There is intoxication to be found in a crowd. For it is good to be one
of many all doing the same thing—good whatever the thing may be, whether
singing hymns, watching a football match, or applauding the eternal
truths of politicians. Anything will serve as an excuse. It matters not
in whose name your two or three thousand are gathered together; what is
important is the process of gathering. In these last days we have
witnessed a most illuminating example of this tendency in the wild
outburst of mob excitement over the arrival in this country of Mary
Pickford. It is not as though people were really very much interested in
the Little Sweetheart of the World. She is no more than an excuse for
assembling in a crowd and working up a powerful communal emotion. The
newspapers set the excitement going; they built the fire, applied the
match, and cherished the infant flame. The crowds, only too happy to be
kindled, did the rest; they burned.
I belong to that class of unhappy people who are not easily infected by
crowd excitement. Too often I find myself sadly and coldly unmoved in
the midst of multitudinous emotion. Few sensations are more
disagreeable. The defect is in part temperamental, and in part is due to
that intellectual snobbishness, that fastidious rejection of what is
easy and obvious, which is one of the melancholy consequences of the
acquisition of culture. How often one regrets this asceticism of the
mind! How wistfully sometimes one longs to be able to rid oneself of the
habit of rejection and selection, and to enjoy all the dear, obviously
luscious, idiotic emotions without an afterthought! And indeed, however
much we may admire the Chromatic Fantasia of Bach, we all of us have a
soft spot somewhere in our minds that is sensitive to “Roses in
Picardy.” But the soft spot is surrounded by hard spots; the enjoyment
is never unmixed with critical disapprobation. The excuses for working
up a communal emotion, even communal emotion itself, are rejected as too
gross. We turn from them as a cœnobite of the Thebaid would have turned
from dancing girls or a steaming dish of tripe and onions.
I have before me now a little book, recently arrived from America, which
points out the way in which the random mob emotion may be systematically
organized into a kind of religion. This volume, _The Will of Song_ (Boni
& Liveright, 70 c.), is the joint production of Messrs. Harry Barnhart
and Percy MacKaye. “How are art and social service to be reconciled?...
How shall the Hermit Soul of the Individual Poet give valid, spontaneous
expression to the Communal Soul of assembled multitudes? How may the
surging Tides of Man be sluiced in Conduits of Art, without losing their
primal glory and momentum?” These questions and many others, involving a
great expense of capital letters, are asked by Mr. MacKaye and answered
in _The Will of Song_, which bears the qualifying sub-title, “A Dramatic
Service of Community Singing.”
The service is democratically undogmatic. Abstractions, such as Will,
Imagination, Joy, Love and Liberty, some of whom are represented in the
dramatic performance, not by individuals, but by Group Personages
(_i.e._, choruses), chant about Brotherhood in a semi-Biblical
phraseology that is almost wholly empty of content. It is all
delightfully vague and non-committal, like a Cabinet Minister’s speech
about the League of Nations, and, like such a speech, leaves behind it a
comfortable glow, a noble feeling of uplift. But, like Cabinet
Ministers, preachers and all whose profession it is to move the people
by the emission of words, the authors of _The Will of Song_ are well
aware that what matters in a popular work of art is not the intellectual
content so much as the picturesqueness of its form and the emotion with
which it is presented. In the staging—if such a term is not
irreverent—of their service, Messrs. Barnhart and MacKaye have borrowed
from Roman Catholic ritual all its most effective emotion-creators. The
darknesses, the illuminations, the chiming bells, the solemn mysterious
voices, the choral responses—all these traditional devices have been
most scientifically exploited in the Communal Service.
These are the stage directions which herald the opening of the service:
As the final song of the Prelude ceases, the assembly hall grows
suddenly dark, and the DARKNESS is filled with fanfare of blowing
TRUMPETS. And now, taking up the trumpets’ refrain, the Orchestra
plays an elemental music, suggestive of rain, wind, thunder and the
rushing of waters; from behind the raised Central Seat great Flashes
of Fire spout upward, and while they are flaring there rises a FLAME
GOLD FIGURE, in a cone of light, who calls with deep, vibrant voice:
“Who has risen up from the heart of the people?” Instantaneous, from
three portions of the assembly, the VOICES OF THREE GROUPS, Men, Women
and Children, answer from the dark in triple unison: “I!”
Even from the cold print one can see that this opening would be
extremely effective. But doubts assail me. I have a horrid suspicion
that that elemental music would not sweep me off my feet as it ought to.
My fears are justified when, looking up the musical programme, I
discover that the elemental music is by Langey, and that the orchestral
accompaniments that follow are the work of Massenet, Tschaikovsky,
Langey once more, Julia Ward Howe and Sinding. Alas! once more one finds
oneself the slave of one’s habit of selection and rejection. One would
find oneself left out in the cold just because one couldn’t stand
Massenet. Those who have seen Sir James Barrie’s latest play, _Mary
Rose_, will perhaps recall the blasts of music which prelude the piece
and recur at every mystical moment throughout the play. In theory one
ought to have mounted on the wings of that music into a serene
acceptance of Sir James Barrie’s supernatural machinery; one ought to
have been filled by it with deeply religious emotions. In practice,
however, one found oneself shrinking with quivering nerves from the
poignant vulgarity of that _Leitmotif_, isolated by what should have
united one with the author and the rest of the audience. The cœnobite
would like to eat the tripe and onions, but finds by experiment that the
smell of the dish makes him feel rather sick.
One must not, however, reject such things as _The Will of Song_ as
absolutely and entirely bad. They are useful, they are even good, on
their own plane and for people who belong to a certain order of the
spiritual hierarchy. _The Will of Song_, set to elemental music by
Massenet and Julia Ward Howe, may be a moving spiritual force for people
to whom, shall we say, Wagner means nothing; just as Wagner himself may
be of spiritual importance to people belonging to a slightly higher
caste, but still incapable of understanding or getting any good out of
the highest, the transcendent works of art—out of the Mass in D, for
example, or Sonata Op. 111.
The democratically minded will ask what right we have to say that the
Mass in D is better than the works of Julia Ward Howe, what right we
have to assign a lower place in the spiritual hierarchy to the admirers
of _The Will of Song_ than to the admirers of Beethoven. They will
insist that there is no hierarchy at all; that every creature possessing
humanity, possessing even life, is as good and as important, by the mere
fact of that possession, as any other creature. It is not altogether
easy to answer these objections. The arguments on both sides are
ultimately based on conviction and faith. The best one can do to
convince the paradoxical democrat of the real superiority of the Mass in
D over _The Will of Song_ is to point out that, in a sense, one contains
the other; that _The Will of Song_ is a part, and a very small part at
that, of a great Whole of human experience, to which the Mass in D much
more nearly approximates. In _The Will of Song_, and its “elemental”
accompaniment one knows exactly how every effect is obtained; its range
of emotional and intellectual experience is extremely limited and
perfectly familiar. But the range of the Mass in D is enormously much
larger; it includes within itself the range of _The Will of Song_, takes
it for granted, so to speak, and reaches out into remoter spheres of
experience. It is in a real sense quantitatively larger than _The Will
of Song_. To the democrat who believes in majorities this is an argument
which must surely prove convincing.