Crowds Part 25

I have seen crowds of minor poets running, their little boxes of perfume and poetry, their cologne water, their smelling-salts, in their hands.

And, of course, if the world were all minor poets the situation would be serious.

And I have seen flocks of faint-hearted temples, of big, sulky, beautiful, absent-minded colleges, looking afraid. Every now and then perhaps one sees a professor run out, throw a book at the machines, and run back again. Oxford still looks at science, at matter itself, tremulously, with that same old, still, dreamy air of dignity, of gentlemanly disappointment.

And if the world were all Oxford the situation would be serious.

When Oxford with its hundred spires, its little beautiful boy choirs of professors, draws me one side from the Great Western Railway Station, and intones in those still, solemn, lonely s.p.a.ces the great truth in my ears, that machines and ideals cannot go together, that the only way to deal with ideals is to keep them away from machines, my only reply is that ideals that are so tired that they are merely devoted to defending themselves, ideals that will not and cannot go forth and be the breath of the machines, ideals that cannot and will not master the machines, that will not ride the machines as the wind, overrun matter, and conquer the earth, are not ideals for gentlemen.

At least they are not ideals that can keep up the standard of the Oxford gentleman.

A gentleman is a man who is engaged in expressing his best and n.o.blest self in every fibre of his mind and every fibre of his body. He makes the very force of gravity pulling on his clothes express him, and the movements of his feet and his hands. He gathers up his rooms into his will and all the appointments of his life and crowds into them the full meaning of his soul. He makes all these things say him.

The main attribute of a man who is not a gentleman is that he does not do these things, that he cannot inform his body with his spirit.

I go back to the Great Western Railway, ugly as it still is. I go alone, and sadly if I must, and for a little time--without the deep bells and without the stained-gla.s.s windows, without all that dear, familiar beauty I have loved in the old and quiet quadrangles--I take my stand beside the Great Western Railway! I claim the Great Western Railway for the spirit of man and for the will of G.o.d!

With its vast shuttle of steam and shining engines, its little, whispering telegraph office, the Great Western Railway is a part of my body. I lay my will on the heart of London with it, or I sleep in the old house in Lynmouth with it. I am the Great Western Railway, and the Great Western Railway is ME. And from the heart of the roar of London to the slow, sleepy surge of the sea in my window at Lynmouth it is mine! Though it be iron and wood, switches, whistles, and white steam, it is my body, and I inform it with my spirit, or I die. With the will of G.o.d I endow it, with the glory of the world, with the desires of my heart, and with the prayers of the hurrying men and women.

I declare that that same glory I have known before, and that I will always know, and will never give up, in the old quiet quadrangles of Oxford and in the deep bells and in the still waters, as in some strange, new, and mighty Child, is in the Great Western Railway too.

When I am in the train it sings. Strangely and hoa.r.s.ely It sings! I lie down to rest. It whistles on ahead my ideals down the slope of the world. It roars softly, while I sleep, my religion in my ears.

CHAPTER III

DEW AND ENGINES

When I was small, and wanted suddenly to play tag or duck-on-the-rock I had a little square half-mile of boys near by to play with.

My daughter plays tag or plays dolls, any minute she likes, with a whole city. She is not surprised at the telephone; she takes it for granted like sunshine and milk. It is a part of the gray matter in her brain--a whole city, six or seven square miles of it. A little mouthpiece on a desk, a number, and two hundred little girls are hers in a minute, to play dolls with. She thinks in miles when she plays, where I thought in door-yards. The whole city is a part of the daily, hourly furniture of her mind. The little gray molecules in the structure of her brain are different from those in mine.

I have seen that Man moves over with each new generation into a bigger body, more awful, more reverent and free than he has had before.

A few minutes ago, here where I am writing, an engine all in bright, soft, lit-up green with little lines of yellow on it and flashing silver feet, like a vision, swept past--through my still gla.s.s window, through the quiet green fields--like a great, swift, gleaming whisper of London.

And now, all in six seconds, this great quiet air about me is waked to vast vibrations of the mighty city. Out over the red pines, the lonely gorse fields, I have seen pa.s.sing the spirit of the Strand. I have seen the great flocking bridges and the roar about St. Paul's in communion with the treetops and with the hedgerows and with the little brooks, all in six seconds, when an engine, with its vision like a cloud of glory swept past.

And yet there are people in Oxford who tell me that an engine when it is in the very act of expressing such stupendous and boundless thoughts, of making such mighty and beautiful things happen, is not beautiful, that it has nothing to do with art. They can but watch the machines, the earth black with them, going about everywhere mowing down great nations and rolling under the souls of men.

I cannot see it so. I see a thousand thousand engines carrying dew and green fields to the stones of London. I see the desires of the earth hastening. The ships and the wireless telegraph beckon the wills of cities on the seas and on the sky. With the machines I have taken a whole planet to me for my feet and for my hands. I gesture with the earth. I hand up oceans to my G.o.d.

CHAPTER IV

DEAD AS A DOOR NAIL!

There are people who say that machines cannot be beautiful, and cannot make for beauty, because machines are dead.

I would agree with them if I thought that machines were dead.

I have watched in spirit, hundreds of years, the machines grow out of Man like nails, like vast antennae--a kind of enormous, more unconscious sub-body. They are apparently of less lively and less sensitive tissue than tongues or eyes or flesh; and like all bones they do not renew, of course, as often or as rapidly as flesh. But the difference between live and dead machines is quite as grave and quite as important as the difference between live and dead men. The generally accepted idea a live thing is, that it is a thing that keeps dying and being born again every minute; it is seen to be alive by its responsiveness to the spirit, to the intelligence that created it and that keeps re-creating it. I have known thousands of factories; and every factory I have known that is really strong or efficient has scales like a snake, and casts off its old self. All the people in it, and all the iron and wood in it, month by month are being renewed and shedding themselves. Any live factory can always be seen moulting year after year. A live spirit goes all through the machinery, a kind of nervous tissue of invention, of thought.

We already speak of live and dead iron, of live and dead engines or half-dead and half-sick engines, and we have learned that there is such a thing as tired steel. What people do to steel makes a difference to it. Steel is sensitive to people. My human spirit grows my arm and moves it and guides it and expresses itself in it, keeps re-creating it and destroying it; and daily my soul keeps rubbing out and writing in new lines upon my face; and in the same way my typewriter, in a slow, more stolid fashion, responds to my spirit too. Two men changing typewriters or motor-cars are, though more subtly, like two men changing boots.

Sewing machines, pianos, and fiddles grow intimate with the people who use them, and they come to express those particular people and the ways in which they are different from others. A t.i.tian-haired typewriter girl makes her machine move differently every day from a blue-eyed one.

Typewriters never like to have their people take the liberty of lending them. Steel bars and wooden levers all have little mannerisms, little expressions, small souls of their own, habits of people that they have lived with, which have grasped the little wood and iron levers of their wills and made them what they are.

It is somewhere in the region of this fact that we are going to discover the great determining secret of modern life, of the mastery of man over his machines. Man, at the present moment, with all his new machines about him, is engaged in becoming as self-controlled, as self-expressive, with his new machines, with his wireless telegraph arms and his railway legs, as he is with his flesh and blood ones. The force in man that is doing this is the spiritual genius in him that created the machine, the genius of imperious and implacable self-expression, of glorious self-a.s.sertion in matter, the genius for being human, for being spiritual, and for overflowing everything we touch and everything we use with our own wills and with the ideals and desires of our souls. The Dutchman has expressed himself in Dutch architecture and in Dutch art; the American has expressed himself in the motor-car; the Englishman has expressed himself, has carved his will and his poetry upon the hills, and made his landscape a masterpiece by a great nation. He has made his walls and winding roads, his rivers, his very treetops express his deep, silent joy in the earth. So the great, fresh young nations to-day, with a kind of new, stern gladness, implacableness, and hope, have appointed to their souls expression through machinery. Our Engines and our radium shall cry to G.o.d! Our wheels sing in the sun!

Machinery is our new art-form. A man expresses himself first in his hands and feet, then in his clothes, and then in his rooms or in his house, and then on the ground about him; the very hills grow like him, and the ground in the fields becomes his countenance; and now, last and furthest of all, requiring the liveliest and n.o.blest grasp of his soul, the finest circulation of will of all, he begins expressing himself in his vast machines, in his three-thousand-mile railways, in his vast, cold-looking looms and dull steel hammers. With telescopes for Mars-eyes for his spirit, he walks up the skies; he expresses his soul in deep and dark mines, and in mighty foundries melting and re-moulding the world.

He is making these things intimate, sensitive, and colossal expressions of his soul. They have become the subconscious body, the abysmal, semi-infinite body of the man, sacred as the body of the man is sacred, and as full of light or of darkness.

So I have seen the machines go swinging through the world. Like archangels, like demons, they mount up our desires on the mountains. We do as we will with them. We build Winchester Cathedral all over again, on water. We dive down with our steel wheels and nose for knowledge--like a great Fish--along the bottom of the sea. We beat up our wills through the air. We fling up, with our religion, with our faith, our bodies on the clouds. We fly reverently and strangely, our hearts all still and happy, in the face of G.o.d!

CHAPTER V

AN OXFORD MAN AND AN INCH OF IRON

The whole process of machine-invention is itself the most colossal, spiritual achievement of history. The bare idea we have had of unravelling all creation, and of doing it up again to express our own souls--the idea of subduing matter, of making our ideals get their way with matter, with radium, ether, antiseptics, is itself a religion, a poetry, a ritual, a cry to heaven. The supreme, spiritual adventure of the world has become this task that man has set himself, of breaking down and casting away forever the idea that there is such a thing as matter belonging to matter--matter that keeps on in a dead, stupid way, just being matter. The idea that matter is not all alive with our souls, with our desires and prayers, with hope, terror, worship, with the little terrible wills of men and the spirit of G.o.d, is already irreligious to us. Is not every cubic inch of iron (the coldest-blooded scientist admits it) like a kind of little temple, its million million little atoms in it going round and round and round dancing before the Lord?

And why should an Oxford man be afraid of a cubic inch of iron, or afraid of becoming like it?

I daily thank G.o.d that I have been allowed to belong to this generation.

I have looked at last a little cubic inch of iron out of countenance. I can sit and watch it, the little cubic inch of iron, in its still coldness, in all its little funny play-deadness, and laugh! I know that to a telescope or a G.o.d, or to me, to us, the little cubic inch of iron is all alive inside, that it is whirling with will, that it is sensitive in a rather dead-looking but lively cosmic way, sensitive like another kind of more slowly quivering flesh, sensitive to moons and to stars and to heat and cold, to time and s.p.a.ce and to human souls. It is singing every minute low and strange, night and day, in its little grim blackness, of the glory of Things. I am filled with the same feeling, the same sense of kindred, of triumphant companionship, when I go out among them and watch the majestic family of the machines, of the engines, those mighty Innocents, those new awful sons of G.o.d, going abroad through all the world, looking back at us when we have made them, unblinking and without sin!

Like rain and sunshine, like chemicals, and like all the other innocent, G.o.dlike things, and like waves of water and waves of air, rainbows, starlight, they say what we make them say. They are alive with the life that is in us.

The first element of power in a man, in getting control of his life in our modern era, is to have spirit enough to know what matter is like.

The Machine-Trainer is the man who sees what the machines are like. He is the man who conceives of iron-and-wood machines, in his daily habit of thought, as alive. He has discovered ways in which he can produce an impression upon iron and wood with his desires, and with his will. He goes about making iron-and-wood machines do live things.

It is never the machines that are dead.

It is only mechanical-minded men that are dead.

CHAPTER VI