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BOOK FOUR
CROWDS AND HEROES
CHAPTER XVI
EXCEPTION
A BICYCLE, the other day, a little outside Paris as it was
running along quietly, lifted itself off the ground suddenly, and
flew three yards and seven inches.
There are nine million seven hundred and eighty nine thou-
sand nine hundred and seventy-nine bicycles that have not
flown three yards and seven inches.
But what of it? Why count them up? Why bother about
them? The important, conclusive, massive, irresistible, crush-
ing, material fact is that one bicycle has flown three yards seven
inches.
The nine million seven hundred and eighty-nine thousand
nine hundred and seventy-nine bicycles that can not fly yet
are negligible. So are nine out of ten business firms.
If there is one exceptional man in modern industry who is
running his business in the right way and who has made a suc-
cess of it and has proved it—he may look visionary to class-
socialists and to other people who decide by measuring off
masses of fact, and counting up rows of people and who see
what anybody can see, but he is after all in arranging our
social programme the only man of any material importance for
us to consider. It would be visionary to take the past, dump
it around in front of one, and try to make a future out of it.
I do not deny what people tell me about millionaires and about
factory slaves. I have not mooned or lied or turned away my
face. I stand by the one live, right, implacable, irrevocable,
prolific exception. I stand by the one bicycle out of them all
that has flown three yards and seven inches. I layout my
program, conceive my world on that. All these things people [381]
say about factories, about millionaires are mere history.
Piles of facts arranged in dead layers high against heaven, rows
of figures, miles of factory slaves, acres of cemeteries of dead
millionaires, going-by streetfuls of going-by people, shall not
cow me.
My heart has been broken long enough by counting truths
on my fingers, by numbering grains of sand, men, and moun-
tains, bombs, acorns and marbles alike.
Which truth matters?
Which man is right?
Where is Nazareth?
. . . . . . .
Nazareth is our only really important town now. I will see
what is going on in Nazareth. On every subject that comes
up, in every line of thought, I will go to the city of implacable
exceptions. All the inventors flock there—the man with the
one bicycle which flies, the one great industrial organizer, the
man with the man-machine, and the man—the great boy who
carries new great beautiful cities in his pocket like strings and
nails and knives, they are all there.
Nazareth is the city, the one mighty little city of the spirit
where all the really worth-while men wherever they may seem
to be, all day, all night, do their living.
Other cities may make things, in Nazareth they make worlds.
One can see a new one almost any day in Nazareth. Men go
up and down the streets there with their new worlds in their
eyes.
Some of them have them almost in their hands or are looking
down and working on them.
It does not seem to me that any of us can make ourselves
strong and fit to layout a sound program or vision for a
world, who do not watch with critical expectation and with
fierce joy these men of Nazareth, who do not take at least a
little time off every day, in spirit, in Nazareth, and spend it in [382]
watching bicycles fly three feet and seven inches. To watch
these men, it seems to me, is our one natural, economical way
to get at essential facts, at the set-one-side truths, at the
exceptions that worlds and all-around programs for worlds
are made out of. To watch these men is the one way I know
not to be lost in great museums and storehouses of facts that
do not matter, in the streetfuls and skyscraperfuls of men that
go by.
I regret to record that professors of political economy, social
philosophers, industrial big-wigs, presidents of boards of trade
have not been often met with on the streets of this silent,
crowded, mighty, invisible little town that rules the destinies
of men.
Not during the last twenty years, but one is meeting them
there to-day.
All these things that people are saying to me are mere history,
I have seen the one live, right, implacable, irrevocably prolific
exception. One telephone was enough. And one Galileo was
enough, with his little planet turning round and round, with
all of us on it who were obliged to agree with him about it.
It kept turning round and round with us until we did.
CHAPTER XVII
INVENTION
IF I were a Noah and wanted to get a fair selection of people
in London to be saved to start a new world, I would go out
and look over the crowd who are watching the flying machines
at Hendon, and select from them.
The Hendon crowd will not last forever. People who would
be far less desirable to start worlds with would gradually work
their way in, but it is only fair to say that these first few thou-
sand men and women of all classes who responded to the flying
machine would be possessed, as anyone could see with a look,
of special qualifications for running worlds.
I shall never quite forget the sense I had the first day of
the crowd at Hendon—those thousands of faces that had
gathered up in some way out of themselves a kind of huge
crowd-face before one—that imperturbable happiness on it and
that look of hard sense and hope, half poetry, half science . . .
it was like gazing at some portrait, or some vast countenance
of the future—watching the crowd at Hendon. Scores of
times I looked away from the machines swinging up past me
into the sky to watch the faces of the men and the women that
belonged with sky machines; these men and women who stood
on the precipice of a new world of air, of sunshine, and of dark-
ness, and were not afraid.
One was in a little special civilization for the time being, all
the new people in it sorted out from the old ones. One felt
a vast light-heartedness all about. One was in the presence
of the picked people who had come to see this first vast initiative
of man toward Space, toward the stars, the people who had
waited for four thousand years to see it; to see at last Little [384]
Man (as it would seem to God) in this his first clumsy, beauti-
ful childlike tottering up the sky.
One was with the people on the planet who were the first to
see the practical, personal value, the market value, of all these
huge idle fields of air that go with planets. They were the
first people to feel identified with the air, to have courage for
the air, the lovers of initiative, the men and women that one
felt might really get a new world if they wanted one and who
would know what to do with it when they got it.
. . . . . . .
The other day in London near Charing Cross, as the crowds
were streaming down the Strand, a heavy box joggled off over
the end of a dray, crashed to the pavement, flew open and sent
twenty-four hundred pennies rolling under the feet of the men
and of the women and of the boys along the street.
Traffic was stopped and a thousand men and women and
boys began picking the pennies up. They all crowded up
around the dray and put the pennies in the box.
The next day the brewer to whom the pennies belonged had
a letter in the Times saying that not one of the twenty-four
hundred pennies was missing.
He closed his letter with a few moral remarks, announced
that he had sent the twenty-four hundred pennies as a kind
of tribute to people—to anybody Who Happened Along the
Strand—to a Foundling Hospital.
. . . . . . .
The man who told me this (it was at a business men's dinner),
told it because he knew I was trying to believe pleasant things
about human nature. He thought he ought to encourage
me.
I will not record the conversation, I merely record my humble
opinion.
I think it would have been better to have had just a few of [385]
those pennies in the Strand—say seven or eight missing.
On Broadway probably eleven or twelve out of twenty-four
hundred would have been missing—I hope.
And I am not unhopeful about England, or about the Strand.
There are two ways to get relief from this story.
First, the brewer lied. There were fewer pennies stolen
than he would have thought, and when he figured it out and
found just a few pennies between him and a good story, he
put the pennies in. And so the dear little foundlings got them
—the letter in the Times said. They were presented to them,
as it were, by the Good Little Boys in the Strand.
Second, somebody else put the pennies in, some person
standing by with a sense of humour, who knew the letters
that people write to the Times and the kind, serious, grave
way English people read them. He put the pennies grimly
in at one end, then he waited grimly for the letter in the Times
to come out at the other.
Either of these theories would work very well and let the
crowd off.
But if they are disproved to me, I have one more to fall back
upon.
If the story is true and not a soul in that memorable crowd
on that memorable day stole a penny, it was because they had
all, as it happened in that particular crowd, stolen their pennies
before, and got over it. It would seem a great pity if there
had not been some one boy with enough initiative in him,
enough faculty for moral experiment, to try stealing a penny
just once, to see what it would be like.
The same boy would have seen at once what it was like,
tried feeling ashamed of it promptly, and would never have
had to bother to do it again. He would have felt that penny
burning in his pocket past cash drawers, past banks, past bonds,
until he became President of the United States.
At all events the last thing that I would be willing to believe
is that either America or England would be capable of producing [386]
a chance crowd in the street that out of sheer laziness or moral
thoughtlessness would not be able to work up at least one boy
in it who would have a sudden flash of imagination about a
penny rolling around a man's leg—if he picked it up and
—did not put it in the box.
The crowd in the Strand, of course, like any other real crowd,
was a stew of development, a huge laboratory of people. All
stages of experience were in it.
Some of the people in the crowd that day had a new refresh-
ing thought, when they saw those pennies rolling around
everybody, They thought they would try and see what stealing
a penny was like. Then they did it.
Others in the crowd thought of stealing a penny too, and
then they had still another thought. They thought of not
stealing it, And this second thought interested them more.
Others did; not think of stealing a penny at all because they
had thought of it so often before had got used to it and had
got used to dismissing it.
Others thought of stealing a penny and then they thought
how ashamed they were of having thought of it. Others looked
thoughtfully at the pennies and thought they would wait for
guineas.
But whatever it was or may have been that was taking place
in that crowd that day—they all thought.
And after all what is really important to a nation is that the
people in it—any chance crowd in a street in it should think.
I confess I care very little one way or the other about the
pennies being saved, or about the brewer's little touch of moral
poetry, his idea that this particular crowd was solid Sunday-
school from one end to the other, all through. Whether it
was a crowd that thought of stealing a penny and did or did
not, if the pennies rolling around among their feet made them
think, made them experiment, played upon the initiative, the
individuality or invention in them, the personal self-control, the
social responsibility in them, it was a crowd to be proud of. [387]
And I am glad, for one, that the box of pennies was dumped
in the street.
I would like to see shillings tried next time.
Then guineas might be used.
A box of guineas dumped in the street would do more good
than a box of pennies because there are many people who
would think more with the guineas rolling around out of sight
around a man's legs than they would with a penny's doing it.
In this way a box of guineas would do more good.
. . . . . . .
Thousands of men and women that we have sent to India
from this Western World have been trying with Bibles, and
good deeds, and kind faces, and Sunday-schools to get the
Hindoos to believe that it would not be a sin to kill the rats
and stop the bubonic plague.
Nothing came of it.
In due time General Booth-Tucker appeared on the scene.
He came too, of course, with a Bible and with his kind face
like the others, and of course, too, he went to Sunday-school
regularly.
And while he was watching the bubonic plague sweeping up
cities, he tried too, like the others, to tell the people about a
God who would not be displeased if they killed the rats and
stopped the plague.
But he could not convince anybody, or at best a few here
and there.
The next thing that was known about General Booth-
Tucker's work in India was, that he had (still with his Bible,
of course, and with his kind look) slipped away and established
in the south of France a factory for the manufacture of gloves.
He then returned to his poor superstitious people in India
who would not believe him, and told them that he knew and
knew absolutely that they would not be punished for killing
the rats, that the rats were not sacred, and that he could prove [388]
it.
He offered the people so much apiece for the skins of the rats.
The poorest and most desperate of the natives then began
killing the rats secretly and bringing in the skins.
They waited for the wrath of Heaven to fall upon them.
Nothing happened, then they told others. The others are
telling everybody.
General Booth-Tucker's factory to-day in the south of France
is very busy making money for the Salvation Army, turning
out Christian gloves for the West and turning out Christians
or the beginnings of Christians for the East, and the ancient,
obstinate theological idea of the holiness of the rats which the
Hindoos have had is being ceaselessly, happily, and stupen-
dously, all day and all night, disproved.
Incidentally the little religious glove factory of General
Booth-Tucker's in the south of France is giving India the first
serious and fair chance it has ever had to stop being a pest
house on the world, and to bring the bubonic plague with its
threat at a planet to an end.
General Booth-Tucker's Bible was just like anybody else's
Bible. But there must have been something about the way he
read his Bible that made him think of things. And there must
have been something about his kind look. He looked kindly
at something in particular, and he was determined to make
that something in particular do. He had the rats, and he had
the gloves, and he had the Hindoo's—and he made them do,
and before he knew it (I doubt if he knows it now) he became
a saviour or inventor.
In the big, desolate, darkened heart of a nation he had
wedged in a God.
. . . . . . .
I wonder if General Booth-Tucker—that is, the original, very
small edition of General Booth-Tucker—had been in that
memorable crowd, that memorable day in the Strand when [389]
nobody (with a report that was heard around the world) stole
a penny—I wonder if General Booth-Tucker would have been
A Very Good Little Boy.
One of the pennies might have been missing.
I have no prejudice against the Very Good Little Boy. It
is not his goodness that is what is the matter with him. But
I am very much afraid that if there were any way of getting
all the facts, it would not be hard to prove categorically that
what has been holding the world back the last twenty-five
years in its religious ideals, its business ethics, its liberty,
candour, its courage, and its skill in social engineering, is the
Very Good Little Boy. He may be comparatively harmless at
first and before his moustache is grown, but the moment he
becomes a grown-up or the moment he sits on committees with
his quiet, careful, snug, proper fear of experiment, of bold
initiative, his disease of never running a risk, his moral anaemia,
he blocks all progress in churches, in legislatures, in directors'
meetings, in trades unions, in slums and May-fairs. One sees
The Good Little Boys weighing down everything the moment
they are grown up.
They have all been brought up each with his one faint,
polite little hunger, his one ambition, his one pale downy
desire in life, looking forward day by day, year by year, to the
fine frenzy, to the fierce joy of Never Making a Mistake.
If I had been given the appointment and were about to set
to work to-morrow morning to make a new world, I would
begin by getting together all the people in this one that I knew,
or had noticed anywhere, who seemed to have in them the
spirit of experiment. Any boy or girl or man or woman that
I had seen having the curiosity to try the different kinds and
different sizes of right and wrong, or that I had seen boldly and
faithfully experimenting with the beautiful and the ugly so that
they really knew about them for themselves—would be let
in. I would put these people for a time in a place by them-
selves where the people who want to keep them from trying [390]
or learning, could not get at them.
Then I would let them try.
I would put the humdrum people in another place by them-
selves and let them humdrum, the respectable people by them-
selves and let them respectabilize.
Then after my try-world had tried, and got well started and
the people in it had finished off some things and knew what
they wanted, I would allow the humdrums and the respecta-
bilities to be let in—to do what they were told.
Doing what they are told is what they like. So they would
be happy.
Of course doing what they are, told is what is the matter
with them. But what is the matter with them would be
useful.
And everybody would be happy.
. . . . . . .
When the Titanic went down a little while ago and those
few quiet men on deck began their duty in that soft, gracious
moonlit night, of sorting out the people who should die from
the people who should live—if one was a woman one could
live. If one was a man one could die.
No one will quarrel with the division as the only possible
or endurable one that could have been made.
But if God himself could have made the division or some
super-man ship's officer who could have represented God,
could have made it, it is not hard to believe that a less super-
ficial, a more profound and human difference between people
would have been used in sorting out the people who should
live from the people who should die than a difference in organs
of reproduction.
The women were saved first because the men were men and
because it was the way the men felt. It expressed the men
who were on the deck that night that the women should be
saved first; it was the last chance they had to express them- [391]
selves like men and they wanted to do it.
But if God himself could have made the division with the
immediate and conclusive knowledge of who everybody was,
of what they really were in their hearts, and of what they and
their children and their children's children would do for the
world if they lived—no one would have quarrelled with God
for making what would have seemed at the moment, no doubt,
very unreasonable and ungallant and impossible-looking dis-
criminations in sorting out the people who should live from the
people who should die.
Possibly even Man (using the word with a capital), acting
from the point of view of history and of the race and from the
point of view of making a kind of world where Titanic disasters
could not happen, would have chosen on the deck of the Titanic
that night, very much the way God would.
From the point of view of Man there would have been
no discrimination in favour of a woman because she was a
woman.
The last cry of the last man that the still listening life-boats
heard coming up out of the sea that night might have been the
cry of the man who had invented a ship that could not
sink.
There would not have been a woman in a life-boat or a
woman sinking in the sea who would not have had this man
saved before a woman.
If we could absolutely know all about the people, who are
the people in this world that we should want to have saved
first, that we would want to have taken to the life-boats and
saved first at sea?
The women who are with child.
And the men who are about to have ideas.
And the men who man the boats for them, who in God's
name and in the name of a world protect its women who are
with child, and its men who are about to have ideas.
The world is different from the Titanic. We do not need to [392]
line up our immortal fellow human beings, sort them out in
a minute on a world and say to them, "Go here and die!"
"Go there and live!" We are able to spend on a world at
least an average of thirty-five years apiece on all these im-
mortal human beings we are with, in seeing what they are like,
in guessing on what they are for and on their relative value,
and in deciding where they belong and what a world can do
with them.
We ought to do better in saving people on a world. We have
more time to think.
What would we try to do if we took the time to think?
Would there be any way of fixing upon an order for saving
people on a world? What would be the most noble, the most
universal, the most Godlike and democratic schedule for souls
to be saved on—on a world?
I think the man that would save the most other people
should be saved first. It would not be democratic to save an
ordinary man, a man who could just save himself, just think
for himself, when saving the man next to him instead would
be saving a man.who would save a thousand ordinary men,
or men who have gifts for thinking only of themselves.
Of course one man who thinks merely of himself is as good
as another man who thinks merely of himself, but from the
point of view of a democracy every common man has an in-
alienable right—the right to have the man who saves common
men saved first.
And the moment we get in this world, our first democracy,
the moment the common man really believes in democracy,
this aristocracy or people who save others (the common man
himself will see to it) will be saved first.
He will make mistakes in applying the principle of democ-
racy, that is in collecting his aristocracies, his strategic men,
his linchpins of society, but he will believe in the principle
all through. It will be not merely in his brain, but in his in-
stincts, in his unconscious hero-worship, in his sinews and his [393]
bones, and it will stir in his blood, that some men should be
saved before others.
But if the world is not a Titanic, and if we have on the
average thirty-five years apiece to decide about men on a world
and put them where they belong, it might not be amiss to try
to unite for the time being on a few fundamental principles.
What would seem to us to be a few fundamental principles
for the act of world-assimilation, that vast, slow, unconscious
crowd-process, that peristaltic action of society of gathering
up and stowing away men—all these little numberless cells of
humanity where they belong?
No one cell can have much to say about it. But we can watch.
And as we watch it seems to us that men may be said to be
dividing themselves roughly and flowingly at all times into
three great streams or classes.
They are either Inventors, or they are Artists, or they are
Hewers.
Of course in classifying men it is necessary to bear in mind
that their getting out of their classifications is what the classi-
fications are for.
And it is also necessary to bear in mind that men can only
be classified with regard to their emphasis and may belong
in one class in regard to one thing and in another class with
regard to another, but in any particular place, or at any par-
ticular time a man is doing a thing in this world, he is probably
for the time being, while he is doing it, doing it as an Inventor
(or genius), as an Artist (or organizer), or as a Hewer. Most
men, it must be said, settle down in their classifications. They
are very apt to decide for life whether they are Inventors or
Artists or Hewers.
But as has been said before, being on a world and not on
a Titanic, we have time to think.
On what principles could we make out a schedule or inven-
tory of human nature, and decide on world-values in men?
When I was a boy I played in the hollow of a great butternut [394]
tree—the one my mother was married under. When I was
in college I used to go back to it. I used to wonder a little
that it was still there. When we had all grown up we all came
back and got together under it one happy day and there it
still stood, its great arms from out of the sky bent over lovers
and over children on its little island, its wide river singing
round it, still that glorious old hollow in it, full of dreams
and childhood and mystery, and that old sudden sunshine in
it through the knots like portholes . . . then we stood there
all of us together. And the mother watched her daughter
married under it.
I can remember many days standing beneath it as a small
boy (my small insides full of butternuts, a thousand more
butternuts up on the tree), and I used to look up in its branches
and wonder about it, wonder how it could keep on so with its
butternuts and with its leaves, with its winters and with its
summers, its cool shadows and sunshines, still being a butter-
nut tree, with that huge hollow in it.
I have learned since that if a few ounces or whittlings of wood
in a tree are chipped out in a ring around it under the bark,
cords of wood in the limbs all up across the sky would die in
a week—if one chips out those few little ounces of wood.
Cords of wood can be taken out of the inside of the tree and
it will not mind.
It is that little half-inch rim of the tree where the juice runs
up to the sun that. makes the tree alive or dead.
The part that must be saved first and provided for first is
that slippery little shiny streak under the bark.
One could dig out a huge brush-heap of roots and the tree
would live. One could pick off millions of leaves, could cut
cords of branches out of it, or one could make long hollows up
to the sun, tubes to the sky out of trees, and they would live,
if one still managed to save those little delicate pipe lines for
Sap, running up and running down, day and night, night and
day, between the light in heaven and the darkness in the [395]
ground.
Perhaps Men are valuable in proportion as it would be diffi-
cult to produce promptly other men to perform their functions,
or to take their places.
If we cut away in society men of genius, leaves, and blos-
soms, in trees, men who reach down Heaven to us, they grow
out again.
If we cut away in society great masses of roots, common men
who hew out the earth in the ground and get earth ready to
be heaved up to the sky—the roots grow out again.
But if we cut a little faint rim around it of artists, of inventive
men-controllers, of the Sap-conductors, the men who make the
Hewers run up to the sky and who make the geniuses come down
to the ground, the men who run the tree together, who out of
dark earth and bright sunshine build it softly—if we destroy
these, this little rim of great men or men who save others, a
totally new tree has to be begun.
It is the essence of a democracy to acknowledge that some
men for the time being are more important in it than others,
and that these men, whosoever they are, in whatever order of
society they may be—poor, rich, famous, obscure—these
men who think for others, who save others and invent others,
who make it possible for others to invent themselves, these
men shall be saved first.
. . . . . . .
One always thinks at first that one would like to make a
diagram of human nature. It would be neat and convenient.
Then one discovers that no diagram one can make of human
nature—unless one makes what might be called a kind of
squirming diagram will really work.
Then one tries to imagine what a flowing diagram would be
like.
Then it occurs to one, one has seen a flowing diagram.
A Tree is a flowing diagram. [396]
So I am putting down on this page for what it may be
worth, what I have called A Family Tree of Folks.
Read across:
INVENTORS. . . . . . . . . ARTISTS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . HEWERS
Inventors. . . . . . . . . . . . Organizers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Labourers
Imagination. . . . . . . . . . Applied Imagination. . . . Tool or Mechanism
Fecundity. . . . . . . . . . . .Control. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Activity
Seer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Poet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Actor
The Man who . . . . . . .The Man who Sees the
Generalizes. . . . . . . . General in the Particular }. . . . . . Action
The Deeper Permanent {The Immediate Signifi- }. . . . . . Hewing
Significance. . . . . . . . . . . cance or Meaning
Light. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Applied Light or Heat. . . Applied Heat or Motion
Stevenson and Watt. . . . . James J. Hill. . . . . . . . . . . .Railway Hands
Creating. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Creative Selecting. . . . . . .Hewing
The Democrat. . . . . . .The Aristocrat or Crowdman. . . .The Crowd
Gods. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Heroes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Men
Centrifugal Power. . . . . .Equilibrium. . . . . . . . . . . . Centripetal Power
The Whirl-Out People. . . .The Centre People. . . . . . The Whirl-In People
Alexander Graham Bell. . . Telephone-Vail. . . . . . . . . . . Hands
Architect. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contractor. . . . . . . . . . . . Carpenter
Genius. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Artist. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Workmen
Columbus. . . . . . . . . . Columbus. . . . . . . . . . . Isabella and the sailors
The Prospector . . . . . The Engineer. . . . . . . Scoopers, Grabbers (in
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . mind or body), Hewers
David the poet. . . . . . . David the king. . . . . . . . . . David the soldier
Shakespeare. . . . . . . . Shakespeare . . . . . . . . . . . .Shakespeare
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