An end-of-the-century horse is doubtless pretty much the same as a
horse of another period, but is there not in literature, art, politics
and in intellectual and moral matters generally, an element, a spirit
peculiar to the time and not altogether discernible to observation—a
something which, not hitherto noted, or at least not so noticeable,
now “pervades and animates the whole?” It seems to me that there is.
Precisely what is its nature? That is not easy to answer; the thing is
felt rather than observed. It is subtle, elusive, addressing, perhaps,
only those sensibilities for whose needs of expression our English
vocabulary makes little provision. I should with some misgiving call
it the note of despair, or, more accurately, desperation. It sounds
through the tumult of our lives as the boatswain’s whistle penetrates
with a vibrant power the uproar of the storm—the singing and shouting
of the wind in the cordage, the hissing of the waves, the shock and
thunder of their monstrous buffets as they burst against the ship. O
there’s a meaning in the phrase—a significance born of iteration. As
certain predictions by their power upon the imagination assist in their
own fulfilment, so this haunting phrase has made itself a meaning and
shaped the facts to fit it. In the twilight of the century we have
prophecies of the coming night, and see ghosts.
We are all dominated by our imaginations and our views are creatures
of our viewpoints. To the ordinary mind the end of a century seems the
end of one of a series of stages of progress, arranged in straight-away
order, and impossible of prolongation. To turn the end of one line is
to go back and begin it all _de novo_ on a parallel line—an end
of progress, a long leap to the rear, a slow and painful resumption.
Of course there is nothing in the facts to correspond to this fanciful
and fantastic notion, but it is none the less powerful for that. To
the person of that order of mind it undoubtedly seems that with the
final year of the century the race will have lost a century of some
advantage which he is not likely to see regained. He does not think
that—he thinks nothing at all about it—he merely feels so, and can not
even formulate the feeling. Quite the same it colors his moods, his
character, his very manner of life and action. He has something of the
ghastly gaiety of the plague-smitten soldiers in the song, who drank
to those already dead and hurrahed for those about to die. The _fin
de siècle_ spirit is fairly expressible by an intention to make the
most of a vanishing opportunity by doing something out of the common.
Nearly everywhere we observe this spirit translating itself into acts
and phenomena. In religion it finds manifestation in repair of “creeds
outworn,” in acceptance of modern miracles, in pilgrimages, in strange
and futile attempts at unification—even in toleration. In politics it
has overspread the earth with anarchism, socialism, communism, woman
suffrage and actual antagonism between the sexes. Industrial affairs
show it in unnatural animosities and destructive struggles between
employers and employees, in wild aspirations for impossible advantages,
in resurrection of crude convictions and methods of antiquity. In
literature it has given us realism, in art impressionism, and in
both as much else that is false and extravagant as it is possible to
name. In morals it has gone to the length of denying the expedience
of morality. In all civilized countries crime is so augmenting, the
sociologists tell us, that national earnings will not much longer
be sufficient to support the machinery for its repression. Madness
and suicide are advancing “by leaps and bounds,” and wars were never
so needless and reasonless as now. Everywhere are a wild welter of
action and thought, a cutting loose from all that is conservative and
restraining, a “carnival of crime,” a reign of unreason.
Not everywhere: superior to all this madness, tranquil in the midst of
it, and to some degree controlling it, stands Science, inaccessible
to its malign influence and unaffectable by the tumult. Why?—how? God
knows; I only perceive that the scientific mind has an imagination of
its own kind. To him who has been trained to accurate observation and
definite thought a century of years does not seem to have an end—it
is simply one hundred times round the sun; and at the last moment of
our _siècle_ we shall be just where we have been a million times
before, under no different cosmic conditions. He is not impressed with
“the sadness of it,” feels no desperation—sees nothing in it. He keeps
his head—which, by the way, is worth keeping.
1898.