* * * * *
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.