Crowds Part 29

In my morning paper the other day I read that in a factory whose long windows I often pa.s.s in the train, they have their machinery so perfected that it takes sixty-four machines to make one shoe.

Query--If it takes sixty-four machines run by sixty-four men who do nothing else to make one shoe, how many machines would it take, and how many shoes, to make one man?

Query--And when an employer in a shoe factory deals with his employee, can it really be said, after all, that he is dealing with _him_? He is dealing with _It_--with Nine Hours a Day, of one sixty-fourth of a man.

The natural effect of crowds and of machines is to make a man feel that he is, and always was, and always will be, immemorially, unanimously, innumerably n.o.body.

Sometimes we are allowed a little faint numeral to dangle up over our oblivion. Not long ago I saw a notice or letter in the _West Bulletin_--probably from a member of something--ending like this: "...

I hope the readers of the _Bulletin_ will ponder over this suggestion of _Number_ 29,619.--Sincerely yours, _No._ 11, 175."

CHAPTER III

THE INCONVENIENCE OF BEING HUMAN

I shall never forget one day I spent in New York some years ago--more years than I thought at first. It was a wrong-headed day, but I cannot help remembering it as a symbol of a dread I still feel at times in New York--a feeling of being suddenly lifted, of being swept out under (it is like the undertow of the sea) into a kind of vast deep of impersonality--swept out of myself into a wide, imperious waste or emptiness of people. I had come fresh from my still country meadow and mountain, my own trees and my own bobolinks and my own little island of sky up over me, and in the vast and desolate solitude of men and women I wandered about up and down the streets. Every block I saw, every window, skyline, engine, street-car, every human face, made me feel as if I belonged to another world. Here was a great conspiracy in stone and iron against my own life with myself. Was there a soul in all this huge roar and spectacle of gla.s.s and stone and pa.s.sion that cared for the things that I cared for, or the things that I loved, or that would care one shuffle of all the feet upon the stones for any thought or word or desire of mine? The rain swept in my face, and I spent the day walking up and down the streets looking at stones and gla.s.s and people. _"Here we are!"_ say the great buildings crowding on the sky. _"Who are you?"_....all the stone and the gla.s.s and the walls, the mighty syndicate of matter everywhere, surrounded me--one little, shivering, foolish mote of being fighting foolishly for its own little foolish mote of ident.i.ty!

And I do not believe that I was all wrong. New York, like some vast, implacable cone of ether, some merciless anaesthetic, was thrust down over me and my breathing, and I still had a kind of left-over prejudice that I wanted to be myself, with my own private self-respect, with my own private, temporarily finished-off, provisionally complete personality. I felt then, and I still feel to-day, that every man, as he fights for his breath, must stand out at least part of his time for the right of being self-contained. It is, and always will be, one of the appalling sights of New York to me--the spectacle of the helplessness, the wistfulness, of all those poor New York people without one another.

Sometimes the city seems to be a kind of huge monument or idol or shrine of crowds. It seems to be a part of the ceaseless crowd action or crowd corrosion on the sense of ident.i.ty in the human spirit that the man who lives in crowds should grow more dull and more literal about himself every day. He becomes a mere millionth of something. All these other people he sees about him hurrying to and fro are mere millionths too. He grows more and more obliged to live with a vast bulk of people if he is to notice people at all. Unless he sees all the different kinds of people and forms of life with his own eye, and feels human beings with his hands, as it were, he does not know and sympathize with them. The crowd-craving or love of continual city life on the part of many people comes to be a sheer lack of imagination, an inability to live in qualities instead of quant.i.ties in men. To live merely in a city is not to know the real flavour of life any more than the daily paper knows it--the daily paper, the huge dull monster of observation, the seer of outsides. The whole effect of crowds on the individual man is to emphasize scareheads and appearances, advertis.e.m.e.nts, and the huge general showing off. The ride in the train from New Haven to New York is the true portrait of a crowd. Crowds of soaps and patent medicines straining on trees and signboard out of the gentle fields toward crowds of men, culminating at last in Woodlawn Cemetery, where the marble signposts of death flaunt themselves. Oblivion itself is advertised, and the end of the show of a show world is placarded on our graves. Men buy s.p.a.ce in papers for cards, and bits of country scenery by the great railroads to put up signboards, and they spend money and make constant efforts to advertise that they are alive, and then they build expensive monuments to advertise that they are dead....

The same craving for piled-up appearances is brought to bear by crowds upon their arts. Even a gentle soul like Paderewski, full of a personal and strange beauty that he could lend to everything he touched, finds himself swept out of himself at last by the huge undertow of crowds.

Scarcely a season but his playing has become worn down at the end of it into shrieks and hushes. Have I not watched him at the end of a tour, when, one audience after the other, those huge Svengalis had hypnotized him--thundering his very subtleties at them, hour after hour, in Carnegie Hall? One could only wonder what had happened, sit by helplessly, watch the crowd--thousands of headlong human beings lunging their souls and their bodies through the music, weeping, gasping, huzzaing, and clapping to one another. After every crash of new crescendo, after every precipice of silence, they seemed to be crying, "This is Soul! Oh, this is Soul!" The feeling of a vast audience holding its breath, no matter why it does it or whether it ought to do it or not, seems to have become almost a religious rite of itself. Vistas of faces gallery after gallery hanging on a note, two or three thousand souls suspended in s.p.a.ce all on one tiny little ivory lever at the end of one man's forefinger ... dim lights shining on them and soft vibrations floating round them ... going to hear Paderewski play at the end of his season was going to hear a crowd at a piano singing with its own hands and having a kind of orgy with itself. One could only remember that there had been a Paderewski once who hypnotized and possessed his audience by being hypnotized and possessed by his own music. One liked to remember him--the Paderewski who was really an artist and who performed the function of the artist showering imperiously his own visions on the hearts of the people.

And what is true in music one finds still truer in the other arts. One keeps coming on it everywhere--the egotism of cities, the self-complacency of the crowds swerving the finer and the truer artists from their functions, making them sing in hoa.r.s.e crowd-voices instead of singing in their own and giving us themselves. Nearly all our acting has been corroded by crowds. Some of us have been obliged almost to give up going to the theatre except to very little ones, and we are wondering if churches cannot possibly be made small enough to believe great things, or if galleries cannot be arranged with few enough people in them to allow us great paintings, or if there will not be an author so well known to a few men that he will live forever, or if some newspaper will not yet be great enough to advertise that it has a circulation small enough to tell the truth.

CHAPTER IV

LETTING THE CROWD HAVE PEOPLE IN IT

So we face the issue.

Nothing beautiful can be accomplished in a crowd civilization, by the crowd for the crowd, unless the crowd is beautiful. No man who is engaged in looking under the lives about him, who wishes to face the facts of these lives as they are lived to-day, will find himself able to avoid this last and most important fact in the history of the world--the fact that, whatever it may mean, or whether it is for better or worse, the world has staked all that it is and has been, and all that it is capable of being, on the one supreme issue, "How can the crowd be made beautiful?"

The answer to this question involves two difficulties: (1) A crowd cannot make itself beautiful. (2) A crowd will not let any one else make it beautiful.

The men who have been on the whole the most eager democrats of history--the real-idealists--the men who love the crowd and the beautiful too, and who can have no honest or human pleasure in either of them except as they are being drawn together, are obliged to admit that living in a democratic country, a country where politics and aesthetics can no longer be kept apart, is an ordeal that can only be faced a large part of the time with heavy hearts. We are obliged to admit that it is a country where paintings have little but the Const.i.tution of the United States wrought into them; where sculpture is voted and paid for by the common people; where music is composed for majorities; where poetry is sung to a circulation; where literature itself is scaled to subscription lists; where all the creators of the True and the Beautiful and the Good may be seen almost any day tramping the tableland of the average man, fed by the average man, allowed to live by the average man, plodding along with weary and dusty steps to the average man's forgetfulness. And, indeed, it is not the least trait of this same average man that he forgets, that he is forgotten, that his slaves are forgotten, that the world remembers only those who have been his masters.

On the other hand, the literature of finding fault with the average man (which is what the larger part of our more ambitious literature really is) is not a kind of literature that can do anything to mend matters.

The art of finding fault with the average man, with the fact that the world is made convenient for him, is inferior art because it is helpless art. The world is made convenient for the average man because it has to be, to get him to live in it; and if the world were not made convenient for him, the man of genius would find living with him a great deal more uncomfortable than he does. He would not even be allowed the comfort of saying how uncomfortable. The world belongs to the average man, and, excepting the stars and other things that are too big to belong to him, the moment the average man deserves anything better in it or more beautiful in it than he is getting, some man of genius rises by his side, in spite of him, and claims it for him. Then he slowly claims it for himself. The last thing to do, to make the world a good place for the average man, would be to make it a world with nothing but average men in it. If it is the ideal of democracy that there shall be a slow ma.s.sive lifting, a grading up of all things at once; that whatever is highest in the true and the beautiful, and whatever is lowest in them shall be graded down and graded up to the middle height of human life, where the greatest numbers shall make their home and live upon it; if the ideal of democracy is tableland--that is--mountains for everybody--a few mountains must be kept on hand to make tableland out of.

Two solutions, then, of a crowd civilization--having the extraordinary men crowded out of it as a convenience to the average ones, and having the average men crowded out of it as a convenience to the extraordinary ones--are equally impracticable.

This brings us to the horns of our dilemma. If the crowd cannot be made beautiful by itself, and if the crowd will not allow itself to be made beautiful by any one else, the crowd can only be made beautiful by a man who lives so great a life in it that he can make a crowd beautiful whether it allows him to or not.

When this man is born to us and looks out on the conditions around him, he will find that to be born in a crowd civilization is to be born in a civilization, first, in which every man can do as he pleases; second, in which n.o.body does. Every man is given by the Government absolute freedom; and when it has given him absolute freedom the Government says to him, "Now if you can get enough other men, with their absolute freedom, to put their absolute freedom with your absolute freedom, you can use your absolute freedom in any way you want." Democracy, seeking to free a man from being a slave to one master, has simply increased the number of masters a man shall have. He is hemmed in with crowds of masters. He cannot see his master's huge amorphous face. He cannot go to his master and reason with him. He cannot even plead with him. You can cry your heart out to one of these modern ballot-boxes. You have but one ballot. They will not count tears. The ultimate question in a crowd civilization becomes, not "What does a thing mean?" or "What is it worth?" but "How much is there of it?" "If thou art a great man," says civilization, "get thou a crowd for thy greatness. Then come with thy crowd and we will deal with thee. It shall be even as thou wilt." The pressure has become so great, as is obvious on every side, that men who are of small or ordinary calibre can only be more pressed by it. They are pressed smaller and smaller--the more they are civilized, the smaller they are pressed; and we are being daily brought face to face with the fact that the one solution a crowd civilization can have for the evil of being a crowd civilization is the man in the crowd who can withstand the pressure of the crowd; that is to say, the one solution of a crowd civilization is the great-man solution--a solution which is none the less true because by name, at least, it leaves most of us out or because it is so familiar that we have forgotten it. The one method by which a crowd can be freed and can be made to realize itself is the great-man method--the method of crucifying and worshipping great men, until by crucifying and worshipping great men enough, inch by inch, and era by era, it is lifted to greatness itself.

Not very many years ago, certain great and good men, who, at the cost of infinite pains, were standing at the time on a safe and lofty rock protected from the fury of their kind by the fury of the sea, contrived to say to the older nations of the earth, "All men are created equal."

It is a thing to be borne in mind, that if these men, who declared that all men were created equal, had not been some several hundred per cent.

better men than the men they said they were created equal to, it would not have made any difference to us or to any one else whether they had said that all men were created equal or not, or whether the Republic had ever been started or not, in which every man, for hundreds of years, should look up to these men and worship them as the kind of men that every man in America was free to try to be equal to. A civilization by numbers, a crowd civilization, if it had not been started by heroes, could never have been started at all. Shall this civilization attempt to live by the crowd principle, without men in it who are living by the hero principle? On our answer to this question hangs the question whether this civilization, with all its crowds, shall stand or fall among the civilizations of the earth. The main difference between the heroes of Plymouth Rock, the heroes who proclaimed freedom in 1776, and the heroes who must contrive to proclaim freedom now, is that tyranny now is crowding around the Rock, and climbing up on the Rock, eighty-seven million strong, and that tyranny then was a half-idiot king three thousand miles away.

We know or think we know, some of us--at least we have taken a certain joy in working it out in our minds, and live with it every day--how people in crowds are going to be beautiful by and by.

The difficulty of being beautiful now, I have tried to express. It seems better to express, if possible, what a difficulty is before trying to meet it.

And now we would like to try to meet it. How can we determine what is the most practical and natural way for crowds of people to try to be beautiful now?

It would seem to be a matter of crowd psychology, of crowd technique, and of determining how human nature works.

All thoughtful people are agreed as to the aim.

Everything turns on the method.

In the following chapters we will try to consider the technique of being beautiful in crowds.

BOOK FOUR

CROWDS AND HEROES

TO WALT WHITMAN

_"And I saw the free souls of poets, The loftiest bards of all ages strode before me Strange large men, long unwaked, undisclosed, were disclosed to me ... O my rapt verse, my call, mock me not!

... I will not be outfaced by irrational things, I will penetrate what is sarcastic upon me, I will make cities and civilizations defer to me This is what I have learnt from America--

I will confront these shows of the day and night I will know if I am to be less than they, I will see if I am not as majestic as they, I will see if I am not as subtle and real as they, I will see if I have no meaning while the houses and ships have meaning,

... I am for those that have never been mastered, For men and women whose tempers have never been mastered, For those whom laws, theories, conventions can never master.

I am for those who walk abreast of the whole earth Who inaugurate one to inaugurate all."_

CHAPTER I

THE SOCIALIST AND THE HERO