112
PARTISAN REVIEW
pictured the twenty-fifth century as a relapse into anthropoid animal–
ity; and there is a sense of the impending collapse of western civiliza–
tion both in Nietzsche's
Twilight of the Idols,
(1889), and in Max
Nordau's
Degeneration,
which was immensely successful in its 1895
English translation. The idea gained even wider currency from Oscar
Wilde 's
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891), where Lord Henry mur–
murs
"Fin de Siecle,"
and his hostess knowingly answers
"Fin du
globe."
The most immediate basis for this loss of confidence in the future
was probably political, but the implications of natural science were
also important.
Darwin himself had been in the main dubious about whether any
political or psychological deductions about man and his future could
be drawn from evolutionary theory, a good many of Darwin's follow–
ers, however, had drawn such deductions, and, in the case of the most
eminent of them, Thomas Huxley, they had become increasingly
pessimistic.
In
his influential and widely-reported 1893 Romanes
lecture on "Evolution and Ethics," a lecture which had the optimism
of Spencer as its main target, Huxley asserted an intractable dualism
between nature and human values which is in many ways parallel to
that which Conrad presented in
Heart of Darkness.
Spencer had been sure that what he regarded as the necessary law
of progress meant that "evil and immorality" would disappear, and
"man become perfect. " Huxley had no such illusions. H e conceded
that "after the manner of successful persons, civilized man would
gladly kick down the ladder by which he has climbed. He would be
on ly too pleased
to
see 'the ape and tiger die. ' But they decline to suit
his convenience, and the unwelcome intrusion of these boon compan–
ions of his hot youth into the ranged existence of civi l life adds pains
and griefs, innumerable and immeasureably great, to those which the
cosmic process brings on the mere animal." The prospect of happiness
or perfection, then, is "as misleading an illusion as ever was dangled
before the eyes of poor humanity"; man will always "bring with him
the instinct of unlimited self-assertion," so that his future will be "a
constant struggle ... in opposition to the State of Nature"; and this
unhappy conflict will continue until "the evolution of our globe shall
have entered so far upon its downward course that the cosmic process
resumes its sway; and, once more, the State of Nature prevails over the
surface of our planet."
Five years later, in 1898, even the sanguine positivism of Herbert
Spencer had apparently evaporated and he was inclined to agree,
