The Voice of the Machines An Introduction to the Twentieth Century BY Gerald Stanley Lee The Mount Tom PressNorthampton, Massachusetts COPYRIGHT, 1906BYTHE 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 wouldjustify the claim that we are about to make, or anything in thedictionary. Even a poem--which is supposed to prove anything with alittle of nothing--could hardly be found to prove it; but in thisbeginning hour of the twentieth century there are not a few of us--forthe time at least allowed to exist upon the earth--who are obliged tosay (with Luther), "Though every tile on the roundhouse be a devil, wecannot say otherwise--the locomotive is beautiful. " As seen when one is looking at it as it is, and is not merely usingit. As seen from a meadow. We had never thought to fall so low as this, or that the time wouldcome when we would feel moved--all but compelled, in fact--to betrayto a cold and discriminating world our poor, pitiful, one-adjectivestate. We do not know why a locomotive is beautiful. We are perfectly awarethat it ought not to be. We have all but been ashamed of it for beingbeautiful--and of ourselves. We have attempted all possible words uponit--the most complimentary and worthy ones we know--words with thefiner resonance in them, and the air of discrimination the soul loves. We cannot but say that several of these words from time to time haveseemed almost satisfactory to our ears. They seem satisfactory alsofor general use in talking with people, and for introducinglocomotives in conversation; but the next time we see a locomotivecoming down the track, there is no help for us. We quail before theheadlight of it. The thunder of its voice is as the voice of thehurrying people. Our little row of adjectives is vanished. Alladjectives 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 areno longer its disciples. It is become a play word. It lags behindtruth. Let it be shut in with its rim of hills--the wordbeautiful--its show of sunsets and its bouquets and its doilies andits songs of birds. We are seekers for a new word. It is the firsthour of the twentieth century. If the hill be beautiful, so is thelocomotive that conquers a hill. So is the telephone, piercing athousand sunsets north to south, with the sound of a voice. The nightis not more beautiful, hanging its shadow over the city, than theelectric spark pushing the night one side, that the city may beholditself; and the hour is at hand--is even now upon us--when not the sunitself shall be more beautiful to men than the telegraph stopping thesun in the midst of its high heaven, and holding it there, while thewill of a child to another child ticks round the earth. "Time shall befolded up as a scroll, " saith the voice of Man, my Brother. "Thespaces between the hills, to ME, " saith the Voice, "shall be as thoughthey 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 itsconditions, the machine is in every sense a new and unprecedentedfact. The machine has no traditions. The only way to take atraditional stand with regard to life or the representation of lifeto-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 thepeople 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 seepoetry 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 hismother'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 bya machine, or cast in a foundry. The windows he looks out of werebuilt in mills. His knife and fork were made by steam. His food hascome through rollers and wheels. The water he drinks is pumped to himby engines. The ice in it was frozen by a factory and the cloth of theclothes he wears was flashed together by looms. The machine does not end here. When he grows to years of discretionand looks about him to choose a place for himself in life, he findsthat that place must come to him out of a machine. By the side of amachine of one sort or another, whether it be of steel rods and wheelsor of human beings' souls, he must find his place in the greatwhirling system of the order of mortal lives, and somewhere in thesystem--that is, the Machine--be the ratchet, drive-wheel, belt, orspindle under infinite space, ordained for him to be from thebeginning of the world. The moment he begins to think, a human being finds himself facing ahuge, silent, blue-and-gold something called the universe, the mainfact of which must be to him that it seems to go without him verywell, and that he must drop into the place that comes, whatever it maybe, and hold on as he loves his soul, or forever be left behind. Helearns before many years that this great machine shop of a globe, turning solemnly its days and nights, where he has wandered for alife, will hardly be inclined to stop--to wait perchance--to ask himwhat he wants to be, or how this life of his shall get itself said. Helooks into the Face of Circumstance. (Sometimes it is the Fist ofCircumstance. ) The Face of Circumstance is a silent face. It points tothe machine. He looks into the faces of his fellow-men, hurrying pasthim night and day, --miles of streets of them. They, too, have lookedinto the Face of Circumstance. It pointed to the Machine. They show itin their faces. Some of them show it in their gait. The Machine closesaround him, with its vast insistent murmur, million-peopled and fullof laughs and cries. He listens to it as to the roar of all Being. He listens to the Machine's prophet. "All men, " says PoliticalEconomy, "may be roughly divided as attaching themselves to one or theother of three great classes of activity--production, consumption ordistribution. " The number of persons who are engaged in production outside ofassociation with machinery, if they could be gathered together in oneplace, would be an exceedingly small and strange and uncanny band ofhuman beings. They would be visited by all the world as curiosities. The number of persons who are engaged in distribution outside ofassociation with machinery is equally insignificant. Except for a fewpeddlers, distribution is hardly anything else but machinery. The number of persons who are engaged in consumption outside ofassociation with machinery is equally insignificant. So far asconsumption is concerned, any passing freight train, if it could bestopped and examined on its way to New York, would be found to beloaded with commodities, the most important part of which, from thecoal up, have been produced by one set of machines to be consumed byanother set of machines. So omnipresent and masterful and intimate with all existence have cogsand wheels and belts become, that not a civilized man could be foundon the globe to-day, who, if all the machines that have helped him tolive this single year of 1906 could be gathered or piled around himwhere he stands, would be able, for the machines piled high around hislife, to see the sky--to be sure there was a sky. It is then hisprivilege, looking up at this horizon of steel and iron and runningbelts, to read in a paper book the literary definition of what thisheaven is, that spreads itself above him, and above the world, walledin forever with its irrevocable roar of wheels. "No inspiring emotions, " says the literary definition, "ideas orconceptions can possibly be connected with machinery--or ever willbe. " What is to become of a world roofed in with machines for the rest ofits natural life, and of the people who will have to live under theroof of machines, the literary definition does not say. It is not theway of literary definitions. For a time at least we feel assured thatwe, who are the makers of definitions, are poetically and personallysafe. Can we not live behind the ramparts of our books? We takecomfort with the medallions of poets and the shelves that sing aroundus. We sit by our library fires, the last nook of poetry. Beside ourgates the great crowding chimneys lift themselves. Beneath our windowsherds of human beings, flocking through the din, in the dark of themorning and the dark of the night, go marching to their fate. We havedone what we could. Have we not defined poetry? Is it nothing to havelaid the boundary line of beauty?. .. The huge, hurrying, helplessworld in its belts and spindles--the people who are going to beobliged to live in it when the present tense has spoiled it a littlemore--all this--the great strenuous problem--the defense of beauty, the saving of its past, the forging of its future, the welding of itwith life-all these?. .. Pull down the blinds, Jeems. Shut out thenoises of the street. A little longer . .. The low singing toourselves. Then darkness. The wheels and the din above our gravesshall be as the passing of silence. Is it true that, in a few years more, if a man wants the society ofhis kind, he will have to look down through a hatchway? Or that, if hewants to be happy, he will have to stand on it and look away? I do notknow. 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 ispoetry 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 themachines. Men who are under things want to know what the things arefor, and they want to know what they are under them for. It is a verylive, concrete, practical question whether there is, or can be, poetryin machinery or not. The fate of society turns upon it. There seems to be nothing that men can care for, whether in this worldor the next, or that they can do, or have, or hope to have, which isnot bound up, in our modern age, with machinery. With the fate ofmachinery it stands or falls. Modern religion is a machine. If thecharacteristic vital power and spirit of the modern age isorganization, and it cannot organize in its religion, there is littleto be hoped for in religion. Modern education is a machine. If theprinciple of machinery is a wrong and inherently uninspiredprinciple--if because a machine is a machine no great meaning can beexpressed by it, and no great result accomplished by it--there islittle to be hoped for in modern education. Modern government is a machine. The more modern a government is, themore the machine in it is emphasized. Modern trade is a machine. It ismade 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 journalismis a machine for distributing them; and modern art is a machine forsupplying the few, very few, things that are left that other machinescannot supply. Both in its best and worst features the characteristic, inevitablething that looms up in modern life over us and around us, for betteror worse, is the machine. We may whine poetry at it, or not. It makeslittle difference to the machine. We may not see what it is for. Ithas 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. Weare born in the machine. A man cannot move the place he is born in. Webreathe the machine. A man cannot go around what he breathes, any morethan he can go around himself. He cannot destroy what he breathes, even by destroying himself. If there cannot be poetry inmachinery--that is if there is no beautiful and gloriousinterpretation of machinery for our modern life--there cannot bepoetry in anything in modern life. Either the machine is the door ofthe 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 aboveour lives is meaningless, the winds that blow down upon us from it areempty winds, and the lights that lure us in it are pictures ofdarkness. There is one question that confronts and undergirds ourwhole modern civilization. All other questions are a part of it. Can aMachine Age have a soul? If we can find a great hope and a great meaning for the machine-ideain its simplest form, for machinery itself--that is, the machines ofsteel and flame that minister to us--it will be possible to find agreat hope for our other machines. If we cannot use the machines wehave already mastered to hope with, the less we hope from our othermachines--our spirit-machines, the machines we have not mastered--thebetter. In taking the stand that there is poetry in machinery, thatinspiring ideas and emotions can be and will be connected withmachinery, we are taking a stand for the continued existence of modernreligion--(in all reverence) the God-machine; for moderneducation--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 becauseit is a machine, there is not going to be anything left in this modernworld to connect inspiring ideas with. Johnstown haunts me--the very memory of it. Flame and vapor andshadow--like some huge, dim face of Labor, it lifts itself dumbly andlooks at me. I suppose, to some it is but a wraith of rusty vapor, amist of old iron, sparks floating from a chimney, while a train sweepspast. But to me, with its spires of smoke and its towers of fire, itis as if a great door had been opened and I had watched a god, down inthe wonder of real things--in the act of making an earth. I am filledwith childhood--and a kind of strange, happy terror. I struggle towonder my way out. Thousands of railways--after this--bind Johnstownto me; miles of high, narrow, steel-built streets--the whole worldlifting itself mightily up, rolling itself along, turning itself overon 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 seenmen lifting their souls up in a great flame and laying down floors ona star. I have stood and watched, in the melting-down place, themaking and the welding place of the bones of the world. It is the object of this present writing to search out a world--aworld a man can live in. If he cannot live in this one, let him knowit and make one. If he can, let him face it. If the word YES cannot bewritten across the world once more--written across this year of theworld in the roar of its vast machines--we want to know it. We cannotquite see the word YES--sometimes, huddled behind our machines. But wehear it sometimes. We know we hear it. It is stammered to us by themachines themselves. IV POETS When, standing in the midst of the huge machine-shop of our modernlife, we are informed by the Professor of Poetics that machinery--thething we do our living with--is inevitably connected with ideaspractical and utilitarian--at best intellectual--that "it will alwaysbe practically impossible to make poetry out of it, to make it appealto the imagination, " we refer the question to the real world, to thereal 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 arenow gone by, is the property to-day of all who are born upon theearth. The man who is not able to draw a distinction between the works ofJohn Milton and the plays of Shakespeare, but who expects something ofthe age he lives in, comes nearer to being a true poet than any writerof verses can ever expect to be who does not expect anything of thissame age he lives in--not even verses. Expectancy is the practice ofpoetry. It is poetry caught in the act. Though the whole world belifting its voice, and saying in the same breath that poetry is dead, this same world is living in the presence of more poetry, and morekinds of poetry, than men have known on the earth before, even in thedaring of their dreams. Pessimism has always been either literary--the result of not being inthe real world enough--or genuine and provincial--the result of notbeing in enough of the real world. If we look about in this present day for a suitable and worthyexpectancy to make an age out of, or even a poem out of, where shallwe 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 thedoctors, or defining art in the schools, nor shall he be seen at firstby peerers in books. The passer-by shall see him, perhaps, through thedoor of a foundry at night, a lurid figure there, bent with labor, andhumbled with labor, but with the fire from the heart of the earthplaying upon his face. His hands--innocent of the ink of poets, of themere outsides of things--shall be beautiful with the grasp of thething called life--with the grim, silent, patient creating of life. Heshall be seen living with retorts around him, loomed over bymachines--shadowed by weariness--to the men about him half comrade, half monk--going in and out among them silently, with some secretglory in his heart. If literary men--so called--knew the men who live with machines, whoare putting their lives into them--inventors, engineers andbrakemen--as well as they know Shakespeare and Milton and the Club, there would be no difficulty about finding a great meaning--_i. E. _, agreat hope or great poetry--in machinery. The real problem that standsin the way of poetry in machinery is not literary, nor ęsthetic. It issociological. It is in getting people to notice that an engineer is agentleman and a poet. V GENTLEMEN The truest definition of a gentleman is that he is a man who loves hiswork. This is also the truest definition of a poet. The man who loveshis work is a poet because he expresses delight in that work. He is agentleman 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 failto pay him, he stands under the wide heaven the one man who is masterof the earth. He is the one infallibly overpaid man on it. The man wholoves his work has the single thing the world affords that can make aman free, that can make him his own employer, that admits him to theranks of gentlemen, that pays him, or is rich enough to pay him, whata 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 thatthese men touch, as with some strange and immortal joy from out ofthem, has the thrill of beauty in it, and exultation and wonder. Theycannot have it otherwise even if they would. A true man is theautobiography 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 numberemployed there are more gentlemen running locomotives to-day thanthere are teaching in colleges. In proportion as we are more creativein creating machines at present than we are in creating anything elsethere are more poets in the mechanical arts than there are in the finearts; and while many of the men who are engaged in the machine-shopscan hardly be said to be gentlemen (that is, they would rather bepreachers or lawyers), these can be more than offset by the muchlarger proportion of men in the fine arts, who, if they were gentlemenin the truest sense, would turn mechanics at once; that is, they woulddo 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 wholoves his work--might appear to make a new division of society, it isa division that already exists in the actual life of the world, andconstitutes the only literal aristocracy the world has ever had. It may be set down as a fundamental principle that, no matter howprosaic a man may be, or how proud he is of having been born upon thisplanet with poetry all left out of him, it is the very essence of themost hard and practical man that, as regards the one uppermost thingin his life, the thing that reveals the power in him, he is a poet inspite 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 tohim, 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 theunconquerableness of that man, and of that man's delight, shall beupon all that he does. It shall sing to heaven. It shall sing to allon earth who overhear heaven. Every man who loves his work, who gets his work and his idealconnected, 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 hehas power with a thing; in proportion as he makes the thing--be it abit of color, or a fragment of flying sound, or a word, or a wheel, ora throttle--in proportion as he makes the thing fulfill or expresswhat he wants it to fulfill or express, he is a poet. All heaven andearth cannot make him otherwise. That the inventor is in all essential respects a poet toward themachine that he has made, it would be hard to deny. That, with all theapparent prose that piles itself about his machine, the machine is inall essential respects a poem to him, who can question? Who has everknown an inventor, a man with a passion in his hands, without feelingtoward him as he feels toward a poet? Is it nothing to us to know thatmen are living now under the same sky with us, hundreds of them (theirfaces haunt us on the street), who would all but die, who are all butdying now, this very moment, to make a machine live, --martyrs ofvalves 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 soulsand the needs of their bodies, --to know an inventor at all is to knowthat 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 thatDante knew, is his also, with the grime upon his hands, standing andwatching it there. It is the same song that from pride to pride andjoy 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 andcog and wheel--is it not more than these to him standing before itthere? It is the face of matter--who does not know it?--answering theface 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 themen who live with them. The brakeman and the locomotive engineer andthe mechanical engineer and the sailor all have the same spirit. Theirdays are invested with the same dignity and aspiration, the sameunwonted enthusiasm, and self-forgetfulness in the work itself. Theybegin their lives as boys dreaming of the track, or of cogs andwheels, or of great waters. As I stood by the track the other night, Michael the switchman washolding 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, everybrakeman backing to the wind, lying on the air, at the jolt of theswitch, started, as at some greeting out of the dark, and turned andgave the sign to Michael. All of the brakemen gave it. Then we watchedthem, Michael and I, out of the roar and the hiss of their splendidcloud, their flickering, swaying bodies against the sky, flying out tothe Night, until there was nothing but a dull red murmur and thefalling of smoke. Michael hobbled back to his mansion by the rails. He put up the footthat was left from the wreck, and puffed and puffed. He had been abrakeman himself. Brakemen are prosaic men enough, no doubt, in the ordinary sense, butthey love a railroad as Shakespeare loved a sonnet. It is not given tobrakemen, as it is to poets, to show to the world as it passes by thattheir ideals are beautiful. They give their lives for them, --hundredsof lives a year. These lives may be sordid lives looked at from theoutside, but mystery, danger, surprise, dark cities, and glisteninglights, roar, dust, and water, and death, and life, --these play theirendless spell upon them. They love the shining of the track. It iswrought into the very fibre of their being. Years pass and years, and still more years. Who shall persuade thebrakemen to leave the track? They never leave it. I shall always seethem--on their flying footboards beneath the sky--swaying androcking--still swaying and rocking--to Eternity. They are men who live down through to the spirit and the poetry oftheir 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 theuniverse, that we may see IT withal; but if we love it enough andstand close to it enough, we breathe the secret and touch in our livesthe secret that throbs through it all. For a man to have an ideal in this world, for a man to know what anideal is, even though nothing but a wooden leg shall come of it, and alife in a switch-house, and the signal of comrades whirling by, thisalso is to have lived. The fact that the railroad has the same fascination for the railroadman that the sea has for the sailor is not a mere item of interestpertaining to human nature. It is a fact that pertains to the art ofthe present day, and to the future of its literature. It is as much asymbol of the art of a machine age as the man Ulysses is a symbol ofthe 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 yearsold. We find it accounted for not only in the observation andexperience of men, but in their art. It was rather hard for them to doit at first (as with many other things), but even the minor poets haveadmitted the sea into poetry. The sea was allowed in poetry beforemountains were allowed in it. It has long been an old story. When thesailor has grown too stiff to climb the masts he mends sails on thedecks. Everybody understands--even the commonest people and the minorpoets understand--why it is that a sailor, when he is old and bent andobliged to be a landsman to die, does something that holds him closeto the sea. If he has a garden, he hoes where he can see the sails. Ifhe must tend flowers, he plants them in an old yawl, and when heselects a place for his grave, it is where surges shall be heard atnight 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 aman of them who could not sit down in his seat, flying through spacebehind the set and splendid hundred-guarding eyes of the engineer, andwrite a poem on a dead sailor buried by the sea. A crowd on the streetcould write a poem on a dead sailor (that is, if they were sure he wasdead), and now that sailors enough have died in the course of time tobring the feeling of the sea over into poetry, sailors who are stillalive are allowed in it. It remains to be seen how many wrecks it isgoing to take, lists of killed and wounded, fatally injured, columnsof engineers dying at their posts, to penetrate the spiritual safewhere poets are keeping their souls to-day, untouched of the world, and bring home to them some sense of the adventure and quiet splendorand unparalleled expressiveness of the engineer's life. He is a manwho would rather be without a life (so long as he has his nerve) thanto have to live one without an engine, and when he climbs down fromthe old girl at last, to continue to live at all, to him, is to lingerwhere she is. He watches the track as a sailor watches the sea. Hespends his old age in the roundhouse. With the engines coming in andout, one always sees him sitting in the sun there until he dies, andtalking with them. Nothing can take him away. Does any one know an engineer who has not all but a personal affectionfor his engine, who has not an ideal for his engine, who holding herbreath with his will does not put his hand upon the throttle ofthat ideal and make that ideal say something? Woe to the poet whoshall 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 oflife. The engineer who is not expressing his whole soul in hisengine, and in the aisles of souls behind him, is not worthy to placehis hand upon an engine's throttle. Indeed, who is he--this man--thatthis awful privilege should be allowed to him, that he should dare totouch the motor nerve of her, that her mighty forty-mile-an-hourmuscles should be the slaves of the fingers of a man like this, climbing the hills for him, circling the globe for him? It isimpossible to believe that an engineer--a man who with a single touchsends a thousand tons of steel across the earth as an empty wind cango, or as a pigeon swings her wings, or as a cloud sets sail in thewest--does not mean something by it, does not love to do it becausehe means something by it. If ever there was a poet, the engineer is apoet. In his dumb and mighty, thousand-horizoned brotherhood, hastener of men from the ends of the earth that they may be as one, Ialways see him, --ceaseless--tireless--flying past sleep--out throughthe 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 tospeak, or to make a thing that shall be beautiful with my hands--thatI should stand by my brother's life and gaze on his tremblingtrack--and not feel what the engine says as it plunges past, about theman in the cab? What matters it that he is a wordless man, that hewears not his heart in a book? Are not the bell and the whistle andthe cloud of steam, and the rush, and the peering in his eyes wordsenough? They are the signals of this man's life beckoning to my life. Standing in his engine there, making every wheel of that engine thrillto his will, he is the priest of wonder to me, and of the terror ofthe splendor of the beauty of power. The train is the voice of hislife. The sound of its coming is a psalm of strength. It is as thesinging 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 thunderingpast--leading its troop of glories echoing along the hills, telling itto the flocks in the fields and the birds in the air, telling it tothe trees and the buds and the little, trembling growing things, thatthe 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 whomakes it and who knows it best; if it is to be taken, as it has aright to be taken, in the nature of things, as being an expression ofthe human spirit, as being that man's way of expressing the humanspirit, there shall be no escape for the children of this presentworld, from the wonder and beauty in it, and the strong delight in itthat shall hem life in, and bound it round on every side. The idealismand passion and devotion and poetry in an engineer, in the feeling hehas about his machine, the power with which that machine expressesthat feeling, is one of the great typical living inspirations of thismodern age, a fragment of the new apocalypse, vast and inarticulateand far and faint to us, but striving to reach us still, now fromabove, and now from below, and on every side of life. It is as thoughthe very ground itself should speak, --speak to our poor, pitiful, unspiritual, matter-despising souls, --should command them to comeforth, 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, canhardly otherwise than guess the coming of some vast surprise, --thecoming of the day when, in the very rumble of the world, our sons anddaughters shall prophesy, and our young men shall see visions, and ourold men shall dream dreams. It cannot be uttered. I do not dare to sayit. What it means to our religion and to our life and to our art, thisgreat athletic uplift of the world, I do not know. I only know that solong as the fine arts, in an age like this, look down on themechanical arts there shall be no fine arts. I only know that so longas the church worships the laborer's God, but does not reverencelabor, there shall be no religion in it for men to-day, and none forwomen and children to-morrow. I only know that so long as there is nopoet amongst us, who can put himself into a word, as this man, mybrother the engineer, is putting himself into his engine, the engineshall remove mountains, and the word of the poet shall not; it shallbe buried beneath the mountains. I only know that so long as we havemore preachers who can be hired to stop preaching or to go into lifeinsurance than we have engineers who can be hired to leave theirengines, inspiration shall be looked for more in engine cabs than inpulpits, --the vestibule trains shall say deeper things than sermonssay. In the rhythm of the anthem of them singing along the rails, weshall find again the worship we have lost in church, the worship wefain would find in the simpered prayers and paid praises of a thousandchoirs, --the worship of the creative spirit, the beholding of afragment of creation morning, the watching of the delight of a man inthe delight of God, --in the first and last delight of God. I have madea vow in my heart. I shall not enter a pulpit to speak, unless everyword have the joy of God and of fathers and mothers in it. And so longas men are more creative and godlike in engines than they are insermons, I listen to engines. Would to God it were otherwise. But so it shall be with all of us. Soit 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 oflife sounding beneath her belfries in the street, shall she beworshipful; not until the love of all life and the love of all love isher love, not until all faces are her faces, not until the face of theengineer peering from his cab, sentry of a thousand souls, isbeautiful to her, as an altar cloth is beautiful or a stained glasswindow is beautiful, shall the church be beautiful. That day is boundto come. If the church will not do it with herself, the great roughhand of the world shall do it with the church. That day of the newchurch shall be known by men because it will be a day in which allworship shall be gathered into her worship, in which her holy houseshall be the comradeship of all delights and of all masteries underthe sun, and all the masteries and all the delights shall be laid ather 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 inpoetry, poetry will call itself something else. If it is not in thechurch, religion will call itself something else. It is the businessof a living religion, not to wish that the age it lives in were someother age, but to tell what the age is for, and what every man born init is for. A church that can see only what a few of the men born in anage are for, can help only a few. If a church does not believe in aparticular man more than he believes in himself, the less it tries todo for him the better. If a church does not believe in a man's work ashe believes in it, does not see some divine meaning and spirit in itand give him honor and standing and dignity for the divine meaning init; if it is a church in which labor is secretly despised and in whichit is openly patronized, in which a man has more honor for workingfeebly with his brain than for working passionately and perfectly withhis hands, it is a church that stands outside of life. It isexcommunicated by the will of Heaven and the nature of things, fromthe only Communion that is large enough for a man to belong to or fora God to bless. If there is one sign rather than another of religious possibility andspiritual worth in the men who do the world's work with machinesto-day, it is that these men are never persuaded to attend a churchthat despises that work. Symposiums on how to reach the masses are pitiless irony. There is noneed for symposiums. It is an open secret. It cries upon thehouse-tops. It calls above the world in the Sabbath bells. A churchthat believes less than the world believes shall lose its leadershipin the world. "Why should I pay pew rent, " says the man who sings withhis hands, "to men who do not believe in me, to worship, with men whodo not believe in me, a God that does not believe in me?" If heavenitself (represented as a rich and idle place, --seats free in theevening) were opened to the true laboring man on the condition that heshould despise his hands by holding palms in them, he would find someexcuse for staying away. He feels in no wise different with regard tohis present life. "Unless your God, " says the man who sings with hishands, to those who pity him and do him good, --"unless your God is aGod I can worship in a factory, He is not a God I care to worship in achurch. " Behold it is written: The church that does not delight in these menand 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 thestreet is not let into the church, it shall sweep over the church andsweep around it, shall pile the floors of its strength upon it, aboveit. From the roofs of labor--radiant and beautiful labor--shall menlook down upon its towers. Only a church that believes more than theworld believes shall lead the world. It always leads the world. Itcannot help leading it. The religion that lives in a machine age, andthat cannot see and feel, and make others see and feel, the meaning ofthat machine age, is a religion which is not worthy of us. It is notworthy of our machines. One of the machines we have made could make abetter religion than this. Even now, almost everywhere in almost everytown 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 formore than a few years more to be discouraged about modern religion. The telephone, the wireless telegraph, the X-rays, and all the othergreat believers are singing up around it. The very railroads aresurrounding it and taking care of it. A few years more and thesteeples will stop hesitating and tottering in the sight of all thepeople. They will no longer stand in fear before what the crowds ofchimneys and railways and the miles of smokestacks sweeping past aresaying 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 withtheir ears stopped, are being swept to the same irrevocable issue. Byall poets and prophets the same danger signal shall be seen spreadingbefore them both jogging along their old highways. It is the arm thatreaches 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 poeticit must have great ideas in it, and must successfully express them. The idea that there is poetry in machinery, has to meet the objectionthat, while a machine may have great ideas in it, "it does not lookit. " The average machine not only fails to express the idea that itstands for, but it generally expresses something else. The language ofthe average machine, when one considers what it is for, what it isactually doing, is not merely irrelevant or feeble. It is oftenabsurd. 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 asteam-engine (when one thinks of it) really expresses itself as wellas the rest of us. All language is irrelevant, feeble, and absurd. Welive in an organically inexpressible world. The language of everythingin it is absurd. Judged merely by its outer signs, the universe overour heads--with its cunning little stars in it--is the height ofabsurdity, as a self-expression. The sky laughs at us. We know it whenwe look in a telescope. Time and space are God's jokes. Looked atstrictly in its outer language, the whole visible world is a joke. Tosuppose that God has ever expressed Himself to us in it, or to supposethat He could express Himself in it, or that any one can expressanything in it, is not to see the point of the joke. We cannot even express ourselves to one another. The language ofeverything we use or touch is absurd. Nearly all of the tools we doour living with--even the things that human beings amuse themselveswith--are inexpressive and foolish-looking. Golf and tennis andfootball have all been accused in turn, by people who do not know themfrom the inside, of being meaningless. A golf-stick does not conveyanything to the uninitiated, but the bare sight of a golf-stick lyingon a seat is a feeling to the one to whom it belongs, a play of senseand spirit to him, a subtle thrill in his arms. The same is true of anew fiery-red baby, which, considering the fuss that is made about it, to a comparative outsider like a small boy, has always been from thebeginning of the world a ridiculous and inadequate object. A man couldnot possibly conceive, even if he gave all his time to it, of a morefutile, reckless, hapless expression of or pointer to an immortal soulthan a week-old baby wailing at time and space. The idea of a baby maybe all right, but in its outer form, at first, at least, a baby is afailure, and always has been. The same is true of our other musicalinstruments. A horn caricatures music. A flute is a man rubbing ablack stick with his lips. A trombone player is a monster. We listensolemnly to the violin--the voice of an archangel with a board tuckedunder his chin--and to Girardi's 'cello--a whole human race laughingand crying and singing to us between a boy's legs. The eye-language ofthe violin has to be interpreted, and only people who are cultivatedenough to suppress whole parts of themselves (rather useful andimportant parts elsewhere) can enjoy a great opera--a huge conspiracyof symbolism, every visible thing in it standing for something thatcan not be seen, beckoning at something that cannot be heard. Nothingcould possibly be more grotesque, looked at from the outside or by atourist from another planet or another religion, than the celebrationof the Lord's Supper in a Protestant church. All things have theirouter senses, and these outer senses have to be learned one at a timeby being flashed through with inner ones. Except to people who havetried it, nothing could be more grotesque than kissing, as a form ofhuman expression. A reception--a roomful of people shouting at eachother three inches away--is comical enough. So is handshaking. Lookedat from the outside, what could be more unimpressive than thespectacle of the greatest dignitary of the United States put in a visein his own house for three hours, having his hand squeezed by longrows of people? And, taken as a whole, scurrying about in its din, what could possibly be more grotesque than a great city--a city lookedat from almost any adequate, respectable place for an immortal soul tolook from--a star, for instance, or a beautiful life? Whether he is looked at by ants or by angels, every outer token thatpertains to man is absurd and unfinished until some inner thing is putwith it. Man himself is futile and comic-looking (to the otheranimals), rushing empty about space. New York is a spectacle for asquirrel to laugh at, and, from the point of view of a mouse, a man isa mere, stupid, sitting-down, skull-living, desk-infesting animal. All these things being true of expression--both the expression of menand of God--the fact that machines which have poetry in them do notexpress it very well does not trouble me much. I do not forget thelook 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 itsmighty heart-beat he stood with his strange, happy, helpless "Twelvethousand horse-power, sir!" upon his lips. That first night with my first engineer still follows me. The timeseems always coming back to me again when he brought me up from hiswhirl of wheels in the hold to the deck of stars, and left me--my newwonder 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 thephonograph (whose talking had been rumored of many months) was allowedto talk in public, it talked to an audience in Metuchen, New Jersey, and, much to Mr. Edison's dismay, everybody laughed. Instead of beingimpressed with the real idea of the phonograph--being impressedbecause it could talk at all--people were impressed because it talkedthrough its nose. The more modern a machine is, when a man stands before it and seeks toknow it, --the more it expects of the man, the more it appeals to hisimagination and his soul, --the less it is willing to appeal to theoutside of him. If he will not look with his whole being at atwin-screw steamer, he will not see it. Its poetry is under water. This is one of the chief characteristics of the modern world, that itspoetry is under water. The old sidewheel steamer floundering around inthe big seas, pounding the air and water both with her huge, showypaddles, is not so poetic-looking as the sailboat, and the poetry inthe sailboat is not so obvious, so plainly on top, as in a gondola. People who do not admit poetry in machinery in general admit thatthere is poetry in a Dutch windmill, because the poetry is in sight. ADutch windmill flourishes. The American windmill, being improved somuch that it does not flourish, is supposed not to have poetry in itat all. The same general principle holds good with every machine thathas been invented. The more the poet--that is, the inventor--works onit, the less the poetry in it shows. Progress in a modern machine, ifone watches it in its various stages, always consists in making amachine stop posing and get down to work. The earlier locomotive, puffing helplessly along with a few cars on its crooked rails, wasmuch more fire-breathing, dragon-like and picturesque than the presentone, and the locomotive that came next, while very different, was moreimpressive than the present one. Every one remembers it, --theimportant-looking, bell-headed, woodpile-eating locomotive of thirtyyears ago, with its noisy steam-blowing habits and its ceaselesswater-drinking habits, with its grim, spreading cowcatcher and itshuge plug-hat--who does not remember it--fussing up and down stations, ringing its bell forever and whistling at everything in sight? It wasimpossible to travel on a train at all thirty years ago without alwaysthinking of the locomotive. It shoved itself at people. It was alwaysdoing 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 fumedand spread enough in hauling three cars from Boston to Concord to getto Chicago and back. It was the poetic, old-fashioned way that engineswere made. One takes a train from New York to San Francisco now, andscarcely knows there is an engine on it. All he knows is that he isgoing, and sometimes the going is so good he hardly knows that. The modern engines, the short-necked, pin-headed, large-limbed, silentones, plunging with smooth and splendid leaps down their aisles ofspace--engines without any faces, blind, grim, conquering, lifting theworld--are more poetic to some of us than the old engines were, forthe very reason that they are not so poetic-looking. They are lessshowy, more furtive, suggestive, modern and perfect. In proportion as a machine is modern it hides its face. It refuses tolook as poetic as it is; and if it makes a sound, it is almost alwaysa sound that is too small for it, or one that belongs to some oneelse. The trolley-wire, lifting a whole city home to supper, is agiant with a falsetto voice. The large-sounding, the poetic-sounding, is not characteristic of the modern spirit. In so far as it exists atall in the modern age, either in its machinery or its poetry, itexists because it is accidental or left over. There was a deep basssteamer on the Mississippi once, with a very small head of steam, which any one would have admitted had poetry in it--old-fashionedpoetry. 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. Hedoes not care for poetry that bears on--or for eloquent poetry. Hecares for poetry in a new sense. In the old sense he does not care foreloquence in anything. The lawyer on the floor of Congress who seeksto 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. Thedoctor who stands best with the typical modern patient is not the mostagreeable, sociable, jogging-about man a town contains, like thedoctor 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 cutdown from two hours and a half to twenty or thirty minutes) is thatone has to practise more than one can preach. To be modern is to be suggestive and symbolic, to stand for more thanone says or looks--the little girl with her loom clothing twelvehundred people. People like it. They are used to it. All life aroundthem is filled with it. The old-fashioned prayer-meeting is dying outin the modern church because it is a mere specialty in modern life. The prayer-meeting recognizes but one way of praying, and people whohave a gift for praying that way go, but the majority ofpeople--people who have discovered that there are a thousand otherways of praying, and who like them better--stay away. When the telegraph machine was first thought of, the words all showedon the outside. When it was improved it became inner and subtle. Themessages were read by sound. Everything we have which improves at allimproves in the same way. The exterior conception of righteousness ofa hundred years ago--namely, that a man must do right because it ishis duty--is displaced by the modern one, the morally thoroughone--namely, that a man must do right because he likes it--do it fromthe inside. The more improved righteousness is, the less it shows onthe outside. The more modern righteousness is, the more it looks likeselfishness, the better the modern world likes it, and the more itcounts. On the whole, it is against a thing rather than in its favor, in thetwentieth century, that it looks large. Time was when if it had notbeen known as a matter of fact that Galileo discovered heaven with aglass three feet long, men would have said that it would hardly do todiscover heaven with anything less than six hundred feet long. To theancients, Galileo's instrument, even if it had been practical, wouldnot have been poetic or fitting. To the moderns, however, the factthat Galileo's star-tool was three feet long, that he carried a newheaven about with him in his hands, was half the poetry and wonder ofit. Yet it was not so poetic-looking as the six-hundred-foot telescopeinvented 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 musthave said a sentence. It was like saying things with pile-drivers. Themachine obtruded itself at every point. It flourished its means andends. It was a gesticulating machine. One commenced every new linewith his foot. The same general principle may be seen running alike through machineryand through life. The history of man is traced in water-wheels. Theovershot wheel belonged to a period when everything else--religion, literature, and art--was overshot. When, as time passed on, common menbegan to think, began to think under a little, the Reformation camein--and the undershot wheel, as a matter of course. There is nodenying that the overshot wheel is more poetic-looking--it does itswork with twelve quarts of water at a time and shows every quart--butit soon develops into the undershot wheel, which shows only thedrippings of the water, and the undershot wheel develops into theturbine wheel, which keeps everything out of sight--except its work. The water in the six turbine wheels at Niagara has sixty thousandhorses in it, but it is not nearly as impressive and poetic-looking assix turbine wheels' worth of water would be--wasted and going over theFalls. The main fact about the modern man as regards poetry is, that heprefers poetry that has this reserved turbine-wheel trait in it. It isbecause most of the poetry the modern man gets a chance to see to-dayis merely going over the Falls that poetry is not supposed to appealto the modern man. He supposes so himself. He supposes that a dynamo(forty street-cars on forty streets, flying through the dark) is notpoetic, but its whir holds him, sense and spirit, spellbound, morethan any poetry that is being written. The things that are hidden--thethings that are spiritual and wondering--are the ones that appeal tohim. The idle, foolish look of a magnet fascinates him. He gropes inhis own body silently, harmlessly with the X-ray, and watches with awethe beating of his heart. He glories in inner essences, both in hislife and in his art. He is the disciple of the X-ray, the defier ofappearances. Why should a man who has seen the inside of matter careabout appearances, either in little things or great? Or why argueabout 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 ismatter-loving spirit, and if he is matter, he is spirit-loving matter. Every time he touches a spiritual thing, he makes it (as God makesmountains out of sunlight) a material thing. Every time he touches amaterial thing, in proportion as he touches it mightily he brings outinner light in it. He spiritualizes it. He abandons the glisteningbrass knocker--pleasing symbol to the outer sense--for a tiny knob onhis porch door and a far-away tinkle in his kitchen. The brass knockerdoes not appeal to the spirit enough for the modern man, nor to theimagination. He wants an inner world to draw on to ring a door-bellwith. He loves to wake the unseen. He will not even ring a door-bellif he can help it. He likes it better, by touching a button, to have adoor-bell rung for him by a couple of metals down in his cellarchewing each other. He likes to reach down twelve flights of stairswith a thrill on a wire and open his front door. He may be seen ridingin three stories along his streets, but he takes his engines all offthe 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 soulsees it and glories in it. His fireplace is underground. Hidden waterspouts over his head and pours beneath his feet through his house. Hidden light creeps through the dark in it. The more might, the moresubtlety. He hauls the whole human race around the crust of the earthwith a vapor made out of a solid. He stops solids--sixty miles anhour--with invisible air. He photographs the tone of his voice on aplatinum plate. His voice reaches across death with the platinumplate. He is heard of the unborn. If he speaks in either one of hisworlds he takes two worlds to speak with. He will not be shut in withone. If he lives in either he wraps the other about him. He makes menwalk on air. He drills out rocks with a cloud and he breaks openmountains with gas. The more perfect he makes his machines the morespiritual they are, the more their power hides itself. The more themachines of the man loom in human life the more they reach down intosilence, and into darkness. Their foundations are infinity. Theinfinity which is the man's infinity is their infinity. The machinesgrasp all space for him. They lean out on ether. They are the man'smachines. The man has made them and the man worships with them. Fromthe first breath of flame, burning out the secret of the Dust to thelast shadow of the dust--the breathless, soundless shadow of the dust, which he calls electricity--the man worships the invisible, theintangible. Electricity is his prophet. It sums him up. It sums up hismodern world and the religion and the arts of his modern world. Out ofall the machines that he has made the electric machine is the mostmodern because it is the most spiritual. The empty and futile look ofa trolley wire does not trouble the modern man. It is his instinctiveexpression of himself. All the habits of electricity are his habits. Electricity has the modern man's temperament--the passion of beinginvisible and irresistible. The electric machine fills him withbrotherhood and delight. It is the first of the machines that he cannot help seeing is like himself. It is the symbol of the man's highestself. His own soul beckons to him out of it. And the more electricity grows the more like the man it grows, themore spirit-like it is. The telegraph wire around the globe is meltedinto the wireless telegraph. The words of his spirit break away fromthe dust. They envelop the earth like ether, and Human Speech, atlast, unconquerable, immeasurable, subtle as the light ofstars, --fights its way to God. The man no longer gropes in the dull helpless ground or through thefroth of heaven for the spirit. Having drawn to him the X-ray, whichmakes spirit out of dust, and the wireless telegraph, which makesearth out of air, he delves into the deepest sea as a cloud. Hestrides heaven. He has touched the hem of the garment at last ofELECTRICITY--the archangel of matter. IV ON MAKING PEOPLE PROUD OF THE WORLD Religion consists in being proud of the Creator. Poetry is largely thesame feeling--a kind of personal joy one takes in the way the world ismade and is being made every morning. The true lover of nature istouched with a kind of cosmic family pride every time he looks up fromhis work--sees the night and morning, still and splendid, hanging overhim. Probably if there were another universe than this one, to go andvisit in, or if there were an extra Creator we could go to--some ofus--and boast about the one we have, it would afford infinite reliefamong many classes of people--especially poets. The most common sign that poetry, real poetry, exists in the modernhuman heart is the pride that people are taking in the world. Thetypical modern man, whatever may be said or not said of his religion, of his attitude toward the maker of the world, has regular and almostdaily habits of being proud of the world. In the twentieth century the best way for a man to worship God isgoing 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 Godconsists in recognizing the fact that he is not a mere God who doesdivine 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 thingshimself, an earthquake, for instance, may be called a rather feebleaffair, a slight jar to a ball going ---- miles an hour--a Creatorcould do little less, if He gave a bare thought to it--but when Iwaked a few mornings ago and felt myself swinging in my own house asif it were a hammock, and was told that some men down in Hazardville, Connecticut, had managed to shake the planet like that, with somegunpowder 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 ofGravity--make the very hand of God to tremble? To his thoughts thevery hills, with their hearts of stone, make soft responses--when hethinks them. The Corliss engine of Machinery Hall in '76, under its sky of iron andglass, is remembered by many people the day they saw it first as oneof the great experiences of life. Like some vast, Titanic spirit, soulof a thousand, thousand wheels, it stood to some of us, in its mightysilence there, and wrought miracles. To one twelve-year-old boy, atleast, the thought of the hour he spent with that engine first is athought he sings and prays with to this day. His lips trembled beforeit. He sought to hide himself in its presence. Why had no one evertaught him anything before? As he looks back through his life there isone experience that stands out by itself in all those boyhoodyears--the choking in his throat--the strange grip upon him--upon hisbody and upon his soul--as of some awful unseen Hand reaching downSpace to him, drawing him up to Its might. He was like a dazed childbeing held up before It--held up to an infinite fact, that he mightlook at it again and again. The first conception of what the life of man was like, of what itmight be like, came to at least one immortal soul not from lips thathe 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 ofdreams, the appeal to destiny, to the imagination and to the soul. Itrebuilds the universe. It is the opportunity of beauty throughoutlife, the symbol of freedom, the freedom of men, and of the unity ofnations, and of the worship of God. In silence--like the soft farrunning of the sky--it wrought upon him there; like some heroic humanspirit, its finger on a thousand wheels, through miles of aisles, andcrowds of gazers, it wrought. The beat and rhythm of it was as thebeat and rhythm of the heart of man mastering matter, of the clayconquering God. Like some wonder-crowded chorus its voices surrounded me. It was thefirst hearing of the psalm of life. The hum and murmur of it was likethe spell of ages upon me; and the vision that floated in it--nay, thevision that was builded in it--was the vision of the age to be: thevision of Man, My Brother, after the singsong and dance and drone ofhis sad four thousand years, lifting himself to the stature of hissoul at last, lifting himself with the sun, and with the rain, andwith the wind, and the heat and the light, into comradeship withCreation 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 thegreat Machine that He has made, to watch it running softly above usall, moonlight and starlight, and winter and summer, rain andsnowflakes, and growing things. Another way is to worship Him not onlybecause He has made the vast and still machine of creation, in thebeating of whose days and nights we live our lives, but because He hasmade a Machine that can make machines--because out of the dust of theearth He has made a Machine that shall take more of the dust of theearth, and of the vapor of heaven, crowd it into steel and iron andsay, "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--thespirit 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 manwith its great ideas while he stands and watches it. It does not makehim feel its great ideas. And therefore it is denied that it ispoetic. The impressiveness of the bare spiritual facts of machinery is notdenied. What seems to be lacking in the machines from the artisticpoint of view at present is a mere knack of making the faces plain andliteral-looking. Grasshoppers would be more appreciated by more peopleif they were made with microscopes on, --either the grasshoppers or thepeople. If the mere machinery of a grasshopper's hop could be made plain andlarge enough, there is not a man living who would not be impressed byit. If grasshoppers were made (as they might quite as easily havebeen) 640 feet high, the huge beams of their legs above their bodiestowering like cranes against the horizon, the sublimity of agrasshopper's machinery--the huge levers of it, his hops acrossvalleys from mountain to mountain, shadowing fields andvillages--would have been one of the impressive features of humanlife. Everybody would be willing to admit of the mere machinery of agrasshopper, (if there were several acres of it) that there wascreative sublimity in it. They would admit that the bare idea ofhaving such a stately piece of machinery in a world at all, slippingsoftly around on it, was an idea with creative sublimity in it; andyet these same people because the sublimity, instead of being spreadover several acres, is crowded into an inch and a quarter, are notimpressed by it. But it is objected, it is not merely a matter of spiritual size. Thereis something more than plainness lacking in the symbolism ofmachinery. "The symbolism of machinery is lacking in fitness. It isnot poetic. " "A thing can only be said to be poetic in proportion asits form expresses its nature. " Mechanical inventions may stand forimpressive facts, but such inventions, no matter how impressive thefacts may be, cannot be called poetic unless their form expressesthose facts. A horse plunging and champing his bits on the eve ofbattle, for instance, is impressive to a man, and a pill-box full ofdynamite, with a spark creeping toward it, is not. That depends partly on the man and partly on the spark. A man may notbe impressed by a pill-box full of dynamite and a spark creepingtoward 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 andcriticise the lack of expression in pill-boxes, nor wait to rememberthe 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 anissue the whole matter of poetry in machinery. Everything has itslanguage, and the power of feeling what a thing means, by the way itlooks, is a matter of experience--of learning the language. Thelanguage is there. The fact that the language of the machine is a newlanguage, and a strangely subtle one, does not prove that it is not alanguage, that its symbolism is not good, and that there is not poetryin machinery. The inventor need not be troubled because in making his machine itdoes 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'smachine, in this world shall express or be expressed. If it is themeaning of life to us to be expressed in it, to be all-expressed, weare indeed sorry, dumb, plaintive creatures dotting a star awhile, creeping about on it, warmed by a heater ninety-five million milesaway. The machine of the universe itself, does not express itsInventor. It does not even express the men who are under it. Theninety-five millionth mile waits on us silently, at the doorways ofour souls night and day, and we wait on IT. Is it not THERE? Is it notHERE--this ninety-five millionth mile? It is ours. It runs in ourveins. Why should Man--a being who can live forever in a day, who isborn of a boundless birth, who takes for his fireside theimmeasurable--express or expect to be expressed? What we would like tobe--even what we are--who can say? Our music is an apostrophe todumbness. The Pantomime above us rolls softly, resistlessly on, overthe pantomime within us. We and our machines, both, hewing away on theinfinite, beckon and are still. I am not troubled because the machines do not seem to expressthemselves. I do not know that they can express themselves. I knowthat when the day is over, and strength is spent, and my soul looksout upon the great plain--upon the soft, night-blooming cities, withtheir 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 ofthe world, clashing its awful cymbals against the night, I lift mysoul to it, and in some way--I know not how--while it sings to me Igrow 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 themain lines of travel in New England, and whenever I am passing near byand the railroads let me, I drop in on him awhile and quarrel aboutart. It's a good old-fashioned comfortable, disorderly conversation wehave generally, the kind people used to have more than they donow--sketchy and not too wise--the kind that makes one think of thingsone wishes one had said, afterward. We always drift a little at first, as if of course we could talk aboutother 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 ThingsThat Are Beautiful and the Things That Are Not. Brim thinks that I have picked out more things to be beautiful than Ihave a right to, or than any man has, and he is trying to put a stopto it. He thinks that there are enough beautiful things in this worldthat have been beautiful a long while, without having people--well, people like me, for instance, poking blindly around among all thesemodern brand-new things hoping that in spite of appearances there issomething one can do with them that will make them beautiful enough togo with the rest. I'm afraid Brim gets a little personal in talkingwith me at times and I might as well say that, while disagreeing in aconversation with Brim does not lead to calling names it does seem tolead 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 orStucco-Greek mind. The Greeks, the real Greeks, would have liked allthese things--trolley cars, cables, locomotives, --seen the beautifulin them, if they had to do their living with them every day, the waywe do. You would say you were more Greek than I am, but when onethinks of it, you are just going around liking the things the Greeksliked 3000 years ago, and I am around liking the things a Greek wouldlike now, that is, as well as I can. I don't flatter myself I begin toenjoy the wireless telegraph to-day the way Plato would if he had thechance, and Alcibiades in an automobile would get a great deal moreout of it, I suspect, than anyone I have seen in one, so far; and Isuspect that if Socrates could take Bliss Carman and, say, WilliamWatson around with him on a tour of the General Electric Works inSchenectady they wouldn't either of them write sonnets about anythingelse for the rest of their natural lives. " I can only speak for one and I do not begin to see the poetry in themachines that a Greek would see, as yet. But I have seen enough. I have seen engineers go by, pounding on this planet, making it smallenough, welding the nations together before my eyes. I have seen inventors, still men by lamps at midnight with a whirl ofvisions, with a whirl of thoughts, putting in new drivewheels on theworld. I have seen (in Schenectady, ) all those men--the five thousand ofthem--the grime on their faces and the great caldrons of meltedrailroad swinging above their heads. I have stood and watched themthere with lightning and with flame hammering out the wills of cities, putting in the underpinnings of nations, and it seemed to me me thatBliss 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 andthe 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 thedaily wonder of life to countless silent people. The next thing theworld 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 putwith the fact which concerns us next and which really troubles usmost. There are very few of us, on the whole, who can take any solidcomfort in a fact--no matter what it is--until we have a theory toapprove of it with. Its merely being a fact does not seem to make verymuch 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 themachine--the inventor, and (2) the man who lives with the machine theengineer. 3. It expresses God, if only that He is a God who can make men who canthus express their souls. Machinery is an act of worship in the leastsense if not in the greatest. If a man who can make machines like thisis not clever enough with all his powers to find a God, and to worshipa God, he can worship himself. It is because the poetry of machineryis the kind of poetry that does immeasurable things instead ofimmeasurably singing about them that it has been quite generally takenfor granted that it is not poetry at all. The world has learned moreof the purely poetic idea of freedom from a few dumb, prosaic machinesthat have not been able to say anything beautiful about it than fromthe poets of twenty centuries. The machine frees a hundred thousandmen and smokes. The poet writes a thousand lines on freedom and hashis bust in Westminster Abbey. The blacks in America were freed byAbraham Lincoln and the cotton gin. The real argument for unity--theargument against secession--was the locomotive. No one can fight thelocomotive very long. It makes the world over into one world whetherit wants to be one world or not. China is being conquered bysteamships. 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 inmatter that comes to us is a spiritual masterpiece. It is crowded withideas. The Bessemer process has more political philosophy in it thanwas ever dreamed of in Shelley's poetry, and it would not be hard toshow that the invention of the sewing machine was one of the mostliterary and artistic as well as one of the most religious events ofthe nineteenth century. The loom is the most beautiful thought thatany one has ever had about Woman, and the printing press is morewonderful than anything that has ever been said on it. "This is all very true, " interrupts the Logical Person, "aboutprinting presses and looms and everything else--one could go onforever--but it does not prove anything. It may be true that the loomhas made twenty readers for Robert Browning's poetry where Browningwould have made but one, but it does not follow that because the loomhas freed women for beauty that the loom is beautiful, or that it is afit theme for poetry. " "Besides"--breaks in the Minor Poet--"there isa difference between a thing's being full of big ideas and its beingbeautiful. A foundry is powerful and interesting, but is it beautifulthe way an electric fountain is beautiful or a sonnet or a doily?" This brings to a point the whole question as to where the definitionof beauty--the boundary line of beauty--shall be placed. A thing'sbeing considered beautiful is largely a matter of size. The question"Is a thing beautiful?" resolves itself into "How large has abeautiful thing a right to be?" A man's theory of beauty depends, in auniverse 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 andpassions live in a very little of it, he is apt to assume that if abeautiful thing rises into the sublime and immeasurable--suggestsboundless ideas--the beauty is blurred out of it. It issomething--there is no denying that it is something--but, whatever itis or is not, it is not beauty. Nearly everything in our modern lifeis getting too big to be beautiful. Our poets are dumb because theysee more poetry than their theories have room for. The fundamentalidea of the poetry of machinery is infinity. Our theories of poetrywere made--most of them--before infinity was discovered. Infinity itself is old, and the idea that infinity exists--a kind ofhuge, empty rim around human life--is not a new idea to us, but theidea that this same infinity has or can have anything to do with us orwith our arts, or our theories of art, or that we have anything to dowith IT, is an essentially modern discovery. The actual experience ofinfinity--that is, the experience of being infinite (comparativelyspeaking)--as in the use of machinery, is a still more moderndiscovery. There is no better way perhaps, of saying what modernmachinery really is, than to say that it is a recent invention forbeing infinite. The machines of the world are all practically engaged in manufacturingthe same thing. They are all time-and-space-machines. They knit timeand space. Hundreds of thousands of things may be put in machines thisvery day, for us, before night falls, but only eternity and infinityshall be turned out. Sometimes it is called one and sometimes theother. If a man is going to be infinite or eternal it makes littledifference which. It is merely a matter of form whether one iseverywhere a few years, or anywhere forever. A sewing machine is asmuch a means of communication as a printing press or a locomotive. Thelocomotive takes a woman around the world. The sewing machine givesher a new world where she is. At every point where a machine touchesthe life of a human being, it serves him with a new measure ofinfinity. This would seem to be a poetic thing for a machine to do. Traditionalpoetry does not see any poetry in it, because, according to ourtraditions poetry has fixed boundary lines, is an old, establishedinstitution in human life, and infinity is not. No one has wanted to be infinite before. Poetry in the ancient worldwas largely engaged in protecting people from the Infinite. They wereafraid of it. They could not help feeling that the Infinite was overthem. Worship consisted in propitiating it, poetry in helping peopleto forget it. With the exception of Job, the Hebrews almost invariablyemployed a poet--when they could get one--as a kind of transfiguredpoliceman--to keep the sky off. It was what was expected of poets. The Greeks did the same thing in a different way. The only differencewas, that the Greeks, instead of employing their poets to keep the skyoff, employed them to make it as much like the earth as possible--akind of raised platform which was less dreadful and more familiar andhomelike and answered the same general purpose. In other words, thesky 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 itbeautiful. Galileo knew another way. It is because Galileo knew anotherway--because he knew that the way to make the sky beautiful, was tomake it large enough--that men are living in a new world. A newreligion beats down through space to us. A new poetry lifts away theceilings of our dreams. The old sky, with its little tent of stars, its film of flame and darkness burning over us, has floated to thepast. The twentieth century--the home of the Infinite--arches over ourhuman 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, withlittle painted paper stars in it, to hide the wilderness. It is a new heaven. Who, that has lived these latter years, that hasseen it crashing and breaking through the old one, can deny that whatis over us now is a new heaven? The infinite cave of it, scooped outat last over our little naked, foolish lives, our running-aboutphilosophies, our religions, and our governments--it is the main factabout us. Arts and literatures--ants under a stone, thousands ofyears, blind with light, hither and thither, racing about, hidingthemselves. But not long for dreams. More than this. The new heaven is matched bya new earth. Men who see a new heaven make a new earth. In its cloudof 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 ofnights to It, digs wells for winds under It, lights darkness withfalling water, makes ice out of vapor, and heat out of cold, drawsdown Space with engines, makes years out of moments with machines. Itis a new world and all the men that are born upon it are newwidemoving, cloud and mountain-moving men. The habits of stars andwaters, 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 merehiding place of Death, the awful living-room of God--is theneighborhood of human life. Machinery has poetry in it because in expressing the soul it expressesthe greatest idea that the soul of man can have, namely, the idea thatthe soul of man is infinite, or capable of being infinite. Machinery has poetry in it also not merely because it is the symbol ofinfinite power in human life, or because it makes man think he isinfinite, 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 hemakes 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 beenthe gradual sorting out of poets into two classes--those who like theinfinite, who have a fellow-feeling for it, and those who have not. Itseems reasonable to say that the poets who have habits of infinity, ofspace-conquering (like our vast machines), who seek the suggestive andimmeasurable in the things they see about them--poets who likeinfinity, will be the poets to whom we will have to look to reveal tous the characteristic and real poetry of this modern world. The otherpoets, it is to be feared, are not even liking the modern world, tosay nothing of singing in it. They do not feel at home in it. Theclassic-walled poet seems to feel exposed in our world. It is toosavagely large, too various and unspeakable and unfinished. He looksat the sky of it--the vast, unkempt, unbounded sky of it, to which itsings and lifts itself--with a strange, cold, hidden dread down in hisheart. To him it is a mere vast, dizzy, dreary, troubled formlessness. Its literature--its art with its infinite life in it, is a blur ofvagueness. He complains because mobs of images are allowed in it. Itis full of huddled associations. When Carlyle appeared, theStucco-Greek mind grudgingly admitted that he was 'effective. ' A manwho could use words as other men used things, who could put a pen downon paper in such a way as to lift men out from the boundaries of theirlives and make them live in other lives and in other ages, who couldlend 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 meregreat man (that is: a merely infinite man). He was a man who wentabout living and loving things, with a few blind words opening theeyes of the blind. It had to be admitted that Robert Browning couldmake men who had never looked at their brothers' faces dwell for daysin their souls, but he was not a poet. Richard Wagner, too, seer, lover, singer, standing in the turmoil of his violins conquering a newheaven for us, had great conceptions and was a musical genius withoutthe slightest doubt, but he was not an "artist. " He never worked hisconceptions out. His scores are gorged with mere suggestiveness. Theyare nothing if they are not played again and again. For twenty orthirty years Richard Wagner was outlawed because his music wasinfinitely unfinished (like the music of the spheres). People seemedto 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 aspossible 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 alandscape before they are ready to call it beautiful. The typicalAmerican woman, unless she has unusual gifts or training, if she isleft entirely to herself, prefers nice cuddlesome scenery. Even if herimagination has been somewhat cultivated and deepened, so that shefeels that a place must be wild, or at least partly wild, in order tobe beautiful, she still chooses nooks and ravines, as a rule, to behappy in--places roofed in with gentle, quiet wonder, fenced in withbeauty on every side. She is not without her due respect andadmiration 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; andif the truth were told--even at its best she finds a mountain distant, impersonal, uncompanionable. Unless she is born in it she does not seebeauty in the wide plain. There is something in her being that makesher bashful before a whole sky; she wants a sunset she can snuggle upto. It is essentially the bird's taste in scenery. "Give me a nest, OLord, under the wide heaven. Cover me from Thy glory. " A bush or atree with two or three other bushes or trees near by, and just enoughsky to go with it--is it not enough? The average man is like the average woman in this regard except thathe is less so. The fact seems to be that the average human being (likethe average poet), at least for everyday purposes, does not want anymore of the world around him than he can use, or than he can putsomewhere. If there is so much more of the world than one can use, orthan anyone else can use, what is the possible object of living whereone cannot help being reminded of it? The same spiritual trait, a kind of gentle persistent grudge againstthe infinite, shows itself in the not uncommon prejudice against pinetrees. There are a great many people who have a way of saying pleasantthings about pine trees and who like to drive through them or look atthem in the landscape or have them on other people's hills, but theywould not plant a pine tree near their houses or live with pinessinging over them and watching them, every day and night, for theworld. The mood of the pine is such a vast, still, hypnotic, imperiousmood that there are very few persons, no matter how dull orunsusceptible they may seem to be, who are not as much affected by asingle pine, standing in a yard by a doorway, as they are by a wholeskyful of weather. If they are down on the infinite--they do not wanta whole treeful of it around on the premises. And the pine comes asnear to being infinite as anything purely vegetable, in a world likethis, could expect. It is the one tree of all others that profoundlysuggests, every time the light falls upon it or the wind stirs throughit, THE THINGS THAT MAN CANNOT TOUCH. Woven out of air and sunlightand its shred of dust, it always seems to stand the monument of thewoods, to The Intangible, and The Invisible, to the spirituality ofmatter. Who shall find a tree that looks down upon the spirit of thepine? And who, who has ever looked upon the pines--who has seen themclimbing the hills in crowds, drinking at the sun--has not felt thathowever we may take to them personally they are the Chosen Peopleamong the trees? To pass from the voice of them to the voice of thecommon leaves is to pass from the temple to the street. In the rest ofthe forest all the leaves seem to be full of one another's din--ofrattle and chatter--heedless, happy chaos, but in the pines the voiceof every pine-spill is as a chord in the voice of all the rest, andthe whole solemn, measured chant of it floats to us as the voice ofthe sky itself. It is as if all the mystical, beautiful far-thingsthat human spirits know had come from the paths of Space, and from thepresence of God, to sing in the tree-trunks over our heads. Now it seems to me that the supremacy of the pine in the imaginationis not that it is more beautiful in itself than other trees, but thatthe beauty of the pine seems more symbolic than other beauty, andsymbolic of more and of greater things. It is full of the sturdinessand strength of the ground, but it is of all trees the tree to see thesky with, and its voice is the voice of the horizons, the voice of themarriage of the heavens and the earth; and not only is there more ofthe sky in it, and more of the kingdom of the air and of the place ofSleep, but there is more of the fiber and odor from the solemn heartof the earth. No other tree can be mutilated like the pine by the handof man and still keep a certain earthy, unearthly dignity and beautyabout 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 andstately, their bare trunks against heaven, cannot help beingbeautiful. The beauty is symbolic and infinite. It cannot be takenaway. If the entire street-side of a row of common, ordinarymiddle-class trees were cut away there would be nothing to do with themaimed and helpless things but to cut them down--remove their miseryfrom all men's sight. To lop away the half of a pine is only to seehow beautiful the other half is. The other half has the infinite init. 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. Theinfinite 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 spiritof the tropics in the snows. It is the touch of the infinite--ofeverywhere--wherever its shadow falls. I have heard the sound of ahammer in the street and it was the sound of a hammer. In the pinewoods it was a hundred guns. As the cloud catches the great emptyspaces of night out of heaven and makes them glorious the pine gathersall 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 anelectric-lighted heaven. It has the two kinds of beauty that belong tolife: finite beauty, in that its beauty can be seen in itself, andinfinite beauty in that it makes itself the symbol, the center, of thebeauty 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 modernlife, is its symbolic power, its power of standing for more thanitself. Every great invention of modern mechanical art and modern fine art hasheld within it an extraordinary power of playing upon associations, ofplaying upon the spirits and essences of things until the outer sensesare all gathered up, led on, and melted, as outer senses were meant tobe melted, into inner ones. What is wrought before the eyes of a manat last by a great modern picture is not the picture that fronts himon the wall, but a picture behind the picture, painted with the flameof the heart on the eternal part of him. It is the business of a greatmodern work of art to bring a man face to face with the greatness fromwhich it came. Millet's Angelus is a portrait of the infinite, --and aman and a woman. A picture with this feeling of the infinite paintedin it--behind it--which produces this feeling of the infinite in othermen by playing upon the infinite in their own lives, is a typicalmodern 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, wedo not like it in a picture, or in the face of a man, or in a Corlissengine--a picture of the face of All-Man, mastering theearth--silent--lifted to heaven. V THE MACHINES AS ARTISTS It is not necessary, in order to connect a railway train with theinfinite, to see it steaming along a low sky and plunging into a hugewhite hill of cloud, as I did the other day. It is quite as infiniteflying through granite in Hoosac Mountain. Most people who do notthink there is poetry in a railway train are not satisfied with flyingthrough granite as a trait of the infinite in a locomotive, and yetthese same people, if a locomotive could be lifted bodily to whereinfinity is or is supposed to be (up in the sky somewhere)--if theycould watch one night after night plowing through planets--would wanta poem written about it at once. A man who has a theory he does not see poetry in a locomotive, doesnot see it because theoretically he does not connect it with infinitethings: the things that poetry is usually about. The idea that theinfinite is not cooped up in heaven, that it can be geared and run ona 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 lookfor the infinite in the world is to stop and think a moment, where heis, 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 thefiber of the earth and of the lives of men, the infinity and poetry init are a matter of course. I like to think that it is merely a matterof seeing a locomotive as it is, of seeing it in enough of its actualrelations as it is, to feel that it is beautiful; that the beauty, theorder, the energy, and the restfulness of the whole universe arepulsing there through its wheels. The times when we do not feel poetry in a locomotive are the timeswhen we are not matter-of-fact enough. We do not see it in enough ofits actual relations. Being matter-of-fact enough is all that makesanything poetic. Everything in the universe, seen as it is, is seen asthe symbol, the infinitely connected, infinitely crowded symbol ofeverything else in the universe--the summing up of everythingelse--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 ofthe trees drink all night from the stars, and when I have listenedwith my soul--thousands of years--I have heard The Night and The Daycreeping softly through mountains. People called it geology. It seems that if a man cannot be infinite by going to the infinite, heis 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 crustof it, with winds and waters and flame and steel he is writing it onall things--that he is infinite, that he will be infinite. The wholeplanet is his signature. If what the modern man is trying to say in his modern age is his owninfinity, it naturally follows that the only way a modern artist canbe a great artist in a modern age is to say in that age that man isinfinite, better than any one else is saying it. The best way to express this infinity of man is to seek out the thingsin the life of the man which are the symbols of his infinity--whichsuggest his infinity the most--and then play on those symbols and letthose symbols play on him. In other words the poet's program issomething like this. The modern age means the infinity of man. Modernart means symbolism of man's infinity. The best symbol of the man'sinfinity the poet can find, in this world the man has made, is TheMachine. At least it seems so to me. I was looking out of my study window downthe long track in the meadow the other morning and saw a smoke-cloudfloating its train out of sight. A high wind was driving, and in longwavering folds the cloud lay down around the train. It was like agreat Bird, close to the snow, forty miles an hour. For a moment italmost seemed that, instead of a train making a cloud, it was a cloudpropelling a train--wing of a thousand tons. I have often before seena broken fog towing a mountain, but never have I seen before, a trainof cars with its engine, pulled by the steam escaping from itswhistle. Of course the train out in my meadow, with its pillar of fireby night and of cloud by day hovering over it, is nothing new; neitheris the tower of steam when it stands still of a winter morningbuilding pyramids, nor the long, low cloud creeping back on thecar-tops and scudding away in the light; but this mad and splendidThing of Whiteness and Wind, riding out there in the morning, thisghost of a train--soul or look in the eyes of it, haunting it, gathering it all up, steel and thunder, into itself, catching it awayinto heaven--was one of the most magical and stirring sights I haveseen for a long time. It came to me like a kind of Zeit-geist orpassing of the spirit of the age. When I looked again it was old 992 from the roundhouse escortingNumber Eight to Springfield. VI THE MACHINES AS PHILOSOPHERS If we could go into History as we go into a theatre, take our seatsquietly, ring up the vast curtain on any generation we liked, and thencould watch it--all those far off queer happy people living before oureyes, two or three hours--living with their new inventions and theirlast wonders all about them, they would not seem to us, probably toknow why they were happy. They would merely be living along with theirnew 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 bearranged after we have had them. The fundamental appeal of machineryseems 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. Butthere is something comfortable about a theory. A theory gives onepermission to let ones self go--makes it seem more respectable toenjoy things. So I suggest something--the one I have used when I feltI had to have one. I have partitioned it off by itself and it can beskipped. 1. The substance of a beautiful thing is its Idea. 2. A beautiful thing is beautiful in proportion as its form revealsthe nature of its substance, that is, conveys its idea. 3. Machinery is beautiful by reason of immeasurable ideas consummatelyexpressed. 4. Machinery has poetry in it because the three immeasurable ideasexpressed by machinery are the three immeasurable ideas of poetry andof the imagination and the soul--infinity and the two forms ofinfinity, the liberty and the unity of man. 5. These immeasurable ideas are consummately expressed by machinerybecause machinery expresses them in the only way that immeasurableideas can ever be expressed: (1) by literally doing the immeasurablethings, (2) by suggesting that it is doing them. To the man who is inthe mood of looking at it with his whole being, the machine isbeautiful because it is the mightiest and silentest symbol the worldcontains of the infinity of his own life, and of the liberty and unityof all men's lives, which slowly, out of the passion of history is nowbeing 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 thatthe ęsthetic form of a machine, if it is a good machine, can becriticised as unbeautiful. The less forms dealing with immeasurableideas are finished forms the more symbolic and speechless they are;the more they invoke the imagination and make it build out on God, andupon the Future, and upon Silence, the more artistic and beautiful andsatisfying they are. 7. The first great artist a modern or machine age can have, will bethe man who brings out for it the ideas behind its machines. Theseideas--the ones the machines are daily playing over and about thelives 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 inthe human spirit. PART FOUR IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES I THE IDEA OF INCARNATION "_I sought myself through earth and fire and seas, And found it not--but many things beside; Behemoth old, Leviathans that ride. And protoplasm, and jellies of the tide. Then wandering upward through the solid earth With its dim sounds, potential rage and mirth, I faced the dim Forefather of my birth, And thus addressed Him: 'All of you that lie Safe in the dust or ride along the sky-- Lo, these and these and these! But where am I?_'" The grasshopper may be called the poet of the insects. He has more hopfor his size than any of the others. I am very fond of watchinghim--especially of watching those two enormous beams of his that loomup on either side of his body. They have always seemed to me one ofthe great marvels of mechanics. By knowing how to use them, he jumpsforty times his own length. A man who could contrive to walk as wellas any ordinary grasshopper does (and without half trying) could maketwo hundred and fifty feet at a step. There is no denying, of course, that the man does it, after his fashion, but he has to have a trolleyto do it with. The man seems to prefer, as a rule, to use thingsoutside to get what he wants inside. He has a way of making everythingoutside him serve him as if he had it on his own body--uses a wholeuniverse every day without the trouble of always having to carry itaround with him. He gets his will out of the ground and even out ofthe air. He lays hold of the universe and makes arms and legs out ofit. If he wants at any time, for any reason, more body than he wasmade with, he has his soul reach out over or around the planet alittle farther and draw it in for him. The grasshopper, so far as I know, does not differ from the man inthat he has a soul and body both, but his soul and body seem to beperfectly matched. He has his soul and body all on. It is probably thebest (and the worst) that can be said of a grasshopper's soul, if hehas one, that it is in his legs--that he really has his wits abouthim. Looked at superficially, or from the point of view of the next hop, itcan hardly be denied that the body the human soul has been fitted outwith is a rather inferior affair. From the point of view of anyrespectable or ordinarily well-equipped animal the human body--the oneaccorded to the average human being in the great show ofcreation--almost looks sometimes as if God really must have made it asa kind of practical joke, in the presence of the other animals, on therest of us. It looks as if He had suddenly decided at the very momenthe was in the middle of making a body for a man, that out of all theanimals man should be immortal--and had let it go at that. With theexception of the giraffe and perhaps the goose or camel and an extrafold or so in the hippopotamus, we are easily the strangest, the mostunexplained-looking shape on the face of the earth. It is exceedinglyunlikely that we are beautiful or impressive, at first at least, toany one but ourselves. Nearly all the things we do with our hands andfeet, any animal on earth could tell us, are things we do not do aswell as men did once, or as well as we ought to, or as well as we didwhen we were born. Our very babies are our superiors. The only defence we are able to make when we are arraigned before thebar of creation, seems to be, that while some of the powers we haveexhibited have been very obviously lost, we have gained some very finenew invisible ones. We are not so bad, we argue, after all, --ournerves, for instance, --the mentalized condition of our organs. Andthen, of course, there is the superior quality of our gray matter. When we find ourselves obliged to appeal in this pathetic way from thejudgment of the brutes, or of those who, like them, insist on lookingat us in the mere ordinary, observing, scientific, realistic fashion, we hint at our mysteriousness--a kind of mesh of mysticism there is inus. We tell them it cannot really be seen from the outside, how wellour bodies work. We do not put it in so many words, but what we meanis, that we need to be cut up to be appreciated, or seen in the large, or in our more infinite relations. Our matter may not be very wellarranged on us, perhaps, but we flatter ourselves that there is asuperior unseen spiritual quality in it. It takes seers or surgeons toappreciate us--more of the same sort, etc. In the meantime (no man candeny the way things look) here we all are, with our queer, pale, little stretched-out legs and arms and things, floundering about onthis earth, without even our clothes on, covering ourselves as best wecan. And what could really be funnier than a human body living beforeThe Great Sun under its frame of wood and glass, all winter and allsummer . .. Strange and bleached-looking, like celery, grown almostalways under cloth, kept in the kind of cellar of cotton or wool itlikes for itself, moving about or being moved about, the way it is, inthousands of queer, dependent, helpless-looking ways? The earth, wecan well believe, as we go up and down in it is full of soft laughterat us. One cannot so much as go in swimming without feeling the fishespeeking around the rocks, getting their fun out of us in some still, underworld sort of way. We cannot help--a great many of us--feeling, in a subtle way, strange and embarrassed in the woods. Most of us, itis true, manage to keep up a look of being fairly at home on theplanet by huddling up and living in cities. By dint of stayingcarefully away from the other animals, keeping pretty much byourselves, and whistling a good deal and making a great deal of noise, called civilization, we keep each other in countenance after afashion, but we are really the guys of the animal world, and when westop to think of it and face the facts and see ourselves as the otherssee us, we cannot help acknowledging it. I, for one, rather like to, and have it done with. It is getting to be one of my regular pleasures now, as I go up anddown the world, --looking upon the man's body, --the little funny onethat he thinks he has, and then stretching my soul and looking uponthe one that he really has. When one considers what a man actuallydoes, where he really lives, one sees very plainly that all that hehas been allowed is a mere suggestion or hint of a body, a sort ofcentral nerve or ganglion for his real self. A seed or spore ofinfinity, blown down on a star--held there by the grip, apparently, ofNothing--a human body is pathetic enough, looked at in itself. Thereis something indescribably helpless and wistful and reaching out andincomplete about it--a body made to pray with, perhaps, one might say, but not for action. All that it really comes to or is for, apparently, is a kind of light there is in it. But the sea is its footpath. The light that is in it is the same lightthat reaches down to the central fires of the earth. It flames uponheaven. Helpless and unfinished-looking as it is, when I look upon it, I have seen the animals slinking to their holes before it, andworshipping, or following the light that is in it. The great watersand the great lights flock to it--this beckoning and a prayer for abody, which the man has. I go into the printing room of a great newspaper. In a single flash ofblack and white the press flings down the world for him--birth, death, disgrace, honor and war and farce and love and death, sea and hills, and the days on the other side of the world. Before the dawn thepapers are carried forth. They hasten on glimmering trains out throughthe dark. Soon the newsboys shrill in the streets--China and thePhilippines and Australia, and East and West they cry--the voices ofthe nations of the earth, and in my soul I worship the body of theman. Have I not seen two trains full of the will of the body of theman meet at full speed in the darkness of the night? I have watchedthem on the trembling ground--the flash of light, the crash of power, ninety miles an hour twenty inches apart, . .. Thundering aisles ofsouls . .. On into blackness, and in my soul I worship the body of theman. And when I go forth at night, feel the earth walking silently acrossheaven beneath my feet, I know that the heart-beat and the will of theman is in it--in all of it. With thousands of trains under it, overit, around it, he thrills it through with his will. I no longer look, since I have known this, upon the sun alone, nor upon the countenanceof the hills, nor feel the earth around me growing softly or restingin the light, lifting itself to live. All that is, all that reachesout around me, is the body of the man. One must look up to stars andbeyond horizons to look in his face. Who is there, I have said, thatshall trace upon the earth the footsteps of this body, all wirelesstelegraph and steel, or know the sound of its going? Now, when I seeit, it is a terrible body, trembling the earth. Like a low thunder itreaches around the crust of it, grasping it. And now it is a gentlebody (oh, Signor Marconi!), swift as thought up over the hill of thesea, soft and stately as the walking of the clouds in the upper air. Is there any one to-day so small as to know where he is? I am alwayscoming suddenly upon my body, crying out with joy like a child in thedark, "And I am here, too!" Has the twentieth century, I have wondered, a man in it who shall feelHimself? And so it has come to pass, this vision I have seen with my owneyes--Man, my Brother, with his mean, absurd little unfinished body, going triumphant up and down the earth making limbs of Time and Space. Who is there who has not seen it, if only through the peephole of adream--the whole earth lying still and strange in the hollow of hishand, the sea waiting upon him? Thousands of times I have seen it, thewhole earth with a look, wrapped white and still in its ball of mist, the glint of the Atlantic on it, and in the blue place the vision ofthe ships. Between the seas and skies The Shuttle flies Seven sunsets long, tropic-deep, Thousand-sailed, Half in waking, half in sleep. Glistening calms and shouting gales Water-gold and green, And many a heavenly-minded blue It thrusts and shudders through, Past my starlight, Past the glow of suns I know, Weaving fates, Loves and hates In the Sea-- The stately Shuttle To and fro, Mast by mast, Through the farthest bounds of moons and noons. Flights of Days and Nights Flies fast. It may be true, as the poets are telling us, that this fashion themodern man has, of reaching out with steel and vapor and smoke, andholding a star silently in his hand, has no poetry in it, and thatmachinery is not a fit subject for poets. Perhaps. I am merely judgingfor myself. I have seen the few poets of this modern world crowdedinto their corner of it (in Westminster Abbey), and I have seen also agreat foundry chiming its epic up to the night, freeing the bodies andthe souls of men around the world, beating out the floors of cities, making the limbs of the great ships silently striding the sea, androlling out the roads of continents. If this is not poetry, it is because it is too great a vision. And yetthere are times I am inclined to think when it brushes againstus--against all of us. We feel Something there. More than once I havealmost touched the edge of it. Then I have looked to see the manwondering at it. But he puts up his hands to his eyes, or he is merelyhammering on something. Then I wish that some one would be born forhim, and write a book for him, a book that should come upon the manand fold him in like a cloud, breathe into him where his wonder is. Heought to have a book that shall be to him like a whole Age--the one helives in, coming to him and leaning over him, whispering to him, "Rise, my Son and live. Dost thou not behold thy hands and thy feet?" The trains like spirits flock to him. There are days when I can read a time-table. When I put it back in mypocket it sings. In the time-table I carry in my pocket I unfold the earth. I have come to despise poets and dreams. Truths have made dreams paleand small. What is wanted now is some man who is literal enough totell the truth. II THE IDEA OF SIZE Sometimes I have a haunting feeling that the other readers of MountTom (besides me) may not be so tremendously interested after all inmachinery and interpretations of machinery. Perhaps they are merelybeing polite about the subject while up here with me on the mountain, not wanting to interrupt exactly and not talking back. It is really noplace for talking back, perhaps they think, on a mountain. But thetrouble is, I get more interested than other people before I know it. Then suddenly it occurs to me to wonder if they are listeningparticularly and are not looking off at the scenery and the river andthe hills and the meadow while I wander on about railroad trains andsymbolism and the Mount Tom Pulp Mill and socialism and electricityand Schopenhauer and the other things, tracking out relations. It getsworse than other people's genealogies. But all I ask is, that when they come, as they are coming now, justover the page to some more of these machine ideas, or interpretationsas one might call them, or impressions, or orgies with engines, theywill not drop the matter altogether. They may not feel as I do. Itwould be a great disappointment to all of us, perhaps, if I could beagreed with by everybody; but boring people is a seriousmatter--boring them all the time, I mean. It's no more than fair, ofcourse, that the subscribers to a magazine should run some of therisk--as well as the editor--but I do like to think that in these nextfew pages there are--spots, and that people will keep hopeful. * * * * * Some people are very fond of looking up at the sky, taking it for aregular exercise, and thinking how small they are. It relieves them. Ido not wish to deny that there is a certain luxury in it. But I mustsay that for all practical purposes of a mind--of having a mind--Iwould be willing to throw over whole hours and days of feeling verysmall, any time, for a single minute of feeling big. The details aremore interesting. Feeling small, at best, is a kind of glitteringgenerality. I do not think I am altogether unaware how I look from a star--atleast I have spent days and nights practising with a star, lookingdown from it on the thing I have agreed for the time being (whateverit is) to call myself, and I have discovered that the real luxury forme does not consist in feeling very small or even in feeling verylarge. The luxury for me is in having a regular reliable feeling, every day of my life, that I have been made on purpose--and veryconveniently made, to be infinitely small or infinitely large as Ilike. I arrange it any time. I find myself saying one minute, "Are notthe whole human race my house-servants? Is not London my valet--alwaysat my door to do my bidding? Clouds do my errands for me. It takes aworld to make room for my body. My soul is furnished with other worldsI cannot see. " The next minute I find myself saying nothing. The whole star I am onis a bit of pale yellow down floating softly through space. What Ireally seem to enjoy is a kind of insured feeling. Whether I am smallor large all space cannot help waiting upon me--now that I have takeniron and vapor and light and made hands for my hands, millions ofthem, and reached out with them. A little one shall become a thousand. I have abolished all size--even my own size does not exist. If all thework that is being done by the hands of my hands had literally to bedone by men, there would not be standing room for them on theglobe--comfortable standing room. But even though, as it happens, muchof the globe is not very good to stand on, and vast tracts of it, every year, are going to waste, it matters nothing to us. Every thingwe touch is near or far, or large or small, as we like. As long as ayoung woman can sit down by a loom which is as good as six hundredmore just like her, and all in a few square feet--as long as we can doup the whole of one of Napoleon's armies in a ball of dynamite, orstable twelve thousand horses in the boiler of an ocean steamer, itdoes not make very much difference what kind of a planet we are on, orhow large or small it is. If suddenly it sometimes seems as if it wereall used up and things look cramped again (which they do once in sooften) we have but to think of something, invent something, and let itout a little. We move over into a new world in a minute. Columbus wasmere bagatelle. We get continents every few days. Thousands of men arethinking of them--adding them on. Mere size is getting to beold-fashioned--as a way of arranging things. It has never been a verybig earth--at best--the way God made it first. He made a single spiderthat could weave a rope out of her own body around it. It can beticked all through, and all around, with the thoughts of a man. Theuniverse has been put into a little telescope and the oceans into alittle compass. Alice in Wonderland's romantic and clever way with apill is become the barest matter of fact. Looking at the world asingle moment with a soul instead of a theodolite, no one who has everbeen on it--before--would know it. It's as if the world were a littlewizened balloon that had been given us once and had been used so forthousands of years, and we had just lately discovered how to blow it. III THE IDEA OF LIBERTY Some one told me one morning not so very long ago that the sun wasgetting a mile smaller across every ten years. It gave me a shut-inand helpless feeling. I found myself several times during that daylooking at it anxiously. I almost held my hands up to it to warm them. I knew in a vague fashion that it would last long enough for me. And amile in ten years was not much. It did not take much figuring to seethat I had not the slightest reason to be anxious. But my feelingswere hurt. I felt as if something had hit the universe. I could notget myself--and I have not been able to get myself since--to look atit impersonally. I suppose every man lives in some theory of theuniverse, unconsciously, every day, as much as he lives in thesunlight. And he does not want it disturbed. I have always felt safebefore. And, what was a necessary part of safety with me, I have feltthat history was safe--that there was going to be enough of it. I have been in the world a good pleasant while on the whole, tried itand got used to it--used to the weather on it and used to having myfriends hate me and my enemies turn on me and love me, and the otheruncertainties; but all the time, when I looked up at the sun and sawit, or thought of it down under the world, I counted on it. Idiscovered that my soul had been using it daily as a kind of fulcrumfor all things. I helped God lift with it. It was obvious that it wasgoing to be harder for both of us--a mere matter of time. I could notget myself used to the thought. Every fresh look I took at the sunpeeling off mile after mile up there, as fast as I lived, flusteredme--made my sky less useful to me, less convenient to rest in. Ifound myself trying slowly to see how this universe would look--whatit would be like, if I were the last man on it. Somebody would have tobe. It would be necessary to justify things for him. He would probablybe too tired and cold to do it. So I tried. I had a good deal the same experience with Mount Pelée last summer. Iresented being cooped up helplessly, on a planet that leaked. The fact that it leaked several thousand miles away, and had made acomparatively safe hole for it, out in the middle of the sea, onlyafforded momentary relief. The hurt I felt was deeper than that. Itcould not be remedied by a mere applying long distances to it. It wasunderneath down in my soul. Time and Space could not get at it. Thefeeling that I had been trapped in a planet somehow, and that I couldnot get off possibly, the feeling that I had been deliberately takenbody and soul, without my knowing it and without my ever having beenasked, and set down on a cooled-off cinder to live, whether I wantedto or not--the sudden new appalling sense I had, that the groundunderneath my feet was not really good and solid, that I was livingevery day of my life just over a roar of great fire, that I was beingasked (and everybody else) to make history and build stone houses, andfound institutions and things on the bare outside--the destroyed andruined part of a ball that had been tossed out in space to burn itselfup--the sense, on top of all this, that this dried crust I live on, orbit of caked ashes, was liable to break through suddenly at any timeand pour down the center of the earth on one's head, did not add tothe dignity, it seemed to me, or the self-respect of human life. "Youmight as well front the facts, my dear youth, look Mount Pelée in theface, " I tried to say coldly and calmly to myself. "Here you are, setdown helplessly among stars, on a great round blue and green somethingall fire and wind inside. And it is all liable--this superficial crustor geological ice you are on--perfectly liable, at any time or anyplace after this, to let through suddenly and dump all the nations andall ancient and modern history, and you and Your Book, into this awfulceaseless abyss--of boiled mountains and stewed up continents that isseething beneath your feet. " It is hard enough, it seems to me, to be an optimist on the edge ofthis earth as it is, to keep on believing in people and things on it, without having to believe besides that the earth is a huge roundswindle just of itself, going round and round through all heaven, withall of us on it, laughing at us. I felt chilled through for a long time after Mount Pelée broke out. Iwent wistfully about sitting in sunny and windless places trying toget warmed all summer. And it was not all in my soul. It was not allsubjective. I noticed that the thermometer was caught the same way. Itwas a plain case enough--it seemed to me--the heater I lived on hadlet through, spilled out and wasted a lot of its fire, and the groundsimply could not get warmed up after it. I sat in the sun and picturedthe earth freezing itself up slowly and deliberately, on the outside. I had it all arranged in my mind. The end of the world was not comingas the ancients saw it, by a kind of overflow of fire, but by thefires going out. A mile off the sun every ten years (this for the lossof outside heat) and volcanoes and things (for the inside heat), andgradually between being frozen under us, and frozen over us, both, both sides at once, the human race would face the situation. We wouldhave to learn to live together. Any one could see that. The human racewas going to be one long row, sometime--great nations of us and littleones all at last huddled up along the equator to keep warm. Justoutside of this a little way, it would be perfectly empty star, all ina swirl of snowdrifts. I do not claim that it was very scientific to feel in this way, but Ihave always had, ever since I can remember, a moderate or decent humaninterest in the universe as a universe, and I had always felt as ifthe earth had made, for all practical purposes, a sort of contractwith the human race, and when it acted like this--cooled itself offall of a sudden, in the middle of a hot summer, and all to show off acomparatively unknown and unimportant mountain hid on an island farout at sea--I could not conceal from myself (in my present and usualcapacity as a kind of agent or sponsor for humanity) that there wassomething distinctly jarring about it and disrespectful. I felt as ifwe had been trifled with. It was not a feeling I had very long--thisinjured feeling toward the universe in behalf of the man in it, but Icould not help it at first. There grew an anger within me and then outof the anger a great delight. It seemed to me I saw my soul standingafar off down there, on its cold and emptied-looking earth. Then slowly I saw it was the same soul I had always had. I wasstanding as I had always stood on an earth before, be it a bare orflowering one. I saw myself standing before all that was. Then Idefied the heaven over my head and the ground under my feet not tokeep me strong and glad before God. I saw that it mattered not to me, of an earth, how bare it was, or could be, or could be made to be; ifthe soul of a man could be kept burning on it, victory and gladnesswould be alive upon it. I fell to thinking of the man. I took aninventory down in my being of all that the man was, of the might ofthe spirit that was in him. Would it be anything new to the man to bemaltreated, a little, neglected--almost outwitted by a universe? Hadhe not already, thousands of times in the history of this planet, flung his spirit upon the cold, and upon empty space--and made homesout of it? He had snuggled in icebergs. He had entered the place ofthe mighty heat and made the coolness of shadow out of it. It was nothing new. The planet had always been a little queer. It waswhen it commenced. The only difference would seem to be that, insteadof having the earth at first the way it is going to be by and byapparently--an earth with a little rim of humanity around it, greatnations toeing the equator to live--everything was turned around. Allthe young nations might have been seen any day crowded around the endsor tips of the earth to keep from falling into the fire that was stillat work on the middle of it, finishing it off and getting it ready tohave things happen on it. Boys might have been seen almost anyafternoon, in those early days, going out to the north pole andplaying duck on the rock to keep from being too warm. It is a mere matter of opinion or of taste--the way a planet acts atany given time. Now it is one way and now another, and we do as welike. I do not pretend to say in so many words if the sun grew feeble, justwhat the man would do, down in his snowdrifts. But I know he wouldmake some kind of summer out of them. One cannot help feeling that ifthe sun went out, it would be because he wanted it to--had arrangedsomething, if nothing but a good bit of philosophy. It is not likelythat the man has defied the heavens and the earth all these centuriesfor nothing. The things they have done against him have been themaking of him. When he found this same sun we are talking about, inthe earliest days of all, was a sun that kept running away from himand left him in a great darkness half of every day he lived, he knewwhat to do. Every time that Heaven has done anything to him, he hashad his answer ready. The man who finds himself on a planet that isonly lighted part of the time, is merely reminded that he must thinkof something. He digs light out of the ground and glows up the worldwith her own sap. When he finds himself living on an earth that canonly be said to be properly heated a small fraction of the year, hemakes the earth itself to burn itself and keep him warm. Things likethis are small to us. We put coal through a desire and take the breathout of its dark body, and put it in pipes, and cook our food withpoisons. We take water and burn it into air and we telegraph boilers, and flash mills around the earth on poles. We move vast machines witha little throb, like light. We put a street on a wire. Great crowds inthe great cities--whole blocks of them--are handed along day and nightlike dots and dashes in telegrams. A man cannot be stopped by abreath. We save a man up in his own whisper hundreds of years when heis dead. A human voice that reaches only a few yards makes thousandsof miles of copper talk. Then we make the thousand miles talk withoutthe copper wire. We stand on the shore and beat the air with a thoughtthousands of miles away--make it whisper for us to ships. One need notfear for a man like this--a man who has made all the earth a deed, anaction of his own soul, who has thrown his soul at last upon the wasteof heaven and made words out of it. One cannot but believe that a manlike this is a free man. Let what will happen to the sun that warmshim or the star that seems just now his foothold in space. All shallbe as his soul says when his soul determines what it shall say. Fireand wind and cold--when his soul speaks--and Invisibility itself andNothing are his servants. The vision of a little helpless human race huddled in the tropicssaying its last prayers, holding up its face to a far-offneglected-looking universe, warming its hands at the stars--the visionof all the great peoples of the earth squeezed up into Esquimaux, infurs up to their eyes, stamping their feet on the equator to keepwarm, is merely the sort of vision that one set of scientists gloatson giving us. One needs but to look for what the other set is saying. It has not time to be saying much, but what it practically says is:"Let the sun wizen up if it wants to. There will be something. Somebody will think of something. Possibly we are outgrowing suns. Atall events to a real man any little accident or bruise to the planethe's on is a mere suggestion of how strong he is. Some new beautifulimpossibility--if the truth were known--is just what we are lookingfor. " A human race which makes its car wheels and napkins out of paper, itsstreet pavements out of glass, its railway ties out of old shoes, which draws food out of air, which winds up operas on spools, whichhas its way with oceans, and plays chess with the empty ether that isover the sea--which makes clouds speak with tongues, which lightsrailway trains with pin-wheels and which makes its cars go by stoppingthem, and heats its furnaces with smoke--it would be very strange if arace like this could not find some way at least of managing its ownplanet, and (heaped with snowdrifts though it be) some way of warmingit, or of melting off a place to live on. A corporation was formeddown in New Jersey the other day to light a city by the tossing of thewaves. We are always getting some new grasp--giving some new suddenalmost humorous stretch to matter. We keep nature fairly smiling atherself. One can hardly tell, when one hears of half the new thingsnowadays--actual facts--whether to laugh or cry, or form a stockcompany or break out into singing. No one would dare to say that athousand years from now we will not have found some other use formoonlight than for love affairs and to haul tides with. We will bemanufacturing noon yet, out of compressed starlight, and heatinghouses with it. It will be peddled about the streets like milk, fromdoor to door in cases and bottles. First and last, whatever else may be said of us, we do as we like witha planet. Nothing it can do to us, nothing that can happen to it, outwits us--at least more than a few hundred years at a time. The ideathat we cannot even keep warm on it is preposterous. Nothing would bemore likely--almost any time now--than for some one to decide that weought to have our continents warmed more, winters. It would not bemuch, as things are going, to remodel the floors of a few of ourcontinents--put in registers and things, have the heat piped up fromthe center of the earth. The best way to get a faint idea of whatscience is going to be like the next few thousand years, is to pickout something that could not possibly be so and believe it. Wemanufacture ice in July by boiling it, and if we cannot warm a planetas we want to--at least a few furnished continents--with hot things, we will do it with cold ones, or by rubbing icebergs together. If onewants a good simple working outfit for a prophet in science andmechanics, all one has to do is to think of things that are unexpectedenough, and they will come to pass. A scientist out in the Northwesthas just finished his plans for getting hold of the other end of theforce of gravity. The general idea is to build a sort of tower orflag-pole on the planet--something that reaches far enough out overthe edge to get an underhold as it were--grip hold of the force ofgravity where it works backwards. Of course, as anyone can see at aglance, when it is once built out with steel, the first forty miles orso (workmen using compressed air and tubular trolleys, etc. ), everything on the tower would pull the other way and the pressurewould gradually be relieved until the thing balanced itself. Whencompleted it could be used to draw down electricity from waste space(which has as much as everybody on this planet could ever want, andmore). What a little earth like ours would develop into, with aconnection like this--a sort of umbilical cord to the infinite--no onewould care to try to say. It would at least be a kind of planet thatwould always be sure of anything it wanted. When we had used up allthe raw material or live force in our own world we could draw on theothers. At the very least we would have a sort of signal station tothe planets in general that would be useful. They would know what wewant, and if we could not get it from them they would tell us where wecould. All this may be a little mixing perhaps. It is always difficult totell the difference between the sublime and the ridiculous in talkingof a being like man. It is what makes him sublime--that there is notelling about him--that he is a great, lusty, rollicking, easy-goingson of God and throws off a world every now and then, or puts one on, with quips and jests. When the laugh dies away his jokes areprophecies. It behooves us therefore to walk softly, you and I, GentleReader, while we are here with him--while this dear gentle ground isstill beneath our feet. There is no telling his reach. Let us noticestars more. In the meantime it does seem to me that a comparatively simple affairlike this one single planet, need not worry us much. I still keep seeing it--I cannot help it--I always keep seeingit--eternities at a time, warm, convenient, and comfortable, the sameold green and white, with all its improvements on it, whatever the sundoes. And above all I keep seeing the Man on it, full of defiance andof love and worship, being born and buried--the little-great man, running about and strutting, flying through space on it, all hisinterests and his loves wound about it like clouds, but beckoning toworlds as he flies. And whatever the Man does with the other worlds orwith this one, I always keep seeing this one, the same old stand ordeck in eternity, for praying and singing and living, it always was. Long after I am dead, oh, dear little planet, least and furthestbreath that is blown on thy face, my soul flocks to you, rises aroundyou, and looks back upon you and watches you down there in your roundwhite cloud, rowing faithfully through space! IV THE IDEA OF IMMORTALITY If I had never thought of it before, and some one were to come aroundto my study tomorrow morning and tell me that I was immortal, I am notat all sure that I would be attracted by it. The first thing that Ishould do, probably, would be to argue a little--ask him what it wasfor. I might take some pains not to commit myself (one does not wantto settle a million years in a few minutes), but I cannot help beingconscious, on the inside of my own mind, at least, that the firstthought on immortality that would come to me, would be that perhaps itmight be overdoing things a little. I can speak only for myself. I am not unaware that a great many menand women are talking to-day about immortality and writing about it. Iknow many people too, who, in a faithful, worried way seem to belugging about with them, while they live, what they call a faith inimmortality. I would not mean to say a word against immortality, if Iwere asked suddenly and had never thought of it before. If by puttingout my hand I could get some of it, for other people, --people thatwanted it or thought they did--I would probably. They would be happierand easier to live with. I could watch them enjoying the idea of howlong they were going to last. There would be a certain social pleasurein it. But, speaking strictly for myself, if I were asked suddenly andhad never heard of it before, I would not have the slightestpreference on the subject. It may be true, as some say, that a man isonly half alive if he does not long to live forever, but while I havethe best wishes and intentions with regard to my hope for immortalityI cannot get interested. I feel as if I were living forever now, thisvery moment, right here on the premises--Universe, Earth, UnitedStates of America, Hampshire County, Northampton, Massachusetts. Ifeel infinitely related every day and hour and minute of my life, toan infinite number of things. As for joggling God's elbow or prayingto Him or any such thing as that, under the circumstances, and beggingHim to let me live forever, it always seems to me (I have done itsometimes when I was very tired) as if it were a way of denying Him toHis face. How a man who is literally standing up to his soul's eyes, and to the tops of the stars in the infinite, who can feel the eternalthrobbing through the very pores of his body, can so far lose hissense of humor in a prayer, or his reverence in it, as to put up apetition to God to live forever, I entirely fail to see. I always feelas if I had stopped living forever--to ask Him. I have traveled in the blaze of a trolley car when all the world wasasleep, and have been shot through still country fields in the greatblackness. All things that were--it seemed to my soul, were snuffedout. It was as if all the earth had become a whir and a bit oflight--had dwindled away to a long plunge, or roll and roar throughNothing. Slowly as I came to myself I said, "Now I will try to realizeMotion. I will see if I can know. I spread my soul about me. .. . " Tiesflying under my feet, black poles picked out with lights, flappingghostlike past the windows. .. . Voices of wheels over and under. .. . Thelong, dreary waver of the something that sounds when the car stops(and which feels like taking gas) . .. The semi-confidential, semi-public talk of the passengers, the sudden collision with silence, they come to, when the car halts--all these. Finally when I look upevery one has slipped away. Then I find my soul spreading further andfurther. The great night, silent and splendid, builds itself over me. The night is the crowded time to travel--car almost to one's self, nothing but a few whirls of light and a conductor for company--thelong monotone of miles--miles--flying beside me and above and aroundand beneath--all this shadowed world to belong to, to dwell in, topick out with one's soul from Darkness. "Here am I, " I said as theroar tightened once more, and gripped on its awful wire and glowedthrough the blackness. "Here I am in infinite space, I and my bit ofglimmer. .. . Worlds fall about me. The very one I am on, and stamp myfeet on to know it is there, falls and plunges with me out throughdeserts of space, and stars I cannot see have their hand upon me andhold me. " No one would deny that the idea of immortality is a well-meaning ideaand pleasantly inclined and intended to be appreciative of a God, butit does seem to me that it is one of the most absent-minded ways ofappreciating Him that could be conceived. I am infinite at 88 HighStreet. I have all the immortality I can use, without going through myown front gate. I have but to look out of a window. There is no denyingthat Mount Tom is convenient, and as a kind of soul-stepping-stone, orhorse-block to the infinite, the immeasurable and immortal, a mountainmay be an advantage, perhaps, and make some difference; but I mustconfess that it seems to me that in all times and in all places a man'simmortality is absolutely in his own hands. His immortality consists inhis being in an immortally related state of mind. His immortality ishis sense of having infinite relations with all the time there is, andhis infinity consists in his having infinite relations with all thespace there is. Wherever, as a matter of form, a man may say he isliving or staying, the universe is his real address. I have been at sea--lain with a board over me out in the wide nightand looked at the infinite through a port-hole. Over the edge of theswash of a wave I have gathered in oceans and possessed them. Under myboard in the night I have lain still with the whole earth and masteredit in my heart, shared it until I could not sleep with the joy ofit--the great ship with all its souls throbbing a planet through meand chanting it to me. I thought to my soul, "Where art thou?" Ilooked down upon myself as if I were a God looking down on myself andupon the others, and upon the ship and upon the waters. A thousand breaths we lie Shrouded limbs and faces Horizontal Packed in cases In our named and numbered places, Catalogued for sleep, Trembling through the Godlight Below, above, Deep to Deep. How a church-going man in a world like this can possibly contrive tohave time to cry out or worry on it, or to be troubled aboutanother--how he can demand another, the way he does sometimes, as ifit were the only thing left a God could do to straighten matters outfor having put him on this one, and how he can call this religion--isa problem that leaves my mind like an exhausted receiver. It is agrave question whether any immortality they are likely to get inanother world would ever really pay some people for the time they havewasted in this one, worrying about it. Does any science in the world suppose or dare to suppose that I am asunimportant in it as I look--or that I could be if I tried? that I ama parasite rolled up in a drop of dew, down under a shimmering mist ofworlds that do not serve me nor care for me? I swear daily that I amnot living and that I will not and cannot live underneath a universe. .. With a little horizon or teacup of space set down over me. Thewhole sky is the tool of my daily life. It belongs to me and I to it. I have said to the heavens that they shall hourly minister to me--tothe uses of my spirit and the needs of my body. When I, or my spirit, would move a little I swing out on stars. In the watches of the nightthey reach under my eyelids and serve my sleep and wait on me withdreams, I know I am immortal because I know I am infinite. A man is atleast as long as he is wide. There is no need to quibble with words. Icare little enough whether I am supposed to say it is forever acrossmy soul or everywhere across it. Whichever it is, I make it the otherwhen I am ready. If a man is infinite and lives an infinitely relatedlife, why should it matter whether he is eternal as he calls it ornot, --takes his immortality sideways here, now, and in the terms ofspace or later with some kind of time-arrangement stretched out andpetering along over a long, narrow row of years? Thousands of things are happening that are mine--out, around, andthrough the great darkness--being born and killed and ticked andprinted while I sleep. When I have stilled myself with sleep, do I notknow that the lightning is waiting on me? When I see a cloud of steamI say, "There is my omnipresence. " My being is busy out in theuniverse having its way somewhere. The days on the other side of theworld are my days. I get what I want out of them without having tokeep awake for them. In the middle of the night and without trying Ilay my hand on the moon. It is my moon, wherever it may be, or whetherI so much as look upon it, and when I do look upon it it is no rooffor me, and the stars behind it flow in my veins. II I have been reading lately a book on Immortality, the leading idea ofwhich seems to be a sort of astral body for people--people who areworthy of it. The author does not believe after the old-fashionedmethod that we are going to the stars. He intimates (for all practicalpurposes) that we do not need to. The stars are coming to us, --arealready being woven in us. The author does not say it in so manywords, but the general idea seems to be that the more spiritual orsubtle body we are going to have, is already started in us--if we liveas we should--growing like a kind of lining for this one. I can only speak for one, but I find that when I am willing to takethe time from reading books on immortality to enjoy a few infiniteexperiences, I am not apt to be troubled very much about anotherworld. It is daily obvious to me that I belong and that I am living in aninfinite and eternal world, inconceivably better planned and managedthan one of mine would be, and the only logical thing that I can do, is to take it for granted that the next one is even better than this. If the main feature of the next world consists in there not being one, then so much the better. I would not have thought so. It seems alittle abrupt at this moment, perhaps, but it is a mere detail and whynot leave it to God to work it out? He doesn't have to neglectanything to do it--which is what we do--and He is going to do itanyway. I have refused to take time from my infinity now for a theory of atheory about some new kind by and by. I have but to stand perfectlystill. There is an infinite opening and shutting of doors for me, through all the heavens and the earth. I lie with my head in the deepgrass. A square yard is forever across. I listen to a great city inthe grass--millions of insects. Microscopes have threaded it for me. Iknow their city--all its mighty little highways. I possess it. Andwhen I walk away I rebuild their city softly in my heart. Winds, tides, and vapors are for me everywhere, that my soul may possessthem. I reach down to the silent metals under my feet that millions ofages have worked on, and fire and wonder and darkness. I feel the sunand the lives of nations flowing around to me, from under the sea. Whocan shut me out from anybody's sunrise? "Oh, tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire; One morn is in the mighty heaven And one in my desire. " I play with the Seasons, with all the weathers on earth. I cantelegraph for them. I go to the weather I want. The sky--to me--is nolonger a great, serious, foreign-looking shore, conducting a bigfoolish cloud-business, sending down decrees of weather on helplesscities. With a whistle and a roar I defy it--move any strip of it outfrom over me--for any other strip. I order the time of year. It is mysky. I bend it a little--just a little. The sky no longer has amonopoly of wonder. With the hands of my hands, my brother and I havemade an earth that can answer a sky back, that can commune with a sky. The soul at last guesses at its real self. It reaches out and dares. Men go about singing with telescopes. I do not always need to lift myhands to a sky and pray to it now. I am related to it. With the handsof my hands I work with it. I say "I and the sky. " I say "I and theEarth. " We are immortal because we are infinite. We have reached overwith the hands of our hands. They are praying a stupendous prayer--akind of god's prayer. God's hand has been grasped--vaguely--wonderfullyout in the Dark. No longer is the joy of the universe to a man, one ofhis great, solemn, solitary joys. The sublime itself is a neighborlythought. God's machine--up--There--and the machines of the man havesignaled each other. V THE IDEA OF GOD My study (not the place where I get my knowledge but the place where Iput it together) is a great meadow--ten square splendid level miles ofit--as fenceless and as open as a sky--merely two mountains to standguard. If H---- the scientist who lives nearest to me (that is;nearest to my mind, ) were to come down to me to-morrow morning, downin my meadow, with its huge triangle of trolleys and railways humminggently around the edges and tell me that he had found a God, I wouldnot believe it. "Where?" I would say, "in which Bottle?" I have gropedfor one all these years. Ever since I was a child I have been gropingfor a God. I thought one had to. I have turned over the pages ofancient books and hunted in morning papers and rummaged in the eventsof the great world and looked on the under sides of leaves and guessedon the other sides of the stars and all in vain. I never could makeout to find a God in that way. I wonder if anyone can. I know it is not the right spirit to have, but I must confess thatwhen the scientist (the smaller sort of scientist around the corner inmy mind and everybody's mind) with all his retorts and things, pottering with his argument of design, comes down to me in my meadowand reminds me that he has been looking for a God and tells mecautiously and with all his kind, conscientious hems and haws that hehas found Him, I wonder if he has. The very necessity a man is under of seeking a God at all, in a worldalive all over like this, of feeling obliged to go on a long journeyto search one out makes one doubt if the kind of God he would findwould be worth while. I have never caught a man yet who has found hisGod in this way, enjoying Him or getting anyone else to. It does seem to me that the idea of a God is an absolutely plain, rudimentary, fundamental, universal human instinct, that the veryessence of finding a God consists in His not having to be looked for, in giving one's self up to one's plain every-day infinite experiences. I suppose if it could be analyzed, the poet's real quarrel with thescientist is not that he is material, but that he is not materialenough, --he does not conceive matter enough to find a God. I cannotbelieve for instance that any man on earth to whom the great spectacleof matter going on every day before his eyes is a scarcely noticedthing--any man who is willing to turn aside from this spectacle--thisspectacle as a whole--and who looks for a God like a chemist in abottle for instance--a bottle which he places absolutely by itself, would be able to find one if he tried. It seems to me that it is byletting one's self have one's infinite--one's infinitely relatedexperiences, and not by cutting them off that one comes to know a God. To find a God who is everywhere one must at least spend a part ofone's time in being everywhere one's self--in relating one's knowledgeto all knowledge. There are various undergirding arguments and reasons, but the only waythat I really know there is an infinite God is because I aminfinite--in a small way--myself. Even the matter that has come intothe world connected with me, and that belongs to me, is infinite. Ifmy soul, like some dim pale light left burning within me, were merelyto creep to the boundaries of its own body, it would know there was aGod. The very flesh I live with every day is infinite flesh. From thefurthest rumors of men and women, the furthest edge of time and spacemy soul has gathered dust to itself. I carry a temple about with me. If I could do no better, and if there were need, I am my owncathedral. I worship when I breathe. I bow down before the tick of mypulse. I chant to the palm of my hand. The lines in the tips of myfingers could not be duplicated in a million years. Shall any man askme to prove there are miracles or to put my finger on God? or to goout into some great breath of emptiness or argument to be sure thereis a God? I am infinite. Therefore there is a God. I feel daily theGod within me. Has He not kindled the fire in my bones and out of theburning dust warmed me before the stars--made a hearth for my soulbefore them? I am at home with them. I sit daily before worlds as atmy own fireside. I suppose there is something intolerant and impatient and a littleheartless about an optimist--especially the kind of optimism that isbased upon a simple everyday rudimentary joy in the structure of theworld. There is such a thing, I suppose, with some of us, as having akind of devilish pride in faith, as one would say to ordinary mortalsand creepers and considerers and arguers "Oh now just see me believe!"We are like boys taking turns jumping in the Great Vacant Lot, seeingwhich can believe the furthest. We need to be reminded that a mancannot simply bring a little brag to God, about His world, and make areligion out of it. I do not doubt in the least, as a matter oftheory, that I have the wrong spirit--sometimes--toward the scientificman who lives around the corner of my mind. It seems to me he isalways suggesting important-looking unimportant things. I have days ofsympathizing with him, of rolling his great useless heavy-empty packup upon my shoulders and strapping it there. But before I know it I'moff. I throw it away or melt it down into a tablet or something--putit in my pocket. I walk jauntily before God. And the worst of it is, I think He intended me to. I think He intendedme to know and to keep knowing daily what He has done for me and isdoing now, out in the universe, and what He has made me to do. I alsoam a God. From the first time I saw the sun I have been one daily. Ihave performed daily all the homelier miracles and all the commonfunctions of a God. I have breathed the Invisible into my being. Outof the air of heaven I have made flesh. I have taken earth from theearth and burned it within me and made it into prayers and into songs. I have said to my soul "To eat is to sing. " I worship all over. I ammy own sacrament. I lay before God nights of sleep, and the delightand wonder of the flesh I render back to Him again, daily, as anoffering in His sight. And what is true of my literal body--of the joy of my hands and myfeet, is still more true of the hands of my hands. When I wake in the night and send forth my thought upon the darkness, track out my own infinity in it, feel my vast body of earth and skyreaching around me, all telegraphed through with thought, and flooredwith steel, I may have to grope for a God a little (I do sometimes), but I do it with loud cheers. I sing before the door of heaven ifthere is a heaven or needs to be a heaven. When I look upon the gloryof the other worlds, has not science itself told me that they are apart of me and I a part of them? Nothing is that would not bedifferent without something else. My thoughts are ticking through theclouds, and the great sun itself is creeping through me daily down inmy bones. The steam cloud hurries for me on a hundred seas. I turnover in my sleep at midnight and lay my hand on the noon. And when Ihave slept and walk forth in the morning, the stars flow in my veins. Why should a man dare to whine? "Whine not at me!" I have said to manmy brother. If you cannot sing to me do not interrupt me. Let him sing to me Who sees the watching of the stars above the day, Who hears the singing of the sunrise On its way Through all the night. Who outfaces skies, outsings the storms, Whose soul has roamed Infinite-homed Through tents of Space, His hand in the dim Great Hand that forms All wonder. Let him sing to me Who is The Sky Voice, The Thunder Lover Who hears above the wind's fast-flying shrouds The drifted darkness, the heavenly strife, The singing on the sunny sides of all the clouds, Of His Own Life. VI THE IDEA OF THE UNSEEN AND INTANGIBLE _AN ODE TO THE UNSEEN_ Poets of flowers, singers of nooks in Space, Petal-mongers, embroiderers of words In the music-haunted houses of the birds, Singers with the thrushes and pewees In the glimmer-lighted roofs Of the trees-- Unhand my soul! Buds with singing in their hearts, Birds with blooms upon their wings, All the wandering whispers of delight, The near familiar things; Voice of pine trees, winds of daisies, Sounds of going in the grain Shall not bind me to thy singing When the sky with God is ringing For the Joy of the Rain. Sea and star and hill and thunder, Dawn and sunset, noon and night, All the vast processional of the wonder Where the worlds are, Where my soul is, Where the shining tracks are For the spirit's flight-- Lift thine eyes to these From the haunts of dewdrops, Hollows of the flowers, Caves of bees That sing like thee, Only in their bowers; From the stately growing cities Of the little blowing leaves, To the infinite windless eaves Of the stars; From the dainty music of the ground, The dim innumerable sound Of the Mighty Sun Creeping in the grass, Softest stir of His feet (Where they go Far and slow On their immemorial beat Of buds and seeds And all the gentle and holy needs Of flowers), To the old eternal round Of the Going of His Might, Above the confines of the dark, Odors and winds and showers, Day and night, Above the dream of death and birth Flickering East and West, Boundaries of a Shadow of an Earth-- Where He wheels And soars And plays In illimitable light, Sends the singing stars upon their ways And on each and every world When The Little Shadow for its Little Sleep Is furled-- Pours the Days. * * * * * The first time I gazed in the great town upon a solid mile of electriccars--threaded with Nothing--mesmerism hauling a whole city home tosupper, it seemed to me as if the central power of all things, TheThing that floats and breathes through the universe, must have beenfound by someone--gathered up from between stars, and turnedon--poured down gently on the planet--falling on a thousand wheels, and run on the tops of cars--the secret thrill that softly and out inthe darkness and through all ages had done all things. I felt as if Ihad seen the infinite in some near familiar, humdrum place. I walkedon in a dazed fashion. I do not suppose I could really have been moresurprised if I had met a star walking in the street. In my deepest dream I heard the Song Running in my sleep Through the lowest caves of Being Down below Where no sound is, sun is, Hearing, seeing That men know. There was something about it, about that sense of the mile of carsmoving, that made it all seem very old. _An Ode to the Lightning. _ Before the first new dust of dream God took For making man and hope and love and graves Had kindled to its fate. Before the floods Had folded round the hills. Before the rainbow Born of cloud had taught the sky its tints, The Lightning Minstrel was. The cry of Vague To Vague. The Chaos-voice that rolled and crept From out the pale bewildered wonder-stuff That wove the worlds, Before the Hand had stirred that touched them, While still, hinged on nothing, Dim and shapeless Things And clouds with groping sleep upon their wings Floated and waited. Before the winds had breathed the breath of life Or blown from wastes of Space To Earth's creating place, The souls of seeds And ghosts of old dead stars, The Lightning Spirit willed Their feet with wonder should be thrilled. --Primal fire of all desire That leaps from men to men, Brother of Suns And all the Glorious Ones That circle skies, He flashed to these The night that brought the birth, The vision of the place And raised his awful face To all their glittering crowds, And cried from where It lay --A tiny ball of fire and clay In swaddling clothes of clouds, "Behold the Earth!" * * * * * * * * * * Oh heavenly feet of The Hot Cloud! Bringer Of the garnered airs. Herald of the shining rains! Looser of the locked and lusty winds from their misty caves. Opener of the thousand thousand-gloried doors twixt heaven And heaven and Heaven's heaven. Oh thou whose play Men make to do their work (_Why do their work?_) --And call from holidays of space, sojourns Of suns and moons, and lock to earth (_Why lock to earth?_) * * * * * That the Dead Face may flash across the seas The cry of the new-born babe be heard around A world. Ah me! and the click of lust And the madness and the gladness and the ache Of Dust, Dust! AN ODE TO THE TELEGRAPH WIRES. THE SONG THE WORLD SANG LAYING THE ATLANTIC CABLE The mortal wires of the heart of the earth I sing, melted and fused by men, That the immortal fires of their souls should fling To eaves of heaven and caves of sea, And God Himself, and farthest hills and dimmest bounds of sense The flame of the Creature's ken, The flame of the glow of the face of God Upon the face of men. Wind-singing wires Along their thousand airy aisles, Feet of birds and songs of leaves, Glimmer of stars and dewy eves. Sea-singing wires Along their thousand slimy miles, Shadowy deeps, Unsunned steeps, Beating in their awful caves To mouthing fish and bones And weeds unfurled Deserts of waves The heart-beat of this upper world. Infinite blue, infinite green, Infinite glory of the ear Ticking its passions through Infinite fear, Ooze of storm, sodden and slanting wrecks The forever untrodden decks Of Death, Ever the seething wires On the floors Of the world, Below the last Locked fast Water-darkened doors Of the sun, Lighting the awful signal fires Of our speechless vast desires On the mountains and the hills Of the sea Till the sandy-buried heights And the sullen sunken vales And fire-defying barrens of the deep The hearth of souls shall be Beacons of Thought, And from the lurk of the shark To the sunrise-lighted eerie of the lark And where the farthest cloud-sail fills Shall be felt the throbbing and the sobbing and the hoping The might and mad delight, The hell-and-heaven groping Of our little human wills. AN ODE TO THE WIRELESS THE PRAYER OF MAN THROUGH ALL THE YEARS IN WHICH THE SKY-TELEGRAPHWOULD NOT WORK Roofed in with fears, Beneath its little strip of sky That is blown about In and out Across my wavering strip of years-- Who am I Whose singing scarce doth reach The cloud-climbed hills, To take upon my lips the speech Of those whose voices Heaven fills With splendor? And yet-- I cannot quite forget That in the underdawn of dreams I have felt the faint surmise Shining through the starry deep of my sleep That I with God went singing once Up and down with suns and storms Through the phantom-pillared forms And stately-silent naves And thunder-dreaming caves Of Heaven. Great Spirit--Thou who in my being's burning mesh Hath wrought the shining of the mist through and through the flesh, Who, through the double-wondered glory of the dust Hast thrust Habits of skies upon me, souls of days and nights, Where are the deeds that needs must be, The dreams, the high delights, That I once more may hear my voice From cloudy door to door rejoice-- May stretch the boundaries of love Beyond the mumbling, mock horizons of my fears To the faint-remembered glory of those years-- May lift my soul And reach this Heaven of thine With mine? Where are the gleams? Thou shalt tell me, Shalt compel me. The sometime glory shall return I know. The day shall be When by wondering I shall learn With vapor-fingers to discern The music-hidden keys of skies-- Shall touch like thee Until they answer me The chords of the silent air And strike the wild and slumber-music out Dreaming there. Above the hills of singing that I know On the trackless, soundless path That wonder hath I shall go, Beyond the street-cry of the poet, The hurdy-gurdy singing Of the throngs, To the Throne of Silence, Where the Doors That guard the farthest faintest shores Of Day Swing their bars, And shut the songs of heaven in From all our dreaming-doing din, Behind the stars. There, at last, The climbing and the singing passed, And the cry, My hushed and listening soul shall lie At the feet of the place Where the Singer sings Who Hides His Face. VII THE IDEA OF GREAT MEN "_I had a vision under a green hedge A hedge of hips and haws--Men yet shall hear Archangels rolling over the high mountains Old Satan's empty skull. _" As it looks from MOUNT TOM, casting a general glance around, the Earthhas about been put into shape, now, to do things. The Earth has never been seen before looking so trim andconvenient--so ready for action--as it is now. Steamships and loomsand printing presses and railways have been supplied, wirelesstelegraph furnishings have lately been arranged throughout, and wehave put in speaking tubes on nearly all the continents, and itlooks--as seen from Mount Tom, at least, as if the planet were justbeing finished up, now, for a Great Author. It is true that art and literature do not have, at first glance, aprosperous look in a machine age, but probably the real trouble themodern world is having with its authors is not because it is a worldfull of materialism and machinery, but because its authors are thewrong size. The modern world as it booms along recognizes this, in its practicalway, and instead of stopping to speak to its little authors, to itspoets crying beside it, and stooping to them and encouraging them, itis quietly and sensibly (as it seems to some of us) going on with itsmachines and things making preparations for bigger ones. I have thought the great authors in every age were made by thegreatness of the listening to them. The greatest of all, I notice, have felt listened to by God. Even the lesser ones (who have sometimesbeen called greatest) have felt listened to, most of them, one finds, by nothing less than nations. The man Jesus gathers kingdoms about Himin His talk, like an infant class. It was the way He felt. Almost anyone who could have felt himself listened to in this daring way thatJesus did would have managed to say something. He could hardly havemissed, one would think, letting fall one or two great ideas atleast--ideas that nations would be born for. It ought not to be altogether without meaning to a modern man that thegreat prophets and interpreters have talked as a rule to whole nationsand that they have talked to them generally, too, for the glory of thewhole earth. They could not get their souls geared smaller than awhole earth. Shakspeare feels the generations stretching away likegalleries around him listening--when he makes love. It was noparticular heroism or patience in the man Columbus that made him sailacross an ocean and discover a continent. He had the girth of an earthin him and had to do something with it. He could not have helped it. He discovered America because he felt crowded. One would think from the way some people have of talking or writing ofimmortality that it must be a kind of knack. As a matter of historicfact it has almost always been some mere great man's helplessness. When people have to be created and born on purpose, generation aftergeneration of them, to listen to a man, two or three thousand years ofthem sometimes, on this planet, it is because the man himself when hespoke felt the need of them--and mentioned it. It is the man who is inthe habit of addressing his remarks to a few continents and to severalcenturies who gets them. I would not dare to say just how or when our next great author on thisearth is going to happen to us, but I shall begin to listen hard andlook expectant the first time I hear of a man who gets up on his feetsomewhere in it and who speaks as if the whole earth were listening tohim. If ever there was an earth that is getting ready to listen, andto listen all over, it is this one. And the first great man who speaksin it is going to speak as if he knew it. It is a world which has beenallowed about a million years now, to get to the point where it couldbe said to begin to be conscious of being a world at all. And I cannotbelieve that a world which for the first time in its history has atlast the conveniences for listening all over, if it wants to, is notgoing to produce at the same time a man who shall have something tosay to it--a man that shall be worthy of the first single fullaudience, sunset to sunset, that has ever been thought of. It wouldseem as if, to say the least, such an audience as this, gathering halfin light and half in darkness around a star, would celebrate by havinga man to match. It would not be necessary for him to fall back, either, one would think, upon anything that has ever been said orthought of before. Already even in the sight and sounds of thispresent world has the verse of scripture about the next cometrue--"Eye hath not seen nor ear heard. " It is not conceivable thatthere shall not be something said unspeakably and incredibly great tothe first full house the planet has afforded. I have gone to the place of books. I have seen before this all thepeoples flocking past me under the earth with their littlecorner-saviors--each with his own little disc of worship all tohimself on the planet--partitioned away from the rest for thousands ofyears. But now the whole face of the earth is changed. No longer cangreat men and great events be aimed at it and glanced off on it--intosingle nations. Great men, when they come now, can generally have aworld at their feet. It is not possible that we shall not have them. The whole earth is the wager that we are going to have them. The bidsare out--great statesmen, great actors, great financiers, greatauthors--even millionaires will gradually grow great. It cannot behelped. And it will be strange if someone cannot think of something tosay, with the first full house this planet has afforded. Even as it is now, let any man with a great girth of love in him butspeak once--but speak one single round-the-world delight and nationssit at his feet. When Rudyard Kipling is dying with pneumonia sevenseas listen to his breathing. The nations are in galleries on thestage of the earth now, one listening above the other to the same playfollowing around the sunrise. Every one is affected by it--a kind ofsoul-suction--a great pulling from the world. People who do not wantto write at all feel it--a kind of huge, soft, capillary attractionapparently--to a pen. The whole planet kindles every man's solitude. Continents are bellows for the glow in him if there is any. Thewireless telegraph beckons ideas around the world. "How does a planetapplaud?" dreams the young author. "With a faint flush of light?" Onewould like to be liked by it--speak one's little piece to it. When onewas through, one could hear the soft hurrah through Space. I wonder sometimes that in This Presence I ever could have thought orhad times of thinking it was a little or a lonely world to writein--to flicker out thoughts in. When I think of what a world it wasthat came to men once and of the world that waits around me--aroundall of us now--I do like to mention it. When many years ago, as a small boy, I was allowed for the first timeto open the little inside door in the paddle-box of a great side-wheelsteamer and watched its splendid thrust on the sea, I did not know whyit was that I could not be called away from it, or why I stood andwatched hour after hour unconscious before it--the thunder and thefoam piling up upon my being. I have guessed now. I watch thedrive-wheel of an engine now as if I were tracking out at last thelast secret of loneliness. I face Time and Space with it. I know Ihave but to do a true deed and I am crowded round--to help me do it. Iknow I have but to think a true thought, but to be true and deepenough with a book--feel a worldful for it, put a worldful in it--andthe whole planet will look over my shoulder while I write. Thousandsof printing presses under a thousand skies I hear truth workingsoftly, saying over and over, and around and around the earth, theword that was given to me to say. Can any one believe that this strange new, deep, beautiful, clairvoyant feeling a man has nowadays every day, every hour, for theother side of a star, is not going to make arts and men and words andactions great in the world? Silently, you and I, Gentle Reader, are watching the first greatgathering-in of a world to listen and to live. The continents areunanimous. There has never been a quorum before. They are gettingtogether at last for the first world-sized man, for the firstworld-sized word. They are listening him into life. It is reallygetting to be a planet now, a whole completed articulated, furnished, lived-through, loved-through star, from sun's end to sun's end. Onesees the sign on it TO LET TO ANY MAN WHO REALLY WANTS IT. VIII THE IDEA OF LOVE AND COMRADESHIP "_Ever there comes an onward phrase to me Of some transcendent music I have heard; No piteous thing by soft hands dulcimered, No trumpet crash of blood-sick victory. But a glad strain of some still symphony That no proud mortal touch has ever stirred. _" Have you ever walked out over the hill in your city at night, GentleReader--your own city--felt the soul of it lying about you--lyingthere in its gentleness and splendor and lust? Have you never felt asyou stood there that you had some right to it, some right way down inyour being--that all this haze of light and darkness, all the peoplein it, somehow really belonged to you? We do not exactly let our soulssay it--at least out loud--but there are times when I have been out inthe street with The Others, when I have heard them--heard our souls, that is--all softly trooping through us, saying it to ourselves. "O toknow--to be utterly known one moment; to have, if only for one second, twenty thousand souls for a home; to be gathered around by a city, tobe sought out and haunted by some one great all-love, once, streetsand silent houses of it!" I go up and down the pavements reaching out into the days and nightsof the men and the women. Perhaps you have seen me, Gentle Reader, inThe Great Street, in the long, slow shuffle with the others? And Ihave said to you though I did not know it: "Did you not call to me?Did you hear anything? I think it was I calling to you. " I have sat at the feet of cities. I have swept the land with my soul. I have gone about and looked upon the face of the earth. I havedemanded of smoking villages sweeping past and of the mountains and ofthe plains and of the middle of the sea: "Where are those that belongto me? Will I ever travel near enough, far enough?" I have gone up anddown the world--seen the countless men and women in it, standing oneither side of their Abyss of Circumstance, beckoning and reachingout. I have seen men and women sleepless, or worn, or old, castingtheir bread upon the waters, grasping at sunsets or afterglows, putting their souls like letters in bottles. Some of them seem to beflickering their lives out like Marconi messages into a sort ofinfinite, swallowing human space. Always this same wild aimless sea of living. There does not seem to bea geography for love. My soul answered me: "Did you expect a world tobe indexed? Life is steered by a Wind. Blossoms and cyclones andsunshine and you and I--all blundering along together. " "Let everyseed swell for itself, " the Universe has said, in its first finecareless rapture. God is merely having a good time. Why should I go upand down a universe crying through it, "Where are those that belong tome?" I have looked at the stars swung out at me and they have notanswered, and now when I look at the men, I have seemed to see them, every man in a kind of dull might, rushing, his hands before him, hinged on emptiness. "You are alone, " the heart hath said. "Get up andbe your own brother. The world is a great WHO CARES?" But when, in the middle of deep, helpless sleep, tossed on the widewaters, I wake in a ship, feel it trembling all through out there withmy brother's care for me, I know that this is not true. "Aroundsunsets, out through the great dark, " I find myself saying, "he hasreached over and held me. Out here on this high hill of water, underthis low, touching sky, I sleep. " Sometimes I do not sleep. I lie awake silently, and feel gatheredaround. I wonder if I could be lonely if I tried. I touch the buttonby my pillow. I listen to great cities tending me. I have found allthe earth paved, or carpeted, or hung, or thrilled through with mybrother's thoughts for me. I cannot hide from love. He has hiredoceans to do my errands. He has made the whole human race myhouse-servants. I lie in my berth for sheer joy, thinking of thestrange peoples where the morning is, running to and fro for me, downunder the dark. Next me, the great quiet throb of the engine--betweenme and infinite space--beating comfortably. I cannot help answering toit--this soft and mighty reaching out where I lie. My thoughts follow along the great twin shafts my brother holds mewith. I wonder about them. I wish to do and share with them. Were I a spirit I would go Where the murmuring axles of the screws Along their whirling aisles Break through the hold, Where they lift the awful shining thews Of Thought, Of Trade, And strike the Sea Till the scar of London lies Miles and miles upon its breast Out in the West. As I lie and look out of my port-hole and watch the starlight steppingalong the sea I let my soul go out and visit with it. The ship I amin--a little human beckoning between two deserts. Out through myport-hole I seem to see other ships, ghosts of great cities--an oceanof them, creeping through their still huge picture of the night, withtheir low hoarse whistles meeting one another, whispering to oneanother under the stars. "And they are all mine, " I say, "hastening gently. " I lie awake thinking of it. I let my whole being float out upon thethought of it. The bare thought of it, to me, is like having lived agreat life. It is as if I had been allowed to be a great man a minute. I feel rested down through to before I was born. The very stars, afterit, seem rested over my head. I have gathered my universe about me. Itis as if I had lain all still in my soul and some beautiful eternalsleep--a minute of it--had come to me and visited me. All men are mybrothers. Is not the world filled with hastening to me? What is theremy brother has not done for me? From the uttermost parts of themorning, all things that are flow fresh and beautiful upon my flesh. He has laid my will on the heavens. His machines are like the tidesthat do not stop. They are a part of the vast antennę of the earth. They have grown themselves upon it. Like wind and vapor and dust, theyare a part of the furnishing of the earth. If I am cold and seek fursAlaska is as near as the next snowdrift. My brother has caused it tobe so. Everywhere is five cents away. I take tea in Pekin with a spoonfrom Australia and a saucer from Dresden. With the handle of my knifefrom India and the blade from Sheffield, I eat meat from Kansas. Thousands of miles bring me spoonfuls. The taste in my mouth, five orsix continents have made for me. The isles of the sea are on the tipof my tongue. And this is the thing my brother means, the thing he has done for me, solitary. I keep saying it over to myself. I lie still and try to takeit in--to feel the touch of the hands of his hands. Does any one saythis thing he is doing is done for money--that it is not done forcomradeship or love? Could money have thought of it or dared it ordesired it? Could all the money in the world ever pay him for it? Thispaper-ticket I give him--for this berth I lie in--does it pay him forit? Do I think to pay my fare to the infinite?--I--a parasite of agreat roar in a city? These seven nights in the hollow of his hand hehas held me and let me look upon the heaped-up stillness in heaven--ofclouds. I have visited with the middle of the sea. And now with a thought, have I furnished my hot plain and smokeforever. I have not time to dream. I spell out each night, before I sleep, somevast new far-off love, this new daily sense of mutual service, thiswhole round world to measure one's being against. Crowds wait on me insilence. I tip nations with a nickel. Who would believe it? I lie inmy berth and laugh at the bigness of my heart. When I go out on the meadow at high noon and in the great sleepy sunnysilence there I stand and watch that long imperious train go byputting together the White Mountains and New York, it is no longer asit was at first, a mere train by itself to me, --a flash of parlor carsbetween a great city and a sky up on Mt. Washington. When it swings upbetween my two little mountains its huge banner of steam and smoke, itis the beckoning of The Other Trains, the whole starful, creepingthrough the Alps (that moment), stealing up the Andes, roaring throughthe sun or pounding through the dark on the under sides of the world. In the great silence on the meadow after the train rolls by, it wouldbe hard to be lonely for a minute, not to stand still, not to share inspirit around the earth a few of the big, happy things--the far unseenpeoples in the sun, the streets, the domes and towers, the statesmen, and poets, but always between and above and beneath the streets andthe domes and the towers, and the statesmen and poets--always theengineers, --I keep seeing them--these men who dip up the world intheir hands, who sweep up life . .. Long, narrow, little towns ofsouls, and bowl them through the Days and Nights. In this huge, bottomless, speechless, modern world--one would ratherbe running the poems than writing them. At night I turn in my sleep. Ihear the midnight mail go by--that same still face before it, thegreat human headlight of it. I lie in my bed wondering. And when thethunder of the Face has died away, I am still wondering. Out there onthe roof of the world, thundering alone, thundering past death, pastglimmering bridges, past pale rivers, folding away villages behind him(the strange, soft, still little villages), pounding on theswitch-lights, scooping up the stations, the fresh strips of earth andsky. .. . The cities swoon before him . .. Swoon past him. Thunderingpast his own thunder, echoes dying away . .. And now out in the greatplain, out in the fields of silence, drinking up mad splendid, littleblack miles. .. . Every now and then he thinks back over his shoulder, thinks back over his long roaring, yellow trail of souls. He laughsbitterly at sleep, at the men with tickets, at the way the men withtickets believe in him. He knows (he grips his hand on the lever) heis not infallible. Once . .. Twice . .. He might have . .. He almost. .. . Then suddenly there is a flash ahead . .. He sets his teeth, he reachesout with his soul . .. Masters it, he strains himself up to hisinfallibility again . .. All those people there . .. Fathers, mothers, children, . .. Sleeping on their arms full of dreams. He feels as theminister feels, I should think, when the bells have stopped on aSabbath morning, when he stands in his pulpit alone, alone before God. .. Alone before the Great Silence, and the people bow their heads. But I have found that it is not merely the machines that one can seeat a glance are woven all through with men (like the great trains)which make the big companions. It is a mere matter of gettingacquainted with the machines and there is not one that is not woventhrough with men, with dim faces of vanished lives--with inventors. I have seen great wheels, in steam and in smoke, like swinging spiritsof the dead. I have been told that the inventors were no longer withus, that their little tired, old-fashioned bodies were tucked incemeteries, in the crypts of churches, but I have seen them withmighty new ones in the night--in the broad day, in a nameless silence, walk the earth. Inventors may not be put like engineers, in showwindows in front of their machines, but they are all wrought intothem. From the first bit of cold steel on the cowcatcher to the littlelast whiff of breath in the air-brake, they are wrought in--fibre ofsoul and fibre of body. As the sun and the wind are wrought in thetrees and rivers in the mountains, they are there. There is not amachine anywhere, that has not its crowd of men in it, that is notfull of laughter and hope and tears. The machines give one some idea, after a few years of listening, of what the inventors' lives werelike. One hears them--the machines and the men, telling about eachother. There are days when it has been given to me to see the machines asinventors and prophets see them. On these days I have seen inventors handling bits of wood and metal. Ihave seen them taking up empires in their hands and putting the futurethrough their fingers. On these days I have heard the machines as the voices of great peoplessinging in the streets. * * * * * And after all, the finest and most perfect use of machinery, I havecome to think, is this one the soul has, this awful, beautiful dailyjoy in its presence. To have this communion with it speaking aroundone, on sea and land, and in the low boom of cities, to have all thisvast reaching out, earnest machinery of human life--sights and soundsand symbols of it, beckoning to one's spirit day and night everywhere, playing upon one the love and glory of the world--to have--ah, well, when in the last great moment of life I lay my universe out in orderaround about me, and lie down to die, I shall remember I have lived. This great sorrowing civilization of ours, which I had seen before, always sorrowing at heart but with a kind of devilish convulsiveenergy in it, has come to me and lived with me, and let me see thelook of the future in its face. And now I dare look up. For a moment--for a moment that shall liveforever--I have seen once, I think--at least once, this great radiantgesturing of Man around the edges of a world. I shall not die, now, solitary. And when my time shall come and I lie down to do it, oh, unknown faces that shall wait with me, --let it not be with drawncurtains nor with shy, quiet flowers of fields about me, and silenceand darkness. Do not shut out the great heartless-sounding, forgetting-looking roar of life. Rather let the windows be opened. Andthen with the voice of mills and of the mighty street--all the din andwonder of it, --with the sound in my ears of my big brother outsideliving his great life around his little earth, I will fall asleep. BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF THIS BOOK PART ONE I. The word beautiful in 1905 is no longer shut in with its ancientrim of hills, or with a show of sunsets, or with bouquets and doiliesand songs of birds. It is a man's word, says The Twentieth Century. "If a hill is beautiful. So is the locomotive that conquers a hill. " II. The modern literary man--slow to be converted, is already drivento his task. Living in an age in which nine-tenths of his fellows aregetting their living out of machines, or putting their living intothem, he is not content with a definition of beauty which shuts downunder the floor of the world nine tenths of his fellowbeings, leaveshim standing by himself with his lonely idea of beauty, where--exceptby shouting or by looking down through a hatchway he has no way ofcommuning with his kind. III. Unless he can conquer the machines, interpret them for the soulor the manhood of the men about him he sees that after a littlewhile--in the great desert of machines, there will not be any men. Alittle while after that there will not be any machines. He has come tofeel that the whole problem of civilization turns on it--on what seemsat first sight an abstract or literary theory--that there is poetry inmachines. If we cannot find a great hope or a great meaning for themachine-idea in its simplest form, the machines of steel and flamethat minister to us, if inspiring ideas cannot be connected with amachine simply because it is a machine, there is not going to beanything left in modern life with which to connect inspiring ideas. All our great spiritual values are being operated as machines. To takethe stand that inspiring ideas and emotions can be and will beconnected with machinery is to take a stand for the continuedexistence of modern religion (in all reverence) the God-machine, formodern education, the man-machine, for modern government, thecrowd-machine, for modern art, the machine that expresses the crowd, and for modern society--the machine in which the crowd lives. IV. V. The poetry in machinery is a matter of fact. The literary menwho know the men who know the machines, the men who live with them, the inventors, and engineers and brakemen have no doubts about thepoetry in machinery. The real problem that stands in the way ofinterpreting and bringing out the poetry in machinery, instead ofbeing a literary or ęsthetic problem is a social one. It is in gettingpeople to notice that an engineer is a gentleman and a poet. VI. The inventor is working out the passions and the freedoms of thepeople, the tools of the nations. The people are already coming to look upon the inventor under ourmodern conditions as the new form of prophet. If what we callliterature cannot interpret the tools that men are daily doing theirliving with, literature as a form of art, is doomed. So long as menare more creative and godlike in engines than they are in poems theworld listens to engines. If what we call the church cannot interpretmachines, the church as a form of religion loses its leadership untilit does. A church that can only see what a few of the men born in anage, are for, can only help a few. A religion that lives in amachine-age and that does not see and feel the meaning of that age, isnot worthy of us. It is not even worthy of our machines. One of themachines that we have made could make a better religion than this. PART TWO THE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES I. I have heard it said that if a thing is to be called poetic it musthave great ideas in it and must successfully express them; that thelanguage of the machines, considered as an expression of the ideasthat are in the machines, is irrelevant and absurd. But all languagelooked at in the outside way that men have looked at machines, isirrelevant and absurd. We listen solemnly to the violin, the voice ofan archangel with a board tucked under his chin. Except to people whohave tried it, nothing could be more inadequate than kissing as a formof human expression, between two immortal infinite human beings. II. The chief characteristic of the modern machine as well as ofeverything else that is strictly modern is that it refuses to showoff. The man who is looking at a twin-screw steamer and who is notfeeling as he looks at it the facts and the ideas that belong with it, is not seeing it. The poetry is under water. III. I have heard it said that the modern man does not care forpoetry. It would be truer to say that he does not care forold-fashioned poetry--the poetry that bears on. The poetry in a Dutchwindmill flourishes and is therefore going by, to the strictly modernman. The idle foolish look of a magnet appeals to him more. Itslanguage is more expressive and penetrating. He has learned that inproportion as a machine or anything else is expressive--in the modernlanguage, it hides. The more perfect or poetic he makes his machinesthe more spiritual they become. His utmost machines are electric. Electricity is the modern man's prophet. It sums up his world. It hasthe modern man's temperament--the passion of being invisible andirresistible. IV. Poetry and religion consist--at bottom, in being proud of God. Most men to-day are worshipping God--at least in secret, not merelybecause of this great Machine that He has made, running softly aboveus--moonlight and starlight . .. But because He has made a Machine thatcan make machines, a machine that shall take more of the dust of theearth and of the vapor of heaven and crowd it into steel and iron andsay "Go ye now, --depths of the earth, heights of heaven--serve ye me!Stones and mists, winds and waters and thunder--the spirit that is inthee is my spirit. I also, even I also am God!" V. Everything has its language and the power of feeling what a thingmeans, by the way it looks, is a matter of noticing, of learning thelanguage. The language of the machines is there. I cannot preciselyknow whether the machines are expressing their ideas or not. I onlyknow that when I stand before a foundry hammering out the floors ofthe world, clashing its awful cymbals against the night, I lift mysoul to it, and in some way--I know not how, while it sings to me, Igrow strong and glad. PART THREE THE MACHINES AS POETS I. II. Machinery has poetry in it because it expresses the soul ofman--of a whole world of men. It has poetry in it because it expresses the individual soul of theindividual man who creates the Machine--the inventor, and the man wholives with the machine--the engineer. It has poetry in it because it expresses God. He is the kind of Godwho can make men who can make machines. III. IV. Machinery has poetry in it because in expressing the man'ssoul it expresses the greatest idea that the soul of man can have--theman's sense of being related to the Infinite. It has poetry in it notmerely because it makes the man think he is infinite but because it ismaking the man as infinite as he thinks he is. When I hear themachines, I hear Man saying, "God and I. " V. Machinery has poetry in it because in expressing the infinity ofman it expresses the two great immeasurable ideas of poetry and of theimagination and of the soul in all ages--the two forms ofinfinity--the liberty and the unity of man. The substance of a beautiful thing is its Idea. A beautiful thing is beautiful in proportion as its form reveals thenature of its substance, that is, conveys its idea. Machinery is beautiful by reason of immeasurable ideas consummatelyexpressed. PART FOUR THE IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES The ideas of machinery in their several phases are sketched inchapters as follows: I. II. The idea of the incarnation. The God in the body of the man. III. The idea of liberty--the soul's rescue from environment. IV. The idea of immortality. V. The idea of God. VI. The idea of the Spirit--of the Unseen and Intangible. VII. The practical idea of invoking great men. VIII. The religious idea of love and comradeship. * * * * * Note. --The present volume is the first of a series which had theirbeginnings in some articles in the _Atlantic_ a few years ago, answering or trying to answer the question, "Can a machine age have asoul?" Perhaps it is only fair to the present conception, as itstands, to suggest that it is an overture, and that the various phasesand implications of machinery--the general bearing of machinery in ourmodern life, upon democracy, and upon the humanities and the arts, arebeing considered in a series of three volumes called: I. The Voice of the Machines. II. Machines and Millionaires. III. Machines and Crowds. BY THE SAME AUTHOR ABOUT AN OLD NEW ENGLAND CHURCH. _$1. 00. _ "I have read it twice andenjoyed it the second time even more than the first. "--_Oliver WendellHolmes. _ "I read the preface, and that one little bite out of the crust made meas hungry as a man on a railroad. What a bright evening full oflaughter, touched every now and then with tenderness, it made for us Ido not know how to tell. Here is a book I am glad to indorse as Iwould a note--right across the face and present it for payment in anyman's library. "--_Robert J. Burdette. _ THE CHILD AND THE BOOK. _$. 75. _ (_G. P. Putnam's Sons. _) "I mustexpress with your connivance the joy I have had, the enthusiasm I havefelt, in gloating over every page of what I believe is the mostbrilliant book of any season since Carlyle's and Emerson's pens werelaid aside. It is full of humor, rich in style, and eccentric in form, and all suffused with the perfervid genius of a man who is not merelya thinker but a force. Every sentence is tinglingly alive. .. . "I have been reading with wonder and laughter and with loud cheers. Itis the word of all words that needed to be spoken just now. It makesme believe that after all we haven't a great kindergarten about us inauthorship, but that there is virtue, race, sap in us yet. I canconceive that the date of the publication of this book may well be thedate of the moral and intellectual renaissance for which we have longbeen scanning the horizon. "--WM. SLOANE KENNEDY, in _BostonTranscript_. THE LOST ART OF READING. _$1. 00. _ (_G. P. Putnam's Sons. _) "It is areal pleasure to chronicle an intellectual treat among the books ofthe day. Some of us will shrug at this volume. Others of us havingread it will keep it near us. "--_Life_. "Mr. Lee is a writer of great courage, who ventures to say what somepeople are a little alarmed even to think. "--_Springfield Republican_. "You get right in between the covers and live. "--_Denver Post_. THE SHADOW CHRIST. _$1. 25. _ (_The Century Co. _) "Let me be one of thefirst to recognize in this book what every man who reads itthoughtfully will feel. Heaps of the books that have been writtenabout the Bible are desiccated to the last grain of their dust. Theyare the desert which lies around Palestine. Now and then a man appearswho makes his way straight into the Promised Land, by sea ifnecessary, and takes you with him. It is not meant to be a full, precise treatment of the subject. It is history seen in a vision. Theology expressed in a lyric. Criticism condensed into anepigram. "--DR. HENRY VAN DYKE, in _The Book Buyer_. "The author's name--Gerald Stanley Lee--has been hitherto unknown tous in England, but the book he has here offered to the world indicatesthat he has that in him which will soon make it familiar. "--_TheChristian World_ (London). MOUNT TOM. AN ALL OUTDOORS MAGAZINE, devoted to rest and worship, andto a little look-off on the world. Edited by Mr. LEE. Every other month. 12 copies, $1. 00. THE VOICE OF THE MACHINES. _$1. 25. _ (_Mt. 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