Conservatives of the Fin-de-Siècle

ELT 36:3 1993 else he was carrying that he couldn't leave instead of the painting—gold bullion perhaps?) An epüogue to the collection reprints a piece of juvenüia by Virginia Woolf entitled "A Terrible Tragedy in a Duckpond." The story makes no sense as an epüogue but it is useful to have the text that has been misrepresented in recent discussions of Woolf s chüdhood. A number of the pieces in A Cézanne in the Hedge were first given as talks at Charleston Trust meetings and more than a few have been recycled from or into books about Bloomsbury and its members. There are some insights and useful bits of information about Bloomsbury in these brief memoirs and discussions but almost all of them can be found in fuller form elsewhere. Several pieces stand out, and they are mainly by Quentin Bell. His memoir of Charleston theatricals, for example, includes an account of his lost prophetic play, Charleston Revisited. The play consisted of a guided tour for future visitors in which the furniture was identified with the audience: Keynes was a safe, the Woolfs' twin bookcases labelled Fact and Fiction, Clive Bell an eighteenth-century escritoire, etc. But too many of the contributions selected for A Cézanne in the Hedge attain only the customary levels of appreciative reminiscence and generality characteristic of fund-raising publications. Had the book been forthright about its origins, this commemorative tone would have made more sense. S. P. Rosenbaum University of Toronto Conservatives of the Fin-de-Siècle Michael Mariais. Conservative Echoes in "Fin-de-Siècle" Parisian Art Criticism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. χ + 245 pp. $35.00 THE END of the nineteenth century in France was a remarkably complex period füled with social, cultural, political and religious conflicts . The "Dreyfus Affair" itself became a symbol and polarized France. One long-term effect was proto-fascist nationalism. This nationalism found its roots in traditionalism and a fervent revival of Middle-Age Catholicism. It is this period about which Michael Mariais has written an enlightened critical study. His research into the symbolist writers is as extensive as it is, at least for this reader, wearily confusing. The prose is, however, clear and direct—but the ever-present need to compare the ideologies of that time with those of our time defies conventional thought. Like many neo-conservatives of today, some symbolist writers 372 BOOK REVIEWS moved from leftist political socialism to rightist nationalism. Indeed this must have made Marlais's task troubling, particularly since writing objectively about anachronistic idealism in our era of cynicism is simply not done. But Mariais reminds us that history is important and good solid research can inform us and help us understand who we were, where we are and perhaps charge us with some responsibüity as to where we ought to be going. I am indebted to Mariais for helping to sort out these contradictory ambiguities. Essentially, his thesis is simple: in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, modernism had been rather firmly established in French social, political and cultural institutions. The impressionists had cemented modern times' foothold on everyday life. This was to last, depending upon whom you speak to, about a hundred years. What Meyer Shapiro has called "freedom of the spirit," while not necessarily repudiated by postmodernity, has been the pathway for the diversity of art, culture and society since he described Courbet as the first modernist. By the 1880s, anti-naturalist, anti-academic, or anti-salon (read realist) tendencies among a large group of conservative writers advocated advanced art—i.e., neo-impressionism, nabis and symbolism—because they believed that idealism was the highest of human achievements. Naturalism was seen as the antithesis of idealism: man is far more important than his nature or environment. The conservative critics, Joséphin Péladan, J. K. Huysmans, Albert Aurier, Camüle Mauclair, the artist-critic Maurice Denis and others equated naturalism with scientism and scientism with botany and botany with Darwinism and, of course, Darwinism with atheism. This "evü"—naturalism—was applied to the impressionists as weU, since the impressionists were concerned with...