IVTHE LOST PARADISE OF BEAUTY
Thebewildering growth in the wealth of America has affected in many different ways the whole world. Economists are studying its effects with much zeal. One, and not the least curious, of them, is the rise in the value of antiques. From Etruscan ceramics to French furniture of the eighteenth century, from Greek statues to Italian pictures of every epoch, from Tanagra statuettes to the lace, embroideries, tapestries, manuscripts, glass, and filigree from every part of the world, all the artistic furniture of Europe, Asia, and Africa which has survived the ravages of time has trebled and quadrupled its value. Few financial speculations proved more successful in Europe than the collection about fifty years ago of antiques.
Many instances could be quoted to prove this. Everybody, even in America, I suppose, has heard recently of the great Paris tailor who set to work thirty years ago to collect statues, pictures, and Frenchobjets d’artof the eighteenth century. He spent about three millions on his collection; and he put it up for auctionlast year and cleared fourteen millions! An occurrence which made less noise, because it was on a smaller scale, but analogous to the foregoing, is the following: A journalist, a man of taste and a great admirer of beautiful antiques, came to Rome. Everybody called him a maniac, because, though he had a family, he spent all his savings in buying from the small antique dealers and in the Campo di Fiori lamps, books, stuffs, and every other bit of antique he could lay hands on. Well, he died ten years ago, and left his family nothing but a houseful of fine antiques. The family, which did not share his mania, sold them, and realised a fortune, the income of which was, and is, enough to support them in comfort. If the journalist had been discreet and had invested his savings in shares and bonds, probably his family would now be living in a very much humbler way.
It is unnecessary to quote further evidence in support of so notorious a fact. Ask any European antiquarian the reason for this appreciation, and he will reply unhesitatingly, “America.” America for the last thirty years has been making assaults on the antiquities-market with all the tenacity of her untiring activity, and the might of her new-made wealth. Some people in Europe—those who have antiques to sell—are very glad that it should be so. Others lament, complaining that Europe is emptying herself of her treasures in favour of the New World. Most people, however, smile at what they consider a proof of the incurablesnobbery of the New World. Europe is very ready to accuse America of loving antiques only because they are rare and, therefore, dear; of fighting dollar-duels about them, only to prove their own wealth, without any power of judging and distinguishing between the good and the bad, though even among antiques there are ugly as well as beautiful ones, representing comparative grades of beauty. And this accusation too is, in its general application, unjust and unsubstantial. Anybody who has had any extensive dealings with the wealthy houses of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and Chicago, knows that they contain many Americans who are competent judges and buyers of artistic antiques. It is true that, from this point of view, the big American houses cannot yet challenge comparison with the big European houses. Nevertheless, numberless are the marvellous ceramics from the Far East, numberless the magnificent pieces of French eighteenth century furniture, numberless the pieces of wonderful lace, glass, and antiqueboiserieswhich it has been my good fortune to see, not without an occasional pang, in America.
On the other hand, this reproach, which, couched in its usual form, is unjust, contains a modicum of truth, which however applies to Europe as well as to America. I have often had occasion to notice in wealthy modern houses—in Europe as well as in America, but in America more than in Europe—that they are adorned with many extremely beautiful old pieces, but thatthese are too numerous, and too heterogeneous. You find in a modern drawing-room material of every epoch and from all parts of the world; from ancient Greece, and from China of the last century, from the Italian Middle Ages and from contemporary Persia. Consequently modern houses are too much like small museums, in which numbers of wonderful little antiques, picked up wherever they were to be had, are exposed to view, and in which the modern furniture and adornments serve as the show-case in which the antiques are displayed, instead of being, as they were in the eighteenth century, the principal decoration, of which some beautiful antique was the appropriate ornament and complement. This inversion of the natural order of things would be inexplicable, were we not all of us persuaded more or less consciously that old things must necessarily be more beautiful than modern ones. For this reason we are willing that what we make, the modern, shall be subordinated and serve as a tool to the antique.
In short, the antique, in Europe as in America, has acquired nowadays a value of its own in art, merely on the score of its antiquity. I need not dwell on the strangeness of this prejudice in favour of antiques in an age and in countries in which, directly one leaves the field of art behind, one finds so keen a craze for the modern. Not to be up-to-date is at the present day the greatest reproach we can fling at a man in Europe and in America, especially in America. Why then doesmodernity in art arouse, not only in old Europe, but also, and perhaps more, in young America, so much diffidence and mistrust? Why do we, notwithstanding the attempts which modern artists make to emulate the ancients or to create new things, turn to the past when we want to possess or enjoy something really beautiful? May this contradiction be the effort of a last surviving prejudice? For centuries, man was educated to consider all antique things, only because they were antique, preferable to modern ones. In many respects, we have conquered this venerable prejudice. May our attachment to the antique in art be the last and most persistent survival of this sentiment, itself destined to disappear?
No. This persistent attachment to the antique in art is not prejudice; it is the effect of the incurable artistic weakness of our epoch. Men are following a profound and sure instinct when, in their desire for beauty, they turn to the antique; for art is as it were the lost Paradise of our civilisation, whose atmosphere we are always breathing, but to which the entrance is forbidden us. It is a phenomenon of contemporary life which usually attracts but little attention; and yet how strange it is! The need for the adornment of life with beautiful things—for translating quantity into quality, as I said above—has not diminished among the wealthy classes, and could not diminish, because it is a profoundly human need. The world’s upper classes never had so much wealth at their disposal as now, andnever had so keen a desire to spend a considerable part of it in the purchase of beautiful things. How many artistic masterpieces could have been paid for, and how many painters, sculptors, and architects of genius liberally rewarded with half the sums which have been spent in raising fourfold or sixfold the value of the antiquities of Europe, Asia, and Africa? Indeed the immense growth in the world’s wealth has profited the dead, not the living, in the world of art, antiquities and not the modern arts. And it was inevitable that this should be so. Why?
Because modern times are not adapted to be a golden age of art, for a psychological and moral reason, which, however, is not to be sought in the practical and commercial spirit of modern times. Many of the fairest palaces and pictures which we admire in Italy were commissioned by merchants who were no less practical than modern bankers. The reason is to be sought elsewhere, and it is more profound. Modern civilisation has conquered with its railways, telegraphs, and steam-boats, the whole earth. In fifty years, it has succeeded in conquering continents so vast as North America. It has created riches so fabulous, in a word, it has achieved so much power, because it has broken through all the limits within which the spirit of tradition confined past generations. Escaping from these limits, it has learned to create at great speed. Speed and the tireless spirit of innovation are the two formidable weapons which have given our civilisation the victory in herstruggle with nature and with the other more conservative and more deliberate civilisations. But the qualities necessary to artistic excellence are just the two opposite qualities: the spirit of tradition and laborious deliberateness.
We moderns, victims of the giddy pace at which we live, may be somewhat oblivious of the fact; but it is a fact that anyone who knows history cannot ignore. To create and foster an art really worthy of the name,—Greek sculpture, Italian painting, the French decorative art of the eighteenth century,—the immense sums at our disposal are useless, and the sciences of steam and electricity of no avail. I have already had occasion to prove this in the preceding chapters. The nations and the generations which have created the most famous arts and whose relics are still our delight, were poor and ignorant compared with us. In order to create and foster art, it is necessary to educate generations of artists to do good work and generations of amateurs to understand and appreciate it. Neither the artists nor the public taste can be educated without a spirit of tradition and of æsthetic discipline, which induces the public to allow the artists the time necessary for the perfecting of their respective arts in all their details; which induces the artist to recognise the legitimate requirements of the public for which he works, and to seek to satisfy it by adapting his own work to those requirements.
Anyone can see, however, that nowadays these twoconditions have become well-nigh impossible. In the gigantic confusion of the modern world, races, cultures, and populations are continually intermingling. Generations follow each other with the fixed determination not to continue what their immediate predecessor has done but to do something different. Ancient traditions are dying out, and no new ones are being formed or can be formed. Change is the order of the day. Sons but rarely adopt their father’s professions, and not a few die in lands other than those in which they were born. Modern society is agitated by a continual process of renewal, which is the deep-seated source of her energy and activity, but is also a reason for her artistic decadence. In this continual mobility of bodies, wills, and ideas; in this perpetual change of tendencies, tastes, and standards, art is losing her bearings and, alone in this age of bold enterprises, is becoming greedy and diffident.
Public and artists, instead of helping each other, have grown timid. The public no longer does what it likes. It no longer has any standard of judgment. It has become timid and diffident. It is obsessed by the fear of mistaking a masterpiece for a deception or a deception for a masterpiece. This uncertainty of tastes and desires in the public in its turn bewilders the artists. When the painter, the sculptor, the musician, and the poet try to find in the desires and inclinations of the public the sure indication which in times past used to be the support and guidance of artists in their creations,they find that the public is ready to admire anything, but has no marked preference for anything in particular. The artist is free, but his liberty is a liberty which embarrasses and paralyses him.
Under these circumstances, the adroit artists quickly learn the art of exploiting the uncertainties and inexperiences of the public, and win riches and honours. The crazy and the charlatans seek to intimidate the public by perpetrating novelties of extravagant audacity. Serious and conscientious artists there are nowadays, of course, but everyone has new formulæ of his own art, differing from those of everyone else, and proclaims his to be the only true, fruitful, and admirable formulæ, at the same time denouncing all others as freaks. By what standard are we to judge these quarrels? Bewildered by so many different attempts and judgments, the public ends by turning to the antique. It has a vague idea that the past ages may have been inferior to our own in all other respects, but in art were superior to it. It knows that a work of art at least one century old may be more or less beautiful, but that it is at least a serious work of art, conceived and carried out in good faith, not for the mystification of an ingenuous public by some daring theory of novelty.
So the Europeans are wrong in ridiculing the passion of the Americans for ancient things. This passion has the same origin on the other side of the Atlantic as it has on this. In art, our civilisation is destined to remain inferior to ancient civilisations, which it hasovershadowed with its wisdom, its power, and its wealth. This is the reason for the rapid growth in the value of the antique in art, even in the age of modernityà outrance. We need feel no shame in avowing it openly. Civilisations and epochs, like individuals, cannot have and expect everything; and the share which has fallen to us of the good things of the earth is so large, that we can readily console ourselves for the loss of this particular one.
Who reasoned thus would reason wisely. Nevertheless, the fact is of greater importance than it appears. It shows that the balance between the ancient culture of Europe and the spirit of American culture—that balance which might perhaps have produced the most brilliant civilisation in history—will never be perfectly secured, at least so long as the conditions of the world remain what they now are. America will be able to continue her Europeanisation, and Europe her Americanisation, as we have seen is the case. But this interchange of influences will not have as its only result the increase of the wealth of Europe and of the culture of America. It will give birth in the two worlds to a discontent and an unrest which nothing will be able to allay.
In fact, the more its upper classes come under the influence of the culture of the Old World, the more ardent will become the admiration and desire of America for the antique,—for that beauty which the civilisations preceding our own created with suchwealth and perfection of forms; the more strongly will it be convinced of our artistic inferiority, and persuaded that one of the treasures of life we have lost irreparably, and can only enjoy in the relics of other generations. Every picture or statue or artistic object which crosses the ocean and enters America, every museum which a rich Maecenas opens in the New World to the public or which a city or a state creates, every chair founded, and every book of artistic history printed,—everything, in fact, which brings the spirit of America into contact with the masterpieces of ancient European art, and awakens recognition and admiration for them, makes America at the same time recognise how comparatively decadent is that which our times produce; reveals to it that lost Paradise of Beauty around whose closed gates we are now condemned to hover. This contact with the artistic achievement of the past becomes, therefore, at the same time a gadfly of discontent and unrest to the upper and cultured classes.
By an inverse process, the further the spirit of American progress penetrates into Europe, the more completely does it detach the Old World from its past, and, therefore, irritates, grieves, and disgusts the classes which have enough culture to recognise and admire the marvellous arts of that past. With every ten years that elapse, we feel that our past, with all its radiant glories, has receded a hundred years; that we are plunging into a new world, in which riches, knowledge, and our power over nature will increase, but which willbe ugly, inharmonious, and vulgar compared with the centuries which preceded it. Many Americans fail to understand why Europe cherishes so many latent antipathies to America, which has never done her any harm, directly at least. The real reason for these antipathies must be looked for in the artistic decadence which accompanies the development of modern civilisation. That civilisation has not been created by America alone, but by America and Europe combined. Europe and America, therefore, share the responsibility for this decadence. Yet it suits the European book from time to time to see in America the symbol of the civilisation of railways, steam, electricity, business, and industry on a large scale; and Europeans gladly vent on America their spleen for whatever in this civilisation, pregnant with good and with evil, offends them and arouses regret.
In short, there is an insoluble contradiction between progress, as our age understands the word,—between the “American” progress, as many Europeans call it,—and art. This contradiction has as yet attracted but little notice, in the still great confusion in which we live, in the initial tumult of this new civilisation which is invading the earth. It will be noticed, however, more and more strongly, as generation succeeds generation, and in many families the primary hunger for wealth is satiated and gives way to the desire to “translate quantity into quality”: as American love for the historical beauties of the Old World increases, andEurope takes further lessons in the multiplication of her wealth. There is no escape or salvation for our civilisation from the discontent and unrest which will arise from this contradiction. It is a torment which will grow with the growth of wealth and culture; which nations and classes will feel more acutely the richer and the more cultivated they become; from which perhaps, one day, America will suffer more severely than many European nations; which will oppress the upper classes much more heavily than the people. The latter, indeed, will not feel it at all, and will alone be able to live in modern civilisation, as contented as man ever can be in this world.
History often has strange surprises in store. The civilisation of machinery tended at its birth to appear as a death-blow to the working classes, a godsend to the upper classes. For years and years, socialism, generalising from the initial rubs, predicted and pretended to prove that the great mechanical industry must enrich a small oligarchy inordinately, and reduce to the blackest wretchedness the great mass of the population; that a new feudalism of capitalists, fiercer than the barons of the Middle Ages, would seize all the good things of the world. A century passes, and we find this civilisation giving complete satisfaction only to the workmen, because it can content the workmen only from the double point of view of quantity and quality. It gives them an abundance which only a small fraction of the people enjoyed up to a century ago; and, atthe same time, bestows on them a luxury which fully satisfies their yet simple and unsophisticated æsthetic sense. We may smile when we see in a workman’s home mirrors and clocks which are the rudest imitations of masterpieces of the Louis XV and Louis XVI styles, hideous reproductions from a German factory; and coarse carpets which are poor European copies of beautiful Turkish and Persian models, the result of the substitution of the iron teeth of a machine for the industrious fingers of the human hand, and of decadent aniline dyes for the brilliant and unfading vegetable colours. The workman, however, does not know the matchless models of which these objects are the ugly copies, and, inasmuch as every æsthetic verdict arises out of a comparison, these reproductions represent for him the summit of perfection, and entirely satisfy his need for beautiful things round about him.
To the upper classes, on the other hand, this civilisation has given immense and imposing wealth, such as no epoch had ever considered possible; but it has deprived them of the means of enjoying it. Wealth becomes nowadays more useless, the greater it becomes, because a multi-millionaire cannot build himself a house, wear clothes, or buy objects a hundred times finer and better than the possessor of only a few millions. We no longer have artists capable of accomplishing miracles. The men of great wealth are forced to compete with each other for the relics of past beauty at fabulous prices, when they are not inclined to spend all theirwealth for the benefit of others. These relics are not sufficient, however, to satisfy the desire for beauty and art which grows in our times with the growth of wealth and of culture. On the contrary, they only make us feel more acutely the decadent vulgarity of everything, with but few exceptions, which our age produces.
* * * * *
Someone will say that, after all, this torment is not a very serious one; and that men will easily find means of consoling themselves. No epoch, as I have already said, can have everything; and modern civilisation bestows on the wealthy classes of our times numberless compensations for the ugliness of the modern world. One of these should be enough by itself to content even the most discontented: that kind of bodily and mental ubiquity which is enjoyed, thanks to the prodigious inventions of modern genius. Cannot the wealthy, thanks to their riches, remove from one continent to another, travel, have dealings and acquaintances in, and receive communications from, every part of the world, come to know the most distant and recondite beauties of nature and of art—in a word, live over the whole globe? A modern great man may well feel himself almost a demigod compared with the men of two centuries ago, so great is the sway his money gives him over the forces of nature, so easily can he escape from the tyranny which space and time used to exercise over men up to a century ago. May not the intoxication of this proud sway be worth as much as the pleasurewhich the works of Phidias, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Houdon gave to our ancestors?
It is true that the pride of our knowledge and the intoxication of our power stun us, and therefore help us to bear with greater patience the want of more æsthetic pleasures. But this compensation, like all compensations, is of its very nature provisional. It is not possible utterly to destroy a need inherent in human nature. There is at the present day a certain tendency in the world to consider art as a superfluous frivolity, as a luxury only to be thought of in moments of leisure. Art and such-like superfluities are contrasted with what are called the serious occupations, the practical realities of life: industry, commerce, inventions, business, and wealth. Those who hold this opinion forget, however, that the sculptures of Phidias and the paintings of Raphael appeared in the world long before the steam-engine and the Voltaic pile. Are we, too, prepared in face of this fact to affirm, with the most advanced champion of the American idea of progress in my dialogue, that “history was off the track up to the discovery of America”? That if men had had any sense, they would have invented machinery and developed the sciences first, and then created and developed the arts? But even if we were prepared to maintain this paradoxical theory, another fact of common observation would be there to prove to us that beauty is not a luxury and whim of gentlemen of leisure, but a primary, universal, and indestructible need of our minds, whichevery human creature seeks to satisfy as best it can. Do we not see every day that the peasant and the artisan, items in modern civilisation though they are, no sooner have a little money than they try to procure for themselves ornaments, either for their persons or for their homes, which may be as tawdry as you like, but which to them seem beautiful and well worth the expenditure of some of the little money they have? Have we not seen that one of the merits of modern civilisation is that of satisfying the æsthetic needs of the masses? Why should we not expect, then, to find the same need, though in a refined and intense form, felt by those to whom superior intelligence and energy, or the favour of fortune, has granted the power to accumulate wealth in large quantities, those, in other words, who have at their disposal greater means of procuring for themselves the pleasures and good things of life?
No: the artistic impotence of modern civilisation is likely to prove, to judge by the first effects which are now beginning to manifest themselves, a graver phenomenon than is at present realised. The upper classes in Europe and America will not be able to go on for an indefinite length of time living with a consciousness that the world in which they find themselves is ugly, coarse, and decadent in comparison with preceding civilisations; feeling the inferiority of the present more acutely the more they study, and at the same time extending still further their sway over the world and accumulating new riches to console themselves for it. This would bea state of moral want of balance; and moral want of balance cannot continue indefinitely, just as physical want of balance cannot continue indefinitely. Either our civilisation will abate its aspirations to the level of the mediocrity which it is capable of producing in art, destroying in itself the remembrance of and regret for those ancient civilisations which created so many beautiful things; or it will have to put itself into a position to satisfy not only the æsthetic needs of the masses, but also those of the more cultured and refined strata of society. The first supposition appears improbable, or at least no man of sense will wish to consider it possible. It would mean a relapse of the world into barbarism, the end of all the traditions and all the studies which have been and still are an indispensable element of intellectual and moral refinement. So we are left with the other hypothesis, which assumes that man will make up his mind one day to make an effort to create arts of his own, which will survive comparison with those of the past.
Yet the task is an arduous one. As I have already said, an art is not created or perfected without the spirit of tradition and of discipline; and the attempt in our times to re-infuse vigour into the spirit of tradition and of discipline, if only in the measure necessary for the progress of art, is an enterprise, the difficulties of which everyone can understand without a long explanation. It cannot be effected without a profound intellectual and moral reform, which will bring about achange in many things besides the originality and power of the arts which are to-day languid and decadent. So the struggle between American progress and art may well be a more important phenomenon than is at present apparent; and may well entail transformations of far-reaching extent.