Em The American Scholar, um texto antigo de Jacques Barzun sobre modernismo:

The Cradle of Modernism

From the Autumn 1990 issue of The Scholar

By Jacques Barzun

Two things besides fatigue account for the radical shift in outlook away from Romanticism and for the extraordinary animus, the angry revulsion, the indignant scorn with which the next generations treated the movement. One is the revolutions of 1848; the other is the collapse of philosophy from an inadequate idealism into a crude materialism. Poets have no obligation to be philosophers and few of them read philosophy, but most if not all absorb the new doctrines in the air of their time and these affect their work, both the contents and the form.

Eighteen-forty-eight in France and its four-year sequel of uprisings all over Europe toppled thrones, caused repression, civil wars, executions and exiles, and finally brought on an eighteen-year dictatorship under a nephew of Napoleon in the country where Liberal democracy had first sought to establish itself. Those events broke the back of the century culturally and emotionally. Many artists died or fled from their homelands, promising careers were ruined, and perhaps worst of all, intellectuals were discredited on the one hand and disillusioned on the other.

Every generous idea previously accepted was now despised and, in fact, blamed for failure to bring about the better world. Love, liberty, progress, the sovereign people, the brotherhood of man, and the oneness of spirit under a mysterious but manifest providence — these were now regarded as the vaporings of feeble minds or glib rhetoricians. What was true was hard matter and evil man, nothing else. Science confirmed the first of these sole realities, politics the other. Hence Realism and Materialism: “Things are in the saddle, / And ride mankind.”

Realism, moreover, was defined as the commonplace, the dull, dreary, sordid repetitious occurrences of daily life. They made anything other than soberness of word and feeling ridiculous. To be sure, the Romanticists had often felt despair; they were not fools — or blind. But their love of life was strong, and they were also gifted with the love of love; those among them who survived the debacle of 1848 kept their faith in humankind and felt it a duty to continue the fight for political freedom and social equality. Hugo, exiled on his Channel Island for eighteen years, was the chief spokesman for this “Nevertheless” attitude and thereby earned the contempt of the younger men who knew that ideas were “mere” ideas and worthless. He continued to love and worship nature; they, on the contrary, were possessed by the emotion that Roger Williams has described and analyzed in his book The Horror of Life and has shown by psychological and medical evidence to have been no affectation but fact.