Mob mentality and the fickleness of the crowd

Mob mentality and the fickleness of the crowd is a recurring social force in Martin Eden: it turns partial impressions into public truth, treats art as a passing spectacle, and rewards Martin only after recognition has become fashionable. Across a distorted newspaper report, the public derision of Brissenden’s poem, and Martin’s late fame, the novel presents acclaim and rejection as opposite expressions of the same unthinking appetite.

Sensation Made into Public Truth

At the socialist meeting, a cub reporter arrives on a day dull of news and wants to make a sensation from the evening. Unable to follow the working-class speakers’ argument, he is nonetheless confident in his own capacity to produce a compelling story. His method is not to understand the debate but to seize on a cue: the word revolution. From that single word, he invents a whole speech and assigns it to Martin, recasting Martin’s reactionary individualism as lurid socialist agitation.

The report’s vivid local color—wild-eyed, long-haired men, clenched fists, raised voices, and angry tumult—does not clarify what happened. It makes the audience’s presumed expectations more important than the meeting’s actual ideas. Martin discovers the result over coffee the next morning: he has been headlined on the front page and transformed into Oakland’s most notorious socialist leader. He is first angered by the fabrication, then laughs and throws the paper aside. The episode shows how the press can manufacture a public identity from a fragment, while readers receive sensation in place of the argument they never heard.

Brissenden’s Poem as Public Spectacle

The crowd’s treatment of Brissenden’s Ephemera turns literary attention into a noisy contest over whether the poem is really poetry. The work makes a hit, but that success does not bring considered recognition. Local papers fill columns with criticism, facetious editorials, and subscriber letters; Helen Della Delmar, proclaimed the greatest woman poet in the United States, publicly denies Brissenden a place among poets and writes at length to prove her case.

The response becomes self-promoting. In its next issue, The Parthenon congratulates itself for the stir it has caused, mocks Sir John Value, and exploits Brissenden’s death. A newspaper claiming a circulation of half a million prints a poem by Delmar that sneers at Brissenden, followed by her parody of his work. Ministers preach against Ephemera, and one minister who defends much of its content is expelled for heresy. Comic writers, cartoonists, and society-weekly columns turn the poem into a joke, circulating fanciful claims about the harm its lines might cause. These reactions make the public response seem less like a judgment of the poem than a competition to be seen reacting to it.

Martin watches the controversy with sadness rather than amusement or anger. He believes Brissenden hated the crowd, yet the crowd has seized what was finest and most sacred in him and subjected it to public dissection. The poem’s attention draws out critics, mockers, and self-advertisers who use its fame to push their own names into view. Martin’s grief is sharpened by the mismatch between the work and its reception: the crowd has gathered around Ephemera, but gathering is not the same as understanding.

Fame as a Change in the Crowd

Martin later finds himself on the other side of public attention, acclaimed rather than mocked. He remains doubtful that this reversal demonstrates a genuine recognition of his writing. In his view, the bourgeois readers buying his books cannot be assumed to understand their intrinsic beauty and power. He compares the public’s treatment of his success with its earlier treatment of Ephemera: the same crowd that tore Brissenden’s work apart now fawns on Martin. Its response has changed from attack to praise, but Martin sees chance, not discernment, as the governing principle.

The contrast is especially stark at dinners and literary gatherings. At an Arden Club banquet, men of note tell Martin that they had recognized him as a winner when they read The Ring of Bells in The Transcontinental and The Peri and the Pearl in The Hornet. Their retrospective confidence collides with his memory of being hungry and in rags. The works they now celebrate have not changed; what has changed is Martin’s standing and the public fashion surrounding him.

As invitations multiply, they carry the same explanation: the guests remember those early stories and poems. Martin interprets the hospitality differently. He believes he is being fed not because the work has newly earned a reward, but because everyone else is feeding him and it has become an honor to do so. At the Press Club, the Redwood Club, literary gatherings, and pink teas, the praise repeats while his private demand remains unanswered: why was the work not enough when he needed help? The repeated recognition exposes an audience that follows the direction of current approval rather than responding consistently to the work itself.

The Meaning of the Crowd’s Reversals

Across these episodes, the crowd is not simply shown making a series of mistaken opinions. It behaves collectively: the reporter supplies a sensation because he expects journalism to need one; the public controversy around Ephemera draws people into ridicule and self-display; and Martin’s success makes entertaining him a social honor. Each response gains force from its circulation. A report becomes a public identity, a poem becomes a pretext for public performance, and fame becomes a signal that others should join in celebrating.

The concept also gives Martin a painful test of the values he once pursued. Recognition arrives, but its timing makes it difficult for him to accept as a measure of artistic worth. The crowd’s earlier indifference and later enthusiasm reveal how little either reaction can assure him that his work has been understood. By placing Brissenden’s posthumous humiliation beside Martin’s fashionable acclaim, the novel makes public opinion appear reversible, contagious, and governed by social momentum. Its praise and condemnation differ in tone, but both can obscure the art they claim to judge.