But to satisfy a public which is so greedy of reading, an extraordinary number of writers is required at the present day, from the obscure editors of provincial journals to the favoured few who succeed in winning world-fame, and in reaching the position of sovereigns or, if you prefer it, satraps of literature. And all this enormous multitude of writers is compelled to write prolifically and rapidly, because the public wants to read voraciously. It must choose diverse topics, and vary its themes according to the varieties of fashion and events. On the other hand, it is no longer compelled to be concise, both because the public often likes prolixity, which makes reading comfortable and easy, and because, nowadays, printing is so cheap and facile. But the art of writing is being lost through this haste, this instability of public interest, this prolixity. Every tongue is becoming a muddy mixture of words and phrases which have dripped from every point of heaven on to the daily language and literature. Taste is being corrupted, with writers as with readers, deteriorating now into negligence and carelessness, now into affectation and grotesqueness.
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Quality and quantity: these are the two principles of the two civilisations, the ancient and the modern. They are two opposite principles, a circumstance which explains why in the last fifty years the gradual triumph of the civilisation of machinery or of industry on a large scale, which aims at multiplying the quantity of riches, has been accompanied by a decline in classical studies. The new generation, even that portion of it that represents the educated classes, has broken away from the study of a world which, though resembling the modern world in so many of its ideas and institutions, differed from the present era in the fundamental conception of life, and professed an entirely different idea of perfection.
However, if the two principles are mutually exclusive, we must ask ourselves, which is true and which false, which is good and which is not. Who is in the right,—we, who wish to fill the world with riches, even at the cost of disfiguring it and making it hideous; or the ancients, who were content to live a life of greater simplicity, of more leisurely and more peaceful activity, but wished to spend it in a persevering effort to materialise their ideals of beauty? In how many of the confused disputes which set the men of our times by the ears is this problem obscurely implied, though the disputants are unaware of it? But the problem is a terrible one, because it involves all the fundamental problems of contemporary life and the very destiny of the gigantic operations to which our own generation, and those which preceded it, have applied themselves with such frenzied activity.
So I will not attempt to solve the formidable problem. Yet may I be permitted to express a thought, simple in itself, but one which presents itself with the smiling countenance of hope. It is, that “opposite” principles do not mean “irreconcilable” principles. Is it not just possible that this craze for work, for riches, and for speed, of which we are victims, may slacken somewhat, and give men time to collect their thoughts, and to piece together again the shattered grandeur of the modern world in the image of a more serene and composed beauty? Are men really doomed to become more insatiable, the richer they become; or will the day arrive when they will think it wiser to employ a larger part of the immense riches they possess, not in producing other riches, but in embellishing the world, seeing that beauty is no less a joy in life than wealth, and that we ourselves, though all athirst for gold, prove that it is so, by searching untiringly in every corner for the few remains of ancient beauty?
I feel that I have not the courage to answer this question with a brutal “No”; and I hope that many others will be of the same opinion. For one cannot help thinking that one of the most marvellous epochs in history would really begin on the day on which Europe and America succeeded in reconciling in a new civilisation the two opposite principles of quantity and quality, and in employing the extraordinary riches at their disposal in adorning and beautifying the world, which their energy and audacity have so immeasurably enlarged in recent centuries.
III
WOMAN AND HOME
Some years ago, in the course of the excavations which are being made with such success in Egypt, a papyrus was found which is now known among archæologists by the name of The Petition of Dionysia. This papyrus, which belongs to the second century A.D., contains on one side some books of the Iliad, on the other a defence presented by a certain Dionysia to an Egyptian court, before which she was defending an action brought against her by her own father affecting her dowry and other questions of interest. To escape paying his daughter and her husband the sums which they demanded, the father had directed the husband to return him his daughter, and had dissolved the marriage. But the daughter, on her side, maintained in her defence that the father had forfeited his right to dissolve her marriage and to separate her from her husband, because her marriage was a “written” marriage—established, that is to say, by an act or document in writing. If it had been an “unwritten” marriage, Dionysia would not have contested her father’s right in that case to dissolve it, for no motive whatever, merely because it so pleased him.
It would be difficult to imagine a document more strange than this, from the point of view of the ideas which prevail at the present day in European and American society. Matrimony is for us an act of so great social importance that the state alone—that is to say, the law, and the law courts—can recognise or dissolve it. To leave the destiny of a family at the mercy of the will of the father of one of the two parties, to recognise as his the right to destroy a family at any moment to suit his individual interest, without being accountable to anyone for so doing, would seem to us a monstrous thing. And yet this monstrous thing seemed to the whole of antiquity, with few restrictions and reservations, legitimate, reasonable, and wise. Differences in the organisation of the family existed in different countries and in different centuries; but they were but superficial, unessential differences. On one point, the whole world agreed: that matrimony should never be considered an act to be left to the will of the contracting parties, but a business transaction which the young people should leave to their fathers to arrange.