The voice of the machines; an introduction to the twentieth century

Front matter

Class TS^S^-^ Book £ 3:1V 6

Copyright N°_

COPyRIGHT DEPOSIT.

Part I The Men Behind The Machines

I. — Machines as Seen from a Meadow II. — As Seen through a Hatchway III. — The Souls of Machines

IV.— Poets

V. — Gentlemen ....

VI.— Prophets ....

Part II The Language Of The Machines

I. — As Good as Ours II. — On Being Busy and Still . III.— On Not Showing Off . . .

IV. — On Making People Proud of the World V. — A Modest Universe

iii

PAGE 3

52 60

IV

Contents

Part III The Machines As Poets

I. — Plato and the General Electric Works II. — Hewing away on the Heavens and the Earth

III. — The Grudge against the Infinite

IV. — Symbolism in Modern Art V. — The Machines as Artists

VI. — The Machines as Philosophers .

PAGB

73 76 84 87 94 99

PART IV THE IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES I. — The Idea of Incarnation . . .105

II. — The Idea of Size . . , . .115

III. — The Idea of Liberty . . . .120

IV. — The Idea of Immortality . . -134

v.— The Idea of God i44

VI. — The Idea of the Unseen and the Iijtangible 151

VII.— The Idea of Great Men . . .163

VIII. — The Idea of Love and Comradeship . 170

Part One The Men Behind The Machines

MACHINES. AS SEEN FROM A MEADOW

IT would be difficult to find anything in the encyclopedia that would justify the claim that we are about to make, or anything in the dictionary. Even a poem — which is supposed to prove anything with a little of nothing — could hardly be found to prove it; but in this beginning hour of the twentieth century there are not a few of us — for the time at least allowed to exist upon the earth — who are obliged to say (with Luther), "Though every tile on the roundhouse be a devil, we cannot say otherwise — the locomotive is beautiful."

As seen when one is looking at it as it is, and is not merely using it.

As seen from a meadow.

We had never thought to fall so low as this, or that the time would come when we would feel moved — all but compelled, in fact — to betray to a cold and discriminating world our poor, pitiful, one-adjective state. 3

We do not know why a locomotive is beautiful. We are perfectly aware that it ought not to be. We have all but been ashamed of it for being beautiful — and of ourselves. We have attempted all possible words upon it — the most complimentary and worthy ones we know — ■ words with the finer resonance in them, and the air of discrimination the soul loves. We cannot but say that several of these words from time to time have seemed almost satisfactory to our ears. They seem satisfactory also for general use in talking with people, and for introducing locomotives in conversation; but the next time we see a locomotive coming down the track, there is no help for us. We quail before the headlight of it. The thunder of its voice is as the voice of the hurrying people. Our little row of adjectives is vanished. All adjectives are vanished. They are as one.

Unless the word "beautiful" is big enough to make room for a glorious, imperious, worldpossessing, world-commanding beauty like this, we are no longer its disciples. It is become a play word. It lags behind truth. Let it be shut in with its rim of hills — the word beautiful — its show of sunsets and its bouquets and its doilies and its songs of birds. We are seekers for a new word. It is the first hour of the twentieth century. If the hill be beautiful, so is the locomotive that conquers a hill. So is the

Machines, As Seen from a Meadow 5

telephone, piercing a thousand sunsets north to south, with the sound of a voice. The night is not more beautiful, hanging its shadow over the city, than the electric spark pushing the night one side, that the city may behold itself; and the hour is at hand — is even now upon us — when not the sun itself shall be more beautiful to men than the telegraph stopping the sun in the "midst of its high heaven, and holding it there, while the will of a child to another child ticks round the earth. "Time shall be folded up as a scroll," saith the voice of Man, my Brother. "The spaces between the hills, to ME," saith the Voice, "shall be as though they were not."

The voice of man, my brother, is a new voice.

It is the voice of the machines.

II As Seen Through A Hatchway '

IN its present importance as a factor in life and a modifier of its conditions, the machine is in every sense a new and unprecedented fact The machine has no traditions. The only way to take a traditional stand with regard to life or the representation of life to-day, is to leave the machine out. It has always been left out. Leaving it out has made little difference. Only a small portion of the people of the world have had to be left out with it.

Not to see poetry in the machinery of this present age, is not to see poetry in the life of the age. It is not to believe in the age.

The first fact a man encounters in this modern world, after his mother's face, is the machine. The moment be begins to think outwards, he thinks toward a machine. The bed he lies in was sawed and planed by a machine, or cast in a foundry. The windows he looks out of were built in mills. His knife and fork were made 6

As Seen Through a Hatchway 7

by steam. His food has come through rollers and wheels. The water he drinks is pumped to him by engines. The ice in it was frozen by a factory and the cloth of the clothes he wears was flashed together by looms.

The machine does not end here. When he grows to years of discretion and looks about him to choose a place for himself in life, he finds that that place must come to him out of a machine. By the side of a machine of one sort or another, whether it be of steel rods and wheels or of human beings' souls, he must find his place in the great whirling system of the order of mortal lives, and somewhere in the system — that is, the Machine — be the ratchet, drive-wheel, belt, or spindle under infinite space, ordained for him to be from the beginning of the world.

The moment he begins to think, a human being finds himself facing a huge, silent, blue-and-gold something called the universe, the main fact of which must be to him that it seems to go without him very well, and that he must drop into the place that comes, whatever it may be, and hold on as he loves his soul, or forever be left behind. He learns before many years that this great machine shop of a globe, turning solemnly its days and nights, where he has wandered for a life, will hardly be inclined to stop — to wait perchance — to ask him what he wants to be, or how this life of his shall get itself said. He looks into the Face of Circumstance. (Sometimes it is the Fist of Circumstance.) The Face of Circumstance is a silent face. It points to the machine. He looks into the faces of his fellow-men, hurrying past him night and day, — miles of streets of them. They, too, have looked into the Face of Circumstance. It pointed to the Machine. They show it in their faces. Some of them show it in their gait. The Machine closes around him, with its vast insistent murmur, million-peopled and full of laughs and cries. He listens to it as to the roar of all Being.

He listens to the Machine's prophet. "All men," says Pohtical Economy, "may be roughly divided as attaching themselves to one or the other of three great classes of activity — production, consumption or distribution."

The number of persons who are engaged in production outside of association with machinery, if they could be gathered together in one place, would be an exceedingly small and strange and uncanny band of human beings. They would be visited by all the world as curiosities.

The number of persons who are engaged in distribution outside of association with machinery is equally insignificant. Except for a few peddlers, distribution is hardly anything else but machinery.

As Seen Through a Hatchway 9

The number of persons who are engaged in consumption outside of association with machinery is equally insignificant. So far as consumption is concerned, any passing freight train^ if it could be stopped and examined on its way to New York, would be found to be loaded with commodities, the most important part of which, from the coal up, have been produced by one set of machines to be consumed by another set of machines.

So omnipresent and masterful and intimate with all existence have cogs and wheels and belts become, that not a civilized man could be found on the globe to-day, who, if all the machines that have helped him to live this single year of 1906 could be gathered or piled around him where he stands, would be able, for the machines piled high around his life, to see the sky — to be sure there was a sky. It is then his privilege, looking up at this horizon of steel and iron and running belts, to read in a paper book the literary definition of what this heaven is, that spreads itself above him, and above the world, walled in forever with its irrevocable roar of wheels.

"No inspiring emotions," says the literary definition, "ideas or conceptions can possibly be connected with machinery — -or ever will be."

What is to become of a world roofed in with machines for the rest of its natural life, and of lo The Men Behind the Machines

the people who will have to live under the roof of machines, the literary definition does not say. It is not the way of literary definitions. For a time at least we feel assured that we, who are the makers of definitions, are poetically and personally safe. Can we not live behind the ramparts of our books? We take comfort with the medallions of poets and the shelves that sing around us. We sit by our library fires, the last nook of poetry. Beside our gates the great crowding chimneys lift themselves. Beneath our windows herds of human beings, flocking through the din, in the dark of the morning and the dark of the night, go marching to their fate. We have done what we could. Have we not defined poetry? Is it nothing to have laid the boundary line of beauty ? .... The huge, hurrying, helpless world in its belts and spindles — the people who are going to be obliged to live in it when the present tense has spoiled it a little more — all this — the great strenuous problem — ■ the defense of beauty, the saving of its past, the forging of its future, the welding of it with life — • all these? .... Pull down the blinds, Jeems. Shut out the noises of the street. A little longer .... the low singing to ourselves. Then darkness. The wheels and the din above our graves shall be as the passing of silence.

Is it true that, in a few years more, if a man

As Seen Through a Hatchway 1 1

wants the society of his kind, he will have to look down through a hatchway? Or that, if he wants to be happy, he will have to stand on it and look away? I do not know. I only know how it is now.

They stay not in their hold

These stokers,

Stooping to hell

To feed a ship.

Below the ocean floors,

Before their awful doors

Bathed in flame,

I hear their human lives

Drip — drip.

Through the lolling aisles of comrades

In and out of sleep,

Troops of faces

To and fro of happy feet,

They haunt my eyes.

Their murky faces beckon me

From the spaces of the coolness of the sea

Their fitful bodies away against the skies.

Ill

SOULS OF MACHINES

IT does not make very much difference to the machines whether there is poetry in them or not. It is a mere abstract question to the machines.

It is not an abstract question to the people who are under the machines. Men who are under things want to know what the things are for, and they want to know what they are under them for. It is a very hve, concrete, practical question whether there is, or can be, poetry in machinery or not. The fate of society turns upon it.

There seems to be nothing that men can care for, whether in this world or the next, or that they can do, or have, or hope to have, which is not bound up, in our modem age, with machinery. With the fate of machinery it stands or falls. Modern religion is a machine. If the characteristic vital power and spirit of the modern age is organization, and it cannot organize

Souls of Machines 13

in its religion, there is little to be hoped for in religion. Modern education is a machine. If the principle of machinery is a wrong and inherently uninspired principle — if because a machine is a machine no great meaning can be expressed by it, and no great result accomplished by it — there is little to be hoped for in modern education.

Modern government is a machine. The more modern a government is, the more the machine in it is emphasized. Modern trade is a machine. It is made up of (i) corporations — huge machines employing machines, and (2) of trusts — huge machines that control machines that employ machines. Modem charity is a machine for getting people to help each other. Modem society is a machine for getting them to enjoy each other. Modern literature is a machine for supplying ideas. Modem journalism is a machine for distributing them; and modern art is a machine for supplying the few, very few, things that are left that other machines cannot supply.

Both in its best and worst features the characteristic, inevitable thing that looms up in modem life over us and around us, for better or worse, is the machine. We may whine poetry at it, or not. It makes Httle difference to the machine. We may not see what it is for. It has come to stay. It is going to stay until we do see what it is for. We cannot move it. We cannot go around it. We cannot destroy it. We are born in the machine. A man cannot move the place he is born in. We breathe the machine. A man cannot go around what he breathes, any more than he can go around himself. He cannot destroy what he breathes, even by destroying himself. If there cannot be poetry in machinery — that is if there is no beautiful and glorious interpretation of machinery for our modern life — there cannot be poetry in anything in modem life. Either the machine is the door of the future, or it stands and mocks at us where the door ought to be. If we who have made machines cannot make our machines mean something, we ourselves are meaningless, the great blue-and-gold machine above our lives is meaningless, the winds that blow down upon us from it are empty winds, and the lights that lure us in it are pictures of darkness. There is one question that confronts and undergirds our whole modern civilization. All other questions are a part of it. Can a Machine Age have a soul?

If we can find a great hope and a great meaning for the machine-idea in its simplest form, for machinery itself — that is, the machines of steel and flame that minister to us — it will be possible to find a great hope for our other machines. If we cannot use the machines we have already mastered to hope with, the less

Souls of Machines 15

we hope from our other machines — our spiritmachines, the machines we have not mastered — the better. In taking the stand that there is poetry in machinery, that inspiring ideas and emotions can be and will be connected with machinery, we are taking a stand for the continued existence of modem reHgion — (in all reverence) the God-machine; for modem education — the man -machine ; for modem government — the crowd-machine; for modem art — the machine in which the crowd lives.

If inspiring ideas cannot be connected with a machine simply because it is a machine, there is not going to be anything left in this modern world to connect inspiring ideas with.

Johnstown haunts me — the very memory of it. Flame and vapor and shadow — like some huge, dim face of Labor, it Hfts itself dumbly and looks at me. I suppose, to some it is but a wraith of rusty vapor, a mist of old iron, sparks floating from a chimney, while a train sweeps past. But to me, with its spires of smoke and its towers of fire, it is as if a great door had been opened and I had watched a god, down in the wonder of real things — in the act of making an earth. I am filled with childhood — and a kind of strange, happy terror. I struggle to wonder my way out. Thousands of railways— after this— bind Johnstown to me; miles of high, narrow, steel-built streets— the i6 The Men Behind the Machines

whole world lifting itself mightily up, rolling itself along, turning itself over on a great steel pivot, down in Pennsylvania — for its days and nights. I am whirled away from it as from a vision. I am as one who has seen men lifting their souls up in a great flame and laying down floors on a star. I have stood and watched, in the melting-down place, the making and the welding place of the bones of the world.

It is the object of this present writing to search out a world — a world a man can live in. If he cannot live in this one, let him know it and make one. If he can, let him face it. If the word YES cannot be written across the world once more — written across this year of the world in the roar of its vast machines — we want to know it. We cannot quite see the word YES — sometimes, huddled behind our machines. But we hear it sometimes. We know we hear it. It is stammered to us by the machines themselves.

IV Poets

WHEN, standing in the midst of the huge machine-shop of our modem Hfe, we are informed by the Professor of Poetics that machinery — the thing we do our Hving with — is inevitably connected with ideas practical and utilitarian — at best intellectual — that "it will always be practically impossible to make poetry out of it, to make it appeal to the imagination," we refer the question to the real world, to the real spirit we know exists in the real world.

Expectancy is the creed of the twentieth century.

Expectancy, which was the property of poets in the centuries that are now gone by, is the property to-day of all who are born upon the earth.

The man who is not able to draw a distinction

between the works of John Milton and the plays

of Shakespeare, but who expects something of

the age he lives in, comes nearer to being a true

2 17 poet than any writer of verses can ever expect to be who does not expect anything of this same age he Hves in — not even verses. Expectancy is the practice of poetry. It is poetry caught in the act. Though the whole world be lifting its voice, and saying in the same breath that poetry is dead, this same world is living in the presence of more poetry, and more kinds of poetry, than men have known on the earth before, even in the daring of their dreams.

Pessimism has always been either literary — the result of not being in the real world enough — • or genuine and provincial — the result of not being in enough of the real world.

If we look about in this present day for a suitable and worthy expectancy to make an age out of, or even a poem out of, where shall we look for it? In the literary definition? the historical argument? the minor poet?

The poet of the new movement shall not be discovered talking with the doctors, or defining art in the schools, nor shall he be seen at first by peerers in books. The passer-by shall see him, perhaps, through the door of a foundry at night, a lurid figure there, bent with labor, and humbled with labor, but with the fire from the heart of the earth playing upon his face. His hands — innocent of the ink of poets, of the mere outsides of things — shall be beautiful with the grasp of the thing called life — with the

Poets 19

grim, silent, patient creating of life. He shall be seen living with retorts around him, loomed over by machines — shadowed by weariness — to the men about him half comrade, half monk — - going in and out among them silently, with some secret glory in his heart.

If literary men — so called — knew the men who live with machines, who are putting their lives into them — inventors, engineers and brakemen — as well as they know Shakespeare and Milton and the Club, there would be no difficulty about finding a great meaning — i. e. , a great hope or great poetry — in machinery. The real problem that stands in the way of poetry in machinery is not literary, nor aesthetic. It is sociological. It is in getting people to notice that an engineer is a gentleman and a poet.

V

THE truest definition of a gentleman is that he is a man who loves his work. This is also the truest definition of a poet. The man who loves his work is a poet because he expresses delight in that work. He is a gentleman because his delight in that work makes him his own employer. No matter how many men are over him, or how many men pay him, or fail to pay him, he stands under the wide heaven the one man who is master of the earth. He is the one infallibly overpaid man on it. The man who loves his work has the single thing the world affords that can make a man free, that can make him his own employer, that admits him to the ranks of gentlemen, that pays him, or is rich enough to pay him, what a gentleman's work is worth.

The poets of the world are the men who pour their passions into it, the men who make the world over with their passions. Everything that these men touch, as with some strange and immortal joy from out of them, has the thrill of beauty in it, and exultation and wonder. They cannot have it otherwise even if they would. A true man is the autobiography of some great delight mastering his heart for him, possessing his brain, making his hands beautiful.

Looking at the matter in this way, in proportion to the number employed there are more gentlemen running locomotives to-day than there are teaching in colleges. In proportion as we are more creative in creating machines at present than we are in creating anything else there are more poets in the mechanical arts than there are in the fine arts; and while many of the men who are engaged in the machine-shops can hardly be said to be gentlemen (that is, they would rather be preachers or lawyers), these can be more than offset by the much larger proportion of men in the fine arts, who, if they were gentlemen in the truest sense, would turn mechanics at once; that is, they would do the thing they were born to do, and they would respect that thing, and make every one else respect it.

While the definition of a poet and a gentleman — that he is a man who loves his work — ■ might appear to make a new division of society, it is a division that already exists in the actual life of the world, and constitutes the only literal aristocracy the world has ever had.

It may be set down as a fundamental principle that, no matter how prosaic a man may be, or how proud he is of having been born upon this planet with poetry all left out of him, it is the very essence of the most hard and practical man that, as regards the one uppermost thing in his life, the thing that reveals the power in him, he is a poet in spite of himself, and whether he knows it or not.

So long as the thing a man works with is a part of an inner ideal to him, so long as he makes the thing he works with express that ideal, the heat and the glow and the lustre and the beauty and the unconquerableness of that man, and of that man's delight, shall be upon all that he does. It shall sing to heaven. It shall sing to all on earth who overhear heaven.

Every man who loves his work, who gets his work and his ideal connected, who makes his work speak out the heart of him, is a poet. It makes little difference what he says about it. In proportion as he has power with a thing; in proportion ac he makes the thing — be it a bit of color, or a fragment of flying sound, or a word, or a wheel, or a throttle — in proportion as he makes the thing fulfill or express what he wants it to fulfill or express, he is a poet. All heaven and earth cannot make him otherwise.

That the inventor is in all essential respects a poet toward the machine that he has made, it would be hard to deny. That, with all the apparent prose that piles itself about his machine, the machine is in all essential respects a poem to him, who can question? Who has ever known an inventor, a man with a passion in his hands, without feeling toward him as he feels toward a poet? Is it nothing to us to know that men are living now under the same sky with us, hundreds of them (their faces haunt us on the street), who would all but die, who are all but dying now, this very moment, to make a machine live, — martyrs of valves and wheels and of rivets and retorts, sleepless, tireless, unconquerable men?

To know an inventor the moment of his triumph, — the moment when, working his will before him, the machine at last, resistless, silent, massive pantomime of a life, offers itself to the gaze of men's souls and the needs of their bodies, — to know an inventor at all is to know that at a moment like this a chord is touched in him strange and deep, soft as from out of all eternity. The melody that Homer knew, and that Dante knew, is his also, with the grime upon his hands, standing and watching it there. It is the same song that from pride to pride and joy to joy has been singing through the hearts of The Men Who Make, from the beginning of the world. The thing that was not, that now is. after all the praying with his hands . . iron and wood and rivet and cog and wheel — is it not more than these to him standing before it there? It is the face of matter — who does not know it? — answering the face of the man, whispering to him out of the dust of the earth.

What is true of the men who make the machines is equally true of the men who live with them. The brakeman and the locomotive engineer and the mechanical engineer and the sailor all have the same spirit. Their days are invested with the same dignity and aspiration, the same unwonted enthusiasm, and self-forgetfulness in the work itself. They begin their lives as boys dreaming of the track, or of cogs and wheels, or of great waters.

As I stood by the track the other night, Michael the switchman was holding the road for the nine o'clock freight, with his faded flag, and his grim brown pipe, and his wooden leg. As it rumbled by him, headhght, clatter, and smoke, and whirl, and halo of the steam, every brakeman backing to the wind, lying on the air, at the jolt of the switch, started, as at some greeting out of the dark, and turned and gave the sign to Michael. All of the brakemen gave it. Then we watched them, Michael and I, out of the roar and the hiss of their splendid cloud, their flickering, swaying bodies against the sky, flying out to the Night, until there was nothing but a dull red murmur and the falling of smoke.