In spite of all our protests, in spite of all our anger, we belong by our way of speaking to the same literary, scientific, and political society that we would ruin. . . . We are at the same time the corpse and the prosecutor of the old world; that is our vocation. The death of the old world will carry us away also; there is no salvation possible; our sick lungs can breathe no other than infected air. We are being hurried to inevitable ruin. It is altogether legitimate and indispensible; we feel that soon we shall be in the way; but, in disappearing with the old world, we shall be aware of the fatality that has bound us to it, and shall still deliver the most ferocious blows to it amid disaster and chaos; we shall passionately acclaim the new world—that world which does not belong to us—crying towards it our: “Caesar, the dying salute thee!”
—ALEXANDER HERZEN
Nero and Narcissus are always with us.
—OSCAR WILDE
NOT just Marxists and existentialists, secularists and theologians, but artists and writers of every persuasion have been profoundly affected by the development of industrialized mass culture. Over the last two centuries, painters, poets, sculptors, novelists, and playwrights have all been either the beneficiaries or the victims of the forces of massification: democratization, commercialization, the techniques of mass production. Nietzsche sums up one aspect of the complicated, often tortured relationship between the artist and modern society when he writes: “That is an artist as I love artists, modest in his needs; he really wants only two things, his bread and his art—panem et Circen.”1 The meaning of the aphorism depends on the understanding that the society of bread and circuses, as Nietzsche knew from his own experience, did not allow artists to enjoy their bread and art without paying dearly. Central to Nietzsche’s philosophy, moreover, is the paradox that the seeming progress of society really signifies its decadence, a paradox that is also basic to the “decadent movement” of artists and poets. “Nothing avails: one must go forward—step by step further into decadence (that is my definition of modern ‘progress’).”2 Here is the formula of all decadent avant-gardes and modernist classicisms in the arts, as also of all decadent “transvaluations of values” in philosophy. “‘Progress’ is merely a modern idea, that is, a false idea” (571). The discoveries of the philosopher and the innovations of the avant-garde artist take on the appearance of delvings in a charnel house, using all the latest equipment. “It is a painful, horrible spectacle that has dawned on me,” writes Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ. “I have drawn back the curtain from the corruption of man. . . . I understand corruption . . . in the sense of decadence: it is my contention that all the values in which mankind now sums up its supreme desiderata are decadence-values” (572). For Nietzsche, there are always new frontiers to cross, new boundaries to violate, even of disease. The “progress”—that is, “decadence”—of modern society forces the artist and philosopher of genius to be also “progressive,” avant-garde, modernist—that is, “decadent.”
The first modern versions of negative classicism were the declarations of decadence issued by Théophile Gautier and his Bohemian contemporaries in the 1830s; these were the deliberate antitheses of bourgeois assertions of progress through industry. The Chevalier d’Albert in Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) set the pattern by likening both his ennui and his pleasures to those of the Roman emperors: “Thy gilded house, O Nero! is but a filthy stable beside the palace I have built myself; my wardrobe is better stocked than yours, Heliogabalus, and it is infinitely more magnificent. My circuses are bloodier and more roaring,” and so forth.3 Nevertheless, says d’Albert, “nothing I can do has the least attraction for me.” His mock distress points toward that hedonistic, solipsistic, “decadent” lifestyle that is both celebrated and satirized in later fiction: for example, in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s A Rebours, Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, and Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray.
“We are all emperors of the Lower Empire,” said Théophile de Ferrière, also in 1835. “For are we not in decadence?”4 Since the 1830s decadent artists and poets have thought of themselves as forming an avant-garde of esthetic modernism in the midst of historical backsliding, hastening the downfall of a moribund society by pushing art beyond the limits of bourgeois tolerance. This esthetic decadence contrasted a perversely ideal antiquity—Rome or Byzantium both as the capital of all pleasure and as necropolis, the ultimate dead end of history—to the sterility of industrial modernity. Rome or Byzantium could be at once utopia and dystopia, a model of decadent behavior to be admired and imitated but also an exemplar of imperial hubris and futility—the ironic mirror of the decadents’ own bourgeois, industrial, imperial society which, they declared, was rapidly becoming another tottering empire like the one that had fallen. They condemned the decadence of their times; they also paraded the decadence of their own art works and lifestyles. The famous first line of Paul Verlaine’s “Langueur” sums up this delicious contradiction, shared by many of the artists and writers who shaped artistic modernism in opposition to industrial modernism: “Je suis l’Empire á la fin de la décadence” (I am the Empire at the end of the decadence).
The chief factors that the decadent movement reacted against were progress in the guise of industrialization and the failures and inconsistencies that plagued democratization. In France, decadent posturing was inspired partly by the declines and falls that followed the revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848: the democratic promise of 1789 snuffed out by Napoleonic imperialism and the Bourbon Restoration; the promise of democracy in 1830 leading only to the July Monarchy and bourgeois industrialism; and the “socialist revolutions” across Europe in 1848 ending with the victory of reactionary forces, including, in France, the Second Empire of Napoleon III. Even more devastating was the “debacle” of the Franco-Prussian War followed by the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, which Gustave Flaubert, for one, saw as an unmitigated catastrophe and the end of French civilization: “What barbarism! What a disaster! I was hardly a progressive and a humanitarian in the past. Nevertheless, I had my illusions! And I did not believe that I would see the end of the world. But this is it. We are witnessing the end of the latin world.”5
After the setbacks suffered by the democratic movements throughout the nineteenth century, many artists and intellectuals adopted pessimistic, cynical, often reactionary positions. Toward the end of Emile Zola’s Germinal (1885), Etienne Lantier, who has gone through the hell of a miner’s life and who has seen the innocent “savagery” of the working class crushed by the “cannibalism” of the bourgeoisie, continues to dream of liberation. Etienne imagines the proletariat as the fittest species, overcoming a decadent bourgeoisie (Marxism for Etienne and perhaps also for Zola is a branch of social Darwinism). In the same passage, he also imagines the future revolution in terms of a Roman analogy:
For if one class had to be devoured, surely the people, vigorous and young, must devour the effete and luxury-loving bourgeoisie? A new society needed new blood. In this expectation of a new invasion of barbarians regenerating the decayed nations of the old world, he rediscovered his absolute faith in a coming revolution, and this time it would be the real one, whose fires would cast their red glare over the end of this epoch even as the rising sun was now drenching the sky in blood.6
Etienne marches off into the bloody sunrise of the Paris Commune of 1871.
Zola could not have given his novel a more pessimistic conclusion. Marx viewed the Paris Commune as the harbinger of the final revolution, only temporarily checked by the forces of repression. But, closer to Flaubert, Zola interprets the Commune and its aftermath as one more inevitable disaster for the unfit masses, visited upon them by the fitter bourgeoisie and the extremely fit Prussians. In Germinal, all the revolutionary efforts of the miners end in calamity. The novel reaches a climax in the desperate machine-breaking riot that also breaks the back of the strike. The sabotage of the Le Voreux mine by the anarchist Souvarine kills only miners. Etienne himself emerges from the ordeal of being buried alive a white-haired skeleton. When he marches off full of hope toward the bloody “debacle” of 1871, he leaves nothing but disaster in his wake and is headed only toward a still greater catastrophe.
The entire Rougon-Macquart series of novels, anatomizing life under the Second Empire, points deterministically toward the catastrophes of 1870–71. Zola’s naturalism, supposedly applying the latest, most progressive “experimental” methods to the novel, explores the decadence of France after 1848 through the disasters and degenerations visited upon his characters. Even the more successful side of the family tree, the Rougons, eventually produces imbeciles and deformed specimens. The counterfeit imperialism of Napoleon III also represents a degenerate falling away from that of the first Napoleon. No wonder that Max Nordau, in his massive exposé of the corruption of his times, Degeneration (1893), includes Zola and other “realists” alongside esthetes, impressionists, and symbolists as exemplars of decay. The anatomist of decadence turns out himself to be decadent: Zola “constantly practices . . . that atavistic anthropomorphism and symbolism . . . which is found among savages . . . and among the whole category of degenerates. . . . Machines are horrible monsters dreaming of destruction; the streets of Paris open the jaws of Moloch to devour the human masses; a magasin de modes is an alarming, supernaturally powerful being.”7 There is much truth in Nordau’s assessment. But by identifying the critique of decadence with decadence itself, Nordau adopts a line of argument that ought to condemn his own treatise as an example of degeneracy. More to the point, despite his superficial antagonism to art-for-art’s sake, Zola approximates the many “decadent” poets and symbolists who are Nordau’s chief anathema: both the naturalists and the “decadents” create works of art that revel in the same regressive qualities they expose and condemn.
Dissecting the decadence of his society, Zola was frequently attacked by other anatomists of decay. “Zolaism is a disease. It is a study of the putrid. . . . No one can read Zola without moral contamination.”8 Condemnations of the “leprous character” and “sheer beastliness” of Zola’s novels became rampant in the British press in the late 1880s, at the time of the Vizetelly censorship trial. When the matter of Victor Vizetelly’s English translations of Zola came before Parliament in 1888, an M.P. wondered: “Were they to stand still while the country was wholly corrupted by literature of this kind? Were they to wait until the moral fibre of the English race was eaten out, as that of the French was almost? Look what such literature had done for France. It overspread that country like a torrent, and its poison was destroying the whole national life. France, to-day, was rapidly approaching the condition of Rome in the time of the Caesars.”9 This was to attribute, of course, great corruptive if not constructive power to literature, a belief that “decadent” writers were quite willing to encourage by making style their sovereign value, even while they disengaged themselves as completely as possible from social responsibility. The arguments against Zola, moreover, follow the general pattern of arguments against mass culture as corruptive and decadent. The same M.P. had no difficulty in associating Zola with the literary “garbage on which the children of London fed . . . the penny dreadful and the penny novelette.” This literature of the masses is poisoning the entire national life; it constitutes a “terrible pestilence . . . spreading throughout the country.”
The association of literary naturalism with negative classicism and also with the decadent movement is not fortuitous. Both Huysmans, whose A Rebours served as the pattern book and “breviary” for the decadent movement, and George Moore, the only British novelist who tried to be faithful to Zola’s naturalism, began as imitators of Zola and ended by adopting decadent poses and styles. Zola himself declared his preference for “the works of decadence where a sort of sickly sensibility replaces the robust fertility of classical epochs.”10 And a number of other writers, Flaubert prominent among them, combine naturalistic and decadent traits.
With his hatred of things utilitarian, industrial, and bourgeois, Flaubert may be taken as representative of the decadent movement in France. The opposite of Homais, that smug, detestably progressive apothecary and citoyen who ironically wins the medal of the Legion of Honor at the end of Madame Bovary, is perhaps Heliogabalus. The sadistic, antique splendors of Salammbô are as inimical to bourgeois, industrial values as the clichés of Bouvard et Pécuchet are ironically expressive of them. And Flaubert has his cult of Nero, as Oscar Wilde and the fin de siècle decadents have theirs of Domitian, Salome, and Byzantium. Flaubert cultivates “the love of things Roman branching out into all madnesses, expanding into all lubricities, by turn Egyptian under Antony, Asiatic at Naples with Nero, Indian with Heliogabalus, Sicilian, Tartar and Byzantine under Theodorus, and always mingling some blood with its roses, and always displaying its red flesh under the arcade of its grand circus where the lions roared, where the hippopotamuses swam, where the Christians died.”11
At the same time that Flaubert exemplifies many of the themes and attitudes of the decadent movement, he also points toward that extreme development of realism which Zola called naturalism. He denied being a realist, and would also have denied being a decadent, a naturalist, or anything else programmatic. But Salammbô reveals the axis along which naturalism and the decadent movement are joined. Flaubert’s agonizingly precise realistic techniques are lavished upon a story that is essentially nihilistic. Salammbô comes close to fulfilling Flaubert’s ambition to write “a book about nothing, a book without external attachments, which would hold together by itself through the internal force of its style.”12 Just as much as Zola in Germinal, Flaubert is dealing with a historical cul-de-sac. The sadistic triumphs and lapidary splendors of Carthage lead nowhere but to treachery and destruction, the decimation of the barbarians who seem at least to embody some wild freedom, and the torture and death of Mâtho by the entire “civilized” population of the capital. Also, of course, Carthage itself is doomed to destruction in an even more ruinous and final way than Rome. Rome at least, as Sainte-Beuve declared, points toward “the whole future of civilization”; but Carthage is only a necropolis, devoid of hope.
Flaubert’s Carthage represents in extreme form the futility, cruelty, and desolation of all empires; the entire history of civilization takes on the aspect of a death factory. Salammbô belongs partly to the memento mori genre exemplified by Constantin François Volney’s Ruins; Flaubert populates the ruins with a horde of cruel, exotic ghosts. But as Georg Lukács suggests in The Historical Novel (1962), Salammbô resolutely refuses to be a political statement or to point a finger out of the past at the crimes of the present. The historical dead end of Carthage is mirrored in the total disjunction between Flaubert’s narrative and immediate social concerns: the novelist refuses to judge; the work of art exists in a state of hermetic splendor; the supreme value is style. Flaubert’s is the stance of the decadent practitioner of art-for-art’s sake, although the stance itself is in an important way political: a decadent estheticism, by which art no longer connects with anything but art, is obviously antithetical to anything like mass art, anything manufactured for consumption by the masses. Salammbô is thus an implicit condemnation of the decadent, bourgeois, industrial society that casts the arts into the outer darkness of a modish alienation. Only across the barricade of Flaubert’s deliberate isolation can Hamilcar’s prophecy of the downfall of Carthage, for example, be read as pointing also to modern France: “You will lose your ships, your lands, your chariots, your hanging beds, the slaves who rub your feet! Jackals will lie down in your palaces, the plough will turn up your graves. Nothing will remain but the eagles’ cry and heaps of ruins. You will fall, Carthage!”13
Flaubert’s Carthage nevertheless mirrors the Paris of the Second Empire, although of course less directly than Yvetot and Tostes mirror provincial France in Madame Bovary. Lukács argues that Salammbô’s “frozen, lunar landscape of archaeological precision” betrays a false “modernization of history a dead Carthage is made to stand in the place of a dying modernity. Lukács finds the result not far removed from naturalism: “Only in Flaubert’s imagination does Mâtho embody ancient love. In reality, he is a prophetic model of the decadent drunkards and madmen of Zola.”14 The treacheries, triumphs, and disasters of the Carthaginians are no different in kind from those of modern France. History is both static and endlessly repetitious for Flaubert, because human nature never progresses. Flaubert’s frequent descriptions of jewels and precious metals as features of clothing and architecture, the ornaments of a cruelly static necropolis petrified in the sands of the past, are also suggestive of the way history always works: imperializing civilization seems inevitably to transform the raw materials of humanity into piles of useless wealth, and then again into piles of bones and ruins. Like the golden bird in Yeats’s Byzantium poems, the lapidary brilliance of Carthage seems to exist outside of time, beyond “the fury and the mire” of history. But whereas Yeats’s Byzantium represents at least the mirage of eternality, the chief god of Flaubert’s Carthage is Moloch the Devourer, to whom belongs “men’s existence, their very flesh,” and to whom frequent sacrifice must be made “to still his fury.” Flaubert might just as well have said that Mammon is the chief god of his fellow Parisians; in L'education sentimentale, we are told that after the revolution of 1848, despite “the most humanitarian legislation ever passed in France . . . property was raised to the level of Religion and became indistinguishable from God.”15
From the outset the decadent movement was profoundly antibourgeois, anti-industrial, and also antidemocratic. The antithesis of a genuine work of art is whatever can be understood and consumed by “the public,” “the masses,” “the canaille.” According to that decadent impressionist, James McNeill Whistler, great artists are always geniuses isolated in the midst of dull publics that fail to comprehend them: “There never was an Art-loving nation.”16 History has been a declension from the days when heroic artists could forge their will against the unwitting mediocrity of the masses down to modern times, when the bourgeoisie with their factories and their profit mongering have made the pursuit of the beautiful nearly impossible:
The world was flooded with all that was beautiful, until there arose a new class, who discovered the cheap, and foresaw fortune in the facture of the sham.
Then sprang into existence the tawdry, the common, the geegaw.
The taste of the tradesman supplanted the science of the artist, and what was born of the million went back to them, and charmed them, for it was after their own heart; and the great and the small, the statesman and the slave, took to themselves the abomination that was tendered, and preferred it—and have lived with it ever since!
And the artist’s occupation was gone, and the manufacturer and the huckster took his place.17
This is the central myth of the esthetic decadents, expressed in one form or another in all of their manifestoes and works of art. It follows that a novel like Salammbô stands as a deliberate if implicit protest against any idea of art as a utilitarian or profitable or progressive or industrial activity. Like many later modernist artists and writers, the decadents aimed to produce works of art that were completely antithetical to mass culture, or to whatever seemed vulgar and cheap enough to be appreciated by the bourgeoisie and the masses below them.
If Salammbô is attached to the present only by indirection, Huysmans’s A Rebours is very much a novel about contemporary decadence: the decline and fall of Des Esseintes, victim of urban-industrial malaise, ennui, and syphilis, reflects in miniature the fate of modern civilization. The decadent hero suffers from “that peculiar malady which ravages effete, enfeebled races.” Des Esseintes represents a moribund aristocracy, which there is no hope of reviving: “The decayed nobility was done for; the aristocracy had sunk into imbecility or depravity. It was dying from the degeneracy of its scions, whose faculties had deteriorated with each succeeding generation till they now consisted of the instincts of gorillas at work in the skulls of grooms and jockeys.”18 Huysmans’s language is unmistakably both Darwinian and Zolaesque; he applies an evolutionary but degenerative determinism to entire classes and societies. Huysmans did not leave naturalism behind to write decadent “breviaries”; rather, he found the theme of decadence ready-made in Zola and the Goncourt brothers and applied it to the upper end of the social register. A Rebours portrays the other side of the landscape of social disaster depicted in Germinal: both Des Esseintes and Etienne Lantier, both aristocracy and working class, are doomed at least metaphorically to be eaten alive by the fittest species, the bourgeoisie. “What point of contact,” Des Esseintes wonders, “could there possibly be between him and that bourgeois class which had gradually climbed to the top, taking advantage of every disaster to fill its pickets, stirring up every sort of trouble to command respect for its countless crimes and thefts?” The commercialism of the bourgeoisie devours everything that stands in its way, like the cannibal god of capital in Germinal. “Overbearing and underhand in behavior, base and cowardly in character, [the bourgeoisie] ruthlessly shot down its perennial and essential dupe, the mob, which it had previously unmuzzled and sent flying at the throats of the old castes.” The impact on culture of bourgeois domination and crassness, needless to say, has been catastrophic: “the suppression of all intelligence, the negation of all honesty, the destruction of all art” (218). Des Esseintes’s attempt to create a sanctuary of esthetic sensation, walled off from the cultural depredations of the bourgeoisie, prefigures the pattern of many later attacks upon mass culture as sham, disease, or commercial cannibalism, an apocalyptic category of decline and fall.
In an important way, however, Des Esseintes does not merely despair of the future; he delights masochistically in his own deterioration and in the idea of the ultimate downfall of society at large. Inspired by reading Dickens, Des Esseintes conjures up a vision of London and even sets off on a trip to visit it, though he gets no farther than Paris. His London vision is replete with dockside scenes, street traffic, fog, the roar and bustle of business and industry, and it ends on this note: “Des Esseintes shuddered with delight at feeling himself lost in this terrifying world of commerce, immersed in this isolating fog, involved in this incessant activity, and caught up in this ruthless machine which ground to powder millions of poor wretches” (134). Here is the atavistic world of Germinal, in which “machines are horrible monsters dreaming of destruction,” but viewed through an opera glass of esthetic sensation.
The same sense of perverse enjoyment characterizes the theme of negative classicism in Huysmans’s story. Des Esseintes’s evocations of the crepuscular style of Latin decadence, which lead him to recount the decline and fall of ancient civilization, are high on his list of pleasures. He is especially fond of Petronius’s Satyricon, which he reads as a “realistic novel, [a] slice cut from Roman life in the raw”; of Claudian, who “calls Antiquity back to life” while “the Western Empire crumble[s] to its ruin all about him”; and of Tertullian, that sine qua non of negative classicism, who “had gone on calmly writing his sermons . . . while the Roman Empire tottered” (45). Not that Des Esseintes pays heed to the content of the gloomy African’s sermons: while Tertullian was preaching “carnal abstinence, frugality of diet, sobriety of dress . . . Elagabalus was treading in silver dust and sand of gold, his head crowned with a tiara and his clothes studded with jewels, working at women’s tasks in the midst of his eunuchs, calling himself Empress and bedding every night with a new Emperor, picked for choice from among his barbers, scullions, and charioteers.” Des Esseintes, we are told, delights in this contrast, but of course it is Heliogabalus upon whom he models his own behavior. Even more than the behavior of perverse emperors, however, it is the literary style of the Roman decadence that Des Esseintes admires. He is enamored of “that special gamy flavour which in the fourth century—and even more in the following centuries—the odour of Christianity was to give to the pagan tongue as it decomposed like venison, dropping to pieces at the same time as the civilization of the Ancient World, falling apart while the Empires succumbed to the barbarian onslaught and the accumulated pus of ages” (46).
Des Esseintes’s fondness for decadent Latin is anything but pedantic. Far from a quiet rummaging among old books, his account of linguistic decadence leads to passages of bloodthirsty, apocalyptic lyricism, reaching a crescendo in this evocation of the barbarian invasions:
On the banks of the Danube, thousands of men wrapped in ratskin cloaks and mounted on little horses, hideous Tartars with enormous heads, flat noses, hairless, jaundiced faces, and chins furrowed with gashes and scars, rode hell-for-leather into the territories of the Lower Empire, sweeping all before them in their whirlwind advance. . . . Civilization disappeared in the dust of their horses’ hooves, in the smoke of the fires they kindled. Darkness fell upon the world and the peoples trembled in consternation as they listened to the dreadful tornado pass by with a sound like thunder. The horde of Huns swept over Europe. . . . The earth, gorged with blood, looked like a sea of crimson froth; two hundred thousand corpses barred the way and broke the impetus of the invading avalanche which, turned from its path, fell like a thunderbolt on Italy, whose ruined cities burned like blazing hay-ricks. [49]
If Zola had written a novel about the fall of the Roman Empire, it would have sounded like this. In any case, Des Esseintes’s love of decadence clearly also involves a love of barbarism and scenes of destruction. Huysmans leads us on an ironic path from his protagonist’s fastidious and eccentric bibliophile tastes to images of the smashing of civilizations. What is the connection between the two? Perhaps only the meanderings of Des Esseintes’s depraved imagination. But the very insistence on style as the supreme value seems to lead to scenes of desolation; it functions like a kind of vampirism, leaving the world symbolically incoherent, ravaged, falling into ruins.
The emphasis on style is evident in every important decadent manifesto. The decadents were far from being linguistic purists, however, seeking to prop up a tottering civilization by improving its rhetoric. The styles they valued most were themselves supposedly diseased, corrupt. Their classicism was primarily negative; their avant-garde modernism resuscitated the writers of a twilight age. In his preface to Les fleurs du mal, Gautier defines Baudelaire’s “style of decadence” as “nothing other than art reaching the point of extreme maturity determined by the oblique suns of aging civilizations: a style ingenious, complicated, knowing, full of nuances and affectations.”19 He proceeds to compare Baudelaire’s style to the “decomposing” language of falling Rome and of “the Byzantine school.” Baudelaire, he says, preferred to the language of Virgil and Cicero that of “Apuleius, Petronius, Juvenal, Saint Augustine, and that Tertullian whose style has the black sound of ebony” (18). Gautier quotes a statement that Baudelaire attached to a Latin poem in Les fleurs du mal: “Does it not seem . . . that the language of the final Latin decadence—supreme sigh of a robust person already transformed and prepared for the life of the spirit—is singularly able to express the passion which the modern poetic world understands and feels?” Out of their impotence and rage in the face of bourgeois hegemony, decadent writers sought their revenge by declaring style, that seemingly least powerful value, to be their private monopoly, off limits to the bourgeoisie. Style was a mystery beyond the ken of ordinary mortals. The effect of so treating it, however, was like removing, at least in imagination, the keystone from the grand arch of civilization. Here was a whole generation of writers who might have been singing the praises of the French Second Empire or of the British Empire, but who declared instead that those empires were doomed. They even seemed to be hastening decline and fall by imitating the decadent Romans and by cultivating linguistic corruptions and eccentricities, like magical incantations against the powers-that-be. And one and all they subscribed to the heresy that modern society was not following the path of progress, but its opposite.
Just as much as the failures and disillusionments attendant upon democratization, industrialization was a cause of dismay for many nineteenth-century artists and intellectuals. The idea that machinery is destructive of art and culture arose with the factory system. The full history of how artists have responded to the threats of specific new machine techniques—steam printing and linotyping, lithography, photography, the telegraph and telephone, radio, cinema, television—has yet to be written, but it would deal with everything that we now categorize as mass media. Flaubert again can serve as an example: “Let us cry against imitation silk, desk chairs, economy kitchens, fake materials, fake luxury, fake pride. Industrialism has developed the ugly to gigantic proportions. . . . The department store has rendered true luxury difficult . . . we have all become fakers and charlatans. . . . Our century is a whorish century . . . the least prostituted are the real prostitutes.”20 The equation of machinery with degeneration rather than with progress, paradoxically central to many versions of literary and artistic modernism, was in part a defensive reaction to the displacement of traditional arts and crafts by methods of mechanical reproduction.21 Zola’s naturalism also shows the industrial present as retrograde, brutal, destructive of humane values and of the masses who, though inevitably the victims of history, still sometimes exhibit tragic or heroic qualities. Both the decadent movement and naturalism are anti-industrial, and the former at least is thoroughly antidemocratic as well: no good is to be expected either from mass production or from the masses, the two main ingredients in the modern idea of mass culture.
George Moore, that Irish-Parisian mimic of all late-nineteenth-century fads and isms, including both naturalism and decadence, can condemn the degeneracy of modern industrial society in one passage and invoke the macabre splendors of falling Rome in the next. In his Confessions of a Young Man (1888), Moore writes: “Oh, for the silence of marble courts, for the shadow of great pillars, for gold, for reticulated canopies of lilies; to see the great gladiators pass, to hear them cry the famous ‘Ave Caesar,’ to hold the thumb down, to see the blood flow, to fill the languid hours with the agonies of poisoned slaves! Oh, for excess, for crime!”22 No doubt this is the decadent movement at its most jejune, but the same double purpose occurs in the other celebrators of Roman degeneracy, from Gautier and Flaubert to Huysmans and Wilde. As antique decadence is praised, so modern decadence, supposedly caused by industrialization and democratization, is condemned. “The world is dying of machinery,” says Moore; “that is the great disease, that is the plague that will sweep away and destroy civilization; man will have to rise against it sooner or later.” Moore is perhaps echoing William Morris when he adds: “I say the great and the reasonable revolution will be when mankind rises in revolt, and smashes the machinery and restores the handicrafts” (113).
As Raymond Williams has shown in the British case, similar anti-industrial attitudes, together with the idea that the factory system (if not society as a whole) was doomed to collapse, can be found in the first critics of mass production, particularly the romantic poets (Blake, Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth) and their Victorian descendants (Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin, Morris). “A Machine is not a Man nor a Work of Art,” wrote William Blake; “it is destructive of Humanity & of Art.”23 As early as 1804, Blake condemned England’s “dark satanic mills” for destroying the original Eden or Jerusalem of “England’s green and pleasant land,” while in 1829 Robert Southey could write that “everything connected with manufactures presents . . . features of unqualified deformity.” Like Blake’s, Southey’s rejection of the factories was as much esthetic as economic and humanitarian. Samuel Taylor Coleridge also thought that industrialism, at least if allowed to regulate itself according to the self-justifying laws of political economy, was a menace to culture and to “human personality.” Spinning an archaeological fantasy, Coleridge said of the new science of economics that “it would dig up the charcoal foundations of the temple of Ephesus to burn as fuel for a steam-engine.”24
In France, a similar hostility toward industrialism appears at least by the 1830s. Long before Baudelaire attacked “the fanaticism of utensils,” Stendhal decried “industrialism, second cousin to charlatanism”; Sainte-Beuve anatomized the “industrialization of literature”; and Balzac’s Illusions perdues (1837–43) exposed the destructive effects of commercial and industrial techniques on poetry. “We shall die by that which we believed would bring us life,” writes Baudelaire in one of his Fusées. “Mechanization will have so thoroughly Americanized us, progress will have so thoroughly atrophied the entire spiritual side of us, that nothing among the bloody, sacrilegious, or antinatural dreams of the Utopians will be comparable to these positive results.” Therefore, “the world is coming to an end.”25
For Baudelaire and many other artists and intellectuals, industrialization and the emergence of the masses as a threat to the social order formed one process. Three decades into the nineteenth century, Thomas Carlyle penned his first accounts of how “the huge demon of Mechanism” was calling forth “whole multitudes of workmen” who needed somehow to be “organized” and led by some principle higher than “Mammonism.” The protagonists of Carlyle’s French Revolution, Chartism, and Past and Present are the industrialized masses, looking for upper-class heroes and leaders. In Chartism, Carlyle applies a Roman analogy to the industrial scene of 1839, suggesting that new chieftains must arise to lead the new barbarian hordes abroad—thus anticipating by nearly a century Spengler’s and Ortega’s identifications of “masses” with “barbarism.” “Now once more, as at the end of the Roman Empire, a most confused epoch and yet one of the greatest, the Teutonic Countries find themselves too full. On a certain western rim of our small Europe, there are more men than were expected.”26 Where, then, Carlyle asks, are the new “Hengsts and Alarics . . . who, when their home is grown too narrow, will enlist and, like fire-pillars, guide onwards those superfluous masses of indomitable living Valour; equipped, not now with the battle-axe and war chariot, but with the steam-engine and ploughshare?”
Just as much as the doctrine of “hero worship,” such a solution to the Malthusian problem of “superfluous masses” makes Carlyle sound like a precursor of fascism, as H. C. Grierson and others have claimed him to be. The equation may be anachronistic, but it is still true that the Malthusian image of “masses,” associated with industrial regimentation and unemployment, became tragically linked to rationalizations not just for emigration but also for imperialistic expansion, as in this 1904 German call for Lebensraum:
A people needs land for its activities, land for its nourishment. No people needs it as much as the German people which is increasing so rapidly and whose old boundaries have become dangerously narrow. If we do not soon acquire new territories, we are moving towards a frightful catastrophe. . . . Once more, as 2000 years ago when the Cimbri and the Teutons were hammering at the gates of Rome, sounds the cry, now full of anguish and unappeased desires, now arrogant and full of confidence—sounds more and more strongly the cry, “We must have lands, new lands!”27
Throughout much of Western Europe the failure of industrial capitalism to organize the “superfluous masses” led to attempts to organize them through the extreme alternatives either of revolutionary socialism or of facism and National Socialism—alternatives which, viewed from the perspectives of many modern cultural theorists of all political persuasions, involved the destruction of civilization either through a revolution of working-class “slaves” or through an eruption of working- and middle-class “barbarians.”
Malthusianism may seem unrelated to the concerns of the decadent movement. Germinal, however, with its blunt depiction of the sex lives of the proletariat, “germinating” children to add to the “superfluous masses,” is very much a Malthusian novel. And, though in reverse, so is A Rebours: Des Esseintes represents the sexual dead end of the aristocracy, its failure to match the other classes in reproducing its own kind. In his influential tract on decadence, Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1880–83), Paul Bourget defines a society on the wane as one “which produces too large a number of individuals who are unsuited to the labours of the common life.” These are the masses of the unemployed and the poorly employed, everyone from paupers and miners on strike to decadent poets like Baudelaire and depraved aristocrats like Des Esseintes, whom Bourget sees as visited by the same deadly and insatiable craving for sensation which plagued Nero and Heliogabalus. According to Bourget:
A society should be like an organism. Like an organism, in fact, it may be resolved into a federation of smaller organisms, which may themselves be resolved into a federation of cells. The individual is the social cell. In order that the organism should perform its functions with energy it is necessary that the organisms composing it should perform their functions with energy, but with a subordinated energy. . . . If the energy of the cells becomes independent, the lesser organisms will likewise cease to subordinate their energy to the total energy and the anarchy which is established constitutes the decadence of the whole.28
Bourget offers an early, Darwinian and Malthusian version of the theory of the atomization that takes place in a mass society. The same “law” which governs the disintegration of the social organism, moreover, also governs the disintegration of language: “A style of decadence is one in which the unity of the book is decomposed to give place to the independence of the page, in which the page is decomposed to give place to the independence of the phrase, and the phrase to give place to the independence of the word.” Such was the style of the writers of the Latin decadence; and such is the style of the decadent writers of modern Europe. In The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche paraphrases this passage from Bourget and concludes that decadence appears “every time there is an anarchy of atoms.”29
The Malthusian side of Bourget’s theory, according to which a declining society throws up superfluous individuals, seems to conflict with an exactly contrary idea: that a state of decadence arises from a weakening of the sexual impulse and consequently from under- rather than from over-population. This is Huysmans’s version of the decadence of the aristocracy. In its later stages, according to Bourget, “Roman society failed to produce enough children; it therefore could no longer put enough soldiers in the field. The citizens ceased to care for the routines of parentage” (27). Bourget goes on to defend decadence, partly in these terms: if the members of a declining society “are poor reproducers of future generations,” they may turn instead to the reproduction of an “abundance” of “fine sensations” and “rarefied sentiments . . . sterilised but refined.” By implication, the problem of overpopulation or of the production of superfluous masses is here taken out of the hands of the effete, declining civilization and attached instead to the image of barbarian hordes. “Certainly, a teutonic chieftain of the second century was more able to invade the empire than a Roman patrician was able to defend it” (27).
In contrast to the romantics and decadents, the first political economists equate machinery with progress. But whereas they might be expected to show how the masses can gradually be transformed into a prosperous, democratic public through industrial expansion, they not only rationalize the existing distribution of property but also fail to show conclusively how capitalism can cure poverty. Indeed, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo seem to prove that the progress of society does not mean and perhaps can never mean progress for the poor. Malthus’s Essay on Population (1798) negates all prospects for the betterment of “the lower orders” through “systems of equality” and through schemes of government relief like the poor laws.30 Unless “checked” by “moral restraint,” population will always outgrow subsistence only to be checked in harsher ways by warfare, disease, or famine. At the same time, as Ricardo shows even more clearly than Malthus, industrial expansion will not necessarily help the poor either. To Malthus’s theory of overpopulation, Ricardo adds the problem of technological unemployment. Together, they suggest that even under the best industrial conditions there will be unemployment, or, to use Malthus’s phrase, a “redundant population”: “the poor ye shall always have with you.” No wonder that Carlyle calls the “science” of bourgeois progress “dismal.” At the heart of bustling rationalizations of industrialism and free trade looms up the specter of “the masses” as “redundant population,” ominous, haggard, a hideous “swarm” casting its pall over England’s green and pleasant land.
Just as much as against machinery and “the factory system,” the first romantics set themselves against Malthusianism. As early as 1803, Southey writes that Malthus’s Essay has become “the political bible of the rich, the selfish, and the sensual.”31 He sees at least dimly the main fallacy in Malthus’s argument, which is that poverty antedates overpopulation and is the result of preexisting arrangements of property and power, not of “imprudence.” Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Hazlitt, Shelley, and Carlyle also lash out against “sophisms like those of Mr. Malthus,” which according to Shelley are “calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a security of everlasting triumph.”32 There was in fact a torrent of anti-Malthusian literature written between 1820 and 1850, much of it summarized in Harold Bonar’s able study Hungry Generations, which takes its title from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down—
an allusion that suggests the extent to which romanticism and the new political economy were incompatible with each other, but that also suggests how much both groups of intellectuals, the romantics and the economists, are troubled by the Malthusian specter of a “redundant population” of the unemployed, uprooted poor.
Keats’s lines point to the dilemma that other writers and artists—John Ruskin, William Morris, Leo Tolstoy—explore more thoroughly later in the century: the difficulty or perhaps impossibility of fulfilling cultural ideals in the midst of injustice, poverty, class conflict, and industrial regimentation and squalor. Even those intellectuals who most vigorously deny the validity of Malthus’s arguments of course do not deny the existence of alienated masses of the dispossessed and disfranchised. But often the romantics are thrown back upon solutions to “the social question” which are not far from those advocated by Malthus. In The Excursion, for example, Wordsworth rejects Malthus but lamely recommends emigration as a cure for overpopulation. Britain should “cast off / her swarms” by shipping them overseas.33 Similarly, Carlyle rains down wrath on Malthus, whom he accuses of wanting to murder the poor (like “Marcus,” the author of the notorious Book of Murder—a nineteenth-century “Modest Proposal”). But Carlyle also adopts the language of “swarms” and “masses” and a “surplus population” that must be drawn off through emigration—the original of the Lebensraum argument.
No matter how much hatred Malthus inspired, his notion of a “redundant population” of the unemployed poor became the central image in nineteenth-century social thought, and it has remained central ever since. It is obviously on the idea of the masses as alienated—“superfluous,” unemployed or employed only as the tools of other people’s tools—that Marxism is grounded. Industrialization devours the old class alignments and the natural environment as well, converting the potentially democratic “people” into rich and poor, and dehumanizing both classes in the process—“people” become capital and labor, owners and masses. Abstract or mechanical money relations—Carlyle’s “cash nexus”—in urban industrial centers take the place of older, local, perhaps simpler and perhaps kindlier relations in natural or rural settings. The peasantry, wrenched from the land by the enclosure movement, by overpopulation, and by both aristocratic and bourgeois greed, is converted into a new and dangerous sort of industrial cannon fodder. The new factories spew out commodities, including the “most wretched of commodities,” the proletariat. Marx summarizes: “The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.”34 Thus the bourgeoisie manufactures its own undoing, “the masses” who, “crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers.” “The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself. But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians” (340).
Throughout their writings, Marx and Engels often liken the masses to slaves and sometimes to barbarians on the Roman model; for Marx and Engels too, it appears, “the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” Spartacus ranks high on the list of Marxist saints, and “barbarism” is cherished both for its destructive and for its rejuvenative powers. In one of Engels’s last essays, moreover, the revolutionary masses are not just the destroyers of an old civilization, but the founders of a new one:
It is now, almost to the year, sixteen centuries since a dangerous party of overthrow was likewise active in the Roman Empire. It undermined religion and all the foundations of the state; it flatly denied that Caesar’s law was the supreme law; it was without a fatherland, was international; it spread over all countries of the empire, from Gaul to Asia, and beyond the frontiers of the empire. It had long carried on seditious activities in secret, underground; for a considerable time, however, it had felt itself strong enough to come out into the open. This party of overthrow was known by the name of Christians.35
No doubt Marx would have approved of Engels’s Roman analogy only in the sense that communism seeks to realize in this life the ideals of freedom and equality disembodied and inverted in Christian eschatology. The promise of religion becomes the promise of the liberation and humanization of the masses, their “de-reification,” but outside the churches, without benefit of clergy, who cannot accept the transmutation of theological illusions into materialistic goals. In much the same way, whatever is valid—that is, aiming toward the construction of a just society—in the culture of the past will remain valid, although outside the elitist institutions and without benefit of clerisy or of the critics, artists, and professors who insist that the class culture to which they are devoted is all-sufficing or that it can resolve the injustices of a class-divided society.36 To Marx and Engels, the choice was clear: “either barbarism or socialism.” Citing Engels as the source of this phrase, Rosa Luxemburg could write in the midst of World War I:
This world war means a reversion to barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the destruction of culture, sporadically during a modern war, and forever, if the period of world wars that has just begun is allowed to take its damnable course to the last ultimate consequence. Thus we stand today, as Friedrich Engels prophesied . . . before the awful proposition: either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; or, the victory of socialism, that is, the conscious struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism, against its methods, against war. This is the dilemma of world history, its inevitable choice, whose scales are trembling in the balance awaiting the decision of the proletariat.37
From Luxemburg’s perspective, imperialism and war are the worst, last results of the failure to organize the “superfluous masses” through socialism. From the perspective of the decadent movement, imperialism and the masses may seem like social problems to be resolutely ignored, but it is clear that a vision similar to Luxemburg’s underlies all decadent invocations of Roman imperialism and barbarian invasions. Empire is the state of society before the final collapse, at the edge of the precipice, of barbarism, of the new Dark Age.
Ten years before the start of World War I, in terms like Luxemburg’s, Anatole France declared: “Imperialism is the most recent form of barbarism, the end of the line for civilization. I do not distinguish between the two terms—imperialism and barbarism—for they mean the same thing.”38 When France wrote, however, the paradoxical equation of barbarism with empire was less familiar than the view that overseas expansion coupled with industrial growth was leading to the gradual elimination of “barbarism” and “savagery” and to the installation of “civilization” around the world. From the perspective of the defenders of empire, the “barbarians” waiting to be transformed into their better selves might be the industrial masses, but were also and more obviously the “coloured,” “inferior” races in Africa and Asia—the “new-caught, sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child,” as Kipling called them. The rhetoric of a civilizing mission and “the white man’s burden” was the basic stuff not only of imperialist or “jingoist” journalism, but also of much literature written from about 1880 down to World War I, the same period in which the decadent movement reached its peak. The languages of jingoism and of decadence, the praise of empires and the prophecies of their doom, are the contrary poles around which much turn-of-the-century European writing revolves.
Of the British writers who defended empire, none was more prominent than Kipling, who was, as George Orwell put it, “the prophet of British imperialism in its expansionist phase.”39 Kipling’s reputation has inevitably been bound up with his position as an imperial propagandist, with critics taking sides in a dispute more ideological than esthetic. In an early attack on Kipling as “the voice of the hooligan,” Robert Buchanan writes: “There is a universal scramble for plunder, for excitement, for amusement, for speculation, and, above it all, the flag of a Hooligan Imperialism is raised, with the proclamation that it is the sole mission of Anglo-Saxon England, forgetful of the task of keeping its own drains in order, to expand and extend its boundaries indefinitely, and, again in the name of the Christianity it has practically abandoned, to conquer and inherit the earth.”40 As in the days of ancient Rome, Buchanan thinks, the upper classes are bribing the working class with the cheap stuff of a “spectacular” patriotism, to which Kipling is contributing: “The mob, promised a merry time by the governing classes, just as the old Roman mob was deluded by bread and pageants—panem et circenses—dances merrily to patriotic war-tunes, while that modern monstrosity and anachronism, the conservative working man, exchanges his birthright of freedom and free thought for a pat on the head from any little rump-fed lord that steps his way and spouts the platitudes of cockney patriotism” (235). Buchanan offers us Juvenal redone into Victorian English. That Kipling is a defender of British imperialism is obvious, but his “hooliganism” is partly qualified by the fact that much of his propaganda takes the form of warnings to deal with empire responsibly, in the spirit of civilizing rather than exploiting: imperialists must “take up the white man’s burden.” This is the message underlying Kipling’s own frequent comparisons of British with Roman imperialism, where the Roman decline serves as warning—for example, in the Roman Wall stories in Puck of Pook’s Hill.
Of the other early modern writers in Britain who took empire for a theme, the most important is Joseph Conrad, who has rarely been accused of jingoism, but often of a disturbing ambiguity about the expansionist practices of his adopted country. Especially in his African stories, based on his experiences in the Belgian Congo in 1890, Conrad appears to condemn civilization as skin-deep, a rapacious fraud. The two European traders in “An Outpost of Progress,” Kayerts and Carlier, go mad in the jungle and destroy each other over a bit of sugar. Conrad tells us that these specimens of civilization “could only live on condition of being machines.” They are mass men, whom civilization has protected and programmed and whom the wilderness has “liberated” to the horror of their own nothingness. The story clearly implies that between civilization and the savagery that worships fetishes and practices cannibalism there is little to choose. Similarly, in “The Heart of Darkness,” the metamorphosis of Kurtz suggests that civilization is merely a veneer and that its vaunted superiority to savagery is a sham, like the lie that Marlow tells Kurtz’s “intended” at the end of the story.
Rather than as indictments of imperialism in general, however, Conrad’s African stories should perhaps be more narrowly interpreted as reflecting his Congo experiences. It is not clear, for example, that what he says in “The Heart of Darkness” about the Eldorado Exploring Expedition (“to tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe”) is aimed at a larger target than King Leopold II’s murderous central African venture, which was a scandal to both the friends and the enemies of European expansion.41 What is clear is that Conrad generally thinks of British as superior to other European imperialisms. When Marlow describes the African map in the company office in Brussels, “marked with all the colours of a rainbow,” he says: “There was a vast amount of red—good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there,” in contrast to all the other colors, including yellow for the Belgian Congo, “dead in the center.” Conrad’s tale tells us something of the “horror” that goes on in the yellow part of the map, equating imperialist rapacity with the “unspeakable rites” practiced by Kurtz.
Idol worship is the common denominator uniting Europeans and “savages” in “The Heart of Darkness.” Not only is Kurtz worshiped as an idol, but he indulges in his own worship—or, what amounts to the same thing, in his own self-aggrandizement and the sacrifice of other lives to it. The “pilgrims” at the trading station worship ivory, money, advancement, and also Kurtz’s reputation. And Kurtz’s “intended” back in Europe worships her heroic image of Kurtz as civilizer. Even Marlow is not immune from fetishism, sitting cross-legged on deck like a Buddha as he expresses his own worship of Kurtz as a superior person able to confront “the horror” within us all. Of imperialism in general, Marlow thinks quite cynically: “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.” But he adds: “What redeems it is the idea only.” A moral purpose, progress, a civilizing mission—these, presumably, can justify imperialism. Marlow-Conrad does not rest content with this justification, however; he equates the belief in a redeeming idea also with idol worship: “An idea at the back of it” justifies imperialism, but is also “something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to. . . .”
This passage, which both gives and takes away one of the two justifications for imperialism that Marlow offers, comes at the end of an extended comparison between Roman and British imperialism, in which Marlow accuses the Romans of operating only by “brute force” and “robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind,” although he adds: “as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness.” The British, however, are saved from being no better than the Romans by “efficiency—the devotion to efficiency”—or does “devotion” suggest idol worship again? In any case, “efficiency” is the second justification for empire which Marlow offers. But his account leaves it far from clear that things are very much better now than when the Romans conquered Britain. “And this also,” Marlow begins his tale, “has been one of the dark places on the earth.” Thus it was when the Romans arrived, conquering, looting, murdering. Now “darkness” seems to be restricted to “the Dark Continent,” and more especially to the yellow, blue, and green parts of the map; but the meaning of Kurtz’s regression and of Marlow’s lie to his “intended” is also to generalize darkness, to show that “this”—England, anywhere—is still “one of the dark places on the earth.”
It is obviously harder to see Conrad as an imperialist than to see Kipling as the poet of empire. What unites them perhaps more than any degree of political agreement are the patterns of social and psychological regression in their stories. Despite their more strident patriotic emphases, many of Kipling’s tales—“The Mark of the Beast,” “Namgay Doola,” “Without Benefit of Clergy,” even Kim, to name just a few—describe the shedding of civilization by Europeans rather than the civilizing of Indians. It would be difficult to find in Kipling an example of a successfully Europeanized Indian; the movement seems all in the other direction. Even his best moral specimens, like those in “William the Conqueror,” seem almost to be pushing duty and work as a way of avoiding the temptations of “going native.” Kim cannot make up his mind whether to be white or to go native, but the attractions are clearly on the native side. And a story such as “The Man Who Would Be King” seems almost a parable against imperialism, warning of inevitable downfall to those who invade primitive societies and meddle with their customs. The characters in Conrad’s African tales also undergo obvious, self-destructive regressions, similar to the experience of lycanthropy in Kipling’s “The Mark of the Beast.” In Conrad’s oriental tales, the regressions are less severe and often beneficial, even salvations from the frequently false values of civilization, as in Lord Jim’s version of going native in Patusan. These regressive patterns involve the perception (quite conscious on Conrad’s part, probably less so on Kipling’s) of the cold, destructive emptiness at the heart of empires both ancient and modern, and of the secret attractions of decadence and barbarism.
The problems of mass production and of alienated masses were both reflected in the larger patterns of European imperialism. Empire and industry were linked by economic expansion and the competition for cheap labor, new resources, and new markets. Empire and the emergence of the masses were linked by the same forces, together with the population explosion, which seemed to be producing new, mostly internal “barbarian” hordes and creating pressure for Lebensraum. The Marxism that accused bourgeois society of decadence argued that modern imperialism is the final stage of “monopoly” or “late” capitalism, the prelude to the ultimate revolutionary upheaval. The height of the decadent movement in fin de siècle Europe also saw the zenith of imperialist expansion in the “scramble for Africa” and for large parts of Asia; there followed the Spanish-American War, the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, and World War I.
Imperialists from Sir John R. Seeley down to Mussolini and Hitler invoked the glory rather than the decline of Rome. In The Expansion of England (1883), Seeley remarks that there is a crucial “difference between the Roman Empire and other Empires founded on conquest, [which] arises from the superiority in civilisation of the conquerors to the conquered.”42 Many empires have been forged by barbarian warlords such as Genghis Khan, but the Roman Empire was the work of a highly civilized society. “The domination of Rome over the western races was the empire of civilization over barbarism. Among the Gauls and Iberians Rome stood as a beacon-light” (192). Seeley believes that the British Empire embodies the same qualities that had distinguished the Roman, for it too is the bearer of light to the dark places of the earth. Nor was the advance in civilization of the subject peoples the only benefit claimed for empire. As late as 1941, Baron Hailey could assert that “the privileges which the Roman Empire held out to its subject peoples were the guarantee of peace, and participation in a system of law,” and that along with these boons the British Empire also offered eventual independence to its colonies. This is the same as arguing that subjugation now will mean freedom later—after the subject peoples have been “improved.” Hailey thus expressed the reality of the decline and fall of the British Empire, a fact by 1941, in the most positive terms possible.43
In contrast to Hailey, those who defended empire in the second half of the nineteenth century often did so in improbable Virgilian terms, as imperium sine fine dedi (empire without end). Of course Rome’s fall posed difficulties, but these could be offset by arguing that the British (or French or German) Empire had a moral or divine mission that would ensure its survival. According to Lord Curzon, empires fell only when they lost sight of their ideals. If the British maintained their “faithful attachment to the acquisitions of [their] forefathers,” and if they kept their “national character . . . high and undefiled,” they would never experience the fate of lesser empires.44 Other imperialists acknowledged the inevitability of decline and fall, often explaining this unhappy outcome in Darwinian terms as the death of an organism progressing naturally to the end of its life cycle. From about 1870 down to World War I, social Darwinists like Ernst Haeckel and Karl Pearson defended empire on the “scientific” grounds of racial superiority and “survival of the fittest.” Paradoxically, however, racist theories of empire lend themselves more easily to ideas of decadence than of progress, as in Joseph de Gobineau’s Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (1853). Starting from the assumption of a pure race in the past—“the Aryan myth,” for example—racist theories arrive easily at the idea of corruption by miscegenation in the present. Unless standards of racial purity can be strictly enforced, the course of history is inevitably downward. Commenting on the relation of this pattern to imperialism, Hannah Arendt quotes Gobineau’s first sentence: “The fall of civilization is the most striking and, at the same time, the most obscure of all phenomena of history.” Gobineau, Arendt remarks, was “fascinated by the fall and hardly interested in the rise of civilizations.”45
In what may be the most thorough application of Roman parallels to the British Empire, Greater Rome and Greater Britain (1912), Sir Charles P. Lucas writes:
Manual labour among the Romans was, under the Republic and at the beginning of the Empire, almost exclusively slave labour. . . . The Roman plebs, who demanded panem et circenses, did not apparently consist of wage earners. They were rather a privileged class of unemployed, who looked to the State and to the conquests made by the State to keep them fed and amused. This fact, that manual labour was in the main slave labour, accounts for the absence of any definite labour movement or labour problems in the Roman Empire.46
That modern mass movements like trade unionism, strikes, and socialism were missing from Roman history, Lucas thinks, makes the British record much preferable—labor is now “free” to express itself—though he does not approve of trade unionism, strikes, and socialism. Perhaps because of his conservative attitudes, Lucas is cited by Lenin in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) as an example of what is wrong with Roman analogizing: “Disquisitions on imperialism, which ignore, or put into the background, the fundamental difference between social-economic systems, inevitably degenerate into the most vapid banality or bragging, like the comparison: ‘Greater Rome and Greater Britain.’”47 But if Lenin disapproved of pro-empire Roman analogizing, he was nevertheless influenced by the chief British opponent of imperialism, J. A. Hobson, though Hobson also has much to say about Roman parallels: “Whether we regard Imperialism [as a general historical pattern] or as confined to the policy of Great Britain,” Hobson writes, “we find much that is closely analogous to the Imperialism of Rome.”48
Rather than Roman glory, of course, Hobson in Imperialism (1902) stresses decline and fall. Referring to the wild celebration after one of the key battles of the Boer War, which he felt had been turned into a series of “spectacular” events by the sensation-mongering press, Hobson declares that “panem et circenses interpreted into English means cheap booze and Mafficking” (101). He adds: “Popular education, instead of serving as a defense, is an incitement towards Imperialism; it has opened up a panorama of vulgar pride and crude sensationalism to a great inert mass who see current history and the tangled maze of world movements with dim, bewildered eyes, and are the inevitable dupes of the able organized interests who can lure, or scare, or drive them into any convenient course.” Thus through the press and the schools the “glories” of empire and of nationalist warfare were helping to fill in the content of the new, raw, industrialized mass culture, closing the vicious circle that joins the production of alienated masses to the pursuit of expansionist foreign policies.
Though Hobson stops short of Marxism, his analysis does not differ substantially from Lenin’s. The two chief economic causes of empire Hobson sees as underconsumption in home markets and a conspiracy of big businessmen, bankers, and financiers in search of foreign markets and resources. A similar pattern of “parasitism” or economic vampirism by a wealthy, nonlaboring class explains the downfall of Rome. “This is the largest, plainest instance history presents of the social parasitic process by which a moneyed interest within the State, usurping the reins of government, makes for imperial expansion in order to fasten economic suckers into foreign bodies so as to drain them of their wealth in order to support domestic luxury" (367). Hobson adds: “The new Imperialism differs in no vital point from this old example." Applying social Darwinist metaphors in reverse, he concludes: “The laws which, operative throughout nature, doom the parasite to atrophy, decay, and final extinction, are not evaded by nations any more than by individual organisms" (367). Hobson is especially good at demolishing the ideological rationalizations for “parasitism” provided by social Darwinists such as Karl Pearson: “The notion of the world as a cock-pit of nations in which round after round shall eliminate feebler fighters and leave in the end one nation, the most efficient, to lord it on the dung-hill, has no scientific validity. Invoked to support the claims of militant nationalism, it begins by ignoring the very nature and purposes of national life,” which are to provide security through cooperation and law and order for individual development (188–89). The surest way for an empire to fall, says Hobson, is to nurture “the habit of economic parasitism” manifest in the bread and circuses syndrome.49 The inevitable result must be the overwhelming of the parasitic civilization by the barbarians whom it excludes (193–94). Lenin’s chief difference from Hobson, whom he considers a shrewd but incomplete “petit bourgeois” theorist, lies in Lenin’s belief that it will take much more to stop imperialist expansion than curing “underconsumption” at home. From Lenin’s standpoint, imperialism is precisely capitalism in the midst of its death throes, from which there can be no escape.
The controversies over imperialism, socialism, and decadence formed the intellectual context of the arts and crafts movement associated with William Morris, who combined Marxism with elements of a decadent romanticism. As Morris’s biographer E. P. Thompson notes, imperialism is what “brought him to Socialism.”50 Morris’s definition of imperialism is close to Hobson’s and Lenin’s: “It is simply the agony of capitalism driven by a force it cannot resist to seek for new and ever new markets at any price and any risk.”51 The rapacity and violence of imperialism destroys more peaceful, “savage” and “barbarian” social and cultural patterns throughout the world. The process of exploitation turns “fairly happy barbarians into very miserable half-civilized people surrounded by a fringe of exploiters and middle-men varied in nation but of one religion—‘Take care of Number One’” (384–85). Morris condemns jingoism and the idea of Britain’s civilizing mission as sheer hypocrisy. The “barbarians” needing to be “civilized” may be primitive peoples, but Morris is just as ready to turn the former word into a charge against his own countrymen: “Strange that the new Attila, the new Genghis Khan, the modern scourge of God, should be destined to stalk through the world in the gentlemanly broadcloth of a Quaker manufacturer!” (719). Like Marx and Engels before and Lenin after him, Morris sees imperialism as the last phase of capitalism, its final desperate search for new sources of profit and new solutions to its periodic crises. It is a method of imposing “civilization”—that is, exploitation—at the end of a bayonet, and it is sure to end in a worldwide “doom of Blood and Iron” (720).
Morris arrived at his Marxist views by an apparently circuitous path. In common with the romantics and decadents who also deplored bourgeois industrialism, Morris’s earliest concerns were esthetic, not political. His intellectual lineage runs back through the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to the Gothic revival in architecture, which especially through the proselytizing of A. W. N. Pugin pointed the way to John Ruskin’s theory of Gothic. In his True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841), Pugin rejects industrial techniques almost wholesale. He cries out against “those inexhaustible mines of bad taste, Birmingham and Sheffield,” and he lambastes modern industrial design generally under the sarcastic epithet “Sheffield eternal.”52 Industrialism is the main antithesis in Pugin’s thinking to the one true style of art and building: namely, Gothic. For Pugin, Gothic is Christian, and therefore perfect, art and architecture.
Though Ruskin did not follow Pugin to the letter, both Pugin’s insistence that Gothic is the one true style and his hatred of industrialism reappear in Modern Painters (1843–60), The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and The Stones of Venice (1851–53). In these works, Ruskin agrees with Pugin that machine production itself is fraudulent or inauthentic, especially when applied to the arts. Here is Pugin on cast-iron ornamentation, foreshadowing Ruskin: “Cast-iron is a deception; it is seldom or never left as iron. It is disguised by paint, either as stone, wood, or marble. This is a mere trick, and the severity of Christian or Pointed Architecture is utterly opposed to all deception” (True Principles, p. 30). Similarly, in Seven Lamps, Ruskin declaims against what he calls “architectural deceits.” There are three kinds of such fraudulence, the last of which is “operative deceit,” by which he means “the use of cast or machine-made ornaments of any kind.” “There are two reasons, both weighty, against [operative deceit]; one, that all cast and machine work is bad, as work; the other, that it is dishonest.”53
In this sort of argument, machine production and the devaluation or cheapening and democratizing of symbols go hand in hand, as in Flaubert’s tirade against industrialized life. Pugin and Ruskin point directly to two of the principal associations of industrialized mass culture with decadence: handwork is perceived as intrinsically more valuable and “honest” than machine work; and the virtually endless replication and dissemination of objects made possible by machinery seems to destroy their esthetic value by destroying their economic value. The latter is not an argument actually presented by Pugin and Ruskin, though it is implicit in many of their assertions, as also in the attacks on machinery and on mass-produced goods made by Carlyle, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and many other nineteenth-century intellectuals and artists. They are especially disturbed by what they perceive as the misuse of machinery to imitate, and consequently cheapen, the forms of the past. Pugin and Ruskin themselves, however, seek to resuscitate these forms in authentic, nonindustrial ways: not classical, but Gothic art and architecture and, for Ruskin, the hypothetical conditions of freedom which the Gothic worker enjoyed.
Central to Ruskin’s social criticism are his identifications of art with freedom and of industrial techniques with slavery. Ruskin sees in machine production a rebirth of the system of “servile ornament” that characterizes the architecture of the ancient slave civilizations. The very perfection of antique architecture and sculpture reveals their roots in slavery. The classical slave laborer could execute only the finite and therefore perfectible designs imposed upon him by his masters. “But in the medieval, or especially Christian, system of ornament, this slavery is done away with altogether; Christianity having recognized, in small things as well as great, the individual value of every soul.”54 For this reason especially, “Gothic is not only the best, but the only rational architecture” (X:212). Unfortunately, history moved on from the Middle Ages to the corruptions of the Renaissance, of which the fate of Venice is emblematic; Ruskin invokes biblical terms in his descriptions of its eclipse: “That ancient curse was upon her, the curse of the Cities of the Plain, ‘Pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness.’ By the inner burning of her own passions, as fatal as the fiery rain of Gomorrah, she was consumed from her place among the nations; and her ashes are choking the channels of the dead, salt sea” (XI:195). So fell Venice, that focal point of the clash between barbarism and classical civilization which Ruskin views as itself a kind of artistic mausoleum “charged with embayed fragments of the Roman wreck” (IX:38). But the downfall of Venice is, of course, not attributable to mechanization; Ruskin thinks it was due rather to the two apparently opposite corruptions of secularization and Roman Catholicism.
For Ruskin the course of both social and cultural history has declined from the age of Gothic to the nadir of the industrial present, with its new system of slavery and esthetic degradation based on machinery. Ruskin’s powers as a prophet of nearly biblical eloquence are greatest when he focuses on machinery and its effects: “Alas! if read rightly, these [mechanical] perfectnesses are signs of a slavery in our England a thousand times more bitter and more degrading than that of the scourged African, or helot Greek” (X:193). He declares that to purchase and enjoy machine-made artifacts is to perpetuate a system that degrades “the operative into a machine”; “every young lady, therefore, who buys glass beads is engaged in the slave-trade” (X:197). Once again, what seems to be progress proves to be decadence. Ruskin sees with great clarity and bitterness how the division of labor dehumanizes and creates revolutionary discontent: “The great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this,—that we manufacture everything there except men” (X:196). Instead of discovering in modern industrial techniques a new esthetic discipline and a promise of social liberation, Ruskin sees in them at best mere utilitarian expediency and at worst a regression to slavery on the antique model, all the more apparent from the very “perfectness” of mass-produced artifacts. Perfection means the substitution of mechanical for spiritual ends; it is always a symptom of slavery, whether ancient or modern. The exactness of execution of Greek architecture, Ruskin thinks, is a symptom of the “degradation” of the workman: Egyptian or Ninevite work is freer, but medieval work is the only truly free work of the past. Because “there is perpetual change both in design and in execution” in Gothic architecture, “the workman must be altogether set free” (X:204–5).
Of course such a diagnostic method is much too simplistic; Ruskin’s claim that the Greek worker was less free than the Egyptian or the Ninevite is nonsense. But Ruskin points ahead to arguments like those in Oswald Spenglers Man and Technics (1931) and Friedrich Jünger’s The Failure of Technology (1949), where the antithesis between art and machinery, genuine culture and anything mass-produced, is maintained just as rigidly as in The Stones of Venice.55 And Roman analogies are never far from his thinking, just as they form an important element in the anti-industrial theories of the esthetic decadents and of both the right and the left today:
Now, you are to remember that all these vilenesses had taken possession of the civilized world under the Roman Empire, just as they have done at this present time. The forms of Scorn, Disobedience, Cowardice, Lust, and Infidelity correspond in the closest manner, in the temper of the Romans in their last decline, with those manifested among ourselves at this day; what cure may be done on ourselves remains for us and our children to feel, and already it is becoming sharp. [XX:358]
As a Gothicist rather than a Hellenic classicist, Ruskin, like Thomas Carlyle before him, sees a possible salvation for corrupt civilization in a return of the barbarians, for “the cure of the Roman degeneracy was in the descent upon them of the Northern tribes, some to slay and some to govern, some to reinhabit; all of them alike gifted with a new terrific force of will and passion, and a fertility of savage blood which was again to give Italy suck from the teat of the wolf” (XX:358–59).
In The House of the Wolfings (1888), Ruskin’s disciple William Morris portrays a courageous barbarian tribe defending its forest homeland against the rapacious tyranny of Rome. “Now the name of this House was the Wolfings, and they bore a Wolf on their banners, and their warriors were marked on the breast with the image of the Wolf, that they might be known for what they were if they fell in battle.”56 Morris perhaps has in mind the triumph of Hermann over the Roman army in the Battle of Teutoberger Forest, an event dear to the hearts of German völkisch nationalists from Friedrich Jahn through Richard Wagner down to the Nazis, and celebrated in that nineteenth-century bestseller Felix Dahn’s Kampf um Rom (1867). Certain it is that Morris’s version of the Gothic revival often goes beyond the polite if vaguely decadent re-creations of Dante, Chaucer, and Arthurian legend associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and with much of his own artwork. In Sigurd the Volsung, The House of the Wolfings, The Roots of the Mountains, and his Icelandic translations, Morris seeks to re-create barbarian vigor and freedom and to uphold barbarism at least by analogy as an alternative to “this filth of civilization.” And throughout Morris’s writings, the Romans “are a most evil folk,” as a Wolfing warrior puts it (46).
According to Carl Schorske, “Wagner and Morris both quested for the future in the relics of the past.”57 Though The House of the Wolfings and his other Teutonic romances are Wagnerian both in their operatic qualities and in their celebration of antique, mythic virtues, Morris is not inventing or echoing a racist version of history. For him, the analogy is not between barbarism and Aryan racial superiority, but between barbarism and the industrial proletariat. And Rome for Morris is not parallel to a decadent because racially impure Europe as it had been for Gobineau; Rome is instead parallel to the tyranny of industrial capitalism and modern imperialism.58 Like Ruskin and Carlyle, Morris interprets the overthrow of Rome by the barbarians as a necessary purgation and renewal of a decadent world (“and so Rome fell and Europe rose, and the hope of the world was born again”); it is this interpretation that underlies The House of the Wolfings. In contrast to most late nineteenth-century fictional accounts of the triumph of barbarism and religion over the Roman Empire—Quo Vadis (1897) and Ben-Hur (1899), for example—Morris ignores religion and sentimentalizes barbarism instead. Therefore, “to those that have hearts to understand,” the fall of Rome “is a parable of the days to come; of the change in store for us hidden in the breast of the Barbarism of civilisation—the Proletariat.”59
The great, heroic, bloody war waged by the Wolfings against the Romans, mirroring a dim, precivilized, preimperialized past, is one of Morris’s many adumbrations of the longed-for revolution, the eschatological Judgment Day battle or Ragnarök of the communist future. All of Morris’s art, even when it seems most vapidly escapist, involves a search for what is least civilized, most vigorously primitive, or at any rate most distant from or defiant of modern industrial and imperialist society. His is a utopian primitivism that seeks to transcend the features of both positive and negative classicism, but that in doing so itself acquires the features of decadent escapism.
Forget six counties overhung with smoke,
Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke,
Forget the spreading of the hideous town.60
In his account of how he became a socialist, Morris writes: “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.”61 Given this twin motivation, Morris’s Pre-Raphaelitism, his Icelandic translations, his prose romances and fantasies, and his work in the anti-industrial arts and crafts movement, of which he was a founder and leader, can all be seen as consistent with his esthetic version of Marxism. As does Marx, however, Morris holds an ambivalent attitude toward machinery—an attitude more ambivalent than many of his anti-industrial and antibourgeois pronouncements suggest. Machinery for Morris promises freedom and leisure, even though under capitalism it only adds to the oppression of the masses.62 Machine technology has a shadowy role to play even in the pastoral utopia of News from Nowhere, which Morris wrote in conscious opposition to the industrial regimentation idealized by Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward. It appeared to Morris that machinery could help people achieve the utopia of popular art by shortening labor time, but he did not see—as do Lewis Mumford and Susan Sontag, for example—an esthetic potential in machinery itself.63
The arts and crafts movement, however, was deliberately anti-mechanistic, setting handcrafted artifacts in contrast to machine-made goods. Its ultimate goal was to transform all workers into artists and all labor into esthetically pleasing experience. Like Ruskin, Morris identifies freedom with esthetic fulfillment; the utopia that ought to follow the coming revolution would mean the reign of “popular art,” by which Morris means something like mass culture humanized or dereified. To a defender of technical expertise and “the instinct of workmanship” like Thorstein Veblen, the arts and crafts movement looked silly and sentimental. The “visible imperfections” of “handwrought goods” are considered “honorific,” Veblen writes, at least according to the “barbarian” scale of values of “the leisure class.” Ruskin and Morris have exalted “the defective” and defended “crudity and wasted effort.”64 Veblen detects in the arts and crafts movement elements of snobbery that would hardly seem to fit such a dedicated socialist as Morris, were it not for the fact that Morris himself criticizes his esthetic endeavors on the grounds of their elitist nature. “What business have we to do with art unless all can share it?”65 Sharing many of the values of the esthetic decadents, Morris stands their antidemocratic attitudes upside down and arrives at the ideal of the complete democratization of the arts. He wanted to be an artist for the masses, but he knew he was an artist only for the few, and he thought this would always be the case under capitalism. Given this theoretical predicament, even his praise of barbarism looks like the last refinement of a decadent age, the longing for a rejuvenation that seems both impossibly remote and historically inevitable, close at hand.
In The Pilgrims of Hope, like Germinal published in 1885, Morris interprets the Paris Commune in Marxist terms as a tragic defeat for the revolution. The crushing of the Commune was the apotheosis of the tyranny of industrial capitalism over the enslaved masses. But the revolution would come, even against the war machine of the bourgeoisie, which in Morris’s poem mows down the heroic workers. The sunrise for both Marx and Morris, as also for Etienne Lantier, would be bloodred. After the Wolfings and their Gothic allies have beaten back the Romans in one of their engagements, Morris’s noble barbarians sing their victory song:
Now hearken and hear
Of the day-dawn of fear,
And how up rose the sun
On the battle begun.
All night lay a-hiding,
Our anger abiding,
Dark down in the wood
The sharp seekers of blood.
[XIV:183
Like the Wolfings’ weapons (“sharp seekers of blood”), the machinery of Western civilization, based on capitalist wage slavery and the competition for empire, has produced more than one sort of Gothic revival in the twentieth century.
“In my country there are no gods left,” says the Cappodocian in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. “The Romans have driven them out.” For the decadent writers and artists of the nineteenth century, the imperial powers-that-be had also driven out art, the possibility of the beautiful, and genuine culture, replacing them with the sham goods of industrialized mass culture. For Marxists and radicals like Morris, the charges against “the Romans” went further: their form of civilization meant slavery, their vaunted progress was nothing more than an unmitigated catastrophe. Perhaps it would make sense to speak of “decadence” wherever the longing for “barbarism” arises, and vice versa. In an essay on “barbarism” and “decadence” in the work of three modernist poets (C. P. Cavafy, Valery Bryusov, and W. B. Yeats), Renato Poggioli contends that these concepts have an affinity for each other. He suggests that they are sadomasochistic antonyms which imply the goals of an exhausted civilization, a civilization that yearns for endings, for destruction and peace, for suicide and new life. “Decadence may well be another name for civilization’s self-betrayal,” says Poggioli, “a truth more or less knowingly reflected in many literary documents of our time.”66 Morris and Wilde would have agreed with this assessment; so would Verlaine, whose self-identification with decadence includes a glowing report on the barbarians:
Je suis l’Empire à la fin de la décadence,
Qui regarde passer les grands Barbares blancs.67
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “Maxims and Arrows 17,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 468.
2. Ibid., p. 547.
3. Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, tr. Joanna Richardson (New York: Penguin, 1981), p. 143.
4. Théophile de Ferrière quoted by Koenraad Swart, The Sense of Decadence in Nineteenth-Century France (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), p. 77, n. 1.
5. Gustave Flaubert quoted by Swart, The Sense of Decadence in Nineteenth-Century France, p. 124.
6. Emile Zola, Germinal, tr. L. W. Tancock (Baltimore: Penguin, 1954), p. 496.
7. Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York: Appleton, 1895), p. 494.
8. The National Vigilance Association, “Pernicious Literature” (1889), in George J. Becker, ed., Documents of Modern Literary Realism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 381.
9. Ibid., p. 355.
10. Zola quoted by Swart, The Sense of Decadence in Nineteenth-Century France, p. 112.
11. Gustave Flaubert quoted by Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 182 (my translation). For Flaubert’s Neronian cult, see the entire series of quotations in Praz. And compare Verlaine: “J’aime le mot de décadence, tout miroitant de pourpre et d’ors,” quoted by Swart, The Sense of Decadence in Nineteenth-Century France, p. 165. See also A. E. Carter, The Idea of Decadence in French Literature, 1830–1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958).
12. Flaubert quoted in Becker, Documents of Modern Literary Realism, p. 90.
13. Gustave Flaubert, Salammbô, tr. A. J. Krailshamer (New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 115.
14. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, tr. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (New York: Humanities, 1965 [1937, English trans. 1962]), p. 192.
15. Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education, tr. Robert Baldick (New York: Penguin, 1964), p. 295.
16. James McNeill Whistler, “The Ten O’clock,” in Robert L. Peters, ed., Victorians on Literature and Art (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1961), p. 143.
17. Ibid., p. 145.
18. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, tr. Robert Baldick (New York: Penguin, 1959), p. 214.
19. Théophile Gautier, preface to Charles Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1868), p. 17.
20. Flaubert quoted by César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois (New York: Basic, 1964), p. 108.
21. See my comments on Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in chapter 7, pp. 238–40.
22. George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man, ed. Susan Dick (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1972), pp. 125 and 113.
23. William Blake quoted by Morris Eaves, “Blake and the Artistic Machine,” PMLA, 92 (October 1977), p. 903.
24. William Blake, preface to Milton; Robert Southey, Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (London: John Murray, 1827), 1, 174; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk, 20 June 1834, Complete Works, 7 vols., ed. W. G. T. Shedd (New York: Harper, 1884), VI, 516.
25. Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, 15 vols. (Paris: Louis Conard, 1952), XI, pt. 2, 74. See also Albert George, The Development of French Romanticism: The Impact of the Industrial Revolution on Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1955).
26. Thomas Carlyle, Chartism, in Essays: Scottish and Other Miscellanies, 2 vols. (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1915), II, 200.
27. Quoted in Louis Synder, ed., The Imperialism Reader (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1962), p. 89.
28. Paul Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1893 [1-881]), pp. 3–32. I have quoted the translated passages from Havelock Ellis, “A Note on Paul Bourget,” in Views and Reviews (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), p. 52; the page numbers in parentheses are from Bourget’s book.
29. See Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 73.
30. Thomas Malthus, Essay on the Principal of Population, 2 vols. (London: Everyman’s Library, 1932). Malthus also has his version of the decline and fall of empires. Rome’s fall was due to moral degeneracy including a failure to attend to agriculture. “The pernicious custom of importing great quantities of corn to distribute, gratuitously among the people,” Malthus says, “had given it [agriculture? the Empire?] a blow from which it never afterwards recovered” (I:149). Like all forms of relief to the poor, the bread side of the bread and circuses policy Malthus regards as ruinous. A severe moralist, he does not mention circuses.
31. Robert Southey quoted by Harold A. Bonar, Hungry Generations (New York: King’s Crown, 1955), p. 69.
32. Shelley, preface to The Revolt of Islam.
33. Wordsworth, The Excursion, Book IX, lines 377–78.
34. Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto (1848), in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1972), p. 344.
35. Friedrich Engels, “The Tactics of Social Democracy” (1895), in Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 422–23.
36. See the discussion of the allegedly humanizing properties of culture in the Frankfurt Institute, Aspects of Sociology (Boston: Beacon, 1972), p. 94.
37. Rosa Luxemburg, “The Junius Pamphlet” (1916), in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, ed. Mary-Alice Waters (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), p. 269.
38. Anatole France, “La folie coloniale” (1904), in Synder, The Imperialism Reader, p. 155.
39. George Orwell, “Rudyard Kipling,” in A Collection of Essays (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1954), p. 125.
40. Robert Buchanan, “The Voice of the Hooligan,” Contemporary Review (1899), reprinted in Roger Lancelyn Green, ed., Kipling: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 235.
41. Joseph Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness,” in Youth and Two Other Stories, Malay Edition (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1929), p. 55.
42. Sir J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 188.
43. William Malcolm, Baron Hailey, “Romanes Lecture,” 14 May 1941, in George Bennett, ed., The Concept of Empire: Burke to Attlee, 1774–1947 (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1962), p. 412.
44. Lord Curzon of Kedleston, speech at Birmingham, 11 December 1907, in Bennett, The Concept of Empire, p. 356.
45. Hannah Arendt, Imperialism, part 2 of The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968 [1951]), p. 51.
46. Sir Charles P. Lucas, Greater Rome and Greater Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912), p. 103.
47. V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Peking: Foreign Languages, 1975), p. 97.
48. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), p. 365.
49. Hobson uses the metaphor of the “arena” of competition or conflict throughout Imperialism to describe social Darwinist doctrine, perhaps echoing Thomas Huxley’s criticism of the “gladiatorial theory of existence” in Evolution and Ethics.
50. E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (New York: Pantheon, 1977), p. 631.
51. Morris quoted by Thompson, William Morris, p. 272. The quotations in the rest of this paragraph are also from Thompson.
52. A. W. N. Pugin, The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (London: J. Weale, 1841). See also Pugin’s Contrasts and Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (Baltimore: Penguin, 1964 [1928]).
53. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, in the Library Edition of the Works, 39 vols., ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (New York: Longmans, Green, 1903), VIII, 81.
54. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Works, X, 189–90.
55. Both Spenglers and Jünger’s essays offer versions of negative classicism. Like Volney musing upon the ruins of the past, the prophets of the demise of machine civilization muse upon the ruins of the future. “The earth-spanning power of technology is of an ephemeral kind,” writes Jünger. “Everywhere it is threatened by decay, given over to decay, and decay follows upon its heels all the more insistently and closely, the faster it marches on towards new triumphs” (The Failure of Technology [Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1956 (1949)], pp. 26–27). Jünger thinks that, though “the technical organization of Imperial Rome cannot be compared to ours, . . . imperialism and the formation of the masses go hand in hand,” and he invokes “bread and circuses” to prove his point (pp. 158–60). Similarly, Spengler decries the subversion of spirituality, art, and culture by the utilitarian and industrial partly in these terms: “It is the panem et circenses of the giant city of the late periods that is presenting itself” (Man and Technics, tr. Charles Atkinson [London: George Allen and Unwin, 1932 (1931)], p. 6).
56. William Morris, The House of the Wolfings, in Collected Works, 24 vols., ed. May Morris (London: Longmans, Green, 1912), XIV, 5.
57. Carl Schorske, “The Quest for the Grail: Wagner and Morris,” in Kurt H. Wolff and Barrington Moore, Jr., eds., The Critical Spirit: Essays in Honor of Herbert Marcuse (Boston: Beacon, 1967), p. 216.
58. William Morris, “Art and Socialism,” in G. D. H. Cole, ed., William Morris (New York: Random House, 1934), p. 636.
59. Ibid.
60. William Morris, opening lines of The Earthly Paradise (1868–70), Works III, 3.
61. Cole, William Morris, p. 657.
62. Ibid., p. 625.
63. For Lewis Mumford, see, for example, Interpretations and Forecasts, 1922–1972 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 231: “If the goods of industrialism are still largely evanescent, its aesthetic is a durable contribution,” etc. In Against Interpretation (New York: Dell, 1969), pp. 297–98, Susan Sontag writes that “the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ (or ‘mass’ or ‘popular’) culture is based partly on an evaluation of the difference between unique and mass-produced objects,” but that “in the light of contemporary practice in the arts, this distinction appears extremely shallow. . . . The exploration of the impersonal (and trans-personal) in contemporary art is the new classicism.”
64. Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, in Max Lerner, ed., The Portable Veblen (New York: Viking, 1948), p. 192.
65. William Morris, Selected Writings and Designs, ed. Asa Briggs (Baltimore: Penguin, 1962), p. 139.
66. Renato Poggioli, “Qualis Artifex Pereo! or Barbarism and Decadence,” Harvard Library Bulletin, 13 (1959), 135–59.
67. “I am the Empire at the end of the decadence, / Who watches the great white Barbarians pass by.