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. 68too 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 c?nobite 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 69kind 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 70move 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!”
71even 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 c?nobite would like to eat the tripe and onions, but finds by experiment 72that 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. 73the 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.
