Crowds Part 70

By a Crowd-Man I do not mean a pull-and-haul man, a balance of equilibrium between these two men, I mean a fusion, a glowed together interpenetration of them both. They did not either of them believe in the people as much as a man made out of both of them would--a really wrought-through aristocrat, a really wrought-through democrat or Crowd-Man, or Hero or Saviour.

I am afraid that some of us do not like the word Saviour as people think we ought to. There seems to be something about the way many people use the word Saviour which makes it seem as if it had been dropped off over the edge of the world--of a real world, of a man's world.

I do not believe that Christ spent five minutes in His whole life in feeling like a Saviour. He would have felt hurt if He had found any one saying He was a Saviour in the tone people often use. He wanted people to feel as if they were like Him. And the way He served them was by making them feel that they were.

I do not believe that Thomas Jefferson, if he were here to-day, would object to a hero, or aristocrat, a special expert or a genius in expressing crowds, if he lived and wrought in this spirit.

The final objection that people commonly make to heroes or to men of marked and special vision or courage is that they are not good for people, because people put them on pedestals and worship them. They look up at them wistfully. And then they look down on themselves.

But I have never seen a hero on a pedestal.

It is only the Carlyle kind of hero who could ever be put on a pedestal, or who would stay there if put there.

And Carlyle--with all honour be it said--never quite knew what a hero was. A hero is either a gentleman, or a philosopher, or an inventor.

The gentleman--on a pedestal--feels hurt and slips down.

The philosopher laughs.

The inventor thinks up some way of having somebody else get up so that it will not really be a pedestal at all.

I agree with all the socialists' objections to heroes, if they mean by a hero the kind of man that Thomas Carlyle, with all his little glorious h.e.l.ls, all his little cold, lonesome, select heavens, his thunderclub view of life, and his Old Testament imagination, called a hero. There is always something a little strained and compet.i.tive about Carlyle's heroes as he conceives them except possibly one or two.

Being a hero with Carlyle consisted in conquering and displacing other heroes. Even if you were a poet, being a hero consisted in a kind of spiritual standing on some other poet's neck. According to Carlyle, one must always be a hero against other men. Modern heroism consists in being a hero with other men. The hero Against comes in the Twentieth Century to be the hero With, and the modern hero is known, not by cutting his enemies down, but by his absorbing and understanding them.

He drinks up what they wish they could do into what he does, or he states what they believe better than they can state it. Combination or cooperation is the tremendous heroism of our present life.

I admit that I would be afraid of Carlyle's heroes having pedestals.

They have already--many of them--done a good deal of harm because they have had pedestals, and because they would not get down from them.

But mine would.

With a man who is being a hero by cooperation, getting down is part of the heroism. And there is never any real danger in allowing a pedestal for a real hero. He never has time to sit on it.

One sees him always over and over again kicking his pedestal out from under him and using it to batter a world with. As the world does not take to enjoying its heroes' pedestals in this way, a pedestal is quite safe. Most people feel the same about a hero's halo. They prefer to have him wear it like a kind of glare around his head, and if he uses it as a searchlight upon them, if he makes his halo really practical and lights up the world a little around him instead, he is not likely to be spoiled, is almost always safe from any danger of having any more halo crowded upon him than he wants, or than anybody wants him to have. One might put it down as a motto for heroes, "Keep your halo busy and it won't hurt you." Modern democracy will never have a chance of being what it wants to be as long as it keeps on throwing away great natural forces like halos and pedestals. There is no reason why we should not believe in halos and pedestals, not to wear or stand on, but when used strictly for b.u.t.ting and seeing purposes.

We may know a real hero by the fact that we always have to keep rediscovering him. One knows the real hero by the fact that in his relation to people who put him on a pedestal he is always kicking his pedestal away and subst.i.tuting his vision.

There is something about any real heroism that we see to-day which makes heroes out of the people who see it, A real hero has his back to the people and the crowd looks over his shoulders with him at his work and he feels behind him daily, with joy and strength, thousands of heroes pressing up to take his place. And he is daily happy with a strange, mighty, impersonal joy in all these other people who could do it, too.

He lives with a great hurrah for the world in his heart. The hero he worships is the hero he sees in others. A man like this would feel cramped if he were merely being himself, or if he were being imprisoned by the people in his own glory, or were being cooped up into a hero.

It is in this sense that I have finally come again to believe that hero worship is safe, that in some form as one of the great elemental energies in human nature it must be saved, that it must be regulated and used, that it has an incalculable power which was meant to be turned on to run a nation with.

And I believe that Thomas Jefferson, confronted in this desperate, sublime 1913, with the new socialized spirit of our time, placed face to face at last with a Christian aristocrat or Crowd-Man, would want him saved and emphasized too.

It is because in democracies saviours are being kept by crowds and by millionaires and by machines very largely in the position of hired men, or of ordered about men, that ninety-nine one-hundredths of the saving or of the man-inventing and man-freeing in crowds, is not being attended to.

I have wanted to suggest in this book that the moment the Saviours in any nation will organize quietly and save themselves first, the less difficult thing (with men to attend to it) like saving the rest of us, will be a mere matter of detail.

The only thing that stands in the way is the Thomas Jefferson bug-a-boo.

People seem to have a kind of left-over fear that the moment these saviours or experts or inventors or heroes, call them what you will, get the chance that they have been working to get to save us, they will not want to use it.

It does not seem to me that anything will be allowed to interfere with it--with their saving us, or making detailed arrangements for our saving ourselves.

Being a great man (if as democracies seem to think being a great man is a disease) is at least a self-limiting disease. Inventors when they get their first chance are going to save us, because they could not endure living with us unless we were saved.

Inventors could not enjoy inventing--inventing their greater, more n.o.ble inventions, until they had attended to a little rudimentary thing in the world like having people half alive on it to live with and to invent for.

It does not interest a really inspired man--inventing flying machines for people who have not time to notice the sky, wireless telegraph for people who have nothing to say, symphonies for tone-deaf crowds, or ambrosia for people who prefer potatoes.

This is the whole issue in a nutsh.e.l.l. When people say that our inventors, or Crowd-Men or saviours, when they have fulfilled or saved themselves, cannot be trusted to save us, the reply that will have to be made is that only people who do not know how inventors feel or how they are made or what it is in them that drives them to do things, or how they do them, will be afraid to let men who give us worlds and who express worlds for us and who make us express ourselves in worlds the freedom to help shape them and run them.

Men who have the automatic courage, the helpless bigness and disinterestedness that always goes with invention, with creative power, can be trusted by crowds.

The prejudice against the hero is due to the fact that heroes in days gone by have been by a very large majority fighters, expressing themselves against the world, or expressing one part of the world against another.

The moment the hero becomes the artist and begins expressing himself and expressing the crowd together, the crowd will no longer be touched with fear and driven back upon itself by the Thomas Jefferson bug-a-boo.

EPILOGUE

France is threatened by her childless women, Germany by her machines, Russia is beginning the Nineteenth Century. It is to England and America, struggling still sublimely with their sins, the nations look--for the time being--for the next big free lift upon the world.

Looked at in the large, in their historic import and their effect on the time, the English temperament and the American temperament are essentially the same. As between ourselves, England and America are apt to seem different, but as between us and the world, we blend together.

One could go through in what I have been saying about Oxford Street and the House of Commons in this book, strike out all after Oxford Street and read Broadway, and all after the House of Commons and read Congress, and it would be essentially true with the necessary English or American modulation. In the same way it would be possible to go through and strike out all after the President and read Prime Minister or the Government.

England and America have the individualistic temperament, and if we cannot make a self-expressive individualism n.o.ble, and if we are not men enough to sing up our individualism into the social and the universal, we perish.

It is our native way. We are to be crowdmen or n.o.bodies.

The English temperament or the American temperament, whichever we may call it, is the same tune, but played with a different and almost contrasting expression.

England is being played gravely and ma.s.sively like a violoncello, and America--played more lightly, is full of the sweeps and the lulls, the ecstasy, the overriding glory of the violins.

But it is the same tune, and G.o.d helping us, we will not and we shall not be overwhelmed under the great dome of the world, by Germany with all her faithful pianolas, or by France with her cold sweet flutes, or by Russia with her shrieks and her pauses, pounding her splendid kettledrums in that awful silence!

Our song is ours--England and America, the 'cello, and the bright violins!

And no one shall sing it for us.

And no one shall keep us from singing it.

The skysc.r.a.pers are singing, "I will, I will!" to G.o.d, and Manchester and London and Port Sunlight are singing, "I will, I will!" to G.o.d. I have heard even Westminister Abbey and York--those beautiful old fellows--altering, "I will, I will!" to G.o.d!

And I have seen, as I was going by, Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street repenting her sins and holding noonday prayer meetings for millionaires.