1914—Civilization

The future is very dark in Europe, and to me it looks as if we were entering upon a period quite new in history.... Whether our period of economical enterprise, unlimited competition, and unrestrained individualism, is the highest stage of human progress is to me very doubtful; and sometimes when I see the existing conditions of European (to say nothing of American) social order, bad as they are for the mass alike of upper and lower classes, I wonder whether our civilization can maintain itself against the forces which are banding together for the destruction of many of the institutions in which it is embodied, or whether we are not to have another period of decline, fall, and ruin and revival, like that of the first thirteen hundred years of our era. It would not grieve me much to know that this were to be the case. No man who knows what society at the present day really is, but must agree that it is not worth preserving on its present basis.

These were strong words—but they were not about the Europe of 1914. Disillusionment, disgust and the anticipation of disaster lend a sharply modern tone, but this was Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), editor, art critic, and educator, writing home to America in 1869 as he toured Britain, Italy, Germany, and France. Over sixty years later, as Europe yet again spiraled into unrest, T. S. Eliot would quote this passage in his lectures in honor of Norton at Harvard University in 1932. To Eliot, Norton stood for the viewpoint that culture was the mainstay of a decent society. Without it, everything came to ruin. As Eliot put it, "the people which ceases to care for its literary inheritance becomes barbaric; the people which ceases to produce literature ceases to move in thought and sensibility."

Henry James wrote to Edith Wharton in August 1914 that he felt "all but unbearably overdarkened by this crash of our civilization." But this was a crash that had been a long time coming, and which would not prove to be final. Norton and Eliot's comments, straddling several decades either side of the First World War, demonstrate that a sense of impending disaster for humanity, and the hope that culture might avert it, were longstanding concerns. In his Harvard lectures of 1932–33, Eliot carefully distanced both himself and Norton from Matthew Arnold's mid-Victorian view of culture as a force for the propagation of good morals. Although he shared Arnold's concern for "literary inheritance," Eliot would place the value of literature not in what it taught but what it showed. Culture was not the cause but the product of a balanced society, one rich in "thought and sensibility." Good writing was not a conduit for truths passed on from the old to the young, but an indicator of a healthy, individual curiosity about self and context. "We must write our poetry as we can," Eliot concluded, "and take it as we find it"—a sentiment very much in line with Ralph Waldo Emerson's delight in "Man Thinking" instead of parroting the traditions of the past.

This habit of mental self-reliance, so prevalent in American literature from Emerson onward, was, and perhaps still is, counterbalanced by the potential consequences of its failure, the specter of the "barbaric" so vivid to Eliot in the 1930s. From the mid-nineteenth century, ideas of evolutionary progress derived from the work of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were projected into the swiftly changing scenery of Gilded Age America by social theorists such as William Graham Sumner and Adna Weber, for whom urban life was an endless and vicious round of competition for space, work, food, and time. Darwin and Spencer had promised improvement toward perfection, but Weber's generation projected bleaker outcomes. Failure in this daily battle for resources could lead to personal extinction in the greater cause of social refinement, or could result in the kind of degeneration forecast by Ray Lankester, and dramatized in the naturalistic fiction of Emile Zola and Theodore Dreiser, or in the dystopian romances of H. G. Wells. Success in the struggle, as Thorstein Veblen argued, led merely to interclass conflict and, through "conspicuous consumption" and "conspicuous waste," to the atrophy of the leisure class—whose very existence was both the defining element of a "civilized" society and its most potent internal threat. Although these ideas did not all originate in America, they resonated strongly in the imagination of many early twentieth-century citizens, who inherited, or self-consciously adopted, a powerful but confused legacy from the nation's Puritan past, in which the value of the individual, the power of the written word, a strong work ethic, the taint of materialism, the certainty of retributive judgment on society, and the hope of some ideal world beyond were haphazardly jumbled together. Even for those who rejected the religious framework which supported (and rationalized) such concepts, stubborn patterns of thought remained. The anticipation of destruction was perhaps the most enduring. James called it "the imagination of disaster."

So, the idea of "a war that will end war" was nothing new in 1914. Rumors of secret pacts and alliances between European nations from the beginning of the century had raised public expectations of conflict, which had been narrowly avoided in a series of diplomatic crises from 1908 onward. When war came, it shocked the world, but simultaneously fulfilled an expectation of an epic conflict between the great nations of the world, which would ultimately purge and strengthen the civilized and virtuous races of humankind. Wharton wrote to the American scholar Gaillard Lapsley in December 1914, "The only consoling thought is that the beastly horror had to be gone through, for some mysterious cosmic reason of ripening and rotting, and the heads on whom that rotten German civilisation are falling are bound to get cracked." For others, the progress brought by war was not so much a bitter consolation as a positive objective. Cleveland Moffett would write in 1916 that the American union "born of war" proved that conflict was essential for peace: "And why not ultimately the United States of Europe, the United States of Asia, the United States of Africa, all created by useful and progressive wars? ... 'United we stand, divided we fall,' applies not merely to states, counties and townships, but to nations, to empires, to continents. Continents will be the last to join hands across the seas (having first waged vast inter-continental wars) and then, after the rise and fall of so many sovereignties, there will be established on earth the last great government, the United States of the World!" From the sinking of the Pequod in Moby Dick (1851) to the freezing over of New York in The Day after Tomorrow (2004), the secular apocalyptic narrative is a powerful, recurring presence in American popular culture. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (1922) both drew on and helped to define the genre. To Henry James, schooled in...