A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

Artists and Intellectuals in the Waste Land 989

society incapable of responding effectively to domestic and international
crises. Political and social tensions encouraged the disillusionment with
democracy felt by parties of the political extremes such as the French Com­
munist Party on the one hand, and the fledgling right-wing fascist move­
ments intrigued by Benito Mussolini’s seizure of power in Italy on the
other (see Chapter 25).

Artists and Intellectuals in the Waste Land

The effects of the Great War could also be clearly seen in European intel­

lectual and artistic life, as writers and painters wrestled with the conse­

quences of a devastating struggle that stood as a great divide between the

present and a world that was no more. A veteran of the trenches described

the war’s cataclysmic destruction as “a cyclopean dividing wall in time: a

thousand miles high and a thousand miles thick, a great barrier laid across

our life.” The resulting cultural uncertainty reflected the economic, social,

and political chaos of the period.

The defiant modernism of artists and intellectuals in the wake of the

war was part of a revolt against traditional cultural conventions within the

arts but also against the strictures of bourgeois society. In Britain, for

example, people still read Victorian novels and romantic poetry, but such

texts seemed to offer no explanation for what had gone wrong in Europe.

Horrified by the war, many artists and writers now rejected the social con­

ventions that had inculcated the values of nationalism and blind obedi­

ence. In the wake of the war, the “outsiders” of the Belle Epoque had

become, at least in the realm of the arts, “insiders.” To be sure, most of the

dramatic changes in artistic expression that followed the war had their ori­

gins in the pre-war years—for example, the adoption of psychological, sub­

jective themes and approaches to painting and writing (see Chapter 20).

The war had destroyed not only millions of lives but many of the signposts

by which artists and writers defined reality. The American writer Gertrude

Stein (1874-1946), who bounced back and forth between her artist and

writer friends in London and Paris, called the war’s survivors “a lost gener­

ation.” In a 1922 lecture, the French poet Paul Valery (1871-1945) said,

“The storm has died away and still we are restless, uneasy, as if the storm

were about to break... among all these injured things is the mind. The

mind has indeed been cruelly wounded. ... It doubts itself profoundly.”

The bleak 1922 poem The Waste Landy by American-born poet and critic

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), reflected the disintegrating impact that the war

had on Europe.

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water....