The Voice of the Machines | Page 5

which was the property of poets in the centuries that are now gone by, is the property to-day of all who are born upon the earth.
The man who is not able to draw a distinction between the works of John Milton and the plays of Shakespeare, but who expects something of the age he lives in, comes nearer to being a true poet than any writer of verses can ever expect to be who does not expect anything of this same age he lives in--not even verses. Expectancy is the practice of poetry. It is poetry caught in the act. Though the whole world be lifting its voice, and saying in the same breath that poetry is dead, this same world is living in the presence of more poetry, and more kinds of poetry, than men have known on the earth before, even in the daring of their dreams.
Pessimism has always been either literary--the result of not being in the real world enough--or genuine and provincial--the result of not being in enough of the real world.
If we look about in this present day for a suitable and worthy expectancy to make an age out of, or even a poem out of, where shall we look for it? In the literary definition? the historical argument? the minor poet?
The poet of the new movement shall not be discovered talking with the doctors, or defining art in the schools, nor shall he be seen at first by peerers in books. The passer-by shall see him, perhaps, through the door of a foundry at night, a lurid figure there, bent with labor, and humbled with labor, but with the fire from the heart of the earth playing upon his face. His hands--innocent of the ink of poets, of the mere outsides of things--shall be beautiful with the grasp of the thing called life--with the grim, silent, patient creating of life. He shall be seen living with retorts around him, loomed over by machines--shadowed by weariness--to the men about him half comrade, half monk--going in and out among them silently, with some secret glory in his heart.
If literary men--so called--knew the men who live with machines, who are putting their lives into them--inventors, engineers and brakemen--as well as they know Shakespeare and Milton and the Club, there would be no difficulty about finding a great meaning--i. e., a great hope or great poetry--in machinery. The real problem that stands in the way of poetry in machinery is not literary, nor ?sthetic. It is sociological. It is in getting people to notice that an engineer is a gentleman and a poet.

V
GENTLEMEN
The truest definition of a gentleman is that he is a man who loves his work. This is also the truest definition of a poet. The man who loves his work is a poet because he expresses delight in that work. He is a gentleman because his delight in that work makes him his own employer. No matter how many men are over him, or how many men pay him, or fail to pay him, he stands under the wide heaven the one man who is master of the earth. He is the one infallibly overpaid man on it. The man who loves his work has the single thing the world affords that can make a man free, that can make him his own employer, that admits him to the ranks of gentlemen, that pays him, or is rich enough to pay him, what a gentleman's work is worth.
The poets of the world are the men who pour their passions into it, the men who make the world over with their passions. Everything that these men touch, as with some strange and immortal joy from out of them, has the thrill of beauty in it, and exultation and wonder. They cannot have it otherwise even if they would. A true man is the autobiography of some great delight mastering his heart for him, possessing his brain, making his hands beautiful.
Looking at the matter in this way, in proportion to the number employed there are more gentlemen running locomotives to-day than there are teaching in colleges. In proportion as we are more creative in creating machines at present than we are in creating anything else there are more poets in the mechanical arts than there are in the fine arts; and while many of the men who are engaged in the machine-shops can hardly be said to be gentlemen (that is, they would rather be preachers or lawyers), these can be more than offset by the much larger proportion of men in the fine arts, who, if they were gentlemen in the truest sense, would turn mechanics at once; that is, they would do the thing they were born to do, and they would respect that thing,