Eliot and Pound, flawed and broken as they were, provide a mirror for us to look in as we try to acknowledge who and what we are

The Wasted Century

by Thomas Fleming 

The Great War and its inevitable successor have been called Europe’s civil war, and there is some truth in this characterization. Divided by language, religion, and culture, the nations of Europe were nonetheless united in a common civilization that developed out of the ruins of the Christianized Roman Empire. Despite the strains brought on by religious schisms and the Enlightenment’s revolt against the Church, an educated Scottish atheist had much in common with French Catholics and German Lutherans: Civilized Europeans accepted both the classical tradition and the residue of Christian morality that underlay their notions of fair play, personal responsibility, and the duties of charity. No more. To speak of Europe today makes sense only as a reference to material comfort, state-subsidized benefits, and adherence to the corrupt and inept bureaucracy of the European Union.

If the two armed conflicts were part of a European civil war, they were also the beginning of the end both of Europe itself and of the vestigial Christendom that survived in the hypocrisy of good manners. The memory of those traditions is now preserved only in libraries, museums, and church buildings that tourists admire as uncomprehendingly as a savage who relies on the magic of television and mobile devices.

The Great War that began the process of cultural extinction was a writer’s war, particularly a poet’s war. It was the first modern war in which large numbers of writers actually fought in the ranks. The war was also a writer’s graveyard: Britain alone lost Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, and Isaac Rosenberg.

The worst ravages of the Great War consisted not so much in the loss of so many fine men as in its effect on the Western mind. This was conspicuous in the case of the literary combatants who survived the war often as broken men, but only a very superficial person in Britain or Europe came through unscathed. The moral and mental derangements caused by the war—adultery, divorce, alcoholism—were mercilessly recorded in the novels of Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, though later readers may not always comprehend the moral insanity that excited the restless spirits of the “Jazz Age.”

These were the postwar years that T.S. Eliot later described as “Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres.” The phrase “largely wasted” cannot fail to recall his most famous poem, published only four years after the war’s end. Gertrude Stein is famous (only) for describing her young literary friends in Paris as “a lost generation,” though Hemingway later claimed that she had borrowed the phrase from a young garage mechanic, whose boss had complained of the difficulty of training the young veterans who had survived the war. It was a generation of men who had lost their bearings; they lacked discipline and a sense of purpose. A century later, it is now apparent that succeeding generations never found their way back to sanity.

On the positive side, the postwar generation had also lost some of the naive illusions that had encouraged European man in his follies since the beginning of the Renaissance. The technological and economic progress of the 19th century had encouraged a radiant optimism in the West. Diseases were being conquered, agricultural yields were improving, the blessings of hygiene and sanitation were being extended ever more broadly. Even war itself was being civilized by conventions that were inspired by Christian convictions that few people held. The religion of Northern Europe and North America was increasingly a hypocritical sham, but stiff upper lip and carry on were the words of the day for the readers of Henley’s “Invictus” or of his friend R.L. Stevenson’s prayer: “The day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating concerns and duties. Help us to play the man, help us to perform them with laughter and kind faces, let cheerfulness abound with industry . . . ” For optimists, a good man of strong will can heroically fight off the evils that not only surround him but lurk within him.

Stevenson knew better, as his tale of Dr. Jekyll’s experiment, written only a generation before the war, would seem to indicate, but the dominant creed of the 19th century was neither the Christianity that had dominated the mind of the 17th century nor the anti-Christian Marxism that would rule the 20th. The Victorian Creed was one or another form of liberalism. Though it was sometimes undercoated or gilded with a false Christian luster, as in the case of Lord Acton, liberalism was fundamentally a non-Christian and implicitly anti-Christian set of doctrines. The individual and his relations with the state were the paramount political concerns of liberals from Locke and Smith down to the end of the 19th century, while comfort, hygiene, and prosperity were the marks of this earthly paradise.

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