The Voice of the Machines | Page 3

one set of machines to be consumed by
another set of machines.
So omnipresent and masterful and intimate with all existence have cogs
and wheels and belts become, that not a civilized man could be found
on the globe to-day, who, if all the machines that have helped him to
live this single year of 1906 could be gathered or piled around him
where he stands, would be able, for the machines piled high around his
life, to see the sky--to be sure there was a sky. It is then his privilege,
looking up at this horizon of steel and iron and running belts, to read in
a paper book the literary definition of what this heaven is, that spreads
itself above him, and above the world, walled in forever with its
irrevocable roar of wheels.
"No inspiring emotions," says the literary definition, "ideas or
conceptions can possibly be connected with machinery--or ever will
be."
What is to become of a world roofed in with machines for the rest of its
natural life, and of the people who will have to live under the roof of
machines, the literary definition does not say. It is not the way of
literary definitions. For a time at least we feel assured that we, who are
the makers of definitions, are poetically and personally safe. Can we
not live behind the ramparts of our books? We take comfort with the
medallions of poets and the shelves that sing around us. We sit by our
library fires, the last nook of poetry. Beside our gates the great
crowding chimneys lift themselves. Beneath our windows herds of
human beings, flocking through the din, in the dark of the morning and
the dark of the night, go marching to their fate. We have done what we
could. Have we not defined poetry? Is it nothing to have laid the
boundary line of beauty?... The huge, hurrying, helpless world in its
belts and spindles--the people who are going to be obliged to live in it

when the present tense has spoiled it a little more--all this--the great
strenuous problem--the defense of beauty, the saving of its past, the
forging of its future, the welding of it with life-all these?... Pull down
the blinds, Jeems. Shut out the noises of the street. A little longer ... the
low singing to ourselves. Then darkness. The wheels and the din above
our graves shall be as the passing of silence.
Is it true that, in a few years more, if a man wants the society of his
kind, he will have to look down through a hatchway? Or that, if he
wants to be happy, he will have to stand on it and look away? I do not
know. I only know how it is now.
They stay not in their hold These stokers, Stooping to hell To feed a
ship. Below the ocean floors, Before their awful doors Bathed in flame,
I hear their human lives Drip--drip.
Through the lolling aisles of comrades In and out of sleep, Troops of
faces To and fro of happy feet, They haunt my eyes. Their murky faces
beckon me From the spaces of the coolness of the sea Their fitful
bodies away against the skies.

III
SOULS OF MACHINES
It does not make very much difference to the machines whether there is
poetry in them or not. It is a mere abstract question to the machines.
It is not an abstract question to the people who are under the machines.
Men who are under things want to know what the things are for, and
they want to know what they are under them for. It is a very live,
concrete, practical question whether there is, or can be, poetry in
machinery or not. The fate of society turns upon it.
There seems to be nothing that men can care for, whether in this world
or the next, or that they can do, or have, or hope to have, which is not
bound up, in our modern age, with machinery. With the fate of

machinery it stands or falls. Modern religion is a machine. If the
characteristic vital power and spirit of the modern age is organization,
and it cannot organize in its religion, there is little to be hoped for in
religion. Modern education is a machine. If the principle of machinery
is a wrong and inherently uninspired principle--if because a machine is
a machine no great meaning can be expressed by it, and no great result
accomplished by it--there is little to be hoped for in modern education.
Modern government is a machine. The more modern a government is,
the more the machine in it is emphasized. Modern trade is a machine. It
is made up of (1) corporations--huge machines employing machines,