through the music, weeping, gasping,
huzzaing, and clapping to one another. After every crash of new
crescendo, after every precipice of silence, they seemed to be crying,
"This is Soul! Oh, this is Soul!" The feeling of a vast audience holding
its breath, no matter why it does it or whether it ought to do it or
not, seems to have become almost a religious rite of itself. Vistas of
faces gallery after gallery hanging on a note, two or three thousand
souls suspended in space all on one tiny little ivory lever at the end
of one man's forefinger ... dim lights shining on them and soft
vibrations floating round them ... going to hear Paderewski play at the
end of his season was going to hear a crowd at a piano singing with its
own hands and having a kind of orgy with itself. One could only remember
that there had been a Paderewski once who hypnotized and possessed his
audience by being hypnotized and possessed by his own music. One liked
to remember him--the Paderewski who was really an artist and who
performed the function of the artist showering imperiously his own
visions on the hearts of the people.

And what is true in music one finds still truer in the other arts. One
keeps coming on it everywhere--the egotism of cities, the
self-complacency of the crowds swerving the finer and the truer artists
from their functions, making them sing in hoarse crowd-voices instead of
singing in their own and giving us themselves. Nearly all our acting has
been corroded by crowds. Some of us have been obliged almost to give up
going to the theatre except to very little ones, and we are wondering if
churches cannot possibly be made small enough to believe great things,
or if galleries cannot be arranged with few enough people in them to
allow us great paintings, or if there will not be an author so well
known to a few men that he will live forever, or if some newspaper will
not yet be great enough to advertise that it has a circulation small
enough to tell the truth.

CHAPTER IV

LETTING THE CROWD HAVE PEOPLE IN IT

So we face the issue.

Nothing beautiful can be accomplished in a crowd civilization, by the
crowd for the crowd, unless the crowd is beautiful. No man who is
engaged in looking under the lives about him, who wishes to face the
facts of these lives as they are lived to-day, will find himself able to
avoid this last and most important fact in the history of the world--the
fact that, whatever it may mean, or whet