Mal du Siècle: The New Romanticism and the Sickness of the Age

A Meditation on the Here and Now

William Blake, Frontispiece to The Song of Los, 1795, Color relief etching

“the most dishonourable accusation which can be brought against an Author, namely, that of an indolence which prevents him from endeavouring to ascertain what is his duty, or when his duty is ascertained, prevents him from performing it.” —Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 1802

“Romanticism is sickness, Classicism is health.” —Goethe

In 1924, the French novelist Marcel Arland — founder of the Dadaist newspaper Aventure — wrote an article in La Nouvelle Revue Française which contained the phrase mal du siècle (the illness of the century), which he used to describe an ambivalent feeling, a dissonance, well-known to young men of his generation. Those men, many scarcely boys at the war’s beginning, had returned to a culture entirely removed from the mechanized brutality of the front from which they had emerged in 1918. It was an experience which some would try, and mostly fail, to sublimate in art and literature.

As someone temperamentally conditioned to appreciate aesthetic novelty, and given to a grandiose historical view of epochs, I cannot help but feel invigorated by the prospect of a return to a new era of Romanticism, especially one described in eloquent terms by writers such as Sam Jennings: “What’s coming must be new — must be strange and fitful, awkward and passionate. A lover rediscovering the world, confused by its tactless kisses, yet charmed, endlessly by its dents and imperfections, its sadness and its religion, the dimples where its ancient smile shows.” Or indeed, in the noble and hopeful political sentiments of Ross Barkan — who sees more clearly than perhaps anyone else that the success of such a turn may portend a collective liberation of consciousness, as it did in previous times, which was followed by the emergence of unashamedly utopian modes of thinking that completely reconfigured the material conditions of the modern world: “Now we beat on into a murkier future. There is good news still, flickers of light in fog. A serf cannot liberate himself until he knows he is a serf. He must survey the land, his life, and his relation to power to see that he must get free. That is as hard as breaking the chains themselves.”

And yet, alas, despite my own romantic temperament — I cannot hope to share the beautiful optimism of these sentiments without first giving expression to my misgivings. Such an epoch will hardly lack romantics, of which there are thankfully many, but it may suffer defeat from the same spiritual defect, the same sickness, that once laid waste to Romanticism in its original form.

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One of the most well-attended art exhibitions in history was organized in part by Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Nazi minister of propaganda, future author of the bestselling sentimental novel Michael, and erstwhile literary scholar with a PhD on the minor German romantic poet Wilhelm von Schütz. The title of the exhibition was Entartete Kunst, a term customarily translated into English as “Degenerate Art.” This reflected a very specific line of thinking in the early twentieth century that was formulated in response to the palpable sense of anomie, most evident in the work of Max Nordau, that took the artistic avant-gardes to be expressions of actual mental sickness and degeneracy. The exhibition took place in Munich, the spiritual home of Nazism and the region from which many of its most fervent ideologues hailed. It ran alongside the (significantly less well-attended) “Great German Art Exhibition,” championed and heavily endorsed by the new regime and Goebbels himself. The former exhibition was over-filled with paintings hung carelessly, with mocking epithets at the artists’ lack of “formal” skill, their moral turpitude, and lack of patriotism — their fundamental otherness. The Degenerate Art exhibition served a dual purpose, taking place as it did a few years after the burning of books by writers and thinkers inimical to the new sensibility. In the first instance, it was to unequivocally excoriate modernist experimentation and the avant-garde, and what the Nazis considered an unwelcome departure from the healthy, Romantic spiritual ideals of the German Volk, or nation. The underlying objective was also to highlight the influence of cosmopolitan Jewishness in modernism, yet the exhibition itself, in the end, featured only a minimal number of German Jewish painters. Modernism, international in style and temperament, was anathema to the irredentist ambitions of Nazi ideologues such as Goebbels, and Adolf Hitler himself — whose serviceable, sentimental landscape paintings failed to earn him a place at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna on two separate occasions. The Academy was, during that time, at the very forefront of various competing avant-garde and modernist currents that were emerging at the fin de siècle. It is difficult to imagine, but a cursory glance at the Great German Art Exhibition informs us that the Nazis’ proposed counter-revolution to modernist degeneracy, following the saccharine tastes of their Führer, was very much a return to a formal Romantic tradition.

I have argued elsewhere that there is an indeterminacy at the heart of fascist ideology, when we consider its genealogical origins within the work of Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile. This initial iteration, a counter-revolutionary impulse championed by disillusioned anarcho-syndicalists (Marinetti) and socialists (Mussolini) did not have the distinctly racialist character readily associated with German fascism in the popular imagination, and was, as Roger Griffin noted, itself tethered to a quasi-modernist impulse. In stark contrast, and not by any means uniformly, Nazism was in many ways a Neo-romantic impulse. What both iterations of fascism hold in common, however, is the centrality of the aesthetic to its ideological construction.

The modernist painter and writer Wyndham Lewis, in my view, offers the most prescient critique of the fascist impulse, because it derives from someone once seduced by its fatal appeal. This appeal was timely to the “Generation of 1914,” to which Lewis belonged, whom William Empson rather aptly described as men “ripe for fascism.” They were young men who came of age at the fin de siècle, were reared in the romantic ideals of a bygone era, and subject to the gloom of Nietzsche’s injunction to fight against the dark cloud of nihilism descending across Europe. They initially ran with feverish excitement to the Western Front, only to find untold apocalyptic horrors, perpetrated by machines immune to the facile romanticism of a previous age. In the trenches, Lewis worked on his first novel, Tarr of 1918. Believing it to be his swansong, he wished to give account of himself and his generation in this work — which is set amid the intense artistic milieu of early twentieth-century Paris. To offer a reductive summary that cannot hope to capture the various subtleties and nuances of this modernist masterpiece, Tarr conveys how the competing national aesthetic ideologies apparent in that heady atmosphere prefigured the carnage of the war to come. Most memorable in this milieu is the character of the German painter Otto Kreisler. This depiction of Kreisler in 1918 is what we can now understand to be proto-fascist. In some sense, it gives us the most honest account of the fate of the nineteenth-century Romantic in the twentieth century who, like a feral beast cornered, is shown to be capable of committing untold atrocities. Kreisler is in possession of a belligerent conception of Romanticism, or nationalism, which amounts to the same thing. This is evident in his exaggerated ressentiment and thirst for self-destruction:

His face, wearing, it is true, like a uniform the frowning fixity of the Prussian warrior, had a neglected look. The true bismarckian Prussian would seek every day, by little acts of boorishness, to keep fresh this trenchant attitude; like the german student with his weekly routine of duels which regimen is to keep courage simmering in times of peace, that it may instantly boil up to war pitch at the merest sign from the german War-Master.

These droll aspects of Kreisler’s personality border on caricature, yet also form a plausible portrait of his decidedly Romantic psychopathology. Compared to his effete compatriots in Paris, the masculine, virile, “purer” German Kreisler — who we are often reminded is large and physically imposing — holds himself apart from his contemporaries who he believes have been corrupted by modernist cosmopolitanism. In contrast to Kreisler, they speak “a language and expressed opinions he could not agree with” and they extol the virtues of Fauvism and Cubism — movements he considers degenerate and anathema to his “stiff ideals” and the acceptable national conceptions of romantic beauty. There is an underlying violence to this aesthetic hostility and his blustering pronouncements, one which eventually bursts forth into its actual form in the rape of his compatriot Bertha Lunken. When asked what he means by the word “beautiful,” Kreisler replies with a mocking description of Cubist aesthetics that simultaneously comes across as a physical threat: “What do I call beautiful? How would you like your face to be as flat as a pancake, your nostrils like a squashed strawberry, one of your eyes cocked up by the side of your ear?” Lewis’ identification of this peculiar aesthetic hostility, and the implication that it is rooted in a certain temperament, sounded a prescient forewarning of a future that, in many ways, would later come to life in the Nazi exhibition Entartete Kunst in 1937.

We cannot help but see then that the pleasant feelings invoked by the prospect of a return to a New Romanticism — as several writers such as John Pistelli, Ross Barkan, and Sam Jennings have poignantly argued and signaled — cannot be apprehended without perturbation. Indeed, the failure of Romanticism in its first historical moment occurred due to circumstances that have yet to be properly understood, yet alone surmounted.

Lewis would publish a quickly forgotten novel, The Vulgar Streak of 1941, from his self-imposed exile in Canada. He was fleeing the notoriety that came from his ill-fated support for the fascist cause, which had made him essentially persona non grata in Britain. The Vulgar Streak was a post-mortem examination of the essential drive of fascism, to which Lewis attributes an “empty will.” Oddly, he was keenly aware of the insufficiency of Arthur Schopenhauer’s dichotomy much before his own political ruin. In discussing Schopenhauer’s notion of Will, he concluded in Time and Western Man that:

“As a Will, and as it manifests itself in us, it certainly seems to be a Will to something pleasant; and in the case of some people to something quite sublime [ . . . . ]But yet it is the feeblest of Wills with which any unhappy universe was ever afflicted. For it cannot get anything that it wants. All that it can do is to tear itself to pieces.”

Following to some extent this notion of a “Will” that is never satisfied and fated inevitably to seek self-destruction, Lewis posits an “empty will” that cannot even begin to know its true object. Such is the pathological portrait of European fascism that Lewis offers for our consideration, one made more poignant by the fact that it was essentially a self-portrait.

Such a Will is, I fear, all too familiar to the contemporary subject. It is one decidedly romantic in character; indeed it is a leftover from Romanticism’s first efflorescence. It haunts us, still. As a Will, it was incapable of getting beyond itself, it could not fully and convincingly identify its duty to the world and to the cause of humanity — if indeed that was who it claimed to serve. And what other purpose should art serve?

Before committing suicide, The Vulgar Streak’s protagonist Vincent Penhale, an actor whose life becomes unraveled through a quixotic quest to portray himself as someone he is not, confesses to his friend:

“I’ve been going about this mal du siècle for years. But now I know the worst. I know I’ve got it!

[ . . . ]

“My main trouble,” he told Martin, with finality, “is that I am all made up of action.”

“Y-y-you are.”

“The arch-type of that sort of man who is all action”, Vincent continued, “is to be found in Berlin — or that bloody little Jack-in-the-box up in his balcony, at the Palazzo Venezia. That is obvious enough. Our epoch finds its highest expressions in those dynamical puppets — with little names full of stupid percussion like Hitler. Our time will go down branded with those six letters.”

Lewis wrote to H. G. Wells in 1942 that he derived inspiration from the protagonists of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. He sought to render in fiction

the doctrine extracted by Mussolini from Les Reflections sur la Violence and from Nietzsche [ . . . ] — it seemed to me that this doctrine taken over by Hitler, and influencing so many minds in Europe, might be made to do its fell work in the soul of a character in fiction, once again. On very different lines, it was time to project another Sorel or Raskolnikov, whose bug could not be the Napoleonic bug this time, but rather the [. . . ] ‘power’, ‘force’, and ‘action’ that has infected so many people today.

If in Lewis’ desperate time, the rebellious romantic had evolved into a man of action — he has in the contemporary moment become his stifled, passive, opposite. The mostly indicative archetype of this sort is the incel, who is the subject of much scorn and derision. He is nonetheless — as I have argued — the most universal expression of our specific, and no less sordid, mal du siècle. He is watched over, surveilled, and judged by others — most intensely by himself. He succumbs to such conditions voluntarily, for he possesses a fear of failure so great and so vast, a misfiring romantic longing so intense and purposeless, that it completely negates the reality of his own predicament. In his solipsism, he has become too comfortable and reliant on determinism, has a taste for the simple and prosaic, and ultimately lacks all imagination that ought to affirm life and existence. To such a subject, romantic renewal may seem an attractive prospect, a welcome respite. He does not know that he himself is the product of Romanticism’s failure, its stillborn revolution, yet to be consummated. For Romanticism in and of itself is a curse, if it lacks knowledge of some overarching purpose and duty.

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No better writer encapsulates the myriad ailments that constituted the modernist mal du siècle than Franz Kafka. This tendency is most evident not in the prominent and celebrated works — but in one of his shortest, and best, stories: A Hunger Artist.

The story concerns a performer whose art consists of starving himself as a spectacle, and how this once fascinating art form has begun to fall out of favor with the public. The Hunger Artist once commanded huge crowds, with whole villages observing his traveling spectacle, overseen and organized by an impresario in his employ. He would always starve himself for forty days — in imitation of Christ — but was always disappointed when the spectacle came to an end. For him, this task was easy and required little effort — and he always believed that given the opportunity he could do much, much more . . . all for the sake of his “art”:

Why stop just now, after forty days? He would have held out for a long time, a time without limit, even yet; why stop just now, when he was still at the height of hungering, indeed not yet at the height? Why did they want to rob him of the fame of hungering still further, of becoming not only the greatest hunger artist of all times, which, indeed, he probably was already, but also to outperform himself far beyond all comprehension, for he felt there was no bounds to his capacity for hungering.

Eventually the Hunger Artist, his prospects much diminished, parts ways with his impresario, and is forced to take a job with a circus. There his efforts draw only passing interest, and he is kept in a straw-filled cage, forgotten, and unappreciated. His attendants lose track of the extent of his hungering, which far surpasses any of his previous attempts which were always diligently capped at forty days by his prudent manager. He dies not long after, when someone notices the almost empty cage with the hunger artist buried under the straw. Before dying, he utters a few last words to the indifferent attendant, maintaining that he could not have done otherwise than hunger: “Because I could not find food that was to my taste. If I had found it, believe me, I would not have caused a stir, and would have eaten my fill, like you and everyone else.”

Published in 1922, this was one of Franz Kafka’s last stories. He was a writer who achieved almost no recognition in his own lifetime, and shortly before his untimely death instructed his friend Max Brod to destroy the work he had entrusted to him. This story, however, published in the periodical Die neue Rundschau in October of that year, he wished to preserve. The eminent critic J. P. Stern noted that it not only served as an epigraph to his brief and tragic life, but also as an artistic imperative to those that would come in his wake (for, despite it all, he had a sense of fate and a belief in his own gifts). It was a response to a question that had been essential to young men across Europe suffering from a comparable mal du siècle. It was a question formulated by Friedrich Nietzsche — in the posthumous collection The Will to Power — a philosopher who was in many ways their dissolute patron saint, and remains still for many in our uneasy present: “The deepest distinction: whether it is hunger or abundance that becomes creative?”

Stern continues, attempting to attribute a meaning and purpose to this enigmatic story:

Without an impresario to set a limit to his fasting, the hunger artist is at last free to attempt the ultimate perfection of his art, and indeed reaches it. His death is hardly noticed. What is left of him is tossed out with the soiled straw on which he lay, to make room for a young panther, a sleek beast fed on chunks of raw meat [ . . . ]. Deprived of a public, it seems that the hunger artist ends by practising his self-destructive art for art’s sake. His justification through the perfecting of his art is achieved at the supreme cost of self-sacrifice.

Yet, as Stern could not help but note, since the Hunger Artist knows himself how naturally and easily hungering came to him, and that this art was inspired by the mere fact that he could not actually find the food he liked — this supreme and noble act of artful self-annihilation becomes meaningless in the final analysis:

. . . the story leads us to the deep doubt Kafka had concerning the living value of his art and his fear that it is not a bounty of life but the product of deprivation. This, after all, is the story of a man’s validation through the art he practises, the only thing he knows — a validation achieved through a supreme effort which turns out to be no effort at all.

We see in this rather dissolute story, a not dissimilar predicament to our contemporary Romantic archetype, the incel. It is a story motivated by a profound and irredeemable self-disgust, loathing, and contempt, and it can now be considered, along with its author, to be “great,” since we feel so far removed — and thus insulated — from the anguish and pain which prompted it, and because we have imbued the fundamentally self-destructive neurosis of its author (as “bad subject”) with the highest aesthetic values available to us for appreciation of literature. Such values are the product of a misapprehension, a mistaken belief inspired by the Romantics’ apparently sincere adherence to the undulating truth furnished by subjective experience. Contra the Nazi philistine, whose idea of art didn’t go much beyond the pretty picture, I too can appreciate the peculiar vitality of such art. It is indeed anything but “degenerate” and yet I cannot, I refuse to, see it as healthy.

For the original Romantic ambition was far grander, and far more ambitious, than the promulgation of lyricism — it aspired to a great deal more than the proliferation of mere subjectivity. Such subjectivity was a waypoint, a means to rediscover and reacquaint ourselves with the attributes of a common and shared human experience, which can be encompassed by Frederick Beiser’s notion of the “Romantic Imperative.” The awareness Beiser’s notion — the attributes of a common and shared human experience — should, then, be at the forefront of our minds. And yet, awareness may not be enough — we must be dutiful. Though the romantics ultimately failed in this duty, their defeat should be salutary for us in confronting the specific material conditions of our disconsolate age. The nineteenth century did inform the twentieth, but the inheritance it bequeathed was, for better and mostly worse, a Century of the Self. We live with that inheritance still; only now it has become a universal sickness; narcissism, solipsism, compulsory vanity, and pointless and self-pitying introspection that has become a crutch and a blight in regard to all art. Unless, and until, we are capable of surmounting this sickness — the fate of the New Romanticism, like its predecessor, will already be sealed.

Udith Dematagoda is an author, literary scholar, and publisher of Hyperidean Press. He writes about literature, philosophy and contemporary culture on the substack Immanent Dissolution.