In a world where everything is for sale, where value is price and price is value, where feelings are bartered, and the sentimental fake no longer distinguished from the genuine article, the artist becomes a modernist, and culture escapes to a garrett, high above the market place. For a century or more modern culture has been a modernist culture, and even if we are now entering a ‘post-modern’, or ‘post-modernist’, or maybe ‘post-post-modernist’ phase, there is no chance of understanding where we are without considering the modernist enterprise.
Three great artists prepared the way for modernism – Baudelaire, Manet and Wagner. And all three haunt the work of T.S. Eliot, the greatest modernist writer in English, and the one who has inspired the thoughts contained in this book. To begin with Wagner is not to begin the story of modernism at the beginning. But it is to gain insight into the mission bequeathed by the Enlightenment to art. The operas of Wagner attempt to dignify the human being in something like the way that he might be dignified by an uncorrupted common culture. Acutely conscious of the death of God, Wagner proposed man as his own redeemer and art as the transfiguring rite of passage to a higher world. The suggestion was visionary, and its impact on modern culture so great that the shock waves are still overtaking us. Modern high culture is as much a set of footnotes to Wagner as Western philosophy is, in Whitehead’s judgement, footnotes to Plato.
In the mature operas of Wagner our civilisation gave voice for the last time to its idea of the heroic, through music which strives to endorse that idea to the full extent of its power. And because Wagner was a composer of supreme genius, perhaps the only one to have taken forward the intense inner language forged by Beethoven and to have used it to conquer the psychic spaces that Beethoven shunned, everything he wrote in his mature idiom has the ring of truth, and every note is both absolutely right and profoundly surprising.
Wagner was in conscious reaction against the sentimentality and lassitude of official art. Like Baudelaire (whose admiring letter to the composer after the Parisian performance of Tannhauser displays a self-conscious affinity) he saw that the ideal had fled from the world into the citadel of the imagination. Unlike Baudelaire, however, he believed that the ideal could be tempted back, so as to dwell among us (though at considerable public expense). He therefore tried to create a new musical public, one that would not merely see the point of the heroic ideal, but also adopt it. This attempt was already doomed when Wagner first conceived it, and his sacerdotal presumptions have never ceased to alienate those who feel threatened by his message. Hence modern producers, embarrassed by dramas that make a mockery of their way of life, decide in their turn to make a mockery of the dramas. Of course, even today, musicians and singers, responding as they must to the urgency and sincerity of the music, do their best to produce the sounds that Wagner intended. But the action is invariably caricatured, wrapped in inverted commas, and reduced to the dimensions of a television sitcom. Sarcasm and satire run riot on the stage, not because they have anything to prove or say in the shadow of this unsurpassably noble music, but because nobility has become intolerable. The producer strives to distract the audience from Wagner’s message, and to mock every heroic gesture, lest the point of the drama should finally come home. As Michael Tanner has argued, in his succinct and penetrating defence of the composer, modern productions attempt to ‘domesticate’ Wagner, to bring his dramas down from the exalted sphere in which the music places them, to the world of human trivia, usually in order to make a ‘political statement’ which, being both blatant and banal, succeeds only in cancelling the rich ambiguities of the drama.26 In contemporary Wagner productions we see exactly what the transition from modernism to the ‘post-modern’ world involves, namely, the final rejection of high culture as a redemptive force and the ruination of the sacred in its last imagined form.
Modern producers were anticipated by Nietzsche, for whom the heroic in Wagner is a sham. Wagner, after all, was a disciple of Feuerbach, for whom gods, saints and heroes are nothing but projections into the void of our finite human perfections. Rather than accept Wagner’s characters in the terms suggested by the drama we should, Nietzsche advises, translate them ‘into reality, into the modern – let us be even crueller – into the bourgeois!’ And what then? We find ourselves among the ‘metropolitan’ problems of Parisian decadents – ‘always five steps from the hospital’.27
Nietzsche’s judgements are seldom fair, and this is no exception. Wagner was concerned to create a new kind of heroism, and to offer a new kind of solace to those of us for whom the old heroic way of life is not available. Heroes of the old type are larger-than-life versions of humanity, who live, love and suffer more completely than the rest of us, and who illustrate the possibilities to which man, with divine assistance, may aspire. Wagner’s heroes belong to a new type. They exist in a state of exalted solitude, the result of some primeval mistake; but they long either to redeem or be redeemed, through an act of loving sacrifice. Redemption comes when, having found the love which meets their inner need, they will and achieve their own extinction.
Our sympathy for the Wagnerian hero – a sympathy brilliantly ‘managed’ by the music which propels him – is not the artificial thing that Nietzsche pilloried. It stems from the deep-down recognition that his predicament is ours. Precisely because we live in a morbidly unheroic world – the world of the cynic and the salesman, in which gods and heroes have no place – we are driven to regard our own existence as some kind of mistake. If it is to have a meaning this can come only through a gesture which throws all calculation aside, which recklessly disregards both cost and benefit and, by freely embracing its own absurdity, reconsecrates our lives. In love we aspire to this, and our lives are briefly irradiated by a sense of the transcendent. But love too degenerates into cost and benefit, and comes to seem like just another version of the primal error. Only in those sublime moments when love prepares to sacrifice itself for the beloved – in other words, when it wills its own extinction – do the salesman and the accountant step back into the shadow.
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract …
T.S. Eliot’s words, written out of a later and bleaker experience of loss, capture the enduring influence of Wagner. These moments in and out of time, Wagner implies, are all that we should mean, and all that we can mean, by redemption. This, and this alone, endows our life with meaning, by sanctifying, from our own resources, the two realities – erotic love and death – which were once sanctified by religion.
Of course, few of us live like that – and, from the point of view of the species, the fewer the better. But that is precisely why Wagner’s art is so important. For it raises into conscious and dramatic form the one experience that can rescue godless people from triviality. It shows man the redeemer, who re-enchants the world without divine assistance. The proof that this is possible – even if it is a proof that depends on the highest artistic contrivance – clears the psychic space that we require. We live as if we could make that final sacrifice, as if we could free ourselves, through some absolute and peremptory self-command, from the original mistake – the mistake of existing in a disenchanted world. This ‘as if permeates our daily thoughts and feelings, and reconciles us to each other and the world.
There is another way of seeing what Wagner is getting at. Modern people are living beyond the death of their gods. And this means that they live with an enhanced awareness of their own contingency – of the fact of being, as Heidegger puts it, thrown down in the world without an explanation. And yet, just as much as their forebears, they are social beings, bound to each other by guilt and shame and hesitation. You do not rescue yourself from this predicament by overcoming guilt and shame. For the person without shame – the one who lives beyond judgement, and in the moment alone – can neither love nor be loved. He lives in a solipsistic void, where there is neither meaning nor joy, but at best only pleasure.
Love can rescue us from this predicament, not by enabling us to escape our guilt, but by putting us in a position where we confront and expiate it. Love of the highest kind is a pilgrimage to a place of purification. And at that place stands Death, guardian of the ultimate mystery. In love our contingency becomes a necessity, and our mortality a kind of eternity – provided only that we accept these things with fullness of heart, wanting to justify the love that we receive, and to give love in return. We may not achieve the highest renunciation which that ideal requires. But by holding it before us we are steadily redeemed from our original failing. Therefore we should live as if a heroic love were possible, and as if we could renounce our life for the sake of it.
What is meant by the phrase ‘as if’? The Kantian philosopher Hans Vaihinger once presented this term as capturing what is distinctive in the human condition – the thing which sets us apart from the rest of nature, in a world of our own devising.28 We are able, he argued, to look on the world as if a certain thought were true, even while keeping open the possibility of its falsehood – as in a hypothesis – or while not fully believing it – as in many aspects of religion – or while not believing it at all, as in a fiction. And by enduing the world with ‘useful fictions’ we not only increase our power over it, but begin to shape it according to our social and moral needs.
Of course, if you believe that something – a god, say – is merely a fiction, then you are unlikely to respond to it with any lively sense of its power. As Wagner saw, however – and saw more deeply than any other modern artist – a myth is not just a fiction, and our engagement with it is never just a game. The myth sets before us in allegorical form a truth about our condition, but a truth which is veiled in mystery. Through the myth we understand both the thing to which we aspire, and the forces which prevent us from attaining it. And we understand these things not theoretically, but by living through them in imagination and sympathy – as the fate of Demeter is lived through by the one who sings the Homeric hymn to her, or as the crucifixion of Christ is lived through by the choir and congregation during the St. Matthew Passion.
The myth, through its reenactment, shapes our emotions, encouraging us to live for the higher state to which the god promises to raise us. This is what happens in the Eucharist, and it is part of the reason why the Eucharist must be constantly repeated. We need to rehearse the transition from the fallen to the redeemed state, in order to renew in ourselves the aspiration towards it.29 The Eucharist, in providing us with a repeated triumph over evil, over death, and over all that drags us down to the animal kingdom, renews our faith in ourselves as creatures destined to another and higher realm. Even with the death of God the Eucharist retains its magic. For, the religious ceremony is now enacted at the mythical level, and another ‘as if arrests us in our mortal divagations. Such is the theme of that strangest and most ineffable of Wagner’s operas – the paganly Christian Parsifal.
To understand the depth of the Wagnerian ‘as if’ is to understand the condition of the modern soul. We know that we are animals, parts of the natural order, bound by laws which tie us to the material forces which govern everything. We believe that the gods are our invention, and that death is exactly what it seems. Our world has been disenchanted and our illusions destroyed. At the same time we cannot live as though that were the whole truth of our condition. Even modern people are compelled to praise and blame, love and hate, reward and punish. Even modern people – especially modern people – are aware of the self, as the centre of their being; and even modern people try to connect to other selves around them. We therefore see others as if they were free beings, animated by a self or soul, and with a more than worldly destiny. If we abandon that perception, then human relations dwindle into a machine-like parody of themselves, the world is voided of love, duty and desire, and only the body remains – though centre stage, flicking channels on its private TV. Modern science has presented us with the ‘as ifness’ of human freedom; but it could never equip us to live without the belief in it. And this deep and indispensable ‘as if’ is what Wagner seizes on in his cosmic myths.
The Ring cycle shows us people living in an enchanted world – a world in which the gods roam, brimful of interest in humanity, and in which the forces that thwart and abet us are personalised and prayed to. But this enchantment, which sets the gods in Valhalla and laws in the human world, is also a usurpation. The gods spring from our unconscious needs and strivings – they are thrown off by that great explosion of moral energy, whereby the human community first emerges from the natural order and idealises itself in a common culture. They therefore bear the marks of a deeper nature – a nature which is pre-conscious, pre-moral and unfree. Examine them too closely and their credentials dissolve – and how wonderfully Wagner shows this, not only in the character of Wotan, but in the narrative which constantly and continuously deconstructs him, needs no emphasis. Consequently the gods stand in need of us for their redemption. The old hierarchy of theology is reversed. Only through incarnation in a human being, and the enjoyment of a human freedom, the freedom that comes to the contingent and the created, can the divine achieve salvation. But the freedom that we enjoy is conditional on our mortality. Death lies at the heart of the moral community, and love is a relation between dying things. But love is also, in its highest form, a recognition and acceptance of death. Redemption, therefore, for the gods as much as for us, lies in love and in the exalted acceptance of death which love makes possible.
We do not live in that way. But the drama shows us that we could do so. A new world arises whenever humans dare to be free: the enchanted world of higher and lower, good and evil, god and devil: the world of divinity and distinction. That is the world that Wagner shows us, and if he places his dramas always in some mythic and primeval realm, this is in order to emphasise their trans-historical character. Wagner’s dramas are symbolic representations of forces and processes that lie deeper than words, and to which we respond with a sympathy that is a deeper and darker version of our sympathy for people. The Wagnerian drama creates its own religious background, its own awareness of a more than human cosmic order. And this awareness shines through the deeds of god and hero in much the way that it shines through the actions on the Greek tragic stage.
But we should return for a moment to the argument of Chapter 5. Wagner’s idea of erotic love is a direct descendent of Romanticism. Love enters the drama from outside the home. It is an untamed, undomesticated force, leading to adultery (Tristan) or incest (Die Walküre). Love proves itself only in opposition to morality, and by desecrating marriage. Children hardly get a look in; when, in the love of Siegmund and Sieglinde, a child results, it is promptly orphaned, and placed in a home which is not a home at all, but a place of servitude and alienation. And that is why love has no fulfilment in this life, and must will its own extinction: all other means of fulfilment have been cut off by love’s own transgression.
If therefore we look at Wagner’s heroic ideal not from the internal perspective of the dramas, but from the external perspective of the anthropologist, they offer a striking commentary on our situation. In Wagner we see the erotic severed from its normal rite of passage. Faithful love is guaranteed by no institution, no moral status within the community. It is a condition outside society, in which individuals coalesce in the moral void. Children are no part of their intention, and child-bearing is both accidental and intrinsically tragic, resulting in another individual as lost and as alien as its parents. Despite this, love is experienced as a yearning, all-consuming force: the prelude to some transfiguring change. Such a change is marriage, in which the moral status of the lovers is revised upwards, and fidelity given its communal endorsement. Having rejected marriage – the rite of passage into the community – the Wagnerian lover must therefore choose death – the rite of passage out of it. Any other telos would merely trivialise his love, bringing it down to the level of the transient, the substitutable, the aesthetic, the level of Don Juan. And, the critic might say, this shows the untenability of Wagner’s heroic ideal. Love cannot in reality be treated in this way. Its higher – that is to say, ethical – form is marriage. The destiny of love lies not in the individual but in the tribe: in the process of reproduction which the rite of passage guarantees. Take away the rite of passage, and all that remains is a transient and Juanesque desire, whose protestations of fidelity are no more than a sentimental disguise. Indeed, does not Wagner show as much, in the drink of forgetfulness which is offered to Siegfried?
Wagner was greatly admired by Baudelaire, the nocturnal poet of the city; but the heroic has no place in Baudelaire’s poetry. Nor does Baudelaire try to rescue the ideal through myth and its re-enactment. For Baudelaire, the ideal, the noble, the ethical itself, all belong to a world that has been called away. He was perhaps the first artist to recognise the gulf that had opened, between the real community which the artist observed, and the imagined community invoked by his language. Eliot wrote that ‘it is not merely in the use of imagery of common life, not merely in the use of imagery of the sordid life of a great metropolis, but in the elevation of such imagery to the first intensity – presenting it as it is, and yet making it represent something more than itself – that Baudelaire has created a mode of release and expression for other men’.30 But the words ‘first intensity’ do not say enough – nor does Eliot’s somewhat lame parenthesis. The intensity of experience in Baudelaire is of a piece with an evaluation. It comes about because Baudelaire sets the experience within the spiritual context that shows what it means. For Baudelaire retained in the midst of vacillation the robust sense of sin, and of Hell as the punishment for sin.
This ‘recognition of the reality of sin,’ Eliot writes, ‘is a New Life; and the possibility of damnation is so immense a relief in a world of electoral reform, plebiscites, sex reform and dress reform, that damnation itself is an immediate form of salvation – salvation from the ennui of modern life.’ But that too is lame. Reforms and plebiscites count for nothing in Les fleurs du mal because they make no impact on the relentless observing consciousness. This consciousness is overborne by a sense of loss – not the loss of paradise, but the loss of that loss, the vaporisation of once holy dreams. The ennui of modern life is the sign of a deeper disorder – the dissipation of the community which gave sacraments their meaning.
Baudelaire’s imagery is therefore steeped in the Christian symbols, while his verse forms – the sonnet in particular – invoke a lyrical innocence which is in stark contrast to the scenes of dissipation that they portray. Baudelaire’s modernism consists in this: that he takes the old verse-forms, with their implicit reference to a community in touch with its God, and sets them in judgement over the experience of a self-consciously modern person, adrift on a boundless sea of evil, and with no consolation and no triumph save the fact of consciousness itself:
Un phare ironique, infernal,
Flambeau des grâces sataniques,
Soulagement et gloire uniques,
– La conscience dans le Mal!
Such is the task of the modern poet: to show consciousness, alive and judging, in a world that will not be judged. Tradition is of the greatest importance to the modern artist, since it defines the perspective from which judgement is sustained. Hence the renewal of tradition is the most modern of artistic motives. This was the theme of Baudelaire’s essays on modern painting, in which he demands that the painter, like the poet, be true to the experience of the modern city. Le peintre de la vie moderne offers the justification for Manet’s realism; but it also shows why tradition matters to the modernist. You cannot paint modern life merely by producing recognisable images of it – for photographs, which are images of modern life, are also part of modern life, in need of the very artistic ordering which they fail to provide. You can paint modern life only if you produce your image of it as painters do – which means using brush and pigments with the same broad intention as they were used by Titian, Rembrandt or Gainsborough. That is why modern art is so difficult, and why it has proved necessary to be not merely modern but also modernist. The modernist is the one who consciously reshapes the medium, in order that the old intentions can be entertained. The salon art of a Bouguereau may look in one sense more like a traditional painting than Manet’s Olympia. But only in the sense that a photograph may look more like a painting. At a deeper level it looks nothing like a traditional painting, any more than a mocking imitation of someone’s gesture looks like a sincere human gesture. The intention in Bouguereau’s painting is of another order from that which we see in a Raphael or a Titian: with Bouguereau we leave the world of the artist for that of the salesman, and Baudelaire’s protest against the salons was among the first outspoken acknowledgements of the existence and depravity of kitsch. Manet’s intention is of the same kind as Titian’s, but working with other human material and another message.
Of course, in Olympia and Le deéjeuner sur l’herbe, Manet makes knowing reference to the tradition, and in particular to Titian and Giorgione. But this is not merely in order to advertise his new perspective or to make ironical play with vanished feelings. It is for the very reason that Baudelaire made use of the sonnet, or Schoenberg of the classical forms: in order to show the proximity of his intentions to those which had been central to the art of the past. And here it is worth noting that the self-conscious attempt to be part of a tradition – even the concept of tradition itself – is a modern phenomenon. Artists who are immersed in a tradition have little consciousness of the fact. They create by instinct what later generations must re-create by connoisseurship. It is an accident of modern life that Manet should be familiar with the paintings of Titian. And the obsessive quoting of the art of the past that we find in Picasso or Bacon would have been inconceivable in other ages, not only because of the shortage of information, but because only a modernist would have seen the point of it. Only a modernist has the problem of staying true to an artistic enterprise which must be re-made if it is to exist at all. Only a modernist is concerned to situate himself and his art in history. Modernism is essentially a view from outside.
But let us return to literature, since it is in literature that modern life first defined itself. In Baudelaire we find the most important project of modernism: the attempt to revive the spirit by offending it. The fall into sensuality, the opium-pillowed lassitude, the open wound of sex and the alcoholic haze that both obscures despair and heightens it – all these are evoked in exquisite language, so as to become forms of moral suffering, ordeals of the spirit that paradoxically prove through its degradation that the spirit belongs elsewhere. (See, for example, the verse preface to Les fleurs du Mal, and the sonnet entitled ‘Recueillement’.) The project was taken up by Baudelaire’s immediate successors – by no one more ferociously than Rimbaud – and later by T.S. Eliot, the first true modernist in English literature. The Waste Land effects a remarkable synthesis: on the one hand Baudelaire’s experience of the city as a spiritual ordeal, giving proof of our higher nature by depicting its ruin. (The verse preface to Les Fleurs du mal is significantly quoted.) On the other hand, the self-conscious appeal to myth, which outlines the original community, the divinely ordained order and lost Edenic innocence, from which all our wanderings and grievings decline. The ruling influences in this second enterprise are two: anthropology, for its vision of myth as the flowering of a common culture, and Wagner, for his attempt to use myth as part of the redeeming alchemy of art. At each point in Eliot’s invocation of modern London we find two artistic givens – the alienated observer and, in the soul of that observer, the echoing vault of a vanished religious culture, in which the fragments of experience seek their completion in myth. The vault echoes with the words of poets: Dante, Shakespeare, Verlaine, Nerval, Wagner. Its walls are crowded with symbols, from the legend of the grail, from Christianity, and from other cults of the ‘dying god’. These echoes and symbols are there not to establish Eliot’s place in the high culture of Europe, but to create, in imagination, an ideal common culture – a deep-down collective experience which will supply the meaning which is absent from the fragments. The anthropological vision of Christianity as a vegetation cult is internalised. The ruined soulscape of the modern city calls for the refreshing rain of Christ’s passion. And the alienated observer is both Christ and the pilgrim seeking him – the soul for whom suffering is also a mystical redemption.
What explains the extraordinary impact of this poem – its claim to be a founding document of modern English literature? The answer is surely obvious. In The Waste Land our high culture at last comes clean: the myths and legends that had fed the Arthurian twilight, and thereby sentimentalised and falsified modern life, are, in this poem, subjected to anthropological dissection, and returned to their grave. The poem openly confesses to its loss. High culture hurts because it is bereft. For a century it has denied the death of the common culture that gave sense to it; now it can acknowledge its loss. What Freud called ‘the work of mourning’ has, in this poem, begun. The poem invokes the dying god, and the communal emotions which he symbolised, while showing the world as it is when the god withdraws from it – when the god dies for the last time, and the miraculous rebirth no longer happens. The theme had already been explored by Wagner in Parsifal, a work whose influence is everywhere apparent in Eliot’s poem. But the redemption that is offered – some might say contrived – by Wagner, is only mourned by Eliot, as a thing irretrievably lost.
The Waste Land both acknowledges the death of God and also implies that God’s death can never be acknowledged, since to confront this supreme bereavement is to enter a condition of penitential suffering akin to prayer. The desolation of the godforsaken city is proof of that higher world from which the soul descends. This vision of a higher world is there, of course, in Tennyson and Rossetti, and it pervades the sad, thin literature of the Edwardians and Georgians. But in their stilted diction and reproduction-antique style the vision becomes a lie. It constitutes a denial of modern life, of the machine, of the implacable city, and of the society of strangers. By sentimentalising the human soul, the late Romantics shift the focus of emotion; the soul is etherealised, advertised, remade as a charming simulacrum and so auctioned off.
In Eliot the modern experience finds artistic form, without losing its reference to a redeemed and higher life. Eliot’s modernism is also a realism – an avoidance of sentimentality. For, as Eliot made wonderfully clear in his critical essays, sentimentality causes us not merely to write in clichés, but to feel in clichés too, lest we be troubled by the truth of our condition. The task of the artistic modernist, as Eliot later expressed it, borrowing from Mallarmé, is ‘to purify the dialect of the tribe’: that is, to find the words, rhythms, and artistic forms that would make contact again with our experience – not my experience or yours, but our experience – the experience that unites us as living here and now.
Eliot’s artistic modernism was the start of a spiritual quest, which ended only when he embraced the Christian religion, in the eccentric and localised form defined by the doctrine and liturgy of the Anglican church. For Nietzsche, the crisis of modernity had come about because of the loss of the Christian faith. At the same time, as Nietzsche, Wagner and Baudelaire all acknowledged, it is not possible for mankind really to live without faith; and for those who have inherited the habits and concepts of a Christian culture, that faith must be Christianity. Take away the faith, and you do not take away a body of doctrine only; nor do you leave a clear uncluttered landscape in which man is at last visible for what he is. You take away the power to perceive other and more important truths – truths about our condition which cannot, without the support of faith, be confronted. (For example, the truth of our mortality, which is not simply a scientific fact, to be added to our store of knowledge, but a pervasive experience, which runs through all things and changes the aspect of the world.)
The solution which Nietzsche impetuously embraced in this quandary was to deny the sovereignty of truth altogether – to hold that ‘there are no truths’, and to build a philosophy of life on the ruins of both science and religion, in the name of a purely aesthetic ideal. This response is doomed to failure; for the aesthetic is rooted in the religious and provides no emotional fruit when severed from its root. Eliot saw this; but the paradox remains for Eliot too. The truths that mattered to Eliot are truths of feeling, truths about the weight of human life, and the reality of human attachments. Science does not make these truths more easily perceivable: on the contrary, it prompts us to see our situation from outside, to consider human emotion as we might consider the mating habits of curious insects, and so clouds the psyche with fantasies. The result is a corruption of the very language of feeling, a decline from sensibility to sentimentality, and a veiling of the human world. The paradox is this: the falsehoods of religious faith reveal the truths that matter. The truths of science conceal the human reality. Eliot’s solution to the paradox was compelled by the path that he had taken to its discovery -the path of poetry, with its agonising examples of poets whose precision, perception and sincerity were the gifts of doctrine. The solution was to embrace the Christian faith, not, as Tertullian did, because of the paradox, but rather in spite of it.
For Eliot conversion was a gesture of belonging, an imaginative homecoming whereby he united himself with an historical common culture. This culture was, for Eliot, at once local and placeless, present and timeless, the possession of a community sanctified by history, and transcending history through prayer. To pass on a culture we must also inherit it, and inheritance is an active and arduous process, no longer granted automatically as it is granted to the tribesman. We must listen to the voices of the dead, and capture their meaning in those elusive moments when ‘History is now and England’. Only in a religious community are such moments part of everyday life. For us, in the modern world, religion and culture are both to be gained through a work of sacrifice. But it is a sacrifice on which redemption of the poet depends. Hence, by an extraordinary route, the modernist poet becomes the traditionalist priest: the stylistic task of the one coalesces with the spiritual task of the other. The renewal of the artistic tradition is also a re-affirmation of orthodoxy.
Eliot was not alone in seeing the problem of the modern artist in theological terms. The same idea – that the reinvention of the artistic tradition and the rediscovery of the religious community are one and the same spiritual exercise – animates the work of Arnold Schoenberg, and is dramatised in his unfinished opera, Moses and Aaron (which breaks off, however, with a bleak recognition of the hopelessness of the task that the artist-priest has set himself). Nor is this religious emphasis surprising. The question for the modernist is this: can you rediscover the ethical vision in the midst of modern life, without some equivalent of faith – some self-guaranteeing vision of the community and its gods? We should not be surprised to find that so many modernists have been religious traditionalists: Stravinsky, for example, Messiaen, Britten, Matisse and Henry Moore. Modern artists may withdraw from or lose their religious convictions. But often they lose their modernism too, like Richard Strauss or Ralph Vaughan Williams (who nevertheless made some of the last great additions to the Anglican hymnal). Failing that, they may try to invent a new and subjective religion, through which to invoke a kind of one-ness with the collective unconscious that is not available in life as it is lived. (Rilke, for example, Lawrence, and the Joyce of Finnegans Wake.) They may offer a meditation on God’s absence, in which the human subject disintegrates for lack of communal endorsement, as in the novels and plays of Beckett. In all these endeavours the religious need reaches through the aesthetic and endows it with its urgency and force.
Modernists who have found themselves unable to subscribe to their ancestral religion have sometimes, like Eliot in The Waste Land, reconstructed the religious context through an anthropologist’s eye: witness Picasso’s early fascination with the art of Africa, through which he rescued himself, just in time, from the sentimentality of his ‘Blue’ period. Or witness Stravinsky in The Rite of Spring, Yeats in his Celtic Twilight, Janáček, Vaughan Williams and Bartók, as they scoured the countryside for natural music, sung simply and sincerely by people not yet discovered by the travelling salesman. Whether or not they were aware of it, these artists were engaged in a spiritual pilgrimage, searching for the traces left by forgotten tribes. Nothing is more striking than the collapse of the modernist project when the religious motive dies. The result is the sterile mass-production of Picasso in his later years, or the desiccated perfectionism of Boulez, whose Marteau sans maître survives in the archive, the last pressed flower in the book of modernism, a memento mori which we study from time to time and then wistfully return to its grave.
Modernists who have not taken Eliot’s path (for it is an overgrown path, and leads only to abandoned ruins) have, as a rule, taken Wagner’s, weaving modern life into a mythic version of itself, in which those very things which most disturb us are somehow re-shaped as our redemption. The Wagnerian ‘as if’ dominates the modernist novel, from Joyce to Patrick White, and from Mann to Nabokov. The transfiguration of the commonplace, to borrow Arthur Danto’s trenchant phrase, is also the Eucharist of modern art.
We should always revere the modernist heroes. But the world has changed, and their agenda cannot be ours. As my examples show, modernism involves too great a divorce between the high culture of its adepts, and the religious feelings to which it makes appeal. Standing vigil at the grave of the old religion, modernism maintains its unearthly dignity for year after year. But the grave is less and less visited, and the display looks more and more redundant and absurd. Without the religious motive, and the ingrained reverence towards a sacred text, the trouble demanded by high culture seems an excessive price to pay for its dubious privilege. And there arises what has become, for teachers of the humanities, the most pressing of moral dilemmas. Do we attempt to impart our culture to the young, knowing that we can do so only by requiring efforts which they themselves may see as wasted? Or do we leave them to their own devices, and allow the culture which shaped us, and which provides our lasting images of value, to die? These questions define the post-modern predicament.