342
FRANK KERMODE
Naturally this fuss about centuries can be seen to be based on
the arbitrary calendar; it is known for a myth. You sometimes hear
people say, with a certain pride in their clerical resistance to the
myth, that the nineteenth century really ended not in 1900 but in
1914. But there are different ways of measuring an epoch. 1914 has
obvious qualifications; but if you wanted to defend the neater, more
mythical date, you could do very well. In 1900 Nietzsche died. Freud
published
The Interpretation of Dreams.
1900 was the date of Hus–
serl's
Logic,
and of Russell's
Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of
Leibniz.
With an exquisite sense of timing Planck published his
quantum hypothesis in the very last days of the century, December
1900. Thus, within a few months, were published works which
transformed or transvalued spirituality, the relation of language to
knowing and the very locus of human uncertainty, henceforth to be
thought of not as an imperfection of the human apparatus but part
of the nature of things, a condition of what we may know. 1900, like
1400 and 1600 and 1000, has the look of a year that ends a
saeculum.
The mood of
fin de siecie
is confronted by a harsh historical
finis
saeculi.
There is something satisfying about it, some confirmation of
the rightness of the patterns we impose. But as FociIIon observed, the
anxiety reflected by the
fin de siecle
is perpetual, and people don't
wait for centuries to end before they express it. Any date can be
justified on some calculation or other.
And of course we have it now, the sense of an ending. It has
not diminished, and is as endemic to what we call modernism as
apocalyptic utopianism is to political revolution. When we live in the
mood of end-dominated crisis, certain now familiar patterns of as–
sumption become evident. Yeats will help me to illustrate them.
For Yeats, an age would end in 1927; the year passed without
apocalypse, as end-years do; but this is hardly material. "When I was
writing
A Vision,"
he said, "I had constantly the word 'terror' im–
pressed upon me, and once the old Stoic prophecy of earthquake,
fire and flood at the end of an age, but this I did not take literally."
Yeats is certainly an apocalyptic poet, but he does not take it literally,
and this, I think, is characteristic of the attitude not only of modern
poets but of the modern literary public to the apocalyptic elements.
All the same, like us, he believed them in some fashion, and associated
