"Proud Tower"

The Hague

• Jaurès lashed at the imperialist adventure as a crime of capitalism which had frivolously imperiled peace without preparing for the consequence of challenging England... he wrote with foreboding, “Peace has been left to the whim of chance. But if war breaks out it will be vast and terrible. For the first time it will be universal, sucking in all the continents. Capitalism has widened the field of battle and the entire planet will turn red with the blood of countless men. No more terrible accusation can be made against this social system.” In his time it was still possible to suppose the fault lay in the system, not humanity.
• Science made all phenomena seem subject to certitudes and laws, and if man’s physical world could be understood and controlled, why not his social relations also?
• Fear as well as faith impelled the peace movement, fear of the unchained energy of the machine age.
• “To the German mind,” commented Secretary Hay, “there is something monstrous in the thought that a war should take place anywhere and they not profit by it.”
• Nietzsche recognized the waning of religion as a primary force in people’s lives and flung his challenge in three words: “God is dead.” He would have substituted Superman, but ordinary people substituted patriotism. As faith in God retreated before the advance of science, love of country began to fill the empty spaces in the heart. Nationalism absorbed the strength once belonging to religion.
• His naval colleague was the most unsubdued individualist of his time, possessed of a vigor and impetus remarkable in any time. Admiral Sir John Fisher was a force of nature entirely directed to the renaissance of British sea power through modernization of the Navy. His only other mania was dancing,
• During the bombardment of Alexandria when an armored train was needed to transport a landing force, he invented one.
• Discussions of this kind stimulated and absorbed the participants. The conduct of war was so much more interesting than its prevention.
• Everyone was therefore delighted to fall upon the question of dumdum, or expanding, bullets, which offered an opportunity both to outlaw something and to vent the general anti-British feeling of the time.
• “Your fanatical barbarian, similarly wounded, continues to rush on, spear or sword in hand; and before you have had time to represent to him that his conduct is in flagrant violation of the understanding relative to the proper course for the wounded man to follow—he may have cut off your head.”
• Amid the charms of the Huis ten Bosch, the prospect of a largely negative outcome, so lightly assumed at the start, began to cause anxiety about the public reaction, especially that of the Socialists, society’s “awful conscience.”
• The Twentieth was already unmistakably modern, which is to say it was absorbed in pursuit of the material with maximum vigor and diminished self-assurance; it had forgotten decadence and acquired doubt. Mechanical energy and material goods were redoubling and dominant, but whether beneficent had somehow become a question. Progress, the great certainty of the Nineteenth, no longer appeared so sure.
• Though the Russian fleet was annihilated, its defeat did not end the war, thus proving Bloch’s thesis, though few realized it, that against the total resources of a nation, victories on the battlefield were no longer decisive.
• He had the mental energy of a geyser and the flaws of Everyman. His Attorney-General, Philander Knox, rather admired the way the President ignored his advice and once remarked, “Ah, Mr. President, why have such a beautiful action marred by any taint of legality.” President Eliot still did not admire him, although when Roosevelt came to Cambridge in 1905 for his twenty-fifth reunion
• Translated into simpler language, this meant that Britain could not agree to anything which might, by limiting the damages of war, cause people to enter on it more lightly. With the British Liberals it was obligatory to find a moral reason to fortify a natural policy of self-interest, a practice no one carried to higher perfection or more obscure expression than Sir Edward Grey.

The artists:

• By now Strauss was the new Hero, so acknowledged in his self-portrait in music, A Hero’s Life.
• The musical world of the eighties was immersed in the party politics of classical versus romantic. New works were heard less for themselves than as upholders of the one or followers of the other. Composers, critics and public revolved in a perpetual war dance around the rival totem poles of Brahms and Wagner. To his partisans Brahms, who died in 1897, was the last of the great classicists, Wagner was anti-Christ and Liszt a secondary Satan.
• Even Wagner’s seduction of his wife could not dim Bülow’s admiration for the seducer’s operas. Strauss was affected also by the preaching of Alexander Ritter, first violinist of the Meiningen, who enjoyed extra prestige as husband of Wagner’s niece and convinced Strauss that Zukunftsmusik (Music of the Future) belonged to the successors of Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner. “We must study Brahms,” he asserted, “long enough to discover that there is nothing in him.”
• Strauss, like a circus trainer, could make music, like a trained seal, perform dazzling miracles against nature. Don Juan proved an enthralling seventeen minutes of music with its snatches of amorous melody, its headlong passion, its marvelous song of melancholy by the oboe, its frenzied climax and strange end on a dissonant trumpet note of disenchantment.
• Nothing so clever, so comic, so flashing and surprising as Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks had ever been heard. The brisk twinkling motif of the horn carries the medieval folk hero, Germany’s Peer Gynt, on his picaresque progress, with every kind of instrumental device portraying his adventures as he gallops through the marketplace scattering pots and pans, disguises himself as a priest, makes love, and comes to a bad end in court with a long drum roll announcing the death sentence. An impudent twitter of the clarinet voices his final defiance on the gallows and a faint trill carries off his last breath as his feet swing in air. Strauss’s program notes this time were more specific: “That was an awful hobgoblin,”
• superior fulfillment to become Übermensch, seduced the imagination of Europe. It stirred both the yearning hope of human progress as well as the beginning disillusionment with democracy.
• Where Lord Salisbury had feared democracy as leading to political, and Charles Eliot Norton to cultural, debasement, Nietzsche saw it as a ball and chain holding man back from his highest attainment.
• Nietzsche roamed wildly. His ideas rolled and billowed like storm clouds, beautifully and dangerously. He preached Yes to the promptings of energy as good per se, regardless of conflict with conventional morality.
• Realism was a German passion.
• The painter Philip Ernst, father of Max Ernst, when painting a picture of his garden omitted a tree which spoiled the composition and then, overcome with remorse at this offence against realism, cut down the tree.
• Architecturally, Berlin, Europe’s third largest city, was new and not beautiful. It belonged in style to what in America was called the Gilded Age.
• Berlin women of the middle class wore homemade clothes with plaid blouses, muddy-brown skirts, sack coats like traveling rugs, square-toed boots and nondescript hats that went with everything and matched nothing.
• Prussia, the ruling caste was drawn from the land-owning Junkers, or Prussian nobility, who were numerous, poor and backward. Looked down on by the Catholic nobility of Württemberg and Bavaria as coarse, tasteless and unfitted for social leadership, the Junkers made up in assertiveness what they lacked in education.
• They learned that instead of loading heavy equipment separately on each freight car from the side, the circus people laid connecting iron treads through the whole length of the train on which all equipment, loaded from one end, could be rolled straight through. By this means three trains, of twenty-two cars each, could be loaded in an hour. The circus technique promptly went to feed the insatiable appetite for speed of the German mobilization system. The Kaiser’s observers also noted the advantages of the great circus cooking wagons over stationary field kitchens, and adopted them for the Army so that meals could be cooked on the move.
• Frau Strauss did not permit dawdling. If her husband should be found on occasion wandering aimlessly around the house, she would command, “Richard, jetzt gehst componieren!” (Go ahead and compose!), and he would obey. If he worked too hard she would say, “Richard, put down that pencil!” and he would put it down.
• “Can’t I walk with you at least?” Strauss begged humbly. “All right—ten steps behind me!” and she stalked off followed by the hero of the evening at a respectful distance.
• Strauss returned to the painting on their way back through the rooms, studied it again and exclaimed, “Speyer is right. I am the Tintoretto of music!”
• A drama as lush and gruesome as Wilde trying hard could make it, Salome was a pursuit of sensation for its own sake, an effort to produce what Baudelaire called “the phosphorescence of putrescence.”
• as if the pressure of so much industrial success and military power were creating an inner reaction in the form of a need to negate, to expose the worms and passions writhing within that masterful, prosperous, well-behaved, orderly people. It was as if Bismarck had perforce produced Krafft-Ebing. Indeed Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis
• Lulu, who represents sensuality incarnate both heterosexual and lesbian. Her adventures proceed through brothels and dives, seduction, abortion, sadism, necrophilia and nymphomania in what a contemporary critic called “a torrent of sex foaming over jagged rocks of insanity and crime.”
• Hurt and indignant, the Kaiser retired to the estate of his friend Prince Fürstenberg, where, in the course of an evening’s festivities, Count Hülsen-Haeseler, chief of the Military Cabinet, appeared in a pink ballet skirt and rose wreath and “danced beautifully,” affording everybody much entertainment. On finishing he dropped dead of heart failure. Rigor mortis having set in by the time the doctors came, the General’s body could only with the greatest difficulty be divested of its ballet costume and restored to the propriety of military uniform.
• In Bloomsbury, Lytton Strachey prepared a new kind of biography. The Moscow Art Theatre demonstrated a new kind of acting. The Irish Renaissance flowered in Yeats and in J. M. Synge, who in Riders to the Sea and The Playboy of the Western World proved himself the only writer since Shakespeare to produce an equally fine tragedy and comedy.
• Ida Rubinstein borne on a palanquin surrounded by a whirling bacchanal of veils and rose leaves arranged to conceal the fact that as a dancer she was as yet barely trained. Paris found her almost “too beautiful, like strong perfume.”
• Bakst inspired Paul Poiret and five years of women’s fashions.
• It was Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) by Stravinsky... As the curtain rose on tribal games and dances, the music became vibrant and frenetic with primeval rhythms, the chant of trumpets, the driving beat of machinery, jazz metres and pitiless drums never before used with such power and abandon. It rose in intensity and excitement to a blazing climax and all the promise of a new age. It was the Twentieth Century incarnate. It reached at one stride a peak of modern music that was to dominate later generations. It was to the Twentieth Century what Beethoven’s Eroica was to the Nineteenth, and like it, never surpassed.
• Monteux threw desperate glances to Diaghilev who signed to him to keep on playing and shouted to the audience to let the piece be heard. “Listen first, hiss afterwards!” screamed Gabriel Astruc, the French manager, in a rage.