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Contents |
BOOK FOUR
CROWDS AND HEROES
TO WALT WHITMAN
"And I saw the free souls of poets,
The loftiest bards of all ages strode before me
Strange large men, long unwaked, undisclosed, were disclosed
to me
. . . O my rapt verse, my call, mock me not!
. . . I will not be outfaced by irrational things.
I will penetrate what is sarcastic upon me,
I will make cities and civilizations defer to me
This is what I have learnt from America—
I will confront these shows of the day and night
I will know if I am to be less than they,
I will see if I am not as majestic as they,
I will see if I am not as subtle and real as they,
I will see if I have no meaning while the houses and ships have
meaning,
. . . I am for those that have never been mastered,
For men and women whose tempers have never been mastered,
For those whom laws, theories, conventions can never master.
I am for those who walk abreast of the whole earth
Who inaugurate one to inaugurate all."
CHAPTER I
THE SOCIALIST AND THE HERO
I WAS spending a little time not long ago with a man of singu-
larly devoted and noble spirit who had dedicated his life and his
fortune to the Socialist movement. We had had several talks
before, and always with a little flurry at first of hopefulness
toward one another's ideas. We both felt that the other, for a
mere Socialist or for a mere Individualist, was really rather
reasonable. We admitted great tracts of things to one another,
and we always felt as if by this one next argument, perchance,
or by one further illustration, we would convince the other and
rescue him like a brand from the burning.
The last time I saw him he started in at once at the station as
we climbed up into the car by telling me what he was doing.
He was studying up the heroes of the American Revolution, and
was writing something to show that they were not really heroes
after all. All manner of things were the matter with them.
They had always troubled him, he said. He knew there was
something wrong, and he was glad to have the matter settled.
He said he did not, and never had believed in heroes, and
thought they did a great deal of harm—even dead ones.
Heroes, he said, always deceived the people. They kept people
from seeing that nothing could be done in our modern society
by anyone man. Only crowds could do things, he intimated
—each man, like one little wave on the world, wavering up to
the shore and dying away.
As the evening wore on our conversation became more con-
crete, and I began to drag in, of course, every now and then,
naturally, an inspired or semi-inspired millionaire or so.
I cannot say that these gentlemen were received with en- [298]
thusiasm.
Finally, I turned on him. "What is it that makes you so
angry (and nearly all the Socialists) every time you hear
something good, something you cannot deny is good, about
a successful business man? If I brought a row of inspired
millionaires, say ten or twelve of them one after the other,
into your library this minute, you would get hotter and
hotter with every one, wouldn't you? You would scarcely
speak to me."
____ intimated that he was afraid I was deceived; he was
afraid that I was going about deceiving other people about its
being possible for mere individual men to be good; he was afraid
I was doing a great deal of damage.
He then confided to me that not so very long ago he dropped
in one Monday morning into his guest-chamber just after his
guest had gone and found a copy of "Inspired Millionaires,"
which his guest had obviously been reading over Sunday, lying
on the little reading-table at the head of the bed.
He said that he took the book back to his library, took out
two or three encyclopaedias from the shelf in the corner, put
my inspired millionaires in behind them, put the encyclopaedias
back, and that they had been there to this day.
With this very generous and kindly introduction we went on
to a frank talk on the general attitude of Socialists toward the
instinct of hero-worship in human nature.
A Socialist had said only a few days before, speaking of a
certain municipal movement in which the people were inter-
ested, that he thought it really had a very good chance to suc-
ceed "if only the heroes could be staved off a little longer."
He deprecated the almost incurable idea people seemed to have
that nothing could ever be done in this world without being all
mixed up with heroes.
My mind kept recurring in a perplexed way to this remark
for a few days after I had heard it, and I soon came on the fol-
lowing letter from a prominent Socialist which,had been read at [299]
a dinner the night before:
"I am glad to join with others of my comrades in conveying
greetings to Comrade Cahan on the occasion of the fiftieth anni-
versary of his birth, and in recognition of the eminent services
that he has rendered in the Socialist movement.
"Yet my gladness is not untinged with a certain note of
apprehension lest in expressing so conspicuously our esteem of
an honoured comrade we obscure the broader scene which, if
equally illumined, would disclose tens of thousands of other
comrades, labouring with equal devotion, and each no less
worthy of praise. . .
"In our rejoicing over the services of Comrade Cahan let
us not forget that the facilities that he and that each of us
enjoy are the products of thousands of other men and women,
and sometimes of children too.
"In our rejoicing let us recall that we cannot safely assume
that any comrade's services to the movement have been greater
than the movement's services to him; that we are but fellow-
workers together, deriving help and perhaps inspiration one
from another and each from all.
"In our rejoicing let us place the emphasis rather upon the
services of the many to each, than upon the services of anyone
of the many."
I have not quoted from this letter because I disagree with the
idea in it. I am ready to admit that though the idea is a some-
what dampening one perhaps for a banquet, that it is true and
important.
What I object to in the letter is the Fear in it.
In spite of the fineness and truth of the motive that lies, I know,
underneath every line, the letter is baleful, sinister, and weary.
I accuse the letter of being, in a kind of nobly sick way,
visionary, unpractical, and socially destructive.
I would heartily agree with the writer of the letter about the [300]
quality of many heroes, possibly about most heroes. I would
agree in a large measure that the heroes the crowds choose are
the wrong ones.
But there is a great difference between his belief and mine as
to our practical working policy in getting the things for crowds
that we both want for them. It seems to me that he does not
believe in crowds. He is filled with fear that they would select
the wrong heroes. He says they must not have heroes, or
must be allowed as few as possible.
I believe in crowds, and I believe that the more they have the
hero-habit, the more heroes they have to compare and select
from, the finer, longer, and truer heroes they will select, the
more deeply, truly, and concretely the crowds will think, and the
more nobly they will express themselves.
But the great argument for the hero as a social method is
that the crowd in a clumsy, wistful way, deep down in its heart,
in the long run, lows the beautiful. Appealing to the crowd's
ideal of the beautiful in conduct, its sense of the heroic, or semi-
heroic, is the only practical, hard-headed understanding way of
getting out of the crowd, for the crowd, what the crowd wants.
I saw the other day in Boston several thousand schoolboys
in the street keeping step. It was a band that held them
together. A band is a practical thing.
Is it not about time, in our dreary, drab, listless procession of
economics, stringing helplessly across the world, that we have
a band of music? What economics needs now is a march.
We have to-day a thousand men who can tell people what to
do where we have one who can touch the music, the dance, the
hurrah, the cry, the worship in them, and make them want to
do something. The hero is the man who makes people want to
do something, and strangely and subtly, all through the blood,
while they watch him, he makes them believe they can.
It is socially destructive to throwaway the overpowering
instinct of human nature which we have called hero-worship.
CHAPTER II
THE CROWD AND THE HERO
BUT it is not only socially destructive. It is dumb and help-
less for crowds to try to get on without heroes. Big events and
big men are crowd expressions. Heroes, World Fairs, and
Titanic disasters are crowd words, the crowd's way of seeing
and saying things.
Crowds think in great men, or they think in simple, big,
broadly drawn events, or words of one syllable, like coal strikes.
A whole world works through to an entirely new idea, the
idea that England is not necessarily impregnable, in the Boer
war. And we see England, by way of South Africa, searching
her own heart. The Meat Trust, by raising prices for a few
trial weeks, makes half a nation think its way over into vege-
tarianism or semi-vegetarianism.
In the American war with Spain modern thought attacked
the last pathetic citadel in modern life of polite illusion, of
lie-poetry, and in that one little flash of war between the Spain
spirit and the American spirit, in our modern world, the
nations got their final and conclusive sense of what the Spanish
civilization really was, of the old Don Quixote thinking, of the
delightful, brave, courtly blindness, of the world's last strong-
hold of pomposity, of vague, empty prettiness, of talking grand
and shooting crooked.
Japan and Russia fight with guns, but the real fight is not
between their guns, but between two great national concep-
tions of human life. Like two vast national searchlights we
saw them turned on each other, two huge, grim, naked civiliza-
tions, and now in an awful light and roar, and now in stately
sudden silence, while we all looked on, all breathless and con- [302]
centrated, we saw them, as on some strange vast stage of the
world, all lit up, exposed, penetrated by the minds of men for-
ever. While they fought before us we saw the last two
thousand years flash up once more and fade away, and then the
next two thousand years on its slide, with one click before our
faces was fastened into place.
Men see great spiritual conceptions or ideals for a world
when the great ideals are dramatized, when they stalk out before
us, are acted out before our eyes by mighty nations. Before
the stage we sit silently and think and watch the ideals of a
world, the souls of the nations struggling together, and as we
watch we discover our souls for ourselves, we define our ideals
for ourselves. We make up our minds. See what we want.
We begin to live.
I have come to believe that the hero, in the same way, is the
common man's desire and prayer writ large. It is his way of
keeping it refreshed before him so that he sees it, recalls it,
suns himself in it, lifts up his life to it, every day.
CHAPTER III
THE CROWD AND THE AVERAGE PERSON
TO STATE still further my difference with the typical Social-
ist point of view, as expressed in the letter from which I have
quoted, I am obliged to confess that I not only believe in having
heroes on behalf of crowds, but in having as a regular method
of democracy little crowds of heroes, or an aristocracy. In
other words, I am a democrat. I believe that crowds can pro-
duce, and are bound to produce by a natural crowd-process, a
real aristocracy—an aristocracy which will be truly aristo-
cratic and noble in spirit and action, and which will express the
best ideas in the best way that a crowd can have.
The main business of a democracy is to find out which these
people are in it and put them where they will represent it. The
trouble seems to have been in democracies so far, that we find
out who these people are a generation too late. The great and
rare moments of history have been those in which we have
found out who they were in time, as when we found in America
Abraham Lincoln, an unaristocratic-looking and ungainly man,
and saw suddenly that he was the first gentleman in the United
States.
The next great task of democracy is to determine the best
means it can of finding out who its aristocrats are, its all-men, and
determining who they are in time, men who have vision, courage,
individuality, imagination enough to face real things, and to
know real people, and to put real things and real people together.
It is what an aristocracy in a democratic form of government
is for, to furnish imagination to crowds. A real aristocracy is
the only clear-headed, practical means a great nation can have
of distributing, classifying, and digesting and evoking hordes [304]
of men and women. People do not have imagination in hordes,
and imagination is latent and unorganized in masses of people.
The crowd problem is the problem of having leaders who can
fertilize the imagination and organize the will of crowds. Noth-
ing but worship or great desire has ever been able to focus a
crowd, and only the great man, rich and various in his elements,
abounding, great as the crowd is great, can ever hope to do it.
Every man in a crowd knows that he is or is in danger of
being a mere Me-man, or a mere class-man, and he knows that
his neighbour is, and he wishes to be in a world that is saved
from his own mere me-ness and his own mere classness. His
hero-worship is his way of worshipping his larger self. He com-
munes with his possible or completed self, his self of the best
moments in the official great man or crowd man.
The average man in a crowd does not want to be an average
man, and .the last thing he wants is to have an average man to
represent him. He wants a man to represent him as he would
like to be.
He cannot express himself—his best self, in the State, to
all the others in the State, without a lifted-up man or crowd
man to do it.
It is as if he said—as if the average man said, "I want a
certain sort of world, I want to be able to point to a man, to a
particular man, and say, as I look at him and ask others to look
at him, 'This is the sort of world I want.'"
Then everybody knows.
The great world that lies in all men's hearts is expressed in
miniature, in the great man.
Crowds speak in heroes.
. . . . . . .
I have often heard Socialists wondering among themselves
why a movement that had so many fine insights and so many
noble motives behind it had produced so few artists.
It has seemed to me that it might be because Socialists as a [305]
class, speaking roughly, are generalizers. They do not see
vividly and deeply the universal in the particular, the universal
in the individual, the national in the local. They are convinced
by counting, and are moved by masses, and are prone to over-
look the Spirit of the Little, the immensity of the seed and of
the individual. They are prone to look past the next single
thing to be done. They look past the next single man to be
fulfilled.
They feel a bit superior to Individualists for the way they
have of seeing the universal in the particular, and of being pic-
turesque and personal.
Socialists are not picturesque and personal. They do not
think in pictures.
Then they wonder why they do not make more headway.
Crowds and great men and children think in pictures.
A hero pictures greatness to them. Then they want it for
themselves.
From the practical, political point of view of getting things
for crowds, perhaps the trouble lies, not in our common popular
idea of having heroes, but in the heroes. And perhaps the cure
lies not in abolishing heroes, but in making our heroes move on
and in insisting on more and better ones.
Any man who looks may watch the crowd to-day making its
heroes move on.
If they do not move on, the crowd picks up the next hero at
hand who is moving—and drops them.
One can watch in every civilized country to-day crowds
picking up heroes, comparing, sorting, selecting, seeing the ones
that wear the longest, and one by one taking the old ones down.
The crowd takes a hero up in its huge rough hand, gazes
through him at the world, sees what it wants through him.
Then it takes up another, and then another.
Heroes are crowd spy-glasses.
Pierpont Morgan and Tom Mann for example.
Pierpont Morgan is a typical American business man raised [306]
to the nth or hero power.
The crowd thinks it is interesting to take up Pierpont Mor-
gan, the Tom Mann of the banks. It will see what it wants,
through him.
And the crowd thinks it is interesting to take up Tom Mann,
too, the Pierpont Morgan of the Trades Unions. It will see
what it wants, through him.
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