One day, in New York, I was praising an example of American architecture to an American architect of great talent. “Yes, yes,” he answered with a touch of satire, “my fellow countrymen would willingly spend a hundred million dollars to build a church as beautiful as St. Mark’s in Venice, but they would command me, as a condition of my undertaking the work, to finish it within eighteen months.”
That is a significant phrase. How is it possible to beautify a world which is incessantly in transformation, wherein nothing is stable, and which wishes to multiply everything it possesses—buildings, as it would furniture? To create beautiful palaces, to construct beautiful furniture, to attain the distant ideal of perfection, time is essential—time and wise deliberation, reasonable limitation of the multiplicity of human demands, and a certain stability in taste. No one could have built St. Mark’s or Notre Dame in eighteen months, and France could not have created her famous decorative styles of the eighteenth century if public taste had been so fickle as ours, and if everybody at that time had wished every ten years to change his furniture.
The crises in classical studies and in the decorative arts are, however, still relatively slight in comparison with the general intellectual and moral confusion into which the doctrine of Quantity has plunged men’s minds, by substituting a standard of Quantity in place of the traditional standard of Quality. If my phrase is obscure, examples may possibly elucidate what I say. We all know, for instance, that, in recent years, the citizens of the United States have waged a bitter campaign against the trusts, the great banks, the railroads, and insurance companies; in fact, against all the vast powers of money. In newspaper articles, in public speeches, and in whole volumes filled with accusations, these trusts have been charged with being centres of corruption, instruments of a new despotism not less odious than the political despotism of old. They are decried as scandalous conspiracies to despoil honest men of the legitimate fruits of their labour. The campaign has penetrated to the very heart of the nation; but in the face of the enormous indignation of the masses, there has been exhibited both in America and Europe the Olympian calm of economists and men of great affairs, who have denounced this movement of protest as a return to Mediæval ideas, and who in the face of a vast outcry have paid enthusiastic homage to modern finance, its enormous enterprises, and its tremendous organisation.
How can there be so vast a difference of opinion in an age so intelligent and educated as ours? Is half the world struck blind to-day, and is sight given to the other half alone? No, there is neither incurable blindness, nor sight vouchsafed only to a few. The sole reason for the confusion is that men employ different standards in measuring the same thing, and for this reason find it impossible to understand each other. If one accepts the quantitative standard, if one admits that the supreme object of life is to produce an enormous pile of riches as rapidly as possible, the economists are right. The injustices and cruelties denounced by the adversaries of high finance are merely negligible inconveniences in a régime of economic liberty of which the modern world is naturally proud, for it is to this liberty that the modern world owes most of its wealth. Yet we must remember that the idea of leaving the wages of each individual to be determined by the blind play of economic forces was foreign to all the civilisations that preceded our own. They always sought to correct the principles of business in order to keep them in accord with the principles of charity and justice. To carry out this policy, they did not even hesitate to limit the development of industry and business, for example, by forbidding interest on money. Former ages subordinated economic development to an ideal of moral perfection; they placed Quality above Quantity. If, however, one applies this standard of qualitative measure to the modern world, it is these detractors of high finance who have the right on their side. Many methods employed by modern finance, useful as they are from an economic point of view, are for the above-mentioned reason none the less repugnant to a moral and slightly sensitive conscience. Detractors and defenders may dispute to the end of time. They will never understand each other, for they start from different premises, which never can be reconciled to each other.
It is this continual confusion between quantitative and qualitative standards which prevents the modern world from steering a true course amid the gravest moral questions. Take, for example, the question of progress. Is there an idea more popular to-day, or a word more often repeated, than “progress”? And yet if to every person who pronounces this word we were to put the question, “What do you mean by progress?” few indeed would be able to answer with precision. There is a thing still stranger. In this century of progress, the whole world deplores ten times a day the decadence of all things. How can such a contradiction be explained? The answer is simply that the same act may be judged as a phenomenon of progress or of decadence, according as it is viewed from the standpoint of Quality or of Quantity. Set an architect and a locomotive builder to disputing about the modern world. The former will maintain that the world is reverting to barbarism because it multiplies cities, and hastily and hideously constructed villages without being able to create a single one of those marvellous monuments which are the glory of the Middle Ages. The latter will reply that the world moves forward, because the population, number, and size of the cities, the amount of cultivated land, the extension of railroads, increase without cessation. The interlocutors will never come to understand each other, just as two men who look at the world through spectacles of different colours can never agree on the colour of their environment. The riddle of America, which for some time past has bothered Europe so much, is merely another example of this permanent confusion of standards which characterises the age in which we live.
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America is neither the monstrous country where men think solely of making money, nor the country of marvels boasted by her admirers. It is the country where the principles of Quantity, which have become so powerful during the last one hundred and fifty years, have achieved their most extraordinary triumph. An active, energetic, vigorous nation has found itself master of an enormous territory, portions of which were very fertile and other portions very rich in mines and forests, at the very moment when our civilisation finally invented the machine which makes possible the exploitation of vast countries and the swift creation of wealth: the steam-engine.
Less cumbered by old traditions than the elder nations, and with a vast continent in front of her, America has marched along the new roads of history with a rapidity and an energy for which there is no precedent. Ten, fifteen, thirty times in a single century has she multiplied her population, her cities, and all the wealth coveted by man. She has created, in careless and prodigal profusion, a society which has subordinated all former ideas of perfection to a new ideal; ever building on a grander scale and ever building more swiftly. No, it is not true that America is indifferent to the higher activities of mind, but the effort which she spends upon the arts and sciences is, and will long remain, subordinate to the great historic task of the United States, the intensive cultivation of a huge continent. Intellectual things will remain subordinate, although very many Americans of the upper classes would wish that it were otherwise.
In just the same way, it is not accurate to say that, in contrast to American barbarism, Europe reaps the harvest of civilisation; just as it would be unfair to say that the Old World is done for, exhausted by its petrifying, inevitable routine. The ancient societies of Europe have likewise entered into the quantitative phase of civilisation. The new demon has also got hold of them. In Europe, as well as in America, the masses of people long for a more comfortable existence; public and private expenses pile up with bewildering speed. Thus in the Old World also the production of wealth must be increased, but this enterprise is far more difficult in Europe than in America. The population of Europe is much more dense than that of the New World; a portion of its lands is exhausted; the great number of political subdivisions and the multiplicity of tongues increase enormously the difficulties of conducting business on a great scale. Traditions handed down from the time when men toiled to produce slowly and in small quantities things shaped toward a far-distant ideal of perfection are still strong among its people. Europe, then, has the advantage over America in the higher activities of the mind, but she cannot help being more timid, more sluggish, and more limited in her economic enterprises. America and Europe may each be judged superior or inferior to the other according as the critic takes for his standard the criteria of Quality or of Quantity. If a civilisation approximates perfection in proportion to the rapidity with which she produced riches, America is the model to be followed; if, on the contrary, perfection is expressed by the measure of the higher activities of the spirit, Europe leads the way.
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