4
LES DEMOISELLES DE MODERNISME

In 1905 Dresden was one of the most beautiful cities on earth, a delicate Baroque jewel straddling the Elbe. It was a fitting location for the première of a new opera composed by Richard Strauss, called Salomé. Nonetheless, after rehearsals started, rumours began to circulate in the city that all was not well backstage. Strauss’s new work was said to be ‘too hard’ for the singers. As the opening night, 9 December, drew close, the fuss grew in intensity, and some of the singers wanted to hand back their scores. Throughout the rehearsals for Salomé, Strauss maintained his equilibrium, despite the problems. At one stage an oboist complained, ‘Herr Doktor, maybe this passage works on the piano, but it doesn’t on the oboes.’ ‘Take heart, man,’ Strauss replied briskly. ‘It doesn’t work on the piano, either.’ News about the divisions inside the opera house were taken so much to heart that Dresdeners began to cut the conductor, Ernst von Schuch, in the street. An expensive and embarrassing failure was predicted, and the proud burghers of Dresden could not stomach that. Schuch remained convinced of the importance of Strauss’s new work, and despite the disturbances and rumours, the production went ahead. The first performance of Salomé was to open, in the words of one critic, ‘a new chapter in the history of modernism.¹

The word modernism has three meanings, and we need to distinguish between them. Its first meaning refers to the break in history that occurred between the Renaissance and the Reformation, when the recognisably modern world began, when science began to flourish as an alternative system of knowledge, in contrast with religion and metaphysics. The second, and most common meaning of modernism refers to a movement – in the arts mainly – that began with Charles Baudelaire in France but soon widened. This itself had three elements. The first and most basic element was the belief that the modern world was just as good and fulfilling as any age that had gone before. This was most notably a reaction in France, in Paris in particular, against the historicism that had prevailed throughout most of the nineteenth century, especially in painting. It was helped by the rebuilding of Paris by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussman in the 1850s. A second aspect of modernism in this sense was that it was an urban art, cities being the ‘storm centres’ of civilisation. This was most clear in one of its earliest forms, impressionism, where the aim is to catch the fleeting moment, that ephemeral instance so prevalent in the urban experience. Last, in its urge to advocate the new over and above everything else, modernism implied the existence of an ‘avant-garde’, an artistic and intellectual elite, set apart from the masses by their brains and creativity, destined more often than not to be pitched against those masses even as they lead them. This form of modernism makes a distinction between the leisurely, premodern face-to-face agricultural society and the anonymous, fast-moving, atomistic society of large cities, carrying with it the risks of alienation, squalor, degeneration (as Freud, for one, had pointed out).²

The third meaning of modernism is used in the context of organised religion, and Catholicism in particular. Throughout the nineteenth century, various aspects of Catholic dogma came under threat. Young clerics were anxious for the church to respond to the new findings of science, especially Darwin’s theory of evolution and the discoveries of German archaeologists in the Holy Land, many of which appeared to contradict the Bible. The present chapter concerns all three aspects of modernism that came together in the early years of the century.

Salomé was closely based on Oscar Wilde’s play of the same name. Strauss was well aware of the play’s scandalous nature. When Wilde had originally tried to produce Salomé in London, it had been banned by the Lord Chamberlain. (In retaliation, Wilde had threatened to take out French citizenship.)³ Wilde recast the ancient account of Herod, Salomé, and Saint John the Baptist with a ‘modernist’ gloss, portraying the ‘heroine’ as a ‘Virgin consumed by evil chastity.’⁴ When he wrote the play, Wilde had not read Freud, but he had read Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, and his plot clearly suggested in Salomé’s demand for the head of Saint John echoes of sexual perversion. In an age when many people still regarded themselves as religious, this was almost guaranteed to offend. Strauss’s music, on top of Wilde’s plot, added fuel to the fire. The orchestration was difficult, disturbing, and to many ears discordant. To highlight the psychological contrast between Herod and Jokanaan, Strauss employed the unusual device of writing in two keys simultaneously.⁵ The continuous dissonance of the score reflected the tensions in the plot, reaching its culmination with Salomé’s moan as she awaits execution. This, rendered as a B-flat on a solo double bass, nails the painful drama of Salomé’s plight: she is butchered by guards crushing the life out of her with their shields.

After the first night, opinions varied. Cosima Wagner was convinced the new opera was ‘Madness! … wedded to indecency.’ The Kaiser would only allow Salomé to be performed in Berlin after the manager of the opera house shrewdly modified the ending, so that a Star of Bethlehem rose at the end of the performance.⁶ This simple trick changed everything, and Salomé was performed fifty times in that one season. Ten of Germany’s sixty opera houses – all fiercely competitive – chose to follow Berlin’s lead and stage the production so that within months, Strauss could afford to build a villa at Garmisch in the art nouveau style.⁷ Despite its success in Germany, the opera became notorious internationally. In London Thomas Beecham had to call in every favour to obtain permission to perform the opera at all.⁸ In New York and Chicago it was banned outright. (In New York one cartoonist suggested it might help if advertisements were printed on each of the seven veils.)⁹ Vienna also banned the opera, but Graz, for some reason, did not. There the opera opened in May 1906 to an audience that included Giacomo Puccini, Gustav Mahler, and a band of young music lovers who had come down from Vienna, including an out-of-work would-be artist called Adolf Hitler.

Despite the offence Salomé caused in some quarters, its eventual success contributed to Strauss’s appointment as senior musical director of the Hofoper in Berlin. The composer began work there with a one-year leave of absence to complete his next opera, Elektra. This work was his first major collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, whose play of the same name, realised by that magician of the German theatre, Max Reinhardt, Strauss had seen in Berlin (at the same theatre where he saw Wilde’s Salomé).¹⁰ Strauss was not keen to begin with, because he thought Elektra’s theme was too similar to that of Salomé. But Hofmannsthal’s ‘demonic, ecstatic’ image of sixth-century Greece caught his fancy; it was so very different from the noble, elegant, calm image traditionally revealed in the writings of johann Joachim Winckelmann and Goethe. Strauss therefore changed his mind, and Elektra turned out to be even more intense, violent, and concentrated than Salomé. ‘These two operas stand alone in my life’s work,’ said Strauss later; ‘in them I went to the utmost limits of harmony, psychological polyphony (Clytemnestra’s dream) and the capacity of today’s ears to take in what they hear.’¹¹

The setting of the opera is the Lion Gate at Mycenae – after Krafft-Ebing, Heinrich Schliemann. Elektra uses a larger orchestra even than Salomé, one-hundred and eleven players, and the combination of score and mass of musicians produces a much more painful, dissonant experience. There are swaths of ‘huge granite chords,’ sounds of ‘blood and iron,’ as Strauss’s biographer Michael Kennedy has put it.¹² For all its dissonance, Salomé is voluptuous, but Elektra is austere, edgy, grating. The original Clytemnestra was Ernestine Schumann-Heink, who described the early performances as ‘frightful…. We were a set of mad women…. There is nothing beyond Elektra…. We have come to a full-stop. I believe Strauss himself sees it.’ She said she wouldn’t sing the role again for $3,000 a performance.¹³

Two aspects of the opera compete for attention. The first is Clytemnestra’s tormented aria. A ‘stumbling, nightmare-ridden, ghastly wreck of a human being,’ she has nevertheless decorated herself with ornaments and, to begin with, the music follows the rattles and cranks of these.¹⁴ At the same time she sings of a dreadful dream – a biological horror – that her bone marrow is dissolving away, that some unknown creature is crawling all over her skin as she tries to sleep. Slowly, the music turns harsher, grows more discordant, atonal. The terror mounts, the dread is inescapable. Alongside this there is the confrontation between the three female characters, Electra and Clytemnestra on the one hand, and Electra and Chrysothemis on the other. Both encounters carry strong lesbian overtones that, added to the dissonance of the music, ensured that Elektra was as scandalous as Salomé. When it premiered on 25 January 1909, also in Dresden, one critic angrily dismissed it as ‘polluted art.’¹⁵

Strauss and Hofmannsthal were trying to do two things with Elektra. At the most obvious level they were doing in musical theatre what the expressionist painters of Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter (Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc) were doing in their art – using unexpected and ‘unnatural’ colours, disturbing distortion, and jarring juxtapositions to change people’s perceptions of the world. And in this, perceptions of the ancient world had resonance. In Germany at the time, as well as in Britain and the United States, most scholars had inherited an idealised picture of antiquity, from Winckelmann and Goethe, who had understood classical Greece and Rome as restrained, simple, austere, coldly beautiful. But Nietzsche changed all that. He stressed the instinctive, savage, irrational, and darker aspects of pre-Homeric ancient Greece (fairly obvious, for example, if one reads the Iliad and the Odyssey without preconceptions). But Strauss’s Elektra wasn’t only about the past. It was about man’s (and therefore woman’s) true nature, and in this psychoanalysis played an even bigger role. Hofmannsthal met Arthur Schnitzler nearly every day at the Café Griensteidl, and Schnitzler was regarded by Freud, after all, as his ‘double.’ There can be little doubt therefore that Hofmannsthal had read Studies in Hysteria and The Interpretation of Dreams.¹⁶ Indeed, Electra herself shows a number of the symptoms portrayed by Anna O., the famous patient treated by Josef Breuer. These include her father fixation, her recurring hallucinations, and her disturbed sexuality. But Elektra is theatre, not a clinical report.¹⁷ The characters face moral dilemmas, not just psychological ones. Nevertheless, the very presence of Freud’s ideas onstage, undermining the traditional basis of ancient myths, as well as recognisable music and dance (both Salomé and Elektra have dance scenes), placed Strauss and Hofmannsthal firmly in the modernist camp. Elektra assaulted the accepted notions of what was beautiful and what wasn’t. Its exploration of the unconscious world beneath the surface may not have made people content, but it certainly made them think.

Elektra made Strauss think too. Ernestine Schumann-Heink had been right. He had followed the path of dissonance and the instincts and the irrational far enough. Again, as Michael Kennedy has said, the famous ‘blood chord’ in Elektra, E-major and D-major mingled in pain,’ where the voices go their own way, as far from the orchestra as dreams are from reality, was as jarring as anything then happening in painting. Strauss was at his best ‘when he set mania to music,’ but nevertheless he abandoned the discordant line he had followed from Salomé to Elektra, leaving the way free for a new generation of composers, the most innovative of whom was Arnold Schoenberg.*¹⁸

Strauss was, however, ambivalent about Schoenberg. He thought he would be better off ‘shovelling snow’ than composing, yet recommended him for a Liszt scholarship (the revenue of the Liszt Foundation was used annually to help composers or pianists).²⁰ Born in September 1874 into a poor family, Arnold Schoenberg always had a serious disposition and was largely self-taught.²¹ Like Max Weber, he was not given to smiling. A small, wiry man, he went bald early on, and this helped to give him a fierce appearance – the face of a fanatic, according to his near-namesake, the critic Harold Schonberg.²² Stravinsky once pinned down his colleague’s character in this way: ‘His eyes were protuberant and explosive, and the whole force of the man was in them.’²³ Schoenberg was strikingly inventive, and his inventiveness was not confined to music. He carved his own chessmen, bound his own books, painted (Kandinsky was a fan), and invented a typewriter for music.²⁴

To begin with, Schoenberg worked in a bank, but he never thought of anything other than music. ‘Once, in the army, I was asked if I was the composer Arnold Schoenberg. “Somebody has to be,” I said, “and nobody else wanted to be, so I took it on myself.” ’²⁵ Although Schoenberg preferred Vienna, where he frequented the cafés Landtmann and Griensteidl, and where Karl Kraus, Theodor Herzl and Gustav Klimt were great friends, he realised that Berlin was the place to advance his career. There he studied under Alexander von Zemlinsky, whose sister, Mathilde, he married in 1901.²⁶

Schoenberg’s autodidacticism, and sheer inventiveness, served him well. While other composers, Strauss, Mahler, and Claude Debussy among them, made the pilgrimage to Bayreuth to learn from Wagner’s chromatic harmony, Schoenberg chose a different course, realising that evolution in art proceeds as much by complete switchbacks in direction, by quantum leaps, as by gradual growth.²⁷ He knew that the expressionist painters were trying to make visible the distorted and raw forms unleashed by the modern world and analysed and ordered by Freud. He aimed to do something similar in music. The term he himself liked was ‘the emancipation of dissonance.’²⁸

Schoenberg once described music as ‘a prophetic message revealing a higher form of life toward which mankind evolves.’²⁹ Unfortunately, he found his own evolution slow and very painful. Even though his early music owed a debt to Wagner, Tristan especially, it had a troubled reception in Vienna. The first demonstrations occurred in 1900 at a recital. ‘Since then,’ he wrote later, ‘the scandal has never ceased.’³⁰ It was only after the first outbursts that he began to explore dissonance. As with other ideas in the early years of the century – relativity, for example, and abstraction – several composers were groping toward dissonance and atonality at more or less the same time. One was Strauss, as we have seen. But Jean Sibelius, Mahler, and Alexandr Scriabin, all older than Schoenberg, also seemed about to embrace the same course when they died. Schoenberg’s relative youth and his determined, uncompromising nature meant that it was he who led the way toward atonality.³¹

One morning in December 1907 Schoenberg, Anton von Webern, Gustav Klimt, and a couple of hundred other notables gathered at Vienna’s Westbahnhof to say good-bye to Gustav Mahler, the composer and conductor who was bound for New York. He had grown tired of the ‘fashionable anti-Semitism’ in Vienna and had fallen out with the management of the Opéra.³² As the train pulled out of the station, Schoenberg and the rest of the Café Griensteidl set, now bereft of the star who had shaped Viennese music for a decade, waved in silence. Klimt spoke for them all when he whispered, ‘Vorbei’ (It’s over). But it could have been Schoenberg speaking – Mahler was the only figure of note in the German music world who understood what he was trying to achieve.³³ A second crisis which faced Schoenberg was much more powerful. In the summer of 1908, the very moment of his first atonal compositions, his wife Mathilde abandoned him for a friend.³⁴ Rejected by his wife, isolated from Mahler, Schoenberg was left with nothing but his music. No wonder such dark themes are a prominent feature of his early atonal compositions.

The year 1908 was momentous for music, and for Schoenberg. In that year he composed his Second String Quartet and Das Buch der hängenden Gärten. In both compositions he took the historic step of producing a style that, echoing the new physics, was ‘bereft of foundations.’³⁵ Both compositions were inspired by the tense poems of Stefan George, another member of the Café Griensteidl set.³⁶ George’s poems were a cross between experimentalist paintings and Strauss operas. They were full of references to darkness, hidden worlds, sacred fires, and voices.

The precise point at which atonality arrived, according to Schoenberg, was during the writing of the third and fourth movements of the string quartet. He was using George’s poem ‘Entrückung’ (Ecstatic Transport) when he suddenly left out all six sharps of the key signature. As he rapidly completed the part for the cello, he abandoned completely any sense of key, to produce a ‘real pandemonium of sounds, rhythms and forms.’³⁷ As luck would have it, the stanza ended with the line, ‘Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten,’ ‘I feel the air of other planets.’ It could not have been more appropriate.³⁸ The Second String Quartet was finished toward the end of July. Between then and its premiere, on 21 December, one more personal crisis shook the Schoenberg household. In November the painter his wife had left him for hanged himself, after he had failed to stab himself to death. Schoenberg took back Mathilde, and when he handed the score to the orchestra for the rehearsal, it bore the dedication, ‘To my wife.’³⁹

The premiere of the Second String Quartet turned into one of the great scandals of music history. After the lights went down, the first few bars were heard in respectful silence. But only the first few. Most people who lived in apartments in Vienna then carried whistles attached to their door keys. If they arrived home late at night, and the main gates of the building were locked, they would use the whistles to attract the attention of the concierge. On the night of the première, the audience got out its whistles. A wailing chorus arose in the auditorium to drown out what was happening onstage. One critic leaped to his feet and shouted, ‘Stop it! Enough!’ though no one knew if he meant the audience or the performers. When Schoenberg’s sympathisers joined in, shouting their support, it only added to the din. Next day one newspaper labelled the performance a ‘Convocation of Cats,’ and the New Vienna Daily, showing a sense of invention that even Schoenberg would have approved, printed their review in the ‘crime’ section of the paper.⁴⁰ ‘Mahler trusted him without being able to understand him.’⁴¹

Years later Schoenberg conceded that this was one of the worst moments of his life, but he wasn’t deterred. Instead, in 1909, continuing his emancipation of dissonance, he composed Erwartung, a thirty-minute opera, the story line for which is so minimal as to be almost absent: a woman goes searching in the forest for her lover; she discovers him only to find that he is dead not far from the house of the rival who has stolen him. The music does not so much tell a story as reflect the woman’s moods – joy, anger, jealousy.⁴² In painterly terms, Erwartung is both expressionistic and abstract, reflecting the fact that Schoenberg’s wife had recently abandoned him.⁴³ In addition to the minimal narrative, it never repeats any theme or melody. Since most forms of music in the ‘classical’ tradition usually employ variations on themes, and since repetition, lots of it, is the single most obvious characteristic of popular music, Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet and Erwartung stand out as the great break, after which ‘serious’ music began to lose the faithful following it had once had. It was to be fifteen years before Erwartung was performed.

Although he might be too impenetrable for many people’s taste, Schoenberg was not obtuse. He knew that some people objected to his atonality for its own sake, but that wasn’t the only problem. As with Freud (and Picasso, as we shall see), there were just as many traditionalists who hated what he was saying as much as how he was saying it. His response to this was a piece that, to him at least, was ‘light, ironic, satirical.’⁴⁴ Pierrot lunaire, appearing in 1912, features a familiar icon of the theatre – a dumb puppet who also happens to be a feeling being, a sad and cynical clown allowed by tradition to raise awkward truths so long as they are wrapped in riddles. It had been commissioned by the Viennese actress Albertine Zehme, who liked the Pierrot role.⁴⁵ Out of this unexpected format, Schoenberg managed to produce what many people consider his seminal work, what has been called the musical equivalent of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon or E=mc².⁴⁶ Pierrot’s main focus is a theme we are already familiar with, the decadence and degeneration of modern man. Schoenberg introduced in the piece several innovations in form, notably Sprechgesang, literally song-speech in which the voice rises and falls but cannot be said to be either singing or speaking. The main part, composed for an actress rather than a straight singer, calls for her to be both a ‘serious’ performer and a cabaret act. Despite this suggestion of a more popular, accessible format, listeners have found that the music breaks down ‘into atoms and molecules, behaving in a jerky, uncoordinated way not unlike the molecules that bombard pollen in Brownian movement.’⁴⁷

Schoenberg claimed a lot for Pierrot. He had once described Debussy as an impressionist composer, meaning that his harmonies merely added to the colour of moods. But Schoenberg saw himself as an expressionist, a Postimpressionist like Paul Gauguin or Paul Cézanne or Vincent van Gogh, uncovering unconscious meaning in much the same way that the expressionist painters thought they went beyond the merely decorative impressionists. He certainly believed, as Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead did, that music – like mathematics (see chapter 6) – had logic.⁴⁸

The first night took place in mid-October in Berlin, in the Choralionsaal on Berlin’s Bellevuestrasse, which was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1945. As the house lights went down, dark screens could be made out onstage with the actress Albertine Zehme dressed as Columbine. The musicians were farther back, conducted by the composer. The structure of Pierrot is tight. It is comprised of three parts, each containing seven miniature poems; each poem lasts about a minute and a half, and there are twenty-one poems in all, stretching to just on half an hour. Despite the formality, the music was utterly free, as was the range of moods, leading from sheer humour, as Pierrot tries to clean a spot off his clothes, to the darkness when a giant moth kills the rays of the sun. Following the premières of the Second String Quartet and Erwartung, the critics gathered, themselves resembling nothing so much as a swarm of giant moths, ready to kill off this shining sun. But the performance was heard in silence, and when it was over, Schoenberg was given an ovation. Since it was so short, many in the audience shouted for the piece to be repeated, and they liked it even better the second time. So too did some of the critics. One of them went so far as to describe the evening ‘not as the end of music; but as the beginning of a new stage in listening.’

It was true enough. One of the many innovations of modernism was the new demands it placed on the audience. Music, painting, literature, even architecture, would never again be quite so ‘easy’ as they had been. Schoenberg, like Freud, Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Otto Weininger, Hofmannsthal, and Schnitzler, believed in the instincts, expressionism, subjectivism.⁴⁹ For those who were willing to join the ride, it was exhilarating. For those who weren’t, there was really nowhere to turn and go forward. And like it or not, Schoenberg had found a way forward after Wagner. The French composer Claude Debussy once remarked that Wagner’s music was ‘a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.’ No one realised that more than Schoenberg.

If Salomé and Elektra and Pierrot’s Columbine are the founding females of modernism, they were soon followed by five equally sensuous, shadowy, disturbing sisters in a canvas produced by Picasso in 1907. No less than Strauss’s women, Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was an attack on all previous ideas of art, self-consciously shocking, crude but compelling.

In the autumn of 1907 Picasso was twenty-six. Between his arrival in Paris in 1900 and his modest success with Last Moments, he had been back and forth several times between Malaga, or Barcelona, and Paris, but he was at last beginning to find fame and controversy (much the same thing in the world where he lived). Between 1886 and the outbreak of World War I there were more new movements in painting than at any time since the Renaissance, and Paris was the centre of this activity. Georges Seurat had followed impressionism with pointillism in 1886; three years later, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, and Aristide Maillol formed Les Nabis (from the Hebrew word for prophet), attracted by the theories of Gauguin, to paint in flat, pure colours. Later in the 1890s, as we have seen in the case of Klimt, painters in the mainly German-speaking cities – Vienna, Berlin, Munich – opted out of the academies to initiate the various ‘secessionist’ movements. Mostly they began as impressionists, but the experimentation they encouraged brought about expressionism, the search for emotional impact by means of exaggerations and distortions of line and colour. Fauvism was the most fruitful movement, in particular in the paintings of Henri Matisse, who would be Picasso’s chief rival while they were both alive. In 1905, at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, pictures by Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Georges Rouault, Albert Marquet, Henri Manguin, and Charles Camoin were grouped together in one room that also featured, in the centre, a statue by Donatello, the fifteenth-century Florentine sculptor. When the critic Louis Vauxcelles saw this arrangement, the calm of the statue contemplating the frenzied, flat colours and distortions on the walls, he sighed, ‘Ah, Donatello chez les Fauvres.’ Fauve means ‘wild beast’ – and the name stuck. It did no harm. For a time, Matisse was regarded as the beast-in-chief of the Paris avant-garde.

Matisse’s most notorious works during that early period were other demoiselles de modernisme – Woman with a Hat and The Green Stripe, a portrait of his wife. Both used colour to do violence to familiar images, and both created scandals. At this stage Matisse was leading, and Picasso following. The two painters had met in 1905, in the apartment of Gertrude Stein, the expatriate American writer. She was a discerning and passionate collector of modern art, as was her equally wealthy brother, Leo, and invitations to their Sunday-evening soirées in the rue de Fleurus were much sought after.⁵⁰ Matisse and Picasso were regulars at the Stein evenings, each with his band of supporters. Even then, though, Picasso understood how different they were. He once described Matisse and himself as ‘north pole and south pole.’⁵¹ For his part, Matisse’s aim, he said, was for ‘an art of balance, of purity and serenity, free of disturbing or disquieting subjects … an appeasing influence.’⁵²

Not Picasso. Until then, he had been feeling his way. He had a recognisable style, but the images he had painted – of poor acrobats and circus people – were hardly avant-garde. They could even be described as sentimental. His approach to art had not yet matured; all he knew, looking around him, was that in his art he needed to do as the other moderns were doing, as Strauss and Schoenberg and Matisse were doing: to shock. He saw a way ahead when he observed that many of his friends, other artists, were visiting the ‘primitive art’ departments at the Louvre and in the Trocadéro’s Museum of Ethnography. This was no accident. Darwin’s theories were well known by now, as were the polemics of the social Darwinists. Another influence was James Frazer, the anthropologist who, in The Golden Bough, had collected together in one book many of the myths and customs of different races. And on top of it all, there was the scramble for Africa and other empires. All of this produced a fashion for the achievements and cultures of the remoter regions of ‘darkness’ in the world – in particular the South Pacific and Africa. In Paris, friends of Picasso started buying masks and African and Pacific statuettes from bric-a-brac dealers. None were more taken by this art than Matisse and Derain. In fact, as Matisse himself said, ‘On the Rue de Rennes, I often passed the shop of Père Sauvage. There were Negro statuettes in his window. I was struck by their character, their purity of line. It was as fine as Egyptian art. So I bought one and showed it to Gertrude Stein, whom I was visiting that day. And then Picasso arrived. He took to it immediately.’⁵³

He certainly did, for the statuette seems to have been the first inspiration toward Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. As the critic Robert Hughes tells us, Picasso soon after commissioned an especially large canvas, which needed reinforced stretchers. Later in his life, Picasso described to André Malraux, the French writer and minister of culture, what happened next: ‘All alone in that awful museum [i.e. the Trocadéro], with masks, dolls made by the redskins, dusty manikins, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon must have come to me that very day, but not at all because of the forms; because it was my first exorcism-painting – yes absolutely…. The masks weren’t just like any other pieces of sculpture. Not at all. They were magic things…. The Negro pieces were intercesseurs, mediators; ever since then I’ve known the word in French. They were against everything – against unknown, threatening spirits. I always looked at fetishes. I understood; I too am against everything. I too believe that everything is unknown, that everything is an enemy! … all the fetishes were used for the same thing. They were weapons. To help people avoid coming under the influence of spirits again, to help them become independent. They’re tools. If we give spirits a form, we become independent. Spirits, the unconscious (people still weren’t talking about that very much), emotion – they’re all the same thing. I understood why I was a painter.’⁵⁴

Jumbled up here are Darwin, Freud, Frazer, and Henri Bergson, whom we shall meet later in this chapter. There is a touch of Nietzsche too, in Picasso’s nihilistic and revealing phrase, ‘everything is an enemy! … They were weapons.’⁵⁵ Demoiselles was an attack on all previous ideas of art. Like Elektra and Erwartung, it was modernistic in that it was intended to be as destructive as it was creative, shocking, deliberately ugly, and undeniably crude. Picasso’s brilliance lay in also making the painting irresistible. The five women are naked, heavily made up, completely brazen about what they are: prostitutes in a brothel. They stare back at the viewer, unflinching, confrontational rather than seductive. Their faces are primitive masks that point up the similarities and differences between so-called primitive and civilised peoples. While others were looking for the serene beauty in non-Western art, Picasso questioned Western assumptions about beauty itself, its links to the unconscious and the instincts. Certainly, Picasso’s images left no one indifferent. The painting made Georges Braque feel ‘as if someone was drinking gasoline and spitting fire,’ a comment not entirely negative, as it implies an explosion of energy.⁵⁶ Gertrude Stein’s brother Leo was racked with embarrassed laughter when he first saw Les Demoiselles, but Braque at least realised that the picture was built on Cézanne but added twentieth-century ideas, rather as Schoenberg built on Wagner and Strauss.

Cézanne, who had died the previous year, achieved recognition only at the end of his life as the critics finally grasped that he was trying to simplify art and to reduce it to its fundamentals. Most of Cézanne’s work was done in the nineteenth century, but his last great series, ‘The Bathers,’ was produced in 1904 and 1905, in the very months when, as we shall see, Einstein was preparing for publication his three great papers, on relativity, Brownian motion, and quantum theory. Modern art and much of modern science was therefore conceived at exactly the same moment. Moreover, Cézanne captured the essence of a landscape, or a bowl of fruit, by painting smudges of colour – quanta – all carefully related to each other but none of which conformed exactly to what was there. Like the relation of electrons and atoms to matter, orbiting largely empty space, Cézanne revealed the shimmering, uncertain quality beneath hard reality.

In the year after Cézanne’s death, 1907, the year of Les Demoiselles, the dealer Ambroise Vollard held a huge retrospective of the painter’s works, which thousands of Parisians flocked to see. Seeing this show, and seeing Demoiselles so soon after, Braque was transformed. Hitherto a disciple more of Matisse than Picasso, Braque was totally converted.

Six feet tall, with a large, square, handsome face, Georges Braque came from the Channel port of Le Havre. The son of a decorator who fancied himself as a real painter, Braque was very physical: he boxed, loved dancing, and was always welcome at Montmartre parties because he played the accordion (though Beethoven was more to his taste). ‘I never decided to become a painter any more than I decided to breathe,’ he said. ‘I truly don’t have any memory of making a choice.’⁵⁷ He first showed his paintings in 1906 at the Salon des Indépendants; in 1907 his works hung next to those of Matisse and Derain, and proved so popular that everything he sent in was sold. Despite this success, after seeing Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, he quickly realised that it was with Picasso that the way forward lay, and he changed course. For two years, as cubism evolved, they lived in each other’s pockets, thinking and working as one. ‘The things Picasso and I said to each other during those years,’ Braque later said, ‘will never be said again, and even if they were, no one would understand them any more. It was like being two mountaineers roped together.’⁵⁸

Before Les Demoiselles, Picasso had really only explored the emotional possibilities of two colour ranges – blue and pink. But after this painting his palette became more subtle, and more muted, than at any time in his life. He was at the time working at La-Rue-des-Bois in the countryside just outside Paris, which inspired the autumnal greens in his early cubist works. Braque, meanwhile, had headed south, to L’Estaque and the paysage Cézanne near Aix. Despite the distance separating them, the similarity between Braque’s southern paintings of the period and Picasso’s from La-Rue-des-Bois is striking: not just the colour tones but the geometrical, geological simplicity – landscapes lacking in order, at some earlier stage of evolution perhaps. Or else it was the paysage Cézanne seen close up, the molecular basis of landscape.⁵⁹

Though revolutionary, these new pictures were soon displayed. The German art dealer Daniel Henry Kahnweiler liked them so much he immediately organised a show of Braque’s landscapes that opened in his gallery in the rue Vignon in November 1908. Among those invited was Louis Vauxcelles, the critic who had cracked the joke about Donatello and the Fauves. In his review of the show, he again had a turn of phrase for what he had seen. Braque, he said, had reduced everything to ‘little cubes.’ It was intended to wound, but Kahnweiler was not a dealer for nothing, and he made the most of this early example of a sound bite. Cubism was born.⁶⁰

It lasted as a movement and style until the guns of August 1914 announced the beginning of World War I. Braque went off to fight and was wounded, after which the relationship between him and Picasso was never the same again. Unlike Les Demoiselles, which was designed to shock, cubism was a quieter, more reflective art, with a specific goal. ‘Picasso and I,’ Braque said, ‘were engaged in what we felt was a search for the anonymous personality. We were inclined to efface our own personalities in order to find originality.’⁶¹ This was why cubist works early on were signed on the back, to preserve anonymity and to keep the images uncontaminated by the personality of the painter. In 1907— 8 it was never easy to distinguish which painter had produced which picture, and that was how they thought it should be. Historically, cubism is central because it is the main pivot in twentieth-century art, the culmination of the process begun with impressionism but also the route to abstraction. We have seen that Cézanne’s great paintings were produced in the very months in which Einstein was preparing his theories. The whole change that was overtaking art mirrored the changes in science. There was a search in both fields for fundamental units, the deeper reality that would yield new forms. Paradoxically, in painting this led to an art in which the absence of form turned out to be just as liberating.

Abstraction has a long history. In antiquity certain shapes and colours like stars and crescents were believed to have magical properties. In Muslim countries it was and is forbidden to show the human form, and so abstract motifs – arabesques – were highly developed in both secular and religious works of art. As abstraction had been available in this way to Western artists for thousands of years, it was curious that several people, in different countries, edged toward abstraction during the first decade of the new century. It paralleled the way various people groped toward the unconscious or began to see the limits of Newton’s physics.

In Paris, both Robert Delaunay and František Kupka, a Czech cartoonist who had dropped out of the Vienna art school, made pictures without objects. Kupka was the more interesting of the two. Although he had been convinced by Darwin’s scientific theory, he also had a mystical side and believed there were hidden meanings in the universe that could be painted.⁶² Mikalojus-Konstantinas Ciurlionis, a Lithuanian painter living in Saint Petersburg, began his series of ‘transcendent’ pictures, again lacking recognisable objects and named after musical tempos: andante, allegro, and so on. (One of his patrons was a young composer named Igor Stravinsky.)⁶³ America had an early abstractionist, too, in the form of Arthur Dove, who left his safe haven as a commercial illustrator in 1907 and exiled himself to Paris. He was so overwhelmed by the works of Cézanne that he never painted a representational picture again. He was given an exhibition by Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer who established the famous ‘291’ avant-garde gallery in New York at 291 Broadway.⁶⁴ Each of these artists, in three separate cities, broke new ground and deserve their paragraph in history. Yet it was someone else entirely who is generally regarded as the father of abstract art, mainly because it was his work that had the greatest influence on others.

Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866. He had intended to be a lawyer but abandoned that to attend art school in Munich. Munich wasn’t nearly as exciting culturally as Paris or Vienna, but it wasn’t a backwater. Thomas Mann and Stefan George lived there. There was a famous cabaret, the Eleven Executioners, for whom Frank Wedekind wrote and sang.⁶⁵ The city’s museums were second only to Berlin in Germany, and since 1892 there had been the Munich artists’ Sezession. Expressionism had taken the country by storm, with Franz Marc, Aleksey Jawlensky, and Kandinsky forming ‘the Munich Phalanx.’ Kandinsky was not as precocious as Picasso, who was twenty-six when he painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. In fact, Kandinsky did not paint his first picture until he was thirty and was all of forty-five when, on New Year’s Eve, 1910–11, he went to a party given by two artists. Kandinsky’s marriage was collapsing at that time, and he went alone to the party, where he met Franz Marc. They struck up an accord and went on to a concert by a composer new to them but who also painted expressionist pictures; his name was Arnold Schoenberg. All of these influences proved crucial for Kandinsky, as did the theosophical doctrines of Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner. Blavatsky predicted a new age, more spiritual, less material, and Kandinsky (like many artists, who banded into quasi-religious groups) was impressed enough to feel that a new art was needed for this new age.⁶⁶ Another influence had been his visit to an exhibition of French impressionists in Moscow in the 1890s, where he had stood for several minutes in front of one of Claude Monet’s haystack paintings, although Kandinsky wasn’t sure what the subject was. Gripped by what he called the ‘unsuspected power of the palette,’ he began to realise that objects no longer need be an ‘essential element’ within a picture.⁶⁷ Other painters, in whose circle he moved, were groping in the same direction.⁶⁸

Then there were the influences of science. Outwardly, Kandinsky was an austere man, who wore thick glasses. His manner was authoritative, but his mystical side made him sometimes prone to overinterpret events, as happened with the discovery of the electron. ‘The collapse of the atom was equated, in my soul, with the collapse of the whole world. Suddenly, the stoutest walls crumbled. Everything became uncertain, precarious and insubstantial.’⁶⁹ Everything?

With so many influences acting on Kandinsky, it is perhaps not surprising he was the one to ‘discover’ abstraction. There was one final precipitating factor, one precise moment when, it could be said, abstract art was born. In 1908 Kandinsky was in Murnau, a country town south of Munich, near the small lake of Staffelsee and the Bavarian Alps, on the way to Garmisch, where Strauss was building his villa on the strength of his success with Salomé. One afternoon, after sketching in the foothills of the Alps, Kandinsky returned home, lost in thought. ‘On opening the studio door, I was suddenly confronted by a picture of indescribable and incandescent loveliness. Bewildered, I stopped, staring at it. The painting lacked all subject, depicted no identifiable object and was entirely composed of bright colour-patches. Finally I approached closer and only then saw it for what it really was – my own painting, standing on its side … One thing became clear to me: that objectiveness, the depiction of objects, needed no place in my paintings, and was indeed harmful to them.’⁷⁰

Following this incident, Kandinsky produced a series of landscapes, each slightly different from the one before. Shapes became less and less distinct, colours more vivid and more prominent. Trees are just about recognisable as trees, the smoke issuing from a train’s smokestack is just identifiable as smoke. But nothing is certain. His progress to abstraction was unhurried, deliberate. This process continued until, in 1911, Kandinsky painted three series of pictures, called Impressions, Improvisations, and Compositions, each one numbered, each one totally abstract. By the time he had completed the series, his divorce had come through.⁷¹ Thus there is a curious personal parallel with Schoenberg and his creation of atonality.

At the turn of the century there were six great philosophers then living, although Nietzsche died before 1900 was out. The other five were Henri Bergson, Benedetto Croce, Edmund Husserl, William James and Bertrand Russell. At this end of the century, Russell is by far the best remembered, in Europe, James in the United States, but Bergson was probably the most accessible thinker of the first decade and, after 1907, certainly the most famous.

Bergson was born in Paris in the rue Lamartine in 1859, the same year as Edmund Husserl.⁷² This was also the year in which Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared. Bergson was a singular individual right from childhood. Delicate, with a high forehead, he spoke very slowly, with long breaths between utterances. This was slightly off-putting, and at the Lycée Condorcet, his high school in Paris, he came across as so reserved that his fellow students felt ‘he had no soul,’ a telling irony in view of his later theories.⁷³ For his teachers, however, any idiosyncratic behaviour was more than offset by his mathematical brilliance. He graduated well from Condorcet and, in 1878, secured admission to the Ecole Normale, a year after Emile Durkheim, who would become the most famous sociologist of his day.⁷⁴ After teaching in several schools, Bergson applied twice for a post at the Sorbonne but failed both times. Durkheim is believed responsible for these rejections, jealousy the motive. Undeterred, Bergson wrote his first book, Time and Free Will (1889), and then Matter and Memory (1896). Influenced by Franz Brentano and Husserl, Bergson argued forcefully that a sharp distinction should be drawn between physical and psychological processes. The methods evolved to explore the physical world, he said, were inappropriate to the study of mental life. These books were well received, and in 1900 Bergson was appointed to a chair at the Collège de France, overtaking Durkheim.

But it was L’Evolution créatrice (Creative Evolution), which appeared in 1907, that established Bergson’s world reputation, extending it far beyond academic life. The book was quickly published in English, German, and Russian, and Bergson’s weekly lectures at the Collège de France turned into crowded and fashionable social events, attracting not only the Parisian but the international elite. In 1914, the Holy Office, the Vatican office that decided Catholic doctrine, decided to put Bergson’s works on its index of prohibited books.⁷⁵ This was a precaution very rarely imposed on non-Catholic writers, so what was the fuss about? Bergson once wrote that ‘each great philosopher has only one thing to say, and more often than not gets no further than an attempt to express it.’ Bergson’s own central insight was that time is real. Hardly original or provocative, but the excitement lay in the details. What drew people’s attention was his claim that the future does not in any sense exist. This was especially contentious because in 1907 the scientific determinists, bolstered by recent discoveries, were claiming that life was merely the unfolding of an already existing sequence of events, as if time were no more than a gigantic film reel, where the future is only that part which has yet to be played. In France this owed a lot to the cult of scientism popularised by Hippolyte Taine, who claimed that if everything could be broken down to atoms, the future was by definition utterly predictable.⁷⁶

Bergson thought this was nonsense. For him there were two types of time, physics-time and real time. By definition, he said, time, as we normally understand it, involves memory; physics-time, on the other hand, consists of ‘one long strip of nearly identical segments,’ where segments of the past perish almost instantaneously. ‘Real’ time, however, is not reversible – on the contrary, each new segment takes its colour from the past. His final point, the one people found most difficult to accept, was that since memory is necessary for time, then time itself must to some extent be psychological. (This is what the Holy Office most objected to, since it was an interference in God’s domain.) From this it followed for Bergson that the evolution of the universe, insofar as it can be known, is itself a psychological process also. Echoing Brentano and Husserl, Bergson was saying that evolution, far from being a truth ‘out there’ in the world, is itself a product, an ‘intention’ of mind.⁷⁷

What really appealed to the French at first, and then to increasing numbers around the world, was Bergson’s unshakeable belief in human freedom of choice and the unscientific effects of an entity he called the élan vital, the vital impulse, or life force. For Bergson, well read as he was in the sciences, rationalism was never enough. There had to be something else on top, ‘vital phenomena’ that were ‘inaccessible to reason,’ that could only be apprehended by intuition. The vital force further explained why humans are qualitatively different from other forms of life. For Bergson, an animal, almost by definition, was a specialist – in other words, very good at one thing (not unlike philosophers). Humans, on the other hand, were nonspecialists, the result of reason but also of intuition.⁷⁸ Herein lay Bergson’s attraction to the younger generation of intellectuals in France, who crowded to his lectures. Known as the ‘liberator,’ he became the figure ‘who had redeemed Western thought from the nineteenth-century “religion of science.”’ T. E. Hulme, a British acolyte, confessed that Bergson had brought ‘relief to an ‘entire generation’ by dispelling ‘the nightmare of determinism.’⁷⁹

An entire generation is an exaggeration, for there was no shortage of critics. Julien Benda, a fervent rationahst, said he would ‘cheerfully have killed Bergson’ if his views could have been stifled with him.⁸⁰ For the rationalists, Bergson’s philosophy was a sign of degeneration, an atavistic congeries of opinions in which the rigours of science were replaced by quasi-mystical ramblings. Paradoxically, he came under fire from the church on the grounds that he paid too much attention to science. For a time, little of this criticism stuck. Creative Evolution was a runaway success (T. S. Eliot went so far as to call Bergsonism ‘an epidemic’).⁸¹ America was just as excited, and William James confessed that ‘Bergson’s originality is so profuse that many of his ideas baffle me entirely.’⁸² Elan vital, the ‘life force,’ turned into a widely used cliché, but ‘life’ meant not only life but intuition, instinct, the very opposite of reason. As a result, religious and metaphysical mysteries, which science had seemingly killed off, reappeared in ‘respectable’ guise. William James, who had himself written a book on religion, thought that Bergson had ‘killed intellectualism definitively and without hope of recovery. I don’t see how it can ever revive again in its ancient platonizing role of claiming to be the most authentic, intimate, and exhaustive definer of the nature of reality.’⁸³ Bergson’s followers believed Creative Evolution had shown that reason itself is just one aspect of life, rather than the all-important judge of what mattered. This overlapped with Freud, but it also found an echo, much later in the century, in the philosophers of postmodernism.

One of the central tenets of Bergsonism was that the future is unpredictable. Yet in his will, dated 8 February 1937, he said, ‘I would have become a convert [to Catholicism], had I not seen in preparation for years the formidable wave of anti-Semitism which is to break upon the world. I wanted to remain among those who tomorrow will be persecuted.’⁸⁴ Bergson died in 1941 of pneumonia contracted from having stood for hours in line with other Jews, forced to register with the authorities, then under Nazi military occupation.

Throughout the nineteenth century organised religion, and Christianity in particular, came under sustained assault from many of the sciences, the discoveries of which contradicted the biblical account of the universe. Many younger members of the clergy urged the Vatican to respond to these findings, while traditionalists wanted the church to explain them away and allow a return to familiar verities. In this debate, which threatened a deep divide, the young radicals were known as modernists.

In September 1907 the traditionalists finally got what they had been praying for when, from Rome, Pope Pius X published his encyclical, Pascendi Dominici Gregis. This unequivocally condemned modernism in all its forms. Papal encyclicals (letters to all bishops of the church) rarely make headlines now, but they were once very reassuring for the faithful, and Pascendi was the first of the century.⁸⁵ The ideas that Pius was responding to may be grouped under four headings. There was first the general attitude of science, developed since the Enlightenment, which brought about a change in the way that man looked at the world around him and, in the appeal to reason and experience that science typified, constituted a challenge to established authority. Then there was the specific science of Darwin and his concept of evolution. This had two effects. First, evolution carried the Copernican and Galilean revolutions still further toward the displacement of man from a specially appointed position in a limited universe. It showed that man had arisen from the animals, and was essentially no different from them and certainly not set apart in any way. The second effect of evolution was as metaphor: that ideas, like animals, evolve, change, develop. The theological modernists believed that the church – and belief – should evolve too, that in the modern world dogma as such was out of place. Third, there was the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724—1804), who argued that there were limits to reason, that human observations of the world were ‘never neutral, never free of priorly imposed conceptual judgements’, and because of that one could never know that God exists. And finally there were the theories of Henri Bergson. As we have seen, he actually supported spiritual notions, but these were very different from the traditional teachings of the church and closely interwoven with science and reason.⁸⁶

The theological modernists believed that the church should address its own ‘self-serving’ forms of reason, such as the Immaculate Conception and the infallibility of the pope. They also wanted a reexamination of church teaching in the light of Kant, pragmatism, and recent scientific developments. In archaeology there were the discoveries and researches of the German school, who had made so much of the quest for the historical Jesus, the evidence for his actual, temporal existence rather than his meaning for the faithful. In anthropology, Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough had shown the ubiquity of magical and religious rites, and their similarities in various cultures. This great diversity of religions had therefore undermined Christian claims to unique possession of truth – people found it hard to believe, as one writer said, ‘that the greater part of humanity is plunged in error.’⁸⁷ With the benefit of hindsight, it is tempting to see Pascendi as yet another stage in ‘the death of God.’ However, most of the young clergy who took part in the debate over theological modernism did not wish to leave the church; instead they hoped it would ‘evolve’ to a higher plane.

The pope in Rome, Pius X (later Saint Pius), was a working-class man from Riese in the northern Italian province of the Veneto. Unsophisticated, having begun his career as a country priest, he was not surprisingly an uncompromising conservative and not at all afraid to get into politics. He therefore responded to the young clergy not by appeasing their demands but by carrying the fight to them. Modernism was condemned outright, without any prevarication, as ‘nothing but the union of the faith with false philosophy.’⁸⁸ Modernism, for the pope and traditional Catholics, was defined as ‘an exaggerated love of what is modern, an infatuation for modern ideas.’ One Catholic writer even went so far as to say it was ‘an abuse of what is modern.’⁸⁹ Pascendi, however, was only the most prominent part of a Vatican-led campaign against modernism. The Holy Office, the Cardinal Secretary of State, decrees of the Consistorial Congregation, and a second encyclical, Editae, published in 1910, all condemned the trend, and Pius repeated the argument in several papal letters to cardinals and the Catholic Institute in Paris. In his decree, Lamentabili, he singled out for condemnation no fewer than sixty-five specific propositions of modernism. Moreover, candidates for higher orders, newly appointed confessors, preachers, parish priests, canons, and bishops’ staff were all obliged to swear allegiance to the pope, according to a formula ‘which reprobates the principal modernist tenets.’ And the primary role of dogma was reasserted: ‘Faith is an act of the intellect made under the sway of the will.’⁹⁰

Faithful Catholics across the world were grateful for the Vatican’s closely reasoned arguments and its firm stance. Discoveries in the sciences were coming thick and fast in the early years of the century, changes in the arts were more bewildering and challenging than ever. It was good to have a rock in this turbulent world. Beyond the Catholic Church, however, few people were listening.

One place they weren’t listening was China. There, in 1900, the number of Christian converts, after several centuries of missionary work, was barely a million. The fact is that the intellectual changes taking place in China were very different from anywhere else. This immense country was finally coming to terms with the modern world, and that involved abandoning, above all, Confucianism, the religion that had once led China to the forefront of mankind (helping to produce a society that first discovered paper, gunpowder, and much else) but had by then long ceased to be an innovative force, had indeed become a liability. This was far more daunting than the West’s piecemeal attempts to move beyond Christianity.

Confucianism began by taking its fundamental strength, its basic analogy, from the cosmic order. Put simply, there is in Confucianism an hierarchy of superior-inferior relationships that form the governing principle of life. ‘Parents are superior to children, men to women, rulers to subjects.’ From this, it follows that each person has a role to fulfil; there is a ‘conventionally fixed set of social expectations to which individual behaviour should conform.’ Confucius himself described the hierarchy this way: ‘Jun jun chen chen fu fu zi zi,’ which meant, in effect, ‘Let the ruler rule as he should and the minister be a minister as he should. Let the father act as a father should and the son act as a son should.’ So long as everyone performs his role, social stability is maintained.⁹¹ In laying stress on ‘proper behaviour according to status,’ the Confucian gentleman was guided by li, a moral code that stressed the quiet virtues of patience, pacifism, and compromise, respect for ancestors, the old, and the educated, and above all a gentle humanism, taking man as the measure of all things. Confucianism also stressed that men were naturally equal at birth but perfectible, and that an individual, by his own efforts, could do ‘the right thing’ and be a model for others. The successful sages were those who put ‘right conduct’ above everything else.⁹²

And yet, for all its undoubted successes, the Confucian view of life was a form of conservatism. Given the tumultuous changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that the system was failing could not be disguised for long. As the rest of the world coped with scientific advances, the concepts of modernism and the advent of socialism, China needed changes that were more profound, the mental and moral road more tortuous. The ancient virtues of patience and compromise no longer offered real hope, and the old and the traditionally educated no longer had the answers. Nowhere was the demoralisation more evident than in the educated class, the scholars, the very guardians of the neo-Confucian faith.

The modernisation of China had in theory been going on since the seventeenth century, but by the beginning of the twentieth it had in practice become a kind of game played by a few high officials who realised it was needed but did not have the political wherewithal to carry these changes through. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jesuit missionaries had produced Chinese translations of over four hundred Western works, more than half on Christianity and about a third in science. But Chinese scholars still remained conservative, as was highlighted by the case of Yung Wing, a student who was invited to the United States by missionaries in 1847 and graduated from Yale in 1854. He returned to China after eight years’ study but was forced to wait another eight years before his skills as an interpreter and translator were made use of.⁹³ There was some change. The original concentration of Confucian scholarship on philosophy had given way by the nineteenth century to ‘evidential research,’ the concrete analysis of ancient texts.⁹⁴ This had two consequences of significance. One was the discovery that many of the so-called classic texts were fake, thus throwing the very tenets of Confucianism itself into doubt. No less importantly, the ‘evidential research’ was extended to mathematics, astronomy, fiscal and administrative matters, and archaeology. This could not yet be described as a scientific revolution, but it was a start, however late.

The final thrust in the move away from Confucianism arrived in the form of the Boxer Rising, which began in 1898 and ended two years later with the beginnings of China’s republican revolution. The reason for this was once again the Confucian attitude to life, which meant that although there had been some change in Chinese scholarly activity, the compartmentalisation recommended by classical Confucianism was still paramount, its most important consequence being that many of the die-hard and powerful Manchu princes had had palace upbringings that had left them ‘ignorant of the world and proud of it.’⁹⁵ This profound ignorance was one of the reasons so many of them became patrons of a peasant secret society known as the Boxers, merely the most obvious and tragic sign of China’s intellectual bankruptcy. The Boxers, who began in the Shandong area and were rabidly xenophobic, featured two peasant traditions – the technique of martial arts (‘boxing’) and spirit possession or shamanism. Nothing could have been more inappropriate, and this fatal combination made for a vicious set of episodes. The Chinese were defeated at the hands of eleven (despised) foreign countries, and were thus forced to pay $333 million in indemnities over forty years (which would be at least $20 billion now), and suffer the most severe loss of face the nation had ever seen. The year the Boxer Uprising was put down was therefore the low point by a long way for Confucianism, and everyone, inside and outside China, knew that radical, fundamental, philosophical change had to come.⁹⁶

Such change began with a set of New Policies (with initial capitals). Of these, the most portentous – and most revealing – was educational reform. Under this scheme, a raft of modern schools was to be set up across the country, teaching a new Japanese-style mix of old and new subjects (Japan was the culture to be emulated because that country had defeated China in the war of 1895 and, under Confucianism, the victor was superior to the vanquished: at the turn of the century Chinese students crowded into Tokyo).⁹⁷ It was intended that many of China’s academies would be converted into these new schools. Traditionally, China had hundreds if not thousands of academies, each consisting of a few dozen local scholars thinking high thoughts but not in any way coordinated with one another or the needs of the country. In time they had become a small elite who ran things locally, from burials to water distribution, but had no overall, systematic influence. The idea was that these academies would be modernised.⁹⁸

It didn’t work out like that. The new – modern, Japanese, and Western science-oriented – curriculum proved so strange and so difficult for the Chinese that most students stuck to the easier, more familiar Confucianism, despite the evidence everywhere that it wasn’t working or didn’t meet China’s needs. It soon became apparent that the only way to deal with the classical system was to abolish it entirely, and that in fact is what happened just four years later, in 1905. A great turning point for China, this stopped in its tracks the production of the degree-holding elite, the gentry class. As a result, the old order lost its intellectual foundation and with it its intellectual cohesion. So far so good, one might think. However, the student class that replaced the old scholar gentry was presented, in John Fairbanks’s words, with a ‘grab-bag’ of Chinese and Western thought, which pulled students into technical specialities that however modern still left them without a moral order: ‘The Neo-Confucian synthesis was no longer valid or useful, yet nothing to replace it was in sight.’⁹⁹ The important intellectual point to grasp about China is that that is how it has since remained. The country might take on over the years many semblances of Western thinking and behaviour, but the moral void at the centre of the society, vacated by Confucianism, has never been filled.

It is perhaps difficult for us, today, to imagine the full impact of modernism. Those alive now have all grown up in a scientific world, for many the life of large cities is the only life they know, and rapid change the only change there is. Only a minority of people have an intimate relation with the land or nature.

None of this was true at the turn of the century. Vast cities were still a relatively new experience for many people; social security systems were not yet in place, so that squalor and poverty were much harsher than now, a much greater shallow; and fundamental scientific discoveries, building on these new, uncertain worlds, created a sense of bewilderment, desolation and loss probably sharper and more widespread than had ever been felt before, or has since. The collapse of organised religion was only one of the factors in this seismic shift in sensibility: the growth in nationalism, anti-Semitism, and racial theories overall, and the enthusiastic embrace of the modernist art forms, seeking to break down experience into fundamental units, were all part of the same response.

The biggest paradox, the most worrying transformation, was this: according to evolution, the world’s natural pace of change was glacial. According to modernism, everything was changing at once, and in fundamental ways, virtually overnight. For most people, therefore, modernism was as much a threat as it was a promise. The beauty it offered held a terror within.