Chapter VII: Part III: Europe and America (3)

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.

* * * * *

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.