Crowds Part 3

Then suddenly it was as if I had forgotten something. I turned and looked back; saw those three boys--a little retinue to that solitary fish--trudging down the road in the yellow sun. And I stood there and wanted to be in it! Then I saw them going round the bend in the road thirty years away.

I still want to be one of those boys.

And I am going to try. Perhaps, Heaven helping me, I will yet grow up to them!

I know that the way those three boys felt about the fish--the way they folded it around with something, the way they made the most of it, is the way to feel about the world.

I side with the three boys. I am ready to admit that as regards technical and comparatively unimportant details or as regards perspective on the fish the boys may not have been right. It is possible that they had not taken a point of view, measured in inches or volts or foot-pounds, that was right and could last forever; but I know that the spirit of their point of view was right--the spirit that hovered around the three boys and around the fish that day was right and could last forever.

It is the spirit in which the world was made, and the spirit in which new worlds in all ages, and even before our eyes by Boys and Girls and--G.o.d, are being made.

It is only the boys and the girls (all sizes) who know about worlds. And it is only boys and girls who are right.

I heard a robin in the apple tree this morning out in the rain singing, _"I believe! I believe!"_

At the same time, I am glad that I have known and faced, and that I shall have to know and face, the Crowd Fear.

I know in some dogged, submerged, and speechless way that it is not a true fear. And yet I want to move along the sheer edge of it all my life. I want it. I want all men to have it, and to keep having it, and to keep conquering it. I have seen that no man who has not felt it, who does not know this huge numbing, numberless fear before the crowd, and who may not know it again almost any moment, will ever be able to lead the crowd, glory in it, die for it, or help it. Nor will any man who has not defied it, and lifted his soul up naked and alone before it and cried to G.o.d, ever interpret the crowd or express the will of the crowd, or hew out of earth and heaven what the crowd wants.

We want to help to express and fulfil a crowd civilization, we want to share the crowd life, to express what people in crowds feel--the great crowd sensations, excitements, the inspirations and depressions of those who live and struggle with crowds.

We want to face, and face grimly, implacably, the main facts, the main emotions men are having to-day. And the main emotion men are having to-day about our modern world is that it is a crowded world, that in the nature of the case its civilization is a crowd civilization. Every other important thing for this present age to know must be worked out from this one. It is the main thing with which our religion has to deal, the thing our literature is about, and the thing our arts will be obliged to express. Any man who makes the attempt to consider or interpret anything either in art or life without a true understanding of the crowd principle as it is working to-day, without a due sense of its central place in all that goes on around us, is a spectator in the blur and bewilderment of this modern world, as helpless in it, and as childish and superficial in it, as a Greek G.o.d at the World's Fair, gazing out of his still Olympian eyes at the Midway Pleasance.

After the Crowd Fear there comes to most of us the machine fear.

Machines are the huge limbs or tentacles of crowds. As the crowds grow the machines grow; grasping at the little strip of sky over us, at the little patch of ground beneath our feet, they swing out before us and beckon daily to us new h.e.l.ls and new heavens in our eyes.

CHAPTER III

THE MACHINE SCARE

I have had occasion nearly every day for the past two weeks to pa.s.s by an ancient churchyard on a great hillside not far from London. Most of the stones are very old, and seem to have been thoughtfully and reverently, flake by flake, wrought into their final form by long-vanished hands. As I stand and watch them, with the yews and cypresses flocking round them, it is as if in some sort of way they had been surely wrought by the hand of love, so full are they of grief and of joy, of devotion, of the very singing of the dead and of those who loved them.

When I walk on a little farther, and come to a small and new addition to the churchyard, and look about me at the stones, I find myself suddenly in quite a new company. So far as one could observe, looking at the gravestones in the new churchyard, the people who died there died rather thoughtlessly and mechanically, and as if n.o.body cared very much. Of course, when one thinks a little further, one knows that this cannot be true, and that the men and the women who gathered by these glib, trim, capable-looking modern tombstones were as full of love and tenderness and reverence before their dead as the others were--but the lines on the stones give no sign. One never stops to read an epitaph on one of them; one knows it would not be interesting, or really whisper to one the strange, happy, human things of another world--even of this world, that make the old tombstones such good company and so friendly to us. One gives a glance at the stone and pa.s.ses on. It was made by machinery, apparently; a machine might have designed it, a machine might have died and been buried under it. One looks beyond it at all the others like it--all the glib, competent-looking white stones. Were the silenced people all machines under them, all mechanical, all made to a pattern like their stones, like these strangely hard, brief tombstones standing here at their heads, summing up their lives before us curtly, heartlessly, on this gentle old hillside?

I wondered.

I looked back to the old eloquent cemetery that almost seemed to be breathing things, and looked once more at the new.

And as I stood and thought, they seemed to me to be two worlds--one the world the people all about me are always saying sadly is going by, and the other--well, the one we will have to have.

As I look off from the hilltop at the great sloping countryside about me, which stretches miles and miles, with its green fields, and bushy treetops, its red roofs, its banners of steam from twenty railways, its huge, grim, furious chimneys, its still, sleepy steeples, I also see two worlds, the same two worlds over again that I saw in the churchyard, except that they are all jumbled together--the complacent, capable, cut-out, homeless-looking houses, the little snuggled-down old ones with their happy trees about them and trails of cooking smoke. I see the same two worlds standing and facing each other before me whichever way I turn.

And when I slip out of the churchyard from those two little separate worlds of the dead, and move slowly down the long bustling village street, and look into the faces of the living, the same two worlds that were in the churchyard and on the hills seem to look at me out of the faces of the living too.

The faces go hurrying past me, worlds apart. Most people, I imagine, who read these pages must have noticed the people's faces in the streets nowadays--how they seem to have come out of separate worlds into the street a moment, and hurry past, and seem to be going back in a moment more to separate worlds.

There is hardly even a village footway left anywhere to-day where one cannot see these two worlds, or the spirit of these two worlds, flitting past one through the streets in people's faces, and nightly before our eyes, struggling with each other to possess, to swallow away into itself human souls, to master the fate of man upon the earth.

One of these is the World of the Hand-made; the other is the Machine-made World.

As day by day I watch these two worlds with all their people in them flocking past me, I have come to have certain momentary but recurrent resentments and attractions, unaccountable strong emotions; and when I try afterward to rationalize my emotions, as a man should, and give an account of them to myself, and get them ready to use and face my age with, and make myself strong and fit to live in an age, I find myself with a great task before me. And yet one must do it; one cannot live in an age strongly and fitly if one would rather be living in some other age, or if it is an age with two worlds in it and one cannot make up one's mind which is the world one wants and settle down quietly and live in it. Then a strange thing happens, and always happens the moment I begin to try to decide which of the two--the Hand-made World or the Machine-made World--I will choose. I find that in an odd, confused, groping, obstinate way I am bound to choose them both. In spite of all its ugly ways--a kind of vast indifference it has to me, to everybody, its magnificent heartlessness--I find I have come to take in the Machine-made World a kind of boundless, half-secret pride and joy, for a terrible and strange beauty there is in it. And then, too, even if I wanted to give it up, I could not: neither I nor any man, nor all the world combined, could unthink to-day a hundred years, fold up a hundred thousand miles of railway, tuck modern life all neatly up again in a little, old, snug, safe, lovable Hand-made World. There must be some way out, some connecting link between the Hand-made and the Machine-made. We have merely lost it for a moment.

Which way shall we turn? And so at last to the little Thing through which the whole world whispers to me on my desk, to the mighty railways that beckon past my door, to the airships that cannot be stilled, and to the rolling mills that will not be silenced, I turn at last! I turn to the Machines Themselves. Half-singing and half-cursing, I have faced them. There is some way in which they can answer and can be made to answer--can be made to give me and the men about me the kind of world we want. I try to a.n.a.lyze it and think it out. What is the thing, the real thing in the Hand-made World, that fills me with pride and joy, and that I cannot and will not give up? Is not the real thing that is in it something that can be or might be freed from it, exhaled from it, something that might be in some new form saved, made an atmosphere or a spirit and pa.s.sed on? And what is it in the new Machine-made World which, in spite of the splendid joy, a rough new, wild religion there is in it, keeps daily filling me as I go past machines with this contradictory obstinate dread of them? After a time I have made a little cleared s.p.a.ce in my mind, a little breathing room. It has come to me from thinking that what is beautiful in the Hand-made World perhaps is not these particular Hand-made things themselves at which I so delight, but the Hand-made spirit of the men who made them which the men put into the things. And perhaps what is full of death and fear in the Machine-made World is not the machines themselves, but the Machine-made spirit in which the men who run the machines have made the machines work. Perhaps the Hand-made spirit is pervasive, eternal. Perhaps it can escape like a spirit, and can live where it will live, and do what it will do, like a spirit, and possess the body that it wills to possess.

Perhaps the Hand-made spirit is still living around me to-day, and is not only living, but is living in a more unspeakable, unbounded body than any spirit has ever lived in before, and is to-day before our eyes, laying its huge iron fingers around our little earth, and holding the oceans in its hand, and brushing away mountains with a breath, until we have Man at last playing all night through the sky, with visions and airships and telescopes. His very words walk on the air with soft and unseen feet.

It is the Hand-made spirit that creates machines. The machines themselves are still the mighty children of the men who move and work in the Hand-made spirit; and the men who glory in them, the men who bring them forth, who think them out, and who create them, and who do the great and mighty things with them, are still the Hand-made men.

This leads us up to the question we are all asking ourselves every day.

"How can a machine-made world be run in the spirit of a hand-made world?" The particular form in which the question has been put, which is taken from "Inspired Millionaires" is as follows:

"The idea that there is something in a machine simply as a machine which makes it inherently unspiritual is based upon the experience of the world; but it is, after all, a rather amateur and juvenile world with machines as yet. Its ideas are in their first stages, and are based for the most part upon the world's experience with second-rate men, working in second-rate factories--men who have been bullied, and could be bullied, by the machines they worked with into being machines themselves. No one would think of denying that men who let machines get the better of them, either in their minds or their bodies, in any walk of life, grow unspiritual and mechanical. But it does not take a machine to make a machine out of a man. Anything will do it if the man will let it. Even the farmer who is out under the great free dome of heaven, and working in wonder every day of his life, grows like a clod if he buries his soul alive in the soil. But farming has been tried many thousands of years, and the other kind of farmer is known by everybody--the farmer who is master over the soil; who, instead of becoming an expression of the soil himself, makes the soil express him. The next thing that is going to happen is that every one is going to know the other kind of mechanic. It is cheerfully admitted that the kind of mechanic we largely have now, who allows himself to be a watcher of a machine, a turner-of-something for forty years, can hardly be cla.s.sed as vegetable life. He is not even organic matter except in a very small part of himself.

"But it is not the mechanical machine which makes the man unspiritual.

It is the mechanical man beside the machine. A master at a piano (which is a machine) makes it a spiritual thing; and a master at a printing-press, like William Morris, makes it a free and artistic and self-expressive thing."

I spent a day a little while ago in walking through a factory. I went past miles of machines--great gla.s.s roofs of sunshine over them--and looked in the faces of thousands of men. As I went through the machines I kept looking to and fro between the machines and the men who stood beside them, and sometimes I came back and looked again at the machines and the men beside them; and every machine, or nearly every machine, I saw (any one could see it in that factory) was making a man of somebody.

One could see the spirit of the man who invented the machine, and the spirit of the man who worked with it, and the spirit of the man who owned it and who placed it there with the man, all softly, powerfully running together. There were exceptions, and every now and then one came, of course, upon the man who seemed to be simply another and somewhat different contrivance or attachment to his machine--some part that had been left over and thought of last, and had not been done as well as the others; but the factory, taken as a whole, from the manager's offices and the great counting-room, and from the tall chimneys to the dump, seemed to me to have something fresh and human and unwonted about it. It seemed to be a factory that had a look, a look of its own. It was like a vast countenance. It had features, an expression.

It had an air--well, one must say it, of course, if one is driven to it: the factory had a soul, and was humming it. Any one could have seen why by going into his office and talking a little while with the owner, or by even not talking to him--by seeing him look up from his desk. After walking through several miles of his personality, and up and down and down and up the corridors of his mind, one did not really need to meet him except as a matter of form and as a finishing touch. One had been visiting with him all along: to look in his face was merely to sum it up, to see it all, the whole place, over again in one look. One did not need to be surprised; one might have known what such a man would be like--that such a factory could only be conceived and wrought by a man of genius, a kind of lighted-up man. A man who had put not only skylights in his buildings, but skylights in his men, would have to have a skylight in himself (a skylight with a motor attachment, of course).

If one were to try to think in nature or in art of something that would be like him--well, some kind of transcendental engine, I should say, running softly, smoothly outdoors in a great sunshine, would have given one a good idea of him. But, however this may be, it certainly would have been quite impossible to go through his factory and ever say again that machines do not and could not have souls, or at least over-souls, and that men who worked with machines did not and could not have souls as fast as they were allowed to.

A few days later I went through another factory, and I came out weary and spent at night, feeling as unreasonable and almost as hateful about machines, and as discouraged about the people who had to work with them as John Ruskin did in those first early days when the Factory Chimney first lifted its long black flag upon our earth, and bullied great cities into cowards and slaves, and all the great, quiet-hearted nations, and began making for us--all around us, before our eyes, as though in a kind of jeer at us, and at our queer, pretty, helpless little religions--the h.e.l.l we had ceased to believe in.

The h.e.l.l is here, and is going to be here apparently as long as may be necessary for us to see it and believe in it once more. If a h.e.l.l on our own premises, shut down hard over our lives here and now, is what is necessary to make us religious and human once more, if we are reduced to it, and if having a hard, literal h.e.l.l--one of our own--is our only way of seeing things, of fighting our way through to the truth, and of getting once more decisive, manful, commanding ideas of good and evil, I for one can only be glad we have Pittsburgs and Sheffields to hurry us along and soon have it over with.

But while, like Ruskin, any one can look about the machines and see h.e.l.l, he can see h.e.l.l to-day, unlike Ruskin, with heaven lined up close beside it. The machines have come to have souls. The machines we can see all about us have taken sides. We can all of us see the machines about us to-day like vast looms, weaving in and weaving out the fate of the world, the fate of the churches, the fate of the women and the little children, and the very fate of G.o.d; and everything about us we can see turning at last on what we are doing with the machines that are about us, and what we are letting our machines do with us.

It has cleared my mind, and at least helped me to live side by side with machines better from day to day, to consider what these two souls or spirits in the machines are, and what they are doing and likely to do.

If one knows them and one sees them, and sees how they are working, it is easier to take sides and join in and help.

It would seem to me that there are two spirits in machinery--the spirit of weariness, weakness, of inventing ways of getting out of work; and there is the spirit in the machines, too, of moving mountains, conquering the sea and air, of working harder and lifting one's work over to more heroic, to more splendid and difficult, and almost impossible things. It is these two spirits that are fighting for the possession and control of our machine civilization. I watch the machines and the men beside them and see which side they are on. The labourer who is doing as little work as he dares for his wages and the capitalist who is giving as little service as he dares for his money are on the one side (the vast, lazy, mean majority of employers and employees), and there may be seen standing on the other side against them, battling for our world, another small but mighty group made up of the labourer who loves his work more than his wages, and the capitalist who loves the thing he makes more than the profit. In other words, the fate of our modern civilization, with all its marvellous machines on it, its art galleries and its churches, is all hanging to-day on the battle between the spirit of achievement, the spirit of creating things, and the spirit of weariness or the spirit of thinking of ways of getting out of things.