Part 3 (2/2)

If the mere machinery of a gra.s.shopper's hop could be made plain and large enough, there is not a man living who would not be impressed by it. If gra.s.shoppers were made (as they might quite as easily have been) 640 feet high, the huge beams of their legs above their bodies towering like cranes against the horizon, the sublimity of a gra.s.shopper's machinery--the huge levers of it, his hops across valleys from mountain to mountain, shadowing fields and villages--would have been one of the impressive features of human life. Everybody would be willing to admit of the mere machinery of a gra.s.shopper, (if there were several acres of it) that there was creative sublimity in it. They would admit that the bare idea of having such a stately piece of machinery in a world at all, slipping softly around on it, was an idea with creative sublimity in it; and yet these same people because the sublimity, instead of being spread over several acres, is crowded into an inch and a quarter, are not impressed by it.

But it is objected, it is not merely a matter of spiritual size. There is something more than plainness lacking in the symbolism of machinery. ”The symbolism of machinery is lacking in fitness. It is not poetic.” ”A thing can only be said to be poetic in proportion as its form expresses its nature.” Mechanical inventions may stand for impressive facts, but such inventions, no matter how impressive the facts may be, cannot be called poetic unless their form expresses those facts. A horse plunging and champing his bits on the eve of battle, for instance, is impressive to a man, and a pill-box full of dynamite, with a spark creeping toward it, is not.

That depends partly on the man and partly on the spark. A man may not be impressed by a pill-box full of dynamite and a spark creeping toward it, the first time he sees it, but the second time he sees it, if he has time, he is impressed enough. He does not stand and criticise the lack of expression in pill-boxes, nor wait to remember the day when he all but lost his life because

A pill-box by the river's brim A simple pill-box was to him And nothing more.

Wordsworth in these memorable lines has summed up and brought to an issue the whole matter of poetry in machinery. Everything has its language, and the power of feeling what a thing means, by the way it looks, is a matter of experience--of learning the language. The language is there. The fact that the language of the machine is a new language, and a strangely subtle one, does not prove that it is not a language, that its symbolism is not good, and that there is not poetry in machinery.

The inventor need not be troubled because in making his machine it does not seem to express. It is written that neither you nor I, comrade nor G.o.d, nor any man, nor any man's machine, nor G.o.d's machine, in this world shall express or be expressed. If it is the meaning of life to us to be expressed in it, to be all-expressed, we are indeed sorry, dumb, plaintive creatures dotting a star awhile, creeping about on it, warmed by a heater ninety-five million miles away. The machine of the universe itself, does not express its Inventor. It does not even express the men who are under it. The ninety-five millionth mile waits on us silently, at the doorways of our souls night and day, and we wait on IT. Is it not THERE? Is it not HERE--this ninety-five millionth mile? It is ours. It runs in our veins. Why should Man--a being who can live forever in a day, who is born of a boundless birth, who takes for his fireside the immeasurable--express or expect to be expressed? What we would like to be--even what we are--who can say? Our music is an apostrophe to dumbness. The Pantomime above us rolls softly, resistlessly on, over the pantomime within us. We and our machines, both, hewing away on the infinite, beckon and are still.

I am not troubled because the machines do not seem to express themselves. I do not know that they can express themselves. I know that when the day is over, and strength is spent, and my soul looks out upon the great plain--upon the soft, night-blooming cities, with their huge machines striving in sleep, might lifts itself out upon me.

I rest.

I know that when I stand before a foundry hammering out the floors of the world, clas.h.i.+ng its awful cymbals against the night, I lift my soul to it, and in some way--I know not how--while it sings to me I grow strong and glad.

PART THREE

THE MACHINES AS POETS

I

PLATO AND THE GENERAL ELECTRIC WORKS

I have an old friend who lives just around the corner from one of the main lines of travel in New England, and whenever I am pa.s.sing near by and the railroads let me, I drop in on him awhile and quarrel about art. It's a good old-fas.h.i.+oned comfortable, disorderly conversation we have generally, the kind people used to have more than they do now--sketchy and not too wise--the kind that makes one think of things one wishes one had said, afterward.

We always drift a little at first, as if of course we could talk about other things if we wanted to, but we both know, and know every time, that in a few minutes we shall be deep in a discussion of the Things That Are Beautiful and the Things That Are Not.

Brim thinks that I have picked out more things to be beautiful than I have a right to, or than any man has, and he is trying to put a stop to it. He thinks that there are enough beautiful things in this world that have been beautiful a long while, without having people--well, people like me, for instance, poking blindly around among all these modern brand-new things hoping that in spite of appearances there is something one can do with them that will make them beautiful enough to go with the rest. I'm afraid Brim gets a little personal in talking with me at times and I might as well say that, while disagreeing in a conversation with Brim does not lead to calling names it does seem to lead logically to one's going away, and trying to find afterwards, some thing that is the matter with him.

”The trouble with you, my dear Brim, is,” I say (on paper, afterwards, as the train speeds away), ”that you have a false-cla.s.sic or Stucco-Greek mind. The Greeks, the real Greeks, would have liked all these things--trolley cars, cables, locomotives,--seen the beautiful in them, if they had to do their living with them every day, the way we do. You would say you were more Greek than I am, but when one thinks of it, you are just going around liking the things the Greeks liked 3000 years ago, and I am around liking the things a Greek would like now, that is, as well as I can. I don't flatter myself I begin to enjoy the wireless telegraph to-day the way Plato would if he had the chance, and Alcibiades in an automobile would get a great deal more out of it, I suspect, than anyone I have seen in one, so far; and I suspect that if Socrates could take Bliss Carman and, say, William Watson around with him on a tour of the General Electric Works in Schenectady they wouldn't either of them write sonnets about anything else for the rest of their natural lives.”

I can only speak for one and I do not begin to see the poetry in the machines that a Greek would see, as yet.

But I have seen enough.

I have seen engineers go by, pounding on this planet, making it small enough, welding the nations together before my eyes.

I have seen inventors, still men by lamps at midnight with a whirl of visions, with a whirl of thoughts, putting in new drivewheels on the world.

I have seen (in Schenectady,) all those men--the five thousand of them--the grime on their faces and the great caldrons of melted railroad swinging above their heads. I have stood and watched them there with lightning and with flame hammering out the wills of cities, putting in the underpinnings of nations, and it seemed to me me that Bliss Carman and William Watson would not be ashamed of them ...

brother-artists every one ... in the glory ... in the dark ...

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