Ancient Rome and Modern America; A Comparative Study of Morals and Manners

by Guglielmo Ferrero

Consuming little, and content with a life of simplicity and poverty, the ancients had no need to produce much or to produce at great speed. So they had no requirement for machines, whether steam- or electricity-driven. The few simple machines, which the hand of man or the muscular force of domestic animals can operate,—the domestic loom, the horse-propelled mill,—sufficed. Therefore, they had no need of science to help them to construct new machines of greater size and power. They had no need to work at high pressure. They could work slowly, with their hands and with a few simple instruments, and with them produce beautiful, accurate, and finished articles, which aspired to a lofty and difficult ideal of perfection. Accordingly, art occupied in the ancient world the position which science occupies in modern civilisation. It was not a refined luxury for the few, but an elementary and universal necessity. Governments and wealthy citizens were obliged to adorn their cities with monuments, sculptures, and pictures, to embellish squares, streets, and houses, because the masses wished the cities to be beautiful, and would have rebelled against an authority which would have them live in an unadorned city; just as nowadays they would rebel against a municipal authority which would have them dwell in a city without light, or against a government which placed obstacles and hindrances in the way of the construction of railways. In those times, the requirement was that everything, down to the household utensils, even of the most modest description and destined for the use of the poorer classes, be inspired with a breath of beauty. Anyone who visits a museum of Greco-Roman antiquities, in which are exposed to view objects found in rich and highly cultivated districts,—that of Naples, for example, where so many objects excavated from the ashes of Pompeii are to be seen,—can easily convince himself of this curious phenomenon, and realise more vividly, by contrast, the carelessness, roughness, and commonplace vulgarity of the objects made by modern machinery. In short, if the quantity of the things produced by the industry of the ancients was small, for that very reason, and by way of compensation, their quality was refined and excellent.

The contrary is the case in the modern world. The quantity of the things which modern industry, thanks to electricity- and steam-driven machinery, produces, is prodigious. No century ever witnessed the realisation of the miracle of abundance in a more marvellous way. But the quality of the things suffers in consequence. The ugliness and the crude vulgarity of so many objects, which in much poorer times had an elegance and a beauty which have now vanished, are the price we pay for the abundance of our times. The necessities of man have increased beyond all measure, and to satisfy them lavish and rapid production is required. The need for rapid production accounts for the invention of so many machines. But it is not possible to secure the manufacture by rigid hands of iron of so many things at such speed, and at the same time to impart to them an exquisitely artistic appearance, revealing the personal excellence of the artist. It is as much as we can do to impart to them a coarse and rude appearance of beauty, with a few ornamentations copied casually from the beautiful things which our fathers succeeded in creating in poorer and less busy times. Machinery, driven by steam or electricity, has the advantage of speed over the hand of man. It can produce in the same time a much greater number of objects. For this reason it has triumphed in a time like ours, in which the increased necessities of the world demand an extraordinary growth in production. But the hand of man,—that living and mind-inspired machine,—if it cannot compete with machines of iron for speed, is alone capable of imparting to things that perfection, that grace, and that excellence of form which can fill us with a joy which is different from, but perhaps more intense than, that afforded by easy and coarse abundance.

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This contrast between ancient and modern times, between the civilisations which preceded the French Revolution and the modern American civilisation, should and would have received more attention than it has, had not the students of antiquity been too prone to lose their way in the maze of a dead erudition. We are proud of our wealth and power. We are proud of having extended our dominion over the whole planet, only a small part of which was known to the ancients, and that but vaguely. We are proud of having surprised so many of nature’s secrets, of having deciphered the mystery of so many laws, of having thrown light on so many lurking-places of disease and death, of having shaken ourselves free from so many vain fears which tormented our ancestors, of having released ourselves from so many yokes—political, moral, and intellectual—which used to weigh upon their necks. We feel ourselves strong, sure of ourselves and of our destiny as no men before us in history, in face of the blind forces of the Universe, so many of which we have subjected to our dominion and forced to serve our necessities, our ambitions, and our whims.

Nevertheless, in the midst of all this wealth, this power, and this knowledge, a dull sense of disquietude vexes men’s souls. Man is not yet content. Every day he finds new pretexts or motives for complaining. One of the most oft-repeated of these pretexts or motives is, that the world is becoming uglier. If in our cities any beautiful part remains, it is nearly always the old part. In the historical cities, the new parts are horrible, and form a strange contrast with the older. The altogether-new cities—especially those which have sprung up in the last century in America—appear to the artistic eye almost always like a sort of anteroom to the infernal regions. Architecture has become a mother of monsters. Sculpture and painting, which were once upon a time the two most select amongst the decorative arts, protected and pampered by the great ones of the earth and adored by the masses, are reduced to the necessity of employing a thousand artifices to extort orders out of the negligent malevolence of an epoch, whose ornaments and monuments seem an encumbrance and an excrescence rather than a beauty. There was a time when the dress of men and women was a work of art. At the present day, only that of women has preserved a certain artistic grace and beauty. Let us not dwell upon the countless other forms of ugliness which have invaded our houses with the furniture, the carpets, the candelabra, and the china.

The artistic mediocrity of our epoch is surpassed only by the superficiality and confusion of its tastes. Each succeeding year sees that which used to appear the height of elegance and beauty to its predecessors, despised, neglected, and forgotten. All the styles of the past and all the styles of the different countries swirl round us, before the fickle gusts of fashion. Every picture which excites admiration for a moment is quickly forgotten by the fickle taste of an age which ransacks every corner in search of the beautiful, because nowhere can the beautiful be found. Many ask themselves what is the origin of this strange corruption of taste and of the æsthetic sense. But no two people agree on the answer. This one attributes the degeneration to the decadence of traditions, and therefore proposes to open schools and to institute courses of instruction. That one, on the other hand, traces the responsibility to the lack of liberty afforded the public taste and the genius of the artists, a condition of things for which these same traditions are to blame. Such a one therefore inveighs against the schools and the rules of tradition, and would like to see them all swept away. Nobody can explain how it happens that so rich, so wise, and so powerful a civilisation does not succeed in being beautiful, and shows itself powerless to infuse a breath of beauty into anything it creates, be it big or little, into its cities or into the small objects of daily use.

But the history of civilisation explains this apparent mystery. A civilisation cannot deck itself with the most exquisite beauties of art, if it cannot persuade itself to live with a certain simplicity and to work with a certain deliberation. What kills art in our civilisation is the mad desire for wealth, the giddy increase of necessities, the universal craze for speed, the effort to multiply production, the general restlessness of body and mind. Beauty is not so simple and commonplace a thing as to admit of its examples being multiplied by machinery in furious haste. Whether in big things or in little, it can only be the result of a long and steady effort of the intellect and the will, which must be expressed at all costs through the medium of that living and marvellous machine, the human hand. If we wish to accumulate round us the wealth of the world at express speed, if we wish to produce and to consume with giddy rapidity, we must not be too exacting in our demands for quality and beauty in the things produced. We cannot have a great deal in this world, and have that great deal beautiful.

Therefore, speaking still more generally, we might say that in the ancient civilisation the dominant principle was quality, in the modern civilisation, on the other hand, quantity. In ancient times, the more cultured, powerful, and wealthy a nation became, the greater efforts it made to produce in every branch of human activity but few things, but to ensure the materialisation in those things of a difficult and lofty ideal of perfection which should find common acceptance and admiration. Men of our time, on the other hand, direct their efforts towards production in large quantities, and at great speed, and are proud of seeing their power and grandeur expressed in the formidable figures of modern statistics. That the goods produced are of deteriorating quality is of small account. Thus the ancient civilisations tended, so to speak, towards eternity, towards the manufacture of things which, if not eternal in the precise meaning of the word, should last a long time, should conquer the ages, and should succeed in conveying to distant posterity a supreme image of their past existence. In very truth, after numberless catastrophes and pillagings, the material remains of ancient civilisations, which are piously preserved to this day, are very numerous. Our age produces in great quantities, but maybe not a single one of the buildings and material objects produced by it in such abundance can hope to conquer the ages. Everything is precarious, ephemeral, destined to live a few months or a few years; destined to a premature death from the very first hour of its birth.

And this diversity crops up again in every branch of human activity; in industrial as in intellectual activity, in art as in literature. We look upon the literatures of Greece and Rome as a treasure of inestimable value, almost as the foundation of our culture; and we still recommend them as models to all who wish to learn the difficult art of writing and of speaking with precision, elegance, and clearness. And yet how little the ancients wrote and read compared with ourselves! The press did not exist; paper, now the cheapest of materials, was a rare luxury—the papyrus was a most precious Egyptian monopoly. Consequently, the number of persons who could provide themselves with books was very small, and such persons were found only among the élite of culture or of wealth. The only opportunities of reading the people had were afforded by the public notices, and by the laws engraved on bronze or marble tablets. In those times, there was nothing to correspond in any way at all with the newspapers of to-day. In view of the very scanty numbers of the readers of books, those also who wrote them were bound to be few in number; these could not write much. With but very few exceptions, the works bequeathed to us by the ancients are by no means voluminous. Of all the qualities commonly found in Greek and Latin writers, sobriety and conciseness are the most prominent. These virtues were to some extent the product of circumstances. For in times in which paper was so dear, and every copy of a book had to be prepared specially by an amanuensis, conciseness and brevity were the two qualities of importance to insure the wide circulation and preservation of a book.

It was, however, just the circumstance that the ancients wrote so little that enabled them to carry the art of writing to an indescribable pitch of perfection; that enabled them to obtain that clearness, that harmony, that cadence and proportion of phrase, that concentration which has made them the great masters of the literary art for all time. And to-day!—A wolfish, insatiable hunger for printed paper and reading matter is the scourge of our civilisation. Look at the Pantagruelian literary orgies to which Europe and America surrender themselves! Every day brings its daily paper, every week its journals, illustrated or otherwise, every month its reviews and magazines. Then we have the special publications devoted to a particular art, a particular profession, a particular industry, a favourite sport, in number without end. We have, too, the volumes of every kind and quality with which a crowd of publishers congests the book market: novels, poems, books of travel, science, political economy, religion, sport. Who could enumerate all the kinds of books which are published nowadays? Many of these, it is true, do not find readers, but many do; and a certain number, so many readers as to be sold in thousands, in tens of thousands, and to be scattered broadcast all over the world.