Musical naturalism was, by contrast, an attempt at dramatic literalness. Richard Strauss boasted that he could render a soup spoon. Actually, he could not and did not. The noises of his Sinfonia Domestica are standard orchestral sounds fitted with a preliminary explanation, like the libretto or synopsis of a Wagnerian or other opera. When the sheep bleat in Strauss’s Don Quixote, the clarinets play notes that are decorative on their own account and do not in the least suggest wool. It is rather the thickness of Strauss’s orchestration and chromatic harmony that connect him with naturalist doctrine—the headlong embrace with matter. And so it is also in the operas of Bruneau or Charpentier or in the verismo of Puccini and the late Italian school generally. Music remains atmospheric; never, except in Wagner’s system, denotative.
This definition of Naturalism, coupled with the aesthetic, or “art for art’s sake,” impetus in Symbolism and with the Impressionists’ transmutation of concreteness into light, justifies the name of Neoromanticism that has been given to the cultural temper with which the 19th century ended. After the glum self-repression of the middle period, it was an outburst of vehement self-assertion, whether directed inward or outward. “Art for art’s sake” and Naturalism are indeed but twin branches of one doctrine: art for life’s sake. The new century
In 1895 George Bernard Shaw said: “France is certainly decadent if she thinks she is.” The remark is characteristic of Shaw, but it is also indicative of a new wave of energy. From under the despair and decadence, the scattered retreats and the violent nihilism, the same human strength that produced Symbolist and Naturalist art was trying to reshape the civilization that all found so unsatisfactory.
In England, the Fabians, of whom Shaw was one, were preaching the “inevitableness of gradualism” toward the socialist state. It was they, seconded by the growing strength of the trade unions after a spectacular dock strike of 1889, who paved the way to Labour governments and the British welfare state. Throughout Europe, socialism was no longer the creed of a lunatic fringe but was the ideal of many among the masses and the intellectuals. The original fight for liberty and democracy in political action had turned into a fight for economic democracy—freedom from want. Laissez-faire liberalism had turned inside out, and the liberal imagination at work in the many brands of socialism now demanded state interference to remove the appalling conditions causing all the despair. Arts and Crafts movement
Among the socialists belonging to no party, Ruskin and William Morris worked also to effect immediate changes in the quality of their surroundings: they started the so-called Arts and Crafts movement, whose aim was to make objects once again beautiful. Because machine industry produced only the “cheap and nasty” (as it was commonly called), they tried to produce by hand the cheap and handsome—good furniture, hangings, and household articles; fast dyes of good colour; well-printed books on good paper; and jewelry and ornaments of all kinds that showed visual talent as well as manual skill. In a word, the movement reinstated the ideal of design and succeeded in forcing it on machine industry itself. Within two decades manufacturers began to hire artists as designers, and by 1910 the 20th-century omnipresence of design, from clothes to print and from gadgetry to packaging, was a fait accompli. The visual revolution can be seen easily by looking back with modern eyes to a page of advertising at the turn of the century. New trends in technology and science
In parallel with the new craftsmanship, the new technology of the 1900s began to give hope of wider improvements. The use and transmission of electric power suggested the possibility of the clean factory, all glass and white tile. Better machines, new materials and alloys, a greatly expanded chemical industry—all supplied more exact, more functional, less hazardous objects of use and consumption, while the application of science to medicine nourished the hope of greatly reducing the physical ills of mankind. Those closest to all these developments were certainly not among the despairers and fugitives from the world. Like all those who struggle successfully with practical difficulties, they were inspirited by what they knew to be demonstrable progress along their chosen lines.
The same outlook animated workers in the natural and social sciences. It was for both a time of transformation, and genuine novelty exerted its usual invigorating effect. From the 1880s onward it had been clear that simple mechanistic explanations based on “dead” matter were inadequate. The Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 had given the coup de grace to the mere push-pull principle by showing that, though light consisted of waves, the waves were not in or of anything, such as the ether, which did not exist. Even earlier, James Clerk Maxwell’s attempt to work out the facts of electromagnetism on Newtonian principles had failed. And on the philosophic front, the notion of natural “laws” was being radically modified by thinkers such as Poincaré, Boutroux, Ernst Mach, Bergson, and William James. All this prepared the ground for the twin revolutions of relativity and quantum theory on which the 20th-century scientific regime is based.
The decline of the machine analogy had its counterpart in the biological sciences. With narrow Darwinian dogmas in abeyance, the genetics of Gregor Mendel were rediscovered, and a new science was born. The fixity of species was again regarded as important (Bateson), while the phenomenon of large mutations (de Vries) caught the public imagination, just as the slow, small changes had done 60 years earlier. The elusive “fitness of the environment” was being considered of as much importance in the march of evolution as the fitness of the creature. Vitalism once more reasserted its claims, as it seems bound to do in an eternal seesaw with mechanism. The social sciences
Finally, in the social sciences, fresh starts were made on new premises. Anthropology dropped its concern with physique and race and turned to “culture” as the proper unit of scientific study. Similarly in sociology, Durkheim, seconded by Tönnies, Weber, Tarde, and Le Bon, concentrated on “the social fact” as an independent and measurable reality equivalent to a physical datum. Psychology, also long under the exclusive sway of physics and physiology, now established at the hands of William James that the irreducible element of its subject matter was the “stream of consciousness”—not a compound of atomized “ideas” or “impressions” or “mind-stuff” but a live force in which image and feeling, subconscious drive and purposive interest, were not separable except abstractly. A last domain of research was mythology, to the significance of which James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough gave massive witness, thereby exerting proportional influence on literature and criticism. Reexamination of the universe
The net effect of these innovations in the sciences of man and of nature was liberating. Whatever each specialty or subspecialty meant to its practitioners, the persons who carry in their minds the general culture of an age took the new message to mean that the universe, formerly closed and complete like a machine, had been reopened and shown to be more alive than dead—and by the same token more mysterious, full of questions to be resolved by new research and new sciences. The term astrophysics, replacing astronomy, symbolized the change of perspective from Newton’s cosmology to Einstein’s. In turn, these conclusions furnished a new opportunity for the exercise of individual thought and will in the realm of mind and spirit, of ethics and religion. Man was no longer deemed an automaton, he had free choice in the all-important matters that lay outside physical science.