PART THREE

PEOPLE-MACHINES

CHAPTER I

NOW!

This outlook or glimmer of vision I have tried to trace, for the art of crowds is something we want, and want daily, in the future.  We want daily a future.  But, after all, it is a future.

I speak in this present chapter as one of the crowd who wants something now.

I find myself in a world in which apparently some vast anonymous arrangement was made about me and about my life, before I was born.  This arrangement seems to be, as I understand it, that if I want to live while I am on this planet a certain sort of life or be a certain sort of person, I am expected practically to take out a permit for it from the proper authorities.

In the previous chapter I made a request of the authorities, as perhaps the reader will remember.  I said, “I want to be good now.”

In this one I have a further request to make of the authorities:  “I want to be beautiful.”

I want to be beautiful now.

I find thousands of other people about me on every hand making these same two requests.  I find that the authorities do not seem to notice their requests any more than they have noticed mine.

Some of us have begun to suspect that we must have made the request in the wrong way.  Perhaps we should not ask a world—­a great, vague thing like the world in general—­to make any slight arrangement we may need for being beautiful.  We have come to feel that we must ask somebody in particular, and do something in particular, and find some one in particular with whom we can do it.  There is getting to be but one course open to a man if he wants to be beautiful.  He must bone down and work hard with his soul, make himself see precisely what it is and who it is standing between him and a beautiful world.  He must ask particular persons in particular positions if they do not think he ought to be allowed to be beautiful.  He must ask some millionaire probably first—­his employer, for instance—­to stop getting in his way, and at least to step one side and let him reason with him.  And when he cannot ask his millionaire—­his own particular humdrum millionaire—­to step one side and reason with him, he must ask iron-machines to step one side and reason with him.  After this he must ask crowds to please to step one side and reason with him.

Whatever happens, he is sure to find always these same three great, imponderable obstructions in the way of his being beautiful—­the humdrum millionaires, the iron-machines, and crowds.

In the old days when any one wanted to be beautiful he found it more convenient.  There was very likely some one who was more beautiful than he was nearby, some one who found him craving the same thing that he had craved, and who recognized it and delighted in it, and who could make room and help.