The Human Machine

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The Human Machine

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Human Machine, by E. Arnold
Bennett This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and
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Title: The Human Machine
Author: E. Arnold Bennett
Release Date: July 3, 2004 [EBook #12811]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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HUMAN MACHINE ***

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THE HUMAN MACHINE
BY ARNOLD BENNETT

_First Published November 1908
Second Edition September 1910
Third Edition April 1911
Fourth Edition August 1912
Fifth Edition January 1913
Sixth Edition August 1913_

CONTENTS
I
TAKING ONESELF FOR GRANTED
II
AMATEURS IN THE ART OF LIVING
III
THE BRAIN AS A GENTLEMAN-AT-LARGE
IV
THE FIRST PRACTICAL STEP
V
HABIT-FORMING BY CONCENTRATION
VI
LORD OVER THE NODDLE

VII
WHAT 'LIVING' CHIEFLY IS
VIII
THE DAILY FRICTION
IX
'FIRE!'
X
MISCHIEVOUSLY OVERWORKING IT
XI
AN INTERLUDE
XII
AN INTEREST IN LIFE
XIII
SUCCESS AND FAILURE
XIV
A MAN AND HIS ENVIRONMENT
XV
L.S.D.
XVI
REASON, REASON!

I
TAKING ONESELF FOR GRANTED
There are men who are capable of loving a machine more deeply than
they can love a woman. They are among the happiest men on earth.
This is not a sneer meanly shot from cover at women. It is simply a
statement of notorious fact. Men who worry themselves to distraction
over the perfecting of a machine are indubitably blessed beyond their
kind. Most of us have known such men. Yesterday they were
constructing motorcars. But to-day aeroplanes are in the air--or, at any
rate, they ought to be, according to the inventors. Watch the inventors.
Invention is not usually their principal business. They must invent in
their spare time. They must invent before breakfast, invent in the
Strand between Lyons's and the office, invent after dinner, invent on
Sundays. See with what ardour they rush home of a night! See how
they seize a half-holiday, like hungry dogs a bone! They don't want
golf, bridge, limericks, novels, illustrated magazines, clubs, whisky,
starting-prices, hints about neckties, political meetings, yarns, comic
songs, anturic salts, nor the smiles that are situate between a gay
corsage and a picture hat. They never wonder, at a loss, what they will
do next. Their evenings never drag--are always too short. You may,
indeed, catch them at twelve o'clock at night on the flat of their backs;
but not in bed! No, in a shed, under a machine, holding a candle (whose
paths drop fatness) up to the connecting-rod that is strained, or the
wheel that is out of centre. They are continually interested, nay,
enthralled. They have a machine, and they are perfecting it. They get
one part right, and then another goes wrong; and they get that right, and
then another goes wrong, and so on. When they are quite sure they have
reached perfection, forth issues the machine out of the shed--and in five
minutes is smashed up, together with a limb or so of the inventors, just
because they had been quite sure too soon. Then the whole business
starts again. They do not give up--that particular wreck was, of course,
due to a mere oversight; the whole business starts again. For they have
glimpsed perfection; they have the gleam of perfection in their souls.
Thus their lives run away. 'They will never fly!' you remark, cynically.

Well, if they don't? Besides, what about Wright? With all your
cynicism, have you never envied them their machine and their
passionate interest in it?
You know, perhaps, the moment when, brushing in front of the glass,
you detected your first grey hair. You stopped brushing; then you
resumed brushing, hastily; you pretended not to be shocked, but you
were. Perhaps you know a more disturbing moment than that, the
moment when it suddenly occurred to you that you had 'arrived' as far
as you ever will arrive; and you had realised as much of your early
dream as you ever will realise, and the realisation was utterly unlike the
dream; the marriage was excessively prosaic and eternal, not at all what
you expected it to be; and your illusions were dissipated; and games
and hobbies had an unpleasant core of tedium and futility; and the ideal
tobacco-mixture did not exist; and one literary masterpiece resembled
another; and all the days that are to come will more or less resemble the
present day, until you die; and in an illuminating flash you understood
what all those people were driving at when they wrote such
unconscionably