PART IV

THE IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES

I.--The Idea of Incarnation

II.--The Idea of Size

III.--The Idea of Liberty

IV.--The Idea of Immortality

V.--The Idea of God

VI.--The Idea of the Unseen and the Intangible

VII.--The Idea of Great Men

VIII.--The Idea of Love and Comradeship

PART ONE

THE MEN BEHIND THE MACHINES

I

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.

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, world-possessing, 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 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 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 Political

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.

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 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 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.

III

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

live, 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 modern 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 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 (1) corporations--huge machines employing machines, and (2)

of trusts--huge machines that control machines that employ machines.

Modern charity is a machine for getting people to help each other.

Modern society is a machine for getting them to enjoy each other.

Modern literature is a machine for supplying ideas. Modern 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 modern life over us and around us, for better

or worse, is the machine. We may whine poetry at it, or not. It makes

little 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 modern 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 we hope from our other

machines--our spirit-machines, 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 modern

religion--(in all reverence) the God-machine; for modern

education--the man-machine; for modern government--the crowd-machine;

for modern 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 lifts 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 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 modern

life, we are informed by the Professor of Poetics that machinery--the

thing we do our living 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 poet than any writer

of verses can ever expect to be who does not expect anything of this

same age he lives 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 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 æsthetic. It is

sociological. It is in getting people to notice that an engineer is a

gentleman and a poet.

V

GENTLEMEN

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 as 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,

headlight, 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.

Michael hobbled back to his mansion by the rails. He put up the foot

that was left from the wreck, and puffed and puffed. He had been a

brakeman himself.

Brakemen are prosaic men enough, no doubt, in the ordinary sense, but

they love a railroad as Shakespeare loved a sonnet. It is not given to

brakemen, as it is to poets, to show to the world as it passes by that

their ideals are beautiful. They give their lives for them,--hundreds

of lives a year. These lives may be sordid lives looked at from the

outside, but mystery, danger, surprise, dark cities, and glistening

lights, roar, dust, and water, and death, and life,--these play their

endless spell upon them. They love the shining of the track. It is

wrought into the very fibre of their being.

Years pass and years, and still more years. Who shall persuade the

brakemen to leave the track? They never leave it. I shall always see

them--on their flying footboards beneath the sky--swaying and

rocking--still swaying and rocking--to Eternity.

They are men who live down through to the spirit and the poetry of

their calling. It is the poetry of the calling that keeps them there.

Most of us in this mortal life are allowed but our one peephole in the

universe, that we may see IT withal; but if we love it enough and

stand close to it enough, we breathe the secret and touch in our lives

the secret that throbs through it all.

For a man to have an ideal in this world, for a man to know what an

ideal is, even though nothing but a wooden leg shall come of it, and a

life in a switch-house, and the signal of comrades whirling by, this

also is to have lived.

The fact that the railroad has the same fascination for the railroad

man that the sea has for the sailor is not a mere item of interest

pertaining to human nature. It is a fact that pertains to the art of

the present day, and to the future of its literature. It is as much a

symbol of the art of a machine age as the man Ulysses is a symbol of

the art of an heroic age.

That it is next to impossible to get a sailor, with all his hardships,

to turn his back upon the sea is a fact a great many thousand years

old. We find it accounted for not only in the observation and

experience of men, but in their art. It was rather hard for them to do

it at first (as with many other things), but even the minor poets have

admitted the sea into poetry. The sea was allowed in poetry before

mountains were allowed in it. It has long been an old story. When the

sailor has grown too stiff to climb the masts he mends sails on the

decks. Everybody understands--even the commonest people and the minor

poets understand--why it is that a sailor, when he is old and bent and

obliged to be a landsman to die, does something that holds him close

to the sea. If he has a garden, he hoes where he can see the sails. If

he must tend flowers, he plants them in an old yawl, and when he

selects a place for his grave, it is where surges shall be heard at

night singing to his bones. Every one appreciates a fact like this.

There is not a passenger on the Empire State Express, this moment,

being whirled to the West, who could not write a sonnet on it,--not a

man of them who could not sit down in his seat, flying through space

behind the set and splendid hundred-guarding eyes of the engineer, and

write a poem on a dead sailor buried by the sea. A crowd on the street

could write a poem on a dead sailor (that is, if they were sure he was

dead), and now that sailors enough have died in the course of time to

bring the feeling of the sea over into poetry, sailors who are still

alive are allowed in it. It remains to be seen how many wrecks it is

going to take, lists of killed and wounded, fatally injured, columns

of engineers dying at their posts, to penetrate the spiritual safe

where poets are keeping their souls to-day, untouched of the world,

and bring home to them some sense of the adventure and quiet splendor

and unparalleled expressiveness of the engineer's life. He is a man

who would rather be without a life (so long as he has his nerve) than

to have to live one without an engine, and when he climbs down from

the old girl at last, to continue to live at all, to him, is to linger

where she is. He watches the track as a sailor watches the sea. He

spends his old age in the roundhouse. With the engines coming in and

out, one always sees him sitting in the sun there until he dies, and

talking with them. Nothing can take him away.

Does any one know an engineer who has not all but a personal affection

for his engine, who has not an ideal for his engine, who holding her

breath with his will does not put his hand upon the throttle of

that ideal and make that ideal say something? Woe to the poet who

shall seek to define down or to sing away that ideal. In its glory,

in darkness or in day, we are hid from death. It is the protection of

life. The engineer who is not expressing his whole soul in his

engine, and in the aisles of souls behind him, is not worthy to place

his hand upon an engine's throttle. Indeed, who is he--this man--that

this awful privilege should be allowed to him, that he should dare to

touch the motor nerve of her, that her mighty forty-mile-an-hour

muscles should be the slaves of the fingers of a man like this,

climbing the hills for him, circling the globe for him? It is

impossible to believe that an engineer--a man who with a single touch

sends a thousand tons of steel across the earth as an empty wind can

go, or as a pigeon swings her wings, or as a cloud sets sail in the

west--does not mean something by it, does not love to do it because

he means something by it. If ever there was a poet, the engineer is a

poet. In his dumb and mighty, thousand-horizoned brotherhood,

hastener of men from the ends of the earth that they may be as one, I

always see him,--ceaseless--tireless--flying past sleep--out through

the Night--thundering down the edge of the world, into the Dawn.

Who am I that it should be given to me to make a word on my lips to

speak, or to make a thing that shall be beautiful with my hands--that

I should stand by my brother's life and gaze on his trembling

track--and not feel what the engine says as it plunges past, about the

man in the cab? What matters it that he is a wordless man, that he

wears not his heart in a book? Are not the bell and the whistle and

the cloud of steam, and the rush, and the peering in his eyes words

enough? They are the signals of this man's life beckoning to my life.

Standing in his engine there, making every wheel of that engine thrill

to his will, he is the priest of wonder to me, and of the terror of

the splendor of the beauty of power. The train is the voice of his

life. The sound of its coming is a psalm of strength. It is as the

singing a man would sing who felt his hand on the throttle of things.

The engine is a soul to me--soul of the quiet face thundering

past--leading its troop of glories echoing along the hills, telling it

to the flocks in the fields and the birds in the air, telling it to

the trees and the buds and the little, trembling growing things, that

the might of the spirit of man has passed that way.

If an engine is to be looked at from the point of view of the man who

makes it and who knows it best; if it is to be taken, as it has a

right to be taken, in the nature of things, as being an expression of

the human spirit, as being that man's way of expressing the human

spirit, there shall be no escape for the children of this present

world, from the wonder and beauty in it, and the strong delight in it

that shall hem life in, and bound it round on every side. The idealism

and passion and devotion and poetry in an engineer, in the feeling he

has about his machine, the power with which that machine expresses

that feeling, is one of the great typical living inspirations of this

modern age, a fragment of the new apocalypse, vast and inarticulate

and far and faint to us, but striving to reach us still, now from

above, and now from below, and on every side of life. It is as though

the very ground itself should speak,--speak to our poor, pitiful,

unspiritual, matter-despising souls,--should command them to come

forth, to live, to gaze into the heart of matter for the heart of God.

It is so that the very dullest of us, standing among our machines, can

hardly otherwise than guess the coming of some vast surprise,--the

coming of the day when, in the very rumble of the world, our sons and

daughters shall prophesy, and our young men shall see visions, and our

old men shall dream dreams. It cannot be uttered. I do not dare to say

it. What it means to our religion and to our life and to our art, this

great athletic uplift of the world, I do not know. I only know that so

long as the fine arts, in an age like this, look down on the

mechanical arts there shall be no fine arts. I only know that so long

as the church worships the laborer's God, but does not reverence

labor, there shall be no religion in it for men to-day, and none for

women and children to-morrow. I only know that so long as there is no

poet amongst us, who can put himself into a word, as this man, my

brother the engineer, is putting himself into his engine, the engine

shall remove mountains, and the word of the poet shall not; it shall

be buried beneath the mountains. I only know that so long as we have

more preachers who can be hired to stop preaching or to go into life

insurance than we have engineers who can be hired to leave their

engines, inspiration shall be looked for more in engine cabs than in

pulpits,--the vestibule trains shall say deeper things than sermons

say. In the rhythm of the anthem of them singing along the rails, we

shall find again the worship we have lost in church, the worship we

fain would find in the simpered prayers and paid praises of a thousand

choirs,--the worship of the creative spirit, the beholding of a

fragment of creation morning, the watching of the delight of a man in

the delight of God,--in the first and last delight of God. I have made

a vow in my heart. I shall not enter a pulpit to speak, unless every

word have the joy of God and of fathers and mothers in it. And so long

as men are more creative and godlike in engines than they are in

sermons, I listen to engines.

Would to God it were otherwise. But so it shall be with all of us. So

it cannot but be. Not until the day shall come when this wistful,

blundering church of ours, loved with exceeding great and bitter love,

with all her proud and solitary towers, shall turn to the voices of

life sounding beneath her belfries in the street, shall she be

worshipful; not until the love of all life and the love of all love is

her love, not until all faces are her faces, not until the face of the

engineer peering from his cab, sentry of a thousand souls, is

beautiful to her, as an altar cloth is beautiful or a stained glass

window is beautiful, shall the church be beautiful. That day is bound

to come. If the church will not do it with herself, the great rough

hand of the world shall do it with the church. That day of the new

church shall be known by men because it will be a day in which all

worship shall be gathered into her worship, in which her holy house

shall be the comradeship of all delights and of all masteries under

the sun, and all the masteries and all the delights shall be laid at

her feet.

VI

PROPHETS

The world follows the creative spirit. Where the spirit is creating,

the strong and the beautiful flock. If the creative spirit is not in

poetry, poetry will call itself something else. If it is not in the

church, religion will call itself something else. It is the business

of a living religion, not to wish that the age it lives in were some

other age, but to tell what the age is for, and what every man born in

it is for. A church that can see only what a few of the men born in an

age are for, can help only a few. If a church does not believe in a

particular man more than he believes in himself, the less it tries to

do for him the better. If a church does not believe in a man's work as

he believes in it, does not see some divine meaning and spirit in it

and give him honor and standing and dignity for the divine meaning in

it; if it is a church in which labor is secretly despised and in which

it is openly patronized, in which a man has more honor for working

feebly with his brain than for working passionately and perfectly with

his hands, it is a church that stands outside of life. It is

excommunicated by the will of Heaven and the nature of things, from

the only Communion that is large enough for a man to belong to or for

a God to bless.

If there is one sign rather than another of religious possibility and

spiritual worth in the men who do the world's work with machines

to-day, it is that these men are never persuaded to attend a church

that despises that work.

Symposiums on how to reach the masses are pitiless irony. There is no

need for symposiums. It is an open secret. It cries upon the

house-tops. It calls above the world in the Sabbath bells. A church

that believes less than the world believes shall lose its leadership

in the world. "Why should I pay pew rent," says the man who sings with

his hands, "to men who do not believe in me, to worship, with men who

do not believe in me, a God that does not believe in me?" If heaven

itself (represented as a rich and idle place,--seats free in the

evening) were opened to the true laboring man on the condition that he

should despise his hands by holding palms in them, he would find some

excuse for staying away. He feels in no wise different with regard to

his present life. "Unless your God," says the man who sings with his

hands, to those who pity him and do him good,--"unless your God is a

God I can worship in a factory, He is not a God I care to worship in a

church."

Behold it is written: The church that does not delight in these men

and in what these men are for, as much as the street delights in them,

shall give way to the street. The street is more beautiful. If the

street is not let into the church, it shall sweep over the church and

sweep around it, shall pile the floors of its strength upon it, above

it. From the roofs of labor--radiant and beautiful labor--shall men

look down upon its towers. Only a church that believes more than the

world believes shall lead the world. It always leads the world. It

cannot help leading it. The religion that lives in a machine age, and

that cannot see and feel, and make others see and feel, the meaning of

that machine age, is a religion which is not worthy of us. It is not

worthy of our machines. One of the machines we have made could make a

better religion than this. Even now, almost everywhere in almost every

town or city where one goes, if one will stop or look up or listen,

one hears the chimneys teaching the steeples. It would be blind for

more than a few years more to be discouraged about modern religion.

The telephone, the wireless telegraph, the X-rays, and all the other

great believers are singing up around it. The very railroads are

surrounding it and taking care of it. A few years more and the

steeples will stop hesitating and tottering in the sight of all the

people. They will no longer stand in fear before what the crowds of

chimneys and railways and the miles of smokestacks sweeping past are

saying to the people.

They will listen to what the smokestacks are saying to the people.

They will say it better.

In the meantime they are not listening.

Religion and art at the present moment, both blindfolded and both with

their ears stopped, are being swept to the same irrevocable issue. By

all poets and prophets the same danger signal shall be seen spreading

before them both jogging along their old highways. It is the arm that

reaches across the age.

RAILROAD CROSSING

LOOK OUT FOR THE ENGINE!

PART II.

THE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES

I

AS GOOD AS OURS

One is always hearing it said that if a thing is to be called poetic

it must have great ideas in it, and must successfully express them.

The idea that there is poetry in machinery, has to meet the objection

that, while a machine may have great ideas in it, "it does not look

it." The average machine not only fails to express the idea that it

stands for, but it generally expresses something else. The language of

the average machine, when one considers what it is for, what it is

actually doing, is not merely irrelevant or feeble. It is often

absurd. It is a rare machine which, when one looks for poetry in it,

does not make itself ridiculous.

The only answer that can be made to this objection is that a

steam-engine (when one thinks of it) really expresses itself as well

as the rest of us. All language is irrelevant, feeble, and absurd. We

live in an organically inexpressible world. The language of everything

in it is absurd. Judged merely by its outer signs, the universe over

our heads--with its cunning little stars in it--is the height of

absurdity, as a self-expression. The sky laughs at us. We know it when

we look in a telescope. Time and space are God's jokes. Looked at

strictly in its outer language, the whole visible world is a joke. To

suppose that God has ever expressed Himself to us in it, or to suppose

that He could express Himself in it, or that any one can express

anything in it, is not to see the point of the joke.

We cannot even express ourselves to one another. The language of

everything we use or touch is absurd. Nearly all of the tools we do

our living with--even the things that human beings amuse themselves

with--are inexpressive and foolish-looking. Golf and tennis and

football have all been accused in turn, by people who do not know them

from the inside, of being meaningless. A golf-stick does not convey

anything to the uninitiated, but the bare sight of a golf-stick lying

on a seat is a feeling to the one to whom it belongs, a play of sense

and spirit to him, a subtle thrill in his arms. The same is true of a

new fiery-red baby, which, considering the fuss that is made about it,

to a comparative outsider like a small boy, has always been from the

beginning of the world a ridiculous and inadequate object. A man could

not possibly conceive, even if he gave all his time to it, of a more

futile, reckless, hapless expression of or pointer to an immortal soul

than a week-old baby wailing at time and space. The idea of a baby may

be all right, but in its outer form, at first, at least, a baby is a

failure, and always has been. The same is true of our other musical

instruments. A horn caricatures music. A flute is a man rubbing a

black stick with his lips. A trombone player is a monster. We listen

solemnly to the violin--the voice of an archangel with a board tucked

under his chin--and to Girardi's 'cello--a whole human race laughing

and crying and singing to us between a boy's legs. The eye-language of

the violin has to be interpreted, and only people who are cultivated

enough to suppress whole parts of themselves (rather useful and

important parts elsewhere) can enjoy a great opera--a huge conspiracy

of symbolism, every visible thing in it standing for something that

can not be seen, beckoning at something that cannot be heard. Nothing

could possibly be more grotesque, looked at from the outside or by a

tourist from another planet or another religion, than the celebration

of the Lord's Supper in a Protestant church. All things have their

outer senses, and these outer senses have to be learned one at a time

by being flashed through with inner ones. Except to people who have

tried it, nothing could be more grotesque than kissing, as a form of

human expression. A reception--a roomful of people shouting at each

other three inches away--is comical enough. So is handshaking. Looked

at from the outside, what could be more unimpressive than the

spectacle of the greatest dignitary of the United States put in a vise

in his own house for three hours, having his hand squeezed by long

rows of people? And, taken as a whole, scurrying about in its din,

what could possibly be more grotesque than a great city--a city looked

at from almost any adequate, respectable place for an immortal soul to

look from--a star, for instance, or a beautiful life?

Whether he is looked at by ants or by angels, every outer token that

pertains to man is absurd and unfinished until some inner thing is put

with it. Man himself is futile and comic-looking (to the other

animals), rushing empty about space. New York is a spectacle for a

squirrel to laugh at, and, from the point of view of a mouse, a man is

a mere, stupid, sitting-down, skull-living, desk-infesting animal.

All these things being true of expression--both the expression of men

and of God--the fact that machines which have poetry in them do not

express it very well does not trouble me much. I do not forget the

look of the first ocean-engine I ever saw--four or five stories of it;

nor do I forget the look of the ocean-engine's engineer as in its

mighty heart-beat he stood with his strange, happy, helpless "Twelve

thousand horse-power, sir!" upon his lips.

That first night with my first engineer still follows me. The time

seems always coming back to me again when he brought me up from his

whirl of wheels in the hold to the deck of stars, and left me--my new

wonder all stumbling through me--alone with them and with my thoughts.

The engines breathe.

No sound but cinders on the sails

And the ghostly heave,

The voice the wind makes in the mast--

And dainty gales

And fluffs of mist and smoking stars

Floating past--

From night-lit funnels.

In the wild of the heart of God I stand.

Time and Space

Wheel past my face.

Forever. Everywhere.

I alone.

Beyond the Here and There

Now and Then

Of men,

Winds from the unknown

Round me blow

Blow to the unknown again.

Out in its solitude I hear the prow

Beyond the silence-crowded decks

Laughing and shouting

At Night,

Lashing the heads and necks

Of the lifted seas,

That in their flight

Urge onward

And rise and sweep and leap and sink

To the very brink

Of Heaven.

Timber and steel and smoke

And Sleep

Thousand-souled

A quiver,

A deadened thunder,

A vague and countless creep

Through the hold,

The weird and dusky chariot lunges on

Through Fate.

From the lookout watch of my soul's eyes

Above the houses of the deep

Their shadowy haunches fall and rise

--O'er the glimmer-gabled roofs

The flying of their hoofs,

Through the wonder and the dark

Where skies and waters meet

The shimmer of manes and knees

Dust of seas...

The sound of breathing, urge, confusion

And the beat, the starlight beat

Soft and far and stealthy-fleet

Of the dim unnumbered trampling of their feet.

II

ON BEING BUSY AND STILL

One of the hardest things about being an inventor is that the machines

(excepting the poorer ones) never show off. The first time that the

phonograph (whose talking had been rumored of many months) was allowed

to talk in public, it talked to an audience in Metuchen, New Jersey,

and, much to Mr. Edison's dismay, everybody laughed. Instead of being

impressed with the real idea of the phonograph--being impressed

because it could talk at all--people were impressed because it talked

through its nose.

The more modern a machine is, when a man stands before it and seeks to

know it,--the more it expects of the man, the more it appeals to his

imagination and his soul,--the less it is willing to appeal to the

outside of him. If he will not look with his whole being at a

twin-screw steamer, he will not see it. Its poetry is under water.

This is one of the chief characteristics of the modern world, that its

poetry is under water. The old sidewheel steamer floundering around in

the big seas, pounding the air and water both with her huge, showy

paddles, is not so poetic-looking as the sailboat, and the poetry in

the sailboat is not so obvious, so plainly on top, as in a gondola.

People who do not admit poetry in machinery in general admit that

there is poetry in a Dutch windmill, because the poetry is in sight. A

Dutch windmill flourishes. The American windmill, being improved so

much that it does not flourish, is supposed not to have poetry in it

at all. The same general principle holds good with every machine that

has been invented. The more the poet--that is, the inventor--works on

it, the less the poetry in it shows. Progress in a modern machine, if

one watches it in its various stages, always consists in making a

machine stop posing and get down to work. The earlier locomotive,

puffing helplessly along with a few cars on its crooked rails, was

much more fire-breathing, dragon-like and picturesque than the present

one, and the locomotive that came next, while very different, was more

impressive than the present one. Every one remembers it,--the

important-looking, bell-headed, woodpile-eating locomotive of thirty

years ago, with its noisy steam-blowing habits and its ceaseless

water-drinking habits, with its grim, spreading cowcatcher and its

huge plug-hat--who does not remember it--fussing up and down stations,

ringing its bell forever and whistling at everything in sight? It was

impossible to travel on a train at all thirty years ago without always

thinking of the locomotive. It shoved itself at people. It was always

doing things--now at one end of the train and now at the other,

ringing its bell down the track, blowing in at the windows, it fumed

and spread enough in hauling three cars from Boston to Concord to get

to Chicago and back. It was the poetic, old-fashioned way that engines

were made. One takes a train from New York to San Francisco now, and

scarcely knows there is an engine on it. All he knows is that he is

going, and sometimes the going is so good he hardly knows that.

The modern engines, the short-necked, pin-headed, large-limbed, silent

ones, plunging with smooth and splendid leaps down their aisles of

space--engines without any faces, blind, grim, conquering, lifting the

world--are more poetic to some of us than the old engines were, for

the very reason that they are not so poetic-looking. They are less

showy, more furtive, suggestive, modern and perfect.

In proportion as a machine is modern it hides its face. It refuses to

look as poetic as it is; and if it makes a sound, it is almost always

a sound that is too small for it, or one that belongs to some one

else. The trolley-wire, lifting a whole city home to supper, is a

giant with a falsetto voice. The large-sounding, the poetic-sounding,

is not characteristic of the modern spirit. In so far as it exists at

all in the modern age, either in its machinery or its poetry, it

exists because it is accidental or left over. There was a deep bass

steamer on the Mississippi once, with a very small head of steam,

which any one would have admitted had poetry in it--old-fashioned

poetry. Every time it whistled it stopped.

III

ON NOT SHOWING OFF

It is not true to say that the modern man does not care for poetry. He

does not care for poetry that bears on--or for eloquent poetry. He

cares for poetry in a new sense. In the old sense he does not care for

eloquence in anything. The lawyer on the floor of Congress who seeks

to win votes by a show of eloquence is turned down. Votes are facts,

and if the votes are to be won, facts must be arranged to do it. The

doctor who stands best with the typical modern patient is not the most

agreeable, sociable, jogging-about man a town contains, like the

doctor of the days gone by. He talks less. He even prescribes less,

and the reason that it is hard to be a modern minister (already cut

down from two hours and a half to twenty or thirty minutes) is that

one has to practise more than one can preach.

To be modern is to be suggestive and symbolic, to stand for more than

one says or looks--the little girl with her loom clothing twelve

hundred people. People like it. They are used to it. All life around

them is filled with it. The old-fashioned prayer-meeting is dying out

in the modern church because it is a mere specialty in modern life.

The prayer-meeting recognizes but one way of praying, and people who

have a gift for praying that way go, but the majority of

people--people who have discovered that there are a thousand other

ways of praying, and who like them better--stay away.

When the telegraph machine was first thought of, the words all showed

on the outside. When it was improved it became inner and subtle. The

messages were read by sound. Everything we have which improves at all

improves in the same way. The exterior conception of righteousness of

a hundred years ago--namely, that a man must do right because it is

his duty--is displaced by the modern one, the morally thorough

one--namely, that a man must do right because he likes it--do it from

the inside. The more improved righteousness is, the less it shows on

the outside. The more modern righteousness is, the more it looks like

selfishness, the better the modern world likes it, and the more it

counts.

On the whole, it is against a thing rather than in its favor, in the

twentieth century, that it looks large. Time was when if it had not

been known as a matter of fact that Galileo discovered heaven with a

glass three feet long, men would have said that it would hardly do to

discover heaven with anything less than six hundred feet long. To the

ancients, Galileo's instrument, even if it had been practical, would

not have been poetic or fitting. To the moderns, however, the fact

that Galileo's star-tool was three feet long, that he carried a new

heaven about with him in his hands, was half the poetry and wonder of

it. Yet it was not so poetic-looking as the six-hundred-foot telescope

invented later, which never worked.

Nothing could be more impressive than the original substantial R----

typewriter. One felt, every time he touched a letter, as if he must

have said a sentence. It was like saying things with pile-drivers. The

machine obtruded itself at every point. It flourished its means and

ends. It was a gesticulating machine. One commenced every new line

with his foot.

The same general principle may be seen running alike through machinery

and through life. The history of man is traced in water-wheels. The

overshot wheel belonged to a period when everything else--religion,

literature, and art--was overshot. When, as time passed on, common men

began to think, began to think under a little, the Reformation came

in--and the undershot wheel, as a matter of course. There is no

denying that the overshot wheel is more poetic-looking--it does its

work with twelve quarts of water at a time and shows every quart--but

it soon develops into the undershot wheel, which shows only the

drippings of the water, and the undershot wheel develops into the

turbine wheel, which keeps everything out of sight--except its work.

The water in the six turbine wheels at Niagara has sixty thousand

horses in it, but it is not nearly as impressive and poetic-looking as

six turbine wheels' worth of water would be--wasted and going over the

Falls.

The main fact about the modern man as regards poetry is, that he

prefers poetry that has this reserved turbine-wheel trait in it. It is

because most of the poetry the modern man gets a chance to see to-day

is merely going over the Falls that poetry is not supposed to appeal

to the modern man. He supposes so himself. He supposes that a dynamo

(forty street-cars on forty streets, flying through the dark) is not

poetic, but its whir holds him, sense and spirit, spellbound, more

than any poetry that is being written. The things that are hidden--the

things that are spiritual and wondering--are the ones that appeal to

him. The idle, foolish look of a magnet fascinates him. He gropes in

his own body silently, harmlessly with the X-ray, and watches with awe

the beating of his heart. He glories in inner essences, both in his

life and in his art. He is the disciple of the X-ray, the defier of

appearances. Why should a man who has seen the inside of matter care

about appearances, either in little things or great? Or why argue

about the man, or argue about the man's God, or quibble with words?

Perhaps he is matter. Perhaps he is spirit. If he is spirit, he is

matter-loving spirit, and if he is matter, he is spirit-loving matter.

Every time he touches a spiritual thing, he makes it (as God makes

mountains out of sunlight) a material thing. Every time he touches a

material thing, in proportion as he touches it mightily he brings out

inner light in it. He spiritualizes it. He abandons the glistening

brass knocker--pleasing symbol to the outer sense--for a tiny knob on

his porch door and a far-away tinkle in his kitchen. The brass knocker

does not appeal to the spirit enough for the modern man, nor to the

imagination. He wants an inner world to draw on to ring a door-bell

with. He loves to wake the unseen. He will not even ring a door-bell

if he can help it. He likes it better, by touching a button, to have a

door-bell rung for him by a couple of metals down in his cellar

chewing each other. He likes to reach down twelve flights of stairs

with a thrill on a wire and open his front door. He may be seen riding

in three stories along his streets, but he takes his engines all off

the tracks and crowds them into one engine and puts it out of sight.

The more a thing is out of the sight of his eyes the more his soul

sees it and glories in it. His fireplace is underground. Hidden water

spouts over his head and pours beneath his feet through his house.

Hidden light creeps through the dark in it. The more might, the more

subtlety. He hauls the whole human race around the crust of the earth

with a vapor made out of a solid. He stops solids--sixty miles an

hour--with invisible air. He photographs the tone of his voice on a

platinum plate. His voice reaches across death with the platinum

plate. He is heard of the unborn. If he speaks in either one of his

worlds he takes two worlds to speak with. He will not be shut in with

one. If he lives in either he wraps the other about him. He makes men

walk on air. He drills out rocks with a cloud and he breaks open

mountains with gas. The more perfect he makes his machines the more

spiritual they are, the more their power hides itself. The more the

machines of the man loom in human life the more they reach down into

silence, and into darkness. Their foundations are infinity. The

infinity which is the man's infinity is their infinity. The machines

grasp all space for him. They lean out on ether. They are the man's

machines. The man has made them and the man worships with them. From

the first breath of flame, burning out the secret of the Dust to the

last shadow of the dust--the breathless, soundless shadow of the dust,

which he calls electricity--the man worships the invisible, the

intangible. Electricity is his prophet. It sums him up. It sums up his

modern world and the religion and the arts of his modern world. Out of

all the machines that he has made the electric machine is the most

modern because it is the most spiritual. The empty and futile look of

a trolley wire does not trouble the modern man. It is his instinctive

expression of himself. All the habits of electricity are his habits.

Electricity has the modern man's temperament--the passion of being

invisible and irresistible. The electric machine fills him with

brotherhood and delight. It is the first of the machines that he can

not help seeing is like himself. It is the symbol of the man's highest

self. His own soul beckons to him out of it.

And the more electricity grows the more like the man it grows, the

more spirit-like it is. The telegraph wire around the globe is melted

into the wireless telegraph. The words of his spirit break away from

the dust. They envelop the earth like ether, and Human Speech, at

last, unconquerable, immeasurable, subtle as the light of

stars,--fights its way to God.

The man no longer gropes in the dull helpless ground or through the

froth of heaven for the spirit. Having drawn to him the X-ray, which

makes spirit out of dust, and the wireless telegraph, which makes

earth out of air, he delves into the deepest sea as a cloud. He

strides heaven. He has touched the hem of the garment at last of

ELECTRICITY--the archangel of matter.

IV

ON MAKING PEOPLE PROUD OF THE WORLD

Religion consists in being proud of the Creator. Poetry is largely the

same feeling--a kind of personal joy one takes in the way the world is

made and is being made every morning. The true lover of nature is

touched with a kind of cosmic family pride every time he looks up from

his work--sees the night and morning, still and splendid, hanging over

him. Probably if there were another universe than this one, to go and

visit in, or if there were an extra Creator we could go to--some of

us--and boast about the one we have, it would afford infinite relief

among many classes of people--especially poets.

The most common sign that poetry, real poetry, exists in the modern

human heart is the pride that people are taking in the world. The

typical modern man, whatever may be said or not said of his religion,

of his attitude toward the maker of the world, has regular and almost

daily habits of being proud of the world.

In the twentieth century the best way for a man to worship God is

going to be to realize his own nature, to recognize what he is for,

and be a god, too. We believe to-day that the best recognition of God

consists in recognizing the fact that he is not a mere God who does

divine things himself, but a God who can make others do them.

Looked at from the point of view of a mere God who does divine things

himself, an earthquake, for instance, may be called a rather feeble

affair, a slight jar to a ball going ---- miles an hour--a Creator

could do little less, if He gave a bare thought to it--but when I

waked a few mornings ago and felt myself swinging in my own house as

if it were a hammock, and was told that some men down in Hazardville,

Connecticut, had managed to shake the planet like that, with some

gunpowder they had made, I felt a new respect for Messrs. ---- and Co.

I was proud of man, my brother. Does he not shake loose the Force of

Gravity--make the very hand of God to tremble? To his thoughts the

very hills, with their hearts of stone, make soft responses--when he

thinks them.

The Corliss engine of Machinery Hall in '76, under its sky of iron and

glass, is remembered by many people the day they saw it first as one

of the great experiences of life. Like some vast, Titanic spirit, soul

of a thousand, thousand wheels, it stood to some of us, in its mighty

silence there, and wrought miracles. To one twelve-year-old boy, at

least, the thought of the hour he spent with that engine first is a

thought he sings and prays with to this day. His lips trembled before

it. He sought to hide himself in its presence. Why had no one ever

taught him anything before? As he looks back through his life there is

one experience that stands out by itself in all those boyhood

years--the choking in his throat--the strange grip upon him--upon his

body and upon his soul--as of some awful unseen Hand reaching down

Space to him, drawing him up to Its might. He was like a dazed child

being held up before It--held up to an infinite fact, that he might

look at it again and again.

The first conception of what the life of man was like, of what it

might be like, came to at least one immortal soul not from lips that

he loved, or from a face behind a pulpit, or a voice behind a desk,

but from a machine. To this day that Corliss engine is the engine of

dreams, the appeal to destiny, to the imagination and to the soul. It

rebuilds the universe. It is the opportunity of beauty throughout

life, the symbol of freedom, the freedom of men, and of the unity of

nations, and of the worship of God. In silence--like the soft far

running of the sky--it wrought upon him there; like some heroic human

spirit, its finger on a thousand wheels, through miles of aisles, and

crowds of gazers, it wrought. The beat and rhythm of it was as the

beat and rhythm of the heart of man mastering matter, of the clay

conquering God.

Like some wonder-crowded chorus its voices surrounded me. It was the

first hearing of the psalm of life. The hum and murmur of it was like

the spell of ages upon me; and the vision that floated in it--nay, the

vision that was builded in it--was the vision of the age to be: the

vision of Man, My Brother, after the singsong and dance and drone of

his sad four thousand years, lifting himself to the stature of his

soul at last, lifting himself with the sun, and with the rain, and

with the wind, and the heat and the light, into comradeship with

Creation morning, and into something (in our far-off, wistful fashion)

of the might and gentleness of God.

There seem to be two ways to worship Him. One way is to gaze upon the

great Machine that He has made, to watch it running softly above us

all, moonlight and starlight, and winter and summer, rain and

snowflakes, and growing things. Another way is to worship Him not only

because He has made the vast and still machine of creation, in the

beating of whose days and nights we live our lives, but because He has

made a Machine that can make machines--because out of the dust of the

earth He has made a Machine that shall take more of the dust of the

earth, and of the vapor of heaven, crowd it into steel and iron and

say, "Go ye now, depths of the earth--heights of heaven--serve ye me.

I, too, am God. Stones and mists, winds and waters and thunder--the

spirit that is in thee is my spirit. I also--even I also--am God!"

V

A MODEST UNIVERSE

I have heard it objected that a machine does not take hold of a man

with its great ideas while he stands and watches it. It does not make

him feel its great ideas. And therefore it is denied that it is

poetic.

The impressiveness of the bare spiritual facts of machinery is not

denied. What seems to be lacking in the machines from the artistic

point of view at present is a mere knack of making the faces plain and

literal-looking. Grasshoppers would be more appreciated by more people

if they were made with microscopes on,--either the grasshoppers or the

people.

If the mere machinery of a grasshopper's hop could be made plain and

large enough, there is not a man living who would not be impressed by

it. If grasshoppers were made (as they might quite as easily have

been) 640 feet high, the huge beams of their legs above their bodies

towering like cranes against the horizon, the sublimity of a

grasshopper's machinery--the huge levers of it, his hops across

valleys from mountain to mountain, shadowing fields and

villages--would have been one of the impressive features of human

life. Everybody would be willing to admit of the mere machinery of a

grasshopper, (if there were several acres of it) that there was

creative sublimity in it. They would admit that the bare idea of

having such a stately piece of machinery in a world at all, slipping

softly around on it, was an idea with creative sublimity in it; and

yet these same people because the sublimity, instead of being spread

over several acres, is crowded into an inch and a quarter, are not

impressed by it.

But it is objected, it is not merely a matter of spiritual size. There

is something more than plainness lacking in the symbolism of

machinery. "The symbolism of machinery is lacking in fitness. It is

not poetic." "A thing can only be said to be poetic in proportion as

its form expresses its nature." Mechanical inventions may stand for

impressive facts, but such inventions, no matter how impressive the

facts may be, cannot be called poetic unless their form expresses

those facts. A horse plunging and champing his bits on the eve of

battle, for instance, is impressive to a man, and a pill-box full of

dynamite, with a spark creeping toward it, is not.

That depends partly on the man and partly on the spark. A man may not

be impressed by a pill-box full of dynamite and a spark creeping

toward it, the first time he sees it, but the second time he sees it,

if he has time, he is impressed enough. He does not stand and

criticise the lack of expression in pill-boxes, nor wait to remember

the day when he all but lost his life because

A pill-box by the river's brim

A simple pill-box was to him

And nothing more.

Wordsworth in these memorable lines has summed up and brought to an

issue the whole matter of poetry in machinery. Everything has its

language, and the power of feeling what a thing means, by the way it

looks, is a matter of experience--of learning the language. The

language is there. The fact that the language of the machine is a new

language, and a strangely subtle one, does not prove that it is not a

language, that its symbolism is not good, and that there is not poetry

in machinery.

The inventor need not be troubled because in making his machine it

does not seem to express. It is written that neither you nor I,

comrade nor God, nor any man, nor any man's machine, nor God's

machine, in this world shall express or be expressed. If it is the

meaning of life to us to be expressed in it, to be all-expressed, we

are indeed sorry, dumb, plaintive creatures dotting a star awhile,

creeping about on it, warmed by a heater ninety-five million miles

away. The machine of the universe itself, does not express its

Inventor. It does not even express the men who are under it. The

ninety-five millionth mile waits on us silently, at the doorways of

our souls night and day, and we wait on IT. Is it not THERE? Is it not

HERE--this ninety-five millionth mile? It is ours. It runs in our

veins. Why should Man--a being who can live forever in a day, who is

born of a boundless birth, who takes for his fireside the

immeasurable--express or expect to be expressed? What we would like to

be--even what we are--who can say? Our music is an apostrophe to

dumbness. The Pantomime above us rolls softly, resistlessly on, over

the pantomime within us. We and our machines, both, hewing away on the

infinite, beckon and are still.

I am not troubled because the machines do not seem to express

themselves. I do not know that they can express themselves. I know

that when the day is over, and strength is spent, and my soul looks

out upon the great plain--upon the soft, night-blooming cities, with

their huge machines striving in sleep, might lifts itself out upon me.

I rest.

I know that when I stand before a foundry hammering out the floors of

the world, clashing its awful cymbals against the night, I lift my

soul to it, and in some way--I know not how--while it sings to me I

grow strong and glad.

PART THREE

THE MACHINES AS POETS

I

PLATO AND THE GENERAL ELECTRIC WORKS

I have an old friend who lives just around the corner from one of the

main lines of travel in New England, and whenever I am passing near by

and the railroads let me, I drop in on him awhile and quarrel about

art. It's a good old-fashioned comfortable, disorderly conversation we

have generally, the kind people used to have more than they do

now--sketchy and not too wise--the kind that makes one think of things

one wishes one had said, afterward.

We always drift a little at first, as if of course we could talk about

other things if we wanted to, but we both know, and know every time,

that in a few minutes we shall be deep in a discussion of the Things

That Are Beautiful and the Things That Are Not.

Brim thinks that I have picked out more things to be beautiful than I

have a right to, or than any man has, and he is trying to put a stop

to it. He thinks that there are enough beautiful things in this world

that have been beautiful a long while, without having people--well,

people like me, for instance, poking blindly around among all these

modern brand-new things hoping that in spite of appearances there is

something one can do with them that will make them beautiful enough to

go with the rest. I'm afraid Brim gets a little personal in talking

with me at times and I might as well say that, while disagreeing in a

conversation with Brim does not lead to calling names it does seem to

lead logically to one's going away, and trying to find afterwards,

some thing that is the matter with him.

"The trouble with you, my dear Brim, is," I say (on paper, afterwards,

as the train speeds away), "that you have a false-classic or

Stucco-Greek mind. The Greeks, the real Greeks, would have liked all

these things--trolley cars, cables, locomotives,--seen the beautiful

in them, if they had to do their living with them every day, the way

we do. You would say you were more Greek than I am, but when one

thinks of it, you are just going around liking the things the Greeks

liked 3000 years ago, and I am around liking the things a Greek would

like now, that is, as well as I can. I don't flatter myself I begin to

enjoy the wireless telegraph to-day the way Plato would if he had the

chance, and Alcibiades in an automobile would get a great deal more

out of it, I suspect, than anyone I have seen in one, so far; and I

suspect that if Socrates could take Bliss Carman and, say, William

Watson around with him on a tour of the General Electric Works in

Schenectady they wouldn't either of them write sonnets about anything

else for the rest of their natural lives."

I can only speak for one and I do not begin to see the poetry in the

machines that a Greek would see, as yet.

But I have seen enough.

I have seen engineers go by, pounding on this planet, making it small

enough, welding the nations together before my eyes.

I have seen inventors, still men by lamps at midnight with a whirl of

visions, with a whirl of thoughts, putting in new drivewheels on the

world.

I have seen (in Schenectady,) all those men--the five thousand of

them--the grime on their faces and the great caldrons of melted

railroad swinging above their heads. I have stood and watched them

there with lightning and with flame hammering out the wills of cities,

putting in the underpinnings of nations, and it seemed to me me that

Bliss Carman and William Watson would not be ashamed of them ...

brother-artists every one ... in the glory ... in the dark ...

Vulcan-Tennysons, blacksmiths to a planet, with dredges, skyscrapers,

steam shovels and wireless telegraphs, hewing away on the heavens and

the earth.

II

HEWING AWAY ON THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH

The poetry of machinery to-day is a mere matter of fact--a part of the

daily wonder of life to countless silent people. The next thing the

world wants to know about machinery is not that there is poetry in it,

but that the poetry which the common people have already found there,

has a right to be there. We have the fact. It is the theory to put

with the fact which concerns us next and which really troubles us

most. There are very few of us, on the whole, who can take any solid

comfort in a fact--no matter what it is--until we have a theory to

approve of it with. Its merely being a fact does not seem to make very

much difference.

1. Machinery has poetry in it because it is an expression of the soul.

2. It expresses the soul (1) of the individual man who creates the

machine--the inventor, and (2) the man who lives with the machine the

engineer.

3. It expresses God, if only that He is a God who can make men who can

thus express their souls. Machinery is an act of worship in the least

sense if not in the greatest. If a man who can make machines like this

is not clever enough with all his powers to find a God, and to worship

a God, he can worship himself. It is because the poetry of machinery

is the kind of poetry that does immeasurable things instead of

immeasurably singing about them that it has been quite generally taken

for granted that it is not poetry at all. The world has learned more

of the purely poetic idea of freedom from a few dumb, prosaic machines

that have not been able to say anything beautiful about it than from

the poets of twenty centuries. The machine frees a hundred thousand

men and smokes. The poet writes a thousand lines on freedom and has

his bust in Westminster Abbey. The blacks in America were freed by

Abraham Lincoln and the cotton gin. The real argument for unity--the

argument against secession--was the locomotive. No one can fight the

locomotive very long. It makes the world over into one world whether

it wants to be one world or not. China is being conquered by

steamships. It cannot be said that the idea of unity is a new one.

Seers and poets have made poetry out of it for two thousand years.

Machinery is making the poetry mean something. Every new invention in

matter that comes to us is a spiritual masterpiece. It is crowded with

ideas. The Bessemer process has more political philosophy in it than

was ever dreamed of in Shelley's poetry, and it would not be hard to

show that the invention of the sewing machine was one of the most

literary and artistic as well as one of the most religious events of

the nineteenth century. The loom is the most beautiful thought that

any one has ever had about Woman, and the printing press is more

wonderful than anything that has ever been said on it.

"This is all very true," interrupts the Logical Person, "about

printing presses and looms and everything else--one could go on

forever--but it does not prove anything. It may be true that the loom

has made twenty readers for Robert Browning's poetry where Browning

would have made but one, but it does not follow that because the loom

has freed women for beauty that the loom is beautiful, or that it is a

fit theme for poetry." "Besides"--breaks in the Minor Poet--"there is

a difference between a thing's being full of big ideas and its being

beautiful. A foundry is powerful and interesting, but is it beautiful

the way an electric fountain is beautiful or a sonnet or a doily?"

This brings to a point the whole question as to where the definition

of beauty--the boundary line of beauty--shall be placed. A thing's

being considered beautiful is largely a matter of size. The question

"Is a thing beautiful?" resolves itself into "How large has a

beautiful thing a right to be?" A man's theory of beauty depends, in a

universe like this, upon how much of the universe he will let into it.

If he is afraid of the universe if he only lets his thoughts and

passions live in a very little of it, he is apt to assume that if a

beautiful thing rises into the sublime and immeasurable--suggests

boundless ideas--the beauty is blurred out of it. It is

something--there is no denying that it is something--but, whatever it

is or is not, it is not beauty. Nearly everything in our modern life

is getting too big to be beautiful. Our poets are dumb because they

see more poetry than their theories have room for. The fundamental

idea of the poetry of machinery is infinity. Our theories of poetry

were made--most of them--before infinity was discovered.

Infinity itself is old, and the idea that infinity exists--a kind of

huge, empty rim around human life--is not a new idea to us, but the

idea that this same infinity has or can have anything to do with us or

with our arts, or our theories of art, or that we have anything to do

with IT, is an essentially modern discovery. The actual experience of

infinity--that is, the experience of being infinite (comparatively

speaking)--as in the use of machinery, is a still more modern

discovery. There is no better way perhaps, of saying what modern

machinery really is, than to say that it is a recent invention for

being infinite.

The machines of the world are all practically engaged in manufacturing

the same thing. They are all time-and-space-machines. They knit time

and space. Hundreds of thousands of things may be put in machines this

very day, for us, before night falls, but only eternity and infinity

shall be turned out. Sometimes it is called one and sometimes the

other. If a man is going to be infinite or eternal it makes little

difference which. It is merely a matter of form whether one is

everywhere a few years, or anywhere forever. A sewing machine is as

much a means of communication as a printing press or a locomotive. The

locomotive takes a woman around the world. The sewing machine gives

her a new world where she is. At every point where a machine touches

the life of a human being, it serves him with a new measure of

infinity.

This would seem to be a poetic thing for a machine to do. Traditional

poetry does not see any poetry in it, because, according to our

traditions poetry has fixed boundary lines, is an old, established

institution in human life, and infinity is not.

No one has wanted to be infinite before. Poetry in the ancient world

was largely engaged in protecting people from the Infinite. They were

afraid of it. They could not help feeling that the Infinite was over

them. Worship consisted in propitiating it, poetry in helping people

to forget it. With the exception of Job, the Hebrews almost invariably

employed a poet--when they could get one--as a kind of transfigured

policeman--to keep the sky off. It was what was expected of poets.

The Greeks did the same thing in a different way. The only difference

was, that the Greeks, instead of employing their poets to keep the sky

off, employed them to make it as much like the earth as possible--a

kind of raised platform which was less dreadful and more familiar and

homelike and answered the same general purpose. In other words, the

sky became beautiful to the Greek when he had made it small enough.

Making it small enough was the only way a Greek knew of making it

beautiful.

Galileo knew another way. It is because Galileo knew another

way--because he knew that the way to make the sky beautiful, was to

make it large enough--that men are living in a new world. A new

religion beats down through space to us. A new poetry lifts away the

ceilings of our dreams. The old sky, with its little tent of stars,

its film of flame and darkness burning over us, has floated to the

past. The twentieth century--the home of the Infinite--arches over our

human lives. The heaven is no longer, to the sons of men, a priests'

wilderness, nor is it a poet's heaven--a paper, painted heaven, with

little painted paper stars in it, to hide the wilderness.

It is a new heaven. Who, that has lived these latter years, that has

seen it crashing and breaking through the old one, can deny that what

is over us now is a new heaven? The infinite cave of it, scooped out

at last over our little naked, foolish lives, our running-about

philosophies, our religions, and our governments--it is the main fact

about us. Arts and literatures--ants under a stone, thousands of

years, blind with light, hither and thither, racing about, hiding

themselves.

But not long for dreams. More than this. The new heaven is matched by

a new earth. Men who see a new heaven make a new earth. In its cloud

of steam, in a kind of splendid, silent stammer of praise and love,

the new earth lifts itself to the new heaven, lifts up days out of

nights to It, digs wells for winds under It, lights darkness with

falling water, makes ice out of vapor, and heat out of cold, draws

down Space with engines, makes years out of moments with machines. It

is a new world and all the men that are born upon it are new

widemoving, cloud and mountain-moving men. The habits of stars and

waters, the huge habits of space and time, are the habits of the men.

The Infinite, at last, which in days gone by hung over us--the mere

hiding place of Death, the awful living-room of God--is the

neighborhood of human life.

Machinery has poetry in it because in expressing the soul it expresses

the greatest idea that the soul of man can have, namely, the idea that

the soul of man is infinite, or capable of being infinite.

Machinery has poetry in it also not merely because it is the symbol of

infinite power in human life, or because it makes man think he is

infinite, but because it is making him as infinite as he thinks he is.

The infinity of man is no longer a thing that the poet takes--that he

makes an idea out of--Machinery makes it a matter of fact.

III

THE GRUDGE AGAINST THE INFINITE

The main thing the nineteenth century has done in literature has been

the gradual sorting out of poets into two classes--those who like the

infinite, who have a fellow-feeling for it, and those who have not. It

seems reasonable to say that the poets who have habits of infinity, of

space-conquering (like our vast machines), who seek the suggestive and

immeasurable in the things they see about them--poets who like

infinity, will be the poets to whom we will have to look to reveal to

us the characteristic and real poetry of this modern world. The other

poets, it is to be feared, are not even liking the modern world, to

say nothing of singing in it. They do not feel at home in it. The

classic-walled poet seems to feel exposed in our world. It is too

savagely large, too various and unspeakable and unfinished. He looks

at the sky of it--the vast, unkempt, unbounded sky of it, to which it

sings and lifts itself--with a strange, cold, hidden dread down in his

heart. To him it is a mere vast, dizzy, dreary, troubled formlessness.

Its literature--its art with its infinite life in it, is a blur of

vagueness. He complains because mobs of images are allowed in it. It

is full of huddled associations. When Carlyle appeared, the

Stucco-Greek mind grudgingly admitted that he was 'effective.' A man

who could use words as other men used things, who could put a pen down

on paper in such a way as to lift men out from the boundaries of their

lives and make them live in other lives and in other ages, who could

lend them his own soul, had to have something said about him;

something very good and so it was said, but he was not an "artist."

From the same point of view and to the same people Browning was a mere

great man (that is: a merely infinite man). He was a man who went

about living and loving things, with a few blind words opening the

eyes of the blind. It had to be admitted that Robert Browning could

make men who had never looked at their brothers' faces dwell for days

in their souls, but he was not a poet. Richard Wagner, too, seer,

lover, singer, standing in the turmoil of his violins conquering a new

heaven for us, had great conceptions and was a musical genius without

the slightest doubt, but he was not an "artist." He never worked his

conceptions out. His scores are gorged with mere suggestiveness. They

are nothing if they are not played again and again. For twenty or

thirty years Richard Wagner was outlawed because his music was

infinitely unfinished (like the music of the spheres). People seemed

to want him to write cosy, homelike music.

IV

SYMBOLISM IN MODERN ART

"_So I drop downward from the wonderment

Of timelessness and space, in which were blent

The wind, the sunshine and the wanderings

Of all the planets--to the little things

That are my grass and flowers, and am content._"

This prejudice against the infinite, or desire to avoid as much as

possible all personal contact with it, betrays itself most commonly,

perhaps, in people who have what might be called the domestic feeling,

who consciously or unconsciously demand the domestic touch in a

landscape before they are ready to call it beautiful. The typical

American woman, unless she has unusual gifts or training, if she is

left entirely to herself, prefers nice cuddlesome scenery. Even if her

imagination has been somewhat cultivated and deepened, so that she

feels that a place must be wild, or at least partly wild, in order to

be beautiful, she still chooses nooks and ravines, as a rule, to be

happy in--places roofed in with gentle, quiet wonder, fenced in with

beauty on every side. She is not without her due respect and

admiration for a mountain, but she does not want it to be too large,

or too near the stars, if she has to live with it day and night; and

if the truth were told--even at its best she finds a mountain distant,

impersonal, uncompanionable. Unless she is born in it she does not see

beauty in the wide plain. There is something in her being that makes

her bashful before a whole sky; she wants a sunset she can snuggle up

to. It is essentially the bird's taste in scenery. "Give me a nest, O

Lord, under the wide heaven. Cover me from Thy glory." A bush or a

tree with two or three other bushes or trees near by, and just enough

sky to go with it--is it not enough?

The average man is like the average woman in this regard except that

he is less so. The fact seems to be that the average human being (like

the average poet), at least for everyday purposes, does not want any

more of the world around him than he can use, or than he can put

somewhere. If there is so much more of the world than one can use, or

than anyone else can use, what is the possible object of living where

one cannot help being reminded of it?

The same spiritual trait, a kind of gentle persistent grudge against

the infinite, shows itself in the not uncommon prejudice against pine

trees. There are a great many people who have a way of saying pleasant

things about pine trees and who like to drive through them or look at

them in the landscape or have them on other people's hills, but they

would not plant a pine tree near their houses or live with pines

singing over them and watching them, every day and night, for the

world. The mood of the pine is such a vast, still, hypnotic, imperious

mood that there are very few persons, no matter how dull or

unsusceptible they may seem to be, who are not as much affected by a

single pine, standing in a yard by a doorway, as they are by a whole

skyful of weather. If they are down on the infinite--they do not want

a whole treeful of it around on the premises. And the pine comes as

near to being infinite as anything purely vegetable, in a world like

this, could expect. It is the one tree of all others that profoundly

suggests, every time the light falls upon it or the wind stirs through

it, THE THINGS THAT MAN CANNOT TOUCH. Woven out of air and sunlight

and its shred of dust, it always seems to stand the monument of the

woods, to The Intangible, and The Invisible, to the spirituality of

matter. Who shall find a tree that looks down upon the spirit of the

pine? And who, who has ever looked upon the pines--who has seen them

climbing the hills in crowds, drinking at the sun--has not felt that

however we may take to them personally they are the Chosen People

among the trees? To pass from the voice of them to the voice of the

common leaves is to pass from the temple to the street. In the rest of

the forest all the leaves seem to be full of one another's din--of

rattle and chatter--heedless, happy chaos, but in the pines the voice

of every pine-spill is as a chord in the voice of all the rest, and

the whole solemn, measured chant of it floats to us as the voice of

the sky itself. It is as if all the mystical, beautiful far-things

that human spirits know had come from the paths of Space, and from the

presence of God, to sing in the tree-trunks over our heads.

Now it seems to me that the supremacy of the pine in the imagination

is not that it is more beautiful in itself than other trees, but that

the beauty of the pine seems more symbolic than other beauty, and

symbolic of more and of greater things. It is full of the sturdiness

and strength of the ground, but it is of all trees the tree to see the

sky with, and its voice is the voice of the horizons, the voice of the

marriage of the heavens and the earth; and not only is there more of

the sky in it, and more of the kingdom of the air and of the place of

Sleep, but there is more of the fiber and odor from the solemn heart

of the earth. No other tree can be mutilated like the pine by the hand

of man and still keep a certain earthy, unearthly dignity and beauty

about it and about all the place where it stands. A whole row of them,

with their left arms cut off for passing wires, standing severe and

stately, their bare trunks against heaven, cannot help being

beautiful. The beauty is symbolic and infinite. It cannot be taken

away. If the entire street-side of a row of common, ordinary

middle-class trees were cut away there would be nothing to do with the

maimed and helpless things but to cut them down--remove their misery

from all men's sight. To lop away the half of a pine is only to see

how beautiful the other half is. The other half has the infinite in

it. However little of a pine is left it suggests everything there is.

It points to the universe and beckons to the Night and the Day. The

infinite still speaks in it. It is the optimist, the prophet of trees.

In the sad lands it but grows more luxuriantly, and it is the spirit

of the tropics in the snows. It is the touch of the infinite--of

everywhere--wherever its shadow falls. I have heard the sound of a

hammer in the street and it was the sound of a hammer. In the pine

woods it was a hundred guns. As the cloud catches the great empty

spaces of night out of heaven and makes them glorious the pine gathers

all sound into itself--echoes it along the infinite.

The pine may be said to be the symbol of the beauty in machinery,

because it is beautiful the way an electric light is beautiful, or an

electric-lighted heaven. It has the two kinds of beauty that belong to

life: finite beauty, in that its beauty can be seen in itself, and

infinite beauty in that it makes itself the symbol, the center, of the

beauty that cannot be seen, the beauty that dwells around it.

What is going to be called the typical power of the colossal art,

myriad-nationed, undreamed of men before, now gathering in our modern

life, is its symbolic power, its power of standing for more than

itself.

Every great invention of modern mechanical art and modern fine art has

held within it an extraordinary power of playing upon associations, of

playing upon the spirits and essences of things until the outer senses

are all gathered up, led on, and melted, as outer senses were meant to

be melted, into inner ones. What is wrought before the eyes of a man

at last by a great modern picture is not the picture that fronts him

on the wall, but a picture behind the picture, painted with the flame

of the heart on the eternal part of him. It is the business of a great

modern work of art to bring a man face to face with the greatness from

which it came. Millet's Angelus is a portrait of the infinite,--and a

man and a woman. A picture with this feeling of the infinite painted

in it--behind it--which produces this feeling of the infinite in other

men by playing upon the infinite in their own lives, is a typical

modern masterpiece.

The days when the infinite is not in our own lives we do not see it.

If the infinite is in our own lives, and we do not like it there, we

do not like it in a picture, or in the face of a man, or in a Corliss

engine--a picture of the face of All-Man, mastering the

earth--silent--lifted to heaven.

V

THE MACHINES AS ARTISTS

It is not necessary, in order to connect a railway train with the

infinite, to see it steaming along a low sky and plunging into a huge

white hill of cloud, as I did the other day. It is quite as infinite

flying through granite in Hoosac Mountain. Most people who do not

think there is poetry in a railway train are not satisfied with flying

through granite as a trait of the infinite in a locomotive, and yet

these same people, if a locomotive could be lifted bodily to where

infinity is or is supposed to be (up in the sky somewhere)--if they

could watch one night after night plowing through planets--would want

a poem written about it at once.

A man who has a theory he does not see poetry in a locomotive, does

not see it because theoretically he does not connect it with infinite

things: the things that poetry is usually about. The idea that the

infinite is not cooped up in heaven, that it can be geared and run on

a track (and be all the more infinite for not running off the track),

does not occur to him. The first thing he does when he is told to look

for the infinite in the world is to stop and think a moment, where he

is, and then look for it somewhere else.

It would seem to be the first idea of the infinite, in being infinite,

not to be anywhere else. It could not be anywhere else if it tried;

and if a locomotive is a real thing, a thing wrought in and out of the

fiber of the earth and of the lives of men, the infinity and poetry in

it are a matter of course. I like to think that it is merely a matter

of seeing a locomotive as it is, of seeing it in enough of its actual

relations as it is, to feel that it is beautiful; that the beauty, the

order, the energy, and the restfulness of the whole universe are

pulsing there through its wheels.

The times when we do not feel poetry in a locomotive are the times

when we are not matter-of-fact enough. We do not see it in enough of

its actual relations. Being matter-of-fact enough is all that makes

anything poetic. Everything in the universe, seen as it is, is seen as

the symbol, the infinitely connected, infinitely crowded symbol of

everything else in the universe--the summing up of everything

else--another whisper of God's.

Have I not seen the great Sun Itself, from out of its huge heaven,

packed in a seed and blown about on a wind? I have seen the leaves of

the trees drink all night from the stars, and when I have listened

with my soul--thousands of years--I have heard The Night and The Day

creeping softly through mountains. People called it geology.

It seems that if a man cannot be infinite by going to the infinite, he

is going to be infinite where he is. He is carving it on the hills,

tunneling it through the rocks of the earth, piling it up on the crust

of it, with winds and waters and flame and steel he is writing it on

all things--that he is infinite, that he will be infinite. The whole

planet is his signature.

If what the modern man is trying to say in his modern age is his own

infinity, it naturally follows that the only way a modern artist can

be a great artist in a modern age is to say in that age that man is

infinite, better than any one else is saying it.

The best way to express this infinity of man is to seek out the things

in the life of the man which are the symbols of his infinity--which

suggest his infinity the most--and then play on those symbols and let

those symbols play on him. In other words the poet's program is

something like this. The modern age means the infinity of man. Modern

art means symbolism of man's infinity. The best symbol of the man's

infinity the poet can find, in this world the man has made, is The

Machine.

At least it seems so to me. I was looking out of my study window down

the long track in the meadow the other morning and saw a smoke-cloud

floating its train out of sight. A high wind was driving, and in long

wavering folds the cloud lay down around the train. It was like a

great Bird, close to the snow, forty miles an hour. For a moment it

almost seemed that, instead of a train making a cloud, it was a cloud

propelling a train--wing of a thousand tons. I have often before seen

a broken fog towing a mountain, but never have I seen before, a train

of cars with its engine, pulled by the steam escaping from its

whistle. Of course the train out in my meadow, with its pillar of fire

by night and of cloud by day hovering over it, is nothing new; neither

is the tower of steam when it stands still of a winter morning

building pyramids, nor the long, low cloud creeping back on the

car-tops and scudding away in the light; but this mad and splendid

Thing of Whiteness and Wind, riding out there in the morning, this

ghost of a train--soul or look in the eyes of it, haunting it,

gathering it all up, steel and thunder, into itself, catching it away

into heaven--was one of the most magical and stirring sights I have

seen for a long time. It came to me like a kind of Zeit-geist or

passing of the spirit of the age.

When I looked again it was old 992 from the roundhouse escorting

Number Eight to Springfield.

VI

THE MACHINES AS PHILOSOPHERS

If we could go into History as we go into a theatre, take our seats

quietly, ring up the vast curtain on any generation we liked, and then

could watch it--all those far off queer happy people living before our

eyes, two or three hours--living with their new inventions and their

last wonders all about them, they would not seem to us, probably to

know why they were happy. They would merely be living along with their

new things from day to day, in a kind of secret clumsy gladness.

Perhaps it is the same with us. The theories for poems have to be

arranged after we have had them. The fundamental appeal of machinery

seems to be to every man's personal everyday instinct and experience.

We have, most of the time, neither words nor theories for it.

I do not think that our case must stand or fall with our theory. But

there is something comfortable about a theory. A theory gives one

permission to let ones self go--makes it seem more respectable to

enjoy things. So I suggest something--the one I have used when I felt

I had to have one. I have partitioned it off by itself and it can be

skipped.

1. The substance of a beautiful thing is its Idea.

2. A beautiful thing is beautiful in proportion as its form reveals

the nature of its substance, that is, conveys its idea.

3. Machinery is beautiful by reason of immeasurable ideas consummately

expressed.

4. Machinery has poetry in it because the three immeasurable ideas

expressed by machinery are the three immeasurable ideas of poetry and

of the imagination and the soul--infinity and the two forms of

infinity, the liberty and the unity of man.

5. These immeasurable ideas are consummately expressed by machinery

because machinery expresses them in the only way that immeasurable

ideas can ever be expressed: (1) by literally doing the immeasurable

things, (2) by suggesting that it is doing them. To the man who is in

the mood of looking at it with his whole being, the machine is

beautiful because it is the mightiest and silentest symbol the world

contains of the infinity of his own life, and of the liberty and unity

of all men's lives, which slowly, out of the passion of history is now

being wrought out before our eyes upon the face of the earth.

6. It is only from the point of view of a nightingale or a sonnet that

the æsthetic form of a machine, if it is a good machine, can be

criticised as unbeautiful. The less forms dealing with immeasurable

ideas are finished forms the more symbolic and speechless they are;

the more they invoke the imagination and make it build out on God, and

upon the Future, and upon Silence, the more artistic and beautiful and

satisfying they are.

7. The first great artist a modern or machine age can have, will be

the man who brings out for it the ideas behind its machines. These

ideas--the ones the machines are daily playing over and about the

lives of all of us--might be stated roughly as follows:

The idea of the incarnation--the god in the body of the man.

The idea of liberty--the soul's rescue from others.

The idea of unity--the soul's rescue from its mere self.

The idea of the Spirit--the Unseen and Intangible.

The idea of immortality.

The cosmic idea of God.

The practical idea of invoking great men.

The religious idea of love and comradeship.

And nearly every other idea that makes of itself a song or a prayer in

the human spirit.