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 at the end of a tour, when, one audience after the other, those huge Svengalis had hypnotized him--thundering his very subtleties at them, hour after hour, in Carnegie Hall? One could only wonder what had happened, sit by helplessly, watch the crowd--thousands of headlong human beings lunging their souls and their bodies through the music, weeping, gasping, huzzaing, and clapping to one another. After every crash of new crescendo, after every precipice of silence, they seemed to be crying, "This is Soul! Oh, this is Soul!" The feeling of a vast audience holding its breath, no matter why it does it or whether it ought to do it or not, seems to have become almost a religious rite of itself. Vistas of faces gallery after gallery hanging on a note, two or three thousand souls suspended in space all on one tiny little ivory lever at the end of one man's forefinger ... dim lights shining on them and soft vibrations floating round them ... going to hear Paderewski play at the end of his season was going to hear a crowd at a piano singing with its own hands and having a kind of orgy with itself. One could only remember that there had been a Paderewski once who hypnotized and possessed his audience by being hypnotized and possessed by his own music. One liked to remember him--the Paderewski who was really an artist and who performed the function of the artist showering imperiously his own visions on the hearts of the people. And what is true in music one finds still truer in the other arts. One keeps coming on it everywhere--the egotism of cities, the self-complacency of the crowds swerving the finer and the truer artists from their functions, making them sing in hoarse crowd-voices instead of singing in their own and giving us themselves. Nearly all our acting has been corroded by crowds. Some of us have been obliged almost to give up going to the theatre except to very little ones, and we are wondering if churches cannot possibly be made small enough to believe great things, or if galleries cannot be arranged with few enough people in them to allow us great paintings, or if there will not be an author so well known to a few men that he will live forever, or if some newspaper will not yet be great enough to advertise that it has a circulation small enough to tell the truth. CHAPTER IV LETTING THE CROWD HAVE PEOPLE IN IT So we face the issue.