The Sickness of the Century

The mal du siècle, the sickness of the century, was a sickness of the last century. Today we no longer even understand this sickness, so far off has the last century become. Nothing is so out of date as what happened yesterday: Greek antiquity is not old-fashioned; our grandfathers' day is.

The 'sickness of the century' was also called 'world-sorrow'. World-sorrow is sorrow on account of the world: sorrow that the world is as it is and not as the poets dreamed it; that life is a chain of small and grey realities, and is not made up solely of noble and exalted feelings.

The protagonist and very pattern of the age of world-sorrow was Lord Byron, the great English poet. For decades upon decades people lived under Byron's spell: at the beginning of the century Count István Széchenyi opened his diary with quotations from Byron, and in its latter half Queen Elisabeth was still copying Byron's verses into her own. To Byron's cradle, says Macaulay, every fairy had been invited, save one. And indeed the fairies came; one bestowed on him nobility, another genius, a third beauty. But the wicked fairy who had been not been invited came last, and, since she was too late to reverse what her sisters had done for their favourite, she mixed some curse into every blessing. Byron sprang from an old and noble family, but the family, through crimes and follies, had fallen into decline… he had great abilities, but there was something sickly in his mind… he had such a head that sculptors delighted to carve it in marble, but a foot as lame as a street-corner beggar's…

But the chief trouble, the sickness of the century, sat in Byron's own soul. His life was played out upon the summits of mankind. It is a life like some magnificent film: he is feted and hounded, attended at every step by loves and scandals, at once and in one person the world-weary man of fashion and the magnfiicent hero of liberty; ladies faint when he enters the room unawares; a girl, ten years after Byron's death, falls so in love with him that she takes her own life for his sake. He had everything that life can give: brilliance, riches, a literary success such as has fallen to scarcely anyone besides him, and a success with women no less; self-sacrificing friends and women surrounded him, and he was able to dedicate both his fortune and his life to the service of a great cause — and yet he was unhappy.

Consciously unhappy and proud of it. When, in Rome, he called upon Thorvaldsen, the world-famous sculptor, to have his likeness made, Thorvaldsen was surprised to see Byron seat himself before him in some quite peculiar, dramatic pose. He asked him merely to be as he usually was. "But this is how I am!" cried Byron, affronted. And when the bust was finished, it did not please him. "It is no good," he said; "I am far more unhappy than that."

And how many followed him into that willed, carefully guarded sorrow! Men would enter company with a dark expression, conspicuously concealing their secret grief. Ladies ate vinegared salad and chalk to make themselves pale, or ate nothing at all. In this too it was Byron who bewitched the age. For Byron was inclined to stoutness, yet, as an Englishman and a man of fashion, he was sorely anxious for his figure. From time to time he kept a strict diet, taking little but biscuit and mineral water — though it is true that after a while he would weary of it and make up the arrears with measureless eating and drinking. This forced and irregular slimming undermined his nerves, heightened his irritability, and became, as it were, the bodily ground of his world-sorrow. By degrees he came to regard eating, taken altogether, as a thing contemptible and unworthy; he was disenchanted with a marchesa because she despatched a veal cutlet with a hearty appetite, while his greatest love, Countess Teresa Guiccioli, is said to have eaten nothing at all. Under Byron's influence eating then went out of fashion among the more refined souls — not because they feared growing fat, as our lady contemporaries do, but because appetite could not be reconciled with world-sorrow.

Our century is in every respect more unfortunate than the peacefully developing, prosperous and mild, bourgeoisly self-assured and honest last century. But in this one thing it is the more fortunate: that it has been cured of the 'sickness of the century'. After the pale, fragile dreamers of the last century, and its sloping-shouldered young ladies forever faint with the headache, there came into fashion the sporting, sun-tanned women and men of today. Sorrow is no longer a glory; on the contrary, good cheer is now obligatory — keep smiling — and whoever is in trouble today honestly strives to hide it from his fellow men, lest they make his plight worse still with their contemptuous pity.

And it is a strange thing, but so it is: the good fortune that the 'sickness of the century' has passed we owe to our living in such an unfortunate and restless age. In the peaceful, happy nineteenth century people had ample leisure to occupy themselves with their souls — and the soul, left to itself, is generally sad. Sad, because it is soul in a world of matter; and sad, because it is left to itself. But who, in our own day, can afford the luxury of living for his soul? These burdened times lay claim to all our strength. Day after day and hour by hour we must do battle anew with the seven-headed dragon of reality, for ourselves, for our own, for our country. We feel only the immediate pains, and have no leisure to divine those great, supra-personal sorrows, as Byron and his age did. And that is a great good fortune within our misfortune.