lives in his hands. He did not have the smallest possible chance from the day he was named for President, to be a second-rate man or to betray a nation, or to back down out of being himself. He had been filled night and day with the vision of a great nation struggling, with the grim glory of it. He was free to make mistakes for it, but there was no way he could have kept from being a true, mighty, single-hearted man for it, if he had tried. We had clinched Lincoln in 1862. He was caught fast in the vise of our hopes.
Perhaps it is because, at certain times in history, nations seem to be siding with the worst in their public men and expecting the worst in them that they get them.
If a crowd wants to be represented, wants to touch to the quick and kindle the man in it, the man filled with vision, the man who is born again into its desire, the crowd-man, they have but to surround him and overshadow him. They will create him, in scorn and joy will they conceive him, and before he knows who he is, they will bring him forth.
It would not be hard, I imagine, to be a great man, with a true, steadied, colossal, single-heartedness, if one were caught fast in the vision, the expectation of a great nation.
To be born again is simple with ninety million people to help. We have all been born again in little things with a few people to help. We have been swung over from little short motives to big, long-levered controlling ones. We have known in a small way what Conversion is. We have seen how naturally it works out in little things.
There is nothing new about it. There is not a man who does not know what it is to get over a small motive. We have seen, when we looked back, what it was that happened.
The way to get over a small motive is to let it get lost in a big one.
A man does not stop to pick up a penny or a million dollars when he is running to save his life.
A man does not stop to pick up two pennies, or two thousand dollars, or two million dollars when he is running to save ten thousand lives or running to save ninety million lives, when he is running to save a city or a nation.
This is Conversion--entering into the World"s Womb, the world"s vision or expectation and being born again.
It is not for nothing that I have seen the sun lifting up the faces of the flowers, and crumbling the countenances of the hills. And I have seen music stirring faintly in the bones of old men. And I have heard the dead Beethoven singing in the feet of children.
And I have watched the Little Earth in its little round of seasons dancing before the Lord.
And I have believed that music is wrought into all things, and that the people I see about me have not one of them been left out.
I believe in sunshine and in hothouses. I believe in burning gla.s.ses. I believe in focusing light into heat and heat into white fire, and turning white fire into little flowing brooks of steel.
And I believe in focusing men upon men.
I believe in Conversion.
Of course it would all be different--focusing men upon men, if men were cogs and wheels, or if the men they were focused on were made of stones.
I stand and look at this stone and believe it is all rubber and whalebone inside.
But what of it?
It does not get true.
While I am looking at a man and believing a certain thing about the man, it gets true.
What is going on in my mind while I look at him effects actual mechanical changes in him, affects the flow of blood in his veins. A look colours him, whitens him, twists and turns the muscles and tissues in his body. I draw lines upon his inmost being. I lay down a new face upon his face. A moment after I look upon the man"s face it has become, as it were, or may have become, a new little landscape. I have seen a great country opened up in him of what he might be like. While I look I have been ushered softly, for a second, into the presence of a man who was not there before.
Such things have happened.
Beatrice looked at Dante once. Ten silent centuries began singing.
A man named Stephen, one day, while he was dying, gave a look at a man named Paul. Paul came away quietly and hewed out history for two thousand years.
CHAPTER XVI
EXCEPTION
A bicycle, the other day, a little outside Paris as it was running along quietly, lifted itself off the ground suddenly, and flew three yards and seven inches.
There are nine million seven hundred and eighty nine thousand nine hundred and seventy-nine bicycles that have not flown three yards and seven inches.
But what of it? Why count them up? Why bother about them? The important, conclusive, ma.s.sive, irresistible, crushing, material fact is that one bicycle has flown three yards seven inches.
The nine million seven hundred and eighty-nine thousand nine hundred and seventy-nine bicycles that can not fly yet are negligible. So are nine out of ten business firms.
If there is one exceptional man in modern industry who is running his business in the right way and who has made a success of it and has proved it--he may look visionary to cla.s.s-socialists and to other people who decide by measuring off ma.s.ses of fact, and counting up rows of people and who see what anybody can see, but he is after all in arranging our social programme the only man of any material importance for us to consider. It would be visionary to take the past, dump it around in front of one, and try to make a future out of it. I do not deny what people tell me about millionaires and about factory slaves. I have not mooned or lied or turned away my face. I stand by time one live, right, implacable, irrevocable, prolific exception. I stand by the one bicycle out of them all that has flown three yards and seven inches.
I lay out my program, conceive my world on that. Piles of facts arranged in dead layers high against heaven, rows of figures, miles of factory slaves, acres of cemeteries of dead millionaires, going-by streetfuls of going-by people, shall not cow me.
My heart has been broken long enough by counting truths on my fingers, by numbering grains of sand, men, and mountains, bombs, acorns and marbles alike.
Which truth matters?
Which man is right?
Where is Nazareth?
Nazareth is our only really important town now. I will see what is going on in Nazareth. On every subject that comes up, in every line of thought, I will go to the city of implacable exceptions. All the inventors flock there--the man with the one bicycle which flies, the one great industrial organizer, the man with the man-machine, and the man--the great boy who carries new great beautiful cities in his pocket like strings and nails and knives, they are all there.
Nazareth is the city, the one mighty little city of the spirit where all the really worth-while men wherever they may seem to be, all day, all night, do their living.
Other cities may make things, in Nazareth they make worlds. One can see a new one almost any day in Nazareth. Men go up and down the streets there with their new worlds in their eyes.
Some of them have them almost in their hands or are looking down and working on them.
It does not seem to me that any of us can make ourselves strong and fit to lay out a sound program or vision for a world, who do not watch with critical expectation and with fierce joy these men of Nazareth, who do not take at least a little time off every day, in spirit, in Nazareth, and spend it in watching bicycles fly three feet and seven inches. To watch these men, it seems to me, is our one natural, economical way to get at essential facts, at the set-one-side truths, at the exceptions that worlds and all-around programs for worlds are made out of. To watch these men is the one way I know not to be lost in great museums and storehouses of facts that do not matter, in the streetfuls and skysc.r.a.perfuls of men that go by.
I regret to record that professors of political economy, social philosophers, industrial big-wigs, presidents of boards of trade have not been often met with on the streets of this silent, crowded, mighty, invisible little town that rules the destinies of men.
Not during the last twenty years, but one is meeting them there to-day.
All these things that people are saying to me are mere history. I have seen the one live exception. One telephone was enough. And one Galileo was enough, with his little planet turning round and round, with all of us on it who were obliged to agree with him about it. It kept turning round and round with us until we did.