Part 2 (2/2)

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, Las.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+mmer 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 the phonograph (whose talking had been rumored of many months) was allowed to talk in public, it talked to an audience in Metuchen, New Jersey, and, much to Mr. Edison's dismay, everybody laughed. Instead of being impressed with the real idea of the phonograph--being impressed because it could talk at all--people were impressed because it talked through its nose.

The more modern a machine is, when a man stands before it and seeks to know it,--the more it expects of the man, the more it appeals to his imagination and his soul,--the less it is willing to appeal to the outside of him. If he will not look with his whole being at a twin-screw steamer, he will not see it. Its poetry is under water.

This is one of the chief characteristics of the modern world, that its poetry is under water. The old sidewheel steamer floundering around in the big seas, pounding the air and water both with her huge, showy paddles, is not so poetic-looking as the sailboat, and the poetry in the sailboat is not so obvious, so plainly on top, as in a gondola.

People who do not admit poetry in machinery in general admit that there is poetry in a Dutch windmill, because the poetry is in sight. A Dutch windmill flourishes. The American windmill, being improved so much that it does not flourish, is supposed not to have poetry in it at all. The same general principle holds good with every machine that has been invented. The more the poet--that is, the inventor--works on it, the less the poetry in it shows. Progress in a modern machine, if one watches it in its various stages, always consists in making a machine stop posing and get down to work. The earlier locomotive, puffing helplessly along with a few cars on its crooked rails, was much more fire-breathing, dragon-like and picturesque than the present one, and the locomotive that came next, while very different, was more impressive than the present one. Every one remembers it,--the important-looking, bell-headed, woodpile-eating locomotive of thirty years ago, with its noisy steam-blowing habits and its ceaseless water-drinking habits, with its grim, spreading cowcatcher and its huge plug-hat--who does not remember it--fussing up and down stations, ringing its bell forever and whistling at everything in sight? It was impossible to travel on a train at all thirty years ago without always thinking of the locomotive. It shoved itself at people. It was always doing things--now at one end of the train and now at the other, ringing its bell down the track, blowing in at the windows, it fumed and spread enough in hauling three cars from Boston to Concord to get to Chicago and back. It was the poetic, old-fas.h.i.+oned way that engines were made. One takes a train from New York to San Francisco now, and scarcely knows there is an engine on it. All he knows is that he is going, and sometimes the going is so good he hardly knows that.

The modern engines, the short-necked, pin-headed, large-limbed, silent ones, plunging with smooth and splendid leaps down their aisles of s.p.a.ce--engines without any faces, blind, grim, conquering, lifting the world--are more poetic to some of us than the old engines were, for the very reason that they are not so poetic-looking. They are less showy, more furtive, suggestive, modern and perfect.

In proportion as a machine is modern it hides its face. It refuses to look as poetic as it is; and if it makes a sound, it is almost always a sound that is too small for it, or one that belongs to some one else. The trolley-wire, lifting a whole city home to supper, is a giant with a falsetto voice. The large-sounding, the poetic-sounding, is not characteristic of the modern spirit. In so far as it exists at all in the modern age, either in its machinery or its poetry, it exists because it is accidental or left over. There was a deep ba.s.s steamer on the Mississippi once, with a very small head of steam, which any one would have admitted had poetry in it--old-fas.h.i.+oned poetry. Every time it whistled it stopped.

III

ON NOT SHOWING OFF

It is not true to say that the modern man does not care for poetry. He does not care for poetry that bears on--or for eloquent poetry. He cares for poetry in a new sense. In the old sense he does not care for eloquence in anything. The lawyer on the floor of Congress who seeks to win votes by a show of eloquence is turned down. Votes are facts, and if the votes are to be won, facts must be arranged to do it. The doctor who stands best with the typical modern patient is not the most agreeable, sociable, jogging-about man a town contains, like the doctor of the days gone by. He talks less. He even prescribes less, and the reason that it is hard to be a modern minister (already cut down from two hours and a half to twenty or thirty minutes) is that one has to practise more than one can preach.

To be modern is to be suggestive and symbolic, to stand for more than one says or looks--the little girl with her loom clothing twelve hundred people. People like it. They are used to it. All life around them is filled with it. The old-fas.h.i.+oned prayer-meeting is dying out in the modern church because it is a mere specialty in modern life.

The prayer-meeting recognizes but one way of praying, and people who have a gift for praying that way go, but the majority of people--people who have discovered that there are a thousand other ways of praying, and who like them better--stay away.

When the telegraph machine was first thought of, the words all showed on the outside. When it was improved it became inner and subtle. The messages were read by sound. Everything we have which improves at all improves in the same way. The exterior conception of righteousness of a hundred years ago--namely, that a man must do right because it is his duty--is displaced by the modern one, the morally thorough one--namely, that a man must do right because he likes it--do it from the inside. The more improved righteousness is, the less it shows on the outside. The more modern righteousness is, the more it looks like selfishness, the better the modern world likes it, and the more it counts.

On the whole, it is against a thing rather than in its favor, in the twentieth century, that it looks large. Time was when if it had not been known as a matter of fact that Galileo discovered heaven with a gla.s.s three feet long, men would have said that it would hardly do to discover heaven with anything less than six hundred feet long. To the ancients, Galileo's instrument, even if it had been practical, would not have been poetic or fitting. To the moderns, however, the fact that Galileo's star-tool was three feet long, that he carried a new heaven about with him in his hands, was half the poetry and wonder of it. Yet it was not so poetic-looking as the six-hundred-foot telescope invented later, which never worked.

Nothing could be more impressive than the original substantial R---- typewriter. One felt, every time he touched a letter, as if he must have said a sentence. It was like saying things with pile-drivers. The machine obtruded itself at every point. It flourished its means and ends. It was a gesticulating machine. One commenced every new line with his foot.

The same general principle may be seen running alike through machinery and through life. The history of man is traced in water-wheels. The overshot wheel belonged to a period when everything else--religion, literature, and art--was overshot. When, as time pa.s.sed on, common men began to think, began to think under a little, the Reformation came in--and the undershot wheel, as a matter of course. There is no denying that the overshot wheel is more poetic-looking--it does its work with twelve quarts of water at a time and shows every quart--but it soon develops into the undershot wheel, which shows only the drippings of the water, and the undershot wheel develops into the turbine wheel, which keeps everything out of sight--except its work.

The water in the six turbine wheels at Niagara has sixty thousand horses in it, but it is not nearly as impressive and poetic-looking as six turbine wheels' worth of water would be--wasted and going over the Falls.

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