380
PARTISAN REVIEW
Ferrero collected his judgments and prophecies on the modern
world in a series of dialogues which he entitled
Between
Two
Worlds
because the interlocutors were passengers on board a
transatlantic luxury liner sailing from Europe to America. They
were society people, adventurers, profiteers, people who had
"arrived"; optimistic, ingenuous and also rather grotesque, as
vulgar people almost always are when they think themselves
happy; people of unlimited material possibilities. But it was this
very absence of limits, seemingly guaranteeing to modern man an
absolute sovereignty over nature and society, that began to alarm
Ferrero. He defined modern civilisation as
quantitative,
in con·
trast to ancient civilisations which were
qualitative.
In Ferrero's
mind, a qualitative civilisation is one which has clearly defined
limits, has models of moral and esthetic perfection, is based on
certain virtues, draws its inspiration from certain forms of beauty.
Up to the time of the French Revolution and the nineteenth cen·
tury, humanity, according to Ferrero, had created only qualitative
civilisations; but the French Revolution brought chaos in its wake,
it gave rise to a civilisation aimed exclusively at riches and power,
it swept away the ancient boundaries and was incapable of creat·
ing new ones. A quantitative civilisation, in the eyes of Ferrero, is
not a real civilisation, but a tumultuous transition, a parenthesis,
a fearful interregnum, a tragic adventure; in it there can be no
security.
Ferrero was the poet of conservative anguish in an epoch of
transition. In giving voice to the longing of every man for a just
and ordered society, he struck profoundly human chords, but he
could never overcome his horror of everything new, of adventure,
as he called it, and his deep attachment to antiquity. Without a
minimum of common assurances, it is not possible for men to live
together in society.
If
they are not to massacre each other, men
must agree on a certain number of fundamental questions; what is
good, what evil; what is true, what false; what is beautiful, what
ugly. Ferrero wanted to be the historian of transition periods. He
studied and analysed the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in
the third century, the end of the French monarchy in the eighteenth,
the collapse of the Central and Eastern European monarchies in
our own century, and the subsequent defeat of the democracies.
He made his personal drama out of the death of civilisations.
These events, in themselves far apart and unconnected, were in his
vision of them bound together by the same chain of causes. lsolat-
