Sad Lucidity Of Soul

Emery Neff, The Poetry of History: The Contribution of Literature and Literary Scholarship To the Writing of History since Voltaire (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1947; repr. 1961), 151-2:

Faith in the exceptional individual tended to replace faith in the group, in the nation, in the mass of mankind. Among men of letters, this revulsion of feeling was reinforced by growing awareness that increased literacy and cheap printing, instead of enlightening the masses, encouraged books with diluted or distorted thought and without art. Unwilling to stoop to meet the demand for literature as a mere commercial product, most of the ablest writers held themselves to exacting standards of art and thought. The extreme of this scorn of popular taste was the doctrine of art for art’s sake proclaimed by Gautier, Flaubert, and Baudelaire in France, by Swinburne, D. G. Rossetti, and Pater in England. “Let the Empire run along,” was the celebrated counsel of Flaubert, “Let us climb to the top of our ivory tower, to the last step, the one nearest the sky. It is cold there, sometimes, isn’t it? But what does that matter? You see the stars shine clear, and you do not hear the geese cackle any longer.”

Disgust with the present, with the spectacle of ignorant masses deluded and exploited by a vulgar plutocracy, with the ugliness of crass industrialism, turned many eyes to the past for refuge, for refreshment. In this mood Leconte de Lisle produced Poémes antiques (1852) and William Morris The Earthly Paradise (1868-1870); in this mood Flaubert, Thackeray, and Morris each composed a historical novel— Salammbô (1862), Henry Esmond (1852), and the historical romance A Dream of John Ball (1888). “I am going to write a novel whose action will take place three centuries before Christ,” Flaubert explained, “for I feel the need of escaping from the modern world, . . . which fatigues me as much to reproduce as it disgusts me to observe.” His theme was the “implacable war” of Carthage with her mercenaries brilliantly sketched by Michelet, a savage and remorseless struggle in which neither side engaged his sympathies. For, however refreshing a change from the present, the past was seldom idealized by authors who came to maturity after 1848. They contemplated both past and future with what Matthew Arnold called a “sad lucidity of soul.”