In short, the perusal of Between the Old World and the New in the original Italian has produced upon more than one critic the same effect as if he had come back to his house to find all his belongings, his letters, his furniture, his clothes, shifted and turned upside down. “What demon has been at work here?” he cries in dismay. Such critics are not altogether wrong from their point of view. Nevertheless, this demon, which is always urging man to turn his home upside down in the hopes of arranging it better, no adjuration will succeed in exorcising from our epoch. I hope that, when presented in the form of a book, these dialogues will produce a less alarming impression on America. Accustomed as she is to seeing such demons raging in her house, she should not permit herself to be prevented from taking breath in the satisfaction of having done well, by the ambition to do better. To be sure, between the so-called Homeric question and steam-engines, between the discovery of America and the tendencies of philosophy, between the troubles which torment us in private life and the French Revolution, between transatlantic emigration and the architecture of New York, there is a connection. It is a profound, an organic, a vital connection; for, in the last four centuries, little by little, almost imperceptibly at first, then with a speed which increased gradually up to the French Revolution, finally, at headlong speed from the Revolution to the present day, the world has changed in every part, in form, spirit, and order. And it has changed in form, order, and spirit, because it has changed the order of its demands upon man. In compensation for the liberty granted him in everything else, it has demanded of him a rapidity, a punctuality, an intensity, and a passivity of obedience in his work, such as no other epoch has ever dreamed of being able to exact from lazy human nature.
From the French Revolution onwards, throughout Europe and throughout America, the political parties, the social classes, and institutions, and the philosophical doctrines which supported the principle of authority, little by little, but everywhere and unintermittently, have given way before the onslaught of the parties, the classes, and the doctrines which support the principle of liberty. The former have been forced sooner or later to allow the right of free criticism and discussion to oust the ancient duty of tacit obedience in the state, in religion, in the school, and ultimately in the family. Poets and philosophers have extolled the liberation of man from ancient servitudes as the most glorious victory man can vaunt. A victory, certainly; but over whom? Over himself, as it seems; since the limits, within which man was content to rest confined until the French Revolution, he himself had erected and invested with sacred terrors. It is clear that the slave, the tyrant, and the liberator were one and the same person. Moreover, one may well think that, in gaining his liberty, man has not been born again to a new destiny nor has he regenerated his own nature; rather has he learned to employ his own energies in a different way. Man had lived for centuries within strict limits, which confined in a narrow compass his curiosity, ambition, energy, and pride. But within those limits he had lived with greater comfort and less anxiety than we are living, without racking his brains to invent or to understand something new every day, not spurred on every hour to produce at greater speed and in greater abundance, not exasperated by the multitude of his needs nor agitated from morning to night by the pursuit of the means to satisfy them. But after the discovery of America and the first great astronomical discoveries which shed glory on the beginning of the sixteenth century, there arose in man the first sparks of ambition to seek new ways in the world outside the ancient limits. The philosophies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and still more the first discoveries of science, lent boldness to these ambitions. One day men realised that Prometheus, that clumsy thief, had stolen from the gods only a tiny spark of the fire. They planned a second robbery, discovered coal and electricity, and invented the steam-engine. And behold! the French Revolution, which confounded and upset, from one end of Europe to the other, boundaries, laws, institutions, and traditions—ideal and material limits. Then at last man realised that he could conquer and exploit the whole earth with iron and fire. At the same time as liberty, a new, untiring, formidable eagerness invaded the two worlds. All the limits which, for so many centuries, had confined in a narrow circle the energy and aspirations of even the most highly venerated of men fell one after the other to the ground. They fell, because the human mind could not have launched out into the unknown to essay so many new marvels if those ancient limits which imprisoned it had remained standing. The multitude would not have bowed their necks to the hard discipline of their new work, if in compensation they had not been liberated from other, more ancient, disciplinary restrictions.
In short, the great era of iron and fire began, in which the principle of liberty was destined to assault the principle of authority in its last entrenchments, and to drive it right away to the farthest frontiers of political, moral, and intellectual anarchy. But for this very reason the era of iron and fire has seen the gradual confusion and reduction to wavering uncertainty of all the criteria which served to distinguish the beautiful from the ugly, the true from the false, good from evil. These criteria have become confused because they are and can be nothing else but limits; limits which are precise and sure so long as they are restricted, but become feeble the more they are enlarged. But how can a century, which has made itself so powerful by dint of overturning the ancient limits on every hand, be expected to respect these limits in the spiritual world? As a result we find a civilisation which has built railways, studded the Atlantic with steamers, exploited America, and multiplied the world’s riches a hundredfold in fifty years,—we find it obsessed by grotesque doubts and eccentric uncertainties with regard to the Iliad and the Odyssey, in which generation after generation, accustomed to respect amongst other limits those imposed by literary traditions, had unhesitatingly agreed to recognise two masterpieces composed by a poet of genius. So we see the epoch which has overturned and destroyed so many thrones and altars and made Reason and Science march in triumph through the smoking ruins of a score of revolutions,—we see it obsessed on a sudden by a thousand scruples, halt, ask itself what is truth, whether it exists, and if it can be recognised. We see it rack its brains to decide whether what we know is a real and objective something or only a creation of our fancy. All these scruples and doubts are, as it were, the brow of a slope down which our epoch slides at headlong speed towards the abyss of nothingness. And in the century which has given man liberty, the certainty of food, comfort in abundance, and so many guarantees against the oppression of individuals and authorities as were known to no previous century; in the century which, by overthrowing so many limits, has banished from our midst so many reasons for hatred and war, do we not hear a thousand voices on every side cursing man for a miserable slave and accusing the times of being corrupt; crying that conditions must be purified with fire and sword, according to some, with war, according to others, with revolution? Having once transgressed the limits, man has become insatiable. The more he possesses, the more he wants. He no longer acknowledges any restraint in his desires.
The quantity which vanquishes quality, the liberty which vanquishes authority, the desires which blaze out anew each time they are satisfied—these are the forces and the phenomena which shape and fashion our civilisation. For this reason we can, it is true, accumulate vast hordes of wealth and conquer the earth with iron and fire. But we must resign ourselves to living in a new Tower of Babel, in the midst of a confusion of tongues. The æsthetic, intellectual, and moral confusion of our times is the price nature exacts for the treasures which she is obliged to resign into our power. This book and its successor have been written with the object of throwing light on the obscure but vital bond which links together in a living unity the most diverse phenomena of contemporary life. They have not been written, as some have thought, with the view of comparing the ancient and the modern civilisations, Europe and America, to the detriment of the one or of the other; much less with the view of denouncing the régime of liberty, on the ground that it corrupts the world, and of demanding that it be suppressed. To find fault with the tendency of a civilisation, one must postulate the fact that history has gone wrong. And what criterion, what standard is there which justifies a man in declaring to successive generations that they ought to have held different objects in view, and adopted other means to attain them?
No: the author’s only object has been to sound the depths of life, in the hope of tracing that unity from which flow forth and into which flow back again so many apparently diverse phenomena; that unity in which alone thought can find some respite from its weary search after the secret of its own being and of that of things in general. Without a doubt each one of us attains only provisional success in his search for this unity; but is not every work of man only provisional, and what are we but beings destined to live only for an instant? Therefore, I have endeavoured in this book to reveal, by way of an analytical and rational exposition, set out in the simplest and plainest terms, the vital bond of this unity. But, inasmuch as a unity is a synthesis, and analysis necessarily modifies and disfigures while trying to explain, I have availed myself in my other work of what is perhaps the most effective method of representing the phenomena of life in their synthesis: I mean, art. For this reason I have written a dialogue, in which I have made my characters begin by wandering haphazard over a wide field and jumping, apparently at random, from one to another of a series of widely different topics. But at the end the various topics are gathered into a united whole, showing the bond which unites them, in the speeches of the most acute and intelligent of the passengers; especially in that speech which coincides with the entry of the ship from the open Atlantic, the free high-road of the new world, into the Mediterranean, the confined arena of ancient civilisation. Livre désordonné et pourtant bien ordonné is the verdict of a French critic, André Maurel. How glad I should be if all my readers subscribed to this verdict! In truth, this tragic conflict of the two worlds, of the two civilisations, of man with himself, for licence to dispense with the limits of which he, in fact, has need if he is to enjoy the most exquisite fruits of life, is a picture so vast as to overtax the resources of the painter. But the painter has worked at his canvas with so much ardour and passion that he hopes to find on the other side of the Atlantic, as on this, readers willing to view the defects in his work with the intelligent indulgence of which really cultured men are always so liberal; readers prompt to feel some quickening in response to the few sparks of beauty and of truth which the author may have succeeded in infusing into his work. It is a small thing, no doubt. But do not even the tiny rivulets which flow through the valleys unite to form the mighty rivers in the plain?
Part II
Ancient History and the Modern World
I
ANCIENT SOCIAL SYSTEMS AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICA
At the end of the year 1906, while sojourning in Paris, where I had been giving at the Collège de France a course of lectures on Roman history, I received an invitation from Emilio Mitré, the son of the famous Argentine general, to undertake a long expedition to South America. This invitation evoked general surprise. What, my friends asked, was I, the historian of the ancient world, going to do in the newest of new worlds, in ultra-modern countries, in countries without a past and caring only for the future, where industry and agriculture fill the place which for the ancients was occupied by war? Why, if I was willing to leave my studies and my books for one moment, did I not repair to Egypt or the East, the scene of so much of the history which I had recounted, where the Romans have left so many traces of the world which has passed away, and where so many important excavations, tending to enrich history with new documentary evidence, are in progress?