When I was coming home from New York the last time, had reached a safe distance behind my engine, out in the fields, I found myself listening all over again to the roar (saved up in me) of the great city. I tried to make it out, tried to analyse what it was that the voice of the great city said to me. “The voice of the city is the Voice of Things,” my soul said to me. “And the Man?” I said, “where does the Man come in? Are not the Things for the Man?” Then the roar of the great city rose up about me, like a flood, swallowed my senses in itself, numbed and overbore me, swooned my soul in itself, and said: “No, the things are not for the man. The man is for the things.”
This is what the great city said. And while I still listened, the roar broke over me once more with its NO! NO! NO! its million voices in it, its million souls in it. All doubts and fears and hates and cries, all deadnesses flowed around me, took possession of me.
Then I remembered the iron and wood faces of the men, great processions of them, I had seen there, the strange, protected-looking, boxed-in faces of the women, faces in crates, I had seen, and I understood. “New York,” I said, “is a huge war, a great battle numbered off in streets and houses, every man against every man, every man a shut-in, self-defended man. It is a huge lamp-lighted, sun-lighted, ceaseless struggle, day unto day.”
“But New York is not the world. Try the whole world,” said my soul to me. “Perhaps you can do better. Are there not churches, men-making, men-gathering places, oases for strength and rest in it?”
Then I went to all the churches in the land at once, of a still Sabbath morning, steeples in the fields and hills, and steeples in cities. The sound of splendid organs praying for the poor emptied people, the long, still, innumerable sound of countless collections being taken, the drone and seesaw of sermons, countless sermons! (Ah, these poor helpless Sundays!) Paper-philosophy and axioms. Chimes of bells to call the people to paper-philosophy and axioms! “Canst thou not,” said I to my soul, “guide me to a Man, to a door that leads to a Man—a world-lover or prophet?” Then I fled (I always do after a course of churches) to the hills from whence cometh strength. David tried to believe this. I do sometimes, but hills are great, still, coldly companionable, rather heartless fellows. I know in my heart that all the hills on earth, with all their halos on them, their cities of leaves, and circles of life, would not take the place to me, in mystery, closeness, illimitableness, and wonder—of one man.
And when I turn from the world of affairs and churches, to the world of scholarship, I cannot say that I find relief. Even scholarship, scholarship itself, is under a stone most of it, prone and pale and like all the rest, under The Emphasis of Things. Scholarship is getting to be a mere huge New York, infinite rows and streets of things, taught by rows of men who have made themselves over into things, to another row of men who are trying to make themselves over into things. I visit one after the other of our great colleges, with their forlorn, lonesome little chapels, cosy-corners for God and for the humanities, their vast Thing-libraries, men like dots in them, their great long, reached-out laboratories, stables for truth, and I am obliged to confess in spirit that even the colleges, in all ages the strongholds of the human past, and the human future, the citadels of manhood, are getting to be great man-blind centres, shambles of souls, places for turning every man out from himself, every man away from other men, making a Thing of him—or at best a Columbus for a new kind of fly, or valet to a worm, or tag or label on Matter.
When one considers that it is a literal, scientific, demonstrable fact that there is not a single evil that can be named in modern life, social, religious, political, or industrial, which is not based on the narrowness and blindness of classes of men toward one another, it is very hard to sit by and watch the modern college almost everywhere, with its silent, deadly Thing-emphasis upon it, educating every man it can reach, into not knowing other men, into not knowing even himself.
VI
The Outsiders
One cannot but look with deep pleasure at first, and with much relief, upon these healthy objective modern men of ours. The only way out, for spiritual hardihood, after the world-sick Middle Ages, was a Columbus, a vast splendid train of Things after him, of men who emphasised Things,—who could emphasise Things. It is a great spectacle and a memorable one—the one we are in to-day, the spectacle of the wonder that men are doing with Things, but when one begins to see that it is all being turned around, that it is really a spectacle of what Things are doing with men, one wakes with a start. One wonders if there could be such a thing as having all the personalities of a whole generation lost. One looks suspiciously and wistfully at the children one sees in the schools. One wonders if they are going to be allowed, like their fathers and mothers, to have personalities to lose. I have all but caught myself kidnapping children as I have watched them flocking in the street. I have wanted to scurry them off to the country, a few of them, almost anywhere—for a few years. I have thought I would try to find a college to hide them in, some back-county, protected college, a college which still has the emphasis of Persons as well as the emphasis of Things upon it. Then I would wait and see what would come of it. I would at least have a little bevy of great men perhaps, saved out for a generation, enough to keep the world supplied with samples—to keep up the bare idea of the great man, a kind of isthmus to the future.
The test of civilisation is what it produces—its man, if only because he produces all else. If we have all made up our minds to allow the specialist to set the pace for us, either to be specialists ourselves or vulgarly to compete with specialists, for the right of living, or getting a living, there is going to be a crash sometime. Then a sense of emptiness after the crash which will call us to our senses. The specialist’s view of the world logically narrows itself down to a race of nonentities for nothings. And even if a thing is a thing, it is a nothing to a nonentity. And if it is the one business of the specialist to obtain results, and we are all browbeaten into being specialists, but one result is going to be possible. It is obvious that the man who is willing to sacrifice the most is going to have the most success in the race, crowd out and humiliate or annihilate the others. If this is to be the world, it is only men who are ready to die for nothing in order to create nothing who will be able to secure enough of nothing to rule it. One wonders how long ruling such a world will be worth while, a world which has accepted as the order of the day success by suicide, the spending of manhood on things which only by being men we can enjoy—the method of forging boilers and getting deaf to buy violins, of having elevated railways for dead men, wireless telegraphs for clods, gigantic printing-presses for men who have forgotten how to read. “Let us all, by all means, make all things for the world.” So we set ourselves to our task cheerfully, the task of attaining results for people at large by killing people in particular off. We are getting to be already, even in the arts, men with one sense. We have classes even in colour. Schools of painters are founded by men because they have one seventh of a sense of sight. Schools of musicians divide themselves off into fractions of the sense of sound, and on every hand men with a hundred and forty-three million cells in their brains, become noted (nobodies) because they only use a hundred and forty-three. “What is the use of attaining results,” one asks, “of making such a perfectly finished world, when there is not a man in it who would pay any attention to it as a world?” If the planet were really being improved by us, if the stars shone better by our committing suicide to know their names, it might be worth while for us all to die, perhaps, to make racks of ourselves, frames for souls (one whole generation of us), in one single, heroic, concerted attempt to perfect a universe like this, the use and mastery of it. But what would it all come to? Would we not still be left in the way on it, we and our children, lumbering it up, soiling and disgracing it, making a machine of it? There would be no one to appreciate it. Our children would inherit the curse from us, would be more like us than we are. If any one is to appreciate this world, we must appreciate it and pass the old secret on.