Abstract
A significant strain of thought in European modernist literature identified the formal achievement and classic timelessness to which its high art aspired with the historical aristocracy and its traditions. At the same time, modernist authors portrayed the twentieth-century deadend of this aristocracy through the demise of one of its potent symbols: the horseman-soldier. Novelists (Proust, Ford, Roth) explored the class-inflected idea of the artwork within depictions of a changing society. Lyric poets (Rilke, Yeats) located an aristocratic realm of aesthetic play apparently outside of history. Both kinds of writers assimilated this artistic/noble realm with childhood immaturity on the one hand, with death on the other. In this attraction to an expiring aristocracy, such modernism was uncertain how grown-up and modern it wanted to be.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
I am grateful to Olivier Gildas Tonnerre for pointing this passage out to me, and for other insightful exchanges in conversation.
See the chapter, “Nobility and Mobility in Modern Britain,” in Cannadine (1994, pp. 55–73).
On the opposite phenomenon, the late nineteenth century characterization of art as non-functional and therefore aristocratic, see Angenot (1989, pp. 788–792). More generally on the non-functional and literature, with a particular emphasis on literature after the French Revolution and fall of the Ancien Régime, see Orlando (1993 and 1994; English translation: 2006).
See Mayer (2010 [1981], pp. 285–295), and his fourth chapter on “Official Culture and the Avant-Gardes,” (pp. 189–273), which argues for a social conservatism underlying the latter; Angenot, 1889 (1989, pp. 781–799). Ben de Bruyn and David Martens discuss de Rougemont’s late version of this nostalgia for aristocracy and his program to build a future culture on aristocratic lines in “La passion aristocratique de l’Occident. Denis de Rougemont: lecteur d’une tradition, prophète d’un déclin” (2012, pp. 401–418).
My thinking on this divergence in modernist literature owes a great deal to a conversation with Barry McCrea, who has studied the modernist interest in dying languages, a parallel phenomenon to a dying social class. On the modern idea of art, traceable back to the romantics, that ascribes self-sufficiency and internal logic to the work of art, particularly to poetry, see Todorov (1977, pp. 206–260); see also Greene (1991).
Proust (1987). I will refer to this edition by indicating, the respective volume followed by the page number(s).
I am indebted to Andrea Gadberry who has pointed out, in the context of Propertius and, surprisingly, Descartes, the connection between complaint (querela, complainte) and elegy.
“Un sous-officier qui essayait un cheval dans la cour, très occupé à le faire sauter, ne répondant pas aux saluts des soldats, mais envoyant des bordées d’injures à ceux qui se mettaient sur son chemin, adressa à ce moment un sourire à Saint-Loup et, s’apercevant alors que celui-ci avait un ami avec lui, salua. Mais son cheval se dressa de toute sa hauteur, écumant. Saint-Loup se jeta à sa tête, le prit par la bride, réussit à le calmer et revint à moi” (2, pp. 371–372).
“Ainsi pour nous autres cavaliers, nous vivons sur le Service en Campagne de 1896 dont on peut dire qu’il est périmé, puisqu’il repose sur la vieille et désuète doctrine qui considère que le combat de cavalerie n’a guère qu’un effet moral par l’effroi que la charge produit sur l’adversaire. Or les plus intelligents de nos maîtres, tout ce qu’il y a de meilleur dans la cavalerie, et notamment le commandant dont je te parlais, envisagent au contraire que la décision sera obtenue par une véritable mêlée où on s’escrimera du sabre et de la lance et où le plus tenace sera vainqueur non pas simplement moralement et par impression de terreur, mais matériellement” (2, pp. 414–415).
There is a first version of this scene in Proust’s Jean Santeuil (III, p. vi), where, in a late addition to this novel that Proust had already more or less abandoned and would never publish, the character Bertand de Réveillon walks over tables in his haste to greet his friend Jean; Jean Santeuil (1952, 1, pp. 295–298). Both Bertrand and Saint-Loup, of whom Bertrand is a prototype, are based on Proust’s real-life friend, Bertrand de Fénelon, who in 1902 walked on the back of the restaurant banquettes to bring Proust a greatcoat; see Painter (1959, 1, pp. 366–367). Fénelon died fighting in World War I in 1914. Painter records (2, pp. 162–163) that Jean Cocteau would subsequently duplicate the feat on or about 1911. Cocteau subsequently claimed that he was, in fact, the original of Saint-Loup’s balancing act; see Steegmuller (1970, pp. 521–522).
“…sans y embarrasser Saint-Loup les sauta adroitement comme une cheval de course un obstacle; confus quelle s’exerçât uniquement pour moi et dans le but de m’éviter un mouvement bien simple, j’étais en même temps émerveillé de cette sûreté avec laquelle mon ami accomplissait cet exercice de voltige; et je n’étais pas le seul; car encore qu’ils l’eussent sans doute médiocrement goûté de la part d’un moins aristocratique et moins généreux client, le patron et les garçons restaient fascinés, comme des connaisseurs au pesage, un commis, comme paralysé, restait immobile avec un plat que des dîneurs attendaient à côté… des applaudissements discrets éclatèrent dans le fond de la salle” (2, p. 705).
Leo Bersani comments on this episode in a more general dicussion of aristocratic society as a work of art; see Bersani (1965, pp. 139–155). At the basis of aristocratic glamor, Bersani (pp. 141–143) notes, is the caste’s “confidence in their own value,” which produces in turn the narrator Marcel’s “fantasy of [their] self-sufficiency.” The scene is also discussed by Lamont (1973, pp. 226–246).
“…comme dans le paysage antique où à la place d’une nymphe disparue il y a une source inanimée, une intention discernable et concréte s’y était changée en quelque qualité du timbre, d’une limpidité étrange, appropriée et froide” (2, p. 348).
“…permettait à ce goût de s’exercer sans la contrainte d’aucune autre considération dont tant de jeunes bourgeois eussent été paralysés” (2, p. 707).
« …telles étaient les qualités, toutes essentielles à l’aristocratie, qui, derrière ce corps non pas opaque et obscure comme eût été le mien, mais significatif et limpide, transparaissaient, comme à travers une œuvre d’art la puissance industrieuse, efficiente qui l’a créée, et rendaient les mouvements de cette course légère que Robert avait déroulée le long du mur, aussi intelligibles et charmants que ceux de cavaliers sculptés sur une frise » (2, p. 707).
“Le vrai moderne devient classique au lieu de se démoder,” Antoine Compagnon comments in Proust entre deux siècles (1989, p. 28), where he reflects on tensions between the historicism (and implied teleology, whether of decadence or of progress) that underlies a modern conception of originality and the recognition of the intrinsic (timeless) merits of the work of art. See also Compagnon (1990). The issue, I have argued, begins in the Renaissance; see Quint (1983, pp. 214–220).
“Un artiste n’a pas besoin d’exprimer directement sa pensée dans son ouvrage pour que celui-ci en reflète la qualité: on a même pu dire que la louange plus haute de Dieu est dans la négation de l’athée qui trouve la Création assez parfaite pour se passer d’un créateur” (2, p. 708).
For a good discussion of the novel’s exploration of the idea of the gentleman and the model of the chivalric knight, see Berberich (2006, pp. 185–209).
The final crisis of the novel begins in part 4 when Edward makes a gift of the old horse he is riding to the son of a recently impoverished neighbor forced to sell his hunters (Ford 1990, pp. 239–241), an act of aristocratic generosity that infuriates Leonora.
For the aristocratic male, particularly one with (horse) whip in hand, as an object of sexual fascination and fantasy, see Quint (2010, pp. 104–121).
In Ford’s complex ironies, Leonora is both the novel’s realist who understands the monetary bottom line and its truest believer, a Catholic who is horrified by Florence Dowell’s celebration of Protestant modernity—the emptying of the eucharist, and hence of language itself, of its real presence and meaning—at the moment when she is also seducing Edward before Leonora’s eyes. See the revelatory reading of Jacobs (1978, pp. 32–51), which relates this theological horror to the chatter of the narrator Dowell. Catholic himself, Ford suggest that the two perspectives—real money, real presence—are not incompatible.
“Der Monarch,”—hieß es—“hatte sich im Eifer des Gefechts so weit vorgewagt, dass er sich plötzlich von feindlichen Reitern umdrängt sah. In diesem Augenblick der höchsten Not sprengte ein blutjunger Leutnant auf schweissebedecktem Fuchs herbei, den Säbel schwingend. Hei! wie fielen da die Hiebe auf Kopf und Nacken der feindlichen Reiter!” Und ferner: “Eine feindliche Lanze durchbohrte die Brust des jungen Helden, aber die Mehrzahl der Feinde war bereits erschlagen. Den blanken Degen in der Hand, konnte sich der junge, unerschrockene Monarch leicht der immer schwächer werdenden Angriffe erwehren. Damals geriet die ganze feindliche Reiterei in Gefangenschaft. Der junge Leutnant—Joseph Ritter von Trotta war sein Name—bekam die höchste Auszeichnung, die unser Vaterland seinen Heldensöhnen zu vergeben hat: den Maria-Theresienorden” (Roth 1932, pp. 18–19).
“Alle historischen Taten. . .werden für den Schulgebrauch anders dargestellt. Es ist auch so richtig, meiner Meinung nach. Die Kinder brauchen Beispiele, die sie begreifen, die sich ihnen einprägen. Die richtige Wahrheit erfanden sie dann später!” (Roth 1932, pp. 20–21; 8–9).
See the rich analysis in Tonkin (2008, pp. 133–148).
“Der Lipizzanerschimmel kam tänzelnd einher, mir der majestätischen Koketterie der berühmten Lipizzanerpferde, die im Kaiserlich-Königlichen Gestüt ihre Ausbildung genossen. Ihm folgte da Hufgetrappel der Halbschwadron Dragoner, ein zierlicher Paradedonner. Die schwarz-goldenen Helme blitzten in der Sonne. Die Rufe der hellen Fanfaren ertönten, Stimmen fröhlicher Mahner: Habt acht, habt acht, der alte Kaiser naht!… Kein Leutnant der Kaiser- und Königlichen Armee hätte dieser Zeremonie gleichgültig zusehen können. Und Carl Joseph war einer des Empfindlichsten. Er sah den goldenen Glanz, den die Prozession verströmte und er hörte nicht den düstern Flügelschlag der Geier. Denn über dem Doppeladler der Habsburger kreisten sie schon, die Geier, seine brüderlichen Feinde. Nein, die Welt ging nicht unter, wie Chojnicki gesagt hatte, man sah mit eigenen Augen, wie sie lebte!… Da wallten über die Fahrbahn der Ringstraße in zwei breiten Reihen die Leibgardisten in weißen Engelspelerinen mit roten Aufschlägen und weißen Federbüschen, schimmernde Hellebarden in den Fäusten, und die Straßenbahnen, die Fiaker und selbst die Automobile hielten vor ihnen ein, wie vor wohlvertrauten Gespenstern der Geschichte” (Roth 1932, pp. 338–341).
“Es zerfiel in zahlreiche tiefe Schatten und helle Lichtflecke, in Pinselstriche und Tupfen, in ein tausendfältiges Gewebe der bemalten Leinwand, in ein hartes Farbenspiel getrockneten Öls. . .Von Jahr zu Jahr schien das Bildnis blasser und jenseitiger zu werden, als stürbe der Held von Solferino noch einmal dahin, als zöge er sein Andenken langsam zu sich hinüber, und als müsste eine Zeit kommen, in der eine leere Leinwand aus dem schwarzen Rahmen noch stummer als das Porträt auf den Nachkommen niederstarren würde” (Roth 1932, pp. 60–61).
“…aus der bemalten Leinwand strömten sie ihm entgegen, die Einsamkeit und das Alter.”
Im Auge Traum. Die Stirn wie in Berührung / mit etwas Fernem. Um den Mund enorm / viel Jugend, ungelächelte Verführung, / und vor der vollen schmückenden Verschnürung / der schlanken adeligen Uniform / der Säbelkorb und beide Hände –, die / abwarten, ruhig, zu nichts hingedrängt. / Und nun fast nicht mehr sichtbar: als ob sie / zuerst, die Fernes greifenden, verschwänden. / Und alles andre mit sich selbst verhängt / und ausgelöscht, als ob wir’s nicht verständen / und tief aus seiner eigen Tiefe trüb –. / Du schnell vergehendes Daguerreotyp / in meinen langsamer vergehenden Händen. / Rilke (1938, pp. 168–169; trans. M. D. Herter Norton).
Freedman (1996, p. 10) recounts how the young “René developed genuine feelings for chivalry and military glory. Many of his childhood drawings were of soldiers, knight in armor, horsemen bearing banners with crosses… At the age when he started copying poems to please his mother, he wrote his father from a summer holiday that he was now “a major in the second cavalry squadron” and had a “saber hammered with gold.” We shall see those banners reappear below.
Rilke (1991, pp. 173–175; trans. E. Snow). See Snow’s remarks on the poem (1991, pp. xiv–xv).
On the British case, see Cannadine (1994, p. 69). The noble rider turned World War I pilot may have already been a cliché in 1937, when in Jean Renoir’s film, La Grande Illusion the German von Rauffenstein and the French cousin of the equally bluebooded Capitaine de Boeldieu are both aviators who had formerly been horsemen. Von Rauffenstein had even won the “Prince of Wales Cup” in 1909 riding his horse Blue Minnie (Lt. General Howard Vyse had won his Olympic bronze medal a year ealier on Blue Steel.) See Renoir (1974, pp. 29, 134, 137).
Marjorie Perloff has found more irony than I do in Yeats’s elegy; see Perloff (1966, pp. 299–305).
A. Norman Jeffares cites a letter of J.B. Yeats, the poet’s painter father, in which he tells his son that Robert Gregory was happy because he could throw himself into war, games, or art and beauty, all of them sharing the same aesthetic intensity and the same promotion of self-forgetfulness. See Jeffares (1970, pp. 141–142). On Gregory’s painting, see Pickering (2009, pp. 80–99).
On the relationship of Yeats’s attraction to the aristocracy and his fascist political stances, see George Orwell’s 1943 essay, “W. B. Yeats,” collected in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 2, My Country Right or Left, 1940–1943.
References
Angenot, M. (1989). 1889: Un état du discours social. Québec: Éditions du Préambule.
Badsey, S. (2008). Doctrine and reform in the British cavalry 1880–1918. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Berberich, C. (2006). A modernist elegy to the gentleman? Englishness and the idea of the gentleman in Ford’s The good soldier. In D. Brown & J. Plastow (Eds.), Ford Madox Ford and Englishness (pp. 185–209). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Bersani, L. (1965). Marcel Proust: The fictions of life and art. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bourget, P. (1907). L’Émigré. Paris: Plon-Nourrit.
Cannadine, D. (1990). The decline and fall of the British aristocracy. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Cannadine, D. (1994). Aspects of aristocracy: grandeur and decline in modern Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Compagnon, A. (1989). Proust entre deux siècles. Paris: Seuil.
Compagnon, A. (1990). Les cinq paradoxes de la modernité. Paris: Seuil.
de Bruyn, B., & Martens, D. (2012). La passion aristocratique de l’Occident. Denis de Rougemont: lecteur d’une tradition, prophète d’un déclin. C. Meurée (Ed.). Le Souci de l’avenir chez les écrivains francophones. Les Lettres romanes, 66(3–4), 401–418.
de Man, P. (1979). Allegories of reading: Figural language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Eliot, T.S. (1958) [1921]. The Metaphysical Poets. In Selected Prose. Hammondworth: Penguin.
Ellman, R. (1948). Yeats: The man and the masks. New York: E. P. Dutton.
Ford, F. M. (1990). The good soldier (T. Moser, Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Freedman, R. (1996). Life of a poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Greene, T. M. (1991). Poésie et magie. Paris: Julliard.
Jacobs, C. (1978). The (too) good soldier: ‘A real story’. Glyph, 3, 32–51.
Jeffares, A. N. (1970). The circus animals: Essays on W.B. Yeats. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Jeffares, A. N. (1996) [1949]. W. B. Yeats: man and poet. London: Kyle Cathie.
Kenyon, D. (2011). Horsemen in no man’s land: British cavalry & trench warfare 1914–1918. Barneley: Pen & Sword.
Komar, K. L. (1987). Transcending angels: Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Lamont, R. C. (1973). Le rituel dramatique dans A la recherche du temps perdu. In L. B. Price (Ed.), Marcel Proust: A critical panorama (pp. 226–246). Urbana: Universtiy of Illinois Press.
Mayer, A. (2010) [1981]. The persistence of the old regime: Europe to the great war. London: Verso.
Mazzoni, G. (2011). Teoria del romanzo. Bologna: Il Mulino.
Orlando, F. (1993 and 1994). Gli oggetti desueti nelle immagini della letteratura. Turin: Einaudi.
Orlando, F. (2006). Obsolete objects in the literary imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press. [English translation].
Orwell, G. (1943). W. B. Yeats. In S. Orwell & I. Angus (Eds.), The collected essays, journalism and letters of George Orwell, Vol. 2, my country right or left, 1940–1943 (pp. 271–276). New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.
Painter, G. D. (1978) [1959]. Marcel Proust: A biography. New York: Vintage Books.
Pavel, T. (2003). La pensée du roman. Paris: Gallimard.
Perloff, M. (1966). The consolation theme in Yeats’s ‘In memory of major Robert Gregory’. Modern Langage Quarterly, 27, 299–305.
Pickering, E. D. (2009). The artist’s tragic flight: Yeats’s portrayal of major Robert Gregory. Journal of Modern Literature, 32, 80–99.
Proust, M. (1952). Jean Santeuil 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard.
Proust, M. (1987). À la recherche du temps perdu (4 Vols.) (J.-Y. Tadié et al., Eds.). Paris: Gallimard.
Proust, M. (2005). The Guermantes way (M. Trehane, Trans.). New York: Penguin.
Quint, D. (1983). Origin and originality in Renaissance literature. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Quint, D. (2010). Noble passions: Aristocracy and the novel. Comparative Literature, 62, 104–121.
Renoir, J. (1974). La grande illusion. Paris: Balland.
Rilke, R. M. (1938). Translations from the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (M. D. Herter Norton, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton.
Rilke, R. M. (1962). Sonnets to Orpheus (M. D. Herter Norton, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton.
Rilke, R. M. (1963). Duino Elegies (J. B. Leishman & S. Spender, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton.
Rilke, R. M. (1991). The book of images (E. Snow, Trans.). San Francisco: North Point Press.
Roth, J. (2002) [1932]. The Radetzky March/Radetzkymarsch (J. Neugroschel, Trans.). Woodstock and New York: Overlook Press/ Berlin: Gustav Kiepenheuer.
Steegmuller, F. (1970). Cocteau: A biography. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
Steiner, J. (1969). Rilkes Duineser Elegien. Berne and Munich: Francke Verlag.
Tonkin, K. (2008). Joseph Roth’s march into history: From the early novels to Radetzkymarsch and die Kapuzinergrust. Rochester, NY: Camden House.
Todorov, T. (1977). Théories du symbole. Paris: Seuil.
Vendler, H. (2007). Our secret discipline: Yeats and lyric form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wortman, M. (2006). The millionaires’ unit: The aristocratic flyboys who fought the Great War and invented American air power. New York: Public Affairs.
Yeats, W. B. (1996). The collected poems of W. B. Yeats (2nd revised ed.) (R. J. Finneran, Ed.). New York: Scribner Paperback Poetry.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Quint, D. Uneasy riders: some literary modernists and the aristocracy. Neohelicon 42, 17–42 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-014-0271-8
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-014-0271-8