The Voice of the Machines | Page 6

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, and make
every one else respect it.
While the definition of a poet and a gentleman--that he is a man who
loves his work--might appear to make a new division of society, it is a
division that already exists in the actual life of the world, and
constitutes the only literal aristocracy the world has ever had.
It may be set down as a fundamental principle that, no matter how
prosaic a man may be, or how proud he is of having been born upon
this planet with poetry all left out of him, it is the very essence of the
most hard and practical man that, as regards the one uppermost thing in

his life, the thing that reveals the power in him, he is a poet in spite of
himself, and whether he knows it or not.
So long as the thing a man works with is a part of an inner ideal to him,
so long as he makes the thing he works with express that ideal, the heat
and the glow and the lustre and the beauty and the unconquerableness
of that man, and of that man's delight, shall be upon all that he does. It
shall sing to heaven. It shall sing to all on earth who overhear heaven.
Every man who loves his work, who gets his work and his ideal
connected, who makes his work speak out the heart of him, is a poet. It
makes little difference what he says about it. In proportion as he has
power with a thing; in proportion as he makes the thing--be it a bit of
color, or a fragment of flying sound, or a word, or a wheel, or a
throttle--in proportion as he makes the thing fulfill or express what he
wants it to fulfill or express, he is a poet. All heaven and earth cannot
make him otherwise.
That the inventor is in all essential respects a poet toward the machine
that he has made, it would be hard to deny. That, with all the apparent
prose that piles itself about his machine, the machine is in all essential
respects a poem to him, who can question? Who has ever known an
inventor, a man with a passion in his hands, without feeling toward him
as he feels toward a poet? Is it nothing to us to know that men are
living now under the same sky with us, hundreds of them (their faces
haunt us on the street), who would all but die, who are all but dying
now, this very moment, to make a machine live,--martyrs of valves and
wheels and of rivets and retorts, sleepless, tireless, unconquerable men?
To know an inventor the moment of his triumph,--the moment when,
working his will before him, the machine at last, resistless, silent,
massive pantomime of a life, offers itself to the gaze of men's souls and
the needs of their bodies,--to know an inventor at all is to know that at a
moment like this a chord is touched in him strange and deep, soft as
from out of all eternity. The melody that Homer knew, and that Dante
knew, is his also, with the grime upon his hands, standing and watching
it there. It is the same song that from pride to pride and joy to joy has
been singing through the hearts of The Men Who Make, from the

beginning of the world. The thing that was not, that now is, after all the
praying with his hands ... iron and wood and rivet and cog and
wheel--is it not more than these to him standing before it there? It is the
face of matter--who does not know it?--answering the face of the man,
whispering to him out of the dust of the earth.
What is true of the men who make the machines is equally true of the
men who live with them. The brakeman and the locomotive engineer
and the mechanical engineer and the sailor all have the same spirit.
Their days are invested with the same dignity and aspiration, the same
unwonted enthusiasm, and self-forgetfulness in the work itself. They
begin their lives as boys dreaming of the track, or of cogs and wheels,
or of great waters.
As I stood