THE CROWD AND THE AVERAGE PERSON
To state still further my difference with the typical Socialist point of
view, as expressed in the letter from which I have quoted, I am obliged
to confess that I not only believe in having heroes on behalf of crowds,
but in having as a regular method of democracy little crowds of heroes,
or an aristocracy. In other words, I am a democrat. I believe that
crowds can produce, and are bound to produce by a natural crowd-process,
a real aristocracy--an aristocracy which will be truly aristocratic and
noble in spirit and action, and which will express the best ideas in the
best way that a crowd can have.
The main business of a democracy is to find out which these people are
in it and put them where they will represent it. The trouble seems to
have been in democracies so far, that we find out who these people are a
generation too late. The great and rare moments of history have been
those in which we have found out who they were in time, as when we found
in America Abraham Lincoln, an unaristocratic-looking and ungainly man,
and saw suddenly that he was the first gentleman in the United States.
The next great task of democracy is to determine the best means it can
of finding out who its aristocrats are, its all-men, and determining who
they are in time, men who have vision, courage, individuality,
imagination enough to face real things, and to know real people, and to
put real things and real people together.
It is what an aristocracy in a democratic form of government is for, to
furnish imagination to crowds. A real aristocracy is the only
clear-headed, practical means a great nation can have of distributing,
classifying, and digesting and evoking hordes of men and women. People
do not have imagination in hordes, and imagination is latent and
unorganized in masses of people. The crowd problem is the problem of
having leaders who can fertilize the imagination and organize the will
of crowds. Nothing but worship or great desire has ever been able to
focus a crowd, and only the great man, rich and various in his elements,
abounding, great as the crowd is great, can ever hope to do it.
Every man in a crowd knows that he is or is in danger of being a mere
Me-man, or a mere class-man, and he knows that his neighbour is, and he
wishes to be in a world that is saved from his own mere me-ness and his
own mere classness. His hero-worship is his way of worshipping his
larger self. He communes with his possible or completed self, his self
of the best moments in the official great man or crowd man.
The average man in a crowd does not want to be an average man, and the
last thing he wants is to have an average man to represent him. He wants
a man to represent him as he would like to be.
He cannot express himself--his best self, in the State, to all the
others in the State, without a lifted-up man or crowd man to do it.
It is as if he said--as if the average man said, "I want a certain sort
of world, I want to be able to point to a man, to a particular man, and
say, as I look at him and ask others to look at him, 'This is the sort
of world I want.'"
Then everybody knows.
The great world that lies in all men's hearts is expressed in miniature,
in the great man.
Crowds speak in heroes.
* * * * *
I have often heard Socialists wondering among themselves why a movement
that had so many fine insights and so many noble motives behind it had
produced so few artists.
It has seemed to me that it might be because Socialists as a class,
speaking roughly, are generalizers. They do not see vividly and deeply
the universal in the particular, the universal in the individual, the
national in the local. They are convinced by counting, and are moved by
masses, and are prone to overlook the Spirit of the Little, the
immensity of the seed and of the individual. They are prone to look past
the next single thing to be done. They look past the next single man to
be fulfilled.
They feel a bit superior to Individualists for the way they have of
seeing the universal in the particular, and of being picturesque and
personal.
Socialists are not picturesque and personal. They do not think in
pictures.
Then they wonder why they do not make more headway.
Crowds and great men and children think in pictures.
A hero pictures greatness to them. Then they want it for themselves.
From the practical, political point of view of getting things for
crowds, perhaps the trouble lies, not in our common popular idea of
having heroes, but in the heroes. And perhaps the cure lies not in
abolishing heroes, but in making our heroes move on and in insisting on
more and better ones.
Any man who looks may watch the crowd to-day making its heroes move on.
If they do not move on, the crowd picks up the next hero at hand who is
moving--and drops them.
One can watch in every civilized country to-day crowds picking up
heroes, comparing, sorting, selecting, seeing the ones that wear the
longest, and one by one taking the old ones down.
The crowd takes a hero up in its huge rough hand, gazes through him at
the world, sees what it wants through him. Then it takes up another, and
then another.
Heroes are crowd spy-glasses.
Pierpont Morgan and Tom Mann for example.
Pierpont Morgan is a typical American business man raised to the n-th
or hero power.
The crowd thinks it is interesting to take up Pierpont Morgan, the Tom
Mann of the banks. It will see what it wants, through him.
And the crowd thinks it is interesting to take up Tom Mann, too, the
Pierpont Morgan of the Trades Unions. It will see what it wants, through
him.