Yet the task is an arduous one. As I have already said, an art is not created or perfected without the spirit of tradition and of discipline; and the attempt in our times to re-infuse vigour into the spirit of tradition and of discipline, if only in the measure necessary for the progress of art, is an enterprise, the difficulties of which everyone can understand without a long explanation. It cannot be effected without a profound intellectual and moral reform, which will bring about a change in many things besides the originality and power of the arts which are to-day languid and decadent. So the struggle between American progress and art may well be a more important phenomenon than is at present apparent; and may well entail transformations of far-reaching extent.
V
BEYOND EVERY LIMIT
For century after century, our civilisation lay low in its Mediterranean lair. It knew but a small part of Europe, Asia, and Africa; and no pricks of curiosity impelled it to ascertain how far the world extended over land and sea beyond the vague bounds which marked the limit of its efforts. That small part of the world satisfied the ambitions of our ancestors, though they certainly were not shy and craven. Confined in that narrow corner of the earth and with only the scanty resources which it could provide, they created literatures, arts, philosophies, states, laws, and religions. Some of these creations are alive to this day, and help us distant descendants to shed a little beauty and to impose a little order on the modern world.
Between the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries there began a great change in the history of our civilisation. Impelled by the wish to reach India by way of the Atlantic, our forefathers began to explore the earth. Gradually geographical exploration became the preoccupation of governments, the passion of the public, and the business of a great number of persons who made almost a vocation of these daring voyages. And behold one fine day, one grand day, the most fortunate and daring of the navigators who were exploring the Atlantic in every direction discovered America. In mid-Atlantic there lay two connected continents, stretching from one hemisphere to the other, covering many latitudes and a great variety of clime, and much of this vast territory was still but sparsely inhabited. It was then that our forefathers realised how vast and rich was the earth, and how small and poor in comparison seemed that Mediterranean world in which for so many centuries they had lived. It was then that they began to pass beyond the limits within which they had been so long confined, to invade and to conquer the outside world.
The Pillars of Hercules, which had been the impassable geographical limit of the ancient Mediterranean world, were not, however, the only bounds which they passed; they transcended also the moral and intellectual limits which until then had circumscribed their thoughts and actions. All the time that the ancient Mediterranean civilisation, turned loose into the Atlantic, was striking root and expanding in America, an uninterrupted sequence of events and movements was taking place in Europe, destroying ancient laws, ancient traditions, and ancient discipline; upsetting, in other words, the bounds placed in the past to the thought, the sentiment, and the will of Man. The most important of these events were: the Protestant Reformation, the philosophies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the advances of science, the French Revolution and its wars, the birth and the development of the great industrial movement, and the all but universal triumph of democratic ideas.
Little by little, while the aspect of the globe changed, a great revolution was taking place in the spirit of the ancient Christian civilisation in Europe, which from being dictatorial and traditionalist became free and progressive. Religion, which for so many centuries had been a kind of severe moral discipline, a life of prohibitions, scruples, rules, precepts, ceremonies, and rites, changed into a kind of free contemplation of the Deity in which the individual conscience had full play. Everybody became his own high priest.
The ceremonial of social life, which at no time had been so complicated, serious, and exacting, gradually became so far simplified as no longer to encumber man in his every movement and activity. The State, which at one time, hand-in-hand with religion, watched over the customs and life of its citizens, accorded greater and greater liberty to them. To-day everybody, provided he contributes to society his daily sum of work, is free to live and think as he likes. Severe laws used once upon a time to regulate men’s luxuries and pleasures. Every class was forbidden to spend its money in any way other than that prescribed by these laws. There were times of the year in which men were forbidden to amuse themselves, and, when amusements were allowed, the laws took care that they should not degenerate into vice. Nowadays the whole year is one long festival and carnival for all who have money to spend; and together with freedom in pleasure men have acquired also a freedom in vice which would scandalise our friends the ancients, if they might come back to life again.
Every authority is losing power. The people discuss the government and the laws; children take the first opportunity of escaping from the authority of their parents. The younger generation is convinced that it knows more than the older, and values the latter’s experience at zero. Traditions are losing their force and academics their prestige. Everyone holds the opinion he likes in religious, artistic, political, and moral questions; just as he is free to regulate his own conduct, at his own risk and peril, as he pleases, with the sole obligation of respecting the limits imposed by the laws, which are for the most part neither numerous nor embarrassing.
What is the deep-lying cause of this duplex and contemporaneous movement? Why has the old Christian civilisation of Europe felt itself in the last four centuries unable any longer either to contain itself within the ancient material limits or within the ancient ideal limits? Why, at the same moment as it advances to the conquest of new continents, does it destroy within itself all the ancient disciplinary restrictions? Because in these last centuries it has gradually discovered that the earth is much vaster and richer than it suspected; that it contains, in old Europe, as well as in young America, treasures in much greater abundance than it had ever pictured in its dreams; and that it can invent tools which bring these rapidly within its reach. Gradually, as man found that he could rob nature of her immense treasures, there arose and spread from generation to generation through all classes in Europe and America a craze for wealth and a mad ambition to win the mastery over nature, such as the world had never yet seen.