There is intoxication to be found in a crowd. For it is good to be one of many all doing the same thing—good whatever the thing may be, whether singing hymns, watching a football match, or applauding the eternal truths of politicians. Anything will serve as an excuse. It matters not in whose name your two or three thousand are gathered together; what is important is the process of gathering. In these last days we have witnessed a most illuminating example of this tendency in the wild outburst of mob excitement over the arrival in this country of Mary Pickford. It is not as though people were really very much interested in the Little Sweetheart of the World. She is no more than an excuse for assembling in a crowd and working up a powerful communal emotion. The newspapers set the excitement going; they built the fire, applied the match, and cherished the infant flame. The crowds, only too happy to be kindled, did the rest; they burned. I belong to that class of unhappy people who are not easily infected by crowd excitement. 68Too often I find myself sadly and coldly unmoved in the midst of multitudinous emotion. Few sensations are more disagreeable. The defect is in part temperamental, and in part is due to that intellectual snobbishness, that fastidious rejection of what is easy and obvious, which is one of the melancholy consequences of the acquisition of culture. How often one regrets this asceticism of the mind! How wistfully sometimes one longs to be able to rid oneself of the habit of rejection and selection, and to enjoy all the dear, obviously luscious, idiotic emotions without an afterthought! And indeed, however much we may admire the Chromatic Fantasia of Bach, we all of us have a soft spot somewhere in our minds that is sensitive to “Roses in Picardy.” But the soft spot is surrounded by hard spots; the enjoyment is never unmixed with critical disapprobation. The excuses for working up a communal emotion, even communal emotion itself, are rejected as too gross. We turn from them as a c?nobite of the Thebaid would have turned from dancing girls or a steaming dish of tripe and onions.
I have before me now a little book, recently arrived from America, which points out the way in which the random mob emotion may be systematically organized into a 69kind of religion. This volume, The Will of Song (Boni & Liveright, 70 c.), is the joint production of Messrs. Harry Barnhart and Percy MacKaye. “How are art and social service to be reconciled?... How shall the Hermit Soul of the Individual Poet give valid, spontaneous expression to the Communal Soul of assembled multitudes? How may the surging Tides of Man be sluiced in Conduits of Art, without losing their primal glory and momentum?” These questions and many others, involving a great expense of capital letters, are asked by Mr. MacKaye and answered in The Will of Song, which bears the qualifying sub-title, “A Dramatic Service of Community Singing.”
The service is democratically undogmatic. Abstractions, such as Will, Imagination, Joy, Love and Liberty, some of whom are represented in the dramatic performance, not by individuals, but by Group Personages (i.e., choruses), chant about Brotherhood in a semi-Biblical phraseology that is almost wholly empty of content. It is all delightfully vague and non-committal, like a Cabinet Minister’s speech about the League of Nations, and, like such a speech, leaves behind it a comfortable glow, a noble feeling of uplift. But, like Cabinet Ministers, preachers and all whose profession it is to 70move the people by the emission of words, the authors of The Will of Song are well aware that what matters in a popular work of art is not the intellectual content so much as the picturesqueness of its form and the emotion with which it is presented. In the staging—if such a term is not irreverent—of their service, Messrs. Barnhart and MacKaye have borrowed from Roman Catholic ritual all its most effective emotion-creators. The darknesses, the illuminations, the chiming bells, the solemn mysterious voices, the choral responses—all these traditional devices have been most scientifically exploited in the Communal Service.
These are the stage directions which hera............