on 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 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