Crowds. Gerald Stanley Lee
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Of course the sky and the air and the unknown and the future had been recognized before, but only a little and in a rather patronizing way. But when a world has made a great, solid continent by following a horizon line, it begins to take things just beyond very seriously. And so our Time has been fulfilled. We have had the stone age; we have had the iron age; and now we have the sky age, and the sky telegraph, and sky men, and sky cities. Mountains of stone are built out of men's visions, towers and skyscrapers swing up out of their wills and up out of their hearts.
Not long ago, as I was coming away from New York in the Springfield Express, which was running at fifty-five miles an hour, I saw suddenly some smoke coming up apparently out of a satchel on the floor, belonging to the man in the chair in front of me. I moved the satchel away, and the smoke came up through the carpet. I spoke to the Pullman conductor who was passing through, and in a second the train had stopped, and the great wild roaring Thing had ceased, and we stood in a long, wide, white silence in the fields. We got off the car—some of us—to see what had happened, and to see if there was a hot box on the wheels. We found that the entire underside of the floor of the car was on fire, and what had happened? Nothing except a new impossibility; nothing except that a human being had invented an electrical locomotive so powerful that it was pulling that train fifty-five miles an hour while the brakes on the car were set—twelve brakes all grinding twenty miles on those twelve wheels; and the locomotive paid no more attention to the brakes of that heavy Pullman than it would to a feather or to a small boy, all the way from New York to Stamford, hanging on behind. As I came in I looked again at the train—the long dull train that had been pulled along by the Invisible, by the kingdom of the air and the sky—the long, dull, heavy Train! And the spirit of the far-off sun was in it!
In Count Zeppelin's new airship the new social spirit has a symbol, and in the gyroscopic train the inspired millionaire is on a firm foundation. The power of the new kind and new size of capitalist is his power of keeping an equilibrium with the people, and the men of real genius in modern affairs are men who have motor genius and light genius over other men's wills. They are allied to the X-ray and the airship, and gain their pre-eminence by their power of forecast and invention—their power of riding upon the unseen, upon the thoughts of men and the spirit of the time. Even the painters have caught this spirit. The plein air painters are painting the light, and the sculptors are carving shadows and haloes, and we have not an art left which does not lean out into the Invisible. And religion is full of this spirit and theosophy and Christian Science. The playwrights are touched by it; and the action, instead of being all on the stage, is thrown out into the spirit of the audience. The play in a modern theatre is not on the stage but in the stalls. Maeterlinck, Ibsen, Shaw, merely use the stage as a kind of magic-lantern or suggestion-centre for the real things that, out behind us in the dark, are happening in the audience.
CHAPTER VIII
THE CROWD'S IMAGINATION ABOUT THE FUTURE
I remember looking over with H.G. Wells one night some time ago a set of pictures or photographs of the future in America, which he had brought home with him. They were largely skyscrapers, big bridges, Niagaras, and things; and I could not help thinking, as I came home that night, how much more Mr. Wells had of the future of America in his own mind than he could possibly buy in his photographs. What funny little films they were after all, how faint and pathetic, how almost tragically dull, those pictures of the future of my country were! H.G. Wells himself, standing in his own doorway, was more like America, and more like the future of America, than the pictures were.
The future in America cannot be pictured. The only place it can be seen is in people's faces. Go out into the street, in New York, in Chicago, in San Francisco, in Seattle; look eagerly as you go into the faces of the men who pass, and you feel hundreds of years—the next hundred years—like a breath, swept past. America, with all its forty-story buildings, its little Play Niagaras, its great dumb Rockies, is the unseen country. It can only as yet be seen in people's eyes. Some days, flowing sublime and silent through our noisy streets, and through the vast panorama of our towers, I have heard the footfalls of the unborn, like sunshine around me.
This feeling America gives one in the streets is the real America. The solidity, the finality, the substantial fact in America, is the daily sense in the streets of the future. And it has seemed to me that this fact—whether one observes it in Americans in America, in Americans in England and in other nations—is what one might call, for lack of a better name, the American temperament in all peoples is the most outstanding typical and important fact with which our modern world and our philosophy about the world have now to reckon. Nothing can be seen as it really is if this amazing pervasive hourly sense of the future is left out of it.
All power is rapidly coming to be based on news—news about human nature, and about what is soon to be done by people. This news travels by express in boxes, by newspapers, by telephone, by word of mouth, and by wireless telegraph. Most of the wireless news is not only wireless, but it is in cipher—hence prophets, or men who have great sensitiveness; men whose souls and bodies are films for the future, platinum plates for the lights and shadows of events; men who are world-poets, sensitive to the air-waves and the light-waves of truth, to the faintest vibrations from To-morrow, or from the next hundred years hovering just ahead. As a matter of course, it is already coming to be true that the most practical man to-day is the prophet. In the older days, men used to look back for wisdom, and the practical man was the man who spoke from experience, and they crucified the prophet. But to-day, the practical man is the man who can make the best guess on to-morrow. The cross has gone by; at least, the cross is being pushed farther along. A prophet in business or politics gets a large salary now; he is a recognized force. Being a prophet is getting to be almost smug and respectable.
We live so in the future in our modern life, and our rewards are so great for men who can live in the future, that a man who can be a ten-year prophet, or a twenty-five-year prophet, like James J. Hill, is put on a pedestal, or rather is not wasted on a pedestal, and is made President of a railroad. He swings the country as if it were his hat. We see great cities tagging Wilbur Wright, and emperors clinging to the skirts of Count Zeppelin. We only crucify a prophet now if he is a hundred, or two hundred or five hundred years ahead. Even then, we would not be apt to crucify; we would merely not use him much, except the first twenty-five years of him.
The theory is no longer tenable that prophets must be necessarily crucified. As a matter of history, most prophets have been crucified by people; but it was not so much because of their prophecy as because their prophecy did not have any first twenty-five years in it. They were crucified because of a blank place or hiatus, not necessarily in their own minds, but at least in other people's. People would have been very glad to have their first twenty-five years' worth if they could have got it. It is this first twenty-five years, or joining-on part, which is most important in prophecy, and which has become our specialty in the Western World. One might say, in a general way, that the idea of having a first twenty-five years' section in truth for a prophet is a modern, an almost American, invention. We are temperamentally a country of the future, and think instinctively in futures; and perhaps it is not too much to say (considering all the faults that go with it for which we are criticized) that we have led the way in futures as a specialty, as a national habit of mind; and though with terrific blunders perhaps have been really the first people en masse to put being a prophet on a practical basis—that is, to supply the first twenty-five years' section, or the next-thing-to-do section to Truth, to put in a kind of coupling between this world and the next. This is what America is for, perhaps—to put in the coupling between this world and the next.
In the former days, the strength of a man, or of an estate, or a business, was its stability. In the new world, instead of stability, we have the idea of persistence, and power lies not so much in solid brittle foundation quality as in conductivity. Socially, men can be divided into conductors—men