BOOK THREE

      LETTING THE CROWD BE BEAUTIFUL


      PART TWO

      IRON MACHINES

      CHAPTER I

      STEEPLES AND CHIMNEYS

      I WENT to the Durbar the other night in cinema colour and
      saw the King and Queen through India. I had found my way,
      with hundreds of others, into the gallery of the Scala Theatre,
      and out of that big, still rim of watchful darkness where I sat I
      saw—there must have been thousands of them—crowds of
      camels running.

      And crowds of elephants went swinging past.

      I watched them like a boy, like a boy standing on the edge of
      a thousand years and looking off at a world.

      It was stately and strange, and like far music to sit quite still
      and watch civilizations swinging past.

      Then suddenly it became near and human—the spirit of
      playgrounds and of shouting and boyish laughter ran through
      it. And we watched the elephants, naked and untrimmed,
      lolling down to the lake and lying down to be scrubbed in it with
      comfortable low snortings and slow rolling in the water, and the
      men standing by all the while like little play-nurses and tending
      them, their big bungling babies, at the bath. A few minutes
      later we watched the same elephants, hundreds of them, their
      mighty toilets made, pacing slowly past, swinging their gorgeous
      trappings in our eyes, rolling their huge hoodahs at us, and all
      the time still those little funny dots of men beside them, moving
      them silently, moving them invisibly as by a spirit, as by a kind
      of awful wireless—those great engines of the flesh! I shall [237]
      never forget it or live without it, that slow pantomime of those
      I mighty, silent Eastern nations, their religions, their philosophies,
      their wills, their souls, moving their elephants past—the long
      panorama of it, of their little awful human wills, all those
      little black, helpless-looking slits of Human Will astride those
      mighty necks!

      I have the same feeling when I see Count Zeppelin with his
      airship, or Grahame-White at Hendon, riding his vast cosmic
      pigeon up the sky; and it is the same feeling I have with the
      locomotives—those unconscious, forbidding, coldly obedient.
      terrible fellows! Have I not lain awake and listened to them
      storming through the night, heard them out there ahead working
      our wills on the blackness, on the thick night, on the stars,
      on Space, and on Time while we slept?

      My main feeling at the Durbar while I watched those splendid
      beasts—the crowds of camels, the crowds of elephants—all
      being driven along by the little, faint, dreamy, sleepy-looking
      people was, "Why don't their elephants turn around on them
      and chase them?"

      I kept thinking at first that they would, almost any minute.

      Our elephants chase us—most of us. Who has not seen
      locomotives coming quietly out of their roundhouses in New
      York and begin chasing people, chasing whole towns, tearing
      along with them, making everybody hurry whether or no,
      speeding up and ordering around by the clock great cities,
      everybody alike, the rich and the poor, the just and the unjust,
      for hundreds of miles around? In the same way I have seen,
      hundreds of times, motor cars turning around on their owners
      and chasing them—chasing them fairly out of their lives.
      And hundreds of thousands of little wood-and-rubber Things
      with nickel bells whirring, may be seen ordering around peo-
      ple—who pay for them it—in any city of our modern
      world.

      Now and then one comes on a man who keeps a telephone,
      who is a gentleman with it, and who keeps it in its place, but [238]
      not often.

      There are certain questions to be asked and to be settled in
      any civilization that would be called great.

      First: Do the elephants chase the men in it? Second:
      And if—as in our Western civilization—the men have made
      their own elephants, why should they be chased by them?

      There are some of us who have wondered a little at the
      comparative inferiority of organ music. We have come to the
      conclusion that perhaps organ music is inferior because it has
      been largely composed by organists, by men who sit at organ
      machines many hours a day, and who have let their organ
      machines with all their stops and pedals, and with all their
      stop-and-pedal-mindedness, select out of their minds the tones
      that organs can do best—the music that machines like.

      Wagner has come to be recognized as a great and original
      composer for a machine age because he would not let his imagi-
      nation be cowed by the mere technical limitations, the narrow-
      mindedness of brass horns, wooden flutes, and catgut; he made
      up his mind that he would not sing violins. He made violins
      sing him.

      Perhaps this is the whole secret of art in a machine
      civilization.

      Perhaps a machine civilization is capable of a greater art than
      has ever been dreamed in the world before, the moment it
      stops being chased by its elephants. The question of letting
      the crowd be beautiful in our world of machines and crowds
      to-day turns on our producing Machine-Trainers.

      Men possessed by watches in their vest pockets cannot be
      inspired, men possessed by churches or religion-machines
      cannot be prophets, men possessed by school-machines cannot
      be educators.

      The reason that we find the poet, or at least the minor poet,
      discouraged in a machine age probably is, that there is nothing
      a minor poet can do in it. Why should nightingales, poppies,
      and dells expect, in a main trial of strength, to compete with [239]
      machines? And why should human beings running for their
      souls in a race with locomotives expect to keep very long from
      losing their souls?

      The reason that most people are discouraged about machinery
      to-day is that this is what they think a machine civilization is.
      They whine at the machines. They blame the locomotive.

      A better way for a man to do would be to stop blaming the
      locomotive, and stop running along out of breath beside it, and
      climb up into the cab.

      This is the whole issue of art in our modern civilization-
      climbing up into the cab.

      First come the Machine-Trainers, or poets who can tame
      engines. Then the other poets.

      In the meantime, the less we hear about nightingales and
      poppies and dells and love and above, the better.

      Poetry must make a few iron-handed, gentle-hearted, mighty
      men next. It is because we demand and expect the beautiful
      that we say that poetry must make men next.

      The elephants have been running around in the garden
      long enough.
 


      CHAPTER II

      BELLS AND WHEELS

      WE ARE living in a day of the great rebellion of the ma-
      chines. Out of a thousand thousand roundhouses and factories,
      vast cities and nations of machines on the land and on the sea
      have risen before the soul of man and said, "We have served
      you; now, you serve us."

      A million million vulgar, swaggering Goliaths, one sees them
      everywhere; they wave their arms at us around the world, they
      puff their white breath at us, they spit smoke in our eyes, line up
      in a row before the great cities, before the mighty-hearted
      nations, and say it again and again, all in chorus, "We have
      served you, now, you serve us!"

      It has come to sound to some of us as a kind of chant around
      our lives.

      But why should we serve them?

      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 [241]
      choirs of professors, draws me one side from the Great Western
      Railway Station, and intones in those still, solemn, lonely spaces
      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 noblest 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-glass 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 God!

      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 [242]
      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 God 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 hoarsely 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.