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Contents |
BOOK THREE
LETTING THE CROWD BE BEAUTIFUL
CHAPTER XI
MACHINES, CROWD AND ARTISTS
A CROWD civilization produces, as a matter of course,
crowd art and art for crowded conditions. This fact is at once
the glory and the weakness of the kind of art a democracy is
bound to have.
The most natural evidence to turn to first, of the crowd
in a crowd age, is such as can be found in its literature,
especially in its masterpieces.
The significance of shaking hands with a Senator of the
United States is that it is a convenient and labour-saving way of
shaking hands with two or three million people. The impressive-
ness of the Senator's Washington voice, the voice on the floor
of the Senate, consists in the mystical undertone—the chorus
in it—multitudes in smoking cities, men and women, rich and
poor, who are speaking when this man speaks, and who are
silent when he is silent, in the government of the United States.
The typical fact that the Senator stands for in modern life
has a corresponding typical fact in modern literature. The
typical fact in modern literature is the epigram, the senatorial
sentence, the sentence that immeasurably represents what it
does not say. The difference between democracy in Washing-
ton and democracy in Athens may be said to be that in Washing-
ton we have an epigram government, a government in which
ninety million people are crowded into two rooms to consider
what to do, and in which ninety million people are made to
sit in one chair to see that it is done. In Athens every man
represented himself.
It may be said to be a good working distinction between
modern and classic art that in modern art words and colours [270]
and sounds stand for things, and in classic art they said them.
In the art of the Greek, things were what they seemed, and they
were all there. Hence simplicity. It is a quality of the art of
to-day that things are not what they seem in it. If they were,
we should not call it art at all. Everything stands not only
for itself and for what it says, but for an immeasurable
something that cannot be said. Every sound in music is the
senator of a thousand sounds, thoughts, and associations, and
in literature every word that is allowed to appear is the
representative in three syllables of three pages of a dictionary.
The whistle of the locomotive, and the ring of the telephone,
and the still, swift rush of the elevator are making themselves
felt in the ideal world. They are proclaiming to the ideal
world that the real world is outstripping it. The twelve
thousand horsepower steamer does not find itself accurately
expressed in iambics on the leisurely fleet of Ulysses. It is seek-
ing new expression. The command has gone forth over all
the beauty and over all the art of the present world, crowded
for time and crowded for space. "Telegraph!" To the nine
Muses the order flies. One can hear it on every side. "Tele-
graph!" The result is symbolism, the Morse alphabet of
art and "types," the epigrams of human nature, crowding
us all into ten or twelve people. The epic is telescoped into
the sonnet, and the sonnet is compressed into quatrains or
Tabbs of poetry, and couplets are signed as masterpieces.
The novel has come into being—several hundred pages of
crowded people in crowded sentences, jostling each other to
oblivion; and now the novel, jostled into oblivion by the next
novel, is becoming the short story. Kipling's short stories sum
the situation up. So far as skeleton or plot is concerned, they
are built up out of a bit of nothing put with an infinity of Kip-
ling; so far as meat is concerned, they are the Liebig Beef Ex-
tract of fiction. A single jar of Kipling contains a whole herd
of old-time novels lowing on a hundred hills.
The classic of any given world is a work of art, that has passed [271]
through the same process in being a work of art that that world
has passed through in being a world. Mr. Kipling represents
a crowd age, because he is crowded with it; because, above all
others, he is the man who produces art in the way the age he
lives in is producing everything else.
This is no mere circumstance of democracy. It is its manifest
destiny that it shall produce art for crowded conditions, that it
shall have crowd art. The kind of beauty that can be indefi-
nitely multiplied is the kind of beauty in which, in the nature of
things, we have made our most characteristic and most impor-
tant progress. Our most considerable success in pictures could
not be otherwise than in black and white. Black-and-white
art is printing-press art; and art that can be produced in endless
copies, that can be subscribed for by crowds, finds an extra-
ordinary demand, and artists have applied themselves to
supplying it. All the improvements, moving on through
the use of wood and steel and copper, and the process of etching,
to the photogravure, the lithograph, the moving picture, and
the latest photograph in colour, whatever else may be said
of them from the point of view of Titian or Michael Angelo,
constitute a most amazing and triumphant advance from the
point of view of making art a democracy, of making the rare and
the beautiful minister day and night to crowds. The fact that
the mechanical arts are so prominent in their relation to the fine
arts may not seem to argue a high ideal amongst us; but as the
mechanical arts are the body of beauty, and the fine arts are the
soul of it, it is a necessary part of the ideal to keep body and
soul together until we can do better. Mourning with Ruskin
is not so much to the point as going to work with William
Morris. If we have deeper feelings about wall-papers than we
have about other things, it is going to the root of the matter
to begin with wall-papers, to make machinery say something as
beautiful as possible, inasmuch as it is bound to have, for a
long time at least, about all the say there is. The photograph
does not go about the world doing Murillos everywhere by [272]
pressing a button, but the camera habit is doing more in the
way of steady daily hydraulic lifting of great masses of men to
where they enjoy beauty in the world than Leonardo da Vinci
would have dared to dream in his far-off day; and Leonardo's
pictures, thanks to the same photograph, and everybody's
pictures, films of paper, countless spirits of themselves, pass
around the world to every home in Christendom. The printing
press made literature a democracy, and machinery is making all
the arts democracies. The symphony piano, an invention for
making vast numbers of people who can play only a few very
poor things play very poorly a great many good ones, is a con-
summate instance both of the limitation and the value of our
contemporary tendency in the arts. The pipe organ, though
on a much higher plane, is an equally characteristic contrivance
making it possible for a man to be a complete orchestra and a
conductor all by himself, playing on a crowd of instruments, to
a crowd of people, with two hands and one pair of feet. It is a
crowd invention. The orchestra—a most distinctively mod-
ern institution, a kind of republic of sound, the unseen spirit
of the many in one—is the sublimest expression yet attained
of the crowd music, which is, and must be, the supreme music
of this modern day, the symphony. Richard Wagner comes to
his triumph because his music is the voice of multitudes. The
opera, a crowd of sounds accompanied by a crowd of sights,
presented by one crowd of people on the stage to another crowd
of people in the galleries, stands for the same tendency in art
that the syndicate stands for in commerce. It is syndicate
music; and in proportion as a musical composition in this present
day is an aggregation of multitudinous moods, in proportion
as it is suggestive, complex, paradoxical, the way a crowd
is complex, suggestive, and paradoxical—provided it be
wrought at the same time into some vast and splendid unity—
just in this proportion is it modern music. It gives itself to
the counterpoints of the spirit, the passion of variety in modern
life. The legacy of all the ages, is it not descended upon us? [278]
—the spirit of a thousand nations? All our arts are thousand-
nation arts, shadows and echoes of dead worlds playing upon
our own. Italian music, out of its feudal kingdoms, comes to
us as essentially solo music—melody; and the civilization of
Greece, being a civilization of heroes, individuals, comes to us
in its noble array with its solo arts, its striding heroes every-
where in front of all, and with nothing nearer to the people in it
than the Greek Chorus, which, out of limbo, pale and featureless
across all ages, sounds to us as the first far faint coming of the
crowd to the arts of this groping world. Modern art, inheriting
each of these and each of all things, is revealed to. us as the
struggle to express all things at once. Democracy is democracy
for this very reason, and for no other: that all things may be ex-
pressed at once in it, and that all things may be given a chance to
be expressed at once in it. Being a race of hero-worshippers, the
Greeks said the best, perhaps, what could be said in sculpture;
but the marbles and bronzes of a democracy, having average
men for subjects, and being done by average men, are aver-
age marbles and bronzes. We express what we have. We are
in a transition stage. It is not without its significance, however,
that we have perfected the plaster cast—the establishment
of democracy among statues, and mobs of Greek gods min-
gling with the people can be seen almost any day in every con-
siderable city of the world. The same priniciple is working
itself out in our architecture. It is idle to contend against
the principle. The way out is the way through. However
eagerly we gaze at Parthenons on their ruined hills, if
thirty-one-story blocks are in our souls thirty-one-story
blocks will be our masterpieces, whether we like it or not. They
will be our masterpieces because they tell the truth about us;
and while truth may not be beautiful, it is the thing that must
be told first before beauty can begin. The beauty we are to
have shall only be worked out from the truth we have. Living
as we do in a new era, not to see that the thirty-one-story
block is the expression of a new truth is to turn ourselves away [274]
from the one way that beauty can ever be found by men, in this
era or in any other.
What is it that the thirty-one-story block is trying to say
about us? The thirty-one-story block is the masterpiece of
mass, of immensity, of numbers; with its 2427 windows and its
779 offices, and its crowds of lives piled upon lives, it is express-
ing the one supreme and characteristic thing that is taking
place in the era in which we live. The city is the main fact
that modern civilization stands for, and crowding is the logical
architectural form of the city idea. The thirty-one-story
block is the statue of a crowd. It stands for a spiritual fact,
and it will never be beautiful until that fact is beautiful. The
only way to make the thirty-one-story block beautiful (the
crowd expressed by the crowd) is to make the crowd beautiful.
The most artistic, the only artistic, thing the world can do next
is to make the crowd beautiful.
The typical city blocks, with their garrets in the lower stories
of the sky, were not possible in the ancient world, because steel
had not been invented; and the invention of steel, which is not
the least of our triumphs in the mechanical arts, is in many
ways the most characteristic. Steel is republican for stone.
Putting whole quarries into a single girder, it makes room for
crowds; and what is more significant than this, inasmuch as the
steel pillar is an invention that makes it possible to put floors
up first, and build the walls around the floors, instead of putting
the walls up first and supporting the floors upon the walls, as
in the ancient world, it has come to pass that the modern world
being the ancient world turned upside down, modern architec-
ture is ancient architecture turned inside out, a symbol of many
things. The ancient world was a wall of individuals, supporting
floor after floor and stage after stage of society, from the lowest
to the highest; and it is a typical fact in this modern demo-
cratic world that it grows from the inside, and that it supports!
itself from the inside. When the mass in the centre has been
finished, an ornamental stone facing of great ,individuals will [275]
be built around it and supported by it, and the work will be
considered done.
The modern spirit has much to boast of in its mechanical arts,
and in its fine arts almost nothing, because the mechanical arts
are studying what men are needing to-day, and the fine arts
are studying what the Greeks needed three thousand years ago.
To be a real classic is, first, to be a contemporary of one's own
time; second, to be a contemporary of one's own time so deeply
and widely as to be a contemporary of all time. The true
Greek is a man who is doing with his own age what the Greeks
did With theirs, bringing all ages to bear upon it, and interpreting
it. As long as the fine arts miss the fundamental principle of
this present age—the crowd principle, and the mechanical
arts do not, the mechanical arts are bound to have their way
with us. And it were vastly better that they should. Sincere
and straightforward mechanical arts are not only more beautiful
than affected fine ones, but they are more to the point: they are
the one sure sign we have of where we are going to be beautiful
next. It is impossible to love the fine arts in the year 1913
without studying the mechanical ones; without finding one's self
looking for artistic material in the things that people are using,
and that they are obliged to use. The determining law of a
thing of beauty being, in the nature of things, what it is for, the
very essence of the classic attitude in a utilitarian age is to make
the beautiful follow the useful and inspire the useful With its
spirit. The fine art of the next thousand years shall be the
transfiguring of the mechanical arts. The modern hotel, having
been made necessary by great natural forces in modern life, and
having been made possible by new mechanical arts, now puts
itself forward as the next great opportunity of the fine arts.
One of the characteristic achievements of the immediate future
shall be the twentieth-century Parthenon—a Parthenon not
of the great and of the few and of the gods, but of the great
many, where, through mighty corridors, day and night, democ-
racy wanders and sleeps and chatters and is sad and lives and [276]
dies, streets rumbling below. The hotel—the crowd fireside
—being more than any other one thing, perhaps, the thing that
this civilization is about, the token of what it loves and of how it
lives, is bound to be a masterpiece sooner or later that shall
express democracy. The hotel rotunda, the parlour for multi-
tudes, is bound to be made beautiful in ways we do not guess.
Why should we guess? Multitudes have never wanted par-
lours before. The idea of a parlour has been to get out of a
multitude. All the inevitable problems that come of having
a whole city of families live in one house have yet to be solved
by the fine arts as well as by the mechanical ones. We have
barely begun. Th,e time is bound to come when the radiator,
the crowd's fireplace-in-a-pipe, shall be made beautiful; and
when the electric light shall be taught the secret of the candle;
and when the especial problem of modern life—of how to make
two rooms as good as twelve—shall be mastered aesthetically
as well as mathematically; and when even the piano-folding,
bed-bookcase-toilet-stand-writing-desk—a crowd invention for
living in a crowd—shall either take beauty to itself or lead
to beauty that serves the same end.
While for the time being it seems to be true that the fine arts
are looking to the past, the mechanical arts are producing con-
ditions in the future that will bring the fine arts to terms,
whether they want to be brought to terms or not. The mechani-
cal arts hold the situation in their hands. It is decreed that
people who cannot begin by making the things they use beautiful
shall be allowed no beauty in other things. We may wish that
Parthenons and cathedrals were within our souls; but what the
cathedral said of an age that had the cathedral mood, that had
a cathedral civilization and thrones and popes in it, we are
bound to say in some stupendous fashion of our own—some-
thing which, when it is built at last, will be left worshipping
upon the ground beneath the sky when we are dead, as a me-
morial that we too have lived. The great cathedrals, with the
feet of the huddled and dreary poor upon their floors, and saints [277]
and heroes shining on their pillars, and priests behind the
chancel with God to themselves, and the vast and vacant nave,
symbol of the heaven glimmering above that few could reach—
it is not to these that we shall look to get ourselves said to the
nations that are now unborn; rather, though it be strange to say
it, we shall look to something like the ocean steamship—
cathedral of this huge unresting modern world—under the
wide heaven, on the infinite seas, with spars for towers and the
empty nave reversed filled with human beings' souls—the
cathedral of crowds hurrying to crowds. There are hundreds
of them throbbing and gleaming in the night—this very mo-
ment—lonely cities in the hollow of the stars, bringing together
the nations of the earth.
When the spirit of our modern way of living, the idea in it,
the bare facts about our modern human nature have been
noticed at last by our modern artists, masterpieces shall come
to us out of every great and living activity in our lives.
Art shall tell the things these lives are about. When this
is once realized in America as it was in Greece, the fine arts
shall cover the other arts as the waters cover the sea. The
Brooklyn Bridge, swinging its web for immortal souls across
sky and sea, comes nearer to being a work of art than almost
anything we possess to-day, because it tells the truth, because
it is the material form of a spiritual idea, because it is a
sublime and beautiful expression of New York in the way
that the Acropolis was a sublime and beautiful expression
of Athens. The Acropolis was beautiful because it was the
abode of heroes, of great individuals; and the Brooklyn Bridge,
because it expresses the bringing together of millions of men.
It is the architecture of crowds—this Brooklyn Bridge—
with winds and sunsets and the dark and the tides of souls
upon it; it is the type and symbol of the kind of thing that our
modern genius is bound to make beautiful and immortal before
it dies. The very word "bridge" is the symbol of the future of
art and of everything else, the bringing together of things that [278]
are apart—democracy. The bridge, which makes land across
the water, and the boat, which makes land on the water, and
the cable, which makes land and water alike—these are the
physical forms of the spirit of modern life, the democracy of
matter. But the spirit has countless forms. They are all new
and they are all waiting to be made beautiful. The dumb
crowd waits in them. We have electricity—the life current
of the republican idea—characteristically our foremost
invention, because it takes all power that belongs to individual
places and puts it on a wire and carries it to all places. We
have the telephone, an invention which makes it possible for
a man to live on a back street and be a next-door neighbour to
boulevards; and we have the trolley, the modern reduction of
the private carriage to its lowest terms, so that any man for five
cents can have as much carriage power as Napoleon with all his
chariots. We have the phonograph, an invention which gives
a man a thousand voices; which sets him to singing a thousand
songs at the same time to a thousand crowds; which makes it
possible for the commonest man to hear the whisper of Bismarck
or Gladstone, to unwind crowds of great men by the firelight
of his own house. We have the elevator, an invention for mak-
ing the many as well off as the few, an approximate arrange-
ment for giving first floors to everybody, and putting all men
on a level at the same price—one more of a thousand instances
of the extraordinary manner in which the mechanical arts have
devoted themselves from first to last to the Constitution of the
United States. While it cannot be said of many of these tools
of existence that they are beautiful now, it is enough to affirm
that when they are perfected they will be beautiful; and that
if we cannot make beautiful the things that we need, we cannot
expect to make beautiful the things that we merely want.
When the beauty of these things is at last brought out, we shall
have attained the most characteristic and original and expressive
and beautiful art that is in our power. It will be unprecedented
because it will tell unprecedented truths. It was the mission of [279]
ancient art to express states of being and individuals, and it
may be said to be in a general way the mission of our modern
art to express the beautiful in endless change, the movement
of masses, coming to its sublimity and immortality at last by
revealing the beauty of the things that move and that have to do
with motion, the bringing of all things and of all souls together
on the earth.
The fulfillment of the word that has been written, "Your
valleys shall be exalted, and your mountains shall be made low,"
is by no means a beautiful process. Democracy is the grading
principle of the beautiful. The natural tendency the arts have
had from the first to rise from the level of the world, to make
themselves into Switzerlands in it, is finding itself confronted
with the Constitution of the United States—a Constitution
which, whatever it may be said to mean in the years to come,
has placed itself on record up to the present time, at least, as
standing for the tableland.
The very least that can be granted to this Constitution is
that it is so consummate a political document that it has made
itself the creed of our theology, philosophy, and sociology; the
principle of our commerce and industry; the law of production,
education, and journalism; the method of our life; the con-
trolling characteristic and the significant force in our literature;
and the thing our religion and our arts are about.
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