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Contents |
BOOK THREE
LETTING THE CROWD BE BEAUTIFUL
PART THREE
PEOPLE-MACHINES
CHAPTER I
NOW!
THIS outlook or glimmer of vision I have tried to trace,
for the art of crowds is something we want, and want daily,
in the future. We want daily a future. But, after all, it
is a future.
I speak in this present chapter as one of the crowd who
wants something now.
I find myself in a world in which apparently some vast
anonymous arrangement was made about me and about
my life, before I was born. This arrangement seems to be,
as I understand it, that if I want to live while I am on this
planet a certain sort of life or be a certain sort of person,
I am expected practically to take out a permit for it from
the proper authorities.
In the previous chapter I made a request of the authorities,
as perhaps the reader will remember. I said, "I want to
be good now."
In this one I have a further request to make of the authori-
ties: "I want to be beautiful."
I want to be beautiful now.
I find thousands of other people about me on every hand
making these same two requests. I find that the authorities
do not seem to notice their requests any more than they have
noticed mine.
Some of us have begun to suspect that we must have made [281]
the request in the wrong way. Perhaps we should not ask
a world—a great, vague thing like the world in general—
to make any slight arrangement we may need for being beau-
tiful. We have come to feel that we must ask somebody
in particular, and do something in particular, and find some
one in particular with whom we can do it. There is getting
to be but one course open to a man if he wants to be beau-
tiful. He must bone down and work hard with his soul, make
himself see precisely what it is and who it is standing between
him and a beautiful world. He must ask particular persons
in particular positions if they do not think he ought to be
allowed to be beautiful. He must ask some millionaire prob-
ably first—his employer, for instance—to stop getting in
his way, and at least to step one side and let him reason with
him. And when he cannot ask his millionaire—his own
particular humdrum millionaire—to step one side and reason
with him, he must ask iron-machines to step one side and
reason with him. After this he must ask crowds to please
to step one side and reason with him.
Whatever happens, he is sure to find always these same
three great, imponderable obstructions in the way of his
being beautiful—the humdrum millionaires, the iron-machines,
and crowds.
In the old days when anyone wanted to be beautiful he
found it more convenient. There was very likely some one
who was more beautiful than he was nearby, some one who
found him craving the same thing that he had craved, and
who recognized it and delighted in it. and who could make
room and help.
Nowadays, if one wants to be beautiful one must ask every-
body. Every man finds it the same. He must ask mil-
lions of people to let him be something, one after the other
in rows, that they do not want him to be or do not care whether
he is or not. He has to ask more people than he could count,
before he dies, to let him be beautiful. Many of them that [282]
he has to ask, sometimes most of them, are his inferiors.
I have tried to deal with how it is going to be possible for
a man to break through to being beautiful, past millionaires
and past iron-machines. I would like now to deal with the
people-machines or crowds, and how perhaps to break past
them and be beautiful in behalf of them, in spite of them.
CHAPTER II
COMMITTEES AND COMMITTEES
THE problem seems to be something like this. One finds
one has been born and put here whether or no, and that one
is inextricably alive in a state of society in which men are
coming to live in a kind of vast disease of being obliged to
do everything together.
We are still old-fashioned enough to be born one at a time,
but we are educated in litters and we do our work in the world
in herds and gangs. Even the upper classes do their work
in gangs, and with overseers and little crowds called com-
mittees. Our latest idea consists in putting parts of a great
many different men together to make one great one—form-
ing a committee to make a man of genius.
There is no denying that, in a way, a committee does things;
but what becomes of the committee?
And the lower in the scale of life we go the more commit-
tees it takes to do the work of one man and the more im-
possible it becomes to find anything but parts of men to do
things. I put it frankly to the reader. The chances are
nine out of ten that when you meet a man nowadays and
look at him hard or try to do something with him you find
he is not a man at all but is some subsection of a committee.
You cannot even talk with such a man without selecting
some subsection of some subject which interests him; and
if you select any other subsection than his subsection he will
think you a bore; and if you select his subsection he will think
that you do not know anything.
And if you want to get anything done that is different,
or that is the least bit interesting, and want to get some one [284]
to do it, how will you go about it? You will find yourself
being sent from one person to another; and before you know
it you find yourself mixed up with nine or ten subdivisions
of nine or ten committees; and after you have got your rune
or ten subsections of nine or ten committees to get together
to consider what it is you want done, they will tell you, after
due deliberation, that it is not worth doing, or that you had
better do it yourself. Then every subsection of every com-
mittee will go home muttering under its breath to every other
subsection that a man who wants slightly different and in-
teresting things done in society is a public nuisance; and
that the man who does not know what subsection he is
in and what subsection of a man he was intended to
be, and who tries to do things, carries dismay and
anger on every side around him. Drop into your pigeon-
hole and be filed away, O Gentle Reader! Do you think
you are a soul? No; you are Series B. No. 2574, top row on
the left.
In my morning paper the other day I read that in a factory
whose long windows I often pass in the train, they have their
machinery so perfected that it takes sixty-four machines to
make one shoe.
Query—If it takes sixty-four machines run by sixty-four
men who do nothing else to make one shoe, how many
machines would it take, and how many shoes, to make one
man?
Query—And when an employer in a shoe factory deals
with his employee, can it really be said, after all, that he is
dealing with him? He is dealing with It—with Nine Hours
a Day, of one sixty-fourth of a man.
The natural effect of crowds and of machines is to
make a man feel that he is, and always was, and
always will be, immemorially, unanimously, innumerably
nobody.
Sometimes we are allowed a little faint numeral to dangle [285]
up over our oblivion. Not long ago I saw a notice or letter
in the West Bulletin—probably from a member of something
—ending like this: " . . . I hope the readers of the Bulletin
will ponder over this suggestion of Number 29,619.—Sincerely
yours, No. 11,175."
CHAPTER III
THE INCONVENIENCE OF BEING HUMAN
I SHALL never forget one day I spent in New York some
years ago—more years than I thought at first. It was a wrong-
headed day, but I cannot help remembering it as a symbol
of a dread I still feel at times in New York—a feeling of being
suddenly lifted, of being swept out under (it is like the un-
dertow of the sea) into a kind of vast deep of impersonality
—swept out of myself into a wide, imperious waste or empti-
ness of people. I had come fresh from my still country
meadow and mountain, my own trees and my own bobo-
links and my own little island of sky up over me, and in the
vast and desolate solitude of men and women I wandered
about up and down the streets. Every block I saw, every
window, skyline, engine, street-car, every human face, made
me feel as if I belonged to another world. Here was a great
conspiracy in stone and iron against my own life with myself.
Was there a soul in all this huge roar and spectacle of glass
and stone and passion that cared for the things that I cared
for, or the things that I loved, or that would care one shuffle
of all the feet upon the stones for any thought or word or
desire of mine? The rain swept in my face, and I spent the
day walking up and down the streets looking at stones and
glass and people. "Here we are!" say the great buildings
crowding on the sky. "Who are you?" . . . . all the
stone and the glass and the walls, the mighty syndicate of
matter everywhere, surrounded me—one little, shivering,
foolish mote of being fighting foolishly for its own little fool-
ish mote of identity!
And I do not believe that I was all wrong. New York, [287]
like some vast, implacable cone of ether, some merciless an-
aesthetic, was thrust down over me and my breathing, and
I still had a kind of left-over prejudice that I wanted to be
myself, with my own private self-respect, with my own pri-
vate, temporarily finished-off, provisionally complete per-
sonality. I felt then, and I still feel to-day, that every man,
as he fights for his breath, must stand out at least part of
his time for the right of being self-contained. It is, and al-
ways will be, one of the appalling sights of New York to me—
the spectacle of the helplessness, the wistfulness, of all those
poor New York people without one another. Sometimes
the city seems to be a kind of huge monument or idol or shrine
of crowds. It seems to be a part of the ceaseless crowd action
or crowd corrosion on the sense of identity in the human
spirit that the man who lives in crowds should grow more
dull and more literal about himself every day. He becomes
a mere millionth of something. All these other people he
sees about him hurrying to and fro are mere millionths too.
He grows more and more obliged to live with a vast bulk
of people if he is to notice people at all. Unless he sees all
the different kinds of people and forms of life with his own
eye, and feels human beings with his hands, as it were, he does
not know and sympathize with them. The crowd-craving
or love of continual city life on the part of many people comes
to be a sheer lack of imagination, an inability to live in quali-
ties instead of quantities in men. To live merely in a city is not
to know the real flavour of life any more than the daily paper
knows it—the daily paper, the huge dull monster of observa-
tion, the seer of outsides. The whole effect of crowds on
the individual man is to emphasize scareheads and appear-
ances, advertisements, and the huge general showing off.
The ride in the train from New Haven to New York is the
true portrait of a crowd. Crowds of soaps and patent medi-
icines straining on trees and signboard out of the gentle fields
toward crowds of men, culminating at last in Woodlawn [288]
Cemetery, where the marble signposts of death flaunt them-
selves. Oblivion itself is advertised, and the end of the show
of a show world is placarded on our graves. Men buy space
in papers for cards, and bits of country scenery by the great
railroads to put up signboards, and they spend money and
make constant efforts to advertise that they are alive, and
then they build expensive monuments to advertise that they
are dead. . . .
The same craving for piled-up appearances is brought
to bear by crowds upon their arts. Even a gentle soul like
Paderewski, full of a personal and strange beauty that he
could lend to everything he touched, finds himself swept out
of himself at last by the huge undertow of crowds. Scarcely
a season but his playing has become worn down at the end
of it into shrieks and hushes. Have I not watched him at
the end of a tour, when, one audience after the other, those huge
Svengalis had hypnotized him—thundering his very subtle-
ties at them, hour after hour, in Carnegie Hall? One could
only wonder what had happened, sit by helplessly, watch
the crowd—thousands of headlong human beings lunging
their souls and their bodies through the music, weeping,
gasping, huzzaing, and clapping to one another. After
every crash of new crescendo, after every precipice of silence,
they seemed to be crying, "This is Soul! Oh, this is Soul!"
The feeling of a vast audience holding its breath, no matter
why it does it or whether it ought to do it or not, seems to
have become almost a religious rite of itself. Vistas of faces
gallery after gallery hanging on a note, two or three thousand
souls suspended in space all on one tiny little ivory lever
at the end of one man's forefinger . . . dim lights shining
on them and soft vibrations floating round them. . . . going to
hear Paderewski play at the end of his season was going to
hear a crowd at a piano singing with its own hands and having
a kind of orgy with itself. One could only remember that
there had been a Paderewski once who hypnotized and pos- [289]
sessed his audience by being hypnotized and possessed by
his own music. One liked to remember him—the Paderewski
who was really an artist and who performed the function
of the artist showering imperiously his own visions on the
hearts of the people.
And what is true in music one finds still truer in the other
arts. One keeps coming on it everywhere—the egotism
of cities, the self-complacency of the crowds swerving the
finer and the truer artists from their functions, making them
sing in hoarse crowd-voices instead of singing in their own
and giving us themselves. Nearly all our acting has been
corroded by crowds. Some of us have been obliged almost
to give up going to the theatre except to very little ones,
and we are wondering if churches cannot possibly be made
small enough to believe great things, or if galleries cannot
be arranged with few enough people in them to allow us great
paintings, or if there will not be an author so well known
to a few men that he will live forever, or if some newspaper
will not yet be great enough to advertise that it has a cir-
culation small enough to tell the truth.
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