Guglielmo Ferrero

“ And behold! the French Revolution, which confounded and upset, from one end of Europe to the other, boundaries, laws, institutions, and traditions—ideal and material limits. Then at last man realised that he could conquer and exploit the whole earth with iron and fire. At the same time as liberty, a new, untiring, formidable eagerness invaded the two worlds. All the limits which, for so many centuries, had confined in a narrow circle the energy and aspirations of even the most highly venerated of men fell one after the other to the ground. ”

“ It is difficult to find in history a longer and more troubled career than that known by Augustus for nearly sixty years, from the far-away days when, young, handsome, full of ambition and daring, he had come to Rome, throwing himself head first into the frightful turmoil let loose by the murder of Caesar, to that tranquil death, the death of a great wise man, in the midst of the pax Romana, now spread from end to end of the Empire! ”

“ 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. ”

“ It seems to me that the chief reason for the eternal fascination of the history of Rome is this, that it includes, as in a miniature drawn with simple lines, well defined, all the essential phenomena of social life; so that every age is able there to find its own image, its gravest problems, its intensest passions, its most pressing interests, its keenest struggles; therefore Roman history is forever modern, because every new age has only to choose that part which most resembles it, to find its own self. ”

“ At no moment of my life have I felt myself so much detached from, and so superior to, the accustomed preoccupations which form the groundwork of ordinary existence in the modern world. And when I found myself living amongst persons for whom the culture of Europe represented the supreme blessing of life, the greatest pride of civilisation, for a moment I believed myself freed from that demon of American progress which had dogged me in Argentina. ”

“ Tiberius from his retreat in Rodi kept every one in Rome afraid, beginning with Augustus. Too rich, too eager now for pleasures and comforts, Rome was almost disgusted with the virtues and the defects that had in fact created it, and which survived in Tiberius—aristocratic pride, the spirit of rigour in authority, military valour, simplicity. Peace had come, extending everywhere, with wealth, the desire for enjoyment, happiness, pleasure, freedom, loosening everywhere the firmest bonds of social discipline, persuading Rome to lay down the heavy armour it had worn for so many centuries. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There are no insignificant events in history; for the great events, like revolutions and wars, are inevitably and indissolubly accompanied by an infinite number of slight changes, appearing in every part of a nation: if in life there are men without note, and if these make up the great majority of nations—that which is called the "mass"—there is no greater mistake than to believe they are extraneous to history, mere inert instruments in the hands of the oligarchies that govern. States and institutions rest on this nameless mass, as a building rests upon its foundations. ”

“ Was the world then greater and man more powerful than the ancients had thought, and had the ancients been wrong in seeking to limit the efforts of human genius so strictly? Gradually, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the effort of the human spirit to free itself from the ancient limits continued, increased, and became bolder and more methodical. Subtle and ingenious philosophies delivered masked but clear attacks on the limits which marked the bounds of Good and Evil, Truth and Error; on tradition, on century-old institutions, on authority in all its forms. ”

“ Paris is the modern Rome, the metropolis of the Latin world. France continues, as far as can be done in modern times, the ancient sway of Rome, irradiating round so much of the globe, by commerce, literature, art, science, industry, dominance of political ideas, the influence of the Latin world, making tributaries to Latin culture of barbarous peoples, and nations too young for leadership or grown too old; and France has inherited the pre-eminence in wines, although it lies at the farthest confines of the vine-bearing zone, beyond which the tree of Bacchus refuses to live. ”

“ Riches may be the goal of an individual’s efforts; for a nation they can only be means to conquer the other good things of life which we call civilisation: glory, grandeur, power, beauty, knowledge, moral refinement. Can America, and will she, make use of her riches to rob Europe of the intellectual and moral leadership which the latter still possesses? Or will these riches, too swiftly won, exercise an evil influence simultaneously upon Europe and America, by making both continents more materialistic? ”

“ Agrippina alive! It was like a thunderbolt to Nero, and he lost his head: he saw his mother hurrying on to Rome, denouncing the abominable attempt to Senate and people, rousing against him the Prætorian guard and the legions. Thoroughly frightened, he summoned Seneca and Burrhus and laid before them the terrible situation. It is easy to imagine the shock of the old preceptors. How could he risk such a grave imprudence? And yet there was no time to lose in reproaches. Nero begged for advice: Seneca and Burrhus were silent, but they, also frightened, asked of themselves what Agrippina would do. ”

“ Never has man lived in such a state of permanent and growing excitement. If the men of the ancient world could come to life again, their first impression, you may be sure, would be that mankind had gone mad. It is this excitement which has produced the formidable explosion of energy that we are witnessing on our little planet, which for ages had lived in comparative tranquillity. But has not this formidable tension of the world-soul itself need of limits? Can we conceive its being allowed to increase indefinitely until the time when the nervous system breaks down as inevitably it must? ”

“ Twenty years ago they began to excavate in France the ruins of the great Gallo-Roman villas: these are constructed on the plan of the Italian villa, decorated in the same way, but are much larger, more sumptuous, more sightly; one feels in them the pride of a new people which has adopted the Latin civilisation, but has infused into that, derived from the wealth of their land, a spirit of grandeur and of luxury that poorer and older Latins did not know, exactly as to-day the Americans infuse a spirit of greater magnitude and boldness into so many things that they take from timid, old Europe. ”

“ Can we honestly declare that our epoch is untainted by this mania for grandeur and display, this spirit of sterile public and private rivalry, which caused the ancient Roman Empire to squander such vast treasures, and cloaked its fatal decadence with a vesture of splendour? I cannot suppose that our freedom from such taint would be maintained by anyone who remarked the headlong growth of public and private luxury, the ever swelling vanity of nations, professions, and classes, the tendency to mistake in everything the grandeur of colossal proportions for the grandeur of intrinsic virtue. ”

“ Coming into your midst, I feel that the history of Rome lives not only in the interest with which you have followed these lectures, but also, even if in part without clear cognisance, in things here, in the life you lead, in what you accomplish. The heritage of Rome is, for the peoples of America still more than for those of Europe, an heredity not purely artistic and literary, but political and social, which exercises the most beneficent influence on your history. In a certain sense it might be said that America is to-day politically, more than Europe, the true heir of Rome ”

“ The artist, the priest, the historian, the philosopher, in moments of discouragement, when they feel themselves assailed by the temptation to think only of a career or of money, may well find new strength in the idea that each of them is working in his different way to preserve an ideal of perfection in men’s souls—it may be a perfection of art or of morality, of the intellect or of the spirit. Let them remember that this ideal, limited as it may seem, serves as a dike to prevent our civilisation from being engulfed in an overwhelming flood of riches and from sinking in an orgy of brutality. ”

“ It would be possible to declare that it makes and pours into all the world its precious wine by that same virtue, intimate, national, and historic, by which it created the encyclopædia and made the Revolution, let Napoleon loose on Europe and founded the Empire, wrote so many famous books and built on the banks of the Seine the marvellous universal city, where all the forces of modern civilisation are gathered together and hold each other in equilibrium: aristocracy and democracy, the cosmopolite spirit and the spirit of nationality, money and science, war and fashion, art and religion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nothing in the world is without import: what women spend for their toilet, the resistance that men make from day to day to the temptations of the commonest pleasures, the new and petty needs that insinuate themselves unconsciously into the habits of all; the reading, the conversations, the impressions, even the most fugacious that pass in our spirit—all these things, little and innumerable, that no historian registers, have contributed to produce this revolution, that war, this catastrophe, that political overturn, which men wonder at and study as a prodigy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The theory of corruption so dear to the ancients, which I have already explained, gives us the key to the mystery. Those who have been disposed to see in that theory merely a plaything of poets, orators, philosophers, will now realise that it had power enough to kill the person and destroy the family of the first citizen of the Empire. That kind of continuous fear of luxury, of amusements, of prodigality, on account of which the ancients called corruption so many things that we define as progress, was not a sentiment always equally alive in the mind of the multitude. ”

“ What philosopher is there who, as he pursues his transcendental preoccupation, does not feel himself sometimes hopelessly adrift, like a being fallen upon the earth, from another planet, in an age which no longer is passionately interested in anything except economic reality? What artist is there who seeks not only to make money, but to reach the perfection of his ideal, who has not cursed a thousand times this frenzied hurly-burly in the midst of which we live? ”