Modernism

“ Here, reversing the natural order, poetics came before poetry. The champions of modernism revolted against the traditional subservience of literature to social progress. They asserted the autonomy and primacy of art, and offered the milk of mysticism to the soul starved on positivist fare. ”

“ This observation leads us to consider what we mean by modernism, when we say we find it in ancient literature. Sometimes the phrase is loosely used to indicate the permanent and invariable qualities of human nature emergent from local and temporary conditions. ”

“ Every one possessing any feeling for modernism must highly prize what American art and American literature have done and are doing for the directness, vividness, and intensity of presentation to our eyes or our imagination either of outward objects or the silent workings of character and inner sensations. ”

“ We shall speak of the holy traditions of the past, we shall despise certain daring innovations on the part of the inexperienced youth, which were perfectly proper twenty years ago, when you were beginning, but which now are out of place. Do you care for a thrust at modernism? ”

“ What she read described the formation of the New Modernism, the Artistic Society about which so much was being said among well-informed circles of the Art World, with the reservation that nothing must be accepted as official. ”

“ But these declining years are preceding those wherein all things are made new, and the next two generations will see, not alone the passing of what we may call modernism, since it is our own age, but the prologue of the epoch that is to come. ”

“ If they are movements in the direction of emancipation, "the elevation of the type Man," then they are modern; if they are not, then they are movements to be opposed or ignored by moderns. If modernism be a vital thing it must needs have roots in the past and be an essential expression of humanity, to be traced, therefore, in the history of humanity: in short, it can only be a tradition. The true modern is a continuator of tradition as much as the Christian or the conservative: the tine fight between progress and stagnation is always a fight between antagonistic traditions. ”

“ To penetrate still deeper into Modernism and to find a suitable remedy for such a deep sore, it behoves Us, Venerable Brethren, to investigate the causes which have engendered it and which foster its growth. ”

“ It is incomprehensible to me that any thinker can calmly call himself a modernist; he might as well call himself a Thursdayite. But apart altogether from that particular disturbance, I am conscious of a general irritation expressed against the people who boast of their advancement and modernity in the discussion of religion. But I never succeeded in saying the quite clear and obvious thing that is really the matter with modernism. The real objection to modernism is simply that it is a form of snobbishness. ”

“ For instance, these pages contain a sort of recurring protest against the boast of certain writers that they are merely recent. They brag that their philosophy of the universe is the last philosophy or the new philosophy, or the advanced and progressive philosophy. I have said much against a mere modernism. ”

“ The general division on modernism includes sections for the theory, literary context, critique, and critical reception of the movement; fiction; poetry; drama; anthologies; general studies; and literary modernism and the arts. Entries (arranged chronologically within each section or division) are accompanied by evaluative annotations that clearly delineate content. Each division has two indexes: subjects ”

“ This in turn became the basis of culture, displacing theology, because in many ways it furnished better ideals and standards—especially in literature, sculpture, and above all in the use of reason. But since the fifteenth century vast new sources of culture have developed—the modern literatures, modern music, modern painting, and above all the great structure of modern science, which gives us ideals and standards of judgment drawn from a new field, the book of Nature herself. The reason why we differ is clear. ”

“ Religion, industry, state, education, and literature have been consciously transformed by the heroic efforts of such great men of the world, and these conscious and artificial transformations of the several aspects of social life have been the constituents of a new environment and thus the seeds of Renaissance. ”

“ Fashions and modes in literature and art, as in society, come and go; new institutions arise, demanding new methods and modifying cherished customs; and men’s thoughts enlarge and widen with improved conditions, as with the inevitable progress of the age. ”

“ Enterprise and practicalness we are apt to think of as the exclusive possession of much more modern generations. Least of all would we be apt to consider them as likely to be found in the Thirteenth Century, yet here they are, and the commercial arrangements which were made are as absolute premonitions of our modern thought as were the literature and architecture, the painting, even the teachings of science at the same period. ”

“ In various other ways, apart from the mutual influence of divergent group-customs, the progress of civilization tends to produce variations in ideals. The increase of knowledge, the development of science and philosophy, bring floods of new ideas to burst the old dams; deepening insight reveals the irrationality of old ideas to the leaders of thought. The progress of the arts gives new interests and valuations. ”

“ All eras in a state of decline and dissolution are subjective; on the other hand, all progressive eras have an objective tendency. Our present time is retrograde, for it is subjective; we see this not merely in poetry, but also in painting and much besides. Every healthy effort, on the contrary, is directed from the inward to the outward world, as you will see in all great eras, which have been really in a state of progression, and all of an objective nature.’”—Ibid. ”

“ The term Renaissance is frequently applied at present not only to the "new birth" of art and letters, but to all the characteristics, taken together, of the period of transition from the Middle Ages to modern life. The transformation in the structure and policy of states, the passion for discovery, the dawn of a more scientific method of observing man and nature, the movement towards more freedom of intellect and of conscience, are part and parcel of one comprehensive change,—a change which even now has not reached its goal. ”

“ We think of the future, not the past, as the more glorious time in comparison with which the present is nothing. Progress, development,—those are modern words. The modern idea is to leave the past and press onward to something new. ”

“ In other words, the fate of our modern civilization, with all its marvellous machines on it, its art galleries and its churches, is all hanging to-day on the battle between the spirit of achievement, the spirit of creating things, and the spirit of weariness or the spirit of thinking of ways of getting out of things.
It does not take very long to see which one prefers when one considers the problem of living in one world or the other. ”

“ The ten studies which constitute this volume are devoted to individuals who are held out as being reasonably characteristic of that modern movement of the last and present century which started with the French Revolution. At any rate, they were all modern once. For the spirit of modernity enjoys, like the priest-god of the ancient grove, only a temporary reign, and is speedily killed by its inevitable successor. ”

“ For is it not called forth by that civilisation's requirements, material or spiritual; and is it not, by the very fact of being thus new, or at all events nascent, devoid of all conditioning factors, save those which the civilisation and its requirements impose from without? An art, like everything vital, takes shape not merely by pressure from without, but much more by the necessities inherent in its own constitution, the almost mechanical necessities by which all variable things can vary only in certain fashions. ”

“ About this time many new forms of intellectual activity began to engage the minds of the more gifted. Speculative philosophy, the opening fields of science, the imaginative literature of the ancients; these were among the subjects which, while they enlarged the sphere of individual thought, destroyed that social ideal which had its roots in a common belief, and with it, the secret source of all past development in architecture. ”

“ I do not wish you, remember, ‘to build a new Pisa,’ nor to bring ‘the life or the decorations of the thirteenth century back again.’ ‘The circumstances with which you must surround your workmen are those’ of modern American life, ‘because the designs you have now to ask for from your workmen are such as will make modern’ American ‘life beautiful.’ The art we want is the art based on all the inventions of modern civilisation, and to suit all the needs of nineteenth century life. ”

“ Putting it very broadly one may say that literature in the seventeenth century becomes for the first time essentially modern in spirit. We began our survey of modern English literature at the Renaissance because the discovery of the New World, and the widening of human experience and knowledge, which that and the revival of classical learning implied, mark a definite break from a way of thought which had been continuous since the break up of the Roman Empire. The men of the Renaissance felt themselves to be modern. ”

“ Modern civilization is a stepmother to poets; it is crowded, noisy and ugly, and they run away and seek refuge in gardens, or monasteries, or dreams of a happier past. But modern civilization is alive; it is the life of hundreds of millions of human beings, forging a new future. And there comes a new kind of poet, able to penetrate to the inner spirit of that future. ”

“ The emotions of the present may incline us to look back regretfully upon that past which reminds us of so much that is great and noble, in spite of its many and inevitable drawbacks, and which, by showing us the origin of modern society, by revealing to us the manner of its birth and its onward progress, may give us the key to its present critical condition when a profound and universal transformation seems about to take place. ”

“ Let intelligence and science and wisdom, therefore, increase and progress abundantly and vigorously in individuals and in the mass, in the believer and in the whole Church, throughout the ages and the centuries - but only in its own kind, that is, according to the same dogma, the same sense, the same acceptation.
The Modernist as Historian and Critic
29. After having studied the Modernist as philosopher, believer and theologian, it now remains for us to consider him as historian, critic, apologist, reformer. ”

“ We find two forces constantly at work in humanity—the one static (morals) , the other dynamic (intellect) —bent upon leading us to culture, progress, truth, goodness, and beauty. In the fifth and at the beginning of the fourth century B.C., for once in our development, and then only for a short period, humanity296 undoubtedly succeeded in attaining a perfect balance of its moral, intellectual, and esthetical faculties. We may well call that period the golden age of mankind in art. ”

“ Modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter are entirely and absolutely wrong. We have mistaken the common livery of the age for the vesture of the muses, and spent our days in the sordid streets and hideous suburbs of our vile cities when we should be out on the hillside with Apollo. Certainly we are a degraded race, and have sold our birthright for a mess of facts. ”

“ Probably their moral and spiritual progress was greater than it will be in the next two hundred years, exposed to all the dangers of modern materialism, which saps the life of nations in the midst of the most brilliant triumphs of art. We are now on the road to a marvellous intellectual enlightenment, unprecedented and full of encouragement. ”

“ Now this great century, the last of the true Middle Ages, which as it drew to its own end gave birth to Modern Society, has a special character of its own, a character that gives it an abiding and enchanting interest. ”

“ Nothing speaks so much to his imagination as the latest and most composite things, the refinements of current civilisation, the most delicate shades of the actual. It is scarcely too much to say that (especially in the Parisian race) , modern manners, modern nerves, modern wealth, and modern improvements, have engendered a new sense, a sense not easily named nor classified, but recognisable in all the most characteristic productions of contemporary art. ”

“ One, of those wherein the greatest part of those Learned Men who have compared Ancient and Modern Performances, either give up the Cause to the Ancients quite, or think, at least, that the Moderns have not gone beyond them. The other of those, where the Advocates for the Moderns think the Case so clear on their Side, that they wonder how any Man can dispute it with them. ”

“ It was his idea to go back to first principles; to study the bases of modern society, and show how its customs and institutions came to be, and interpret its art as a product of these. He would show what the modern artist was, and how he got his living, and how this moulded his work. ”

“ And as the scientific spirit or the socialistic spirit can give to the permanent instincts of the world a new zest, so the Renaissance passion for self-expansion and for education gave to the old road a new mirage. ”

“ But if the civilization of the present race of men, founded, as it is, in solid science, the true knowledge of nature, and vast discoveries in art, and which is elevated and purified by moral sentiment and by the truths of Christianity, be not destined to destruction before the final termination of human existence on earth, the object and purpose of this edifice will be known till that hour shall come. ”