BOOK THREE

      LETTING THE CROWD BE BEAUTIFUL


      CHAPTER IV

      LETTING THE CROWD HAVE PEOPLE IN IT

      SO we face the issue.

      Nothing beautiful can be accomplished in a crowd civili-
      zation, by the crowd for the crowd, unless the crowd is beau-
      tiful. No man who is engaged in looking under the lives
      about him, who wishes to face the facts of these lives as they
      are lived to-day, will find himself able to avoid this last and
      most important fact in the history of the world—the fact
      that, whatever it may mean, or whether it is for better or
      worse, the world has staked all that it is and has been, and
      all that it is capable of being, on the one supreme issue, "How
      can the crowd be made beautiful?"

      The answer to this question involves two difficulties: (1)
      A crowd cannot make itself beautiful. (2) A crowd will
      not let anyone else make it beautiful.

      The men who have been on the whole the most eager
      democrats of history—the real-idealists—the men who
      love the crowd and the beautiful too, and who can have no
      honest or human pleasure in either of them except as they
      are being drawn together, are obliged to admit that living
      in a democratic country, a country where politics and aesthetics
      can no longer be kept apart, is an ordeal that can only be
      faced a large part of the time with heavy hearts. We are
      obliged to admit that it is a country where paintings have
      little but the Constitution of the United States wrought
      into them; where sculpture is voted and paid for by the com-
      mon people; where music is composed for majorities; where
      poetry is sung to a circulation; where literature itself is scaled
      to subscription lists; where all the creators of the True and [291]
      the Beautiful and the Good may be seen almost any day
      tramping the tableland of the average man, fed by the aver-
      age man, allowed to live by the average man, plodding along
      with weary and dusty steps to the average man's forgetful-
      ness. And, indeed, it is not the least trait of this same aver-
      age man that he forgets, that he is forgotten, that his slaves
      are forgotten, that the world remembers only those who
      have been his masters.

      On the other hand, the literature of finding fault with the
      average man (which is what the larger part of our more am-
      bitious literature really is) is not a kind of literature that
      can do anything to mend matters. The art of finding fault
      with the average man, with the fact that the world is made
      convenient for him, is inferior art because it is helpless art.

      The world is made convenient for the average man because
      it has to be, to get him to live in it; and if the world were
      not made convenient for him, the man of genius would find
      living with him a great deal more uncomfortable than he
      does. He would not even be allowed the comfort of saying
      how uncomfortable. The world belongs to the average man,
      and, excepting the stars and other things that are too big
      to belong to him, the moment the average man deserves
      anything better in it or more beautiful in it than he is getting,
      some man of genius rises by his side, in spite of him, and
      claims it for him. Then he slowly claims it for himself. The
      last thing to do, to make the world a good place for the aver-
      age man, would be to make it a world with nothing but aver-
      age men in it. If it is the ideal of democracy that there shall
      be a slow massive lifting, a grading up of all things at once;
      that whatever is highest in the true and the beautiful, and
      whatever is lowest in them shall be graded down and graded
      up to the middle height of human life, where the greatest
      numbers shall make their home and live upon it; if the ideal
      of democracy is tableland—that is—mountains for every-
      body—a few mountains must be kept on hand to make table- [292]
      land out of.

      Two solutions, then, of a crowd civilization—having the
      extraordinary men crowded out of it as a convenience to
      the average ones, and having the average men crowded out
      of it as a convenience to the extraordinary ones—are equally
      impracticable.

      This brings us to the horns of our dilemma. If the crowd
      cannot be made beautiful by itself, and if the crowd will not
      allow itself to be made beautiful by anyone else, the crowd
      can only be made beautiful by a man who lives so great a life
      in it that he can make a crowd beautiful whether it allows
      him to or not.

      When this man is born to us and looks out on the condi-
      tions around him, he will find that to be born in a crowd civili-
      zation is to be born in a civilization, first, in which every
      man can do as he pleases; second, in which nobody does.

      Every man is given by the Government absolute freedom;
      and when it has given him absolute freedom the Government
      says to him, "Now if you can get enough other men, with
      their absolute freedom, to put their absolute freedom with
      your absolute freedom, you can use your absolute freedom
      in any way you want." Democracy, seeking to free a man
      from being a slave to one master, has simply increased the
      number of masters a man shall have. He is hemmed in with
      crowds of masters. He cannot see his master's huge amor-
      phous face. He cannot go to his master and reason with him.
      He cannot even plead with him. You can cry your heart
      out to one of these modern ballot-boxes. You have but
      one ballot. They will not count tears. The ultimate ques-
      tion in a crowd civilization becomes, not "What does a thing
      mean?" or "What is it worth?" but "How much is there
      of it?" "If thou art a great man," says civilization, "get
      thou a crowd for thy greatness. Then come with thy crowd
      and we will deal with thee. It shall be even as thou wilt."
      The pressure has become so great, as is obvious on every side, [293]
      that men who are of small or ordinary calibre can only be
      more pressed by it. They are pressed smaller and smaller—
      the more they are civilized, the smaller they are pressed;
      and we are being daily brought face to face with the fact
      that the one solution a crowd civilization can have for the
      evil of being a crowd civilization is the man in the crowd
      who can withstand the pressure of the crowd; that is to say,
      the one solution of a crowd civilization is the great-man solu-
      tion—a solution which is none the less true because by name,
      at least, it leaves most of us out or because it is so familiar
      that we have forgotten it. The one method by which a crowd
      can be freed and can be made to realize itself is the great-
      man method—the method of crucifying and worshipping
      great men, until by crucifying and worshipping great men
      enough, inch by inch, and era by era, it is lifted to great-
      ness itself.

      Not very many years ago, certain great and good men,
      who, at the cost of infinite pains, were standing at the time
      on a safe and lofty rock protected from the fury of their kind
      by the fury of the sea, contrived to say to the older nations
      of the earth, "All men are created equal." It is a thing to
      be borne in mind, that if these men, who declared that all
      men were created equal, had not been some several hundred
      per cent. better men than the men they said they were cre-
      ated equal to, it would not have made any difference to us or
      to anyone else whether they had said that all men were cre-
      ated equal or not, or whether the Republic had ever been started
      or not, in which every man, for hundreds of years, should
      look up to these men and worship them as the kind of men that
      every man in America was free to try to be equal to. A civili-
      zation by numbers, a crowd civilization, if it had not been
      started by heroes, could never have been started at all. Shall
      this civilization attempt to live by the crowd principle, with-
      out men in it who are living by the hero principle? On our
      answer to this question hangs the question whether this civili- [294]
      zation, with all its crowds, shall stand or fall among the civili-
      zations of the earth. The main difference between the heroes
      of Plymouth Rock, the heroes who proclaimed freedom in
      1776, and the heroes who must contrive to proclaim freedom
      now, is that tyranny now is crowding around the Rock, and
      climbing up on the Rock, eighty-seven million strong, and
      that tyranny then was a half-idiot king three thousand miles
      away.

      . . . . . . .

      We know or think we know, some of us—at least we have
      taken a certain joy in working it out in our minds, and live
      with it every day—how people in crowds are going to be
      beautiful by and by.

      The difficulty of being beautiful now, I have tried to express.
      It seems better to express, if possible, what a difficulty is
      before trying to meet it.

      And now we would like to try to meet it. How can we
      determine what is the most practical and natural way for
      crowds of people to try to be beautiful now?

      It would seem to be a matter of crowd psychology, of crowd
      technique, and of determining how human nature works.

      All thoughtful people are agreed as to the aim.

      Everything turns on the method.

      In the following chapters we will try to consider the tech-
      nique of being beautiful in crowds.