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sorrow, with conviction or with passion, it is always with their own particular excesses. Two
somewhat feminine characteristics may be noted in them: a remarkably expressive symbolism related
to a great poverty of imagination in inventing of these symbols, which are always the same, repeated
to the point of satiety. Marching in procession carrying banners and flags, statues, relics, sometimes
heads cut off and stuck on pikes, shouting vivas or slogans, hymns or songs: that is about all they have
been able to invent to express their sentiments. But if they have few ideas, they hold on to them and do
not tire of shouting the same slogans, starting again on the same march. Publics too, when brought to a
certain point of excitement, can become demonstrative, not only indirectly through the crowds arising
from them, but especially, and directly, through the contagious influence that they exert on the very
people who stirred them up in the first place and who can no longer control them, through torrents of
lyricism or imprecations, adulation or defamation, Utopian delirium or bloody fury called forth from
the pens of their obedient publicists, the masters who have become slaves. Their manifestations are
therefore more varied and more dangerous than those of crowds, and we must deplore the inventive
genius expended on clever lies, specious fables, all continually contradicted, continually revived, for
the simple pleasure of serving each public the dishes it desires, of expressing what they think to be
true, or what they wish to be true.
We come now to active crowds. But what can crowds do? We see what they can undo, destroy—
but what can they produce with their essential incoherence and the lack of coordination in their
efforts? Corporations, sects, organized associations are productive as well as destructive. The
pontifical brothers of the Middle Ages built bridges, the monks of the Occident cleared land and
built villages; the Jesuits in Paraguay made the most interesting attempt at phalansteries that has ever
been successfully undertaken; and groups of masons put up the majority of our cathedrals. But can we
cite a single house built by a crowd, any land cleared and worked by a crowd, or any industry created
by a crowd? For the few trees of liberty that they planted, how many forests have been burned, homes
pillaged, chateaux demolished by them. . . .
The danger for new democracies is the growing difficulty for thoughtful men to escape the
obsession and fascination of turmoil. It is difficult to descend in a diving bell into a very rough sea.
The guiding individuals whom contemporary society brings into prominence are more and more often
writers living in continual contact with society; the powerful action that they exercise, though
preferable to the blindness of leaderless crowds, is still a refutation of the theory of creative masses.
But this is not enough, and since to spread average culture everywhere is not enough, and since we
must carry high culture still higher, we could, like Summer Maine, already be concerned with what
will be the lot of the last intellectuals, whose long-term services do not stand out. What keeps
mountain populations from razing and transforming the mountains into workable land, vineyards, or
grasslands is certainly not the gratitude for the services of these natural water-towers; it is simply the
solidity of their peaks, the durability of their substance, which is too expensive to dynamite. What
will preserve the intellectual and artistic summits of humanity from democratic leveling will not, I
fear, be recognition of the good that the world owes them, the just esteem for their discoveries. What
then? I should like to think that it will be their force of resistance. Let them beware if they should
separate!