the young mind and developed it for all intellectual 
purposes, because it was observation and organized common sense — noth- 
ing there to frighten or repel the liberal arts major. Science has become some- 
thing other than common sense, but that is another story (750>). 

* 
* * 

Populism, the state of mind that moved members of the comfortable 
classes to take thought and action for "the needs of the people," did not over- 
look intellectual matters. Andrew Carnegie decided to pepper the country 
with public libraries; others set up workingmen's institutes, as Thomas 
Cooper had done in New York as early as 1859. And one other, peculiarly 
American organization flourished in the Nineties that supplemented the 
work of the academy. This was the Chautauqua Movement, named after the 
lake in New York state, where the Episcopal Methodist church established 
the main center of the enterprise. Others arose in scattered fashion across the 
country, often serving rural areas by sending out troupes of lecturers and 
entertainers. Starting out as a camp meeting for religious studies and discus- 
sion, these assemblies became occasions for music and drama and general 
education. The Institution also offered correspondence courses, published a 
review for 35 years, and held a summer session at which notables lectured. 
William James accepted an invitation and dutifully addressed the thousands. 
But by the end of the week he was suffocated by the atmosphere — earnest, 
blameless people piously eager to learn. He longed, as he put it characteristi- 
cally, for "the flash of a pistol, a dagger, or a devilish eye." 

One more agency at work on American culture was Elbert Hubbard's 



608 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

group of Roycrofters in East Aurora, N.Y., who worked with their hands and 
published The Philistine. Reference books treat this institution harshly, because 
Hubbard used it to make money and the product was not of high quality, 
especially when compared with the Kelmscott Press, which the poet and 
socialist reformer William Morris had set up in England and which Hubbard 
professed to emulate. Morris's aim was to reinvigorate the arts and crafts in a 
world of shoddy factory products. By the Nineties the movement had suc- 
ceeded: the market offered manufactured objects of good materials and 
attractive design and at a lower price than the handmade. Over here, 
Hubbard's propaganda at least helped to create the taste for good things, 
although what the country bought in large numbers as the Morris chair with 
adjustable back was nothing of the kind. Hubbard also issued pamphlets — 
some 1 70 in all — entitledjoumeys to the Home of the Great, which fostered admi- 
ration and respect for human achievement. That he and his Roycrofters must 
be classed as purveyors of popular culture does not justify scornful descrip- 
tions of the effort; and if it was profitable, so are pop art and thought every- 
where today without blame. He must be accounted a pioneer. 



In the wake of political and economic reform, care for the person, the 
individual life, grew intense. As we saw, the Columbian Exposition sponsored 
conferences on the young. Shortly, societies for their protection were formed 
in Germany, France, and Belgium. In 1899, a Festival of Youth drew a large 
crowd in the Bois de Boulogne. A specialized literature flourished abun- 
dantly: there must be "child savers" argued one author. Another viewed juve- 
nile offenses as "the spirit of youth on the city streets." Ellen Key, the 
Swedish feminist, declared on the eve of the new century that it would be "the 
century of the child," and in her book of that tide the first chapter heading is: 
"The Right of the Child to Choose His Parents." 

Many parents and other persons sharing their concern set about reforming 
the school. As always, it was "ossified," "stultifying," and therefore cruel. The 
child must be freed from dull teachers and rote learning; his naturally inquisi- 
tive mind redirected from words to things (<1 81). John Dewey and his friends 
at the University of Chicago started a school that would effect the EMANCIPA- 
TION from all these errors — the progressive school. The pupil could choose 
his line of studies, would not recite memorized facts but discuss them, and 
would progress at his own pace. The teacher would be a mere guide (now called 
a facilitator), who would present knowledge as the solution of problems. 

Dewey fell into this last fallacy by assuming that thinking always follows 
"the deliberate method of science." What is deliberate in science is verifica- 
tion. Discoveries, as shown by their individual histories, are made not step by 



Cross Section: Chicago <^k 609 

step according to Dewey's formula, but by spurts of illumination, as in art or 
philosophy — or everyday life; the Eureka ("I have found it") of Archimedes 
in his bath is typical. In modern times, the famous case of Kekule has been 
not at all unusual: working on the carbon compound benzene, the chemist, 
asleep and dreaming, "saw" the "benzene ring" that represents the configu- 
ration of the molecule. It was an important advance, because it established 
that the properties of a substance depend on its structure. [The book to read 
is Science and Hypothesis by Henri Poincare.]° The "problem approach" in 
teaching has done as much harm to students as the look-and-say routine to 
young pupils learning to read. 

In any case, infants could not be expected to solve problems in five steps 
or choose their own studies; and as kindergartens were spreading fast and 
psychologists recommended early schooling, programs for tots were needed. 
One of the most approved was devised by Maria Montessori, an Italian physi- 
cian who was first interested in teaching the retarded. She was a disciple of 
Edouard Seguin and Jean Itard, pioneers in the treatment of idiots, deaf 
mutes, and other disabled children. Dr. Montessori studied further in Paris 
and London and was made professor at the University of Rome. She resigned 
to open her Casa dei Bambini — House for Tots. McClures Magazine publi- 
cized her work for years before she brought out The Montessori Method in 1912. 

It is based on the same premise of individualism as the progressive 
school and is an excellent preparation for it. The infant is "self-active" and 
can therefore be made self-teaching. Objects devised for the purpose incite 
the joint development of the senses, the muscles, and the mind. (One is 
reminded of Dr. Beddoes' educational toys, <438.) Suitable games sustain 
interest; the child is on his own for hours, uninterrupted by adults, and the 
result is concentration and self-discipline. By the age of six he or she has a 
"unique personality," fashioned by his or her own efforts. "The child," says 
the Method, is "building a man or woman," the scheme obviously an elabo- 
ration of Rousseau's principles. Praised and well patronized until the First 
World War, the Montessori schools suffered eclipse when behavioral psy- 
chology decreed that intelligence was physically predetermined and showed 
fixed levels at every phase of the child's growth. This made early experiences 
unimportant. When that dogma lost authority in the 1950s, Montessori 
schools reappeared here and abroad. Meantime, Dr. Montessori had become 
a mystic who viewed the child as a redeemer of mankind. 

On the next stage in life — adolescence — it was the American psycholo- 
gist G. Stanley Hall who gathered the facts and drew up the guidelines. He too 
agreed with Rousseau about the late emergence of intellect in a kind of sec- 
ond birth — adolescence — which is often accompanied by storm and stress. 
Like the two preceding stages, it can be righdy dealt with only if one knows 
that all three recapitulate human evolution: from birth to 6 or 7 the child is a 



610 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

little animal — "simian" — who needs the "negative education" given simply 
by controlling the environment. From 8 to 1 1 we have the savage, selfish and 
tribal in his conduct. Physical exercise is indicated; drill rather than book work 
and anti-social behavior tolerated as outlet, to prevent its later emergence. 
Lastly, the adolescent needs a broad survey of knowledge and ideas and 
should be informed about sexuality, which nature presses on his attention. At 
this stage, coeducation should cease; it puts obstacles to learning for both 
girls and boys. 

In the United States, a long stretch of schoolwork lay ahead: more than 
one state was setting up the public high school, after which propaganda drove 
many to college. The free and compulsory high school was unheard of except 
in the United States. There it was much favored by labor for the delay it 
imposed on becoming a worker competing in the market. For very clear rea- 
sons, Stanley Hall thought the high school should be a "people's college" in 
itself, not a place of preparation for the "unregenerate colleges" that others 
so much admired. In this belief he regenerated Clark University as its presi- 
dent in 1888, and invited as visiting professors the leaders of the new science 
of psychology (659>). He incurred odium when he welcomed Dr. Freud of 
Vienna in 1909 (641 >). 

* * 

Stanley Hall's opposition to coeducation in the high school did not spring 
from any anti- feminism, and even had it done so, the current that was pro- 
pelling women's interests — higher education in particular — would have 
swamped his "scientific" conclusions. Not a few women's colleges were being 
founded, Bryn Mawr, Barnard, and Radcliffe enlarging the northeastern 
group of Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley, senior by 20 years. The earliest went 
back in date to the 1830s. In all respects, women's EMANCIPATION in this 
country was ahead of the European effort. The Seneca Falls Convention for 
Women's Rights of 1848 had had no counterpart elsewhere. 

From the beginning, the settlement of the American continent had 

drawn heavily on women's strength of 

Men tell us 'tis fit that wives should submit bod y and mind ' and thek contribution 

To their husbands submissively, weakly; g ave them an authority in the home 

That whatever they say, their wives should that was marveled at abroad and that 

obey, they never lost. But they wanted 

Unquestioning, stupidly, meekly; more — the vote and access to the pro- 

But I don't and I can't and I won't and I fessions — and it was in the 1870s that 

shan't, the struggle became unceasing. By the 

No! I will speak my mind if I die for it. 18 9 0s me professional world was 

—"Let Us All Speak Our Minds" (1848) beginning to open up and the demand 



Cross Section: Chicago <^ 611 

for the vote was no longer shocking. Women had obtained it in Wyoming as 
early as 1869 and Colorado followed suit in 1893, Utah and Idaho in 1896. It 
is hard to speak of independent American women in the 1 890s without evok- 
ing the figure of Lizzie Borden who, in 1892, was charged with the murder of 
her parents. Clearly she was not one to act "weakly, meekly." She was acquit- 
ted (righdy, as the most thorough study concludes) and thereafter proved 
herself a woman of character and dignity in the teeth of local prejudice. 

Perhaps because of the gains already achieved, one finds in American lit- 
erature at the end of the century nothing like the array of English genius pro- 
moting women's rights. The best American writers had always portrayed 
women that were clearheaded, self-reliant in conduct, and in speech often 
scornful of men. Women's part in conquering the West everybody fully 
acknowledged. As the century closed, any reader of Henry James, William 
Dean Howells, or John William De Forest, knew what restrictions were still 
to be lifted, mainly in the higher reaches of society. To the general under- 
standing, Oliver Wendell Holmes contributed his knowledge of psychiatric 
cases in three novels (<586) and Theodore Dreiser that of the strong-willed, 
talented, self-made woman in Sister Carrie. 

Literary theory hardly troubled the American reader of these books. The 
batde between schools going on abroad interested chiefly the men of letters 
and critics. The news and ideas that crossed the ocean were more entertain- 
ing. There was Trilby, a novel by George du Maurier that swept the world. Like 
Sister Carrie, Trilby is an acclaimed singer, but not at all self-made. A sinister 
character named Svengali, Hungarian and a musician, had got hold of her, an 
artist's model (originally a laundress), and by hypnosis made her a concert 
artist. Her love for a young English painter in Paris and the Bohemian life 
there supply the charm of the story. When Svengali dies suddenly, Trilby's 
voice fails too. There is no happy ending. What the name Trilby now evokes 
is a soft felt hat creased in the middle. 

The English musical comedy Floradora was another import that won 
instant success, and as a new form of entertainment it gradually ousted the 
simpler vaudeville from the stage. In Paris, a little before the 1900 Exposition, 
the theatrical sensation of the hour was Cyrano de Bergerac, whose acclaim 
reverberated throughout the West. The five-act drama in verse was by a 29- 
year-old poet named Edmond Rostand. The play pivots (so to speak) on the 
hero's nose, which is outsize and which did adorn the real 17C writer, 
Bergerac. The plot is slight and the romance of no interest. Nevertheless, the 
explosion of enthusiasm at the premiere was unprecedented; it was like a 
sports event today. The author was pelted with ladies' gloves and fans. People 
wept and embraced and would not leave the theater, as if they were one fam- 
ily at their own party. The emotion released is indicative of a pre-existing state 
of feeling. Cyrano is the heroic individualist, ugly and crossed in love, but 



612 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

lashing out fearlessly against those in power, against the rich, the liars, and the 
blockheads. He is the universal underdog, but endowed with the glamour of 
swordplay and the art of rhetoric/ 

This last is the strong element in the play's appeal. The spectator who 
understands French is gripped by the virtuosity of the language. The verse 
technique is pure Victor Hugo, handled with the liveliest fancy, just short of 
imagination. The fancy is the only element that has proved translatable into 
other languages; reproducing the click and sparkle of the French is not possi- 
ble. That has not stopped the work from being performed everywhere with- 
out letup. Some actors have specialized in the role; for example, Shago 
Shimada, who for the last 25 years has portrayed "Shirano Benjuro" for the 
Japanese. Films and television productions continue to be made; the hero- 
victim is ever popular. 

When Cyrano burst upon the world, the same fine craftsmanship and 
brilliant polish had for some years enchanted audiences in the comic operas 
of Gilbert and Sullivan. Gilbert's sure-handed plotting and picturesque fig- 
ures were rendered memorable by efficient dialogue and superb versifying in 
the manner of Byron's Don Juan — all this perfectiy matched by Sullivan's 
melodies, which often parody well-known passages in great operas, from 
Handel's to Verdi's. In addition, several of these little "G. and S." masterpieces 
were topical in their satire. Trial by Jury makes fun of English law; Pinafore of 
the English navy; lolanthe of the House of Lords; Princess Ida of women in 
male occupations; and Patience of preciosity in the arts. 

Of this last-named opera, conventional criticism says that the hero-poet 
Bunthorne was patterned after Oscar Wilde. The dates suffice to disprove it. 
The opera was produced in 1881, therefore conceived, written, and com- 
posed earlier. Wilde's first volume of poems appeared in 1882, when he was 
28. He was not enough known in London to be an object of humor on the 
stage. A satirist addressing a theater audience can ridicule only what many 
average people have heard of more than once. This is a generality. Moliere's 
Precieuses (<344) lived a generation before him. Gilbert's Bunthorne is not 
Wilde but a Pre-Raphaelite, as is confirmed by several lines in the play, such 
as holding a lily in his "medieval hand" — a backward-looking aesthetic, not 
Wilde's modern one. 

In the same year as Cyrano, a show as widely reported was the celebration 
of Queen Victoria's 60th year on the throne. She seemed to have occupied it 
forever, but she was only 77. The variety of events and the extent of change 
in her time gave the Methuselah impression. She had survived accidents, 
republican disfavor, and popular protests; she had filled the other thrones of 
Europe with her offspring and relatives; she was Empress of India and titular 
head of nations and peoples multi-ethnic, infidel, and pagan. On her posses- 
sions the sun never set — a thought that her English subjects curiously found 



Cross Section: Chicago <^> 613 

advantageous. They cheered enthusias- On Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee: Glory 

tically her Diamond Jubilee, believing be, whin I look back fr'm this day iv gin'ral 

for the moment that they owed rejoicin' an' see what changes has taken 

England's world supremacy to her, or P lace an ' how much better off th ' ™* tXd is, 

again to their own superior breed. Pm P roud iv mesdf ' War and P estilence have 

The other nations of the West, occurred fa me time ' but 1 count thhn ^ ht 

, , ^ , , T T . , compared with th* binifits that have fallen to 

particularly Germany and the United , , . 

.... . th* race since I come on th* earth. 

States, both nsing to power, might _ wha( aMe ye taMn , abm? eM ^ 

share the feeling of respect due an old Hennessy . ^ have ye had to do ^ ^ 

and upright monarch but could not these things? 

partake of the self-congratulations or —Well, said Mr. Dooley, I had as much to do 
testify to the excellence of the British with thim as th' queen. 
Empire. One voice in Britain, that of a _ m dooley in Peace and in War (1898) 
man reared in India and who knew the 

United States, was raised amid the hurrahs to sound a warning. Rudyard 
Kipling's "Recessional" told his fellow Englishmen that they should remem- 
ber the just God watching their actions. "Lest they forget," he conjured the 
vision of "their pomp of yesterday" becoming that of "Nineveh and Tyre," 
that is to say extinct. 

Kipling is too often regarded as a jingo imperialist. On more than one 
occasion he was a severe judge of his country, and when the United States 
acquired its first colonies in the Spanish-American War, he again defined 
imperialism — "the White Man's Burden" — in ethical terms: "By all ye leave 
or do, the sullen, silent peoples shall weigh your gods and you." Kipling was 
evidendy aware of portents of change, of some risen wind that could over- 
turn and destroy. His uttering that perception while the queen was being glo- 
rified was apt. The Victorian institutions and their counterparts outside 
England no longer commanded allegiance or respect. The thoughtful knew 
that a certain view of life must be given up, but not by revolution in the heroic 
mood — that had bred its own evils. The ethos could be overturned in the lit- 
eral sense — turned upside down — by ridicule, by doing in all things the exact 
opposite. Gilbert and Sullivan's topsy-turvydom was to be enacted in social 
thought and real life. 



A Summit of Energies 



The SUGGESTION that two decades, and not one, be called the Nineties 
(<599) arises from the rush of new ideas and behavior that took place 
between 1 885 and 1 905. Change did not then stop; on the contrary: but it was 
another and quite different impulse that irrupted early in the 20C and ani- 
mated the Cubist Decade that followed. If one could write a page on a dozen 
levels simultaneously as in a musical score, an account of those 30 years 
would form one story. To be fair to the actors in it, one would recall (as will 
be done here) the fruitful germs that came to light during the preparatory 
1870s. 

The turn of the century was a turning indeed; not an ordinary turning 
point, but rather a turntable on which a whole crowd of things facing one way 
revolved till they faced the opposite way. The image falsifies only a little: 
things did not turn in unison. Besides, the new was not, as it sometimes is, all 
of one kind or showing a family likeness. In art, science, and politics, and 
social outlook the period offered two opposite ways of being new and two 
ways of judging it, exultant or desperate. The daring were sanguine, the reti- 
cent found new retreats in new forms of PRIMITIVISM. In either case, the clear 
intent was EMANCIPATION. The forward march proceeded in several columns 
fighting as they went. 

To play with the image of the turn once more: the turning, as said before, 
was often upside down. Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest is the perfect 
display of this intellectual gymnastics, beginning with the punning title: the 
importance to the hero of being named Ernest is not that he has the moral 
quality praised by the Victorians, but that the young woman he loves fancies 
the name. In the play all the pieties of the previous age are turned on their 
heads; for example, having lost both parents is reproved as sheer carelessness. 
Smoking is approved because a man must have some occupation. The farce 
is a serious criticism of the ideas it is respectable to utter. 

Earlier, Samuel Butler (<553) had done the same puncturing of thought- 
cliches. Tennyson's "Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have 



616 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

loved at all," Butler rewrote as: "Tis better to have loved and lost than never 
to have lost at all." He and his witty friend Miss Savage exchanged such revi- 
sions of conventional sentiments, calling the game "quoting from memory." 
Wilde's epigrams, which state the opposite of what one expects, do not do so 
merely as a trick; they dismiss affectations and condemn thoughtless states of 
mind. "I live constantly in the fear of not being misunderstood," says Wilde, 
meaning: the public should be baffled by new art, not reduce it to something 
it already understands. Shaw's plays work out in life situations a similar rever- 
sal of judgment. In Mrs. Warrens Profession, running an efficient brothel is 
shown to be in her circumstances, the only way open to her of earning a 
decent living and educating her daughter — in short, of being "respectable." 
Overturning one social judgment thus condemns more than one accepted 
part of the system. When Ibsen at long last was tolerated on the stage in this 
period, his plays supported the new thesis that the most admired virtues and 
revered institutions were obstacles to the good life: marriage, always telling 
the truth, respect for authority, propriety at all costs. All ideals in the abstract 
are causes of disaster to individuals and ultimately to society. 

In Ibsen these teachings were not, as in Shaw, coupled with high comedy, 
which for some spectators lessens the gravity of the issue; Ibsen adapted the 
19C melodrama to his purpose, putting live characters in conflicts made 
memorable by violence. Under the influence of these new ideas, the theatre 
was reviving after a long coma: besides Wilde and Shaw, Pinero, Galsworthy, 
Henry Arthur Jones in England, Strindberg in Sweden, Brieux in France, 
Hauptmann and Sudermann in Germany, Schnitzler in Austria, Pirandello in 
Italy were giving the public cause for scandal and thereby inculcating the new 
ethos. 

An interesting paradox accompanies this course of education: Wilde and 
other writers in their capacity of critics insisted that art had no duty to teach 
morality (61 7>). But here they all were doing just that by denouncing the old 
morality as no longer serving moral ends. Obviously the dictum about art 
should have said: "no duty to teach conventional morals." What then did the 
new code command? The answer was not simple. Art itself, not this or that 
message, was to be the guide of conduct — art by its truth, harmony, and grace 
molded the spirit; aesthetics was a form of ethics. In other words, evil is ugly 
and detestable. 

Such a rule means that rules carved in stone for the whole world are as 
inadequate and misleading as local conventions. Life's complexities must be 
artfully, not mechanically, handled. As Shaw pointed out: "Do not do unto 
others as you want them to do unto you; they may not have the same tastes." 
What art teaches at this point is Fitness. Time, place, persons create a unique 
situation that the moral being deals with as one seeking the most harmonious 



A Summit of Energies <^> 617 

result. This chimed in, as we shall see, with the philosophy of verified result 
(the true meaning of Pragmatism) that contemporary thinkers were elaborat- 
ing (665>). 

This use of an artistic criterion to judge moral problems extends to art as 
a whole the 1 9C tenet that literature is a criticism of life; it reaffirms the 1 9C 
devotion to art, whose mission was to combat "bourgeois ideas." The adjec- 
tive is unfair but the phrase is clear. To profess this "religion" came to be 
called aestheticism. The aesthete was a new social type by reason of attitudes 
and ways of speech that were deliberate poses, means of propaganda for the 
purpose of destroying Respectability. Not all the writers, painters, and musi- 
cians of the time assumed the manner, nor did they all believe in "art for art's 
sake." This axiom borrowed from Gautier after half a century was always 
more of a fighting slogan than a first principle. To the philistine it gave the 
command: "appreciate the artistry in art; not just the entertainment or moral 
lesson." To the artist it enjoined "no compromise with the taste of the multi- 
tude. Do not write or paint to sell." And for many others, artists and lovers of 
art, as we shall see, it held yet another meaning (620>). 

Why should this attitude have been common enough to find multiplied 
expression in a period of steady improvement in the means of life? Perhaps 
poetic minds are never satisfied; perhaps improvement always raises expecta- 
tions higher than its own level. Perhaps the very busy-ness of the changing 
world was felt as hostile by the contemplative seekers of beauty and perfection. 
The three explanations singly or together probably account for the various 
individual judgments that led toward a common conclusion. What is certain is 
that part of the Nineties' desire to create also went with a program of active 
retreat. 

* 
* * 

What the retreat was from, earlier pages have described: the industrial 
world. It had long caused stress and strain, and the accumulated complaints 
were summed up in the charge that business, imperialism, labor unrest, and 
war were destroying civilization. The facts were reinforced by the superstition 
that fin de siecle — the end of years numbered in 1 8 hundreds — somehow 
indicated all things coming to an end. Events, it is true, were suggestive. The 
Third French Republic was shaky and threatened by "the man on horseback" 
(military dictatorship). England felt its industrial and commercial supremacy 
slipping away and labor threatening. Germany, while glorying in its freshly 
won imperial might, was rent by a struggle between the state and the Catholic 
population — Virchow called it a Kulturkampf (war of cultures) — and by the 
violent action of socialists and workingmen inside Parliament and outside. 



618 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Italy and Spain were no less disunited over similar issues of religion and gov- 
ernance. In Norway nationalism was brewing the revolt that within 10 years 
would make the country split off from Sweden. When a French newspaper in 
1895 opened a survey on the question "Are We Decadent?," it cited the 
"crises" in parliamentary government, rebellion in the colonies, the falling 
birthrate, and the strange turn in the arts. 

Near that date, a book called Degeneration, by a German physician named 
Max Nordau,° had gone through several editions in central Europe and been 
translated into the other languages. It professed to show that every well- 
known artist of recent years was a neurotic, an alcoholic and drug addict, or 
had died insane. His scope may be gauged from the headings of his central 
chapters: The Pre-Raphaelites; Symbolism; Tolstoyism; The Richard Wagner 
Cult; Parnassians and Diabolists; Decadents and Aesthetes; Ibsenism; 
Friedrich Nietzsche; Zola and His School. The list sounds like the description 
of a course in late 19C thought and culture; after which the last two chapters: 
Prognosis and Therapeutics suggest the confidence of a psychiatrist who can 
take on half a century of intellect and sanitize it. Nordau's clinical facts were 

well set out; his conclusion was that the 
A noble age, begetter of good arts, is dying. arts in di C ated social decay and fur- 
Whoever cares to may celebrate in song the thered k Rence ^ influence must 

conveniences and laws of nature that have , , , n i i i • i ^i 

be resisted by all healthy minds. I he 
been brought to light. For my part, the mis- ,. , . . __ .. . , 

j j c i . j ,. . «. ca ll went unheeded. Not only did the 

deeds of this declining century affect me J 

u « aii t-u i • popularity of the arts increase, but their 

much more forcefully. They make me grieve r r / » 

and feel wrathful. What shame, what tower- moral and social message became more 
ing examples of disgrace do I descry when I and more hostile toward society and 
look back! persuaded the literate that Europe was 

-Pope Leo XIII (January 1901) decadent. The pope wrote a Latin ode 

bewailing the fact. 
To such a conviction, responses vary with temperament. In the bad days 
of Realism (<559) Baudelaire had recommended drugs — "artificial heavens." 
In the generation after him, the extraordinary youth Arthur Rimbaud, who 
wrote all his poems between the ages of 1 5 and 20, chose violence — at least 
in words. He would destroy everything if he could. He began by roughing up 
the language and the form of verse (622>). Later he disowned his works as 
"rinsings," by which he meant at once dishwater and things watered down 
from others' work — he may have been thinking of his use of Coleridge's 
Ancient Mariner in his own Bateau ivre. In his other poems (two in free verse, 
others in prose), his aim was "to disorganize the senses" so as to erase the 
associations that possess our minds. Perception of the world must begin 
again from a clean slate. When adult, Rimbaud the anarchist and anti-ratio- 
nalist left western Europe for the Near East; he lived and died there as a mis- 
cellaneous trader, with apparentiy no intellectual interests or companionship. 



A Summit of Energies ^> 619 



* 
* * 



Rimbaud is the first of those I have elsewhere called the French 
Abolitionists, bent on complete cultural destruction. A contemporary of 
Rimbaud's who emerged later and had the same goal was Isidore Ducasse. 
Under the pseudonym of Comte de Lautreamont, he wrote a series of prose 
fragments called Songs ofMaldoror. They tell of the young author's hatred of Man 
and God and his worship of the Ocean, alone pure and life-giving, particularly 
of monstrous and repulsive creatures. The stream of nightmarish visions is 
often poetic-erotic; the imagery resembles that of the Symbolist poets (620>), 
but the denunciation of the cultural past and present is lucid. The pseudo 
comte voices the aristocrat's disdain for the common life and its habitat, the 
stance also implied in Villiers de l'lsle- Adam's dictum when describing the con- 
ditions of an ideal state: "Living? Our servants will do that for us."° 

The most explicit Abolitionist is also the one who tried to embody the 
doctrine in his day-to-day behavior: Alfred Jarry His best-known work is the 
play Ubu rot {King Ubu), in which the main character serves a double purpose; 
he is to be laughed at with contempt as stupid, arrogant, and incapable; and 
he also throws back on the world these same feelings. Jarry dressed in out- 
landish garments like Ubu, spoke in a high falsetto — like Ubu — and acted 
erratically and offensively. He pre- 
tended to be a good shot and would 

without reason point a revolver at a Eveiythiiig in Jarry, that strange humbug, 
ii r i i smelled of affectation — his face whited with 

bystander, one of whom he once 

i i 1 T flour, his mechanical speech without intona- 

wounded with a blank. Tarry would . , „ f , , , , 

J J tion, the syllables evenly spaced, and the 

repeat with variations one of Ubu's words made up OI dieted. 

speeches: "We won't have destroyed 

r .. . . . — Andre Gide (1926) 

anything unless we destroy the ruins 

too." Jarry died of alcoholism. 

The work and its author find admirers today; a New York acting group 
for avant-garde plays is named the Ubu Theatre. Others take the play less seri- 
ously and enjoy the humor that still others see as intended rather than real- 
ized. Jarry made up the name Ubu from that of a teacher, one Ebe, whom he 
had hated and ridiculed in school, and the adolescent fun is prolonged in 
Jarry's sequels and commentaries on the play.° The scene is Poland, "because 
that means Nowhere," presumably an allusion to the country's frequent 
annexation and loss of identity. Ubu invents swearwords and talks in a man- 
ner supposedly Rabelaisian. In the text, the wotdjinance is spdledphynance and 
reference is made to the science of pataphysics. The verb merdre, from the sca- 
tological noun merde, was regarded, when the play was produced, as a bold 
invention weighted with satirical force. And so were the speeches that seem 
to say something but carry no discoverable sense. 



620 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

The reception of Ubu roi and the legend rapidly formed around Jarry's 
antics have given him and his hero a place as the carrier of a central message 
for his time: Destruction. The Abolitionists were surrounded by writers who 
held the same estimate of the contemporary world but relied on its destroy- 
ing itself. These were the Decadents. They took the name for themselves and 
Decadence as the tide of one of their innumerable litde magazines. The desig- 
nation made them neither sad nor angry; there was even something chic — 
late Roman Empire — about being the last and the doomed. 

But side by side with them, writers of a different order chose another 
means of assuaging the pain they felt. They turned their back on ordinary 
existence and through their poems created an ideal one to live in, a realm of 
beauty attainable only by fit spirits. Their art was not descriptive; the ideal was 
conveyed in symbols to keep it secret and sacred. This Symbolist school of 
poets — Mallarme, Verlaine, Laforgue, Tailhade, Moreas (who gave the group 
its name) was the pre-eminent one of the early Nineties. For them and their 
admirers among the public, art for art's sake really signified art for life's 
sake — art is what helps us to live; without it existence would be unendurable. 
This had been Schopenhauer's credo. It has remained, barring the interrup- 
tion of the Cubist Decade (643>), the comfort of sensitive persons unwilling 
or ill-equipped to wage the batde of life. 

The form and coloring that this conviction took at the turn of the cen- 
tury, not in France alone but in artistic circles throughout Europe, found its 
English expression in the writings of Walter Pater, a modest Oxford don, 
who pondered the masterpieces of painting and literature to extract from 
them some magic to enhance life. He found it in the resolve to make each 
moment carry a unique sensation of the most exalted kind, "to burn," as he 
put it, "with a pure gem-like flame." The hero of his one novel, Marius the 
Epicurean, does so and may be taken as the prophet of the Nineties religion. It 
deserves that name not alone because it considers art the highest spiritual 
expression of man, but also because the world that it rejects is in fact "the 
world" in the Christian sense of pleasures of the flesh, wealth and self-seek- 
ing — all the vanities. The artist and his disciples do cultivate the senses, but 
not in a carnal way. 

Pater was not the man to make a stir with his philosophy of life. 
Fortunately, he had taught the perfect bearer of the gospel: Oscar Wilde. He 
personified the ideal Epicurean; he was the living embodiment of the new 
social type, the aesthete. But he was much more and he is due recognition for 
what he did beyond playing that role and being the victim of a famous prose- 
cution. His true worth has been blanketed by the figure of the^oj-^rand the 
homosexual. As playwright he wrote the most brilliant farce in the English 
language, The Importance of Being Earnest (<615), as well as other plays that 
helped break down the Victorian prejudice against the woman who takes a 



A Summit of Energies <^*> 621 

lover, while the man remains "respectable." He wrote delightful fairy tales for 
grown-ups (originally for his two children) and a few fine poems, of which 
one — "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" — is masterly. As a maker of epigrams he 
deserves a place next to the best of the French; and as a critic he belongs in 
the first rank, both for the three long essays that define aestheticism and for 
his reviews of current books, which contain maxims worth remembering 
about life and literature. His apologia De Profundis is a moving chapter among 
autobiographies, and his article "The Future of Socialism" shows again the 
well-balanced mind, as much at home in the worldly world as in the world 
of art. 

From this sketchy recital it may be seen that if Wilde, like Bernard Shaw, 
resorted to acting a part, it was in the interest of the causes they espoused; 
they made up each a personage whom the responsible critic must see through 
in order to judge rightly the solid and varied accomplishments that lie behind. 
Now, as to Wilde's representation of the aesthete: the name by etymology 
refers to sense impressions. The aesthete is expert at recording and judging 
sensations. He perceives more in the universe and makes finer distinctions 
than the common creature. In works of art, which are bound to be difficult if 
they are genuinely art, he sees everything where the rest see nothing. Two 
things follow: art needs a critic to interpret it for public appreciation and the 
critic must be as gifted as the artist to see deeply and justly into the work. 
Hence a piece of true criticism is a work of art. The Nineties were a time espe- 
cially rich in critics, and the position that criticism acquired then, on the 
strength of Wilde's aesthetic reasoning, has not been disputed since. A hun- 
dred years later, it is true, critics have evolved: there are a dozen different 
species that determine exactly what the artist did that he knew nothing about 
and what inner or outer forces drove his mind. The latest practitioners, called 
Deconstructionists, have finally got the upper hand and disposed of the 
maker altogether in favor of his public, Tom, Dick, and Harry, all adept at 
"creativity" (788>). 



In the original aesthetic outlook the only criterion for judging art was 
perfection of form, which was deemed the essence of beauty. All other fea- 
tures are irrelevant. This exclusion makes art "autonomous." Being indepen- 
dent of subject matter, including ideas, social, moral, or religious, each work 
is a complete world. This contradicts some 3,000 years of artistic theory 
and practice, but it has the advantage of detaching the work from this world 
and enabling the beholder to feel himself in another, by definition perfect and 
beautiful. These assumptions form the basis of the talk about "pure art." The 
concept owes something to Poe (<562), whom Baudelaire interpreted for the 



622 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Europeans, and also to Pater, who said that all the arts were tending toward 
the condition of music, which was supposed by these predominantly non- 
musical poets to be form pure of contents, nothing but inner relations. Purity 
is another evocative term implying EMANCIPATION from things as they are. 

The Nineties' theorizing about the graphic arts was reaching the same 
position. Roger Fry, Clive Bell, and others asserted that painting consists of line 
and color and nothing else; sculpture presents volume and line. The relations 
of these elements are the points of interest and signs of mastery. The apparent 
subject is a mere excuse or pretext for design. A work therefore has no mean- 
ing expressible in words. It is philistinism to look at it as if it represented any 
thing or idea (646 >). Whistler's famous picture of his mother sitting in a chair 
is nothing but what its title says: "Arrangement in black and gray No. 3." Those 
words hint of an influence on the doctrine that its promoters may not have 
been conscious of. Like the would-be purist in art, the scientist takes a concrete 
experience and by an act of ABSTRACTION brings out a principle that may have 
no resemblance to the visible world. Thus the ideal of form in art resembles the 
idea of mass in physics: externals disregarded to reach essence. This entire sys- 
tem — if it deserves the name — helps to explain a large part of 20C art that 
would otherwise be incomprehensible (723>). 

Poets and prosaists, whether Abolitionist, Decadent, or Symbolist, found 
that to create works adequate to their vision the language must be re-created. 
Symbolist diction needs words that suggest rather than denote. Mallarme 
called it "giving a purer meaning to the words of the tribe." At the same time, 
abolitionist purposes require grammar and syntax to be defied. Decadent 
feeling looks for vocables of the rich and rare kind that imply the sensual 
indulgence of Sardanapalus about to die amid his treasures and his women. 
To "disorganize the senses" as Rimbaud wished, images are juxtaposed with- 
out links and come from contrary parts of experience. Successive lines have 
no apparent connection. The strange words that Laurent Tailhade threw into 
his lines disconcerted in another way, so that little glossaries were compiled 
for the relief of the bewildered. Mallarme resorted to yet another device for 
this general brainwashing. He looked up in Littre's dictionary on historical 
principles some long- forgotten meaning of common words and used these in 
that sense. From all these deviations, poetry — and by contagion prose liter- 
ature and the other arts — become objects of study that start as riddles. 

The period thus contains the models and methods of all modern poetry 
since: free verse, language distortion, calculated obscurity. One apparent 
exception is the poetry of our day that combines free verse with ordinary col- 
loquial prosiness, as in the works of William Carlos Williams, in children's 
poetry, and the contributions that newspapers print; but even this mode was 
prefigured a century ago in the works of the English poet John Davidson. To 
the extent that this last poetic style also disregards regularity, the forward 



A Summit of Energies <^> 623 

march of literature since Rimbaud has been a vast collective EMANCIPATION. 
One can understand and sympathize with the motive that led to linguistic 
tampering. If the goal was to shut out the external world of the daily press, 
one must get rid not only of its cliches but also of its mind, which consists of 
plain words, short sentences, and unchanging adjectives that explain all things 
with equal ease. 

What is singular about the philosophy of aestheticism is the combination 
of the striving for purity and the Pateresque program of making life a series 
of strong sensations. Plato, who was the first worshipper of Form, made no 
such mistake: his love was mathematics, not the aesthete's revel in images of 
physical beauty and elaborate decoration, delicate colors, sounds, and tex- 
tures — such as are found in the prose of Pater and Wilde, the poems of 
Verlaine, and notably in Huysmans' novel about Des Esseintes, who makes a 
cult of collecting fragrances. Mallarme himself was not above writing adver- 
tisements for perfume. The prevailing tone of the artistic Nineties is volup- 
tuousness, subtle, to be sure — mauve rather than purple — but still physical 
and far from mathematical pleasure. 

The paradox was inevitable and in its way touching. Artists, whatever 
they may say, are by nature uncommonly alive to sense impressions, every art 
calling for keenness in one or more of the senses; their practitioners ' one aim 
in life is to give their conceptions material being. The musician, far from deal- 
ing in pure forms, molds tons of air. "Abstract art" is a contradiction in terms 
(723>). The social motive for the aesthetes' retreat into art being clear, there 
remains the question, what motive made purity a second necessity? Mallarme 
gives the answer in his superb sonnet, written in clear language and entitled 
"Brise Marine" (Sea Breeze). The first line reads: "The flesh is sad and I have 
read all the books." The last six words tell us that the whole weight of past lit- 
erature bears down on him and adds to his pre-existing sorrow. Exacdy 100 
years earlier Faust had said the same thing, also in the first line of his solilo- 
quy — all the books are dust, not life. Each of the two utterances records the 
end of a cultural age, 1790 and 1890. 

* 
* * 

Naturalism is the period's other, broader movement, and as its name indi- 
cates, it is the exact opposite of Symbolism. With a few exceptions, 
Naturalism finds expression in the novel, where persons and objects are 
described in ordinary words and the reader, far from being transported to an 
ideal realm of beauty, is thrust among the sordid places and vulgar predica- 
ments of the present. It was shown earlier how Ibsen, Shaw, and other play- 
wrights performed that same task. The novelists had a larger canvas to fill 
with horrors and could deal with subjects not easily stageable. Like the plays, 



624 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

the novels said: "Look; it is not as you think." The effect was to destroy the 
conventions of the respectable by showing how they and the other half of 
society actually lived. One may ask how this differed from Realism. In two 
ways: the Naturalists pretended no aloofness from the scenes they described. 
Without preaching, they compelled the reader to be appalled and indignant, 
so deeply that sometimes the shock brought reform. For example, the expo- 
sure of meat packing in Chicago by Upton Sinclair in his novel The Jungle led 
President Roosevelt to investigate and install the Pure Food and Drug 
Administration. The master producer and theorist of the genre, Zola, 
declared the Naturalistic novel scientific by virtue of its method — or at any 
rate his method, which was to collect news items and official statistics, as well 
as social and medical studies before framing plot and character. All these pro- 
vided the "nature" to be reconstructed in Naturalist fiction. He systematized 
Balzac's claim that his works amounted to a social zoology (<560). 

The transition between these two novelists a generation apart was 
effected by the Goncourt brothers, Jules and Edmond. They began as dilet- 
tantes interested in 1 8C manners and ladies, in Japanese art, and other aes- 
thetic curiosities. Writing on these subjects, they became good cultural histo- 
rians and when they turned to novel writing they presented their works as 
"documentary" and reliable. One was about a servant (their own), who leads 
a double life, blameless and debauched; others of their "studies" were about 
the vicissitudes of a circus and about the troubles of a hospital nurse. These 
stories are no longer read, partly because they are written in short impres- 
sionistic scenes that must be fitted together by the reader, and because of 
their contorted style, which the authors called prose d'art. 

Their connection with Naturalism (the document) and with Symbolism 
(a special language) shows the weak point in Zola's theory. When challenged 
by critics who denied that a novel could be scientific, Zola redefined 
Naturalism as "Nature seen through a temperament." Scientists too have 
their little ways, but these do not appear in the product. In the novel it turned 
out that temperaments were liable to alteration. The Naturalist Huysmans 
turned Symbolist; the Gissing of New Grub Street shortly before his death was 
planning a historical romance; and young Andre Gide, who absorbed the 
Symbolist atmosphere as he came of age, abandoned it for direct discourse 
when he came to write novels. 

Zola's backtracking did not change the tone and animus of the 
Naturalistic novel as produced by many different temperaments: Zola, 
Mirbeau, Huysmans (the early works) in France; George Moore, Gissing, 
Arnold Bennett, the later Hardy in England; Frank Norris, Hamlin Garland, 
Upton Sinclair in the United States; Douglas Brown in Scotland; Maxim 
Gorky in Russia. In the best Naturalist novels — certainly in Zola's — the 
reforming purpose imparts great energy to the world it portrays: it is not 



A Summit of Energies <^> 625 

Realism; because one feels the zest for life in the worst characters and the 
worst circumstances. Germinal, which deals with a strike in the coal mining 
region, is a particularly good example because of the passions aroused. But 
even in the average apartment house of Pot-Bouille {Restless House) or the 
drunkard's milieu in L'Assommoir ot the prostitute's in Nana, the reader is not 
exposed to the listless mood of Flaubert's Bovary or The Education of the Feelings 
(<561). When Naturalism pointed to social decadence, it was to the sound of 
drums and trumpets. 

A shelf full of novels, however fine, could not expose all imaginable 
evils — or cure them — but among other revelations it threw its glaring light on 
the secrets of sexuality, which in a sense is nature itself; and as novels reach a 
wider public than plays, the outbreak of truth- telling provoked a storm. It gal- 
vanized Dr. Nordau (<618). For now the facts were shouted from every quar- 
ter. Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and fude the Obscure showed that an irregular 
sexual union did not blight a woman's character — Tess was "a pure woman 
faithfully presented." The relations of Jude and Sue showed both the urgency 
of the instinct and the revulsion it can cause. Grant Allen's The Woman Who 
Did by its tide alone caused a furor; innocent as readers might appear, they 
understood. It was the shock that did the good work. George Moore's Esther 
Waters and H. G Wells's Ann Veronica put sexuality back as a force among 
other social forces, the interaction always a danger and a cause of disaster 
under the present convention of systematic blindness. The scandalous topic 
could no longer be ignored and to chart this unruly power meant discussing 
marriage and the family. Bagehot's friend R. H. Hutton had long ago 
remarked: "The dark places of the earth are the happy Christian homes." 

The structure of constraint and deceit about sex and domestic life did not 
prevail only in England. In his best work, the satire Penguin Island, Anatole 
France delivers a little lecture on sexuality and convention. Maupassant's 
short stories dealt with both these topics. Abroad, Tolstoy had recorded in 
The Devil an episode of sexual obsession — his own. Sologub in The Petty 
Demon combined sexual and symbolic themes; and in central Europe, plays 
and novels on the subject poured forth once secrecy had been breached: 
Wedekind's Spring's Awakening, Sudermann's Magda, Strindberg's Missfulie, and 
other studies in the aberrations of love. The body of work by Arthur 
Schnitzler, the Viennese playwright now unjustly neglected, explored the 
varieties of sexual relations in a civilized capital, from Liebelei, the "unimpor- 
tant affair" that ends badly, to Reigen, the successive encounters that interlink 
upper, lower, and middle class, admirably filmed as La Ronde. 

Worse to think about was the itinerary of venereal disease that Ibsen 
retraced in Ghosts and Brieux in Damaged Goods. And next, a hint that homo- 
sexuality was to be accepted as an irreducible fact appeared in a novel, quickly 
suppressed. Swinburne's and Edward Carpenter's poems had been similarly 



626 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

allusive, but poetry is easily misread. Aubrey Beardsley's striking black-and- 
white illustrations to various texts ranged over the whole of sexuality, includ- 
ing the hermaphrodite/ And Wilde's two trials were public enough to propel 
a question that in the mid- 1920s Gide's Cory don and Radclyffe Hall's Well of 
Loneliness kept alive by shocking until it became the openly discussed topic 
that it is at present. 

The riddling and ruining of the previous ethos by men of letters was no 
routine exercise in bourgeois-baiting; it was a strenuous effort of the moral 
conscience, which included a positive aim: to do justice to women in every 
respect — sexual, social, and political. The same conscience moved a number 
of sociologists and physicians, their works buttressing the literary positions. 
Paolo Mantegazza compiled three volumes on The Sexual Relations of Mankind; 
Rene Guyon half a dozen on the Legitimacy, the Ethics, and the state's attitude 
toward the sexual act; Patrick Geddes described The Evolution of Sex; Otto 
Weininger wrote Sex and Character, Iwan Bloch described The Sexual Life of Our 
Time and Its Relation to Modern Civilisation, and Havelock Ellis's seven volumes 
of Studies in the Psychology of Sex gave the first account of the subject through 
case reports and commentary. The abnormal manifestations had been stud- 
ied earlier by Krafft-Ebing.° At the same time, well before Freud, physicians 
were noting the presence of sexuality in infants, the last domain where 
"purity" interpreted as absence of sexual feeling could take refuge. In the 
United States a lone pioneer, Dr. Denslow Lewis, met with great resistance 
from his colleagues when he tried to publish his paper on The Gynecologic 
Consideration of the Sexual Act. a One of his relevant facts was that the age of 
consent in several states of the Union was nine years. 

* 
* * 

After all this it should be clear that the sexual revolution — if that is its 
right name — took place then and not now The mid-20C amplified and 
extended the EMANCIPATION that the Nineties fought for and began to prac- 
tice. An emblem of the changed attitude: in 1900, FitzGerald's translation of 
the Rubaiyat ofOmarKayyam reappeared after 40 years of obscurity and graced 
the coffee table, appropriately bound in limp leather. In short, Thefoy of Sex is 
a late-20C book title, but proclaiming the fact dates from the Nineties. 

Women's emancipation ran parallel to the sexual and interacted with it. 
Free love was a slogan and a vogue; divorce became more frequent and less 
reproved; Parliament took up marriage with deceased wife's sister and talked 
about it with unusual freedom. The Commons had already passed the 
Women's Property Act that abolished the husband's grip on his wife's for- 
tune. Oxford and Cambridge each founded a college for women, after several 
years of offering extension classes and degrees by examinations. The queen 



A Summit of Energies <^ 627 

herself approved. And public schooling for the whole nation was beginning 
to make literacy commonplace for both sexes. Robert Lowe M.P. had said on 
voting for the measure: "We must educate our masters." Well-to-do families 
had not waited for this democratic move to give their daughters good instruc- 
tion in history and general literature. After the male playwrights' and novel- 
ists' converging critiques, it was possible for Shaw to put the New Woman on 
the stage (in The Philanderer) and begin to take for granted the vast difference 
from the old in manners and rights. 

The liberation from sexual taboos and the rise of the freedom to live and 
to love on the same terms as man had been preceded by a large-scale activity 
and influence, now forgotten. Women in the 1 870s and 1 880s dominated the 
field of English fiction for educated readers. In the first of those decades nine 
of these professional writers published a total of 554 novels — an average of 
61 apiece/ The dozens of other producers satisfied an inexhaustible hunger 
for romance, for history dressed up, and increasingly for "problems," reli- 
gious, social, and sexual. Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf 's father- to-be, pre- 
dicted that it would not be long before women held a monopoly of novel- 
writing What did happen was that fifty years after his prediction, instead of 
scores of women authors, England would boast hundreds. George Eliot's 
Middlemarch and Meredith's Egoist (<564) are of course in a class apart. But The 
True History of Joshua Davidson, Christian Communist by Mrs. Lynn Linton 
proved extremely popular in the 1870s. Among some 40 authors whose 
names send a faint echo, any reader of today who has spent time in summer 
hotels where old books linger will come across Rhoda Broughton, Amelia 
Edwards, Miss Braddon, Mrs. Oliphant, the witty "John Oliver Hobbes," and 
perhaps Marie Corelli, and the passionate "Ouida" (Louise de la Ramee), in 
whose well-printed and violently illustrated works a great deal of talent and 
social thought are buried. Hidden away with them are a couple of satires by 
men: Laurence Oliphant's Piccadilly, which demythifies high society, and 
Ginks Baby by Edward Jenkins, which makes savage fun out of Parliament, 
the law courts, and the religious sects. Trollope was helping on the good work 
too, notably in that fine satire The Way We Live Now, but was undervalued as 
being neither a genius nor a truly popular writer. 

Fewer than their novelist sisters, but steady producers too, women poets 
published epics and long stories in verse, love lyrics and poems about nature. 
These filled the keepsake albums and were praised sincerely but mistakenly 
by male reviewers; they had perhaps not enough material for comparison. 
Emily Bronte* and Christina Rossetti stand out as poets, not poetesses, but 
their output was small and obscured by the familiar voices of the old-estab- 
lished Tennyson and his peers. Meredith, as poets like James Thomson, the 
author of "The City of Dreadful Night," were hardly prized. An atheist and 
political radical, Thomson was as disreputable as Swinburne. 



628 <^*> From Dawn to Decadence 

In making their case for Eros and an open world for women, the argu- 
mentative artists of the Nineties seemed once more to forget their own 
dogma that art has nothing to do with morals. They had in mind the old 
morals; and they forgot at the same time that getting rid of one code of 
behavior inevitably tends to install its opposite. In the course of training the 
public to use a new set of standards for judging art and life, this host of crit- 
ics of life accustomed the crowd to bear up under shock — indeed to expect it, 
particularly from the arts. The lesson took so well that shock from art is now 
required. 

For the ordinary citizen who yielded to the temptings of change, throw- 
ing off the compulsions and habits of the preceding age felt like going from a 
house of discomfort into the open air. And the image was close to the reality. 
Attention to the individual included his bodily health. It was then that 
hygiene, public health, the flush toilet, and clean water supply joined town 
planning in the drive to reform everything and inspired at the same time new 
tastes, activities, manners, and institutions. As Paris couture gained world 
dominance, the rigidities of dress were relaxed. The designer Paul Poiret lib- 
erated thousands by decreeing that the well-dressed woman need not wear a 
corset. The bicycle and lawn tennis had already begun to loosen the limbs and 
their coverings. The outdoor life beckoned. New games of throwing or kick- 
ing a ball helped to give a new meaning to the word sport; it was soon an insti- 
tution for both amateurs and professionals. An English soldier founded the 
Boy Scouts; schools added gymnastics to the program. Skiing, imported from 
Scandinavia, was transformed from makeshift wintertime travel into an all- 
year pleasure industry. 

The machine — railroad, motor, bicycle, plane, motion picture — lured the 
senses into a new addiction: speed. Trains could now run at 100 miles an 
hour. But speed in an enclosed space quickly loses its thrill. The car, then 
mostiy an open affair, makes the wind jet passing the ears give a sense of 
heroic recklessness. In 1901 the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt wrote in his diary: 
"Going at 1 5 miles an hour. It is certainly an exhilarating experience." He 
would have been even more exhilarated nine years later had he crossed the 
Channel in the cockpit of Bleriot's airplane — or he could have taken up the 
new sport of hang gliding from hilltops. 

Offsetting these cheerful doings was the increase in mental illness and 
the spreading use of drugs. Something in industrial civilization seemed to be 
too much for the steadily alert mind to bear. In a long essay, Civilisation, Its 
Cause and Cure, Edward Carpenter gave a clear account of the affliction and 
specified as remedy a simple PRIMITIVISM. At the Paris hospital La 
Salpetriere, Charcot and Janet dealt with a stream of patients suffering from 
hysteria, the name that covered depression, anxiety, causeless excitement, 
motor disturbances, and "simulated diseases" — those that have no discover- 



A Summit of Energies c ^t> 629 

able basis in the body. Some few of the troubled had multiple personalities. 
One hears an echo of the strange fact in Stevenson's tale about Dr. Jekyll and 
Mr. Hyde. 

An increasing recourse to drugs suggested a like maladjustment. 
Addiction, mainly in the upper classes, was viewed with sympathy. It was not 
a criminal offense to buy or sell morphine. Freud for a time prescribed 
cocaine to some of his excitable patients, and we know that Sherlock Holmes, 
when he was bored, injected himself with a 7 percent solution. Soon after 
their accession, the tsar and tsarina in St. Petersburg were taking a mixture of 
marijuana and hyoscine by way of relief from official cares. More thorough- 
going, a man named Aleistair Crowley preached the joys of the drug experi- 
ence combined with black magic. Thus the late Timothy Leary was not the 
first in his line. Nor have acolytes disappeared: a new edition of Crowley's 
Magick appeared in 1997.° 



The contrast between the enthusiasm of the innumerable reformers and 
the belief that civilization was at once decadent and too harsh for the 
thoughtful to live in and stay sane was matched by the contrast between the 
regard for individual well-being and the violence in many forms that threat- 
ened life. The turn of the century treated itself to four big wars and a handful 
of lesser conflicts, all marked by atrocities and massacres not needed for vic- 
tory, but continuing proof that the perpetrators were indeed human. After 
years of meddling in Cuban uprisings, the United States fought Spain and 
acquired its first colonies. England, after long involvement in South African 
conflicts, fought the Dutch Boers, incidentally learning from the medical 
review of their own recruits in what poor physical condition were the English 
lower-class males. The Boer War also showed up English generalship and 
ended in a treaty praised as liberal because it left the Boers in charge of south- 
ernmost Africa; but it also left there apartheid- — discrimination against Indians 
and Blacks that required later bloodshed before it was abolished. Japan 
fought China, mainly over possession of Korea, and thus laid the ground for 
many-sided conflicts later on. Japan then fought Russia over Korea and 
Manchuria. The Russian defeat demonstrated the nation's incompetence and 
persuaded the West that it now faced a "Yellow Peril." 

The Chinese meanwhile had been harassing the foreigners in their midst 
who held territories and concessions and were always seeking more. A 
nationalist group, called Boxers from their symbol of the clenched fist, mur- 
dered some 250 westerners and finally drove the European diplomats in 
Peking into their embassy compound, while killing missionaries and traders 
in the provinces. A force of Europeans and Americans, led in part by a 



630 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

German general, was sent to relieve the besieged and followed up their suc- 
cess by massacres elsewhere. A huge indemnity was levied, of which the 
United States devoted its portion to fellowships that enabled Chinese stu- 
dents to attend American colleges. 

So much for professional violence. The amateur kind was expended on 
kings, heads of state, and other political figures (695>). A bomb in a 
Barcelona theater made a point that presumably could not be made in any 
other way, and our time has faithfully applied the technique. In those pioneer 
days it was "the Anarchists" or "the Nihilists" who were blamed, causing per- 
petual confusion in the use of the terms. The true anarchist is a gentle trust- 
ing soul who argues for a world without government — a type Marx would 
turn into after the necessary dictatorship (<589). But in the Nineties there 
were impatient anarchists, who wanted immediate results and relied on 
Alfred Nobel's recent invention, dynamite, to gain their ends. It was from 
remorse at this misuse of his product that Nobel established his prizes. As for 
the Nihilists, they too are often mislabeled. The genuine kind believe in noth- 
ing and do nothing about it. Disillusion, cynicism demonstrate that every 
action, even getting up in the morning, is futile. The type is depicted in two 
Russian novels and in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. 

The general restlessness apparendy affected criminals too. It drove cat 
burglars and safecrackers for the first time out of their private enclaves in 
cities and spread them all over town, upsetting police routines and increasing 
their own opportunities. Some of their exploits apparently excited the public 
in a new way: it began to welcome fiction glorifying the gentleman burglar. 
Raffles and Arsene Lupin were Robin Hood redux in evening dress. The cre- 
ator of Raffles was the brother-in-law of Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock 
Holmes, equally in demand, has outlived the upper-class thief and remains a 
leading indicator of that past time. 

Like another piece of make-believe, but grimmer, the incredibly long- 
drawn-out Dreyfus Affair aroused passion and prejudice throughout the 
world. In France the chain of misdeeds — treason, coercion, perjury, forgery, 
suicide, and manifest injustice — re-created the cleavage of "the two Frances," 
always recurring at critical moments. The nearest had been "1789"; the next 
was to come with the German occupation in 1 940. The battle about Captain 
Dreyfus's innocence while he was in prison for life on Devil's Island posed 
for the intellectuals on both sides the dilemma: the individual or the state? 
Zola's decisive appeal to public opinion was argued in rational detail, not in 
ringing tones, as suggexted by the defiant title J'accuse supplied by 
Clemenceau, and INDIVIDUALISM finally triumphed. 

Since the Nineties the Left and the Right have fought battles under these 
mutually oblique names in other countries, the issues seemingly unlike on the 



A Summit of Energies <^> 631 

surface but linked underneath to the choice between expansive change and 
restrictive status quo, between Liberal and Conservative, with fitful surges of 
Radical, which sometimes means change by force of arms. It was during "the 
Affair" that the word intellectual became a noun with its present connotation 
of professional of the mind holding social and political views. It bears the 
relation to thinker that aesthete does to artist: it denotes a large group of peo- 
ple articulate for a cause and often militant, without being themselves artists 
or thinkers. [The book to read is Nineteenth-Century Opinion, an anthology of 
extracts, 1877-1901, ed. Michael Goodwin.] 

* 
* * 

Moral and social attitudes are one thing; the works of art that come out 
of them are another; and the theorizing that accompanies the art is a third. 
The interconnections among the three are interesting and may add to one's 
understanding, but they rarely help to determine the quality of the art or the 
pleasure it can give. One can enjoy and admire a neo-classical tragedy while 
rejecting its monarchical tendency, and one can read Rimbaud, Mallarme, and 
Laforgue without suffering the horrors that they felt or wanting to destroy 
the world. One can do the same with science — admire the results and distrust 
the assumptions. That is what happened in this all-questioning period. First a 
short list of results: elegant experiments by Michelson and Morley in the late 
1880s had shown that the ether, the substance imagined as the carrier of light 
waves throughout the universe, had no existence. It was a blow to the 
mechanics of Newton that took it for granted there could be "no action at a 
distance"; everything happens by push or pull. 

From another quarter it appeared that the Clerk Maxwell equations for 
electromagnetic events did not fit certain phenomena that came out of 
advances in chemistry. In the 1 870s the table of the elements drawn up by 
Mendeleyev showed that they clustered in groups with similar properties. 
And there were gaps in the series that suggested the existence of others as yet 
undiscovered but with predictable characteristics. Two young chemists work- 
ing in the Nineties with Becquerel and Bemont, Pierre and Marie Curie, 
extracted from pitchblende some stuff that wasted away into nothing, diough 
it produced heat and electrical effects. The phenomenon was called radiation. 
One emerging fact after another led to Max Planck's Quantum Theory, which 
states that radiation is not continuous but occurs in separate small units. They 
cannot be dealt with individually, but only by calculating the "half-life" of the 
whole. Incidentally, a "quantum leap" is not the great pole vault that jargon 
assumes from the impressive sound of the words: it happens inside the atom 
without being detectable. Undetected in a different way, Willard Gibbs, work- 



632 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

ing at Yale on thermodynamics, laid the foundations of the new science of 
physical chemistry, but recognition of its value and his methods was much 
delayed. 

These discoveries put in doubt, not the vast amount of knowledge about 
nature amassed since the late Middle Ages, but the assumptions beneath the 
physics and chemistry elaborated in the 19C. Nor was it the mechanical view 
alone being upset; the idea of a "law of nature," akin to a statute law invariably 
enforced, seemed no longer a sound metaphor. As early as the 1 870s it was 
pointed out that natural laws were only observed regularities measured care- 
fully but not absolutely. Next, an American therorist, J. B. Stallo, showed in 
detail the inconsistency among the ideas used in different parts of physics. To 
be sure, science has never been troubled or hampered by shaky foundations, 
but in the spring-cleaning mood of the Nineties, all such rifts in Positivism 
(<509) added something to the discomfort, and the laity was puzzled. [The 
book to leaf through is Album of Science: The 19th Century by L. Pierce Williams.] ° 

Henry Adams, who kept abreast of 
The multiplication table is in need of review ideas in many fields, was dismayed 
and reform. especially by what was happening to 

— Strindberg, The Blue Notebook Evolution: not that it was being 

rejected, but how it produced new 
species was the object of debate. Mendel's work on the color of sweet peas 
had been rescued from obscurity after 30 years and a new science, genetics, 
based upon that work, established the notion of dominant and recessive char- 
acteristics. It suggested to Weismann that the "conflict for survival" took 
place within the plasm. Without theorizing, Bateson and others pointed out 
that species were more stable than Darwinists liked to think. Du Bois- 
Reymond believed his experiments showed that characteristics acquired in 
life could be inherited, as Lamarck had said and the Darwinists (but not 
Darwin) denied. De Vries was struck by the occurrence of "sports," familiar 
in animal husbandry — offspring quite different from the progenitors. He 

called these "mutations" and consid- 
ered them more important than 
Forty years ago, our friends always explained . . 

,. , , , , , . Darwin s small random variations. 

things and had the cosmos down to a point, 

teste Darwin and Charles Lyell. Now they say ° n this view Evolution might be 
they don't believe there is any explanation, or discontinuous. Abstractly, it looked like 
that you can choose between half a dozen, all quantum radiation. Hans Driesch, 
correct. The Germans are all balled up. Every working on embryonic cells and find- 
generalization that we settled forty years ago ing that position affected their role, 
is abandoned. The one most completely became a vitalist, together with other 
thrown over is our gende Darwin's Survival, scientists and philosophers, notably J. 
which has no longer a leg to stand on. S Haldane/ who was qualified in both 
—Henry Adams (1903) domains. Philosophically, it seemed as 



A Summit of Energies <^> 633 

if there were a general impatience with Matter, which had loomed so large 
and pressed down so heavily on 19C thought. The data suggested discarding 
it along with the rest of Victoriana. This sweeping out was undertaken in the 
most interesting, though at the time fruitless, way by 

Samuel Butler 

Like William James, the young Butler thought that he might make a 
career as a painter. Both did creditable work for their studio masters and each 
left a couple of good portraits; but they decided alike that the vital spark was 
missing, and both wound up as psychologists and philosophers, although 
Butler never sought or held such professional titles. 

When Origin of Species came out, Butler was immediately convinced that 
evolution was the best hypothesis for replacing the biblical account of man's 
creation. On that point Darwin's book only confirmed an idea already well 
discussed (<455; 501; 571); but on the other point, the main one, of struggle 
and survival as the means by which evolution works, Butler had strong 
doubts. He put them to Darwin, was not properly answered, grew angry, and 
unwisely protested in a way that fastened on him the reputation of a crank. It 
doomed him to leading his intellectual life on the outskirts of literature, pub- 
lishing his books at his own expense, and emerging posthumously in the early 
20C as the author of a novel, The Way of All Flesh. Its timely concurrence with 
the new ethos made his name. 

Much earlier, in the 1870s, he had published anonymously the satirical 
Utopia Erehwon ("Nowhere" spelled backward), in which we find him already 
attacking the two idols of the century: Progress and Respectability. He calls 
churches "musical banks" where one keeps an account of merit and demerit 
to be cashed in as happiness or damnation hereafter. Sin, to the Erehwonians, 
is being sick or poor, not matters for pity or charity but punishable crimes. As 
for Progress, Erehwon has machines and keeps perfecting them until the 
thought occurs that they will soon develop consciousness, win their indepen- 
dence and, being stronger, enslave mankind. It is therefore decided to destroy 
them — even watches. A few specimens, made harmless, are kept in a 
museum. 

The tale rapidly found readers as long as they could attribute it to one or 
another well-known Victorian; the book stopped selling when the unknown 
Butler's name was revealed. This snub was not the best treatment for a man 
whose character had been bruised by his rearing; The Way of All Flesh shows 
how (<553). It made Butler critical of all things established, and when he 
attacked he expected debate but got only silence or reproof. The Darwin affair 
reproduced the experience of home. Yet it is to this one-sided guerrilla war that 
we owe the remarkable works that fill 20 volumes in the Shrewsbury edition. 



634 c^> From Dawn to Decadence 



The late Samuel Butler [was] in his own The cloud that hid Butler from his con- 
department, the greatest English writer of temporaries has since then been pierced 
the latter half of the 19C. It drives one almost only here and there to let through the 
to despair of English literature when one sees light. What suited the temper of the 
so extraordinary a study of English life as Nin eties and 1 920s is pretty well known: 
Butler's Way of All Flesh making so little m ^ q/ m ^ Enhmnt and 

impression that, when some years later, I pro- r , A T , , , ^ , 

r J r extracts from the Notebooks. Pour works 

duce plays in which Butlers extraordinarily • • i , ., , • • T •/• i 

. , „ . „ . . of original philosophizing — Lie and 

fresh, free, and future-piercing suggestions ° r r ° J 

u . . u t * *u *u- Habit, Unconscious Memory, Evolution Old 

have an obvious share, I am met with nothing ' J' 

but cacklings about Ibsen and Nietzsche. and New, and Luck or Cunmng-^ie as if 
Really, the English do not deserve to have they did not exist. Their tides broadly 
great men. indicate the contents but do not suggest 

—Shaw, Preface to Major Barbara (1907) ^ variet y of ^sights about life and the 

mind. To combine their arguments 
would yield something like this: the objection to Darwin's evolution by survival 
alone is that it relies entirely on Luck; it "banishes mind from the universe," 
while experience shows mind acting for results that it foresees. Mind is sec- 
onded by habit, which starts conscious and becomes unconscious. This com- 
posite cunning was the agency that Erasmus Darwin had proposed in his work 
on evolution (<455) and Butler espouses it, with a list of zoological facts hard 
to explain by Darwinian Luck. Butler also pointed out that to account for the 
origin of new species one must account for the origin of variation from the old, 
which nobody so far knew or had said anything about. These considerations 
place Butler among the vitalists of his own day and he did receive from 
Bateson, the geneticist and namer of the science of genetics, a fair tribute at the 
50th anniversary celebration of Darwin's book/ 

Butler as thinker was in tune with the pragmatist generation (666 >). In his 
comments on the conduct of life he always asks to what result a view will tend, 
and his guide in ethics is common sense of the Johnsonian kind (<411). This 
choice is not inconsistent with the fact that whatever his mind turned to 
inspired in him unusual ideas and projects. He disliked the plushy language in 
which Homer was translated, so he brushed up his Greek and translated the 
///Wand the Odyssey into colloquial English prose. He liked Shakespeare's son- 
nets and wanted to elucidate the story they told, if any. He memorized all 1 54 
and concluded to his satisfaction that a small group of them had traditionally 
been misplaced. After rearrangement, he could follow the straightforward nar- 
rative and deal with the autobiographical lines and the puzzling dedication by 
surmising that Mr. W. H. was not some noble lord but someone called Hughes 
or Hews, probably a fellow actor. Oscar Wilde had independently reached on 
the same evidence the same conclusion, detailed in his story The Portrait of Mr. 
W. H. Neither account has received scholarly attention. 

Butler liked to spend his holdiays in Italy and what he enjoyed there sup- 



A Summit of Energies <^> 635 

plied the material for a pair of travel books, one of which, Alps and Sanctuaries, 

is a gem. But more was to come of his wanderings: exploring Sicily led him to 

the belief, based in part on geographical features, that it was the goal of 

Odysseus' journey and, from internal evidence, that the tale had been written 

by a woman, the princess Nausicaa 

described in the Odyssey. Classical 

scholars paid no attention; Butler was " God is love " l dare "* But what a mis " 

c i • i • riii chievous devil Love is! 

confirmed in his contempt for holders 

of chairs who have no curiosity and To be ^^ « Tracts for children," warning 

will not argue against a thesis that is them against the virtues of their elders. 

based on reasons lucidly set forth. 

Only lately has a scholar deigned to " Th e Complete Drunkard." He would not 

discuss this work of Butler's and & ve money to sober people; he said they 

accorded it respect. Two volumes of would ot ^ eat {t and send their children to 

entertaining essays, an admiring life of sc oolwlt lU 

his grandfather, headmaster of the It is not he who gains the exact point in dis- 

famed Shrewsbury School, and the p ute who scores most in controversy, but he 

Notebooks complete Butler's contribu- who ha s shown the most forbearance and 

tion to English literature. The Notes better temper. 

were appreciated after the First World _ Sa muel Butler, Notebooks (n.d.)° 

War, because their tone often jibes 

with the serious frivolity of the period. 

It was fortunate that Butier did not have to make a living by his pen. As a 
young man having his way to make, he went to New Zealand, was very suc- 
cessful as a sheep farmer, and returned home with a competence. Later in life 
it was reduced, partly through a fraud practiced by a friend. What gave Butier 
most satisfaction in his self-restricted bachelor existence was Handel's music. 
He detested 19C composers and relished that of his idol so much that he took 
lessons in counterpoint and (with a friend) composed the words and music of 
two small cantatas, one of them farcical. Could a man do more to bewilder the 
public? 



* 
* * 



While pure science was in temporary confusion, medicine was making 
assured strides. The work of Claude Bernard and Pasteur at mid-century had 
finally imposed on the ancient art the latest ways of laboratory research, and 
discoveries followed one another in rapid succession. In his comprehensive 
study of digestion, Bernard established the functions of the pancreas and the 
liver, including the formation of blood sugar, and he also made clear the 
workings of the vasomotor system — the opening and narrowing of the blood 
vessels — by showing the equilibrium between opposite impulses from nerves 



636 s^ From Dawn to Decadence 

that he was the first to discover. After Pasteur's proof that microorganisms 
existed and could do amazing things, such as turn milk sour (whence pas- 
teurization — killing the germ with heat), a host of searchers found in one or 
another shape of bacterium the cause of tuberculosis, diphtheria, anthrax, 
typhoid fever, leprosy, influenza, gonorrhea, and syphilis, and the parasite of 
malaria. It was also discovered that ultraviolet rays are germicidal. Out of this 
fund of knowledge came the anti-toxin or serum therapy. Meanwhile, 
Hahnemann's principle of homeopathy, that a small dose of a drug whose 
effect resembled the disease would incite nature to cure it, had been applied 
by physicians for half a century. Now the parallel with serum therapy had the 
result of increasing the number of homeopathic physicians and patients. 
Surgery did not lag behind. Appendectomy enjoyed a vogue and President 
Cleveland's physician, Dr. Keen, declared: "the abdominal cavity has become 
the playground of the surgeon." Add for the record: the systematic practice 
of osteopathy; Luther Burbank's plant manipulation that yielded as a starter 
the superior potato; and the founding of the authoritative journal Science. 

But once more in counterpoint, an interest that had been confined to the 
classicists in universities was given a different status by the publication in 
1 890 of the first volume of The Golden Bough by James Frazer. The very tide 
suggests a realm alien to science: the work was a study of myths. Originating 
in all parts of the world, these tales fashioned by early man in many cultures 
had been gathered by observant missionaries and others in their voluntary 
exile from Europe. Concurrendy, the work of early cultural anthropologists 
such as Tylor and Lewis Morgan in the 1 860s and 1 870s had familiarized the 
public with the ways of the tribal mind. Noting some striking similarities 
among geographically distant myths, Frazer had begun to classify them and 
compare details. It seemed obvious that myth-making was a primitive form of 
science — man explaining the universe, making order among the facts of 
experience by means of overarching ideas, and embodying these in characters 
whose acts evoke the truth. 

For 200 years myths had been dismissed as ignorant superstitions; now 
they were seen as expressions of important thought. That they were richly 
symbolic comforted both the Symbolist poets and the critics of materialism 
in science, while the rehabilitation of the primitive mind encouraged the 
renouncers of civilization. The western mind was experiencing one of its 
periodic attacks of PRIMITIVISM. Rimbaud, Robert Louis Stevenson, 
Gauguin, Lafcadio Hearn fled Europe permanendy Others such as Henry 
Adams and John La Farge went on trips to the Near or Far East for tempo- 
rary relief; and the ordinary tourist was steadily lured by the travel agent's 
promise of "old world," "unspoiled" places, where the roar of the modern 
city did not penetrate. Edward Carpenter's essay (<628) goes into great detail 
about the needs of body and mind for surcease from citification. 



A Summit of Energies <^> 637 

The advent of myth, joined to the earthly twins, fatigue and boredom, 
contributed to the outbreak of Wagnerism. It was an ism and not just the 
vogue of a particular composer and his works, such as happened for Mahler 
in the late 20C. Wagner's operas had been before the public for thirty years 
and were appreciated at their just value by connoisseurs. What occurred 
around 1895 was a vast extension of his public, thanks to an organized pro- 
paganda built on the subject, the message, and the musical system of The Ring 
of the Nibelungen. Music lovers had always been a minority among intellectuals; 
and the rest had generally ridiculed opera (<327). For the first time now liter- 
ary people en masse took to music — to Wagner's music. They were told that to 
bridge the gap between their tone-deaf past and this new art form, they must 
study Articles, handbooks, lectures were there to help, besides Wagner's 
prose works in eight volumes. Shaw wrote The Perfect Wagnerite\ in Paris 
Mallarme in a sonnet called Wagner a god, and a Revue Wagnerienne was started 
to confound the resistant and to keep the devotees of the cult abreast of inter- 
pretation. 

What was there to interpret? A musical system and an array of provoca- 
tive Wagnerian theories. The master (so ran the thesis) had composed works 
that made obsolete all previous operas and the genre itself; the new music dra- 
mas re-created the art of ancient Greek tragedy. Not looking back only, this 
was the "music of the future" promised to the world as far back as the 1860s. 
That future was now. In addition, the text of The Ring was a great poem, writ- 
ten by Wagner himself and needing interpretation, because it was a social alle- 
gory that described how and why the existing order of things was doomed. 
Total destruction is brought on by love of gold. This catastrophe pleased the 
Abolitionists and confirmed the Decadents and such of the Primitivists as 
had not yet fled. It was also rumored that young Wagner had been a revolu- 
tionary in Dresden and had barely escaped death in the upheaval of 1848. 
This endeared him to social reformers. 

But what clinched this verbal agitation was the fresh aspect of the operas 
themselves. No more Realism coupled with tiresome historical subjects such 
as Meyerbeer and Verdi and their kind, French or Italian, kept using. Instead, 
a blessedly unfamiliar legend — several legends if one went to see Tristan, 
Lohengrin, Tannhauser, and Parsifal. In The Ring, against fantastic scenery, the 
characters, sporting barbaric names and primitive costumes, declaimed 
impressively rather than sang separate litde tunes that could be whisded on 
the way out. Having grasped the role of the brief series of notes called leit- 
motiv and memorized what character or idea each stood for, the listener 
could follow the extremely detailed story while bathed in the endlessly repet- 
itive melodious flow. As Thomas Mann remarked, Wagner by his system 
taught his listeners music. And indeed many of the literate found themselves 
genuinely enjoying it, or at least Wagner's brand. That reliable witness 



638 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Sherlock Holmes drags his philistine roommate to "Wagner night at Covent 
Garden" and does not record any protest from Dr. Watson. 

One thing more raised Wagner high in the esteem of those men of letters, 
painters, sculptors, architects, and critics, who perhaps had never before 
attended a concert. That was the spectacle of an artist who had conquered 
stupid resistance from stuffy bourgeois and academics and had died wealthy 
and revered in his own country. Accounts of him pictured a lord receiving 
tribute in his castle and a demigod worshipped at Bayreuth. He was the 
emblem of vindication for every artist — and he stood in nobody's way, since 
he was dead. 

Considering the service Wagner rendered not to music and musicians 
alone, but also to culture at large, one is reminded of what Darwin did for sci- 
ence and Marx for political science. Drawing on the pioneer work of half a 
century, each produced work which, right or wrong, publicized to the whole 
world the importance of the object they were concerned with — evolution, 
the distribution of wealth in society, and dramatic music. 

While Wagnerism was conquering the Occident, another musical ism 
claiming to be new was being touted in Italy: Verismo, or truthful-ism. Its aim 
was to portray "real life" instead of either historical melodrama or Wagnerian 
myth. Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana dealt with rural passions; Leoncavallo 
and Puccini each dramatized La Boheme, which is the life of the impoverished 
artist, and so did Charpentier with Louise, the artist's "free-lover." In Puccini's 
Madama Butterfly, the down-to-earth oudook is no doubt conveyed by the 
hero's being asked "Will you have a whiskey-and-soda?"; but in Tosca the story 
is dated 1 800, while the plot is an old-style melodrama with only one touch of 
the contemporary: the heroine's aria "Vissi d'arte" (I lived by and for art) is 
Nineties aestheticism. More consistent, Alfred Bruneau systematically took 
his subjects from Zola's Naturalistic novels. But in all of them only the sub- 
ject was new. Form and musical substance followed, with some added free- 
doms, the vivid example that Bizet's Carmen (at first unsuccessful) had set in 
the mid-1 870s and that independently Verdi had given in his late master- 
pieces Otello and Falstaff. 

Liking Wagner's music was to be "advanced," but so was talking against 
it in the name of a contrary movement with the motto: genuine music is abso- 
lute. Denouncing dramatic music, "program music," words with music or 
uttered about it, was the dogma of pure art applied to sound. Its adherents, 
like those who followed Pater in thinking that all the arts tend toward music 
as pure form (<621), could not help deploring the cult of Wagner. True, it had 
shown up the fripperies of Italian and French 19C opera — no musical soul 
could now take them seriously — but in their place stood this massive mon- 
grel, which was anything but pure form and pure music. The absolute kind 
required the true connoisseur to stop regarding as art the works that pretend 



A Summit of Energies ^> 639 

to arouse emotion or convey drama, that is to say, all music since the ancient 
Greeks, and stick to fugues, canons, or other forms that are composed 
expressly to exclude any interest other than the fulfilling of the pattern. This 
last qualification is needed, because there are such pieces — fugues and so 
on — that are arousing and dramatic (<388). Purity in music, painting, and 
poetry came down to the appreciation of technique. Had that view been log- 
ically held to, the show-off pieces of note-spinning for solo instruments 
would be art, whereas the works of Chopin and Liszt would be flawed 
because impure. 

One source of the fallacious doctrine is the ambiguous word program. 
When it is taken to mean that a piece of music relates again in sounds a scene 
or story, then a program is certainly objectionable and contrary to the nature 
of music. Inarticulate sounds cannot tell a story or depict a scene, and no 
composer has ever tried to make it do so; it is an impossibility. There is in fact 
no "program music" to throw stones at with righteous anger. But in the sense 
of a plan or outline, all music is programmatic. Those admired pure forms are 
a program for the composer to follow, an outline to fill out. Unless he does so 
as sheer exercise, his mind-and-heart as it thinks and feels will leave its 
imprint on the work — hence the difference between a dull fugue, perfectly 
"correct," and an exciting one. 

That being so, the composer can also follow the outlines of a second pro- 
gram, such as the words of a song: he makes the music fit form and atmo- 
sphere. The songs of all times and places convey joy, love, or grief. Music for 
church services also follows a second, outside pattern, and oratorios and 
operas obviously do the same. Even dance music, beyond its pattern, suggests 
wild gaiety or stateliness. A march is for a wedding or a funeral, and it is not the 
same march. So-called program music is evocative in no other way than a song 
or a march. It does not unfold a tale — it cannot — but it matches the character, 
mood, atmosphere of this or that episode without interfering with the estab- 
lished forms and rules of composition. Music is pure sound at all times and 
places, even at the opera. What is remarkable about western music is that by its 
chosen scales, modified through equal temperament, and by developing com- 
plex forms and complex instruments, it has raised the expressive power of 
music to heights and depths unattained 

in other cultures. _. c n . . r 

The fallacy that the essense of music is vague 

But the power of expressing a namable expressivenesSj mstead of definite 

mood, of suiting an occasion, of fitting unDasoa3 ^ impressiveness, is only carried 

the words of a song or the course of a out by making the expressiveness mechani- 

ritual must not be confused with imita- C al and independent of any impressiveness 

tive effects such as the greatest com- whatever. 

posers have indulged in from time to —Edmund Gurney, "Wagner and 

time. Bach's St. Matthew Passion has pas- Wagnerism" (1883) 



640 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

sages where we are to imagine the earthquake and the tearing of the veil; 
Beethoven's Pastoral symphony presents analogues of a storm, a brook, and a 
bird. Such imitations rely more often on rhythm or tone color than on notes, 
and they are not "expression" in the important sense. If not, it leaves the 
question, How can a concourse of sounds correspond to an emotion? That 
last word is not the right one. For example, in Haydn's Creation there is a 
strong modulation to C major on the words "Let there be light." The notes as 
such have nothing to do with light. But the change of key — and to that key — 
produces a visceral sensation (for want of a better word), a sensation of dis- 
covery, of openness, release, relief — it has no name; it is not one of the emo- 
tions. The same sensation could in fact match several different emotions: 
surprise, joy, escape, triumph — and thus could fit different situations. This is 
proved again and again when composers transfer a piece written for one 
opera to another. The soldiers' march in Gounod's Faust was composed for 
Ivan the Terrible. Much of Moussorgsky's Boris Godunov was composed for 
other subjects. Such is the nature of the link between pure sounds and things 
outside. 

The composer who sets words or conveys drama knows from his own 
visceral responses what he should do at any point with melody, harmony, and 
rhythm to move the listener appropriately. And when in the absence of stated 
ideas a fugue or a chaconne moves us as if it had a plot, it is because the com- 
poser has followed some visceral sequence of his own — wordless and image- 
less — while carrying out the demands of the form. 

That the universal practice of classic composers refutes the believers in 
absolute music should not obscure the reason why the latter took up their 
cause. Like other artists they wanted to clear the ground for their own con- 
ceptions and specifically to clear the air of talk about Beethoven's titanic 
thoughts, of Hoffmann idolizing Mozart; of Schumann explaining Berlioz; of 
Liszt and his mistress programmatizing his symphonic "poems"; of wordy 
librettos to read before the curtain goes up — of all talk whatsoever. Another 
irritant was that the symphonic composers of the 19C had also been men of 
letters, who found literary works as suggestive of musical ideas as the texts of 
church service and the biblical narratives had been earlier. The music linked 
to these secular scriptures, works by Shakespeare and Goethe, Byron, Scott, 
or Victor Hugo, was a reminder of the cultural burden of the past. The cry of 
absolute music, of pure art, was a detergent. As it turned out, pure music was 
more argued for than produced. Composers continued to record in the tides 
of their works the inspiration they drew from life and literature, and a good 
many did not scruple to add "programmatic" comments to facilitate appreci- 
ation. 

If a generality is to be gathered from this debate on detaching art from 
life and enjoying under the name of Form the skeleton of a piece of work, it 



A Summit of Energies ^> 641 

is that the human mind is not pure. It is full of ingrained responses and 
acquired associations that cannot be got rid of or set aside. They form what 
psychologists call the apperceptive mass. A study made long ago of the ways 
in which good listeners "take" a piece of music when neither title nor com- 
poser is given showed that, in amateurs and professionals alike, all sorts of so- 
called extraneous factors entered into the experience/ To be an inert receiver 
would in fact amount to a mental disease. 

That purism should arise in the Nineties is understandable; let it be said 
again: it was a practical means of retreat. But it is yet another paradox that the 
same period and often the same minds made use of symbols and welcomed 
the rehabilitation of myth, both of which imply a human mind that adds 
something to what it perceives. In doing so it finds in the object not only 
meaning but often multiple meanings. Soon a certain Dr. Freud, who had 
studied in Paris with the men who treated the psychotic, was developing in 
Vienna a theory of the unconscious that assigned to myths and dreams a sig- 
nificant role in all the workings of the mind. 



The Cubist Decade 



The CULTURAL effervescence of the double decade I have called for 
short the Nineties did not stop as the century turned. The energies deployed 
continued to innovate and attack the leftovers of the high 19C culture. But a 
marked change occurred about the years 1 905—1 908, which makes it conve- 
nient to call that prewar period the Cubist Decade. Naming it after a style of 
painting seems justified by the parallels that will appear between one new art 
and the rest and with still other cultural starts of the time. 

The first of the differences from the recent past was that the energy 
expended by the Nineties in putting the world at a distance, in negation, 
turned affirmative. The doers and the spectators appear exhilarated instead 
of wounded. There was no more talk of decadence, even though outward 
events remained as chaotic and deplorable as they had been before. The fresh 
vigor came with a generation of men and women born in the late 1870s and 
early 1880s, who grew up in the doleful time, appreciated its anti-worldly art 
and thought, but felt either that the 
Symbolist or Decadent ideas and tech- 
niques were played out, or that there 
were other ways not of resisting but of 
combating the evils of society. 

To appreciate this change of atti- 
tude, it is useful to go back to the 
Impressionists and Post-Impression- 
ists and see how their vision of the 
world veered into its opposite. The 
first, shocking exhibition of works by 
those whom the annual Salon rejected 
in 1874 — Manet, Monet, Pissarro, 
Sisley, Degas, Renoir, and Berthe 
Morisot — earned them the nickname 
by which the movement and the style 



I had the greatest difficulty in getting a new 
foothold on reality and in giving up the theo- 
ries of that school. (I mean the ones formed 
by Mallarme's followers), which tended to 
present reality as an accidental contingency 
and wanted the work of art to escape from its 
g ri P- 
-Andre Gide (1918) 

We were not part of a negative movement of 
destruction against the past: We were out to 
construct something new; we were in the van 
of the builders of a new society which should 
be free, rational, civilized, pursuing truth and 
beauty. It was all tremendously exhilarating. 

— Leonard Woolf, Sowing (1 961) 



644 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

are known: a critic denied that those canvases were serious paintings; they 
evaded reality; they were mere impressions, as one of Monet's works was mod- 
esdy tided. 

It was Manet's Gare St. La^are that by its subject — a railway station — 
proved how outrageous this sort of painting was — figures and objects in a col- 
ored haze, composition indefinite, execution sketchy. Yet some people pre- 
tended to like it; for others it was a new affliction, ridiculed as monomanetmania. 
Three years after Manet's vaporous vision, Monet painted 1 1 views of the same 
Gare St. Lazare that represent the changes of light within the glass-topped 
smoke-filled structure. The seven artists who were not hung (soon joined by 
the American Mary Cassatt) were proclaiming the EMANCIPATION of one art 
from the narrow confines of Realism, and they thrust on the eye a new realness, 
just as "perceived" as any other. When finally acknowledged, this feat of re- 
education inspired Wilde's later dictum that "nature imitates art." 

The Impressionist painters worked on the principle that the play of light 
was the true reality; objects are not the solid things with a definite outline and 
color that we take them to be; nor are shadows uniformly dark. They contain 

the color complementary to that of the 

object that casts the shadow. The artists 

The mission of art is not to copy nature but to i r.i _i _ r _.? i 

yy made use or the phenomenon or optical 

express it. The radiation of light is what gives • i i • i i 

r -& & merging, by which two pure colors put 

the appearance of a particular body; so I have i i n i i i 

t . , , close together — say, yellow and blue — 

not drawn outlines; I have spread over the ° J J 

contours a cloud of warm and delicate tints in ^ be Seen aS lf blended lnt ° g reen and 
such a way that you cannot put your ringer on much brighter than if actually mixed. 
the spot where the contours merge with the This technique gives the characteristic 
background. Nearby it all looks woolly and luminosity of Impressionist work. 
imprecise, but from two paces away every- Lasdy, light is perpetually changing, so 
thing grows clear and one feels that the air that a painting ought to be made 
surrounds the whole. instandy — a snapshot — or as near to 

— Balzac's hero in The Unknown that as possible. It was on this premise 

Masterpiece (1832) that Monet painted the series of Rouen 

cathedral in 20 "takes" — gray, blue, 
pink, and so on. [Still worth reading, George Moore's Modern Painting gives in a 
series of short articles a contemporary's view of the transition from Corot to 
Monet.] 

There was a scientific basis for the new technique; Chevreul and 
Helmholtz had settied the facts about color a generation earlier, but the 
Impressionists did not read science; their eyesight and the works of Delacroix 
justified their technique. He had painted colored shadows, and as he once 
explained to the son of George Sand, this optical effect is fundamental to 
painting. 

More than one painter as far back as the 15C Venetians had shown 



The Cubist Decade <^ 645 

inklings of the same perception. You can stuff the most violent colors into 

Nearer to the 1 900s, Turner in his last your painting, just give them a reflection that 

period had painted bursts of light in unites them and you will never be loud. Is 

bright clashing colors. These prece- nature sober in coloring? Isn't it flooded with 

dents could be urged in defense of the fierce conttasts Aat *» no wa Y destf °y its haf " 

rr^u^T^i »j- j. j mony? Some people try to eliminate this in 

new effects, but Delacroix s direct and J r r j 

, i i i • n i tneu " painting; it can be done but there's a 

acknowledged influence is what con- ,. , , , 

ill slight drawback, which is that painting is 

firms the connection stated earlier, that ... , 

' eliminated too. 

Impressionism, like Symbolism, is the 

n , . . r „ . . — Delacroix, Reminiscences (n.d.) 

final working out of Romanticism 

(<479). 

It took about eight years for the Impressionists to gain some recognition. 
They were stoutly defended by Zola and other Naturalist writers, who saw the 
kinship with their own work in the exact re-creation of "nature" and the 
choice of subjects from common life. It could have been argued just as truly 
that these painters were, like the Symbolists, evading the real world by blur- 
ring its harshness. Since more than one Impressionist master lived and 
worked well into the 20C, the Post-Impressionist techniques of the Nineties 
must be seen as so many dissonant lines moving against a style that continued 
to dominate the scene for 60 years after its birth. Accidentally as usual, it was 
not Impressionism or its rebellious offshoots that around 1 900 were called 
Art Nouveau — the new art. It was a vogue which in its gentle way also left 
Realism behind in favor of sinuous threads of color and flowerlike designs, 
such as those of the ironwork over the entrances to the Paris Metro. Mucha in 
France and Tiffany in America are two of its prized performers, but it offered 
no new technique and had no long future. 

The painter who first used, then abandoned the Impressionists' technique 
was a man of their own generation, Paul Cezanne. He was considered such a 
failure that Zola made him a pathetic character in a novel. On his part Cezanne 
thought that color and drawing are a single element, so that to neglect draw- 
ing — line and outline — was to end in formlessness. My aim, he said, "has been 
to make Impressionism into something solid and lasting, like the art one sees in 
museums." In place of the momentary aspect, he reinstated emphatic compo- 
sition by the contrast of blocks of colors and of definite volumes. From 
Cezanne onward, the younger painters variously diverged from the 
Impressionist haze. The object, which threatened to fade like a phantom, reap- 
peared in Cezanne, but not in the shape it bore in, say, the Realism of 
Courbet — not closely imitated from nature, such as had been the rule since the 
Renaissance discovery of perspective, yet strongly indicative of its natural form. 

In Cezanne's time, there were Neo-Impressionists, such as Seurat, who 
also claimed Delacroix as their forebear and who gave outline to figures while 
keeping the Impressionist sparkle by the division of color into small patches 



646 <^5 From Dawn to Decadence 

(not dots) — brilliance by optical merging. Another was Signac, who supplied 
a complete theory of the genre. His book is doubly significant, because it 
marks the beginning of extensive verbalizing about artistic innovations for 
the benefit of the public. Theory was actually wanted; instead of one period 
style as in the past, several styles co-existed and the amateur asked: "What am 
I to look for?" while the critic wondered: "Is it art? If so, which of the dis- 
parate kinds?" Theory answered these questions more or less rationally. 
Meantime galleries needed arguments or principles to cite in publicity for 
their artists' renown and sales. Balzac estimated in 1840 that there were 2,000 
painters in Paris; a century later, all the cultural centers of Europe and 
America had contingents at least as large. Every artist who hoped to exhibit 
or obtain an agent must give an account of his aims and justify his special 
brand of vision and method. 

While Cezanne was working at volumes and gradations of planes, 
Gauguin was painting clearly outlined areas that look flat because the paint is 
thin and evenly distributed, and Van Gogh was developing his original mode 
of thick slashes of violent color that give the canvas a rough surface and an 
extraordinary glow. Both Gauguin and Van Gogh depicted recognizable 
objects but the interest lay in the treatment. The same concern was handled 
in yet another way by the painters who called themselves Nabis (prophets in 
Hebrew) and who were described as Fauves {wild beasts in French). The 
acknowledged leader of another group, Matisse, loosened the link between 
painting and "the illusion of reality" by distorting form for aesthetic or 
decorative effect. In Gauguin and Van Gogh color is used for contrast or bril- 
liancy, not representation; in a portrait two aspects of the face turned three- 
quarters may be orange and green. The onlooker gradually learned not to 
expect the literal on canvas. Some of these deviations from the actual were 
inspired by interest in Oriental art, especially the Japanese. And out of the 
variably Real came more books, notably those of Roger Fry and Clive Bell 
(<622) that reconciled all presentations, declaring that the art consisted in 
nothing but color and line on a flat surface. Whistier's "arrangements" might 
show a bridge or a seated woman: never mind that; how well were the por- 
tions arranged? The question kept the eyes busy and ideas at bay. 

In sculpture, volumes are of course integral to the art, but in Epstein and 
in some works of Rodin, both contemporary with these painters, the surfaces 
are roughly indented and suggest the texture of a Van Gogh. Rodin's concep- 
tions also diverge from pure representation. When for a public site he made a 
figure of Balzac with a massive head and bust rising out of a sort of barrel, it 
caused protest and was rejected. 



The Cubist Decade <^d 647 

The radical break with Impressionism and its three or four sequels came 
in 1908 with the first works by Picasso and Braque that were dubbed Cubist. 
As usual the appellation was crude and the outcry ferocious. For connois- 
seurs who had finally embraced the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, 
the leap forward from Cezanne, though really not tremendous, was alarming. 
A respected critic who had battied for the Impressionists ended up in the 
1930s weary and damning the works of the previous quarter century under 
the caption "Painting Gone Mad." 

What was infuriating was that the Cubists — not the original pair alone 
but soon a group of young and well-trained artists: Gleizes, Delaunay, 
Metzinger, Ozenfant, Severini, Leger, Lyonel Feininger, Russolo, Juan Gris — 
were painting, exhibiting, and arguing for Cubism as the only art fit for the 
times. Their affront to the beholder was to offer as something worth looking 
at a geometrical construction of dully colored planes that defied harmo- 
niousness as well as the exercise of imagination. A poet, Guillaume 
Apollinaire, undertook the task of explaining the paradox in a series of arti- 
cles, and shortiy two of the painters, Gleizes and Metzinger, joined in writing 
a pair of books, Cubism and On Cubism and How to Understand It. The authors 
showed that a Cubist painting was the product of an ANALYSIS of forms. In 
choosing to neglect appearance altogether and to present essence, Cubism 
was a return to classical principles. The dramatic and psychological inten- 
tions of Romanticism had been worked out to the full. There was no use in 
repeating what had been done. 

The analysis of forms had already concerned Cezanne. Some of his land- 
scapes at L'Estaque have a pre-Cubist look; and the sculptured masks from 
the Congo that Picasso admired show the facial planes angular and juxta- 
posed. The Cubists, moreover, took "form" to mean the whole object, not its 
front view only; they put on canvas in one image the successive facets that 
someone walking around the object might see. Perhaps the clearest demon- 
stration of the principle was given by Marcel Duchamp while he was still a 
Cubist. His two versions of a Nude Descending a Staircase present the figure in 
outlines at once successive and simultaneous, thereby suggesting movement 
down the steps. That this way of taking reality was not restricted to painters 
but was somehow in the air is shown by the remark of the Symbolist critic 
Remy de Gourment, a decade before Cubism: "Believe it or not, I can see all 
the facets of a cube at the same time." 

The idea — the feeling — of simultaneity governed the efforts of talents in 
other arts, which justifies the appellation of Cubist for the whole movement. 
Sculptors analyzed the shapes of things and of the human body and arrived 
also at geometric solids whose coordinated planes suggest motion. 
Duchamp-Villon's Horse in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art is not a 



648 ^^ From Dawn to Decadence 

quadruped, but the animal's coiled power. Brancusi's bird, like Archipenko's 
human figures, is related to motion in the same way through the streamlined 
surfaces, flat or round without detailed modeling These works and the 
Cubist paintings exerted a lasting influence on the design of furniture, appli- 
ances, and textiles. The style known as Art Deco was so called because the 
first group of such designers planned an exhibition of their Arts Decoratifs for 
the year 1915. War postponed it a full decade (725>). A year before the war, 
the now famous Armory Show of 1913 in New York City aroused 
widespread discussion, no longer wholly hostile, as it had been on scattered 
occasions earlier. Ex-President Roosevelt reviewed the show and was 
extremely polite through several paragraphs before deciding that the painters 
latest in date belonged to the "lunatic fringe." The Armory pictures went to 
Boston and Philadelphia and were seen by an estimated 1 50,000 people. 

The architects, as everybody knows, also went in for flat and bare sur- 
faces. They had a head start on the Cubists, having been stimulated by the rail- 
road station, the availability of steel, and the need for high office towers on 
expensive city space. Louis Sullivan had solved the problem in Chicago in the 
1 890s. In the Cubist Decade the makings of what became the International 
Style might be seen in the buildings of Tony Garner, Behrens, or Auguste 
Perret. The last-named was especially influential in furthering the use of con- 
crete, then a new material, and he was distinguished from his peers by his 
belief that entirely bare surfaces everywhere in sight would become boring 
He found ways to break flatness without diminishing the sober functional 
look, for example, in the Theatre des Champs Elysees. 

* * 

If simultaneity was the ruling idea, the poet could no longer be content to 
set down his own single voice as in the past; he must orchestrate and repre- 
sent on the page the many voices that he heard or could imagine in the 
cacophony of the times. This program was defined in 1912 by H. M. Barzun° 
and carried out by him and others in a variety of works. They break up the lin- 
ear page of print, either to compose above one another a polyphony of 
lines — simultaneous songs or other utterances; or, again, transform the 
familiar stanza spacially for a visual representation of the theme. From these 
derive the Choric and the Concrete poetry of later years/ One of the best 
known of such early works is Apollinaire's collection of Calligrammes.° Using 
more traditional means for the same intention, the Unanimists interpreted 
simultaneity as the powerful common voice of the liberated masses, not 
diversified yet requiring expression in some new form. Jules Romains' free- 
verse poems and novels embody this vision as does Verhaeren's Villes 
Tentaculaires (Octopus Cities). 



The Cubist Decade ^ 649 

It has been said that Cubism and In his latest works (1911) Picasso has 

kindred arts were influenced by sci- achieved the logical destruction of matter, 

ence. That is the wrong way to put it, not, however by dissolution but rather by a 

because none of those artists read kind of parcelling out of its various divisions 

much if any contemporary science. But and a constructive scattering of these divi- 

in trying to go below the surface of sions - The P roblem ° f P™* artistic form is 

„i. 11 • ^ j. _ i the real problem of his life. 

things and bring out structure in place v 

of appearance, Cubism does indepen- — Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the 

dentiy parallel the early 20C physics: N ^ ' 

the atom is "more real" than the visible 

chunk of matter, and so on down to the farthest reach of ANALYSIS. 

Rather than science it was techne that affected the Cubist eye: motor-car 
speed and aviation, which respectively force images into each other and flat- 
ten what is rounded. There is no record of Cubist fliers, but photographs 
showed the earth in the geometric way now familiar to the air traveler. 
Obviously, the influence of motion pictures in changing visual reality belongs 
here also. The figures in the "movies" do not move, but seen in rapid succes- 
sion give the illusion of motion — the stroboscopic effect. The mad results of 
speeding up the film strip, juxtaposing pieces of it for impossible actions, and 
using a soft focus or other distortion emancipated the mind; it was no longer 
crassly resistant to artful mis-Representation. 

Soon, the genius of David Griffith invented a series of devices that laid 
the foundations of the new art of film. A failed actor and playwright, Griffith 
was employed for five years to direct short movies for a firm called Biograph. 
In the 400 that he made, he created the close-up, the long shot, the fade out 
and fade in, the framing to vary the scene from the usual rectangle, and cross- 
cutting to suggest simultaneous actions. The modern viewer accustomed to 
these and other effects has no notion how much they distort normal sight and 
how strongly they affected the first viewers. 

In those same years, the work and the propaganda of Stieglitz and his 
associate Steichen established photography as a graphic art separate from 
painting and of equal interest to those with eyes to see. At the gallery known 
by its street number "291," Stieglitz held exhibitions, gave lectures, and like 
Griffith kept inventing new ways of making the camera do what he wanted. 
He was the first to produce scenes in snow, rain, and at night. Again, a 
medium wordlessly opened the mind to what it had never perceived. 
Incidentally, a law of the 1 890s preceded Steichen in declaring that a photog- 
rapher was not a mechanic; he was a professional man and must pay a fee for 
a license. Stieglitz was an activist. Before the Armory Show he exhibited 
paintings by Cezanne, Matisse, Lautrec, Rousseau, Picasso, and Severini and 
sculptures by Rodin and Brancusi — to an almost entirely hostile and mocking 
public. But there were modern American painters, also hung at the gallery, 



650 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

who found the shows an encouragement: John Marin, Hartley, Dove, Maurer, 
and Max Weber among them. 

Like the Impressionists, the Cubists took their subjects from the life 
around them — no more history, mythology, or allegory and, in portraits, very 
little if any psychology This workaday outlook was reinforced by Braque's 
invention of collage — "pastings" on the canvas of bits and pieces from ordi- 
nary objects, such as a newspaper headline, to highlight a still life. This touch 
of the actual disappeared in the evolution of Cubism through several phases. 
By the 1920s, it has been maintained, the Cubist works of Gleizes and 
Delaunay led to the so-called abstract art that now prevails almost univer- 
sally (723 >). As remarked earlier, it is not the painting or sculpture that is 
abstract — it can be seen and touched; it is what is left after other elements 
have been abstracted. Since "abstraction art" would be clumsy, a better term 
would be "analytic," or even better, "residual art." 

The elimination of the recognizable, especially of the individual face in a 
Cubist portrait, bears a subtle relation to the wave of Populism which, as 
noted earlier, flowed over Europe and America at the turn of the century. The 
emerging masses swamped the individual. He still existed, of course, but 
anonymously, an atom among thousands of similars. To portray the particu- 
lar, of which Blake had made such a point — that detailed uniqueness the 
Romanticists had cultivated with passion — looked like trifling in view of the 
numbers, the millions of human beings now so important, but indistinguish- 
able alike in status and habits. 

While France witnessed these departures from Impressionism, several 
other alterations of it occurred in other countries. The German artists of the 
"Blue Rider" group headed by Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky modified 
representation to render symbolically the spiritual element in life and in 
objects. Those of "The Bridge" with Emil Nolde represented human beings 
as borne down by outer forces. The Scandinavian Edvard Munch showed 
them weirdly frightened or maddened and the Viennese Kokoschka, dena- 
tured under torture. Art faced the evils of its time: recording the sense of 
wrong has sometimes been called Expressionism, but the name is more prop- 
erly applied to the theater. The common element in the styles just listed is dis- 
tortion of form without abstracting from a self. In Italy, the message and 
manner were different. The Futurists there applied the Cubist technique in 
celebration of speed, machinery, and a buoyant Abolitionism (<619). 
Russolo's "Dynamism of an Automobile" is intended to suggest the rush of 
air as felt in headlong motion, without any car or person visible. 

From the summary of this ebullient period in the arts, two generalities 
emerge. One is that the most reasonable date for the term Modernism is not 
1880 or 1890 but the years just described, after Symbolism and Impressionism 
had achieved renown and before the large public of the 1920s came to know 



The Cubist Decade <^> 651 

what had been done in the years just preceding war in 1914. That the break 
implied by tacking on ism to modern was widely felt only then is shown by a 
simple fact: the denigration of Romanticism and ridicule of the Victorians 
reached the newspaper public after the war was over. Lytton Strachey and 
Irving Babbitt are cheerleaders of the Twenties. 

A second conclusion is implicit in the first: the arts of our time have all 
derived their techniques from the Cubist Decade, but in developing them var- 
iously, the sensibility of the artist, his attitude toward the world, and his feel- 
ing about himself have progressively changed from Constructivism — the apt 
name taken by some painters before 1914 — to Destructivism. The cognate 
word Deconstruction lately made commonplace can be stretched to cover the 
same rooted purpose and is especially apt because it means "taking to pieces 
what has been built" and not simply "knocking it down." 

One other energy was arrested during death's interregnum and hardly 
resumed full strength: the general culture, and not its avant-garde products 
alone, had been international in spirit. Before 1914 the critics and scholars of 
Central Europe were particularly free of national bias. They wrote about past 
and present art with such zeal and sympathy as to diffuse an atmosphere akin 
to that of the cosmopolitan 18C. It contributed to the mood of joy in creation 
and appreciation that made later comers look back on those years as a belle 
epoque. Artists traveled freely — no passports or visas — many to Paris, where 
they might stay for a time, because the excitement there was the hottest; and, 
when back in Berlin, Vienna, Prague, or St. Petersburg, they merged their 
newfound inspirations with local influences and independent innovations. 
[The book to read is The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig.] 

* 
* * 

The word Populism has come up in various contexts as one of the charac- 
teristics of the turn of the century. Only in America was it a conscious move- 
ment bearing that name. In Europe it was an oudook that influenced political 
and cultural action. Its meaning could be defined as the strongly felt presence 
of "the people," their needs and rights, their behavior and ideas. In the 
Nineties all this was the substance of the Naturalist's novels and the cause of 
the aesthetes' flight to a finer world. No fewer than three outstanding books 
appeared on crowd psychology/ Systematic study was devoted all over the 
western world to society's role in shaping the individual. Lester Ward, C. H. 
Cooley, and George Mead in America and Tonnies, Hobhouse, Pareto, and 
Max Weber in Europe laid solid bases for social psychology. The methods 
came from the newly defined and independent science of sociology. 

Emile Durkheim, its founder, posited as a fundamental unit akin to the 
atom "the social fact." It has no connection with psychology, which regards 



652 q^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Organized crowds have always played an the individual mind, or with politics, or 
important part in the life of peoples, but this the law, which can change arbitrarily. 
part has never been of such moment as at Suicide is a social fact, and Durkheim 
present. chose it for his first large-scale study. It 

— Lebon, The Psychology of Crowds can be measured by counting and be 

( 1895 ) related to other social facts so as to 

Asocialfactisanywayofbehaving,regularor yield correlations and predictions— the 
not, that is capable of exerting an external " laws " of a particular society; that is, 
constraint on an individual; or again, any way their statistical norms. If this premise is 
of behaving that is general throughout a given true it implies a determinism and 
society, provided the behavior exists indepen- makes the study a science. 
dently of its individual manifestations. The 20C developed Durkheim's 

—Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological discipline into endless specialties. Today, 

Method (1895) through newspapers, the public is 

treated to a daily dose of "studies" that 
indicate with numbers how, under stated conditions, individuals in groups 
behave. Legislation is often guided by such reports, crime statistics being an 
example, despite the fact that statisticians keep questioning the accuracy of 
the data. A whole community, Middletown^ has been twice analyzed in great 
detail," and the universal pastime of polling is an offshoot of sociology. There 
is moreover a sociology of every activity — science, art, play, sexuality; of 
crime it is called criminology. 

Concurrently, with the proliferating social sciences, the writing of history 
underwent review and reform, again in keeping with the populist temper. 
When Lord Acton, dean of the profession and editor of the Cambridge Modern 
History^ told his juniors: "Take up a problem not a period", he was directing 
them to a social situation in place of a series of events. In France, a group 
headed by Lucien Febvre had a similar idea: no more events but "collective 
mentalities." They published the Annates d'Histoire Economique etSociale, and the 
name Annates came to mean a doctrine and technique that converted the major- 
ity of historians everywhere. The substance and character of historiography 
were radically altered; narrative, individual figures, and literary art were ban- 
ished from the definition and the practice. In Germany, Dilthey redefined the 
history of ideas into something close to the history of social myth and 
Lamprecht demanded a history that would make use of the latest findings in 
psychology and sociology (656>). 

These goals for history have been pursued down to the present, the late 
Fernand Braudel and his colleague Robert Mandrou being considered the 
masters of the reformed genre. Regarded by some as making history a science 
at last, and by others as achieving a synthesis of the "sciences of man," it rests 
on the exhaustive study of the commonplace facts that the course of life 
leaves in city halls, police stations, business firms, and private attics — wher- 



The Cubist Decade <^> 653 

ever paper accumulates. There, the theory maintains, the real life of the peo- 
ple is to be seen. In such histories narrative gives way to description. Topic 
dominates continuity in time; the historian turns into a sociologist working 
on the past. He studies violence or the cost of living, religious habits or the 
forms of business enterprise at a certain place and date. Thus: Poverty in 
Habsburg Spain or Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in 17th Century England. When 
stouthearted, he attempts to treat all of these and their like in a set of chapters 
covering a considerable span; for example the single-topical Centuries of 
Childhood* and the comprehensive France: 1848—1945° in two volumes, the 
first subtitled "Ambition, Love, and Politics;" chapter headings include: "The 
Rich," "Children," "Notaries," "The Genius in Politics." 

By opening up those large repositories of inconspicuous facts formerly 
underused, these historians have done pioneer work; and their painstaking 
labors are worthy of respect. Earlier historians did not disdain such topics, 
but they only sampled the sources as they wove their compact findings into 
narratives of events and individual action. Now individuals were deemed 
unimportant. Neither great men nor medium-size ones had influence; only 
the crowd had power, and what it affected was not events, which matter little, 
but the broad conditions of life. This motionless history defied a tradition of 
2,500 years. 

A second result was that the general public no longer read history as it 
had in the 1 9C Some professional historians continued to write monographs 
on persons and events, but the Macaulays and Prescotts and Michelets and 
Mommsens were missing; their descendants were busy collecting scraps for 
the history of friendship, or the history of private life," or that of envy. ° The 
general public read the popularizers. Their work can be excellent, but more 
often it is a catchy recital without the life-giving ingredient of vision. 

One must deplore the replacement of history by attempts at retrospec- 
tive sociology, not because it lacks interest as such — though it can be 
tediously anecdotal — but because it fails in spite of all the digging. With fine 
honesty the practitioners keep telling us that the data are incomplete, inade- 
quate. The result, as an English historian has pointed out, is that in Braudel's 
survey of The Mediterranean World, the mass of details tells us no more than we 
knew before from the earlier "literary" accounts/ A further drawback is that 
the topics treated — marriage, violence, friendship — are not definable sub- 
jects; they are ventures in ABSTRACTION; like sociology, they mix under one 
name actions and situations existentially very different. 

But what of Toynbee and Spengler, contemporaries of the Annates 
groups, and others before them who professed to explain in large works the 
meaning of history? These attempts are classed as philosophy of history, 
because they find a system and a purpose in the chaos of events. This is done 
by assigning one continuous force or a predestined goal as the motive power 



654 <^s> From Dawn to Decadence 

which in the end will bring mankind to some attractive or disastrous end. 
Divine Providence, the march of Freedom, or the class struggle is shown to 
be the engine at work beneath the welter. By grouping historical instances 
that show a steady progression, the thesis is proved. 

The merit of these ambitious works lies in their by-products, the descrip- 
tive parts, which are often good history, original and convincing. It is when 
the author forces well-known events and persons into a set of boxes that the 
scheme breaks down; for example, when Toynbee has to make the Thirty 
Years' War a "small war" to satisfy his set pattern. What vitiates all the sys- 
tems is the fallacy of the single cause. To begin with, cause in history cannot 
be ascertained any better than motive in its human agents. Both must be rep- 
resented as probable, and it is wiser to speak of conditions rather than causes 
and of influences rather than a force making for change, because what brings it 
about is the human will, which is distributed among all the living. 

This is to say that a historian who contemplates the infinite diversity of 
human character, the range of human desires and powers, the multiplicity of 
social and political institutions, the endless schemes proposed for improving 
life, the numberless faiths, codes, and customs passionately adhered to, 
fiercely hated, and in unceasing warfare, the vast universe of art with its 
expressions in a galaxy of styles and languages — all these existing to an 
accompaniment of sacrifice, injustice, and suffering, persecution imposed or 
willingly endured — such a historian is persuaded that these challenges to the 
concrete imagination cannot be merged and reduced to a formula. History is 
not an agency nor does it harbor a hidden power; the word history is an 
ABSTRACTION for the totality of human deeds, and to make their clashing 
outcomes the fulfillment of some concealed purpose is to make human 
beings into puppets. 

For the same reason, history cannot be a science; it is the very opposite, 
in that its interest resides in the particulars. As James Fitzjames Stephen 
pointed out in the 19C, if a science of history were possible, it would consist 
of a few "laws" that could be written on half a page. To invent an example, the 
first law of historico-dynamics might read: "Everything sticks and nothing 
holds." It would cover every instance of the observed fact that no purpose or 
idea makes its way without hitches, setbacks, and temporary stasis; and no 
movement, institution, or culture goes on forever. 

Not a science and not a philosophy, history is bereft in an age like ours, 
which wants at least theory when science is not attainable. Can a case still be 
made for Cinderella? One line of advocacy might be that even if history were 
simply a story recited in various versions, it would be worth having as a vast 
mural full of action and color. But as pointed out earlier (<xiv), when pre- 
sented by a thinking historian, history does more: it shows patterns that recur 



The Cubist Decade <^> 655 

with a difference, dramas in which one follows exposition, complication, and 
denouement, while continuity in aims suggests THEMES. In all these ways 
knowledge of man is enhanced. History moreover includes energetic lives, no 
two alike, that show creatures as characters. 

These elements need no theory to earn respect. And a further possibility 
exists. At times in the present work, the narrator threw in the remark: "This 
is a generality." The dictum meant that a conclusion just reached applied 
mutatis mutandis to other broad ranges of fact. These fruits of reflection, like 
history itself, are interesting as well as useful; here is a round dozen to show 
how scanning the last five centuries in the West impresses on the mind certain 
types of order: 

— An age (a shorter span within an era) is unified by one or two pressing 
needs, not by the proposed remedies, which are many and thus divide. 

— A movement in thought or art produces its best work during the uphill 
fight to oust the enemy; that is, the previous thought or art. Victory brings on 
imitation and ultimately Boredom. 

— "An Age of " (fill in: Reason, Faith, Science, Absolutism, Democracy, 

Anxiety, Communication) is always a misnomer because insufficient, except 
perhaps "An Age of Troubles," which fits every age in varying degrees. 

— All historical labels are nicknames — Puritan, Gothic, Rationalist, 
Romantic, Symbolist, Expressionist, Modernist — and therefore falsify. But 
"renaming more accurately" would be effort wasted. Coming from diverse 
minds, it would re-introduce confusion. All names given by history must be 
accepted and opened up, not defined in one sentence or divided into sub- 
species. 

— The historian does not isolate causes, which defy sorting out even in the 
natural world; he describes conditions that he judges relevant, adding occa- 
sionally an estimate of their relative strength. 

— Neither of these propositions is true by itself: "Ideas are the product of 
society." "Social change is the product of ideas." 

— The denial just stated applies also to heredity and environment; great men 
and the masses of mankind; economic forces and conscious purpose; and any 
other pair of commonly invoked coordinate factors. The exact course of their 
respective action cannot be understood and consequently cannot be stated. 

— A class is not a homogeneous group of people marching in step but a sort 
of labeled platform populated by a continuous stream of individuals coming 
from above and from below. Once settled, they acquire the common traits. 



656 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

— The potent writings that helped to reshape minds and institutions in the 
West have done so through a formula or two, not always consistent with the 
text. Partisans and scholars start to read the book with care after it has done its 
work. 

— In art, influence does take place and when strongest is least literal. When it 
is literal it must be called plagiarism and the fact should not be concealed by 
the eminence of the thief. 

— In biography, systematic explanation by unconscious motives defeats the 
purpose of portraying an individual character. It turns him or her into a case, 
which then belongs to one of the types in the literature of psychology. 

— Progress does occur from point to point along a given line for a given time. 
It does not occur along the whole cultural front, though it may appear to by 
throwing into shadow the resistant portion. The sciences are no exception. 

To these dogmatically stated rules, some modifications or contrary cases 
will no doubt occur to the student and the reader. That is one use of the rules: 
to sharpen the sense of difference in similarity. The other is to guide reflec- 
tion on the facts met with in any account of a past or present scene. Testing a 
generality makes for precision in remembrance, which is knowing history. To 
be remembered also is that these twelve are not exhaustive; others might be 
framed, and few or none may fit times and places other than those which sug- 
gested them. 

* * 

Lamprecht told his colleagues at St. Louis that "the progressive and 
therefore aggressive point of view is the socio-psychological. ,, We have seen 
the outcome of the socio part; the psychological has had a comparable 
impact, not so much on history as on biography, which is reserved for later 
discussion (792>). What is in point here is the recasting of anthropology. 
Once again one sees a discipline enlarging its scope. The 1 9C concentrated 
on the individual subject — the dimensions of his skull, with a glance at the 
color of hair and eyes and height. In the most intent practitioners, these 
indices were enough to determine race, politics, degree of ambition, and ulti- 
mate fate (<578). The populist temper abandoned the single specimen to that 
fate and turned to the tribe. At the hands of Malinowski and Franz Boas, 
anthropology became the sociology of primitive groups. The researcher went 
to live with them and noted down every feature of their life. To this entire set 
of habits and beliefs the anthropologist gave the name of culture and, as 
explained earlier, the term has degenerated into near- absurdity. The find- 



The Cubist Decade q^> 657 

ings excited general curiosity and, Why is the word culture one of the most con- 
used piecemeal, fed arguments about tested in the language? The truth is that none 
morals and government in modern ofus quite understands what we mean by it. 

societies. In other words, PRIMITIVISM —John Casey" (1994) 
found fresh materials to work with. 

In further parallel, the scholarship developed in the 19C as philology laid 
claim in the early 20th to being a social science and took the new name of lin- 
guistics. This change was also a by-product of populist feeling. Philology had 
studied literary texts and charted the course of changes and regularities within 
families of related languages back to a hypothetical Aryan tongue (<503). At 
the turn of the century The English Grammar of Henry Sweet (Shaw's model 
for Higgins in Pygmalion) pointed the way to a new rigor by being purely his- 
torical and descriptive instead of prescriptive; that is, it did not recommend 
certain forms and condemn others. The word correct lost its meaning. Usage 
was all. Sweet also reclassified the parts of speech to get rid of the grouping 
and terminology derived from Latin. English — and any other language — 
must be examined like a distinct natural phenomenon; and the place to do so 
was no longer printed books but the speechways of the common people, the 
least educated. 

At the same time in Switzerland, Ferdinand de Saussure was lecturing on 
what he called General Linguistics, by which he meant the structure of lan- 
guage as such. He defined it as a system of signs that are arbitrary and that 
carry meaning not by their sound but by their difference from each other. 
Thus language is pure form. (Compare "pure art" above, <640). A language 
is never complete or perfect in any individual, only in the mass of speakers. It 
must therefore be studied not only for its changes through time, but also for 
its state at any time. This novel idea, Saussure likened to the work of the soci- 
ologist and thus made good linguistics' claim to being a social science. The 
various types and uses of Structuralism as well as the idea of stylistics derive 
from Saussure. 

The cultural consequences of replacing philology by linguistics have 
been many and far-reaching. Since the real language is what the people 
speak — the linguist's sole concern — the written language must be dismissed 
as artificial. Since there is no right or wrong way of speaking no judgment is 
to be passed on usage. Correctness is the vicious idol of snobs. Since the doc- 
trine interprets changes in speech as the "life of the language," any criticism 
of usage, such as deploring confusions in meaning or losses of useful distinc- 
tions is so much violence done to the well-being of the mother tongue. 
Complaints are bound to fail, anyway; they only prove the critic an enemy of 
Populism. As a leading linguist put it in a famous essay: "No native speaker 
can make a mistake." On the contrary, his "mistake" may contribute to that 
vigorous life which the linguist studies like a biologist. 



658 <^*> From Dawn to Decadence 

The effect of linguistics on education was severe. Grammar books dou- 
bled in size, rich in diagrams and definitions, owing to the abandonment of 
the old parts of speech and the standard terms for their interrelations; for 
example, not "subject of a sentence" but "head word." Words themselves 
were assigned multiple labels according to meaning and function: there was 
not only an adverb; it could be a pronoun when used to refer to a previously 
mentioned place: "I will be there." In short, the principle that teaching begins 
with simplification was flouted in favor of strict science. Worse still, linguists 
differed in the grammatical names and categories that they sought to impose. 
One outcome has been the need for remedial classes in college. 

In the pursuit of science, some linguists sought for the fundamental unit 
out of which language is made. They found it in the "phoneme," the single 
sound which, compounded with others, makes up a word. Unfortunately, it 
was not long before there were six definitions of the particle. And in 
Saussure's system, sound is not the unit, it is only the vehicle of the sign, the 
abstract item that signifies what is meant. 

The loss of grammar and the dogma that anything said is to be treated 
with the respect due to life itself have had the further cultural effect of 
encouraging the natural carelessness of talk; it even made it an asset: a new 
president of the United States in 1988 gained in popularity when he was 
found halting in speech and loose in grammar. In the same spirit, the lin- 
guists attack anybody who speaks up for saving threatened meanings and 
especially distinctions among words. This rebuke is paradoxical, since as sci- 
entists they should remain neutral toward all influences acting on language. 
That it is a social institution for exchanging thoughts and at its best when its 
terms remain clear, as in the sciences and other technical fields, does not seem 
to be part of the linguistic creed, nor that language has aesthetic powers and 
uses that also depend on conservation. 

The linguists' exclusion of the written word from their purview as if it 
had no influence on speech is again a touch of Populism and bad science. The 
western peoples read printed matter by the ton and pick up their cliches from 
a hundred written sources generated by business, government, newspapers 
and magazines, advertising, and directions about the use of appliances and 
medication. There are even people who read books and absorb for use new 
expressions made up by authors. And readers and authors being part of the 
people, their concern with the efficacy and the beauty of the language gives 
them a right to speak up at least equal to the right of the careless. Many among 
"the people" do not, in fact, adopt the linguists' attitude; they want to be cor- 
rect and buy dictionaries. There they find the notations "standard" and "sub- 
standard," "colloq." and sometimes "vulg." If these distinctions exist, it 
seems as if a native speaker could make a mistake, such as uttering something 
"vulg." at a wedding or a funeral. In truth, right has nothing to do with the 



The Cubist Decade <^> 659 

matter. If it had, one might complain that, as stated in linguistics, it is too nar- 
row: native speakers who cannot make a mistake ought to share their privilege 
with children and foreigners, none of whom should ever be set straight. 

As for the life of the language, that phrase is not science, but metaphor. 
Language is not alive; only those who use it have life, and when they stop 
speaking it, their language, if written, remains whole, readable and usable like 
classical Latin and Greek. To decide whether the living users should be 
encouraged to preserve or to tamper, one must judge by results. Establishing 
a standard spelling abolished the old democratic right to follow one's fancy, 
and the result is that we can still read with relative ease the literature of the last 
500 years. During that same time the vocabulary has suffered losses and 
changes, the increase in distinctions being much to the good; while the losses 
and confusions, many due to ignorance in a world of illiterates, were not then 
cheered along by specialists. The present order of things is not likely to keep 
the written word readable for another five centuries. But, it is only fair to add 
that the laxity now favored and fostered came in parallel with the poets' 
games with vocabulary and syntax in the Nineties, a recreation soon taken up 
by the writers of prose, and pursued in the 20C by advertisers, journalists, and 
corporate managers. 

When the new historians spoke of "collective mentalities," they meant 
the temper or states of mind prevailing in certain periods and differing from 
those before and after. Psychology was a word in vogue; the study of the sub- 
ject formerly known as "the human understanding" had been making strides 
like the other social sciences and had earned its ology. Its program was to 
replace the generalities of former thinkers by detailed observation and mea- 
surement. 

In the preparatory 1870s, William James, trained as physiologist and 
physician, had set up at Harvard the first psychological laboratory. It was 
soon followed by Wilhelm Wundt's in Leipzig, and others elsewhere. By hav- 
ing willing subjects detect differences in sensation between weights or colors 
and the like, certain regularities were noted. Ernst Weber found that a pro- 
portional increase in the stimulus was needed to perceive change: if after lift- 
ing 40 grams 41 are needed for feeling any difference, 80 grams requires not 
81 but 82. It was termed Weber's Lam 

But the law (and others like it) seemed to apply only within a moderate 
range. Beyond it, human variety set in and the conclusion was drawn that sen- 
sory and other perceptions could not be explained by analysis and counting. 
Wundt posited an inner psychic force that integrates simple elements. 
Observation and introspection remained the instruments of modern psy- 
chology; observing rats in traps and mazes being a favorite and giving cur- 
rency to "rat race" as a useful metaphor for modern occupations. In the early 
experimental period, Pavlov was accounted a contributor to psychology 



660 q^d From Dawn to Decadence 

when he engineered the conditioned reflex in dogs. But this was an incidental 
result of his study of digestion. Pavlov directed a physiological laboratory in 
St. Petersburg and always "renounced the untenable pretensions of psychol- 
ogy." Dogs differed, so they gave no clue to the human mind's working; a sud- 
den emergency such as fire de-conditioned them. When they were forced to 
differentiate between smaller and smaller differences in stimulus, they bit the 
apparatus; humans similarly worked on may have been tempted to bite the 
experimenter — it is not recorded. 

When, in 1890, William James's Principles of Psychology appeared, the two 
volumes were at once recognized as epoch-making. The work summed up in 
critical fashion all the solid findings since Locke on the mind and Berkeley on 
vision. It disposed of still current theories such as "mind-stuff" and pure 
Associationism and replaced them with James's own contributions. The 
scope and analytic power of the Psychology have made it more than a hallowed 
classic. Leading authorities in our time keep referring to its insights and its 
unexhausted suggestiveness. It is moreover so full of the stuff of life that lay 
readers have found it engrossing. 

The most notable and influential 
Mr. James, I mean Mr. William James, the chapter was James's redefinition of the 
humorist who writes on psychology, not his mind. It is "first of all a stream. Chain 
brother, the psychologist who writes novels. or train does not express it; it flows." 

—Anon., Pages from a Private Diary James headed his detailed description 

(1899)° "The Stream of Thought" to make it 

clear that he was refuting the former 
account in which separate "ideas" derived from as many sensations somehow 
got combined. In an abridgment of The Principles that he published two years 
later, the phrase "stream of consciousness" conveyed still more vividly the 
fact of flowing and established itself as the final designation in psychology, lit- 
erature, and common speech. 

James showed that relations among ideas come in the stream also, along 
with whatever they relate; Hazlitt had an inkling of this reality at the height of 
the Associationist doctrine. And James, like Destutt (<453), re-affirmed that 
feelings are attached to the fluctuating waves of thought, some of them often 
entirely devoid of images: a feeling of if, a feeling of but, are familiar and not pic- 
turable. Ideas, James went on, are not so much lumps in the stream as "cuts" 
that we make in it for our various purposes — the mind is purposive. When 
instead of daydreaming the purpose is firmly pursued, that is properly thinking. 
In his treatment of a score of other functions of the mind, James evinced 
no desire to make a system. His scientific bent and empiricist philosophy 
(668>) both opposed such a course. But his contemporaries did not refrain. 
Half a dozen systems flourished and were debated among doctrinaire adher- 
ents. The British hung on to their Associationist scheme — ideas cling 



The Cubist Decade <^> 661 

together because they originate at the same time or place — but they modified 
it in the light of new findings. The Germans were structuralists — sensations 
follow a predetermined order. Some Americans stressed personal and organ- 
ismic factors; others called themselves Behaviorist, because all thoughts 
result from the body's actions. The Scot MacDougal was "hormic," that is, a 
believer in intention and purpose; and two Germans, Kohler and Koffka, 
devised the Gestalt theory, according to which the whole being responds to 
whole situations for the sake of adjustments. This made them severe critics of 
the linguists who believed that speech and ideas were installed as a separate 
appliance in the mind. Debaters who wanted to pin a label on James and his 
disciples called them functionalist, which leaves the door open to revisions of 
theory. 

Finally, an Austrian School was in being that adopted the name 
Psychoanalytic. Unlike the others, it had its start in the study of mental illness, 
like the theories of the French Ideologues in Napoleon's time: studying the dis- 
eased mind reveals how the healthy works. It is worth remarking further that 
from 1912 to 1950, no new school of thought about the mind made its 
appearance, and since then the novelties have been only variations. The 
Cubist Decade remains the fountainhead in every department of culture. 

The head-and-heart of the Vienna School was of course Freud, who kept 
building theory brilliantly and with great speed on experience gathered dur- 
ing and since his work with Charcot, Janet, and Breuer. His acolytes Jung, 
Adler, and Ferenczi are still recognizable names. These and later disciples 
diverged from the master, but all agreed on the governing power of the 
Unconscious and made its existence as familiar and important as that of the 
appendix or (now) the genes. 

Despite its public prominence and its role in all the "depth psycholo- 
gies," knowledge of the Unconscious did not begin with Freud. In the ency- 
clopedic work that covers the history of the subject, one reaches Freud on 
page 418 out of 900.° What comes before Freud is a sizable number of 
Romanticist thinkers and notably Schopenhauer, who saw life ruled by two 
instincts — self-preservation and the sexual drive, the latter producing the 
contents of consciousness. After him, Eduard von Hartmann collected a 
large store of supporting evidence for his assigning much of culture to 
unconscious motivation. Others suggested analyses of dreams and the death 
wish. William James was well aware of the part played in the mind's opera- 
tions by what was called in his day the subliminal, and he was ready for 
Freud's message when he heard it at Clark University in Massachusetts, where 
Stanley Hall brought the two men together in 1909. 

They continued talking, in German, as they walked to the train station, 
James carrying Freud's suitcase and suffering an angina attack, but tactfully 
concealing it from Freud, who noticed it all the same. Their later references 



662 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

to each other show mutual respect, though James thought Freud attributed 
too wide a scope in human motives to the sexual drive. James's pluralistic 
mind resisted any form of the single cause. He might have accepted the libido 
in its broad meaning and the death wish too, had he lived to read Freud's later 
expositions. Other physicians had the same objection; and the public, which 
heard mostiy rumors from Vienna, was also incredulous — shocked, in spite 
of the recent discussions in public of sexual matters (<625). 

Freud's mentors in Paris had concluded that certain mental disturbances 
were rooted in sexual maladjustment, and so had Dr. Beddoes in the early 
19C (<438). When Freud made the Unconscious an agent in the mind at large 
he was basing his belief on work with patients ill-adjusted to the social world. 
His genius lay in discerning within their uninhibited talk elements that his 
powerful imagination formed into a system. His knowledge of myth, religion, 
and literature, when applied to his ANALYSIS, gave an unusual flavor to the 
persuasive written lectures that he published as an introduction to his psy- 
chology. But the system was first of all for therapy. 

Earlier workers had used self-searching and unbosoming as relief from 
anxieties, and the Catholics' periodic confession strongly suggests the formal- 
izing of a natural urge. Perhaps there is also a link between the old notion of the 
guiding genius — angel or devil — and a sense of compulsion from within. 
Freud made all such traditions and speculations seem obsolete by the clarity 
and completeness of his arguments. In this respect, he resembles Marx and 
Wagner in their role as great borrowers and great formulators. But Freud's doc- 
trine was not final. Jung veered into the realm of myth, finding there 
archetypes — the shapers of the mind both in the persona or individual and in the 
"collective unconscious" that he posited. It is Jung's scheme and language that 
have won over the artists and critics and have led to methods of literary ANAL- 
YSIS by noting recurrent images, symbols, and mythic patterns. As for the 
Freudian interpretation of authors and historical characters, it finds no warrant 
in the master's work. The amount of evidence drawn from documents, com- 
pared with that of a live psychoanalysis is patendy insufficient. 

The second main dissident, Alfred Adler, has been unjustly overshad- 
owed by the other pair. He was alone in contending that society exerts a shap- 
ing influence on the mind. In the sequel he has been vindicated by more than 
one psychoanalyst, from Karen Horney to Abraham Maslow And the "infe- 
riority complex" that Adler postulated is at least as much bandied about in 
popular psychology as its rival named after Oedipus. [The book to read is In 
Freud's Shadow by Paul E. Stepansky] 

When in the late 1920s emancipation from the 19C ethos was well- 
advanced, the primacy of sexuality in Freud was at last found titillating, espe- 
cially in common talk; reticence was old fogeyish and bluntness the mark of a 
free spirit. But those who used the jargon without reading the sources did not 



The Cubist Decade <^> 663 

notice the ambiguity in the word libido. No doubt in many contexts Freud is 
speaking of the sexual drive, but elsewhere he has in mind the Latin meaning 
of desire, eagerness, longing, which includes the sexual but covers Urge at large, 
the dionysiac impetus that moves human beings to want, do, and achieve. 
Libido corresponds to Schopenhauer's Will, Bergson's elan vital, Nietzsche's 
"will to power," and other thinkers' "life force." The terms differ in their pre- 
cise application and are not identical with Freud's understanding of the Id, 
but all imply the same engine at the core of the creature. Freud's use of libido 
about himself shows that it can apply to entirely non-sexual situations (701 >). 
And when four years of war supplied fresh matter for reflection, he added the 
death wish to whatever propels the psyche. 

In two respects psychoanalysis differs from a number of its rivals in psy- 
chology. Freud offered it as a physiological science fulfilling the same 
demands of material verification as any other; to him, Id, Ego, and Superego 
were organs functioning like the nerves and the brain; his works described the 
mechanics of their operation. He never acknowledged that some of his 
answers to queries beg the question or that the terms he created may help 
understanding but are not the equivalent of formulas in physics. 

In the second place, Freud had little 
to say about the workings of the artistic i t i s impossible to ignore the extent to which 
mind or the character of human soci- civilization is built up on renunciation of 
eties. The Leonardo and Dostoevsky instinctual gratification, the degree to which 
essays do not assess their art. There was the existence of civilization presupposes the 
no reason to expect that they should, non-gratification (suppression, repression, 
but in those two domains his ideas have or something else?) of powerful instinctual 
been exploited so freely that his system energies. 
is commonly considered to have ex- — Freud (1930) 
plained biography, literature, and human 

relations. Of artists he says only that they want money, fame, and sexual gratifi- 
cation; of societies he says in one of his best books that it would be risky to 
psychoanalyze a culture. And far from encouraging the overthrow of social 
restraints he sees repression as the prerequisite of civilization. 

* 
* * 

During the time when psychoanalysis was deemed wild and incredible — 
interpreters of dreams were charlatans — other notions and systems, equally 
hard for sensible people to believe, were flourishing. Since the 1 870s and the 
weakening of the established religions, it had been a time of cults. The critique 
of scientific materialism had opened a breach, and people with spiritual long- 
ings who could find fulfillment neither in the old churches nor in the arts 
yielded to the lure of sects. Their richly abstract verbiage gave access to The 



664 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Gross and unclean living, indulgence in ani- One or The All, with peace of mind 

mal passions and appetites thicken and and pride in owning The Truth as side 

coarsen the astral body, while a temperate effects. Mary Baker Eddy had led the 

and a pure life, control of the lower nature, procession in the preparatory period 

and high unselfish thoughts attract to it the ^^ Christian Science, which defied 

finestandrarestsortsofastralmaterials. ±& materialism of medicine. Next 

—Annie Besant, "The Conditions of came Madame Blavatsky's Theosophy, 

Life After Death" (1896) a bknd of fdigion and (Meatgl m ^_ 

physics that brought relief from the 
burdens of western INDIVIDUALISM; it contained enough imaginative sub- 
stance to capture Yeats's strong mind. This appeal of the East gave currency 
also to Vivekananda's Esoteric Buddhism. The recovery of myths and the 
interest in psychology generated several types of "New Thought" that drew 
on autosuggestion and other modes of guiding consciousness to the Light 
and enhancing happiness. This movement of ideas has gone on into the pre- 
sent, reinforced by cultish innovations within Christianity; biblical criticism 
had confused its message, giving license to new prophets who have redefined 
moral duties and promised salvation, sometimes through mass suicide. The 
important thing is to believe again. 

Not quite a cult, because unorganized, the believers in mediums and spirit 
return kept in existence the methods and manifestations traditional since the 
mid-1 9C (<574). But now, the rise to consciousness of the Unconscious had 
the unexpected result of arousing genuinely scientific interest in psychical phe- 
nomena, from the revelations of mediums to thought transference, the behav- 
ior of ghosts, and the misbehavior of poltergeists. The Society for Psychical 
Research had been conducting investigations in the field since the early 1880s, 
but its activities did not draw much attention until a connection was made 
between the familiar showings of the supernatural and the work of uncon- 
scious suggestion. A book by the Swiss psychologist Flournoy, based on five 
years' study of a medium, made known the "mythopoetic function" and its 
"romances of the unconscious." This scientific enterprise had a martyr. 

Edmund Gurney (<639), the gifted 

critic and vigilant secretary of the 
What are the obstacles to the Yogi? Disease, . ..... 

..... . . Society, committed suicide — a mystery 

mental laziness, false perception, non-attain- Jy J J 

tog concentration and falling away from the to ^ frienck E ^dence subsequently 
state when obtained. found suggests that his act resulted 

-Swami Vivekananda, Raja Yoga (1897) from Ms «&«««y that a report of psy- 

chic phenomena that he had validated 
and published was fraudulent. 
Scientific and popular preoccupation with the mind naturally had the 
effect of increasing western SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, and in amateur intro- 
spection one of the first discoveries is that motives are not simple or single. It 



The Cubist Decade <^> 665 

may seem odd to associate this now obvious statement with political econ- 
omy; the warrant for it is the change in the name and principle of that social 
science about the time when the others also revised their oudook. The adjec- 
tive political in use from the beginnings of the discipline meant that the whole 
state was affected by the production and trade of goods and the government 
must regulate them (<292). By the latter third of the 19C, the ideas of utility 
and equilibrium altered this relation, while emancipation from governmen- 
tal controls suggested that dropping political and coining economics met the 
need for accuracy. 

In the original view of motive, "economic man" was a standardized 
automaton: he bought in the cheapest market and sold in the dearest. In the 
revised view, he still does this but the decision to buy, which contributes to 
the demand and influences value and price, is governed by the "marginal util- 
ity" to him of the article. The automaton now had a mind; individual psychol- 
ogy had entered the market. The buyer takes thought about the amount of 
use or pleasure that he would derive from the last unit of these benefits 
embodied in the product: one buys three clocks to furnish a new house; a 
fourth one would be nice but is the enjoyment worth the ouday? The last 
clock's value is at the very edge, the margin, of the desire. A fifth clock is not 
even considered. When all similar utilities — the customer's about buying, the 
manufacturer's about producing, the retailer's about stocking, and so on — are 
calculated, the economy should be in equilibrium. Jevons, Marshall, and 
Walras were the thinkers who theorized to this effect and established eco- 
nomics as a self-standing social science. Historians of the subject still call this 
turn-of-the-century model part of "classical economics," but a cultural histo- 
rian must point out the difference just indicated. With the advent of the wel- 
fare state government has re-entered the scene and political economy has 
resumed its place, even though it has not recovered its proper name (778>). 

* 
* * 

One can sympathize with Freud's insistence on the materialistic basis of 
his system; he did not want the medical world to class him as a quack. But the 
timing of his claim was unfortunate. As will be recalled, biological thought 
had begun to stray from materialism into vitalism, die mechanics of evolution 
were under fire, and philosophy was generalizing these and other tendencies 
in a fashion that denied matter or idea as the sole underlying reality. If the sci- 
entist found that he must regard light now as waves and now as corpuscles, it 
implied inconsistent behavior in matter and contradiction in thought. That 
pair of dilemmas posed the question of truth and how it is made sure. The 
theory that gave a radical answer was named Pragmatism. The Greek-rooted 
word was chosen by Charles Saunders Peirce, who first suggested the method 



666 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

as a way of ascertaining the meaning of important words: the meaning was 
the sum total of the practical effects the word implied. This definition 
William James developed into a theory of truth, which he supported by argu- 
ments and applications in Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of 
Thinking. The name that Peirce chose and James adopted is regrettable, 
because it has a bad historical past and a worse present. There is little hope of 
disinfecting it, but clarity here requires a 

Digression on a Word 

Over the centuries pragmatic has meant: busy, meddlesome (busybody), opin- 
ionated, connected with state business, according to common practice, giving factual reasons, 
and — nowadays — devoid of principle — surely a poor record for one word. The 
Greek toot pragma means the thing done, to be done, rightly done, and more simply 
fact. Headlines such as one reads today: "Election Raises Pragmatist to 
Power," "From Revolutionist to Pragmatist," suggest a politician not 
expected to steer a straight course; he has made his way by compromise and 
the abandonment of stated aims. There was an excellent word for this flexi- 
bility: opportunism — until the press hit upon a more high-sounding term. 

In its philosophical meaning, Pragmatism occasioned a vehement debate 
in the Cubist Decade; or rather, the meaning that James intended was mis- 
taken for something else, which was furiously attacked. With such a past, 
there is litde hope that the ism will ever regain its intended sense and an 
acceptable connotation. The case is as bad as that of Romanticism and worse 
than that of Puritanism. James's pragmatic theory of truth answers the ques- 
tion: how do we go about determining whether a statement is true? The obvi- 
ous reply is: when it describes the fact exacdy. This is the "copy-theory" of 
truth, which as James pointed out, has a radical flaw. One notes down a piece 
of experience and the notation is offered as true. How can this be tested? The 
answer cannot be: by looking again at the thing reported. That would catch a 
gross error or a lie; but barring these, to look again and repeat the statement 
may be to echo an illusion. One should be able to somehow go behind the 
appearance and obtain something else to compare with the possibly false 
impression — and that is impossible. 

James says: do not look back to the origin of the statement but forward 
to its consequences. What practical effects will occur from believing and act- 
ing on the proposition? The method also holds true of objects. A true con- 
ception of an object is the sum of the 
To talk of reliance is a poor external way of observations that follow from handling 
speaking. Speak rather of that which relies and using it. Act in keeping with a 
because it works and is. hypothesis and the outcome will prove 

— Emerson (1840) or disprove it. In this view, a theory or 



The Cubist Decade <^> 667 

system must fulfill our expectations and must also fit in with our previous 
knowledge, already tested by use. If there is a clash, which is to be discarded? 
Testing by concrete results is the only answer. Neither past certainty nor 
reliance on authority can validate truths. 

When James called Pragmatism an old way of thinking, he was recalling 
the dictum repeated throughout history in various wordings, of which the 
most familiar is: "By their fruits ye shall know them." He was also saying that 
the pragmatic test by results is what everybody, scientist or layman, actually 
does, since there is nothing else obtainable to match with a statement offered 
as truth. 

Yet during the controversy about Pragmatism, its opponents tried to dis- 
credit the principle by boiling down: "Truth is what will be steadily borne out 
by subsequent experience" to: "Truth is what you can get away with." 
European critics, seizing upon James's birthplace, said that his thesis was typ- 
ically American, "a theory for engineers" — minds limited to action and deaf 
to ideas. 

Except for a very few, the professional philosophers in the debate did not 
shine by the relevance or courtesy of their arguments. They ignored the 
answers to objections and did not examine the abundant applications of the 
method that James made in his book, showing how it resolved the perennial 
questions of determinism, design in nature, matter and spirit, and the like. To 
them, Truth with a capital T had a disembodied, goddesslike nature that called 
for a worshipful attitude and that resided in statements in an absolute way. To 
call for acting on a statement degraded something noble. James's conception of 
truth as a pointer to utility, always tentative and incomplete, was heresy. 

More than one European critic forgot science, which pursues truth by 
testing what follows from a hypothesis and how it fits in with previous truths, 
all this done with rigor and integrity. Verification means to make true; it is a 
process, an instrument for reaching desirable goals, rather than a static fea- 
ture in certain propositions. The height of imbecility on the part of academic 
philosophers was reached when one of them wrote a rejection of Pragmatism 
on the ground that he had tried it and found it would not work. 
Instrumentalism would have been a better name and it was used by a few 
among James's supporters, but it died with them. 

Although mention of James usu- 
ally triggers the thought of Prag- People picture pragmatism as something 
matism, it is not for bringing out the t hat must necessarily be simple and capable 
merits of that age-old way of finding of being summed up in a formula. I cease- 
truths that he is a towering figure lessly repeat that on the contrary pragmatism 
among western thinkers. First as a psy- is one of the most subtle and nuancees doc- 
chologist and then as a metaphysician trines that have ever appeared in philosophy. 
he re-oriented the seekers in the field. — Bergson (1909) 



668 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Describing how truths are made was but one part of that achievement. A sec- 
ond consists of James's Radical Empircism. By this phrase is meant his 
premise that experience is the sole ground of reality; it is not divided into 
mind and matter, soul and body, idea and sensation. 

To open the way to this conception, James published a paper entitled 
"Does Consciousness Exist?" The question is not a joke. James does not deny, 
of course, that human beings are conscious, both of themselves and of the 
world; what he denies is the existence of an entity called Consciousness that 
stands apart and watches the contents of experience go by. What we feel and 
know, says James, arises from one part of experience entering into relation with 
another part, just as happens when we think about ourselves and examine our 
actions and ideas, or when we distinguish the separate qualities of an object, or 
indeed when we divide the flow of experience into objects — all these activities 
occurring within the flow and serving needs, practical and intellectual. These 
two needs do not differ in kind, for experience includes curiosity and truth- 
seeking which, as pragmatic theory shows, is related to use in life. 

Radical Empiricism is a philosophy; Pragmatism a method, each inde- 
pendent of the other. If Pragmatism states the facts correctly, everybody is a 
pragmatist without knowing it. To follow James, the Radical Empiricist is a 
choice; one must come to see how the familiar notions of common sense and 
philosophy find their place in his comprehensive view of experience. For 
James the universe is pluralistic and open; it is not a ready-made order but one 
in the making as the sciences and the arts go deeper and deeper into the phys- 
ical and psychic (plural) realities. Without blurring this distinction between 
method and worldview, those who may be called the Pragmatist generation 
belong to it by their fresh recognition, variously expressed, of the primacy of 
experience — in politics, social thought, aesthetics, and religion. 

The influences that converged on that generation were various; Bergson, 

Duguit, Ernst Mach, Vaihinger, Croce, Simmel, Dilthey, F. C. S. Schiller, 

Dewey, Nietzsche, Frazer, Durkheim, Shaw, Ortega y Gasset, Pareto, 

Norman Angell, the Fabians, came 

•t_ • tom,. t t_ • from different traditions and retained 

In attributing to William James the inaugura- 

tion of a new stage in philosophy, we should from them ^parate elements in their 

be neglecting other influences of his time. handling of diverse subjects. One can 

But admitting this, there remains a certain rea ^ about a Pragmatic Revolution in 

fitness in contrasting his essay "Does Politics. One should read in the works 

Consciousness Exist?" with Descartes' of Alfred Sidgwick the inadequacy of 

Discourse on Method. James clears the stage of formal logic and the ways of sound 

the old paraphernalia, or rather he entirely argument in actual debate/ It is a les- 

alters its lighting. sorij once more, on the worth of expe- 

— Whitehead (1925) rience, the lesson applied throughout 



The Cubist Decade <^> 669 

the undoing of Victorian ethos. What was wrong with that ethos was its cal- 
culated denial — useful in its day — of certain facts of experience. "Taken" in a 
new way, experience shattered the ethos. Spontaneous pragmatists, the men 
of the Nineties (as we saw) had an easy time showing that the consequences 
in life of the old ideals proved them false and that exact opposites might be 
true. Hence the "change of lighting" that Whitehead attributes to James. 

His contribution to the understanding of beliefs (in contrast with truth) 
is well known but not always righdy represented. In The Varieties of Religious 
Experience he studied the many forms and directions that the human impulse 
of faith can take and the links between these forms and other mental traits. 
He warned against the reductive view that explains mysticism as frustrated 
sexuality or Puritan self-torment as chronic dyspepsia. Before the Varieties^ 
James had coined the phrase Will to Believe in the course of showing that 
belief — an unverified idea — is legitimate and valuable in situations where 
testing is not possible. He gives the example of the mountaineer who must 
leap across a chasm if he is to save himself; the belief that he can do it adds to 
his chance of success; disbelief probably means failure; disbelief is in fact a 
belief. Life continually presents options of this type, in which the confident 
outstrip the hesitant. 

By the same reasoning, religious It is this maintained contact with the facts of 
faith sustains and is to that extent vali- life that makes James's vivid, beautiful prose 
dated. Critics have twisted this quali- so easy to read and so difficult to understand. 
fled statement to mean "believe any- One feels its richness and ignores its kind of 
thing you like and it's the truth." James precision. Here is an abstract philosopher 
carefully defined when and where his who makes concrete connections and appli- 

principle holds; as one logician put it, cations > but a man for whom concrete situa " 
<<wn T 11 i -i tions sprout into philosophy. 

What James really advocates is the use r r r J 

of working hypotheses, though they —Leo Stein (1948) 
may often be hypotheses which can 

never be verified." James later modified the will to the right to believe, neither 
meaning the same as "wishful thinking." The breadth of James's worldview 
and of its influence has been matched by its permanence. He is quoted apro- 
pos of innumerable subjects, and he periodically reappears in retrospective 
estimates expressing wonder at the extent of his powers. 

* 
* * 

A thinker, no less radical than James, but whose work, finished by 1890, 
became widely known only in the 1900s, made the starting point of his specula- 
tions the contrast in Greek religion between Apollo and Dionysus: the static 
order of reason versus the dynamic working of impulse. That thinker was 



670 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Nietzsche and Georg Brandes was his prophet. Thanks to him a philosophy dif- 
ficult to extract from the aphorisms in which it is couched began to be seen 
more or less whole. There is no Nietzscheanism, not for lack of admirers and 
interpreters, but because the work is a series of critiques and visions. They are 
clear and coherent, but not framed into a system. That fact makes a point: for 
Nietzsche as for James, experience is not yet complete; it contains novelty, espe- 
cially as regards the nature of man, who is at present inadequate and unfinished. 

The word superman, the phrase Will to Power, and the statement "God is 
dead" are the tags that Nietzsche stands for in the casually educated mind, 
and as they are understood in that precinct all three are misleading. Nietzsche 
is no crude atheist; he evinces respect for Jesus and he is no materialist. Spirit, 
inherent in mind, is creative, and the superman is the self-development of 
man into a creature a state above and beyond what he is now The God that is 
dead is the one who presides over Christianity, a doctrine designed for the 
weak and the poor in spirit. By glorifying the helpless it multiplies the number 
of victims afraid and resentful of life. 

In health man feels within him the will to power, a drive to action and 
achievement, including the self-mastery that will characterize the superman 
and establish a new ethos. The present conception of what is evil will be 
replaced by other standards of right and wrong, contrary to both the 
Christian and the worldly virtues and vices of western civilization. In ethics 
and the search for truth Nietzsche is a Pragmatist. 

Like Ibsen, Nietzsche despises cur- 
rent ideals; like the Pragmatists he wants 

In place of fundamental truths I put funda- in ^ • • j j i_ 

r v challenges to conventions udged by 

mental probabilities — provisionally assumed . . . . . . 

. , , , . , ,. , ,. , results, and these measured by the 

guides by which one lives and thinks. M i \ 

enhancement of life. Like the aesthetes 

^ ' he cannot bear the public mind fed on 

newspapers and the "thoughtful" jour- 
nals. The intellectuals who "love art" and hold "advanced ideas" are as sheep- 
like as the masses; he calls them "culture philistines." Individuality, courage, 
and imagination, the zeal to enlarge and diversify individuality instead of regu- 
larizing it, are all wanting. Only by defiance and attack can a livable world, with 
an expressive art to match, be created. Some of Nietzsche's metaphors, like the 
phrases already cited, make him easy to misunderstand; "blonde beast of prey" 
"beyond good and evil," and bellicose imagery suggest a brutish warrior and 
"superman," a tyrannical overlord. Coupled with his condemnation of pity and 
Christian charity and his contempt for the behavior of good people, what 
Nietzsche seems to desiderate looks like barbarism rather than superhumanity. 
But his regrettable phrasings are more conspicuous than frequent, and in the 
bulk of his writings he appears in his true guise as psychologist, social critic, and 
interpreter of art. 



The Cubist Decade q^> 671 

This is not to say that a livable society could be founded on his brand of 
individualism. But his design is a new man and civilization, not a Utopia. 
His psychology is sound: compassion easily becomes a selfish pleasure fos- 
tering self-righteousness (787>). It requires a constant supply of the poor and 
the weak, instead of encouraging the healthful and self-reliant. 

Nietzsche's assault on the character of both the mass man and the intel- 
lectual conformist was launched in the 1870s and 1880s, a time when the 
booming of industry, the ruthlessness of capitalist enterprise, and the ravages 
of renewed imperialism were at their height, filling the air with rejoicing and 
self-congratulation, in Germany particularly. The three wars by which 
Bismarck made an empire corresponded in no way to Nietzsche's military fig- 
ures of speech; he was disgusted by the vainglorious mood after the defeats of 
Denmark, Austria, and France; the country's attitude was the reverse of aris- 
tocratic. 

Besides being a philosopher and a classical scholar, Nietzsche was a more 
than ordinary amateur composer: He wrote two symphonic works in the 
Berlioz genre, and when he heard Bizet's Carmen he hailed it as a model of 
"Mediterranean art." The epithet was bestowed with Wagner's "Northern" 
music in mind. Nietzsche had fallen early under the spell of Wagnerism — the 
ideas and the music, both, and was soon a friend and defender of the master. 
Then had come disenchantment, and in a pair of essays he assailed the doctrine 
and the works; he saw in them an expression of what he was denouncing in cul- 
ture at large: the massive, the long-winded, and the theatrical. Art like man's 
soul should be aristocratic, the signs of which are: directness and the brevity 
that comes from concentrated energy and rapid perception. Carmen met these 
specifications, in sharp contrast with the slow ruminating pace not only of the 
Wagnerian system but also of German scholarship and philosophy. Nietzsche's 
prose, which ranks with Goethe's and Schopenhauer's for clarity and elegance, 
fulfills these demands neglected by the German tradition. 

Nietzsche was naturally immune to the contagion of populism. His 
model aristocrat Zarathustra is such because he is truly and solely himself and 
aloof from collective enthusiasms. It was the mistake of Hider and his intel- 
lectual aides to include Nietzsche among the early prophets of their social and 
racial dogmas. They soon found that he did not suit the role — quite the oppo- 
site — and within a short time he was quiedy cast aside. [The book to read is 
What Nietzsche Means by George Allen Morgan.] 

There is more than one way of showing up the civilization one lives in. 
The most usual is to contrast the moral and mental vices of the upper classes 
with the sturdy virtues of those they dominate. That was Rousseau's and 
Jefferson's way. They chose as the ideal citizen the sober artisan and the con- 
tented farmer. Tolstoy went one level lower and glorified the moujik, the 
Russian peasant. These choices were not made in the abstract. Each grew out 



672 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

of familiar dealings with the desirable type. In Tolstoy this PRIMITIVISM came 
after equal familiarity with rank and power — they were his birthright — and 
after the production of literary masterpieces acclaimed by the whole world. 

These novels and other fictions Tolstoy came to disown, sweeping out in 
the same gesture the entire artistic output of the West. He set out to demon- 
strate how artificial is the experience of life reproduced in novels and plays, 
how narrow their subject matter, which would be unintelligible to any human 
being not brought up in capital cities and corrupted by absurd customs and 
concocted interests. His description of a modern opera is a superb piece of 
satire, the plot and the production possibly made up, since nobody has been 
able to identify the work. [The essay to read is his diatribe What Is Art? °~\ 

To Tolstoy the natural man he respects is simpleminded in the good 
sense and ignorant in the eyes of the world. Such a man knows how to do his 
work and is faithful to his duty. He is humble and a Christian, but not as the 
Orthodox church understands the believer. The words of Jesus suffice. 
Tolstoy proved his integrity by ending his days living like a peasant among his 
former serfs, without comforts, good clothes, hygiene, or fine food. For the 
teaching that he undertook in their behalf he wrote four Reading Books \ which 
are masterpieces of storytelling in the folk tradition. 

News of this saintlike withdrawal from society and intellect spread 
abroad and generated a cult. People came to pay homage to this latter-day 
early Christian, from curiosity or to confirm their resolve to imitate him. His 
pacifism and creed of non-resistance influenced still others, adding to the 
number of previous agitators for peace. For it was then that the first moves 
were made to promote the arbitration of international disputes, coupled with 
hopes of an organization for peace. In 1 898 the tsar called a conference to 
meet the next year at the Hague. Twenty-six nations sent delegates who dis- 
cussed disarmament and codification of the laws of war. It was agreed — on 
paper — to ban the dropping of bombs from balloons, poison gas, and dum- 
dum (soft-nosed) bullets. War prisoners were to be humanely treated and 
conflicts resolved by arbitration. A permanent court was set up to direct it, 
but recourse to it was not compulsory, nor any limitation of armaments. 

The tsar's motive was thought to be the lack of money to compete with 
other nations in military strength. Still, his move was not futile; a second 
Hague conference, instigated by President Roosevelt, was held eight years 
later. It improved the machinery for arbitration and produced signed conven- 
tions governing the rules of war, the rights of neutrals, and the permissible 
actions for collecting international debts. Between the two conferences, 
Peace Societies were formed in many countries and agitation continued up to 
1914. William James, knowing that the aggressive instinct needed an outlet, 
wrote "The Moral Equivalent of War," which suggested the conscription of 



The Cubist Decade <^> 673 

youth for hard work in the midst of The war against war is going to be no holiday 

nature or in community service, a fore- excursion or camping party. "Peace" in mili- 

shadowing of the mid-20C Peace taf y mouths today is a synonym for "war 

Corps. expected." Every up-to-date dictionary 

The Four Years' War later made should **? that "P eace " and <w ' mean ** 
pacifism equivalent to treason, although same ,hin «' now * P° sse > now * **• But a 

-p, -p, „ , r permanently successful peace-economy can- 

some writers — Romain Rolland, for r , . , , 

not be a simple pleasure-economy. We must 
one — kept up the propaganda for , . •,. ,.. , 

r r r r o make new energies and hardihood continue. 

peace from the haven of neutral 

c . , , T , , , T — Tames on "The Moral Equivalent 

Switzerland. It was there also that Lenin J w „ „ gi Q 

and his little band of orthodox Marxists 
plotted and kept up in Iskra (The Spark) 

an endless philosophical polemic against other Socialists and other philoso- 
phers, against scientists or anybody else who deviated from historical material- 
ism. Compared with the new tendencies in thought and science, they were doc- 
trinaire reactionaries and the chances were slim that their ideas had any future. 

* 
* * 

The Cubist Decade brought forth novelty in literature, but without the 
shock that the painters inflicted. The outward form of play and novel seemed 
undisturbed. But the substance in the innovators was radically new, though 
obscured at first by the flood of regular novels. The Russian writers were 
being assimilated as translations kept appearing in quick succession, and their 
presentation of character influenced and paralleled a transfer of interest from 
the body to the mind and its wild vagaries — again a shift in keeping with the 
current anti-materialism. Individual action in Russian literature, especially in 
Dostoevsky and Chekhov, is often unaccountable, against reason and self- 
interest, and though at times tied to religious belief or ancestral habits, more 
detached from social conditions than occidental writers were accustomed to 
make out. The inner life is stronger than the outer norms. This new vision 
made the Naturalist novel seem jejune and imparted a sense of mystery and 
terror to the novel. 

In an entirely different tone but with the same depth, Henry James in his 
final works concentrated on involutions of feeling and idea that make for 
tense drama. He gives only the barest indications of the circumstances, the 
occupations, and even the actions of his figures, but the reader who learns 
how to read him is made witness to unforgettable scenes. After 150 years the 
novel was abandoning its role as fictive history and social criticism, retaining 
psychology as its field of study. In his Notebooks, moreover, James defined 
the ways of making the novel a work of art, limiting dialogue and external 



674 <5^> From Dawn to Decadence 

description and devoting attention to form — balance and symmetry in han- 
dling the main matter. To him this consisted in the decisions people make that 
affect others as, face-to-face, they work out their conflicting desires. Public 
and critic excused themselves from reading him by saying that his style had 
grown too difficult. What escaped their notice was that his subtle trailing after 
emotions and their qualifying adverbs is punctuated by colloquial phrases 
that maintain the connection with the workaday world — and the Naturalist 
technique. 

In a different way, Conrad combined violent action in exotic places or on 
the sea with persistent inquiry into the strange thoughts and motives of the 
rather ordinary people that he portrayed. Striking events and picturesque set- 
tings gave his works the popularity denied to James, whose last three novels 
hardly found readers. Conrad benefited from the impression that he was sim- 
ply a writer of sea stories and revolutionary politics. A theory of this change 
in direction had appeared much earlier, when J. K. Huysmans broke with the 
Naturalist leader Zola and wrote novels about eccentricities of character 
unrelated to social conditions, the first of which, ^4 Rebours [Against the Grain) , 
was prefaced with a long justifying essay. 

The unreformed novel remained 
Nobody understood the soul less than the less original. The leading producers, 
Naturalists, who meant to study it. They saw such as Anatole France, Romain 
life as all of a piece and accepted it only as Rolland, Paul Bourget, and their coun- 
conditioned by plausible factors. I have now terparts in every country, did not 
learned by experience that the unbelievable neglect character as a source of inter- 
is not always, in this world, an exception. estj but they were happier criticizing 
— Huysmans, Preface to A Rebours ideas. They were really writing long 
(Againstthe Grain) (1884) essays ^^ dialogue and furnishings to 

make the pill palatable. Only Maurice 
Barres and Pierre Loti sounded a new note in their "novels of egotism," 
which — long after Stendhal's invention of the style — recited faraway wander- 
ings and uncommon sensations and desires that fed the love of self and sin- 
gularity. Still, the objections to the Naturalist novel kept being repeated. Long 
after Huysmans, Virginia Woolf was pleading the same cause in Mr. Bennett 
and Mrs. Brown. Bennett was the widely read and respected author of "studies" 
of English life at every level. Mrs. Brown was the imaginary figure whom, 
according to Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett would depict almost entirely by 
externals, from ancestry to class, clothes, and domestic life, her mind and 
feelings not ignored, but superficially treated. 

Psychology was clearly the chosen preoccupation of the new century, 
both as a professional study and as the main fare of literature, pure or mixed 
with the old social details. The purest form was to come when the author 
reproduced a character's stream-of-consciousness. One French writer of the 



The Cubist Decade <^> 675 

older generation, Edouard Dujardin, Strip the novel of all the elements that do not 

had in one brief novella inserted what specifically belong to it: External events, 

he called an "interior monologue." accidents, traumas belong to film. Let the 

Earlier, Dickens in one or two short novel hand them over - Even the description 

passages had shown the stream spoken of Ae characters does not belon g to the 

i j i i . t\ • j- ■> genre. The pure novel — and in art purity 

aloud by a character. Dujardin s con- s /- r j 

, i t-x- 1 » alone matters — should not concern itself 
tnvance went unnoticed and Dickens s . , . 

. with it. 
unremembered. Of course, the device 

■ r • i v • j, iL ^, — Gide, The Counterfeiters (1926) 

is artificial; it is managed by the author ' v ' 

to make a point. The images of an 

actual stream are too fluid and fleeting for anybody to take notes on them and 
Joyce's later expedient in Finnegans Wake ends in self-defeat (720>). All this 
introspection differed essentially from the Nineties' revulsion from material 
reality and creation of another world. Indeed, it was the opposite. The artists 
in the early 20C did not retreat from any conceivable reality; they were explor- 
ing with zest any territory not yet conquered. 

* * 

In the Cubist decade the stage did not yet dare to present as leading char- 
acters the madly incomprehensible. On the contrary, when Strindberg, Shaw, 
Ibsen, Galsworthy, Pirandello replaced the routine motives of melodrama 
(<565) they used figures of unusual intelligence and lucidity and set them to 
deal with the questionings of the self-conscious mind, Pirandello stressing 
the ambiguity at the bottom of self and behavior. [The book to read is The 
Playwright as Thinker by Eric Bentley] Concurrently, staging underwent a 
change at the hands of Max Reinhardt, Gordon Craig, and Stanislavsky. The 
first produced spectacles on a grand scale with the aid of new mechanical 
devices; the second designed settings that ignored Realism in favor of picto- 
rial and architectural beauty, not for use in the action, but able to enhance it; 
the last laid down rules that were later famed as "the Method" to be described 
in a moment. The producers of effects were slowly taking precedence over 
the dramatist and his actors. 

Of these, the ones still reigning were of the old school, notably Sarah 
Bernhardt, whose golden voice prolonged the life of the 1 9C repertory; and 
Eleanora Duse, a more subtle interpreter who faintly foreshadowed the new 
style — "she seemed not to be acting at all" — and thus suited the contempo- 
rary theater of ideas. It was in fact sheer intellectualism that animated 
Stanislavsky. His system for training actors for a modern play, say, one of 
Chekhov's, was to make them master the "psychology" of the figure they 
impersonated. To do so required studying the character's milieu; that is, the 
rest of the play and the world outside, of which the play was a slice. For this 



676 q^> From Dawn to Decadence 

purpose the assembled performers and Stanislavsky read and reread and dis- 
cussed the play for months. Then at rehearsals he bullied them individually, 
his death blow being a repetitious: "I do not believe you." He himself had 
done research in an ever-widening circle, so that on the boards he was virtu- 
ally conducting a Ph.D. seminar. In time, he came to disavow acting "with a 
stuffed head and empty heart." 

There was a hint of "the method" in Shaw's printed plays, where each of 
the principal characters is introduced by a few lines about age, circumstance, 
and prevailing attitude, but it is nothing to compare with the brainwashing 
that Stanislavsky's system entailed. The uniqueness of the individual that it 
implied — once more a by-product of the intense psychological temper — 
found expression in the poets. In Germany, Stefan George made disciples 
who, without being poets themselves, formed a cult on that same core idea of 
the induplicable ego. D'Annunzio in Italy shared the conviction, and not only 
wrote but behaved so as to make it conspicuous. The more highly prized 
poetry of Rilke dissected the self's experience to find in it myths, but so 
expressed that their bearing must be deciphered to yield the sense beneath 
the sensuousness. 

It has been said that Richard Strauss's librettist, Hugo von Hofmann- 
stahl, gave promise in his early poems of being the greatest lyricist in German 
since Morike. But during a nervous breakdown he became convinced of the 
futility of words and chose the subsidiary role for which he is known by all 
opera-goers. The genre obviously requires plain, singable speech, which he 
did provide; yet he managed through fine-grained lines and curious motives 
to endow his plots with a delicacy not frequent in what is hopefully called the 
lyric theater. 

The decade ended just in time to salute the new Yeats. The surface qual- 
ities of word music and fluid responsiveness to sensation that had character- 
ized his poetry since his beginnings in the mid- 1880s had disappeared from 
the collection Responsibilities that appeared in 1914. The poems in it are writ- 
ten in tight-packed lines, and the hard-edged words treat of social and moral 
themes in no bucolic spirit. But again in the decade, a greater surprise was the 
appearance of a new poet who was old in years and practice. In the late 1 890s 
Thomas Hardy, because of the harsh criticism that greeted his sexual themes 
(<625), gave up the novel and brought out a first group of Wessex poems, 
some of which had been composed 30 years before. Then came his verse epic 
in three parts on the Napoleonic wars, The Dynasts. New collections of lyrics 
early and late kept appearing and winning immediate acclaim. Seven well- 
filled gatherings, the last appearing shortly after his death in 1 928, established 
the fame of a major poet. Their enthusiastic reception owes something to his 
verbal innovations, strange but clear and in keeping with the genius of 
English, and to the impassive recital of compressed dramas that end in death 



The Cubist Decade <^> 677 

or despair. Sometimes the cause is accidental and victims are doomed by their 
incapacity to see or act; at other times, perverse ideas or feelings ensure catas- 
trophe. Hence the titles: Life's Little Ironies, Satires of Circumstance, Times 
Laughingstocks. No other English poet has made rural lives and ways so grip- 
ping or so free of sentimentality. That his mood is often stoically hopeless 
shows a sensibility formed when scientific determinism ruled thoughtful 
minds; yet reading him does not leave one depressed but exhilarated, which 
in poetry is the sign of the tragic spirit. 

* 
* * 

The span that opened with Cubism ended in a great burst of music and 
dance: the Russian Ballet and a new school of post- Wagnerian composers. 
The Russian dancers, choreographers, designers, and their chief musician 
Stravinsky astonished Paris in 1910 with the performance of Firebird, soon 
followed by Petrushka and Le Sacre du Printemps — the rites celebrating the 
advent of spring. The mythic themes of the first and third works and that of 
the circus in the other were congenial and the productions dazzling. Ultra- 
bright colors in the decors by Bakst, the amazing feats of the principal 
dancers, Nijinsky and Pavlova, the brand-new choreography of Fokine, the 
flawless productions by Diaghilev, and the unaccustomed sonorities and 
rhythms of Stravinsky aroused enthusiasm and fury. The Sacre provoked as 
much anger as the first Cubist works; its premiere caused a riot in Auguste 
Perret's newly opened modernist Theatre des Champs Elysees. People stood 
on their seats to yell insults and pummel their neighbors of opposite opinion. 

The Parisians — and the rest of Europe — greeted very differently the per- 
formances of a self-exiled American woman who also had something new to 
show them. Isadora Duncan incarnated the natural dance of free movement 
and varied rhythm in opposition to the artifices of classical ballet. The slight 
shock of seeing a solo dancer, barefoot and thinly veiled, was altogether plea- 
surable and so were Isadora's "interpretations" of music by Beethoven and 
Wagner. Others danced; she re-created. She became an idol sung by poets, 
and her advocacy of free love formed a cult. She founded schools of dance in 
several countries and her disciples firmly established the modern dance. 
Jaques-Dalcroze devised "eurhythmies," a method by which children learned 
to move their limbs and bodies naturally while responding to music apprecia- 
tively. 

Part of this energetic PRIMITIVISM inaugurated by Stravinsky (and 
matched by Duncan) was no doubt due to his emphatic rhythms and dis- 
cords, which acted on the nerves directly. They had the further effect of mak- 
ing the composers who were disturbingly new in the late 1890s appear by 
contrast rational and delightful. It was a varied group, whose sensibilities con- 



678 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

verged in the resolve to swear off Wagnerism and be expressive without 
repeating 19C lyricism and drama. To name Debussy, Delius, Chabrier, Hugo 
Wolf, Skriabin, Erik Satie, Dukas, and Busoni is to name but the most con- 
spicuous innovators. But they form only one half of the musical contingent; 
masterly adapters and extenders of 1 9C techniques still flourished in tandem 
with the modernists: Bruckner, Mahler, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Strauss, 
Sibelius, and Puccini with his Verismo compatriots (<638) composed works 
that have not lost their power. 

The moderns led by Debussy came to be known as Impressionists, 
because they composed by detached touches of harmony and tone color like 
die pointillists, avoiding long melodies, counterpoint, and rhythmic or other 
kinds of emphasis, and thus turning their backs on 1 9C methods. They were 
in fact dealing with a predicament inherited from that period, the gradual 
undoing of tonality by chromaticism, which is the use of notes outside the 
prevailing key. This difficulty went back a long way: when Cherubini heard 
Beethoven's Fidelio, he complained that he could not tell in what key the over- 
ture was. Debussy also sought to change the familiar atmosphere of music by 
the use of unusual scales. The line of influence here is unusually roundabout. 
He owes this inspiration to the "Russian Five," who belong to the 1870s, and 
particularly to Borodin and Moussorgsky, who acknowledged their debt to 
Berlioz and his use of modes. Debussy went further. By his chords used as 
dabs not dictated by melodic line he defied one kind of logic to establish 
another. It was so effective and pliable a technique that looking back on the 
double decade, a later composer and music historian finds it applied, robustly, 
in the prewar works of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. [His book, recommended 
for reading, is Music Ho! by Constant Lambert.] 

Schoenberg, as is well known, worried about tonality almost from the 
beginning of his career, and one may suppose that to put his ideas in order he 
published a treatise on harmony in 191 1. His contemporary, Kandinsky, cites 
it as another contribution to modernism, though it contains no mention of 
the system that ultimately became a technique adopted for a time by com- 
posers everywhere. It made Schoenberg the rescuer of music. Before his trea- 
tise he had in fact taken the first step in his Opus 1 1 , No. 1 , of 1 909, a piano 
piece that is atonal, or as he preferred to say, pantonal — it has no central key. 
In the same year Five Orchestral Pieces followed this program, disorienting aca- 
demic and custom-trained ears. This EMANCIPATION from tonality as the 
organizing principle of western music corresponds to the radical departures 
made contemporaneously in the other arts. 

Within those same years, America made two contributions to classical 
music, one of which is likely to be overlooked: the marches of John Philip 
Sousa. Far from being commonplace military music, the sizable group of his 
best are remarkable for melody and counterpoint and can stand comparison 



The Cubist Decade <^> 679 

with any other composer's in a genre that was not disdained by the greatest 
masters. The second, an epoch-making innovation, was Ragtime and the 
Blues composed and played by Black musicians, first in New Orleans, then in 
Chicago. Their work was the flowering of mixed traditions and it remained 
local until its eruption full force in the rightly named Jazz Age (738>). 

While this new American music was rapidly developing in the South and 
Midwest, the Northeast was being educated to European modernism by a 
mixed group of Wagnerites and Nietzscheans, admirers of Ibsen, Shaw, and 
the Cubists — James Huneker, Barrett Wendell, Brander Matthews, John 
Sloan, Alfred Stieglitz, Stephen Crane, and the writers for The Smart Set, "a 
journal of ideas," edited by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. 

To sum up, the gestation of modernism went through three phases: a 
preparatory period, roughly from 1870 to 1885, during which old modes are 
questioned or tentatively flouted; the Nineties (1885 to 1905) when the 19C 
ethos and its limitations on art are turned upside down, while the common 
world is shunned by a growing brood of aesthetes; third and last, the Cubist 
Decade (1905-14), when the young generation, stimulated by the inventions 
that transform visible reality and working in parallel with the scientific 
notions that negate common sense, gives the arts fundamentally altered goals 
and forms. At the same time, the great wave of Populism, also rising in the 
1 870s, inspires a redefinition of history and the social sciences. All that the 
20C has contributed and created since is refinement by ANALYSIS or criticism 
by pastiche and parody. But these manifestations came to public notice only 
after the wide hiatus of the Four Years' War. 



Part IV 

From "The Great Illusion" 
to "Western Civ Has Got to Go" 



The Great Illusion 

The Artist Prophet and Jester 

Embracing the Absurd 

Demotic Life and Times 



The Great Illusion 



The blow that hurled the modern world on its course of self-destruction 
was the Great War of 1914— 1 8. It was called great on account of its size rather 
than for any notable merit. When its sequel broke out in 1 940, the earlier con- 
flict was renamed First World War in deference to the second. This was an 
error, since the European wars of the 18C were also world wars, promiscu- 
ously fought in India and North America and on the five seas. But these, not 
being wars of peoples, did not threaten civilization or close an era. 

The 1 5 years that preceded the catastrophe have since been called la belle 
epoque and also "the banquet years." This nostalgic remembrance dwelt on 
the high artistic achievements of the Cubist Decade and on the outstanding 
minds that promoted social reform and forced a political turnaround that has 
shaped the present conception of the state throughout the West. A third form 
of energy was also at work: the practice and cult of violence. Many contem- 
poraries blinded themselves to its significance in the enthusiasm for the 
abundance of original art and intellect; but many others, with fear or zeal, 
thought of nothing else. 

Before dealing with the kinds and causes of bloodshed, the constructive 
effort in politics must be sketched so as to show to what degrees it bears on 
present-day forms of government. In England during the decade before the 
war, the quartet who stirred the reading public into thinking were Wells, 
Chesterton, Belloc, and Shaw. Wells was for a time a Fabian Socialist (686>) but 
left the group when he thought their proposals unworkable, although he had 
his doubts also about democratic Liberalism. His forte was not politics but the 
state of society, which he discussed in novels he managed to make popular. 
They are in fact tales, as defined earlier: plausible characters but not memo- 
rable, contrived yet lifelike situations, and outcomes that clearly show the social 
predicament and sometimes resolve it by a mixture of common sense and orig- 
inal prophetic suggestions. His essays attack more directiy. Largely self-taught 
and with a tincture of modern conceptions, Wells took up science fiction where 
Jules Verne left off. These tales, long or short, still make excellent reading; 



684 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

indeed, they make most of his successors' works in the genre sound crude in 
narrative and unimaginative apart from the technical fantasies. 

Chesterton disagreed with Shaw's Socialism and Wells's reformism and 
agreed with Belloc on the social and spiritual teachings of the Catholic church 
to which he was converted in mid-career. His own program for ending the 
evils of capitalist plutocracy was Distributism — the wide ownership of prop- 
erty. It would restore independence to the individual and create a true demo- 
cratic electorate, instead of a populace manipulated by a venal press that can 
govern the governors (<599). 

The Nineties had seen the advent of the cheap daily paper, in which rau- 
cous propaganda, crime, and scandal were the main fare, but not the only 
attraction. Starting when Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, began 
publishing a sheet called Answers to Correspondents (earlier Tit-Bits) in the late 
1880s, the newspaper became the sort of popular encyclopedia that it is still. 
Daily features about sports, fashions, and theater; advice about health, busi- 
ness, and finance, card games and cookery, in addition to a puzzle, a comic 
strip, and the day's installment of a long-winded romance — all this amid wads 

of advertising — turned the traditional 
The main business of the Press, supposedly four to eight pages of strictly political 
is news. If news is what happened yesterday, news, major accidents, and obituaries 
the newspapers print an awful lot of phoney into the sole source of mass enlighten- 
news. News is what the Press produces. Most ment. Radio and television have only 
of the world's "news" is manufactured by the annexed the program at the expense of 
Press itself: interviews with important men, genuine news — and lengthened the 
reports on grave situations, political surveys, menu; sk SQap opems and fifty ads 
"informed speculation," etc. A large part of instead q{ Qne continued story and 2Q 

the Press has in effect abandoned the pre- r , 

, , ,. . , . , , pages or ads. 

tence of dealing exclusively with facts. ^ T r a i i 

Newspapers or the new type had 

— T. S. Mathews (1959) c „, • r^ • u 

v J no room tor the views or the pair whom 

Shaw dubbed "the ChesterBelloc" or 

for Wells's or for his own. Serious views required other modes of publishing, 

such as tracts. These tended to reach only the already converted. A new form 

of journalism was called for. G.Ks Weekly, written almost entirely by 

Chesterton and his brother, was the type of journal that countered the press 

lords' "organs" and their giant circulations. The Saturday Review, The New Age, The 

New Statesman, The Spectator in England, The Nation, The New Republic in the 

United States, and their analogues in other countries fed the educated curiosity 

about new ideas, particularly about la question sociale, "the submerged tenth," but 

also about the new books. It was a modified return to the 1 8C Tatler, Spectator, 

Rambler, and other periodicals written by one or a small group of like-minded 

thinkers. The most unified and best organized were the Fabians. And among 

them the most untiring and resourceful propagandist was 



The Great Illusion q^> 685 

Shaw 

Although today the frequent production of his plays ensures familiarity 
with his name and a few of his ideas, the range of his genius and his place in 
the evolution of western culture has been obscured by the usual postmortem 
cloud that overtakes great figures. 

His extraordinary life, begun as a shabby-genteel Dubliner without 
patrons or prospects, who by sheer will made his influence felt in half a dozen 
domains and was for half a century a world figure in literature and social 
thought, is kept before the public by new editions of his works and large and 
small biographies. His enormous out- 
put of plays, preface-essays, political ft is not easy to digpute ^ a man for 20 
tracts, music and drama criticism, and years ^j^t sometimes feeling that he hits 
his correspondence — a quarter of a unfair blows or employs discreditable inge- 
million letters, most of them also small nuities. I can testify that I have never read a 
essays on the subject he was master reply by Bernard Shaw that did not leave me 
of — make him a 20C Voltaire carrying in a better temper or frame of mind; which 
the message of a Rousseau in his pro- ^ d not seem to come out of an inexhaustible 
paganda for radical change in govern- fountain of fair-mindedness and intellectual 
ment, morals, aesthetics, and religion. geniality. 

He was a formidable debater and prose — G- K. Chesterton on Shaw (1 936) 
polemist. 

That his plays are more than comedies of ideas and contain an evolving 
metaphysics is hardly suspected, least of all by his most voluminous biogra- 
phers. Nor are the plays and their long prefaces generally seen in their right 
relation to each other. A misconception lingers that the plays are witty discus- 
sions, whereas they are full of emotion, of hope and pathos, arising from the 
clash of convictions — true dramas in the tradition of Aristophanes and 
Moliere. Nor does the play simply dramatize the gist of its preface. That intro- 
ductory essay supplies the complex background of those passionate positions; 
each preface is a study in cultural history. Shaw's mind was formed by the 19C 
poets, historians, and philosophical writers, and his grasp of implications and 
knowledge of secondary figures are those of a scholar in the field. In the play 
that follows the preface it is current desires, needs, and errors drawn from life 
itself that are at issue and that led Shaw to retrace their origins. 

A comparison of Shaw's plays with, say, Galsworthy's will show that 
Shaw is the more objective of the two. Like Bagehot, he had a double vision, 
even and especially in his crusades. He promoted the teachings of Ibsen, 
Wagner, and Socialism, but pointed out the limits of their applicability. When 
Shaw wrote about Shakespeare, he allowed himself to be misunderstood by 
blaming the bard for his pessimism and lack of doctrine. But he knew the 
plays better than most critics; he denounced the actor-managers who cut and 



686 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

altered the text to make a "vehicle" for themselves, and he campaigned for a 
national theater to give the repertoire decent productions. 

Shaw was a conscious pragmatist, like every true artist. What counts in a 
work of art is its effect, however obtained; obedience to previous canons of 
form or limits of any kind will only yield academic exercises. Pragmatism is 
the natural bent of Shaw's heroes and heroines, just as his own made him a 
Fabian Socialist. He acknowledged Marx's influence as denouncer of capital- 
ism, but his method and his economics were wrong. The label Fabian chosen 
by the group — not a nickname for once — comes from the name of the 
Roman general who wore down the enemy by skirmishes and delaying tactics 
instead of head-on combat. Gradual change, suited to the English temper and 
form of government and beginning with municipal ownership of utilities, 
could bring about Socialism and install it solidly Each step should be taken 
only after a survey of conditions by experts in economics and statistics such 
as the famous pair Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Shaw's closest associates in the 
company. In the event, the Labour Party was formed out of Fabians and 
other Socialist groups which, by Fabianizing, made England a welfare state — 
old-age pensions, national insurance, free medical care, and taxation of 
wealth through income and inheritance taxes. [The book to read is This Little 
Band of Prophets by Anne Fremantle.] 

Above and beyond Shaw's political propaganda and his arguments in 
favor of vegetarianism, anti- vivisection, and more healthful clothing; on top 
of his universal criticism of doctors, schools, prisons, parents, politicians, 
actors, bishops, musicians, conductors, philistines, and the king's censor of 
plays; and even more central than writing and directing his plays, what preoc- 
cupied Shaw was philosophy and religion. He did not belong to any church 
nor was he an independent Christian. But he kept redefining in modern terms 
many of Christ's teachings and the churches' dogmas, especially the Catholic: 
"There is a soul hidden in every dogma." The word Catholic meant to him 
what an up-to-date religion should be — universal; a common faith is a neces- 
sity for any society that wants internal peace and decent government. He 
invoked Jesus in condemning punishment as now administered by law; he 
declared every birth an immaculate conception. The communion of saints 
was to him what others have called the Great Conversation among all 
thinkers and artists, who with everybody else own a place in the world that is 
"the temple of the holy spirit." As a member of the pragmatist generation 
Shaw was an anti-materialist and an anti-idealist; reality is not split in two, 
with one element pushing the other around. The life force is a single animat- 
ing element, matter and spirit being its aspects or manifestations. Hence 
Shaw fought the Darwinists and supported Samuel Butler (<634). Man is 
self-evolving, as in Nietzsche (<670), led forward and upward by the "mas- 
ters of reality" — artists, statesmen, founders of religion. The superiority of 



The Great Illusion <^> 687 

Shaw's superman will lie in the spontaneous self which makes for right action 
without a struggle. 

So far, the work of redefining myth and dogma so as to satisfy a modern 
man's need of faith was relatively easy: the character of the ultimate reality was 
harder to conceive, because the pragmatic turn from abstract and conven- 
tional ideals to effective action and solid results in human affairs does not 
generate future goals, and these cannot help being also abstract ideals until 
they materialize — or turn conventional. That danger is ever present. Faithful 
to his religious interpretation of life, Shaw in play after play represents this 
predicament as a fight between God 

and the Devil. A man or woman is in Your Mends are not «%*<*»: the Y are only 
heaven or hell, depending on the part P^-^nters. They are not moral: they are 

! v ! only conventional. They are not virtuous: 

chosen in ordinary concerns; it shows 3 J 

, . . they are only cowardly. They are not even 

one s spiritual state. The great speech . . , , „. „ „ „ 

r or vicious: they are only frail. They are not 

in the Hell scene of Man and Superman . . t , i i • • *ru 

r artistic: they are only lascivious. They are not 

contrasts a page-long calendar of petty pros p er ous: they are only rich; not coura- 

motives with true ethical impulses, geous: only quarrelsome; not masterful, only 

showing the difference between those domineering. . . . 

who assist the life force to create the _ D on Juan to the Devil in 

superman and those who are a drag Shaw's Man and Superman (1904) 

upon it by being hostile or inert. The 

superman, as mentioned before, will act rightly, ethically, not by struggling 

with selfish and carnal desires, but naturally, thus making ethical calculation 

unnecessary. And the life force will gradually eliminate that other drag, its 

union with matter. This is the outcome of the five plays that make up Back to 

Methuselah. 

This Eutopia did not weather events. At the nadir of the war years, Shaw 
despaired of man's ability to overcome his brutish instincts and his propensity 
to lie and mouthe empty ideals. Shaw put his increasing pessimism in 
Heartbreak House, which appeared in 1920 and shows the end of a world (or 
the world?) with a bang, not a whimper. His last plays all dealt with the same 
theme of cosmic and human illusion and aimlessness. His estimate was con- 
firmed by seeing the Labour government act on Fabian lines and leave soci- 
ety unchanged. Shaw ended in the mood he had blamed in Shakespeare, both 
borne down by the chaotic spectacle of man's actions. 

In his last years, Shaw extolled Russian Communism, like Bertrand 
Russell, the Webbs, and millions of other intellectuals. But in Shaw, one sus- 
pects a different spirit within the motive. His approval of government by 
murder and massacre looks like a desperate gambler's last throw. It contra- 
dicts not only a lifetime of clear pragmatic thought, since protracted violence 
means practical failure, but also the plays written at the same time as the advo- 
cacy: The Apple Cart, On the Rocks, and Geneva, the first pair arguing against 



688 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

The conception of the general strike, engen- persecuting dissent, even though 

dered by the practice of violent strikes, democracy is in danger; the third, ridi- 

implies the conception of an irrevocable over- culing Hider and Mussolini, whose 

throw. There is something terrifying in this, methods paralleled Stalin's. The play- 

which will appear more and more terrifying wright kept tQ the faith that ^ wearied 

as violence takes a greater place in the minds propagandist ab j ured . 

of the proletariat. But by undertaking this c1 , i j- n 

, Shaw was not the only disillu- 

senous, formidable, and sublime work, . ... 

. t . .„. . sioned Socialist. A decade before him 
Sociahsts will raise themselves above our 

frivolous society and become worthy of show- ^ French engineer Georges Sorel, 
ing a new path to the world. seeln g the mea g er results of &* 

-Georges Sorel (1908) Socialists' entry into parliaments and 

cabinets, proposed direct action. In his 
book Reflections on Violence, he urged the 
industrial unions to form a single body which, by means of a general strike 
and its sequel — a final combat with the police — would overthrow the capi- 
talist system. To weld together this new force required a myth; that is, an ideal 
image of the future happy state. The young journalist Mussolini was much 
struck by this program and did not forget its salient features. 



* 



What Shaw and all the other publicists who agitated the social question 
helped to precipitate was the onset of the Great Switch. It was the pressure of 
Socialist ideas, and mainly the Reformed groups in parliaments and the 
Fabian outside, that brought it about. By Great Switch I mean the reversal of 
Liberalism into its opposite. It began quietiy in the 1880s in Germany after 
Bismarck "stole the Socialists' thunder" — as observers put it — by enacting 
old-age pensions and other social legislation. By the turn of the century 
Liberal opinion generally had come to see the necessity on all counts, eco- 
nomic, social, and political, to pass laws in aid of the many — old or sick or 
unemployed — who could no longer provide for themselves. Ten years into 
the century, the Lloyd George budget started England on the road to the 
Welfare State. 

Liberalism triumphed on the principle that the best government is that 
which governs least; now for all the western nations political wisdom has 
recast this ideal of liberty into liberality. The shift has thrown the vocabulary 
into disorder. In the United States, where Liberals are people who favor reg- 
ulation, entidements, and every kind of protection, the Republican party, who 
call themselves Conservatives, campaign for less government like the old 
Liberals reared on Adam Smith; they oppose as many social programs as they 
dare. In France, traditionally a much-governed country, liberal retains its eco- 
nomic meaning of free markets, and is only part of the name of one small 



The Great Illusion q^> 689 

semi-conservative party; Left and Right suffice to separate the main tenden- 
cies. In England also, the new Liberal party numbers very few. Conservative 
and Labor designate the parties that elsewhere are known as Conservatives in 
opposition to Social Democrats. The political reality, the actual character of 
the state, does not correspond to any of these labels. It is on the contrary a 
thorough mixture of purposes and former isms that earlier would have 
seemed incompatible. Nowadays, a sensible voter should call himself a 
Liberal Conservative Socialist, regardless of the election returns. Changes of 
party mean only a litde more or a litde less of each tendency, depending on 
the matter under consideration. [The book to read on the arguments, briefly 
and beautifully dramatized long ago about shades of political opinion, is A 
Modern Symposium by G. Lowes Dickinson.] 

* 
* * 

The West that brought on itself the war of 1914 was a larger society than 
the one that was split four centuries earlier by the Protestant Revolution. The 
later Europe included Russia and Turkey, and the world at war included 
Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific, and Japan. Two-thirds of 
the way through, the United States joined the Occident. The seas were dou- 
bled in size by the submarine, and the air was added as a spacious new theater 
of war. Who can deny the reality of progress? 

Much has been said about the causes of the Great War, and all the chief 
actors in the feverish August days — nations and individuals both — have been 
accused of making it inevitable. No conclusion has been agreed upon, 
because no action can be held to have been decisive by itself. The most that 
can be charged against any officials is that the Austrian Minister Konrad von 
Hoetzendorf wanted a war and that Sir Edward Grey in the Foreign Office 
vacillated before announcing that Britain would side with France. All the 
other diplomats and heads of state worked hard to avert the catastrophe. And 
no man could have engineered it alone. Likewise, no single "cause," overt or 
underlying, propelled the multitudes into shedding their blood. A cluster of 
long-standing conditions, of cultural traits and intellectual defects, of pur- 
poses varying in force, brought the diverse minds to their collective act of 
will. 

The occasion is not in dispute: it was the assassination by a young Serb, in 
June of the fatal year, of the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, Archduke 
Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie. The name Sarajevo, the site of the mur- 
ders, evoked that event until recendy, when the same name raised another pic- 
ture of carnage. The background of both occurrences was the same: in 1914 
the peoples of the Balkan region had been in turmoil for decades and at grips 
with one another in two wars since 1912. [Read Bernard Shaw's play^4/mr and 



690 c^o From Dawn to Decadence 

the Man.] Long under Turkish rule, the Balkan population was mixed in ances- 
try, language, and religion, each an obstacle to forming stable nations, espe- 
cially when the neighboring Russia, Austria, and enfeebled Turkey kept 
fomenting the unrest for their own ends. These intrigues, complicated by 
alliances among the other European powers, precipitated war one month 
after the killing of the archduke. 

It has accordingly been said that nationalism was the root cause of the 
Great War. That passion was indeed one of the impelling ideas, but it was 
rather the failure of nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe: the long delay 
before Germany, Austria, Italy, and Russia became nations bred in that region 
the perpetually nervous and grasping state of mind. The evidence is intricate 
but nonetheless clear. Austria-Hungary was an ill-glued empire, in which 
Hungary and some Slavic parts — Bosnia prominent then as now — wanted 
more independence. The archduke was in favor of a three-cornered union in 
which the Slavs would no longer be mere possessions. It was late in the day to 
hope for the fusion that the full-fledged nations had achieved when the occi- 
dental monarchs made their revolution (<239). In a Europe with parliaments 
and free-thinking intellectuals, separatist and irredentist (= land peopled by 
fellow nationals beyond a frontier and therefore "unredeemed") feeling could 
not be stilled. The appeal to some past greatness, to "a unique language," to 
"a great hero of the 9C sung in the national epic," to religion — all this 

together with the demand for a parlia- 
Serbia will someday set Europe by the ears ment in the place of puppet kings, 

and bring about a universal war on the energized small groups that could only 
Continent. I cannot tell you how exasperated be re pressed by intermittent violence. 
peoplearegettinghereatthecontinualworry The tyranny ^ ^ weak exerdse on 

which that little country causes to Austria . j- j n 

J the strong undid ail compromises. 

under encouragement from Russia. It will be \ r i i n i i 

, , .,„ As tor the other two new- fledged 

lucky if Europe succeeds in avoiding war as a , • , i • i 

. r , . . nations, their old aggressive attitudes 

result of the present crisis. && 

hung on. In the middle of the Balkan 
— Sir Fairfax Cartwright, ambassador t. /-..run *o t i i 

A i- ^ troubles or lvlz— 1 3, Italy made war on 

to Austria, to the Foreign Office ' J 

(Jan. 31 1913) Turkey to wrest in North Africa the 

infertile strip of Tripoli, a sop to Italian 
national egotism and no strengthening of Italian unity (691). Germany, no 
longer guided by Bismarck's diplomatic genius, stumbled into the several 
"crises" that dotted the 1 5 years before the Great War. The particulars of each 
came under the general aim of "a place in the sun." (In the next war Hitler 
called it Lebensraum — room to live.) The German kaiser Wilhelm II turned up 
here and there to make blustering remarks that enabled the French and 
English during the war to represent all the Germans as Huns led by a new 
Attila. In fact, after the Sarajevo crisis the kaiser did all he could to hold back 
Austria and avert war. 



The Great Illusion <^d 691 

The confrontations were about possessions, whether in Europe, like 
Austria's, or elsewhere on the globe, like those of Germany, England, and 
France. Italy's in Africa were so trifling that the hunger for more was a lasting 
motive. In view of this ardent bickering the hunt for a single cause of the war 
shifts ground and points to Imperialism, later renamed Colonialism. It cer- 
tainly was a prominent condition, but it does not explain the line-up on each 
side of the conflict. The crisis of 1898 over a spot in Africa was between 
England and France, soon to be allies; England and Russia were traditional 
enemies over portions of the Middle East, but in 1 914 allies against Germany. 
This triple alliance opposed a dual one between Germany and Austria, which 
Italy joined, only to break away from it after war started. 

Both sides had plenty of reasons for arming to the teeth. England built 
dreadnoughts and superdreadnoughts as Germany watched the seesaw 
between armor and firepower and widened the Kiel Canal for access to the 
North Sea. France lengthened military service to three years. Everywhere 
"The Next War" filled news articles and common talk. The phrase was in the 
title of a book by a German general, and the provocative utterances of the 
kaiser helped to keep the tension high. 

What must be said further about the 20C colonial empires is not that 
nations found them financially worth fighting for — on the contrary, they 
were an expense; only some individuals profited. But Imperialism created 
endless opportunities for enhancing or wounding prestige. Hence the boast 
about possessing lands so fortunate that the sun never sets on them. In short, 
not alone imperialism as economic greed, but "national honor" — Jingoism as 
a state of mind — was another of the conditions that led to war. 

To cite but one example, when Germany and France were trying to settle 
a crisis relating to commercial rights in Morocco, the "peace-minded" prime 
minister Lloyd George made a speech in London in which he complained of 
being ignored in the negotiations. The German government protested vio- 
lently that England had no interest in Morocco, so it must be hatred of 
Germany that inspired the speech. The German rebuke was so strong that 
England made more than token preparations for war. The year was 1911. 

In every country before 1914 there were groups organized ostensibly in 
defense of the national interest, but actually aggressive in that they all harped 
on some particular "menace" that had to be put down. In France, these patriot 
leagues were anti-German and wanted revenge for the humiliating defeat of 
1 870 and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. In Germany, England was the target; in 
England, German progress in empire and industry was felt to be more than 
competition: direct aggression. As a prominent journalist wrote in the first sen- 
tence of the first article of a series: "Germany is deliberately preparing to 
destroy the British Empire." And until 1904, when France and England 
reached an understanding precisely with "the German menace" in mind, the 



692 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

two countries eyed each other with suspicion. They had nearly come to blows 
over Egypt and the Sudan; the French had been the incurably warlike people 
under two Napoleons. England was "perfidious Albion," a scavenger nation 
that picked up its possessions by fomenting wars on the continent and entering 
them at the last minute on the winning side. History thus read with a squint 
played a formative role on minds kept steadily insecure. 

The meaning of the Balkan troubles was clear enough, but opinion was 
fiercely divided over two other and bigger wars, though these were seen from 
a distance. The English had with difficulty put down the Boers of South 
Africa; the Americans had easily wiped out the Spanish overseas empire, both 
wars at the turn of the century (<629). The English, as we saw, had made a 
generous peace that consolidated the bigoted Boer regime; the United States 
had become an expansionist power with colonies outside its borders. The 
Boer War's contributions to the dawning century should not be lighdy passed 
over: the use of dum-dum (expanding) bullets, the color khaki to make mili- 
tary uniforms blend with the scenery, and a novel institution: the concentra- 
tion camp. 

Also outside Europe, a quasi war, the Boxer Rebellion already referred to 
(<629), focused attention: that the relief of the beleaguered diplomats came 
from an international force under the command of a German general showed 
that a common enemy fosters cooperation, but it hardly lasts beyond the crisis. 

Violent events of this kind, simultaneous or in rapid succession, made 
the conscious mind reel: anger, shame, pride, confusion, relief, then a return 
to apprehension nurtured by the press. Newspapers were more widely read 
than ever as public schooling kept increasing the number of working-class 
readers. Replacing the pulpit as the medium of information about current 
events, print was more authoritative than voice, and its message came out 
daily, not once a week on Sunday. And instead of being coupled with a pre- 
dictable sermon, the news (true or not) sounded fresh and was served up with 
excitement added. The power of the press was demonstrated when it prod- 
ded the United States into that gratifying war with Spain. 



The educated public that read the weeklies was likely to find in some of 
them justification for war as such, or at least debate about it. It was a live issue 
because writers of various nationalities and grades of intellect were Social 
Darwinists (<572); they believed that the theory of Natural Selection applied 
to nations as well as to animal species: struggle brought out the fittest. In the 
light of this belief the Yellow Peril became a "fact" after Japan defeated 
Russia. The American Homer Lea, a hunchback who was a general in the 
Chinese army, had warned in The Valor of Ignorance against Japanese aggression 



The Great Illusion q^> 693 



War is one of the conditions of progress, the 
sting that prevents a country from going to 
sleep. 

— Ernest Renan (1876) 

War is the storm that purifies the air and 
destroys the trees, leaving the sturdy oak 
standing. 

— Baron Karl von Stengel (1901) 

Natural entities are controlled by the same 
laws that govern life — plant or animal or 
national. These laws, so universal, so unalter- 
able in causation, are only valuable as knowl- 
edge of and obedience to them is true or 
false. To thwart, to deny, to violate them is 
folly. 

—Homer Lea (1895) 



and pointed out in The Day of the Saxon 
the duty of concerted policies against 
the menace from the East. He was not 
alone in arguing that the West must be 
ready for conflict and never flinch 
from it. War might be cosdy in lives 
and money, but the reward was an 
improved "race," a stronger, finer, 
more capable people. The term struggle- 
for-lifer was adopted as is into the 
French language and its equivalent 
elsewhere. The American president 
Theodore Roosevelt generalized the 
notion as "the strenuous life" and 
defined foreign policy as walking sofdy 
and carrying a big stick. 

This argument drew additional 
plausibility from the analogy with eco- 
nomic competition: the stronger firm conquers and swallows the weaker, 
proving itself more efficient. The world benefits from better goods at 
cheaper prices. Opponents of this simple vision — a small minority — pointed 
out that the economic benefits were anything but likely: the bigger firm 
charges monopoly prices. And as for war between peoples, it is the fittest, 
youngest, and most selfless individuals who get killed. Victory is ruinous and 
defeat profitable, as (for example) it had been to France in the Franco- 
German War of 1870 and to Spain after 1898. The French reacted with 
energy and quickly paid off the large indemnity; Spanish industry boomed. 
The French defeat did Germany more harm than good, economically and 
morally, as Nietzsche had pointed out: rampant vulgarity and "materialism" 
characterized the fledgling Second Reich. 

Yet another line of thought converged with Social Darwinism to rein- 
force the war spirit. Scholars who called themselves anthropo-sociologists 
did not hesitate to assert that the "Mediterranean race," with its brown eyes 
and round skull, was not disposed toward individual self-reliance and risk- 
taking. Its nature was to favor social- 
ism — protection by the state; whereas 
the Nordic type was the pioneer, the 
individual endowed with courage and 
originality, who single-handed achieves 
great things. On him alone all progress 
depends. The political implications of 
this pseudo science were that England, 



I am pleased with the spirit of those who are 
now advocating war for its own sake as a 
tonic. Let those who believe in it repair to 
Salisbury Plain and blaze away at one another 
until the survivors (if any) feel that their char- 
acters are up to the mark. 

— Bernard Shaw (Jan. 1, 1914) 



694 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Holland, Germany, Scandinavia, and the United States were bound to pros- 
per and lead the world, while the Mediterranean countries ("the Latin 
nations") would be left trailing farther and farther behind. 

That fortunate adventurer in South Africa, Cecil Rhodes, believed this 
prediction so literally that to help prepare the future rulers of the world he 
endowed by his will of 1903 the scholarships that bear his name. They were 
intended for English, German, and American students of high character and 
ability, who would acquire at Oxford the attitudes and traditions that made 
Englishmen movers and shakers. Those wonderful colleges had something to 
teach fellow Nordics and would bind them in brotherly love. When the war 
came, the Germans suddenly lost their racial merit and their scholarships. 

Another proposal for improving the world, professing to be purely sci- 
entific readily fostered the polemics on race. It originated in the concern with 
mental disease and defects. Francis Galton and Karl Pearson used certain 
statistics about hereditary ills and set afloat the program of Eugenics. The 
incidence of genius and of feeble-mindedness seemed to indicate that an 
advanced civilization ought to take steps that would produce more of the for- 
mer and none of the latter. The defective should be forbidden to marry and 
the healthy and bright encouraged to mate. 

Much was published on heredity and argued about the program's feasi- 
bility. When someone suggested that Shaw ought to have offspring with 
Isadora Duncan, he is said to have replied: "It might have my body and her 
brains." Karl Pearson was the first professor of eugenics (and perhaps the 
last); he taught many but did not create a lasting band of followers. Dalton's 
example inspired a number of books about genius, often with the aim of 
comparing countries, measured in numbers of great artists and thinkers. 

What is false in this dogma is the belief that a nation is a race, a group 
sharing a common biological descent. Equating nation with race defies the 
most elementary knowledge of history. From time immemorial, Europe and 
America have been playgrounds of miscegenation. Celts, Picts, Iberians, 
Etruscans, Romans, Latins, Huns, Slavs, Tartars, Gypsies, Arabs, Jews, 
Hittites, Berbers, Goths, Franks, Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Vikings, Normans, 
and a host of lesser tribes once thought distinct mingled in and around the 
Roman empire, a vast mongrel population. The Celts swept from Britain to 
Asia Minor; the Scots came from Ireland, Germanic tribes covered the 
Occident, Arabs and North Africans held southern parts of it — and so on. 
Later, the conglomerates called nations mingled likewise through voluntary 
migration, exile, and the violent or willing crossbreeding of wars fought by 
multinational mercenary armies. Napoleon's troops at the last were drawn 
from all Europe. Since his time, easy travel has added its tribute to the tutti 
frutti of genetic diversity. To say Anglo-Saxon or Latin about any modern 



The Great Illusion <^> 695 

people is as absurd as it would be to call Winston Churchill a Jute or a 
Norman — or an American because of his mother. 

If nations are of mixed "race," groups of nations are still more mixed and 
the names for such groups are meaningless. "Nordic" says nothing about 
"blood" or character. And the supposed fate attached to the name never 
stopped anybody from trying to prevent its taking place. As we saw, against 
the Pan-German League bent on uniting all German-speaking peoples, there 
was the Pan-Slavic League with a matching goal, and an Alliance of Latin 
Nations bringing up the rear. Apparently, round skulls were not altogether 
lacking in get-up-and-go. 

But in the basis of these groupings one detects the principle that Hitler 
exploited in his Third Reich. A nation is forged into unity by successive wars 
and the passage of time. When this result has not been achieved, some other 
means must be found. Pseudo science and determinism suggested faith in race 
as a substitute; it is inborn, a "natural" unifier, and it is present in each citizen; 
if it can be made conscious it bridges over religious, political, and class divi- 
sions. Of course, assigning race in this arbitrary fashion also serves separatism 
by fostering the cozy atmosphere of the subrace or clan. In the Germany that 
sought perfect oneness and no less in the present opposite tendency to secede 
into ever smaller groups based on "roots," the West has been witnessing a con- 
fused melee among four of its traditional drives to unity: nation, class, race, and 
"culture" in the voguish sense deprecated earlier (<xv). 

* 
* * 

Although fiercely debated, the Great Switch legislation was not seen as 
the beginning of a profound change, social or political. Two writers, 
Chesterton and Belloc, did express alarm at the coming of The Servile State, 
but they were not heeded in the tumult of violent ideas and events. The men 
and women called Anarchists or Nihilists (actually early terrorists) publicized 
their views by assassination. Heads of state and prime ministers were an 
endangered species. The outstanding cases of the former were the presidents 
of France and of the United States: Sadi Carnot and McKinley, the Empress 
of Austria and the King of Italy — all within five years. Next came some 
Russian officials, claimants to Balkan thrones, and then Franz Ferdinand and 
his archduchess. [Read Oscar Wilde's melodrama Vera or The Nihilists. ] 

A different sort of terrorism, lacking a philosophy but expressing the 
revolt of misery, broke out in Paris just before the war. It was the work of the 
first motorized criminal gang. Twenty youths, 1 7 boys and 3 girls, managed in 
1 8 months to rob banks, raid gunsmiths for weapons, and kill 8 people. When 
caught they were found to be pale and underfed. Four had died during their 



696 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

rampage. (It is worth noting that the Paris Grand Guignol theater specialized 
just then in the thrilling novelty of short plays of no interest except for horri- 
ble violence and visible gore.) 

Other youngsters, better dressed and better fed, favored violence for a 
different purpose. They were French students and intellectuals bent on over- 
throwing the republic and installing a dictator or else restoring the monarchy, 
and in either case rabidly anti-Semitic. These anti-Dreyfus, anti-Republicans 
were inspired and sometimes led in their street demonstrations by older men, 
respected thinkers, whose books expressed total disaffection from the con- 
temporary culture. Such men were to be found not only in France but in Italy 
and Germany. 

In England, seeing Parliament remain deaf to the demand for the vote, the 
New Woman turned activist. She was patronizingly dubbed suffragette but 

gave a performance that had nothing 

Mrs. Banger. "What women need is the right lad y Uke about [t Led h Y M^ Pankhurst, 

to military service. Give me a well-mounted mese Y oun g women yelled themselves 

regiment of women with sabres, opposed to a hoarse in parades, stormed the House 

regiment of men with votes. We shall see who of Commons, chained their wrists to the 

goes down before the other. This question doorknobs of public buildings, or set 

must be solved by blood and iron, as was well fire to them, wrestled with policemen 

said by Bismarck, whom I have reason to ^ Trafalgar Square, went on hunger 

believe was a woman in disguise." strikes when j^^. and Qne young herQ _ 

—Shaw, Press Cuttings (1 909) ine, carried away by zeal for martyrdom, 

went to a racetrack and stood in front of 
the onrushing horses. At the same time in the United States the parallel move- 
ment for the vote was making peaceful progress. President Taft's wife ex- 
pressed approval; parades and petitions were accustoming the public to the 
strange idea. 

Although, as we saw, crime for gain spread throughout cities, it was still 
professional, not violent or vindictive — no street muggings. The police gen- 
erally knew their opponents, both sides played a kind of game. Sentences 
were short and prison harsh. Killing had a clear motive. 

During the very month of tense exchanges that ended in war, Paris and 
other capitals waited with the usual relish the outcome of a murder trial in 
Paris. A well-known figure, Joseph Caillaux, had been the one statesman in 
France working for a good understanding with Germany; he had defused a 
grave crisis by yielding unimportant holdings in Africa. A newspaper vio- 
lently opposed to his policy began to cast discredit on him as a man by pub- 
lishing (stolen) love letters of his to his wife, who was his mistress at the time 
they were written. Without his knowledge, Mme Caillaux went to the news- 
paper office, spoke with the editor-in-chief demanding that the publication 
stop, and when he refused drew from her handbag a revolver and shot him 



The Great Illusion <^> 697 

dead. [The book to read is Death of an Editorhy Peter Shankland.] Incidentally, 
the editor she killed, Gaston Calmette, had been helping Proust to get his 
novel published. 

Mme Caillaux was acquitted, but the jury had a hard time. The episode 
had no precedent and the means used by partisans for carrying on political 
debate were unexampled. Perhaps the jury thought that the new journalism 
was a provocation to violence. Certainly, what went on day after day outside 
the courtroom did not promote calm deliberations. Mobs paraded and yelled 
insults at counsel entering or leaving the courtroom and cried "Murderer!" 
whenever Caillaux himself appeared. The rioters were from those parties 
opposed to the Republic, notably the Action Franchise, and were called on 
that account "the king's henchmen." They were not riffraff but young bour- 
geois intellectuals moved by the same animus that was expressed across the 
Rhine by the forerunners of National Socialism/ 

* 
* * 

In view of later events, the state of mind that prevailed in Russia in this pre- 
war period has relevance here. For decades the intelligentsia had variously 
argued and plotted against the autocratic regime of the Romanovs. 
Assassinations, executions, and forced labor in the salt mines of Siberia had not 
quelled the spirit of revolt; it was encouraged by the production of novels and 
plays which, owing to a tradition due to the censorship of political writings, 
were not simply literature but propaganda. In 1881, heedlessly, the tsar who 
had freed the serfs and entertained some reformist ideas was murdered. More 
executions and more activism followed. By the 1890s the mood of defiance and 
hope of freedom ruled many minds. It found clearest expression in the novels 
and plays of Maxim Gorky, making him the leader of rebel opinion. By 1905, 
after Russia's defeat by Japan, this intellectual and popular discontent made a 
rising seem opportune. After an effective general strike, for a whole year vio- 
lence and concessions by the government alternated. Workers fought soldiers 
and organized Soviets (action committees). A Duma (parliament) was set up 
and led by the Liberals. The provinces did not hang back. And then the tide 
turned. With army support, the tsar was declared an autocrat (sole ruler) and 
given control over all legislation by the Duma. Punitive expeditions into the 
provinces completed the work with the usual savagery. 

All hopes were dashed. Passiveness and eroticism succeeded energy and 
dissent. Gorky ceased to be a hero. Leonid Andreyev, also in novel and plays, 
became the voice of lassitude and despair, the obsession with death and existen- 
tial Angst in the face of a cold universe. [Read The Seven That Were Hanged] 

Andreyev was borne down not merely by the loneliness of Man in the cos- 
mos but also by that of men in cities. Russia was beginning to be industrialized, 



698 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

I curse everything that you have given. I with the usual accompaniment of 

curse the day on which I was born. I curse the crowding and individual anonymity. It is 

day on which I shall die. I curse the whole of significant that in the West, social 

my life. I fling everything back in your face, observers had begun to criticize the 

senseless Fate. With my last breath I will mo dern city and to offer plans to make it 

shout in your stupid ears: "Be accursed, be ^^ p^^ QcMes ^ Brhain ^ weU 

known, but Camillo Sitte and several 
—Andreyev, The Life ofMan(\906) others - m Centml Europe pi one ered the 

new art which is also a social science/ 
With all the preaching and practicing of bloodshed between 1 890 and 
1914, how can it be that in retrospect the period was seen as an ideal time 
deserving to be called la belle epoquet An answer has been given on a previous 
page (<651). Here it is enough to say that the intellectual and artistic elites, 
and to a certain extent high society, lived in their world of creation, criticism, 
and delight in the new They were aware of the crises, no doubt, but after one 
or two had gone by gave litde thought to what they might still cause. At any 
rate, those engaged in high art and science took litde notice. It was popular lit- 
erature that pictured the state of affairs. Erskine Childers in The Riddle of the 
Sands warned of German designs; Conan Doyle made Sherlock Holmes 
uncover foreign plots to steal secret plans; and the inexhaustible E. Phillips 
Oppenheim in his spy fiction made excellent use of the material furnished by 
the news while giving the model of a genre popular ever after. 

The cosmopolitan spirit held fast, sustained by a great deal of travel 
between capitals. Biographies show how often the artists and writers whose 
names we remember were away from home and visiting their counterparts in 
Paris, Vienna, Berlin, London, Prague, Buda-Pest, or St. Petersburg [The 
book to read is Buda-Pest 1900 by John Lukacs.°] They must see at first hand 
the extraordinary things being created, exhibited, and found wonderful or 
detestable. Acquaintances begun by correspondence developed into friend- 
ships. Periodicals were numerous and prompt reporters of the new. The 
Germans were particularly noted for their international oudook and quick 
receptivity. [The book to read is again The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig] 
In the United States the cultural gap was shrinking (<679). The West as a 
whole rejoiced in the vibrant common culture, continually cross-fertilized 
and thriving high above national and other material interests. Exceptions to 
this unpolitical frame of mind were few, for it was not easy to combine a 
throbbing, demanding aesthetic life with any kind of political cause. To many 
artists public affairs seemed unworthy of their attention. Their contempt for 
politicians, mass movements, and journalism equaled their scorn for business 
at large. They looked down not merely on the source of their own families' 
wealth but also on the prosperous "academic" artist, and more harshly still on 
publishers, art dealers, or musical impresarios. 



The Great Illusion q^ 699 

This haughty ignorance of social and political facts enables us to under- 
stand why the cultivated classes reacted as they did when war came: several 
hundred intellectuals in Germany signed a manifesto denouncing "the other 
side" as if betrayed by a friend and brother. It was immediately answered, with 
a like rhetoric, by several hundred of the French. The enemy's purpose must 
be wicked since we are innocent. 

As for the masses, when they heard the newsboys shout: "War Declared!" 
they felt as if concussed. Their thoughts ran wild in all directions. It could not 
be, yet it was. The word war had been uttered a million times earlier, in fear or 
in hope and raised whatever images the speaker had at command; but the 
immediate prospect of battle was like an explosion in the soul. The next instant, 
emotions varied — appall for some, joy for others; relief at the end of suspense, 
positive zest for action, negative resolve to die rather than yield; all this pro- 
jected against a kaleidoscopic background of faces — son, brother, husband, 
friend. Every country but England had compulsory military service; all men 
between 1 8 and varying dates of middle age had received an identity booklet 
that specified where to report in case of war — no additional summons needed. 
It was a saving of time for that instrument of policy known by the antiseptic 
name of Mobilization. 

Mingled with concern for the self and those held dear went a sudden 
spasm of brotherly love for all fellow citizens, high and low. Danger, glory 
made them into a compact totality of equals at grips with heaven knows what 
evils. It was exhilarating and righteous besides. The overarching thought was 
a great simplifier; everybody understands war and bows to its single objective. 
Long dormant motives burst into life: heroism — risking one's life unselfishly 
to defend the homeland, its women and children; manliness — to do superhu- 
man deeds under fire; to put down wanton aggressors who were committing 
atrocities. In England and France it was also noble to defend democratic 
institutions against "Prussian militarism" and humble the kaiser with his 
ridiculous upturned mustache and spiked helmet. 

Altogether it spelled liberation from the humdrum of existence, with all 
its petty cunning for selfish ends. A new life opened, free of corrupt motives 
and vulgar self-indulgence. Proponents of war as good in itself were being 
vindicated. Thematically, the first industrial world war combined PRIMI- 
TrviSM — the cure for civilization that Carpenter had called for (<636) — with 
an EMANCIPATION that nobody could oppose. 

In the event, this last desire was fulfilled in many ways. Class barriers lost 
rigidity; conventions were relaxed. The soldier was cut loose from his nine-to- 
five at the office or six-to-four in the factory, as well as from home and its 
constraints. Watchful neighbors having scattered, each spouse, now sepa- 
rated, gained sexual freedom if it was wanted, or at least escape from a bad 
marriage. Hostile feelings against fellowman, employer, or state authority 



700 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

found release in being legitimately turned against the anonymous foe. These 
freedoms, soon taken for granted, furthered the feminist movement. Women 
were indispensable to "war work" and not solely as nurses and entertainers of 
the troops, but as chauffeurs, bureaucrats, factory hands, and "farmerettes." 
They showed that they could perform as well as men — often more conscien- 
tiously — in the reserved precincts of the male. It was impossible after the war 
to deny them the vote by arguing their incapacity. 

Besides these by-products of 
One is an idealist only if one finds beauty in wartime, the ever-changing conditions 
self-sacrifice; and one is all the greater ideal- of the conflict gave rise to ideas and 
ist if one sacrifices oneself for a motive that is attitudes that unhinged the public mind 
chivalric and arbitrary. The acme of idealism anc J l e f t i t maimed and disoriented. It 

is sacrifice for no motive at all. scrambled the continuities of western 

— PAULSouDAYiNZ^7feifRy(MAYll,1917) culture. The artists' mutual under- 

standing across frontiers vanished in an 
instant. The same thing happened to the Socialist movement, which had 
often been thought an automatic brake on war in Europe; people knew the 
working class put solidarity first; branches of the party in the several countries 
would not fight but fraternize. This did not come near happening. In 
England, a few leaders withdrew from politics by way of protest; in France, 
the man who might have acted according to prediction, Jean Jaures, was 
assassinated two days before the declaration of war. After August 1914 social- 
ists had to sing U Internationale like hypocrites, if at all. 

But the intellectual rift was worse than the political; the cultivated classes 
had no excuse. By definition — their own boastful definition — intellectuals 
were independent thinkers, always abreast of the latest truths in art, science, 
and social thought. In France they had become conscious of their strength as 
groups on each side of the Dreyfus Affair (<630; 696); now they seemed 
incapable of judgment. Overnight, en masse like so many sheep, they turned 
into rabid superpatriots. 

The most remarkable feature of this turncoat response was not its being 
the same in all the belligerent countries — so much could have been foretold 
from the common features of western culture. What is truly astonishing is the 
unanimity, unheard of on any other subject but the war and the enemy. 
Looking over the roster of great names in literature, painting, music, philoso- 
phy, science, and social science, one cannot think of more than half a dozen 
or so who did not spout all the catchphrases of abuse and vainglory. It would 
fill pages with repetitious, distressing quotations if a full survey of the partic- 
ipants in this aberration were attempted here. [The book to read is Redemption 
by War: The Intellectuals and 1914 by Ronald N. Stromberg] A handful of exam- 
ples will show what the few dissenters were expected to say and what courage 
it took to refuse or say the opposite. 



The Great Illusion q^> 701 

First, war glorified by poets. Robert Graves: Never was such antiqueness 
of romance/Such tasty honey oozing from the heart. Rupert Brooke: Now 
God be thanked who matched us with this hour. Claudel, Apollinaire, Ezra 
Pound, Isadora Duncan, and others extolled the fighting as divine. H. G. 
Wells in his best-seller Mr. Britling Sees It Through has the war bring about a 
return to religion. Lesser talents wrote hate songs that were set to music by 
Richard Strauss and Mahler, while Debussy, Alban Berg, and Stravinsky made 
patriotic boasts. Freud wrote of "giving all his libido" to Austria-Hungary. 
The historians and social scientists — Lamprecht, Meinecke, Max Weber, 
Lavisse, Aulard, Durkheim, Tawney — all found in the materials of their field 
good arguments in praise of war or reasons to excoriate the enemy. Arnold 
Toynbee wrote volumes of atrocity propaganda, for which he later hoped to 
atone by writing his Study of History in 1 volumes. Bergson and other philoso- 
phers sang the same tune. 

And everywhere the clergy were Carry on the war to win the peace — there's a 
the most rabid glorifiers of the struggle formula that should certainly fulfill the wish 
and inciters to hatred. The Brother- of Benedict XV. 

hood of Man and the Thou Shalt Not — Monsignor Cabrieres, Aug. 28, 1917 
Kill were no longer preachable. Only 

the pope, Benedict XV, could be a pacifist, and in spite of his plea for peace 
addressed to all belligerents in 1 91 5 and later, his bishops in various countries 
spoke out for total war. They enlisted God: "He is certainly on our side, 
because our goals are sinless and our hearts are pure." The most moderate 
said: "Kill but do not hate." One English preacher spoke of "the wrath of the 
Lamb" and another speculated that although Jesus would not have become a 
combatant, he would have enlisted in the Medical Corps. [The book to read is 
Society at War by Caroline Playne.] 

This unprecedented cultural phenomenon requires an explanation. 
Nothing close to it happened during the Napoleonic wars. Many intellectuals 
then were able to stay cool over the heads of the nations-in-arms. The 20C 
fury recalled the wars of religion or the English and American civil wars. In 
1914 religion was no longer a prime aggressive impulse, and the "religion of 
art" was not the creed of an organized force. In the 1 9C, it is true, one or 
another thinker found himself sharing the national animus in wartime; for 
example Tolstoy on two occasions, though he was a pacifist, and Dostoevsky 
during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877. But not before 1914 was the flush of 
blood lust seen on the whole intellectual class. What made the cultural elite 
give up its ideals, its habits, and its friendships? 

The "purifying" of human motives by war has been mentioned; it could 
boast precedents more acceptable than the declarations of generals and rev- 
olutionists. As we saw, Tennyson in the mid-19C had written a novel in verse, 
Maud, in which social-political corruption is shown as swept away by the war 



702 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

spirit. A little later Ruskin gave a lecture to young soldiers in which he 
asserted that war had two faces, noble and ignoble. When war was just, when 
it was fought by dedication and not compulsion, and fought according to the 
rules of chivalry, it was not only admirable but it could lead to the creation of 
fine art, equally noble. It is a remarkable piece of reasoning, parts of which 
could be quoted as a denunciation of the nation-in-arms and of the "military- 
industrial complex" later castigated by President Eisenhower. But in 1914 
nobody thought of Ruskin's and Tennyson's literary works. "Redemption by 
war" was a spontaneous popular impression, soon seen to be fallacious. War 
profiteers, cowards looking for safe posts, the black market in rationed goods, 
and a relaxation of sexual conventions showed that war was overrated as a 
moral detergent. [The book to read is The Sexual History of the World War by 
Magnus Hirschfeld, "Translated from the German and Intended for 
Circulation Among Mature Educated Persons Only."] 

The next explanation is: normal patriotism reinvigorated by the old, 
deep-lying instinct of aggression that can turn into a vocation and become 
the badge of nobility, as it did in the Middle Ages and for centuries after. It 
could be said too that peaceful patriotism had been exacerbated into violent 
isms — nationalism, imperialism, monarchism, militarism, jingoism, anar- 
chism, nihilism — by the prewar years of crisis and confrontation. And yet one 
must think again. It is true that some intellectuals had been doctrinaire, "inte- 
gral nationalists," but the majority were not and their about-face owed some- 
thing to their rediscovery of the importance of justice in public affairs. The 
Dreyfus case had stirred them earlier because he was an individual persecuted 
by the state — he resembled the artist punished by society. With the war the 
pattern was revised and applied to nations: "litde Belgium" invaded by "a bar- 
barian horde," innocent women and children massacred, atrocities (cutting 
off children's hands and women's breasts) committed "on principle." This last 
charge was made by all the governments and all probably had some factual 
basis as in every war, but with the also usual exaggeration of numbers. These 
notions formed the material of the incessant propaganda, required for "psy- 
chological warfare," a new mode of aggression and an art form. It was per- 
fected not solely by journalists, as might have been expected, but by novelists, 
poets, and critics, graphic artists and photographers. 

Yet another motive, though perhaps less conscious, animated these cul- 
ture-makers: for the first time in their lives they had become important, use- 
ful, wanted. No doubt society before the war gave them much attention, in 
praise or dispraise, and "the arts" were extolled as — among other things — 
the mark of a great nation. But much of this worship was paid at the feet of 
the dead — past artists and their works. The living had to be content with the 
approval of their peers. The fine cosmopolitan exchanges did form a genuine 
self-approving elite, but did not afford each artist the ecumenical recognition 



The Great Illusion <^> 703 

he aspired to. And these workers as a class did not feel a part of the buzzing, 
booming confusion of the "real" world. While despising that world, creators 
of the new felt that this compliment was returned. War let these unacknowl- 
edged leaders rejoin society, cheered them as soldiers, praised and paid them 
for their ability to fight — or write communiques, draw posters, censor corre- 
spondence, and do research in history for the "war effort." They were practi- 
cal men at last. 

The misfortune was that the military and civil authorities did not coordi- 
nate their plans. They allowed many artists, especially the young, to perish in 
the trenches, or at best to waste time and talent in other places: the violinist 
Jacques Thibaut had no way to practice during his years at the front, while the 
Cubist Albert Gleizes, on kitchen duty, peeled potatoes at Toul. The many 
who died, like the young writer Dixon Scott, are but names one comes across 
in old periodicals, memoirs, or privately printed anthologies. 

* * 

If both sides were right, what did each fear and contend in its propaganda 
for home and foreign consumption? The head of the central powers, the 
Germans, must defend their recently won unity and their greatness in science, 
industry, and world trade. The ancestral foes, France and England, were jeal- 
ous and would undo Bismarck's work, redivide the empire to destroy their 
competitor; while to the east, Russia, a barbarian state, would seize territories 
to add to its conglomerate empire. For Austria-Hungary the issue was dynas- 
tic survival by "containment" of the Slavic menace from Russia through the 
Balkans. Everybody had a flawless case in addition to self-defense. So armed 
in spirit, the belligerents could not dream of anything but total victory — 
hence the interminable, death-dealing years. 

In the western camp, as noted earlier, peaceful democracy was the palla- 
dium that must be saved from imperial militarism. The presence of Russia on 
this side of the struggle made the argument a little shaky; a better one was the 
proof of German lawlessness in its violation of the treaty that had guaranteed 
the neutrality of Belgium for nearly a century. When the Germans marched 
through the "gallant little country" calling the treaty "a scrap of paper," the 
true character of the Huns began to be perceived. England had planned to do 
the same, but that was a military secret. As the years showed, all-out war 
knows nothing of neutrality and little of international law. Huge masses of 
men in collision means a pitiless, unprofessional war of attrition, fought not 
on fields but in trenches or foxholes and anywhere else as needed. 

None of this had been foreseen. The nation-in-arms initiated by the 
French revolutionists in 1 792 was too far back to remember and 44 years had 
elapsed since the previous European war, in 1 870, which had been between 



704 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

armies in motion. In August 1914 the populations expected to hear about 
marches, sieges, and pitched battles. Professional soldiers, reinforced by 
levies as needed, and carrying out planned campaigns, would decide the issue. 
Many in France were sure that "We'll be in Berlin in three months." The gen- 
eral staffs, at least among the Allies, were not far from the same predictions. 
They expected the cavalry to take part — soldiers in August 1914 filled ditches 
around Paris with branches and twigs to hinder the horses — and uniforms 
were still showy: the trousers of the French had been dyed red in Germany; 
rifles and bayonets and field guns were of tried and tested patterns. German 
industrial advances upset all this "preparedness." 

Among other unexpected facts some were entirely novel and not all of 
German origin: poison gas, air raids over capitals, submarines sinking ships 
regardless of flag or cargo, thus starving neutral states; the use of church tow- 
ers as observation posts and their consequent destruction, the issuing of 
forged currency to cripple enemy finance, and propaganda organized like 
large-scale advertising. In short, the deployment of the entire population and 
economy in support of "the front." 

Strategy failed on both sides. When the Germans' Schlieffen Plan to 
defeat France quickly by passing through neutral Belgium could not be prop- 
erly followed up, because the Prussians to the east complained of being over- 
run by the Russian army and re-enforcements were taken from the west, no 
plan but a series of improvisations followed, ending in mutual stalemate along 
miles of disputed lines. This front was quickly a devastated area, strung with 
barbed wire and seamed with man-high dugouts, the trenches. The combat- 
ants, self-trained for the ordeal, lived in squalor — mud, water, vermin — in 
preparation for sorties designed to capture the opposing trench by annihilat- 
ing its occupants. This over-the-top endeavor was prepared by bombard- 
ment — a barrage of shells — to reduce the opposition. Casualties were in pro- 
portion to the enlarged scale of everything: 5,000 men, perhaps, on a normal 
day when, as Erich-Maria Remarque recorded in his famous novel years later, 
the communique read: "On the West Front, Nothing New." 

In the modern people-to-people 

, , , , fighting, men are expendable like pow- 
. . . men staggered wearily over duckboard ° ^ L 

i wr j j r » • 1. ji • der and shells; they are important but 

tracks. Wounded men falling headlong into ' J r 

the shell holes were in danger of drowning. less so man men and women in fact °- 

Mules slipped from the tracks and were often ries making that ammunition. Still 

drowned in the giant shell holes alongside. more important are the material 

Guns sank till they became useless; rifles resources out of which to make it, the 

caked and would not fire; even food was money to pay the bill, and the inventive 

tainted with the inevitable mud. talent to create better or novel 

— Col. G. L. McEntee, Military History weapons. The Great War produced the 

of the World War tank and the "French 75," a small, 



The Great Illusion <^> 705 

mobile cannon; the wide-ranging submarine; the blimp and the gas mask; var- 
ious types of planes; the armed dirigible (zeppelin); and finally the large-bore 
gun, "Big Bertha," that could fire a shell over Paris from 75 miles away. I 
remember its inauguration and effects, worse than the air raids by the noisy 
Tauben ("doves"), because the big gun fired at any moment of the day, 
whereas the night raids by planes were concentrated in a short time and pre- 
ceded by a warning. Taking refuge in a cellar at night was for us children a 
kind of fun — at first. 

Also by the end of the war, boys of 1 6 were filling the gaps in the insa- 
tiable trenches. The use for the first time of troops from the African and 
Asian colonies had not sufficed, but it marked the entry of Third World set- 
tlers into the European nations. The hope never ceased that a sudden push on 
a broad front — an "offensive" — would dislodge enough of the enemy to 
cause a rout and end the war. The German effort at Verdun in 1 91 6 wiped out 
some 700,000 lives in four months and brought no decision; the same year at 
the Somme, the British losses were 60,000 in one day 

Neither did the war at sea. The battle of Jutland in the same year showed 
the Germans superior to the Grand Fleet in tactics and marksmanship, but 
overborne by the size and number of the English capital ships. The loss of 
English tonnage was twice the German. Later, Germany's so-called unre- 
stricted submarine warfare destroyed merchant shipping liberally, with the 
result of bringing the United States into the war. The fresh troops and sup- 
plies refueled the offensive that put an end to the German and the Turkish 
Empires, broke the Austrian into small pieces, and left the restless Balkans at 
the mercy of statesmen and journalists who must draw a new map of the 
West. 

It was an impossible task, made so largely by the existence of secret 
treaties that had been negotiated between the heads of the powers to appor- 
tion their future spoils. They swapped provinces undisturbed by notions of 
ethnic or other rights. It was the old dynastic mode. When revealed after the 
war, these treaties caused the revulsion that created the demand for open 
diplomacy, thereby putting an end to the importance of ambassadors and 
leading to the "summit" meetings of heads of state, with the press in atten- 
dance, the calculated leaks, and the dubious results. The selfish, vengeful pro- 
visions of the treaty of peace in 1919 made the new map unstable. The 
demand that Germany give material reparations and the attempt to keep her 
forever weak were based on an outmoded conception of both victory and the 
character of Central Europe (711>). John Maynard Keynes gained instant 
prominence by his exposure of The Economic Consequences of the Peace. 

Long before the book, before the war itself, the futility and the danger of 
war for profit had been demonstrated. Fair warning had been given to all 
thinking people in the West by an English journalist named Norman Angell. 



706 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

In 1 909 he had written a pamphlet entitled Europe's Optical-Illusion. His thesis 
was simple: modern war between great powers means a dead loss for both 
victor and vanquished. The pamphlet attracted wide attention, which led 
Angell to expand it into a fully documented work retided The Great Illusion — 
A Study of the Relation of Military Power in Nations to Their Economic and Social 
Advantage. In it he quoted the words of leaders on all sides who entertained 
the great illusion. He showed that the existing ways of international finance 
put the wealth of one nation at the mercy of another. Hostilities would ensure 
their common loss. Colonies were no asset but a subsidized expense; annex- 
ing them or some part of a defeated country, or occupying it to levy tribute 
was yet more wasteful. Besides, the cost of an up-to-date war would be 
ruinous. All the resources of all the participants would be drained dry. No 
nation and no individual would benefit from victory. A large-scale war in 20C 
Europe would be suicide disguised as self-interest. 

The argument was so clear, temperate, and convincing that all who gave 
their minds to it believed it. But it is one thing to believe that one's previous 
idea is wrong and another to act on the newly revealed right. Habit, social 
pressures, a streak of fatalism conspire to keep action in the groove already 
dug. The Great Illusion was not heeded but enacted. 

* 
* * 

From the earliest days of the struggle each belligerent also carried on an 
internal war of ideas, coupled with popular persecution. To begin with, 
"enemy art" must be banned from the stage, the museum, and the concert 
hall. More than this, it must be shown through scholarly books that enemy 
thinkers had long ago created the viciously aggressive character of the enemy 
nation. History backed up the charge: to the Allies, the Germans had always 
been barbarian raiders; they had destroyed Roman civilization and overrun 
the helpless Occident, their eternal motto: "Might Makes Right." Hegel, 
Fichte, Nietzsche had glorified either the conquering state or the conquering 
superman, in Nietzsche's words applicable to both, "the blond beast of prey" 
(<670). 

The Germans had a corresponding case, in some respects more tenable: 
the French, though long since decadent, were pursing their obsessive aim to 
dominate Central Europe. In their palmy days, it had been their playground; 
invasion after invasion had ravaged the small helpless states, kept them poor, 
underpopulated, and divided — made them the laughing stock of the rest of 
the world. Slowly, from Frederick the Great to Bismarck, nationhood had 
developed and had triumphed at Versailles in 1871. This legitimate union of 
German peoples into a German national state had created in France a breed 



The Great Illusion <^ 707 

of monarchists, nationalists, imperialists, anti-Semites, revanchards — all rabid 
militarists who believed that breaking up Germany one more time was essen- 
tial to both the well-being of France and the success of their several factions 
at home. 

England had naturally joined in. The age-old policy of meddling in conti- 
nental affairs, always against the strongest, most advanced nation, was aimed at 
dominating the world by sea power and trade. The German character, noble, 
courageous, sincere (and pioneering in science and techne) had good reason to 
despise the decadent French and the English nation of shopkeepers, as 
Napoleon called them. In this joint betrayal of their best traditions — to say 
nothing of the nuances of truth — the leaders of opinion on both sides were 
rehearsing (so to speak) what happened less than a dozen years later, when 
writers, artists, and academics attacked or defended the renewed aggressiveness 
of Fascist, Communist, or National-Socialist regimes. 

Two conspicuous exceptions to the frenzy were the French novelist and 
musicologist Romain Rolland and the playwright and social thinker Bernard 
Shaw. In late 1914, Rolland published a short book entitled Au-dessus de la 
Melee (Above the Struggle), in which he tried to show the oneness of western cul- 
ture and the folly of all the recriminations. He was at once reviled, called 
traitor and spy, and his prewar fame revoked as an aberration. It does not 
detract from his midwar courage and clear-sightedness to point out that he 
was in neutral and multinational Switzerland when he wrote his book, but the 
fact helps to make clear the force of the contagion to which the brains of 
Europe succumbed — the likes of Bergson, Arnold Bennett, and Thomas 
Mann, but not, be it noted, Richard Strauss, who refused to sign the German 
Manifesto (<699), saying it was not an artist's proper role to make declara- 
tions about politics and war. He was consistent and made no protest in the 
sequel war, 1 5 years later, incurring much blame. 

Similarly in 1914, the dean of 

French letters, Anatole France, 

shocked his friends and the public by Sel * er WateK consult y° ur S a2eteer under 

in i "Seltz" — what do you find? "Prussian vil- 

remaining mute — and sullen when J 

. TT . . • • i i l a S e > 40 kilometers from Mainz-on-Ems, 

questioned. He would noti oin the cno- , . . . , „.. , TJ 

1 11 i i known for its mineral water." After that I dare 

rus. At last, beset from all sides, he , , , . A , .. r 

' ' you to splash seltzer into your aperitifs. 

wrote some propaganda pieces about 

. , ill , • , — Paris-Midi, ]uly 30, \9\7 

the homeland, but so saccharine that 

only the naive could think them sin- 
cere. In England alone a few politicians, including the future Labour prime 
minister Ramsay MacDonald, resigned from office and went into semi-retire- 
ment. [The book to read is Shaw's Common Sense About the War, which adroitly 
takes to pieces the thought-cliches of the embattled mind.] 



708 ^> From Dawn to Decadence 



* 
* 



To pass from individual expression to collective attitudes leaves the same 
impression of idealism out of control and corrupted by the belief that to 
uphold it required falsehood and hatred. To be sure, the unceasing anxiety of 
millions about the fate of the nation and of their relatives and friends at the 
front acted as a permanent bar to sober reflection. After that first shock and 
indignant dismay, various ways developed of coping with the facts and the 
emotional strain. For the facts included not only what was known or sup- 
posed about the fighting itself but also what happened at home, plain to see: 
family life broken as badly as by divorce; careers, occupations ended and 
livelihood reduced to a meager government allowance; social distinctions and 
manners diluted or erased — even clothing and speech altered to fit new 
human relations, loss of bourgeois pride and comforts — in short, an unex- 
pected tide of egalitarianism. 

It required, among other things, that nobody but the physically disabled 
should be exempt from fighting in the trenches. This ensured that the fittest 
in the realms of art, science, intellect, and eminence generally would be 
reduced in numbers proportionately with the rest. The same exposure 
applied to works of art, architecture, libraries, and the like: the war supposedly 
fought on each side to defend the cultural heritage of each "truly civilized" 
nation took little care of the objects and the persons in whom and in which 
that heritage was embodied. It is hard to see how it could have been done, 
given the temper of the time and the means at hand. By the next world war a 
lesson had been learned and valuable works and workers were rather better 
protected. [The book to leaf through is UEurope Blessee (in English despite its 
title) by Henry Lafarge.] The animus too had changed and few spoke or acted 
against the classics of enemy art. Only a philosopher or historian here and 
there produced a tract to prove that Carlyle and the indispensable Hegel had 
been the instigators of Fascism. 

To describe the ways in which civilians adjusted themselves to the shifting 
stresses and strains of 1914—18 would mean a nation-by-nation survey of dif- 
ferent groups in each country — a book in itself. Only a few suggestive facts can 
be cited as representing typical behavior within and across the frontiers. 

One shield against the spectacle of death was the renewed resort to 
spiritism. Conan Doyle was far from being the only notable convert; many 
men and women — often atheists or agnostics — were driven by the urge to 
talk with their dead, and fortune-tellers enjoyed a surge of popularity and 
profit. Other stricken souls became atheists from that same spectacle. At the 
front, finality had another effect: the lure of danger, after months in the 
trenches, took a peculiar turn into the lure of death. "Come and die," cried 
Rupert Brooke, "it will be such fun." It was in observing this new fascination 



The Great Illusion <^> 709 

that Freud surmised the presence of a death wish in human beings. A small 
scattering of ethical or Christian minds turned "conscientious objectors," a 
category provided only for English subjects and entailing imprisonment. 
Bertrand Russell and Lytton Strachey are the remembered examplars. On the 
Continent, the only equivalent mode of refusing combat was to ask for ser- 
vice as stretcher bearer or ambulance driver. 

Apprehension as a steady state fed the spy mania. That spies were a sub- 
tle menace was true, though often their reports were not believed or not used 
in time by their employers. And as it happens, the two publicized executions 
for the crime were mistakes. Edith Cavell was only a nurse who helped sol- 
diers to escape and Mata Hari (later the heroine of a musical) merely acted out 
her private romance of spying without doing any. Persons (or things) with 
names that were or were thought Germanic were denounced. Many natives 
and foreigners were interned, others lost their employment, were separated 
from their spouse, and in the best outcome, merely ostracized. (Americans of 
German descent had the same experience after 1917.) In Europe during the 
early August days, shops with foreign names were likely to find their windows 
broken and their business at an end — for example in France, the chain of 
dairies called Maggi, a Swiss firm. 

In England as well as France, We have looted and persecuted, reviled and 

changing names became a safety mea- insulted and assaulted - We have meanl y 
r ri i tii i- robbed poor women of their little savings: we 

sure or a proof of loyalty. The novelist r B 

' . have seized a man for going across London 

we know as Ford Madox Ford was , . , . .. , , 

to snatch a caress from his wife, and we have 

born Ford Madox Hueffer, the son of a punished hhn as we punish only ^ most 
German musician long resident in savage hooligans . Editors of new spapers 
England. The royal family, Hanoverian have prmte d dastardly letters demanding 
to start with and more recently of Saxe- that German prisoners of war, when they die, 
Coburg-Gotha, turned into the House shall not be buried as soldiers who have 
of Windsor, while its Battenberg rela- fought for their country, but thrown on the 
fives by a happy transposition flour- dungheap to "rot like dogs." 
ished as the Mountbattens. Unfortun- — Shaw on the civilians' anti-German 
ately, anyone who owned a little dog of FURY (1917) 

the dachshund breed (badger-hound), 

and was thus an object of suspicion, had no choice but to get rid of the dog; 
its distinctive silhouette made a change of name unavailing. 

Any remark not fully orthodox might bring on the accusation. That fine 
scholar and prose writer, G. Lowes Dickinson, was driven from King's College, 
Cambridge, by his outraged fellows. How Shaw escaped lynching is a miracle as 
well as a tribute to his polemical skill. The paranoia lasted as long as the war- — 
and no wonder: the very form the fighting had taken was a piece of madness, 
so that caught between the revolt of reason and the fear of defeat, the only out- 
let was to talk nonsense and vent frustration on others at random. The reign of 



710 ^^ From Dawn to Decadence 

I have seen the fingerprints of the Hidden the Absurd, now a literary genre, begins 
Hand in the Foreign Office, in Downing in the Great War. 

Street, in Finance, in Ireland, and in the sea Those who well before 1918 saw 

affair by the transfer of the management of through the great illusion or discovered 
the Navy from the Sea Lords to a ^ futility of mutual decimation but 
Germanized Foreign Office. kept ^ combined Aeir loathing 

—Arnold White, The Hidden Hand with resignation. Others contrariwise 

^ ' found a new fighting resolve, not based 

on hope of glorious success, but for the 
sake of a quick ending: see it through as fast as possible for a return to peace 
and sanity. The politicians in power shared the intention to speed the conclu- 
sion, with the added motive of coming out, at peacetime, ahead of the oppo- 
sition party and of fellow leaders. Both purposes explain the continual dis- 
sension within governments and the frequent changes of method and of 
generals. Except in spots, now and then, the conduct of the war in every 
nation was crippled by rivalries and misconceptions, chaotic, inefficient. 

The task was in truth formidable. The nation-in-arms is virtually a com- 
munist state: the people must be paid wages and fed and protected and regi- 
mented behind the lines as much as at the front. Minds must be kept loyal and 
at the right pitch of hate, so that successive drafts of fighters are accepted with- 
out murmurings. Letters and newspapers must be censored while the propa- 
ganda mill grinds on. As for decisions about strategy and overall command, 
they must please many masters: dissenters in the cabinet, the heads of the allied 
states, and public opinion. Hence failures must be disguised or concealed. 

It is significant that the mind control broke down soonest and oftenest in 
the trenches, where fine words could not compete with physical and moral 
sensations. Fraternizing with the enemy occurred early in the war and contin- 
ued. At Christmas, at Easter, on other occasions, truces took place; under 
identical conditions human beings develop fellow feeling. In 1917, after two 
and a half years of misery, and repeated, obviously futile attacks against an 
impregnable position, mutiny broke out on the French front. It was put down 
and the fact kept secret. (In 1998 the French prime minister spoke of those 
mutineers as worthy of respect and commemoration and the press agreed; 
the English likewise exonerated their participants.) Eighty-one years earlier, 
the Germans, just then holding the advantage, made peace overtures. They 
were rejected. Then came the news of America's declaration of war against 
Germany, which gave the conflict renewed impetus. 

Varying estimates have been made of the losses that must be credited to 
the great illusion. Some say 10 million lives were snuffed out in the 52 months 
and double that number wounded. Others propose higher or lower figures. 
The exercise is pointless, because loss is a far wider category than death alone. 
The maimed, the tubercular, the incurables, the shell-shocked, the sorrowing, 



The Great Illusion <^> 711 

the driven mad, the suicides, the broken spirits, the destroyed careers, the 
budding geniuses plowed under, the missing births were losses, and they are 
incommensurable. The postwar survey, Economic and Social History of the World 
War, made in the early 1920s under the editorship of Professor James 
Shotwell, is a shelful of volumes and is thus unreadable. It was still incomplete 
by the beginning of the second war. Simply looking at the subtitles broadens 
one's idea of the magnitude of each item in the moral and material 
bankruptcy. 

The Armistice, moreover, did not halt the toll. It was escorted by an out- 
break of typhus in Central Europe and a worldwide epidemic called Spanish 
flu, virulent and in most cases fatal. Then, as Herbert Hoover told the world 
in his famous report as commissioner in charge of relief in Europe, the post- 
war state of large sections of the Continent was one of starvation, homeless- 
ness, and disease. One cannot pour all human and material resources into a 
fiery cauldron year after year and expect to resume normal life at the end of 
the prodigal enterprise. 

Nor did fighting end with the Armistice of 1918, still celebrated as the 
close of the Great War. Little wars continued sporadically — in Russia against 
the Bolshevik regime, and also in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, 
Rumania, Greece, Turkey, and northern Italy: Except for Russia, which 
wanted peace at any price, these other peoples had not had the benefit of long 
years of attrition on their soil and they were apparently content to lose more 
lives for doubtful gains. 

The reckless expenditure of lives was bound to make a postwar world 
deficient in talents as well as deprived of needful links to the prewar culture. 
What proved equally devastating in the sequel was the policy of the Allies 
toward Germany. They acted on the fallacy about finance that Norman 
Angell had exposed and created in Central Europe a festering wound. To cite 
but one instance of their exactions, by January 1921 — some 18 months after 
the signing of the treaty — Germany had delivered 20 billion marks' worth of 
goods. The Allies said the lot was worth only 8 billion. By way of punishment 
they occupied additional industrial centers at German expense and imposed 
special duties against German imports into the Allied countries. 

The balance of trade against Germany steadily increased while the coun- 
try was expected to produce in cash and in products such as coal variable 
amounts each year to reach a total of 32 billion. Inflation set in, coal delivery 
lagged, and France occupied its source, the Ruhr. While there it fomented a 
movement to make the Rhineland a separate state. It failed. But meantime, 
the wealthiest German capitalists, indifferent to the fate of the republic, 
invested abroad, worsening further the plight of the German people. The 
Allies, it is true, were trying to pay off their debts to the United States, which 
was pressing: one way or another, the great illusion was the script the allied 



712 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

players kept rehearsing through one act after another. Two decades later, 
when Hitler came to power by a straightforward vote of the German people, 
the players were surprised at the denouement. 

It was not long after the end of the Great War that farseeing observers 
predicted the likelihood of another and it became plain that western civiliza- 
tion had brought itself into a condition from which full recovery was unlikely. 
The devastation, both material and moral, had gone so deep that it turned the 
creative energies from their course, first into frivolity, and then into the chan- 
nel of self-destruction. 



The Artist Prophet and Jester 



One NOTABLE death that occurred in the Great War has gone unsung, 
indeed unrecorded: the death of the philistine. That omission is no doubt due 
to his not having been called a hero, ever, although he was one of a special 
kind. Surely it took courage of the best mulish sort to make the same protest, 
generation after generation, on seeing each new school of 19C art and litera- 
ture produced and derided, then accepted, and at last exalted and lodged at 
public expense in museums, libraries, and concert halls. 

Philistines were still alive and kicking late in the Cubist Decade (<647); 
they disappeared into the trenches with everybody else. By 1920 any that sur- 
vived had been miraculously transformed, not into aesthetes but into trim- 
mers and cowards. To this new breed anything offered as art merited auto- 
matic respect and grave scrutiny. If a new work or style was not easy to like, if 
it was painful to behold, revolting, even, it was nonetheless "interesting." Half 
a century later unless the reviewer finds it "unsettling," "disturbing," "cruel," 
"perverse," it is written off as "academic," not merely //^interesting but con- 
temptible. 

The stupid bourgeois had through the alchemy of war come out the 
docile consumer of the mid- and late 20C. He takes the existence of a mind- 
twisting avant-garde as much for granted as the earth's being round; it has the 
status of a holy synod. To say this is not to overdo metaphor. Art has been 
defined over and over as Man's highest spiritual expression, and in one 
respect superior to religion in that it is the only activity that does not lead to 
killing; it is in fact the redeemer of an otherwise evil affliction, human life. 
The artist is moreover a prophet in the biblical sense. Long since called "a 
criticism of life," his work denounces the sins of the contemporary world. 
This view of the arts, fervendy held by their leading practitioners, has come 
to be accepted by a sizable part of the public, for many of whom it provides a 
pastime or a livelihood. The pillars of society — business, the church, govern- 
ment — have concurred. It would seem appropriate to date popular 
Modernism from the time of this final victory won by the religion of art in the 



714 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

early 1920s. The message first uttered in the early 1800s, "art for art's sake," 
finally conveyed to the literate its true sense: "art for life's sake" (<617). 

This dating of ecumenical Modernism gets rid of the confusion among 
the two or three others without affecting the traditional use of Modern (no -isf) 
for the era since 1500.° At that time, as we saw (<224), the phrase Middle Ages 
was not in use and modern meant "common" in the sense of new, voguish. 
(The low Latin modernuswas rooted in modo — recently) It took a long time for 
new and common to become new and uncommon. Here again, the early 1 9C 
is the pivotal moment. Modern was used in a complimentary way by the pio- 
neering Gautier in the 1830s; modernite by Chateaubriand in the 1840s;° and 
Baudelaire in the 1850s found it an accepted critical term. A small indication: 
the French bibliographer Octave Uzanne edited Le Livre for many years; in 
1 890 he renamed it Le Livre Moderne. Thanks to this changed view of moder- 
nity, art joined science in spreading the 20C dogma that latest is best. 
Modernist Man looks forward, a born future-ist, thus reversing the old pre- 
sumption about ancestral wisdom and the value of prudent conservation. It 
follows that whatever is old is obsolete, wrong, dull, or all three. 

Such was the deep conviction of some talented young in the 1920s. 
Unlike the reconstructed philistine, they did not need to subdue the flesh in 
order to partake of the new and shocking. They had survived the beastliness 
of the war, the war caused by their stupid or wicked elders. The new life must 
be free of all the old errors and full of new pleasures. Gaiety was the main 
item on the agenda, a taking hold of life with both hands, feeling tolerant 
toward human vagaries (including one's own), and under stress, showing non- 
chalance. This last trait is no doubt what. Hemingway had in mind when he 
defined courage as grace under pressure — an odd notion, since physical 
courage can be ungraceful, ugly, desperate. But applied to moral resistance, 
the maxim fits the temper here characterized. Given the relaxed situation of 
the early postwar, this rejection of the past, coupled with ways of compensat- 
ing oneself for the recent horrors, was EMANCIPATION with the least effort. 



Despite the break in beliefs and feelings, the pause between the Great 
War and the next saw the progress of three movements that were already 
prominent in the period called for convenience the Nineties. These late 19C 
beginnings were revolts too, which is why their continuation fell in with the 
postwar temper. The 1920s might have completed these earlier purposes if 
the second war had not taken place and postponed fulfillment till the 1950s 
and 1 960s. The three were: sexual emancipation, women's rights, and the wel- 
fare state (<688). 

Because these were changes in moral, social, and political habits and the 



The Artist Prophet and Jester q^ 715 



1 920s and 1 930s are remembered chiefly for art and frivolity, the fact that this 
period took the second step toward the mores and the politics of the 20C fin 
de siecle has been forgotten. The final, mid-20C phase of 1890 emancipa- 
tions has been regarded as so many beginnings* Since the artistic and the 
other manifestations cannot be described simultaneously, the former as the 
more conspicuous then and now shall occupy us first. 

Early in the 1920s the young intellectuals were turning excited attention 
to half a dozen works of literature that deserve to be called defining. Their 
authors belonged to an older generation and the works, gestated during the 
war, dealt with the experience that every living soul had recently undergone. 
T. S. Eliot's Waste Land epitomized by both tide and contents the thoughts 
and feelings of the survivors. The note of desolation is struck in the first line: 
"April is the cruellest month." From Chaucer to Shakespeare and from 
Shakespeare to Browning and Whitman April had been sung as the gentiest, 
most welcoming month. Now all that April stands for, particularly the gener- 
ative force, arouses antipathy; life is abhorrent. 

The Waste Land goes on to record a hodgepodge of facts, ideas, supersti- 
tions, and interests born or vivified during the ordeal. In Eliot's first group of 
poems "wasteland" is foreshadowed; it is the name for the earth and the soul; 
for what coexists without meaning: art and its nightingales; fragments of 
cabaret song; Buddhist nihilism; sublime longings ending in vulgar, senseless 
riming jokes; sexuality acknowledged in the mood of revulsion — the dis- 
parate images and tones affirm the blurring of all distinctions, the incoher- 
ence of the world. By itself, The Waste Land was the crystallization of a 
moment in European culture. There had been none such since Goethe's Faust 
and Byron's Childe Harold (<485). 

Very different but likewise emblematic, Joyce's Ulysses made a saga out of 
the contrast between the critical consciousness and the inescapable demands 
of life. The tale begins with a glimpse of the poet, the artist, whose powers 
keep him a spectator, an alien in the uncaring world. The rest of the odyssey 
is framed by the next scene and the final soliloquy, both expressions of the 
physical: in the first Bloom is at stool and thinking evacuations; the last shows 
Molly thinking sexual organs and intercourse. In between, the spectator trails 
through that other wasteland called a city. Sordid back streets and busy thor- 
oughfares form the boundaries of modern life. Bald description, satire 
through parody, calculated ramblings permit nuances within disgust, and 
even at times a sad sort of sympathy. The literary innovation borrowed from 
an obscure French author, the "interior monologue," parallels the "free 
association" method of curing neurotics. 

Two other outstanding works, new in the early 1 920s though finished 
during the war years, embodied its experience by showing former codes of 
conduct and belief as obsolete and society in decay. These were Shaw's 



716 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

Heartbreak House and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. This last title, attrac- 
tive as it is for readers of the Scott-Moncrieff translation, misses the point: the 
original says "in search of lost time," with a play on words suggestive of "for- 
gotten days" and "time wasted." The story stresses the evanescence of all 
things and in particular of the social and artistic world that the narrator tries 
to reconstruct in memory It is interesting — and was largely unnoticed till an 
American scholar made the survey — that the recollection includes with 
respectful attention a good deal of the contemporary science, both directly 
and by way of metaphor. 

The length of Proust's novel is a logical consequence of his way of 
remembering. It too is associative: the famous crumb of tea cake and other 
similar details made the now overstated point that the mind is at bottom non- 
rational. That is also the lesson of the interior monologue, of which Proust 
makes indirect use. Instead of the non-logical "stream," he created the mean- 
dering sentence (in French: phrase a tiroirs). One clause after another is forced 
into the preceding, the lengthening group somehow harnessed together in a 
single syntactical unit. It is hard to read and often to understand. It is anti- 
prose, as the first critics of the work noticed. For as we saw earlier (<353), 
prose is a highly artificial genre that requires the taming of speechways to 
attain clarity, and in Proust one is pulled down, below speech, into the way- 
ward flitting of thoughts and images. 

The counterargument is that without the wanderings no impression of 
search, of difficulty and doubt, would have been rendered. One has only to 
read Proust's easy, delightful first novel in one volume,/&z# Santeuii, to see that 
lucid and rapid discourse was inappropriate to the later work. The pastness of 
the past — let alone its rediscovery — called for the way he wrote. That this 
memory-seeking prose has given the loose to a large amount of bad writing in 
every literary language is true but not the originator's fault. 

Much has been written to the effect that Proust intended a devastating 
exposure of the upper bourgeoisie and the relics of the nobility in France, 
making their tastes and their vices look so repulsive that, as in Marx, this 
upper crust would be blown to bits. This is to mistake portrayal for propa- 
ganda. A reading of Balzac's Comedie Humaine will show that his subject was 
the tastes and vices of the aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie of his time, and 
if their descendants were still around for Proust to observe a century later, the 
chances are that new money and old titles alike survive in spite of revolutions 
and wars. The question is, with how much authority? What Proust recorded 
was the passing of an elite, swamped — as Balzac feared — by the fully risen 
tide of democracy. After 1 920, as mentioned earlier, another wave of pop- 
ulism, mightier than the first (<595; 651) swept over western culture. It arose 
from the communal experience of war and was accelerated by the Russian 
revolution. The people became the sole object of interest and concern. Art, 



The Artist Prophet and Jester <^> 1X1 

literature, social theory, manners, and morals reshaped the common feelings 
and set the tone of the altered society. 

Shaw's Heartbreak House gives a more concentrated view of the mael- 
strom of emotions after the war; a play is always more tightly woven than a 
novel. As usual, Shaw's mode of edifying is that of high comedy. The people 
who live in Heartbreak House or visit there are, like Proust's, the idle well-to- 
do, and two or three contrasting types, including a burglar and the mad 
Captain who owns but cannot run the dwelling he calls his ship: it is adrift. He 
can only comment on the frivolity of the crew as they make love, quarrel, brag 
about their prowess, and remain ignorant of the conditions that govern their 
conflicting beliefs and actions. All but young Ellie, who ages rapidly out of 
innocence into experience, are as unhappy as they are worthless. The busi- 
nessman in their midst, like the burglar, knows more of the truths of life, but 
the motives the pair live by are narrow and destructive of others and them- 
selves. The Captain's acquired wisdom comes out in bursts and sometimes 
stuns the person addressed; at other times it is dismissed as his madness. In 
either case it does no good. Maxims in times of danger are useless, experience 
is incommunicable. The knotted strands of life, desire, assumptions, and 
moral codes cannot be unsnarled; they can only be cut, which is what hap- 
pens when an air raid occurs, with a silencing fortissimo like the finale of a 
Beethoven symphony. The two thieves — burglar and businessman — are 
killed, the survivors exhilarated: they hope for another bombing the next day. 
The allegory is plain: the West has brought on itself the housecleaning its foul 
habits deserved; whoever looks about him and reflects should welcome it. 

One other great figure voiced the same perception, also allegorically, the 
last of the great poets, Yeats. He had been one of the pensive Symbolists and 
mystics of the 1 890s. He remained a mystic, but age and political responsibil- 
ities had turned him into a prophet too, hardening and condensing his lan- 
guage in phrases some of which, such as "the center cannot hold," have 
become cliches descriptive of "our condition." 



Whether or not the younger talents admired any of these older figures, 
they were driven in other directions by the cult of the new. It was an impera- 
tive so ingrained that it was not discussed: the 19C had seen to it. But in that 
century, the new was a departure by a number of geniuses who soon gener- 
ated a school of able exploiters. In the 1920s, originality produced the specta- 
cle of many overlapping styles at once. The apparent gain was an actual loss: 
it not only deprived the age of what might have been its characteristic style, it 
also subjected each competing group to the accidents of vogue. By the end of 
the 20C it was commonly said that the lifespan of a style is three months. For 



718 c^s From Dawn to Decadence 

The great geniuses of the past still rule over such creators the ancient maxim is 
us from their graves; they still stalk or scurry reversed: life is long and art is short. 
about in the present, tripping up the living, Why did Modernism not get a sin- 
mysteriously congesting the traffic, confus- g j e sty j e t h at WO uld define the ism con- 
ing values in art and manners, a brilliant cret ely? The answer is not rebellious 
cohort of mortals determined not to die, in egotism aW The burden q£ ^ 

possession of the land. , , , , r , 

r whole past, down to the turn of the 

-Wyndham Lewis (1915) 19C— aU the masterpieces, great and 

small — exerted a pressure of paralyz- 
ing effect. Everything had been done. Substance and techniques had given all 
that was in them. 

The impetus born of the Renaissance was exhausted, and the new start 
made in the years just before 1914 had been cut short; its creators themselves 
were unable or unwilling to pick up where they left off. These facts made the 
younger talents feel caught in the jaws of history; they must be original, but 
their heritage stood in the way and the means of making a new start were 
denied by the break in culture. They were at a new starting point without the 
benefit of an uncluttered ground, a clean slate. 

In retrospect, the scattering of 
The age demanded that we sing their efforts may be grouped into a 

and cut away our tongue. small number of tendencies: One, to 

The age demanded that we flow take past and present and make fun of 

and hammered in the bung. everything in it by parody, pastiche, 

The age demanded that we dance ridicule, and desecration, to signify 

and jammed us into iron pants. rejection. Two, return to the bare ele- 

And in the end the age was handed mentg of ^ ^ ^ excluding ideas 

the sort of shit that it demanded. i * ^ i • • 

and ulterior purpose, play variations on 

—Ernest Hemingway (1925) these elements simply to show their 

sensuous power and the pleasure 
afforded by bare technique. Three, remain serious but find ways to get rid of 
the past by destroying the very idea of art itself. 

The enormous sum of talents exerted to carry out the individual pro- 
grams under these categories fills one with admiration for the undertakers' 
pertinacity and with sympathy for their historical plight. All alike were doing 
the work proper to the artist — mirror life as they saw it, respond to its pres- 
sure by criticism overt or implied. And clearly also, their different paths con- 
verged on the negatives: ridicule, denial, anti-art, and sensory simplicity mean 
that culture and society are in the decadent phase, when it is everybody's duty 
to do his share of ground clearing. It is a manifestation of PRIMITIVISM on the 
large scale. 

It was in the midst of war, that a small group of young people inaugurated 
the first of these modern techniques of destruction by seeming madly irre- 



The Artist Prophet and Jester <^> 719 

sponsible on purpose. They were in I don't even want to know that any man lived 

Zurich in 1916, protected by Swiss before me. 

neutrality but not "above the struggle" _on the cover of Dada No. 3 (1917) 

emotionally. They chose for their 

_ 1,111 ,,-r-x i „ Every word was wrong; every word was 

movement of revolt the label Dada, „ . , , , , ' , , 

Romantic, banal, probably used by the so- 
which is French baby talk for hobby- caUed poet§ of me 19C He fM agam: 

horse. In usage the connotation is dou- ochreous residue , heart > s dregs-that was 

ble: obsession and mischief. Giving su fficiemly unlike Tennyson, but it wouldn't 

this tag to a new literature signified that do. Heart was one of the bad old words. But 

it mocked and threw over the set forms why write about autumn at all — another pro- 

and rational language of all previous hibited word. It all shows how second-rate I 

poetry and prose, together with the am, he concluded. 

conventions of print. — Gerald Bullett, The Jury (1 935) 

The Dada manifestos were accom- 
panied by poems and prose that made their way across frontiers, so that by 
1920, Dadaism, led by Tristan Tzara, was one of the new schools that critics 
treated with respect. Its productions were classed as "amusing," but that did 
not make them any less "important" — destruction by derision is a recognized 
mode. Its novelty lay in the nihilism of the joke. It was not aimed at particular 
targets in orderly language; it attacked everything by dislocating everything. 
There lay the importance of Dada and its analogues in the graphic arts (722>). 
They gave a new model of total demolition, a fresh impetus to the prewar 
Abolitionism of Jarry, Lautreamont, and Marinetti (<619). The point was easy 
to grasp — a child could understand it. 

In that same year, 1916, James Joyce was also in Zurich, studying music 
with Busoni and intending to be a singer. But he was even then leaning toward 
literature. His fellow student, the American composer Otto Luening, recalls in 
his autobiography how fond Joyce was of producing verbal glosses on musical 
works/ Whether Dada's way with words in print had anything to do with 
Joyce's later taking apart and regluing of syllables remains conjecture. If it is 
only a coincidence, the parallel shows the spirit of the times at work disman- 
tling linguistic and literary habits. Apollinaire had prayed for a new language, 
Mallarme for a new visual layout of ideas; H. M. Barzun for an orchestration of 
voices (<648). Time and the war translated their desires into an explosion of 
the dictionary. The prewar Futurist Marinetti brought his creed up to date in 
Freedom for Words* listing among 10 principles: war on intellect, ending syntax 
and common spelling, creating the ugly, machinelike living, simultaneous per- 
ception, and "the maximum of disorder." Many kinds of poems and novels 
resulted from this form of freedom, and to this day one comes across contem- 
porary writers who exploit typography as a means of expression/ What 
remains firmly established for all is the right to disregard not only the reader's 
beliefs but also his understanding. 



720 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 



Surrealism is pure psychic automatism by 
means of which is expressed the real func- 
tioning of thought — thought dictated with- 
out any control over it from reason or from 
considerations of a moral or esthetic land. 

— Andre Breton (1934) 



This right acquired a recognized 
basis when Surrealism came into being 
under the leadership of Andre Breton. 
The Dadaists claimed that they were its 
progenitors by virtue of their yielding 
to impulse; the Surrealists had the 
advantage of being "scientific" about 
it: they were versed in the nature and workings of the Unconscious and relied 
on dreams and the well-known phenomenon of automatic writing as the 
proper groundwork of poetry and fiction. Here was an offshoot of the 
recently publicized psychoanalysis, which seemed to justify abandoning 
the rational, the coherent, the readily intelligible in literature. Were they not 
largely absent from everyday life, business, government? Let the ubiquitous 
Haphazard speak. 

This attitude suggests another turn in the theme of INDIVIDUALISM. 
Each artist cultivates his own garden, psychically speaking, and the reader or 
beholder uses his own fund of psychic images to interpret what is before him. 
The critical theory of the 1890s that each work of art is "an autonomous 
world" validates the practice. From another point of view, such works are also 
"pure art," because, coming out of the unconscious, they ignore all the mean- 
ings of the world. In the domain of spirit and psyche, communication is at a 
low ebb, its value negligible; it depends after all on conventions, and these are 
outworn. Non-sense rules the world. 

The result is paradoxical but of 
decisive effect. The artist condemns 
society by picturing not its follies but its 
madness. He is the jester whose absurd 
remarks tell the king what is wrong with 
his realm. The 20C writer is under no 
obligation of clear discourse — the lan- 
guage of Dada, like the blur oiFinnegans 
Wake and the stutterings of Gertrude 
Stein, is by its nature anti-social; like 
Mallarme he himself despises his audi- 
ence; but claims its attention as the one 
being who pictures the world as it is. At 
the same time, the work of art being 
pure and autonomous, not subject to 
any rules, it affirms the artist's uncondi- 
tional EMANCIPATION. 

Dada, Surrealism, and their sequels 
had as a by-product a democratic en- 



DADASONG 

An elevator's song 
That had dada in its heart 
And overtaxed its motor 
That had dada in its heart 

The elevator 

Was carrying a king 

Heavy breakable autonomous 

He cut off his big right arm 

Sent it to the pope in Rome 

Which is why 

The elevator 

No longer had dada in its heart 

Eat some chocolate 

Wash your brain 

dada 

dada 

Drink some water 



The Artist Prophet and Jester <^> 721 

largement of the terms art and artist. Relying on the unconscious simplifies 
things: the unconscious is by definition neither learned nor thoughtful and 
everybody has one; and its deliverances in free associations or automatic writ- 
ing are exempt from revision, else they would lose their genuineness. Thus the 
individual artist, not responsible in any direction, is really above criticism. It is 
a return to the ancient Greek conception of the "genius" — for example 
Socrates' daemon — as a spirit that lives within and guides the creature without 
his control. 

Of course, the best disciples of Surrealism did more than tap the under- 
ground lake of associations driven by instinct, and as a result of their giving 
their material a tendency Surrealist acquired a narrower meaning, now the only 
one in common use: anything that causes dismay by violating ordinary expe- 
rience. And since it seems that the unconscious is a reservoir of horrors, 
exploring it makes the cruel, the perverse, the obscene — the "sick" — more 
and more taken for granted as natural and normal. The untoward that is 
reported by the press it dubs "surrealistic," and this factual source encourages 
writers to outdo one another in creating scenes of outrage. Science fiction 
and film as well as novels keep teasing the mind with the unspeakable and 
possibly incite young and old to reenact the deeds in real life. The progress 
made since the Gothic shudders of the late 18C is manifest (<410). 

* 
* * 

When back from the trenches, the painters and musicians of the older gen- 
eration felt disoriented. The path traced so long ago, in the zeros and teens of 
the century, had petered out. It was impossible to paint, sculp, or compose 
in the old way; equally impossible to start from scratch like a beginner. And 
since the latest young generation had been deprived of the normal tutelage by 
and resistance to their immediate elders, 

those newcomers who were unmoved Today every composer's overcoat has its cor- 
by Dada were at a loss how to proceed. responding hook in the cloakroom of the 

As it turned out, these elders past. 
tended to leapfrog backward over one — Constant Lambert (1934) 
or more centuries and draw stimulus 

from forgotten works. Apollinaire, who returned wounded from the south- 
eastern front, modified his technique and ended up writing poems to his new 
love in the versification of the mid-1 9C. Stravinsky, the star that led the musi- 
cally advanced before 1914, found themes to inspire him in Pergolesi. 

Fernand Leger and Picasso abandoned their ways of analysis-cum- 
synthesis and dealt in representation and rotundities that negated their previ- 
ous geometries. For a time it was believed that a sober neo-classicism was 
under way. 



722 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

But the winning gamble, the ultramodernist note was struck by 
Duchamp, also an elder. His temper had been contrary even before the war, 
from dissatisfaction with himself and his peers. The brilliance of his Nude 
Descending a Staircase remained a glow in the distance but not a beacon. His far- 
reaching influence on his contemporaries and successors has come from 
another signal light: his painting a mustache on a reproduction of the Mona 
Lisa. This coupling of two powerful symbols disposed of the Renaissance and 
its sequels; it was the counterpart of Dada. Construction was at an end and its 
opposite had begun. 

To mix images one might say that the mustache opened a door, gave a 
password, flashed a permanent green light that allowed anything well done 
with pencil or chisel to qualify as art — or rather, to qualify as fulfilling the col- 
lective aim of anti-art. [The reproductions to look at are in The World of Marcel 
Duchamp by Calvin Tomkins.] A new term, "free form," summarizes the var- 
ious techniques used in this emancipation. The creative eye found ways to 
discern in ordinary objects the "free form" of others, as Arp did in his mus- 
tache-hat and mustache-watch. Incompatibles when fused spark ambiguous 
meanings — witness the "free-formers" in words — and Ambiguity con- 
tributes to disarray. 

These departures served the further purpose of bewildering by the tides 
put on the works. They could be cryptic, visibly irrelevant, or obscene. 
Everything kept on "amusing" the beholder through the years to come. The 
stuffed goat with a tire around its middle entertained at the Tate Gallery in 
London; the ladder against the wall inviting a walk-through at the Whitney in 
New York; the 22 small television screens around the room just oscillating 
in South America; the man's suit of gray felt on a hanger in Munich — Duchamp 
again had blazed the trail with a green vest, also on a hanger. These jokes were 
serious and must be taken so. Helping to destroy a culture is, in fact, no joke if 
one is bursting with talent and technical skill and must bend them to a sort of 
REDUCTIONISM, instead of giving their expansiveness free rein. Other artists 
found less demanding and more direct means of contributing to the common 
effort. Found Art (jetsam from the beach), Junk Art (the discarded refrigerator 
door), Disposable Art (objects, magnified, or made of flimsy materials; bridges 
and buildings draped in cloth) — all these told the world that art as an institution 
with a moral or social purpose was dead. 

The same message could be read in aleatory art (based on random points 
generated by dice or a computer); mobile art, including "sculptures" in the 
form of small useless machines in purposeless motion, or the pair of shoes 
that step back and forth; the canvases that show simple or complex geomet- 
rical lines (a whole series "exploring the square"), these last opening the way 
to drawings or photographs of bacteria, snowflakes, or internal organs. The 



The Artist Prophet and Jester <^> 723 

point is: just design, in two dimensions or three, with or without color. 
Pattern is all — almost any pattern pleases. 

On seeing that painters and sculptors were no longer representing per- 
sons or objects but preferred forms bare of suggestiveness, critics began to 
speak of Abstract Art. This usage took it for granted that those forms were 
abstracted; that is, derived from some existing thing in nature. It is an unfor- 
tunate label, convenient as shorthand perhaps, but a critical misnomer on 
several counts. First, it blots out the fact that all art is concrete, made of mat- 
ter and non-existent apart from it, even literature, oral and written. If anyone 
thinks that music escapes this condition, let him calculate the mass of the air 
set vibrating in definite shapes during a two-hour concert. Next, the arts that 
"represent" do so by abstracting too. No portrait, landscape, or bust dupli- 
cates in full what its model offers to view. Lastly, not all the Modernists 
derived their visual or plastic forms from some part of nature, something 
seen and then stripped down to a skeletal look. Nor can the term properly 
apply to some abstract idea that the work supposedly conveys. Sir Joshua 
Reynolds called one of his paintings The Age of Innocence, but what we see on 
the canvas is the figure of a little girl. These distinctions are important 
because of the genuine ABSTRACTION that science and techne have interwo- 
ven with the immediate and palpable in modern life. That type of abstraction, 
as shown earlier, deserves the name: it pulls away from direct experience, for 
example, a musical performance live last year and heard, subdy weakened, on 
tape today. 

Duchamp's world of forms was soon supplemented by Dali's, sprung 
explicidy from Surrealism. This artist too felt the need to raise a flag by paint- 
ing Mona Lisa's upper lip, endowing it with a facsimile of his own German- 
Kaiser bracketlike mustache. For the rest, his representation of things is as 
they occur — or might occur — in dreams and preferably in nightmares. The 
watch bent over the edge of the table cannot be expected, in its uncomfort- 
able pose, to keep good time. But the technique itself is of the very old-fash- 
ioned "photographic" kind, much imitated by other Surrealists, who can thus 
indulge their evident abilities. Their landscapes, nudes, and still lifes, includ- 
ing the jusdy famous can of tomato soup,° are academic art of the best worst 
kind and thus make the point that even that despised style is scheduled for 
perdition. 

The imaginative painter's eye and hand found yet another way to 
enlighten the beholder: make line, color, and texture the sole interest. Prewar 
critics had said that this trinity was the only part to admire in any work (<622; 
646), but they had not supposed that it would exclude other elements. Now 
the program was taken literally. Large panels of "vibrating" colors in graded 
or contrasted shades, or dots, lines, planes, checkerboards, or unpatterned 



724 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

splotches (some randomly dripped on the canvas) arrested attention even 
though they are in essence very still life. (The parallel in music will be noted 
later, 727 >.) The mind and the senses must be led back to their naive condi- 
tion to bring high culture back to its first elements. 

Finally, the most intense artistic minds took the most direct path. They 
represented on canvas or in stone, wood, or metal human beings in dehu- 
manized form — body parts twisted, amputated, emaciated, background and 
accessories revolting, coloring and texture mortuary. At one exhibition in 
New York the artist produced the ultimate model by painting his body green 
and lying nude in an open coffin. Since then an English painter has chosen as 
his medium excrement. They have a good pretext for their offerings in the 
physical and moral destruction of war. No imagining of disfigured faces and 
torn bodies and ruined landscapes could rival what firepower does, and it 
would be but a slight exaggeration to call Picasso's Guernica 2. "realistic" pic- 
ture. From physical degradation made visible one can infer what the latest 
moderns feel in their existence and recognize in these anti-human portrai- 
tures. [The book to read is The Dehumani^ation of Art by Ortega y Gasset] 

Given the several ways of modernist art it is logical to conclude that the 
production of things to see and read is not a rare or special gift. It is populis- 
tically distributed to all or nearly all. For one thing, some of the genres such 
as Found Art do not require long study or much practice. For another, the 
unimportance of subject matter eliminates the need for psychological or 
other truth in the work. In other words, the demand for genius has died out. 
Accordingly, there has sprouted throughout the western world a great num- 
ber of museums, galleries, workshops, sidewalk shows, and government or 
business programs to exhibit, sell, or send abroad as propaganda the increas- 
ing mass of works. This flowering has taken place not only in capital cities but 
also in modest towns and villages. These new art centers have been seconded 
by schools, hospitals, and other sources of wall space so as to accommodate 
children's art, art by the physically or mentally disabled, art by convicts, art by 
chimpanzees. Art proves also suitable for therapy and for tranquilizing the 
unruly in prisons and asylums. 

In the genres that call for more premeditation than the rest, the beholder 
often found that appreciation required some familiarity with the great tradi- 
tion. Pastiche and parody cannot avoid being Allusive Art and it loses its 
point if the target is unfamiliar. Other tendencies likewise contained echoes 
of the past, the modernist mind being haunted by it willy-nilly. Picasso, for 
example, seemed obsessed with Delacroix's Women of Algiers. Fifteen times he 
patterned a work of his own on the Romanticist painting, each more "scrib- 
bled over" than the last, but all recognizable. The series might be entitled The 
Victory of Duty Over Admiration, the duty being to erase the past. For another 



The Artist Prophet and Jester <^> 725 

kind of allusiveness, read Balzac's play of 1 847, Mercadet, and note the recur- 
ring line "waiting for Godeau," a character who is expected to solve every- 
body's troubles and who never appears. 

* 
* * 

Architecture and music must be modern too, in their own way Architects 
and craftsmen in the decorative arts did not reject their immediate forerun- 
ners, possibly because they dealt in objects of public and domestic utility. The 
former had to house thousands of office workers on a narrow plot and built 
tall towers; the latter graced the period by the brilliant profusion of the 
Exposition des Arts Decoratifs of 1925, postponed 10 years by the war. The 
show made Art Deco a historical term. The glass of Lalique, the textiles of 
Rodier, the tapestries of Lur$at, together with the new forms of chairs and 
lamps and tables imprinted the mind's eye indelibly. They reshaped not 
merely the public's expectations as to household furniture, but gave the idea 
of design a distinct status while creating a new profession (726>). Its mem- 
bers serve the world of commerce and dictate shapes for everything from 
perfume bottles and computers to vacuum cleaners and bathroom fixtures. 
This breed of artists arose with Art Nouveau in the Nineties, but Art Deco 
moved away from fluidity and toward the sterner lines of machinery. Louis 
Sullivan's doctrine of Functionalism — form follows function — continued to 
rule modernist architecture. The doctrine, though fallacious, was productive 
of much beauty. Function in any artifact is rarely single, and the designer's 
favoring one function usually means neglect of another: the motor car looks 
like a turtle to be "aerodynamic" — speed in the wind — but it is anti-func- 
tional for the user to get in and out of. So true is this conflict of aims that a 
new descriptive term has emerged: makers of quite functional devices have 
had to modify them so as to pacify the customers who want them "user- 
friendly." 

Art Deco objects and furniture, smooth in sweeping lines, sharp angles, 
and low to the ground, were preceded by the radical architecture of the 
Nineties, also influenced by machine industry (<554). Its postwar flowering 
descriptively called International was ever more geometrical and bare of 
ornament; it gave the modernist city block the silhouette of shoe boxes on 
end. The mass effect was awe-inspiring even when any or all of the separate 
buildings were undistinguished. [The book to look through is The International 
Style by Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson.] One architect only, the 
Belgian Auguste Perret, the prewar pioneer of construction in glass and con- 
crete (<677), continued to invent ways to give surfaces diversity by Art Deco 
decorations and receding or protruding planes. Most other buildings relied 



726 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

on window placement and the feeble effect of modest molding or timid 
entablatures at the second-story level. Above, the walls rose flat and gray like 
so many punched cards. 

At the same time, what may be called techne architecture had become a 
genre of its own and was receiving enthusiastic praise for such masterpieces 
as the liner Normandie° the George Washington Bridge in New York, and 
later the Gateway Arch over the Mississippi at St. Louis. It was characteristic 
of its novelty that the New York bridge was "saved" by artistic influence from 
having its metal towers encased in stone panels, as originally planned. 
Concurrently, people with Art Deco furniture sported an actual valve or gear 
of polished metal on their mantelpiece. 

To justify his monotony in concrete, Le Corbusier, high priest of the 
genre, said that a house was a machine for living. He built large blocks of 
workers' houses and a lock-keeper's gate on the Rhine in the same functional 
(and one would think, suicidal) style. When after the second war the reaction 
came, helped by the development of new materials and new ways of handling 
the old, it rejoined the other arts in their defiance of expectation. Churches 
took on rounded animal forms and museums double-boiler outlines. The lat- 
est conception of a luxurious mansion suggests huge rocks in a heap. All pro- 
claim the liberated fancy. 

To call a house a machine and make it feel as if it were, by movable parti- 
tions, large expanses of glass, and other factorylike features, yields, once 
again, convenience at the expense of comfort. Such a house is REDUCTIVISM, 
down from the neolithic coziness of the cave, later refined into the hearth and 
home. Together, free form and mechanizing add to the aggressive conviction 
that anything may be done. 

To believe that these several characteristics of the modernist arts molded 
only the souls of the elites is to overlook the fact of "cultural seepage" — 
through advertising, which always borrows from art and intellect; through the 
highly organized entertainment industry, which translates the new into the pop- 
ular; and through a new, self-conscious activity that some have called the dis- 
tinctive feature of the age: design. Owing much to the Decorative Arts 
Exhibition of 1 925, it had its start early in the Depression years, when a French 
army captain named Raymond Loewy came to the United States and, with a 
portfolio under his arm, aggressively argued with manufacturers that their 
products were ugly, clumsy, and possibly dangerous. He made sketches and got 
orders to redesign a variety of articles from dictating machines to locomotives. 
Of the last he made the first streamlined model. Soon other draftsmen, who 
had encroached on his lucrative practice, were streamlining everything in sight. 
Loewy also introduced color, and on the plea that certain products, such as per- 
fume, looked so much like one another that advertising was useless, he annexed 
packaging for his stable of designers. The skill of the new profession has been 



The Artist Prophet and Jester q^> 727 

applied without limit and has resulted in making the outside of what we buy 
even more desirable than the thing within. [The book to read is Loewy's 
account of his odyssey: Industrial Design] 

The arts of Modernism have done one more thing; they have played a 
part in the general relaxation of conduct so widely complained of since the 
mid-century The attack on authority, the ridicule of anything established, 
the distortions of language and objects, the indifference to clear meaning, 
the violence to the human form, the return to the primitive elements of sen- 
sation, the growing list of genres called Anti-, of which the root principle is 
"Expect nothing," have made Modernism at once the mirror of disintegra- 
tion and an incitement to extending it. And all this was going on long before 
the moral, sexual, and political rebellions that shook the western world in 
the 1960s. 

* 
* * 

Except for a small group, the musicians did not immediately find ways to 
do for their art what Dada and the architects accomplished. This exceptional 
vanguard was linked to the Futurists 

and called themselves Bruiteurs — When George Antheil adds to his score six- 
noise-makers. Theirs was both the true teen pianos, an electric buzzer or two, an aero- 
music of the city and the return to the plane propeller, and a pneumatic drill he is, 
elemental fact that concussing various after all, providing little more than the average 
materials will create sound. Hence a background to a telephone conversation. 
lifelike polyphony of clangors, inter- — Constant Lambert, "The Mechanical 
spersed with the chromatic portamenti Stimulus" (1934) 

of sirens and the two notes of fire 

engines. This innovation was recently recalled in anniversary celebrations in 
Italy and in France; the Futurist effort had anticipated the harmony of shell- 
fire at the front. After the war, a somewhat modified inspiration produced 
Antheil's Ballet Mecanique^ and in our time John Cage and others have reverted 
to the eloquence of pure noise. 

Cage denatured the sound of the piano by physical means, presented 
works consisting of blows on pieces of wood, and in the notable 4' 33" fea- 
tured silence carefully measured. These works purpose to teach respect for 
the elements of the art. During the silence all kinds of sound occur in the hall; 
this revelation helps to loosen up the auditor's rigid notions of what music 
should be, whereas in the composer's ear all sounds are equal. These events 
inspire the reflection that a good deal of 20C art has been instructional, the 
artist-pedagogue flogging the dead philistine, as in Magritte's painting of a 
large briar type with the caption "This is not a pipe" — as of course it isn't. 

From the prewar decade the musicians of the 1 920s inherited the strong 



728 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

belief that the system of tonality was literally played out. The extreme use of 
chromaticism (using notes outside the chosen scale) had destroyed the value 
of scale itself as carrier of significance. Recourse to polytonality (two or more 
scales simultaneously) then to atonality (disregard of the sense of scale) ush- 
ered in for music the common modernist state of complete emancipation. 
The orchestra also tended to lose its preeminence as an instrument, and small 
groupings of its constituents were favored, with special emphasis on percus- 
sion, which echoed the cacophony of life. But Varese's subtle and complex 
lonisation showed that music could not, like words and paint, do without sys- 
tem. Notes by themselves lack the connotations that even a syllable may 
evoke or the emotional tone that a line or dab of color arouses. After a good 
deal of composing atonally, Schoenberg devised the system called serial (he 
preferred the term pantonality), which attracted the majority of musicians 
while repelling most audiences. 

The public tried hard; the philistine did not come out of his grave; on the 
contrary, he kept there his aesthetic distance. The reason for the prevailing 
demur was that "serial composition" by means of the "12-note row" appeals 
to the mind rather than the ear. It liberated dissonance and demanded of the 
listener a perceptiveness nothing had trained him for. What the system 
required was to decide at the outset the only allowable notes to be used in the 
piece, all combinations and permutations being usable. It was a challenge: 
"see what you can do within these constraints." The scheme was circum- 
scribed creation. Boulez among others declared that he was bent on "destroy- 
ing everything" and he earned critical approval for his "dismantling of music 
and total reconstruction under new laws." 

After use by Schoenberg, Boulez, Pousseur, Stockhausen, and others, 
some serialists came to employ mathematics to ascertain the possibilities. It 
turned out surprisingly that wider ranges of sounds were available than had 
been expected. Seeing this, some used computers to make the choices at ran- 
dom — "aleatory music," as in the poetry similarly engineered and like 

painting by dripping pigments. Other 

^, , . „ . , , composers left the choices to the per- 

The work is made collectively at the moment L 1111 

r . , . . ~ , , former, and one at least declared that 

of its being composed-performed, and 

henceforth merged in a single creative, quasi Ae result was something not to be 

magical art. I try to put you, the performer, in called music but onl Y vibrations. Tra- 

tune with the currents that go through me, so ditional scoring by conventional signs 

that you may be joined to the inexhaustible on the staff sometimes gave way to 

fount that floods us with vibrations and curving lines — arabesques in different 

thereby transmit not a music, but the vibra- colors — general indications for a semi- 

tions that come from a higher region of direct improvising performer. The practice of 

actlon - the jazz musicians was instanced as a 

— Karlheinz Stockhausen (1969) justifying precedent. 



The Artist Prophet and Jester <^> 729 

Technique, ingenuity, chance, and the irresistible lure of SCIENTISM dis- 
placed the tonally ordered intention of expressiveness. These aspects of the 
new music resemble Joyce's words made out of other words, the architects' 
"sculptured" houses, the painters' elaborate geometries, and the sculptors' 
search for new materials and ready-made items to assemble for "installa- 
tions." Artists in the 1920s began to speak of their "research," its "problems" 
and difficulties hinting at heroic effort. Like Stravinsky referring to one of his 
works, they confided to the public: "This has been labored over very 
patiently." 

Serial composition does not favor the lyric voice — melody — but the 
genius of Alban Berg, by using a modified form of the system, did create two 
operas — Wo^eck and Lulu — that won over the choosy devotees of that 
genre. Though not melodic in the bel canto Italian sense, the music of these 
works unmistakably conveys whatever Berg intended. For the application of 
the pure system one must listen to the works of Webern. Characteristically, 
they are brief; his entire output fits on two small disks. 

At one point in the second half of the century it seemed as if an advance 
in techne comparable to that which created the 19C orchestra (<546) would 
inspire composers in new directions. This was the synthesizer, a device by 
which any note, rhythm, or tone color can be produced in any volume desired 
and immediately recorded on tape. It is as if every instrument had unlimited 
range and power without the help of human lungs and fingers. The machine 
had a forerunner in the 1930s when Leon Theremin demonstrated how radio 
oscillations could be controlled by hand to produce "electro-acoustic" music. 
But his invention found no takers. 

Twenty years later, more than one classically trained musician greeted the 
synthesizer warmly for its flexibility and ease of control. They have used it for 
effects by themselves or in combination with the familiar instruments. This 
"electronic music," like the percussive genre, enabled the composer to echo the 
violence and harshness of life. But the modernist sensibility is disinclined to 
vastness. Just as poets attempted no large-scale works of public import, culti- 
vating only the personal voice, so composers preferred the small ensemble, 
often unusual in its instrumental makeup. Small works had the advantage of 
being more likely to be performed. The large orchestras had a set repertoire, 
and to be played by one of them entailed prohibitive expense, from the print- 
ing of parts to the extra rehearsing of difficult scores. And as in the theater, 
unionized labor created hurdles along the path between artist and public. 

One other musical innovation also bore this restrained character: the 
solo-voice works composed and sung on a 43-tone scale by Harry Partch. 
They required a few specially built instruments, and the unfamiliarity of both 
the apparatus and the music kept these cantatas from receiving much notice 
for a long time. [The book to read is Genesis of a Music by Partch himself.] 



730 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Appreciation is beginning to be shown at the very end of the century, and one 
much-played composer, Gyorgy Ligeti, has acknowledged Partch's influence. 
But the music of Bernard Van Dieren, again sui generis, is still awaiting the 
serious attention it deserves. 

* 
* * 

Any contemporary observer of the cultural scene since the Great War 
knows that it does not appear to him or her in its fullness and that judgments 
about any part of it are uncommonly liable to error. The neglect of Partch and 
Van Dieren illustrates the incompleteness; the clash of opinion about a crowd 
of composers, including Varese, Stockhausen, Cowell, Carter, Luening, 
Babbitt, Boulez, Sessions, Wuorinen, and Ussachevsky, and about electronic 
music shows the danger. It applies to modernists in every other art. A con- 
scientious critic faces a barrage of views that are tenable — and contradictory; 
he cannot entertain them all; yet not to choose is to prove wrong. 

As for spotting general characteristics, the task is difficult too. A critical 
term first used about Modernism tells us why: its arts have been promoted and 
accepted as "experimental." The word stands for endless efforts to be differ- 
ent; it is one of the many misnomers of our time. An experiment is conducted 
under rigorous conditions; it follows a method, relies on others' most recent 
research, and is subject to review by peers. The artist's effort is entirely individ- 
ual and uncontrolled. It is barely trial and error, since there exist no standards 
by which error can be gauged and a better trial made. What Modernism 
achieved is no less worthy for the lack of an honorific drawn from the labora- 
tory. It would be better described — and this for more than one reason — as sug- 
gestive art. (The French slang phrase "launching a balloon" springs to mind.) 
Suggestive would cover the part that was pastiche and parody, the part that 
appealed by scandal, the part that embodied the obscure hints of the uncon- 
scious, and — perhaps clearest of all — the combination of parts that detach 
emotion from past art. Still, the word experimental proved a great convenience as 
a mind-opener. It made the public, inured to science, take the improbable with 
composure; it kept the lid down on the coffin of the philistine. 

But the artists' suggestive efforts 
The worker is one rather given to observing, dM not promote the mission of 
thinking, and doing. It's not easy for him to Modernism unaided. More than ever 
talk about and explain his work, but as he and before, the creators harangued the 
his work have been placed in false position crowd. Theories proliferated; books, 
many times, I suppose he owes it to himself periodicals, interviews, catalogues of 
to say something. exhibitions, and program notes ex- 

— John Marin (c. 1910) plained and justified and made tech- 



The Artist Prophet and Jester <^> 731 

nique pre-eminent. The inarticulate artist was at a disadvantage and made 
weak gestures to follow the fashion. If the articulate felt a similar inadequacy 
when wanting to impress otherwise than by the work itself, they concealed it 
in recurrent cliches. Their art was the result of "concentrated study of spatial 
and linear interrelations"; or as "the determination of spaces by their relation 
to surface and line." The blurbs rang the changes on space, line, color, vol- 
ume, and material or (in the other arts) brought in nature, sensation, feelings 
research, rigor, and control. Much of this was no doubt sincere but added noth- 
ing to the beholder's previous knowledge that painters and sculptors are con- 
cerned with space, line, and volume, and others with the things they boasted 
of. When the tides of compositions did not joke or provoke, they expressed 
the same wish to appear learned, difficult, and scientific: Investigation No. 12, 
Structure for Two Pianos, Study in Curves and Squares — this last rather superfluous. 
The ancient maxim about art concealing art had lost currency. 

Critics and artists who favored the serious, hard-work posture, as against 
the jokes and mockings that were prominent in the 1920s and 1930s and that 
are still found spicing new works, have 

at times called these "the sophomoric Dada was born of a revoh that was shared by 
element" in Modernism. The allega- aU adolescents. 

tion rests pardy on the fact that many _ _ „ 

r j j — Tristan Tzara (1926) 

of the artists were very young and also 
on the quality of the jokes. 

The rimes and contents of the Dadaists' works were not witty, their 
ridicule was not sharply aimed or worded with brilliance or originality. Painting 
the mustache on Mona Lisa can hardly be deemed an inspiration that thrills and 
makes one go back to it with renewed delight. The same is true of that photo- 
graph by Man Ray, righdy regarded as a master, which shows the back of a 
seated nude woman, decorated with cutouts that imitate the^shaped holes of 
a violin. One feels likewise about the tides Erik Satie gave his compositions: 
Three Pieces Shaped Like Pears, Dried Up Embryos, Things Seen Without Spectacles. 
When Duchamp in later years signed a copy of the Mona Lisa untouched, he 
wrote on it "Shaved." These sallies from artists now in the pantheon call for a 
few words more. 

The term sophomoric means wisdom expressed foolishly — or folly wisely. 
If taken merely as dismissive it would not fit the case, for the results of Dada 
and its continuing animus show that the jesting was not silly but effective. Yet 
sophomoric does apply when one reflects that the mustache and the dorsal 
violin were intended to be #«inspired, adolescent — not a joke but a jape. The 
ridicule mocks itself as well as its object. Modernist works of derision did not 
provoke laughter and were not meant to. They were mock-funny, which 
means serious, and those called "amusing" are designed to leave one hardly 



732 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

smiling but moved to reflection. This is also one's blunted response to the 
new style of caricature: Paul Klee's or Ronald Searle's differ in this way from 
the old practice from Daumier to Max Beerbohm. 

This muted elation is what the people of the period urged upon one 
another and boasted of possessing but misnamed "the sense of humor." It 
was not the ability to see life as comedy, which needs no special recommen- 
dation. It was the readiness to laugh at oneself when among others, a feat that 
rarely sparks explosive laughter; it is only SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS made into 
the habit of self-depreciation. It requires no self-reform, but has its use in 
forestalling criticism. Such apologies and confessions should not be classed 
as hypocrisy. Their popularity corresponded to the postwar increase in demo- 
cratic feeling, which demands that one continually show awareness of one's 
limitations. Far from feeling at ease or superior, one reassures others by 
acknowledging that one is "only human" or "human after all." At the same 
time, through its connection with the mocking arts, the modernist sense of 
humor (it needs a better name) guarantees that one is adept at seeing through 
everything. 

* 
* * 

Although the philistine left no descendants, it should not be imagined 
that the great drive to emancipate the arts was entirely unopposed. The 
resisters and denouncers of Modernism were highly qualified critics, culti- 
vated men and women, impeccable intellectuals. And they took a higher 
ground than that of simply rejecting some products of the artistic avant-garde 
as repetitious, sophomoric, and obscure not from profundity of thought but 
from mere slovenliness. This opposition attacked the entire mass of culture- 
makers with a capital C- — writers, thinkers, and talkers, as well as artists. A 
widely read book published in 1 928, The Treason of the Clerks, gave a compact 
statement of the charge. ("Clerks" was the inclusive term, as in Coleridge's 
"clerisy.") The betrayal consisted in abandoning Reason and the duty to 
devote it to universal ends. The truths of the spirit were eternal and imposed 
limits that must not be transgressed. The author, Julien Benda, argued that a 
philosophy such as Bergson's gave free rein to the will, and thus to the will- 
fulness characteristic of the modernist temper. 

Many works before and after Benda's made the related points with kin- 
dred arguments. Mas sis' Defence of the Occident, Irving Babbitt's Rousseau and 
Romanticism, and the Shelburne Essays of Paul Elmer More (these last two 
authors Americans) took the reader back a hundred years to find the germs 
of the decline in store for western civilization: it was Romanticism, with its 
abandonment of rules, overstepping of limits, and ridicule of conventions — 
in short, the general EMANCIPATION — now victorious. 



The Artist Prophet and Jester q^> 733 

Anti-Romanticism was not a new critical position, especially in France, 
and it had (for some) a political and religious corollary. That side of the move- 
ment was much to the fore in the heyday of Mussolini. T. S. Eliot was not 
alone in defining himself as classicist, Anglican, and monarchist. Only, out- 
side England this last pair of allegiances meant one or another religious faith 
and some form of dictatorship. In the United States the literary group known 
as the Southern Agrarians were content to be "reactionaries," in the sense of 
resisting looseness in art, morals, and politics. 

The world of the articulate was thus divided into two camps, each of 
which saw a different set of menaces working their evil on civilization — a new 
barbarism or a reactionary oppression. A third group, the Marxists, favored 
"social realism," which was plain representation in all the arts so as to convey 
to the people a simple message in support of the socialized state. This last 
conception of art has vanished; the other two have faded away from the cen- 
ter of discussion and there is talk of Postmodernism. The reasons given for 
this new label are often elusive. One fact stands out in the graphic arts: repre- 
sentation is once more acceptable, clear common speech in poetry also, and 
"serial" composition is no longer obligatory. As for the political discontent 
that incited to flirting with dictatorship, it has had to find other outlets. What 
arouses partisan passion at the end of the century is the split on moral and 
religious issues. The outlook that calls itself Liberal faces everywhere one or 
more parties of the right who demand, like Benda, a return to the fixities. 

* 
* * 

While the public between the wars watched with amusement or distaste 
the avant-gardes discharging their arrows at past literature and present soci- 
ety, prewar writers who had survived and were still productive enjoyed ever 
wider appreciation. Shaw, Wells, Conrad, Yeats, Hardy came fully into their 
own. Kipling's reputation entered a new phase. He was prized for his prewar 
masterpiece Kim and had moved on from stories about India and poems 
about the British empire to tales for children — the Jungle Books — and next, to 
atmospheric stories about rural England, ghost stories, social satire, and tales 
about ships' engines and imaginable air transport across oceans. This chimed 
in with some artists and designers' reverence for machinery, but one critic 
complained that Kipling began by depicting human situations, then wild ani- 
mals, and was ending with steam boilers and propeller shafts. The rejoinder 
might be that it takes art to make the behavior of animals and machines hold 
the attention of adult readers. 

Another group — Andre Gide, Romain Rolland, Galsworthy, Arnold 
Bennett, Norman Douglas, Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Mann — were the 
acknowledged leaders of western fiction; and the rising generation — Cocteau, 



734 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Maurois, Sinclair Lewis, Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest 
Hemingway — seemed the avant-garde, more solid than the Surrealists. A few 
more — E. M. Forster, Chekhov, and Proust — were in fact published authors 
before the war but recognized only afterward. 

One underlying idea, one subject inspires this large output of fiction: the 
horrors of the narrow fate enforced by bourgeois life and institutions. From 
Mann's Buddenbrooks, which depicts a family's disintegration, to Galsworthy's 
Forsyte Saga, Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, and Proust's and Gide's extended novels, 
each set in a different country, the same conflict is shown in which the life of 
the spirit is stifled or destroyed. Society is hostile to the artist, and the family 
shrinks ordinary men and women to a fraction of their human capacity. The 
American novelists of the period had an ally in H. L. Mencken, who inveighed 
against what he called "the booboisie" and the democracy it controlled. The 
attack sounds as if the Nineties had never broken through the earlier 
Victorian narrowness and a new EMANCIPATION was called for. 

Side by side with the authors of these attacks on "the system," writers 
back from the trenches turned their experience into a myriad of war novels, 
which is to say anti-war novels. A good many combined the spectacle of those 
horrors, or the return from them to civilian life, with scenes of sexual free- 
dom — again, a repetition of the Nineties. This literary crusade was induced 
by wartime emotions and occasions, which concentrated the thoughts of 
many on sexual satisfaction, denying it by separating men from women, 
encouraging it by the opportunities the separation created. It was not long 
before it became obligatory in the novel to introduce at some point the overt 
sexual scene. D. H. Lawrence's widely banned Lady Chatterley's Lover was in 
effect a discourse on method, in which the words used (though in dialect) 
reinstated a kind of basic English. It raised the legal issue of obscenity, still 
with us. In poetry, instead of the dreams and sighs of late Victorian verse, one 
found the breasts and thighs of the uninhibited image-maker. In due course, 
but more guardedly, there followed the celebration of homosexual love. 

Thanks to courageous women such as Margaret Sanger and Marie 
Stopes, knowledge of contraception made headway in the 1920s, and social 
thought was broadened by a growing list of instructors in sexual fulfillment. 
Lovemaking as an art and the techniques to be mastered for adequate, not to 
say professional, performance became a concern of the wider public. 
Sexology was welcomed to the circle of ologies, while the popularization of 
Freud led to the belief that repressing the sexual instinct was dangerous. A 
change in manners favored this EMANCIPATION. Informality had become the 
fashion and it simplified encounters; for etiquette is a barrier, the casual style 
an invitation. The soft collar, the short skirt, the slip-on shoe accompanied a 
new feeling of camaraderie between the sexes that encouraged meeting and 
dashing about in sports cars, also a convenience for the pastime known as 



The Artist Prophet and Jester <^> 735 

"necking." The bobbed hair and flat chest, bobby socks and sensible shoes 
distinguished the "flapper" of the Jazz Age from her predecessor the damsel. 
[For visual evidence, look at the drawings of John Held, Jr., and then read The 
Ja%% Age by Percy Marks.] Not that the "pals together" behavior of young 
women diminished sexual attraction; it was felt and discussed by the pals, 
though modestly known as "It" — "she or he has It." Whether the boyish look 
was an unconscious response to the fact that the bond created by life in the 
trenches made men prefer the male figure and deportment is matter for spec- 
ulation. Military life tends to stimulate affection between males and may per- 
manently divert it. 

The charged atmosphere and discussion in the press incited to premari- 
tal lovemaking, to "experimentation," and gave warrant to it for the sake of 
"emotional maturity." An American judge named Lindsay promoted "com- 
panionate marriage," a trial period of cohabitation governed by stated rules; 
it is by now frequent without rules or memory of the judge. Bertrand Russell, 
A. P. Herbert, and others agitated for the reform of divorce laws, and nearly 
everywhere the previous requirement of adultery as the sole ground gave way 
to the claim of incompatibility. Those who resisted this great drive to 
acknowledge copulation as a human right and a subject of constant public 
interest waged a losing battie. Books were prosecuted here and there for 
obscenity or excluded from public libraries, but the label "banned in Boston" 
proved helpful to sales elsewhere. When in 1 927, Judge Woolsey ruled Ulysses 
fit to circulate in "Puritan America," the aim of the Nineties rebellion was ful- 
filled. Writers and artists everywhere had made common cause against the 
last-ditch defenses of Respectability, which Somerset Maugham redefined as 
"the cloak under which fools conceal their stupidity." 

* * 

Gaiety, we saw, was in order after the anxious years of bloodshed and sor- 
row. The desire was met by entertainments that appealed to the mind at the 
same time as they were lighthearted. The word sophisticated came into use to 
describe the happy mixture. The stage was booming and well supplied with 
clever plays. Somerset Maugham, A. A. Milne, Noel Coward, Ferenc Molnar, 
Philip Barry among others cultivated the drawing-room comedy. Revues dis- 
placed vaudeville with higher-grade humor, as in the brilliant works of Lorenz 
Hart and Richard Rodgers, Beatrice Lillie's clever skits, and Balieff 's Chauve- 
Souris. Musical comedies also flourished, the lyrics, music, and dance superior 
to early models and the productions elaborate. 

Light verse and the humorous essay acquired the status of literature and 
appeared in book form as well as in magazines — Punch, Judge, Life, La Vie 
Parisienne. Max Beerbohm, Robert Benchley, A. P. Herbert, Dorothy Parker, 



736 ^^ From Dawn to Decadence 

Stephen Leacock were intellectual satirists who caused laughter rather than 
wounds, and so were such caricaturists as Gluyas Williams, Caran d'Ache," 
and Beerbohm again. It is from this period that nonsense in prose or verse 
came to be seen as an important part of literature, Shakespeare's songs being 
cited as proof. Lewis Carroll's poems and his Alice stories were works of art to 
be respected, children's books were designed in that vein to appeal also to 
adults — witness Milne's Winnie the Pooh or H. G. Wells's Tommy. The limerick 
meanwhile, first addressed to children by Edward Lear, had been modernized 
before the war by turning the last of the five lines from a repetition of the first 
to a fresh idea for shock or surprise. The vogue inspired poets and novelists 
to contribute their fantasies, predominandy off-color, in that capsule form. 
Norman Douglas published a classic collection of limericks in 1928. 

After the supremacy of Vanity Fair 'as the magazine of sophistication, The 
New Yorker recruited a galaxy of talents of a like cleverness as essayists and 
draftsmen, while Mencken's American Mercury of a nearby date used irony and 
sarcasm in chronicling the deeds and beliefs of the middle class. In England, 
Life and Letters, The New Statesman, The Criterion, and Punch were arbiters of 
taste, precisely in life and letters. 

With the same purpose earnest playwrights dramatized social and moral 
issues. At the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, a center of the Irish literary 
Renaissance, Yeats, Synge, Sean O'Casey produced lasting works. Sadler's 
Wells in London, the Vieux Colombier in Paris, the Freie Buhne in Berlin, and 
in New York the Theater Guild and the Provincetown Playhouse helped to 
launch young playwrights. At the Guild or elsewhere on Broadway the 
somber Eugene O'Neill headed a group that included Maxwell Anderson, 
Sherwood, Behrman, Sidney Howard, and Thornton Wilder. Later, Clare 
Boothe and Lillian Hellman proved their equals. 

For these works a host of fine actors were available, the last to be classi- 
cally trained in voice and movement before The Method devised by 
Stanislavsky to elicit spontaneity and naturalness (>675). Those older actors 
frequendy deviated into the standard Shakespeare repertory, and one com- 
pany in New York gave a memorable Hamlet in modern dress, with a tele- 
phone on the king's desk for the line: "Come, Gertrude, let's call up our 
wisest friends." 

By then the movies had captivated a still larger public and created an 
unheard-of habit: going out for entertainment once a week. It was the 
halfway step to the daily, hourly television enchantment. In the 1 920s, thanks 
to Griffith (<649), motion pictures had developed means of its own, adapt- 
able to every kind of sight or story. The early one-reel slapstick farce and sim- 
ple serial tale in almost identical installments gave way to comedy, drama, and 
"spectaculars." The choice afforded openings to a variety of acting talents 
who became specialized heroes and heroines, their lives and loves chronicled 



The Artist Prophet and Jester <^ 737 

in picture magazines. Charlie Chaplin reigned as the incomparable satirist 
through farce; Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were worshipped as 
embodiments of romance and adventure; the horse-and-gun Western was 
manned by half a dozen grim-faced interpreters; and abroad the sinister type 
of tale, such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, thrilled the masses. There also, with 
The Blue Angel, came one of the first would-be significant films, based on a 
serious novel by Henrich Mann, Professor Unrat. 

Yet another form of entertainment, which competed with film and novel, 
was the short story without pretension to literature. Magazines, weekly and 
monthly, proliferated, were cheaper than books, and offered a menu instead 
of a single dish. Each year, the Best Stories appeared in book form to fill the 
bottomless chasm. From that half-century's output there survive but a few 
performances of lasting merit, some with the finest characteristics of the 
novel, for example, the short stories of Katherine Mansfield and those of 
Chekhov, then newly translated from the Russian. Others than Kipling wrote 
tales that deserve a place in literature: Arthur Machen's fantasies, Conan 
Doyle's medical and other strange adventures; M. R. James's and Algernon 
Blackwood's ghost stories. Lasdy, the recital of true crimes and famous trials, 
which Henry James was fond of reading, was elevated into an established 
form of narrative by such masters as Edmund Pearson and William 
Roughead. 

Sharing popularity with the foregoing were two types of biography. 
Lytton Strachey, a member of the Bloomsbury group, gave the model of the 
"debunking life" in short compass. The chapters of Eminent Victorians 
repeated the Nineties' attack through ridicule, seasoned in this case with gar- 
bled facts and a few falsehoods. At the same time, Andre Maurois invented 
the biography enlivened by fictional detail and dialogue, but not pretending to 
be other than it was. There flourished as well several modes of exploiting the 
careers of the dead, to belitde or explain them away, for instance the "psy- 
chographs" of Gamaliel Bradford. These works were complemented by a 
spate of autobiographies, many written early in the subject's life and retailing 
the miseries of his childhood and schooling. Likewise biographical was E. C. 
(Edmund Clerihew) Bendey's creation, the clerihew. It consists of four lines 
of free verse purporting to relate an incident in the life of a famous character. 
Like the limerick, it has aroused the talent for nonsense in such writers as Paul 
Horgan and W H. Auden.° Altogether, the 1 920s and 1 930s were fond of see- 
ing the highbrow mind at play, whether in Dada or in the nonsense writers. It 
was relaxing and "humanizing." 

But fun could be energetic too. Wlien Josephine Baker, the Black 
American dancer, came to Paris in 1 928, she aroused a frenzy of enthusiasm 
with her danse sauvage ( = not "savage" but "wild and primitive"). Paris was 
ready; it was already dancing in steps that some thought primitive indeed — 



738 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

the one-step, two-step, and fox-trot. The wildness was provided by that new 
music, also from America, jazz. It was loud, pulsing, insistent, full of synco- 
pations and cross-rhythms; it left one deaf and dizzy when it stopped. One 
felt intoxicated by it, even without the other import from overseas, the Bronx 
cocktail (pronounced bronze in France), a blend of orange juice and gin, an 
odd mixture, medicinal in taste and hardly fit to go with food. It was super- 
seded, but jazz was not a vogue; it had come to stay Even then it numbered 
famous performers, though it had not yet developed its theorists and histori- 
ans or raised the creators of its successive forms to the same Pantheon as the 
classical composers. Jazz continued to be music for use, for the feet, while 
gradually appealing to devotees and musicologists as concert offerings. 

On the stage "modern dance" had another meaning. After Isadora 
(<677), it was a new art, freely evolving, and original performers from various 
countries found an international audience. Mary Wigman, La Argentina, 
Jeanne Ronsay, Harald Kreutzberg, Jose Limon, each innovated and some 
founded schools. And from India Shankar (the elder) dazzled the West with 
his troupe, whose dances and rhythms were a revelation in music and ritual. 

Independently in Germany, a music also for use {Gebrauchsrnusik) was the 
program of Paul Hindemith and others. It aimed at reinstating music in the 
home for a steady diet there as well as outdoors; the disused older practice 
should end the 1 9C isolation of music in a hall visited at intervals. The move- 
ment led nowhere, but its aim foreshadows the later taste for the chamber 
group, Baroque music, and the habit, akin to chewing gum, of turning on 
background music — at home, in elevators and taxis, or while telephoning. 

Meanwhile in Paris near the end of the war there had gathered around the 
writers Erik Satie and Cocteau a group of young composers, "The six," 
notably Auric, Poulenc, and Honegger, soon joined by Milhaud, who pro- 
duced an abundance of usable works, a good many of which were marked by 
the light touch of the period. In the same vein, the German Carl Orff made a 
cantata, now very popular, of the roistering songs of medieval monks — 
Carmina Burana.° In the United States, Charles Ives composed in an original 
idiom many songs, marches, and dances, as well as five symphonies. To 
An theirs Ballet Mecanique already cited should be added Walton's Facade, 
poems by Edith Sitwell set for voice and small orchestra; Constant Lambert's 
stunning Rio Grande, and some similarly rollicking works by Randall 
Thompson, Percy Grainger, and Virgil Thomson. These same composers 
were also attracted to staid topics, but it is fair to say that by and large it is their 
works of either populist or comedic intent that have become familiar. 
Heaven-storming was cut off by the wall of war. 

* 
* * 



The Artist Prophet and Jester <^> 739 

Engaging the mind so as to entertain it adroitly without raising social 
issues drew in the 1 920s an increasing public to a genre that has since then 
risen in esteem and popularity until it is now the subject of university courses 
and dissertations. That genre is crime fiction, first known as the detective 
story, or again as mysteries or thrillers. These are really subspecies that differ 
widely and need not take up space here; aficionados are aware of the differ- 
ences and others would not recognize features cited in general terms. The 
important point is that crime stories are not novels but tales. The distinction, 
it will be recalled (<111; 352), is that between narratives in which, to put it 
briefly, psychology and sociology are the main concern and stories that depict 
plausible but captivating lifelike incidents that involve only familiar social 
types. Novels analyze individual characters and their social setting. Tales 
relate adventures that take for granted motives and settings. 

The detective tale in its ideal form has a regular pattern, like Greek 
tragedy. A dead body is found, doubdess murdered; the police fumble the 
investigation. Accompanied by his admiring friend and biographer, the gifted 
amateur appears and solves the case by 

reasoning backward from clues to The detective's friend acts in the dual capac- 
criminal. The unfolding must observe ity of very average reader and of Greek cho- 
certain restrictions — no supernatural ™s; he comments freely on what he does not 
agencies or poison unknown to sci- understand. 
ence, no physical impossibilities or — E. M. Wrong (1926) 
even improbabilities; and since the 

main interest consists in the process of discovery amid the confusion of facts 
and human purposes, there must be neither psychological delving nor a full- 
blown love affair. 

In the first postwar period the taste for "mysteries" was considered infra 
dig; readers would apologize for their addiction. Some famous literary critics 
went out of their way to castigate them as lowbrow. This was contrary to fact; 
detective stories were written by and for highbrows. In that Golden Age of the 
genre, the English women writers led the field: Sayers, Marsh, Allingham, 
Heyer, and Christie were unsurpassed in invention and technique, affording the 
pleasure of literary art — plotting, wit, and narrative skill, in the service of 
invention, which must be ever fresh. President Wilson and Bertrand Russell 
were voracious consumers and more 
recendy,J.L.BorgesandPabloNeruda. Aurelius Smith did not look much like a 

Later observers psychologized and detective, yet there was something calculat- 
said that reading the tales purged the ingly cool about each trivial motion he made. 
lust for mayhem. This showed com- As he sat at tea with his secretary his slender 

plete ignorance, since the genre does fingers dropped a slice of lemon into his cup 
not dwell on the physical act of murder with the deliberate motion of science. 
and the corpse is usually disposed in — R. T.M.Scott, "Bombay Duck" (1929) 



740 ^> From Dawn to Decadence 

the first few pages. What the stories satisfied was fascination with method — 
an aspect of SCIENTISM — coupled with the pleasure of seeing crime put 
down; in other words, Reason and Right. If the four-year spectacle of mass 
slaughter had anything to do with the popularity of these tales, it must have 
acted by contraries, for crime fiction stacked the cards against the killer and 
concentrated on justice and the rare mind endowed with "ratiocinative 

powers." 
Commit a crime and it seems as if a coat of The taste for interpreting clues was 

snow fell on the ground, such as reveal in the not new in the 1 920s. In the mid-1 8C 
woods the trace of every partridge and fox Voltaire had written a tale called Zadig 
and squirrel and mole. You cannot wipe out after its hero, an "oriental" who serves 
the foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, his king by useful detective feats. 

so as to leave no clew. Somewhat later, Beaumarchais wrote a 

—Emerson, "Compensation" short skit of the same kind in a con- 

temporary setting. In neither of these is 
murder involved; it is pure reconstruction of events by inference. In the early 
19C an American named Leggett applied the technique to a shooting; and 
next, Edgar Poe,° creator of the short story as a form, put the stamp of his 
genius on four tales in which investigation is the motive power. Between Poe 
and Agatha Christie the crime tale was cultivated along two paths. The French 
developed the roman policier, long on melodrama and short on thinking. 
English writers preferred the short story, which in Conan Doyle found a mas- 
ter. Not only did he possess the ingenuity needed to sustain the detective 
interest, but he created a pair of characters that are among the best known on 
earth. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson rank with Don Quixote and Sancho 
Panza, and it is hard to think of a third partnership of equal renown. Indeed, 
in a fundamental sense they are the same pair, bent on a similar quest but in a 
different costume, 300 years apart. 

So vivid are the two moderns that they have become the object of a 
worldwide cult coupled with a make-believe scholarship: the members of the 
dozens of Sherlock Holmes societies pretend that Holmes and his friend 
were historical persons whose lives are recorded in minutest details in the 60 
stories. Since these were not written to be consistent or complete, inferences 
from the data are the subject of endless argument, much of it carried on with 
the subdued humor that is itself an engaging aspect of Doyle's narratives. This 
manifestation of modern pedantry does not differ from that shown in the 
single-author societies and collectors' bibliographical concerns. But the 
Holmes-and-Watson "findings" show how easy it is to draw plausible con- 
clusions from verbal hints when the truth is in fact unknowable. 

After Holmes, as one student said, the deluge. [The book to browse in is 
Catalogue of Crime, ed. by J. Barzun and W. H. Taylor.] In the end it was the long 



The Artist Prophet and Jester <^> 741 

story that prevailed — too long at first and spoiled by red herrings, then 
reduced to novelette length, and latterly reinflated to tome proportions. The 
reason for these variations is the rapid exhaustion of intrinsic devices and 
external sources of interest. Thus the exploits of the gifted amateur gave 
place to the "police procedural," side by side with the "private eye"; and 
again, to the lawyer, doctor, insurance inspector, or other professional who, 
more modesdy but as effectively as Holmes, assists the regular force. In 
Holmes's day it was appropriate to look down on Scodand Yard, because not 
long before his time several detectives had been convicted of breach of duty 
and corruption/ 

Out of the interest in crime fiction came two cognate genres: the spy 
story and the recital of true crime, already mentioned (<739). All these 
species of tale offer a common substance that has been litde noted: they are 
faithful records of tastes and fashions. It has been well said that one goes back 
to the Sherlock Holmes adventures because in them "it is always 1895" — the 
London of hansom cabs, opium dens, and Jean de Reske at Covent Garden. 
Holmes himself is a man of science and a Ninetyish aesthete at the same time. 
Similarly, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in America, like their 
progeny on the West Coast, have echoed the catchwords and vogues, even the 
tastes in jazz, film, and artwork of their decade, and certainly the obsession 
with sexuality. This cultural journalism adds verisimilitude to plots that are 
not the fruit of observation but contrivance. Unfortunately, of recent years 
this topical varnish has thickened and tended to obscure the central purpose 
of the genre. The hero or heroine forgets to display investigative ability while 
showing off extensive knowledge of music and the decorative arts. 

For the best critical discussion of the form and merits of the detective 
tale, one should go to the writings of 

Dorothy Sayers 

She started in life with a gift and a passion for words. Born in Oxford, she 
was the only child of a clergyman and musician and a woman of modest edu- 
cation but energetic, highly intelligent, and proud of an ancestress who was a 
cousin of William Hazlitt's. Unfortunately for mother and daughter, four 
years after the child's birth, the family moved to a vicarage in Cambridgeshire, 
remote but handsomely endowed. There, the wife grew increasingly bored 
with her husband, and the child was reared with hardly any young friends or 
other society. She amused herself by voracious reading, writing stories and 
poems, imagining what the outer world was like and pondering the details of 
the Christian faith, which she read as a story. At the same time, she was a 
tomboy, full of life like her mother and practical in everyday matters. These 



742 c^g From Dawn to Decadence 

traits shaped her subsequent career: innocence, energy, a down-to-earth atti- 
tude that did not limit imagination, and a peculiarly intimate feeling for what 
has been called the Christian epic. 

She went to Somerville College at Oxford, where she became a fine 
scholar (read her next- to-last tale, Gaudy Night), and was one of the first batch 
of women to receive a full Oxford degree instead of a certificate; or rather, 
two degrees in one ceremony — Bachelor and Master of Arts. So far, her life 
had been smooth and pleasant: now she must earn a living. She served as sec- 
retary to a man who ran a service associated with a school in France. They 
had a sort of love affair — in words — that was the first of her misfortunes in 
that domain. She had a plain face and unattractive shape, coupled with strong 
sexual appetites. After two more episodes, which left her with an illegitimate 
son who turned out handsome and intelligent, she found late in life a conge- 
nial husband, though his latter days darkened hers by becoming ill, alcoholic, 
and of uncharacteristic bad temper. 

So much for the unedifying yet anguishing odyssey that Sayers had to 
endure while developing her literary gifts. As a young woman, a job as copy- 
writer in the largest London advertising agency proved useful (read Murder 
Must Advertise) and enjoyable too: there was good writing even in ads. In all 
she wrote she aimed at the simple and direct. 

Like Henry James, who gave a full-blown theory of the novel, Sayers laid 
down that of the detective tale,° using her scholarship by turns seriously and 
with humor. Interviewed on the subject, she once manifested her forthright 
ways of speech: "imbeciles and magazine editors" would ask her to discuss 
crime fiction "from the woman's point of view. To such demands one can 
only say 'Go away and don't be silly' You might as well ask what is the female 
angle on the equilateral triangle." On aesthetics at large she wrote an extraor- 
dinary little book, The Mind of the Maker. Its thesis is that the ordinary experi- 
ence of making anything — creating art or applying workmanship to any 
object — corresponds to the meanings symbolized by the Trinity. First comes 
the creative Idea, which foresees the whole work as finished. This is the 
Father. Next the creative Energy, which engages in a vigorous struggle with 
matter and overcomes one obstacle after another. This is the Son. Third is the 
creative Power of the work, its influence on the world through its effect on 
the soul of the user-beholder. This is the Holy Spirit. All three are indispens- 
able to completeness as they unite in the work. 

The demonstration had a double purpose, critical and religious. While 
analyzing human creation it showed that God's work as revealed in Christian 
theology followed the same pattern and man is indeed made in God's image. 
Before this highly original book, Sayers had lectured and written plays on reli- 
gious themes for festivals held in Canterbury cathedral and other churches. 
For these she did research in medieval history, literature, and language and 



The Artist Prophet and Jester <^ 743 



her activity brought her national atten- St. Supercilia's unworthy father brutally com- 

tion as an intellectual evangelist. When manded her to accept the hand of a man who, 

the BBC commissioned her to present though virtuous, sensible, and of good estate, 

in dramatic form six programs depict- ^ onl y six languages and was weak in 

ing the life and death of Jesus, she mathematics. At this the outraged saint 

wrote a script that combined simplicity raised her e y ebrows so **& that the y Ufted 
i i . , . , ■ r r her off her feet and out through a top-storey 

in word and idea with emotion tree or 

window, whence she was seen floating away 
sentimentality. And like naturally reli- . , , ,. 

\ J . in a northerly direction. 

gious persons in the Catholic tradition, 

,.,,., , , — Dorothy Sayers, Pantheon Papers 

she enjoyed being humorous about the 

objects of her faith. 

She continued without letup what she considered her mission to show the 
role and validity of belief, using reason and example in the manner that makes 
The Mind of the Maker z work of permanent interest, comparable to C. S. Lewis's. 
But Sayers was not an absolutist. In this world belief in God she thought indis- 
pensable to answering unavoidable cosmic questions and as a fixed point by 
which to settle earthly ones, but to demand or enforce a particular conception 
of the Deity would ensure only division and oppression. She was explicitly a 
pragmatic relativist; more than once, in various contexts, she writes: "The first 
thing a principle does is to kill somebody." 

The research she had done in the history and literature of the Middle 
Ages had persuaded her that she could translate Dante. Competent in Greek, 
Latin, and French, she now learned Italian and rendered Dante in the terza 
rima verse scheme of the original. Her youthful scribblings had trained her to 
think metrically and she chose the simplest, briefest language to give due 
place to Dante's wit, sarcasm, and humor, little or none of which appeared in 
previous efforts; all were solemn in deference to the theme. 

She died suddenly at the age of 64 before quite finishing. But a friend 
supplied the lack and the translation appeared in the Penguin Classics, to 
mixed reviews, some enthusiastic. Much praise came from C. S. Lewis. Her 
version has two merits: it makes for an easily readable and dramatically effec- 
tive work, like Samuel Butler's prose translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, 
and her interpretation of Dante is tenable if one remembers that he wrote a 
pamphleteering poem in which, as a wandering exile, he damned his political 
and personal enemies, extolled friends, and put forth dogmas by no means all 
orthodox. 

What will remain of Dorothy Sayers' work as a whole is a matter for con- 
jecture. The attitudes and prose style of crime fiction have changed, though 
several of her tales keep being reprinted. The Mind of the Maker has the survival 
value of an original idea perfectly developed and expressed. In the rest of her 
religious writings Sayers was ahead of time. The present preoccupation with 
the Bible, Jesus, and Creation should lead back to her views. If the colloquial 



744 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

Dante finds no lasting favor, the scholarly Introduction and Notes must 

remain important for students. 

Sayers' conclusion that principle kills had been borne in upon her by the 

onset and the conduct of the Great War. National honor, naval supremacy, 

colonies for show rather than benefit, 

We believe that the chief trouble among regions that must be conquered to 

nations today is fear— the fear of death and "redeem people of our race," and "No 

especially the fear of life. This is what peacej no surren der" had been goals 

depresses men's spirits and paralyzes con- pursued SQ stubbornly ^ Eumpe had 

structive effort. We believe that this fear can j • ir • i_ cr 

turned itself into a vast burnt orrer- 
only be driven out by a strong awareness of . . , 

„.« _ . . . , ing — a holocaust — without seeing that 

the value of life. Our aim is to give to the peo- ° ° 

pie of this country a constructive purpose the **> sides were cooperating to that 

worth living for and worth dying for. end on identical principles. Some now 

^ c said that it might happen again. If so, 

— Dorothy Sayers: Prospectus for a b rr G 

SERIES OF BOOKS TO BE EDITED BY HER Hfe WaS n0t WOfth Hvln & Stefan Zwel g 

(1940) and his wife, refugees in Brazil, com- 

mitted suicide together in 1942. 

During the stalemate phase of the first war, Oswald Spengler, a German 
schoolteacher of mathematics, revised and completed a large work, begun 
some years earlier, and which came out at the right time when the two vol- 
umes appeared in 1918 and 1922. The Decline of the West provoked, as is usual 
with large intellectual demonstrations, responses of all kinds — instant or rea- 
soned denial, agreement from persuasion or from previous conviction, and 
haggling because of disputable facts and generalities. The net effect was that 
for many who did not share the contemporary gaiety and resented the futility 
of the war, Spengler's thesis was proved. All the news confirmed it: a severe 
depression and unemployment; small wars all over Europe after a peace 
treaty that did not respect national feelings; a wobbly republic in Germany 
which could not pay reparations, nor the Allies their crushing debts; dictator- 
ship under Mussolini in Italy; continued displacement and starvation of 
refugees; global and local epidemics; and the lasting spectacle in the mind's 
eye of devastated regions and broken bodies. 

If that was the handiwork of western civilization, its demise was not only 
sure but also not to be regretted. Some of the thoughtful not possessed by 
love of the arts or pleasure-seeking predicted Armaggedon in another war. 
Others began to believe that "light comes from the East": Soviet Russia holds 
the only livable future. 



Embracing the Absurd 



The American Expeditionary Force that went to Europe in June 
1917 not only enabled the Allies to defeat the Central Powers, it laid tribute 
on the old world for the benefit of the new by absorbing and bringing back 
Culture. The soldiers who served in France gathered from the Occident new 
impressions and ideas that made some of them want to return to Europe and 
gather more. The so-called American expatriates of the late 1920s were 
young. Favored by the high value of the dollar in lowered foreign currencies, 
they were able to stay over there until the Great Depression of the 1930s 
forced them home. Their sojourn amounted to a traveling fellowship of 
which the effect was to close the cultural lag of about ten years that had gen- 
erally obtained between European and American art and intellect. In the 
1920s the presence in Paris of such figures as Picasso, Joyce, and Pound and 
of Gertrude Stein, who provided a meeting place where aspiring artists and 
writers would find their elders and one another, stirred the kettle of ideas to 
their joint advantage. [The book to read, despite its invidious title, is The Cra%y 
Years by William Wiser.] 

When these young men left for their culture quest, the United States was 
in a mood of fierce isolationism and "anti-red" apprehension that made 
departure only the more attractive. But when they returned the academy was 
receptive to the image and ideas of Europe carried home by native sons. The 
ground had been prepared for this welcome. The American school system 
was at the height of its dedication and efficiency. The grammar school had 
assimilated millions of motley immigrants; the free public high school was a 
daring venture that was the envy of industrialized nations; its curriculum was 
liberal (in modern speech: elitist) — Latin, the English poets, American and 
English history, a modern foreign language, mathematics and science every 
year — and no marshmallow subjects. With some variations, the school world, 
in which discipline applied to work and behavior alike, had been saturated 
during the war with references to Europe, whether at sales of "liberty bonds" 
or programs to encourage giving to troops, refugees, and Belgian children. 



746 ^> From Dawn to Decadence 

The idea of the Continent was a live idea, and when some of its art and liter- 
ature — and strange foods — began to filter in, minds were eager, not resistant. 

This was still more evident in higher education. The big universities such 
as Columbia under Nicholas Murray Buder, the self-appointed traveling rep- 
resentative of American scholarship to Europe, and Harvard under Lawrence 
Lowell, had in recent years opened their doors to a larger group than ever 
before. Second-generation Americans showed their deep thirst for all the 
learning that their parents had missed and that the upper classes had presum- 
ably kept to themselves. The new-risen took to it with ease, while the upper 
classes apparendy did not want to hoard it. 

Some of the demobilized soldiers made their way to college to resume an 
interrupted education or went there to start one, and this injection of maturer 
minds also gave those years on campus an unusual vibrancy. It held over until 
the return of the exiles, when because of their economic plight something 
unprecedented took place: the academy took in the artist, for shelter and for 
use in teaching. This was a wholly American departure. Scholarship and art 
had nowhere before hobnobbed in one faculty. In the 1 890s Romain Rolland 
had not found it easy to have his dissertation in musicology accepted for a 
doctorate by the University of Paris; it was an extreme concession. In postwar 
America, beginning with one or two tame specimens, the university gradually 
acquired whole departments of music, fine arts, and drama; the English 
department admitted critics and novelists, and soon the campus boasted of 
resident poets and string quartets, theater troupes, and an arts center. 

The isolationism of the rest of the country had a plausible motive. 
Although President Wilson, contrary to legend, had maneuvered ably at 
Versailles against the vulture-minded victors," he failed to get the United 
States to join the League of Nations, and European intrigues and conflicts 
persisted in a disheartening way. The treaty (in several parts) was not a setde- 
ment, as the one at Vienna in 1815 had been after Napoleon, and its unwis- 
dom laid the ground for the next melee of peoples twenty years later. [The 
small book to read is Between the Wars by D. C. Somervell.] 

In the interim, the Soviet regime took firm hold on the Russias, Turkey 
modernized itself under Kemal Pasha (Ataturk), Italy yielded to Mussolini's 
dictatorship and Spain to Primo de Rivera's, Japan invaded Mongolia, the 
small countries of Central Europe succumbed to armed Communism or 
struggled against it, and Germany, starving, weakened and beset by inflation, 
failed to solidify its republican institutions. When the Weimar regime could 
not pay the reparations imposed by the Allies (<71 1), the punitive occupation 
that followed solidified antagonism toward the victors and gave Hider his 
toehold. The books by historians and journalists that blamed Germany alone 
for starting the war did not lessen resentment. Meantime, the United States, 
unable to collect the war debts incurred by the Allies, recouped its losses by 



Embracing the Absurd <^ 747 

enabling Germany to recover economically, thus in the end adding material 
means to the will of revenge. 

Throughout the Occident and America, Communism was making con- 
verts. Disillusioned by the Great War and the peace, intellectuals saw in "the 
Russian experiment" a fresh start with clean hands — Lenin and Trotsky, those 
great leaders, had denounced the war, got out of it, and had successfully fought 
off the armies of Imperialism and Capitalism. Writers and artists believed the 
promise of the Soviet apologists that workers of the mind were to be supported 
by the state equally with those of the hand; the Russian culture-makers no 
longer faced the western catch-as-catch-can of art patronage, nor did the pro- 
letariat fear unemployment. For the western reader Marx was abridged and 
popularized again, Communist party "cells" were formed under managers 
trained in Moscow, and recruits took to the discipline with the aid of mental or 
sexual lures according to taste. Many sympathizers, called fellow travelers, 
remained outside the party and gave it strength in public opinion. When the 
Great Depression, set off by the worldwide collapse of the stock market in late 
1929, ruined industries and banks and threw millions out of work, Marx's 
prophecy that capitalism was doomed by its own internal vice was proved, and 
the ranks of Communists of all degrees of participation swelled everywhere. 
Marxism pushed aside every other current of thought, including the Catholic 
neo-Thomism, which had made notable adherents a little earlier. 

A reporter who went to Russia wrote back that "he had seen the future — 
and it worked." Former populists and socialists took the new ism as the ful- 
fillment of their old dream. Young writers and other artists collaborated in 
Marxist theater and music, published Marxist novels, painted Marxist murals. 
Marxist colleges were founded, and in uncommitted institutions Marxism 
was lectured on and discussed: one could not be "educated" if ignorant of the 
doctrine that was "the wave of the future." As one skeptic remarked, "The 
Communist Manifesto is assigned reading in every course except Hygiene." 
Fascism and soon National Socialism, which had won some partisans at their 
beginnings in the 1 920s and 1 930s, lost them, and together became the enemy 
for the right-thinking to combat. The world looked like the arena of the eter- 
nal crusade between Good and Evil. In the second of those two decades, war 
in Spain between the young Republic and the soldiers of General Franco aim- 
ing at dictatorship became the battleground on which the two "Fascist" pow- 
ers tested their arms against the Liberal and Leftist (Socialist) forces. These 
last were joined by many writers and artists from England and America, with 
the eventual loss of young talents; of the native Spanish killed in the struggle, 
the loss of the poet Lorca was the most deplored. 

Disillusionment followed when it was found that on orders from 
Moscow Communist fighters ostensibly on the Liberal side helped to elimi- 
nate some of its leaders as enemies of their own. The power shining in the 



748 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

East that had enjoyed so much support among men of ideas did not lose it on 
this account, and only some recanted after the revelation of extensive domes- 
tic murder and massacre under Stalin. Then, in less than half a dozen years the 
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics became the noble ally of the Occident in 
its war against German and Italian Fascism, although for a couple of years 
Hitler and Stalin had contracted a marriage of convenience. 

Their nations are more permanently associated in history by their use of 
massacre as state policy. What distinguishes from other mass killings the two 
egregious examples of the 20C, the Russian of the kulaks (enriched farmers) 
and the German of Jews, Gypsies, and others marked for destruction by their 
beliefs, is that they were deliberate and systematic, and in the German, abet- 
ted by science. In neither instance was it the soldiers' frenzy in victory or the 
populace avenging against their neighbors some old grievance. There is no 
excuse for massacre in any case, but history set a kind of standard that these 
acts of national policy violated. It was left to the 20C to perform deeds resem- 
bling the Roman extermination of Carthage, though even in that instance 
there was understandable occasion in the two previous wars between the 
powers, in one of which Hannibal had invaded Italy and inflicted a humiliat- 
ing defeat on the Romans. 

The modern attempts at genocide were ignobly intellectual: the kulaks' 
existence contradicted the theory of Communism, and the German victims 
were "racially harmful" to the nation. Granted the mix of other objectives — 
for the Germans a scapegoat, for the Russians, money and land, and for both 
a unifying effect — the blot remains that a pair of ideas, long matured and held 
as true by millions outside the scene of their application, should have pro- 
duced a special kind of sophisticated crime. 

Undeclared war is condemned by international law, but not without 
precedent. Thanks to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States 
once more became involved in the European struggle that began as a "phony 
war" in 1939 — phony because declared but inactive. President Roosevelt's 
subdued help to England early on; the occupation of France by Germany; De 
Gaulle's leadership of the Free French; the Resistance in the maquis (the 
bush); the Vichy regime of Marshal Petain, formerly the hero of the Great 
War, who now complied with German demands, hoping to emerge at last as 
head of an arch-Conservative regime; and the six years of bloodshed in all 
parts of the world — these scenes of the echo-war have not yet faded from all 
memories. What is not sufficiently known is the role played by Pierre Laval, 
twice co-leader of the reactionary Vichy government. To preserve the 
integrity of France, he battled with the German head of the Occupation, 
Abetz, to keep workers from being sent to German factories and Jews to 
death camps. He held on to food and other supplies and kept the basic ser- 
vices of the nation from disarray — all this not absolutely but to the extent that 



Embracing the Absurd <^> 749 

his superior ability managed to extort concessions from the enemy. His too 
was a resistance. He was shot as a traitor in 1945 but his record more justiy 
classes him as a patriot in a post of double danger. [The book to read is Laval, 
Patriot or Traitor? by Rene de Chambrun.] 

By 1945, when Hitier, defeated, had committed suicide and Japan, atom- 
bombed, had surrendered and was under American occupation, the war had 
set western economies afloat again and at the same time had solidly estab- 
lished the welfare state. Its beginnings, it will be remembered, go back, first, 
to Germany in the 1880s; then to England and the budget of 1911; conclu- 
sively to the 1930s, when President Roosevelt with his brain trust of Great 
Switch Liberals (<688) set up the agencies to administer a full program. 
Throughout the West nowadays no other type of government is dreamed of; 
the only debate between opposed parties is whether the government shall be 
fatter or leaner and it appears that sustained dieting is something bureaucra- 
cies find as hard as individuals (779 >). 

* * 

To sum up, the crowded quarter century preceding the renewal of world- 
class war showed two contrasting moods — lighthearted, some survivors of 
the Great Illusion revelled among artistic and intellectual novelties and 
agreed on the resolve "Never Again" to fight for king and country or lapatrie. 
Francis Buchman's Oxford Group united many young and old in global 
benevolence coupled with this pervasive pacifism. Simultaneously, events 
piled up that provoked the death-struggle, farther flung and at the outset not 
at all jaunty as the first had been, and gravity returned. But these are only two 
sides of the pyramid. The third has been touched on: it was the coming to 
general awareness of the intellectual and scientific achievements of 
Modernism. The philosophers were glum, the men of science bright-eyed; 
they had a new view of the cosmos that altered the aspect of science, whereas 
the psychologists, novelists, and poets made the human mind more self-con- 
scious than ever, convinced as they were that thought and action are driven. 

Einstein and Freud were the principal names attached to the new tidings; 
but as we saw, the work of these two embodied half a century of previous dis- 
covery and cogitation. Poincare was on the verge of stating Relativity; James, 
the French psychiatrists, and their predecessors took account of the 
Unconscious and the role of sexuality. This link with the past does not 
deprive the later pair of their glory; it only means that the bombshell effect of 
their ideas in the 1 920s was such only for the lay public. And for it the news 
was not merely astonishing: feelings and attitudes rapidly adapted to the 
changed vision of the outer and inner worlds, with the usual distortions that 
follow the diffusion of ideas. 



750 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

"Surely, we ought to be a little more upset Einstein's Relativity posited the 

than we are over this great universe that has speed of light as the ultimate yardstick, a 

just died so suddenly." time-space continuum and a multi- 

"What universe?" dimensional world, in which the 

«w/u . j > • XT ' , . observer is part of the determination of 

"Why, yesterday s universe, Newton's uni- r 

verse. Hitherto, the various cosmic systems fact W^ 11 ^ curvin g of % ht ra Y s 

have fitted inside our skulls. This new one around the sun gave proof of the system 
refuses to do so. From the point of view of the and other paradoxes emerged, such as 
man in the street, it is absurd. That is what is the habit of no longer regarding any- 
really great about it." thing physical as absolute except the 

— Anatole France to Nicholas Segur speed of light, they put an end to the 

(c. 1920) comfortable notion that science is com- 

mon sense organized. Newton was now 
a classic on the shelf, still valid up to a certain point, inapplicable beyond it. 

The new science was no longer within the grasp of the intelligent ama- 
teur. Both its concepts and its mathematics required a specially molded mind, 
for whom the concepts needed no names but could be read in numerical for- 
mulas. This made the scientist still more wonderful but set him as a breed 
apart. 

What was the citizen to make of assertions that one infinite is larger than 
another and that a magnitude can be added to another without changing the 
sum? Or that "an electron is merely the pattern of its aspects in its environ- 
ment so far as those are relevant to the electro-magnetic field"? Or worse, 
perhaps, that man must be regarded as a mere collection of occurrences; 
obeying the must is quite difficult. The net result was that modernist physics 
deprived human beings of any object of cosmic contemplation. The actual 
order of the heavens and the workings of nature on earth were alike unimag- 
inable — no poet could make an epic out of them, as Lucretius and Milton had 
done, or address a lyric to the moon. One could still gaze at the Milky Way, 
but it was vieuxjeu\ whatever notion crossed the mind at the sight was obso- 
lete, any emotion a primitive fantasy. None of the new terms coined at the sci- 
entific mint were evocative. Electron, photon, and later: quark, charm, which 
popularizers keep idiotically calling "building blocks" of the universe, carry 
no suggestion of being blocks. Even "particle" (all 40-odd) is a misnomer, 
since its instant-flash existence leaves but a dot on a sensitive plate; it never 
flies into one's eye and makes it water. 

What happened in physics has had comparable effects in the other famil- 
iar sciences and on the new ones that have arisen to link them in the hope of 
an ultimately unified account of all that is. Curiously, just as ordinary man was 
being left incommunicado, some of the language used in scientific descrip- 
tions became anthropomorphic in the way once forbidden. It used to be said 
that force was wrong because it suggested man's right arm at work; energy was 



Embracing the Absurd q^ 751 

the right neutral word. Now, as we saw, it is official to speak of a weak force 
and a strong force. Similarly, in the life sciences one hears of a substance con- 
veying "information" to another — "Neuron talks to chip and chip to nerve 
cell" — and of a "code" regulating these exchanges. All this has an unreality 
which is once again a bar to contemplation. 

The rapid advances due to coordinated research over the wide world con- 
tinually add deeper findings, subder relations than those announced yesterday, 
and the impression grows that science is the task of peeling an infinite onion. 
In that process, science as it moves leaves behind it a shadow: superstition. This 
is unavoidable. If ten years ago the facts were such and such and now they are 
different — perhaps the reverse — then everybody has for a decade been labor- 
ing under a superstition. The one comfort is that it was not devised without 
much care on the part of many people. This unrolling tape of what is reliable is 
a guarantee of watchfulness, although at any one moment the truths of science 
are not the same for all those who work at it, let alone the laity. 

Perhaps only in medicine does acting on its assurances at a given time 
prove hurtful, many of its findings being based on the post hoc fallacy: this 
outcome after that treatment; after which another study finds otherwise. 
There is no other way open, but error need not be fatal and yet damaging. 
During the early years of this century Dr. Metchnikov, who was Tolstoy's 
physician and had a European reputation, laid down the rule that the prod- 
ucts of digestion must be eliminated early if poisons were not to percolate 
into the system and cause "auto-intoxication." Headache, nausea, and bad 
complexion were attributed to this self-poisoning and were particularly 
harmful to the young. The result was that several generations of small chil- 
dren were tormented by their enlightened parents into behaving according to 
rule, until it was shown that no poisons filtered out. 

In purely mechanical matters, the danger is less, although in early days 
radiation caused deaths, both to workers who put radium paint on watch dials 
to make the numbers visible in the dark and to patients overdosed with X- 
rays in dentistry and the radium treatment of tumors. The counterpart of this 
unhappy experience is the current apprehension of lead and asbestos. They 
endanger those who work where they are breathed in, of course, but do they 
harm where they do not pollute the air? As things stand, despite the consci- 
entious work of the many trained minds, the reports of "science" on a wide 
range of subjects are contradictory, equally publicized, and the laity cannot 
decide what to believe: global warming, radon in the soil, agent orange, addi- 
tives to food, genetic tampering — an intelligent opinion about them cannot 
be formed. And when there is evidence that business and politics affect more 
than one "scientific" pronouncement, gone is the confidence in science felt 
and voiced in the 19C. 

Meanwhile, the development of the atom bomb and its use against Japan 



752 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

Is Science to Be Man's Servant or His Idol? raised the ethical question: should sci- 

— Headline over a review of two books entists work at projects for destruc- 

in Science (1962) tion? In several countries "Concerned 

Scientists" joined to establish the 
entirely new principle that science is not above all moral considerations. 
Shortly thereafter, advances in genetics posed the same ethical query about 
seemingly beneficial deeds, such as aiding the infertile, modifying plant and 
animal species, and finally "cloning," which would duplicate a human being 
to the last detail, as a mechanical copier does a document. 

Between the end of one war and the next, techne fashioned impressive 
new machines. In aviation, the dirigible (the zeppelin), though brought to a 
huge size with many advantages for travel, had a short life: it was vulnerable 
to wind and storm. The airplane, rapidly improved for war use, was standard- 
ized at two wings instead of the original four, one pair above the other; and 
beginnings were made to replace propellers by jet propulsion through tur- 
bines. During the second war Germany developed rocket engineering to a 
point that made possible in a few years man's first excursion outside the 
earth's atmosphere. The Russian artificial satellite Sputnik (= "co- traveler"), 
put in orbit in 1 957, blazed a path that led Americans to achieve the first stroll 
on the moon. Outer space is now everybody's playground, cluttered with 
wandering appliances and mobile homes under classical names like Apollo. 
These accomplishments have revived — quite irrationally — the idea that other 
worlds may be inhabited and have given science fiction impetus and materi- 
als. (H. G. Wells had already imagined The War of the Worlds in 1898.) 
Broadcasting, first by radio, then with television, enabled people to indulge 
their tastes for things to hear and see. They have done so with remarkable 
unanimity throughout the world. Speed in communication and means of 
detecting facts at a distance, such as radar, multiplied at a similar rate, culmi- 
nating today in the various devices attached like the tentacles of an octopus to 
the computer, which despite its name is not in essence a calculating machine. 
It is not likely that any turn of fashion would deprive science and techne of 
the overriding power and influence they have obtained. 

* 
* * 

The political mistakes that were made on all sides before Europe slipped 
into war again are so well remembered that words such as appeasement, fifth col- 
umn, collaborator, Munich are still used as shorthand in the press. On the mood 
of that stretch of time in England, its fads, its films and plays, its novels and 
music, there exists a record of prime merit and interest, which is a master- 
piece in its genre. That is the diary in nine compact volumes covering 1 5 years 
called Ego and written by 



Embracing the Absurd <^ 753 



James Agate 

Having served in France during the war years and stayed there a while 

longer, the young man from Lancashire became bilingual and well versed in 

French culture, so that he keeps recurring in his work to its contemporary 

aspects. An early novel based on his experiences proved to him that fiction 

was not his forte. He tried another form of writing and by his 30th year he 

was a widely read drama and film critic. 

Among his colleagues he was the most This then is the situation in 1926. A large part 

learned about the history of the stage of the London Theatre is given up to plays 

and literature at large. His reviews were about dope-fiends and jazz maniacs; other 

terse, decisive, and extremely readable. laree tracts m abandoned to ** ******* of 

A i i , , t musical comedy. Roughly speaking, three- 

And he was also a character whose J -*> j r -*» 

. . . ... fourths of the London stage is closed to per- 

tastes, avocations, and friendships 

r sons possessed by the slightest particle of 

made him a conspicuous figure on the ■ * « * ^ i * * i- r +u j 

r & intellect or the least feeling for the drama. 

London scene. Picture theatres are springing up all over the 

He was an excellent musician and place> attracting by their cheapness, superior 
steady concert-goer, he loved good comfort and the greater intellectual content 
food and the best champagne, he of their programmes. 
played golf with scientific assiduity, —James Agate 
and he took part in the staid racing of 

show horses. When in 1 932 he decided to start a diary, he resolved to depict 
his life entire, which meant giving a place not solely to his daily thoughts and 
occupations but also to his talk and correspondence with others, including 
his brothers and sister, no less singular than himself. The resulting narrative, 
with fragments of hilarious mock-fiction, ranks with Pepys's diary for vivid- 
ness of characterization and fullness of historical detail. 

Agate (he pronounced it to rime with Hay gate ', but many acquaintances 
said Ay-git) found his tastes expensive, was always short of money, and took 
on every kind of literary job. He worked with speed but scrupulous care, 
keeping count of the hundreds of thousands of words that he turned into 
print each year. He wrote a good short life of the French actress Rachel; and 
published his best reviews in At Half-Past Eight, Red Letter Nights, and A Short 
View of the English Stage: 1900—1926; he edited classics on the same subject and 
his correspondence, never collected and perhaps largely lost by this time, was 
voluminous. 

He was helped in these labors by a succession of secretaries, of whom 
Alan Dent, himself a fine mind and excellent critic, lasted the longest; his role 
in Ego adds much to its conversational brilliance. Agate helped to give a start 
to Kenneth Tynan, among other writers and musicians, and was a strong 
force behind young talents and new undertakings in music and letters. But his 
common sense of the Johnsonian type kept him from being an all-out 



754 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

It was a dire day when Hitchcock or some- Modernist; he did not rave like others 
body discovered that a woman screaming over the plays of Christopher Fry, find- 
emits the same sound as a train entering a ing his imagery affected. He detested 
tunnel. Fusion became the rage, what began me music of Bartok. On account of 
as woman ended as tunnel, and why she was such judgments Agate was put down 
screaming or who was in the train ceased to by SQme ^ a semi _ philistine> H is inter- 

est in the points of pacer horses 
—James Agate in Ego (1935) seemed confirmation; and although 

himself a fluent Shakespearean, when 
he said that soldiers on leave should be given musical comedy and not 
Macbeth, his low brow raised the high brows of the righteous even higher. 

The same perceptiveness made Agate aware of portents that the self-cen- 
tered avant-garde failed to take in. As Rebecca West said in reviewing one of 
the Egos: "The sense of doom beats behind the frivolity like a majestic theme 
in the bass." His friends expected in 1940 that he would suspend Ego: when 
he said no, they expostulated: "It means that you regard your diary as more 
important than the war." — "Well, isn't it? The war is vital, not important. 
Because I am suddenly stricken with cancer, must cancer become my whole 
world? Except insofar as I am a coward, it does not fill my whole mind." 

It is of course because Agate's mind-and-heart was in touch with the feel- 
ings and thoughts of both the unassuming and the intellectual that he was a 
good critic of plays and had a broad taste in music and an intimate knowledge 
of both. He resembles Shaw in this range and in the freedom to express his lik- 
ing for the less than sublime: love of what is fine should not make one finicky. 
That Agate was a stylist is evident from all his mature writings; his voice is his 
own, his talent natural; he could not have written his millions of words if he had 
had to struggle with them. How long it will take before Ego 1 to 9 comes back 
into readers' hands is beyond guessing. It is a pity the diary is not in cipher, like 
Pepys's, for then it would benefit from the irrelevant interest that so often pro- 
motes great work — witness Stendhal's. [Still on library shelves is one volume, 
The Later Ego, which combines nos. 8 and 9, ed. by J. Barzun.°] 



* * 



Absurd 'was the term used by Anatole France when he heard of Einstein's 
universe, and the word began to be used more and more often about the 
workings of the postwar state and society. During those years also, a philoso- 
phy both technical and popular made the Absurd a definition of human exis- 
tence, thereby generating a "theater of the absurd" and visiting kindred 
changes on other literary genres. What precisely does the word suggest? 
Etymologically, it implies "not to be listened to"; usage adds: illogical, plainly 
not true, contemptibly wrong, contrary to common sense and laughably so. 



Embracing the Absurd <^> 755 

But little laughter is heard from those philosophers or from people who 
find themselves in an "absurd predicament" caused by the ways of contem- 
porary society. Absurd in that context means cross-purposes, self-defeating 
arrangements. Societies have always been flawed by patches of self-contra- 
diction. It is hard to imagine a huge group of people fashioning at various 
times a great many institutions and producing a fully consistent pattern of 
aims and actions. Unless the disparities go deep — for example, slave states 
and free states in a federation — the culture glides over local and temporary 
absurdities — until they grow too numerous or too glaring. 

The philosophic absurd betokens something of a different order: a state 
of mind about the conditions of life as such. That native state, according to 
the belief, is Angst, anguish. In its first statement by the Danish theologian 
Soren Kierkegaard, it was a religious anxiety. He was revolted by Hegel's con- 
ception of the universe, in which Reason coincided neady with Reality and 
man could feel cheerful at being part of so well ordered a divine absolute. 
Men's souls came out of it and would return to it after witnessing reason turn 
into fact. Kierkegaard saw instead an unbridgeable chasm between God and 
man with his troubled world, which called for a wholly individual and humble 
worship. 

The 20C has translated this intuition into the atheist vision of 
Existentialism. Man is simply here; he has to make what he can of a universe 
that is not even hostile but strange and uncertain. Man is never given a pur- 
pose or mission; he must devise them for himself, knowing that their fulfill- 
ment has no external justification or reward — altogether an absurd situation. 
The feeling-thought at the root of this metaphysics is an assessment of the 
present century The madness, the futility of the two wars, Man's incapacity to 
direct civilization along any precise course, and especially the gap between the 
actions of men and their stubbornly professed ideals show that they have no 
given destiny. 

This account does not explain how and why an Existentialist takes up his 
creed from among the several varieties. Their unifying principle is that a 
modern philosophy must start with things as they are perceived, existence as 
we live it, and not from any prior idea. Given that premise, one may suppose 
that after the first and second wars of the century, it was not so much the per- 
manent condition of human life, or the varied conditions in which most of 
mankind live, as the spontaneous estimate thinkers put on their own life that 
gave the tone to their speculations. Thus the guilt, anxiety, indifference, and 
strangeness that beset them as human beings who suffered from the plight of 
western culture found a place in their systems. 

That this is a tenable interpretation of the existentialist Absurd appears 
from the ideas put forward simultaneously by certain psychologists and soci- 
ologists. They diagnosed people and the world as mad. The Scottish psychia- 



756 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

You are a pain in the neck trist Ronald D. Laing made his name 

To stop you giving me a pain in the neck with the paradox that madness was the 

I protect my neck by tightening my neck sane response to an insane world; and 

muscles he illustrated the absurdity of his 

Which gives me the pain in the neck that patients' madness by fashioning little 

you are. verses that show the typical modern 

— Ronald Laing, Knots' (1970) . , ,. . . 

mind going round in circles. 

Other writers, students of Marx 

and Freud and loosely known as the Frankfort School, argued for combining 

the liberal side of Marxism with the erotic ingredient of psychoanalysis to 

effect a new emancipation of mankind from intolerable physical, social, 

and economic oppression. In the United States, a parallel demand under the 

arresting title of Life Against Death gave its author, Norman O. Brown, an 

influence comparable to that of Herbert Marcuse, the representative in 

America of the Frankfort School. Together with Timothy Leary, the advocate 

of drugging as the means of enhancing the free life, these mentors have been 

classed among those responsible for the outbreak of the world's youth in 

1968. 

The novelists and playwrights were not behindhand. In order to reject 
"realism," which they saw as a false front — in fact, by now an almost senti- 
mental rendering of reality — they created the various types of the literary 
Absurd: the theater of that name — originally and significantly "the theater of 
cruelty" — associated with Antonin Artaud, Beckett, Harold Pinter, Ionesco, 
and others, and the theory and illustration of the same new ethics in the nov- 
els of Albert Camus and a number of other talents. The pattern that emerges 
from the endeavor as a whole is that absurdity, anti-reason, is the formula that 
explains social and individual life and the indicated pattern for the arts. It is a 
curious match with the pattern of science, where common sense no longer 
has any place in the results to be expected from investigating nature. 

However fitting for the times, the existentialist complaint seems puny. It 
laments because man must make his own goals within a universe that stays 
aloof. Both are questionable assumptions. It can be argued that man and nature 
are one: nature is conscious of itself in and through man. And what man has 
made of the world, intellectually and materially, is his mission — chosen by him, 
it is true, but so universal that it is tantamount to fated, obligatory. Besides, how 
strange and unfriendly is nature? It has of course no intentions, friendly or 
unfriendly; it does not even exist as an entity; it is a man-made construct from 
his experience and for his purposes. But once taken as such "it" feeds him, it 
yields in a thousand ways to his handling, and it is beautiful. The sight of it 
often gives pure mindless joy. To dismiss as mistaken all these links with the 
cosmos that men have celebrated in worship and song is to forget that if the 



Embracing the Absurd <^ 757 

mind mistakes, it is because it "takes," and that the current submission to the 
absurd is a taking within life, not outside it; hence not competent to damn it 
permanently. 

From the conjunction of science with philosophy and literary theory in 
anti-reason, one is reminded of the youths writing in Zurich in 1916, the 
Dadaists. They too were practicing the Absurd, though without the name or 
the theory And so were the later Surrealists, especially the painters and sculp- 
tors (<723.). The conclusion to be drawn is commonplace: these artists and 
thinkers, moved by the same opinion of their surroundings, did more than 
"reflect" or "mirror" it in their work, they reproduced the actual features of 
that environment — but with a difference: the works of the Absurd set off no 
spark of positive electricity, no rebellion against the absurdity of the Absurd. 
On the contrary, it is accepted as inherent in life. 

In contrast, earlier philosophies used life as the very source of sanity; it 
was the measure of rightness, not vulnerable to corruption. The distinction 
was implicit between Life and our life at the moment; and the new thought, 
the new art showed what Life demanded. Even the Stoics, who did not dance 
with joy at the idea of being alive, left life and the cosmos their validity. The 
Absurd marks a failure of nerve. 

It is true that some French Existentialists, notably Gabriel Marcel, have 
been able to reconcile their philosophy with the Catholic faith, which tells us 
to be resigned rather than to rebel. But the mainstream, represented by Sartre 
and Beauvoir, adopted Marxism and were its faithful propagandists. It was 
hardly an original countermove to absurdity; in fact, it is a contradiction. To 
follow Marx is to believe that the steps ahead are determined by the phase of 
history — its present material conditions — not the free choice of men's will. 
And the goal of Marxist history is a Utopian existence without laws and pre- 
sumably without Angst. 

The passage from the original speculation to the mind of the public and 
the pages of newspapers took place rapidly after the mid-century point, the end 
of the second war. With an atmosphere saturated with the reports of scientific 
truths contrary to sense; poems and plays and paintings "expressive of our 
time," yet riddles without a key; critical theories from which we learn that sur- 
face meanings are a cloak and only hidden ones matter; or else that there being 
no intention in the author, there are no ascertainable meanings in the work; 
lastly, laws and rules that entangle one in fantastic predicaments (grist to 
Kafka's mill) — so many daily encounters with the absurd made it part of the 
regular furnishings of the mind. The absurd has always maintained a spacious 
home in daily life; whoever should doubt it need only consult Erasmus in The 
Praise of Folly, But the 20C has gone the 16th one better in making the absurd a 
sign of rightness, of surefire appeal. Any doctrine or program that claims the 



758 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

merit of going against common sense has presumption in its favor — a major 

discovery is at hand. Where earlier the proponent was declared a charlatan, 

now he is the bearer of the desirable new and enlightened. 

A repertory of such doctrines and programs would be lengthy. Here are 

a few samples of the absurd in practice. Western nations spend billions on 

public schooling for all, urged along by the public cry for Excellence. At the 

same time the society pounces on any show of superiority as elitism. The 

same nations deplore violence and sexual promiscuity among the young, but 

pornography and violence in films and books, shops and clubs, on television 

and the Internet, and in the lyrics of pop music cannot be suppressed, in the 

interests of "the free market of ideas." 

Under that rubric, speech (at least in 
Democratic civilization is the first in history 

,,.,., , . the United Mates) has enlarged its 

to blame itself because another power is try- ' ° 

ing to destroy it. meaning to include action: one may 

burn the flag with impunity: it is a state- 
—lEAN-FRANgois Revel (1970) _ . . ^ . .. 

ment of opinion. The legalism would 

seem to authorize assassination. 

Before the second war ended, groups in the West began to agitate for 
means to protect the approaching peace. Schemes for an Atlantic Union and a 
strengthened League of Nations were well supported and did issue in the 
North Adantic Treaty Organization and the United Nations, which include a 
number of agencies for good works in education, labor relations, and the like. 
Independently, English and other publicists revived the demand for an inter- 
national language that would aid mutual understanding. It was an old idea, first 
proposed in the 1 7C, worked out in the 1 8th, and doubly fruitful in the 1 880s, 
when Esperanto and Volapiik were devised. Early in the 20C a leading mathe- 
matician, Giuseppe Peano, created Interlingua, largely for scientific purposes 
and based like the others on European roots and a simplified grammar. 

After 1945 this idiom was put forward again but the victory went to a 
new scheme, entirely different from the others, Basic English. It was the work 
of C. K. Ogden, promoted by his friend and collaborator the respected liter- 
ary critic I. A. Richards. They rightly presumed that English was already inter- 
national and strove to reduce it to essentials for beginners' sakes. The result 
was in fact a reductio ad absurdum. The Basic vocabulary was far from truly 
simple; it disallowed many common words in favor of phrases with make or 
have that are difficult to put together, let alone remember. No faithful user of 
the method could build on his Basic by reading newspapers or listening to 
English speakers. It is even doubtful whether anybody who mastered the 
rules could say very much of interest to another proficient; and one who 
knew English and wanted to address a fluent Basicist might find it hard not 
to stray outside the limits of 850 words: 600 nouns and 1 8 verbs. He would 
find soup permissible, but for potato he would have to concoct: plant with thick 



Embracing the Absurd q^ 759 

brown cover that is bursting from the earth. Basic English is a carefully wrought plan for 
Headwaiter s would have to add mind transactions of practical business and inter- 
reading to their polyglot virtuosity. It is change of ideas, a medium of understanding 
curious that a prodigal handler of real to man y races and an aid to the building of a 
words such as Winston Churchill new structure for preserving peace. 
praised this constipated idiom. —Winston Churchill at Harvard (1 943) 

The present addiction to using ini- 
tials instead of names and to giving institutions long tides that yield a pseudo- 
word acronym is the childish-absurd. It taxes the memory, creates ambiguity 
as identical letter groups multiply, and makes it difficult to understand both 
the local newspaper of a town not our own and the periodical literature of a 
foreign country. All this wastes time, and when the practice invades biogra- 
phy to refer to persons, it insults the subject and reader alike. 

Enough has been said about the serious-absurd in the arts (<722), except 
for its side effect, the now standard practice for making the classic plays and 
operas acceptable. To most directors, modernizing means inventing travesties 
that will surprise and shock by a change of setting or purport. They offer a 
Tartuffe who is no self-seeking hypocrite but a sincere lover driven to sub- 
terfuge by passion; or again, a Don Giovanni in a wheelchair throughout the 
opera, because his boast of sexual conquests really conceals impotence. 

That the words and the music of these (and other) works contradict the 
"interpretation" no longer bothers anyone. With this revisionist effort goes 
the habit of underlining the meaning of the piece by untoward action — much 
kneeling and lying and rolling on the floor and long, close embraces to make 
sure the audience sees that the lovers are sexually intent. Shouting instead of 
speaking the lines completes the stage-absurd at its most emphatic. 

When we come to modern theoriz- 
ing, the drive to defeat common sense if I am still here at that point, what I'd really 
takes another turn and divides opinion, love to do is [Shaw's] Back to Methuselah. I 
some rejecting a doctrine because its would like to rip it to shreds and really go at it. 
aim is to make us forget in a fantastic — The artistic director of the Shaw 
way the diversity and concreteness of Festival in Canada (1995) 

things, others finding the far-fetched 

system congenial because it replaces experience by verbal abstractions, often 
amusing. Three names — Levi-Strauss, McLuhan, Kuhn — although not usually 
associated, nevertheless were at one through their parallel systems and found 
enthusiastic believers because of these common characteristics. 

The first was an anthropologist, who in his study of primitive peoples 
introduced the idea of Structure. This is a formal pattern made up of indica- 
tive items, such as whether food is eaten cooked or raw. Peoples' diversities 
recede in favor of classification. Structuralism was readily extended to other 
subjects; it had a great vogue among linguists, helping to make grammar 



760 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

unteachable in school; and to literary critics it supplied new criteria and a way 
to refresh their vocabulary 

For Marshall McLuhan, theorist of behavior, the catchy formula "the 
medium is the message" meant that techne, which is systematic and coercive, 
overwhelms language and meaning. Words, in fact, are obsolete; the visual, 
which is patterns, now rules thought, form obliterates contents. Released 
from "linear" habits, the modern mind, suitably dislocated, embraces wholes 
in new structured relations. And so the Renaissance, with the painter's linear 
perspective, and Gutenberg, with his mischievous invention of printing, are 
got rid of.° 

Thomas Kuhn was a physicist and historian of science who proposed to 
general acclaim by his peers the idea of "paradigm shift." The paradigm is the 
new conception in science that periodically occurs and being a pattern rather 
than single truths causes a change in all the fields of research. It is able to 
affect the entire domain at once, because the older minds offer no adequate 
defense against the new organic structure. 

In these three movements SCIEN- 
From the Look of Things to the tism j s f course evident, and more 

Structure of Appearance: particularly the long-established scien- 

By looking at their representation you learn tific use of models, the bare outline of a 
something about their internal structure [but state of affairs. By matching it with data 
when looking at what is fed into a computer] f rom f resn experiments, hypotheses 
we are seeing something analogous to the can be ver if le d and thus new generali- 
computational processes which go on in the ^ fitted [ntQ ^ pre _ existing scheme> 

To leave behind the facts of experience 
—Jonathan Miller on some effects and reach the smalles t number of 

IN PAINTING (1990) , • , i 

v ' mathematical statements about pat- 

terns is indeed the scientist's business. 
Is it the business of anybody else? Levi-Strauss's Structuralism and the for- 
mulas of McLuhan and Kuhn have been questioned on this philosophic 
ground, as well as on the evidence of particulars. Without much inquiry one 
can see that despite McLuhan, the use of words has not decreased; techne is 
the parent of television, where talk shows thrive, a verbal flood, and of e-mail, 
which is a form of print. Structuralism in language and criticism has been 
supplanted by other doctrines, znApace Kuhn, a number of specialist histori- 
ans have denied that the overturns in scientific thought suggest to them the 
flapjack in the pan. 

* 
* * 

In the realm of ethics, the most blatant absurdity of the day is wrapped up 
in the bogey word Relativism. Its current misapplication is a serious error, 



Embracing the Absurd q^> 761 

because it affects one's understanding of physical and social science and 
derails any reasoning about the morals of the day. Nine times out of ten, the 
outcry against Relativism is mechanical, not to say absentminded. Everybody 
is supposed to know what the term means; it has become a cliche that stands 
for the cause of every laxity; corrupt or scandalous conduct is supposed the 
product of a relativist oudook. When linked with Liberal politics, it implies 
complacent irresponsibility. 

The Relativist denies (so runs the charge) that there is a fixed Right and 
Wrong, better and worse. This makes for a readiness to follow fashion in 
behavior — "anything goes," "everybody does it." Relativism and conscience 
are diametrical opposites. What in all this is the meaning of relative? It means 
flexible, adaptable, a sliding scale that gives a different reading in similar situ- 
ations. Morality says: "Do not lie." The relativist says: "In view of this or that 
fact, I shall lie without hesitation or remorse" — to head off a criminal, to 
spare anxiety, or any other good reason. The anti-relativist then infers that the 
same person will cheat, steal, and so on up the ladder of immorality, always 
justified "relatively" to some particular; or — even more likely — with no 
excuse, because Relativism turns habitual and supports no idea but that of 
self-indulgence. 

Another count in the indictment is that Relativists make no distinctions 
among moral codes, religions, or cultures. All these, relatively to their place 
and time, their history, their means of subsistence are equal in value: as 5 is to 
10, so 10 is to 20 — multiply and you get 100 = 100. This grievance has in view 
the stance of the historian and the anthropologist, who in their descriptions 
apply a local and time-related standard, not an invariable external one. They 
believe that to understand one must sympathize. To illustrate: the anthropol- 
ogist asserts that the man who can count up to five in a tribe ignorant of num- 
bers is a mathematical genius. The historian who finds a 1 6C ruler granting 
toleration to all Christian sects calls him a pioneer moralist and humanitarian. 
The denouncer of Relativism infers from these relative judgments that the 
five-digit man and Einstein are equals and the tolerant ruler on a par with the 
framers of the United States Constitution. This is a gross error in logic. The 
relative judgment implies no ultimate estimation or preference. 

It is here we begin to see the Absurd concealed in the misuse of the term. 
Western civilization jusdy boasts of having developed the idea and the 
machinery of Pluralism. It accommodates in one polity contradictory reli- 
gions, moral codes, and political doctrines, all equal in status. Nothing is said 
about their respective merit or value, let alone their being equal, which would 
be meaningless. From this social and cultural tolerance those who assail 
Relativism do not dissent; they benefit from it; they never mention it. Now, 
the opposite of the Relative is the Absolute, and the Absolute means one 
principle only, a single standard of thought and behavior. One must therefore 



762 c^o From Dawn to Decadence 

ask the anti-relativist: "Whose Absolute are we to adopt and impose?" The 

plural state is full of them, down to the several sects of any one religion. How 

far a society can allow diversity under Pluralism is a real issue. The rival claims 

of two large language groups can split a 

nation badly — witness Belgium and 
World is crazier and more of it than we ^ i ™ i i ™ i i 

Canada, but blaming Relativism wnen- 

..,,1, T i . ever diversity creates disorder beclouds 

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion J 

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel a W* ° f sitUation that muSt be Setded 

The drunkenness of things being various. politically. Meantime, the absurdity 

,, XT ffC , „ Hf ,. nN remains of espousing Pluralism and 

— Louis MacNeice, "Snow" (1970) . r & 

groaning about the absence of an abso- 
lute that would cure moral ills. 

Reflection shows further that anybody who thinks at all uses the relative 
standard continually; it is the operation the mind goes through in all judg- 
ments. To compare two lengths, one relates each to a yardstick. A judge or 
jury relates the facts of the case to the law. Under an absolute code the same 
relativing procedure would still be needed to judge offense and punishment. 
No standard works like an automatic machine, nor can a civilized society do 
without variable standards that call for relativist application: the law is the law, 
but the judge sentences the first offender less heavily than the second or 
third. Unequal treatment within typical situations is the rule of intelligent 
action: the child's meal or medical dose is related to his age and size. 

But are there not at least a few fundamental principles of conduct that 
the whole world acknowledges as binding and not subject to change? 
Apparentiy not. Not even "Thou shalt not kill." At the start of the admirable 
common law, in the 1 1C, wergeldvrzs the rule; that is, paying for murder done; 
murther originally denotes a fine (<228). Among the Eskimos, in the past also, 
a murderer was asked to leave, he did so and was received without a word by 
the neighboring tribe. In the most advanced countries self-defense allows 
killing. So does war, which qualifies as remote self-defense. The Christian 
clergy in the Great War read the Sixth Commandment in that relative way 
(<701). The absolutely uniform human conscience does not seem to exist. 

It is true that for civil peace and comfort most societies reprove and pun- 
ish killing and all kinds of injury to the person, lying and breaking promises in 
serious matters, and cheating and stealing — if property is part of the system. 
But the particular laws vary infinitely and stand in contradiction from time to 
time. In the one realm of property, the western businessman's moral con- 
science in the year 1 880 differed radically from that of his descendant in 1 980. 
The same disparity occurs from place to place: what is (criminal) bigamy in 
the Occident is the first step in gaining status in parts of Africa. When the 
anti-relativist deplores the present state of morals he is judging it relatively to 
a previous state, which he believes was fixed and eternal. 



Embracing the Absurd ^^ 763 

Perhaps to clear the mind of the stubborn cliche, one should speak of 
Relationism. One would then notice that science is Relationism first and last. 
The whole effort is to establish relations between phenomena, ultimately 
between pairs of well-defined sense impressions, by the medium of a material 
or numerical yardstick. This done, all proportions can be derived for practical 
uses. Form in art — fitness in anything — consists in a subtle or vivid relation 
between parts that cannot be arrived at by means of an absolute formula. In 
society tact is the great art that makes for civility, for civilization, and tact is 
nothing but the subtlest relationism in action. 

* 
* * 

The century's second big war, like the first, left small fires burning in 
many places and only two powers apparendy strong enough to influence the 
course of the world, the United States and Russia. Unable to come to terms, 
they confronted each other for 40 years in a Cold War; that is, a war by proxy. 
But because the close of the war against Germany and Japan was followed by 
the collapse of the colonial empires, and out of them the creation of a collec- 
tion of small states — they really should not be called nations — the degree of 
importance given to these states and wars grew in magnitude, representing as 
they did the antagonism between the two main powers. Ever since — and in 
spite of the Soviet collapse — the western populations have felt daily concern 
about the struggles in eastern and southeastern Europe, the Middle and Far 
East, South America, and all parts of Africa. 

The repeated splitting apart of the liberated colonies, Communist 
seizures of power, followed by counter-dictatorships with a revolving-door 
effect (and changes in more and more geographical names) have put the large 
and peaceful at the mercy of the small and aggressive. In many regions, 
Fundamentalisms animate without unifying. To maintain some order in 
strategic areas, the older nations have taken on the task of policing — piece- 
meal — because in many corners some "liberation army" is raiding and mas- 
sacring in order to cut up still further the nationette recently carved out of a 
larger unit. The boast that speed in communication and the desire every- 
where for western entertainments and conveniences have at last created one 
world is offset by the amoebic division among peoples. 

Very different was the drive toward a new freedom which, in the United 
States, changed human relations throughout the society. After many long 
years, the sense of outrage set off in the southern states a revolt against things 
as they were. The Black population staged protests of various forms to obtain 
the rights that the Civil War had enshrined in the Constitution a century ear- 
lier and evil custom had denied. Thanks to the self-controlled crowd action 
led by individuals who were intelligent, courageous, eloquent, and temperate, 



764 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

the uprising was not a bloody fray. The country as a whole judged it morally 
and legally justified, and it now celebrates by a national holiday the outstand- 
ing figure who guided the movement to substantial success: the prophetically 
named Reverend Martin Luther King. 

The sequel has not been all that was hoped for; prejudice dissolves 
slowly. In addition, steps were taken that have magnified the idea of race and 
made it of decisive importance almost everywhere in the culture. Not the law- 
makers, who passed in 1964 a wise act compelling equity, but afterward, cer- 
tain public and private agencies imposed rules that ensured a preferential 
right to work or to qualify for posts on the basis of status as "a minority." 
That absurd term included women, and this new privilege increased mutual 
hostility among individuals and groups. In Europe, the same confused policy 
has damaged the relations between natives and immigrants. Here and abroad 
the state has lost the virtue of being impartial and thus the moral authority to 
make impartiality the law for all. 

It was during one of the wars by which the United States intended the 
containment of Communist power in the Far East, the Vietnam War of the 
1960s, that there occurred a widespread revolt of youth. The former French 
power in Indochina had been allowed to collapse and the American forces 
fighting in the jungle were not making headway against the guerrillas from the 
North. In the States, conscription was being evaded by the alert in colleges 
and universities. With help and money from various sources, born leaders 
among students turned the disaffection first against their alma maters and 
soon into denunciation and sabotage of "the system." 

Violent confrontations began in California in 1965 and spread east, 
where by 1968 it was paralyzing college life. Reaching Europe, it nearly top- 
pled the government of De Gaulle in France, affected England and Germany, 
the rest of the Continent sporadically, and deeply disturbed the Japanese uni- 
versities, otherwise bastions of discipline. The troubles continued in various 
forms until the mid-1970s, having marked upon the mind of a generation a 
pattern that still affects policy in government and the academic world. 

Starting with anti-war feeling like the English pacifism of the 1920s — 
"make love, not war" — the young Americans picked up the anti-capitalist ani- 
mus of the Marxist 1930s, and merged these emotions with either primi- 
TTVTSM or NIHILISM, depending on temperaments. Some of the rebels formed 
communes in which they lived like early Christian or 1 9C Utopian groups — 
brother-and-sisterhoods with property and workload in common; others hid 
in basements to make bombs and blow up businesses by way of advertising 
their views. The European students, much more numerous in their non-resi- 
dent universities and with a tradition of rioting that goes back to the 12C, 
made their anger politically effective and obtained from government conces- 
sions that enhanced their livelihood and have kept them a threat. 



Embracing the Absurd <^> 765 

The programs naturally differed according to country or city. During one 
demonstration in Chicago that was brutally repressed, a leaflet was issued list- 
ing eight immediate desiderata, among them: the abolition of money and 
"everyone an artist." Some artists might well think that this state of affairs 
had been their own long since. A later protest, at one of the leading universi- 
ties in California, is to be remembered for the encouraging presence of a cler- 
gyman active in national politics and for the slogan he and the crowd chanted 
during the demonstration: "Western Civ. Has Got to Go!" The civ. in ques- 
tion was a course in the core curriculum, but it was not being denounced for 
academic reasons. Its tide expressed an ecumenical emotion that is still voiced 
at large and systematically in many a college classroom. 

American students in 1968 had one genuine grievance that hardly 
appeared in their speeches and posters: their neglect by the faculty and aban- 
donment to teaching assistants. The absentee professoriate was the fruit of a 
double pull: the federal government's pressing into war service experts not in 
science only, but in all fields from foreign languages to naval history; and the 
foundations' large bribes to the universities for allowing the best members of 
their faculties to man the social and other projects devised by the ex-profes- 
sors in charge of making grants. These managers also created on campus spe- 
cialized centers and institutes that drew to the foundation the loyalty and 
financial dependence that the teaching faculty formerly owed to their own 
institution and students. 

When the rebellious were still in their colleges and universities, their way of 
protest was to occupy a building, especially the president's office, and vandalize 
ad lib, not excluding the destruction of research notes and equipment. On their 
side, administrative officers behaved with that final degree of caution which is 
cowardice. They complied a with summons to discuss "non-negotiable issues," 
swallowed all insults — one president on a platform before the student body 
allowed a pot of paint to be poured on his head — and countered no student 
advocacy with their own. In the few cases where they called the police to pro- 
tect employees and strangers, they were universally blamed. In the midst of the 
excitement some professors were heard to say that they had never felt so alive; 
conflict invigorates, as the intellectuals learned in 1914 (< 701). In England, the 
tumult was briefer, thanks to the Cambridge vice-chancellor, who got in touch 
with his counterparts and drafted a joint statement pledging that they would 
confer, and if need be, reform, but not tolerate resort to physical means. 

To assess this unusual movement, which shook the West seriously and 
yet without overturning regimes, is risky. Some of the loudest and ablest of 
the student leaders turned into obscure business or professional men; others 
went successfully into regular politics. But with the exception of one man in 
Europe, neither group has bred a statesman. What their diffuse influence 
has done is to make usual a truculent attitude toward professors. The latter's 



766 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 

authority, whether conferred by scholarship or the title itself, is now held in 
check by practices reminiscent of the Middle Ages (<229). Students now give 
their teachers good or bad marks annually and these are used in determining 
salary and promotion. In some institutions students take part in planning the 
subject and readings of the course and are free to argue about their grades. 
The rebel feeling of the 1960s helped put authority always on the defensive 
(the word itself is taboo) — all decisions must follow consultation. Such is the 
logic of EMANCIPATION. 

Two of the themes that have earned their small capitals in these pages, 
ABSTRACTION and ANALYSIS, have been attached to material facts for obvi- 
ous reasons and in a literal sense. But there are modern habits and occur- 
rences that are less visible, including the frequent combination of the two 
themes in one event. The occasion or result may carry a flavor of the absurd. 

One may posit as a generality that "the machine abstracts." It puts a mid- 
dleman — a middle-thing — between experience and perception, it yields only 
a derived and artificial experience. For example, the voice on the telephone or 
in the movie theater is not the human voice; it is the distorted residue 
required to make out what is said. To call this and all other transformations by 
machine Abstraction is warranted by the fact that machines are designed to 
capture or modify one part of reality in order to gain some advantage. The 
loss of other parts seems a fair exchange. In canned foods, their lasting power 
is secured by destroying subde tastes and sometimes by creating an altogether 
different product, drawn from the original in the way that a Cubist painter 
deals with a face or figure. 

It is a function of the cyber world, so-called, to go a step further and offer 
the client a wide choice of manufactured experience — everything from 
reproductions of famous paintings to lifelike female figures that act out 
seduction in looks and gestures. It is a measure of the taste for the abstract 
that in the eyes of European viewers these digital courtesans outshine real 
women; "virtual reality" is now stronger than the concrete; machine-made 
love conquers all. 

This is not to say that the practice of abstracting from the real did not 
exist before the machine, or that human life could be carried on without the 
use of abstraction; it begins in infancy. Names abstract: motherjather, tree, chair, 
five, six are abstractions that also abridge in a crude way the reality of the indi- 
vidual things — toys do the same in a physical way, and so does cooking food. 
A high civilization multiplies these devices and develops super-abstractions 
that are the product of ANALYSIS. Analysis, as we saw early on, breaks wholes 
into parts for a better grasp of the qualities and behavior of the object. This 



Embracing the Absurd <^ 767 

increase in understanding also depletes, since analysis omits the feature that 
makes the whole interesting or valuable. One tends to think that the clock and 
its parts are the same, but until assembled the parts are not a clock: they can- 
not be wound; they have been abstracted physically; they are scrap metal until 
properly reunited in space. 

Analysis that entails abstraction is also done mentally for the sake of 
counting. When a sociologist wants to know how many children, on average, 
are born to the families in the state, he must frame a set of abstractions after 
analyzing the visible reality: is a family only a married pair or any fertile cou- 
ple? What of adopted children? How to deal with stillbirths? If sampling 
rather than counting is used, there enter new abstractions that define the sam- 
ple by analyzing the population for certain features. The desired result turns 
out to be something like 3.2 children per family, which is surely a super- 
abstraction. 

The hundreds of statistics, the "indexes" and "ratings" applicable to 
innumerable activities are all analytic abstractions that bear an arbitrary but — 
it is hoped — useful relation to things as they are. The figures are definite, their 
worth often indefinite; so indefinite, indeed, that the three critiques continu- 
ally made of statistical reports are: the analysis included a part that does not 
belong; the statistical method was faulty; and no account was taken of an 
interfering factor. Frequently forgotten is the fact that a perfectly computed 
correlation does not imply a causal relation between the paired events. At 
best, statistics — the stat life, as it figures in these pages — puts before us a 
plausible reproduction at a remove from reality. 

It is quite far removed when one considers a further step in certain 
abstractions, the reliance on "indicators." These are the signs chosen to rep- 
resent something hard to get at direct. Going by signs has been commonplace 
from early times too: pimples indicate measles; the art of medicine relies with 
great success on symptoms. But abstract pimples, so to speak, are more 
chancy. Do answers to a questionnaire about a prospective employee's tastes 
and habits indicate future performance? The correlation that charms the per- 
sonnel officer may be self-serving. The answers given may be largely false, 
and even if honest, even if correct, what is the connection? This is the essence 
of the case against opinion polls. 

It is not unfair to say that the present culture conducts its business largely 
like the inhabitants of Swift's island of Laputa, who hovered in the air over the 
solid earth beneath. Direct judgment of human beings is mistrusted. Ours is 
a credentials society, in which estimates of ability and character are round- 
about. Sizing up someone face-to-face has come to be frowned upon: "Don't 
be judgmental." Yet the appraisal is not without indicators; its chief defect is 
that it is hard to defend, whereas a score expressed in numbers cuts off argu- 
ment regardless of its validity. 



768 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

In the scholarly disciplines likewise, analysis furnishes the materials and 
abstraction the mode of expressing results — the terminology of the field of 
study. It often makes the reports and the textbooks so empty of concrete 
words that the reader must translate strings of vocables ending in -tion into 
pictures of life until his imagination retreats exhausted. 

Like workers in science, economists make use of models that consist of 
figures about things made and sold, rates over time, and so on. Refined mea- 
surements of abstract interconnections lead to models entirely in mathemat- 
ical formulas — the branch of study called econometrics. Experience during 
the last decade or so has not been kind to economists. Their warnings and 
predictions have been falsified by what people as producers, consumers, and 
investors have chosen to do. This unruly behavior adds to the tangled argu- 
ment between Keynesians and their decriers about desirable policies. Some 
call for measures in support of the supply side of the economy; others want 
government to keep up demand, if need be by deficit spending. But both 
groups in fact agree on the mechanics that Keynes described in his epoch- 
making General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. 

Attempts have been made to use numbers similarly in history — to "mea- 
sure" violence, for example, as if it were a homogeneous substance. The 
effort has not had much success. An older form of abstraction, which is also 
a structuralism, is the philosophy of history. It was described earlier (<653) 
and shown to be misleading principally through its assertion of a single cause. 
Events are roughly handled to form recurring patterns that together form the 
structure of history. The hope of strengthening such a scheme by importing 
scientific ideas into it was made early in this century by Henry Adams. He 
tried to fit his knowledge of medieval and modern history and his experience 
of life, which was that of a man subjected to forces that he could neither resist 
nor fully understand, into a system of recurrences. But instead of a single 
named cause and an identical pattern, he posited Energy at large as the driv- 
ing force of history and cited a principle of thermodynamics to explain the 
course of civilization. The principle states that energy, though never lost, 
becomes less and less organized and usable — the log burns and gives heat but 
once. In modern culture and society, Adams saw increasing multiplicity and 
diversity as this loss of energy. He added a "law of phase," which he borrowed 
from Willard Gibbs and which he apparently misunderstood, to determine 
moments when the energy is frittered away more massively than usual, this 
taking place at an accelerating rate. Adams predicted that 1917 was such a 
moment. Recurrent bursts would eventually produce the disarray and death 
of civilization. 

An attempt to "structure events" — a voguish abstract phrase for "put 
order in things" — need not produce absurdity. Order in facts, ideas, intentions 
is necessary Without patterns, memory is swamped. And for present action 



Embracing the Absurd <^& 769 

and control, contemporary facts must be put in order, even at the cost of doing 
injustice to exceptions. The result warrants what may be called "the sociologi- 
cal intent." What is absurd is the habit of believing the order to be the truth and 
the facts negligible. Almost as bad is to import the cast of thought and the jar- 
gon where they are not needed; for instance, to say, "everybody tends to maxi- 
mize their values," instead of: seeks pleasure and tries to avoid pain — if that is 
indeed the thought behind the vague abstraction. In any context the word val- 
ues is surely the emptiest in current use. To sum up, analysis and abstraction are 
not demons to exorcise, but like the machine, to be mastered, not obeyed. To 
live amid lax words and dim thoughts more or less translatable into concrete- 
ness depletes energy and deadens the joy of life. The man in the street who says 
"Precipitation probability is twenty percent" is less alive than if he said and felt 
"small chance of rain." 

* * 

For the thoughtful who take part — at a distance, it may be, and by soli- 
tary reflection — in the fiercest battle of the day, the deep division over the 
idea of the state, and the place of religion, there is a document that should be 
read to concentrate thought and guide choices. It is a section some 20 pages 
long in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karama^ov. The piece is somewhat formally pre- 
sented by one of the brothers, Ivan, as a poem that he wants to recite to the 
youngest, Alyosha; it bears a title: "The Grand Inquisitor." Ivan immediately 
adds that it is not verse and not written down; he will speak it if Alyosha will 
listen. What it is may be called a fantasy fiction, an allegory. Ivan is a rational- 
ist and atheist disaffected from both heaven and earth; he might pass for an 
Existentialist disgusted with life. Alyosha is all candor, goodness, and simple 
faith — and eager to hear his brother's "poem." 

The scene is Seville at the height of the Spanish Inquisition, on the day 
after an auto-da-fe in which 100 heretics were burned. Christ appears. He is 
immediately recognized by everybody. The people fall to their knees and wor- 
ship. They beg that a young girl being brought out of church in her coffin be 
revived. He speaks and she sits up, smiling. At His word an old man regains 
his sight; Christ is no phantom or delusion. In the midst of the wonders, the 
old, very old Cardinal-Inquisitor appears. He too recognizes the stranger and 
orders his guards to arrest Him and put him in prison. The crowd, automati- 
cally overawed, offer no protest but fall on their knees and worship the 
Cardinal. 

That night the Inquisitor goes to Christ in his cell and berates him for what 
He has done — not only in reappearing, but in His original cruelty to Man. The 
accusation is detailed and constitutes a little treatise on political science and the 
Christian faith. The Inquisitor harks back to the three temptations with which 



770 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

the Devil tried to make Christ one of his own: first offering bread to Him who 
was starving in the desert; then urging that He throw Himself down from a 
height to show Himself miraculously saved; lasdy displaying the empires of the 
earth, to tempt Him with power. In rejecting all these, says the Inquisitor, 
Christ reaffirmed through his own person Man's gift of freedom; human con- 
science chooses without compulsion or limitation. 

But, says the Inquisitor, man is weak, confused, sinful, incapable of bear- 
ing such a burden. Seeing this heardess imposition, some wise men among 
the mass of mankind have taken the burden on themselves of giving the rest 
what they need to be at ease; the agency is the hierarchy of the church. It pro- 
vides bread. Man needs it but does not live by bread alone; the weak and way- 
ward conscience needs certainties; it wants miracle, mystery, and authority. 
These also the church supplies. Man's final desire is unity, the peace of know- 
ing that all think and feel alike. And this boon is on the way to realization, 
thanks to thought-control and the irresistible appeal of the other gifts, espe- 
cially bread. 

Throughout the harangue, Christ has been silent and gendy smiling. But 
the Inquisitor is not through. Not only has Christ harmed God's creatures by 
making them free, He has imposed on the wise — the 1 00,000 on earth who 
run the great deception — an intolerable burden. They live in sadness, 
deprived of their freedom in keeping up the show — "correcting His work" — 
not from love of power but out of pity for Man. 

Now and then during the indictment Alyosha protests against the mean- 
ing Ivan puts on the gospel and the church. Ivan loves his brother and does 
not argue with him but quiedy continues. Although the smiling Christ says 
not a word, the drama built up among these four is intense. How it is resolved 
need not be set down, for it is the dilemma that relates to our concern. [The 
resume should tempt to reading the masterpiece, which is in part II, book V, 
chapter V of The Brothers Karama^ov. Separate editions of The Grand Inquisitor 
are also available.] ° 

Dostoevsky was once an Ivan and became a matured Alyosha, yet his 
view of man did not change as radically. He chose freedom but gave approval 
to the policies of Pobietonostsev, the head of the Holy Synod — not a Grand 
Inquisitor, to be sure, but an autocrat governing an orthodox hierarchy 
resembling the Catholic. In the novel, the illegitimate half-brother of the 
Karamazovs, Smerdiakov, has traits such as Dostoevsky attributes to most 
men in Ivan's allegory: weak, credulous, sinful, and also full of vanity, resent- 
ment, and half-baked knowledge acquired by reading beyond one's intelli- 
gence. It seems as if Dostoevsky, like the critics of modern society from 
Baudelaire to Ortega y Gasset, lumped together all classes into the figure of 
the Mass Man, contemptible regardless of birth or education. 



Embracing the Absurd ^ 771 

That Russia was the country where the Inquisitor's scheme of bread and 
mystery was attempted under the name of Communism would not have sur- 
prised Ivan's creator. The tradition of ruthless authority and total unity went 
back to Peter the Great (<319); the emancipation of the serfs and the begin- 
nings of industry were too recent to have developed different habits, and the 
rebel intelligentsia, lacking political skill, had been repeatedly put down. 
Bread ensured obedience to the Soviets as in the Spanish allegory, but the 
Inquisitor's 200,000 were not matched in efficiency and the regime broke 
down over bread, not ideas. 

The late 20C welfare states of the West are not Communist Russia or 
Seville in the 16C, but some of the aims and devices are not unlike. The desire 
for security on the part of the population is the same, coupled though it is 
with a desire for freedom. This combination, as the Inquisitor implies, is self- 
contradictory and probably unworkable. Coming at the end of the Occident's 
long struggle to emancipate all men from ancestral bonds and natural con- 
straints, the question makes it opportune to survey western institutions as 
they now work or fail. But before this risky stock-taking, the elements of tone 
and temper, of manners and morals must be sketched where they are to be 
found, which is in the behavior of the individual. 



Demotic Life and Times 



The fourth or Social Revolution that was set off — but far from 
completed — by the events of 1917-18 in Russia changed the governments of 
many regions of the world. A large number of peoples became Communist, 
and the official names they assumed often suggested that they were new 
democracies added to those of the West. The leaders of the time paid lip ser- 
vice to "the rule of the people." But the elections and assemblies of those 
upstart regimes were make-believe. And one must add that even the western 
countries had no right to the designation. Democracy means rule by the entire 
people — the town meeting in which all debate and vote. There were none 
such. The right name, when it was deserved, should have been representative 
government. By a further slippage, democratic had come to be used in praise of 
miscellaneous things — a restaurant with "democratic prices" or a person 
whose manners were "very democratic." For clear thought about the ethos of 
that period in decline we shall say demotic, which means "of the people." 

Making this distinction is not a piece of pedantry. Toward the end of that 
era of the West, individuals and society alike thought and acted in ways quite 
/^democratic in both the strict sense and the loose — for instance, staging 
protests in the streets against a lawful decision or demanding after a poll that 
the legislative body vote in accordance with its results. 

In attempting a sketch of a culture at its close, the elements to look for 
may be classed under the headings of style and society, style meaning the 
choices made by individuals, and society meaning the ways of institutions. 
Although not clear-cut, the difference is that between what is personal or pri- 
vate and what is public or official. The aims and desires of the two overlap but 
generally conflict — a small civil war, for it is of course individuals who decide 
and carry out the official demands that are challenged or resisted by other 
individuals. 



774 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

The strongest tendency of the later 20C was Separatism. It affected all 
earlier forms of unity. The fact was noticed early in this book apropos of cul- 
ture (<xiv). The ideal of Pluralism had disintegrated and Separatism took its 
place; as one partisan of the new goal put it: "Salad bowl is better than melt- 
ing pot." The melting pot had not eliminated all diversities; it had created a 
common core. 

At the outset, separatism might have seemed a mood that would pass. 
But if one surveyed the Occident and the world as well, one could see that the 
greatest political creation of the West, the nation-state, was stricken. In Great 
Britain the former kingdoms of Scodand and Wales won autonomous parlia- 
ments; in France the Bretons, Basques, and Alsacians cried out for regional 
power; Corsica wanted independence and a language of its own. Italy har- 
bored a League that would cut off the North from the South, and Venice pro- 
duced a small party wanting their city a separate state. Northern Ireland, 
Algeria, Lebanon carried on unstoppable civil wars. 

The Spanish Basques fought for years to break away from Spain, and 
Catalonia kept on showing disaffection as in the past. Belgium was rent by a 
language difference that is also geographical and that pitted the two halves 
against each other on most issues. Germany, recendy reunited, was not re- 
welded. The former Soviet Union lay helpless in many parts, and in the one 
still called Russia, insurrection led to war in Chechnya and Dargestan. Turkey 
and Iraq had to fight the Kurd separatists. The Afghans were up in arms. 
Mexico faced the rebellious Zapatistas, while Quebec periodically demanded 
freedom from Canada. The Balkan would-be nations continued their ethnic 
and religious massacres for the sake of separateness. 

In the United States there were mosdy tokens of the malaise. A small 
group that wanted Texas to regain its status of independent republic had to 
be quelled by force; and there were armed parties and religious bodies that 
spoke and behaved as if entirely independent of the existing order. There 
were also threats within smaller units: Martha's Vineyard talked of secession 
from Massachusetts and Staten Island from New York. It is symptomatic that 
a group calling itself the Nation of Islam used the word nation without protest 
from other groups or from the authorities. Would this denomination have 
passed without comment at any earlier time in American history? Puerto 
Rico, a territory, was of two minds: some of the people wanted statehood, 
others nationhood. Several Amerind peoples also called themselves nations 
and were at last recovering their just due under old treaties, but their demands 
were for sharing rights, not secession. Efforts to make English the official 
language of the United States regularly failed. 

Other forces worked to denationalize. Immigrants from far-off emanci- 
pated colonies brought into Europe alien languages and customs. They hud- 
dled separately in slum enclaves — a Turkish settlement here, an Algerian 



Demotic Life and times <^d 775 

suburb there. France had an African village, complete with medicine men 
and ritual chants and dances. This 20C "colonizing" of the West could 
muster only the power of the weak. Unemployed or in menial jobs, these 
foreigners were victims, and being united mainly by religion appealed to sen- 
timent for help from the welfare state. When molested by their equally poor 
white neighbors or expected to conform to western habits, these clans were 
defended by their host government, from compassion and fear that a 
demand for conformity would be "racist." And in some of these districts the 
national police would not venture. The same motive of respect led to the 
official encouragement of plans to revive local dialects. Europe was experi- 
encing again the grand confusion of peoples that had occurred in the Late 
Roman Empire and tapered off in the Middle Ages. 

Separatism was rampant all over the globe. No sooner was India free of 
British rule than Pakistan broke away, and no sooner was the new nation sep- 
arate than Bangladesh freed itself from it. The old Ceylon, a huge island 
renamed Sri Lanka, carried on a civil war for more than 20 years, and in the 
Himalayas, India again fought Pakistan over Kashmir. The East Timorese 
nearly destroyed Indonesia. Wherever one looked — at Ireland, the Middle 
East, South America, Southeast Asia, all of Africa, the Caribbean, and the 
whole ocean speckled with islands, one would find a nation or would-be 
nation at war to win or prevent independence. In the Indian Ocean, 300 miles 
east of the tip of Madagascar, are the Comoros — four islands whose total 
area is 830 square miles and whose population was then 493,000. Released 
from French ownership they became the Federal Islamic Republic of the 
Comoros. It could not last: the people of the smallest island, the Anjouans, 
wrangled for a dozen years with the central government and finally declared 
their separateness. Delegates from neighboring countries joined in celebrat- 
ing EMANCIPATION triumphant. That the nation-state was ceasing to be the 
desirable form of political society was clear in spite of the growing number of 
fragments that assumed the name — close to 200 by the end of the 20C. 

Disuniting in another way was the European Union, made up of 1 5 of the 
most productive countries. It had gradually won the power to intervene in 
national affairs. The ruling body in Brussels could regulate important eco- 
nomic transactions, nullify judicial decisions, enforce the acceptance of immi- 
grants, and set the central bank interest rate for 1 1 of its members. Scholars 
wrote monographs on sovereignty, asking themselves and the public "What 
Makes a Nation?" A large part of the answer to that question is: common 
historical memories. When the nation's history is poorly taught in schools, 
ignored by the young, and proudly rejected by qualified elders, awareness of 
tradition consists only in wanting to destroy it. True, the word history contin- 
ues to be freely used, but in ways and places where it does not belong 
Garbled and fictionalized versions in films and "docudramas" disgrace the 



776 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

word, while the fancy for objects dug up or dredged from the sea, which the 
press hails as "a piece of history," complete the quietus of the historical sense. 

In the light of the facts, it was absurd for contemporaries to say that the 
ubiquitous armed conflicts were expressions of nationalism. They were the 
diametrical opposite; like the artists' anti-art, the time was creating the anti- 
nation. To become a separate state, not really independent, but on the con- 
trary dependent on money and protection from one of the big powers, was a 
step backward. The end of the half millennium destroyed what the beginning 
had so painfully accomplished: put an end to feudal wars by welding together 
neighboring regions, assimilated foreign enclaves, set up strong kings over 
large territories, and done everything to foster loyalty to something larger 
than the eye could see. A common language, a core of historical memories 
with heroes and villains, compulsory public schooling and military service 
finally made the 19C nation-state the carrier of civilization. 

Now all these elements were decaying and could not be restored. It must 
have struck keen observers as a pathetic move when the French government 
in 1996 organized a celebration to mark the anniversary of "the Baptism of 
Clovis," the 5C Frankish chieftain who turned Christian and ordered his tribe 
to do the same. The celebration was to remind the modern nation of its 
ancient unity, as if Clovis had made France. No such thing existed in the 5C. 
And in the 20th, disunity was marked by the immediate protest against the 
celebration by all the parties of the Left, more than half the nation. 



The main merit of the nation-state was that over its large territory violence 
had been reduced; nobles first and citizens later were subjected to one law uni- 
formly recognized and applied. In the last-years of the era of nations, violence 
returned; crime was endemic in the West. Assault in the home, the office, and 
on city streets was commonplace and particularly vicious. That children — 
infants — were frequently victims of parental rage, incest, or killing was a puz- 
zling fact that cast doubt on the reality of traits such as love of offspring, part 
of the myth of "human nature." Prisons were full and new ones continually 
being built to receive causeless killers, offenders against the drug laws, and the 
personnel of organized crime. Even so, the number of prosecutions and con- 
victions was a small fraction of the reported offenses. The prisons themselves, 
far from exerting the full force of the law, were scenes of perpetual violence. 
Humane sentiment had made them less rigorous, almost comfortable, while 
prisoners' rights multiplied. The inmates formed gangs that governed, overaw- 
ing the guards and abusing their fellow prisoners sexually and in other ways; 
riots and escapes were frequent. 

A baffling fact was that the public schools were also a regular setting for 



Demotic Life and times ^ 777 

violent acts. Armed guards patrolled It's very exciting to violate the law, though it 
the corridors to keep the peace among can also lead to a kind of madness. 

the pupils; teachers were assaulted — Ice-T, internationally renowned 
to the point where the danger became rapper (1998) 

an expected risk of the profession. In a 

large state, some 50,000 incidents could occur in one year. From their early 
teens, pupils carried guns, assaulted each other, and on occasion committed 
little massacres by shooting into a group at random with a rapid-fire weapon. 
As we shall see, certain recurring situations having to do with rights and 
the agencies that administer them produced fits of rage that could turn dan- 
gerous. The feeling of being hemmed in by rules matched that of being 
hemmed in by people — there were too many of both/ INDIVIDUALISM had 
undergone an unexpected turn: under the welfare ethos the individual came 
in conflict with his alter ego — his equal 

in rights — throughout the day. To the , ,,,,.. 

. . /- i • i ■" y° u are oppressed, wake up about four in 

competition of talent in business or the ,_._., ,i 

r the morning and most places you can usually 

professions was added endless con- be free some of the time if you wake up before 

frontation within the private sphere, other people. 

often over things at once trivial and 1V , c «„ „ „ n _ nx 

& . — William Stafford, Freedom (1970) 

important: the suburban community 
dictated the color of your front door. 

It was the eutopian imagination at work making corrective rules as the path 
to the good life. The welfare ideal did not merely see to it that the poor should 
be able to survive, but that everybody should be safe and at ease in a hundred 
ways. Besides providing health care, pensions ("social security"), and work- 
men's compensation for accidents, it undertook to protect every employee by 
workplace regulations and every consumer by laws against harm from foods, 
drugs, and the multiform dangers that industry creates. All appliances were 
subject to design control and inspection. The citizen must moreover be pro- 
tected from actions by others that are not visibly hostile or inherentiy criminal, 
those, for example, that can be committed by the imaginative in trade, invest- 
ment, and banking. 

At the same time, it was also held that the state had the duty of support- 
ing art and science, medical research, and the integrity of the environment, 
while it must also make sure that all children were not simply literate but edu- 
cated up to and through college — rules, rules, definitions, classifications, and 
exceptions = indignation — and litigation. The welfare state cannot avoid 
becoming the judiciary state. 

The cost of welfare in money was huge and in mental effort exorbitant. 
As a kind of afterthought there was the old-fashioned role of government 
that had to be attended to: military defense, policing the land, building roads, 
dispensing ordinary justice, delivering the mail, and running the political and 



778 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

executive institutions themselves. The task of distributing benefits was alone 
overwhelming. High taxes were unavoidable, and so was waste. Add to it cor- 
ruption, also inevitable when inspectors are afoot, and it should have been no 
surprise to the contemporaries that the program fell short of its aim. There 
was still poverty, derelicts on the street, unattended illness, and complaints of 
"not enough" from every welfared group in turn — workers, farmers, busi- 
nessmen, doctors, artists, scientists, teachers, prisoners, and the homeless. 

* 
* * 

In a culture based as it was on the machine, a welfare state was 
inescapable. The array of safeguards against danger would be a sufficient jus- 
tification of the system. A second, also arising from the machine, was mass 
production. The population must have the means of buying without letup; 
and the phrase "social security" must include security for the producers of 
the abundance as well. Only buying by everybody all the time kept the great 
machine running. This obvious truth does not mean that the motives behind 
welfare were all of the material order; humane feelings mingled with the prac- 
tical and with certain historical memories. Nobody wanted to return to the 
19C economic free-for-all with its periodic "starvation in the midst of plenty" 
(<456). This time around the middle classes would have sided with the work- 
ers in protest and revolt. The society was demotic. 

Hence advertising with its peculiar status of approved deceit and tempta- 
tion. Since techne kept driving production, new appetites as well as old must 
be kept at a high level, and in effect rich and poor must be made to live with 
the sense of continual deprivation; there were always new necessities. Seeing 
this endless prodding and spending, often entailing perpetual indebtedness, 
thoughtful people inveighed against "the consumer society." It seemed ani- 
mal-like in its concentration on filling physical wants. The consumer could 
have retorted that he was helpless; the standard of living was an official agent 
of oppression. 

It was remarked earlier about the 20C that the art of administration had 
not been thought about since Napoleon. As the welfare state needed a new 
bureau for every added program, the lack of men and women properly 
trained for the diverse operations was crippling. It is true that many manuals 
were published about management, the running of big firms. But those books 
dispensed only platitudes concealed in a would-be military jargon that 
changed every year without altering the substance. The only works deserving 
of attention were the rare first-person accounts of things accomplished. [An 
interested reader can learn about good 20C business management from The 
Art of Being an Executive by Louis B. Lundborg.] 

Owing to sheer size, corporations, hospitals, and universities suffered the 



Demotic Life and times <^> 779 

same difficulties as the government bureaucracies. They were in fact all alike. 
Those appointed to man them improvised their procedures, and as legislation 
augmented, laid down rules that filled hundreds of pages, an impenetrable 
jungle for citizens and officials both. One reads of a new ordinance of 1999 
issued by a large city to control demolition for low-cost housing; the news 
report casually mentions that it comes on top of 56 others. Achieving some 
ordinary purpose was difficult and carrying through a large undertaking 
impossible without help. The prosperous tribe of consultants, strong minds 
who had mastered one set of intricacies, enabled entrepreneurs armed with 
patience to attain their ends. 

The common man all the while remained a working member of all the 
institutions that his needs and rights compelled him to approach. His very 
existence generated forms that he had to fill out; he was an unpaid clerk who 
wrote his name and address three times on one page. When he had to thread 
his way among the gears of an institution, he began a collaboration with an 
indefinite number of its representatives, amiable or grudging, but all armed 
with computers, who helped or delayed his rescue from entanglement. As in 
the years before the French Revolution, demotic society had become 
labyrinthine. It was easy to forget that the aims of demotic society had been 
devised by the combined intellect of 1 5 generations of men and women who 
stood out of the mass by their capacity and courage. It would have been rea- 
sonable to infer that simply to carry on their work demanded, not indeed an 
equal amount of collective genius, but as high a degree of common sense and 
alertness. The point at which good intentions exceeded the power to fulfill 
them marked for the culture the onset of decadence. [The book to read is The 
Death of Common Sense by Philip K. Howard.] 

* * 

The welfare duty hampered and distorted the functioning of "political 
democracy." In the genuinely elected governments of the West, the system had 
drifted away from the original plan and mode of operation. To begin with, the 
voter turnout had shrunk; national elections were not infrequently won by the 
votes of fewer than half the electorate; the people were no longer proud to have 
the franchise. This indifference was due to distrust of politicians and contempt 
for politics, although these are the very organs of representative government. 
Politics was a pejorative word; an endeavor or institution that was branded as 
politicized lost it virtue. 

In legislatures, instead of power to enact the policies approved by the 
popular majority, the leadership must walk the tight-rope of coalition. There 
were too many parties — a dozen was not unusual — and where proportional 
representation was in force this evil was compounded. Voters bent on a sin- 



780 <x*> From Dawn to Decadence 

gle goal formed parties, elected a few candidates who joined coalitions by 
contributing votes to a frail majority in exchange for supporting the dwarf 
party's solitary plank. The effect on the quality of legislation is easy to imag- 
ine, and as the welfare state must pass laws by the bushel, the consequences 
were on the large scale. 

The United States, though not a parliamentary government, was 
nonetheless in the same position. Its two parties were facades for factions 
with incompatible aims, so that the party platform was coalition work and the 
president in office had to conciliate not two but several subparties in 
Congress if his program was to succeed. In that body (as in its counterparts 
abroad) powerful committees were coached on issues by hardworking staffs, 
a sizable corps of unelected talent with ideas of their own; the most cogent 
debates might take place in this legislative underground. When a bill such as 
the budget took up several thousand pages, the single representative was a 
mere spectator nursing his independent mind. And all the while he and other 
members were subjected to expert propaganda from lobbies, interest groups 
organized on every kind of basis — oil, pigs, or old age. 

It is plain that the representative system had slid from one assumption to 
another. Originally, the national interest was to be determined by each mem- 
ber individually, and his view determined his party allegiance and his vote. But 
now a committee chairman weighed the arguments of the lobbyists and bar- 
gained with other chairmen to secure in advance the vote of the chamber. 
True, group interests had always been influential; but when lobbies became 
part of the machinery, the aim was to seek a balance of many competing 
groups instead of ascertaining the needs of the nation's large constituen- 
cies — land, commerce, finance, empire, and the poor. In demotic times, par- 
liamentary debates, such as they were, no longer interested the public; the 
press ignored them. 

In the United States this change was solidified by the high cost of running 
for office. To be elected took millions of dollars. The economic and ideological 
interests provided those millions, often divided among rival candidates so as to 
forward the cause no matter who won. Campaigning largely bypassed issues 
and dealt in attacks on character. Candidates were coached by experts in what 
they should say; the public was informed in 30-second television "bites." Lastly, 
the root idea of a parliament was fundamentally distorted by the practice of 
polling. Anybody could conduct a poll and announce what the people wanted. 
Candidates and representatives would then try to reconcile the popular verdict 
with the claims of their financial backers and the urgings of the lobbyists. 

Bogged down in their efforts to keep welfare up-to-date, the democra- 
cies had lost the power to keep the governing machinery up to the same date. 
Reforms were much discussed; many were virtually unquestioned and states- 
men talked of "re-inventing government." All that happened was bill after bill 



Demotic Life and times ^ 781 

put before the legislatures and soon or slowly allowed to die. Such a failure of 
will, which is to say the wish without the act, is characteristic of institutions in 
decadence. 

* * 

In all the foregoing the 20C demotic individual has appeared in his pub- 
lic guise, as citizen — an immigrant, freedom fighter, or criminal; a lisdess 
voter, a victim of impotent law and order, and a receiver of benefits at the 
hands of government and business bureaucrats not adequate to their role. 
The one reference to the individual as a private person was the mention that 
he felt a lack of room to breathe, oppressed by the rule book and by the mass 
of adversaries in the allocation of conflicting rights. He must now be 
observed in the sphere of action that was presumably his own — in his tastes 
and habits, which together may be called his style. 

His overriding taste was for the Unconditioned Life. After 500 years of 
steady EMANCIPATION this preference might have been expected; it was bred 
in the occidental character. For the large groups that until the mid-century 
had been disregarded and mistreated as inferiors, acquiring the common priv- 
ileges and an increasing measure of respect naturally stimulated the desire for 
more. But the unconditioned life was something different from enjoying 
rights and decent treatment from one's fellows. It was to act as if nothing 
stood in the way of every wish. Such an attitude expects no rebuffs and over- 
looks those it provokes. When the longing for the limidess arises in a mind 
out of the common it may be called Faustian. It then may lead to new knowl- 
edge and spiritual discoveries; but in the ordinary soul the urge is for small 
satisfactions. Under its sway, the men and women of the period made choices 
that amounted to a style in the usual meaning of the word: the demotic style 
was the Unfitting. 

It was the outgrowth of the casual style which, as we saw, had its begin- 
ning after the Great War (<734). Casualness took many forms, and to wear 
jeans that were torn and stained was casual, but only at the start. When one 
could go to a shop and buy the jeans ready-made with spots and patches, cut 
short and unraveled at the edges, a new intention was evident. When young 
women put on an old sweater, pearls, and evening pumps together, when 
young men went about in suits of which the sleeves covered their hands and 
the legs of the trousers were trod underfoot, they made known a rejection of 
elegance, a denial of feminine allure, and a sympathy for the "disadvantaged." 
Such clothes were not cheap; their style was anti-propriety, anti-bourgeois; it 
implied siding with the poor, whose clothes are hand-me-downs in bad con- 
dition. To appear unkempt, undressed, and for perfection unwashed, is the 
key signature of the whole age. As in earlier times the striving was to look and 



782 <^ From Dawn to Decadence 

act like "quality," whether aristocrat or upper bourgeois, now the effort was 
to look like one marching along the bottom line of society The hitherto usual 
motive behind self-adornment — vanity — had the advantage of concealing 
physical blemishes, thereby showing regard for the onlookers' sensibilities. 
The reverse, the self purposely uncared for, expressed at once demotic anti- 
snobbery and demotic egotism. 

The Unfitting appealed to the young but was not their monopoly. A sam- 
ple of the casual style among adults had been to sport a business suit at the 
opera; this expanded into the open collar and no tie or jerseys and T-shirts 
almost anywhere, even in church. Airport crowds offered a typical fashion 
show. Where office workers were still required by their employer's rules to 
wear business suits, "free Friday" relaxed them to usher in the weekend. In 
schools, extreme unfitness caused a reversal. Dress codes were enforced 
despite protests and strikes, so as to put an end to the distraction caused by 
the bizarre and sometimes indecent garb that the pupils had devised, 
unchecked by their parents. It turned out that discipline in classes and hall- 
ways improved, further evidence that the unfitting was an aspect of the 
unconditioned life. 

Clothing was but the most obvious sign of the demotic style. Other 
choices expressed the same taste, for example, getting married underground 
in a subway station or around a pool, in swimming suits. And since unfitness 
meant freedom, other conventions should be defied, notably those classed as 
manners. The word was seldom used and the practice highly variable. 
Business firms and airlines thanked their customers effusively, but civility 

between persons was scant, especially 

In the Pasadena, California, City Council, a ln cl ties. 

member was censured for cursing and Deference toward women had 

screaming invective during the session. The decreased and was sometimes resented 

American Civil Liberties Union defended by feminists as condescending. Nor 

him by attacking the Council's courtesy code we re the elderly entitied to more cour- 

as "silly," "goofy," "embarrassing," and "a tesy t h an other equals. The curious use 

laughing-stock." In the triumphant press of first nameg SQOn after acqua i ntance 

release, the ACLU called [the Council's wag a convention mat showed the 

defeat] "a victory for all of Pasadena." i • i 1 

J J demotic paradox about convention 

—Judith Martin (1996) itself 

The Italian parliament has passed a bill The need to hurry, real or imag- 
decriminalizing some 100 offenses, such as ined, had created fast food, available at 
insulting a public official, drunken behavior all hours, and it begot eating and drink- 
in public, begging aggressively, and dese- ing everywhere at any time. Shops, 
crating the flag. public offices, libraries, and museums 
— News item, June 17, 1999 had to post "No Eating or Drinking" 



Demotic Life and times <^> 783 

signs to protect their premises from accidents and the disposal of refuse. The 
consumer society consumed, and up to a point one can sympathize with the 
impulse. In a heedless, uncivil world the driven needed to look after their 
wants as soon as they arose, to pay themselves back, as it were, by self-cod- 
dling. The indulgence was after all but the extension of the habit of EMANCI- 
PATION. So many curbs and hindrances to desire had been removed — the 
legal and conventional by new laws and new conventions, the natural ones by 
techne with the aid of science — that the practice of permissiveness sprang in 
fact from the workings of welfare, coupled with the power of doing innu- 
merable things by pushing a button. 

Pleasure first and fast in a society Having grown up in the 1960s, Fve never 
that oppressed only unintentionally seen a protest I didn't like. I might not always 
was bound to make instinctive rebels. have agreed with the shouted objectives or 
At work, criticism or reproof was felt postered profanities, but it seemed such an 
to be intolerable; there is a human right American thing to do. 
to make mistakes. Observers spoke of — Letterin The New York Times (1991) 
the decline of authority, but how could 

it survive in a company of equals? Distrust attached to anything that retained 
a shadow of authoritativeness — old people, old ideas, old conceptions of 
what a leader or a teacher was meant to do. In the same spirit, the period cul- 
tivated the anti-hero. A positive hero would have raised a compelling example. 
There was indeed talk of "role models," but the celebrities chosen supplied 
very few Champions in sports did beget emulation in the athletic young, but 
only entertainers caught the imagination of the masses. Unfortunately, suc- 
cess on stage or screen went with disorderly lives, chronicled from day to day 
with discouraging comments by the experimental moralists themselves: 
drugs, prison, sexual promiscuity, suicide punctuated their performances — as 
happened also to some sports figures. 

Anyhow, the demotic individual I didn't know how to study, but I liked the 
was supposed to fashion a "lifestyle" lifestyle. You could dress any way you 
for himself; that new word implied it. wanted. I was wearing pajamas and a sport 
Yet one found very few eccentrics. coat to school and pajamas and loafers to for- 
Compared with the 19C contingent mal events. College was terrible. I didn't get 
that defied Victoria's menacing eye, the h at ^ but k S ot me out of the house ' 
showing of their descendants was —Bill Murray, actor (1999) 
poor. Most of their eccentrics were 

criminals; the laity conformed, not least in their supposedly custom-made 
lifestyles; from which it would seem that emancipation is attainable from 
everything except one's peers. 

* 
* * 



784 ^° From Dawn to Decadence 



Visitors tend to be conscious of the time they 
have available and are more likely to be con- 
cerned with whether the experience will be 
entertaining as well as educational. 

— Richard Foster, "Defining Museums 
for the 21st Century" (1998) 

"Art Galleries: Church or Funfair? Museums 
in a Democracy." 

— Julian Spalding, director of the 
Manchester (England) City Gallery 
(1989) 

"This library will surprise you," said the 
dean. "The coffee bar is as far from the image 
of the old [library] as you can get. We're 
thinking of the library as a social space as 
well as a study space." 

— At a college in the Northeast (1998) 



Passing from tastes and habits to 
fancies, the historian of the late 20C 
notes the love of the conglomerate. 
Originally used for business, the word 
denotes here the wish to mix pleasures, 
activities, and other goods so as to find 
them available in one place. The pur- 
pose in itself was not new; the country 
general store, the city grocery or depart- 
ment store were traditional, for conve- 
nience. But something else made the 
museum of art sell jewelry and offer the 
public motion pictures, lecture series, 
and string quartets. More than one great 
library had some of these, and teas and 
soirees besides; universities provided 
their alumni with guided tours of pic- 
turesque regions of the world, and to 
their own townspeople a whole range of artistic events. Bookshops owned by 
chains provided a corner with tables for coffee and toys for children and their 
mothers to play with, while the clerk scanned Clio on line for the elusive book. 
In the refurbishing of a railroad station it was felt desirable to make room for a 
chapel in case anyone bored with waiting wished to worship or be married. It is 
not enough to suggest economic need for some of these conglomerates. They 
did not create but respond to a want. In most combinations there is an element 
of pleasant surprise due to a touch of the Unfitting. Multisatisfaction, multime- 
dia hinted of multiself, gave a feeling of opulence, and brightened one's mood 
at the expense of blurring distinctions. 

There was also the mental conglomerate, better known as muddled 
thinking. It was evident in the "as" habit: gesture as language; hockey as the- 
ater; clothing as animated sculpture; landscapes as living art. Straight thinking 
could have pointed out that language replaced gesture and by being radically 

different proved more effective. 
Gesture may have meaning and commu- 
nicate it, but Language is language and 
nothing else is. Similarly, hockey is 
occasionally drama, which means con- 
flict, but theater is coherent and signif- 
icant drama, prearranged — and so on. 
The conglomerate that best ful- 
filled the ideal of the time was the 
course offering of the large colleges 



When White photographed frost on a win- 
dow he saw galaxies; when he posed a branch 
against a certain kind of light, he caused it to 
stand for a whole system of mystic thought. 
His pictures were worlds complete in them- 
selves; even though they captured something 
from the outside, they did not refer to it again 
but made it into something else. 

—David Travis (1994) 



Demotic Life and times ^ 785 

and universities. It had ceased to be a "Fifty-some majors, thirty-some concentra- 
curriculum, of which the dictionary tions, and hundreds of electives." 
definition is: "a fixed series of courses —The dean of an Ivy-League college 
required for graduation." Qualified to arriving students. 

judges called the catalogue listings a A university that offers a doctorate in sensu- 
smorgasbord and not a balanced meal. ^ mcluding courses m "niceness and 
And large parts of it were hardly nour- meanness" and "mutual pleasurable stimula- 
ishing. The number of subjects had tion of the human nervous system" was [well 
kept increasing, in the belief that any described] in 1992 as "an academy of carnal 
human occupation, interest, hobby, or knowledge." 
predicament could furnish the sub- — New York Times (1996) 
stance of an academic course. It must 

therefore be available to young and old in higher learning. From photography 
to playing the trombone and from marriage counseling to hotel management, 
a multitude of respectable vocations had a program that led to a degree. On 
many a campus one might meet a student who disliked reading and had "gone 
visual," or be introduced to an assistant professor of family living. 

These hundreds of electives were designed to appeal to students who 
wanted unconditioned choice. To produce the large array was not difficult, 
given the favoring tendencies in the outer world. The liberal arts were subdi- 
vided by SPECIALISM into bits and pieces of scholarly interest, but of little 
benefit to young minds that lacked previous knowledge of the larger field. 
And the concern with social EMANCIPATION, seconded by SEPARATISM, gen- 
erated whole departments, each devoted to teaching the accomplishments of 
one ethnic or sexual group in isolation. But not all groups were eligible for 
such attention. 

* * 

Being suspicious of conventions, demotic equals were often at a loss in 
their daily encounters: shall one act diffident or clamant of one's rights? Does 
occupation confer a status that one is entitled to show off? Where in the 
scheme of things do I belong? Who am I, anyway? Such questions made up 
the "identity crisis" studied by psychiatrists whose patients had not "found 
themselves." Others struggled with "lack of self-esteem"; still others con- 
fessed to painful wanderings before being rescued by an act of conversion — 
religious, often cultist, or assisted by therapy. The number of sufferers in the 
population was admitted to be large, a continuing problem for the family, the 
employer, and the social services. 

Finding oneself was a misnomer: a self is not found but made; and the anti- 
hero, anti-history bias was an obstacle to making it, because a starting point 
from the past was missing; it had to be made from scratch. The situation was 



786 <^*> From Dawn to Decadence 



There is always that other strange second 
man in me, calm, observant, critical, 
unmoved, blase — odious! He is a shadow 
that walks with me, a sort of canker of doubt 
and dissection; it's very seldom that I forget 
his loathsome presence. 

— Lord Leighton (1857)° 



akin to that of a displaced person in dis- 
tress. No one is on record as exclaiming 
with Erasmus or Wordsworth "Oh, 
what a joy to be alive!" (<8). Instead, in 
numberless novels a character was 
shown possessed by self-hatred, which 
soon culminated in a hatred of life. One 
incident was repeatedly used to make 
the point. The anti-hero comes upon someone whose face causes him imme- 
diate aversion: it is his own mirrored in a plate-glass window Self-CON- 
SCIOUSNESS had been deepening with every advance in psychology and by the 
delving of poets, novelists, and other experts in ANALYSIS. The self-torture dif- 
fered from Luther's and Bunyan's: theirs 
was concentrated on the soul and the 
purity of their faith. The modern self- 
harassment was diffused over every 
impulse to action. 

Self-contempt was redoubled by 
knowing that performance was of slight 
value compared to Image. That inclusive word could be defined as a set of indi- 
cators that suggest, but do not indicate, the thing sought. Judgment of people 
by signs was not a new habit; it is almost inevitable and it is fair enough when 
the signs are an outgrowth of personality. But the period required the con- 
trived; one made one's way by image-building-and-tending. This duty was not 
limited to persons: businesses, political parties, schools, museums, churches — 
any institution that had a public — must present the type of image favored at the 

moment. The craft of public relations 
was there to help manufacture the 
facades, and the onlookers confessed 
that "Perception is all." Or not quite all, 
if one looks into another corner of the 
demotic mind. There, disgust at playact- 
ing, a surviving sense of the real, a spurt 
of true independence caused in the sen- 
sitive a subdued conflict that bred guilt. 



. . . publicity over achievement, revelation 
over restraint, honesty over decency, victim- 
hood over personal responsibility, confronta- 
tion over civility, psychology over morality. 

— Maureen Dowd (1995) 



— Guilty about what? 

— Guilty at being ourselves, guilty at not 
being ourselves. I don't know: guilty at feel- 
ing guilty, guilty because we don't feel guilty. 
Above all, we want to confess — to anybody, 
about anything. 

— Cecil Jenkins, Message from Sirius 
(1961) 



After so dispiriting a catalogue, a reminder is in order. No period style 
affects the entire population. A majority remains untouched by what is most 
visible in the age, yet without changing the style that it declines to follow. The 



Demotic Life and times <^> 787 

counterpoint does not affect what is steadily in the news and talked about as 
important and lively and desirable. Older tastes and desires persist but are 
neglected, or so taken for granted that they might as well not exist. Style, like 
celebrities, is what is well known for being well known/ Of course, the major- 
ity that keeps aloof is not cut off; it rejects the style but is aware of its ideas 
and attitudes and may share one or another of them. Among demotics, three 
stood out: Compassion, Irreverence, and Creativity. 

Compassion was the sign of the right-minded, truly human person; com- 
passionate was the highest compliment one could pay to the living or the dead. 
All victims deserve pity and help, and as victims outnumbered everybody else 
(so to speak), since any person might well turn victim overnight, there were 
plenty of opportunities for compassion. Glorifying it was not lip-service. The 
whole population was readily moved to help the distressed at home or 
abroad. Besides the well-known Red Cross and Peace Corps, dozens of orga- 
nizations roamed the world, teaching, curing, saving women from prostitu- 
tion and children from sweatshops and starvation, rescuing the unjustiy 
jailed, housing and feeding refugees, denouncing tyranny, and raising money 
for these and all other charitable purposes. The 20C was continuing the 1 9C 
tradition, but detached from sectarianism and, since governments took part, 
vastiy expanding the amount and variety of aid supplied. 

At home, fire, flood, and earthquake brought the victims instant help, 
individual and organized. The physically disabled, the retarded, the excluded 
in any way had public opinion behind them to secure compensatory treat- 
ment. A victim's claim to appropriate assistance was a logical extension of the 
doctrine of Human Rights, which had been enshrined in an international 
charter and not limited by any definition. Rights were continually being 
extended. Group propaganda and lawsuits by individuals did the work. 
Prisoners obtained most of the rights of the law-abiding; animals, babies, 
embryos were on the list for similar protection. In 1999 the state of New York 
made breast-feeding in public a civil right. This ceaseless endeavor to aid and 
permit was a spectacle unknown to any previous civilization. 

The second idea, irreverence, was the monopoly of the clever and bold, 
free of compassion. They saw through everything and spoke out with an 
amused smile. Their skill was always mentioned in obituaries and in articles 
introducing those freshly in the news. It was rarely noticed that when nothing 
is revered, irreverence ceases to indicate critical thought. 

But the most endearing idea in the demotic mind was surely that creativ- 
ity dwells or lurks in every human being. In retrospect it seems not so much a 
mistake as a mislabeling. It is a fact that nearly all human beings feel the urge, 
and a great many have the ability, to make something with their hands or 
think a new thought. The knack of drawing, singing, riming, making similes, 



788 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

and recording emotions in prose is widely distributed. But the activity ought 
not to be called creative. In truth, the products of this creativity were rarely 
called creations \ the name reserved for the works of genius. 

Still, the misnomer was nonetheless harmful to the person and to society. 
Individuals of ordinary talent or glibness were encouraged to become profes- 
sionals and thereby doomed to disappointment; and too many others, with 
just enough ability to get by, contributed to the lowering of standards and the 
surfeit of art (790>). The error was to suppose that art is made by innate skill 
combined with acquired technique. These will turn out only conscientiously 
imitative art. Creation requires an uncommon mind and strong will serving 
an original view of life and the world. [The book to read is Journalism Versus 
Art by Max Eastman.] 

Particularly in industrial society the gifted and the sensitive long for the 
artist's life; they exaggerate its autonomy and freedom from routine. But per- 
haps there were substitutes for it in white-collar fraud and the obsession with 
entertainment, including immersion in sexual imagery. The fraud, like the 
violence, was new in frequency and it too seemed mindless, although in both 
cases the act must have satisfied some budding thought and required a choice 
of means to carry it out. At any rate, white-collar crime called for intellect: in 
every country one found bevies of top executives and leading politicians 
behind bars and others under indictment. They had no need of money or 
prestige; what they needed and found — one may surmise — was adventure 
and a field for the use of imagination in outwitting the system. Fraud was the 
sport of capable minds and lofty souls who wanted to rise above commerce 
and make-believe. It was creativity in a rich medium; and codes of profes- 
sional ethics had to be written and rewritten to cover new offenses. Simpler 
kinds of cheating were popular among university students, the merits and 
morals of the custom argued in the campus newspaper; while their well-to-do 
parents practiced shoplifting and as guests in motels appropriated any desir- 
able object not firmly bolted down. 

These occupations showed a desire for activity which, for the energetic, 
entertainment failed to provide. Whether sports event or soap opera or rock 
concert, entertainment in its main 20C forms was seated and passive. The 
amount supplied was unexampled — Imperial Rome did not match it. In both 
places it became the people's chief object in life, because for the millions 
Work had lost its power to satisfy the spirit. Yielding no finished object, tak- 
ing place only abstractly on paper and in words over a wire, it starved the feel- 
ing of accomplishment. It was drudgery without reward, boredom unre- 
lieved; the factory assembly line had more reality, although it too could bring 
on the comparable "blue-collar blues." By contrast, the most routine enter- 
tainment had color and shape, and by depicting violence and sexuality it 
stirred the deadened senses. 



Demotic Life and times ^ 789 



"I mean," says the other, "this is what we live 
for." That is, "catastrophe, chaos." Or, as he 
adds, "you can't always count on the occa- 
sional earthquake to jump-start your heart." 

— Interview, The New York Times (1 996) 



Beer ads featuring animals having sex were 
ordered removed from Harlem stores by the 
brewer after complaints. But the campaign 
will continue elsewhere, posted everywhere 
the beer is sold. It features rhinos and giant 
turtles mating; the caption: "Research Says 
Sex Sells Beer." 

— News item, February 20, 1999° 



Children, who are easily bored and 
restless, stared for hours at the televi- 
sion screen for the parallel reason that 
school denied them the sense of 
progress toward knowledge. 

The atmosphere of sexuality like- 
wise gave the illusion of real life. And the word atmosphere suggests only the 
enveloping presence: its force was invasive. The air was thick with pictures of 
half-naked bodies in seductive poses. Advertising, film, and popular magazines 
depended on these to make sure of catching and holding public attention. 

The sexual act itself was imitated 
wherever it could be managed, onstage 
or onscreen; some performers went so 
far as to commit indecent acts in front 
of their live audience. There was a cult 
of nudity, in serious plays and on pub- 
lic beaches, quite as if in those settings 
naked bodies were not the reverse of 
aphrodisiac. Pornography, protected 
by the rules of free speech, was abun- 
dant but of low quality compared with the classics from Petronius onward; 
even the 19C models were better literature. Closely allied were the writings of 
innumerable doctors and psychologists, seconded by columnists in maga- 
zines and newspapers, who offered advice on coital technique, or methods 
for luring the opposite sex, or encouragement to the old not to give up. The 
preoccupation with the subject began about the age of 12 and was in propor- 
tion to the incitement/ 

The greatest damage from the sex- 
ual emancipation occurred in the pub- 
lic schools, where sexual talk and 
behavior, being tolerated, distracted 
from work. The resulting early preg- 
nancies caused disasters of all kinds. But so great was the thrall of the sexual 
that school authorities dealt with the problem by means of courses, free con- 
traceptives, and handbooks giving a full view of the subject, its variants and 
aberrations. Quite as deplorable was the effect of so much SELF-CONSCIOUS- 
NESS throughout society. By a hastily worded convention linked with the ideal 
of female independence from the male, all unwanted "advances" (as they 
used to be called) were stigmatized as "sexual harassment." A single gesture 
and even staring might bring on the charge, the consequences of which 
ranged from penalties at law to compulsory "sensitivity training." 

The sexual reality was often halfhearted and disappointing, much obses- 



Every sixteen-year-old is a pornographer, 
Miss Piranesi. We had to know what was 
open to us. 

— Hortense Calisher, Queenie (1971) 



790 «^> From Dawn to Decadence 



The sexualization of the masses by optical sion but little passion — what D. H. 

stimulation goes hand in hand with a Lawrence had called "sex in the head." 

diminution of the tension between individual Men and women did not benefit from 

partners. The wish-dream figures of mass tne boasted "revolution" as they had 

sexuality lose all quality when they are expected; it did give some people the 

reduced to private ownership. Like Rose- ffee pky they wanted> but k pushed 

Marie they draw fabulous salaries for their ■ ^ . j ^ 

3 many more into courses unsuited to 

ability to sexualize the atmosphere at a dis- . . , 

their nature and capacities. 
tance; they practice anticipation and destruc- 

^ cc u uu t_ ^ r • It did not install the Mohammedan 

tion, offer a shabby substitute for experience. 

paradise on earth, although everything 
— Erich Kuby, Rose-Marie (1960) r . . if -if 

in sight suggested that it had. 

Pornography is a form of Utopian liter- 
ature and, like the advertising of Desire, it set a standard that brought on 
paralysis. When an erectifying drug was put on the market, the millions who 
rushed to obtain it numbered the healthy young as well as the ailing old, and 
women at once demanded its feminine equivalent. It was apparently not 
known that desire must be dammed up to be self-renewing. 

* 
* * 

Persons who could detach their minds from the current obsessions and 
turned to the arts found in them the self-destructive characteristics detailed 
on earlier pages. The sheer amount to be seen and heard debased it. An 
explicit dead end was reached when, in the last year of the century, Warhol's 
Brillo Box sculpture, which is an exact reproduction of what stands on the gro- 
cer's shelf, was said to face the beholder with "the important question, What 
makes the difference between a work of art and something not a work of art 
when there is no perceptual difference between them?" That matchless pair 
of destroyers, Duchamp and Picasso, had done what they set out to do. 

If one moved on to literature, violence and sexuality were there too, full 
of imaginative refinements and seasoned perversities, often laced with 
pseudo-technical pedantry such as Henry Miller's notorious: "Tarda, I make 
your ovaries incandescent." Black humor was one of the favorite spicings 
substituted for energy; another is known to psychiatrists as kgout de la boue — 
the love of dirt. Black humor — no connection with Black people — resem- 
bled the old heartless practical joke; it 
Decadence was brought about by the easy enacted in words a predicament that 
way of producing works and laziness in doing ended in cruel horror. The victim 

it, by the surfeit of fine art and the love of the might be shown as destroyed by his 
bizarre, enemy or fate or — the 20C touch — a 

— Voltaire (1748) stranger. The taste for it helps to 



Demotic Life and times <^> 791 



understand the rehabilitation of De Sade (<448), and it may have concealed a 
wish to protect oneself from disasters to come — the method of Mithridates, 
who fed on poison so as to withstand poisoning. One cannot laugh at black 
humor; the face merely contracts into an unprepossessing rictus. 

The featuring of filth was likewise the extreme of a past interest, that 
shown in the Naturalist novel. In the later period it had the reinforcement of 
the two great demotic wars, whose veterans knew mud and blood at first hand. 
Television, when it came, brought both into the living room. In the interval, 
poetry and fiction did their part to pro- 
vide what an Italian critic, referring to 
the Beat movement, praised as "vulgar- 
ity, crudeness, and sordidness."° Before 
the Beats, Joyce had frequendy meant 
to disgust: he preferred "the snot-green 
sea" to Byron's blue Ocean. By the end 
of the era, performers and their groups 
knew how to choose names based on 
the tastes that would attract: Garbage, 
Johnny Rotten, Sex Pistols, Grateful 
Dead, and the like. 

If one happens to remember 
Conrad's definition of art a century ear- 
lier — "a single-minded effort to render 
the highest kind of justice to the visible 
universe" — one wonders whether 20C 
writers no longer wanted to render jus- 
tice, and if they did, whether the uni- 
verse had radically changed its visible 
aspect. The critical mind inclines 
toward a complex judgment: the artist 
remained a faithful portrayer, but over 
the century his work has done its share 
to make the visible universe deteriorate. 
Unfortunately, in this bewildering of 

the senses, such as Rimbaud had called for (<618), both the artistic and the 
ordinary person were left without a guide. Criticism had given up its main duty 
of reasoned review and was busy praising and promoting rather than putting 
order in the welter. Even when the language of the commentators was not 
obscure on purpose, it only added to confusion by vagueness or paradox. 



The logistics of the gaze infiltrate the work. 
They suggest inwardness and events beyond 
the frame. The shocked mien in Untitled 
[two nudes] implies an unseen transgressor. 
In another canvas two stares lead in opposite 
directions ... an eerie condition of de-cen- 
tering. 

— A Critic on Rothko (1999) 

His paintings are reflections of solitude. His 
drawings are whispers — like chalk drawings 
on a slate. He tests our established rules. 

— One artist about another 

Forms that have a catalytic force growing 
from an ambiguous but strongly felt foun- 
tainhead in nature, frequendy with double 
meanings and feelings, have a hold on me. 

A SCULPTOR ON HIS WORK 

Music could be defined as a system of pro- 
portions in the service of a spiritual impulse. 

— George Crumb (n.d.) 

Art is what you can get away with. 

—Andy Warhol (1987) 



* 
* * 



792 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

So much exposure to the puzzling, the shocking, the bizarre (called surre- 
alist), the repellent, the intrusively (sexually) intimate, the disturbing and the 
disturbed was bound to cause a perpetual inquisitiveness about human 
motives. The upshot was the pastime of psychologizing It became common 
after the dissemination of Freudian ideas, when a new form of superstition — 
popular psychology — using and misusing technical terms, began to fill the con- 
versation, the routine novel, and the press. By accounting for conduct or point 
of view, psychologizing ended discussion — no need to think of an argument to 
meet whatever was advanced; the imputed motive explained it away. It was 
another form of name-calling; the person was classified and labeled with final- 
ity. Psychologizing was particularly destructive in biography. The subject was 
reduced to a case, which brought him or her down to the common level of all 

other cases of the kind; the anti-hero 
How pleasant it is to respect people! When I was the final aspect of the eminent. But 
read books I am not concerned with how the demotic inquisitiveness did not stop 
authors loved or played cards. I see only their ^ et ^ The interest in the personal led 
marvelous works. writers to interview the subject's surviv- 

— Chekhov, Notebooks (n.d.) ing contemporaries and fill the life with 

the full harvest of gossip. Eager readers 
of biographies spoke like everybody else of human dignity but forgot that it is 
tied to a due measure of privacy. 

Bringing into one view these elements of the demotic style shows how 
reasonable was the search for ease and latitude. The excess of demands had 
to be shifted from oneself to others. The claims did not rest on one's out- 
standing performance but on stated rights that all shared. Hence the collec- 
tive energy, successful as it might be in affording the multitude a living full of 
conveniences, added litde to the fund of civilization and left a host of people 
in various states of discontent and unhappiness. The grounds for this con- 
ception of the self in relation to the world have been detailed as the story of 
the West unfolded. In that light they evoke sympathy, at the same time as they 
help to explain the disorientation of the culture at its close. 

For it must be remembered that although the habits and desires that 
formed the demotic style were lodged in individuals, it is they — and the most 
able and active among them — who made the rules and led the institutions all 
lived by. Some of these public agencies have been shown earlier to be disinte- 
grating, working against their best intentions, and unable to change. A brief 
look at a few more, particularly those that are not official or organized — lan- 
guage, for example — will enable the observer to judge whether the culture as 
a whole should be called decadent. 

The demotic languages were decadent because verbal inflation and mis- 
usage interfered with vigor, precision, and clarity. Correctness had ceased to 



Demotic Life and times <**> 793 



be recognized; it was, on the contrary, denounced. The resulting obstacles to 
good prose were: a vocabulary full of technical terms and their jargon imita- 
tions, an excess of voguish metaphors, and the preference for long abstract 
words denoting general ideas, in place of short concrete ones pointing to acts 
and objects. An idiomatic writer sounded simpleminded. All the western 
tongues were similarly afflicted. 

It was said earlier that the great 1 9C 
invention, the public school, had lost 
the power to make children literate. 
Methods useless for that purpose, 
absurd teacher training, the dislike of 
hard work, the love of gadgetry, and the 
efforts to copy and to change the outer 
world ruined education throughout the 
West. These schemes and notions of 
American origin were taken up abroad 
as they arose. [The book to read is The 
Transformation of the School by Lawrence 
Cremin.] During the last phase of 
school decay in the United States, the 
family was invoked in blame and for 
help. Parents, so ran the charge, were 
not "involved" in their children's 
schoolwork, did not know teachers or 
programs, and were hostile when their 
offspring were disciplined. They should 
become part of the institution, which 
could not work without them, and cer- 
tainly not against. 

In this admission of failure, what 
was in fact "the family"? The attacks 
on that institution in the 1890s, fol- 
lowed by disruptive wars and new ideas 

about sexual relations, had changed it to the point where "family values" was 
a phrase that divided the population into believers and heretics, and the 
believers not always model practitioners. The traditional form of union had 
not disappeared, but the variants (celebrated by the soap opera) were becom- 
ing traditional themselves: families in which both parents were employed; 
families in which one or both parents, employed outside, worked at home; 
single-parent families, the parent being employed or not; "second families" 
with children from previous marriages; families for months or years in mid- 



In general, it can be said that the school 
attempts to reproduce actual community life 
on a democratic basis, to establish social 
habits and attitudes, and in particular the 
habit of scientific thinking. 

— Report on a progressive school (1919) 

Here's how an eighth-grade social studies 
teacher begins her explanation of "Current 
History in the Middle School": "There is a 
common misconception that a history course 
is a study of the past." 

—Simon Schama (1998) 

I saw a tug boat pulling a barge. I learned 
what a ferry boat looks like. I liked the time 
when the ferry boat made a big squeak. I 
think the trip was fun. I don't think the trip 
was worthwhile because I had seen it all 
before. 

— Kathy H. in the fourth grade (1972) 

From laying our own rail system for steam 
engines, to studying the houses of Frank 
Lloyd Wright, to designing amusement park 
rides — that's how the physics curriculum 
flows in my classroom. 

— Teacher in Macungie, Pennsylvania 
(1999) 



794 ^5 From Dawn to Decadence 

divorce; families rearing grandchildren; unmarried couples with or without 
children; homosexual couples with a child, adopted or not. Out of these situ- 
ations arose two novelties: the day care center and the semi-orphan. 

Adapting schedules, abilities, and emotions to rearing children and fur- 
nishing the help requested by the school was a dismaying task, even when the 
hindrances of poverty and lack of literacy in the common tongue were not 
present. The upshot was that an increasing number of children found at 
home no encouragement to schooling, no instruction in simple manners, no 
inkling of the moral sense. Some of the waifs bred in that way were those who 
took to drugs, became thieves before their teens, and committed the con- 
scienceless crimes falsely called mindless. They formed gangs, boys and girls 
together, with able leaders and strict rules. It was they, not prime ministers, 
who reinvented government. And when they joined to it so-called Satanism, 
they rediscovered ritual if not religion. The larger group that executed graffiti 
on city walls were in line with the makers of disposable art, bent on destroy- 
ing the medium as well as the culture. 

* 
* * 

In the 1890s, sports then in their infancy had been praised for developing 
the high moral oudook called sportsmanship. In less than a hundred years, 
sports had lost their honor, though not their glamour. Competition had enor- 
mously increased skill, and better nutrition, physical strength. Participants 
and spectators numbered by the millions; but amateurism was in decline and 
corruption was rife. Professionals cheated for money or by taking body- 
enhancing drugs; champions committed rape and other violent crimes. When 
contests pitted together two national teams, one crowd of fans mobbed the 
other; riots, wounds, and deaths were the sportsmanship of the day. At the 
same time, without sports, colleges and universities would have lost their 
standing and alumni money. Sports were the last refuge of patriotism. On 
such occasions as the French victory of 1998 in soccer, the whole people's 
enthusiasm led the leaders of opposite political parties to fraternize and 
declare that the event had reunited the nation. Soon after, it was discovered 
that the governors of the Olympic Games, also reborn in the Nineties, had 
taken bribes from the countries wanting to be hosts. 

The other professions, called liberal, had similarly lost enough of their 
self-respect to be deprived of the prestige they once enjoyed. Doctors, once 
idolized, were accused of indifference to their patients and of money-grub- 
bing as well as malpractice. Professors were no longer regarded as the indis- 
pensable experts they had been from the time of the brain trusts through the 
Second World War. They had injected "political correctness" into the 



Demotic Life and times <^> 795 

academy and made themselves ridiculous by the antics it entailed. Scholarship 
was the pretentious garbed in the unintelligible. Lawyers ceased to be divided 
into two kinds, the worthy and the contemptible. "Let's kill all the lawyers," 
dug out of context from Shakespeare," became a cliche. This animus was due 
to the large increase in litigation under the many protective rules of the wel- 
fare ethos; lawyers thrived on suits against corporations for product liability, 
the jury verdicts being often exorbitant. 

Journalism, which not everybody called a profession, did not escape the 
common revulsion. The press had abandoned the ideal of impartiality; every 
newsman editorialized and colored the truth, while also responding to the 
supposed demotic need that news be "human." Instead of the former "lead" 
summarizing the facts, a novel-like 

opening described the scene, then Scotty managed to get hold of the full text of 
quoted the predictable comments of a each of the principal nations' proposals, 
person chosen at random to typify the which the [New York] Times duly pub- 
situation. Often, a String of experts lished— to the statesmen's consternation and 
also expressed an opinion before the journalists' admiration— day by day. 
important points were disclosed. It was —Obituary of James B. Reston (1995) 
a suspense story. A new professional, 

the "investigative reporter" invaded privacy, abetted the theft of confidential 
documents, and claimed immunity for "the public's right to know." 

It was not unusual for someone to learn of his promotion or dismissal by 
reading the paper a week ahead of the official announcement. To public fig- 
ures the reporter was the dog of uncertain temper, pacified by fresh news. As 
for broadcast news, it was meager, repetitious, and limited to what could be 
photographed; natural and other disasters were its best raison d'etre. 

Journalists themselves were dissatisfied with the state of their craft and 
continually criticized their fellows' performance in journals and discussion 
groups." On the Continent associations and in England a semi-official body 
tried to limit the excesses of which most newspeople disapproved but which 
the zeal to make a scoop kept unstoppable. Meanwhile, the physical produc- 
tion of the newspaper remained a stunning feat. Many pages, millions of 
words and figures, fitted headlines and pictures, advertising as ordered, and 
on Sundays thick supplements bundled in the right order — all this in fair 
prose and with few glaring errors was a miracle accomplished daily in the dark 
hours. 

One more thing to recall about "the media" is that they spread abroad 
the latest findings that made up the Stat Life (<535; 652). Through both news 
stories and advertising, everyone was sooner or later made aware of the needs 
of health and the dangers of life, together with the norms set by the average 
in behavior. The Stat Life was an abstract police force working from within. 



796 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 



I WANT YOU * 

* * 

To Stop Smoking / Wear Your Seat Belt 
Eat Your Vegetables / Stay Out of the Sun For the growing contingent of per- 

Lose Weight / Buckle Your Kids in the sons hooked to computers, it was the 

Back Seat / Talk About Race Internet that promised a future full of 

Use a Condom / Volunteer continuous miracles. It dazzled even 

Eat Less Red Meat those who stayed away from it. One 

— Around a picture of Uncle Sam thing it proved was the power of techne 

pointing his finger at the reader and its good health. But not every use 

997 ) of that new Delphic Oracle made 

things easier than before. The library, 
for one, presented the researcher some new obstacles. To specify them would 
call for details of interest only to the profession; two obvious points must suf- 
fice here. In large libraries, the number of computer terminals never equaled 
that of the users who formerly could work simultaneously at the card cata- 
logue lining the walls. In small libraries, when the solitary computer was in use 
or "down," the collection of books was for the time being incommunicado to 
others/ 

With science, techne was the sole institution untouched by any falling off; 
that is, in results. That qualifier is required, because science and techne were 
not exempt from severe social and philosophical criticism. Quite apart from 
instances of falsified data, science and techne had lost their sanctity. A body 
of thoughtful opinion made the joint enterprise responsible for the worst of 
contemporary ills. Too much of the rational and the mechanical was deemed 
destructive of the spiritual in man. Then too the ever presence of numbers, of 
technical terms and ideas, of dependence on system and formula — fallible or 
not — bred a prison-like atmosphere. The absence of variety, of empty time, 
of things unprocessed quenched the simple love of life. Again, the renewed 
religious longings remained unsatisfied. The churches, internally divided, 
vainly tried to unite with others; theology, intellectually strong earlier in the 
century, was enfeebled and could not move the culture from its secular- 
scientific base. 

Added to the unease was the fear of physical destruction by nuclear 
weapons and of psychic disarray by the manipulation of genes. Cloning was 
only the apex of disturbing procedures. But no complaints stifled the zest and 
ingenuity of researchers and engineers. It is true that the time of vast original 
conceptions that cause a readjustment of accepted ideas was over. The one 
important novelty was an addition that modified little despite its dramatic 
name. Chaos, the new branch of physics, dealt with irregularities such as the 
weather or motion within a waterfall. Instead of defining parts, Chaos found 
patterns in wholes, thus going counter to the standard method of ANALYSIS 



Demotic Life and times <s^> 797 

and avoiding its REDUCTIVISM. It raised, but did not settle, doubts about the 
law of thermodynamics that records how matter and energy perpetually dis- 
integrate. But Chaos did not affect the knowledge-is -power men, who could 
boast of having justified every claim made by their sponsors from Bacon to 
T. H. Huxley 

As for techne, the wonders of the space program sufficed to prove its 
imagination and versatility. One picturesque measure of its progress could be 
seen in June 1993, when the Space Center in Florida unrolled into the air a 
spool of 1 ,640 feet of copper wire to generate electricity in a tube at the end. 
It made one think of Franklin, turned as it were on his head. 

Outer space was the theater for such techne spectacles; cyberspace was the 
scene of human inquisitiveness, fashion, garrulity, and greed. What the world- 
wide Web did to the demotic character is hard to define. It made still more gen- 
eral the nerveless mode of existence — sitting and staring — and thus further iso- 
lated the individual. It enlarged the realm of ABSTRACTION; to command the 
virtual reduces the taste for the concrete. At the same time, the contents of the 
Internet were the same old items in multiplied confusion. That a user had 
"the whole world of knowledge at his disposal" was one of those absurdities like 
the belief that ultimately computers would think — it will be time to say so when 
a computer makes an ironic answer. "The whole world of knowledge" could be 
at one's disposal only if one already knew a great deal and wanted further infor- 
mation to turn into knowledge after gauging its value. The Internet dispensed 
error and misinformation with the same 

impartiality as other data, the best trans- j ust as the strength of the Internet is chaos, 
ferred from books in libraries. so the strength of our liberty depends upon 

The last 20C report on the work- the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered 
ing of the "world-wide web" was that speech the First Amendment protects. 
its popularity was causing traffic jams —Judge Stewart Dalzell (1996) 
on the roads to access and that the 

unregulated freedom to contribute to it words, numbers, ideas, pictures, and 
foolishness was creating chaos — in other words, duplicating the world in 
electronic form. The remaining advantage of the real world was that its con- 
tents were scattered over a wide territory and one need not be aware of more 
than one's mind had room for. 

* 
* * 

The thought occurs that in the high tide of demotics — the second half of 
the century — it was hard to find a figure of the intellectual world to put side 
by side with those singled out earlier. One must go back to the first half for a 
thinker of comparable range and power: the obvious one is Ortega y Gasset, 



798 c^s From Dawn to Decadence 

the author of The Revolt of the Masses and numerous other philosophical stud- 
ies that are also contributions to cultural history. [The book to begin with is 
The Modern Theme.] Ortega y Gasset died at mid-century, but in his treatment 
of the arts, education, psychology, and social theory, this aptest observer of 
his period delineated the leading features of the next. That he was not much 
cited or quoted after his death does not amount to a settled judgment upon 
him. [The book to read is: Ortega j Gasset: A Pragmatic Philosophy of Life by John 
T. Graham.] Sooner or later he will have to be heard as a witness — and not 
alone. To know the whole century adequately, historians will have to listen to 
the words of several others who also belong to its formative time. To cite only 
three Americans: John Jay Chapman, Albert Jay Nock, and Leo Stein. 

* * 

From this summary survey of individual style and social institutions, it is 
plain that the demotic culture in decadence did not suffer from inertia. It was 
active in proportion to its predicaments; paralysis in one domain — and 
incompetence in many — excited lively efforts to overcome them. Many 
shrewd minds, accurately noting the condition of stasis, urged plausible reme- 
dies; nobody pretended that apart from science and techne advance was tak- 
ing place. But some hesitation was shown about applying the word Decadence 
to the whole West and the whole era, as our distance from it now enables us 
to do without tremor. 

That reluctance was natural but — again — it did not preclude insight or 
courage. A document from that time, undated and anonymous, shows the 
demotic mind and character at its best and fittingly concludes our account. It 
is entitled 

Let Us End with a Prologue 

"The careful historian, before he ventures to predict the course of his- 
tory, murmurs to himself 'Schedel' It is not a magic word, but the name of a 
learned German who, in 1493 — note the date — compiled and published the 
Nuremberg Chronicle. It announced that the sixth of the seven ages of mankind 
was drawing to a close, and it included several blank pages for recording any- 
thing of interest that might still occur during the final days. As we know, what 
occurred was the opening of the New World and all innovations that followed 
from it — hardly a close. With this risk in mind, I mean to set down what 
appears to me possible, plausible, likely, as our own era reaches an end. 



Demotic Life and times <^> 799 



Our Age 



Some of the descriptive labels: Age of Uncertainty; Age of Science; Age 

of Nihilism; Age of Massacre^ Age of the Masses; Age of Globalism; 

Age o£ Dictatorships; Age of Design; Age of Defeat, Age of Communication; 

Age of the Common Man; Age of Cinema and Democracy; Age of the 

6M/£ Age of Anxiety; Age of Anger, Age of Absurd Expectations 

"Some writers have called our time the end of the European age. True in 
one sense, the phrase is misleading in another: it overlooks the 
Europeanization of the globe. Techno-science and democracy are far from 
ruling everywhere, and in certain places they are fiercely opposed; but 
together they grip people's imagination and inflame their desires. The whole 
world wants, not freedom, but EMANCIPATION and enjoyment. And the West 
is the corner of the globe whose peoples, borrowing freely from all others, 
have shown the way of achieving the one and given the means of possessing 
the other. [A book to browse in is Pandemonium by Humphrey Jennings.] The 
shape and coloring of the next era is beyond anyone's power to define; if it 
were guessable it would not be new But on the character of the interval 
between us and the real tomorrow, speculation is possible. Within the histo- 
rian lives a confederate who is an incurable pattern-maker and willing to risk 
the penalties against fortune-telling. 

"Let the transitional state be described in the past tense, like a chronicler 
looking back from the year 2300. As the wise ancient Disraeli remarked, "We 
cannot be wrong, because we have studied the past and we are famous for dis- 
covering the future when it has taken place." 

The population was divided roughly into two groups; they did not like 
the word classes. The first, less numerous, was made up of the men and women 
who possessed the virtually inborn ability to handle the products of techne 
and master the methods of physical science, especially mathematics — it was 
to them what Latin had been to the medieval clergy. This modern elite had 
the geometrical mind (<216) that singled them out for the life of research and 
engineering. The Lord Bacon had predicted that once the ways and biases of 
science were enthroned, this type of mind would be found relatively com- 
mon. Dials, toggles, buzzers, gauges, icons on screens, light-emitting diodes, 
symbols and formulas to save time and thought — these were for this group 
of people the source of emotional satisfaction, the means of rule over others, 
the substance of shoptalk, the very joy and justification of life. 

"The mind was shaped and the fancy filled by these intricacies as had 
been done in an earlier era by theology, poetry, and the fine arts. The New 
Man saw the world as a storehouse of items retrievable through a keyboard, 



800 <^> From Dawn to Decadence 

and whoever added to the sum was in high repute. He, and more and more 
often She, might be an inventor or a theorist, for the interest in hypotheses 
about the creation of the cosmos and the origin of life persisted, intensified, 
from the previous era. The sense of being close to a final formulation lasted 
for over 200 years. 

"It is from this class — no, group — that the governors and heads of insti- 
tutions were recruited. The parallel with the Middle Ages is plain — clerics in 
one case, cybernists in the other. The latter took pride in the fact that in 
ancient Greek cybernetes means helmsman, governor. It validated their posi- 
tion as rulers over the masses, which by then could neither read nor count. 
But these less capable citizens were by no means barbarians, yet any school- 
ing would have been wasted on them; that had been proved in the late 20C. 
Some now argue that the schooling was at fault, not the pupils; but when the 
teachers themselves declared children unteachable, the Deschooling Society 
movement rapidly converted everybody to its view. 

"What saved the masses from brutishness was the survival (though in 
odd shapes) of a good deal of literature and history from the 500 years of 
western culture, mingled with a sizable infusion of the eastern. Some among 
the untutored group taught themselves to read, compiled digests, and by 
adapting great stories and diluting great ideas provided the common people 
with a culture over and above the televised fare. It was already well mixed and 
stirred by the 21 C. Public readings, recitals of new poems based on ancient 
ones, simple plays, and public debates about the eternal questions (which 
bored the upper class), furnished the minds and souls of the ordinary citizen. 
This compost of longings, images, and information resembles that which the 
medieval monks, poets, and troubadours fashioned out of the Greco-Roman 
heritage. Religious belief in the two ages alike varied from piety, deep or con- 
ventional, to mysticism. 

"As for social organization, the people were automatically divided into 
interest groups by their residence and occupation, or again by some personal 
privilege granted for a social purpose. The nation no longer existed, super- 
seded by regions, much smaller, but sensibly determined by economic instead 
of linguistic and historical unity. Their business affairs were in the hands of cor- 
poration executives whose view of their role resembled that of their medieval 
ancestors. Not the accumulation of territories but of companies and control 
over markets were their one aim in life, sanctified by efficiency. The pretext was 
rarely borne out, but the game prospered and the character of the players fol- 
lowed another medieval prototype: constant nervousness punctuated by vio- 
lent and arbitrary acts against persons and firms. Dismissals, resignations, 
wholesale firings of workers and staffs were daily events. There being no visi- 
ble bloodshed, wounds and distress were veiled. The comprehensive welfare 
system, improved since its inception, repaired the damage. Its decisions being 



Demotic Life and times q^> 801 

all made by computer on the basis of each citizen's set of identity numbers, 
there could be few tenable grievances. Those due to typing errors would be 
corrected — in time. There was thus no place for the citizen-voter and the per- 
petual clash of opinions that had paralyzed representative governments. 

"The goal of equality was not only preserved but the feeling of it 
enhanced. Faith in science excluded dissent on important matters; the 
method brings everyone to a single state of mind. On the workaday plane, the 
dictates of numerical studies guided the consumer and the parent, the old and 
the sick. The great era had ended — by coincidence, no doubt — as it had 
begun, with a new world disease, transmitted (also like the old) through sex- 
ual contact. But intense medical research in due course achieved cure and pre- 
vention, and the chief killer ailment was once more heart disease, most often 
linked to obesity. The control of nature apparendy stops short of self-control. 
But Stat Life, ensured by the many specialized government agencies, inspired 
successful programs and propaganda in many domains of the secure society. 
The moral anarchy complained of in the early days of the Interim rather sud- 
denly gave way to a strict policing of everybody by everybody else. In time it 
became less exacting, and although fraud, corruption, sexual promiscuity, and 
tyranny at home or in the office did not disappear, these vices, having to be 
concealed, attracted only the bold or reckless. And even they agreed that the 
veil is a sign not of hypocrisy but of respect for human dignity. 

"As for peace and war, the former was the distinguishing mark of the 
West from the rest of the world. The numerous regions of the Occident and 
America formed a loose confederation obeying rules from Brussels and 
Washington in concert; they were prosperous, law-abiding, overwhelming in 
offensive weaponry, and they had decided to let outside peoples and their fac- 
tions eliminate one another until exhaustion introduced peaceableness into 
their plans. 

"After a time, estimated at a little over a century, the western mind was set 
upon by a blight: it was Boredom. The attack was so severe that the over-enter- 
tained people, led by a handful of resdess men and women from the upper 
orders, demanded Reform and finally imposed it in the usual way, by repeating 
one idea. These radicals had begun to study the old neglected literary and pho- 
tographic texts and maintained that they were the record of a fuller life. They 
urged looking with a fresh eye at the monuments still standing about; they 
reopened the collections of works or art that had long seemed so uniformly 
dull that nobody went near them. They distinguished styles and die different 
ages of their emergence — in short, they found a past and used it to create a new 
present. Fortunately, they were bad imitators (except for a few pedants), and 
their twisted view of their sources laid the foundation of our nascent — or per- 
haps one should say, renascent — culture. It has resurrected enthusiasm in the 
young and talented, who keep exclaiming what a joy it is to be alive." 



802 ^ From Dawn to Decadence 






It need hardly be pointed out that the anonymous author's extravaganza 
did not represent any body of contemporary opinion, only his own. Nor can 
it be ascertained when and on what grounds his vision of the future occurred 
to him. But the preceding survey of demotic life and times can be chronolog- 
ically situated and described as 



A View from New York, Around 199 J 



Reference Notes 



NOTE: Readers who look up the marginal quotations will notice that some have been condensed 
without the usual three dots to show omissions; this was done to save space, restricted as it was by the 
page design. In some quotations given in translations not my own, I have changed a word here or there 
for clearer meaning. Most quotations have been left without reference, either because their source is noted 
in part and easily found, or because they represent widespread views, and to name the writer as if he were 
the originator would be misleading and in some cases unfair. Latinists will recognise in this the principle 
stated by another historian, Tacitus: neminem nominabo, genus hominum significasse contentus — "I 
name no one; it is enough to point out the kind. " 

The abbreviations P., L., and NY. in the references to place of publication stand for Paris, 
London, and New York. 

For help in verifying these references, I am indebted to my diligent copy editor, Shelly Perron; to 
Sally Kim at HarperCollins Publishers; and to the equally resourceful fames Nielsen of the library staff 
of the University of Texas at San Antonio. 



Prologue 
Page 

xiv James repr. in Memories and Studies, N.Y, 1 91 1 , p. 318. 

department New York Times, August 8, 1995. 

bus culture New York Times, September 17,1 995. 

brewing See Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations and the 

Remaking of World Order, N.Y, 1996. 

coffee table E.D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, 

Boston, 1987. 
xv to learn John Cowper Powys, The Meaning of Culture, N.Y, 1929, Preface, 
xvii town crier One did survive: Ralph Smith, of Mariemont, Ohio, near 

Cincinnati; he died on August 14, 1995, as noted in the New York Times. 
xviii Birrell Obiter Dicta, L., 1884, essay on Carlyle. 

Shakespeare The remark is typical of the would-be practical mind — hence no 

need to name the author. See in the head note above the Tacitus principle. 



804 <^> Reference Notes 

The West Torn Apart 

4 techne The word is short and exact; technology is neither. 

10 greatest number Otto Jespersen's doubts about Luther's influence on German 
would deny the importance of the written word. 

1 1 Erasmus Quoted in J.A. Froude, Life and Letters of Erasmus, L., 1906, p. 49. 

1 5 recent date May 1,1991. 

1 6 the legend On the psychoanalytic view in Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther, see 
Roland H. Bainton's "Psychology and History" in Religion and Life, Winter 1971. 
Preserved Smith A fuller version, entitled Life of Luther m. the Bohn series, 2nd 
ed., L., 1872, is a retranslation, corrected and amplified with useful notes, of 
Michelet's 1 9C French translation. 

The New Life 

21 discontents See Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, N.Y., 1930. 
25 heavenly body The City of God, ch. XX. 

soul-substance See Josiah Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, Boston, 1 893. 

27 human time See R.C. Churchill, The English Sunday, L., 1954. 

28 suicide Jim Jones led The People's Temple to their death in 1978. Since then 
David Koresch and his Branch Davidians also perished, and several sections 
of the Solar Temple aim at the same goal. Millennial cults likewise expecting 
The End exist in the hundreds throughout the West. 

30 The Mind of the Maker N.Y., 1 941 , See the chapter "Scalene Trinities," pp. 1 49 ff. 

38 of capitalism See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. 
Talcott Parsons, with an Introduction by R.H. Tawney, N.Y., 1958, Chapter V. 
may be done "Appeal to the Council of Trent," quoted from his Eirenikon in The 
Renaissance Reader, ed. byJ.B. Ross and M.M. McLaughlin, N.Y., 1953, p. 666. 

39 William James "On the Perception of Reality" in Principles of Psychology, N.Y, 
1890, v.I, p. 321. 

40 being waged e.g. the resurgent protest in the United States against the teaching 
of Evolution in the public schools. 

42 Burckhardt. Judgments on History Notes posthumously published, trans, by 
Hans Zohn, Boston, 1958, pp. 98,105. 

The Good Letters 

43 humanism A survey of several hundred writers, made in the 1 950s by Warren 
Allen Smith, elicited responses that he classified under seven definitions, 
including ancient, classical, communistic. See Free Inquiry, v.I, no.l, and New York 
Times, Oct. 15 and Nov. 8, 1980. 

45 bilingual On bilingual education in the public schools of the United States, 
see Jorge Amselle, The Failure of Bilingual Education, N.Y, 1996, pp. Ill ff. 

46 footnote Now a convention under fire. See New York Times, August 1996, passim. 
Al of the 13 th Besides Henry Adams's Mont St. Michel and Chartres, see J.J. Walsh, 

The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries, N.Y, 1907. 



Reference Notes <^> 805 

48 Middle Ages Originally published in English in 1923. A new translation by 
Rodney J. Paxton and Ulrich Mammitzsch under the literal title The Autumn of 
the Middle Ages appeared in 1996 (Chicago Press). 

49 changed emphasis John Herman Randall in The Making of the Modern Mind, N.Y., 
1926/1976, p. 118. 

50 admire the view Revisionists have doubted the climb up Mont Ventoux, but it 
remains part of the cultural past by its role as a common reference on the 
love of nature. 

53 Fall of Adam See the evidence in Norman Douglas, Old Calabria, L., 1 9 1 5 
(N.Y.,1956),ch.21. 

54 Seminal Emission See the article of that title in The Bible Review, February. 
1992, pp. 35 ff. 

56 forerunners See Charles Edward Trinkaus, Jr., "Lorenzo Valla on Free Will," in 
Ernst Cassirer, ed., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, Chicago, 1948, pp. 147 ff. 

61 Petrarch's handwriting Actually, italic was based on the current cursive used by 
the humanists. 

62 of the language Caxton thus belongs with Dante, Amyot, and Luther, but is 
rarely given the credit. 

63 and alone Saint Jerome is said to have been the first to read with his eyes 
only, no sound or lip movement when reading by himself. 

64 their %oos For an elephant's painful and picturesque journey by land and sea 
from Lisbon to Rome, see Silvio A. Bedini, The Pope's Elephant, L., 1997. 

The Artist Is Born 

66 Cellini Two Treatises, trans, by C.R. Ashbee, L., 1888; N.Y., 1967, pp. 122-23. 

67 a book to read in the selection made by Edward McCurdy: Leonardo da Vinci's 
Notebooks,NX.,\92?>. 

69 look "natural" During this period of "good painting" in the West, the 
Byzantine artists also began to make their works more "natural." See Charles 
Diehl, Choses et Gens de Byname, P., 1926, pp.146 ff. 

70 and Profane Love The title is traditional, not Titian's. 

lifelike See H. Pirenne, Optics: the Illusions of Perspective, Painting, and 
Photography,!,., 1970. 

72 Notebooks See note to p. 67 above. 

73 and color The treatise is by Piero della Francesca, written 1480-90. 

74 about it arose See J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress, L., 1 920, p. 35 «. 

75 stored in books See preceding note. 
H.Ruhemann NY, 1948. 

79 representatives Ralph Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance: four lawgivers, 
Cleveland, 1933. 

80 Diary of 1580-8 in English in Montaigne's Complete Works, trans, by Donald 
M. Frame, Stanford, 1948. 

81 Beaumarchais' play See a modern translation by J. Barzun in Phaedra and 
Figaro, NY, 1961 (Racine's Phedrewzs translated by Robert Lowell). 



806 <&> Reference Notes 

84 Drummer Boy charcoal and pastel at The Century Association, New York. 

87 of women An exhaustive and highly readable survey entitled "The Landmarks 
of Classic Feminism From Plato to the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848" was written 
by Harrison and Edna Steeves in the 1960s. It remains unpublished. The 
typescript entrusted by the authors to my care and gratefully used in this 
book is now in the Columbia University Rare Book Library See also M.P. 
Hunnay, Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, Kent 
State, Ohio, 1985. 

Cross Section: The View from Madrid 

94 life and honor His message is traditional. What he actually wrote to his 

mother on Feb. 23, 1 525 was: "The only thing left to me is honor, and my life 
is saved." 

98 Caribbean island Which one is still argued over. See New York Times, Oct. 12, 
1985; and Samuel Eliot Morison, Christopher Columbus, Mariner, Boston, 1942; 
in paperback, NY, 1985. 

implausible ones The list includes the Phoenicians, Romans, and Chinese; St. 
Brendan in the 6C; Herjohfson and Leif Ericson; the Welsh prince Madoc; 
the brothers Zeno and the Pole Jan Korno; some English fishermen and 
Portuguese sailors a decade before Columbus; and in his time, the Venetians; 
a French claim stated that the Gauls had been first. 

99 deception See Morison, note to p. 98 above. 

100 anniversary year There was no celebration of Columbus in the United States 
until 1 792. Young Washington Irving was soon a glorifier, while Charles 
Francis Adams and Justin Winsor the historian were early detractors. 

and the Gospel The phrase, used in his lectures, is William R. Shepherd's, 
professor of history at Columbia University in the 1920s. 

101 80 years ago A.H. Lybyer, "The Ottoman Turks and the Routes of Oriental 
Trade," English Historical Review, October 1915, pp. 577 ff. 

102 corrupted politics See Woodruff D. Smith, "Complications of the 
Commonplace: Tea, Sugar, and Imperialism," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 
Autumn 1992, pp. 259 ff. 

poetry and prose On various names and meanings of tobacco, see Isaac Taylor, 
Words and Places, L., 1864/1921, p. 360. 

103 Oliver Warner A British Council Publication, L., 1958. See also James 
Anthony Froude, English Seamen of the Sixteenth Century, N.Y, 1898. 

at her nose Comedy of Errors, III, ii (1 592) . 

104 America unlikely Vespucci is named Alberigo in documents of his time, 
which has suggested that it was America that gave its name to him in the 
iotm. Amerigo. See Sir William Fraser, Hie et Ubique, L., 1893, p. 103. 

108 / 789 revolution See J. Barzun, The French Race: Theories of its Origins and Their 

Social and Political Implications, NY, 1932. 
110 of his age J.B. Trend, The Civilisation of Spain, L., 1944, p. 101. 
112 hallucinations See Piero Camporesi, Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe, 

N.Y, 1989. 



Reference Notes ^> 807 

and the dance Among users of the legend besides Marlowe and Goethe: 
Delacroix, Berlioz, Bonington, Schumann, Liszt, Gounod, Boito, and Busoni. 

114 demand for surnames Quoted in J.P. Hughes, Is Thy Name Wart?, L., 1 965, p. 1 7. 
See also CM. Matthews, English Surnames, N.Y., 1967. 

115 their validity J.H. Brennan, Nostradamus: Visions of the Future, NY, 1 992. 

The Eutopians 

117 our own day See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed., Cambridge, Mass., 1 999. 

121 with speeches See Edward E. Lowinsky, "Music in the Culture of the 

Renaissance," Journal of the History of Ideas, Oct. 1954, pp. 509 ff.; see also the 
exhaustive study of one city: Frank A. D'Accone, The Civic Muse: music and 
musicians in Siena during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Chicago, 1 997. 

124 Long live Gon^alo The Tempest, II, i. 

1 25 Counter-Renaissance See the work of that title by Hiram Haydn, N.Y., 1 950. 

133 Albert Jay Nock Illustrated, N.Y, 1934. 

134 be mistaken Letter to the General Assembly of the Scottish Church, Sept. 
1643. 

140 reference to it The Tempest, I, ii. 

1 42 gentlemanly pursuit See Alfred Harbage, As They Liked It, N.Y. , 1 947 . 
tabulated See The Shakespeare Allusion Book, by successive editors, London, 
1909/1932, 2v. 

143 one of Shakespeare's In Twelfth Night (V, i) it is the "whirligig of time"; E.E. 
Kellett coined from it The Whirligig of Taste, L., 1929. 

Epic & Comic Lyric & Music Critic & Public 

1 53 tip of Africa Encouragingly renamed Cape of Good Hope by King John II of 
Portugal. 

to the colonists See J.B. Trend, The Civilisation of Spain, L., 1944. 

1 54 no musician The judgment is by Saint-Saens, an intimate. 

period as a whole See Cecil Gray, The History of Music, L., 1 928/1 947. 

1 55 in favor See Ernest H. Wilkins, "A General Survey of Renaissance 
Petrarchism," Comparative Literature, Fall 1 950. 

1 58 pluck the strings The vsordjongleur now means juggler but, derived from the 
Latinjocum, it was long used for any person playing, including playing jokes. 

1 59 dated 1470 See Joan Peyser, ed., The Orchestra, N.Y, 1 986. 

recent times See Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New, N.Y, 1959. 

161 on a shutter Six more lines add nothing to the sentiment. See Thomas Percy, 
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, new ed., L., 1847, v.2, p. 134. 

1 62 Pasquier in Recherches de la France, 1 560, Bk VII, ch. vii. 

166 Spingarn A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, 2nd ed., 1954. See 

also Marvin T. Herrick, The Fusion ofHoratian and Aristotelian Literary Criticism, 
1531-1555, Urbana, 111., 1946. 



808 <^> Reference Notes 



Cross Section: The View from Venice 

1 70 Nicolson See Diplomacy, L., 1 939, p. 5 1 . 

171 was frequent Galileo died on Jan. 8, 1642; Newton was born on Dec. 25, 
1642, which would be Jan. 5, 1643 on the Continent. England adopted the 
Occidental calendar in 1752; Russia in 1918. 

174 inherently absurd See his small book What Is Art?, first published in English in 
1898. It is coupled with The Kingdom of God m the N.Y. edition of 1899 
(Thomas Crowell). 

1 75 Gascony See Geoffrey F. Hall and Joan Sanders, D'Artagnan the Ultimate 
Musketeer, Boston, 1964. 

1 82 important points See "The Significance of John Amos Comenius at the 
Present Time," Introduction to Comenius on Education, Teachers College 
Classics No. 33, N.Y, 1967. 

1 83 gastronomy The word was not used until the 19C, but the reality is attested by 
the facts in Jean-Francois Revel, Culture and Cuisine, N.Y, 1982, ch. 6. 

184 reappearance in 1997 A new design of blue jeans called Flip Fly: news item 
Dec. 7, 1997. 

1 85 memoirs of the day For example the five volumes of Historiettes by Tallemant 
desReaux(c. 1655-1660). 

186 theological bar For the details, see note to p. 87. 

The Invisible College 

191 dates from 1840 Proposed by William Whewell, of Trinity College, 
Cambridge, in The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, L., 1 840, it was adopted 
without opposition. 

1 92 of the moderns See Neil C. Van Dusen, Telesio, the First of the Moderns, N.Y, 1 932. 
not 1600 Published for the Board of Education and the Science Museum by 
His Majesty's Stationery Office, L., 1939. 

1 96 // didn't To sort out Galileo's ideas from conventional notions, see James 
Brophy and Henry Paolucci, The Achievement of Galileo, N.Y, 1962. 

200 market at work See P.J. Davis and Reuben Hersh, Descartes' Dream, Boston, 
1986. and Alain Laurant, Du Bon Usage de Descartes, P., 1996. 

202 heart-and-mind See Wm. Theodore De Bary, Message of the Mind, N.Y, 1 989, 
General Introduction. 

206 as a debit See A.C.L. Day, The Economics of Money, L., 1 959, pp. 1 50-1 51 . 

210 Skeptical Chemist Not only a chemist, Boyle framed the familiar "Boyle's Law" 
on the behavior of gases. 

21 1 dated 1670 See Saul Jarcho, "Seventeenth-Century Medical Journalism," 
Journal of the American Medical Association, April 3, 1 972, p. 32. 

215 on love For its authenticity, see Morris Bishop, Pascal, the Life ofGenuis, N.Y, 1 936. 

21 8 Scientific Biography NY, 1 970, 1 5v. 

222 Democritus Junior The name implies "cheerful philosopher." Democritus 

Senior was an ancient Greek sage reputed to be always laughing at the follies 

of mankind. 



Reference Notes <^> 809 

a cathedral The poet was Frederick Mortimer Clapp, in conversation. 
Bergen Evans The title page adds: In consultation with George W. Mohr, M.D. 
222 at John Hopkins See Dale Keiger, "Touched with Fire," Johns Hopkins 
Magazine, Nov. 1993, pp. 38 ff. 

An Interlude 

225 the late 1 7C See Nathan Edelman, "Early Uses of medium aevum, moyen 
age, middle ages." Romanic Review, Fall 1938, pp. 327 ff. See also George 
Gordon, "Medium Aevum and Middle Age," Society for Pure English , Tract 
19, 1925. 

dark is vague; the period has also been called muddy, rusty, leaden, monkish, 
and Gothic. See preceding note, Tract 19, p. 15. 

individual freedom In France, the histories of Guizot — of France and of 
Europe — led the way for the later theorists of race; in England, "Saxonism" 
began earlier, see note to p. 108. 

226 in detail See Ferdinand Lot, The End of the Ancient World, NY, 1931; R.W 
Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages; Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, Chicago, 
1961, 2v; Carolly Erickson, The Records of Medieval Europe, an anthology, NY, 
1971. 

for the post See Marc Bloch in preceding footnote, v.2, p. 343. 
impetuous and violent Ibid, pp. 41 ff. 

227 Agincourt Quoted in Patrick Devlin, The Judge, Chicago, 1981, p. 170 n2, 
quoting John Keegan, The Face of Battle, L., 1979, p. 112. 

Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan, or A Vision in a Dream, 1 797. 

habits of thought See George L. Burr "The Year 1000 and the Antecedents of 

the Crusades." American Historical Review, April 1901, pp. 429 ff. 

228 the professions See Jacques Le Goff, Les Intellectuels au Moyen Age, P., 1 95 

229 with impunity For the student life and university administration, see Pearl 
Kibre, The Nations in the Mediaeval Universities, Cambridge, Mass., 1945. 
Carmina Burana Settings of medieval lyrics, mostly joyful, found in the 
Benediktbeuren monastery in Bavaria. See Helen Waddell, The Wandering 
Scholars (discussion and translations of songs), NY, Anchor Books, 1955; and 
Anthony Bonner, Songs of the Troubadours (with musical examples), NY, 1972. 

232 fabliaux See below last note for this page. 

and importance See H.S. Bennett, Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century, N.Y, 2nd 

ed., 1954, pp. 8ff. 

no of She was born in Domremy, therefore not "of Arc." The confusion 

arose with her legend. 

needs interpreting See R. Howard Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux, Chicago, 

1986. 

Monarchs' Revolution 

244 of the robe For example, Montesquieu inherited from his father the judgeship 
that the latter had bought. 



810 <^ Reference Notes 

to start with His rise owed much to his sister Arabella's being the mistress of 
the Duke of York, later James II. 
fraudulent See Jean de Bonnefon, Les Curiosites heraldiques, P., 1 91 2. 

245 vile bourgeoisie See p. 295 for exact meaning of this phrase. 

246 On the Republic See Julian H. Franklin, Jean Bo din and the Sixteenth Century 
Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History, N.Y., 1963. 

247 theories of race For an example of its innocent genesis in medieval history, see 
Books XXX and XXXI of Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois (1748). 

249 We not I The custom began with the Roman Emperors, who are thought to 
have had in mind the large number of countries of which they were the 
highest authority, making as it were a collection of emperors. 

250 voice of God See George Boas, Vox Populi, Essays in the History of an Idea, 
Baltimore, 1969. 

limited monarchy See Paul Doolin, "The Kingdom of France in the Last 
Three Centuries of the Ancien Regime Was a Limited Monarchy." Paper 
given at the American Historical Association Meeting in N.Y. City, Dec. 1940. 

251 has two bodies See Ernst H. Kantorovich, The King's Two Bodies, Princeton, 1 981 . 
people perform See Diderot's description in Rameau's Nephew of the "little 
dance" (figurative) that everybody, high and low, must go through repeatedly 
in front of royalty. 

253 of the earth This account, shortened, is drawn from Cheruel, Dictionnaire 

Historique des Institutions, Moeurs et Coutumes de la France, P., 1885, v.2, 1 1 17 ff. 
259 Vettori The letter is dated Dec. 10, 1513. 

Puritans as Democrats 

262 and Music by Percy Scholes, N.Y, 1 962. 

266 of his own See William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism: The Way to the New 
Jerusalem as Set Forth in the Pulpit and Press from Thomas Cartwright to John Lilburne 
and John Milton, 1570-1 '643, N.Y, 1938/1965. 

267 social justice See John Rawls,^4 Theory of Justice, rev. ed., Cambridge, Mass., 
1999. 

268 his Politics See his work of that title, Book III, ch. 1 0, and Book IV, ch. 1 2. 
272 our century See in its Bulletin for Dec. 1991, the conclusion of volume I of a 

five-year study of Fundamentalism conducted by the American Academy of 
Arts and Sciences; and also William H. McNeill, "Fundamentalism and the 
World of the 1990s," Bulletin for Dec. 1993. 

277 sense of longing Quoted in Charles Harding Firth, Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of 
the Puritans in England, L., 1 900, repr. L., 1 953, p. 381 . 

278 independent sects The adjective here stands for the small dissident groups who 
favored toleration, not those known as the Independents, who were against 

it. See "Orthodoxy in England and New England, 1640-1650" in Proceedings of 
the American Philosophical Society, 1991, p. 401. 

279 William Penn His deserved reputation as the establisher of tolerance in 
Pennsylvania has obscured his stormy political career, spent mostly in 
England. See Joseph Illick, William Penn the Politician, N.Y, 1965. 



Reference Notes <^ 811 



279 alleged misdeeds The Apologia of Robert Keayne, the Self-Portrait of a Puritan 

Merchant, ed., Bernard Baylin, NY, 1964. Superb editing has made a difficult 
text intelligible in half the number of pages that the probate court had to deal 
with. 

Reign of Etiquette 

285 untenable position Press conference, New York Times, June 29, 1958. 

Business of Kings See Gabriel Boissy, ed., Pensees choisies des rois de France, P., 

1920, p. 197; see also pp. 144-45 nn. 
289 surgery This practice was inaugurated when president Eisenhower's ileitis 

was diagnosed. 
291 the king's use See Gabriel Hanotaux, Etudes Historiques, P., 1 886, pp. 262 ff. 

293 political debate See Le Monde passim after the French elections of 1 997. 

294 were asked On this and related details, see Cheruel, Histoire de l' Administration 
monarchique en France; James E. King, Science and Rationalism in the Government of 
Louis XIV, NY, 1972; Paul Beik,AJudgmentofthe Old Regime (Columbia 
University dissertation, 1943); and Lionel Rothberg, Opposition to Louis XIV, 
Princeton, 1965. 

early 20C See the work by James E. King in preceding note. 

this century See records in the Columbia University Rare Book and 

Manuscript Library. 

Charlemagne See note to fraudulent on p. 244. 

295 a monarchy See J. Barzun, The French Race, Theories of Its Origins and Their Social 
and Political Implications, NY., 1932. 

302 and elsewhere See Barbara Swain, Fools and Folly During the Middle Ages and The 
Renaissance, N.Y, 1932. 

303 Grand Design See Edwin D. Mead, ed., The Great Design of Henry IV from the 
Memoirs of the Duke of Sully, with "The United States of Europe" by Edward 
Everett Hale, Boston, 1909. 

304 considered foreign The others were: pays of the state; pays formerly self- taxing 
{election); pays of custom law; pays of written law; self-ransomed for paying one 
tax only (redime). 

no French So said the Abbe Gregoire, which may be too broad a general- 
ization. These non-speakers must have sung the French words of the 
Marseillaise as they marched to Paris to celebrate the 14th of July. 

Cross Section: The View from London 

312 drive him away See Trevor H. Hall, New Light on Old Ghosts, L., 1965. In 
Poltergeists, N.Y, 1959, Sacheverell Sitwell prints the diaries and letters of the 
Wesley family about the manifestations: pp. 157 ff. 

ever been found See Rupert T. Gold, Oddities, L., 1 928, ch. 5, for pictures of the 
machine and reports of the tests. 

313 patriote Earlier it meant only native, compatriot. 

Vauban quotation and all details on fortification are from Christopher 



812 q^> Reference Notes 

Duffy, The Fortress in the Age of Vauban and Frederick the Great, 1660-1789, L., 
1985, pp. 72 ff. 
314 Laurence Sterne Uncle Toby's obsession with the siege of Namur is 
entertaining and instructive. 

New Science Translated from the 3rd ed., 1744, by T.G. Bergin and M.H. 
Fisch, Ithaca, N.Y., 1948. See also Vico's Autobiography, trans, by M. H. Fisch 
and T.G. Bergin, N.Y., 1944. 

317 their lot See Robert Beverley "The Historical and Present State of Virginia," 
L., 1705, quoted in The Annals of America, Chicago, 1968, v. 1, pp. 326, 329. 

318 Du Bartas This Huguenot poet, who fought under Henry IV, wrote The 
Week of Creation, a religious work which, translated by Joshua Sylvester, went 
through 30 editions in a few years. 

not disown See Wilfred Mellers, Music in a New Found Land, N.Y., 1965. 

13 or 14 The high school had not been invented and college was not university, 

but the site of passage from pupil 'to student. 

319 between 1719 and 1727 Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, The Russian Question 
at the End of the Twentieth Century, N.Y., 1994. 

321 Anonymous French squib My translation is virtually word for word. 
governors See Tim Congdon, "John Law and the Invention of Paper Money," 
Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, January, 1991. 

322 into money Swift's Examiner No. 13, Nov. 2, 1710, pp. 916 ff. 
non-fiction novel This term has been made ambiguous by its application to 
novels closely based on contemporary facts. My original use of it in The 
Atlantic Monthly (July 1946) and again in The Energies of Art (1956, p. 125) was 
to designate novels such as Kafka's, Andre Gide's and C.P Snow's, in which 
the atmosphere of fiction is absent and that of a factual report is present, 
though the story is entirely invented. 

323 letter writer For her letters to her future husband, see Edward Abbott Parry, 
Letters From Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple (1652—1654), Wayfarer's 
Library, L, n.d. 

Timons manner The allusion is to an ancient Greek story and possibly to 
Shakepeare's Timon of Athens. 

324 resort to it See Jae Nunn Lee, Swift and Scatological Satire, Albuquerque, N.M., 
1971. 

325 of Dr. Swift See the commentary in Master Poems of the English Language, ed., 
Oscar Williams, N.Y., 1966. 

sweetness and light The phrase, often attributed to Matthew Arnold, occurs 

early in Swift's Battle of the Books. 

Alzheimer's disease For diagnoses other than madness, see Milton Vogt, Swift 

and the Twentieth Century, Detroit, 1964. 

minor poets Waller and Denham. See Edmund Gosse, From Shakespeare to Pope, 

L., 1885. 

326 qualified scholars See Ernest Weekley, SomethingAbout Words, L., 1936. 

of King Lear See Hazelton Spencer, Shakespeare Improved, Cambridge, Mass., 
1927. 



Reference Notes ^ 813 

328 The Messiah now called Messiah, without the, by misguided persons who want 
to reproduce Handel's unidiomatic notation on the score. 

Trajan See Linoln Kirstein, Four Centuries of Ballet, N.Y., 1970/84, p. 94. 

329 each product See note to p. 183. 

330 of the Guards The name is possibly the anglicized form of Condom, a 
cathedral town and county seat in southwestern France. Bossuet was bishop 
of Condom. 

Opulent Eye 

338 of the kind See Philip John Stead, The Police of Paris, L., 1 957. 

340 Scudery The full tide is Artamene ou le Grand Cyrus, P., 1 650, 1 2,000 pp. 
convolution For Calderon in translation, see (besides a fragment by Shelley), 
Kathleen Raine and R.M. Nadal, Life's a Dream, N.Y., 1968. In Eric Bendey's 
series of translations called The Classic Theatre (Anchor Books, N.Y., var. dates, 
there is a volume of Spanish plays that includes Calderon. 

341 Corneille to Voltaire See preceding note for translations in the volumes of The 
Classic Theatre. 

342 Phaedra in Phaedra and Figaro, respectively translated by Robert Lowell and 
Jacques Barzun, N.Y., 1961. 

346 the people for a full survey of Moliere's language see F. Genin, Lexique . . . de 
la langue de Moliere, P., 1846. 

347 Locke's The comparable works are dated 1643 and 1690, Gassendi's the 
earlier. For a modern revaluation of his influence, see his entry in the 
Dictionary of Scientific Biography. 

Saint-Evremond His friend Des Maizeaux persuaded him to allow publication 
of the works, translated into English, in three volumes, L., 1728. The Letters of 
Saint-Evremond, also in English, were published with an engaging introduction 
by John Hayward, L., 1930. 

350 of soul There is no adequate version of the Maxims in English, because the 
conciseness is hard to reproduce, but for the sense the translation by Louis 
Kronenberger (N.Y, 1959) may generally be relied on. 

351 of the form For comparison, see Richard Aldington, ^4 Book of Characters,!^., 
n.d. 

352 7 50 pages The French text in the edition by A. Chassang, Oeuvres Completes, 
P., 1876, 2 v., has a useful discussion of La Bruyere's method and his language. 

354 modern improvements William James to his parents, May 27, 1867, in The Letters 

of William fames, L., 1920, v. I, p. 87. 

of any period See George P. Marsh, Lectures on the English Language, N.Y, 1 880, 

p. 263. 

dead corpses it occurs twice, in 2 Kings 19.35 and Isaiah 37.36. 

sitting position The definition is Russell Baker's in the New York Times, Feb. 17, 

1996. 
356 English neither Thomas Rymer. 



814 ^ Reference Notes 



Encyclopedic Century 

360 historical and critical Originally planned as a repertory of the errors in Moreri; 
Bayle's was published in two folio volumes, 1697. 

361 Philosophic Dictionary This is not the work in two or more volumes that have 
been put together by later editors from miscellaneous pieces by Voltaire 
related to philosophy and religion. 

a hundred religions The saying is attributed to Marquis Caraccioli, the 
ambassador from Naples, and he did not say a hundred — only sixty. 
for him E. Beatrice Hall, writing as S.G Tallentyre in The Friends of Voltaire, L., 
1906, p. 199 and, slightly modified in Voltaire in His Letters, L., 1919, p. 65. See 
Burdette Kinne in Modern Language Notes for November 1943. 
364 Spirit of the Laws The first, widely read, translation into English by Henry 

Reeve is marred by mistakes. Revision by Phillips Bradley appeared in N.Y. in 
1945, and a new version by George Lawrence, L., 1969. This last is an 
improvement but still improvable. 

what they read See Bernard Fay, The Revolutionary Spirit in France and America, 
NY, 1927. 

366 explicit statements particularly in his four letters to Dr. Bentley; see Derek 
Gjertsen, The Newton Handbook, L., 1986, pp. 176, 218-9, 348, and 461-4. 

367 refute it thus Boswell's Life offohnson, August 5, 1 763. 

369 available The most popular was Moreri's in one volume (1674/1691), which 
Bayle accused of Catholic bias. 

370 fournalde Trevoux originally Memoires de Trevoux. The change of title suggests 
a more miscellaneous audience to be reached and persuaded. 

371 Diderot's work, See DH. Gordon and N.L. Torrey, The Censoring of Diderot's 
Encyclopedic and the Re-established Text, N.Y., 1 947. 

372 excellent reading See Louis Biancolli, ed., The Book of Great Conversations, N.Y, 
1948. 

373 with variations As late as the 1980s, an American university press issued a 
book in which this canard was made much of. 

lines of Virgil In his Letter on the Deaf and Dumb (1 759) about art and esthetics. 

374 misapplied See J. Barzun "Why Diderot?" in Stanley Burnshaw, Varieties of 
Literary Experienced^., 1962. 

of matter See the "Conversation Between D'Alembert and Diderot," in J. 
Barzun and Ralph Bowen, Rameau's Nephew and Other Works, N.Y. (Anchor 
Books), 1956. 

radical empiricist The term is defined and the principle applied in James's 
Essays in Radical Empiricism, L., 1912. 

375 named after him For a concise summary of Franklin's scientific work, see 
Samuel Devons, "Franklin as Experimental Philosopher" in American fournal 
of Physics, Dec .1977. 

377 Bernoulli Sometimes spelled Bernoulli. 

378 Anthony Hecht Poem Upon the Lisbon Disaster (bilingual text), Lincoln, Mass. 
1977. 

379 made from it Lyrics by Richard Wilbur, music by Leonard Bernstein. 



Reference Notes <^> 815 

379 Charles XII King of Sweden, famous as soldier, defeated by Peter the Great 
in 1718 and killed while invading Norway. 

384 of perfection See George R. Havens, Voltaire's Marginalia on the Pages of Rousseau, 
Columbus, Ohio, 1933. 

385 government See Mary Osborn, Rousseau and Burke, N.Y., L., 1940. 

386 M. Angard in M.J. Gaberel, Rousseau et les Genevois, Geneva, 1 858, pp. 143^-4. 
forward to nature This is the persuasive theme of Ernest Hunter Wright's The 
Meaning of Rousseau, L., 1929. 

390 the clarinet For further details, see Joan Peyser, ed., The Orchestra: Origins and 
Transformations, NX., 1986. 
other way around Ibid. 

Cross Section: The View from Weimar 

395 in Frankfort See his account in the autobiography Poetry and Truth, Bk II, 

paragraph 4. 

the oppressed See especially The Brigands, his early play urging rebellion against 

all existing institutions and all "the fathers." 
398 Canada See the details of persecution in Colin Nicolson, "Mcintosh, Otis, 

and Adams Are Our Demagogues," in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical 

Society for 1996, Boston, 1998, pp. 73 ff. 

406 a curiosity by amateurs on the Columbia University campus in 1928. For a 
comprehensive survey, see Kenneth Silverman,^ Cultural History of the 
American Revolution, N.Y., 1987. 

407 musical people See Wilfrid Mellers, Music in a New Found Land, N.Y., 1 965. 

408 New Man, the American The phrase was coined by J. Hector St. John, pseud, 
of M.G.J, de Crevecoeur, about the Americanized European, in his book 
Letters From an American Farmer, L., 1782. 

41 1 Great Cham The despotic ruler of Tartary; the title is a form of Khan; the 
nickname was given Johnson by Smollett. 

412 Ramblerese Johnson said first: "It has not enough wit to keep it sweet," and 
at once rephrased it: "It has not vitality enough to keep it from putrefaction." 
The remark referred to the Duke of Buckingham's comedy, The Rehearsal. The 
anecdote is in Boswell, May 30, 1984. 

masterly writing For the mutual misunderstanding, see J.H. Sledd and G.J. 
Kolb, Dr. Johnsons Dictionary, Chicago, 1955, ch. 3. 

41 3 claim to it Abbe Redonvilliers of the French Academy: De la maniere 
d'apprendre les langues, P., 1768; and Nicolas Adam, Vraie maniere d' apprendre une 
langue quelconque, P., 1787. 

414 of Figaro It is more properly Figaro's wedding that is the pivot of the play. 

41 8 Glucks work It is limited to parts of Idomeneo, Re di Creta, an operia seria, 1 780. 
420 La Poupeliniere Wealthy tax farmer, pupil of Rameau, and patron of 

musicians, who first introduced horns, clarinets, and the harp into his private 

orchestra. 

Madeleine B. Ellis Baltimore, 1 966. 



816 <^ Reference Notes 

421 queen's necklace Dumas' novel, The Queens Necklace gives in the opening 
chapters a good portrait of Cagliostro. 

422 and thinker New editions appeared in 1 820 and 1 825, and it was reprinted in 
The Oxford Library of Prose and Poetry, ed., W.A. Gill, Oxford, 1912. 

Forgotten Troop 

425 social system On some of the debated points, see J.R. Censer, ed., The French 

Revolution and Intellectural History, Chicago, 1989. 
427 the nation See Crane Brinton, The Jacobins, N.Y., 1930. 
429 I lived The usual translation "I survived" does not express what the original 

implies: he did not say "J'ai survecu"; living was by itself an extraordinary feat. 
427 their friends See F.J. C. Hernshaw, ed., The Social and Political Ideas of Some 

Representative Thinkers of the Revolutionary Era, L., 1931. 
433 conspirators See Bernard Fay, La Franc-Maconnerie et la revolution intellectuelle du 

XVIIIe siecle,V., 1942. 

436 than others Guedalla coined the phrase in "A Russian Fairy Tale" {The Missing 
Muse, L., 1927). Much later, Orwell popularized the idea, but it is likely that he 
arrived at it independendy. 

437 John E. Lesch See also David M. Vess, Medical Revolution in France 1789-96, 
Gainesville, Florida, 1975. 

psychiatrist On this and related subjects, see the pioneering papers of Dora 
Weiner in various learned journals. 

439 of his death His life and work are detailed in John Edmonds Stock, Memoirs of 
the Life of Thomas Beddoes, M.D., L., 1 81 1 , a remarkable book of 500 pp., all in 
one chapter. For a summary, see J. Barzun, "Thomas Beddoes, or Medicine 
and Social Conscience," Journal of 'the American Medical 'Association, April 3, 
1972, pp. 50 ff. 

440 Notebooks For a selection of Lichtenberg's Aphorisms and Letters, with a 
detailed account of his life, see F.H. Mautner and Henry Hatfield, eds., The 
Lichten berg Reader, Boston, 1959; and for the complete writings in German, 
Werke, with an Afterword by Carl Brinitzer, Hamburg, 1967. 

441 Universal Peace See Theodore Caplow, Peace Games, Middletown, Conn., 
1989. 

445 54 inches by 28 The present account is almost entirely based on Robert Sole, 
Les Savants de Bonaparte, P., 1998. See also Christopher J. Herold, Bonaparte in 
Egypt,N.Y.,\962. 

448 and of literature So says the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1 5th ed. (micropedia) 
under his name. 

449 de la Bretonne Les Nuits de Paris or the Nocturnal Spectator, N.Y., 1 964. See also 
Alex Karmel, My Revolution, a semi-fictional autobiography based on Restif 's 
"Journals," 1789-94; NY, 1970. For a recent study of De Sade, see Francine 
du Plessix Gray, At Home With the Marquis de Sade, N.Y, 1998. 

in fiction He appears in half a dozen of Balzac's novels as Jacques Collin — his 
"real" name, made up by Balzac — then as Vautrin in La Derniere incarnation de 
Vautrin, 1845. 



Reference Notes <^> 817 

English translation Bohn edition, 1 854. The French is in 4 volumes, 1 828. 
450 her contemporaries See Christopher J. Herold, Mistress to an Age: a Life ofMme de 
Stael, L., 1959. 

453 Weltanschauungen The Physiology of Taste: Transcendental Meditations on Gastronmony, 
N.Y., 1948, a very poor translation. 

454 deficiency For a reasoned and entertaining account of English dishes, see 
Rupert Croft-Cooke, English Cooking. A New Approach, L., 1960. 

455 of the past The phrase occurs in the Reflections of the Due de Levis dated 

1 808. The duke lay claim to descent from the oldest noble family in France, 
an ancestor having presumably taken part in the first crusade. The idea of 
noblesse oblige thus took a long time to germinate. 
two-volume work Zoonomia, L., 1794, translated into German, 1796—97. 

457 their life Quoted in Mao-han Tuan, Simonde de Sismondi as an Economist, N.Y., 
1927, p. 38. 

458 Salpetriere The present account of these two women relies on the work by 
H.R. and Edna Steeves cited in note to p. 37 and on Simon Schama's Citizens, 
see p. 426. See also Gwyn A. Williams, Artisans and Sans-Culottes, N.Y., 1969. 
Rights of Women A paperback reprint of the 2nd ed., L., 1 792, was published 
by Dover Books, Mineola, N.Y., 1996. 

454 recent works See Boris Schwartz, French Instrumental Music Between the 

Revolutions, 1789—1830, N.Y., 1987; and Jean Mongredien, La musique en France 
des Lumieres au Romantisme, P., 1986. 

461 our time Helene Delavault. 

462 the beholder Blake's marginalia on the Discourses overlook this shift and are to 
that extent unjust to Reynolds. 

The Work of Mind-and-Heart 

466 of ideas the late Arthur Lovejoy, of Johns Hopkins University. 

467 romanticism) In Classic, Romantic, and Modern, Boston, 1943/1961. 
not romantic Ibid.,pA5S. 

475 Work of Art Dan Hofstadter, The Love Affair as a Work of Art, N.Y, 1 996. 
478 professor at the Jardin des Plantes- the botanical garden, but in part a 200 

where Barye could study the animals he wanted to sculp. 
480 and by Hugo For example "L'Egout de Rome" in Les Chatiments, Bk VII (1 852). 

is in art Preface to his first play Cromwell, a ringing manifesto for artistic 

freedom (1827). 

20C poets See P. Thieme, "Notes on Victor Hugo's Versification," in Studies 

in Honor of A. Marshall Elliot, Baltimore, 191 1, v.I. 

one of his works His monumental and posthumous autobiography, Memoires 

d'Outre-Tombe (1849-50). 
482 for the future See J. Barzun "Romantic Historiography as a Political Force in 

France," Journal of the History of Ideas, June 1 941 . 

History of Mankind See the edition in English, abridged and introduced by 

Frank E. Manuel, Chicago, 1968. 



818 c^ Reference Notes 

483 set of novels Scottish and medieval. 

485 reconnoiter See Thomas Hardy's short stories and reminiscences, passim. 

486 kindred satires The Vision of Judgment and Beppo (181 8—1 820) . 

two-syllable rimes The precursor of W.S. Gilbert in the operas that he created 
with Arthur Sullivan. 
488 Peabody She was the model, unconsciously on Henry James's part, for Miss 
Birds eye in The Bostonians. 

Cross Section: The View from Paris 

492 the omnibus The first company failed. See L.A.G. Strong, The Rolling Road, L., 
1956, pp. 93 ff. 

494 cobblestones For a summary of the official report, see Le Romantisme, 
Bibliotheque Nationale Catalogue, P, 1930, pp. 174 ff. 

495 Hoffmann originally E.T.W. (for Wolfgang). He changed W to A. in honor of 
Mozart, whose second given name was Amadeus. 

496 Romanticist music See Katherine Kolb Reeve, The Poetics of the Orchestra in the 
Writings ofBerlio^ Yale dissertation, 1978. 

497 American South Nat Turner's rebellion to free the slaves, one of several about 
that time in the southern American states and the West Indies. 

498 of the century See Angus Holder, Elegant Modes in the Nineteenth Century, L., 1 935. 

499 great applause For a picturesque description of the preparation and premiere 
of Robert the Devil, see Mark Edward Perugini, The Omnibus Box, L., 1946, 
Ch. IV. See also: William L. Crosten, French Grand Opera, an Art and a Business, 
N.Y., 1948. 

505 American Scholar The quarterly review that bears this tide is an organ of the Phi 
Beta Kappa Society and aims at furthering Emerson's conception of culture. 

506 imperial self The phrase is Quentin Anderson's. See his book of the same 
tide, subtided an Essay in American Literary and Cultural History, NY, 1 971 . 
on government For a critique, see J. Barzun, "Thoreau the Thorough 
Impressionist," American Scholar, Spring 1987. 

narrative thread Ibid., pp. 255 ff. 
509 revolutionary See A. Vera, Introduction a la philosophie de Hegel, P., 1 844, pp. 4 ff. 

behind physics The derivation of the word has been questioned by some who 

say it arose when copyists placed his philosophy after (metd) his Physics. A wit 

accordingly redefined metaphysics as "an author's instructions mistaken by 

his bookbinder." 

a feminist A similar liaison had the same effect on John Stuart Mill. See his 

Autobiography, ed., Mortimer J. Adler, NY, 1924. 
512 Harold Bloom Said at the Shakespeare Conference, Bowie State University, 

Dec. 5, 1998. 

John Kinnaird See his William Ha^litt, Critic of Power, N.Y, 1978; and for the 

details of his life, P.P. Howe, William Ha^litt, L., 1922 (Penguin ed. 1949). 
515 Wosgeck The original name is Woyzeck, corrupted by mistake. See The Plays 

of GeorgBiichner, trans. Geoffrey Dunlop, NY, 1928. 



Reference Notes <^> 819 

517 two novelists Anthony and his elder brother Thomas Adolphus, author of 
novels and other works now forgotten. 

found it out Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, Cincinnati 
(1828),N.Y.,1904,p.91. 

The Mother of Parliaments 

519 public interest From the law named after Le Chapelier, passed June 14, 1791. 

528 and Communism See Frangois Pejto, Heine: a Biography, L., 1966. 

531 well yourself For several of these quotations and others of equal interest, see 
Lady Holland and Mrs. Austin, Memoir and Letters of Sydney Smith, new ed., L., 
1 869; and Stuart J. Reid, A Sketch of the Life and Times of Sydney Smith, N.Y., 1 885. 

536 saved his life In his Confessions of an Opium-Eater (1 821). 

in our time See Peter Quennell, ed., London's Underworld, Selections from the 
Fourth Volume of London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew, L., n.d. 

540 grooves of change In "Locksley Hall" (1842). 

541 nine miles an hour The sense of speed is relative to what habit has made 
"normal" and also to the degree of bodily comfort or exposure to the 
elements. 

542 Thomas Creevey The now famous diarist, an M.P. who had opposed railways, 
was given a short ride on Nov. 4, 1829— a trial run for notables ahead of the 
formal opening of Sept. 15, 1830. 

Accepted Ideas See the translation by J. Barzun, New Directions, N.Y., 1 968. 

543 to our day See J. Barzun, "The Imagination of the Real," in Art, Politics, and 
Will, ed., Quentin Anderson et al, N.Y., 1977. 

544 common time Starting out as the principal of a girls' school in the Northeast, 
Charles F Dowd wrote and lectured about his idea till his retirement; See his 
System of national time and its application, etc., Albany, 1870; and a biography: 
Charles F. Dowd. . . a Narrative of His Services, by Charles N. Dowd, N.Y, 1930. 
nobody objected In his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, L., 1940. 

546 for the organ See Michael Murray, French Masters of the Organ, New Haven, 

1998. 
548 propaganda The efficiency and extent of this movement has only recently 

been shown. See Jeanne Gilmore, La Republique clandestine: 1818—1848, P., 1997. 

Things Ride Mankind 

552 offensive phrase News item, August 25, 1999. 

554 ride mankind Ode Inscribed to W.H. Channing (c. 1848). 

556 and His Own Max Stirner (meaning the impudent}) was the pseudonym of 
Kaspar Schmidt (1806-56). 

558 Beauty in Music For Hanslick's precise ideas and actual role, see Geoffrey 

Payzant, "Tones Already Fading: Hanslick on Music and Time." Paper read at 
Time Symposium 14, University of Toronto, Feb. 3-9, 1992. See also a 
published version in Journal of Musicological Research, 1989, pp. 133 ff. 



820 <&> Reference Notes 

561 Accepted Ideas See second note to p. 542. 

keep reading New Grub Street, L., 1 891 . 

Les Miserables See Victor H. Brombert, Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel, 

Cambridge, Mass., 1984. 
563 was abundant See Harley Granville Barker, ed., The Eighteen-Seventies, N.Y., 1929. 

565 Toms Cabin The numerous adaptations of her novel, staged simultaneously 
in several countries is said to have opened the age of Sensation Drama. See 
M. Willson Disher, Melodrama, N.Y, 1954, pp. 2-4. 

well-made play See examples in the Bendey series, note to p. 340 above. 

566 Abraham Lincoln translated by WH. Schofield, American-Scandinavian Review, 
1918, pp. 104-06. 

568 Lord Acton Quoted in James W Thompson, A History of Historical Writing, 
N.Y, 1942, v.2, p. 300. 

569 biennial history Frederic Harrison in The Meaning of History, N.Y, 1 894. 
than Froude See W.H. Dunn, James Anthony Froude, Oxford, 1961 , 2v. 
Jefferson Washington, DC, 1926, Appendix. 

570 a novelist See in G.O. Trevelyan's Life and Letters ofMacaulay, the diary for 
Dec. 1838, Nov. 1841 -July 1843, July 1848. 

571 educated reader See also Norman Macbeth, Darwinism, San Francisco, 1985; 
and for a scientist's detailed account, Soren Lovtrup, Darwinism, L., 1987. 

572 would disappear Renan wrote his Future of Science in 1 848 but did not publish it 
until 1890. 

New Republic Subtided: Culture, Faith, and Philosophy in an English Country 

House,L.,\877. 

chaotic scene For the definitive work on Matthew Arnold's ideas, see Lionel 

Trilling, Matthew Arnold, N.Y, 1939/1977. 

573 peace and justice For a full treatment of Stephen's ideas, see James A. Colaiaco, 
James Fit^james Stephen, N.Y, 1983. 

574 still exhale See Michael Sanderson, ed., The Universities in the Nineteenth 
Century, L., 1975. 

575 foolishness See Gustave Simon, Che% Victor Hugo: Les tables tournantes de Jersey, 
P., 1855/1923. 

London Times For the attitude of the press in general, see Richard D Altick, 
Deadly Encounters, Philadelphia, 1986. 

576 this Boheme By Leoncavallo and Puccini. 

577 Metternich See The Private Letters of Princess Lieven to Prince Metternich: 
1 820-1 8S6,L., 1937. 

578 without practice See J. Barzun, Race: A Study in Superstition, N.Y, 1937/1965. 
recent book Francis Schiller, PaulBroca, Founder of French Anthropology, Explorer 
of the Brain, Berkeley, Calif, 1979. 

580 so well told by Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale, L., 1 950/1 983, and 

Elspeth Huxley, Florence Nightingale, L., 1975. 
584 rhythm and force This is demonstrated in J. Barzun, "Lincoln the Writer," in 

Essays on Writing, Editing, and Publishing, Chicago, 1971/1986. 



Reference Notes <^> 821 

585 contributions See his Medical Essays, Boston, 1 861/1 881 . 
588 Paris Commune Quoted in Lady St. Helier, Memories of Fifty Years, L., 1 909, pp. 
102 ff. 

Cross Section: The View from Chicago 

592 Brown Decades They are stated after the title: 1 865-1 895. Publ. N.Y., 1 931 . 
Woodhull See Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers, N.Y., 1998, and Mary 
Gabriel, Notorious Victoria, Chapel Hill, 1998. 

to suicide See Allan Keller, Scandalous Lady, the Life and Times of Madame Restell, 
NY, 1981. 

596 literary genius See his life written by Elmer Ellis, Mr. Dooleys America: a Life of 
Finley Peter Dunne, NY, 1941. 

Spanish War Sticklers insist it was Kettle Hill, not San Juan, a less attractive 
vision. But as with William the Conqueror's landing place, Hastings or Senlac, 
the world has enshrined the better-sounding name. 

597 first ecologist See his Man and Nature edited by David Lowenthal, Cambridge, 
Mass., 1965, and the same editor's George Perkins Marsh: Versatile Vermonter, 
NY, 1958. 

598 700 tons See Quinta Scott, The Eads Bridge, Columbia, Missouri, 1979. 

600 in the morning The account of its installation by the White House factotum, 
Irwin Hood Hoover is in his Forty-two Years in the White House, L., 1935. 

601 worked miracles See James Harvey Young, "The Paradise of Quacks," TV Y State 
Journal of Medicine, Feb. 1993, pp. 127 ff.; and "Sex Fraud," Pharmacy in History, 

1993, No. 2, pp. 65 ff. 

602 to be written See Sir Charles Higham, Advertising, L., 1 925; J.S. Wright and D.S. 
Warner, eds., Speaking of Advertising, N.Y, 1963; and Edd Applegate, 
Personalities and Products: A Historical Perspective on Advertising in America, 
Westport, Conn., 1998. For a brilliant sidelight, read H.G Well's novel, Tono 
Bungay (1909). 

606 instituted See the comment by Dean Briggs quoted on p. 45. 

of the first rank See Hardin Craig, Woodrow Wilson at Princeton, Norman, Okla., 
1960. 

609 Dewey's formula See John Dewey, How We Think, Boston, 1909. 

Poincare For a critical survey of the varied methods of science, see R.M. 
Blake, C.J. Ducasse, and E.H. Madden, Theories of Scientific Method: The 
Renaissance Through the Nineteenth Century, Seatde, 1960; and Jacques 
Hadamard, ThePsychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, Princeton, 1943; 
other works by Abraham A. Moles (Geneva, 1957) and W.I.B. Beveridge (L., 
1955) make the same point of diversity in method and inspiration. On 
Vitalism see L. Richmond Wheeler, L., 1939. 

611 study concludes See Edward D. Radin, Li^ie Borden, the Untold Story, N.Y, 
1961. 

612 of rhetoric For the historical Cyrano, thinker and satirist, see Erica Harth, 
Cyrano de Bergerac and the Polemics of Modernity, N.Y, 1970. 



822 <^> Reference Notes 



Summit of Energies 

617 labor threatening See Helen Merrell Lynd, England in the Eighteen Eighties, L. , 
1945. 

618 Nordau pseudonym of Max Simon Sudfeld (1849-1923). 

619 do that for us Axel, P., 1890; trans, by June Guicharnaud, Englewood Cliffs, 
N.J., 1970. See also his novel LEve future, P., 1886, in which Edison is a 
character and techne refashions daily life. 

on the play See Maurice Saillet ed., Tout Ubu, P., 1962. 
622 in that sense See Charles Chasse, Les Clefs de Mallarme, P., 1 954. 

free verse The early practitioner and best theorist was Gustave Kahn. See the 
Preface to his Premiers Poemes, P., 1897 and the developed treatment of the 
subject Le Vers libre, P., 1912. The belief that Walt Whitman was a formative 
influence has been shown to be baseless. See P. Mansell Jones, The Background 
of Modern French Poetry, Cambridge, Mass., 1968, pp. 159 ff. 

625 quickly suppressed The Hazard of the Die. See S. Beach Chester, Anomalies of 
the English Law, Boston, 1912, p. 135. 

626 hermaphrodite To be even-handed, his heterosexual Lysistrata drawings were 
also suppressed. 

Krafft-Ebing His Psysopathia Sexualis, first translated into English in 1892 

(Philadelphia), was sold only to physicians until the 1920s. 

take refuge For a survey of reports by medical men, see Stephen Kern, Freud 

and the Emergence of Child Psychology: 1880—1910, Columbia University 

Dissertation, 1970. 

Sexual Act published, Chicago, 1 900, after its rejection by the Journal of the 

American Medical Association; repr. Weston, Mass. 1 970. 

nine years Ibid., p. 21. 

627 61 apiece See H. Granville Barker, ed., The Eighteen Seventies, N.Y., 1929; and 
also: (Anon.) Women Novelists of Queen Victorias Reign: a Book of Appreciations, 
L., 1891. 

629 black magic For this annotated edition, see Magich Liber Aba, York Beach, 
Maine, 1997. 

630 Mutual Friend in the character of Eugene Wrayburn. 

631 no existence But a physicist writing in Physics Today questions the assertion. 
See New York Times, Feb. 2, 1999. 

632 Pierce Williams Regrettably, it omits Mendeleef 's Periodic Table. 

J. S. Haldane Not to be confused with his younger relative J.B.S. Haldane. 

634 Darwin's book See Darwin and Modern Science: Essays in Commemoration of. . . The 
50 th Anniversay of the Publication of the Origin of Species, Cambridge, Eng., 1909. 

635 respect David Greene, Introduction to The Authoress of the Odyssey by Samuel 
Butler, Chicago, 1967. 

Notebooks Additional notes were published in Life and Letters, Oct. 1931 . 

636 Surgeon Dr. WW Keen in The Progress of the Century, a Symposium, N.Y., 1901, 
p. 254. 

639 impossibility Berlioz was the first to say so in his program to the Symphonie 



Reference Notes <j^> 823 



Fantastique of 1830. See also "Is Music Unspeakable?" American Scholar, Spring 
1996. 
641 the experience See P. E. Vernon's report, originally published in The Musical 
Times (London), repr. in Pleasures of Music, ed., J. Barzun, N.Y., 1951, Chicago, 
1977. 



Cubist Decade 

644 impressions Louis Leroy in Charivari, Apr. 25, 1 874. 

647 Gone Mad by Camille Mauclair, L., 1 931 ; it is the English translation of a 
series of articles in Le Figaro. 

648 lunatic fringe Roosevelt's review appeared in The Outlook, Mar. 22, 1913. 
H.M. Barzun in "Voix, rythmes, et chants simultanes" in Poeme etDrame, P., 
1913; see also Simultaneisme/ Simultaneita, Quaderni del Novecento Francese 
10, Rome, 1987; and Leon Somville, Les Devanciers de Surrealisme, Geneva, 
1971. 

later years For a collection of such poems, see John Hollander, Types of Shape, 
N.Y., 1979; Emmett Williams, An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, N.Y., 1967, and 
S. McCaffery and B.P Nichol, Sound Poetry, Toronto, 1978. 
Calligrammes P. , 1 9 1 8 . 

650 universally See Daniel Robbins, "From Cubism to Abstract Art," Baltimore 
Museum of Art News, Spring 1962, pp. 9 ff. 

Abolitionism See FT. Marinetti, Les Mots en Liberie, Milan, 1919. 

651 crowd psychology by Gustave Lebon; Gabriel Tarde; Scipio Sighele. Lebon's 
The Crowd was reissued with an introduction by Robert K. Merton, N.Y., 
1960. 

652 in great detail First by Robert and Helen Lynd in Middletown, a study in 
American culture, N.Y., 1929, and again in two other volumes, 1930 and 1937; 
finally in successive volumes under the editorship of Theodore Caplow in the 
1980s. 

653 France 1848-1945 by Theodore Zeldin, Oxford, 1973, 2v; Centuries of 
Childhoodis by Philippe Aries, trans, by Robert Baldick, N.Y., 1965. 

2,500 years On the features and arguments about the new of history see J. 
Barzun, Clio and the Doctors, Chicago, 1974; and Gertrude Himmelfarb, The 
New History and The Old, Cambridge, Mass., 1987. 
of friendship Anne Vincent-Briffault, L'Exercice de I'Amitie, P., 1 995. 
of private life A series of volumes under the editorship of Philippe Aries, P., 
1985-87 and Cambridge, Mass., 1987 ff. 

of envy Helmut Schoeck, Vienna, 1 996 and P., 1 998; see also A History of 
Rudeness by Mark Caldwell, N.Y, 1999. 
literary accounts See Encounter, April 1973. 
657 fohn Casey in the London Sunday Times for Mar. 1, 1994. 

General Linguistics The Course on General Linguistics was publ.: La Salle, 111., 
1986/1994. For a contrasting cultural view, see Roman Jakobson, Essais de 
Linguistique Generate, P., 1963. 



824 <^*> Reference Notes 

a mistake Allen Walker Read in 1 964. 

658 and function For the most thorough application of the principle, see 
Ferdinand Brunot, La Pensee et la Langue, P., 1936. 

in grammar Noted by William Safire in his column "On Language," Mar. 6, 
1988. 

659 in Leipzig The sequence in dates was established by Robert S. Harper in the 
Harvard Alumni Bulletin, 1949, pp. 169 ff. 

660 Private Diary Anonymous; attributed to H.C. Beeching, L., 1898. 

661 out of 900 Henri F. Ellenberg, The Discovery of the Unconscious, N.Y., 1970. 

663 best books Civilisation and Its Discontents (1 930) . 

664 fraudulent See Trevor H. Hall, The Strange Case of Edward Gurney, L., 1964. 
668 and religion For this movement of ideas, see J. Barzun, A Stroll with With 

William James, N.Y., 1983, Chicago, 1986. 

in Politics See W.Y. Elliott, The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics, N.Y, 1 928; Hans 
Joas, Pragmatism and Social Theory, Chicago, 1993; and Louis Menand, "The 
Return of Pragmatism," American Heritage, Oct. 1997. 

668 actual debate See first: The Use of Words in Reasoning, L., 1 901 ; then The Process of 
Argument, L., 1893, and The Progress of Disputes, L., 1910. 

669 be verified See Edwin Leavitt Clarke, The Art of Straight Thinking, N.Y, 1 929, p. 
217*. 

powers See Sigmund Koch and David E. Leary, A Century of Psychology as 
Jfl«i*,N.Y.1985. 

67 1 Berlio^genre See Charles Andler Nietzsche et Sa Pensee, P., 1 920 and Lajeuness 
de Nietzsche, P., 1921, p. 280. 

672 What is Art? See note to p. 1 74. 

677 re-created Sir Frederick Ashton in the New York Times, June 26, 1981; and also 
Anna Kisselgoff, New York Times, July 1, 1981. 
modern dance See Fredrika Blair, Isadora, N.Y, 1986. 

Great Illusion 

683 banquet years See book of that title by Roger Shattuck, N.Y, 1 955/58. See 
also Sisley Huddleston, Paris Salons, Cafes, Studios, Phila., 1928. 

684 Matthews The Sugar Pill: an Essay on Newspapers, N.Y, 1959. For a partisan but 
equally skeptical view, see Hilaire Belloc, The Free Press, L., 1918. 

691 German general Friedrich von Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War, N.Y, 

1914(1912). 
695 Servile State By Hilaire Belloc, L., 1 927/1 948. 

The Nihilists The place and date of the events are given as Moscow, 1 800, 

but they would still be plausible in 1900. 

697 National Socialism See Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, Berkeley, 
Cal.,1961. 

698 a social science See George R. and Christiane C. Collins, Camillo Sitte and the 
Birth of Modern City Planning, N.Y, 1965. 



Reference Notes q*& 825 

John Lukacs See also Mary Gluck, "Endre Ady: an East European Response 
to the Cultural Crisis of the "Fin de Siecle," Columbia University 
Dissertation, 1977; and Carl E. Schorske, Fin de Siecle Vienna: Politics and 
Culture,!,., 1979. 
708 notable convert Doyle's interest antedated the war and was in his eyes 

compatible with the scientific attitude. See Owen Dudley Edwards, The Quest 
for Sherlock Holmes, Edingurgh, 1983. 

Artist Prophet and Jester 

714 era since 1500 Several recent works on the meaning of modern Modernism are 
worth attention, notably Robert Ctxxndcn, American Salons: Encounters with 
European Modernism, N.Y., 1992, and his anthology The Superfluous Men, Austin, 
Texas, 1977; Christopher Faille, These Last Four Centuries, N.Y., 1988; William R. 
Everdell, The First Moderns, Chicago, 1997; and Noel Annan, Our Age, NY, 
1990. 

in the 40s In his Memoires d' Outre-torn be, publ. 1 849 but completed by 1 843. 

715 interior monologue The novella is Edouard Dajardin's We'll to the Woods No 
More; in the original French, 1 887-88; in English translation by Stuart Gilbert, 
NY, 1938. Joyce read the book in 1901. 

716 made the survey Charles Scribner, Jr. "Scientific Imagery in Proust," Proceedings 
of the American Philosphical Society, v. 134, no. 3, 1990. 

718 Hemingway in DerQuerschnitt, Feb A925. 

719 musical works See Otto Luening on the group in his autobiography, The 
Odyssey of an American Composer, N.Y, 1980. 

Freedom For Words Les Mots en libertefuturistes, Milan, 1919. See also Marjorie 
Perloff, The Futurist Moment, Chicago, 1986; and Leon Somville, Les Devanciers 
du Surrealisme, Geneva, 1971. 
723 tomato soup by the late Andy Warhol. 

726 Normandie unconscionably scuttled in New York harbor at the beginning of 
the second world war. 

727 Mechanical Stimulus in Music Ho!, L., 1934, p. 239. 

728 new laws Antoine Golea in Musical Quarterly, Jan. 1 965. 

729 and Lulu unfinished but performable and filmed. 

730 experimental Blake used it once, without echo for over a century. 

731 Without Spectacles See Nigel Wilkins, ed., The Writings of Erik Satie, L., 1980. 

733 in France Baron Seilliere made it the subject of several works, see also Hugo 
Friedrich, Das Anti-romantische Denken in Modernen Frankreich, Munich, 1935. 
and politics The American poet John Crowe Ransom declared that he was in 
manners aristocratic, in art traditional, and in religion ritualistic. 

734 homosexual love Notably in Gide's Cory don (1 920) and Radclyff Hall's Well of 
Loneliness (1 928) . 

735 their stupidity See A Writer's Notebook, L., 1949. 

736 Caran dAche pseudonym of Emanuel Poire, which he made up by turning 
the Russian word for pencil 'into a French-sounding name. 



826 <^> Reference Notes 

the clerihew created in his Biography for Beginners, L., 1905. His Clerihews 
Complete , L., 1951. 

W.H. Auden See his Academic Graffiti (which includes the earlier collection in 
Homage to Clio), N.Y., 1971; and The Clerihews of Paul Horgan, Middletown, 
Conn., 1984, which has a technical description in verse. 

738 Carmina Burana See p. 229. 

739 Greek tragedy The demonstration is given in Dorothy Sayers' essay, "Aristotle 
on Detective Fiction," Unpopular Opinions, N.Y., 1947, pp. 222 ff. 

as lowbrow notably Edmund Wilson and Robert Graves. Wilson recanted 
after reading Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles. 

740 a shooting William Leggett, "The Rifle," in Sketches by a Country Schoolmaster, 
N.Y., 1829, reprinted in Mary Russell Mitford, ed., Stories of American Life, L., 
1830. Beaumarchais, Gaitefaite a Londres, trans, in J. Barzun, ed., The Delights of 
Detection,N.Y., 1961. 

Edgar Poe as he was known to his contemporaries and in Europe to this day. 

The form Edgar Allan Poe was imposed by his posthumous editors. 

found a master See note to p. 708 above for a study of Doyle's work in the genre. 

741 corruption See George Dilnot, The Trial of the Detectives, L., 1928. 

742 detective tale in the Introduction to The Omnibus of Crime, N.Y., 1929. 

The Absurd 

746 victors See Klaus Schwabe, Woodrow Wilson, Revolutionary Germany, and Peace- 
Making: 1918-1919, Chapel Hill, 1985. 

750 magnetic field Whitehead's formulation in Science and the Modern World [Boston] 
1925, N.Y., 1954, p. 191. See also "features of a conceptual scheme" 
(Polykarp Kusch), and such discussions as Bernard d'Espagnat, "The 
Quantum Theory and Reality," Scientific American, Nov. 1979, pp. 158 ff.; and 
Murray Gell-Mann, "Is the World Really Made of Quarks, Leptons, and 
Bosons?" Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, April 1976. 

754 /. Barzun Crown Publishers, N.Y, 1951. 
756 Knots Pantheon Books, N.Y, 1970, p. 30. 

751 Canada Interview in the Toronto Star, May 20, 1995. 

760 got rid of See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, N.Y, 1 963. 

765 physical means The vice chancellor was Sir Eric Ashby See his book, written with 

Mary Anderson, The Rise of the Student Estate in Britain, Cambridge, Mass., 1970. 

one man in Europe Daniel Cohen-Bendit. 
770 also available For a Russian commentary, see Vasily Rosanov, Dostoevski and the 

Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, trans, by Spencer E. Roberts, Ithaca, NY, 1972. 

Demotic Life and Times 

775 Makes a Nation? See New York Times, Dec. 5, 1992, and article by Sophie 
Gerhardi on the "cracks" in the nations of Europe, Le Monde, May 16, 1996. 

776 "human nature" Its cultural diversity is so great that its unity seems hardly 



Reference Notes ^ 827 

more than physical. See Laura Bohannan's case study, "Miching Mallecho, 
From the Third Program, ed., John Morris, L., 1956. 
in one year Reported in Texas for 1998. 
777 too many of both Hence Sartre's "Hell is other people," which was anticipated 
by Oscar Wilde in An Ideal Husband, Act III, where Lord Goring says "Other 
people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself." 

786 LordLeighton in Mrs. Russell Barrington, The Life, Letters, and Work of Frederic 
Leighton, N.Y., 1906, 2v, v.I, p. 18. 

787 for being well-known The phrase is that of Daniel Boorstin, famed historian 
and former Director of the Library of Congress. 

789 public attention An early study of American iconography shows how, from 
comics to pinups, the eye is given the pleasure of unreality: Geoffrey Wagner, 
Parade of Pleasure, N.Y., 1955. 

the incitement Possibly a hoax, notice came in the mail in 1 999 of a 
symposium on "The New Sexual Frontier: Safe Sex With Your Pets; the 
Courage to Break Through the Human-Animal Frontier." College and school 
students were urged to send in "topics" and to attend. 
"sexual harassment" a misnomer when applied to one or a few incidents. 
even staring "If you become aware that someone is staring at you, do not 
tolerate his behavior . . . talk to the police." Posted in the library of a leading 
midwestern university (1995). 

790 between them For other critical predicaments, see Arthur Danto, After the End 
<?/.4tf,N.Y.,1987. 

incandescent See "The Last Pages of Sexus" in The New Olympia No. 3, 1962, 
pp. 44 ff. 

791 sordidness See Fernanda Pivano, Cera una volta un beat, Rome, 1 976; and 
Album Americano, Milan, 1997. See also Henri Raczymon, De l'ordure en 
litterature," Le Monde, Oct. 3, 1998. 

793 as they arose See Liliane Lur^at, L'Echec et le desinteret scolaire (P., 1 976) and Le 
Temps prisonnier, P., 1995; and the frequent articles of Max Beloff in the British 
press. 

794 by the millions See Richard D. Mandell, Sport a Cultural History, N.Y., 1 984; 
and E.E. Snyder and E.A. Spreitzer, Social Aspects of Sports, 2nd ed., Englewood 
Cliffs, N.J., 1983. 

795 from Shakespeare 2 Henry VI, iv, 2. Jack Cade and other rebels want "all in 
common" and "no money," which requires that not only lawyers should be 
killed, but anyone who can read and write. 

James B. Reston Obituary in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 

for June 1998. 

discussion groups Notably the Media Studies Forum, seconded by the Columbia 
Journalism Review. 

796 to others In different ways the classic principles of librarianship were 
frequendy flouted. For those principles, see William E. Henry, Upon Libraries 
and Librarianship, Freeport, N.Y, 1931/1967. 

criticism These critics were respectively: Celia Greene (1976); George Perec 
(1991); and Susan Haack (1999). 



828 ^ Reference Notes 

798 and Leo Stein To sample their contributions, see the JJ. Chapman anthology, 
Unbought Spirit, ed., Richard Stone (Urbana, 111., 1998); Albert J. Nock, The State 
of the Union, Essays in Social Criticism, ed., Charles H. Hamilton, Indianapolis, 
1991; and Leo Stein, Appreciations: Painting, Poetry and Prose, NY, 1947. 
in many See Victor Bugliosi, Outrage, NY, 1996, pp. 32-36. 
without tremor For a comparative judgment, see Joseph R. Strayer, "The 
Fourth and The Fourteenth Centuries," Presidential Address at the American 
Historical Association meeting, 1971; publ. American Historical Review, v.77, 
no. 1,1972. 



Index of Persons 



NOTE. Numbers in boldface type indicate the pages of the main treatment and of substantial 
additions to it. Cross references to the names will be found in the Index of Subjects beginning on page 
853. For turning the entire book into type several times and finally on to disk, I am indebted to the 
skill, accuracy, and intelligence ofTreva Kelly. 



Abelard, (Petrus Abaelardus) (1079-1142), 472, 

476 
Abetz, Otto (1903-1958), 748 
Ackermann, Konrad Ernst (1710-1771), 479 
Acton, John, Lord (1834-1902), 536, 537; 

quoted: 568, 652 
Adam, Robert (1728-1792), 460 
Adams, Henry (1838-1918), x, 40, 591, 636, 

768, quoted: 600, 632 
Adams, John (1735-1826), 258 
Adams, Samuel (1722-1803), 278 
Addison, Joseph (1672-1719), 310, 326; 

quoted: 328 
Adler, Alfred, (1870-1937), 661, 662 
Agate, James (1877-1947), 753 ff. quoted: 

753-54 
Agricola, Johannes (1494P-1566), 32 
Agrippa, Cornelius (1486P-1535), 87 
Agubard (9C), quoted: 225 
Alarcon, Hernando de (1466-1540), 94 
Albert, Prince Consort of Queen Victoria 

(1819-1861), 555 
Alberti, Leo Battista (1404-1472), 78, 79; 

quoted: 70 
Alcott, Amos Bronson, (1799-1888), 505 
Aldington, Richard (1892-1962), 232, 813 
Aldus, Manutius, (the Elder) (1449-1515), 174 
Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.), 163, 231 
Alexander I of Russia (1777-1825), 465 
Alexander VI (1431 ?-l 503), 64 
Allbutt, Sir Thomas (1836-1925), 575, 599 



Allen, Grant (1848-1899), 625 
Allingham, Margery (1904-1966), 739 
Alva, Duke of (1508-1582), 85 
Ampere, Andre Marie (1775-1836), 544 
Anderson, Maxwell (1888-1959), 736 
Andreyev, Leonid (1871-1919), 697-9 
Andros, Edmund (1637-1714), 316 
Angell, Sir Norman (1874-1967), 668, 705-6 
Anna Amalia, duchess of Saxe -Weimar 

(1739-1807), 394 ff. 
Anne, Queen of England (1665-1714), 330 
Antheil, George (1900-1959), 727, 738 
Apollinaire, GuiUaume (1880-1918), 647, 648, 

701,719,721 
Aquinas, Thomas (1225-1274), 32, 59, 258 
Aranda, Conde de (1718-1799), 381 
Arbuthnot, John (1667-1735), 309-328 
Archimedes (287P-212 B.C.), quoted: 609 
Archipenko, Aleksandr (1887-1964), 647 
Aretino, Pietro (1492-1556), 79, 81 
Argand, Aime (1755-1803), 421 
Argyropoulos, Johannes (1416?— 1436), 58 
Ariosto, Lodovico (1474-1533), 47, 53, 81, 

146, 147, 152, 155, 161, 174 
Aristophanes (448?-?380 B.C.), 685 
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), 45, 55-6, 58-9, 72, 

141, 146, 152, 165, 191, 222, 226, 268, 282 
Arkwright, Sir Richard (1732-1792), 375 
Arminius, Jacobus (1560-1609), 33 
Arnauld, Antoine (1612-1694), 296 
Arnauld, Angelique (1591-1661), 296 



830 <^> Index 



Arne, Thomas (1710-1778), 406, 407 
Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888), 573; quoted: 

573, 574 
Arnold, Thomas (1795-1842), 573 
Arp, Jean (1887-1966), 722 
Artaud, Antonin (1896-1948), 756 
Arthur, King of Britons (?6C), 226, 231 
Attila, King of Huns (d.453), 690 
Auber, Daniel (1782-1871), 499 
Auden, Wysten Hugh (1907-1973), 392 
Audubon, John James (1785-1851), 478 
Aulard, Francis (1849-1928), 701 
Aumer,Jean(fl. 19C),515 
Auric, Georges (1899-1983), 738 
Austen, Jane (1775-1817), 410 
Averroes (Ibn Rushd) (1126-1198), 5 

Babbitt, Irving (1865-1933), 732 

Babbitt, Milton, 730 

Babeuf, Francois (1760-1797), 428, 523 

Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel (1714-1788), 388, 

407 
Bachjohann Sebastian (1685-1750), 342, 347, 

388-9, 395, 406, 467, 639-40 
Bacon, Francis (1561-1626), 80, 117, 118, 191, 

198, 203-4, 207, 258, 377, 799; quoted: 119, 

120, 204 
Bacon, Nathaniel (1647-1676), 316 
Bacon, Roger (1220-1292), 229, 274 
Bagehot, Walter (1826-1877), 137, 535, 581-2, 

626, 685; quoted: 582 
Baillot, Pierre Marie (1771-1842), 500 
Baker, Josephine (1906-1975), 737-8 
Bakst, Leon (1866P-1924), 677 
Bakunin, Michael (1814-1876), xiv, 556 
Balboa, Vasco Nunez de (1475-1517), 98 
Balieff, Nikita (1877-1936), 735 
Balzac, Honore de (1799-1850), 86, 132, 449, 

454, 480, 482, 492, 513, 515, 560, 624, 646, 

716, 725; quoted: 129, 561, 644 
Bancroft, George (1800-1891), 505, 568 
Barlow, Joel (1754-1812), 406 
Baronius, Caesar, Cardinal (1538-1607), 38 
Barres, Maurice (1862-1923), 674 
Barry, Philip (1896-1949), 735 
Bartholomaeus, Anglicus (fl.l3C), 231 
Barton, Clara (1821-1912), 477 
Barye, Antoine Louis (1795-1875), 478 
Barzun, Henri Martin (1881-1972), 648, 719 
Bastiat, Frederic (1801-1850), 524 
Bateson, William (1861-1926), 632 
Baudelaire, Charles (1821-1867), 559, 562, 576, 

621,770 
Baudouin, Francois (1520-1573), 247 



Baumgarten, Alexander (1714-1762), 416 
Baxter, Richard (1615-1691), 37 
Bayard, Chevalier de (c. 147 5-1 524), 94 
Bayle, Pierre (1647-1706), 181, 295, 314, 362, 

370; quoted: 360 
Beardsley, Aubrey (1872-1898), 626 
Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Caron de 

(1732-1799), 81, 294, 395, 399-404, 424, 

740; quoted: 399, 403, 414 
Beaumont, Archbishop Christophe de 

(1703-1781), quoted: 368 
Beaumont, Sir George (1753-1827), 478 
Beaumont, Gustave de (1802-1866), 538 
Beauvoir, Simone de (1908-1986), 757 
Beckett, Samuel (1906-1989), 756 
Becque, Henry (1837-1899), 565 
Becquerel, Henri (1852-1908), 631 
Beddoes, Dr. Thomas (1760-1808), 437-39, 

609, 662; quoted: 438 
Beerbohm, Max (1872-1956), 735, 736 
Beeton, Mrs. (Isabella Mary Mayson) 

(1836-1865), 553 
Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770-1827), 447, 461, 

495, 496, 501, 547, 558, 640, 677, 678, 717; 

quoted: 484 
Behn, Aphra (1640-1689), 326, 356 
Behrens, Peter (1868-1940), 648 
Behrman, Samuel (1893-1973), 736 
Bell, Clive (1881-1964), 622, 646 
Bellamy, Edward (1850-1898), 593 
Bellini, Vincenzo (1801-1835), 498, 499 
Belloc, Hilaire (1870-1953), 683, 684, 695 
Benchley, Robert (1889-1945), 735; quoted: 

169 
Bendajulien (1867-1956), 732, 733 
Benedict XV (1854-1922), 701 
Bennett, Arnold (1867-1931), 624-5, 674, 707, 

733 
Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832), 422, 477, 573 
Bendey, E.C. (1875-1956), 737 
Bendey, Eric, 675, 813 
Bendey, Richard (1662-1742), 362, 407 
Berg, Alban (1885-1935), 701, 729 
Bergson, Henri (1859-1941), 663, 707, 732; 

quoted: 667, 668 
Beriot, Charles Auguste de (1802-1870), 500 
Berkeley, Bp. George (1685-1753), 366, 367, 

374, 660; quoted: 397 
Berlichingen, Goetz von (1481-1562), 14 
Berlin, Sir Isaiah (1909-1992), 440 
Berlioz, Hector (1803-1869), 149, 176, 461, 

472, 484, 492, 494-7, 499, 500, 514, 547, 

549, 558, 575, 640, 671, 678, 822; quoted: 

495, 496 



Index <^> 831 



Bernard, Claude (1813-1899), 635 
Bernhardt, Sarah (1844-1923), 675 
Berni, Francesco (1497-1536), 165 
Bernini, Giovanni (1598-1680), 66, 209, 336, 

339,341,342,347 
Bernoulli (family) (18C), 377 
Besant, Annie (1847-1933), 664 
Berthollet, Claude (1748-1822), 445 
Beverly, Robert (c. 1673-1 722), 317 
Bichat, Marie Francois Xavier (1771-1802), 

437 
Bierce, Ambrose (1842-1914), 591, 597, 604 
Birrell, Augustine (1850-1933), xviii 
Bismarck, Otto von (1815-1898), xii, 587, 671, 

688, 690, 696, 706 
Bizet, Georges (1838-1875), 638 
Bjornson, Bjornsterne (1832-1910), 565, 566 
Blackwood, Algernon (1869-1951), 737 
Blake, Robert (1599-1657), 276, 314 
Blake, William, (1757-1827), 460, 567; quoted: 

462, 470, 478, 479 
Blanc, Louis (181 1-1882), 548 
Blanche of Castille (1188-1252), 232 
Blanqui, Auguste (1805-1881), 428, quoted: 556 
Blavatsky, Helena (1831-1891), 664 
Bleriot, Louis (1872-1936), 628 
Bligh, Captain William (1754-1817), 420 
Bloch, Iwan (1872-1922), 626 
Blunt, Wilfred Scawen (1840-1922), quoted: 

628 
Bly, Nellie, (Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman), 

1867-1922) 599 
Boas, Franz (1858-1942), 654 
Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313-1375), 44, 53, 86, 

145 
Bodin, Jean (1520-1596), 107, 245, 258, 362; 

quoted: 246 
Boehme, Jakob (1575-1624), 33, 298 
Boerhaave, Herman (1668-1738), 197 
Boiardo, Matteo Maria (1440 or 41-1494), 147, 

148, 165 
Boieldieu, Francois Adrien (1775-1834), 461 
Boileau, Nicholas Despreaux (1636-1711), 345 
Boisgilbert, Sieur de (1646-1714), 381 
Bolingbroke, Henry St. John (1678-1715), 309 
Bolt, Robert, 118 
Bonaparte, Napoleon (1769-1821), 84, 251, 

442 ff, 425, 446-7, 450, 465, 472, 480, 521; 

see also Napoleon I 
Bonaparte, Caroline (1782-1839), 460, 485-6 
Bonington, Richard Parkes (1801P-1828), 478 
Bononcini, Giovanni (1672-C.1752), 327, 388 
Boothe, Clare (Luce) (1903-1987), 736 
Bopp, Franz (1791-1867), 504 



Bora, Katherina von (1499-1552), 16-7 
Borden, Lizzie (1860-1927), 611 
Borel, Petrus (1809-1859), 480 
Borges, Jorge Luis (1899-1986), 739 
Borodin, Aleksandr Porfiryevich (1833-1887), 

678 
Borromini, Francesco (1599-1667), 336 
Boscan Almogaver, Juan (1493P-1542), 110 
Bosch, Hieronymus (1450P-1516), 160 
Bossuet, Jacques Benigne (1627-1704), 291, 

298, 300, 355, 813; quoted: 249 
Boswell, James (1740-1795), 16, 372, 411, 412 
Boucher, Francois (1703-1770), 391 
Bougainville, Louis Antoine de (1729-1811), 

374, 376 
Bouhours, Pere Dominique (1628-1702), 

quoted: 355 
Bouilly, Jean Nicolas (1763-1842), 447 
Boulainvilliers, Henri de (1658-1722), 295 
Boulez, Pierre, quoted: 728 
Boulton, Matthew (1728-1809), 205 
Bourges, Michel de (fl. 19C), 523 
Bourget, Paul (1852-1935), 674 
Bowdler, Thomas (1754-1825), 516, 517 
Boyle, Robert (1627-1691), 207, 210, 211 
Boylston, Zabdiel (1679-1766), 329 
Bradford, Gamaliel (1863-1932), 737 
Bradford, John (1510P-1555), 12; quoted: 13 
Bradtreet, Anne (c.1612-1672), 318, 406 
Brady, Mathew (1823-1896), 586 
Brahe, Tycho (1546-1601), 192, 204 
Brahms, Johannes (1833-1897), 547, 558 
Bramante, Donato (c. 1444-1 5 14), 64, 66 
Brancusi, Constantin (1876-1957), 647, 649 
Brandes, Georg (1842-1927), 669 
Braque, Georges (1882-1963), 647, 650 
Braudel, Fernand (1902-1985), 652-3 
BrayJ.F (fl. 19C), 527 
Brecht, Bertholt (1898-1956), 328 
Brentano, Clemens (1778-1842), 565 
Breton, Andre (1896-1966), quoted: 720 
Breuer, Josef (1842-1925), 661 
Brieux, Eugene (1858-1932), 616, 625 
Briggs, Le Baron Russell (1855-1934), 821; 

quoted: 45 
Brillat-Savarin, Anthelme (1775-1826), 453 
Brisbane, Albert (1809-1890), 524 
Britten, Benjamin (1913-1976), 176 
Britton, Thomas (1654P-1714), 311 
Broadwood, Henry (1811-1893), 546 
Broca, Paul (1824-1880), 578 
Brockhaus, Hermann (1806-1877), 504 
Bronte, Anne (1820-1849), 563 
Bronte, Charlotte (1816-1855), 563 



832 <^> Index 



Bronte, Emily (1818-1848), 485, 563, 627 
Brooke, Rupert (1887-1915), 701; quoted: 708 
Broughton, Rhoda (1840-1920), 627 
Brown, George Douglas (1869-1902), 624-5 
Brown, Norman O., 756 
Browne, Sir Thomas (1605-1682), 198, 212, 

213,222,354 
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861), 574 
Browning, Robert (1812-1889), 562, 574, 575, 

715 
Brownson, Orestes (1803-1876), 505 
Bruckner, Anton (1824-1896), 547 
Brummel, George Bryan (1778-1840), 498 
Bruneau, Alfred (1857-1934), 638 
Brunei, Isambard Kingdom (1806-1859), 543 
Bruno, Giordano (1548P-1600), 194, 194-5, 

196,212 
Brutus, Marcus Junius (85?^2 B.C.), 51 
Bryan, William Jennings (1860-1925), 593 
Bucer, Martin (1491-1551), 28, 32 
Buchman, Frank (1878-1961), 749 
Biichner, Georg (1813-1837), 515 
Buchner, Ludwig (1824-1899), quoted: 570 
Buckingham, George Villiers, duke of 

(1591-1628), 335 
Bude, Guillaume (1468-1540), 113, 245 
Buffon, Georges Leclerc, Comte de 

(1707-1788), 374, 376, 450, 455 
Bullett, Gerald (1893-1958), quoted: 719 
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward (1831-1891), 498 
Bunyan, John (1628-1688), 275, 785; quoted: 

357, 358 
Buonarotti, Phillippe (1761-1837), 428, 523 
Burbank, Luther (1849-1926), 636 
Burckhardt, Jacob Christopher (1818-1897), 

48, 242; quoted: 21, 42, 254 
Burgess, John W. (1844-1931), 605-6 
Burke, Edmund (1729-1797), 117, 385, 416-7, 

431, 458, 469, 511, 520, 521; quoted: 398, 

417 
Burne-Jones, Edward (1833-1898), 567 
Burney, Charles (1726-1814), 410 
Burney, Fanny (1752-1840), 410, 415 
Burnouf, Eugene (1801-1852), 504 
Burns, Robert (1759-1796), 431, 473 
Burton, Robert (1577-1640), 221-4; quoted: 

137 
Busoni, Ferruccio (1866-1924), 678 
Buder, Nicholas Murray (1862-1947), 607, 746 
Buder, Samuel (1612-1680), 271; quoted: 358 
Buder, Samuel (1835-1902), 553, 576, 615, 

633-5; 686, 743; quoted: 220, 615-6, 634, 

635 
Byrd, William (1543-1623), 161 



Byrd, William (1674-1744), 318 
Byrom, John (1692-1763), quoted: 328 
Byron, George Gordon, Lord (1788-1824), 35, 
146, 165, 417, 460, 479, 480, 484, 485-6, 
493, 504, 514, 515, 517, 531, 551, 556, 577, 
612, 640, 715, 791; quoted: 149, 170, 471, 
486, 500 

Cabanis, Dr. Georges (1757-1808), 452 
Caccini, Giulio (1558/60-1615), quoted: 159 
Caesar, Gaius Julius (100-44 B.C.), 51, 274, 

378, 483, 503 
Cage, John, 727 

Cagliostro, Count (1743-1795), 421 
Caillaux, Henriette (1874-1943), 696, 697 
Caillaux, Joseph (1863-1944), 696, 697 
Calasjean (1698-1762), 372 
Calderon de la Barca, Pedro (1600-1681), 334, 

340 
Calisher, Hortense, quoted: 789 
Calmette, Gaston (1858-1914), 697 
Calvin, John (1509-1564), 17, 19, 31-2, 34-7, 

43, 86, 113, 129, 195; quoted: 18, 29, 35, 36 
Calzabigi, Ranieri (1714-1795), 416 
Camoens, Luz Vaz de (1524-1580), 109, 153-5 
Campanella, Tommaso (1568-1639), 117; 

quoted: 120, 121 
Campion, Thomas (1567-1620), 160 
Camus, Albert (1913-1960), 756 
Canaletto (Antonio Canale) (1720-1780), 420 
Canova, Antonio (1757-1822), 460 
Caran D'Ache, (Emmanuel Poire) 

(1858-1909), 736 
Caravaggio, Polidoro Caldera da (c. 1496-1 543), 

334 
Cardan, Jerome (1501-1576), 197 
Carducci, Giosue (1835-1907), 559 
Careme, Marie- Antoine (1784-1833), 454 
Carlstadt, Andreas (1480P-1541), 33 
Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881), 430, 479, 482, 

504, 526, 554; quoted: 516, 526, 527 
Carnegie, Andrew (1835-1919), 280, 595, 607; 

quoted: 596 
Carnot, Hippolyte (1801-1888), 435 
Carnot, Lazare (1753-1823), 434-5; quoted: 

435 
Carnot, Sadi (1837-1894), 434, 435, 695 
Carpenter, Edward (1872-1950), 625, 628, 636, 

699 
Carter, Elliott, 730 
Cartouche (Louis-Dominique Bourguignon), 

(1693-1721), 308, 309 
Casanova, Jacques (1725-1798), 170, 372, 448 
Cassatt, Mary (1844-1926), 644 



Index <^> 833 



Cassini, Jean Dominique (1625-1712), 338 
Castel, Father Louis (1688-1757), 389 
Castellio, Sebastianus (1515-1563), 32 
Castelvetro, Lodovico (1505-1571), quoted: 

166 
Castiglione, Conte Baldassare (1478-1529), 78, 

79,84,123,126,131,156 
Castro, Ifies de (1320P-1355), 154 
Catherine of Aragon (1485-1536), 9 
Catherine II of Russia (1729-1796), 372-3, 381 
Cavaille-Coll, Aristide (181 1-1899), 546; 

quoted: 547 
Cavell, Edith Louisa (1865-1915), 709 
Cavendish, Henry (1731-1810), 377 
Cellini, Benvenuto (1500-1571), 75-6, 112; 

quoted: 66, 76 
Centlivre, Susannah (1667-1723), 326, 406 
Cervantes, Miguel de (1 547-1 61 6), 111,113; 

quoted: 166 
Cezanne, Paul (1839-1906), 645, 646, 647, 649; 

quoted: 645 
Chabrier, Alexis (1841-1894), 176, 678 
Chambers, Robert (1802-1871), 502 
Chamfort, Sebastien (1741-1794), quoted: 452 
Champ fleury (Jules Fleury-Husson), 

(1821-1889), 557 
Champollionjean Francois (1790-1832), 446 
Chandler, Raymond (1888-1959), 741 
Chaplin, Charlie (1 889-1 977), 737 
Chapman, John Jay (1862-1933), 798, 827 
Charcot, Jean Martin (1825-1893), 628-9 
Chardin, Jean (1699-1779), 391 
Charlemagne (742-814), 40, 47, 93, 97, 147, 

152,225,231,252,295 
Charles I of England (1600-1649), 189, 240, 

263-4, 265, 268, 275, 335 
Charles II of England (1630-1685), 210, 263, 

271, 277, 309, 316, 347, 355, 358 
Charles IX of France (1550-1574), 150 
Charles X of France (1757-1836), 492, 493 
Charles XII of Poland (1682-1718), 379, 815 
Charles V of Spain (1500-1558), 9, 12, 34, 86, 

92-8, 96-7, 100, 1 10, 147, 209, 303, 307; 

quoted: 14, 93 
Charpentier, Gustave (1860-1956), 638 
Chateaubriand, Rene de (1768-1848), 450, 471, 

480, 504, 714; quoted: 472 
Chatelet, Marquise du (1706-1749), 378 
Chatterton, Thomas (1752-1770), 409 
Chaucer, Geoffrey (1340-1400), 164, 232, 480, 

715 
Chekhov, Anton (1860-1904), 673, 675, 734, 

737; quoted: 792 
Chenier, Andre (1762-1794), 429, 447 



Cherubini, Maria Luigi (1760-1842), 461, 678 
Chesterfield, 4th Earl of (1694-1773), 364, 412 
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith (1874-1936), 683, 

684, 695; quoted: 685 
Chevreul, Michel Eugene (1786-1889), 644 
Chopin, Frederic (1810-1849), 492, 499, 500, 

639 
Christie, Agatha (1890-1976), 739, 740 
Christina of Sweden (1626-1689), 186, 189, 

207-10, 240; quoted: 209 
Christine de Pisan (1363P-1431), 232-3 
Church, Frederick (1826-1900), 604 
Churchill, John, (Duke of Marlborough) 

(1650-1722), 244, 302 
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965), 244, 436, 695; 

quoted: 759 
Cibber, Colley (1671-1757), 326, 406 
Cicero, Marcus Tullius (106-43 B.C.), 44-5, 46, 

49,57,142,235 
Cimabue, (Bencivieni di Pepo) (1251P-1302), 

69 
Cimarosa, Domenico (1749-1801), 498 
Claudel, Paul (1868-1955), 701 
Clemenceau, Georges (1841-1929), quoted: 

630 
Clement VII (1478-1534), 76 
Clement XIII (1693-1769), quoted: 369 
Clerk-Maxwell, James (1831-1879), 631 
Cleveland, Grover (1837-1908), 636; quoted: 

242 
ClovisI(466?-511),252,776 
Cocteaujean (1889-1963), 733, 738 
Coehoorn, Baron Menno van (1641-1704), 

313 
Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 826 
Coke, Sir Edward (1552-1634), 266 
Colbert, Jean Baptiste (1619-1683), 292 ff., 

302, 304, 309, 338 
Cole, Thomas (1801-1848), 604 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834), 227, 

254, 258, 367, 430, 431, 437, 439, 462, 466, 

469, 473, 504, 509, 510, 515, 516, 618, 732; 

quoted: 27, 142, 194,273 
Collins, Mortimer (1827-1876), quoted: 571 
Collins, William (1721-1759), 409 
Collodi, Carlo (1826-1890), 599 
Colonna (family) (14C-16C), 49 
Colonna, Vittoria (1492P-1547), 56 
Columbus, Christopher (1446P-1506), 98-101, 

102, 104, 123, 169, 339; quoted: 108 
Comenius, John Amos (1592-1670), 120, 

180-2; quoted: 181 
Commines, Philippe de (1447P-P151 1), 235 
Comstock, Anthony (1844-1915), 592 



834 <^*> Index 



Comte, Auguste (1798-1857), 509, 510, 515, 

571 
Conde, Prince Louis de (1621-1686), 352 
Condor cet, Jean Antoine Nicholas de 

(1743-1794), 371 
Congreve, William (1670-1729), 339, 356, 357, 

415 
Conrad, Joseph (1857-1924), 674, 733; quoted: 

791 
Constable de Bourbon (1490-1527), 94 
Constable, John (1776-1837), 469, 477 
Constant, Benjamin (1767-1830), 450-1, 512 
Constantine I, Roman Emperor (280-337), 47, 

54 
Contarini, Cardinal Gasparo (1483-1542), 14 
Cook, Captain James (1728-1779), 376 
Cook, Thomas (1808-1892), 583 
Cooley, C.H. (1864-1929), 651 
Cooper, James Fenimore (1789-1851), 526 
Cooper, Jane (£1. 16C), 302 
Cooper, Peter (1791-1883), 607 
Copernicus, Nicolaus (1473-1543), 59, 192, 

192-3,194,207,230 
Copley, John Singleton (1738-1815), 405 
Corday, Charlotte (1768-1793), 429 
Corelli, Arcangelo (1653-1713), 210 
Corneille, Pierre (1606-1684), 342, 344, 378 
Cornell, Ezra (1807-1874), 606 
Corot, Jean Baptiste (1796-1875), 566, 644 
Cortez, Hernan (1485-1547), 98, 100, 102 
Cotolendi, Charles (?-ca 1710), 348 
Coulomb, Charles de (1736-1806), 375 
Courbet, Gustave (1819-1877), 566; quoted: 

557, 566 
Coverdale, Miles (1488P-1569), 354 
Coward, Noel (1899-1973), 735 
Cowell, Henry (1897-1965), 730 
Cowley, Abraham (1618-1667), quoted: 180 
Cowper, William (1731-1800), 409 
Coxey, Jacob (1854-1951), 593-4 
Coysevox, Antoine (1640-1720), 337 
Craft, Robert, 497 
Craig, Gordon (1872-1966), 675 
Cranach, Lucas (1472-1553), 4 
Crane, Stephen (1871-1900), 679 
Cranmer, Thomas (1489-1556), 354 
Creevey, Thomas (1763-1838), quoted: 542 
Cremin, Lawrence (1925-1990), 793 
Crevecoeur, Jean Hector St John de 

(1735-1813), 815 
Cristofori, Bartolommeo (1655-1731), 389 
Croce, Benedetto (1866-1952), 668 
Croft-Cooke, Rupert (1903-1979), 93 
Crompton, Samuel (1753-1827), 375 



Cromwell, Oliver (1599-1658), 209, 261, 262, 
264, 268, 269, 270, 274-7, 278, 309, 358, 
398, 526; quoted: 134, 275, 276, 277 

Cromwell, Richard (1626-1712), 274 

Crowley, Aleister (1875-1947), 629 

Cugnot, Nicholas-Joseph (1725-1804), 421 

Cullen, William (1710-1790), 405 

Cumberland, Richard (1732-1811), 415 

Cundum, Colonel of the Guards (£1. 17C), 330 

Curie, Marie (1867-1934), 631 

Curie, Pierre (1859-1906), 631 

Cuvier, Georges (1769-1832), 501 

Dacier, Anne (1654-1720), 348 
Daguerre, Louis Jacques (1789-1851), 586 
Dalcroze, see Jaques-Dalcroze 
d'Alembert, Jean Le Rond (1717P-1783), 369, 

371,377 
Dali, Salvador (1904-1989), 723 
Dalzell, Judge Stewart, quoted: 797 
Damien, Father de Veuster (1840-1889), 477 
Dana, Charles Anderson (1819-1897), 524 
D'Annunzio, Gabriele (1863-1938), 676 
Dante, Alighieri (1265-1321), 51,93, 113, 147, 

157, 164, 167, 233, 303, 526, 567, 743 
Danton, George Jacques (1759-1794), 429, 521 
Da Ponte, Lorenzo (1749-1838), 81, 416 
D'Artagnan (1611-1673), 177 
Darwin, Charles (1809-1882), 193, 501, 502, 

503, 568 ff., 570-2, 577, 632, 633, 637; 

quoted: 455 
Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802), 456, 634; 

quoted: 455 
Daubenton, Louis Jean Marie (1716?— 1800), 

371,376 
Daumier, Honore (1808-1879), 543, 548, 566 
David, King (d.ca.973 B.C.), 54 
David, Jacques Louis (1748-1825), 429, 432, 

461 
Davidson, John (1857-1909), 622 
Davy, Sir Humphrey (1778-1829), 438, 439 
Debussy, Claude (1862-1918), 495, 547, 678, 

701 
Defoe, Daniel (1661-1731), 184, 310-1; 322, 

330, 410, 560; quoted: 310, 323 
De Forest, John William (1826-1906), 611 
Degas, Edgar (1834-1917), 643 
De Gaulle, Charles (1890-1970), 748, 764; 

quoted: 285 
De Grasse, Comte Francois (1722-1788), 404, 

426 
Delacroix, Eugene (1798-1863), 478, 494, 512, 

513, 567, 644-5, 723; quoted: 646 
Delaroche, Paul (1797-1856), quoted: 587 



Index ^ 835 



Delaunay, Robert (1885-1941), 647, 650 

Delius, Frederick (1862-1934), 678 

De Maistre, Joseph Marie, Comte (1754-1821), 

466; quoted 477 
Democritus (5th and 4th C B.C.), 58, 194 
Denon, Vivant (1747-1825), 445, 556 
De Quincey, Thomas (1785-1859), 510, 536, 

540 
De Sade, Donatien ("Marquis") (1740-1814), 

447-8, 453; quoted: 448 
Descartes, Rene (1596-1650), 42, 173, 186, 

191, 200-2, 207, 208, 210, 214, 217, 282, 

314, 346, 361, 668; quoted: 201 
De Stael, Germaine (1766-1817), 450-2, 453, 

456, 460, 475, 512; quoted: 451 
Destutt de Tracy, Antoine Comte de 

(1754-1836), 452-3, 476, 660; quoted: 453 
De Vries, Hugo (1848-1935), 632 
Dewey, John (1859-1952), 385, 608-9, 668 
Diaghilev, Sergei (1872-1929), 677 
Dickens, Charles (1812-1870), 124, 148, 340, 

454,477, 487, 498, 504, 533, 542, 563, 576, 

577, 582, 630, 675; quoted: 553, 582 
Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886), 595 
Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes (1862-1932), 

689, 709 
Diderot, Denis (1713-1784), 137, 369-75, 378, 

380, 381, 382, 383, 387, 392, 410, 414, 417, 

420, 459, 481; quoted: 374, 391 
Dilke, Sir Charles Wentworth (1843-191 1), 577 
Dilthey, Wilhelm (1833-191 1), 652, 668 
Dinesen, Izak (Baroness Blixen) (1885-1962), 

560 
Diocletian, Jovius (245-313), 209 
Disraeli, Benjamin (1804-1881), 563; quoted: 

502,571,799 
Dolet, Etienne (1509-1546), 108 
Donizetti, Gaetano (1797-1848), 498, 499 
Donne, John (1572-1631), 142, 161, 162 
Dostoevsky, Feodor (1821-1881), 258, 271, 

563, 663, 673, 701, 769; quoted: 769-71 
Douglas, Norman (1868-1952), 733, 736 
Douglass, Frederick (1817-1895), 592 
Dove, Arthur (1880-1946), 650 
Dover, Dr. Thomas (1660-1742), 330 
Dowd, Charles F (1825-1904), 819 
Dowd, Maureen, quoted: 785 
Dowlandjohn (1562-1626), 161 
Doyle, Arthur Conan (1859-1930), 595, 630, 

698, 737; quoted: 638 
Dreiser, Theodore (1871-1945), 611, 733 
Dreyfus, Alfred (1859-1935), 294, 630, 696, 

700, 702 
Driesch, Hans (1867-1941), 632 



Dryden, John (1631-1700), 325, 339, 340, 353, 

356, 357, 409, 516; quoted: 221 
Du Barry, Countess (1746-1793), 403, 429, 430 
Du Bartas, Guillaume (1544-1590), 314, 812 
Du Bellay, Jean Cardinal (1492-1560), 128, 133 
Du Bellay, Joachim (1524-1560), 163 
Du Bois-Reymond (1818-1896), 632 
Dubos, Jean-Baptiste, Abbe (1670-1742), 

quoted: 41 6 
Du Camp, Maxime (1822-1894), 586-7 
Ducasse, Isidore Lucien (1846-1870), 619, 719 
Duchamp, Marcel (1887-1968), 647, 722, 723, 

731,790 
Duchamp-Villon, Raymond (1876-1918), 647 
Duchess of Lorraine (fl. 14C?), 233 
Du Deffand, Marie de Vichy Chamrond, 

Marquise (1697-1780), 378 
Duguit, Leon (1859-1928), 668 
Dujardin, Edouard (1861-1949), 715, 825 
Dukas, Paul (1865-1935), 678 
Dumas, Alexandre (1802-1870), 208, 241, 334, 

478,515 
du Maurier, George (1834-1896), 611 
Duncan, Isadora (1878-1927), 677, 694, 701, 

738 
Dunne, Finley Peter (1867-1936), quoted: 

596-7, 613 
Dupont de Nemours, Pierre Samuel 

(1739-1817), 382 
Dupuytren, Dr. Guillaume (1777-1835), 437 
Durand, Asher Brown (1796-1886), 604 
Duranty, Louis Edmond (1833-1880), 557 
Durer, Albrecht (1471-1528), 11, 60, 66; 

quoted: 68 
Durkheim, Emile (1858-1917), 651-2, 668, 

701; quoted: 652 
Du Roullet, Marie Francois (1716-1786), 416 
Duse, Eleanora (1859-1924), 675 
Dwight, Timothy (1752-1817), 406 
Dyer, George (1755-1841), 326 

Eads, James B. (1820-1887), 598 
Earle, Ralph (1751-1801), 405 
Eck, Dr. Johann (1486-1543), 7, 17 
Eckermannjohann (1792-1854), 501 
Eddy, Mary Baker (1821-1910), 664 
Edison, Thomas Alva (1847-1931), 545 
Edwards, Amelia (1831-1892), 626 
Edwards, Jonathan (1703-1758), 405 
Eiffel, Gustave (1832-1923), 601 
Einstein, Albert (1879-1955), 436, 749, 750, 

754, 761 
Eisenhower, Dwight (1890-1969), 702 
Eldon, John Clerk, Lord (1757-1832), 511 



836 <^> Index 



Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204), 232 
Elgin, Lord (1766-1841), 417, 514 
Eliot, Charles W (1834-1926), 606 
Eliot, George (Marian Evans) (1819-1880), 

124, 393, 563, 572, 576, 577, 627 
Eliot, T.S. (1888-1965), 214, 715, 733; quoted: 

715 
Elizabeth I of England (1533-1603), xviii, 107, 

115, 186, 207, 208; quoted: 86, 154, 162 
Elizabeth, Princess Palatine (1618-1680), 186, 

207 
Ellis, Havelock (1859-1939), 626 
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882), 318, 505, 

506, 524; quoted: 554, 666, 740 
Engels, Friedrich (1820-1895), 549, 588 
Epictetus (60P-120?), 134; quoted: 190 
Epinay, Louise Florence, Marquise d' 

(1726-1783), 378 
Epstein, Jacob (1880-1959), 646 
Erard, Sebastien (1752-1831), 546 
Erasmus, Desiderius (1469-1536), xi, 8, 11-3, 

43, 47, 52, 68, 96, 118, 128, 129, 136, 157, 

757, 786; quoted: 11, 13, 55, 157, 206 
Erskine Childers, Robert (1870-1922), 698 
Euclid (£1. c.300 B.C.), 217, 220 
Euler, Leonard (1707-1783), 377 
Eustachio, Bartolommeo (1524P-1574), 114 
Evelyn, John (1620-1760), 210 

Fahrenheit, Gabriel Daniel (1686-1736), 737 
Fairbanks, Douglas, (Sr.) (1883-1939), 737 
Fairfax, Sir Cartwright (fl. 19-20C), 690 
Fallopio, Gabriel (1523-1562), 114 
Faraday, Michael (1791-1867), 205, 544 
Farquhar, George (1678-1707), 356 
Faure, Gabriel (1845-1924), 161 
Faust, Dr. Johann (148P-1540), 112, 483 
Febvre, Lucien (1878-1956), 652 
Feininger, Lyonel (1871-1956), 647 
Fenelon, Francois de Salignac de La Mothe 

(1651-1715), 296, 298-300, 301, 345, 355; 

quoted: 249, 298 
Ferdinand of Aragon (1452-1516), 85, 92-3 
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762-1814), 706 
Ficino, Marsilio (1433-1499), 57-9, 196; 

quoted: 58 
Fielding, Henry (1707-1754), 112, 309, 326, 

380,386,392,410,477,560 
Filmer, Sir Robert (d.1653), 362, 363 
Fitch, John (1743-1798), 420 
Fitzgerald, Edward (1809-1883), 626 
Fitzgerald, Scott (1896-1940), 124, 734 
Fitzroy, Captain Robert (1805-1865), 503 
Flaubert, Gustave (1821-1880), 297, 542, 



557-8, 561, 586; quoted: 558 
Floriojohn (c. 1553-1 625), 140 
Flournoy, Theodore (1854-1920), quoted: 664 
Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de (1657-1757) 
Forster, E(dward) M(organ) (1879-1970), 734; 

quoted: 63 
Foster, Richard, quoted: 784 
Fouillee, Alfred (1838-1912), quoted: 579 
Fouquet, Nicolas (1615-1680), 292, 294, 347 
Fouquier-Tinville, Antoine (1746-1795), 429 
Fourier, Charles (1772-1837), 523-^, 525, 526 
Fourier, Jean (1768-1830), 443, 523 
Fox, Charles James (1749-1806), 460; quoted: 

431 
Fox, George (1624-1691), 28, 265, 274 
Fracastoro, Girolamo (1483-1553), 114, 115 
Fragonardjean Honore (1732-1806), 391, 

460 
France, (Anatole Thibault) (1844-1924), 625, 

674, 754; quoted: 750 
Francis I of France (1494-1547), 81, 86, 94-5, 

112, 113; quoted: 94, 806 
Franco, Francisco (1892-1975), 747 
Franklin, Benjamin (1706-1790), 37, 375, 392, 

405, 407-8, 412; quoted: 408 
Franz Ferdinand of Austria (1863-1914), 689, 

690, 695 
Frazer, Sir James (1854-1941), 636, 668 
Frederick, Elector of Saxony (1463-1525), 9; 

quoted: 14 
Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (1090-1147), 46 
Frederick II of Prussia (1712-1786), 30, 256, 

257, 367, 372, 381, 395, 706; quoted: 258 
Freeman, Edward Augustus (1823-1892), 569 
Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939), 21, 193, 197, 

224, 610, 626, 629, 641, 661-3, 709, 734, 

749, 792; quoted: 663,701 
Frith, William Powell (1819-1909), 543 
Froebel, Friedrich (1782-1852), quoted: 487-8 
Froissartjean (1333?-? 1400), 235 
Froude, James Anthony (1818-1894), 568, 569 
Fry, Christopher, 754 
Fry, Roger (1866-1934), 622, 646 
Fugger (family) (14C-20C), 15, 96 
Fuller, Margaret (1810-1850), 505, 524 
Fulton, Robert (1765-1815), 
Furetiere, Antoine (1620-1688), 380 
Fuseli, Henry (1741-1825), 460 

Gabrieli, Andrea (1510?-1586), 160 
Gabrieli, Giovanni (1557-1602), 160 
Gainsborough, Thomas (1727-1788), 392 
Galen, Claudius (c.130-c.230), 191, 196, 223 
Galilei, Vincenzio (1520-1691), 159 



Index <^> 837 



Galileo (1564-1642), 40, 117, 148, 173, 191, 

193, 204, 207, 212, 282, 361, 808 
Gallojacopo (P-1505), quoted: 78 
Galsworthy, John (1867-1933), 616, 675, 685, 

733, 734 
Galton, Francis (1822-1911), 694 
Galvani, Luigi (1737-1798), 375 
Gama, Vasco da (1460-1524), 101, 153 
Garcilaso de la Vega (1503-1536), 110 
Gardel, Pierre-Gabriel (1758-1840), 461 
Garland, Hamlin (1860-1940), 605, 624-5 
Garnier, Tony (1869-1948), 648 
Garrick, David (1717-1779), 400, 460 
Garrison, William Lloyd (1805-1879) 274, 547 
Gaskell, Mrs. (Elizabeth Cleghorn) 

(1810-1865), 563 
Gassendi, Pierre (1592-1655), 282, 314, 344, 

346-7,361,365 
Gauguin, Paul (1848-1903), 636, 646 
Gautier, Theophile (181 1-1872), 469, 476, 480, 

493, 516, 558, 617, 714; quoted: 474, 515, 

559 
Gay, John (1685-1732), 328, 406 
Geddes, Patrick (1854-1932), 626, 698 
Geoffrin, Marie Therese (1699-1777), 378 
Geoffroy St. Hilaire, Etienne (1772-1844), 445, 

501,560 
George I of England (1660-1727), 327, 329 
George IV of England (1762-1830), 482, 

497-8, 551 
George, Henry (1839-1897), 594 
George, Stefan (1868-1933), 676 
Gericault, Jean (1791-1824), 478 
Germain, Sophie (1776-1831), 443 
Gesualdo, Don Carlo (1560-1613), 160, 161 
Ghiberti, Lorenzo (1378-1455), 65 
Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794), x, 321-2, 380, 

412,422 
Gibbons, Orlando (1583-1625), 161 
Gibbs, Josiah Willard (1839-1903), 631, 768 
Gibson, William, 254 
Gide, Andre (1869-1951), 124, 480, 518, 624, 

626, 643, 733, 734; quoted: 619, 675, 812 
Gilbert, William (1544-1603), 204 
Gilbert, William Schwenk (1836-1911), 358, 

612 
Gilman, Daniel Coit (1831-1908), 606 
Giotto, (di Bondone) (1267-1337), 69, 74 
Gissing, George (1857-1903), 561, 624; 

quoted: 557 
Gladstone, William Ewart (1809-1898), 577 
Glanvill, Joseph (1636-1680), 212, 213, 281; 

quoted: 282 
Gleizes, Albert (1881-1953), 647, 650, 703 



Gluck, Christoph Willibald (1714-1787), 176, 

402, 415-6, 417, 494, 496; quoted: 416 
Gneisenau, August, (Count) (1760-1831), 426 
Gobineau, Comte Joseph de (1816-1882), 578; 

quoted: 571 
Godfrey of Bouillon (1061P-1100), 148 
Godwin, William (1756-1836), 458 
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1 749-1 832), 
14, 109, 112, 146, 149, 152, 315, 394 ff., 400, 
414, 417, 430, 431, 440, 451, 453, 468, 469, 
479, 483, 484, 500, 501, 504, 505, 507, 514, 
516, 523, 563, 564, 640, 715; quoted: 402, 
470,473,475,501,506,518 
Goezman, Louis Valentin de (1730-1794), 400 

ff. 
Goldoni, Carlo (1707-1793), 165, 174 
Goldsmith, Oliver (1728-1774), 326, 409 
Goncourt, Edmond (1822-1896), 624 
Goncourt, Jules (1830-1870), 624 
Gonzaga, Scipione (1542-1593), 149 
Gonzales, Eva (1849-1883), 84 
Gordon, Lord George (1751-1793), 421 
Gordon, Patrick (1635-1699), 319 
Gorky, Maxim (1868-1936), 697 
Gosse, Edmund (1849-1928), 572 
Gossec, Francois Joseph (1734-1829), 432, 461 
Gouges, Olympe de (1748-1793), 457; quoted: 

457 
Gounod, Charles Francois (1818-1893), 567, 

640 
Gourmont, Remy de (1858-1915), quoted: 647 
Gournay, Marie de (1565-1645), 87, 186 
Goya y Lucientes, Francisco (1746-1828), 478 
Gozzi, Conte Carlo (1720-1806), 174 
Gracian, Baltasar (1601-1658), 258 
Grainger, James (1721P-1766), 326 
Grainger, Percy (1882-1961), 738 
Gramont, Philibert, Comte de (1621-1707), 

quoted: 287 
Grant, Ulysses S. (1822-1885), 591 
Graves, Robert (1895-1985), 701 
Gray, Thomas (1716-1771), 409, 413; quoted: 9 
Greco, El (c.l 541-1 614), 334 
Greene, Graham (1904-1991), quoted: 145 
Gretry, Andre (1741-1813), 432 
Greuze, Jean-Baptiste (1725-1805), 391 
Grey, Sir Edward (1862-1933), 689 
Griffith, David (1875-1948), 649, 736 
Grillparzer, Franz (1791-1872), 565 
Grimm, Friedrich Melchior (1723-1807), 414 
Grimm, Jakob (1785-1863), 414, 502 
Grimm, Wilhelm (1786-1859), 414, 502 
Grimmelshausen, Hans von (1625-1676), 177, 
178 



838 <^> Index 



Grisjuan (1887-1927), 647 

Grotius, Hugo, (de Groot) (1583-1645), 110, 

111,179,208 
Grout, Donald, quoted: 1 77 
Guardi, Francesco (1712-1793), 420 
Guedalla, Philip (1889-1944), quoted: 436 
GuiUotin, Dr. Joseph (1738-1814), 423 
Guizot, Francois (1787-1874), 534, 548, 570 
Gunther, Ignaz (1725-1775), 391 
Gurney, Edmund (1847-1888), 664; quoted: 

639 
Gustavus Adolphus (1594-1632), 176, 208, 

240, 275 
Gutenberg, Johannes (1400-1468), 760 
Gutzkow, Karl (1811-1878), 476 
Guyon, Jeanne Bouvier de la Motte 

(1648-1717), 298 
Guyon, Rene, 626 

Hahnemann, Samuel (1755-1843), 636 

Hakluyt, Richard (c. 1552-1 6 16), 103 

Haldane, John Scott (1860-1936), 632 

Hall, Basil (1788-1844), 504 

Hall, Charles (1745P-1825?), 527 

Hall, Granville Stanley (1844-1924), 609-10, 

661 
Hall, Radclyffe (1886-1943), 626 
Haller, Albrecht von (1708-1777), 371 
Halley, Edmund (1656-1742), 84, 377 
Halsted, William S. (1852-1922), 606 
Hamilton, Alexander (1757-1804), 84, 404, 

407, 460; quoted: 408 
Hamilton, Anthony (1646-1720), quoted: 287 
Hammett, Dashiell (1894-1961), 741 
Handel, George Frideric (1685-1759), 176, 

327, 388, 389, 390, 407, 416, 422, 612, 635 
Hannibal (183-47 B.C.), 748 
Hanslick, Eduard (1825-1904), 558, 819 
Hapsburg (family) (11C-20C), 303 
Hardouin-Mansard, Jules (1646-1708), 337 
Hardy, Thomas (1840-1928), 124, 518, 543, 

563, 624-5, 676-7, 733; quoted: 625 
Hargreaves, James (d.1778), 375 
Harper, William (1856-1906), 606 
Harrington, James (1611-1677), 268 
Harrison, Benjamin (1833-1901), 600 
Harrison, John (1693-1776), 376 
Hart, Lorenz (1895-1943), 735 
Hardey, David (1705-1757), 413 
Hardey, Marsden (1877-1948), 650 
Hartlib, Samuel (d.c.1670), 181 
Hartmann, Edouard von (1842-1906), 661 
Harvey, William (1578-1657), 282; quoted: 195 
Hauptmann, Gerhardt (1862-1946), 616 



Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864), 505, 524 
Haydn, Joseph (1732-1809), 407, 409, 433, 640 
Hayward, John (17C), quoted: 35 
Hazlitt, William (1778-1830), 91, 431, 466, 

484, 510, 516, 531, 741; quoted: 511, 512 
Hearn, Lafcadio (1850-1904), 636 
Hearst, William Randolph (1863-1951), 599 
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770-1831), 

315, 395, 484, 508, 509, 549, 588-9, 706, 

755 
Heilbrun, Carolyn, quoted: 468 
Heine, Heinrich (1797-1856), 479-80; 528 
Held, John, Jr. (1889-1958), 735 
Helmholtz, Hermann von (1821-1894), 644 
Helmontjan-Baptista van (1577?-?1644), 197; 

quoted: 203 
Heloise (1098-1164), 232, 472, 476 
Helvetius, Claude Adrien (1715-1771), 361, 

365, 374 
Hemingway, Ernest (1898-1961), 449, 734; 

quoted: 718 
Henley, William Ernest (1849-1903), quoted: 

496 
Hennell, Mary (1802-1843), 527 
Henry, Joseph (1797-1878), 544 
Henry, Patrick (1736-1799), 278 
Henry of Portugal (1394-1460), 98 
Henry III of England (1207-1272), quoted: 

229 
Henry V of England (1387-1422), 227 
Henry VII of England (1457-1509), 122 
Henry VIII of England (1491-1547), 8-9, 12, 

110,113,118 
Henry III of France (1551-1589), 84-5, 137 
Henry IV of France (1553-1610), 137, 245, 

247, 303, 333, 334, 379; quoted: 248 
Heraclitus (6C-5C B.C.), 58 
Herbert, A.P. (1890-1971), 735 
Herbert, George (1593-1633), quoted: 27 
Herbert, Sidney (1810-1861), 580 
Herder, Johann Gottfried von (1744-1803), 

258,380,395,482,505,516 
Herodotus (484?^125? B.C.), 57 
Herschel, William (1738-1822), 440 
Herzen, Alexander (1812-1870), 556 
Heyer, Georgette (1902-1974), 486, 739 
Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 823 
Hindemith, Paul (1895-1963), 738 
Hider, Adolf (1889-1945), 671, 688, 746, 749 
Hobbes,John Oliver (Mrs. P.M. Craigie) 

(1867-1906), 627 
Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679), 189, 

267, 282, 314, 362, 363; quoted: 206, 267 
Hobhouse, Leonard (1864-1929), 651 



Index ^ 839 



Hodgkin, Thomas (1798-1866), 527 
Hoffmann, E.T.A. (1766-1822), 495, 640, 818 
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von (1874-1929), 676 
Hogarth, William (1697-1764), 392, 409, 440 
Holbach, Baron d' (1723-1789), 365, 371 
Holbein, Hans (1497P-1543), 72 
Holderlin, Friedrich (1770-1843), 479 
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr. (1841-1935), 585, 

586 
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr. (1809-1894), 

584-6, 611; quoted: 505 
Home, Daniel Dunglas (1833-1886), 574, 575 
Homer (fl. PI 250 or ?850 B.C.), 52, 146, 298, 

348,514,517,634 
Honegger, Arthur (1892-1955), 738 
Hoover, Herbert (1874-1964), quoted: 711 
Horace (65-8 B.C.), 68, 165, 167 
Horner, Francis (1778-1817), 531 
Horney, Karen (1885-1952), 662 
Hotman, Francois (1524-1590), 247, 295 
Hotzendorf, Conrad von (1852-1925), 689 
Houdetot, Elisabeth Franchise de (1730-1813), 

378 
Houdon, Jean-Antoine (1741-1828), 391-2 
Howard, John (1726-1790), 477 
Howard, Sidney (1891-1939), 736 
Howells, William Dean (1837-1920), 610 
Hubbard, Elbert (1856-1915), 608 
Hugo, Victor (1802-1885), 32, 61, 466, 467, 

478, 479, 480, 481, 484, 492, 493, 513, 515, 

549, 561, 575, 612, 640; quoted: 155, 549 
Huizinga, Johan (1872-1945), 48 
Humbert I of Italy (1844-1900), 695 
Humboldt, Alexander (1769-1859), 501, 502 
Hume, David (1711-1776), 258, 380, 413, 422, 

470, 481, 508 
Humphreys, David (1752-1818), 406 
Huneker, James Gibbons (1860-1921), 679 
Hunt, Holman (1827-1910), 567 
Hunt, Leigh (1784-1859), 431 
Huskisson, William (1770-1830), 539^0 
Hussjohn (1369-1415), 4 
Hutchins, Robert Maynard (1899-1977), 574 
Hutchinson, Anne (1590P-1643), 186, 278 
Hutten, Ulrich von (1488-1523), 15; quoted: 

44 
Hutton, James (1726-1797), 455-6 
Hutton, Richard Holt (1826-1897), 142; 

quoted: 625 
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825-1895), 367, 571, 

572, 577, 607; quoted: 24 
Huysmans, Joris Karl (1848-1907), 623, 624; 

quoted: 674 



Ibsen, Henrik (1828-1906), 553, 565, 566, 616, 

623, 625, 670, 675, 679 
Ice-T, quoted: 777 
Ingersoll, Robert (1833-1899), 593 
Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique (1780-1867), 

517 
Ionesco, Eugene (1912-1994), 756 
Irving, Washington (1783-1859), 104, 507 
Isabella of Castile (1451-1504), 85, 92, 98, 100, 

232 
Isidore of Seville (c.560-636), 231 
Itardjean (1775-1838), 609 
Ives, Charles (1874-1954), 318, 738 

Jackson, Andrew (1767-1845), 504, 520 
Jackson, Helen Hunt (1830-1885), 595 
James I of England (1566-1625), 265; quoted: 

102, 248, 277 
James II of England (1633-1701), 309, 347, 

362, 363 
James, Henry (1843-1916), 352, 379, 561, 611, 

673-4, 737, 742 
James, Henry Sr. (1811-1882), 524 
James, Jesse (1847-1882), 599 
James M(ontague) R(hodes) (1862-1936), 737 
James, William (1842-1910), x, 6, 137, 353, 

374, 411, 504, 582, 607, 633, 666-668; 

quoted: xiii, 25, 39, 353-4, 599, 672-3 
Janet, Paul (1823-1899), 628-9, 661 
Jannequin, Clement (fl. 16C), 156 
Jansen, Cornelis (1585-1638), 296, 297 
Jaques-Dalcroze, Emile (1865-1950), 677 
Jarry, Alfred (1873-1907), 619-20, 719; 

quoted: 619 
Jaucourt, Chevalier Louis de (1704-1779, 369, 

371 
Jaures, Jean (1859-1914), 700 
Jay, John (1745-1829), quoted: 403 
Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826), 278, 360, 386, 

396, 407, 428, 460, 488, 537, 671 
Jeffrey, Francis (1773-1850), 531 
Jenkins, Cecil, quoted: 785 
Jenkins, Edward (1838-1910), 627 
Jenner, Edward (1749-1823), 377 
Jevons, W Stanley (1838-1882), 665 
Joan of Arc (1412-1431), xi, 232, 379, 809 
John of Austria, Don (1547-1578), 97, 104 
John of Leyden (1509P-1536), 15, 265 
Johnson, Eastman (1824-1906), 84 
Johnson, Esther (1681-1728), 323 
Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784), 326, 367, 392, 

409, 411-3, 512, 516, 526; quoted: 367, 412, 

815 
Jones, Henry Arthur (1851-1929), 616 



840 <^> Index 



Jones, William (1746-1794), 504 

Jonson, Ben (1572-1637), 189; quoted: 102, 

137, 141-2, 161 
Joseph II of Austria (1741-1790), 381 
Josquin des Pres (c.1445-1521), 159 
Joubert, Joseph (1754-1824), quoted: 453 
Joule, James Prescott (1818-1889), 205, 544 
Joyce, James (1882-1941), 124, 132, 480, 675, 

715, 719, 745; quoted: 791 
Julius II (1443-1513), 64 
Jung, Carl (1875-1961), 191, 662 
Jung, Joachim (1587-1657), 199 

Kafka, Franz (1883-1924), 479, 734, 757, 812 
Kahn, Gustave (1859-1936), 822 
Kandinsky, Wassily (1866-1944), 649, 650, 678 
Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804), 395, 440, 469, 

505, 508, 509; quoted: 413, 430, 441, 508 
"Kathie" see Bora, K. von 
Kauffmann, Angelica (1741-1807), 460 
Keats, John (1795-1821), 98, 154, 417 
Keayne, Robert (1595-1656), 279; quoted: 280 
Keen, Dr. William Williams (1837-1932), 

quoted: 636 
Kekule von Stradonitz, Friedrich (1829-1896), 

609 
Keller, Gottfried (1819-1890), 565 
Keller, Helen (1880-1968), quoted: 117 
Kelvin, William Thomson, Lord (1824-1907), 

527, 544 
Kemal, Mustapha (Ataturk) (1881-1938), 746 
Kempis, Thomas a (1380-1471), 5 
Kepler, Johannes (1571-1630), 59, 191, 196, 

204, 230 
Key, Ellen (1849-1926), 608 
Keynes, John Maynard (1883-1975), 705, 768 
Khayyam, Omar (1048-1122), 626 
Kierkegaard, Soren (1813-1855), 216, 755; 

quoted: 24 
King, Martin Luther, Jr. (1929-1968), xii, 764 
Kinglake, Alexander (1809-1891), 504 
Kipling, Rudyard (1865-1935), 612, 733, 737; 

quoted: 612 
Kleber, Jean Baptiste (1753-1800), 434, 445 
Klee, Paul (1879-1940), 732 
Kleist, Henrich (1777-1811), 479 
Klinger, Friedrich Maximilian von 

(1752-1831), 396 
Knox, John (1505P-1572), 17, 34 
Koffka, Kurt (1886-1941), 661 
Kohler, Wolfgang (1887-1967), 661 
Kokoschka, Oskar (1886-1980), 650 
Kotzebue, August von (1761-1819), 520 
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von (1840-1902), 626 



Kreutzberg, Harald (1902-1968), 738 
Kubla Khan (1216P-1294), 227 
Kuby, Erich, quoted: 790 
Kuhn, Thomas (1922-1996), 759 

La Argentina, Antonia Merce (1890-1936), 738 

Labe, Louise (1524-1566), 87, 186 

La Boetie, Etienne de (1530-1563), 136 

La Bruyere, Jean de (1645-1696), 351-3; 

quoted: 352 
Laclos, Pierre de (1741-1803), 414 
Lacombe, Claire (1765-?), 427 
La Condamine, Charles Marie de (1701-1774), 

376 
Laennec, Rene (1781-1826) 437 
La Farge, John (1835-1910), 636 
La Fayette, Mme de (1634-1693), 352-3, 380 
La Fayette, Marie Joseph, Marquis de 

(1757-1834), 404, 426 
La Fontaine, Jean de (1621-1695), 291, 294, 

346, 351 
La Forgue, Jules (1860-1887), 620, 631 
La Grange, Joseph Louis (1736-1813), 84, 544 
Laing, Ronald D. (1927-1989), quoted: 756 
Lalique, Rene (1860-1945), 725 
Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste de (1744-1829), 445, 

455, 456, 501, 571, 632 
Lamartine, Alphonse de (1790-1869), 469, 484, 

504, 548; quoted: 549 
Lamb, Charles (1775-1834), 222, 510, 515, 516, 

518 
Lamb, Mary (1764-1847), 516 
Lamballe, Princess de (1749-1792), quoted: 

429 
Lambert, Constant (1905-1951), 721, 738; 

quoted: 721, 727 
Lamennais, Felicite Robert de (1782-1854), 

523 
La Mettrie, Julien Offray de (1709-1751), 367, 

374 
La Mothe, Jeanne, Countess de (1756-1791), 

421 
Lamprecht, Karl (1856-1915), 652, 701; 

quoted: 656 
Lancret, Nicolas (1690-1743), 391 
Landor, Walter Savage (1775-1864), 152 
Laplace, Pierre Simon, Marquis de 

(1749-1827), 377, 439, 544 
La Poupeliniere, Alexandre Riche de 

(1693-1762), 420 
La Rochefoucauld, Francis, Duke of 

(1613-1680), 290, 349-51, 356, 451; quoted: 

350,351 
Larrey, Dr. Dominique Jean (1766-1842), 443 



Index <^ 841 



Las Casas, Bartolome de (1474-1566), 100, 107 

Lassalle, Ferdinand (1825-1864), 528 

Lasso, Orlando (1530/2-1594), 159 

La Taille, Jacques de (1542-1562), 163 

LaTaille,Jean de (1540-1608), 163; quoted 166 

Lautreamont, Comte de, see Ducasse 

Laval, Pierre (1888-1945), 748, 749 

La Valliere, Duchesse de (1644-1710), 291 

Lavater, Johann Kaspar (1741-1801), 456 

Lavisse, Ernest (1842-1922), 701 

Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent (1743-1794), 375, 

377, 429, 437, 439 
Law, John (1671-1729), 320-1 
Lawrence, D.H. (1885-1930), 124, 151, 734, 

790 
Lea, Homer (1876-1912), 692-3; quoted: 693 
Leacock, Stephen (1869-1944), 736 
Lear, Edward (1812-1888), 736 
Leary, Timothy (1920-1996), 629, 756 
Le Bon, Gustave (1841-1931), 823; quoted: 

652 
Le Breton (1708-1779), 369 ff. 
Le Brun, Charles (1619-1690), 337 
Leconte de Lisle, Charles Rene (1818-1894), 

559 
Le Corbusier, Charles (1887-1965), 459, 726 
Ledoux, Claude Nicolas (1736-1806), 392, 459, 

514 
Lee, Ann (1736-1784), 404 
Lee, Robert E. (1807-1870), 86 
Le Fevre d'Etaples, Jacques (1450P-1537), 113 
Le Franc, Martin (fl. 14C-15C), 232 
Legallois, Julien (1770-1814), 437 
Leger, Fernand (1881-1955), 647, 721 
Leggett, William (1801-1839), 740 
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhem von (1646-1716), 

84, 220, 366, 377 
Leighton, Frederic, Baron (1830-1896), 

quoted: 785 
Lemercier, Louis Jean Nepomucene 

(1771-1840), 
Le Nain, Louis (1593P-1648), 338 
L'Enfant, Pierre Charles (1754-1825), 459, 460 
Lenin (Vladimir Ulanov) (1870-1924), 34, 272, 

428, 589, 673 
Le Notre, Andre (1613-1700), 337 
Leo X (1475-1521), 6, 64 
Leo XIII (1810-1903), quoted: 618 
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), 66, 67, 68, 70, 

78-9, 105, 112, 206, 663; quoted: 72, 79 
Leoncavallo, Ruggiero (1858-1914), 638 
Leopardi, Giacomo (1798-1837), 258, 478 
Leroux, Pierre (1797-1871), 523 
Lesage, Alain-Rene (1668-1747), 380 



Lespinnasse, Julie de (1732-1776), 378 
Lesseps, Ferdinand de (1805-1894), 
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729-1781), 395, 

409,417 
Le Sueur, Eustache (1617-1655), 461 
Le Sueur, Jean Francois (1760-1837), 494 
Leuuwenhoek, Antonius von (1632-1723), 

377 
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 759 
Lewes, George Henry (1817-1878), 576 
Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) (1832-1898), 

736 
Lewis, C(live) S(taples) (1898-1963), 743 
Lewis, Denslow (fl. 19C), 626 
Lewis, Matthew Gregory (1775-1818), 410 
Lewis, Sinclair (1885-1951), 734 
Lewis, Wyndham (1884-1951), quoted: 718 
L'Hopital, Michel de (1507-1573), quoted: 29 
Lichtenberg, Georg (1742-1799), 182, 409, 

439^1; quoted: 40 
Liebig, Justus von (1803-1873), 545 
Lieven, Dorothea, Princess (1785-1856), 475 
Ligeti, Gyorgy, 730 
Lilburne, John (1614P-1657), 268-70, 274; 

quoted: 269, 270 
Lillie, Beatrice (1894-1989), 735 
Lillo, George (1693P-1739), 406 
Limon, Jose (1908-1972), 738 
Lincoln, Abraham (1809-1865), 183, 566, 584, 

595 
Under, Steffan, quoted: 603 
Lindsey, Judge Ben (1869-1943), 735 
Linnaeus, Carolus (1707-1778), 376 
L'Isle-Adam, Comte Villiers de (1838-1889); 

quoted: 619 
Liszt, Franz (1811-1886), 149, 481, 495, 499, 

523, 546, 558, 577, 639, 640 
Littre, Maximilien (1801-1881), 622; quoted: 

293 
Livingston, David (1813-1873), 599 
Lloyd George, David (1863-1945), 688, 691 
Lobachevsky, Nikolaus Ivanovich (1793—1856), 

502 
Locke, John (1632-1704), 314, 361, 362, 363, 

364, 365, 385, 660; quoted: 363 
Loewy, Raymond (1893-1986), 726 
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1807-1882), 

561,562 
Lope de Vega, Felix (1562-1635), 110, 164; 

quoted: 166 
Lorraine, Claude (1600-1682), 336 
Loti, Pierre, (Julien Viaud) (1850-1923), 674 
Louis XIII of France (1601-1643), 173, 184, 

285,338 



842 <^> Index 



Louis XIV of France (1638-1715), 173, 187, 
188, 210, 242, 244, 247, 277, 285 ff., 288-9, 
290, 294, 300, 301, 302, 303, 307, 313, 320, 
337, 338, 344, 345, 347, 351, 390, 391, 393, 
394, 41 4 ? 434, 558; quoted: 285, 289, 293, 
298, 304, 342 
Louis XV of France (1710-1774), 305, 399, 

403, 429 
Louis XVI of France (1754-1793), 122, 251 ff., 

402,415,427,430,434 
Louis-Philippe of France (1773-1850), 493, 

497, 547 
Louise of Savoy (1476-1531), 86, 94, 95 
Louvois, Francois Michel le Tellier, Marquis de 

(1639-1691), 293, 294, 337 
Lowe, Robert (1811-1892), quoted: 627 
Lowell, James Russell, (1819-1891), 584 
Loyola, Ignacio de (1491-1556), 38; quoted: 39 
Lucretius (96P-55 B.C.), 58, 194, 365, 750 
Ludlow, George (fl. 19C), quoted: 548 
Ludwig the Pious (778-840), 225 
Luening, Otto (1900-1996), 719, 730 
Lukacs,John,698,824 
Lully, Jean Baptiste (1632-1682), 188, 328, 329, 

387 
Lurcat, Jean (1892-1966), 725 
Luther, Martin (1483-1546), 4-7, 9-10, 16-20, 
22-3, 24, 26, 27, 30, 33, 43, 55, 64, 79, 96, 
126, 129, 180, 195, 262, 273, 297, 349, 357, 
453, 520, 785; quoted: 5, 7, 10, 14, 16, 17, 
18,19,20,22,25 
Lyell, Sir Charles (1797-1875), 455, 451 
Lynch, John Roy (1847-1939), 592 
Lynd, Helen Merrell (1896-1982), 823 
Lynd, Robert (1892-1970), 823 

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, (1800-1859), 

412,533,568,570 
MacDonald, Ramsay (1866-1937), 707 
MacDougal, William (1871-1938), 661 
Mach, Ernst (1838-1894), 668 
Machiavelli, Niccolo (1469-1527), 79, 150, 165, 

245, 255-8, 315; quoted: 256, 257 
Mackenzie, Henry (1745-1831), 410 
Mac Neice, Louis (1907-1963), 762 
Macpherson, James (1736-1796), quoted: 409 
McAdam, John Loudon (1756-1836), 492 
McClellan, General George (1826-1885), 584 
McClure, S.S. (1857-1949), 595, 596, 601, 609 
McCormick, Cyrus Hall (1809-1884), 545 
McKinley, William (1843-1901), 695 
McLuhan, Marshall (1911-1980), 759 
Maderno, Carlo (1556-1629), 66 
Madison, James (1751-1836), 407 



Magellan, Ferdinand (1480-1521), 98 
Magendie, Francois (1783-1855), 437 
Magritte, Rene (1898-1967), 727 
Mahler, Gustav (1860-1911), 547, 637, 701 
Maintenon, Madame de (1635-1719), 291, 300, 

301,343 
Major, John (1469-1550), 110 
Malesherbes, Chretien (1721-1794), 370 
Malibran, Maria Felicia (1808-1836), 500 
Malinowsky, Bronislaw (1884-1942), 654 
Mallarme, Stephane (1842-1898), 562, 620, 

622, 623, 631, 643, 719, 720; quoted: 622, 

623, 637 

Mallett, Anatole (1837-1919), 312 
Mallock, William Hurrell (1849-1923), 572 
Malthus, Thomas (1766-1834), 524, 525 
Mandeville, Bernard (1670-1733), 382, quoted: 

382 
Mandrou, Robert (1921-1997), 652 
Manet, Edouard (1833-1883), 84, 567, 587, 

643, 644 
Mann, Heinrich (1871-1950), 737 
Mann, Horace (1796-1859), 488-9 
Mann, Thomas (1875-1955), 707, 733, 734; 

quoted: 637 
Mansard(t), Francois (1598-1666), 173 
Mansfield, Katherine (1888-1923), 737 
Mantegazza, Paolo (1831-1910), 626 
Mantegna, Andrea (1431-1506), 334 
Manzoni, Alessandro (1785-1873), 478, 484, 560 
Marat, Jean-Paul (1743-1793), 427, 429 
Marc, Franz (1880-1916), 650 
Marcel, Gabriel (1889-1973), 216, 757 
Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121-180), 97 
Marcuse, Herbert (1898-1979), 756 
Margaret of Austria (1480-1530), 85, 95, 97 
Margaret of Parma (1522-1586), 86, 95 
Marguerite of Navarre (1492-1549), 87, 94, 

113,145,186 
Maria Theresia, Empress of Austria 

(1717-1780), 394 
Mariana, Juan de (1536-1623), 41 
Marie-Antoinette of France (1755-1793), 386, 

421, 460; quoted: 415 
Marin, John (1870-1953), 650; quoted: 730 
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso (1876-1944), 719 
Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de (1688-1763), 379, 

380 
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) (1835-1910), xi, 

591, 596, 604; quoted: 249 
Marks, Percy (1891-1956), 735 
Marlborough, 1st Duke of (John Churchill) 

(1650-1722), 244, 302 
Marlowe, Christopher (1564-1593), 112 



Index <^ 843 



Marmontel, Jean Francois (1723-1799), 371 
Marot, Clement (1495P-1544), 163 
Marsh, George Perkins (1801-1882), 597 
Marsh, Ngaio (1899-1982), 739 
Marshall, Alfred (1842-1924), 665 
Marten, Harry (1602-1680), quoted: 271 
Martin, Judith (Miss Manners), quoted: 782 
Martineau, Harriet (1802-1876), 309 
Marvell, Andrew (1621-1678), 39, 262; quoted: 

275 
Marx, Karl (1818-1883), xvi, xviii, 117, 218, 

243, 272, 315, 457, 528, 549, 556, 588, 594, 

630, 638, 662, 673, 686, 716, 747, 757; 

quoted: 588-9 
Mary, Queen of Scots (1542-1587), 207, 486 
Mary Tudor of England (1516-1558), 110, 302 
Mascagni, Pietro (1863-1945), 638 
Maslow, Abraham (1908-1970), 662 
Mata Hari (Gertrude Zelle) (1876-1917), 709 
Mather, Cotton (1663-1728), 329 
Matilda, Queen of England (1102-1167), 232 
Matisse, Henri (1869-1954), 646, 649 
Matthesonjohann (1681-1764), quoted: 390, 

391 
Matthews, Brander (1852-1929), 679 
Matthews, T.S., quoted: 684 
Maugham, Somerset (1874-1965), quoted: 735 
Maupassant, Guy de (1850-1893), 625 
Maurer, Alfred (1868-1932), 650 
Maurois, Andre (1885-1967), 734, 737 
Maurras, Charles (1868-1952), 
Max Muller, Friedrich (1823-1900), 504 
Maximilian (Ferdinand) of Austria 

(1832-1867), 587 
Mayer, Julius Robert von (1814-1878), 544 
Mayhew, Henry (1812-1887), 536, 537 
Mazarin, Cardinal (1602-1661), 209, 285, 286, 

302, 338 
Mazarin, Duchess of (1646-1699), 347 
Mazzini, Giuseppe (1805-1872), 548 
Mead, George (1863-1931), 651 
Medici, Catherine de' (1519-1589), 84-5, 86 
Medici, Cosimo de' (1389-1464), quoted: 58 
Medici, Giovanni de' (d.1514), 58 
Medici, Maria de' (1573-1642), 333, 334 
Mehul, Etienne Henri (1763-1817), 432, 461 
Meineke, Friedrich (1862-1936), 701 
Melanchthon, Philipp (1497-1560), 14, 17, 43, 

84 
Melville, Herman (1819-1891), 469 
Menage, Giles (1613-1692), 349 
Menander (342P-291 B.C.) 165 
Mencken, H(enry) L(ouis) (1880-1956), 679, 

734, 736 



Mendel, Gregor (1832-1884), 632 
Mendeleev, Dmitri (1834-1907), 631 
Mendelssohn, Felix (1809-1847), 547 
Meredith, George (1828-1909), 50, 563, 564, 

576, 627 
Mericourt, Theroigne de (1762-1817), 458 
Merrill, Stuart (1863-1915), 604 
Mersenne, Marin (1588-1648), 207, 210, 220 
Mesmer, Friedrich Anton (1733-1815), 375 
Metternich, Klemens Wenzel von (1733-1859), 

436,519,520,548,577 
Metzingerjean (1883-1956), 647 
Meyerbeer, Giacomo (1791-1864), 499, 567, 

637 
Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475-1564), 74, 78, 

334, 428; quoted: 56, 64, 66, 75, 77, 117 
Michelet, Jules (1798-1874), 315, 568 
Michelson, Albert (1852-1931), 631 
Mickiewicz, Adam (1798-1855), 468 
Mill, James (1773-1836), 594 
Mill, John Stuart (1806-1873), 88, 509, 523, 

524, 527, 573, 594, 604; quoted: 293, 527 
Millais, John Everett (1829-1896), 567 
Miller, Henry (1891-1980), quoted: 790 
Miller, Jonathan, quoted: 760 
Millet, Jean Francois (1814-1875), 566 
Milne, A(lan) Alexander) (1882-1956), 735, 

736 
Milton, John (1608-1674), 39, 52, 53, 146, 164, 

181, 188, 263, 268, 353, 750; quoted: 262, 

282 
Minturno, Antonio (1500-1574), quoted: 166 
Mirabeau, Honore-Gabriel de Riquetti 

(1749-1791), quoted: 426 
Moderne, Jacques (c.1495/1500-1562), 160 
Mohammed (570P-632), 27, 378 
Moliere, (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) (1622-1673), 

42, 210, 328, 339, 344-7, 353, 356, 414, 612, 

685; quoted: 345 
Molnar, Ferenc (1878-1952), 735 
Mommsen, Theodor (1817-1903), 568 
Mond, Alfred (1868-1930), 601 
Monet, Claude (1840-1926), 567, 643, 644 
Monge, Gaspard (1746-1818), 442, 444, 445 
Monsigny, Pierre (1729-1817), 432 
Montagu, Lady Mary Wordey (1689-1762), 

329, 330 
Montaigne, Michel Equeym de (1533-1592), 

32, 47, 80, 123, 126, 133-^0, 141, 149, 186, 

193, 198, 202, 217, 219, 258, 386, 505, 511; 

quoted: 135, 136, 137, 138, 139 
Montemayor, Jorge de (1521?— 1561), 110 
Montespan, Madame de (1641-1707), 291, 300 
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de 



844 <^> Index 



(1689-1755), 140, 220, 242, 243, 246, 294, 

295, 364, 371, 422; quoted: 365 
Montessori, Maria (1870-1952), 609 
Monteverdi, Claudio (1567-1643), 175, 176, 

327 
Montfort, Simon de (1208P-1265), 263 
Montgolfier, Jacques Etienne (1745-1799), 421 
Montgolfier, Joseph Michel (1740-1810), 421 
Moon, Rev. Sun Myung, xvi, 40—1 
Moore, George (1852-1933), 624-5, 644 
Moore, Marianne (1887-1972), 346 
Moray, Sir Robert (d.1673), 210 
More, Paul Elmer (1864-1937), 732 
More, Sir Thomas (1477-1535), 107, 117, 122, 

126, 129, 203; quoted: 127 
Moreas, Jean (1856-1910), 620 
Morgan, Lewis, (1818-1881), 636 
Morgann, Maurice (1726-1802), 516, quoted: 

422 
Morike, Eduard (1804-1875), 676 
Morisot, Berthe (1841-1895), 643 
Morley, Edward (1838-1923), 631 
Morley, Thomas (c.l 557-1 603), 161 
Morris, William (1834-1896), 608 
Morse, Samuel EB. (1791-1872), 541 
Morton, Thomas (d.1646 or 7), 280 
Modey, John Lothrop (1814-1877), 280, 568 
Motteux, Peter Anthony (c.l 663-1 7 18), 133 
Moussorgsky, Modest (1839-1881), 176, 640, 

678 
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756-1791), 149, 

176, 392, 399, 416, 417, 433, 496, 640; 

quoted: 417-8 
Mucha, Alphonse (1860-1939), 645 
Muir, John (1838-1914), 506 
Mumford, Lewis (1895-1990), 591, 592 
Munch, Edvard (1863-1944), 650 
Mundt, Theodor (1808-1861), 476 
Munster, Sebastian (1489-1552), 102 
Miinzer, Thomas (cl 490-1 525), 15 
Murillo, Bartolome Esteban (1617P-1682), 334 
Murray, Bill, quoted: 783 
Musset, Alfred de (1810-1857), 478, 479, 491, 

497, 500, 515, 577 
Mussolini, Benito (1883-1945), 688, 733, 744 
Mutian, Konrad (1470-1526), 32 

Nadar (Felix Tournachon) (1820-1910), 460 
Napoleon I (1769-1821), 394, 435, 436, 441-7, 
452, 454, 460, 461, 465, 466, 478, 483, 485, 
492, 510, 516, 519, 526, 580, 595, 694, 701, 
778; quoted: 482, 484, 707 
Napoleon III (1808-1873), 549, 580, 581, 587 
Nathan, George Jean (1882-1958), 679 



Nation, Carry (1846-1911), 592 
Necker, Jacques (1732-1804), 450 
Nelson, Horatio (1758-1805), 443 
Neruda, Pablo (1904-1973), 739 
Nerval, Gerard de (1808-1855), 479, 481 
Newcomen, Thomas (1603-1665), 375 
Newman, Ernest (1868-1959), 389 
Newman, John Henry, Cardinal (1801-1890), 

quoted: 470 
Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727), 173, 190, 193, 

196, 197, 207, 218, 282, 361, 362, 365-6, 

367, 374, 377, 501, 631, 750, 808 
Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), 229-30 
Nicholas I of Russia (1796-1855), 697 
Nicolson, Harold (1886-1968), 172, 351, 498; 

quoted: 173 
Niepce, Claude-Felix-Abel (1805-1870), 586 
Niepce, Nicephore Joseph (1765-1833), 586 
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900), 440, 663, 

668, 669-71, 679, 687, 693, 706; quoted: 

670 
Nightingale, Florence (1820-1910), xii, 580, 

585 
Nijinsky, Waslaw (1890-1950), 677 
Nobel, Alfred (1833-1896), xiv, 599, 630 
Nock, Albert J. (1870-1945), 133, 569, 798; 

quoted: 570, 594 
Nolde, Emil (1867-1956), 650 
Nollekens, Joseph (1737-1823), 460 
Nordau, Max Simon (1849-1923), 618, 625 
Norris, Frank (1870-1902), 624-5 
Northcliffe, Viscount (Alfred Harmsworth) 

(1865-1922), 684 
Northcote, James (1746-1831), 512 
Nostradamus, Michel de (1503-1566), 115 
Novalis (1772-1801), 395, 479 

O'Casey, Sean (1880-1964), 736 
Occam, William of (1285-1349), 192 
Oecolampadius, John, (Johannes Huszgen) 

(1482-1531), 28 
Oersted, Hans Christian (1777-1851), 544 
Offenbach, Jacques (1819-1889), 495, 481 
Ogden, C(harles) K(ay) (1889-1957), 758 
Ohm, Georg Simon (1787-1854), 544 
Oldenburg, Henry (1615P-1677), 210 
Oliphant, Laurence (1829-1888), 627 
Oliphant, Margaret (1828-1897), 627 
Olivier, Laurence (1907-1989), 252 
O'Neill, Eugene (1888-1953), 736 
Oppenheim, E. Phillips (1866-1946), 698 
Orff, Carl (1895-1982), 229, 738 
Orffyreus (Bessler, Jean Ernest Elie) 

(1680-1745), 312 



Index <^> 845 



Orleans, due d' (1674-1723), 305, 308, 320 
Orsay, Alfred Guillaume Gabriel, Comte d' 

(1801-1852), 498 
Ortega y Gasset, Jose (1883-1955), 106, 668, 

770, 798 
Osborne, Dorothy (1627-1695), 323 
Osier, William (1849-1919), 606 
Ouida (Louise de la Ramee) (1839-1908), 627 
Outcault, Richard Felton (1863-1928), 599 
Owen, Robert (1771-1858), 524, 525 
Oxenstierna, Count Axel (1583-1654), 208 
Ozenfant, Amedee (1886-1966), 647 

Pacioli, Luca (1450P-1520), 206 
Paganini, Nicolo (1782-1840), 500 
Paine, Thomas (1737-1809), 397, 458 
Palestrina, Giovanni de (1525/6-1594), 159 
Palladio, Andrea (1508-1580), 66, 206 
Palmieri, Matteo (1406-1475), quoted: 59 
Pankhurst, Emmeline (1858-1928), 696 
Paracelsus, (Philippus von Hohenheim) 

(1493-1541), 192, 197-8, 223, 330 
Pare, Ambroise (1510-1590), 192 
Pareto, Vilfredo (1848-1923), 651, 668 
Parker, Dorothy (1893-1967), 735 
Parker, Theodore (1810-1860), 505 
Partch, Harry (1901-1974), 729-30 
Pascal, Blaise (1623-1662), 140, 173, 191, 198, 

205, 208, 214-8, 258, 296, 297, 314, 353, 

471; quoted: 215, 216, 219, 350 
Pasquier, Etienne (1529-1615), 163 
Pasteur, Louis (1822-1895), 545, 635 
Pater, Walter (1839-1894), 621, 623, 638; 

quoted: 620, 622 
Paul III (1468-1549), 115 
Pavlov, Ivan (1849-1936), 659-60 
Pavlova, Anna (1885-1931), 677 
Peabody, Elizabeth (1804-1894), 505, 818 
Peacock, Thomas Love (1785-1866), 132, 152, 

585 
Peak, Charles Wilson (1741-1827), 405 
Peano, Guiseppe (1858-1932), 758 
Pearson, Edmund (1880-1937), 737 
Pearson, Karl (1857-1936), 694 
Peel, Sir Robert (1788-1850), 553 
Pembroke, Countess of (1561-1621), 87, 155 
Penn, William (1644-1718), 279, 810; quoted: 

279 
Pepusch, John Christopher (1667-1752), 328 
Pepys, Samuel (1633-1703), 210, 277, 754; 

quoted: 356 
Percy, Thomas (1729-1811), 483 
Pergolesi, Giovanni (1710-1736), 721 
Perier, Casimir (1777-1832), 497 



Perrault, Charles (1628-1703), 348 
Perrault, Claude (1613-1688), 336 
Perret, Auguste (1874-1954), 648, 677 
Pestalozzi, Johann Henrich (1746-1827), 

487-8 
Petain, Phillippe (1856-1951), 748 
Peter I of Russia (1672-1725), 185, 319, 379; 

quoted: 319 
Petrarch (1304-1374), 44, 48-52, 54, 68, 74, 

145, 146, 156, 164, 172, 233, 348; quoted: 49 
Petty, Sir William (1623-1687), 210 
Philip II of Spain (1556-1598), 85, 97, 161, 197 
Philip IV of Spain (1605-1666), 75, 81, 335 
Philip of Hesse (1504-1567), 17, 20, 96 
Phillipe de Vitry (1291-1361), 157, 160 
Piagetjean (1896-1980), 181-2 
Picasso, Pablo (1881-1973), 193, 512, 647, 649, 

721,724-5,745,790 
Piccinni, Nicola (1728-1800), 415 
Pickford, Mary (1893-1979), 737 
Pico della Mirandola (1433-1494), 57, 59, 78, 

198; quoted: 60 
Piero della Francesca (d.1492), 66 
Pilatre de Rozier, Jean (1756-1785), 421 
Pinchot, Gifford (1865-1946), 597 
Pinel, Phillipe (1745-1826), 222 
Pinero, Arthur Wing (1855-1934), 616 
Pinkerton, John (1758-1826), 503 
Pinter, Harold, 756 

Pirandello, Luigi (1867-1936), 479, 616, 675 
Pissarro, Camille (1830-1903), 643 
Pitt, William (1759-1806), 84, 436 
Pitt, William, Earl of Chatham (1708-1778), 

quoted: 33 
Pius II (1405-1464), 53, 64 
Pius IX (1792-1878), 592 
Pizarro, Francisco (c. 147 5-1 541), 102 
Planck, Max (1858-1947), 631 
Plato (427P-347 B.C.), 45, 52, 55, 56, 58-9, 72, 

117, 118, 120, 128, 139, 171, 514, 567, 623 
Plautus, Titus Maccius (254P-184 B.C.), 165; 

quoted: 60 
Pledge, H.T, 192 

Pletho, Georgius Gemistus (c.l400-?1450), 57 
Pliny (A.D. 23-79), 196 
Plotinus (205P-270), 58 
Pobiedonostsev, Konstantin Petrovich 

(1827-1907), 770 
Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849), 117, 507, 562, 

621,740 
Poincare, Henri (1854-1912), 609 
Poiret, Paul (1879-1944), 628 
Pole, Reginald (1500-1558), quoted: 38 
Polo, Marco (c.1254-c.1324), 227 



346 <^> Index 



Pombal, Sebastio, Marquis de (1699-1782), 381 
Pompadour, Marquise de (1721-1764), 367, 

372 
Pomponazzi, Pietro (1462-1525), 198 
Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), 309, 328, 409, 

485; quoted: 326 
Porphyry (Malchus) (232?-?304), 56, 58 
Postel, Guillaume (1510-1581), 75 
Potter, Jeremy, quoted: 1 87 
Poulenc, Francis (1899-1963), 738 
Pound, Ezra (1885-1972), 701, 745 
Pousseur, Henri, 728 

Poussin, Nicolas (1594-1665), 336, 338-9 
Pradier, James (1792-1852), 337 
Prester John (legendary), 99 
Priesdey, Joseph (1733-1804), 377 
Primaticcio, Francesco (1504-1570), 112 
Proudhon, Pierre Joseph (1809-1865), quoted: 

556 
Proust, Marcel (1871-1922), 355, 480, 697, 

716, 717, 733, 734 
Prud'hon, Pierre (1758-1823), 460 
Prynne, William (1600-1669), 269 
Ptolemy (fl. 127-151), 192, 193 
Puccini, Giacomo (1858-1924), 638 
Puget, Pierre (1622-1694), 337 
Pugin, Augustus Welby Northmore 

(1812-1852), 513 
Pulci, Luigi (1432-1484), 146, 147, 165 
Pulitzer, Joseph (1847-1911), 599 
Purcell, Henry (1659-1695), 327, 407 
Pushkin, Aleksandr (1799-1837), 468, 469, 

478, 515 
Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre (1824-1898), 558, 

559 

Quesnay, Francois (1694-1774), 371, 382, 450 

Rabelais, Francois (1494-1553), 47, 86, 

128-33, 136, 138, 139, 163, 198, 202, 222, 

324; quoted: 74, 123, 293, 302 
Rachel (Elisabeth Felix) (1 820/1 ?-l 858), 753 
Racine, Jean (1639-1699), 291, 294, 296, 301, 

304, 339, 342-3, 378 
Radcliffe, Ann (1764-1823), 410 
Raeburn, Sir Henry (1756-1823), 392 
Rainborow, Thomas (d.1648), quoted: 265 
Raleigh, Sir Walter (1552-1618), 161, 258, 274 
Rambouillet, Marquise de (1588-1665), 187 
Rameaujean (1859-1942), 176, 387 
Ramus, Pierre (1515-1572), 74 
Ranke, Leopold von (1795-1886), 258; quoted: 

x,569 
Ransom, John Crowe (1888-1974), quoted: 518 



Raphael, (Sanzio, da Urbino) (1483-1520), 64, 

334, 567 
Rawls, John, 117 
Ray, Man (1890-1976), 731 
Reaumur, Rene Antoine de (1683-1757), 376 
Redi, Francesco (1626-1698), quoted: 102 
Reeve, Clara (1729-1807), 410 
Reid, Thomas (1783-1861), 413 
Reinhardt, Max (1873-1943), 675 
Remarque, Erich Maria (1897-1970), 704 
Rembrandt Van Rijn (1607-1669), xii, 77, 114, 

189 
Renan, Ernest (1823-1892), 572, 693, 820 
Renoir, Pierre Auguste (1841-1919), 643 
Restell, Madame (1812-1878), 592 
Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806), 448-9, 453, 

459; quoted: 449 
Reston, James (1909-1995), 795 
Reszke, Jean de (1850-1925), 740 
Revel, J. F, 183,758 
Reynolds, Sir Joshua (1723-1792), 392, 462, 

723 
Rhodes, Cecil (1853-1902), 694 
Ribera, Jusepe (c.l 590-1 652), 334 
Richard II of England (1367-1400), 84 
Richard III of England (1452-1485), 122 
Richards, LA. (1893-1979), 758 
Richardson, Henry Hobson (1838-1886), 605 
Richardson, Samuel (1689-1761), 380, 391, 

410; quoted: 293 
Richelieu, Armand Duplessis, Cardinal de 

(1585-1642), 173, 177, 184, 241, 248, 285, 

286, 288, 338, 342 
Richter, Jean Paul (1763-1825), 132, 409, 479, 

488; quoted: 488 
Rienzi, Cola di (1313-1354), 51 
Riesman, David, quoted: 434 
Rigaud, Hyacinthe (1659-1743), 289 
Rilke, Rainer Maria (1875-1926), 479, 676 
Rimbaud, Arthur (1854-1891), 480, 618-9, 

631, 636, 791; 618, 622 
Rittenhouse, David (1732-1796), 405 
Rivera, Miguel Primo de (1870-1930), 746 
Roannez, Mile de (1633-1683), 215-6 
Robert, Henry Martyn (1837-1923), 599 
Robertson, William (1721-1793), 380, 413, 

422 
Robespierre, Maximilien (1758-1794), 426, 

428, 429, 430, 434, 441 
Robinson, Ralph (fl. 1551), 118 
Rochambeau, Jean Baptiste Vicomte de 

(1725-1807), 404, 426 
Rochester, John, Earl of (1647-1680), 330 
Rodgers, Richard (1902-1979), 735 



Index ^ 847 



Rodier, Francois, 725 
Rodin, Auguste (1840-1917), 646 
Roebling, Washington (1837-1926), 598 
Rogers, Samuel (1763-1855), 533 
Rockefeller, John D. (1839-1937), 280, 595, 

596, 606 
Rohan, Cardinal Louis de (1734-1803), 421 
Rohan, Chevalier de (1635-1674), quoted: 296 
Roland, Manon (Phlipon) (1754-1793), 

quoted: 429 
Rolland, Romain (1866-1944), 673, 674, 707, 

733, 746 
Romains, Jules (Louis Farigoule) (1885-1972), 

648 
Romano, Giulo (1499-1546), 334 
Ronsard, Pierre de (1524-1585), 163-^, 342, 

480 
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (1882-1945), 748, 

749 
Roosevelt, Theodore (1858-1919), 594, 595, 

596, 597, 624, 672; quoted: 648, 693 
Ross, James Clark (1800-1862), 502 
Rossetti, Christina (1830-1894), 627 
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882), 567 
Rossini, Gioaquino (1792-1868), 84, 176, 498, 

499 
Rostand, Edmond (1868-1918), 611-2 
Rothko, Mark (1903-1970), 791 
Rouget de Lisle, Claude (1760-1836), 433 
Roughead, William (1870-1952), 737 
Rousseau, Henri (1844-1910), 649 
Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712-1788), xvi, 108, 

371, 382-7, 391, 392, 395, 399, 420, 423, 

428, 441, 448, 450, 459, 467, 469, 470, 471, 

473, 475, 486-8, 526, 609, 671, 685; quoted: 

384, 385, 537 
Rovere, Francesco della (1490-1538), 84 
Rubens, Peter Paul (1577-1640), 70, 75, 334-5, 

347; quoted: 335 
Rush, Benjamin (1745-1813), 405 
Ruskin, John (1819-1900), xviii, 174, 354, 512, 

533, 567, 702 
Russell, Bertrand (1872-1970), 687, 709, 735, 

739 
Russolo, Luigi (1885-1947), 647, 650 
Ryder, Albert (1847-1917), 604-5 

Sachs, Hans (1494-1576), 160 
Sade, Marquis de, see De Sade 
Saint Augustine (354-430), 24, 25, 51, 258, 296, 

297 
Saint Clement, Pope (30?-?100), 118 
Saint James the Lesser (d. A.D.. 62), 20; quoted: 

39 



Saint Patrick (c.396-?469), 225 
Saint Paul (d. c.67), quoted: 249, 253, 270 
Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), 233 
Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin (1804-1869), 

297, 472, 494 
Saint-Evremond, Charles de (1613-1703), 

quoted: 347-8 
Saint-Simon, Comte de (1760-1825), xii, 289, 

522-3, 524; quoted: 523 
Saint-Simon, Due de (1675-1755), 244, 294, 

321, 343, 399; quoted: 245, 295, 313, 355 
Salieri, Antonio (1750-1825), 402 
Salutati, Coluccio (1331-1406), 44 
Sand, George (Aurore Dupin) (1804-1876), 84, 

523, 560, 577, 584, 645 
Sand, Karl Ludwig (1795-1820), 520 
Sanger, Margaret (1883-1966), 734 
Santayana, George (1863-1952), 563 
Sarah, 54, 360 

Sarpi, Paolo (1552-1623), 174 
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905-1980), 757; quoted: 826 
Satie, Erik (1866-1925), 731, 738 
Saumaise, Claude de (1588-1653), 208 
Saussure, Ferdinand de (1857-1913), 657, 658 
Savonarola, Girolamo (1452-1498), 55, 56, 79, 

160 
Sax, Aldophe (1814-1894), 545 
Say, Jean Baptiste (1767-1832), 524 
Sayers, Dorothy Leigh (1893-1957), 30, 103, 

739, 74i^ ; quoted: 742, 743, 744 
Scaliger, Julius Caesar (1484-1588), quoted: 166 
Scarlatti, Alessandro (1659-1725), 210 
Scarron, Paul (1610-1660), 165, 300 
Schama, Simon, 817; quoted: 793 
Schedel, Hartmann (1440-1514), 798 
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von 

(1775-1854), 509 
Schiller, ECS. (1864-1937), 668 
Schiller, Friedrich (1759-1805), 395, 396, 451, 

468,469,505,516 
Schlegel, August Wilhelm von (1767-1845), 

395,451,516 
Schlegel, Friedrich von (1772-1829), 395, 451, 

476, 516 
Schleiermacher, Friedrich (1768-1834), 395; 

quoted: 473 
Schliemann, Henrich (1822-1890), 599 
Schnitzler, Arthur (1882-1931), 616, 625 
Schoenberg, Arnold (1874-1951), 678, 728 
Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860), 440, 504, 

556, 559, 566, 661 
Schubert, Franz (1808-1878), 156, 547 
Schumann, Robert (1810-1856), 156, 482, 495, 

547 



848 <^> Index 



Schurmann, Anna Maria von (1607-1678), 186 
Schwarz, Boris (1906-1983), quoted: 462 
Schweitzer, Albert (1875-1965), 388-9 
Schwenkfeld, Kaspar (1490-1561), 33 
Schwind, Morkz von (1804-1871), 567 
Scipio Africanus (237-183 B.C.), 49 
Scott, Dixon (1881-1915), 703 
Scott, R.T.M. (fl. 20C), 739 
Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832), 640; quoted: 

471, 473, 482, 483, 484, 510, 533, 568 
Scriabin, Alexander (1872-1915), 678 
Scribe, Augustin Eugene (1791-1861), 515 
Scudery, Madeleine de (1607-1701), 340 
Searle, Ronald (fl. 20C), 732 
Sebond, Raymond (?-c.l437), 137 
Seguin, Edouard (1812-1880), 609 
Seilliere, Baron Ernest de (1866-1955), 825 
Selden, John, quoted: 25 
Selkirk, Alexander (1676-1721), 322, 330 
Semmelweis, Ignaz (1818-1866), 485 
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (c.4 B.C.-A.D.. 65), 52, 

134,349,462 
Senior, Nassau (1790-1864), 524 
Servetus, Michael (1511-1553), 30-1, 108 
Seurat, Georges (1859-1891), 645 
Severini, Gino (1883-1966), 647, 649 
Sevigne, Marquise de (1629-1696), 343; 

quoted: 330 
Sewall, Samuel (1652-1730), 318 
Shaftsbury, Anthony Cooper, Third Earl of 

(1671-1713), 361 
Shaftsbury, Ashley Cooper, Seventh Earl of 

(1801-1885), 477, 526 
Shakespeare, William (1564-1616), xviii, 47, 53, 
84, 103, 123, 140-3, 146, 162, 164, 189, 228, 
253-4, 261, 274, 302, 326, 341, 342, 344, 
356, 362, 378-9, 395, 406, 409, 41 1, 422, 
452, 483, 485, 512, 516-8, 526, 566, 634, 
640, 687, 715, 736, 754; quoted: 124, 200, 
228, 248, 249, 383, 795, 827 
Shankar, Uday (1900-1977), 738 
Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950), xii, 32, 
140, 160, 357, 400, 582, 589, 592, 594, 621, 
623, 627, 637, 657, 668, 675, 676, 679, 683, 
685-8, 694, 707, 715, 716, 717, 733, 754; 
quoted: 616, 634, 686, 687, 693, 696, 709 
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822), 152, 258, 

475, 478; quoted 474 
Shepard, Thomas (1605P-1649), quoted: 278 
Sheridan, Frances (1724-1766), 415 
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751-1816), 415 
Sherwood, Robert E. (1896-1955), 736 
Shipton, Mother (1488-C.1559), 
Shotstakovich, Dmitri (1906-1975), 547 



Shotwell, James Thomson (1874-1965), 711 

Sibelius, Jean (1865-1957), 547 

Siddons, Sarah, (Mrs.) (1755-1831), 421, 422 

Signac, Paul (1863-1935), 646 

Sidgwick, Alfred (1850-1943), 668 

Sidney, Sir Philip (1554-1586), 87, 155, 161, 

162 
Sieyes, Emanuel Joseph (1748-1836), 423; 

quoted: 429 
Sighele, Scipio (1868-1913), 823 
Simmel, Georg (1858-1918), 668 
Simon, Richard (1638-1712), 359, 362 
Sinclair, Upton (1878-1968), 624 
Sisley, Alfred (1839-1899), 643 
Sismondi, Jean Simonde de (1773-1842), 456, 

457, 588; quoted: 456 
Sitte, Camillo (1843-1903), 698 
Sitwell, Dame Edith (1887-1964), 738 
Skeltonjohn (1460-1529), quoted: 5 
Sloan, John (1871-1951), 679 
Smith, Adam (1723-1790), 200, 422, 456, 524 
Smith, Joseph (1805-1844), 471 
Smith, Sydney (1771-1845), 529-34, 540; 

quoted: 530, 531, 532, 533 
Smollett, Tobias George (1721-1799), 392, 

560,815 
Socinius, Faustus (1539-1604), 31 
Socinius, Laelius (1525-1562), 31 
Socrates (470P-399 B.C.), 12, 52, 453, 514 
Sologub (Fyodor Teternikov) (1863-1927), 625 
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 319 
Sorel, Albert (1842-1906), 482 
Sorel, Georges (1847-1922), xiv, 688 
Souday, Paul (1868P-1931), quoted: 700 
Sousa, John Philip (1854-1932), 678-9 
Southey, Robert (1774-1843), 431, 437, 462, 

466 
Spalding, Julian, quoted: 784 
Spencer, Herbert (1820-1903), 570, 571, 572, 

589 
Spengler, Oswald (1880-1936), xvi, 588, 

652-4, 743 
Spenser, Edmund (c. 1552-1 599), 87, 154, 161 
Spinoza, Baruch (1632-1677), 258, 314, 347, 

359, 360, 362, 471 
Spontini, Gasparo (1774-1851), 461, 496 
Sprat, Bishop Thomas, (1635-1713), 211, 282 
Stael, Germaine de (1766-1817), 450-2, 453; 

quoted: 451 
Stafford, William, quoted: 777 
Stahl, Georg Ernst (1660-1734), 377 
Stallo, J(ohann) B(ernhard) (1823-1900), 632 
Stamitz, Johann (1717-1757), 419 
Stamitz, Karl (1745-1801), 419 



Index <^d 849 



Stanislavsky, Konstantin (1863-1938), 675-6, 

736; quoted: 676 
Stanley, Henry Morton (1841-1904), 599 
Steele, Sir Richard (1672-1729), 310; quoted 

242 
Steichen, Edward (1879-1973), 649 
Stein, Gertrude (1874-1946), 720, 745 
Stein, Leo (1872-1947), 798; quoted: 669 
Steffens, Lincoln (1866-1936), 595 
Stendhal, (Henri Beyle) (1783-1842), 453, 467, 

475-6, 477, 478, 480, 484, 492, 498, 560, 

754; quoted: 466, 476, 483 
Stengel, General Karl von (fl. 19C), 693 
Stephen, James Fitzjames (1829-1894), 573, 

654; quoted: 574 
Stephen, Sir Leslie (1832-1904), 627 
Stephenson, George (1781-1848), 539, 540 
Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768), 132, 314, 409, 

410,411 
Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850-1894), 629, 

636; quoted: 510 
Stieglitz, Alfred (1864-1946), 649 
Stirner, Max (Kaspar Schmit) (1806-1856), 

556,819 
Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 728 
Stopes, Marie (1880-1958), 734 
Storm, Theodor (1817-1888), 565 
Story, William Wetmore (1819-1895), 604 
Stowe, Harriet Beecher (1811-1896), 565 
Strachey, Lytton (1880-1932), 651, 709, 737 
Stradivarius, Antonius (c. 1644-1 737), 389 
Strauss, David Friedrich (1808-1874), 572 
Strauss, Richard (1864-1949), 547, 676, 701, 

707; quoted: 707 
Stravinsky, Igor (1882-1971), 392, 677, 678, 

701, 721; quoted: 729 
Strindberg, August (1849-1912), 616, 625, 675; 

quoted: 632 
Sublet de Noyers (fl. 17C), 338, 339 
Sudermann, Hermann (1857-1928), 616 
Sue, Eugene (1804-1857), 478 
Sullivan, Sir Arthur (1842-1900), 612 
Sullivan, Louis (1856-1924), 601, 605, 648, 

725; quoted: 601 
Sully, Duke of (1560-1641), 185, 241 
Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of (1517P-1547), 

162 
Swedenborg, Emanuel (1688-1772), 376 
Sweet, Henry (1845-1912), 657 
Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745), 123, 132, 231, 

309, 310, 311, 322-5, 328, 409, 452, 533, 

767; quoted: 273, 322 
Swinburne, Algernon Charles (1837-1909), 

575, 576, 625, 627 



Sydenham, Thomas (1624-1689), 330 
Symonds John Addington (1840-1893), 117 
Synge, John Millington (1871-1909), 736 

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius (c.55-c.l20), 9,45, 

107, 108, 126, 235, 384, 503, 577, 579; 

quoted 803 
Taft, Helen Herron (1861-1943), 696 
Taglioni, Maria (1804-1884), 499, 516 
Tailhade, Laurent (1854-1919), 620, 622 
Talleyrand-Perigord, Charles de (1754-1838), 

442,449 
TaUis, Thomas (c. 1510-1 585), 161 
Tarbell, Ida (1857-1944), 595, 596 
Tarde, Gabriel de (1843-1904), 823 
Tasso, Torquato (1544-1595), 47, 53, 146, 

148-52, 153, 157, 174, 258, 348, 378, 474; 

quoted: 147, 150 
Tate, Nahum (1652-1715), 326 
Tawney, R.H. (1880-1962), 36-7, 701 
Taylor, Edward (c.l 645-1 729), 406 
Taylor, Jeremy (1613-1667), 39, 41 
Taylor, John (1580-1653), quoted: 271 
Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilich (1840-1893), 547 
Telesio, Bernardino (1509-1588), 192 
Tell, William (legendary), 427 
Temple, Sir William (1629-1699), 323; quoted: 

297 
Tencin, Claudine Guerin de (1682-1745), 378 
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord (1809-1892), 519, 520, 

540, 561, 562, 579, 701, 702; quoted: 571, 

580 
Terence, Publius (c.185-c.159 B.C.), 165 
Tertullian, Quintus Septimus (160?-?230), 15 
Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811-1863), 

563 
Thalberg, Sigismond (1812-1871), 499 
Theophrastus (d.c.287 B.C.), 351 
Theremin, Leon (1896-1993), 729 
Thibault, Jacques (1844-1924), 703 
Thompson, Randall (1899-1984), 738 
Thomson, James (1700-1748), 326 
Thomson, James (1834-1882), 627 
Thomson, Virgil (1896-1989), 738 
Thoreau, Henry David (1817-1862), 505, 506 
Thorvaldsen, Bertel (1770-1844), 460, 461 
Thou,Jacques-Auguste de (1553-1617), 

quoted: 273 
Thucydides (c.460-c.400 B.C.), 57 
Tichborne, Chidiock (1558-1586), 162 
Ticknor, George (1791-1871), 504-5 
Tieck, Ludwig (1773-1853), 395, 516 
Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista (1693-C.1769), 70, 

336 



850 <^> Index 



Tiffany, Louis Comfort (1848-1933), 645 

Tirso de Molina (1571P-1648), 334 

Titian, (Tiziano Vecellio) (1488-1576), 82, 96, 

334 
Tocqueville, Alexis de (1805-1859), 386, 435, 

537-9; quoted: 538, 539, 549, 584 
Tolstoy, Leo (1828-1910), 112, 543, 565, 625, 

671-2, 701 
Tonnies, Ferdinand (1855-1936), 651 
Torricelli, Evangelista (1608-1647), 205 
Toulouse-Lautrec, H.M.R. de (1864-1901), 649 
Tourte, Francois (1747-1835), 389 
Townshend, Charles (1674-1738), 382 
Toynbee, Arnold J. (1889-1975), xvi, 652-4, 

701 
Traherne, Thomas (1637P-1674), 356 
Trajan, Roman Emperor (98-177), 328 
Travis, David, 784 

Trevelyan, George Macaulay (1876-1962), 482 
Treviso, Girolardo da (1497-1549), quoted: 

200 
Trilling, Lionel (1905-1975), 820 
Trollope, Anthony (1815-1882), 563, 627 
Trollope, Frances (1780-1863), 504; quoted: 

517 
Trotsky, Leon (1879-1940), 747 
Trumbull, John (1750-1831), 406; quoted: 397 
Tull, Jethro (1674-1741), 382 
Turgenev, Ivan (1818-1833), 556 
Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, (1727-1781), 

371,382,450 
Turner, Joseph Mallard William (1775-1851), 

512, 513, 533, 567, 646; quoted: 513 
Tweed, William Marcy (1823-1878), quoted: 

799 
Tyler, Royall (1757-1826), 406 
Tylor, Edward Burnett (1832-1917), 636 
Tynan, Kenneth, 753 
Tyndale, William (1492P-1536), 354 
Tyndalljohn (1820-1893), 571, 575 
Tzara, Tristan (1896-1963), 719; quoted: 731 

Urmstone, John (fl. 18C), 318 
Ussachevsky, Vladimir (1911-1990), 730 
Uzanne, Octave (1852-1931), 714 

Vaihinger, Hans (1852-1933), 668 

Valery, Paul (1871-1945), 448 

Valla, Lorenzo (1406-1457), 54, 56-7, 245 

Vanbrugh, Sir John (1664-1726), 356 

Van Dieren, Bernard (1887-1936), 496, 730 

Van Gogh, Vincent (1853-1890), 646 

Varese. Edgard (1883-1965), 728 

Vasari, Giorgio (1511-1574), 66; quoted: 69 



Vauban, Sebastien Le Prestre de (1633-1707), 

313-4; quoted: 313 
Vaucanson, Jacques de (1709-1782), 371, 421 
Vaughan, Henry (1622-1695), 356 
Vaux, Clotilde de (1815-1846), 509 
Veblen, Thorstein (1857-1929), 594, 595 
Vecchi, Orfeo (c. 1540-1 604), 156 
Vegetius (fl. 385), 259 
Velasquez, Diego (1599-1660), 75, 81, 105, 

334, 335 
Velikovsky, Immanuel (1895-1979), 271 
Verdi, Giuseppe (1813-1901), 176, 567, 612, 

637, 638 
Verhaeren, Emile (1855-1916), 648 
Verlaine, Paul (1844-1896), 620, 623 
Vermeer, Jan (1632-1675), 336 
Verne, Jules (1828-1905), 565, 599, 683 
Vernet, Joseph (1714-1789), 391 
Veronese, Paolo (1528-1588), 71; quoted: 76-7 
Very, Jones (1813-1880), 505 
Vesalius, Andreas (1514-1564), 114, 196 
Vespucci, America (fl. 19C), 104 
Vespucci, Amerigo (1451-1512), 104, 118 
Vico, Giambattista (1668-1744), 218, 314-6, 

380, 416; quoted: 315 
Victoria, Queen of Great Britain (1819-1901), 

244, 612-3, 626-7, 783; quoted: 555 
Victoria, Tomas Luis de (1540-1611), 159; 

quoted: 161 
Vidocq, Eugene Francois (1775-1857), 449, 450 
Vigee-Lebrun, Marie Anne Elisabeth 

(1755-1842), 460 
Vigny, Alfred de (1797-1863), 478, 479, 492, 

515,541 
Villars, Marshall Claude de (1653-1734), 321 
Villehardouin, Geoffroi de (1150?-?1218), 235 
Villon, Francois (1431-1463), 229, 480 
Viollet le Due, Eugene Emmanuel 

(1814-1879), 513 
Virchow, Rudolf (1821-1902), 578-9, 617 
Virgil (70-19 B.C.), 47, 48, 64, 347, 348, 356, 

373, 514 
Virgin Mary, the, 22-3, 41, 151, 201 
Vitoria, Francisco de (1486P-1546), 110, 111, 

179 
Vivekenanda, Swami (1863—1902), quoted: 664 
Vives, Juan Luis (1492-1540), 110 
Volland, Sophie (1716-1784), 378 
Volney, Constantin Francois, Comte de 

(1757-1820), 428 
Volta, Count Alessandro (1745-1827), 375, 

439, 440 
Voltaire, (Arouet, Francois Marie) (1694-1778), 

xiv, 32, 42, 140, 142, 152, 216, 256, 258, 294, 



Index <^> 851 



341, 344, 360, 364, 366, 369, 371, 372, 
378-80, 381, 392, 395, 399, 410, 420, 423, 
480, 481, 685, 740; quoted: 361, 384, 790 

Voss, Johann Heinrich (1751-1826), 208 

Vouet, Simon (1590-1649), 339 

Wagner, Richard (1813-1883), 51, 176, 226, 

416, 469, 495, 497, 499, 548, 558, 567, 576, 

637-8, 639, 662, 671, 677, 679 
Waldseemuller, Martin (1470?-?1522), 104 
Wallace, Alfred Russel (1823-1913), 571 
Wallenstein, Albrechtvon (1583-1634), 176 
Waller, Edmund (1606-1687), 189 
Walpole, Horace (1717-1797), 122, 410 
Walpole, Robert (1676-1742), 316-7, 321 
Walras, Antoine Auguste (1801-1866), 665 
Walton, Sir William Turner (1902-1983), 738 
Ward, Lester (1841-1913), 651 
Warens, Louise Elenore, Baronne de 

(1700-1762), 383 
Warhol, Andy (1926-1987), 723, 790; quoted: 

791 
Warner, Charles Dudley (1829-1900), 591 
Warton, Joseph (1722-1800), 409 
Warton, Thomas (1728-1790), 409 
Washington, George (1732-1799), 84, 392, 

398, 423, 459, 460; quoted: 403 
Watt, James (1736-1819), 205, 375 
Watteau, Jean Antoine (1684-1721), 391 
Watts, Sir Isaac (1674-1748), 330-1 
Webb, Beatrice Potter (1858-1943), 686, 687 
Webb, Sidney (1859-1947), 686, 687 
Webb, Walter Prescott (1888-1963), 605 
Weber, Carl Maria von (1786-1826), 176 
Weber, Ernst (1901-1996), 659 
Weber, Max (1864-1920), 36, 279, 651, 701 
Weber, Max (1881-1961), 650 
Webern, Anton von (1883-1945), 729 
Webster, John (1580P-1634), 82 
Wedekind, Franz (1864-1918), 625 
Wedgwood, Josiah (1730-1795), 586 
Weelkes, Thomas (c. 1575-1 623), 161 
Weill, Kurt (1900-1950), 328 
Weiner, Dora, 816 
Weininger, Otto (1 880-1 903), 626 
Weismann, August (1834-1914), 632 
Weiss, Peter Ulrich (1916-1982), 448 
Wellington, Duke of (1769-1852), 436, 478, 

539, 540 
Wells, H(erbert) G(eorge) (1866-1946), 465, 

625,683-^,701,733,736,752 
Wendell, Barrett (1855-1921), 679 
Wesley, Charles (1707-1788), 312, 330, 404, 409 
Wesley, John (1703-1791), 33, 311, 312, 330, 404 



Wesley, Samuel (1662-1735), 311, 312 
West, Benjamin (1730-1813), 405, 460 
West, Dame Rebecca (1892-1983), 754 
Whewell, William (1794-1866), 544, 808 
Whistler, James McNeill (1834-1903), 646; 

quoted: 622 
White, Andrew D (1832-1918), 606 
White, Gilbert (1720-1793), 506 
Whitefield, George (1714-1770), 404 
Whitehead, Alfred North (1889-1975), 192, 

230; quoted: 668, 669 
Whitman, Walt (1819-1892), 217, 506, 538, 

584,715,822 
Wieland, Christoph Martin (1733-1813), 451 
Wigman, Mary (1886-1973), 738 
Wilberforce, Samuel (1805-1873), 572 
Wild, Jonathan (1682P-1725), 309 
Wilde, Oscar (1856-1900), 599, 604, 612, 615, 

620-2, 623, 626, 634, 695; quoted: 616, 644, 

826 
Wilder, Thornton (1897-1975), 736 
Wilkins, John (1614-1672), 282 
William the Conqueror (1028-1087), 228, 240 
William II of Germany (1859-1941), 301, 690, 

699 
William III of England (1650-1702), 309, 310, 

319,347,363 
Williams, Gluyas, 756 

Williams, Roger (c.l 603-1 683), 186, 278, 279 
Wilson, Woodrow (1856-1924), xiv, 574, 606, 

739, 746 
Winckelmann, Johann (1717-1768), 417 
Winthropjohn (1588-1649), 174, 278, 283 
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889-1951), 440 
Wolf, Hugo (1860-1903), 678 
Wolff, Christian von (1679-1754), 366 
Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797), 458 
Woodhull, Victoria (1838-1927), 592 
Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941), 573, 627, 674, 734 
Woolsey, Judge (1877-1949), 735 
Wordsworth, William (1770-1850), 8, 164, 430, 

431, 437, 462, 469, 477, 541, 572; quoted: 

470, 786 
Wren, Sir Christopher (1632-1723), 210 
Wrong, E.M. (fl. 20C), quoted: 739 
Wundt, Wilhelm (1832-1920), 659 
Wuorinen, Charles, 730 
Wyatt, Sir Thomas (1503-1542), 162 
Wycherley, William (1640P-1716), 356 
Wycliffe, John (1320P-1384), 4, 74, 354 

Yale, Elihu (1649-1721), 318 
Yeats, William Butler (1865-1934), 513, 518, 
676,717,733,736 



852 <5^> Index 



Young, George M. (1882-1959), 582 
Young, Thomas (1773-1829), 446 



Zarlino, Gioseffe (1517-1590), quoted: 158 
Zesen, Philip von (1619-1689), 187 



Zola, Emile (1840-1902), 478, 543, 587, 624, 

630, 638, 645, 674; quoted: 624-5 
Zoroaster (fl. ca. 6C B.C.), 59 
Zweig, Stefan (1881-1942), 651, 744 
Zwingli, Huldreich (1484-1531), 15 



Index of Subjects 



NOTE. For the reader's convenience, some of the entries on large subjects have as heading the name, 
adjective, and derivative noun that go together, e.g. Liberal(s)(ism). The phrasing of each subentry then 
links up with one or another of the three forms. 

On every subject treated in this book, my obligation for advice and correction has been extensive. I 
hereby give unmeasured thanks to Henry Graff, John Lukacs, Joan Peyser, Charles Scribner III, and 
Carl Schorske. 



Abolitionism(ists), U.S., of slavery 551; of 
machinery 604, 633; French 619-20, 622, 
719; and Wagner 637 

abstraction (theme), method of 193; 196, 201, 
203, 213-4, 218, 245, 255, 373, 384, 398, 
522, 544, 554, 589, 766-7; in science 216, 
622; Lichtenberg on 440; Faust on 470; in 
criticism 511, 760; in idealism 616; in art 
622, contradictory 623; in Cubism 649, 723; 
structure in historiography 653, 768, in 
linguistics 657-8, 759-60, in anthropology 
759-60, in history of science 760; in 
common talk 769, and virtual reality 797 

Absurd, the, 12; theatre of 515, 754-5, 756; in 
science 607, 750; in criticism 621, 651; in 
war 710, in world 720, 757-8; philosophy of 
754 ff.; sign of tightness 757-8; in rule- 
making 779 

academic, term of contempt 78 

academy(ies), def. 57; Florentine 57, Pico 

attends 59; Tasso writes for 149; Swedish, of 
Science 207, 281-2; of art and science 
210-1; English Royal, of Science 210-1; 
17C French, Spanish, German, American 
21 1, 405; on Orffyreus's wheel 312; Russian 
319; of Painting and Sculpture (France) 338; 
numerous 1 8C 377-8; Dijon and Rousseau 
383; French Revolutionary 432; English 
Royal of Arts 460, 555; French, of Science 
501 



acting, 675-6; and staging 675; and Stanislavsky 
675-6, 736; outre 759; see also titles of plays 

Adamo Caduto, 53 

Adiaphorist(s), 28, 31 

administration 39; of empire 97; Cromwell and 
277; of monarchy 292, 301-2; difficult art 
426; Bonaparte a master of 447; badly 
needed 778-9 

advertising, early 206, 684; 599, 601-2, 603; by 
Mallarme 623; late 20C 684; cultural use of 
726; by public relations 785; for image 137, 
289, 785; of Desire 790 

Aeneid, The, 1 52; travestied 1 65 

aesthetics, see criticism 

Africa, epic 49; railways in 542 

Age of Louis XIV, The, 379 

Ajuan island, see Comoros 

Albigenses, 5 

alchemy 58, 65, 191, 207, 221, 282; Erasmus on 
206 

algebra, Descartes and 202; Pacioli treatise 206; 
origin of 206-7 

allegory (ies) Luther on 20, 30; Faery Queene 154; 
for masque or music 156; Pilgrim's Progress 
357; in Blake 479; in Thoreau 506; in Shaw 
717 

Alps and Sanctuaries, 635 

A Man for All Seasons, 118 

ambassadors, see diplomacy 

America(s), Spanish 93, 97, 100; discovery of 



854 <&> Index 



98 f£; in Shakespeare 103, 140; name of 
104; English colonies in 316 ff., 397 ff; in 
revolt 402 ff.; 18C culture in 404 ff; the 
"New Man" in 408 

"American Scholar, The," 505 

"Amerika," 506 

-ana{s), 349 

Anabaptists, 1 5, 1 88; in English Civil War 265 ff. 

analysis (theme), def 167; 201, 203, 213-4, 
679, 766; in tragedy 341, 353; in modern 
tongues 354; in study of texts 359; 417; in 
self-consciousness 453; 501; in science 522; 
in literature 557; in love 559; in painting 647, 
649; psycho- 662 

Anarchism xiv, Proudhon's 556; in Marx and 
Spencer 589, 630; violent 593, 630, 695 

"Anatomy Lesson, The," 114 

Anatomy of Melancholy, The, 221-24 

ancients and moderns, quarrel of 125-6, 300, 
324, 348-9; and graphic arts 349; moderns 
win 521 

Anglican(s)(ism), 26; in 20C England 40; in 
17C Virginia 277; and Oxford Movement 
471; Puseyites 532, 572; bishops' Essays 572 

Anglophile(s), 53, 361, 364, 409, 440, 497 

Angst, 30; def. 755; 757; see also guilt; sin 

anthropology (ists), 195, 316, 444, 759-60; 
physical 577 ff.; and skulls 577, 578, 579; 
and coloring 578, 579; cultural 636; new 
scope 656—7; anthroposociology 693; and 
Relativism 761-3 

anti-, xvii; anti-Laura poems 48, 51; anti-hero 
153; 344, 786; Anti-Machiavel 256; Anti- 
Christ 269; anti-elitism 428, 758; anti-art 
718, 776; meaning of 727; anti-war novels 
734; anti-colonialism 763 — 4; anti- 
Westernism 765; anti-nation 776, 

Antony and Cleopatra, 254 

Apple Cart, The, 687 

Arcadia (Sidney), 87; 155 

architecture, Protestant 26; Catholic 39; Alberti 
on 65—6; Certosa at Pavia 68; Gothic 68; 
scholarly 74; Mansart roof 173; 16C 
domestic 182-4; and fortification 206; and 
engineering 312; Shaker 404—5; and nature 
417; Ledoux on 459; inconvenient 460; 
Jefferson and 460; apartment house 493; 
Romanticist lack of 513; and the railroad 
543; of Crystal Palace 543, 555; skyscraper 
601, 605, 648; Louis Sullivan on 601; 
Richardson's 605; Cubist 648; at Columbian 
Exposition 660 ff.; Modernist 725-6 

Areopagitica, q. 262 

arithmetic, on paper 191, 200; 228 



Armory Show, 648, 649 

army(ies), mercenary 93, 95, 320, 407; 

multinational 93, 95, 630, 694; infantry 104; 
cavalry 104, 105; Swiss tactics 104; 
invincible Spanish 178; medieval 226; 
artillery 231, 241, 243; monarch's alone 241, 
essential 243; "Model" 264; Mutiny Act 363; 
and music 407 

ars nova, 78; in music 157, 160 

ArsPoetica (Horace), 68, 165 

art(s), and morality 67, 145, 616-7, 628; 20C 
autonomous 67, 621, 640; periods of great 
67-8; theory and 68, 646; intention in 68; 
for art's sake 71, 474, 566, 616-7; called fine 
75; classics local 109; "creation" in 152, 787; 
medieval 231; and life 416, 556; 
Romanticism redef. 474, 616—7, pure 621; 
religion of 474, 616 ff.; and creativity 474, 
621, 787-8; and love 476; and nature 480, 
509; the ugly in 480; shocks public 628, 647, 
673; so-called Abstract 650, 723; as 
destroyer 651, 790; international 651, 683, 
698; Nietzsche on 671; Tolstoy on 672; and 
war 702, 706-7, 708; disturbing 713; 
"interesting" 713; elements only 718, 723-4; 
anti-718, parody of 718, 724, 730, 731; 
varieties of 722; free form in 722; teaches 
727; "installations" 729; experimental 730; 
publicity about 730-1, 791; sophomoric 
731-2; surfeit of 788, 790; Conrad def. of 
791; see also decorative arts, liberal, see 
Humanism; see also pure; theory 

artist(s), social type 65, 76, 88; and craftsman 
75; menial or "domestic" 75, 80-1, 182; sign 
the work 75; independent contractor 75; 
handles matter 77; apprentice 77; self- 
expression and 88-9; called creator 152; 
Hugo poem on 155; in Egyptian expedition 
443 ff.; 19C galaxy of 465 ff; archetypal 
500; in Bohemia 576, 638; not-for-profit 
615; aesthete 620-1, 651, 624, 638, 670; 
Wagner vindicates 638; pre-1914 698; and 
tradesmen 698; used in war 702-3; prophet 
713 ff.; solipsist 720;7 "everyone an artist" 
724, 764; aesthetics of 742; 

asceticism, Puritan exaggerated 37, 288; 

humanists reject 60; def. 60; Rabelais attacks 
129, 131; "dying to the world" 134 

assassination(s), at turn of 19C 592 ff, 630, 
695, 697 

astrology, xviii; 58, 65, 191, 193, 221, 282; 
Luther on 19; Ficino, Copernicus, Kepler 
use 58; 65 

astronomy, Copernicus on 19; 192-3; 193; 



Index <^> 855 



Galileo's 40; the Pleiades 163; motion of 
Mars 192; the circle in 192, 196; 228, 405; 
Comte and 509 

atheism(ists), 54, 60, 127, 249, 282; Moliere's 
344-5, 347; Shaftsbury on 361; and Diderot 
374; 18C 378, 465; in 19C 556, 627; and 
Nietzsche 670; existential 755 

Athens, ancient art city 71, 173, 226, 379, 514 

Aureng-Zebe, 356 

Authoress of the Odyssey, The, 635 

authority, in thought and opinion 203-4, 229; 
as governing force 239, 301; loses force 594, 
783 

autobiography(ies), Petrarch's 50; Cellini's 66; 
brief in Montaigne 134; Bunyan's 134, 357; 
Saint Augustine's 1 34; Christina of Sweden's 
208; Gibbon's 321; Cibber's 326; Saint- 
Simon's 343; Saint-Simon on his own 355; 
Franklin's 407; Restif 's 448; Vidocq's 449; 
Hazlitt's 511-2; see also Confessions 

Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, The, 585 

aviation, see vehicles 

bagatelle, la, def. 309 

balance of power 303; a system 307, 521, 690, 

703 
ballet, -pantomime 328; 17C French 328, 329; 

18C 387; 19C 499, 515-6; Russian 677 
banking 172, 320 ff. 

baptism, cleanses of sin 30, 387; of Clovis 252 
Barber of Seville, The, 399, 401, 402, 414 
Baroque, art 39; despised 143; and Bernini 209; 

features of 210, 333, 336, 340, 387; in 

fortresses 312; etymology 333; and 

classicism 336, 357; at Versailles 337; in 

playwriting 342; and Saint-Evremond 347; 

Saint-Simon's Memoirs as 355; opera 388; 

music 388-9, 467, 546-7 
Barzun, Seigneurie de, 294 
Basic English 758-9 
Basilikon Doron, 248 
Basques, 93, 774 
Bastille, la, Voltaire in 361; stormed 423; 

Beaumarchais dismantles 424; C.J. Fox on 

431;Day:Julyl4 433 
baths, see hygiene; Lyon; Puritan 
battle(s), Pavia 94; Miihlberg 96, 104; Lepanto 

104; Agincourt decided by heralds 227; 

Lexington 398; Somme 705; Verdun 705 
Bay Psalm Book, The, 174 
Beagle, the, 503, 571 
beds, see house 
Beggar's Opera, The, John Gay's 328, 406; Kurt 

Weill's 328 



belle epoque, 454, 651, 683, 698-9 

Benvenuto Cellini, 496 

Bible, xviii, 4, 10, 12, 19; translated 10, 12, 32, 
33, 41, 54; a literature 27-8; 357-8; Vulgate 
version 38; Trent on 40; and literalism 40; 
and higher criticism 54, 359-60, 572, 664; 
subjects for painters 70, for musicians 327, 
388; in New England 174; Newton on 197; 
Genesis 212, 360; on kings 249, 362; 
English Puritans use 269-70; and English 
prose 354; King James version 354; core 
tradition 573; 667; new interest 743; see also 
Sarah 

Berlin, 395 

Big Bertha, 705; and air raids 705 

biography, contradictions in 136; medieval 234; 
Boswell's not a 41 1 ; debunking 737; semi- 
fictional 737; psychologizing 792 

birth control, see sexuality, contraceptives 

Blacks, in U.S. 584; and Supreme Court 592, 
763-4; men of talent 592; Jim Crow laws 
592, 604; create Jazz 679; belated rights by 
law 763-4 

Blithedale Romance, The, 524 

Bohemia, 576; in opera 638 

bonfire of the vanities, 55 

Book(s), coming of 4-5; features of printed 
60-1 ; affect reading habits 61 , 63, 148; 
publishers of 61-2; bookkeeping 66, 206; 
blurbs 62; copyright 62, 65, 130, 146; 
dedication of 62; use of book for part 63; in 
Rabelais 131; circulate in manuscript 146, 
347; medieval 231, 234; read aloud 235, 342; 
library, royal 338, revolutionary 432, 
computerized 796; in 20C 658, bookshop 
784 

Book of Common Prayer, The, 354, 355 

Book of Life, The, q. 58 

boredom, xvi, 21, 145, 153, 158, 165, 189, 215, 
410, 574, 629, 637, 788, 789; antidotes to 79, 
153 

bourgeoisie), patrons of painting 72; lack of in 
Spain and Russia 106; "bourgeois values" 
106, 173, 206-7; def. 243-4; "rising" 243, 
268, 534; support monarchs 243, 245, 247, 
396; buy titles 244, 352, 399; Saint-Simon on 
245, 295; in power under Louis XTV 292 ff.; 
first novel about 380; drama 381, 400; 
patrons of music 420; cuisine 454; artists' 
hostility to 474, 493, 617; in 1830 
revolutions 493-4; and parliaments 528; 
Flaubert on 558, 561; harried by techne 603; 
reborn 713; and Proust 716; novels against 
733-4 



856 ^ Index 



Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Le, 345 

boy(s), drummers 84; "cabin" on ships 99; 
scouts 628 

"Bramah," 505 

Brigands, The, 396, 815 

Brothers Karama^ov, The, 769—70 

Brothers of the Common Life, 5 

Bubble(s), Mississippi 309, 320; South Sea 
321—2; see also John Law; tulips 

Buda-Pest 1900, 698 

bundling, see sexuality 

bureaucracy, regulation by 126, 172, 777, 779; 
Venetian 171; in nation state 241, 243 ff.; 
centralization through 255; under Colbert 
292 ff.; akin to etiquette 341; in 18C France 
423; burden in welfare state 778-9 

Burgundy, 93, 94, 95 

Cabbala, the, 55, 59, 196 

Calendar, Gregorian 173; French 
Revolutionary 432; see also time 

Calligrammes, 648 

Calvinism, on Real Presence 29, in Scotland 
and Switzerland 36; 334, 357; and Rousseau 
35, 383, and Byron 35 

Candide, 366, 379, 380, 411 

"canon, the" (of classics), 45—46; 20C attack on 
46; Italian epics in 53; variable 109, 142 

Canterbury Tales, The, 61 

capitalism), 36-7, 206, 279; evils of 457, 671, 
686, 688; Das Kapital 588; "robber barons" 
593; Standard Oil Company and 595; Wells 
on 684; seen as failing 747; see also 
economics; money 

Carmen, 638, 671 

Carmina Burana, 229 

Castle ofOtranto, The, 410 

casuistry, def 41; and Jesuits 210, 219, 296 

cathedral(s), towers of Chartres 48; Notre- 
Dame (Paris) 61; Gothic 68; 230 Reims 251 
ff; St. Denis 305 

Catholic(s)(ism), in 16C England xviii; church 
in 16C 4, 1 1 ; def. 24; esthetic appeal 26; self 
reform 38 ff; union with Orthodox 57; 
favors intellectuals 59; Counter 
Reformation 70; in Rabelais 129; in Thirty 
Years' War 177—8; and Christina of Sweden 
209; and James II of England 309-10; fight 
in Vendee 428, 434; dispossessed 431-2; 
19C revival 471 ff; emancipation 529; errors 
condemned by 592—3; and Kulturkampf 
617-18; and confession 662; in 20C 
England 684; and Shaw 686; and humor 
743; Neo-Thomism 747; Existentialists 757 



censorship, see printing 

Chaconne (Bach), 389 

Chants deMaldoror, Les, 619 

character(s), discovered by Montaigne 135; 

variability of 135, 136; distinct from type 

135-6, 140; in Shakespeare 140-1, 516, 517; 

how created 141; La Bruyere's book of 

351-2; Theophrastus's 351; in music 418 
Chautauqua, 607 
Childe Harold, 485, 715 
Chivalry, Charles V and 92; conception of war 

94, of love 233-4; knighthood 233; code of 

manners 245; De Stael on 451; Byron's 

Childe 485 
cholera, in 1830 497 
Christmas, prohibited 22 
Cid,Le, \S5 
city(ies), 182; in American colonies 317; and 

rural life 384, 386, 537; Restif on 448, 471; 

ill-governed 593, 599; better life in 605; 

vacation from 636, 637; planning 698; in 

Ulysses 715; late 20C 782; see also cities by 

name 
City of the Sun, The, 117 ff. 
"Civil Disobedience," 506 
civil war(s), see war 
Civilisation and Its Discontents, 663 
Civilisation, Its Cause and Cure, xvi, 625, 628, 

636 
Classic(al)(ism), usage 400, 451, 468; Goethe 

on 514; exhausted 521; recurrent term 558; 

see also Neo-classicism 
clerihew, 737 
clothing, see costume 
college(s), see university 
Colloquies (Erasmus), 13, 206 
Colonialism, see empire; imperialism 
Colt pistol 555, 605 
Comedie Humaine, La, 560, 716 
comedy, of sexuality 132; def. 164; and social 

rank 344, 345; Restoration 356, 533; 

sentimental 400, 415; late 19C 615-6, 685; 

intellectual 685, 717; of life 732 
Comedy of Errors, The, q. 103 
commedia dell' arte, 165 
Commonwealth, in More 1 18; in Bodin 245; 

17C government of England 263, 264, 286; 

of Oceana 268 
Commune (Paris, 1870), Courbet and 566; 587- 

q. 588 
Communism, 127; in Utopias 118 ff.; in The 

Tempest VIA; in cold war 276; in Marx 249, 

588-9, his Manifesto 549, 588, 747; in French 

Revolution 428, 434; Shaw and 687; in 



Index <^> 857 



Russia 707, 763; in wartime 710; in U.S. 745; 

in the arts 747; in Central Europe 746; 

world-wide 747; in the Far East 764; and 

pseudo democracy 773 
Comoros islands, 775 
compassion, 778, 787 
computer(s), and libraries 796; internetted 797; 

rebuked 797; errors by 801 
Comus, 188 
Confessions, The, of Saint Augustine 134; of 

Rousseau 387, 420; see also autobiography 
conscientious objector(s), see war 
Conservative(ism), 74, 511-2, 526; Tory Party 

529, 535; since late 19C 631; party name 

688-9 
constitution(s), United States 363; 364, 383, 

508, 529, 537, and Founding Fathers 761; 

division of powers 364; English 364; for 

Corsica and Poland (Rousseau) 385; making 

of 423, political skill in 426; in late 1 8C 

France 431, in 19C 548; 19C demand for 

519 ff.; German (1848) 549; The English 

(Bagehot) 582; 
Contes Drolatiques, 132, 480 
copyright, see book 
Corinne, 450, 451 
Coriolanus, ISA 
coronation, of Charles V 93; English claims in 

239; French ritual 251; claims to north lands 

253 
Corsica, 242; Rousseau and 385 
Corydon, 626 
Cosmos, The, 502 
costume, 95, 288, 325, 341, 478; and cosmetics 

115; 184; subdued 189; wearing mask 188, 

308; 17C theatrical 341; in painting 392; 

demotic 434, 781-2; the dandy's 498; early 

19C 498; troubadour 523; and corset 628; 

for sports 628; in Wagner 637; and Shaw 

686; ragged on purpose 781-2; see also hair 
Council, of Trent, 38-40, 115, 174; Vatican 592 
Courtier, The, 84, 85-6, 88, 123 
Creation, The, 419,640 
crime, of the queen's necklace 421; study of 

652; at turn of 19C 696; Caillaux murder 

696—7; murther and wergeld 762; and relative 

guilt 762; in late 20C 776; white-collar 788; 

by youthful gangs 794 
crime fiction, 562, 630, 739-41, 742; see also 

Raffles; Sherlock Holmes 
criticism), of art 71; and variable fame 109, 

142; "whirligig of taste," 142, 189, 325, 336; 

by analysis 167; creates social type 167; 

aesthetic(s) in 167, 416, 562, -ism 599, 



620-1, 624, 651, 670; theories of 299, 
Dryden as 357; Burke's 417; Hazlitt's 
510-12, Poe's 562; Lowell's 584; of life 617; 
the aesthete as 620, 621; period of 621; 
Deconstruction as 621, 651; samples of 791 

Crowd, The, q. 652 

Crowning of Poppea, The, 175, 176, 177 

Crusades, 169, 227, 503; women during 232 

Cubism, 647-8, 649, 679, 683, 766 

cuisine, see gastronomy 

cult(s), suicidal xvi; 32; of the new 78, 157, 160, 
415, 717; see also sects 

culture, described ix; western xiii; uses of term 
xiv; the two cultures xiv, 68, 79, 217; culture 
wars xiv; def. xv; high xv, 800; changed by 
intercourse 123; rise and fall of 380; 
Rousseau on 383; a tight web 436; for 
anthropologists 656—7; resurgent 800 

Cyrano deBergerac, 611—2 

dachshund, 709 

Dada, 718-9, 720-1, 731-2, 737, 757 

dance(s), 158—9; of Death 161; around 
Maypole 188; in masque 188; list of 17C 
188; waltz 188, 500; Taglioni's 499, 515; 
adopted in 19C 500; and Russian Ballet 677; 
after 1920 737-8 

dandy, the 498 

Dan ton's Death, 515 

Daughter of Time, The, 122 

David Copperfield, 553 

Death of a Salesman, 132, 343 

decadence, def. xvi; 12, 132, 315; 18C 371, 418, 
454, 718; of ancien regime 420; late 19C 
617-8; French periodical 620; and language 
622; and Wagnerism 637; and Great War 
713; failure of nerve 757; from stasis 781, 
but energetic 792; applicable term 798 

Decameron, The, 86, 145 

Declaration(s), of Rights (English) 362, 363; of 
American Independence 375, 396 ff., 407, 
456, in literature 505; of the Rights of Man 
423, 430, 457, 458, 489; of Human Rights 
431; of Women's Rights q. 457, 547 

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The, 422 

Decline of the West, The, 744 

Deconstruction, see criticism 

decorative arts, 230-1, 337, 391, 392; 623; Art 
Deco 554, 648, 725-6; in painting 646; 

Degeneration, 618 

Deism, def. 32; forerunners of 194; 360—1; 365, 
368, 378, 465; Rousseau on 387; in French 
Revolution 433; and Romanticism 465, 470 

De I'Allemagne, 451-2 



858 q**> Index 



Delphine, 450 

democracy, 243, 246; Puritans and 264 ff; and 
patronage 338; Rousseau on 385; pure 385; 
in colonial America 398; against elites 428, 
436; Jacksonian 504, 506-7, 520; 19C 
meaning 507, 537; march of 538; social 
pressure in 538, 551; and human face 587; 
and U.S. Education 606, 610; def. 773; 
workings of clogged 778-9, 780; 
indifference to 779; television and 780; see 
also demo tics; populism 

Democracy in America, 398, 507, 537—9 

demotic (s), manners 434, casual 781; and 
creativity 474, 787-8; the term 773, applied 
778, not universal 785-6; and the 
Unconditioned 781, and Unfitting 784; 
"lifestyle" 781; choosing the low 782, 790; 
and protest 783; conglomerates 784; and 
self-doubt 785—6; compassion and 
irreverence 787; seek ease 792; concluded 
802 

De Profundis, 621 

De Rerum Novarum, 592—3 

design, of books 61-2; by Michelangelo 64; 
603, 726-7 

detective story, see crime fiction 

Devil(s), besets Luther 10, 18-19; hates music 
25; perpetual tempter 25, 58, 112, 193, 
271-2; Satanism 41, 271, 281, 282, 291, 300, 
311, 794; Pletho taken for 57; and Dr. Faust 
112, 472, 473; in Tasso 151; in Chain of 
Being 212, 213; at Black Mass 291; and the 
Wesleys 31 1 ; in love passion 475; in Faust II 
514; rehabilitated 523; in Baudelaire 559; 
Devil's Dictionary 591 ; The Devil, Tolstoy 625; 
guiding 662; in Shaw 687; in U.S. schools 
794 

Devin du Village, Le, 388 

dialogue{s), genre 63; of 'the Dead '298, 299; 
Diderot's 373 ff; Beaumarchais' 402; 
Hume's on religion 413, 422 

diary(ies), Montaigne's 80, 81, 123, 137; John 
Evelyn's 210; Pepy's 210; Scott's 483 

Dictionary (ies), of Scientific Biography 218, 222, q. 
439, 589; Bayle's Historical and Critical 295, 
360, q. 370; Voltaire's 360-1 ; Dictionnaire de 
Trevoux 370; Johnson's English 411,41 2; The 
Devil's 591 ; Oxford English 597 

Dido and Aeneas, 327 

Diet of Worms, 9-10 

Digression(s) on Word(s), Man,Woman, 
Teenager 82-5; esprit, geist, spirit 220-1; 
Romanticism 467; pragmatism 666—9; see 
also Relativism 760-3 



diplomacy, early modes 49, 75, 172; Venetians 

formalize 172-3; Rubens and 334-5; G.P 

Marsh and 597; preceding 1914 689 ff. 
Discipline, The (Geneva), 35, 108 
Discourse on Method, 201, 210 
diversity, xv, 4; Henry Adams on 40; in Middle 

Ages 225; bothersome 272; verbal fetish 785 
Divine Comedy, The, 164, 560, 562 
divine right, of kings x, 248, 363, 364; of 

peoples 250; see also king 
Doge, see Venice 
Doll's House, A, 553 
Donation of Constantine 54, 56 
Don Giovanni, 419; travestied 759 
Don Juan, Moliere's 344; Byron's 358, 486, 612; 

Mozart's 419; Shaw's 687 
Don Quixote, 1 1 1-2; interpreted 124; model of 

Hudibras 358; 7 40 
Doppelgdnger, 470, 473 
"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," 629 
drama, see theater 
drink(s), beer 20; tea 102; chocolate 102; coffee 

102, 342; in Rabelais 129, 130; port wine 

329; bourbon 423; whiskey 544; gin 544; 

rum 592; English liquor law 592; cocktail 

738 
drug(s), Paracelsus on 198; Burton on 223, 224; 

addiction 629; and sexuality 756; 

criminalized 776 
dueling, 185-6; duellum 228; nation prohibits 

241-2; replaces blood feud 242, 256 
Dynasts, The, 676-7 

ecology, xvii; father of 597 

economic(s), 268, 279, 292, 293, 313, 324; 
classical 61, 299, 371, 381, 382, 456, 554, 
778; its two names 296; Adam Smith's 413; 
Kant and 471; Sismondi's 456-7; theory of 
value 457, 588; laws in error 524-5, 526, 
588; and 1848 548; and Bagehot 581-2; 
Marx's 588, 638, 686; Panic of 1873 592, and 
later 593; Veblen's 594; Economic Man 36, 
525, 665; marginal use 665; and war 693; 
fallibility of 768; demands on state 778; 
tycoonery 800; see also capitalism 

Economic Consequences of the Peace, 705 

Edict of Nantes, 301 

Edinburgh Review, 531 

education, by travel 80; in Utopias 120 ff; 
women's 131, 298, 458, 475, 476, 532, 
626-7; Montaigne on 138; Rabelais on 138; 
Comenius on 181; Milton on 181; free 
public 299, 489, 627; Rousseau on 385, q. 
386, 487-9; Jefferson on 407; look-and-say 



Index <^> 859 



413; toys in 438, 487, 609; Froebel on 
487—8; kindergarten 487; perennial slogan 
488; Pestalozzi's 488; Horace Mann on 488; 
moral 573; of 19C workingmen 574; Arnold 
on 574; English act (1870) 574; U.S. higher 
606; 784-5; Ellen Key on 608; John Dewey 
on 608—9; of the disabled 609; and grammar 
658-9; paradox in 758, 793; see also school, 
university 
Education Sentimentale, L', 558, 625 
Ego(1to9),l52&. 
Egoist, The, 627 
Egypt, and slavery 172; Bonaparte and 

scientists in 442-7, and Freemasonry 433; 
hostility toward Savants 443; monuments 
445; Rosetta Stone 445—6; The Description of 
445-6; style brought back 447; 501; 
Eiffel tower, 492, 601 
"Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott," 1 8 
electricity, 18C work on 375; 19C 544; at 
Columbian Exposition 600; in the White 
House 600; effect on factory 604; and music 
729; sciences of 750 
elitism, see anti- 
emancipation (theme), xv, 35, 43, 60, 78, 88, 
766, 771; from class 88, 226; from hardships 
123; in the arts 160, 162, 299, 480, 622-3, 
644, 678, 728, 791; from religion 190, 244, 
265, 272, 556; is not freedom 279; through 
knowledge 359, 368, 371; sexual 374, 459, 
734-5, 789 ff.; Germany's 409; political 430, 
522, 534; of women 457-9, 610-1, 626-7, 
782; in schooling 488; and 19C revolutions 
520; Catholic 529; from toil 603; from 
moralism 615 ff., 626 ff.; from clothing 628, 
782; from peace routine 699 ff.; through 
gaiety 714; through obscurity 719, 720; from 
Reason 732-3, 796; from nationhood 775; 
wish of all 799, inbred 781, 783; see also 
nation; toleration; Women 
Emile, 385; condemned 387; 394, 486-8 
empire, of Charles V 93 ff, 307; British 277, 
307, 613; redef. 307; Second French 581; see 
also Napoleon I; Napoleon III 
Empiricism, scientific 266; philosophic 346-7, 
365, 366-7; 508, 509; Radical 374; see also 
Pragmatism 
encyclopedia(s), medieval 231; 18C 359; 
Chambers' 369; Britannica All; see also 
LEncyclopedie 
Encyclopedic, L', 360, 369 ff., 370, 373, 398 
engineering, 17C French 173, 293; and science 
205; and war 205; of cathedrals 230; of 
fortifications 243, 312; civil 312, 337, 598, 



726; in Faust II 514; of railroads 540 ff.; see 

also techne; Utopia 
engraving, a new art 72 
Enlightened Despot(s), in Utopias 125; in 

history 381 
Enlightenment, the, 42, 360 ff, 410, 504; 

writers of 181, 209, 360 ff, 368, 371, 382, 

423, 481; politics of in 17C England 270; 

and present ills 331; challenged 360, 395; 

personified 378; on government 425; Kant 

and 441; in action 445 
entertainment, literary genre 145; prolonged 

406; in English Regency 497—8; frequent 

736, 784; continuous 788-9 
epic, Milton's 147; Italian 147 ff, 340; def. 152; 

Lusiads 153—5; South American 154; French 

154, 379; mock genre 165, 271, 300, 326, 

358; Tomjones as 380 
Epicureanism), Lucretius and Ficino 58; view 

of nature 72-3; 190, 200; and Moliere 344; 

in La Fontaine 346; Gassendi and 346; 

Saint-Evremond 347-8; Marius the 680 
equality, Miinzer on 1 5; in Utopias 119 ff; 

humane principle 127; in monarchy 254—5; 

in English Civil War 265 ff ; in literature 

343; Rousseau on 384; Conspiracy for 428; 

theory of 381 , 435—6; between lovers 476; 

and envy 538; wartime 708; in democracy 

732; between ethnic and sex groups 764; 

maintained 801 
Erewhon, . . . Revisited, 604, 633 
Esoteric Buddhism, 664 
esprit, see Digression(s) 
Esprit des Lois, L\ 220, 295, 364 
Essqy(s), by Montaigne 32, 87, 219, 133-40; 

genre and name 134; Dr. Johnson's 412; 

Emerson's 505; Hazlitt's 510 ff.; Macaulay's 

531; and Reviews 572; Bagehot's 582 
Essay on the Customs and Manners of Nations, 

379-80, 481 
Estates General, 29; Bodin a member 246; of 

1614 248, 295; summoned again 422-3; 425, 

455 
etiquette, of courts 251; at Versailles 287 ff, 

301, 341, 351; quasi military 343; Victorian 

552-3 
eugenics, in Utopias 1 1 8 ff.; as science 694 
Europe, def. 3; Union of 94; how peopled 

100-1, 577; expansion of 103; currency 172; 

turmoil in S.E. 764; 1968 student riots 764; 

anti-Westernism 765; disunity 775; end of, 

declared 799 
Eutopia, see Utopia 
Evangelical(s), 10, 12; defeat of 1547 20; 54, 64; 



860 <^> Index 



in Rabelais 129; 262, 265; 19C "Clapham 
sect" 532, 551; see also Protestantism 

Evelina, 410, q. 415 

Everyman in His (Out of His) Humor, 135 

Evolution, Darwinism def. 24, 571 ff., 632; 
212; foreshadowed 374; stated 376-7, 445, 
455; debated 501, 570-3, 575; a catchword 
521; Natural Selection 570 ff., 582, 692; 
Social Darwinism 572, 582, 692-3; debated 
again 632; 634; in wartime 708 

Evolution Old and New, 634 

Existentialism, 30; in Pascal 216, 219, in 

Romanticism 491; in Kierkegaard 755; after 
two wars 755 ff., claim scanned 756—7 

exploration(s), 98 ff., 376, 503; by women 583; 
in Africa 599 

Expressionism, hints of 460; in painting 650; in 
drama 736 

Fabian(s), 594, 668, 683, 684, 686 

Fable of the Bees, The, 382 

fabliaux, 232 

factory, trading post 103; manufacturing plant 

375; and electricity 604; see also industry; 

machine 
Faery Queene, The, 154 
fair(s) Great Exhibition (1851) 543, 553-4, 

555; Paris 555, 601; Centennial (1876) 600; 

Columbian (1893) 600 ff.; Louisiana 

Purchase (1904) 600 
fame, 16, 109, 142, 182, 436-7 
famine(s), see food 
Fascism, 688, 707, 733, 744, 747 
Faust, Marlowe's 112; Goethe's 112, 470, 473, 

475, 483, 518; dictum 623; 715; Part II 

514-5; Gounod's 640; meaning of Faustian 

781 
Feast of Fools, 26, 227 
Federalist, The, 407 
Feminism, see women 
feudalism, and letter writing 185; def. 226 
Fideism(ists), def. 198; adherents 198; case of 

Pascal 220 
Fidelio, 447, 678 
Fifteen Joys of Marriage, The, 232 
Figaro, 112, 400, 414; see also Marriage of Figaro 
film, see motion pictures 
Finnegans' Wake, 675, 720 
flapper, 735 
Fleurs du Mai, Les, 576 
Florence, art and 53, 71; sunshine in 70; 

Leonardo painting in 79; wars beset 164; 

and opera 174; in Machiavelli's time 256-8 
Florentine History, (Machiavelli) 256 



Flower people xvi, 265, 764 

food(s), from and to New World 101-2; sugar 
102; natural 126; exotic 169; in 16-17C 
Europe 183; famines 183, Irish 1845 547, 
"Hungry Forties" 548; canned 596, 776; 
inspected 777; at all hours 782-3; see also 
gastronomy 

fool(s), 122,302 

France, 15-6; anglophile 53, 361, 364; 

engineering in 173, 206; 17C prosperity 178; 
a nation 241; needs monarch 246, a limited 
one 250; crowning of king 251 ; Clovis 252; 
and De Gaulle 285; 17C workshop of 
Europe 293; warmonger 294; 
constitution(s) of 295, 431 ff; "Two 
Frances" 297, 432, (y?>0; pays m 304; in 
Germany 305, 400; Third Republic 588, in 
danger 617-8; Vichy regime 748; 20C role 
of Clovis 776; see also French 

Frankfort School, 756 

freedom, xiv, 35; Protestant 6; German origins 
of 247, 295; natural 266; in colonial America 
279; in 17C France 294; of speech 361, 538; 
in 18C England 364; of the press 370, 758; 
in Hegel 508; in 19C agitation 522; political 
534 ff.; Mill and Stephen on 573; Bagehot 
on 582; in love 592, 638; see also 
emancipation; parliament; printing; 
toleration 

Freemasons, 196, 419, 421, 433; and French 
Revolution 432; in American colonies 432-3 

free-thinkers, in 17C 190, 220, 282, 346-8, 352, 
360; see also Epicureans 

free trade, in ideas 61; market economy 61, 
269, 299, 371, 382, 456; see also economics 

free will, see predestination 

Freien, Die, 556 

French (language), Italian influence on 86; 
Marie de Gournay on 87; cited as national 
97; Montaigne's readable 139; Rabelais' 
difficult 139; 16C vocabulary turgid 163; 
language purified 187; Pascal and 219; 
Moliere's 345-6; La Fontaine's 346; in 
Germany 393 ff.; dislocated 622, 648, 719 

Fronde, La, 173, 286, 287, 292, 308, 349 

Fugger Newsletter, The, 15, 206 

functionalism 601, 604, 725 

Fundamentalism(s), 10; in 16C 28, 40; in 20C 
Islam 28; in 20C world 40, 272, 763 

Futurism, 650, 719, 727 

gastronomy, 101; beginnings 183; progress in 
287; full-fledged 329; Brillat-Savarin's 453, 
q. 454; English maligned 454 



Index <^> 861 



General Theory oj Employment, Interest, and Money, 
768 

generality(ies), historical xvi, 46, 47, 67, 69, 74, 
143, 175, 205, 246, 288, 315, 340, 348, 368, 
370, 375, 427, 430, 433, 466 ff., 486, 497, 
528, 561, 612; list of 655-6; 717, 766 

genetic(s), tampering 138, 796; Mendel and 632 

Geneva, 34 ff., 182; university of 34, 52, 108; 
Voltaire refuge 372; and Rousseau 383; 
Geneva (Shaw) 687; see also Calvinism 

genius, difficulties of 99; Descartes' 201; and 
melancholy 222-3; unendearing traits 274; 
def. 470; art requires 474; as hero 483 

Genius of Christianity, The, 471-2 

Genoa, 169 

genre(s), oration 59, 63; dialogue 63, 299; genre 
painting 71; landscape 71; portraiture 71; 
still life 71; diary 80; masque 81, 158, 188; 
prose 87; travel book 103; novel 112; essay 
134; epic 145 ff.; the marvelous 147, 152; 
science fiction 152; opera 152, 174 ff.; 
sequence of 153; pastoral 158; private letter 
323; romance 339-40; -ana 349; table-talk 
349; maxim 350; parody 718; see also 
comedy; sonnet, theater; tragedy 

geometry, 189; expert in 191; mode of thought 
193, 194, 196; and Descartes 202; and 
Hobbes 206; and Spinoza 206, 228; and 
Lichtenberg 440; analytic 202-3; 
geometrical mind 194, 215, def. 216; in 
fortress building 312 ff.; non-Euclidian 502 

Germany(ies), 9, 15; Germania 9, 107, 126, 503; 
and nationhood 9, 241, 303, 395-6, 508; 
language 10, 187; and north trade 37; 19C 
culture of 53, 152; type of art 70; tribes in 
Europe 108, 126, 225, 295, 503; and music 
161, 390; wars fought in 177, 178, 189, 
293-4, 296; moralistic 184; many states 193, 
393; Descartes in 200; techne 231; small 
courts 381, 393 ff.; French sway 390, 393 ff., 
409, 414, 440; warmonger people 396, 508; 
anglophile 409; De Stael on 451-2; and 
American culture 504; awakening of 508; 
and Shakespeare 516; Pan-Germanism 579; 
empire 587, 593, 595; attracts scholars 604; 
rise to power 613, 617; Nietzsche on 671; 
reparations from 71 1; second world war 
763; reunification 774 

Giaour, The, 485 

Gilded Age, 591 ff., 599 

Gobelins, les, 338 

"Gold, Glory, and the Gospel," 100 

Golden Bough, The, 636 

Gothic, term of abuse 47, 68, 147, 517; art 225; 



18C pseudo 410; crippling style 513-4; see 

also cathedral; works 
Grand Cyrus, Le, 340 
Grand Guignol, 696 
Grand Inquisitor, The, 271,769-70 
Great Armada, 97 
Great chain of being, 212-3 
Great Illusion, 106, 7 10 
Great Switch, see Liberal 
Great War, see war 
Greek, knowledge of 12, 17, 45; and Platonism 

57; taught in Florence 58; Leonardo lacks 

79; in Rabelais' prose 131; drama 159, 

225-6; ancient culture 417; war of 

independence 417, 486, 514; in college 

teaching 607; word pragma 666 
Gregorian chant, 157, 161 
Grobiana, 17 
guild(s), regulation by 75, 78, 88, 371; brewers' 

waltz 188, 500; spirit in science 211; 

abolished 519 
guilt, indefinite 30; existential 755; endemic 

q. 786 
Gulliver's Travels, 132, 231, 323, q. 324, 346, 384, 

367 
gunpowder, potent 105; Montaigne on 138; 

231, 241, 243; and fortress 313 ff.; see also 

war 
Gypsies, see Romani 

Habsburgs, Charles V and kin 92 ff., their jaw 

96; Spanish branch 97; Austrian 97; in 

Thirty Years' War 177-8 
hair, wig(s) 115, 184, 288, 341; 17C ladies' 185; 

meaning old fogey 493; the dandy's 498; 

"political" in riots 764-5, in demotic life 781 
Hamlet, the hero 4; the play 9, 249; the text 

garbled 254; not vacillating 254; Dryden on 

356; in modern dress 736 
Hanover(ians), 240, 393 
Heartbreak House, 687, 716, 717 
Heptameron, The, 86-7 
Hernani, riot over q. 493, 496 
Hidden Hand, The, q. 710 
Higher criticism, 54, 359-60; German and 

French 572; see also Sarah 
Hints on Etiquette, 551 
history, cultural ix, 299, in Macaulay 568; x-xi; 

the past opposed xiii; record-keeping xviii; 

sense of 47, 64, 234, 246, 250, 379, 801; 

method of 54, 299, 379, 380; Valla and 57; 

painting likened to 70; in Montaigne 136; in 

Middle Ages 234-5, 245; Bodin on 246; 

Baudoin on 247; Burckhardt on q. 254; 



862 q**> Index 



economic cause 264; single cause 264, 570, 
653-4; method of 299, 379, 380; Vico on 
314-16; 380; philosophy of 315, 484, 508, 
570, 653-4, 768; Voltaire's 379-80; national 
380, 481-2; royal patrons of 380; 
Romanticism and 466, 481-2; and Scott 
482; Napoleon on 482; Hegel on 484, 508, 
588; genetic fallacy 502; and Hawthorne 
506; and the novel 557 ff; 19C vogue of 
568-70; theory of 568-70, error in 569; 
pessimism in 570; Marx's 588-9; and 
sociology 652-3; Annales school 652 ff.; and 
science 652—4; no causes, conditions 654; 
generalities in 655-6; Lamprecht on 656; 
and nationalism 692; and Relativism 761-3; 
H. Adams on 768; character in 20C 775; no 
longer prized or taught 775 

History of the Standard Oil Company, 595 

holidays, religious, 22; at Versailles 288 

honor(s), word of 226— 7; Cleveland on q. 242; 
in monarchy 242; titles bought 244; word in 
Shakespeare 254 

Horror of Life, The, 559 

house, for church 26; as masters and servants 
81; as dwelling 182; furnishings of 182; bed 
and ruelle 182-3; decoration of 338; not a 
machine 726; see also decorative arts 

Huckleberry Finn, 577 

Hudibras, 27 1, q. 358 

Huguenots, massacre by 86; toleration of 1 13, 
150; Henry IV leads 137; bar to nationhood 
241; expelled from France 301 

Humanism(ists), 12; secular 24, 51; def. 43—8; 
the humanities in danger 44, 606-7; 
methods of 46, 54; root idea of 74, 78; as 
liberal arts 228, 600, 785, Arnold on 573, 574 

humor(s), in organism 135; in Burton 135, 222 
ff.; and Paracelsus 198; for sense of, see 
laughter 

hygiene, 129, 229, 325, 337, 525; in Venice 172, 
182; washing hands 183, 185, 325; public 
baths 183, 188, 262; Beddoes on 438; 
French in Egypt and 444; in war 580; 
industry propels 585; in late 19C 628; and 
Tolstoy 672; course in 747 

id, 663 

idea(s), influence of xviii, 655 

Idealism, philosophical 25, 56, 507-8, 512; 

moral 708; see also philosophy 
ideology (ies), 19; religion as 23, 54 
Ideologues, 452-3, 661 
Iliad, The, 152, 348, 743 
image, see advertising 



imagination, in art 439; in science 439, 440; in 
Romanticism 470; def. 473 ff.; of the real 
474; and music 495; Sydney Smith's 533 

immortality, 25; see also religion 

Imperialism, 444; and railroads 542; 579; 
Bagehot on 582; Kipling on 613; Nietzsche 
and 671; does not pay 706; collapses 763-4; 
reverse colonies 775 

Importance of Being Earnest, The, 615, 620 

Impressionism, hints of 420; beginnings 567; 
the term 644; the school 644-5, Neo- 
645-6; technique 645-6; Post- 647; subjects 
650; waning of 650, 651 

Indes Galantes, Les, 176, 387 

Index of Prohibited Books, 38 

Indians (Armerinds), oppressed and defended 
100; Iroquois 100; Columbus's errors about 
103-4; noble behavior 107, 126; kill Anne 
Hutchison 1 86; Franklin and 407; Helen 
Hunt Jackson and 595; dispossessed 605; in 
late 20C 774 

Individualism (theme), in religion 6; 20, 25; 
political and social 33, 43, 49, 88, 114, 125; 
and upward mobility 88, 226, 331; thought 
Germanic 225, 247; and painting 334, 338; 
and equality 343; in state of nature 362—3; 
and inherent rights 425; source of 
knowledge 491; in the U.S. 505; since 1789 
519 ff, 535; in Utopias 525; in economics 
596; in education 609; in Dreyfus Affair 
630; Nietzsche's 671; autonomous 720; 
constrained 777, 779, 781; seeks the 
Unconditioned 781 ff.; see also freedom 

industry, 127, 318, 382, 404, 408, 617, 698, 771, 
777; evils of 456-7, 522, 671; class 
connection 534; and hygiene 585; see also 
factory; machine; techne 

infame,l',42,361,381 

Inquisition, 38, 201; early instances 105; auto 
da fe 108, logic of 271-2, 277; not Spanish 
only 108; still active 109; in Venice 171; 
burns Bruno 194 

insanity, see madness 

Institutes of the Christian Religion, 32, 34 

instruments, musical, 156, 175, 399, 545; 
ensemble of 158; first concerti 160; 
"philosophical" 191, 205, 214, 230, 312, 
405; for calculating 214, 366; for sailing 230; 
for manufacture 371; for time keeping 376, 
399; for agriculture 382; color organ 389; 
flute 389, 545; piano 389, 546; oboe 389; 
violin bow 389, 545; clarinet 390; trompe 
marine 390; organ 546-7; see also orchestra; 
organ; techne; time 



Index <^> 863 



intellectuals, see society 

Ireland, St. Patrick in 225; 242; Cromwell in 

276; William III in 310; Swift defends 

323-4; literary revival 736 
Irredentism, see nation, race 
irreverence, see demotics 
Islam, heaven of 25, 790; in 20C 41; status of 

women 88; in Spain 105, 196; learned men 

of 46, 105, 231, 234; in southwest Europe 

225; faith in 249; Bonaparte's adherence to 

446; Nation of 774; 
It, see id; libido; sexuality 
Italy, Ode toS\; mother of arts and sciences 

52-3; words borrowed from 53, 1 60; 

refinements from 182; and nationhood 241, 

303; in Machiavelli's time 256; Milan clean 

492; Butler and 634-5; 

Jacobin(s), 427, 442, 480 

Jansen(ism)(ists), and Pascal 219; at Port Royal 
296-7, 300, 303, 343; and Racine 343; 
vanquish Jesuits 372 

Jazz, origins 679; -Age 679; 738 

Jerusalem Delivered, q. 147, 149 ff. 

Jesuit(s), founded 38-9; schools of 42, 180, 
200; in New World 100, 277; and casuistry 
210, 219, 296; order abolished 368; 
enlightened members 372; expelled from 
France 372 

Jesus, xviii, 670, 672, 743, 769 ff; order of the 
Sacred Heart 368 

Jews, 234, 270, 276, 387, 444; in Spain 105, 108, 
113, 240; in Venice 1 71 ; 20C massacres of 
748; see also Cabbala 

journalism(ist), cartoons 28, 599; 81; political 
310-1, 581, 697; beginnings of 311; 322-3, 
352; 18C 367 ff.; in early 19C 494; Yellow 
599; in late 19C 684; weekly 684; wide 
circulation 692; literary 698; cultural 741 ; by 
air waves 752; versus art 788; and sexuality 
789; daily paper 795; new practices 795 

Judgments on History, q. 21 , q. 42, q. 254 

Julius Caesar, 51, 254 

kindergarten, 487 

king(s), uncertain powers of 93, 239, 247; 
brotherly courtesies 94-5; and nation state 
239 ff.; few left 240; as monarchs 241 ff., 
249, 263, 277, 293; illiterate 243; theory of 
rule 245 ff., 248, 253, 293, 425, attacked in 
France 294, 296; needs church 248; is God's 
anointed 249, 272; has two bodies 251, 290; 
Mark Twain on 249; and primogeniture 251; 
in Madagascar 252; Shakespeare on 254-5; 



and centralization 255; Machiavelli on 256 
ff.; in English Civil Wars 263 ff.; in Europe 
266; as art collectors 338; spirit of, in 
literature 341, 344; glory questioned 351; 
nobles' revenge 372; France loyal in 1789 
423; Tocqueville on 539; see also coronation 

KingArthur, 327 

&«gZ^r, 254, 326, 343 

knight(s), German 6; war service 226; 
-hood 233 

Koran, 27; see also Islam 

labor, division of 1 60; in American colonies 
318; gives property rights 363; called 
proletariat 457; early union 477; wages of 
525; legislation 535; aristocracy of 541; 
theory of value 588; agitation 592 ff.; 
Institutes for 574; social burdens on 604; 
Party 686, 687; and 1914 war 700; see also 
work 

Ladies' Peace, the, 86, 95 

language, see French; Greek; Latin; 

linguistics; prose 

Laokbon, The, 41 7 

Last Supper, The, Leonardo's 70; Veronese's 71, 
76- 

Latin, in public debate 4; in church service 27; 
classical 43; in education 45, 532; killed by 
science 45, 606; Petrarch's use of 48, 146; 
decline of 65, 109, 201; Leonardo lacks 79; 
spurs translation 109; dropped from law 
113; syntax in modern tongues 139, 353; 
medieval 230, 799, poetry in 231; grammar 
in English 657 

laughter, none in Utopias 125; Rabelais on 130; 
physical description 422; sense of humor 
731-2, 791; Dada jokes 751; black humor 
790-1 

law(s), international 110-1, 179, 436, 672; of 
war and peace def. 1 1 1 ; in Utopias 1 20; no 
lawyers in Utopias 120 ff; natural 126, 266; 
classification by 213; canon 225; custom 
225, multiple customs 250; Roman 225, 245, 
247; Anglo-Saxon 228; of murder 228; in 
1 8C France 400 ff.; 423; game 531-2; O.W 
Holmes, Jr. and 586; of social science 652; 
of history 654; in welfare state, 777-8; 
killing all lawyers 795; see also Nature 

La^arillo de Tormes, La Vida de, 111-2 

Leaves of Grass, 584 

Legende des siecles, La, 481 , 561 

Le Globe, 523, 527 

Leonore or Wedded Love, 447 

Letters, modern writing style 185; 



864 <^> Index 



From a Provincial '219, 297; Dorothy 
Osborne's 323; On the English 361, 372; The 
Persian 364; Grimm and Diderot's 414 

Levellers, 264 ff. 

Leviathan, The, 267 

Liaisons dangereuses, Les, 165, 259, 414 

Liberalism), theology 40; political opinion 85, 
247, 733, and Relativism 760-3; 
government 424, 683; in wartime 428; 
economic 456; and 1789 revolution 519; the 
term 519; Party 529, 631; 1848 triumph 547; 
Sydney Smith embodies 530; historiography 
568; its Great Switch 574, 596, 688; Empire 
587 

Libertine (ism), see freethinkers 

libido, 552, 662-3; Freud's own 701; see also 
sexuality 

limerick, 736 

linguistics, and Descartes 200; Indo-European 
tongues 502, 504; 19C philology 502-3, 504; 
as science 504; Marsh and 597; language 
dislocated 622, 648, 719, artificial language 
758, Basic English 758-9, initialese 759; 
Saussure's 657; dogmas of 657-9; speech 
splits nations 762, 774, 776; language is 
unique 784, in decline 793; see also prose 

Lisbon, earthquake 378 

Lives of the Poets, The, 412 

Lloyd's insurance, 276, 322 

London, "a mud hole" 182; fire of 1666 184; in 
1715 307 ff; looks westward 316; 
prostitution in 536; police of 553-4; 
between the wars 752 

Longitude, 205, 376 

Looking Backward, 593 

Louvre (palace), 113, 336; and Poussin 338-9 

love, upper class 80; in Decameron and 

Heptameron 87; in Rabelais 131; in Italian 
epics 148 ff; in The Lusiads 153; Pascal on 
215; Burton on 222 ff ; courdy 233; and 
romance 233-4, 467; at Versailles 290, 350; 
of mankind, Swift on 323—4; in La Fontaine 
346; La Rochefoucauld on 350; in Princesse de 
Cleves 352; Chamfort on 452; Joubert on 
453; Stendhal on 475-6; the century of 
476-7, 487; in phrenology 503; Hazlitt on 
51 1-2; as refuge 574; Meredith on 576; see 
also Fidelio, sexuality 

love affairs, Henry VIII's 9; Petrarch's 48 ff., 
233; Charles V's 97; as work of art 200, 475; 
Christina of Sweden's 208 ff.; Pascal's 
215-6; Dante's 233; Machiavelli's 259; Vico's 
315; Moliere's 345; Charles Second's 356; 
1 8C German 393; Werther's 396; 



Beaumarchais' 400; Lichtenberg's 441; 

Bonaparte's 441-2; in Stendhal 447; Restif 's 

448; De Stael's 450-1, 452; Byron's 486; 

Comte's 509; Hazlitt's 511; George Sand's 

523 
Love for Love, 415 
Lusiads, The, 109, 153-5 
Lyon, cultural center 32, 52, 128, 160, 309, 421; 

its bath houses 183; 19C strikes in 497 
lyric(s), poetry 158, 470; poet 159, 160, 161, 

162; and Hofmannstahl 676 
Lyrical Ballads, 462; plain diction of 478, mixed 

contents 479 

Macbeth, 254 

machine(s), xiv; scarce in Utopias 120, 127; 
effects of 457, 526, 539, 554-5; and 
Luddites 486; Carlyle on 526; and sensorium 
540; abolition of 604, 633; as house 726; for 
music 727, 729; abstracts 766; danger from 
777; requires welfare 778; see also factory; 
industry; techne 

Madame Bovary, 557-8, 625 

Mademoiselle de Maupin, 41 A 

madness, treatment, in Utopia 122, in colonial 
America 405, in 18C France 437, at La 
Salpetriere 222, 628; R.D. Laing on 756; see 
also psychology (psychiatry) 

Madrid, 91-2; 109 ff 

madrigal(s), 156, 158; by English school 158, 
159,161,262 

magic(ian), Virgil a 47; white 55, 58, 147; 
Hermes Trismegistus as 58; in The Tempest 
140; Bruno as 194, 196; princes eager for 
1 97; philospher's stone 207; secret code 207; 
and witchcraft 281, 300; Magick (Crowley) 
629 

Magic Flute, The, 419 

Magna Carta, 266 

man, dignity of 59, 60, 133, 193, 792, 801; 
etymology of 82 ff; and science 193; part of 
Nature 195; an enigma 216; existential 216, 
755 ff; great and wretched 219, 471, 485; 
"an Automaton" 337; perfectible 349; Man a 
Machine 367; variable 379; Romanticist 466; 
descended from ape 571; as modernist 714; 
dehumanized 724; mass 770; see also 
economics; Montaigne; Shakespeare; Swift 

management (business), see administration; 
bureaucracy 

Man and Superman, 592, 687 

Mandragola, La, 165, 258 

Manicheanism, 25 

Mannerism, def. 74 



Index <^> 865 



manners, at table 52; 1 83; refinement of 74, 79; 
handshaking 127; letter writing 185; and 
work of Precieuses 187; wearing masks 188; 
stiffer 189; code of civilized 245; regency 
308; 17C ideal (honnete homme) 351; in 
1 8C Germany 393 ff.; and emotion 41 1 ; 
Johnson on 412; in revolutions 433—4; 
Lichtenberg on 440; 19C change in 477; 
high bourgeois 498; 1880s change in 591; 
and war 708; casual 734, 781, 782 

Man of Feeling, The, 410 

manuscript(s), search for medieval 46, 49; 
defects of 60; Oriental 210; Ireland 
preserves 225; work on 234; circulate like 
books 347 

Marat-Sade, 448 

marriage, of first cousins 27; for acquisition 81, 
290; concern of state 118, 181, 187; in 
Utopias 118 ff.; none in The Tempest 124; 
needs reform 127, 133, 458, 459; in fabliaux 
232; def. 233; after bundling 281; Moliere 
on 345; in Rousseau 386; and divorce 119, 
262, 459, 735; symbolic in Gutzkow 476; 
after Great War 735; and bigamy 762; 
various new types 793-4; see also polygamy 

Marriage of Figaro, The, 81, 339, 414 

Marseillaise, La, 433, 494 

Mary Celeste, the, 599 

Masaniello, 499 

masque, 81, 158-9, 188; masquerade 158; 
Comus 1 88; 

Massachusetts Bay Colony, 173-4; Anne 

Hutchison dissident 186; witch trials 213, 278 

Massacre(s), of German peasants 16C 15; Saint 
Bartholomew's 16, 74; a human habit 60; 
Saint-Michael's Day 86; Europe settled by 
100-1; 20C world-wide 101; in English Civil 
War 267; French, in Egypt and Syria 446; in 
China 630; in Russia 748; in Germany 748; 
of Carthage 748; after colonies freed 763; 
small, ubiquitous 777 

materialism, scientific 29-30, 56, 189, 195, 452, 
544, 570 ff, questioned 633; 636, 652, 663, 
665, 670, 686; worldly 37, 542, 560, 574, 
778; philosophical 56, 189; in 18C 365, 452; 
Spiritism as 575; dialectical 589, 673; see 
also free will; predestination; Vitalism 

mathematics, and world view 1 89; and science 
194, 205-6; in Newton's Principia 206; 
symbols by Descartes 207; in Pascal 214 ff., 
217, 220, 230; calculus 366; Diderot and 
373; 18C advances 377, 405, 445, 502, 509, 
623; 19C 544; for music 728; see also 
algebra; geometry 



Maud, 561-2, 579 q. 580, 701 

maxim{s), La Rochefoucauld's 349-51; 
Chamfort's q. 452; Joubert's 452 q. 453, 
Wilde's 621; in wartime 717 

medicine, 114; Rabelais and 128 ff.; Paracelsus 
and 197-8; psychosomatic 244, 438, 441; 
vaccination 329, 377; hypnotism and 375; in 
Egyptian in 18C 377; Scottish 413; French 
437, 452; hospitals 437; nursing 437, 580; 
surgery 437, 444, 636; and consumption 
438, 636; in Egypt 446; and O.W Holmes 
585; quacks 601; schools of 606; in 
mid-1 9C 635-6; homeopathy 636; 
osteopathy 636; serum therapy 636; endless 
revision in 751, 801; see also psychology 
(psychiatry) 

medieval, scholasticism 56, 230, 234, 466, 509; 
mosaics 69; plays 141, 164-5; writers 145; 
music 157 ff, lyric stanza 162; French 
vocabulary 163; term of abuse 225, 226; 
literature 229, songs 229; students 229; 
towns 229; Latin 230; encyclopedias 231; 
231-2; legends and myths 231; lives of 
saints 234; 19C pastiches 409; church and 
confession 453; see also Middle Ages 

melancholy, Ficino on 59; Montaigne's 1 37; 
Burton on 221-4; and genius 222-3; La 
Rochefoucauld's 350; in English poetry 409; 
Beddoes on 438; Sydney Smith's 533; 
Arnold's 574 

memoirs, see autobiography 

mercantilism 107, 292 ff., 381-2; see also 
money 

mercenaries, see army 

Merchant of Venice, The, 103 

mesmerism, see medicine (hypnotism) 

Messiah, The, 328 

Mesta, the, 106 

Metaphysical Society, 572 

Methodism(ists), 330-1, 404-5, 471, 532, 551, 
607 

Middle Ages, capitalism in 37; maligned 44, 
193, 224; preserved classics 46; sense of 
history 47; rehabilitated 47, 451, 481; 
scholastics in 56, 230; and alphabetizing 60; 
art in 68, 450; upward mobility in 88; 
bathhouses 183; science and techne 193, 
229-31; called dark 224; a modern name 
224-5, 714; brutish 225; more than one age 
225; two renaissances 225; jollity in 225, 
227; marriages in 233, 234; miracles in 234; 
affect 19C architecture 513; see also law; 
medieval; university 

Middlemarch, 617 



866 <^ Index 



Middletown, 652 

mind-and-hear t, Chinese character for 202, 
217, 470; in Pascal 219; in Destutt 453; 465 
f£, 470; Hume on 470; 470; def. 470, 476, 
491,536 

Mind of the Maker, The, 30, 742, 743 

Misanthrope, Le, 345 

Miserables, Les, 561 

modern, era xvii, def. 3, 48, 125, 145, 224, 244; 
the term, 125, 521, 650-1; great divide 270; 
-ism 679, 713-4, and style 718; 722, 730; 
opponents of 732; Post- 733; achievements 
749; see also ancients and moderns 

Modern Love, 50, 576 

monad(s), 194, 366; see also science 

Mona Lisa, 7 22,731 

monarch(y), see king; nation 

money, in Spanish inflation 106; silver at 
Potosi; theory of prices 107; not used in 
Utopias, 120, 765; gendemen do not write 
for 142; coined by Venice 172; first state 
bank 172, aim of 320— 1; monarch sole 
coiner 241; state bankrupt 292, 315, 320, 
422; for war 304; paper 320-2, 431-2; Swift 
on power of 322; in patronage 340; decimal 
units 432; "is everything" 560, 795; soft and 
hard 594; gives status 594; public, stolen 
599; theory of 768; spent for election 780; 
see also banking; economics; mercantilism; 
patronage 

Monk, The, 410 

monks, see asceticism 

Monroe Doctrine, 520 

Mont Ventoux, 50 

Moors, Kingdom of Granada 105, 153; 
"Morisco" converts 105, 108, 113, 240; 
Camoens fights against 1 53; see also Islam 

moral(s), moralism 19, 261, 279 ff., 283, 533, 
551 ff., 564, 576, 582-3, 592, 613 ff., 617, 
633, 735; conflict with religion 55; 
discovered long ago 127; and bathhouses 
183; and prostitution 183, 261; judgments in 
history 254; in politics 256 ff.; Machiavelli 
on 256 ff.; in regencies 305; in maxims 
349-50; Christian view of 350; Mme de La 
Fayette on 352-3; in 18C German thought 
395; art ignores 616-7, 628; Nietzsche on 
670; and Relativism 760-3; of discretion 
801; see also Puritan; Versailles 

Mormons, 28, 471 

motion pictures, 587, 649; world-wide 736-7; 
Agate on Hitchcock's 754; and docudramas 
775 



Mr. Dooley, 596-7; in Peace and War, 596, q. 
597, q. 613 

music, Luther on 1 8; in Protestant church 26; 
polyphony 74, 157-8, 159, 160; Leonardo 
on 79; in Utopias 121; 16C programs 155; in 
city and church 155, 157, 253; and 
"program" question 155, 389, 494-5; 558, 
640; domestic 156, 495; harmony 156, 158, 
175, 678; melody 157, 159, 175, 418, 496; 
Erasmus on 157; expressiveness 157, 158, 
175, 461, 495-6, 639 ff.; notation 157; and 
religion 157, 161, 390; rhythm 158, 496; 
explosive 159; dramatic 159, 174 ff., 
389-90, 415-6, 639; chromaticism 160; tone 
color 160; international 161; in American 
colonies 318, 407; in 18C France 387-8; 
"absolute" 388-9, 638-41 ; Baroque 388-9; 
controversy about 417; redirected 419; and 
bourgeois patrons 420; Handel festivals 422; 
Paris Conservatoire 432; for French 
Revolution 432-3, 461, popular songs of 
432-3, number of 461; Paris School 432, 
461; ethnic 444; in Egypt 444; 19C piano 
499, 639; violin 500; chamber 500-1, 546-7; 
molds matter 623, 723; Wagner system 
637-8, 678; Verismo 638; Nietzsche on 
671;"Impressionist" 677-8; and 
chromaticism 678, 728; Russian Five 678; 
criticism of 685; after Great War 721; and 
machines 727; and noise 727; 12-tone row 
728; aleatory 728; Gebrauchs 738; U.S. after 
1920 738; musicology 746; see also 
instruments; orchestra; organ; symphony 

Music Ho!, 678, q. 721, q. 727 

mysticism, Christian 58; and Pascal 214; def. 
215-6; frowned on by church 215 

myth(s), ancient and Christian mixed 52, 154; 
Plato's, of the cave 55; classical in painting 
70; in masques and pastorals 162; and 
Freemasonry 433; 473; in Golden Bough 636; 
in Wagner 637, 638; in Freud 662 

names, surnames required 113, types of 114 
nation (s)(alism), self-determined xiv; 
nationhood 9, negative form of 93; 
beginnings of 50, 97, 179, 229, 239 ff.; and 
language 97, 690, 774-6;"the four" 229; 
kings and 239 ff.; 20C decline of 240, and 
patriotism 121, 245, 272, 776, 794; 
monarchical def. 241 , 274, 303; and church 
248, 265; subnationalities 304; and 
geography 319; France a 423; theory of 431, 
435; -in-arms 435; cultural 482, 555; leagues 



Index ^ 867 



of 503, 691, 695; aggressive 556, 572, 618, 
690, 702, 744; causes fought for 703, 710; 
and irredentism 705, 744; in Versailles 
Treaty 705; split 762, 774, 776; 
disintegrating 774-6; -ism not at work 776; 
merits of 776; replaced 776, 800 

National Socialism, 295, 671, 707 

natural philosopher, Renaissance artist as 68; 
replaced by scientist 554 

Naturalism, in philosophy 69; in the novel 478; 
in Romanticism 479, 515; and the 
supernatural 574-5; psychical research 575, 
664; and photography 587; def. 623-4, 651, 
673; reformist 624-5 

Nature, 46, 69; love of 50, 386, 471, 505, 
756-7, in art 73 ff, 416-7, 718, 722; as 
yardstick 73, 757; "rediscovered" 73; 
infallible guide 125, 126, 129, 204; living 
according to 126, 130, 134; human, is good 
129; German philosophy of 194, 509; is 
uniform 212; argued from 266, 271, 296, 
297, 362-3; laws of 363, 365, 473; in politics 
431; the supernatural, 421, 473, 574-5; in 
science 750; uses of 756; see also Deism, 
Epicureanism; Stoicism 

Neo-classic(ism), 325 ff.; the term 342; 387, 
521, 558, 566, 721; see also Classicism 

Netherlands, The, 1 5, 36; trade of 37; painters 
of 70; rebellious 85; under Spanish rule 96; 
musical school of 157; independence of 178; 
nationhood 240, 319; at war with England 
276, 307 

New Atlantis, The, 118, q. 119, 120 

New Christianity, The, 522 

New England, and Puritans 261, 277 ff.; 
triangular trade of 316; Transcendentalists 
in 504, as Utopians 524, 525; in Lowell 
poem 584; see also Massachusetts Bay 
Colony 

Nihilism, see Anarchism 

Ninety-five Theses, 4; 5; 7, 13, 85, 117 

Nineties, the, 599-600, 601-2, 607, 615; retreat 
in 617, 620; religion of 620; traits of 623, 
628, 630-1, 641, 651, 669, 675, 679, 684, 
714, 725, 734, 735 

Noah, 19 

Noble Savage, xvi, 107-8, in Montaigne 126, 
139; Franklin as 375; Rousseau on 382, 384, 
385 

Notebook(s), Leonardo's 66-7, 72, 79; Samuel 
Buder's 220, 634; Lichtenberg's 440 

novel(s), picaresque 111, 177; of education 112, 
564-5; tone of in Utopias 128; a serious 



genre 145; tales inserted in 148, 340; created 
326, 380 ff; def. 352; of mystery 410; 
pornographic 410; the term 467; historical 
478; sentimental 410; social and 
psychological 557; dominant genre 557 ff, 
563-5; and crime fiction 562; and short 
story 562, 737; and science fiction 565; and 
the novella 565; psychiatric 586; Naturalist 
623, 624, 791; by scores of women 627; 
Russian 673; theory of 673-4; war 704, 734; 
after 1920 733-4 

Novum Organum, 203 

Nude Descending a Staircase, 647, 722 

nursing, see medicine 

obscenity, 132, 517, 567, 734, 789 ff; see also 
pornography; sexuality 

Occident, def. 3; 23; barbarous 169; its 
formation 225; enlarged 689; self- 
emancipating 771 

Oceana, 268, 362 

Odyssey, The, 635, 743 

ologies, 205, 218, 221,659, 734 

"On the Dignity of Man," 59; see also man 

On the Laws of War and Peace, 179 

On the Sublime and Beautiful, 117 

opera, rise of 152; subjects of 152, 176; cradle 
of 174 ff; castrati in 175; founder of 175; 
etymology 175; unappreciated 175; Tolstoy 
condemns 176, 672; emotions in 176; comic 
176, 358; bel canto and cuisine 183; masked 
ball at 308; in England 326 ff, 388; 17-18C 
French 327 ff.; seria 327, 328-9, 415; 
ridiculed 337, 387-8; buffa 387; Rousseau 
derides 387—8; Baroque 388; Gluck's reform 
415-6, 424, Mozart's 418; and Napoleon 
461; in early 19C 495, 498-9; cholera at 497; 
Grand 499, 545, 567, 638; Wagner's 637-8; 
and Hofmannstahl 676 

Oratorians, 38, 359 

Orbispictus, 180 

orchestra, dramatic effects by 1 56, 1 75; in 
Monteverdi 175; 390; in Mozart 419; 
developed 420; for Handel festivals 422; as 
19C instrument 495, 545, 729; Treatise on 
497; method of 546; components 545; 
retreat from 547; 

Orfeo, Monteverdi's 175; Gluck's 416 

Orient(al), Near Eastern 39, 53, 101, 109; 
travels to 75, 587, 618; source of luxuries 
169, 227; tulips from 179; manuscripts from 
210; and Voltaire 378; and rococo 391; and 
Bonaparte 442-3; music of 444; 



868 q**> Index 



Romanticism and 481, 504; and language 
502; and calm poetry 559; and photography 
587; Rimbaud and 618; art of 646; religions 
borrowed from 664; "light comes from" 
744 

Origin of Species, The, 502, 570-3 

Orlando Furioso, 147 

Ossian, 409, 410 

Othello, 105 

Padua, university of 1 14, 172; honors Anna von 
Schurman 1 85 

painting, wood cuts 4, 72; caricature, cartoons 
28, 599, 732, 736; parallel with "good 
letters," 66; Vasari on 66; in oils 71-2, fresco 
71—2; elements of 72, 73; turns secular 74; 
chiaroscuro 189; art shows 391, 648, 724; 
18C American 405; late 18C European 420; 
lithography 444, 567; 18C American school 
461; and local color 478; Romanticist 478; 
Hazlitt and 510, 512; Pre-Raphaelites 558, 
567; Barbizon School 566; 19C Realists 
566-7; 19C U.S. school 604-5; pure 622, 
646; Wm. James and S. Butler and 633; 
Balzac on 644; color in 644; Art Nouveau 
645; and science 645; Fauves, Nabis 646; 
Cubist 647 ff., 673, 675; collage 650; after 
1920 721-2; teaches 727; drip-dry 728; 
surfeit of 788,790; critics on 791 

Pamela, 380 

Pantagruel, q. 75; main figure 129, 130, his 

theses 131; meaning of Panurge 130 ff.; -ism 
130, Abbey of Theleme 131; fifth book 133; 
English translation 133; Montaigne a 
Pantagruelist 1 37 

Paradise Lost, 146; 263; Regained 263 

Paris, "a mud hole" 182, 492; La Salpetriere 
hospital 222; students in 229; police 309, 
329, 338, 548; fairs 555; mob 427-8, 537; 
Conservatoire 432; street names 446; gates 
by Ledoux 459; in 1830 491-6; 
cobblestones of 494; Commune 566, 587—8; 
siege of 587; couture 628; Metro 645; in 
belle epoque 651, 683, 698-9; after Great 
War 723; see also academy; France; 
university 

Paris Nights, q. 449 

parlement(s), Paris 286, 372, 402; provincial 
meet and report 423 

parliament(s), English 45, 363, 364; is absolute 
250; in English Civil Wars 263 ff., 277; 
government by 385, urged 423,508, 520 ff, 
528-9, 534, 549; reform of 431; 512, 520, 
528-9, 569; hard to maintain 528, 535, 536; 



shape of chamber 535-6; and suffragettes 
696; Russian Duma 697; see also Reform 
Bill 

Parnassians, 559 

Parthenon, 45, 417, 514 

Pascal's Wager, 220, 290 

Pascaline, la, inventor and purpose of 199, 208, 
214 

patriotism, 20C decline of 121 ; widened 245, 
272; new meaning 313; abjured 749; 
ridiculed 776, 794; see also nation 

patron(age), as meddler 75, 339; deference to 
78; insoluble problem 78; by grants in 20C 
100; and Rubens 334; and Poussin 338-9; 
money stinted 338; the public as 339; in 
Bohemia 576 

peace, leagues for 1 1 1, 179, 441, 758; United 
Nations 179, 758; Wm. James on 672-3; 
movement (Tsar's) 672-3; League of 
Nations 746, 758; through language 758; 
and 1968 student riots 764; Corps 787; in 
Occident 801 

peasant(s), revolt in Germany 15, 19, 97; in 
England 84; in Spain 97; La Bruyere on 352 

Pensees, 214 ff, q. 216, 219, 314 

period(s), in history xvii, 247, 315, 655 

persecution, x; whether desirable 32; England 
on heretics 108; by Sorbonne 108; mild in 
Venice 109; Montaigne rejects 134; justified 
271-2, 273; Rousseau's case 383; in 
American War of Independence 398; and 
Shaw 688; in wartime 706, 709; see also 
witchcraft 

perspective, "science of" 67; not scientific 70; 
discovery of 73; def. 73 

Phedre (Phaedra), Racine's 342, 343; Pradon's 342 

philistine(s), 243, 416, 474-5; injunction to 617; 
and culture 573, 622, 670, 686; death of 713, 
727, 730, 732, 754; The Philistine 608 

philology, see linguistics 

philosophe(s), 359 ff., name 365, 367-8, 371; 
Jesuit friends of 372; against Rousseau 384; 
and women's rights 458-9 

philosophy, x; Humanism and 89; of meaning 
110; negative to positive 134; of history 
314-6, 380, 484; of science 361; of German 
Idealism 507-9; logic, 508, 668; of 
Positivism 509-10, 571, 632; 20C plight 749 

photography, in US. Civil War 58; 72, 392, 
586—7; advances in 599; of motion 649; as 
an art 649 

phrenology, 456, 503, 577 

Physiocrats, 382 

Physiology of Taste, The y 453-4 



Index <^ 869 



Pickwick Papers, 498, 530 
Pietism(ists), 26, def. 33; 298, 404 
pilgrim(age) 13, 21; The Pilgrim's Progress, 39, 

357-8, muckrakers' in 595; Pilgrim Fathers 

261,277,279,281,506 
pirates, Barbarossa in Mediterranean 96, 172; 

destroyed by United States 96; 16C English 

107; 20C Far East 276, 330 
plague(s), bubonic 114, 183-4; in Florence 145; 

in London, Milan 184; Defoe novel on 322; 

Marseille 329; smallpox (vaccination) 329, 

377; 17C English 330; yellow fever, 405; see 

also cholera; medicine; syphilis 
Playwright As Thinker, The, 675 
Pleiade, la, 47; 162 ff. 
Pluralism, opposed 272; Western idea 761-2; 

absolutists want and oppose 762; challenged 

774 
poet(ry), laureate 48-9, 146, 151, 561, 579; lyric 

159 ff.; Defense o/(Sidney) 162, (Shelley) 152; 

Poetics (Aristotle) 165; Horace 165; diction in 

478; 622; pure 562; Vers de Societe 585; turn 

of 19C styles 622; simultaneity in 648; 

orchestral, choric, concrete 648, 719; Beat 

791; see also lyric; Parnassians; sonnet; 

Symbolism; tragedy; versification 
Poland, Protestant refugees in 31; Catholics 

regain 38-9; 20C religious festival 41 ; 

nationhood 240; Rousseau and 385; dances 

of 500 
"political correctness," 109, 272, 794-5 
political economy, see economics 
politique{s), 137,247,278 
poltergeists), 311, 664 
polygamy, 15, 17, 20, 28, 118, 471; see also 

marriage 
Poor Richards Almanack, 407 
Pope(s), attacks on 7; at Avignon 49; secular 

attitude of 64; in Renaissance 64, 251; keep 

zoos 64; "popery" 262, 276, 280; art 

collectors 388 
population, Utopian concern 119; Mai thus on 

525 
Populism, 408, 506-7, 591 ff., 595-6; in 

Cubism 650; in studies 651-3, 657, 658, 

679, 716-7, 724; in history 652-3; Nietzsche 

and 671 ; 2nd wave of 716; in art 724; in 

welfare tastes 781-2; see also democracy; 

demotics 
pornography, 410; the term 449; 566, 577, 789, 

790; see also obscenity; sexuality 
Portugal, nationhood 240; and port wine 329; 

and Fielding 477; and Liberalism 520; loses 

Brazil 520; see also Lusiads, The 



Potosi, 106-7 

Pragmatism(ists), Rabelais, Montaigne as 139; 

Lichtenberg as 440; in art 617; Butler as 634; 

and Peirce 665—6; and Wm. James 665 ff.; 

798; Emerson on 666; the term 666-9; 

Bergson on 667; and Nietzsche 670; and 

Shaw 686, 687 
Praise of Folly, The, 13 
Precieuses, 187; in Moliere's play 187, 344; 

prohibit words 341; their work undone 493 
predestination, 12; belief in 29; scientific 

29-30, 195, 275, 365, 367; conditional 33; 

suffering caused by 275; in Jansenism 297; 

in race theories 695 
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 558, 567 
Presbyterian(s), 26; in English Civil War 264 ff, 

269 
primitivism (theme), xv, xvii; Protestant 15; 38; 

Catholic 39; 43; ancient 56; and Noble 

Savage 126, 384; 164; 262; sexual 374; 382; 

409, 506, 615; late 19C 636; and Wagnerism 

637; Tolstoy's 672; in war 699 ff.; in art 722; 

in dance 737-8 
Prince, The, 165, 255 ff. 
Princesse de Cleves, La, 352-3, 396 
printing), 4—5, 60—1; fonts 61—2, designers of 

62, 174; censorship of 262, 360, 370-1, 

451-2, 710, 755; Diderot on 371; flood of, 

in 1789 423; in wartime 710; McLuhan on 

760; the daily paper 795 
Progress, 74, in Utopias 119-20; belief in 125, 

138, 190, 502, 527, 555; in the arts 349; a 

catchword 521; denied 526, 633; in history 

568; 
Progress and Poverty, 594 
prose, simple and direct, 87; science and techne 

affect 114; late in perfecting 139; model in 

French 219, 298; Moliere's 346; poor 

scientific 211; def. 353; German 354; ornate 

354; Saint-Simon on 355; Johnsonian 412; 

Macaulay's 412, 570; Restif 's 449; 

Romanticist 480; Hazlitt's 510 ff.; Flaubert's 

561; Dickens's 563; d'art 624; in decline 659; 

Nietzsche's 671; Proust's 716; Agate's 754; 

see also Precieuses 
prostitution, see sexuality 
Protestant(s)(ism), 3 ff., name accidental 10; its 

handiwork 21 ff., 239; def. 24; unsocial 25; 

and capitalism 36—8; 42; and music 1 57; in 

Thirty Years' War; grave manner 227; in 17C 

French revolt 296; Burke on 398; and 

freedom 425; 1 9C revival 473; see also 

Evangelicals; Reformation 
Prussia, Huguenots in 301; under Frederick II 



870 <^> Index 



381; leads Germanies to nationhood 395-6; 
see also Germany 

psychiatry, see psychology 

psychoanalysis, see psychology 

psychology, 41; scant in Utopia 122; based on 
humors 140, 222 ff.; at La Salpetriere 222, 
628; psychiatry in Burton 222 ff.; Destutt on 
452; and Ideologues 452-3; in 1890s 473; 
and apperception 641; and Freud 641, 661 
ff., system of 663, and Wm. James 659-62, 
and his contemporaries 661; Gestalt 661; 
Unconscious 661, 664, 720, 721, 792; death 
wish 662, 709; conscious mind 668; and 
literature 674-5; in acting 675—6, for war 
702; in propaganda 703, in daily life 792, in 
biography 737, 792; and sexuality 789; gout 
de la boue 790-1 

pure(ity), in religion 31; in revolution 35; in art 
56, 495, 621-2, 639, 720; in love 56; in 
language 187, 299, 324; spirit 221; causes 
233; society 430, 552; music 495, 638-41; in 
universe 506; reason 507; women 552; 
poetry 562; race 579; ivory soap 602; ocean 
619; painting 622; infants 626; linguistics 
657; novel 675; see also Puritan 

Puritan(s)(ism), English 26, 261 ff.; in Calvin's 
Geneva 35-6; and public baths 183, 188; 
French 219; meaning of 259-63, 277 ff.; and 
theater 261, 406; late 20C 261; rejected by 
Restoration 356; ridiculed in Hudibras 358; 
influence on Rousseau 383; echoed on 
democracy 431; 20C 735 

Puritans and Music, The, 262 ff. 

Quaker(s), 26, 28, 32, 33; in English Civil War 

265 ff., 277 
Quietism, 33, 298 

race(s), new category 108; Anglo-Saxonism 
108, 503, theories of 247, 501, 577 ff., and 
nationalism 579, 693-4; and National 
Socialism 295, and human traits 579; Aryan 
503, 577; and language 503; names of 
577-8; fallacy of 694-5; -ism 775; see also 
anthropology 

Raffles, 630 

railway (s) (road), station 492, 543, all-purpose 
784; first lines 492, 539 ff., 542; rules of 533, 
540, q. 541 ; influence of 539 ff.; features of 
540-1, 544; speed 540, 542; 628, 
responses to 541-3; mania 542, 544; in U.S. 
and Russia 542; poetry of 543; comfort of 
543; and architecture 543, and the novel 
563; and anthropology 578; and warfare 



583-4; train robbers 590; gouging 592; 
transcontinental 598; Orient Express 598 

raison d'etat, 94, 178 

Rake's Progress, The, Hogarth's 392; Auden and 
Stravinsky's 392 

Rameau's Nephew, q. 374 

Rape ofLucrece, The, 142 

Rasselas, 41 1 

Rationalism, see Reason 

Real(ism), def. 69; term misused 468, 557; in 
Romanticism 479; school of 480, 555 ff., q. 
560, 618; in opera 499; Realpolitik 555, 589; 
Flaubert and 557, 559-60; Browning and 
562; Dickens and 563; poetic 565; and 
Darwinism 571; and photography 587; and 
Naturalism 624; given up in opera 637, and 
painting 645, 646, in staging 675; and 
Modernist art 723; Social 733 

Real Presence, trans (con) substantiation 29; 33 

Reason, 46, 69; "none in religion" 129, 259, 
347; faith in 202; and Nature 66, 69 ff, 266, 
296, 297, 325, 362, 370, 391; excess of 796, 
reason/^ 202, 219, 465; Pascal on 219; in 
argument 266, 296, 297, 362; Age of 314, 
368, 372, 375, 381, 421, 430; in science 365; 
worshipped 368; Diderot on 373-4; in 
culture q. 390; the revolution of 419; in 
Romanticism 466, 491; and emotion 536; 
abandoned 732; in fiction 740; see also 
Nature 

reductivism (theme), 167, 502, 570, 669, 722, 
726 

reform, of Catholic church 1 1, 38 ff.; of the 
Reformation 32; see also Reform Bill 

Reformation, Protestant xv; a revolution 3 ff.; a 
New 24 

Reform Bill of 1832, 497, 509, 512, 520, 528, 
530, 535 

Regency(ies), 18C French 305, 308; English 
497, 551 

Relativism, 70, 73, 410, 760-3 

religion, and politics 4, 270; relics 9, 193; 

controversy 10; Reformation 23; wars of 23, 
178, 239; 20C 24, 40; belief def. 24, 39, 669; 
and immortality 25, 664; given up 27; and 
conversion 29, 785; and confession 30, 662; 
varieties of 31, Wm. James on 669; and 
blasphemy 35; and science 40, 297, 571, 
606; theology (liberal) 40, late 20C 796; ; 
20C upsurge 40; clash with morals 55; in 
Utopias 118; natural 137-8, 266, 386, 387, 
471, 473; and women 186; and the state 189, 
247-8; in 17C Rome 209; and love 233-4; in 
English Civil War 264, 270; of reasonable 



Index <^> 871 



men 360-1 ; scholars on 380; orders expelled 
380; ecumenical 387; in colonial America 
404—5; revival def. 404; on television 405; 
and poetry 409; and Romanticism 471, 473, 
507; Comte's positivist 509-10; 19C loss of 
574; "musical banking" 633; late 19C cults 
663-4, 785; Nietzsche on 670; Tolstoy's 672; 
Shaw's 686; in 1914 war 701 ff.; Dorothy 
Sayers' 742—4; and killing in war 762 
divisions deep 796; variable 800; see also 
Fundamentalism; secularism 

Remembrance of Things Past, 716 

Renaissance, def. 47; in 12C 47, and 13C 225; 
ages of 53, 225; Renaissance man 78-9, 440, 
woman 79, 82; Utopias of 1 18; counter- 
renaissance 125, 203-4; and Shakespeare 
141; and music 155 ff; Voltaire's view 379; 
scope of 466; exhausted 718; got rid of 760 

Rene, Ml 

respectability, see morals 

Restoration, English 308, 355-7, 358; relaxed 
temper 355-6; comedy of 356, 533; 
dissenters alienated 357; French 465, 492, 
493 

Return of Ulysses, The, 175 

Revolt of the Masses, The 798 

revolution (s), the four ix, 3; the first 3; def. 3, 
239; atmosphere of 7-8, Idea of each, 8; 
promises of 30; turn repressive 35; 
aftermath difficult 38; so-called, in science 
191 ff; monarch's 239 ff.; not a single event 
240; "Glorious," 240, 309-10; 316, 568; 
more than political 245; French of 1789 247, 
255, 286, 402, 504, 519, 779, Figaro and 414; 
familiar facts of 425; phases of 425 ff., sans- 
culottes 427-8, 431, 436, accomplishments 
431 ff., 555, Lichtenberg on 440, ideas of 
repressed 465 ff; French 1830 494-3; 
others of 1830 497; Belgian 499; and in New 
World 520; Tocqueville on q. 539; French 
1848 547-8, 558, 580, German 637; English 
literature 570, in early 19C European 519 ff; 
Boxer rebels 629-30, 692; in Russian 687, 
697, 716, 744, 746 ff, 771 

Rhodes scholarships, 694 

Richard II, 248 

Rien^i, 51 

right(s), xv, 32; human 255; natural 266; are 
inherent 425; of the weak and the poor 477, 
555, 778; of man 486, 489; of U.S. Blacks 
584; of youth 608-10; of victims 787; of 
breast feeding in public 787; of animals, the 
ailing, other 787; see also Declaration(s) 

Rinaldo, Tasso's, 149, 150; Handel's 327 



Ring oftheNibelungen, The, 231, 637 

Robert le Diable, 499, alluded to 637 

Robinson Crusoe, 322, 346, 506 

Rococo, 391, 418 

Roman empire, see Rome 

Romance of the Rose, 231 

Romani ("Gypsies"), music of 481; 20C 
massacres of 748 

Romanticism), 153; foreshadowed 373, 409, 
419, 461, 465 ff., 466; the term 467-9; and 
factuality 478-9; Realism in 479, 561; as 
reconstruction 480, 487, 491; and meaning 
of Faust4S3, 518; and education 487-8; 2nd 
generation of 492 ff, 557; in music 494 ff.; 
and science 501; and the Orient 504; in New 
England 506; in painting 512-3; large 
output 513; Goethe on 514; passion gone 
547, 555; and love of art 556-7; Flaubert's 
557, retreat from 558; Poe's 562; exhausted 
647; uniqueness 650; denigrated 651, 732-3; 
see also mind-and-heart 

Rome, Luther in 6, 64; St. Peter in 6, 64; 
republican 44, 51; papal 49; tourist site 53; 
academies in 53; "rebirth of" 66; 
unhealthful climate 66; sunshine 70; 
polyglot beggars 80; sack of 95; ancient 
empire 108, 125, 788; and Christina of 
Sweden 208—9; Montesquieu on decadence 
of 364; Voltaire's view 379; see also Vatican 

Rosicrucians, 196,282 

Rousseau and Burke, 385 

Roycrofters, the, 608 

Russia, likeness with Spain 92; formerly 

Muscovy 106, 319; slaves from 172; Soviet 
Union 218, 272, 537, 744, 746, 748, western 
ally 748, and Grand Inquisitor 770—1 ; 
Peter's reforms 319; moujik 319, 671-2, 
697; under Catherine II 381; lets in Das 
Kapital 588; turn of 19C 697-8 

sacrament(s), 5, 6; cost of 21; communion 26, 

27, 35; Mass 27; Eucharist 29, 35; and music 

1 57; see also marriage 
Sacre du Printemps, Le, 577 
Sacred Books of the East, The, 504, 556 
Saint(s), patron 22, 25; 193; lives of, in art 71, in 

literature 232 
Saint Matthew Passion, The, 389, 639^0 
Saint Peter's (Rome), 21; rebuilding of 64, 66; 

music in 161 
Saint Petersburg, 319 
Saint-Simonians, 522-3 
salon(s), as part of the house 182; as gathering 

of wits 87, 300, 351; 18C flowering 378; as 



872 <^ Index 



criticism of art show 391; De Stael's 451 

salvation, 6, 23; resurrection of flesh 25; 
Platonic 55 

Samson Agonistes, 263 

Sarah, 54, 360 

Satanism, see Devil 

scatology, 128, 324-5, 619, 715, 791 

Scarlet Letter, The, 278 

scholarship, pseudo 63, misplaced 607; 

pointless 671; Rhodes 694; deceptive 740; 
and N.M. Butler 746; "models" in 768 

scholasticism, see medieval; Middle Ages 

school(s), 5, Luther on 18, 180; Sunday 27; 
Jesuit 42, 180; Valla's for orators 56; nature 
of 180-1, 488; progressive 385, 608-9, 793; 
co-educational 438, 610; 19C American 489; 
reformed 608 ff.; Thomas Arnold's 573; 
John Dewey's 608-9; Montessori 609; 
excellent U.S. 745, no longer 758; fail to 
teach history 775; scene of violence 776-7; 
and discipline 782; in decay 789, 793, 
evidence of 88, 793; sexuality in 790; 
abolished 790; see also education 

School for Scandal, The,A\S 

science(s), disaffection from xviii, 41, 796—7; 
war of and theology 31, 40, 297, 571, 606; 
Bacon and 1 18; is only truth 126, 165, 202, 
211, 217; useless for ethics 127; new 16C 
views 130; flourishing 173, 189, 190, 501-2, 
796-7, 799; matter in motion 189, 194, 196, 
211, 365, 501; chronology revised 191; 
name scientist 191, 544; and atom 193, 214; 
man degraded by 193; methods of 193, 195, 
218, 222, 473, 609; Newton gives up 197; 
17C achievements 197-9; and 
contemporary culture 204; and techne 205; 
communication in 207, 211; Big Bang 212; 
of man 218; persecutes 271; history of 281; 
philosophical basis of 282, 441, 507-8, 632; 
Royal Society of 282; laws of 360, 632, 659; 
in 18C America 405; Hume on 413; and 
superstition 415, 751; and units of measure 
432; and Poe 507; Kant on 508; in Egyptian 
expedition 442 ff.; Positivism and 509-10; 
entropy 545; ahead of industry 600; and 
advertising 602; and universities 606—7; and 
progressive schools 609; radiation 631, 751; 
thermodynamics 632; Science founded 636; 
anthropomorphic 750—1; relativity 750; 
confidence in 751, weakened 796; critique 
of 796-7; "final picture" 800; 
biology 193, 365, 376, 377, 437, 501-2, 509, 
545, 665; botany 376, 501, 636; chaos 



796-7; chemistry 65, 198, 210, 311, 377, 
405, 437, 438, 439, 445, 609, 631; geology 
455-6, 501; physics 191, 312, 365, 367, 440, 
501, 544, 545, 632, 649, 750; see also 
astronomy; evolution; materialism; 
mathematics; sociology; vitalism 

Science and Hypothesis, 609 

Science Since 1 500, 192 

scientism (theme), 218, 324, 570; in art 729, 
730, 760; in historiography 768 

scientist(s), 65; the term 544 

Scien^a Nuova, La, 218, 314, 380 

Scotland, under John Knox 34, 36; schools in 
39; persecution in 108; in English Civil War 
264 ff; union with England 277, 310; 
golden age 412-3 

sculpture (s), Apollo Belvedere 64; Laocoon 64; 
manual labor in 77; Bernini's 336; 20C 646; 
Cubist 647-8; "installations" 719; machines 
as 722; Brillo Box 790 

sects, 23, 28, 41, 43, 189, 196 Amish 28, 525; 
Mennonites 28, 525; Familists 33, 265; 
Moravian Brothers 33, 180, 406, 525; in 17C 
England 264 ff.; Shakers 404, 525; Christian 
Science 593; Esoteric Buddhism q. 664; new 
in 1890s 593; see also cult 

secularism (theme), 28, 44, 88, 179, 247, 273, 
296, 331, 349, 360, 363, 378, 432, 522 

self-consciousness (theme), 49, 88, 123, 125, 
134 ff., 202, 223, 250, 331, 349, 395, 453, 
469, 473, 664, 732, 785; 789-90 

self-determination, see nation 

Seneca Falls Convention, q. 610-1 

sentimentality), 381, 400, 410-1, 415; 552; 
Schiller's use of term 469 

Sentimental Journey, A, AW 

Separatism, xiv, 690, 774-6, 785; see also nation 

serf(s), medieval 226; desirable status 226; 
Russian 319, 672, freed 697 

sermon(s), 18; new in 16C 27; in 19C England 
27; in stone 70; in late 19C 692 

sex(es), x«.; misuse of word 132; -ology 734; 
see also man; woman; sexuality 

sexuality, Luther on 17; platonic love 56; Ficino 
on 58; in Rabelais 131, 132; 20C problem of 
132; comical 132-3; homosexuality 137, 
476, 620, 726, 734-5; and prostitution 119, 
132, 172, 183, 189, 261, 420, 448, 449; 
London 536, 577; in mental disorders 222 
ff.; bundling and 280-1; refinement of 290; 
contraception 330; 734; Diderot on 374, q. 
374, 459; Rousseau on 386; Beddoes on 
438; Lichtenberg on 440; Restif on 448-9; 



Index <^> 873 



De Sade on 448; emancipated 476, 553, 714; 
and the waltz 500; and the poor 525; 
repressed 552-4; Balzac and 560-1; in 
painting 566; in poetry 575-6; in 19C 
murder 575; among artists 576; in music 
576; and Darwinism 571; in education 610; 
in literature 625-6, 734; in slang "It" 735; in 
treatises 626; infants 626; "revolution" of 
626 ff.; in psychology 661 ff.; and war 699, 
702; after Great War 734-5; and 
psychoanalysis 756; and drugs 756; on stage 
759; in film and television 776, 789-90; and 
harassment 789; promoted by press 789; 
ubiquitous 792; persists 801; see also 
obscenity 

Sherlock Holmes, and drugs 629; and music 
638; and spies 698; 740-1 

ship(s), 99, 172, 375; improved 205; tacking 
230; money 275; trade in English 276; steam 
420-1 ; The Bounty 420; in Egyptian 
expedition 443; at Jutland 705; the 
Normandie 726; see also instruments; Longitude 

Simplicissimus, 177—8 

sin, original, poem on 27; sense of 30; denial of 
60, 127, 387, 487; in action 133; in Erewhon, 
633; see also religion 

single cause, fallacy of, xvi, 689, 690; see also 
history 

Sistine Chapel, Michaelanelo on q. 77 

slave(s)(ry), in Utopias 120; meaning of Slav 
172; Venetian trade in 172; English trade in 
307; in American colonies 317, 397; 
Bonaparte abolishes in Malta 443; 
Beaumont on, in U.S. 538—9, 547; England 
abolishes 551; Abolitionism in U.S. 583, 584; 
see also serf 

social, engineering 123, 127, 349; contract 277, 
362-3, 382-3; Social Contract (Rousseau) q. 
384-5, 428; critique of techne 796-7; 
security, see also society; welfare state 

Socialism, early 19C 522, 523-4, 527-8, 
549-50; Marxist 588-9, 617-8; Wilde on 
621; English 686, 688; and Bismarck 688; 
and 1914 war 700; in Spain 747; see also 
Fabians 

society, critique of 123, 127, 223, 224, 345, 357, 
414, by intellectuals 399, 402, 474, 563, 564, 
579, 604, 617, 619-20, 631, 700-1, 713; 
classes of def. 244; poverty in 555, 777, 782; 
against artist xiv, 734; of ancien regime, 
clogged 779; consumer 783; role models in 
783; leadership diffused 797; see also social; 
Utopia 



Socinians, see Unitarians 

sociology, the term 509; in Macaulay 568; and 

Marx 589; the founders of 651; method of 

767 
Song of Roland, The, 147; hero of 148; hero's 

betrothed 152; 231 
sonnet(s), Petrarch's 48; def. 50-1; 

Shakespeare's 51, 634; Meredith's 51; in 

French 51; Michelangelo's 56; Renaissance 

162 
Sorrows of Young Werther, The, 396 
sovereign(ty) 178, 179, 245 ff.; popular 239, 

245, 250-1, 262, 267, 285, 337, 362-3; in 

Milton's poems 263; 20C decline of 775; see 

also nation 
Spain, source of light 53; nationhood 85, 240; 

likeness to Russia 92; plural states of 93; 

leading power in 16C 93 ff.; in New World 

93, 97; as coloizers 100 ff.; Arab civilization 

in 105, 231; ballad on war dead 105; 

Reconquista 105; hidalgos 106; apart from 

Europe 106, 109; poverty in 106, 112; 

Golden Age 109, 334; names of persons 

113; codpiece 184; English raids on 276; 

Bourbons in 303; in Grand Alliance 307; 

Rubens in 334; dances from 500; 20C civil 

war 747 
Specialism (theme), 78, 145; intellectual 80; in 

science 217; in education 785 
speed, 540-1, 542; def. 628, 649, 725 
spices, in food 101; pepper on map 101; trade 

in 169 
Spiritism, see Naturalism (the supernatural) 
Spiritual Exercises (Loyola), 39 
sport(s), 330, 344; Montaigne recommends 

1 38; golf 1 87; skating 1 87; tennis 1 87; with 

balls 187, redef. 628; skiing 628; heroes of 

783; and ethics 794; cause riots 794; 

Olympics 330, 596, 794 
spy(ing), pre-1914 698; in Great War 709; and 

20C consciousness 757, 792 
Stat Life, 535, 652, 751, 767, 796, 801, standard 

of living 778 
Stoic (s) (ism), 52, 134; view of nature 72; 

fashionable 189-90, 200; demanding 190; 

Christina of Sweden's 208 ff.; not suited to 

Baroque 347 
Stones of Venice, The, \1A 
Strasbourg, 28, 34, 52, 433 
Stream of consciousness, 563, 660, 674—5, 715, 

716 
Structuralism, see Abstraction (structure) 
Sturm and Drang, 395, 472 



874 <^> Index 



style, Petrarch on 49, 78; in the arts, 78, 717; 

manners relaxed 351, 782; casual 734, 781; 

life- 783; see also demotics; poetry; prose 
Suez Canal, 446 

Superman, Shaw's 592, q. 687; Nietzsche's 670 
superstition(s), 19, 58, 202; 17C resurgence 

212, 213; in Middle Ages 225, 227-8; 

respect for 409, 444, 473; Goethe def. q. 

473; race as 579, 694-5; follows science 751 
Surrealism, 480, 720-1, 723, 734, 757 
"Surrender at Breda, The," 105 
Sweden, Lutheran 36; new power 1 77; in 

ThirtyYears'Warl77,248 
Switzerland, 15, 36; its soldiers in 16C 93; 

independence of 178; nationhood 240, 319 
Symbol(ism), in Romanticism 479, 562; in 

French poets 604; in painting 605; def. 620 

ff.; and language 622; reason for 623; in 

Huysmans, Gissing, Goncourts, Gide 624; 

and myth 636; in Yeats 717 
symphony (ies), Haydn's 409, 419; Mozart's 419; 

Mannheim group's 419; Beethoven's 419; 

Berlioz's Fantastique All, 494-5, 496, 499; 

Eroica 484, 495; Liszt's Tasso 495; symphonic 

poem 558, 640; see also music 
syphilis, 114-5, 161, 183, 197, 329-30, 437, 636 

Table talk, Luther's 16, 349; Selden's 25; 
Coleridge's 273; Johnson's 411; Hazlitt's 
511;Mr.Dooley's596 

Tammany Hall 423, 599 

7*^,1^,42,210,345 

taxation, difficult in empire 97; nation has 
monopoly of 241 ; excessive 296, 778 

techne, xvii, xviii, 4, 74, 114, 120, 173, 203, 
205-6, 228; calculating machine 173, 208; 
def. 205; precedes science 205; applies 
science 205; medieval 230; in fortresses 243; 
civil engineering 312; in Encyclopedie 371; 
Franklin and 375; and fine arts 383; 
steamship 420-1; 18C inventions 399, 408, 
421; fails to impress Egypt 444, 446; 
invasive 535; late 19C inventions 597, listed 
602-3; bridges 598, 726; convenient 603; 
resented 633; and weapons (1914-18) 
704-5; atom bomb 752; space travel 752, 
797; booming 796—7; mastering 799; see 
also Middle Ages; science 

teenager(s), xvi, 83-5, 115, 171, 173, 174, 203, 
233, 268-9, 281, 300, 313, 318, 319, 320, 
437, 442, 448, 473, 546, 580, 608-10 

Telemaque, 298-9 

Tempest, The, q. 103, q. 124, 140, 254 



Temptation of Saint Anthony, The, 557, 559 

terrorism, see assassination; violence 

theater, English boy players 84; puppet 112; 
ancient Greek 141; drama (genre) 164; 
pastoral play 164; nomenclature 164; English 
closed 1642-60 188-9; 261; 17C French 341; 
Restoration 356; sentimental 381, 415; in 18C 
America 406; condemned pastime 406; 
during French Revolution 447; in Paris 493; 
Romanticism barren 513, 515; melodrama 
565-6, 675; late 19C revival 616; Naturalist 
623-4; Shaw and 676, 685-6; new after 1920 
736; Agate on 753; of the Absurd 754 ff; 756; 
plays garbled 759; see also comedy; tragedy 

Theatre des Champs-Elysees, 648, 677 

theme (s), def. xi, 522; see abstraction; analysis; 
emancipation; primitivism; reductivism; 
secularism; self-consciousness; scientism; 
specialism 

theology, see religion; secularism 

theory, of aspect 46-7; in the arts 66, 174, 205, 
467, 557, 560, 611, 621, 646, 720, 730, 738, 
757; in criticism 299; in history 568-9, 
practice precedes 68, 149, 156; of 
probability 220, 439; of monarchy 245 ff., 
248, 253, 293, 425; why any? 250; of nation 
431, 435; love of 654-5; psychoanalytic 661; 
of money 768; of structure 759 ff. 

Third World, 101, 110, 268, 775; see also 
Africa, Orient 

Three Musketeers, The, 185, 241 

Till Eulenspiegel, 154 

time, 54, 231, 234, 246-7, 504; -keeping 376, 
399; artificial 544; see also instruments, 
Longitude 

Times, The (London), 422, q. 441, q. 465, q. 575 

Timon of Athens, 254 

Titus Andronicus, 254 

tobacco, 102; denounced by James 1 102; use 
prohibited 127, or not 261; withheld 403 

toleration, root argument for 217; Coleridge on 
273; limits of 273, 278, 361, 362; Cromwell's 
276; 277 ff., 309; in American colonies 317; 
James II and 362; Spinoza and 362 

Tom Jones, 124,380,386 

Tom Thumb the Great, 326 

tour(ism), Grand Tour 53; Thos. Cook and 
583; see also travel 

trade, westward 98-9; Venetian 169, 171-2; 
and crusades 227; and crime 777; see also 
Capitalism; mercantilism; money 

tragedy, exhilarating 132; Greek 141, 159, 174; 
Aristode on 141; rules of 165-6, 174, ; and 



Index ^ 875 



ballet 329; and sculpture 336; 17C subjects 
341, 342, 343, 349, 416; unlike ancient 348; 
18C genre 378; and Wagner 637 

transportation, see railroad, travel, vehicle 

travel(s), in Renaissance 80; 98—9; books of 
103, a genre 123, 129, 132, 504, 506, Marco 
Polo's 227; and Thos. Cook 583; women 
travelers 583; S. Buder's 635; in space 752, 
797; see also Orient; tour(ism) 

Treatise on Make-up, 115 

Trilby, 611 

Trinity, Luther on 309; D. Sayers on 30; 
Orthodox view of 57 

Tristan and Isolde, medieval 231; Wagner's 576, 
637 

Tristram Shandy, 132 

Troilus and Cressida, 254 

troubadour(s), 158, 159, 233, 523 

tulip(s), mania 179-80 

Turks, in Europe 3, 14, 20, 330; their heaven 
25; 39; capture Constantinople 45, 57; 
stemmed by Habsburgs 96-7; "the enemy" 
in literature 147, 150; fought by Venice 172, 
177,178; vessel captured 173; Greek 
independence from 417, 514; and Crimean 
War 579; in Balkans 690; empire ends 705; 
modernize 746 

Twelfth Night, q. 261 

Uburoi, 619 

Ulysses, 132,715,735,791 

Uncle Tom's Cabin, 565 

unconscious, see psychology 

Unitarians 30, 31, 505 

United Nations, see peace 

United States, taken as model 53; frontier 100; 
noun and adjective American 104; Gold Rush 
106; and Cuba 173; Civil War 264; flag 
burning in 273, 304, 758; Constitution 363, 
529; Founding Fathers 398; first president 
423; education in 488, ill thought-of 504, 
507; institutions successful 528, 537; 
westward expansion 583, 605; cultural 
upsurge 605, 698; rise to power 613; party 
names in 688; since 1917 745; Great 
Depression 745; good schools 745-6, bad ; 
expatriates 745; and war debts 746; Japan 
attacks 748; in Far East 764; Separatism in 
774; two-party system 780; high cost of 
office 780; in disarray 778 ff. 

Unity(ies), xv, xvii, 40, 175, 303, 305; is not 
uniformity xviii, 4; in faith 23; of the 
intellect 25; in theology 30; western passion 



for 125, 272; in playwriting 165-7; 341, 342; 
through knowledge 359, broken up 785; 
four drives to 695; see also diversity; 
Separatism 

universal monarchy, Dante on 93; Habsburg 
hope of 97; Louis XIV and 303, 305; see 
also monarchy 

university(ies), Sorbonne 108, 191, 228, 372, 
413, 746; Salamanca 110-1; College de 
France 113; Padua 114, 115, 186; Harvard 
180, 280, 318, 599, 606; Bologna 186; 
medieval 226; meaning of name 228; 
organization of 228; curriculum of 228; 
degrees given 228; students of 229, 766; 
Yale 318, 606; William and Mary 318; 
Columbia 405, 605-6; Edinburgh 412-3; 
Scottish 412-3; German 413, 505; 18 
English 413, 19C 432, reformed 574; U.S. 
upgraded 605-6, and Ph.D. 606; Chicago 
605, 606, 608; Johns Hopkins 605, 606; 
Cornell 605, 606; Princeton 606; Clark 610, 
661—2; Chinese students in 630; returning 
soldiers 746; California 764; and the arts 
746; 1968 riots in 764-5; late 20C 783; 
alumni of 784; conglomerate curriculum of 
785; political correctness in 794-5 

Utopia(s), 171, 257; in Shakespeare 103, 140, 
More's 107, 117 ff., full tide of 1 18, 
compared 118-25; meaning of word 117; 
critique of 121-2, 123, 124, 126, 127; in Don 
Quixote 124; in novels 124; Montaigne's 126, 
138; as fiction 127-8; Rabelais' 131; John 
Oswald's 441; Socialism in 522, 523-4; 
Looking Backward '593; 1968 youth groups 
764-5; in modern life 777; "re-inventing 
government" 780-1; one more 799-802 

vaccination, see plague (smallpox) 

Vatican, rebuilding of 21, 64, 66; women's 
influence in 85, 185, 186; 251; Council 593 

vehicles, cart, chaise, coach 1 84, 540; balloon 
421, 584; bus 492, 535; cab 498; motorcar 
628; airplane 628, 649; see also railway 

Venice, painters of 70; no persecution in 109; 
singing gondoliers 147-8; music in San 
Marco 160; founded 169; in decline 169-70; 
Doge ritual 170, 171, 174, 251; government 
of 170 ff.; laws of 170-2; republican stability 
of 171, 259; tolerance in 171; polyglot 171; 
in long wars 172-3, 179; decaying system 
173; and literature 174; patron of opera 175; 
double-entry bookkeeping used 206; 
Rousseau in 383; home of pleasure 420, 536 



876 Q*& Index 



Venus and Adonis, 142 

Versailles, Court of 287-9, 343; occupations at 
290; building of chateau 291-2, 337; on 
battlefield 303; 305; chateau described 337; 
depressing life at 350; music at 390; a 
symbol of monarch 423; German empire 
born at 587, 706; Treaty of (1919) 705, 746 

versification, ancient 1 63; alexandrine 163, 342, 
493; blank verse 164; heroic couplet 164, 
356; complex rules of 299, 341 ; neo -classic 
325, 341; double rimes 358, 486; plain 
diction 478; Hugo's novelties 493; after 
1920 721; see also lyric; poet; sonnet 

Vestiges of Creation, The, 502 

Victorian (ism), see Moral(ism) 

Vienna, 14, 415; Treaty of 465 ff.; and music 
481; School (psychiatry) 661-3 

Vindication of the Rights of Women, 458 

violence, advocated xiv, 688, 698; in opera 176; 
student 226; in 20C society 242, 683, 776; in 
painting 336; unsettling 692; youthful 
695-6; anti-republican 696, 697; rage at 
crowding 777; in schools 777; riots and 
sports 794 

Virginia (U.S.A.), 74, 316, 318; and education 
407, 488 

vitalism, 56, 195, 365, 665; Diderot and 374; 
Butler and 634 

Vita Nuova, La, 167 

"waiting for Godeau," 725 

Walden, 506 

war(s), culture resists xviii; civil 16, 179, 240, 
255, 259, 261 ff., 264, 747; in Rabelais 131; 
Venetian 172; and engineering 205; medieval 
116-7; Art o/(Machiavelli) 259; as unifier 
303; 17C world wars 317; of 1792-1815 
425, 428, 434 ff, 442, 521; nation-in-arms 
435, 703-4, 710; Swiss tactics 104-5; just 
war 521, 702; Yellow Peril 629, 692; 
invigorating 699, 701, 765; conscientious 
objector 709; mutiny 363; 
of Charles V 93 ff., 96, 104; Thirty Years' 
177-8, 200, 240-1, 275, 654; Anglo-Dutch 
276; of Louis XTV 293-4, 296, 302-4; of the 
Roses 240; English Civil 255, 263 ff; of 
American Independence 255, 397, 398, 399, 
406, 441 ; Crimean 579-80; American Civil 
583-^, 586, 701; Franco Mexican 587; 
Franco-Prussian 587, 703; of German 
unification 671; Boer 629, 692; Sino- 
Japanese 629; Russo-Japanese 629, 692, 697; 
Spanish- American 593, 596, 613, 629, 692; 



Balkan 689-90; Great War (1914-18) 109, 
301, 673, 679, 683, 689 ff., 704, and 
intellectuals 699, 700, new mode of 699 ff., 
causes fought for 703, 707, mutiny in 710, 
losses in 710-1, not ended in 1920 711, 744, 
disillusion with 747, casualness linked with 
781; Spanish Civil 747; Second World 708, 
749, and sequels 763-4; Cold War 763; 
Vietnam 764 

War and Peace, 112, 565 

Waste Land, The, 115 

Waterloo, 452, 465, 485 

Waverley (and sequels), 482 

Way of All Flesh, The, 553, 633-^ 

Wealth of Nations, The, All, 456 

Weimar, 394; Goethe in 394 ff.; 409, 414, 451; 
Republic 744, 746-7 

welfare state, 126-7, 528, 535, 686, 687-8, 714, 
749, 778; Utopia in 777-8; expands 780; 
improved 800 

Whirligig of Taste, 807; see also canon; 
criticism 

Winterslow, 511 

Winter's Tale, The, q. 200 

witchcraft, Luther on 19; 25; persecution of 
210, 212-3, 261; in New England 277, 278, 
279 ff, 281; 317; to win king's favor 291; in 
Egypt 444 

Women, of the Renaissance, 79, 82-3; 

distinguished 82, 85-9, 340; rights defended 
85, 171, 181, 186-7, 232, 234, 259, 404, 
457-9, 523; 19C novelists 563 ff., 627; 
equality with men 87; status of 87-8, 232-3; 
soldiers in Utopia 120; Querelle desfemmes 
131, 232; education of 131, 186, 298, 438, 
458, 475, 476, 532, 626-7; in Italian epics 
147, 152; in Song of 'Roland ; in plays 189; 
during crusades 232; in high office 232, 243, 
459; in courtly love 233-^, 552-3; and 
dueling 242; preachers 268; and blue ribbon 
287; in American colonies 317; exact in 
speech 350; influence through salons 351; 
portrayed by Restif 448, 449; as portrait 
painters 460; "eternal feminine" 475; list of 
"muses" 475; women in the wilderness 524; 
in the United States 538; travelers 583; in 
Paris Commune 588; the "new woman" 
591, 610-1, 626-7, 628; colleges for 610; 
votes for 610-1; English suffragettes 696—7; 
in war work 704; a "minority" 764; less 
deference to 782; future in science 800 

work, ethic 36; required of all 81, 121, 126, 127, 
522, 527; less in Utopias 120, 593; respected 



Index <^> 877 



242, 299; changes character 522, 541, 788; 

by hand 554, 608; devices 603-4; and the 

weekend 595; and machinery 603; see also 

labor 
works (charitable), 19, 20, 21, 32, 37, 290, 358, 

537; modern 596, 758; Peace Corps 673, 

778, 787 
Wesgeck, play 515; opera 515, 729 



Xerxes, 327 

Year 1000, 227 
Yellow Journalism, 599 
Yellow Peril, 629, 692 

Zadig, 379, 740 

Zwinger, the (Dresden), 391