BOOK THREE

      LETTING THE CROWD BE BEAUTIFUL


      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 furni-
      ture 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
      glass 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 passing the spirit of the Strand. I
      have seen the great flocking bridges and the roar about
      St. Paul's in communion with the tree-tops 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 [244]
      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 God.
 


      CHAPTER IV

      DEAD AS A DOOR NAIL!

      THERE are people who say that machines cannot be beauti-
      ful, 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 differ-
      ence between live and dead men. The generally accepted idea
      of 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 responsive-
      ness 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 [246]
      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 Titian-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 cre-
      ated the machine, the genius of imperious and implacable self-
      expression, of glorious self-assertion in matter, the genius for
      being human, for being spiritual, and for overflowing every-
      thing 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 English-
      man 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, stem [247]
      gladness, implacableness, and hope, have appointed to their
      souls expression through machinery. Our Engines and our
      radium shall cry to God! 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 noblest 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 God!
 


      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 God,
      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 God 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 god, 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 he,at and cold, to [249]
      time and space 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 God, going abroad through all the world, looking
      back at us when we have made them, unblinking and with-
      out sin!

      Like rain and sunshine, like chemicals, and like all the other
      innocent, godlike 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 dis-
      covered 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

      THE MACHINES' MACHINES

      THE fate of civilization is not going to be determined
      by people who are morbidly like machines on the one hand,
      or by people who are morbidly unmechanical, on the other.

      People in a machine civilization who try to live without being
      automatic and mechanical-minded part of the time and in
      some things, people who try to make everything they do artistic
      and self-expressive and hand-made, who attend to all their own
      thoughts and finish off all their actions by hand themselves,
      soon wish they were dead.

      People who do everything they do mechanically, or by
      machinery, are dead already.

      It is bad enough for those of us who are trying to live our
      lives ourselves—real, true, hand-made individual lives—to
      have to fight all these machines about us trying daily to roar
      and roll us down into humdrum and nothingness, without
      having to fight besides all these dear people we have about us
      too, who have turned machines, even one's own flesh and blood.

      Does not one see them—see them everywhere—one's own
      flesh and blood, going about like stone-crushers, road-rollers,
      lifts, lawn-mowers?

      Between the morbidly mechanical people and the morbidly
      unmechanical people, modern civilization hangs in the balance.

      There must be some way of being just mechanical enough,
      and at the right time and right place, and of being just un-
      mechanical enough at the right time and right place. And
      there must be some way in which men can be mechanical and
      unmechanical at will.

      The fate of civilization turns on men who recognize the nature [251]
      of machinery, who make machines serve them, who add the
      machines to their souls, like telephones and wireless telegraph,
      or to their bodies, like radium and railroads, and who know
      when and when not and how and how not to use them—who
      are so used to using machines quietly and powerfully, that they
      do not let the machines outwit them and unman them.

      Who are these men?

      How do they do it?

      They are the Machine-Trainers. The men who understand
      people-machines, who understand iron machines, and who
      understand how to make people-machines and iron machines
      run softly together.