The Voice of the Machines

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

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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.

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