Crowds. Gerald Stanley Lee
to say a thing the kind of way that will make everybody stop and listen to him, cablegrams and all. Horace Greeley and Samuel Bowles and Charles A. Dana have passed from the press, and the march of the crowd through the miles of their columns every day is trampling on their graves. The newspaper is the mass machine, the crowd thinker. To and fro, from week to week and from year to year, its flaming headlines sway, now hither and now thither, where the greatest numbers go, or the best guess of where they are going to go; and Personality, creative, triumphant, masterful, imperious Personality—is it not at an end? It were a dazzling sight, perhaps, to gaze at night upon a huge building, thinking with telegraph under the wide sky around the world, the hurrying of its hundred pens upon the desks, and the trembling of its floors with the mighty coming of a Day out of the grip of the press; but even this huge bewildering pile of power, this aggregation, this corporation of forces, machines of souls, glittering down the Night—does any one suppose It stands by Itself, that It is its own master, that It can do its own will in the world? In all its splendour It stands, weaving the thoughts of the world in the dark; but that very night, that very moment, It lies in the power of a little ticking-thing behind its doors. It belongs to that legislature of information and telegraph, that owner of what happens in a day, called the Associated Press.
If the One who called Himself a man and a God had not been born in a crowd, if he had not loved and grappled with it, and been crucified and worshipped by it, He might have been a Redeemer for the silent, stately, ancient world that was before He came, but He would have failed to be a Redeemer for this modern world—a world where the main inspiration and the main discouragement is the crowd, where every great problem and every great hope is one that deals with crowds. It is a world where, from the first day a man looks forth to move, he finds his feet and hands held by crowds. The sun rises over crowds for him, and sets over crowds; and having presumed to be born, when he presumes to die at last, in a crowd of graves he is left not even alone with God. Ten human lives deep they have them—the graves in Paris; and whether men live their lives piled upon other men's lives, in blocks in cities or in the apparent loneliness of town or country what they shall do or shall not do, or shall have or shall not have—is it not determined by crowds, by the movement of crowds? The farmer is lonely enough, one would say, as he rests by his fire in the plains, his barns bursting with wheat; but the murmur of the telegraph almost any moment is the voice of the crowd to him, thousands of miles away, shouting in the Stock Exchange: "You shall not sell your wheat! Let it lie! Let it rot in your barns!"
And yet, if a man were to go around the earth with a surveyor's chain, there would seem to be plenty of room for all who are born upon it. The fact that there are enough square miles of the planet for every human being on it to have several square miles to himself does not prove that a man can avoid the crowd—that it is not a crowded world. If what a man could be were determined by the square mile, it would indeed be a gentle and graceful earth to live on. But an acre of Nowhere satisfies no one; and how many square miles does a man want to be a nobody in? He can do it better in a crowd, where every one else is doing it.
In the ancient world, when a human being found something in the wrong place and wanted to put it where it belonged, he found himself face to face with a few men. He found he had to deal with these few men. To-day, if he wants anything put where it belongs, he finds himself face to face with a crowd. He finds that he has to deal with a crowd. The world has telephones and newspapers now, and it has railroads; and if a man proposes to do a certain thing in it, the telephones tell the few, and the newspapers tell the crowd, and the crowd gets on to the railroad; and before he rises from his sleep, behold the crowd in his front yard; and if he can get as far as his own front gate in the thing he is going for, he must be—either a statesman? a hero? or a great genius? None of these. Let him be a corporation—of ideas or of dollars; let him be some complex, solid, crowded thing, would he do anything for himself, or for anybody else, or for everybody else, in a world too crowded to tell the truth without breaking something, or to find room for it, when it is told, without breaking something.
This is the Crowd's World.
What I have written I have written.
I have been sitting and reading it. It is a mood. But there is an implacable truth in it, I believe, that must be gotten out and used.
As I have been reading I have looked up. I see the quiet little mountain through my window standing out there in the sun. It looks around the world as if nothing had happened; and the bobolinks out in the great meadow are all flying and singing in the same breath and rowing through the air, thousands of them, miles of them. They do not stop a minute.
A moment ago while I was writing I heard the Child outside on the piazza, four years old, going by my window back and forth, listening to the crunch of her new shoes as if it were the music of the spheres. Why should not I do as well? I thought. The Child is merely seeing her shoes as they are with as many senses and as many thoughts and desires at once as she can muster, and with all her might.
What if I were to see the world like the Child?
Yesterday I went to Robert's Meadow. I saw three small city boys, with their splendid shining rubber boots and their beautiful bamboo poles. They were on their way home. They had only the one trout between them, and that had been fondled, examined, and poked over and bragged about until it was fairly stiff and brown with those boys—looked as if it had been stolen out of a dried-herring box. They put it reverently back, when I saw it, into their big basket. I smiled a little as I walked on and thought how they felt about it.
Then suddenly it was as if I had forgotten something. I turned and looked back; saw those three boys—a little retinue to that solitary fish—trudging down the road in the yellow sun. And I stood there and wanted to be in it! Then I saw them going round the bend in the road thirty years away.
I still want to be one of those boys.
And I am going to try. Perhaps, Heaven helping me, I will yet grow up to them!
I know that the way those three boys felt about the fish—the way they folded it around with something, the way they made the most of it, is the way to feel about the world.
I side with the three boys. I am ready to admit that as regards technical and comparatively unimportant details or as regards perspective on the fish the boys may not have been right. It is possible that they had not taken a point of view, measured in inches or volts or foot-pounds, that was right and could last forever; but I know that the spirit of their point of view was right—the spirit that hovered around the three boys and around the fish that day was right and could last forever.
It is the spirit in which the world was made, and the spirit in which new worlds in all ages, and even before our eyes by Boys and Girls and—God, are being made.
It is only the boys and the girls (all sizes) who know about worlds. And it is only boys and girls who are right.
I heard a robin in the apple tree this morning out in the rain singing, "I believe! I believe!"
At the same time, I am glad that I have known and faced, and that I shall have to know and face, the Crowd Fear.
I know in some dogged, submerged, and speechless way that it is not a true fear. And yet I want to move along the sheer edge of it all my life. I want it. I want all men to have it, and to keep having it, and to keep conquering it. I have seen that no man who has not felt it, who does not know this huge numbing, numberless fear before the crowd, and who may not know it again almost any moment, will ever be able to lead the crowd, glory in it, die for it, or help it. Nor will any man who has not defied it, and lifted his soul up naked and alone before it and cried to God, ever interpret the crowd or express the will of the crowd, or hew out of earth and heaven what the crowd wants.
We want to help to express and fulfil a crowd civilization, we want to share the crowd life, to express what people in crowds feel—the great crowd sensations, excitements, the inspirations and depressions of those who live and struggle with crowds.
We want to face, and face grimly, implacably, the main facts, the main emotions men are having to-day. And the main emotion men are having to-day about our modern world is that it is a crowded world, that in the nature of the case