Crowds Part 23

Alfred n.o.bel was the inventor of an explosive, a rearranger of things a.s.sumed and things unbedded, and it was this same expansive, half-terrible, half-sublime power in other men and other men's books he wanted to endow--the power to free and mobilize the elements in a world, make it budge over a little toward a new one. He wanted to spend forty thousand dollars a year on the man in literature who had the pent-up power in him to crash the world's mind open once more every year like a Seed, and send groping up out of it once more its hidden thought.

I may not be right in antic.i.p.ating the eventual opinion of Allen Upward's book; but even if I am wrong, it will have helped perhaps to call attention to the essential failure of the n.o.bel Prize Trustees to side with the darers and experimenters in literature, to take a serious part in those great creative, centrifugal movements in the souls of men in which new worlds and the sense of new worlds are swept in upon us.

For the Sciences, which are more matter of fact and tangible, the n.o.bel Prize is functioning more or less as Mr. n.o.bel intended, but certainly in Literature it will have to be cla.s.sed as one more of our humdrum regular millionaire arrangements for patting successful people expensively on the back. It acts twenty years too late, falls into line with our usual worldly ornamental D.D., LL.D. habit, and has become, so far as Literature is concerned, a mere colossal, kindly, doddering Old Age Pension from a few gentlemen in Stockholm. It adds itself as one more futile effort of men of wealth--or world owners to be creative and lively with money, very much on the premises with money, after they are dead.

CHAPTER IV

PAPER BOOKS, MARBLE PILLARS, AND WOODEN BOYS

I have sometimes wished that Mr. Carnegie would post the following sign up on his Libraries, on the outside where people are pa.s.sing, and on the inside in the room where people sit and think:

A MILLION DOLLARS REWARD.

WANTED, A GREAT LIVING AMERICAN AUTHOR FOR MY LIBRARIES IN THE UNITED STATES. AT PRESENT OUR GREAT AUTHOR IN AMERICA APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN LOST OR MISLAID; ANY ONE FINDING HIM, OR ANY ONE THAT MIGHT DO FOR HIM TEMPORARILY, PLEASE COMMUNICATE WITH ME.

ANDREW CARNEGIE.

Mr. Carnegie's Libraries must be a source of constant regret to the author of "Triumphant Democracy." They are generally made up of books written in the Old World. It would be interesting to know what are the real reasons great Libraries are not being written for Mr. Carnegie in America, and what there is that Mr. Carnegie or other people can do about it. They are certainly going to be written in America some time, and certainly, unless the best and greatest part of the Carnegie Library of the future is to be the American part of it, the best our Carnegie Libraries will do for America will be to remind us of what we are not.

Unless we can make the American part of Mr. Carnegie's Libraries loom in the world as big as Mr. Carnegie's chimneys, America--which is the last newest experiment station of the world--is a failure.

It has occurred to me to try to express, for what it may be worth, a point of view toward Triumphant Democracy Mr. Carnegie may have inadvertently overlooked.

If Mr. Carnegie would establish in every town where he has put a Library, by endowment or otherwise, a Commission, or what might be called perhaps a Searching Party, in that community, made up of men of inventive and creative temperament, who instinctively know this temperament in others--men in all specialities, in all walks of life, who are doing things better than any one wants to pay them to do them--and if Mr. Carnegie would set these men to work, in one way and another, looking up boys who are like them, boys about the town, who are doing things better than any one wants to pay them to do them--he would soon get a monopoly of the idealism of the world; he would collect in thirty-five years, or in one generation, an array of living great men, of national figures, men who would be monuments to Andrew Carnegie, as compared with which his present libraries, big, thoughtless, innumerable, humdrum, sogging down into the past, would be as nothing.

Mr. Carnegie has given forty libraries to New York; and I venture to say that there is at this very moment, running round the streets of the great city, one single boy, who has it in him to conceive, to imagine, and hammer together a new world; and if Mr. Carnegie would invest his fortune, not in buildings or in books, but in buying brains enough to find that boy, and if the whole city of New York were to devote itself for one hour every day for years to searching about and finding that boy, to seeing just which he is, to going over all the other boys five hours a day to pick him out, it would be--well, all I can say is, all those forty libraries of Mr. Carnegie's, those great proud buildings, would do well if they did not do one thing for six years but find that boy!

There is a boy at this very moment with strings and marbles and a nation in his pocket, a system of railroads--a boy with a national cure for tuberculosis, with sun-engines for everybody--there is a boy with cathedrals in him too, no doubt or some boy like young Pinchot, with mountainsful of forests in his heart.

This is what Mr. Carnegie himself would like to do, but with his big, stiff, clumsy libraries trailing their huge, senseless brick-and-mortar bodies, their white pillars and things, about the country, unmanned, inert, eyeless, all those great gates and forts of knowledge, Coliseums of paper, and with the mechanical people behind the counters, the policemen of the books, all standing about protecting them--with all this formidable array, how can such a boy be hunted out or drawn in, or how would he dare go tramping in through the great gates and hunting about for himself? He could only be hunted out by people all wrought through with human experience, men and women who would give the world to find him, who are on the daily lookout for such a boy--by some special kind of eager librarian, or by disguised teachers, anonymous poets, or by diviners, by expert geniuses in boys. If Mr. Carnegie could go about and look up and buy up wherever he went these men who have this boy-genius in them, deliver them from empty, helpless, mere getting-a-living lives; and if he could set these men, and set them about thickly, among the books in his libraries--those huge anatomies and bones of knowledge he has established everywhere, all his great literary steel-works--men would soon begin to be discovered, to be created, to be built in libraries ... but as it is now....

Gentle Reader, have you ever stood in front of one of them, looked up at the windows, thought of all those great tiers, those moulds and blocks of learning on the shelves; and have you never watched the weary people that dribble in from the streets and wander coldly about, or sit down listless in them--in those mighty, silent empires of the past? have you never thought that somewhere all about them, somewhere in this same library, there must be some white, silent, sunny country of the future, full of children and of singing, full of something very different from these iron walls of wisdom? And have you never thought what it would mean if Mr. Carnegie would spend his money on search parties for people among the books, or what it would mean if the entire library, if all the books in it, became, as it were, wired throughout with live, splendid, delighted men and women, to make connections, to establish the current between the people and the books, to discover the people one by one and follow them to their homes, and follow them in their lives, and take out the latent geniuses, and the listless engineers and poets, and the Kossuths, Caesars, the Florence Nightingales...?

It is only by employing forces that can be made extremely small, invisible, personal, penetrating, and spiritual, that this sort of work can be done. It must be delicate and wonderful workmans.h.i.+p, like the magnet, like the mighty thistledown in the wind, like electricity, like love, like hope--sheer, happy, warm human vision going about and casting itself, casting all its still and tiny might, its boundless seed, upon the earth: but it would pay.

The same people too, specialists in detecting and developing inventors, could be supplied also to all other possible callings. They would const.i.tute a universal profession, penetrating all the others. They would go hunting among foremen and in machine shops for the misplaced geniuses, tried by wrong standards, underpaid for having other gifts.

They would keep a lookout through all the schools and colleges, looking over the shoulders of scolding teachers and absent professors. They would go about studying the playgrounds and mastering the streets.

We do not a little for the Submerged Tenth and the sons of the poor, and we have schools or missions for the sons of the rich, but one of the things we need next to-day is that something should be done for the sons of the great neglected respectable cla.s.ses. Far more important than one more library--say in Denver, for instance would be a Denver Bureau of Investigation, to be appointed, of high-priced, spirited men, of expert humanists, to study difficulties, and devise methods and missions for putting all society in Denver through filters or placers, and finding out the rich human ore, finding out where everybody really belonged, and what all the clever misplaced people were really for. Of course it would take money to do all this, and flocks of free people who are doing the work they love. But it is not book-racks, nor paper, nor ink, nor stone steps, nor white pillars--it is free men and free women America and England are asking of their Andrew Carnegies to-day.

Mr. Carnegie has not touched this human problem in his libraries. If Society were fitted up all through with electric connections, men with a genius for discovering continents in people, Columbuses, boy-geniuses; and if there were established everywhere a current between every boy and the great world, this would be something on which Mr. Carnegie could make a great beginning with the little mite of his fortune. If we were to have even one city fitted up in this way, it would be hard to say how much it would mean--one city with enough people in it who were free to do beautiful things, free to be curious about the others, free to follow clues of greatness, free to go up the streams of Society to the still, faint little springs and beginnings of things. It would soon be a memorable city. A world would watch it, and other cities would grope toward it. Instead of this we have these big, hollow, unmanned libraries of Mr. Carnegie's everywhere, with no people practically to go with them, no great hive of happy living men and women in and out all day cross-fertilizing boys and books.

There seems to be something unfinished and stolid and brutal about a Carnegie Library now. The spirit of the garden and the sea, of the spring and the light, and of the child, is not in it. They have come to seem to some of us mere huge Pittsburgs of brains--all these impervious, unwieldy, rolling-mills of knowledge. I should think it would be a terrible prospect to grow old with, just to sit and see them flocking across the country from your window, all these huge smoke-stacks of books in their weary, sordid cities; and the boys who might be great men, the small Lincolns with nations in their pockets, the little Bells with worlds in their ears, the Pinchots with their forests, the McAdoos and Roosevelts, the young Carnegies and Marconis in the streets!

CHAPTER V

THE HUMDRUM FACTORY AND THE TUMPTY-TUM THEATRE

Mr. Israel Zangwill in presiding at the meeting of the Sociological Society the other night remarked, in referring to inspired millionaires, that as a rule in the minds of most people nowadays a millionaire seemed to be a kind of broken-off person, or possibly two persons. There always seemed to have to be a violent change in a millionaire somewhere along the middle of his life. The change seemed to be a.s.sociated in some way, Mr. Zangwill thought with his money. He reminded one of the patent-medicine advertis.e.m.e.nts, "Before and After Taking."

I have been trying to think why it is that the average millionaire reminds people--as Mr. Zangwill says he does--of a patent-medicine advertis.e.m.e.nt, "Before and After Taking."

I have thought, since Mr. Zangwill made this remark, of getting together a small collection of pictures of millionaires--two pictures of each, one before and the other after taking--and having them mounted in the most approved patent-medicine style, and taking them down to Far End and asking Mr. Zangwill to look them over with me and see if he thought--he, Israel Zangwill, the novelist, the play-wright, the psychologist--really thought, that millionaires "Before and After" were as different as they looked.

I imagine he would say--and practically without looking at the pictures--that of course to him or to me perhaps, or to any especially interested student of human nature, millionaires are not really different at all "Before and After Taking"; that they merely had a slightly different outer look. They would merely look different, Mr.

Zangwill would say, to the common run or majority of people--the people one meets in the streets.

But would they?

One of the most hopeful things that I have been thinking of lately is that the people--the ordinary people one meets in the streets--are beginning quite generally to see through their millionaires, and to see that their money almost never really cures them. Most very rich men, indeed, are having their times now, of even seeing through themselves; and it brings me up abruptly with a shock to think that the ordinary people who pa.s.s in the streets would be deceived by these simple little pictures Before and After. They have been deceived until lately, but are they being deceived now? I would like to see the matter tested, and I have thought it would be a good idea to take my small collection of pictures of millionaires--two pictures of each, one Before and the other After Taking--to a millionaire--of course some really reformed or cured one--and ask him to pay the necessary expenses in the columns of the _Times_, and of the _Westminster Gazette_, and the _Daily Chronicle_, and other representative London journals (all on the same morning), of having the pictures published. We could then take what might be called a social, human, economic inventory of London: ask people to send in their honest opinions, on looking at the pictures, as to whether Money, Before and After Taking, does or does not produce these remarkable cures in millionaires. I very much doubt if Mr. Zangwill would be found to be right in his estimate of our common people to-day.

I venture to believe that it is precisely because our common people are seeing that millionaires are not changed Before and After Taking that the majority of time millionaires we have to-day have come to be looked upon as one of the charges--one of the great spiritual charges and burdens modern Society has to carry.

Society has always had to do what it could for the poor, but in our modern civilization, in a new and big sense, we have to see now what there is, if possibly anything, that can be done for the rich.

We have come to have them now almost everywhere about us--these great spiritual orphans, with their pathetic, blind, useless fortunes piled up around them; and Society has to support them, to keep them up morally, keep them doing as little damage as possible, and has to allow day by day besides for the strain and structural weakness they bring upon the girders of the world--the faith of men in men, and the credit of G.o.d, which alone can hold a world together.

It is not denied that the average millionaire, when he has made his money, does different-looking things, and gathers different-looking objects about him, and is seen in different-looking places. And it is not denied that he changes in more important particulars than things. He quite often changes people, the people he is seen with but he never or almost never changes himself. He is not one man when he is putting money into his pocket and another when he is taking it out.

We keep hoping at first with each new mere millionaire that when he gets all the money he has wanted it will change him; but we find it almost never does.

Merely reversing the motion with a pocket does not make a man a new and beautiful creature, and one soon sees that the typical millionaire is governed by the same bargain principles, is bullied and domineered over by the same personal limitations, the same old something-for-nothing habits. If he had the habit, while getting money out of people, of getting the better of them, he still insists on getting the better of people when he gives it to them or to their causes. He takes it out of their souls. There never has been a millionaire who runs his business on the old humdrum principle of merely making all the money he can who does not run his very philanthropies afterward on the same general principle of oppressing everybody, of outwitting everybody--and of doing people good in a way that makes them wish they were dead. Philanthropy as a philosophy, and even as an inst.i.tution, is getting to be nearly futile to-day, for the reason that millionaires--valid, authentic cases of millionaires who are really cured--who are changed either in their motives or their methods with regard to what they do with money, except in rare cases, do not exist.

The New Theatre in New York, which was started as a kind of Polar Expedition to discover and rescue Dramatic Art in America, failed because two hundred and forty millionaires tried to help it. If enough millionaires could have been staved off from that enterprise, or if it could have been taken in hand either by fewer or more select millionaires cooperating with the public and with artists of all cla.s.ses, New Theatre of New York would not have been obliged, as it has been since, to start all over again on a new basis. The blunders in creative public work that men who get rich in the wrong way are always sure to make had to be made first. They nearly always have to be made first. There is hardly a single enterprise of higher social value in which the world is interested to-day which is not being gravely threatened in efficient service by letting in too many millionaires, and by paying too much attention to what they think. If our people were generally alive to the terrific sameness and monotony of a millionaire's life "before and after," and if millionaires were looked over discriminatingly before being allowed to take part in great public enterprises like the cinema, for instance, the newspapers, the hospitals, the theatres, there is hardly any limit to the new things that public enterprises would begin to make happen in the world, and the new men that would begin to function in them.

Of course, if what a great vision for the people--_i.e._, a public enterprise is for, is to make money, it would be different. The mere millionaire might understand, and his understanding might help. But if an inst.i.tution is founded (like a great theatre) to be a superb and n.o.ble masterpiece of understanding and changing human nature; if it is founded to be a creative and dominating influence, to build up the ideals and fire the enthusiasm of a city, to lay the foundations of the daily thoughts and the daily motives of a great people, the mere millionaire finds, if he tries to manage it, that he is getting in beyond his depth. A man who has made his money by exploiting and taking advantage of the public can only be expected, in conducting a Theatre, to be an authority on how to exploit a public and take advantage of it still more, and how to make it go to the play that merely looks like the play that it wants.

Millionaires as a cla.s.s, unless they are men who have made their money in the artist's or the inventor's spirit, really ought to be expected by this time, except in the size of their cheques, to be modest and thoughtful, to stand back a little and watch other people. The millionaires themselves, if they thought about it, would be the first to advise us not to pay too much attention to them. They are used to large things, and they know that the only way to do, in conducting great enterprises, is to select and use men (whether millionaires or not) for the particular efficiencies they have developed. If we are conducting what is called a charity, we will not expect that a millionaire can do good things unless he is a good man. He spoils them by picking out the wrong people. And we will not expect him to do artistic things unless he has lived his life and done his business in the spirit and the temperament of the artist. He will not know which the artists are or what the artists are like inside; and he will not like them and they will not like him, nor will they be interested in him or interested in working with him. Everything that artists or men of creative temperament try to do with the common run of millionaires--all these huge, blind, imponderable megatheriums, stamping along through life, ordering people about--ends in the same way--in irksomeness, bewildered vision, fear, compromise, and failure, as seen from the inside. Seen on the outside or before the public, of course, the Inst.i.tution will have the same old, bland, familiar air of looking successful and of looking intelligent, and yet of being uninteresting, and of not changing the world by a hair's breadth.

The only millionaires who should be allowed to have a controlling interest in public enterprises are millionaires who do not need to be different before and after making their money. Everybody is coming to see this, sooner or later. It is already getting very hard to raise money for any public enterprise in which mere millionaires or bewildered, unhappy rich men are known to have a controlling interest.

The most efficient and far-sighted men do not expect anything very decided or of marked character from such enterprises, and will no longer lend to them either their brains or their money. Mere millionaires will soon have to conduct their public enterprises quite by themselves, and they will then soon fall of their own weight. The moment men are put in control of public enterprises by the size of their brains instead of the size of their cheques, the whole complexion of what are known as our public enterprises will change, and churches, theatres, hospitals, settlements, art galleries, and all other great public causes, instead of boring everybody and teasing everybody, will be attracting everybody and attracting everybody's money. They will be full of character, courage, and vision. Our present great, vague, helpless, plaintive public enterprises--one third art, one third millionaire, one third deficit--drag along financially because they are listless compromises, because they have no souls or vision, and are not interesting--not even interesting to themselves.

Men with creative or imaginative quality, and courage, and insight into ordinary human nature, and far-sightedness of what can be expected of people, do not get on with the ordinary millionaire. It cannot be denied that millionaires and artists get together in time; but the particular point that seems to be interesting to consider is how the millionaires and artists can be got together before the artists are dead, and before the millionaires stop growing and stop being creative and understanding creative men.

It might be well to consider the present situation in the concrete--the theatre, for instance--and see how the situation lies, and where one would have to begin, and how one would have to go to work to change it.

The present failure of the theatre to encourage what is best in modern art is due to the fact that the public is unimaginative and inartistic.

If a public is unimaginative and inartistic, the only way the best things that are offered can succeed with them is by having these best things held before them long and steadily enough for them slowly to compare them with other things, and see that they are better than the other things, and that they are what they want.

Unimaginative and inartistic people do not know what they want. If things are tried long enough with them they do. When they have been tried long enough with them they support them themselves.

The only way fine things can be tried long enough is with sufficient capital.