Three significant deaths occurred in 1900. John Ruskin died insane on 20 January, aged eighty-one. The most influential art critic of his day, he had a profound effect on nineteenth-century architecture and, in Modern Painters, on the appreciation of J. M. W. Turner.1 Ruskin hated industrialism and its effect on aesthetics and championed the Pre-Raphaelites – he was splendidly anachronistic. Oscar Wilde died on 30 November, aged forty-four. His art and wit, his campaign against the standardisation of the eccentric, and his efforts ‘to replace a morality of severity by one of sympathy’ have made him seem more modern, and more missed, as the twentieth century has gone by. Far and away the most significant death, however, certainly in regard to the subject of this book, was that of Friedrich Nietzsche, on 25 August. Aged fifty-six, he too died insane.
There is no question that the figure of Nietzsche looms over twentieth-century thought. Inheriting the pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche gave it a modern, post-Darwinian twist, stimulating in turn such later figures as Oswald Spengler, T. S. Eliot, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, and even Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Michel Foucault. Yet when he died, Nietzsche was a virtual vegetable and had been so for more than a decade. As he left his boardinghouse in Turin on 3 January 1889 he saw a cabdriver beating a horse in the Palazzo Carlo Alberto. Rushing to the horse’s defence, Nietzsche suddenly collapsed in the street. He was taken back to his lodgings by onlookers, and began shouting and banging the keys of his piano where a short while before he had been quietly playing Wagner. A doctor was summoned who diagnosed ‘mental degeneration.’ It was an ironic verdict, as we shall see.2
Nietzsche was suffering from the tertiary phase of syphilis. To begin with, he was wildly deluded. He insisted he was the Kaiser and became convinced his incarceration had been ordered by Bismarck. These delusions alternated with uncontrollable rages. Gradually, however, his condition quietened and he was released, to be looked after first by his mother and then by his sister. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche took an active interest in her brother’s philosophy. A member of Wagner’s circle of intellectuals, she had married another acolyte, Bernard Förster, who in 1887 had conceived a bizarre plan to set up a colony of Aryan German settlers in Paraguay, whose aim was to recolonise the New World with ‘racially pure Nordic pioneers.’ This Utopian scheme failed disastrously, and Elisabeth returned to Germany. (Bernard committed suicide.) Not at all humbled by the experience, she began promoting her brother’s philosophy. She forced her mother to sign over sole legal control in his affairs, and she set up a Nietzsche archive. She then wrote a two-volume adulatory biography of Friedrich and organised his home so that it became a shrine to his work.3 In doing this, she vastly simplified and coarsened her brother’s ideas, leaving out anything that was politically sensitive or too controversial. What remained, however, was controversial enough. Nietzsche’s main idea (not that he was particularly systematic) was that all of history was a metaphysical struggle between two groups, those who express the ‘will to power,’ the vital life force necessary for the creation of values, on which civilisation is based, and those who do not, primarily the masses produced by democracy.4 ‘Those poor in life, the weak,’ he said, ‘impoverish culture,’ whereas ‘those rich in life, the strong, enrich it.’5 All civilisation owes its existence to ‘men of prey who were still in possession of unbroken strength of will and lust for power, [who] hurled themselves on weaker, more civilised, more peaceful races … upon mellow old cultures whose last vitality was even then flaring up in splendid fireworks of spirit and corruption.’6 These men of prey he called ‘Aryans,’ who become the ruling class or caste. Furthermore, this ‘noble caste was always the barbarian caste.’ Simply because they had more life, more energy, they were, he said, ‘more complete human beings’ than the ‘jaded sophisticates’ they put down.7 These energetic nobles, he said, ‘spontaneously create values’ for themselves and the society around them. This strong ‘aristocratic class’ creates its own definitions of right and wrong, honour and duty, truth and falsity, beauty and ugliness, and the conquerors impose their views on the conquered – this is only natural, says Nietzsche. Morality, on the other hand, ‘is the creation of the underclass.’8 It springs from resentment and nourishes the virtues of the herd animal. For Nietzsche, ‘morality negates life.’9 Conventional, sophisticated civilisation – ‘Western man’ – he thought, would inevitably result in the end of humanity. This was his famous description of ‘the last man.’10
The acceptance of Nietzsche’s views was hardly helped by the fact that many of them were written when he was already ill with the early stages of syphilis. But there is no denying that his philosophy – mad or not – has been extremely influential, not least for the way in which, for many people, it accords neatly with what Charles Darwin had said in his theory of evolution, published in 1859. Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘superman,’ the Übermensch, lording it over the underclass certainly sounds like evolution, the law of the jungle, with natural selection in operation as ‘the survival of the fittest’ for the overall good of humanity, whatever its effects on certain individuals. But of course the ability to lead, to create values, to impose one’s will on others, is not in and of itself what evolutionary theory meant by ‘the fittest.’ The fittest were those who reproduced most, propagating their own kind. Social Darwinists, into which class Nietzsche essentially fell, have often made this mistake.
After publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species it did not take long for his ideas about biology to be extended to the operation of human societies. Darwinism first caught on in the United States of America. (Darwin was made an honorary member of the American Philosophical Society in 1869, ten years before his own university, Cambridge, conferred on him an honorary degree.)11 American social scientists William Graham Sumner and Thorsten Veblen of Yale, Lester Ward of Brown, John Dewey at the University of Chicago, and William James, John Fiske and others at Harvard, debated politics, war, and the layering of human communities into different classes against the background of a Darwinian ‘struggle for survival’ and the ‘survival of the fittest.’ Sumner believed that Darwin’s new way of looking at mankind had provided the ultimate explanation – and rationalisation – for the world as it was. It explained laissez-faire economics, the free, unfettered competition popular among businessmen. Others believed that it explained the prevailing imperial structure of the world in which the ‘fit’ white races were placed ‘naturally’ above the ‘degenerate’ races of other colours. On a slightly different note, the slow pace of change implied by evolution, occurring across geological aeons, also offered to people like Sumner a natural metaphor for political advancement: rapid, revolutionary change was ‘unnatural’; the world was essentially the way it was as a result of natural laws that brought about change only gradually.12
Fiske and Veblen, whose Theory of the Leisure Class was published in 1899, flatly contradicted Sumner’s belief that the well-to-do could be equated with the biologically fittest. Veblen in fact turned such reasoning on its head, arguing that the type of characters ‘selected for dominance’ in the business world were little more than barbarians, a ‘throw-back’ to a more primitive form of society.13
Britain had probably the most influential social Darwinist in Herbert Spencer. Born in 1820 into a lower-middle-class Nonconformist English family in Derby, Spencer had a lifelong hatred of state power. In his early years he was on the staff of the Economist, a weekly periodical that was fanatically pro-laissez-faire. He was also influenced by the positivist scientists, in particular Sir Charles Lyell, whose Principles of Geology, published in the 1830s, went into great detail about fossils that were millions of years old. Spencer was thus primed for Darwin’s theory, which at a stroke appeared to connect earlier forms of life to later forms in one continuous thread. It was Spencer, and not Darwin, who actually coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest,’ and Spencer quickly saw how Darwinism might be applied to human societies. His views on this were uncompromising. Regarding the poor, for example, he was against all state aid. They were unfit, he said, and should be eliminated: ‘The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them, and make room for better.’14 He explained his theories in his seminal work The Study of Sociology (1872–3), which had a notable impact on the rise of sociology as a discipline (a biological base made it seem so much more like science). Spencer was almost certainly the most widely read social Darwinist, as famous in the United States as in Britain.
Germany had its own Spencer-type figure in Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919). A zoologist from the University of Jena, Haeckel took to social Darwinism as if it were second nature. He referred to ‘struggle’ as ‘a watchword of the day.’15 However, Haeckel was a passionate advocate of the principle of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and unlike Spencer he favoured a strong state. It was this, allied to his bellicose racism and anti-Semitism, that led people to see him as a proto-Nazi.16 France, in contrast, was relatively slow to catch on to Darwinism, but when she did, she had her own passionate advocate. In her Origines de l’homme et des sociétés, Clemence August Royer took a strong social Darwinist line, regarding ‘Aryans’ as superior to other races and warfare between them as inevitable in the interests of progress.’17 In Russia, the anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) released Mutual Aid in 1902, in which he took a different line, arguing that although competition was undoubtedly a fact of life, so too was cooperation, which was so prevalent in the animal kingdom as to constitute a natural law. Like Veblen, he presented an alternative model to the Spencerians, in which violence was condemned as abnormal. Social Darwinism was, not unnaturally, compared with Marxism, and not only in the minds of Russian intellectuals.18 Neither Karl Marx nor Friedrich Engels saw any conflict between the two systems. At Marx’s graveside, Engels said, ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.’19 But others did see a conflict. Darwinism was based on perpetual struggle; Marxism looked forward to a time when a new harmony would be established.
If one had to draw up a balance sheet of the social Darwinist arguments at the turn of the century, one would have to say that the ardent Spencerians (who included several members of Darwin’s family, though never the great man himself) had the better of it. This helps explain the openly racist views that were widespread then. For example, in the theories of the French aristocratic poet Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), racial interbreeding was ‘dysgenic’ and led to the collapse of civilisation. This reasoning was taken to its limits by another Frenchman, Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936). Lapouge, who studied ancient skulls, believed that races were species in the process of formation, that racial differences were ‘innate and ineradicable,’ and that any idea that races could integrate was contrary to the laws of biology.20 For Lapouge, Europe was populated by three racial groups: Homo europaeus, tall, pale-skinned, and long-skulled (dolichocephalic); Homo alpinus, smaller and darker with brachycephalic (short) heads; and the Mediterranean type, long-headed again but darker and shorter even than alpinus. Such attempts to calibrate racial differences would recur time and again in the twentieth century.21 Lapouge regarded democracy as a disaster and believed that the brachycephalic types were taking over the world. He thought the proportion of dolichocephalic individuals was declining in Europe, due to emigration to the United States, and suggested that alcohol be provided free of charge in the hope that the worst types might kill each other off in their excesses. He wasn’t joking.22
In the German-speaking countries, a veritable galaxy of scientists and pseudoscientists, philosophers and pseudophilosophers, intellectuals and would-be intellectuals, competed to outdo each other in the struggle for public attention. Friedrich Ratzel, a zoologist and geographer, argued that all living organisms competed in a Kampf um Raum, a struggle for space in which the winners expelled the losers. This struggle extended to humans, and the successful races had to extend their living space, Lebensraum, if they were to avoid decline.23 For Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), the renegade son of a British admiral, who went to Germany and married Wagner’s daughter, racial struggle was ‘fundamental to a “scientific” understanding of history and culture.’24 Chamberlain portrayed the history of the West ‘as an incessant conflict between the spiritual and culture-creating Aryans and the mercenary and materialistic Jews’ (his first wife had been half Jewish).25 For Chamberlain, the Germanic peoples were the last remnants of the Aryans, but they had become enfeebled through interbreeding with other races.
Max Nordau (1849–1923), born in Budapest, was the son of a rabbi. His best-known book was the two-volume Entartung (Degeneration), which, despite being 600 pages long, became an international best-seller. Nordau became convinced of ‘a severe mental epidemic; a sort of black death of degeneracy and hysteria’ that was affecting Europe, sapping its vitality, manifested in a whole range of symptoms: ‘squint eyes, imperfect ears, stunted growth … pessimism, apathy, impulsiveness, emotionalism, mysticism, and a complete absence of any sense of right and wrong.’26 Everywhere he looked, there was decline.27 The impressionist painters were the result, he said, of a degenerate physiology, nystagmus, a trembling of the eyeball, causing them to paint in the fuzzy, indistinct way that they did. In the writings of Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and Friedrich Nietzsche, Nordau found ‘overweening egomania,’ while Zola had ‘an obsession with filth.’ Nordau believed that degeneracy was caused by industrialised society – literally the wear-and-tear exerted on leaders by railways, steamships, telephones, and factories. When Freud visited Nordau, he found him ‘unbearably vain’ with a complete lack of sense of humoura.28 In Austria, more than anywhere else in Europe, social Darwinism did not stop at theory. Two political leaders, Georg Ritter von Schönerer and Karl Lueger, fashioned their own cocktail of ideas from this brew to initiate political platforms that stressed the twin aims of first, power to the peasants (because they had remained ‘uncontaminated’ by contact with the corrupt cities), and second, a virulent anti-Semitism, in which Jews were characterised as the very embodiment of degeneracy. It was this miasma of ideas that greeted the young Adolf Hitler when he first arrived in Vienna in 1907 to attend art school.
Not dissimilar arguments were heard across the Atlantic in the southern part of the United States. Darwinism prescribed a common origin for all races and therefore could have been used as an argument against slavery, as it was by Chester Loring Brace.29 But others argued the opposite. Joseph le Conte (1823–1901), like Lapouge or Ratzel, was an educated man, not a redneck but a trained geologist. When his book, The Race Problem in the South, appeared in 1892, he was the highly esteemed president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His argument was brutally Darwinian.30 When two races came into contact, one was bound to dominate the other. He argued that if the weaker race was at an early stage of development – like the Negro —slavery was appropriate because the ‘primitive’ mentality could be shaped. If, however, the race had achieved a greater measure of sophistication, like ‘the redskin,’ then ‘extermination is unavoidable.’31
The most immediate political impact of social Darwinism was the eugenics movement that became established with the new century. All of the above writers played a role in this, but the most direct progenitor, the real father, was Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1822–1911). In an article published in 1904 in the American Journal of Sociology, he argued that the essence of eugenics was that ‘inferiority’ and ‘superiority’ could be objectively described and measured – which is why Lapouge’s calibration of skulls was so important.32 Lending support for this argument was the fall in European populations at the time (thanks partly to emigration to the United States), adding to fears that ‘degeneration’ – urbanisation and industrialisation – was making people less likely or able to reproduce and encouraging the ‘less fit’ to breed faster than the ‘more fit.’ The growth in suicide, crime, prostitution, sexual deviance, and those squint eyes and imperfect ears that Nordau thought he saw, seemed to support this interpretation.33 This view acquired what appeared to be decisive support from a survey of British soldiers in the Boer War between 1899 and 1902, which exposed alarmingly low levels of health and education among the urban working class.
The German Race Hygiene Society was founded in 1905, followed by the Eugenics Education Society in England in 1907.34 An equivalent body was founded in the United States, in 1910 and in France in 1912.35 Arguments at times bordered on the fanatical. For example, F. H. Bradley, an Oxford professor, recommended that lunatics and persons with hereditary diseases should be killed, and their children.36 In America, in 1907, the state of Indiana passed a law that required a radically new punishment for inmates in state institutions who were ‘insane, idiotic, imbecilic, feebleminded or who were convicted rapists’: sterilisation.37
It would be wrong, however, to give the impression that the influence of social Darwinism was wholly crude and wholly bad. It was not.
A distinctive feature of Viennese journalism at the turn of the century was the feuilleton. This was a detachable part of the front page of a newspaper, below the fold, which contained not news but a chatty – and ideally speaking, witty – essay written on any topical subject. One of the best feuilletonistes was a member of the Café Griendsteidl set, Theodor Herzl (1860–1904). Herzl, the son of a Jewish merchant, was born in Budapest but studied law in Vienna, which soon became home. While at the university Herzl began sending squibs to the Neue Freie Presse, and he soon developed a witty prose style to match his dandified dress. He met Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, and Stefan Zweig. He did his best to ignore the growing anti-Semitism around him, identifying with the liberal aristocracy of the empire rather than with the ugly masses, the ‘rabble,’ as Freud called them. He believed that Jews should assimilate, as he was doing, or on rare occasions recover their honour after they had suffered discrimination through duels, then very common in Vienna. He thought that after a few duels (as fine a Darwinian device as one could imagine) Jewish honour would be reclaimed. But in October 1891 his life began to change. His journalism was rewarded with his appointment as Paris correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse. His arrival in the French capital, however, coincided with a flood of anti-Semitism set loose by the Panama scandal, when corrupt officials of the company running the canal were put on trial. This was followed in 1894 by the case of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer convicted of treason. Herzl doubted the man’s guilt from the start, but he was very much in a minority. For Herzl, France had originally represented all that was progressive and noble in Europe – and yet in a matter of months he had discovered her to be hardly different from his own Vienna, where the vicious anti-Semite Karl Lueger was well on his way to becoming mayor.38
A change came over Herzl. At the end of May 1895, he attended a performance of Tannhäuser at the Opéra in Paris. Not normally passionate about opera, that evening he was, as he later said, ‘electrified’ by the performance, which illustrated the irrationalism of völkisch politics.39 He went home and, ‘trembling with excitement,’ sat down to work out a strategy by means of which the Jews could secede from Europe and establish an independent homeland.40 Thereafter he was a man transformed, a committed Zionist. Between his visit to Tannhäuser and his death in 1904, Herzl organised no fewer than six world congresses of Jewry, lobbying everyone for the cause, from the pope to the sultan.41 The sophisticated, educated, and aristocratic Jews wouldn’t listen to him at first. But he outthought them. There had been Zionist movements before, but usually they had appealed to personal self-interest and/or offered financial inducements. Instead, Herzl rejected a rational concept of history in favour of ‘sheer psychic energy as the motive force.’ The Jews must have their Mecca, their Lourdes, he said. ‘Great things need no firm foundation … the secret lies in movement. Hence I believe that somewhere a guidable aircraft will be discovered. Gravity overcome through movement.’42 Herzl did not specify that Zion had to be in Palestine; parts of Africa or Argentina would do just as well, and he saw no need for Hebrew to be the official language.43 Orthodox Jews condemned him as an heretic (because he plainly wasn’t the Messiah), but at his death, ten years and six congresses later, the Jewish Colonial Trust, the joint stock company he had helped initiate and which would be the backbone of any new state, had 135,000 shareholders, more than any other enterprise then existing. His funeral was attended by 10,000 Jews from all over Europe. A Jewish homeland had not yet been achieved, but the idea was no longer a heresy.44
Like Herzl, Max Weber was concerned with religion as a shared experience. Like Max Nordau and the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, he was troubled by the ‘degenerate’ nature of modern society. He differed from them in believing that what he saw around him was not wholly bad. No stranger to the ‘alienation’ that modern life could induce, he thought that group identity was a central factor in making life bearable in modern cities and that its importance had been overlooked. For several years around the turn of the century he had produced almost no serious academic work (he was on the faculty at the University of Freiburg), being afflicted by a severe depression that showed no signs of recovery until 1904. Once begun, however, few recoveries can have been so dramatic. The book he produced that year, quite different from anything he had done before, transformed his reputation.45
Prior to his illness, most of Weber’s works were dry, technical monographs on agrarian history, economics, and economic law, including studies of mediaeval trading law and the conditions of rural workers in the eastern part of Germany – hardly best-sellers. However, fellow academics were interested in his Germanic approach, which in marked contrast to British style focused on economic life within its cultural context, rather than separating out economics and politics as a dual entity, more or less self-limiting.46
A tall, stooping man, Weber had an iconic presence, like Brentano, and was full of contradictions.47 He rarely smiled – indeed his features were often clouded by worry. But it seems that his experience of depression, or simply the time it had allowed for reflection, was responsible for the change that came over him and helped produce his controversial but undoubtedly powerful idea. The study that Weber began on his return to health was on a much broader canvas than, say, the peasants of eastern Germany. It was entitled The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Weber’s thesis in this book was hardly less contentious than Freud’s and, as Anthony Giddens has pointed out, it immediately provoked much the same sort of sharp critical debate. He himself saw it as a refutation of Marxism and materialism, and the themes of The Protestant Ethic cannot easily be understood without some knowledge of Weber’s intellectual background.48 He came from the same tradition as Brentano and Husserl, the tradition of Geisteswissenschaftler, which insisted on the differentiation of the sciences of nature from the study of man:49 ‘While we can “explain” natural occurrences in terms of the application of causal laws, human conduct is intrinsically meaningful, and has to be “interpreted” or “understood” in a way which has no counterpart in nature.’50 For Weber, this meant that social and psychological matters were much more relevant than purely economic or material issues. The very opening of The Protestant Ethic shows Weber’s characteristic way of thinking: B glance at the occupation statistics of any country of mixed religious composition brings to light with remarkable frequency a situation which has several times provoked discussion in the Catholic press and literature, and in Catholic congresses in Germany, namely, the fact that business leaders and owners of capital, as well as the higher grades of skilled labour, and even more the higher technically and commercially trained personnel of modern enterprises, are overwhelmingly Protestant.’51
That observation is, for Weber, the nub of the matter, the crucial discrepancy that needs to be explained. Early on in the book, Weber makes it clear that he is not talking just about money. For him, a capitalistic enterprise and the pursuit of gain are not at all the same thing. People have always wanted to be rich, but that has little to do with capitalism, which he identifies as ‘a regular orientation to the achievement of profit through (nominally peaceful) economic exchange.’52 Pointing out that there were mercantile operations – very successful and of considerable size – in Babylonia, Egypt, India, China, and mediaeval Europe, he says that it is only in Europe, since the Reformation, that capitalist activity has become associated with the rational organisation of formally free labour.53
Weber was also fascinated by what he thought to begin with was a puzzling paradox. In many cases, men – and a few women – evinced a drive toward the accumulation of wealth but at the same time showed a ‘ferocious asceticism,’ a singular absence of interest in the worldly pleasures that such wealth could buy. Many entrepreneurs actually pursued a lifestyle that was ‘decidedly frugal.’54 Was this not odd? Why work hard for so little reward? After much consideration, carried out while he was suffering from depression, Weber thought he had found an answer in what he called the ‘this-worldly asceticism’ of puritanism, a notion that he expanded by reference to the concept of ‘the calling.’55 Such an idea did not exist in antiquity and, according to Weber, it does not exist in Catholicism either. It dates only from the Reformation, and behind it lies the idea that the highest form of moral obligation of the individual, the best way to fulfil his duty to God, is to help his fellow men, now, in this world. In other words, whereas for the Catholics the highest idea was purification of one’s own soul through withdrawal from the world and contemplation (as with monks in a retreat), for Protestants the virtual opposite was true: fulfilment arises from helping others.56 Weber backed up these assertions by pointing out that the accumulation of wealth, in the early stages of capitalism and in Calvinist countries in particular, was morally sanctioned only if it was combined with ‘a sober, industrious career.’ Idle wealth that did not contribute to the spread of well-being, capital that did not work, was condemned as a sin. For Weber, capitalism, whatever it has become, was originally sparked by religious fervour, and without that fervour the organisation of labour that made capitalism so different from what had gone before would not have been possible.
Weber was familiar with the religions and economic practices of non-European areas of the world, such as India, China, and the Middle East, and this imbued The Protestant Ethic with an authority it might otherwise not have had. He argued that in China, for example, widespread kinship units provided the predominant forms of economic cooperation, naturally limiting the influence both of the guilds and of individual entrepreneurs.57 In India, Hinduism was associated with great wealth in history, but its tenets about the afterlife prevented the same sort of energy that built up under Protestantism, and capitalism proper never developed. Europe also had the advantage of inheriting the tradition of Roman law, which provided a more integrated juridical practice than elsewhere, easing the transfer of ideas and facilitating the understanding of contracts.58 That The Protestant Ethic continues to generate controversy, that attempts have been made to transfer its basic idea to other cultures, such as Confucianism, and that links between Protestantism and economic growth are evident even today in predominantly Catholic Latin America suggest that Weber’s thesis had merit.
Darwinism was not mentioned in The Protestant Ethic, but it was there, in the idea that Protestantism, via the Reformation, grew out of earlier, more primitive faiths and produced a more advanced economic system (more advanced because it was less sinful and benefited more people). Others have discovered in his theory a ‘primitive Arianism,’ and Weber himself referred to the Darwinian struggle in his inaugural address at the University of Freiburg in 1895.59 His work was later used by sociobiologists as an example of how their theories applied to economics.60
Nietzsche paid tribute to the men of prey who – by their actions – helped create the world. Perhaps no one was more predatory, was having more effect on the world in 1900, than the imperialists, who in their scramble for Africa and elsewhere spread Western technology and Western ideas faster and farther than ever before. Of all the people who shared in this scramble, Joseph Conrad became known for turning his back on the ‘active life,’ for withdrawing from the dark continents of ‘overflowing riches’ where it was relatively easy (as well as safe) to exercise the ‘will to power.’ After years as a sailor in different merchant navies, Conrad removed himself to the sedentary life of writing fiction. In his imagination, however, he returned to those foreign lands – Africa, the Far East, the South Seas – to establish the first major literary theme of the century.
Conrad’s best-known books, Lord Jim (1900), Heart of Darkness (published in book form in 1902), Nostromo (1904), and The Secret Agent (1907), draw on ideas from Darwin, Nietzsche, Nordau, and even Lombroso to explore the great fault line between scientific, liberal, and technical optimism in the twentieth century and pessimism about human nature. He is reported to have said to H. G. Wells on one occasion, ‘The difference between us, Wells, is fundamental. You don’t care for humanity but think they are to be improved. I love humanity but know they are not!’61 It was a Conradian joke, it seems, to dedicate The Secret Agent to Wells.
Christened Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, Conrad was born in 1857 in a part of Poland taken by the Russians in the 1793 partition of that often-dismembered country (his birthplace is now in Ukraine). His father, Apollo, was an aristocrat without lands, for the family estates had been sequestered in 1839 following an anti-Russian rebellion. In 1862 both parents were deported, along with Józef, to Vologda in northern Russia, where his mother died of tuberculosis. Józef was orphaned in 1869 when his father, permitted the previous year to return to Kraków, died of the same disease. From this moment on Conrad depended very much on the generosity of his maternal uncle Tadeusz, who provided an annual allowance and, on his death in 1894, left about £1,600 to his nephew (well over £100,000 now). This event coincided with the acceptance of Conrad’s first book, Almayer’s Folly (begun in 1889), and the adoption of the pen name Joseph Conrad. He was from then on a man of letters, turning his experiences and the tales he heard at sea into fiction.62
These adventures began when he was still only sixteen, on board the Mont Blanc, bound for Martinique out of Marseilles. No doubt his subsequent sailing to the Caribbean provided much of the visual imagery for his later writing, especially Nostromo. It seems likely that he was also involved in a disastrous scheme of gunrunning from Marseilles to Spain. Deeply in debt both from this enterprise and from gambling at Monte Carlo, he attempted suicide, shooting himself in the chest. Uncle Tadeusz bailed him out, discharging his debts and inventing for him the fiction that he was shot in a duel, which Conrad found useful later for his wife and his friends.63
Conrad’s sixteen-year career in the British merchant navy, starting as a deckhand, was scarcely smooth, but it provided the store upon which, as a writer, he would draw. Typically Conrad’s best work, such as Heart of Darkness, is the result of long gestation periods during which he seems to have repeatedly brooded on the meaning or symbolic shape of his experience seen against the background of the developments in contemporary science. Most of these he understood as ominous, rather than liberating, for humanity. But Conrad was not anti-scientific. On the contrary, he engaged with the rapidly changing shape of scientific thought, as Redmond O’Hanlon has shown in his study Joseph Conrad and Charles Darwin: The Influence of Scientific Thought on Conrad’s Fiction (1984).64 Conrad was brought up on the classical physics of the Victorian age, which rested on the cornerstone belief in the permanence of matter, albeit with the assumptions that the sun was cooling and that life on earth was inevitably doomed. In a letter to his publisher dated 29 September 1898, Conrad describes the effect of a demonstration of X rays. He was in Glasgow and staying with Dr John McIntyre, a radiologist: ‘In the evening dinner, phonograph, X rays, talk about the secret of the universe, and the non-existence of, so called, matter. The secret of the universe is in the existence of horizontal waves whose varied vibrations are set at the bottom of all states of consciousness…. Neil Munro stood in front of a Röntgen machine and on the screen behind we contemplated his backbone and ribs…. It was so – said the doctor – and there is no space, time, matter, mind as vulgarly understood … only the eternal force that causes the waves – it’s not much.’65
Conrad was not quite as up-to-date as he imagined, for J. J. Thomson’s demonstration the previous year showed the ‘waves’ to be particles. But the point is not so much that Conrad was au fait with science, but rather that the certainties about the nature of matter that he had absorbed were now deeply undermined. This sense he translates into the structures of many of his characters whose seemingly solid personalities, when placed in the crucible of nature (often in sea voyages), are revealed as utterly unstable or rotten.
After Conrad’s uncle fell ill, Józef stopped off in Brussels on the way to Poland, to be interviewed for a post with the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo – a fateful interview that led to his experiences between June and December 1890 in the Belgian Congo and, ten years on, to Heart of Darkness. In that decade, the Congo lurked in his mind, awaiting a trigger to be formulated in prose. That was provided by the shocking revelations of the ‘Benin Massacres’ in 1897, as well as the accounts of Sir Henry Morton Stanley’s expeditions in Africa.66 Benin: The City of Blood was published in London and New York in 1897, revealing to the western civilised world a horror story of native African blood rites. After the Berlin Conference of 1884, Britain proclaimed a protectorate over the Niger River region. Following the slaughter of a British mission to Benin (a state west of Nigeria), which arrived during King Duboar’s celebrations of his ancestors with ritual sacrifices, a punitive expedition was dispatched to capture this city, long a centre of slavery. The account of Commander R. H. Bacon, intelligence officer of the expedition, parallels in some of its details the events in Heart of Darkness. When Commander Bacon reached Benin, he saw what, despite his vivid language, he says lay beyond description: ‘It is useless to continue describing the horrors of the place, everywhere death, barbarity and blood, and smells that it hardly seems right for human beings to smell and yet live.’67 Conrad avoids definition of what constituted ‘The horror! The horror!’ – the famous last words in the book, spoken by Kurtz, the man Marlow, the hero, has come to save – opting instead for hints such as round balls on posts that Marlow thinks he sees through his field glasses when approaching Kurtz’s compound. Bacon, for his part, describes crucifixion trees surrounded by piles of skulls and bones, blood smeared everywhere, over bronze idols and ivory.
Conrad’s purpose, however, is not to elicit the typical response of the civilised world to reports of barbarism. In his report Commander Bacon had exemplified this attitude: ‘they [the natives] cannot fail to see that peace and the good rule of the white man mean happiness, contentment and security.’ Similar sentiments are expressed in the report that Kurtz composes for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. Marlow describes this ‘beautiful piece of writing,’ ‘vibrating with eloquence.’ And yet, scrawled ‘at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment is blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: “Exterminate all the brutes!”’68
This savagery at the heart of civilised humans is also revealed in the behaviour of the white traders – ‘pilgrims,’ Marlow calls them. White travellers’ tales, like those of Henry Morton Stanley in ‘darkest Africa,’ written from an unquestioned sense of the superiority of the European over the native, were available to Conrad’s dark vision. Heart of Darkness thrives upon the ironic reversals of civilisation and barbarity, of light and darkness. Here is a characteristic Stanley episode, recorded in his diary. Needing food, he told a group of natives that ‘I must have it or we would die. They must sell it for beads, red, blue or green, copper or brass wire or shells, or … I drew significant signs across the throat. It was enough, they understood at once.’69 In Heart of Darkness, by contrast, Marlow is impressed by the extraordinary restraint of the starving cannibals accompanying the expedition, who have been paid in bits of brass wire but have no food, their rotting hippo flesh – too nauseating a smell for European endurance – having been thrown overboard. He wonders why ‘they didn’t go for us – they were thirty to five – and have a good tuck-in for once.’70 Kurtz is a symbolic figure, of course (‘All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’), and the thrust of Conrad’s fierce satire emerges clearly through Marlow’s narrative.71 The imperial civilising mission amounts to a savage predation: ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of the human conscience,’ as Conrad elsewhere described it. At this end of the century such a conclusion about the novel seems obvious, but it was otherwise in the reviews that greeted its first appearance in 1902. The Manchester Guardian wrote that Conrad was not attacking colonisation, expansion, or imperialism, but rather showing how cheap ideals shrivel up.72 Part of the fascination surely lies in Conradian psychology. The journey within of so many of his characters seems explicitly Freudian, and indeed many Freudian interpretations of his works have been proposed. Yet Conrad strongly resisted Freud. When he was in Corsica, and on the verge of a breakdown, Conrad was given a copy of The Interpretation of Dreams. He spoke of Freud ‘with scornful irony,’ took the book to his room, and returned it on the eve of his departure, unopened.73
At the time Heart of Darkness appeared, there was – and there continues to be – a distaste for Conrad on the part of some readers. It is that very reaction which underlines his significance. This is perhaps best explained by Richard Curie, author of the first full-length study of Conrad, published in 1914.74 Curie could see that for many people there is a tenacious need to believe that the world, horrible as it might be, can be put right by human effort and the appropriate brand of liberal philosophy. Unlike the novels of his contemporaries H. G. Wells and John Galsworthy, Conrad derides this point of view as an illusion at best, and the pathway to desperate destruction at its worst. Recently the morality of Conrad’s work, rather than its aesthetics, has been questioned. In 1977 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe described Conrad as ‘a bloody racist’ and Heart of Darkness as a novel that ‘celebrates’ the dehumanisation of some of the human race. In 1993 the cultural critic Edward Said thought that Achebe’s criticism did not go far enough.75 But evidence shows that Conrad was sickened by his experience in Africa, both physically and psychologically. In the Congo he met Roger Casement (executed in 1916 for his activities in Ireland), who as a British consular officer had written a report exposing the atrocities he and Conrad saw.76 In 1904 he visited Conrad to solicit his support. Whatever Conrad’s relationship to Marlow, he was deeply alienated from the imperialist, racist exploiters of Africa and Africans at that time. Heart of Darkness played a part in ending Leopold’s tyranny.77 One is left after reading the novel with the sheer terror of the enslavement and the slaughter, and a sense of the horrible futility and guilt that Marlow’s narrative conveys. Kurtz’s final words, ‘The horror! The horror!’ serve as a chilling endpoint for where social Darwinism all too easily can lead.