11. Chapter XI: Of The Spirit In Which The Americans Cultivate The
Arts
It would be to waste the time of my readers and my own if I
strove to demonstrate how the general mediocrity of fortunes, the
absence of superfluous wealth, the universal desire of comfort,
and the constant efforts by which everyone attempts to procure
it, make the taste for the useful predominate over the love of
the beautiful in the heart of man. Democratic nations, amongst
which all these things exist, will therefore cultivate the arts
which serve to render life easy, in preference to those whose
object is to adorn it. They will habitually prefer the useful to
the beautiful, and they will require that the beautiful should be
useful. But I propose to go further; and after having pointed
out this first feature, to sketch several others.
It commonly happens that in the ages of privilege the
practice of almost all the arts becomes a privilege; and that
every profession is a separate walk, upon which it is not
allowable for everyone to enter. Even when productive industry
is free, the fixed character which belongs to aristocratic
nations gradually segregates all the persons who practise the
same art, till they form a distinct class, always composed of the
same families, whose members are all known to each other, and
amongst whom a public opinion of their own and a species of
corporate pride soon spring up. In a class or guild of this kind,
each artisan has not only his fortune to make, but his reputation
to preserve. He is not exclusively swayed by his own interest,
or even by that of his customer, but by that of the body to which
he belongs; and the interest of that body is, that each artisan
should produce the best possible workmanship. In aristocratic
ages, the object of the arts is therefore to manufacture as well
as possible -not with the greatest despatch, or at the lowest
rate.
When, on the contrary, every profession is open to all -when a multitude of persons are constantly embracing and
abandoning it -and when its several members are strangers to
each other, indifferent, and from their numbers hardly seen
amongst themselves; the social tie is destroyed, and each
workman, standing alone, endeavors simply to gain the greatest
possible quantity of money at the least possible cost. The will
of the customer is then his only limit. But at the same time a
corresponding revolution takes place in the customer also. In
countries in which riches as well as power are concentrated and
retained in the hands of the few, the use of the greater part of
this world's goods belongs to a small number of individuals, who
are always the same. Necessity, public opinion, or moderate
desires exclude all others from the enjoyment of them. As this
aristocratic class remains fixed at the pinnacle of greatness on
which it stands, without diminution or increase, it is always
acted upon by the same wants and affected by them in the same
manner. The men of whom it is composed naturally derive from
their superior and hereditary position a taste for what is
extremely well made and lasting. This affects the general way of
thinking of the nation in relation to the arts. It often occurs,
among such a people, that even the peasant will rather go without
the object he covets, than procure it in a state of imperfection.
In aristocracies, then, the handicraftsmen work for only a
limited number of very fastidious customers: the profit they hope
to make depends principally on the perfection of their
workmanship.
Such is no longer the case when, all privileges being
abolished, ranks are intermingled, and men are forever rising or
sinking upon the ladder of society. Amongst a democratic people
a number of citizens always exist whose patrimony is divided and
decreasing. They have contracted, under more prosperous
circumstances, certain wants, which remain after the means of
satisfying such wants are gone; and they are anxiously looking
out for some surreptitious method of providing for them. On the
other hand, there are always in democracies a large number of men
whose fortune is upon the increase, but whose desires grow much
faster than their fortunes: and who gloat upon the gifts of
wealth in anticipation, long before they have means to command
them. Such men eager to find some short cut to these
gratifications, already almost within their reach. From the
combination of these causes the result is, that in democracies
there are always a multitude of individuals whose wants are above
their means, and who are very willing to take up with imperfect
satisfaction rather than abandon the object of their desires.
The artisan readily understands these passions, for he
himself partakes in them: in an aristocracy he would seek to sell
his workmanship at a high price to the few; he now conceives that
the more expeditious way of getting rich is to sell them at a low
price to all. But there are only two ways of lowering the price
of commodities. The first is to discover some better, shorter,
and more ingenious method of producing them: the second is to
manufacture a larger quantity of goods, nearly similar, but of
less value. Amongst a democratic population, all the intellectual
faculties of the workman are directed to these two objects: he
strives to invent methods which may enable him not only to work
better, but quicker and cheaper; or, if he cannot succeed in
that, to diminish the intrinsic qualities of the thing he makes,
without rendering it wholly unfit for the use for which it is
intended. When none but the wealthy had watches, they were
almost all very good ones: few are now made which are worth much,
but everybody has one in his pocket. Thus the democratic
principle not only tends to direct the human mind to the useful
arts, but it induces the artisan to produce with greater rapidity
a quantity of imperfect commodities, and the consumer to content
himself with these commodities.
Not that in democracies the arts are incapable of producing
very commendable works, if such be required. This may
occasionally be the case, if customers appear who are ready to
pay for time and trouble. In this rivalry of every kind of
industry -in the midst of this immense competition and these
countless experiments, some excellent workmen are formed who
reach the utmost limits of their craft. But they have rarely an
opportunity of displaying what they can do; they are scrupulously
sparing of their powers; they remain in a state of accomplished
mediocrity, which condemns itself, and, though it be very well
able to shoot beyond the mark before it, aims only at what it
hits. In aristocracies, on the contrary, workmen always do all
they can; and when they stop, it is because they have reached the
limit of their attainments.
When I arrive in a country where I find some of the finest
productions of the arts, I learn from this fact nothing of the
social condition or of the political constitution of the country.
But if I perceive that the productions of the arts are generally
of an inferior quality, very abundant and very cheap, I am
convinced that, amongst the people where this occurs, privilege
is on the decline, and that ranks are beginning to intermingle,
and will soon be confounded together.
The handicraftsmen of democratic ages endeavor not only to
bring their useful productions within the reach of the whole
community, but they strive to give to all their commodities
attractive qualities which they do not in reality possess. In
the confusion of all ranks everyone hopes to appear what he is
not, and makes great exertions to succeed in this object. This
sentiment indeed, which is but too natural to the heart of man,
does not originate in the democratic principle; but that
principle applies it to material objects. To mimic virtue is of
every age; but the hypocrisy of luxury belongs more particularly
to the ages of democracy.
To satisfy these new cravings of human vanity the arts have
recourse to every species of imposture: and these devices
sometimes go so far as to defeat their own purpose. Imitation
diamonds are now made which may be easily mistaken for real ones;
as soon as the art of fabricating false diamonds shall have
reached so high a degree of perfection that they cannot be
distinguished from real ones, it is probable that both one and
the other will be abandoned, and become mere pebbles again.
This leads me to speak of those arts which are called the
fine arts, by way of distinction. I do not believe that it is a
necessary effect of a democratic social condition and of
democratic institutions to diminish the number of men who
cultivate the fine arts; but these causes exert a very powerful
influence on the manner in which these arts are cultivated. Many
of those who had already contracted a taste for the fine arts are
impoverished: on the other hand, many of those who are not yet
rich begin to conceive that taste, at least by imitation; and the
number of consumers increases, but opulent and fastidious
consumers become more scarce. Something analogous to what I have
already pointed out in the useful arts then takes place in the
fine arts; the productions of artists are more numerous, but the
merit of each production is diminished. No longer able to soar
to what is great, they cultivate what is pretty and elegant; and
appearance is more attended to than reality. In aristocracies a
few great pictures are produced; in democratic countries, a vast
number of insignificant ones. In the former, statues are raised
of bronze; in the latter, they are modelled in plaster.
When I arrived for the first time at New York, by that part
of the Atlantic Ocean which is called the Narrows, I was
surprised to perceive along the shore, at some distance from the
city, a considerable number of little palaces of white marble,
several of which were built after the models of ancient
architecture. When I went the next day to inspect more closely
the building which had particularly attracted my notice, I found
that its walls were of whitewashed brick, and its columns of
painted wood. All the edifices which I had admired the night
before were of the same kind.
The social condition and the institutions of democracy
impart, moreover, certain peculiar tendencies to all the
imitative arts, which it is easy to point out. They frequently
withdraw them from the delineation of the soul to fix them
exclusively on that of the body: and they substitute the
representation of motion and sensation for that of sentiment and
thought: in a word, they put the real in the place of the ideal.
I doubt whether Raphael studied the minutest intricacies of the
mechanism of the human body as thoroughly as the draughtsmen of
our own time. He did not attach the same importance to rigorous
accuracy on this point as they do, because he aspired to surpass
nature. He sought to make of man something which should be
superior to man, and to embellish beauty's self. David and his
scholars were, on the contrary, as good anatomists as they were
good painters. They wonderfully depicted the models which they
had before their eyes, but they rarely imagined anything beyond
them: they followed nature with fidelity: whilst Raphael sought
for something better than nature. They have left us an exact
portraiture of man; but he discloses in his works a glimpse of
the Divinity. This remark as to the manner of treating a subject
is no less applicable to the choice of it. The painters of the
Middle Ages generally sought far above themselves, and away from
their own time, for mighty subjects, which left to their
imagination an unbounded range. Our painters frequently employ
their talents in the exact imitation of the details of private
life, which they have always before their eyes; and they are
forever copying trivial objects, the originals of which are only
too abundant in nature.