The Machine-Trainers

I

I WENT to the Durbar the other night (in kinemacolor) and saw the King and Queen through India. I had found my way, with hundreds of others, into a gallery of the Scala Theatre, and, out of that big, still rim of watchful darkness where I sat, I saw — there must have been thousands of them — crowds of camels running.

And crowds of elephants went swinging past. I watched them like a boy; like a boy standing on the edge of a thousand years and looking off at a world. It was stately and strange and like far music to sit quite still and watch civilizations swinging past.

Then, suddenly, it became near and human, the spirit of playgrounds and of shouting and boyish laughter ran through it. And we watched the elephants naked and untrimmed, lolling down to the lake, and lying down to be scrubbed in it, with comfortable, low snortings and slow rolling in the water, and the men standing by, all the while, like little play nurses, and tending them — their big bungling babies at the bath. A few minutes later we watched the same elephants, hundreds of them, their mighty toilets made, pacing slowly past, swinging their gorgeous trappings in our eyes, rolling their huge hoodahs at us, and, all the time, still those little funny dots of men beside them, moving them silently, moving them invisibly, as by a spirit, as by a kind of awful wireless — those great engines of the flesh! I shall never forget it or live without it, that slow pantomime of those mighty, silent Eastern nations; their religions, their philosophies, their wills, their souls, moving their elephants past; the long panorama of it, of their little, awful, human wills; all those little black, helpless looking slits of Human Will astride those mighty necks!

I have the same feeling when I see Count Zeppelin with his air-ship, or Grahame-White at Hendon, riding his vast cosmic pigeon up the sky; and it is the same feeling I have with the locomotives — those unconscious, forbidding, coldly obedient, terrible fellows! Have I not lain awake and listened to them storming through the night, heard them out there, ahead, working our wills on the blackness, on the thick night, on the stars, on space, and on time, while we slept?

My main feeling at the Durbar, while I watched those splendid beasts, the crowds of camels, the crowds of elephants, all being driven along by the little faint, dreamy, sleepy-looking people, was, ‘Why don’t their elephants turn around on them and chase them?'

I kept thinking at first that they would, almost any minute.

Our elephants chase us, most of us. Who has not seen locomotives come quietly out of their round-houses in New York and begin chasing people; chasing whole towns, tearing along with them, making everybody hurry whether or no; speeding up and ordering around by the clock great cities, everybody alike, the rich and the poor, the just and the unjust, for hundreds of miles around? In the same way I have seen, hundreds of times, motor-cars turning around on their owners and chasing them, chasing them fairly out of their lives. And hundreds of thousands of little wood and rubber Things with nickel bells whirring may be seen ordering around people — who pay them for it — in any city of our modern world.

Now and then one comes on a man who keeps a telephone who is a gentleman with it, and who keeps it in its place, but not often.

There are certain questions to be asked, and to be settled, in any civilization that would be called great.

First. Do the elephants chase the men in it? Second. And if—as in our western civilization — the men have made their own elephants, why should they be chased by them?

There are some of us who have wondered a little at the comparative inferiority of organ music. We have come to the conclusion that, perhaps, organ music is inferior because it has been largely composed by organists, by men who sit at organ machines many hours a day, and who have let their organ machines, with all their stops and pedals, and with all their stop-and-pedal mindedness, select out of their minds the tones that organs can do best — the music that machines like.

Wagner has come to be recognized as a great and original composer for a machine age, because he would not let his imagination be cowed by the mere technical limitations, the narrowmindedness of brass horns, wooden flutes, and catgut; he made up his mind that he would not sing violins. He made violins sing him.

Perhaps this is the whole secret of art in a machine civilization. Perhaps a machine civilization is capable of a greater art than has ever been dreamed of in the world before, the moment it stops being chased by its elephants. The question of letting the crowd be beautiful in our world of machines and crowds, to-day, turns on our producing Machine-Trainers.

Men possessed by watches in their vest pockets cannot be inspired; men possessed by churches or by religionmachines, cannot be prophets; men possessed by school-machines cannot be educators.

The reason that we find the poet, or at least the minor poet, discouraged in a machine age, probably is because there is nothing a minor poet can do in it. Why should nightingales, poppies, and dells expect, in a main trial of strength, to compete with machines? And why should human beings running for their souls in a race with locomotives expect to keep very long from losing them?

The reason that most people are discouraged about machinery to-day is because this is what they think a machine civilization is. They whine at the machines. They blame the locomotive.

A better way for a man to do would be to stop blaming the locomotive and stop running along out of breath beside it, and get up into the cab.

This is the whole issue of art in our modern civilization — getting up into the cab.

First come the Machine-Trainers, or poets who can tame engines. Then the other poets. In the mean time, the less we hear about nightingales and poppies and dells and love and above, the better. Poetry must make a few ironhanded, gentle-hearted, mighty men next. It is because we demand and expect the beautiful that we say that poetry must make men next.

The elephants have been running around in the garden long enough.

II

There are people who say that machines cannot be beautiful and cannot make for beauty because machines are dead.

I would agree with them if I thought that machines were dead.

I have watched in spirit, hundreds of years, the machines grow out of Man like nails, like vast antennæ, a kind of enormous, more unconscious sub-body. They are apparently of less lively and less sensitive tissue than tongues or eyes or flesh; and, like all bones, they do not renew, of course, as often or as rapidly as flesh. But the difference between live and dead machines is quite as grave and quite as important as the difference between live and dead men. The generally accepted idea of a live thing is that it is a thing that keeps dying and being born again every minute; it is seen to be alive by its responsiveness to the spirit, to the intelligence that created it, and that keeps re-creating it. I have known thousands of factories, and every factory I have known that is really strong or efficient has scales like a snake, and casts off its old self. All the people in it, and all the iron and wood in it, month by month, are being renewed and shedding themselves. Any live factory can always be seen moulting year after year. A live spirit goes all through the machinery, a kind of nervous tissue of invention, of thought.

We already speak of live and dead iron, of live and dead engines or halfdead and half-sick engines, and we have learned that there is such a thing as tired steel. What people do to steel makes a difference to it. Steel is sensitive to people. My human spirit grows my arm and moves it and guides it and expresses itself in it; keeps re-creating it and destroying it; and daily my soul keeps rubbing out and writing in new lines upon my face; and in the same way my typewriter, in a slow, more stolid fashion, responds to my spirit, too. Two men changing typewriters or motor-cars are, though more subtly, like two men changing boots. Sewingmachines, pianos, and fiddles grow intimate with the people who use them, and they come to express those particular people, and the ways in which they are different from others. A brown-eyed typewriter makes her machine move differently every day from a blue-eyed one. Typewriting machines never like to have their people take the liberty of lending them. Steel bars and wooden levers all have little mannerisms, little expressions, small souls of their own, habits of people that they have lived with, which have grasped the little wood and iron levers of their wills, and made them what they are.

It is somewhere in the region of this fact that we are going to discover the great determining secret of modern life, of the mastery of man over his machines. Man at the present moment, with all his new machines about him, is engaged in becoming as self-controlled, as self-expressive, with his new machines, with his wireless telegraph arms, and his railway legs, as he is with his flesh-and-blood ones. The force in man that is doing this is the spiritual genius in him that created the machine, the genius of imperious and implacable self-expression, of glorious self-assertion in matter, the genius for being human, for being spiritual, and for overflowing everything he touches, and everything he uses, with his own will, and with the ideals and desires of his soul. The Dutchman has expressed himself in Dutch architecture and in Dutch art, the American has expressed himself in the motor-car, the Englishman has expressed himself, has carved his will and his poetry, upon the hills, and made his landscape a masterpiece by a great nation. He has made his walls and winding roads, his rivers, his very tree-tops, express his deep, silent joy in the earth. So the great, fresh, young nations to-day, with a kind of new stern gladness, implacableness, and hope, have appointed to their souls expression through machinery. Our engines and our radium shall cry to God. Our wheels sing in the sun!

Machinery is our new art-form. A man expresses himself first in his hands and feet, then in his clothes, and then in his rooms or in his house, and then on the ground about him; the very hills grow like him, and the ground in the fields becomes his countenance, and now, last and furthest of all, requiring the liveliest and noblest grasp of his soul, the finest circulation of will, of all, he begins expressing himself in the vast machines, in his three-thousandmile railways, his vast, cold-looking looms, and dull steel hammers. With telescopes for Mars-eyes for his spirit, he walks up the skies; he expresses his soul in deep and dark mines, and in mighty foundries melting and remoulding the world. He is making these things intimate, sensitive and colossal expressions of his soul. They have become the subconscious body, the abysmal, semi-infinite body of the man, sacred as the body of the man is sacred, and as full of light or darkness.

So I have seen the machines go swinging through the world. Like archangels, like demons, they mount up our desires on the mountains. We do as we will with them. We build Winchester Cathedral all over again, on water. We dive down with our steel wheels and nose for knowledge, like a great fish, along the bottom of the sea. We beat up our wills through the air. We fling up, with our religion, with our faith, our bodies on the clouds. We fly reverently and strangely, our hearts all still and happy, in the face of God!

III

The whole process of machineinvention is itself the most colossal spiritual achievement of history. The bare idea we have had of unraveling all creation, and of doing it up again to express our own souls, — the idea of subduing matter, of making our ideals get their way with matter, with radium, ether, antiseptics, — is itself a religion, a poetry, a ritual, a cry to heaven. The supreme spiritual adventure of the world has become this task that man has set himself, of breaking down and casting away forever the idea that there is such a thing as matter belonging to Matter — matter that keeps on in a dead, stupid way, just being matter. The idea that matter is not all alive with our souls, with our desires and prayers, with hope, terror, worship, with the little terrible wills of men, and the spirit of God, is already irreligious to us. Is not every cubic inch of iron (the coldest blooded scientist admits it) like a kind of little temple, its million million little atoms in it going round and round and round, dancing before the Lord?

And why should an Oxford man be afraid of a cubic inch of iron, or afraid of becoming like it ?

I daily thank God that I have been allowed to belong to this generation. I have looked at last a little cubic inch of iron out of countenance! I can sit and watch it, the little cubic inch of iron, in its still coldness, in all its little funny play-deadness, and laugh! I know that to a telescope or a god, or to me, to us, the little cubic inch of iron is all alive inside; that it is whirling with will, that it is sensitive in a rather dead-looking, but lively, cosmic way, sensitive like another kind of more slowly quivering flesh, sensitive to moons and to stars and to heat and cold, to time and space, and to human souls. It is singing every minute, low and strange, night and day, in its little grim blackness, of the glory of things. I am filled with the same feeling, the same sense of kinship, of triumphant companionship, when I go out among them, and watch the majestic family of the machines, of the engines, those mighty Innocents, those new, awful sons of God, going abroad through all the world, looking back at us when we have made them, unblinking and without sin!

Like rain and sunshine, like chemicals, and like all the other innocent, godlike things, and like waves of water and waves of air, rainbows, starlight, they say what we make them say. They are alive with the life that is in us.

The first element of power in a man — in getting control of his life in our modern era — is the having spirit enough to know what matter is like.

The Machine-Trainer is the man who sees what the machines are like. He is the man who conceives of iron and wood machines, in his daily habit of thought, as alive. He has discovered ways in which he can produce an impression upon iron and wood with his desires, and with his will. He goes about making iron and wood machines do live things.

It is never the machines that are dead.

It is only mechanical-minded men that are dead.

IV

The fate of civilization is not going to be determined by people who are morbidly like machines, on the one hand, or by people who are morbidly unmechanical, on the other.

People in a machine civilization who try to live without being automatic and mechanical-minded part of the time, and in some things,—people who try to make everything they do artistic and self-expressive and hand-made, who attend to all their own thoughts and finish off all their actions by hand themselves, soon wish they were dead.

People who do everything they do mechanically, or by machinery, are dead already.

It is bad enough for those of us who are trying to live our lives ourselves, real true hand-made individual lives, to have to fight all these machines about us trying daily to roar and roll us down into humdrum and nothingness, without having to fight besides all these dear people we have about us, too, who have turned machines, even one’s own flesh and blood. Does not one see them, — see them everywhere, — one’s own flesh and blood, going about like stone-crushers, roadrollers, lifts, and lawn-mowers?

Between the morbidly mechanical people and the morbidly unmechanical people, modern civilization hangs in the balance.

There must be some way of being just mechanical enough, and at the right time and right place, and of being just unmechanical enough, at the right time and right place. And there must be some way in which men can be mechanical and unmechanical at will.

The fate of civilization turns on men who recognize the nature of machinery, who make machines serve them, who add the machines to their souls, like telephones and wireless telegraph, or to their bodies, like radium and railroads, and who know when and when not, and how and how not, to use them — who are so used to using machines quietly, powerfully, that they do not let the machines outwit, them and unman them.

Who are these men?

How do they do it?

They are the Machine-Trainers.

They are the men who understand people-machines, who understand ironmachines, and who understand how to make people-machines and iron-machines run softly together.

V

There was a time, once, in the old, simple, individual days, when drygoods stores could be human. They expressed in a quiet, easy way the souls of the people who owned them.

When machinery was invented, and when organization was invented, machines of people — dry-goods stores — became vast selling-machines.

We then faced the problem of making a dry-goods store with twenty-five hundred clerks in it as human as a dry-goods store with fifteen.

This problem has been essentially, and in principle, solved. At least we know it is about to be solved. We are ready to admit — most of us — that it is practicable for a department store to be human. Everything the man at the top does expresses his human nature and his personality — to his clerks. His clerks become twenty-five hundred more of him in miniature. What is more, the very stuff in which the clerks in department stores work — the thing that passes through their hands — is human, and everything about it is human, or can be made human; and all the while vast currents of human beings, huge Mississippis of human feeling, flow past the clerks — thousands and thousands of souls a day — and pour over their souls, making them and keeping them human. The stream clears itself.

But what can we say about human beings in a mine, about the practicability of keeping human twenty-five hundred men in a hole in the ground? And how can a mine-owner reach down to the men in the hole, make himself felt, as a human being, on the bottom floor of the hole in the ground?

In a department store, the employer expresses himself and his clerks through every one of the other twenty-five hundred; they mingle, and stir their souls and hopes and fears together, and he expresses himself to all of them through them all. But in a mine — two men work all alone down in a dark hole in the ground. Thousands of other men, all in dark holes, are near by, with nothing but the dull sound of picks to come between. In thousands of other holes men work, each man with his helper, all alone. The utmost the helper can do is to grow like the man he works with or like his own pick — or like the coal he chips out or like the black hole. The utmost the man he works with can do, in the way of being human, is with his helper.

In a factory, for the most part, the only way, during working hours, that an employer can express himself and his humanness to his workman, is through the steel machine the workman works with — through its being a new, good, fair machine, or a poor one. He can only smile and frown at him with steel, be good to him in wheels and levers, or now and then, perhaps, through a foreman pacing down the aisles.

The question the modern business man in a factory has to face is very largely this: ‘I have acres of machines all roaring my will at my men. I have leather belts, printed rules, white steam, pistons, roar, air, water, and fire, and silence, to express myself to my workmen in. I have long, monotonous swings and sweeps of cold steel, buckets of melted iron, strips of wood; bells, whistles, clocks — to express myself, to express my human spirit to my men. Is there any possible way in which my factory, with its machines, can be made as human and expressive of the human as a department store?

This is the question that our machine civilization has set itself to answer.

All the men with good, honest, working imaginations — the geniuses and freemen of the world — are setting themselves the task of answering it.

Some say, machines are on the necks of the men. We will take the machines away.

Others say, we will make our men as good as our machines. We will make our inventions in men catch up with our inventions in machines.

We naturally turn to the employer first, as having the first chance. What is there an employer can do, to draw out the latent force in the men — evoke the divine, incalculable passion sleeping beneath — in the machine-walled minds, the padlocked wills, the dull, unmined desires of men? How can he touch and wake the solar-plexus of labor?

If an employer desires to get into the inner substance of the most common type of workman, — be an artist with him, express himself with him, and change the nature of that substance, give it a different color or light or movement, so that he will work three times as fast, ten times as cheerfully and healthfully, and with his whole body, soul, and spirit, — how is he going to do it?

Most employers wish they could do this. If they could persuade their men to believe in them, to begin to be willing to work with them instead of against them, they would do it.

What form of language is there — whether of words or actions — that an employer can use to make the men who work nine hours a day for him, and to whom he has to express himself across acres of machines, believe in him and understand him?

The modern employer finds himself set sternly face to face, every day of his life, with this question. All civilization seems crowding up, day by day; seems standing outside his office door as he goes in and as he goes out, and asking him, now with despair, now with a kind of grim, implacable hope, ’Do you believe, or do you not believe, that a factory can be made as human as a department store?’

This question is going to be answered first by men who know what iron machines really are, and what they are really for, and how they work; who know what people-machines really are, and what they are really for, and how they work. They will base all they do upon certain resemblances and certain differences between people and machines.

They will work the machines of iron according to the laws of iron.

They will work the machines of men according to the laws of human nature.

There are certain human feelings, enthusiasms, and general principles, concerning the natural working relation between men and machines, that it may be well to consider as a basis for a possible solution.

What are our machines, after all? How are the machines like us? And on what theory of their relation can machines and men expect in a world like this to work softly together? These are the questions that men are going to answer next. In the mean time I venture to believe that no man who is morose to-day about the machines, or who is afraid of machines in our civilization, — because they are machines, — is likely to be able to do much to save the men in it.

VI

Every man has, according to the scientists, a place in the small of his back which might be called roughly, perhaps, the soul of his body. All the little streets of the senses or avenues of knowledge, the spiritual conduits through which he lives in this world, meet in this little mighty brain in the small of a man’s back.

About nine hundred millions of his grandfathers apparently make their headquarters in this little place in the small of his back.

It is in this one little modest unnoticed place that he is supposed to keep his race-consciousness, his subconscious memory of a whole human race; and it is here that the desires and the delights and labors of thousands of years of other people are turned off and turned on in him. This is the brain that has been given to every man for the heavy, everyday hard work of living. The other brain, the one with which he does his thinking, and which is kept in an honored place up in the cupola of his being, is a comparatively light-working organ, merely his own private personal brain, a conscious, small, and supposably controllable affair. He holds on to his own particular identity with it. The great lower brain in the small of his back is merely lent to him, as it were, out of eternity — while he goes by.

It is like a great engine, which he has been allowed the use of as long as he can keep it connected up properly with his cerebral arrangements.

This appears to be mainly what the cerebral brain is for, this keeping the man connected up. It acts as a kind of stop-cock for one’s infinity, for screwing on or screwing off one’s vast raceconsciousness, one’s all-humanityness, all those unsounded deeps or reservoirs of human energy, of hope and memory, of love, of passionate thought, of earthly and heavenly desire, that are lent to each of us, as we slip softly by for seventy years or so, by a whole human race.

A human being is a kind of factory. The engine and the works and all the various machines are kept in the basement, and he sends down orders to them from time to time, and they do the work which has been conceived up in headquarters. He expects the works down below to keep on doing these things without his taking any particular notice of them, while he occupies his mind, as the competent head of a factory should, with the things that are new and different and special, and that his mind alone can do; the things which, at least in their present initial formative or creative stage, no machines as yet have been developed to do, and which can only be worked out by the man up in the headquarters, himself, personally, by the handiwork of his own thought.

The more a human being develops, the more delicate, sensitive, strong, and efficient, the more spirit-informed, once for all, the machines in the basement are. As he grows, the various subconscious arrangements for discriminating, assimilating, classifying material, for pumping up power, light, and heat to headquarters, all of which can be turned on at will, grow more masterful every year. They are found all slaving away for him, dimly, down in the dark, while he sleeps. They hand him up, in his very dreams, new and strange powers to live and to know with.

The men who have been most developed of all, in this regard, civilization has always selected and set aside from the others. It calls these men, in their generation, men of genius.

Ordinary men do not try to compete with men of genius.

The reason that people set the genius to one side, and do not try to compete with him, is that he has more and better machinery than they have. It is always the first thing one notices about a man of genius — the incredible number of things that he manages to get done for him; apparently, the things that he never takes any time off, like the rest of us, to do himself. The subconscious, automatic, mechanical equipment of his senses; the extraordinary intelligence and refinement of his body; the way his senses keep his spirit informed automatically and convey outer knowledge to him; the power he has, in return, of informing this outer knowledge with his spirit, with his will, with his choices, once for all, so that he is always able afterwards to rely on his senses to work out things beautifully for him, quite by themselves, and to hand up to him, when he wants them, rare, deep, unconscious knowledge, — all the things he wants to use for what his soul is doing at the moment, — it is these that make the man of genius what he is. He has a larger and better factory than others, and has developed a huge subconscious service in mind and body. Having all these things done for him he is naturally more free than others, and has more vision and more originality, his spirit is swung free to build new worlds, to take walks with God, until at last we come to look upon him — upon the man of genius — a little superstitiously. We look up every little while from doing the things that he gets done for him by his subconscious machinery, and we wonder at him; we wonder at the strange, the mighty feats he does, at his thousand-league boots, at his apparent everywhereness. His songs and joys, sometimes his very sorrows, look miraculous.

And yet it is all merely because he has a factory, a great automatic equipment, a thousand-employee sense-perception, down in the basement of his being, doing things for him that the rest of us do, or think we are obliged to do, ourselves, and give up all of our time to. He is not held back as we are; he moves freely. So he dives under the sea familiarly, or takes peeps at the farther side of the stars; or he flies in the air, or he builds unspeakable railroads, or thinks out ships or sea-cities, or he builds books, or he builds little, new, still undreamed-of worlds out of chemistry; or he unravels history out of rocks, or plants new cities and mighty states without seeming to try; or, perhaps, he proceeds quietly to be interested in men, in all these little funny dots of men about him; and out of the earth and sky, out of the same old earth and sky that everybody else has had, he makes new kinds and new sizes of men with a thought, like some mighty, serene child playing with dolls.

It is generally supposed that the man of genius rules history and dictates the ideals and activities of the next generation; writes out the specifications for the joys and sorrows of a world, and lays the ground-plan of nations, because he has an inspired mind. It is really because he has an inspired body, a body that has received its orders once for all from his spirit. We should never wonder that everything a genius does has that vivid and strange reality if we realized what his body is doing for him, how he has a body which is at work automatically drinking up the earth into everything he thinks, drinking up practicability, art, and technique for him into everything he sees, and everything he hopes and desires. And every year he keeps on adding a new body; keeps on handing down to his basement new sets, every day, of finer and yet finer things to do automatically.

The great spiritual genius becomes great by economizing his consciousness in one direction, and letting it fare forth in another. He converts his old inspirations into his new machines. He converts heat into power and power into light, and comes to live at last — as almost any man of genius can be partly seen living — in a kind of transfigured or lighted-up body. The poet transmutes his subconscious or machine-body into words, and the artist transmutes his into color or sound, or into carved stone. The engineer transmutes his subconscious body into long buildings, into aisles of windows, into stories of thoughtful machines. Every great spiritual and imaginative genius is seen — sooner or later — to be the transmuted genius of some man’s body. The things in Leonardo da Vinci that his unconscious, high-spirited, automatic senses gathered together for him, piled up in his mind for him and handed over to him for the use of his soul, would have made a genius out of anybody. It is not as if he had to work out every day all the old details of being a genius, himself.

The miracles he seems to work are all made possible to him because of his thousand-man-power, his deep subconscious body, his tremendous factory of sensuous machinery. It is as if he had practically a thousand men all working for him, for dear life, down in his basement, and the things that he can get these men to attend to for him give him a start with which none of the rest of us could ever hope to compete. We call him inspired, because he is more mechanical than we are, and because his real spiritual life begins where our lives leave off.

So the poets who have filled the world with glory and beauty, have been free to do it because they have had more perfect, more healthful, and improved subconscious senses handing up wonder to them than the rest of us have.

And so the engineers, living as they always live, with that fierce, silent, implacable curiosity of theirs, woven through their bodies and through their senses and through their souls, have tagged the Creator’s footsteps under the earth, and along the sky, every now and then throwing up new little worlds to Him like his worlds, saying, ‘Look, O God, look at this!' — the engineers whose poetry is too deep to look poetic have all done what they have done because the unconscious and automatic gifts of their senses, of the powers of their observation, have swung their souls free, have given them long, still reaches of thought, and vast new orbits of desire, like gods.

All the great men of the world have always had machinery.

Now everybody is having it. The power to get little things, innumerable, omnipresent, forever-and-ever things, tiny just-so things, done for us automatically, so that we can go on to our inspirations, is no longer to-day the special prerogative of men of genius. It is for all of us. Machinery is the stored-up spirit, the old saved-up inspiration of the world turned on for every man. And as the greatness of a man lies in his command over machinery, in his power to free his soul by making his body work for him, the greatness of a civilization lies in its getting machines to do its work. The more of our living we can learn to do to-day automatically, the more inspired and creative and godlike and unmechanical our civilization becomes.

Machinery is the subconscious mind of the world.