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Contents |
BOOK ONE
CROWDS AND MACHINES
TO CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
"A battered, wrecked old man
Thrown on this savage shore far, far from home,
Pent by the sea and dark rebellious brows twelve dreary months
. . . The end I know not, it is all in Thee,
Or small or great I know not—haply what broad fields, what
lands! . . .
And these things I see suddenly, what mean they
As if some miracle, some hand divine unsealed my eyes,
Shadowy vast shapes smile through the air and sky,
And on the distant waves sail countless ships,
And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me."
CHAPTER I
WHERE ARE WE GOING?
THE best picture I know of my religion is Ludgate Hill as one
sees it going down the foot of Fleet Street. It would seem to
many perhaps like a rather strange half-heathen altar, but it
has in it the three things with which I worship most my
Maker in this present world—the three things which it would
be the breath of religion to me to offer to a God together—
Cathedrals, Crowds, and Machines.
With the railway bridge reaching over, all the little still
locomotives in the din whispering across the street; with the
wide black crowd streaming up and streaming down, and the
big, far-away, other-worldly church above, I am strangely glad.
It is like having a picture of one's whole world taken up deftly,
and done in miniature and hung up for one against the sky—
the white steam which is the breath of modern life, the vast
hurrying of our feet, and that Great Finger pointing toward
heaven day and night for us all. . . .
I never tire of walking out a moment from my nook in
Clifford's Inn and stealing a glimpse and coming back to my
fireplace. I sit still a moment before going to work and look
in the flames and think. The great roar outside the Court
gathers it all up—that huge, boundless, tiny, summed-up
world out there; flings it faintly against my quiet windows
while I sit and think.
And when one thinks of it a minute, it sends one half-fearfully, [4]
half-triumphantly back to one's work—the very thought of it.
The Crowd hurrying, the Crowd's Hurrying Machines, and
the Crowd's God, send one back to one's work!
In the afternoon I go out again, slip my way through the
crowds along the Strand, toward Charing Cross.
I never tire of watching the drays, the horses, the streaming
taxis, all these little, fearful, gliding crowds of men and women,
when a little space of street is left, flowing swiftly, flowing like
globules, like mercury, between the cabs.
But most of all I like looking up at that vast second story
of the street, coming in over one like waves, like seas—all these
happy, curious tops of 'buses; these dear, funny, way-up people
on benches; these world-worshippers, sight-worshippers, and
Americans—all these little scurrying congregations, hundreds
of them, rolling past.
I sit on the front seat of a horse 'bus elbow to elbow
with the driver, staring down over the brink of the abyss upon
ears and necks—that low, distant space where the horses look
so tiny and so ineffectual and so gone-by below.
The street is the true path of the spirit. To walk through it,
or roll or swing on top of a bus through it—the miles of faces,
all these tottering, toddling, swinging miles of legs and stom-
achs; and on all sides of you, and in the windows and along the
walks, the things they wear, and the things they eat, and the
things they pour down their little throats, and the things they
pray to and curse and worship and swindle in! It is like being
out in the middle of a great ocean of living, or like climbing
up some great mountain-height of people, their abysses and
their clouds about them, their precipices and jungles and
heavens, the great high roads of their souls reaching off. . . .
I can never say why, but so strange is it, so full of awe is it, and
of splendour and pity, that there are times when, rolling and
swinging along on top of a 'bus, with all this strange, fearful joy
of life about me, within me . . . it is as if on top of my 'bus
I had been far away in some infinite place, and had felt Heaven [5]
and Hell sweep past.
One of the first things that strikes an American when he slips
over from New York, and finds himself, almost before he had
thought of it—walking down the Strand, suddenly, instead of
Broadway, is the way things—thousands of things at once;
begin happening to him.
Of course, with all the things that are happening to him—
the 'buses, the taxis, the Wren steeples, the great streams of new
sights in the streets, the things that happen to his eyes and to
his ears, to his feet and his hands, and to his body lunging
through the ground and swimming up in space on top of a 'bus
through this huge, glorious, yellow mist of people . . .
there are all the things besides that begin happening to his mind.
In New York, of course, he rushes along through the city, in
a kind of tunnel of his own thoughts, of his own affairs, and
drives on to his point, and New York does not—at least it does
not very often—make things happen to his mind. He is not
in London five minutes before he begins to notice how London
does his thinking for him. The streets of the city set him to
thinking, mile after mile, miles of comparing, miles of ex-
pecting.
And above the streets that he walks through and drives
through he finds in London another complete set of streets that
interest him: the greater, silenter streets of England—the
streets of people's thoughts. And he reads the great news-
papers, those huge highways on which the English people are
really going somewhere. . . . "Where are they going?"
He goes through the editorials, he stumbles through the news,
"Where are the English people going?"
. . . . . . .
An American thinks of the English people in the third person
—at first, of course.
After three days or so, he begins, half-unconsciously, slipping
over every now and then into what seems to be a vague, loose [6]
first person plural.
Then the first person plural grows.
He finds at last that his thinking has settled down into a
kind of happy, easy-going, international, editorial "We."
New York and London, Chicago and Sheffield, go drifting
together through his thoughts, and even Paris, glimmering
faintly over there, and a dim round world, and he asks, as the
people of a world stream by, "Where are WE going?"
Thus it is that London, looming, teeming, world-suggesting,
gets its grip upon a man, a fresh American, and stretches him,
stretches him before his own eyes, makes him cosmopolitan,
does his thinking for him.
. . . . . . .
There was a great sea to still his soul and lay down upon his
spirit that big, quiet roundness of the earth.
Nothing is quite the same after that wide strip of sea—
sleeping out there alone night by night—the gentle round
earth sloping away down from under one on both sides, in
the midst of space. . . . Then, suddenly, almost before
one knows, that quiet Space still lingering round one, perhaps
one finds oneself thrust up out of the ground in the night into
that big yellow roar of Trafalgar Square.
And here are the swift sudden crowds of people, one's own
fellow-men hurrying past. One looks into the faces of the
people hurrying past: "Where are we going?" One looks at
the stars: "WHERE ARE WE GOING?"
. . . . . . .
That night, when I was thrust up out of the ground and
stood dazed in the Square, I was told in a minute that this
London where I was was a besieged and conquered city. Some
men had risen up in a day and said to London: "No one shall
go in. No one shall go out."
I was in the great proud city at last, the capital of the world, [7]
her big, new, self-assured inventions all about her, all around
her, and soldiers camping out with her locomotives!
With her long trains for endless belts of people going in and
coming out, with her air-brakes, electric lights, and motor-cars
and aerial mails, it seemed passing strange to be told that her
great stations were all choked up with a queer, funny, old,
gone-by, clanky piece of machinery, an invention for making
people good, like soldiers!
And I stood in the middle of the roar of Trafalgar Square
and asked, as all England was asking that night: "Where are
we going?"
And I looked in the faces of the people hurrying past.
And nobody knew.
And the next day I went through the silenter streets of the
city, the great crowded dailies where all the world troops
through, and then the more quiet weeklies, then the monthlies,
more dignified and like private parks; and the quarterlies, too,
thoughtful, high-minded, a little absent, now and then a foot-
fall passing through.
And I found them all full of the same strange questioning:
"Where are we going?"
And nobody knew.
It was the same questioning I had just left in New York,
going up all about me, out of the skyscrapers.
New York did not know.
Now London did not know.
. . . . . . .
And after I had tried the journals and the magazines, I
thought of books.
I could not but look about—how could I do otherwise than
look about?—a lonely American walking at last past all these
nobly haunted doorways and windows—for your idealists or
interpreters, your men who bring in the sea upon your streets
and the mountains on your roof-tops; who still see the wide, [8]
still reaches of the souls of men beyond the faint and tiny roar
of London.
I could not but look for your men of imagination, your poets;
for the men who build the dreams and shape the destinies of
nations because they mould their thoughts.
I do not like to say it. How shall an American, coming to
you out of his long, flat, literary desert, dare to say it? . .
Here, where Shakespeare played mightily, and like a great boy
with the world; where Milton, Keats, Wordsworth, Browning,
Shelley, and even Dickens flooded the lives and refreshed the
hearts of the people; here, in these selfsame streets, going past
these same old, gentle, smoky temples where Charles Lamb
walked and loved a world, and laughed at a world, and even
made one—lifted over his London forever into the hearts
of men. . . .
I can only say what I saw those first few fresh days: John
Galsworthy out with his camera—his beautiful, sad, foggy
camera; Arnold Bennett stitching and stitching faithfully
twenty-four hours a day—big, curious tapestries of little things;
H. G. Wells, with his retorts, his experiments about him, his
pots and kettles of humanity in a great stew of, steam, half-
hopeful, half-dismayed, mixing up his great, new, queer messes
of human nature; and (when I could look up again) G. K.
Chesterton, divinely swearing, chanting, gloriously contra-
dicting, rolled lustily through the wide, sunny spaces of His
Own Mind; and Bernard Shaw (all civilization trooping by),
the eternal boy, on the eternal curbstone of the world, threw
stones; and the Bishop of Birmingham preached a fine,
helpless sermon. . . .
When a new American, coming from his own big, hurried,
formless, speechless country, finds himself in what he had
always supposed to be this trim, arranged, grown-up, articulate
England, and when, thrust up out of the ground in Trafalgar [9]
Square, he finds himself looking at that vast yellow mist of
people, that vast bewilderment of faces, of the poor, of the
rich, coming and going they cannot say where—he naturally
thinks at first it must be because they cannot speak; and when
he looks to those who speak for them, to their writers or inter-
preters, and when he finds that they are bewildered, that they
are asking the same question over and over that we in America
are asking too, "Where are we going?" he is brought abruptly
up, front to front with the great broadside of modern life.
London, his last resort, is as bewildered as New York; and so,
at last, here it is. It has to be faced now and here, as if it were
some great scare-head or bill-board on the world, "WHERE
ARE WE GOING?"
. . . . . . .
The most stupendous feat for the artist or man of imagination
in modern times is to conceive a picture or vision for our
Society—our present machine-civilization—a common expec-
tation for people which will make them want to live.
If Leonardo were living now, he would probably slight for
the time being his building bridges, and skimp his work on
Mona Lisa, and write a book—an exultant book about com-
mon people. He would focus and express democracy as only
the great and true aristocrat or genius or artist will ever do it.
A great society must be expressed as a vision or expectation
before men can see it together, and go to work on it together,
and make it a fact. What makes a society great is that it is
full of people who have something to live for and who know
what it is. It is because nobody knows, now, that our present
society is not great. The different kinds of people in it have not
made up their minds what they are for, and some kinds have
particularly failed to make up their minds what the other
kinds are for. .
We are all making our particular contribution to the common
vision, and some of us are able to say in one way and some [10]
in another what this vision is; but it is going to take a supreme
catholic, summing-up individualist, a great man or artist—
a man who is all of us in one—to express for Crowds, and for
all of us together, where we want to go, what we think we are
for, and what kind of a world we want.
This will have to be done first in a book. The modern world
is collecting its thoughts. It is trying to write its bible.
The Bible of the Hebrews (which had to be borrowed by the
rest of the world if they were to have one) is the one great
outstanding fact and result of the Hebrew genius. They did
not produce a civilization, but they produced a book for the
rest of the world to make civilizations out of, a book which has
made all other nations the moral passengers of the Hebrews for
two thousand years.
And the whole spirit and aim of this book, the thing about
it that made it great, was that it was the sublimest, most
persistent, most colossal, masterful attempt ever made by
men to look forth upon the earth, to see all the men in it,
like spirits hurrying past, and to answer the question, "WHERE
ARE WE GOING?"
I would not have anyone suppose that in these present
tracings and outlines of thought I am making an attempt to
look upon the world and say where the people are going, and
where they think they are going, and where they want to go.
I have attempted to find out, and put down what might seem
at first sight (at least it did to me) the answer to a very small
and unimportant question—"Where is it that I really want
to go myself?" "What kind of a world is it, all the facts about
me being duly considered, I really want to be in?"
No man living in a world as interesting as this ever writes
a book if he can help it. If Mr. Bernard Shaw or Mr. Chester-
ton or Mr. Wells had been so good as to write a book for me in
which they had given the answer to my question, in which they
had said more or less authoritatively for me what kind of a
world it is that I want to be in, this book would never have been [11]
written. The book is not put forward as an attempt to arrange
a world, or as a system or a chart, or as a nation-machine, or
even as an argument. The one thing that anyone can fairly
claim for this book is that one man's life has been saved with it.
It is the record of one man fighting up through story after story
of crowds and of crowds' machines to the great steel and iron
floor on the top of the world, until he had found the manhole
in it, and broken through and caught a breath of air and looked
at the light. The book is merely a life-preserver—that is all;
and one man's life-preserver. Perhaps the man is representa-
tive, and perhaps he is not. At all events, here it is. Anybody
else who can use it is welcome to it.
. . . . . . .
The first and most practical step in getting what one wants
in this world is wanting it. One would think that the next step
would be expressing what one wants. But it almost never is.
It generally consists in wanting it still harder and still harder
until one can express it.
This is particularly true when the thing one wants is a new
world. Here are all these other people who have to be asked.
And until one wants it hard enough to say it, to get it outside
one's self, possibly make it catching, nothing happens.
If one were to point out one trait rather than another that
makes Bernard Shaw, for so brilliant a man, so ineffective as a
leader, or literary statesman, or social reformer, it would be his
modesty. He has never wanted anything.
If I could have found a book by Bernard Shaw in which
Mr. Shaw had merely said what he wanted himself, it. is quite
possible this book would not have been written. Even if
Mr. Shaw, without saying what he wanted, had ever shown in
any corner of any book that one man's wanting something in
this world amounted to anything, or could make anyone
else want it, or could make any difference in him or in
the world around him, perhaps I would not have written this [12]
book.
Everywhere, as I have looked about me among the bookmen
in America, in England, I have found, not the things that they
wanted in their books, but always these same deadly lists or
bleak inventories—these prairies of things that they did not
want.
Now, as a matter of fact, I knew already, with an almost
despairing distinctness, nearly all these things I did not want
and it has not helped me (with all due courtesy and admiration)
having John Galsworthy out photographing them day after day,
so that I merely did not want them harder. And Mr. Wells's
measles and children's diseases, too. I knew already that
I did not want them. And Mr. Shaw's entire, heroic, almost
noble collection of things he does not want does not supply me
—nor could it supply any other man with furniture to make
a world with—even if it were not this real, big world, with
rain and sunshine and wind and people in it, and were only
that little, wonderful world a man lives within his own heart.
There have been times, and there will be more of them, when
I could not otherwise than speak as the champion of Bernard
Shaw; but, after all, what single piece of furniture is there that
George Bernard Shaw, living with his great attic of not-things
all around him, is able to offer to furnish me for me single, little,
warm, lighted room to keep my thoughts in? Nor has he
furnished me with one thing with which I would care to sit
down in my little room and think—looking into the cold,
perfect hygienic ashes he has left upon my hearth. Even if
I were a revolutionist, and not a mere, plain human being,
loving life and wanting to live more abundantly, I am bound
to say I do not see what there is in Mr. Galsworthy's photo-
graphs, or in Mr. Wells's rich, bottomless murk of humanity
to make a revolution for. And Mr. Bernard Shaw, with all his
bottles of disinfectants and shelves of sterilized truths, his hard
well-being and his glittering comforts, has presented the vision
of a world in which at the very best—even if it all comes out as [13]
he says it will—a man would merely have things without
wanting them, and without wanting anything.
. . . . . . .
And so it has seemed to me that even if he is quite unimpor-
tant, any man to-day who, in some public place, like a book,
shall paint the picture of his heart's desire, who shall throw up,
as upon a screen, where all men may see them, his most im-
mediate and most pressing ideals, would perform an important
service. If a man's sole interest were to find out what all men
in the world want, the best way to do it would be for him to
say quite definitely, so that we could all compare notes, what
he wanted himself. Speaking for a planet has gone by, but
possibly, if a few of us but speak for ourselves, the planet will
talk back, and we shall find out at last what it really is that
it wants.
The thing that many of us want most in the present grayness
and din of the world is some one to play with, or if the word
"play" is not quite the right word, some one with whom we can
work with freedom and self-expressiveness and joy. Nine
men out of ten one meets to-day talk with one as it were with
their watches in their hands. The people who are rich one
sees everywhere, being run away with by their motor-cars;
and the people who are poor one sees struggling pitifully
and for their very souls, under great wheels and beneath
machines.
Of course, I can only speak for myself. I do not deny that
a little while at a time I can sit by a brook in the woods and be
happy; but if, as it happens, I would rather have other people
about me—people who do not spoil things, I find that the
machines about me everywhere have made most people very
strange and pathetic in the woods. They cannot sit by brooks,
many of them; and when they come out to the sky, it looks to
them like some mere, big, blue lead roof up over their lives.
Perhaps I am selfish about it, but I cannot bear to see people [14]
looking at the sky in this way. . . .
. . . . . . .
So, as I have watched my fellow human beings, what I have
come to want most of all in this world is the inspired employer
—or what I have called the inspired millionaire or organizer;
the man who can take the machines off the backs of the people
and take the machines out of their wits, and make the machines
free their bodies and serve their souls.
If we ever have the inspired employer, he will have to be
made by the social imagination of the people, by creating the
spirit of expectation and challenge toward the rich among the
masses of the people.
I believe that the time has come when the world is to make
its last stand for idealism, great men, and crowds.
I believe that great men can be really great, that they can
represent crowds. I believe that crowds can be really great,
that they can know great men.
The most natural kind of great man for crowds to know first
will probably be a kind of everyday great man or business
statesman, the man who represents all classes, and who proves
it in the way he conducts his business.
I have called this man the Crowdman.
I do not say that I have met precisely the type of inspired
millionaire I have in mind, but I have known scores of men
who have reminded me of him and of what he is going to be, and
I am prepared to say that in spirit, or latent at least, he is all
about me in the world to-day. If it is proved to me that no
such man exists, I am here to say there will be one. If it is
proved to me that there cannot be one, I will make one. If it is
proved to me that by lifting up Desire in the faces of young men
and of boys, and in the faces of true fathers and young mothers,
and by ringing up my challenge on the great doors of the schools,
I cannot make one, then I will invoke the men that shall write
the books, that shall sing the songs that shall make one! I say [15]
this with all reverence for other men's desires and with all
respect for natural prejudgments. As I have conceived it,
the one business of the world to-day is to find out what we are
for and to find out what men in the world—on the whole—
really want. When men know what they want they get it.
Every wrong thing we have to face in modern industrial life
is due to men who know what they want, and who therefore get
it, due to the passions and the dreams of men; and the one
single way in which these wrong things will ever be overcome is
with more passions and with more and mightier dreams of men.
Nothing is more visionary than trying to run a world without
dreams, especially an economic world. It is because even bad
dreams are better in this world than having no dreams at all
that bad people so called are so largely allowed to run it.
In the final and practical sense, the one factor in economics
to be reckoned with is Desire.
The next move in economics is going to be the statement of
a shrewd, dogged, realizable ideal. It is only ideals that have
aroused the wrong passions, and it is only ideals that will arouse
the right ones.
It will have to be, I imagine, when it comes, not a mere
statement of principles, an analysis, or a criticism, but a moving-
picture, a portrait of the human race, that shall reveal man's
heart to himself. What we want is a vast white canvas,
spread, as it were, over the end of the world, before which we
shall all sit together, the audience of the nations, of the poor,
of the rich, as in some still, thoughtful place—all of us
together; and then we will throw up before us on the vast
white screen in the dark the vivid picture of our vast desires,
flame up upon it the hopes, the passions of human lives, and
the grim, silent wills of men. "What do we want?" "Where
are we going?"
In place of the literature of criticism we have come now to
the literature of Desire.
This literature will have to come slowly, and I have come [16]
to believe that the first book, when it comes, will be perhaps a
book that does not prove anything, a book that is a mere cry,
a prayer, or challenge; the story of what one man with these
streetfuls of the faces of men and the faces of women pouring
their dullness and pouring their weariness over him, has desired,
and of what, God helping him, he will have.
There is a certain sense in which merely praying to God
has gone by. In the present desperate crisis of a world plung-
ing on in the dark to a catastrophe or a glory that we cannot
guess, it is a time for men to pray a prayer, a standing-up
prayer, to one another.
I believe that it is going to be this huge gathering-in of
public desire, this imperious challenge of what men want,
this standing-up prayer of men to one another, which alone
shall make men go forth with faith and singing once more
into the battle of life. Sometimes it has seemed to me I have
already heard it—this song of men's desires about me—
faintly. But I have seen that the time is at hand when it
shall come as a vast chorus of cities, of fields, of men's voices,
filling the dome of the world—a chorus in the glory and the
shame of which no millionaire who merely wants to make
money, no artist who is not expressing the souls and freeing the
bodies of men, no statesman who is not gathering up the desires
of crowds, and going daily through the world hewing out
the will of the people, shall dare to live.
But while this is the vision of my belief, I would not have any
one suppose that I am the bearer of easy and gracious tidings.
It is rather of a great daily adventure one has with the
world.
There have been times when it seemed as if it had to begin
all over again every morning.
Day by day I walk down Fleet Street toward Ludgate Hill. [17]
I look once more every morning at that great picture of
my religion; I look at the quiet, soaring, hopeful dome—that
little touch of singing or praying that men have lifted up
against heaven. "Will the Dome bring the Man to me?"
I look up at the machines, strange and eager, hurrying
across the bridge. "Will the Machines bring the Man to me?"
I look in the faces of the crowd hurrying past. "Will the
Crowd bring the Man to me?"
With the picture of my religion—or perhaps three religions
or three stories of religion—I walk on and on through the
crowd, past the railway, past the Cathedral, past the Mansion
House, and over the Tower Bridge. I walk fast and eagerly
and blindly, as though a man would walk away from the
world.
Suddenly I find myself, throngs of voices all about me,
standing half-unconsciously by a high iron fence in Bermondsey
watching that smooth asphalt playground where one sees the
very dead (for once) crowded by the living—pushed over to
the edges—their gravestones tilted calmly up against the
walls. I stand and look through the pickets and watch the
children run and shout—the little funny, mockingly dressed,
frowzily frumpily happy children, the stored-up sunshine of
a thousand years all shining faintly out through the dirt, out
through the generations in their little faces—"Will the Man
come to me out these?
The tombstones lean against the wall and the children run
and shout. As I watch them with my hopes and fears and the
tombstones tilted against the walls—as I peer through the
railings at the children, I face my three religions. What
will the three religions do with the children? What will
the children do with the three religions?
And now I will tell the truth. I will not cheat nor run
away as sometimes I seem to have tried to do for years. I
will no longer let myself be tricked by the mere glamour and
bigness of our modern life nor swooned into good-will by the [18]
roll and liturgy of revolution, "of the people," "for the people,"
"by the people," nor will I be longer awed by those huge
phrase-idols, constitutions, routines. that have roared around
me "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"—those imperious
thoughtless, stupid tra-la-las of the People. Do the People
see truth? Can the People see truth? Can all the crowd, and
can all the machines, and all the cathedrals piled up together
produce the Man, the Crowd-man or great man who sees truth?
And so with my three religions, I have three fears, one
for each of them. There is the Machine fear, lest the crowd
should be overswept by its machines and become like them;
and the Crowd fear, lest the crowd should overlook its mighty
innumerable and personal need of great men; and there is also
the daily fear for the Church, lest the Church should not
understand crowds and machines and grapple with crowds
and machines, interpret them and glory in them and appropriate
them for her own use and for God's—lest the Church should
turn away from the crowds and the machines and graciously
and idly bow down to Herself.
And now I am going to try to express these three fears that
go with the three religions as well as I can, so that I can turn
on them and face them and, God helping me, look them out
of countenance.
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