THE CROWD AND PIERPONT MORGAN
One keeps turning back every now and then, in reading the "Life of
Pierpont Morgan," to the portrait which Carl Hovey has placed at the
beginning of the book. If one were to look at the portrait long enough,
one would not need to read the book. The portrait puts into a few square
inches of space what Mr. Hovey takes half an acre of paper for. And all
that he really does on the half-acre of paper is to bring back to one
again and again that set and focused look one sees in Mr. Morgan's
eyes--the remoteness, the silence, the amazing, dogged, implacable
concentration, and, when all is said, a certain terrible, inexplicable
blindness.
The blindness keeps one looking again. One cannot quite believe it. The
portrait has something so strong, so almost noble and commanding, about
it that one cannot but stand back with one's little judgments and give
the man who can hurl together out of the bewilderment of the world a
personality like this, and fix it here--all in one small human face--the
benefit of the doubt. This is the way the crowd has always taken
Pierpont Morgan at first. The bare spectacle of a man so magnificently
set, so imperiously preoccupied, silences our judgments. It seems as if,
of course, he must be seeing things--things that we and others possibly
do not and cannot see. The blindness in the eyes is so complete and set
in such a full array that it acts at first on one almost like a kind of
vision. The eyes hold themselves like pictures of eyes, like little
walls, as if real eyes were in behind them. One wonders if there is any
one who could ever manage to break through them, fleck up little
ordinary human things--personality, for instance, atmosphere, or
light--against them. If Shakespeare, whose folios he has, and Keats,
whose "Endymion" he owns, or Milton, whose "Paradise Lost" he keeps in
his safe, were all to assail him at once, were to bear down upon that
set look in Pierpont Morgan's eyes--try to get them to turn one side a
second and notice that they--Shakespeare and Milton and Keats--were
there, there would not be a flicker or shadow of movement. They are eyes
that are set like jaws, like magnificent spiritual muscles, on
Something. Neither do they reveal light or receive it.
* * * * *
It will be some time before the crowd will find it possible to hand in
an account and render a full estimate of the value of the service that
Pierpont Morgan has rendered to our modern world; but the service has
been for the most part rendered now and while the world, in its mingled
dismay and gratitude at the way he has hammered it together, is
distributing its praise and blame, there are some of us who would like
to step one side a little and think quietly, if we may, not about what
Pierpont Morgan has done, which we admit duly, but about the blindness
in his eyes. It is Pierpont Morgan's blindness that interests the crowd
more than anything else about him interests them now. It is his
blindness--and the chance to find out just what it is that is making
people read his book. His blindness (if we can fix just what it is) is
the thing that we are going to make our next Pierpont Morgan out of. The
next Pierpont Morgan--the one the crowd is getting ready now--will be
made out of the things that this Pierpont Morgan did not see. What are
these things? We have been looking for the things in Carl Hovey's book,
peering in between the lines on every page, and turning up his
adjectives and looking under them, his adverbs and qualifications, his
shrewdness and carefulness for the things that Pierpont Morgan did not
see. Pierpont Morgan himself would not have tried to hide them, and
neither has his biographer. His whole book breathes throughout with a
just-mindedness, a spirit of truth, a necessary and inevitable honesty,
which of itself is not the least testimony to the essential validity and
soundness of Morgan's career. Pierpont Morgan's attitude toward his
biography (if, in spite of his reticence, it became one of the
necessities--even one of the industrial necessities, of the world that
he should have one) was probably a good deal the attitude of Walt
Whitman when he told Traubel, "Whatever you do with me, don't prettify
me"; and if there were things in Mr. Morgan's career which he
imperturbably failed to see, Mr. Morgan himself would be the last man
not to try to help people to find out what they are. But living has been
to Mr. Morgan as it is to us (as I write these lines he is seventy-four
years old) a serious, bottomless business. He does not know which the
things are he has not seen. His eyes are magnificently set. They cannot
help us. We must do our own looking.
* * * * *
If I were called upon to speak very quickly and without warning; if any
one suddenly expected me in my first sentence to hit the bull's-eye of
Mr. Morgan's blindness, I think I would try socialism. When the Emperor
William was giving himself the treat of talking with the man who runs,
or is supposed to run, the economics of a world, he found that he was
talking with a man who had not noticed socialism yet, and who was not
interested in it. Most people would probably have said that Morgan was
not interested in socialism enough; but there are very few people who
would not be as surprised as Emperor William was to know that he,
Pierpont Morgan, was not informed about the greatest and, to some of us,
the most threatening, omnipresent, and significant spectre in modern
industrial life.
But when one thinks of it, and, when more particularly, one looks again
at that set look in his eyes, I cannot see how it could possibly have
been otherwise. If Morgan's eyes had suddenly begun seeing all sorts of
human things--the bewildering welter of the individual minds, the
tragedy of the individual interests around him; if he had lost his
imperious sense of a whole--had tried to potter over and piece together,
like the good people and the wonderers, the innumerable entangled wires
of the world, his eyes might have been filled perhaps with the beautiful
and helpless light of the philosophers, with the fire of the prophets,
or with the gentle paralysis of the poets, but he never would have had
the courage to do the great work of his life--to turn down forever those
iron shutters on his eyes and smite a world together.
There was one thing this poor, dizzied, scattered planet needed. With
its quarrelling and its peevish industries, its sick poets and its tired
religions, the one thing this planet needed was a Blow; it needed a man
that could hammer it together. To find fault with this man for not being
a seer, or to feel superior to him for not being an idealist, or to
heckle him for not being a sociologist, when here he was all the time
with this mighty frenzy or heat in him that could melt down the chaos of
a world while we looked, weld it to his will, and then lift his arm and
smite it, though all men said him nay--back into a world again--to
heckle over this man's not being a complete sociologist or professor is
not worthy of thoughtful and manful men.
I cannot express it, but I can only declare, living as I do in a day
like this, that to me there is a kind of colossal naked poetry in what
Pierpont Morgan has done which I cannot but acknowledge with gratitude
and hope. Though there be in it, as in all massive things, a brutality
perhaps like that of the moving glaciers, like the making and boiling of
coal in the earth, like death, like childbirth, like the impersonality
of the sea, my imagination can never get past a kind of elemental,
almost heathen poetry or heathen-god poetry in Pierpont Morgan's Blow or
shock upon our world. There may be reason to doubt as to whether it is
to be called a heaven-poetry or a hell-poetry--something so gaunt and
simple is there about it; but here we are with all our machines around
us, with our young, rough, fresh nations in the act of starting a great
civilization once more on this old and gentle earth, and I can only say
that poetry (though it be new, or different, or even a little terrible)
is the one thing that now, or in any other age, men begin great
civilizations with.
* * * * *
I have tried to express the spirit of what Morgan's genius seized
unconsciously by the grim, resistless will of his age, has wrought into
his career.
But in the background of my mind as I see Pierpont Morgan, there is
always the man who will take his place, and if I did not see the man
coming, and coming rapidly, who is to take Mr. Morgan's place, I admit
that Mr. Morgan himself would be a failure, a disaster, a closed wall at
the end of the world.
No one man will take Mr. Morgan's place, but the typical man in the
group of men that will take his place will justify Mr. Morgan's work, by
taking this world in his hand and riveting his vision on where Morgan's
vision leaves off. As Morgan has fused railroads, iron, coal,
steamships, seas, and cities, the next industrial genius shall fuse the
spirits and the wills of men. The Individualists and the Socialists, the
aristocracies and democracies, the capitalists and the labourers shall
be welded together, shall be fused and transfused by the next Morgan
into their ultimate, inevitable, inextricable, mutual interests.
The chief characteristic of the new industrial leader is coming to be
social imagination or the power of seeing the larger industrial values
in human gifts and efficiencies, the more human and intellectual
energies of workmen, the market value of their spirits, their
imaginations, and their good-will. The underpinning and Morganizing work
has been done; the power of instant decision which Mr. Morgan has had,
has been very often based on a lack of imagination about the things that
got in his way; but the things that get in the way now, the big,
little-looking things--are the things on which the new and inspired
millionaires' imagination will find its skill and accumulate its power.
It is men's spirits that are now in the way; they have been piling up
and accumulating under Morgan's régime long enough, and it is now their
turn. Perhaps men's spirits have always been beyond Mr. Morgan, and
perhaps his imagination has been worked largely as a kind of cerebellum
imagination: it is a kind of imagination that sees related and
articulated the physical body of things, the grip on the material tools,
on the gigantic limbs of a world. The man who succeeds Mr. Morgan, and
for whom Mr. Morgan has made the world ready, is the man who has his
imagination in the upper part of his brain, and instead of doing things
by not seeing, and by not being seen, he will swing a light. He will be
himself in his own personality, a little of the nature of a searchlight,
and he will work the way a searchlight works, and will have his will
with things by seeing and lighting, by X-raying his way through them and
not by a kind of colossal world-butting, which is Morgan's way, both
eyes imperiously, implacably shut, his whole being all bent, all crowded
into his vast machine of men, his huge will lifted ... and excavating
blindly, furiously, as through some groping force he knew not, great
sub-cellars for a new heaven and new earth.
The Crowd gets its heroes one at a time. Heroes are the Crowd's tools.
Some are dredges, some are telescopes. The Crowd, by a kind of
instinct--an oversoul or undersoul of which it knows not until
afterward, takes up each tool gropingly--sometimes even against its will
and against its conscience, uses it and drops it.
Then it sees why, suddenly, it has used it.
Then God hands it Another One.