Crowds Part 69

2 + 2 = 4

20 + 20 = 40

200 + 200 = 400

2,000 + 2,000 = 4,000

20,000 + 20,000 = 40,000

etc.

This arrangement would make the book what might be called a Moving Sidewalk of Truth. First sidewalk rather quick (six miles an hour).

Second, four miles an hour. Third, two miles an hour. People could move over from one sidewalk to the other in the middle of an idea any time, and go faster or slower as they liked to, needed to.

No one would accuse me--though I might like or need for my own personal use at one time or another, a slower sidewalk or a faster one than others--no one would accuse me of being inconsistent if I supplied extra sidewalks for people of different temperaments to move over to suddenly any time they wanted to. I have come to some of my truth by a bitterly slow sidewalk--slower than other people need, and sometimes I have come by a fast one (or what some would say was no sidewalk at all!) but it cannot fairly be claimed that there is anything inconsistent in my offering people every possible convenience I can think of--for believing me.

Mr. Cadbury is not inconsistent if he tells truth at a different rate to different people, or if he chooses to put truths before people in Indian file.

A man is not inconsistent who does not tell all the news he knows to all kinds of people, all at once, all the time.

There is nothing disingenuous about having an order for truth.

It is not considered compromising to have an order in moving railway trains. Why not allow an order in moving trains of thought? And why should a schedule for moving around people's bodies be considered any more reasonable than a schedule or timetable or order for moving around their souls?

Truth in action must always be in an order. Nine idealists out of ten who fight against News-men, or men who are trying to make the beautiful work, and who call them hypocrites, would not do it if they were trying desperately to make the beautiful work themselves. It is more comfortable and has a fine free look, to be blunt with the beautiful--the way a Poet is--to dump all one's ideals down before people and walk off. But it seems to some of us a cold, sentimental, lazy, and ign.o.ble thing to do with ideals if one loves them--to give everybody all of them all the time without considering what becomes of the ideals or what becomes of the people.

CHAPTER XVI

CROWD-MEN

MARCH 4, 1913.

As I write these words, I look out upon the great meadow. I see the poles and the wires in the sun, that long trail of poles and wires I am used to, stalking across the meadow. I know what they are doing.

They are telling a thousand cities and villages about our new President, the one they are making this minute, down in Was.h.i.+ngton, for these United States. With his hand lifted up he has just taken his oath, has sworn before G.o.d and before his people to serve the destinies of a nation. And now along a hundred thousand miles of wire on dumb wooden poles, a hope, a prayer, a kind of quiet, stern singing of a mighty people goes by. And I am sitting here in my study window wondering what he will be like, what he will think, and what he will believe about us.

What will our new President do with these hundreds of miles of prayer, of crying to G.o.d, stretched up to him out of the hills and out of the plains?

Does he really overhear it--that huge, dumb, half-helpless, half-defiant prayer going up past him, out of the eager, hoa.r.s.e cities, out of the slow, patient fields, to G.o.d?

Does he overhear it, I wonder? What does he make out that we are like?

I should think it would sound like music to him.

It would come to seem, I should think, when he is alone with his G.o.d (and will he not please be alone with his G.o.d sometimes?), like some vast ocean of people singing, a kind of mult.i.tudinous, faraway singing, like the wind--ah, how often have I heard the wind like some strange and mighty people in the pine treetops go singing by!

I do not see how a President could help growing a little like a poet--down in his heart--as he listens.

If he does, he may do as he will with us.

We will let him be an artist in a nation.

As Winslow Homer takes the sea, as Millet takes the peasants in the fields, as Frank Brangwyn lifts up the labour in the mills and makes it colossal and sublime, the President is an artist, in touching the crowd's imagination with itself--in making a nation self-conscious.

He shall be the artist, the composer, the portrait painter of the people--their faith, their cry, their anger, and their love shall be in him. In him shall be seen the panorama of the crowd, focused into a single face. In him there shall be put in the foreground of this nation's countenance the things that belong in the foreground. And the things that belong in the background shall be put in the background, and the little ideas and little men shall look little in it, and the big ones shall look big.

They do not look so now. This is the one thing that is the matter with America. The countenence of the nation is not a composed countenance.

All that we want is latent in us, everything is there in our Was.h.i.+ngton face. The face merely lacks features and an expression.

This is what a President is for--to give at last the Face of the United States an expression!

If he is a shrewd poet and believes in us, we shall accept him as the official mind reader of the nation. He focuses our desires. In the weariness of the day he looks away--he looks up--he leans his head upon his hand--through the corridors of his brain, that little silent Main street of America, the thoughts and the crowds and the jostling wills of the people go.

If he is a shrewd poet about us, he becomes the organic function, the organizer of the news about our people to ourselves. He is the public made visible, the public made one. He is a moving picture of us. He speaks and gestures the United States--if he is a poet about us--when he beckons or points or when he puts his finger on his lips, or when he says, "Hus.h.!.+" or when he says, "Wait a moment!" he is the voice of the people of the United States.

I am sitting and correcting, one by one, as they are brought to me, these last page proofs in the factory. The low thunder on the floors of the mighty presses, cras.h.i.+ng down into paper words I can never cross out--rises around me. In a minute more--minute by minute that I am counting, that low thunder will overtake me, will roar down and fold away these last guilty, hopeful, tucked-in words with you, Gentle Reader, and you will get away! And the book will get away!

There is no time to try to hold up that low thunder now, and to say what I have meant to say about false simplicity and democracy, and about our all being bullied into being little old faded Thomas Jeffersons a hundred years after he is dead.

But I will try to suggest what I hope that some one who has no printing-presses rolling over him--will say:

One cannot help wis.h.i.+ng that our socialists to-day would outgrow Karl Marx, and that our individualists would outgrow Emerson. Democrats by this time ought to grow a little, too, and outgrow Jefferson, and Republicans ought to be able by this time to outgrow Hamilton.

Why not drop Karl Marx and Emerson and run the gamut of both of them, on a continent 3,000 miles wide? Why should we live Thomas Jefferson's and Alexander Hamilton's lives? Why not drop Jefferson and Hamilton and live ours?

The last thing that Jefferson would do, if he were here, would be to be Jefferson over again. It is not fair to Jefferson for anybody to take the liberty of being like him, when he would not even do it himself. If Jefferson were here, he would break away from everybody, lawyers, statesmen and Congress and go outdoors and look at 1913 for himself.

I like to imagine how it would strike him. I am not troubled about what he would do. Let Jefferson go out and listen to that vast machine, to the New York Central Railway smoothing out and roaring down crowds, rolling and rolling and rolling men all day and all night into machines.

Let Jefferson go out and face the New York Central Railway! Jefferson in his time had not faced nor looked down through those great fissures or chasms of inefficiency in what he chose to call democracy, the haughty, tyrannical aimlessness and meaninglessness of crowds, too mean-spirited and full of fear and machines to dare to have leaders!

He had not faced that blank staring h.e.l.l of anonymousness, that bottomless, weak, watery muck of irresponsibility--that terrific, devilish vagueness which a crowd is and which a crowd has to be without leaders.

Jefferson did not know about or reckon with Inventors, as a means of governing, as a means of getting the will of the people.

A whole new age of invention, of creation, has flooded the world since Jefferson. This is the main fact about the modern man, that he is gloriously self-made. He is practising democracy, inventing his own life, making his own soul before our eyes.

If we have a poet in the White House, this is the main fact he is going to reckon with: He will not be seen taking sides with the Alexander Hamilton model or with the Thomas Jefferson model or with Karl Marx or Emerson. We will see him taking Karl Marx and Emerson and Hamilton and Jefferson and melting them down, glowing them and fusing them together into one man--the Crowd-Man--who shall be more aristocratic than Hamilton ever dreamed, and be filled with a genius for democracy that Jefferson never guessed. America to-day, on the face of the earth and in the hearts of men, is a new democracy, as new as Radium, Copernicus, the Wireless Telegraph, as new and just beginning to be noticed and guessed at as Jesus Christ!

Copernicus, Marconi, Wilbur Wright, and Christianity have turned men's hearts outward. Men live for the first time in a wide daily consciousness of one another.

Alexander Hamilton, had really a rather timid and polite idea of what an aristocrat was and Jefferson had merely sketched out a ground plan for a democrat. If Hamilton had been aristocratic in the modern sense, he would have devoted half his career to expressing a man like Jefferson; and if Jefferson had been more of a democrat, he would have had room in himself to tuck in several Alexander Hamiltons. Either one of them would have been a Crowd-Man.