Crowds Part 24

The only way sufficient capital for fine things can be obtained is by having millionaires who appreciate fine things, and believe in them, and believe the public in time will believe in them.

The only way in which a millionaire can recognize and believe in the fine things and in the best artists is by being, in spirit and temperament at least, an artist himself.

The only way in which a millionaire can be an artist is to work every day in the spirit in which the artist works.

This means the artist in business.

(1) The artist in business is the man who makes things people already want enough to make money, and who makes things he is going to make people want enough to make new values and to be of some use.

(2) The artist in business is the employer who makes new things and men together. He lets the men who make new things with him become new men; and when the things are made, they go forth in their turn and make new men and make new publics. New publics have had to be made for everything: for the first umbrellas, for the first telephones, the first typewriters. New publics have had to be made for Wagner, for Sunlight Soap, for Bernard Shaw; and it is the men who make new publics--be it for big or little things--who are artists. They are in spirit, prophets, kings, and world-builders.

(3) Incidentally, the artist in business--the employer who creates new values and is creative himself--will like creative men in his factory, and will treat them so that they will put their creativeness into his business; he not only will be an artist himself, but he will have, comparatively speaking, a factory full of artists working with him. And when the factories pour out the men at night, and the smoke and the murmur cease, and the windows are dark, they will go to creative and live men's plays.

So it has come to pa.s.s that the modern business man of the artist sort holds the arts of modern times in the hollow of his hand. He is a past-master of creating new publics.

(4) The artist in business is the man who educates and draws out, at every point where his business touches them, every day, all day, the men with whom he works. He educates and develops the men who make the things. He educates and develops the men who buy them. Even the people who wish they had bought them, are educated or secreted, by the artist in business. He is a maker of new publics, a world-builder, whichever way he turns. A business man who merely makes for people what they want, and who does not get the prestige with men of making for them things that they did not know they wanted, is a failure and falls behind in his business. All the big men in business work in future tenses. They are prophets, historians, and they are Now-men, men who work by seeing the truth all round the present moment, the present persons, and the present market, and before it and behind it. Millionaires who are making their money in this spirit will understand and believe in plays that are written in this spirit, and the people who work for such employers will like to go to such plays, and the theatre managers, instead of being the bullies and tyrants of the world of art, will be held in the power of the men who see things and who make things--men who in vast sweeps called audiences, night after night, make new men upon the earth.

PART TWO

IRON MACHINES

CHAPTER I

STEEPLES AND CHIMNEYS

I went to the Durbar the other night in cinema colour and saw the King and Queen through India. I had found my way, with hundreds of others, into the gallery of the Scala Theatre, and out of that big, still rim of watchful darkness where I sat I saw--there must have been thousands of them--crowds of camels running.

And crowds of elephants went swinging past.

I watched them like a boy, like a boy standing on the edge of a thousand years and looking off at a world.

It was stately and strange, and like far music to sit quite still and watch civilizations swinging past.

Then suddenly it became near and human--the spirit of playgrounds and of shouting and boyish laughter ran through it. And we watched the elephants, naked and untrimmed, lolling down to the lake and lying down to be scrubbed in it with comfortable low snorting and slow rolling in the water, and the men standing by all the while like little play-nurses and tending them, their big bungling babies, at the bath. A few minutes later we watched the same elephants, hundreds of them, their mighty toilets made, pacing slowly past, swinging their gorgeous trappings in our eyes, rolling their huge hoodahs at us, and all the time still those little funny dots of men beside them, moving them silently, moving them invisibly as by a spirit, as by a kind of awful wireless--those great engines of the flesh! I shall never forget it or live without it, that slow pantomime of those mighty, silent Eastern nations, their religions, their philosophies, their wills, their souls, moving their elephants past--the long panorama of it, of their little awful human wills, all those little black, helpless-looking slits of Human Will astride those mighty necks!

I have the same feeling when I see Count Zeppelin with his airship, or Grahame-White at Hendon, riding his vast cosmic pigeon up the sky; and it is the same feeling I have with the locomotives--those unconscious, forbidding, coldly obedient terrible fellows! Have I not lain awake and listened to them storming through the night, heard them out there ahead working our wills on the blackness, on the thick night, on the stars, on s.p.a.ce, and on Time while we slept?

My main feeling at the Durbar while I watched those splendid beasts--the crowds of camels, the crowds of elephants--all being driven along by the little, faint, dreamy, sleepy-looking people was, "Why don't their elephants turn around on them and chase them?"

I kept thinking at first that they would, almost any minute.

Our elephants chase us--most of us. Who has not seen locomotives coming quietly out of their roundhouses in New York and begin chasing people, chasing whole towns, tearing along with them, making everybody hurry whether or no, speeding up and ordering around by the clock great cities, everybody alike, the rich and the poor, the just and the unjust, for hundreds of miles around? In the same way I have seen, hundreds of times, motor cars turning around on their owners and chasing them--chasing them fairly out of their lives. And hundreds of thousands of little wood-and-rubber Things with nickel bells whirring, may be seen ordering around people--who pay them for it--in any city of our modern world.

Now and then one comes on a man who keeps a telephone, who is a gentleman with it, and who keeps it in its place, but not often.

There are certain questions to be asked and to be settled in any civilization that would be called great.

First: Do the elephants chase the men in it? Second: And if--as in our Western civilization--the men have made their own elephants, why should they be chased by them?

There are some of us who have wondered a little at the comparative inferiority of organ music. We have come to the conclusion that perhaps organ music is inferior because it has been largely composed by organists, by men who sit at organ machines many hours a day, and who have let their organ machines with all their stops and pedals, and with all their stop-and-pedal-mindedness, select out of their minds the tones that organs can do best--the music that machines like.

Wagner has come to be recognized as a great and original composer for a machine age because he would not let his imagination be cowed by the mere technical limitations, the narrow-mindedness of bra.s.s horns, wooden flutes, and catgut; he made up his mind that he would not sing violins.

He made violins sing him.

Perhaps this is the whole secret of art in a machine civilization.

Perhaps a machine civilization is capable of a greater art than has ever been dreamed in the world before, the moment it stops being chased by its elephants. The question of letting the crowd be beautiful in our world of machines and crowds to-day turns on our producing Machine-Trainers.

Men possessed by watches in their vest pockets cannot be inspired, men possessed by churches or religion-machines cannot be prophets, men possessed by school-machines cannot be educators.

The reason that we find the poet, or at least the minor poet, discouraged in a machine age probably is, that there is nothing a minor poet can do in it. Why should nightingales, poppies, and dells expect, in a main trial of strength, to compete with machines? And why should human beings running for their souls in a race with locomotives expect to keep very long from losing their souls?

The reason that most people are discouraged about machinery to-day is that this is what they think a machine civilization is. They whine at the machines. They blame the locomotive.

A better way for a man to do would be to stop blaming the locomotive, and stop running along out of breath beside it, and climb up into the cab.

This is the whole issue of art in our modern civilization--climbing up into the cab.

First come the Machine-Trainers, or poets who can tame engines. Then the other poets.

In the meantime, the less we hear about nightingales and poppies and dells and love and above, the better.

Poetry must make a few iron-handed, gentle-hearted, mighty men next. It is because we demand and expect the beautiful that we say that poetry must make men next.

The elephants have been running around in the garden long enough.

CHAPTER II

BELLS AND WHEELS

We are living in a day of the great rebellion of the machines. Out of a thousand thousand roundhouses and factories, vast cities and nations of machines on the land and on the sea have risen before the soul of man and said, "We have served you; now, you serve us."

A million million vulgar, swaggering Goliaths, one sees them everywhere; they wave their arms at us around the world, they puff their white breath at us, they spit smoke in our eyes, line up in a row before the great cities, before the mighty-hearted nations, and say it again and again, all in chorus, _"We have served you, now, you serve us!"_

It has come to sound to some of us as a kind of chant around our lives.

But why should we serve them?