The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  On 25 October 1900, only days after Max Planck sent his crucial equations on a postcard to Heinrich Rubens, Pablo Picasso stepped off the Barcelona train at the Gare d’Orsay in Paris. Planck and Picasso could not have been more different. Whereas Planck led an ordered, relatively calm life in which tradition played a formidable role, Picasso was described, even by his mother, as ‘an angel and a devil.’ At school he rarely obeyed the rules, doodled compulsively, and bragged about his inability to read and write. But he became a prodigy in art, transferring rapidly from Malaga, where he was born, to his father’s class at the art school in Corunna, to La Llotja, the school of fine arts in Barcelona, then to the Royal Academy in Madrid after he had won an award for his painting Science and Charity. However, for him, as for other artists of his time, Paris was the centre of the universe, and just before his nineteenth birthday he arrived in the City of Light. Descending from his train at the newly opened station, Picasso had no place to stay and spoke almost no French. To begin with he took a room at the Hôtel du Nouvel Hippodrome, a maison de passe on the rue Caulaincourt, which was lined with brothels.53 He rented first a studio in Montparnasse on the Left Bank, but soon moved to Montmartre, on the Right.

  Paris in 1900 was teeming with talent on every side. There were seventy daily newspapers, 350,000 electric streetlamps and the first Michelin guide had just appeared. It was the home of Alfred Jarry, whose play Ubu Roi was a grotesque parody of Shakespeare in which a fat, puppetlike king tries to take over Poland by means of mass murder. It shocked even W. B. Yeats, who attended its opening night. Paris was the home of Marie Curie, working on radioactivity, of Stephane Mallarmé, symbolist poet, and of Claude Debussy and his ‘impressionist music.’ It was the home of Erik Satie and his ‘atonally adventurous’ piano pieces. James Whistler and Oscar Wilde were exiles in residence, though the latter died that year. It was the city of Emile Zola and the Dreyfus affair, of Auguste and Louis Lumière who, having given the world’s first commercial showing of movies in Lyons in 1895, had brought their new craze to the capital. At the Moulin Rouge, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a fixture; Sarah Bernhardt was a fixture too, in the theatre named after her, where she played the lead role in Hamlet en travesti. It was the city of Gertrude Stein, Maurice Maeterlinck, Guillaume Apollinaire, of Isadora Duncan and Henri Bergson. In his study of the period, the Harvard historian Roger Shattuck called these the ‘Banquet Years,’ because Paris was celebrating, with glorious enthusiasm, the pleasures of life. How could Picasso hope to shine amid such avant-garde company?54

  Even at the age of almost nineteen Picasso had already made a promising beginning. A somewhat sentimental picture by him, Last Moments, hung in the Spanish pavilion of the great Exposition Universelle of 1900, in effect a world’s fair held in both the Grand and the Petit Palais in Paris to celebrate the new century.55 Occupying 260 acres, the fair had its own electric train, a moving sidewalk that could reach a speed of five miles an hour, and a great wheel with more than eighty cabins. For more than a mile on either side of the Trocadero, the banks of the Seine were transformed by exotic facades. There were Cambodian temples, a mosque from Samarkand, and entire African villages. Below ground were an imitation gold mine from California and royal tombs from Egypt. Thirty-six ticket offices admitted one thousand people a minute.56 Picasso’s contribution to the exhibition was subsequently painted over, but X rays and drawings of the composition show a priest standing over the bed of a dying girl, a lamp throwing a lugubrious light over the entire scene. The subject may have been stimulated by the death of Picasso’s sister, Conchita, or by Giacomo Puccini’s opera La Bohème, which had recently caused a sensation when it opened in the Catalan capital. Last Moments had been hung too high in the exhibition to be clearly seen, but to judge by a drawing Picasso made of himself and his friends joyously leaving the show, he was pleased by its impact.57

  To coincide with the Exposition Universelle, many distinguished international scholarly associations arranged to have their own conventions in Paris that year, in a building near the Pont d’Alma specially set aside for the purpose. At least 130 congresses were held in the building during the year and, of these, 40 were scientific, including the Thirteenth International Congress of Medicine, an International Congress of Philosophy, another on the rights of women, and major get-togethers of mathematicians, physicists, and electrical engineers. The philosophers tried (unsuccessfully) to define the foundations of mathematics, a discussion that floored Bertrand Russell, who would later write a book on the subject, together with Alfred North Whitehead. The mathematical congress was dominated by David Hilbert of Göttingen, Germany’s (and perhaps the world’s) foremost mathematician, who outlined what he felt were the twenty-three outstanding mathematical problems to be settled in the twentieth century.58 These became known as the ‘Hilbert questions’. Many would be solved, though the basis for his choice was to be challenged fundamentally.

  It would not take Picasso long to conquer the teeming artistic and intellectual world of Paris. Being an angel and a devil, there was never any question of an empty space forming itself about his person. Soon Picasso’s painting would attack the very foundations of art, assaulting the eye with the same vigour with which physics and biology and psychology were bombarding the mind, and asking many of the same questions. His work probed what is solid and what is not, and dived beneath the surface of appearances to explore the connections between hitherto unapprehended hidden structures in nature. Picasso would focus on sexual anxiety, ‘primitive’ mentalities, the Minotaur, and the place of classical civilisations in the light of modern knowledge. In his collages he used industrial and mass-produced materials to play with meaning, aiming to disturb as much as to please. (‘A painting,’ he once said, ‘is a sum of destructions.’) Like that of Darwin, Mendel, Freud, J. J. Thomson and Max Planck, Picasso’s work challenged the very categories into which reality had hitherto been organised.59

  Picasso’s work, and the extraordinary range of the exposition in Paris, underline what was happening in thought as the 1800s became the 1900s. The central points to grasp are, first, the extraordinary complementarity of many ideas at the turn of the century, the confident and optimistic search for hidden fundamentals and their place within what Freud, with characteristic overstatement, called ‘underworlds’; and second, that the driving motor in this mentality, even when it was experienced as art, was scientific. Amazingly, the backbone of the century was already in place.

  2

  HALF-WAY HOUSE

  In 1900 Great Britain was the most influential nation on earth, in political and economic terms. It held territories in north America and central America, and in South America Argentina was heavily dependent on Britain. It ruled colonies in Africa and the Middle East, and had dominions as far afield as Australasia. Much of the rest of the world was parcelled out between other European powers – France, Belgium, Holland, Portugal, Italy, and even Denmark. The United States had acquired the Panama Canal in 1899, and the Spanish Empire had just fallen into her hands. But although America’s appetite for influence was growing, the dominant country in the world of ideas – in philosophy, in the arts and the humanities, in the sciences and the social sciences – was Germany, or more accurately, the German-speaking countries. This simple fact is important, for Germany’s intellectual traditions were by no means unconnected to later political developments.

  One reason for the German preeminence in the realm of thought was her universities, which produced so much of the chemistry of the nineteenth century and were at the forefront of biblical scholarship and classical archaeology, not to mention the very concept of the Ph.D., which was born in Germany. Another was demographic: in 1900 there were thirty-three cities in the German-speaking lands with populations of more than 100,000, and city life was a vital element in creating a marketplace of ideas. Among the German-speaking cities Vienna took precedence. If one place could be said to represent the mentality of western Europe as the twentieth century began, it was
the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  Unlike other empires – the British or the Belgian, for example – the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, under the Habsburgs, had most of its territories in Europe: it comprised parts of Hungary, Bohemia, Romania, and Croatia and had its seaport at Trieste, in what is now Italy. It was also largely inward-looking. The German-speaking people were a proud race, highly conscious of their history and what they felt set them apart from other peoples. Such nationalism gave their intellectual life a particular flavour, driving it forward but circumscribing it at the same time, as we shall see. The architecture of Vienna also played a role in determining its unique character. The Ringstrasse, a ring of monumental buildings that included the university, the opera house, and the parliament building, had been erected in the second half of the nineteenth century around the central area of the old town, between it and the outer suburbs, in effect enclosing the intellectual and cultural life of the city inside a relatively small and very accessible area.1 In that small enclosure had emerged the city’s distinctive coffeehouses, an informal institution that helped make Vienna different from London, Paris, or Berlin, say. Their marble-topped tables were just as much a platform for new ideas as the newspapers, academic journals, and books of the day. These coffeehouses were reputed to have had their origins in the discovery of vast stocks of coffee in the camps abandoned by the Turks after their siege of Vienna in 1683. Whatever the truth of that, by 1900 they had evolved into informal clubs, well furnished and spacious, where the purchase of a small cup of coffee carried with it the right to remain there for the rest of the day and to have delivered, every half-hour, a glass of water on a silver tray.2 Newspapers, magazines, billiard tables, and chess sets were provided free of charge, as were pen, ink, and (headed) writing paper. Regulars could have their mail sent to them at their favourite coffeehouse; they could leave their evening clothes there, so they needn’t go home to change; and in some establishments, such as the Café Griensteidl, large encyclopaedias and other reference books were kept on hand for writers who worked at their tables.3

  The chief arguments at the tables of the Café Griensteidl, and other cafés, were between what the social philosopher Karl Pribram termed two ‘world-views.4 The words he used to describe these worldviews were individualism and universalism, but they echoed an even earlier dichotomy, one that interested Freud and arose out of the transformation at the beginning of the nineteenth century from a rural society of face-to-face intimacy to an urban society of ‘atomistic’ individuals, moving frantically about but never really meeting. For Pribram the individualist believes in empirical reason in the manner of the Enlightenment, and follows the scientific method of seeking truth by formulating hypotheses and testing them. Universalism, on the other hand, ‘posits eternal, extramental truth, whose validity defies testing…. An individualist discovers truth, whereas a universalist undergoes it.’5 For Pribram, Vienna was the only true individualist city east of the Rhine, but even there, with the Catholic Church still so strong, universalism was nonetheless ever-present. This meant that, philosophically speaking, Vienna was a halfway house, where there were a number of ‘halfway’ avenues of thought, of which psychoanalysis was a perfect example. Freud saw himself as a scientist yet provided no real methodology whereby the existence of the unconscious, say, could be identified to the satisfaction of a sceptic. But Freud and the unconscious were not the only examples. The very doctrine of therapeutic nihilism — that nothing could be done about the ills of society or even about the sicknesses that afflicted the human body – showed an indifference to progressivism that was the very opposite of the empirical, optimistic, scientific approach. The aesthetics of impressionism — very popular in Vienna – was part of this same divide. The essence of impressionism was defined by the Hungarian art historian Arnold Hauser as an urban art that ‘describes the changeability, the nervous rhythm, the sudden, sharp, but always ephemeral impressions of city life.’6 This concern with evanescence, the transitoriness of experience, fitted in with the therapeutic nihilistic idea that there was nothing to be done about the world, except stand aloof and watch.

  Two men who grappled with this view in their different ways were the writers Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. They belonged to a group of young bohemians who gathered at the Café Griensteidl and were known as Jung Wien (young Vienna).7 The group also included Theodor Herzl, a brilliant reporter, an essayist, and later a leader of the Zionist movement; Stefan Zweig, a writer; and their leader, the newspaper editor Hermann Bahr. His paper, Die Zeit, was the forum for many of these talents, as was Die Fackel (The Torch), edited no less brilliantly by another writer of the group, Karl Kraus, more famous for his play The Last Days of Mankind.

  The career of Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) shared a number of intriguing parallels with that of Freud. He too trained as a doctor and neurologist and studied neurasthenia.8 Freud was taught by Theodor Meynert, whereas Schnitzler was Meynert’s assistant. Schnitzler’s interest in what Freud called the ‘underestimated and much maligned erotic’ was so similar to his own that Freud referred to Schnitzler as his doppelgänger (double) and deliberately avoided him. But Schnitzler turned away from medicine to literature, though his writings reflected many psychoanalytic concepts. His early works explored the emptiness of café society, but it was with Lieutenant Gustl (1901) and The Road into the Open (1908) that Schnitzler really made his mark.9 Lieutenant Gustl, a sustained interior monologue, takes as its starting point an episode when ‘a vulgar civilian’ dares to touch the lieutenant’s sword in the busy cloakroom of the opera. This small gesture provokes in the lieutenant confused and involuntary ‘stream-of-consciousness’ ramblings that prefigure Proust. In Gustl, Schnitzler is still primarily a social critic, but in his references to aspects of the lieutenant’s childhood that he thought he had forgotten, he hints at psychoanalytic ideas.10 The Road into the Open explores more widely the instinctive, irrational aspects of individuals and the society in which they live. The dramatic structure of the book takes its power from an examination of the way the careers of several Jewish characters have been blocked or frustrated. Schnitzler indicts anti-Semitism, not simply for being wrong, but as the symbol of a new, illiberal culture brought about by a decadent aestheticism and by the arrival of mass society, which, together with a parliament ‘[that] has become a mere theatre through which the masses are manipulated,’ gives full rein to the instincts, and which in the novel overwhelms the ‘purposive, moral and scientific’ culture represented by many of the Jewish characters. Schnitzler’s aim is to highlight the insolubility of the ‘Jewish question’ and the dilemma between art and science.11 Each disappoints him – aestheticism ‘because it leads nowhere, science because it offers no meaning for the self’.12

  Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) went further than Schnitzler. Born into an aristocratic family, he was blessed with a father who encouraged, even expected, his son to become an aesthete. Hofmannsthal senior introduced his son to the Café Griensteidl when Hugo was quite young, so that the group around Bahr acted as a forcing house for the youth’s precocious talents. In the early part of his career, Hofmannsthal produced what has been described as ‘the most polished achievement in the history of German poetry,’ but he was never totally comfortable with the aesthetic attitude.13 Both The Death of Titian (1892) and The Fool and Death (1893), his most famous poems written before 1900, are sceptical that art can ever be the basis for society’s values.14 For Hofmannsthal, the problem is that while art may offer fulfilment for the person who creates beauty, it doesn’t necessarily do so for the mass of society who are unable to create:

  Our present is all void and dreariness,

  If consecration comes not from without.15

  Hofmannsthal’s view is most clearly shown in his poem ‘Idyll on an Ancient Vase Painting,’ which tells the story of the daughter of a Greek vase painter. She has a husband, a blacksmith, and a comfortable standard of living, but she is dissatisfied; her life,
she feels, is not fulfilled. She spends her time dreaming of her childhood, recalling the mythological images her father painted on the vases he sold. These paintings portrayed the heroic actions of the gods, who led the sort of dramatic life she yearns for. Eventually Hofmannsthal grants the woman her wish, and a centaur appears. Delighted that her fortunes have taken this turn, she immediately abandons her old life and escapes with the centaur. Alas, her husband has other ideas; if he can’t have her, no one else can, and he kills her with a spear.16 In summary this sounds heavy-handed, but Hofmannsthal’s argument is unambiguous: beauty is paradoxical and can be subversive, terrible even. Though the spontaneous, instinctual life has its attractions, however vital its expression is for fulfilment, it is nevertheless dangerous, explosive. Aesthetics, in other words, is never simply self-contained and passive: it implies judgement and action.

  Hofmannsthal also noted the encroachment of science on the old aesthetic culture of Vienna. ‘The nature of our epoch,’ he wrote in 1905, ‘is multiplicity and indeterminacy. It can rest only on das Gleitende [the slipping, the sliding].’ He added that ‘what other generations believed to be firm is in fact das Gleitende.’17 Could there be a better description about the way the Newtonian world was slipping after Maxwell’s and Planck’s discoveries? ‘Everything fell into parts,’ Hofmannsthal wrote, ‘the parts again into more parts, and nothing allowed itself to be embraced by concepts any more.’18 Like Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal was disturbed by political developments in the dual monarchy and in particular the growth of anti-Semitism. For him, this rise in irrationalism owed some of its force to science-induced changes in the understanding of reality; the new ideas were so disturbing as to promote a large-scale reactionary irrationalism. His personal response was idiosyncratic, to say the least, but had its own logic. At the grand age of twenty-six he abandoned poetry, feeling that the theatre offered a better chance of meeting current challenges. Schnitzler had pointed out that politics had become a form of theatre, and Hofmannsthal thought that theatre was needed to counteract political developments.19 His work, from the plays Fortunatus and His Sons (1900–I) and King Candaules (1903) to his librettos for Richard Strauss, is all about political leadership as an art form, the point of kings being to preserve an aesthetic that provides order and, in so doing, controls irrationality. Yet the irrational must be given an outlet, Hofmannsthal says, and his solution is ‘the ceremony of the whole,’ a ritual form of politics in which no one feels excluded. His plays are attempts to create ceremonies of the whole, marrying individual psychology to group psychology, psychological dramas that anticipate Freud’s later theories.20 And so, whereas Schnitzler was prepared to be merely an observer of Viennese society, an elegant diagnostician of its shortcomings, Hofmannsthal rejected this therapeutic nihilism and saw himself in a more direct role, trying to change that society. As he revealingly put it, the arts had become the ‘spiritual space of the nation.’21 In his heart, Hofmannsthal always hoped that his writings about kings would help Vienna throw up a great leader, someone who would offer moral guidance and show the way ahead, ‘melting all fragmentary manifestations into unity and changing all matter into “form, a new German reality.” ‘The words he used were uncannily close to what eventually came to pass. What he hoped for was a ‘genius … marked with the stigma of the usurper,’ ‘a true German and absolute man,’ ‘a prophet,’ ‘poet,’ ‘teacher,’ ‘seducer,’ an ‘erotic dreamer.’22 Hofmannsthal’s aesthetics of kingship overlapped with Freud’s ideas about the dominant male, with the anthropological discoveries of Sir James Frazer, with Nietzsche and with Darwin. Hofmannsthal was very ambitious for the harmonising possibilities of art; he thought it could help counter the disruptive effects of science.