Chapter 11. Literature of Imperialism. Modernism in British Literature.

Queen Victoria's reign ended in 1901, but the Victorian age ended about twenty years earlier. That peculiar spirit called 'Victorianism' - a mixture of optimism, doubt, and guilt - began to disappear with men like Swinburne the rebel, Fitzgerald the pessimist, Butler the satirist, and some others. The literature produced from about 1880 to 1914 is characterised either by an attempt to find substitutes for a religion which seems dead, whose death was theoretically proclaimed by F. Nietzsche, or by a kind of spiritual emptiness - a sense of the hopelessness of trying to believe in anything.

There were many possible substitutes for religion. One was Art, and Walter Pater (1839-94) was its prophet. 'Art for art's sake' was the theme of books like Marius the Epicurean and Studies in the History of the Renaissance. It was one's duty, said Pater (in the most exquisite prose), to cultivate pleasure, to drink deep from the fountains of natural and created breauty. In other words he advocated hedonism as a way of life. Pater does not preach, however. He is mainly concerned with shaping his wonderful prose, concentrating on his art, and letting the philosophy filter gently through.

A new stage of social and cultural development in Britain and in Europe in general at the turn of the twentieth century predetermined the emergence of new literary trends and general atmosphere in the world of art - Decadence, Neoromanticism and Socialism. The general crisis of the bourgeois ideology and culture was reflected in literature and fine arts and defined as Decadence. The French word means 'deterioration, decay, decline'. The cultural concept of Decadence reveals decline in art and manifests itself in various trends that came into being at the end of the nineteenth century: aestheticism, symbolism, impressionism, imagism, futurism, some others. The most widely known manifestation of decadence in England was Aestheticism. It was a movement in search of beauty, which was based on the doctrine that aesthetic principles are of supreme importance and that works of art should be judged accordingly. The aesthetic movement blossomed in England after 1880. Its origins can be found in earlier intellectual opposition to materialism and industrialisation. The art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) was a friend and public champion of the Romantic painter J. W. Turner and a disciple and admirer of the Victorian prophet Thomas Carlyle. His early essays explore the relationship between art and society. They assert the morality of great art and were very influential in the Gothic revival in English architecture. In the later part of his life, Ruskin attacked social philosophies of political economists and attempted to awaken the working classes to their artistic and moral impoverishment., views which were to influence early leaders of the British labour Party.

Aestheticists, as O. Wilde and George Moore (1852-1933), owed much to the early nineteenth century French doctrine of 'L'art pour l'art' (art for art's sake). Influenced by Walter Pater, they rejected Ruskin's moral purpose in art in favour of beauty of form and cultivated artificial styles of speech and manner and eccentricity of dress. The works of aesthetes exposed a challenge to the dominating views in the British society of the period. They protested against the severe and vulgar reality and found their way in seeking pleasure and joined the hedonistic revival which started in Europe at that time.

Hedonism was the thesis of some of Oscar Wilde's witty essays, as also of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde (1856-1900) seems, in the latter book, however to be concerned with showing the dangers of asking too much from life. The beautiful Dorian Gray - Faustus-like wishes that he should remain eternally young and handsome, while his picture, painted in the finest flush of his beauty, should grow old in his stead. The wish is granted: Dorian remains ever-young, but his portrait shows signs of ever-increasing age and, moreover, the scars of the crimes attendant on asking for too much (a murder, the ruining of many women, unnameable debauchery). Dorian, repentant, tries to destroy his portrait, symbolically quelling his sins, but - magically - it is he himself who dies, monstrous with age and ugliness, and his portrait that reverts to its former perfection of youthful beauty. The scene of guilt - as much mediaeval as Victorian - intrudes into Wilde's bright godless world unexpectedly, and this book prepares us for those later works of his - written under the shadow and shame of his prison-sentence - which lack the old wit and contain a sombre seriousness - The Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profundis.

The similar attitude to the harsh reality was shown by neoromantics. But while neoromantics chose the world of adventure and cult of a strong man, opposing these to the routine of life, aestheticists concentrated their art on the pue form. The latter rejected both the social and the moral function of art. One of the aesthetes said: 'Art is indifferent to what is moral and what is immoral'. They tried to lead their reader away from the problems of the day into the illusionary world of beautiful forms, into the world of dreams, the world of beauty, the world of antireality.

Alongside Decadence, the protest against the reality was taken up by a group of writers who resorted to the concept of romance, adventure, psychologism, and super heroism. They called themself neoromantics. They considered life to give no pleasure to anyone, they believed that the writer should create beautiful pictures and extraordinary ones for the benefit of the reader, for his pleasure. R. L. Stevenson (1850-94) said: 'Art in contemporary society is only necessary for entertainment'. He wrote Treasure Island as an example of an adventure story (novel) with his characters - strong, brave men. His following novels - Kidnapped, Catriona, The Master of Ballantrae - were written along the same lines with a historical setting. Stevenson's most outstanding prose work is his short novel - The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - which was compared with the darkest fantasies of Edgar Allan Poe. Stevenson raises the age-old problem of the struggle between Good and Evil that exist in every man. A parallel can be drawn between this novel and O. Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray. The difference lies in Wilde's purely aesthetical approach to the problem, while Stevenson's is a purely ethical one. Stevenson's hero is strong-willed and the reader can successfully disclose in him the better qualities of man: his energy, his thirst for knowledge, compassion. Stevenson stresses these quality to keep them alive in the bourgeois world, which has already consumed them as a commodity and has already made them disappear. Stevenson's love of beauty, his outstanding mastery of the language, have made him a very good poet too.

Another substitute for religion was Imperialism, and Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was the great singer of Empire. His concern with Empire expresses itself in many forms - in sympathy with the soldiers who fought the frontier wars, kept peace in the Empire, did glorious work for the mere reward of civilian contempt.; the stress on the white man's responsibility to his brothers who, despite difference of colour and creed, acknowledged the same Queen; the value of the Empire as the creator of a new, rich civilisation. Kipling is not the best of all English poets, but he sums up a certain phase in English history. Moreover, He has a gift of stating the obvious - not for the men of reason and learning, but for the man in the street. He is the poet who knows the East, and certain lines of his (as in The Road to Mandalay) evoke the sun and the palm-trees, and the original nostalgia of many a repatriated Englishman, with real power. As a prose-writer, Kipling is known for one novel (Kim) and a host of excellent short stories, also for a school-boy's classic, Stalky and Co. He has, in both verse and prose, a vigour and an occasional vulgarity that are refreshing after men like William Morris, Swinburne, and Rossetti.

The other side of the coin is shown in the novels of Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) who produced a whole series of books dedicated to the life of his native Dorset, full of the sense of man's bond with nature and with the past - a past revealed in the age-old trees, heaths, fields, and in the prehistoric remains of the Celts, the ruined camps of the Romans. In his novels man never seems to be free: the weight of time and place presses heavily on him, and, above everything, there are mysterious forces which control his life. Man is a puppet whose strings are worked by fates which are either hostile or indifferent to him. There is no message of hope in Tess of the D'Urbervilles (when Tess is finally hanged we hear: '...And so the President of the Immortals had finished his sport with Tess') nor in The Mayor of Casterbridge or Jude the Obscure. The reception of his last work, with its gloomy 'Curst be the day in which I was born' and its occasional brutal frankness, was so hostile that Hardy turned from the novel to verse.

A new faith, more compelling than Pater's hedonism or Kipling's Imperialism, was still needed, and Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells (1866-1946) found one in what may be called Liberalism - the belief that man's future lies on earth, not in heaven, and that, with scientific and social progress, an earthly paradise may eventually be built. Wells is one of the great figures of modern literature. He owed a lot to Dickens in such novels as Kipps and The History of Mr. Polly - works which borrow a lot from Dickens's style, his humour, and his love of eccentrics, and which deal affectionately with working people - but he found themes of his own in the scientific novels. The Time Machine, The First Men in the Moon, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, When the Sleeper Awakes, and The Food of the Gods all seem concerned not merely with telling a strange and entertaining story but with showing that, to science, everything is theoretically possible. The glorification of scientific discovery leads Wells to think that time and space can easily be conquered, and so we can travel to the moon, or Martians can attack us; we can travel forward to the future, and back again to the present.The old Newtonian world, with its fixed dimensions, begins to melt and dissolve in the imaginative stories of Wells: flesh can be made as transparent as glass, human size can be increased indefinitely, a man can sleep for a couple of centuries and wake up in the strange Wellsian future; a man can work miracles; a newspaper from the future can be delivered by mistake; a man can lose weight without bulk and drift like a balloon.

Both Wells and Shaw built Utopias in which they wanted to destroy all the vestiges of the past which cluttered the modern world - class-distinction, relics of feudalism, directionless education, unenlightened and self-seeking politicians, economic inequality. In other words, both Shaw and Wells wanted a kind of Socialism. Rejecting the doctrine of sin, they believed that man's mistakes and crimes came from stupidity, or from unfavourable environment, and they set to work to blueprint the devices which would put everything right. Optimistic liberalism died with the two novelists.

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) brought a new quality into the novel. Conrad was a Pole (his real name was Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski), born in the Ukraine, in love with the sea from an early age. This led him eventually to a British merchant ship, a Master's certificate and a mastery of the English language. Conrad produced his first novel at the age of forty, but then made up for lost time by turning out a book every year. He normally writes of the sea, of the Eastern islands, of the English character as seen against the background of the exotic or faced with difficulties. Conrad's finest book is Lord Jim, where moral conflict is admirably presented in the character of the young Englishman who loses his honour through leaping overboard when his ship seems to be in danger, but expiates his sin by dying heroically at the end. Conrad's Heart of Darkness is widely studied nowadays.

The twentieth century has been much concerned with finding something to believe in - it has that in common with the last twenty years of the Victorian era. The things that modern writers - the writers of the beginning of the twentieth century - started to believe in the power of arts, universality of life, and originality of man. New tendencies in the European arts of the period were all united under the common term 'modernism'. Modernism is the main tendency in European culture in the period of crisis in all the spheres of the European society. This tendency represents a most categoric and militant denial of old traditions and conventions in art. Instead of all-penetrating beauty, philistine morality of Decadence was proclaimed. The aesthetic of the ugly, of the evil was praised by the men of art. Modernism came into being as a sort of rebellion against high appreciation of classical epoch, against realism and conventions in art, and against life itself. This abstract denial of everything is the most general principle in Avant-gardism (trend that united those who experimented using some new methods and strange combination of several principles). The modernist art regards itself as a revolution in art. The aim in the artistic activity in Modernism is not a mere critical description of the existing reality in order to improve it but a change of form and invention of a new way of viewing this reality. It is the beginning of the epoch of numerous formal experiments with the help of which artists hope to subordinate the ugly contemporary reality to his will.

Philosophy of Modernism was created by Henry Louis Bergson whose main ideas were: