Crowds. Gerald Stanley Lee

crowd civilization. Every other important thing for this present age to know must be worked out from this one. It is the main thing with which our religion has to deal, the thing our literature is about, and the thing our arts will be obliged to express. Any man who makes the attempt to consider or interpret anything either in art or life without a true understanding of the crowd principle as it is working to-day, without a due sense of its central place in all that goes on around us, is a spectator in the blur and bewilderment of this modern world, as helpless in it, and as childish and superficial in it, as a Greek god at the World's Fair, gazing out of his still Olympian eyes at the Midway Pleasance.

      After the Crowd Fear there comes to most of us the machine fear. Machines are the huge limbs or tentacles of crowds. As the crowds grow the machines grow; grasping at the little strip of sky over us, at the little patch of ground beneath our feet, they swing out before us and beckon daily to us new hells and new heavens in our eyes.

CHAPTER III

       Table of Contents

THE MACHINE SCARE

       Table of Contents

      I have had occasion nearly every day for the past two weeks to pass by an ancient churchyard on a great hillside not far from London. Most of the stones are very old, and seem to have been thoughtfully and reverently, flake by flake, wrought into their final form by long-vanished hands. As I stand and watch them, with the yews and cypresses flocking round them, it is as if in some sort of way they had been surely wrought by the hand of love, so full are they of grief and of joy, of devotion, of the very singing of the dead and of those who loved them.

      When I walk on a little farther, and come to a small and new addition to the churchyard, and look about me at the stones, I find myself suddenly in quite a new company. So far as one could observe, looking at the gravestones in the new churchyard, the people who died there died rather thoughtlessly and mechanically, and as if nobody cared very much. Of course, when one thinks a little further, one knows that this cannot be true, and that the men and the women who gathered by these glib, trim, capable-looking modern tombstones were as full of love and tenderness and reverence before their dead as the others were—but the lines on the stones give no sign. One never stops to read an epitaph on one of them; one knows it would not be interesting, or really whisper to one the strange, happy, human things of another world—even of this world, that make the old tombstones such good company and so friendly to us. One gives a glance at the stone and passes on. It was made by machinery, apparently; a machine might have designed it, a machine might have died and been buried under it. One looks beyond it at all the others like it—all the glib, competent-looking white stones. Were the silenced people all machines under them, all mechanical, all made to a pattern like their stones, like these strangely hard, brief tombstones standing here at their heads, summing up their lives before us curtly, heartlessly, on this gentle old hillside?

      I wondered.

      I looked back to the old eloquent cemetery that almost seemed to be breathing things, and looked once more at the new.

      And as I stood and thought, they seemed to me to be two worlds—one the world the people all about me are always saying sadly is going by, and the other—well, the one we will have to have.

      As I look off from the hilltop at the great sloping countryside about me, which stretches miles and miles, with its green fields, and bushy treetops, its red roofs, its banners of steam from twenty railways, its huge, grim, furious chimneys, its still, sleepy steeples, I also see two worlds, the same two worlds over again that I saw in the churchyard, except that they are all jumbled together—the complacent, capable, cut-out, homeless-looking houses, the little snuggled-down old ones with their happy trees about them and trails of cooking smoke. I see the same two worlds standing and facing each other before me whichever way I turn.

      And when I slip out of the churchyard from those two little separate worlds of the dead, and move slowly down the long bustling village street, and look into the faces of the living, the same two worlds that were in the churchyard and on the hills seem to look at me out of the faces of the living too.

      The faces go hurrying past me, worlds apart. Most people, I imagine, who read these pages must have noticed the people's faces in the streets nowadays—how they seem to have come out of separate worlds into the street a moment, and hurry past, and seem to be going back in a moment more to separate worlds.

      There is hardly even a village footway left anywhere to-day where one cannot see these two worlds, or the spirit of these two worlds, flitting past one through the streets in people's faces, and nightly before our eyes, struggling with each other to possess, to swallow away into itself human souls, to master the fate of man upon the earth.

      One of these is the World of the Hand-made; the other is the Machine-made World.

      As day by day I watch these two worlds with all their people in them flocking past me, I have come to have certain momentary but recurrent resentments and attractions, unaccountable strong emotions; and when I try afterward to rationalize my emotions, as a man should, and give an account of them to myself, and get them ready to use and face my age with, and make myself strong and fit to live in an age, I find myself with a great task before me. And yet one must do it; one cannot live in an age strongly and fitly if one would rather be living in some other age, or if it is an age with two worlds in it and one cannot make up one's mind which is the world one wants and settle down quietly and live in it. Then a strange thing happens, and always happens the moment I begin to try to decide which of the two—the Hand-made World or the Machine-made World—I will choose. I find that in an odd, confused, groping, obstinate way I am bound to choose them both. In spite of all its ugly ways—a kind of vast indifference it has to me, to everybody, its magnificent heartlessness—I find I have come to take in the Machine-made World a kind of boundless, half-secret pride and joy, for a terrible and strange beauty there is in it. And then, too, even if I wanted to give it up, I could not: neither I nor any man, nor all the world combined, could unthink to-day a hundred years, fold up a hundred thousand miles of railway, tuck modern life all neatly up again in a little, old, snug, safe, lovable Hand-made World. There must be some way out, some connecting link between the Hand-made and the Machine-made. We have merely lost it for a moment.

      Which way shall we turn? And so at last to the little Thing through which the whole world whispers to me on my desk, to the mighty railways that beckon past my door, to the airships that cannot be stilled, and to the rolling mills that will not be silenced, I turn at last! I turn to the Machines Themselves. Half-singing and half-cursing, I have faced them. There is some way in which they can answer and can be made to answer—can be made to give me and the men about me the kind of world we want. I try to analyze it and think it out. What is the thing, the real thing in the Hand-made World, that fills me with pride and joy, and that I cannot and will not give up? Is not the real thing that is in it something that can be or might be freed from it, exhaled from it, something that might be in some new form saved, made an atmosphere or a spirit and passed on? And what is it in the new Machine-made World which, in spite of the splendid joy, a rough new, wild religion there is in it, keeps daily filling me as I go past machines with this contradictory obstinate dread of them? After a time I have made a little cleared space in my mind, a little breathing room. It has come to me from thinking that what is beautiful in the Hand-made World perhaps is not these particular Hand-made things themselves at which I so delight, but the Hand-made spirit of the men who made them which the men put into the things. And perhaps what is full of death and fear in the Machine-made World is not the machines themselves, but the Machine-made spirit in which the men who run the machines have made the machines work. Perhaps the Hand-made spirit is pervasive, eternal. Perhaps it can escape like a spirit, and can live where it will live, and do what it will do, like a spirit, and possess the body that it wills to possess. Perhaps the Hand-made spirit is still living around me to-day, and is not only living, but is living in a more unspeakable, unbounded body than any spirit has ever lived in before, and is to-day