The Song of Gasoline

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

I wonder how many persons were really moved by that curious motor-rhapsody with which the late W. E. Henley’s poetic career closed ? For my part, I felt that a liberty had been taken. I did not relish being snatched up from my comfortable footpath and whirled about the country in all this pother of haste. I had no regard for the puffing, whirring, tooting abomination under me, and I was not proud of the dismay of dust and flurry and stench I left behind me. Nor was my fancy touched by the adventure. I could understand that we were achieving transit by road at a rate for which the law prescribes rails; but I searched my consciousness in vain for the sense of speed.

The fact is, you can’t thrill the imagination with mechanical contrivances or feats. You can excite the curiosity; you can, at best, thrill the nerves. When Kipling’s McAndrew prays for “a man like Robbie Burns to sing the song of steam,” he is asking too much of a good-natured Providence. Yet it remained for the man of our generation who was in many respects nearest Burns to make the first vigorous try at poetizing an apparatus.

Mr. Henley’s motor-car is, he declares, a supreme product of human invention and skill: —

She is, above all, the symbol of speed. She at once domesticates and enfranchises a power which has hitherto been at the mercy of corporations and timetables. You are no longer to undergo the humiliation of buying tickets and making connections; for she gives you

She also affords, according to the poet, various sensations, the record of which is stirring enough; it tingles along the vasomotor nerves, and troubles the roots of the hair. One feels the sweep of the wind, the tremulous rote of the wheels. . . . Piff, piff — toot, toot,—

Sit close, Leathery One! Do you know how many miles an hour we are putting in ?

No, sir, I do not know, and I do not care. Be good enough to set me down at precisely this spot. I like traveling, and I like racing, but I do not care to be implicated in this disreputable debauch of hurry. Let me take a brisk walk home: that will restore me to the experience of a respectable human sensation. I, for one, cannot see that rational speed can exist at the expense of all other pleasures of the road.

This is an old-fashioned view, now that our love of haste has made real travel almost as rare as real correspondence. Our notion is to annihilate space and time. We exult in the promised privilege of “wiring” by “ wireless;” and we mainly delight in the automobile, not as a horseless carriage, but as a railless locomotive.

One must believe nature had some design in providing man with members not only stable enough to prop him against gravity, but with springs and hinges enabling him for self-propulsion, and even for making creditable headway. But the flesh is weak: it may not have been Adam who discovered what an improvement a proxy of four legs was over the original arrangement of two. The horse, at all events, represented merely a development of the leg idea. Even the invention of the wheel did not provide a radically new method of getting over the ground, I think it was the Autocrat who said that a wheel is in principle nothing more than a series of legs. Until almost our own day it x-emained simply a recognized auxiliary of the perpendicular member. That was before the notion of sheer transit had taken possession of us. No doubt a journey in a traveling-carriage entailed many discomforts; but it was a human experience, not merely a hiatus. Now it is not enough for us to progress; we do not care a rap for the pleasures of the road: the thing is to hurtle.

De Quincey certainly thought there was a limit of profitable speed, for the locomotive was already invented when he chose the English mail-coach as symbol of the “Glory of motion.” Fifteen miles an hour! what a surprising rate of motion — of normal motion. Not so many years later Mrs. Carlyle recorded a journey by rail at the tremendous speed of thirty miles an hour. “It was not so much riding as flying,” she says significantly. The sense of normal motion was lost. Shehad not enjoyed even vicariously a triumph of muscular exertion; she had simply passed with extreme and unintelligible rapidity over space, between points, as a parcel is shot thi’ough a pneumatic tube. What is the imagination going to do with an experience like that ? Landscape through a car-window is a shift of irritating glimpses, or a mere blur. One might as well try to enjoy a library at a smart walk along the shelves, or a picture gallery on the dead run.

Even as a racing event the exploit of a machine is a tame affair. We have a type of popular short story just now which deals with excessive speeds attained by locomotives. Not even the man behind the throttle succeeds in making his “record run,” or his feat with a “wild engine,” material for imaginative art. It is exciting, yes, but that is because we keep hoping against hope that somebody will be run over, telescoped, blown up, or at least ditched. Otherwise, increase of speed from thirty to a hundred miles an hour has no particular meaning for us. What does the racing of “ocean greyhounds” do except offer a chance for betting in the smoking-room ? What is the moral of the gi’eat motor-race which devastated half Europe not long ago ? I should say it would bear upon the utter ridiculousness of the affair. It is not so bad to murder people, history teaches, if it is done in a respectable way. Few persons would fancy being assassinated by an automobile, even if it were breaking a record; it would not be a death which any man of gallantry could tolerate.

Who would n’t take more satisfaction in seeing Joe Patchen do a mile in 1.58 (without a wind-shield) than in seeing an automobile make the same distance in, say, thirty seconds ? One can but notice the shifts to which Mr. Henley was put in order to galvanize the sympathy of his readers: —

How coolly and adroitly equine beauty, as well as equine strength, is appropriated to the uses of this infernal machine! Even so one might celebrate, poetically, the charms of a double-cylindered steam-laundering apparatus, because it does the work of some seventy-five puissant superb ladies of the tub.

What sort of figure would Pheidippides have made, off for Sparta in a racing auto ? How should we have looked, Dirck, Joris, and I, on the road from Ghent to Aix in a touring-car ? Or Paul Revere tearing through Medford town on a motor-bicycle? Or De Quincey (the wires down) bearing the news of Waterloo through England by special engine ? I do not believe there is any possible combination of wheels and valves and pistons, or any feat which may be accomplished by its aid, which is capable of permanently impressing the human imagination. If there is, we shall doubtless have, sooner or later, our epic of driving-rods, and our song of gasoline.