Gerald Stanley Lee

“ If one goes about and takes a grim happiness, a kind of iron joy in seeing how successful a locomotive is, or if one watches a great, worshipful ocean liner with delight, or if, down in New York, one looks up and sees a new skyscraper going slowly up, unfolding into the sky before one, lifting up its gigantic, restless, resistless face to God; there comes to seem to be something about churches and about good people and about the way they have of acting and thinking about goodness and doing things with goodness, that makes one unhappy. ”

“ All our arts are thousand-nation arts, shadows and echoes of dead worlds playing upon our own. Italian music, out of its feudal kingdoms, comes to us as essentially solo music—melody; and the civilization of Greece, being a civilization of heroes, individuals, comes to us in its noble array with its solo arts, its striding heroes everywhere in front of all, and with nothing nearer to the people in it than the Greek Chorus, which, out of limbo, pale and featureless across all ages, sounds to us as the first far faint coming of the crowd to the arts of this groping world. ”

“ Why fly around a little town like New York, or show your bright wings in the light, or circle the Statue of Liberty for fun, when you are reconstructing civilization, and binding a whole planet together, and wrapping the heavens close down around the earth, and making railroads everywhere out of the air? New York is always a little superficial and funny about itself. All it needs to do, it seems to think, is to snap its fingers at a man of genius anywhere on this broad world, whisper to him pleasantly, and he will trot promptly up, of course, and do his little turn for it. ”

“ He is the skylight and the manhole of life.
The monotonous, the innumerable and over and over again, one's desk, one's typewriter, one's machine, one's own particular factory window, the tall chimney, the little forever motion with one's hand—it is these, godlike, inscrutable, speechless, out of the depths of our unconsciousness and down through our dreams, that become the very breath and rumble of living to us, domineer over our imaginations and rule our lives. It is decreed that what our Employers think and let us know enough to think shall be a part of the inner substance of our being. ”

“ A President can set the focus for four years. But only a book can set the focus for a nation's next hundred years so that it can act intelligently and steadfastly on its main line from week to week and morning to morning. Only a book can make a vast, inspiring, steadfast, stage-setting for a nation. Only a book, strong, slow, reflective, alone with each man, and before all men, can set in vast still array the perspective, the vision of the people, can give that magnificent self-consciousness which alone makes a great nation, or a mighty man. ”

“ Machinery is our new art-form. A man expresses himself first in his hands and feet, then in his clothes, and then in his rooms or in his house, and then on the ground about him; the very hills grow like him, and the ground in the fields becomes his countenance; and now, last and furthest of all, requiring the liveliest and noblest grasp of his soul, the finest circulation of will of all, he begins expressing himself in his vast machines, in his three-thousand-mile railways, in his vast, cold-looking looms and dull steel hammers. ”

“ I have liked to call these employers inspired millionaires. I would rather have the machine owner or employer a millionaire, because the more machines an inspired employer can own, the more he can buy and get away from the uninspired ones, the sooner will the right of labour and the will of the people be accomplished. When the machines are in the hands of inspired and strong and spirited men—men of real competence or genius for business, the machines will be seen on every hand around us as the engines of war against evil, against slavery, the whirling weapons of the Spirit. ”

“ One of the characteristic achievements of the immediate future shall be the twentieth-century Parthenon—a Parthenon not of the great and of the few and of the gods, but of the great many, where, through mighty corridors, day and night, democracy wanders and sleeps and chatters and is sad and lives and dies, streets rumbling below. The hotel—the crowd fireside—being more than any other one thing, perhaps, the thing that this civilization is about, the token of what it loves and of how it lives, is bound to be a masterpiece sooner or later that shall express democracy. ”

“ The hush of disappointment in a small audience all alone with itself, the mutual shame of it, the chill in it, that spreads softly through the room, every identical shiver of which the lecturer is hired to warm through—all these are signs of the times. People look at the empty chairs as if every modest, unassuming chair there were some great personality saying to each and all of us: "Why are you here? Did you not make a mistake? Are you not ashamed to be a party to—to—as small a crowd as this?" ”

“ Just outside thousands of taxies shooting all these little mighty wills of men across my window, across London, across England, across the world ... the huge, imperious street ... all these men hurling themselves about in it, joining their wills on to telephone wires, to mighty trains and little quiet country roads, hitching up cables to their wills, and ships—hitching up the very clouds over the sea to their wills and running a world—why are not men like these—men who have the street-spirit in them, this motor genius of driving through to what they want, taking seats in the House of Commons? ”

“ It is a crowd invention. The orchestra—a most distinctively modern institution, a kind of republic of sound, the unseen spirit of the many in one—is the sublimest expression yet attained of the crowd music, which is, and must be, the supreme music of this modern day, the symphony. Richard Wagner comes to his triumph because his music is the voice of multitudes. The opera, a crowd of sounds accompanied by a crowd of sights, presented by one crowd of people on the stage to another crowd of people in the galleries, stands for the same tendency in art that the syndicate stands for in commerce. ”

“ It is its ideals that have made the factory a great gate on the World.
And ideals are news. Ideals are news to a man about himself. News to a man about himself and about what he can be, is gospel.
And a factory with men at the top who have the brains about human nature to do things like this, men who can tell people news about themselves, all day, every day, all the week, like a church—let such a factory, I say, for one, have a steeple with chimes in it, if it wants to, and be counted with the other churches! ”

“ Many men have been lonely before in the presence of a few fellow human beings; but to be lonely with a whole nation—eighty million people; to feel a whole human race standing there outside of your life and softly wondering about you, staring at you in the showcase of your money, peering in as out of a thousand newspapers upon you as a kind of moral curiosity under glass, studying you as the man who has performed the most athletic feat of not seeing what he was really doing and how he really looked in all the world—this has been Mr. Rockefeller's experience. ”

“ The blindness keeps one looking again. One cannot quite believe it. The portrait has something so strong, so almost noble and commanding, about it that one cannot but stand back with one's little judgments and give the man who can hurl together out of the bewilderment of the world a personality like this, and fix it here—all in one small human face—the benefit of the doubt. This is the way the crowd has always taken Pierpont Morgan at first. The bare spectacle of a man so magnificently set, so imperiously preoccupied, silences our judgments. ”

“ I have seen that goodness is a thing to be sung about like a sunset. I have seen that goodness is organic, and grounded in the nature of things and in the nature of man. I have seen that being good is the one great adventure of the world, the huge daily passionate moral experiment of the human heart—that all men are at work on it, that goodness is an implacable crowd process, and that nothing can stop it. ”

“ One cannot help being angered by force, because one knows that it is not only not a remedy, but is itself the cause of all incompetence and blindness in business. Force merely heaps the incompetence and blindness up, postpones coöperation, defeats the mutual interest which is the very substance of business efficiency in a nation. Force is itself the injury mounting up more and more, which it seeks to cure.
The most likely way to prevent industrial trouble would seem to be to have employers and managers and foremen who have a genius for getting men to trust and believe in them. ”

“ I will no longer let myself be tricked by the mere glamour and bigness of our modern life nor swooned into good-will by the roll and liturgy of revolution, "of the people," "for the people," "by the people," nor will I be longer awed by those huge phrase-idols, constitutions, routines, that have roared around me "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"—those imperious, thoughtless, stupid tra-la-las of the People. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He has a crowd soul, a crowd creed. Charged with convictions, galvanized from one convention to another, he contrives to live, and with a sense of multitude, applause, and cheers he warms his thoughts. When they have been warmed enough he exhorts, dictates, goes hither and thither on the crutch of the crowd, and places his crutch on the world, and pries on it, if perchance it may be stirred to something. To the bigotry of the man who knows because he speaks for himself has been added a new bigotry on the earth—the bigotry of the man who speaks for the nation ”

“ 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 whether it is for better or worse, the world has staked all that it is and has been, and all that it is capable of being, on the one supreme issue, "How can the crowd be made beautiful?" ”

“ So I have seen the machines go swinging through the world. Like archangels, like demons, they mount up our desires on the mountains. We do as we will with them. We build Winchester Cathedral all over again, on water. We dive down with our steel wheels and nose for knowledge—like a great Fish—along the bottom of the sea. We beat up our wills through the air. We fling up, with our religion, with our faith, our bodies on the clouds. We fly reverently and strangely, our hearts all still and happy, in the face of God! ”

“ Peter and Paul, and all the rest with their vague, airy other-worldliness, all soaring and tugging like so many balloons of religion and goodness, trying to get away from this world—are not to me so splendid, so magnificently wilful as the Metropolitan Tower—as the souls of these modern, heaven-striking men, taking the world itself, at last, its streets of stone, of steel, its very tunnels and lifting them up as blind offerings, as unbounded instincts, as prayers, as songs to heaven! ”

“ It is only by employing forces that can be made extremely small, invisible, personal, penetrating, and spiritual, that this sort of work can be done. It must be delicate and wonderful workmanship, like the magnet, like the mighty thistledown in the wind, like electricity, like love, like hope—sheer, happy, warm human vision going about and casting itself, casting all its still and tiny might, its boundless seed, upon the earth: but it would pay. ”

“ Why is no one stuttering out our Bible—one the President could have to refer to, our own Bible in our own tongue from morning to morning in the symbols that breathe to us out of the sounds in the street, out of the air, out of the fresh, bright American sky, and out of the new ground beneath our feet?
It is easy for a President to pile up three columns a morning of news about himself to us, show each man his face in the morning, but what is there he can do with twenty thousand newspapers at his breakfast table, to pick out the real news about us? Who shall paint the portrait of a people? ”

“ What Alfred Nobel had in mind, I think, with his little forty thousand dollars, was that it should be given a chance to become an intimate part of some man's genius; that it should become perhaps at last a Great Book—that great foundry of men's souls, where the moulds of History are patterned out, and where the hopes of nations and the prayers of women and children and of great men are, and where the ideals of men—those huge drive-wheels of the world—are cast in a strange light and silence. ”

“ For hundreds of years we have religiously run after martyrs and we have learned in a way, most of us, to have a kind of cooped-up patriotism for our own nation, but why are there not more people who are patriotic toward the whole human race? One has been used to seeing it now for centuries, good people all over the world hanging their harps on willow trees, or snuggling down together by the cold sluggish stream of their lives, and gossiping about how the world has abused them, when they would be far better occupied, nine out of ten of them—in doing something that would make it stop. ”

“ We may know a real hero by the fact that we always have to keep rediscovering him. One knows the real hero by the fact that in his relation to people who put him on a pedestal he is always kicking his pedestal away and substituting his vision.
There is something about any real heroism that we see to-day which makes heroes out of the people who see it, A real hero has his back to the people and the crowd looks over his shoulders with him at his work and he feels behind him daily, with joy and strength, thousands of heroes pressing up to take his place. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I believe that altruism is a feeble and discouraged thing from a religious point of view. I have believed that the big, difficult and glorious thing in religion is mutualism, a spiritual genius for finding identities, for putting people's interests together-you-and-I-ness, and we-ness, letting people crowd in and help themselves.
And why not believe this and drop it? Why should nearly every business man one meets to-day, try to keep up this desperate show, of avoiding the appearance of good, of not wanting to seem mixed up in any way with goodness—either his own or other people's? ”

“ To me, the Metropolitan Tower, sweeping up its prayer out of the streets the way it does, and doing it, too, right beside that little safe, tucked-in, trim, Sunday religion of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, lifts itself up as one of the mighty signs and portents of our time. Have I not heard the bell tolling to the people in the midst of business and singing great hymns? A great city lifts itself and prays in it—prays while it sings and clangs so absent-looking below. ”

“ It is not as if he had had to work out every day all the old details of being a genius, himself.
The miracles he seems to work are all made possible to him because of his thousand man-power, deep subconscious body, his tremendous factory of sensuous machinery. It is as if he had practically a thousand men all working for him, for dear life, down in his basement, and the things that he can get these men to attend to for him give him a start with which none of the rest of us could ever hope to compete. ”

“ When one comes to know a man of this type more intimately, one is apt to find that he is really a flunkey in his thoughts; that he feels hired in his mind; that he is the valet of a crowd, and often, too, the valet of some particular crowd—some little, safe, shut-in crowd, party, or special interest that wants to own, or to keep, or to take away a world.
Whichever way to-day one looks, one finds this illusion as to what a public servant really is, for the moment, corrupting our public life. ”