The Birth of the Modern: World Society, 1815-1830.

PAUL JOHNSON is spreading himself thick. He has already written two surveys of modern intellectual life; histories of Christianity the Jews the English people, and Ireland; biographies of Elizabeth I and Pope John XXIII; and of course Modern Times. Some of these are in my opinion wrongheaded books, but all are impressive for sheer breadth of knowledge. Johnson never writes a page without at least a couple of surprising facts.

Now he is apparently reduced to inventing a new subject, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830. He contends that this underrated period is that during which "the matrix of the modern world was largely formed." To those who doubt this, he says: "It is true that modernity was conceived in the 1780s. But the actual birth, delayed by the long, destructive gestation period formed by the Napoleonic Wars, could begin in full measure only when peace came and the immense new resources in finance, management, science, and technology which were now available could be put to constructive purposes." This is an ambitious book, to say the least. It runs to a thousand pages of text, plus notes and index. It covers hundreds of topics, from piano sales in Europe to Malay piracy. European and American politics are dealt with in detail; the main narrative is interwoven with dozens of subplots and essays, on Beethoven, landscape art, the semaphore, coach travel, the era of cheap land, the crushing of the American Indian, Islamic fundamentalism, the cotton industry, the Royal Navy, the changing status of the sexes, dueling, scientific advances, Spanish politics, secret societies in Italy, Byron's sex life, the rise of cricket, child prodigies, medical progress and body snatching, Turkish reform, Chinese corruption, the rise of international banking, and dozens of other matters, all more or less related to Johnson's central thesis.

What emerges from it all is a portrait of the rising middle class in the West, and of the incipient Westernization of the rest of the world. In Europe and America, there was unprecedented prosperity, which raised the condition of ordinary people. Infant mortality fell; birth rates soared; education thrived; the common people acquired new influence and political rights; women gained a measure of independence; the press became a major locus of power. The arts became democratized too: the piano became a household altar," as Johnson puts it, of the middle-class home, a symbol of the new availability of culture. Consider the episode of George IVs attempted divorce from his wayward wife, Caroline. When he succeeded to the throne in 1820, they were already so bitterly estranged that he didn't want her to share the royal honors. But when he schemed to get a divorce, he found several unexpected obstacles, among them popular sympathy for her. As early as 1813, Jane Austen had written: "Poor woman, I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a Woman, and because I hate her Husband." In 1820, the 14-year-old Elizabeth Barrett wrote: "At this period, when the base & servile aristocracy of our beloved country overwhelm with insults our magnanimous and unfortunate Queen, I cannot restrain my indignation, I cannot control my enthusiasm-my dearest ambition would be to serve her, to serve the glorious Queen of my native isle."

"For the first time in English history," Johnson comments, "an issue had arisen in which the entire country became emotionally involved and everyone felt they had a right to an opinion. In its own way it was an important landmark in the road to democracy and a tribute to the new power of the press which made such national participation possible."

We take participation for granted, but it came as a surprise to George IV. The same thing was happening in France, which saw "the growth of the printing industry and the increase in reading," along with "the growth of a large professional class of writers"all of which together made possible what Sainte-Beuve would call la literature industrielle, culminating in factory." Today, public opinion has become almost an artifact of mass production. Meanwhile, the Western powers were exploring and colonizing the whole world. "Perhaps the most important single aspect of modernity," Johnson writes, "was the way in which, almost imperceptibly, mankind was transforming itself into a single global community, in which different races and civilizations, now touching at all points, simply had to come to terms with each other." Profoundly true, but also a little fuzzy. It wasn't as if everyone was in touch with everyone else; the real common denominator was Western contact with all nations. "Coming to terms with each other" generally meant Western dominance, thanks to superior Western science, technology, and, most specifically, weapons. The Sioux and the Maori didn't meet each other; they met Western artillery. The "single global community" of the twentieth century was effected by a good deal of slaughter in the nineteenth, about which Johnson provides much less detail than he does about other topics, though he tells a fairly chilling amount about the fate of American Indians. He is right to point out that the non-Western world wasn't a set of Edens before the white man came. Western explorers and traders were honestly indignant about the backward and often savage societies they encountered. And the whole experience shouldn't be reduced to indignant homilies about Western imperialism; in the long run Westernization has been accomplished less by raw force than by the power of Western ideas. Still, it's a pity that so inclusive a book should give so little attention to how it all felt on the receiving end. The arrival of the West must have struck most natives as awesome, unimaginable, terrifying, and sometimes wonderful -like an invasion from Mars.

Thanks to the changes that gathered such momentum in this period, the ancient relation between civilization and wilderness has been nearly reversed. Human society used to be a set of unconnected islands in the ocean of nature; now society encloses nature and in some ways threatens its existence. Very little on the earth's surface is impenetrable any more, for better or for worse.

Johnson is certainly right to see the years 1815-1830 as an age of stupendous change, and he has done his best to convey the magnitude of it all, seeking, as he says, "to portray international society in its totality." He is less successful in conveying the sense of chronology he says he aims at; the ratio of digression to narrative is even higher in this book than in his others, though in the nature of the case that was probably unavoidable.

Some of the book's faults are harder to excuse. It is very nearly humorless; and this can be tiresome, not only because so much of Johnson's material seems to invite a smile, but because his tone is monotonous. He says everything with a sort of relentless finality, without doubt, irony, or degrees of knowledge. He addresses all topics with what might be called equicertitude. Nothing amuses him, nothing puzzles him; the meaning of it all seems too pat, too much an expression of Johnson's own attitudes. Surely even recent history has its mysteries. But his narrative lacks drama, not only because the outcome seems foreordained by Johnson's approach, but because he rarely gives the reader a vivid sense of the stakes in any given struggle. There is a dull sense of obviousness about it all. The Birth of the Modern is nevertheless an impressive feat of learning. Readers who don't want to plow through it from cover to cover may still find it useful as an encyclopedia of its period. It has an index, that indispensable device that can turn any book into a reference book; and this is a case where the parts are better than the whole, as far as reading pleasure is concerned.

Partly this is a tribute to Johnson's immense range of interests; not many readers will share it, though few will begrudge it. But it's also a reflection on his style. He never writes a bad sentence; but he never writes a brilliant one, either. He is intellectually far superior to another great popular historian, Will Durant; but Durant is charming to read at any length.

Worse yet, Johnson's understanding of "modernity" is superficial. He seems unaware of it as a fundamental form of knowing that has caused deep dislocations within the West itself. Though he is called a conservative, his outlook is essentially very Whiggish and progressive, and the category of the "modern" holds no terrors or even problems for him. It is merely associated with such evidently good things as a higher standard of living, improved medical care, and democracy. He isn't troubled by the tension between the modern and the sacred, or by modernity's powerful tendency to reduce everything to the measurable. He lacks empathy with the pre-modern societies whose encounters with the West have not only left them subjugated but have shattered their confidence in their gods.

Modernity is above all a drama in the soul, not a clash between primitive and complex technologies. That drama occurred in the West first. It's a great story, one that The Birth of the Modern fails to tell.