Roots of the Great Ennui by George Steiner

It is the events of 1789 and 1815 that interpenetrate common, private existence with the perception of historical processes. The levée en masse of the Revolutionary armies was far more than an instrument of long-continued warfare  and social indoctrination. It did more than terminate the old conventions of professional, limited warfare. As Goethe noted acutely on the field at Valmy, populist armies, the concept of a nation under arms, meant that history had become every man’s milieu Henceforth, in Western  culture, each day was to bring news – a perpetuity of crisis, a break with the pastoral silences and uniformity of the eighteenth century made memorable in De Quincy’s account of the mails racing through England with news of the Peninsular Wars. Wherever ordinary men and women looked across the garden hedge they saw bayonets passing. As Hegel completed Phenomenology, which is the master statement of the new density of being, he heard the hoofbeats of Napoleon’s escort passing through the nocturnal street on the way to the Battle of Jena.

We also lack a history of the future tense ( in another context I am trying to show what such a phenomenology of internal grammar would be ). But it is clear that the Revolutionary and Napoleonic decades brought on an overwhelming immanence, a deep, emotionally stressed change in the quality of hope. Expectations of progress, of personal and social enfranchisement, which had formerly had a conventional, often allegoric character, as of a millenary horizon, suddenly moved very close. The great metaphor of renewal, of the creation, as by a second coming of secular grace, of a just, rational city for man, took on the urgent drama of concrete possibility. The eternal ‘tomorrow’ of utopian political vision became, as it were, Monday morning.

 

 We experience something of this dizzying sense of total possibility when reading the decrees of the Convention and of the Jacobin regime: injustice, superstition, poverty are to be eradicated  now, in the next glorious hour. The world is to shed its worn skin a fortnight hence. In the grammar of Saint-Juste the future tense is never more than moments away. If we seek to trace this irruption – it was that violent- of dawn into private sensibility, we need only look to Wordsworth’s  Prelude and to the poetry of Shelley. The crowning statement, perhaps, is to be found in Marx’s economic and political manuscripts of 1844. Not since early Christianity had men felt so near renovation and to the end of night.

The quickening of time, the new vehemence and historicity of private consciousness, the sudden nearness of the messianic future contributed to a marked change in the tone of sexual relations. The evidence is plain enough. It comes as early as Wordsworth ‘Lucy” poems and the penetrating remark on sexual appetite in the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. It declares itself from a comparison, even cursory, between Swift’s Journal to Stella and Keats’s letters to Fanny  Brawne. Nothing I know of at an earlier period truly resembles the self-dramatizing, self-castigating eroticism of Hazlitt’s extraordinary Liber Amoris (1832). Many elements are in play: the ‘sexualization’ of the very landscape, making of weather, season, and the particular hour a symbolic restatement of the erotic mood; a compulsion to experience more intimately, to experience sex to the last pitch of nervous singularity, and at the same time to make this experience public. I can make out what must have been contributory causes: the partial emancipation of women and the actual role of a number of them in political life and argument: the breakdown of usages of decorum and formal reticence which had been a part of the caste system of the ancient regime. It is not difficult to see in what ways an intensification and widening of the erotic could be a counterpart to the dynamics of revolution and European conquest. Nevertheless, the phenomena, with its culmination in Wagner’s amalgam of Eros and history, remains complicated and in certain regards obscure. The fact that our own sexuality is distinctly post-romantic, that many of our own conventions stem directly from the revaluation of the erotic in the period from Rousseau to Heine, does not  make analysis any simpler.

But taking these different  strands together, one can say confidently that immense transmutations of value and perception took place in Europe over a time span more crowded, more sharply registered by individual and social sensibility, than any other of which we have a reliable record. Hegel could argue, with rigorous logic of feeling, that history itself was passing into a new state of being, that ancient time was at an end.

What followed was, of course, a long spell of reaction and stasis. Depending on one’s political idiom, one can see it either as a century of repression by a bourgeoisie that had turned the French Revolution and the Napoleonic extravaganza to its own economic advantage, or as a hundred years of liberal gradualism and civilized order. Broken only by convulsive but continued revolutionary spasms in 1830, 1848, and 1871, and by short wars of intensely professional, socially conservative character such as the Crimean and the Prussian Wars, this hundred years’ peace shaped Western society and established the criteria of culture which have, until very recently, been ours.

To many who personally experienced the change, the drop in tension, the abrupt drawing of curtains against the morning, were deeply enervating. It is to the years after Waterloo that we must look for the roots of ‘the great ennui,’ which, as early as 1819, Schopenhauer defined as the corrosive illness of the new age.

What was a gifted man to do after Napoleon? How could organisms bred for the electric air of revolution and imperial epic breathe under the leaden sky of middle-class rule? How was it possible for a young man to hear his father’s tales of the Terror and  Austerlitz and to amble down the placid boulevard to the counting house? The past drove rats’ teeth into the gray pulp of the present; it exasperated, it sowed wild dreams. Of that exasperation comes a major literature.  Musset’s La Confession d’un enfant du siècle  (1835-36). The generation of 1830- was damned by memories of events, of hopes in which it had taken no personal  part. It nursed within ‘un fonds d’incurable tristesse et d’incurable  ennui.’ No doubt there was narcissism in this cultivation, the somber complacency of dreamers who, from Goethe to Turgenev, sought to identify with Hamlet. But the void was real, and the sensation of history gone absurdly wrong. Stendhal is the chronicler of genius of this frustration. He had participated in the insane vitality of the Napoleonic era; he conducted the rest of his life in the ironic guise of a man betrayed. It is a terrible thing to be ‘languissant d’ennuui au plus beau moment de la vie, de seize ans jusqu a vingt’ (Mlle. De La Mole’s condition before she resolves to love Julien Sorel in La Rouge et le noir). Madness, death are preferable to the interminable Sunday and suet of a bourgeois life-form. How can an intellectual bear to feel within himself something of Bonaparte’s genius, something of that demonic strength which led from obscurity to empire, and see before him nothing but the tawdry flatness of bureaucracy? Raskolnikov writes his essay on Napoleon and goes out to kill and old woman.

The collapse of revolutionary hopes after 1815, the brutal deceleration of time and radical expectation left a reservoir of unused turbulent energies. The romantic generation was jealous of its fathers. The ‘antiheroes,’ the spleen-ridden dandies of the world of Stendhal, Musset, Byron, and Pushkin, move through the bourgeois city like condottieri out of work. Or worse, like condottieri meagerly pensioned before their first battle. Moreover, the city itself, once festive with the tocsin of revolution, had become a prison.

For although politics had entered a phase of bland mendacity analyzed by Stendhal in Lucien Leuwen, the economic-industrial growth released by continental war and centralized consciousness of the new nation-states took place exponentially.  The ‘dark Satanic mills’ were everywhere creating the soiled, hybrid landscape which we have inherited. The theme of alienation, so vital to any theory of the crisis of culture, is, as both Hegel and Saint-Simon were among the first to realize, directly related to the development of mass-manufacture. It is in the early and mid-nineteenth century that occur both the dehumanization of laboring men and women in the assembly-line system, and the disassociation between ordinary educated sensibility and the increasingly complex, technological artifacts of daily life. In manufacture and the money market, energies bared from revolutionary action  or war could find outlet and social approval. Such expressions as ‘Napoleons of finance” and ‘captains of industry’ are semantic markers of this modulation.

The immense growth of the monetary-industrial complex also brought with it the modern city, what a later poet was to all la ville tentaculaire – a megalopolis whose uncontrollable cellular division and spread now threatens to choke so much of our lives. Hence the definition of a new, major conflict: that between the individual and the stone sea that may, at any moment, overwhelm him. The urban inferno, with its hordes of faceless inhabitants, haunts the nineteenth-century imagination.

Sometimes the metropolis is a jungle, the crazed tropical growth of Hard Times and Brecht’s Im Dickicht der Stadt. A man must make his mark on its indifferent immensity, or he will be cast off like the rags, the dawn flotsam which obsessed Baudelaire. In his invention of Rastignac, looking down on Paris, challenging the city to mortal combat, Balzac dramatized one of the focal points of the modern crisis. It is precisely from the 1830s onwards that one can observe the emergence of a characteristic ‘counter-dream’ – the vision of a city laid waste, the fantasies of Scythian and Vandal invasion, the Mongol steeds slaking their thirst in the fountain of the Tuileries Gardens. A odd school of painting develops: Pictures of  London, Paris, or Berlin seen as colossal ruins, famous landmarks burnt, eviscerated, or located in a weird emptiness among charred stumps and dead water. Romantic fantasy anticipates Brecht’s vengeful promise that nothing shall remain of the great cities except the winds that blows through them. Exactly a hundred years later, these apocalyptic collages and imaginary drawings of the end of Pompeii were to be our photographs of Warsaw and Dresden. It needs no psychoanalysis to suggest how strong a part of wish-fulfillment there was in these nineteenth-century intimations.

The conjunction of extreme economic-technical dynamism with a large measure of enforced social immobility, a conjunction on which a century of liberal, bourgeois civilization was built, made for an explosive mixture. It provoked in the life of art and of intelligence certain specific, ultimately destructive ripostes. These, in seems to me, constitute the meaning of Romanticism. It is from them that will grow the nostalgia for disaster.

Here I am on familiar ground and can move rapidly.  .  .