After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Pius X’s attempt to hold the pass was of comfort to timid bigots within the fold who believed, or feared, that thought, and intellectual journeyings, might destroy faith. To enemies of religion, and of Christianity in particular, it confirmed the sense that to be Christian was necessarily to be obscurantist, and it drove many half-believers out of the sphere of the Churches altogether into unbelief.

  In The Makers of Modern Europe (1930) Count Carlo Sforza remarked upon the peasanty origins of the anti-modernist pope. Whereas ‘the prejudices of the aristocrat are often counterbalanced by his scepticism, always by his laziness … those of the peasant have no counterpoise’. Characters such as Pope Pius are ‘hard on the noblest minds whose doubts and misgivings they do not understand’ and ‘very often put their whole trust in fanatics who please them with certainties’.5 There would be plenty of repetitions of this phenomenon in the coming century of the Common Man, when the political dogmas and simplicities of communism and fascism would have little time for noble minds with doubts and misgivings.

  ‘Modernism’ as narrowly understood in Church history refers to a movement within the Catholic Church which was suppressed in 1907. Many of the Catholic modernists were aesthetically conservative, as the liturgical taste of Marcel Hebert suggests. Yet there is a link between what Church historians call modernism and the same word as applied to what was happening in music, poetry, painting and sculpture. The old minster tower had crumbled. To rebuild in some pastiche of the old order, as the neo-Gothic architects or the Nazarene or Pre-Raphaelite painters might have done, was no longer an option.

  In the United States, a young travelling musician named Scott Joplin (1868–1917) had begun, not just to perform but to compose and write down the music which he had evolved from the black Dixie traditions of Missouri, where he had settled in his early twenties. His opera based on his lifetime vision, Treemonisha (1911), was never performed while he was alive, but in many short piano pieces of Joplin’s, ragtime had entered the popular consciousness, not merely of Europe but America. A palpably new sound had arrived, signalling a world which was mysteriously different from anything which had gone before.

  This difference, an agonizing and baffling one in so many respects, was nowhere more obvious than in the heart of the most conservative of all the great European empires, the Austrian. It was in Vienna that Sigmund Freud revolutionized contemporary perceptions of the human mind. It was in Vienna that the leading analytical philosopher of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, had been born; just as it was in Vienna that, under the leadership of Moritz Schlick, a group of philosophers would develop the system of thought known as Logical Positivism.

  But if there is any sphere of human achievement with which Vienna is immediately associated it is music. And in that city, where Joseph Haydn had composed and performed so many of his greatest works, where Mozart had first known independence and had written his greatest operas, where Beethoven had lived and died, and where Franz Schubert was born and died, another Viennese, Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), and his disciple Alban Berg (1885–1935), began to pioneer atonal music. It was as if the tradition of harmony itself had been taken, by Wagner, Debussy and Richard Strauss, as far as it could go, and the next stage was to step into a void, in which the shapes and patterns to which the European ear had been responding for centuries no longer reflected the music of soul or sphere. Schoenberg’s in many ways agonized music, recognizable as belonging to the great Austro-German tradition, reflects a new horror, tension, anxiety, as if it had plumbed down, like Dr Freud listening to the outpourings of an hysteric patient, and heard rumours of the tragedies which the new century was bringing forth.

  Something highly comparable was happening in literature, though you would not know it if you merely read the solid Edwardian novels of Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett, distinguished as these may be, or the lyrics of Belloc and A. E. Housman. There was a similar sense of things coming to an end, of the end of a civilization.

  ‘Fin de siècle’ was a phrase used of and in the 1890s to suggest not merely the decadent behaviour of some of the more exhibitionistic bohemians in London and Paris, but also the sense that an era had ended. A young American poet named Ezra Loomis Pound (1885–1972), who was obsessed by the Nineties and the ‘characters’ thrown up by that drug- and alcohol-fuelled decade, was also possessed by a sense that European culture, the story which had begun with Homer, and known some of its highest points in medieval Provence and Italy, had now reached the buffers. He looked like a Nineties eccentric dreamed up by Max Beerbohm, with a shirt of midnight blue, a satin sock worn as a cravat, trousers tailored from bright green felt used normally for billiard tables, and an old dinner jacket. The goatee beard and the sombrero were modelled loosely on the clothes Whistler had worn to take London by storm thirty years before. The spats and the pince-nez were equally conservative, as was the ebony cane carried as a bohemian sceptre. London to this twenty-three-year-old seemed ‘the centre at least of Anglo-Saxon letters and presumably of intellectual action … There was more going on, and what did go on, went on sooner than in New York.’ ‘Deah old Lunnon,’ he wrote. ‘Seeking what giants and dragons I may devour.’6

  Of course, Pound was on one level no more than a young poseur, coming to a capital city as a way of boosting his ego. But great artists intuit things, about themselves and about the civilizations in which they move. The first English periodical to publish one of his poems was the Evening Standard, whose readers could discover the idea this young American had of himself – ‘Thus am I Dante for a space and am/One François Villon, ballad-lord and thief.’ To eke out his living he gave lectures at the London Polytechnic in what he called in his Ezra-lingo ‘The Devil upment of Literachoor in Southern Yourup’ – followed up by a course on Romance Literature.7

  England was to be resistant to literary modernism. No English poets matched Pound or his young American friend Eliot. The giant W. B. Yeats, a sui generis Irishman, had belonged to a shared English tradition in the 1890s, and still resided in London much of each year, but he self-consciously placed himself outside the English tradition. No English composer successfully followed the musical lead of Schoenberg or Berg, no English painters followed Braque or Picasso. The British cultural traditions of the fifty years covered by this book produced much in the way of charm, quiet elegiac or eccentric work. But one of the sure signs that Britain was finished as a civilization, long before two world wars had bankrupted the British economy and dismantled the British Empire, was the cultural emptiness of the years 1900–1950. That is not to say there was no one of any charm or talent painting or composing or writing a poem; but from now onwards, everything is transposed into a very minor key.

  This test, which no doubt some would consider contentious, applies chiefly to poetry. The twentieth century produced a far wider range of excellent novelists in Britain than did the nineteenth. Though there is none to match Dickens, the list hardly needs to be made, starting with H. G. Wells, Conrad, Bennett and their generation, in a glorious line from D. H. Lawrence, John Cowper Powys, Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell … it is obvious that this was a half-century in which the novel flourished, on the British mainland, while James Joyce, an Irishman in exile, towered above his contemporaries at home. It is the poets whom I am using as an acid-test of something amiss with a whole civilization. When Spenser and Shakespeare wrote, continuing through the lifetime of Milton, this coincided with a time when England felt itself almost literally possessed by a divine afflatus. Racine and Corneille matched the flowering not merely of French power, but of French self-possession, Goethe and Schiller flourished before the nightmare of nationalism or pseudo-imperialism clouded the German picture, when Germany, a group of federal states, was most itself. The explosion of Pushkin’s career coincided with the birth of modern Russia. The etiolated lyrics of the English Edwardian poets, followed by the feeble poetic productions of the years which followed, should sound a warning note; something has gone out of th
e mixture. We are drinking a martini cocktail in which someone has forgotten to put the spirits. Yeats, speaking of the high horse in whose saddle Homer rode, found it in his day to be ‘riderless’.

  It was this fact which the young Ezra Pound, however tiresome he might seem to us, could feel. It was something much more than the mere coincidence, which happens every few decades in any literary culture, that apart from the Irishman Yeats and old Thomas Hardy there were so few poets of any stature writing in Britain in 1908. It was something much deeper than that. Something had died in the night, and no one had noticed. We are told that the Edwardian period was some kind of glory age, the last summer afternoon before the storm, the brightly lit house party before they all went to die in the mud. Of course one sees how such a perception can be formed. But it might be truer to say that the culture which could allow itself to move into the First World War was one which was already moribund, morbid.

  Britain was poised to die, America was poised, half desperately, half unwillingly, to take over the world. It is entirely apt that those who sniff the putrescence in the London air in the Edwardian period should be Americans, just as it is entirely fitting that those Americans who are capable of keeping great literature alive should choose to do so off home territory. Pound, Henry James, T. S. Eliot did not merely have an ambivalent attitude to the land of their birth, they embodied and reflected a much more widespread American ambivalence about itself, either as imperial power or cultural standard-bearer.

  In the decade of Edward VII, Henry James was analysing the European and American scenes with new eyes, and his brother William, the pioneer psychologist and pragmatist philosopher, had turned his generous intelligence towards the question of religious belief.

  ‘Modernism’ is a term applied to a particular phase of religious thought; and it is also used to describe what was happening in Europe and America in poetry, painting, architecture, sculpture. The young modernists in poetry, of whom Pound was pre-eminent, looked to Henry James as ‘the Master’. Pound reread the complete works of James when he came to London. When he had been married two months and met James by chance in a Chelsea street, he came to feel there was an emblematic significance in the Master’s question as they strolled along together – ‘And is she a com-patriot?’ The syllables spaced, the accented vowel short.8

  The beginning of modernism was that perception, our means of perception, is all. It is no accident that so many modernists were conservative in temperament. For a transitory phase of the nineteenth century, some of the painters who thought themselves most old-fashioned, the English Pre-Raphaelites, had tried to imitate the most modern of inventions, the camera. The Impressionists, by contrast, returned to Turner’s efforts to reproduce not what an impersonal camera-lens but a human eye actually saw. Artists after the Impressionists began to return to even older traditions, shown forth in Christian icon-painting or ‘primitive’ masks and fetishes of what human beings felt about their material surroundings.

  While Henry chronicled, obliquely but surely, the transformations in human consciousness which were to change civilization itself, his brother William, psychologist and philosopher, probed the mystery of religious belief. Was it the case, as nineteenth-century literalists had believed, that Christianity depended upon the verifiability of a series of actual events or the provability – whatever that would mean – of the existence of God? Was there something in the human mind or personality which could explain why we are, or are not, religious? In his great book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, delivered as lectures at St Andrews University in 1902, William James found all but no ‘evidence’ which could justify belief, but he refused to be reductionist and suggest that piety was simply a matter of temperament, still less that religious feeling was a substitute for other sorts of feeling. He maintained the legitimacy of faith, and he did so on the robust grounds that faith, for many, worked. He quoted with approval another American psychologist, Professor Leuba, as saying:

  God is not known, he is not understood; he is used – sometimes as meat-purveyor; sometimes as moral support, sometimes as friend, sometimes as an object of love. If he proves himself useful, the religious impulse asks for no more than that. Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is he? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion.9

  Whether it is the end of religion or not, it is certainly a very similar attitude which informs both the humanism of Henry’s late novels – ‘Live all you can – it is a mistake not to,’ urges Strether in The Ambassadors – and the warmth of William James’s reflections on the spiritual dimension of human experience.

  William James, who died aged sixty-eight in 1910, had sobbed, ‘It’s so good to get home,’ when he finally reached Connecticut after the last of his European lecture tours. Their peripatetic childhood and youth, traipsing from one European city to the next, and living often in hotels, had made one brother, William, feel more intensely American and the other, Henry, ever a stranger, a wanderer upon Earth. They were extremely fond of one another while being in some ways polar opposites.

  Staying with his brother at Lamb House, Rye, in 1908, William became fascinated by the figure of G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), the vastly obese poet-journalist who happened to be in the area. Rye, the original of E. F. Benson’s Tilling in the Mapp and Lucia stories (Benson moved into Lamb House when James vacated it), was a small town which enjoyed the joys of discreet neighbour-watching. On 27 July 1908, Henry James instructed his secretary, Miss Bosanquet, to ‘peep through the curtain to see “the unspeakable Chesterton” pass by – a sort of elephant with a crimson face and oily curls. He [Henry James] thinks it is very tragic that his mind should be imprisoned in such a body.’ Brother William was so excited by the phenomenon that when he heard that Chesterton was standing in a neighbour’s garden, he borrowed the gardener’s ladder to peer over the wall. Henry was appalled. By the small-town rules of British intrusiveness which he instinctively picked up, it was all right to peer at oddities through a curtain; quite another thing to gawp openly from the top of a ladder.10

  Chesterton, in the reign of Edward VII, had written two books about religion which have not worn very well, in spite of being enlivened with some marvellous phrases and the occasional good paragraph: Heretics and Orthodoxy. His expertise was for instant journalism, for wonderfully perceptive criticism – witness his books on Browning and Dickens, among the best on their subjects – and for rollicky versifying about the Rolling English Drunkard making the Rolling English Road. He had also in this period managed to fit in the time to write two very distinctive novels, The Man Who Was Thursday and The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and to have endless public debates, challenging the opinions of those with whom he disagreed, notably Shaw. The passion for opinions will strike us as one of the great curses of the twentieth century. Chesterton had it in advanced, but benign form. A philosopher or a theologian he was not, strictly speaking, but he has enjoyed more reputation as a thinker than many who were. Although at this stage of his life not much of a churchgoer, he had set up as Defender of the Faith against such comers as the neo-pagan Kipling, the scientific materialist H. G. Wells, the Nietzschean Bernard Shaw and others – the ‘Heretics’, in short, of his title. Neither of the books mentioned offers a scintilla of evidence or argument for his opinions. Their power, which is undoubted, depends upon their advancement of an idea in an attractive manner. Chesterton makes his reader feel that Christianity is a point of view more plausible, because more decent, than its rivals. He set himself up against ‘motor-car civilization going its triumphant way’.11 He saw Christianity as essentially democratic, decent, and on the side of the individual against the bosses and the collectives. ‘The old tyrants had enough insolence to despoil the poor, but they had not enough insolence to preach to them’ nicely skewers both the laissez-faire Benthamite liberals and the new Fabian socialists such as the Webbs. Although seeing himself as
defending ‘orthodoxy’, and admired by many today who consider themselves thoroughgoing supernaturalists, Chesterton’s given reasons for being a Christian and eventually for accepting Roman Catholicism were essentially pragmatic – that this view of the world ‘fitted’ with his experience.

  Henry James never entered the church at Rye for solemn worship. ‘For James the Christian religion … figures most frequently as a means of withdrawing unwanted members of a house-party from his scene on a Sunday morning.’12 There is no doubt that James was personally an agonistic humanist. He had enough in him, however, of his old Swedenborgian father to believe that human beings were essentially mysterious, in life and in death. There was nothing simple about being a humanist because there was nothing simple about being human.

  The closing decades of the nineteenth, and early decades of the twentieth centuries, saw a deepening interest, among thinking people, in the occult and the dead. Yeats was obsessed with mediums, ouija boards and the like. He was far from being unusual. Arthur Balfour, philosopher and prime minister, was in constant touch with the Other Side, and was in receipt of over 20,000 letters from his dead sweetheart, penned by a spirit medium.

  Henry James, who picked up on what was going on around him with what one might term a passionate obliquity, absorbed all this interest into his fiction. Indeed, he must have shared the interest himself. As we should expect, however, from a man who had more capacity than almost any other (except perhaps his brother William) to see ‘round’ a subject, to understand its implications, he never spelt out what he thought in simple terms. If forced to ask whether there was life after death Henry James would not perhaps have wished to answer this question directly, but one could imagine that his answer, were he forced to give one, would have been – as was his brother William’s – a very, very cautious Yes.