Pantygraigwen
21-04-2006, 00:55
I'm reading Micheal Foot's biography of HG Wells at the moment. I don't think i've ever told people how fascinating i find the period of history around Wells was in his prime - more so because i know so little about it. But looking at it from a cultural perspective, this was really the golden age of the British mind - Wells comes to the fore in 1895 with the publication of "The Time Machine" - fact i didn't realise was that was his first published novel. Bit scary when you contemplate it like that - a world shatteringly important novel, for oh so many reasons, and it's his debut. Makes my teenaged scrawlings seem impotent in comparison.
But yeah, 1890s - you have Wells and Conan Doyle. You have George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. You have Bertrand Russell and Joseph Conrad. You have JM Barrie and Thomas Hardy.
What excites me about this period is the sense of change and worlds ending. It's odd, really, because at the time, it probably felt cosy, unchallenged....the nice cosy middle class victorian idyll...and thats how we tend to portray it when we look back, all Upstairs Downstairs and a world that was torn apart by World War 1, but until that point stasis, no movement, no change.
But that ignores things. It ignores how the common man was mobilising, educating himself, pushing himself upwards and outwards - it ignores the birth and growth of the Labour Party, which would change the shape of Britain within 40 years. It ignores how the interior of the human mind was being mapped (ok, badly) by Freud and Jung and Adler - pioneers in a field maybe, but it was still there,change was coming. Darwinian thought was filtering through the masses slowly, France was tearing itself apart over a ordinary little military man called Dreyfus who had committed one crime - being a jew in an army full of anti-semites, in Zurich other jews were watching this and giving birth to the ideology which today is jointly responsible for half the suffering in the world (Zionism and Militant Islam are two of the enemies of peace...Neo-Liberal Capitalism and Nationalism are the others), in Vienna - another city of imperial contradictions and confusion and morality and hypocrisy - a dark, intense, bad painter was beginning to put together a world view which would leave Europe in ruins by the year HG died, in Dublin James Joyce was growing up - ready to shake the world with his style of writing - to kill the style of novel that HG was master of, Nietzche had announced a while back the death of god and people started listening, started questioning, free love societies, feminist societies, suffragette societies, pacifist societies...all being born from this tremendous explosion of energy and creativity in a landscape that to us seems mundane and normal - we see the cosy middle class world, we don't realise the constant tensions on the verge of tearing it apart. This cosy little world was built on the presumption of the permanency of the British Empire, but the Boers were mobilising against the concept during this decade, the Irish had been fighting the idea for many a year and were about to start once more, writers such as Conrad were - in books like "Heart of Darkness" and "The ****** of the Narcissus" - questioning what imperial power DOES to a man, and to man....and in Russia, a small bearded man was starting on the first steps down a road that leads us to 1917. VI Lenin is no more or less a creature of this decade than any of the writers i mentioned above, no less a creature of the tensions and domesticity, the contrasts and contradictions. And soon, within 20 years, he would be shaking the world....not just Britain, not just Russia, but the world.
And if i feel nostalgic for any time, i think it's probably for that decade i never lived, the 1890s, a more innocent age, maybe. A more hypocritical and confused age, definetly. But an age with a brighter and better conception of the future than we have ever had since. World War 1 and the Bolshevk coup didn't just kill the hypocrisies and smug complacency of the Late Victorian/Edwardian period, it also killed it's optimism and hope. It's never really come back in this country. Yes, i know, there was a flowering post World War 11 when HG Wells spiritual heirs finally came to unchallenged power - ironically the year after the great man died - but that soon sank into the cynicism and bitterness engendered by World War 1 and the birth of modernism. And in Russia, after a brief flowering of 2 or three years, the great hope for humanity died, strangled in it's crib by outside interference and inside counter revolution - the workers paradise became the bureaucrats dream, Communism became State Capitalism - anyone who ever says to me "Communism failed in Russia" is up for a torrent of abuse - how could it not fail? The entire world ranged against it, the need to ensure it's day to day survival ironically giving birth to the class within Russian society which would quietly usher it out of power and sit in control for the next 60 years, all the while claiming to be the beast they had murdered. And please, don't hit me with the "it's against human nature" line either - the 1890s....like any other turbulent decade in the history of man, shows us one thing, and one thing alone - human nature is not some fixed, unchangeable, immovable force. The only constant that exists inside man, or woman, is the urge towards love. Everything else can be changed, everything else is just the product of environment, everything else is irrelevant. And above all, after all, love.
And thats why i can't feel the same jaded, cynical world view that my peers feel, that most of you probably feel - you probably look towards the future and see nothing more than the present, only a little brighter, faster, more confusing, or a little grimmer, darker, more painful. I don't, and i never will. The lesson of Wells is the lesson of Lenin is the lesson of Freud. The future can be shaped. We can change our world and change ourselves. Nothing is permanent, everything is fluid. And so, despite this marking me out as one of the old skool of optimist socialists, i will say it now:- Humanity shall once more rise free of the shackles we have made for ourselves. The petty gods and monsters and system will be overthrown. The Bastille we have built for our own imprisonment will be thrown wide open and the prisoners will stream into the open air, to bask in the sunshine of a glorious, impermanent, fluid, CHANGEABLE future. Our day will come again.
‘And these words shall then become
Like Oppression’s thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain.
Heard again—again—again—
‘Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.’
But yeah, 1890s - you have Wells and Conan Doyle. You have George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. You have Bertrand Russell and Joseph Conrad. You have JM Barrie and Thomas Hardy.
What excites me about this period is the sense of change and worlds ending. It's odd, really, because at the time, it probably felt cosy, unchallenged....the nice cosy middle class victorian idyll...and thats how we tend to portray it when we look back, all Upstairs Downstairs and a world that was torn apart by World War 1, but until that point stasis, no movement, no change.
But that ignores things. It ignores how the common man was mobilising, educating himself, pushing himself upwards and outwards - it ignores the birth and growth of the Labour Party, which would change the shape of Britain within 40 years. It ignores how the interior of the human mind was being mapped (ok, badly) by Freud and Jung and Adler - pioneers in a field maybe, but it was still there,change was coming. Darwinian thought was filtering through the masses slowly, France was tearing itself apart over a ordinary little military man called Dreyfus who had committed one crime - being a jew in an army full of anti-semites, in Zurich other jews were watching this and giving birth to the ideology which today is jointly responsible for half the suffering in the world (Zionism and Militant Islam are two of the enemies of peace...Neo-Liberal Capitalism and Nationalism are the others), in Vienna - another city of imperial contradictions and confusion and morality and hypocrisy - a dark, intense, bad painter was beginning to put together a world view which would leave Europe in ruins by the year HG died, in Dublin James Joyce was growing up - ready to shake the world with his style of writing - to kill the style of novel that HG was master of, Nietzche had announced a while back the death of god and people started listening, started questioning, free love societies, feminist societies, suffragette societies, pacifist societies...all being born from this tremendous explosion of energy and creativity in a landscape that to us seems mundane and normal - we see the cosy middle class world, we don't realise the constant tensions on the verge of tearing it apart. This cosy little world was built on the presumption of the permanency of the British Empire, but the Boers were mobilising against the concept during this decade, the Irish had been fighting the idea for many a year and were about to start once more, writers such as Conrad were - in books like "Heart of Darkness" and "The ****** of the Narcissus" - questioning what imperial power DOES to a man, and to man....and in Russia, a small bearded man was starting on the first steps down a road that leads us to 1917. VI Lenin is no more or less a creature of this decade than any of the writers i mentioned above, no less a creature of the tensions and domesticity, the contrasts and contradictions. And soon, within 20 years, he would be shaking the world....not just Britain, not just Russia, but the world.
And if i feel nostalgic for any time, i think it's probably for that decade i never lived, the 1890s, a more innocent age, maybe. A more hypocritical and confused age, definetly. But an age with a brighter and better conception of the future than we have ever had since. World War 1 and the Bolshevk coup didn't just kill the hypocrisies and smug complacency of the Late Victorian/Edwardian period, it also killed it's optimism and hope. It's never really come back in this country. Yes, i know, there was a flowering post World War 11 when HG Wells spiritual heirs finally came to unchallenged power - ironically the year after the great man died - but that soon sank into the cynicism and bitterness engendered by World War 1 and the birth of modernism. And in Russia, after a brief flowering of 2 or three years, the great hope for humanity died, strangled in it's crib by outside interference and inside counter revolution - the workers paradise became the bureaucrats dream, Communism became State Capitalism - anyone who ever says to me "Communism failed in Russia" is up for a torrent of abuse - how could it not fail? The entire world ranged against it, the need to ensure it's day to day survival ironically giving birth to the class within Russian society which would quietly usher it out of power and sit in control for the next 60 years, all the while claiming to be the beast they had murdered. And please, don't hit me with the "it's against human nature" line either - the 1890s....like any other turbulent decade in the history of man, shows us one thing, and one thing alone - human nature is not some fixed, unchangeable, immovable force. The only constant that exists inside man, or woman, is the urge towards love. Everything else can be changed, everything else is just the product of environment, everything else is irrelevant. And above all, after all, love.
And thats why i can't feel the same jaded, cynical world view that my peers feel, that most of you probably feel - you probably look towards the future and see nothing more than the present, only a little brighter, faster, more confusing, or a little grimmer, darker, more painful. I don't, and i never will. The lesson of Wells is the lesson of Lenin is the lesson of Freud. The future can be shaped. We can change our world and change ourselves. Nothing is permanent, everything is fluid. And so, despite this marking me out as one of the old skool of optimist socialists, i will say it now:- Humanity shall once more rise free of the shackles we have made for ourselves. The petty gods and monsters and system will be overthrown. The Bastille we have built for our own imprisonment will be thrown wide open and the prisoners will stream into the open air, to bask in the sunshine of a glorious, impermanent, fluid, CHANGEABLE future. Our day will come again.
‘And these words shall then become
Like Oppression’s thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain.
Heard again—again—again—
‘Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.’