A Mystery of Crowds

[Decoration]

WHO has not at some time leaned over the parapet of a bridge to watch the wrinklings and dimplings of the current below,--to wonder at the trembling permanency of surface-shapes that never change, though the substance of them is never for two successive moments the same? The mystery of the spectacle fascinates; and it is worth thinking about.

Symbols of the riddle of our own being are those shuddering forms. In ourselves likewise the substance perpetually changes with the flow of the Infinite Stream; but the shapes, though ever agitated by various inter-opposing forces, remain throughout the years.

And who has not been fascinated also by the sight of the human stream that pours and pulses through the streets of some great metropolis?

This, too, has its currents and counter-currents and eddyings,--all strengthening or weakening according to the tide-rise or tide-ebb of the city's sea of toil. But the attraction of the greater spectacle for us is not really the mystery of motion: it is rather the mystery of man. As outside observers we are interested chiefly by the pa.s.sing forms and faces,--by their intimations of personality, their suggestions of sympathy or repulsion. We soon cease to think about the general flow.

For the atoms of the human current are visible to our gaze: we see them walk, and deem their movements sufficiently explained by our own experience of walking. And, nevertheless, the motions of the visible individual are more mysterious than those of the always invisible molecule of water.--I am not forgetting the truth that all forms of motion are ultimately incomprehensible: I am referring only to the fact that our common relative knowledge of motions, which are supposed to depend upon will, is even less than our possible relative knowledge of the behavior of the atoms of a water-current.

Every one who has lived in a great city is aware of certain laws of movement which regulate the flow of population through the more crowded thoroughfares. (We need not for present purposes concern ourselves about the complex middle-currents of the living river, with their thunder of hoofs and wheels: I shall speak of the side-currents only.) On either footpath the crowd naturally divides itself into an upward and a downward stream. All persons going in one direction take the right-hand side; all going in the other direction take the left-hand side. By moving with either one of these two streams you can proceed even quickly; but you cannot walk against it: only a drunken or insane person is likely to attempt such a thing. Between the two currents there is going on, by reason of the pressure, a continual self-displacement of individuals to left and right, alternately,--such a yielding and swerving as might be represented, in a drawing of the double-current, by zigzag medial lines ascending and descending. This constant yielding alone makes progress possible: without it the contrary streams would quickly bring each other to a standstill by lateral pressure. But it is especially where two crowd-streams intersect each other, as at street-angles, that this systematic self-displacement is worthy of study. Everybody observes the phenomenon; but few persons think about it. Whoever really thinks about it will discover that there is a mystery in it,--a mystery which no individual experience can fully explain.

In any thronged street of a great metropolis thousands of people are constantly turning aside to left or right in order to pa.s.s each other.

Whenever two persons walking in contrary directions come face to face in such a press, one of three things is likely to happen:--Either there is a mutual yielding,--or one makes room for the other,--or else both, in their endeavor to be accommodating, step at once in the same direction, and as quickly repeat the blunder by trying to correct it, and so keep dancing to and fro in each other's way,--until the first to perceive the absurdity of the situation stands still, or until the more irritable actually pushes his _vis-a-vis_ to one side. But these blunders are relatively infrequent: all necessary yielding, as a rule, is done quickly and correctly.

Of course there must be some general law regulating all this self-displacement,--some law in accord with the universal law of motion in the direction of least resistance. You have only to watch any crowded street for half an hour to be convinced of this. But the law is not easily found or formulated: there are puzzles in the phenomenon.

If you study the crowd-movement closely, you will perceive that those encounters in which one person yields to make way for the other are much less common than those in which both parties give way. But a little reflection will convince you that, even in cases of mutual yielding, one person must of necessity yield sooner than the other,--though the difference in time of the impulse-manifestation should be--as it often is--altogether inappreciable. For the sum of character, physical and psychical, cannot be precisely the same in two human beings. No two persons can have exactly equal faculties of perception and will, nor exactly similar qualities of that experience which expresses itself in mental and physical activities. And therefore in every case of apparent mutual yielding, the yielding must really be successive, not simultaneous. Now although what we might here call the "personal equation" proves that in every case of mutual yielding one individual necessarily yields sooner than the other, it does not at all explain the mystery of the individual impulse in cases where the yielding is not mutual;--it does not explain why you feel at one time that you are about to make your _vis-a-vis_ give place, and feel at another time that you must yourself give place. What originates the feeling?

A friend once attempted to answer this question by the ingenious theory of a sort of eye-duel between every two persons coming face to face in a street-throng; but I feel sure that his theory could account for the psychological facts in scarcely half-a-dozen of a thousand such encounters. The greater number of people hurrying by each other in a dense press rarely observe faces: only the disinterested idler has time for that. Hundreds actually pa.s.s along the street with their eyes fixed upon the pavement. Certainly it is not the man in a hurry who can guide himself by ocular snap-shot views of physiognomy;--he is usually absorbed in his own thoughts.... I have studied my own case repeatedly.

While in a crowd I seldom look at faces; but without any conscious observation I am always able to tell when I should give way, or when my _vis-a-vis_ is going to save me that trouble. My knowledge is certainly intuitive--a mere knowledge of feeling; and I know not with what to compare it except that blind faculty by which, in absolute darkness, one becomes aware of the proximity of bulky objects without touching them.

And my intuition is almost infallible. If I hesitate to obey it, a collision is the invariable consequence.

Furthermore, I find that whenever automatic, or at least semi-conscious, action is replaced by reasoned action--in plainer words, whenever I begin to think about my movements--I always blunder. It is only while I am thinking of other matters,--only while I am acting almost automatically,--that I can thread a dense crowd with ease. Indeed, my personal experience has convinced me that what pilots one quickly and safely through a thick press is not conscious observation at all, but unreasoning, intuitive perception. Now intuitive action of any kind represents inherited knowledge, the experience of past lives,--in this case the experience of past lives incalculable.

Utterly incalculable.... Why do I think so? Well, simply because this faculty of intuitive self-direction in a crowd is shared by man with very inferior forms of animal being,--evolutional proof that it must be a faculty immensely older than man. Does not a herd of cattle, a herd of deer, a flock of sheep, offer us the same phenomenon of mutual yielding?

Or a flock of birds--gregarious birds especially: crows, sparrows, wild pigeons? Or a shoal of fish? Even among insects--bees, ants, termites--we can study the same law of intuitive self-displacement. The yielding, in all these cases, must still represent an inherited experience unimaginably old. Could we endeavor to retrace the whole course of such inheritance, the attempt would probably lead us back, not only to the very beginnings of sentient life upon this planet, but further,--back into the history of non-sentient substance,--back even to the primal evolution of those mysterious tendencies which are stored up in the atoms of elements. Such atoms we know of only as points of multiple resistance,--incomprehensible knittings of incomprehensible forces. Even the tendencies of atoms doubtless represent acc.u.mulations of inheritance----but here thought checks with a shock at the eternal barrier of the Infinite Riddle.

Gothic Horror

[Decoration]

I

LONG before I had arrived at what catechisms call the age of reason, I was frequently taken, much against my will, to church. The church was very old; and I can see the interior of it at this moment just as plainly as I saw it forty years ago, when it appeared to me like an evil dream. There I first learned to know the peculiar horror that certain forms of Gothic architecture can inspire.... I am using the word "horror" in a cla.s.sic sense,--in its antique meaning of ghostly fear.

On the very first day of this experience, my child-fancy could place the source of the horror. The wizened and pointed shapes of the windows immediately terrified me. In their outline I found the form of apparitions that tormented me in sleep;--and at once I began to imagine some dreadful affinity between goblins and Gothic churches. Presently, in the tall doorways, in the archings of the aisles, in the ribbings and groinings of the roof, I discovered other and wilder suggestions of fear. Even the facade of the organ,--peaking high into the shadow above its gallery,--seemed to me a frightful thing.... Had I been then suddenly obliged to answer the question, "What are you afraid of?" I should have whispered, "_Those points!_" I could not have otherwise explained the matter: I only knew that I was afraid of the "points."

Of course the real enigma of what I felt in that church could not present itself to my mind while I continued to believe in goblins. But long after the age of superst.i.tious terrors, other Gothic experiences severally revived the childish emotion in so startling a way as to convince me that childish fancy could not account for the feeling. Then my curiosity was aroused; and I tried to discover some rational cause for the horror. I read many books, and asked many questions; but the mystery seemed only to deepen.

Books about architecture were very disappointing. I was much less impressed by what I could find in them than by references in pure fiction to the awfulness of Gothic art,--particularly by one writer's confession that the interior of a Gothic church, seen at night, gave him the idea of being inside the skeleton of some monstrous animal; and by a far-famed comparison of the windows of a cathedral to eyes, and of its door to a great mouth, "devouring the people." These imaginations explained little; they could not be developed beyond the phase of vague intimation: yet they stirred such emotional response that I felt sure they had touched some truth. Certainly the architecture of a Gothic cathedral offers strange resemblances to the architecture of bone; and the general impression that it makes upon the mind is an impression of life. But this impression or sense of life I found to be indefinable,--not a sense of any life organic, but of a life latent and daemonic. And the manifestation of that life I felt to be in the _pointing_ of the structure.

Attempts to interpret the emotion by effects of alt.i.tude and gloom and vastness appeared to me of no worth; for buildings loftier and larger and darker than any Gothic cathedral, but of a different order of architecture,--Egyptian, for instance,--could not produce a like impression. I felt certain that the horror was made by something altogether peculiar to Gothic construction, and that this something haunted the tops of the arches.

"Yes, Gothic architecture is awful," said a religious friend, "because it is the visible expression of Christian faith. No other religious architecture symbolizes spiritual longing; but the Gothic embodies it.

Every part climbs or leaps; every supreme detail soars and points like fire...." "There may be considerable truth in what you say," I replied;--"but it does not relate to the riddle that baffles me. Why should shapes that symbolize spiritual longing create horror? Why should any expression of Christian ecstasy inspire alarm?..."

Other hypotheses in mult.i.tude I tested without avail; and I returned to the simple and savage conviction that the secret of the horror somehow belonged to the points of the archings. But for years I could not find it. At last, at last, in the early hours of a certain tropical morning, it revealed itself quite unexpectedly, while I was looking at a glorious group of palms.

Then I wondered at my stupidity in not having guessed the riddle before.

II

The characteristics of many kinds of palm have been made familiar by pictures and photographs. But the giant palms of the American tropics cannot be adequately represented by the modern methods of pictorial ill.u.s.tration: they must be seen. You cannot draw or photograph a palm two hundred feet high.

The first sight of a group of such forms, in their natural environment of tropical forest, is a magnificent surprise,--a surprise that strikes you dumb. Nothing seen in temperate zones,--not even the huger growths of the Californian slope,--could have prepared your imagination for the weird solemnity of that mighty colonnade. Each stone-grey trunk is a perfect pillar,--but a pillar of which the stupendous grace has no counterpart in the works of man. You must strain your head well back to follow the soaring of the prodigious column, up, up, up through abysses of green twilight, till at last--far beyond a break in that infinite interweaving of limbs and lianas which is the roof of the forest--you catch one dizzy glimpse of the capital: a parasol of emerald feathers outspread in a sky so blinding as to suggest the notion of azure electricity.

Now what is the emotion that such a vision excites,--an emotion too powerful to be called wonder, too weird to be called delight? Only when the first shock of it has pa.s.sed,--when the several elements that were combined in it have begun to set in motion widely different groups of ideas,--can you comprehend how very complex it must have been. Many impressions belonging to personal experience were doubtless revived in it, but also with them a mult.i.tude of sensations more shadowy,--acc.u.mulations of organic memory; possibly even vague feelings older than man,--for the tropical shapes that aroused the emotion have a history more ancient than our race.

One of the first elements of the emotion to become clearly distinguishable is the aesthetic; and this, in its general ma.s.s, might be termed the sense of terrible beauty. Certainly the spectacle of that unfamiliar life,--silent, tremendous, springing to the sun in colossal aspiration, striving for light against t.i.tans, and heedless of man in the gloom beneath as of a groping beetle,--thrills like the rhythm of some single marvellous verse that is learned in a glance and remembered forever. Yet the delight, even at its vividest, is shadowed by a queer disquiet. The aspect of that monstrous, pale, naked, smooth-stretching column suggests a life as conscious as the serpent's. You stare at the towering lines of the shape,--vaguely fearing to discern some sign of stealthy movement, some beginning of undulation. Then sight and reason combine to correct the suspicion. Yes, motion is there, and life enormous--but a life seeking only sun,--life, rushing like the jet of a geyser, straight to the giant day.

III

During my own experience I could perceive that certain feelings commingled in the wave of delight,--feelings related to ideas of power and splendor and triumph,--were accompanied by a faint sense of religious awe. Perhaps our modern aesthetic sentiments are so interwoven with various inherited elements of religious emotionalism that the recognition of beauty cannot arise independently of reverential feeling. Be this as it may, such a feeling defined itself while I gazed;--and at once the great grey trunks were changed to the pillars of a mighty aisle; and from alt.i.tudes of dream there suddenly descended upon me the old dark thrill of Gothic horror.

Even before it died away, I recognized that it must have been due to some old cathedral-memory revived by the vision of those giant trunks uprising into gloom. But neither the height nor the gloom could account for anything beyond the memory. Columns tall as those palms, but supporting a cla.s.sic entablature, could evoke no sense of disquiet resembling the Gothic horror. I felt sure of this,--because I was able, without any difficulty, to shape immediately the imagination of such a facade. But presently the mental picture distorted. I saw the architrave elbow upward in each of the s.p.a.ces between the pillars, and curve and point itself into a range of prodigious arches;--and again the sombre thrill descended upon me. Simultaneously there flashed to me the solution of the mystery. I understood that the Gothic horror was a _horror of monstrous motion_,--and that it had seemed to belong to the points of the arches because the idea of such motion was chiefly suggested by the extraordinary angle at which the curves of the arching touched.

To any experienced eye, the curves of Gothic arching offer a striking resemblance to certain curves of vegetal growth;--the curves of the palm-branch being, perhaps, especially suggested. But observe that the architectural form suggests more than any vegetal comparison could ill.u.s.trate! The meeting of two palm-crests would indeed form a kind of Gothic arch; yet the effect of so short an arch would be insignificant.

For nature to repeat the strange impression of the real Gothic arch, it were necessary that the branches of the touching crests should vastly exceed, both in length of curve and strength of spring, anything of their kind existing in the vegetable world. The effect of the Gothic arch depends altogether upon the intimation of energy. An arch formed by the intersection of two short sprouting lines could suggest only a feeble power of growth; but the lines of the tall mediaeval arch seem to express a crescent force immensely surpa.s.sing that of nature. And the horror of Gothic architecture is not in the mere suggestion of a growing life, but in the suggestion of an energy supernatural and tremendous.

Of course the child, oppressed by the strangeness of Gothic forms, is yet incapable of a.n.a.lyzing the impression received: he is frightened without comprehending. He cannot divine that the points and the curves are terrible to him because they represent the prodigious exaggeration of a real law of vegetal growth. He dreads the shapes because they seem alive; yet he does not know how to express this dread. Without suspecting why, he feels that this silent manifestation of power, everywhere pointing and piercing upward, is not natural. To his startled imagination, the building stretches itself like a phantasm of sleep,--makes itself tall and taller with intent to frighten. Even though built by hands of men, it has ceased to be a ma.s.s of dead stone: it is infused with Something that thinks and threatens;--it has become a shadowing malevolence, a multiple goblinry, a monstrous fetish!

Levitation