LETTING THE CROWD HAVE PEOPLE IN IT

So we face the issue.

Nothing beautiful can be accomplished in a crowd civilization, by the crowd for the crowd, unless the crowd is beautiful.  No man who is engaged in looking under the lives about him, who wishes to face the facts of these lives as they are lived to-day, will find himself able to avoid this last and most important fact in the history of the world-the fact that, whatever it may mean, or whether it is for better or worse, the world has staked all that it is and has been, and all that it is capable of being, on the one supreme issue, “How can the crowd be made beautiful?”

The answer to this question involves two difficulties:  (1) A crowd cannot make itself beautiful. (2) A crowd will not let any one else make it beautiful.

The men who have been on the whole the most eager democrats of history-the real-idealists-the men who love the crowd and the beautiful too, and who can have no honest or human pleasure in either of them except as they are being drawn together, are obliged to admit that living in a democratic country, a country where politics and aesthetics can no longer be kept apart, is an ordeal that can only be faced a large part of the time with heavy hearts.  We are obliged to admit that it is a country where paintings have little but the Constitution of the United States wrought into them; where sculpture is voted and paid for by the common people; where music is composed for majorities; where poetry is sung to a circulation; where literature itself is scaled to subscription lists; where all the creators of the True and the Beautiful and the Good may be seen almost any day tramping the tableland of the average man, fed by the average man, allowed to live by the average man, plodding along with weary and dusty steps to the average man’s forgetfulness.  And, indeed, it is not the least trait of this same average man that he forgets, that he is forgotten, that his slaves are forgotten, that the world remembers only those who have been his masters.

On the other hand, the literature of finding fault with the average man (which is what the larger part of our more ambitious literature really is) is not a kind of literature that can do anything to mend matters.  The art of finding fault with the average man, with the fact that the world is made convenient for him, is inferior art because it is helpless art.  The world is made convenient for the average man because it has to be, to get him to live in it; and if the world were not made convenient for him, the man of genius would find living with him a great deal more uncomfortable than he does.  He would not even be allowed the comfort of saying how uncomfortable.  The world belongs to the average man, and, excepting the stars and other things that are too big to belong to him, the moment the average man deserves anything better in it or more beautiful in it than he is getting, some man of genius rises by his side, in spite of him, and claims it for him.  Then he slowly claims it for himself.  The last thing to do, to make the world a good place for the average man, would be to make it a world with nothing but average men in it.  If it is the ideal of democracy that there shall be a slow massive lifting, a grading up of all things at once; that whatever is highest in the true and the beautiful, and whatever is lowest in them shall be graded down and graded up to the middle height of human life, where the greatest numbers shall make their home and live upon it; if the ideal of democracy is tableland-that is-mountains for everybody-a few mountains must be kept on hand to make tableland out of.

Two solutions, then, of a crowd civilization-having the extraordinary men crowded out of it as a convenience to the average ones, and having the average men crowded out of it as a convenience to the extraordinary ones-are equally impracticable.

This brings us to the horns of our dilemma.  If the crowd cannot be made beautiful by itself, and if the crowd will not allow itself to be made beautiful by any one else, the crowd can only be made beautiful by a man who lives so great a life in it that he can make a crowd beautiful whether it allows him to or not.

When this man is born to us and looks out on the conditions around him, he will find that to be born in a crowd civilization is to be born in a civilization, first, in which every man can do as he pleases; second, in which nobody does.  Every man is given by the Government absolute freedom; and when it has given him absolute freedom the Government says to him, “Now if you can get enough other men, with their absolute freedom, to put their absolute freedom with your absolute freedom, you can use your absolute freedom in any way you want.”  Democracy, seeking to free a man from being a slave to one master, has simply increased the number of masters a man shall have.  He is hemmed in with crowds of masters.  He cannot see his master’s huge amorphous face.  He cannot go to his master and reason with him.  He cannot even plead with him.  You can cry your heart out to one of these modern ballot-boxes.  You have but one ballot.  They will not count tears.  The ultimate question in a crowd civilization becomes, not “What does a thing mean?” or “What is it worth?” but “How much is there of it?” “If thou art a great man,” says civilization, “get thou a crowd for thy greatness.  Then come with thy crowd and we will deal with thee.  It shall be even as thou wilt.”  The pressure has become so great, as is obvious on every side, that men who are of small or ordinary calibre can only be more pressed by it.  They are pressed smaller and smaller-the more they are civilized, the smaller they are pressed; and we are being daily brought face to face with the fact that the one solution a crowd civilization can have for the evil of being a crowd civilization is the man in the crowd who can withstand the pressure of the crowd; that is to say, the one solution of a crowd civilization is the great-man solution-a solution which is none the less true because by name, at least, it leaves most of us out or because it is so familiar that we have forgotten it.  The one method by which a crowd can be freed and can be made to realize itself is the great-man method-the method of crucifying and worshipping great men, until by crucifying and worshipping great men enough, inch by inch, and era by era, it is lifted to greatness itself.

Not very many years ago, certain great and good men, who, at the cost of infinite pains, were standing at the time on a safe and lofty rock protected from the fury of their kind by the fury of the sea, contrived to say to the older nations of the earth, “All men are created equal.”  It is a thing to be borne in mind, that if these men, who declared that all men were created equal, had not been some several hundred per cent. better men than the men they said they were created equal to, it would not have made any difference to us or to any one else whether they had said that all men were created equal or not, or whether the Republic had ever been started or not, in which every man, for hundreds of years, should look up to these men and worship them as the kind of men that every man in America was free to try to be equal to.  A civilization by numbers, a crowd civilization, if it had not been started by heroes, could never have been started at all.  Shall this civilization attempt to live by the crowd principle, without men in it who are living by the hero principle?  On our answer to this question hangs the question whether this civilization, with all its crowds, shall stand or fall among the civilizations of the earth.  The main difference between the heroes of Plymouth Rock, the heroes who proclaimed freedom in 1776, and the heroes who must contrive to proclaim freedom now, is that tyranny now is crowding around the Rock, and climbing up on the Rock, eighty-seven million strong, and that tyranny then was a half-idiot king three thousand miles away.

We know or think we know, some of us-at least we have taken a certain joy in working it out in our minds, and live with it every day-how people in crowds are going to be beautiful by and by.

The difficulty of being beautiful now, I have tried to express.  It seems better to express, if possible, what a difficulty is before trying to meet it.

And now we would like to try to meet it.  How can we determine what is the most practical and natural way for crowds of people to try to be beautiful now?

It would seem to be a matter of crowd psychology, of crowd technique, and of determining how human nature works.

All thoughtful people are agreed as to the aim.

Everything turns on the method.

In the following chapters we will try to consider the technique of being beautiful in crowds.