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.
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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.