The Voice of the Machines

G >> Gerald Stanley Lee >> The Voice of the Machines

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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."

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