The Unseen World and Other Essays XIV. Athenian and American Life
by John Fiske
In a very interesting essay on British and Foreign
Characteristics, published a few years ago, Mr. W. R. Greg quotes
the famous letter of the Turkish cadi to Mr. Layard, with the
comment that "it contains the germ and element of a wisdom to
which our busy and bustling existence is a stranger"; and he uses
it as a text for an instructive sermon on the "gospel of
leisure." He urges, with justice, that the too eager and restless
modern man, absorbed in problems of industrial development, may
learn a wholesome lesson from the contemplation of his Oriental
brother, who cares not to say, "Behold, this star spinneth round
that star, and this other star with a tail cometh and goeth in so
many years"; who aspires not after a "double stomach," nor hopes
to attain to Paradise by "seeking with his eyes." If any one may
be thought to stand in need of some such lesson, it is the
American of to-day. Just as far as the Turk carries his apathy to
excess, does the American carry to excess his restlessness. But
just because the incurious idleness of the Turk is excessive, so
as to be detrimental to completeness of living, it is unfit to
supply us with the hints we need concerning the causes,
character, and effects of our over-activity. A sermon of leisure,
if it is to be of practical use to us, must not be a sermon of
laziness. The Oriental state of mind is incompatible with
progressive improvement of any sort, physical, intellectual, or
moral. It is one of the phenomena attendant upon the arrival of a
community at a stationary condition before it has acquired a
complex civilization. And it appears serviceable rather as a
background upon which to exhibit in relief our modern turmoil,
than by reason of any lesson which it is itself likely to convey.
Let us in preference study one of the most eminently progressive
of all the communities that have existed. Let us take an example
quite different from any that can be drawn from Oriental life,
but almost equally contrasted with any that can be found among
ourselves; and let us, with the aid of it, examine the respective
effects of leisure and of hurry upon the culture of the
community.
What do modern critics mean by the "healthy completeness" of
ancient life, which they are so fond of contrasting with the
"heated," "discontented," or imperfect and one-sided existence of
modern communities? Is this a mere set of phrases, suited to some
imaginary want of the literary critic, but answering to nothing
real? Are they to be summarily disposed of as resting upon some
tacit assumption of that old-grannyism which delights in
asseverating that times are not what they used to be? Is the
contrast an imaginary one, due to the softened, cheerful light
with which we are wont to contemplate classic antiquity through
the charmed medium of its incomparable literature? Or is it a
real contrast, worthy of the attention and analysis of the
historical inquirer? The answer to these queries will lead us far
into the discussion of the subject which we have propounded, and
we shall best reach it by considering some aspects of the social
condition of ancient Greece. The lessons to be learned from that
wonderful country are not yet exhausted Each time that we return
to that richest of historic mines, and delve faithfully and
carefully, we shall be sure to dig up some jewel worth carrying
away.
And in considering ancient Greece, we shall do well to confine
our attention, for the sake of definiteness of conception, to a
single city. Comparatively homogeneous as Greek civilization was,
there was nevertheless a great deal of difference between the
social circumstances of sundry of its civic communities. What was
true of Athens was frequently not true of Sparta or Thebes, and
general assertions about ancient Greece are often likely to be
collect only in a loose and general way. In speaking, therefore,
of Greece, I must be understood in the main as referring to
Athens, the eye and light of Greece, the nucleus and centre of
Hellenic culture.
Let us note first that Athens was a large city surrounded by
pleasant village-suburbs,--the demes of Attika,--very much as
Boston is closely girdled by rural places like Brookline, Jamaica
Plain, and the rest, village after village rather thickly
covering a circuit of from ten to twenty miles' radius. The
population of Athens with its suburbs may perhaps have exceeded
half a million; but the number of adult freemen bearing arms did
not exceed twenty-five thousand.[67] For every one of these
freemen there were four or five slaves; not ignorant, degraded
labourers, belonging to an inferior type of humanity, and bearing
the marks of a lower caste in their very personal formation and
in the colour of their skin, like our lately-enslaved negroes;
but intelligent, skilled labourers, belonging usually to the
Hellenic, and at any rate to the Aryan race, as fair and perhaps
as handsome as their masters, and not subjected to especial
ignominy or hardship. These slaves, of whom there were at least
one hundred thousand adult males, relieved the twenty-five
thousand freemen of nearly all the severe drudgery of life; and
the result was an amount of leisure perhaps never since known on
an equal scale in history.
[67] See Herod. V. 97; Aristoph. Ekkl. 432; Thukyd. II. 13;
Plutarch, Perikl. 37.
The relations of master and slave in ancient Athens constituted,
of course, a very different phenomenon from anything which the
history of our own Southern States has to offer us. Our Southern
slaveholders lived in an age of industrial development; they were
money-makers: they had their full share of business in managing
the operations for which their labourers supplied the crude
physical force. It was not so in Athens. The era of civilization
founded upon organized industry had not begun; money-making had
not come to be, with the Greeks, the one all-important end of
life; and mere subsistence, which is now difficult, was then
easy. The Athenian lived in a mild, genial, healthy climate, in a
country which has always been notable for the activity and
longevity of its inhabitants. He was frugal in his habits,--a
wine-drinker and an eater of meat, but rarely addicted to
gluttony or intemperance. His dress was inexpensive, for the
Greek climate made but little protection necessary, and the
gymnastic habits of the Greeks led them to esteem more highly the
beauty of the body than that of its covering. His house was
simple, not being intended for social purposes, while of what we
should call home-life the Greeks had none. The house was a
shelter at night, a place where the frugal meal might be taken, a
place where the wife might stay, and look after the household
slaves or attend to the children. And this brings us to another
notable feature of Athenian life. The wife having no position in
society, being nothing, indeed, but a sort of household utensil,
how greatly was life simplified! What a door for expenditure was
there, as yet securely closed, and which no one had thought of
opening! No milliner's or dressmaker's bills, no evening parties,
no Protean fashions, no elegant furniture, no imperious necessity
for Kleanthes to outshine Kleon, no coaches, no Chateau Margaux,
no journeys to Arkadia in the summer! In such a state of society,
as one may easily see, the labour of one man would support half a
dozen. It cost the Athenian but a few cents daily to live, and
even these few cents might be earned by his slaves. We need not,
therefore, be surprised to learn that in ancient Athens there
were no paupers or beggars. There might be poverty, but indigence
was unknown; and because of the absence of fashion, style, and
display, even poverty entailed no uncomfortable loss of social
position. The Athenians valued wealth highly, no doubt, as a
source of contributions to public festivals and to the
necessities of the state. But as far as the circumstances of
daily life go, the difference between the rich man and the poor
man was immeasurably less than in any modern community, and the
incentives to the acquirement of wealth were, as a consequence,
comparatively slight.
I do not mean to say that the Athenians did not engage in
business. Their city was a commercial city, and their ships
covered the Mediterranean. They had agencies and factories at
Marseilles, on the remote coasts of Spain, and along the shores
of the Black Sea. They were in many respects the greatest
commercial people of antiquity, and doubtless knew, as well as
other people, the keen delights of acquisition. But my point is,
that with them the acquiring of property had not become the chief
or only end of life. Production was carried on almost entirely by
slave-labour; interchange of commodities was the business of the
masters, and commerce was in those days simple. Banks, insurance
companies, brokers' boards,--all these complex instruments of
Mammon were as yet unthought of. There was no Wall Street in
ancient Athens; there were no great failures, no commercial
panics, no over-issues of stock. Commerce, in short, was a quite
subordinate matter, and the art of money-making was in its
infancy.
The twenty-five thousand Athenian freemen thus enjoyed, on the
whole, more undisturbed leisure, more freedom from petty
harassing cares, than any other community known to history.
Nowhere else can we find, on careful study, so little of the
hurry and anxiety which destroys the even tenour of modern
life,--nowhere else so few of the circumstances which tend to
make men insane, inebriate, or phthisical, or prematurely old.
This being granted, it remains only to state and illustrate the
obverse fact. It is not only true that Athens has produced and
educated a relatively larger number of men of the highest calibre
and most complete culture than any other community of like
dimensions which has ever existed; but it is also true that there
has been no other community, of which the members have, as a
general rule, been so highly cultivated, or have attained
individually such completeness of life. In proof of the first
assertion it will be enough to mention such names as those of
Solon, Themistokles, Perikles, and Demosthenes; Isokrates and
Lysias; Aristophanes and Menander; Aischylos, Sophokles, and
Euripides; Pheidias and Praxiteles; Sokrates and Plato;
Thukydides and Xenophon: remembering that these men,
distinguished for such different kinds of achievement, but like
each other in consummateness of culture, were all produced within
one town in the course of three centuries. At no other time and
place in human history has there been even an approach to such a
fact as this.
My other assertion, about the general culture of the community in
which such men were reared, will need a more detailed
explanation. When I say that the Athenian public was, on the
whole, the most highly cultivated public that has ever existed, I
refer of course to something more than what is now known as
literary culture. Of this there was relatively little in the days
of Athenian greatness; and this was because there was not yet
need for it or room for it. Greece did not until a later time
begin to produce scholars and savants; for the function of
scholarship does not begin until there has been an accumulation
of bygone literature to be interpreted for the benefit of those
who live in a later time. Grecian greatness was already becoming
a thing of the past, when scholarship and literary culture of the
modern type began at Rome and Alexandria. The culture of the
ancient Athenians was largely derived from direct intercourse
with facts of nature and of life, and with the thoughts of rich
and powerful minds orally expressed. The value of this must not
be underrated. We moderns are accustomed to get so large a
portion of our knowledge and of our theories of life out of
books, our taste and judgment are so largely educated by
intercourse with the printed page, that we are apt to confound
culture with book-knowledge; we are apt to forget the innumerable
ways in which the highest intellectual faculties may be
disciplined without the aid of literature. We must study
antiquity to realize how thoroughly this could be done. But even
in our day, how much more fruitful is the direct influence of an
original mind over us, in the rare cases when it can be enjoyed,
than any indirect influence which the same mind may exert through
the medium of printed books! What fellow of a college, placed
amid the most abundant and efficient implements of study, ever
gets such a stimulus to the highest and richest intellectual life
as was afforded to Eckermann by his daily intercourse with
Goethe? The breadth of culture and the perfection of training
exhibited by John Stuart Mill need not surprise us when we
recollect that his earlier days were spent in the society of
James Mill and Jeremy Bentham. And the remarkable extent of view,
the command of facts, and the astonishing productiveness of such
modern Frenchmen as Sainte-Beuve and Littre become explicable
when we reflect upon the circumstance that so many able and
brilliant men are collected in one city, where their minds may
continually and directly react upon each other. It is from the
lack of such personal stimulus that it is difficult or indeed
wellnigh impossible, even for those whose resources are such as
to give them an extensive command of books, to keep up to the
highest level of contemporary culture while living in a village
or provincial town. And it is mainly because of the personal
stimulus which it affords to its students, that a great
university, as a seat of culture, is immeasurably superior to a
small one.
Nevertheless, the small community in any age possesses one signal
advantage over the large one, in its greater simplicity of life
and its consequent relative leisure. It was the prerogative of
ancient Athens that it united the advantages of the large to
those of the small community. In relative simplicity of life it
was not unlike the modern village, while at the same time it was
the metropolis where the foremost minds of the time were enabled
to react directly upon one another. In yet another respect these
opposite advantages were combined. The twenty-five thousand free
inhabitants might perhaps all know something of each other. In
this respect Athens was doubtless much like a New England country
town, with the all-important difference that the sordid tone due
to continual struggle for money was absent. It was like the small
town in the chance which it afforded for publicity and community
of pursuits among its inhabitants. Continuous and unrestrained
social intercourse was accordingly a distinctive feature of
Athenian life. And, as already hinted, this intercourse did not
consist in evening flirtations, with the eating of indigestible
food at unseasonable hours, and the dancing of "the German." It
was carried on out-of-doors in the brightest sunlight; it brooked
no effeminacy; its amusements were athletic games, or dramatic
entertainments, such as have hardly since been equalled. Its
arena was a town whose streets were filled with statues and
adorned with buildings, merely to behold which was in itself an
education. The participators in it were not men with minds so
dwarfed by exclusive devotion to special pursuits that after
"talking shop" they could find nothing else save wine and cookery
to converse about. They were men with minds fresh and open for
the discussion of topics which are not for a day only.
A man like Sokrates, living in such a community, did not need to
write down his wisdom. He had no such vast public as the modern
philosopher has to reach. He could hail any one he happened to
pass in the street, begin an argument with him forthwith, and set
a whole crowd thinking and inquiring about subjects the mere
contemplation of which would raise them for the moment above
matters of transient concern. For more than half a century any
citizen might have gratis the benefit of oral instruction from
such a man as he. And I sometimes think, by the way,
that--curtailed as it is to literary proportions in the dialogues
of Plato, bereft of all that personal potency which it had when
it flowed, instinct with earnestness, from the lips of the
teacher--even to this day the wit of man has perhaps devised no
better general gymnastics for the understanding than the Sokratic
dialectic. I am far from saying that all Athens listened to
Sokrates or understood him: had it been so, the caricature of
Aristophanes would have been pointless, and the sublime yet
mournful trilogy of dialogues which pourtray the closing scenes
of the greatest life of antiquity would never have been written.
But the mere fact that such a man lived and taught in the way
that he did goes far in proof of the deep culture of the Athenian
public. Further confirmation is to be found in the fact that such
tragedies as the Antigone, the Oidipous, and the Prometheus were
written to suit the popular taste of the time; not to be read by
literary people, or to be performed before select audiences such
as in our day listen to Ristori or Janauschek, but to hold
spell-bound that vast concourse of all kinds of people which
assembled at the Dionysiac festivals.
Still further proof is furnished by the exquisite literary
perfection of Greek writings. One of the common arguments in
favour of the study of Greek at the present day is based upon the
opinion that in the best works extant in that language the art of
literary expression has reached wellnigh absolute perfection. I
fully concur in this opinion, so far as to doubt if even the
greatest modern writers, even a Pascal or a Voltaire, can fairly
sustain a comparison with such Athenians as Plato or Lysias. This
excellence of the ancient books is in part immediately due to the
fact that they were not written in a hurry, or amid the anxieties
of an over-busy existence; but it is in greater part due to the
indirect consequences of a leisurely life. These books were
written for a public which knew well how to appreciate the finer
beauties of expression; and, what is still more to the point,
their authors lived in a community where an elegant style was
habitual. Before a matchless style can be written, there must be
a good style "in the air," as the French say. Probably the most
finished talking and writing of modern times has been done in and
about the French court in the seventeenth century; and it is
accordingly there that we find men like Pascal and Bossuet
writing a prose which for precision, purity, and dignity has
never since been surpassed. It is thus that the unapproachable
literary excellence of ancient Greek books speaks for the genuine
culture of the people who were expected to read them, or to hear
them read. For one of the surest indices of true culture, whether
professedly literary or not, is the power to express one's self
in precise, rhythmical, and dignified language. We hardly need a
better evidence than this of the superiority of the ancient
community in the general elevation of its tastes and perceptions.
Recollecting how Herodotos read his history at the Olympic games,
let us try to imagine even so picturesque a writer as Mr. Parkman
reading a few chapters of his "Jesuits in North America" before
the spectators assembled at the Jerome Park races, and we shall
the better realize how deep-seated was Hellenic culture.
As yet, however, I have referred to but one side of Athenian
life. Though "seekers after wisdom," the cultivated people of
Athens did not spend all their valuable leisure in dialectics or
in connoisseurship. They were not a set of dilettanti or dreamy
philosophers, and they were far from subordinating the material
side of life to the intellectual. Also, though they dealt not in
money-making after the eager fashion of modern men, they had
still concerns of immediate practical interest with which to busy
themselves. Each one of these twenty-five thousand free Athenians
was not only a free voter, but an office-holder, a legislator, a
judge. They did not control the government through a
representative body, but they were themselves the government.
They were, one and all, in turn liable to be called upon to make
laws, and to execute them after they were made, as well as to
administer justice in civil and criminal suits. The affairs and
interests, not only of their own city, but of a score or two of
scattered dependencies, were more or less closely to be looked
after by them. It lay with them to declare war, to carry it on
after declaring it, and to pay the expenses of it. Actually and
not by deputy they administered the government of their own city,
both in its local and in its imperial relations. All this implies
a more thorough, more constant, and more vital political training
than that which is implied by the modern duties of casting a
ballot and serving on a jury. The life of the Athenian was
emphatically a political life. From early manhood onward, it was
part of his duty to hear legal questions argued by powerful
advocates, and to utter a decision upon law and fact; or to mix
in debate upon questions of public policy, arguing, listening,
and pondering. It is customary to compare the political talent of
the Greeks unfavourably with that displayed by the Romans, and I
have no wish to dispute this estimate. But on a careful study it
will appear that the Athenians, at least, in a higher degree than
any other community of ancient times, exhibited parliamentary
tact, or the ability to sit still while both sides of a question
are getting discussed,--that sort of political talent for which
the English races are distinguished, and to the lack of which so
many of the political failures of the French are egregiously due.
One would suppose that a judicature of the whole town would be
likely to execute a sorry parody of justice; yet justice was by
no means ill-administered at Athens. Even the most unfortunate
and disgraceful scenes,--as where the proposed massacre of the
Mytilenaians was discussed, and where summary retribution was
dealt out to the generals who had neglected their duty at
Arginusai,--even these scenes furnish, when thoroughly examined,
as by Mr. Grote, only the more convincing proof that the Athenian
was usually swayed by sound reason and good sense to an
extraordinary degree. All great points in fact, were settled
rather by sober appeals to reason than by intrigue or lobbying;
and one cannot help thinking that an Athenian of the time of
Perikles would have regarded with pitying contempt the trick of
the "previous question." And this explains the undoubted
pre-eminence of Athenian oratory. This accounts for the fact that
we find in the forensic annals of a single city, and within the
compass of a single century, such names as Lysias, Isokrates,
Andokides, Hypereides, Aischines, and Demosthenes. The art of
oratory, like the art of sculpture, shone forth more brilliantly
then than ever since, because then the conditions favouring its
development were more perfectly combined than they have since
been. Now, a condition of society in which the multitude can
always be made to stand quietly and listen to a logical discourse
is a condition of high culture. Readers of Xenophon's Anabasis
will remember the frequency of the speeches in that charming
book. Whenever some terrible emergency arose, or some alarming
quarrel or disheartening panic occurred, in the course of the
retreat of the Ten Thousand, an oration from one of the
commanders--not a demagogue's appeal to the lower passions, but a
calm exposition of circumstances addressed to the sober
judgment--usually sufficed to set all things in order. To my mind
this is one of the most impressive historical lessons conveyed in
Xenophon's book. And this peculiar kind of self-control,
indicative of intellectual sobriety and high moral training,
which was more or less characteristic of all Greeks, was
especially characteristic of the Athenians.
These illustrations will, I hope, suffice to show that there is
nothing extravagant in the high estimate which I have made of
Athenian culture. I have barely indicated the causes of this
singular perfection of individual training in the social
circumstances amid which the Athenians lived. I have alleged it
as an instance of what may be accomplished by a well-directed
leisure and in the absence or very scanty development of such a
complex industrial life as that which surrounds us to-day. But I
have not yet quite done with the Athenians. Before leaving this
part of the subject, I must mention one further circumstance
which tends to make ancient life appear in our eyes more sunny
and healthy and less distressed, than the life of modern times.
And in this instance, too, though we are not dealing with any
immediate or remote effects of leisureliness, we still have to
note the peculiar advantage gained by the absence of a great
complexity of interests in the ancient community.
With respect to religion, the Athenians were peculiarly situated.
They had for the most part outgrown the primitive terrorism of
fetishistic belief. Save in cases of public distress, as in the
mutilation of the Hermai, or in the refusal of Nikias to retreat
from Syracuse because of an eclipse of the moon, they were no
longer, like savages, afraid of the dark. Their keen aesthetic
sense had prevailed to turn the horrors of a primeval
nature-worship into beauties. Their springs and groves were
peopled by their fancy with naiads and dryads, not with trolls
and grotesque goblins. Their feelings toward the unseen powers at
work about them were in the main pleasant; as witness the little
story about Pheidippides meeting the god Pan as he was making
with hot haste toward Sparta to announce the arrival of the
Persians. Now, while this original source of mental discomfort,
which afflicts the uncivilized man, had ceased materially to
affect the Athenians, they on the other hand lived at a time when
the vague sense of sin and self-reproof which was characteristic
of the early ages of Christianity, had not yet invaded society.
The vast complication of life brought about by the extension of
the Roman Empire led to a great development of human sympathies,
unknown in earlier times, and called forth unquiet yearnings,
desire for amelioration, a sense of short-coming, and a morbid
self-consciousness. It is accordingly under Roman sway that we
first come across characters approximating to the modern type,
like Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. It is then
that we find the idea of social progress first clearly expressed,
that we discover some glimmerings of a conscious philanthropy,
and that we detect the earliest symptoms of that unhealthy
tendency to subordinate too entirely the physical to the moral
life, which reached its culmination in the Middle Ages. In the
palmy days of the Athenians it was different. When we hint that
they were not consciously philanthropists, we do not mean that
they were not humane; when we accredit them with no idea of
progress, we do not forget how much they did to render both the
idea and the reality possible; when we say that they had not a
distressing sense of spiritual unworthiness, we do not mean that
they had no conscience. We mean that their moral and religious
life sat easily on them, like their own graceful drapery,--did
not gall and worry them, like the hair-cloth garment of the monk.
They were free from that dark conception of a devil which lent
terror to life in the Middle Ages; and the morbid
self-consciousness which led mediaeval women to immure themselves
in convents would have been to an Athenian quite inexplicable.
They had, in short, an open and childlike conception of religion;
and, as such, it was a sunny conception. Any one who will take
the trouble to compare an idyl of Theokritos with a modern
pastoral, or the poem of Kleanthes with a modern hymn, or the
Aphrodite of Melos with a modern Madonna, will realize most
effectually what I mean.
And, finally, the religion of the Athenians was in the main
symbolized in a fluctuating mythology, and had never been
hardened into dogmas. The Athenian was subject to no priest, nor
was he obliged to pin his faith to any formulated creed. His
hospitable polytheism left little room for theological
persecution, and none for any heresy short of virtual atheism.
The feverish doubts which rack the modern mind left him
undisturbed. Though he might sink to any depth of scepticism in
philosophy, yet the eternal welfare of his soul was not supposed
to hang upon the issue of his doubts. Accordingly Athenian
society was not only characterized in the main by freedom of
opinion, in spite of the exceptional cases of Anaxagoras and
Sokrates; but there was also none of that Gothic gloom with which
the deep-seated Christian sense of infinite responsibility for
opinion has saddened modern religious life.
In these reflections I have wandered a little way from my
principal theme, in order more fully to show why the old Greek
life impresses us as so cheerful. Returning now to the keynote
with which we started, let us state succinctly the net result of
what has been said about the Athenians. As a people we have seen
that they enjoyed an unparalleled amount of leisure, living
through life with but little turmoil and clatter. Their life was
more spontaneous and unrestrained, less rigorously marked out by
uncontrollable circumstances, than the life of moderns. They did
not run so much in grooves. And along with this we have seen
reason to believe that they were the most profoundly cultivated
of all peoples; that a larger proportion of men lived complete,
well-rounded, harmonious lives in ancient Athens than in any
other known community. Keen, nimble-minded, and self-possessed;
audacious speculators, but temperate and averse to extravagance;
emotionally healthy, and endowed with an unequalled sense of
beauty and propriety; how admirable and wonderful they seem when
looked at across the gulf of ages intervening,--and what a
priceless possession to humanity, of what noble augury for the
distant future, is the fact that such a society has once existed!
The lesson to be drawn from the study of this antique life will
impress itself more deeply upon us after we have briefly
contemplated the striking contrast to it which is afforded by the
phase of civilization amid which we live to-day. Ever since Greek
civilization was merged in Roman imperialism, there has been a
slowly growing tendency toward complexity of social life,--toward
the widening of sympathies, the multiplying of interests, the
increase of the number of things to be done. Through the later
Middle Ages, after Roman civilization had absorbed and
disciplined the incoming barbarism which had threatened to
destroy it, there was a steadily increasing complication of
society, a multiplication of the wants of life, and a consequent
enhancement of the difficulty of self-maintenance. The ultimate
causes of this phenomenon lie so far beneath the surface that
they could be satisfactorily discussed only in a technical essay
on the evolution of society. It will be enough for us here to
observe that the great geographical discoveries of the sixteenth
century and the somewhat later achievements of physical science
have, during the past two hundred years, aided powerfully in
determining the entrance of the Western world upon an industrial
epoch,--an epoch which has for its final object the complete
subjection of the powers of nature to purposes of individual
comfort and happiness. We have now to trace some of the effects
of this lately-begun industrial development upon social life and
individual culture. And as we studied the leisureliness of
antiquity where its effects were most conspicuous, in the city of
Athens, we shall now do well to study the opposite
characteristics of modern society where they are most
conspicuously exemplified, in our own country. The attributes of
American life which it will be necessary to signalize will be
seen to be only the attributes of modern life in their most
exaggerated phase.
To begin with, in studying the United States, we are no longer
dealing with a single city, or with small groups of cities. The
city as a political unit, in the antique sense, has never existed
among us, and indeed can hardly be said now to exist anywhere.
The modern city is hardly more than a great emporium of trade, or
a place where large numbers of people find it convenient to live
huddled together; not a sacred fatherland to which its
inhabitants owe their highest allegiance, and by the requirements
of which their political activity is limited. What strikes us
here is that our modern life is diffused or spread out, not
concentrated like the ancient civic life. If the Athenian had
been the member of an integral community, comprising all
peninsular Greece and the mainland of Asia Minor, he could not
have taken life so easily as he did.
Now our country is not only a very large one, but compared to its
vast territorial extent it contains a very small population. If
we go on increasing at the present rate, so that a century hence
we number four or five hundred millions, our country will be
hardly more crowded than China is to-day. Or if our whole
population were now to be brought east of Niagara Falls, and
confined on the south by the Potomac, we should still have as
much elbow-room as they have in France. Political economists can
show the effects of this high ratio of land to inhabitants, in
increasing wages, raising the interest of money, and stimulating
production. We are thus living amid circumstances which are
goading the industrial activity characteristic of the last two
centuries, and notably of the English race, into an almost
feverish energy. The vast extent of our unwrought territory is
constantly draining fresh life from our older districts, to aid
in the establishment of new frontier communities of a somewhat
lower or less highly organized type. And these younger
communities, daily springing up, are constantly striving to take
on the higher structure,--to become as highly civilized and to
enjoy as many of the prerogatives of civilization as the rest.
All this calls forth an enormous quantity of activity, and causes
American life to assume the aspect of a life-and-death struggle
for mastery over the material forces of that part of the earth's
surface upon which it thrives.
It is thus that we are traversing what may properly be called the
BARBAROUS epoch of our history,--the epoch at which the
predominant intellectual activity is employed in achievements
which are mainly of a material character. Military barbarism, or
the inability of communities to live together without frequent
warfare, has been nearly outgrown by the whole Western world.
Private wars, long since made everywhere illegal, have nearly
ceased; and public wars, once continual, have become infrequent.
But industrial barbarism, by which I mean the inability of a
community to direct a portion of its time to purposes of
spiritual life, after providing for its physical
maintenance,--this kind of barbarism the modern world has by no
means outgrown. To-day, the great work of life is to live; while
the amount of labour consumed in living has throughout the
present century been rapidly increasing. Nearly the whole of this
American community toils from youth to old age in merely
procuring the means for satisfying the transient wants of life.
Our time and energies, our spirit and buoyancy, are quite used up
in what is called "getting on."
Another point of difference between the structure of American and
of Athenian society must not be left out of the account. The time
has gone by in which the energies of a hundred thousand men and
women could be employed in ministering to the individual
perfection of twenty-five thousand. Slavery, in the antique
sense,--an absolute command of brain as well as of muscle, a
slave-system of skilled labour,--we have never had. In our day it
is for each man to earn his own bread; so that the struggle for
existence has become universal. The work of one class does not
furnish leisure for another class. The exceptional circumstances
which freed the Athenian from industrial barbarism, and enabled
him to become the great teacher and model of culture for the
human race, have disappeared forever.
Then the general standard of comfortable living, as already
hinted, has been greatly raised, and is still rising. What would
have satisfied the ancient would seem to us like penury. We have
a domestic life of which the Greek knew nothing. We live during a
large part of the year in the house. Our social life goes on
under the roof. Our houses are not mere places for eating and
sleeping, like the houses of the ancients. It therefore costs us
a large amount of toil to get what is called shelter for our
heads. The sum which a young married man, in "good society," has
to pay for his house and the furniture contained in it, would
have enabled an Athenian to live in princely leisure from youth
to old age. The sum which he has to pay out each year, to meet
the complicated expense of living in such a house, would have
more than sufficed to bring up an Athenian family. If worthy
Strepsiades could have got an Asmodean glimpse of Fifth Avenue,
or even of some unpretending street in Cambridge, he might have
gone back to his aristocratic wife a sadder but a more contented
man.
Wealth--or at least what would until lately have been called
wealth--has become essential to comfort; while the opportunities
for acquiring it have in recent times been immensely multiplied.
To get money is, therefore, the chief end of life in our time and
country. "Success in life" has become synonymous with "becoming
wealthy." A man who is successful in what he undertakes is a man
who makes his employment pay him in money. Our normal type of
character is that of the shrewd, circumspect business man; as in
the Middle Ages it was that of the hardy warrior. And as in those
days when fighting was a constant necessity, and when the only
honourable way for a gentleman of high rank to make money was by
freebooting, fighting came to be regarded as an end desirable in
itself; so in these days the mere effort to accumulate has become
a source of enjoyment rather than a means to it. The same truth
is to be witnessed in aberrant types of character. The infatuated
speculator and the close-fisted millionaire are our substitutes
for the mediaeval berserkir,--the man who loved the pell-mell of
a contest so well that he would make war on his neighbour, just
to keep his hand in. In like manner, while such crimes as murder
and violent robbery have diminished in frequency during the past
century, on the other hand such crimes as embezzlement, gambling
in stocks, adulteration of goods, and using of false weights and
measures, have probably increased. If Dick Turpin were now to be
brought back to life, he would find the New York Custom-House a
more congenial and profitable working-place than the king's
highway.
The result of this universal quest for money is that we are
always in a hurry. Our lives pass by in a whirl. It is all labour
and no fruition. We work till we are weary; we carry our work
home with us; it haunts our evenings, and disturbs our sleep as
well as our digestion. Our minds are so burdened with it that our
conversation, when serious, can dwell upon little else. If we
step into a railway-car, or the smoking-room of a hotel, or any
other place where a dozen or two of men are gathered together, we
shall hear them talking of stocks, of investments, of commercial
paper, as if there were really nothing in this universe worth
thinking of, save only the interchange of dollars and
commodities. So constant and unremitted is our forced
application, that our minds are dwarfed for everything except the
prosecution of the one universal pursuit.
Are we now prepared for the completing of the contrast? Must we
say that, as Athens was the most leisurely and the United States
is the most hurried community known in history, so the Americans
are, as a consequence of their hurry, lacking in thoroughness of
culture? Or, since it is difficult to bring our modern culture
directly into contrast with that of an ancient community, let me
state the case after a different but equivalent fashion. Since
the United States present only an exaggerated type of the modern
industrial community, since the turmoil of incessant
money-getting, which affects all modern communities in large
measure, affects us most seriously of all, shall it be said that
we are, on the whole, less highly cultivated than our
contemporaries in Western Europe? To a certain extent we must
confess that this is the case. In the higher culture--in the
culture of the whole man, according to the antique idea--we are
undoubtedly behind all other nations with which it would be fair
to compare ourselves. It will not do to decide a question like
this merely by counting literary celebrities, although even thus
we should by no means get a verdict in our favour. Since the
beginning of this century, England has produced as many great
writers and thinkers as France or Germany; yet the general status
of culture in England is said--perhaps with truth--to be lower
than it is in these countries. It is said that the average
Englishman is less ready than the average German or Frenchman to
sympathize with ideas which have no obvious market-value. Yet in
England there is an amount of high culture among those not
professionally scholars, which it would be vain to seek among
ourselves. The purposes of my argument, however, require that the
comparison should be made between our own country and Western
Europe in general. Compare, then, our best magazines--not solely
with regard to their intrinsic excellence, but also with regard
to the way in which they are sustained--with the Revue des Deux
Mondes or the Journal des Debats. Or compare our leading
politicians with men like Gladstone, Disraeli, or Sir G. C.
Lewis; or even with such men as Brougham or Thiers. Or compare
the slovenly style of our newspaper articles, I will not say with
the exquisite prose of the lamented Prevost-Paradol, but with the
ordinary prose of the French or English newspaper. But a far
better illustration--for it goes down to the root of things--is
suggested by the recent work of Matthew Arnold on the schools of
the continent of Europe. The country of our time where the
general culture is unquestionably the highest is Prussia. Now, in
Prussia, they are able to have a Minister of Education, who is a
member of the Cabinet. They are sure that this minister will not
appoint or remove even an assistant professor for political
reasons. Only once, as Arnold tells us, has such a thing been
done; and then public opinion expressed itself in such an
emphatic tone of disapproval that the displaced teacher was
instantly appointed to another position. Nothing of this sort,
says Arnold, could have occurred in England; but still less could
it occur in America. Had we such an educational system, there
would presently be an "Education Ring" to control it. Nor can
this difference be ascribed to the less eager political activity
of Germany. The Prussian state of things would have been possible
in ancient Athens, where political life was as absorbing and
nearly as turbulent as in the United States. The difference is
due to our lack of faith in culture, a lack of faith in that of
which we have not had adequate experience.
We lack culture because we live in a hurry, and because our
attention is given up to pursuits which call into activity and
develop but one side of us. On the one hand contemplate Sokrates
quietly entertaining a crowd in the Athenian market-place, and on
the other hand consider Broadway with its eternal clatter, and
its throngs of hurrying people elbowing and treading on each
other's heels, and you will get a lively notion of the difference
between the extreme phases of ancient and modern life. By the
time we have thus rushed through our day, we have no strength
left to devote to things spiritual. To-day finds us no nearer
fruition than yesterday. And if perhaps the time at last arrives
when fruition is practicable, our minds have run so long in the
ruts that they cannot be twisted out.
As it is impossible for any person living in a given state of
society to keep himself exempt from its influences, detrimental
as well as beneficial, we find that even those who strive to make
a literary occupation subservient to purposes of culture are not,
save in rare cases, spared by the general turmoil. Those who have
at once the ability, the taste, and the wealth needful for
training themselves to the accomplishment of some many-sided and
permanent work are of course very few. Nor have our universities
yet provided themselves with the means for securing to literary
talent the leisure which is essential to complete mental
development, or to a high order of productiveness. Although in
most industrial enterprises we know how to work together so
successfully, in literature we have as yet no co-operation. We
have not only no Paris, but we have not even a Tubingen, a
Leipsic, or a Jena, or anything corresponding to the fellowships
in the English universities. Our literary workers have no choice
but to fall into the ranks, and make merchandise of their
half-formed ideas. They must work without co-operation, they must
write in a hurry, and they must write for those who have no
leisure for aught but hasty and superficial reading.
Bursting boilers and custom-house frauds may have at first sight
nothing to do with each other or with my subject. It is
indisputable, however, that the horrible massacres perpetrated
every few weeks or mouths by our common carriers, and the
disgraceful peculation in which we allow our public servants to
indulge with hardly ever an effective word of protest, are alike
to be ascribed to the same causes which interfere with our higher
culture. It is by no means a mere accidental coincidence that for
every dollar stolen by government officials in Prussia, at least
fifty or a hundred are stolen in the United States. This does not
show that the Germans are our superiors in average honesty, but
it shows that they are our superiors in thoroughness. It is with
them an imperative demand that any official whatever shall be
qualified for his post; a principle of public economy which in
our country is not simply ignored in practice, but often openly
laughed at. But in a country where high intelligence and thorough
training are imperatively demanded, it follows of necessity that
these qualifications must insure for their possessors a permanent
career in which the temptations to malfeasance or dishonesty are
reduced to the minimum. On the other hand, in a country where
intelligence and training have no surety that they are to carry
the day against stupidity and inefficiency, the incentives to
dishonourable conduct are overpowering. The result in our own
political life is that the best men are driven in disgust from
politics, and thus one of the noblest fields for the culture of
the whole man is given over to be worked by swindlers and
charlatans. To an Athenian such a severance of the highest
culture from political life would have been utterly
inconceivable. Obviously the deepest explanation of all this lies
in our lack of belief in the necessity for high and thorough
training. We do not value culture enough to keep it in our employ
or to pay it for its services; and what is this short-sighted
negligence but the outcome of the universal shiftlessness
begotten of the habit of doing everything in a hurry? On every
hand we may see the fruits of this shiftlessness, from buildings
that tumble in, switches that are misplaced, furnaces that are
ill-protected, fire-brigades that are without discipline, up to
unauthorized meddlings with the currency, and revenue laws which
defeat their own purpose.
I said above that the attributes of American life which we should
find it necessary for our purpose to signalize are simply the
attributes of modern life in their most exaggerated phase. Is
there not a certain sense in which all modern handiwork is
hastily and imperfectly done? To begin with common household
arts, does not every one know that old things are more durable
than new things? Our grandfathers wore better shoes than we wear,
because there was leisure enough to cure the leather properly. In
old times a chair was made of seasoned wood, and its joints
carefully fitted; its maker had leisure to see that it was well
put together. Now a thousand are turned off at once by machinery,
out of green wood, and, with their backs glued on, are hurried
off to their evil fate,--destined to drop in pieces if they
happen to stand near the fireplace, and liable to collapse under
the weight of a heavy man. Some of us still preserve, as
heirlooms, old tables and bedsteads of Cromwellian times: in the
twenty-first century what will have become of our machine-made
bedsteads and tables?
Perhaps it may seem odd to talk about tanning and joinery in
connection with culture, but indeed there is a subtle bond of
union holding together all these things. Any phase of life can be
understood only by associating with it some different phase.
Sokrates himself has taught us how the homely things illustrate
the grand things. If we turn to the art of musical composition
and inquire into some of the differences between our recent music
and that of Handel's time, we shall alight upon the very
criticism which Mr. Mill somewhere makes in comparing ancient
with modern literature: the substance has improved, but the form
has in some respects deteriorated. The modern music expresses the
results of a richer and more varied emotional experience, and in
wealth of harmonic resources, to say nothing of increased skill
in orchestration, it is notably superior to the old music. Along
with this advance, however, there is a perceptible falling off in
symmetry and completeness of design, and in what I would call
spontaneousness of composition. I believe that this is because
modern composers, as a rule, do not drudge patiently enough upon
counterpoint. They do not get that absolute mastery over
technical difficulties of figuration which was the great secret
of the incredible facility and spontaneity of composition
displayed by Handel and Bach. Among recent musicians Mendelssohn
is the most thoroughly disciplined in the elements of
counterpoint; and it is this perfect mastery of the technique of
his art which has enabled him to outrank Schubert and Schumann,
neither of whom would one venture to pronounce inferior to him in
native wealth of musical ideas. May we not partly attribute to
rudimentary deficiency in counterpoint the irregularity of
structure which so often disfigures the works of the great Wagner
and the lesser Liszt, and which the more ardent admirers of these
composers are inclined to regard as a symptom of progress?
I am told that a similar illustration might be drawn from the
modern history of painting; that, however noble the conceptions
of the great painters of the present century, there are none who
have gained such a complete mastery over the technicalities of
drawing and the handling of the brush as was required in the
times of Raphael, Titian, and Rubens. But on this point I can
only speak from hearsay, and am quite willing to end here my
series of illustrations, fearing that I may already have been
wrongly set down as a lavulator temporis acti. Not the idle
praising of times gone by, but the getting a lesson from them
which may be of use to us, has been my object. And I believe
enough has been said to show that the great complexity of modern
life, with its multiplicity of demands upon our energy, has got
us into a state of chronic hurry, the results of which are
everywhere to be seen in the shape of less thorough workmanship
and less rounded culture.
For one moment let me stop to note a further source of the
relative imperfection of modern culture, which is best
illustrated in the case of literature. I allude to the immense,
unorganized mass of literature in all departments, representing
the accumulated acquisitions of past ages, which must form the
basis of our own achievement, but with which our present methods
of education seem inadequate to deal properly. Speaking roughly,
modern literature may be said to be getting into the state which
Roman jurisprudence was in before it was reformed by Justinian.
Philosophic criticism has not yet reached the point at which it
may serve as a natural codifier. We must read laboriously and
expend a disproportionate amount of time and pains in winnowing
the chaff from the wheat. This tends to make us "digs" or
literary drudges; but I doubt if the "dig" is a thoroughly
developed man. Goethe, with all his boundless knowledge, his
universal curiosity, and his admirable capacity for work, was not
a "dig." But this matter can only be hinted at: it is too large
to be well discussed at the fag end of an essay while other
points are pressing for consideration.
A state of chronic hurry not only directly hinders the
performance of thorough work, but it has an indirect tendency to
blunt the enjoyment of life. Let us consider for a moment one of
the psychological consequences entailed by the strain of a too
complex and rapid activity. Every one must have observed that in
going off for a vacation of two or three weeks, or in getting
freed in any way from the ruts of every-day life, time slackens
its gait somewhat, and the events which occur are apt a few years
later to cover a disproportionately large area in our
recollections. This is because the human organism is a natural
timepiece in which the ticks are conscious sensations. The
greater the number of sensations which occupy the foreground of
consciousness during the day, the longer the day seems in the
retrospect. But the various groups of sensations which accompany
our daily work tend to become automatic from continual
repetition, and to sink into the background of consciousness; and
in a very complex and busied life the number of sensations or
states of consciousness which can struggle up to the front and
get attended to, is comparatively small It is thus that the days
seem so short when we are busy about every-day matters, and that
they get blurred together, and as it were individually
annihilated in recollection. When we travel, a comparatively
large number of fresh sensations occupy attention, there is a
maximum of consciousness, and a distinct image is left to loom up
in memory. For the same reason the weeks and years are much
longer to the child than to the grown man. The life is simpler
and less hurried, so that there is time to attend to a great many
sensations. Now this fact lies at the bottom of that keen
enjoyment of existence which is the prerogative of childhood and
early youth. The day is not rushed through by the automatic
discharge of certain psychical functions, but each sensation
stays long enough to make itself recognized. Now when once we
understand the psychology of this matter, it becomes evident that
the same contrast that holds between the child and the man must
hold also between the ancient and the modern. The number of
elements entering into ancient life were so few relatively, that
there must have been far more than there is now of that intense
realization of life which we can observe in children and remember
of our own childhood. Space permitting, it would be easy to show
from Greek literature how intense was this realization of life.
But my point will already have been sufficiently apprehended.
Already we cannot fail to see how difficult it is to get more
than a minimum of conscious fruition out of a too complex and
rapid activity.
One other point is worth noticing before we close. How is this
turmoil of modern existence impressing itself upon the physical
constitutions of modern men and women? When an individual man
engages in furious productive activity, his friends warn him that
he will break down. Does the collective man of our time need some
such friendly warning? Let us first get a hint from what
foreigners think of us ultra-modernized Americans. Wandering
journalists, of an ethnological turn of mind, who visit these
shores, profess to be struck with the slenderness, the apparent
lack of toughness, the dyspeptic look, of the American physique.
And from such observations it has been seriously argued that the
stalwart English race is suffering inevitable degeneracy in this
foreign climate. I have even seen it doubted whether a race of
men can ever become thoroughly naturalized in a locality to which
it is not indigenous. To such vagaries it is a sufficient answer
that the English are no more indigenous to England than to
America. They are indigenous to Central Asia, and as they have
survived the first transplantation, they may be safely counted on
to survive the second. A more careful survey will teach us that
the slow alteration of physique which is going on in this country
is only an exaggeration of that which modern civilization is
tending to bring about everywhere. It is caused by the premature
and excessive strain upon the mental powers requisite to meet the
emergencies of our complex life. The progress of events has
thrown the work of sustaining life so largely upon the brain that
we are beginning to sacrifice the physical to the intellectual.
We are growing spirituelle in appearance at the expense of
robustness. Compare any typical Greek face, with its firm
muscles, its symmetry of feature, and its serenity of expression,
to a typical modern portrait, with its more delicate contour, its
exaggerated forehead, its thoughtful, perhaps jaded look. Or
consider in what respects the grand faces of the Plantagenet
monarchs differ from the refined countenances of the leading
English statesmen of to-day. Or again, consider the familiar
pictures of the Oxford and Harvard crews which rowed a race on
the Thames in 1869, and observe how much less youthful are the
faces of the Americans. By contrast they almost look careworn.
The summing up of countless such facts is that modern
civilization is making us nervous. Our most formidable diseases
are of nervous origin. We seem to have got rid of the mediaeval
plague and many of its typhoid congeners; but instead we have an
increased amount of insanity, methomania, consumption, dyspepsia,
and paralysis. In this fact it is plainly written that we are
suffering physically from the over-work and over-excitement
entailed by excessive hurry.
In view of these various but nearly related points of difference
between ancient and modern life as studied in their extreme
manifestations, it cannot be denied that while we have gained
much, we have also lost a good deal that is valuable, in our
progress. We cannot but suspect that we are not in all points
more highly favoured than the ancients. And it becomes probable
that Athens, at all events, which I have chosen as my example,
may have exhibited an adumbration of a state of things which, for
the world at large, is still in the future,--still to be remotely
hoped for. The rich complexity of modern social achievement is
attained at the cost of individual many-sidedness. As Tennyson
puts it, "The individual withers and the world is more and more."
Yet the individual does not exist for the sake of society, as the
positivists would have us believe, but society exists for the
sake of the individual. And the test of complete social life is
the opportunity which it affords for complete individual life.
Tried by this test, our contemporary civilization will appear
seriously defective,--excellent only as a preparation for
something better.
This is the true light in which to regard it. This incessant
turmoil, this rage for accumulation of wealth, this crowding,
jostling, and trampling upon one another, cannot be regarded as
permanent, or as anything more than the accompaniment of a
transitional stage of civilization. There must be a limit to the
extent to which the standard of comfortable living can be raised.
The industrial organization of society, which is now but
beginning, must culminate in a state of things in which the means
of expense will exceed the demand for expense, in which the human
race will have some surplus capital. The incessant manual labour
which the ancients relegated to slaves will in course of time be
more and more largely performed by inanimate machinery. Unskilled
labour will for the most part disappear. Skilled labour will
consist in the guiding of implements contrived with versatile
cunning for the relief of human nerve and muscle. Ultimately
there will be no unsettled land to fill, no frontier life, no
savage races to be assimilated or extirpated, no extensive
migration. Thus life will again become comparatively stationary.
The chances for making great fortunes quickly will be diminished,
while the facilities for acquiring a competence by steady labour
will be increased. When every one is able to reach the normal
standard of comfortable living, we must suppose that the
exaggerated appetite for wealth and display will gradually
disappear. We shall be more easily satisfied, and thus enjoy more
leisure. It may be that there will ultimately exist, over the
civilized world, conditions as favourable to the complete
fruition of life as those which formerly existed within the
narrow circuit of Attika; save that the part once played by
enslaved human brain and muscle will finally be played by the
enslaved forces of insentient nature. Society will at last bear
the test of providing for the complete development of its
individual members.
So, at least, we may hope; such is the probability which the
progress of events, when carefully questioned, sketches out for
us. "Need we fear," asks Mr. Greg, "that the world would stagnate
under such a change? Need we guard ourselves against the
misconstruction of being held to recommend a life of complacent
and inglorious inaction? We think not. We would only substitute a
nobler for a meaner strife,--a rational for an excessive
toil,--an enjoyment that springs from serenity, for one that
springs from excitement only. . . . . To each time its own
preacher, to each excess its own counteraction. In an age of
dissipation, languor, and stagnation, we should join with Mr.
Carlyle in preaching the 'Evangel of Work,' and say with him,
'Blessed is the man who has found his work,--let him ask no other
blessedness.' In an age of strenuous, frenzied, .... and often
utterly irrational and objectless exertion, we join Mr. Mill in
preaching the milder and more needed 'Evangel of Leisure.' "
Bearing all these things in mind, we may understand the remark of
the supremely cultivated Goethe, when asked who were his masters:
Die Griechen, die Griechen, und immer die Griechen. We may
appreciate the significance of Mr. Mill's argument in favour of
the study of antiquity, that it preserves the tradition of an era
of individual completeness. There is a disposition growing among
us to remodel our methods of education in conformity with the
temporary requirements of the age in which we live. In this
endeavour there is much that is wise and practical; but in so far
as it tends to the neglect of antiquity, I cannot think it
well-timed. Our education should not only enhance the value of
what we possess; is should also supply the consciousness of what
we lack. And while, for generations to come, we pass toilfully
through an era of exorbitant industrialism, some fragment of our
time will not be misspent in keeping alive the tradition of a
state of things which was once briefly enjoyed by a little
community, but which, in the distant future, will, as it is
hoped, become the permanent possession of all mankind.