by Philipp Blom
The Dynamo and the Virgin
If fear of the future was particularly strong in France and expressed itself both in the hysteria surrounding the Dreyfus trial and in the aesthetic conception of the 1900 World Fair, not everyone was afraid of the impending change. Those curious enough to think about the cultural transformation enacted by technology found their imaginations taking flight in front of the huge dynamos in the halls of machines. ‘The modest debutante of 1889 has grown big and strong,’ wrote Melchior de Vogüé about this strange machine.
She has her own palace, her furniture. The little dynamo has increased in size and strength. It was a metre large, now it measures ten; it produced the power of 500 horses, now it provides 5,000 ... If it can move our Métropolitain which sometimes even works [a swipe against the first Métro line, still having teething troubles] it has not yet taken possession of a locomotive on our great lines, or of an ocean liner.
The power of a new age: the hall of dynamos at the
1900 World Fair.
The Berlin teacher Jean Sauvage had felt a chill run down his spine as he contemplated the machines. No one, though, was as prophetically perceptive as the American Henry Adams, who recognized them as the very essence of the age to come in his autobiography: ‘he [Adams] found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.’ So far, Adams believed, the West had been inspired by the force of feminine creativity symbolized once by the power of sex, by the terrifying attraction of Venus, and neutralized by Christianity in the person of the Virgin Mary. This transition from a heathen, sexual force to Christian and finally modern womanhood had, the historian wrote, robbed culture of its vitality, especially in his own country.
The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely as a sentiment, but as a force. Why was she unknown in America? For evidently America was ashamed of her, and she was ashamed of herself, otherwise they would not have strewn fig-leaves so profusely all over her. When she was a true force, she was ignorant of fig-leaves, but the monthly-magazine-made American female had not a feature that would have been recognised by Adam. The trait was notorious, and often humorous, but any one brought up among Puritans knew that sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength. Neither art nor beauty was needed ... Adams began to ponder, asking himself whether he knew of any American artist who had ever insisted on the power of sex, as every classic had always done ... American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.
There is an echo in this critical evaluation of the French debate about sterility and the decline of population. Both Adams and his Continental counterparts felt that a cultural, creative force had been lost and trivialized, even if Adams localized the problem not in his own time but in the very beginnings of Christianity. The world of advertising and mass production might have brought forth the sexless monthly-magazine-made American female, but her antecedent was the virginal mother of God, not the procreative force of Venus. It seems significant that for many European writers the problem lay not with womanhood, but with impotence. France was no longer manly, it was effeminate and dissipated.
To Adams (and to many others, as we shall see) the answer to this perceived exhaustion of Western culture lay in the vast, brute force of technology. ‘The nearest approach to the revolution of 1900 was that of 310, when Constantine set up the Cross,’ he summarized, and he was quite serious. Another visitor to the exhibition who felt the same kind of awe and whose reaction is characterized by a similar mixture of impatience with the old and a religious perspective on the new was the French avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918):
In the end you are weary of this ancient world
O shepherd Eiffel Tower, the flock of bridges is bleating
You have enough of living in Greek and Roman antiquity
Here, even automobiles look ancient
Only religion has remained entirely new only religion
Has remained simple like the hangars of airports
The only faith possible was an amalgam of the ancient and the avant garde. The present was irredeemably vulgar, be it for Adams and his women stripped of sex by their puritan world and debased by mass-produced magazines, or for Apollinaire, who saw people burying themselves in the ‘prospectus the catalogues the posters singing at the top of their voices’.
When the Universal Exhibition closed in November with a dinner given for twenty thousand French mayors from all over the country down to the smallest villages (service during this culinary extravaganza was assured by waiters zooming along the tables in motorcars), it was judged to have been a success, an ample demonstration of France’s continuing might and importance, of international harmony and modern technology. What was more, it had almost recouped the huge investments made, and even though twenty times the city’s population had visited, no major incident had marred the event.
Suddenly everything was illuminated:
lightning strikes the Eiffel Tower.
La Parisienne, the fashionably dressed emblem of Paris enthroned on top of the monumental entrance to the 1900 Fair, had received a terrible press and had been seen as an embarrassment. In November she was taken down and unceremoniously packed off to the wreckers, like most of the elaborate structures and ornaments conceived and created for the Fair. Judging from contemporary illustrations, the artistic merits of the sculpture were no more questionable than those of most works of art shown during the exhibition. Perhaps the real reason for the uproar caused by la Parisienne was precisely that she was not allegorical enough. The preoccupation with birth rates and infertility, the overtones of castration and strangulation in the antisemitic clichés of the day, and more generally the obsession with moral corruption and decline, are indicative of anxieties about another, unstoppable, development that would revolutionize society: the changing role of women. Like Dreyfus, the huge, self-assured and contemporary woman greeting all visitors embodied deep public fears. She was too real, too disquietingly powerful. Hers was too much the shape of things to come.
2
1901: The Changing of the Guard
I lived in a closed world trying to ignore the new times and to preserve to the bitter end the old habits and illusions.
- Comtesse Jean de Pange, Comment j’ai vu 1900
Our ancestors kept the political power of the state in the hands of those who had property ... but their successors had destroyed that system, and placed political power in the hands of the multitude, and we must take the consequences.
- The Duke of Northumberland, 1908
When the moment came, it was the grandson who insisted on closing the old woman’s eyes, a last gesture of respect and admiration, accorded to him by his two uncles, her sons. He reached across with his healthy right arm to fulfil this last obligation. His left arm, withered since childhood, hung by his side. He was Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany. His grandmother, who had died on 22 January 1901, was Queen Victoria.
For many years, the empire had been ruled not from London but from Osborne House, the island estate built in European style, far away from it all on the Isle of Wight, a refuge which had allowed the ageing sovereign to live among mementoes of her late husband, to escape her subjects’ incessant demands for official appearances, and her son’s pop-eyed vulgarity. The Queen had become a remote presence, an invocation (‘Gentlemen, the Queen!’), an unseen certainty taken for granted by everyone from Glasgow to Melbourne. Her reign had lasted sixty-four years; she was the only ruler hundreds of millions of people across the globe had ever known.
In our own day, in which every value is contested and contestable, it is difficult to understand the unshakable faith the Victorians had in themselves: their sense of purpose, of mission, of God-given entitlement. It was not the meek, but the British who had inherited the earth. Britain was the richest nation and the most powerful, producing (in 1850) half of the world’s
industrial goods; the British had brought the gospels and the rules of cricket to natives in the remotest rainforests and deserts, and they had managed to concentrate their phenomenal power in the drawing-rooms of a few gentlemen’s clubs on Pall Mall in London, the discreet epicentre of the world’s largest capital. While the governors of Europe’s other great powers appeared regularly in grand, tasselled uniforms, Britain was essentially a civilian culture; while elsewhere the seat of government was an elaborate, neo-something palace, Her Majesty’s prime minister resided, in quiet confidence, in a plain-fronted terraced brick house on Downing Street.
Naturally, the social conventions of the time locked ‘the right’ people into civilian uniforms and hierarchies that were every bit as strict as those of any regiment, with no need for sabres or helmets to signal their intent. Even the vulgarian Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, proved unyielding in this respect: ‘I thought everyone must know that a short jacket is always worn with a silk hat at a private view in the morning,’ he complained when his assistant private secretary Frederick Ponsonby had negligently appeared at a Royal Academy exhibition in the wrong attire. The preoccupation with propriety extended to the remotest points of the empire and to the most unlikely occasions. Survival kits of the 1860s, packed in wooden barrels and deposited on tropical islands for use by the shipwrecked on their way to New Zealand, contained, as well as the predictably useful knife, matches, rope, and fish-hooks, a three-piece tweed suit - presumably to allow any latter-day Robinson Crusoe to welcome his rescuers with appropriate decorum.
‘I believe that the British race is the greatest of the governing races that the world has ever seen,’ remarked the empire’s colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain. ‘It is not enough to occupy great spaces of the world’s surface unless you can make the best of them. It is the duty of a landlord to develop his estate.’ And develop they did: by trade and warfare, by training armies and missionaries, by building railways and prefabricated corrugated-iron chapels for dispatch to far-flung colonies.
It had been a time of constant exploits on the most colossal scale, whose very failures seemed heroic to those in the home country. In 1854, during the Crimean War, 673 British cavalrymen with sabres drawn staged a staggeringly and knowingly futile attack on entrenched Russian artillery positions. One hundred and eighteen men were killed and 127 wounded, and the attack became a gallant myth of valour and self-sacrifice, the proverbial Charge of the Light Brigade, set in verse by the Queen’s Poet Laureate,
Alfred Lord Tennyson: ‘Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die: / Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred.’ When in 1885 political dithering in London left General Charles George Gordon without reinforcements at Khartoum in the Sudan, with his troops overwhelmed by Dervish attackers, Gordon calmly dressed in his best white uniform and faced his enemies alone. They riddled him with spears. He became a martyr of empire, praised in distinctively religious language by the bishop of Thetford: ‘Oh, brethren, we have known others like him, with that beautiful combination of courage and tenderness, the reflection of Him, who was and is the Lion of the tribe of Judah, and the Lamb of God.’
This was an empire built for eternity, for the eye of God: London’s very sewers had been constructed with huge vaulting ceilings worthy of cathedrals and no nation could rival Britain’s possessions, her navy, or her glory, which was celebrated on an appropriately grand scale, never more so than on the occasion of the Queen’s diamond jubilee in 1897. It was a gigantic demonstration of imperial splendour, with 64,000 soldiers marching through the capital, including, in Barbara Tuchman’s almost poetic enumeration:
…the Cape Mounted Rifles, the Canadian Hussars, the New South Wales Lancers, the Trinidad Light Horse, the magnificent turbaned and bearded Lancers of Khapurthala, the Badnagar and other Indian states, the Zaptichs of Cyprus in tasseled fezzes on black-maned ponies. Dark-skinned infantry regiments, ‘terrible and beautiful to behold,’ in the words of a rhapsodic press, wound down the streets in a fantasy of variegated uniforms: the Borneo Dyak Police, the Jamaica Artillery, the Royal Nigerian Constabulary, the giant Sikhs from India, Houssas from the Gold Coast, Chinese from Hong Kong, Malays from Singapore, Negroes from the West Indies, British Guiana and Sierra Leone, company after company passed before a dazzled people, awestruck at the testimony of their own might.
The aged Queen had been delighted. A press photographer even caught a rare image of her smiling broadly into the crowd, and the whole country lived a moment of imperial splendour as the world’s undisputed superpower, God’s chosen people. But in reality, the jubilee celebrations were almost as much of a valediction as the Queen’s funeral would be. Not many foresaw this only four years earlier. Tuchman quotes one of the most admired but also one of the strangest homages paid to the sovereign at her jubilee, the poem ‘Recessional’ by Rudyard Kipling, a work of great dignity and force. If Kipling was the bard of Empire, on this occasion he produced a warning, even an obituary: ‘Far-called, our navies melt away; / On dune and headland sinks the fire: / Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!’
Voices such as this had been few and far between during Victoria’s day, though the extraordinary public response to Kipling’s poem, which was printed in The Times, shows that his artistic sensitivity had captured one aspect of the nation’s mood. The ‘Sea of Faith’ which Matthew Arnold had already seen retreating thirty years earlier with a ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ was silently but inexorably ebbing away ‘to the breath / Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear / And naked shingles of the world’.
When life finally ebbed away from the old Queen in 1901, the empire prepared for a farewell fit not for a person but for an age: a sumptuous celebration of sorrowful glory. The ceremonies were to be so elaborate, and the list of invited royalty so long, that almost two weeks went by between her death and her funeral.
The Queen’s body had been transferred from the Isle of Wight to Portsmouth on the royal yacht Alberta. Royal Navy battleships and cruisers, as well as vessels sent from Germany, France, Portugal, and even Japan, had provided a last escort, with the Spanish regretfully unable to fulfil this decorous duty: their ship had failed to arrive in time, and a smaller craft owned by the Prince of Monaco had been obliged to sail in as a substitute. The transfer between Portsmouth harbour and London was itself testimony to the changing age: the royal remains were conveyed by train, with tens of thousands of mourners lining the rails all the way.
When the funeral cortège finally arrived in the capital on 2 February, the Queen’s body was carried (at Her Majesty’s expressed wish) on a gun carriage. Like a Victorian drawing room, the coffin itself was crammed with personal mementoes and photos (including, of course, the portrait of Albert, and one of John Brown, the Queen’s Scottish manservant, laid on her wrist, as she had ordained). Twenty thousand soldiers accompanied Her Majesty on her last journey, with another thirty thousand forming a guard of honour along the streets. Following the coffin were the German Kaiser, who had closed the old Queen’s eyes, the kings of Portugal and Greece, five crown princes, fourteen princes, two grand dukes, one archduke, five dukes, and innumerable other, lesser, dignitaries. Writing home from his London club, the American novelist Henry James recorded: ‘I mourn the safe and motherly old middle-class Queen, who held the nation warm under the fold of her big, hideous, Scotch-plaid shawl and whose duration had been so extraordinarily convenient and beneficent. I fear her death much more than I should have expected; she was a sustaining symbol - and the wild waters are upon us now.’
Arnold’s receding ‘Sea of Faith’ and Henry James’s ‘wild waters’ were just two of the marine metaphors used to describe a blind, dark, pulling power seemingly dragging the world to an uncertain end, or crashing over it like the rejoined waves over the biblical Egyptians. The disappearance of the supreme symbol of Britain’s greatest century left the onlookers reeling, the ground shifting under their feet. ‘For
they have lost their rhythm, / the pulse of the sea / in their salt blood,’ wrote the poet Jon Stallworthy of their uncertain successors.
With unregal rashness, the new King, Edward VII, Bertie to his friends and ‘Edward the Caresser’ to a contemptuous Henry James, lost no time distancing himself from his mother’s fusty heritage. At Windsor Castle, ‘Bertie’ went on a rampage. Plaster busts and statues of Victoria’s Highland servant and confidant John Brown were smashed, papers burned, mementoes of the late Prince Albert packed off into storage, and hundreds of ‘rubbishy old photographs’ destroyed. Smoking his cigars where smoking had never been allowed and wheezing gleefully at the symbolic carnage around him, Edward felt he had rid himself of a huge and tiresome burden. With a last sweep of the new broom, he converted Osborne House, his mother’s cherished retreat and the place of her death, into a Royal Navy college for cadets, and a home for retired officers.
Where Queen Victoria had been contained and discreet, Edward was crass and demonstrative; where the mother had viewed the essence of a monarch’s life as an uneventful stability, the son believed in fun. His career so far had been one long round of country house parties and shooting weekends, affairs with pretty actresses and married women, race meetings and European holidays. Apart from her two servant-cum-advisers, the Scottish Mr Brown and the Indian Munshi, the late Queen had mixed only with members of the high aristocracy, settled and solid people, like Her famously solid Majesty. Not so Edward, who preferred the company of the nouveaux riches, so much brighter, so much more sophisticated, so much more entertaining, and richer too, or at least so much readier to part with their fortunes in order to keep him amused. The King was ‘always surrounded by a bevy of Jews and a ring of racing people’, Lady Paget noted disdainfully, adding that he had ‘the same luxurious taste as the Semites, and the same love of pleasure and comfort’. The old aristocracy and its ways were being squeezed out of the King’s company.