A Passage from Darwin, Marx, Wagner

As a birthday present this year I received a copy of Jacques Barzun's classic, Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1940).

Jacques Barzun was (and is) a great admirer of the romantic movement of the nineteenth century in all its manifestations: the era of Beethoven, Liszt, and Berlioz in music; of Carlyle, Goethe, and Hugo in letters. He believes, moreover, that something profound and distressing happened to the movement a little past the middle of the 19th century, with the rise of a mechanistic materialism associated especially with the year 1859.

In music, it was in 1859 that Richard Wagner completed Tristan, which Barzun calls his "earliest characteristic work." In the same year, Darwin came out with Origin of Species, and Marx with the first sketch of On Capital. Each in his own way treats feeling, belief, indeed morality itself as so many illusions within the world of brute fact, of matter and energy trudging onward in meaningless ways toward ... nothing. Barzun sees the strength in the work of all three and realizes of course that they were not extraneous intrusions into their age -- they were of the age -- still, their names are appropriately joined to describe the moment. Mechanical materialism split the romantic impulse in two. Some romantics would embrace the new way of seeing the world -- and they were launched toward realism and naturalism. Others would reject this way of looking at the world -- yet their rejection was often an overly emphatic turn, leading to an empty idealism, aestheticism, or irrationalism. The year 1859, then, is a baleful one on Barzun's understanding of the course of European culture.

Anyway, here is a brief passage from the introduction. "Since belief directs action, it behooves us to take stock of the teachings chracteristic of yesterday and today, for the very sake of reason, science, and art. We have thus two motives, one theoretical and one practical, for going back to the sources of our intellectual life. I am far from saying that the world events we are living through [in 1940] are the result of 'mere ideas': that would be to espouse the very idealism I condemn. Ideas by themselves cause nothing. They are as inert as facts by themselves; or to put it another way, closer to the pragmatic view of history, facts and ideas do not occur separately from each other."

Excellently put.