IIQUANTITY AND QUALITY
Suetoniusrecounts that one day a man presented himself to the Emperor Vespasian, and showed him the models of a machine, thanks to which the Emperor could have finished off the construction of certain of his great public works with fewer labourers, and at a great saving of expense. Vespasian was full of praise for the man’s ingenuity, and recompensed him with a sum of money; but he subsequently had the model destroyed, saying that he did not wish to have any machines which would cause his people to go hungry. Applying the standard of modern ideas, how should we judge this sentiment and act? Of course, we should consider it a strange and absurd mistake. Suetonius, on the contrary, quotes the incident to prove how wise Vespasian was. In this divergence of opinion is revealed the essential difference between ourselves and the ancients, between modern civilisation and Greco-Roman civilisation, for all that these resemble each other in so many particulars; the principal difference between the ancient world and America. Although,as I have shown in my preceding essay, America in certain of its institutions and forms of social life resembles the ancient world more than Europe, this comparison does not hold true so far as the instruments of economic production are concerned. In this respect America is much further removed from the ancient world than is Europe, and represents to-day the beginning of a new era and a new civilisation, whose spirit and tendencies would be quite incomprehensible to a re-embodied Greek or Roman.
Greco-Roman antiquity never dreamed that it might be a useful, beautiful, glorious work to invent machines of increasing speed and power, and therefore never gave a thought to those technical elaborations which are the pride of our times. It possessed the elementary machines, the lever, jack-screw, the inclined plane; but it never tried to combine these into more complicated machines. In particular, it never called into play the effort to which all the mechanism of modern times owes its birth; that is to say, it never tried to endow its machines with a more rapid motion than the muscles of men or of animals can endow them with, or to search nature for motive forces of greater power than these. It availed itself only sparingly and on rare occasions of the force of running water or of the wind. The latter it used only for navigation, and even then with regret, hesitation, and fear, as if it were doing an illicit and shameful thing. It knew of no combustible other than the wood of the trees. Notwithstanding the factthat Pliny the elder has preserved for us so much precious information about agriculture and the ancient arts and industries, his writings contain scarcely a single hint suggesting that the men of his civilisation had any desire to make the instruments of economic production more perfect and effective. In one place, the sail, as compared with the oar, inspires him to write a passage in which the modern reader imagines just at first that he has lighted on a sentiment containing a distant echo of contemporary enthusiasm for progress. “Is there a greater marvel in the whole world?” he writes.
A grass exists [flax, of which sails are made] which brings Egypt and Italy so close together that two prefects of Egypt, Galerius and Balbillus, crossed from Alexandria to the straits of Messina, one in seven days and the other in six; and that last summer the senator Valerius Marianus reached Alexandria from Pozzuoli in a light wind in nine days. There is a grass which brings me in seven days from Gades, the harbour near the Pillars of Hercules, to Ostia, in four from this side of Spain, in three from the province of Narbonne, in two from Africa, as C. Flavius, the envoy of the proconsul Vilius Crispus, found.
A grass exists [flax, of which sails are made] which brings Egypt and Italy so close together that two prefects of Egypt, Galerius and Balbillus, crossed from Alexandria to the straits of Messina, one in seven days and the other in six; and that last summer the senator Valerius Marianus reached Alexandria from Pozzuoli in a light wind in nine days. There is a grass which brings me in seven days from Gades, the harbour near the Pillars of Hercules, to Ostia, in four from this side of Spain, in three from the province of Narbonne, in two from Africa, as C. Flavius, the envoy of the proconsul Vilius Crispus, found.
Does it not seem as if we were reading an anticipation by eighteen hundred years of that hymn which moderns so often raise to the power of steam and to the great ocean liners which cross the Atlantic in five or six days? But ours is only a brief illusion. The wonder and the admiration of Pliny are soon over, and a sort of awe takes their place. “Audax vita, scelerum plena!” hequickly adds. “Creature full of wicked daring!” The invention of sails seems to him almost a sacrilegious impiety, and his view was that of all the ancients.
In short, the few victories which the ancients had won over nature were to them a cause of embarrassment rather than of enthusiasm; for they saw in them merely a proof of the perversity and foolhardiness of human pride. If a contemporary of Sophocles or Horace came back to the world, he would probably just at first be terrified by what he saw all round him, as by the spectacle of a gigantic and unheard-of madness. Machinery, which to us seems the most marvellous instrument of our energy and intelligence, appeared to the ancients a danger, an enemy, and almost a sacrilege: an attempt to rebel against the gods and their wishes. Consequently, they invented and adopted machines—and those but simple and primitive ones—only for use in war, especially for siege-work. The necessity of conquering made them forget to some extent their usual fears.
So great a difference in thought and feeling, in a matter which to us seems of such vital importance, must arise from deep-seated causes. Why did the ancients invent and construct so few machines, and hold in such fear the few they had? Why did they wish the hand of man to be the principal and the most powerful among the instruments of production? Many attribute the inferiority of the ancients in this department to the comparatively undeveloped state of science. Vast andprofound knowledge of science, they say, is required for the construction of modern machines. The ancients did not possess this knowledge; therefore, they conclude, they could not construct the machines.
But, in this deduction there are two exaggerations. The services of science, especially in early times, to machines and their progress, are exaggerated; so also is the scientific ignorance of the ancients. Science has helped materially to perfect certain machines, but has actually invented scarcely one. Many of the marvellous machines which, at a giddy rate, multiply riches all round us, have been conceived for the first time in the minds of artisans,contre-maîtres, managers of factories, and other persons more expert in practice than rich in scientific lore. The founder of the great mechanical industry, Arkwright, who invented the cotton-spinning machine, was a barber. Watt, the inventor of the steam-engine, though perhaps a better-educated man than Arkwright, was not in any sense a great scientist. For the rest, whoever knows the history of machinery is aware that science did not begin to concern herself with machinery, or to inquire whether her studies might help inventors with useful suggestions, until the great mechanical industry had already invaded the world. Science, then, only followed a movement which had already begun, and did not give it the first impulse.
Furthermore, the scientific ignorance of the ancients is exaggerated. Ancient science is not so well-knownas ancient art and literature; and it certainly did not make very striking progress during the last brilliant period of ancient history—the Roman Empire. Therefore to many, whose knowledge regarding it is comparatively superficial, the ancient world may seem empty of scientific wisdom. But such is not the case. If the Romans never applied much thought to the scientific study of nature, the Greeks for their part had laid the foundations of many sciences, and had laid them boldly and truly. Even the Copernican system had been anticipated by Greek astronomers, like Aristarchus of Samos and Seleucus of Seleucia, who had maintained that the earth revolved round the sun, and that the firmament was much more vast than was generally supposed.
We need not, therefore, believe that the ancients were not able to construct more complicated machines than those they used, because they lacked scientific knowledge. It would be nearer the truth to say that they did not make much effort to raise sciences out of the necessarily narrow domain of purely theoretical problems, because, independent as they were of machinery, they had no need of the practical aids which science, if developed in certain directions, can lend to the construction of machines. In fact, we men of the present day encourage the sciences to search and investigate in every direction and to try every path, not from a disinterested love of the True nor from an intellectual curiosity to spy out the mysteries of nature;but because we hope that we shall discover, in the course of our all-embracing search, laws or bodies or forces which will help us to subdue and exploit nature.
The ancients then abstained from inventing and constructing machines, not from lack of knowledge but from lack of will. The effort seemed to them useless, nay, pernicious; and the enterprise did not attract them. It remains, therefore, to consider why the ancients, in their great struggle to extend the dominion of man over nature, felt no need of help from swift engines of iron, and, therefore, did not make the effort necessary to invent them. This is a question of the highest importance for the history of civilisation, for by its solution only can we gain an insight into what is perhaps the most profound difference between ancient and modern civilisation. The difference consists in this: while our civilisation is a mechanical-scientific civilisation, the ancient was above all things an artistic civilisation. Therefore our civilisation tends in the main to multiply the needs and the consumption of man, so as to quicken production as much as possible, while the ancient civilisation tended to limit man’s needs and consumption, to hold up to esteem and imitation customs of simplicity and parsimony which involved a reduction in consumption, and therefore in production. If we are to grasp the very essence of our history, we must understand clearly how indisolubly united are the artistic civilisation and the ideal of a simple life, the mechanical-scientificcivilisation and the ideal of a life of extravagance and luxury.
Even at the present day, many will be found to extol the greatness, the wealth, and the might of the Roman Empire as a marvel never surpassed in history. But this is a delusion. The Roman Empire seemed marvellously wealthy and powerful to the ancients, because they had never yet seen greater wealth and greater might. But what are the wealth and the might of the Roman Empire compared with the might and the wealth of the great modern states of Europe and America? One observation will suffice to give an idea of the difference. We are justified in deducing from the great number of facts and data in our possession that in the most flourishing and wealthy centuries the budget of the Empire, the sum total, that is, of all the items of expenditure which the central government at Rome had to meet—expenditure on the most important public services of so immense an empire, which comprised the whole basin of the Mediterranean, and a large part of Europe, Asia, and Africa—fell short, far short, of the municipal budget of the city of New York. Only the man who is conversant with the customs of the past in their minutest details can fully estimate how much simpler, poorer, and more economical the civilisation of the ancients was than that which has permeated America and Europe since the invention of the steam-engine and electricity, when the riches of the New World, exploitedintensively with the help of machinery, began to flood the earth.
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 theconstruction 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 productionis 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 losetheir 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 infernalregions. 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 degenerationto 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 atexpress 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 producesin 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 theéliteof 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 nomeans 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 istrue, 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.
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.