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.