VI
In its present stage of development capitalism, every one admits, is ugly. Haste and vandalism have characterized the work of constructing it. It is like the wall of Athens, rough stone upon hewn memorial tablets to the dead, upon the trunks and limbs of statues of gods and men and beasts. The feast of Our Lady of Carmel was beautiful in Palermo; transplanted to New York, it is grotesque. There was dignity in the demeanor of the Lithuanian on his native soil: in the anthracite towns, the Lithuanian is a mortar-disfigured torso, thrown heedlessly into the courses of a rubble wall. All the mixing up of peoples, of customs, of ideals, that an incipient capitalism implies, produces a conglomerate that is inevitably ugly.
And quite apart from the ugliness of discordant combinations, there is an ugliness originating in the very virtues of capitalism. As we have seen, it is the tendency of capitalism to leave human nature free in all that transcends the narrow limits of the process of profit making. And this would be well if, as the optimists assure us, human nature were uniformly beautiful. Those of us, however, who are not committed to dogmatic optimism know that if some part of human nature is most beautiful when unrestrained and unadorned, another part is most seemly when well laced with stays of custom, well draped in garments of convention. At any rate, in the initial phase of the capitalistic liberation of human nature, which we are now experiencing, it is an open question whether our eyes are not more frequently offended than regaled.
It is in the field of material objects, however, that the contrasts between present capitalism and the earlier order are most clearly visible. Time was when the man who built a house granted to the whole community a voice in determining its design. And the community permitted variation from type, but only a moderate, well regulated variation. Thus were the walled cities of the Middle Ages governed by a harmony of construction, which gave to each dwelling, at the very least, a beauty of use and wont. Today in America the builder is free. If he chooses to dwell in a Greek temple or a Gothic chapel or a Chinese pagoda, there is no one to dissuade him. No one, except perhaps an architect whose plans have been rejected or a good citizen at large, ex-officio adviser of an unheeding world.
In the economic field human conduct is narrowly ruled and restricted by capitalism; but in the non-economic field—the greater and more significant part of life—the good and the evil, the beautiful and the ugly, are set free by capitalism, to struggle for existence. Capitalism offers no direct pecuniary rewards for virtue and beauty. Nor, however, does it impose any penalties upon them. Did any earlier order of society impose such penalties? To be sure. Let us recall the contempt for the arts on the part of militaristic Rome, the pride in illiteracy of the glittering mediæval knight. Capitalism does not require a merchant or a banker to become a connoisseur of art. Nor does it require him to apologize for any such variation from typical instincts.
If good and evil must thus strive in a fair field, neither rewarded nor penalized economically, what will be the outcome? The evil will prevail, say those who—strangely enough—describe themselves as idealists. Most of us refuse to engage in prophecies. But so much is clear: the good and the beautiful that may prevail under a thorough-going capitalism must be better and more beautiful than the values of old time. Capitalistic freedom demands that there must be greater variety and wealth of beauty than an earlier order required; capitalistic fraternity demands that charity and toleration must extend beyond the bounds of class and race. Unless the art and the practical ethics of perfected capitalism represent an advance in universality, they will be thrust aside as meaningless and worthless.
It is, to be sure, more difficult to establish fixed values upon a broad basis of human life than upon a narrow one. More difficult were the problems that confronted Euripides the Pan-Hellene, than Sophocles the Athenian. There is a contrast in technical perfection, between the work of Balzac the Frenchman, and Daudet the adoptive Parisian; between that of Kipling the imperialist, and Bridges the Englander; between that of Ibsen the cosmopolitan, and Björnson the Norwegian. But in all these instances the loss in classical perfection is vastly overbalanced by the gain in human worth. There were poets and dramatists in Scandinavia before the days of Holberg. They had an elaborate canon, all the rules of which were violated by Holberg's iconoclastic cosmopolitanism. What has become of the works of Holberg's predecessors? No one can read them. But Holberg was never so widely read and honored as today.
A broader and more liberal humanity than the world has known before—such, after all, is the evolving soul of capitalism. This does not indicate, however, that capitalism will last forever, or deserves immortality. There comes a time when the most responsive body becomes a clog upon the soul, and should accordingly be buried. The body of capitalism is none too responsive; therefore we may be certain that it must, in the end, be discarded. What the succeeding order will be, no man can forecast. But it will not be one of unbridled individualism; for a spirit of fraternity, transcending that imposed by capitalism, will carry the principle of coöperation to lengths beyond present dreams. And it will not be Socialism; for the spirit of toleration and freedom, now only germinating, will have attained to its full efflorescence in institutions that guarantee a range of personal development not compatible with the well-regimented scheme of a Socialistic state. Capitalism will disappear; but can we doubt that it will be honored in history as a most significant stage in the progress of the human soul towards liberty?