In its present stage of development capitalism, every one admits, is
ugly. Haste and vandalism have characterized the work of constructing
it. It is like the wall of Athens, rough stone upon hewn memorial
tablets to the dead, upon the trunks and limbs of statues of gods and
men and beasts. The feast of Our Lady of Carmel was beautiful in
Palermo; transplanted to New York, it is grotesque. There was dignity
in the demeanor of the Lithuanian on his native soil: in the
anthracite towns, the Lithuanian is a mortar-disfigured torso, thrown
heedlessly into the courses of a rubble wall. All the mixing up of
peoples, of customs, of ideals, that an incipient capitalism implies,
produces a conglomerate that is inevitably ugly.
And quite apart from the ugliness of discordant combinations, there is
an ugliness originating in the very virtues of capitalism. As we have
seen, it is the tendency of capitalism to leave human nature free in
all that transcends the narrow limits of the process of profit making.
And this would be well if, as the optimists assure us, human nature
were uniformly beautiful. Those of us, however, who are not committed
to dogmatic optimism know that if some part of human nature is most
beautiful when unrestrained and unadorned, another part is most seemly
when well laced with stays of custom, well draped in garments of
convention. At any rate, in the initial phase of the capitalistic
liberation of human nature, which we are now experiencing, it is an
open question whether our eyes are not more frequently offended than
regaled.
It is in the field of material objects, however, that the contrasts
between present capitalism and the earlier order are most clearly
visible. Time was when the man who built a house granted to the whole
community a voice in determining its design. And the community
permitted variation from type, but only a moderate, well regulated
variation. Thus were the walled cities of the Middle Ages governed by
a harmony of construction, which gave to each dwelling, at the very
least, a beauty of use and wont. Today in America the builder is free.
If he chooses to dwell in a Greek temple or a Gothic chapel or a
Chinese pagoda, there is no one to dissuade him. No one, except
perhaps an architect whose plans have been rejected or a good citizen
at large, ex-officio adviser of an unheeding world.
In the economic field human conduct is narrowly ruled and restricted
by capitalism; but in the non-economic field--the greater and more
significant part of life--the good and the evil, the beautiful and the
ugly, are set free by capitalism, to struggle for existence.
Capitalism offers no direct pecuniary rewards for virtue and beauty.
Nor, however, does it impose any penalties upon them. Did any earlier
order of society impose such penalties? To be sure. Let us recall the
contempt for the arts on the part of militaristic Rome, the pride in
illiteracy of the glittering mediæval knight. Capitalism does not
require a merchant or a banker to become a connoisseur of art. Nor
does it require him to apologize for any such variation from typical
instincts.
If good and evil must thus strive in a fair field, neither rewarded
nor penalized economically, what will be the outcome? The evil will
prevail, say those who--strangely enough--describe themselves as
idealists. Most of us refuse to engage in prophecies. But so much is
clear: the good and the beautiful that may prevail under a
thorough-going capitalism must be better and more beautiful than the
values of old time. Capitalistic freedom demands that there must be
greater variety and wealth of beauty than an earlier order required;
capitalistic fraternity demands that charity and toleration must
extend beyond the bounds of class and race. Unless the art and the
practical ethics of perfected capitalism represent an advance in
universality, they will be thrust aside as meaningless and worthless.
It is, to be sure, more difficult to establish fixed values upon a
broad basis of human life than upon a narrow one. More difficult were
the problems that confronted Euripides the Pan-Hellene, than Sophocles
the Athenian. There is a contrast in technical perfection, between
the work of Balzac the Frenchman, and Daudet the adoptive Parisian;
between that of Kipling the imperialist, and Bridges the Englander;
between that of Ibsen the cosmopolitan, and Björnson the Norwegian.
But in all these instances the loss in classical perfection is vastly
overbalanced by the gain in human worth. There were poets and
dramatists in Scandinavia before the days of Holberg. They had an
elaborate canon, all the rules of which were violated by Holberg's
iconoclastic cosmopolitanism. What has become of the works of
Holberg's predecessors? No one can read them. But Holberg was never so
widely read and honored as today.
A broader and more liberal humanity than the world has known
before--such, after all, is the evolving soul of capitalism. This does
not indicate, however, that capitalism will last forever, or deserves
immortality. There comes a time when the most responsive body becomes
a clog upon the soul, and should accordingly be buried. The body of
capitalism is none too responsive; therefore we may be certain that it
must, in the end, be discarded. What the succeeding order will be, no
man can forecast. But it will not be one of unbridled individualism;
for a spirit of fraternity, transcending that imposed by capitalism,
will carry the principle of coöperation to lengths beyond present
dreams. And it will not be Socialism; for the spirit of toleration and
freedom, now only germinating, will have attained to its full
efflorescence in institutions that guarantee a range of personal
development not compatible with the well-regimented scheme of a
Socialistic state. Capitalism will disappear; but can we doubt that it
will be honored in history as a most significant stage in the progress
of the human soul towards liberty?