PART III

EUROPE AND AMERICA

I

THE AMERICAN DEFINITION OF PROGRESS

The two visits I paid to South and North America between 1907 and 1909 were the result of a lucky chance, not of a prearranged plan. In 1906, after having been plunged for ten years in the study of Roman history, I had no idea of crossing the Atlantic, much less of writing a book on America and Europe. I had never dreamt that my long researches in the great cemetery of the ancient world might start me suddenly one day along the road which leads to the New World. But destiny willed it so. In November of 1906, by invitation of the Collège de France, I delivered in Paris a course of lectures on the history of Augustus, in which I summarised the fourth and fifth volumes of my _Greatness and Decline of Rome_. There happened to be at Paris at that time a distinguished Argentine, Señor Emilio Mitré, son of that General Mitré who was one of the Republic’s most conspicuous politicians during the second half of the nineteenth century. He himself was a man of importance in the political world, and proprietor of the _Nacion_, which is not only the biggest, most serious, and most authoritative newspaper in Latin America, but one of the leading newspapers of the world. I had contributed to this paper for years, so I called on Mitré in Paris. He came to hear my lectures, and the day before the concluding one, November 29th,—he was due to sail for Buenos Aires on December 1st,—he came to me with a proposal that I should go to Argentina and there deliver some lectures. I accepted, impelled chiefly by curiosity to see that vast and rich country which, for the last ten years, had been so much talked about in Italy, and to which during the last half-century so many Italians had emigrated. I accordingly prepared my lectures, and on June 7, 1907, I sailed from Genoa for Buenos Aires with my wife and little boy. Every European who crosses the Atlantic and can wield his pen with any sort of effect writes his impressions when he gets back. Naturally, therefore, I too had promised several reviews and one publisher to bring back with me a volume of “Impressions of Argentina.”

At six P.M. on June 8th, we put in to Barcelona. Directly the steamer came alongside, the Brazilian consul came on board in search of me. He handed me a despatch from Baron di Rio Branco, the Brazilian Minister of Foreign affairs, who invited me in the name of the Brazilian Academy to stop at Rio, and read a paper there. I begged the consul to telegraph to Baron di Rio Branco that I could not stop on my voyage out, as I was expected at Buenos Aires; but that on my return I should be delighted to accept his kind invitation. As the steamer was to put in at Rio, I could arrange matters with him _en route_. As the steamer resumed her journey, and passed out of the Mediterranean into the vast wilderness of the ocean, I busied myself with some books of philosophy which I had brought along, amongst them, some of Buddha’s discourses, which had just been published in an Italian translation.

On June 24th, at 5 P.M., we reached the bay of Rio, one of the most marvellous spots in the world. But while we were gazing from the deck in admiration at the gloomy mountains standing round about and the woods which covered them, at the city rising from the sea towards the mountains, and the roseate glow of the setting sun upon the bay, we descried a steam launch laden with people coming towards us. It was a deputation from the Brazilian Academy and from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was coming to take us for a motor tour through the city, and afterwards to take us to dinner at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where Baron di Rio Branco was expecting us. We hastened ashore, and found some motors waiting for us at the Pharoux jetty. We jumped in, and were off.

As long as life lasts, I shall never forget that drive at sunset, between the dying light of evening and the first gleams of the electric lamps, which were just beginning to light up the marvellous city built in the midst of the remains of the primeval forest on the borders of the sea, on the hills, and on the mountains. I shall never forget our dash through endless streets, with hurried glimpses of multi-coloured houses, sumptuous palaces half hidden in superb gardens, avenues of gigantic palms which stretched far away into the night, glorious promenades along the seashore, and mountain peaks which beetled above the city. I longed to stop the car. But time pressed, and after having hurriedly traversed the whole city, we reached, about 7.30 P.M., Itamaraty (as the palace of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is called), where a select company of men and women were awaiting us in rooms ablaze with light. As soon as we had been introduced, dinner was served; a most sumptuous dinner, into which, among the most luscious ragoûts of the French cuisine, the thoughtful Minister of Foreign Affairs had introduced several Brazilian dishes. I remember the _palmiti_, a dish of palm-pith, cooked as we cook asparagus, and really delicious; and _bakury_, a white fruit from the equator, preserved in syrup, which reminded me strongly of the smell of magnolia and gave me the illusion of eating marvellous flowers.

Speeches followed the dinner, whereupon we returned on shipboard, but before doing so I had arranged in a corner of the drawing-room with Baron di Rio Branco, Giuseppe Graça Aranha, now Brazilian Minister at the Hague, and a distinguished writer, who was then the Minister’s secretary, and Machado de Assis, the great writer who was then President of the Brazilian Academy, that I would stop a couple of months in Brazil on my way back, repeat my Buenos Aires lectures, and visit the country. At 11 P.M., the steamer weighed anchor and left the dark bay, in which there was nothing now to be seen but the glitter of an infinite number of tiny lights.

That night, however, I did not sleep, so stunned and dazzled was I by that first fantastic glimpse of America, which will remain one of the most singular experiences of my life, though, so far, my life has not been devoid of strange and curious chances. I had started from Europe with no, or practically no, knowledge of the two Americas, excepting the little I had picked up here and there in books and papers which I happened to read. Consequently, my opinion of America was the same as that formed by other Europeans: that it was the country of material realities, of business, of fortunes made rapidly, of wealth stripped of every ornament, poetry, beauty, and ideal refinement; that rude and bustling America with which all cultured Europeans love to contrast Europe as the continent of the Ideal, where beauty, wisdom, and every refinement of civil life flourish. And behold! my first impression of America was as of a strip of India, and the first American city I had seen reminded me of the East, and especially, for some reason or other, of Bagdad, or rather, of the somewhat fantastic idea of Bagdad which I had conceived in the days when I read more often and more ardently than I do now, the _Orientales_ of Victor Hugo, and the other romantic poets of the middle of the nineteenth century. And in that city, I had been present at a succulent and magnificent banquet, at which, amidst the refinements of the old civilisation of Europe, I had tasted the unknown rarities of the tropics, in the company of elegant, cultured, and refined guests, with whom I had discussed in French the latest literary and artistic novelties, as if we had been on the banks of the Seine. Was it a reality or a dream?

Quite other surprises were, however, in store for me on my wanderings in America. Four days later, on June 27th, we reached Buenos Aires, where we were joyfully welcomed by a number of kind folk, who had spared neither trouble nor care to make our stay agreeable to us. Then began four months of really strenuous life, to borrow Theodore Roosevelt’s favourite expression. Conferences, receptions, banquets, visits to hospitals, schools, factories, workshops, and ranches; trips by boat, train, and motor-car. It was a real _moto perpetuo_. I passed the month of July at Buenos Aires. In August, I plunged into the interior, visiting successively Rosario, Mendoza, Cordova, Tucuman, Santiago, dell ’Estero, Santa Fé, Paraná, and penetrating right up to the foot of the Andes. I travelled about ten thousand kilometres in the railway train, observing, collecting documents, asking and answering questions, and discussing problems. All these, however, were labours less tiring than another, which became by degrees the principal preoccupation of my mind during those two months: the endeavour to put to flight a demon which kept obstinately springing up before my eyes, in conversations, on journeys, during visits, during dinner-parties, notwithstanding all the efforts I made to keep it at a distance; and which seemed determined to reappear at every moment and wound me in the inmost recesses of my European pride and in my most touchy European susceptibilities. What was this demon? It was American progress. Every day I had pointed out to me on my rapid journeys, immense and marvellous ranches, herds of many thousand head, markets overflowing with wealth, magnificent schools, and superb hospitals. I was given descriptions and demonstrations, in figures and in fact, of the rapid spread of cultivation, the increase of production, the bewildering prosperity of the banks, the expansion of Buenos Aires, now become the second city of the Latin world in wealth and population, after Paris. They were all interesting things to observe and study. Nevertheless, too many of those who showed them to me implicitly or explicitly established comparisons between this rapid increase and transformation in everything Argentine, and the more deliberate advance of the great nations of Europe, and deduced the conclusion that Argentina was a more progressive and advanced country.

The word “progress” is one of those which is much misused in Europe. I had no sooner landed in Argentina, however, than I recognised that the word had quite a different sound and significance on that side of the water from what it has in Europe. The standard by which my new transatlantic friends were unanimous in measuring progress was the rapidity of transformation and the magnitude of the results. New, modern, larger, were to them synonyms of progress and of improvement. Consequently, they had only to cast their eyes round their own country to find reasons for self-satisfaction. But this conception of progress at first somewhat amused and somewhat irritated me, just as the naïve touches of vanity in the young often amuse and irritate grown men. Many a time, when we were discussing the progress of Argentina and the comparisons, tacit or explicit, which were made with Europe, have I said to my Argentine friends:

“Undoubtedly the effort which you are making is a noble one, and a paying one. In thirty years, you have increased your wealth ten-, twenty-, even thirty-fold. You have been wonderfully quick in extending cultivation, railways, and population over the vast territory which Fortune has given you. You are now flooding the world with riches, and, profiting by the experience of others, you can transform, reshape, and make perfect your public services, your institutions, and your whole mode of living in the smallest number of years.

“You make a great mistake, however, if you think that the contrast between the rapidity of your growth and your changes and the slowness and immutability of Europe is any proof of your own nearer approach to perfection. That rapidity is a phenomenon of youth. A child’s weight and height double themselves every six months, year, two years, or three years in the first years of its life; while an adult stops growing or grows so slowly as to be hardly aware that he is doing so. Would you deduce from this that a boy of six years of age is superior to a man of forty? No. Childhood and manhood are two phases of life. Each has its own necessity, its own function, its own advantages and disadvantages. It is no more possible to compare them than it is to compare day and night, dawn and twilight, winter and summer; I can see no essential difference between the countries of Europe and your own. We are all children of the same civilisation; we have been nursed at the same breast. We are all like one to the other, though we may differ one from the other as brothers, or, if you prefer it, as cousins do. So an American progress, different from European progress, does not exist, though there are countries whose transformation, owing to external circumstances, may be retarded or accelerated. You have political institutions and social orders of less antiquity, and, therefore, of less rigidity and less strength than those of Europe. You also have a territory to exploit which is vaster, very much vaster, and much more easy to exploit, because civilisation supplies you, ready to hand, with almost perfect instruments for such exploitation. There you have the real difference between us.”

Though these arguments were listened to with courteous attention, they made but a slight impression on my hearers. I very soon realised that American progress, the rapid increase, that is to say, of the wealth of Argentina and the incessant modernisation of the customs and institutions of the country, were a sort of national religion, which was accepted by most people with a blind credence. So in the end, I was persuaded that this ardent faith in progress must be attributed to the preponderating influence of Buenos Aires, that immense city, almost half the population of which is composed of European immigrants in search of wealth. For it is the largest port, the principal emporium, and the financial centre of the Republic, through which passes most of the export and import trade, nearly all the great stream of wealth which flows out from the vast territory over the world, and from the world ebbs back to it again: a rich American city, after the European picture of such. It is only natural that a city whose wealth and size are being multiplied by the rapid development of the country should have adopted American progress as its religion, and should, through its influence, have imposed that religion on the whole country. The conclusion of the matter was, however, that the Argentine conception of progress was not and could not be anything but the passing exaltation of a fortunate country which, profiting by circumstances unusually favourable, could watch its wealth growing round it with bewildering rapidity. That, at any rate, was the conclusion I came to, and I thought it both reasonable and justifiable.

With this idea in my head, after a laborious, agreeable, and instructive stay of two months in Argentina, I sailed for Rio, making on my way thither a brief halt at Montevideo. I expected to find in Rio another American city like Buenos Aires. I was, however, mistaken. Brazil is not, like Argentina, a single body with one enormous head. Its economic activity is more diffuse and centres in different cities,—for coffee, in São Paulo; for rubber, in Manaos; for each one of the other great articles of production, in other cities scattered over the vast territory. Rio de Janeiro, though the chief political and intellectual centre of the Confederation, cannot, therefore, be called either the emporium or the port, or the economic capital _par excellence_. Consequently, it differs widely from Buenos Aires. It is less crowded, noisy, and busy. It lives, I might almost say, in the shade of its gardens and between the forest and the sea, quietly and reposedly. It is the only great American city I have visited in which people walk at a leisurely pace and not at headlong speed; and it not only lives reposedly, but it thinks, and even dreams a little.

While at Buenos Aires, we had lived surrounded by men of action; we found at Rio a coterie composed almost exclusively of intellectuals—literary men, journalists, historians, philosophers, and jurists. Most of them were state officials and members of the Brazilian Academy,—an academy founded about ten years ago and modelled exactly on the lines of the Académie Française,—composed, like it, of forty members, elected in the same way, and admitted with the same ceremonial. In a small inn situated on the slopes of Corcovado, on the outskirts of the town and the forest, whose roads were shaded by secular trees, we lived for six weeks, just as Plato and his friends lived in the gardens of the Academy; discussing art, literature, philosophy, right, and morality with the friends whom Graça Aranha, the diplomatist and man of letters chosen by Baron di Rio Branco to do us the honours of Brazil, gathered round us almost daily. At no moment of my life have I felt myself so much detached from, and so superior to, the accustomed preoccupations which form the groundwork of ordinary existence in the modern world. And when I found myself living amongst persons for whom the culture of Europe represented the supreme blessing of life, the greatest pride of civilisation, for a moment I believed myself freed from that demon of American progress which had dogged me in Argentina.

It was an illusion, however, which did not last long. Brazil is a country slightly older than Argentina. Owing to this reason, to its much greater size, to the variety of its climates and lands, which make it impossible to concentrate in a single city the direction of the whole of national life, and to other contingent reasons which it would take too long to enumerate here, Brazil has not developed in the last twenty years so rapidly as has Argentina. It has, however, developed much more quickly than any European country. I speedily saw that the rapidity of this progress was the great national pride of the Brazilians, even of those men of letters, philosophers, and writers, who professed to be such devoted disciples and admirers of Europe. In the same way the great national preoccupation was the acceleration, as far as possible, of the progress and increase of riches, and the exploiting and modernisation of the country, so that Brazil might not appear inferior in this particular to the other great states of America. An energetic administration had just finished the resanitation of Rio de Janeiro, destroying, at the cost of vast public works, all the breeding-places of yellow fever which up till then had infested it. The administration was then renovating it from top to bottom, opening streets and squares in the middle of the old quarters, constructing spacious promenades and gardens, and sumptuous public edifices, in a word, giving air and light and splendour and beauty to a city which was already beautiful in addition to being placed in a unique situation. I think there must be very few cities which in a few years have managed to destroy and rebuild, according to new plans, so large a part of themselves. Naturally the work has cost millions; but on the few occasions on which I timidly dared to make a remark to this effect, I received the laughing answer: “We are optimists; and we believe in progress!” This ædilitian transformation of Rio de Janeiro filled with pride all Brazilians, including my lettered and philosophical friends, on account of its rapidity and grandeur; and their pride was swelled by the thought that no European states, but perhaps the United States of North America alone, their great elder brother, could have done so much.

Everybody thought, moreover, that the whole of Brazil ought to be modernised just like Rio, from top to bottom. I visited São Paulo, the great coffee-producing state. I traversed from end to end Minas Gerães, the great agricultural and mineral state which, as a symbol, as it were, of its intention to modernise itself entirely, has recently constructed a smiling and graceful new capitol, Bello Horizonte, in a most picturesque position crowning the hoary Ouro Preto. Everywhere I found politicians, officials, professors, literary men, commercial men, bankers, Brazilian and European immigrants, united in the same thought: that railways must be built, machinery bought, able engineers engaged, mines explored, cultivation extended, and industries founded to increase the country’s rate of progress by modernising it entirely. It was useless for me to try to prove even to those of my Rio acquaintances who were endowed with the highest and finest intellectual culture, that this conception of progress was too simple and material; that real progress is not to make new or to make quickly, but to make better; that it is not enough to augment wealth, but that it is necessary also to put it to good use, a more difficult problem than the producing of it. I tried to convince my friends that if so simple and material a notion of progress acquired a strong hold on the popular mind, the public would infallibly be impelled to create, not a lofty and noble civilisation, but a sort of opulent barbarism. In Brazil, as much as in Argentina, my arguments beat harmlessly against a faith and a passion which demands no proofs. “American Progress” for the Brazilians too was the great historical force of the future, which is going to create the new world, and the new civilisation whose dim foreshadowing seems to be agitating the masses at the present time.

We returned to Italy in November. I recrossed the ocean from Rio de Janeiro to Genoa in fifteen days, during which I reread my books of philosophy. But the pages of Bergson, Kant, and Comte, which I read in mid-ocean, no longer riveted my attention as they had on the way out. For in the time for thought afforded me by the crossing, far from the world and its troubles, I plunged day by day in a more intense meditation on American progress, which, of all the things and phenomena I had witnessed, was that which had left on me the liveliest impressions. It was clear that it was not a theoretical idea, but a passion, a faith, a religion fervently embraced by nearly everybody. All the arguments which I had advanced to subject it to criticism had been fruitless; and not only ignorant men, and those eager to make money, but the most highly cultivated minds, the very intellectual élite of America, were blind to the contradictions and logical shortcomings of this conception. Nevertheless, was not this but an additional reason for studying this phenomenon thoroughly? It is not ideas which move and transform the world, but passions; and a passion, even if it be absurd, is a thousand times more powerful than a wise idea.

Now it was not difficult to see what would happen if this religion of American progress spread through the world. Europe would lose, so to speak, her rights of historical primogeniture, and all her ancient civilisation would lose a great part of its value. If the rapid increase of riches is the supreme measure of civilisation, and if, in consequence, the efforts of a people must be concentrated on everything which can accelerate this increase, it is clear that the most ancient, populous, and glorious countries of Europe will not be able to keep pace with the young countries and with the nations which are masters of vast territories; and that, bit by bit, the most glorious civilisations of Europe will come to be regarded by the eyes of the rising generations as relics and fossils of another age. This danger no longer appeared to me so distant and hypothetical as to many other Europeans. After what I had seen in America, many facts and thoughts and tendencies to which I had hitherto paid scarcely any attention in Europe, seemed to me to acquire a new significance. I saw everywhere, even in the ancient world, traces and proofs of the rapid spread of the American idea of progress, especially among the nations like Germany, which have developed industry to a great, perhaps a too great, extent; and in all the countries, classes, and professions which have identified their interests most completely with those of industry. So the enemy who threatened the destruction of the ancient civilisation of Europe had already invaded the Old World.

It was while I was meditating on these thoughts in mid-ocean that the idea occurred to me of writing something different from a book of impressions on Argentina and Brazil. Too many books of impressions of the two Americas are written in Europe; and literature of this sort, as copious as it is useless, has justly satiated the public. Inasmuch as this idea of progress implies a great conflict of tendencies, from which may arise a profound upheaval of our civilisation, why should I not contrast in a book the two conceptions of progress, that which America has created and is trying to impose on the world, and that which is even now professed in Europe by the classes most faithful to tradition, and which they ought to seek to defend? If I succeeded in giving a vivid representation of this conflict, should I not have described a living part of America better than if I had merely accumulated thousands of detached impressions and observations? And so the idea flashed across my mind of writing a dialogue introducing some Europeans and Americans who on board a steamer in mid-ocean discussed Europe and America, that is to say, progress, in the sense proper to the word as well as in the sense given to it by the Americans. Is not the dialogue an ancient and glorious literary form? It is true that for many reasons it has lately been neglected, one particular reason being, that in modern life, busy and exhausting as it is, it is difficult to find a scene which will give verisimilitude to a conversation lasting several days. Modern civilisation is a civilisation of much action and little discussion. However, there is still one scene left in modern life on which one can stage with artistic verisimilitude a discussion lasting several days: a transatlantic liner. A liner is perhaps the only spot in the modern world where one may find discussion holding the field. Usually discussions on board ship deal with frivolous and empty topics. Why might not a writer suppose, however, that for once in a way, four or five serious-minded persons met on board a liner and began a casual talk which later developed into a discussion of one of the gravest of the problems which oppress our own generation, no less than every one of its predecessors?

Among the persons whose acquaintance I had made during the voyage, some appeared to me to lend themselves to the rôle of interlocutor in the dialogue. So, directly I got back, I began to sketch out my dialogue. It was then that I experienced a curious phenomenon. With every fresh attempt I made to embody in certain characteristic personages the American idea of progress, as I had observed it in so many of my friends on that side, and the European idea, as I had many times defended it, both ideas seemed to me to evaporate, and to lose consistency and colour. That conflict of tendencies, ideas, and passions which had seemed to me so lively and so profound in my meditations in mid-ocean appeared to have melted away after I had touched the soil of old Europe. The dialogue which I was writing seemed to me cold, dead, and academic.

I was torn in two directions by these difficulties, uncertain whether to abandon the enterprise, and asking myself whether American progress had not been a passing hallucination of the voyage; when towards the middle of February, 1908, I received from North America a new surprise of a still greater and more agreeable nature, in the shape of a letter from Baron Eduardo Mayor de Planches, at that time Italian Ambassador at Washington, in which he told me that President Roosevelt at his last diplomatic reception had expressed to him his wish to see me in the United States, and to have me as his guest for a few days at the White House before his presidential term ended. At any time, so courteous an invitation from a man for whose culture, intellect, and statesmanlike qualities I had so great an admiration, would have given me much pleasure. My joy was much increased, however, by the fact of its having arrived two months after my return from South America. A visit to the United States directly after one to South America was a rare stroke of luck. For, to tell the truth, in visiting Brazil and Argentina, I had seen only a fragment of the New World. But to come to know that great New-World State which by itself personifies America in the eyes of all, and to come to know the two largest states of South America into the bargain, was equivalent to saying that I had studied at least what was most important, characteristic, and deserving of study in the boundless continent which Columbus discovered. All the curiosity to which the rumours and legends current in Europe about the United States had given birth in me, and which was dominant in the recesses of my mind, awoke to life. I forgot the problem of progress, the doubts which tormented me, and the problems which I had posed to myself on my travels in Argentina, as well as the dialogue I intended to write, in my preparation for my fresh journey and for the lectures in Roman history which I was scheduled to give at the Lowell Institute, at Columbia University, and at the University of Chicago. I set to work to read as many books as I could about North America. I resumed the mantle of Roman historian to prepare my course of lectures and gave no further thought to the book on America which I had promised to write.

On November 1, 1908, I sailed for New York, and a three months’ course of the intense life began again for me; rapid journeys, incessant visits, interviews with journalists, hundreds of conversations, banquets, receptions, speeches, and inquiries. I visited schools, hospitals, universities, prisons, law-courts, factories, banks, and co-operative enterprises. I made the acquaintance of millionaires and artisans, industrialists and professors, lawyers and journalists. I managed to get a peep into the wealthy abodes of the rich families of the great cities of the East, and into the little houses in which the middle classes drag out a crowded and pinched existence. I witnessed the frenzy for work, the incessant activity, the unending agitation which wears out every class in America. Most important of all, however, I saw reappear before me—and this time in gigantic form, monstrous, unrestrained, almost sublime in its savage energy—that demon of American progress which had impressed me so much in Brazil and Argentina, comparatively small though it had there appeared to me, and which in Europe seemed to me to have almost melted away. Was it not this which imbued everything American with that startling air of novelty, extravagance, and grandeur, which stunned and almost frightened me? So I devoted myself not only to the accumulation of impressions, informations, and recollections in profusion; I also set to work in the tumult of American life to think again about American progress. I made an effort to dive deeper down into the nature of this strange phenomenon, to guard against its melting away from before me when I got back to Europe. And at last, one day, I really thought I had found the clue.

My wife and I had been invited to luncheon with a cultured and clever author, who knew three languages, had received an extensive and liberal education, and lived by her pen, writing for newspapers, translating, and giving lessons. She belonged, in fact, to what one might call the intellectual middle class. She lived with a sister in a street of old New York, occupying a little flat of the kind in which many middle-class New Yorkers live. One reached it by a little wooden staircase, and entered it by a little door, opening on to a little corridor, which gave access to four tiny rooms, whose floors creaked under foot and whose walls let the voices and noises of the neighbours and co-lodgers be clearly heard. Outside the windows and extending to the court-yard, the fire-escapes reminded one that the house, partly constructed of wood, might at any moment catch fire like a match. Naturally there were no servants in the house. With her sister’s help the charming author, when she returned home, laid down the pen and became cook and chambermaid. The luncheon, considered from an artistic point of view, gave us clearly to understand, that the hands which had prepared it did not possess any very considerable technical skill. That did not prevent us, however, from enjoying ourselves mightily, so interesting and pleasant was the company.

Now, while I was eating my luncheon, and looking round me, I thought that America must certainly be much wealthier than the wealthiest of European countries. A woman as richly endowed with intellect and culture as my kind hostess, who lived by her pen in Paris, Rome, or London, would certainly earn less than she. And yet the foreign woman could live in better style, keep a servant to relieve her of the most troublesome and humble of her domestic duties, live in a large and less inflammable house, and have fresher and better prepared food to eat. If she married a man of her own station, she could more easily and with less stint, bring into the world, rear, and educate a family.

From my hostess, I passed on to think of all the other persons of the same station in life, of those middle classes which are everywhere the support and foundation of democratic institutions and the great reserve of energy of modern civilisation. In New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, the great cities of the East, I had seen several families belonging to this class. I had even been the recipient of their confidences and complaints. At that moment, I realised clearly how much more difficult and laborious, owing to the greater cost of food and lodging, the extreme difficulty of finding servants, and the enormous expense of rearing, and still more of educating, children must be the life of those middle classes in the great cities of the United States than in the great cities of Europe. Like my hostess, a business clerk, a humble employé, or an artisan in the most select industries, though he gains less in Paris or in London than in New York, can live much better in the former towns. He can eat better, lodge more comfortably, employ someone to help in the household, and rear his family without excessive drudgery.

Then I asked myself: “But what is the use of wealth, then, if it is not a means of living better, of securing some extra ease, comfort, or pleasure? What is the reason for this startling paradox, of riches turning from a blessing into a torment? How comes it that America, which has shown such energy in the exploitation of the immense wealth hidden in her boundless territory, has not followed up her conquests by converting these riches to the benefit of the whole population? How is it that, in this fortunate country, it is these middle classes who suffer most who yet have an influence on the Government such as they have in no European country? Why can we find in poorer countries individuals and classes who are happier because they are better satisfied with their condition?”

It was by reflecting on this problem that I at last arrived at a comprehension of the real nature of American progress, and that I finally lighted on the subject, the frame, and the key of the dialogue over which I had so long worried. How and in what way, I shall recount in the following chapter.

II

FACTS AND MOTIVES IN THE MODERN WORLD

Like every other European, I had gone to North America with the fixed idea that it was the country of the practical spirit _par excellence_, and that the Americans were all men who did not lose themselves in dreams, but lived in reality, intent on shaping it to their own ends, and acquiring by the most rapid means the tangible and sure blessings of life—riches, prosperity, power, and the mastery over nature. I was convinced that they knew better than anyone else the art of increasing the comforts, and diminishing the difficulties, of life by the intelligent use of the means furnished by nature, fortune, and preceding generations. I expected, therefore, to find in America, many facts and few ideas; an intelligent and vigorous egoism omnipresent; scanty traces of idealism, and but little faith in the transcendent principles which so often lead dreamers—individuals and nations—to toil and fight for fair but unreal chimeras, in the vain hope of distant glory or grandeur.

So my first surprise, and a very great one it was, arose from my examination at close quarters, of the policy pursued by the United States in dealing with the immense herds of immigrants, who yearly pour into their harbours from all parts of the Old World. In South America, I had closely observed the cautious prudence and really practical sagacity with which the republics try to prevent the continual immigration of foreigners from disturbing too profoundly the political balance of the State, by reserving the government to small oligarchies born and educated in the country, and therefore capable of directing public affairs with a certain continuity of projects and of national spirit. This policy of the South American republics is, I know, severely criticised in Europe, and especially in Italy, by too many persons who judge the affairs of the New World by the standard of the ideas of the Old. But to a historian of Rome, like myself, to whom history has taught the great internal difficulties which were caused in every ancient state by the μέτοιχοι or _peregrini_, this policy seemed practical and reasonable, at least if it be granted that the principal task of every state is that of solving in the best possible way the problems of the hour and leaving to the future its own problems.

To grant every year citizenship in a new state to a great number of men born and educated in distant lands, who come stuffed with ideas and tendencies, opinions which correspond in no wise with the utterly different situation they find in the new country; to give them political rights which they do not want or give a thought to; to make them, almost by force, the pillars of a political constitution which they generally do not understand; to hope to transform them in a flash from subjects of ancient European monarchies into citizens of young American republics—is not all this to do violence to the practical ideas of government, and to multiply the already great difficulties among which every representative régime works, without any compensating advantage, not even that of planting the immigrants firmly in the new country? The vast multitudes which are to-day crossing from Europe to America no longer go, as they did once, in search of liberty beyond the ocean. They go in search of higher salaries, an easier and larger existence, and greater probability of bettering themselves. To open to the children of immigrants on the same terms as to home-born children the high schools, the professions, and the public offices—in short, all the roads by which the son of a peasant or artisan can climb to the higher _bourgeoisie_—is a surer means of planting firmly in the country the crowds carried to America on the wave of emigration than the concession to them of electoral rights. And that is just what the states of South America, with their practical spirit, have done and are doing.

With these impressions and opinions, I arrived from South America in the America which symbolises in the eyes of the world the practical spirit. And in this America, to my no small surprise, I found the opposite policy to this in actual operation, with all the effects which I imagined must follow it; in particular, the growing difficulty of making democratic institutions work smoothly, with an electoral body so swollen, so enormous, and so varied and heterogeneous. I often had occasion, when speaking or writing in the United States, to remember that the cosmopolitan electoral body which is the base of the democracy of the United States recalls that of Rome, where the freedmen—the immigrants of the time—became citizens, and were inscribed in the electoral lists, whatever their national origin, and even if they were all foreigners, barbarians some of them, uncivilised the rest. Nevertheless, there is between the United States and Ancient Rome one essential difference; and that is, that in the Roman Republic, the electoral operations were concentrated in the capital, so that the number of persons who took part in them, the really active electoral body, was extremely small; while in the United States, the electors are numbered by millions, and are scattered over a continent. Do not most of the difficulties and inconveniences of which I have heard America complain in connection with its internal politics arise from the enormous size of the electoral body and from its heterogeneity? For both of these are unique phenomena in the history of the world, as until now every democracy has governed small, and often the tiniest of, states. So this experiment, which America is making, without being compelled to do so by any historical necessity, is a new and bold one, the final result of which it is difficult to foretell. As a matter of fact, the ancient national oligarchies, which governed North America, for so many years after it had gained its independence, did not open the doors of the constitution to the immigrant multitudes who threatened, if admitted, to swamp them. It would have been easy to keep at least the first Europe-born generation out of politics, because—as I have already said—the greater number of immigrants arrive in America without the vaguest idea, much less ambition, of obtaining what, in a democracy, are the political rights of a citizen, and only want big salaries.

How, then, has the United States come to this pass? Certainly historical accidents have contributed to set the Union in this direction. Historical accidents would, however, not have sufficed, if they had not been helped by that conception of democracy, not practical but mystical, so to speak, which I have found obtains among so many Americans. The rights of the people are not in America a political doctrine, to be employed by the nation and its governors in compassing certain ends of general utility, and to be applied only in the measure and with the limitations and qualifications which make it fruitful of good results and prevent it from giving rise to inconveniences. It is a transcendent principle, an article of faith, as it were, to be applied and developed without too much regard to the immediate consequences, which must be endured with patience if they are for the moment unpleasant or dangerous, in the conviction that the principle, being just and true, must finally produce beneficial effects.

So, little by little, I was led to ask myself whether by chance, in politics at any rate, the South Americans and the Europeans were not more practical than the North Americans, and whether the North Americans, on the other hand, were not great idealists; at least, if by the practical spirit is understood the art of solving present difficulties by the quickest and simplest devices with only an immediately realisable benefit in view, instead of multiplying difficulties with future benefits in view or for love of an idea or a principle. The amazement and uncertainty caused by this preliminary survey of the very foundations of the American constitution were increased, however, by my subsequent observation of the numberless philanthropic works, educational institutions, intellectual, political, or social foundations which owe their existence to the inexhaustible generosity of the American upper classes. For though Europeans may think that every American thinks only of making money, a few weeks of travel and of observation were enough to convince me that America is quite as richly, perhaps more richly endowed than Europe with wealthy men whose only thought it is to spend their money for the good of their fellows, for the progress of the nation, in a word, for objects of public utility.

However, though American philanthropic works may equal and often exceed those of Europe in number and in value, I have often had occasion to notice one difference between those of the two continents: and that is, that the American works are not unusually inspired by a more intense, I might almost say a more ingenuous faith in the power of man over the miseries and difficulties of life. The American often addresses himself with fervour, energy, and great intellectual and pecuniary effort to the eradication of ills which the European regards as incurable and irresponsive to treatment. And this American faith in the power to rectify, revive, and purify nature often struck me, no less than many other Europeans, as fringing on the chimerical. In short, even in what are called social works, the American often seemed to me more idealist, more of a dreamer, and less practical than the European; more ready, that is to say, to venture on a struggle against the innumerable ills of life without being quite sure of possessing adequate means for conquering them, at the summons of a mystical faith in the progress of the world.

As the result of all my observations, I kept asking myself whether by chance the United States, notwithstanding their great practical activity, might not be a much more mystical, idealistic, and visionary people than the European gives them credit for. But I did not dare answer the question with a resolute Yes or No. I could not answer No, because that would have involved ignoring facts which were daily obtruding themselves on my notice. On the other hand, I dared not answer Yes, because I was afraid of being accused of excessive fondness for paradoxes, and of wishing to do violence to current opinions at every opportunity and at all costs. So I went groping around for a truth which so far I conjectured rather than saw.

I had reached this point in my reflections and observations when I was invited to luncheon by our friend the author and journalist whom I have mentioned in the preceding chapter. When I saw her home and mode of life, I could not help asking myself: For what reason is the general standard of wealth higher, while that of living is no higher, in America than in Europe? Why are dwellings in the great American cities so small, the distances so great, the communications so difficult, provisions so dear, that notwithstanding the vast riches of the country, life is for the masses and the middle classes more expensive and difficult than in many much less wealthy cities of Europe? The primary answer was not difficult: Because the cities have become too big and populous, because their growth has been too rapid in comparison with the progress of agriculture, and because a section at least of their inhabitants has contracted too expensive habits and is accustomed to a life of too great luxury. This primary answer, however, gave rise to a second question: Why have the cities grown so rapidly, and with the cities the luxury of every class? This too was easily explained: Because of the rapid development of industries. America is a vast continent of great natural wealth, where capital accumulates rapidly. Owing to her ability to accumulate capital readily, and to find work for the numberless hands which the overcrowded districts of Europe have been supplying for the last hundred years to those American countries which have need of them, America has been able, not only to extend her agriculture rapidly and to exploit her mines, but also, and in particular, to multiply her industries to the point of packing her larger cities with so dense a crowd of inhabitants that life has become difficult for the majority of the town populations.

At this point, however, one conclusion seemed to emerge from the preceding observations. Suppose North America, instead of employing all the capital at her disposal in her many industries, as well as the capital borrowed from European countries poorer than herself, had done as France is doing in Europe, namely, had invested part of her capital in foreign countries, in loans to governments, cities, railways, industries, trades, and agricultural enterprises, what would have happened? The demand for labour would doubtless have been less in America, and therefore the emigration to it would not have been so startling. Her industries would have developed less, and her cities would not have increased so rapidly. The United States would now have a smaller population to support, and one better distributed between the cities and the country; would have fewer cities, and those smaller. The band of fortunates who have made huge wealth out of the rapid and prodigious development of the cities would be smaller, but the middle and lower classes would enjoy a more comfortable and easier existence. Their condition would resemble much more closely that of the middle and lower classes in Europe. They would earn lower wages, but those wages, though numerically less, would procure them greater comforts and pleasures.

It was now that, after my many discussions with others, and my extended solitary meditation on the difficult problem, I thought that I had finally confuted the troublesome doctrine of American progress. What is that progress of which the Americans are so proud but the unbridled rush of enterprise which has so rapidly multiplied the industries, enlarged the cities, and increased the population and wealth of the United States? But in that case it was clear that American progress contradicted itself. By inciting the American people to gather together capital and workers, to open their gates to millions of European emigrants, to invest their gains in new enterprises or in the enlargement of old enterprises, to redouble and multiply in every direction efforts and enterprises, so as to form of them a mountain with which to scale the heavens, the spirit of progress had created in America an opulence which teemed with difficulties, contradictions, and embarrassments, and which meant for a large part of the population a condition somewhat resembling that of King Midas: seeing riches all round him, and not being able to enjoy them. But to produce riches with no prospect of enjoying them is an absurdity. Much wiser, therefore, was old Europe, which, taught by the experience of centuries, refused to let herself be dazzled by this idea of progress, and instead of heaping up riches at top speed as does the New World, was more careful in her choice of new riches to create so that she might enjoy them; so that she might make of them a fount of well-being, not a cause of difficulty for mankind.

This was the moment at which I was inclined to think that all the ideas of America and the optimistic spirit which animates them, beginning with the idea of progress, could only be a passing ebullition and the merry madness of youth. This nation, I said to myself, favoured as it is at the moment by unusual facilities for the creation of wealth, has been so much carried away by its success as to make of riches, which are and can be only a means, an end in themselves. A longer experience of history will convince America of its mistake. One day, however, as I was again pondering intently over the facts I had observed, which seemed to prove that the Americans were often dreamers, idealists, almost mystics in matters in which the Europeans show themselves eminently practical, an idea flashed across my mind. What if American progress, which to me had seemed up to then to be but a youthful madness, should prove, if thoroughly analysed, to be only an idealistic and semi-mystical conception of wealth itself? What if this nation, accused of desiring only the immediate possession of worldly goods, was wearing itself out in an unbridled and diabolical activity from dawn till sundown, not with the object of increasing its happiness and pleasure, but for a distant end, transcending the egoism and even the consciousness of the individual? What if all, without knowing it, or impelled as it were by a superior, if not directly mystical force, were labouring and even suffering for this end—a new end, to which history can show us no parallel; the conquest of an immense continent from one sea to the other, by means of a new instrument unknown to our forefathers: steam- or electricity-driven machinery?

* * * * *

From progress, from the democratic and philanthropic ideality of the Americans, from the economic difficulties with which our kind hostess had to wrestle, to machinery and to the conquest of the great territory of the United States, may seem a risky, violent, and unexpected transition or transitions. As a matter of fact, I could not have executed so bold a transition unaided. I was helped by my wife, in an indirect, but, for that very reason, strange and decisive way. In fact, without her help I should not have succeeded in finding my bearings in the chaos of my American experiences, nor in understanding how and to what extent the Old World and the New World are opposed to each other; as a result, I could not have written the philosophical dialogue on Europe and America, which will be published shortly. It seems to me necessary, then, to recount how this help was given me; and I hope that my brief account will not be read without interest.

Several years before we embarked on our journeys to the two Americas, my wife had begun a long and deep study of modern machinery and of the great mechanical industry. Though a daughter of Cesare Lombroso, who was a great inventor, she is temperamentally inclined to the ancient more than to the new, and therefore little disposed by nature to admire the gigantic disorder of modern society which other minds find so intoxicating. Her innate antipathy to the civilisation of steam and electricity had been increased a thousandfold by observation of the profound perturbation which the great mechanical industry has caused in a country of ancient civilisation like Italy, densely populated and living on the resources of a small territory devoid of great natural riches. But when she at last made of machinery an object of methodical study, her researches and the evidence she had patiently accumulated transformed this antipathy into a complex and bold theory, the cardinal idea of which I think I can express as follows. Machinery produces only apparent wealth and prosperity, because instead of diminishing the effort necessary to produce the things we need, and therefore their price, in reality it increases it. The mechanical industry demands immense capital to construct the machines and set them going; immense quantities of raw material to keep the machinery always busy; the concentration of the industry in places where combustibles or the motive forces abound; consequently an enormous development in the means of communication, for the exchange of products and raw materials, and a dense population accustomed to produce and consume as much as possible. Therefore, the civilisation of steam- or electricity-driven machines cannot develop without rapidly exhausting nature, so to speak—mines, or forests, or the fertility of the soil. That explains why it flourishes chiefly in vast and naturally wealthy territories, which it rapidly exploits and impoverishes. Indeed, it explains why it is always seeking for new, rich territories, seeking to penetrate unexplored continents, like Africa, as soon as it has conquered America. Nor is it difficult to understand why nations which live in countries of limited natural resources get more harm than good, and often become involved in vexatious crises, from the introduction of mechanical civilisation. It is clear, too, how that civilisation must result in making life ever more and more expensive, and therefore forcing men to despoil the earth and to work ever harder, without ever attaining to satisfaction.

These ideas were the subject of long and lively discussions between my wife, her father, and myself. These discussions, as was natural with discussions arising out of a doctrine which was maturing in the mind of a patient seeker after truth, were, so to speak, eccentric; they revolved now round one point, now round another. Nevertheless, the central point round which they ultimately revolved was this: whether the wealth for which man has to thank machinery is real or apparent. I said that, since machinery produces much and at great speed, there seemed to me no room for doubt that it increased the sum of benefits at man’s disposal, and therefore enriched the world. My wife replied that if machinery produces much, it also consumes enormously, more indeed than it produces, so that a mechanical civilisation must always feel itself tormented by the necessity of having more than it possesses, and, therefore, must be always in a state of indigence. So the discussions went on, lively and long, without either of the parties convincing the other; and at last I came to the conclusion that our _amour propre_ must be making us persist in the sophistical discussion of an unreal question.

When I got to America, however, I saw that the question we were discussing was anything but unreal; for it was these ideas and discussions which enabled me to collate our friend’s economic difficulties with the mystical spirit which pervades so large a part of American life, and to understand the nature of American progress. Were not the economic difficulties encountered especially in the big cities, notwithstanding the immense wealth of the country, by the most numerous classes of America, the decisive proof that really, as my wife asserted, the wealth created by a mechanical civilisation is to some extent only apparent? That notwithstanding the great depredation of nature carried out with means furnished by science, men’s needs increase faster than their riches; therefore that mechanical civilisation revolves in the vicious circle of an insoluble contradiction? All the same, if America had set herself with less eagerness to exploit by means of machinery her immense natural resources; if she had not welcomed so many millions of men from all parts of the world; if she had not invested in machinery and industries and railways such a vast amount of capital, without a doubt we should find a smaller number of people living, and living more comfortably, in America to-day; but the conquest of the vast continent would not have reached its present pitch, and the world would not have witnessed that unparalleled event in its history, the bewildering development of the United States.

In fact, we must not forget, if we wish to realise what a miracle the civilisation of machinery has succeeded in accomplishing in the New World, how slow and difficult was the expansion of mankind over the world up to the end of the eighteenth century, that is, during a period when men worked with their hands and travelled over their planet on their own legs, or on those of animals little swifter than themselves. The great plains acted as so many great barriers in the way of men’s occupation of the land, because men lost their way in them. Consequently men tended to settle on little tracts of land, in such a way as to be near one another, to be able to communicate easily with one another, and to exchange their products. Everybody knows how slow has been in Europe the advance of civilisation from south to north; how many centuries were required for the passage of the Alps and expansion into Gaul, how many for the crossing of the Rhine and extension as far as the Elbe, and again for the passage of the Elbe and the advance towards the Vistula and the great plains of Eastern Europe. In America itself—in the South as well as in the North—up to the end of the eighteenth century, the progress of population and civilisation was very slow and difficult.

In the twentieth century, on the other hand, a prodigy occurred, thanks to steam-engines and all the other machines of which the steam-engine is the parent. With these machines, men can exploit more rapidly and thoroughly all the wealth of the earth, and with the railways can export the wealth produced, even from the most remote and buried regions, which thus can be peopled and exploited. Civilisation, following the railway-lines, and armed with fire and machines, in little more than fifty years extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific, crossing and occupying, however summarily, the immense territories of the interior, and binding together with a network of communications and interests, cities, climates, and territories without number from east to west, from north to south. But machinery is an inanimate instrument, only to be imbued with creative force by the thought and will of man. In consequence, this miracle of history would not have come about if a bold and energetic people had not multiplied machines with extraordinary rapidity over the whole immensity of their territory; if they had not subordinated to this supreme end every other good, æsthetic beauty, the preservation of traditions, the purity of the national spirit, and even the conveniences of life which wealth can give. American progress is then a transcendent and mystical idea which inflames America with passion and impels it to accomplish the new and rapid conquest of its own territory. And logic wastes its time looking for and laying bare contradictions in it savouring of the absurd. Doubtless, to work with frenzied zeal at creating riches in order to be unable to enjoy them is an absurdity if judged in the light of the interest of each individual; but are not all ideals absurd, when judged in the light of the interest of the individual? What does it matter to the soldier who dies in battle that his country emerges victorious from the conflict in which it is engaged, seeing that he will not be able to enjoy the fruits of the victory? From the point of view of personal interest, it is better to live in a country disgraced and diminished by a defeat than to die in a country aggrandised by a victory. So the privations to which I had seen exposed in the intimacy of her home, that kind hostess of ours, who had offered us luncheon in her modest flat, no longer seemed an absurd contradiction of life. Her privations were transfigured into a small personal sacrifice necessary for the fulfilment of a great national work, transcending the interest and the wishes of every individual American.

* * * * *

Thus at last I had grasped American progress and its apparent incongruities. It was an ideal of life, born and rapidly matured in a new continent during the past half century, at a time when the conquest of the vast territory by means of machinery was becoming more widespread and more intense. It was the ideal of life which, overshadowing all the others, had called forth from the depths of American society the marvellous energy which has staggered the world. When I had once found the key to this enigma, many phenomena of American life seemed to me clearer. I could easily explain to myself why the public attached less weight to politics on that side than in Europe, and regarded the defects and shortcomings in its political institutions with an indifference which to Europeans seems strange; in particular, why it preferred having them in a condition full of defects and inconveniences rather than any reform which increased the power of the State and limited the initiative of the individual. I could explain also how it had succeeded in keeping alive that spirit of liberty, not in politics only, but in religion, administration, customs, and culture which often strikes Europeans as either excessive or bizarre. The great national work—the conquest of the continent—is accomplished much more by personal initiative than with the help and under the direction of the State; the important point, therefore, is that personal energy should be subjected in this great work to the smallest possible number of limits and restrictions.

Lastly, I could explain why in American society, to borrow a rather quaint philosophical expression, the category of quantity prevails over that of quality. During my first few weeks in America, I used to smile when I heard some Americans go into ecstasies at the thought that everything in America was big, from the country to the cities, the factories, and the statistics of population; when they gloated over comparisons between their own country and the little countries of Europe, and statements of the comparative superiority in size of things in their own country. I no longer smiled, however, when I realised what American progress represented. A civilisation, whose principal instrument for the accomplishment of its work and for establishing itself in the world is machinery, must necessarily consider the quantitative criterion the supreme criterion of perfection. In what respect, indeed, is machinery, regarded as an instrument of production, superior to the human hand? Everybody knows that its superiority consists not in quality, but in the quantity, of its output. Machinery produces much and quickly. The hand produces little and slowly. The hand, however, can attain a standard of perfection which is denied machinery. Man will never succeed in constructing a machine capable of sculpturing the Venus of Milo or of weaving the marvellous tapestries which we admire in the museums of Europe. Everything of a high degree of perfection is exclusively handmade; _vice versa_, the hand, however, it may strive and labour and practise, will never succeed in attaining in its work the giddy rapidity of which steam- and electricity-driven machines are capable, or in producing in so short a time so many good things. Consequently, in a civilisation in which machinery predominates, men will be continually making fresh efforts to live faster and faster, and to produce and consume more and more rapidly. They will not be, on the other hand, too exacting on the score of quality. They will be content with things which look nice, without demanding extraordinary excellence or finish in details. They will be better pleased to consume many examples of products of inferior durability than one single example of products of great perfection. Consequently, vagaries of taste, continual movement, ready forgetfulness of traditions, and abundance of mediocrity, will be salient characteristics of machine-ruled civilisation. The great works of art which were the glory of past régimes will disappear for the present, which will see them replaced by objects of medium quality offered in greater quantity.

As a matter of fact, I found all these characteristics in North America, and they no longer offended me. They seemed to me necessary qualities of a society which sets out to conquer a boundless territory with machinery. Nevertheless, at this point, having solved the American problem, I was confronted with the European problem under a new aspect. If American progress, if machinery, if the quantitative criterion of perfection are necessary weapons for the accomplishment of the great historical work to which the United States have set themselves, how are we to explain the fact that in the states of Europe also machines are being multiplied, the American idea of progress is spreading, and the quantitative criterion of perfection is prevailing gradually? All of them except Russia, which in many respects resembles the United States, are countries of an old civilisation, live in small tracts of territory, and have not immense continents to exploit.

At this point I saw hovering over Europe and America a new, vaster, and more general problem, which dominates the two worlds and bestrides the Atlantic like a great bridge: the struggle between quantity and quality.

III

MORE OR BETTER?

It is an undoubted fact that Europe is becoming Americanised; that the American idea of progress—understood to mean the increase of wealth and the perfectioning of the instruments of production—is penetrating European society. No profound knowledge of European society is needed to recognise this. I would even go so far as to say that the only idea which in the last fifty years has sunk deep into the minds of the masses in Europe is this American idea of progress. I must, however, also confess that before I went to America I belonged to that group of Europeans, numerous enough, especially among the cultured and upper classes, which laments this “Americanisation” of Europe, and considers it to be a sort of mental aberration and decadence on the part of the Old World. The idea is fairly wide-spread in Europe. It may startle a good many Americans; but it will not seem paradoxical to those who spare a moment’s reflection for the history of European civilisation up to the French Revolution.

There is no doubt that, considered from the point of view of our ancient history, this idea of progress, interpreted American-fashion, is a kind of revolutionary dissolving force. Perhaps the upheaval which it has produced and is producing in Europe can almost be compared with that which Christianity caused in the ancient civilisation, when it destroyed in the Greco-Latin world the political and military spirit which had been the mainstay of that world. Indeed, we must not forget that from the dawn of history up to the French Revolution succeeding generations had lived in Europe contented with little, faithful to traditions, and holding every innovation to be a danger and every enterprise a revolt against God and against the memory of their ancestors. It is true that even in those days men usually preferred ease to poverty and were not insensible to the magnetism of gold. Even then, each succeeding generation saw an increase in the wealth of the world and in the spread of population over the face of the earth. But how slow and spasmodic was the increase! Up to the time of the French Revolution it is impossible to discern in history any differences in wealth and population at intervals of less than a century. The change produced by each generation was so small as to be barely recognisable. In compensation, the men of that time strove to make the world fairer and better. Art and religion were their absorbing preoccupation.

From Greece [says one of the characters in my dialogue], which taught the world to write and to sculp, up to the Middle Ages which built the fairest cathedrals and the most fantastic palaces of all times; from the Egypt of the Ptolemies, from which the last rays of Hellenic beauty illumined the Mediterranean world, up to the Rome of the popes and up to the Venice of the sixteenth century, which flaunted her marble pomp in the eyes of the world, up to the France of the eighteenth century, which immortalised her three sovereigns in three world-compelling decorative styles; from Augustus, who protected Horace and Virgil, up to Louis XIV, who protected Racine and Molière, and up to the Marquise de Pompadour, who strove to make Paris the metropolis of elegance,—was not the perpetuation of a form of beauty the supreme ambition of every nation and of every state? Consider the countless efforts made to establish in the world the reign either of sanctity or of justice or both, from the Roman Empire which created law, up to Christianity which strove to cleanse human nature of sin, and up to the French Revolution, which proclaimed to the world the age of liberty, fraternity, and equality.

Such was that old Europe which created the numberless masterpieces of architecture, sculpture, and painting, now so much admired by the Americans; that old Europe which discovered America, created science, and produced the French Revolution. But what remains of that old Europe? American progress is busy to-day destroying it; in particular, the artistic spirit is rapidly disappearing from the continent which for centuries was the world’s teacher of beauty.

Do you seriously believe [asks another of my characters, he who in the dialogue defends America and the new ideals of life] that it is any use nowadays lamenting the fact that some rare genius is unable at the present day to give birth to his immortal masterpiece in the solitude of his pride? At a time when man is inventing increasingly powerful machinery, and is conquering the earth, the sea, the air, the vast treasures hidden in every nook and cranny of the universe; with these marvellous tools in his hand is recognising that he is becoming the wizard visioned in the legends of centuries; while the masses are clamouring for bread, victuals, education, ease, security, pleasures, air, light, liberty, all God’s blessings in prodigious and yearly-increasing quantities?

These words are not the vapourings of a fanciful individual. They are repeated a hundred times daily in Europe, in a more or less elegant form, for they express the kernel of the thought of the Europe which is being Americanised. I could quote many examples in support of my contention. I will quote one only, a characteristic one. A foreigner may often see in the smaller Italian cities ancient monuments—churches or palaces—which are gradually falling into ruin. The nonchalance of the authorities or the ignorance and stinginess of the proprietors suffer time to do its deadly work, or even help to accelerate it by befouling the last relics of a past beauty. The foreigner shakes his head, sighs, mutters harsh judgments, and asks himself _sotto voce_ whether the inhabitants of that little town are barbarians. His stupor would be increased, however, if he could speak with one of the locals and open his mind freely to him. “We barbarians?”—would answer the local shop-keeper, lawyer, doctor, or artisan. To prove to the foreigner how wrong he was, they would tell him that that little town has actually got electric light! The municipality, which cannot find a few thousand francs for keeping this or that great monument in a decent state, will spend large sums on lighting with electric light streets in which after 9 P.M. there is nobody to be seen. The adoption of electric light is an act of progress, and nowadays even the shop-keeper and the artisan understand progress in this American sense; while, with the exception of a few cultured and art-loving persons, who have no influence whatever, nobody ever thinks it a barbarism to allow an old monument built by our fathers to fall into ruin.

This is a trifling instance; but it indicates the new spirit which is now pervading and conquering the whole of Europe. The most evident proof of this triumph of American progress is the decadence or disappearance of all the schools of art. Europe was in past centuries, in harder and more difficult times than the present, the glorious mother and mistress of civilisation, because under diverse forms, she managed to create and keep going schools of literature, sculpture, painting, architecture, and music. To-day, these schools have almost all disappeared; and the few survivors, with very few exceptions, are in a state of decadence. On the other hand, schools of electricity, dyeing, weaving, mechanics, commerce, and chemistry abound and flourish; they are the only schools the masses now require. In past centuries, the states and aristocracies of Europe had in various ways protected and encouraged the arts; and this protection had been one of the principal reasons for their progress. Now this is no longer the case. The wealthy classes of Europe to-day consider it much more dignified and elegant to build motor-cars and aeroplanes than to help painting and sculpture. As to the states, if one of them tries to encourage some art, protests pour in from every side that the expenditure is a wasting of the people’s money in the most idiotic way. Italy was for centuries the mistress of the world in every art. Yet even in Italy bitter complaints are made to-day about the few millions which the public bodies have spent in the last thirty years in raising monuments to the great men of the Revolution. On the other hand, how can sculpture flourish, if nobody will pay the sculptors for the works which they are capable of executing? And for what reason is the State, which possesses ancient monuments, unable to spend another million or two on keeping alive the tradition of an art which has shed no little glory on the Nation? Is not this tradition, too, a national heirloom? But the first-born daughter of Beauty no longer understands these simple truths. Infected by the spirit of American progress, she protests that the money spent on art is wasted; she is right willing that hundreds of millions be spent on the encouragement of the mechanical and iron industries.

There is no need to wonder, therefore, if many Europeans regret the Americanisation of the old continent as a kind of grievous madness. Europe—especially its upper classes—lives a great deal—it could hardly help living—in its past history. I have already said, that I, too, when I undertook my journeys to America, was more or less of this same cast of thought. But in America, confronted with this frenzy of desires and of works which has attracted from all parts of the world and fused into one people so many millions of souls, has created so many cities and produced so much wealth, it was no longer possible for me to shut my eyes to the fact that so vast and profound a phenomenon must depend on causes much more complex and grave than a simple mistake or mental aberration. For what reason was Europe ready to destroy even her secular tradition of art for the sake of emulating that rapidity of execution and audacity of enterprise which I was then witnessing in the New World? This was the problem which presented itself to me, after I had grasped the meaning of American progress; and which I succeeded in solving with the help of my wife’s investigations into the history of machinery.

“Christopher Columbus,” says one of my characters, in _Between the Old World and the New_, “not only discovered America, but re-endowed man with the globe which God had already given him, inasmuch as he enabled man at last to know it.” Europe had remained content up to the fifteenth century to live in her little territory, ignorant of how great the world was. That earlier limitation, however, only increased the force of the impulse, given to man by the discovery of America, to scour and ransack the oceans, with the object of discovering and possessing the whole plane. Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, then, Europe saw the world expanding around her. With the expansion of the world, however, came an increase in the longing to possess it, to master it, and to exploit it. How was Europe to do so, with means so scanty, and under the sway of the ancient ideas, which said to man, “Dare not!” which taught him to change as little as possible the order of things under which he had grown up, and not to yield to the temptation of over-ardent desires and of over-lofty ambitions?

Then began, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that effort of thought and of will which, slowly at first, was destined gradually to arm our civilisation with all the weapons necessary for the conquest and exploitation of the earth. The sciences began their advances. The first machines were invented and applied. The idea of liberty of progress, of the rights of man, and of the popular will began to undermine the ancient beliefs and traditions. Nevertheless, it is probable that these would have long resisted, and that the ancient ties which restrained the human will from the great enterprises would have slackened, but not broken for who knows how many more centuries, if it had not been for that immense event which convulsed the history of Europe and America, the French Revolution. The French Revolution and the great wars to which it gave rise made such and so great breaches in the ancient prison-walls of traditions and principles in which our civilisation was confined that man could thereafter easily escape through them and wander freely over the vast world.

In fact, after the French Revolution, we see the beginning of a new history of the world. The ideas of liberty and of progress invade Europe and America. In every class and in every nation comes an awakening of new desires for comfort and culture. Industry develops, railways spread, inventions multiply. Cities become thronged and increase rapidly. The great new phenomenon of the history of the world, the intensive exploitation of America, begins. The new wealth, especially that produced in such abundance in America, whets men’s appetites. Gradually the desire for comfort, ease, and culture spreads to multitudes more numerous and to new nations, drives followers along in the steps of pioneers, in turn prompts others to follow them, and brings crowding on the heels of riches already realised, the hungry greed of the masses; in a word, impels all Europe and all America to the conquest of the earth.

In consequence, not only America, but also Europe, saw the beginning fifty years ago of what might be truly called the Golden Age of human history, the epoch of abundance.

What has man dreamt of [exclaims one of my characters]—what has man dreamt of, since the dawn of time, but the Terrestrial Paradise, the Promised Land, the Garden of the Hesperides, the Age of Gold, Arabia Félix; one single thing, under various names, the empire of nature and abundance? Is not the great myth which centuries have mildly fantasied now at last materialising under our eyes?

But every medal has its reverse side; and we have had to pay, and to pay dearly, for this fabulous abundance which man had vainly visioned for centuries.

The modern world [says another of my characters] has crowned quantity at the expense of quality—which is, after all, an eternal law. For I can make in a certain time things of a certain quality, that is to say, resembling a certain model of perfection which I have before my eyes or in my mind. But in that case, I cannot make any quantity of it which I may require. I must rest content with that quantity which I can manage, working with all my zeal. I can say, on the other hand: I want so many things of a certain quality. But in that case, I can no longer prescribe the time necessary to finish them as my fancy bids me. Or again: I wish in so much time to make such a quantity. Very well; but in that case, I must put up with the best quality I can get. So that whoever wants to increase the quantity, and to curtail the time must abate his demand for quality. And that is just what we are doing to-day in this civilisation of ours, in which quantity reigns supreme.

In the light of this idea that decadence in art, and in so many other refinements of life, which many Europeans impute to America, seemed to me no longer the effect of an aberration on the part of the masses, but a sort of compensation. We pay, and we ought to pay, for the rapid fortunes so commonly made nowadays. We pay, we ought to pay, for the speed of the trains, the motor-cars, the aeroplane, the telegraph; and the price is the mediocrity which pervades everything. We cannot have, we must not want, everything in this world,—railways as well as beautiful pictures, aeroplanes as well as the marvellous furniture which the great French artists used to make in the eighteenth century, speed as well as good manners. For among the reproaches hurled at America by Europe is that of having banished from Europe by the example of her democracy the good manners of our ancient ceremonial, and substituted for it a rather over-simple and over-casual cordiality. But can we expect the polished form, for which the eighteenth century was famous, to survive in the social relations of a civilisation which, like ours, is always in a hurry? Among men, who live between the train, the motor-car, and the telephone?

Every epoch directs all its efforts towards a supreme goal, which for it is the all-important one. There have been epochs ablaze with religious fervour, whose chief aspiration it was to diffuse and to defend the faith. There have been epochs with a profound sense of the ambition for glory, which fought great wars. Others again have turned their attention to the fostering of the arts and sciences. Our civilisation aims, in the first place, at the mastery over nature, and the intensive exploitation of all the riches of the earth. We enjoy the advantages of it. We are not inclined to abjure railways and telegraphs. We have no wish again to run the risk of famine, which was such an ever-present one to the civilisations of the past. We enjoy the incredible abundance and liberty of the day and are by no means eager to return to the pristine régime of discipline and parsimony. We Europeans also, then, must resign ourselves to paying the price which all these advantages cost, and to living in an epoch in which art cannot flourish in any high degree, in which religion will no longer have the strength to emanate waves of mystical ardour, and even science will be cultivated only so far as it can be of immediate service to practical ends, by intensifying and making more prolific the exploitation of natural riches. For this, too, is a phenomenon noticeable to-day in every part of Europe: disinterested studies are falling into disfavour. Rich as it is, the world of to-day is less capable of searching after the true for the sole pleasure of expanding the field of knowledge, than it was two centuries ago, when it was so much poorer. Even scientists nowadays want to see their discoveries turned into money.

* * * * *

The Americanisation of Europe, then, is a fatal phenomenon. Europe, from the moment when she aspired to great wealth and to the dominion of nature, was called upon to renounce her claim to many of the treasures of her ancient and refined culture. This was the conclusion at which I rested for a moment. And yet at this point, I, as a European, felt a misgiving. If matters stood thus, was not Europe fatally doomed to become even more thoroughly Americanised in the future? At the present time, the appetites and ambitions of all classes in Europe, even the most numerous, have been given free rein. Everybody, from the aristocrat of ancient lineage to the most obscure peasant, wishes to earn, spend, and accumulate as much as he can. There is no power, human or divine, which can pretend to drive back towards its historical fountainhead this immense torrent of greed and ambition. Europe, thus, is fated to become increasingly oblivious of the traditions of its ancient and disinterested culture; to struggle to imitate and compete with America in the production of great riches at greater speed. And, as America with her immense territories and smaller store of traditions is better equipped for the competition, so Europe must necessarily become ever more and more decadent in the future. The continent destined to dominate the civilisation of the future, as Europe dominated it up to the middle of the nineteenth century, will be America.

There are not wanting persons in Europe who take a delight in repeating from time to time this prophecy, which to the ears of a European sounds somewhat lugubrious. For a moment, when in America, I, too, somewhat discouraged by the vitality of which the American spirit of progress gives proof, felt myself inclined to give ear to these prophets, whom hitherto in Europe I had always contradicted. Yes, culture in Europe was destined to become ever more decadent before the invasion of progress interpreted in the American sense; quantity, that is to say, the nations with vast territories at their disposal and capable of rapidly producing vast wealth, would rule supreme in the future, while the forces of idealism would lose a great part of their ancient empire over the world.

America, however, actually America, proved to me that the ancient culture represented by Europe is not destined to die out, and that, if Europe is being Americanised, America in compensation is being induced by an eternal impulse to Europeanise herself! I, like so many other Europeans, had gone to America, persuaded that the American’s only thought is to make money. But in America, I, too, ended with the conviction that no country in Europe expends so much money, labour, and zeal on founding museums, schools, universities, and new religions; on fostering, in the midst of the mechanical civilisation and the realm of quantity, the arts, the religious spirit, and the disinterested sciences; on preventing the loss of that intellectual legacy of the past, in which Europe takes an ever-decreasing interest, occupied as she is in developing her industries and her trade. If, out of deference to history, rather than to the present day, we may grant that Europe represents in the world’s history the effort directed to the perfecting of a lofty culture, artistic, scientific, religious, or philosophic,—there is no doubt but that America is to-day becoming Europeanised; is seeking, that is to say, to employ the vast riches which she has accumulated by the intensive exploitation of her territory in the promotion of the progress of art, knowledge, and the religious spirit. Doubtless, not all the efforts she makes are successful; but they are numerous, intense, and obstinate. Indeed, if America is open to any reproach in this relation, it is, in my opinion, to that of feeling too ardent an admiration for lofty culture—art and science in particular—an admiration which sometimes blunts the critical sense, and does not permit her to distinguish what in the world of the ideal is authentic from what is counterfeit, the real gold from pinchbeck. In fact, one can find in no European country so lively and profound a trust in science as in America. Europe knows that science can do a great deal and has done a great deal, but that it often promises, or raises hopes of, more than it can do. Not so in America. Among the cultured, as among the lower classes, faith in the power of science is practically unlimited. There is no marvel which the American does not expect to see issuing from the scientist’s closet. Even the mystical movements in America, whose trend is anti-scientific, like to trick themselves out with the name of “Science,” which has a kind of magic sound and glamour for the men of the New World.

There is the same universal enthusiasm for art in America. It might be said that America is determined to admire everything which might possibly be beautiful, of every country, every epoch, and every school. It is true that the most engrossing preoccupation of the Americans is not that of fostering the arts; they must still keep their minds fixed on the conquest of their great continent. But it is also true that, in the moments of leisure, when they can think of something other than business, they fling open, so to speak, their arms to the arts of the whole world. Just as all the styles of architecture can be found in the great buildings of New York, so all the arts which have flourished in the course of centuries in Asia and Europe have been transplanted into the New World. America, I might almost say, wishes to taste and understand all the beauties which the past has created; classical literature as well as contemporary European literature, Italian as well as German music, Greek sculpture as well as the French sculpture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Italian as well as Dutch painting, Japanese decorative art as well as the styles of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth Louis. New York, from this point of view, is a real artistic cosmopolis.

If, then, Europe is gradually destroying her ancient culture, and her great traditions, in order to construct railways and factories, to found banks and to initiate commercial enterprises, America, on the other hand, wishes to employ the wealth gained by the intensive exploitation of her vast continent in creating an art and a science. How can we explain this contrast? “The snobbery of a parvenue nation,” it pleases the European, with a shrug of the shoulders, to label it. But anyone with any knowledge of America and much knowledge of human nature will not rest content with so glib an explanation. It is true that, thanks to machinery, to America, and to the idea of liberty and progress, quantity is to-day triumphant in the world. Men wish to enjoy abundance. Can they, however, confine their wish to abundance, to the increase, that is to say, of the quantity of things they possess? Observe a peasant who comes to town, turns artisan, and earns a higher wage. What does he do? Does he buy with his higher wage a second pair of boots, or a second suit in addition to and like the one he wore when he was poor? No. He adopts the town fashions and buys more elegant shoes and clothes, in appearance at least, that is to say, like those worn by the upper classes. In every country of America and Europe, the differences in dress between the upper and lower classes, once so great, are disappearing. And why? Because the people want to dress like the “Swells”; and modern industry spares no trouble to give them at little cost the means of satisfying their ambition. In other words, the workman wants to invest his higher wage in the purchase of finer, or what he thinks are finer, clothes, than those he wore before, because to possess a suit of superior clothes is to him a greater joy than to have two suits of the same workmanship as those he wore when he was poorer. In other words, quantity soon satiates, and at a certain stage man needs to translate it into quality, and to employ his wealth to procure for himself, not a greater number of things, but more beautiful and better things, otherwise wealth is useless.

If this need is lively and profound in the minds of the people, how much stronger must it be in the richer classes, those with great resources at their disposal! A man who possesses ten millions and another who possesses one hundred cannot eat ten and a hundred times as much respectively as the modest lord of only one million, live in a house ten or a hundred times as vast, or buy himself ten or a hundred hats where the other buys only one. If they used their wealth in that way, they would be considered mad, and with good reason. They must then strive to procure for themselves, with their superior wealth, things of superior beauty or quality, to translate their wealth into beauty and merit, quantity into quality. There are, it is true, men who desire wealth only for the pleasure of creating it, and who are indifferent to the other pleasures which it brings. At no time, perhaps, were these men so numerous as at present among the great bankers, merchants, and manufacturers who now rule the economic destinies of the modern world. But even to-day, these men, who love money as the artist loves his art, in itself and not for the pleasures which it can give, are in a minority. And so they will always be, because even if—impossible hypothesis—anybody in the upper classes developed such a fervid enthusiasm for banking, industry, and commerce, as to arrive at considering wealth only as an end in itself, a means of displaying his own ability, there would still be the women. Unless it be wished that even in the wealthy classes, women should engage in business and work, women will be bound always to consider wealth as an instrument for the advancement of life, procuring for its possessor joys more select and articles of superior quality.

In fact, this and no other is the origin of snobbery. Snobbery is, I know, an obvious target for sarcasm at the present day. And it is easy to laugh at the _nouveau riche_ who is determined at all costs, even at the price of sacrifice and snubs, to frequent houses and circles which formerly were closed to him; who is glad to go for trips in a motor-car, even if they cause him suffering, or to go to the opera even if he falls asleep there, because he thinks that by doing so, he is living up to the standard of the highest elegance. But if he were not under this delusion, what would be the use of his wealth to him? What compensation would he have for the fatigues and perils he had incurred in its acquisition? Snobbery is simply an effort to translate quantity into quality to which man is impelled by the very increase of wealth. There never was so much snobbery as there is at the present time, because there never was so much wealth.

Without a doubt, modern snobbery is full of grotesque deceptions. The world never contained so many _nouveaux riches_, unprepared to enjoy the real refinements of life, and destined to be the victims of every sort of fraud. How often and in how many instances do we not see the tragi-comedy of _Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme_, Molière’s immortal comedy, acted over again at the present day? But one can also find, in America perhaps more abundantly than in Europe, families whose wealth dates back several generations, in which families the mania for the accumulation of riches has died down, and which have time, inclination, and culture enough to employ their wealth on behalf of the most lofty activities of the mind. These are the American families who ransack Europe for works of art, who found schools and museums, who give work to architects, painters, and sculptors, who directly or indirectly stimulate an ever-increasing number of the rising generation not to concentrate on the making of money, but to devote themselves to those intellectual labours of which, till a short while ago, Europe had the monopoly. And it is the existence of this portion of American society and its tendencies that entitle us to say that America is being Europeanised.

Europe, then, wishing to live a larger life, after centuries of penury and stint, is becoming Americanised, and is sacrificing a part of her splendid traditions of lofty culture to her desire to learn from America the art of producing new wealth rapidly. America, on the other hand, having accumulated immense wealth by the intensive exploitation of her territory, is becoming Europeanised; she is turning, that is to say, to the arts, sciences, and most lofty forms of higher culture, to perfect which Europe has laboured for centuries. Yet at this point I think I hear the reader cry:

“Is not this all to the good? Does it not establish a marvellous balance between the two worlds? Does it not prove that our civilisation is the richest, most powerful, best balanced, and most perfect which has ever existed? Ought Europe to have gone on living for ever in misery, intent only on the perfecting of culture, and America to have had never a thought for anything but the multiplication of wealth?”

To be sure, if this exchange of wealth and culture between the two continents could be effected as well and easily as it can be described, our epoch would be in very truth an epoch of fabulous felicity. We might claim to be, in comparison with preceding generations, a generation of supermen. Unfortunately, the difficulties are greater than they seem at first sight to be. What they are will be seen in the next chapter; we shall then see that it has become much easier to produce new wealth than to employ it in the creation of a lofty and refined civilisation; and that this is the secret torment which afflicts Europe and America.

IV

THE LOST PARADISE OF BEAUTY

The bewildering growth in the wealth of America has affected in many different ways the whole world. Economists are studying its effects with much zeal. One, and not the least curious, of them, is the rise in the value of antiques. From Etruscan ceramics to French furniture of the eighteenth century, from Greek statues to Italian pictures of every epoch, from Tanagra statuettes to the lace, embroideries, tapestries, manuscripts, glass, and filigree from every part of the world, all the artistic furniture of Europe, Asia, and Africa which has survived the ravages of time has trebled and quadrupled its value. Few financial speculations proved more successful in Europe than the collection about fifty years ago of antiques.

Many instances could be quoted to prove this. Everybody, even in America, I suppose, has heard recently of the great Paris tailor who set to work thirty years ago to collect statues, pictures, and French _objets d’art_ of the eighteenth century. He spent about three millions on his collection; and he put it up for auction last year and cleared fourteen millions! An occurrence which made less noise, because it was on a smaller scale, but analogous to the foregoing, is the following: A journalist, a man of taste and a great admirer of beautiful antiques, came to Rome. Everybody called him a maniac, because, though he had a family, he spent all his savings in buying from the small antique dealers and in the Campo di Fiori lamps, books, stuffs, and every other bit of antique he could lay hands on. Well, he died ten years ago, and left his family nothing but a houseful of fine antiques. The family, which did not share his mania, sold them, and realised a fortune, the income of which was, and is, enough to support them in comfort. If the journalist had been discreet and had invested his savings in shares and bonds, probably his family would now be living in a very much humbler way.

It is unnecessary to quote further evidence in support of so notorious a fact. Ask any European antiquarian the reason for this appreciation, and he will reply unhesitatingly, “America.” America for the last thirty years has been making assaults on the antiquities-market with all the tenacity of her untiring activity, and the might of her new-made wealth. Some people in Europe—those who have antiques to sell—are very glad that it should be so. Others lament, complaining that Europe is emptying herself of her treasures in favour of the New World. Most people, however, smile at what they consider a proof of the incurable snobbery of the New World. Europe is very ready to accuse America of loving antiques only because they are rare and, therefore, dear; of fighting dollar-duels about them, only to prove their own wealth, without any power of judging and distinguishing between the good and the bad, though even among antiques there are ugly as well as beautiful ones, representing comparative grades of beauty. And this accusation too is, in its general application, unjust and unsubstantial. Anybody who has had any extensive dealings with the wealthy houses of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and Chicago, knows that they contain many Americans who are competent judges and buyers of artistic antiques. It is true that, from this point of view, the big American houses cannot yet challenge comparison with the big European houses. Nevertheless, numberless are the marvellous ceramics from the Far East, numberless the magnificent pieces of French eighteenth century furniture, numberless the pieces of wonderful lace, glass, and antique _boiseries_ which it has been my good fortune to see, not without an occasional pang, in America.

On the other hand, this reproach, which, couched in its usual form, is unjust, contains a modicum of truth, which however applies to Europe as well as to America. I have often had occasion to notice in wealthy modern houses—in Europe as well as in America, but in America more than in Europe—that they are adorned with many extremely beautiful old pieces, but that these are too numerous, and too heterogeneous. You find in a modern drawing-room material of every epoch and from all parts of the world; from ancient Greece, and from China of the last century, from the Italian Middle Ages and from contemporary Persia. Consequently modern houses are too much like small museums, in which numbers of wonderful little antiques, picked up wherever they were to be had, are exposed to view, and in which the modern furniture and adornments serve as the show-case in which the antiques are displayed, instead of being, as they were in the eighteenth century, the principal decoration, of which some beautiful antique was the appropriate ornament and complement. This inversion of the natural order of things would be inexplicable, were we not all of us persuaded more or less consciously that old things must necessarily be more beautiful than modern ones. For this reason we are willing that what we make, the modern, shall be subordinated and serve as a tool to the antique.

In short, the antique, in Europe as in America, has acquired nowadays a value of its own in art, merely on the score of its antiquity. I need not dwell on the strangeness of this prejudice in favour of antiques in an age and in countries in which, directly one leaves the field of art behind, one finds so keen a craze for the modern. Not to be up-to-date is at the present day the greatest reproach we can fling at a man in Europe and in America, especially in America. Why then does modernity in art arouse, not only in old Europe, but also, and perhaps more, in young America, so much diffidence and mistrust? Why do we, notwithstanding the attempts which modern artists make to emulate the ancients or to create new things, turn to the past when we want to possess or enjoy something really beautiful? May this contradiction be the effort of a last surviving prejudice? For centuries, man was educated to consider all antique things, only because they were antique, preferable to modern ones. In many respects, we have conquered this venerable prejudice. May our attachment to the antique in art be the last and most persistent survival of this sentiment, itself destined to disappear?

No. This persistent attachment to the antique in art is not prejudice; it is the effect of the incurable artistic weakness of our epoch. Men are following a profound and sure instinct when, in their desire for beauty, they turn to the antique; for art is as it were the lost Paradise of our civilisation, whose atmosphere we are always breathing, but to which the entrance is forbidden us. It is a phenomenon of contemporary life which usually attracts but little attention; and yet how strange it is! The need for the adornment of life with beautiful things—for translating quantity into quality, as I said above—has not diminished among the wealthy classes, and could not diminish, because it is a profoundly human need. The world’s upper classes never had so much wealth at their disposal as now, and never had so keen a desire to spend a considerable part of it in the purchase of beautiful things. How many artistic masterpieces could have been paid for, and how many painters, sculptors, and architects of genius liberally rewarded with half the sums which have been spent in raising fourfold or sixfold the value of the antiquities of Europe, Asia, and Africa? Indeed the immense growth in the world’s wealth has profited the dead, not the living, in the world of art, antiquities and not the modern arts. And it was inevitable that this should be so. Why?

Because modern times are not adapted to be a golden age of art, for a psychological and moral reason, which, however, is not to be sought in the practical and commercial spirit of modern times. Many of the fairest palaces and pictures which we admire in Italy were commissioned by merchants who were no less practical than modern bankers. The reason is to be sought elsewhere, and it is more profound. Modern civilisation has conquered with its railways, telegraphs, and steam-boats, the whole earth. In fifty years, it has succeeded in conquering continents so vast as North America. It has created riches so fabulous, in a word, it has achieved so much power, because it has broken through all the limits within which the spirit of tradition confined past generations. Escaping from these limits, it has learned to create at great speed. Speed and the tireless spirit of innovation are the two formidable weapons which have given our civilisation the victory in her struggle with nature and with the other more conservative and more deliberate civilisations. But the qualities necessary to artistic excellence are just the two opposite qualities: the spirit of tradition and laborious deliberateness.

We moderns, victims of the giddy pace at which we live, may be somewhat oblivious of the fact; but it is a fact that anyone who knows history cannot ignore. To create and foster an art really worthy of the name,—Greek sculpture, Italian painting, the French decorative art of the eighteenth century,—the immense sums at our disposal are useless, and the sciences of steam and electricity of no avail. I have already had occasion to prove this in the preceding chapters. The nations and the generations which have created the most famous arts and whose relics are still our delight, were poor and ignorant compared with us. In order to create and foster art, it is necessary to educate generations of artists to do good work and generations of amateurs to understand and appreciate it. Neither the artists nor the public taste can be educated without a spirit of tradition and of æsthetic discipline, which induces the public to allow the artists the time necessary for the perfecting of their respective arts in all their details; which induces the artist to recognise the legitimate requirements of the public for which he works, and to seek to satisfy it by adapting his own work to those requirements.

Anyone can see, however, that nowadays these two conditions have become well-nigh impossible. In the gigantic confusion of the modern world, races, cultures, and populations are continually intermingling. Generations follow each other with the fixed determination not to continue what their immediate predecessor has done but to do something different. Ancient traditions are dying out, and no new ones are being formed or can be formed. Change is the order of the day. Sons but rarely adopt their father’s professions, and not a few die in lands other than those in which they were born. Modern society is agitated by a continual process of renewal, which is the deep-seated source of her energy and activity, but is also a reason for her artistic decadence. In this continual mobility of bodies, wills, and ideas; in this perpetual change of tendencies, tastes, and standards, art is losing her bearings and, alone in this age of bold enterprises, is becoming greedy and diffident.

Public and artists, instead of helping each other, have grown timid. The public no longer does what it likes. It no longer has any standard of judgment. It has become timid and diffident. It is obsessed by the fear of mistaking a masterpiece for a deception or a deception for a masterpiece. This uncertainty of tastes and desires in the public in its turn bewilders the artists. When the painter, the sculptor, the musician, and the poet try to find in the desires and inclinations of the public the sure indication which in times past used to be the support and guidance of artists in their creations, they find that the public is ready to admire anything, but has no marked preference for anything in particular. The artist is free, but his liberty is a liberty which embarrasses and paralyses him.

Under these circumstances, the adroit artists quickly learn the art of exploiting the uncertainties and inexperiences of the public, and win riches and honours. The crazy and the charlatans seek to intimidate the public by perpetrating novelties of extravagant audacity. Serious and conscientious artists there are nowadays, of course, but everyone has new formulæ of his own art, differing from those of everyone else, and proclaims his to be the only true, fruitful, and admirable formulæ, at the same time denouncing all others as freaks. By what standard are we to judge these quarrels? Bewildered by so many different attempts and judgments, the public ends by turning to the antique. It has a vague idea that the past ages may have been inferior to our own in all other respects, but in art were superior to it. It knows that a work of art at least one century old may be more or less beautiful, but that it is at least a serious work of art, conceived and carried out in good faith, not for the mystification of an ingenuous public by some daring theory of novelty.

So the Europeans are wrong in ridiculing the passion of the Americans for ancient things. This passion has the same origin on the other side of the Atlantic as it has on this. In art, our civilisation is destined to remain inferior to ancient civilisations, which it has overshadowed with its wisdom, its power, and its wealth. This is the reason for the rapid growth in the value of the antique in art, even in the age of modernity _à outrance_. We need feel no shame in avowing it openly. Civilisations and epochs, like individuals, cannot have and expect everything; and the share which has fallen to us of the good things of the earth is so large, that we can readily console ourselves for the loss of this particular one.

Who reasoned thus would reason wisely. Nevertheless, the fact is of greater importance than it appears. It shows that the balance between the ancient culture of Europe and the spirit of American culture—that balance which might perhaps have produced the most brilliant civilisation in history—will never be perfectly secured, at least so long as the conditions of the world remain what they now are. America will be able to continue her Europeanisation, and Europe her Americanisation, as we have seen is the case. But this interchange of influences will not have as its only result the increase of the wealth of Europe and of the culture of America. It will give birth in the two worlds to a discontent and an unrest which nothing will be able to allay.

In fact, the more its upper classes come under the influence of the culture of the Old World, the more ardent will become the admiration and desire of America for the antique,—for that beauty which the civilisations preceding our own created with such wealth and perfection of forms; the more strongly will it be convinced of our artistic inferiority, and persuaded that one of the treasures of life we have lost irreparably, and can only enjoy in the relics of other generations. Every picture or statue or artistic object which crosses the ocean and enters America, every museum which a rich Maecenas opens in the New World to the public or which a city or a state creates, every chair founded, and every book of artistic history printed,—everything, in fact, which brings the spirit of America into contact with the masterpieces of ancient European art, and awakens recognition and admiration for them, makes America at the same time recognise how comparatively decadent is that which our times produce; reveals to it that lost Paradise of Beauty around whose closed gates we are now condemned to hover. This contact with the artistic achievement of the past becomes, therefore, at the same time a gadfly of discontent and unrest to the upper and cultured classes.

By an inverse process, the further the spirit of American progress penetrates into Europe, the more completely does it detach the Old World from its past, and, therefore, irritates, grieves, and disgusts the classes which have enough culture to recognise and admire the marvellous arts of that past. With every ten years that elapse, we feel that our past, with all its radiant glories, has receded a hundred years; that we are plunging into a new world, in which riches, knowledge, and our power over nature will increase, but which will be ugly, inharmonious, and vulgar compared with the centuries which preceded it. Many Americans fail to understand why Europe cherishes so many latent antipathies to America, which has never done her any harm, directly at least. The real reason for these antipathies must be looked for in the artistic decadence which accompanies the development of modern civilisation. That civilisation has not been created by America alone, but by America and Europe combined. Europe and America, therefore, share the responsibility for this decadence. Yet it suits the European book from time to time to see in America the symbol of the civilisation of railways, steam, electricity, business, and industry on a large scale; and Europeans gladly vent on America their spleen for whatever in this civilisation, pregnant with good and with evil, offends them and arouses regret.

In short, there is an insoluble contradiction between progress, as our age understands the word,—between the “American” progress, as many Europeans call it,—and art. This contradiction has as yet attracted but little notice, in the still great confusion in which we live, in the initial tumult of this new civilisation which is invading the earth. It will be noticed, however, more and more strongly, as generation succeeds generation, and in many families the primary hunger for wealth is satiated and gives way to the desire to “translate quantity into quality”: as American love for the historical beauties of the Old World increases, and Europe takes further lessons in the multiplication of her wealth. There is no escape or salvation for our civilisation from the discontent and unrest which will arise from this contradiction. It is a torment which will grow with the growth of wealth and culture; which nations and classes will feel more acutely the richer and the more cultivated they become; from which perhaps, one day, America will suffer more severely than many European nations; which will oppress the upper classes much more heavily than the people. The latter, indeed, will not feel it at all, and will alone be able to live in modern civilisation, as contented as man ever can be in this world.

History often has strange surprises in store. The civilisation of machinery tended at its birth to appear as a death-blow to the working classes, a godsend to the upper classes. For years and years, socialism, generalising from the initial rubs, predicted and pretended to prove that the great mechanical industry must enrich a small oligarchy inordinately, and reduce to the blackest wretchedness the great mass of the population; that a new feudalism of capitalists, fiercer than the barons of the Middle Ages, would seize all the good things of the world. A century passes, and we find this civilisation giving complete satisfaction only to the workmen, because it can content the workmen only from the double point of view of quantity and quality. It gives them an abundance which only a small fraction of the people enjoyed up to a century ago; and, at the same time, bestows on them a luxury which fully satisfies their yet simple and unsophisticated æsthetic sense. We may smile when we see in a workman’s home mirrors and clocks which are the rudest imitations of masterpieces of the Louis XV and Louis XVI styles, hideous reproductions from a German factory; and coarse carpets which are poor European copies of beautiful Turkish and Persian models, the result of the substitution of the iron teeth of a machine for the industrious fingers of the human hand, and of decadent aniline dyes for the brilliant and unfading vegetable colours. The workman, however, does not know the matchless models of which these objects are the ugly copies, and, inasmuch as every æsthetic verdict arises out of a comparison, these reproductions represent for him the summit of perfection, and entirely satisfy his need for beautiful things round about him.

To the upper classes, on the other hand, this civilisation has given immense and imposing wealth, such as no epoch had ever considered possible; but it has deprived them of the means of enjoying it. Wealth becomes nowadays more useless, the greater it becomes, because a multi-millionaire cannot build himself a house, wear clothes, or buy objects a hundred times finer and better than the possessor of only a few millions. We no longer have artists capable of accomplishing miracles. The men of great wealth are forced to compete with each other for the relics of past beauty at fabulous prices, when they are not inclined to spend all their wealth for the benefit of others. These relics are not sufficient, however, to satisfy the desire for beauty and art which grows in our times with the growth of wealth and of culture. On the contrary, they only make us feel more acutely the decadent vulgarity of everything, with but few exceptions, which our age produces.

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Someone will say that, after all, this torment is not a very serious one; and that men will easily find means of consoling themselves. No epoch, as I have already said, can have everything; and modern civilisation bestows on the wealthy classes of our times numberless compensations for the ugliness of the modern world. One of these should be enough by itself to content even the most discontented: that kind of bodily and mental ubiquity which is enjoyed, thanks to the prodigious inventions of modern genius. Cannot the wealthy, thanks to their riches, remove from one continent to another, travel, have dealings and acquaintances in, and receive communications from, every part of the world, come to know the most distant and recondite beauties of nature and of art—in a word, live over the whole globe? A modern great man may well feel himself almost a demigod compared with the men of two centuries ago, so great is the sway his money gives him over the forces of nature, so easily can he escape from the tyranny which space and time used to exercise over men up to a century ago. May not the intoxication of this proud sway be worth as much as the pleasure which the works of Phidias, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Houdon gave to our ancestors?

It is true that the pride of our knowledge and the intoxication of our power stun us, and therefore help us to bear with greater patience the want of more æsthetic pleasures. But this compensation, like all compensations, is of its very nature provisional. It is not possible utterly to destroy a need inherent in human nature. There is at the present day a certain tendency in the world to consider art as a superfluous frivolity, as a luxury only to be thought of in moments of leisure. Art and such-like superfluities are contrasted with what are called the serious occupations, the practical realities of life: industry, commerce, inventions, business, and wealth. Those who hold this opinion forget, however, that the sculptures of Phidias and the paintings of Raphael appeared in the world long before the steam-engine and the Voltaic pile. Are we, too, prepared in face of this fact to affirm, with the most advanced champion of the American idea of progress in my dialogue, that “history was off the track up to the discovery of America”? That if men had had any sense, they would have invented machinery and developed the sciences first, and then created and developed the arts? But even if we were prepared to maintain this paradoxical theory, another fact of common observation would be there to prove to us that beauty is not a luxury and whim of gentlemen of leisure, but a primary, universal, and indestructible need of our minds, which every human creature seeks to satisfy as best it can. Do we not see every day that the peasant and the artisan, items in modern civilisation though they are, no sooner have a little money than they try to procure for themselves ornaments, either for their persons or for their homes, which may be as tawdry as you like, but which to them seem beautiful and well worth the expenditure of some of the little money they have? Have we not seen that one of the merits of modern civilisation is that of satisfying the æsthetic needs of the masses? Why should we not expect, then, to find the same need, though in a refined and intense form, felt by those to whom superior intelligence and energy, or the favour of fortune, has granted the power to accumulate wealth in large quantities, those, in other words, who have at their disposal greater means of procuring for themselves the pleasures and good things of life?

No: the artistic impotence of modern civilisation is likely to prove, to judge by the first effects which are now beginning to manifest themselves, a graver phenomenon than is at present realised. The upper classes in Europe and America will not be able to go on for an indefinite length of time living with a consciousness that the world in which they find themselves is ugly, coarse, and decadent in comparison with preceding civilisations; feeling the inferiority of the present more acutely the more they study, and at the same time extending still further their sway over the world and accumulating new riches to console themselves for it. This would be a state of moral want of balance; and moral want of balance cannot continue indefinitely, just as physical want of balance cannot continue indefinitely. Either our civilisation will abate its aspirations to the level of the mediocrity which it is capable of producing in art, destroying in itself the remembrance of and regret for those ancient civilisations which created so many beautiful things; or it will have to put itself into a position to satisfy not only the æsthetic needs of the masses, but also those of the more cultured and refined strata of society. The first supposition appears improbable, or at least no man of sense will wish to consider it possible. It would mean a relapse of the world into barbarism, the end of all the traditions and all the studies which have been and still are an indispensable element of intellectual and moral refinement. So we are left with the other hypothesis, which assumes that man will make up his mind one day to make an effort to create arts of his own, which will survive comparison with those of the past.

Yet the task is an arduous one. As I have already said, an art is not created or perfected without the spirit of tradition and of discipline; and the attempt in our times to re-infuse vigour into the spirit of tradition and of discipline, if only in the measure necessary for the progress of art, is an enterprise, the difficulties of which everyone can understand without a long explanation. It cannot be effected without a profound intellectual and moral reform, which will bring about a change in many things besides the originality and power of the arts which are to-day languid and decadent. So the struggle between American progress and art may well be a more important phenomenon than is at present apparent; and may well entail transformations of far-reaching extent.

V

BEYOND EVERY LIMIT

For century after century, our civilisation lay low in its Mediterranean lair. It knew but a small part of Europe, Asia, and Africa; and no pricks of curiosity impelled it to ascertain how far the world extended over land and sea beyond the vague bounds which marked the limit of its efforts. That small part of the world satisfied the ambitions of our ancestors, though they certainly were not shy and craven. Confined in that narrow corner of the earth and with only the scanty resources which it could provide, they created literatures, arts, philosophies, states, laws, and religions. Some of these creations are alive to this day, and help us distant descendants to shed a little beauty and to impose a little order on the modern world.

Between the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries there began a great change in the history of our civilisation. Impelled by the wish to reach India by way of the Atlantic, our forefathers began to explore the earth. Gradually geographical exploration became the preoccupation of governments, the passion of the public, and the business of a great number of persons who made almost a vocation of these daring voyages. And behold one fine day, one grand day, the most fortunate and daring of the navigators who were exploring the Atlantic in every direction discovered America. In mid-Atlantic there lay two connected continents, stretching from one hemisphere to the other, covering many latitudes and a great variety of clime, and much of this vast territory was still but sparsely inhabited. It was then that our forefathers realised how vast and rich was the earth, and how small and poor in comparison seemed that Mediterranean world in which for so many centuries they had lived. It was then that they began to pass beyond the limits within which they had been so long confined, to invade and to conquer the outside world.

The Pillars of Hercules, which had been the impassable geographical limit of the ancient Mediterranean world, were not, however, the only bounds which they passed; they transcended also the moral and intellectual limits which until then had circumscribed their thoughts and actions. All the time that the ancient Mediterranean civilisation, turned loose into the Atlantic, was striking root and expanding in America, an uninterrupted sequence of events and movements was taking place in Europe, destroying ancient laws, ancient traditions, and ancient discipline; upsetting, in other words, the bounds placed in the past to the thought, the sentiment, and the will of Man. The most important of these events were: the Protestant Reformation, the philosophies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the advances of science, the French Revolution and its wars, the birth and the development of the great industrial movement, and the all but universal triumph of democratic ideas.

Little by little, while the aspect of the globe changed, a great revolution was taking place in the spirit of the ancient Christian civilisation in Europe, which from being dictatorial and traditionalist became free and progressive. Religion, which for so many centuries had been a kind of severe moral discipline, a life of prohibitions, scruples, rules, precepts, ceremonies, and rites, changed into a kind of free contemplation of the Deity in which the individual conscience had full play. Everybody became his own high priest.

The ceremonial of social life, which at no time had been so complicated, serious, and exacting, gradually became so far simplified as no longer to encumber man in his every movement and activity. The State, which at one time, hand-in-hand with religion, watched over the customs and life of its citizens, accorded greater and greater liberty to them. To-day everybody, provided he contributes to society his daily sum of work, is free to live and think as he likes. Severe laws used once upon a time to regulate men’s luxuries and pleasures. Every class was forbidden to spend its money in any way other than that prescribed by these laws. There were times of the year in which men were forbidden to amuse themselves, and, when amusements were allowed, the laws took care that they should not degenerate into vice. Nowadays the whole year is one long festival and carnival for all who have money to spend; and together with freedom in pleasure men have acquired also a freedom in vice which would scandalise our friends the ancients, if they might come back to life again.

Every authority is losing power. The people discuss the government and the laws; children take the first opportunity of escaping from the authority of their parents. The younger generation is convinced that it knows more than the older, and values the latter’s experience at zero. Traditions are losing their force and academics their prestige. Everyone holds the opinion he likes in religious, artistic, political, and moral questions; just as he is free to regulate his own conduct, at his own risk and peril, as he pleases, with the sole obligation of respecting the limits imposed by the laws, which are for the most part neither numerous nor embarrassing.

What is the deep-lying cause of this duplex and contemporaneous movement? Why has the old Christian civilisation of Europe felt itself in the last four centuries unable any longer either to contain itself within the ancient material limits or within the ancient ideal limits? Why, at the same moment as it advances to the conquest of new continents, does it destroy within itself all the ancient disciplinary restrictions? Because in these last centuries it has gradually discovered that the earth is much vaster and richer than it suspected; that it contains, in old Europe, as well as in young America, treasures in much greater abundance than it had ever pictured in its dreams; and that it can invent tools which bring these rapidly within its reach. Gradually, as man found that he could rob nature of her immense treasures, there arose and spread from generation to generation through all classes in Europe and America a craze for wealth and a mad ambition to win the mastery over nature, such as the world had never yet seen.

To satisfy this craze and this ambition, however, it was necessary to break many of the innumerable bonds—religious, moral, æsthetic, and political,—which limited the energy and initiative of our forefathers. How could so many millions of men have brought themselves to emigrate to America, if the spirit of tradition had not been weakened in Europe, and if everybody had continued to hold, as they did once upon a time, that the greatest good fortune a man could have was that of being buried in the church in which he had been baptised? Even to-day there are those who lament the diminution, in all the Christian churches during the last few centuries, of the number, complexity, and rigour of the rites and ceremonies, just as others lament that the ceremonial of social life and etiquette is dying out. But would not men who are obliged to work, travel, and rush about as we do nowadays find themselves embarrassed beyond the point of endurance by a religion which made them spend too much time over rites, and by a complicated etiquette like that which still prevails in the states of the East, requiring a large part of the day to be spent in compliments and ceremonies? Europeans often laugh at the architecture of New York; and I must confess that I, too, found it distinctly bizarre. On the other hand, could that vast city have grown and renovated itself so rapidly in the last century, and have found accommodation for the countless multitudes which throng to it from all the corners of the world, if those who built it had troubled themselves to observe the rules formulated by the great architects of the sixteenth century, in the days when it took as much time to build a palace and a church as it now does to construct a city?

Modern society, if compared with the societies which preceded it, may seem in many of its aspects—and in fact it is—ugly, poor in artistic beauty, coarse, and brutal. It may even seem atheistic and irreverent, frivolous and superficial in matters of religion, and, in certain respects, morally lax or downright licentious. This kind of disorder, however, which is such a common subject of heart-burning, is only the necessary effect of the outburst of our energy over the world and nature on its path of conquest. A civilisation cannot produce, refine, or perfect arts or traditions of elegance and of social life, or a morality and a religion, if it does not adopt an attitude of reserve, if it does not limit itself to some extent, if it does not sacrifice its other ambitions and aspirations to this object. A civilisation like ours, whose supreme aspiration it is to extend in the shortest possible time and as far as it can its empire over the world; to surpass all the limits which nature seeks to oppose to its restless ambitions and to the multiform energy of man, must needs sacrifice beauty, refinement, elegance, and moral delicacy to rapidity, energy, activity, and daring. The discovery and development of new countries, the marvellous progress of America, the discoveries of science, the perfection of machinery, the ideas of liberty which emerge triumphant from political revolutions and changes in customs, the weakening of the spirit of authority in every department of social life, the abolition of so many limits which once entangled the movements of man, are all phenomena which are mutually and indissolubly connected.

* * * * *

“Yes,” many will say; “and they are phenomena which all go to make up the grandeur and glory of the modern world. We have power, wealth, knowledge, and liberty, the four blessings of which our forefathers had little, if any, knowledge. What cause have we then to grumble? And amongst all the blessings which modern times shower upon us, perhaps the most precious—more precious than wealth, power, and knowledge—is liberty. If we have no reason to regret the past, it is chiefly because our forefathers lived, imprisoned, and in suffering, within limits which we have overstepped. Is there any greater joy for a man than that of being able in thought, feeling, and action to follow the inner impulse of his own conscience, instead of making it bend to an external will, whether it be that of the law, or that of the public, or that of a tradition? Surely the modern world is the greatest as well as the most fortunate which has ever existed?”

That is what many people think, and thoughts like this breed the optimism which at the present day cheers so many minds. This thought is, moreover, partially true; but only partially. For in the intoxication of their triumph over nature, of the riches which they have conquered so easily and in such abundance, men seem not to recognise that this civilisation without limits is little by little allowing that same unbridled energy to hurry it into excesses which threaten to drive it back into that very state of barbarism from which it has made so many efforts to escape. The impetus which it has acquired, now that it has cast off so many of its ancient restraints, is great; but the danger is precisely that this impetus may carry it too far.

I have already said that amongst the limits abolished by modern civilisation are those which preceding civilisations had placed on luxury. How great a change has taken place in men’s ideas on this subject during two centuries! Simplicity and austerity were considered for centuries virtues proper to saints and heroes. Christianity had gone so far as to glorify poverty in so many words. Man, by increasing his needs, only increased the number of his masters and tyrants; only multiplied for himself occasions for sorrow. The more simply a man could live, the freer, stronger, and happier he was. In short, in ancient times, up to the French Revolution, religion, law, and tradition set limits on every side to man’s desire to possess and to enjoy; and these limits were so numerous and so close, that they entailed no little suffering on the generations constrained to live within them. That is why we have upset them all. And what is the result? That we no longer have any sure criterion by which to distinguish reasonable consumption from insensate waste, legitimate need from vice. We can no longer say what are the limits at which it is reasonable and wise for the peasant, the artisan, the small tradesman, the man of leisure, the millionaire, the multi-millionaire, the child, the woman, the old man, respectively, to cry a halt to their desires. All men and all classes arrogate to themselves the right to desire, to spend, even to waste as much as they can. No one has any clear idea of a standard by which to distinguish what he may desire and what he ought to deny himself. A kind of universal prodigality is becoming obligatory in every class; and modern civilisation is hurrying towards an unbridled, gross, and oppressive orgy. There is already a large number of men in Europe and America who eat, drink, and smoke to excess; who over-indulge in intoxicating and stimulating drinks; and who spend themselves in that continual whirl of diversions and distractions which form so large a part of modern life. The number is fated, however, to grow yet larger, rapidly and indefinitely. Is not production increasing on every side? Is not progress for us first and foremost the continual increase of production? And what avails it to produce more, if the riches produced do not find consumers?

The modern world, in freeing men’s desires from all the ancient limits and restraints, has given a vigorous impulse to human industry. In order to satisfy the increased needs of the masses, man has invented machinery, and has put a premium on the new countries. But precisely because there is no longer limit or restraint to men’s desires, industry, which in the past was the handmaiden of human needs, is now becoming their tyrant. It is creating and multiplying our needs with a view to their subsequent satisfaction. In order that it may never be short of work, it is tempting men in a thousand ways to desire and to consume more. Therefore our civilisation has made of riches not the fitting means of satisfying reasonable and legitimate needs, but an end in themselves. We are obliged to produce them in order to consume them, and to consume them in order to produce them. Every moment which a man does not spend in producing riches, he must spend in consuming the riches produced by others; so that he can never stay still for one instant, but must jump from occupation to amusement, and from amusement back again to occupation. He must try to make the day as long as possible, accustoming himself to do everything at full speed, and cutting down the hours of sleep as much as possible. Everybody knows that we moderns, especially in the great cities, are losing the habit of sleeping.

We have not yet mentioned, however, the most serious drawbacks of the present-day lack of any fixed limit to men’s desires. In the past ages, the efforts of religion were directed to educating men to self-introspection; to teaching them to explore their own consciences, to render account to themselves of their own sins and vices, and to try to amend them. One might even go so far as to say that from one point of view Christianity was principally a melancholy meditation on the perversity of human nature, and an effort to purify it through meditation, suffering, and the love of God. One has only to read the letters of Saint Catherine, or the _Divine Comedy_, or Pascal’s _Pensées_ to realise to what an extent the moral refinement which is the fruit of these meditations preoccupied the loftiest minds, and, at second hand, the great ones of the earth in past centuries. A considerable part of the energies of every generation was consumed in this introspective effort, instead of in action; for centuries and centuries, saints, moralists, and preachers abounded in Europe, while men of action, fit to conquer the world and its riches, nature and her secrets, were scarce.

This searching of the inward parts was not always soothing by any manner of means. For the past century and a half, numerous writers and philosophers have denounced it as one of the refinements of torture with which religion in the past made men’s lives a burden to them. Perhaps, however, they are wrong; for this effort, which religion made for so many centuries to habituate man to self-introspection, self-knowledge, and self-judgment, demands a less superficial explanation. However great be the force of the laws and the vigilance of public opinion, there can be no convenient order in a social system, if man does not help by exercising some sort of surveillance over himself, if he does not give ear to an inward voice, forbidding him to take advantage of every opportunity of doing evil with impunity which may offer itself. This necessity for self-restraint is particularly urgent in connection with three duties: the duty of speaking the truth, the duty of checking one’s own inclination to pleasure, especially in the relations between the sexes, and the duty of not using one’s own strength improperly at the expense of the weak. Many are the times when we could tell a lie with impunity, or even with advantage to ourselves, if we wished to do so; and yet it is necessary that we should speak the truth spontaneously, in order that justice may triumph. How easy it is for the man who has become the slave of vice to evade the eyes of his fellows and to satisfy in secret his most perverse passions! And what system of laws can be conceived which will be wise and perfect enough to bar all the countless ways in which the stronger can impose upon the weaker?

Every religion with more or less success—and none with more success than Christianity—in centuries past helped law and public opinion to regulate this most important part of morality. They all made a sacred thing of an oath, which is nothing but a covenant which every individual enters into with himself to speak the truth, even when he could lie with impunity or with advantage to himself. They all created a sexual morality to regulate love, marriage, and the family. They endeavoured in various ways to awaken in the consciences of the rich and powerful the recognition of certain duties of moderation and charity towards the weak and the poor. Nowadays, on the contrary, men no longer have time to examine their consciences, or to reflect on their own vices and defects, or on their own duties and rights. The whole atmosphere of our lives is exterior to ourselves; we are always moving about and always busy. We have become almost incapable of meditation and self-introspection. Our times no longer lay any store by this education of our inner feelings. The only discipline they impose on man is that of work. Everybody, whether of high degree or of low, is required, under penalty of losing his daily bread or of dropping in the social scale, to fill with exactness, precision, diligence, and correctness, the rôle, be it little or big, which has been allotted to him in the immense operations of our times. But, for the rest, everyone is to-day much more free than he was in the past to adjust his line of action to his own beliefs, and to make for himself his own standard and his own laws.

The result is that all the scruples and internal restraints with which religion endowed the conscience of man in the past are growing rusty from disuse. Our civilisation, rich and splendid as it is, threatens to be spoiled by fraud, by evil habits, and by oppression. There is no doubt about it; not even in these days is the discipline of work sufficient in itself to keep the State in good order. Man is not a living machine, destined only to produce riches. When he leaves his office and comes back into the world, the modern man there finds a family, sons, parents, friends, persons of the other sex who may attract him, men richer and more powerful than himself, others weaker and poorer, political institutions and public problems; in short, opportunities of doing good or evil, temptations dangerous but agreeable, and duties painful but necessary. And our times not only give him practically no moral assistance to conquer these temptations and to perform these duties, but rather in many ways incite him to yield to the temptations, and to exercise his cunning in evading the duties. Fraud in particular is becoming simply second nature to our civilisation. What is the great industrial movement of modern times but a continual deception for cloaking the deterioration which it is bringing about in the quality of things as the price of increasing the quantity of them? Every day sees an increase in the number of cleverly faked objects, which are not what they seem; and science—especially chemistry—is the highly paid accomplice which furnishes industry with the means of imposing this colossal deception on an inexperienced and ingenuous public. In other words, commerce and industry, which play so large a part in modern life, are becoming more and more a colossal deception in which he succeeds best and makes most money who is cleverest at lying to the public and at foisting on them goods of inferior quality though superior in outward seeming. Now if we see in a social system, on the one hand, a weakening of all the internal restraints which keep a man from lying and cheating, and, on the other, a premium put on that same lying and cheating, must we not expect to find fraud permeating the whole system? And what will our customs be like, what will life be like, in the days when nobody any longer feels any remorse or scruple in cheating his neighbour, and when everybody becomes cheat and cheated turn and turn about, cheat in matters which he understands, cheated in those in which he has to rely on other people?

The growing depravity of customs, furthermore, threatens us with no less a danger. I do not wish to exaggerate the horrors of the modern Babylons, as Catholic priests and Protestant ministers are apt to do. Their grief at seeing the rising generation turn a deaf ear to their wise counsels makes them take too gloomy a view of the present state of affairs. Nevertheless, it is certain that the customs of modern civilisation are hurrying it towards a dangerous crisis. The internal restraints are being relaxed, and temptations and facilities are multiplying with the growth of riches and of cities, and with the increasing mobility of persons of both sexes, so many of whom it prompts to leave their native village or country. Especially in the big cities where everyone is unknown, can easily hide away, and is watched by nobody; where money has greater power over men’s minds because there is more of it and more of it is needed,—virtue runs serious and continual risks. Without being aware of it, we are undoing, little by little, Christianity’s great contribution to the chastening of our customs, by suppressing many of the limits which Christianity had established with such labour in the midst of the unbridled licence of the ancient world. We are travelling, therefore, step by step back towards paganism, with all its conveniences and all its perils. Already, in fact, we can see cropping up here and there in the richer and more highly civilised countries and classes that mortal sickness which killed the ancient civilisations: sterility. One of the reasons why all the most flourishing ancient civilisations have perished is that at the moment of their greatest glory the population suddenly began to dwindle; and this sterility which killed them was the effect to a large extent of the licence of their customs. Love remains fertile only so long as it restrains itself and limits itself. Christianity, by subjecting men’s customs to discipline—one of the noblest of its services to mankind—succeeded for centuries in maintaining in Europe and America an incessant fertility, which has proved to be one of the most potent causes of the increase of our power. But now we can see, with the return of the world to paganism, the beginning of a new era of sterility, especially in the big cities and in the most ancient and most wealthy states.

Lastly, I have referred to another danger which threatens this our social system, victim as it is of its limitless desires; I mean the increase in the opportunities for the strong to abuse their strength. This is certainly the least of the three evils; for thanks to the diffusion of culture and of liberty, the weak have learned and are able, to unite in their own defence. Some balance of justice is obtained and will continue to be obtained by opposing force to force. The balance, however, will be in external things rather than in men’s convictions. For in this unbridled and limitless chase after money and enjoyment, of which the world is the theatre, the spirit of charity is obscured; and men’s minds become accustomed to a hardness and brutality which may perhaps one day startle the world in a disagreeable and terrible way.

* * * * *

It may seem to some of my readers that I take a delight in uttering gloomy prognostications of the future of modern civilisation. Such, however, is not my intention. Who would dare to deny that, notwithstanding its defects, the civilisation in which we have the good fortune to live is the most splendid and powerful on which the sun has ever shone? But its very grandeur, which is to so large an extent the fruit of our boldness in overthrowing most of the limits which preceding civilisations had placed to human energy, gives birth to a new and formidable problem which is already beginning to confront our speed-loving civilisation, and which is itself, too, a problem of limits, perhaps of the limit _par excellence_. And that problem may be expressed in one question: _Quousque tandem?_ Up to what point, in our desire to conquer the world and its treasures, to multiply riches, and to increase our power over nature, must we and can we sacrifice beauty, and the forms, ceremonies, and refinements of life, moral and æsthetic? Up to what point must we and can we make legitimate use of the liberty which the modern world has given us; and at what point does abuse of it begin?

This is the vital problem which I have posed and tried to dissect in the dialogue which my travels in America inspired me to write: the problem treated in the speeches and discussions of the many characters, European and American, who figure in that dialogue. It may seem strange, at first sight, that a discussion of the Old World and the New, in which the contending parties propose to prove which is superior to the other, should end in this second problem, apparently so unlike the first; whether it is necessary or not to place a limit on the unbridled activity and immoderate desires of our times. Anyone who has read the present series of essays, however, will be less likely to find this conclusion singular and obscure. I have repeatedly said, and tried to prove, that there is too great a tendency on both sides of the Atlantic to find an antagonism between Europe and America. If certain tendencies are stronger in one of the two continents, and weaker in the other, these are differences of quantity, not of quality. America is becoming Europeanised, and Europe Americanised. However little reflection and cool reasoning the European may bring to his abuse of America on the score of its excessive zeal in the production of riches, or the American to his abuse of Europe on account of the scanty remains of the spirit of tradition and conservatism in the Old World, each will recognise that he is at the same time inveighing against his own continent. In fact, Europe applies herself with no less zeal than America to the production of greater wealth; and America is no less anxious than Europe to enjoy the advantages which may even now accrue to the world from the spirit of tradition.

Consequently the discussion of the question whether America is superior to Europe or Europe to America is a futile enterprise and labour lost; because the balance between the differences is rapidly adjusting itself. Nevertheless, if any difference exists to-day between the two continents, it is undoubtedly this: that all the phenomena of social life in America are simpler and clearer, and less overlaid and obscured by traditions, institutions, and century-old ideas and sentiments than in Europe. For this reason, the careful observer will find in America a much more profitable field for the study of the dangerous tendencies and exaggerations of modern civilisation which are common to Europe and America. Of these dangerous tendencies, the one which has struck me most in the course of my travels in America, and has given me most food for thought, is precisely this, which I have treated in this my latest work and which forms, as it were, the crown to the whole discussion of the dialogue. Modern civilisation has accomplished miracles and marvels without number, since she left behind her the limits, material and ideal, within which the timid generations of old confined themselves,—since she outstepped and upset these limits on her way to conquer the earth, riches, and liberty. Now, however, precisely because she has crossed all the limits and no longer has any before her, she finds herself impelled on every side, in politics, customs, morals, art, and philosophy, to excesses which may one day prove very dangerous. Men are beginning to have a vague presentiment of this danger. They do not clearly see, however, the quarter from which it threatens. They disquiet themselves without thoroughly diagnosing the evil. And this disquietude may perhaps explain the pessimism which afflicts a civilisation so flourishing and fortunate in many respects as that of our own times.

For this reason, I thought that the great problem of the limits might grow little by little, on board a transatlantic liner, out of a discussion about America. An Italian, who has made money in America, and who, like so many Europeans who have made their fortune thus, is an admirer of the New World, one evening launches out into a eulogy of young America at the expense of old Europe. He extols the civilisation of machinery, progress, and liberty, by contrast with what remains in Europe of the ancient civilisation whose efforts were directed to improving the quality of things rather than augmenting their quantity; which left the world poor while it created arts, religions, moralities, and rights. The discussion becomes heated, complicated, and diffuse until, under the guiding influence of an old savant who knows Europe and America too, it concentrates on this point: Granted that man was well-advised to exceed the ancient limits within which preceding civilisations had confined him, to hurl himself on the world and to conquer it; up to what point may man aspire to liberty in every department of life, without endangering in the long run the most precious fruits of his conquest?

The book does not pretend to solve this formidable problem. No philosopher, no writer, no book could solve it. It can only be solved by a radical revolution in the ideas, sentiments, and interests of the masses. But the book which I have written purports to throw light on some, at least, of the essential aspects of the problem. It endeavours to make it clear to the men of our time, by harping on a principle of great antiquity, great simplicity, and great modesty, which may be perhaps usefully recalled to the memory of present generations, in Europe as well as in America. That principle is, that man is a being of limits; and that he ought, therefore, to observe in his desires a certain mean. A civilisation must remember that it is the sum of the efforts of a great many individuals; that these individuals may be very numerous, but that each one is a small limited being; and that the sum of their efforts cannot be infinite. Consequently, a civilisation must not let its desires and wishes extend untrammelled in every direction. It must learn to confine itself within limits.

VI

THE RIDDLE OF AMERICA

In Argentina, there are vast and luxuriant valleys, over which the train seems to creep toward the very edge of a horizon which ever recedes as the traveller advances. From time to time, four or five red one-storied houses, clustered behind a station, recall to his mind the fact that this wilderness is actually inhabited. In Brazil, so far as the eye can see, there are ranges of mountains, shadowy even in brilliant daylight, in the midst of which, from time to time, one mountain stands out more distinctly than its fellows. The shadowy hills are those still covered by the primeval forest; the others, those where the timber has been burned off and replaced by coffee plantations; but even here there is no trace of human life. One must travel long hours by railroad before even catching sight of a village.

In North America, or at least in its Eastern States, there are vast and desolate tracts. From time to time a village appears, bristling with chimneys. Then the traveller slips on into the deserted country. Another village appears, only in its turn to disappear. Then all at once the train begins to rush through the midst of houses. On, on it goes. The houses never cease to follow it. Huge edifices rise from the midst of the little dwellings like giants from a crowd of dwarfs. Automobiles and trolley cars move through the streets. It is a great city; half a million, a million, two million men are crowded together there in the shadow of a thousand chimneys, surrounded on every side by an almost deserted country. What a strange sight are these wildernesses to a European accustomed to live in one of the crowded countries of the Old World where men have built their houses everywhere, from the shores of the sea up to the highest habitable slopes of the mountains!

In observing a phenomenon so novel to his experience, the historian of antiquity is deeply interested; and as he studies it, like so many other Europeans in the presence of the same spectacle, he forgets his own preoccupations. The riddle of America rises before him and the desire of finding an answer to it turns him from his former studies. For America is a true riddle to Europeans. During the past thirty years, not only the United States, but even smaller American countries like Brazil and Argentina, have impressed themselves sharply upon the attention of Europe. The Old World has been compelled to recognise that America has in her turn become a mighty historic force; and that she exercises an influence on the Old World which grows continuously greater. When one reflects that, only a century and a half ago, all these American states were merely poverty-stricken colonies of Europe, harshly exploited by their European masters, one cannot suppress amazement at the rapidity with which their destiny has changed.

What power is it which has worked this miracle? On this point, it is impossible to feel any doubt; the power is wealth. These plains and these mountains which look so deserted are tilled, mined, worked with intensest energy; and every year, with a generosity which seems inexhaustible, they yield to the men who have toiled over them prodigious quantities of cereals, tobacco, coffee, wool, gold, silver, iron, oil—an enormous torrent of riches which pours over the entire world. The great industrial cities of North America manufacture these raw materials with profits so large and swiftly won that to the Old World they seem fantastic. In these plains, in these valleys, in these mountains, in these cities, labourers receive higher wages, merchants and manufacturers make their fortunes faster, capitalists come into contact with mightier interests, landlords draw higher rents from this prosperity—all the sources of profit are more abundant than in Europe. And these conditions have made it possible for a few of Fortune’s favourites to pile up in the course of a single lifetime wealth whose vastness makes the brain swim. America has, in fact, succeeded in producing riches at a rate of speed that man has never yet attained elsewhere in the world. She has been the principal factor in the fabulous increase of the world’s wealth during the last fifty years. Her riches have become one of the historic forces of our civilisation, and one of the principal preoccupations of the European mind.

Whence come these vast riches and whither do they go? How is it that America can grow rich so much faster than Europe? Is it thanks to far more fortunate physical conditions, which bear no relation to the deserts of man? Or is it in consequence of moral and intellectual qualities which are lacking in Europeans? And what will be the ultimate effect of this economic superiority? Riches may be the goal of an individual’s efforts; for a nation they can only be means to conquer the other good things of life which we call civilisation: glory, grandeur, power, beauty, knowledge, moral refinement. Can America, and will she, make use of her riches to rob Europe of the intellectual and moral leadership which the latter still possesses? Or will these riches, too swiftly won, exercise an evil influence simultaneously upon Europe and America, by making both continents more materialistic?

* * * * *

Such is the riddle of America, which, for some time past, has been steadily forcing itself upon the attention of Europe. To arrive at an answer, we must know whether the influence of a too swift economic development of the New World upon the higher activities of the mind, upon morals, upon science, art, and religion is beneficial or the reverse. The detractors of America—and there are many of them in Europe—affirm without hesitation that the Americans are barbarians laden with gold; that they think only of making money, and that, in consequence of their riches, they lower the level of Europe’s ancient civilisation and infect its beautiful traditions with a crass materialism. Admirers of America, on the contrary—and of these there are as many in Europe as there are detractors—will tell you that the New World is giving to the Old a unique example of energy, activity, intelligence, and daring. Let old Europe then give heed; beyond the Atlantic, young rivals are girding themselves with new weapons to dispute with her the superiority of which she is proud. What must one think of these conflicting answers to the puzzle?

Let us begin with the reasoning of the detractors: “Americans are barbarians laden with gold.” In order to simplify the discussion, let us limit our examination to the United States, which is justly entitled to represent contemporary America with all its qualities and all its defects. No long sojourn within the borders of the United States is necessary to convince a person that in the great Republic people think only of making money. A writer partial to paradox might well amuse himself with proving that the Americans are more idealistic than the Europeans, or even that they are a mystical people. Anyone who cares to find arguments to establish this thesis may well be embarrassed by their number. For instance, would a people which despised the higher activities of the mind have been able to create the philosophical doctrine which is popularly known to us under the name of “Pragmatism”? The Pragmatist affirms that all ideas capable of rendering useful service are true. He takes utility as his standard of the measure of truth. This theory has seemed to many writers of the Old World a decisive proof of the practical mind of the American people, who never forget their material interests, even in connection with metaphysical questions. This, however, is a mistake. Pragmatism does not propose to subordinate the ideal to practical interest. Its purpose is to reconcile opposing doctrines by proving that all ideas, even those which seem mutually exclusive, can help us to become wiser, stronger, better. What service is there then in struggling to make one idea triumph over another instead of allowing men to draw from each idea the good which each can yield? In a word, Pragmatism, as America has conceived it, is a mighty effort to give the right of expression in modern civilisation to all religious and philosophical doctrines which in the past have stained the world with their sanguinary struggles.

A beautiful doctrine this, which may lend itself to many objections; but true or false, it proves that the people who have conceived it, far from despising the ideal, have such respect for all ideas and all beliefs, that they have not the courage to repel a single one. Such a people wishes to learn all and understand all.

Another proof of this same characteristic is furnished by American universities. Europeans have all heard descriptions of these great American universities, Harvard and Columbia, for example. They are true cities of learning with vast and splendid buildings, gardens, pavilions, laboratories, museums, libraries, athletic fields for physical exercises, pools where students can go to swim. They are enormously rich and, at the same time, always in dire straits. How can that be? Because no speciality or item of perfection is allowed to be lacking. All the languages and the literatures of the world which have reached any degree of importance, all the histories, all the sciences,—judicial, social, moral, physical, natural,—all the divisions of mathematics, and all the philosophies, are taught there by hundreds of professors. Private citizens of the rich classes, bankers, manufacturers, merchants, have in a great degree met from their private purses the steadily growing needs of the universities.

There is the same tendency in art. That American cities are ugly, I willingly admit. It would need much courage, no doubt, to brand this affirmation as false, but it would also be unjust to deny that America is making mighty efforts to beautify her cities. All the schools of architecture in Europe, especially that of Paris, are full of Americans hard at work. The sums which cities, states, banks, insurance companies, universities, and railroads, have spent in beautifying their magnificent edifices is fabulous. Not all these buildings, by any means, are masterpieces, but there are many which are very beautiful. America has architects of indisputable worth. In Europe, men like to repeat that Americans buy at extravagant prices objects of ancient art, or things that pass for such, not distinguishing those which are beautiful and ancient from those which are inferior and counterfeit. But those who have seen something of the houses of rich Americans know that, although there are snobs and dupes in America, as everywhere else, there are also people who know the meaning of art, who know how to buy beautiful things, and who search the world over for them. You will find in the streets of New York every variety of architecture, just as you find in its libraries all the literatures of the world, and in its theatres all the music, and in its houses all the decorative arts.

“The barbarian laden with gold” is, then, a legendary personage, but it is not at all surprising that such a conception should exist. Modern society is organised in such fashion that it is impossible even to conceive of a people at once rich and ignorant. Industry, business, agriculture, demand nowadays very special technical knowledge, and a very complete social organisation; that is to say, they imply a scientific, political, and judicial civilisation of a reasonably high order. Thus America is not at all uninterested in the higher activities of the mind. It would be more just to say that as a nation, and without regard to individual instances, she interests herself in such activities less than in industry, in business, and in agriculture. But is not this also the case with Europe? Who would dare affirm that the progress of the arts and sciences and letters is at this moment the principal concern of the governments and of the influential classes of the Old World? We Europeans have only to listen to what people round about us are saying. Their talk is all of bringing the cultivation of the land to economic perfection, of opening coal and iron mines, of harnessing waterfalls, of developing industries, of increasing exports. Kings who rule “by the grace of God” publicly declare that nothing interests them so much as the business of their countries!

If all this were characteristic only of American barbarism, we should be obliged to admit that Europe is Americanising herself with disconcerting rapidity. But this economic effort of Europe in turn presents nothing that need surprise us; like the American development, it is only the dizzy acceleration of a vast historic movement whose beginnings go back to the far distant day when an obscure and obstinate Genoese set sail, and in the midst of the waters of the Atlantic crossed the impassable boundary of the Old World. Yes, before that day, Europe had created admirable arts and literatures, profound philosophies, consoling religions, lofty morals, wise systems of justice, but—she was poor. She produced little, and produced it slowly; she had defied tradition and authority; she had fettered human energy by a multitude of laws, precepts, and prejudices. To humble men’s pride, she kept repeating to them that they were feeble and corrupt creatures. She taught them to use Virgil’s beautiful figure that they were like “a rower who painfully forces his boat against the current of the stream. Evil be on his head if for one instant he forgets, and ceases to struggle against the current’s force; in that moment, he is lost; the flood sweeps away his fragile boat.”

One fine day, however, Europe discovered a vast continent in the midst of the ocean. Then it dawned upon her that Prometheus had been but a clumsy thief, for he had stolen only a tiny spark of fire; she discovered mines, coal, and electricity. She created the steam-engine and all the other machines which have been derived from it. She succeeded in multiplying riches with a rapidity unimagined by remoter ancestors. From that moment, man no longer contented himself with dreaming of the Promised Land. He wished to go there. He destroyed all the traditions, the laws, and institutions which place limitations upon the store of human energy. He learned to work swiftly. At a single stroke, he conquered liberty and riches, and he conceived the idea of progress. If America seems to-day to symbolise this movement, which has turned the world topsy-turvy, the movement was derived from Europe. After having conceived the idea of such a revolution, could Europe remain untouched by it?

* * * * *

It would appear then that the riddle of America is very simple. The answer contains nothing to make us uneasy. The riches of the New World threaten no catastrophe to the noblest traditions of our civilisation. For New York’s wealth is only a part of the riches produced in the same economic development in the two worlds. The ultimate development of these mighty riches might be merely a general advance, both material and ideal, of Europe and America. Rich and prosperous Americans might try to assimilate the culture of Europe, and on her part Europe, in her effort to increase her own riches, might seek to equal America. But a historian of antiquity who returns from America cannot share this optimism. In the lap of modern civilisation, there are twin worlds struggling with each other for leadership. But these two worlds are not, as people are apt to think, Europe and America. Their names are Quality and Quantity.

The civilisations from which our own is sprung were poor indeed. They set limits to their desires, their ambitions, their spirit of initiative, their audacity, their originality. They brought forth slowly and a little at a time, and suffered continuously from the insufficiency of their material resources. They looked upon the amassing of wealth merely as a painful necessity; but, in all things, they sought to attain the difficult model of perfection, whether in art, or in literature, or in the realms of morality and religion. The aristocratic character of almost all the industries of the past, the importance which was formerly bestowed on the decorative arts and on all questions of personal morality, ceremonial, and form—these are all proofs of it. It was Quality, not Quantity, which carried our forefathers forward. All the limitations to which these civilisations were subject, so astonishing to us to-day, were only the necessary cost of these perfections which men once so ardently desired. We have turned upside down the world our ancestors lived in. We have made our goal the multiplication of riches. We have won liberty, but we have been obliged to abandon almost all the ancient ideals of perfection, sacrificing Quality in everything.

How many of the difficulties which torture this brilliant period of ours so cruelly are the result of this duel between Quality and Quantity! Look, for example, at the present crisis in the study of the classics. Why did men formerly study Homer and Cicero with passionate zeal? Because, in those days, the great Greek and Latin writers were the models of that literary perfection, so greatly admired by the influential classes, which was not merely an ornament of the mind. The attainment of perfection often carried with it the admiration of the public, fame, sometimes even glory and high rank. In this last century, however, these models have lost much of their prestige, either on account of the multitude of literatures which have come to be known and liked, or because they have proved troublesome to a period compelled to write too much and too quickly. Just imagine a candidate for the presidency of the United States who should pronounce ten or fifteen long orations daily and who should in each discourse show himself the perfect orator according to the rules of Cicero or Quintilian! The day when classical culture ceased to be an official school of literary taste, on that day it was condemned to die; and scientific philology, which we have sought to set up in its place, can only serve to bury its corpse. No longer models for posterity, the books of the ancient authors have become like any others, and are less interesting for the majority of readers than the works of modern literatures.

It is the fashion nowadays to discuss the crisis which threatens all the arts. We must, however, remember to preserve a distinction. We must divide the arts into two categories: those which serve to amuse men by helping them to pass the time agreeably, like music, the theatre, and, to a certain degree, literature; and those which serve to beautify the world, like architecture, sculpture, painting, and all the decorative arts. It is patent that the crisis which we are considering is much more serious among the arts embraced by the second category. No epoch has spent so much money in beautifying the world as has our own; no age has supported so formidable an army of architects, sculptors, decorators, and cabinet-makers; no age has built so many cities, palaces, monuments, bridges, plazas, and gardens. In the midst of lavish plenty, why are we so discontented with the results obtained; why have not Americans, in view of the enormous sums which they have spent to beautify their cities, succeeded in building a St. Mark’s or a Notre Dame? They have all the materials,—money, artists, the desire to create beautiful things. What then do they lack? They lack one single thing—time.

One day, in New York, I was praising an example of American architecture to an American architect of great talent. “Yes, yes,” he answered with a touch of satire, “my fellow countrymen would willingly spend a hundred million dollars to build a church as beautiful as St. Mark’s in Venice, but they would command me, as a condition of my undertaking the work, to finish it within eighteen months.”

That is a significant phrase. How is it possible to beautify a world which is incessantly in transformation, wherein nothing is stable, and which wishes to multiply everything it possesses—buildings, as it would furniture? To create beautiful palaces, to construct beautiful furniture, to attain the distant ideal of perfection, time is essential—time and wise deliberation, reasonable limitation of the multiplicity of human demands, and a certain stability in taste. No one could have built St. Mark’s or Notre Dame in eighteen months, and France could not have created her famous decorative styles of the eighteenth century if public taste had been so fickle as ours, and if everybody at that time had wished every ten years to change his furniture.

The crises in classical studies and in the decorative arts are, however, still relatively slight in comparison with the general intellectual and moral confusion into which the doctrine of Quantity has plunged men’s minds, by substituting a standard of Quantity in place of the traditional standard of Quality. If my phrase is obscure, examples may possibly elucidate what I say. We all know, for instance, that, in recent years, the citizens of the United States have waged a bitter campaign against the trusts, the great banks, the railroads, and insurance companies; in fact, against all the vast powers of money. In newspaper articles, in public speeches, and in whole volumes filled with accusations, these trusts have been charged with being centres of corruption, instruments of a new despotism not less odious than the political despotism of old. They are decried as scandalous conspiracies to despoil honest men of the legitimate fruits of their labour. The campaign has penetrated to the very heart of the nation; but in the face of the enormous indignation of the masses, there has been exhibited both in America and Europe the Olympian calm of economists and men of great affairs, who have denounced this movement of protest as a return to Mediæval ideas, and who in the face of a vast outcry have paid enthusiastic homage to modern finance, its enormous enterprises, and its tremendous organisation.

How can there be so vast a difference of opinion in an age so intelligent and educated as ours? Is half the world struck blind to-day, and is sight given to the other half alone? No, there is neither incurable blindness, nor sight vouchsafed only to a few. The sole reason for the confusion is that men employ different standards in measuring the same thing, and for this reason find it impossible to understand each other. If one accepts the quantitative standard, if one admits that the supreme object of life is to produce an enormous pile of riches as rapidly as possible, the economists are right. The injustices and cruelties denounced by the adversaries of high finance are merely negligible inconveniences in a régime of economic liberty of which the modern world is naturally proud, for it is to this liberty that the modern world owes most of its wealth. Yet we must remember that the idea of leaving the wages of each individual to be determined by the blind play of economic forces was foreign to all the civilisations that preceded our own. They always sought to correct the principles of business in order to keep them in accord with the principles of charity and justice. To carry out this policy, they did not even hesitate to limit the development of industry and business, for example, by forbidding interest on money. Former ages subordinated economic development to an ideal of moral perfection; they placed Quality above Quantity. If, however, one applies this standard of qualitative measure to the modern world, it is these detractors of high finance who have the right on their side. Many methods employed by modern finance, useful as they are from an economic point of view, are for the above-mentioned reason none the less repugnant to a moral and slightly sensitive conscience. Detractors and defenders may dispute to the end of time. They will never understand each other, for they start from different premises, which never can be reconciled to each other.

It is this continual confusion between quantitative and qualitative standards which prevents the modern world from steering a true course amid the gravest moral questions. Take, for example, the question of progress. Is there an idea more popular to-day, or a word more often repeated, than “progress”? And yet if to every person who pronounces this word we were to put the question, “What do you mean by progress?” few indeed would be able to answer with precision. There is a thing still stranger. In this century of progress, the whole world deplores ten times a day the decadence of all things. How can such a contradiction be explained? The answer is simply that the same act may be judged as a phenomenon of progress or of decadence, according as it is viewed from the standpoint of Quality or of Quantity. Set an architect and a locomotive builder to disputing about the modern world. The former will maintain that the world is reverting to barbarism because it multiplies cities, and hastily and hideously constructed villages without being able to create a single one of those marvellous monuments which are the glory of the Middle Ages. The latter will reply that the world moves forward, because the population, number, and size of the cities, the amount of cultivated land, the extension of railroads, increase without cessation. The interlocutors will never come to understand each other, just as two men who look at the world through spectacles of different colours can never agree on the colour of their environment. The riddle of America, which for some time past has bothered Europe so much, is merely another example of this permanent confusion of standards which characterises the age in which we live.

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America is neither the monstrous country where men think solely of making money, nor the country of marvels boasted by her admirers. It is the country where the principles of Quantity, which have become so powerful during the last one hundred and fifty years, have achieved their most extraordinary triumph. An active, energetic, vigorous nation has found itself master of an enormous territory, portions of which were very fertile and other portions very rich in mines and forests, at the very moment when our civilisation finally invented the machine which makes possible the exploitation of vast countries and the swift creation of wealth: the steam-engine.

Less cumbered by old traditions than the elder nations, and with a vast continent in front of her, America has marched along the new roads of history with a rapidity and an energy for which there is no precedent. Ten, fifteen, thirty times in a single century has she multiplied her population, her cities, and all the wealth coveted by man. She has created, in careless and prodigal profusion, a society which has subordinated all former ideas of perfection to a new ideal; ever building on a grander scale and ever building more swiftly. No, it is not true that America is indifferent to the higher activities of mind, but the effort which she spends upon the arts and sciences is, and will long remain, subordinate to the great historic task of the United States, the intensive cultivation of a huge continent. Intellectual things will remain subordinate, although very many Americans of the upper classes would wish that it were otherwise.

In just the same way, it is not accurate to say that, in contrast to American barbarism, Europe reaps the harvest of civilisation; just as it would be unfair to say that the Old World is done for, exhausted by its petrifying, inevitable routine. The ancient societies of Europe have likewise entered into the quantitative phase of civilisation. The new demon has also got hold of them. In Europe, as well as in America, the masses of people long for a more comfortable existence; public and private expenses pile up with bewildering speed. Thus in the Old World also the production of wealth must be increased, but this enterprise is far more difficult in Europe than in America. The population of Europe is much more dense than that of the New World; a portion of its lands is exhausted; the great number of political subdivisions and the multiplicity of tongues increase enormously the difficulties of conducting business on a great scale. Traditions handed down from the time when men toiled to produce slowly and in small quantities things shaped toward a far-distant ideal of perfection are still strong among its people. Europe, then, has the advantage over America in the higher activities of the mind, but she cannot help being more timid, more sluggish, and more limited in her economic enterprises. America and Europe may each be judged superior or inferior to the other according as the critic takes for his standard the criteria of Quality or of Quantity. If a civilisation approximates perfection in proportion to the rapidity with which she produced riches, America is the model to be followed; if, on the contrary, perfection is expressed by the measure of the higher activities of the spirit, Europe leads the way.

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The riddle, then, seems solved, but the reader may object that it is solved only by admitting that we dwell in a perpetual condition of misunderstanding; that the modern world is a sort of Tower of Babel where men speak a tongue which others cannot understand. If this agreeable news were the only thing brought back by the historian of antiquity from his two voyages to America, he might better perhaps have spared himself the trouble! Such might well be the conclusion of this long argument! Nevertheless, it is indisputable that the modern world demands two contradictory things, speed and perfection. We wish to conquer the earth and its treasures with all possible haste. To this end, we have created tremendous machinery and have uncovered new forces in nature. It is a huge task, no doubt, but to accomplish it we must renounce almost all the artistic and moral perfections which used to be at once the torment and joy and pride of our forefathers. It is a painful necessity indeed, against which our age revolts, and from which it seeks in vain every possible channel of escape.

Let us strip off the last shred of illusion. Deterioration must ever continue amongst the ideals of perfection which our ancestors worshipped, so long as population multiplies and the demands and aspirations of all classes, as well as all expenses, public and private, continue to increase on the scale and with the momentum with which they are increasing at this moment. Even if this formidable revolution should slacken a trifle, the ideal of Quantity must spread its empire over the earth, morality and beauty must of necessity be subordinated to the prime necessities of constructing machines ever increasing in speed and power, of expanding cultivated land, and of working new mines. Art, like industry, agriculture, like literature, will be compelled to increase their production to the continuous deterioration of their quality, and our secret discontent will grow in proportion as our triumphs increase. Unable ourselves to decide between Quality and Quantity, we shall never know whether the great drama of the world at which we are looking is a marvellous epoch of progress or a melancholy tragedy of decadence.

From this singular situation, there is only one possible way of escape; a method which has no precedent in the world’s history. It is that very method, however, which men will not hear spoken of. It would be absolutely essential to create a movement of public opinion through religious, political, or moral means, which should impose upon the world a reasonable limit to its desires. To the age in which we live, it seems impossible to express an idea seemingly more absurd than this. The material situation of every one of us is to-day bound up with this formidable movement, which drives men ceaselessly to increase the making and spending of wealth. Think what an economic crisis there would be if this movement were to slow down. All the moral systems which governed the world down to the French Revolution forced upon men the belief that they would grow more perfect as they grew simpler. When religion and custom were not sufficient to teach men to set limits to their needs and desires, then these old moral systems had recourse to sumptuary laws. In direct contrast to this, the nineteenth century affirms that man grows more perfect in proportion as he produces and consumes. So confusing are the definitions of legitimate desires and vices, of reasonable expenses and inordinate luxury, that in this century it is almost impossible to differentiate between the one and the other.

A vast revolution has been brought into being, the greatest, perhaps, which history can show; but if the new principles which our century has borne to the front should be developed until they insured the ultimate and supreme triumph of Quantity, would it be possible to escape what would amount to the demolition of the whole fabric of the glorious civilisation bequeathed to us by the centuries; religious doctrines and the principles upon which morality is based, as well as all the traditions of the arts?

History knows better than do we the dusky roads of the future, and it is idle for us to wish to see the way along them; but in spite of our ignorance of the future, we have duties toward the past and toward ourselves, and is it not one of these duties to call the attention of our generation to the possibility of this catastrophe, even if our generation likes to turn its face away from it? Very often during my travels in America, I used to ask myself whether men of various intellectual interests might not find in this duty something to strengthen their conscience for the part which they must play in the world.

If we except medicine, which aims to cure our bodily ills, those sciences which are concerned with discoveries useful to industry, and those arts which entertain the public, all other branches of intellectual activity are to-day in dire confusion. Is there a pious clergyman who has not asked himself in moments of discouragement what good it is to preach the virtues of the Christian faith in a century whose dynamic power springs from an exaltation of pride and an emancipation of passion which amount almost to delirium? What intelligent historian is there who does not now and then ask himself why he persists in telling over again the events of the past to a generation which no longer looks ahead, and which rushes violently on the future, head down like a bull? What philosopher is there who, as he pursues his transcendental preoccupation, does not feel himself sometimes hopelessly adrift, like a being fallen upon the earth, from another planet, in an age which no longer is passionately interested in anything except economic reality? What artist is there who seeks not only to make money, but to reach the perfection of his ideal, who has not cursed a thousand times this frenzied hurly-burly in the midst of which we live?

From time to time, it is true, there seems to be a genuine revival of the ancient ideal; men suddenly appear who seem to interest themselves afresh in the progress of religion, in the future of morality, in the history of the past, in the problems of metaphysics, in the artistic records of civilisation long since dead. These are, however, only passing phenomena, and they are not enduring enough to give artists and philosophers the definite consciousness of playing a well-thought-out and useful part.

If all intellectual activities of to-day tend to become either lucrative professions or government careers; it is because nowadays such careers aim either at the acquisition of money or the attainment of social position, and no longer find their end in the careers themselves. And yet—how many times as he travelled across the territory of the two Americas, watching all day fields of wheat and rye, or plantations of maize or coffee, extending to the very edge of the solitary horizon, how many times has the historian of antiquity brooded over those fragments of marble wrought by the Greeks in such perfection, which we admire in our museums, and pondered upon the fragments of the great Roman system of jurisprudence preserved in the “_Corpus juris_.” Did not the Greeks and Romans succeed in reaching this marvellous perfection in the arts and laws because there came a time when they were willing to cease extending the limits of their empire over the earth and all the treasures it contains? Have we not conquered vast deserts with our railroads just because we have been able to renounce almost all the artistic and moral perfections which were the glory of the ancients?

In the light of this idea, the historian felt that he had come to understand all the better ancient civilisation and our own, and that his eyes were able to pierce more deeply into the shadowy depths of human destiny. A civilisation which pursues its desire for perfection beyond a certain limit ends by exhausting its energy in the pursuit of an object at once too narrow and impossible of attainment. On the other hand, a civilisation which allows itself to be intoxicated by the madness of mere size, by speed, by quantity, is destined to end in a new type of crass and violent barbarism. But the point where these two opposing forces of life find their most perfect equilibrium changes continually from age to age; and any epoch approaches more or less near this point according to the degree of activity of the two forces struggling within it. The artist, the priest, the historian, the philosopher, in moments of discouragement, when they feel themselves assailed by the temptation to think only of a career or of money, may well find new strength in the idea that each of them is working in his different way to preserve an ideal of perfection in men’s souls—it may be a perfection of art or of morality, of the intellect or of the spirit. Let them remember that this ideal, limited as it may seem, serves as a dike to prevent our civilisation from being engulfed in an overwhelming flood of riches and from sinking in an orgy of brutality. This task is so great and so noble that those who strive for it ought surely to feel that they do not live in vain.