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John Adams once said that he had to study politics and war in order to give his grandchildren the right to study painting, poetry and music; history shows that he was right. His whole generation in America put its best creative energies into politics and war, particularly politics, and the generation of his grandchildren produced the first notable American literature and painting. Not until Americans had established their new nation would they have surplus energy for letters and the arts.
This is no insult to America's greatest generation. The political work before them was huge. They had to create a new political order, based on a completely new principle of sovereignty, and make it stick through very tough times. They had to make it flexible enough to absorb an unimaginable expansion of territory and population.
In Europe, meanwhile, painting, poetry and music were flowing in a vast torrent, as they had done for centuries and would do for at least a century more. In Britain alone, the year 1776 brought "The Wealth of Nations" and "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," while in little Salzburg, 20-year-old Mozart was writing 25 new compositions, two of them enduringly famous. Not even the tumults of politics and war that followed the French Revolution could stop the flow. Every year from 1789 to 1914 brought the debut of some European masterpiece of poetry, prose, painting, drama or music.
What, then, are we to make of Europe today? The stream of artistic genius appears to have dried up. Novels and plays continue to appear, buildings continue to be designed and built, paintings and sculptures go on view, movies open in small theaters - and much is good. But the torrential flow of works of indisputable artistic genius has stopped. In its place is a steady buzz of interesting artistic background noise as Europe goes about its life, day by day, peacefully and prosperously.
This is no insult to today's Europeans. They have bigger things on their plate. Like Americans of Adams' generation, Europeans are creating a completely new political order. They are trying to unite a couple of dozen nations, each with its own laws and habits, each with loyalties and rivalries stretching back centuries, most with their own discrete languages, into a super-nation without historical parallel.
Unlike the builders of earlier empires, today's Europeans are bringing their nations together fairly, freely and in their own good time, with a complete equality of citizens and nations. (Ireland, which said "yes" to a more united Europe the other day, was free to say "no.") And today's European unity is not restricted to the high level of electing parliaments and ratifying treaties; it is moving fastest at the you-and-me level of looking for work, setting up conference calls, getting married and retiring to a warmer climate.
Last year, when Horace Engdahl, the secretary of the Swedish Nobel Committee, said that no American author should be allowed to win the Nobel Prize for Literature because American literature was not sufficiently in touch with Europe, "still the center of the literary world," literary Americans were wryly contemptuous. Where, they sneered, are the European writers who can stand up to Updike, Roth or Oates?
We Americans have a right to chuckle at what sounds like the last gasp of old European supremacy. But we should also listen. Mr. Engdahl was speaking as the authentic voice of Europe today, and his probably silly words were not the last gasp of something old but the first cry of something new. With or without big literary names, Europe is coming to be the center of the world once more.
Europe is now embarked on a political endeavor as big as the shaping of the American republic. Just as we showed the world how to found a stable political order on the sovereignty of the people, Europe is showing the world, including us, how to found a stable political order that crosses the ancient lines of nation and culture. Europeans are doing this very gradually. Their Adams generation will stretch for several generations, from Adenauer and de Gaulle to Merkel and Sarkozy and beyond. During that time, Europeans may well put their best creative energies where our Founding Fathers put theirs.
Does this mean that Europeans, in a generation or two, will begin once more to paint like Raphael and compose like Bach? That is not, I think, very important. What is important is that Europeans are getting up every morning, quietly and without artistic chest-thumping, and building the world's first great political improvement since "We the People." That may be their greatest masterpiece of all.
Charles B. Duff is president of Jubilee Baltimore Inc. and executive director of Midtown Development Inc. He is working on a book about cities in Northern Europe and North America. His e-mail is charlie@jubileebaltimore.org.
This is no insult to America's greatest generation. The political work before them was huge. They had to create a new political order, based on a completely new principle of sovereignty, and make it stick through very tough times. They had to make it flexible enough to absorb an unimaginable expansion of territory and population.
In Europe, meanwhile, painting, poetry and music were flowing in a vast torrent, as they had done for centuries and would do for at least a century more. In Britain alone, the year 1776 brought "The Wealth of Nations" and "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," while in little Salzburg, 20-year-old Mozart was writing 25 new compositions, two of them enduringly famous. Not even the tumults of politics and war that followed the French Revolution could stop the flow. Every year from 1789 to 1914 brought the debut of some European masterpiece of poetry, prose, painting, drama or music.
What, then, are we to make of Europe today? The stream of artistic genius appears to have dried up. Novels and plays continue to appear, buildings continue to be designed and built, paintings and sculptures go on view, movies open in small theaters - and much is good. But the torrential flow of works of indisputable artistic genius has stopped. In its place is a steady buzz of interesting artistic background noise as Europe goes about its life, day by day, peacefully and prosperously.
This is no insult to today's Europeans. They have bigger things on their plate. Like Americans of Adams' generation, Europeans are creating a completely new political order. They are trying to unite a couple of dozen nations, each with its own laws and habits, each with loyalties and rivalries stretching back centuries, most with their own discrete languages, into a super-nation without historical parallel.
Unlike the builders of earlier empires, today's Europeans are bringing their nations together fairly, freely and in their own good time, with a complete equality of citizens and nations. (Ireland, which said "yes" to a more united Europe the other day, was free to say "no.") And today's European unity is not restricted to the high level of electing parliaments and ratifying treaties; it is moving fastest at the you-and-me level of looking for work, setting up conference calls, getting married and retiring to a warmer climate.
Last year, when Horace Engdahl, the secretary of the Swedish Nobel Committee, said that no American author should be allowed to win the Nobel Prize for Literature because American literature was not sufficiently in touch with Europe, "still the center of the literary world," literary Americans were wryly contemptuous. Where, they sneered, are the European writers who can stand up to Updike, Roth or Oates?
We Americans have a right to chuckle at what sounds like the last gasp of old European supremacy. But we should also listen. Mr. Engdahl was speaking as the authentic voice of Europe today, and his probably silly words were not the last gasp of something old but the first cry of something new. With or without big literary names, Europe is coming to be the center of the world once more.
Europe is now embarked on a political endeavor as big as the shaping of the American republic. Just as we showed the world how to found a stable political order on the sovereignty of the people, Europe is showing the world, including us, how to found a stable political order that crosses the ancient lines of nation and culture. Europeans are doing this very gradually. Their Adams generation will stretch for several generations, from Adenauer and de Gaulle to Merkel and Sarkozy and beyond. During that time, Europeans may well put their best creative energies where our Founding Fathers put theirs.
Does this mean that Europeans, in a generation or two, will begin once more to paint like Raphael and compose like Bach? That is not, I think, very important. What is important is that Europeans are getting up every morning, quietly and without artistic chest-thumping, and building the world's first great political improvement since "We the People." That may be their greatest masterpiece of all.
Charles B. Duff is president of Jubilee Baltimore Inc. and executive director of Midtown Development Inc. He is working on a book about cities in Northern Europe and North America. His e-mail is charlie@jubileebaltimore.org.
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