IIIMORE OR BETTER?

Itis an undoubted fact that Europe is becoming Americanised; that the American idea of progress—understood to mean the increase of wealth and the perfectioning of the instruments of production—is penetrating European society. No profound knowledge of European society is needed to recognise this. I would even go so far as to say that the only idea which in the last fifty years has sunk deep into the minds of the masses in Europe is this American idea of progress. I must, however, also confess that before I went to America I belonged to that group of Europeans, numerous enough, especially among the cultured and upper classes, which laments this “Americanisation” of Europe, and considers it to be a sort of mental aberration and decadence on the part of the Old World. The idea is fairly wide-spread in Europe. It may startle a good many Americans; but it will not seem paradoxical to those who spare a moment’s reflection for the history of European civilisation up to the French Revolution.

There is no doubt that, considered from the point of view of our ancient history, this idea of progress, interpreted American-fashion, is a kind of revolutionary dissolving force. Perhaps the upheaval which it has produced and is producing in Europe can almost be compared with that which Christianity caused in the ancient civilisation, when it destroyed in the Greco-Latin world the political and military spirit which had been the mainstay of that world. Indeed, we must not forget that from the dawn of history up to the French Revolution succeeding generations had lived in Europe contented with little, faithful to traditions, and holding every innovation to be a danger and every enterprise a revolt against God and against the memory of their ancestors. It is true that even in those days men usually preferred ease to poverty and were not insensible to the magnetism of gold. Even then, each succeeding generation saw an increase in the wealth of the world and in the spread of population over the face of the earth. But how slow and spasmodic was the increase! Up to the time of the French Revolution it is impossible to discern in history any differences in wealth and population at intervals of less than a century. The change produced by each generation was so small as to be barely recognisable. In compensation, the men of that time strove to make the world fairer and better. Art and religion were their absorbing preoccupation.

From Greece [says one of the characters in my dialogue], which taught the world to write and to sculp, up to theMiddle Ages which built the fairest cathedrals and the most fantastic palaces of all times; from the Egypt of the Ptolemies, from which the last rays of Hellenic beauty illumined the Mediterranean world, up to the Rome of the popes and up to the Venice of the sixteenth century, which flaunted her marble pomp in the eyes of the world, up to the France of the eighteenth century, which immortalised her three sovereigns in three world-compelling decorative styles; from Augustus, who protected Horace and Virgil, up to Louis XIV, who protected Racine and Molière, and up to the Marquise de Pompadour, who strove to make Paris the metropolis of elegance,—was not the perpetuation of a form of beauty the supreme ambition of every nation and of every state? Consider the countless efforts made to establish in the world the reign either of sanctity or of justice or both, from the Roman Empire which created law, up to Christianity which strove to cleanse human nature of sin, and up to the French Revolution, which proclaimed to the world the age of liberty, fraternity, and equality.

Such was that old Europe which created the numberless masterpieces of architecture, sculpture, and painting, now so much admired by the Americans; that old Europe which discovered America, created science, and produced the French Revolution. But what remains of that old Europe? American progress is busy to-day destroying it; in particular, the artistic spirit is rapidly disappearing from the continent which for centuries was the world’s teacher of beauty.

Do you seriously believe [asks another of my characters, he who in the dialogue defends America and the new idealsof life] that it is any use nowadays lamenting the fact that some rare genius is unable at the present day to give birth to his immortal masterpiece in the solitude of his pride? At a time when man is inventing increasingly powerful machinery, and is conquering the earth, the sea, the air, the vast treasures hidden in every nook and cranny of the universe; with these marvellous tools in his hand is recognising that he is becoming the wizard visioned in the legends of centuries; while the masses are clamouring for bread, victuals, education, ease, security, pleasures, air, light, liberty, all God’s blessings in prodigious and yearly-increasing quantities?

These words are not the vapourings of a fanciful individual. They are repeated a hundred times daily in Europe, in a more or less elegant form, for they express the kernel of the thought of the Europe which is being Americanised. I could quote many examples in support of my contention. I will quote one only, a characteristic one. A foreigner may often see in the smaller Italian cities ancient monuments—churches or palaces—which are gradually falling into ruin. The nonchalance of the authorities or the ignorance and stinginess of the proprietors suffer time to do its deadly work, or even help to accelerate it by befouling the last relics of a past beauty. The foreigner shakes his head, sighs, mutters harsh judgments, and asks himselfsotto vocewhether the inhabitants of that little town are barbarians. His stupor would be increased, however, if he could speak with one of the locals and open his mind freely to him. “We barbarians?”—would answer the local shop-keeper, lawyer, doctor, or artisan. Toprove to the foreigner how wrong he was, they would tell him that that little town has actually got electric light! The municipality, which cannot find a few thousand francs for keeping this or that great monument in a decent state, will spend large sums on lighting with electric light streets in which after 9P.M.there is nobody to be seen. The adoption of electric light is an act of progress, and nowadays even the shop-keeper and the artisan understand progress in this American sense; while, with the exception of a few cultured and art-loving persons, who have no influence whatever, nobody ever thinks it a barbarism to allow an old monument built by our fathers to fall into ruin.

This is a trifling instance; but it indicates the new spirit which is now pervading and conquering the whole of Europe. The most evident proof of this triumph of American progress is the decadence or disappearance of all the schools of art. Europe was in past centuries, in harder and more difficult times than the present, the glorious mother and mistress of civilisation, because under diverse forms, she managed to create and keep going schools of literature, sculpture, painting, architecture, and music. To-day, these schools have almost all disappeared; and the few survivors, with very few exceptions, are in a state of decadence. On the other hand, schools of electricity, dyeing, weaving, mechanics, commerce, and chemistry abound and flourish; they are the only schools the masses nowrequire. In past centuries, the states and aristocracies of Europe had in various ways protected and encouraged the arts; and this protection had been one of the principal reasons for their progress. Now this is no longer the case. The wealthy classes of Europe to-day consider it much more dignified and elegant to build motor-cars and aeroplanes than to help painting and sculpture. As to the states, if one of them tries to encourage some art, protests pour in from every side that the expenditure is a wasting of the people’s money in the most idiotic way. Italy was for centuries the mistress of the world in every art. Yet even in Italy bitter complaints are made to-day about the few millions which the public bodies have spent in the last thirty years in raising monuments to the great men of the Revolution. On the other hand, how can sculpture flourish, if nobody will pay the sculptors for the works which they are capable of executing? And for what reason is the State, which possesses ancient monuments, unable to spend another million or two on keeping alive the tradition of an art which has shed no little glory on the Nation? Is not this tradition, too, a national heirloom? But the first-born daughter of Beauty no longer understands these simple truths. Infected by the spirit of American progress, she protests that the money spent on art is wasted; she is right willing that hundreds of millions be spent on the encouragement of the mechanical and iron industries.

There is no need to wonder, therefore, if many Europeans regret the Americanisation of the old continent as a kind of grievous madness. Europe—especially its upper classes—lives a great deal—it could hardly help living—in its past history. I have already said, that I, too, when I undertook my journeys to America, was more or less of this same cast of thought. But in America, confronted with this frenzy of desires and of works which has attracted from all parts of the world and fused into one people so many millions of souls, has created so many cities and produced so much wealth, it was no longer possible for me to shut my eyes to the fact that so vast and profound a phenomenon must depend on causes much more complex and grave than a simple mistake or mental aberration. For what reason was Europe ready to destroy even her secular tradition of art for the sake of emulating that rapidity of execution and audacity of enterprise which I was then witnessing in the New World? This was the problem which presented itself to me, after I had grasped the meaning of American progress; and which I succeeded in solving with the help of my wife’s investigations into the history of machinery.

“Christopher Columbus,” says one of my characters, inBetween the Old World and the New, “not only discovered America, but re-endowed man with the globe which God had already given him, inasmuch as he enabled man at last to know it.” Europe had remained content up to the fifteenth century to live in herlittle territory, ignorant of how great the world was. That earlier limitation, however, only increased the force of the impulse, given to man by the discovery of America, to scour and ransack the oceans, with the object of discovering and possessing the whole plane. Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, then, Europe saw the world expanding around her. With the expansion of the world, however, came an increase in the longing to possess it, to master it, and to exploit it. How was Europe to do so, with means so scanty, and under the sway of the ancient ideas, which said to man, “Dare not!” which taught him to change as little as possible the order of things under which he had grown up, and not to yield to the temptation of over-ardent desires and of over-lofty ambitions?

Then began, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that effort of thought and of will which, slowly at first, was destined gradually to arm our civilisation with all the weapons necessary for the conquest and exploitation of the earth. The sciences began their advances. The first machines were invented and applied. The idea of liberty of progress, of the rights of man, and of the popular will began to undermine the ancient beliefs and traditions. Nevertheless, it is probable that these would have long resisted, and that the ancient ties which restrained the human will from the great enterprises would have slackened, but not broken for who knows how many more centuries, if it had not been for that immense event which convulsed thehistory of Europe and America, the French Revolution. The French Revolution and the great wars to which it gave rise made such and so great breaches in the ancient prison-walls of traditions and principles in which our civilisation was confined that man could thereafter easily escape through them and wander freely over the vast world.

In fact, after the French Revolution, we see the beginning of a new history of the world. The ideas of liberty and of progress invade Europe and America. In every class and in every nation comes an awakening of new desires for comfort and culture. Industry develops, railways spread, inventions multiply. Cities become thronged and increase rapidly. The great new phenomenon of the history of the world, the intensive exploitation of America, begins. The new wealth, especially that produced in such abundance in America, whets men’s appetites. Gradually the desire for comfort, ease, and culture spreads to multitudes more numerous and to new nations, drives followers along in the steps of pioneers, in turn prompts others to follow them, and brings crowding on the heels of riches already realised, the hungry greed of the masses; in a word, impels all Europe and all America to the conquest of the earth.

In consequence, not only America, but also Europe, saw the beginning fifty years ago of what might be truly called the Golden Age of human history, the epoch of abundance.

What has man dreamt of [exclaims one of my characters]—what has man dreamt of, since the dawn of time, but the Terrestrial Paradise, the Promised Land, the Garden of the Hesperides, the Age of Gold, Arabia Félix; one single thing, under various names, the empire of nature and abundance? Is not the great myth which centuries have mildly fantasied now at last materialising under our eyes?

But every medal has its reverse side; and we have had to pay, and to pay dearly, for this fabulous abundance which man had vainly visioned for centuries.

The modern world [says another of my characters] has crowned quantity at the expense of quality—which is, after all, an eternal law. For I can make in a certain time things of a certain quality, that is to say, resembling a certain model of perfection which I have before my eyes or in my mind. But in that case, I cannot make any quantity of it which I may require. I must rest content with that quantity which I can manage, working with all my zeal. I can say, on the other hand: I want so many things of a certain quality. But in that case, I can no longer prescribe the time necessary to finish them as my fancy bids me. Or again: I wish in so much time to make such a quantity. Very well; but in that case, I must put up with the best quality I can get. So that whoever wants to increase the quantity, and to curtail the time must abate his demand for quality. And that is just what we are doing to-day in this civilisation of ours, in which quantity reigns supreme.

In the light of this idea that decadence in art, and in so many other refinements of life, which many Europeans impute to America, seemed to me no longer the effect of an aberration on the part of the masses, but asort of compensation. We pay, and we ought to pay, for the rapid fortunes so commonly made nowadays. We pay, we ought to pay, for the speed of the trains, the motor-cars, the aeroplane, the telegraph; and the price is the mediocrity which pervades everything. We cannot have, we must not want, everything in this world,—railways as well as beautiful pictures, aeroplanes as well as the marvellous furniture which the great French artists used to make in the eighteenth century, speed as well as good manners. For among the reproaches hurled at America by Europe is that of having banished from Europe by the example of her democracy the good manners of our ancient ceremonial, and substituted for it a rather over-simple and over-casual cordiality. But can we expect the polished form, for which the eighteenth century was famous, to survive in the social relations of a civilisation which, like ours, is always in a hurry? Among men, who live between the train, the motor-car, and the telephone?

Every epoch directs all its efforts towards a supreme goal, which for it is the all-important one. There have been epochs ablaze with religious fervour, whose chief aspiration it was to diffuse and to defend the faith. There have been epochs with a profound sense of the ambition for glory, which fought great wars. Others again have turned their attention to the fostering of the arts and sciences. Our civilisation aims, in the first place, at the mastery over nature, and the intensive exploitation of all the riches of the earth. We enjoy theadvantages of it. We are not inclined to abjure railways and telegraphs. We have no wish again to run the risk of famine, which was such an ever-present one to the civilisations of the past. We enjoy the incredible abundance and liberty of the day and are by no means eager to return to the pristine régime of discipline and parsimony. We Europeans also, then, must resign ourselves to paying the price which all these advantages cost, and to living in an epoch in which art cannot flourish in any high degree, in which religion will no longer have the strength to emanate waves of mystical ardour, and even science will be cultivated only so far as it can be of immediate service to practical ends, by intensifying and making more prolific the exploitation of natural riches. For this, too, is a phenomenon noticeable to-day in every part of Europe: disinterested studies are falling into disfavour. Rich as it is, the world of to-day is less capable of searching after the true for the sole pleasure of expanding the field of knowledge, than it was two centuries ago, when it was so much poorer. Even scientists nowadays want to see their discoveries turned into money.

* * * * *

The Americanisation of Europe, then, is a fatal phenomenon. Europe, from the moment when she aspired to great wealth and to the dominion of nature, was called upon to renounce her claim to many of the treasures of her ancient and refined culture. This was the conclusion at which I rested for a moment. Andyet at this point, I, as a European, felt a misgiving. If matters stood thus, was not Europe fatally doomed to become even more thoroughly Americanised in the future? At the present time, the appetites and ambitions of all classes in Europe, even the most numerous, have been given free rein. Everybody, from the aristocrat of ancient lineage to the most obscure peasant, wishes to earn, spend, and accumulate as much as he can. There is no power, human or divine, which can pretend to drive back towards its historical fountainhead this immense torrent of greed and ambition. Europe, thus, is fated to become increasingly oblivious of the traditions of its ancient and disinterested culture; to struggle to imitate and compete with America in the production of great riches at greater speed. And, as America with her immense territories and smaller store of traditions is better equipped for the competition, so Europe must necessarily become ever more and more decadent in the future. The continent destined to dominate the civilisation of the future, as Europe dominated it up to the middle of the nineteenth century, will be America.

There are not wanting persons in Europe who take a delight in repeating from time to time this prophecy, which to the ears of a European sounds somewhat lugubrious. For a moment, when in America, I, too, somewhat discouraged by the vitality of which the American spirit of progress gives proof, felt myself inclined to give ear to these prophets, whom hithertoin Europe I had always contradicted. Yes, culture in Europe was destined to become ever more decadent before the invasion of progress interpreted in the American sense; quantity, that is to say, the nations with vast territories at their disposal and capable of rapidly producing vast wealth, would rule supreme in the future, while the forces of idealism would lose a great part of their ancient empire over the world.

America, however, actually America, proved to me that the ancient culture represented by Europe is not destined to die out, and that, if Europe is being Americanised, America in compensation is being induced by an eternal impulse to Europeanise herself! I, like so many other Europeans, had gone to America, persuaded that the American’s only thought is to make money. But in America, I, too, ended with the conviction that no country in Europe expends so much money, labour, and zeal on founding museums, schools, universities, and new religions; on fostering, in the midst of the mechanical civilisation and the realm of quantity, the arts, the religious spirit, and the disinterested sciences; on preventing the loss of that intellectual legacy of the past, in which Europe takes an ever-decreasing interest, occupied as she is in developing her industries and her trade. If, out of deference to history, rather than to the present day, we may grant that Europe represents in the world’s history the effort directed to the perfecting of a lofty culture, artistic, scientific, religious, or philosophic,—there is no doubtbut that America is to-day becoming Europeanised; is seeking, that is to say, to employ the vast riches which she has accumulated by the intensive exploitation of her territory in the promotion of the progress of art, knowledge, and the religious spirit. Doubtless, not all the efforts she makes are successful; but they are numerous, intense, and obstinate. Indeed, if America is open to any reproach in this relation, it is, in my opinion, to that of feeling too ardent an admiration for lofty culture—art and science in particular—an admiration which sometimes blunts the critical sense, and does not permit her to distinguish what in the world of the ideal is authentic from what is counterfeit, the real gold from pinchbeck. In fact, one can find in no European country so lively and profound a trust in science as in America. Europe knows that science can do a great deal and has done a great deal, but that it often promises, or raises hopes of, more than it can do. Not so in America. Among the cultured, as among the lower classes, faith in the power of science is practically unlimited. There is no marvel which the American does not expect to see issuing from the scientist’s closet. Even the mystical movements in America, whose trend is anti-scientific, like to trick themselves out with the name of “Science,” which has a kind of magic sound and glamour for the men of the New World.

There is the same universal enthusiasm for art in America. It might be said that America is determined to admire everything which might possibly be beautiful,of every country, every epoch, and every school. It is true that the most engrossing preoccupation of the Americans is not that of fostering the arts; they must still keep their minds fixed on the conquest of their great continent. But it is also true that, in the moments of leisure, when they can think of something other than business, they fling open, so to speak, their arms to the arts of the whole world. Just as all the styles of architecture can be found in the great buildings of New York, so all the arts which have flourished in the course of centuries in Asia and Europe have been transplanted into the New World. America, I might almost say, wishes to taste and understand all the beauties which the past has created; classical literature as well as contemporary European literature, Italian as well as German music, Greek sculpture as well as the French sculpture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Italian as well as Dutch painting, Japanese decorative art as well as the styles of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth Louis. New York, from this point of view, is a real artistic cosmopolis.

If, then, Europe is gradually destroying her ancient culture, and her great traditions, in order to construct railways and factories, to found banks and to initiate commercial enterprises, America, on the other hand, wishes to employ the wealth gained by the intensive exploitation of her vast continent in creating an art and a science. How can we explain this contrast? “The snobbery of a parvenue nation,” it pleases theEuropean, with a shrug of the shoulders, to label it. But anyone with any knowledge of America and much knowledge of human nature will not rest content with so glib an explanation. It is true that, thanks to machinery, to America, and to the idea of liberty and progress, quantity is to-day triumphant in the world. Men wish to enjoy abundance. Can they, however, confine their wish to abundance, to the increase, that is to say, of the quantity of things they possess? Observe a peasant who comes to town, turns artisan, and earns a higher wage. What does he do? Does he buy with his higher wage a second pair of boots, or a second suit in addition to and like the one he wore when he was poor? No. He adopts the town fashions and buys more elegant shoes and clothes, in appearance at least, that is to say, like those worn by the upper classes. In every country of America and Europe, the differences in dress between the upper and lower classes, once so great, are disappearing. And why? Because the people want to dress like the “Swells”; and modern industry spares no trouble to give them at little cost the means of satisfying their ambition. In other words, the workman wants to invest his higher wage in the purchase of finer, or what he thinks are finer, clothes, than those he wore before, because to possess a suit of superior clothes is to him a greater joy than to have two suits of the same workmanship as those he wore when he was poorer. In other words, quantity soon satiates, and at a certain stage man needs to translate it intoquality, and to employ his wealth to procure for himself, not a greater number of things, but more beautiful and better things, otherwise wealth is useless.

If this need is lively and profound in the minds of the people, how much stronger must it be in the richer classes, those with great resources at their disposal! A man who possesses ten millions and another who possesses one hundred cannot eat ten and a hundred times as much respectively as the modest lord of only one million, live in a house ten or a hundred times as vast, or buy himself ten or a hundred hats where the other buys only one. If they used their wealth in that way, they would be considered mad, and with good reason. They must then strive to procure for themselves, with their superior wealth, things of superior beauty or quality, to translate their wealth into beauty and merit, quantity into quality. There are, it is true, men who desire wealth only for the pleasure of creating it, and who are indifferent to the other pleasures which it brings. At no time, perhaps, were these men so numerous as at present among the great bankers, merchants, and manufacturers who now rule the economic destinies of the modern world. But even to-day, these men, who love money as the artist loves his art, in itself and not for the pleasures which it can give, are in a minority. And so they will always be, because even if—impossible hypothesis—anybody in the upper classes developed such a fervid enthusiasm for banking, industry, and commerce, as to arrive at considering wealth only as anend in itself, a means of displaying his own ability, there would still be the women. Unless it be wished that even in the wealthy classes, women should engage in business and work, women will be bound always to consider wealth as an instrument for the advancement of life, procuring for its possessor joys more select and articles of superior quality.

In fact, this and no other is the origin of snobbery. Snobbery is, I know, an obvious target for sarcasm at the present day. And it is easy to laugh at thenouveau richewho is determined at all costs, even at the price of sacrifice and snubs, to frequent houses and circles which formerly were closed to him; who is glad to go for trips in a motor-car, even if they cause him suffering, or to go to the opera even if he falls asleep there, because he thinks that by doing so, he is living up to the standard of the highest elegance. But if he were not under this delusion, what would be the use of his wealth to him? What compensation would he have for the fatigues and perils he had incurred in its acquisition? Snobbery is simply an effort to translate quantity into quality to which man is impelled by the very increase of wealth. There never was so much snobbery as there is at the present time, because there never was so much wealth.

Without a doubt, modern snobbery is full of grotesque deceptions. The world never contained so manynouveaux riches, unprepared to enjoy the real refinements of life, and destined to be the victims of everysort of fraud. How often and in how many instances do we not see the tragi-comedy ofLe Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Molière’s immortal comedy, acted over again at the present day? But one can also find, in America perhaps more abundantly than in Europe, families whose wealth dates back several generations, in which families the mania for the accumulation of riches has died down, and which have time, inclination, and culture enough to employ their wealth on behalf of the most lofty activities of the mind. These are the American families who ransack Europe for works of art, who found schools and museums, who give work to architects, painters, and sculptors, who directly or indirectly stimulate an ever-increasing number of the rising generation not to concentrate on the making of money, but to devote themselves to those intellectual labours of which, till a short while ago, Europe had the monopoly. And it is the existence of this portion of American society and its tendencies that entitle us to say that America is being Europeanised.

Europe, then, wishing to live a larger life, after centuries of penury and stint, is becoming Americanised, and is sacrificing a part of her splendid traditions of lofty culture to her desire to learn from America the art of producing new wealth rapidly. America, on the other hand, having accumulated immense wealth by the intensive exploitation of her territory, is becoming Europeanised; she is turning, that is to say, to the arts, sciences, and most lofty forms of higher culture, toperfect which Europe has laboured for centuries. Yet at this point I think I hear the reader cry:

“Is not this all to the good? Does it not establish a marvellous balance between the two worlds? Does it not prove that our civilisation is the richest, most powerful, best balanced, and most perfect which has ever existed? Ought Europe to have gone on living for ever in misery, intent only on the perfecting of culture, and America to have had never a thought for anything but the multiplication of wealth?”

To be sure, if this exchange of wealth and culture between the two continents could be effected as well and easily as it can be described, our epoch would be in very truth an epoch of fabulous felicity. We might claim to be, in comparison with preceding generations, a generation of supermen. Unfortunately, the difficulties are greater than they seem at first sight to be. What they are will be seen in the next chapter; we shall then see that it has become much easier to produce new wealth than to employ it in the creation of a lofty and refined civilisation; and that this is the secret torment which afflicts Europe and America.

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