Part 4 (1/2)
Vulcan-Tennysons, blacksmiths to a planet, with dredges, skysc.r.a.pers, steam shovels and wireless telegraphs, hewing away on the heavens and the earth.
II
HEWING AWAY ON THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH
The poetry of machinery to-day is a mere matter of fact--a part of the daily wonder of life to countless silent people. The next thing the world wants to know about machinery is not that there is poetry in it, but that the poetry which the common people have already found there, has a right to be there. We have the fact. It is the theory to put with the fact which concerns us next and which really troubles us most. There are very few of us, on the whole, who can take any solid comfort in a fact--no matter what it is--until we have a theory to approve of it with. Its merely being a fact does not seem to make very much difference.
1. Machinery has poetry in it because it is an expression of the soul.
2. It expresses the soul (1) of the individual man who creates the machine--the inventor, and (2) the man who lives with the machine the engineer.
3. It expresses G.o.d, if only that He is a G.o.d who can make men who can thus express their souls. Machinery is an act of wors.h.i.+p in the least sense if not in the greatest. If a man who can make machines like this is not clever enough with all his powers to find a G.o.d, and to wors.h.i.+p a G.o.d, he can wors.h.i.+p himself. It is because the poetry of machinery is the kind of poetry that does immeasurable things instead of immeasurably singing about them that it has been quite generally taken for granted that it is not poetry at all. The world has learned more of the purely poetic idea of freedom from a few dumb, prosaic machines that have not been able to say anything beautiful about it than from the poets of twenty centuries. The machine frees a hundred thousand men and smokes. The poet writes a thousand lines on freedom and has his bust in Westminster Abbey. The blacks in America were freed by Abraham Lincoln and the cotton gin. The real argument for unity--the argument against secession--was the locomotive. No one can fight the locomotive very long. It makes the world over into one world whether it wants to be one world or not. China is being conquered by steams.h.i.+ps. It cannot be said that the idea of unity is a new one.
Seers and poets have made poetry out of it for two thousand years.
Machinery is making the poetry mean something. Every new invention in matter that comes to us is a spiritual masterpiece. It is crowded with ideas. The Bessemer process has more political philosophy in it than was ever dreamed of in Sh.e.l.ley's poetry, and it would not be hard to show that the invention of the sewing machine was one of the most literary and artistic as well as one of the most religious events of the nineteenth century. The loom is the most beautiful thought that any one has ever had about Woman, and the printing press is more wonderful than anything that has ever been said on it.
”This is all very true,” interrupts the Logical Person, ”about printing presses and looms and everything else--one could go on forever--but it does not prove anything. It may be true that the loom has made twenty readers for Robert Browning's poetry where Browning would have made but one, but it does not follow that because the loom has freed women for beauty that the loom is beautiful, or that it is a fit theme for poetry.” ”Besides”--breaks in the Minor Poet--”there is a difference between a thing's being full of big ideas and its being beautiful. A foundry is powerful and interesting, but is it beautiful the way an electric fountain is beautiful or a sonnet or a doily?”
This brings to a point the whole question as to where the definition of beauty--the boundary line of beauty--shall be placed. A thing's being considered beautiful is largely a matter of size. The question ”Is a thing beautiful?” resolves itself into ”How large has a beautiful thing a right to be?” A man's theory of beauty depends, in a universe like this, upon how much of the universe he will let into it.
If he is afraid of the universe if he only lets his thoughts and pa.s.sions live in a very little of it, he is apt to a.s.sume that if a beautiful thing rises into the sublime and immeasurable--suggests boundless ideas--the beauty is blurred out of it. It is something--there is no denying that it is something--but, whatever it is or is not, it is not beauty. Nearly everything in our modern life is getting too big to be beautiful. Our poets are dumb because they see more poetry than their theories have room for. The fundamental idea of the poetry of machinery is infinity. Our theories of poetry were made--most of them--before infinity was discovered.
Infinity itself is old, and the idea that infinity exists--a kind of huge, empty rim around human life--is not a new idea to us, but the idea that this same infinity has or can have anything to do with us or with our arts, or our theories of art, or that we have anything to do with IT, is an essentially modern discovery. The actual experience of infinity--that is, the experience of being infinite (comparatively speaking)--as in the use of machinery, is a still more modern discovery. There is no better way perhaps, of saying what modern machinery really is, than to say that it is a recent invention for being infinite.
The machines of the world are all practically engaged in manufacturing the same thing. They are all time-and-s.p.a.ce-machines. They knit time and s.p.a.ce. Hundreds of thousands of things may be put in machines this very day, for us, before night falls, but only eternity and infinity shall be turned out. Sometimes it is called one and sometimes the other. If a man is going to be infinite or eternal it makes little difference which. It is merely a matter of form whether one is everywhere a few years, or anywhere forever. A sewing machine is as much a means of communication as a printing press or a locomotive. The locomotive takes a woman around the world. The sewing machine gives her a new world where she is. At every point where a machine touches the life of a human being, it serves him with a new measure of infinity.
This would seem to be a poetic thing for a machine to do. Traditional poetry does not see any poetry in it, because, according to our traditions poetry has fixed boundary lines, is an old, established inst.i.tution in human life, and infinity is not.
No one has wanted to be infinite before. Poetry in the ancient world was largely engaged in protecting people from the Infinite. They were afraid of it. They could not help feeling that the Infinite was over them. Wors.h.i.+p consisted in propitiating it, poetry in helping people to forget it. With the exception of Job, the Hebrews almost invariably employed a poet--when they could get one--as a kind of transfigured policeman--to keep the sky off. It was what was expected of poets.
The Greeks did the same thing in a different way. The only difference was, that the Greeks, instead of employing their poets to keep the sky off, employed them to make it as much like the earth as possible--a kind of raised platform which was less dreadful and more familiar and homelike and answered the same general purpose. In other words, the sky became beautiful to the Greek when he had made it small enough.
Making it small enough was the only way a Greek knew of making it beautiful.
Galileo knew another way. It is because Galileo knew another way--because he knew that the way to make the sky beautiful, was to make it large enough--that men are living in a new world. A new religion beats down through s.p.a.ce to us. A new poetry lifts away the ceilings of our dreams. The old sky, with its little tent of stars, its film of flame and darkness burning over us, has floated to the past. The twentieth century--the home of the Infinite--arches over our human lives. The heaven is no longer, to the sons of men, a priests'
wilderness, nor is it a poet's heaven--a paper, painted heaven, with little painted paper stars in it, to hide the wilderness.
It is a new heaven. Who, that has lived these latter years, that has seen it cras.h.i.+ng and breaking through the old one, can deny that what is over us now is a new heaven? The infinite cave of it, scooped out at last over our little naked, foolish lives, our running-about philosophies, our religions, and our governments--it is the main fact about us. Arts and literatures--ants under a stone, thousands of years, blind with light, hither and thither, racing about, hiding themselves.
But not long for dreams. More than this. The new heaven is matched by a new earth. Men who see a new heaven make a new earth. In its cloud of steam, in a kind of splendid, silent stammer of praise and love, the new earth lifts itself to the new heaven, lifts up days out of nights to It, digs wells for winds under It, lights darkness with falling water, makes ice out of vapor, and heat out of cold, draws down s.p.a.ce with engines, makes years out of moments with machines. It is a new world and all the men that are born upon it are new widemoving, cloud and mountain-moving men. The habits of stars and waters, the huge habits of s.p.a.ce and time, are the habits of the men.
The Infinite, at last, which in days gone by hung over us--the mere hiding place of Death, the awful living-room of G.o.d--is the neighborhood of human life.
Machinery has poetry in it because in expressing the soul it expresses the greatest idea that the soul of man can have, namely, the idea that the soul of man is infinite, or capable of being infinite.
Machinery has poetry in it also not merely because it is the symbol of infinite power in human life, or because it makes man think he is infinite, but because it is making him as infinite as he thinks he is.