Victor Davis Hanson
First, what is modernism?
In a word, it was the rejection of traditionalism in every imaginable aspect.
Starting in the mid-eighteenth century, the trend accelerated in art, literature, architecture, politics, religion, and all cultural and social life. The French Revolution, the revolutions in Europe of 1848, the Industrial Revolution, the faith in the new rationalism and dramatic upswings in the standard of living and health due to science—and the Armageddon of the trenches of World War I—all conspired to create a newfound but naïve confidence in man without need of God and a backlash against traditionalism that soon by the 1920s had begun to descend into nihilism.
Of course, at first, in the arts, modernism was an exciting and adventurous departure from the constraints of the past. Take impressionist painters such as Van Gogh, Renoir, Monet, Degas, Seurat, and others. They took a detour from painting portraits focused on the elite and turned to the life of the proverbial people, farming, nature, and leisure. And they did so to accentuate, not hide brush strokes to make painting one of shadows, wind, fire, movement, and light. In the process, their “impressions” were often more realistic than the great Renaissance classical painters.
By the artists’ capturing impressions of what they saw and were to express in dimensions other than classical painting (classic painters had sought to capture or even improve on what the eye saw), they were able to bring the viewer inside the scene at hand. But remember, all the great impressionists were first masters of classical drawing and painting. They could make new rules and discover techniques because they had mastered the old styles. That certainly is no longer true today; most modern artists would flunk a classical drawing course.
So, those who inevitably followed in modern art, surrealism, cubism, dadaism, and our current “representational” art exploded all rules. Many of the current “artists” have no requisite artistic training—and so we ended up with Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” and such junk passed off as sculpture, and paint thrown over a canvas became art.
The poetry of William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, and T.S. Eliot, for example, and others did away often with meter, poetic vocabulary, rhyme, and topics—but these modernist early poets had mastered classical tropes and knew what they were discarding and why. Again, not so the generations of modernist poets who followed.
Today most “poets” do not have a clue what iambic pentameter is, have a vastly abbreviated vocabulary, and have no logic to their line breaks. You could take a sentence out of any nonfiction book, scatter about the word and line breaks—and call it a poem.
The same trajectory marked novels, music, architecture, and sculpture: the rebelling first generations were masters of the arts of the past and knew how to expand upon and modify but not destroy their classicism. Those who followed them, generation by generation lost such reverence and expertise until today most architects, for example, could not design the Supreme Court building, most poets could not rhyme in meter, and most novelists will never match the plot and characterization of a novel by Joseph Conrad or Victor Hugo.
World War I and the nihilist destruction of 17 million on the Western and Eastern fronts eroded classical ideas of nationalism, patriotism, and sacrifice—at least until World War II, which was caused by the destruction of deterrence in the 1920s.
There were certainly brilliant classically trained modernist poets and memoirists like Robert Graves and his Goodbye to All That, or Wilfred Owen and the haunting last lines of his poem Dulce et Decorum Est (from Horace’s Odes [3.2.13], “It is a sweet and noble thing to die on behalf of one’s country”):
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Yet note that Owen and most of Graves’ recollections are full of classical illusions by which they present the case for modernism as defined by skepticism, cynicism, sarcasm, and parody.
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