Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

It was in the cities of the nineteenth century that modernism was born. In the later years, the internal combustion engine and the steam turbine were invented, electricity was finally mastered, the telephone, the typewriter and the tape machine all came into being. The popular press and the cinema were invented. The first trades unions were formed and the workers became organised. By 1900 there were eleven metropolises – including London, Paris, Berlin and New York – which had more than a million inhabitants, unprecedented concentrations of people. The expansion of the cities, together with that of the universities, covered in an earlier chapter, were responsible for what Harold Perkin has called the rise of professional society, the time – from roughly 1880 on – when the likes of doctors, lawyers, school and university teachers, local government officers, architects and scientists began to dominate politics in the democracies, and who viewed expertise

as the way forward. In England Perkin shows that the number of such professions at least doubled and in some cases quadrupled between 1880 and 1911. Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert were the first to put into words what Manet and his ‘gang’ (as a critic called them) were trying to capture in paint: the fleeting experiences of the city – short, intense, accidental and arbitrary. The impressionists captured the changing light but also the unusual sights – the new machinery, like the railways, awesome and dreadful at the same time, great cavernous railway stations, offering the promise of travel but choking with soot, a beautiful cityscape truncated by an ugly but necessary bridge, cabaret stars lit unnaturally from footlights underneath, a barmaid seen both from the front and from behind, through the great glittering mirror on the wall. These were visual emblems of ‘newness’ but there was much more to modernism than this. Its interest lies in the fact that it became both a celebration and a condemnation of the modern, and of the world – the world of science, positivism, rationalism – that had produced the great cities, with their vast wealth and new forms of poverty, desolate and degrading.⁴⁵

The cities of modernism were bewildering, full of comings and goings, largely contingent or accidental. Science had denuded this world of meaning (in a religious, spiritual sense) and in such a predicament it became the job of art both to describe this state of affairs, to assess and criticise it, and, if possible, to redeem it. In this way, a climate of opinion formed, in which whatever modernism stood for, it also stood for the opposite. And what was amazing was that so much talent blossomed in such bewildering and paradoxical circumstances. ‘In terms of sheer creativity, the epoch of modernism compares with the impact of the romantic period and even with the renaissance.’⁴⁶

There grew up what Harold Rosenberg called ‘the tradition of the new’. This was the apogee of bourgeois culture and it was in this world, this teeming world, that the concept of the avant-garde

was conceived, a consecration of the romantic idea that the artist was ahead of – and usually dead against – the bourgeoisie, a pace-setter when it came to taste and imagination, but whose role was as much sabotage as invention.

If anything united the modernists – the rationalists and realists on the one hand, and the critics of rationality, the apostles of the unconscious, and the cultural pessimists on the other – it was the intensity of their engagement. Modernism was, more than anything, a high point of the arts – painting, literature, music – because cities were an intensifier: by their nature they threw people up against one another – and better communications ensured that all encounters were accelerated.⁴⁷ As a result exchanges became sharper, louder, inevitably more bitter. We take this for granted now but at the time stress increased, and people found that was a creative force too. If modernism was often anti-science, this was because its pessimism was sparked by that same science. The discoveries of Darwin, Maxwell and J. J. Thomson were disconcerting, to say the least, seeming to remove all morality, direction and stability from the world, undermining the very notion of reality.