Crowds Part 30

I was spending a little time not long ago with a man of singularly devoted and n.o.ble spirit who had dedicated his life and his fortune to the Socialist movement. We had had several talks before, and always with a little flurry at first of hopefulness toward one another's ideas. We both felt that the other, for a mere Socialist or for a mere Individualist, was really rather reasonable. We admitted great tracts of things to one another, and we always felt as if by this one next argument, perchance, or by one further ill.u.s.tration, we would convince the other and rescue him like a brand from the burning.

The last time I saw him he started in at once at the station as we climbed up into the car by telling me what he was doing. He was studying up the heroes of the American Revolution, and was writing something to show that they were not really heroes after all. All manner of things were the matter with them. They had always troubled him, he said. He knew there was something wrong, and he was glad to have the matter settled. He said he did not, and never had believed in heroes, and thought they did a great deal of harm--even dead ones. Heroes, he said, always deceived the people. They kept people from seeing that nothing could be done in our modern society by any one man. Only crowds could do things, he intimated--each man, like one little wave on the world, wavering up to the sh.o.r.e and dying away.

As the evening wore on our conversation became more concrete, and I began to drag in, of course, every now and then, naturally, an inspired or semi-inspired millionaire or so.

I cannot say that these gentlemen were received with enthusiasm.

Finally, I turned on him. "What is it that makes you so angry (and nearly all the Socialists) every time you hear something good, something you cannot deny is good, about a successful business man? If I brought a row of inspired millionaires, say ten or twelve of them one after the other, into your library this minute, you would get hotter and hotter with every one, wouldn't you? You would scarcely speak to me."

---- intimated that he was afraid I was deceived; he was afraid that I was going about deceiving other people about its being possible for mere individual men to be good; he was afraid I was doing a great deal of damage.

He then confided to me that not so very long ago he dropped in one Monday morning into his guest-chamber just after his guest had gone and found a copy of "Inspired Millionaires," which his guest had obviously been reading over Sunday, lying on the little reading-table at the head of the bed.

He said that he took the book back to his library, took out two or three encyclopaedias from the shelf in the corner, put my inspired millionaires in behind them, put the encyclopaedias back, and that they had been there to this day.

With this very generous and kindly introduction we went on to a frank talk on the general att.i.tude of Socialists toward the instinct of hero-worship in human nature.

A Socialist had said only a few days before, speaking of a certain munic.i.p.al movement in which the people were interested, that he thought it really had a very good chance to succeed "if only the heroes could be staved off a little longer." He deprecated the almost incurable idea people seemed to have that nothing could ever be done in this world without being all mixed up with heroes.

My mind kept recurring in a perplexed way to this remark for a few days after I had heard it, and I soon came on the following letter from a prominent Socialist which had been read at a dinner the night before:

"I am glad to join with others of my comrades in conveying greetings to Comrade Cahan on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his birth and in recognition of the eminent services that he has rendered in the Socialist movement.

"Yet my gladness is not untinged with a certain note of apprehension lest in expressing so conspicuously our esteem of an honoured comrade we obscure the broader scene which, if equally illumined, would disclose tens of thousands of other comrades, labouring with equal devotion, and each no less worthy of praise....

"In our rejoicing over the services of Comrade Cahan let us not forget that the facilities that he and that each of us enjoy are the products of thousands of other men and women, and sometimes of children too.

"In our rejoicing let us recall that we cannot safely a.s.sume that any comrade's services to the movement have been greater than the movement's services to him; that we are but fellow-workers together, deriving help and perhaps inspiration one from another and each from all.

"In our rejoicing let us place the emphasis rather upon the services of the many to each, than upon the services of any one of the many."

I have not quoted from this letter because I disagree with the idea in it. I am ready to admit that though the idea is a somewhat dampening one perhaps for a banquet, that it is true and important.

What I object to in the letter is the Fear in it.

In spite of the fineness and truth of the motive that lies, I know, underneath every line, the letter is baleful, sinister, and weary.

I accuse the letter of being, in a kind of n.o.bly sick way, visionary, unpractical, and socially destructive.

I would heartily agree with the writer of the letter about the quality of many heroes, possibly about most heroes. I would agree in a large measure that the heroes the crowds choose are the wrong ones.

But there is a great difference between his belief and mine as to our practical working policy in getting the things for crowds that we both want for them. It seems to me that he does not believe in crowds. He is filled with fear that they would select the wrong heroes. He says they must not have heroes, or must be allowed as few as possible.

I believe in crowds, and I believe that the more they have the hero-habit, the more heroes they have to compare and select from, the finer, longer, and truer heroes they will select, the more deeply, truly, and concretely the crowds will think, and the more n.o.bly they will express themselves.

But the great argument for the hero as a social method is that the crowd in a clumsy, wistful way, deep down in its heart, in the long run, loves the beautiful. Appealing to the crowd's ideal of the beautiful in conduct, its sense of the heroic, or semi-heroic, is the only practical, hard-headed understanding way of getting out of the crowd, for the crowd, what the crowd wants.

I saw the other day in Boston several thousand schoolboys in the street keeping step. It was a band that held them together. A band is a practical thing.

Is it not about time, in our dreary, drab, listless procession of economics, stringing helplessly across the world, that we have a band of music? What economics needs now is a march.

We have to-day a thousand men who can tell people what to do where we have one who can touch the music, the dance, the hurrah, the cry, the worship in them, and make them want to do something. The hero is the man who makes people want to do something, and strangely and subtly, all through the blood, while they watch him, he makes them believe they can.

It is socially destructive to throw away the overpowering instinct of human nature which we have called hero-worship.

CHAPTER II

THE CROWD AND THE HERO

But it is not only socially destructive. It is dumb and helpless for crowds to try to get on without heroes. Big events and big men are crowd expressions. Heroes, World Fairs, and t.i.tanic disasters are crowd words, the crowd's way of seeing and saying things.

Crowds think in great men, or they think in simple, big, broadly drawn events, or words of one syllable, like coal strikes.

A whole world works through to an entirely new idea, the idea that England is not necessarily impregnable, in the Boer war. And we see England, by way of South Africa, searching her own heart. The Meat Trust, by raising prices for a few trial weeks, makes half a nation think its way over into vegetarianism or semi-vegetarianism.

In the American war with Spain modern thought attacked the last pathetic citadel in modern life of polite illusion, of lie-poetry, and in that one little flash of war between the Spain spirit and the American spirit, in our modern world, the nations got their final and conclusive sense of what the Spanish civilization really was, of the old Don Quixote thinking, of the delightful, brave, courtly blindness, of the world's last stronghold of pomposity, of vague, empty prettiness, of talking grand and shooting crooked.

j.a.pan and Russia fight with guns, but the real fight is not between their guns, but between two great national conceptions of human life.

Like two vast national searchlights we saw them turned on each other, two huge, grim, naked civilizations, and now in an awful light and roar, and now in stately sudden silence, while we all looked on, all breathless and concentrated, we saw them, as on some strange vast stage of the world, all lit up, exposed, penetrated by the minds of men forever. While they fought before us we saw the last two thousand years flash up once more and fade away, and then the next two thousand years on its slide, with one click before our faces was fastened into place.

Men see great spiritual conceptions or ideals for a world when the great ideals are dramatized, when they stalk out before us, are acted out before our eyes by mighty nations. Before the stage we sit silently and think and watch the ideals of a world, the souls of the nations struggling together, and as we watch we discover our souls for ourselves, we define our ideals for ourselves. We make up our minds. We see what we want. We begin to live.

I have come to believe that the hero, in the same way, is the common man's desire and prayer writ large. It is his way of keeping it refreshed before him so that he sees it, recalls it, suns himself in it, lifts up his life to it, every day.

CHAPTER III

THE CROWD AND THE AVERAGE PERSON

To state still further my difference with the typical Socialist point of view, as expressed in the letter from which I have quoted, I am obliged to confess that I not only believe in having heroes on behalf of crowds, but in having as a regular method of democracy little crowds of heroes, or an aristocracy. In other words, I am a democrat. I believe that crowds can produce, and are bound to produce by a natural crowd-process, a real aristocracy--an aristocracy which will be truly aristocratic and n.o.ble in spirit and action, and which will express the best ideas in the best way that a crowd can have.

The main business of a democracy is to find out which these people are in it and put them where they will represent it. The trouble seems to have been in democracies so far, that we find out who these people are a generation too late. The great and rare moments of history have been those in which we have found out who they were in time, as when we found in America Abraham Lincoln, an unaristocratic-looking and ungainly man, and saw suddenly that he was the first gentleman in the United States.

The next great task of democracy is to determine the best means it can of finding out who its aristocrats are, its all-men, and determining who they are in time, men who have vision, courage, individuality, imagination enough to face real things, and to know real people, and to put real things and real people together.

It is what an aristocracy in a democratic form of government is for, to furnish imagination to crowds. A real aristocracy is the only clear-headed, practical means a great nation can have of distributing, cla.s.sifying, and digesting and evoking hordes of men and women. People do not have imagination in hordes, and imagination is latent and unorganized in ma.s.ses of people. The crowd problem is the problem of having leaders who can fertilize the imagination and organize the will of crowds. Nothing but worship or great desire has ever been able to focus a crowd, and only the great man, rich and various in his elements, abounding, great as the crowd is great, can ever hope to do it.

Every man in a crowd knows that he is or is in danger of being a mere Me-man, or a mere cla.s.s-man, and he knows that his neighbour is, and he wishes to be in a world that is saved from his own mere me-ness and his own mere cla.s.sness. His hero-worship is his way of worshipping his larger self. He communes with his possible or completed self, his self of the best moments in the official great man or crowd man.

The average man in a crowd does not want to be an average man, and the last thing he wants is to have an average man to represent him. He wants a man to represent him as he would like to be.