The Voice of the Machines
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Gerald Stanley Lee >> The Voice of the Machines
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9 The Voice of the Machines
An Introduction to the Twentieth Century
BY
Gerald Stanley Lee
The Mount Tom Press
Northampton, Massachusetts
COPYRIGHT, 1906
BY
THE MOUNT TOM PRESS
TO JENNETTE LEE
... "Now and then my fancy caught
A flying glimpse of a good life beyond--
Something of ships and sunlight, streets and singing,
Troy falling, and the ages coming back,
And ages coming forward."...
Contents
PART I
THE MEN BEHIND THE MACHINES
I.--Machines as Seen from a Meadow
II.--As Seen through a Hatchway
III.--The Souls of Machines
IV.--Poets
V.--Gentlemen
VI.--Prophets
PART II
THE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES
I.--As Good as Ours
II.--On Being Busy and Still
III.--On Not Showing Off
IV.--On Making People Proud of the World
V.--A Modest Universe
PART III
THE MACHINES AS POETS
I.--Plato and the General Electric Works
II.--Hewing away on the Heavens and the Earth
III.--The Grudge against the Infinite
IV.--Symbolism in Modern Art
V.--The Machines as Artists
VI.--The Machines as Philosophers
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 aesthetic. 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.
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