by Philipp Blom
At the Paris Exhibition of 1900, Henry Adams had worshipped at the altar of the dynamo, with its quiet force and velocity. In Germany, it appeared to many that the dynamo had taken over. It was not only the Italian Futurists who saw energy as a virtue in itself. Mechanical energy became the very opposite of the decadent, degenerate culture of neurasthenia. ‘Where “energy” became the highest virtue, a world-view emerged in which there was no longer “good” and “evil”, not even “right” and “wrong”, but only “energetic” and “neurasthenic”; “forceful” and “limp”,’ writes the historian Joachim Radkau.
Thomas Mann famously wrote about the ‘almost unbearable nervous tension’ of these years, and it was his genius to condense the motifs of the neurasthenia debate and of an entire era into his novel The Magic Mountain, in which Hans Castorp, a young engineer, visits his sick cousin, an officer in the German army, in a Swiss sanatorium. The short visit becomes a seven-year stay in a place whose most important characteristic is the suspension of all speed, of time itself. Days, months and years flow into one another as the rules of the world ‘down there’ seem suspended, and after a while Hans falls in with the residents and even loses interest in his only book ‘up here’, Ocean Steamships. The counterpart to the engineer and his fast machines is his cousin Joachim Ziemsen, the tubercular officer, whose greatest terror is being thought of as ‘limp’ and unable to do his manly duty ‘down in the plains’. Disguised as an institution for the treatment of sick lungs, the sanatorium is in fact a neurasthenic cosmos in miniature, a refuge for people no longer able to keep up, a universe saturated with anxiety and morbid sensuality - all the more so as the ferocious and Freudian Dr Krokowski is given to lecturing on topics such as ‘Love as an Illness-Inducing Force’.
Speed was fascinating because of its inherent danger, because machines embodied the thrusting force of modernity. When Henry Adams had proclaimed the end of the age of the Virgin and the beginning of the age of the Dynamo he had equated the quiet force of the generator with a female principle; the male equivalents were aircraft and racing cars, which transformed every pilot and chauffeur into a mechanically enhanced, bionic superman whose potency was measured in horsepower. Fast cars, as Apollinaire had suggested, were sexually charged, and the men of the 1900s needed more of them - or so they thought.
The alternative to hitching a ride in the cockpit was being run over. Those who could not adapt fast enough, those who were paralysed by the gulf between public morality and personal impulse and those who did not have the strength to hold on to the vehicle were left by the wayside, bruised and bloodied by the encounter. Despite the new horizons opened by it, the new world was a merciless place, dividing humankind into those who coped and those who did not. The battle for the mind of the twentieth century was fuelled by technology, but it was fought over sex.
11
1910: Human Nature Changed
We have ceased to ask ‘What does this picture represent?’ and ask instead, ‘What does it make us feel?’ We expect a work of plastic art to have more in common with a piece of music than with a coloured photograph. - Clive Bell
One evening in 1923, a strikingly elegant woman with a face of severe, almost classical beauty stood in front of a group of Cambridge students to deliver a lecture about modern literature, built around a sentence that was as arresting as she was beautiful: ‘in or around December, 1910, human character changed.’ The author of this grandiose claim was speaking about novels, but her statement applied to all the arts, and she was uniquely qualified to make such a statement, because already in 1910 she had been at the heart of one of Europe’s most conspicuous artistic groups. She was, of course, Virginia Woolf.
The change in human character which Woolf believed she had observed was subtle and difficult to grasp: ‘I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless, and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.’ Instead of occurring outside and with the gratifying obviousness of a definite flowering or the production of something useful, the transformation happened inside, at home, and in people’s heads:
In life one can see the change, if I may use a homely illustration, in the character of one’s cook. The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook [i.e. under George V] is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing room, not to borrow the Daily Herald, but to ask advice about a hat. Do you ask for a more solemn instance of the power of the human race to change?
A ruddy-cheeked kitchen maid with a fashionable hat may not be the most obvious symbol of a revolution, but Woolf was adamant that she represented nothing less: ‘All human relations have shifted - those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.’ A writer herself, Woolf was interested in this last, and the change she described here - obvious in the 1920s but originating around 1910 - was one that was all the more fundamental for not being fully understood. Until that point, she claimed, novelists had been able to describe the world more or less as it was, whether they concentrated on character and story or chose to use their characters as examples of larger ideas. Now, however, the tools of narration seemed inadequate for fixing on the page the feelings and nature of people and events. Once sophisticated and exact, language had become ‘the sound of breaking and falling, crashing and destruction’. It was no longer possible to capture the world in simple sentences; conventions, roles and expectations were changing so fast and so thoroughly that the metaphorical web of language had trouble keeping up. The contract between writer and reader, a silent agreement similar to those of polite conversation, had broken down and left both sides squirming in the attempt to say anything meaningful:
At the present moment we are suffering, not from decay, but from having no code of manners which writers and readers accept as a prelude to the more exciting intercourse of friendship. The literary conversation of the time is so artificial - you have to talk about the weather and nothing but the weather throughout the entire visit - that, naturally, the feeble are tempted to outrage and the strong are led to destroy the very foundations and rules of literary society. Signs of this are everywhere apparent. Grammar is violated; syntax disintegrated; as a boy staying with an aunt for the weekend rolls in the geranium bed out of sheer desperation as the solemnities of the sabbath wear on. Their sincerity is desperate and their courage tremendous ... but what a waste of energy!
The consequence of this reinvention of language was twofold: on the one hand, the creative energy invested in words made new writing wonderfully rich and colourful; on the other, however, too little was left to drive along the text, to convey a minimum of assurance even to the most daring reader. Reading T. S. Eliot’s poetry, Woolf herself explained, she found herself at once admiring and exhausted: ‘As I sun myself upon the intense and ravishing beauty of one of his lines, and reflect that I must make a dizzy and dangerous leap to the next, and so from line to line, like an acrobat flying from bar to bar, I cry out, I confess, for the old decorum and envy the indolence of my ancestors who, instead of spinning madly through mid-air, dreamt quietly in the shade with a book.’ So much effort had gone into devising new narrative tools, a new language and a new style, that the text itself was sapped of vital force, as if the very words were suffering from neurasthenia: ‘if you compare [Lytton Strachey’s historical masterpiece] Eminent Victorians with some of [the Victorian historian] Lord Macaulay’s essays, though you will feel that Lord Macaulay is always wrong and Mr Strachey is always right, you will also feel a body, a sweep, a richness in Lord Macaulay’s essays, which show that his age was behind him; all his strength went straight into his work; none was used for the purpose of concealment and conversion.’
In or around 1910, everything had become difficult for writers, Woolf claimed. The changes that occurred were too powerful to be ignored, too swift to be fully assimilated, and they had left language itself behind. The consequence was a difficult season in the arts, a kind of art demanding of its public to ‘tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure’.
Talking of Copulation
Daring as it was to fix 1910 as a key date for humanity, for Virginia Stephen, the later Virginia Woolf, it was a year of powerful biographical resonance. After the death of their father in 1904 (their mother had died almost ten years earlier), the four Stephen siblings had moved into a large house at 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, an area of faded gentility far away from the social world of their childhood. Their decision to live together, without any matronly figure to watch over their virtue and without a chaperone for Virginia and Vanessa, raised eyebrows, but they were determined to live their own lives free from the constraints of Edwardian upper-middle-class respectability.
For Virginia this was a period of beginnings. Aged twenty-two, she wanted to write, and she began by penning reviews for literary magazines. The death of her father had precipitated a severe mental crisis for her, the first of many, and in her new home she began to construct an adult personality for herself. Her determination was tested once again when her adored brother Thoby died of typhoid during a trip through Greece in 1907, but she inherited from him a circle of Cambridge friends who would still come to the Stephens’ bohemian residence with its airy interiors, Indian scarfs draped over walls and furniture, and piles of books everywhere. There they would drink strong coffee and smoke cigarettes and discuss every topic under the sun, even scandalous, unspeakable things. The liberating blow had been struck in 1908 by one of Thoby’s friends, as famously retold by Woolf:
The long and sinister figure of Mr. Lytton Strachey stood on the threshold. He pointed his finger at a stain on Vanessa’s white dress.
‘Semen?’ he said.
Can one really say that? I thought & we burst out laughing. With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down. A flood of the sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us. Sex permeated our conversation. The word bugger was never far from our lips. We discussed copulation with the same excitement and openness that we had discussed the nature of good. It is strange to think how reticent, how reversed we had been and for how long.
Strachey (1880-1932), the flamboyantly homosexual later author of Eminent Victorians, had a particular gift for finding the right phrase at the right time. When in 1914 he became a conscientious objector and had to appear before an army panel, he was asked by the officers what he would do if a German soldier raped his sister. ‘I would endeavour to come between them,’ was his reply.
After Vanessa’s marriage to the painter Clive Bell, the bohemian Stephen household changed and Virginia moved, together with her brother Adrian, into a house close by, where the life of books, discussions and designs for living continued unabated. In 1910, aged twenty-eight, Virginia was ready to confront the world head-on. Three events that year, each one characteristic of a different aspect of the time, accentuated this determination. In February she was involved, at the last minute, in a practical joke designed to explode the grand ‘Britannia rules the waves’ rhetoric that was prevalent at the time: as Prince Mendax she participated in the Dreadnought Hoax, face blackened and with a false beard stuck to her chin. During the year, Woolf also became involved in the suffragette movement, whose campaign was reaching its high point. Her personal involvement did not go beyond stuffing and addressing envelopes in a local office of the NWUSS, but it involved taking a stand, even if Virginia found that she herself was not made for political movements and agitation.
The third event in 1910 that sharpened Woolf’s sense that something new was happening and that human character and outlook were no longer the same as they had been was an exhibition of ‘post-Impressionist’ painters, curated by another member of their circle, the painter and art critic Roger Fry.
Oh, for a time when art still had the capacity to shock! Into the genteel world of James Abbott McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent, into the lives of a middle class whose heads were filled with works by Victorian dream merchants such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais, burst the new wave. A public taste marked by English landscapes was invaded by the primeval emotional intensity of Vincent van Gogh, the quasi-abstract grandeur of Paul Cézanne, and the primitivist sensualism of Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian canvases. The effect was extraordinary. Overwhelmingly hostile, reviewers called the works ‘hysterical daubs’, ‘crude intolerable outrages’ and ‘childish rubbish’. Predictably van Gogh’s work was attacked as the ravings of an ‘adult maniac’, Gauguin’s for his ‘crude savagery’ and Cézanne’s unveiling of geometries in nature was seen as ‘sterile’ and ‘unmanly’, while the exhibition itself was criticized as a collection of ‘sickening aberrations’ created by ‘morbid’, ‘diseased minds’, a symptom of ‘the last degradation of art’. This, many critics agreed, was not art, but an attack on all that is beautiful, true and sacred in civilization.
Some of their colleagues across the Channel were altogether more understanding of the energies at work in these canvases. In his book Modern Art (published in English translation in 1908), the German critic Julius Meier-Graefe perceptively and characteristically explained the message of a Gauguin in terms of disease and civilization, health and nature, virility and femininity:
‘Your civilization is your disease,’ he says, ‘my barbarism is my restoration to health. The Eve of your civilized conception makes us nearly all misogynists. The old Eve, who shocked you in my studio, will perhaps seem less odious to you one day ... Only the Eve I have painted can stand naked before us. Yours would be shameless in this natural state, and if beautiful, the source of pain and evil.’
The English art world had been largely sheltered from new developments in European art and was, in effect, a generation behind its time. The work of Picasso and Klimt, Schiele and Malevich, the Fauves and the Futurists had passed almost entirely unnoticed (even by avant-gardists like Fry himself), and so it was the previous generation of searchers and provocateurs that brought a shocked public to realize that art could be many things it had not yet seen or understood. Woolf followed the vituperations by the press and by an establishment that left her feeling increasingly alienated. The way of seeing the world that she and her friends were cultivating, she realized, was in effect at war with the aesthetics, the politics and the morals of the Edwardian establishment and its public expressions. She saw a society refusing to accept that something had come to an end with the death of Queen Victoria, that something new was happening, a different way of seeing the world, of being in the world.
Yet another convenient date helped Woolf to pinpoint the date of the transformation. On 6 May 1910, George V ascended to the throne after his father Edward the Caresser had wheezed his last in a hotel in Biarritz. Making a clear division between the old Edwardian days and her own time, Virginia Woolf would refer to this period as ‘Georgian’, hoping perhaps that this second Georgian period (a term which has not survived into history writing) would bring as much innovation and social change as had the first, two hundred years earlier.
If there are several convenient pegs with which to fasten Woolf’s perception of radical change to the year 1910, we must not forget the less obvious but more ubiquitous shifts in outlook and behaviour which punctuated daily life. Woolf herself points in this direction by taking, with more than a little ironic snobbery, ‘one’s cook’ as the only and supreme example of her grand claim. Formerly banished downstairs, the said cook is now confident enough to breeze into the sitting room to ask her employer’s advice about a hat - speaking as if she were among equals, behaving like someone who has a life away from her vocation and her preordained role, someone who wants to look feminine, to enjoy herself, perhaps to find a man, to have a family - someone who feels entit
led to ask all that of life, and to ask it in the face of her social betters. She was not alone. The suffragettes were on the streets, miners in Wales were on strike and Ireland was demanding Home Rule. To many this was a dangerous symptom of modern degeneration that had to be fought with all means possible, just as the post-Impressionists were nothing but barbarians poisoning the wells of civilization. Others, however, saw these changes as necessary and concluded that not only society but the very way of perceiving the world and of feeling would have to give way to something new, and that art had to respond to this new fact.
While in 1910 the London art world was reeling from the shock of encountering the French avant-garde of the 1880s, this was a crucial time for artistic renewal throughout Europe. The artistic mainstream was still conservative.
In music, it was just moving out of romanticism (a whole generation had just vanished from the scene: Tchaikovsky had died in 1893, Bruckner in 1896, Brahms in 1897, Verdi in 1901 and Dvořák in 1904) and was cautiously trying to get to grips with the harmonic and formal innovations Richard Wagner had brought. The first decade of the century was a fruitful period in the work of well-established late Romantics - the mindscapes of the Finn Jean Sibelius, the tragic heroism of Edward Elgar, the folkloric sounds of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in Russia, the elegant textures of Gabriel Fauré and the academic grandeur of Camille Saint-Saëns in France, the compositions of Max Bruch in Germany, of Manuel de Falla in Spain, of the Dane Carl Nielsen and of Ferruccio Busoni’s richly seasoned tone poems. Eclipsing them all in success were the operas of Giacomo Puccini, whose sure-fire trio of La Bohème (1896), Tosca (1900) and Madame Butterfly (1904) played to full houses the world over and who would finally give a nod to his own century with the American emigrant opera La Fanciulla del West (1910). All of these artists were of a conservative, tentatively searching disposition, and all of them were outstanding in their way. It is the way of history to be particularly interested in change, in fissures, in seminal works and new developments, but it does not do to let this interest obscure our view of the fact that art can be great without being radically new or creating a new school.