And I do not believe that I was all wrong.  New York, like some vast, implacable cone of ether, some merciless anaesthetic, was thrust down over me and my breathing, and I still had a kind of left-over prejudice that I wanted to be myself, with my own private self-respect, with my own private, temporarily finished-off, provisionally complete personality.  I felt then, and I still feel to-day, that every man, as he fights for his breath, must stand out at least part of his time for the right of being self-contained.  It is, and always will be, one of the appalling sights of New York to me—­the spectacle of the helplessness, the wistfulness, of all those poor New York people without one another.  Sometimes the city seems to be a kind of huge monument or idol or shrine of crowds.  It seems to be a part of the ceaseless crowd action or crowd corrosion on the sense of identity in the human spirit that the man who lives in crowds should grow more dull and more literal about himself every day.  He becomes a mere millionth of something.  All these other people he sees about him hurrying to and fro are mere millionths too.  He grows more and more obliged to live with a vast bulk of people if he is to notice people at all.  Unless he sees all the different kinds of people and forms of life with his own eye, and feels human beings with his hands, as it were, he does not know and sympathize with them.  The crowd-craving or love of continual city life on the part of many people comes to be a sheer lack of imagination, an inability to live in qualities instead of quantities in men.  To live merely in a city is not to know the real flavour of life any more than the daily paper knows it—­the daily paper, the huge dull monster of observation, the seer of outsides.  The whole effect of crowds on the individual man is to emphasize scareheads and appearances, advertisements, and the huge general showing off.  The ride in the train from New Haven to New York is the true portrait of a crowd.  Crowds of soaps and patent medicines straining on trees and signboard out of the gentle fields toward crowds of men, culminating at last in Woodlawn Cemetery, where the marble signposts of death flaunt themselves.  Oblivion itself is advertised, and the end of the show of a show world is placarded on our graves.  Men buy space in papers for cards, and bits of country scenery by the great railroads to put up signboards, and they spend money and make constant efforts to advertise that they are alive, and then they build expensive monuments to advertise that they are dead....

The same craving for piled-up appearances is brought to bear by crowds upon their arts.  Even a gentle soul like Paderewski, full of a personal and strange beauty that he could lend to everything he touched, finds himself swept out of himself at last by the huge undertow of crowds.  Scarcely a season but his playing has become worn down at the end of it into shrieks and hushes.  Have I not watched him