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"A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many I had not thought death had undone so many, Sighs, short and infrequent are exhaled. and each man fixed his eyes before his feet." For all the Dantean reference here, Eliot is appalled at mass society, at the communal but voluntary mass movements of the undead; but they were merely clerks walking to their desks in the City, having alighted at London Bridge Station off commuter trains, poor souls (but now I am getting Dantean) from Lewisham or Brockley. Lewisham? Brockley? Thought enough to inspire in the patrician Eliot a frisson of distaste! Paul Valery in 1930? Same bridge, same problem: "A little while I was walking across London Bridge…..This seemed to me no crowd of individual beings…rather I made of it…a flux of identical particles, equally sucked in by the same nameless void, their deaf, headlong current pattering monotonously over the bridge." (Beware of high-minded poets standing on bridges, one might conclude, since Eliot's and Valery's comments remind us of Wordsworth's Westminster Bridge. Wordsworth's distaste with common, urban man, expresses itself conveniently through a city seen so early that there were none of them about.)

John Carey (The Intellectuals and the Masses) describes the disdain that Bloomsbury held for the masses, the semi-educated modestly aspirational urban or suburban class, the clerks, as they were invariably typified: Pooter, Kipps, Leonard Bast (in Howards End) and others.

This tendency is important in the history of the city crowd; the city had always had its crowds; and yes this had caused concern; honest fear of the mob, real social concern at overcrowding etc. But the distaste that Carey describes is different. The 'new' crowd was made up of the inhabitants of raw new suburbs, readers of Tit-bits magazine, consumers of tinned food. It was they who constituted the crowd, the new crowd.

And later again there was a sociologists' crowd, and the fear of anomie. There was an irritating film in the eighties called Koyanisqaatsi; it included much speeded up footage of urban life under rapidly scudding clouds to a hypnotic soundtrack by Philip Glass, imagery that became very popular in TV commercials for cars . (Perhaps that was where it belonged in the first place?) The title is Hopi (what else?) for Life Out of Balance. In our automatic assumption that aboriginal cultures are better than our own we are obliged to conclude that our amazing modern world is out of balance.
Why out of balance?

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