Ancient Rome and Modern America; A Comparative Study of Morals and Manners

by Guglielmo Ferrero

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?