ast, about all the
world, all joining in, all hard at work for us, a million, million
machines a day making the crowd beautiful.

CHAPTER XI

MACHINES, CROWDS, AND ARTISTS

A crowd civilization produces, as a matter of course, crowd art and art
for crowded conditions. This fact is at once the glory and the weakness
of the kind of art a democracy is bound to have.

The most natural evidence to turn to first, of the crowd in a crowd age,
is such as can be found in its literature, especially in its
masterpieces.

The significance of shaking hands with a Senator of the United States is
that it is a convenient and labour-saving way of shaking hands with two
or three million people. The impressiveness of the Senator's Washington
voice, the voice on the floor of the Senate, consists in the mystical
undertone--the chorus in it--multitudes in smoking cities, men and
women, rich and poor, who are speaking when this man speaks, and who are
silent when he is silent, in the government of the United States.

The typical fact that the Senator stands for in modern life has a
corresponding typical fact in modern literature. The typical fact in
modern literature is the epigram, the senatorial sentence, the sentence
that immeasurably represents what it does not say. The difference
between democracy in Washington and democracy in Athens may be said to
be that in Washington we have an epigram government, a government in
which ninety million people are crowded into two rooms to consider what
to do, and in which ninety million people are made to sit in one chair
to see that it is done. In Athens every man represented himself.

It may be said to be a good working distinction between modern and
classic art that in modern art words and colours and sounds stand for
things, and in classic art they said them. In the art of the Greek,
things were what they seemed, and they were all there. Hence simplicity.
It is a quality of the art of to-day that things are not what they seem
in it. If they were, we should not call it art at all. Everything stands
not only for itself and for what it says, but for an immeasurable
something that cannot be said. Every sound in music is the senator of a
thousand sounds, thoughts, and associations, and in literature every
word that is allowed to appear is the representative in three syllables
of three pages of a dictionary. The whistle of the locomotive, and the
ring of the telephone, and the still, swif