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Contents |
BOOK THREE
LETTING THE CROWD BE BEAUTIFUL
CHAPTER IV
PAPER BOOKS, MARBLE PILLARS, AND WOODEN
BOYS
I HAVE sometimes wished that Mr. Carnegie would post
the following sign up on his Libraries, on the outside where
people are passing, and on the inside in the room where peo-
ple sit and think:
A Million Dollars Reward.
Wanted, a great living American author for my libraries in
the United States. At present our great author in America
appears to have been lost or mislaid; any one finding him, or any
one that might do for him temporarily, please communicate with
me.
Andrew Carnegie.
Mr. Carnegie's Libraries must be a source of constant
regret to the author of "Triumphant Democracy." They are
generally made up of books written in the Old World. It
would be interesting to know what are the real reasons great
Libraries are not being written for Mr. Carnegie in America,
and what there is that Mr. Carnegie or other people can
do about it. They are certainly going to be written in Amer-
ica some time, and certainly, unless the best and greatest
part of the Carnegie Library of the future is to be the Amer-
ican part of it, the best our Carnegie Libraries will do for
America will be to remind us of what we are not. Unless
we can make the American part of Mr. Carnegie's Libraries
loom in the world as big as Mr. Carnegie's chimneys, Amer-
ica—which is the last newest experiment station of the
world—is a failure.
It has occurred to me to try to express, for what it may [222]
be worth, a point of view toward Triumphant Democracy
Mr. Carnegie may have inadvertently overlooked.
If Mr. Carnegie would establish in every town where he
has put a Library, by endowment or otherwise, a Commis-
sion, or what might be called perhaps a Searching Party,
in that community, made up of men of inventive and creative
temperament, who instinctively know this temperament
in others—men in all specialities, in all walks of life, who
are doing things better than anyone wants to pay them to
do them—and if Mr. Carnegie would set these men to
work, in one way and another, looking up boys who are like
them, boys about the town, who are doing things better
than anyone wants to pay them to do them—he would
soon get a monopoly of the idealism of the world; he would
collect in thirty-five years, or in one generation, an array
of living great men, of national figures, men who would be
monuments to Andrew Carnegie, as compared with which
his present libraries, big, thoughtless, innumerable, hum-
drum, sogging down into the past, would be as nothing. Mr.
Carnegie has given forty libraries to New York; and I venture
to say that there is at this very moment, running round the
streets of the great city, one single boy, who has it in him
to conceive, to imagine, and hammer together a new world;
and if Mr. Carnegie would invest his fortune, not in build-
ings or in books, but in buying brains enough to find that
boy, and if the whole city of New York were to devote itself
for one hour every day for years to searching about and find-
ing that boy, to seeing just which he is, to going over all the
other boys five hours a day to pick him out, it would be—
well, all I can say is, all those forty libraries of Mr. Car-
negie's, those great proud buildings, would do well if they
did not do one thing for six years but find that boy!
There is a boy at this very moment with strings and marbles
and a nation in his pocket, a system of railroads—a boy
with a national cure for tuberculosis, with sun-engines for [223]
everybody—there is a boy with cathedrals in him too, no
doubt or some boy like young Pinchot, with mountainsful
of forests in his heart.
This is what Mr. Carnegie himself would like to do, but
with his big, stiff, clumsy libraries trailing their huge, sense-
less brick-and-mortar bodies, their white pillars and things,
about the country, unmanned, inert, eyeless, all those great
gates and forts of knowledge, Coliseums of paper, and with
the mechanical people behind the counters, the policemen
of the books, all standing about protecting them—with
all this formidable array, how can such a boy be hunted out
or drawn in, or how would he dare go tramping in through
the great gates and hunting about for himself? He could
only be hunted out by people all wrought through with human
experience, men and women who would give the world to
find him, who are on the daily lookout for such a boy—
by some special kind of eager librarian, or by disguised teach-
ers, anonymous poets, or by diviners, by expert geniuses
in boys. If Mr. Carnegie could go about and look up and
buy up wherever he went these men who have this boy-genius
in them, deliver them from empty, helpless, mere getting-a-
living lives; and if he could set these men, and set them about
thickly, among the books in his libraries—those huge an-
atomies and bones of knowledge he has established every-
where, all his great literary steel-works—men would soon
begin to be discovered, to be created, to be built in libraries
. . but as it is now. . . .
Gentle Reader, have you ever stood in front of one of them,
looked up at the windows, thought of all those great tiers,
those moulds and blocks of learning on the shelves; and
have you never watched the weary people that dribble in
from the streets and wander coldly about, or sit down list-
less in them—in those mighty, silent empires of the past?
Have you never thought that somewhere all about them,
somewhere in this same library, there must be some white, [224]
silent, sunny country of the future, full of children and of
singing, full of something very different from these iron walls
of wisdom? And have you never thought what it would
mean if Mr. Carnegie would spend his money on search parties
for people among the books, or what it would mean if the
entire library, if all the books in it, became, as it were, wired
throughout with live, splendid, delighted men and women,
to make connections, to establish the current between the
people and the books, to discover the people one by one and
follow them to their homes, and follow them in their lives,
and take out the latent geniuses, and the listless engineers
and poets, and the Kossuths, Caesars, the Florence Nightin-
gales . . . ?
It is only by employing forces that can be made extremely
small, invisible, personal, penetrating, and spiritual, that
this sort of work can be done. It must be delicate and won-
derful workmanship, like the magnet, like the mighty thistle-
down in the wind, like electricity, like love, like hope—
sheer, happy, warm human vision going about and casting
itself, casting all its still and tiny might, its boundless seed,
upon the earth: but it would pay.
The same people too, specialists in detecting and develop-
ing inventors, could be supplied also to all other possible
callings. They would constitute a universal profession,
penetrating all the others. They would go hunting among
foremen and in machine shops for the misplaced geniuses,
tried by wrong standards, underpaid for having other gifts.
They would keep a lookout through all the schools and col-
leges, looking over the shoulders of scolding teachers and
absent professors. They would go about studying the play-
grounds and mastering the streets.
We do not a little for the Submerged Tenth and the sons
of the poor, and we have schools or missions for the sons
of the rich, but one of the things we need next to-day is that
something should be done for the sons of the great neglected [225]
respectable classes. Far more important than one more
library—say in Denver, for instance—would be a Denver
Bureau of Investigation, to be appointed, of high-priced,
spirited men, of expert humanists, to study difficulties, and
devise methods and missions for putting all society in Denver
through filters or placers, and finding out the rich human
ore, finding out where everybody really belonged, and what
all the clever misplaced people were really for. Of course
it would take money to do all this, and flocks of free people
who are doing the work they love. But it is not book-racks,
nor paper, nor ink, nor stone steps, nor white pillars—it
is free men and free women America and England are ask-
ing of their Andrew Carnegies to-day.
Mr. Carnegie has not touched this human problem in his
libraries. If Society were fitted up all through with electric
connections, men with a genius for discovering continents
in people, Columbuses, boy-geniuses; and if there were es-
tablished everywhere a current between every boy and the
great world, this would be something on which Mr. Carnegie
could make a great beginning with the little mite of his for-
tune. If we were to have even one city fitted up in this way,
it would be hard to say how much it would mean—one city
with enough people in it who were free to do beautiful things,
free to be curious about the others, free to follow clues of
greatness, free to go up the streams of Society to the still,
faint little springs and beginnings of things. It would soon
be a memorable city. A world would watch it, and other
cities would grope toward it. Instead of this we have these
big, hollow, unmanned libraries of Mr. Carnegie's every-
where, with no people practically to go with them, no great
hive of happy living men and women in and out all day cross-
fertilizing boys and books.
There seems to be something unfinished and stolid and
brutal about a Carnegie Library now. The spirit of the
garden and the sea, of the spring and the light, and of the [226]
child, is not in it. They have come to seem to some of us
mere huge Pittsburgs of brains—all these impervious, un-
wieldy, rolling-mills of knowledge. I should think it would
be a terrible prospect to grow old with, just to sit and see
them flocking across the country from your window, all these
huge smoke-stacks of books in their weary, sordid cities;
and the boys who might be great men, the small Lincolns
with nations in their pockets, the little Bells with worlds
in their ears, the Pinchots with their forests, the McAdoos
and Roosevelts, the young Carnegies and Marconis in the
streets!
CHAPTER V
THE HUMDRUM FACTORY AND THE TUMTY-TUM
THEATRE
MR. ISRAEL ZANGWILL in presiding at the meeting
of the Sociological Society the other night remarked, in re-
ferring to inspired millionaires, that as a rule in the minds
of most people nowadays a millionaire seemed to be a kind
of broken-off person, or possibly two persons. There always
seemed to have to be a violent change in a millionaire some-
where along the middle of his life. The change seemed to
be associated in some way, Mr. Zangwill thought with his
money. He reminded one of the patent-medicine adver-
tisements, "Before and After Taking."
I have been trying to think why it is that the average mil-
lionaire reminds people—as Mr. Zangwill says he does—
of a patent-medicine advertisement, "Before and After Taking."
I have thought, since Mr. Zangwill made this remark,
of getting together a small collection of pictures of million-
aires—two pictures of each, one before and the other after
taking—and having them mounted in the most approved
patent-medicine style, and taking them down to Far End
and asking Mr. Zangwill to look them over with me and see
if he thought—he, Israel Zangwill, the novelist, the play-
wright, the psychologist—really thought, that millionaires
"Before and After" were as different as they looked.
I imagine he would say—and practically without looking
at the pictures—that of course to him or to me perhaps,
or to any especially interested student of human nature,
I millionaires are not really different at all "Before and After
Taking"; that they merely had a slightly different outer [228]
look. They would merely look different, Mr. Zangwill would
say, to the common run or majority of people—the people
one meets in the streets.
But would they?
One of the most hopeful things that I have been thinking
of lately is that the people—the ordinary people one meets
in the streets—are beginning quite generally to see through
their millionaires, and to see that their money almost never
really cures them. Most very rich men, indeed, are hav-
ing their times now, of even seeing through themselves; and
it brings me up abruptly with a shock to think that the or-
dinary people who pass in the streets would be deceived by
these simple little pictures Before and After. They have
been deceived until lately, but are they being deceived now?
I would like to see the matter tested, and I have thought
it would be a good idea to take my small collection of pict-
ures of millionaires—two pictures of each, one Before and
the other After Taking—to a millionaire—of course some
really reformed or cured one—and ask him to pay the
necessary expenses in the columns of the Times, and of the
Westminister Gazette, and the Daily Chronicle, and other rep-
resentative London journals (all on the same morning), of
having the pictures published. We could then take what
might be called a social, human, economic inventory of
London: ask people to send in their honest opinions, on look-
ing at the pictures, as to whether Money, Before and After
Taking, does or does not produce these remarkable cures
in millionaires. I very much doubt if Mr. Zangwill would
be found to be right in his estimate of our common people
to-day.
I venture to believe that it is precisely because our common
people are seeing that millionaires are not changed Before
and After Taking that the majority of the millionaires we
have to-day have come to be looked upon as one of the charges
—one of the great spiritual charges and burdens modern [229]
Society has to carry.
Society has always had to do what it could for the poor,
but in our modern civilization, in a new and big sense, we
have to see now what there is, if possibly anything, that can
be done for the rich.
We have come to have them now almost everywhere about
us—these great spiritual orphans, with their pathetic, blind,
useless fortunes piled up around them; and Society has to
support them, to keep them up morally, keep them doing
as little damage as possible, and has to allow day by day
besides for the strain and structural weakness they bring
upon the girders of the world—the faith of men in men,
and the credit of God, which alone can hold a world together.
It is not denied that the average millionaire, when he has
made his money, does different-looking things, and gathers
different-looking objects about him, and is seen in different-
looking places. And it is not denied that he changes in more
important particulars than things. He quite often changes
people, the people he is seen with but he never or almost
never changes himself. He is not one man when he is put-
ting money into his pocket and another when, he is taking
it out.
We keep hoping at first with each new mere millionaire
that when he gets all the money he has wanted it will change
him; but we find it almost never does.
Merely reversing the motion with a pocket does not make
a man a new and beautiful creature, and one soon sees that
the typical millionaire is governed by the same bargain prin-
ciples, is bullied and domineered over by the same personal
limitations, the same old something-for-nothing habits. If
he had the habit, while getting money out of people, of get-
ting the better of them, he still insists on getting the better
of people when he gives it to them or to their causes. He
takes it out of their souls. There never has been a million-
aire who runs his business on the old humdrum principle [230]
of merely making all the money he can who does not run
his very philanthropies afterward on the same general prin-
ciple of oppressing everybody, of outwitting everybody—
and of doing people good in a way that makes them wish
they were dead. Philanthropy as a philosophy, and even
as an institution, is getting to be nearly futile to-day, for
the reason that millionaires—valid, authentic cases of mil-
lionaires who are really cured—who are changed either
in their motives or their methods with regard to what they
do with money, except in rare cases, do not exist.
The New Theatre in New York, which was started as a
kind of Polar Expedition to discover and rescue Dramatic
Art in America, failed because two hundred and forty mil-
lionaires tried to help it. If enough millionaires could have
been staved off from that enterprise, or if it could have been
taken in hand either by fewer or more select millionaires
cooperating with the public and with artists of all classes,
New Theatre of New York would not have been obliged,
as it has been since, to start all over again on a new
basis. The blunders in creative public work that men who
get rich in the wrong way are always sure to make had to
be made first. They nearly always have to be made first.
There is hardly a single enterprise of higher social value in
which the world is interested to-day which is not being gravely
threatened in efficient service by letting in too many mil-
lionaires, and by paying too much attention to what they
think. If our people were generally alive to the terrific same-
ness and monotony of a millionaire's life "before and after,"
and if millionaires were looked over discriminatingly before
being allowed to take part in great public enterprises like the
cinema, for instance, the newspapers, the hospitals, the theatres,
there is hardly any limit to the new things that public en-
terprises would begin to make happen in the world, and the
new men that would begin to function in them.
Of course, if what a great vision for the people—i.e., a [281]
public enterprise is for, is to make money, it would be
different. The mere millionaire might understand, and his
understanding might help. But if an institution is founded
(like a great theatre) to be a superb and noble master-
piece of understanding and changing human nature; if
it is founded to be a creative and dominating influence, to
build up the ideals and fire the enthusiasm of a city, to lay
the foundations of the daily thoughts and the daily motives
of a great people, the mere millionaire finds, if he tries
to manage it, that he is getting in beyond his depth.
A man who has made his money by exploiting and tak-
ing advantage of the public can only be expected, in
conducting a Theatre, to be an authority on how to ex-
ploit a public and take advantage of it still more, and how
to make it go to the play that merely looks like the play
that it wants.
Millionaires as a class, unless they are men who have made
their money in the artist's or the inventor's spirit, really
ought to be expected by this time, except in the size of their
cheques, to be modest and thoughtful, to stand back a little
and watch other people. The millionaires themselves, if
they thought about it, would be the first to advise us not
to pay too much attention to them. They are used to large
things, and they know that the only way to do, in conduct-
ing great enterprises, is to select and use men (whether mil-
lionaires or not) for the particular efficiencies they have de-
veloped. If we are conducting what is called a charity, we
will not expect that a millionaire can do good things unless
he is a good man. He spoils them by picking out the wrong
people. And we will not expect him to do artistic things
unless he has lived his life and done his business in the spirit
and the temperament of the artist. He will not know which
the artists are or what the artists are like inside; and he will
not like them and. they will not like him, nor will they be
interested in him or interested in working with him. Every- [232]
thing that artists or men of creative temperament try to do
with the common run of millionaires—all these huge, blind,
imponderable megatheriums, stamping along through life,
ordering people about—ends in the same way—in irksome-
ness, bewildered vision, fear, compromise, and failure, as
seen from the inside. Seen on the outside or before the public,
of course, the Institution will have the same old, bland, familiar
air of looking successful and of looking intelligent, and yet
of being uninteresting, and of not changing the world by a
hair's breadth.
The only millionaires who should be allowed to have a
controlling interest in public enterprises are millionaires
who do not need to be different before and after making their
money. Everybody is coming to see this, sooner or later.
It is already getting very hard to raise money for any public
enterprise in which mere millionaires or bewildered, unhappy
rich men are known to have a controlling interest. The
most efficient and far-sighted men do not expect anything
very decided or of marked character from such enterprises,
and will no longer lend to them either their brains or their
money. Mere millionaires will soon have to conduct their
public enterprises quite by themselves, and they will then
soon fall of their own weight. The moment men are put
in control of public enterprises by the size of their brains
instead of the size of their cheques, the whole complexion
of what are known as our public enterprises will change,
and churches, theatres, hospitals, settlements, art galleries,
and all other great public causes, instead of boring every-
body and teasing everybody, will be attracting everybody
and attracting everybody's money. They will be full of
character, courage, and vision. Our present great, vague,
helpless, plaintive public enterprises—one third art, one
third millionaire, one third deficit—drag along financially
because they are listless compromises, because they have
no souls or vision, and are not interesting—not even inter- [233]
esting to themselves.
Men with creative or imaginative quality, and courage,
and insight into ordinary human nature, and far-sighted-
ness of what can be expected of people, do not get on with
the ordinary millionaire. It cannot be denied that million-
aires and artists get together in time; but the particular point
that seems to be interesting to consider is how the million-
aires and artists can be got together before the artists are
dead, and before the millionaires stop growing and stop being
creative and understanding creative men.
It might be well to consider the present situation in the
concrete—the theatre, for instance—and see how the situa-
tion lies, and where one would have to begin, and how one
would have to go to work to change it.
The present failure of the theatre to encourage what is
best in modern art is due to the fact that the public is un-
imaginative and inartistic.
If a public is unimaginative and inartistic, the only way
the best things that are offered can succeed with them is
by having these best things held before them long and steadily
enough for them slowly to compare them with other things,
and see that they are better than the other things, and that
they are what they want.
Unimaginative and inartistic people do not know what
they want. If things are tried long enough with them they
do. When they have been tried long enough with them
they support them themselves.
The only way fine things can be tried long enough is with
sufficient capital.
The only way sufficient capital for fine things can be ob-
tained is by having millionaires who appreciate fine things,
and believe in them, and believe the public in time will be-
lieve in them.
The only way in which a millionaire can recognize and be-
lieve in the fine things and in the best artists is by being, [234]
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 every-
thing: 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 pass 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 edu-
cates and developes the men who make the things. He edu-
cates and develops the men who buy them. Even the people [235]
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.
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